The Campaign Builder's Guild

I opened the door to the cell carefully, quietly, but the second I was in sight the Captive went nuts, pounding himself against the bars to get at me. I looked the cage over; it was homemade, a cage in a cell, but transfering the Captive to an interrogation room/dining hall would have been too complicated. We didn't have those kinds of resources.

The cage was homemade, but it held. I stood just outside his reach, trying to find some trace of human intelligence in his now-lidless eyes. I failed.

I gave him the arm. Not my arm, obviously. It was the arm from Perry, poor guy, got his head bashed in while trying to steal supplies for his run for the border. We all thought about the fact that the revenants seemed calmer after they had eaten, even acting more sophisticated, and we thought about the fact that Perry wasn't going to be needing all that good meat on his bones, and when he didn't turn revenant, we decided to see how feeding would affect the Captive.

The Captive took the arm. For a second, he just held it in his hands, squeezing and shaking it with lunatic glee. Just like they do when they catch one of us live ones. Then he bit into it and began to eat.

He had cleaned most of the meat off the upper arm, almost down to the elbow, when the sounds he was making started to make a kind of sense. "Ohh, delicious, oh it's so good, so good, food, food, good food, oh it's so good..." Never bothered to thank me though.

I decided to try to engage him. "Good, is it?"

The Captive didn't stop eating, not for a moment, but his bites became smaller as his belly distended, and he became more articulate. He was actually talking to me. "You have no idea. You have food, and sex, and massage, and wind in your hair, and jokes, and tv, and showers, and faith and home and god and country and all kinds of pleasures, pleasures and more pleasure. Imagine all those pleasures rolled up in one experience." Then he glanced up at me as he chewed, and despite his eyes color, he looked almost sane. Almost. "That's what this is for me."

This was what we had been hoping for. A line into the revenants minds. "So why not eat it? I mean, your covered in it, for crying out loud. Why not chew on your own fingers?"

The Captive snorted a laugh around another bite. "Can't. Doesn't work. Zombie flesh is like grass. Or rock. Or dog. Just isn't interesting."

I must've frowned at that. "We've done chemical tests. Revenants - zombies - have human flesh. There's no difference."

The Captive was down the forearm now. "Oh, I"m sure. There's nothing in the chemistry. It's the energy. It feels different. Haven't you ever noticed that zom- that revenants, whatever, can tell the difference between a wounded live one and another zombie? It's not the smell. I can hardly smell anything, nasal membranes were the first to go. It's the feel. It feels different. Like when somebody comes back, the 'eat this' sign goes out. Once he starts moving again, you don't feel like taking another mouthful. No point. It's not chemistry. It's not even disease, although that's what it looks like. It's energy."

This was all new. I had to figure out if this guy was on the level. "Sounds like you know what your talking about."

The Captives words gabbled around the wristbones. "Oh yeah. I was a pretty smart guy when I was alive, and we zo- revenants have our moments of reprieve. When the belly is full, when the mouth is still wet with food, then we can remember, and think. We never feel anything very strong. I remember killing and eating my own mother, well part of her, before she came back, but we'd barely know each other now. We never feel anything very strong, except hunger, but if we were in the habit of thinking before, we can do it now. When we're not hungry."

He was shredding fingers now, tearing the hand apart even as he talked and talked - maybe he still had a bit of human feeling in there, or maybe he was like a professor, and had to tell someone about the things he thought, but I got the impression that he was deliberately pacing himself, trying to keep himself full long enough to tell me what was on his mind.

"I've been thinking about the fact that we don't do very well in water. We don't seem to remember swimming, and when we're in water we don't feel the presence of food. That's when live ones escape us easily, when we're in the water. Only time I ever lost someone on land was when he hosed me down. See, that's why I say it's energy. We sense the em signature of functioning human brain, and go for that. And the EM signature for our own brains, or whatever it is we're using to think with, is off limits. That's what the Pale Event did for us."

"You remember the Pale Event, right? When the sky went white in the daytime, and lightened a little at night. For just about sixteen minutes. For that sixteen minutes, anybody who died came back. See, I think that was the energy flowing over the Earth. Energy flowing into dying human brains, replacing the energy pattern of living people with a different pattern. That's why people have stopped rising, unless we bite them. We're the only sources of the pattern now."

The captive was down to the last fingers now, talking fast, munching on the bones. I could actually see his teeth splintering from his chewing. And talking. "One thing I can tell you for sure, your right about the chemistry. And that's the important clue. Zombie bodies dissolve the flesh we eat fast, so fast, it should be working with anything. It's almost nuclear. We should be able to eat our own flesh, or dog, or grass, but we can't. The one thing that would be unthinkable to us alive is all we can eat now."

"Do you see it? There is no accidental way we could be cannibles! Humans don't have that urge! No psychology would account for it! No culture countenances it! We are an army of zombies, being raised to wage war on the living! We are bioweapons, or maybe necroweapons! SOMEBODY MEANT FOR US TO BE THIS WAY!"

As he began to shout, I belatedly realized that he was no longer chewing. He was out of food. He had eaten it all, and I could actually see his belly beginning to shrink.

The Captive pressed himself against he bars. "Give me more. Please. More. I know you have more food for me. I can see it, right there! Your blood is pouring through it, your breath is making it go, you have so much food for me! Give it to me! Now!"

Thnking time was over. He slammed himself against the bar, his 'give me the food!' dissolving into inhumans screeches of renewed appetite. I backed out the door, closed it behind me. We, the other survivors and I, needed to talk about what we had learned. Then maybe we would give the Captive a slug in the head and be on about our business.

Or maybe Perry, hanging neatly in the meatlocker, could make another contribution in the name of science...

------------------------------------------------------

This little vignette was my attempt to deal with the various irrationalities inherent in the Walking Dead genre. The fact that even the fast ones in the Dawn of the Dead remake can't seem to deal with an ordinary mall fountain could be put down to careless flimmakers playing the 'dead guy in two feet of water' thing for laughs, but there could also be an in-story explanation.

The big irrationality, of course, is the whole idea of the walking dead being interested in eating human flesh. See, before Mr. Romero did his thing, zombies were merely servants - and very faithful ones, right up to the point where they ate salt in their food. But Night of the Living Dead introduced the concept of obligate cannibalism into the mix, and no such movie, no matter how much technobabble they introduced, has come close to an explanation. (I am particularly annoyed by the Resident Evil line - 'the virus erases everything except the most basic of needs, the need to feed'. If that were the case, we would be expecting the reanimated dead to ambush every fruit tray in Raccoon City, but noooo...)

My Captive explains my thoughts on the matter, as far as they go. The walking dead would not be as they are without someone intending it. Would anyone else like to add their reflections on the subject?

That's a finger-lickin' bit o' zombie lit'rachoor!

I like your zombie logic! A lot!

Go zombie fiction!  Zombies really aren't my thing, but I may be acquiring a taste now...  I like how you rationalaized everyting, and if you have any more stuff, do share!

Same here, the logic is sound and very interesting. It also adds an element of horror the Zombie genre seems to have been lacking...after all, who intended this?

Very good. Thanks for this explanation! :D

Thank you all very much.  I meant what I said though - I was kind of hoping that someone would add their own fiction to this thread, as a way of explaining this nonsense.  The Captive vignette addresses the big mystery inherent to every Walking Dead story, but doesn't even come close to solving it.  So?  Turin?  Crit?  Anybody want to climb into the Mystery Machine and find out just who is responsible?  (I'll bet it's that Old Man Smithers...)

I think I like it better this way, actually. Not that I won't read what anyone else comes up with, but keeping things open ended seems better. Especially on such a widely effective topic as the origin of zombies.

It's still somewhat tempting to come up with somewhat, but I feel it would turn out cheesy.

I've tried playing with the possible creator, but I can't think of one yet. I have a couple cheesy answers...if something good occurs to me, you'll see a short story about it.

Sam had been called 'Silent' from way back. It was just the way he was - he rarely spoke to more than one person at a time, rationing his conversation in bits here, pieces there. He preferred listening. And he liked listening to places where there were no people best of all.

He found himself out in the field out back of his house. The field was rich in golden wheat. He alone at first, but after a few moments he became aware that there were women around him. Naked orientas, their long black hair rippling past the wheat. "Are you faithful?" one of them asked. And then his clothes were gone, and they were brushing up against him, their skin seething to be stroked, long hair aching to be grasped.

"Come on, come on, come on, how can you not be faithful on a bright day like this?" Her voice was ugly, though. Like the cawing of a crow.

But they were so lithe and lovely, unclothed as he was, and the day was warm and inticing, and he lay down and they followed him down into the gold...

...and then the sky turned white and cold, clouds dark as tumors against the new brilliance. It didn't last long, but when it turned blue again the grain wasn't gold anymore. It was white, and the women had begun to lose skin, lose muscle, and yet they were strong and heavy, holding Sam down, beginning to bite, beginning to eat of him.

Pieces of Sam started to disappear down their throats, reminding him of how children eat a gingerbread man, each bite leaving a painless bleeding crescent but adding nothing to his devourers. It seemed that the more they ate the less there was of them. By the time they reached his head they were little more than rinds of flesh barely holding their bones together.

And then he awoke. Shivering. Sweating. The bunker had not been breached. He was still safe.

He threw on his breeches and a tee, and headed for the dining hall. He brewed an entire pot of coffee. Rarely was there just one person sitting vigil.

-------------------------------------------------------

In a different dreamscape, only a little behind Sams, Key was playing catch with a few friends of his, his dad watching from the porch. He was twenty for this dream. So were his friends. In the dream, his muscles propelled his body lightly, wonderfully. It had been six years since he had moved so free from care. As he caught the ball, he wondered where those six years had gone...

...and the sky whitened. Veins of carious argence savaged the blue, clawing silently at the natural order. The game of catch turned into a different game.

The others started running toward him, at him, hands outstretched. They weren't asking for the ball. Their mouths were open. Their skins were pale and bloodless.

Key looked up onto the porch, hoping his dad would see and call off the others. But his dad was dead, flesh decaying, eyes hollow, looking on with impassive amusement as Key was dragged down...

...and Key awakened. Gasping. Then calming as he remembered where the previous six years had gone.

Shrugging, he headed for the dining hall. He could already smell the coffee.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Key and Sam poured cups for themselves, then sat at the lone table quietly. Neither of them were big talkers, but after they got themselves settled some sort of conversation was inevitable.

Key began. "The one that woke me was a Pale Event dream. You?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah, me too. Wonder what Freud would make of it."

"He'd probly say we were plumb crazy."

"Yeah, but he'd say it in german."

They chuckled at that, then let the silence swell. Then Key spoke. "When was the last good dream you had?"

Sam found this such an interesting question, he actually thought about the answer. "Well, I guess it was kind of the one I had tonight only it was interrupted. The alarm went off when those lurkers got in, you know? And I woke up before the girls flesh started falling off, when they were still sexy, so I guess you'd call that a good dream. You?"

Key didn't bother to ask for more details about the 'girls', or about how sexy they were. Something told him that the usual order of this dream was that the sexiness was a prelude for something uglier. He simply thought about his own experience.

"I don't remember it. I just remember waking up last year, after a whole nights sleep. My face felt funny. Like it hurt, but not. It wasn't until I checked myself out in a mirror that I realized I was smiling. I don't remember the dream, but I woke up smiling. So I guess it was a good dream."

Sam turned that over as he sipped his joe. "Yeah. Good dream. Hell, I'd give up remembering my dreams if I could wake up smiling once a year."

And so it was that the two sat vigil. And in the bunker, the other surviving humans slept. And the night passed.

And outside the bunker, the puppets of the Pale Event shambled and staggered and slouched and slithered, their appetite for living human flesh stoked by deprivation.

OMG.

Conceptually, your fisrt vignette is possibly one of the best pieces of zombie fiction I've ever read.  The literary quality is average, but your vision is superb.

The scenario reminds me of the anophelia (I think that's the name) from the novel The Scar.  They're mosquito people, and like mosquitos, the men are docile herbivores and the women are mindless carnivores who kill blindly to slake their literal bloodlust.  However, when they've fed, they are quite sensible and good natured.  The only problem is, they spend most of their time consumed by bloodlust, and therefore never have the opportunity to learn how to communicate.

Is this fiction part of a setting, or does it stand alone?

It's all part of a single setting, although so far it is comprised of only 2 samples, the two above.  There's more coming, though - the people in the bunker have already had more adventures in my head.  And the zombies have deeper secrets...any specific improvements you would make to the writing above?  Constructive criticism is always welcome.  As are additions to the cycle of stories.

If your interested, I suspect that d20 Modern might be appropriate rules for creating this setting, although I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it.

I've never found d20 modern to be an effective simulation of the zombie genre.  It's nowhere near gritty enough to supply the paranoia and horrified alienation that comes with living in a world full of stenches.

Something with a more conservative hit point allocation system (like GURPS of World of Darkness) would probably suit the genre better.

I've got my ideas, but I have no way to funnel them in through short fiction yet. I have no idea how our hman characters would find these things out. That said,

"We are coming. You thought you could end us. You thought that you could replace us. But we have been here all along. We have waited for this day.

And now it is your turn. Like us, you will sink into the waters beyond the world. Like us, you will fall victim to DELUGE.

We are coming."

Anyway, like I said, I've got my ideas but I suck as a writer. Especially in fiction. I guess I'll PM an explanation to anybody interested.

Angel is interested.

Meh... I've passed on my thoughts to DeeL. He'll implement them (or not implement them) better than I ever will.

"Shit!" Sam looked at the truck, then back again at me. "Isn't it just our luck? It's the first time in months we've had any fuel and you fucking total my truck!" His eyes bulged, "What the fuck were you thinking?" Bill and Sarah stared on from the back of the truck, disinterested.

"It wasn't my fault," I protested, "I couldn't just hit him!"

"Hit who? We're miles from anywhere! You gonna tell me a pedestrian just happened to be taking a stroll on an abandoned highway in the middle of the fucking desert?"

"Go ask him yourself," I replied, pointing off to the side of the road.

And there he was, shambling around, staring dumbly at the orange sky. It was a pitiful sight, really. He was an old man, well dressed, with salt-and-pepper hair. He walked the way I've seen some mental patients do. They stand there, shambling, not so much because they want to go anywhere as because they want to remember where their legs are. It was like that.

Sam stared at him for a second. After a couple of minutes, he forced out a weak "zombie."

It was at this point that Bill saw fit to respond, "Bull. If that was any zombie he'd be on us by now. You remember well as I what the doc in the cage said. They know what's us. And when was the last time you saw any zombie move so God damned SLOW? They aint like the movies, you know."

Sarah replied, "You can't possibly be telling me that that's a person. He'd have died before he could walk all the way out here. If he didn't starve, the zombies would have gotten him."

Sam had forgotten me for the moment. "Maybe it's like what we learned in biology. Like about how sometimes species mutate, and sometimes the mutations are inviable?"

Bill jumped back in, "But zombies don't starve. It's been how long now since this started, and we're still seeing our fair share of 'em in the city. You think they need this food to..."

I wasn't even paying attention to them anymore at this point. Somehow, I was too fascinated by the image of the old man, whose gray silhouette swayed metronomically against the phosphorescent sky. It was downright hypnotic.

Then it stopped. He turned. Made eye contact. It was all over.

In a flash I was upon him. My knife was in his ribs. My teeth were in his shoulder. My foot was between two halves of a split shin. I was tearing him limb from limb, consumed by the most blinding of hatreds, tearing off great chunks of flesh and forcing them down my throat.

And through it all he laughed. It wasn't a cackle, or a shriek, or some kind of maniacal thing. It was the sanest, purest, most jovial laugh I've ever heard.

I don't remember clearly how it ended. But it did. I slaughtered the man. The others pulled me off of him. Sam left on a bicycle and came back with another car from somewhere. We went home... But in a way that night will never end. I will always feel the flesh melting off his bones. I will always feel the sudden release of his throat collapsing under my thumbs. I will always feel that slight resistance of the lone rib as I pulled it off the cage, and the ease with which I crushed his sternum with it. And I will always hear the laughter.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I see his fetid corpse lying by the side of the road. He is laughing at me. He still finds all of this to be genuinely funny.

Intriguing... but frustratingly ambiguous.

What's ambiguous? The writing or what the fuck just happened? The latter's supposed to be. I could use some constructive critisism on the former.

Hell, I'm curious to see if and when you contribute. That'll be something. After all, you're more the writer than I am.

I've got nuthin'.  The first part's really good.  I enjoyed it.  But the wtf moment isn't really the good kind; it was more an anticlimactic wtf than a "whoah, wtf???"  I want to know why he ATE A ZOMBIE.

That not really zombie. That horrible hypnotic old man. I mean, since when do zombies laugh?

And more like half-ate.

But, yeah, I know what you mean. I may do a follow up that explains why that was necessary.

Beejazz, you are a better writer than you give yourself credit for.  I like the additions you made to the cast, and might even borrow them for a later piece for myself if you don't mind.  

But... whoa.  

As of the line 'It was all over.', I am officially intrigued.  All I've got to say is you better do a follow up!  This I gotta see!

Thanks man.

I've got a vague idea for my follow up, but I may have to wait until characters/setting get more developed to flesh it out (hint-hint).

Light...
Dark...
Light...
Dark...
The intervals of light and dark were the only thing that changed in the prison.  Not that Beth knew it was a prison.  The only thing she knew was hunger, now, but since it had never been sated it was right to say that she was locked away from happiness.  All she really knew was hunger.  
The light meant she was hungry in the light.  The dark meant she was hungry in the dark.
She wasn't utterly without memory, but the hunger kept her memories fragmented, crippling her thoughts and self so profoundly that the syllable Beth would have meant nothing to her.  Bits of memory surfaced and were gone, never really rising above the darkness of her hunger.  If she could have seen them, she might have known...
...known that six years ago, she was alive.  A girl of eight years, going to a nice school (a public school, but still nice), with nice friends and the best parents a little girl could hope for.  Then the day came, just a couple of days after the sky turned white for a while, when everyone was rushing and the children like her who went to school met a teacher in the hallway who told them that school had been cancelled and she should go right home.  
She tried, but then a naked man had run in and started bellowing with a strange voice.  She ran, but he grabbed her and bit her and she screamed and then the teacher had hit the naked man in the head and pushed her into a room.  The room was a file room for the school secretary, and it had a lock on the door and the teacher had told Beth to lock it and she had and then she had heard screaming and then it was quiet.
Beth's arm had bled, and she had ducked under a desk.  She had heard noises and quiet outside, but she had kept the door locked.  She wasn't foolish; sooner or later, someone would come, or if she got hungry enough she could dare to venture outside when it was quiet.  But before she could make any such decision, she had gotten cold.  Colder and colder.  And sleepy.  And stiff.  The last thing she saw in her life was how pale her skin was.
And the next thing she saw she didn't recognize, because she couldn't recognize anything except hunger.  Her life was over.  Her forever had begun.
And because she could recognize nothing but hunger, she couldn't unlock the door.  Nobody came, and she would never see a reason to break a window or try a doorknob.  They did not meet the hunger in her, and her thoughts were never sufficient to the task of fulfilment being outside.  What she knew was what she could see.  There was paper.  There were cabinets.  And there was hunger.  She could see better in the light, but she couldn't see the difference between one light and another, one dark and another.
She had become a Pop-up.
That was what the long-term survivors called people like her, people who had been bitten in the early days, before they knew what the bite could do, and then hidden themselves away in closets, cellars, attics, whatever bolt-holes they could find until the trouble blew over.  And then so hidden, they had turned.  And then they couldn't get out.  They stayed there, in whatever bolt-holes they had found until someone found them.  It didn't matter how long they had been locked away, the second they saw a living person they lashed out, trying to bite.  Popping up, the worst kind of surprise.  Uninvited.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
In the light, she tended to move, but in the dark she stood still.  Even at eight years old, she was habituated to standing and walking, so she didn't sit or lie down.  She stood.  When it was light, she shuffled hither and thither.  She retained enough awareness to not bump into the walls, but otherwise she was utterly aimless.
Like all the walking dead, Beth did not decay.  The bacteria that caused natural disintegration did not propogate through her tissue, but her flesh also did not renew itself.  Her constant movement served the purpose of keeping her lymphatic fluid flowing through her body, but her blood pooled into her legs.
Light.
Until one day, when the lengthy walking took its toll, and her blood began to weep its way out of her feet and ankles, leaving her white as bleach.
Dark.
Then she was at her most dangerous, no longer weighted down by her blood she could move like lightning.  At this point, she was a dasher; the fresh zombies were only as fast as a very fast live human, but dashers were sometimes clocked at over thirty miles per hour.  It didn't usually last long; after running for a while, the dasher's dead tissues would begin to abrade and tear.  Feeling no sense of pain, they would endure multiple sprains and breaks before their speed was gone forever.
Light.
But Beth was never to run so fast.  Standing and walking through the reek and growing filth of her cast-off tissue, her skin began to fatigue, like soft metal, and break.  Then her lymphatic fluid began to leech out of her.  And she slowly, slowly entered the last stage of the walking dead.  Dessicated and darkenening from those few microorganisms that could grow on and under her skin, she became a husk.  With only the marginal remnants of senses left, and her skin and bones turning dry and stiff, she became less of a threat in some ways, but far more in others.  Slower, but quieter.  Before, she might have vocalized when excited.  But her lungs became even stiffer and less mobile than the rest of her, and the only sound she could make was the faint rustle of her papery flesh.
Dark.
But her tooth enamel remained hard and functional.  A threat.
Light.
It was light outside.  She sometimes heard noises from outside, but they didn't mean much to her.  This light, however, was accompanied by a noise she could still hear, and understand.  Voices.  Food.
She was still.
The voices travelled.  To the hallway.  Toward the door.
She shuffled over towards the door.  
The door opened, and she began to tumble towards the opening, but in the years since Beth had closed the door, shelves had weakened and timbers had been gutted; as the door was opened a section of the lintel fell.  Suddenly, she couldn't see outside.  Neither could anyone outside see in.
Something stirred in the dusty light.
Beth watched it as closely as her gummy eyes could manage.
Then the door fell away, and she saw the food.
She tumbled foward again, and bit -
-and bits of memory stirred and flowed in the ruin of her mind, and she realized she was almost naked, her clothes being little more than shreds of moldy cloth.  That wasn't how she liked to dress - her color was pink!  Everyone knew that!  She remembered how she had picked it two years ago -
"FUCK!  POP-UP"
"It's got him!  It's really getting him!"
"GET IT OFF ME!  GET IT OFF!"
"I wasn't there!  I'm sorry!"
Hands grasped at her.  She tried to shrug them off, but her own arms had lost most of their strength.  She was pushed away from her food, but she was still nimble and quick.  She twisted down, biting into the hand that had her -
- and her favorite ride at the fair was the Discus, a huge frisbee-shaped ride where they didn't strap you in, they just let you spin around on the enterior surface like a centrifuge, and it was fun to stand on the wall like that, with her father at her side, and the music blaring -
"Shit!  Shitshitshitshitshit!  Get it-"
"Break the head!  Hit it!"
"I CAN'T!  NOT HERE - OUT OF THE WAY!"
One of Beth's brittle legs snapped under the weight over much bigger assailants, and she went sprawling.  There was no pain, though, and even though her head hit the ground hard enough to reduce a living human to unconsciousness she moved with all the coordination remaining to her to get at a nearby ankle.  It was food, it was delicious as she bit into it -
- and she remembered Rob who was in her grade and he helped her collect shells when that was a project and their parents were friends and one day she had let him touch her panties and she had thought it would tickle -

And her mouth was trickling with food, but she was being heaved back into the file room, and the door was pounding and then a section of wall collapsed and she was trapped under a section of shelving and she had seen the very last food she would ever see.  She lay where she fell, as she always would, her reeling senses calming over the next few hours until there was only hunger again.
Hunger would be all she would ever know again, but then there was no longer any she.  No longer any 'know'.  There was only the hunger.  There would only be hunger, down through the long slow march of years, as the dessication and deterioration continued until mobility was gone, form was lost, even the tooth enamel splintered and fell away.  And at last, the blindly groping root of a blackberry bush would slowly penetrate the delicate remnant of her brain case, extinguishing what little there remained of Beth.  
But that was long to come.  For now, she had a day to get through.  Then a night.  Then another day.  
Light.
Dark.
Light...

Oie...

The life of a zombie.

Never have I seen it put in such clear perspective.

Bravo.

VERY nice. This thread still delivers. More please! :D
Túrin

It stared at me, beyond the bars. It watched me - what I had once been, what I would never be again. It watched. Another of them had given me meat, earlier. An arm - some of it was left on the ground. Nothing edible, though. But this one - this one was cruel.

I could feel it... feel it like a taste in the air - something that I'd not felt in a long time. Not a scent - a feel. I felt drool - not that it was real, but more what remained of my imagination. Something - something lost...

I looked up. Probably he would start the sprinklers again, soon. And again, I would be drowned - lost to thought, unable to sense. There was no way I could defend myself - nothing. The bars protected him. I could see a slight film of something on them - something that I had left there when I flung myself at it. But above - a vent - small, but large enough. The hunger came ag-

I was crouching, bloodstained, over a flesh-stripped corpse. The hunger was sated - for a short while. But I could feel others around... somewhere.

And I was hungry....


(Presumably it's okay if I add something...)

Sure Golem, go for it!  That's why it's a thread, not a blog.

Which raises the question - should I make a blog out of this?  Something to seperate the story from the commentary...

The storyline so far seems to be (with my addition), doc in cage questioned, dream happens, people from bunker go to city, doc escapes...

Wait... what?
When did doc escape?

*points at his addition*

Okay, so our character list thus far runs:

First narrator (dead?)
Doc in the Cage (escaped)
Sam
Key
Third story narrator
Bill
Sarah

Also, someone got zombified in the Beth story (I think)... who now?

[From the report of Key to the bunker council]

Yeah, I wanted you all here - no, I'm not getting all military on you, but I wanted this taped and witnessed six different ways.  Something happened in the city.  Something huge.

No, I'm not talking about my screwup.  I blew it, okay?  I got so used to dealing with husks, I forgot how it was with the fresh ones.  I parked the van behind a barb wire fence.  I wasn't thinking.  Here's what I've been repeating to myself all day - zombies don't feel pain.  They don't care about barb wire.  Husks can't climb for nothing, but the fresh ones go over concertina wire like they don't even miss the bits of flesh they leave behind.  Guess they don't.  

So anyway, I remembered just as they reached the fence, and peeled out of there just as they jumped it.  Nobody got bit, no harm no foul, okay?  That's not what this little get together is about.

This is bigger than me losing my head.  Way bigger.

It all started in the morning, with the paper.  I had gone off in my own van, down to the south side - only husks down there, so it's pretty safe.   I spiked a few of them, but it was boring work.  It was almost clear down there.  Once your down there, you can almost imagine that the world could be normal again.

Then a piece of paper blew up to me.  A piece of loose paper.  It's been six years, all the paper on the street has been eroded into dust.  This was new.  

I picked it up.  It was an announcement for the Pike school curriculum.  Here it is, no big deal, except that it's fresh.  Somewhere something got opened up, recently.  That's not much of a mystery, considering what happened next.

There was a chick.  Dressed like those packers, old clothes but well cared for.  She was walking down Lombard, I could only see her left side at first.  I said something, and she turned toward me, and most of her shirt was gone.  Didn't get me hot, though - most of her titty was gone too.

I hotfooted back to the van, and about half a second after I closed the door there was a big dent in it.  That girl zombie hit like a SCUD missile, you know - I spiked her, but by then the others had shown up.  At least two dozen.

Packers, for sure.  Looks like they came to town, scavenging, and opened up a pop-up or two.  Maybe they didn't realize they had been bitten - or maybe, even now, they didn't know what the bite would do, or figured it had worn off, you know?  Hardly matters.  They went down.  They turned.  And they were all over me.  Like in some old tv commercial, 'Revenants come a'runnin' for the great taste of fresh people!', you know?

I didn't have a gun, so I met up with Sam and the others.  Bill jumped into my van with guns and ammo, and we started to set up a parkway ambush, just like in the old days.  Took some arranging, and that's when I pulled my own bonehead play, parking back of the wire fence at the off-post store.

We got away.  Bill smacked me upside the head later, but it was all cool.  We led them to the overpass where Sam, Q, Steve, Sleepy and Nate had set up a firing line.  We had to make three passes, but Sam's a deadeye, and nobody else is a slouch.  We got all of them.  

And by the way, I want to put something on the record.  When we got back to the bunker, Bill's wife Abigail kicked my ass.  I don't hold it against her, even with the busted lip, but she knew before we even got back.  Somebody squealed on me.

Go ahead.  Get it over with, 'cause this is a real comedy here.  With my lip busted and Abby's bootprints on my nuts, guts and ass.  Laugh.  Go ahead and laugh.

Just get one thing straight.  Somebody owes me.  It wasn't Bill, even though he enjoyed watching me get my nuts cracked, 'cause he doesn't tell his wife anything.  It wasn't Sam, he doesn't tell anyone anything.  It wasn't Sleepy, he rode back with me and he didn't use my two-way.

That leaves Steve, Q and Nate.  One of those guys is a wide-mouth cocksucker who owes me.  I'm going to remember this shit.  Someday when Abigail is talking to me again, I'm gonna find out -

No, you know what?  One of those guys tattled, but the other two just sat there and listened, probably laughing their asses off.  All three of them owe me.  Cocksuckers.  I will collect.  I just want that on the record.

Anyway, we got most of the fresh ones, so it's really gonna stink on the parkway for a while.  Don't know if we got 'em all, though, so no more solitary scouting expeditions, for me or anybody else.  And by the way, I would love to know how the parkway was clear.  I mean, after years worth of those ambushes, we've left enough bodies out there to choke Godzilla, and the parkway is always clear.  Somebody is moving our roadkill off to the side of the road, and it isn't one of us.

Maybe I got a look at who it was.

It was really weird.  So weird that if Bill and Q hadn't seen it too, I'd wonder if I was dreaming.

It was on the way back.  We had stopped outside the city to take stock, and take a leak, and whatever, and we saw a husk.  About fifty yards away.  Ambling down the sidewalk, not missing any legs or arms which was a little weird for a husk, but it was skinny and brown and mummified, so there was no question.  

Then it saw us, and this is where it gets weird.

It turned and ran away from us.

Ask Bill.  Ask Q, if you can catch him before he starts on his next six-pack.  In six God damn years, I've never seen a zombie run away from live humans.  I've never heard of anyone who has.

Things might be changing again.  The rules, you know?  We gotta have another talk with the dead Doc.  Somebody find some - what the hell?

[Report ends as all hell breaks loose in the wake of Q, intoxicated, breaking security protocols in the captive revenants cell]

----------------------------------------------------------

Just thought I'd add a late observation of what would work to contain zombies, and what wouldn't.  Another absurdity in the movies - wherever barbed wire appears, it works to keep the zombies out.  Only one exception, in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but little was made of that.  Am I the only one who realizes the implication?  In containing prisoners, in enforcing quarantine, in protecting bases and stockpiles, what does civilized man turn to to keep safe?  

Barbed wire.  And it works like a charm, as long as whatever you are containing fears pain.  If it doesn't, though, it's a whole new ball game.

Golem, I also  tried to incorporate your addition into the general course of events.  It wasn't perfect, I know, but all of this is subject to modification.  Would have done the same for you, beejazz, if I only understood your addition.  Perhaps later - I'm still waiting with bated breath for your next installment.

And yes, it is intended that the story of Beth serves as backstory for the zombie packers that encounter Key in the Southside.  Not that our protagonists will ever know the whole story.

As for the timid zombie, I might be changing the premises of the world of the Pale Event.  We'll see.  I'm still kind of letting it gel.

Wow... nice. Hell, I think I might be ready for a follow-up. Also, I may have missed something, but packers?

As a side-note, I'm loving the lingo that's developing. Really making this feel like a fleshed-out setting.

Packers, short for 'wolf-packers'.  Just a name the bunker people give for the less organized survivalists who live elsewhere.  And oh, Spikers are a new weapon, a pneumatic spike with a two yard reach, quieter and less ammo-intensive than a gun.  Compress air for about 15 minutes, and you have a capsule that will 'spike' about 30 zombie skulls.  And it works like a bayonette even when it's out of compressed air.

Not sure how to incorporate that stuff in narrative form, so there it is.

Woah... spiker. Win and apples, DeeL, win and fucking apples.

Also, forgot to mention: Zombie runs away? Really curious.

Cool.

Aha! So Q is the guy who got eaten... good good.

So, the next part...

(Note: The dude who ate the zombie... his name is henceforth Edward)

"Jesus, I never thought I'd be staring at these bars from the inside," Edward muttered, "The least they could have done is move Q." It had been three days since the incedent. It had been decided shortly thereafter that it would be best for all parties if Ed was kept confined. So here he was now, alone under the flickering of the flourescent lights, confined in a cage... like an animal.

Q's body sat still in the corner, the flesh stripped from the bones. The right arm lay bent in an unnatural position across the chest. The left arm was on the other side of the room. "You speak nonsense," the body rasped, "you know you like the company."

"SHUT UP! HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU! This isn't real! YOU aren't real... just leave me alone already."

"Yes, you'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd like to deny what's been in you since the pale event... you'd like to believe it isn't real. Hell, you may even be convinced that what you were once was the real thing."

"Why do you say these things?"

"I haven't told you anything you didn't already know."

"You're drunk... you always were a drunkard."

______________________________________________________________

Sarah broke the silence,"You know we didn't have to cage him..."

"He's a danger to himself and others. Besides, he's a hell of alot safer than we are right now..." Sam checked the corner, signalled, moved forward.

"That's a bit of a fuss to be making over a lone zombie," Bill cut in, "and such an old zombie at that."

"Ffft! You want him to hear you?" Key rasped, "This is the Doc we're talking about. Took two of us down just to catch that one. He may be old," Key wiped his bleeding nose, "but he's tough. Like he aged himself brittle."

"And he's eaten."

Silence.

The signal.

Running.

The feel is around again - a taste, almost, a scent, and yet neither. Me - John - is that really my name? Since the Time, I've forgotten - John. The voices speak to me, but I don't listen. Voices on the edge of hearing, almost - unhearable, and yet there. Hungry. Feed.

I look around. Some kind of metal - tubes? Guns - that's it. I'm beginning to lose it all. Clutch. Grip. Sanity. But I don't need guns, not anymore. Not when I have myself.

Something comes back to my memory - what was it? Ah - a door. The door, not just a door, THE door. The feel from beyond there is stronger - stronger. The slick film I left there when the Voices, the Hunger, overtook me - a line down it. Clawmarks, almost - my fingers had made.

They were there. One of them, the feel of him is strong, very strong - and familiar. The one who questioned me - the Once-Born. That's a nice term. Once-Born.

The hunger overta-

The door is still there, and still shut. I find another way. I climb back up into the ventilation shaft, crawl along. I can hear voices from beneath me - speaking of the 'Doc'. Where have I heard that before? They refer to me? I halt. I slow. They speak.

And then it overtakes me ag-

Ooooh, spiffing. Yesterday I was in a bookstore when I became aware that Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide was merely the prequel to a serious novel entitled World War Z, a series of vignettes regarding ... well, a zombie apocalypse.  

As if that weren't enough, I read enough of it to see that it's pretty good.

Pissfuckit, can't I do anything original???

Originality is defined relative to the individual.  Whether or not a similar idea existed already, so long as that idea did not inspire you your Zombie Apocalypse is as original as it needs to be.

Besides, most of us ain't never read no "World War Z".  The Zombie Survival Guide, on the other hand, is necessary reading for all:

After all, it could happen to you...

Yeah... quite true.
'Sides, the zombie genre was done to death before WWZ ever came out... we're just gamers and we're here to have fun!

Quote from: DeeLOoooh, spiffing. Yesterday I was in a bookstore when I became aware that Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide was merely the prequel to a serious novel entitled World War Z, a series of vignettes regarding ... well, a zombie apocalypse.  

As if that weren't enough, I read enough of it to see that it's pretty good.

Pissfuckit, can't I do anything original???

Ever heard of All Flesh Must Be Eaten?  It's a horror setting with heavy zombie influence published by Eden Studios.  Regardless of what-came-befores, this thread is great.  Zombies really do make everything better.

BUMPAGE!
SUMMUDDY WRITE SUMMAT!

I got nuthin'.

From the report of the sole surviving wolf-packer, who insists on calling herself Dirt:

Thanks for the grub.  And thanks for taking me in.  

This is what I saw.  I was the only one left.  The others were all turned.  Then I found a bus station, and ducked into the baggage part.  And I saw them.

They were all zombies, most of them were really old, but some of them had been my friends.  Fresh risen.

And there was another one.  It looked like an old zombie, but acted like a person.

It was in the bus part, and the zombies were kind of ambling around - but they weren't going far.  Like the person-zombie was where they wanted to be.  More and more of them showed up.

The person-zombie was working on one of the buses.  He started humming, then came out and went to a toolbox or something, then went into the bus again.  In and out.  In and out.  He started singing as he worked on it -

"Do you think that I know something you don't know?
If I promise you the answers, would you go?
Do you want my blood?  Do you want my tears?  What do you want?
What do you want from me?
Shall I sing until I can't sing anymore?  Play guitar 'til my fingers are raw?
You're so hard to please!  
What do you want from me???"

He had walked down into the crowd of other zombies, and then he killed one of them.  Casual.  He just turned and grabbed it's head and twisted, and it fell.  I had never seen one zombie kill another before.

The other zombies didn't seem to notice.  

Then he stood up on the ticket counter, and waved the screwdriver around like he was in front of a band.  He was singing at them, like he was trying to get them to listen -

"You can have anything you want.
Drift, you can dream, you can walk on water, anything you want.
You can own everything you see.
Sell your soul for complete control, is that really what you need?
You can lose yourself this night
Realize you have nothing to hide!  Turn and face the light!"

And then it gets really weird.

There was this one big window at the end of the room, where the sunlight was coming in.  And when he said face the light, all the zombies kind of turned toward it.  Like they could hear him, and kind of wanted to do what he said.

Then he came up behind one of them, and started stabbing it with the screwdriver.  Five times, just grabbed it and stabbed it under the ribs, five hits.  Vicious.  Then he just let it go and walked away, like he had made his point.  The zombie didn't seem to notice.

Then he stood back up on the counter and started preaching.  He had a normal sounding voice, not like what a husk would sound like.

"In the beginning!  Our Father created us!  And he promised us dominion, over all the Earth, and everything that dwelt therein, and everything that walked upon it!  Our Father promised us!  Our Father promised!  Our Father promised us dominion!  Dominion!  Dominion!"

Then he kind of looked up, not at the ceiling, not even at the sky, but like he was looking higher than the sky.  And he said something, to whatever was higher than the sky, he spat one word out like it was too bitter to keep in his mouth.

"Liar."

That's when I saw the panel, that led to the roof.  From the roof, I got to the building next door.  And just in time.

'Cause from up there, I could see the streets.  Full of zombies.  Husks.  A few fresher ones, but no dashers.  They were already there.

All of them headed for the bus station.

Woah. Nicely done.

Ernest sighed as he and his classmates listened to their teacher lecture. He doodled a little on his arm, which didn't do much since they were using clay tablets. Styluses just left a red mark for about for about fourty or so seconds on his skin. His classroom had once been a part of a steel factory. Bits of machinery littered the factory floor. Perhaps the room they used was once an office for a manager, or a storage room,  but now there was no hint to it's original purpose. It was just a bare room full of 30 kids and a grizzled old man. The old man's name was Greg. He'd been fairly old  when the Pale event happened and consequently had survived a lot. Ernest and all the kids at least vaguely remembered the pale event. Ernest was 8, and consequently it was somewhat foggy for him. The Pale Event happened about four years ago; he was four at the time, and could hardly be expected to remember much about it.

"Now, listen here you little tykes, today we're going to deal with how to kill zombies, or Revenants, or whtever they're calling them these days. The obvious thing is that range is your friend. A lone zombie is far stronger than a lone man, and consequently wrestling with one is a bad idea."

The island this community was on is called Blackrock Military Base. It had just under 300 inhabitants, mostly over 20 and under 30. A lot of them were soldiers or factory workers. A lot of the kids were from the town near by. Ernest used to live right near the elementary school. The elementary school was now a mass grave full of child-sized revenants. What protected them from all the dead in town was the water. The life-giving Atlantic ocean. It also provided a lot of their food and water; the desalinization plant still functioned, and someone had rigged up a small power generator that ran off of the medium sized river on the island. It powered the desalinization plant and the Factory. Not the one they were in, which didn't have power, like most of the buildings on the island. The Factory produced munitions, body armor, and converted vehicles to suit the needs of the survivors.  It was also one of the largest communities of humans on the planet. There were maybe two larger on the continent and seven total larger accross the world.

"Guns are our biggest advantage. We can take them zombies down without much difficulty, comparitively. Headshots are the key, knees are good, neck is better, hips ain't bad either, but only with high caliber weapons or explosive rounds. The key is taking down their mobility or totally blowin them to bits. Also we got water. For some reason, water scrambles 'em up and they can't just sense us, like they normally can. You need to drench them or partially submerge them, at the least. It isn't based on size though. One big one I saw, was friend of mine actually, got stuck in a kiddie pool. Couldn't summon the energy to get out of it. Blew it's head off. Anyway, Fire's fine if you got something to hide in while it's taking them down. Dead flesh burns decent, specially husks and dashers, but it takes a long time to kill them if you only use fire. They don't feel pain, so it doesn't disable them while it kills them."

One of the things that the Rock, as it was known coloquially, did was train the few kids that lived there to survive. Greg was the one who brought it up originally and was the teacher. Already the survival rate was up 30%. Ernest remembered hearing the figure from his father, originally a mechanical engineer, currently a weapons designer. Ernest had inherited his father's head for numbers and interest, so he didn't really care about actually killing zombies himself. It was useful information, but it was mostly obvious when you thought about it. The worst thing about the training program was the clay tablets. Ernest much prefered the computers that ran on the solar batteries, and paper. Paper was hard to come by; there hadn't been a real timber operation in four years. They said that out west most of the power grid was still functional, if dormant, because of all the solar batteries in the desert. The concentration of people who died out there during the Pale Event was actually quite low, due to the lack of populace.  Sure the bigger cities were essentially mausoleums, just like in the east, but in the desert there just weren't enough people around to create a huge zombie problem. It was a question of population density.

"The Zombies biggest edge is their ability to sense us whenever we get close. We haven't figured out any other way to jam it besides water. Some believe that they can pick up our brainwaves, and once an EMP generator was suggested, but no-one has the resources to produce something like that. So don't laugh when you see some of the recovery teams go out with water balloons."

And that was about as much of the lesson that was useful to Ernest, so he started designing a new spiker. Probably wouldn't work, but it might. And that was the key.

 

Ooooooh, nice addition, Helix!  This is most certainly not 'The Bunker', but Blackrock could easily be an interesting setting in its own right.

And now I think it's time to establish what I originally had in mind, although at this point it's been blown to smithereens.  The first vignette, The Captive, was intended to have taken place a few months after the Pale Event, when everyone was still exploring the ramifications.  The first generation of zombies would most certainly have taken the world by surprise.  They would have had essentially human characteristics, although evidence of actual thought would have been elusive until someone had a chance - and the stomach - to watch them feed.

Things wouldn't have exploded completely out of control until the first generation 'developed' into dashers, the light-weight zombies that combined inhuman endurance with superhuman bursts of speed.  I have a story in mind for those early days, but it might have to wait until Halloween.

By the time the dashers had started to degenerate into husks, zombies would outnumber humans in the major population centers.  Where there were no humans at all, the undead would begin to amble, spreading the curse outward to rural areas that might have been otherwise untouched.  Where humanity kept a toehold, however, the dead would congregate.  It would be a nightmare, but it would give the 'safe areas' a chance to regroup and eventually strike back.

Events would be complicated by the presence of zombies, or creatures very like them, that would seem to demonstrate human levels of intelligence.  Mostly they would avoid human contact - since they didn't trigger the feeding instinct of zombies, they could escape contact fairly easily.  This definitely includes the 'person-zombie' in Dirt's account, and might include the being that provoked Edward to homicide in Beejazz' earlier post.  

We've kind of gotten the time periods jumbled, though - The Captive (or the Doc as we've begun to call him) seems to be contemporaneous with the 6-years-later period.  He may have a unique story of his own.  

So humanity would survive in those places where there would be sufficient isolation to keep the zombies away, or sufficient preserved food to keep humans alive underground or in confined spaces until the dashers were gone.  After that point, human communities would have the best chance in places that combined a significant military force with some knowledge of agriculture.

Who else has thoughts on the matter?  I have less interest in being the sole creator or arbiter of this setting than I do making a fun shared universe.

Only real thoughts are "Whatever happened to the Doc after escape?" I got no real ideas on how to *conclude* it, really.

Another thought is that islands are wayyyy safer than the continents. It just wasn't likely that people died during the Pale event on islands. Probabiity functions more accurately the more people you put in the function, so many of the islands would be essentially untouched, giving a nice foot hold to humanity.

Also, I'd think that since it's highly likely that the human population centers are near or in the ocean (islands, not underwater empires), fishing would become an immensely important part of the human diet, and livestock would fade out of the picture. My post was kind of intended to "jump ahead" a little to ressurrect (pun intended) the thread.

If left alone, how long would it take for a zombie to lose mobility? Probably more than a decade I guess? More than two? Regardless, a time may come to pass after the Pale Event when most of the zombies that were created shortly after it are no longer mobile. What would happen then? (I'm assuming here that a few years after the Pale Event, the surviving humans will have become smart enough to no longer suffer considerable losses to the zombies, so few new zombies will arise anymore.)

Túrin

Indeed Turin, the zombies are a transitory crisis.  The effect that animates the dead also preserves them from decay, but by no means perfectly.  In the dry, cold Gobi Desert a zombie might make it for 20 years; in other environments the 'unlife' expectancy is much lower.  In a temperate climate, figure a decade, tops.  Probably the zombie in question would be reduced to harmlessness considerably before then as wear and happenstance removed limbs and bone structure.  Six years after the Pale Event, Key felt confident in going alone to a metropolitan center and spiking husks; he described this as 'boring work'.

 Taking a cue from the Zombie Survival Guide, I am ruling that zombies may be preserved perfectly by freezing; this means that in areas where the temperature regularly drops below freezing in the winter the zombie menace may be ongoing for several decades; I'll go as far as to say that such thawed zombies would function as husks, however, due to the effect of freezing and thawing on their remaining body integrity.

Still, that reduced casualities would only really apply to an organized, intelligent resistance that dealt with zombies on a consistant basis. The construction of the Zombie Pandemic doesn't really facilitate much communication which makes it very difficult to share knowledge. It creates small, closed communities that are hyper defensive. Carrier pigeons would be one way, given that zombies aren't attracted to animals. The zombie pandemic would basically be a series of epidemics.

 One zombie would find an undefended location and then basically create a new epidemic, which would lead to at least two or three zombies wandering off to found new colonies, while the rest spread in a fairly circular growth pattern. In cold climates the safest time would be winter, because it would certainly slow them down. Their joints would freeze.

One thought that occured to me was on the "talkers", the zombie-people. I have to say that they have the potential to sneak into a closed community and quickly spread the "disease". Perhaps that's their function, to turn the transient zombie threat into a permanent threat.

I offer up my theory on re-animation; it's simple, it's crude, maybe unimaginitive, but I dare say reasonable. Maybe I can tell you something you didn't know, or give you an idea for something new.

The dead cannot walk or eat. Nothing that is dead has motivation, nor does it feed or reproduce. Zombies have all the characteristics of being living organisms; they seem to require fuel (they try to eat people), they have some motivation (desire to eat people), and they reproduce (by spreading their "disease" through their bite). They move and walk and in some stories even have some memories of what they once were, sometimes even operate simple machinery in the quest to end their obligatory hunger for human flesh. Suffice to say, I don't think "zombies" are really dead. I think they simply are no longer true mammals. Instead, they are similar to single-celled organisms.

They all have the motivation to move to a source of food; or at least, a host for reproduction. Who knows if zombies actually gain any nourishment from human flesh. I think it's unlikely, as few stories (except "28 days later"... but they weren't really dead, just pissed off) ever feature zombies starving. The only thing they can do in their unlife is to create more zombies. Reproduction is common among all living things, and zombies seem to do so in a viral fashion, or at least like any disease. They seek a healthy host for their "seed" (supposedly the micro-organism which gives the human corpse energy and motion), which they infect; soon after the host becomes like the parent.

Like I said before, the dead can't move. Without muscles to move bones, and something to provide power and command to the muscles, you don't have an animated body (unless you want to get into telekinetic animation of bones, but I'm not big on "magic" explanations). When alive, the brain provides command to the muscles, and the muscles are powered by normal human metabolism -an extremely complicated system involving the intake of many different substances and transforming them into energy, and then motion. Zombies usually don't need their organs, so normal human metabolism is no longer functional. This is what makes them "dead", in that they resemble dead human beings. However, something must provide energy and motivation to the muscles that move the body towards live, healthy human flesh.

If I remember my biology class, the thing in our body that turns all of this oxygen and food and whatnot into actual energy is similar to bacteria; a little organelle in our cells that makes ATP, which we use to do stuff. I suggest that maybe the micro-organism which reanimates the body replicates some of the functions of a normal human body in order to get it moving and spread itself. It creates ATP which powers the muscles, activates the very base and simple functions of the brain, and provides a motivation to reproduce.

Therefore, zombies still rely upon some processes present in the human body, namely the skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems (hence the "shoot-them-inna-head" or "chop-em-up" methods). If the micro-organism which reanimates the body can act like the vascular system and transport the energy it creates throughout the body, then it can provide energy to all parts necessary for its reproduction.

I don't think a zombie is really all that far-fetched. There's a lot we don't understand about how life and death works, many ways for a disease to be spread, and lots of ways for an organism to survive... could be an alien bacteria that survives by reanimating the native dominant species and spreading like wildfire. I'm always a big fan of the bio-engineered weapon story.

-Professor Velox

@ DeeL : I agree with Endless_Helix. If it takes 10 years on average for a zombie to rot away to the point where it can no longer move, it would be about 15 years after the Pale Event when things really start calming down (note that this is not taking into account the effect of the "sentient zombies", which, as Endless_Helix suggested, might serve to lengthen the crisis even further). Throughout the first five years, there would still be plenty of humans that have too little knowledge to prevent zombie-victims, especially considering that the Pale Event took a while to transform into a full-blown crisis. I'd imagine the zombie epidemic as a bell-curve, worsening throughout the first five years until the surviving humans would all have gathered in well-defended communities, then at its top throughout years five to ten, and then slowly wearing out throughout the next ten years (again, unless the "talkers" find a way of suspending the epidemic).

@ Velox121 : Though you've got some interesting suggestions, I'd personally opt not to get too deep into explaining the inner workings of the zombies. It demystifies things, and on top of that, people at the Bunker or the Rock or another post-Pale Event community don't have the means to figure this kind of things out.

Túrin

@Velox: That is a great summary of what could be zombie biology. Personally, I think that there are several other explanations as to precisely what animates the body (How about parasites in the reflexive nerves that feed off the bacteria attracted to the rotting flesh. The parasites generate an electric field that stimulates our reflex arcs. Adding more flesh to the pile would attract more bacteria, and thus more food...). While it does take away the mystery a bit, perhaps a bit of that is needed to comprehend why zombies do the things they do. Of course... That doesn't explain talkers.

Not sure if anyone's covered this already, but with all these parasites/bacteria or whatever, what's coordinating their movements?  It's all well and good to have the motive power to walk, but walking is not an easy process, requiring the tandem effort of numerous muscular activities.

The wonderful thing about having a brain and spine to dictate function is that it's all connected, so how do these bacteria communicate so that their actions are not totally contradictory to one another, and how do they motivate an organism continuously over a period of years as its muscles slough off, its eyeballs drain, its eardrums shrivel and its nerves degenerate (including the brain - fact is, none of our fleshy bits last long in any structurally cohesive fashion), effectively eliminating the possibility of sensual experience and motive function?

Of course, if I've just missed the point entirely, nevermind.

Hive mind? Pheromones? Electric Pulse Fields? Take your pick. I'm pretty sure that there are plenty more ways to get bacteria and parasites to march in lock-step...

Quote"Like all the walking dead, Beth did not decay."
(From the 'Beth' vignette)

Ah, that one solves it for me.  As long as they are not prey to the bacteria that cause decay, a lot of my doubts are alleviated.  A few things still seem a little iffy though: when the inevitable dessication kicks in, are neurons still suitable conduits for impulses, and can muscle retain its function?  Does natural cell death occur?  If not, why not?  Do the micro-organisms prevent it?  How are nutrients conveyed?  How do the parasites modify the human organic process and regulate it in its subsequent form, and how do they perceive without a brain to interpret senses?  Is sensory input rerouted to the parasites?  My understanding of biology is elementary at best, so bear with me.

Even having answered this, can a corpse that has in fact been rotting be reanimated, or is it "too dead", so to speak?  Can only fresh corpses come back?

Oh yeah, and probably the most important question for me: where in the fuck did these badass parasites come from?  They can't possibly have evolved for the myriad of functions they are required to perform (they lack that element of... evolutionary reducibility), and the fact that they know how to psychically (for want of a better word) communicate extraordinarily complex coordinations of muscular process (heck, even if they're shambling and stumbling, that's still mighty impressive) suggests that they were designed for the very purpose of making our lives as shit as possible.

Not trying to be an ass.  Just playing devil's advocate.  I want to make sure this is as cohesive as possible.

Or maybe this don't run on microorganisms.


Buaghahahahahahaha!

In that eventuality, my queries are moot, but my post pertains to the scenario wherein they are, as Velox and Helix suggested as possibilities.

I think it'd be cooler if it didn't, though.  I don't really like the idea of zombies powered by a microorganic hivemind.  Ultimately, I agree with Turin's coments about demystification.  It's a helluva lot creepier when you go "Why are the dead walking?!" than "A telepathic host of parasitic pseudo-organelles have seized control of the recently deceased's motor functions!"  The fact that we don't know how or why they've come back is half the horror, methinks.

Pages found in the streets in the aftermath of the Wolf-packer massacre, entries from the journal of a person calling himself Shepherd.

[spoiler=Entry 1]I often think in music.  I think of pop tunes to accompany my life's little situations.  It's usually Pink Floyd, but on the day that I died it was L. Beth Cohen's Halleluja.  

I was always a sickly kid.  I grew into a sickly man.  Mesomorph build, but heart trouble.  I was 33, and had a nitro prescription.  When I felt the old familiar pain in my chest, I knew I had to get to my medicine fast.  I was always leaving it somewhere - in retrospect, I was kind of daring death.  That day, he took the dare.  The pain grew and grew as I headed toward my truck, until it just clipped my legs out from under me.

I was lying face down on the ground, coughing into the dirt, couldn't move, laughing at myself for leaving my nitro in the glove box.  Halleluja was playing in my head - not the good version, by Jeff Buckley, but the 'commercial' version by Rufus Wainwright, the same one that they used in Shrek.  It only took my a couple of seconds to figure out why I would go for that one - Buckley's version finishes with an elaborate trail of notes, suggesting that the agonies of love are all part of a continuing dance of life, and it just goes on.  Wainwright makes a more classic resolve into a major-key close.  A conclusion.  An ending.

I figured I was going to die.  I probably was, but that was when the Event happened.

Before it all went to hell, scientists were saying that the sky lightened for just about one thousand seconds - just over 16 minutes.  I didn't see it.  My nose was pressed into the dirt, and my eyes were closed.  But even then my pain was fading.  I could feel my heart strengthening.  I couldn't think very clearly - ever since then it's as if my mind is wrapped in fur, but I could tell it was getting better.  

After a few minutes - long enough for the Pale Event to be gone - I got up, walked heavily over to my truck, and got to a hospital.  

They checked me in, made sure my insurance was okay, got me up to a room, contacted my doctor and started to run tests.  Boy, did they run tests.  At first it was just curiosity, then they got almost panicky, but before they could conclude anything it all started to break loose.

Some guy up in the terminal ward had gone nuts.  They had to restrain him, but no sedatives worked on him.  One of the orderlies who brought me my dinner of clear liquids had a big bandage on his arm.  The emergency room was constantly calling codes.  Somebody had come out of a barfight foaming at the mouth with a pool cue in his gut.  It hadn't stopped him from attacking the EMS guys.

Two ambulances came in from a local nursing home, a call came in from hospice home care.  People had been jumped, people had gone crazy.  Running around, acting like rabid dogs, even though they had been too sick and old to even get up before.  Word had it that several sheriff's deputies had disappeared at the scene of a car accident, after calling in two dead-at-the-scene.

For a long time, no nurses came into my room.  No doctors, no orderlies, nothing.  Outside, there was noise, but it just didn't seem important to me.  

My body temperature was low.  Around 87 degrees.  My blood pressure was good, but my hearbeat was slow.  Regular.  THey said it was strong, just slow.  20 beats per minute.  They had said my blood was showing some strange properties.  Then they just stopped coming.

I watched TV, trying to find out more about that Pale Event thing, but the news didn't care.  There was talk of biowarfare, about how the crazy people were emphatically not dead but victims of a bioagent, and shooting them would be considered a crime against humanity or something.  Then they were saying they *were* dead, and Hell was full or something.  I don't know.  

It was days before I felt hungry.  Even then, it wasn't until the stations stopped broadcasting before I felt the urge to move.  I put on my pants and walked outside.

On my floor, there was nothing.  Blood and empty hallways.  I knew I should feel alarmed, but there was nothing.  It was like the adrenaline was all out.

I found bodies.  One was half eaten.  Didn't look like dogs, but eaten.  Another was blue-ish grey, with a big hole in her head.

It wasn't until I went downstairs that I saw someone.  A big crowd of people were walking around.  Mostly naked, some in hospital scrubs, all of them kind of broken or bloody.  None of them bleeding, though.  Even ones with open wounds.  

Some of them looked at me.  There was a flicker of recognition in their eyes.  Then they looked away, like I wasn't what they were looking for.  My pulse didn't quicken.  

Then there was screaming upstairs.  And a kind of howling.  They all looked up, then started heading for the stairs.  Slowly at first, as if they didn't quite get it.  Then faster.  Like there was a scent to follow.  

I pushed at the ones in front.  I didn't really want to stop them - I didn't really want anything.  I just wanted to see it first.

They stayed behind me.  I didn't think it was strange, didn't really know what to think.  After the fact, sure it was weird.  But they stayed behind me, and I went back upstairs.  

It was three floors up that I found a flood.  Water, water everywhere.  There were these people, four of them.   And an emergency hose, dripping but dry.  And they were throwing beakers and test tubes.  At first I thought it was acid, but it was just water.  The blue-ish grey people were trying to get them, but the water dripping down them seemed to have them confused.

The ones behind me began to moan, and howl.  That same weird howling, grunting sound.  They wanted to get in there.  Maybe they just wanted water.  I didn't know.  I just pushed them back.

And they stayed back.  I don't know why.  Because I pushed them.

The healthy people saw me coming down the hall, and screamed "There's more of them!" and headed for a room.  I looked and saw that there was  kind of bridge to another building, made out of a couple of tables.  From one window-ledge to another.

The ones in the hallway seemed to snap out of hit, when there was no water being thrown at them, then they followed the other people in.  The ones behind me were scrambling and howling, but they didn't get past me.  

The other ones followed them, scrambling after the healthy people - the live people - across the bridge.  They could keep dead ones from crossing, once they got across, but they couldn't move the bridge with the weight of the dead ones on it, and they couldn't leave because then the dead ones would get across.  

I don't know why I started thinking of the blue-ish grey people as dead, I guess I just did.  That's what the TV had said.

I felt a kind of mental shrug, and walked over to the bridge of tables.  I hefted the tables easily.  I felt my bones creak from the weight, but it didn't feel like much.  The tables and the dead people on them fell four stories.  The live people now in the other building looked at me like they had never seen anything like me before.

They dead people howling across the chasm didn't look at me at all.  Like the live people were the only things in the world they could see.

I walked through them, and looked at myself in a mirror.  It was me, with this blue-ish grey tinge in my skin.  My heart didn't race.  It didn't stop.

My mind is still wrapped in fur, but I don't think my heart will ever stop again.[/spoiler]

*Applaudes*

That was the best piece of literature I've read in a while, D-man.  The Shepherd has me intrigued, like some kind of hapless undead anti-hero.  His heart-attack was a good explanation for his apparent half-alive state, and I like the subtle Romero reference.

I wanna hear more about this fellow.

Let's wrap up the escape of the doc first? Maybe?


But besides that, wow. I'm likin' it.

Some musings:


Bejazz and Golem, you two are the ones who really cranked up the 'Doc Escapes' story.  I'm all on tenderhooks, btw.  I'm really not sure where to go with it, but I can tell you this - The Shepherd does indeed tie into the Bunker SL.  Future entries from his journal will clarify matters.

And I just recently got hold of a new d20 Modern game supplement entitled Year of the Zombie.  In that version of the Zombie Apocalypse, things are even more complicated than usual.  For one thing, most of the zombies are shambling types; some are runners.  There's a kind of zombie classed as frenzied - think of zombies with barbarian levels.  Then there are some that 'remember' bits of tool use and articulation - never much, but sometimes enough to make them dangerous (and always enough to make them disturbing.)

But the most distinctive detail of YoZ is what we might call the arising interval.  It is rarely defined in the movies; there is occasionally some reference to how the 'recently dead are coming back to life,', but it's never nailed down how recently, or whether the effect stops.  In the world of the Pale Event, the interval is nailed down pretty well - everyone who died during a sixteen minute long world-wide phenomenon known as the Pale Event came back as a runner-type zombie, unless he died of a broken brain case.

In Albert Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, the phenomenon is a viral type contagion, which periodically emerges from the wilderness, from entirely unknown origins - some stranger just wanders out of the woods or jungle or tundra or wherever without a pulse, but with an appetite.

YoZ goes all worst case scenario - the arising interval in that setting lasts sixteen years.  Within that time, if anyone dies of anything without their skull being cracked, they come back.  And they are infectious too.  And I thought my scenario endangered the survival of the human species.

The matter of just how dangerous the zombie threat is to the human race would seem to be a function of arising interval, area of arising, and the formidability of individual zombies.

If the zombies are shambling types, even if the effect is global, the danger of the zombies would seem to be limited by their weakness - I mean, lets face it, even if they are stronger than human, they're slower.  Once the 'shoot 'em in the head' principle becomes known, a lone human with a steel pipe can take down a considerable number of zombies singlehanded with a little forethought.  

(And what do you call a group of zombies, anyway?  A shuffle?  A lurch of zombies?  They should have their own collective term, is all I'm saying.)

One important factor in considering the operation of colletive anti-zombie tactics is the inertia of local governments.  National governments would almost not count - as detailed in World War Z, the vast forces used by national armies, like incendiaries, shrapnel- and pressure- type explosives, and gas attacks would have trivial effects on a large number of zombies.  So the real counterattack would have to be organized on the local level, using the national infrastructure for support.

If the local government reacts quickly, organizing a large number of small units, arming them with light and nimble weapons, and carefully accounting for the terrain and the tactics of baiting the zombies to provoke them into vulnerable positions, that community has a good chance of suffering minimal casualties.  If the city council or other local power block slipped into a state of intractable denial, though - well, things could get ugly.  Even with shambling zombies.

That's kind of why I kept the interval to sixteen minutes.  The zombies of the Pale Event are fast and strong, and when they've eaten they even recover some of their intelligence.  I got that last detail from Marvel Zombies; in that story, the zombies all kept their intelligence, but could only think of eating human flesh unless they were full, when they could focus on other thoughts.  I thought that that would truly ensure the annihilation of humanity, even if the zombies didn't have super powers, so I went with a less dangerous version.

So - sixteen minutes of arising, fast zombies, global, in a world where politics and territoriality would trump large-scale communication and cooperation until it was almost too late = a fearsome but not hopeless challenge for those who survive the first great tumult.

Okay, I'm all out for now.  I'll scribble out another entry from The Shepherd's Journal later. Anybody else have anything to add regarding the dramatic equation?


Edited for spelling.

Other pages found from the journal of 'Shepherd'.  (Italicized text is transcribed from notes in the margins, most of which are identifiable as song lyrics.)

 [spoiler=Entry 2]

Welcome my son; welcome to the machine.

After they eat, they sometimes talk.  It's brief.  They eat, and say things, and ask me things.  I answer as best I can.  I kill them when they ask me to.

They only eat one thing.  There isn't much of it around.

Bleating and babbling they fell on his neck with a scream
Wave upon wave of demented avengers marched cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream

I eat all kinds of things.  I'm down to cooking things over wood fires.  Stoves aren't what they used to be.  I can find all kinds of food.  Nobody else is eating it.

I don't hide from the dead.  They're just dead.  Unless they've eaten, they don't notice me.  Sometimes they seem to listen to me, or move the way I shove them.  But there isn't anything there; it's like they don't have any will, so they just take mine.  A few times I've kept them back when live people were in front of them; as soon as the live people were out of sight, the dead stopped trying to get past me.  

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon

At first, the army tried to get a lot of survivors into the camp.  They put a big barb-wire fence around it, just in case someone was infected.  Then they put guards around the outside.  But in two days, the fence went down.  One morning, as the sun rose and lit up the living guards, all the people behind the fence rose up like a dead wave and slammed the barriers aside.  

Only a few people were left.  People who were smart, but not sociable.  Paranoid or inconspicuous enough to escape the armies notice.  I hide from them.  The others.  The live ones.  They think I'm dead.  I'm not bitten or anything, but my color is still off.  I feel calm, always.  I can't really think as fast as I used to.  I don't need as much food or water or air as I used to.  I can hold my breath for a long time.  

But they don't see all that.  What they see is a dead one.  What I see are a bunch of people who could do well if they got together.  The big quiet one, the sniper, I think he was a policeman but it's hard to tell.  The little one, fast and agile.  He escapes by being even faster than the dashers.  The health nut, owner of that big health food store, whose boyfriend had that bunker - that might be a good place to hide.

The foul-mouthed cook.  The skinny one, searches for booze as much as for food.  The gang-banger, and his two sisters.  The doctor using the rabbit hutch for a hiding place.  Each of them could be so good to each other, if only they were together.

Hey you!  Out there on the road, always doing what your told can you help me?
Hey you!  Out there beyond the wall breaking bottles in the hall can you help me?
Hey you!  Don't tell me there's no hope at all
Together we stand; divided we fall

I try to help.  They know about each other, and how to stay safe from the dead ones.  Now they need to get out of the city.  I can help.  I can keep the dead ones back.

But I have to stay away from them.  They try to shoot me.  In the head.  Don't blame them, but I have to keep my head down a lot.

And if I show you my dark side
Will you still hold me tonight
And if I open my heart to you
And show you my weak side
What would you do?

[/spoiler]

 [spoiler=Entry 3]

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?  Hot ashes for trees?  Hot air for a cool breeze?  Cold comfort for change?  Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

I wake up screaming from dreams I don't remember.

I don't seem to go to sleep.  Not since I ran out of food.  I feel pretty good, though.  I don't know if I'm thinking any better, but it feels like I do.  

Have you heard the news?  The dogs are dead
You better stay home, and do as your told.  Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

The food is gone.  But there is something to eat.  All I have to do is go out to the bunker and get it.

I think about it all the time.  I just stopped eating when I noticed I didn't really feel hungry.  My skin is drying.  My body seems to be thinning into a kind of rind, but I'm not any weaker.  I'm even stronger.  I've noticed this.  

I stopped eating, and started getting stronger and looking worse, more dead.  And I started thinking about being a zombie.  Just letting go.  Just being a wanderer and a feaster.  Thinking about enjoying the feast of the dead.

I'm a husk.  In one piece, but I can't kid myself.  A husk.

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the highest wave
You race toward an early grave

I tried to eat again.  Crackers.  Couldn't keep them down, mostly.  Kept water down and some fresh rat meat.  Gotta be careful.  I have decided I don't want to stop eating.  I have decided I don't want to know what happens if I don't eat human food anymore.

I've been thinking about religion.  I wonder if the world is coming to an end.  I wonder if it's just the human race.  I wonder what became of God's promise to give the earth to mankind.  We were supposed to have dominion over the earth and everything that lived on it.  What happened to that?

What makes me think I'm part of mankind anymore?

I have always been here
I have always looked out from behind these eyes
It feels like more than a lifetime
Feels like more than a lifetime

When I was still eating right, I had a dream every night.  It wasn't much of a dream, just a voice.  "We are coming.  You thought you could end us.  You thought you could replace us.  But we have been here all along.  We have waited for this day.  And now it is your turn.  Like us, you will sink into the waters beyond the world.  Like us, you will fall victim to DELUGE.  We are coming."

He's haunted by the memory of a lost paradise
In his youth or a dream.  He can't be precise
He's chained forever to a world that's departed
It's not enough.  It's not enough

That was when I was slower.  But now I'm faster.  Eating less.  Cleaning the roads.  Running when the living ones come to town.  And now I'm starting to wonder why I still do things for them.  Why I can't just be dead.

So you
Thought you
Might like to
Go to the show
To feel the warm thrill of confusion
That space cadet glow?
Tell me, is something eluding you Sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes
You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise

I don't remember my dreams anymore.  But I wake up screaming.

You can have anything  you want
You can drift you can dream, even walk on water
Anything you want
You can own anything you see
Sell your soul for complete control
Is that really what you need?
You can lose yourself this night
Realize you have nothing to hide
Turn and face the light
What do you want from me??????




[/spoiler]

:D [yuss!]

Thanks.  Hopefully the identification of Shepherd is clear enough.  If it is, that brings us up to the present, six years into the ZA.  

Major cookies go out to anyone who can identify the songs quoted in the italicized text without googling.

Beejazz@, I do hope you got the quote of your own; it seemed to be the right place to slip it into the main storyline.

Dark Side of the Moon would seem like an obvious guess, otherwise I have no idea.

Amazing work on Shepherd. He's a fascinating character. Can't wait to hear what will happen to him.

Túrin

John. That was all he could think of... John... John... why? Ah...

"John? John, can you hear me?"

He twitched, and opened one eye slowly, carefully. He was strapped down, inside something... moving. What moved and was shaped like this...? It was a word, from his life. Ah, that was it.

"Subway. We're on the subway."

The woman above him looked over to her counterpart, raising an eyebrow, then looked down.

"Well done, John... it's rare that somebody so... far gone... can remember that level of detail..."

He did not need to look, he could feel the bands around his arms. The hunger was there again, but it had been sated not long ago.

"Why... why am I strapped down?"

"We're taking you to... to a clinic. Just a clinic." The woman smiled reassuringly, just failing to hide the wrinkling of her nose at the smell of the formaldehyde the people who had put him in the Cage had used... the Cage. What had... he had... escaped? Yes, that was the word. And then the hunger had taken him. He had fought, oh yes... but... he could not remember. What had happened... happened...

"What... I was in... I was in a place, with a cage?"

The woman looked across at the man again, and he nodded and said: "The Bunker. We're not sure how he got out... we think he was given a shot of Venelmaldine Compound 19 and dumped."

John thought about this for a moment. Who would have done that, have helped him? And what was Venelmaldine? He was sure he'd known in life, but it was... was... slipping away.

"Should've been enough to kill him - but he's already dead, so it doesn't matter." The woman nodded.

"We'll have to check out that compound once we get back to the Monastery, see what properties it has."

She turned back to him, then, lowering a sac of something... disgusting, yet strangely alluring to his hungry mind, from an arch above the slab he was lying on.

"Don't worry, John. This is just to keep the hunger down."

The woman attached a tube to the sac and pushed it into a mask. He suddenly realised what the bag was full of...

Dead, rotted, flesh...

And then the mask was strapped across his face. Bliss overtook him as the hunger was, for once, totally purged beneath the mix of lumps and fluid. He knew nothing, saw nothing, until the train slowed and stopped. The doors slid open - a dull, background hiss in his blissful mind - and then the mask was pulled away. He was brought back to reality.

He realised, then - this carriage was built to keep EVERYTHING out. The windows were slatted with steel, the walls reinforced, and the doors thicker than his arm. Those same doors slid open, and two men climbed aboard. As he was wheeled off, still on the slab which he now believed was a hospital bed, he listened to their conversation.

"Where'd'you find him?"

"He was in Red Sector, near that bunker. Somebody had shot him with Venelmaldine Compound 19, we believe. We'll have to study its effects."

This new man nodded. He was wearing a medical mask, which again looked familiar - perhaps something again from his life. They were moving through a tunnel.

"Is the subway station still hidden, or do we need to send the code?"

"It's still hidden. That biological compound Dr. Deering made is amazing... causes a great sense of aversion in both RBLFs and humans. RBLFs are rarely strong enough to get through it, and humans will eventually die from it. Genius."

"Good."

They paused for a moment as one of the newer men hammered in a code onto a door. Somehow, John memorised the numbers by sound. It was one of his new skills - his hearing was much sharper, one of the few areas that hadn't degenerated. And somehow, he knew those sounds anyway...

There was a hiss of doors sliding open, and John saw the doorjamb pass overhead. Now they were inside a long concrete hall, decorated with what appeared to be religious images - Christ on the cross, Moses on the mountaintop, Adam and Eve in the garden...

"Welcome, John," the woman said, "to the Monastery of the New Knights Hospitalier..."

::moment of stunned silence, then::



 Bravoooo!!!

::clapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclap::

On top of everything else, Golem, you have at least started to fill a need I have noted but not addressed - the need for a major female protagonist.  The closest I have come so far was 'Dirt', and now we have a New Knight Hospitallar.  I hope to hear her name sometime soon, as well as definitions for some of the new terms.  I can gather some of it from the context, but man! this is clearly the beginning of a whole new phase.  

Thank you.

Oh, I'm working on it. More perhaps later tonight.

The metal bed was still being moved along the corridor - he saw side exits, and could hear conversation, but they did not turn off. After a while, he spoke.

"Knights... Hospitalier?" It echoed in his mind, perhaps a rare piece of general knowledge obtained as a living one. He couldn't quite make it out...

"Yes. You may have heard of us before - but that would be the Old Knights Hospitalier. Involved in the crusades... we do not crusade for religion, though. We heal the sick and seek a cure..."

There was silence, again, then. And then, there was noise of speech from up ahead. The bed was pushed into a double-walled glass cylinder capped and floored with metal. A glass panel slid across behind him, and he looked around. Within his restricted view, he could see... nothing, at the moment. The passage went in a circle around the glass cylinder, sending passages out in five directions other than the one he had come through. He memorised this. It could be useful...

Then, there was a humming. Presumably a button had been pressed, or maybe... a memory stirred... they were powered by sensors. The metal was carved with latin, english, french. The glass cylinder moved upward, suddenly. The concrete passageways were replaced by curved metal walls. Suddenly, the... elevator? Was that a word? He thought it was. The elevator stopped. The doors slid open with a hiss, and a deep, meditational chant filled his ears. It was quiet, yet loud. The woman who'd brought him in pulled out a hood from beneath her cloak, and placed it over her head. The others did the same. The bed was moved out into a gleaming-white room edged with what appeared to be bays for beds like his own. Only two were occupied, however. He couldn't see the occupants from his angle of view, but they were Dead. He knew it, he could... feel... it.

He was wheeled into a bay where, it seemed, the wheels were locked. The strap around his neck was undone by a careful hand, and then another mask, alike to the one he wore on the subway, was placed over his mouth. Two more women had joined them, but the first woman seemed to be leaving...

"Brothers Mark and Solomon, return to your duties. Brother-Doctor Ishmael, stay and observe the patient. Sister-Nurse Martha, assist Brother-Doctor Ishmael."

He noticed that only the last, the one called Martha, gave a curtsy, whispering "In Christ's name it shall be, Sister-Chaplain Esther."

"And I..." she said, "I will get changed into proper uniform."

The Sister-Nurse nodded and immediately began taking readings, whilst the Brother-Doctor didn't seem to do much at all. After a while he just nodded and wandered off somewhere, picking up something from a rack on the wall that John couldn't quite see. The nurse completed her readings, and removed the mask. John had not enjoyed it that time - the hunger hadn't come. Not truely. The Sister-Nurse then pierced his rotting flesh with several tiny needlepoint spikes, to which were attached long tubes heading off to various tanks in the centre of the ceiling, arrayed, strangely, as a stained glass window. Beneath that, he could see little more than an altar.

The nurse left after making the sign of the cross before the altar - the sign of the cross... where had he heard of that before? leaving a clipboard with his results. He had glimpsed words in latin on there - whether the nurses were required to write in latin, or just read it, he did not know.

"They won't let you go, you know."

A quiet, rasping voice spoke at him from somewhere. Then he realised - from one of the other beds. But the voice was not real... it was inside his mouldering, rotting brain.

Very good, very good.

You know, I don't know where you plan to go with this, but perhaps it would be useful to shift the viewpoint away from the Doc himself. I mean, he's a zombie and already you seem to be turning him back into a human (his episode of sanity lasts far longer than in DeeL's original tale, but if he'll go insane again, we won't be able to keep track of what's going on). Perhaps you are doing this deliberately in which case I will withhold my opinion until you're done, but for now, my suggestion stands.

Túrin

He's only remaining sane because of his constant shots of chemicals, but in the next instalment I am moving it away from Doc...

A bell tolled somewhere in the heights of the Sanctum, and Sister-Guardian Elizabeth sighed as she came off duty. She hadn't been posted on a journey for two months now, and guarding the Sanctum was becoming... tedious. She heard they'd brought in a new Victim today. Satan's disease would be cured, by the love of God. One day. Until then, she would serve the Trinity with mind, soul and body.

She placed her sword against the bed and removed her black kevlar jacket with the red cross of the Knights Hospitaller marked across it, placing it carefully over a rack. Underneath, she wore the standard Guardian garb - a black tunic with the templar insignia. She had only been promoted from woman-at-arms recently, and she knew that if she worked hard, she could make Knight or even Templar within three years. As always, she strapped her submachinegun, pistol and ammunition into the lockers and clamped it shut. She hadn't always been 'Elizabeth', once she'd been Anna Harper - before she joined the Hospitallers. She hadn't really had any choice, though - it was either join them, or succumb to the waves of victims, possibly even end up as one of them. She shuddered and moved over to the shrine that occupied one corner of her cramped cell. As a Sister-Guardian, she had her own sleeping-chamber, but it was only twelve feet by twelve feet - hardly large. But, then again, Men-at-Arms had to sleep in dormitories, so she supposed this was better. In a way.

She knelt before the shrine, made the sign of the cross and spoke her midday devotions. Then it was time to eat. She left her rooms, giving a passing nod to Brother-Guardian Michael, taking her sword with her. The sword was an important part of any Hospitaller's garb - ranking somewhere on the same level as the insignia. She carried hers at her side, where it was easy to reach. If trouble called, Guardians were expected to form the first line of defence - or attack, come to that. She didn't take her pistol, however - training with the sword, unlike with the pistol, was compulsory, and she had been lax in her visits to the Firing Range of late. If trouble called, she would rather decapitate it.

She left the accomodation blocks and travelled down the elevator to the dining chamber. This place was huge, high-roofed with huge pillars and arches, built in the style of an ancient cathedral hall. Men-at-Arms and Initiates were expected to remain silent during meals, but she was allowed to talk due to her rank. After being given food, she sat down at the Guardian table. Those here that weren't on duty were talking quietly, drinking water and eating the 'EYN' bread provided by the Hospitallers - EYN standing for everything you need. Of course, EYN bread was a disgusting, tasteless brown mass, but it contained everything you required for a healthy diet. None of her friends were there.

Once the Midday Hour ended, she returned to duty, retrieving her equipment from her cell. Today was likely to be a hard day, if the rumours she had heard were true - bringing in a Victim from the Dead District? Unwise, she would have said, if she did not know her superiors better. She joined her Hand - one other Guardian and six Men-at-Arms - and they began patrolling the streets. Many of the survivors within the city knew of these armed men and women in uniforms, but they generally had more pressing concerns - unless they wanted to reach the Holy Land, of course, or join as an Initiate or Man-at-Arms.

Of course, the Holy Land sounded grand, but it wasn't actually Israel in this case. It was the code for the Hospitaller Enclave far beyond the city, in the wilderness. Of course, the outer reaches of the city were filled with Victims, and the Hospitallers specialised in smuggling people through here - for a small contribution to the church, generally, or something along those lines. Helicopters were hard to find, nowadays - the Hospitallers didn't have even one - but they smuggled different ways. Generally they went on foot, as working vehicles were difficult to find too, or if necessary they would take the Subway to convenient points. The Enclave itself was a town, defended and run by the Hospitallers. At the moment its population wasn't sparse, but it wasn't dense, either.

She sighed again. Hopefully she'd be put on another journey soon.

This is a very nice thread, filled with interesting stories.

But I'm not a writer. I'm a story teller.

I do that voodoo that I do so well, y'all.

Watch ma thread-necromancy-moves! They call me doctor thread! Etc!

Pting. Perhaps more Hospitaller stuff later.

Of all the threads i come across looking for something to Necro...

Rise Zombies...

Anyone got any new Zombie with or without the Apocalypse Material? Or any references for good Zombie Literature?  

read the zombie survival guide. It's a pretty good zombie book.

re-thread necromanced

DeeL hasn't posted in forever, but it seems as if Wensleydale has taken up quite a bit of the fiction, too. He still posts.

Of course, why limit this thread to only his zombie stories? Why not let everybody who wants to add something to this whole mythos?

Bumping, as this was (and can still be) awesome, as everyone loves zombies.  

Some people just express their love with a 12-gauge Remington 870 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_870).

I think I'm going to try to run this in my next game using AFMBE.

[ic]Cousin, I heard a story about a fella who caged a zombie a few years back.  The fella fed that there zombie his dead buddy.  Supposedly, the zombie talked to him, told him things.  Then that zombie escaped.  After that, people started telling all kinds of stories about it; calling it "the Doc" and such.  You know, 'cause it was a 'smart' zombie.  Cousin, both you and me know zombies ain't smart.  They just got a head full of hungry and a stomach full of empty.  Now I know all y'all say they're rightly called "Revenants," but I couldn't give two hoots.  A zombie is a zombie is a zombie.

Now let me tell you something, cousin.  I met that there fella.  Now I know, people went and said that the zombie ate him , but all that's right crap.  That fella ain't dead.  And he ain't no zombie neither.  Ain't no truth behind his story.  Any part of it.  Zombies ain't got enough brains to do much more than eat, let alone talk.  'Sides, ain't like you, me, or anyone else's got nothing to say to them.  I know the only thing I have for a zombie is a shovel to the face.  Or a 12-gauge Remington 870.  Whichever I fancy.

Now who you gonna believe?  Some fella who's shit-piled-high story makes him a zombie?  Cousin, if I were you I'd know which horse my money's on.[/ic]
This is a short piece of flash fiction, to get the ball rolling again.  And to thicken the plot; you know, like week-old rice pudding.  My narrator here is called Ray.

Perhaps I'll do something longer soonish.

Hicks vs Zombies... the omega edition

Quote from: RayI'm in the zombie killing business. And cousin, business is a-boomin![/ic]
But really, one of the things I was shooting for, and I'm not sure how well this really short piece pulled it off, was introducing a bit of unreliable narration into the mix.  The question, of course, would be is Ray the unreliable one, or was the original narrator.  I thought it was important to keep in mind that the characters, unlike us readers and writers, are not omniscient.

If no one minds could I give this a shot? I'll just do a short story, and you guys can see how it is.

Okay, i'm just going to give this a shot I hope no one minds.


  The door exploded inwards, dirt and dust filling the air of the small room. In the entrance stood a middle aged man, clean shaven with short dark hair. In his hands he held a .38 millimeter pistol with a flashlight ducktaped on the side. "All clear," He said, and his three companions came in behind him.
   "Did you have to kick the door in?" The woman said, coughing as she came into the entry way, a titanium baseball bat in her hands.

 "I'm getting damn sick of pop ups, and I figured if one of them was next to the door, I would have gotten it." He explained in a grim voice.

   Standing next to the woman was an older black man with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. He said nothing, and as always kept a passive look on his face. The last to come in was a kid, barely fifteen. He wore a dark hoodie sweatshirt, and stuck close to the older man. The kid's small, dark eyes darted around cautiously.

  It was clear this was a system they were used to, as they went through their routine without saying a word. The two in the front stepped into the room, while the old man and the kid remained behind in the hallway.
  As the dust in the small room cleared, their surrounding became apparent. Moldy wallpaper lined the room, showing pictures of children playing on the beach. Two small beds sat in the center of the room, divided by a bedstand with a lamp sitting on it. A broken mirror lay across one of the beds, the shards spread out everywhere. Dark red, dried blood was splattered across the far wall. A small window sat halfway up the wall north of the beds, the glass shattered. Chilly sea air blew in, salty and moist.

"Mike..." The woman said to the other man in the room.
"Yes?" He answered.
"You should see this..." She said, lifting a book from the ground. Originally the word "Journal" was imprinted across the top in uppercase gold font, but the phrase "God is dead" was smeared across it in blood. The man called Mike took the book out of her hands.

"Just don't show Arthur." The woman whispered to him while motioning to the old black man in the hallway. "He's sensititive about those things." He nodded, then holstered his gun. Mike's fingers ran across the cover slowly, feeling the dried blood, chills running down his spine. He then flipped the book open.

        [ic]Day 1
 I don't turn on the TV anymore. Or the radio. Only a few stations broadcast anymore anyway. All they talk about are the dead, and it gives me nightmares. On some news stations religious preachers have taken over the broadcasting studio after the original newscasters are gone, saying that we have "sewn the seeds of sin, and this is our punishment". On some channels they say a solar flare came and the intense radiation mutated dead cells to bring them back to partial life. Some channels say that everything is under control, that it will all stop soon and the goverment can handle it. Some even deny it happening.

 To me, the solar flare radiation idea makes the most sense. I don't know. It just does. It would explain that big white light a few days back. And it did seem to give a good explanation of why the dead are walking. But I don't really care how it happened anymore. I am just scared.

  Yes, this is my first journal entry. I was here in Sea Isle City, New Jersey with all of my college friends. When it first happened, they all left, went back to their families. I was going to go with them, but I got a call from my family to stay put, stockpile food and stay safe. So I did that. I raided those vending machines down by the mini golf course. I got a shovel and busted them open. I've never been one for vandalism or anything, but it was the best thing I could think of at the time. And now I have a rubbermaid full of pretzels, potato chips and bottles of water and pepsi, plus all the food everyone else left here. They left plenty of real food. I figure I have enough for about a month, maby two if I ration.
  Yesterday I saw a big group of people go into the Wawa down the street ready to rob the place. Ha! There wasn't anybody even there to stop them. I should've been there. They got so much food for free.

 The house i'm staying in right now is a two story house. My friends and I rented out the top half for the summer, some young couple rented the bottom half. It worked fine, because we both made lots of noise and neither of us minded. They left two days ago. I got lucky, and they didn't bother taking their food with them.
  Yesterday, while some people robbed the Wawa, alot of others and I blocked off the bridge to the mainland. If the rumors were true, the dead couldn't swim. So we got anything we could and blocked off the bridge, even destroying some parts. It looks great, a huge barrier of cars and boxes, trashcans and life guard stands piled up about twenty feet high in some places. While I was doing that with the others, some guys my age busted into the police station. No one there.

 That really scared me. The police left? Is this that bad? No one else seemed that alarmed. Back to talking about the barrier on the bridge. What used to be toll booths are now guard posts. The police left lots of guns and ammo, and now we have sentries posted all over our barrier. I don't really think anything's going to get past that. But i've been talking. Talking to other people, and no one else seems to be thinking about what i'm thinking. I see the problems. What if bitten people come in on boats? What if there's another way on the island? What if a plane full of the dead crashes here? What if they can just walk strait through the water?

  Anyway, I have to go to bed tonight. I think this helped, getting some of my thoughts out on paper. I'm glad I did it. I'm just scared all this thinking about the dead will give me nightmares. Tommorow i'll have another entry about how my first day on guard duty went.
 [/ic]

So if anybody read any of that, how is it?

Quote from: SurvivormanSo if anybody read any of that, how is it?

pretty good so far.

The second entry in the journal.

 [ic]Day 2
 Today was my first day on guard duty. After spending all day sitting in that 'guard tower' I have felt a lot worse about all this. Let me start from the beginning.

  So I had set my alarm for 8:30 am, when night shift ended and my shift began. I was going to drive, but then decided against it. When everybody left, they took the van and the station wagon, leaving me with the truck. The truck was a gas guzler, and that was the reason they didn't take it, but was a gigantic pickup with four wheel drive. So instead of driving and wasting the little gas I have (what's already in the tank and four gas cans in the shed), I walked. Everything was so quiet. It was scary. People stared nervously out their dark windows at me as I walked by. It was a bright, sunny, nearly cloudless day. All that could be heard was the squawk of seagulls helping themselves to lots of easy meals, and wind. Other then that it was quiet. Trash blew down the street. Wood creaked in the wind. Muffled voices could be heard out of window. The place was a shadow of what is was before.

   When I reached the bridge, I passed alot of people around my age, some even younger. They were just sitting there at the end of the bridge. Some were holding shovels and baseball bats, just sitting there, staring into the distance. Some of them talked to eachother quietly. These were the people who had nothing better to do then stay on a sort of half guard at the end of the bridge. When I started getting closer to the barrier at the middle of the bridge, I could see the actual guards, and the 'guard towers'. Originally, halfway across the bridge there were two toll booths. The barrier was created in front of those toll booths. The toll booths themselves were very high, higher then the barrier. Although the lower portion had originally served as a toll booth, the upper portion had served as a small lighthouse.
      Now, however, I could see lots of men and women wearing blue police vests sitting on the platform on top of the tower. Although they may have been wearing police gear, and holding guns, it was apparent they weren't cops. They looked frightened and gave off an inexperienced vibe. As I got closer to them, I switched with someone sitting at the top of the tower. I was one of the guards that guarded from the top of the towers. Some others sat in the small toll booth room at the bottom.

  The top of the tower was rather plain. It was a white concrete platform that had originally let maintnence workers repair the lighthouse light. In the center of the platform was a light mounted on a rod. The lightbulb inside it was shattered into pieces, as the night shift guards were afraid it would attract the dead. Four chairs were set up on the platform, along with one cooler with water bottles in it and boxes of ammunition. I sat down in one of the white fold up chairs and another one of the guards handed me a pistol, and quickly showed me how to use it. I was nervous about using it, because I had never used a gun before. Even though I was unsure of my abilities with the firearm, it made me feel alot safer.

    Six hours passed by in the heat of the day. Nothing happened. I had been talking to the other guards about how the night shift people said they had seen the dead shambling around on the other side of the bridge through their binoculars. This didn't really scare me. I was sort of looking forward to seeing the dead, in a way. I wanted to see what the source of all this hysteria was about. I didn't really beleive something that bad could happen, and figured it wouldn't be as bad as people were saying, and this whole event was probably blown out of proportion by media. So I was excited about seeing the dead. Until it happened.

  It was around 3:00 pm when one of the other guards stood up. At first I thought he was stretching. That is usually all it means when somebody gets up. But this time he was looking down on the other side of the barrier, an astonished look on his face. It was only when he loaded his weapon when I decided to get up.

   I saw it, saw it running across the bridge. It was fast. Not like I had expected. It ran with speed, but not quite grace. As it got closer, I could make out the details of its body. It had an earthy gray skin, and white, pupiless eyes. It was wearing dirty, torn clothes, and it seemed like it was once wearing shoes, but the bottom had degraded after much running. Its face was covered in dried blood.

  As it closed in, my mind came back into focus. I aimed my weapon strait towards its chest. I fired, and missed. My hands were shaking. I was terrified. The man next to me fired. At first I thought he had missed, but then I saw a fresh splash of blood on the ground, and noticed a wound in the thing's stomach. The wound didn't slow it in the least, and as it closed in on the barrier it leaped, colliding solidly with the wall of cars and furniture. It didn't stop for a second, even though the impact had made it bruised and bloody. It started climbing the wall, and I was terrified by the sheer blood thirstiness of this horrible thing. When it reached the top of the wall, everyone started firing at once. In that few second of shooting, one shot had penetrated its forehead, and the thing fell over limp.

  Were all going to die. DIE. That was all I could think about. There had only been one, and our barrier barely helped. It climbed right over it! If one did that, what would a hundred do? I'm afraid we won't be able to hold these things back. I'm afraid this is all for nothing.    [/ic]

I really like that. Anybody else? I don't want to intrude on Deel or anybody elses previous writing. Is it okay if I keep going?

I didn't start this, but I did post in it a while back. The whole point was to create a sort of communal writing piece, I think, or at least that's what I got from it. I like your journal entries, they really get into the meat of what it would be like in a Zombie Apocalypse I think. I think that given how many zombie flicks I've watched, I've forgotten to be scared of them. Your story reminded me a little.

It's almost like a world-wide Stalingrad, and we've got the worst bits of both sides.

It's been a while, and I finally dropped back in to resurrect the thread and maybe rejoin the guild on an active basis.  I like what I've seen in the - years, isn't it? - since I left, and if anyone wants to bring more flesh-eating fun into this mess, feel free.  Survivorman in particular seems to be tuned in, if he's still here and posting.

Hey DeeL, welcome back!
I haven't seen Survivorman in a while, but he might be lurking.

I wrote a short story for this ages ago, and never got around to posting it. Now I need to see if I can get my POS laptop up and running to find it. Welcome back, DeeL - glad to see this project resurrected and some more of the old gang returning!