Alive! Not Dead! Read Online Free PDF Page A

caught in a huge traffic jam - then another one of those sky waves hit and people and cars went flying.  My car went airborne and landed on top of another car.  This building right next to everyone went to pieces – bricks and stuff went flying.  I ran as fast as I could away from there.  There were fires and people were screaming.  Some guy on a motorcycle drove up to me.  He said ‘We gotta get away from the deads!’ so I jumped on the back of his bike and we went flying down the highway.  We were gonna get out of town and away from the tsunami flood and all that.  We almost got all the way out of town but then his bike got a flat ‘cause of all the glass we’d been running over.  We stopped at a gas station.  He went in to see if he could find anything to fix the flat but then these deads tore into him.  They came after me, too but I ran away.  I ran down this alley and hid behind some trash dumpsters.  I stayed there a long time.  I saw your van come into the parking lot behind me.  I watched your van.  You never got out so I figured you must be ok and you weren’t a dead.  It got dark so fast.   I could barely see.  I ran over to your van.  I think I bumped it pretty hard with my knee,” she said as she rubbed the bruise on her knee. “I climbed up on top of the van so none of the deads would come after me.  When you turned on the light for a second, I knew you were still in there, and not one of the freaks who wanted to eat me, so I tapped on the roof of the van and here I am.”
    I said “I didn’t know what to think when you tapped on the roof.  You scared the shit out of me.”
    “I was scared too.”
    I told her about the plane crash, the fires and the river of zombies.  I told her I still had the tire iron and that she needed to find a weapon as well.  She said she had one.  She pulled a switchblade out of her pocket.
    “We need to get a gun, too.” I said.
    “What’s your name?” she asked me.
    “Dan Kingsley.”
    “I’m Tara O’Neal.”
    I asked her what she thought caused all of this.  She had no idea.  She didn’t say anything about a nuke – and why would she? If a nuke had gone off in Seattle, I would’ve thought that the whole place would be gone.  There wouldn’t be buildings standing.  There wouldn’t be trees or telephone poles with wires still attached.  The whole place would be gone.  Totally destroyed.  To me, it looked like a massive earthquake had hit.  I don’t know why Norm told me he had heard something about a nuke.  Obviously, his mind wasn’t in the right place.  He had been looking for his wife.  Maybe he just thought he heard them talking about a nuke on the radio.
    Tara and I needed to find somewhere safe.  We needed protection.  We needed to hole up and wait until this all passed.  Surely FEMA must have had people on it already – but we didn’t know.  The radio didn’t work - all we heard was static.  Neither one of us had seen any police directing traffic.  There was no National Guard patrolling the streets.  There weren’t any sirens blowing, no vans driving around with loudspeakers advising people what to do.  There weren’t any fire trucks, no helicopters circling.  Disaster relief was nonexistent.
    If people had gone to disaster shelters then they would all be full by now.
    I thought that maybe everyone had gone to the Century Link football stadium. Tara reminded me that it had probably been destroyed by the tsunami since it was downtown.
    Other than the stadium, we didn’t know where any other disaster relief centers were.  I mean, how often does a person even think about things like that – maybe in passing when you see a sign in a hallway p ointing to a disaster shelter? Maybe one in a hospital somewhere? Maybe in a school basement?
    We could have gone to a police station.  Tara said she thought there was on 12 th street, but she wasn’t sure if it survived the tsunami, either.  Honestly, we didn’t