Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
While Miss Burton is currently too busy fighting zombis to blog, a journalist from the Time of Stabilization seems to have taken a big interest in Miss B and her kids.
He’s compiled a book about her first year of adventures that is currently available on amazon.
What is Sure, is Fleeting
Posted: March 13, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: 5th grade, death, hordes, loss, undead, zombies
In this world, these moments of comfort and consistency are few and fleeting. It’s hard when we are in them to remember that nothing, absolutely nothing lasts. It doesn’t matter how bad we want them to, they just won’t.
And unlike life before, when we are in these moments, we are in danger. The world is still spinning around us, bringing flesh-eating danger to our door. These moments take our guard away and puts us into a non-existent safe place that just sets us up for hurt and failure. As Javier and I slept, that is exactly what happened. We weren’t exactly fortified in the house that we had taken over, but we had felt that we were secluded enough that we would be okay until the spring came. Then we had planned to either fortify or to move on.
The moon was big last night. It shined through the parts of the windows that we hadn’t covered, casting everything in gray. I awoke to the sounds of feet on the floor. I stirred slowly, letting my eyes adjust to the room. Javier was still asleep beside me. As my eyes adjusted I could see Shelby’s blond hair gleaming in the moon light.
I thought she was having trouble sleeping again. I moved to make room for her, but as I lifted the blanket to let her in, I realized that something wasn’t right with Shelby. I shot up and stared at her. It took me several more moment to realize that Shelby was dead. I could see the gray of her skin, smeared with what I was hoping was her own blood. Her arms reached out for me, only this time not for comfort, but for my flesh.
I shot out of bed, pushing Javier as I went. “Holy fuck,” I scream as I try to both gather my wits and grab something to take her out with. Javier, still oblivious to what’s going on, finally wakes up. “What the hell, Leez? What’s going on?”
He looks from me to Shelby. “Oh God,” he mutters and moves to grab something.
As if the scene could not get anymore complicated, Vincent comes bursting into the room. “I’m sorry,” he’s screaming. “I just couldn’t do it to her! She asked me not to!”
We have Shelby in the middle of all of us. She’s dragging her feet and reaching for each of us, unsure of what her next move should and would be.
“What the hell do you mean, Vincent! We talked about this,” Javier is slowly becoming infuriated.
“Never mind that, how the hell and when the hell did this even happen,” I interject.
“This morning, when we went to look for food. There’s a group of them…in the woods.” Vincent looks down at his feet, knowing hiding that information has put us all in danger.
“Oh my God.” I grab a lamp off of one of the nightstands and I hit Shelby as hard as I could, completely separating myself from the part of me that loved her in life. She goes down and stays down with ease. Vincent is staring at Shelby’s body in awe. “Are you bit,” I ask with more calm than I actually have.
He shakes his head. “It was just her.”
Javier is beside himself. When I turn to him, I can see the tears welling in his eyes. No one has time to say anything. Armand starts screaming, an ungodly, stomach-churning wail. I push past Vincent and I run to my mom’s room.
I find her trying to calm him down, but he just keeps screaming. I run my hand over my face. What’s happening? Before I can even figure it out, my mom fills me in.
“They’re coming, Lizzie. He does this when they’re coming.”
Defrosting the Man in the Ice
Posted: February 20, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: 5th grade, javier, survival, the man in the ice, undead, zombies
It’s been beautifully warm and then bitterly cold. Last week, we even saw our first real snow storm since this all began. We were trapped for the entire weekend until we were able to dig out our little house. It reminded me how in my life before I should have been more appreciative of public services like snow plows and snow removal.
It was bitter and cold and we were thankful for it because it meant that we did not have to deal with The Man in the Ice. But then, it started to get warmer out. We had days where it felt like spring. I would stand with the children and we would stop doing chores. We’d put our faces to the sun and just feel the renewal that was coming.
It amazes me how much more in-tune we have become with the natural world since ours lives changed. Our moods align with the temperature and the weather. It was so nice for those few days. It made all of the snow melt and made it easier for us. Javier though paid close attention to The Man in the Ice.
One morning we could see the ice beginning to break up. We both stood there watching him, as his fingers began to slowly protrude through the ice. It was disgusting and stomach churning to watch these purple/brown bloated fingers worm there way through the weak parts of the ice. If we helped to pull him out we knew he would break apart. If we let him struggle to get out we figured the same would happen to him.
His eyes said that his mind was muddled, probably both with decay, his unceasing hunger and the temperature of the near-freezing water.
“If we leave him in there, he will spoil the lake. If he hasn’t already,” said Javier as he drew me closer to him.
“But how to we remove him?”
“A really big net.”
“Even if we had one of those, we’d still have to get it underneath him.”
“I know.”
Javier was already half way up the hill towards the woods before I could respond.
On the Lake
Posted: January 23, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: 5th grade, apocalypse, end of days, escape, love, relationships, the man in the ice, zombies
I stood over him today, The Man in the Ice. I knew that the ice was thick, having frozen to a near solid. The Man in the Ice is almost cocooned down there with just enough room around him to allow him to move his arms and legs. I stared at him for what felt like hours, I watched him as he sensed me get closer. It was other worldly. The man is dead, has been dead for sometime and since the water is both destroying and helping preserve his purple bloated corpse, he has no eyes left. I doubt he has very much soft tissue left inside him at all, but there he was, bloated and floating, scratching and snarling at me through his ice tomb.
He doesn’t fight to breath because he no longer has to. He could stay under that ice until he rots to a point where his corpse can no longer be held together. And then he’ll just disintegrate and infect the lake. That is if his presence there has not already done that.
I wonder who The Man in the Ice was. I wonder if he was kind and good in life or if he was a horrible person missed by no one. Shelby came down and sat with me for awhile. We don’t say a lot to each other. We haven’t for months. She’s very close with Vincent now. They’ve bonded throughout this entire ordeal. Armand is glued to my mother. Javier and I struggle with whatever our relationship with one another is everyday. And if anyone knows what happened to Bonnie after the escape from…that place, we would all like to know.
I’m sure just like The Man in the Ice would like to know how he’s still alive without air or food and a rotting, purple almost grey tinged corpse.
The Man in the Ice
Posted: January 22, 2013 in On the Road Again, UncategorizedTags: 5th grade, apocalypse, end of days, home, hordes, undead, zombie, zombies
We’ve seen and done a lot since we left Alcott Elementary School nearly a year ago. We’re still moving around and hoping from place to place, always hoping that we stay at least several steps ahead of the herds. The cold has come and with it, it has made the Undead almost sleepy, but at the same time even angrier if we get too close.
The Man in the Ice was by far the thing that has unnerved me the most. We’re trying to reach more desolate areas because Javier believes that if we can find a place out in the country to stay that we will be safe for awhile because there were less people there before the dead started to rise. I’m skeptical. We’ve seen what a good, strong pack of them to do to animals. I can only imagine what they could do to use if we got cornered in a remote area alone.
We’re by water now. A lake to be exact. At first we thought it would be a great food source for us, but once we caught a fish we realized how much it no longer looked like what it was supposed to. Has this plague destroyed everything? That was were we first saw the Man in the Ice. He had clearly been long dead. His face bloated and purple. So bloated that it forced his eye sockets to pucker over into each other, leaving this slights where his eyes had once been. His hands like pudgy, dead gobs still trashed at the ice that held him down.
Had he been alive, he would be fighting the ice to get out, to live, to survive, but not now. Even trapped down there, he still sought to fill that insatiable hunger that runs deeply in all of them. That realization made me realize how bad this all really is.
I’ll never be Miss Burton, fifth grade teacher ever again.
Deep Freeze
Posted: November 4, 2012 in On the Road Again, UncategorizedTags: apocalypse, end of days, escape, hordes, hurricane sandy, kids, new jersey, undead, zombie, zombies
We were spoiled for months in the beginning of all of this shit. We had our school and then my home. Since I killed McGrady we have had nothing, but each other.
The internet has been down for months which scares Javier more than he is willing to admit at times. There hasn’t even been a blip on my computer until last night. My mom and I had put what is left of the kids to bed. Armand was right out, Shelby followed and Vincent stayed up too late with Javier as usual. We have had the roughest week yet.
A hurricane tore apart what was left of New Jersey and with it, the deep, bone-chilling cold has come with it. We stayed held up in an abandoned house in a neighborhood that I had never been to. That’s all we’ve done all summer, is move from house to house to neighborhood to neighborhood avoiding the herds of the Undead and any outside person. I don’t trust anyone anymore other than who is with us.
At night now, it gets so unbelievably cold again. What we had for clothes are torn and worn beyond repair. Nothing can keep out the coldness that sneaks up on your body like long, cold fingers eager to grip at your skin, your nerves and even your bones. Shelby wakes up crying at night because she is freezing.
We’re going to need to get moving again, but we have even more concerns now. The hurricane tore down already dilapidated buildings, homes, leveled woods and I am sure flooded other areas. It’s going to be even more difficult to move about now and I can only imagine how this has affected the Undead. I have seen how this week among us humans has made us irritable and mean, I can only imagine what it has done to a bunch of flesh-starved Walkers.
God help us.
Enter the Ice Age
Posted: January 21, 2012 in UncategorizedTags: apocalypse, hordes, john, kids, media center, reality, strategy, zombie
Havier has been allowing us to use the back-up generators sparingly. It’s absolutely freezing. We’ve all been wearing our coats, gloves, hats – whatever we had or found all day. You can smell the snow in the air, that’s how much the temperature has dropped. I’ve moved back to my spot in the corner. It’s warmer if we’re all together and as Havier tells me, life has to gone despite the mistakes that we make.
And he’s right. I made a half-joke about making a fire in the courtyard, but Havier was quick to remind me how fast that would attract the Undead back to us. What I wouldn’t give for a little warmth. Havier and I have been taking turns on the roof. We watch and listen for the hordes, for John, for Havier’s sister, for my mom, for the kids’ moms and dads. So far no one has found us, but I still have hope that soon somebody will.
We emptied out crates and buckets and put them up there. We’re hoping to collect as much water as we can. We’d all like to bath and manually flush the toilets, it’s getting super gross again. As I sit up on the roof, looking for my friends and family, I can see my hands and how they are no longer pale and milky, but gritty and grimy and somewhere between a gray and brown color. I have dried blood from my students and from cleaning, wedged beneath my nails. I once had a manicure, but that was a lifetime ago now.
My hair is so matted from everything that tomorrow I’ve decided it’s time to cut it off completely. It’ll take some adjusting, but it’s more feasible than trying to hold onto an old life.
We’ve also begun thinking about an escape plan. Alcott School can not be the place that we stay forever. Too much has happened here and with the way the hordes have been moving, we’d always be a prime stop for them. We’re going to have to take what we can and prepare for the day that we will inevitably have to leave here. Havier says that the little kindergarten bus in the back is small enough to maneuver and big enough to hold all of us and supplies. It’s just figuring out where to go that’s stopping us. That and the fact that I know if we just wait it out for a few more days that John will be here and maybe some parents too.
I’m trying to hope as best I can and not freeze to death all at the same time.
Miss Burton's Class 