Chapter Six

"We do the opposite of whatever regular people are doing. While they're leaving the cities, we head in. Once the zombies start rotting, we leave before regular people feel safe enough to start exploring them again."

"And what about long-term? I'm guessing that's phase three, after the majority of zombies are gone? Should we get a boat and head for an island somewhere?"

Hanson rolled his eyes. "Do you know anything about boats? I don't. Besides, pirates will probably be worse than bandits, because there's no fucking way to escape on the ocean. No, what I think we should look for other people who are like us. There's safety in numbers, but a lot of it depends on what happens on the West Coast. The government could stay intact. It could fall. The West Coast could hold the line or they could get overrun. Someone could find a vaccine or a cure. Or the virus could become airborne and wipe out the rest of humanity overnight. There's too many possibilities to plan for everything. We're mostly going to have to wing it."

We both fell silent, lost in our thoughts as I slowly ate the last few apple slices on our plate. "If I hadn't been bit, my first instinct would have been to head deeper into the woods and stay away from populated areas. Since I'm a zombie now—"

"Half," Hanson snapped. "And that's pushing it. I don't see you as a zombie at all. You're a survivor like me."

"Whatever. Since I'm half-zombie now, it makes sense to go where all the zombies are. But we need a better plan for the short-term. I'm not entirely on board with risking our necks to help people escape. Like you said, people are going to be desperate. We don't know how they'll react to us. And maybe I'd get over it if desperation was the only thing we had to worry about, but there are also going to be people who've gone nuts and won't be rational. I'm not okay with us getting our heads blown off because people stopped being able to tell friend from foe."

Hanson tapped his finger against his canteen and, thankfully, didn't snap at me for being less-than-heroic. "Then what do you think we should do?"

"We have five necessities we need to fill right now—food, water, weapons, shelter, and a way to stay informed. We have no choice but to head to town for food and water. Hopefully we'll find weapons on the way, but we need to gear up before we try to approach any other people. I think we should aim for the police station or head to the Army Surplus if the town has one. The Surplus should be our last choice, because everyone will have thought of going there and it'll probably be picked clean. If not, it'll be occupied by survivors, in which case we offer to collect supplies in exchange for some of their gear."

"Can't we go to a sporting goods store instead?" he asked. "I doubt anyone would be able to successfully barricade themselves at one. Too many windows."

"We can try there, too, but I don't think they'll have Kevlar helmets capable of stopping bullets. Remember, we're not protecting ourselves from zombies, but from humans with weapons who think we're zombies. Police, SWAT, and military are the only ones with that kind of ballistic gear and wearing the labels will make people think twice about shooting us on sight."

"Good point. Okay, I'm on board with that, as long as we're only taking abandoned stuff. What do we do after we gear up?"

"Depending on how the roads look, we can borrow a vehicle from one of them. Their cars are basically mobile command centers, which will cover the information part of our five necessities. We pack up all the supplies we can, then head East, deeper into infected territory. We'll want to get as far away from the Quarantine states as we can without heading into any densely populated areas like New York. At the same time, we don't want to hit the coast, since those areas will make us too accessible to Navy bombardment. We want to stick to the center of the US as much as possible."

"I disagree," he replied. "Not with going East, but the part about staying away from the coasts. I think we should aim Southeast toward Florida in case we get a cold front. We don't know what's happened to your body. Word from Alaska is zombies shut down in the cold. You might, too. It'd be safer going somewhere it stays warm all year around. Plus, Florida is highly populated and they have tons of cities where we can hide."

"And all those cities will be regularly scavenged by people who escaped on boat," I argued. "Southeast isn't a bad idea, but I still say we need to stay away from the coast."

"We don't need to decide right now. The plan we have will keep us busy for at least a week. After that, things might have changed and we'll need to change our plans accordingly."

He was right. The plan we had, as haphazard as it was, did keep us busy. We took an hour to pack what we wanted to take with us. In this, the fact we were at a military school helped. We had access to military style rucksacks and rain ponchos. I packed mine with three changes of clothes, doubling up on the underwear and socks, hygiene supplies, and an extra pair of boots. Everything was sorted inside plastic kitchen baggies to keep them weathersafe. At the very top of my bag, I loaded in one of the crappy green blankets cadets were issued and a towel.

Hanson prepared his own bag with similar choices, then we filled our rucksack's side pockets with all the charged cell phones and leftover food. It wasn't much—mostly a few bits of fruit, some boxed goods that had already been opened, and packages of junk food he'd found stashed throughout the school. We also put the useful fiddly bits in there, including flashlights, extra kitchen baggies, trash bags, duct tape, and packages of wet wipes. They were wipes intended for cleaning kitchens, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Having them was better than not having anything if we got into a sticky situation. As for weapons, we strapped ourselves down with kitchen knives and made spears out of broom handles.

We set out on foot late into the evening and it was nearly midnight by the time we encountered civilization in the form of a housing subdivision. I'd only seen the area once on the trip from the airport and there hadn't been anything too unique about it. I was fairly certain that hadn't changed, even with a handful of zombie shufflers lingering out in the open. The rest of the horde, we presumed, had either scattered into the woods in search of fresh prey or they'd relocated to wherever the survivors were barricaded.

There were plenty of spare cars sitting in driveways, but neither of us knew how to hotwire one. It seemed most people either made it out of town without crashing or they never made it to their vehicles. That only made it creepier for me. I'd expected to see obvious signs the town had been overrun, but there was nothing. Whatever had knocked out the power at our camp hadn't affected the town yet. Street lights still functioned, porch lights still glowed, and we could see the flicker of televisions broadcasting within several houses. It was enough to make us question our sanity.

"We had warning," Hanson reminded me. "While we were fortifying the camp, the people here must have been evacuating. And you have to think, it's not even been a full week since the outbreak started."

"A week since we were told that's what it was," I corrected. It'd been difficult to keep track, but I added two days to my pre-bite tally and came up with eleven days since the first use of the word 'zombie'. "Actually, it's been closer to two weeks now. That means it's probably been more like a month since it started—maybe more. I think I remember someone saying it started overseas. Who knows how long they covered it up before it reached us."

Hanson didn't have anything to say to that, so we once again fell into silence and focused on the task at hand. The town was a sprawling one with all the stores and places we needed to go located on the other side, so there was no choice except to search the houses with cars in the driveway. With a traded glance, we agreed not to break down any locked doors in case survivors were hiding inside, choosing instead to move to the next one.

Every house on the first street was either locked or their vehicle was missing. The pattern repeated on the second street. As we rounded the block, Hanson noticed it as soon as I did. Three houses down, a police car sat in someone's driveway.

"No way," Hanson whispered. I mentally echoed him. There had to be a catch. We couldn't possibly be this lucky.