I know I am OT...but here is a little Zombie Story...it's an excerpt including zombie fantasy and zombie reality (not the Haitian Zombie Slave reality) I wrote while sitting here....
Our Prepared Survivor....
had quit smoking three years before. One of the upsides of the
ZA (a euphemism for anything terminally disruptive) was that life was so cheap it didn't matter if you smoked cigarettes any more. I resumed that habit so fast it was like I never quit.
Thinking back we all knew "something" was coming sooner or later. The signs were there.
It (this zombie/hurricane business) was all rather humerous and even the main stream media had picked up on the Zombie Apocalypse mania when the CDC used it to do a "Be Prepared Campaign".....
http://emergency.cdc.gov/preparedness/
"Get a kit, make a plan, be prepared". It was probably the first time the Government was here to help and actually was and probably did! I certainly bought enough stuff from Cabelas, CTD, Bud's, the Ammoman and Gander Mountain. I even heard the radio version of the Be Prepared Campaign during the Neal Boortz Show one day while headed to Turkey Creek Mall. It really spooked me and actually for a millisecond it rippled my space time continuum.
In retrospect
they knew something we didn't? Wasn't one of the theorys of SCI-FI books and movies to de-sensitize the general populace of the day? Heck we are ready to deal with stuff that was out there and now is here. It is the Governments job to keep the lid on and promote domestic tranquility afterall.
Pop culture was being used to prepare the masses for an event, wow, a cool CDC campaign...
http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/
They called it Preparedness 101: The Zombie Apocalypse. Man we didn't know how prophetic they were. You can even buy ZA Be Prepared T Shirts from the Feds. Really.
I remember commenting to my Wife on the night of December 15th (I made a mental note) while watching Brian Williams (we used to laugh together and call him Brian Fellows, Safari Planet) and NBC News when he described how scientists had taken the H1N1 virus and made it a more potent flu then introduced it to ferrets to watch how it would make the "jump" to and through the human population. That certainly was a proverbial freaking and defining moment. Someone was actually being funded at the University of Wisconsin to do this.
When the sh*t finally did enter the general population, all the preparing of the domestic military under the auspices of the Center for Asymmetric Warfare and Domestic Preparedness and Conplan 3501/3502 couldn't bar the doors...the genie was out of the bottle and wasn't going back.
I had always more pictured the onset (of the ZA) being like the jet sunken in the swamp, like in the movie "The Crazies", or the dark military secrets under development in the Central Quarantine Zone, "it's where the epidemic began. The first virals all came out of Colorado". like in the book
The Passage.
Now that it had happened it was all much less dramatic....but just as devastating. We watched, transfixed.
"This was our second recon trip back to Gatlinburg.....Approaching down wind, we weren't there to feed the carion birds or put some short lost loved one out of their misery...this was a cleansing; we wanted our town back. As we moved to the ridge and within large caliber rifle range, two guys were quietly singing"-
Well let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
The way she'd act and the colour of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there
- The Zombies -
These laggards would eventually perish on their own, but winter was coming and camping out for five months was getting old. Nature needed a bit of a nudge.
Thanks to the Federal Govenment and the Zombie Prepardness Campaign, we were prepared, but in some zombie movie somewhere I recall it said that the ones who went early, they were the lucky ones. Amen. "Safeties Off."