Today's Halloween. I had to chuckle at that. Kat and I went as leathers, like we've been doing for several days now. It's also the two year anniversary of the first reported outbreak of zombies. Honestly, it couldn't have happened it on a more apt day. The entire nation, even the world, didn't take it seriously. Who would? Zombies running around the streets on Halloween? Any other day and we would have taken notice. We would have been prepared. Instead, we gave the virus a head start on us, and it devoured our population.
Kat and I talked about the anniversary a bit this morning. It's a very strange thing to be remembering. Well, if you still remember 9/11 which happened 20 years ago and is a very minute tragedy in comparison to an apocalypse, you're going to remember the first zombie outbreak, which only happened two years ago. She asked me if I remembered where I was on that day. I did.
I was with Johanna. She was at my place helping me pass out candy to the trick or treaters. She was dressed up as Jill Valentine from Resident Evil. God, I loved that woman. Any woman who cos-plays is a keeper. I was dressed up as an extra in a movie, the one who gets shot by stray bullets in a police thriller from the bank robber's gun. I had a friend who worked in special effects, and he hooked me up with a few squibs. The first group of trick or treaters were in for a real special treat. The doorbell rang, I opened the door, Johanna pointed a fake gun at me, I yelled out, "NOOO!" and hit the remote on the squibs. POP POP POP! Blood everywhere on my shirt and I went down without so much as a scream. I saved that part for the kiddies. It was a riot!
We were in bed by 11, but Johanna wanted to turn on the news, something we very rarely did. I asked why, and she felt for some reason she just needed to watch the news. CBS 13 ran a live breaking story about a zombie outbreak happening in Boston, MD. There was a lot of chaos in the streets in the background, so much information being reported and it looked incredibly real and believable. But, it was Halloween . We watched it for 15 minutes, and then grew tired and turned it off and went to sleep. When we woke up the next morning, the feed was still going. It became worldwide news at that point. Every media outlet on TV and the web reported outbreaks happening all over. A couple of days later, the first case of zombies hit Maine, and well... I'd rather not bring that up again.
It was my turn to ask Kat what she was doing. She started by telling me she was at a Halloween orgy dressed as Wilma Flintstone and she was going for her thirtieth partner when the crowd drew silent after they turned the news on when someone got a Facebook alert on their phone about the story. She looked at my face after she said that, and my eyes were wide and my mouth was open, thinking of her with that many guys. She punched me in the arm and said she was messing with me, and that I was an asshole for thinking she'd ever go to an orgy. She got me good, I must admit.
No, she was taking her niece Emiline out trick or treating because her sister and her husband were both working that night. Kat was dressed as a french poodle (I told her those were some of the ugliest dogs around and got punched again) and her niece was dressed as Mulan. They rang the doorbell of Emiline's teacher, who she knew, when they were invited inside to chat for a bit. At the moment, the horror marathon the teacher had going on was preempted by a special report. The news story of zombies came on, and Kat and Emiline's teacher both high fived each other thinking how awesome that was, that their local news station would go to such lengths to do a realistic story about zombies. It was far more realistic than we knew that day.
But it's pointless to keep dwelling on that fact. It happened. It grew beyond our control and now all we can do is live as best as we can. We can continue to cry about the people we've lost to the horde, or we can focus on keeping the ones we still have left closer to us and be forever thankful they're still in our lives. I miss Johanna so fucking much right now, but being with Kat has pretty much kept me alive in more ways than one. No one can replace Johanna, and Kat knows that, but that isn't her job. It's never someone's purpose in a relationship to replace the person they've loved before, because it's impossible. Kat will never love me like Johanna, but she doesn't need to. She loves me in her own way, and I love her in my own way. That's enough. If the role was reversed and I was dead with Johanna living on, I wouldn't want her wasting away in a constant state of lamentation either. If she ever found someone worth living for, then I'd want that for Johanna.
So Kat and I did a little trick or treating of our own. We commented on each other's zombie costumes saying, "My, what a SCARY looking zombie you are!" "Wow, your costume is SO disgusting! I LOVE it!" We gave each other beef jerky and stale crackers and granola bars and sunflower seeds. I miss chocolate. Good old fattening teeth-rotting chocolate. I miss peanut butter cups and Snickers and pulling my fillings out trying to eat Milk Duds. I was never into fruit candy, and thought it was an insult to get them when I was trick or treating. I made mental notes of each house that gave me Jolly Ranchers and Starburst and Now and Laters and Smarties, and I returned to them in the middle of the night with eggs and a slingshot. I miss my Halloweens, but this Halloween with Kat, both of us dressed up in real, stinky, hastily stitched together zombie skin exchanging old snack food, was somehow the best Halloween I ever had.
After enough Halloweening and reflecting, we set off on the road again. My leg was feeling a bit better, so I pushed a little faster, although when the road started inclining, I got off my bike to walk. It was more work to bike up a hill than down, and I didn't want to put anymore stress on my leg than I had to. Kat's leg started feeling better by the day, but even after more than a month of being hit, I didn't trust it to do any kind of pedaling. Kat wanted to give me a break, though. She said I've been pushing so hard since we left Terre Haute that she wanted to tow me for a while. I kept trying to insist that I do all the work because I was worried about her leg, but she simply had to have her way. I let her pedal, but only when the road went downhill. She was doing an okay job, but when the road flattened out again and she actually had to work to pedal, I heard her yip. That was enough for me to put my foot down and have her get back in the wheelchair. At least she can walk without crutches, though. We left them behind at the hotel. Less dead weight to carry around.
We also had to fight off a few leathers for the first time in a long while. They were literally smack dab in the center of the road, and we tried to skirt them, but they noticed us. The smell wasn't enough to fool them, but they didn't charge us. They followed us, most likely curious as to why one of their fellow zombies was riding a bike, towing another in a wheelchair. They started clicking to each other, one making low pitched growls and I knew they were planning to attack. So I stopped, got off the bike and turned around, getting the machete out of the pack Kat was holding.
The leathers and I had a stare down. They clicked to other a few more times and then did something I never saw them do before. They got down on all fours, and that's when I noticed something different about their physiology. Their legs tended to stretch out from their hips a bit more than most humans, and the arms seemed to articulate in their sockets in ways that weren't intended. They were almost like four-legged spiders getting ready to pounce on prey stuck in their webbing. One of them began hissing, a long extended hiss, like air escaping a tire that was quickly going flat. Then the other two began hissing as well. It was an intimidation tactic, and it was working. This was the first time we actually drew this much attention from them since having the suits on, and then I remembered what Rampert said about them smelling fear. They where smelling it. I was afraid.
But just because I was afraid, it didn't mean I wasn't ready to fight. In fact, I was more ready to fight because I was afraid. I've had many opportunities to use the adrenaline pumped into my system by fright to my advantage, so when the first lept at me, I swung upward with the machete out of pure reflex. The cold, razor sharp blade cut through the leather's skull as if slicing a tomato and its contents spilled out as such. The second zombie went after Kat, leaping on her and knocking the wheelchair over, but I didn't have time to see what happened after that as the third zombie advance on me. It ducked my swing and chomped on me with all its might, but I fell completely backward to dodge the attack as I heard its teeth shatter from the force. I had to remember to shudder later from thinking how much a bite like that would have hurt.
I heard a gunshot go off, but my undead assaulter had me preoccupied. It grabbed my upper arms and dug its nails into my skin, and I felt a couple of them poke through. It picked me up part way and forced me back down again, smacking my head against the pavement making me see stars. I don't remember letting go of the machete but I heard the clang of the metal bouncing off the ground. Trying to focus again, I was able to make out the leather rearing back for another bite when I felt something hot and wet spraying me in the face. The next second, the zombie's head was gone and then I saw a foot push the headless torso off me. I looked up, and there was Kat, my machete in hand, dripping with leather blood. I cracked a joke and told her saving me all the time was starting to get real annoying. To be honest, she never looked sexier to me than she did at that moment. Certainly wasn't going to have sex with her in the middle of the highway, though. That's for damn sure.
We covered 55 miles today, ending up in Roscoe, just south from the Wisconsin border. I-39 also turned into I-90 at this point. We took up shelter at the Willowbrook Middle School, but it wasn't a pretty sight. We could see evidence of zombies attacking and eating the children that used to occupy these halls. Some of the corpses were still here, too grizzly for me to want to recite the details. I've seen dead bodies before, but for some reason, it's always so much worse when it's kids. We searched classrooms until we found the most pristine one, the chemistry class. This room must have been unoccupied when the attacks came, because there wasn't one single broken beaker or condenser.
Normally, you wouldn't want to sleep in a building where you knew there was a slaughter, but once you've been around enough, you tend to become numb to it. Sure, the unease is always there, knowing the awful events that transpired, but the weariness of traveling easily trumps that feeling. You just want to sit down and relax, eat a meal and go to sleep, which is what we're doing. Hope you had a safer Halloween than we had!
Until tomorrow.
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