The other
distraction I had was killing the undead.
When I was at the Pittsburgh colony I would take an extra shift on
beater duty whenever my brain started to get morose. We were nowhere near as sophisticated as
Haven is, although we did have rudimentary airlock doors at the gate. About half a dozen of us would wait in that
area between the inner gate and the outer gate and get pumped up while the guys
on the walls would distract the undead.
This was fairly early on, so there were no New Breed. There weren’t even any smarties, so the dead
fell for the distractions every time.
Then the doors would open, and there was chaos. Keep in mind that this was a losing
battle. There was no way we were going
to clear out all the undead around the walls.
We were right in the city so the undead population was staggering.
Actually, I
take that back. It wasn’t as staggering
as you'd think a city would be. Have you
ever been to Pittsburgh? It’s not really
a city. It’s a bunch of little towns all
joined together as a city-body. There
are bridges everywhere, but all the neighborhoods are very segregated from each
other. Pittsburghers, when they still
lived, would just stay in their own neighborhood and they certainly would never
travel over a bridge. It was a very provincial
town. So even though the entire
population had turned, it’s not like they could all gather somewhere at
once. For all I know, the Pittsburgh
zombies were just as provincial and unwilling to shamble out of their
neighborhoods as they were in life. All
I know for sure is that Pittsburgh or not, the zombies preferred flesh to
pierogies.
Anyway, even
though the geographics of Pittsburgh kept us safer than, say, living in
downtown New York City, there were still tons of undead out there. So we’d burst out of the gate and start
butchering as many as possible. The guys
on the walls would blast some music to distract the dead and get us hyped (my
favorite was that fax machine beating song from Office Space). And we would just go to town. There’s something very peaceful about wildly
swinging a baseball bat. You can’t think
of anything else. You just identify a
target, swing, feel the jolt as your bat strikes a skull, then move on. Lather, rinse, repeat. Over and over again. Killing the undead had a way of quieting all
those hopeless voices in my head.
So all that
to say, I’ve started taking shooting lessons.
It has a similar effect. All you
focus on is the target. So I’ve been
distracted and happier. Plus it’s pretty
ridiculous that I can’t shoot a gun with any accuracy, particularly in this world
we live in. I’m training with the kids
since I’m still at their skill level.
And I’ll probably be at this level for a while. My aim is just appalling. The instructor (and the kids) tend to laugh
at it, but I really don’t care. I’m
getting what I need out of this. Things
are quiet. I’ve really missed the quiet.
No comments:
Post a Comment