Thursday, August 5, 2010

V for Victory

Science is awesome. Really.

Imagine for a moment that you are a tired and ragged group of survivors, watching as a horde of relatively intelligent zombies are moving in a giant mass toward your safe haven. Further imagine that you have fought a smaller group very recently and were hard pressed to repulse them. Add to that image the certainty that they know you have trapped the area and will be actively avoiding them if possible, requiring you to activate the traps remotely, and thus less efficiently.

It's pretty bleak, don't you think?

So there we were, every able bodied person waiting for the assault on our fallback position at the hotel, the tower, and the civic center. A ring of human bodies, armed to the teeth and only able to look on as the hungry thousands edged closer.

Then, the glorious rain. It had been looming all morning, a bank of iron gray clouds that promised relief from the oppressive heat but at the cost of visibility. Thunder hammered the sky while we waited, and distant lightning danced.

When it came, it struck like a comet. The rain pounded the undead, and the thunder seemed to unsettle them. The moved much faster toward us from many directions but the majority over the bridges. The trapped, deadly bridges. The bridges with tall steel streetlights on them. Of course, those streetlights were the posts that our tripwires and such were anchored to, and that made a nice circuit to the drenched road when the lightning hit.

Electrocution can now be added to the short list of things that will permanently kill a zombie. It didn't take out a lot of them, maybe only three dozen, but it was enough to scare the shit out of the ones coming up the bridges. It made them careless and frenzied, more like dumb zombies. Watching in confusion as the front of their ranks fell all at once, we took the opportunity their hesitation gave, and we began to mow them down.

Traps slinging about, gunfire ripping into them, every person choosing shots. We waylaid them. We also prepared a group to go out and fight them hand to hand, and that worked out very well. I was one of them.

We figured that no matter what we did, at least some of the smarties would make it to the base of our buildings. A dozen of us were outfitted in the hodgepodge armor that has worked so well for us. It was tiring as hell, since all that fabric absorbed a lot of water, but we had secured all of the gear we were wearing with duct tape so none of the smarties could undo our helmets or get inside our Gi. There was nothing to it but wading out into them and cutting as many of them up as we could. We moved in two groups of six, watching each other so that no one got mobbed and weighed down.

Handguns and katana, with cover provided by people right above us with rifles. Good thing about living in Kentucky is the huge numbers of hunting rifles and ammo.

We won. WE WON!

We didn't get them all, of course, but we feel confident that there will be enough time now to truly secure the compound before they have enough numbers to threaten us again. We will surely have worse days, but for today at least, we are the victors.

1 comment: