An Homage to Brooks
I just finished listening to the audio book version of World War Z. I thought it was quite good, although I would have perhaps picked some different excerpts from the book. Anyway, I was feeling fictional again, so I thought I would post another short story- in this case, an homage to World War Z by writing my own interview.
Seattle, WA
The man sitting across from me has a slight build. With his soft manner and quiet voice he seems unlikely to be the poster child for any story about survivors. It’s in his eyes that you can see that Carl Schauffer has seen the worst of what the war had to show.
When the first stories of zack started to trickle through the tubes onto the web I was living in Kansas City. I’d been working as a business consultant, mostly with small start-up engineering and manufacturning companies, teaching them how to market and sell their widgets and whatzits. I was miserable, felt like one of Zack already- the sheer drugery of it, I was ready for a change. I guess really that I was lucky my life had been so miserable, I didn’t really have anything I wanted to hold on to.
All of that intelligence- that stuff those guys were so proud of, that they put in their reports, it was all available. Not many people really kept up with it, but there was a quiet rumble on the web. There were five of us that used to meet on IRC- we’d talk about what we’d seen and gathered from disperate reports. I would say that we had a pretty good idea of what was happening, even if we hadn’t initially guessed the extent of it, at least a few weeks before Isreal went public. This was well before the great panic, you know even after Isreal came out and told everyone what was up- it still took a while for people to even acknowledge the possibility.
That’s why I say, I think that my hatred for the life I was in, I think that it really helped me to survive, because I was ready to believe the end was comming. At that point, I was ready to watch the world burn, or to choke on the dead. So, at one point, I decided fine- everything is going to hell anyway, I might as well get out before it takes me with it. I wasn’t thinking about suicide- you understand, I was far to arrogant for that. So what I did was talked to a few people and we decided to get the hell out of doge.
This was well before the great panic really piqued, but it was still hard to get supplies. Of course, we really didn’t even know what we’d need. At the time, I’d seen a few Gs on TV, and even thought that I’d seen a couple in the city, but it would still be a few weeks before we saw those images of hunderds of Gs moving en masse. At the time, I still thought that people were a much bigger threat than Zack. I guess in the end that was the case in a lot of ways, but I still wouldn’t have minded having a bit more ammo.
I did manage to get my hands on a few weapons. I had always mocked a lot of people I had grown up around- family and friends. They always had guns and reloaded their own ammo, stupid hillbillies I called them. I thought I was so enlightened. In the end, it saved my ass. We were ill prepared, but not completely unprepared. I stopped by my granddads house and picked up some supplies, I grabbed a half-dozen shotguns, a couple of rifles, and a few pistols. He had boxes upon boxes of ammo. He didn’t get around too well after a car accident a few years previously, and he still spent his time reloading shells, so he probably had close to 500,000 rounds total. We ended up taking make 10,000 rounds for the .22 pistols and rifles, and another two or three thousand .410 shells. All told we had maybe 10 of those ammo crates between the five of us, and none of us were that great of a shot.
The five of you? Who was with you?
Well, there was me- of course, then my friend Jack. Jack was about my age, he was a big guy, maybe 6′10″ and every bit of 300 pounds of muscle. Jack had been one of my best friends growing up, and he had some useful skills, but he was also a bit of a liability.
In what way?
Well, Jack was one of those football playing fratboy types, and he’d played way too many videogames. He could sorta shoot, and he thought quick, but he was too happy to run ‘n gun. It took a real tradgety before he calmed down.
…To be continued
stay tuned for An Homage to Brooks, Part II