He was dying from an infected cut. He told us he had been scraped up pretty bad in a fight a week earlier, that’s where he got his infection. His broken leg prevented him from freely searching for medicine, and you could see blackish spider veins over nearly his entire right thigh and abdomen. The blood poisoning had spread too far for antibiotics to help at this point. We both exchanged our incredulity that one could survive the zombie apocalypse for eight months, only to die by what was once considered a minor infection from being cut.

The worst part of the situation for Jim is that it wasn’t a fight with an infected that did him in. He happened to cross paths with what sounded by his description like one of the druggers of the past. Druggies are the current and former users of illegal drugs, but that definition didn’t fit the new threat we had to deal with. We started calling the formerly medicated population “druggers.” This is to distinguish them from those individuals that just went bat-shit crazy from dealing with all the fighting and dying since the end times arrived. The druggers are the people that were on meds to allow them to properly function in society. You know the ones, the severe paranoids, schizophrenics, manic depressives, and others.

Not that we have many problems from the depressives, if they survived the initial attacks, even their meds couldn’t help them deal with the psychological impact of seeing people they know get run down and chewed up. Hell, it hasn’t been easy for any of us, but when you throw in a medical tendency to get depressed when things are good. Your life expectancy isn’t very long when the world literally turns to shit, and you no longer have modern medicines to help regulate your moods.

The schizophrenics are the ones we really have to worry about, and one of them is probably what happened to Jim. If anything will help you survive a zombie-like pandemic apocalypse, it is being paranoid about everything. The schizophrenics have the market cornered for that realm. I mean a lot of them died in the early days of the infection, because they were medicated and thought the bloodied up corpse-like looking people coming toward them were illusions. So unfortunately, many of them died as a result of learning to ignore things that they felt shouldn’t be real.

I shouldn’t say unfortunately though, because it is truly fortunate for us that there aren’t more of them out there. The schizophrenics are amazing survivalists. It seems that their deep down instincts to hide, distrust, scavenge, and kill have truly blossomed in this world. And once they were no longer assisted by the hallucination blocking drugs they were used to, every human became an infected to them.

So I’m going off on a tirade against people that were once considered mentally diseased, and I could never have gotten away with bashing them like this when times were good, but then I also didn’t have a cause to. Now I’m just pissed that it isn’t just a plague of infected cannibalistic humans that I have to worry about, or the gangs of criminals and violent opportunists. It is also those that are just plain crazy that will walk up to you like it is a wonderful morning, happy as a clam to see another human being, and they will pull out a knife or a club and try to kill you.

My anger over the situation runs a little deeper since I can imagine the pain he was going through before his death. Jim didn’t just break his leg and get cut up in his encounter. His wife was killed in the fight as well. Jim and his wife were heading through the town of Central Point and into Medford for the same basic purposes as us; to try and find supplies, people, and maybe some information.

The two of them encountered a young man sitting on the steps outside a house. After they said hello to the man, he started crying, and asked them if they were real. What should seem to be a light bulb going off type of question was actually a common one now with most people isolated and displaced, surviving on their own for months with no non-infected human contact. So when a normal person approaches another survivor, each of them often think the other person they are seeing is just wishful thinking, or at worst, a minor hallucination.

When this guy asked Jim and his wife if they were real, started crying and walking toward them, they weren’t thinking danger as he approached, they were thinking lets comfort this kindred spirit.