Dawn of the Dead 1. Introduction

In the Christian Holy Bible, the Lord God Almighty promised Noah that he would never again destroy the world by flood. Most writers in the twentieth century believed that fire; thermonuclear fire or the raining fire of a comet, meteor, or asteroid strike would destroy the world. Like many intellectuals of the late twentieth century they thought the choices were man or nature, having left God completely out of the picture. Eighteen months ago, the world as we know it finally came to an end. But not by flood or by fire, instead it ended in a torrent of hunger and blood. Perhaps it was all God's fitting vengeance. The dead rose and hungered for the flesh of the living.

Within days all the big cities had fallen - New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Moscow. Small enclaves tried to fortify and hold out in the big cities but decades of ill-advised nanny state politics like gun control and enforced victimization made that a hopeless cause in many places, people had neither the will nor the tools to defend themselves. Communities outside of the cities fortified and still remain. Especially in America's South and the Mid-West where self-reliance was a tradition, these small enclaves offered safe shelter to those who survived and could contribute.

When the dead rose, I was in New York City on business. Some other survivors and I managed to get outside the city, moving during the day, holing up at night, fighting when we had too. Being born and raised in the South, I started traveling in that direction. By that time the small band of survivors had started looking to me as their leader and so they went with me. The eight-month trip from New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina was harrowing. We collected some additional survivors, but many were lost, even though we avoided towns when possible.

Somewhere along the line, we gained a reputation, a purpose, a home, and became known as the Travelers. This is our story. 


	2. Chapter One

"Watch out behind you!" I yelled at Tito. An old woman dressed in an apron and hairnet, long dead with her throat torn out, had risen up from behind the deli counter at Tito's back. The dumb oaf was standing in the way, not giving me a shot that would stop the dead woman before she could get to him. In what once would have been hideous but now was commonplace, the woman clawed at the ruined deli counter as she struggled to pull herself up, driven by the dead's hunger for fresh meat and blood.

We had found this supermarket, an old Winn-Dixie, on the north side of what used to be Charlotte, North Carolina during a sweep we had made a month earlier. At that time we had been full of supplies and since the dead don't need supermarkets we had left it alone. This time through we needed the supplies. It was getting so that we had to travel further or into more dangerous places to find supplies that we could trade. While all the fresh goods had gone bad long ago, some dry and most of the canned goods were fine, as well as medical and pharmacy supplies. Luxury goods like deodorant, shampoo, and cosmetics would also bring a good trade in the larger, more established outposts like Blacksburg and Raleigh.

Once we had salvaged the goods, we would use some of them for ourselves and trade the rest with various outposts. The outposts were like the outposts of the old frontier days, sturdy fortresses to protect the survivors from the dead. They would trade us fresh grown vegetables from their gardens and fresh slaughtered meat for canned items, medicines, and other goods that they needed.

Another source of goods were the hundreds of abandoned or wrecked 18-wheelers that littered the highways. Virtually anything that was shipped locally or long haul could be found inside those trailers. However, because they were out in the open they were difficult to defend while we salvaged the cargo. We always approached those vehicles with a lot of caution, and if there were any signs of the dead, we didn't bother to get out. Better to be safe than greedy.

Bandits were another constant problem due to the loss of law enforcement. Roving bands of outlaws, usually hardened criminals, who banded together, had sprung up since the end. These groups threatened the security of the outposts, and were a danger to us as well. Not only did survivors have to protect themselves from the dead, but from these bandits who stole for survival, and raped, pillaged, maimed and killed for fun.

Tito spun quickly, drawing his sidearm as he did. The roar of the huge Desert Eagle drowned out his rapid fire Spanish cursing. The old woman's head exploded as the huge half inch round tore through it, throwing old blood and brains all over the bulletin board advertising the special of the day from long ago. As much as I hated that gold toned pimped up tire iron of a handgun, no one could complain about its effectiveness. With the dead, overkill was never too much and the only way to make sure they were really dead was to destroy the brain. 

Tito continued to swear in Spanish. The deli counter was on his side of the zone we were clearing and he knew he had messed up. In this world after the dead had risen, all that was left to groups like ours was trust that each person had their area covered. But, I was more worried about the effects of that damned hand cannon of his. We have all had the dead sneak up on us; they are very good at being silent. But that foolish hand-cannon would probably get the attention of all those dead who had been wandering around aimlessly outside the supermarket.

Tito Rodriguez was an ex-member of the Washington D.C.-based 5th Street gang. We had met up with as we fled south from New York City and around the outskirts of the old capital. At the time he had been fleeing from the rest of his gang, all of who had turned into the dead. As the youngest member of my team, I typically took him as my second so I could watch over him. Standing 5 foot 3 inches, he suffered from a bad case of little man's syndrome, but he had proven time and time again that he was courageous and steadfast when the fecal matter hit the rotary air impeller. Black as the ace of spades and born in the urban jungle D.C. had become in the 21st century, he was at home in the cramped confines of places like this supermarket. At first he had been hesitant to trust us, mainly because most of the crew was white and educated. But that had faded as the crew bonded through the good times and bad. Lately he had developed a love of reading and picked up books anytime he could.

We had entered the supermarket about three hours earlier from the rear; easing the big armored cab and dual trailer rig we called The Traveler past the crowd of the dead that milled around among the cars in the parking lot. Seems that the dead tend to hang around stumbling through whatever they were doing prior to their deaths unless their attention is attracted. There was one dead man in the parking lot, his leg broken and still pushing his cart of groceries, trying to unlock the trunk of a car. He had probably been trying to unlock that car for the past two years. Backing up to the rear loading dock, we kept the rear door of The Traveler buttoned tight. Hopefully any of the dead in the loading dock area would be drawn to the sounds of the rig stopping against the dock and would come out where we could blast them from the safety of the armored trailer. When none of the dead appeared, we cracked the door and entered the loading dock in two-man teams. 

As each team moved through the dock, the next team covered them from the trailer door. We had worked this method out over the last year; two man teams were safer than individuals and multiple teams covering each other meant that someone usually saw a hungry zombie before it was on you. The first team out was Carol and Maurice; they would clear the right side of the supermarket and then cover the front. Tito and I followed them out; we would clear the left side of the supermarket and then act as a roving patrol. Next came Bob and Kim followed by Phil and Tony, then Sam and Karl. They would head directly to the canned goods, pharmacy, and medicinal areas respectively to start loading supplies. Each two man team was set up the same way, one person was lightly armed and pushing a cart, while the other was heavily armed like the rest of us and would provide the loader with security. As Tito and I patrolled inside the supermarket, we would move to backup any team that met up with the dead. To keep all this fairly quiet, we were all armed with ex-Special Forces M4 rifles equipped with suppressors as well as a variety of handguns, shotguns, and bladed weapons.

As we swept through the store, you could hear the quiet pop of the suppressed M4 rifles as we destroyed any of the walking dead we came across. This was often the easiest or the hardest part of salvaging a store. The trick was to make sure you gave yourself plenty of clearance so you saw the dead long before they saw you. One technique we learned early on was to avoid the end caps of the aisles until we were sure they were clear. A zombie could be hiding there and we wouldn't see it until we came down the aisle on either side of the thing. To avoid this problem the sweep teams started moving up the outside aisles and allowed plenty of room when reaching the end. Each team then moved inwards up the next aisle, working towards the center until the whole market was swept. Then, only when necessary, did we sweep the various other areas external to the main floor; areas such as deli and bakery.

This particular supermarket was nearly empty with very few of the walking dead inhabiting its aisles. I could hear chatter on the radio as Phil and Tony found a fully stocked pharmacy and had to dispatch a dead pharmacy assistant. After the pharmacy was cleared they began loading the drugs into their first cart. Over the next hour they would fill fifteen carts and take them back to the truck. The other teams were doing the same thing. I heard Bob give a delicious report on the vast supply of canned ham they had found. Someone else muttered "SPAM Shit" over the radio. SPAM had survived the fall of mankind well, and it still tasted like shit.

Almost immediately after Tito's shot, Carol and Maurice started hollering that the dead in the parking lot were moving our way. My guys had learned not to turn at the sound of a single shot, but to keep doing their jobs; at the moment their job was guarding the front door of the supermarket we were raiding. By now this team had become a finally tuned machine - one forged in blood. Each member knew their task and got to it immediately; Carol and Maurice guarding the front, Thomas and Mikey guarding the rear, the others forming teams of two and collecting the supplies.

"Wrap it up and let's move! We've got company coming," I yelled over the radio. We had a full set of secure radios with throat mikes and earpieces thanks to a SWAT van we had found in New York City and abandoned in Fairfax, Virginia last year. Almost immediately I could hear the wheels of the shopping carts rattle as everyone moved back towards the loading dock doors we had used to gain entrance to the store. It's always a relief to see our armored trailer backed against the open bay doors with the single rear door open waiting for us. Tito pushed our cart through while I joined Thomas and Mikey at the doors between the store and the docks. "Carol, Maurice. Start moving back towards the rear."

"We're working on it, Boss." Even as Maurice answered, I could hear the chatter of his suppressed M4. I like the quieter suppressed weapons, as they don't attract the dead's attention like an unsuppressed one will, Tito's Desert Eagle being a case in point. Most people before the end believed the stupid movies Hollywood put out and thought you could silence a firearm. The best you could do was to try and suppress the noise, and it was always a trade-off as you lowered the effectiveness of the weapon in order to quiet it. Moving up to where I could see down what had once been the chip and soda aisle, I watched as Maurice and Carol fought a withdrawal back to our positions. As the dead flooded into the supermarket, they were funneled into the old checkout lines. This bogged them down momentarily and Maurice used that opportunity to kill many of them with accurate bursts from his M4. The truly dead bodies then created even greater jams, but the walking dead were relentless in their push to get to fresh blood and kept coming. We all knew that some would be finding their way around the checkout lines and Maurice did not want to get flanked. When Carol reached me, I waved her on and began firing down the left side of the aisle as Maurice retreated down the right side. Once he reached the end of the aisle, we both started running towards the door to the loading dock, trusting the rest of the team to cover us.

Almost as soon as we started running towards the dock doors, the dead started shambling out of the aisles. A young woman with one arm missing came out of the aisle nearest me moving fairly quickly for the walking dead. I fired a short burst, blowing the top of her head off and knocking her dead body back into the way of those behind her. The team members at the dock doors fired whenever they had clear shots around us, clearing the way for us to make it to the doors. A huge man who before his death had been obscenely fat came out of the aisle in front of me, so close he was on me before I could react. The sudden crack of a rifle was accompanied by his old rancid blood spraying across the end cap as his head exploded. As he fell I could see Phil standing in the door to the docks with his scoped M1A1 rifle calmly picking off targets when the opportunity presented itself. Once we reached the dock doors, we slammed them shut and barred them behind us hoping that would slow the dead down long enough for us to all make it back aboard The Traveler. Quickly and efficiently, Thomas, Maurice, and I leapfrogged back to the truck. Stopping at the door to the truck, I yelled behind me for a head count. With the dead, there is not much chance of a rescue for those left behind.

"All here, Boss!" Regina's voice over the radio brought a smile to my face, even as I loosed a burst of fire at the dead that had started coming through the door onto the docks. Unlike the store where they could come down multiple aisles, only a single door existed from the store to the docks, so they had to pass through that chokepoint. That made them easier to kill. As the dead managed to push through the barred doors, we began picking them off and clogging up the entranceway. But as more pushed from behind, the bar finally gave way allowing the doors to open completely.

A man wearing a white apron, probably the store's butcher before he died based on the cleaver in his hand, pushed through the doors. A quick double tap sent his brains into the face of a lady dressed nicely. The triple strand of pearls around her neck would have been expensive before the end, but now they were worthless. She tripped over the body of the dead butcher and the dead behind her began to pile up as they continued forward without regards and tripped over the growing pile. Firing a series of short bursts into the pile, I pulled back through the door into the semi-truck trailer.

"Fire in the hole!" Mikey always yelled that stupid line. Just as Thomas pulled the door shut, Mikey threw a grenade onto the docks. When I stopped firing, the dead had started coming through the door from the store to the docks over the bodies of those I had killed. As the grenade rolled to a stop at a dead grocery shopper's feet, it detonated. Shrapnel pelted against the armored skin of the trailer. Whatever destruction it did, we did not see it. The moment Thomas had shut the door; Regina had started the truck rolling. The petite redhead from West Virginia had been a long-haul truck driver before the dead had risen and now acted as the team's primary driver.

"Man the guns, boys. We have a full parking lot to get through!" At Regina's orders, the team moved to man the guns mounted along the sides of the trailer. Two gun ports had been cut into each side of both the front and rear trailers. An M60 light machine gun, acquired from a National Guard armory in Raleigh, was mounted at each port. I moved forward through the trailer around the shopping carts and gear to the front of the trailer. There a flexible tunnel led to an opening in the rear of the forward trailer, and from the front of it another one led to the truck's cab. Moving forward, I slid into the passenger seat of the rig's cab.

"Hi, lover," Regina grinned as she turned the big truck and smashed into the mob of the dead between the exit and us. While The Traveler was a bit unwieldy when it came to turning, the massive engine and heavy weight of the extended and armored semi-truck meant that the dead could not swamp us with numbers; the truck would continue to plow through.

"Hi, yourself," I replied as I yanked back the cocking lever on the M60 light machine gun mounted through the windshield on the passenger side. I had already pulled the radio earpiece from my ear and grabbed a set of intercom headphones. The headphones let everyone talk easily in the rig and protected our ears from the hammering of the machine guns. We had installed the intercom after raiding a Radio Shack in Virginia Beach, before that we typically used simple noise reduction headphones. We found that they seriously prohibited communications when a dead child actually managed to crawl through one of the gun ports. I stitched a line of machine gun fire into the crowd on the right side of the truck. Shooting high, I hit many of them in the head, dropping them permanently. Others simply shrugged off what the living would have considered major damage and kept coming. The massive cowcatcher mounted on the front of the truck was throwing bodies to both sides as Regina continued to accelerate towards the parking lot exit.

Suddenly, the section of the parking lot off to our left erupted in blood and flames. One of the crew had manned the Mk-19 40mm Automatic Grenade Launcher that was mounted in an enclosed turret on the roof of the front trailer. It was loaded with a mixture of high explosive and fragmentation grenades that ripped the walking dead to shreds and blew apart cars in the parking lot. The short burst left a wall of burning cars and fuel between the remainder of the parking lot on that side and us.

As a dead man dressed in a bloody old business suit crawled over the nose of the truck and onto the hood, a short burst from my M60 blew his head apart, leaving a bloody smear. Unable to turn tight enough the truck slammed into a parked car, an old Honda by its looks. The car flew over the hood and slammed into the reinforced ceiling above my head. Regina, knowing speed meant survival, never let off the accelerator. I could hear the car as it rolled off the roof and down the armored side of the cab. Stitching another line of fire through a small group of the dead between the exit, and us, I turned and grinned at Regina. Finally we reached the exit to the parking lot and rapidly left the mob behind as Regina sped us towards the interstate.

"Thomas, Carol, Kim. Ya'll start sorting through the stuff we collected. I think that the new outpost in Lancaster will trade well for antibiotics and baby formula. Blacksburg has been asking for drugs, canned goods, and personal hygiene products." That was how we made our living, raiding and scavenging from the ruins of society and trading with the outposts and enclaves. As everyone relaxed behind their guns, Carol and Kim got up to sort the goods we had salvaged.

Several hours of salvaging from the supermarket had left a huge pile of assorted goods on the floor of the rear trailer. Flats of bottled water and dry foodstuffs were pushed to one side; most of those supplies would be kept for our usage. Drugs from the pharmacy were boxed and brought forward into the front trailer. They would be sorted and either used as trade goods or to replenish our medicine cabinet. Canned goods of all varieties; meats, vegetables, and fruits; where sorted and stacked in cabinets in the rear trailer.

"Hey Boss," Kim called. I walked back to where she was sorting through the supplies from the pharmacy. "I've found 100 boxes of Amoxicillian tablets so far." She was pleased at the discovery and so was I. Antibiotics were probably the most sought after item next to guns, ammo, and food in this new world. Without them, simple injuries or infections that no one thought about before the end could now kill.

As we pulled down onto I-485, the bypass around Charlotte, the sun was setting. Normally we bunker down at night, but our current location was not close to reasonably secure. As soon as we stopped, I figured we would be attacked. Even as we pushed vehicles out of the way and continued to make forward progress, the dead, whose attention we drew, would attack us in ones and twos. Those attacks could be ignored or repulsed with a short burst from one of the mounted guns. The attack that worried me was a huge mass of the dead while we were motionless.

A yellow school bus was wrecked across the interstate. While most survivors would have had to go around, Regina hit one end of the bus with the front bumper of The Traveler and pushed it out of the way. The bus slammed through a group of dead football players leaving one lone cheerleader standing in the road. As we drove past, one of the crew on the side-mounted guns finished her.

Some time later, we could all feel The Traveler lean to one side as Regina made the hard turn onto the ramp to Interstate 85 South. The interstates were crowded with cars in some places and empty in others, but the ramps where typically empty. Regina slowed and finally brought The Traveler to a stop in the middle of the ramp. We would sit here for a while and if we were not attacked, bunker down for the night. If we were attacked, whoever was on duty would get us in motion until the rest of us could get to our stations.

Interstate on and off ramps were relatively secure because they were normally higher and easier to defend. If we had to stop on the road, we preferred the flyway ramps that were supported by tall columns. The dead couldn't come up on our sides, which meant we only had to defend our front and back. An overpass was our next choice because we could park close to the railing and have to defend only 3 sides. Last choice was the type of ramp we were on now. Although higher than the surrounding area, we still had to cover four sides, which meant more watch duty and less sleep for everyone.

"Hey Boss, what's for supper?" Damn, Mickey! Poor guy lived by his stomach.

"SPAM on crackers with canned pomegranates," I replied. That combination was bound to get a reaction. Indeed I could hear the protests and hisses of the crew throughout the rig. Since we had just cleaned out the supermarket, we were well stocked and everyone could choose pretty much anything they wanted. But everyone ate at their station in case we were attacked.

After about an hour with no attacks, we settled in for the night. Tito, Carol, Kim, and Mikey had first watch and the rest of us turned in. The firefight at the Supermarket had taken its toll on everyone and most quickly fell into a fitful sleep. Several hours later, Phil woke me for the morning shift. As I grabbed a cup of coffee from the pot that the night shifts had kept going, he gave me a quick verbal report. While a few dead had been seen, they had completely ignored us for the most part. The ones that had gotten too close or who tried to get into the truck had been dispatched with suppressed weapons.

As Phil went off to catch a couple hours of sleep, I climbed into the driver's seat of The Traveler and scanned the local area with the night vision binoculars that were stored there for that purpose. From here, I could start the rig and have us in motion or sound the internal alarms if need be.

The first two hours of my watch shift were quiet. As the shift wore on and morning came closer there was several times when I thought I saw movement in the shadows of the tree line, but the night vision gear did not show me anything. The last time I was sure I saw movement and even as I reached for the night vision gear, the dead began to appear in the gloom between daylight and moonlight. At first I just thought it was one or two wandering about, but they continued to appear, over a widening area. Flipping the cover off the alarm switch mounted on the dash, I turned the knob to activate the internal quiet alarms. The four-position knob could be set to Off, Quiet, Alarm, and External. Each setting was more aggressive than the last. Quiet Alarm turned on low red lights throughout the rig, but did not make any sounds. Alarm turned on the internal lights and sounded an alarm. External turned on the internal lights, the external lights, and sounded a loud external alarm.

Throughout The Traveler you could hear the sounds of people moving quietly. Any loud noises would attract the dead's attention more than we already had, if we even had. "Damn," Mickey griped in a loud wisper over the intercom, "Why do they always have to come out and disturb my sleep after pulling evening watch?" As the crew manned the guns and made preparations to defend The Traveler, I watched the growing crowd of the dead as they came closer.

What had attracted these dead? Usually it was movement, noise, or blood. We had been parked here quietly for most of the night so I was at a loss to explain their actions. It was possible that something had started the dead moving and this crowd was just passing by us. At first the dead passed by us and continued on, shambling through the gloom. Then one of the dead ran into the side of the front trailer. I could see him in the mirror as he backed up and walked forward into the side of the trailer a second time. Others bumped into The Traveler and then turned to go around it, but this one dead began to beat his fists against the side of the trailer.

Before we could silence him, his pounding had attracted the attention of more dead, which began pounding on the sides of the rig. Within moments the dead had surrounded the rig and were beating against the sides. While they were not doing any harm to the armored hull of the rig, they did manage to actually rock the heavy rig about. Regina relieved me in the driver's seat and fired up the engine. I changed the alarm switch to external. Spotlights mounted along the top of the trailers snapped on, turning the area around the rig as bright as the noon sun. Flipping up a switch cover, I flipped the first of two red switches underneath it. This fired one of the two charges contained in the rig's close defense system.

All around the rig, metal boxes, each filled with twenty 12-gauge shotgun shells, fired. These sprayed 00 and 000 pellets in a controlled pattern, scything through the dead who were pressed against the rig. Even before the noise from the close defense system faded, the crew opened up with the side-mounted M60s. A burst of fire from one of the M60s walked through a group of four dead girls, all dressed in school uniforms. Whoever was manning the gun aimed at head level and three of the four fell, now truly dead. A second quick burst finished off the fourth one. Regina gunned the rig and with the big V-12 diesel engine screaming, we pulled away from the dead and onto Interstate 85 south. 


	3. Chapter Two

When the dead rose, some twenty-two months ago, I was in New York City on business. Of all the places to be, New York City was probably one of the worst imaginable to be during a crisis. Eleven million people crammed onto an island not capable of supporting a hundred thousand and one of the most liberal nanny governments in America. The day started off normal enough, get up, shower, shave, get dressed, and take the subway to my client. During the day, I noticed a growing number of reports on the internet news services about riots around the world. Since the January detonation of a nuclear bomb in Baghdad by terrorists, the world had been a place of constant riots, so I really did not pay it all that much attention.

On the way back to my hotel via the subway, I noticed more police out and about than usual. They seemed to be dealing with an increase in homeless activity. Several incidents appeared to have turned violent, but most were far away from me so I was not sure what was happening. Once I got back to the hotel, I locked the door behind me and kicked off my shoes for the evening. Turning on the news, the images were stunning. The news itself was a jumble of confused and contradictory facts about riots, disease, civil unrest, and cannibalism. The world was exploding around us and no one really seemed to know why.

Opening my suitcase, I pulled a black case out of the bottom. Taking it to the bed, I opened it and took out my Kimber 1911, stuffed a magazine of 230 grain jacketed hollowpoints into the grip, and racked the slide to load it. The spare magazine I left in the case for the moment. Yes, I know. Possession of any type of expanding ammunition and possession of a handgun without a NYC handgun license are both considered felonies. Well, too damn bad! After the events of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Baghdad anyone who thinks the government is going to be there to take care of them when the shit hits the fan is a fool. The only person you can rely on to look out for you is you. Plus after the black eyes and expensive lawsuits New York City faced due to ex-mayor Bloomberg's anti-gun rhetoric, unless they caught me actually carrying the pistol, the New York City Police Department was most likely to give me a warning and send me on my way. After all, the handgun was unloaded and locked in a case in the trunk of my car when I was traveling, which federal law said was legal anywhere, even if both New York State and New York City had tried to ignore that particular law for the last couple of years.

Settling down for the night, I made sure the door was locked and bolted, then turned in. New York City seemed unusually loud that night, but sirens and noise were normal for New York and I had learned to ignore them and sleep.

When I awoke in the morning, the first thing I noticed was the quiet. While New York is typically quieter at 4:30am, it's never quiet. But, I had a long workday ahead so I went to the bathroom and did my usual morning routine of shower and shave. When I came out of the bathroom, I still was not hearing any street noise. Looking out my window, I saw no movement on the street, pedestrian or vehicle. That was definitely not a good sign. Before I could look any further, I was interrupted by a scream from the hallway. Armed with my pistol and clad only in a pair of shorts, I snatched open the door to see a woman fighting off a man clad in a business suit. At first I thought his attack was sexual, but it became apparent that it wasn't. Instead he seemed to be trying to bite her. Moving towards them, I yelled at the man to stop, but he completely ignored me. The woman however, heard my yell and managed to slip away from the man, running down the hall to me. The man followed and seemed totally uncaring when I lifted my gun to cover him. Not wanting a confrontation, I backed up through the door into my room, keeping the woman behind me. Once in the room, I slammed the door and relocked it. You could hear the man beating on the door and moaning, but he would not respond to any attempts at conversation.

Asking the woman what had happened, she explained that the man was in the elevator and had seemed ill. When she had inquired about his health, he had attacked her. Her arm was covered in blood, so I got a towel and began to clean it up. Under the blood was a gash that resembled a bite more than anything else. Almost immediately, scenes from old horror movies swept through my mind, but I dismissed them as silly. After cleaning up the woman's wound, I tried to call hotel security. The man was still beating at the door and moaning. Looking out the peephole, you could see his face. His skin looked pale and blotchy, while his eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced. No one answered the phone at the security desk.

Looking at the woman, I noticed that she too was very pale, more so than she had been when I first tended to her. When I asked her if she was okay, she looked at me without answering and I could she that her eyes were becoming bloodshot and jaundiced as well. I knew she was infected with whatever the man outside had. Numerous questions went through my head, mainly I wondered if I was already infected. I watched with horror as over the next few hours the woman changed from a scared human being into something else. Even as I finally backed away from her, she sprang from the couch, moaning and clawing towards me. My reaction was instantaneous, the pistol in my hand came up and I fired, hitting her between the eyes. After taking the shot, I quickly replaced the magazine with a fresh one and then topped off the original one with one of the lose cartridges from my pistol case. I had learned long ago to never shoot a magazine dry unless absolutely necessary. I could always top off partially empty magazines during a lull, but having the slide lock back on an empty magazine at the wrong time could prove fatal. And I had a feeling I would need every round I had to get out of the city.

I knew I had to get out of this hotel and out of New York City. First I got dressed, jeans and tennis shoes, with a black short sleeve shirt. I packed my laptop case with things I thought I would need, mostly bottled water from the room's convenience refrigerator. Like the hotel was going to fuss about those charges! Steeling my nerves, I jerked the door open and shot the man in the business suit in the head. Stepping over him, I moved down the hall to the elevators. Since the power was still on, I pushed the call button and then backed away where I would have a clear shot if an infected person was in the elevator.

When the elevator arrived and its doors opened, it proved to be empty. Moving into the elevator quickly, I punched the button for the parking garage. Like normal, I had given the valet my spare key and the primary was still on my key ring. Once the door shut, I again changed magazines for a completely full one and topped the one from the gun with another loose cartridge.

When the elevator door opened, the parking attendant was standing there. His skin was grey and dead, while his once pristine uniform was covered with blood. As he advanced on me, I shot him in the head. The noise and concussion of the big .45 going off inside the enclosed metal elevator was painful. Stepping over the body, I looked out into the parking deck. Seeing nothing moving, I began moving from column to column seeking my car.

Many of my liberal coworkers would have been shocked beyond words at this point. Most knew that I shot in competition, but the fact that I had just killed three people in what they would see as cold blood would have sent them into fits. If this was the end, and it was going to be anything like the old zombie movies, I figured most of them would not live to see the end of the week anyway.

Unfortunately, the hotel's parking deck was several floors. Twice I was confronted by the dead and was forced to kill them. I knew my Kimber was down 3 rounds, so I changed the magazine to the full one. But I did not have time and enough safety to reload the partial magazine so I just stuck it into my back pocket.

As I entered the 3rd level of the parking deck, I could see the dark black silhouette of my car, easily distinguishable by the dual silver hood stripes. It was backed into a slot on the far side of the deck facing outwards towards me. Deciding to risk it, I quickly moved down the middle of the parking lot towards my car. That mistake almost cost me everything.

About halfway across the parking lot, I fell and stumbled, dropping my Kimber, which slid under the bumper of a parked car. Looking down to see why I had fallen, I was shocked to see a dead woman trying to crawl up my leg towards me. Her legs were torn to shreds below the thighs like someone had been gnawing on them. While a kick to the dead woman's face got me free of her grasp, I could see more of the dead coming up behind her. Scrambling backwards on my hands, I backed up until I hit the bumper of the car behind me. Never taking my eyes off the approaching dead, I felt around behind me and found my pistol.

My first shot was to the lady at my feet. As I scrambled up to my feet, I fired a couple of more rounds at the oncoming crowd. The seemingly ignored impact of the rounds on the dead confirmed what horror movie writers had always assumed. Shoot them in the head! Leaning against a cement column, I began to methodically shoot the oncoming crowd, one shot each into the head. Twice I had to retreat to another column as the crowd got too close, but in the end, they all died.

Hiding behind the cement column, I stood still and watched making sure that no more of the dead were near. Not seeing any, I quickly moved to my car and opened the trunk. Sitting down in the spare tire well was a second black case like the one I had in my suitcase, only larger. Grabbing the case, I slid into the front seat and locked the car doors. Like most men, raised through their teenage years in the 70s and 80s, I thought that raw Detroit horsepower was the pinnacle of car development, and my 2006 Dodge Charger SRT10 "Petty" Edition was definitely raw horsepower. It was basically the Dodge Charger Coupe with the Dodge Viper V-10 engine outfitted with a supercharger for 780 peak horsepower. A lot of the unneeded "stuff" had been stripped from the car to lighten it, plus the suspension and all was tuned to produce a track-ready street-legal car.

Opening the second case, I took out my second Kimber 1911. I shoved a magazine of 230 grain jacketed hollowpoints into it and racked the slide to load the first round. Taking a Jackass Leather double rig out of the case, I slid my arms into the rig and shrugged to settle the holsters. I holstered the two 1911s, one under each arm, and sat back in the seat to think. At the moment, I was safe. While I sat there thinking, I reloaded the spent magazines from my first Kimber and topped the magazine in my second.

I needed to head south. If this was spread by contact, then the densely packed cities of the northeast like New York, Boston, and Washington DC were doomed. But the lightly populated rural areas of the south could possibly survive. Plus my wife and family were down south and I needed to get back to them.

Cranking up the powerful car, I eased it out of the parking spot and headed for the exit ramp. The hotel parking deck was one of those where you had to go through each floor to get to the ramp for the next. Passing through the first two floors I nailed a couple of the walking dead with the bumper, but it wasn't until I got to the final level that life got interesting.

As I passed through the final floor before getting back up to ground level, I saw a screaming woman being chased by three of the dead. Without thinking, I turned the car to cut between her and the dead, using my bumper to smash two of them to the ground.

"Get in the car!" I yelled at the woman. Drawing one of my Kimbers I shot the dead man that was still standing and then the two that were on the ground. The damn woman screamed again. As I turned I could see another one of the dead trying to reach around the car door to get at her. A fast double tap solved that problem and I slid back into the car. Dumping the magazine from my pistol and shoving a fresh one home, I stuck the pistol between my legs where I could get to it easily. Flooring the big supercharged engine I yelled at the woman to hang on. When I got to the top of the ramp, I never slowed down, crashing through the wooden gate.

Pulling out of the parking deck, I turned and headed up Lexington. I could head across the 59th Street Bridge to Queens, but I thought heading up and across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey was a better idea. It got me onto the mainland and headed south down Interstate 95 towards home. The woman I had rescued in the parking garage, she said her name was Kim, was finally beginning to calm down. The tunnels into New Jersey were out of the question. They would be deathtraps with nowhere to go. At least on the bridges, one could jump to the water if trapped. The fall might kill you, but at least you had a chance.

As I turned off Lexington Avenue and onto 57th street to cross over to the west side of New York, I was forced to come to a complete stop. Ahead, a New York Police Department SWAT van was parked across the road. From the bodies lying about, it was pretty obvious that a major conflict had taken place in the streets here. After waiting a few minutes to see if the coast was clear, I slid out of the car. The first body was a NYPD officer that had become one of the walking dead and whose head had been blown open afterwards. Kneeling by the body, I quickly took his sidearm, thigh holster, and spare magazines, as well as the spare MP5 magazines tucked into his vest pockets.

"Look Out!" The high shriek from Kim caused me to turn and look as a group of the dead shambled out of an alley. Now I found myself trapped with them between the car, and me and Kim was not going to be any help. Drawing my matched Kimbers, I started firing with the gun in my strong hand. Even as the undead around them fell, the rest kept coming. Suddenly, a small caliber submachine gun started firing short bursts from behind me. Two of the undead fell, their heads destroyed by the fire.

Looking behind me, I could see a tall black man in a SWAT uniform on the porch of one of the buildings. He motioned for me to come to him. Figuring he was forted up inside the building, I yelled at Kim to come to me. At first she refused, but faced with the threat of staying out in the car by herself, she finally complied. Together we ran into the building, followed closely by the SWAT officer.

The main floor of the building was a trashed mess of dead bodies and broken furniture. Stairs led up to a second floor and we quickly followed the SWAT officer upwards without a word being spoken. At the top of the stairs, another SWAT officer pushed a huge piece of furniture across the top of the stairs, sealing off the second floor.

The two SWAT officers introduced themselves as Carl Roberts and John Luigie. Carl had been the officer outside on the porch providing us with cover fire. John was a short stocky white man with Sergeant's stripes on his shoulder. It was immediately apparent that he felt that he was in charge; and painfully obvious that he did not have a clue what to do.

John immediately got into my face about the pair of handgun's I was carrying. I told him I could care less what the liberal shitheads of New York City had passed for laws and that he was a traitor to his country for enforcing the Sullivan Act to begin with. If he wanted my guns, he was welcome to try and take them away from me, but I reminded him that there were no longer any courts to back his silly play, assuming her survived it. He immediately went on the defensive, acting like a 12 year old who had been out insulted in a "Your Momma" contest. Not caring to butt heads with him, I told everyone I was going to find a room and stretch out. Kim followed me to one of the back halls. The room had an old bed in it and I offered it to her. Before we settled in, I gave her a quick lesson in firearm handling. Luckily, the dead officer on the street had been carrying a Glock 17 9mm Semi-Automatic that is one of the easiest handguns in the world to operate. Tucking the Glock under her pillow, and my spare Kimber between the cushions of an overstuffed easy chair, I curled up in the chair for a nap.

When I awoke, the afternoon sun was fading. Retrieving my Kimber and leaving Kim asleep, I wandered back into the main part of the second floor. Carl was sitting in a chair watching over the stairwell with John nowhere to be found. Carl and I talked for a while about ways to make our shelter more defensible, but most required heavy labor and we decided that could wait until tomorrow.

I decided to go through the four apartments on this floor and search the refrigerators and cabinets. In one of the apartments, I found a wok and plenty of ingredients for making Chinese food. Lighting the gas stove, I stir-fried some vegetables and sliced chicken with a Schezuan Peanut sauce I had found and fixed four plates. I had found a case of bottled water in one of the other refrigerators and I sat four of them out as well.

Returning to the main hallway, I found John on watch in place of Carl. When I handed John the plate of food, he began to complain about the food being Chinese. Since I still had my hand on the plate, I pulled it away. He quickly shut up and took the plate. His asshole attitude was beginning to wear on my nerves, but I let it slide.

Waking Kim, I waited on her to go to the bathroom, and then led her to the apartment I had cooked in. There I had set a table for her. Unlike the officers and myself, I figured Kim was much more sheltered and for some reason I was trying to make things normal for her. After dinner, I found several movies and we put "Walking Tall" in to watch. Carl dropped in and thanked me for dinner. He sat and watched the movie with us for a while, then left to sleep.

About midnight, I went and relieved John on guard duty. He made a couple of crack comments about civilians and guns, but stayed out of my face. I think he had figured out that I was probably much better trained than he was and that his badge meant nothing to me. That is not completely true. I have always had a deep respect for those who go into law enforcement and put their lives on the line daily. But I think a lot of officers have lost the whole point of "Protect and Serve" and I have no respect for them individually.

Late in the evening, I heard Kim scream. Thinking the dead had gotten in; I ran to the room we had given Kim so she would have some privacy. Bull-rushing my way through the door, I was stunned by what I saw in front of me. Sergeant John Luigie was holding Kim down and trying to pull her pants off. The girl was putting up a fight and from the looks of things she had landed a knee, which distracted John long enough for her to scream.

Grabbing John by the collar, I yanked him off of Kim. Carl had also burst into the room and he was now hollering at John. Gaining his feet, John threw a hard left into my gut, causing me to release the hold I had on him. I retaliated with a snap kick to the calf that took his legs out from under him, and then followed through by dropping my knee into his solar plexus. Once he was down, I slammed the butt of my pistol across his jaw, knocking him out for the moment. As I stood up, Kim was there, throwing kicks into the side and head of the unconscious John. I let her go for a moment and then pulled her off.

"What the hell is going on here!" The anxiety in Carl's voice betrayed the fact that he knew what had been happening; his superior had been trying to rape Kim. Before the discussion could go any further, a huge crash came from out in the hallway. Both of us knew instantly that the dead had been attracted by all the commotion and had broken through the blockade at the stairs.

Grabbing up the MP5 that John had set aside, I ran back towards the stairwell. One of the dead, wearing the white monogrammed shirt of a worker from a local Deli, shambled around the corner from the main stairwell and in to the hall. I dispatched him with a quick burst to the head, but he was followed by several more. Slowly we were pushed back down the hallway. Regardless of what kind of an asshole John was, we did not leave him. Pulling him down the hallway with us, we kept up a steady stream of fire, cutting down the advancing dead.

At one point the hungry crowd of the dead overran us. Carl and I fought with shots at pointblank range and slamming buttstocks, while Kim tried to protect John with the Glock. One of the dead slipped past her and mauled John and the smell of his blood attracted the ones attacking us. In the end, his death bought us a bit of breathing room to disengage from close quarters with the dead so we could slide further back down the hallway. However, we found ourselves with another problem. The hallway was coming to an end. At the end of the hall was a window and looking out, I could see that this was a typical New York City apartment building with a fire escape outside the window.

Shattering the window with the butt of the MP5, I pushed Kim out the window onto the fire escape. Yelling for Carl to come on, I fired short bursts past him into the restless mob of the dead. He yelled back for us to go on and I slid out the window. The street below was clear and Kim had already moved down the fire escape towards the ground. Swinging down to the ground, I grabbed her hand and ran towards the SWAT van.

Looking back, I was stunned to see Carl nowhere to be found. I could hear his MP5 chattering back inside the building. Even before I could yell at him to come on, or start back towards the window, I heard him scream and knew it was too late. Carl had made his last stand to buy us time to get away.

The NYPD SWAT van was a huge beast of a vehicle, built to transport a SWAT team and its gear and act as a mobile headquarters in the field. Turning the ignition, I threw the van into gear and drove away from my car and the brownstones. Away from a brave man who had sacrificed his life for Kim and I. When we got to 8th Avenue, I turned and headed uptown. Central Park South had once been an area of high-end condos and townhouse and fancy shops. Now it was a warzone of burning cars, broken windows, and bodies. Several times, we saw the dead wandering about or chasing the living, but we could not stop and help. There was just nothing we could have done, nothing no one could have done with less that a full SWAT team in heavy riot gear.

As I turned the SWAT van onto West 177th Street, I was relieved that we were about to leave New York City behind us. I figured we would have trouble in New Jersey, but once we got clear of the big cities, south on I-95 would be fairly easy down into Virginia. There we would run into larger cities again. The outbound ramp up onto the bridge was blocked with wall-to-wall abandoned cars, many showing the bloody signs of the chaos that had happened here in the final hours of New York's fall. Turning up the inbound ramp, I maneuvered through the few cars that had tried fleeing into the city for protection. A couple of times, I was forced to push cars out of the way with the heavy front bumper of the van.

Ahead, I saw people. At first I thought they were survivors trying to cross the bridge on foot, but as I got closer I realized they were the dead feasting on a corpse. As my anger got the better of me, I slammed on the brakes of the SWAT van and came to a stop in the middle of the roadway. Stepping out, I brought my handgun up and calmly fired four rounds, each round blowing apart the head of one of the dead. As soon as the echo of the last shot died away I heard moaning and looked over at the outbound side of the bridge. There were many dead milling around there; they had been attracted to my gunfire, but were unable to cross the median to get to me.

Returning to the van, we once again started towards the New Jersey shore. Several times I had to push cars out of the way with the van's front bumper and we encountered individual dead, but the transit was fairly easy.

As I pulled off the George Washington Bridge and down onto Interstate 95 South, I spotted several of the dead trying to get into a green conversion van parked on the side of the road. As I pulled closer, I could see a face in the rear window of the van. The face was that of a young girl, probably in her late teens, who was frightened and alone. Bringing the van to a stop, I exited with one of the SWAT MP5s and began destroying the dead with short bursts. After the first burst, the dead turned and began to shamble towards me. Several fell, but the rest closed and I was forced to retreat in order to keep enough distance between the dead and myself.

Once the dead had started following me, Kim ran from the SWAT van and helped the young girl out of the wrecked conversion van. Together they ran back to the SWAT van just as I destroyed the last of the dead who had been trying to get the girl. Looking around I realized that I had attracted the attention of many more dead and had moved away from the safety of the SWAT van as well. 

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I ran back to the SWAT van and quickly got it back into motion. Kim had the young girl in the back of the van calming her down. Armed and with two woman in my care, I continued heading south. 


	4. Chapter Three

As we rolled south down Interstate 85 around Charlotte, I thought about my life before the dead rose. I had lived in this area all my life before the end. Several times we had traveled through here and I had always avoided the small towns of Belmont and Lancaster. Who wants to see old friends and family as the walking dead, zombies who are trying to eat you? Sometimes though the only way to defeat your demons is head-on.

"Regina, pull off the interstate at Exit 27. There is a small gun shop and a Super Wal-Mart there. Hopefully we can grab some ammo at the gun shop and more supplies at the Wal-Mart." The surprise on Regina's face was evident. We had passed the Super Wal-Mart several times and I had always found an excuse to go elsewhere. She knew why, they all did. And they had respected my choice.

Walking back into the rear trailer, I found Carol and Kim hard at work sorting through the supplies we had salvaged from the supermarket in north Charlotte. The trailer rocked as Regina pushed cars out of the way with the cowcatcher on the front of the truck, but we had all become used to the motion over the past months. Occasionally, you would hear one of the guns fire, but not very often. Most of the dead here would have wandered off or been drawn to other food sources.

It was strange speculating on what factors motivated the dead, if you could call it motivation. They would start chasing you if you caught their attention, but if they lost you they might keep going or just start wandering around. They seemed to desperately crave human flesh and blood, but you would find the dead who had wandered for the past eighteen months in an enclosed space or had stood in one place doing the same thing over and over. Both the recently dead and the long deceased were a danger, though for different reasons. The recently dead were fast, tireless, and aggressive, but they tended to operate as loners and were driven purely by instinct with no thought processes. The long dead were much slower as rigor mortis set in, but they operated in packs. Lately I had been noticing that the packs were becoming more cohesive with obvious leaders and some simple pack hunting tactics.

Looking at the inventory sheet Carol and Kim had started, I could see that we had a pretty good haul from the supermarket. Their pharmacy had been well stocked with antibiotics, painkillers, and other useful drugs. They had also been well supplied with the mood altering substances that the doctors had thought or at least prescribed to cure most problems; Prozac, Effexor, and others of that type. Since the end, those drugs had become all but useless and had been replaced with "get your ass in gear or get eaten".

Carol Hathaway had been a Trenton, New Jersey nurse before the end. Luckily she had just come off shift when everything broke loose. Based on what we had been able to piece together, very few medical professionals survived the end as they were on the front lines in the hospitals trying to help the infected, never knowing that their patients would become their worst enemies. A short, heavyset blonde, Carol's no nonsense attitude had served her well. After the end she had attached herself to a small band of survivors made up of police officers, the only ones around who were armed. A liberal and major supporter of the anti-gun movements like Million Moms March, the inability to defend herself when the end came had taught her a valuable lesson. By the time her path crossed ours and she joined us, she had learned to shoot and survive. No one would ever take her guns from her again.

At the base of the off ramp at exit 27 was a major traffic snarl. It looked like there had been a pretty bad wreck here during the end. A red Corvette was buried into the back end of what looked to have once been a luxury sedan of some kind. Seeing the 'Vette, I wondered if my Dodge Charger was still sitting in the alley in New York City. The 'Vette's wreck had setoff a chain reaction that resulted in a Ford F250 Pickup upside down on top of the sedan. We had cleared much of the wreckage off the inside lanes during previous trips through this area. That had resulted in more cars pushed or piled into the tangle of wreckage.

Regina slowed The Traveler and rolled it forward until the bulldozer like front bumper was against the wreckage. Then she slowly applied power. After she had pushed the wreckage further towards the outside of the road, she stopped and backed up. Then she eased forward and pushed it some more. Over and over, she continued this pattern until she had managed to move the entire tangle of wrecked vehicles off the interstate and the ramp and into the grassy area alongside the road. Finally cleared, we took the off ramp up and turned towards Mount Holly and The Gunshop Express.

The Gunshop Express sits just down what many would call a service road, running parallel to the interstate. Given how small the parking lot was at The Gunshop Express, there was no way to get the rig down into it and if we did, no way to get out quickly. Regina drove the rig on down the road past the store and used the old spinning plant parking lot to turn around. Now facing the way we would need to go to get away, Regina parked the truck on the main road in front of the store.

To an outside observer, The Traveler came to a stop and just sat there, like a predatory beast crouched in the grass. In reality, we were gearing up and making preparations inside. Tito, Maurice, and I would enter the store. Kim, Carol, Mikey, and Sam would remain in the truck manning the guns. They would be able to lay down heavy cover fire if we had to evacuate quickly. Tony, Bob, Thomas, and Phil would be ready to help us move goods once we had secured the shop.

Exactly who Tony and Bob had been prior to the end was a bit of a mystery. They never talked about it or answered many questions. That they were family was obvious, they looked enough alike. Both spoke with the mouthful of marbles accent that one typically associates with the deep south, my guess was the Tennessee mountains. Both of them were young, barely into their twenties, stood just over 6 foot, with dark hair and scraggly facial hair. The ladies on the crew constantly teased them and even offered to help them shave. The boys had proven to be crack shots, strong hard workers, and mean as rattlesnakes in a fight, though half the time they were fighting each other, usually over some girl who didn't really care about either of them.

The Traveler had been sitting still for 10 minutes and no one had seen any of the dead yet. Warily, I opened the side door of the front trailer and then Tito and Maurice moved out. They moved about halfway to the gun shop's doors and then dropped into a crouch, covering the area around the shop. I followed behind them. I had left my M4 behind and carried a gas-powered cutoff saw instead. Once I reached the doors of the shop, I yanked the starting cord and the saw roared to life. Pushing the saw into the center of the doors, it cut through the metal overlap like a knife through butter and then began to throw sparks as it hit the harder locking bar on the inside of the doors.

We had learned that this was one of the most dangerous times in a salvage job. The noise we were making could attract the dead from a pretty wide area. Everyone needed to stay sharp so we would not get surprised. Finally, I felt the lock bar part under the blade of the cutoff saw. Dropping the saw to the ground, I took up the large wrecking bar I had brought and jammed it between the doors. One hard shove and the doors flew open. The inside glass door shattered easily as I hit it with the heavy end of the wrecking bar.

The inside of the store was dark. Breaking several light sticks, I threw them into the store so I could see. Standing behind the counter was a dead man, his cold gray skin covered with tattoos. Even after being dead for eighteen months, I could recognize Donnie. This was why I had stayed away from Belmont since we arrived back in this area.

Drawing the pistol from my thigh holster, I took aim at the man that had once been my friend. "Sorry, man." The headshot dropped the zombie and I moved further into the store. Maurice and Tito moved up behind me and covered the store with their rifles. Quickly we did an efficient sweep of the remainder of the store, finding no additional dead. I guess that Donnie came in on that final morning but everyone else stayed home. He must have already been infected and changed before he could actually open the store.

Rather than spend additional time in the store sorting through merchandise, exposed to the dead, we simply swept the shelves clean. Each of us carried several large duffle bags, what people used to call sea bags, and we filled them as fast as possible. Tito started at one end of the ammo shelves and started sweeping boxes into his bag. I started in the pistol cabinet, grabbing all the guns I could. Everything from inexpensive .32s and .380s to the Express's selection of 1911s, I took them all. Maurice stood with his back against the far wall, keeping watch and ready to shoot any of the dead that we might stumble across. As we filled each bag, we would deposit them just outside the door and Sam, Bob, and Thomas hauled them back to the Traveler. Phil entered the store with us and began transporting armloads of rifles back to the rig as well.

While the rest of the team continued cleaning out the front of the store, I moved back into the rear office. Sitting against the wall, was a large black gun safe. This was where the Class III firearms were stored. Most people don't know, but the old Brady Campaign's favorite term "Assault Weapons" was a bald faced lie. True assault weapons - military grade, selective fire or fully automatic firearms - were heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. Before the end, it took approximately eight months and thousands of dollars for a civilian to buy a Class III firearm and then only in those places where the Sheriff would sign the paperwork. What the Brady's fooled most people into believing were assault weapons were actually nice normal semi-automatic rifles that happen to look like their military big brothers. It was never anything more than a campaign against guns that someone thought "looked dangerous". By going after "dangerous looking" guns, they could fool the soccer moms into supporting them and work a process of slowly trying to outlaw more and more guns. The dead put an end to their plans as well. Cranking up the saw again, I cut through the door and into the gap between the door and the frame. Working all the way around three sides of the door, I finally stopped the saw and set it down.

Most safe doors have locking bolts on all four sides. By cutting through three of them, I could pull the door to one side and remove it completely. Once I had set the door down, I gathered up the MP5K submachine gun and selective fire AR15 rifle that was stored in the safe. Sitting in the back of the safe was a black violin case. Removing it from the safe, I laid it on Donnie's old desk and flipped the latches open. Nestled in the red velvet was an original Thompson Submachine gun, made famous by the 1920's gangsters and movies about them. Semi-automatic replicas had been available, but this was a fully automatic version with the fifty round drum magazine. Slinging all three rifles over my shoulder, I moved back into the main part of the store. Many of the semi-automatic rifles could be converted into selective fire with time, effort, and know-how. And I knew just the person to do the job.

We had been inside the store for over an hour when Regina started blowing the Traveler's big air horns. We all knew what that huge bass rubble meant, so we grabbed what we could and headed back out the doors towards the truck. In the hour we had been inside we had cleaned out much of the store; ammo, pistols, rifles, parts, magazines, holsters, etc. Everything that was not tied down went into the bags and out to The Traveler. While we had been in the store, other members of the crew had been moving the bags to the rig.

As I ran back towards the truck, I looked up the hill towards the old burned-out BP station. A group of about twenty of the walking dead was coming down the hill towards us. I figured that I could easily beat them to the truck as they shambled down the hill. Whoever was on the front gun port opened up and began stitching lines of thirty caliber rounds through the group. Being on the outside with that M60 going off nearby was deafening. That was why I did not hear the warnings that Sam was yelling at me from the door of the Traveler.

I realized I was in trouble when I felt the tug on my leg. A dead woman had crawled up behind me and grabbed hold of me. As I fell forward, I twisted to turn back towards her. Rather than landing on my face and having the dead woman climbing my back, I landed on my butt in a semi-sitting position facing the woman. Cursing and kicking at the woman to keep her from climbing up into my lap and biting my exposed flesh, I scooted back towards The Traveler and away from her. She bit into the side of one of my boots and gnawed at the heavy leather. I kicked her face hard with the other boot, crushing one side of her jaw and cheek. Unfortunately the dead don't feel pain or even seem to care, but it did manage to get my foot free of her mouth. Finally coming to my senses, I pulled the cut-down shotgun I carried from behind my shoulder and shot her in the face. The heat and blast from the shotgun singed my boot, but none of the pellets hit my feet. I could have lived with it if they had, since I would have at least been alive. Scrambling back to my feet, I ran up the ramp into the trailer. The machine guns were hammering pretty hard, as my "roll in the hay" with the dead woman had let the incoming crowd of the dead get close.

Scrambling up the ramp and into The Traveler through the trailer's side door, I felt Regina throw the rig into motion the moment I was in. Almost immediately, Tito had his Desert Eagle pressed to my forehead as Kim yanked my pants legs out of my boots. I made myself relax, as I had done this to each of them at one time or another. As cruel as it might seem, we all knew our survival depended on each of us being clean. A hidden wound might mean that someone woke up in the middle of the night as one of the dead and that was a danger to the whole crew.

I could feel Kim's hands as she ran them up my legs, checking for wounds. Once she finished with my legs, I nodded at Tito to let him know that I understood and approved. Standing in front of them, I stripped off my gear, removed my shirt, and dropped my pants down around my boots. Kim quickly gave me a once over, a very thorough once over.

"Geez, Kim. At least take me out to dinner first!" Kim stuck her tongue out at me as she finished inspecting me for any bite marks. Kissing me on the cheek, she patted my ass and pronounced me clean. At one time we had been lovers, if you could call it that, as we fled New York City. Since then we had both moved on, but remained friends.

"Man. I thought you were a goner there for a moment," Tito laughed as he holstered that damn hand-cannon of his. The forced nature of the laugh weighed heavily upon me, my crew needed some down time badly. Hopefully, we could take some R&R at Blacksburg. The single members of the crew all had lovers there, or at least never had a problem hooking up.

The Town of Belmont stretched from Interstate 85 to the curve of the Catawba River. It had once been a typical Carolina mill town, but had become a bedroom community for Charlotte over the last ten years before the end. Downtown had been revitalized with nice pubs and quaint shops, malls to the south, north, and east had taken care of all the heavy shopping. Sitting against Interstate 85 was Belmont's Wal-Mart Super Center, home of most of the local redneck population.

Parked out on the entrance road into the Wal-Mart, I scanned the parking lot with my binoculars. The parking lot was filled with old cars and I could see some of the dead moving about. The number of dead was very light compared to the number of cars and I continued scanning trying to figure out where the remainder might be. One of the dead was a fat old lady who must have weighed three hundred pounds when she was alive. She was trying to get into a green Ford Festiva. The sight and thought of this huge dead woman spending two years trying to get into the tiny car cracked me up.

"Regina, swing us wide around the parking lot and let's see if we can get into the loading docks without too much fuss." Given that I had only seen a handful of the dead wandering around the parking lot, I figured we should be able to slide around to the docks fairly easily. Regina began to ease the big rig we called The Traveler around the road outside of the parking lot and towards the back of the store. A few of the dead in the parking lot saw us and began to come our way, but they were easily destroyed by short, well-placed bursts from our machine guns.

As we proceeded, the bursts from the machine guns kept becoming heavier. Looking across the parking lot, I could see that the few scattered dead we had seen earlier were being joined by more and more dead. From a pair of old Grayhound buses sitting in the center of the parking lot, a stream of dead blue-haired old ladies were pouring forth. The sight would have been hilarious under different circumstances. While the number of dead continued to increase, the parked cars formed a barrier that allowed our guns to thin them out as they approached.

Finally we made it across the parking lot and into the loading area behind the store. Here the dead were limited in the ways they could come at us. But we were also limited in the firepower we could bring to bear against them. Luckily, the dead are driven by hunger with no thought, so we didn't have to worry about any type of tactics being used to pin us in place and overrun us. If it happened it was just pure bad luck on our part.

"Damn, you would think we were a zombie's blue light special!" Leave it to Mikey to make jokes at a time like this. I decided it was just not worth it to tell him the Blue Light Specials were from another of the chain stores. Even as Regina backed The Traveler up to the docks at the back of the store, the guns were still hammering. Unfortunately, once we were backed into the loading dock, only the front mounted M60 machine gun and the roof mounted Mk-19 40mm Grenade Launcher could fire on the mounting numbers of the dead.

Almost immediately, we could hear the dead beating on the sides of the armored trailers. As I got closer to the rear door, I realized they were beating on it as well. Opening a vision slit set high in the rear wall; I could see the Wal-Mart docks were crowded with the dead. Must have been some sale going on at the Wally World that last day. I knew we would never get past all of these zombies and into the store. Even if we did, with this many of the dead here, the store was likely crawling with them as well.

"Regina, pull us out of here! This place is crawling," I yelled into the intercom station at the rear door. Almost immediately, The Traveler lurched forward as Regina shifted into gear and got us moving. The press of the dead in the narrow dock alleyway slowed down our progress, but the raw power and weight of the armored rig meant we could push forward through them. We began to hear the dead pounding on the roof as well as the sides. I thought of Mikey, up in the turret on the roof of the first trailer with the Mk-19. The turret was enclosed so he was safe from the dead, but you could hear him firing his M4 through the gun port built into the turret. The heavy Mk-19 was just not designed for sweeping the dead from on top of us.

As we moved clear of the alley, I moved forward towards the cab and hollered at Mikey as I passed him. "Mikey, lay a volley of fire around us!" Even as I continued to move forward, I could hear the Mk-19 start chugging. The ammo box for the Mk-19 only held 60 rounds, but they were a mix of incendiary, fragmentation, and high explosive. As I strapped myself into the passenger side front seat of The Traveler, the whole rig started bucking from the explosions happening around us. Mikey had fired the grenades into the cement wall of the Wal-Mart, using it to impact detonate them and create a storm of fire and shrapnel between our armored hull and the wall. I just prayed that the armored plating over the tire wells provided enough protection and we did not have a flat tire in the midst of all these hungry dead. If we did, Mikey was going to be the one that got to get out and change it.

As we cleared the loading alley and pulled back into the open parking lot, the ride got a bit rougher. Regina had some speed built up and she used it to plow through the growing crowd of the walking dead. As the gun ports cleared the alley walls, you could hear the crew open up, trying to thin the crowd and cut us an escape route. Luckily most of the dead were behind us as they had still been moving towards the loading dock when we pulled out and through them.

Finally we pulled out of the Wal-Mart parking lot and back up onto the main roads. The vast majority of the dead forgot about us and began to wander off. A few clung with us until the crew destroyed them, one at a time. At the bottom of the hill was a wide intersection and I ordered Regina to come to a halt in the center of it.

Grabbing my gear, I made a decision. There were things here that would haunt me until I dealt with them. Telling Regina to wait here for one hour and planning five additional rendezvous points, I departed The Traveler on foot. The hike up old 273 was simple. This area had become business parks in the years before the end and only a light scattering of the dead were around. When I reached the top of the hill, I stopped at the old laundry mat to take a breather.

I saw the dead old man when he came around the back of the house next door. Staying in the shadows, I remained motionless and tried not to attract his attention. His path was going to bring him within arms reach of me whether he saw me or not, so I knew I had no choice but to deal with him. Sliding my machete from its sheath, I watched as the dead old man came closer and closer. With a swing that started at my knees, I caught him just above the ear with the machete, its razor sharp blade slicing the top of his head clean off and splitting his brain in two. The old man continued walking for two steps before falling to the ground, dead for real this time. As much as I had disliked that old man in life, I would never have wished the curse of the walking dead on anyone.

Moving out, I walked down the hill to the next intersection. The house in front of me had once been a nice blue mill house, with roses growing in the yard. Now, it was overgrown and looked a bit worse for wear. The front door was shut and locked, and a red convertible was parked in the drive. Pulling a key ring from my pocket I walked up to the front door and unlocked it. Knowing the layout of the house made blind ambushes easy, I was very careful as I crept through the front door and into the kitchen. Almost immediately, I could smell the death. Not the still rotting stench of the walking dead, but the lingering smell of true death. As I moved through the house, I found everything like it was when I had left for New York. As I approached the master bedroom at the back of the house, the smell of death got stronger but it was still the smell of old death.

Lying in the bed was the desiccated corpse of a woman, a woman that had once been my wife. No cause of death was apparent, but she had died easily from the looks of things. I found myself relieved that she had died naturally rather than becoming one of the walking dead. When we say the dead arose that is not quite the truth. The dead stayed dead, but those who were infected died and then came back or lived and changed directly into one of the dead. You could usually tell which way one of the dead had come about by the amount of coordination that remained.

Checking the spare bedroom, I opened my gun safes and took out the remainder of the guns I had owned before the end. I wrapped the pistols; two .45 Ruger Vaqueros, a .38 special Smith and Wesson Model 10, and my .38 super Open gun; in rags and dropped them down into the bottom of one of my sea bags and then put the rifles and shotguns into the bag as well. All the ammo I had stored up went into a second bag and I carried both to the door. One of my shotguns was a Remington 1100 with a ported barrel, extended tube, and a red dot sight mounted on top. I loaded it with 00 buck from a case of shells under the bed and set the shotgun aside.

Returning to the Master bedroom, I took an incendiary grenade from my belt. Setting the timer for 60 seconds, I dropped it on the bed and walked out of the house. A proper pyre was about the best I could do for my wife now.  
As I departed the house through the front door, The Traveler was parked on the main road. These people were my family now. Regardless of my instructions they had come to where they knew I was going. As the flames began to lick the walls of the old house, I laid my ghosts to rest and walked towards my future. 


	5. Chapter Four

We pulled up to the outer perimeter of the Blacksburg Outpost early in the morning, two days after we had left Belmont. It had taken us two days to make our way through what had once been a 45-minute drive. But the next time would be easier as we had cleared more of a path through the wrecks on the interstate each time we passed through. In the time since the dead rose, this group of survivors had built themselves a secure place to live from the old Blacksburg County Correctional Farm. The outer perimeter was an eight-foot high chain fence with razor wire on top, with a second fence twelve feet inside the first. The old guard towers at each corner had been reinforced, as had the two that protected the gate. Large burnt areas outside the fence line showed where attacks from the dead had been fended off and the remains burnt.

After Regina stopped The Traveler short of the gate, I prepared to dismount when I heard the all too familiar report of a big-bore handgun. Sure enough there was my friend Roy standing in the open gate with his modified stainless steel Blackhawk which he had nicknamed the "Hog Hammer". He had built this gun to hunt wild hogs long before the dead arose, and while he still did hunt with it, the 2 power scope mounted on the top made it a deadly accurate zombie killer out to 100 yards. Strapped to his hip was a 1911 .45 automatic similar to my Kimbers, but he had built this one from parts, all fitted by hand. Roy and I had been good friends and shooting buddies before the disaster, and even then he had been a pretty fair hand both shooting and working on guns. But since coming to this outpost and working with a couple of professional gunsmiths his work was now outstanding.

"You had one hanging off your cow catcher. Looks like you dragged him for quite some distance 'cause he didn't have any feet. I guess you kind of 'de-feet-ed' his purpose," Roy quipped with a smile and a chuckle. Constantly scanning for threats, he replaced the empty case in the cylinder with a loaded cartridge and put the large revolver back into a chest holster. 

As I stepped down from the cab I looked at the dead zombie with its head split wide open from the 300-grain lead slug delivered by the "Hammer". Roy and his group never worried much about loud noise out here. There just weren't that many zombies left to worry about. There had been several close calls early on, but the remote location pretty much isolated them from the concentrations of the dead that infested the ruins of larger cities. 

Although Roy was the leader, he was never really elected. It was just understood and accepted that he was the leader. He liked to call this outpost a Socialist Democracy under a Monarchy.

"Isn't that a contradiction in terms?" I asked him once.

He smiled and said, "Not in these times, if you know what I mean."

Roy had only two rules that he insisted everyone in the outpost follow to the letter; everyone contributes, and everyone learns how to shoot. Everyone was expected to carry their own weight and contribute to the welfare of the outpost. Everything was community property and shared equally. This was the socialist part of the equation. Anyone who didn't want to contribute and felt the group owed him something was politely asked to leave. But Roy did not expect you to contribute beyond your ability. The old or infirm were welcome members of the community, they did what they could and that was all that was asked.

Even though Roy had absolute authority over every aspect and decision of the outpost, he very rarely exercised that authority. "I guess this is the monarchy part; just don't be giving me a crown or scepter, and frankly my butt hurts too much when I sit on a throne!" That pretty much summed up his feelings about his role, actually his idea of sitting on a throne required privacy and some old gun magazine. He preferred to contribute his gunsmith skills as a regular member and leave the day-to-day running of the outpost to the specialists and committees. When there was a major decision to be made, it was brought up before the entire population where everyone had an equal say and an equal vote. This was the democratic part of the mix.

Everyone in Roy's outpost carried a gun, and was very proficient with it thanks to a rigorous firearms training program. The trend that had started in Florida with concealed carry and spread across the US over liberal cries of blood in the streets had gone from a privilege to a requirement after the dead arose. Here children began training with a gun at age 7 and all new members were required to attend. Ongoing training and competition matches helped maintained proficiency. In fact whenever Roy and I get together we often stage some friendly competition, mostly for bragging rights. Sometimes he wins, sometimes I win, but overall we pretty much come out even. Our matches brought out the gamblers in our respective groups. Although sometimes heavy, the betting was almost always good-natured. Losers did not get angry because they knew they could just as easily turn out as the winners next time.

It didn't matter what type of gun you carried so long as you were proficient with it. One woman in the outpost only carried a semi-auto .22 pistol loaded with high velocity hollow-point bullets. She could pluck the eye out of a zombie at 25 yards. A head shot into the brain with a .22 would drop them just as efficiently as a .44. The .44 just gave you a bit more room for error. Even we sometimes used suppressed .22s for close-in work.

Guns are carried here for survival and protection from the walking dead, not for crime. Crime did not exist in this outpost because there was only one punishment; banishment from the safety, security, and protection of the outpost into the dangerous outside world of the zombies where death was almost certain. Everyone in the outpost had seen or been involved in a zombie attack, which was incentive enough to follow the rules. True, stupid stuff could result in extra guard duty, extra labor in the fields, punishment by parents, but true crime always resulted in banishment.

Whatever Roy was doing here really seemed to be working. This outpost was not only surviving, but also thriving. In our travels we'd seen many different ways to run an outpost, from military dictatorships to forced slavery to outright anarchy where different factions were fighting for power and control. The Blacksburg Outpost was definitely one of the better places to be.

There were a number of reasons we liked stopping here for some rest and relaxation. The outpost offered us protection and other distractions, we all had friends or romantic relationships here, they treated us like family, and Roy and his people provided services we just couldn't get anywhere else. But there was also a reason known only to Roy and a few of his community leaders. We stored a lot of extra trade goods here. Things that were bulky and did not trade well, or needed repairs were stored in the empty buildings of the outpost. Roy always kept detailed inventories and knew his community was welcome to use the goods if they were needed.

Being a former penal farm they had ready-made living quarters, a dining facility, workshops for both wood and metal, and a fully equipped hospital. And of course acres of farmland which provided a large assortment of produce. Everything was heavily guarded, guard duty being mandatory for all members age 16 and above. His people serviced The Traveler in the workshops while the rest of us were serviced in other ways.

Since the rise of the dead, the power grid had failed, faster in some places and slower in others. The old Blacksburg Farm had been an experiment in solar power before the end, a fact that gave the community a much-needed boost. Solar panels were mounted on the roofs of almost every building. Some were photoelectric and produced power directly, and some were designed to heat water used in a steam turbine, as well as providing the community with hot water. Modern windmills out in the fields drove well pumps to move well water to the fields as well as the community.

Roy and his gunsmiths always thoroughly went through our arsenal making repairs and improvements where necessary. They converted many of the semi-automatic rifles we scavenged into selective fire weapons. He never charged for this service; he figured keeping our guns in tip-top condition kept necessary supplies flowing into the outpost. When it came to barter Roy never scrimped. We were always treated fairly and got the freshest produce and meat, but Roy's group always got what they needed as well.

Fresh meat! An interesting side effect of the disaster was the explosion of wildlife. Prior to the end some twenty-odd months ago hunters were an important part of wildlife management; helping to control herd populations. Now that there were no more hunters, and zombies never went after animal flesh, there was no more wildlife management. The smaller animals like rabbits and squirrels were virtually exploding. Roy said it was a constant battle keeping them out of the fields, but it provided great target practice and fresh meat for his growing population.

He figured it would take a few more seasons for the larger animals such as wild pig, deer, and turkey to get out of control because their rut was annual. However, just in the time since the disaster, the larger animals were becoming more plentiful and moving back into lands they had been pushed out of by development. Roy sent out regular hunting parties, which kept the fresh meat coming in.

"Great to see you again, James." Roy said with his ready smile as he pumped my hand. "Come on with me over to the school. Some of my hunters brought in some survivors and I'm going to give them 'the talk'".

Roy and I walked over to the buildings set up with classrooms. Along the way he reminded me of the outpost's policy, "We never turn anyone away who wants to stay, but we want to make it clear we want people to contribute and fit in. There's enough trouble out there without having trouble in here."

Children were already beginning to arrive for school so we filed in with them through a set of double glass doors. Many people before the end would have been shocked to see kids entering a school carrying firearms. Here it was a normal fact of life. As the students were opening lockers and preparing for class we entered the first classroom to our right. Apparently this room was dedicated to the orientation session. I sat down in the back of the room as Roy moved to the front. Without any introduction or preamble Roy began his often-delivered speech.

"We'd like to welcome you to the Blacksburg Outpost. We have only two rules here; everyone works and contributes, and everyone learns how to shoot. If there's anyone here who feels they can't or won't follow these rules please leave now and go back where you came from." His statement was met with blank stares and dead silence.

"Good. No one invited you here and you can leave any time you want. Most folks stay and find helping others and contributing to the group actually helps themselves in the long run. I'm going to pass out a questionnaire that I'd like each of you to fill out to help us decide where to place you. Each of you will also be required to take a complete medical examination before being allowed full access to the compound. You can understand that we can not afford to have any infected newcomers suddenly turn on us."

A middle-aged black man sitting next to me tentatively raised his hand and timidly stated, "Sorry but ah cain't neither read ner write. But please don't send me back out there. I'll do anything you ask so's long as I can stay here!"

"Ok," Roy said, "may I please ask your name?"

"William Jones, but everybody just calls me Willie"

"Nice to meet you, Willie. What can you do?"

"Well, I ain't never had no schooling 'cause my folks were too poh, but me daddy showew me hows to use tools an' such. I's done general construction and repairs, a bit a plumbin' and electric, and if'n I really had to I can work dem fields we saws as we were comin' in."

Roy smiled and went over to shake Willie's hand. "Glad to have you aboard, Willie. We can use a good man like you. You don't have any problems with guns or learning how to shoot, do you?"

The fact that he was being accepted brought a smile to Willie's face. Rumors spread on the CB radios that survivors used to communicate about communities that espoused old hatreds; all black communities that killed whites, all white communities that killed blacks. Roy and I both saw only two types, those with a pulse and those who wanted to eat us and got on with trying to survive. "Heck I'se been huntin' squirrel 'n wabbit since I was big 'nuff to hold my daddy's rifle."

"Great! I know right where to assign you, and we'll get you signed up for some firearm training as we do with everyone. Take this paper outside to Nancy and she'll make sure you get settled in." Roy made some notes on the questionnaire he had taken from Willie's hand and then handed it back to him.

As Willie was walking out the door I saw something I thought I'd never see in these times. One of the newcomers jumped to his feet and exclaimed, "I am not going to be involved with any undertaking that allows such ignorant idiots as that ... person ... to stay and participate!" From the way he spoke, it was apparent that he was an educated man, but apparently he was unclear about the alternatives.

"And you would be?" Roy asked almost nonchalantly.

"Thomas Kennedy Sebastian Wilson III, Professor Emeritus of Political Science from Harvard University. I was teaching a seminar at the University of South Carolina when all this unpleasantness started. I have never seen such ignorance as displayed by these people in all my years and I will not be a part of it. I demand you put me in contact with the closest government official, sir!" The man had his nose so far up in the air you could almost imagine him drowning in the rain.

"Sir," I quipped, trying to keep from laughing at the fool. "Last time I saw anyone I would call a government official, he was running as fast as he could from a pack of hungry dead. Seems they have a taste for that 'blue blooded never worked a day' type."

While the man's face was red with anger at my insolence, Roy's face had turned stone cold as he icily replied to the man's outburst, "That's fine, friend. We wouldn't want to force you to be anywhere you don't want to be." From out of nowhere two burley armed men appeared. "These two men will escort you to the front gate. Please don't come back." He sputtered and cursed very un-Harvard like all the way across the courtyard to the front gate, but he had made his choice. Even now, two years into this horror, some folks just didn't understand the meaning of survival and working together. As harsh as it might have seemed, I could understand Roy's position. He couldn't afford to compromise where the safety and survival of his outpost was concerned. You either worked together so everyone survives, or no one survives.

After speaking with each survivor in turn and reviewing their questionnaires, Roy told me that The Doc wanted to see me. Like Roy, the Doc was one of the reasons that the Blacksburg Outpost thrived. Whatever he had done before the end, he was a gifted man of medicine. The first time we had come through here and found the Outpost, he had spent almost two days operating on me to get a pair of bullets out of my back. The bandits that had put them there had made the mistake of attacking the Blacksburg Outpost after attacking us on the road. Between the armed members of the community and the firepower of The Traveler, the attack had been stopped and the bandits were broken with their leader and most of the members dead.

"What do you know about the cause of the dead walking?" The Doc was not one for small talk. Grumpy, cross, and hiding a huge heart, he reminded me of the old coot that played the doctor on TV's Gunsmoke.

"Not much," I replied. "From what I have seen, it is spread by direct contact with bodily fluids, most often a bite. Higher functions are lost, but those who change alive seem to retain more than those who die. Primal hunger seems to be the only motivating force for the dead. Destroying the brain or higher spine is required to stop them." The Doc seemed happy with my reply as he nodded at each point I made.

"My guess," he started. "And its only a guess, is that someone was playing fast and loose and something got loose." Several times the Doc had made comments that led Roy and I to believe he had been into some type of high-end research, either academic or corporate. But we both felt that what you did before did not matter, only what you could contribute today. "Given what I can tell, with what I have, I would say probably Alzheimer's or Parkinson's research. Anyway, research having something to do with restarting the brain. And that's exactly what it does."

Roy and I waited as the Doc puttered about. This was more than I had heard him say total and I wanted him to continue. "I figure there is about a 1 in 10,000 chance of someone having a natural immunity." The Doc stopped with that statement and looked up at us. "While you are out there," he waved his hand, "keep your eyes and ears open for someone who has been bitten but not changed."

"Doc," I started. "You mean to say that there could be people who did not change?" I was stunned. I had not heard or seen such, but until the last few months I had been more worried about surviving than anything else. Now, the local outposts knew us and traded with us and things were beginning to change from people thinking about surviving to rebuilding.

"Yes." The Doc's tone was that of someone repeating a simple fact for a child. But what the heck, he was entitled so I said nothing. "And if you can bring me such a survivor I might be able to create a vaccine or anti-serum." At the startled look on our faces he continued. "Nothing that would reverse what has happened, but possibly something that would protect you from exposure or combat the effect of a bite if administered immediately thereafter."

The discussion continued for a while, with the Doc trying hard to make sure we understood that he only felt that such things were possible. As we left, I told him to start making a list of equipment he would need. With The Traveler, my crew, and Roy's security teams I felt we could plan and stage a raid on one of the hospitals or universities to get the equipment.

Before I left to head back to The Traveler, Roy told me that they were having a dance the next evening. I told him my crew would be there and on their best behavior. Then I headed off to our assigned barracks for the evening. The barracks were just that. A long low wooden building consisting of one room with cots lined up on either side. A large communal bathroom was located at the far end, things like privacy and body shame took a back seat to surviving. Since the end of things, the survivors here had reinforced the building and cut firing ports into the walls. A close inspection would reveal that every building in this complex was a fortress in and of itself. Like the early days of colonial America or the Wild West, this outpost had to be constantly on the alert for attacks. Since we had been on the road for a while and no one had to stand guard, my crew was all sleeping already. I quickly stripped and found my own cot.

The next morning dawned bright and clear. After breakfast, the crew split up to tend to the various chores we needed to get done. Laundry, maintenance, renewing old friendships, and making new friends were all among the things we set out to do. I went over to the storage shed where Roy stored things we brought in. On a run some months previous, I had found a red strapless dress and a pair of matching high heels in a store we were salvaging. Since they happened to be Regina's size, I had hidden them away. Tonight, she would definitely be the belle of the ball.

The dance was in full swing when Regina and I arrived. When I had presented her with the dress, shoes, and frilly underwear she had been stunned. Then we had to have "You are such a thoughtful man" sex, twice! Then she had showered and fussed with her hair. Then she tried the clothes on and modeled for me. Then she fussed some more. Needless to say, we were running late.

When we walked in, I knew we made quite a sight. I was dressed in a pair of black slacks with a white shirt and red vest that matched her dress. Regina just looked radiant. As the night worn on, she shed the shoes, but even in her bare feet she was marvelous and a much better dancer than I was. I remember getting only get one dance as it seemed that every man in the outpost wanted to dance with her as well. I did not mind because I knew the last dance, and what comes after, were reserved for me. At various times during the evening, I saw the members of my crew and each seemed to be relaxing and having fun.

When we returned to the barracks from the dance, there was a surprise waiting for us. Someone had sectioned off the barracks with curtains so that each couple would have some privacy. I held the curtain aside for Regina and pulled it closed behind us. Once inside, I pulled her close and kissed her hungrily. She returned my kiss with as much hunger and energy. When I reached to undo the dress, she slapped my hands and laughed. Slowly she started unbuttoning my shirt, shooing me every time I reached up to help or to undress her.

That tonight was going to be done her way was obvious. I just hoped I could hold on long enough. The red dress, her china white skin, and fiery red hair had me pretty fired up. Finally I was standing there wearing only my pants and she pushed me back onto the cot. Slowly, she began to sway, dancing to the music that women have danced to for thousands of years. As she began to unzip the dress, I could hear my heart pounding in my chest, everything in me telling me to take what was mine.

When the red dress fell to the floor, it strained my control to not come off the bed after her right then. Underneath it she was wearing a black lace bra, thong panties, stockings and a lacy garter belt. My poor heart was pounding. As the night wore on, Regina proved that my heart could take a lot. She used her mouth, hands, and body to arouse me while torturing me by withholding my release. Finally, we both found our release together.

The next morning I woke early, a side effect of having the morning watch shift day after day when we were on the road. Sliding out from under Regina, I pulled on my pants and shirt and stuffed my feet into my boots. Walking over to the dining hall, I helped myself to a heaped plate of scrambled eggs (they had chicken coops out back) and some type of meat sausage. As I was eating, I saw Roy come in and wander through the dining area speaking with various folks. Watching him, I marveled how each of us had ended up where we could do the most good. I was too fiddle-footed to be tied down, but excelled in the moving, dangerous world of the road. He had not only the weapon skills, but also the administrative skills and patience to make a great outpost leader.

Finally he sat down across from me with a sheaf of papers and a cup of coffee. One of the young ones doing busboy duty stopped by and refilled both our cups with coffee.

"Hell of a dance last night," I said with a grin I had not been able to get off my face.

"Hell of a dress," Roy chuckled. He knew exactly why that grin was there. "But on to business. I have been looking over the inventory list you provided and have marked the items we need or want." When he pushed the papers across the table to me with a frown, I wondered what was going on.

The items he had marked were nothing extraordinary. Canned goods, firearms, ammunition, and medical supplies topped the list. The amount of ammunition he wanted was larger than normal, especially given the reloading that took place at the outpost. Looking through the rest of the items, I still found no reason for the frown.

"Alright Roy, we have been friends a long time and you know good and well that business between us has always been upfront. So, what's the problem? You aren't wearing that frown just because the coffee's cold." I could see that Roy knew I was on the level. Before the end, some businesses would jack up prices knowing the customer was in need. I did not do business that way and neither did Roy. One never knew when I would need a safe place to stop over and screwing one of the outposts would probably take the ability to do so away.

"James, I would take every round of ammo you have if I could." Roy looked thoughtful as he proceeded. "We have been getting hit by bandits, not the dead, but bandits a lot lately. And they seem to be getting better arms from somewhere."

"Roy, there are cases of military 5.56mm in one of the storehouses," I started. "Why haven't you been using it?" The frown on Roy's face deepened. I knew then that not only had he used it, he had used it all. "All of it?" I asked. He only nodded. "If it's that bad, we will unload everything we have."

"We can't afford it," he started.

"Don't worry about it," I replied, cutting him off. "If Blacksburg falls, the best chance this area has for rebuilding falls. And we can't risk that. I will just have to hit some National Guard armories and see if I can rebuild our stockpiles." After that, the rest of the morning was spent dickering. Roy got what he wanted and needed and I ended up with a lot of fresh and home canned vegetables and salted and jerked meats. Salted venison might not be everyone's favorite, but it sure beat SPAM. 

"I really appreciate the loan, James. Listen, I've instructed the guys in the shop to install a higher capacity generator in the Traveler. You're gonna need the extra watts to run the energy-efficient refrigerator they're also installing in your living quarters trailer. You certainly could use it to keep your perishable provisions longer. They're also installing an electric pump so you won't have to break your arms cranking that hand pump every time you need to refuel. I figured this would partially pay back the debt."

I was stunned and really didn't know what to say. That was so much like Roy to help out whenever and however he could, even though he was paying a debt. The fridge and pump were items we really did need.

The afternoon was spent doing small chores on The Traveler that needed doing. Roy sent two kids that he was teaching to be gunsmiths over to field strip and clean each of the mounted M60's and our personal M4s. Regina and a couple of folks with experience in big diesels checked and performed routine maintenance on the big rig's engine. Regina also supervised the installation of the new generator, refueling pump and refrigerator. The rest of us cleaned up the inside and stowed gear that had gotten tossed about. Finally, the rig was ready to go and we all broke for supper. We would head out early the next morning.

"Roy, before I leave I want you to have these," I said as I handed him a pair of MP5s the next morning. "These have been with me since New York on the day after the dead arose. But I like the M4 much better." The full auto MP5 submachine guns would give Roy a better chance at surviving. The outpost was a solid fortress, but every fortress can fall and knowing that they were being attacked by well armed bandits made me worry that much more.

"Thanks James. These are much appreciated. If you happen to run across any heavier firepower we could sure use that as well. The full automatic light weapons don't seem to be enough anymore." We once again shook hands and prepared to depart.

With the morning light, we pulled out of the outpost and headed back onto the road. Once back onto Interstate 85, we headed south. At first the travel was slow as we had a lot of wrecks to push out of the way. But as we got further south, the Interstate cleared and we could make good time. Everything was going well, up until the early afternoon.

Not far down the road, I came upon a grisly sight. The jerk that had decided he did not want to live under Roy's rules was crucified up on one of the telephone poles along the road. It was hard to tell from the ground, but his death had not been an easy one. While I knew our own ammo stores were low, I was glad I had given Roy everything we could spare. Even some of the oddball stuff; which he would disassemble and use the components to reload useable ammo.

Suddenly, the windshield starred as a high caliber round impacted against it, but it held. Regina reacted immediately, pulling the lever over her head that dropped the steel covers down over the windshield. You could hear the clang of rounds impacting the armor over the engine as whoever had setup the ambush began to fire small caliber rounds at us.

"Ambush!" Regina yelled over the intercom. Already you could hear the M60's on the left side firing. The crew didn't typically ride sitting at the guns, but they tended to stay close to the guns when we were traveling. Looking out the windshield I could see movement among the wrecks on either side of us. These must be the bandits that Roy had been worried about.

As usual, Mikey used any excuse he could find to fire the big Mk19 grenade launcher. He stitched a line of fire into the wrecks on our right side. The wrecks began to explode as the grenades detonated on impact. Regina used the weight of The Traveler to slam into the wrecks on our left. Almost immediately the amount of fire against us slacked to almost nothing as the bandits tried to deal with the hurting they had been handed.

As soon as we cleared the ambush area, Regina slowed us down from the "pedal to the metal" pace she had used to get clear of the ambush. I got on the radio to Roy back in Blacksburg to tell him that his bandit problem was a good deal smaller than it had been. 


	6. Chapter Five

Ten months earlier, almost a year after what had simply become known as "the end" had happened, my small band of survivors had holed up in a truck service machine and repair shop just outside Fairfax, Virginia. The machine shop had been chosen for the simple reason that it was a squat cinder block building with few windows and heavy doors, making it defensible against the zombies. Parked in the main bay of the machine shop was an old Kenworth long frame semi with triple rear axles. I never did figure out what the owner had it in the shop for, but I am glad he did. A late model truck with the current trend to small engines would never have met the needs we found ourselves having.

The big New York Police Department SWAT command van we had been traveling in was a bit battered and needed a lot of repair work, so we planned to stay in the shop for a couple of days while Maurice and Regina fixed the van. The front of the van had taken a beating, even though it was protected with the heavy ramming bumper. The inside was also getting a bit ripe from having people living in it night and day. But the poor van, which had brought us so far, was beyond repair. Then Regina approached me with an idea.

"James," Regina started. "Maurice and I have an idea we would like to discuss with you." Looking up I could see Maurice behind her. It was pretty obvious that the idea was Regina's but Maurice liked it enough to back her. He was not much of a free thinker himself, but he was great at taking an idea and pondering on it for a while and finding the flaws. But anytime snap decisions needed to be made he always deferred to someone else.

I had met up with Regina after Kim and I crossed the George Washington Bridge escaping New York City. She had been driving a big rig for Toys-R-Us and was stuck in the wrecked and abandoned traffic that littered the interstate. Unlike most of those on the road, she stayed in her vehicle rather than trying to make it afoot. That was the only reason she was alive. Standing 5 foot 4 inches, weighing 120 soaking wet, and blessed with long red hair and a redhead's temper, she was fit to be tied at being trapped in her cab by the wandering dead. When Kim and I came along in the appropriated NYPD SWAT van, we had cleared out the dead long enough for her to get to us. She had proven to be an experienced and highly capable driver. For a while, I had shared both her attention and Kim's, but Kim had latched on to others as the group grew.

"Go ahead." I had been studying a Rand McNally road map to burn time. I knew where I wanted to go and how we needed to get there. I had known for some time, and the rest were just along 'cause we were surviving. But I hate sitting around with nothing to do. Studying the map gave me time to plan where the dangerous places would be, as well as take inventory on what supplies we would need to get through.

"The van is pretty much done for." Regina smiled, since she had never liked the old SWAT van anyway. It lacked a lot of amenities, but it was there and it ran when we needed something that fateful night in New York City running from the zombies. Carl, the last member of the SWAT team that had called the van home before us, had fallen to the zombies covering our escape from the building to the van. "But we think we can convert the semi cab and trailer into a rolling fortress with the material we have here in this shop. It would give us a heavy vehicle capable of plowing through obstacles and plenty of space on the inside." Regina laid out some sketches that she and Maurice had drawn up of what they thought the truck could be made into. "And we will never get a better chance to do something like this than now, with this shop and the fact that it still has power."

Power. Electricity. The lights coming on when you flipped the switch. We had taken it for granted when the world was still ours. Sure, storms knocked it out on occasion, but crews were out to fix it quickly. But since the night the dead started walking, power had become a rarity. Some places still had electricity and running water, while others did not. I could just imagine some nuclear power plant somewhere inhabited by zombies until that fateful moment when one zombie stumbled against the wrong console and the plant blew itself apart.

When the dead had started walking, the United States Government threw up quarantine lines manned by the Army or National Guard trying to stop it from spreading. While the soldiers slaughtered a lot of the dead, in the end most of them became dead themselves. Finally, in desperation, the President ordered the use of a nuclear weapon on the city of Chicago and for the fourth time in less than a hundred years, a mushroom cloud came to life over a city. Not that most people would miss Chicago. Mayor Daley and Governor Blagojevich had pretty much made it the most crime-ridden city in the world through a serious of debt-creating financially ruinous legislations that created a handout program larger than even the old Soviet Union. Plus their absolute hatred for firearms had created a city and state where most people could not defend themselves from crime, much less the dead.

The next day work began on the truck. Regina and Maurice started by welding up a cage of supports around the cab body from the large pile of tubing that was stacked against the back wall of the shop. A thick metal body made from boiler steel was welded into place over the original body, using the tube cage as support. A second pair of seventy-five gallon fuel tanks scavenged from one of the rigs sitting in the yard behind the shop was mounted into place behind the original set. Regina had cut the tanks open and welded barriers of metal mesh inside them. Supposedly this was to prevent the tanks from exploding if they were shot.

The other issue Regina had to tackle was the truck's suspension. It had to be reinforced to handle the additional weight. We raided a stripped semi-truck cab that was in the fenced in rear-yard for additional shocks and springs. Regina and Maurice welded supports onto the suspension and mounting points for the additional shocks and springs. They also stripped a rear axle from one of the trucks in the yard and mounted it as a third axle on the rear of the truck. The result would handle the additional weight but would not provide the smoothest ride in the world.

In the end, the work on the cab took two weeks. A Caterpillar V-12 engine was salvaged from a bulldozer in the yard behind the shop and installed. The oversized sleeper was also remodeled on the inside. Gun ports were cut on either side of the sleeper, as well as one through the windshield on the passenger side. The armor would hold up to most small arms fire, and with armored fenders and shields over the tires, we would be hard to stop.

The trailer started out as a low-boy flatbed, but Maurice and Regina started by building a frame from steel tubing for it as well. Once they got the frame built and reinforced, they began to weld the boilerplate onto it, to form the armored walls. For the most part, the rest of us just acted as dumb labor. Maurice had the shop skills and Regina the ideas, but Tito, Kim, and I were nothing more than available muscle. 

Based on the transit buses that Maurice drove before the fall, he and Regina came up with a solution to a problem we found. Those in the truck's cab were cut off from those in the trailer. They cut the back out of the cab and built a flexible tunnel between the cab and the front of the trailer.

We cut gun ports into the sides of the trailer. Currently we had a mix of firearms picked up along the way, mostly older M16s from National Guard and regular Army troops that had been overrun trying to stop the zombies. I wanted something heavier to mount in the gun ports but for the moment, just having a safe place to shoot from was an improvement.

After six weeks of sweat, Maurice and Regina had the cab and trailer finished. While they took a well-deserved break, the rest of us began outfitting the inside of the trailer. While construction had been going on we had made several forays into town to gather supplies. Luckily, the zombies had pretty much ignored us and we only had a few encounters inside the shops we were raiding. We mounted bunk beds in the trailer; three high and two wide on either side at the front of the trailer. Kim, we discovered, was a pretty good seamstress, so we stole a sewing machine from the local Singer store and she made curtains so each bunk had some privacy. Between the stacks of bunks on either side we mounted some lockers we found in the local hardware store. Now everyone had a place to store his or her personal gear.

Just behind the bunks was the first set of gun ports. After them we built two rooms. The one on the left side was our armory and the one on the right was to be our bathroom. From a local sporting goods store, we got several gun racks and mounted them on the wall, along with padded hooks. A tan and green outdoor storage building was bolted in the back corner. Its shelves gave us places to store magazines and ammo. Tito proved that he was actually worth the effort it took to save him. He plumbed the bathroom with a working shower, toilet, and sink. He mounted water tanks on the roof of the trailer with cistern openings to catch rainwater. Under the floor he mounted 55-gallon drums to act as gray water storage. Wastewater from the toilet he dumped directly out the bottom of the trailer.

From the two rooms to the rear of the trailer we built a community area. Propane stoves and heavy pantry storage cabinets gave us an area to cook in. Tito plumbed in a valve that would allow water from the cisterns to be run through an electronic water filtration system and into the drinking water tank. The filtration system used electrolysis rather than a filter and we wired it into the truck's electrical system. As long as the truck ran, we could filter water. A table and chairs, and two couches completed the area. The table and couches were bolted into place, but the chairs were left loose. Regina came up with an idea to mount window locks; half to the chairs and half to the table, allowing the chairs to be locked in place.

On the roof of the trailer, Maurice fashioned a turret. Basically it was a dome made of steel mesh on a revolving collar. While a small gun port was cut into turret, he left it closed up since what type of weapon we might find to mount there he did not know.

We had been living in the machine shop for almost eight weeks when the decision was made to pull a second trailer into the shop. With the first outfitted as living space we had left ourselves very little space for cargo or anything else. We maneuvered one of the trailers parked in the yard into the shop. This went smoothly as we saw no zombies the entire time we were working outside. When we opened the door to the trailer, a zombie; most likely some poor soul who had been bitten and then crawled into the trailer seeking a safe haven; fell out. Before the thing could even stand up, Tito had shot it in the head.

After cleaning up the inside of the trailer, Regina started laying out plans for how she wanted to build it up. She started out by building a frame inside the trailer from the same welded tubing we had used on the cab and first trailer. While the framing was inside the trailer, she extended it through the body to the outside. There she welded more of the boilerplate we had used before as armor. For the rear trailer, we again cut four gunports into the trailer, two on either side. Underneath the trailer's body, Regina and Maurice welded several metal lockers and then welded up covers over the tires.

The rear half of the trailer was left empty. That gave us enough room to store a lot of heavy supplies and large items. The front half was divided into large bins for sorting and storing supplies. This would allow us to store enough supplies to keep us for extended periods of time.

With the construction approaching completion, we sat around talking over a supper of pork and beans one evening. The one thing we all felt The Traveler lacked was more aggressive defenses. The armor over the body and tires would protect us from impacts, but we were still worried about being swamped by masses of the dead. Tito devised an amazingly simple solution to the problem. He welded up shallow steel boxes filled with twenty metal tubes and in each tube he placed a 12-gauge shotgun shell. A spring-loaded plate fired the entire box at once. The entire contraption was then hinged so that it could be swung out and reloaded. Three of these where mounted on either side of each trailer and two on either side of the cab. Three hundred and sixty shotguns shells could be simultaneously detonated to clear space around the armored rig, or each box detonated individually.

With the rig and both trailers complete, we decided it was time to move on. We had started seeing more of the dead moving around lately and we had cleaned most of the local stores out of supplies. Our last run had filled the storage bins inside the rig we had named The Traveler and all our preparations were complete. Given the overall jovial mood of everyone, I decided that a feast was in order.

That Friday, I spent most of the day cooking. When we all sat down to eat that night, it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in months. Chopped ham and pineapple, vegetable salad, rolls, water, and sweet tea were on the menu. Everyone ate and talked, and for just a short while the horror that our world had become was pushed aside.

Later that night, Regina came over to the area I had set aside for myself. We all had grabbed some spot in the shop and put down our bedrolls and personal gear. Some of the crew had already moved inside the first trailer, but I was still sleeping outside in a corner of the shop floor. When I looked up she was dressed in a long t-shirt with her legs bare and had two bottles of beer in her hands. When she handed me the beer and sat down beside me, I said nothing. We sat there in silence for a while, sipping the lukewarm beer and enjoying peace and quiet.

I still am not sure who kissed whom first. But suddenly, we were in each other's arms entangled in a kiss, then another one. Before long we were both naked. Regina's body was tight with muscle, the result of fighting to survive for the past months. I did not resist when she pushed me onto my back and straddled me. Finally we fell exhausted into each other's arms. As Regina snuggled close and fell asleep, I laid there awake and thinking. Did this mean something or was it just two survivors looking for comfort and celebrating the fact that they were alive? In the end, I decided it did not matter. In time it would work itself out.

The next morning arrived with the sun shining bright. The conversation over breakfast was tense, but hopeful. Having a heavily armored home like The Traveler would increase our chances of survival, but two major challenges still faced us - getting the rig assembled and fueling it. The only way to assemble it would be to open the doors to both service bays, pull the cab and first trailer out from the first bay, and back it up to mate with the second trailer. This exercise would leave us exposed for some time.

"Alright everyone, here is the plan." Everyone had gathered around the front of the cab. "All the gear goes into the front trailer. No one carries anything but arms and ammo. Tito and Kim on the roof, Maurice and Carol in the first trailer. The only person exposed will be me." Before anyone could argue, I raised my hand for silence. "No argument, this is the way it's going to be. Once everything is hooked up, Tito and Kim can jump onto the roof and get in through the roof hatch. I will climb aboard and we will get out of here." While many of the team wanted to argue, they knew that it was going to do no good.

Everything went well for a short time; we got The Traveler pulled out from the service bay without any problems. I was directing Regina as she backed the rig up to mate to the second trailer when I heard a shot ring out. Looking over my shoulder, I could see one of the dead falling to the ground about half a block away. Others of the dead were appearing, but at the moment they were still just a scattering of individuals.

We got the second trailer hooked up with only a few scattered dead appearing. Tito and Kim jumped off the roof onto the top of the trailer and entered through the rear hatch, while I ran around the rig and climbed in the passenger door of the cab. Pulling away from the concrete building that had been our home for the past three months; I think we all felt a little sadness. We had not gone but a few blocks when we ran into our first crowd of the dead.

The Traveler passed its first test with flying colors. Regina simply kept the hammer down and plowed through the crowd of the dead like they were grass to her lawnmower. I could hear the rest of the crew taking a few shots from the gun ports and then we were through the crowd.

As we approached the intersection with Main Street, the number of the dead roaming around began to increase dramatically. At first they were not an issue as the crowd was thin enough to just bull through, but the crowds kept getting thicker. Soon we were slowed to a crawl, with the dead crushing against us.

"Shit!" I could hear Regina cursing over the sounds of the dead beating against the armored sides of The Traveler. She had missed the turn she wanted to make and was trying to work us back around to Main Street. Main Street headed west out of Fairfax and became US 50, which intersected Interstate 95 to take us south. But the hordes of the dead that had appeared when we entered this section of Fairfax were making it difficult.

While the size and weight of The Traveler was causing Regina problems maneuvering, her design was proving its worth. The weight and power plowed through the crowded dead, while the gun ports gave us access to fire on the dead without exposing ourselves. I continued to fire out the front gun port as Regina used the plow blade front end to sweep the dead aside. After the third left turn I thought we were done for. Two police cars were wrecked with another vehicle in the middle of the road and there was no way to back The Traveler up on this narrow street.

A group of the dead including two police officers started towards the rig. Most moved with the slow shamble of those who had died, but one of the police officers moved much faster. Based on what I had seen since New York, he had been bitten and changed without ever dying. My first burst took him in the shoulder, but even with his arm hanging he kept coming. I walked the second burst up his torso and saw his head snap back as rounds destroyed his brain. He fell and was trampled by the dead behind him as they continued their relentless march towards us. Regina downshifted and put the pedal to the floor. While The Traveler was not capable of gaining a lot of speed in the short distance that much weight in motion has a tremendous amount of power.

She slammed the rig through the crowd of walking dead, throwing bodies left and right. One of the dead held onto the front of the truck and began trying to climb up onto the hood. Then we impacted the wrecked cars. Regina had lined us up so that the pointed center of the front blades hit between two of the cars, splitting them apart and pushing them to the sides. The dead man on the front of the truck was squashed into a greasy paste by the impact, his remains bouncing across the hood to fall to one side. You could hear the wrecked cars scrape down the sides of The Traveler until finally we were through them and Regina threw the rig into a hard right turn to get us back on the road we started on, just headed back to the turn we needed.

Moments later, she threw us into a hard turn to the left as we dropped down the ramp onto US50. By now she had the armored rig up to speed and was bulldozing her way through the wrecked and abandoned vehicles that littered the roadway. Several times the whole rig shook as she hit something that was more resistant to moving than most, but she kept us headed in the right direction. As we moved away from Fairfax, the dead began to thin out and finally we stopped firing, as the lone dead we saw were no threat.

It took us almost three hours to make the mile and a half journey down US50 to the Interstate 95 interchange. Pushing wrecked and abandoned vehicles out of the way to clear the roadway enough so that we could pass through took up most of that time. Once we reached the overpass at Interstate 95, we spent some time pushing wrecked vehicles off to the side of the bridge and then parked for the night.

Our night was rather sleepless as we all stayed on watch most of the night. I knew I would need to make a rotation schedule so that some of us could sleep while the others kept watch. But for tonight, we were all too wound up to sleep.

In the morning, we all gathered in the common area of the first trailer. Before we hit the road, we needed to fuel the rig. What fuel had been in the tanks was largely consumed by our escape from downtown Fairfax. Plans were made to minimize exposure, but this time the crew would not let me be the only one exposed.

Since we had to fill four fuel tanks and the pumps would be dead with no power, we decided that we would switch off who was outside the rig regularly. Pulling forward off the overpass, we pulled into the Flying J Truck Stop that was at the top of the southbound exit ramp. A quick bit of scouting found the tops to the truck stop's underground fuel tanks and Regina pulled the rig up next to them.

Tito and I hopped down, lugging a heavy crank operated pump between us. While Tito opened the top of the underground fuel tank, I setup the pump and put the filler hose into the first of the right side tanks. Handing Tito the long hose, he dropped it down into the tank and I began turning the crank to work the pump. At first it just spit air, then diesel fuel began to flow from the underground tank and into the rig. Tito backed off and unslung the M16 from his shoulder. He would cover me while I cranked the pump. Looking down the side of the rig, I could see barrels sticking out from the gun ports as the rest of the crew covered us from the inside.

After about 45 minutes, the first fuel tank overflowed. Stopping with the pump, I pulled the filler hose out and inserted it into the rear right side tank. Tito handed me his rifle and he took over the task of working the pump. By this time my arms were screaming, but I maintained the watch. After about 30 more minutes, Maurice and Phil opened the side door of the front trailer and relieved us.

Once the two tanks on the right side were filled, Regina started up the rig and pulled it around so we could get to the left side tanks. Maurice and Phil continued with the first left tank, switching places with each other. Once the first tank was filled, Tito and I exchanged places with them and started working on the last tank.

While Tito worked the pump, I kept a watch for the dead. About 15 minutes before I estimated that he would finish, a dead man came staggering from around the back of the truck stop itself. Hoping he would not notice us, I kept still and watched him. At first he took no notice of us at all, just staggering along like he actually had some place to go. Then old man Murphy decided to bite us in the ass. Tito's hand slipped off the pump handle and when his knuckles crashed into the iron frame of the pump, he cursed loudly. I saw the dead man's head lift.

"Hurry the hell up!" I yelled at Tito as I took aim on the dead man. A single shot to the forehead put him down, but a fat dead woman in an old faded pink waitress' uniform came staggering out from the truck stop. Even as I fired on her, I could see more of the dead coming out.

I could hear another M16 open up from inside the rig, one of the crew firing from a gun port. While I continued to fire two and three round bursts to the heads of the coming dead, whoever was inside was spraying the front of the truck stop with fire.

"How far are we?" I yelled at Tito.

"Close damn enough not to risk our asses!" he replied while pulling the filler hose from the tank and replacing its cap. While he unhooked the hoses and coiled them up, I kept the dead at bay. Once he finished, I grabbed one side of the pump and we hauled ass back into the rig, slamming the door of the armored trailer behind us.

When we first began our travels I was worried about being able to refuel this monster, thirsty rig. This fear soon dissipated by just how much refined fuel was left out here. Since there were very few people still alive to drive, finding a fuel station with available diesel was remarkably easy. Every town had multiple filling stations and the interstates were filled with truck stops. Each one had thousands of gallons of fuel available for the taking. We were very careful to never go below 30 full, and started looking to refuel when our tanks are about half empty. Still, we could go a long way before having to fill up. Thank goodness our old fuel-thirsty economy left behind this legacy of virtually limitless juice for The Traveler. 


	7. Chapter Six

After the ambush outside Gaffney by the one of the groups that had been harassing Blacksburg, we continued on south and eastward. Our plan was to use the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport as a stopping point for the night. We had stayed there before, parking out on the taxiways with the vast empty expanse of the airport around us. A small airport, Greenville-Spartanburg had not opened the morning after the dead arose. In the panic of that day, most people could have cared less. But to us, it meant that very few dead were present at the airport.

Entering the airport, we kept a watch for any sign of changes since our last visit. That could mean that other survivors had moved in to the facility or that something had happened to attract more dead. We noticed no changes and Regina pulled The Traveler to a stop on the north taxiway. While Phil and I covered them from atop the rig, Thomas and Mikey setup claymore mines around our location.

The Claymore mine was introduced during the Vietnam War of the 1960's. An anti-personnel mine, it sprayed an arc of steel ball bearings out in a single direction. This allowed it to be used in situations where the older omni-directional mines would cause as much harm to their users as to the enemy. We built ours using a stable black-powder based explosive paste and steel ball bearings in old iron pans. The pans helped direct the blast and ball bearings into an arc in front of the mine. They were effective, but much cruder that the US military version.

Maurice and Carol also went out to plant trip flares and firepots. These would activate if someone or something tripped the trigger wire. The flares would shoot up into the sky and slowly descend on their attached parachute while lighting up the area. This served two purposes, one it highlighted targets for us and second; the dead seemed fascinated by moving lights at night. This gave us an advantage. The firepots were small clay pots filled with chemicals that would produce a large bright flame. These would illuminate whatever set them off as well as blind human attackers momentarily.

Settling in for the evening, Phil started cooking supper. Trained as a professional chef at some point in his life, whenever possible we let him cook. Since we had fresh meat and vegetables, he cooked a chicken and served it over rice with the vegetables on the side. A bottle of white wine and a pitcher of tea completed the meal. Now that we had refrigeration to keep fresh meat for long periods we would eat well for some time to come. Roy's shop crew in Blacksburg had brought refrigeration and freezer capabilities into our trailer, which almost seemed like a miracle after doing without for so long.

Supper was a pleasant affair with some members of the team, both male and female, regaling us with stories of their romantic escapades while we were at Blacksburg. Tito bragged about a fine bottle of scotch he had won during the shooting contest between Roy and me. When I told him betting against the boss was grounds to be left behind, he informed me that I had to pay my employees in order to be considered the boss. That discussion quickly fell into a back and forth of increasingly silly threats and comebacks.

Finally the rest of the crew could not take it anymore and started throwing things at us. This devolved into a free-for-all fight with cups, balled napkins, and other items. Food was too scarce for a food fight. In the end, everyone was laughing so hard, no one could continue. This was how I wanted to see my crew; rested, happy, and easy with each other. I knew that all too quickly the tight confines and constant danger would begin to wear on them again. After dinner, we all pitched in to clean up and then everyone wandered off to do his or her own thing. Some would read, some would snuggle, each enjoying the free time before we turned the power off in a short while. Regina and I retired to The Traveler's cab. We spent a while doing the administrative tasks that keep a crew like ours alive. Regina updated the maintenance logs for The Traveler and went over any items noted by the shop crew at Blacksburg. She also updated the travel logs so that we always knew how much fuel we had and how far we could go. I reviewed the inventory logs. Tito had entered notes from the last stop at Blacksburg as he had restocked our main supplies of food and unloaded the majority of our surplus ammo. Also noted were any needs that Blacksburg or any of the other outposts they communicated with had expressed.

Once we finished our paperwork, it was almost time to shut down the power anyway. Regina and I retired to bed, since neither of us had the first watch. Our sleeping area was in the cab's oversized sleeper. Since the night watch would need to pass through the sleeper and into the cab, we had mounted our bed up high. With the curtain drawn closed, we had some privacy. But aboard a vehicle as crowded as The Traveler, privacy was something given to you by everyone else rather than something you could really find for yourself. Tired from the firefight, we snuggled a little and then drifted off to sleep curled up around each other. About 3 hours before sunrise, I was awakened by Thomas to take my watch.

We had found Thomas here at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport the last time we came though this way. He had fortified one of the small outbuildings and created himself a shelter. I had known Thomas before the end; we had both shot United States Practical Shooting Association matches. He was a manager for a local grocery store chain with a normal family life. When the end came, he had been at work and ended up locked in the store's stockroom to escape the dead. Once he got out, he found his home deserted and had fled to the airport for safety.

Dawn came cloudy and wet, the rain having started during the early hours of the morning. With our water tanks filled before we left Blacksburg, it took very little rain for them to be full once again. The crew was slow to get up and I did not push them, we were not in any hurry. Once everyone was awake and had grabbed a quick breakfast, we retrieved the claymores and flame pots we had set out and made preparations to leave.

Once outside the airport, we hit the old SC Number 9 headed southeast. There was a small outpost in Lancaster County and Roy had told us they were in desperate need of supplies. He had made arrangements for us to "stake" the outpost with goods and he would pay for them if the Lancaster Outpost was unable to pay us back over the next couple of months. I most likely would have done that anyway once I got a chance to meet the principals. Having been born and raised in Lancaster, I was curious to see who had survived and formed the outpost. While I had always assumed that my parents, who had lived in Lancaster, had not survived the end you never really lose all hope.

As we headed southeast along SC Highway 9, we passed through the small towns of Oak Creek, Jonesville, Kelly, Adamsburg, and Robat. While travel was slow due to wrecked and abandoned cars on the roads, we encountered few of the dead. Occasionally we would see signs of life, but the survivors were not ready to meet us and so we continued on. Nights were spent in whatever large open spaces we could find.

On the fourth day of travel we reached the small town of Lockhart. Just outside of Lockhart, we came across a sight we had not seen in a while. A group of survivors were fighting off a number of the dead. It looked like they had raided a small store for supplies and the dead had surprised them. Unfortunately the dead were between them and an overloaded old pickup truck that was obviously theirs.

I ordered Regina to bring us to a stop with the rig stretching between the trapped survivors and their vehicle. That would bring our side mounted guns to bear on the dead as well as allowing us to use the rig itself as a safe passage for the trapped survivors. Most of the survivors stopped firing when we pulled up, I guess they were too startled. Its not often you see a hundred feet of armored truck with four machine gun barrels extending from ports in its side pull up next to you. When our guns opened up, almost all of the survivors dived for the ground. Once our guns had destroyed the dead, I opened the side door and went out to meet the survivors. I did not think there would be any problems since I had just saved their lives and they were still under the guns of The Traveler.

"Hello!" I yelled out to the survivors. One thing about the dead, they did not talk.

"Who are you and what do you want?" The voice came from the group that had been cut-off from their vehicle. I had seen movement in the vehicle itself, so I knew someone was there as well.

"We are the Travelers. Traders who move between outposts." Hopefully this group had a CB radio and listened to the local chatter. We were always on talking with the outposts about their needs and the outposts talked to each other. If they did, then maybe they had heard of us and this would go a lot easier.

A middle-aged man stood up from behind the car. "Heard of you." He looked me over and then looked at The Traveler sitting behind me. "How do we know you're not bandits of some kind?"

"If I was a bandit," I asked with a smile. "Would you still be alive?"

"Guess not." With that, things smoothed out. The man introduced himself as Kyle and then introduced the rest of the small group. They were all family; wife, kids, in-laws, etc. At my call, Kim came out with the first aid kit. Her training as a nurse came in handy at times like this. Maurice and Carol brought out water and some simple food.

The family fell on the food like they had not eaten in days. As they ate, they told us they were part of a convoy fleeing the fall of the outpost in Chester. Maurice and I looked at each other; we had not heard any rumors about an outpost in Chester, much less the fall of one. When we pressed for more details, Kyle refused to elaborate. Instead he said we should talk to Ralph, leader of the group of survivors Kyle and his family were part of. Once we got them patched up, they all climbed aboard the pickup truck and we followed them out.

Following the truck, we pulled into the parking lot of an empty big box store, probably a K-Mart at one time by the look. Parked in the middle of the parking lot was a group of about 11 vehicles, mostly trucks and vans. They had been parked nose to tail forming a circle for mutual protection. I could almost see the covered wagons that would have been parked in the same way, a hundred and fifty years ago.

The vehicle we were following headed directly to the circle, but I had Regina stop a ways off. Survivors were often on edge with the constant need to battle the dead and roaming bandits and I did not want to spook them anymore than was needed. I would go out to meet them on foot. In preparation, I had changed clothes on the trip over. Under my black t-shirt was a Second Chance Level III vest and I was wearing my paired 45 caliber Kimber 1911s in the double Jackass Leather shoulder rig. I had specifically left the heavier artillery behind. I knew Mikey would be on the Mk-19 in the turret atop the first trailer and Phil would be on the roof of the second trailer with his 50 BMG sniper rifle. If things went badly, I would have all the firepower support I needed.

Kyle, the old man who was in charge of the group we had rescued, introduced me to the convoy's leader, a grizzled old man named Ralph. While Ralph was appreciative of our saving Kyle's family, it was obvious that he was not ready to trust us off hand.

One thing I noticed about the group was how overloaded their vehicles were. Not with trade goods or gaudy things, but with household and personal goods. I could see rocking chairs, sofas, tables, and chairs as well as clothing. These were the trappings of refugees, not bandits, a scene right out of The Grapes Of Wrath.

Watching the group, I paid special attention to the way the men treated the women and children. Experiences since the end had taught me that bandits and those who were going to be trouble typically treated their women and children poorly. If the women were all dressed for sex, or were batted about, or walked in constant fear of the men, that was usually a bad sign. Here the women were upright and proud, well dressed in sensible clothes. The children were clean, well as clean as children get, and seemed well behaved. The men and women seem to share the chores and I saw a woman directing a group of men moving some heavy items about.

While I was fairly sure that the group was exactly what they appeared to be, I kept my guard up and my eyes open. I could hear Regina's commentary in my ear through the radio. She was watching through binoculars and not only kept me apprised of any threats, but made comments about me looking at the local ladies as well.

After about 30 minutes of small talk, Ralph finally decided I was trustworthy and decided to tell me their story. They led me to the fire they had built in the center of the defensive ring and offered me a cup of coffee. After taking a sip and managing not to go into convulsions, I got the attention of Ralph's wife who had been tending the fire. Slipping a small package of freeze-dried Folger's from my pocket, I offered it to her. Coffee was always a fine icebreaker. The lady nearly wept at the gift. Fixing her husband a fresh cup of coffee and handing it to him, both she and I laughed at the look of bliss on his face when he tasted it.

"Well," the old man started. "Just after the end, a bunch of us who survived gathered in the old Chester School. They don't build buildings like that anymore and we figured it would hold against the dead better than most of the other buildings." He took a sip of the coffee to wet his lips. I thought about growing up in the area. When I was young Chester School had become Chester Elementary and the older students moved to other newer schools. But I remembered visiting the old brick building. Thinking back I could see where it would make a good place to fort up.

"Everything was okay for a while. We fortified the school and held off a few mobs of the dead who tried to get at us. More and more survivors straggled in. Sometimes it would be one or two people, sometimes a family. After a couple of ugly incidents, we learned to separate the new folks for a day or so and make sure they were not infected." The hard look around the old man's eyes showed that the incidents had been very ugly. This was common practice nowadays to quarantine any survivors newly arriving into any outpost.

"After about a year, things settled down," the man continued. "We made a garden in the interior courtyard and found ways to make the plumbing work. Every so often we would make daytime raids on the local grocery stores for supplies. We had built a nice home out of the old school house. Then one day a survivor came straggling in." The anger in the man's face was strong.

"He told a story about struggling and hiding to survive. Basically the same story everyone else has, only he had been out there longer than most. Most people welcomed him in without a second thought, but a couple of the men had some doubts. He seemed awfully well fed and in good health for someone who had been struggling to survive on their own." A harsh coughing fit shook the old man. His wife offered him water in place of the empty coffee cup. He took it and drank before continuing.

"After a couple of days, he offered to start standing watches. By now most of the doubters had quit worrying about him. Since no one likes the night watch, he ended up on the midnight shift. Exactly where he wanted to be!" The old man spit in disgust. "The third night, he opened the gates to his bandit friends and they swarmed into the school. Before we could mount a defense, they were inside the school. They began to slaughter the men and children, keeping the woman alive. But they made a fatal mistake." The old man stopped for a second. I wondered whom he had lost in the attack, as his pain and hatred could almost be tasted.

"The commotion drew the dead. Maybe it was all the noise. Maybe it was the smell of fresh blood. But the bandits had swarmed inside and not closed the gates behind them. Suddenly they were attacked from behind by the dead and it gave us a chance to get away. When we ran, we could hear the fighting going on in the main courtyard between the bandits and the dead. As the bandits escaped back to their vehicles, the dead followed to some degree. That got most of the dead back out of the school."

"The next day, we sent scouts back into the school. They looked for any of our people who had barricaded themselves in rooms to escape the bandits and the dead. The survivors of the attack were brought back to the old firehouse we had hidden in the night before. Afterwards we sent in a larger group to salvage any equipment and supplies that were left. Since the bandits did not have time to loot, most of our stuff was okay." Again the old man started coughing and after another drink of water continued.

"We buried our dead, and voted as a group to find somewhere new to live. And here we are." The old man shrugged his shoulders and indicated the ragtag convoy of survivors.

"Well, at least you are headed in the right direction." I smiled at the old man. "About three or four days ahead you will come on the Blacksburg Outpost. We will radio ahead and let them know you are coming. Travel should not be too bad since we have cleared at least part of the roads between here and there."

"My advice to you would be to lighten your loads," I went on after a pause. "I know it sounds harsh, but you can move faster without all the furniture and heavy items you are carrying."

The old man smiled. I had seen that smile before. It was that same smile that every old person gave a younger one when they agreed with them, but were about to explain why the facts of life made them wrong. "Most of the women have been through hell and that furniture is all that they have left of their lives before." He shook his head. "I would definitely like to get rid of some of it, but I don't think I would survive the suggestion."

I laughed with the old man. Sitting down with a map, we planned a route to get his convoy to Blacksburg as safely as possible. Since we had cleared roads as we passed through, I marked the route for the convoy using places we had cleared.

That night, we had a huge feast. The women of the convoy took some of the venison we had from Blacksburg and worked some magic with it. The side dishes all came from cans in our stock, but you would have never known. Even during the feast, I noticed that they kept watches posted and that both the men and woman shared the watches. These folks would survive. As the night wore on, my crew returned to The Traveler. Regardless of the watches posted by the survivors, we still kept our own.

The morning dawned clear and bright. By mid-morning, the survivors had finished packing and were ready to move. As we watched the convoy head north towards Blacksburg, I hoped they made it safely. We were going to continue on towards Lancaster. If we met up with any of the bandits that had slaughtered the old man's family as we passed through Chester, I think we could manage a little payback.

As we pulled back onto SC 9, we headed east continuing our trek on to the Lancaster Outpost. By noon, we were passing through the small town of Wilksburg. Like most of the small towns we had passed through, there was very little moving in Wilksburg, dead or alive. By evening we had traveled all the way to the outskirts of Chester.

Rather than try Chester at night, we pulled into the parking lot of an old strip mall. Here we had a large open area around us, so our defense could be setup with some depth. After setting out our claymores and all, we settled in for the night. As the sun rose the next morning, we were all happy to have had an uneventful night.

SC 9 does not pass through Chester, but instead skirts around the outside. After a quick discussion, we decided to stay on SC 9 and skip downtown Chester. That meant we lost any real chance of running into the bandits and the dead that had overrun Chester School, but we could live without the risks.

After we passed around Chester, we continued on eastward until we reached the SC 9 and Interstate 77 exchange. We spent the night parked on the bridge and proceeded onward in the morning. The small towns of Richburg and Bassomville were desolate ghost towns and we did not even bother to stop. As the sun started to set, we stopped atop the US 21 overpass for the night.

As we pulled into Lancaster, South Carolina the next morning we came upon a pair of wrecked 18-wheelers. The faded logos on the side identified them as trucking for Wal-Mart and Lowe's foods. Since both could be treasure troves of supplies, we pulled to a stop just short of them.

"How we gonna work this?" The question from Tony was a good one. The two trucks were pretty much by themselves, but we still needed to be watchful for the dead. While The Traveler let us bull through crowds, it was easy to get overrun outside the rig.

"Regina is going to keep the rig on this side of the wreck with Carol and Kim manning the M60s." I sketched a quick diagram as I talked. "Mikey and Phil will go past the wreck and mount a guard on the far side. Mikey, take the M249 in case you need the firepower." Mikey nodded. The M249 was a light machinegun that fired the same 5.56mm round as our M4 and M16s. While it was belt-fed, it could also use the same 30-round magazines as the M16 family.

"Once we have guards established, Maurice, Thomas, Tony, Tito, and I will make a sweep through the wreckage and then inspect the contents of the trucks. If need be, we will start breaking down pallets and moving goods from the wrecks to The Traveler. Any questions?"

When no one had any questions, we all began to gear up. Mikey and Phil put on heavy body armor, once it had been called riot gear. The rest of us geared up in lighter body armor. All of us, however, made sure that we were covered as completely as possible. If we stumbled on the dead in this wreckage it would be up close and personal and the heavy sleeves and high armored collars could save our lives.

Once everyone was ready, we opened the side door and began to move out. Mikey and Phil went first. They moved around the wreck and took up positions on the far side, providing us with security from external threats. The rest of us moved into the wreckage. As Mikey yanked open the door to one of the trucks, I swept across the inside. Seeing nothing, I held my fire and Mikey shut the door. Tony and Tito did the other cab and the single pop I heard from over there let me know they found one of the dead, but nothing they could not handle.

Moving back along the side of the truck, I kept watch as Mikey cut the lock on the trailer and swung the doors open. Tightly stacked inside the trailer were white boxes with a familiar black pattern. Climbing up into the back of the trailer, I found that the Wal-Mart truck was full of Gateway Computers. Not a very useful item these days.

Jumping down from the back of the trailer, I told Mikey to follow me and we moved over to the Lowes Food's truck. Tony and Tito met us there. Mikey cut the lock on this one just like he had the first one and we swung the doors open. The smell of rotten food hit us like a hammer and as we staggered backward, we knew there was nothing here to salvage.

"Everyone pull back to The Traveler, there is nothing here for us," I commanded over the radio. As we moved back towards the rig, Mikey called out that he had spotted some of the dead moving our way. But they were well away yet and we made it into The Traveler without incident.

Turning onto US 521 from SC 9, we pulled through downtown Lancaster. Much of the city was in ruins as the Army and National Guard had made a stand on the north side of the city, probably against infected and dead people coming south from Charlotte. The courthouse was a charred ruin and we pushed through the seven blocks of Main Street. On the south side of Lancaster things were more as we expected; deserted and desolate, but not showing any major damage. As we continued traveling south, we began to get weak static filled radio traffic on the CB from the Lancaster outpost.

Mom and Dad's house was well out the south side of Lancaster down US 521. Once we cleared downtown, the wreckage on the roads was sparse enough for us to travel easily. The outpost was located further south towards Great Falls. I knew I could not pass that close to the house without checking to see if I could discover what had happened to my mother and father. 

As Regina brought the rig to a stop, I surveyed the carnage outside what had been my parent's house. The windows were shattered, dead bodies lay in the front yard, and both vehicles were still in the driveway. Making a quick sweep through the house, I could not find any evidence that they had packed up to leave, but I did not find their bodies either. My heart sunk as I realized they had most likely been infected 


	8. Chapter Seven

As Regina turned the big rig onto the old blacktop that was US200, my heart skipped a beat. The Lancaster Outpost was just up ahead. While we had known it existed, we had never visited there before. According to the conversations we had been having by radio during the last couple of hours, the survivors of my family were a part of that community and I was looking forward to seeing them after almost 2 years. I had thought my family lost, especially after finding my parent's house empty with no signs they had packed anything and left.

The Lancaster Outpost was built in the old Springs Mill Park. Adjacent to the Catawba River and the old hydroelectric dam, they were reporting that they were well set for power and water, but needed medical supplies and foodstuffs. We were well stocked with both, our only shortage being firearms and ammunitions. Blacksburg had cleaned us out of those. I had broken my own rules and extended Roy credit, not only to pay for the supplies he took on, but also to cover any supplies Lancaster needed that they could not cover. But I knew Roy and the Blacksburg Outpost would be good for it.

As we pulled up to the metal gate that blocked the entrance into Springs Park, I could see some of the changes that the survivors had made. They had cut down a lot of the trees and built palisade walls around their outpost, as well as cleared firing lanes. The old World War II fighter, which I had played on as a child, had been pushed back into the woods outside the perimeter. Inside the wall I knew there was the old lodge building and several other structures that had existed before the end.

As we pulled up the road to the palisade, I was having trouble controlling myself. My parents were just on the other side of the gate. When Regina pulled to a stop, I dismounted from the rig through the cab's passenger side door. While I was wearing my Kimbers underneath my vest, I left all my heavy hardware in the rig.

"Hello, the camp!" I yelled as I walked forward towards the gate. I could see movement behind the wall and knew people were scurrying into defensive placements. This always happened with first visits. Not that I could blame the outposts, they did not know us and needed some assurance. Especially since they were looking at a huge armored vehicle sitting on their doorsteps.

"Who are you? What do you want?" Everyone asks the same old questions. You would think that sooner or later someone would ask different ones.

"We are the Travelers. We trade salvaged goods from outpost to outpost. I have been communicating with Thomas Williams, if you would find him for me." I guess I could have used the fact that my parents were living here as a way to get in, but I represented The Travelers now and I knew that I needed to make sure that we were accepted, not just me.

"Hello, James." Well whoever was on the far side of the gate recognized me or knew who I was from our radio contacts. The gate swung wide and I walked through, letting Regina know to come on through. Looking at the platforms on either side of the gate, it was immediately obvious that the outpost had no heavy weapons or at least they had them hidden, which made no sense.

Suddenly I recognized the man standing inside the gate. The red hair and freckles was a dead giveaway, his name was Mike Adams and we had known each other growing up. I stuck my hand out and he grabbed it and shook it heartily. As he led me past the gate, he looked up at the huge armored rig that was pulling in behind us. "Nice ride." He laughed.

"Yeah, it keeps us alive and moving. Looks like you and the rest are getting things together here." While the outpost was obviously new with its defenses and amenities still under construction, they were thriving. As we walked along, Mike and I caught up on things that had happened since the end. Finally Mike led me into the main structure and we sat in a small room talking.

"While we remain fairly safe from the dead out here, not that long ago we were attacked by bandits." Mike shook his head at the memory. "Luckily we had finished building the front wall and were fairly well protected. Anyway, your parents should be here any second so I will leave you alone." After shaking my hand, Mike left the room.

When Mom walked into the room, I ran like a small child to hug her and cry. Dad followed behind her and we all spent a few minutes hugging and shedding tears in silence. The carnage I had seen at the house was the result of an attack by a small group of the dead who had wandered through and were attracted by Dad out in the yard. Luckily, Dad had made it to the house safely and managed to hold the dead off. The surviving neighbors had pitched in and finished off the dead in a vicious crossfire.

Knowing that they could not stay where they were, my parents along with the Williams, the Flacks, and other neighbors had decided to move to this outpost, which had just started forming. The survivors at the outpost were happy to take Mom, Dad, and the rest in. Mom had become the schoolteacher and Dad had helped the outpost build its walls and taught people how to shoot.

We sat and talked until late in the night. After seeing to the rig, Regina joined us and I introduced her to them. I told Mom and Dad that I had found Judy, my wife, and made sure she was giving a decent burial. The next morning, I sat down with the group that ran the outpost and negotiated over supplies. The outpost had very little to offer and were astounded when I told them that the older established Blacksburg Outpost had offered to covered their supplies. However, with both Mom and Dad sitting on the council, I was not able to negotiate very strongly anyway.

Over the past months, we had made it a practice to just about give away supplies if we were well stocked and the outpost was new. I dickered hard with Roy at Blacksburg, but he had well established gardens, hunting parties, and machine shops. We also tended to stay away from hellhole outposts like the quasi-religious military one north of Raleigh.

The next couple of days were spent unloading supplies, using the raw power of The Traveler to help the outpost with some construction, and just visiting. We transported a group into the outskirts of Lancaster and supported them while they raided the old Bass Pro Shop, the Piggly Wiggly and the Food Lion grocery stores. We ran into very few of the dead, and hauled supplies as well as two vehicles back to the outpost. They hoped to get the vehicles running so they could make raids of their own. Finally, I told Mom and Dad that it was time for us to move on and we would be pulling out the next morning. Since I was headed south, I promised that after Columbia we would proceed on to Charleston in hopes of finding my sister.

As we pulled out of the Lancaster Outpost, we turned south on US200. Survivors at the Lancaster Outpost had told us of another outpost located outside of Columbia and we had decided to check it out. US200 was amazingly clear, but as we left Great Falls and approached the Interstate 77 intersection, the road began to become more and more blocked. We slowed down as Regina was forced to push more and more wrecks out of the road so we could get by.

When we finally reached Interstate 77 we pulled into the Flying J truck stop located over the southbound side of Interstate 77. As we pulled in, it was very obvious that someone had already been here. Dead bodies, both the walking dead and the recently, were scattered about. I had Regina bring us to a halt out in the parking lot, with a clear run at the exit. We just sat there, as Maurice and I studied the truck stop and surrounding area with our binoculars.

"Regina, I don't see any signs of movement." I called down. "Let's move over to the diesel fuel tank and start pumping."

"You got it, boss." Regina eased the big rig through the wreckage in the fuel lot and over to where the access ports for the underground fuel tanks were located. When she brought the rig to a halt, Tito and I disembarked through the side door of the forward trailer. We both crouched down, each of us covering a side with our rifles.

"Tito, start pumping fuel." Tito moved to the side of the rig and opened a storage locker just above the rear fuel tank. Unlike when we had first built The Traveler, thanks to Roy we no longer needed to manually pump diesel fuel out of the underground tanks. The storage locker contained the new electric pump driven by the rig's new generator and hoses. Not only did this set up save our muscles, but it allowed us to fill both tanks on one side at a time thereby reducing the amount of time we were exposed. Dropping the long hose through the access port and putting the filler hoses into the tanks of the rig, Tito was ready to start pumping.

"Pumping in 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Pumping." With a soft rumble, the pump spun to life and started sucking diesel from the underground tank. I stayed alert as the noise would draw any of the dead who were around, though the firefight signs all around gave me cause to think we might be left alone.

After the two tanks on one side of The Traveler were filled, we shut down the pumps and put things away. Tito went back inside and Phil came out to help me. Regina started pulling away in order to turn the big rig around for the other tanks. As she pulled into the main road to come back in the other entrance, I thought I could hear engines in the distance.

When the vehicles appeared, it was immediately obvious that we were in trouble. I don't know what gets into these idiots, but they must have watched the Mad Max movies too many times. Half of them were driving dune buggies and the rest were in stripped pickup trucks. All of them looked to be dressed in leather and various accessories from the local S&M sex shops; spiked collars and all kinds of studded black leather.

Before they even got close, they began firing on The Traveler. I had known they were idiots, but the guy hanging out of the driver's door of a stripped Jeep, firing a handgun at the big rig gave the word stupidity new benchmarks. Even as big as The Traveler was, I don't think he ever hit it. But a burst from one of the gun port M60s hit his windshield, shattering the glass and blowing him apart. Hopefully, he had never had a chance to procreate and spread his stupidity.

The rest of the vehicles circled around the rig, some of the smarter bandits trying to shoot at the tires. The flexible plates mounted over the tires protected them from the poorly aimed shots of the bandits, but sooner or later someone would get lucky. The crew manning the gun port machine guns was having trouble hitting the fast moving vehicles, but the sustained bursts from the M60s were taking a slow and steady toll on the bandits.

Phil and I kept our heads down and moved to the cover of a church bus that had been abandoned in the parking lot. Climbing up the rear ladder to the cargo rack we both took positions lying on the roof. Phil had brought his scoped M1A1 with him when he came out to help me, so once he got settled he began taking out bandits with single precise shots.

Phil Ramenowski was an ex-Marine and a member of the feared Marine Scout Snipers. We had run into him walking along the side of the road as we were traveling from Raleigh, North Carolina towards Charlotte. The interstate had been a mess and we had moved off onto some of the back roads to get around the wreckage. Lo and behold, there was this gentleman in military fatigues walking down the road with a scoped rifle over his back. So we offered him a ride. Standing 6 foot 2 inches in his combat boots, Phil was a crack shot with his rifle, and not too bad with a pistol either. He had helped us develop some of the techniques we used, adapting his military training to keep us alive. At some time in his life, he had also studied to be a professional chef, so we let him do most of the cooking.

We were finally spotted and two vehicles broke off from circling The Traveler and came towards us. Phil picked off the driver of one of the vehicles and it crashed into a gas pump. While the pump erupted in a fireball, the electricity had long been off so no more gas was available to keep the fire going.

The second vehicle got a bit closer and I stitched a line of 5.56mm rounds across the windshield. My magazine was loaded with mixed civilian 55-grain full metal jackets and military 62-grain SS209 rounds. While the FMJ's starred the windshield without penetrating, the steel penetrator cores of the SS209s passed through, killing the driver and passenger. Unfortunately, the now dead driver's foot remained on the gas and they kept coming at us.

"Phil move!" I yelled as I scrambled towards the rear of the bus. Knowing we had no time, Phil and I both jumped. Landing on a parked car, we rolled to absorb some of the impact. While Phil went forward, I rolled down the rear windshield and off the trunk onto the asphalt. As I hit, I could hear the screech of metal as the bandit's vehicle smashed into the bus we had been on seconds before. Climbing to my feet, I could see the remaining bandits pulling out of the truck stop.

As Regina pulled the rig back to the tank caps where we had been refueling, Phil and I took stock. Both of us were battered from the dive to the ground, but other than bruises and scrapes we were basically uninjured. Tito and Mikey came out to replace us and finish fueling the truck. I staggered into the cab and fell into my seat.

Once we had finished refilling the tanks, we pulled down onto Interstate 77 and continued traveling south. The interstate was a tangle of cars northbound, but the southbound lanes were relatively clear. This did not bode well as this type of traffic was typically an indication of severe infestation in the metropolitan area we were approaching.

As we got closer to Columbia, we began to see small groups of survivors on foot. While this was common just after the end, by now most survivors had settled back down. Most of the groups hid from us, but one group walking north on the south side of Interstate 77 stood and watched as we came closer. Regina pulled us to a stop just short of them, and I stepped down to talk to them.

"Hi, folks." I kept my hands in plain sight, not wanting to scare them. "Where are ya'll headed?"

A tall heavyset man who seemed to be the leader of the twelve or so survivors just stood and watched me for a moment. Finally he spoke. "North, anywhere away from here."

When he did not continue, I knew I was going to have to fish for information. "Something happen in Columbia? We had heard of an outpost on the north side of Columbia and were heading down to trade with them." I watched his face as I spoke and at the mention of a Columbia outpost his expression changed. Either these folks were from there and something had happened, or the outpost had refused these folks shelter as they passed through.

"Ain't there no more," the man said slowly. "The dead overran the walls and just kept coming. Wasn't nothing we could do but run." Even as he spoke, the man sank to the ground.

"Carol, Kim! I need medical assistance out here. And bring these folks some water and some light food, the Saltines maybe." We had found a huge supply of saltine crackers in an abandoned big rig not long ago and I knew that was what these folks needed. When you have not eaten in some time, heavy food tends to make you sick so it's better to eat light for a while. By the time we had revived the man and fed his family, more survivors were straggling up. Finally I just ordered the crew to put up the large awning and we setup an impromptu aid station. I was not about to refuse these people help, but I was also wary. Desperate people do stupid things sometimes. Most of the doors to the rig stayed locked and one of us was always on guard at the side door that we kept open.

As night started to fall, I worried about the situation we found ourselves in. Stopped in the middle of the road, there was no shelter and The Traveler could not accommodate the crowd that had gathered. Luckily we had full fuel tanks so we could easily leave the generators running all night. I gave out orders and started moving the survivors as close to the sides of the rig as possible. Some even bedded down underneath the rear trailer.

After quick discussions we began setting up our defenses as best we could. Mikey and Maurice set out the claymores and flame pots, covering a much wider area than normal. We were worried that someone might get up and wander into the trip wires in the night, but we would just have to take the chance. The survivors were warned and they knew the value of the defenses like ours. Sharing duties with the strongest of the survivors, we setup a walking guard rotation and left the external trailer spotlights turned on so that the guards could see.

The first two watches went smoothly. None of the dead came out of the darkness to attack the crowd of survivors that were huddled around The Traveler. Sometime during the early morning watch, life began to get interesting. At first it was just the odd single dead wandering into the light and being quickly dispatched by the guards.

As the morning watch went on, the guards began to encounter more and more of the dead. They had started appearing one every now and then. Then they began to appear more often or in small groups. By now, everyone was awake and on alert.

"Phil, Tony! You and the other guards pull back. Once all the guards are back under the rig's guns, I want Phil on the roof with his rifle. Hustle everyone, I think we are about to get clobbered!" Even as I shifted personnel to cover our vulnerable spots, I heard one of the claymores trip.

I could hear the screams of children as the dead began to come into the light. The staccato bursts from my crew's M4s where punctuated by the louder crack of the survivors' hunting rifles and the deep boom of shotguns. The dead walked through the hail of gunfire like it was nothing. You could see one drop every now and then as its central nervous system was destroyed, but the rest kept coming. "Head shots!" I yelled out to those survivors who were shooting. "Aim for the head!" After what seemed like an eternity, the shooting ceased as all the dead had been destroyed.

"Let's heave these bodies out away from the camp. But put a round in the head first to make sure they are dead!" The men nodded at my orders and began lugging the bodies to the edge of the light and throwing them into the darkness. From the roof of the front trailer, Mikey fired off a string of flares to give us more light to work by. All this while the crack of single pistol shots could be heard at an almost rhythmic pace.

One of the young men, I did not know his name, was throwing a dead body out into the darkness when he was suddenly attacked by another of the dead. The dead, a woman dressed in a tank top and jeans, lunged out of the darkness and locked her teeth around his neck before anyone could react. Two rifle shots rang out from above my head. The first struck the young man between the eyes, ending his suffering, and the second blew the woman's head apart. An older woman, probably his mother, cried out in horror and tried to rush to him but was held back by other survivors. The man who had been leading the original group we had stopped to help caught my eye with a look of understanding.

We had no more settled down, when the claymores, flares, and flame pots all along one side detonated. In the firelight we could see a large crowd of the dead staggering forward. Almost immediately, two of the M60s mounted on that side of The Traveler opened up. I had the 45 caliber Thompson Submachine Gun I had taken from the Gunshop Express in Belmont slung across my back. I pulled it around and began firing short bursts into the heads of the oncoming dead.

The next 10 or 15 minutes was a blur of screams, shots, and yelled commands. The crew and the survivors held strong, keeping the dead at bay and killing them as fast as possible. At one point the dead managed to get close, coming through a thin spot in the defense near the rear of the rig. The fight there devolved into a melee of hand-to-hand combat. Unlike fighting normal humans, fights with the dead were wild. The dead who was fighting with the guy next to you would suddenly turn and bite you simply because you were there. Axes, machetes, baseball bats, and even one sharpened shovel were brought to bear against the dead. As one of the dead attacked me, I swung cutting off both its hands, yet it kept coming. Ducking under its attempt to bite me, I slammed my machete against the back of its neck. As its head fell, the body stumbled into another of the dead distracting it long enough for me to remove its head as well. In the end, the dead who managed to get close were all destroyed, but four of the refugees were killed or bitten in the process. Those that had been bitten were tied up and left to be dealt with later.

Stopping to take a breath after the last of the dead had been destroyed, I waited for the next shoe to drop. No sooner had I thought that than Phil began to holler from atop the trailer. He could see a large crowd of dead in the morning sunlight and they were coming our way. I knew our ammo had to be running low, after leaving so much of it with Roy in Blacksburg.

Cussing, I started gathering those that had stepped up as leaders among the refugees during the evening. "You have got to get these people moving north. There are more of the dead heading this way. We will do what we can to slow them down. Whatever you do don't stop." If the dead kept pushing north, these people were doomed. The dead did not get tired and would eventually catch up with them. Our best chance was to turn the dead like a herd of cattle and that meant getting their attention. We just did not have the ammo to destroy them all.

"Sir?" It was one of the refugee leaders. "There is a chemical truck full of fertilizer on the south bound side about half a mile back. A little diesel fuel and we could make quite a bomb."

Checking with Phil on the location of the group of the dead he had spotted, we thankfully had a little time. The refugees were moving, but it would be fifteen minutes or more before The Traveler was clear. Phil, Tito, and Jeremy, the refugee leader, left to try and get to the chemical truck. As soon as the refugees were clear, we moved the Traveler forward. I had told Jeremy that we would not be heading north, he just nodded and took off. He definitely had sand.

Phil, Tito, and Jeremy worked to convert the truck into a huge fertilizer bomb by mixing diesel fuel and the fertilizer. Most people don't realize just how powerful an explosive can be made that way, the trick is getting the proportions right. Mikey spotted a wrecked gasoline tanker on the northbound side of the interstate and had a brilliant idea. Since we were low on ammo, we could rig a siphon on the tanker and use it as a flamethrower.

Using a small gas-powered pump and some hosing, Mikey worked to setup the flamethrower. As he worked, the first of the dead began to reach us. Trying to conserve ammo, we made sure that each shot destroyed at least one of the dead. As the number of the dead reaching us began to increase, we heard Mikey give a shout of triumph. Suddenly a huge tongue of flame played across the dead. While the fire did not kill the dead immediately, they began to stumble around aimlessly. The burning dead bumped into other dead and set them afire. The flames would kill the dead in the end, but it would take some time. But at the moment, it was buying us time.

Phil, Tito, and Jeremy came running back across the median. Phil and Tito would shoot any of the dead that got too close, but Jeremy was wielding a firefighter's axe like some barbarian warrior. One of the dead lumbered close to him and Jeremy took its head off cleanly with a swing while never breaking stride. We would not be heading north to catch up with the refugees so he was stuck with us for a while. I thought he would make a good addition to the crew as I watched him split another of the dead from crown to belly button.

We all clamored back into The Traveler with Phil yelling, "Go! Go! The damn fuse is lit!"

Regina slammed the rig into gear and plowed through the milling crowd of the dead. We had just cleared the far side of the crowd when the huge armored rig was pushed to one side by a powerful explosion. Regina never let up and kept us moving south. Looking behind us, a huge fire raged in the center the median, slowly dying as the gasoline and diesel that fueled it burned off. Hopefully the fire would continue to burn for a while and form a barrier to keep the dead from following the refugees.

As we moved further south down Interstate 77, we came upon a second band of refugees, this one only about 12 strong. They had hidden in an overturned bus while the dead were attracted to the larger group that had camped at The Traveler. But they had not escaped unharmed. The woman was holding a young girl, not more than 9 or 10. The child's shoulder was a bloody mess where one of the dead had gnawed on her. The anguish in the mother's face was heart breaking, as she knew what would happen over the next couple of hours. 


	9. Chapter Eight

It seemed almost a lifetime ago since we had built The Traveler and formed our crew. The lessons learned over the past year were often hard ones that resulted in the loss of a friend or teammate. Probably one of our most harrowing experiences happened just after we left Fairfax.

"Hey, Boss." Carol came forward into The Traveler's cab, with a clipboard in her hand. She had been working to inventory our supplies since we had left Fairfax, Virginia two weeks earlier. We had raided a couple of small stores along the way and the storage bins in the rear trailer were full. "I have finished the inventory, and other than medicines we are pretty well stocked." She paused for a moment as she handed me the clipboard. "I was thinking. We have been hearing about forted communities that are surviving. We could trade things we scavenge for things they have, like fresh vegetables."

I smiled at Carol. "I had been thinking along the same lines. There has been some CB radio traffic from one such community somewhere outside Raleigh, North Carolina. I was hoping to maybe try to do some trading with them as we passed through." Looking at the inventory sheets Carol had handed me, I agreed with her assessment. If we could find medicines, I knew they would be worth their weight in gold to the outposts - not that gold had any real value these days.

"Regina, keep your eyes open for a billboard advertising a drugstore or a drugstore sign. If we can find an Eckerds or CVS and raid the pharmacy, it would top our supplies off." Regina nodded as she concentrated on driving the big rig. The dual armored trailers gave it a heavy cumbersome feel which coupled with all the cars she had to push out of the way to make progress kept her attention on the road.

Several miles and a couple of hours later, we could see a sign ahead for a Walgreen's. Since it was just about lunchtime, it would take us about an hour to get to the store. That gave us all afternoon to see what we could salvage.

As we pulled off the interstate, a Walgreen's Drug Store could be seen just down the road. "Guys, this is as close as I can get," Regina called out. She had parked in the middle of the road with a clear path into the parking lots on either side. That would give her room to maneuver the big rig if things went bad.

"Tito, Maurice, Carol, Sam, Peter! Gear up. We are going to see what that drug store has for us." Each member of the team grabbed his or her gear and started getting ready. The gear was based on what each person had found during his or her original escape and was comfortable with. One day, I hoped we would find a weapons cache large enough to outfit everyone with the same gear. We had hit several National Guard and Police armories, but most had been emptied when the groups were called out to help with the riots that broke out in the last days.

As we moved down the road, we formed a loose line. "Tito, cover our rear. Maurice, you take the right, Sam take the left side. Peter, you're out front with me. Keep a watch, I don't want to get caught in the open." The team shook out and started covering their assigned areas. I had a rudimentary knowledge of military tactics, but I had been working the team the best I could since I knew that we would need that type of tactical professionalism if we were going to survive.

"Traveler, we have made it to the store." Regina's reply came back quickly over the radio. We had made it to the doors of the drug store without encountering the dead. I hoped our luck would hold. The sliding glass doors where not locked, and easily slid apart when Sam forced the pry bar between them.

Inside the Walgreen's was dark. We could not see any motion in the gloom, but the high displays between the aisles meant you could not see too far anyway. "Peter, Sam, Maurice... You clear across the front and come down the far side. Carol, Tito ... You are with me." Slowly we made our way into the store. Like most Walgreen's, the store was constructed with a register at the front, cosmetics down the near side, and groceries on the far side. The pharmacy was located in the far back corner.

As we pushed down the cosmetics side of the store, Carol stopped me with her hand on my arm. She pointed out one of the dead, a young girl in the remnants of a Walgreen's smock. She was inside the four short walls of the cosmetic's counter and stumbled from side to side. A quick shot from my silenced Beretta to the side of the dead girl's head ended her suffering.

As we moved through the store towards the back, we ran into no other dead. I did not hear any gunfire from the rest of the team, so anything they ran into they were able to handle with the silenced pistol Maurice carried. As we reached the back wall, I could see the beams of light from the other group's flashlights. Moving along the back wall, we met just outside the pharmacy. "Carol, take Tito and Sam with you. Start raiding the pharmacy. Antibiotics, painkillers, and such come first. Peter, start raiding the first aid aisle. Bandages, ointments, and other useful things come first. Maurice and I will provide security. Let's move folks!"

While the first aid aisle of the Walgreen's had been ransacked, the pharmacy was an untouched treasure trove. Whoever had raided this Walgreen's had not been able to get through the locked door of the pharmacy. Sam forced the pry bar between the door and jam. When Maurice and I lent our weight to the pry bar, the door gave way with a loud crack.

"Carol, you and Maurice go through the shelves and get the drugs that will be the most helpful. I'm thinking antibiotics, painkillers, and that sort of things. But you would know better than I. Sam, provide security." Carol and Maurice, with Sam watching over them, proceeded down the aisles of the pharmacy. Almost immediately, I could hear boxes, bags, and bottles being dropped into the large bags they were carrying.

"Looks like we have everything worthwhile, Boss." Maurice could drag the word boss out to almost 10 syllables and give it a definite sarcastic tone. We had picked up Maurice just outside of Petersburg, Virginia. We had cut across to Interstate 85 from Interstate 95. This would lead us to Charlotte, North Carolina, which was the destination I was pushing toward. Standing six and a half feet tall and packing almost three hundred pounds of muscle, he was a dominating presence, but actually a very quiet and introverted person. He had worked for the city of Petersburg driving city buses, and when the end came, he used his bus to escape. While he would not talk about his past prior to being a bus driver, he was very proficient with firearms and well versed in small team military tactics. An old tattoo faded into his upper arm, made me believe that his past included a stint in some army's special forces. While he acted as our backup driver, he would always find some reason not to act as a team leader when I split the crew into teams for a job.

"Alright, everyone lets move out." With Sam leading the way, we moved through the store and towards the front door. The team fell into a strung out line with Carol and Maurice in the center. They both had heavy bags of drugs slung over their shoulders.

"Fall back into the store," I whispered to the team. As we had left the Walgreen's, we found ourselves facing a large crowd of the dead moving between the road where The Traveler was parked and our location. Unfortunately, we had attracted the attention of the dead and the crowd was moving towards us.

A quick burst dropped the first of the walking dead but they continued to shamble towards us. We moved back into the store, working towards the back and hopefully a rear entrance. At least we could use the rear office space to fort up and hold off the dead, momentarily.

"Get Inside!" I yelled at the team. The oncoming dead where pushing through the aisles towards us as the team moved through the storeroom doors back into the hallway beyond. We kept hammering them with fire from our personal weapons. Once we had all passed through the doors, I jammed a broom through the door handle to keep it from opening. "Peter, rearguard!" At the far end of the short hallway was a doorway that led to the storeroom. On the far side of the storeroom, the metal door to the old cold locker could be seen.

"Sam, what have we got?" I had joined Peter in the hallway as rearguard. We could hear the dead as they crashed through the store and began to pound on the closed hallway door.

"Sir, this is a good hold point." Sam replied. "They will bottleneck as they come down the hall and we can thin them out some." He was stuffing shells into the Remington 870 shotgun as he spoke. "If it looks like they're gonna overrun us, we can pull back into the freezer."

"Alright, lets move these crates across the door for cover." Looking at the contents of the storeroom, we could build a fairly defendable area. Everyone stood around looking shell-shocked, surprised at the situation. While we had had a few close calls since the day the dead started walking, we had never been trapped like this. "Let's move the goddamn crates people!"

The team dragged the crates and boxes into a semi-circle in front of the freezer door. We could hear the dead hammering against the door at the store end of the hallway.

"Tell me you remembered to bring them?" Peter grinned at my question. He pulled a pair of improvised explosives from his bag and handed me one. "One ... two ... three!" We pulled the strikers and threw the explosive charges down the hall into the oncoming dead. I slammed the storeroom door behind us, and Peter pushed a heavy crate across the doorway. The improvised explosives detonated, shaking dust from the ceiling.

Everyone took positions behind the crates and readied their personal weapons. We were carrying a hodgepodge of National Guard M16 Rifles, SWAT H&K MP5 submachine guns, and 12 gauge shotguns. "You really think any of us is gonna get thru this?" Tito asked me with a smile.

Looking at my team, I saw a lot of scared but determined faces. "Well, I might!" I quipped. I was going to get my team out of this if at all possible.

We could hear the dead beating against the door and the low grumbling growl they made. With a scream, Carol threw down her shotgun and began to cry as she curled up in the corner. The past couple of months were proving too much for her.

"Well, she picked a hell of a time to go weepy on us," Tito complained. Moving over to Carol, he began to whisper to her, trying to calm her down. 

With a crash, the door gave away, but the crate held it shut. "Hold your fire. Tito and I will take the first wave. You get any that get too close. Once we run dry; Maurice and Peter move up and cover us while we reload."

The crashing of the dead against the door finally moved the crate far enough that one of the dead pushed through. The old man dressed in plaid flannel with half his face eaten off pushed his upper body through the gap, only to be stopped by Tito with a single shot from his M16. The dead behind the old man kept pushing through. Tito and I continued to kill them with well-placed single shots. But the dead kept pushing forward, sliding the crate further and further away from the door.

"Shit!" The crate finally slid out of the way and the dead came pouring through the doorway. Tito and I kept up a disciplined hail of fire, killing them as fast as we could. It was not going to be long before we ran out of ammo and the others would have to cover for us.

"Reload!" Tito yelled. Maurice and Peter had been waiting and began to fire as we withdrew to reload. One of the dead rose up alongside of me just as I was slamming another magazine home. I jammed the butt of my M16 into its maw and tried to keep it off of me. Sam shoved his shotgun up between us and fired at point blank range, removing the dead man's head and my sense of hearing.

"Fall back into the freezer," I yelled. Our weapons reloaded, Tito and had I joined our fire to that of Maurice, Peter, and the rest of the team. But the dead continued to push forward. But in order to get out of here, we would need and exit. A sudden thought occurred to me. "Sam, bring me the explosives!" 

Setting the charge against the outside wall, I moved back towards the freezer unit. The fire from the rest of the team kept the dead pushed back enough for me to make it to the door. Slamming it shut behind me, I continued to keep count under my breath. "Eight... Seven... Six..." When I had reached the count of two, the explosion of the charge I had set rocked the freezer. Shrapnel pelted the door, but nothing came through.

Nodding to Tito, he threw the freezer door open. Amid the blood and body parts, one of the dead stood in the middle of the room with both its arms blown off. A quick burst from my MP5 to the head finished it off. Moving quickly, the team made for the hole that the explosion had blown in the wall. Tito, Peter, and I formed a firing line, as new dead tried to push into the room from the hallway.

The team made it outside into the open. But as the three of us pulled back through the hole I had blown in the wall, one of the dead slipped through and attacked Peter. The old woman's corpse wrapped one arm around his neck and tried to bite through his jacket into his shoulder. Normally, that would have worked, but the zombie's lack of teeth meant that she could not penetrate the leather. But her weight bore Peter to the ground where he was attacked and bitten by more zombies.

"Come on, there is nothing you can do for him now!" yelled Tito as he pulled me out of the store into the open.

"Yes, there is," I replied as I fire a single shot between Peter's eyes, ending his pain and suffering. Even as Peter's dying screams faded, the dead were hit with fire from outside the store. "Pour it into them!" I yelled at the rest of the team. The team intensified its fire on the dead trying to get through the makeshift barricade. Among the sharp reports of rifles, you could hear the deeper booms of Carol and Sam's shotguns.

After a few tense moments that seemed like an eternity, the fire from outside ceased. We had already stopped shooting as all of the walking dead inside had been put down permanently. Grabbing our gear and the duffel bags of drugs, we quickly moved towards the front of the store, fully prepared to board The Traveler and get out of here.

"What the hell?" I came to a sudden stop just as I came around the front corner of the Walgreens. Instead of finding The Traveler and the rest of my team, our rescuers were a group of men, clad in black fatigues and carrying M16 rifles. Having my rifle slung and staring into the barrels of theirs, I slowly raised my hands. "Hi!"

"Lay down your arms." The order came from the largest of the guards. I could not see anything that marked him as the leader, but then again I wore nothing that marked me as well.

"Listen, we don't want any trouble," I started. I had the feeling that I was not going to be able to talk our way out of this one. "We just stopped to pick up some medicine and ran into some zombie trouble. Now we will just be moving on." I had started moving away from the guards as I talked, but the sudden tenseness that came when they raised their rifles brought me to a stop.

"Lay down your arms," the leader of the black dressed soldiers repeated. "Now!" My team had been caught flatfooted and we knew it. I eased my rifle off my shoulder and put it on the ground. The two Kimber .45s from my shoulder holsters and the Para Ordnance P14-45 I carried in a thigh holster followed my rifle, along with the machete and sawed-off shotgun from across my back. Behind me I could hear the rest of my team laying down their arms as well.

Escorted by the black-clad guards, we left the Walgreen's and moved down the road. Looking back up the hill, I did not see The Traveler. Regina must have moved it when these folks appeared. Parked in the lot of some type of old diner was a pair of trucks, late model Ford F650 Super Duty by the looks. Each sported an M60 machine gun mounted on the roll bar where someone standing in the bed could fire it over the top of the four-door crew cab.

"Get in," the leader of the guards ordered. Since he had asked so nicely and we were disarmed, we climbed into the back of one of the trucks. A quick drive through the remnants of a small town brought us to a huge brick structure surrounded by fencing. A gate with ramshackle towers on either side could be seen where the road turned into the structure.

As the trucks approached the closed gate, I could make out the details of this outpost. By the looks of it, it had once been a mill of some type, probably textile. The yard around the mill was enclosed in a standard chain link security fence with barbed wire at the top. You could see places where the fence had been patched or reinforced. Due to the slapped together nature of the patches, I figured these were due to attacks by the dead.

"This way," the head enforcer ordered. While they had disarmed us and were rather emphatic about our doing what they wanted, we were still not tied up or treated like prisoners. Following the enforcer, we entered the mill through a heavy steel door. At the end of the corridor was a large room overlooked by a throne upon a raised dais. Well, basically it was a Lazy-Boy covered with a plush purple quilt, but given the way the occupant sat in it, the throne image came across.

"I want to welcome you to my humble abode," boomed the man sitting on the throne. "I am the Baron James Thatcher, and this is Thatcherville." As he spoke, Baron Thatcher stood up from the throne and slowly spun around, his arms extended in a gesture that was suppose to encompass the entire mill. In reality, this guy was definitely playing with a very short deck.

"So my new friends, just who are you and where have you come from?" the Baron asked.

"We are traders and travelers, survivors from farther north. We salvage what we can and trade it for things we need." I answered the fat man, this Baron Thatcher. "We were searching a Walgreens Pharmacy for antibiotics and other useful drugs when we where attacked by the dead. Luckily your soldiers were there to help out."

"Well," the Baron Thatcher started, "since traveler's afoot are bound to be tired and night is coming, you can just stay here." He began to spout commands for the servants to "fluff the down pillows" and "make ready the executive wash rooms". It was painfully obvious that no one paid him any attention. So, just who ran the outpost was still a mystery.

The guards led us to a large room that had probably been a large office space filled with cubicles at one time. Now it was a large suite with two large beds and very gaudy decorations. After we entered, the guard shut the door and I could hear the lock set. Motioning to Sam, I mimicked turning a key and he nodded, touching my ear I looked around. Sam grinned and started talking totally irrelevant stuff with Carol.

"Hey, Carol and I get one of these beds!" When Carol turned to him with surprise, he signed to her in American Sign Language to play along. One of the things we had discovered early on was that both of them knew it, and I had them teach the group. It gave us a way to communicate with the dead being attracted to voices, or in this case without the guards hearing us.

"You got that right, Baby!" Carol replied in a sultry voice. As the two of them carried on about what a night they could have on a real bed, I signed for the rest of the team to scatter out and look around. Tito and Maurice started a drool banter about the "booty" on one of the woman we had seen in the Baron's throne room as they searched one side of the apartment. At one point the discussion got so exaggerated with slang and comments of bad taste that the rest of us where about to die laughing.

A couple of hours later, a knock at the door announced the entrance of the leader of the guards who had been introduced earlier as Heinrich. "The Baron requests your presence at dinner." Somehow, I didn't think the invitation was much more than a thinly disguised order, so we followed him back to the throne room.

Dinner was served by a group of young women. Watching one cringe as she set a plate down in front of Heinrich set my nerves on edge. After dinner, the Baron stood to make an announcement. "Tonight we celebrate the fifteenth birthday of young Jeanna. Sergeant of the Guard Terrance has won the bidding for her." Two guards with a struggling young woman between them entered the throne room from one of the side doors. The Baron walk down from his throne and sensually touched her face as she continued to struggle. "But tonight I take my prerogative." The smile on his face was sickening.  
"Shit!" Regina awoke with a start. She had fallen asleep on watch. Since guards from the local outpost had captured James and his team, she had kept The Traveler hidden. But with only Kim and herself to keep watch, it was hard to stay awake all night. Looking out the window, she could see nothing around the outside of the rig. Sitting back in relief, she thought about James and where he might be now.

"What the hell?" Looking out the front window, she could see movement among the buildings surrounding The Traveler. Shambling from the shadows came first one then many more of the dead. Quietly she awoke Kim, but the dead had already started to beat upon the sides of The Traveler.

"What are we gonna do, just the two of us?" The panic in Kim's voice worried Regina. If Kim lost it, Regina would be on her own and The Traveler was too big to be handled alone.

"Come with me." Regina led Kim back to the cab and ordered her to take the passenger side seat and its forward mounted M60 machinegun. "Thin out the dead in front of us and keep them from swarming over the hood." Regina watched Kim's face until she was sure Kim understood. Turning the key, Regina brought the big rig's massive motor to life and hit the switch to turn on all the external lights.

For a second, the dead recoiled from the sudden burst of bright light as the external spotlights came on. Regina used that second to slam the rig into life. The rig slowly started to move, it ponderous weight fighting against the power of the big V-12 diesel engine. The dead crowded the front and would have brought many vehicles to a halt, but the weight and power of The Traveler continued to push forward. Flipping the cover off the switches, Regina fired the first charge from the rig's close defenses. Some 240 12-gauge shotguns shells fired around the rig, scything through the crowded dead and opening a space around The Traveler.

Pushing forward as The Traveler gained speed, Regina kept the RPMs high on the engine. The heavy weight of the armored dual trailer rig squished the dead as it ran over them, while Kim and the front mounted M60 thinned down the crowd ahead. Knowing she would have to reload it later, a time consuming manual task, Regina flipped the second switch to fire the remaining charge on the rig's close defenses. As the assault thinned the dead, Regina drove the rig out of the crowd and pulled away to safety.

At the outpost of Baron Thatcher, we were plotting to escape. "We have got to find a way out of here," I told Sam in a whisper. He nodded his agreement.

"Our ... caretakers ... are running a pretty predictable timetable. I think if we plan it just right we can overpower the guards and have about a 45 minute head start before they realize we are gone." Sam looked thoughtful for a moment, and then he continued. "But I think we might be able to recruit the young girl who brings our food."

When the young girl returned to our suite with the noon meal, Sam flirted with her and pulled her into a conversation. When he mentioned leaving, she almost begged him to take her with us along with her brother. After that it was just a matter of planning our escape. The girl gave us more than enough information on how to get through the complex. The most shocking fact was that when she turned 15 on her next birthday, she could be selected by any of the Baron's advisors or enforcers to act as a concubine. Such legalized rape had Sam in what amounted to a killing fury.

So we made our plan. When the guards checked in just after the evening meal, we would overpower them. Changing into their clothes, Sam and I would escort the rest of the team like we were taking them to see the Baron. The girl and brother would meet us in the hallway and show us a way out of the compound. Her brother was a guard trainee and would secure our weapons for us. Then we would make our way back through town to the parking lot where we had left The Traveler. Hopefully, Regina would be watching for us.

As the guard crumpled to the floor, the second guard came around the corner. But, I was waiting for him and quickly dispatched him by hitting the back of his head with the piece of pipe I had picked up. Hearing an approaching noise, I made ready to take out another guard. We had only planned on the two, but if we needed to take out three to get away, so be it. I recognized the young girl that had brought our food and lowered the pipe. The man with her must be her older brother, Mikey.

"I thought you were gonna meet us down the hallway?" I asked as I stripped the uniform from the guard. Sadly, I don't think this guy had bathed in a while and his uniform was a bit ripe, probably had fleas as well. I put the black shirt on over my regular clothes and grabbed his hat.

"It was too dangerous to go that way with these," Mikey replied as he held out a large duffel bag. Most of our personal weapons where in the bag, along with Carol and Sam's shotguns, but the M16s we had been carrying were missing. "The Baron's guards took your rifles for themselves," Mikey explained at my questioning look. Motioning the rest of the team to follow, we formed up with Sam as rear guard. Hopefully anyone seeing us would think we where two of the enforcers leading the guests somewhere.

The two kids led us down several hallways, then into a section of hallway that had not seen any use for a while. We exited the outpost through a small door and fire escape on the backside of the old mill. Using a neighboring building as cover from the guards in the gate watch towers, we moved down the street and started across town towards where we hoped The Traveler would be.

Amazingly, the trip across town was uneventful. The Baron and his enforcers had made considerable efforts to destroy the dead and clear the area. This had been before the Baron's mental health went south, when he was planning to expand out into the town itself.

As we approached the Walgreens where we had been captured, we could see a few of the dead milling around. Using the buildings on the other side of the street as cover, we went around them and towards the parking lot. But in the distance we could hear the sounds of truck engines.

"Shit, I was hoping we had more of a lead over these guys!" The enforcers from the outpost we were calling "Sadisticville" had caught up with us. We had just gotten to the empty parking lot where we had last seen The Traveler, a parking lot that now sat empty.

"Over here," Sam yelled. He waved us over to a pair of metal garbage bins surrounded by some old crates and boxes. While not the best cover in the world, it was better than being caught in the open. No sooner had we gotten to the garbage bins, than the enforcers came roaring into the parking lot. The lead vehicle fired a burst from its mounted machine gun over our heads.

"James! You have abused the hospitality of Baron Thatcher and stolen from him. Surrender and throw yourself to his mercy and I can guarantee the lives of your friends will be spared." Heinrich, the head enforcer of the Baron's guard, was a bit pissed from the sound of his voice. He had the same twelve troops and two trucks with him that he had when he captured us. Looking at the faces of my crew, I knew they did not want to surrender and return to that hellhole of an outpost the Baron controlled.

To reinforce his ultimatum, Heinrich and his troops laid down a withering sheet of fire. Luckily, they were deliberately aiming high, forcing us to keep our heads down. Risking a glance around the side of one of the garbage dumpsters, I could see why. The black-clad enforcers were moving forward from cover to cover. They would have us surrounded in minutes. Desperately, I continued to look around, trying to find anyway out of this. But as they moved ever closer, I could not come up with any ideas.

As I hunched down with bullets whizzing over my head, I could hear the rumble of additional engines coming. With reinforcements coming, I could see no choice but to surrender to the enforcers. Suddenly the air was split with the bellow of an air horn. Glancing around the dumpster again, I looked just in time to see one of the armed trucks go crashing into the four enforcers trying to sneak up on us down the right side.

"I love that girl!" I yelled. Regina drove through the enforcers and brought The Traveler to a halt diagonally across in front of us. "Go! Go! Go!" Even as I yelled at my team, they were already running towards the side door of the rig. Kim opened the door before we got there and we all piled in. I was bringing up the rear and pushed the two people who had come from the Baron's in front of me. Landed on my butt facing back out the door, I used my legs to kick two of the Baron's enforcers who were trying to climb on board as well. Kim slammed the door shut quickly, blocking them out, but almost taking my feet off in the process.

"Hit it Regina!" Before I could yell, I felt the big rig lurch into motion. Regina swung us around the backside of the store and into the parking lot on the other side. I could see Heinrich looking at the burning wreckage of one of his trucks and screaming at his men. At first I was worried that he might try and follow us, but he was still standing there screaming as we pulled away. 


	10. Chapter Nine

As I watched the second group of survivors start heading north, I could see the young child's mother looking back. She was kept from returning by other members of her group. Even though she knew that her daughter was changing into one of the dead, her maternal instincts told her to return.

"I have made her as comfortable as possible under the circumstances," Carol reported after checking on the girl. Looking at the child, I could see the shackle that bound her ankle to a support underneath The Traveler.

"Once the other survivors are far enough away, I will end her life quickly and cleanly. That's the best I can do for her under these circumstances." Carol's face tightened at my response, but she nodded. Like the rest of us, she knew what was going to happen in the next hour or so.

"I don't see any other choice." With tears in her eyes she walked away. The reality of infection with the zombie virus was cruel, but inescapable. If we killed her with an overdose of painkillers, she would just come back afterwards as a zombie.

"James!" I turned when my name was yelled. Walking to Regina, I noticed the disgusted look on her face. "It looks like we took a stray round into one of the rear tires."

Indeed, the left outside rear tire on the second trailer was flat. Opening up one of the outside bins, I pulled free a large jack and a tool bag. "You start unlocking the armored plating, I will go get another tire," I told Regina. Inside the rear trailer were four brand new tires, the heavy ones the rig used. . Back before the end many truckers saved money by purchasing retreads that often shredded under heavy load. We couldn't afford to have a breakdown that might make us susceptible to attack. However, finding new tires was relatively easy, and cheap, and we only went with the best. Dismounting one of the tires from the support bracket, I rolled it out the aft door of the trailer and around to where Regina was unbolting the armored coverings.

"On three ... One ... Two ... Three!" With groaning strains, we lifted the hinged armored covering. Once it was upright against the side of the trailer, I held it in place while Regina threw the latch that would hold it up.

"Alright, give the jack a crank or two," I yelled at Regina from under the trailer. I had placed the heavy jack under the axle. As she used the handle to ratchet the jack upwards, I shifted it until it met the axle correctly. Once the jack had firmly met the axle, I slid out from under the trailer.

"Shit!" The lug nuts on the tire were tight and unmovable. Taking a ball peen hammer from the tool bag, I hit the lug wrench, popping the lug nut free. This was repeated many times until all the lug nuts were broken loose and removed.

"Just a little more, give me one more crank," I grunted at Regina as I pulled the flat tire from the axle hub. Dropping it to the ground, we pushed the new tire into place and started tightening up the lug nuts. Once everything was back in place, all that was left was the cleanup. While Regina locked the armored cover back into place, I rolled the flat into the rear of the trailer and then helped her put the tools away.

"Thanks Lover," she smiled.

Hot, sweaty, and ready to sit in the rig's air conditioning, I remembered the young girl. She was probably a zombie by now, but I had not heard a gunshot that would have ended her suffering. Walking back around to the other side of the rig, I saw Carol kneeling down beside her. Worried, I placed my hand on the butt of my pistol.

"Carol?" I called out fairly loudly. If things had gone wrong, I wanted to know before I got too close. When Carol answered and turned towards me I was shocked. Her face radiated a happiness that was out of place given the situation.

"Come look!" She called. Approaching, I saw the young girl's face. Even though she had been bitten almost 6 hours ago, she showed no signs of turning into a zombie. In fact her eyes were clear and alert. "She hasn't changed. In fact, she seems to be getting better rather than sicker."

"Let's keep her chained and watch her. Maybe she is one of the one in ten thousand that the Doc told us about who is immune. If she is, the Doc will be happy to see her." I told Carol. "He thinks he might be able to make a vaccine or antidote from her blood."

Three hours later, the crew broke for lunch. I took a pair of plates to Carol for her and the girl. The girl was sitting up awake and alert, amazing when she should have been a dead hungering creature. I sat down with Carol and asked the girl some questions. After a few minutes, the young girl, who told us her name was Shelby, started telling us her story.

"I was in school when things started getting strange," young Shelby started. "We were watching the news and they were talking about the bad things happening in the big cities. They closed school early and sent us all home. Mom was home from work and we were playing Candyland when the bad people started pounding on the door. I was scared and I think Mom was too, but Mr. Franks came to the back door and took us away from the bad people. We were living at the old school until the other bad people ran us off."

After we cleaned up from lunch Regina put The Traveler in gear and we once again continued our journey south. Shelby lay comfortably in one of the bunks, but still chained just in case. As we approached the exchange between Interstate 77 and Interstate 20, I had drifted into a half-sleep passengers have used for decades. When Regina slowed The Traveler, however, I sat up quickly, now wide-awake. Ahead of us were the ruins of an old roadblock, probably from the quarantine during the last days. Several military two and a half ton trucks were parked on either side of the road. While we could see various remains, they were all old. No movement was visible anywhere.

"Maurice, Sam! Check out the trucks on the right. Tito, you're with me." Tito and I left the truck by the driver's side door of the trailer, while Maurice and Sam went out the passenger side door. We made a quick sweep through the ruins of the roadblock. Finding no threats, we began to search the military vehicles. While we found several loaded M16 magazines and some spare ammo among the remains, it wasn't until I looked in the back of the last two and a half ton truck that I found what I was hoping for.

"Bingo!" I shouted. Stacked in the back of the truck were metal ammunition canisters. Since this was National Guard, my guess was that it was largely 5.56mm ammo, with some 7.62mm belted ammo as well. Maybe a case or two of hand grenades could be mixed in with all the ammo. There could also be LAW rockets, AT4 rockets, or Stinger missiles in the truck, but none of them would be of much use.

"What have you found, Boss?" Sam came running up, with Maurice and Tito not far behind. When he looked into the back of the truck he whistled. "That should give us a pretty good start on replenishing our stores!"

"Yeap," I replied. "Hope your back is feeling strong!" The look Sam gave me could have melted steel. Oh well, there wasn't but one way to get this stuff aboard The Traveler and that was to carry it aboard. "Sam, you and Tito start hauling this stuff to the rig. Tell Phil and Jeremy to come help you. Maurice, you stand watch and make sure nothing sneaks up on them."

Moving forward, I climbed up on the passenger side running board of the deuce and a half. I was expecting a zombie to jump me as I looked in the window, but the truck's cabin was empty. Opening the door, I climbed in and began searching.

"What have we here?" In the trucks dashboard pocket was a packet of orders. The top one was an authorization to load up the ammunition that this truck had been hauling and bring it to this roadblock. But underneath I found a gold mine.

"Regina," I called over the radios. "I need you to pull the maps and figure us a route to the National Guard Armory at the corner of Assembly and Gervais."

"What's up, James?" While she asked the question, I could hear sounds in the background of papers rustling. She was already pulling the road maps and looking for the route we needed.

"A gold mine, dear. Seems that just before the end, the National Guard moved eleven hundred tons of ammunition and supplies to the Armory to support the troops that were supposed to defend Columbia." Eleven hundred tons was more than we could transport, but it would fill our bins to the tops. "Columbia fell so fast most of it should still be there."

"Looks like a straight run down Interstate 277 into town, then left on Gervais, which is the old US 1." Regina had a trucker's way with finding places. "All major roads, nothing that looks like it would be tight or narrow. James, is it worth the risk?"

"If what I think is there, it'll be more than enough to re-supply us and then some, and also provide the heavy weapons Roy asked for. In fact, if there's enough, we may even be able to start trading weapons and ammo to those outposts that really need them. Yeah, this one's more than worth the risk."

When I finished talking to Regina, I came back around the side of the truck. The guys where hauling the heavy metal ammo cases to the rig, two at a time. Maurice was on the far side of the truck keeping watch.

"Hey James," Sam grunted as he struggled by. "You wanna grab a can or four?"

"Not really!" I yelled back. However, I grabbed cans of ammo and started hauling them to the truck along with everyone else. By the time we finished loading the ammo, we were all tired and the noon sun was beaming down on us. In the end, the load had just been 5.56mm ammo for the M16 and belted 7.62mm ammo for the National Guard's light machine guns.

"All the ammo has been put away and all eight of the M60s are fully loaded." I turned as Maurice reported to me. We had ended the firefight between the refugees and the dead with five of the eight guns shot dry. Now, each gun had a five hundred round belt feeding it. To ensure smooth feeding, the ammunition belt ran inside a flat flexible guide from the ammo bin to the side of the gun. Whenever possible I liked having Maurice load the bins, he had been trained as an assistant gunner during his hitch in the Army and knew how to properly lay the belts into the bins.

Once The Traveler was buttoned back up, Regina got us into motion. We continued down Interstate 77 and then shifted over to Interstate 277 to go into Columbia. As we approached downtown Columbia, Interstate 277 became Bull Street.

On Bull Street is the South Carolina Mental Hospital, and as we drove past I wondered what it was like inside those walls. Was the facility filled with the walking dead? I often wondered about places like that and prisons. The infection would have spread like wildfire through those types of captive populations. Roy told me some pretty wild stories of having to clean out the walking dead inmates from the Blacksburg Outpost before he and his folks could settle in.

As we approached the intersection of Bull Street and Gervais Street, Regina slowed the rig to a crawl. Wrecked and abandoned cars were pretty heavy on these streets and we were having to do a lot of pushing to get through. This was making a lot of noise, but surprisingly, we were not seeing much of the dead. Finally, Regina brought us to a stop in front of the South Carolina National Guard Armory.

"My original intention was to push through and then leave, and come back later." I told Regina. "That way the dead we stirred up would have time to settle back down." Looking around we still saw none of the dead. This was very surprising for the inner city, even one of the smaller cities like Columbia. "Lets wait here for a while and if nothing is moving we will go on in."

"Let's move out," I told the crew a while later. Looking out the window at the National Guard Armory, I had seen no movement in the building's lobby or on the street over about a ten-minute period. As we left the rig and moved across the street to the front doors of the building, we kept a watchful eye out for the dead.

"Tito, cover the high side. Sam, you have the low. 1.. 2.. 3.." I flung the door open to the stairwell, crouching as Tito and Sam swept the stairwell with the muzzles of their rifles. Had anything been moving in the stairwell we would have been well positioned to deal with it immediately. "We go down. If the ammunition is here, it's mostly likely on the floor below us."

Tito took the point as we moved down the stairs, with the team spread out behind me. At the bottom of the stairwell was another door. Tito lay down on his belly as I eased the door open just an inch. "Don't see any movement, boss. Looks clear."

Moving into the open lower floor, we could see stacked pallets covering most of the area, the supplies we were looking for. From the door I could see pallets marked as 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and heavy caliber ammunition as well as crates of M16 rifles and other arms. "Sam, Phil, Carol, Maurice, and Bob. You sweep this floor. Regina, you hear me?" After receiving a reply over the radio, I continued. "Come around to the loading dock on the rear of the building. If after a sweep this floor is clear, we will start loading supplies." I paused and took a deep breath. "According to the signs in the lobby, they had setup a clinic on the second floor. Tito will go with me and we will check it out. Maybe we will get lucky and find a cache of medicine."

The team quickly split up to take on assigned tasks. Tito and I began climbing the stairs to the second floor. As I eased up the stairs, I could hear banging and other noises from the floor above me. Motioning to Tito behind me for silence I crept up to the stairwell door. Listening at the door for a few moments, I could hear the banging, but it was coming from somewhere else on the floor.

"I think the other side of this door is clear," I whispered to Tito. "I am going to ease the door open and take a peek. Get ready to help me slam this door shut if there are zombies on the other side."

Tito nodded without saying a word. He moved around behind the door where he could use his weight to help shut the door if I opened it and zombies tried to come through.

Easing the door just a crack, I peered into the hallway. "Tito, there is an old corpse dressed in scrubs right outside the door, looks like its head was blown off. They must have converted this floor into an infirmary. Let's hold here for a minute." As we sat there, I continued to scan the hallway, watching for any movement that might betray the presence of zombies.

"Give me about thirty seconds and then follow." Tito nodded at my instructions. The ex-gang banger was often brash, but he knew how to be sneaky when he needed to be. I often wondered what his criminal record looked like before the end. As I slid forward through the door, I entered the hallway. Open office doors could be seen in the hallway behind me, but my goal was in front of me. I wanted the drugs and first aid equipment they had brought in for the infirmary.

"Shit! Damn shitty ass zombies!" Even as he cursed, Tito kept his voice down. As we had passed a shut door labeled with a taped up Red Cross sign, a zombie had bumped into the door from the other side causing Tito to jump. It did not seem attracted to us, it was just wandering around the room. We moved on down the hall, keeping our eyes open and rifles ready.

As I approached the door at the end of the hall, two things became apparent. One was the hand written sign taped to the door that read Infirmary and the other was the amount of movement behind the door. An infirmary full of infected soldiers eighteen months ago was now a room full of hungry dead. Motioning to Tito, we began to back down the hallway towards the stairwell door.

"Damn!" I cursed once we were back into the stairwell. I had hoped to be able to salvage any drugs the Army doctors had been using during the last days. "I don't want to tangle with a room full of the dead. What about you?" I asked Tito.

"Sure, let's go. I'm Ready ... Not!" He smiled as he delivered his sarcastic reply. We crouched in the stairwell for a few minutes both lost in our own thoughts.

"Let's rig this door and the stairwell. A couple of grenades should do the trick. That way if the dead come this way we will have a warning and hopefully take out a few as well." Tito nodded and started pulling gear from his rucksack. First and foremost was a roll of silver duct tape.

"The world ends and that stuff still hold's it all together!" We both chuckled at my comment. We quickly taped grenades to the wall on both sides and setup a tripwire so that opening the door would pull the pins. Then we set up another tripwire two steps down. Any of the dead coming down this stairwell would meet a well-deserved end and the blast noise would definitely alert us. When we finished, we moved back downstairs and joined the rest of the crew.

"Sam, see if that forklift will fire up." I pointed to a single yellow forklift sitting on the docks. "That is unless you want to carry more ammo by hand?" After all the complaining he had done when loading the ammo from the deuce-and-a-half, I figured he would find a way to get the forklift cranked up. A loud bang caught my attention and I turned to see the rear end of The Traveler as Regina backed it against the docks.

"Maurice, open the rear end of the trailer up!" Even as I turned I could hear the pop of the propane-powered forklift firing off. Moving among the pallets, I began spraying certain ones with orange paint. We only had room for a small portion of the supplies warehoused here and I wanted to make sure we got the ones that would do us the most good. First was ammunition, 5.56mm and 7.62mm topped the list. I did mark one pallet of 40mm grenades for the Mk19.

"Can't you just pick pallets all in one area?" Sam groused as he drove past me on the forklift. He had to pick up some pallets and move them to one side in order to get to other pallets that I had marked. I noticed that he had stacked a number of the pallets we were leaving against the doors. That should keep anyone from coming into this warehouse from inside the armory.

"Well, what have we here?" I asked myself as I came upon some of the pallets at the rear of the warehouse. One pallet contained four Browning M2 Fifty Caliber heavy machine guns in crates atop twenty or thirty canisters of ammunition. A second contained a GE-built electric minigun, its accessories, and crates of ammo. I quickly sprayed both with orange paint and moved on. Although a bit too much for the mobile Traveler, if nothing else, Roy would pay well for this type of heavy weaponry to defend Blacksburg.

Finally I quit marking pallets and moved back towards the loading doors. Sam was driving the forklift with skill as he grabbed pallets and either set them aside or loaded them into the rig through the open rear cargo door. The rest of the crew had taken up positions in a wide loose semi-circle around the loading door. While the crew looked like they were being slack, in fact they were very alert.

"Hey Boss," Maurice hollered to get my attention. "What are we going to do with all the supplies that we can not take with us?" In fact the question was a good one. "As far as I can see, we can destroy them or try to secure them, maybe booby-trap them?"

I gave Maurice's questions some thought. I did not want to destroy the supplies, not when we could come back and restock from the vast quantity that was stored here. That meant we needed to secure them. Booby-trapping the entrances would work for a while, unless one of the dead stumbled in and set off the traps.

"My only concern about booby-traps is that someone like the survivors we passed on Interstate 77, who needs these supplies to survive, would get killed trying to get to them." Killing some survivor because of a decision I made would not be a good thing.

"True," Phil responded. "But what about assholes like those Mad Max wannabes that attacked us up in Great Falls. We definitely don't want shitheads like that to get hold of military grade weapons like these."

Phil had a point too. The discussion went on for a while. Finally the decision was made to block all the interior doors and disable the exterior one. We would have to pull the door down to get in when we came back, but we had the power to do that easily.

With the door disabled, we headed back to Interstate 77 and made our way around the outer loop of Columbia. Before we got to the end of Interstate 77 and the Interstate 26 exchange, night had fallen and Regina turned on the external lights. Along with the original headlights, now covered with steel mesh to protect them, we had installed large fog lights on the top of the cowcatcher-style bumper, the tops of the fenders, and along the top of the cab. This gave Regina plenty of light to drive by as well as lights pointed far ahead of the truck so she could negotiate the wreckage that cluttered the interstates.

When we reached the intersection between Interstate 77 and Interstate 26, we pulled up for the night. It did not take long for us to set out our defensive perimeter of directional mines, flares, and firebombs, and then we settled in. Since Regina and I had the morning watch as usual, we settled into the sleeper.

"We need fuel bad, we have burned up a lot keeping the engine running even when parked overnight." Regina looked up from where she lay in the sleeper. "I figure by noon we will be dry on all four main tanks and have to dip into the reserve tank. Luckily there is a gas station just one exit up, so we should be able to refuel in the morning."

"Alright, I will let the crew know first thing and we can stop and top off with everything the station has." I ran my hands down across Regina's belly as I spoke. Sliding my hand under the elastic of her panties, I watched her quiver at my touch. "Hmmm, seems someone else needs to be topped off as well," I quipped with a lecherous grin.

"Yeah, now get over here and give me everything you have," she demanded. Laughing I rolled into the sleeper bed and locked my lips against hers. Her hands were already busy stripping off my clothes and I knew it would be a while before either of us got to sleep.

Morning dawned cool and overcast. Winter was coming and I was seriously considering wintering over at the Lancaster Outpost for January and February. But first we had things to do.

"Everyone listen up." The crew looked up from their breakfast as I stood leaned against the inside wall of the trailer. "We need fuel. Nothing new, we always need fuel. The problem is that the closet place to get that fuel is tight." I looked at their faces. They all knew what I meant by tight. Close quarters, no room to see the dead coming and prepare a welcome, and always a chance of getting surprised.

The Petro Express off Interstate 277 is shoehorned into a corner between an Applebees and an office building. Unlike an interstate truck stop, it did not have dedicated lanes for big rigs, instead it had a single diesel pump sitting off to one side, mostly for diesel powered light trucks and cars. The entire contents of their underground tank was probably twenty-five thousand gallons so they would probably have enough left to top us off.

"Rather than getting us boxed in trying to park in there," I told Regina as we surveyed the station from the road. "Park on the street and we will just have to use more hose". My plan was not the best by any means, but parking on the street and running more hose meant The Traveler was free to move if the situation turned bad. But it also meant those of us on the ground would be exposed over the greater distance between the rig and the tanks.

Sam, Tito, Phil, and I exited The Traveler through the side door of the front trailer. While Tito and I provided security, Sam and Phil began unloading the fuel pump lines. Stretching the line from the underground fuel tanks to the rig, took almost every bit of fuel hose we had.

"Sam, we look secure, so fire the pump off." Once the electric pump started, the noise could quickly attract the dead. The manual crank pump we now kept in reserve was quieter, but would take much longer to fill the tanks. I could hear the fuel splashing against the bottom of the tank, a sure sign that we had been empty.

"Shut the pump down and lets fill the second tank." Because we had to use so much hose we could only fill one tank at a time instead of both at once. We had been outside the rig for a while and the first tank was full. Sam shut down the pump and we moved the filler hose to the second tank. One tank filled and three to go with no sign of the dead. With a whir, the pump started back up. Once the second tank was filled, we needed to fill the tanks on the other side. Rather than trying to turn the big rig around, we stretched the filler hose underneath the rig and to the tanks on the far side.

Running the hose underneath the rig, we stretched it to the first tank on the other side and Sam started the pump up again. I was surprised that the noise from the electric pump had not attracted the dead. Tony and Tito came outside and replaced us, but I stayed outside. Hanging on the side of The Traveler's cab, I could see the area around us.

"Shit!" Looking down the length of The Traveler, I spotted motion among the houses and shops beside the gas station. "Hurry up guys, we have company!" Tito and Tony began scrambling to get the pump shutdown and the gear stowed. As the dead came closer, I began to fire single shots taking them down as they approached.

Tito joined me, dropping several of the approaching dead with a quick burst from his M4. "Tony is locking up the gear boxes!" He yelled over the stutter of our rifles. I could hear fire from the M60's on the far side of the rig. That could only mean that we were more surrounded that I had thought.

As Tony cleared the front of the rig, he was firing back towards the other side. Movement caught my eye, but before I could bring my rifle to bear, one of the dead leaped from the hood of the truck and landed on Tony. The zombie had once been a young boy, probably not more that 15. He was freshly dead from the looks of things, still capable of quicker action and more aggressive than the long dead.

As they fell, I could hear Tony scream for us to get the creature off of him. Even as I reached them, Tony's screams faded to a gurgle as the zombie ripped out his throat with its teeth. I fired a short burst, making sure both the zombie and Tony were dead. Tito had already scrambled aboard The Traveler and I dived through the side door as Regina had already gotten the rig into motion.

As we pulled back towards Interstate 77, I had Regina stop the rig in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Normally, such areas would be dangerous, crawling with the zombie remains of the former inhabitants, but this area seemed clear. Dropping to the ground, I ran over to the object that had caught my eye, a white and pink girl's bicycle. I quickly stashed it in one of the cargo boxes on the outside of The Traveler and climbed back into the cab. Regina looked at me in wonder and mumbled something about losing my mind as I grinned back at her.

We stopped on the Interstate 77 to Interstate 26 exchange for the night. The raised roadway gave us the ability to see danger coming, as well as protecting us from attack on two sides. The crew watched and laughed as I gave Shelby the bike. We had removed her chains once we were sure she wasn't going to change. She rode around the truck for a while until we made her come in for dinner and fussed when we locked up for the evening.

"James, wake up!" Regina shook me from side to side to wake me. Normally I was a light sleeper, but the stress from the last couple of days had gotten to me. "Wake up, damn it!"

"What?" I asked as I sat up. The alarms were not going off so we were not under attack. But Regina would not have been waking me up like this if nothing were wrong.

"Shelby has run off! I knew she was homesick and all, but I did not think she would run away from the safety of being with us." 


	11. Chapter Ten

"Look!" At Tito's whisper, I followed his pointing finger with my eyes. Sure enough in front of the school was the pink bicycle I had given Shelby. It was lying on its side with the rear wheel still turning slowly, so we could not be too far behind the little girl. Using hand signals, I directed Sam, Jeremy, Maurice, Carol, Kim, and Phil to move forward. Tito and I covered them as they did. Once they reached the front of the building, we moved forward under cover of their guns, as well as those of The Traveler parked behind us.

The decision to find Shelby had been an easy one to make, and the entire crew had agreed. Because she did not change after being bitten her blood was a hundred times more valuable than that weapons cache back in Columbia. If the Doc was right, and only testing her blood would be able to tell, she just might be the one person to stop the further spread of this madness. That was why we had to get her to Blacksburg.

John Roman Elementary School was a typical modern school building, an ugly two-story brick box with a wide set of steps leading up to boarded-over glass doors. Tall glass windows had lined the wall before the end, but they were now boarded up. Dark patches on the concrete walks could be seen here and there; indications of the carnage that must have happened here during those last days, though some of it seemed a bit more recent.

"I don't want to leave Shelby out here alone any longer than necessary," I whispered to the crew. With a nod to Sam, he eased open one of the boarded up glass doors. I moved forward covering high, with Tito covering low. Once we were inside, the rest of the team moved in behind us, keeping a close watch. Just inside the doors to the school were wide staircases leading up and down. Carol and Bob moved to the right to cover the staircases on that side, while Jeremy and Kim covered the left. "Sam, take Carol and Bob. Search upstairs. Phil, take Jeremy and Kim. Search this floor. Tito and I will search the lower floor. Maurice, set up here and cover our exit."

Sam had joined us the first time we pulled into Blacksburg. He was the oldest member of the crew, but never failed to pull his own weight. Before the end, he had worked at the RJ Reynolds Tobacco warehouse in Gaffney, South Carolina and referred to his life as normal. One night in Blacksburg, over drinks of Old Man Kipling's hooch, he had told me about rushing home, as the news reported riots and violence, to find his wife eating their daughter. He had fired all 5 rounds from the revolver he carried into her, but she still kept coming. Somehow, he managed to get to the bedroom. While she beat on the door, he got the shotgun from the closet. When she burst through the door, he finally gave her peace. That's how he referred to killing the dead, giving them peace. Thinking the worst had happened, he was shocked when his mangled daughter attacked him as well. Armed with the revolver and shotgun, he had survived on his own long enough to join up with other survivors led by Roy. He was one of the original founders of Blacksburg Outpost, but a bad case of the wandering feet had him approaching me to join my crew.

"Which way do we go?" Sam and his team were standing at the top of the stairs they had just climbed looking down the two hallways that extended to either side. The upper floor was laid out like a huge V with the staircases in the point. "I don't think we should split up. So we will take the right hall. Carol cover the right side, Bob the left."

Slowly, the team made its way down the hall, checking each empty classroom as it went. Many of the classrooms had been emptied of the original classroom furniture and converted into living quarters by the survivors who had called this building home at one time. Other classrooms had been converted to storage area and were filled with furniture, clothing, and other assorted items.

When the team reached the end of hall, they had found nothing. A couple of truly dead bodies had been found, mostly the result of gunshot wounds, but no little girl. "Lets move back to the stairwell and check out the other hall." The team followed Sam's lead as he moved back down the hall past classrooms they had already investigated.

When they reached the main stairs, they stopped and looked down the second hall. About halfway down the hall, the hall was closed off about halfway down with a crudely built wall with a door whose construction was obviously post-apocalyptic.

Slowly the team began to move down the hallway. At each door, they would stop and listen for movement, then slowly ease the door open. Carol covered the left side from a kneeling position, while Bob covered the right from a standing one. Sam took care of opening the door and covered the center of the room. Each room was cleared one by one, until the team reached the door that had been built across the hall.

Hearing nothing behind the door, Sam slowly opened it. At first, no threats could be seen. Then Bob caught a glimpse of movement in the far edge of the room. "Movement at the rear of the room," Bob whispered, warning the rest of the team.

"I'm clear," responded Carol. Her side of the room was nothing but empty space filled with old chairs and desks. She kept her M4 carbine up on her shoulder with her cheek welded to the stock. With both eyes open, she saw a full view of the room in front of her with the red dot from the rifle's sight superimposed over the image.

"Light," warned Sam as he turned his gun light from its dim setting up to bright. In the light could be seen a zombie in the far corner of the room. Once it had been a middle-aged man dressed in a tweed coat, now it was just rotting flesh dressed in rags. It started towards the team only to come to a halt as its wrist was caught short. In the light, Sam could see the gleam of the cuff and chain that held the zombie. The zombie kept pulling at the cuff, trying to get to the warm blood-filled flesh of the team. "Looks like someone was experimenting on this zombie." With a cracking noise, the zombie's wrist finally gave way and it stumbled forward, leaving its hand behind. A quick shot from Sam's silenced M4 blew the zombie's head apart and dropped it to the floor. "Good riddance."

Faintly, the sound of a grenade explosion from the floor below could be heard. "Everyone, back to the stairs!" Sam ordered. Bringing up the rear, he followed Carol and Bob back down the hallway. Even though they had cleared these rooms, he kept his eyes peeled for any danger. When they reached the stairs, they flattened themselves to the outside wall. Bob led the way, his eyes and M4 covering the area in front of him. Carol took the middle; her area of responsibility was the center of the stairwell and the flight of stairs below them. Sam brought up the rear, making sure nothing surprised them from the floor they had just been searching.

"Jeremy, you cover the left flank. I have the right. Kim, keep a good watch on our rear. I would hate for something to sneak up on us." On the main floor, Phil held the gaze of each of his team in turn until he was sure they understood. A long wide hallway divided the main floor of the school with doors on both sides. Just to the right of the main entrance, the first set of doors led to the administration offices.

"Kim, watch the hall. Jeremy, follow me in, but leave the door open and stay in sight of Kim. I will check out the offices." As Jeremy turned the doorknob, Phil eased the door open using the muzzle of his suppressed M4 rather than his hand. Just as the door swung completely open, his sights were filled with the teeth of a dead man. Pulling the trigger blew the dead man's head apart, but had he opened the door with his hand his fingers would be missing. Pushing forward, Phil swept the room with his rifle. As no other targets presented themselves he started to move deeper into the room.

"Phil, I think you need to look at this." Jeremy was kneeling down beside the body of the dead man Phil had just shot. "This is a recent corpse, a bandit from the looks of things, not from the original fall of the school."

"Alright, everyone keep their eyes open." The look on Phil's face told Jeremy that the bandit's corpse worried him. "Let's find the girl and get out of here." With a nod from Jeremy, Phil made a quick pass through the administration offices and finding nothing, led everyone back into the hallway. The next couple of doors proved to be empty classrooms.

"Nothing here." Frustration could be heard in Jeremy's voice at the last in a long chain of empty classrooms. Only the three sets of double doors leading to the gymnasium remained to be checked.

"Most likely the girl is on one of the other floors, so let's check the gym and then pull back to the main doors." With nods from Kim and Jeremy, Phil moved towards the first set of double doors. The doors had been damaged at sometime, with the left hand door hanging crooked from a broken hinge.

Easing the right hand door open, Phil peered into the darkness of the gym. The only light in the gym was coming from a series of small windows just under the edge of the roof, which left the gym shrouded in gloom. Engaging the light mounted on the handguard of his M4, Phil began to move slowly forward into the gym. Kim and Jeremy turned their lights on as well and followed him.

"Holy Shit!" Jeremy's curse behind Phil would normally have startled him, but he had already seen the same thing Jeremy did. The gym was full of the dead. By the looks of the zombie standing in the light from Phil's gunlight, these dead had been bandits of some kind as opposed to school children or faculty.

At first the zombie seemed totally unresponsive, then it let out a low moan, which was answered from the darkness beyond it. Turning, it began to approach Phil. Phil began to back up, but others of its kind joined the zombie and Phil's team was quickly hemmed in.

"Back to the doors! Kim, Covering fire!" Phil's words were drowned out as both Kim and Jeremy started firing into the crowds of zombies. Phil backed towards the doors, firing single shots and short bursts with his M4 rifle to keep the zombies back.

"I've got the door!" Kim yelled to Jeremy and Phil. She shifted from the right side of the doorway to the left in order to concentrate more fire into the crowd of zombies that were beginning to push forward. Jeremy made his way back to her, trusting her to keep the zombies from getting behind him. Once he made it to the door, they both continued to pour gunfire into the crowd of zombies, trying to keep them off Phil.

"Let go you, bastard!" One large zombie had closed with Phil and grabbed the barrel of his M4. Phil fired repeatedly into the dead man's gut, but he refused to let go. Releasing his grip on the rifle, Phil grabbed the razor sharp machete he carried across his back and buried it into the zombie's skull. Letting the zombie fall with both his rifle and machete, Phil drew the military issue M9 Berretta he carried. Shooting another zombie between the eyes, he continued backing up towards the door.

"Get Down!" Hearing Kim's screamed order, Phil dropped to one knee. The chatter of Kim's M4 sliced over his head, but even so he continued to drop zombies with well-placed shots. "Come on, now!" Kim ordered and Phil scrambled back through the doors into the hall. Jeremy primed a pair of grenades and threw them into the gym. Once the explosion had settled, Jeremy and Phil used riot straps from Jeremy's kit to secure the door. Hopefully, they would hold long enough for the entire team to get clear of the building.

Tito led the way down the stairs, his suppressed M4 ready to fire if a threat presented itself. I followed a couple of steps behind him, also ready to handle any threat we might encounter. At the bottom of the steps was a set of wide double doors, which were swaying slightly.

"Boss?" The question in Tito's voice was plain. Why where the doors swaying? It could just be airflow, but neither of us believed that.

"We go forward," I replied. "Just stay alert, I hope the doors mean Shelby went this way." The door led into a long hallway. With no lights working, and no windows the hallway was pitch black. "Light sticks," I whispered to Tito. We each pulled out several of the old "break and glow" light sticks. With a snap, each stick slowly began to glow a bright green. We tossed the sticks down the hallway until we could see all but the very end. Moving forward, we checked the first couple of classrooms, all were empty.

The last door before the double doors at the end of the hall was a solid, compared to the classroom doors with their large glass windows. Tito reached forward to turn the handle, as I pushed the door with the muzzle of my M4. The door gently swung open to reveal the darkness beyond. As I kept watch, Tito snapped another light stick and threw it into the room. As I entered the room, I was struck from the side and fired as I turned.

"Well, that's one dead ... mop!" Laughed Tito as he used his foot to lift the mop up from the floor to show me. The room was a janitorial supply closet with shelves of toilet paper, towels, and cleaning supplies.

"Did you hear that?" Tito whispered. I stood still for a moment, ears straining. Then I heard what Tito had heard, the plaintive meow of a kitten followed by the "shhhh" sound of someone trying to make it be quiet. Moving fast, I pushed through a set of double doors about midway down the hall and into the kitchen beyond. Again I heard the meow and located its source as a broom closet just inside the door.

Signaling to Tito, I reached for the closet doorknob as he moved to cover whatever might be inside. As I snatched the door open, I found Shelby crouched down in the corner with something wrapped in her shirt. "Shelby!" I cried. Shelby ran into my arms as I knelt down. In her arms was a scrawny kitten that let a loud meow as it was squeezed between our bodies. Picking her up, I motioned Tito to lead the way back into the hallway and out of here.

"James!" Even as I stopped, I could hear the suppressed snarl of Tito's M4. Through the swinging doors came the shambling forms of several dead. From the looks of the clothing and gear they wore, these were the bandits that had attacked the survivors who had made this school their home. Retreating towards Shelby and I, Tito kept up a steady barrage of short burst, each destroying the head of at least one of the dead.  
"Back into the kitchen!" I yelled at Tito as I added my firepower to his. Shelby stayed attached to me, holding onto my belt as I walked backwards. A huge dead man, dressed in what were once leather pants and a vest, rushed towards us. A burst to his head flayed most of the flesh from the side of his face, but failed to stop him. Through the missing flesh you could see the gleam of metal. "Oh great, a zombie with a steel plate in his skull," I mumbled. Lifting my M4, I reached underneath the handguard and pulled the trigger on the M203 40mm grenade launcher mounted there. The launcher was loaded with the standard US Military's black and olive buckshot round and steel skull or not, the 2000 pellets in the 40mm rounds tore the zombie's upper torso apart and removed his head from the rest of him. The round also did enough damage to the surrounding dead to buy us a minute to retreat into the kitchen.

"What the hell is going on down there?" Phil's military background came through when he got that drill sergeant voice going. He must have heard the loud bang from the grenade launcher and was worried about what was going on down here.

"We have a large number of dead down here." I told him over the radio. "They have cut us off from the main stairwell and we are retreating back through the kitchen." A few short bursts stopped the dead that were trying to push through the kitchen doors. "Is everyone accounted for up there?"

"Yeah, but I hope you found the girl. She is not on the main or upper floors."

"Got her! Get everyone out of the building and back to The Traveler. I have an idea and this is going to get messy!" Over the radio, I could hear Phil curse and then start giving orders to get everyone back to The Traveler. Turning to Tito, I grinned. "I have a plan."

I chuckled at the rapid fire Spanish cursing that Tito started when he saw my grin. But any worries about my plan were cut short as the dead finally burst through the kitchen doors. We both rained short bursts into them to try and hold them back. "Shelby, Tito! Open the gas valves on the stoves! We gonna have us a zombie roast!"

As Tito and Shelby opened the valves, I kept the dead at bay with well-placed bursts. When my M4 ran dry, I could already smell the gas. Drawing the razor sharp machete I kept for when encounters got real personal, I yelled at Tito. "Time to go, folks!" Killing one of the dead who got too close with a hard slice from the machete, I retreated through the cloud of gas and caught up with Tito and Shelby at the kitchen's rear door.

"All in all, I think the world needs less ethics and more fire." I quipped as I flicked open a zippo lighter I carried among my gear and threw it into the kitchen. I had read that line on the NaMo website once long ago and had always wanted an excuse to say it. The lighter spun through the air, then bounced off the top of the stove. When it passed through the free flowing cloud of gas, the gas ignited creating a firestorm in the kitchen. By the time the gas ignited, I had already fled after Tito and Shelby through the double doors and into the open dining area.

The concussion from the exploding gas slammed all of us to the floor. "Holy Shit!" The kitchen doors had been ripped from their hinges and thrown across the room, just missing us as they passed overhead. The inside of the kitchen area was awash with flames, thought I could still see some of the dead moving about. "Let's move!" Grabbing Shelby, Tito and I ran for the rear steps leading up towards the main floor.

The stairway was clear and we took the steps in twos, the young Shelby dangling between us like a rag doll. Even as we left the stairwell and raced down the central hallway towards the school doors, smoke was beginning to billow up from the floor below. "Come on, Come on!" I yelled at Tito. As we burst through the front doors of the school and back into to the open we could feel the tremors from secondary explosions. The rest of the team was waiting at the bottom of the steps.

Even as we began to retreat back to the waiting Traveler, the dead began to boil from the burning school. Immediately the team began to fire on the approaching crowds of the dead. Many were on fire, and as they bumped into each other the fire would spread. Yet, they kept coming. Two of the M60s on this side of The Traveler opened up since they could fire around us. The heavy firepower cut into the crowd of the dead, but whoever was manning the guns was shooting low and the dead would get back up, even with gaping wounds.

"Let's get out of here!" Phil hollered as we scrambled back aboard The Traveler. Yet even as we did, I noticed he had Shelby's pink bicycle over his shoulder. As soon as we were aboard, Regina put the big rig into motion and headed us south.

As we moved I could hear the rear M60 continue to fire, with each burst followed by a string of curses. Moving back to the rear of the vehicle, I found Karl manning the machine gun and cursing not at the dead, but at the gun. "Karl, you were shooting awful low back there."

"This damn gun is stuck!" The frustration in Karl's voice was thick. "It will swivel side to side, but I don't have any up and down movement. I couldn't move to another gun, you were in the way." As he stood up from the gun, he kicked at the mount.

"Let's see what's wrong." I checked the movement of the gun myself and you could feel where it would hang as you tried to raise the muzzle. Lifting the hatch that covered the gunport, I was shocked when one of the dead lunged through. It had once been a young man whose throat the dead had torn out and whose body ended at the waist. As the creature lunged at Karl, he slammed his elbow into its mouth. Its broken teeth clamped down on his elbow. Luckily, under his shirt, he wore a thin puncture resistant undershirt. Designed to protect police officers from knives and needles, the shirt would resist the teeth of the dead for a while which was why we all wore one. Even as I drove my knife down into its skull, Karl grabbed the sides of its head one handed and snapped its neck with a violent twist.

"Get this damn thing off me!" As I threw the corpse out the hatch and slammed it shut, Karl pulled off his shirt and undershirt. I could not see any tears in the undershirt, and no punctures on his elbow. As we finished checking his arm out for bite marks, the M60 flopped up and down. Looking at each other, we both began to laugh.

Knowing what was coming, Karl stripped his shirt and undershirt off. I checked his arm and hands well looking for any indication that the dead man had bitten through to him. I did not find any breaks; the undershirt had held and kept the dead man's teeth out of his flesh.

That evening, I sat on the roof of The Traveler, thinking. In the two years since the dead began walking, mankind had started pulling itself up by the bootstraps and I liked to think I was helping. People like Roy at Blacksburg and Mike at Lancaster were slowly putting communities back together again. Folks like me and a few other traveling traders kept supplies flowing and communications open.

The best hope mankind had at this point was to keep building fortified communities and create a network of outposts across the land. As long as the outposts were outside the old major population areas, the dead did not seem to be as much of a problem. I don't think government outside of each individual outpost would be needed for many years to come. And when it did, the old Constitution of the United States of America would be a good place to start, with certain issues strengthened to stop the empowerment of the federal government, which happened the first time around.

Morning dawned clear and bright. My decisions made, I setup the large antenna for the shortwave radio. No CB would reach Blacksburg from here. "This is The Traveler, calling Blacksburg. This is The Traveler calling Blacksburg. Anyone awake up there? Over." Blacksburg kept someone in the radio room all the time. With the shortwave booster built into The Traveler and the huge antenna at Blacksburg we should be able to make contact.

"Traveler, this is Blacksburg. Reading you five by five. Blacksburg One is on his way. Over." Whoever the radio operator was, they had already alerted Roy that we were calling. Probably because he was in the main building anyway this time of the morning doing the administrative tasks needed to keep an outpost the size of Blacksburg going.

"James! How the hell are you?" A pause followed with no "Over". Roy had never been much for protocols anyway, not unless they meant survival then he could be all business.

"Surviving. I've got some good news and some bad news to report. The bad news is we lost Tony during a refueling stop in Columbia. The good news is I have found the Doc's package. Young girl about thirteen, she was bitten and recovered. Verified. Over"

A minute passed while Roy digested the information. "James, I will let Suzy and the kids know and we will hold a memorial service." Several month's earlier, Tony had married one of the widowed ladies at Blacksburg and adopted her kids. "I have sent someone to get the Doc. We'll see what he says about the package. Over." The seriousness in Roy's voice could be heard through the static.

"Roy, I am planning to head on into Charleston. Once I see what's there and try to find my sister, I will head back towards you. It could be a couple of months before I get back your way. Over."

"Doc's here. He wants you to return immediately. But I understand your plans. Doc wants to talk to Carol for a minute. I think he wants her to conduct some tests 'til you get back here. Luck and hold for the Doc. Roy out."

Giving the mike to Carol, I looked at Shelby asleep in one of the seats. I would get her back to Blacksburg or die trying. Vaccines meant that we could start seriously clearing the dead out and start rebuilding. In the meanwhile, I would have Carol start drawing some blood on occasion and storing it in the refrigerator we got from Blacksburg during our last stop there. If I knew Doc, he would want lots and Shelby was not going to be treated like some lab rat he could stick a tap into and drain dry.

As The Traveler pulled out onto Interstate 26 and headed south, I sat in the passenger side seat and thought about what lay ahead. I hoped to find my sister in Charleston and then transport her and her family back to the Lancaster Outpost. Then take little Shelby to Blacksburg to see Doc. Plus, I had to make a living while I was at it finding outposts to trade with as we went.

With a crackle and hiss, I could hear the CB come to life. "This is a group of survivors located in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Does anyone hear us?" 


End file.
