Episode 10: Of Twenties Part 1
We now visit another group of characters who have been neglected, but for a most grandly shorter time. These are the twenty people (besides Doctor Mabus, Nurse Lotus, and Andy) that are left at the hospital.
These twenty people ranged in age from ten to sixty-seven years. Nine were male, and eleven were female, a count that probably had nothing at all to do with the fact that there are slightly more female humans on the Earth than male ones. The difference is so tiny, that on such a small scale it would not make any sort of difference. If there were a few hundred of them, the female-male ratio would be easily explained through that. But, in this case, it wasn't even a coincidence; it was just something that was.
The youngest of them, little Dinah Oswald, had arrived there on her own. She still was there on her own. And, despite being a generally optimistic little ten-year old, as most are, she had begun to give up hope of her family ever showing up.
She had been sitting at home watching cartoons (all patriotic, of course, because no station wanted to be left behind in the dust of the day) when eleven o’clock rolled around. She had seen the flash outside the window, but ignored it because she thought it was just a big firework. She had seen plenty of fireworks in her life, and didn’t feel that she needed to see another one.
The power flickered, but stayed on. What our young heroine was not aware of was the fact that her father was, for his own reasons, a severe alarmist, and thus had his own generator.
"Damn!" her father cried in his gruff voice. He shot up from his seat at the dining room table and looked out the window; all the power across the neighborhood had gone out. He had seen the flash, too, and, begrudgingly, ignored it as just fireworks. Then the power had flickered; he knew, just from looking out the window, that his entire grid had gone out. Dinah didn’t notice much of this, because she was too intently gazing at the TV.
"Into the basement!" he screamed. Her brother and mother scrambled to the basement door. They struggled to open it, but had difficulty doing so because they were trying simultaneously. Her father had already stood up and shut and locked all the doors and windows, and flipped off all the lights. He ran to the basement door and tore it open, dashing in before his wife and son, who shut it once they were in.
A commercial break started in her cartoons. Dinah stood up and looked around.
"What’s happening?" she asked her father. Then she noticed her father wasn’t there to ask. She whimpered, noticing all the lights were out, too. And where were her brother and mother?
"Mommy?" she searched all around. "Daddy?"
The one door she didn’t open in her search was the basement door. Daddy had said not to play in there. They wouldn’t have gone down there anyway. It was the scary place, with the bright white lights and the tunnels to nowhere.
"Something must have happened," she said to herself. "They must have gone to the hospital! That’s where I’d go if something bad happened." She nodded, and, turning off the TV and grabbing her coat, headed for the hospital. She knew where it was because Daddy always took her there when she started to cough, and besides that once a month. He got so worried over nothing. And they always walked, because Daddy said that cars were the Loomie Nazi’s Zoom Hearts or something.
The walk was not a long one. Daddy had been very careful to get a house very near to the hospital.
Dinah got to the hospital at about 11:15. Most of the doctors were still there.
And there were scary people walking around. Dinah saw the scary people, then saw one of the scary people bite Doctor Ruby, the doctor who Daddy always took her to see. He screamed a horribly pained scream, and Dinah covered her ears. She ran into an empty room and blocked the door. She crouched down and hid and cried.
About an hour later, a nice, but kind of grumpy man, carrying a big gun, found her and helped her out of the room. He brought her to Doctor Mabus, who said that there was nothing wrong with her that was new.
The nice man with the big gun was named Joseph. He was a mountain hunter. He didn’t hunt mountains, though he had once considered it. But they didn’t move quickly enough; the chase was pointless. No, he hunted mountain animals.
He didn’t just hunt them for sport. That was the main reason that he hunted them, but it wasn’t the only one. He had picked it up as a way to save money; many years ago, he had gone bankrupt, been laid off from his job, and got shot in the leg, all in the same day. All this entirely drained his funds; he could barely afford food anymore.
But, he did have his grandfather’s old gun. He learned how to use it, and learned how to hunt for food. He sustained himself-if meagerly-for several years doing this. And then one day he got a brilliant idea: whatever of his kills that he couldn’t eat, he would turn into jerky and sell on the roadside! And he sustained himself, with much work, for several years doing this. And then one day some campers saw him hunting. They thought he was amazing, and paid him to teach them how. And he got so much money from just those three, that he got the brilliant idea to start a business. And from then on, he sustained himself just fine.
Until July 4th of that year. He had been out hunting that day, of course. He also had a "student", a boy of about 18, following him. The student had somehow managed to get both of them lost-and Joseph knew those mountains like the back of his own hand, a part of his body that he had studied extensively in his youth. They were now out, stranded, late at night, lost in the mountains. Joseph had given up on yelling at the student-it wasn’t getting through or helping.
And then the light filled the sky. It illuminated the entire region, and the two could now see their way through the mountains.
"Look, there’s a building down there!" the student yelled, pointing to a shape that he had seen after the flash.
"Yes, I saw," Joseph grunted.
"We should go down there. Maybe they’ll give us a place to sleep?"
Okay, Mary, something laughed in Joseph’s head. He shook it away and tried not to think about it.
"I don’t like it," he mumbled.
"What?"
"I don’t like it. That light. It wasn’t a normal light."
"It filled the whole sky. Of course it wasn’t normal. But maybe it was just lightning?"
"No. No clouds in the sky."
"There’re clouds over there."
"They’re too far away to have made lightning everywhere."
"So what? The light isn’t our business, anyway."
"I just don’t like it."
"So why shouldn’t we go to that building?"
"Because we’re safer up here if something’s gone wrong."
"Gone wrong? How could something have gone wrong?"
"That looked like a large blast to me. Like a bomb."
"If it was a nukuler bomb, the radiation’s already got us, hasn’t it?"
Joseph gave the student a murderous look. He was about to say something new when they heard a groaning behind them. Joseph turned around and looked into the darkness; the student followed suit.
"Who’s there?" Joseph shouted.
No reply came, but they could suddenly make out a shape in the darkness. It was a human shape.
"Who are you?" Joseph shouted again, raising his rifle and aiming it at the figure’s shoulder. It grunted and came near them. And suddenly they could see it.
It was rotting. Bits of the man were dangling off, and the entire body was festering.
"Holy shit what the hell?" The student cried.
Joseph stared at it through his sight. "Stop where you are!" he commanded. It didn’t listen.
BANG!
The bullet tore through the rotting shoulder. The approaching creature stumbled backwards a tiny bit, but continued coming towards them. "Run." Joseph commanded.
The student scampered off over the boulder that they had been crouching near, and ran towards the building. Joseph stood and backed up, around the rock, gun aimed at the approaching beast. "What do you want?" he called out. It just groaned and kept coming at him. He fired again. This time he got it right in the heart. It stumbled backwards again, but still kept going.
"Damn," Joseph grumbled. He kept backing away. "What are you?" He muttered. He didn’t wait for it to groan again; he fired one more time. It pierced the skull this time. The beast stopped moving and collapsed.
Joseph grunted and turned. He dashed past the boulder and down the mountain after his student. It was a steep run, and Joseph stumbled a few times, but eventually he caught up safely to the student.
That was only because the student had gone careening over a cliff face. He had snapped in half internally when he went spinning down and slammed his lower body on the cliff. He had smashed into the ground-already dead.
"Hmph," was the only sound that Joseph made before he continued down towards the building. He arrived at about 11:30; he burst through the hospital doors to see a recent amputee trying to crawl away from one of the ravenous beasts. He tried to shoot the beast, but missed and struck the torso. His second shot was too late to rescue the amputee.
It didn’t take him too long to nearly clear the premises of the monsters, but he did almost get killed a few times reloading his gun.
The building was practically emptied of zombies by midnight.
The student’s name had been Baline. He had been learning to shoot a gun to impress a girl at school, Delailah. Overall, he was fairly pathetic; in that other universe, he and Waldo were basically personality switched.
Baline had no skills with which to impress the ladies. He had once been a mediocre writer, but when he was told that he was just mediocre, he gave up. He had once played soccer, but after a number of minor injuries, he was prohibited from playing the game. He was madly in love with Delailah. But she was the toast of the town, so to speak. Everyone both loved and, for some reason they and she didn’t quite understand, feared her with all their hearts. But this is all beside the point; Baline thought he could impress Delailah by learning to shoot. And it had gotten him killed.
The lesson? Don’t learn to shoot to impress a girl who it probably won't impress, because you’ll end up falling off a jutting rock and snapping yourself in two.
Four of the people at the hospital were merely patients who had been at the hospital at the time and had also managed to evade death at the hands of the monsters.
Sixty year old Shane McDouble had a rare, inoperable, pancreatic cancer. He had made friends with the other three of these, and managed to lead them, in an incapacitated state, to a storage room to hide when they heard the zombies approaching. They were all old enough to have been brainwashed by the Cold War, so assumed that it was a communist invasion. He had been a lieutenant during the Vietnam War, and so had well developed leadership skills. He was one of only twenty-seven people who thought that Vietnam had been a totally just war.
Another of these four was forty year old Rena Desoto. She had suffered blunt trauma to the head recently, and was currently amnesiac and had trouble thinking logically. But she was sufficiently coherent to accept that they had to get to the storage room. She was friendly, regardless of what she was doing.
Also of the four was Eddie Plant, a twenty five year old man whose spleen and appendix had burst simultaneously. He was in post-op now, and was just staying for observation. He should’ve been the quickest to move when they heard the hordes advancing up the stairs (they were on the fifth story), but due to his stitches on his belly, he wasn’t moving even as quickly as Shane. But he managed to scramble into the storage closet before the zombies entered their room.
The final of the four was Hammy Klawv, a sixty-seven year old music critic. She was of Romanian descent, and, quite possibly, the quickest of the four. She was in excellent shape, and was only in the hospital because a disgruntled composer that she had given a poor review to had taken a shot at her with a handgun and grazed her shoulder; she insisted that she was fine, but Dr. Ruby, who was a huge fan of her reviews, had insisted on checking on her for shock.
They didn’t have too tough a time of getting organized with each other and hiding in the storage room, just because they were all very agreeable people in the long run. Nor did they have too hard a time of locking and blocking the door, though it was considerably more difficult than helping each other into the room. And there they slept, practically undisturbed by the zombies until one A.M., when Joseph found them. They all went down together to the waiting room, and joined the other eighteen survivors.
Hammy was severely disappointed to hear that Dr. Ruby had been slain, but was soon happy to just be alive, for however long she would last.
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These twenty people ranged in age from ten to sixty-seven years. Nine were male, and eleven were female, a count that probably had nothing at all to do with the fact that there are slightly more female humans on the Earth than male ones. The difference is so tiny, that on such a small scale it would not make any sort of difference. If there were a few hundred of them, the female-male ratio would be easily explained through that. But, in this case, it wasn't even a coincidence; it was just something that was.
The youngest of them, little Dinah Oswald, had arrived there on her own. She still was there on her own. And, despite being a generally optimistic little ten-year old, as most are, she had begun to give up hope of her family ever showing up.
She had been sitting at home watching cartoons (all patriotic, of course, because no station wanted to be left behind in the dust of the day) when eleven o’clock rolled around. She had seen the flash outside the window, but ignored it because she thought it was just a big firework. She had seen plenty of fireworks in her life, and didn’t feel that she needed to see another one.
The power flickered, but stayed on. What our young heroine was not aware of was the fact that her father was, for his own reasons, a severe alarmist, and thus had his own generator.
"Damn!" her father cried in his gruff voice. He shot up from his seat at the dining room table and looked out the window; all the power across the neighborhood had gone out. He had seen the flash, too, and, begrudgingly, ignored it as just fireworks. Then the power had flickered; he knew, just from looking out the window, that his entire grid had gone out. Dinah didn’t notice much of this, because she was too intently gazing at the TV.
"Into the basement!" he screamed. Her brother and mother scrambled to the basement door. They struggled to open it, but had difficulty doing so because they were trying simultaneously. Her father had already stood up and shut and locked all the doors and windows, and flipped off all the lights. He ran to the basement door and tore it open, dashing in before his wife and son, who shut it once they were in.
A commercial break started in her cartoons. Dinah stood up and looked around.
"What’s happening?" she asked her father. Then she noticed her father wasn’t there to ask. She whimpered, noticing all the lights were out, too. And where were her brother and mother?
"Mommy?" she searched all around. "Daddy?"
The one door she didn’t open in her search was the basement door. Daddy had said not to play in there. They wouldn’t have gone down there anyway. It was the scary place, with the bright white lights and the tunnels to nowhere.
"Something must have happened," she said to herself. "They must have gone to the hospital! That’s where I’d go if something bad happened." She nodded, and, turning off the TV and grabbing her coat, headed for the hospital. She knew where it was because Daddy always took her there when she started to cough, and besides that once a month. He got so worried over nothing. And they always walked, because Daddy said that cars were the Loomie Nazi’s Zoom Hearts or something.
The walk was not a long one. Daddy had been very careful to get a house very near to the hospital.
Dinah got to the hospital at about 11:15. Most of the doctors were still there.
And there were scary people walking around. Dinah saw the scary people, then saw one of the scary people bite Doctor Ruby, the doctor who Daddy always took her to see. He screamed a horribly pained scream, and Dinah covered her ears. She ran into an empty room and blocked the door. She crouched down and hid and cried.
About an hour later, a nice, but kind of grumpy man, carrying a big gun, found her and helped her out of the room. He brought her to Doctor Mabus, who said that there was nothing wrong with her that was new.
* * *
The nice man with the big gun was named Joseph. He was a mountain hunter. He didn’t hunt mountains, though he had once considered it. But they didn’t move quickly enough; the chase was pointless. No, he hunted mountain animals.
He didn’t just hunt them for sport. That was the main reason that he hunted them, but it wasn’t the only one. He had picked it up as a way to save money; many years ago, he had gone bankrupt, been laid off from his job, and got shot in the leg, all in the same day. All this entirely drained his funds; he could barely afford food anymore.
But, he did have his grandfather’s old gun. He learned how to use it, and learned how to hunt for food. He sustained himself-if meagerly-for several years doing this. And then one day he got a brilliant idea: whatever of his kills that he couldn’t eat, he would turn into jerky and sell on the roadside! And he sustained himself, with much work, for several years doing this. And then one day some campers saw him hunting. They thought he was amazing, and paid him to teach them how. And he got so much money from just those three, that he got the brilliant idea to start a business. And from then on, he sustained himself just fine.
Until July 4th of that year. He had been out hunting that day, of course. He also had a "student", a boy of about 18, following him. The student had somehow managed to get both of them lost-and Joseph knew those mountains like the back of his own hand, a part of his body that he had studied extensively in his youth. They were now out, stranded, late at night, lost in the mountains. Joseph had given up on yelling at the student-it wasn’t getting through or helping.
And then the light filled the sky. It illuminated the entire region, and the two could now see their way through the mountains.
"Look, there’s a building down there!" the student yelled, pointing to a shape that he had seen after the flash.
"Yes, I saw," Joseph grunted.
"We should go down there. Maybe they’ll give us a place to sleep?"
Okay, Mary, something laughed in Joseph’s head. He shook it away and tried not to think about it.
"I don’t like it," he mumbled.
"What?"
"I don’t like it. That light. It wasn’t a normal light."
"It filled the whole sky. Of course it wasn’t normal. But maybe it was just lightning?"
"No. No clouds in the sky."
"There’re clouds over there."
"They’re too far away to have made lightning everywhere."
"So what? The light isn’t our business, anyway."
"I just don’t like it."
"So why shouldn’t we go to that building?"
"Because we’re safer up here if something’s gone wrong."
"Gone wrong? How could something have gone wrong?"
"That looked like a large blast to me. Like a bomb."
"If it was a nukuler bomb, the radiation’s already got us, hasn’t it?"
Joseph gave the student a murderous look. He was about to say something new when they heard a groaning behind them. Joseph turned around and looked into the darkness; the student followed suit.
"Who’s there?" Joseph shouted.
No reply came, but they could suddenly make out a shape in the darkness. It was a human shape.
"Who are you?" Joseph shouted again, raising his rifle and aiming it at the figure’s shoulder. It grunted and came near them. And suddenly they could see it.
It was rotting. Bits of the man were dangling off, and the entire body was festering.
"Holy shit what the hell?" The student cried.
Joseph stared at it through his sight. "Stop where you are!" he commanded. It didn’t listen.
BANG!
The bullet tore through the rotting shoulder. The approaching creature stumbled backwards a tiny bit, but continued coming towards them. "Run." Joseph commanded.
The student scampered off over the boulder that they had been crouching near, and ran towards the building. Joseph stood and backed up, around the rock, gun aimed at the approaching beast. "What do you want?" he called out. It just groaned and kept coming at him. He fired again. This time he got it right in the heart. It stumbled backwards again, but still kept going.
"Damn," Joseph grumbled. He kept backing away. "What are you?" He muttered. He didn’t wait for it to groan again; he fired one more time. It pierced the skull this time. The beast stopped moving and collapsed.
Joseph grunted and turned. He dashed past the boulder and down the mountain after his student. It was a steep run, and Joseph stumbled a few times, but eventually he caught up safely to the student.
That was only because the student had gone careening over a cliff face. He had snapped in half internally when he went spinning down and slammed his lower body on the cliff. He had smashed into the ground-already dead.
"Hmph," was the only sound that Joseph made before he continued down towards the building. He arrived at about 11:30; he burst through the hospital doors to see a recent amputee trying to crawl away from one of the ravenous beasts. He tried to shoot the beast, but missed and struck the torso. His second shot was too late to rescue the amputee.
It didn’t take him too long to nearly clear the premises of the monsters, but he did almost get killed a few times reloading his gun.
The building was practically emptied of zombies by midnight.
* * *
The student’s name had been Baline. He had been learning to shoot a gun to impress a girl at school, Delailah. Overall, he was fairly pathetic; in that other universe, he and Waldo were basically personality switched.
Baline had no skills with which to impress the ladies. He had once been a mediocre writer, but when he was told that he was just mediocre, he gave up. He had once played soccer, but after a number of minor injuries, he was prohibited from playing the game. He was madly in love with Delailah. But she was the toast of the town, so to speak. Everyone both loved and, for some reason they and she didn’t quite understand, feared her with all their hearts. But this is all beside the point; Baline thought he could impress Delailah by learning to shoot. And it had gotten him killed.
The lesson? Don’t learn to shoot to impress a girl who it probably won't impress, because you’ll end up falling off a jutting rock and snapping yourself in two.
* * *
Four of the people at the hospital were merely patients who had been at the hospital at the time and had also managed to evade death at the hands of the monsters.
Sixty year old Shane McDouble had a rare, inoperable, pancreatic cancer. He had made friends with the other three of these, and managed to lead them, in an incapacitated state, to a storage room to hide when they heard the zombies approaching. They were all old enough to have been brainwashed by the Cold War, so assumed that it was a communist invasion. He had been a lieutenant during the Vietnam War, and so had well developed leadership skills. He was one of only twenty-seven people who thought that Vietnam had been a totally just war.
Another of these four was forty year old Rena Desoto. She had suffered blunt trauma to the head recently, and was currently amnesiac and had trouble thinking logically. But she was sufficiently coherent to accept that they had to get to the storage room. She was friendly, regardless of what she was doing.
Also of the four was Eddie Plant, a twenty five year old man whose spleen and appendix had burst simultaneously. He was in post-op now, and was just staying for observation. He should’ve been the quickest to move when they heard the hordes advancing up the stairs (they were on the fifth story), but due to his stitches on his belly, he wasn’t moving even as quickly as Shane. But he managed to scramble into the storage closet before the zombies entered their room.
The final of the four was Hammy Klawv, a sixty-seven year old music critic. She was of Romanian descent, and, quite possibly, the quickest of the four. She was in excellent shape, and was only in the hospital because a disgruntled composer that she had given a poor review to had taken a shot at her with a handgun and grazed her shoulder; she insisted that she was fine, but Dr. Ruby, who was a huge fan of her reviews, had insisted on checking on her for shock.
They didn’t have too tough a time of getting organized with each other and hiding in the storage room, just because they were all very agreeable people in the long run. Nor did they have too hard a time of locking and blocking the door, though it was considerably more difficult than helping each other into the room. And there they slept, practically undisturbed by the zombies until one A.M., when Joseph found them. They all went down together to the waiting room, and joined the other eighteen survivors.
Hammy was severely disappointed to hear that Dr. Ruby had been slain, but was soon happy to just be alive, for however long she would last.
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posted by Pope Richard Corey at 10:45 AM
1 Comments:
love the words of advice Tom.
~JJ~
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