Tag: Hope Zero Kelvin

That was several months ago. Now it was time to decide what is worse: Awakening all wet or awakening all wet and covered with the effluvia of the skirmish of the day before. Dealer’s choice I guess. At least my hound didn’t mind, probably because her wet dog smell could trump just about anything.

My overnight water catchment had collected several gallons of water.

Enough to rinse off most of the muck and dirt, was even able to use a bit of soap. Wow. Too bad I could not dry my newly sort of clean clothes but I didn’t feel that I could risk a fire, even if I could have gotten one started. ZK made herself scarce during my ablutions, although she was smelling a bit wiffy.

I needed to get back to the supplies I had cached prior to my encounter at the well. If you’re scouting around, you don’t take all your stuff with you. This means a lot of doubling back, but hey, cardio! This strategy was good if you could remember where your supplies were. And if some Zombies hadn’t looted it. And if the elements hadn’t destroyed them. If, if, if, if and godsdammit, IF.

Enough with the negative vibes. Time to get moving.

To get across a smashed country, you are never going make it humping 40 pounds in your bug out bag. Not unless you are a Navy Seal or Iron Man. If you knew what you really needed and how to get it, you could actually travel quite lightly. It wasn’t about supplies so much as it was about tools and knowledge and ingenuity.

Oh yes, you also had to Embrace the Yuck.

Continue reading “HOPE CHRONICLES – CHAPTER THREE”

Let me tell you about my hound.

I found her when I broke into an abandoned warehouse while avoiding a Zombie horde. It was early into the Crash and the Zombies were focused entirely on gratification of short term urges: I am hungry right now and I can’t image planting some food or taking care of some livestock, so FEED ME!

Double face palm for this lack of forward planning.

There was a goddamn full blooded Irish Wolfhound, in place like Texas no less, in the building’s rear room. She was emaciated and had managed to survive by drinking the puddles of water that came in through holes in the structure. Half crazed by hunger and lack of human contact, chained to a wall, abandoned by her owner, still trying to guard the building, she stood her post faithfully until the biological imperative of survival overrode her breeding and her training.

She ate the warehouse cat and everything within reach of her chain. Even what was probably the remains of her owner.

How different, really, was the vast majority of humanity from this hound, at that point, in the choices they were making?

God must still love me because this warehouse serviced veterinary supplies, including, Jesus my beads, dog food and pet medicines. There were even some comfy doggie beds. The Zombies had mostly stripped the place of what a human might eat or use but were either too proud or too stupid to use stuff originally intended for animals. Bad for them, good for me.

With some tools and several more broken fingernails later, I managed to get her collar off and was rewarded with a quart of doggy slobber and kisses. Yeah, girl, I know how you feel, even if you’ve got fleas, I thought.

We bonded while sharing cans of dog food. That’s me, Taste Taster of Doom. My favorite was Chop House Bone Steak Flavor ™ as it had a nice sauce I could mop up with some little cakes I made from stale crackers from the lunch room. My hound favored Chop House Rotisserie Chicken™.n

Actually, when heated up over a small fire, it wasn’t too bad. It was already cooked after all. I did draw the line at the cat food.

A girl’s got to have some standards, after all.

Continue reading “HOPE CHRONICLES – CHAPTER TWO”

The sun went down, that treacherous orb. I mean, really, could I get just get five, just five, freaking minutes of daylight here? It was dark and here’s me without any night vision goggles, head slap to self.

Okey dokey. The playing field was going to be tipped by hearing and smell. We were probably even on hearing with the rain coming down, but I had the advantage on smell, IF I could get my hound to clue me in on where all the Zombies were. I could hear her growling to my right.

“It’s okay, we won’t hurt you!” called a, possibly, woman’s voice. There were a few chuckles, and, yes, they were evil chuckles.

“Come out, come out, we just want join up with you! We need to form a band against the bad guys!” said the voice again, this time a little closer.

Geez, you would think they could try a little harder to be convincing, I thought.

“And you little doggie too!” This was accompanied by high pitched giggling and laughing, tittering even.

Anybody who titters in general, and most especially in this post-Crash world, has left sanity behind somewhere in a galaxy far far away.

So. Not fremenies then.

I edged around to the left of the well cover, just in time to miss a baseball bat strike where my head had been seconds before. Crap, these guys moved faster than I thought. I began squeezing off single shots from my AR15 in the general direction of the baseball player wannabe and then swept it from right to left and back again. My hound ran around in from the right.

Gunshots, screams, moans, growling, barking, grunting, gurgling, several big thumps and some slithering noises that I earnestly hoped were not somebody’s intestines dragging across the ground.

Continue reading “HOPE CHRONICLES – CHAPTER ONE”

I have three more chapters in the hopper and will post them over the next three days.

Guest Post by HopeZeroKelvin

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s somebody’s arm for sure”, I sighed. I reserved an eye roll for something truly worthy of it, since I was fresh out of eye rolls several months into the Crash.

“And, NO! You cannot eat it!” I shouted at my hound. She slunk away, reluctantly, but not before giving me a Look that said: Some food best be coming forth. And soon.

I peered at the disturbed makeshift grave in the rain and the cold. It was not animals that were digging up the newly dead for a quick meal. There were human foot and hand prints, castoff clothes and broken knives. At least there were not recent human tooth marks on the arm.

It’s the small comforts after all.

Which meant that whoever dug up this poor fellow was probably looking for fresher meat. Or meat that could walk all the way to the dinner table, aha, aha.

Yea Gods. The Zombies were out.

No, not the rotting, mindless, near-corpses lurching across the landscape of some Hollyweird Zombie Apocalypse. That would have been easy. These Zombies were fast, dangerous, cunning, vicious. These Zombies were people driven mad by hunger, deprivation and loss. Disfigured by disease and injury, filthy, covered in rotting clothes, these Zombies were the people caught completely unawares when it all fell apart.

And here were millions of them, at least for a while, before the great die off began. More about that later. Don’t ask me about the smell.

My hound began to growl in that low frequency way that communicates directly to the monkey hindbrain without passing through the monkey ear: Hey there monkey! My Doggie Spider Sense is tingling and I am 3 seconds from tearing someone’s throat out and I am not picky about whose throat that might be.

When your hound does this, the smart monkey option is to pay attention.

I dropped to the cold and wet ground, cold and wet being the freaking SOP in these days, scrabbling over the natural and man made detritus on the ground (don’t ask) to take cover behind a concrete raised well cover. I took off my hat and slowly edged my right eye up over the edge while slapping a 30 round clip into my AR 15 (take that NY Safety Act) and off with the safety. I loosened the straps securing my katana on my leather duster, just in case. I heard my hound off to my right in the darkness somewhere, her growl now broadcasting extreme unhappiness and uncertainty. A brief scream cut short and she trotted back to my position with a bloody, literally, doggie grin on her face.

Godsdammit. I hate this Rambo shit I was always forced into.

Look, prior to the Crash, I was an Official Good Person, by the norms of the time. Worked hard, got an education, good job, marriage, children, had a mortgage and paid taxes, the whole meal deal. Yeah, I dabbled in the prepper movement, learned some good skills, stockpiled some stuff, even had a bug out bag. Went so far as to stock a retreat deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas.

Okay, okay, this was really my deer lease but I made it really cool with camo and stuff. But it was a hobby, a form of rebellion, something new to do. Never ever ever ever thought I would be needing any of it.

Yet, here I am, crouching in the rain and cold, with the sun going down, while three beings of unknown intent were coming out of the trees towards my position.

These are either my frenemies or they want to eat me.

Neither prospect pleases.

Just another day in Paradise.