

The Collected Journals of Isaac Bolachek

From the archives of the American Recovery Corps

Reprinted with the permission of the Bolachek Estate

Copyright © 2013 Thad D. Phetteplace

All rights reserved.

You are allowed to copy and share this book only in its original, unaltered form. You can download this book in epub, mobi, and PDF formats from **http://TheBolachekJournals.com.** Visit the website to provide feedback and to download updated and new content.

This is an original work of fiction. Any resemblance to characters living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental.

### March 19 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston

I've never been one for expressing myself creatively, or at least not artistically. I'm not sure what really possessed me to take a creative writing course.

Maybe I'm not really being fair to myself. I suppose there is plenty of creativity that goes into the type of engineering we do here at MIT, especially in the type of robotics I'm studying... but writing is something very different. It feels more raw. I feel more exposed. Like I'm peeling back a layer of skin and letting people peer inside at secret things. What I build in the lab... it's the opposite. Its like building a protective layer of armor. I'm expressing myself, but its only what I want others to see.

Professor Mead insists there is no requirement we let anyone actually read these journals. She claims it is just to "exercise our creative writing muscles." I'm not supposed to worry about how good any of this is or spend a lot of time editing... just get it all out, get it down, and write something every day. That will probably be the hard part; writing something every day. There are so many other things I would rather be doing, so many things I need to be doing, that I expect this will fall rather low on the priority list. I'm only a freshmen in the engineering program here, not even in the really tough courses yet, and I am already feeling swamped. Still, spring break is coming up, and I'll have some time to catch up then. Some of my friends are going off to Florida to spend a week in a drunken stupor, but I'm just heading back home to Oklahoma to visit the family. I just hope I don't catch that nasty flu bug that's going around and spend the whole break sick.

### April 4 - Tulsa, Oklahoma

Well, so much for getting back to my applied robotics project. School is temporarily closed, not just at MIT but pretty much everywhere. This flu epidemic has really kicked up a notch, and there have already been scattered deaths reported. The CDC has put a travel ban into effect, schools are closed, as are many businesses. Others have their employees wearing hospital masks. It's crazy. Mom and Dad both have caught the thing, but they are far from old and frail, and supposedly it's really only people with compromised immune systems that have to worry. I seem to have fought the thing off; had some sniffles for a few days but feel fine now. I've been taking care of the parental units, which mainly consists of fixing them soup and hot tea at regular intervals. I'll admit I'm a little worried after reading some of the more extreme speculation on the Internet, but all the major news networks say it's not really that bad and the economic consequences will probably far outweigh the actual health consequences. Of course the conspiracy mongers on the net are spinning all sorts of tales of secret quarantines and news black-outs and speculation about germ warfare. I'm not sharing any of that with Mom or Dad. I'm sure everything is going to be fine.

### April 17 - Tulsa, Oklahoma

I'm not sure why I brought this journal with me. I'm not sure why I'm writing in it now. What else is there to do though? I wouldn't have believed any of this was real if I hadn't witnessed it myself. If I hadn't watched the virus take my parents. Take hold and not let go. Several weeks into their illness, it got really bad for them. They were shaking and coughing, their eyes had gone yellowish, and they didn't seem to know what was going on around them. Their phone had stopped working days before... nothing but a fast busy signal. My cell phone was equally useless. The Internet stayed up, but many of the sites stopped updating, like the writers had all quit. One morning I woke up, and the house was quiet. Too quiet. I went into their bedroom, fearing the worst. They were so still. And so pale. I checked their breathing and their pulse. I felt their temperature. They were cold. They were dead. I know they were dead. I went back to the living room and just sat on the floor. I should call someone, I thought. The phones were dead. I thought about knocking on a neighbor's door, but my parents had only just moved to this apartment building, and I knew nobody in this neighborhood. Maybe the Red Cross crisis center a few blocks away. I had been there a few days before, trying to get medication for my parents, but they had nothing to give but advice. I could go down and report their death to the Red Cross. They would know what to do. I grabbed my wallet, slipped on shoes, and headed out. The street was eerily desolate. No cars were moving. I heard the occasional siren, a person yelling in the distance. I saw someone stumbling down the middle of the street about a block away. They seemed confused, drunk maybe... more likely sick. I thought I could hear them moaning. The Red Cross was the opposite direction, set up in the community center a few blocks west, so I ignored the shambling figure and took off that way.

It was closed down. A large hand written sign was duct taped to the door.

Go home

Pray

God help us all

There was an official looking notice posted next to it, something about emergency CDC directives and quarantine procedures. I didn't bother to read it. I was in shock I think. I headed back home. I thought about buying more soup for my parents.... then I remembered. Nevertheless, groceries were getting low, I should shop. They would want me to shop. Mom always wanted her pantry well stocked. The grocery store near the community center was closed. I detoured north a bit on the way home to swing by a 24 hour convenience store. Amazingly it was still open. The attendant stood behind his checkout counter, wearing a surgical mask and latex gloves, with a HEPA air filter running full blast next to him. There was three other people shopping. One of them kept coughing into a dirty handkerchief. The others kept their distance, though it was clear they wanted to shop in the same food aisle. I figured if I was going to catch the thing I already would have. Grabbing a shopping basket, I charged over and started grabbing random packages of soup mix, cereal bars, and whatever else looked edible. The shelves were already very picked over. Coughing man filled his basket until items were spilling out and then staggered toward the checkout. The other shoppers began approaching. I swept some Ramen noodle packets into my basket to top it off and headed toward the checkout. Coughing Man was dropping cash onto the counter. The attendant, a dark haired guy not much older than me, stood back and handled the money at arms length like it was radioactive. He made change, slid it over, and then scurried to the back of his enclosure. Coughing Man counted his change, putting it back in his wallet a dollar or coin at a time as he counted it.

"It's all there. Just take your money and go!" The attendant shouted. Coughing Man just silently finished sliding coins into his wallet before slumping off, his two plastic bags of groceries dangling from one hand. I stepped up and started taking items out of my basket.

Before I could even hand anything toward the attendant, he spoke up. "You need to scan it yourself." He nodded toward a hand held bar-code scanner sitting next to the cash register.

I thought about all the customers that had touched it, including Coughing Man, then shrugged and began zapping each item. The total was $39.29. I slid over two twenties, and as he moved to give me change I told the attendant, "Keep it". He gave a short laugh, but pocketed the 71 cents. I finally looked at him, really looked at him. His name tag labeled him as 'Todd'. I knew him. He graduated high school a couple years before me. He was on the track team I think. I thought about hanging out for a few minutes to catch up. No. We never moved in the same circles back then. What would we talk about now?

"Stay safe." I advised as I grabbed my grocery bags and headed out.

I saw a fight on the way home. Two guys were really tearing into a third. It seemed pretty vicious, so I decided not to play hero and just charted a wide course around them and hurried past. By the time I got home, my shambling sick neighbor had moved on. I though I saw him a couple of blocks away, halfway to the Red Cross center. He would find no help there.

### April 18 - Tulsa, Oklahoma

Decker interrupted my writing yesterday. Said he needed some help checking all the barricades. I and two other volunteers joined Decker and walked around the interior perimeter of the bus depot, making sure none of the stuff we had piled against the windows and doors had shifted. The piles remain in place, but the noises outside are noticeably louder than yesterday.

Yesterday. Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, I had just gotten home. Letting myself into my parent's apartment building, I heard some of their neighbors milling about. A few of them were groaning, perhaps sick with the same flu that had taken my parents. Down the hall, someone was having a hellish fight. I hurried into my parent's apartment, locking the apartment door behind me. Slumping onto the sofa, I dropped the bags of groceries onto the floor at my feet and turned the TV on. Static. I surfed through a few other channels and found several running public service announcements or emergency messages regarding the epidemic. All of the advice seem pointless or stunningly obvious. Stay inside; drink plenty of fluids; avoid contact with sick people. I gave up and put in a DVD of some crime drama my parents liked. I half watched. I wondered how long it would take before the epidemic ran its course and things started returning to normal. I wondered what I should do about my parents. I wondered if I should do anything about the next door neighbors moaning and pounding on the wall.

I turned off the TV. The moaning and pounding seemed louder now. Then I realized, the sounds were not coming from next door... they were coming from my parent's bedroom.

### **April** **19** **-** **Tulsa,** **Oklahoma**

They were dead. I know they were dead. I had gone into their room that morning prepared for the worst. But the worst is so much worse than we imagined. Of course you know what I found when I opened that door a second time. If you are alive to read this, you probably experienced something like it, or at least talked to someone who has. The gray skin, the glassy yellow-white eyes, and that howl they make when they see the living. My parents had only just reanimated, and that probably saved my life. Their movements were still clumsy. It evidently takes a while for the change to finish, for all the muscles to start working again. Miguel described it to us. He worked as an RN at the clinic over on Westerfield Avenue. Before he left, the hospital was swamped with patients. They had people stretched out in the waiting room and in hallways. Some were dying and reanimating before anyone could even examine them. It started out as just a twitching, then grew to something more like convulsions. Eventually, the corpses started dragging themselves along the floor, and then pulled themselves up and started shambling about. They never seemed to gain back all of their former speed or coordination, but they were still damn dangerous. Miguel says nobody realized what was happening at first. A lot of people got bit trying to restrain and treat the already deceased. That was always fatal. Once bit, you have a few hours at best. A bite seems to bi-pass all those weeks of flu-like symptoms and sends you right to the end stage... yellow eyed catatonics.

After seeing my parents like that, reduced to slavering flesh hungry monsters, I completely lost it. Now I wasn't exactly in the best frame of mind before that, but something really snapped at that point. I grabbed my duffel bag with my textbooks, snatched my non-working cell phone from the coffee table, and headed for the door.

"I'm going back to school!", I shouted to my parents as I slammed the door on them. "I've had enough of this crap, and I'm going back to MIT." I ran down the hall, past the sounds of moaning and crying coming from various doors. I bolted outside, nearly running into a manic, pale faced, yellow eyed figure. The creature gave a bellow and lurched at me, but I ran past and headed flat-out for the bus station. I had spent most of my cash at the at the convenience store. I hoped I had enough limit left on my credit card to purchase a ticket back to Boston.

Yeah, I really wasn't thinking very straight.

I saw a few other people on the way to the bus station. Some were running like me. Others shambled and lurched. I didn't slow to talk to any of them. I didn't stop until I got to the bus station. It was locked up of course. The CDC had closed down all the trains and bus stations and airports early on in the epidemic. My brain slowly started functioning again. I looked around. Several pale figures were lurching toward me from different directions. I ran around the corner of the bus station and began to head down the alley that ran between it and the retail store next door. More shapes stumbled toward me from the other end of the alley.

"God damn it!" I shouted. I looked toward the retail store and wondered if I could kick in its side door and escape that way. I was just about to try, when a hand grabbed my arm and drag me toward the bus station.

I screamed and tried to pull away, until a female voice exclaimed, "Quit fighting me and get your ass in here!" Someone had opened a side door to the station, one I had nearly ran past without noticing. I bolted inside, and we both slammed the door shut. I noticed a large red warning label on the door: Alarm Will Sound. No alarm was going off.

"Don't worry", my rescuer assured, "They can't open it from the outside, it's a fire exit." I finally got a good look at my hero, a young brunet woman in sweat pants and a UMKC jersey. "I'm Kalee, by the way."

"I know," I answered, "we went to high school together."

### **April** **21** **-** **Tulsa,** **Oklahoma**

I've been camped out at the bus station for about four days now, me and more than a hundred other people. Most found their way here before me, like me hoping to find a way out of town. Others trickled in a bit at a time as word got out somehow that a group was making a stand here. That trickle has slowed and finally stopped as the number of undead outside grew. Early on, a few brave people had managed to sneak out and back in, picking a door with the fewest monsters near it and then just running faster than their shambling pace could match. That isn't possible any more. The walking dead seem to have figured out we are in here, and their numbers have grown until now there is a ring of them all the way around the building at least three bodies deep. The constant moaning and howling of the creatures is wearing on everyone. I don't think any of us are sleeping.

Supplies are low. I think back to the groceries I had purchased a few days ago and wish I had brought them instead of my textbooks. Very few people brought much in the way of food. Some did, and they were reluctant to share initially, but the hungry far outnumbered the well supplied, and peer pressure or perhaps basic human decency won out over selfishness. By unspoken agreement, we are a temporary commune now. At least we aren't low on water yet. Before the water utility packed up, someone thought to fill every available container, including a few large, cleaned-out garbage cans. We also seem to have sufficient guns and ammo. In Oklahoma, folks value their second amendment rights.

Originally, the plan was to simply hold out until the national guard or army or some such came to the rescue. As our food dwindles and the undead horde grows, that plan seems less viable. Someone in the group has a multi-band radio, basically a hand-held CB, and the news coming in from that is grim. The same virus that has hammered the civilian population has depleted the military. There just isn't enough healthy, live people out there to hold things together.

Max called a meeting earlier. I wouldn't call him our leader, I'm not sure we have one, but people seem willing to to listen to Max. He just has that sort of personality that commands a person's attention. He can talk in a calm, quiet voice, and yet it fills the room. He isn't any taller than average, not particularly striking in appearance, yet he seems bigger than life sometimes. Maybe it's the way he looks people in the eye when he talks. I swear he can talk to an entire room full of people, and every one of them will feel like he is talking to just them individually. He could have cut a swath as a politician, but someone told me he services air conditioners or something along those lines.

"Nobody is coming for us." Max laid it out without sugar coating. "We need to get ourselves out of this." A worried murmur began to rise, and Max charged ahead before it took over the meeting. "We've got a plan. Jack and I have been looking over the buses, the ones inside the repair bay. We think we can get two of them running, and top them off with diesel siphoned from the others. That should be enough to get us all out of here, though we'll be packed in pretty tight."

This caused some excited discussion among the group. Not everyone wanted to try it, but the momentum was definitely in favor. Then someone yelled the question, "What about the people in quarantine?"

Things got quiet rather quick. Not everyone at the bus depot is in perfect health. Anyone with flu-like symptoms is quarantined in the luggage handling area. The people with the mildest symptoms look after those worse off. There have been a few deaths in the few days we've been here. Nobody talks about what was done with the bodies.

Nobody liked the idea of sharing a bus with the sick. It isn't like we can just put them in their own bus; there are too many healthy people and two few buses. The discussion became heated. Some people want to leave them behind. Others insisted we can leave nobody behind no matter the risk. The arguments became circular and steadily louder, until Max insisted we table the topic for now. We could think about solutions while working on the buses, he said.

Kalee is completely in the 'leave nobody behind' camp, as am I. At this point, I think most of us would have already gotten sick if we were going to. I just can't imagine leaving anyone to that hellish horde out there.

Kalee. She's a force of nature. I think it was her idea to fill water containers before the utilities shut down. The water pressure held out longer than electrical service, but they both died within a few days of each other. She warned about both possibilities and got people thinking and preparing for it. She's also been a wizard at figuring out ways to stretch our food supplies. It seems she can take the most incongruous combinations of things and figure out some way to combine them in water and make a soup that will feed hundreds. I expect her to start producing loaves and fishes out of thin air at any moment.

I never really knew her in high school. She moved in the goth crowd. She always seemed a bit cold, aloof, maybe a bit pretentious and superior even. Boy did I get that wrong. Trapped in a bus depot surrounded by the undead, we finally found ourselves able to talk to each other.

"My god I was always terrified in high school." She admitted to me, "I always felt like everyone else had it so much more together. I was convinced if I opened my mouth for more than a couple of words, I would make a total ass of myself."

I laughed. "I think you had the better approach though." was my answer, "I was constantly saying too much and actually making an ass of myself."

She laughed at that, and I realized I'd never seen her laugh or smile back in school. It looked good on her. She looks better all around. More confident. More alive. It seems funny when I think about it now, writing it down, but I think she feels more comfortable trapped in a building surrounded by zombies than she felt in a high school bounded by the expectations of our peers.

### **April** **23** **-** **Tulsa,** **Oklahoma**

As soon as Jack found out I was an MIT engineering student, he recruited me into helping with the bus repairs. He seems to hold MIT in an almost religious reverence, like some people treat the Vatican. He never finished college himself; dropped out of Kansas State back in the late 80's to take care of the family farm when his father fell ill. The guy is a natural engineer though. He spilled his entire life story while we tinkered away on those giant diesel engines, telling me about creative bodges he had wired together to keep farm equipment running and the crazy inventions he hopes to work on some day. He diagnosed those bus engines using instinct and sense of smell I think. I was mostly just there to hand him tools. We got two of the four buses started and running without much effort. We robbed spare parts and fuel from the other two, with each working bus ending up with a little more than half a tank each.

We also hit upon a solution to the quarantine problem while working. These buses are cross country passenger vehicles, the kind that include a large luggage compartment below the seating area. The luggage compartment is accessible only from the outside of the bus, so we can in theory make an effective quarantine area out of it. It might require drilling some ventilation holes through the side panels, and we should find some cushions or padding to make their ride more comfortable, but it should accommodate everyone currently quarantined in the luggage handling area of the depot. I guess that's kind of ironic now that I think about it... from one luggage area to another.

I talked to another old school mate today. Milo was a year ahead of me in high school. He was on the football team, dated cheerleaders, was even voted homecoming king I think... another one of those people moving in completely different circles than me. Turns out he got to the depot before me but then volunteered to go out and find supplies and other survivors. He returned and then went back out two more times. To get back in the last time, he had to gun down a crowd of zombies and then climb up the side of the building so someone could let him in a second floor window. I swear, the guy is Rambo crossed with Spiderman. Kalee mentioned he was around, but he's spent a lot of time on the roof since he got back, observing the undead, watching for military aircraft, or taking a shift on the radio, so I hadn't seen him much before this. I was chatting with Kalee when he stopped over to say hi to her. He actually remembered me from high school, but he looked a bit uncomfortable with me being around. Turns out he was classmates with Kalee at UMKC, so I suspect I'm treading on some history here. I'm not sure if they've dated or if Milo has just been working toward that goal. Either way, I'm now feeling totally third wheelish.

I left Kalee and Milo to reminisce about their college days and distracted myself for a while checking the barricades again, then I parked myself in a quiet corner and powered up my phone. Flipping through the digital pictures of my college friends back in Boston, I wondered how many of them had survived the disaster. Are any of them holed up in a zombie besieged building like this right now? If so, what will be their fate? Hell, what will happen to us? As these questions drifted through my head, my phone flashed a battery warning and went dead.

Talk about fucking ominous.

### **April** **25** **-** **Tulsa,** **Oklahoma**

It's been a couple of days since my last journal entry, and a lot has happened since. The decision was made to leave the depot in the morning. We loaded in what supplies we had left, got all the healthy people on board, opened up the luggage storage, and then gave the word to the quarantine. They filed in slowly, some of them having to carry or drag others. There was no more than a dozen of them left at this point, and by the looks of them there would be fewer soon. I learned later that two of them had actually fully recovered but elected to stay in quarantine to look after the rest.

I remember an incident my second day at the depot. A woman had developed a cough and was told she had to go to quarantine. She refused, swore up and down it was a simple cold. Several armed people made it clear she had no choice. She might have had the deadly cough, or it might have been just a cold like she said. We might be sending her needlessly to likely infection and death. I don't know, but I looked for her in that grim procession, praying I would see her face. I didn't.

Jack was in the lead bus with Max. Kalee and I were together on the second bus; Max made a point of placing Jack and I on different buses. I think he wanted to make sure we had at least one engine mechanic in the event one of the buses didn't make it. Milo was up on the roof of our bus along with five other gunmen. The other bus had its own six gunners. We had drilled holes in the roof that they threaded safety lines through, securing themselves in place. Drilling those holes had not been easy with the power out. We had a cordless drill, and I managed to keep it charged for a time using the batteries from the other buses, but when that finally died, Jack had to fashion hand drills using drill bits, pipe fittings, and a few random odds and ends. We got the job done though.

Opening the garage door without power presented an even bigger challenge. I'm proud of the solution Jack and I came up with. We could hear the undead milling about just outside, and as they heard us working on the buses, they began pressing against and pounding on that garage door. Manually lifting the door would have been a death sentence for whoever tried it, so we rigged up a system of counterweights to do the job. We disconnected the chain from the electric garage door opener, then ran cables from the door, over pulleys hung from the ceiling, to barrels filled with tools and engine parts. We very carefully rigged the barrels so they would remain hanging from the ceiling supports until set free with the yank of a trigger cable. I held my breath when it finally came time to try it. I was so worried about whether it would work correctly or not, I briefly forgot about what was waiting for us on the other side of that door.

God almighty, how do I describe it. We first started both buses, then one of the gunners yanked on the trigger cable. Our contraption worked perfectly. The garage door snapped open as the barrels crashed to the ground. A wave of howling death charged into the garage like the gates of hell itself had opened up.

And kept coming. And coming. The numbers outside had been steadily growing, and the noise of our departure had been attracting them to this side of the building. The lead bus moved forward and met the wave of zombies. Our bus followed right after. At first we gained speed, shoving the undead ahead of us, but then the lead bus slowed. It was losing traction as bodies were crushed under its wheels. Our driver slowed to avoid hitting it. Monster swarmed around us, pounding and clawing. The metal panels rang like gongs. Windows cracked. The first bus gunned its engine, spinning its tires. Bits of shredded zombie flesh sprayed up and splattered on our bus's windshield. We inched forward. The gunners fired repeatedly, trying to open a path. The lead bus was out of the garage. Then ours. We were completely surrounded now but still moving. Then the first bus was free. It rocketed forward as its tires finally bit clean pavement. We shot right after it. Bus one clipped a parked car as the driver cranked the wheel around, steering out of the depot parking lot and into the street. It belched a cloud of diesel fumes as we shifted up a gear and headed out of town.

It was comparatively smooth sailing for a while after that. We encountered plenty of zombies, but individually or in small groups they simply were no match for us. I saw a few other buildings with large swarms of the undead around them and wondered how the survivors within were holding out. There was nothing we could do for them, so we just drove on.

Our luck held until we reached a mess of wrecked cars just west of town. The tangle of twisted metal stretched from shoulder to shoulder with no room to squeeze by. Max got out of his bus and ran back to talk to our driver. It was decided we would back up and take a side road to get around the mess. We had to move fast, because scattered undead were already converging on us. Max got back to his bus just ahead of one. It charged and began hammering at the bus door. It's bellow seemed to quicken the pace of the other nearby ghouls. The other bus got turned around, moving backwards and forwards until facing the right way, then rocketed back the way we had come. Our driver elected to just drive in reverse for a bit, then began to turn our bus around. He misjudged, and put the back of the bus into a ditch on the right side of the road. The wheels spun helplessly. The other bus reached a maintenance road a few hundred yards behind us and pulled off the highway. As its profile cleared the road, it revealed a crowd of shambling death approaching from the city. More undead were appearing from around the wrecked cars.

"Get us moving!" someone yelled, as if the driver didn't understand the urgency of the situation. It was hopeless though; that bus was going nowhere soon, and the undead would be surrounding us in moments. The gunners on the roof kept taking out the ones that got closest, but they would run out of ammunition eventually. My eyes were locked on one particular zombie, a pre-teen girl in jeans and a Hana Montana t-shirt, her hair still pulled up by a purple scrunchy. She lurched toward the bus until a shotgun blast hit her, but the shot was wide and low; it simply took off her arm at the shoulder, and after spinning around and then wandering in a wide circle, she headed back toward the bus. Before I could witness the shot that would finish her, Kalee grabbed my arm.

"Isaac, look over there." She pointed at the first bus, now driving toward us on the maintenance road on the other side of a ditch running parallel to the highway. It began slowing as it drew close. Kalee didn't hesitate. "Everyone out! Get to the other bus." She was already up and heading to the front of the bus.

The gunners clued in to what was happening and began focusing on clearing a path between the two vehicles. People grabbed whatever supplies they could and took off running. Our driver picked up a length of pipe he had stored under his seat and stepped outside to defend the people as they filed out. The gunners mostly kept the way clear, but occasionally someone needed to stop and reload, and then the one of the fiends would get close. Twice I saw the driver brain a zombie with that pipe, knocking it down or slowing it and giving time for the gunners to finish it. Kalee and I had been toward the back of the bus and were some of the last ones out. I heard someone yelling. Hands pounding on metal. We ran to the ditch and began climbing up the other side before I realized what I had heard.

"The quarantined!" I shouted as I turned and looked back, "My god we've left them behind." Several of the gunners had already jumped down from the roof, continuing to shoot as they retreated to the other bus. Milo and another gunner, a middle aged woman with close cut blond hair, remained on the roof . The driver was at the luggage compartment, heaving the door open. Then the blond woman's gun ran dry, and she disconnected her safety line and tried to climb down. She fell, had trouble getting up, and was set upon immediately. The horde began closing on the driver even as he was pulling the first of the sick out of the luggage compartment. Milo fired into the undead crowd, but it just wasn't enough. The bus was completely surrounded now, and some of them were heading toward us.

Kalee shook me. "MOVE, Isaac! We need to get out of here" She didn't need to tell me twice. The undead were in the ditch and heading toward us. We pushed our way onto the bus. It was packed beyond belief. People sat on top of one another, stood in the aisle, several children had even been hoisted into the luggage racks. The bus began moving as soon as Kalee and I crammed ourselves onto the stairs just inside the door. I pulled myself up the top step and looked out the window to the other bus as we pulled away. The last I saw of Milo, he was still standing on the roof, firing into a growing swarm of walking dead.

"Milo." Kalee nearly whispered it, so I barely heard her over the engine noise and the din of our fellow passengers. She slumped down on the step, buried her head in her hands, and began to shake. I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. It's the best I could do in our cramped conditions. I felt helpless. We rode like that for a while, until the bus began to slow.

I heard Jack say, "I think we should turn north here." I finally noticed that Jack was driving. Max folded over the AAA map he was looking at and answered, "I don't know, these farm roads don't show up on the map."

"It should be fine." Jack reassured, "They make a big grid. We can get almost anywhere on them. It'll be a good way to avoid the populated areas." Max seemed convinced, and we headed north.

After placing enough distance between us and the zombie infested highway, Jack stopped the bus and let everyone get out. Two of the gunners scanned the distance with binoculars while people took restroom breaks, repacked supplies, and looked for a more comfortable seating arrangement. A single walking dead was seen in the distance, but we were loaded up and moving again before it got close.

It was decided we would head north a bit longer, then west until we reached Interstate 35, follow that for a bit before heading farther west on more farm roads, then north into Kansas. One of our group was certain there was a FEMA facility in northwestern Kansas, so that seemed as good a direction to head as any. We headed north until the next crossroads, then turned west toward I35. We reached a point where the farm road was washed out and impassable. A tractor might have made it over but our bus would likely not. Jack carefully drove backwards to the previous crossroads, then headed north and took the next western road. It was slow going on those dirt roads, but we eventually saw I35 in the distance, as well as a farm house, barn, and related structures. It was rather picturesque actually, a modest white painted house, faded red barn, a pair of grain silos, and a windmill. Like something off a postcard. The dirt road we were on would take us right past it.

Jack slowed and stopped as we approached the turn-off that could take us directly to the farm. "What do you think?" he asked Max.

"It's fairly secluded, and we need to stop somewhere before it turns dark." Max replied. "I say we check it out." We drove right up to the house and parked next to an old Chevy Impala station wagon. Max told everyone to stay on board while he and a couple of the gunners checked it out. Max stepped right up to the front door, knocked and shouted hello. Nobody came out, but something crashed noisily within, and I thought I could hear a now familiar moaning sound. The gunners walked around the house, peaking in the windows, eventually confirming the presence of at least two undead. Max and the two gunners conferred for a bit, then walked out of sight behind the house. A minute later a couple of gunshots was heard. A few minutes later Max came out the front door. He waved at us to exit the bus. As soon as Jack got out, Max walked over and filled him in.

"Just the two of them. We lured 'em out back and took care of it. The rest of the house is clean, but we should inspect the barn and other buildings and make sure there are no surprises waiting." Jack nodded, and relayed the instructions to the other gunners. They broke up into pairs and went to work. The rest of us filed into the house and began to settle in for the night.

### **April** **27** **-** **The** **Farmhouse,** **Oklahoma**

This farm has been a godsend. There wasn't much in the kitchen, but the basement was filled with canned food. Not the store bought kind, but glass mason jars of jams, jellies, fruit, and every conceivable vegetable one might grow in a home garden. Those farmers might have survived a year on it, had they not joined the undead. We can stretch it and feed our group for a few days at least. We also found guns and ammunition; a shotgun with plenty of shells, two .22 caliber pistols also with lots of ammo, an old .303 bolt action rifle that unfortunately had only a few rounds with it. The barn contains an old flatbed farm truck, a tractor, and a hay wagon. Out back we found fuel tanks for both diesel and regular gas, though the diesel is nearly empty and the gas is completely so. There is no electricity to run the house well pump, but the windmill works just fine, so there is no shortage of water. Jack also found a gasoline generator while poking around in the machine shop back of the barn. He thinks he can siphon gas from the station wagon to get it running. Right now, though, he is checking on the farm truck to see if it runs. All in all, this place is paradise compared to what we've been through the last few days.

The loss of Milo hit Kalee pretty hard. She stopped crying rather quickly, but she has been rather quiet and withdrawn. I tried to talk to her for a while, but I'm just no good with this sort of thing. Miguel is sitting with her now. I expect he knows better how to help people dealing with loss, being a medical professional. Unfortunately, he can't stay with her long. Plenty of people were injured during our escape, though none seriously. He has been doing rounds and looking after every medical problem, not matter how trivial. He also set up our new quarantine area out on the sun porch. We lost two more people, so there are only four people in quarantine now. One of them seems fully recovered, and another seems well on her way. The other two are pretty far gone, nearly to the catatonic end-stage. We might not need the quarantine much longer.

We dug graves today, two for the old farmer couple and two for that pair in quarantine. I took a shift on the shovel. It seems wrong to me, digging a grave for someone who isn't dead yet, but Miguel says it's a forgone conclusion with the state those two are in. He watched a lot of people sicken and die at the clinic, and nobody survived once the eyes went glassy and yellow. Some people seem able to shake it off while it's just acting like a respiratory bug, but most don't. He says the fatality rate has been as high as 85 percent at some hospitals. The lowest any place reported was around 70 percent. We've had nearly 20 people go through our quarantine, and it looks like we'll have three survivors and would have had at least four if we hadn't lost the other bus. No real medical facilities and yet we did better than some hospitals. I'm not sure if that says something about Miguel's skill in setting up our quarantine care or if it's more a commentary on the American health care system.

I got a good look at the farmers as we lowered them into their graves. An older couple. The woman was in her nightgown, the man in bib overalls and a t-shirt. He had obvious bite marks on his arms. I wonder if he might have survived the plague if he hadn't been bitten by his wife. I wonder how many of the 15 to 30 percent who survived the deadly cough eventually fell to the undead. How many people are left alive in the world? Are we now vastly outnumbered by the walking dead?

### **April** **28** **-** **The** **Farmhouse,** **Oklahoma**

Miracles do happen. I was in the barn helping Jack with the farm truck when we heard a commotion outside. Twice already our peaceful refuge had been invaded by a wandering zombie, but they both were easily dispatched. We cautiously left the barn assuming the undead had made another appearance. A silver SUV was heading down the driveway from I35. It pulled up near the bus, and a disheveled, dark haired figure climbed out. Milo.

He was walking with a limp, his shirt was torn up, and he was dirty as all hell, but unless zombies have started driving cars, he was very much alive. Pretty soon nearly the entire group was outside, everyone cheering or shouting questions. Milo was laughing and trying to answer when he was tackled by Kalee. She hugged him so hard I'm surprised his ribs didn't crack. I am happy Milo survived, even if he doesn't have much use for me, but I'm doubly happy that it's knocked Kalee out of her funk. Maybe it's a bit selfish of me, but I think I really need her usual optimism right now.

Once all the excitement died down, Milo finally sat on the front steps of the farm house and told us his story.

"I emptied my shotgun into that mess below me. I wasn't really thinking it through, I just couldn't let the people in the luggage compartment... I mean, nobody deserves..." He took a deep breath, then continued. "Once I was out of shells and just really took a good look at the situation, I realized how truly fucked I was. The freaks were mostly bunched up by the luggage door, so I figured if I was going to make break for it, the opposite side of the bus was my best chance. I couldn't climb down, and a jump to the pavement would break my legs, so I reasoned there was only one option. I aimed for fattest, softest freak I could find on the outside of that crowd. I jumped and planted my feet right on his shoulders, rode the fat bastard down, then tucked in my shoulder, rolled, and came up running."

"And you didn't get bit?" someone asked.

Milo rolled up the left leg of his jeans to reveal a bite mark on the thick leather of his cowboy boots. "When you are going to kick some zombie ass, be sure to dress for the job." he answered. He continued. "So I took off running, headed north off the road then west parallel to it. I saw the dust trail from the bus, but there was no way I was going to catch it. Ran into a few freaks. Managed to avoid most of them. Had to go through a couple of them." He held up his empty shotgun to display some dark smears on the wooden stock. "I kept along that frontage road, thinking I might scavenge some supplies from the abandon cars, but wherever there was cars, there was always some undead freak stumbling around. I didn't really like the idea of just heading out into the fields with nothing but an empty gun, but it was beginning to look like I would have to. Then I found it, just sitting there. Driver side door open, keys still in it... like it had been dropped there by the gods of Detroit."

"Actually it's a European import..."

"Hey, who's story is this?" Milo exclaimed, but with a laugh in his voice. A chuckle went through the crowd, and he continued. "So I went down highway 33 for a while, then off a side road and tried to pick up the trail of the bus. Drove back and forth a bit trying to pick up tracks but had no luck. Siphoned gas from a couple of abandoned cars. Found some granola bars and a couple of juice boxes in one. Spent a couple nights sleeping in the car out in the middle of nowhere. Woke up to a deader pounding on the passenger window the second morning, but managed to drive off before it did more than crack it. I gave up on picking up the bus's trail, so I just headed west, picked up I35 and drove north. Ran into a big mess of the freaks. Had to go off-road to get around them. Then, picked up 35 again, heading north and saw the bus, just sitting here big as life. And here I find all of you just sitting back living the easy life while I'm out there playing road warrior."

Max clapped Milo on the shoulder and exclaimed, "Well we're sure glad to have you back. I won't blame you if you want to take it easy for a bit."

"Hmmm. About that." Milo replied. "That mess of undead I drove around, south of here on I35. They were headed this way."

"How far away?" someone asked.

Milo thougtht about it a moment, then replied, "They aren't moving very fast, but I expect the leading edge to reach here by nightfall. They're a bit spread out... not all moving the same speed I suppose. Still, they seem to be mostly staying to the road, so I expect they will come straight here.

"Do you think they will go past?" The question came from a middle aged woman name Sarah sitting next to Max. "I mean, if we stay inside and stay quiet, they should just go past, right?" She looked to Max as she asked it. Most of us were looking at Max.

"They might. But we don't know enough about how they behave. This place isn't secure enough to make a stand at, and we are low on ammunition and food. I was thinking we should move on soon anyway. Better we just stay ahead of them."

The discussion began to heat up to the point that Max was having difficulty being heard. Finally Jack gave a piercing whistle, and Max jumped into the momentary silence to grab control of the debate.

"Listen, I know we all like this place, but our best bet is still to head for the FEMA center in Oklahoma. We need to stop our jawin' and start packing up." With that, he turned to Jack and moved ahead as if the decision had been made. "Jack, is that farm truck road worthy, and will it pull the hay wagon."

Jack nodded as he answered, "Yup. I'll want to top her off from the diesel tank out back, if we don't put it all in the bus that is. There might be some fuel I can siphon out of the tractor too." The station wagon runs, and we've got Milo's SUV. We won't be as cramped as the ride here."

"OK, load up the generator, and any tools you might need. Sarah, you pick a few helpers and start loading up the last of the canned food. We should also fill up every water container we can find. Miguel, I trust you to take care of medical supplies and moving the quarantine back to the baggage area."

With that we were all moving. I helped Jack with the farm truck, then picked through the tools in the machine shed. We stowed the tools and the generator on the hay wagon. The truck has a flat bed with no sides, but we found a railing that could be attached and locked in place with steal pins. This would provide at least some protection from falling off, though not much protection from the undead if we found ourselves surrounded. After the truck and the wagon was ready, I looked for Kaylee but found her busy loading supplies on the bus. Milo and Miguel had their own tasks to keep themselves busy, and Jack was looking over maps with Max. Our group numbers over a hundred, but I still know so few of them. I've just never been very good at the people thing. Maybe that's why I find myself turning to this journal so readily despite never being much of a writer in the past. Like the electronics and computers I would normally retreat to, it's just not as complicated as people.

### **April** **28** **-** **On** **the** **Road,** **Oklahoma**

We left the farmhouse with a few hours of daylight left, and Max intended to make the best of every minute. We would head north on I35 for a while, then west on a county highway or farm road, making sure to stay clear of Oklahoma City or even any small towns. With luck, we would find another farm house to hole up in before it got dark. Our caravan was led by Max driving Milo's SUV. Sarah road shotgun with him, literally carrying a shotgun in the passenger seat. Jack drove the bus again, and a young guy named Oliver drove the farm truck. I was a passenger in the station wagon being driven by a red haired fellow named Gabriel. Milo was back on top of the Bus along with three other gunners. Miguel and Kaylee were on the bus. I would have preferred to be on the bus too, but Jack asked that I ride in the tail car to keep an eye out for anything falling off the farm truck or the hay wagon. I could see a scattered group of shambling figures walking toward us from the south as we pulled onto I35, the leading edge of the horde Milo had spotted.

It was a relatively uneventful drive. We encountered a few walking dead, but in small enough numbers that they did not present much of a problem. Max dodged them in the SUV. Jack ran a couple over with the bus. The rest of us stayed close to the bus and let Jack clear the way. The gunners didn't even waste any ammo. Gabriel kept up a constant chatter as he drove, barely letting me or the other passengers in the station wagon get a word in.

"My name's Gabriel, like the archangel," he started in, "but you can all call me Gabe." He went on to tell us that he had been a seminary student, but "that had nothing to do with being named after an angel." He went on talking about how exciting it was being in the end-times, as foretold in Revelations in the Bible. A teenage girl named Shelly asked if that meant we had been left behind after the Rapture.

"Oh I don't claim to have any answers." Gabe replied. "I joined the seminary because all I had was questions. The Bible is actually a bit vague about the end times. That whole thing about the Rapture and the Tribulation, there is still a lot of debate going on in theological circles... at least there was. I think God's hand must be in this though, just like the great flood. It's his way to bend the forces of nature and use them to work his will."

"So you think the undead are natural?" the same teenage girl asked.

"Yes, I suppose so. It's a plague of sorts, isn't it?" He thought about it a bit more before continuing, "I mean, just because we haven't seen something like it before doesn't mean it isn't part of God's nature. He's used plagues and pestilence before."

I kept silent. I was never very religious myself and just assumed there was some sort of scientific explanation for the dead seeming to rise. But what do I know, maybe we really are in the end times, and we are all just playing our part in God's mysterious plan.

We kept north until reaching an interchange for state highway 11, then Max slowed and signaled that he was taking the ramp. We all followed and headed west, ignoring the few buildings there. I noticed a boarded up Mexican restaurant and wondered if we might find food in it, but Max evidently did not want to use up our remaining daylight by stopping to look. We drove west, and soon found nothing but empty fields on either side. A few minutes down the road, a large complex of buildings appeared on the north side of the road. The caravan stopped, and I saw Max get out of the SUV and walk back to the bus, no doubt to talk to Jack. After a few minutes he headed back to the SUV and led us all into the nearly empty parking lot of the building. A large sign announced that it was Liberty Forklift Assembly Plant 5, "A Proud American Manufacturer of Quality Warehouse Systems". The parking lot had only two cars in it, so the plant must have been closed when everything finally came apart. Perhaps they shut down when too many of the workers were out sick.

We all climbed out of our respective vehicles to stretch our legs, and Max addressed the group. "We'll bed down here tonight. This place is off the main roads a bit and well built, so we should be safe here. We'll sweep it for supplies and then decide on a route in the morning." He turned to Milo and the other gunners. "Those two cars in the parking lot might mean people, or they might mean we've dead to deal with. You know the drill; split into pairs, sweep the building, make note of anything useful you see, but leave it for others to retrieve later. Our first goal is to make sure this place is safe."

I wandered over to where Kalee was standing, thankful for a chance to finally talk to her. "It looks like we have at least another hour of daylight. I'm surprised Max didn't look for something farther down the road, a bit farther from the Interstate."

"Would you want to sweep a building for zombies in the dark?" was her answer. I couldn't fault her logic. "Seems an odd place to build something like this though, out in the boonies." She looked around, as if trying to see the merits of the location.

"I suppose the land was cheap," I answered, "though they probably also had to pay the power company to extend electrical service from the lines along the Interstate." I pointed to the relatively new looking poles holding high voltage cables running to the building. "This whole factory can't be more than a couple years old. They barely got going before it all came slamming down."

We chatted for a while about nothing in particular. Standing there, next to that bus as the evening sun went down, I could almost imagine this was all just some school outing and not the apocalypse. Miguel came over, and we all speculated about what we might find inside. We all hoped it would include food, as rations had been very thin for more than a week now. There is only so much you can water down soup before it stops being filling.

Two of the gunners finally came out and declared the office area clear. The others were still checking the factory floor and the loading bays. We began hauling various supplies into the building, up the concrete steps through the main doors which someone had jimmied open. Miguel ran ahead to find a new quarantine area, eager to let the remaining sick out of the luggage area and into someplace more comfortable.

The office area of the factory was three stories tall, and its entrance led into an atrium that extended up that full three stories to a giant skylight. The atrium was filled with dried, mostly dead tropical plants. Balconies on the second and third floors overlooked the area. A couple of dusty benches that looked more appropriate to an outdoor park sat on either end of the plant beds.

Kalee walked up and touched the leaves of one of the dried plants. "Poor thing." she whispered. I'd seen her face down hordes of average people transformed into mindless monsters with barely a twitch of emotion, yet these pitiful plants seemed to really move her.

Miguel came jogging past and waved for us to follow him. He had found a place to set up quarantine, a first floor room near a side door he had already propped open. We went back to the bus where the luggage compartment door was already open, and two healthy looking people had already emerged carrying a pale third. Everyone gave them their distance as they laid the person on the pavement and went back into the compartment to retrieve the fourth. The body came out, pale, motionless, with its arms and legs bound. She was a young woman, in her twenties probably, in a floral patterned blouse and tan slacks. She had stringy blond hair, knotted from days of neglect. Her skin was the gray of death.

Then it began. A twitching at first. Then the arms straining against the ropes. Her eyes came open, glassy and yellowish, but _looking_ at us. Her mouth opened and a raspy groan emerged. It deepened and gained in volume. We stood horrified and transfixed.

Miguel shook his head slowly. "It shouldn't have been allowed to go this far. She must have died on the road. They had no way to tell us." He went to the hay wagon and retrieved an ax. He hooked the ax over the ropes that bound the woman's feet and began to drag her to the edge of the parking lot, away from the vehicles. "Isaac, give me some help with this." I ran over, grabbed the handle of the ax with him and helped him awkwardly drag her the rest of the way. "Now stand back"

He swung the ax overhead, and it came down with a sickening crunch. I though he meant to decapitate her, but he had planted the blade right in her skull. The body stopped moving. Miguel planted his foot on her chest, pulled out the bloody ax, and started heading back. The blood wasn't red as I expected, more like brownish black. It was also thicker than normal blood. "We'll need to dig a grave." Miguel announced flatly. "Two actually; the other one doesn't have long." I thought back to the unfilled graves we had dug for them back at the farm, back before we realized we would leave so soon.

I walked back to Kalee. "I'm going to get a shovel from the wagon." I said, but then made no move to find it. Kalee looked at me, her expression a bit sad, but also a bit distant. Like she was remembering something.

"I'm... I'm going to water some plants." she announced, then turned and walked back into the building. I stood there for a while, watching her go, then finally walked to the hay wagon to dig through the tools. Maybe we could get the grave dug before the last of our light vanished.

I found two shovels, and Miguel and I together dug a grave before night fell. It was not as deep as we would have liked, but we wouldn't be staying here more than a day, so it would suffice. The second grave would have to wait until morning. Miguel explained that when the other ill person passed, his brain would be destroyed using a thin, sharp blade inserted through the corners of the eye sockets. This had proven very effective in preventing the reanimation process while not producing a gruesome mess. We rolled the dead woman into her grave and shoveled a thin layer of dirt onto her, then decided we would finish the job in the morning when we had more light. We hurried inside as soon as we were done.

In the atrium, we found Milo and another gunner escorting a short, sandy haired fellow wearing a long blue trench coat. I had never seen this guy before. Max was coming down the stairs from one of the upper office floors, having been retrieved by Sarah. Milo was calling out to Max even before he was completely down the stairs.

"Max, we found this guy in the cafeteria. You really need to hear what he has to say."

### April 28 - The Factory, Oklahoma

I'm nothing if not curious, so when Max headed off to a conference room with the stranger, I tagged along, as did Milo, Jack, Sarah, and a few other people.

The stranger dove right in. "My name is Thomas Reynolds. I work for.. worked for the CDC at the Kansas FEMA center near Colby."

That grabbed Max's attention. "The FEMA center. Near Colby. So you know where it is? You could guide us there?"

"I could," Thomas gave a long slow sigh before continuing, "but you wouldn't like what you found there. It was overrun several days ago. The infected breached the fences... just kept piling up until the chain link toppled over, then swarmed the national guard troops faster than they could shoot. The military loaded all us civilian CDC researchers on army trucks, used mortars to punched a hole in the lines of the infected and drove through. I was in the second truck, so we made it through before the lines closed back in."

"So it's... totally gone. Is there anywhere safe?" Max seemed to address the question to the heavens more than Thomas, but Thomas answered anyway.

"You're sitting in the safest place I've found. As far as I know, all the populated areas have fallen. I had a friend in the guard that heard reports coming in over military communications. The coastal cities fell first, but it moved inland fast enough. Anywhere there was people. The higher the concentration of people, the harder the area was hit. The infection spread far and wide. It was everywhere before we knew what it was. We never had a chance to lock things down with a real quarantine." He rested his head in his hands and rubbed his temples. "We never had a chance."

"Nowhere safe." Max whispered. It wasn't a question this time.

"I was trying to make my way south to the coast. The last I heard, the CDC still had a research lab set up on a nuclear air craft carrier stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. The Sargent driving our evacuation truck wanted to try for the McConnel Air Force Base near Wichita, but that's almost certainly overrun by now. I couldn't get him to listen to reason, so I slipped away, found a working car, and got this far before running out of gas. Probably a good thing. My idea wasn't any better really. The coast will be swarming with infected."

### April 28 - The Factory, Oklahoma

The revelation about the FEMA center really took the wind out of Max's sails. He ended the meeting with Thomas and just wandered off alone into the factory for a while. When he came back, he barely spoke, answering questions with one or two word replies. Sarah finally got a bit more out of him when she pressed him about what we should do next.

"How the hell should I know?" he yelled. "Why are you even asking me? It's not like I'm really any kind of leader. I don't have some god damn map to the promised land."

"You've done alright so far." Sarah replied quietly.

"Alright? I've lead us out into the middle of nowhere to starve to death instead of being eaten alive. Some leadership. You want a leader, hold a damn election. I'm sure you can find someone better at it than me."

Sarah had no immediate reply, but Jack reacted. He started calling the rest of the group into the atrium. He even sent a few people running to collect those few still poking around the farther reaches of the factory. Once most of the group was there, he jumped up on a bench and called a group meeting to order.

"Max has called for an election, and I think that's a really good idea. I'll start out by nominating Max to continue leading our little band of merry men and women. Does anyone second?"

Max seemed about to object, but Sarah jumped in with, "I second that!" and it was quickly followed by several people offering "thirds" and "fourths".

"OK, lets proceed to a vote." Jack continued.

"I just said I didn't want this job." Max finally interjected. "Besides, you can't have an election with just me on the ballot... I nominate... uh, you Jack" This was quickly seconded by several people. Then someone nominated Sarah, and we had a three way race.

Jack began to call for a show of hands for each candidate, but then someone suggested we should have a secret ballot. I donated a few blank pages from my journal notebook to be torn up into ballots and someone offered up a small empty duffel bag to be used as the ballot box. Pens and pencils were passed around as we all voted and dropped the folded scraps of paper into the bag. When it was all done and the votes counted, both Sarah and Jack had a respectable number of votes, but Max had taken it in a landslide. He didn't seem terribly happy with the result, but he at least seemed resigned to it.

"You are all crazy, you realize that, don't you?" Max let out an exasperated sigh, "You really want to be led by an old, overweight, air conditioner repairman?" But then he seemed to get back a bit of his old energy. "Alright then, since I don't have any bright ideas about what we do next, my first action as your officially elected grand potentate is to ask you all for opinions. The FEMA center is a bust. Our newcomer Thomas says it's gone, and he doesn't know of any other good options. Our food and ammunition is low. I want everyone to give our situation some thought then write down what you think we should do, what our priorities need to be. When you are done, give it to Sarah. We'll go over them all tomorrow and take it from there." He turned to me and nodded at my notebook. "Can you spare... no, I see you scribbling in that thing all the time. I'm sure there has to be more paper around here somewhere. Someone find where the office supplies are stashed in this place."

"Grand Potentate." Jack chuckled. "Is that your official title then?"

"I think Mayor would fit the situation." Sarah chimed in. "Mayor Max Reynolds. Sort of has a nice ring to it."

"Anyone calling me Mayor is going to find themselves run out of here on a rail. It's just Max. Now go find something useful to do."

And with that the meeting broke up. A few of us lingered with Max as he leaned back on the atrium park bench and stared up at the dimming sky through that massive skylight.

"Smart move, that whole asking people to write down their ideas." Sarah said. "It will keep them occupied, more hopeful. I think morale was headed for a pretty steep dive without that."

"I suppose so." answered Max, "But that's not why I did it. I really am out of ideas." He straightened up in the bench and looked at each of us in turn. "I mean, what do we do now? With the FEMA center I at least had a target to aim at. A goal that defined what each next step needed to be. Now what? You've seen what's out there. You've heard what Thomas had to say. What the hell is left out there that can offer us any hope?"

Jack seemed to think about this for a bit, then finally replied, "We have us. Everyone in our group. And all the other groups like us holed up out there somewhere. We have our basic human ingenuity. Our courage and drive and plain old stubbornness that allows people to overcome the impossible over and over again. We have us... and that's just going to have to be enough."

### April 30 - The Factory, Oklahoma

It's been a couple days since the election and things have been rather peaceful, all things considered. We buried the last of the quarantined sick and welcomed the two survivors back into the general population. Kalee discovered a bit more food in the cafeteria kitchen and immediately set about stretching it into another thin meal. Jack and I spent some time poking around in the factory floor, seeing if there was anything useful. It is a pretty cutting edge automated assembly line, with robotic arc welders and riveters and no end of other toys, but I couldn't get much of a good look at any of it with the electricity out. A bit of light leaked in from a few windows, and I had a tiny LED flashlight, but most of the machinery was lost in shadow until you got right up to it.

I should have enjoyed poking around all that gadgetry, but if anything it made me a little sad. It made me miss MIT even more, the life I was working toward and would probably never see now. Who needs an electrical engineer in a world without electricity?

After our expedition to the factory floor, Jack and I went back to the offices and spent some time playing chess. We couldn't find an actual chess set, so we drew out a chess board on the back of a motivational poster and scared up a random assortment of bolts, nuts, and washers to designate as different pieces. Jack wrapped black electrical tape around his pieces and let me start. We speculated about the future as we played.

"Do you think things will ever return to normal?" I asked while I slid a washer/pawn forward.

"Not for a long time." Jack answered, "According to Thomas, the epidemic was really bad. It's a pretty good bet that most of the world's population is walking around dead now." He jumped a wingnut/knite out of his back row. "Even if all the undead were gone tomorrow, the remaining live people would still be left with a very different world."

"So all that stuff you said about human ingenuity and hope..."

"I meant it. I just don't think we can expect any return to normal. We'll need to find a new normal. Adapt."

I moved another pawn. "But if the world governments and military and all that couldn't stop the collapse, what real hope do we have?"

Jack thought for a bit before answering. "We need to play a different game." He picked up a washer and squinted at it. "This pawn. In a chess game you might sacrifice it to gain a better position on the board, more control over certain squares. That works fine when your opponent has similar pieces and is playing by the same rules. But what about when your opponent vastly outnumbers you, doesn't care about the rules, doesn't even know they exist? Then every pawn becomes precious. I expect the governments fought the undead like a normal military opponent. They sacrificed foot soldiers to protect territory, not realizing the soldiers were more precious than any damn patch of land." He put the pawn down so it was attacking one of my knights. "We need to be smarter than that."

I moved my knight to a safer location. I didn't answer right away. His words had me thinking. We kept playing and chatting, but the whole time my mind was racing off in another direction, thinking about that other sort of game he thought we should be playing.

### May 2 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Today Max called a meeting of what one might call his 'senior staff'. That mostly consists of Sarah, and Jack, but I was there because I've basically become Jack's assistant. Kalee sat in to give a report on the status of our food supplies, and Miguel talked about our medical supplies and the general health of our group. Thomas was asked to fill us in on everything he knows about the epidemic and the undead. We started out with Sarah showing the large stack of written comments she had collected from the everyone. Some people had written only a few lines, but others had been quite verbose. It resulted in a stack of several hundred pages. It would take hours to get through it all. Jack looked at the massive stack, then gave half of it to me and the other half to Kalee.

"Read through it. Summarize. Write me a report for our next meeting. Let me know what the biggest concerns are. Highlight any good ideas people had."

I want to feel good about his confidence in our abilities, but I suspect he just feels everyone else has more important things to do.

Jack gave a quick report on the condition of the building and the various resources in it. The building is sturdy brick and could make a good refuge against an undead attack, though the ground floor windows in the office area are a potential weak point. He is working on a plan to reinforce the windows, though in the short term he recommends we move critical supplies to the second and third floors and come up with a way to barricade the stairwells if we need to. Sarah reported on morale and discipline issues and our dwindling supply of ammo. Miguel joined in with additional commentary on the health issues, the most pressing being that one of our group has diabetes and a very limited supply of insulin. Kalee talked about the food supply, of which there was very little. We have at most a couple more days of food. I had nothing to report on, so I kept the minutes, making the whole thing seem a little more like an official government-like function and less like a bunch of desperate survivors squatting in a deserted factory.

Finally we came to Thomas's report. Really it was more of a question and answer session, with Max and Miguel asking the most questions. Miguel's questions were more clinical in nature, while Max leaned toward questions about the impact of the epidemic and the behavior of the undead. Thomas had a tendency to lapse into long winded medical and scientific jargon when answering Miguel's questions, so I am not even going to try and accurately reproduce all his dialog here, but I'll do my best in giving the gist of what he told us about zombie physiology.

The first thing he tried to make clear was that the walking dead have not really been brought back to life. Rather, the body is taken over by a viral parasite, something that takes over the cellular machinery, eventually replacing it with a brand new system that just happens to use the old body as scaffolding to build a new biology.

"Think of it like a corral reef where the original creatures have all died, leaving only the hardened, calcified shells that are later inhabited by entirely new animals. Thats what this thing does to our bodies. While we are alive and infected, it uses our own blood stream and metabolism to spread through our cells, but then it kills us, devouring our cells from the inside but leaving most of the cell walls intact. It changes the chemistry of the body, practically embalming it."

He went on to describe how the cellular metabolism was radically changed. I didn't follow most of it, but in short, zombies don't need to eat, they get their energy from some unknown mechanism, gradually breaking down the body's tissues perhaps, absorbing something from the air... Thomas didn't know exactly. What was clear, though, is that a zombie is very decentralized and thus hard to kill, more like a colony of creatures, like an ant hill or bee hive, rather than a single individual.

"So if they don't need to eat, why do they?" Sarah asked, "As far as I can tell, it seems to be all they do, the only thing that motivates them."

"Yes, interesting, isn't it." Thomas seemed entirely too excited talking about this gruesome topic. "The most likely explanation is that it is evolved behavior that facilitates the propagation of the pathogen. Basically, it's how the 'zombie' virus reproduces. Indeed, all the behavior of the necrotized infected lends itself to that end. An infected has an uncontrollable desire to feed, causing them to pursue and bite any person they come in contact with, yet they are also clumsy and slow, increasing the likelihood that a victim will escape once bitten, thus surviving to spread the infection."

Miguel asked some questions about zombie behavior and neural physiology, and Thomas happily went off into a jargon filled explanation about how the virus took advantage of the existing neural patterns of the brain to recreate various primal instinctive behavior. He likened it to parasites in the insect world that could alter the behavior of the host to propagate the parasite, like infected ants that would climb up blades of grass to be eaten by wasps that would then in turn be infected. All interesting stuff if rather revolting.

"Back up a minute," Jack interrupted, "You said the feeding instinct was evolved to spread the infection, but we've seen people become infected without being bitten. Most people died from that nasty respiratory thing. They still turned even without being bitten."

Thomas pursed his lips. His expression darkened. "Yes, that is the really... interesting part of all this. On its own, the necrotizing pathogen could never have developed into such a massive epidemic. The infected are too easily identified and quarantined. It seems there was another virus. Something attached to the original virus, making it airborne, able to remain stable for a while outside of the body. On its own it would be just a flu-like respiratory bug, a very virulent and deadly one, but nothing too unusual. But this virus had just the right chemical structure to bond to the necrotizing virus. It spread both. Once a victim dies, the respiratory virus dies with them, leaving only the necrotizing virus to take possesion of the corpse. That is fortunate actually. It means the 'deadly cough' as you call it is likely to die out for good. There just aren't enough living people to spread it anymore.

"It was the perfect storm really. A respiratory bug with a long infectious period before turning deadly. A mobile, global society that could spread it far and wide. A passenger virus that turned all the dead into a hazard for the survivors, confounding any effort to contain things. Perfect." A tiredness entered his eyes.

"What aren't you telling us?" Max whispered.

Thomas was silent for while. He stared into his coffee, now long cold. "It was too perfect. That air-born virus, it was too perfectly suited to carrying its necrotizing passenger. Too unlike any other naturally occurring virus. We had no proof, but a lot of the researchers thought it must have been engineered."

"This whole damn plague... zombies... engineered?" Max seemed stunned.

"Not the zombie part," Thomas insisted, "I suspect that has been around a long time, thousands, maybe millions of years. It's just that air-born flu-like bug that seemed too... perfect... to be true. I think this whole thing might have been the result of someone trying to engineer a naturally occurring 'zombie' virus into a bio-weapon."

Everyone was silent for a bit while we contemplated that. Finally, Jack broke the silence, "We fucking did it to ourselves."

"Probably," Thomas admitted, "but there's no way to know for certain anymore. I'm just working from rumors. A researcher from another lab claimed he was given a frozen sample of necrotizing pathogen that was _decades_ old. So that at least supports the idea that that the zombie bug has been around a long time, and our government, probably others, knew about it."

"But this flu-like thing, you say that should die out?" Max asked.

"Yes, almost certainly." Thomas answered, "It will have killed off its own propagation vector. Survivors like us are isolated, no longer passing it around. We only have to worry about the dead now."

From there we moved on to more practical topics, like zombie behavior and vulnerabilities. Thomas had less to tell us in that area, but it was still a wealth of information. Like the fact that zombies always keep moving, even if it is just to stand around twitching. A corpse that is completely motionless is likely really dead and harmless. He began to go off on a tangent about the 'self sustaining ecosystem of the necrotized cellular colony' and how the twitching was part of how the undead metabolism kept itself functioning, but Max steered him back to a more immediately useful track.

"You may have noticed the undead are not very intelligent." Thomas expounded. "We estimate their cognitive abilities at even less than a newborn infant. They have no ability to learn or reason, operating completely on instinct. They will always head directly toward potential victims, regardless of danger to themselves. Indeed, it is likely they have no concept of 'self' and no survival instinct. They are the desire to feed made physical, and not much else.

"They seem to utilize the full range of human senses, though hearing seems especially emphasized in locating prey, and touch is less important. They have no perceptible pain response. They are as strong as a living human, though slower and less coordinated. They don't really communicate or coordinate their actions with other infected, but they do have evolved responses that can make it seem that way. They will moan or howl when they spot prey, and that can attract other infected in the area. That can result in a swarming behavior that might look like a coordinated attack but really is not. Oh, and they seem to never get tired. Never."

As official minute keeper, I was scribbling madly to get this all down. When Thomas finally stopped, and there was no more immediate questions, it was a welcome relief for my cramped hand. Max called an end to the meeting but asked Sarah to stick around to talk for a while. Miguel and Jack headed off in different directions, and Kalee and I carried our stacks of comment documents off to a quiet corner to begin reading.

### May 3 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Slogging through all those scribbled comments, the worries and ideas of all my fellow survivors, it would have been boring if I hadn't been sharing it with Kalee. We found a quite office on the west side of the building to take advantage of the evening sun, pulled a pair of chairs up to the same desk, and piled in. Mostly we read in silence, but every so often one of us would stop to read something interesting to the other. We tallied up reoccurring themes, and made notes on ideas that stood out. The hierarchy of concerns went something like this:

  1. Find more food

  2. Contact family/friends

  3. Find someplace safe

  4. Contact the government/military

  5. Locate more guns/ammunition/fuel

There was also many suggestions about what we should do, including impractical ideas about cities we should head to, and descriptions of how we might turn our current refuge into a fortress. I flagged a couple of comments that recommended we find a ham radio or try to connect with communication satellites to contact other survivors and gather more information. Those actually struck me as the kind of constructive suggestions that Max was looking for. Several people made intriguing suggestions about nearby locations that might be scavenged for supplies. I was particularly impressed with Milo's comments. He didn't offer up any specific destinations, but he gave a detailed description of how he would organize scavenge teams and the type of tactics they would use. It reflected hard won knowledge of zombie behavior that mirrored what Thomas had described.

We finished going through our stacks of pages and then put our heads together combining our individual notes. I looked longingly at the dead PC we had removed from the desk, and imagined what sort of spreadsheet I might have whipped up to better organize our notes. I laboriously copied everything into one neat document, looked it over, then added one more item to the list of concerns.

  6. Locate a sustainable source of electrical power

Currently we are running the generator for less than an hour per day, and then mostly to drive the water pump for the factory's well. We also charge a few flashlights, power tools, and the hand-held CB at the same time. I've thought about rummaging up a laptop from one of the offices and adding that to the list, but I really can't justify it. We have limited gasoline, and we need to it for the cars so we can search for supplies.

Kalee gave the document a final read through and nodded her approval. "You have better penmanship than me." She declared, "I thought guys are supposed to have worse handwriting." She rested her head on her arm and looked over the paper at me. "It's not like any school paper I've ever written. How To Survive a Zombie Apocalypse... please provide complete bibliography and cite all your sources. Weird."

I leaned back in my desk chair. The setting sun left half her face in shadow but gave the other half a red-orange glow. I wished for a moment that my phone wasn't dead so I could snap a picture. "I would probably be in the robotics lab right now, back in Boston, if things hadn't gone to hell." She gave a half smile, like she could picture it and found it amusing somehow. "What would you be doing right now," I asked, "if it wasn't the apocalypse?"

"Oh I would be back at the university in Kansas City, probably all wired on coffee with my head buried in an organic chemistry textbook." She laughed. "Your robotics lab sounds more fun. I was picturing you in a mad scientists lab coat tinkering on some huge stompy monster robot all covered in claws and rocket launchers."

I laughed at that. "It's not all tinkering. I'm a freshman, so most of the classes are all theory, so I spend a lot of time buried in textbooks too." I would be embarrassed to admit that I still had those textbooks with me. I should have been like Milo and brought guns and food.

"Oh I don't mind the studying," she said, "It's the exams that I hate. You spend weeks or months learning all sorts of fascinating stuff, then you are expected to regurgitate some arbitrary slice of it on demand under some artificial time constraint. I just hate the stress of it. I mean, I was studying to be an environmental engineer, and I absolutely loved it. I think I was born to be one, was studying for it on my own before I even knew what one was. That's done now I guess. No worries about peak oil or climate change or anything. No more pollution or development encroaching onto wetlands. Just a big green world overrun with walking dead people."

"When you say it that way, it almost sounds nice." I tried to make a joke of it, hoping to lighten the mood.

"I suppose. Maybe. Maybe it's selfish of me, wanting the old world back just so I can make a career of coming to its rescue." She looked bemused. "I'm just tired. Don't listen to me. I'm going to turn in; need to get up early for my new life as cafeteria worker. Get this to Max, will you?" She handed me our report as she got up to leave.

"Goodnight." was all I could think to say as she walked away.

### May 4 - The Factory, Oklahoma

I didn't find Max before going to bed last night, so I gave him the report this morning. He was busy talking to Sarah at the time, so he set it aside and promised to read it later. I then tracked down Jack to see if he needed any help with anything. He was in a machine shop attached to the factory area leaning over what looked like a large car alternator. A worktable had been dragged across the floor to take advantage of the light coming in through the room's small, high windows. From the dust on the floor, he had moved the table several times to follow the moving sunbeam.

"Anything I can help with?" I asked.

"Maybe," Jack replied, "I've got this old truck alternator I found in the machine shed back at the farm. I was thinking about how we might rig it up to generate power. It's a 12 volt system, and we have car adapters that can charge the flashlights and radio. I might even figure some way to charge the cordless drill, though that might draw too much. I'm thinking, wind turbine, but I need to gear things up to the right RPMs to make that work."

Jack had an assortment of gears strewn across the table. They were parts normally used in fork lifts, but he was attempting to adapt them to his purpose.

"I think I can make some of these work," he said, "but I would have to drill out the center hole in one of these to fit the alternator's shaft and then do some welding. That means running the generator for a while to power the arc welder and some other tools. I'm trying to figure a way to minimize that."

I looked at the parts. "They don't have an acetylene torch here?" I asked.

"They do actually," he answered, "but no bottles of acetylene that I've found. I've looked all over the factory and the shops."

If they have the welder, they should have the fuel, so it must be somewhere we hadn't looked yet. "I heard someone say the office basement is full of stuff. They've only swept it to make sure it was zombie free, I don't think anyone inventoried it. Maybe we'll find something there."

Jack smiled, scooped an LED flashlight from the table, and handed it to me. "I have complete confidence in you. I saw some sheet aluminum in the factory that we can make turbine blades out of. I'll be out there if I'm not here when you get back."

I wondered back to the offices and took the stairs down to the basement. With no windows and no electricity, it was a tomb. It was absolute and complete blackness. I turned on the feeble little flashlight. It sliced temporary cones of reality into an otherwise impenetrable void.

Did I mention it was dark?

I walked among metal shelves stacked with office supplies, old computer parts, and boxes of financial records. I could vaguely hear the sounds of activity above me, my fellow survivors dragging things about as they arranged the offices into a more comfortable refuge.

The basement was huge. The entire factory must be nearly a million square feet, though most of that was the factory floor and warehouse. The office area was probably less than a couple hundred thousand square feed counting the basement, but that meant the basement must be nearly 50,000 square feet all on its own, with row after row of shelves to examine. I began to worry that my flashlight would not last long enough.

I worked my way down one row and up another, trying not to spend too much time looking at every little thing that caught my interest. Acetylene bottles, thats what I needed to focus on.

Most of the basement was open space interrupted only by support columns and shelves, but one corner of it was walled off to create an equipment room of some kind. Pipes and conduits snaked around the basement ceiling and converged on this room. It was built of cinder blocks. A sturdy metal fire door emblazoned with warning labels led into it. It was probably a furnace room, but it might also be some sort hazardous materials storage. I was curious, so I decided to check it out before swinging back down the next row of shelves.

I pulled the heavy door open and shined the flashlight in. The center of the room was filled with a large metal shape, a hot water boiler if I had to guess. The walls held some electrical breaker panels and few shelves holding various sized cardboard boxes. I stepped in to get a closer look. An unpleasant odor drifted toward me.

Then I heard it. Movement. A breathy hissing sound. I spun around, and my flashlight caught a human shape as it stumbled out from behind the boiler.

It was dressed in a security guard's uniform, still wearing the hat even. One sleeve of its shirt was torn up as was the flesh of its arm. Its throat was also chewed up, so much so that it evidently could only manage a raspy hiss. The skin looked nearly white in the pale LED light. The eyes shown back like yellow embers. It lurched toward me, arms reaching out. I ran out the door and tried to slam it shut behind me, but the creature slammed against the door and pushed through before I could manage it. I ran down a line of shelves, screaming. I could hear it pursuing. I rounded a corner and ran to where the stairwell should be. There was only a brick wall. I had gotten turned around somehow. The monster was closing on me again. I ran down another row of shelves, frantically trying to find the stairwell. I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, swinging the flashlight around madly to make sure the creature wasn't near.

Suddenly an arm reached through the nearby shelves and grabbed me. I yelled and pulled away. It had me by the wrist and wouldn't let go. I pulled, and the shelf it was reaching through threatened to topple over on top of me. I twisted my arm around and got loose, and continued running. A wall. If I followed it, I must eventually find a stairwell. There are two stairwells, and they are both near outside walls. I ran, my fingers brushing the cinder blocks. I waved the light in front of me, looking for the stairwell door. I came to the corner.

It was a dead-end. Shelves ran parallel to the wall all they way to the adjacent wall. I turned to double back just in time to see the monster round a corner and enter my blind alley. I turned to the shelf and threw myself against it. If I could knock it over, I could make an escape route. But it was loaded with heavy machine parts of some sort and wouldn't budge. I would have to climb it. No time, the thing was almost on me. I grabbed the first heavy object my hands landed on and swung it at the creature's head. There was a sickening crunch as it fell backwards. I started to climb the shelves, but the zombie grabbed my leg and dragged me down. I lost my balance. My head hit the concrete wall. The flashlight went spinning away. A bit of light leaked out from under the shelf where it had had stopped. I sprawled on the floor in the corner of two concrete walls while a dimly lit shape pulled itself up from the floor. It loomed over me. I could sense it more than see it. I could feel the wind of its raspy hiss. My hands found my makeshift club on the floor next to me. I tried to lift it. Tried to defend myself. I was exhausted. My head was ringing.

Then I could _see_ it. A dark silhouette. An ink sketch of an undead. Concrete walls and shelves stretching away behind it. It reached for me...

Its head exploded.

My ears rung. I was covered in a sticky mess. The air smelled of it. It also smelled of gunpowder. I saw lights. Several figures with flashlights. Milo walked up holding a shotgun.

"You OK Isaac?" He played his flashlight over me. I wasn't sure. Was I OK? I looked down, and finally saw what I had used for a club.

It was a pressurized tank of acetylene.

### May 4 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Milo and a young woman named Tilly helped me out of the basement to a shower in the locker rooms just off the factory floor. There was no hot water, but I must have been in shock, because I didn't seem to care. I soaped up and rinsed off repeatedly, probably using up most of the water that had been pumped into the rooftop tank this morning. I also didn't think about Tilly being one of the people holding a flashlight while I showered. Maybe I'll feel embarrassed later. My clothes, covered in zombie brains and blood, were disposed of. I didn't ask what was done with them. Milo brought me a change of clothes, slightly too big for me, but at least clean.

After getting cleaned up, I returned to the office area where Miguel ushered me into a conference room. He had me strip off most of my new clothes and hop up on the conference table where he looked over every inch of my body, checking for bites or scratches. He paid special attention to the growing bruise on my head, a result of slamming it into the wall when I fell from the shelf.

"Your lucky you didn't break the skin there," he declared, "otherwise that shotgun blast might have sprayed zombie goo all over an open wound."

"I'll live?" I asked, still in too much shock to really think through the possible consequences of the attack.

"Probably, but come see me right away if you start feeling sick."

I remembered the woman from the bus quarantine. Her pale body twitching. Her glassy eyes staring at me. I remembered Miguel pulling an ax from her head.

"I will." I whispered.

"Don't worry too much. It really does have to get through a break in the skin. It was a good thing you were on the ground actually, otherwise that blast might have driven a bone chip right into you."

I shuddered, and just nodded my head. He was just telling me to get dressed when Kalee barged into the room. She froze as soon as she saw me sitting there in my boxer shorts, turned bright red, then stammered, "Oh god, I'm sorry... I was told... Jack said you were in here but he didn't..."

"Don't worry about it," I reassured her as I jumped down and started getting dressed, "I'll be here all week, with a matinée performance on Saturday." I tried to wink at her, but I think it came off looking like a grimace. God my head hurt.

"You OK?" she asked, then turned to Miguel, "He's OK?"

"Yeah, except for that lump the size of Idaho growing on his head, he is fine. We'll need to watch him for signs of concussion, but I think the risk is low. We need to make sure he doesn't sleep tonight. You can help with that?"

She nodded, then turned to me to say something. She stopped, her mouth half open, the skin around her eyes wrinkled, then she turned and ran out of the room.

"What was that about?" I asked Miguel.

He just shook his head and answered, "If you are looking for someone to explain women to you, you are asking the wrong guy."

### May 5 - The Factory, Oklahoma

It must be something like 2 in the morning now. I played hours of chess with Jack and lost every game. I think that lump on my head is from my brains trying to burrow out of my skull. It sure feels like that anyway. Kalee is here now. She hasn't been very talkative though. I think maybe she's mad at me about something, but I haven't found the courage to ask what. I've been trying to write in this damn journal just to keep myself occupied, but I keep finding myself just staring at the page for long stretches. I've resorted to doodling. Seems a silly waste of my journal paper, but there must be more notebooks among the office supplies.

### May 5 - The Factory, Oklahoma

I was sitting here staring at my notebook when Kalee reached over and shook me, only Kalee seems to have turned into Milo. I don't remember him taking her place. God I'm tired. I can see the sun coming up. Milo says Miguel will check me out again in a few hours, and then it's OK for me to sleep if I want to. Want to? I don't think I have a choice at this point. Since I'm not allowed to sleep yet, I think I'll walk around for a while.

### May 7 - The Factory, Oklahoma

I woke up to balloons. Well not balloons exactly, they looked more like white kitchen-sized garbage bags, but they had smiley faces and 'get well soon' messages scrawled on them with colorful markers, and they were floating like they were filled with helium. They were tethered to a spiky looking plant poking out of an old coffee tin. Its long leaves were mostly green but faded to deep red toward the center of the plant. I got up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and staggered into the hallway outside the office I had crashed in. I ran into Kalee almost immediately.

"Oh good, you're up," she exclaimed. "If you had slept any longer, I was ready to ask Miguel if we should wake you."

"Balloons?" I inquired.

"Oh that was Jack's idea. He found a tank of helium in the basement when they were... cleaning up. Oh, and he says thanks for finding the acetone or whatever it was you were looking for." I wasn't entirely awake yet, so I didn't know how to respond. She continued. "The plant was from me. It's a bromeliad. I rescued it from the atrium. Close as I could come to flowers. It's easy to take care of, just be sure to water the leaves, not the soil."

"Thanks." was all I could manage. I felt a sudden an unexpected rush of emotion, but I honestly wasn't sure what I was feeling. Maybe the impact of what had happened was finally hitting me.

"Well, I had to find a new home for it anyway, so it was no trouble."

Kalee informed me I'd slept for nearly a full day. Yesterday Miguel checked my pupils, asked if I was feeling nauseous or disoriented, then finally sent me off to bed. I feel worlds better now, though I still have a bit of a headache and one heck of knot on my head. I haven't shown any signs of yellow eye, so I think I dodged a bullet in the zombification department. A bunch of stuff has happened while I snoozed away. Kalee gave me all the news over a lunch of vegetable beef soup. I hadn't eaten in a while, so it tasted fabulous even if it was pretty heavy with soybeans and barley and not much vegetables.

The scavenge teams had made their first run, checking out area farms and rural houses but steering clear of more populated areas. There had been some encounters with a few scattered undead, but nothing overwhelming. We used up ammo, but also found some while scavenging, along with additional food and a few other treasures. An additional CB was found in an abandoned truck as well as a couple of smaller walkie-talkies that work on a single CB channel. Jack fixed up an antenna on the roof of the office and a ran cable down to a third floor office where the truck CB now sits. Someone even used markers and a piece of copy paper to make a colorful 'Radio Room' sign for the door.

Our group has increased by six members; survivors that one of the scavenge teams found holed up in a boarded up house. We also briefly heard someone on the CB shortly after Jack got the antenna up, but they were lost to static after a few minutes. They claimed to be somewhere south of Medford, which is a few miles west of here on highway 11. Jack is already talking about building a better antenna and boosting the power somehow. Right now the CB is running off of an old car battery that we keep charged with the generator. Jack says he's made good progress on his wind turbine, and I can help him assemble and install it if I'm feeling up to it. Assuming it works as planned, that should give us enough power to use the CB a lot more without burning up all our gas in the generator. He's also really excited about building another windmill, not for power but to drive our well pump directly.

The most welcome finds, however, were definitely in the food department. They came across a feed-n-seed store just outside of Deer Creek. It offered up a bounty of seed corn and soybeans and even some sacks of barley and oats and the like. Barley/Soybean soup is now a prominent item on our improving cafeteria menu. Kaylee also thinks we can make corn bread as soon as she works out how to mill the corn. I expect Jack has some ideas that can help. Kalee estimates all that grain will last a few weeks at least, maybe a couple months if we find other supplies to stretch it with.

It was the beef that was the biggest hit though. Milo's team stumbled across a lone steer while driving back from their first scavenge run, just wandering in the road. They stopped to look at it, and one of the team, with visions of sizzling steaks in his head no doubt, shot it. Milo cussed him out, reminding him that the SUV was not exactly suited to hauling the huge thing, but they managed to squeeze it into the back none the less. On the way back they must have been riding so low the wheel wells were probably scraping the tires. Without any refrigeration, they had to set about butchering and cooking it right away. Kalee hit upon the idea of reusing the mason jars from the farm to can a bunch of it. I'm not sure what they used for a pressure cooker, but they evidently figured something out.

A lot had been accomplished while I was sleeping, and a lot more had been planned. I learned about some of it at the daily senior staff meeting. Kalee gave a detailed report about her plans to do container gardening on the roof as well as convert the atrium into a hydroponic farm. She talked a bit about aquaculture and composting and ended with a wish list of supplies that the scavenge teams could look out for. Jack gave updates on the efforts to reinforce the first floor windows and on his wind turbine. Sarah warned that the ammunition supplies were dwindling faster than the scavenge teams were replacing it. Scattered undead continued to wander up to the factory, and nearly every scavenge run involved a skirmish with a few zombies. Max asked if there was a way to make our own bullets, glancing at Jack as he said it.

"Casting the bullets themselves is possible", Jack answered, "but I don't know what we'd do for propellant. I don't think we have the raw materials for gun cotton even if I knew how to make it, and even basic black powder requires stuff we don't have. Maybe someone with a better chemistry background could come up with something." He looked at Kalee as he said it.

She shook her head. "Sorry, I've studied organic chem, but nothing relevant to this. What about you, Isaac? Study any chemistry at MIT?"

"No, I'm an electrical engineer. If you need someone to fix the radio, I'm your guy, but I'm clueless about guns or chemistry."

Max suggested we bring the issue up at the next full group meeting. Someone might have the chemistry background we needed or at least have ideas to offer. We then moved on to Miguel's report on health issues.

"Our general first aid supplies are not bad, but we have several people on prescription medications that are running out. I would also be happier if we had a bigger supply of antibiotics. The most urgent issue, though, is insulin. It turns out we have two people using it, Susan Anderson and Peter Decker. I think we can handle Susan's diabetes mostly by managing her diet carefully, but Peter's is tougher. He needs medication."

"So we need to find him more insulin?" Max asked.

"It would be great if we could," Miguel answered, "and in the short term we might even be able to do it, but insulin begins to lose potency after a month or so, especially when not refrigerated, and I'm guessing there's nobody making new insulin out there any more."

"So, what's the alternative?"

"There's some oral medications like glipizide that could help. That, combined with proper diet could be enough. Oh, and test strips. If we are going to manage with diet, it's going to take very careful monitoring of glucose levels, so we need plenty of test strips. Fortunately both those things are something any real pharmacy should have plenty of, and they'll stay good a long time."

"So we need to raid a pharmacy." Max mused, "You know what that means."

"Blackwell." Susan responded immediately, "It's the closest town large enough to have a pharmacy. Unfortunately, that means it's also large enough to be heavily infested."

"What about Medford?" Jack suggested, "It's not as big, but might have something."

"No," Miguel answered, "I dug up a local phone book, and I've found nothing listed in Medford. Blackwell has two pharmacies and the regional hospital, we definitely can find what we need there.

"Yeah, but it might as well be in Fort Knox for all the good it will do us." Jack retorted, "Blackwell had thousands of people living in it, and most of them are probably still walking around there, just not alive anymore."

"It will have to be a smash-and-grab operation," Sarah suggested. "My gunners are up for it. We pick the target closest to the edge of town. We go in hard and fast with a big enough team to get it done quickly."

Max furrowed his brow. "It's risky. And we'll probably burn through a lot of ammo."

"The alternative," argued Miguel, "is to watch some of your people die from lack of medication. It's a near certainty the first time someone gets a staph infection that needs antibiotics."

Max turned to Sarah. "You and Milo work up a plan. I'm not yet convinced we should do it, but I want to see what you come up with." He leaned back in his chair and sighed. "I just wish we had access to spy satellites or something. I want to see what condition Blackwell is in before we go in there.... find out where the dead are concentrated."

Gears started turning in my head. It was probably a crazy idea, so I kept silent. The meeting ground on for a bit longer, but I don't remember what was said. As soon as it broke up, I headed for one of the factory machine shops.

### May 10 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Today, I helped Jack assemble his wind turbine. We first bolted the tower together, then I climbed up the crisscross supports, hauled the alternator and the gear assembly up with a rope, and affixed it to the pivot on the top of the tower. Next came the six turbine blades. They look more like the blades one finds on a classic farm windmill than the graceful slender blades of a modern turbine, but it was the best Jack could do with the materials at hand. I hauled them up one at a time and attached them, did the same with the large fin that would keep it facing into the wind, then finally climbed down.

We both stared up at it. A gentle breeze blew. It remained motionless.

"Kind of anticlimactic," Jack commented.

"It's bigger than I expected," I observed. The blades must extend twelve feet from tip to tip. "Now that it's done, though, I've an idea for another project." I started to explain the crazy idea I had when Max was wishing for spy satellites. Jack got more interested the more I told him, and we were about to head to the shop so I could show him my drawings and the parts I'd set aside when the wind finally picked up. The blades of the turbine began to spin, and Jack suddenly looked like a kid on Christmas morning. He snatched up the multi-meter attached to the power leads and watched the needle swing. "Well, not as good as I hoped, but it's producing power." He took out a stopwatch, counted the number of rotations for a minute, and then jotted that down along with the output shown on the multi-meter. "OK, lets go look at this gadget of yours. We'll come back after and attach the battery."

As soon as we arrived at the shop, we dragged the worktable under a sunbeam, and I spread my drawings out.

"See, it's actually pretty straight forward," I assured him. The trickiest thing is the release mechanism, but I'm pretty sure I can coble something together from a walkie-talkie.

"But won't the camera get smashed on impact?"

"That's what this bit is for," I answered, holding up a rolled up cylinder of foam padding sticking partway out of a piece of round metal ducting. I demonstrated that my camera phone would fit neatly into the four inch diameter ring of ducting so it would be protected from direct impact. "When it releases from the balloon, a small parachute or drag strip will make it flip over during descent so the foam padding hits first." I demonstrated, holding the contraption with the camera inside the ducting facing down, then flipped it over so the padding was down and the camera up.

"And how will you trigger the pictures?"

"I'll just wire a simple timer circuit directly into the shutter switch. I've already found a real-time clock chip with an integrated oscillator and all the other parts I need. See, I've drawn out the circuit diagram here. With a laptop and the right software I could just write an Android app to do it, but that's not really an option in our case."

"I'll take your word for it," Jack answered, "I'm better with the mechanical end of things." He picked up one of my early concept drawings. "So let me see if I've got this straight. We release the balloon up-wind from Blackwell. It drifts over, snapping pictures the whole way, then when it's safely beyond the town, the team on the down-wind side hits the squawk button on the other walkie-talkie to trigger the release. The electronics all fall safely to earth to be recovered, and all we lose is a bunch of trash bags filled with helium."

"Exactly. The trick will be getting the altitude right. We need to be high enough to actually see a decent size area, but not so high we can't make out any detail. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera, which should be good enough to make out individual zombies from quite a distance. I've got a 32 gigabyte flash card in it, so it should store plenty of pictures."

Jack picked up the phone from where I had laid it down and examined its tiny camera lens. "This could actually work."

"It was your 'get well' balloons that gave me the idea. Do you think that tank you found has enough helium for a test flight or two?"

"I don't know," Jack answered. "We'll need to work out the volume of helium needed to lift the camera package first."

"We could fly it with hydrogen if we needed to, but then we risk the thing going Hindenburg on us."

Jack scooped up a couple of my concept drawings. "I'm going to show these to Max and Sarah. You keep working on the details." I began sketching out a circuit design for a release actuator that could be tripped by a walkie-talkie. If I run the speaker output through a frequency filter and a signal inverter, then used a watchdog chip to check for duration, it should work. Just hold the squawk button for long enough, and the actuator will trip. I'll breadboard it tomorrow and test it. I worked until the sun had crept away from my worktable and began climbing its way up the far wall, then I dug out a flashlight and worked a while longer.

Finally, I had to stop when the flashlight began to dim. Too many late nights writing in this journal has taken its toll on the batteries I think; they don't hold a charge like they used to. I headed to the offices to get some sleep but first made a detour to retrieve the battery for Jack's wind turbine. I installed it in the waning red glow of the slowly setting sun. The car battery, along with a 12 volt car outlet and a 110 volt AC adapter, is housed in an old plastic storage bin to keep it safe from the elements. I looked at the adapter for a moment, then pulled my nearly dead flashlight from my pocket, unfolded the AC outlet charging prongs from its side, and plugged it into the AC adapter, then plugged that into the 12 volt outlet. The flashlight glowed with renewed life when I switched it on. I lifted the entire contraption and balanced it carefully on the lid of the container, taking care not to pull the battery leads loose.

I nestled my back against the turbine tower, pulled out this journal, and began to write.

### May 12 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Today was mostly consumed with reinforcing the office ground floor. Yesterday, a dozen people went to disassemble and bring back sturdy timbers from a barn a few miles away. Today, we hauled those timbers off the old farm truck and set about sealing up all the vulnerable ground floor windows. Jack says he would have preferred to brick in the windows, but that would take time and materials we don't currently have. Instead, he reinforced the doors to the stairwells so they can be made impenetrable. The windows should hold up to any small groups of dead that stumble across us, but if worse comes to worse, we can easily abandon the first floor and survive. We've also made it so the offices can be sealed off from the machine shops, factory floor, and warehouse. Those all have smaller windows, higher in the air, and are less likely to be breached from the outside.

The atrium also has an open air staircase that leads to the second and third floors. It's concrete poured into a metal frame and sturdy as a rock. Jack thinks we can make it zombie proof by removing a bunch of steps, but it won't be easy. We're leaving that for another day. When Kalee learned about the potential for the ground floor to be abandoned, she began to rethink the design of her hydroponic farm. The original plan had some water tanks and support structures down on the first floor in the center of the old plant beds, but she moved the tanks to the second floor balconies and now the entire plant lattice is suspended across the third floor balconies. I took a slightly longer lunch break than Jack would have liked and spent some time sketching up plans with Kalee. She is totally in her element with this stuff and has happily turned cafeteria duty over to others.

"I can picture it," she said as we leaned on the railing of the third floor balcony, "this whole area overflowing with green. Tomatoes and peas vining right up to the top of the skylight." She looked happy.

"You've got seeds?" I asked.

"Better. That farm southwest of here, Milo mentioned it had a garden. Someone managed to get their early spring planting in before everything went to hell. It's a bit weed choked and neglected now, but I plan on heading out there with a scavenger team tomorrow to dig up what I can and transplant it here. I'll also poke around for seeds, fertilizer, gardening tools, gloves, and a big floppy hat. Just call me farmer James."

James. I had forgotten her last name was James. She was just Kalee. We seemed so disconnected from our past, from our high school days and life before the collapse, that I had nearly forgotten she had a family. Forgot that she had lost people like I had, like we all had. I looked over at her, at the lines forming around her eyes, her attention drifting away from the here and now and knew her thoughts were following a similar path.

"Do you think of them?" I asked, before I thought to stop myself.

"All the time," she whispered. She glanced over at me, then cast her eyes down at the atrium plants far below. "My dad used to call me that sometimes. Farmer James. I was always growing potted plants. Running little experiments to see what made them grow best. I even played around with hydroponics on my own. It drove Mom nuts, me filling up every spare container and every bit of window space with plants. Dad never complained though and made Mom put up with it." She laughed briefly. "He kept promising her it was a phase I would grow out of." She grew somber again. "I never did."

"I was never terribly close to my parents," I admitted with some hesitation. "Oh, I loved them, and we got along well enough, but we never really connected. My older brother Mike was more like what they expected from a son I think. They were so proud of him when he became a marine. Then he went to Iraq and didn't come back and..." I didn't know what I was trying to say. Didn't know why I was saying all of this. The words wouldn't stop. "I didn't know how to be the son they wanted. I couldn't figure out how to fill that..." My hands were shaking. My vision blurred. "I took care of them when they were sick. I brought them soup and changed the DVDs for them... and my Dad told me he was proud of me. I didn't know what he meant at first, thought he was talking about the soup, which didn't make any sense. Then he told me he was proud of me for getting into MIT. He had never said that before. I always thought he just resented how much it cost. He said he was proud and that he bragged to all his coworkers how he had a son at MIT. He said he was proud... and then he died."

I held my breath because I feared the sound that might escape me if I didn't. I held my breath, and shook, and realized that Kalee was holding me. I let my breath out in a hiss and finally spoke again. "I never told them how much I loved them," I whispered.

"You didn't need to." she answered quietly. "You never have to with something like that. You brought them soup, and changed the DVDs, and they knew." She squeezed me tighter and I realized she was crying too. "I wasn't there when my parents..." She drew a shuddering breath. "I was back at Kansas State, in the herbarium, pressing plant samples. I ran home as soon as I heard but never got any farther than the bus depot."

We stood there, holding each other. Then I heard a shout from down in the atrium.

"Isaac, Jack is looking for you!" Milo stood there, looking up with a curious expression. Kalee pulled away and looked down at Milo, then turned back to me. "I shouldn't keep you away. Jack depends on you." She turned to go.

"Kalee..." I began, but then realized I didn't know what I wanted to say.

She turned back to me, waited for a moment, then smiled softly and said, "We can talk after the evening staff meeting."

"Isaac." Milo called from below.

"Coming!" I yelled back, and headed for the stairs. I desperately wanted to wipe the tears from my face, but didn't want Milo to see it. I was relieved when I saw that he was already heading back outside.

I spent the afternoon helping Jack, then headed toward the cafeteria to grab a bit of dinner before the evening staff meeting. On the way I was stopped by Milo. I expected it would be about Kalee, but it wasn't.

"I've got something to show you," he insisted, and led me over to the loading bay where they had unloaded the truck he had taken scavenging earlier in the day. I stopped in my tracks when I saw what was stacked there. Six solar panels.

"Where did you find these?" I asked excitedly as I ran over to get a closer look.

"On I35. We headed over that way to look at... well we were scavenging that way, and I saw one of those big lighted construction signs. You know the kind, the ones with the flashing arrows. It had two panels on top of it, and I remembered that thing about sustainable electricity in that report you put out, so we ran over and grabbed it. We found two more signs like it a bit farther north up the Interstate."

I looked over the top panel in the stack and saw that the power cable had been cut, and the mounting brackets were similarly mangled. Rather than unscrew the panels from the brackets, it looked like they had simply severed the brackets with a bolt cutter.

"We had to do that," Milo insisted when he saw what I was looking at. "There's still freaks wandering around on the Interstate, so we couldn't stick around any one place too long."

"You didn't manage to rescue any batteries?" I asked, "or an inverter or charge controller... any of the electronics that went with these?"

Milo looked looked deflated. "No," he answered, "just what you see here. Everything else was locked up in a metal housing. You can still use these though, right?"

"I think so. I mean, yes. We'll find some way to make it work." I lifted the panel and looked at the back, trying to find their output rating. "From the size of these, I'm guessing these are at least 150 watt panels, maybe close to 200 watt. That means together these could put out close to a full kilowatt."

"And thats a lot?"

"A lot more than we have now, that's for sure." I started thinking about how we might put them to use.

Milo was silent for a moment, then spoke again. "So Isaac, I have to ask. You and Kalee... I mean..."

My ears felt hot. I wondered if I was blushing. "It's not... we were talking about family. She was upset. Well really, I was upset. I don't want you to think..." I didn't know what I wanted him to think. I know he likes her. God I suck at this people stuff.

"It's none of my business really. It's just, she stuck by me, at the university. And even in high school, my senior year..." He stopped. I wasn't sure what he was driving at.

"I've got to get ready for Max's staff meeting," I blurted, looking for an excuse to escape.

Milo stared at me for a moment before replying, "Yeah, I've got stuff to do too." We headed our separate directions.

I grabbed a few bites of cold soybean soup at the cafeteria, then ran to the machine shop to poke around in the supply cabinets before the meeting. I was hoping to find something that might help me with the solar panels. Nothing. Plenty of tools and small components, but none of the equipment I was hoping for. No deep cycle batteries. I lingered over some of the larger machines collecting dust near the cabinets. A rapid prototyper, capable of building complex 3d shapes out of plastic. An automated CNC machine that could mill and drill blocks of steel into any number of useful parts. This was top notch equipment, the kind one uses for cutting edge product development. All useless now without power. I thought about how many solar panels it would take to really bring this shop back to life. More than the six sitting back at the loading bay, that was a certainty.

The sun had crept its way across the shop floor and was beginning its ascent up the far wall. I would be late for the staff meeting if I lingered much longer. I headed back to the offices and got to the conference room just before it got started. It was all rather routine until Milo showed up about half-way through.

Sarah finished giving her summary of morale and security issues, then said, "I've asked Milo to sit in and tell us about something he saw today."

Milo stood and dove right in. "We were scavenging east today, out past I35, and I decided to take a peak at the outskirts of Blackwell. There's a ShopWell mega-store with an in store pharmacy on the west side of town, and I wanted to see how approachable it was. I got as close as I dared and then took a peak with the binoculars. It was surrounded. I mean, it looked like the whole damn town was out there. Thousands of undead freaks just swarming that building and clawing at the walls. And there were people, live people I think, walking on the roof. At least they walked like live people."

"Survivors," Max exclaimed.

"Had to be," Milo answered, "but there is no way any of them are getting out of that store, and no way we are getting in. If you thought the bus station was bad, it was nothing compared to this."

"Any guesses how many survivors we're talking about?" Max asked.

"No way to know. I saw at least three on the roof, but there could have been more farther back, and who knows how many inside. I tried to raise them on the CB. They either don't have one or don't have power for it."

"So what other options do we have?" Max asked.

"There's the hospital and the downtown pharmacy," Sarah answered.

Miguel shook his head. "I wouldn't try the hospital. It's probably packed with undead."

"Well, I don't exactly like the idea of going smack dab into the middle of town either. That's why the ShopWell originally seemed like our best bet. It's on the outskirts."

"Aren't we forgetting something?" Kalee interjected, a hint of anger in her voice. All eyes turned to her. "Survivors. Trapped, terrified, waiting for rescue. Remember what it was like for us, in the bus depot. Now imagine what those people are going through. They must have been stuck there for weeks now."

We all sat silently for a minute, then Max spoke up. "Kalee, we all understand how you feel. But I just don't see what we can do. We have to be realistic." He looked pained as he said it.

"Bullshit," she yelled, "We have to try. We have to at least think about it. If it were you, trapped there, would you want everyone to just give up on you like that?"

Nobody answered.

"We could at least fly that balloon thing of Isaac's," she continued, "find out what we're dealing with. Maybe there's something on the other side of the building that will help us. Maybe we'll find something elsewhere in town. We can't just give up."

Max turned to me and Jack. "How soon could you have it ready?"

Jack turned to me. I thought about it for a moment before answering, "We could be ready in a day. Two at most. I'll need some power to run a soldering iron and power drill, maybe a couple of other tools." I thought about the solar panels. It would probably take days to get them working. We couldn't afford the delay right now. "It means using the generator more than usual."

"OK, do it," Max said, "Make it your top priority, and let me know the soonest you are ready to fly it." He turned to Sarah. "I need you to pick teams and plan for the launch and retrieval of this thing."

And with that, Jack and I headed back to the shop.

### May 13 - The Factory, Oklahoma

"It won't work," I told Max and Sarah in a hastily called meeting early today, "I've been over the numbers a dozen times, and we just don't have enough helium."

"You're sure?" Max asked.

"Well, Jack is double checking the basement to make sure we don't have another helium tank, but yes, failing that we have little more than half what we need. We can lift the walk-talkie or the camera but not both. I trimmed weight everywhere I could, replaced the foam shock absorber with an air bag, but kept coming up short."

"And you absolutely have to include the walkie-talkie? You can't skip that somehow?"

"Without it, it just flies off with the camera." I though for a moment. "I suppose I could just wire up a timer, try and guesstimate so it drops after making it over the city, but the risk of losing the whole thing goes up if we can't control where it drops."

Max was still forming a reply when Sarah interjected, "Maybe we are thinking about this all wrong. What if we leave off the camera instead?" I didn't get what she meant, and from the look on Max's face neither did he. Sarah continued. "We need information, right? And it would be helpful if we could communicate with the survivors in that big box store. Can't we drop a walk-talkie right on the roof of that thing?"

"Yes, I see where you're going with that," Max said, "The people in that store could describe the situation, inside and out. They could have information about other parts of town. What about it, Isaac? Can you rig a walkie-talkie to be a release mechanism and still be usable as a walkie-talkie?"

"Yes, that's easy," I replied, "I'm just tapping into the speaker output, so pull those wires and it's back to normal. The tricky part is actually targeting the building. We'll need to get close enough that changes in wind direction don't mess things up too much, and we should release a few small trial balloons to check the wind direction at different altitudes."

Sarah nodded as she answered. "Well it makes things easier on my end. We don't need a recovery team any more, just a launch team."

"Actually, you should still have two teams," I replied. I started to explain, then realized it was easier to show them and stepped up to the conference room's marker board. "Here you have the store, and a team somewhere west of it releasing the balloon." I drew a box in the middle of the marker board and an X to the left. "That team can tell when the balloon's path is lined up with the store, but it will have a hard time telling if it is actually over the store instead of a little before or beyond it. You need another team here." I drew an X above the store. "They can report via radio when it's lined up over the store from their perspective. When both teams see it over the store, it's safe to release." I added dotted lines representing the lines of sight of both teams converging over the store. Where they crossed, I drew a small circle to represent the balloon.

"That will put the second team closer to town," Max mused. "The ShopWell store is on the West end of town, but there's still some buildings north of it on the other side of Highway 11."

"Well, the teams don't have to be at complete right angles, just as long as you have two different perspectives to triangulate." I drew another X farther west and drew another dotted line. "you could also do three teams, the launch team and two spotters. All of them could be west of town, but the spotters would be farther north and south. Of course we are assuming that the wind stays mostly out of the west, but that's a pretty safe bet."

We discussed the details for a while longer, but Max ultimately gave the go-ahead for mid day tomorrow. Sarah went in search of her gunners to fill them in, and I went back to the machine shop. With the simplified design, I finished rather quickly. I found an electronics breadboard in one of the equipment cabinets and got a prototype of the release circuit working with minimal tweaking. I then wire wrapped a permanent version, hooked up the release solenoid, and tested it with weight applied to the release clip. Standing on a work table, I tied a string to one of the overhead fluorescent lights. To that I tied a metal ring, clipped the release clip to it, and let the weight of the walkie-talkie and its cushion of foam padding dangle from it. I stood back and held down the squawk button on the other radio. A loud tone screeched out of the suspended hand set, and a second later it dropped to the table. Success! I repeated the test three more times just to be sure. Without having to worry about the camera mount or a timing circuit, I'd gotten the entire thing finished in only a couple of hours, and without even resorting to drilling or soldering anything.

With that done, I turned to another problem I'd been itching to get to. The solar panels. The closest I found to anything useful was a variable power supply that plugged into 110V AC but could generate varying levels of DC power. It was basically the opposite of what I needed, but it might have parts I could use if I tore it apart. I might also steal parts from a few computer power supplies.

Computers. The thought seemed to tickle something in the back of my mind. Then it hit me.

"My god I'm an idiot!" I shouted to the empty room, then headed quickly back toward the office area. I probably drew a few looks as I ran toward the server room. Once inside, I began wandering up and down the rows of rack mounted equipment. I heard someone else enter the server room. Kalee, Milo, and that young gal named Shelly were approaching. Good, they could help me look.

I turned to greet them, then saw my target in the rack-mount cabinet just opposite of the one I had been examining. I gave a shout of joy as I yanked the glass cabinet door open.

"What?" Kalee asked as she ran up, "What's going on?"

Milo's curiosity was also piqued. "Yeah, what's got you so riled up? You ran in here like the devil himself was on your tail."

"This!" I proclaimed happily, as I began to drag the footlocker sized piece of equipment out into the aisle. "It's a UPS, un-interruptible power supply, and it's exactly what we need to get those solar panels working."

"Solar panels?" Shelly asked. Milo wasted no time proudly describing the results of his scavenging prowess. She grew excited as she realized the implications. "You mean I might be able to use my iPod again? And my hair dryer?"

I wondered for a moment what sort of person brings their hair dryer with them during a zombie apocalypse. Probably the same kind that brings textbooks instead of food, I thought sheepishly.

"So you can actually use this to get them working?" Kalee asked.

"It's almost perfect. This thing is packed full of 12 volt deep cycle batteries, and it already includes the circuitry to convert it to 110 volt AC." I pointed at the standard wall outlets on one face of the unit.

"There's a second one here," Milo declared, and dragged it out of the cabinet with considerably less effort than I used on the first one.

"I'll have to coble together a voltage regulator circuit to go between the panels and the batteries, but I can probably strip parts out of some old computer power supplies to do that. A few capacitors, some resistors... it shouldn't be too tough. This will also work better on Jack's wind turbine than the car battery we are using now."

"Just think of all the stuff we can do with electricity again," Kalee said wistfully, "I could use electric pumps in the hydroponic garden!"

"Music," Shelley said with considerable emphasis. "The thing I miss the most is my music." That got us all talking about the music we listened to before the disaster, our favorite bands.

"There was this local band from Kansas City, Metastatic Mayhem." Shelly shared, "My friends and I would sneak away to their shows. My best friend Gina was a friend of the base guitarist, and he would sneak us in the back door to avoid the bouncers. They were amazing on stage. I wonder if they are all zombies now."

"Would we know the difference?" Milo snorted, "I mean, I saw them in concert once, and, well... all that screeching and yelling, not really my thing I guess." Shelly didn't seem to take it personally. She was lost in thought.

"All those musicians, and artists, and movie actors," She mused, "All probably dead or undead now. At least they did something that will live beyond themselves. They're kind of still alive in a way, in all those CDs and DVDs out there."

"I suppose," Kalee replied, "but only if someone actually listens to them I think. Maybe that's the biggest reason we need to rebuild what we've lost. So all that... beauty... can live on."

I felt humbled. I had been tackling the solar panels as an isolated problem, a puzzle that offered the joy of solving it as its primary reward. Kalee was thinking bigger than that. She was thinking past mere survival to the reclaiming of humanity's legacy, or maybe it's destiny. I don't know. I can't seem to find the words for it, everything that we've lost, the immensity of reclaiming it. But Kalee dares to dream that big. More than that, I don't think she ever imagined thinking smaller.

### May 14 - The Factory, Oklahoma

When I went to tell Max that the walkie-talkie was ready, he dropped a bombshell on me. He expected me to head the launch team. He mentioned it practically in passing, as if he expected I would want nothing different. I just nodded, and agreed to meet with Sarah to coordinate things. That is how, earlier today, I found myself sitting in the cab of a panel truck armed with nothing but a walkie-talkie and heading for a town swarming with undead. A guy named Jeff Watson was driving, and Jack and a couple of gunners were in the back, filling garbage bags with helium as we drove. We waited until departing to start filling them so as not to lose too much helium to any slow leaks before launching.

Milo rode with Sarah in a second vehicle. They were spotters. Our team would double as spotters after launching driving a bit north or south as needed to get a better perspective relative to the other team. We stopped well away from the ShopWell store to get a look with binoculars before proceeding. Jack climbed up on the flat top of the truck's cargo section and peered at the building.

"The swarm is still there. God that's a lot of them," Jack remarked, "The wind seems to be coming from the southwest. Radio Sarah and tell her to swing south a bit when they release the pilot balloons.

I relayed the message, and Milo and Sarah took off in the silver SUV. They drove down highway 11, drawing uncomfortably close to the store, then turned south and cut across a field that lay between us and the building. They slowed, then stopped, and a small black shape emerged from the car and drifted up. They moved on and stopped again. Another black balloon appeared. They repeated this four more time. I couldn't see it without binoculars, but I knew they were also planting flags at each release point.

"The people on the roof have seen them," Jack observed, "I can see them jumping and waving like nuts."

I squinted but couldn't make out the detail from here. I looked back to the SUV and saw them pick up speed and head southwest, a tail of dust kicking up behind them. After a bit they stopped, and I heard Sarah on my walkie-talkie.

"Where in position. The first two are way off the mark I think. Numbers three and four look close."

"Number four looks right on the mark from here," Jack yelled. I was now outside the truck, standing on the running board so Jack could hear the walkie-talkie. I asked Sarah about balloon four.

"It's just drifting up to the building now from my point of view."

"It's looks a bit left but still over the building to me," countered Jack.

"Now. Number four is over it now," yelled Sarah.

Jack yelled, "It's just on the edge from here. I say we launch just south of position four. Isaac, take the binoculars. I'm going to help with the launch when we get in position."

I grabbed the binoculars and climbed back in the cab. As soon as Jack was in the back with the gunners, we took off. Jeff drove until he encountered the tracks of the SUV and turned south. The panel truck bounced and over the rough ground making it difficult to look for the flags.

"There," shouted Jeff, "There's the first flag." He drove over it. I looked over at the ShopWell building. Damn we were close. The horde of undead surrounding it seethed like a stormy ocean.

"Second flag," yelled Jeff. I could see zombies pealing off from the main group and beginning to shamble toward us.

"Third flag," yelled Jeff. More zombies were headed toward us.

"Fourth flag. I'm stopping here."

"Just a little past," I reminded him. As soon as he stopped, I heard the back of the truck open. The gunners took position on either side while Jack guided the balloon out.

"Damn!" I heard him shout, "One of the bags is caught on something." A gun fired, then another.

"No time!" one of the gunners yelled, "Just yank it out." Two more gunshots.

"It's off," jack shouted, "Go go go." I heard the cargo door slam, and Jeff gunned the engine. Dirt flew from under the wheels as he pointed the truck west and floored it. I looked behind us and saw the balloon slowly gaining altitude. A zombie wandered up to it, absently reached at the dangling foam covered walkie-talkie, sending it spinning as it bounced off the creature's hands. The balloon drifted safely over the remaining zombies as it rose. One deflated garbage bag hung from the side of the balloon mass, but it continued to slowly rise.

When we were sufficiently far away, Jeff stopped, and I immediately climbed out and up unto the top of the cargo area. I focused the binoculars on the store and tried to raise Sarah on the walkie-talkie.

"Sarah, how's it look to you. It's still a bit south from here."

"It's still west, not over it yet," she answered. It drifted closer to the building.

"It looks like it's over it now to me," I informed her.

"It's not quit there yet," she insisted. It was now centered over the building from my perspective, and beginning to drift north. "Not quite yet," she said again. It was approaching the left edge from my view. I could see people on the roof staring and pointing at the balloon.

"Now! It's there now," she yelled. I clamped down on the squawk button just as it approached the north edge of the building. Nothing happened. Then a moment later I saw the package drop, drag strip trailing behind. "Did we do it?" Sarah asked, "Did we hit the building?"

"I don't know," I answered, "We either just barely got it or dropped it off the north side. I can't see from here." All we could do now was wait for a voice on the walkie-talkie. As I climbed down, I noticed several undead stumbling toward our location. With everyone back on board, we headed toward the SUV.

How long would it take for them to unpack the walkie-talkie from the foam padding? Read the note we had included with it? Remove the release circuit wires? We pulled up to the SUV.

"Anything on the radio yet?" Sarah asked.

"Nothing yet," I replied, "You want to try reach them with the hand-held CB? It has better range than this thing." She nodded, and gave it a try.

"This is Sarah Williams to the people in the ShopWell. Can you hear me?" We waited. Nothing but quiet static. "This is Sarah Williams. Is anyone receiving me." Still nothing.

"Maybe we missed it after all," Milo suggested. He might be right. Or maybe the walkie-talkie broke on impact. Or maybe my instructions were not clear enough. This thing had always been a long shot.

Suddenly, the CB crackled to life. "This is Mike... Mike (unintelligible). My god are we glad to hear from you. Who are you with? How soon can we expect rescue?"

Sarah thought for a moment before answering. "Well, we're not really _with_ anyone. We're just survivors like you. We'll do what we can for you, but I don't know what that is yet."

"You're not with the military? Or FEMA? Or... anyone?"

"No, I don't think any of them exist anymore." Sarah let that sink in. I could only imagine how their hopes must have crashed back to earth. "Before we can help, we need to know your situation. How many are you? What shape are you in?" There was a long pause before the reply.

"There's ninety two of us." I could hear an unintelligible female voice, then Mike said, "no, it's only eighty nine of us now. I forgot..." The channel was quiet for a while. "It's really all gone?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. Mike, we're going to get you out of there, but I need to know what we have to work with. How well supplied are you? How many guns? How much ammo? How much longer do you think you can hold out?"

A pause, then, "We have a couple of hand guns with a few shots left, but we've used up most of what we had trying to get more supplies from the store. We've been stuck on the roof for more than a week now. They got into the store, and we all had to climb up. For a while we were able to snag food and such from the top shelves, but we've gone through most of that. We've lost people trying to get stuff from lower shelves. We're low on water too. I don't think we'll make it more than another couple of days or so."

Sarah and Mike went back and forth for a while, Mike painting a bleak picture of desperate survivors at the edge of despair. They had very little information about the rest of Blackwell, having been stranded for about two weeks. The conversation was interrupted at one point by the approach of walking dead, but we drove farther south and continued the conversation. Milo and Jeff drove the SUV around the group of approaching dead, keeping them distracted as Sarah finished talking to Mike from the safety of the panel truck's cab.

"OK, stretch your supplies as best you can," Sarah advised Mike, "I need to get back to my people and discuss this. We'll come up with something and get back to you. Turn the radio off for now to conserve the battery, but turn it back on at sunrise tomorrow. We'll send someone out to get back in touch. I promise you, Mike, we are going to find a way to get you out of there."

We packed up and headed back to the factory. Sarah promised we would save them. God I hope we can, but I just can't see how it's possible.

### May 14 - The Factory, Oklahoma

The evening staff meeting was tense. Sarah had given a full report to Max as soon as we got back. He questioned the wisdom of promising a rescue given the odds we were up against, but Sarah wasn't backing down.

"You weren't there, Max, you didn't hear the desperation in his voice. I... I had to give them some hope." Sarah seemed drained.

"Well then, someone, give us some options," Max insisted, "What are we going to do? Just how do we rescue these people?"

Nobody answered immediately. Then Jack spoke up. "In an ideal world, we would just fly them out of there with a bunch of helicopters."

"Hell, as long as we are dreaming," Max replied, "why not wish for a platoon of marines with machine guns. We need to stick with what we have on hand."

"Well, we got out of the bus depot by just driving though them," Miguel offered, "Can't we do the same here. Just drive up, and let people climb down on to the roof of the bus?"

Sarah shook her head. "You didn't see the number of dead swarming around that building. There is no way we could get close enough. Worse, even if we got close, the bus would be surrounded; there is no way it would get back out."

"What we really need is a hook and ladder truck," Jack suggested, "Sling a ladder right across that mob and let people walk over it untouched. Load everyone into the bus and drive off before it gets swamped. What about that? Did the Blackwell fire department have one of those? Maybe with most of the town swarming the ShopWell we could zip downtown and grab it."

"I don't know if Blackwell was large enough for one of the really large ladder trucks," Max countered, "and I'm not sure we want to risk a run downtown to check it out."

"We still need to hit a pharmacy," Miguel reminded, "and with the ground floor of the ShopWell over-run, that leaves the downtown pharmacy."

The debate went on like that until late in the night. We formed the rough outlines of a plan, but Max decided he needs to consult with the survivors on the ShopWell roof before we can nail down all the details. Nevertheless, the arguments were still ongoing when I headed off to write in this journal before grabbing some sleep.

### May 15 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Max left early this morning to spend some time on the radio with the ShopWell survivors. I didn't go along, but I got the short, second hand version. Turns out Max was right about the fire department; there's no ladder truck that will fit the bill. There is, however, something up at the old zinc works that might serve even better. Jack is meeting with Max and Sarah and a few other people planning things out right now, and I'm going to join them in a bit. Max promised those poor souls in Blackwell that we would be back for them in two days. I get the feeling we are all going to be working flat out until then preparing for The Great Rooftop Rescue, as I've come to think of it.

### May 17 - The Factory, Oklahoma

The factory has been buzzing with activity these past couple days. I've spent most of the time helping Jack, using the arc welder or the acetylene torch to weld scrap metal over the windows and door of the bus. Even the windshield is now covered by a sturdy metal grating. That vehicle is about as zombie proof as we can make it. We've made similar modifications to other vehicles that will play a role in the rescue, but the bus is the one that most of the survivors will ride out on, and it has to sit there getting pounded on by zombies while people climb in, so we put extra effort into sealing it up. The only way in or out of that tin can now is through the hatch we cut in the top. I can't believe how much we've gotten done in less than 48 hours. Just about everyone has pitched in, and an impressive number of people have volunteered for the actual rescue operation. I'm exhausted, and I don't have much time to write because I need to grab a few hours of sleep before we launch this crazy mission. Jack wants me along to help man the CB. It's been moved from the radio room into the truck that we will use as a mobile base of operations, observing with binoculars and coordinating the actions of the various teams. I'm not sure how I feel about being volunteered for this venture, but I can't really back out, not after seeing how committed everyone else is. I'm amazed and more than a little proud of this strange community we've formed. Maybe pulling an all nighter over an acetylene torch has my thinking addled, but I feel we've built something really special here, and I don't mean an armor plated bus.

### May 18 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Jack woke me just before the rescue mission kicked off, and I need to be up a while before my brain starts firing on all eight neurons, so it all seemed a bit surreal as we pulled away from the factory. Max, Jack, and I were out front in the panel tuck (our command vehicle), followed by the two chase vehicles, the pharmacy scavenge team, the dump truck, the bus, and finally the construction crane. We drove the nearly eight miles to Blackwell, past I35, stopping on highway 11 no more than a half mile from the ShopWell. Max got on the CB and talked to the ShopWell survivors, confirming that they understood the plan and were ready to go. Then for some reason he decided to switch places with Sarah and drive one of the chase vehicles. Sarah joined us in the command truck, along with two gunners, and we drove to our position a bit south of highway 11 almost directly west of the store. At the same time, a scavenge team made up of four people riding in two cars, continued down highway 11, right into downtown Blackwell and toward the pharmacy on Main Street. As they passed the ShopWell, no doubt some of the undead pealed off from the horde around the building and started following them downtown. That was part of the plan actually. Any dead heading that way was that much fewer for us to deal with during the rescue. Hopefully the scavengers would be long done at the pharmacy and heading south out of town to take a round-about way home long before the walking dead reached them.

The remaining vehicles followed us into the fields west of the store, then turned west and lined up one after another. The heavy dump truck was first, followed by the bus, and finally that massive construction crane. From that position, they began backing slowly toward the store with a chase vehicle pacing them on either side.

The dump truck and the crane had been suggested by a woman named Gina from among the ShopWell survivors. Before the collapse, she was working on demolition and environmental remediation at the old zinc works north of town. When our idea of using a fire department ladder truck came up short one truck, she suggested the construction crane as the next best thing. Honestly, that crane was even better. It's massive, and so heavy I don't think an army of zombie elephants could budge it. The crane arm wasn't exactly well suited for climbing on, but we fixed that with a bit of creative carpentry. After the crane was in position at the outer edge of the undead horde, it extended the crane arm out over the horde and up to the roof. While traveling, the three sections of the arm are contracted, one inside another, so the wooden climbing surfaces couldn't be attached until after the crane was in place. I can't imagine what that was like, lugging those sections up, one at a time, and sliding them into place while a hellish ocean of corpses thrashed about below.

Sarah stood on the running board of the panel truck, clutching the CB handset. Jack and I stood on the roof using high powered binoculars, watching events unfold. The crane rolled up to the building. The undead noticed. The compressed mass of animated corpses became a bit ragged around the edges as some turned and began stumbling toward the approaching vehicles. Before they drew too close, the two chase vehicles turned, one heading north and the other south. They began to angle away from the building, driving just fast enough to stay barely ahead of their undead pursuers. The idea was to draw as many zombies as possible away from the building, reducing the crush of undead already beginning to surround the rescue caravan.

The rescue vehicles were all in position. The crane sat more than a hundred feet away from the building, already extending its arm toward the roof. I could see the main rescue team emerging from the hatch in the top of the bus. They quickly began to unstrap the wooden components of the ramp and began to assemble it. First was a narrow bridge that extended from the bus to the bottom of the crane arm. Once that was hooked into place, they carried additional components across one at a time and slid them onto the metal arm of the crane, working their way up from the bottom. This created a flat surface, about two feet across with a three foot high railing on each side extending all the way up to the roof. The dead swarmed about them, clawing at the vehicles and trying to climb up on the crane. Mostly they failed, but occasionally one would be shoved up a bit higher by the pressing crowd and actually get an arm up near the edge of the ramp. Gunners stationed on the roof of the bus picked them off. I could see the spray of tissue, the body pitching over, then hear the delayed crack of a weapon a second later. It was a disjointed drumbeat that was picking up its tempo even as the first survivors began their decent from the roof.

It was all going smoothly, if agonizingly slowly, until disaster happened. A rather large zombie got a hand up onto the bridge connecting the bus to the crane. It shifted. A survivor lost his balance. Tumbling over the side, he grabbed at the bridge, adding his weight to that of the zombie. The entire section heaved sideways and tumbled into the seething mass of dead.

"They've lost it!" I reported to Sarah, "They've lost the bridge, and there's still people on the roof."

"Peter," Sarah shouted into the CB, "What happened? How many are left?"

The radio crackled. "Peter's on the roof, helping people down." I didn't recognize the voice. "We only got two thirds down before the ramp fell."

"Can you get the rest out on the crane?" She asked.

"I don't know."

"No we can't," Edward Mills, the crane driver, interrupted, "I need to retract the arm before I can drive off, and it would leave nowhere for all those people to sit."

The plan had always been to abandon the crane after getting all the people off. Most would ride out on the bus, and a few in the back of the dump truck with the rescue team. The dump truck would power through the mass of surrounding zombies, clearing a path for the bus. The original plan called for a snow plow blade on front of the dump truck to help shove the undead aside, but after failing to locate one, we made do by welding together an angular 'cow catcher' of sorts, fashioned from a couple of cattle gates and some bits of scrap metal.

"Get the remaining survivors back up on the roof," Sarah commanded, "Get the bus out of there. We'll have to regroup and come back for the rest. Maybe tomorrow."

I heard the sound of arguing coming over the radio. The sound of the bus horn in the distance. Then a cloud of diesel smoke plumed up from the dump truck. It pushed forward, and that pointed nose we'd welded to its front pushed out from the surrounding crowd of undead. The bus followed quickly behind. I saw agitated shapes on the roof the ShopWell, gesturing frantically.

The truck and the bus powered in our direction. The dead fell behind. Suddenly the dump truck turned. It began looping around and heading back to the building.

"What the hell is he doing?" Sarah shouted. "What the hell are you doing?" she shouted into the CB. There was no answer. I didn't know then, but I now know that Richard Poldowski was driving. Sarah shouted a few more things into the radio, not all of them very lady like. The truck hurtled on. It plowed into the crowd of undead, just to one side of the crane. It stopped with its cab just a few feet away from the end of the ramp. The remaining survivors didn't waste any time. They quickly made their way down the ramp, jumping the last few feet from the crane to the roof of the dump truck's cab, from there jumping down into the back of the dump truck. A zombie climbed up on the hood of the truck, it pitched backwards, and a distant gunshot sounded a second later. Someone in the back of the truck must be shooting.

I relayed to Sarah what I was seeing. When one of the survivors slipped and toppled from the truck cab, pulled down into the mass of undead, I nearly choked on the words, but I told her. Only a few survivors remained. Then one froze at the bottom of the ramp. A child. A girl I think. A man came down the ramp and tried to help the child up, tried to convince her to jump. Two people climbed from the back of the truck to the cab. The man practically threw the girl across, losing his balance in the process, falling into the waiting claws below. The girl was caught. She was safe. Three more survivors. Two. The last one.

A plume of diesel fumes. The truck tried to back up. Clouds of dark diesel smoke billowed into the air as it pushed against the massive crowd of corpses behind it. I could hear the engines. Then I could see a bulge appear in the mass of undead now surrounding the crane and dump truck. The back of the dump truck slowly appeared, rolling over the dead as they fell. It was free. It turned and headed toward highway 11 and then west toward the factory.

"I'll be damned," Sarah said, "We actually did it."

Jack and I climbed down from the roof and back into the truck cab. As we drove back to the highway, I looked out the window toward the ShopWell. The once tightly packed mass of undead was fracturing. With their prey gone, lone zombies and small groups of undead were beginning to wander away from the building. We wasted no time getting back on pavement and driving west, toward home.

We arrived back at the factory while the bus was still being unloaded. The Blackwell people were lowered gently to the ground. Some began hobbling across the parking lot directly toward the factory. Others lay next to the bus, too exhausted or weakened from their ordeal. Some sobbed uncontrollably. So did some of the rescue team, I noticed. I was surprised that Miguel was not there attending to the various medical needs. I realized neither of the vehicles from the pharmacy scavenge mission were in the parking lot. Maybe they had parked in the warehouse. The bus was the only vehicle that wouldn't fit through those warehouse doors.

Milo raced up to me and grabbed my arm. "Isaac, have you seen the pharmacy crew" he asked with some urgency.

I shook my head. "I was thinking maybe they parked in the warehouse."

"No. Nobody's seen them." He was visibly upset. "Kalee is with them," he blurted out, then ran off. I located Max near the bus talking to Sarah and a couple of unfamiliar people, Blackwell survivors no doubt. Without thinking, I interrupted.

"The pharmacy team, I heard... has anyone..."

Max looked at me sadly. "Nobody's seen them."

"They should have beat us back," Sarah replied tiredly, "it was supposed to be a smash-and-grab."

I wanted to shout. I don't know what. Something. Demand we form a rescue party. Ask for the keys to one of the chase cars. Ask for a gun. Something. Instead I just stood there. Mute. Confused. Hopeless. I turned and ran inside.

I wandered through the office area, past familiar and unfamiliar faces. Blackwell survivors being fed their first decent meal in days. Gray lipped people drinking water like it was heavenly nectar. I walked past the partially built hydroponic garden, a lattice of metal tubes and containers suspended two floors up, just below the atrium skylight. I found myself on the roof, next to Kalee's container garden. Rectangular plant beds constructed from scrap lumber. Five gallon buckets with drainage holes drilled in them. They all sported vegetable plants transplanted from area gardens. The tomatoes looked a bit wilted and water deprived. They had been neglected during our rescue preparations. I lifted a wooden cover from a large plastic barrel. As I suspected, it was filled with water. I scooped out a bucket full and set about watering the tomato plants. When finished, I sat down on the roof and just stared at those pitiful plants. The leaves took on a gold and red aura as the sun began to set.

Sounds drifted up from the parking lot. People discussing the events of the day. Survivors being helped into the building. Vehicles being moved. I heard shouting. The loud slam of a car door. The voices were louder, more excited. I finally pulled myself up to look.

Two more vehicles sat in the parking lot. Miguel was walking from one of the cars, carrying a heavy duffel bag. My heart began to race. Two more people carrying bags of medical supplies climbed from the cars. The moment her dark hair emerged from the SUV, I knew it was her. She sauntered out of that car like she was simply returning home from an average shopping trip.

A tall figure came running across the parking lot. Milo dropped his shotgun as he lifted Kalee in the air, spinning her around and then squeezing her close. He stood there for some time, hugging her fiercely while she hugged him back and laughed. A thousand feelings raced through me. Joy and relief that she was back safe. Jealousy over Milo's greeting. Shame over the Jealousy. Anger at myself that I was not there to greet her. Mostly I felt confusion that I could feel so many things simultaneously, particularly about someone that seemed to occupy a completely different universe than me only a few weeks ago.

She saw me standing there, at the edge of the roof, and waved. I waved back, then headed down to greet her.

### May 19 - The Factory, Oklahoma

Miguel told us the whole story over breakfast this morning. They got to the pharmacy with no real trouble. Only a few dead attacked them while they were collecting the medical supplies, and those were quickly dispatched. They took longer than expected locating the specific prescription medication they wanted, but they found everything they were after and loaded up with extra general purpose medical supplies while they were at it. Disaster struck when they finally headed out of town.

"The plan had been to take Main Street south out of town all the way to West Hubbard Road," Miguel explained, "then take that west past I35 and then wind back up to highway 11 and back here. Problem was, we hit a big pack of zombies before we'd gone even a few blocks. I don't know where they came from, but it was more than we could push through, so we turned around. Then we saw another mess of them wandering down from highway 11. Those I suspect followed us from the ShopWell. We turned East but quickly bumped up against the river on the edge of town. I thought for sure we were stuck between the river and all those walking dead, but we just kept following the river south and eventually ran into a road that crossed it, Blackwell Avenue I think. After that, we were home free. We ended up going pretty far out of our way before we found another road that crossed back over the river without going through town."

Despite the chaos at the end, the pharmacy raid can only be called a complete success. They found all the supplies they sought and lost no team members. The same cannot be said about the ShopWell rescue. We lost two Blackwell survivors and one of our own. Peter Decker was the man I saw throwing a child to safety at the cost of his own life. That loss brought an edge of sorrow to what should have been a celebration. We held a brief memorial service, and several people spoke about Peter's kindness and bravery. I wish I could remember what was said so I could write it all down here, but I found my mind wandering, remembering Decker during those early days at the bus depot. He drafted me into helping with barricades almost as soon as I arrived. I now wonder if he really needed the help, or if he was just keeping me occupied because he knew I needed the distraction. That would be like him. He was a man of few words but usually used just the right ones when he spoke. He had a calm confidence that lowered the anxiety in a room the moment he stepped in. He was exactly the type of person we need right now, and it is unfair that he is gone.

For a little while, things were really looking up. We had pulled off an amazing rescue. Yes, it had cost Decker his life, but his sacrifice had purchased a future for nearly a hundred other souls. Our community had nearly doubled overnight, and suddenly we were all a bit more hopeful about the future. We had beaten them. We had gone up against death itself and won. When a small group of undead stumbled up to the factory, the gunners nearly tripped over each other for the chance to dispatch them, for another demonstration of life's supremacy over death.

And then a few more showed up. And a few more. We climbed up to the roof and looked east. A steady stream of dead stumbled down highway 11 and through the fields on either side. As they approached the factory, they steered right for it, attracted by the moans and howls of those already clawing at the walls.

Death has followed us back from Blackwell.

END OF PART 1

Thank you for reading this early release of Part 1 of The Bolachek Journals. I am currently hard at work completing the full book, and you can help. Please visit TheBolachekJournals.com to provide feedback on what you've read so far and read updates on my progress.

Thank you.

Thad D. Phetteplace

http://TheBolachekJournals.com

