Another Year

The holidays still hold some kind of vestigial meaning to me. Nothing incredibly deep, but that sense of warm togetherness from when I was a child. We don't celebrate like we used to, and the calender is now just a way for us to find points of reference rather than a timeline of special days. The new year begins tomorrow, but aside from a slight urge to get drunk and dance naughtily with my wife (who is hundreds of miles away), I don't really have feelings about it either way. 

A big part of why this doesn't worry me is due to the zombie attack going on right now. It's a little distracting. 

Since I can't divulge any information of importance about the people we're staying with or the community they share, I've decided to call this place Block. Yeah, it's a weird name, but if you saw the sheer concrete faces of the office buildings that make up this fortress, you'd understand how fitting it is. So, back to those attacking zombies...

The team and I, as well as the injured volunteers who came back from our aborted attack on the marauders, have been told straight-up that we can't fight. I tried to wheedle my way into at least a support position. I argued that even if the stitches and dressings on my side wouldn't allow me to fire a weapon or pull a bowstring back safely, at least I could run water to the people fighting or tote ammunition around. 

Block has a strict policy of not allowing the injured to be combatants, and the leadership gives the medical staff discretion on whether people in their care are allowed to participate at all. Certainly a few of us are well enough to help in some small ways, but our physical injuries are only part of our nurse practitioner's concern. Her name is Gina, and she takes our well being very seriously. 

It's as much the psychological damage she's worried about. Gina thinks we need time to sort through our experience with the marauders, deal with the mental trauma of seeing people die around us while getting hurt ourselves. I can see her point of view, even agree with it to a certain extent, but it's not entirely justified. I think her idea of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) makes her think that we're fragile creatures who could snap at any moment. I don't think I'm suffering from such a thing, and frankly I don't know that Gina thinks so either. She truly is worried that there's some recovery needed for our psyches, and I understand that. 

She hasn't seen a tenth of the combat we have, though. So I think her opinion is flawed. 

I'm sitting here writing this while I hear the undead outside bashing the exterior doors with what I'm guessing are rocks. It's deafeningly loud and really, really annoying. I'm not afraid or anxious, taken with worry that the zombies will break the heavy steel doors from their heavy steel frames and somehow shatter all the reinforcing braces the residents of Block have added onto them. At worst, I feel the urge to put something sharp in that zombie's brain merely to stop the noise, like yelling at a loudly barking dog keeping you awake. 

I've been hurt seriously before. I've been in danger. I can stomach those things with ease and move on. Hell, I even have a fair amount of practice sitting quietly while injured as others do the fighting for me. It sucks, but that's reality. I have no desire to die to prove a point. 

What irks me right now is that we brought those zombies here, and I can't contribute at all. Nothing. We're not allowed to leave the medical wing. My brain knows that the buildings here are tough, the windows on the bottom two floors filled in with reinforced concrete and the doors stronger than the walls themselves. I know that the weak points, the spaces between the buildings clustered together here, are narrow corridors filled with debris and riddled with traps. They're killing zones where the number of zombies becomes irrelevant, as only three or four at a time can move through them. I know these things, and that knowledge does bring a small bit of comfort. 

It's just my nature to protect people. I want to prove to these folks that I'm willing to fight for them, especially considering my team's role in bringing this swarm down on them. Yeah, I really do want to prove a point, but not with a suicidal attempt to fight. I just need to do something to help. Anything. 

Gina is staring me down, though, and she has a taser. She looks like she means business with that thing, which is hilarious since it's one of those bright pink ladies' models. I'm a little surprised Hello Kitty isn't on it. Having no desire to be electrocuted by a woman old enough to be my mother (and subsequently nagged about it afterward, also like my mother...) I suppose I'll be a good boy and sit pretty. No wonder the people of Block do what she tells them to. 

She cheats!