Ha! Listen to the wise and sagely pro here. I’ve been shooting for just under four months and chatting shit like I’m some spec-ops ninja. Still, I’ve got a lot of trigger time now, and as flighty as I seem, I secretly practice my handling all the time. If you do something enough your brain wires up a hard-coded program for that skill. You move from conscious competence – where you know how to do it but have to think about it – to the desired stage of unconscious competence, when it becomes second nature, allowing you to multi-task.
You can see the difference in Maria and Isaac. She’s practiced it way more, as well as having a natural affinity for it. Alicia is the same now, as she does nothing but practice with weapons. It drives her to be better and as long as she can keep her head cool, she’ll be a real asset. That girl does not fuck about and takes her security role very seriously. As long as we don’t see that savagery we witnessed when she first brained a zombie with the halligan, Alicia will join our top tier defence along with me and Nate.
I’ve wandered off on tangents again. Reading my journal entries is like watching Billy Connolly live on stage… I’ll wander off down a merry road of tangents and side notes, but I’ll eventually find my way back to what I was trying to actually talk about.
My point about the house clearing was to illustrate how the small pockets of undead we came across were back to their ‘normal’ aimless selves. Gone was the purpose, the drive, and the singular focus towards me. I’ll admit my relief, because I hated the thought of having to stay in the lodge while others went out and did the grind. At the same time though, it unnerves me. Why did it happen for that short period? And why has it reverted to the same threat level as it is for anyone else?
This is what I put to the group. We laid out everything we’d seen at the little pharmacy where it first appeared, then the wall of undead downtown, which Nate and Alicia both confirmed there was no reaction from until I opened my mouth.
Finally, there was the builder’s yard, and both Mark and Alicia were quite animated about that experience. They saw first-hand how every zombie came stomping after me when I played carrot for the undead donkey, allowing them to gun down some rear stragglers and make it safely to the trucks.
I laid out what I felt and just put it right out there. This apocalypse was not a virus, nor was it some chemical weapon. It was not man-made, and it was not a natural viral mutation. There was something more at work.
“Like God, or the Devil?” asked Maria.
She’s never been religious, but Dean was. Not in-your-face religious or ram-it-down-your-throat religious though. Faith was just something he’d been brought up with and was very personal to him. I think it also gave him some comfort in an incredibly stressful job and let him find some peace amid everything he’d seen.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t believe in magic sky fairies, nor in horned demons in a plane of fire tormenting souls for eternity. I’m not saying there isn’t something out there we don’t understand, because the longer this goes on, the more I have to believe there is something out there that sparked this bullshit. I just can’t give it a name right now.”
“It does feel a little like we’re being judged,” offered Norah.
I was so happy to hear that from someone else because that’s what’s always been eating at me. It does feel like a punishment, a slow death for humanity, with the dead as our judge, jury, and executioner for all the death and misery humanity has inflicted upon itself. I said as much to the group.
Norah nodded her agreement. “When you put it like that, flower, it’s hard to argue with the logic.”
“There’s no real logic to any of this,” Mark mumbled round a mouthful of pasta.
“No, there isn’t,” I agreed. “But even in all these twisted knots of logic and musing about supernatural or divine intervention, why this brief period where it felt like I was being targeted?”
Nobody had any answers to that. I didn’t expect any, and I doubt I will ever get one. There’s so much that will likely go unanswered about this shit show. I have to wonder though; if this happened once, who’s to say it won’t happen again?
“If it does, we’ll deal with it,” said Nate after I voiced that thought. “We can’t control it, Erin, so all we can do is carry on. We’re all still adjusting, so let’s just go one day at a time.”
Sensible, practical Nate. I get the impression that he isn’t convinced by my theory of some agency behind the undead uprising. He can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean he’s on board with the “dark force” I’m suggesting is out there, even if Norah is backing my play.
He’s right about taking it one day at a time though, because we can’t do anything about it if there is some force playing an undead fiddle, so it drops back to Norah’s sagely wisdom about not being bound by the chains of things we can’t change.
I hate it though because it’s different for me. They haven’t briefly been the sole target of the dead, and the reason why I was – even for that brief time - messes with me when I’m not busy doing something or trying to get to sleep. It’s easy to impart that wisdom
