User:Sannok
Member of The Kilt Store | |
Sannok has found true freedom at The Kilt Store, in Nichols Mall, and vows to keep the store open so we can provide the finest in customer service. |
Sannok
About
Resident of Stanbury Village; sufferer of chronic wanderlust. Survival instincts so deeply imbued that time spent unliving is mostly either looking for, waiting at, or sleeping in a revive point.
Employment History
Quit the local firehouse somewhere in west Malton to axe through zombie brains in 2006. Solo-wandered Malton for years, honing zombie-killing and survival skills until meeting The Kilt Store late in 2008. Peddled kilts and evicted shoplifters while nursing a bad case of fernweh, taking occasional short leaves to touch all four quarantine walls of Malton.
Took a sabbatical from the kilt store to golf with OJ for a few weeks in late 2009; returned to Stanbury just in time for the holidays.
Wall of Text
from the early days
i always wake up with this disoriented feeling. sleep is strange. you lie down or you sit down or you don't even consciously relax, but your eyes close and you don't really move much, and when you're awake, hours have passed. sometimes just minutes. but you've completely lost control of yourself in the meanwhile. it'd be light out when i last remember checking, the late morning light filtering in between splintered boards, with things so quiet i almost think everything was alright again. and then i fall asleep.
sometimes it's dark when i wake up, and i have no idea where i am. that's the thing about sleeping in a new building every night. you always forget where you are when you wake up. sometimes i get woken up by sounds, like a shuffling in the barricades somewhere or a window crashing open. sometimes i just wake up in a panic, my heart pounding and i'm on my feet with adrenaline rushing so hard i almost puke, swing a crowbar over my head and wait to be attacked.
nine times out of ten, it's never so dramatic. but the one time that it is, it is.
sometimes i wonder how i can be a heavy sleeper and still survive. it's not really possible to have such a lucky streak that even after years of sleeping in dark buildings, i still always sleep through everything. i still always wake up at just the right time. i don't even want to say i've got good instincts, or that my instincts have been honed thfreshmanrough years of squatting in the dark and waiting to be eaten, but i guess that's what psychologists would say about me. that i had a natural survival instinct that laid dormant during years of porn and beer and only came out to keep me alive now that the world is crawling with dead things that want to eat my spleen.
people really like to play the safety in numbers strategy for this game. i never bought into that; they make you share ammo and food and other supplies. they have to vote on whether or not to escape to another building when the cades get breached, or else have to appoint someone to be in charge, or else let the loudest bastard order everyone around. and anything they do, they're bogged down by the slowest person, or the injured person, or the woman with the little kid or the blind old man (if they're even still alive at this point). yeah, that no man left behind shit? drives me nuts. they told me i was a cold bastard for leaving one guy behind to get eaten so the rest of us could run away. yeah, would you rather be eaten yourselves? no, i don't play well with others.
that's why i sleep alone.
it's nice this way, because usually there are enough caded buildings that i can move around and not have to worry much. it takes zack a while to take down a building, at least longer than it takes me to catch enough sleep to be back on my feet. by the time they're shambling through the first floor of the building, i'm up on the roof and running to the next one. i can see the whole city from on top of a tower. i can see where the dead are clustering, and i can see where the survivors are holding out. sometimes i'll run over to a mall or a shopping center and drop in to grab lunch. sometimes people hate it when i drop in and loot enough supplies to keep me going for a little while longer; then i'll stay and hold the cades, kill some zeds, bandage some babies or whatever. sure. i used to help people for a living, never said i'm opposed to doing it. just don't bog me down when i try to leave. i'm not leaving you because i want you to die. i'm leaving you because i don't care. i'm leaving you because there's no reason to care for strangers.
that's why i sleep alone.
it wasn't always like this, i guess. there were days when i'd settle into a boarded up warehouse, slipping in through a crack on the roof where the ceiling caved in for some reason or another, and find someone else there. yeah, we'd watch each others backs because that's what you do. but people are lonely, too, and when you see your friends and family die and stand up as a slobbering shambling hungry corpse, you don't really want to touch anybody anymore. that hot chick you find sitting on a stack of rations and ammo, twitchy as hell and about to shoot you for dropping in through the ceiling? yeah, she's not so hot anymore when her skin is cold and clammy and feels like death because she's been sitting awake for days and eating her fingernails for dinner. sometimes you need flesh. maybe not the way zack needs it, though sometimes i can't tell the difference anymore. sometimes they'll bite down while caught in the throes of passion or whatever, and for a split second i think i'm being eaten alive.
sometimes i like it.
sometimes i want to be eaten alive. sometimes i eat them alive. food metaphors, right? everyone is obsessed with eating, because if you don't eat, you die.
i've seen survivors kill and eat each other out of desperation. i've seen survivors who may as well be dead, because after years of watching zombies set a nice example of eating human flesh, when you're running out of food, your buddy sitting next to you dying of starvation doesn't look too awful. those legs still look pretty beefy even if you can see their ribs poking out of their torn and bloodied shirts. no, i've never eaten human flesh. that's what separates people from the zombies. the survivors who do it, yeah, they don't last that long and then they turn into zombies.
i'm okay with that. sometimes i put them out of their misery, but i gotta make sure the first shot blows their head to bits or else they'll just stand up and go right back to munching on their poor dead butt-buddy.
yeah, that's why i sleep alone. i don't want to wake up and find some chick putting my body parts in her mouth and blow out her brains before i realize she's just bored and lonely and horny as fuck like the rest of us. i don't want the death reflex to result in the accidental severance of my wang. it's nice to be able to pee standing up. it's nice to be able to jerk off when i'm bored with nothing better to do.
i tell myself it was always like this. that i never knew what it was like before the outbreak. that i could see another human being and not have to suppress the gag reflex like an eighteen year old girl on the frat quad. that i've always felt most comfortable when i have a fenced-up junkyard to myself where i could cade up the hole i used to get in, kick back on the roof of a rusty old pickup truck body with a few ghetto-rigged motion alarms in place, and get tanked on old beer that was just about to skunk.
yeah, it was always like this. there were always zombies. people always got up after they died. all those cemeteries laying around with markings for dead people and broken coffins and gaping holes in the ground, that was just people being silly thinking they could bury their dead and be over with it.
i once tried to imagine what it would be like to wake up in a box, in the dark, with no air. hungering for flesh and without the synapses to even know what's going on. clawing at the box until my rotten fingers fell apart. nice that people used concrete liners for a while. harder for zack to break out of them. but those old-school cemeteries with rickety wooden boxes that are easy to push through, and then six feet of dry soil to claw through.
yeah, people always buried the dead in hopes of keeping zack out of the way, not because they thought bodies would stay there.
this crumbling tower
i don't know why i've been sleeping through the days recently. i've been a fairly consistent night sleeper until a few months ago; a couple all-nighters sitting frozen in a clock tower that was poorly barricaded did me in for a week or so, but it's stuck with me ever since. i sat way up at the top where it was so narrow i could touch every window that looked out on the block, giving me a three hundred and sixty degree view of the world. it was cold because it was late autumn, and all i had was a sack of military rations i looted off a poorly guarded base the week before plus enough ammo to kill a hundred zombies on a good day.
my good day only lasted for twelve hours; after that, my fingers were numb from holding the barrel of a cold rifle, tensed on the trigger and waiting to shoot. not a single body shuffled my way for those whole twelve hours, but i barely even blinked, much less stopped to eat or drink or warm myself up. i had gotten it into my head that anything i did would draw zack's attention, and if zack wasn't looking there was surely a band of roaming looters waiting to kill me and take my food and guns.
i don't know why the paranoia hit me so hard then. i had gone years perfectly relaxed, calm, even enjoying myself a lot of time. a world of anarchy and chaos where no one really had to answer to anyone else, where no one really put responsibility on anyone else's shoulders, where it was perfectly acceptable to hole yourself away somewhere and just survive? yeah, totally my thing. it was the high life. i once broke into an empty house, headshotted a couple zeds, and found a lifetime's stash of liquor in the basement. i still go back there when i'm running low; no one else has touched it in a year. but that couple of days sitting frozen in fear at the top of a tower with nothing actually threatening me? doesn't really happen. not supposed to happen. i don't even think i pissed the whole time i was up there since i sure as hell didn't drink anything. i don't even remember how i convinced myself to come down, how i even got myself out of that.
i gorged myself on constipation-inducing MREs for about five straight hours and passed out for maybe two days curled up under some dead crumbling bushes in a greenhouse miles away. i don't remember walking there. i don't know what sort of dumb luck kept me alive. i never went back that way.
sleep is so disorienting.
alts
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