Deadfall: Hunters
Authors: Richard Flunker
Deadfall: Hunters
Richard Flunker
Copyright © 2015 by Richard Flunker
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. If anything even remotely similar happened to you, I would LOVE to hear about it.
First Publishing, 2015
Editing by Jessica Thomas, © 2015
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To those who lost and have persevered
Contents
Entry 74 – Sometimes I hate the living more than the dead
Proposal for civilian led and run para military group designated as Hunters.
1
st
Training After-Action Report
Video Interview with Corey Fount
Entry – 80 A hike and a village
Entry 81 – They are everywhere.
Entry 82 – Pirates, Slaves and Zombies. Are you serious?
Entry 83 – Visions or a really bad trip
Entry 84 – The rest of the story
Entry 87 – Pirates of the Caribbean
Entry 90 – At the Walls of Sunny Pointe
In this fourth volume covering the period in American History after Deadfall, we expand our scope and point of view greatly from the previous volume. Volume one talked about the political, cultural and social standing of America from the discovery of the comet that brought Deadfall up to the first reports of the rising dead. Volume two retroactively covered the backgrounds of both Richard Arche and Colin Emvil. Volume three used the journal of Richard’s son, Brian, to cover the first nine months from Deadfall up to the Battle of Carolina Beach.
In volume four, we continue to use Brian’s journal, without the entries between 50 and 70, whose losses are explained in his journal entry number 71. Brian also uses notes, records and obtains newspaper clippings of Gracie Adams to further describe events he was not witness to. Lastly, we introduce the writings of the Prophet, Words of the Voice, to further expand our understanding about the Followers of Inanna and their aims and goals to bring about the words of their prophecy. All of these items were collected by Brian in his travels and we have left them in the order he put them in, regardless of chronological order.
This volume covers important events with these three factions, starting just before the Battle of Carolina Beach going through what is now recognized as the initial conflict of the war at the Battle of Benson, setting the stage for the war that has decided our current fates. These three sources provide us with the closest and purest witnesses of these key events. Once again, these volumes are limited while pertaining to the events on the Eastern Coast of the former United States in order to help understand where our current league of states and cities have come from. It has only been in recent years that we have come across a wider base of information concerning events in other locations on the continent as well as the world, but few have as much relevance and importance as the events that happened along the Atlantic Coast just over sixty years ago.
All of Brian’s and Gracie’s journal entries, notes and articles have remained untouched and unmodified except for obvious spelling mistakes that might confuse readers. Entries from Words of the Voice, which have their origins in various sources, have been combined and cleaned up, only for clarity purposes. The only change that has been made has been the translation of the Haitian scrolls. We understand that Brian was unaware of their content when he put them in his journal. As a historian, it is neither my goal nor right to make any comment on religion or matters of faith and I only hope to portray the facts as they are presented to me. That the Followers of Inanna still exist as an integral and important part of our society show us just how far they have come.
It is my hope that this volume can help us see the impact of these three groups upon our very existence and our future. It has only been through their sacrifices, actions and deeds that Deadfall is seen today as just another critical event in our world’s history, instead of the event that brought about our extinction.
Professor Jonathan Gault
Department of Recovered History
University of the Lakes
American History after Deadfall
Volume 4
Hunters
Professor Jonathan Gault
University of the Lakes
Exogenesis
1
In the beginning, we were dark.
There was no light for us.
2 And the Voice spoke and light coursed through our limbs.
3 We were of the darkness, but our eyes beheld light.
We were dead, but the light gave us life.
4 The Voice gave us will.
5 The Voice gave us our shape.
The light moved our limbs and gave us our hunger.
The light gave us warmth and strength, and in it, we moved toward the Voice.
6 The Voice was among us and in us and to each of us, the Voice was one.
We became the Voice and the Voice was in us,
but the Voice never became us.
7 We heard the Voice and it commanded us to war.
We marched with hunger, with new life.
We undid the old life, adding to ours.
8 The Voice was pleased, but our hunger remained.
9 When no war remained, the Voice bade us stop,
but our hunger drowned the Voice
and we could not stop.
10 We heard the Voice cry out in pain and our hunger increased.
We sought the light and devoured all life.
11 Our new life made the Voice cry louder and we became more. When all life had been devoured and the life barely sprang in us, waves of cold overcame us.
12 The Voice cried out one more time and bade us sleep. Our limbs were crushed and our light extinguished, our life turned to dust. But we still heard the Voice, crying out for us. Without limbs, we cried out in empty words, and waited.
13 When our eyes began to close, there was a great rush of heat, and then there was no Voice.
14 We heard no Voice. In cold and ice we remained, waiting to return to the light. Waiting, for the Voice.
It is about time I got this right.
When all is said and done, this really should be entry 51. It would probably make more sense that way. The problem is, it’s not. See, I actually wrote twenty other entries between 50 and 70. Unfortunately, they are all missing and if I’ve learned anything, it is that I am lazy when it comes to writing.
The good thing, though, is that if anyone thought they missed anything of importance in any of those missing entries, well, you didn’t. They were a waste of paper, thought and time and I would like to explain why.
It has been about two months since that horrible day in May when we all lost too much. I can barely remember those first couple of days afterwards. I do remember attempting to forget them though. Maxie had a stash of cheap wine on board and I thought I would attempt to drown away my sorrows in the most traditional way possible, by drinking them away. That worked against me, though. I have never been a drinker of any sort and after a bottle of wine and a slight pickup in wind and waves, I spent the next two days with a horrible headache, an agonizing stomach-ache, and an intimate acquaintance with the ability to hurl nonexistent vomit from my stomach.
So my attempts to forget that day had been foiled by my weak stomach.
I did the next best thing: I hid and moped, something very difficult to do on a small ship. I attempted to write. Very few of my ramblings made any sense. After the first day, my tablet had run out of juice and we had no charging capabilities onboard the boat. I did, however, find an old notebook and pencils, and I began to write what must have seemed like mindless, incoherent babbling. It is probably best that about a month ago, as we continued our sail down the Eastern Coast of the United States, somewhere near Georgia a storm caught up with us. While we were in no danger, the notebook got soaked and destroyed by the rain water.
At the time we didn’t care; we had easy, fresh water.
I will go back and relate a few things, but three days ago we took the boat into the Atlamaha sound in Georgia and found a town called Darien where we were able to port without being completely overrun by zombies. There we found, salvaged, and rigged a simple solar array onto the boat and I can now charge my tablet once again, which means I am back to my writing.
It also helps my head is much clearer now. Not any less angry, but clearer.
I’ll end here, though. Lucy just came up, ran to the side and hurled over the side of the boat. In any other world I would have made fun of her, but she and everyone else were kind beyond words to me when I was doing my own hurling.
Besides, from our point here, a good 600 feet from the dock, a small crowd has gathered to moan and complain about our presence.
Lucy just looked at me as Aaron came up after her. We both looked out across the water with the same disdain. If there's anything that focuses my mind, it’s them.
Zombies.
Yesterday was probably the best day I have had since that awful day. Maybe it was the fact that I restarted my journal in a more coherent fashion or maybe it was just the sun and laughter we enjoyed yesterday. Most likely it was the combination of the two.
After I wrote in my journal, Lucy was having her late afternoon morning sickness bout. Naturally, we would feel really bad for her as, since I know so well, hurling constantly can wear on a person's body and mind. The only problem is that when she does retch, Lucy emits a sort of high-pitched scream along with the naturally gross gurgling sounds of throwing up. The combination of these two sounds yields a very comical noise. When the rest of us on the boat heard it for the first time, we were alarmed and thought something was horribly wrong. Since that day, it has been very difficult for us not to erupt in laughter at the sound of her screaming vomit, as it is now being called. Even Aaron, who is bound as father and husband to remain stoic and calm, has a very hard time not laughing. There's nothing funnier than trying to tell someone not to laugh when you are trying hard not to laugh yourself.
Lucy takes it all in stride. She admits the odd nature of the screaming vomit, and has laughed at times with us. Yesterday it was particularly loud, but matters got worse when Tague ran up to her as she leaned over the side of the boat and began to imitate her motions while wildly exaggerating her scream. It would be natural that a boat filled with guys would join in and make a complete scene of it all.
To top it all off, from across the water along the piers, a sizable crowd of zombies had gathered in protest to our screaming vomit party and were complaining with their usual moaning and groaning so that from one side you had a bunch of guys screaming and on the other side, some dead people moaning. After a few minutes of this, we all just broke out laughing hard, and fell over on the deck. The zombies found no humor in any of this and never laughed once.
The first zombie I find that does indeed laugh will be the first I don't kill.
The rest of day went on in a lighter mood. It was obvious in all we did that day. Even that night, during supper, we were all more animated and we were smiling far more easily than usual. Who knew all it took for us to improve our moods was to make fun of a pregnant woman.
Now that I have explained the change in the mood, mine especially, I need to undertake the task of relating in my journal the events that have led us up to this moment in time. I can see from my last decent and full journal entry that things were about as dark as they could be. Not much has really improved in the last couple months. We lost friends and lovers and all ties with the few friends we had made. The escape from that horrible place was fraught with all sorts of mishaps. Thankfully though, we are all alive and well and fed too.
We're just thirsty a lot.
It never really occurred to us that our main issue would be drinking water. We hadn't stopped to think fully about how we would keep our stocks of drinkable water at a decent level. We had some stores at first, but as the level of water began to go down in that first week sailing south, it dawned on us that we would have to find a way to keep our stores refilled without having to expose ourselves unnecessarily on land. Our first thought would be to simply sail into a river far enough to get fresh water, but we found out rather quickly that we couldn't get in far enough to get truly fresh water and risk the boat on rivers we were unfamiliar with. The One Star Wonder was an ocean boat and these southern swampy rivers were full of hazards.
We ended up spending the next three days trying to find a location that might have water on land. We looked for water towers, pools, homes, but nothing was reliable enough. Our salvation, although only temporary, was when we found a gas station near North Myrtle Beach with a case of bottled water and some soda. It took all our strength not to drink it all and we had to plan on still rationing what we had. And we were still without a good solution. We were very close to abandoning the boat and going back to land, but we were saved by the clouds.
Almost two weeks after we left Fort Fisher, we sailed into a calm weather front moving out to sea. With it came a nice gentle summer shower, and plenty of zombie free fresh water. Maxie quickly showed us how to break down the sails and use them to capture water. We left out any buckets, bottles and cups and while we siphoned water from the sails into the boat tanks, we drank and drank as much as we could. From that point on, we would intentionally sail into rain to refill our water. Despite this, we still had to ration as we sailed south and needed another solution as we simply could not rely on the weather.
We then had to figure out just what we were going to do next. The few coastal towns that we came upon were in horrible conditions without even taking into consideration the zombies that still haunted them. I forgot to mention that we were limited as far as weapons went. We had left most of our weapons with our truck and van back at Sunny Pointe and had certainly not thought about picking up any more weapons on that chaotic night as we escaped the island. Whatever weaponry we had was crude and improvised, enough to deal with one or two zombies but nowhere near enough to deal with a horde of any size. At this point we were all more than familiar enough with the zombies to know when to stay away from them and there was no better place than on the boat at sea.
But a man's gotta drink right?
That third week, Tague and I began to bang our heads together to see what other option we could find and we settled on the easiest, and the most complex idea possible: desalinization. Now, if you don't know what that is, it sounds very complicated. The truth is, the basic idea behind it isn't, and it’s quite simple. You take seawater and boil it, letting the water vapor cool off, and letting the now fresh water collect. It's basic science and on the ocean we had more than enough water of course. The complexity with this idea came from finding the right parts in order to create such a device, and then powering it.
We already knew that there was no way we could carry enough power to boil the water. There just wasn't enough room on here for wood or gas or oil and there seemed something rather unsafe about a fire on board a boat. About the only real source of power that we could use would be the sun. Of course there was no other high-tech way of harnessing the sun's power. Whatever we used would have to rely on low-tech. In our case that meant two barrels painted in black and some copper tubing.
While effective in terms of science, the actual rate of water we got through this method was quite small, just a few cups a day. Nonetheless, we were able to use this method to add to the amount we got from rain. It provided us with an emergency stash in case we went days without it raining. I also assumed that as we went further south and further into the summer, the rate the water evaporated would increase. It wouldn't be enough to take a shower, but enough to live. Now if only we could effectively fish.
All attempts to fish were comical in every sense of the word. I had missed out on ocean fishing experience having lived in the mountains most of my life.
It was ok though, because food was easier to find on land than water ever was. A lot of the coastal communities had been abandoned quickly after Deadfall, so there were plenty of food supplies, both canned and dried goods, that we could scavenge through easily and without much of a hassle from the walkers. Typically, we would sail into a small town or port city, anchor out on the water and just observe the town for a day or two to establish the risk we would encounter if we went on shore. Then, if all looked well, that third day we would raid the town, gather whatever we found, haul it back out to the boat, and move on south to the next town. At first, it was a horribly monotonous job made a hundred times worse by my depression.
Despite being thirsty as hell, those first couple of weeks were horrible. I couldn't stop thinking about her and all I could hear at night when I tried to sleep was her calling out my name. Sleeping was difficult. During the day then, I was my own version of a zombie, just going about, doing whatever I was told to do by Maxie or Aaron.
I can’t really sit here and say that I'm over it because I'm not, but something has changed. Two months is a very short time, but I think my sadness has refined into a fine aged anger. That anger has given me a bit more focus; it has cleared away the fog that was hanging over me this time. I find myself laughing less, but at least more than before.
I'm not even sure why I'm trying to explain this.
Our trip south has been quite slow. If we really wanted to, we could sail to Haiti and be there in a few weeks. Instead, we have to inch down the coast, slowly. We have to chase rain clouds for water and we check every small town along the coast for anything useful. But I think there is another more important reason why the trip is going slowly. We have a destination, but we are completely clueless as to what we will do once we get there.
My father died and among his belongings was a scrap book he had taken many notes in. The only one that seemed off was a mention of Haiti, a name, Abraham and the name of this ship, the One Star Wonder. The boat belonged to my father’s old friend, Maxie, who we thankfully had along with us. Without him we would not have been able get off the pier much less this far. I had made the possibly bad decision of attempting to get to Haiti in order to find this Abraham and…
Well, I didn’t know what.
To make matters worse, I had never visited the island, as had no one else here. And if the zombie infestation wasn’t bad enough, just how were we going to find a man, who was most likely dead, in a small island? The proverbial needle in a zombiestack. For all I knew, Abraham wasn’t even a man, maybe it was a place, or a building, or a donkey. We had no plan to find what we didn’t even know what to look for.
Just saying that confused me.
So here we are at Darien, Georgia. It is the second day of scoping the town out. There is a sizeable horde here, maybe forty to fifty of the walkers. We may have to bypass this town, but we will give it another day. The zombie horde is anything if patient, but sometimes, they do wander off if their target isn’t readily and easily available.
Tague just jumped over the side. His way of washing up. What I wouldn’t give for a fresh water shower. It’s tiring to be covered in salt all the time.
Of course, the splash has driven the horde into a moaning frenzy. It’s made me think something I have never really thought about before. What drives them?
