The Diary of Halforth

A Black Hills hobbit

[tlkshoff]

08/01/2014

This was a ton of fun all. I am missing getting to log in and see what great stuff you all have posted since yesterday!

Terry Hoffman

AKA Proud Papa

[tlkshoff]

July 31,2014

My name is Lee, I am a friend of Halford's. When he didn't answer his phone last night, a friend and I drove up to Silver City to check on things. We scoped out the town from a ridge a half mile away. It looks like the place got wiped out. There were zombies of many kinds wandering around the place, deer, people, cows, coyotes, etc etc etc, and we could see several places where the fence had been torn down. There were to many zombies to risk going into town to look for any survivors. I knew about Halford's blog so i decided to make this post on it to record why he has fallen silent like so many others. I hope you are resting in peace and not a walking disease vector buddy. If I ever get a chance I'll make it so if it isn't.

[tlkshoff]

July 30, 2014

You know, in the press of events I had forgotten about the bull cow and the deer I saw up Nugget. Zombie deer that attack people? Holy Mother of God, we live in a National Forest!!! There are thousands of deer out there, not to mention mountain lions, some elk, bobcats, coyotes, .... How widespread is this virus? What can be infected and what can't? Can a animal attack trigger the virus in a human? If so, we are in serious trouble here, very serious trouble.

[tlkshoff]

July 30, 2014

secondary, this is what we know so far.

1. It is a virus.

2. We are all infected with the virus and so are many animals it seems

3. Death activates the virus and the dead reanimate as a "zombie".

4. The virus is also activated by physical contact with a zombie, being bitten or getting zombie blood or other bodily fluids on yourself.

5, Enough bleach kills the active virus on objects.

6. Active virus in the blood can be detected by modified diabetes blood testing machines.

7. It takes as little as about 15 minutes to as long as an hour for the virus to take over a living host.

If anybody can add to that I'm sure everybody that reads this would be interested. With several of my fellow townsmen, I am going to build a web site on which we will share what ever news and knowledge of which we learn and we will give our opinion of the information's accuracy.

[tlkshoff]

July 29,2014

This is what we face.

We got a telephone call today from a farm house not to far from town. The call was from a girl who said she was hiding in the barn from a zombie mob. We got a group together and I grabbed a video camera. This is what happened when we got there. I don't know if I can do this much longer.

[tlkshoff]

July 28, 2014

It's been quiet here for the last couple days. I am becoming worried about how we are going to continue to live here though. We are a resort town in the woods and this summer is pretty much a bust. You have to wonder what next summer tourist season will be like. Will there even be one? Some of the guys who live here work in the woods for lumber companies. So far the lumber mills at which they work have been shut down. People are still going to need wood though won't they?,These guys are wondering if the ways we have harvested and processed lumber in the past will work in the future. Everything is being rethought and reinvented. I'm an investment adviser and do some day trading on my own account. I've been making some REAL good money short selling, but the Feds have shut the stock market down "for the duration of this emergency" they say. I have some savings, but that is not going to last for ever and who knows how long this emergency is going to last? I have noticed that some of my entries here are being picked up and re-blogged. I wonder if i can make some money off of that some how. This has just been for my own benefit so far. I'll have to think about it some.

[tlkshoff]

July 26, 2014

Well that pretty well puts paid to civil society. Today the truck caravan rolled into town, followed by several zombies. Machine guns don't work quite as well as I had hoped as you have to pretty much tear em to pieces to stop them and that leaves a bloody mess which is as dangerous as the zombies themselves in some ways. Still, if they ever come in large numbers, the more bloody mess there is outside the fence the better I'd venture to predict!

But I digress, the caravan came into town and stocked the town up. Everybody was feeling a lot better so we decided to have a town wide picnic and barbecue up some of the chicken, pork and hamburger that had been delivered. Everything was going just great when people started falling down all over the place and all hell broke loose. By the time it was over nearly 100 people had animated? zombiefied? I don't know what to call it, God why do I even have to find a word for such shit! But they just suddenly started moaning and biting. If we weren't all in the habit of carrying, it would have been the end of the town. Everybody started blazing away and I am not entirely certain everybody that ended up getting shot and killed was necessarily infected, but then we are all infected aren't we. And this is not a time to be asking a bunch of tom fool questions. This is hard to get used to, it a whole new frame of reference.  I think there are some folks in town who might not be able to get used to it. Again we need a name for what happens. Anyway, once things had calmed down some and there weren't anybody townsfolk trying to kill us all anymore we started asking questions. Nobody who had eaten just the chicken had turned, so we got one of Doc's first testing kits and tested some raw hamburger and pork. It was full of live virus! For Christ's sake, even our food is proving to be dangerous. Evidently eating the stuff is a ticket to zombie town. We burned all the beef and pork we could find in town and made damn sure it was all burned. Poultry seems to be safe. Anyway, I think that pretty was pretty much the last time we will all get together. Had it happened when people were at home, a lot fewer people would have been at risk and fewer would have died.

[tlkshoff]

July 25, 2014

Today was locally pretty quiet, we will be getting a food, fuel and supplies delivery tomorrow. Moral is getting pretty low though, driven by what we have learned today from the net. We are all infected with this be damned virus and are all at risk of the infection coming alive at any time. There is no cure. How can this end well? People are starting to avoid each other, it is getting hard to get a town meeting together, people are getting trigger happy and blazing away at damn near anything! We have to find a way to live with this as a group or we are all going to die alone. By oneself, you are no match for any mob of zombies, it is only with the backup of others that we can ward off their attacks. At least we have learned of a test, some guy in India, an MD i think, came up with a way to modify a diabetes machine to test for the virus. We have a few dozen diabetes machines and are modifying them now. Doc has not found a better chemical agent than bleach and we are all starting to clean our clothes, shoes, hands, etc etc etc with bleach when ever we have been outside the fence.

We have set up the machine guns to cover the roadblock and a couple other places we are designation as entry/exit points. The barbed wire is being deployed as are some land mines we found. There is talk of strengthening the fence and especially the gates. We are all starting to wear what ever body armor we can find. All we need to do is start riding horses while on patrol and we will be right back in the Middle Ages! God, what is this world coming too? Why did this happen? Somebody needs to be strung up by their heels for letting these virus's get loose!

[tlkshoff]

July 24, 2014

We finished the fence today and started building watchtowers where they made sense. Tomorrow we will start deploying the coils of barbed wire we brought back from Hill City but more of that in a bit. Doc reported that bleach seems to be pretty effective, but only in rather caustic quantities. He is going to keep looking for a better chemical agent.

The trip to Hill City was full of tension, tragedy and progress. We went in a caravan, pickup trucks leading with armed guards riding in the beds followed by several dry vans and trailers being towed by cars and SUV's. The whole thing was run as militarily as a bunch of civilians could manage. We were divided up into task groups, one to scrounge gasoline, one to collect food and beverages and one to look for weapons and ammunition principally in the national guard armory, pawn shops and hardware stores. I was assigned to the food and beverage squad. We moved in a tight group shooting anything that moved. Grocery stores are dangerous places, you can't see far enough. We lost one of the refugees who went around a corner to fast and ran into a waiting zombie. Still we managed to load up two box vans and a trailer with frozen foods, canned goods, paper goods, first aid supplies, hygiene products, drugs from the pharmacy, pet supplies, bottled water, bottles of wine and liquor, etc. We also found a couple of people hiding in a freezer that identified themselves before we saw them and shot them. I wish we had a way to determine if someone is infected or not before they get sick! We went back to the rendezvous where the gasoline group was waiting having filled every container they had with gasoline or diesel fuel and collected supplies of motor oils, transmission and brake fluids etc. The weapons group took the longest and we were all getting worries when they showed up, but the cause of the delay was obvious once the arrived as there ware three Humvees with them. These guys were from the air force base at Rapid and showed up at the armoury while our guys were there. It appears that Feds are starting to get organized and they were out scouting. They said that food and gasoline convoys will be organized soon and start making the rounds to locations needing help. Welcome news, I was beginning to think we were on our own in a rather extensive way. The armoury yielded a lot of automatic rifles, a half a dozen machine guns with ammunition, a lot of coiled barbed wire, boxes of grenades, boxes of ammunition, body armor, helmets, etc. Overall a successful trip. We all managed to get back to town safely and get the supplies that needed refrigeration stored away.

[tlkshoff]

July 23, 2014

Doc called a meeting today of the town's leaders. He included me! LOL Me a town leader? Wouldn't Dad be surprised .... He told us that he received an email from the professional associates that says there is a virus infecting people called the Kellis-Amberlee virus and that all the zombies have been infected with it. The virus is active in their blood and other bodily fluids and that exposure to them can transmit the infection to a new host. He said he had enough of blood from Vince and the other two specimens we had collected and had destroyed them to prevent any further accidental transmission. He said he will spend the day looking for a chemical agent that can destroy the virus.

We called a town meeting and passed the information along. The City Council passed an ordinance that killing a zombie is not murder and that there will be no charges filed or pursued against anybody who kills one. Everybody working at the roadblock or patrolling our steadily expanding fence is required to keep their body completely covered by waterproof coverings and must be carrying a weapon. Anybody approaching must be told to stop unless there is no time to do so and shot if they do not comply immediately. Large sign announcing the policy have been set up along the fence and outside of town along the road into town. The lettering was painted in reflective paint so it can be read at night.

Scott Munson, the manager of the local Safeway store, said he has not heard from his district manager and that stocks are getting low. There have been no deliveries for three days now. It was decided to send a truck and escorts to Hill City to see what is available there tomorrow. The same is true of gasoline, but we don't have a truck for that. The escorts will take gas cans and the like and we will see if we can get any gas from the pumps there. None of our phone calls to folks there have been answered nor return calls received in response to messages left. Can everybody in Hill City be dead or turned into zombies! God I hope not.

We have heard from the nearest larger city, Rapid City. They seem to be handling this like we are. There has been no response yet from the state capital, no idea what those boneheads in the State Legislature are about, but they had better get their heads out of their collective asses pretty damn quick.

Andrew Jones spoke up and reminded everybody that there is a National Guard armory in Hill City ans we might want to go there and see what kind of military supplies there might be. A few heavier weapons on the roadblock and set up around town might be a good idea. We have 5 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans in town and they are going to accompany the group going to Hill City and take on that task.

[tlkshoff]

07/23/2014

Blair,

She was already dead. You can't murder a dead person, you can put their remains to rest. Be easy, if anybody is at fault, it is not you.

Halford

[tlkshoff]

July 22, 2014

I am back from Hill City having made the trips safely. Lots to tell about here today, I will get to that. I loaded by ATV into the back of my truck and drove to Hill City over the main roads. I destroyed several zombies on the way... shooting somebody in the head is starting to get commonplace and that can't be good can it? I took a side road when I got close to town and parked my truck in an out of the way spot. This did not turn out to be a good idea by the way, but I will get to that. I drove my ATV overland and approached the hardware store from the rear. Getting in was not a problem, I found a door that had been ripped off its hinges. Didn't take long to strip the place of every working weapon and ammunition I could find and load it into the ATV. I then headed back toward my pickup. I was starting to hear moaning when left, so the town is still, what, haunted? infected? I don't know what to call it. Anyway, as I was returning, I took a different route that was not so steep and approached my truck from a different direction, one from which I could see it from farther away. Good thing I did too as there were two zombies lurching around it! Next time, I will park in the open, no more risking a nasty surprise to avoid being noticed. Good thing these things are as dumb as rocks!

When I got back, I found a bunch of the new folks who have been allowed into town hard at work building a fence outward from the check point. Evidently, a zombie appeared in town and was backtracked to a vehicle that had been parked out of view of the roadblock.

There was also an outbreak at the Doc's clinic. Evidently, Vince managed to spit into the eyes of one of Doc's assistants who was not wearing his safety helmet. Doc sent him to wash his face off and the guy slipped in the bathroom and cracked his head open. He went "zombie" not long after that, so Doc is telling us all to be careful of any fluids from a zombie and to wear protective gear as much as possible!

[tlkshoff]

July 21, 2014

Today has been quieter. After the final events of yesterday, that I will relate in a moment, we have placed a roadblock outside of town and are stopping anybody approaching town and are holding them there for several hours before allowing them to enter. Anybody who approaches the roadblock without express permission is shot immediately. Anybody whose eyes are dilated, moves in an awkward manner or who moans is shot. Anybody who bites a dead body or anything for that matter is shot. We have Vince restrained at the Doc's clinic and he and his staff are trying to figure out what is going on with him and the rest of these dead folks who are rising. I hope he figures something out. The Internet is now pretty full of posts and entries about zombies for god sake. The news is getting weirder and weirder.

Last night. When the ambulance for which we had placed a call for Emma never showed up, we loaded Vince into a fire truck and headed for Hill City and it's hospital. It was pretty dark by the time we were leaving. On the drive there, several times as we drove past isolated homes, we saw people coming at us out of the dark, hands out, jaws chewing, etc. Frankly, this is getting to be terrifying. But it got much worse when we reached Hill City. There were mobs of these, I guess I'll call em zombies for lack of a better term, roaming around town. I didn't see many normal folks about. We took some back streets to get to the hospital, but the closer we got the more zombies we saw. We saw KIDS wandering about. As we went by one house, a woman burst out of the home running toward crying for help. She was immediately swarmed by the creatures. We got the hell out of town and came home.

Tomorrow, I am going to go back to Hill City by back roads and see if I can get to the hardware store. We are going to need more guns and more ammunition, all we can get out hands on. God help us.

[tlkshoff]

07/20/2014

I don't understand what is happening around me. Today's events make yesterday's almost irrelevant although I think they are connected somehow. As planned, mid morning or so, I grabbed my old camera, gassed up the ATV and started out to go back to Little Nugget to collect some proof to shove down the throats of the ass wipes at DG&F. I never got there.

As I was heading out of town, my CB came to life. It was Emma Paine, a resident of Silver City. She was talking to her father Vincent Paine who is a county sheriff. She said while she was driving back to Silver, a small out of state convertible passed her at high speed. She shook her head about the antics of our summer tourists and dismissed it. She was stopped on the road at that nasty curve just above the Jenny Creek turnoff. That curve gets tighter as you go around it and drivers who don't know that are in for a nasty surprise. This guy did not know about it. Emma told her Dad that the car was smashed up against a tree and that the driver was up and running toward her with his arms out, She said it was amazing he was up as he had a terrible head wound.

I decided I should head there instead and help in any way I could. I then heard Vince on my police scanner asking the fire department to send their EMT truck out. I turned onto the Jenny Creek road and headed down it. I could hear Vince's siren wailing as I drove. It wasn't long till I heard it stop so i knew Vince had gotten there. I was only a few minutes away when gunshots ran out! Gunshots! When I drove around the corner and onto Silver Road an unbelievable sight was laid out before me. Vince was in the middle of the road with his gun out and a man was TRYING TO GET BACK UP despite several very large gunshot holes in his chest. This guy was moaning! HE was MOANING! It sounded eerily like that damned bull yesterday. Vince yelled at the guy to get down on the ground and when he managed to get upright and start running at Vince again, Vince shot him three more times pretty much turning his chest into one big hole. The guy went down and lay there twitching and scrabbling. This is when I saw Emma face down on the ground by her pickup truck, Vince was moving toward her keeping the guy on the ground covered with his gun as he moved. When he was between the guy and Emma with his back to Emma, I SAW EMMA GET UP! She was all bloody, she looked like her throat had been ravaged and there were large bloody wounds on her arms and legs! Her eyes fixed on her father's back and she charged at him MOANING! I yelled a warning at Vince and he managed to get turned around in time to be facing her as she launched herself at him, hands our like claws mouth open and teeth showing. Vince started struggling with her. At this moment the EMT truck drove up and the two EMT's jumped out of the truck and ran to help Vince. I pulled my handgun and trained it on the guy on the ground who was now trying to crawl toward Vince and the EMT's! For gods sake he practically had not chest left, but was moving anyways. Remembering the bull, I walked over and shot him in the head. He stopped moving. Turning around, I saw that Vince and the EMT's had Emma restrained. Vince was bloody with several deep scratches and at least one bite. So were both of the EMT's. As I walked toward them I heard Vince tell them to take her to the firehouse and he would join them after calling for an ambulance from Hill City. Silver does not have a hospital, Hill City's is the closest. Vince asked me what had happened and I told him the guy had been crawling toward them when I shot him.

Vince and the EMT's got back in their vehicles and drove off sirens blazing. I looked around for a minute or two before leaving myself. The place was a bloody mess and an unbelievable scene. I got back on my ATV and started back to town when suddenly both sirens stopped blaring! I thought that was odd as there was no way they had gotten back to town yet. The road goes up the side of a ridge and then turns to go back down the other side. When I rounded the corner I could see where two vehicles had run off the road down the hillside! I stopped the ATV, got off and walked to the edge of the road to look down. Vince's police cruiser and the EMT truck were both slammed up against the base of pine trees and EMT truck was smoking! I got down the side of the hill as fast as I could reaching Vince's cruiser first as it was the closest. I could see movement in the passenger compartment and was relieved. Vince was OK, it looked like he was stuck in his seat for some reason. When I got close enough I called out to him asking if he was OK. I was ANSWERED BY A MOAN! The same moan the bull, the stranger and Emma had made. I drew my handgun and approached the cruiser slowly making my way to a spot where I could see the driver's side of the cruiser clearly. Vince was in the car with the seat belt fastened and the airbag deployed. He was like clawing with his hands trying to clear the airbag away. I yelled "Vince, what are you doing?". He turned his head and looked right at me. His eyes were dilated as wide as they could go and his mouth opening and closing, his teeth grinding and he was moaning the whole time! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!!!??? Just then there was a loud explosion from the direction of the EMT truck. I backed away from the cruiser until I could see the truck. It was burning! As I ran toward it, the truck exploded again and the back door was blown open. Emma and one of the EMT's came out, both on fire. They were both moaning, not screaming in pain from the fire, they were moaning and they both started running at me. I shot them both in the head and they both went down. The grass around them immediately caught fire. At this point I started hearing the sirens of police cars and fire truck coming from town. I edged around the burning EMT truck until I could see the driver's side of the truck. The second EMT was there, on fire and belted into his seat. He was moaning too.

Up on the road, a city cop car pulled up and Dean Silvernail got out. He had his handgun out and pointed at me! He told me to put my gun down. I said Sure and did so. I said, you have to get down here and see this. There are is some pretty weird shit happening. He came down the slope and I showed him Vince, still stuck in his cruiser unable to unfasten the seat belt, moaning and chewing with those wide open eyes. I told him about what had happened out on the road and then started repeating myself as the other town cop showed up and the rest of the fire department arrived. It almost got bad then. One of the firemen, Joshua Creley, tried to open the EMT truck door and burned his hand pretty good. By this time the driver, Shaun Smith, was dead from his burns. Dean, Woody (the other cop) and I managed to get everybody to back off. We put the brush fire Emma had started out. Vince would not respond with anything more than chewing and moaning, so we got a tarp out and wrapped him up in after opening the door to his cruised. He rolled out and started awkwardly trying to get to his feet immediately. He tried to grab us and bite us as we tackled him and wrapped him up in the canvas. He strapped him into the back of the police car and headed for Hill City and the hospital there. It was getting late by now.

I'll write the rest tomorrow, I am dead beat now and I have to get some sleep. Things just kept getting worse.

[tlkshoff]

July 19, 2014

I saw the damnest thing today. I was out on my ATV up the canyon a ways taking some pictures. To get a good shot of one of my favorite spots where Little Nugget runs over an outcropping of rock, we have always called it The Cascades, I drove up onto the top of the ridge. It has been a rather wet spring and Nugget is still running all the way to the creek. Little Nugget's creek bed at The Cascades tightens up into a small canyon with very steep almost cliff like sides. From up on top you can look down into the  canyon and the water running over the rocks. There was a whitetail deer standing by one of the pools getting a drink so I stopped and got off the take a few pictures. I was focusing in on the deer when something large crashed into it! When I looked over my camera to see what was going on there was a Hereford bull cow standing over the deer with its head down. I looked back through my camera lens, I was using a telephoto lens to get a close up, and the bull WAS TAKING A BITE OUT OF THE SIDE OF THE DEER!!! WTF! I dropped my camera in shock and stood there looking down at the crazy scene while my camera tumbled down the cliff. But it only got crazier because you will not credit what I saw next. I was there and I can hardly credit it myself. At the sound of the camera slamming into some rocks, the bull's head came up, it turned its head and looked directly at me. Then it turned toward me and began to move in my direction. Its movements were a little funny, jerky in a way. Next it opened its mouth and began moaning!!! I have never heard such a sound before. I swear to God the cow was not mooing, it was moaning. It started to run, directly toward me and tried to run UP THE CANYON WALL! By the time it was trying to do this for the third time around, moaning all the while, getting a few feet up the slope before it slipped and went crashing back down only to get up and charge at me again, I got my rifle out and shot the damn thing. I have a scope and I am a good shot. I waited till it was getting back up and hit it right behind its front quarter. I tell you I shot it in the heart. It went down bleeding like a stuck pig and THEN IT GOT BACK UP and tried to climb the cliff again! It failed, fell and got back up again, all the while bleeding like crazy! I shot it again, same thing. It went down, got back up and kept on trying to climb the cliff. The damn thing was trying to get to me! Finally, I shot it in the head, it went down and did not get up again! You might say wow what a story, but I AM NOT DONE!!

No sooner had that damn bull stopped thrashing about than the DEER got up!! I tell you this deer had a couple of chunks missing from it's sides and it had been trampled by that bull! It's legs looked like they were broken. I would have sworn that deer was dead, but it got up and tried to walk only it couldn't. Then it looked directly at me and started fucking moaning, just like the bull had. I had had enough, I got the hell back on my ATV and got the hell out of there.

Needless to saw, the Department of Game and Fish told me I was not nearly as funny as I thought I was when I called them to report what I had seen and hung up on me. I am going back up there tomorrow to take some pictures of the damn bull and see if that deer is still there. As badly as its legs were busted up, it could not have gotten far before its injuries killed it. It is also small enough i can bring it back.

The news casts are still full of the zombie craze, although now there seems to really be something going on! There are pictures of people who have nearly been shot to pieces getting back up and trying to claw the cops shooting them!

[tlkshoff]

Freaky news day

What a wild day for the news. All of the major news channels and our local news station ran segments today about some sort of widespread zombie prank! It seems that there are folks running around all over the place dressed up as zombies and pretending to attack other people! Is this some sort of weird flash mob event? It's not very funny if it is. It's just plain weird.

[tlkshoff]

07/07/2014 What a holiday

Spent the weekend at the beach celebrating the Fourth. What a zoo! The beach is packed solid from the edge of the dunes to the water with cars and trucks and RV's, there are bonfires burning everywhere, cars driving back and forth, people wandering around in the dark and a never ending cascade of fireworks shooting up into the sky and exploding. It was a blast. I spent most of the evening driving up and down the beach on my ATV with my CB and police scanner on listening to the chatter. There was a lot going on. A note to any reader, if your an idiot, don't play with explosives, they do not suffer fools gladly.

Drove well up the creek last week on my ATV and saw one of those cougars I have been hearing about. What a beautiful animal. I also spotted some bighorn sheep that had some little ones stashed up on a steep hill. I live is a pretty cool place.