User:Paddy Dignam

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Paddy, after being stabbed in the eye with a pool cue by Vandr.

Paddy Dignam is a longtime resident of Danversbank and founder of the Danversbank Relief and Reconstruction Project (DRRP), an emergency management group that, in addition to its more practical activities, encourages a palpable sense of comradery among area survivors. He is a well known scrounger and tinkerer and can be seen throughout the neighborhood trailing spare parts, squeezing power out of makeshift generators, stuffing the wires back into gutted radios, delivering small luxuries to fair maidens, and making quid pro quo deals with shadowy figures in the parks. He is also a voracious gabber and self-described "boozehound," the latter term being an accurate description of most DRRP members.^[1] He reserves his ammunition for special occasions and has remarked of his prowess with firearms: "I'm a pretty good shot when my hands aren't shaking." In his free time, which appears to be scarce, Paddy relaxes in room 101 of the Davey Hotel, where he listens to post-apocalypse punk records, hurls sharp objects at his cat Mrkrgnao, and partakes of his extensive collection of Malton whiskeys. Not much is known about Paddy's life before the DRRP, and there are no records of him at all before the outbreak.^[2] The information offered here comes from a variety of sources, including DRRP minutes, copies of journal entries, and eyewitness accounts, many of them dubious.

1 The Outbreak
2 The Obituary Notice
3 The Wandering
4 Paddy Meets Mrkrgnao
5 Paddy Meets Gina
6 Notes

[edit] The Outbreak

Paddy’s first journal entry was written on stationary from the Davey Hotel approximately three weeks after Danversbank was overrun by the walking dead. Much of the entry, and the entries that follow, are beyond recognition due to impenetrable handwriting, deliberate destruction of text, or stains of one type or another.

~~January 28~~ ~~February 2~~ (Oh f*ck it I’ve got no idea what day it is--)

Yeah, so here I am. I'm not dead but I'm not really alive either. What I know isn't much but I'll tell it to you, even though you're not listening, even though no one's got time anymore for anybody else, not in this bitch of a new world. Hell, maybe we never had time for anyone else. Maybe the old world was just as rotten--we just hid it better.

[Second paragraph illegible]

I can hear them banging around out there, looking for a piece of meat they haven’t already swallowed, howling and whining like spoiled bitches in heat--. And I have to be real careful because they can hear everything--they could hear a deep breath a mile away. Then they come and find the owner of that breath, and they take it out of him, and when he starts up again it’s a whole different sound like chains dragging against chains--

The night that Danversbank fell Paddy was unconscious at the foot of the basement stairs of the Denney Arms. He had arrived hours earlier to meet a girl:

... Call her J. Call her whatever you want... And don't ask me any weepy questions about the past. Because it doesn’t matter how I met her or how long I’d been in love with her or how much I missed her or why she made me hate myself more than I already did. What’s important is that she called me up for the first time in six years. She was back in town. She wanted to see me. She wouldn’t say why--just be at Denney at 9:00 Thursday she said. Please be there. Of course I knew it was no good, that it had nothing to do with her wanting me back, but I started to clean up my act anyway. I stayed dry for the next 2 and a half days, I washed up, cut my toenails, took some shirts and my coat to the cleaners, picked up the place, bought her flowers on the way to the pub--you know how it goes when you fall that hard for someone--you forget that some things are so broken that not even going a little insane can make them right again.

After some elaborate examples of what he describes as "the crazy sh*t men will do when they can’t stand coming home to an empty apartment anymore and think that selling themselves to a pair of nice legs can make them whole again," the narrative continues:

... I sat there choking down soda water two f*cking hours, waiting waiting waiting, hands shaking for a real drink, getting all kinds of sh*t from Tommy [Thomas A. Doyle, proprietor of the Denney Arms] and his kid about what a waste of trying it was, me pretending to be a new man and all, how I’d just turn back into the scoundrel I was when she didn’t show. Sometimes [Remainder of the paragraph illegible].

Strange things were happening on the tv--strange things are always happening on the brainsuck box but it was worse that night and everybody was crowding me up at the bar trying to see. Killers on the streets was nothing new, but these f*ckers were real perverts. The cops, the FBI, some suits from some company called something-Tech (f*cking geniuses all) were saying a lot of words and telling everybody not to worry, situation under control, only stay in your houses and lock your doors. D-Bank Police Chief Murker (--I’d had some run-ins with that smirking pig in my day) went so far as to say that it was some kind of satanic cult dealing out dark rites and black magic and what not. F*cking Murker--couldn't solve a crime if the perp's name was written on the inside of his eyelids and blinking in neon lights like a sign on the Kinch Heights Strip... Anyway some of the Denney regulars [hadn't] even come in. And some of them shot right out after seeing the ambulances and cops covering up body parts over in Carrington Plaza.

It didn’t bother me. Not one bit. It didn’t seem different than any other horrorshow on the vids all of us addicts were hooked up to every night. Everybody thought it was different because now it was happening here, because we’re all supposed to be properly civilized here. We may f*ck each other over here, sure--for a buck or for jealousy or for one crazy god or another or just because we can, but it’s not the same as eating people for real. That’s what they thought anyway. For my money it’s all the same. Evil is evil, and it doesn’t matter how much of a shine you try to put on it, doesn’t matter if you call taking somebody else’s kid and keeping it locked up & naked & shaking in a closet for 12 f*cking years a “disease”, doesn’t matter if you dress it up in [an] expensive suit and call it a Vice President. When EnroCorp rolled in here and bulldozed all the factories into junkyards and put everybody out in the streets they may not have chewed poor Johnny Corcoran’s brains out, but they took the food out of his mouth and the mouths of his wife and 3 little girls--yeah, they burned his heart out just as sure as if they’d taken a knife out of the fire and jammed it between his ribs--

I was done with the whole thing. I’d been waiting for the stars to start falling out of the sky & the moon to turn red for years. The only thing I cared about was that J. was still a no show at midnight, and I saw my sorry self the next morning looking at my sheetwhite mug in the mirror, figuring there was no point in shaving, no point in going out to look for work, no point in drinking just OJ when I could have a Screwdriver instead. So I did what everybody expected me to do, I ordered a drink. And I kept ordering them until I forgot who I was or why I ever hoped a girl like that would give up a perfectly shiny life for a [Two lines of text crossed out].

The last thing I remember was Tommy’s kid went out for a smoke, and he came dashing back in looking scared sh*tless and saying he heard screams coming from the fire station. Then Tommy grabbed the shotgun and bolted out with the kid and some of the others who were looking to bust some pervert heads. I waited a few seconds and then stood up. I reached my hand right over that bar, took the bottle of Jameson and finished it off like it was that last bit of coffee with all the sugar in it. Yeah, I know, and I’m the one who survived--.

[edit] The Obituary Notice

It is unknown exactly how Paddy arrived at the basement of the Denney Arms. Based upon descriptions of his injuries, his own admission of extensive alcohol consumption, and the fact that he found the Arms vacant, locked and shuttered the next morning, it is presumed that he fell down the stairs accidentally before the evacuation broadcast and was left behind during the ensuing chaos. Upon regaining consciousness, and before learning of the horrors that had occurred and were still occurring throughout the city, he found the incomplete obituary section of a yellowed newspaper pinned to the front of his shirt. The following notice was circled:

This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise, after a brief illness, came as great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out by Messrs. H.J. O'Neill & Son, 164 North Strand Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr., Martin Cunningham, John Power .)eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, B.A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius Kelleher, Joseph M'C. Hynes, L. Boom, C.P. M'Coy,-- M'Intosh, and several others.

The name of the paper does not appear anywhere on the clipping, though the addresses and place names throughout establish its origin as Ireland, a nation Paddy holds in high esteem but claims to have visited only once. A date on a temperance lecture advertisement reads 16 June, 1904. On the paper, directly beneath the notice in question, Paddy wrote: "Found this stuck to me that first morning. Smells like piss. If I’m a hundred years old I look pretty godd*mn good." Initially he dismissed the "pisspaper" and its deliberate attachment to his person as "some kind of lark on a poor drunk bastard," but the definitive pronouncement of his namesake as a corpse, especially considering the shifting life-death paradigm in Malton and elsewhere, has deeply shaken him on a number of subsequent occasions.

[edit] The Wandering

It was after 1:00pm when, after vomiting, climbing out of the basement and discovering he was alone in a locked pub, Paddy mixed himself a Bloody Mary and began to sing "that song by the BUZZCOCKS that goes 'ever fallen in love with someone ever fallen in love in love with someone ever fallen in love in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with--.'" He switched on a panel of televisions ("I just wanted some cartoons, man") to the now famous final emergency broadcast by anchorman Nathan Zuckerman, which had been repeating every half hour since 6:16am. His reaction to the apocalyptic events was simply: "Guess I don’t have to pay rent this month."^[3]

Paddy did not proceed to the nearest safe zone as directed by the broadcast, and therefore escaped what is now known as the First Fort Perryn Massacre.^[4] Instead, he absconded with a bottle of unknown alcoholic origin and a bag of cashews and claims to have wandered south through Danversbank in the midst of the newly undead.^[5] "They [must've] thought I was one of them," he wrote. "I was all messed up, man. I had a lump on my head the size of a lemon, couldn't see straight, unsteady on my feet, and I was drunk again before I’d stopped being drunk from the night before... I didn't care anymore, that was all. I was lost and I didn't want to be found."

Over the course of the next three weeks Paddy’s arbitrary and at times hallucinogenic recollections include falling asleep in a trash bin while eating a rotten banana; kicking an undead duck in Barrell Park (where he also took a bath in a Koi pond); urinating on luxury automobiles and prominent monuments; embracing Tommy Doyle Jr. in the street before realizing he was "a sh*t-smelling corpse making noises like he had a parking meter shoved up his ass"; drinking the contents of an open beer can without first checking to see if it had been used as an ashtray; and taking blurry-eyed peeks at the sky every night to make sure the stars were "still attached."

Other survivors were scarce. When found they were often indiscriminately violent:

The human beings who hadn't already fallen asleep and woke up dead and brainhungry were swinging on each other with baseball bats and kitchen knives for the rainbow sprinkles off pieces of donuts. Yeah, it was a real f*cking inspiration. I mean really, take away our toys and our indoor plumbing and our home movies, turn out the lights for awhile, make the dead walk, and look what happens to us. There's not much left is there? Just the hole we were born with right in the middle of our gut and no way to know really what we're supposed to fill it up with...

A few nights later Paddy finished the second of three bottles of vodka discovered earlier in a tool box at a gas station, scaled the fence of a junkyard, and passed out in a doorless Toyota Celica. He awoke the following afternoon to a greasy-faced little boy grinning down at him through the sunroof.

"Are you dead?" the little boy asked.

"Yeah," Paddy responded slowly, "and I've got a piece of paper that smells like piss to prove it."

"You look dead but you talk like a person."

"Dead people are still people, kid."

"No they ain't."

"Why not?"

"Cuz they're dead."

"They're walkin' around making noises, aren't they? That's all living people do."

"You have a booger in your nose."

"Yeah, well you got sh*t all over your face... Where am I?"

After telling Paddy where he was and that he smelled funny, the little boy led him back to a group of fifteen or twenty souls who were gathered around a small fire eating what they described as porridge, but what Paddy suspected was "rat stew." Most of them had come from South Whittenside and were heading west in search of a new home. Most of them had lost everything they had and everyone they knew.

They wanted me to join their little marching band but obviously I wasn’t up for it. I felt all kinds of sh*tty about that, there being kids and all, and all sorts of decent folks trying to get [their] lives back, trying to build a better world on top of the one that just got flushed down the pisser after stinking the place up for Christ knows how many thousands of years... But I kept thinking, they'll never make it, not if they had a thousand chances and each one of them a thousand lives. And I felt bad about thinking that right in front of their faces, because they thought I'd come back, they really thought I cared, that I needed them, that more than anything I wanted to belong somewhere. But I couldn't get myself to care anymore, like I said, and my not caring was like a hook dug way down [Two lines illegible].

... There were just too many pigs dressed up in people clothes and it didn't matter how many times I did the math, there were always way more pigs than decent folks at the end of the [equation]. The dead didn't matter as much as the pigs. The dead were too slow and they couldn’t help what they did. It was the ones who could help it but were too weak to pull it off, and it was just a matter of very little time before one of those bitches (the living stupid kind, not the living dead kind) was going to show up with matches and gasoline and up they'd all go, all these nice people and me with them, and then who'd be left to speak pleasantries to all you still-beating-hearts? Who'd be left to record the joyous and inspiration-like unfoldings of this sick new world that's just the same as the old world only with even more living pigs and some walking corpses for show--?

[edit] Paddy Meets Mrkrgnao

Mrkrgnao

Paddy came to a stop at the steps of the Davey Hotel, a landmark he remembered fondly from his childhood days at Hell's Rows. Too exhausted and "cracked" to go any further, it was his intention to "die on those steps, to sit there until nightfall, until one of those mutant anim[a]ls figured out that I really did have the makings of a tasty afternoon snack. Honestly, I think I was a little hurt that they figured me [for something] as savage and repugnant and scooped out as they were."^[6]

He had saved his last bottle of vodka for the occasion, and as he lowered himself onto the steps and took the first drink, watching the sun fall down over the city, he felt a stinging, unremitting pain just above his right elbow. He jumped up, lost his grip on the bottle and watched it fall and break in "the slowest most heartbreaking motion ever." He then screamed and swatted at the smallish cat whose teeth were attached to his flesh. The feline disengaged of its own accord, spun around twice in midair, fell to the earth unharmed, and promptly started to lap up the spreading pool of vodka.^[7]

"Motherf*cker!" Paddy exclaimed, rubbing his elbow and stomping the ground in agony.

The cat lapped leisurely at the liquor pool and then began to clean itself, with one eye always on Paddy.

"I should kick your dumb furry ass clear across the..."

"Mawrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" the cat warned, arching its back, clumps of fur protruding outwards like barbs.

"F*ck off yourself," Paddy said, his gaze shifting to the broken bottle. "Oh look at my poor booze, you slut..."

"Mkgnao."

"You’re one of them aren’t you? One of those moaning dead bitches..."

"Mrkgnao."

"No?"

"Mrrrrrrrr. Mrrrgrrrrr."

"Whatever," Paddy said, noting the dual wounds in his arm through the dual punctures in his coat. "I’ll find out soon enough."

He sat down resignedly, dropped his chin into the palm of his hand and continued:

"You know what this means, you little bastard? It means I have to die sober."

"Prrrrrrrrr," the cat said.

"Yeah, I know, you're all broken up about it."

Hell’s Rows was now a blunt grey and the groans of an undead horde were heard approaching from the north. The cat moved quickly to the entrance of the hotel and spun around in circles, butting its head against the front door at the end of each revolution.

"Get over it," Paddy said. "I’m not goin’ anywhere... It’s over, man, don’t you get it? I’m done; I’m tired of this place; I’m tired of losing things. I’m so tired of losing things that I don’t even want to wake up anymore because I’m gone too. Yeah. There’s nothing to remember because there’s no one to remember it. You get that, cat? It’s all just pretend now. I just walk around pretending that I still have reasons to be walking around..."

The moans of the dead were interrupted by a series of metallic crashes, which Paddy attributed to one or more of the "poor demented bastards" tumbling into a row of trash cans. The cries soon picked up again, growing louder, more haunted.

"You hear that? You know how easy it is to be one of them? No more choices to make, no regrets, no shame... You just shuffle around being hungry all the time and not knowing why. That’s what I want. I’m tired and that’s it. So you go on inside, and in the morning you come on out and have a lick at the bones they left behind. If you’re lucky there won’t be enough of me left to get up again..."

"Brrrrzzzz," the cat said pointedly. And again: "Brrrrrrzzzz."

"Unless..."--Paddy perked up suddenly, blood rushed to his face, his eyes widened--"I mean, you think we'll find another bottle inside?"

The cat scratched at the door and purred.

"No way," Paddy shook his head, deflated. "Those f*ckers wouldn’t’ve left anything so tasty behind."

"Burrrrrrzzzzz," the cat insisted.

"Hell, I guess we can give it a shot," Paddy added with a shrug, hauling himself up and limping to the door. "I’m Paddy by the way."

"Mrkrgnao," the cat said, plunging into the darkness of the hotel lobby.

"Right. Because that just rolls right off the tongue, don’t it?"

[edit] Paddy Meets Gina

As Paddy feared, not a drop of liquor remained in the Davey Hotel, although he discovered a crate of canned food ("f*cking peaches, man--yuck") in the basement, along with two-hundred light bulbs, a stack of plywood about eight feet high, a large collection of bronze age Marvel comic books, and a copy of the classic naval warfare game Battleship still in its original cellophane wrapping. He amused himself during that first week by perusing said comic books and jumping up and down on every bed in the hotel. He also repeatedly "scared the sh*t out of the cat" by croaking the word "redrum"^[8] at every opportunity, and gathered up the remaining hotel property--ashtrays, robes, ice buckets, pillow mints and various toiletries--which he then stashed in several pillow cases and deposited in the ramshackle wardrobe of room 101.

Some days later, after taking a crowbar to a television set on the top floor^[9], Paddy sat catching his breath at the foot of the bed and glanced out the window at the cemetery to the northwest. A great horde of undead was gathered there, all of them standing perfectly still except for a scattered few who lay motionless on the ground. And then there was movement:

This girl popped out of the cemetery like the ice in a drink pops to the top of the glass after you tap it on the bar a few times. She was just there and I knew she was a she because there was this beautiful ponytail flopping around behind her neck and also I could see these dark beautiful eyebrows even from where I was, and even with the sun barely getting around all the black clouds I could see that her lips were pink as a ribbon from some contest she would’ve killed or died before entering. Then she came out a little more and I fell in love. She was in some sort of black military suit and it fit real close--my eyes popped open so wide I didn’t think they’d ever shut again. She had a gun and moved it around like she knew how to use it. She looked around for a minute, real careful like, using tombstones and those little houses for dead rich people (I forget what you call those things) for cover. And then she went right up to those hideous bitches and jabbed one of them in the neck with a syringe thingie she pulled out of her belt. The damn thing was [as] long as a bottle of JJ but not quite as fat. Anyway, the greyskinned pincushion slumped to the ground after being poked and the girl disappeared down right back where she came from.

Paddy was sure to be at the same window at the same time on the following day. And, as he hoped, the same thing happened: the girl emerged from an unseen passageway, carefully surveyed the terrain with firearm drawn, approached the horde and injected one ghoul and then another with two separate syringes. She then quickly disappeared. The effect of these events upon Paddy’s emotional state was significant:

Something was happening to me way down where I didn’t think anything could happen to me anymore. There was this buzzing in my chest like when you go out with someone you really like for the first time. My hands were sweaty and I didn’t know what to do with them. I caught myself smiling in the mirror and it wasn’t because I was pretending not to hate myself, it was because I felt good. I took a bath. I whistled in the bath. I talked all cutesy to the cat and even tried to pet the little bastard (big, BIG mistake). It was like I was changing, like all these poor bastards I’d known [had changed] from workingclass slobs to flesh-eating animals, except I was doing it in reverse. It really was like I’d been dead this whole time and now this girl had come up out of the ground like an [e]ruption and stabbed me in the heart with that giant f*cking needle and I was beating again. The hook way down in my gut was coming loose and I was breathing. When I went to bed I knew there’d be a light at the end of it all and I actually wanted to wake up and see it and walk around in it and maybe go over to where that clump of flowers was growing through the dried blood in the alley and pick some of them...

[To be continued]

[edit] Notes

^[1] Founding member Firebug Malone once described the DRRP as "a band of gun-toting alcoholics."

^[2] Paddy claims that he was born in South Scarletwood and moved to Hell’s Rows in South Danversbank at an early age. There are no records of a Dignam family ever living in Scarletwood, Danversbank, or any other suburb of Malton. The Christian names of Paddy’s parents are never mentioned in his journals or elsewhere. The only description on record is of his father: "He built things and fixed things, and he hated people who had money they never had to work for."

^[3] Though this is how Paddy described his feelings in his journal, many of his friends dispute the accuracy of the remark. They claim that, when confronted with tragic situations, he often uses humor to disguise his sense of outrage and/or despair.

^[4] To date, there have been 862 recorded Fort Perryn Massacres. Paddy had this to say about the continuing efforts by humans to secure the supposed stronghold: "What the f*ck do they want it for? Let the rotten dead bastards have it, for Christ’s sake. Nothing’s worth that much dying."

^[5] According to scientific advancements made in undead biology, it is unlikely that Paddy traveled "right in there with those bitches like Tarzan with the apes." The undead do not hunt based on human senses as we know them, and they simply would not have failed to recognize his neuronal regularity, however altered by alcohol its chemistry might have been.

^[6] Most of the following is taken from a story told to attendees of the first DRRP-sponsored Danversbank meet-and-greet at The Standfast Arms.

^[7] Paddy's first impression of the cat: "This son of a bitch was the scruffiest, most crazy-eyed and cantankerous little demon bastard I'd ever laid eyes on... He looked to be some kind of Siamese but there was something else too, something bigger and loads more vicious. It was like King-Louis-the-whatever and a backalley scrapper were stuck in the same 3-pound body... Christ, he could’ve been infected with the brainhunger for all I knew..."

^[8] The origin and meaning of this word is unknown. It is possible that Paddy meant to say rerum (from the Latin res), which loosely translates as "of all things."

^[9] It took Paddy a total of three days to complete what he called "Operation Reverse Mindsuck," during which every television set in the hotel was destroyed.