Scribbler's story attempt
Jeff's zombie story
No promises, but I thought I'd give it a try because... *Well, it just feels fun.
Break.
** * It had been two days since they last spotted a zombie. Lately it seemed that things were beginning to stabilize. *The trickle of survivors coming in wasn't exactly steady, but after the initial panic and chaos, things had settled down to an average of one or two a week, with the occasional group from time to time. * Zombies would either come by ones and twos, or they would come in mid size semi detached waves. *Waves were rare and they only ever had one at a time. *But when a wave detached from the swarm there was no way to tell how big it would be without knowing what triggered the detachment.*
** * *The chair of the computer sciences department was heading up the group working on the swarm issue. *Professor Janzen from engineering was working on wave *detection, with aid from the group working on small scale detection. *Prof Trenholm from economics was leading up a team doing analysis, models, and predictions. *The modeling team had faculty and students from just about every other department. *At first, everyone thought it would be meteorology that would make the biggest contribution. *Their previous work with climate and weather modeling certainly made the group's work possible, but as time went on, a great deal of help came from a curious *direction. *
** * Agriculture as well as the musical and dramatic arts people were surprising the hell out of everybody. *A swarm acts like a herd, and to understand a herd you need to have a 'feel' for what herds do. *How they move, how they react. *Music and Drama were more involved with the countermeasures task force, but some of them were making good contributions to the modeling group. *They helped with acoustic and movement issues. *Staging and 'audience theory' was playing a significant role in the work of understanding how sounds and movements triggered wave detachments. *While no one knew if the zombies had a 'psychology' per se, it was proven that zombies could attract one another. *They knew that the zombies had a much improved sense of smell, but they had also determined that eyesight and hearing was essentially human normal. *Knowing how sound travelled and how the combination of human ear and brain distinguished 'sound' from 'noise' was proving helpful when it came to understanding how a swarm would react to various stimuli.
** * The business of survival, fortification, and research was proceeding as well as could be expected, but the day James arrived everything changed.
** * He crawled out of the river and made it up to the fence before collapsing. *Campus security put him in the back of a white pickup truck and took him to the medical arts building. *The combination of his injuries, his medic alert bracelet and the fact that he was still alive shocked everyone present. *And if they could figure out exactly what was going on, they knew that they would shock the world. *They also knew that there was not much of a world left to be shocked.
