Tue, 18 March 2008 Fetch catches up with Jonas and calmly expresses his displeasure. With a bat. Guest Stars: Cupcake and Tea (http://www.youtube.com/user/CupcakeAndTea), Michael Spense, Kevin Erhart as Em Caulton, Sean Roberts as Willie Fetch, Barb Ross as Margaret Hess. Radar Masukami reads the Episode 3 Recap Excerpt: February 17th, 2009 Turns out I can take a punch. Actually, let me rephrase that. Turns out I can take a fairly severe ass beating. It's been a bad day and writing is painful, but I'll get as much said as I can before I have to stop. "Bad day" may be the understatement of the century. Let me start at the beginning. I went to church today, less for the religion than the company. Everyone in town goes to church, so it's normally standing room only. There aren't many true holy rollers anymore, because if God has a plan for all this, clearly we're not part of it. Who knows, though, maybe this is the second flood and he plans to wash us all away and start over with what's left. Unfortunately, if Greenly's an ark, he left us without a drunk to steer us to the mountaintop. So, no, I am not personally religious. I used to be, but not any more. But since there's no television, movies, or video games, church is one of the few things that makes one day any different than the other. That, and the heat. During church Horace fires up a wood stove and a few gas heaters, and for two hours we can all take our coats off and stink together. We don't have a pastor any more, since he was part of the Paradise Falls expedition, so we take turns reading the services. This adds an awful lot of "ummms" and "errs" to the bible that may not have been in the original translation, but at least they're trying. We avoid Revelations. It hits too close to home. After the sermon, half a choir trudges it's way through a few hymns and then we hold a memorial service for everyone who we've lost in the previous week. The first few months these were somber, serious affairs but after so many deaths, it's hard to take them personally anymore. If the rest of the family is already gone, and the deceased had no close friends, we just go through the motions. If it's my day to read the eulogy I'm more partial to Hamlet or Emily Dickinson than the Bible. After nearly two hundred funerals we know all of the good funeral verses by heart. People rarely cry, even for family members or close friends. You just get to a point where you don't have any tears left. Death is as much a part of life as breathing to us now, and most of the somberness has to do with the society we lost, not the person. Another dead body is just a symptom of the greater disease. The last funeral that really made an impression was the service for the Paradise Falls expedition. But even then, we weren't really mourning the deaths of our friends, or family members. It was a funeral for hope. That was the last time anyone who wasn't a deputy left Greenly, and the day most of us finally accepted that we'd die here. Horace did the service himself, reading the names of the group one by one, as Sarah sang "Amazing Grace" quietly in the background. That was the last time I cried at a funeral. To me, it was a funeral for civilization. When services finish we gather in the common room for some coffee made with grounds that have been brewed four or five times already. If we're lucky we can cut it with some sugar or syrup. We talk, catch up on gossip, and people talk about what they're going to do when this is all over. We like to pretend that one day the government will sweep in here, and tell us everything has been put right, and we can go back to watching prime-time TV. The best part of coffee hour is when Marian Hess and I get to play book swap. Marian runs our town library, and that's as close to a movie theater as we have right now. On Sundays she gives me first crack at the new acquisitions. The entire living room of her house is filled with mismatched bookshelves, organized by subject instead of author. There's a bookshelf for detective paperbacks, a shelf for textbooks, half a shelf of poetry. She keeps and organizes comic books and magazines for the less serious readers, and I try to pick up a few comics for Wendel when I can. Wendel is obsessed with comics. She's got a huge hope chest filled with collateral, and tips are completely up to the borrower. I leave a hammer, and take Keats. I return it, throw some bullets or soap her way, and grab a few Sanford paperbacks. If I need the hammer, no sweat. I leave something else. It's very good system and Marian and her son Luke run it like true professionals. Luke is in his late twenties and used to be a damn good car salesman from what I've heard. Most of what they earn with the library they spend to expand it. I just wish they'd let me buy instead of rent. "Don't be greedy, Mr Waight," Marian will say in her stern, librarian way, "Knowledge is for everyone." She's right of course, I just wish she'd let me keep a few. I've got a minor book fetish. Today I skipped coffee to avoid Sarah, which was painful because Marian had been hinting about some new textbooks the deputies brought back from a hunting expedition. Non-Fiction is my favorite, to the point where I've even perused an anatomy text book when I was hard up for reading material. But I couldn't deal with Sarah, not after what she showed me on Saturday. I felt her watching me the whole service, giving me evil little smiles whenever she managed to catch my eye. She was wearing a white, long sleeved dress, and looked angelic, but I could feel the tattoos hiding underneath, pictures of things a seventeen year old girl shouldn't know about, let alone be able to depict in ink. Her being in church made the whole place feel dirty. She was defiling it with her presence. When the final song was sung I was first out the door and I didn't look back. Comments[6] |
Mon, 10 March 2008 An unexpected visitor offers Jonas a strange bargain. Guest Stars: Catie Miller as Sarah Goodman, Christian as Alex, Will as Wendel, Michael Spense as the Analyst Laurence Simon reads the Episode 2 Recap Excerpt: February 16th, 2009 I'm exhausted, but I want to get this down on paper while it's all fresh in my mind. Things are happening in Greenly now, things that make me want to leave more than ever. Things I have no good explanation for, which sounds so silly considering the world I live in. It all started this morning. I woke up in a cold sweat to the banging of a insistent fist at my front door. It always takes me a while to get out of bed. I sleep on a cot in the back of the store, with as many quilts and blankets as the night requires. The cot is hell on my back, but I tend to thrash when I'm having a nightmare and I've busted about four air mattresses. Air mattresses are expensive, and I can't afford to break another. I sleep in the store because it's safer than my parents home, and has fewer memories, good or bad. It's best not to dwell on life as it was. Waight Hardware has two entrances, with bars on the door and all the display windows covered in sturdy wooden planks. There's a fringe benefit to this. It keeps the deputies from sneaking in at night and robbing me blind. I followed my normal routine, despite the noise. I brushed my teeth, relieved myself into the hospital bedpan that's become my chamber pot, and checked my secret stockpile of batteries and non transmitting gadgets. Throughout it all the banging continued, and I figured it was one of the deputies coming to "borrow" some ammunition for the watch towers. They'd been shooting all night, and I figured they might run low, so I had a few boxes at the ready. It's just good business. I was expecting the deputies, but to my surprise it was Sarah Goodman banging on my door. She looked irritated, las though we'd had an appointment and I was late for it. I took extra time with the locks just to annoy her. I know, it's juvinile but... well... fuck it. She woke me up. I opened the door a crack and she pushed her way right in, stomping past me and leaving the scent of lavender in her wake. Things like this irk me. The rest of us are huddled together waiting to die and she's wearing perfume. As I asked her what the hell she wanted so early in the morning, she began to rifle through my displays, throwing things on the ground. Anything that she wasn't interested in went into the "Restock after the tantrum pile." Sarah Goodman is used to getting whatever she wants, and the citizens of Greenly know that if you deny her anything she's just going to send her boyfriend Willie Fetch and the rest of the deputies over for a "random" inspection. One personal bottle of antibiotics, hell one anything that's "contraband" this week and you're liable to lose a quarter of your supplies or more. The good stuff. It turns out that though death is no longer inevitable, taxes are. And if they find electronics, banishment. I let her do her thing, and I restocked the shelves as she finished with them. She spent the better part of an hour tearing my store apart I thawed some clean snow and enjoyed a terrible cup of home brewed coffee with a couple of saltines. Breakfast of champions. I cut the bitterness with some honey, that was frozen so solid I had to cut it out of the whimsical bear it came in with my knife. I'm all out of sugar, along with most of the rest of the town. She took nearly all of my ballpoint pens and about a dozen small nails, along with few pieces of cloth I'd torn into dish rags. Nothing I couldn't replace. When she went after my back room, though, I panicked. I didn't want her to find the batteries, and she was getting into everything. When I grabbed her arm she screamed "Don't fucking touch me!" and began to flail around like a wounded bird. I started to become genuinely frightened. Her eyes rolled back slightly and I swear to god she started snapping at me with her teeth. I was afraid she was having some sort of psychotic episode. Not knowing what else to do, I put my forearm into her neck and pinned her against a pillar. The store is filled with a number of nasty things; axes, saws, and my father's lazy habit of just hammering rusty nails in the walls to serve as display hooks. She could have very easily hurt or killed herself the way she was acting, and I'd have been blamed. Her arms flailed, and her pretty painted fingernails became razor blades, slashing at my face and neck. I've never been so thankful to be wearing a parka. I don't know at what point I hit her, but I do know that I was dangerously close to becoming a cyclops when it happened. I smacked her, open handed, and her jaw just dropped. The sound was electric, out of place, like a thunderclap on a sunny day. She froze, and touched her cheek. I watched with not a small amount of concern as her wide blue eyes went cold. She stared at me like a lizard, or a snake, and the hatred I saw was cold and deep and honest. I held her steady for what felt like several minutes as she studied my face. Then she was all weepy eyed and sobbing and whimpering "You HIT me!?" I explained to her that she was, for lack of a better term, acting like a fucking psycopath and again asked her what she wanted. Turns out it was my rubbing alcohol. All of it. "You got it from Jackson Tate for three cartons of Marlboros, and I can't find some anywhere else. I want yours," she said, "Please Jonas? I need it." Comments[3] |
Sun, 2 March 2008 Jonas tells us a little more about town... and about the curious dreams he has nightly. Guest Stars: Catie Miller as Sarah Goodman, Michael Spence, and Laurence Simon as Mr Hurley. Laurence's podcast 100 Word Stories can be found at http://podcasting.isfullofcrap.com/ Daphne Abernathy reads the Episode 1 Recap Excerpt: February 15th, 2008 I'm using the flashlight tonight, small minded superstions be damned. If you've never tried to write by candlelight, it's a pain in the ass. Between the flickering and the shadow cast by your hand it's nearly impossible to write legibly. It also kills your eyes, and for some reason I suspect few optometrists survived. No offense to any eye doctors who happen to read this. I need clear, electric light if I want to get any serious journaling done after sundown. News first. There was another attack today. It's been too cold for the dead things to move, and because of that we've gotten lax about security. Well today Mensa candidate Steve Jarvis got up on his roof today with a snow shovel. Frankly with Steve I'm suprised he didn't try to lug up the snowblower. So there's Steve, a couple shots of newpotato moonshine in his system, up on his roof shoveling snow off when he hit a patch of ice, slid off the roof and broke his neck. He turned, then went inside to kill his wife. From there two of them went thundering through Greenly charging anything that was alive. That's how it happens, multiplication. Two dead, they kill two. Four dead. They kill four. Eight dead. Suddenly you've got a major problem on your hands. Luckily for Greenly it was too cold for anyone but that idiot to be out this morning, so most of us were asleep. Where were the deputies during all this you ask? Wandering outside of town, drinking and taking pot shots at the frozen ones as far as we can tell. They call it hunting but they rarely bring anything back. When they do bring back food, it's more often canned than killed. So, there's Greenly, with all of it's brave defenders out drunk and playing in the snow. This could have been a major problem it it wern't for Alex. Alex Wilks, our towns chef, took Steve down with a revolver and a crowbar and probably would have been killed my Mrs. Jarvis had Horrace Greenly not waddled his fat ass out of the sheriffs office at the last minute and picked her off with a rifle. Alex was not very happy and took a swing at Horrace. The phrase "do your fucking job" was used, along with other, more colorful phrases. They are both master swearers and watching them argue was something to see. I think Horrace would have thrown Alex in jail if he thought he could find someone to cook for a hundred and thirty people. Well, a hundred twenty eight. I’ve been reading over what I’ve wrote in my first journal entry, and it strikes my that I am making a pretty big assumption in thinking that whoever reads this will know what’s going on. What if this journal isn’t found for centuries? Ok, centuries may be a bit much. It's just a 99 cent notebook so I'm probably screwed when it comes to saving things for posterity. But what if what is happening here is different than other places? What if it's ONLY happening here. I can't make any assumptions. I realize that there are some things I should make clear. First, and most central on everyone’s mind: the dead are trying to kill the living. That’s it in a nutshell, I guess, but I’ll try to put down the specifics (or at least the ones I feel pretty certain about). I'll try to sort speculation from fact wherever possible. It all started back on June 13th, all over the world, the entire planet: one day. People who died began getting back up, and they started trying to kill everyone around them. No one knows how it happens, no one knows why (though we've all got our pet theories), but everyone who’s still alive can tell you this: 1) It happens to every living thing, and it happens every time. When something dies, it gets back up. Person, dog, squirrel, or those fucking deer. Doesn’t matter, it’s coming back. 2) It takes one minute and eighteen seconds for a dead thing to get back up. This part really screws things up for those of us who like our answers neat and logical. The dead thing can be five pounds or five hundred. It can be dead from old age or dead from buckshot. It can be male, female, young, old, warm-blooded, cold-blooded, or cut in two. It’s still always one minute and eighteen seconds. One eighteen – thats the number that the numerologists chew on. 3) It's not contagious. Being scratched or bitten will not, as far as we can tell, turn a living person. It's the function of death that's changed, not any sort of disease or infection. The dead don't rest, but they can't infect the living. They don't need to, they're perfectly capable of biting, scratching, punching and gouging. The fresh ones are as fast as they were when they're alive, but over time, their speed and agility deteriorates. I'm no biologist, but my guess is that their bodies just don't repair themselves. They go as best they can for as long as they exist. They're not exactly smart and not exactly stupid. They look for ways in. They don't attack things that are unreasonably larger than they are. Undead mice don't attack a person who's awake, typically. They don't run until they see something they want, they just seem to drift and wander until they find what they're looking for, and then they charge it and kill it. Sometimes they eat some of it, sometimes they don't. But they always stop when it dies. They seem to sense the transition and they don't attack their own. 4) Animals hate them, especially from their own species. When we see a group of dead things, we run. Animals don't. I've seen supposedly tame dogs charge these things and tear chunks out of them. A few weeks ago most of the cats in town disapeared, and were gone so long we suspected someone was eating them. They came back dragging an emaciated, destroyed racoon. Just left it in the middle of town like a warning and returned to their respective owners. These things offend life on a very visceral level. 5) ...and most importantly, if you take the head, the things stay down. Most agree that it’s catastrophic damage to the brain that does it, but I’d suggest getting that head all the way off for safety’s sake. I've seen things keep going after a headshot. Ninety percent of their brains are superfluous to their purpose in life. They don't need memories, logic, spacial recognition, emotions. They just need to go, smell, hear and kill. Comments[10] |
