Status Report: The Midwest Front
Ha ha!!! Get it? Bite? Zombies?
. . . Never mind.'>
I've seen horror stories about the goings-on in urban areas. I've seen reports from a paper-pusher at the Pennsylvania capitol, a frantic girl on the seventh floor of some building on the east coast, and some guy in Texas who may or may not be insane.
Things are a lot quieter in this side of Illinois colloquially known as Iowa East.
The official population of our town is not much higher than a thousand. The nearest town, Franklin Grove, has a slightly higher population. They seem to have been hit pretty hard, while we were not. More than half their population - mostly children and the elderly - appear to have been eaten before they could change, though, and about half of the rest must have gone the other way, because only a few hundred of them came ambling down the highway and over the fields in our direction. Many of the men in town hunt every year, and many of them take their children with them, so there was no shortage of rifles or of people who knew how to use them.
Since we have no idea how long the ammunition supply will last, we set up a second perimeter, using chalk from the high school athletic department. Once they're inside that perimeter, those with rifles leave them for those of us on "The Goon Squad."
I am on the Goon Squad, because I have my own sword, a good hatchet, and a sturdy leather jacket and gloves, which are murder in this heat, and because there are more than enough to man the rifles. We let them get close enough that we're not downrange of the rifles, and we finish them off.
At first, I was assigned to join a couple of high school kids with a katana and a wood axe. I put a stop to that, though, after our first encounter, when the kid with the axe wet himself and the kid with the katana started jumping around and yowling like an extra from Kentucky Fried Movie and nearly hit me. Now the kids are hauling corpses to the burn pile east of town, and I'm paired with a Korean War veteran who jumps in with a garden spade before I even get close.
Familiar faces stopped showing up around mid-afternoon, and we hoped the worst was over. But then commuters started coming home, rushing back to be with their families. We had both doctors, their nurses, and the veterinarian at the three roads into town, checking everybody who came in. onyxblue1 made it home okay. I'm not too sorry to say our neighbor did not. He tried to drive in casually, with a jacket casually draped over one arm in this near-ninety degree weather. They shot him when he tried to run the roadblock and hauled him off to the burn pile.
Now everybody who is likely to come home is home, and we are digging in for the night. It's quiet, now, but we can see the tollway from here, and cars are still speeding back and forth on it, between Iowa and Chicago.