Nearly another month since my last post.
What's been going on? Well, the Degus came of age yesterday and we took 6 of the babies to the pet store. So now we have the Mother (Itch) one baby female and a baby male. So we could have more Degus in the future.
We got a call from Logan's school today. He scraped his arm on the fence playing at recess. Nothing serious but it's about 5 or inches long. His teach cleaned it up and bandaged it. Took a few minutes to find is booster records and it looks like he shouldn't need a tetanus shot. We have a doctors appointment tomorrow so we'll get the cut looked and and a shot done if needed. Logan is still doing well in school. His last 2 spelling tests he's gotten 8/8! He was also selected as one of 50 kids to participate in the "Running and Reading Club". Every Tuesday they meet in the gym to read books and run laps. The goal is to get everyone to do a 5Km run as a "graduation".
Carrie's been doing ok. Her incision was and still is infected. She also had a kidney and bladder infection. She's very excited that WWE Smackdown is doing a house show in Kingston in May. Batista is supposed to be there so we'll be trying to get a pic of him signing the doll she got for her birthday.
Speaking of birthdays... It's only 15 days until Logan's and 16 until mine. Man I'm getting old.
. Well, I tossed something based on a dream into the thread. Some asked me to develop it more and I did. With a size 10 font it's about 4.5 pages long in MS Word. My mother has read what I have and is telling me to keep going with it. I'm jotting down some ideas on where to go with it but so far nothing feels like it fits yet.
So... Here's what I have, any comments would be appreciated.
There was very little electric light, not because things needed to be hidden but because resources for such luxuries were hard to come by. The giant shape loomed out of the gray like the body of a dead bloated animal. Davis stared at it with a mixture of awe and terror wondering if it would actually fly. This and the other "savior" ships had been built as quickly as possible. He wasn't sure if they should bother with it though.
Davis had seen the footage with his own eyes several times and, like the others that had watched it with him, couldn't believe people could be that stupid. Nobody knew what branch of the government had made the video. What they did know was that it was real. The time stamp gave the date as 9.26.2001 and research confirmed that events seen in other areas of the footage had taken place.
He shook his head in disbelief and began his climb to his work section. His ship should be done some time around noon. After that a few final checks would be made and they'd try to leave the Earth behind. They'd be lucky if they didn't blow up on take off. Davis reached his section, grabbed his torch and began welding. He could see that some of the welds in this area couldn't even be called welds. He'd like to fix them but speed is what matters now according to the powers that be.
The footage was of Ground Zero. You could see the devastation everywhere you looked. Broken building, twisted aircraft, body parts. The cameraman panned and zoomed over the entire scene. You could hear people in the background yelling instructions and heavy equipment moving wreckage. Most people you could see were wearing coveralls and hard hats. But there was another figure that wore what appeared to be a hazmat suit.
The figure carried what looked like a GPS and a shovel. "It should be right about here", a slightly muffled voice said. The GPS disappeared into a bag and he began to dig. Several minutes passed before a clunk was heard. The figure began to enlarge the hole and stopped forty-five minutes later. "I need a hand", is heard from the figure and a second hazmat suit steps from behind the camera. They grunt and strain until a hiss of air is heard. A metal plate is lifted into view; it looks like it could be a door. There is witting and a logo on it. The wording can't be made out but the symbol for biohazard is easily recognized, even though it's damaged.
Davis is startled out of his reflection when he feels a hand placed on his shoulder. When he looks up form his work Davis can see it's is foreman.
"Davis, take a ten. We need to get a few more plates up here. It's bad enough to have a doctor welding but we don't need to lose you in an accident."
All Davis could do was reply, "Right". He headed off to grab a coffee. The sun was coming up and in many ways he wished it wouldn't. Regardless he knew it was going to be his last sunrise on Earth. He sipped his coffee and watched it.
Everyone knew what had happened on 9/11/01. What no one knew was that the US Government had a bio lab under the towers. The video proved that. Both the figures disappeared into the ground. Five, ten, then twenty five minutes passed before they re-emerged, both carrying a different canister. They approached the camera and you could see the biohazard warning again. Both appeared to be completely intact. The camera switched off.
That was over eighty years ago. Things seemed fine for the first twenty years. Saddam had been captured and hanged in 2006, Osama Bin Laden was captured and imprisoned in 2010. The truth was that things were about to go very wrong.
The video resumed in a lab. They inspected the canisters and could see the seal on one was damaged. As a safety precaution they exposed a rat to the canister. They observed the rat for weeks and it seemed perfectly healthy. They thought it was safe, they were wrong.
Davis knew now that the rat had become a carrier for the disease. The disease was designed to attack humans only with certain genomes, specifically anyone of Middle Eastern origin. The first real victim was a doctor of the lab. His symptoms were similar to SARS. It spread through New York quickly; anyone could be a carrier for it. Air travel was strictly monitored to try and stop the spread. No one seemed to notice only one group of people was affected. It wasn't until 2022 that other people began being affected. It had mutated to affect more people. In the beginning it had an 80% mortality rate in just one group of humans; the 2022 version was 85% globally.
His grandfather had been brought in on a cure attempt in 2025. Four years of work yielded some very promising results. There were protests that it needed further testing but the governments of the world demanded it be put into production immediately. In June of 2030 people lined up for miles waiting for the injection.
A staccato of gunfire came from the south east corner of the compound. Davis’ hand instinctively went to his hip for the ancient Colt 45 as he stood up to see what was happening. A small band of obviously deformed beings were trying to get in. Shamblers. He could see the snipers moving along the wall to deal with the situation. Davis counted 7 distinct cracks of the rifles and then the silence.
“I think you can relax now. They got all of them. Time to get back to work; the last five plates are in place. If you have a few minutes clean up any welds you thing need be fixed. But only if it isn’t going to take all day. I’d like to get off this dying rock today.”
Doesn’t he ever have anything different to say?, thought Davis. “We should be gone by 2 o’clock. If things check okay”, was all he could, and was expected, to say.
The steel looked like they fit together nicely. It would make the welding so much easier since he wouldn’t have to hunt for scraps to fill larger gaps.
Shamblers. They were becoming more aggressive and seemingly more intelligent. Davis wasn’t surprised about that, they were human after all.
The first reported Shambler sighting was in 2037. It was called a zombie at first. No one knew the truth back then and now those that do refuse to acknowledge it. Its source was the vaccine.
By 2032 approximately 15% of the population had been inoculated and the governments could see a change in the death tolls. They could also see a change in the births. Of those vaccinated less than a quarter would have a perfectly normal child. The majority had various degrees of deformities and defects. Significant numbers of which needed to be put to death, or died, shortly after entering the world. The few that survived lacked normal human intelligence. Most parents tried to deal with them; others abandoned them in deserted areas. They were ignored and left to themselves. The vaccines were stopped but the births continued.
These “non humans” began to reproduce on their own. They had become more like vermin than human, living in the dark unpleasant areas of the cities, eating garbage. They had the advantage of being immune to the disease. Nature decided to torture man a little bit more.
It was assumed by most that the “non humans” had devolved into the Shamblers. Years of study had shown otherwise. The vaccine had an effect on necrotizing fasciitis the Flesh Eating disease. It allowed the disease to take over the body without killing them. Their intelligence seemed to drop further; they were nearly mindless. The body required food and the virus wanted to spread, both are drawn to warm bodies. It was easy to see them as zombies. The infection spread fast, the “non humans” were easy targets for their own kind.
Davis looked over his handy work. The welds were good and he was making good time, he thought he’d be able to make some repairs in some other sections. First, though, it was time for a break and to get more welding rods. He climbed off of the ship and headed of to the break/supply room. He didn’t like going there even though there was a TV and a radio. They never played anything except the status of the Savior ships.
Davis sat down, looked over the boards and noted that one of the ships at his location, near Toronto, was going to be delayed by two weeks. Somehow the coolant for the engines had gotten in to the air system. The scrubbers had been destroyed and a new one had to be built from scratch. Stupidity or sabotage, Davis didn’t really care.
There was a news flash on the TV. The first ship from the New York facility had completed its final checks, was loaded with passengers and cleared for lift off.
Others came in to watch and pray for their safety. The countdown finished, the engines fired and slowly Savior Liberty lumbered into the sky. Shouts of joy rang out and people congratulated each other on a job well done, though they had no hand in the Liberty’s construction. Forty seconds later they were forced back to the reality of things when the first flash of fire erupted two thirds of the way down the ship. A second and a third fire was seen. An explosion ripped the belly of the ship off and the image went blank. In the silence of disbelief a voice was heard to say, “It could have been worse. They could have been on the ground”. Davis agreed, it was better to lose two thousand in one ship than everyone in the 15 ships at the facility.
Davis grabbed his rods and headed back to work, more melancholy than before. These ships were hope and that hope was shown to be a fragile bubble. Just as he was about to start work again word came to double and triple check everything and that Vancouver had a successful launch.
“Non humans” were still being born and discarded even though the laws stated they must be killed. That allowed the number of Shamblers to grow slowly. The big growth spurts came when they managed to get into a populated area.
Shamblers weren’t very fast but they did seem to display a pack like mentality. Once in a populated area, coincidence or not, they managed to separate the infirm, small children or the elderly. Fences and walls started to surround smaller towns’; large cities had problems with that. Aside from being impractical to wall in a major city Shamblers seemed to get into the sewer systems and storm drains. They took extra precautions, set up heavily armed patrols, installed heavy grating in the drainage systems. It worked for a while.
Then a little more than 5 years ago they suddenly became intelligent. They were still well below average human intelligence but they had learned some basics such as how to work door knobs and elevator buttons. They could get up the stairs but it was a slow process. They also figured out humans slept at night.
Patrols were increased in the cities. Populations condensed and moved to one corner of the city for defensive purposes and walls were erected. Populated areas were in constant communication with each other trying to track the larger groups of Shamblers. Things were getting bad, smaller towns fell as groups of several hundred attacked smaller out posts. The worst attack was eight months ago. It was estimated that a group of 1500 Shamblers took down a population of four times that size. With previous attack figures showing only twenty percent of people were killed out right this attack was a bad sign.
The lunch whistle blew. It’s about time, Davis thought. He stood up and stretched; his back popping. Looking around he could see that skin of the ship was almost done. As long as the internal checks were going well they might make the scheduled lift off time.
Davis sat at the lunch table chewing on his stale peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. Scraps of conversation floated through the air. Some were talking about the attack this morning, others had heard the Texas facility had been wiped out by Shamblers or claimed it wasn’t true. People discussed how well the ships were progressing and how they looked forward lift off. No one mentioned the New York incident, acknowledging it would be tainting hope. It would take a lot of hope for 2100 ships, over four million people from Canada alone, to hit space.
Each country had decided on how to leave on its own. Both Canada and the US had similar plans, large quantities of smaller ships. The idea was it’s better to lose a small portion of the population in a single ship. India had chosen to use four ships to save their 150 million people. Two of their ships exploded, one on the ground.
Some of the inspectors had made their way into the lunch room and over to the status board. Everyone could hear clicking as status markers were moved around. The inspectors moved off to have their lunch and people swarmed the board. The majority of responses were groans and curses, few cheered. Davis waited and finished his lunch before checking the board, no point in getting banged around. Forty-five minutes later it was time to go back to work and that’s when he took a look. Ship 12, the one he had worked on for the last ten weeks, was listed as complete and cleared for boarding.
He headed back to his section to clean up his gear. People were already lining up for boarding. Protocols dictated that construction staff was to be boarded first to ensure a repair crew was available. With Davis being a General Practitioner as well he’d be among the first no matter what. He picked up his gear and handed it through the closest hatch for storage then went to his apartment for his suitcase.
As the ships neared completion they were loaded with equipment and provisions. It was like getting ready for a massive family camping trip. Roughing it would be an understatement and everyone knew it. The destination was Mars and the actual conditions there were still a bit on the harsh side.
Terraforming was still in it’s infancy in 2035 and it was expected to take eighty years for it to be complete. With barely fifty years having passed there should be enough water and oxygen there to support the scraps of the human race. At least that’s what the Government said. No one had been back to Mars since the project had begun but the equipment kept sending back regular reports. Things were progressing as they had been predicted.
It was closer to three o’clock before the passengers were loaded. Ears popped as the cabin pressurized, smaller children cried at the discomfort. The crew walked the aisles and ensured that harnesses where done up correctly and were as snug as they should be. Once out of the atmosphere people would be free to move around and use lap belts only during the six month flight.
The Captain announced that it was two minutes to lift off and the engines would be starting. A growl surged through the ship and the passengers yelped. The beast was awakening. Davis’ knuckles turned white as he gripped the armrests of his seat. Small screens around the cabin showed the countdown timer. With fifteen seconds left the growl became a roar and Davis closed his eyes.
The Captain announced liftoff. Davis felt himself pressed deep into the seat and gasped for air. His left arm began to hurt. He opened his eyes to see the woman next to him had grabbed on, tears on her cheek, terror in her eyes. It would be ten minutes before they broke through the atmosphere before it was quiet enough to try to console her, if they were lucky.
The Horse and carriage before leaving for the church.
The Nervous Bride.
The Ring Bearer!
The Bride being given away by her step-father Jim.
The Vows.
Mr. & Mrs. Steve Payne leaving the Church.
The Ring Bearer and Groom.
The Wedding Party.
The Bride and Groom with their Parents.
Head table at the reception.
The First Dance.
Father Daughter dance.
Mother Son dance. The fog machine was in overdrive.
The Cake. Cut with our grandmother's 50th Anniversary Knife.
Cutting the cake!
Everyone Dancing and having fun!
Bouquet toss!
Steve going for the Garter.
Waiting for the garter toss.
