"OW! Hey! YOU want sumthin’ to bite on?! I got something for youse to bite on, right HERE!” ~DING!~
Ah, the sounds of New Jersey. Accents and aluminum bats impacting skulls.
~DING!~
We had an outbreak in the suburbs of Newark last February. No Stryker vehicles this time for the LAST team, and a lot of the Kinetics guys wear street clothes as their urban camoflage. We rolled in in the standard non-descript gray vans and small Ryder rental trucks.
This outbreak was easier to cover up from the media. People in Jersey are used to people acting weird and murderous. And the fact that people were wearing winter clothes offered some protection from Zombie bites. (We don’t cover up to prevent blame from being spread, as you’ve probably guessed, but to minimize the possibility of mass panic. If people knew all that went around them they’d fudge their union suits. )
The cold weather also helped abate the smell. Which is good because I drew corpse collection duties this trip. This can be hazardous. First, no suits. We don’t need to wear BH-4 suits in any case, but it would nice to have a bit more protection. We wear BH-3 suits when it wouldn’t be disruptive to innocent witnesses. We can’t do that when you are pretending to be the local medical examiner’s corpse collection crew. Just rubber gloves, and maybe a mask. And we are in a hurry to load up and get out of Dodge, and mistakes happen when you are in a hurry. The risk is a ‘Twitcher.’ Maybe a Zed just got his spinal cord severed, and not brain popped and still could move it’s jaw. Of course we all have a concealed pistol for this, but when you are in a hurry to get them in the meat wagon you might get a finger too close to the teeth, and.... The Kinetics guys are professionals and hate to leave a hazard like this in their wake, and they would feel horrible if one of the team got infected because they didn’t destroy the entirety of an undead brain on a sweep through, but that is little consolation when you are standing there with a severed fingertip and less than 48 hours to ‘live.’ But the Kinetics guys are human, they make mistakes. And that leaves the rarest but most dangerous clean-up hazard. A zombie that was missed, entirely unnoticed, in the sweep and is just waiting to jump out at you during clean-up. (I HATE it when they do that. )
Anyway, I actually HEARD the quote at the top of this post, sitting at my station, while the Kinetics guys slowly worked their way through a neighborhood sweep. That was help from a concerned civilian. New Jersey people don’t tolerate impolite and pushy folk. And Zed IS that. The good news is, he took out the ghoul and the bite didn’t penetrate his parka. Gun control is pretty severe in the Garden State, but those aluminum bats are everywhere, and many have never touched a baseball in anger. That's not the bat's purpose, playing Abner Doubleday's sport. And when folk tee off on a miscreant, in this case Zombies, they usually go for the head. So New Jersey is actually better off than, say, Texas. For Zombie Outbreaks. People might shoot at a ‘bitey’ interloper in Texas, but they tragically go for center-mass, initially, leaving the undead shamblor a few more moments to close and sink the incisors in. Baseball bats are for heads. And the one I overheard wasn’t the only “Aluminum Shampoo” applied during this outbreak outside of Newark. Gotta love it. Don’t mess with Joisey.
Tally this trip, 9 zombies retired. Truth effectively suppressed. No injuries to Romero team. Cover story back home: I had the ‘flu.’ You’re welcome.
We had an outbreak in the suburbs of Newark last February. No Stryker vehicles this time for the LAST team, and a lot of the Kinetics guys wear street clothes as their urban camoflage. We rolled in in the standard non-descript gray vans and small Ryder rental trucks.
This outbreak was easier to cover up from the media. People in Jersey are used to people acting weird and murderous. And the fact that people were wearing winter clothes offered some protection from Zombie bites. (We don’t cover up to prevent blame from being spread, as you’ve probably guessed, but to minimize the possibility of mass panic. If people knew all that went around them they’d fudge their union suits. )
The cold weather also helped abate the smell. Which is good because I drew corpse collection duties this trip. This can be hazardous. First, no suits. We don’t need to wear BH-4 suits in any case, but it would nice to have a bit more protection. We wear BH-3 suits when it wouldn’t be disruptive to innocent witnesses. We can’t do that when you are pretending to be the local medical examiner’s corpse collection crew. Just rubber gloves, and maybe a mask. And we are in a hurry to load up and get out of Dodge, and mistakes happen when you are in a hurry. The risk is a ‘Twitcher.’ Maybe a Zed just got his spinal cord severed, and not brain popped and still could move it’s jaw. Of course we all have a concealed pistol for this, but when you are in a hurry to get them in the meat wagon you might get a finger too close to the teeth, and.... The Kinetics guys are professionals and hate to leave a hazard like this in their wake, and they would feel horrible if one of the team got infected because they didn’t destroy the entirety of an undead brain on a sweep through, but that is little consolation when you are standing there with a severed fingertip and less than 48 hours to ‘live.’ But the Kinetics guys are human, they make mistakes. And that leaves the rarest but most dangerous clean-up hazard. A zombie that was missed, entirely unnoticed, in the sweep and is just waiting to jump out at you during clean-up. (I HATE it when they do that. )
Anyway, I actually HEARD the quote at the top of this post, sitting at my station, while the Kinetics guys slowly worked their way through a neighborhood sweep. That was help from a concerned civilian. New Jersey people don’t tolerate impolite and pushy folk. And Zed IS that. The good news is, he took out the ghoul and the bite didn’t penetrate his parka. Gun control is pretty severe in the Garden State, but those aluminum bats are everywhere, and many have never touched a baseball in anger. That's not the bat's purpose, playing Abner Doubleday's sport. And when folk tee off on a miscreant, in this case Zombies, they usually go for the head. So New Jersey is actually better off than, say, Texas. For Zombie Outbreaks. People might shoot at a ‘bitey’ interloper in Texas, but they tragically go for center-mass, initially, leaving the undead shamblor a few more moments to close and sink the incisors in. Baseball bats are for heads. And the one I overheard wasn’t the only “Aluminum Shampoo” applied during this outbreak outside of Newark. Gotta love it. Don’t mess with Joisey.
Tally this trip, 9 zombies retired. Truth effectively suppressed. No injuries to Romero team. Cover story back home: I had the ‘flu.’ You’re welcome.
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