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October 2007

Groton Long Point Connecticut had once been a peaceful summer town. In a forgotten time yuppies and upper middle class families had idly spent their summers here as a chance to escape from the constant pressures of city life. That was then. Now the small town was uninhabited, except for the rotting corpses that aimlessly wandered the streets, silently searching for warm flesh. The engine of the '88 Volvo was the first sound that had broken the dead silence in years. The car pulled up to the main building, a long one story complex that housed the post office, police station, and the town's only restaurant, and the driver stepped out. Randy Sullivan was 21 years old now. The once shy goth kid who had seen his friends and family devoured by the living dead three years ago was now a one man army, one of the few humans who had survived the first year of the Plague of the Undead. Things had never been the same since then. The radio broadcasts that had once told people where to go for aid had stopped. The U.S. Government no longer existed. As for the rest of the world, Randy didn't particularly care. The only thing that mattered now was survival. There were less of the zombies now, since many of them had been killed in the foreign aid bombings of the first year, but then the plague had broken out in Europe, and the aid stopped. The free goods that had once been left for the taking in abandoned storefronts had dwindled too. Fresh food was hard to come by these days, and ammunition was a commodity to kill for. Randy pushed his long bangs back from his face. It had been two years since he had cut his hair. That too had become unimportant. Survival was the only thing on his mind. The daily struggle to find enough bullets and food to survive until tomorrow was the inescapable reality that Randy and the few remaining humans in the world faced. On his right Tony Reese stepped out of the passenger's side. Tony was a year younger than Randy, but they had gone to the same high school back before the plague, and when the world started going to hell around them they had become close friends. After their National Guard shelter in Cambridge MA had been overrun a month into the epidemic, Randy and Tony had fled together in a stolen car. There had been others before too. Tony had had a girlfriend named Sarah, but she had been bitten escaping the shelter, and died a few days later. They had put a bullet in her head to keep her from coming back and laid her to rest by the side of the highway. The other survivor, a cop named Steve, had taken his own life almost a year ago. Now Randy and Tony were alone. It had been months since they had seen another human. For all they knew they were the last ones left. It was an idea they tried not to consider, knowing it was not far from the truth.

Randy and Tony looked the building over. It was run down and looked like it hadn't been inhabited in a long time. Garbage from the street blew across the deck and through the open doors. "Empty." Tony observed. "Looks like someone tried to fortify it a long time ago."

"Fuckers probably wasted most of the supplies too." Randy replied. "Well lets go have a look anyway."

Randy pulled out a police revolver, his weapon of choice, and placed six bullets in the chamber. Tony pumped his 12 gauge shotgun and the two men walked up the steps onto the porch of the building.

"I'll check out the post office and police station. You get the restaurant." said Tony.

"Right."

Randy kicked the weakly barricaded door down unceremoniously. He walked into the restaurant with his gun drawn, looking for any sign of movement. There was none. Tables had been turned over in an attempt to form some sort of barricade. The windows were boarded up, broken in places. The door to the porch had been forced open apparently, judging from the broken boards nailed loosely to the flimsy screen door that was now banging in the wind. He looked outside. A single zombie stood on the porch, wandering aimlessly back and forth. Randy had shot him without a second thought. The zombie's head imploded, and it fell to the floor without a sound. A small trickle of thick black blood ran from the wound. Damn, thought Randy. That one was almost dry. How far would these things rot before they stopped walking? Randy scanned the room. There were the usual half eaten bodies lying on the floor. He checked a couple, found bullet holes in their foreheads, and continued to search. These bodies were the zombies that had attacked this place. The defenders were now out there among the undead. Randy checked the bodies for ammunition, found a little, and proceeded to check the freezer. The power had been off for over a year now, and the food was beyond spoiled. Randy would have been bothered by the stench if he didn't live in a world where the walking dead inhabited every town and city. He rummaged through the freezer before giving up. He took a few candy bars from a counter display and headed out the front door.

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