#she's 50-something now and she's a solid driver. she's better than the vast majority of ppl on the road.

[fabulouslygaybean]

my dad is such a cunt

[andykoons]

PROLOGUE - PATIENT(S) ZERO

Fucking zombies. Of all the seemingly impossible calamities in the entire universe to wind up being real, it just had to be fucking zombies. Not dragons, not robots, not aliens. Nope. Hell, we’d have been ok with killer fairies. I’d kick the everliving shit out of a killer fairy. Curb-stomp that little bitch into rainbow dust. Personally, I think the world would be less chaotic, and would definitely smell a bit better if it was the killer fairy apocalypse instead of the rotting, biting, putrid one we were handed. But no, mother nature is a bitch, and she must have been fed up with humanity, because she didn’t give us killer fairies, she gave us fucking zombies. Who can blame her? Humanity has been systematically raping her for the last several hundred years.

I guess I better give you some backstory. Nobody knows how it started, we just know the when and where. It happened in the emergency room of a hospital in Tokyo. It was the perfect breeding ground for a contagious disease. Patient, or rather, patients zero, (depending on how you look at it), was a twenty-three year old woman who was eight months pregnant. The disease got out of the hospital and into a city densely populated with 13.35 million people. This was two years ago. It spread like a wild fire thanks to public transportation and something called the “Incubation Period” which is the time it takes to show symptoms after being exposed to the disease. This particular virus is called Nakashima Virus One, named after Dr. Hitoshi Nakashima, the virologist who got the first good look at the beast, or NV-1 for short. Typically, new diseases and viruses are named based on location, host, and effect, so it actually should have been named something like Japanese Reanimation Disease, or J-RAD. But given how fast it took for this thing to go from bad to worse left little time for a large number of protocols to be followed. Besides, J-RAD sounds like a Japanese boy-band from the 90’s. NV-1 has an incubation period between fourteen and eighteen hours, and symptom numero uno is being a fucking zombie. It’s like a switch gets flipped and all of a sudden, uncle Jerry looks delicious.

The Japanese military tried to quarantine the inner city but Tokyo’s population is, or was, packed so tightly that the measly five percent of the city they tried to lock down still contained upwards of 670,000 exposed people, most of which had already turned. Four days into the outbreak, NV-1 had swallowed Tokyo and the United States stepped in and dropped a dry fuel hydrogen bomb in the middle of the city. The bomb was designed after the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb that the U.S. tested in the 50’s, which, including the surrounding cities, caused the deaths of over 3.3 million, of which maybe half were infected. Nature has a nasty way of bringing up the past.

NV-1 is a resilient little bastard, though. It got out. Maybe it became airborne after it’s many hosts were turned to red mist. Maybe a handful of privates were bitten and brought it back to their various bases in the Southwest. Nobody really knows, but no more than a day later, there were NV-1 cases popping up on South Korea’s east coast, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, crawling up to North Korea and eventually to Beijing. When the reports came in that Beijing was overrun, we all knew we were fucked. All flights were grounded but it was already too late. The vast network of airliners was very instrumental in the dispersion of NV-1 into every major city on the planet. Like I said, fucked.

The first case in the states came from the LAX airport in Los Angeles, the second at JFK in New York. The U.S. population was sandwiched between the coasts which gave way pretty early. I found that particularly surprising. We all had zombie movies, video games, shows, comic books and various other mediums that were saturated in zombie culture, and it was not uncommon to hear about someone’s “zombie plan”. Most involved drunken frat boys punching their way to victory. Because of this, I always assumed the zombie apocalypse would be over in fifteen minutes. If it was on everybody’s mind, then we should have been prepared, right? Well, the reality of shooting your friend/mother/father/child in the face to preserve your own life is a pill few people have the balls to swallow. It’s not pretty, it’s survival.

The biggest difference between the undead of lore and the undead of reality is they’re just broken humans. Dead, broken humans. The CDC in Seattle had been working on something that could fight back on a biological scale, some said there was a breakthrough, a cure even. However, something went wrong and the laboratory, with all the technology, and people necessary in stopping this virus, went up in flames. Some say it was an explosion, others say it was domestic terrorism, conspiracy theorists say it was the Illuminati, and racists say it was the Jews.

In movies and television, zombies had a distinct sound, a growl or a snarl, a gurgly sound of gasses escaping their bloated stomachs, making it easier for the audience to: A. Sympathize with the heroes against a singular foe, and B. Make the distinction between human and zombie. Not in reality, though. When you get bit, you don’t all of a sudden develop the vocal chords of a velociraptor, at least, not until they being to rot. You still have the same ones as before. So, do you want to know what newly-turned zombies sound like?

People.

Yeah, that will fuck with you for a while. No, they don’t talk, but real quick, make a sound with your mouth, a note, like talking without any actual words, enunciation, or pronunciation of anything. Just a solid noise. That’s what they sound like when they’re docile, when they’re hungry, they scream. Just like a normal person would if they were terrified. This cost probably just as many lives as the disease did. People scream when they’re scared, zombies scream when they’re hungry, in the middle of a panic-stricken crowd of people, nobody can tell human from zombie. 

It took a grand total of eleven days for NV-1 to go global and claim it’s first million. A month later, it’s first billion. Now nobody is keeping track. At least, not of the dead. I heard one guy say that there could be less than four million survivors left worldwide. I’m not a mathematician, but on a global scale, four million out of seven billion is like the preverbal drop of water in the ocean. But like so many other details in this zombie clusterfuck, nobody knows.

There are no governments left anywhere, so the military personnel that run the safe zone we are living in are getting their orders from the highest ranking guy in the zone. There’s no coordination with other safe zones because there’s no communication. Cell phones are a thing of the past, obviously, as well as electricity, pizza, and literally anything clean. We don’t know how many safe zones are out there other than Union Pier on the Lake Michigan coast and the one up in Alamo Township, that’s the only one we have any sort of communication with. We send a couple guys in a truck over there to trade supplies if needed and the communication I spoke of is usually nothing more than, “Yeah, they’re not dead yet.”

Rumors about Union Pier have been circling around the zone. Reports of walls instead of fences, fully staffed security, and next to a nearly infinite water and food supply. Sure, the winters suck with the lake effect snow, but that’s advantageous when you consider that zombies don’t do well in the snow. The Alamo Township Safe Zone, however, seems to be a carbon copy of Leonidas. A small community surrounded by weak fences.

Walls. That word alone makes my mouth water. To be honest, we really have no idea if Union Pier is even still standing, but it makes me feel somewhat lighter to entertain the possibility of a walled-in community. We are constantly repairing the fences around our zone. Razor wire can only do so much when you have thousands of pounds of rotting flesh pushing against it. It was the fact that we have fences instead of walls that almost got my ass bitten six months ago.

The Alamo Township Safe Zone is about ten miles northeast of Kalamazoo, which is about thirty miles northeast of us. It’s the closest civilization to us that we have concrete evidence to show we’re not alone. Every once in a while we would send Paul, our agriculture guy up there to make sure they weren’t fucking up their crops, they would also send people to us so Jared, our cook, could show them how to properly cook game.

So this whole time I’ve been talking my ass off and you don’t know a damn thing about me. Sorry. My name is Milo Becker. I have a wife, Heather, and three boys, Wilson, (we call him Willis), Everett, and Luke, ages six, four, and one, respectively. My wife’s half-sister, Addison Fields, lives with us. Heather also has two half-brothers, David and Caleb. David is Addison’s full brother. He had the same mother as Heather, but he and Addison had a different father. He was somewhat of a recluse and we never heard anything from him after Beijing fell. Caleb was a marine. He had the same father as Heather but a different mother. He was deployed about a month before the United States sent troops to Japan. He said he wasn’t allowed to say where he was going, but we all knew once the news came in that were in Tokyo. Our safe zone is in a tiny town called Leonidas, (pronounced Lee-AW-nuh-dis, not Lee-oh-NIGH-dus like that Spartan king with painted-on abs). Leonidas, Alamo Township, and Union Pier are in our favorite mitten shaped state, Michigan. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life, fry cook, barista, nurse’s aide, driver for a medical supply company, etcetera. I even dabbled in blacksmithing for a bit, at the time it was a hobby, but now, any time someone needs their shovels fixed or a pickaxe sharpened they come to me. Now it’s a skill that has come in very handy. All of my experience landed me a job as a handy man in our safe zone. I know a little about a lot so I’ve made myself useful by fixing everybody’s shit and endlessly repairing the fences. Heather worked in a daycare for nearly a decade so she volunteered to watch everybody’s kids while they did whatever job they needed to do. Addy also worked in a dozen different jobs so she works with me. We do good together, we manage to get some stuff done when we’re not goofing off. When I moved away from my family in Kansas, she became my sister just as much as Heather’s. God, I have no idea what happened to my folks. The last thing I ever heard from any of them is a phone call I got from my Dad, telling me he was trying to get his congregation together in his church to wait out the plague. He’s a pastor, that’s where I get my long-windedness from. I may not believe in god, but I could talk in front of a group of people for hours about the things I believe in, mostly Star Wars or Doctor Who. After that phone call, I never heard from him again. As for my mother, she was living in Ozark, Missouri when the shit hit the fan. Her and her boyfriend had a house out in the hills. They might very well be alive. I was so busy getting my family to safety that by the time I had calmed down enough to worry about her, the phones were down. I had never met her boyfriend before, but he is, or was, a career military man, so I keep telling myself that she’s in good hands.

My older sister lived in Olathe, Kansas with her husband and three children. Her husband, Steve, was an outdoorsy type. Hunting, fishing, camping, that was his life. If anybody can survive out here, it’s him. And I can’t think of anybody better equipped to protect my sister and my nephews.

My younger sister, on the other hand, was in the process of moving to California to shack up with a guy she met on the internet. I don’t know anything about the guy. Don’t even remember his name, but he must have been a good guy. My sister is a tough little bitch, and not easy to impress. So if this guy convinced her that he was good enough for her to relocate across the country, he must be good. My only worry is that she was in, or at least heading to California, and the heavily populated states got it the worst.

Her means of meeting him gets no judgement from me, since the internet is exactly how I found myself, a Kansas boy, living in Michigan. Heather and I met online when I was in college. I went to a Christian university in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I was expelled near the end of my first year because I was suspected of sneaking off campus and smoking that dangerous gateway drug, marijuana. Long story short, I was sneaking off campus and smoking a metric fuck-ton of weed, and was caught because I was sitting in the hallway of my dorm building, laughing my ass off at an air vent. I was inexperienced with drugs, to say the least.

The Leonidas safe zone, (we’ll call it LSZ from now on), was established mostly by the citizens living there and was later discovered by the remaining military and… I don’t know, taken over? We didn’t mind the extra firepower and security, but they definitely run the show now. They were the first to really push to get us working, which not only improved morale, but hey, a safe zone against a horde of zombies is going to have it’s hiccups here and there, and to keep those at bay, we needed a workforce. So good on them.

The first year of LSZ life was nothing but trial and error. The first thing we learned was that guns are loud, and loud things attract zombies. I remember someone once said that “Fire is your best friend, and a zombie’s worst enemy.” That guy was eaten by flaming zombies for being an idiot. The key to survival in this new, terrible world is silence and invisibility, so the light from a fire can attract the dead from miles away.

Your real best friend is a blade made with good steel, expertly forged, hardened, and tempered with the right equipment, unfortunately I have none of those things so I make what I can with what steel I can find. I have a homemade forge that I made with the deck of a push mower. I took the engine off and turned it upside down. The hole left in the middle was a good place to attach a grate and force air through it. My anvil and bellows was found at a nearby farm. If there is one thing the area has to offer, it’s tools. Leonidas is in the middle of several thousand acres of farmland and there are close to thirty farm houses in a five mile radius. Hammers, anvils, hardy tools, tongs, anything a blacksmith could ever need is only a short, yet terrifying, walk away.

There are probably about forty people living in the LSZ. Most of them are from surrounding farm towns, Athens, Colon, Bronson, Mendon, Centreville, and Sherwood. Many families share houses since there’s only about twenty houses in town. The actual size of Leonidas is much larger, but the small, one light neighborhood is where the bulk of the residents lived. The rest was farmland.

I guess I should mention the other family we live with. We share a house with the Hasely family. Jared, his wife Mamie, and their sixteen year old daughter, Keysha. They came from Coldwater. They were trying to make it to Kalamazoo but opted to stay off the main highway and instead went the back way, which, you guessed it, brought them through Leonidas. At first they just passed through, but they came right back a few hours later, without their vehicle. They had run into some undead related trouble. They’re good people. Probably the only black people to ever set foot in Leonidas since god knows when. At first there was a bit of rustled feathers with the older folks, but Captain Manallis made it abundantly clear that they either keep their racist shit to themselves or get the fuck out of town. Either way, after a few months of Jared’s cooking for everybody, it was all ebony and ivory, even for the ancient racists.

He went to culinary school where he met his wife. After graduating, they got married and opened a restaurant together in Coldwater called “Jamie’s.” An obvious welding of their names. I had never been there but whenever I passed it, it always looked busy. Which says a lot more than a food critic can. I can tell you this for sure, that dude can do beautiful things with a rabbit. He would just walk out into the woods and come back with a bag full of herbs I’ve never even heard of. It all looked like grass and leaves to me, but it was like LSD for the taste buds.

My family and I were in Colon, when it all happened and by the time we left, we got stuck in Leonidas due to a flat tire, which I had never had to deal with before. We were taken in by a family whose name I forget, since they left the very next day. We were on our way to Battle Creek, at the time thinking a bigger city would be safer. You have to drive through Leonidas to get to Battle Creek. Long story short, we just stayed here and helped build what we have now. It’s not perfect, but with a lot, (good god, a fuck-ton), of TLC, it’s safe for the most part. And, by the way, I can change the shit out of a flat tire now.

We have rules, well, they started as rules but you might as well call them laws now. The most important is to stay quiet. Shouting matches are bound to happen, but they’re best if hashed out indoors. Guns are a big no no, unless it’s your only option or you’re far enough away from the compound that anything that hears it will be drawn away from the rest of the community, such as when you’re hunting.

As I pointed out before, fire is also frowned upon. Zombies have eyes. They use their eyes. So anything that produces a lot of light needs to be put out. The solar powered street lamps in town had to be shot out, (we weren’t observing rule one yet), after we got stormed in the middle of the night.

The curfew is pretty strict. As soon as the sun goes down, only the night watch is allowed to be out. It’s not necessarily a “shoot on sight” type strict, but the night watch won’t let you off the hook without a well-intentioned black eye.

The top ranking guy in the LSZ, Captain Manallis, is a hardass, but underneath his rough and tough exterior is the softy, chewy, caramel center of a halfway decent human being. I think I pegged him in the beginning as someone who puts on a face of authority because we need it to survive. The man has seen some shit too. He served four tours in Afghanistan and the stories he had about his time overseas were chilling indeed. He and his squad were on a military base in Battle creek when they were overrun and fled. I don’t know what made them think of little ol’ Leonidas in the middle of East Jesus Nowhere, but they’re here now, leaderless and self-enlisted, and I’m pretty thankful for them. He stood at roughly six feet, with salt and pepper hair. He still wore camouflage even though the rest of his men donned blue jeans and t-shirts. It helped with the image of order though.

Most of us have been here for a little over two years and the climate is systematic and routine. We get by, in a place to wait while the zombies can starve to death… again… re-die? I don’t know if they ever will starve. At least it’s something to hope for in a seemingly hopeless world.

The next day is going to be long. Addy and I have to inspect the fences and check the town bulletin board for work orders that have accrued since we called it a day. That’s the extent of excitement for our lives now. I used to want to do big things. I wanted to be a writer, go to film school, record an album. Anything creative. And then, just when I was making enough money to get Heather through school to be an ultrasound tech and eventually to put myself through film school, this shit happens. Just when everything was finally going good, zombies happened.

Fucking zombies.

[itsiotrecords-blog]

http://ift.tt/2qQ7GHo

Artwork can sell for millions of dollars, so it’s always a newsworthy event when someone discovers a new piece by a famous artist. The vast majority of found art is found in storage units or secure vaults, but in some cases people have found incredible artwork where you’d least expect.

#1 Nazi Artwork In Tiny Apartment In 2012, police discovered a collection of over 1,300 pieces of art in a small Munich apartment. Most of the work had been feared destroyed during Nazi rule in Germany. The collection had belonged to the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had used his position on the Nazi Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art to hide away and sell a huge number of paintings. The artwork, most of which appeared to have been acquired legally, was inherited by his son, Cornelius Gurliit. Cornelius hoarded most of the work in his small apartment, only selling pieces when it was financially necessary. Following his death in May of 2014, most of the artwork passed to a museum in Switzerland. Police only made the discovery after Cornelius was found to be in possession of €9,000 on a train. With no apparent income, tax authorities obtained a warrant to investigate his apartment. The artwork came to light during that search.

#2 Painting Found Inside Couch In 2007, a German student in Berlin bought a pullout couch at a flea market. When she unfolded the couch at home she found a small oil painting inside. The painting was a piece called “Preparation to Escape to Egypt” and has an unknown origin, though it is believed that the artist was part of the inner circle of the better known Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni. It was painted at some point between 1605 and 1620 according to the auction house appointed to sell the work. It went on to be purchased in Hamburg by an anonymous bidder for a price of $27,630, making the student 100 times what she originally paid for the couch.

#3 Tamayo Piece In Pile Of Trash A New York resident came across a painting lying in the trash while walking through Manhattan in 2003. Elizabeth Gibson knew nothing about modern art but decided to take the piece home with her. After spending four years trying to find out information about the painting she finally saw a website that listed it as having appeared on Antiques Roadshow. The painting was by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, who died in 1991. The piece “Tres Personajes” was painted in 1970 and had previously belonged to an anonymous Houston collector. It was stolen while the collector and his wife were moving and had been lost ever since. Upon learning this, Elizabeth turned it in and it went on to sell for over one million dollars. She received a percentage of the seller fee as well as a $15,000 reward for finding it.

#4 Golden Buddha Found Inside Statue A statue of Buddha dating from the 13th or 14th century was moved around various temples for a number of years before eventually settling at Wat Traimit in Thailand. This temple was not large enough to hold the sculpture so the people in charge chose to leave it outside, where it was protected only by a tin roof. In 1954, the decision was made to house the statue in a newly constructed part of the temple. While moving the statue a rope accidentally snapped and the statue crashed to the floor. Workers discovered that plaster had been chipped off and solid gold could be seen beneath the surface. After carefully removing the rest of the plaster, they found that the statue was in fact made of gold. At some point in the past, the statue had been covered in plaster and painted over. Scholars theorized it was to deter it from being stolen by hiding its value. Over time, people forgot about the gold sculpture underneath the plaster, believing it to be just another ordinary statue.

#5 Jackson Pollock Painting From Thrift Store During the 1990s, retired truck driver Teri Horton entered a thrift store and saw a strange painting. After negotiating the price down from $7 to $5, she took it home intending to give it to a friend as a gift. However, an art teacher happened to notice the painting and its unique style, and believed that it could have been the work of Jackson Pollock. Horton then went on a quest to have the painting authenticated, enlisting the help of forensic experts when auction houses would do nothing to verify it. Matching a partial fingerprint on the painting with some of Pollock’s on his art equipment seemed to prove that it was genuine. Although there is still intense debate over whether it’s authentic, she has since had numerous offers for the painting and it’s currently valued at $50 million by a Toronto gallery.

#6 Movie Poster Found Behind Artwork Laura Stouffer, an art dealer and collector, was looking through the items in a thrift shop when she noticed a print of “Shepard’s Call.” The painting shows a dog who has found a lost lamb in the snow, and was originally painted at some point between 1850 and 1880. She immediately recognized the print and bought it for a relatively low price. Intending to clean the incredibly dusty picture, she took the backing off to discover that between the frame and the print was a poster — an original window card from the 1930 classic film All Quiet on the Western Front, which theaters would have used to advertise showings. Very little memorabilia remains from the film, making the poster more valuable than the print she initially bought.

#7 Abandoned Apartment Contains Rare Painting An apartment that had been abandoned for 70 years was discovered to hold a painting by the artist Giovanni Boldini that eventually sold for $2.5 million. The original owner of the apartment had fled Paris before World War II began, but kept up payments on it despite never returning to it from her new home in the south of France. When she died in 2010, experts had to enter the home to catalog all the items and belongings. While the apartment had a number of expensive items scattered around beneath layers of dust, the painting was what immediately grabbed everyone’s attention. Although they suspected it may have been by Boldini they could find no mention of the painting in any records. However, upon searching the home further they found a note signed by Boldini himself that confirmed the painting was genuine.

#8  Venus de Milo Buried Underground This famous statue was accidentally found when a man from the Greek village of Tripiti came across it. Yorgos Kentrotas found the Venus de Milo buried underneath a field he was working in. With the help of a local farmer, Yorgos was able to dig up the entire sculpture and a number of other statues in a few hours. A French naval officer who was on the island immediately arranged for the statue to be purchased by the French ambassador. It was later presented to King Louis XVIII as a gift, who then donated the statue to the Louvre.

#9 Ancient Statue Used As Bike Rack Two Egyptologists discovered a 2,700-year-old statue of the Pharaoh Taharqa in the basement of a British museum. The statue, a piece of Kushite art, shows the Egyptian king portrayed as a god marching forward in victory. The artwork had been left in the basement of Southampton’s God’s House Tower archaeological museum for over a hundred years. The staff, unaware that the statue was of any value, had been using it as a bike rack. Its importance only became known by chance, when the two Egyptian experts were visiting the museum and noticed it. No one has any idea how anyone could leave such a historic work of art in a basement for so long. However, the statue has since been moved to its own gallery, meaning staff at the museum will have to find something else to rack their bikes on.

#10 Ancient Disc Underneath a City On February 25, 1978, a number of electrical workers were digging up roads in order to begin laying new wiring. After digging for two meters, they eventually hit a large chunk of stone. Careful excavation revealed a giant stone disk that weighed around 20 tons. The disk had a detailed carving that depicted the Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui. This discovery lead to a search of the whole area for other lost work. After demolishing blocks of apartments, archaeologists began working on digging up the surrounding land and found that it was the site of an ancient Aztec temple that had been destroyed by Spanish colonial forces. The project went on to unearth the remains of the pyramid temple along with a number of skeletal remains and smaller statues and carvings. Most of the findings are now available in the Templo Mayor Museum just 200 yards from where the original disk was found.

Source: TopTenz