Madness is the gift that has been given to me.
I'm typing this from a high shelf in the warehouse, a little better than 15 feet in the air. A couple of us are up here, and we have the Sales VP's laptop. I think some of the guys are holed up in the men's room--the bathrooms are the only place in the whole shop with locks but no windows. The warehouse was a second-best; the only window between us and them is in the door to the break room, and we shoved both refrigerators in front of it.
The hatch up to the roof is still open, and if worse comes to worse, we can climb up there until the helicopters come. (Because if Hurricane Katrina taught us anything, it's that we can count on the government to take care of everything.)
After the word "zombies" traveled around the shop, no one really wanted to hang around in a cubicle farm that was surrounded on three sides by plate glass. I mean, it's not like any of us believe that they're real-life zombies, with the shambling and the brains and everything, but I can think of some things with reasonable-sounding scientific explanations. Mind-altering chemicals, or, I dunno, cosmic rays.
Our initial plan seemed to be, "Let's all get out of here and gun it until we find safety," but apparently that was everybody's plan, too, because Newsradio said that traffic is jammed up everywhere. Some of my co-workers left anyway, but none of us know how far they got. None of them are answering their phones--they're probably on them, trying to call their families, or the police, or the nearest chainsaw salesman, or something.
Anyway, I hope that's why they're not answering.
The rest of us barricaded ourselves into the warehouse. It's deathly quiet--the only FM stations we get in the warehouse is the River and WONC (which is a college station here in Naperville), but both of those have been silent for a while now. I had (AM) Newradio on for a while, but then that thing happened where we start off with a good signal, and it slowly slides into noise for no reason. Nobody was able to get it back, so we shut it off. Now everyone is afraid to talk. (Not that it would help--a good number of the people left here don't speak English very well, if they speak it at all.) So now we're just sitting silently in the heat, straining to listen.
The sound of my typing is echoing really loudly, and I think people are getting annoyed at me. I'd really like to kill the lights, because they're hot and they're buzzing really loudly, but the switches are right next to the break room, and I'm not going anywhere near it. Every so often, we can hear sirens, and sometimes there's quick bursts gunfire. Mostly, though, I just hear the prayer circle going on somewhere else in the warehouse. And helicopters--I'm hearing lots of those.
A little while ago, one of the printers decided that the silence was driving him crazy, and he turned on his CD player--to "Down with the Sickness," of all the fucked-up things--until we all yelled at him to turn it off. Somebody--I'm not sure who--threw a wrench at him. It's still stuck in his head--every so often, he sings little snatches of the chorus.
The guys on the roof say there's smoke coming from the mall. I can smell it.
Hey, is anyone near a TV? Those might be news choppers--can you see if they're showing anything?
Meridith used to talk about having a "zombie plan." I wonder now if she was serious. I'm on a 15-foot platform with three guys, and I grabbed a hammer on the way up. Two refrigerators, a hammer, and a 15-foot climb are all that stands between me and the walking dead. I hope they're not very good climbers.
Fuck, they're pounding on the bay doors now. I think the roof suddenly sounds like a good idea.
Blog like it's the end of the world.
The hatch up to the roof is still open, and if worse comes to worse, we can climb up there until the helicopters come. (Because if Hurricane Katrina taught us anything, it's that we can count on the government to take care of everything.)
After the word "zombies" traveled around the shop, no one really wanted to hang around in a cubicle farm that was surrounded on three sides by plate glass. I mean, it's not like any of us believe that they're real-life zombies, with the shambling and the brains and everything, but I can think of some things with reasonable-sounding scientific explanations. Mind-altering chemicals, or, I dunno, cosmic rays.
Our initial plan seemed to be, "Let's all get out of here and gun it until we find safety," but apparently that was everybody's plan, too, because Newsradio said that traffic is jammed up everywhere. Some of my co-workers left anyway, but none of us know how far they got. None of them are answering their phones--they're probably on them, trying to call their families, or the police, or the nearest chainsaw salesman, or something.
Anyway, I hope that's why they're not answering.
The rest of us barricaded ourselves into the warehouse. It's deathly quiet--the only FM stations we get in the warehouse is the River and WONC (which is a college station here in Naperville), but both of those have been silent for a while now. I had (AM) Newradio on for a while, but then that thing happened where we start off with a good signal, and it slowly slides into noise for no reason. Nobody was able to get it back, so we shut it off. Now everyone is afraid to talk. (Not that it would help--a good number of the people left here don't speak English very well, if they speak it at all.) So now we're just sitting silently in the heat, straining to listen.
The sound of my typing is echoing really loudly, and I think people are getting annoyed at me. I'd really like to kill the lights, because they're hot and they're buzzing really loudly, but the switches are right next to the break room, and I'm not going anywhere near it. Every so often, we can hear sirens, and sometimes there's quick bursts gunfire. Mostly, though, I just hear the prayer circle going on somewhere else in the warehouse. And helicopters--I'm hearing lots of those.
A little while ago, one of the printers decided that the silence was driving him crazy, and he turned on his CD player--to "Down with the Sickness," of all the fucked-up things--until we all yelled at him to turn it off. Somebody--I'm not sure who--threw a wrench at him. It's still stuck in his head--every so often, he sings little snatches of the chorus.
The guys on the roof say there's smoke coming from the mall. I can smell it.
Hey, is anyone near a TV? Those might be news choppers--can you see if they're showing anything?
Meridith used to talk about having a "zombie plan." I wonder now if she was serious. I'm on a 15-foot platform with three guys, and I grabbed a hammer on the way up. Two refrigerators, a hammer, and a 15-foot climb are all that stands between me and the walking dead. I hope they're not very good climbers.
Fuck, they're pounding on the bay doors now. I think the roof suddenly sounds like a good idea.
Blog like it's the end of the world.