Getting Home Was a Bitch
/Dodging the zombies on my way to Penn Station was no fun. Thankfully, there seemed to be some confusion as to who was a zombie and who wasn't on the streets of New York. I saw one guy smash what he thought was a zombie with a trash can. It turned out it was a random street crazy who had zoned out listening to his Discman. With all the random street personalities in Manhattan that mimic zombie behavior, even the zombies themselves were a bit confused as to who to kill in their quest for fresh brains. I managed to fake the zombies out until I got to Penn Station, where the PA system declared there were "scattered 5 to 10 minute delays systemwide, due to the zombie armageddon." Anyone who rides the LIRR knows that "scattered delays" actually means "you will get stuck in the East River tunnel for hours or possibly days," so I clocked a motorcyclist with my backpack on 34th and 7th and stole his crotch rocket. Believe it or not, the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge was relatively traffic- and zombie-free. I figured the Grand Central would be reasonably clear of airport traffic, seeing as how no one really wants to travel by plane when there's a full-scale zombie invasion in progress. I took the GCP to the Northern State Parkway and managed to get home that way, traveling most of the time on the shoulder or on the grass.
Upon arriving home, I noticed that Lauren had barricaded herself inside, and there were zombies wigging out all over the lawn. Quite a few of them had fallen into the pool, and at last I had an answer to the age-old question as to whether zombies can drown. The answer is no. They'll turn purple and thrash about from lack of oxygen, but they just don't die until you shoot them in the head.
Speaking of shooting them in the head, I shimmied up the awning in the back yard to a window, grabbed my shotgun and some 00 buck from my gun safe, and played real-life "House of the Dead" for about an hour. If there's anything nice you can say about Wal-Mart, it's that they sell ammo dirt cheap.
After a while, the zombie population on the lawn started to dwindle. Suddenly, the power went out. Since we didn't know who at LIPA had been zombified and who was still consciously in the business of providing us with electricity at exorbitant rates, we figured we had better come up with a power solution soon. After clearing the back yard of zombies, I dug a 6-foot pit in the back lawn. Then I modified Lauren's treadmill with some copper wire, car batteries and a capacitor bank from an old guitar amp I had lying around. I put the treadmill in the pit and mounted some pictures of celebrities Lauren cut out of People Magazine on the forward wall of the pit. Then I fished a zombie out of the pool and threw him down there. As expected, he started sprinting on the treadmill, scrambling as fast as he could toward what he thinks is Orlando Bloom. He's been doing this for 14 hours now, and has generated enough power to run the fridge, the lights and the central AC.
Here's where we test the theory about zombies and whether they ever get tired and stop sniffing after brains. If the conventional wisdom is correct and they never tire, then I've got a zombie-powered perpetual motion machine, and I can make money selling power back to the grid when civilization gets back to normal. If he does tire eventually, I've still got a few zombies thrashing around in the deep end of the pool. So at least we'll have power for a while.
Zombies schmombies. Let's get back to normal life.
One of the things I loved about growing up with an acre of land in the backyard was that we had a big vegetable garden. When I was a young kid, my mom and dad used to send me out to the garden to pick tomatoes, corn, snap peas, squash and other veggies and bring them back to the house. We used to grow some of the best tomatoes, IMHO, since our yard was on a former farm.
Since I demolished the shed in Holtsville, I was kind of at a loss for what to put in the spot it used to occupy. I ran out to Home Depot, got some top soil, fencing and seeds and decided to plant a small garden. Lauren planted all the seeds and we've been watering it religiously for a couple weeks. Already, we have some small squash plants, corn, radishes and peas coming up. We also planted peppers and tomatoes on the right-hand side, but those are taking a bit longer to come up (you can only see the seedlings starting to poke through the soil and that's about it.)
