Secret Courtyard, University of California Berkley, California
[This courtyard is celebrated as the war room. It represents the strategy meetings that the civilians went through during the siege. Hidden on beneath glass and between surrounding buildings, the safety of the location is at the least, questionable. A man in his thirties sits on a bench at the base of a sculpture. He is handsome and smiles frequently.]
We were one of the lucky ones. I convinced a few friends along with my boyfriend at the time and his family that we needed to go. Leave the bigger cities and sleuth through the other ones before a rush came. They were really hesitant. I understood at the time very well. We were all lower middle class where we couldn't just pick up and leave. We didn't have big enough savings accounts to pad us if we lost our jobs. We all had loans and bills and traffic tickets. Leaving for any amount of time was a big deal. Especially before the Great Panic. But we left about a week or two before the great Panic Started.
Who is we?
We was whoever I could convinced would leave with me. The only person I cared about at the time was Alex. I left my immediate family. I didn't even care to push them. They knew what they were doing whether they were staying or picking up and following us. They kicked me out when I was nineteen because I told them I was dating boys. It was a blessing in disguise though. With all of America's will power to connect relatives to one another lost in the war, I haven't received a single letter from them.
I regret somewhat leaving them behind, but they weren't the type of people to listen to anything that I had to say. If we were a family of generals and admirals and the likes, I'd rank last on the people who would have a meaningful word. Even after the grandchildren. If they were infected or died somewhere it was probably because …
[He looks unsure for a brief moment and then continues]
I met my boyfriend at his house the same day I tried to convince my family. He and I had already talked days before and he just broke the news that they were ready to pick up and leave too. When I got there a family across the street was already packing as well. See we lived in Los Angeles county. You want to talk about a shit hole doomed from the beginning to be one of the biggest messes in the nation, talk about the county. No big city in the world fared well at all. If you lived in the city, seven out of ten people you knew, were either dead from infection or from whatever other causes there might have been. Urban violence, traffic accidents, demolition, killing sprees.
We didn't know what to do or where to go until I just started packing their belongings for them and they joined in. Then I got a phone call that probably saved my life. It was my mother. She said that dad was infected. She was screaming at me telling my that I jinxed it or something. She was just so hysterical.
I thought you said you didn't know what happened to them…
I don't. Alex's family had about finished packing so they decided to come with me to see if I could say some last words to my father or maybe he put the family in danger. It turns out my mom had gotten a call from his work. He passed out from dehydration. He came home about two hours later. You know what's funny about all of this? Alex and I had been dating for almost two years and this was the first time that he actually met my parents and my family formally. They shook hands and everything. They loved the in laws. But they still wouldn't go with us. My mom wasn't a sucker for media epidemics and my dad wasn't about to risk a job he had been working for more than twenty years. So we left and I left them there. It wasn't until much later. Years after the war had settled that I learned a band of … whatever you would call them. They weren't quislings, nowhere near it. They weren't secessionists either. Probably some radical religious zealots like the phelps or something. They went door to door passing out disaster kits to everyone. If someone refused then they would make sure a family wouldn't have running water the next day. They left the kits at the door steps in the morning hours.
The kits were made up of duffel bags, one to a household. They had food and bottled water. What the families didn't know was that the food and water were laced with cyanide. Some dumb shit must have confused these for mass neighborhood suicides during the Great Panic because the headlines came out just like that.
Alex's family and I were headed north. It was the first thing we thought of doing. I even brought up Alaska. We had seen it in a movie before. Which is another point I'd like to bring up. Of all the dumb shit things for our world to do, we forget everything we learned from horror movies. Forget post apocalypse. Those were showy epics. But horror movies. Even the undead cult classics! For whoever's sake! Why didn't anyone study those?
Did you?
Of course I did. All my life I did. Ever since I played my first survival horror game I did. The thing was, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Alex wanted to act. Our occupations and college years were thrown out the window basically during the war. When DeStreS came around, we were almost as useless as the rocks we were moving. Till they started the patrols. Then we became very useful.
How so?
We had our first encounter with the Zombies at a diner somewhere in apple valley. We stopped for directions and ended up staying for dinner. Alex's parents just got into an argument over Alex and I showing PDA's. I know right? They stepped outside and so I decided to order us [Alex, his little sister, and I] dessert. We got cheesecake. I love cheesecake. I would kill for cheesecake. I almost had to actually. This guy next to us, next to Alex actually, started groaning like he was going to puke his brains out. I told Alex to move but he wouldn't. I told him to get on the other side of his sister but he refused. He was the type of boyfriend, or boy in general who would stick it through for those he loved. It didn't make sense to me. Not the noble part but the sticking it through. He's just so tiny, you know? He was below a 110 and about my height. I weighed about 200 back then.
So when Alex refused I was ready to say lets go and then the guy, this burly bear of a flannel wearing trucker started vomiting all over the counter. And not just a little slop but a projectile mess. I didn't know it then, but my reflexes were sharp. Something you always wonder about but not really. He turned to Alex, I don't know, to apologize or something. He couldn't get words out and Alex was about to move when he saw the man gag. It was when he turned in our direction that I saw all the bite marks on his other arm.
[He signals to the left arm]
Alex tried to move out of the way but I knew he wouldn't be able to. The big guy hurled chunks in my boyfriend's direction. This brown diarrhea of a liquid and instantly I just felt my hands jolt around Alex's head and squeeze his face. I don't know whether he tried to wiggle free because he thought I was suffocating him or because he now had vomit all over the front of his body.
What were you doing?
I was covering his eyes and his mouth. I tried to cover the ears, but you just can't do that much.
Did you succeed?
I did. I moved my hands carefully away from his face and I told him to wipe everything away from any orifice on his body and it's like he just understood this language I was speaking. I think of a lot of people got infected through natural means. Much more than anyone cares to report. No one thinks about killing the crap out of about twenty undead and then not fucking scratching your itching eye when you have infected blood all over your hands. It was something that I was too naïve to point out to people anywhere till we got to the college.
Berkley?
Yes. I never saw what happened to the flannel man. Didn't stick around. Alex washed himself up in the sink of the restroom at the diner and changed his clothes in the car. I wouldn't let the family stay there any longer. Just didn't make sense to put ourselves in danger. Don't know if the guy re-animated or just had the flu. I just knew the signs and accepted the worst case scenario. It's probably what kept a lot of people alive.
We ran out of gas about twenty miles away from Berkley. His parents and his sister began this crazy argument that they should just wait in the car till someone comes along. We did for a while. But when we started hearing the news about the Great Panic beginning, I mean, it wasn't called that at the time, but we knew what was happening and how it was being notarized, we just started walking to the nearest town. We started seeing more infected, and the more infected we saw, the more luggage we dropped. We even dropped a good case of food. We thought we would just come back for it later. When the night hit we were screwed. We found an empty shack behind an old building on the road. I figured it was used for a security guard or something. It was barely big enough to fit all of us in.
When the moaning started we didn't move. We thought that we'd be safe if we didn't move. We were wrong. There were probably about five of them pounding on the wall at first then came about twenty and then forty. This small shack where we could barely stand was attacked by under worldly demons. So we did the only thing we could do. We opened the window.
[He grins mischievously]
And one by one we all learned how to kill a zombie. Everyone except Alex's sister. She has Autism. She was kept safely in the corner of the small room. You know, looking back on it now, to let one of the infected in of all the idiotic things to do, was probably the smartest thing we did. They were violent and thrashing if you got close. All you had to do was be careful and mindful of yours surroundings and their jaws at every moment. We dispatched these things with of all things a pair of training sais that I held onto in the last piece of luggage I had. I only had two bags though. I always wanted to use the things. By the time the last dwindling idiot had ran into the middle prong of my sai, it was day light. The problem was we had to climb out through the window because so many bodies were blocking the door. There were a few undead coming toward us when we all got out, and we were scared shitless but we were confident as soon as we found out they were slow. We had a feeling, but we didn't know for sure. As long as we didn't see running zombies we wouldn't give up hope.
[He thinks for a second]
We found a group of people going in the same direction we were. Almost. We intersected about a mile away from the original road were on. It was this young lady that told us in their traveling band that she was sure we could make a fortress out of Berkley. She heard after being gone for so long that the townspeople had started building a fortress of a wall around the college and people were beginning to migrate towards it.
When we made it, we saw no understatement. This giant twenty foot wall had been erected in the weeks leading up to the great panic. We were lucky we found it.
Why weren't you over run with fleeing civilians?
That was something I brought up at our first meeting. It was like a townhall. But it was a concern we never had to deal with. You see by the time we actually had a solution to deal with this problem, the undead had already taken care of it for us. They surrounded the walls by such great numbers that no one dare come near us. When we found out that we actually helped pull off America's Redeker plan, we were proud of ourselves because we saved a lot more lives than we turned away.
You think you could have helped anyone?
With so many people already staying amongst the college, we were more afraid of anyone on the inside going on crazy killing sprees or doing something really stupid to let a flood of the undead in. That's something I brought up at the second town hall. I turned from a working class citizen among Alex and his family into a part-time team member on the strong holds think tank. Alex had been trained by his mother to be a medic. She knew a lot of first aid and medical treatments for physical injuries. She was no doctor but she was great with broken bones. His dad was allocated to procuring the food and making sure it was healthy and clean. When I came in, it took a while to make myself useful. Almost got myself kicked out of the college because I offered such a stupid plan.
The Window Equals Death Philosophy?
Precisely. When it came time to finally dispatch these mothers, we had to come up with a plan. A lot of our engineers started telling us the wall would buckle any day now. One of them even scared the shit out of the strong hold and was severely punished.
What happened to him?
I'm not allowed to talk about that.
Not even hint?
No.
When it became clear that we had the resources to survive but not the faith of the wall in front of thousands, almost a million I would say of the undead, we went through seven days straight of planning the Window Equals Death Philosophy. I told them about the night in the shack that we had. Their engineers came up with a way to reinforce the wall for the time being while they would cut small square holes into the metal wall. Some parts were brick. We didn't dare mess with those ones. Our plan was to in one week, train undead dispatchers to kill one at a time at a constant pace, and train watchers to make sure if anything happened, a situation could be taken care of.
Did such a situation occure?
Twice. The first hole we opened up was two big. A few of the undead had managed to press their way in. It took almost trainees to get in there and deal with the situation. No casualties, but it was a hell of a scare to have your only hope of a plan almost fall to shambles because someone thought he didn't have to use a fucking ruler when it came to a wall that was the only thing keeping us alive.
The second incident was a cluster fuck of a screw up. His name was Drew. We had him on the training block in first few days of the plan. So he knew what he had to do. At least we thought he did. When he began dispatching on his shift, his watcher took a piss break. Drew decided to get lazy for just a second and leave his weapon, a wooden branch carved into a javelin, out in the open through the orifice of our wall. Just a second. Something we made sure we punished if a watcher reported to us. And we made sure the watchers reported to us. The undead grabbed a hold of his stick. At first his story was that they tried to pull him into the crowd. But the policy is, lose the weapon. That's where the watcher comes in. They have either an extra weapon or they alert another team nearby. This kid Drew didn't know what to do when the Zombies got lucky and started stepping on top of other bodies and sliding through the patch one by one. He started screaming which is what tipped us off at first. The only team nearby was just getting done with their shift so they heard the ruckus. The guy sent his watcher running and he started cracking at the few that had gotten in. They were overwhelmed in a matter of I'd say five minutes. By the time we got there, about a hundred of them had snuck in. Drew's watcher when he came back was hiding in the brush. We saw him get dragged out and eaten alive in front of us.
All in all it cost us those three men and two women who had been patrolling in Drew's direction. We got the area under control with the help of firearms.
You had guns and didn't use them?
Limited ammo. Used for just such an emergency. Every member in the council or the think tank carried one. The two factions were one in the same essentially. It took two months to dwindle the numbers down so clearly that we could actually send teams out to move bodies away from the wall. That was the hardest part. Sending people out into the danger zone. I went out there every other day moving bodies with Alex and just Alex. We kept each other sane. Alive. We loved each other. I loved him enough to take any bite for him and blow my brains out after I was done getting him to safety. He would have done the same for me. He almost did.
Do you want to talk about it?
No. It's not important.
It is. It's fine.
Before we were asserted as important people within the stronghold I actually feared for our lives at every moment of the day. And I was right to. One of the civilians went crazy. He went on a killing spree just like I thought someone would. He took out his family and his friends and when he was done, we were in the path. I was sewing up a bunch of battle dresses because back then we even knew we were going to have get the hell out of the stronghold every now and then to go into town for supplies to search for them. That was our first contribution. Anyway, Alex was coming back from the library where they had a lot of supplies stored at the time. I was getting up to see him when the guy came around the corner. Didn't even have a name. I think that's what drove him crazy was that he didn't have an identity anyore. When I officially lost my wallet for a day I felt empty. Like there wasn't a picture that could tell people who I was. He didn't have one when they searched him.
He was just coming around the building like I said and I walked out of the door. Alex had seen the blood on his shirt. Speckles on his skin and blotches on his shirt. He picked up the first rock he could. I don't know what happened. Why the guy didn't shoot me when he had the chance. Maybe he was just staring at me for a second. But that second gave Alex the chance to throw this heavy ass rock at this guy. It missed naturally but the guy raised his gun at Alex and Alex just took off. The guy ran after him, but Alex is a first class runner. A gymnast. This guy couldn't catch him with a bullet if Jesus was on his side. This guy was so pre-occupied with Alex that I had enough time to grab these crochet needles we never used and chase after him. I caught to him. I was so angry I don't know what happened.
Really?
No. I killed him. I just chose not to remember how awfully I did it a long time ago that I made myself forget. He tried to kill my boyfriend. By the end of the war we were as self sufficient as any. We proclaimed Berkley a secure sight before the military did but we knew it was. We were so confident we went on expeditions for miles around the strong hold to dispatch any legion of zombies. If the group was too big, we called the team in to lure the bastards to the fort and use the WEDPhilosophy. If it was a small group we made them call for back up so that we could call the team in and lure the bigger group in to use the WEDPhilosophy. We weren't unstoppable, but we certainly weren't useless.
Is Alex still alive?
Yes. We adopted a few kids here and there.
[He shows me a photograph of a man with a chiseled face and beautiful long black hair. He looks like he should be on a magazine cover. There are several children in the photo as well as Himself.]