The Wit, Wisdom and Lost Monologues of a Zombie Uprising Survivor

Speeches and stories by Ken Peters cut from HG World presents: "The Googies"

1.  Ken explains where his understanding of The Googies comes from and why they frighten him.

It's something you carry with you.  You can only process so much of it at any one time, so your brain starts to process things differently.  But you end up walking around with this big rock in your gut; all your fears and grief get stuck there and you wish to god you could just pass it like a kidney stone.  It never goes away, keeps you up at night, slows you down...and it grows.  Most folks can't manage it for long; they don't find ways to shrink the stone as it were.  Most folks let it drag 'em down. They either keep it cool so long they just break down... or just give up and take a slow dance with an eater.  Some get cold and lose their faith or even their humanity rather than put up with that kind of pain. 

How do you shrink the stone?

When I was little, this was probably the middle-1970s...prehistory to you...I knew who the googies were for real. I didn't have a dad. I had a series of grown-up pals who showed up in my life for a few weeks or months at a time, pretended to be interested in me and then disappeared when mom got crazy or tired of them hanging around.  Sometimes mom got loud on the phone with the thing she said was my real dad.  She made him out to be some horrible thing that I should be afraid of.  I thought all moms were that loud, that angry.  One day some people from the county came to visit and mom stopped yelling.  Oh, she was so sweet that day. And for the next month.  When I acted up, she told me that I needed to stay quiet or they'd come back.  They'd come back for me and take me to a dark place and I'd never see her again.  I didn't go to school very often, but after the county people showed up, I was put on the bus every morning, either by my mom or someone from the school district.  I hated it.  One day my teacher read us some poetry by Shel Silverstein. The googies are coming, she told us in a spooky voice.  The googies are coming, the old people say, to find little children and take them away. 

That was all I needed to hear. I was so scared I never really got the point of the poem...never made it to the last few lines without freaking out over two plump, sad-looking goons with big glasses and wet lips and a sour old lady who looked like 50 pounds of sand pounded into a 20 pound tweed sack.  They were sour, sinister beasts wearing suits made of people skin.  None of them looked comfortable.  One even had a lazy eye that she kept on me while scolding my mom in a completely different direction.

(Ken's origin changed as the story was edited, so this explanation was cut from an early draft.)

2.  A digression about his troubled youth and why he grew up introverted and hostile.

I don't like being a guest of authorities.  I ran away from a babysitter when I was nine. While mom was working one of her crap jobs, she parked me with some 20-something welfare mom with three other kids, including her own.  At first it was fun - except for the menthol cigarette stink and the two hungry cats that thought my sneakers were mice - but then her boyfriend started spending time there.  He came "back" from somewhere terrible so I thought it made sense that he and my sitter would love up on each other and disappear for short times upstairs while I played video games.  After a week, though, the guy wouldn't even talk to me, deal with any of the kids, and spent the entire day every day drinking, eating and hogging the video games.  He and the sitter had a kid together and the boyfriend was about as useful and reliable.  The two had a lot in common. Both would scream until fed, whine until comforted, and they hated competition for attention.  The only differences I saw were that the boyfriend could master a game controller and use the bathroom.   One time I tried to play one of his little fighting games, you'd think I tried to steal his car.  He raised a hand to me and I... well, I punched him in the stomach.  While he was getting over the shock, I bolted from the house.  I'd seen what happened when he raised a hand to my sitter.  It wasn't pretty.  My sitter was too busy eating or talking on the phone to notice I left and an hour past before she asked he boyfriend what happened to me.  They called my mom.  Mom had to leave work and track me down. When she found me hiding in the closet at home I thought I was in trouble because I messed up that big baby's stupid game. 

Mom, for all her little faults, saw through it all and took me out of that house.  She couldn't afford it any more anyway since leaving her shift cost her the job, but mom hated juggling plates and tables for a bunch of blue collar grab-asses.  She said that if it didn't kill ya, it made you stronger for the next job.  

A few months later, mom got some bad news that made her very sad.  We never really had a lot of happy-fun-time, but this was different than the usual stress of bounced checks, overdrawn accounts and bill collectors at the door.  Turns out the video game champion couldn't concentrate with his little boy crying right beside him and his little blob of pixels couldn't delete the other blob of pixels or whatever it was that kept his demons occupied.  So enraged was this man-child that he beat his own son with the game controller, then throttled the life out of him.

(Another version of Ken' origin that didn't survive.  It was a much more loving home than future iterations...)

3.  Ken's darkest origin story. 

When I was younger, I used to tell people I left home at an early age.  That was usually enough to cover my rough edges, particularly around suburbanites whose idea of having it rough was losing cable or electricity for more than a few hours after a bad storm.   If I did get close to someone like that it was after a few weeks on the job.  After spending time in their home fixing their things and doing their work, some folks seem to think it's permission to pry into my life.  

I helped build an addition to some couple's house once and by the second week they asked me where I went to school.  "I was home schooled" was my usual reply until one lady shined to me so fast you might have thought I said Jesus himself taught me.  She was a home-schooler, too and had a lot of questions.  After wiggling my way through that encounter I liked to resort to 'here and there' or 'I moved around a lot'.  Interestingly enough, I never realized that when they asked me that question, they were really asking where I went to college.

HA!  My university was a series of courses in how to get money from a deadbeat without getting stabbed or how to evict poor, single mothers from an apartment and still be able to stand looking at yourself in the mirror.   I came from a very dark place, which I guess is what prepared me for when the entire world went that way. 

Anyway, I was in a particularly black mood over a couple who had more money than brains and less understanding of the world outside their little controlled cul de sac.  As someone they brought on from a county rehabilitation project, they decided to treat me like some wounded animal.  Between laying concrete for their patio and assembling exterior walls for their extra bedroom, they wanted to know all about me. 

By the way, I was the "rehabilitation" that program referred to.  Because my early release was contingent upon satisfying these homeowners, I played along and told them I was home schooled and spent time in foster care, managed to get through primary school without being crushed by my classmates or the system and then the pink-polo-shirt-wearing muther fugger asked me "So, Ken: what was your first crime?"

Just because I make polite conversation and tolerate your simple-minded banter about how the world should be and how crappy people got it below you...it don't make us friends.  Something about that question pissed me off, so I decided I would tell Pink Polo the truth.

"I shot my older brother in the face with a nine millimeter pistol.  He was seven.  I was three."

The horrified look on Mrs. Pink Polo convinced me to stop right there.  I felt the need to put back some of the soft and fuzzy stuff that protected such people.  After all, I wanted my points from the assignment and my pay, both of which would disappear if they decided I was too crazy to finish the job.

"It was an accident, they say.  Mom kept a gun in every room of the ratty little apartment we lived in after my dad...or something pretending to be him...just left us.   I found a pistol in the living room behind the radiator.  It was loaded and chambered and I somehow managed to trip the safety.  My big brother was in the living room with me.  I don't remember what happened and nobody else was around to tell me.  They tell me mom was asleep in bed at the time.  I remember a loud bang, a cloud of smoke and something hard and hot hit me in the face; the kick on the gun knocked me out cold.  I woke up in the ambulance.  My brother Benny died a week later. 

They say it wasn't a crime.  But it was the catalyst.  I never saw mom again.  I have vague memories which I'm sure are embellished with a few pictures I have of her...the ones I persuaded myself not to burn in a drunken pity party.

(This represents where Ken comes from:  A mix of guilt and rage; a brilliant mind and a good soul tortured by grief and loss.  I think perhaps he was happy when the rest of the world came around to how he saw things.  Listeners ask how Old Ken can be so thoughtful and worldly after everything he's seen and done.  I modeled his behavior on older veterans who were able to come to terms with a "normal" life of grand kids and peaceful evenings and the opportunity they earned to just sit and read a book or listen to music again.  Ken knows how lucky he was to survive.)

4. Ken's experience dying once...

The body drifts to sleep, but the mind remains awake.  Five senses die but my thoughts are of falling into blackness, freed of my body.  I should be terrified.  This is how it ends, after all.  No beating heart.  No sensation of cool air in my nose and chest. I cannot raw it.  Those impulses are gone.  My universe is so much greater without the impediments of flesh.  Without the chemistry of emotion I become pure thought.  I expected to feel trapped inside the confines of my brain, to feel weighted by my useless mass.  Instead, I am free.  This sensation is one of elation. 

I believed that my body would go numb as though I were going under anesthesia, counting backward from one hundred I would not even be aware how fast I faded.  The truth was sunset, fading of everything in a slow, graceful wave, followed by a sunrise of new perception.  The light of the world is bright, but not so bright as my new sun

All I've written before feels so foreign, so confused and devoid of reason. 

5.  Ken's tips for surviving on the run...

Eaters migrated to warmer climes in the winter.  Things were bad in Dixie year round.  But in the late fall, the herds were clear of the northern part of the country leaving the lurkers and the slumps to deal with more often than the stray wandering loners and small packs.  The first year it was easy to find a place to stay in the small towns and cities.  You picked a row house in a crappy neighborhood so you knew the windows and doors were extra strong, did some recon and some good ole fashioned burglary from the second or third floor...boom.  Shelter.  I learned to keep quiet and check everywhere inside a house even if it looked abandoned.  There were places with fire doors and bars over the windows, but they weren't boarded or fortified after the fact.  Those places were usually clean...and by that I mean nobody likely died inside hiding in the attic or basement.  But you had to check, even the cupboards. 

One time I was rolling through Maryland and stopped in a small ranch house locked up from the inside.  I snuck in through the garage and went to sleep.  I woke up to something tugging on my boot.  It was...well, it was a kid...about six... skin and bones with the yellow eyes of an eater.  From the smear he left across the floor, I figured out he came from a cupboard under the sink in the kitchen.  It must have taken him hours to get out and across the house to where I was sleeping.  I put it down with a table lamp and tossed the body out into the yard.  The rot would mask the scent of my being there.  Moral of the story, kid: You search everywhere.  Twice. 

But once you had a place in an empty neighborhood, you could manage for a short while, set up subtle security measures around the place in case the living or dead try to pay a visit, and then – y’know - recharge the ole batteries.  This one house I stayed in near Gettysburg had a full wardrobe of winter clothes and a closet full of blankets, even a bathroom closet stacked with old, but useful medicines.  It was a treasure box.  The place was a converted commercial property with high windows and heavy, reinforced doors.  From the evidence a single mom with two kids lived there.  The clothes were her ex's.  Fit nice.  Kept me warm.  I slept hard.  

You're gonna sweat and piss and shirt and most people deal with blood, so it's only a matter of time before all that human stink attracts a crowd and you gotta move on.  I lasted longer in that place near Gettysburg than most and had time to scout for spare gas and a Ford Bronco locked up in a secure garage nearby.   I was ready to go before I ate some spoiled food and ended up with a bad fever for a day or two.  Fevers bring out the dead quicker'n shit, so I had to cut my recovery short and …[edited]

6. Ken spends some time in Pennsylvania's capital city...

There were two months in the first spring of the eater uprisings when things weren't so bad.  This was before I made it to Hagerstown, Maryland and took a job driving The Popcorn Express.  I found myself following the back roads through the Appalachians heading southwest.  I found myself in scenic Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.   I had one set of clothes and a really under-stocked go-bag strapped to my back.  Word along the refugee trails was that Harrisburg was the place to go to get the hell away from what many predicted would be a million-eater herd pouring out of the city come summer.

Harrisburg was a capital city and a hub of evacuations for the northeast.  If you look at the old maps, you'll see that Harrisburg is like the center point between important places with Interstates crossing through town in every direction.  I was there because I had outdated information about flights leaving from the airport.

When things started falling apart in Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, and all those little farm towns in between, Harrisburg bravely loaded all the lawmakers and their lawyers and staff into helicopters and flew away.  Then the city was opened up to refugees.  The locals got out first, clearing mid-town for the military.  Then outsiders were let in.  The highways would only take you so far before checkpoints stopped all traffic into town.  You took anything you could carry into the check point and left the rest for looters.  Past the check points, everything was military. From there, you got processed and put on a bus to the airport or tossed in a row home or hotel room for the time being until you got booked on a flight out.  Where you would be going?  You didn't know until you got there in most cases.  Rumor had it that the more letters you had behind your last name the faster you and your family got off the ground and out of town.

When I got there, the soldiers at the checkpoints and refugees were long gone, but the medians and embankments around them looked like auto scrap yards.  By the time I reached the airport just down river in Middletown the only planes on the ground were stripped for parts or burned out metal tubes.   The Air National Guard unit stationed there took everything but the paint on the hanger walls. 

In downtown, it's easy to confuse the old stone government buildings for mausoleums.  A lot of them were sealed up and full of eaters... thousands of 'em.  It was common practice to bait eaters with what the army called "Swifts" and "Dodgers" - who would get a mob of eaters all excited by the scent of "dodgers" who would run up the street in between stragglers and form them up into a herd.  The Dodgers would lead them to a building and hide as the Swifts drew them deeper into the building, filling up rooms on every level, all the way up to the roof before getting lifted away by a waiting chopper or zip-lining to safety like in an action movie. The buildings were boarded up or welded shut from the outside. Many were burned.  As burning or razing buildings became too dangerous or time consuming, they were just left as is - sealed tombs for the undead.

I'm not saying that just boxing up a thousand eaters inside an office building was the brightest tactic in the world, but one of the side effects of this mass entombment was a relatively eater-free zone in the city.  The smell of the dead masked the smell of living meat.  The few eaters left had been cleared out by the few living stragglers left in town.  These were tin pot warlords and survivalist weirdies keeping watch over neighborhoods form inside row homes or apartment buildings.  They wouldn't think twice about squeezing off a warning shot or five if you wandered too close to their kingdoms.   They had enough time to strip out all the resources they could hoard.  a few of them were kind enough to leave 2-way radios in plain view so they could tell you directly to feck off of their streets.

But for the most part, Harrisburg west of Cameron Street, north of Derry up to Division was a ghost town.  I was able to get some essential supplies and spend a few calm hours sitting on the river bank, watching the mile-wide Susquehanna River ferry bodies down toward the Chesapeake Bay.   At sunrise, with the sun peeking up over the Capitol dome and smoke rising up over the hills to the west, it was like a view from a bank of the River Styx.

My ride of choice in those days was a local news van.  I found it parked off in a corner of an empty parking garage.  I preferred it because it had space and was lower profile than a camper.  It wasn’t a sat-truck with the big dish on top, but it had a little control room and recording booth inside.  This made it warm and quiet and bullet-proof.  When I found it, the tank was full and the engine recently tuned.  Aside from the dead guy in the driver’s seat with a chewed up arm and a lap full of blood from the canal blasted through his chiseled chin up into his brain, it was pristine. I even found a nice house just outside of town in an area used to house soldiers running the relocation mission, an updated row home with 10-foot hardwood fencing all the way around and a detached garage off the main road.  I don’t remember how I found it.  I was looking for stuff to scrounge near a truck repair shop and a supply depot when there she was.  Three stories, well stocked with canned goods, a gassed up genny, enough water for six months, operational plumbing, beer…the end of the world’s version of a mansion.

7.  Life before the uprising wasn't luxurious, but it was "normal"...

A year into the end of the world, everyone I knew started talking about adapting to the New Normal. It was our way of saying goodbye to the old world.  We all talked about the streetlights and public water fountains, silent-flush toilets and 24/7 conveniences that would never come back.  Oh such-n-such was a pretty town once, before the army bombed the crap out of it.  If the Baltimore Orioles had made it to the 2011 season, their line up would have taken them to the pennant.

You know what was "normal" for me?  Normal was starting my day at 5:15 when the forklift across the street started moving empty water cooler bottles from a trailer truck to the washing facility next door.  Normal was the rumble of fully-loaded eighteen wheelers rolling by my apartment on 21st street because they'd turned 20th street by the loading docks into a tire-chewing minefield of potholes, ruts and sinkholes.  Normal was starting my day with a luke-warm shower and cold pizza from the night before.  My apartment opened onto an alleyway, the front door right in front of a sewer cover.  On cold days, the steam rising through the holes in the cover would frost up my first-floor window.  On summer days, I'd open the door to go to work and walk into a wall of stink so bad that to this day I never walk through a door anywhere without taking a breath and holding it.

Normal was a walk up 21st street to the corner market, talking with Rashni over a hot cup of coffee. She was the owner’s daughter and every time he saw us together he'd ask if I wanted to marry her and take her away from a life chained to a cash register.  Pretty girl, Rashni was and her bashful smile told me that dinner and a movie wasn't out of the question, but in those days, I didn't think my life was much of a step up for anybody, so I kept our relationship strictly coffee.  Normal was that rare night off when I could get home by 5pm with some take-out, throw my boots into the corner and prop my dogs up on the edge of the couch.  I didn't have to have cable or nothin', I could crack the front window and listen to my neighbor Monique perform the latest scene in her one-woman show outside her apartment.  She must've had the worst cellphone reception because I could hear her all the way upstairs on the toilet.  Normal was Police lights outside my apartment building every night sometime between sunset and midnight, twice on Saturdays.  Normal was gunshots in the complex once a week.  Most times it was just bangers blowing off steam by throwing some nine-mills into the air.  Other times, it was bloody stuff for the evening news and the morning paper.  Normal was a hug from my old landlady when I told her I fixed the leak under my sink myself or replaced this or that without asking her idiot son to come muck it up.  For that, she kept my rent low and swapped out my crappy ice box with a new fridge she picked up at a Sherriff’s Sale.

Career-wise, I was as high on the corporate ladder as I could go, really.  I was born for the field and not the office.  I had my CDL license, certs to run most construction equipment on tires or treads, knew all the roach coach operators in midtown by name, and a lot of good cash money coming in – under the table, but all legit work.  Normal was not so bad. 

Then normal changed.  I should've had a clue when work started drying up.  I started taking government contracts, infrastructure projects with tight deadlines and impossible standards.  As things around the world started to fall apart, I was getting jobs that sounded more like Smokey and the Bandit runs than typical hauls.  Safety regs just vanished one day. If I could get from Baltimore to upstate New York and back on a freight swap, I’d get paid well.

(Originally, Ken's story was a biography that lasted an entire episode.  I wanted to show how he came to be the man you'd read later.  Down the line I thought it was better if the listener didn't know what he would do in any given situation based on his erratic and pointedly selfish behavior.  I didn't want to give clues of heroism in his back story.)

8.  A rough version of Ken's first run-in with the Eaters.

To me, there's little difference between the eaters and the lost souls you saw in the later part of the big depression.  You had parks, prisons, hospitals, shopping malls, every forgotten alley was full of people that most of the world tried to ignore.  They were dirty and tired, sick and invisible.  The only difference was that the dead were not crushed under the weight of their own circumstance; they weren't ashamed or programmed to feel like they needed to hide from those who didn't want to see them.   That's where the world went wrong.  The PAIN epidemic spread fast through the tent towns and in the underground communities hiding in the cities. 

The first time I saw an eater was on the job site.  We had about fifty guys clearing a lot downtown for someone who was gonna build a Starchucks or a McBurger joint.  Before you can go in and start knocking out the rot and breaking stuff, the law says you gotta make sure there aren’t people hangin’ around that might get hurt. Me and some goon named Clyde were doing a walkthrough to make sure there were no squatters or homeless folks inside the run-down, four-level townhouse.  Back then we went in with the usual jumpsuit, gloves, crowbar and brass knuckles because squatters, druggies, even rat familes get testy when you try to move them along. 

Clyde went to the third floor bedroom and found one guy crouched down and chowing on a pasty, white leg that had been attached to a body resting on top of a pile of blankets.  Clyde saw it before it caught his scent and put the crowbar through its skull.  Then he slipped on the big pool of gore and landed on top of his crow bar. In a move you couldn’t choreograph, he wound up landing in such a way that the prying end went through his right eye into his brain. 

That's the moment I remember seeing as I reached the top of the stairs.  He never saw the woman in rags stand up from her spot in front of the closet door. She had a knife stuck in her chest and about a dozen other holes thereabouts.  She went right for Clyde's body.  She dove for him like he was the first meal she’d seen in weeks and I managed a pretty impressive golf swing that connected just before she reached his bleeding face.  I wish I could tell you that was thinking heroically in a time of crisis, but I didn’t care what it was coming at me – it needed to fall down before me.  

Her skull was soft.   I never got a look at its face before I pulverized it. 

After I turned Clyde over and decided he was definitely a dead man, I yelled out the window that we had a man down, two scabs and a Bio-Hazard emergency in the house. Inside, I was working out a good excuse for two dead bodies and thinking the severed, chewed leg was good enough to keep me out of jail – especially if the CSI guys saw the missing bits of it inside the one dead dude.  This was unusual, but not a unique experience. Barney was yelling something up at me so I leaned my head out the window to repeat what I’d just said. 

Barney the foreman - otherwise known as the fat guy who stayed outside with the truck while the rest of us actually worked - went for his cell phone to call it in.  That's when I heard movement on the old wood floors behind me.  I think, if not for the fact that Clyde's body was between the front window and the bedroom door, the three eaters who appeared would have got to me before I heard them.  They fell on Clyde and tore him apart.  I started screaming at them and they kept tearing and chewing and digging their bare-boned hand into the hole they punched into his stomach. 

Unbeknownst to me, about a dozen of the guys waiting outside with hammers and pry bars and other implements of destruction heard that Clyde was hurt and decided to come in and help me.  In the melee that ensued, the gang uncovered a nest of about a dozen eaters.  All of them were dispatched, but not before two of them were killed and five others getting infected.

Cops came out like an armored brigade. The house was surrounded and they thought it was a riot.  The infected men got put in ambulances and taken to two different hospitals. Most of the men on the scene were put into plastic cuffs and processed downtown.  Me? I heard the sirens and quickly walked off the job down the back stairs and made a bead for this little place I know where you can shower the blood off your body and launder it out of your clothes without question. It’s the kind of place that specializes in good times and happy endings, if you understand me.  I wasn’t scared, but I looked into the sunken, yellow eyes of an eater, looked at something that could not possibly be alive and I understood them.  They were not evil, but they were hungry…like the big men I stood with in the rain looking for work.  They were not things to reason with or intimidate with a single punch to the face.  You could only destroy them or keep out of their way. 

With that knowledge I understood that the sirens didn’t mean rescue.  The men with wounds would never make it out of the hospital.  Best case, the hospital knew what it was doing and would keep them isolated or put them down.  Worst case, they wouldn’t know what they had on the table until it bit them.  The cops would have to call the feds, the CDC and Homeland Security.  I wasn’t going to a relocation center. I wasn’t gonna get Superdome’d.  So I left my buddies and pals to their own wits and hoped they had the same sense as me.  If I’d stayed, I would probably be stuck at that HG World up north or in that one in Dover, Delaware that got overrun by eaters.

We’re all so used to the phenomenon now, but even at that moment I thought I was just dealing with someone on drugs, someone who mixed their “X” with PCP or shot mescaline directly into their brains or something that would make them do what they did. People going crazy on bath salts and clawing off their own faces – or someone else’s – that was always on the news. With the world in the economic shitter, the R&D sections of many drug cartels were hard providing different ways for people to punch out of this world as hard and as long as possible for little money. 

In sum, Ken won't shut up if you let him roll... :)