The Last Blade Of Grass

 

 

 

 

The Last Blade Of Grass

 

Robert Brown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2015 by Robert Brown

www.severedpress.com


Chapter one

The Journey Home

June   

 

Be careful what you wish for. I always knew the saying had meaning, but never imagined my wishes for a global re-start would be caused by zombies. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say I never imagined it. I was a big fan of zombie books and movies before the world fell apart. What I mean is that I am a realist and a skeptic, so while thoughts of zombies once were entertaining, I knew the odds of some type of disease taking hold that could be considered a zombie illness was extremely remote.

To humanity’s good fortune, the zombie-like infected population is like the old school movies in the way they move. They creep up on you slowly and silently, only sometimes giving themselves away with a raspy breath or a scraping shoe. Their shuffling pace is nothing faster than a regular walk. This slow movement has helped those groups of survivors such as us overcome the sheer volume of actual infected people that are out there.

Another fortunate thing for us is the infected aren’t actually the risen or walking dead. It’s just a disease, an infection that was spread intentionally, but with the unintentional consequences of turning the population into zombie like cannibals. But that’s not so important right now.

Based on what we have been able to learn from other survivors around the world with Ham radios, it seems that like here, most of the human population in urban centers became infected in the first week of the diseases’ arrival.

The primary reason for the high level of infection was an inability of people to effectively defend themselves against the diseased. The only way to fight back without fear of infection is using firearms from a distance, because any physical interaction with a diseased person exposes you to the infected blood or saliva.

Unfortunately for humanity, most countries had low gun ownership rates and high restrictions for the general populace, so those nations and the U.S. states and cities with the lowest firearm ownership saw the highest infection rates. Even with firearms the fighting was difficult, because any noise, especially the loud report of gunfire, attracts the infected.

Now, eight months into this situation, the numbers of humans both infected and un-infected have dropped sharply. The severe winter we just made it through in the U.S. and other nations in the northern hemisphere killed off many of the people that had managed to survive the infected. People just aren’t used to living without the comforts of electricity or oil or natural gas heat. The die off was particularly severe, because for sustained periods the temperatures around the world dropped well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Here in Oregon, the temperatures were more like what we had when we lived in South Dakota, in the range of -10 to -15 °F for weeks at a time. Even now in June, the weather is unusually cold.

So here I am eight months after the first reports of “rioting” began, crouched down and hiding in an abandoned store with my family. My wife and our five kids have been on a supply and training mission of sorts. Since the numbers of infected have dropped off and the weather started to turn better we’ve been looking for other groups of people, news, supplies and any unusual concentrations of remaining infected, that we should be concerned about. We are heading back to our property where there are several other families waiting for us to get back.

We didn’t have much luck with finding other survivors this trip. Yesterday we ran into a man named Jim Margrove in a small town on the outskirts of Medford, Oregon.