Day 6

There is something peaceful about these mountains. Maybe it is the green. Something still green in this winter. It seems to give me a sense of hope. I watched the sun rise between the trees and the illumination of life was breathtaking. Like a new birth after the carnage from the previous days. There are few cars, and it is eerie. It's been only days since the first outbreak in the US and already things are silent. At least here and now it is quiet and simple and green.

We wind our way through the highway with no traffic. The rush west must have passed. Or, as Josh has speculated, something prevented them from getting this far.

We chat like old times, I think it is more to distract us from what is going on more than anything. There is a certain point you reach, it seems where the brain brings up certain memories to cope with ones you're recently obtained. To suppress them, maybe. Eventually the conversation turns to the zombies.

I asked him when it broke out in China.

"I think it was a lab malfunction where someone was infected but didn't know. He died in a hospital and just went crazy. It just escalated. Probably got on planes with people who were infected and spread everywhere else."

I am shocked at how fast it spreads. I speculate that it is passed through blood and saliva, and we both decide that as soon as we can we need to get some facial cover. We were lucky back in Reno to not get infected, (as far as we knew).

* * *

There is a trailer on the side of the road. It is dirty and old and looks like it may have been attacked. I look at Josh and after a moments consideration decide to pull in behind it and find out what is going on.

I grab my hand gun and step out of the car. I can hear birds singing in the cool breeze. It blows the long blades of grass beside the trailer that grows on the side of the road. As we round the edge we see a smear of blood along the side of the trailer and some on the ground. It isn't much, but still easy to spot.

"Hello?" Josh calls out. Nothing. "Anybody in there?"

We walk to the door, it is only a screen door and the smell coming out is unbearable. It takes a minute for my gag reflex to calm down before I open the door and walk up the short steps. Two people, an older couple sit at a table with both of their hands limp, playing cards having fallen out of each. In the hand of the female is a gun, similar to the one I had grabbed from the gas station attendant. There is a hole through the back of the mans head and blood and brains litter the area just behind the seat. There was then a blood stain to the woman's temple. and had sprayed the window next to her. I throw up as I saw this, and Josh began to gag, running out of the trailer. I follow, not wanting to see the gruesome site any longer.

"Did she do that?" He says, after regaining himself.

"I think she shot him and then herself."

"Then what," Josh said, pointing to the smear on the trailer, "is that?"

We looked at it a long time. The screen door was still there, but the main door, the outside door, we found some twenty feet away and had been ripped off of its hinges. It was bent and mangled. We walked back to our Van, leaving the scene as we found it.

"They killed themselves to prevent them from dying by a zombie?" He asks it, but I know he didn't need me to answer.

"Or to prevent becoming one."

"But . . . why not just kill the thing?"

"Maybe there were more than one. We can't really say, but I'm anxious to get out of here."

Josh is driving so I can fall asleep. I can feel it coming over me like a reluctant blanket of clouds. I simply cannot hold on to consciousness any longer and allow my limps to relax, my eyes to close and I fall asleep.

I wake up to honking. It is constant and loud. Painfully I open my eyes. My head it throbbing and there is blood slowly flowing down around my ear. It is dark outside and Josh is lying against the steering wheel, his eyes closed and un-moving.