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Civil authorities did try to set up rescue stations, but the dead turned them inside out. It all went to shit pretty quickly. The more the government tried to do, the more things popped up that needed to be done. First it was the crashes into the buildings in DC and New York City with the immediate response by the appropriate authorities. Then they were wiped out when the clouds in the two cities started doing their thing. Then dealing with the Anthrax freak out that was going on in the media and trying to get the medicines in the right place. Most of the people that got the bug all got it at the same time. That caused a problem with distribution. All this was going on starting from the first of the month with the magazines and symptoms started showing around the eleventh of September.

News anchormen could not wait to tell how they were a target and be the first on the air to show their symptoms. Dan Rather and Peter Jennings were caught in a dead heat in the race of systems but Tom Brokaw topped them all. On air he unbuttons his shirt to

below his pecs and shows a purple, red and black five inch contusion looking thing that

does not look like it would be a good thing to own. Sucks to be him, I guess, but he pro-

baby got his shot of bug juice.

Every resource was being used. Neglected people started dropping like flies. Then from Ground Zero, the Pentagon and rural PA, the first dead heads got up or died and got up from that cloud that was part asbestos, PCB's and who knows what kind of shit the terrorists put in there. For all I know terrorists had nothing to do with the dead coming back and that part was just coincidence. People were feeling the pressure though because all around them the normalcy of their life quickly disappeared within a week.

Replace that normalcy with the feeling of shock at the early news of mysterious illness that was spreading, then the planes did their thing, with all the flash death that happened in twenty-five minutes. The coup-de-gras being the dead getting up to

dance. That made for one depressing week or so. Literal anarchy broke out, people

tried all at once to buy everything that they would need for the rest of their lives. If they

could not buy it, they took it. Every minute the deads' activity was unchecked. People

just didn't know what they were seeing or if they did were unable to do anything about

it because the country was practically disarmed by some leftist pussies in the government.

The government declared they were in control, trust that your government is doing its job with all agencies on highest alert. So be calm, stay at home and wait for bulletins on what to do in your local area.

When people wanted to freak out that's when they watched TV, because the TV was

a direct line to just how bad and how fast things had slid towards total break down and

that made the need for family togetherness and safe location and supplies more apparent.

The result of this was total congestion of roads and highways, grid lock. Authorities and

rescue, army, police all tried to get where needed most from their centrally located stations, depots, and bases only to become one with traffic, and the dead were waking up further and further west. Early they thought the dead were in some kind of state of sickness brought on by the still unknown illness sweeping America.

At first they tried to help the zombies that they did not understand as zombies by treating them as biological warfare victims. Along with antibiotics they tried counseling to help with their apparent trauma. But we got educated pretty slow, or at least not fast enough to slow what had become a desperate fight on several fronts. Modern man entered a state never seen before. All the factors that were working against man and civilization won out and humanity slid into a state of every man for himself in about six months. By the time a year went by, the ratio of zombies to man had to be in the area of five hundred to one, but that's just a guess. There were a fucking lot of the bastards and they never slept at all.

But I had to, and I had eat to stay alive. But they didn't. I owned a stop and shop kind of store: newspapers, lotto, candy, Slim Jims, that sort of stuff. I was doing the morning thing, selling coffee, gas, and cigarettes to people on their way to work and listening to Howard Stern. Right in the middle of Howard telling about him and Pam Anderson, Baba Booey said, "Howard, turn on channel six." The morning rush hour going to work and the people already there heard the news unfold second by second.

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