Thread: Making the switch.

Originally Posted by Allane

Well, I have to hand it to you guys. You are a different group than the guys we have on the 2142 server. The Arty's were falling from the sky and I kept on trying to last them out, but I forgot that you can't last out an artillary, it's not an orbital strike. Also managed to get my butt handed to me 3 rounds in a row.

Thanks for making it a tough time, see you guys tomorrow.

Oh, and Iron, just because MGs do that, doesn't mean I won't try to snipe people with them.

Welcome Allane, good to see you on both COD4 and BF2, although you may kill my ass at every corner in COD4, I hope to return the favor in BF2.

Good to have you back to the present!

LONG: But I promise you'll like it if you give it a chance

I am quite sure my house has long been reduced to ashes, though if any possession of mine would have survived (even so, I could not retrieve it, as the nuclear destruction of Tampa surely made the entire area radioactive for years to come, but more on that later), I would think it would be fitting that a certain book of mine was still intact. The Zombie Survival Guide, a "satirical" manual to zombie apocalypse survival by Max Brooks.

Yes, of all my friends, I loved zombie lore the very most. I joked that I was prepared. Not quite true - I didn't even own a gun, though my interest in firearms was low and I didn't expect to ever need one. You don't really believe in zombies, right? It's just an ongoing joke, from which you never break character. Yeah, that's how I liked to think of it. Survival fantasies were so fun to daydream about. An AK-47 in my hand (do you know where to get one, because I don't, they aren't as common in the USA as you'd think), with seemingly unlimited ammo. My stomach is full, I'm chugging back a Yuengling, I'm smoking a tasty cigarette, and I'm holding that AK in one hand mowing down the zombies as I see fit. In my fantasies.

There were a few things we were wrong about. When I first was able to come to terms with the fact that this shit was real, I went back to the myth and decided they all needed to be shot in the head. Those aren't easy to land. They're either far, or they're close - and when they're close, you're not too worried about aiming, you're too busy freaking out. Fight or flight, your subconscious chooses flight, you have to override it. Jared killed the first one. He went for the headshot twice but missed. It got too close. He shot it three times in the chest. It kept coming. He ran. I hit it in face with a tire iron. I think if it were still human, it would have screamed in pain. Teeth knocked out, nose broken, an eye slashed. It kept coming. Jared shot it again, four more times. The seventh shot in the chest, it went down.

Actually, we need to go further back. Not too far back. I won't tell you about my childhood. I won't even tell you about the news breaking of the "Green Flu" and how we took it in stride. Shit, something is always happening to the world. Earthquake kills 100,000 in Asia somewhere, another African country has a civil war. Though god forbid Americans die, especially good middle class white Americans, then that's something to be concerned about. But only for 10 minutes max. We are the desensitized, we were before the infection, now we still are, but in a much different way. See, once a survivor dies, it didn't matter if you knew them, it hurts. You're reminded that you're part of a dying species, going extinct, as things that look like you dominate the Earth, hungry for that last piece of flesh of the last human being, and still looking even after they've picked us clean.

So, back to how we did not participate in the panic. Good for us, I heard a lot of people got eaten up on the highways in the traffic jams. You need to understand, there was about 72 hours between "There's a flu in China" and "Fucking Armageddon." Somewhere around hour 58, me, Jared, and James were getting good and drunk. See, Jared was getting married soon. This wasn't his bachelor party, it was more like a practice run. It was an excuse to drink, need I say more?

I woke up first that morning. Probably only minutes after we passed out the night before, the trailer park down the road for our lower-middle-middle class neighborhood was quarantined by the police. When we got up, it was burning, and the fire was a little too close to comfort.

"Holy shit, Jared, look at this! Dude, fucking look at this!" I said, kicking him from his position on the floor. "Chill bro." he said, hungover. I drank water and popped an Excedrin before going to sleep, I knew better, I was actually feeling great. "Dude, seriously, look at this!" I said, and we walked out the front door I just opened.

The blaze less than half a football field's length away from us was a scary enough sight, but then what we noticed was worse - no one was putting it out. There was not a single firetruck to be seen. "Should we call 911?" Jared asked. "I think, uh, someone has." I said, making a logical guess. I don't know why he called, even I could see it was a futile act. But he put down his phone seconds later, he said there was an auto-message that the 911 system was offline.

"James! Wake up!" Jared yelled, as I couldn't help but just stand and stare. It's funny how he drank the least of us, had only four, he didn't need alcohol as an excuse to sleep, and sleep deeply. He responded to Jared in a similar way that Jared responded to me prodding him awake, but once he saw, he was like me, just kind of shocked.

I was compelled to look at my phone. The service was out now, but I had received a text while asleep. Was from my parents in Indianapolis, said their flight was cancelled and they were going back to the hotel, and would find another the next day.

We noticed we were coughing. The wind was carrying the fire towards us. "John, I think it's coming this way." James said. Jared ran back into James' house, and we asked him what he was doing. He came back holding his keys "'I'm going to move my car to your house, I think we should all go." He drove an SRT, by far the nicest of all our vehicles. I lived on the opposite end of the street, further from the fire, but only by 8 houses. "If someone doesn't come or the wind doesn't change, I don't think even my house will be safe." I said, very pessimistically.

With little time to spare, we talked it out and decided on a plan. We each had a car of our own. James would load up his important things into his car as quickly as he could, and I would do the same. Jared lived a few more miles away, so the only thing he had to protect was his car. But we all agreed, having all of them was a good plan. We would go to the local community college just a few blocks away and see if we could figure out what the hell was going on, why a huge fire was blazing and no one was helping.

I was surprised I didn't notice sooner, but there was smoke rising from far away in all directions. By this time we had linked the flu to all this, the apparent riots, hysteria, and flu induced psychosis we had heard about was behind this, no doubt.

By the time we were all driving towards the end of the street, the fire was consuming some houses, the wind had not yet changed. As we turned out on the first major road, we saw pile ups like nothing we'd seen before, and not a cop in sight. And then we saw people, well, at the time we thought they were still people, walking around aimlessly. We parked and got out of our cars for a minute to talk. There were five of them, only one was close. But they all saw us, and they all charged.

That's the other thing I had wrong about zombies - I thought they were slow. Nope, they can run as fast as a human, only they never run out of breath. We could have died there, but we were saved. A guy behind the wheel of a crashed car, I thought he was dead on impact. But I was wrong, I saw him writhe in agony, as the infected saw he was closer to them than us, and therefore a better meal. I don't quite remember the conversation the three of us had then, but I think that's when we first realized, we had to kill them. And that's how it came to be that Jared shot dead five zombies with his glock, that's the rest of the story I started to tell earlier. Jared was a security guard, and an army reservist. He would be called up to duty soon, but he didn't know it, nor did he know that he would ignore those orders like his life depended on it, which it certainly did.

CEDA. Those bastards, useless bastards who never did anything right, they found us then. The college campus wasn't a bad idea, it was turned into one of their bases. It fell in 12 hours, but at the time, it looked like a really appealing place to take cover. They found us on those streets, running out in their suits and holding assault rifles, but we had already done the job for them. They told us that there was a "safe house" they set up, that they'd keep us safe, but they'd have to 'test' us first. We were a little confused - after all, if we were sick, wouldn't we be zombies?

First thing, some guy made us strip to our underwear in a tent right in the parking lot, said he was checking for bites. We were clean. Glad that was over with, glad they figured we probably weren't bitten on the ass or dick. Then they took blood, and mixed it with a chemical, I took notice of a color code poster taped above them.

Jared and I were "immunes", they said. James wasn't, they said he was normal, but luckily, not infected. They told us they had to separate carriers, people with the infection who were asymptomatic. They gave us blue wristbands (except for James, who got a yellow one since he was not an immune) and directed us where to walk, across the occupied parking lot full of armed men to the safe zone with the other survivors. I asked one how many were alive, he said "Less than 50 here.", and said it in a way that it was almost an optimistic thing to say.

There were houses behind the college, an old chain link fence keeping them apart. I saw something in the branches, and didn't hesitate to tell the armed CEDA worker who was escorting us. "Hey man, there's something up there." It shrieked. Oh, it nearly could make your ears bleed. And then it pounced, right on the man next to me. "Hunter!" another worker screamed from far away, and then raised his rifle. He was too far, and I was too close, I had a bad feeling he was about to spray bullets randomly. I thought quick, and bashed it as hard as I could with the tire iron, and the CEDA worker threw it off of him. It tried to stand, with a crooked back. I hit it again, and it scratched my arm, deep. Three deep incisions down my forearm. It would really hurt later, it doesn't hurt much in the moment, when adrenaline, and I mean the natural kind, not the syringes they left laying around for soldiers to use, is flowing through your body. A third time, I hit it, and it's skull broke. It was dead.

The human it once was wore a flannel shirt, dirty denim jeans, and a NASCAR hat. It's face was twisted into something grotesque, and I mean before I smashed it in too. The eyes, they were yellow, an unnatural, monstrous yellow, the face was grey like death.

Two CEDA workers picked up the body and threw it in a nearby bonfire of the slain infected. The guy who was pounced had his suit broken, but insisted he had not been bitten. They forced him into quarantine anyway, arguing with him that the virus did in fact have airborne properties.

They told us to keep going, but I was distracted by the sight of two more survivors, two women, one old, one young, my age. I could tell quite soon they did not know each other, from the way they stood apart. And then I recognized the girl - she was James' friend, Hayley. She looked like she was wearing the clothes she slept in, and her shirt had a blood stain on it. I approached her as CEDA tested the old woman.

"Hey, I remember you! Hayley, right?" I asked, quite sure of myself. "Yeah. John." she said my name, having as decent of a memory as I did. "Who is she, how did you get here?" I asked. "I don't know her, but everyone else is-" she didn't know how to finish the sentence. "Dead, more or less." I said candidly. "James will be happy you're okay." I said, trying to cheer her up, realizing how dark my last statement sounded. My two friends had made it to the safe room already, they were probably wondering where the hell I just stopped to go off to. "What's that wristband?" she asked, and I started to explain, but I stopped was the old woman vomited.

And to say that the old woman vomited could not even come close to an adequate description. She spewed from her mouth a puddle of bubbling, green acid which ate through the suits of two CEDA workers she was facing. She looked at us and I raised my tire iron in defense, but she didn't attack, she ran. From the second floor of one of the buildings, snipers opened fire and downed it in the parking lot.

The spit had half solidified by now, and the two CEDA workers were very obviously dead. More were rushing over, they were having a panicked conversation. "Why are there so many changers so soon? They told us this wouldn't happen so fast!"

Hayley suddenly became very nervous. She didn't quite realize at the time that the woman she was with was a zombie. Because she didn't act like a zombie, she didn't try to eat us, she just puked up the green goo. But seeing the way the woman, the spitter, was gunned down, Hayley suddenly worried the same fate was about to be hers. She grabbed a blue wristband like I was wearing off of the table, and put it on herself before the CEDA team came too close to us.

They looked at the bodies of their acid killed comrades and one just said "Jesus Christ." And then they looked at us and asked "You've both been checked?" I raised up my wrist and said "Immune. I was up there when the uh, what did you call it, hunter, pounced that guy, I just came back when I saw the thing spitting acid, guess I was curious, sorry." I said, rather casually. One of them looked at Hayley and said "You're both immune?", with a hint of suspicion in his voice. Knowing a little about genetics, I said, as if it should have been obvious "Yeah, she's my sister." I even rolled my eyes to make the lie convincing.

"Alright then, get going to the safe house, hurry up, we're about to fence in this whole area and hold off until the survivor evacuation teams arrive." the man in the green hazmat told me, and me and Hayley made our way down the parking lot.

I stopped for a second to tighten my shoelaces, and when I stood up, Hayley gave me an unexpected hug and just said "Thanks." When she let go of me, I said, realizing what I had done for the first time "If you turn into one of those things I'm going to have to kill you." She laughed a little, as if I weren't serious. "You haven't been bitten, right?" I asked. "No, I promise, I haven't." she said. For the next minute, I had thought I might have made a very bad mistake, but then I felt relieved as I found out the immunes and non-immunes were separated as well.

In that safe house, that was the last time we'd get some real rest for a long time. Some of the people didn't like the MRE's, I loved them, hell, I lived on ramen most days before the apocalypse because it was all I could afford anyway. That, and I could sleep on the ground with a little bedding really easy. Though none of us slept, we just laid there.

I didn't know that in six hours, all hell would break loose at the evacuation center. I didn't know that when we left our safe room, we'd find among blood and bullet shells the note that James left saying he was going a mile up the road, leaving the safe zone out of his own free will, to find his dad, who he was sure was still alive. I didn't know Hayley was in fact a carrier. I didn't know there were even worse things than the ones that could pounce, and the ones that could spew acid. I didn't know I'd start my night with a zombie humping my back and trying to bite my jugular. Oh yes, we really knew nothing about zombies at the time, it's a fucking miracle we've made it this far.



TO BE CONTINUED