rules to live by. [trigger #58]

20 rules to live by in the event of  a zombie apocalypse:

1. Ammo runs out, find melee weapons.

2. Guns make noise, noise attracts zombies, see above rule.

3. You’re stronger together than alone.

4. Still, once someone starts to turn, they aren’t your loved one anymore. In the words of Zombieland: Double-tap.

5. Go north, frozen zombies can’t eat you.

6. Setting zombies on fire is both useful and cathartic.

7. The more layers of clothing you wear, the less likely teeth meet skin.

8. When in doubt, always be moving. Zombies are slow, you shouldn’t be. Your primary disadvantage is numbers, and the most danger is in being swarmed; your primary advantage is being far faster than the undead. Often, a fast walk will be enough to stay ahead of danger, while freezing to decide your next move only allows more zombies to converge.

9. When in danger, run like a motherfucker. As mentioned above, zombies are slow.  Fight only when absolutely necessary, flight is always the safer option.

10. As in any crisis, water is your most important commodity. A healthy human can survive for weeks without food, but even in ideal conditions, you’ll be dead within five days without water.

11. Sleep in shifts, zombies don’t sleep so someone needs to be paying attention at all times.

12. Zombies can often be tricked with smells and sounds. All zombies will be in a different state of decomp, but sight deteriorates far faster than hearing or smell. Also, cognitive filtering processes will no longer be active. Thus, zombies will follow noises and human smells even if it is completely illogical to do so, often even if it feels like they should be able to see you. You’re smarter than they are, act like it.

13. Never be the slowest person in your party.

14. The military is not trained for Z-Day. When you find the military outpost that claims to be safe and seems too good to be true, it is. Stay long enough to stock up on supplies and move on. Shit is going to hit the fan eventually and you don’t want to be there when it does.

15. Little kid zombies are just as dangerous as adult zombies. Leave sentimentality behind or become zombie chow. They aren’t human anymore, kill the fuckers.

16. Have sex whenever consensual and safely possible. Endorphins will be in short supply and sex provides them in healthy quantities. Apocalypse creates panic, sex creates peace of mind and helps one keep a level head. Also, it helps you remember what you have to live for. Forget your normal ethics and rules. It’s the end of the world, folks, you might as well enjoy the few benefits.

17. Travel light. Sentimentality is your enemy. Carry only what can directly aid your survival.

18. Your trust should be hard earned. When everyone is trying to survive, betrayal will be commonplace, choose who you decide to trust very, very carefully.

19. Play to your strengths, be wary of your weaknesses. Be brutally honest with yourself about your survival skills, both as contributions to a group and as an individual. Working out how to utilize your strengths will keep you alive, ignoring embarrassing weaknesses will get you killed.

20. Always be brainstorming strategies as a party. Creativity and ingenuity are advantages you have over the horde, use them. Zombies are nothing more than shuffling apetites, making them predictable. It should be possible to create strategies for your group to survive indefinitely with a little bit of forethought.

is this all a dream? [trigger #54]

The fires had been burning for weeks. The smoke could be seen as far away as Tacoma to the south, and a black haze filled the air for miles and miles in different directions, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

The fact that all of this destruction was caused by human beings made Won’s head spin. There had been no earthquake, no tornado, no tsunami; just humanity in all its destructive power.

The people had gradually lost faith in literally every aspect of their society. Then, in a tremendous powder keg moment, President Aiken had panicked and declared martial law in eight major cities, and the reaction was revolt. The nation had been torn down in a massive, violent upheaval toward anarchy and chaos. The government had broken down, authority had been removed, and people had been burning and destroying ever since.

Won couldn’t believe the things he’d seen. He’d always known, in some abstract way, that people had been acting out great atrocities as long as there had been people, but to see it happen was mind-boggling. Ordinary people, men and women he’d seen on the bus and in cafes, were killing and raping and looting with a wantonness that was overwhelming.

Won needed to move again to get some food, which meant going back into the dangerous Seattle streets. He checked that his gun was loaded before putting it back in the waistband of his pants, adjusted the ski goggles that made it possible to keep his eyes open amidst the smoke, then stepped out into the unnatural fog.

The trick was to walk quickly, with purpose, and avoid looking anyone in the face. The method wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he could do to move around the city, and he needed food.

He walked nine or ten blocks before he rounded a corner on the fifth rape he’d seen in the last month. It was a lone man acting out violence on a woman who’d found herself alone in the street. It was another moment where he saw the weak being preyed on by the stronger. Rage bubbled up from within him and before even making a conscious choice he pulled the gun from his waistband, rushed the son of a bitch, and pistol-whipped him across the temple. The rapist never saw Won coming, too caught up in his perverted violence, and he crumpled sideways after being struck with the revolver. Won moved quickly and kicked the rapist in his face, introducing the bridge of his foot to the bridge of the rapist’s nose.

Won positioned himself between the woman and her attacker, aiming the barrel of the gun at the man’s face. Dazed for a few moments, the rapist shook his head and looked up at Won.

“The fuck’s your problem, man?!? Why don’t you mind your own fucking business?”

Won didn’t respond verbally to the man, he simply pulled back the hammer of the revolver. The click of the gun as it cocked sent his message loud and clear.

The rapist stood up and spit on the concrete, his hand never left his nose. He started to back away from Won and the woman.

“You broke my fucking nose, man!”

The man realized there was nothing he could get from this situation but a bullet, turned, and ran into the haze.

It wasn’t safe for them to remain in the street, exposed like they were.

Won slipped his jacket off and placed it around the woman’s shoulders. He whispered, “I’m sorry, but we need to get off the street, fast.” She was still shaking, but she nodded that she understood and let Won help her to her feet. He ushered her as gently and quickly as he could into a nearby doorway where they crouched in the shadows.

They sat in the darkness, her hands tightly gripping Won’s forearm. Her fingernails were digging into his flesh, her rage and her fear manifesting in the same gesture.

Won wondered at the idea that people were reveling in the lack of order. It was as if the majority of people had monsters inside who were just waiting for an excuse to kill, to take, to destroy, to violate. When the societal boundaries had gone, so many people had become animals overnight.

Won wanted to wake up, to find out that it had all been a horrible dream, but he knew it was real. He sat there in the shadows and tried to remember what hope felt like, but to no avail.

the pot was melting into the soup. [trigger #51]

We all laughed. We made fun of those lunatics, with their rapture predictions. Even the bible says such a prediction is impossible, so it seems odd you’d be able to use that some bible to do some math and pick out when the rapture was going to happen.

We laughed right up until the moment on May 21st when all those people disappeared. Other ideas were suggested. An elaborate hoax. Spontaneous human combustion. Even alien abduction. Still, deep down we all knew. We’d been left behind.

Now, all that was left to do was await the end of the world on October 21.

People chose to wait in a myriad of ways. They joked; they planned ‘end of the world’ parties; they got wasted; they had lots of sex; they committed suicide; they tried illicit drugs; they went to war; they converted and prayed for a second rapture; they started doomsday cults, a few of which even resorted to human sacrifice. Yet, most of these sorts of behaviors were frequently interrupted. It was the great period of tribulation after all. Earthquakes were happening almost daily. Tornadoes, hurricanes, and random storms of locusts were popping up in the most unlikely of places at a remarkably frequent rate. It was hard to plan ahead, even by a few moments.

It was mid-August when Seattle finally went, about half-way through the tribulation. Many predicted Seattle would go earlier than that. The city had really gone to hell since Mark Driscoll had been raptured. There was all the gay marrying; lots of yoga; guys in dresses; dudes weren’t fighting each other for macho dominance; dads were staying at home to take care of their children instead of the moms, all of whom were wearing pants and putting on weight like crazy, turning their husbands into homosexual adulterers; people were even watching Avatar and turning into crazy tree-huggers. It was basically the most terrible environment imaginable. Still, against all odds the city made it to the midway point.

Seattle literally went up in smoke in impressive fashion. On August 16th, 2011, at 1:46pm, the city turned into a volcano. It wasn’t that the nearby volcanic mountains erupted, those had sunk beneath the ground and turned into lakes weeks earlier. No, the city of Seattle itself turned into a volcano.

First, came the heat. It had been growing gradually warmer for days, on August 15th it was 103 degrees.

On the 16th, shit got real.

Scott was in his kitchen when it happened, attempting to carry out an ill-advised plan to make himself some tomato soup and tuna melts before he passed out again from the high temperature. All morning the heat had been rising in earnest, and it picked up pace at 1:30. It didn’t take long for him to realize something was very wrong. The floor became too hot to touch, forcing him to take off his shorts to stand on them to protect his feet. That was about the time his skin started turned red from the heat. Still the temperature rose.

He knew he was about to die. For someone who had always been terrified of death, and who was about as good with pain as a toddler who’d missed his nap, Scott was surprised how calm he was as his skin started to blister from the heat. He looked over at what moments earlier had been intended to be his lunch: the pot was melting into the soup, which in turn was pouring all over stove, bubbling and smoking.

As molten rock started to erupt through the surface of the earth in his backyard, Scott’s last thought was of the irony that the lack of heat and relatively low number of crazy religious fundamentalists had been two of his favorite things about Seattle, and now he was melting in his own kitchen because he hadn’t heeded the warnings of a fundamentalist doomsday preacher.

what it means to be home. [trigger #36]

**continuation of trigger #1**

Thomas woke again, as the heat of the day continued to rise, and finally he realized it was too warm to consider trying to fall back to sleep. This would be the 12th day in a row that he and his new traveling companions would need to lay low. This time of year, it was far too hot during the day to consider traveling , and at night the raiders had been far too active to risk their attention by moving around. So, Thomas had been using this reality as an excuse to catch up on some much needed sleep. Finally it was time to get moving, even if moving extended only outside his tent to sit in the hot sun until dark.

He slipped from his tent and looked around the camp. It was exactly as it had been each of the other 11 days they’d been waiting for the chance to move.

Peter sat at the far edge of the camp, sharpening blades and watching for movement in the distance while taking great care to appear as if he weren’t watching. Thomas went and sat beside the large man. Conversation was impossible, as Peter had lost his tongue to raiders long ago, but there was still an ever building rapport between the two, and Thomas enjoyed his company. Peter handed Thomas a canteen of water and Thomas took a long, deep pull from it. He was terribly thirsty, and the water was fantastic. He handed back the canteen and Peter handed over another canteen, this one filled with whiskey. Thomas took an equally long pull, and it was equally as good.

Thomas felt a hand on his shoulder, and without turning he knew Carlos was behind him. The hand patted his back and Carlos slid down beside him in the sand.

It was so strange. Thomas had lived within the walls of Sanctuary his entire life, he’d known nothing else, but he’d felt like an alien there ever since Carlos had died, or at least since he thought Carlos had died. Now, out here in the constant danger of the wastes, with the chance a raiding party comes over the hill at any moment, in the brutal heat of the day and the frigid cold of the nights, he felt at ease, like he was home.

Thomas sat in silence with Carlos and Peter, one of whom wasn’t even capable of talking, the other a man with whom conversation had been difficult because of all the secrets Carlos still hadn’t been willing to reveal. Yet, even in this profound silence Thomas felt belonging he never felt back in Sanctuary. Part of it might be that at least with Carlos the secrets were front and center. Neither denied that there was a great deal to Carlos’ story that Thomas was ignorant of. Whereas, back at Sanctuary, there were secrets that Thomas had always felt dancing on the edges of his consciousness, as if all was not as it seemed. He wasn’t aware how true this was, and how deeply it had troubled him, until he had been able to rest with these motley travelers with whom he now threw in his lot.

only seven hours to live. [trigger #26]

Li did it because there was no other choice.

The aliens, wherever they had come from, were apparently singleminded in their desire to destroy the population of earth. They brought with them a doomsday device so terrifying in its power that humans would shudder to think of it for the rest of their communal existence.

The device, referred to by Li (an avid comic book reader) as the Galactus Device, would literally devolve an entire planet back to the most basic forms of matter. Thus, the name was pretty apt. Just as Galactus required the lifeforce of entire planets to survive, so too did this alien race require entire planets to continue their journey of conquest through space. They would find planets with the elements and minerals they needed, would use the Galactus device to devolve the entire planet to its basest form, and would use the resulting resources to fuel their future domination of the galaxy. They were very upfront about this, realizing that no earth weapon posed them any danger.

The only thing that had saved humanity so far was that the Galactoids, as Li called them, had come to enjoy the pleasures of the earth as it was. This meant that they lingered here longer than was normal for them, leaching off of the earth in its present form before finally deciding it was time to deconstruct the world down to nothing.

This is what bought Li the time to come up with a plan to save the world.

Direct assault against the Galactoids was futile, but he came up with a plan of subterfuge that was actually plausible. So plausible, in fact, that it actually worked. With a small group, he’d stolen onto the ‘mothership’, for lack of a better phrase, which housed the Galactus Device. The Galactoids had gotten lazy enough that it was actually fairly simple to smuggle the device onto one of the smaller space crafts, in which Li took off toward the stars.

They did have help, there was a small contingent of Galactoids who saw value in the lives of the species they conquered, and were against the wholesale slaughter of entire races. They gave Li the information he needed to carry out his plan.

The goals of the plan were: first to get to a safe distance from earth, then to ready the Galactus Device for self-destruction, and finally to then allow whatever fleet of Galactoids followed him to catch him, just in time to activate the self-destruct mechanism on the device while destroying the Galactoid forces with their own weapon.

As is to be expected, a device of this power was going to take quite a while to prepare itself, and the information from the rogue human sympathizers allowed him to translate that the alien display indicated that it needed about seven more hours until it was ready. In other words, Li only had seven more hours before his short life would end in a blaze of heroic glory, saving mankind from the most powerful device it had even imagined.

photography. [trigger #1]

Thomas winces as he shifts his weight. His muscles are sore and tired. The dust is caked into every inch of his clothing. It makes the cloth stiff and heavy. All he can do is try to keep the discomfort out of his mind.

He turns and looks back the way he has come these past eight days. He sees nothing. This absence of any discernible shape on the horizon is far more troubling than dirt-matted clothes. By a long shot. He’s never been this far from his home within Sanctuary before. The massive dome of the Sanctuary towers far above the dunes of dirt and ash. When the winds are calm and the dust settles, you can see Sanctuary for miles and miles. No one ever travels into the wastes far enough that you can’t see the dome.

Yet, here he is.

He needs to get photographs and depth imaging of all the raider camps anywhere near Sanctuary. That’s objective #1. Resources are growing thin, and if there is going to be any hope of sending exploration caravans to look for other refuges like Sanctuary, they are going to need to know where the highest concentrations of raiders are. They are going to need to know where the camps are and how big a threat each poses.

These photographs could literally mean the difference between life and death.

He turns forward again, laying flat and low in the dirt. He lifts his binoculars back to his eyes and looks at the camp. He’s been watching for hours, trying to plan his best strategy for getting useful images without being seen.

Something is troubling him.

Only raiders live in the waste. The problem is, this doesn’t look like a raider camp. He isn’t sure what it is exactly. It isn’t that they aren’t formidable looking. These grunts are downright terrifying. Still, something about the way they carry themselves is odd. These men aren’t more alien than he would expect from a raider camp, instead they are more familiar. They are lacking something of the wildness of the raiders.

Then Thomas sees something that takes his breath away for a good ten seconds.

Carlos.

It can’t be. It’s impossible. Carlos had been declared dead two years earlier, killed by raiders when he led his party too far from Sanctuary. Still. Thomas knows beyond any doubt. He sees the way the old man moves from his tent; the way he walks between his companions; the way he crouches and stares off into the distance at the edge of camp. The man had been like a father to Thomas, and this is him.

Carlos moves back into his tent.

Before he knows what he is doing, Thomas is standing up and walking towards the camp. He moves slowly, trying to be as unthreatening as possible.

The man closest to Thomas sees him coming. Of this, Thomas is certain. Thomas’ approach doesn’t seem to bother the man much.

When he is close enough to be heard without shouting, he speaks.

“Um, excuse me.” His throat is dry and his voice shaky. He’d had no reason to speak over the last week. Alone in the wastes. “I was hoping you could let a friend of mine know I’m here.”

The man only raises an eyebrow. Two things are clear: not a single part of this man sees Thomas as impressive, but this situation is novel enough, absurd to the point that he is waiting before he decides what to do. Finally, he spits on the ground at Thomas’ feet and grunts, nodding his head in the direction Thomas had just come from.

Hm, eloquent.

“No, seriously. I know this sounds like a load of shit. I’m having trouble believing it myself. But, really, a friend of mine is in your camp. I could call him over if you’d like. I just don’t want you to show me the business end of whatever weapons you’re holding if I do.”

The man is still unimpressed. Thomas could see tension working its way through the man’s limbs. Patience is growing thin.

Then, Carlos came out of his tent again, Thomas decides it’s time to act. “Carlos! Carlos Rivera!”

Faster than he ever would have imagined possible the grunting man with the eloquent way of spitting has a knife to Thomas’ throat.

Fortunately, Carlos has heard him. He turns and looks, his face displays six or seven different forms of disbelief before he has enough sense to call to his camp-mate.

“Peter. Peter! He’s okay. I know him. You can let him go.”

The knife vanishes as quickly as it had appeared. The man, Peter, smacks Thomas on the back hard and smiles, a gruesome display of the ugliest teeth Thomas has ever seen.

Thomas walks toward Carlos, still having trouble understanding how the dead man could be standing in front of him. The two men stare for a moment, then embrace.

Carlos speaks first. “What in the seven hells are you doing here?”

“Me? You’re the one’s supposed to be dead.”

“Dead, eh? Is that what they told you? Interesting.”

“Interesting…” Thomas has no idea what to say. Rather than acclimating to the situation, it is only getting harder to process what is happening.

Carlos smiles, “I see you’ve met Peter. He’s a good man.”

“A good man? Am I wrong or is he wearing a necklace made of human ears?”

Carlos lets his smile widen. “Well, out here in the wastes, things work on a bit of a sliding scale as far as all that’s concerned. If a man can be trusted not to stab you in the back just to watch you bleed, he just may qualify for sainthood.”

Carlos chuckles to himself. Thomas finds himself marveling at the warmth of the old man’s smile, the humor in his breathy laugh, even here in the hellish wastes. They were things he thought he’d never know again. He’d missed this old man even more than he thought.