Zombie Town Survive & Escape
We called the place Zombie Town. Name on the map will be in the mission report. This was a strange one. Maybe the eggheads will figure it out.
Walking into town we almost mistook it for a safe zone. Police sitting in patrol cars, people walking, then we spotted the girl in the bake shop behind racks of moldy cakes and realized she was zombie. They were all zombie.
We were literally looking at a city of the dead, where everyone had turned at almost the same time so there were no visible bite mark injuries or gore splatter. We theorized perhaps a zombie had fallen into the city water system, infecting everyone and everything. Not like a little government Chlorine or water filter is going to take out the zombie plague virus.
Exploring the town virtually on tiptoe, the school held a class of zombie small fry complete with a zombie teacher apparently leading a moan along. Zombie cops were sitting in the Donut Palace with a zombie waitress shuffling back and forth, holding an empty coffee pot.
From the newspaper racks our best guess was this town had turned roughly three years ago. With nothing to feed on the creatures were on some form of energy conservation mode and we didn’t want to shake them out of it.
For a contamination zone the town was in pristine condition, without the usual signs of violence and quick get-a-ways, leaving belongings strewn on lawns and abandoned cars clogging the roads.
Looking into houses, we saw zombies sitting on couches as if the Super Bowl were on. Others were bumping into doors, while others with better muscle memory could apparently open unlocked doors. One zombie kept opening the refrigerator as if looking for beer.
Watching these almost docile domestic zombies, I can’t help recalling their incredibly hostile brethren at the Battle of the Beginning Of The End.
At first the authorities wouldn’t admit even the possible existence of zombies. All news sources voluntarily edited out any mention of the walking dead. Zombie attacks that made it into the news sans the word zombie seemed strangely disjointed, incomplete, lacking the necessary information for readers to reach a conclusion. Unfortunately, most civilians first learned about zombies by checking out the odd scratching sound.
For a time longer than you’d expect the authorities kept a lid on the zombie problem, at least in public view. Police would capture them and remove them, first to hospitals and later when we had a better idea what we were dealing with, to disposal sites. What no one knew was how many were populating the sewer system, the hood, and replacing the homeless.
When the plague reached outbreak size, zombies coming out of the sewers to decimate shoppers, battle lines were drawn, plans made. Too bad for us, no strategy survives the battle. We were still being lead by pols and old fossils incapable of learning how to address this new form of warfare needed to fight those that can not be killed except by head shot.
We were bait at the Battle of the Beginning of the End. We were incompetently led. If heavy machine guns had been emplaced at head height they would have taken their toll. Instead we were ordered to blow fox holes into the pavement from which we were supposed to fight, like the battle for Pork Chop Hill, Korea.
Now I’ve never fought from a foxhole before, but have deer hunted that way and wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the concept. The difference is deer don’t drop into a foxhole and try to bite your face off.
Zombies don’t know fear, or much of anything else for that matter, beyond hunger which is strange considering how long they can last without food, but I digress. The point is it’s impossible to make a zombie afraid, to back off, to cease attacking to reach their food supply.
After the first lines of foxholes vanished under a pile of hungry zombies the rest of us decided we weren’t going to meet their dietary requirements and retreated into the surrounding buildings to fort up. I am still amazed I survived to tell the tale and was later promoted to sergeant to run these recon patrols for the authorities and eggheads back at the bunker.
Well nothing lasts forever. One of my troopers had to try and take an expensive watch off a zombie and woke it up forcing us to retreat as we were not armed for this kind of combat. I recall my captain saying he’d send us out with only survival knives if he could, because maybe then we wouldn’t go looking for trouble and some of us might make it back.
Thinking about Zombie Town, for the first time I’m wondering if there might be some kind of future for these crazy mixed up zombie things. When we get back I intend to recommend this devil’s playground be left alone to study what these creatures may eventually become.
