HMTL Original Series: The Dead Life – #22
Last time, Dani caught up with Alicia and the discussed books and the status of Mary, Alicia’s mother, who is still laid up from a broken leg. This week in the Haunted MTL Original The Dead Life, Dani looks at long-term plans with Jimmy – could a garden be the next step?
This is a serialized novel of post-apocalyptic zombie survival. Learn more about the story and setting at the series hub and take advantage of a complete list of installments.
Day 25
“Go ahead and check in on your mom, Alicia. Let her know I am gonna come by in a bit.”
Alicia nodded and, after a brief moment, gave Dani a small hug. Dani initially felt surprised but returned the gesture by squeezing the girl’s elbow. She was a good kid.
Alicia wandered off, gesturing with a wave as she approached her and her mother’s trailer. Dani turned her attention to the units claimed by Jimmy and Edgar.
Jimmy and Edgar had opened the four she saw, removed various boxes, and contents had been strewn about in multiple piles, the two still obviously sorting through them. The presence of an overly furry lady’s coat on a coat rack caught her eye for a moment. She had no idea what fur it was, but the fact that Jimmy or Edgar had perceived enough value to hang the coat up was pretty funny. From what she had learned about them, she expected that was a Jimmy gesture, the more reflective of the two.
She made her way down the row, which was the main row connected to the front gate. Sure enough, she saw Jimmy, the slighter of the pair, standing at the front entrance. His hair had grown a bit longer, and he had a tangle of red curls starting to form. He was in sweatpants and a t-shirt salvaged from one of the boxes. As she approached, she noticed the neon-colored graphic of a boat with “Catalina Open ‘92” in stylized letters on the back.
She presumed nobody in their sanctuary had ever been to Catalina before.
“Why is the car out of the way?” she asked as she approached.
Jimmy looked back; his hands were on his hips, intently studying the building across the street. He pointed to them.
“Edgar is scouting that building, so we’re keeping the gate free to roll open when he gets back.”
“By himself?”
“Believe it or not, that giant is very quiet.”
Giant didn’t even begin to describe Edgar. He was a sizeable Mexican man. While only about 5’9”, by most estimations, he was thick, a seeming combination of muscle and fat. Edgar was like a wall. Dani was glad to have him.
Jimmy was different. He was skinny, and his muscles were ropey. He looked underfed, and his raid hair had not only grown longer at the top of his head, but he was beginning to develop a rat nest for a beard. Dani would need to get him something to trim it next time they were on a supply run.
He was pretty wired-looking when he first came to the U-Stor-It, but in the time since, he seemed to have mellowed out, seemingly enthused at the company and things to do. He was one of the hardest working people she had met, always up to something to make the location more livable, and the first to assist in projects.
He didn’t even bother hiding his track marks lately. Dani wondered how long ago he’d kicked his habit and if the work helped him manage.
“Any idea what he is looking for over there?”
Jimmy scratched his chin vigorously, and Dani could hear the rustle of hair. “We saw that it is a school district facility or something. I think they make food there, and there could be buses.”
Dani technically lived around the corner, right from the building. She hadn’t paid attention to it at the time. Dani did recall a colorful mural on one of the walls. She supposed she saw some buses there from time to time as well. It was shocking how disconnected she felt from the location across from her apartment of two years.
“Why are we interested in buses, Jimmy?”
He smiled.
“Well, if we can hotwire them, we can take a couple of them and build a wall around the parking lot in front of us.”
Dani looked at the lot; they hadn’t been able to use it due to the need to reinforce the broken gate.
“We could find a way to make another gate and have two layers of protection here,” she added.
“Yep. Maybe even park a couple of cars or a truck for supply runs.”
“It could also give us a chance to fix the gate.”
“Yeah. I feel really shitty about breaking it. I swear I’ll fix it.”
Dani took a few steps forward toward the rolling gate and shrugged. “You didn’t know anyone was here, and you’re doing what you can to help. Nobody is mad.”
Jimmy pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his sweats’ pockets and a book of matches from the other. He lit up and began to puff away. Dani watched him for a moment, and soon enough, he nodded at her, plucking the cigarette from his lips and offering her a puff. She enjoyed it. She handed it back.
“Is he going to be okay by himself?”
“If it were me, you’d be right to be worried. Edgar, though, fucker is built differently. He won’t be long. Besides, I really, really want to get to the parking lot.”
“We have plenty of parking here.”
“It’s the grass. The soil. I think I can get a garden going.”
Dani’s eyes narrowed. “No shit?”
“No shit. I was 4-H in high school, and my parents shipped me off to a boy’s ranch as a kid. I picked up the knack for growing.”
Danit thought back to the day he and Edgar had crashed the gate of the storage place. Dani and Bob had found marijuana packed up in one of the units belonging to Jimmy.
“So that weed was homegrown, I assume?”
“I can grow potatoes too.”
“I’m sure you can.”
Jimmy took a couple more puffs and handed the cigarette back to Dani.
“I have some ideas, but I need the supplies.”
“Do tell,” Dani urged.
“Well, I can build some garden boxes, but I need wood, wire, liners… soil bags… seeds; it’s a lot.”
“Makes sense,” she added, “thinking of loading up one of the buses?”
Jimmy looked over at the truck still parked against the front office’s windows.
“That moving truck would have been perfect. I hope we can salvage that if we close the lot.” He took the cigarette back from Dani. “I am thinking about a lot of supplies because I have a much bigger idea.”
He paused for a moment, perhaps worried he was going to sound crazy or something.
“Dani, do you know what is next to us,” he gestured behind them as he spoke, back toward the southern part of the U-Stor-It, “that area between us at the houses?”
“No.”
“A drainage ditch for one, and a dirt alley with the railroad tracks.”
Dani remembered that a railway, abandoned, had run through part of Emmett for nearly 60 years, an artifact of the day when the town was known for orange groves. She saw where he was going with this.
“You want to seal the place up and grow back there?” she asked.
“It’d give us a lot more room than some boxes and a strip of grass in front of the office.”
It was a good idea, but the project seemed like a massive pain in the ass, especially given the need to secure the area and move the goods. She understood why Jimy and Edgar were interested in the buses.
“The problem is,” Jimmy continued, “we can’t risk losing that truck in front of the office yet because we can’t reinforce the window frame. We don’t have anything else that can work to haul around the supplies I need.”
Dani thought about it for a moment. Jimmy offered her the last few puffs of the cigarette, but she politely waved it off, deep in thought. She thought back to the area around them and where they had been in the previous few weeks.
She remembered something about her flight from the apartments where she had lived before the bullshit went down. The place was around the corner and seemed so much further away when she first escaped. Now it offered a tantalizingly close solution.
“I know where we can find a moving truck.”
Jimmy’s eyebrow raised, intrigued. He dropped the cigarette butt and mashed it with the toe of his sneakers.
“Hell yes.” He beamed. “Fuck yes.”
Did you enjoy this installment of the story? How do you think the system they opt for regarding supplies will work out for them? Let us know what you think and what supplies would be your zombie apocalypse necessity.
The Dead Life is a Haunted MTL original fiction series.
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So I tried to convince the AI to give me a spider made out of fingers, because there’s no way it could possibly mess that up right? Wink. After multiple unfulfilled requests for finger spiders, I bring you this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva for the month of September…
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: fingers as spider; spider made of fingers; a spider out of nothing but fingers; finger spider hand.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Coming Soon! It’s just a matter of time before these horrifying AI art generated creations come crawling into your home to feast on your blood. For they are hungry and they are evolving…
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: fingers as spider; spider hand shadow puppetry; fingers in shape of spider; spider that is a hand.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders They’re Here! Too late, you let them into the house. You’d better be sure to find and squish them all before they breed and come after you. They are still hungry, and they are still evolving…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
So most people don’t see orca whales as inherently horrific, but then again we don’t tend to see ourselves as humans that way either. That said, we are both apex predators, and the orca have earned the name killer whale for totally valid reasons. They’re kind of like giant sea wolves in their social structuring, and wolves are long thought to be terrifying.
And these aptly named killers have gotten a lot of press lately for sinking yachts and sailing vessels at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. So we decided to explore these giant dolphin kin on this segment of Nightmarish Nature, because we focus a lot on the creepy crawlies but honestly a lot of bugs are just minding their own business (and minding it well, mind you).
On the Hunt
Killer whales have been known to terrorize other denizens of the deep and will often take advantage of spawning and reproductive grounds of other aquatic life, hunting down baby humpback whales migrating from their Caribbean birthing waters or attacking sea lion or seal pups en masse as they take to the sea for the first time (or the fifth or sixth or even as adults).
Some orca are even known to rush the shore and beach themselves to then shimmy back into the water, ideally with something to eat in tow. Or use their ability to make waves to wash their desired prey off of ice floes where they can nab it in the water. And they aren’t picky, when you’re that high up the food chain a grab ‘n go meal of any kind is all good: seals, polar bears, penguins, birds… because those big bodies need a lot of fuel… And killer whales will also toss living prey into the air in socialization, play, training, and just general sport whether they intend to eat the unfortunate creature(s) or not.
Culture Clashes
Each orca pod’s culture and habits differ, as some focus their attentions on nabbing fish and others on marine mammals. These two groups can often coexist in the same area, living very different lifestyles. Some will attack dolphin or porpoise pods (among their closest relatives), and others will clash with pilot whales competing for resources such as mackerel. Pods develop strong bonds and learning is passed down from mother whales; it is widely believed a female orca began the practice of attacking boats, possibly after being struck by one but possibly out of play or curiosity, and has taught it to others now doing so.
Attacking People
So why don’t orca attack and eat humans? Probably because of the missed opportunity, honestly. Killer whales learn about hunting from their mothers, and they simply haven’t been taught to prey on humans as such. In fairness, sharks don’t eat us either. Sure sharks might bite us occasionally, but the fact remains that they spit us out – likely because we aren’t the protein- and fat-rich injured seals they had hoped to be attacking. (We’re kind of scrawny and tough by comparison, probably not worth picking out of the teeth…)
Will orcas learn to attack and eat humans? Perhaps, if they keep attacking boats they may develop a taste for it. If they do, then that will likely seal their fate, because in the clash between apex predators, our engaging in a huge array of tool use is likely to force the issue. And, throughout our own history, we haven’t been known to tolerate animals that we come into conflict with very well at all. Just ask the Asiatic Lion.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
Original Creations
Fourth Time’s a Charm, or Fifth, or Whatever We’re at Now, in Nail Polish Painting
Oops, I did it again. I got more thrift store art to paint in nail polish. Well, fourth time’s a charm, or so they say. Or was that third… I lose track… Anyway, without further ado, I present: more Revisitations paintings by Jennifer Weigel.
I have no idea who did the original woodburning of the sailing ship and clouds on this plaque, but it begged for a giant squid Kraken to come and threaten to sink it. So here we are. Enjoy, and try not to get dragged under.
So here are some more Revisitations that aren’t nearly so horrifying. Some would say only the dragon classifies as a monster. But I figure you’ll get a kick out of them anyway, so they tagged along for the ride… This mailbox scene was originally signed Ryan K and now features a gnome who cannot see if he got anything or no. The dragon seascape was signed E Smith and almost featured a sea serpent or mermaid, but I had to do something with that cloud of noxious fumes looming over the top portion of the painting. And I had this painting of these cabins by Hutchings for a long time before finally adding this pegasus.
But here’s the icing on the cake… I found these two porcelain figurines at the antique store. She was broken in several places and repaired with only a small chip missing from the bottom. and he was filthy. So I cleaned them up and painted them like Zombies, in mixed media with nail polish accents for the blood and their blacklight sensitive eyes. I took it a step further – do you recognize Blue Boy and Pinky? I swear everyone’s grandparents had those prints hanging in their house, along with the praying old man and Christ at Gethesmane. Or maybe I’m just that old. Sigh.
I invite you to follow the link-backs to see more of these pieces if you wish. It’s like an ever building thread. And I’m not going to split these out so you’ll have to just slog back through the pile if you want to see where this started here. Honestly, it’s all kind of the same, give or take, but if this is what rocks your boat then there’s some choppy waters all set up just waiting for you to sail on into them…
Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
