Do Over

By David Tipton

A virus turns people into zombies. Hiram Portwood knows what he's seeing and hearing on the news terrifies him and he leaves his home just before things really get bad. He goes to his cabin in northern Michigan of the lower peninsula. His next-door neighbor there teaches him a lot about survival. She's a prepper. And they know either raiders or zombies or both will eventually migrate north. The zombies keep decaying and their "life span" is six months. But then where will the virus go? Because viruses mutate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Tipton
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201330101

David Tipton

The author lives in Michigan. He’s been married for 47+ years. Raised three beautiful daughters, and three grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. He was a technical writer for 24+ years. An armed security guard working under the supervision of US Air Force Security Forces and US Army personnel right after the towers came down. He retired at the age of 62 due to health problems. Life is good, even with health issues.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It came out of South East Asia. No one knew exactly where it came from. It didn’t matter. A virus that put fear into every human being worldwide. It wasn’t because this thing had a high morbidity rate, it did; or that from the time of first symptoms to death was 72 hours. What scared everyone witless was one to twenty-four hours after death the dead reanimated. It was like every bad (or good) zombie movie rolled into one in real-time.

It was called the Zombie Virus; or ZV. I wanted to call it Captain Trips in honor of the Stephen King novel and movie The Stand. Nobody asked me of course.

Testing for the virus was useless, there was nothing that could be done for the person who was infected. Well, there was one thing and military personnel under the direction of their governments did it. Destroying the infected person’s brain. If there were people in close proximity to them (such as a car, plane, train, car, bus, and so forth), then they too were dispatched as quickly as possible.

ZV was transmitted through air transmission in its flu-like stage, blood or bodily fluid transfer, and of course getting bitten by the undead. No matter how you contracted it the end result was the same. You became a zombie when you died. In my opinion, getting bitten was the worst.

You could feel yourself turning, your veins burning as your blood thickened; you became hot, extremely thirsty, and craved raw meat. Your bodily temperature went from 98.6 to 110 in a matter of hours; and then your brain fried, you died, and ta-da! A new you.

While there were still places keeping track and news stations reporting; the morbidity rate was 40%. Four in ten died from it and unless their brainstem was eviscerated, they’d rise again. When you were bit, it only took one to three hours before you turned. That meant that in a small city like mine, (57,500), 23,000 would die from the Z-virus. And then of the 34,500 survivors, 25,875 would be turned by the 23,000. So, if people weren’t willing to put the infected down, you’d have 48,750 ravenous dead looking for the remaining 8,750 meals.

It took two weeks for the Z-virus to cover the entire globe, except Antarctica. And the space station. The five-person crew on the ISS chose to vent their oxygen instead of starving to death or slow asphyxiation. Rumor had it the President, Congress, and SCOTUS had all gone to a specially prepared bunker, all with friends, and family members. They were guarded by an elite military unit.

We heard rumors that close to 2,000 ‘leaders’ and a company of soldiers had gone into the bunker. To my knowledge, none of them ever came out of it. A few announcements of encouragement and false assurances and then wherever they were, went silent.

The nature of the disease made it almost impossible to band together for self-protection. Many of us learned that mistake quickly. People were reluctant to reveal a loved one had cold symptoms, it could be a cold, right? Maybe? And by the time the family knew for sure they had a dead family member in their house, or camper, or tent; they too were as good as dead.

We started seeing groups of survivors of less than thirty banding together. Usually these groups had a handful of individuals tough enough to immediately do what was necessary, quickly. Even to their own kin-folk.

We discovered a few things about the undead dead. Their eyes burned out because they didn’t blink. Dried up, or too much daylight, it didn’t matter, they were blind. They used sound to find us. Unlike the movies, they couldn’t smell, scream, or moan. Anything requiring inhaling or exhaling; the dead don’t breathe.

They could run for short distances; but then they lost track of the pray because of their own noise. If you stayed still, and there weren’t too many of them, they’d pass on by you. As time went by, the zombies became slower and slower as the rot took hold of their decaying flesh and parts started falling off. They moved slow with their arms out like they were crucified, not with their arms in front of them like they were feeling their way, or were afraid they’d bump into something. If an arm touched something, they’d immediately attack it. Many zombies were torn to shreds by fellow zombies thinking they were a meal.

They couldn’t open doors, climb up stairs (they could fall down them), or dozens of other things we living take for granted. Stepping up or down from a curb, for example, would make a zombie fall and the rest of the zombies around them would pounce on them. They wondered aimlessly at first. They didn’t herd together unless a bunch were drawn to a sound. As soon as the prey was found and consumed, they’d start aimlessly wandering again.

Unless noise was made, there weren’t the hordes the movies showed chasing a living person. They didn’t sense us by our heat signature, though they were attracted to fire. Make enough noise and every zombie who could hear it would come flocking to the source. They were uncanny at arriving at the point where whatever sound originated from. Even as long as an hour or two after the sound was made. After a couple hours they lost track and roamed.

Burning a zombie would put it down, but it had to be burned up until there was nothing holding it together and the brains had boiled away. The brain, or rather the brain stem (the lizard brain as it’s called) was the mobilizing factor. Destroy the brain stem, destroy the zombie. Of course, destroying the whole brain worked too.

Most of us who were alive after six months only carried firearms for extreme emergency. Bows and arrows, spears, swords, hammers, knives, axes, baseball bats, and tire irons were the weapons of choice. You did have to be weary of your fellow living human; thievery, rape, and murder was the repertoire of some folks.

Chapter 2

Iwasn’t a prepper . I didn’t have a bugout bag or stockpiles of dehydrated foods. I did own a pump shotgun; a .38 caliber revolver; and I had an excellent cross bow with a 4x scope on it. I wasn’t married, I’d divorced years before the pandemic. My children had moved to other states. My son to California to pursue his dream of acting; a daughter was in Texas with her husband, who didn’t like me much; and my youngest daughter lived three states away.

We weren’t close. They’d swallowed their mother’s bullshit about me; hook, line, and sinker as the saying goes. Their mother was the one who’d had an affair, not me. But somehow, I’d betrayed the covenant of marriage, probably because I didn’t condone her infidelity. My one saving grace is I hadn’t added her name to the house title, and since I’d put her through college the judge decided I didn’t owe her a dime. So, I spoke briefly with my kids at Christmas and their birthdays. They didn’t call me on mine.

The pandemic took hold in the United States on a Saturday in March. I lived alone and I followed the advice of the CDC and stayed home from work and stayed away from public gatherings. I did make a run on Sam’s club and got as much nonperishable foods as I could, bottled water, toilet paper, cigarettes and hard alcohol (for trading). I loaded it all in the bed of my F250 Ford pickup.

I’d packed clothes. My weapons. Some books from the library on how to make soap, build primitive shelters, find edible wild plants, how to cure meat, and the list went on. All the stuff my great grand parents knew, and my grand parents’ sort of knew, and my parents did not. I left my city for a little cabin I’d bought on the edge of the national forest up north. I figured if the pandemic was overblown, the worst I’d be is deeply in debt to my charge card for all the stuff I’d bought.

The drive from my place to my place took a little over four hours if I didn’t stop. But I stopped at every sporting good’s store I came across. I bought another shotgun, another cross bow with a scope and lots of spare parts for it; and I bought arrows (they’re called bolts for crossbows). The last place I stopped had a book on how to make bows and arrows, knives, and other primitive weapons. And this place had combat axes (limit two) and an all-in-one entrenching tool (limit two).

The entrenching tool was an amazing design. It could dig like a shovel; turn the blade 90 degrees from the handle and you had a pick or hoe; one edge was a short machete like blade; the final side had a serrated blade for sawing. The last place I stopped only sold fireworks, and I bought a boatload of firecrackers, big and small.

Like I said before. I wasn’t a prepper. Hadn’t been in the military either. I had been a Boy Scout. I’d made it to Life rank so I knew a lot of camping and survival skills. The books were to help me remember and build on the knowledge I had. I’d gotten the cabin for a song, really. The previous owner hadn’t paid his taxes. I did and wham! I had a cabin with one large room that served as the bedroom, living, dining, and kitchen areas. There was a loft which also had a bedroom.

The place came furnished, including a nice ham radio, a solar-powered generator, and a gasoline generator. The previous owner must have been a real paranoid individual. He had a sensor grid around his three-acre property. Anything taller than three-foot could trip the beam and a corresponding light would illuminate on a wall map of the property. The ham radio and sensors just had to be hooked up to the generators.

Chapter 3

It was dark when I pulled off the county road, onto my two-track driveway. A hundred feet back from the road was a steel pole across the two-track road with a pad lock. The previous owner had put up No Trespassing signs. Below them, he had a notice that trails and other areas had anti-motorcycle and snowmobile spikes, and other goodies was the way he put it.

I came up to the cabin as often as I could, especially during deer season and winter. Some people just didn’t pay attention and trespassed. Hunters were fined by the DNR and motorcyclists and snowmobilers were fined and had their machines confiscated. I’d caught one guy who was a repeat trespass offender; he gave me his cross-country bike if I wouldn’t turn him in. He didn’t fancy 18 months in the county jail.

I hated winter, but I loved that cabin. The quiet and solitude. I’m comfortable in my own skin. I don’t mind company, it’s just crowds of people I couldn’t tolerate. I was planning on retiring to the cabin when the time was right. I guess now was the right time.

Before I got out of my truck, I surveyed the area around me. I’d read too many books about a person thinking they were safe and stepped out of their vehicle and bam! A zombie’s munching on them. I didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean anything either. It was the beginning of the Zombie Virus outbreak, only the big cities were reporting major problems, my city had had a dozen or so cases, easily contained. I still didn’t want to be there.

Stepping down from my truck’s cab, I thumbed back the hammer on my Smith and Wesson K-frame .38. My index finger rested on the outside of the trigger guard. I approached my gate, still looking around. My nearest neighbor was Wendy McGee and she had woodburning everything; stove, furnace, water heater. Unlocking the pole, I swung it out of the way, drove the truck through, and locked everything back up.

I honked three short honks and one long, letting Wendy know I was there. She kept an eye on the place for me and I helped her out any way I could. I drove another hundred feet and the two-track split. I took the right-hand fork, last time I’d been up I found snowmobile tracks leading down the left fork, so I’d laid in spikes along it which could puncture my tires, shred snowmobile pads, motorcycle tires, and ATV tires. I’d have to do that for the righthand side again. I didn’t plan on driving out anytime soon.

Three hundred feet down the track and it curved back to the left and was joined by the other track, and fifty feet straight back was a small clearing where I parked. Again, I sat in the gathering gloom and darkness, window down slightly. My headlights and engine were off. I was letting my eyes adjust to the gloom and I was listening to the sounds of the forest.

There were maples and oaks, lodgepole pine, spruce, and birch trees galore around my place. At the back of my place it was predominately pine trees of various types of the national forest. The foliage and trees around my place hid it from the county road. You had to know where to look to see the beginning of my two-track off of the road to see it. Next to my front door was an electronic number pad and the green light was on above it. No one had tampered with my place. If someone broke in an alarm would be triggered at the County Sheriff’s office and at Wendy’s place. We had reciprocal alarm systems and a year ago we hooked up a hardline intercom system.

The night sounds seemed normal and I didn’t see any movement. Except for a two-hundred-foot area around the cabin and pole barn I’d kept everything overgrown and wild. You had to look to see the trail that led to Wendy’s place. More importantly, you had to know where to look to find it. This wasn’t by design (though I will take credit for having the forethought, but it was pure laziness not to trim back the brush, saplings, and vines). It was just too much work. The two-track I hid, in the hopes trespassers couldn’t find the place.

I had a blind spot on one side of the cabin and the back of the pole barn. I’d been thinking about it on my long drive up. I’d take some traps I’d found in the house, leg traps, and set them up on those side and back areas. It wasn’t for the dead I’d set the traps; it was for the living who might try and steal what I had.

A cold drizzle had started by the time I exited my truck, and I stood by my truck wearing my surplus army fatigue cap, the rain dripping off the brim. I debated emptying the truck in the drizzle and growing dark, or wait until the morning. Morning won.

After putting in my access code (which Wendy also knew) I entered my new permanent home. A small light was on over my wood burning stove. It was bright enough that if Wendy suspected someone was in my place, she could look through the windows (the drapes and curtains were open) and see anyone moving around.

Hap? Are you there? Hap? Wendy was a big redheaded woman. Not fat. Big boned and six foot tall. She was muscular. She was in immensely better shape than I.

As I walked towards the intercom set up on my nightstand, I noticed the place smelled clean and was free of dust, You knew I was coming? I asked her.

Of course, her voice was a smokey baritone, You may not be a survivalist or a prepper but you sure as shit ain’t stupid either.

I chuckled, Thanks for the ringing endorsement. When I left my house, there weren’t that many reported cases in the city, but they were already discussing Marshal Law and strict curfews. Didn’t need to get worse before I got the hell outta Dodge.

Well I’m glad you’re here. It’s gotten a bit lonely. Only a few Weekenders have shown up, and Martha came down with cancer so she’s in Manistee receiving treatments, and of course Stan is with her.

Weekenders was the term the permanent residents called people like me. People who came up to the forest on the weekends, holidays, or hunting season from Grand Rapids and Detroit. We even had a couple of folks from Chicago in our neck of the woods. There were 30 or 40 year-round occupants within a two-mile radius of me. Some were retirees who went to Florida in the winter-time. The snow comes early and stays late. Most of the folks in our area drove the hour or so to Manistee to work.

Michigan’s Huron-Manistee National Forest is a breath-taking and beautiful place. We have bear, dear galore, fox, wolf, coyote, and a plethora of other animals. There was an Elk farm and two Alpaca farms. The locals didn’t begrudge us Weekenders too much. We brought revenue to the small businesses along the Michigan-55 corridor.

There were some motels and lodges. Hunting camps that pampered mostly rich out-of-towners to the experience of hunting deer which were penned inside large acreages with electrified fencing. Those businesses were always trying to grab more of the National Forest land to expand their businesses. They weren’t liked much by the locals.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I laughed, releasing the button.

Just stating the obvious. You’re no fool, there was a long pause, I could hear her breathing, How bad do you think this is going to get?

Truth?

Truth, she said. I’d told her I was working on my shoot from the hip mouth without thinking whether I hurt someone’s feelings or not.

End-of-the-world as we know it.

Geeez-us! Wendy rarely swore, Guess I’ll make a run for Sam’s club tomorrow before panic sets in.

Keep in mind, sweety, that’s just my opinion.

My gut tells me you’re right. Some of us at the dinner have speculated as much. We’re all staying away from each other. Do you think this was a manufactured virus?

Does it matter Wendy? Pandora’s box is open. The four horsemen are riding. If humanity survives, it’ll definitely be a Do Over for homo sapiens, it was my turn to pause, "Maybe we’ll