November 30th, 2021

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Fowler,

This is Katerina Healy, Martin's fiance.  I'm writing this letter to you in his journal in case I don't survive in my attempt to make it to you in Mariposa, CA.  If you're reading this, it means I didn't make it to you.  If I did make it to you, then I would have deleted this entry so I could tell you in person what happened.

Your names weren't in your settlement's registry of survivors when Martin last checked the website, so we assumed you most likely didn't survive the fire.  We were going to settle in Rhinelander.  After I recovered Martin's tablet, I checked the website again and saw your names Evelyn and Peter added to the registry.  That's when I knew I had to seek you out.  I want to deliver his journal to you.  It was a record of his last two months alive.

I have to let you know what happened to your son after he turned.  I killed him, like I promised him. After several days have passed without Martin returning, I grew worried and convinced Theresa, who was now the mayor of Rhinelander, to organize a search party.  It took a week of searching the highway from here to Terre Haute until I finally spotted his car from the interstate at the truck center.  
I will spare you the grizzly details, but he ate Hector and Temperance.  Martin was still stuck in that truck center, still recognizable as the man I loved.  He did not recognize me at all, crawling along the floor toward me with his hands out, fingers like claws.  I didn't want to do it, but it wasn't the first time I had to kill someone I loved for losing them to this evil disease!  Just know even though he looked like your son, he was far from it. Martin Fowler was dead long before I put the bullet in his head.  He wanted it this way.  I fulfilled his last wish.  My only regret was that I wasn't there to do it before he completely turned.  

Martin's accomplishments have been well documented so there's no need for me to go over again what he did.  Even though he couldn't save everyone he came across, he saved me.  He saved your grandchild.  Martin will live on through it.  I love him so much, I still can't go a minute without crying.  He meant everything to me, and if I wasn't pregnant with his child, I would have shot myself next.  I'm so sorry that there was nothing I could do to save him. I really wish I could have met you two,  Martin was so amazing, and I'm sure it was because you were such amazing parents!   I hope you don't get to read this entry. I really, really don't.

Your daughter-in-law to be,

Katerina Hearly

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To whomever finds this journal,

I ask you that you take it to Mariposa, CA and give it to Evelyn and Peter Fowler.  I hope you read through it all and understand how important it is that it reaches his parents.  They need to know what happened to their son.  Put yourself in their shoes.  Imagine being separated by from your child for two years on completely opposite sides of the country.  If there was some kind of information regarding what happened, you would like to know, wouldn't you?

I know what I ask of you might be hard, or even impossible to do but if you have any way of doing it, please attempt to get this tablet to them.  Also, like Martin had asked at the beginning of his journal, if you find me walking around somewhere, please pay me the same courtesy of putting me down.  I don't want to be one of those things, killing and turning people, walking to nowhere for forever.

Thank you for doing this. I hope there will always be a tomorrow for you.

Novumber 18 20 21

I turning. Mus knot have chop leg offf in time.  Feeleng sick and hot and ichy, want to tear skin off.  can bearly think straight. Growwing hungree. Can't discribe the sensashun. Like want food but nnot food. want something elss.  Them.  Want them.  cant remembur names.  Hec...hector.  Hector. Womun. married to Walllllll walter.  Walter. belly huge. want wat's inside

sleeping. they are sleepng.  shudnt eat them.. stil humaan. Must fight. not be won oof them. i cahn smell tehm. Smell good.  ichy wont stop!! hav to scrach. bones hurt. Feel them thinin. jooints acheing and mussles on fire. have to feed. Food will hellp. need blood and fleshhh. eat.. EAT them

no NO! human! Martin! i'm still Martin Fouler. lOve katthrine . need kat.  to eat kat.  so hungry! loosing baddle with viruss. feel it inside head taking ovur. hurs so much.  becuming somnneone else. Somethin else..

bbullet. kat supspose to kill meeee. promsied she'd do it. cant try eat them. They willll kill me. hav to run but cant bcause one legg.will crawl.  must leev now. kat will find me and finnish me off.

TEMPURANCE! i remember her name. i will ate herr belly then leve.

no toomarrow................................................................................................................

November 17th, 2021

I can't believe it.  I just can't believe it!  After all this time of me being so careful, of everything I've done while writing this journal... I'm bit!  They were in the snow!  They were in the damn snow! Those fuckers hid in the snow and waited until someone tripped on them!  I'M SO STUPID!  SO FUCKING STUPID!  How could I have let it happen!

Ok.. ok.. let me just write down what happened here.  This morning when we woke up, it was still snowing, but it looked like it was about to let up.  I decided to go out to the car and brush it off anyway.  I told Hector to tell the others that I'm going to the car and staying there for about a half hour until the car gets enough juice to drive it down and pick them up.  No sense in all of us trudging through the snow.  It wasn't even much, just a couple of inches, but I wanted everyone else to remain comfortable.  

There was nothing out there but white, and if I saw a zombie coming from anywhere, they would stand out against the snowy canvas and be easier to see.  I got to the car no problem at all, and then ate my breakfast of canned pineapple.  There wasn't much to do while in the car, so I got a bit of extra sleep. Roughly nine in the morning, the car had a charge of 10 percent, so I decided to turn it on and drive it back to the apartments.  

We gave it a couple of extra hours to charge up at that point, while the four of us debated whether or not we should attempt to reach Rhinelander.  The car would need a full a day, maybe more, of being in the sun to have enough energy to take us more than 400 miles north.  We ultimately decided to leave now, coast when we could, and make it as far as possible before dark came.  And that was a HORRIBLE IDEA!

Because we didn't make it.  We were just south of Rockford, IL, until we ran headlong into a mean blizzard.  It was literally like driving into a while fall of fury.  It must have been dumping an inch of snow every ten minutes, and we soon couldn't see where the road was anymore.  I drifted off the road and got us stuck in a snowbank.  Dammit, if only Thaddeus would have let me go when I wanted to, I could have grabbed them and beat this storm!

We couldn't stay in the car.  We had to brave the blizzard and walk through roughly a foot and a half to two feet of snow to find shelter.  We spotted a sign almost nearly covered in sticky wet snow and were able to make out that it was for a truck center.  That was our destination, but just as we were about 100 feet away, I felt something grab my right calf deep in the snow and bite me.  I screamed out in surprise, panic and pain, in that order.  I fell backward and yanked my foot away when the leather rose from the snow.  I heard its skin creaking and crinkling, obviously near frozen and trying to advance toward me.  My screams alerted everyone else, and they rushed over to help. Hector ended up throwing his ax at the zombie aiming for its head, but he missed and it sunk into the leather's shoulder instead.  It didn't even turn to them; it just kept coming towards me and fell on top of me. 

I grabbed its face trying to keep him from biting me.  If it weren't for it being nearly frozen, I might not have been able to fend it off.  Even its current condition, it was still pretty strong.  I damn near lost my fingers trying to force his jaw shut.  Just when I thought I was about to lost the fight, I heard the bone shattering crunch of the ax being driven into the back of its head.  Wallace got to him, yanked the ax out and swung it at his skull.  

But that wasn't the end of it.  During the commotion, we failed to notice the two other leathers rise from the snow behind us, both moving as slow as the one that just attacked me.  Wallace must have been infuriated by the leather attacking me, because he charged at the two raising the ax.  In a split second, I realized what was happening.  I yelled at Wallace to stop, to let the zombies come to him, but he didn't.  On his way rushing through the deep snow, he was tripped by another zombie at the bottom and a fourth rose from the snow right where Wallace fell and was on him instantly... There was nothing any one of us could have done.  

And then I remembered the rifle.  I had it slung behind my pack because I felt I didn't need to hold it since I would have seen them coming, even through the blowing snow, but I cursed myself for remembering it so late.  Once I had it out, I immediately fired on the four zombies.  The two on top of Wallace, I took out first, and they erupted in flames, burning him in the process.  There was nothing to be done about that.  He was already being eaten.  The two that were walking towards him began coming towards me, so I shot each one, their immolating bodies falling in the snow and melting a hole around them.  

My mind went numb.  I was bit.  Wallace was dying.  I was waiting on more leathers to rise from the snow.  I don't even remember hearing Temperance screaming.  When I finally snapped to, I noticed her holding his bloodied, charred remains.  I saw Hector with his ax again looking around for any more undead surprises, and that's when I knew I had to do something, a last ditch effort.  I told him he had to chop off my leg.  His eyes went wide, but he nodded.  

It didn't go well at all.  There was so much deep snow everywhere that I had no solid place to lay down.  Hector tried to clear snow away, enough so that I could lay down on the ground, but I told him I didn't have time for that.  It had to happen now.  He needed to swing as hard as he could at my leg with me standing up.  I yelled at Temperance a few times until she turned to me, and I told her what was about to happen to me and I needed her help.  She has the makings of a true nurse, because she was able to leave her husband behind to rush to my aid.  I had her strip some cloth from Wallace's shirt and tie a tourniquet around my leg, above the knee where Hector was going to chop.  I pulled  my wallet out of my pocket and used it as a bit, and then nodded to Hector.  I closed my eyes and turned my head and I heard the swishing of the snow as Hector ran to me and then I was hit with explosive pain.

It was not a clean hack.  I don't know what I felt worse, or felt more pain from.  The ax cutting into my skin, severing my muscles, or chipping into my bone.  He must not have gotten a good angle with the swing. I groaned in agony through my wallet bit, surprised I was still standing, and motioned Hector to do it again, but just as ax came a second time, I started to fall and Hector landed a glancing blow on my knee instead.  I fell backward on the snow, having lost my bit and I cried out.  I yelled at Hector to just hurry it up and he stood over with the ax, bringing it down again, but it only drove me further into the snow.  I was on the verge of passing out when after the sixth swing, I felt the ax finally go all the way through.  

The tourniquet held, and I lost very little blood compared to what I would have without it.  Then Temperance pulled out some rubbing alcohol and Wallace's old flint, and I knew I wasn't done with the pain yet.  She sprinkled the alcohol all over my stump and then used the flint to light it on fire. THAT'S when I passed out.  

We managed to make it to the truck stop, dragging me behind.  I've been up for about twenty minutes or so, trying to keep my mind off the pain, but I can't.  It really isn't helping when I'm writing about it.  Temperance has already changed my dressing once, and said that the cauterization seems to be doing OK.  She tried to hide her anger, but let's just say she'd never win at poker.  I know she blames me for Wallace's death.  I do, too.  

Hector came over after Temperance tended to me, and he cracked a joke saying that together, we add up to a full man.  I don't know how, but I managed to laugh at that.  I told him how much this sucks, that I know fully now what he had to go through.  He asked me if I could still feel it, my leg.  I made a conscious effort to move my leg where there used to be one, and surprisingly still felt it.  I even felt the wiggling of my toes.  It's an extremely eerie feeling.  He said I'll eventually not feel it anymore. The brain just had a hard time letting go.  I had to thank him for what he did for me, but I also told him I'm worried that we may not have done it soon enough.  We both remembered Carmello, how when he got bit on the hand, he chopped it first, and THEN killed the zombie.  That was a hardcore man.  The virus literally did not have a second to move up his arm.  Me on the other hand, several minutes passed before he started chopping off my leg.  Even though the ax was covered in zombie blood, I knew because of my Class 3 immunity that it wouldn't infect me, only the bite would.  Was it able to travel up my leg fast enough?  I don't know.  I'm feeling okay now, but we'll have to wait and see how I feel in the morning.

God have I fucked up, and it's all because of me forgetting those fucking batteries!  We could have made it back by now!  Wallace would have been alive, and I wouldn't have been bitten.   And what happens now?  Even if I'm perfectly fine tomorrow, the car's stuck in the snow.  There's AAA to tow us out, and there's no department of transportation to clear the roads!  We still have 300 miles to go. How are supposed to make it back there on foot?  Winter's already appeared, and it will only get worse.  This isn't even close to the worst kind of snow storm I've seen.  

Night three without Kat.  I can only imagine her reaction when she see me - if she sees me - come home.  I wonder if she thinks I'm dead yet.  I just want to see her again.  I'm starting to feel scared that I won't.  I try to remain positive, but I'm so afraid Hector didn't chop my leg off in time.  I need to see her again.  God, I know I haven't believed in you much and I've said some pretty blasphemous things about you, but please forgive me for all that.  I know this is just the desperate attempt of a man trying to ask God for one last favor, but please help us make it out of this!  I really, really could use a deus ex machina... 

Until tomorrow...hopefully...

November 16th, 2021

How could I be so stupid!  With all the packing that I did before I left for Terre Haute, why didn't I grab a few extra battery cells for the car?  For starters, the car was almost drained this morning, and we had a late start letting the car charge up with the solar cells a bit before leaving.  We made it a good 100 miles until the batteries were so low that we couldn't go much farther.  To make matters worse, when we pulled over to let the car charge back up in the sun, the skies went overcast and now the damned thing wasn't charging at all!  I'm so stupid!  I should have anticipated something like this.

We're in the northern part of Champagne, IL right now.  We left the car on the side of the highway and we walked down the road to look for some shelter.  We didn't have to go very far until we ran into Baytowne Apartments, a complex that surrounds an amoeba-shaped pond.  There was also clear evidence that it was attacked by a horde some time ago.  There are several mostly eaten corpses lying on the ground, but only a few draggers were still lurking around the place.  Their state of decay was so advanced, they tripped and fell trying to move towards us and just crawled along the ground.  Wallace and I stomped their skulls in while Hector stayed back with Temperance to make sure no draggers snuck up behind us.

The leathers must not have found this place, because I haven't seen any sign of them.  It's nice to know that the vivensmortua virus doesn't just spontaneously mutate.  A mutated strain needs to be transmitted to other hosts via actual contact in order to propagate.  This means there should be pockets across the country where the zombie population is nothing but draggers.  If they didn't find any humans to eat, then they could simply rot to the point where they become immobile and pose even less of a threat.

It makes me wonder if there aren't more settlements like Rhinelander within these pockets.  I know there's a website that lists some settlements, but I'm sure it doesn't contain every one of them.  There has to be some places where they have no access to the internet at all.  Doesn't really matter, though. The only interested settlement I care about right now is Rhinelander, but it we're not making it back tonight.  Kat's got to be worried to death about me, about the rest of us.  She expected us back by now.

We planned on taking up residence in the first unit, but we were hit in the face with an overwhelming smell of mold and mildew.  Something must have happened in this building, maybe a pipe burst or there was a fire and the sprinklers came on to put it out.  Whatever the case, with so much mold, it wouldn't be healthy for our respiratory systems to spend the night here.

We ended up settling in Unit B just off to the right.  It smelled dusty and the air was stale, but at least it was dry. We decided just for safety reasons, we were all going to spend the night in the same apartment.  Luckily, the one we picked had a fireplace, so we looked for things to burn.  We broke off legs from tables, and I hacked at the table itself to break it into smaller pieces and threw them all into the fireplace, but then we had a hell of a time getting the fire to start.  Wallace went Boy Scouts and started rubbing two sticks together over a wad of crumpled up newspapers until we got an ember to light the fireplace.

The fire was a real treat to have.  It was also getting extremely cold.  Wallace wanted to be left alone with her wife for a bit, so Hector and I went to explore the rest of the complex to see if we could find anything useful.  Of course, the very first apartment we search, we found a box of matches.  If we ever need to start a fire again, though, they would definitely come in handy.  We also found food in one apartment's cupboard - some baked beans and canned mixed vegetables.  That would be our dinner, and we could even cook them in their cans by placing them in the fire.

I talked to Hector a bit while we continued to search, asking how he was adjusting to not having his right arm, and he said it was incredibly difficult at first.  He's right-handed, so its made some things harder for him to do.  I told him I was worried about him snapping and killing Wallace, even Temperance, for what Wallace did to him, but he said that desire long went away.  It honestly was just a horrible accident.  He considered himself fortunate to just be alive.  I'm glad to see he's been able to keep his sanity putting my worries about the virus making him crazy to bed.

When we returned to the apartment, the bedroom door was shut and either they didn't hear us come in, or they simply didn't care, but they were making love noises.  Some may find that sick, a pregnant couple having sex, but not me.  I find it beautiful.  Kat and I have already done that but of course, she's not showing yet.  When she gets as big as Temperance, that won't affect me in the slightest.  I'll still find her beautiful and I'll still want her, because I love her.  Hearing them in that bedroom simply puts a smile on my face, because I know they love each other.  It's something this world needs a hell of a lot of right now, even before it all went to shit.

They came out about 30 minutes later, and they saw us looking at them.  I smiled, and they became embarrassed as they looked at other's red faces.  Temperance asked when we got back and Hector started to speak, but I nudged him and said just a few minutes ago.  She just gave an "ahh" and Wallace coughed and asked if we're ready to eat dinner yet.  So, I pulled out the canned food Hector and I found and we put in the fire to heat up.  Once we started eating, I told them more about Rhinelander, and the defenses they had and how awesome the solar panels were.  I said how much they were going to love it.  We also played some poker with Hector's deck.  Yes, he still has those cards.  He even found a way to shuffle one handed.  He said so long as he still has one hand, he'll be playing cards.  If he loses his other arm, he'll play cards with his feet!  I chuckled at that.

And now it's snowing outside.  The flakes aren't all that large but they're many of them, and they're being whipped around by the wind.  It's almost as if we're in a snow globe and someone's just shaken us.  I'm not one to pray, but I really do pray it doesn't become a blizzard, because that's all we need with more than 400 miles to go in an electric car that needs solar energy to charge.  Regardless, I'm going to get up before dawn and clear the snow off the car so the sun can hit those solar cells.

Twice in a row I'll be sleeping without Kat.  Heh, it's gotten me thinking about why I've been writing this journal.  It started out as a record of events and a list of survival tips to keep whoever's reading this alive, but it's become more personal than that to me.  I know at times it sounds like a love story, and well, it's both a love and survival story.  Kat's a major reason why I'm still alive today.  Of course, who knows what my life would have been like had I not met her.  She was the reason my life was in danger to even begin with, but I could have also found myself in a different situation without her, a much more dangerous one.  I could have even stumbled into a river and drowned.  Or, I could have gone insane from being alone and who knows?  I might have become another Rampert.  Yeah, if you can, let yourself fall in love with someone.  I haven't given you survival tips in a long while, but that's a really good one right there.  Let yourself fall in love.  Just remember to be smart about it.

Until tomorrow.

November 15th, 2021

I woke up a little earlier than I planned, because I wanted to spend a bit of time with Kat.  I told her since the drive was going to be roughly eight hours long, I was going to spend the night at Wallace and Temperance's place, that is if everything was still OK.  She said that made a lot of sense, that I shouldn't risk driving back during the night.  So, I whisked us up some omelettes and we had breakfast.  We talked a bit more about things, mostly how I was dealing with what happened at Stephen's Point.  She said I was proud of the decision I made to keep secret that there was no cure.  We were both angry at first, but honestly, we saw the wisdom in the move they made now.  It was getting close to eight, and I really needed to get going so I could make it there before the sun set.  I kissed her goodbye and got in the car and left.  

The car's an all-electric Hyundai Harmony, state of the art at the time.  From a full charge, the car gets 250 miles from the main batteries alone.  Its mirrored surface is crammed with photovoltaic cells that help keep the batteries charged while in use.  The car generates electricity from the motion of the axles and wheels to further recharge the batteries. The Harmony also senses when you're going downhill and it will reduce power consumption in the engine making this one of the most energy efficient production vehicles ever made.  The mayor of Rhinelander before Thaddeus had ordered a fleet of them when they were first being made, but almost every single one of them were traded away for goods.  I was remarkably fortunate that this one was kept.  It allowed me to make it to Terre Haute in one day.

When I got there, though, it was already dark. I didn't want to use the headlights because I was no longer getting solar energy and the batteries were nearly dead.  Using the headlights would only speed that process up.  Unfortunately, it was getting so dark, I had to use them,but I limited it to a few seconds here and there.  I finally found the road that led to their house.  It looked just like I remembered.  There didn't seem to be any signs of distress or disturbance, so I parked the car in the driveway and got out.  

Upon hearing my door slam, I was met with a shout of, "WHO'S OUT THERE?"  It was Wallace.  I couldn't see him well, but I was sure he had his rifle aimed at me.  I answered back that it was me, and he cussed up a storm out of happiness to see me.  He eagerly invited me in, and shook my hand so hard, I thought my arm was going to fall off after my hand was crushed.  He yelled up to Temperance to come down, and he brought me into the den where Hector was reading.  Hector looked up, and he almost couldn't believe what he was seeing.  I made it!  I made it to Rhinelander, and came back for them!

When Temperance was down, we gathered in the kitchen.  They had just ate and offered me some left over stew and biscuits.  I took a bowl of stew (those biscuits...so easy to pass on them).  I had so much to tell them.  All the good.  All the bad.  All the extremely ugly.  I saw the horrified look on their faces when I described the gargoyles and the nest they came from.  I also told them there was no cure, and when I bring them back to Rhinelander, they'll have to keep that front going.  After a moment, they decided they could handle that. Hector noticed Kat wasn't with me, and I told them she's back in Rhinelander helping the children with the grieving process.  She's doing just fine.  

They asked what happened to Johnathan, and I simply failed at concealing a reaction.  My face went to anger, then quickly to sorrow.  I didn't know whether or I should tell them exactly what happened, but I decided this was something I shouldn't talk to them about without Kat being present.  I just said Johnathan didn't make it.  They asked what happened, and I told what little truth I could.  He was eaten by a cannibal.  Their faces went aghast, and Hector looked like he was ready to tear off someone's head with his one remaining arm.

Speaking of Hector, he looks good.  He actually seems to have packed on a few pounds (obviously not picky about the biscuits).  They've been treating him rather well, and Wallace has been doing a lot of hunting to keep everyone fed.  Wallace also told me he noticed the zombie population thinning out recently, like they had some other place where they had to be, and my face went pale.  He asked if I was alright, and I just told him I had a bad feeling about that, but I didn't know exactly why.  I thought I'd wait and get them in Rhinelander before I talked to them about it.  

Temperance is getting bigger, nearing seven months.  Carrying triplets, she looks even bigger than she should be for how far along she is.  I'm so glad they're all alive, especially Hector.  He's the last remaining survivor of Lock Haven aside from Kat and me.  Temperance would be a great help not just for Kat when it's her time to deliver our child, but to the community as well with her medical knowledge.  Having Wallace there to help with hunting would only further cement his need in the community, and well, it would just be nice to have more friends there.  

I told everyone to grab all their essentials and pack them in the car.  We're heading back to Rhinelander tomorrow as early in the morning as early can be.  I'm not going to get caught out in the dark again.  Temperance gave me an extra set of blankets to make a bed out of the lounger in the den, and I just realized this is the first time in a while that I'm going to bed without being next to Kat.  I know it's only one night, but I feel like I'm missing her so much as if I'm never going to see her again.  Why am I even thinking like that?  I'll be next to her in bed tomorrow.  

Yes, there's always until tomorrow.

November 14th, 2021

No nightmares tonight, because I didn't sleep.  At all.  Not only was there too much on my mind, there was also the throbbing pain in my right upper leg where I got shot.  The painkillers seemed to be on break every 15 minutes or so.  They must have belonged to a union.  Unfortunately, the medication one of the nurses gave me to get some sleep didn't even bother to show up for work.

I spent all morning in Theresa's office at the police station filing the report.  I recounted in every detail what happened in that hangar - every detail sans Thaddeus shooting me and me shooting back.  I wrote about my bullet wound being a result of friendly fire as one of the men went down.  She thanked me for everything I did for Rhinelander, but I expressed my concern that gargoyles may be growing in other places.  They would need to keep a huge stock of those tracer rounds and maybe see if they can acquire a mounted machine gun the next time they trade for weapons.  She noted my suggestion.

Anthony disappeared.  I went to his house after I was done with Theresa, knocking on it several times.  I broke the window in his door to unlock it but found no sign of him.  He could have simply just been out and I caught him not at home, but the look he gave me last night when I told him I killed Thaddeus was enough for me to know he wouldn't be around anymore.  In a way, I'm glad I didn't see him, because I have no idea what I would have done.

We held a memorial service for Thaddeus later that evening, along with the 17 others that gave their lives in defense of our town, and so many people showed up, we had to hold it outside.  Funerals are funny things, though.  You end up learning a lot more about people's lives than you did while they were alive.  Granted, I only knew Thaddeus for a few days.  Still, I learned a lot. His wife Tabitha delivered his eulogy among a great many tears and sobs and sniffles.  He was one of six siblings and a father of five children, all who were lost to the undead.  Even through the pains of losing everyone closest to him, he reached out to everyone in Rhinelander as his next family.  He was so profoundly loved by the people here, and he considered himself blessed when "Saint" Anthony discovered the much needed cure to quite everyone's worries so his new family could stay together.

What surprised me was that I was offered to speak.  I don't know why I didn't decline.  I guess I didn't want to be rude, so I took the podium.  I started by just saying his name, "Thaddeus..." trailing off.  I thought of Chloe, and how she got bit by Michael, how the result of that bite had both her and Calista kicked out.  I thought of the possibility of Michael biting someone again.  These people were living a lie, and I almost said "... was a liar."  Instead, I told them only the truth they really needed to know.  "... fought valiantly"  He did.  Regardless of his attempt on my life, he shot and killed so many zombies last night and risked his life to the save the lives of his men.  "He will be missed." "But not by me," I said in my head.  I looked at Kat sitting off in the back expecting to see a look of disapproval.  Instead, her face was just forlorn.  I walked off the podium and  headed back to my seat. Kat looked at me, and I thought she was going to ask me why I didn't tell them the truth about the cure, but she knew.  Instead, she rested her head on my shoulder and grabbed my hand.

A part of me still felt like they needed to know.  They needed to take precautions so that another Chloe incident wouldn't happen.  But honestly, what good would that do?  It would only cause another panic among the townspeople  That had the potential to ruin a lot more lives than just another person being bit every blue moon.  I thought for a second that by withholding the truth from them, I'm no better than Thaddeus and Anthony, but they were the ones who lied to them.  Not me.  I merely wasn't saying anything.  If I am to be judged for that, let it be then.  The sad thing is, Thaddeus had to die for nothing now along with Anthony running off, because I ended up not saying anything in the end.

After the service was over, I talked with Theresa about the deal I had with Thaddeus, where he was going to give me a car and allow me to pick up my friends in Terre Haute.  Of course, I left the part of the leverage out.  Theresa said it would be fine.  She also said she was going to ask the people to elect her as the next mayor.  I don't know much about her, either, but I did get the feeling she was well liked by everyone, so there's no doubt about her being elected.

To spite my leg, I felt like doing a bit of DJing at the radio station.  Music helps to wash away all our problems, even the physical ones.  During one of my breaks, I recounted the events of what happened at Stephen's Point to my listeners and soon, the switchboard lit up.  I had so many people congratulating and thanking me and it was an immeasurable feeling.  I have never felt so appreciated in my life.  This only made it harder for me to ever want to tell them the truth now.  I made a final decision right then and there to keep it hidden.

When I came home, I found Kat holding my tablet.  She had a blank expression on her face and it almost seemed like she was somehow upset at me for some reason.  I was getting ready to ask if something was the matter when she flipped over the tablet and a handwritten message said "YES!!!"  She threw the tablet on the couch and ran to me and I swept her up in my arms hugging her and then lifting her in the air, forgetting about the pain in my leg.  It quickly punished me for my neglect and buckled on me causing me to fall to the ground taking her with me.  We laughed and kissed and kissed some more, eventually making love right there on that very spot.  WE'RE ENGAGED!  As soon as I get our friends back, we can get all settled in and then we can get married and have our child and start our family!  This is it!  This is the place!  This is everything I've wanted in life since the outbreak first happened!

I paid Charles and Glenda a visit shorty after and gave them the good news, both Thaddeus allowing me to leave to get my friends and the engagement to Kat.  They were so happy for me and offered congratulations.  I asked them if I could still use their car, because the one I managed to run in was all bloodied up.  They said of course I could use it, and they couldn't wait to meet Hector, Temperance and Wallace.  They gave me the keys, showed me to the garage and I got in and started it up.  I drove back home with it, parking it in the driveway of our house ready to leave in the morning.

I asked Kat if she wanted to come along, but she said that Margaret's going to need a lot of help tomorrow.  A few of the kids' fathers were among the 18 killed last night, and they need people to help with grief counseling.  I understood, and told her with a car, there shouldn't be any problems.  It's a long drive, though, eight hours each way, so we loaded up the car with food and other supplies along with a rifle and a few clips of the remaining tracer ammunition.  Personally, I would much rather just stick to the machete, but I'm no good fighting on this leg.  I just really hope they're still OK.  Going to call it a night.  Got a long, long drive ahead of me in the morning.

I'M ENGAGED!!!

Until tomorrow.

November 13th, 2021

Where the hell do I even begin.  Mission successful, I guess.  We headed to Stephen's Point 19 deep across three cars and a minivan.  The ride was about an hour and a half long.  Thaddeus left all the wall guards stationed at Rhinelander, so that meant we had to use some volunteers that never saw much action.  And Thaddeus wanted to send 100 men to Stephen's Point?  That would have been a slaughter, on us.  Thaddeus came with us to help lead the attack.

When we approached the border of Stephen's Point, we got out of the cars and walked into town.  Driving the vehicles in would have immediately alerted the zombies, and it seemed their numbers have grown these past several days.  We plotted a route on the map and pinpointed four buildings of interest that we were going to check out first.  There was a warehouse, an office building, a factory and a hangar.  I suggested to Thaddeus that we not investigate buildings that didn't have a horde of zombies around them.  They'd most likely be protecting the nest.  

That's when we saw them all over the hangar.  Hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes. You couldn't even see the doors to the hangar because there were so many.  I felt the tension in some of the men, which was understandable.  Even with our zombie suits on, the thought of walking through so many would have unnerved just about anyone.  They were so tightly packed, though, that there didn't seem to be a way through them.

Yosef, a young Jewish man about 19, came forward and said that we should distract them.  Thaddeus asked how, and Yosef held up his rifle.  I shook my head back and forth, not liking the idea at all but before I could stop him, he ran off to the west side of the building screaming at the zombies.  Their heads turned following the noise, but didn't seem to pay Yosef any attention until he started firing on them!  Single shots of tracer rounds into the undead crowd caused random zombies to light up like giant match heads, and that caused them to react.  They all screamed in unison, and most began giving chase to the zombie they deemed a traitor.  Yosef ran off still firing, which opened up a gap in the crowd,  I ordered everyone to start slowly walking to the doors, but I paused a few seconds when I thought I heard Yosef scream.  That was a very brave thing he did... but stupid.  He didn't even let me think of another way.  Yet, it told me something important that I needed to know.  Once we started firing, our cover would be blown.  It now seemed more and more likely that this would be a suicide mission, but we were going to go through with it.  

Once we got in the hangar, we were frozen in our tracks.  Suspended from the beams of the ceiling were what looked to be cocoons, dozens upon dozens of them.  They looked large enough to fit three fully grown people in them, and they were disgusting to look at, like overgrown cysts with veins wrapping around them.  The pods were truly alien looking, and I knew instantly what was growing within them.  The next thing we noticed was that there was no zombies actually in the hangar.  They all appeared to be outside protecting what was inside.  This gave us an advantage.  Once we started shooting the pods, we could focus our attention on the doors as they would funnel the zombies through.  With concentrated fire, we could stand a chance of lasting long enough to make it out.  

I took the first shot.  I aimed up at one and fired hoping the tracer would ignite them like they did the zombies, and to my gratitude, they burned just as bright.  That's when everything went south.  Before we even spread out to start destroying them systematically, one of the men Vernon, eager to start shooting, shot one directly above him.  As the bullet tore through the leathery membrane of the cocoon, it ignited the fluid inside along with the developing gargoyle and the pod burst spilling its flaming contents on the men below.  It splattered on five of them, including Vernon, and they dropped to the ground yelling in agony.  It was like napalm, clinging to them like glue burning through their suits and charring their flesh.  Dan was in so much pain, he was freaking out and started shooting blindly, hitting three of us with friendly fire!

We all scattered, but Thaddeus kept his head about him and shot and killed Dan to stop him from firing on us.  A million thoughts were running through my mind at that point.  We now had mere seconds before the zombies outside would start flocking inside after hearing us attack their pods.  We're already down to 10 men, so I barked out to Thaddeus to put three on the door and the rest of us would run around destroying as many pods as we could.  Zachary, Marcus and Bart already had a late start on the door as those that didn't follow Yosef were already charging through.  There was so much screaming going on that it became impossible to issue any more orders to follow.  The three men at the door flipped to full auto once the horde returned.  So many were trying to get in at once that the zombies were only making it easier to be shot. 

I popped so many pods that I ended up going through five clips of ammo when I heard the glass break.  The zombies were coming in through the west side of the glass windows, four or five at a time.  As I had to turn my attention away from the ceiling to the incoming zombies, I heard the glass breaking from the east side.  We were bring flanked.  Almost instinctively, men and myself firing on the cocoons backed up into the center of the hangar, covering each others backs in a loose circle.  When one man had to change clips, the other to his side would keep him covered.  It's amazing how well we started fighting together.  But it was a numbers game.  I could already feel my trench coat growing lighter as I was burning through the clips.  Whenever we had a few seconds in between waves, we would aim around looking for more cocoons and then shoot them. 

I don't know how many we killed tonight, but there were so many zombies burning that an acrid haze of smoke began to fill the hangar.  The wind outside was doing its best to pull the smoke out, but we started having problems breathing.  We were holding out and for a brief moment, we had that feeling we could even make it, until Marcus ran out of ammo.  Not able to help Zachary and Bart push the zombies back out of the doors, they soon overpowered them.  One lept on Bart and tore his head clean off, while another bit Zachary, but he kept firing.  He crawled backwards while Thaddeus ran to his aid, then picked up some clips from the bodies of the ones Dan accidentally killed.  He gave Zachary everything he could grab and then helped him shoot more zombies that came through the doors. 

The numbers were beginning to thin out, but that meant so too our ammo.  More of our men clicked empty, and they did their best to fight off the zombies that ran at them, but they didn't make it.  When we killed the last one that came in after us, it was just me, Thaddeus, Zachary and Roger.  Zachary was bit, though.  We all looked at each other silently thinking to one another about who was going to do it, but Zachary said not to worry.  He would do it himself.  "Someone just give me a clip."  I gave him my last one, and he slammed it home, cocked it back, and then looked around.  "Did we do it?" I looked around with everyone else. Every one of them was burst open and burnt.  I nodded to Zachary and he nodded back.  I turned away and then heard the gunshot.  

I expected Zachary to shoot himself, which he did.  What I DIDN'T expect was that motherfucker Thaddeus SHOOTING ME!  HE SHOT ME IN THE LEG! I fell to the ground looking at him in surprise and it caught Roger off guard as well.  Thaddeus started laughing at me, saying I did good, but now it was my time to die.  I was going to be remembered as a hero, and then he lowered his breath saying, "A hero who died keeping a secret."  He raised his gun at me to finish me off and he pulled the trigger.  It clicked.  His eyes went wide and he panicked trying to change his clip, but he couldn't find one to put in, and then I raised my gun and shot him square in the chest.  I looked at Roger, and he looked back at me. His mouth was open, and I was trying to figure out what he was thinking when he started pointing at his gun at me.  I called out to him, "Roger, no!" but he just kept aiming, so I shot him as well, the tracer clearing out the right side of his skull.  I fell backward and roared out of pain, both physical and mental.  

It was not supposed to go down like this.  I don't know if I'm to blame for pushing the attack on Stephen's Point.  The men needed training.  We weren't supposed to go in all trigger happy!  Why didn't I think of a plan to get into the warehouse before Yosef ran off and did what he did?  But like I said, mission accomplished I guess.  Who knows what would have happened if we waited another day?  Those gargoyles would have hatched and infected god knows how many other zombies.  I only hope there are no other nests around.  I can't handle the thought of everything we've done here being in vain if it turns out things are worse in other parts of the world.

And Thaddeus.  I knew he couldn't be trusted, but I had no idea he would have picked that moment of all moments to try to kill me.  He tried to kill me right in front of Roger, too!  "A hero who died keeping a secret." Roger was going to ask him about that, about what secret?  I'm sure Thaddeus would have killed Roger as well.  He probably would have loved to leave Stephen's Point and return to Rhinelander as the hero, the only one who survived to make it back.  Instead, that title fell to me.

I was shot bad, and was losing a good amount of blood.  I had to limp all the way back to one of the cars. It was after dark by the time I finally made it back, and it there was no joy to be had among the people who greeted me.  18 lives lost.  Kat was hysterical when she saw me fall out of the car into the snow, blood all down my leg.  Anthony had some people bring me to the hospital where he stitched up my leg, and then gave me a blood transfusion with Kat's blood.  Heh... Kat saves my life again.  I love you so much, Kat.  I know you still try to sneak into my journal and read my entries, so if you're doing that now, then I want you to answer me one question the next time you talk to me.  Katerina Healy, will you marry me?  

Kat's spending the night with me, but Theresa wants a full report of what happened in the morning.  She asked what happened to Thaddeus right off the bat, though.  Anthony was looking right at me awaiting my response.  I put on my best poker face and answered, "He got surprised during the firefight and a zombie bit into him.  We managed to survive the attack, but he was bleeding out from the neck.  He asked me to shoot him, so I did."  I hung my head and even turned on a few tears.  Theresa began crying a bit and thanked me for letting her know, and Anthony just left.  I don't know if he bought it or not.  I'm going to deal with him tomorrow, so....

Until tomorrow.

November 12th, 2021

No snow today, but high winds and horrendously cold temps made our hunt worse than it was yesterday.  It managed to drop to -10 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was with the sun out.  We got six more zombies, though, bringing the count up to 19 workable bodies for suits.  One of the young wall guards, Franklin, got excited when he made a kill, but it was a dragger. I had to break it to him that dragger skin is about as worthless as a fur coat to an elephant.  In order for zombie leather suits to hold up while being worn, they need to be tough... like leather.  He said he tanned leather once back when he was 15 living with his father, but I just held my head low and shook it.

I talked to Thaddeus today and proposed my limitation on the number of men we should bring along. I also said we need to hit Stephen's Point tomorrow, or there's no telling how much worse it could be.  If these gargoyles are growing, they could become a serious problem, not just attacking our town but also infecting other zombies and turning them.  He said that while we were out hunting, the town actually got attacked by two more, but they were picked out of the sky by guards.  He didn't seem concerned about the gargoyles attacking us now that they're using tracers and can shoot them down as easy as clay pigeons.  I had to reiterate what I JUST said to him about the fact that these creatures may be flying to other towns looking for other zombies to infect.  I said, "Sure.  The way things are now, we can defend against them for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but imagine what happens when one of those massive hordes of leathers becomes a flock of fucking gargoyles."  I hate having to make my cases again.  After a few minutes, he conceded and agreed to my proposal.

Since Kat and I made the suits before, we took point and taught a few people how to skin the bodies and prepare the skin, and how to stitch all the components together.  Before we actually started sewing them into suits, I suddenly had a thought.  I remember the zombies were staring at Kat and I frequently when they saw us riding a bike and towing a wheelchair.  They knew something was up, but they couldn't quite figure out what it was.  If they're getting smarter like they're getting stronger, then I'd wager to say there's a good chance they'll notice 19 zombies carrying rifles and treat it as a threat.  I asked Rachel, the owner of the clothing store, if she had any trench coats or any other long jackets and she said quite a few left over from last Halloween. Everyone wanted to be Neo from the Matrix that year.  Rachel had EXACTLY 19.  Talk about frigging luck.  I came back to the group and passed the trench coats around and told everyone to stitch the skin directly to the coats. Of course this means each one has to be made perfectly, When we go into Stephen's Point tomorrow, we do so concealing our weapons in the coats. This should buy us much needed time to find the nest.

Oh, while we were out hunting, I inspected a boathouse on the southern tip of Lake Julia.  What I found, I didn't share with anyone else, because they didn't need to know.  I found Calista and Chloe. Chloe had turned, still fresh showing no major sign of decay yet, and she came at me like a lumbering dog eager to jump up on me and lick my face.  Instead of licking my face, however, her intent would be to eat it.  I slung my rifle and reached for the Alligator and swung down as she jumped up, cleaving her almost clear down the middle.  Her undead carcass flopped to the floor, and a sudden sadness set in.  I knew she was already dead, but this was the second time I had to kill a zombie child. I looked her over and I noticed something on her right hand.  There were teeth marks.  They didn't look extremely deep, but I did notice a couple black marks that indicated exactly where she got infected.  I found Calista at the back of the boathouse, in the corner under some tool shelves.  Chloe had been eating her from the head downward.  All that was left from her waste up was her skeleton.  I've never seen a zombie eat like this.  Normally, they just ravish the body chowing down on random parts.

I told Kat this today, and her mouth dropped open in shock.  I asked her what happened that day she noticed Chloe sick.  Did she see or hear anything about Chloe being bitten by any of the other kids. Kat then recalled that one of the kids, I believe she said his name was Michael, was teasing her and they got in a fight.  She didn't see it happen. Margaret was the one who handled it, but she didn't say anything about Chloe being bitten.  Kat said now that I mentioned it, she did notice a Yo Gabba Gabba! band-aid on her hand.  So that explains it.  Fuck. Michael bit Chloe, who got sick and freaked out Thaddeus and Anthony, which caused them to exile her and Calista.  It makes me wonder if Margaret even knew what Michael caused.  Of course not... the town's "cured"!  Just out of curiosity, I asked if she noticed anything unusual about her eating habits, and all she could think of was that she nibbled her sandwich very neatly from one side to the next.  Kat asked me why I wanted to know, and I said it wasn't important.

I decided to pay a visit to Anthony today and told him about what I saw in the boathouse.  I asked him if he knew we were all carriers, and he did.  I asked him if he knew that bites from one carrier to the next causes the victim to catch a strain he wasn't immune to and turn.  The blank look on his face said he didn't.  He thought the virus's airborne strain was mutating again, and he wanted Chloe out before it spread further.  He needed to kick Calista out as well, because it would have looked far worse to just send the girl out by herself, and that's when I lost my temper and struck him in the jaw.  He sent Calista to her death just to maintain his cover up!  Chloe wasn't going to infect anyone else!  She could have just been pulled aside and put down, and then they could  have just come up with some medical excuse about a rare birth defect or something, but instead Calista had to die for his ignorance!  Her blood was on his hands, and I punched him again to accentuate my point.  He held up his hands and pleaded with me to stop, and I caught myself.  This was the second time I've assaulted him.  I know I'm holding something over his head, but I half expected some form of retaliation by now, considering he once ordered guards to shoot me on sight if I left my tent that night.  Yet, I beat him up again today.  Whatever "man of importance" I once thought of him is gone.  He's just a pathetic coward.

The town needs to know.  This can't happen again, but I can't reveal the truth just yet.  I need my car. Soon as Stephen's Point is done, I'm exposing both Thaddeus and Anthony.  I don't necessarily like who I am right now.  I feel like I need to tell the truth now to prevent this from happening to someone else, but at the same time, I can't do it yet.  I also feel like shit for wanting to go back on my word, but what meaning does a word have when you're keeping it with a bunch of lying assholes?  Does that make me a lying asshole myself?  They lied, though, to protect the town, but at the same time that lie is condemning it.  I asked Kat what she thinks, and she said that we need to think of ourselves We have friends who need us.  Yes, some more innocent people might get hurt, but we don't know them like we do our friends back in Terre Haute.  We come first.  I closed my eyes on that for a bit, feeling a tear seep out, and then feeling her soft lips kiss it away.  I nodded.  We come first.

After dinner, I went to the radio station and after playing a few requests and a golden oldies playlist I put together, I broadcast the plan we were going to do tomorrow.  I explained in detail that 19 of us were going to Stephen's Point in attempt to locate and neutralize the threat to our great town. I stated that we still needed bodies, so anyone who has any experience with firearms please meet us at the police station at six in the morning.  I closed my eyes and let the dead air hang for a good several minutes. I wanted to blurt out, "Also, there is no cure.  There never was," but Kat's voice repeated in my head. "We come first. We come first. We come first."  I should have said it.  I really should have. Withholding this information is not like me. Such is the cost of love.  You sacrifice a bit of yourself for the person you love. So after all the silence, I selected a very apt song to play: Power of Love, by Huey Lewis and the News.

Kat expressed again to me that she wished I wouldn't go tomorrow, but she wasn't going to ask me not to.  She knew I had to do this. I told her everything's going to be fine.  The plan will work.  We'll find what we're looking for, destroy it and return home before dinner.  I promised.  Of course, in times like these, it's never really a good idea to make a promise like that.  No way you can keep it, but I'm going to die trying.  Ok... bad choice of words.

Until tomorrow.

November 11th, 2021

Yet another nightmare.  This one was about Hector, Wallace and Temperance.  They had killed Hector, shooting him several times with the same rifle Wallace used to blow his arm off.   That wasn't part of the dream that disturbed me.  It was Wallace and Temperance eating his amputated arm.  They were chewing in it like a fat slab of beef ribs.  The gnawing and gulping sounds still play back and forth in my head.  After they picked his arm clean down to the bones, they want back to Hector on his bed.  One of them, I can't remember which, had a nasty looking knife, almost like a cleaver.  They were going back for seconds, and then Hector's body shot upright.  He was turning fast, his skin decaying, sloughing off his skeleton, but then it stopped as quickly as it began. It started to harden, toughen up and turn into leather, and then the wings emerged.  All this happened in seconds, freezing Wallace and Temperance where they stood.  Hector got out of bed, nearly twice the size he was, having to crouch a bit or his disfigured head would rub against the ceiling  Tendrils of tissue began worming their way out of his shoulder, twisting around each other forming cords of muscle, and that muscle wound over itself until skin formed.  Hector now had his arm back, but it was not the same as before.  The cannibals wanted to run but couldn't, and then Hector leaped on both of them, one foot into each of their chests for purchase while grabbing their heads in each hand.  Hector straightened his body in one powerful motion, driving their bodies toward the ground and ripping their heads off their shoulders, spinal cords intact.  

I didn't even sit up from this one.  I opened my eyes, looking around the dark room, seeing my clock say 2:34 am, and then went back to sleep.  I have no recollection of what I dreamed after that.  After a breakfast of boiled eggs (Lucero is a god among men, because he has chickens), Kat went to work and I went to meet up with Theresa and a good number of other men from town.  Thaddeus was going to follow my plan, but the first step was trying to round up as many zombies as we could.  His target number was 100, but we didn't get anywhere near that.  Not only was the zombie population outside the gates sparse, but a storm moved in and the wind began blowing snow creating whiteout conditions.  We were lucky to bring back 15 leathers.  Two of them are so shot up it, might not be worth the effort stitching them back together again.  

All I know is at this rate, we're going to get attacked again before we have enough suits for the number of men that Thaddeus wants.  I don't believe we need 100, or even 50.  I honestly think no more than 30 would be good enough.  Besides, I'm not sure how many tracer rounds they have, but it would be better to send few people in with more ammunition per unit than it would be to send more men in with fewer bullets.  All you're really doing then is just offering up a buffet, and the plan involves us walking right past them until we find what we're looking for.  I'm going to bring that up tomorrow.  I'm really worrying about my friends, and the more days that pass, the more likely something bad's going to happen to them. 

I was tired from hunting zombies all day, but I still wanted more swimming lessons from Kat, so we braved the blizzard and made our way to the rec center.  It was really something to see all this snow piling up on lawns and cars and yet seeing none of it collect on the streets and sidewalks.  I just can't get over how cool these solar panels are!  If we ever make it out of this. I'm going to do my best to lobby for solar roadways across America.  

We also came across Corey on the way to the rec center.  He was perched in a tree, his eyes glowing from the reflection of the moon.  He looked like a sentry keeping an eye out for intruders on the horizon.  Upon seeing us, he hopped down from the tree and came over to us with a somewhat eager gait.  I held my hand out for him to sniff, which he then rubbed his face all over, and I gave him a scratch behind the ears, instantly flipping on his purr switch.  I saw the patches on his fur that had been singed by the flaming gargoyle yesterday, and winced a little.  This cat saved my life.  He is by far the most fascinating animal I have ever known. He's my hero.  

And speaking of heroes, today's Veteran's Day.  Today's the day we honor those heroes who gave their lives to protect our freedom.  But Veteran's Day is more than just about those who served in the military.  It now encompasses anyone who laid their lives down protecting those they loved from the undead.  This is a new war, unlike anything in the history of civilization, and everyone who fought in this war, whether they be civilian or military, deserves to be remembered and honored. 

After we spent an hour at the pool (I finally swam by myself! Although I still suck at it), we headed to the high school where the town of Rhinelander holds a barbecue every Veteran's Day.  They have a tradition where people take the podium and they talk about people they want to remember.  I was glad to hear some people reciting accounts of their heroes who fought against the undead.  I even spoke myself, talking about the attack that happened at Lock Haven, how Dustin and Carmello had given their lives to protect us all.  I named off everyone who got killed and as Rhinelander tradition, we gave a moment of peace after each speaker.  It was nice that they did this, and I was happy and fortunate to have viewed people getting together that actually honor the holiday instead of just using it as a day off from work or school to goof around.  

I didn't see Anthony all day today, and with good reason.  He probably doesn't want to show his face around me at least for a couple of days.  I'm really not that mad at him anymore, but who's to say I won't get infuriated at the sight of him again, but I honestly don't think it's a good idea to continue to keep this secret from the town.  If Chloe did somehow come down with vivensmortua, that means she was going to turn, or even infect other children with it.  If someone else is sick and no one notices in time, we could be looking at another zombie outbreak like they had in the past.  The truth will then come out, and the people will revolt for being lied to.  But what can I do?  I can't tell people about it because 1) I don't want to cause a panic if there's a chance that nothing will happen, and 2) I need this secret as leverage to make sure I get a car so that I can rescue our friends.  

Kat also threw up pretty hard this evening after we returned home.  It could be the pregnancy, or maybe it was just the fact that she wasn't used to eating so much meat.  She gorged herself, eating a hamburger, two link sandwiches, some baby back ribs and half of a chicken.  I'm shocked that this place is so well stocked up on meat, but I was told that just about every piece of meat that we traded for was kept for this day.  Well, it didn't do Kat any good.  

The snow's stopped by now, which is good.  Hopefully it won't pick up again tomorrow, and we can have better results hunting leathers.  We need to get ready for Stephen's Point ASAP.  

Until tomorrow.

November 10th, 2021

A lot has happened today.  Let me get the not so exciting part out of the way first.  After breakfast, Kat and I went to the recreation center and as promised, she was going to teach me how to swim.  I have to admit, I was incredibly tensed thinking about entering that water.  I was like a cat; I really didn't want anything to do with it.  I also learned something about Kat today.  She's an amazingly patient teacher.  She really helped ease my trepidation about getting into the pool.

Once in the water, she took me through the basics. She had me practice breathing exercises, floating on my back, kicking while holding onto the edge of the pool, and the part that I really hated: holding my breath underwater.  At first, I couldn't do it.  The moment I had my head underwater, I instinctively tried to breathe and stood up out of the water coughing.  So then, she had me simply put my face in the water and gently pushed me down a bit more at a time until I was completely submerged.  She would go underwater with me, smiling while I was under, and that helped to calm me.  In fact, the more calm I was, the more I noticed her in the bikini and I started getting aroused. She noticed too, and giggled underwater, the bubbles coming up from her mouth and rolling over her face.  Thank god there were other people in the pool, which immediately reversed my state.

We were in the water for about an hour and a half and ended with me trying to do the freestyle stroke while being held up by Kat.  I know it looked kind of silly for a grown man trying to swim, but I didn't care.  I was having fun and it was something I needed to learn.  We toweled off and decided to go for a long walk up the northern part of the neighborhood, and then it happened.

A group of teenagers were playing street hockey when a large flying monster descended upon them and was met with blood curdling screams.  At first, it looked like a gargoyle, about twice the size of a grown man, until I recognized the leathery texture of its skin.  It also had bits and pieces of clothing clinging to its body, reminiscent of Bruce Banner after he turned into the Hulk.  Its wingspan was enormous, probably 15-20 feet, made from a stronger, more flexible skin than the rest of its body.  It slashed and swiped at the kids until it caught one, a girl, and pinned her to the ground, snapping it her with an elongated jaw.  The sound of the crunch as the creature bit down into the poor teen's head was sickening.  As it turned its head, it noticed me and Kat, and we were both paralyzed out of fear.  It reared is asymmetrical head back and roared, sounding like a mix of a lion and a siren.  Its jaw opened, then opened even further like a snake's, exposing two rows of wickedly sharp teeth.  It then ripped off an arm from its prey and dragged it through its mouth as you would a chicken wing, stripping the meat from the bone.

I tried to wake up from this nightmare, but I couldn't.  It all happened in slow motion, and then I had the horrible realization that this wasn't a nightmare.  This was actually happening!  I took Kat's arm and we slowly began to walk backward when that brief motion of retreat triggered the abomination's predatory instinct.  It dropped the leg, stood up from its crouch and walked towards us, one massive leg at a time.  It beat its wings, rushing a burst of wind at us and beat it a couple more times and it was no longer on the ground, hovering mere inches above the solar paneled surface of the street.  It leaned forward while flapping and flew towards us.  That was enough to make us run away but its aerial speed was alarming.  I heard the concussive power of his flapping wings getting louder with each stride Kat and I took, and just as the monster reached for us, I grabbed the back of Kat's head and took us both flat to the ground.  The devilish creature swooped past us, just missing my coat by a half inch.

It shot straight up in the air and then dove back down, barely giving us the time to get up and move away.  As it came down, I knew both of us wouldn't be clear of it, so I pushed Kat out of the way when I was knocked down by what felt like a mattress full of bricks.  I felt sharp claws digging into my rib cage and my awareness was narrowed down to nothing but the space occupied by the monster and me.  You know when people say they have near death experiences, their lives flash before their eyes?  I was waiting for my slideshow to start, because I thought for certain my time was up.  It took me a few seconds to register the snarls of another creature, the roars of something wild and feline and that's when I recognized those noises as Corey the Cougar.  The winged beast on me didn't seem to care at all, and was set upon shredding me into ribbons when I felt the force of a leaping mass colliding into the creature.

 Corey had the monster's wing in its jowls, thrashing it with his claws ripping tears into its tough dark leather, when the thing managed to whip its wing out of his mouth, blindsiding him with its other wing.  It jumped into the air and landed on Corey, who bit and roared and scratched at the creature's legs.  Not caring about further injuring itself, it fed the cat its arms as it attempted to pin the feline down on the ground.  Corey even snagged the beast's throat, tearing it open, but to no avail.  I watched, helpless, unable to do anything not because I didn't know what to do, but because my ribs and chest were on fire.  Then, the monster was lit up in fire.

Vinnie Caldera, one of Teresa's deputies, shot the winged monster with a tracer bullet from his rifle. The round ignited after it left the barrel, which in turn ignited the winged leather's blood, causing it to erupt in flames, The flames spread so quickly, it singed the fur on Corey, who sprung out from under it and ran off.  As it burned, it tried to beat its wings it vain, only spreading bits and pieces of its fiery flesh across the street.  It collapsed in a sudden lump as the fire consumed all it could, leaving nothing behind but a barely recognizable corpse of embers.

"What. The. Fuck. Was. That." Vinnie's reaction.  Mine and Kat's as well.  If the rest of the kids who were playing street hockey were still around, that would have been there reaction as well, and there would have been no admonishment for their language either.  The commotion brought everyone out.  One look at me, and Saint Anthony immediately brought me into his home to patch me up.  I ended up getting about 30 stitches when all was said and done.  Luckily, the damned thing's claws didn't damage anything internally.

Since I had Saint Anthony alone, I decided it was now or never.  I asked him flat out, "There isn't a cure, is there?"  At first, he laughed and tried to say that was absurd, but I've seen people lie before.  I know when they jerk their head back and scrunch their nose and pffft their lips, they've been caught in a lie. I got up off the table he patched me up on, despite the pain, and walked to him and asked again.  "There is no cure, is there?"  He looked scared now, being confronted for the truth he didn't want to give.  He ran to the phone in the kitchen, but I cut him off and punched him in the stomach.  My patience was done.  "ANSWER ME!" I yelled at him. After he started blubbering, I smacked his face to get him to focus.

And so he answered.  "No, there isn't."  My rage was boiling.  I wanted to pound his face in until my knuckles collapsed, but I controlled my anger and allowed him to talk.  He asked first how I knew, and I said it was the exiling of Calista and Chole after Chloe was sick.  It was also the mentioning of Corey having killed zombies WITHIN the town.  I suspected it all along and his horrible poker face only confirmed it.  I asked him why the ruse?  He said that when the wall was first formed, Thaddeus had a hard time keeping people in order.  People were scared out of their minds and wanted to leave. It didn't matter how secure this place felt on the outside; it was the people on the inside everyone was worried about.  They felt there would be a zombie outbreak inside Rhinelander and it would eventually claim them all.  That's when Saint Ant... fuck the Saint.  That's when ANTHONY here decided to come up with the idea of presenting a cure.  He used a fancy dialysis machine and hooked up everyone in town to it and gave everyone a psychological placebo.  With everyone thinking they were cured, people began calming down.  Then I realized Kat and I weren't cured, and my anger rose again.  I understood why Anthony did what he had to do, but that didn't stop me from punching him so hard, I broke his nose.  He tried to speak through the blood pouring down his face and said I can't tell anyone.  I wasn't going to.  There was no need to cause a panic.  And as much as I wanted to see the town turn on him and Thaddeus, I couldn't rob people of their sense of security, even if it was so thinly veiled.  I just left him bleeding.  He'll be fine.  He's a doctor.

We had an emergency town meeting.  Every major player in the city except Anthony was present. We discussed the attack on the teens today, and no one knew what that thing was.  No one ever saw it before, but quite a few people had an idea of where it came from.  The nest of Stephen's Point was brought up.  I spoke up and believed I had a theory.  I felt the attention of every pair of eyes on me while I spoke.  I said that that for the past several months, I've been witnessing the zombies changing. I assumed that everyone did too, and was met with nods and "mm hmms".  The vivensmortua virus is evolving, not just mutating.  It's making its host bodies tougher to kill and making them smarter.  The virus figured out a way to stop the rapid decaying process and created leathers.  When leathers found their prey harder to catch, their physiology changed to become stronger and more agile.  Now that they have no way into Rhinelander, the virus adapted again and grew wings, as ridiculous as that sounded. But this virus came from another planet.  We don't understand a single thing about it.  It could be that whatever life form it originally came from is slowing evolving itself back into that life form here on Earth.

One guy, I believe his name was Randolph, one of the farmers, stood up and called bullshit.  He scoffed at the idea the virus was alien.  I had to remind him that he was forced to believe in the walking dead.  He saw with his own two eyes corpses reanimate and eat people.  He saw them change and become worse things, even worse still with what landed in our town today.  I asked him what other explanation he had.  He had no answer and sat back down.  I had to admit, even saying it out loud in front of all these people, it was hard to believe.  I sat back down when Thaddeus motioned to me that he wanted to speak again.

Mayor Shaw suggested that it was time to send another team to Stephen's Point.  It wasn't a suggestion that anyone took lightly.  The last time they sent men to that town, no one came back, but he said now that whatever threat Stephen's Point harbored, it was something that no longer could be ignored, and it was something that we had no defense against.  He wanted to send an army into Stephen's Point, but I knew that wouldn't work.  I had to stand up and object.  Again, every pair of eyes turned to me.

He objected to my objection and said this time it would be different.  We had several boxes of tracer ammunition freshly made, and we'd light up the zombies. I cut him off saying that it would be a great way to waste that ammunition before we ever got to what we were looking for.  He asked if I had a better plan, and as a matter of fact, I did.  Only the two guards, Anthony and Thaddeus knew Kat and I wore leather skin on the way to Rhinelander, so when I suggested that we all do the same, I heard wave after wave of ewwws and ughhhhs and even a woman gulping for air as she tried to prevent herself from vomiting and failed.  I told them, though, as disgusting as it was, it worked.  The stench of zombie blood on us immediately discounts us as threat to them.  That's why they don't end up eating their own kind in a feeding frenzy.  I suggested a plan of hunting some leathers, bringing them back and skinning them, then wearing their skin as undead camouflage until we find what we're looking for.  THEN we can proceed to mow them down with our tracers.

Thaddeus thought it over a minute, and then proposed a vote.  It was unanimous.  We'd catch as many leathers as we can tomorrow, make suites for about  100 men, get them equipped and then head to Stephen's Point.  I have no idea how fast these gargoyles grow (my new word for them) or even if a gargoyle can bite and turn another zombie into a gargoyle, but if we believe they're coming from Stephen's Point, we need to act immediately.

After the meeting was adjourned, I managed to grab Thaddeus and waited until everyone had left the hall.  I told him I knew there was no cure.  His eyes went wide and then before he was about to speak, I told him I wasn't going to tell anyone.  I knew why they had to do what they had to do, but now I had to do something that I didn't want to do.  He called it blackmail.  I called it leverage.  I said after this whole Stephen's Point business was done with, I wanted a car to go grab my friends and bring them back here.  I even said they could do the whole purification charade to keep up appearances.  I didn't care anymore about the fact that we were lied to; I just wanted my friends safe.  If he didn't give me a car, I'd expose them, and I said I'd have proof and he wouldn't want to see exactly how.  He huffed and puffed a bit, but seeing the determination in my eyes, he recognized my strong character and yielded to my request.  We shook hands, and then he apologized for everything.  It wasn't supposed to be this way, but I just patted his shoulder and left.

Of course, when I told Kat, she was furious.  She wanted to kill both Anthony and Thaddeus for their deceit, how they had the audacity to build up people's hopes only for it to come crashing down, and I had to restrain her from running out of the house and carrying out what she wanted to do.  It took several minutes of trying to calm her down until she broke down and cried a new level of painful tears that I haven't experienced from her.  She was so looking forward to a world without the undead so that our baby could grow up and have a normal life.  That wasn't going to happen.  Killing Anthony and Thaddeus honestly wouldn't have solved anything.  I had to explain to her that it would only make it worse, shattering the town.

She asked me if I planned on going to Stephen's Point with the rest of them, and I said yes.  She didn't want me to go, even forbade me to, but I said I needed to see this done.  I knew I was endangering myself, but I had to make sure that whatever threat was out there was thoroughly eliminated.  I wouldn't feel safe here otherwise.  I also said I struck a deal with Thaddeus, that he would give me a car to get Hector, Wallace and Temperance.  That made her feel somewhat better.  I also promised I'd come back.  I had to.  She still had more swimming lessons to teach me.  She smiled, said she loves me and fell asleep on my chest.  Sleep sounds real good right now, so that's what I'm going to do.

Until tomorrow.

November 9th, 2021

I was hoping it would have been a long, long time since I'd have a nightmare again, especially since Rhinelander feels so safe, but I ended up having one last night.  I was under some kind of anesthetic, but it began to wear off and when I came to, I was lying on an operating table.  Saint Anthony was bent over me, cutting something out of me.  I don't know if it was a kidney or a liver or some other vital organ.  I didn't feel any pain, but I felt the pressure of the surgical tools holding my skin apart.  I don't remember seeing any kind of equipment next to the table.  Just him and his tools.  He carefully put whatever he took out of me into a blue case, kind of like those Igloo ice chests.  Then, he got up, peeled off his gloves, and grabbed the case telling me, "Rhinelander thanks you for your donation," and walked out of the room.

At least I'm waking up from nightmares not screaming anymore.  I don't know what to make of that, but it's clear that my subconscious doesn't trust something about this town, and today hasn't made it any easier.  Calista McCoy and her four year old daughter Chloe were exiled from Rhinelander tonight.  I was taking a jog around the perimeter enjoying the cold night air when I saw Theresa and a deputy escorting them out.  Of course, when I asked, I was politely told that it wasn't my concern; it was police business.  I started arguing with her, saying she's feeding them to the wolves out there, that's it not safe.  I objected saying she couldn't do that, but Theresa put a hand on her gun and ordered to me to stand down.  I just held up my hands and kept jogging.

When I talked to Kat about it, though, she had a look of worry on her face.  I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that Chloe exhibited flu-like symptoms in daycare this afternoon.  She told Margaret and she called Chloe's mother Calista, but Kat also noticed her calling someone else.  She didn't know who.  I began to become concerned as well.  The first thing that jumped in my mind was that Chloe somehow came down with vivensmortua, but that couldn't be it.  Everyone in this town was cured. Could it be that they simply don't want anyone even having the flu to make anyone else sick?  Kat also brought up the point that we don't know Calista at all.  She may have done something terrible to people here in the past, and it was just a coincidence her child getting sick on the same day Calista's past caught up to her and they were thrown out.  I don't know... this really bothers me

Thaddeus came through and got me an electrician to help fix the transformer at the station and after a couple of hours, we got the station online.  I was ordered by Thaddeus to keep broadcasting down to a two hour minimum, because transmitting was sucking up a lot of power.  That was fine by me.  The good news is that I actually DJ'd today.  The bad news is that not very many people own radios.  After the last radio station went off the air many months ago, most people didn't bother hanging on to them.  When word got around that Rhinelander has a radio station again, people began going to their neighbors, or to restaurants and other places of business that had radios to hear my broadcast.  I didn't really know what the people of Rhinelander liked to listen too, so I told them as I was playing to call in (oh yeah, we have phones, but can't dial out of town) and request.  I started playing some 80's rock, some 90's hip hop, even some classic music like Mozart and Chopin.  A few people called in and their requests were pretty varied.  They wanted to hear everything from country to metal and even some... ugh... Nikki Minaj.  I was so happy to hear the news when she got eaten last year.  I've missed DJing so much.  I just love playing music for people.

We spent a bit of time at our neighbor's house, Charles and Glenda Tabernacky.  They actually grilled us steaks and I simply couldn't believe it.  I asked where on earth did they get the meat, and they said they trade with a settlement that farms cattle.  They get batteries and we get meat.  They keep the steaks in the freezer and only pull them out for special occasions, like today.  That made Kat and me feel special.  I really appreciate neighborly gestures like that.  After dinner, we played a couple of board games, including Boggle, which I'm relentless at.

We talked about what they did for a living.  Glenda's in charge of the town's finance and Charles works on upkeeping the solar panels, does trash collection and helps run the water filtration plant.  I wanted to talk to them about what they thought of Thaddeus and Saint Anthony, but I thought better to open a can of worms.  I did talk to them about how I wanted to use a car and go down to Terre Haute and get our friends, but they mentioned what Thaddeus had already told us, that we're not allowed to leave.  I don't care how nice of a town Rhinelander is; if I can't leave when I want to, it feels like a prison.  They did mention that they have an electric car that I could use, but I'd have no way of taking it out of town.  Every gate along the wall is guarded, and they'd never let me out without Thaddeus's approval.  I'm going to need to think on that.

The town has a mascot as well, whom I was very fortunate to be able to pet.  Corey the Cougar was found by Sarah Ferdinand, who arrived to Rhinelander near the beginning of the year.  The poor thing was orphaned when hunters killed his mother in the forest.  Corey's about a year and a half now, with a beautiful tan and brown coat, and his friendly personality belies his predatory nature.  I'm such a cat person, and Corey sensed it, coming to me and brushing all over me purring loud as loud could be.  I've never seen a cougar outside of a zoo and to have a cougar rubbing against like any old domestic cat was a uniquely awesome experience.  I was even told that Corey has killed his fair share of zombies.  I asked how zombies managed to get past the wall, and then they went silent, until someone mentioned that sometimes they would sneak past the gate as it was opening to let someone in.  That's another red flag.  Someone's hiding something.

Kat wants to take me to the indoor pool that's in their recreation center tomorrow.  She's insistent on teaching me how to swim.  I have to be honest, after almost drowning in the Illinois River, I'm not looking forward to getting in the water again, but I realize that this is something I simply have to do.  Plus, Kat says she's really excited about wanting to teach me something as most of the time, I was always teaching her.  She even went into the bathroom to change and came out wearing a skimpy two-piece bikini that she got from the clothing store today.  I stammered asking if that's what she was wearing tomorrow, and she nodded, putting a finger down the front of her bikini bottom as she walked towards me, nudging me backwards to the bed.  I fell backward on it with Kat climbing on top of me where she proceeded to give me my first lesson of CPR, among other things.

But I can't let myself get intoxicated by this town.  I have to keep focused here.  Our friends, Hector Temperance and Wallace, need to be moved up here.  Even with occasional shady things happening here, it's a hell of a lot safer than back there, especially with winter rolling in.  I also need to try to figure out just what went on with Calista and Chloe.  I don't know how I can go about doing that.  I can't trust Teresa; she was ready to shoot me.  Saint Anthony ordered guards to shoot me if I left my tent that first night I arrived.  Thaddeus won't let me leave.  I don't know who I can trust here.  All I know is I'm stuck behind a wall that keeps deadly creatures I know how to deal with out by people I don't know at all.  I'm not sure which is the better trade off, honestly.

Until tomorrow.

November 8th, 2021

Today was a pretty uneventful day.  I spent the majority of it cleaning up the radio station.  I got everything dusted, threw out the trash, got a few broken windows boarded up and repaired as much equipment as I could.  I got the computer on, but the transformer is another problem altogether.  Without that going, I won't be able to broadcast at all.  Thaddeus said he'd get me a guy to take a look at it tomorrow.

Speaking of Thaddeus, I had a talk with him about leaving Rhinelander to go pick up our friends back in Terre Haute, and I was a little surprised to see him so hesitant to say anything at first.  It seemed like he wasn't exactly sure how he wanted to respond to my question, making up excuses as to why I shouldn't go, why they couldn't spare a car, etc.  I don't quite understand.  If I wanted to leave, shouldn't I be allowed to just leave?  He just kept saying it was too risky, that even though I was cured, I'd only get sick again if I got exposed to zombies.  That's a red flag.  They appear to be dealing with zombies on a daily basis, and I don't see the guards or anyone else undergoing the purification process again.

Anyway, he gave me the passkey for the Internet, but he explained that it would do little good.  Just about every major website was offline, including Google, and whatever net was still running was basic sites designed for communication and information.  I said that would be perfect.  I had no interest in browsing Amazon or Reddit or Buzzfeed.  He gave me the URL for Rhinelander, and it was about as basic as basic HTML can get.  It literally was just a directory of people living in the town and reports of daily happenings.  The one thing I did see were links to other settlement websites.  One of them that caught my intereset belonged to Mariposa, CA, a small mining town that was located in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  My heart actually skipped a beat, and I scanned their list of residents, but I didn't see my parents among them.  That didn't mean anything, though.  They could still be living off somewhere away from civilization.  I also read some disturbing news, though.  Apparently, there was a forest fire last month that burned about 25,000 acres.  This made me think of the nightmare I had, and about Augustina telling me it was a premonition.  Did I really dream about a forest fire that actually happened?   I don't believe it.  I'm just going to chalk it up to coincidence.  Still, hearing the news and not seeing my parents' names in the directory was disheartening.

Kat started working at Bright Eyes today and managed to do just fine.  She got to look after a group of 10 kids aging from 2-5.  She said it was an uncomfortable feeling at first, being with not just a child that young, but several children that young.  There was a time where back before she met me, she thought that all the children left in the world would have been eaten by now.  She impressed Margaret, though, with how quickly she adapted to the position.  She played games with them, read them books and fed them snacks.  The kids seemed to be warming up to Kat as well.

I talked to her about the mysteriousness of Thaddeus not wanting us to leave.  She agreed that it didn't make much sense, but maybe he's just worried about us being two people who just arrived to his town wanting to go back out in the dangerous world.  I tried to tell her that even though it was a risk, it meant possibly adding three more people to his community.  He could also have been reluctant to let such an important resource like an electric car out of his possession.  Still, if we just wanted to up and leave, we should have the freedom to do so.

So yeah, it was overall a pretty boring day.  I even started reading my library book Rise of the Fallen King by Gerry Gentleheart, which unfortunately didn't ease the boredom.  I read the first 150 pages of this 700 page book and so far, all that's happened was a young boy being given the task of finding a hermit out in the woods who used to be a king.  This king was needed to once again restore order to the lands, but at 150 pages, he should have found the king by now.  The boy still hasn't even left his village.  It kills me when books have such tremendously slow pacing.  To be honest, it felt rather nice to have a boring day for once.  I'd much rather have a day where nothing happens than a day where I'm fighting for my life.

Until tomorrow.

November 7th, 2021

Kat and I woke up and looked out the window to see about an inch of snow.  It was still lightly snowing, but stopped after the sun started rising in the sky.  The snow had collected on everything but the solar panel roadways, driveways and sidewalks.  One of the brilliant features of these panels is they generate just enough heat to keep the surface slightly above freezing.  The snow melts the moment it lands, and the water is collected in runoffs and stored for use as drinking water.  

We saw the trenches in use today.  There was an attack on the southwestern wall later in the morning where about 50 to 70 leathers tried crossing the trench to get up the wall.  They were piling on top of each other, something the guards never seen them do.  They opened the sluice gate at Hanson Lake where it unleashed a roaring torrent of water storming the trenches.  It plowed into them with the force of a train hitting a snowdrift, clearing the tracks with its cowcatcher.  The zombies were swept away so swiftly, we lost sight of them in the roaring froth of the water as it emptied into the Wisconsin River and dumped them off as undead flotsam.  After the flushing of the trench, the sluice gate was closed, and the trench slowly drained.

Teresa was on call and arrived at the wall to make sure everything was operating smoothly after the attack.  I asked her how often Rhinelander gets attacked, and she told me usually once or twice every other day.  She was almost certain that they were coming from Stephen's Point, which is why they believed there was some kind of nest there.  Her theory was leathers were sent out to find draggers or other humans, infect them and bring them back to Stephens Point where they would group together and try another attack on Rhinelander.  They've been attacked at other points along the wall as well, and it was always in waves.  They said they haven't seen a single lone zombie approach the town in months.  I asked why they kept trying to attack, and she looked kind of puzzled as to why I didn't already know the answer.  I guess I did.  They zombies know that beyond this wall, there's a massive food source. 

Thaddeus paid us another visit today and began talking to us about vocation.  He said no one gets paid for the work they do, as currency hasn't really served a purpose for quite some time, but everyone has to pull their weight in Rhinelander somehow.  I told him I used to DJ when lived in Maine and to my surprise, he informed me that Rhinelander has a radio station.  He said, though, that if I wanted to get it up and running, it would take a lot of work.  Anyone who used to know how to operate the equipment had long since past.  Just thinking of DJing again had me incredibly excited! Not only would I be DJing, but he said that the station would actually be mine if I got it working!  My very own station! I actually dropped by the station which was on a small hill just up north, and he wasn't kidding.  It would take a lot of work.  Kat and I only stayed up there for about an hour just dusting things off.  I'll take a look at the electronics tomorrow.

Kat didn't have much to offer skills wise.  There was no need for an artist or any kind of web designer, but the one thing she said would love to do is help out in the daycare center.  She had plenty of experience watching children, so Thaddeus got her in touch with Margaret Steinholme, the owner of Bright Eyes Daycare.  She starts her job tomorrow.  

On the topic of Kat, she had her first bout of morning sickness during the night.  I somehow slept through it, and I felt awful about it.  Something like that, you're supposed to get up with your partner and hold their hair back while they vomit.  Speaking of hair, it's starting to grow a little long again.  I'll have to give her a trim tomorrow, not to mention myself.  I've got a pretty scruffy beard by now and I mentioned to Kat that I wanted to chop it off, but she said, "Don't you fucking dare!"  She finds beards sexy, and well, if your woman finds something sexy about you, you don't change it!

 Also, Saint Anthony examined her leg, and found that her ankle still has a slight hairline fracture, so it isn't fully healed.  She said she's walking just fine, but he played the persuasive doctor role and put a new cast on her, although this one did allow for full mobility.  Shock would simply be absorbed through the cast instead of up her foot.  She wasn't happy to have a cast on her again and suddenly, she remembered Sandra and how she decorated her cast.  Kat started crying and I shed a few tears as I held her to comfort her.  

I remembered Hector, Wallace and Temperance back in Terre Huate, and I thought maybe we should try to head back and grab them.  The electric car we rode in also had solar panels on the top, so it would be the perfect thing to travel in.  I forgot to bring that subject up when I last spoke to Thaddeus, so I'll have to remember to talk to him tomorrow about seeing if we can use it, or at least if there's another car like it.  We can get them back here in a day, two at most.  Temperance is nearly seven months along now.  I don't want her having that baby in the dead of winter.  It's obviously safer for her to be here to have it.  

I met Javier today, Rhinelander's civil engineer.  Not only did he help with the installation of all the solar panels for the roads and parking lots, but he also designed the trench system.  He loves to tinker as well, claiming to be a serious inventor.  He was the one that came up with the idea of tazer arrows. They were swift, accurate and had far greater range than tazer guns.  He also showed me a prototype that he was working on.  He called it the Man-o-War, after the Portuguese man o' war.  It looked like a pill-shaped boat with nodes sticking out from underneath, just like the tentacles of a man o' war.  The Man-o-War would float around the edge of lakes, or even down flooded trenches, and it would release a burst of electricity into the water when anything came near its proximity.  

I had never thought electricity worked on zombies.  Javier said it worked just as well on them as us, if not better.  I asked how it could work better, and in turn he asked if I knew that zombie blood is flammable.  Without telling him exactly how I discovered that fact, I simply answered yes.  He said, "Well, if you shock a zombie long enough or with enough voltage, they burst into flames.  He had a theory that if you caught a bunch of zombies in the water and electrocuted them, their blood would catch on fire and they would spontaneously combust.  I asked where he got that theory.  He smirked and said from the Zombie Slayer 5 video game.  See?  Video games aren't pointless!

Kat and I were also formally welcomed to Rhinelander by an impromptu meeting at their town hall.  About 100 people showed up, and the one thing I noticed right off the bat was the high level of diversity.  I recognized people from just about every nationality, culture and creed.  Japanese, African, Hindu, Muslim, German, Native American, Australian, Spanish, Chinese, Nordic.  They all seemed like great people and very welcoming to us.  This is what I like to see.  So many different people living as actual people, not isolating themselves because of differences in culture and race.  This is how it should have been, everywhere, before the apocalypse. I hate how the end of the world has to come about to make us appreciate that were are, after all, members of that same world. 

I also noticed something on my tablet just now while writing this entry, something that I never noticed before.  It was a Wi-Fi signal.  Does this town actually have internet?  I tried to get on, but it's passkey locked.  I'll need to talk to Thaddeus tomorrow about seeing if I can get on.  If there is internet, though, I'd be surprised.  I haven't been on in at least a year, not since I last had my cellphone.  As far as I know, there aren't working cellphone towers anymore, and the internet itself suffered a massive hack back in 2019 that disabled just about every local hub. The hack was only exacerbated by the fact that ISP personnel was dropping at an alarming rate. Nevermind that the world was being overrun with zombies.  People were freaking out because they couldn't get on their fucking Facebook and Twitter.  

Oh yeah, we made snowmen today at West Side Park.  A few of the children were playing with us, and we made a scene where human snowmen were killing zombie snowmen.  It was so much fun to actually play in the snow again, with children no less.  It made us feel like children ourselves. After their parents came and got them, Kat and I made snow angels, individual ones at first, and then we made a joint snow angel, laying on our sides kissing.  We got up carefully and admired our work.  Then Kat had me close my eyes to get ready for a big surprise, and SPLAT!  Snowball to my face!  I yelled at her playfully, "You bitch!" and she hit me in the nuts with another.  It didn't hurt much, but I milked it for what it was worth, grabbing my crotch and falling over.  She ran over to me to check if I was alright, and that's when I stopped playing possum and grabbed and pulled her down on the snow and started filling her shirt with the cold white stuff.  God, we had so much fun!  We laughed so much, the sound of true genuine laughter felt alien to us.  

Today was such a good day.  I had similar feelings when I first arrived at Lock Haven, like this could be a place where I could finally settle in and rest at, but unlike Lock Haven, this place felt so much safer.  Kat and I talked about how awesome it would be to actually live here.  It has everything we need. Food, water, schools, a library (by the way, I finally checked out a book today called Rise of the Fallen King, which I haven't started reading yet), and such an impressive defense system.  I honestly can't see anything happening that would threaten this town.  ... And I feel like just typing that out, I've somehow cursed this place.  I really hope not.  

Until tomorow.