Authors: Gregg Cocking
Owen says that they kind of figured that that was the end of the power, but they are conserving whatever power the generators have for as long as possible – man, I would hate to be there – Owen says that tensions are running high and that even he and Johan, who have been mates since they could first walk, have been getting at each other’s throats, and Owen said that if they weren’t separated at one stage by some of the others boarded up there, there was a huge likelihood that they would have come to blows. Not good.
He reckons that they might be able to charge their phones from the generator, but we had to say our goodbyes – not looking forward to speaking to my parents in the morning... I know my mom is going to be in tears. She says that they have had to rethink the fa
8:20pm, May 31
Hey, I’m back! Missed me? I suppose you are wondering how I got online again? Did the power miraculously come back? The simple answer is... no. But first, before I let you know how I have managed to get back up and running, I’ve got to let you know what happened a couple of days ago on Friday night, the day after the power died.
Okay. So I was asleep – I have been going to bed a lot earlier since the power went out, firstly because there is absolutely nothing to do, and secondly, it makes living through this whole thing a hell of a lot scarier when you know you can’t just jump up and turn on the lights. Sleeping, nightmares apart, makes this all that little bit easier to deal with.
So anyways, I was fast asleep when I was suddenly blinded by light – my first thought was that the power was back on – thank every high and mighty power ever – but it wasn’t, it was my phone which I keep next to me at night just in case anyone phones – remember, my phone has been on silent since I first saw one of the infected from my window.
So there I was, seriously shaken out of my sleep – I checked my clock – 4:24am – and looked back at my phone. I blinked. And blinked again. Then I rubbed my eyes and looked at my phone again. And it wasn’t the dwindling battery that had caught my eye. It was the name of the caller. It was Lil.
I grabbed at the phone and answered – “Lily, baby. Lil? Hello? Lily?” But nothing. It wasn’t that the call was dead, it was that nobody was answering me. I listened as hard as I could, struggling to distinguish whether the sound of the howling dog was coming from the phone or from outside my complex. When the phone clicked and the engaged tone alternated with the howling dog, I had my answer.
Now what the fuck was that? A call from Lil’s phone at four in the morning? Weird... And here’s the thing – she can’t get signal from the game reserve. So that must mean that she or whoever dialled my number is in cellular range, which means that the phone is at least in Hoedspruit (a small town which is your first stop when you make your way from the game reserve back to ‘civilisation’). But if it was her, why didn’t she speak? Was it just her way of saying hi and letting me know that she is okay? I guess that you are probably wondering whether I called back? I didn’t. What if it was her saying ‘hi’ the only way she could without letting the infected know that she was there by talking? And what if I called and gave her away and alerted them to her presence? But now you are probably thinking, then why didn’t she just sms her. And I can’t answer you there… to be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind.
Enough of that, I’m getting emotional again. Let’s get onto how it can be that I am online when there is no power.
The simple answer is solar power. The long answer is, well, long.
I used a 12V DC-DC converter designed to run a laptop off a car's lighter socket (it was in the box for the Macbook that I stole/borrowed). Then through some research that I came across in an old copy of Popular Mechanics on sustainable energy, I found out that 12V is a major standard, and the majority of solar panels and off-the-shelf solutions are designed either to charge 12V lead-acid batteries, or for a 12V system, which means once a laptop looks like a lead-acid battery, it will work with most solar panels as-is, no DIY electronics required. All very confusing, but this meant that all I needed was solar panels... but more of that later. Solar power voltage is hugely variable (clouds passing over sun, angle in sky, etc., etc.,), so I let the DC-DC converter deal with that. I have permanently mounted the panels to my balcony wall – it gets sun about 80% of the day. What is a bonus is that if I connect my phone to the laptop via USB, it charges! Brilliant! The charge doesn’t last long on the laptop then, but once fully charged the phone should last me a couple of days.
Okay, so how did I manage to hook all of this up then? Well, remember Flat 31? The guy with all the electrical stuff? Barry? Well, after lying around for a day feeling sorry for myself, I suddenly realised that I had to do something, either I would die of boredom, or, worse, die of being killed by the infected. So I planned another raid.
The next day at midday I did my checks and saw that the coast was clear. I made my way down to Barry’s place wielding a big empty bag, my nail gun for protection and my screwdriver to gain entry. Once in and having caught my breath back from the 100m dash (seriously, if the streets weren’t filled with people out to kill me, I may have considered starting to run just to try and get some semblance of fitness back), I went straight for the cupboards which I had first rummaged through a week or so ago. Anything that looked like it could be plugged into anything was squeezed into the bag – I even removed all the cabling from his Xbox, TV, DVD player and VCR (who still has a VCR anyways?), just in case. I then went through to his room and to his computer for something that I had noticed, probably subconsciously without really noticing it when I was there last – a UPS (an uninterrupted power supply for those of you who don’t know). That would surely come in handy.
I scoured the place once more in case I had missed anything and headed back to my spot to unpack. Then I was out again with the empty bag. Further into the complex. Further away from the safety of my place.
I remembered seeing a couple of people who had those solar powered lights in their gardens – you know the ones that are supposed to look like rocks? So I was off to see what I could get – I first tried the gardens around me – nothing – no solar lights and none of the infected. So I headed further from my unit. The ones I thought I remembered seeing where closer to the gate, so I headed that way slowly, stopping every few metres to check for any signs of life. A couple of units away from mine I struck it lucky – they had two of those big ones (the ones sort of on pegs), so I reached over the wall and pulled those out - they have pretty big solar panels so I was chuffed with those, but I was sure that I needed more. Quite a lot more. I left one in the road to be picked up on the way back and carried the other with me – those pegs are serious weapons.
A couple of units later I stopped in my tracks, frozen to the spot. There was Huge, lying in a garden on the other side of the wall mere metres from me. I could feel the sweat dripping off my brow. I slowly lowered myself to the ground, nail gun at the ready. If she was able to smell the dead dog that was stuck in a sealed off car, surely she would be able to smell me over the wall? I raised my head slowly to peer over the wall – she hadn’t moved. I crawled a metre and a half forward so that I could have a look through the gate. The back of her head faced me and all I could see was her matted hair and her blood stained floral dress rising slowly and descending again as she breathed. Her left hand, stretched out away from her body, flickered as the sun caught her wedding ring. Where is your husband, I thought, and a chill ran down my spine as I pictured him creeping up on me from behind. I checked my surroundings again and steadied myself.
Then I shot her. One quick squeeze of the trigger and her undulating stomach stopped moving. The nail disappeared into her skull and a thin line of thick, murky blood trickled from the small hole that it made. I felt sick. Not because of the stuff oozing out of her head, but because I had just killed someone. Something. I once hit a bird while I was driving, and I think I might have killed it on purpose, and this felt strangely similar. The bird had been in the middle of the road while I was driving, and as I exclaimed, “Move, you stupid bird,” I hit the accelerator instead of brake. And killed it. There were feathers everywhere and I had to take my car to the car wash just to get rid of the bird guts on my radiator. I’m sure something inside made me speed up on purpose. I felt terrible for weeks afterwards. But that was just a bird, this was a person. Sort of.
The only good thing, I suppose, is that I now know that the nail gun that I have been carrying around for protection is actually a viable weapon. And all those hours I wasted shooting at business cards with the nail gun when I should have been designing some menu for some or other new age restaurant that was bound to go out of business within six months was actually worth it.
Huge’s husband popped into my mind, but before I could imagine what he would have thought of what I had just done to his wife, I slowly got up and moved on. I didn’t want to be out there for longer than I had to be. Luck was obviously with me, as the next garden wall that I looked over was one of the ones that I had remembered from before – lying strategically around the garden were four solar powered lights crudely disguised as ‘rocks’. I jumped over the wall so as not to make a noise by using the garden gate (I had been woken uncountable times in the middle of the night by people coming home and opening their gates). I grabbed the four rocks, unzipped the bag and carefully placed them at the bottom. I knew that four would be nowhere near enough, so I hopped back over the wall and continued vigilantly on my search.
To cut a long story slightly shorter, after about half an hour of creeping around the complex, I made my way back with a grand total of 13 solar powered lights – eight of the ‘rocks’, and after another slice of luck, three of the larger pole mounted lights. I had a figure of about fifteen in mind when I left, so thirteen was close enough for me. I didn’t have any more encounters with the infected other than poor Huge, although I did hear them, I think. In one unit towards the pool I could hear that unmistakable grunting/breathing, and in a downstairs unit where I had jumped over the wall to get two solar powered lights, I shat myself when I heard a banging on the window just a few metres behind me. I jumped, nail gun at the ready, and saw two hands outlined by those white, thin curtain things – (liners? I don’t know the name, I am a guy). I couldn’t see a face, just the big hands alternating as they rhythmically banged on the window. I wasn’t going to hang around to see who/what it was, or to see if the continuous banging would eventually break the window. I was out of there in a flash.
Okay, so I got back to my place and after locking myself in and making sure that the thing inside unit 78 that had seen me hadn’t got out and followed me back, I laid out my loot on the kitchen counter. Shit... power is running low. Will get back to you tomorrow after a day of charging the battery.
Take care,
Sam W
5:47pm, June 1
Hi bloggers. Sorry about that – it seems that my solar power allows me about 45 minutes of computer power a day, and that’s making sure that I don’t run the batteries flat in case I need to charge my phone or iPod.
Okay, so to get back to the story that I was unable to finish yesterday… I laid out everything that I had found from both Barry’s place and from the gardens on my kitchen counter and looked at it. Then I took a step back and looked at it for a bit longer. Then I picked up a solar powered light. Then I put it down again. Then some cables. And I put that down again too. Then, somehow, I managed to make sense of everything without really knowing what I was doing. I removed all the solar panels from the lights and connected them together, gluing their backs to the bottom of a big cardboard box. Using some of Barry’s cabling I made sure that they were all linked in sequence. When I was done I stepped back and looked at what I had a created – a rather large-ish 50cm x 50cm give or take a few centimetres here or there, solar panel. I was impressed.
I then found the UPS, also from Barry, and after a bit of wiring and rewiring, and then some further rewiring, I plugged my makeshift solar panel in and the UPS whirred. Not much, but it made an audible noise. I would have screamed with joy if it wasn’t for the fact that zombies would have heard me. It was now close to 5pm, and although there was only a dwindling amount of winter sunlight left on the balcony, I just had to try it out. I eased open the door, placed the panel gingerly in the quickly diminishing afternoon winter sun, passed the cable through the window and plugged it into the UPS. Nothing. I then remembered to turn the UPS back on, and… success!!! The lights that had been red started to flash green intermittently, meaning that it was receiving a charge. Until the sun disappeared three minutes later.
But that was enough to give me hope, and after a bad night’s sleep peppered with dreams of sun and enormous solar panels which melted my fingers when I touched them, I awoke to check on my ‘invention’. I was a bit over eager and had to wait until just before ten before the first rays of sun started stretching over the balcony, but as they hit the panel the red light changed to green. I had done it, I thought. Just to be sure, I plugged my Mac into the UPS and it registered that it was charging – yay! And then I tried my phone. And then my iPod – they both worked!