Episode 2: Dreams and Dreamers

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.