The Campaign Builder's Guild

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...