Last Night Was Hell

I don't know how the rest of you spent your night, but mine was spent in utter hell. Pure, unfettered, putrid, horrifying hell.

No, I did spend my night stuck watching Star Trek V or videos of Jar-Jar Binks. I had a night of one long

continuing nightmare about zombies. Hour after painful hour, of undead mayhem.

When these nights occur - which are thankfully few and far between, my mind gets stuck in a groove. I will enter a dream sequence that I know is a dream - but I am so afraid of zombies it overpowers my ability to Lucid dream. What I can do, is wake myself up. So my night is spent in the dream world running in terror, sometimes dying, mostly waiting with apprehension and discomfort wondering why this dream won't stop.

How often do we have dreams we want to continue that just won't? No one can say they have not woken up and yearned to go back and finish what their dream had going on for them. Does it work? Hardly ever! Your mind is a jerk who snatches away that joyous endeavor like a bully steals your lunch money.

On an aside - having grown up poor and generally getting free lunch - I have no idea what it is like to have my lunch money stolen. Poverty for the win! ....Shit...

Getting back to my main topic here - my mental torture. So I spend these nights balancing between two bad situations. If I stay away I will be even more exhausted the next day. I risk having a migraine all day, being unable to drive safely, or not being able to enjoy my day because I am spending it rubbing my eyes and trying not to cry at the knots in my back. If I go back to sleep unknown horrors await me. I have been eaten,  chased and trapped with the grim horde battering their way in. I have witnessed thousands attacked and turned by the undead. No seriously - thousands of people. Many times they are people I care about - or their arch-type.

The struggle goes on and on. Fall asleep - maybe it will be different. Wake up because it was no different. Feel so very tired. Let myself close my eyes - yup - more undead there. Open my eyes... You get the idea. It is like being bombarded with your greatest fear both awake and asleep.

That is what is even more horrible about it. Because I get so tired after a night of this - my brain finds it harder and harder to separate the reality from the dream. Even more so when the dream world uses real world places I know to torture me. I wake up and I begin to fear going back to sleep. Every little noise is a zombie sneaking towards trying to eat me or my family. You know how much I freak out knowing my daughter would have to face that? It makes me want to install those awesome steel window covers from "I am Legend". Not sure how one we even get those - it must be a custom iron working job.

So yes, today I am tired, I am exhausted, and I am left with another night of tortured dreams filled with undead attacks. I can only hope that the paranoia that is left behind is not too debilitating today and I can not freak out at every sound that happens to occur near me.

Terminal Defensive Positions

I am pretty sure my family has been involved, in some form or another, in most every major conflict in the last 1000 years of Western European history. No - I can't confirm all of that - that is the beauty of "anecdotal" history. Needless to say though, of all the generations currently alive - all of them have served in the military. At least one member of the family has found their way into the defense of the country we call home. Part of the reason this matters to me - is because all of us are obsessed with tactics and strategy. My love of strategy also bleeds over into my fear of the undead.

In the past I have written about my need to know the escape routes of places I am at, or think of how I can turn said locations into an easily defensible position. This is important to me - in some part of my mind I need to know what sort of defensive strategy I should have in place for where I am at a given moment. Handy? not most of the time, but it is in that one in a million time when that sort of information needs to be understood. 

This entry will discuss the importance of Terminal Defense Positions. These are locations that have a few required ratings that a person should take into consideration, to determine how long you should stay there, and what sort of places really are the best places to escape to in case of zombie outbreak.

1. Limited Approach. How limited are the access points for the undead to reach you. Are you trying to hide in a green house? (That is an Epic Fail by the way) Are you just hanging out in your basement/attic? (Another possible group of FAIL) Are you using one of these?

Yes, that is one freaking epic-ally hard to approach fortress (Built in Yemen according to the Google Image search that found it). While this limited approach appears, well, pretty awesome, it does suggest utter failure in the next category.

2. Length of Stay before Re-Supply. While that Yemeni fortress above is a great place to draw a proverbial "line in the sand", it probably doesn't have a natural spring of fresh water inside of it. That rock looks pretty dry. Probably doesn't have access to fuel - either wood, oil, gas, or anything else. While it would be perfect for a solar installation (power for the place and shade for you is a good idea) lugging solar panels around in the apocalypse is not going to be an option here.

3. Supplies. How difficult is it to manage long-term in that location. Can you supply yourself food, fresh water, and fuel supplies? Materials to rebuild equipment that breaks? I do not consider non-replenishing scavenging here. The idea that you can "scavenge forever" is faulty - and fails to take in the assumption that there are million of tons of high-grade explosives and nuclear weapons that will be used in a Zombie Apocalypse. 

That whole "you need two keys and some magic codes from that briefcase by the president..." goes out the window really fast when a rural base commander see a nearby town overrun with undead coming at his soldiers, and he gets a technician to jury rig an override to that fancy trigger gizmo inside of it. Nuclear weapons need two things - fissionable materials and a really big *bang* surrounding it to get it to become unstable. every other part is just to help or control the reaction when it prepares to go off. Urban centers will be ravaged by fires, nuclear and traditional explosions and the thousands of people living in that town that panic and strip the place bare before you get to it. Scavenging will not be a good fall back plan. 

4. Available Skill Set. Some people are more valuable than others to save - sorry Geek Squad. Unless you can toss together a Tesla Coil or any other technical feasible device other than an Ipod we don't need you. I will not have to worry about my IP Address in the Apocalypse. Civil engineers, Contractors, Electricians, Pipe Fitters, Masons... Hell with it - just find every tradesmen you can tie up and toss in whatever vehicle you have around. Ignore doctors, get the Nurse Practitioners first - they do a lot of the real work anyways. 

This is a perfect time to be friends with a Union Representative because chances are he knows some of the best in these trades. Please don't discuss Union vs. non-Union here - Unions are more connected typically than non union and we need that knowledge fast. You don't have time to take applications and do background checks.

Additionally, it is handy to know that crazy, food hoarding gun enthusiast down the street - that I assume you made sure to invite to every fun event at your home you could get away with over the past few years. If he is hoarding Twinkies you don't have to be his friend - we want the people that are hoarding raw grains and salts for curing the meat they hunt or fish themselves. That family - strange as you may think they are, will have what you need. You better have been helping them out otherwise they might just shoot you on sight.

These four values should be used to evaluate any location that you want to sit down in and ride out the hoard of undead wiping out all those people you didn't really like anyways. Next week - we will begin going over locations that are best suited for a long term survival of you and your family (or people you saved instead of your horrible, horrible, insane family that were the first to be turned).  

Bad news - California is actually, AGAIN, one of the best places to be for this sort of event - if you can avoid the initial problem of that state having more undead than any other on the continent. Goddamn hippies did that on purpose didn't they?

Zombies Details

One of the most fascinating aspects of my personal fear, are the minor details that can determine whether or not I freak out. Instead of being a broad brush, like a general fear of guns - and it won't matter what type of gun, my fear is much more finicky. While I do know a large amount of Psychological theory as it pertains to personality - I know strikingly little about the dynamics of how fears develop and mature in ones psyche.

I know it sounds strange, but my fear is only triggered by a few specific sets of characteristics that if they are not in the correct alignment I am not as afraid. You see my fiance pointed this out to me just a few weeks ago, I am not afraid of the rabid humans from "I am Legend", when by all obvious accounts I should be. In fact, the level of virulence is so very high in that film that it is almost unbelievable. The people mutated by the virus still ate everyone else, they still destroyed humanity in almost it's entirety. I am not sure what it is about this that helps me to watch the film - though I admit I am still nervous about the virulence of the disease. In fact, I am more worried about the virus than I am the rage-filled mutants eating and killing everyone.

Let's take another example - Skeletons. by all accounts, if my fear of the undead was a blanket "they should be dead but are not" than my fear should also cover skeletons. However this is not the case, I am actually quite fine with them running around as an army bent on terrorizing the local village. Hell, I even have my best friend from high school to credit with an incredibly useful trap for aquatically inclined heroes in D&D and other role playing games.

No, my fear really is about a very specific set of things that must be in place for zombies to terrorize me. Virus - yes. Eating people - yes. Stumbling rotting flesh bent on mindless consumption that is society - yes.

I am not sure I will ever figure out what specifically qualifies a specific thing to become terrifying, but I am sure it is in there somewhere. I guess as the saying goes - the devil is in the details. 

Disease Transit

One of the worst things about zombie flicks these days - is the spread of the disease typically causing the problem. I say "worst" simply because I don't like zombies, usually they take a simple fluid to fluid transmission system and let the biting, gnawing, scratching and other unpleasantness begin. This is probably my least favorite part.

I think if a zombie disease were to really break out - it would probably have a similar spreading mechanism to the modern flu. After watching the movie "Contagion" this weekend, my distaste for touching things grew tenfold. The disease was transmitted through touch - that alone was enough to move the virus around. The horrible part of this (aside from the idiotic teenagers laughing at death) is that it is the most likely mode of transmission that would probably develop. Airborne pathogens (thankfully) I believe enjoy great frailty due to their "airy" nature. Let us hope that I am not too wrong in that understanding (I heard it somewhere trustworthy I hope) But disease that can move through touch - well those apparently can be quite tough.

Someone grabs an object hours after an infected person does - and BLAMMO! Undeadification occurs. (I should probably copyright that word - undeadification has a nice ring to it). How frustrating to think you won't even be able to touch anything - even your own clothes - without fear that right there could be a few tiny microbes ready to turn you into the next human-deconstruction device. I was told that the movie "Carriers" actually kept this in mind for the disease that breaks out killing humanity. It would be days before a surface was safe to touch even if disinfected.

I should get back in the habit of writing this - I am starting to think I should just write my zombie novel and get it out of my mind - before it gets turned into a larger books series like my fantasy line has.