Poster Unknown..."Walker Survivor"

Note: I should explain.

The last three postings that you have seen have been from me.  I'm calling myself "Walker Survivor" to keep my true identity unknown. It isn't completely safe yet as the authorities are still trying to figure out the true cause of the so-called zombie outbreak. But the Internet is back up.

I had followed the posts from Dan (you may not remember, but he is the person behind the Johnny Dog Journal) until the Internet went completely black on March 4th 2011. The story he was telling certainly left me with hope of being rescued from my own hiding spot.

Spin forward. I had decided to find my way to Boyne to join their group. Pretty risky, but I was relatively close. (I would rather not disclose where I was hiding.) I never made it there.

This is the amazing part. As civilization has begun to recover (although under Marshall Law) I began to wander outside, feeling I wouldn't be leaving myself open to a zombie attack. On one particularly nice day, I stumbled upon a stray dog. She seemed friendly. She had a black coat, with a white tip on her tail. Her face was gray/white and she had a spot on one of her hips that looked like the Greek letter "Omega".

This dog seemed familiar to me. I had some bread with me and offered it to her. As she approached, I noticed she had a collar, and attached to it was a USB drive. She gladly ate the bread, and I was able to coax her to follow me home.

When we got into my home (loosely defined, more like my hovel) I took the USB drive off her collar and plugged it into my computer. It had a single Word document file. Title-"Johnny Dog Journal"!

This was Johnny Dog! I couldn't believe it!

The document is Dan's entire journal. It also contains the User Name and Password to this site. Although not specifically stated by Dan, I believe he intended for the person who found the file to post the journal, if there were survivors and a recovery from the outbreak.

I'm going to continue to post this journal in chronological order. It's a story that continues to be worth telling.

Johnny Dog is safe with me.

3.21.11

So here we are.

6 people. Me, my brother and sister Billy and Jen. Jerry, Greg and Javier. And of course, Johnny Dog.

Spring is here. Most of the snow has melted up here at Boyne. We have gas generators that run quietly and provide electricity when we need it. We have plenty of food from the pantry's at the two lodges here on site.

The townhouse is comfortable. Plenty of room. The elevated porch gives us a pretty good view of the whole Boyne resort. If walkers try to attack, we can see them coming.

Under the circumstances, life is pretty good. And I can't stand it...
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3.13.11

We had three teams simultaneously beheading the zombies. Some were more efficient than the others. It took us a total of 14 hours to take care of all the walkers that were buried in the snow. Total count: 135!

It got a bit dicey at the end. The temperature had to have reached almost 55 degrees. The walkers had started to thaw and would become a threat if we didn't work fast.

Billy was the first to come across walkers who were showing signs of coming back to life. Hold that. Coming back to life would be the wrong term to use. Showing signs of rising would be the correct way to characterize it.

Thinking fast, Billy came up with a solution to keeping the thawed walkers semi-stationary until the teams could behead them.

Grabbing an axe from the porch on our town home, Billy was able to quickly cut off one leg of the last 30 or so walkers that we hadn't beheaded, so if they awoke from their hibernation, they wouldn't be able to quickly rise and attack. Brilliant move. We decided to let Billy have half a kill for each one-legged zombie.

Good thing, as they started to rise in the early evening (the 12th hour of work that day). We were working by flashlight.

Kind of funny, seeing 20 walkers dragging themselves towards us.

So now we have a new moniker for the one's that can't walk...draggers!

3.6.11

It got pretty warm yesterday. We are definitely seeing the beginning of the Spring melt.

It was sunny. My guess was it reached almost 50 degrees. Greg and Billy volunteered to go outside and see if the scythe and sickles would easily behead the frozen walkers. Jerry thought he would bring out the Samurai sword too. They took Johnny Dog to help sniff out the buried walkers. Quite a posse!

As Javier, Jen and I watched from the second floor porch on our townhome, the posse approached the first few walkers that were now exposed from the melt. These walkers formed the bottom portion of our undead slalom course.

Greg grabbed the first walker by the exposed arm and pulled until the body was exposed. He sat the walker up. No sign of it waking up from it's deep freeze. Javier had told us that a nice two-handed grip on the sickle, with a baseball bat style swing would be the technique to use.

Billy took the first swing. He missed a little low, the blade embedding itself in the shoulder of the walker. We all had a good laugh, which only served to inspire Billy. His second swing was right on target but the blade only made it about half way through the walkers neck.

His third swing did the trick. He hit the neck clean, and the head tumbled down the hill. Johnny Dog gave chase, but when she reached it she just sniffed at it and returned to the posse.

"Let's see what you can do with the second one!" I yelled from the porch.

"I'm just warming up!" Billy yelled back.

Greg propped up a second walker. Billy took his grip, and with a grunt beheaded the walker with one swing!

"That's the way!" Jen yelled.

Billy looked pretty proud of himself.

"These don't count!" I yelled from the porch. "They have to show some sign of life if you want them to count towards Zombie kills on the scoreboard!"

Greg, Billy and Jerry stared back, looking incredulous. "What the fuck, this is a lot of work! This should count for something!" Billy exclaimed.

Jen had the answer. "OK, a half kill for the lifeless one's. But the guy who props it up gets a half kill too."

Jen had ruled. And it was done!

3.3.11

We needed a plan.

How were we going to deal with the frozen zombies when they thawed out? We didn't want to waste ammunition. A couple of days ago Jen took a walk with Johnny Dog (she broke our rule about never leaving the townhouse without a partner). As we had spent a lot of time trying to devise a plan, she decided to try to do a count of how many potential walkers we would be dealing with.

When she came back (and after being admonished by me for going out alone) she reported that there were at least 120 zombies buried in the snow. There was still a 30 inch base, so who knew how many more were buried that Jen couldn't count.

Javier was surprised. He had thought that most people had evacuated the area. Our guess was that noise from the large generator facility that provided power to the buildings attracted whoever/whatever was left in the area to the Boyne grounds. Since Javier never left the pizza pub he didn't notice.

Yesterday Javier and I took Johnny Dog to the golf course maintenance shed. He was thinking he might be able to rig one of the large fairway mower attachments to to a snow groomer and basically shred the frozen zombies. We had to scuttle that plan when we realized we couldn't get the attachment to the groomers through the 30" deep snow. We also realized that using precious gasoline for that purpose might not be a wise choice.

As we were leaving the shed I happened to notice two sickles and a scythe hanging on the wall. They were rusty and looked like they hadn't been used for a couple of years. But when we took them off the wall we found them to still be structurally sound.

"These just might do the trick!" I said.

Javier agreed. "You may be right. We will need to sharpen them up a bit. I also think we are going to need a little bit of thaw to take place so these things cut through the necks of the zombies cleanly. It will take a little bit of work, but there are plenty of us here."

"It's a plan!" I exclaimed. "But we will have to agree that these won't count towards our zombie kill score."

Javier looked puzzled. "Zombie kill score?"

"I'll explain later. Let's get these back to the townhouse and decide when we will start."

Let the beheadings begin!
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