• 5Jan 10

  A Warning to Survivors

  "I'm going to try to kill you. You know that right?"

  "Yeah."

  "All right. Well, you're the one with the gun."

  I was the one with the gun, but only by chance. I found it under my uncle's bed, wrapped in a sweatshirt inside a gym bag; I was hoping for a baseball bat or a golf club. The gun seemed more…efficient.

  Despite my years of video game experience, mowing down opponents with virtual guns, I wasn't comfortable holding one. Maybe it was because I'd never actually held one before, or maybe it's because I knew what I had to do with it.

  It was going to happen. Sarah needed to be "put down," as she said it. Put down, like she was some kind of animal, like she wasn't my girlfriend. She asked me to do it after it happened, to smash her skull with the tire iron in my trunk. I didn't of course. I said I had a plan, we would get to my uncle's house, wait for him to come home, and then see if we could get her to the hospital. She went along with it, not because she believed they could do anything at the hospital, but because I needed her to. I'm still impressed by that; how mature she was. She didn't complain, didn't even cry. Just accepted what would happen next, and what needed to be done.

  "If you want, you can wait till I'm asleep, so you don't have to look. Or I can just do it myself."

  I tightened my grip on the gun, making sure the safety was on. "No. We're sticking to the plan. As soon as Uncle Ken gets home, we'll all go to the hospital."

  "Shouldn't he have come home already?"

  "Maybe he's working late."

  "Yeah…maybe."

  I wondered how long she would let me continue with my delusions before she tried something drastic. We had already eaten a light dinner–some tuna sandwiches I found in the fridge–and watched a bit of the emergency broadcast on TV, which was really the same information from the morning, just read by a different face. Uncle Ken was three hours late, I had a feeling I wouldn't be seeing him again. When would she tell me to cut the crap, to get real and pull the trigger? Moreover, when would I wise up? It's not like there was a cure. Get infected, you die, then you live again, that was it. I knew she was doomed, but I couldn't let go.

  We sat on the couch, and I pulled her toward me, the gun in my right hand. Sarah curled up on my left, leaned on my shoulder, and slept lightly, she was already starting to feel sick. We sat that way for hours, my dread growing with each passing minute, her light snores punctuated by increasingly coarse coughs. I didn't know what else to do. I just sat, worried and wished. Maybe she was an exception, maybe she had some kind of rare immunity. Maybe she could be the key to saving the world. If her body could just fight it off.

  When the house was dark and the light of the day had long passed, Sarah bolted up and ran for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, jarring me from my weary slumber. I heard her retching over the toilet, and I tried to block it out. Not only because I knew that the end was near, but to my embarrassment, her vomiting made me queasy.

  She stayed in there a long time, long enough for me to worry–as if it were possible for me to worry any more. I knocked on the door once and started to enter, but she turned between heaves and gave me a look I'll never forget. Her brow furrowed to the point where I could barely see her eyes and her lips curled into a painful looking grimace.

  "Get away! Get away from me!" Her voice sounded wet, almost slimy. She turned to vomit again, but before she did I caught her eyes and I could see the worry. Deep down, she was scared, and that scared me even more.

  I went back to the couch and nervously clutched the gun. Eventually the bathroom door opened and she–it–came out. I don't know why the movies always depicted them as shuffling, shambling creatures. Sarah walked toward me as if everything were fine. Her gait didn't change at all, if anything she moved like a healthy, physically fit person. It was her skin, which had a grayish hue that wasn't there before, and the low moan rumbling in her throat that tipped me off. Unfortunately I didn't see those things till she was close, too close.

  I was sitting in horrified shock when she lunged at me, green bile smeared on her chin. She wound her hand tightly in my shirt and hissed as she went for my neck. I like to think there was still a bit of my Sarah in there, because she hesitated, hovered there a split second before taking a bite.

  I drove my knee up and pushed her shoulders hard, knocking her off the couch. Her hand was still caught in my shirt and I tumbled with her. I used the momentum to slip out of my shirt and dart to the other side of the room, the gun still down at my side. She growled, a horrible gurgling growl from her belly, and came after me. I didn't fire the gun. Instead I ran into the bedroom and locked the door behind me.

  I paced around my uncle's room, breathing hard and crying, while Sarah beat on the door. Scared of having more skin exposed than I needed to, I grabbed the sweatshirt my uncle wrapped the gun in and put it on. I sat on the floor against the wall opposite the door and wept.

  I stayed in that spot for two days, and she never once stopped hitting the door, a slow metronomic pounding.

  Finally, after hours of pep talks–she's not Sarah, she'll kill you if you give her the chance, she wanted you to do this–I went to the door. She could stand on the other side forever, I was growing weaker by the hour, I needed to get out. I made sure the safety was off on the gun and flipped the lock. I jumped back as the door swung open and raised the gun. Sarah's skin was blotchier and she smelled like death. It took her a second to realize the door was no longer there, that her beating was successful. She looked at me and growled.

  "I love you," I said, and pulled the trigger.

  The shot was loud, much louder than I expected; it left my ears ringing. I guess it scared Sarah too, because she jumped as if she were hit. She wasn't. Apparently my video game marksmanship didn't translate to the real world.

  I clenched my teeth and squeezed off another shot, still nothing. Sarah wasn't fazed this time, she came through the doorway snarling. I pulled the trigger over and over, until the gun clicked, the magazine spent. Sarah, free of bullet holes, swatted the gun away, scratching the skin on my hand. I kicked her hard in the stomach and rolled across the bed, pulling the comforter with me. As she scrambled over the mattress I threw the blanket over her and dove under the bed to crawl out the other side. On my way out I hit a heavy cardboard box with my foot and it made a metallic chink as it spun into an old suitcase. I caught the word "blanks" on the side as it spun away and I cursed my uncle.

  I ran from the bedroom with Sarah still stupidly thrashing in the sheets. My hand was bleeding, and I was nervous. A scratch alone wouldn't infect me–the emergency broadcast said that much–but having an open wound around those creatures was dangerous, especially if they were fresh enough to still have fluids in their bodies. I had no idea where my uncle kept his first aid kit, or if he even had one, so I went for the kit in the trunk of my car.

  With my back to the house and my attention on finding my first aid kit, I didn't see or hear Sarah until she was on top of me. In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to shut the front door when I ran from the house. She tackled me at the knees, bringing me face to face with the tire iron in my trunk. She clawed up my body, pulling me toward her. I grabbed the tire iron and pushed myself back, using our combined force to bounce off her and roll away.

  I rose to my knees and brought the tire iron down on her face. The first hit was off, I smashed her teeth and she howled and spat black blood in my face. I swung again, hitting her in the forehead, then again, cracking her nose, then again, and again, until my vision was blurry with tears and blood.

  –

  It's kind of funny, after all that–the initial infection, the grueling wait, the standoff in the bedroom, the bludgeoning in the driveway, not to mention the emotional scars–I was done in by a stupid mistake, a simple lack of hygiene.

  I wiped the back of my hand, the one with the open wound, across my bloodied forehead.

  I felt the sting of infection immediately; an icy spike that locked my fingers in a claw for hours. They eventually loosened up, at least enough for me to type. It's all I've ever really been good at, so I figured it was fitting that I spend my last few hours doing it, updating the old blog one last time, one final warning.

  I think I'm going to print it out as well and safety pin it to my sweatshirt. I imagine I'll get quite a few looks when I walk into the hospital elevators, papers flapping on my chest. Hopefully they'll remain intact after I jump. Hopefully someone will see this and learn from my mistakes. Hopefully.

  -THERE IS NO CURE. END IT QUICKLY, END IT CLEANLY-

  • Posted Jan 5, 2010 3:51 am PT
  • Category: Writing
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• 3Jan 10

  2010 For The Win!

  My January goal update is a little late because I was in Virginia visiting my younger bro, Cole, and his wife, Tori. Cole is a watercraft engineer in the Army and he's getting ready to leave for Haiti for six to nine months, so we thought it would be good to hang out with them for New Year's. On Saturday Cole took us on his boat, a LCU (or some acronym like that). He showed us his bunk, the engine room where he works, the ridiculous wall of switches and gauges he monitors, and a bunch of other cool things, like "the tunnel," a long hallway type section where they store supplies like gigantic oil filters.

  
  
  

  I brought my spare 20 inch monitor with me because Cole wanted to borrow it while he was away. He showed me the space in his bunk where he planned to mount it and his Xbox so he could play during his downtime. He put off mounting it while I was there so he could set up his Xbox in the other room and play some Codmow2 online with me.

  We were playing a special ops match Saturday morning and he picked up a gun and said, "Dude, turn around and look at my guy." I did, and asked him what was so special about it.

  "I shot this gun last week, in real life," he said.

  Whoa.

  It was part of some routine training I think. They had machine guns with grenade launchers attached (I want to say it was an M16, but who knows) and they had to shoot down targets that would pop up at the range, similar to what you have to do in the first level of Call of Duty. Cole said he normally gets pretty good rankings, but when they added the grenade launcher he had to hold the gun differently and he didn't score as well as he would have liked. Maybe it's because he's my little brother, but I found that little exchange to be both awesome, and slightly unsettling.

  Overall, it was quite a humbling trip. I'm proud of my little brother (okay, so he's only a year younger than me). I might be able to work from home now (more on that in a bit), but his office blows mine away. And yes I can string a few words together in a pretty sentence, but he knows how to fix an engine on a huge military vessel. Impressive.

  Anyways, on to the January goals. Let's review December first.

  -Get a job |Hired on Dec. 29, and I start tomorrow!|
  -Finish some artwork for some friends and family |Yep, now I just have to send it|
  -Have faith in God, not in myself |I think I did pretty good, really tried to not worry|
  -Get the Thunderbird registered in NC |Ran into some complications with the paperwork. Apparently Brooke's grandma's will, death certificate, and car title are not enough. We needed one more random piece of paper to make it officially ours. We really have to get this done because I got in a wreck on the 29th. I was halfway through an intersection and this 16-year-old girl runs a red light. I swerved and missed hitting her car door, which could have killed her, but still smashed into her front left tire. She got out sobbing, and with something spilled all over her, but she was fine. Our cars weren't though. Don't know about her, but mine was totaled. Her insurance people were slow over the holidays, but they called me just the other day to let me know my check would be on the way soon. They actually gave me a pretty decent amount for my car.
  -Go to the dentist |Nope|
  -Get new glasses |No, but I picked some out|
  -Don't be a scrooge! Ignore those introverted tendencies during holiday fellowship times |Yep, had a blast at Brooke's Christmas party, her office had craps and black jack tables where we gambled for chips that could exchange for tickets to win prizes, also, free alcohol.|
  -Keep on training for that half marathon |Mostly|

  So here are my January goals:

  -Stick to my new half marathon training schedule
  -Show my new employers that hiring me was a great decision
  -Register the Thunderbird
  -Finish at least two of the books I got for Christmas (I got a lot!)
  -Do something awesome for Brooke when she's not expecting it
  -Get my home office organized

  Since everyone likes to come up with yearly goals in January, I thought I'd do a couple of those too:

  -Finish my novel
  -Run three half marathons, and PR on them all
  -Grow my company's brand, which will in turn grow our paychecks, haha
  -Save for our trip to Italy in May so that Brooke and I can have an excellent five year anniversary, and we can have a blast hanging out with my parents
  -Reach my savings account goals

  All right, that's all the goals taken care. So the new job, it's going to be quite an adventure. I'm the VP of Marketing for SPAN Enterprises, a web software development company based in Rock Hill, SC, just 20 mins from Charlotte. The company is relatively new, there's a small team of talented programmers in India that have been working hard the past year or so to get our new products ready for 2010, and then there's me, the founders, and a few other folks here. I was brought on to take these products and make them known. Because we're so small, I'll be wearing multiple hats. One day I might be designing and writing some press materials and conducting interviews, and another day I could be taking calls from customers and interacting with clients online via, Twitter, Facebook, or our website. This job is perfect for me. I'll get to do things I'm good at, I'll have tons of variety to keep me on my toes, and I'm sure I'll learn a ton.

  I took a bit of a pay cut to come here, but as studies on my generation have shown, we're willing to do that if it means we'll move to a better work environment. Since I'll get to do much of my work from home, I'd say that's a pretty good environment. Anything is better than back at the newspaper. Now that I don't work there I could write pages and pages about how terribly run that place is and how the company culture in the Charlotte office is a breeding ground for hostility and cynicism, but I'd rather not. I learned a lot of great lessons there, and I'm ready to move on (in case you haven't picked up on it by now, I'm kind of a learning junkie. I know that's weird, but I enjoy feeding my brain).

  Another perk to my new job is the growth potential. We're poised to be quite successful, our product is excellent (I'll share that with you later…that's kind of my job), I just have to make sure people know about it and can get to it.

  So December was a great month overall, but I'm really looking forward to what January, and 2010 has in store for me. What about you?

  Oh yeah, here's a fun fact, while driving home we were listening to Ryan Seacrest count down the top songs of the decade and Brooke and I realized we were together for all of them. We started dating November 20, 2000, I was 16, she was 15, been together ever since. Kind of cool.

  • Posted Jan 3, 2010 6:37 pm PT
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• 28Dec 09

  Employment Dreams and Bloody Screens

  I hope everyone had a great holiday break. We actually did Christmas a week early, because that's when Brooke's family was in town. So on Christmas day Brooke and I got in our pajamas (which we picked up at Target the day before) and relaxed. We had a Lost marathon—rewatched the fifth season to prepare for the final season in February—and I played some Xbox online with my brother. It was a wonderful weekend.

  Employment Dreams
  So I had a job interview last week, and I have a follow up interview tomorrow. I can't talk too much about it just yet (part of it is because I'm afraid I'll jinx it), but if everything works out, it could be a real sweet gig. I'll keep you folks posted. This is my last week at the paper, and I could not be more excited about that. I know, it seems weird that I'm excited to not have a job, but it just feels so right, like a break-up that needed to happen. Besides, I could be starting something new as early as next week, and if not, I've got freelance stuff to hold me over for a few months. Sometimes it sucks to be a creative person, to always feel that burn for something new, but it sure is nice that I can freelance; some people don't have that luxury, so I'm thankful for it.

  Bloody Screens
  So I got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (or 'Codmow 2') and I managed to pull myself away from Assassin's Creed 2 (LOVE IT!) for a few hours to play it this weekend. Overall, I'm not crazy about the single player campaign. Sure it has some huge action-packed set pieces, but it also feels hollow, lifeless. The story is over-the-top and quite silly, and I'm getting tired of how most of it is told through those lame digital readouts and maps between levels. It's still a fun campaign, just not as exciting as the first one.

  Then there's the multiplayer, which I finally got around to last night. It's pretty much perfect; a finely tuned and much improved iteration of the system that made the last game's multiplayer so addicting. Of course I totally sucked last night, I spent most of the time getting worked over by a bunch of squeaky teenagers with itchy trigger fingers, but I still had fun. Gotta love how they give you perks if you get killed too many times in a row. It's like the game says, "Hey you're really sucking right now, maybe this will help." I also like how much feedback you get from kills—ending someone's streak, paying them back from an earlier attack, stopping a potential threat—it all conveniently pops up on the fly as you gun folks down.

  One thing that is really starting to bug me though is the bloody screen. In the last few years FPS games went from red edges, to blood stains, to this mess:

  

  It looks like I hit a deer with my car and its bloody entrails are splattered on my windshield! I can't see anything through that! Whatever happened to good ol' energy bars? It's so irritating to get blasted and then not be able to see where it's coming from because the screen is smeared in blood. Is this supposed to be realistic? Because getting shot to pieces and then kneeling in the corner to heal up certainly isn't. Apparently that's how the world works in Call of Duty land—you stub your toe and your face gets covered in blood. People must walk around with bibs or something. I guess it's supposed to be motivation to not get blasted, but I wish there was an option to turn it off.

  Anyways, that's what I'm up to. I'll leave you with a sketch I did yesterday during church, because nothing goes together better than Batman and Jesus, haha.

  

  • Posted Dec 28, 2009 3:56 pm PT
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