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“Where are all the lights?” I was watching some doomsday show and they pointed out a very sobering fact. If the nations electrical grid fails for what ever reason we have, in a split second, gone from a civilization greater than any seen on the earth before to glorified cavemen. Cities like NYC, Boston, Paris, London, etc even little old Little Rock would become immobile, no phones, tv, wi-fi, food in grocery stores would rot quickly (about a week), no lights, If you look at all the things that take electricity to run we wold be basically screwed.
The ladder no longer electrified. their electrified ladder, their greatest security on the roof, gone. They are vulnerable, open, exposed even hidden on that roof. They have a shovel and an Ice Pike to protect themselves. Without the electrified ladder they are very poor cave people.
Fire. Right now if you had to could you make a fire from scratch and keep it going for hours, days? Growing up for years off and on I was in the boy scouts and was an avid camper and I never mastered the art of making a fire from scratch. A little smoke, a spark but never got a flame blazing, not without a lighter. I slept many a night cold. When they power goes out in the city our couple have a sobering moment when they realize just how lucky they have had it till now. Thankfully the power comes on again but if it had stayed off or goes off the next time and never comes back on they are thrown back into the cave era.
Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle & internet searches. I have said earlier that my father was a marksman and a Marine, on days when he would babysit me as a small child to give me a puzzle to put together he would hand me an M-16 and we would take it apart then I would put it back together. Sometime we would go out and shoot it afterwords. That being said I do not have any guns, I don't particularly like them. I also don't have anything against them, I simply choose not to have one. So I am not a big gun guy. I had to do a search to find the two sniper riffles in this story just to get something close to true. The Barrett are apparently very popular among gun people. That's why I gave them to the Page family.
The Page family back story. I really wanted to do more with the Page family. I had it in mind early that their would be a family of preppers who just missed it. All that preparation and damned the luck they messed it up.
The pages were a family that complexly bought into the be prepper philosophy. They had food stashed away in a storage unit as well as under their house in the crawl spaces. Everyone in the family did some kind of training for fire starting, water purification, curing meat, basically if it involved survival on ones own or in a family group they practiced. As our boy guesses the Page family had an underground shelter covered by a trailer on a plot of land they had off the Sweetwater Cutoff road going south on Asher (HWY-367). I know it doesn't matter where that is actually it was just in my mind. In fact I had it in my mind that if they had looked around more they would have found a treasurer trove of survival gear and enough food to last them the winter. However they did not look closely enough. It would have been my luck that that would have happened to me.
Now the fate of the Page family is about what our boy guessed. The outbreak occurred and while one of the kids was at school someone turned or got bitten and it spread fast through the school. When the kids got home one of them was "Sick" and as they looked on knowing what was about to happen they still couldn't believe it and the kid turned then went on a biting spree, getting mommy first who called the rest fo the kids to her and then turned and bit them. Mr. Page himself was just too overcome with emotion to think straight. He ended up trying suicide but when he used a crossbow pistol instead of a real pistol he messed that up and slowly turned into a zombie. When we meet him he has a slight shred of himself left and, well we see what happened.
the church notebook. This was a running theme in the original tweets that never really took off in the book. The original tweet Idea was that they our heros would be in one part of the city, living on the roof and another group of people they would hook up later. The notebook would be, at first how they would communicate as they feel each other out. They would shoot a single shot in the air to let the other group know they had responded. Naturally the idea came about that a third group would hear the shot and read all the correspondence and pretend to be one of the other two and basically ambush a group and start bad blood between groups who would eventually team up and fight the third group. But as is the case with some stories it never happened because the story did not go that way. In the end the notebook never really did much but to introduce the SOL.
The SOL
Sons of Lemmy. Believe me, when you want an acronym finding the words for the letters isn't easy, at least for me. I wanted to call them the S.O.L. much the same way as in Frank Millers the Dark Knight Returns when the kids all start calling themselves Sons of Batman (SOB) and I wanted to bring in a musical element to their title. It was just luck that day that my playlist started playing Motorhead and I thought to myself Lemmy, Sons of Lemmy. I wanted to do a lot of things with the kids but the story dictated otherwise. I rewrote their first encounter several times and settled on the simplest where they boys thought that calling themselves Sons of Lemmy would somehow strike fear into the hearts of men and never really considering two things. One if you don't know who Lemmy is then its not very tough sounding and your not afraid of them. Two if you do know who Lemmy is your a metal head and you think these guys are cool just for coming up with the name and your not afraid of them.
Heroes Wall- This just seemed to be an organic thing that needed to grow on it's own. Her gesture with respects to the dead seemed like one of those memorials you see on the sidewalk after a horrific shooting and over the next few days flowers, beads, photos and other things appear as people pay their respects. But because their were so many dead and funerals were a little out of the questions because of the attention they would bring it seemed organic to me that people would bring their dead after seeing someone else come up with a way of showing respect.
Shaun. I was asked recently if this was a nod to the movie Shaun of the Dead. No it is not. Shaun is from a short story I wrote many years ago that started this mess. In that story Shaun was a punk kid named Shaun-tee. He was a wannabee gang banger but he was just too smart for his own good so he never really got into it, instead he got into collage and . . . well his story isn't finished yet. I brought him into the story one as a way to keep the crossover between stories going and two I needed another neighborhood family so I thought I would explore his a little.
I have to say it gave me a lot of ideas about Shaun and his uncle Andy who we meet in this story. because of what I have written in ZWD I now have an idea about what went on in Shaun's life between his first appearance in my mind and this one. Hopefully I will be able to tell that story in a few years.
