Waking up with the sun, in his tent in the Adirondacks, Jon doesn’t want to leave the warmth of his sleeping bag, even though he really needs to take a piss. He resolves to get up because he can’t hold it any longer. Leaning against a tree pissing, he hears a groaning noise. He thinks it sounds like an injured animal. Just as he is about to finish, he sees a shadow stumbling out of the brush in front of him a mere twenty yards away. Jon puts himself away and gets in a defensive stance because it may be a bear or something else aggressive. Realizing the only weapon at hand is a good sized rock; he reaches down and grabs it.
The shadow breaks the tree line and he sees that it is a person, covered in blood and making awful gurgling noises. “What the fuck is that?” he yells in surprise. The yell startles what he can now tell is a woman, and he realizes that she is gaining speed and coming right toward him. Once she gets close enough, he sees that she is biting at the air as she comes closer. Throwing the rock, he nails her in the head hard enough to knock her down. He runs to where she is, on the ground still gnawing in his direction. He picks the rock up and bashes in her head, not stopping till he is splattered with brains.
Fear finally setting in, he realizes he just murdered someone, and that his worst fears have come to fruition. Zombies are walking the earth!
Running back to where he made camp, he hastily throws his gear into his beefy jeep, and then speeds back to the road. Before he makes it back to the black top he spots a group of zombies stumbling around. The noise from his jeep alerts them to his presence. He lead foots it, and splats all four of them on the grill of his beautiful green wrangler.
He finally makes it back to a paved road, and comes to a screeching halt when he sees the mayhem. Car wrecks, mutilated bodies, and zombies everywhere. He turns away from the wreckage and heads toward the nearest little town. Knowing that he is going to run into zombies in town, he still goes because he needs to gas up his jeep and get a few supplies to make sure he can survive.
The closer he gets to town the less movement he sees. He makes it to the gas station without seeing anyone, alive or dead. At the gas station he fills up the tank and a gas can he has with him, because miraculously the pumps are still working. He knows he has to enter the store to get supplies. Weary of the quiet, he grabs his tire iron from the jeep. As he approaches the store, he can hear a dog inside whimpering and barking. Looking through the window, he sees a zombie clawing in slow motion at a door that must lead to a back room.
He sneaks inside the unlocked door. Once inside he creeps up on the zombie and gets within touching distance before the zombie even realizes he is there. He swings the tire iron, and catches the zombie at the nape of his neck, snapping it with a bone crushing thud. The zombie drops to the floor, but he smashes it again and again till he hears the loud crunching of its skull. Finally satisfied that the zombie is dead he stands behind the door, and pulls it open slowly, waiting to see what will come out. He hears whimpering again, so he peeks around the door. Inside the small bathroom, he finds a black and white border collie and two pups huddled together next to the toilet. “Shit!” he exclaims. Conflicted, he has to decide between leaving these poor dogs to be a zombie meal, or taking them with him and adding risk to his journey. “Fuck ‘em.” He mutters, as he turns to the front door to lock it so he can feel safer for a moment. As he starts to fill grocery bags with the few food items he can find the dogs try to play with him, jumping up and licking him as he pushes them back. “Aw, fuck. I guess you’re not going to let me just leave you here, huh?” He remembers to not only grab as much dog food as he can, but to take as many cartons of Newport’s as he can find. Looking around, he decides to grab any cat food he can as well, so he won’t have to share his rations with them in case they eat all the dog food.
Just before he unlocks the door to run back to his vehicle, he turns to the dogs. “If you shit in my jeep, I will leave you by the si/de of the road!” Realizing he doesn’t have a suitable weapon, he checks behind the counter. “Well, what do you know, the stereotype about these little mom and pop stores is true!” he says to the dogs as he pulls out a sawed off double barrel and a couple of boxes of shells. He turns the bolt and they run to his jeep with the supplies. He secures everything, and the dogs, in the vehicle. The grown dog starts growling. “What is it, mama?” he says looking around. She continues to growl, as he spots a large cluster of zombies in his review mirror, rounding the corner of the store. He looks at the dog and says “What do you think, should we get out of here?” She barks in agreement. He gets it into gear and realizes there is another group of zombies headed around the front side of the store coming right at them. He unloads the double barrel at the group in front as he drives past them, just out of their reach.
They take a couple of turns, trying to lose the group that is now chasing them, and everywhere they go there is blood on store fronts and zombies feeding off body parts. Hoping to find people somewhere, he crashes through a fence and heads off road through the woods, missing trees by mere inches. Zombies are piling through the fence behind him slowly; bottle necked at the small section he broke through. Up ahead he sees a ravine, and hopes he can fool some of the zombies into walking right off the edge. Slowing down so they close in on him, he hopes this risk is worth it. Feet away from the edge he cranks the wheel to the right. To his surprise the Zombies fall off in droves. “It fucking worked! I can’t believe it fucking worked!” he yells in excitement as he speeds away along the edge. The tail end still follows him, but he reduced their numbers dramatically.
Realizing he is only going to find more of the same, he ventures out to find a safe place to make camp and come to grips with what his world has become.