Zombie Con 2006: The Year They Came Back
or
“Lock and Loll!!!!”
I love the smell of Zombie Con. It’s the smell of fire. It’s the smell of mud and dirt. It’s the smell of people who’ve bathed in a swimming hole for three days. It’s the smell of bourbon, gin, vodka, warm beer, Jaeger, and orange flavored drink. It’s the smell of the woods as the sun sets and things begin to cool down. More than any of that though, it’s the smell of forty awesome people who’ve come together for four days of fun and camaraderie. Emphasis on the camaraderie.
Last weekend was Zombie Con 2006: The Year They Came Back, Zombie Squad’s annual wilderness retreat. It’s the event where we charge people $75 a head for the opportunity to walk uphill for an entire weekend. If you were there, you know I’m only slightly exaggerating about that claim. We doubled the size of last year’s Zcon by opening registration for forty participants. Forty survival enthusiasts hell-bent on surviving the coming zombie apocalypse, and saving as much whiskey as possible from the rotting hands of the walking dead. I had a great time, and hopefully they did as well.
I left Wednesday night, a couple of hours after work. I packed up my bag and my tent, a bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel Bourbon, a bottle of Four Roses Yellow Label, and a bottle of Caol Ila, 12 year single malt Scotch whiskey, which while intended for someone else, I knew I’d get plenty of. I had everything I needed to guarantee a productive weekend. After a two-hour drive to Irondale, Missouri, I pulled up to cabin where the pre-Zcon activities were underway. It was a night of drinking good whiskey and catching up with people we hadn’t seen for almost a year around a nice big fire. I’d love to regale you with the tales we told around that fire, but some of us may have political aspirations. You’ll have to use your imagination.
Thursday morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn and motored our gear to the campsite and began the process of setting of Zcon Base Camp. To recap a point I made last year about this event – Zombie Con takes place on a cliff. Setting up camp requires multiple trips down one cliff and up another, carrying gear from the trucks to the site. So, with the help of some of our attendees, we started the procession and had everything unloaded in no time flat. A few hours later, and we had the entire campsite set up. Which was good, because Thursday afternoon brought tons of rain that stuck around well into Thursday night. Luckily, we’d foreseen this event and we’d set up a giant tent that everyone could huddle under and wait out the storm in good company. Finally, the rain stopped and we brought out the generator and theater set up. Ashnack’s Bag of Doom supplied us with a number of movies for the weekend, but none as great as the masterpiece Wild Zero, starring Japanese rock gods, Guitar Wolf.
Friday, of course, was range day. There’s nothing more inviting to a group of zombaclypse oriented survivalists than a pristine, self policed, open range. I stood back and watched as our caravan began unloading enough firepower to give serious consideration to starting our own defense-contracting agency. The sun was overhead, the air was clean, and the hills were silent. At least until someone shouted “Range is Hot!†Then it was all explosions and gunpowder.
Ashnack has the greatest toys. The HK UMP45, according to HK, is a “simple, yet highly capable†submachine gun. They aren’t lying either. Pick this up, slap a magazine in, push a bolt forward, turn off the safety and your firing round after round of 45-caliber goodness down range. You won’t care that you’re not hitting a target. You won’t care about the cry of a turkey somewhere deep in the woods behind the range. All you’ll care about is the feeling of tapping the trigger as fast as you can, emptying the magazine as quickly as possible. If a stagger of the undead were coming after you, this wouldn’t be a bad gun to have in your arsenal. I recommend getting steel thumbs before then. They’ll help you load the magazine that gets tighter than the flesh around Ann Coulter’s ribs after you put five or six rounds in (the magazine, not Coulter).
I also played “so you want to be an Afghani insurgent†and tore up both the ground and some paper with my good buddy Gundown’s AK-47. Easy to load and easy to use, fire one of these and you’ll quickly learn why it’s the weapon of choice among revolutionaries worldwide. At first, I wasn’t totally comfortable with the gun. I’d fire a round, retarget and fire again. Then I realized that I’d never take the dictator’s palace that way. So I simply let lose a year’s worth of pent up aggression and frustration. I may or may not have had an evil grin on my face after.
There were other guns. Grifter’s nine mil with special “Straight Out of Compton†slide. Ashnack’s .308 made another appearance. A couple of folks set up a shotgun area where I proved that clay pigeons are not as easy to shoot as the undead. And of course, there was the 30-gun salute. Finally, after six hours of target practice, we broke down our equipment and headed back to camp where all firearms were placed under lock and key. Once everything was secure, we began our second night of camaraderie with a long swim and soak in manbath (made less manly this year by the presence of almost 10 women), the swimming hole at the bottom of our cliff, which was also full of snakes we discovered. Live and let live we always say.
Friday night’s movies were the enjoyable Hide and Creep (a movie that’s made for your living room, not a cliff) and 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. While both movies were good, there was a definite lack of Japanese rock gods, Guitar Wolf. That was kind of a let down.
Saturday, most of the participants hit the Black River for the Pirate Squad training session and float trip. I heard they had a good time. I, and a couple of other guys, stayed behind and pretty much just chilled out in the water at our camp. It was a nice quiet time that ended with me falling asleep on some rocks and waking up with the pink face of death and red shoulders of doom. I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the scariest book on tax collection ever, and waiting for the group to return and tell me that the float trip was either great or terrible. I was nervous since I’d made the arrangements, and they were suspicious since I’d opted out of the trip. Luckily, they had fun and good moods abounded.
Saturday night, Zombie Squad provided everyone with as much grilled food as they could eat and then we held a general meeting where we made the exciting announcement that the first couple official Zombie Squad chapters would be rolling out in the next month or so. We’ve chosen a couple of areas where the ZS board knows people personally to test our plans for allowing more chapters to be formed across the country. Our membership has been itching for their own local chapters for a while now and this is the step that’ll make that happen. By this time next year, I hope we’ll be reporting on the nationwide activities of Zombie Squad. After the meeting, which left everyone excited, Ashnack’s Bag of Doom brought forth some rather mainstream movies for the night, the always funny and quotable, Shaun of the Dead, and the “we could argue about whether this is a zombie movie all night†The Omega Man. I’ve heard that more fun happened, but I was sun poisoned and tired, so I crawled up to my tent and passed out.
Sunday, we broke down our campsite and left no trace of our existence on the cliff. Some folks went for breakfast, I wasn’t feeling too great though, so I headed home to see the wife and animals I’d abandoned earlier that week. It wasn’t until I lay half naked on my couch lamenting the evils of the sun that I really believed it was over. One more event done with god knows how long before I get to see these people whom I’ve grown incredibly fond of again. I was sad, but I couldn’t find any emo on my iPod, so I got over it.
So now we get to the part where I make some observations about how this weekend relates to life. Like Springer’s final thought, with less lesbian kissing. So, here are a few observations.
It’s amazing how much coming home from a camping trip is like coming home from a strip club. I enter the house through the basement. I immediately throw everything I’m wearing into the washer. I look over my squishy parts for stuff that shouldn’t be there, and then I jump immediately into a shower. Maybe next year’s event should just be in the wilderness of Brooklyn, Illinois. There might be fewer ticks.
To the folks at Zombie Con 2006: They Year They Came Back, I want to say thanks. Every ZS event we hold brings more and more people that I’m glad to have met. You guys were no exceptions. To the ones from the Lou, we’ll hopefully be seeing you around. To the ones from all over, we’ll make sure to lure you back often.
Be vigilant and remember…Rock and Roll has no boundaries.