I want to thank all of you for your faith and contributions.

Regrettably, we had an initial setback that tripped up our ability to reach out and fully market the project to the most possible contributors. Mainly, our outside team got us our graphics 3 weeks late. While we are thrilled with what they came up with, dropping them in our lap a few days before Valentines day did us no good. Our core company is Krishon Chocolates, so we had to focus on V Day.

It became apparent that we were not going to reach our goal. I decided it would be more efficacious and less bothersome to contributors to let the clock run out, and move our project to a larger, better organized site (indiegogo).

So that is what we are doing.

I have been assured by Kickstarter that your monies will be fully refunded within the next few days (please inform me directly at eric@krishon.com if they are not).

I believe Zombie Rubs is/are a phenomenal product that maintains the integrity of quality, purity, sustainability of ingredient and deliciousness that we have pursued since we first hung up our sign. And I believe it is a viable product that will succeed in the market place. So now to the next step.

There will be a few addenda to the reward program. But the gist remains unchanged.

ZOMBIE RUBS BRING MEAT BACK TO LIFE!

Please look for our invitation to sponsor our project knowing this, you WILL get your rubs. And shirts.

Thank you.

Sincerely Alive,

Eric Johnson-The Well Tempered Undead

January 12, 2013

The countdown started June 4,  2012, when a small, independent treasure hunting and salvage crew discovered a previously uncharted trench on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, 75 miles due east of Stockholm.

They sent down their UUV (unmanned undersea vehicle) to snap a few images and ping around.

Well, they did find a ship.

But it wasn’t a treasure laden seafaring vessel.

It was a round flat-metallic discuss shaped object 100 meters in diameter. In the center of the disk a circular whole perforated through completely.   

There was a second cylindrical object nearby that was later discovered to be the center of the ship, and was its fuel supply.

At the time, I didn’t know any of this. Almost nobody in the world did. American and Chinese spy agencies snatched the images out of the air within minutes of their being taken by the UUV, right as the salvage team transmitted them to the University of Stockholm.

And as the US had a battle group off the Aland Islands, and China did not, lucky US.

Russia’s navy was too busy smuggling drugs and weapons to the rest of the eastern hemisphere, and couldn’t be bothered.

The American Navy quietly compensated and bought the salvage vessel crew’s silence, and effectively cordoned off 30 square nautical miles of international waters in the Baltic Sea for 6 months. They diverted everything from tankers, merchant vessels, and Finnish crabbers to the persistently curious Chinese navy. And none were particularly happy with that arrangement.

To maintain secrecy for 6 months, the American government strong armed and threatened every press agency in the world. Not one professional news source mentioned the incident. Ever. But the internet was another story.

Crazy rumors of a recovered, intact alien ship and its fuel core were spreading like wildfire around the World Wide Web. In spite of the suppression, still pictures were smuggled to underground news sources. They were posted on ‘dirty’ sites and would stay accessible to any who could find them. The site would stay up for a day, and then crash mysteriously. But no amount of secrecy can stop rumors.

For some reason, on December 5th the United States Navy hired the most successful private salvage and treasure hunting team in the Atlantic, which was mine. Well, I fed them anyway. I couldn’t do what they did, but we were friends. We were the ship, captain and crew of the SS Omen. It seemed amazing to me that the US Navy could need our help. And for this one job we would receive millions. Each. This was more than ‘wealthy’ money; this was a dollar short of ‘freakin’ rich’. I don’t know what Captain Peter would have earned. He never said, and he never got a chance to spend it.

We all should have known better. Even I knew the Baltic in December is like the Caribbean during hurricane season; predictably unpredictable. Which, by-the-way, was why there remained 10,000 undiscovered wrecks at the bottom of the Baltic. Probably a similar number in the Caribbean, as well.

And for all that money, all we had to do was help the US Navy raise an object the size of a school bus to 100 feet below the surface. There they would take over and do whatever naval researchers do with submerged buses. Captain Peter confided in me that it was to be the heaviest object ever raised. Something like 290,000 tons. So it was, he said, an object the size of a bus that weighed as much as 3 nuclear powered, Nimitz Class aircraft carriers.

I really didn’t even know what that meant. I just understood that it was heavy and dense.

I’m sure Captain Peter suspected that we were to be engaging in something that would have military implications, which became clear to him when our escort turned out to be a Battleship, the USS Iowa.

At the time, the Omen was the largest pontoon vessel in private hands. But even in the dark, when the Iowa banked along side of us, we looked like a dingy compared to her.

When the sun rose that first morning, it dawned on all of us. It seemed we were hemmed in by the entire US Navy. There must have been hundreds of ships, boats, tankers, zodiacs zipping around, and two aircraft carriers a mile or so in the distance to the east and south. Those are hard to miss. None of the crew had ever seen anything like this.

As the land-lubbing cook, I didn’t understand much ship/boat/dive or aquatic parlance. I was just a galley cook that was about to payroll his retirement by cooking for a top secret salvage mission. This was going to be the one, the final haul for all of us. We were not rich, but were all wealthy. And greedy I guess. We could have retired. But why? And do what? We weren’t that rich. Plus it was an exciting life 3 months out of the year, and paradise found for 9 months. It was a sexy life, and people dug a successful deep-sea treasure hunter.

For me, it would be enough money to get off the stinking water forever. Prosperous and sexy or not, I hated life on the sea, and was looking forward to terra firma in perpetuity. There wasn’t even going to be a bathtub in my house.

 I know now why the Navy chose us. The SS Omen and crew were one of the most successful and reckless salvage teams in the Atlantic. (We had even helped the Russians locate and successfully raise a couple of their lost subs, including the Kursk.) Our captain, Peter Lundgrin, and his crew were all risk takers. They would dive deeper and stay under longer than anyone else. The Navy needed an expendable team of fearless divers that would attempt the impossible. We were the ones.

...............................................................

After the night of the 21st, and for a week afterwards, without even knowing what I had witnessed, I raced towards my family in the US as fast as I could by any means. With my head spinning, and the entire planet in chaos, I realized that I had witnessed the beginning of the end.

The press finally 'leaked' it the next day: The Zombie Apocalypse had begun. The world was being overrun by alien infected, brain-eating-living-dead zombies!

And it actually happened when the Mayans predicted, December 21, 2012.

                                 THE BEGINNING

2/1/13                       Recollections:

There were flat screens in every corner of the Omen. Each connected to satellite cable, or what was being captured by the UUV or the lead diver’s helmet cam.

On that night, every screen on the vessel was tuned to the images streaming from Peter’s camera.

……………

 It seems funny to me now that there was so much secrecy and “security” surrounding our salvage mission.

The Navy had posted 30 men on the Omen. Just to be safe.

Safe from what, the crappy food on their own ships?

That meant I was feeding an extra 30 men or more three meals a day from the 7th of December until the 21st.

….…………

 There were guns everywhere. That almost stifled most conversation.

 A funny factoid for future naval commanders to remember:sailors have been communicating with other sailors on separate vessels without verbal or written prompts for 1,000’s of years.

People were sharing what they knew, or thought they knew, in the galley as sailors have since man returned to the water.

What I heard was impossible.

More impossible than what I initially conceived of.

I thought we were there to raise the lost city of Atlantis.

But it was aliens. Seriously.

No one believed it until Captain Peter confirmed it was so.

No one questioned him. There’s no doubting a person like that.

But aliens?