Why I believe in Zombies! Firefighters see a lot of reality. Sometimes too much. So it might come as a surprise to hear that, after twenty years of firefighting, I, like most teen-age boys, believe in Zombies. Let’s look at the evidence. First of course, there was the cow. We’d been paged to a rollover involving a truck hauling cattle. When we arrived on scene, there were live cattle grazing in the median and dead cows scattered on the roadbed. We’d been paged because one of the cowboys who was hauling dead cows out of the back of the truck had been kicked — allegedly by a dead cow — and broken his ankle. Their story was that rigor mortis had set in and cow’s leg just “snapped.” Haha. Sure. One of our medics peered into the back of the dark truck and whispered back to us, “She’s not dead! It’s a zombie!” Chalk it up to firefighter humor, but it rang true. Case number two: Rattlesnakes. I admit I am not a fan of rattlers. I have history with snakes that reaches way back to my childhood. In New Mexico, it just has become more nightmarish. Once, walking to my office in the morning, still essentially asleep, I heard this, “chzzzzzzz” sound. I looked and between my legs was a prairie rattler. I screamed, jumped, threw my coffee and my phone twenty yards over our wall. Another time, with a prairie rattler in our garage, I did my best imitation of an NFL running back. I dodged and feinted while trying to move snake into a bucket with a broom. All this while my loving family laughed at me (from a distance). But those snake were alive. The zombie snake was on the road by our office in town. It had been clearly run over and was dead. Let me repeat that: dead. Dead-dead. Not wanting our out-of-town clients to see the dead snake, I (foolishly) got out of my car, got a stick intending to move it. When I touched the dead, run-over snake, it struck at me! Again, jumping and screaming ensued. But this time I ran back to my car, backed up and ran over the dead (I mean Zombie) snake four or five times swearing a blue streak in terror. Before we move on to inanimate zombies, I would like to point that our EMS protocol manual (our EMT bible) specifically states that the removed head of rattlers may still envenomate. Seriously? A dead snake can still bite? Who thought of that one? Talk about proof positive. Let us now move to inanimate objects. At another crash scene I was standing on the roadbed, looking down into a ravine where a car had landed after zooming off the road. No one was badly hurt. I was just manning a radio. There was a State Police car parked on the shoulder about thirty yards from me. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that said car started to move. Then I noticed there was no driver. Suddenly the car lurched to the right and began careening down the ravine. It was headed right for our crew and patient. I couldn’t get words out of my mouth! Finally, in a somewhat of a strangled voice I yelled the only word I could think of, “CLEAR!” They jumped out of the way, the car slammed into trees. The zombies had been thwarted again! It is nerve wracking to think that even inanimate objects can have malevolent intent, right? But the cases keep building up. A motorcycle dumped it’s driver and sped down the interstate, driverless for almost a half mile before a quick thinking and courageous guy wedged the out-of-control zombie bike against the guardrail with his car. A true hero of the zombie wars. Of course, the bike was not out of control, it was a zombie motorcycle, it knew exactly what it was trying to do. I think I can rest my case. Finally, firefighters love to give advice. Here’s mine: Never sleep! Trust nothing! Don’t trust your toaster. Those dead mice you trapped and threw in the garbage? Are you sure they’re still there? Or are they lurching back towards the kitchen? Nervous? I am . . . always.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 17:12:52 +0000
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