Surviving World War Z
Emerzo Peters- Hero of Fortress Pokk
INTRO
A Strange Disease, Our New Home
Disclaimer- The book World War Z does not belong to me. I am simply writing about the book that I love so much. Max Brooks Rocks!!
TOLD BY:
Emerzo Peters
The only thing I knew about African rabies were the stories I had heard. The government didn't take steps to tell us what we were dealing with until the U.S. defense fell back to the Rocky Mountains. Millions of lives could have been saved if only those stupid pedestal heads had told us what to expect. The government knew how to deal with zombies; they had specialty scientists working on the problem day and night. The only news source that we had was the radio and the television. The television could hardly be trusted however. One channel claimed that the zombies were afraid of fire. The next channel said that they were fireproof.
The radio was a little bit better, as it served as a gateway for the average citizen to tell others what they knew. But we had to be wary of the people who were lying through their teeth just to get attention. They were sometimes worse than the misinformed people on the T.V. in that they were actually trying to do harm.
There were the stations that could be trusted: Radio Free Earth, Wartime News. There were a few lesser stations that civilians set up themselves; my uncle had one of those up and running with his friends.
My point here is simple. Information is what helped us in this struggle, not major technology.
My story starts in my family's car. A new outbreak had occurred in nearby Minnesota. This was the point at which my family decided to evacuate.
We lived in the southeast corner of North Dakota before the war. My father's plan was to move to his brother's cabin about two hundred miles north. We never made it there.
Our plan was to take twenty-nine all the way to Pembina, and then drive the remaining few miles on country roads. His cabin was very close to the Canadian border.
If only it had been that easy. The Interstate was so jammed with vehicles, it would have saved time to walk to Canada. Four hours in, we had only gone thirty miles. Even worse, some of the fleeing people had been infected, and they were beginning to reanimate.
I heard the screams of the dying people and the moans of the fresh zombies long before I saw them. My father was driving, and he was convinced that we could drive away safely. Instead, we were forced to flee our car when the zombies were about two hundred yards away. A semi truck had overturned, blocking all traffic.
We stopped to grab what we thought we could carry. I had a big blue duffel bag and a large black rolling suitcase. My mother and my father tried to bring some food and some water in a big cooler. It took both of them to carry it, and they both also had their suitcases.
We abandoned our car in the middle of the road, serving as yet another blockade for the fleeing people. I darted between several cars, some of which were already abandoned and some of which contained people who were honking angrily.
We headed blindly west, off of the interstate and through some sparse living areas and a couple of gas stations. We must have traveled almost five miles before my mother collapsed from exhaustion. My father told me to get to the bank that was down the street, and that they would catch up.
My parents were overrun with zombies in mere seconds; some of them had been lying in wait behind a neighborhood fence. There wasn't anything that I could have done, so I just kept running. I found it hard to run with tears streaming down my face, but I made it to the edge of the small town. I found myself on a road heading southwest.
If you could imagine my surprise when a familiar face showed up in what appeared to be an armored bus.
Somehow, my classmate Harold had gotten his hands on a bus, and modified it to suit his needs. There were armored plates on most of the bus, and at least thirty people had taken up refuge inside. The entire back half of the bus was stuffed with supplies.
They were heading for a supply depot that had been shut down by the government a few weeks before, due to the owner's inability to pay the bills. Harold and his older brother thought it would be a great place to hole up and wait out the attack that was inevitable.
The drive was eighty miles or so, and I cried the whole way. When we arrived, I stood up and wiped off my tears. I knew that the only way to survive was to move forward, forget the past. I could mourn for my parents at a later time.
When we saw what was to be our new home, some of us were pleased, some downright distraught.
At first, our new home didn't look like much. There were four warehouses full of random boxes that had yet to be cleared out by the government, and about one hundred sq. yards of open fields that were contained within the outer gates. The outer walls were five foot tall brick structures with another three feet of chain link fence jutting from the top. There were also inner walls, just around the warehouses themselves. We would eventually reinforce the twelve foot concrete inner walls with sentries at all times of day.
The bus was quickly unloaded; I counted thirty-eight people, including myself. Most of them hadn't anything along with them; a few had bags or suitcases. The boxes and bags at the back of the bus were quickly unloaded, and I saw that they were mostly full of food and ammunition for the dozens of guns that had been obtained by questionable means. The food itself was packaged in suck a way that it was obvious it had been looted from a grocery store. There were several crates of fruit and nuts, and a whole lot more dried food and packaged foodstuffs. The obvious reasoning behind this was that it would keep longer.
There were other things packaged in the compartments under the bus. Crank radios, toilet paper, knives and forks, pads of writing paper, several blankets, you name it. But the best things we had were the musical instruments. If you know anything about being surrounded by zombies, you'd know that the constant moaning would drive you insane easily. To drown out this noise we had a violin and a guitar, a couple of bugles. Without those, we probably wouldn't have made it more than a few weeks.
Someone had brought potato and corn seeds. God bless his heart. We would need those indefinitely.
The first order of business we attended to was to clear out the eastern warehouse. We stacked the crates along the outer northern and western walls to protect us from the colds winds. One of the crates I helped to carry broke open and several deflated beach balls fell out.
When I asked Harold about this, he told me that his uncle used to work in this place, and that these warehouses belonged to a company that supplied party supplies and random luau knickknacks. I had been hoping to find something useful in some of those crates, but they were mostly useless. The young children weren't disappointed however; they found many ways to keep themselves entertained.
The people that we had brought into the new fortress numbered as follows: There were twelve children younger than ten, eighteen able bodied workers (Ten men and eight women) and seven people retired people over fifty who helped mostly by doing things around the warehouse and looking after the children. One woman was six months pregnant, and hung around the warehouse also.
We had two carpenters, an eye doctor, a nurse, three farmers, a professional hunter, a storyteller, a banker, two office workers, (they had escaped together) a chiropractor, and a web site designer. Four of us were students at high school, including Harold and I.
The warehouse had a second story balcony around the inside, and that is where we set up our blankets and makeshift cots. The area downstairs, now cleared of crates, served as a recreational area. Our carpenters managed to build all sorts of furnishings, using the extra wood from the crates in the other three warehouses. In time we would have wooden rocking chairs and footstools, and couches stuffed with soft things we found in crates.
The first weeks must have been the hardest thing to survive; save for the invasion itself. It would take months of living together before we acted as a family. Our many struggles and defeats, horrors and letdowns are recanted in this story.