Deadfall: Survivors (4 page)

Entry 5 – Macaroni and Cheese
[5]

Milk. Not real milk, the powdered kind. But that’s still a big deal for me. I was rummaging through the cupboards in the house I slept in this morning, the two zombies still stuck up in the porch quiet enough for me, and I found a couple of bags of powdered milk. I crumbled my cereal bar into a bowl, and had it with some “real” milk. That was a treat.

I left out of the back and along the lower bank
of the river, so that the two zombies wouldn’t get all riled up at the thought of free lunch walking out through the front door.

It is always warmer down here out of the mountains. Granted
, it wasn’t really that hot, maybe, 70 degrees, but, I get so used to chilly weather and more importantly, dress for it. By noon, I was stripping down clothing and working on packing it up into my bag. Thankfully, it was yet another sunny day. As long as I have sun, my few electronics can stay charged thanks to a little mobile solar pack I keep draped over the back of my backpack. I have my maps, but it’s so nice to have my GPS with me.

Did I mention I
drift towards the lazy things in life?

I have often wondered how long the
GPS will stay accurate, or even work at all. I have dug through a lot of information at home, but haven’t really come to a good, concrete conclusion. So far, they remain rather accurate. Combined with my maps, I’ve been able to avoid getting lost.

I planned on taking the river all the way into Hendersonville. Water is really useful, not only for the obvious drinking part, but
I’ve noticed that zombies have a really hard time dealing with moving water. Whatever controls the body is just enough to get it walking, flail arms about to grab things, and bite and eat. But after that, there is essentially no coordination at all.

They appear to hear very well, BUT, they have to see along with hearing. If they don’t se
e anything, apparently,  it doesn’t exist. But if they can see it, they react really quickly to sound. There is like a five to ten second window that they seem to remember that what they just saw exists, and that the sound they’re  hearing is caused by this thing they just saw.

One solitary zombie is very rarely a threat
, unless you happen to be sleeping or stuck in a bear trap. But if they see you, all they need to do is hear you. Their heads are so uncoordinated that they rarely keep their eyes on you, but can react quickly to sound. That, of course, works to your advantage; if you can create a lot of loud noise, it can easily be distracted.

So
, back to hiking along the river: zombies rarely can deal with the moving water. Instead, I've seen them stumble and fall along the current and slippery rocks, and get swept away. Even if they try to stand up again, the whole stumble show goes on. It would be comical, if it weren’t for the fact that they were still trying to bite your flesh off.

I've used this to my advantage when travelling and running into groups of them; just head into the water and either cross the river to the other side
, or wait until they are so helplessly caught up in the tripping and slipping, that I can get out of the water and be gone before they are able to get themselves out of the water.

My easiest course, travel wise, would be to follow the French Broad to
Interstate 26, but as I have already mentioned, the interstates have become a flowing river of dead people. I wanted to find a place to hole up for the night before I took to scavenging through Hendersonville, but, even if I got extremely lucky, and there weren’t any zombies locked up in rooms in any of the myriad of hotels at the interstate exits, just that proximity to the interstate could be quite an issue.

Again, one zombie is very rarely the issue. It will never catch you. Well, that is, it
won’t catch you if you don’t want it to. The problem is when these things start gathering in hordes. I don’t know how they do it, but they seem to have a hive mind or they simply only want one thing, more living flesh. One zombie sees another walking and it starts following. Soon you have a crowd, and then you have a million zombie march. Then it seems all the zombies in the area are walking towards you. It might seem simple enough to just run away, but within minutes, it seems they are all coming out of the woodworks, from all directions. The best bet is to simply avoid areas where you could get stuck.

That’s the stuff
of nightmares. Once they get you, you are done. It’s ironic that the dead would have a death grip on their meals.

There’s a motel,
next to a park, off a few miles from the interstate. Obviously, that's where I'm at. I can’t tell what the name is, Wind something. The sign has been sheared off, maybe in a storm or maybe by some other gruesome method. But the place was devoid of living or dead, and I got a room that gave me a clear view across into the park.

I wonder what happened here
, though. I somewhat remember that park having trees, and now there are a bunch of stumps and holes, crater like, all across the park. The parks parking lot has a few burned out cars or trucks, as well. The good thing is that it gives me a clear view of anything that might come lumbering up. There is also a creek down below the park that I know flows right into the French Broad. That, is my escape route.

Macaroni and cheese for supper.
My old school is just down the road, as well as a ton of stores. I’ll  check them out tomorrow.

My room has a TV.

Entry
6 – Lots of Them
[6]

The problem with writing a journal like this is that one has to really pick and choose what they’re  going to write about. You see, a whole bunch of important (or at least to me) things happened today, but all of that pales in comparison to the commotion I nearly blundered into this evening. I had  a fairly successful day of scavenging, found some rechargeable AA batteries, some shampoo, and a few bags of rice. I managed to do that all without getting the attention of any zombies. That was the odd part.

There were no zombies anywhere. Even Hendersonville High, which I assumed would have some wandering around, was quite empty. I didn’t dare venture inside the school,
but the parking lots, the sports fields, everything, was quiet and empty. The streets were empty, and I had yet to run into a single zombie. I almost felt bold enough to walk down the middle of the road.

I didn’t.

As I headed down south through the town, this incredible silence was annoying me. I was headed towards the local airport to see if I could find anything useful there, and if not, there was a local college right next to it as well. When the world started to fall apart, college kids went home in a hurry. There were plenty of goodies left behind in those dorm rooms.

I took a left on
Highway 176 when I saw them all. Apparently, all of the zombies in this whole area had decided to congregate just a few blocks down from where I had just turned. I remember quickly ducking back around whatever building it was I was around, heart racing. They were all quite a ways away from me, but any stupid noise would have started a stampede of dead zombie cattle headed my way.

I collected myself and glanced as stealthily as a non-military
-spy-commando person can do. The zombies were clearly all gathered up quite tightly, and were focused on something else entirely. They were  easily at least three to four football fields from me. They weren’t wandering around in their usual random sense, but instead appeared to be  trying to climb over each other in the only way a zombie can; by tearing and clawing at whatever was in front of them.

To my right and slightly ahead of me
, was a smaller mom and pop appliance shop, called Harding and Son. Washers and dryers lay strewn through the broken glass of the shop. To my delight, the top of the shop was flat, the perfect place to stay hidden in plain sight.

My curiosity was peaked. You see, there is practically only one reason why there would be so many zombies all gathered up
; free food. There was the small chance that somewhere in the middle of that zombie mess were living people. Even if that wasn’t the case, I needed to know what had gathered all of these zombies  together.

I managed to sneak over to the shop, and with the use of some of the appliances,
made myself a series of steps with which to get onto the roof. From there, I could gaze further into that gigantic, writhing mass of dead limbs. It looks like they were all gathered around a large grocery store, which was barricaded with a lot of cars.

Someone had created a small fort out of the grocery store, perhaps in hopes of using the food that was inside of it to live. They probably didn’t count on being completely surrounded by such a captive audience.

I would have loved to cook some rice tonight. Guess I will settle for some more cereal bars.

I’m going to try to sleep now. No zombie can see me where I’m at, but
it’s  still quite unnerving to sleep about a football field or two away from the largest amount of zombies I have ever seen. Last thing I need is to get trapped up here.

This was the route taken by Brian from his mountain house, to Pisgah Inn and down into Hendersonville.

Entry 7
[7]

I didn’t sleep well last night. They were just close enough that the moaning and groaning involved with a pack of zombies was ever so constant. I simply couldn’t get comfortable either. I had gotten used to either sleeping on a bed or in my hammock, so sleeping on the nice hard roof didn’t go over too well. I kept thinking that I would wake up the next morning and I would peer over, and be surrounded myself.

When I came to think of it, shacking up on top of this shop was actually quite a dumb idea. My dad would never have allowed us to get potentially stuck up here. He would have laughed at my curiosity
, and my attempts to see if I could find another living person. He had told me many times that the world had already ended, and that we were just riding it out to the bitter end. There was no point in trying to find another living human being because humanity was already finished.

Fine guy my dad. Really knew how to prop one up.

Well, I have spent most of my day up here on this roof. Thankfully, it was mostly cloudy today, but without the rain, that really would have made my stay on top of this roof completely miserable. I had my binoculars out, and tried desperately to see if there was anything, or more importantly, anyone, inside of the grocery store, but was never really able to see anything. The windows and doors were all barricaded from the inside. The secondary barricade of turned over cars provided a cover that the stupid zombies had yet to overcome, so there was this empty gap right in front of the doors. If they would ever bust through there, they probably would get through the doors.

So, is there anyone in there? I can’t be sure, but again, I have yet to see zombies attracted in this sense to anything other than living human beings.

So, what am I going to do?

Right now, piss off the other side of the shop. As I stand there, peering into the horizon, the sun just having set under the mountains to the west, again I see no other movement th
an what I know is behind me.

Entry 8 - People
[8]

I finally saw them today. They saw me as well.

These people must not be that understanding of how zombies are. Well, I guess, who really is,
other than myself and my self stylized attempts to understand the dead. I was bored. But in either case, they must not be familiar with how they act. The very reason I stuck around, and was almost certain that there were living people inside that store, was the very fact that zombies are attracted to sound and sight, but disperse easily. The problem here was that so many had congregated together, that it was creating a ripple attraction effect. It was really hard for them to disperse. It also told me that those inside weren’t just lying low, and more importantly, lying low quietly.

This
morning, I was proven correct. I saw a guy appear on the roof of the store sometime mid-morning. Through my binoculars, I could see him carrying a rifle. He fired a few shots into the dead crowd, and then just sat there on the edge of the roof, smoking a cigarette. If they (or just him) had carried on this way, it’s no wonder they were trapped.

I had to try to get his attention without making any noise or creating any really visible attraction to myself. I couldn’t really flash anything, like glass or a mirror, because I was too afraid of messing up and flashing a glint of light into a zombie’s eye
, and starting a mass movement in my direction. I looked around, and could see nothing really useful. The sun was facing me, so I just needed something out of the ordinary to get the man’s attention. I used a broken refrigerator door I dragged up to the roof and set it up...and slowly walked back and forth. I peered out of the side of the door to see if I got any reaction.

In the distance, I saw the man stand up and point his rifle at me
, and for a brief second I thought he was going to shoot me, that is, until it dawned on me he was looking through the scope.

I waved at him.

He waved back.

I was having the most elaborate conversation I had had in about five months. I could hear him shouting
, but simply couldn’t make out what he was saying. I looked around, somewhat frantically, and found a pile of blackish soot like material on a few buckets that were up here. I wish I had a stick of some sort, but simply was too overjoyed in the prospect of continuing this conversation, that I just stuck my hand in it and began writing on the fridge door.

“Don’t shout”

The guy must have realized what I was doing, because he peered through his scope again and was silent.

I washed up the door and began writing again.

“How are you?”

Sounds horribly corny, but it was
the God’s honest truth. It was the simplest way of trying to find out just what their condition was. The guy took another look through his scope. As I observed him through my binoculars, I could see him set down the rifle and look almost slumped over. Then, he vanished.

He returned some ten minutes later with a white board, you know, the kind you used to have in your house to write your list or chores on
. He was, after all, inside a grocery store; whereas, I was limited to my fridge door. He must have found some markers too, because he began writing furiously. He was soon joined by four other people; two more guys and two women.

He moved his board around so that I could see it, but he had written so much that I simply couldn’t read what was on there. So I scribbled back. What follows is the silent conversation relayed over super high tech fridge door and white board:

Me :
“Bigger letters. Can’t read.”

Them :
“Sorry. We are trapped.”

Me:
“How many?”

Them:
“Many. 1000?”

Me:
“No, living.”

Them:
“5.”

Me:
“Food?”

Them:
“Enough for now.”

Me:
“What can I do?”

Them:
“Get us out. Please.”

I managed to ask them how long they had been there
, but maybe they didn’t understand, because they answered with a month. That would be a really long time to be trapped inside of a grocery store. The quality of the food in there must not be the best, as most non-perishables had probably already been raided. Or maybe they had just got lucky.

I did manage to find out that there were a couple of back doors
; loading docks, which weren’t as heavily populated by the wandering dead. In the afternoon, I got off the roof and took a long way around to see just how that area looked, and while it certainly had less of the dead, it was a tight squeeze up along a set of really high fences. Any attempt to get a vehicle in there would get it stuck among all the dead, and then I’d be trapped myself.

So I messaged back that I needed some time to try to figure out how to do this. I let them know to always keep someone on the roof
, in order to have immediate contact if needed. Then I slumped down on the far side of the roof to think this one through.

There was always the
“distract the zombies away from a location”. I had done that one several times. A motorcycle, or just a car, driven slowly away from whatever shop or house I wanted to scavenge, would take them far enough away, as long as I had time. Then I would drop the vehicle and double back way around to my now empty location.

The problem with that scenario here was there were simply too many zombies
.  I know I could get the attention of enough zombies to start a stampede, but the whole thing would get bogged down as they stumbled and tripped over each other. It was like trying to drain a large bucket full of muddy water with a tiny hole. I know, not the best analogy, but it was simply going to take too long, or simply not be effective at all.

There was also no way that I could shoot my way through there. Even if I could find enough guns and ammo to attempt that action, I’m simply not good enough with guns to be able to comfortably work my way through a crowd of a thousand before I did something stupid myself and got myself mauled. What I needed was a whole nest of those World War Two machine guns up here on this roof so that I could just empty them out into that crowd.

That and some artillery.

Of course, the sheer stupidity of
it all, other than the fact that I'm sure I would have a hard time finding machine guns and artillery in Hendersonville, North Carolina, was that while I would make a whole huge mess of exploded limbs; it wouldn’t wipe them out. Just blow them into blown up, yet still crawling around, versions of themselves. What I needed was something larger, more complete.

A big ass bomb.
I do believe that is a technical term.

I was going to have to wander around town a bit to see if I could put something together that would blow a hole big enough into that mess of zombies
, yet not blow up the whole area, including the grocery store.

I messaged the group back before the sun went down
, tentatively telling them I planned to make some kind of bomb, and that I would look tomorrow for things around town.

I finish writing this and look around me
, and it seems clouds are moving in. I really hope it doesn’t rain tonight. I could probably duck under into the shop, but without doors or gates I could lock, I’d never feel safe. I’ll get out my tarp and be ready tonight.

Tomorrow, I go bomb making.