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hometown of Sullivan and parked just below the horizon of the next hill so they could scout ahead. The highways were as empty as the rumored Ghost Cities of China, an image Ethan had never seen before.             
    "I don't see any movement. Let's just get going."
                  "I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for Marines in the bushes to jump out and take us to the stockade or shoot us. Call me paranoid.”
                  "Dude, the Marines are retreating too." Keith put the binoculars down. "Nobody's going to ambush us."
                  Keith was wrong. They were ambushed at the bottom of the hill by snipers in the woods, their high powered rounds plowing through the engine block like the massive vehicle was made of little more than a paper. The truck lurched to a stop and they bailed out before the attacker could reload. It killed Ethan to be so close yet so far away, but they had to lay in a ditch until dark after hearing the snipers shoot several more times nearby. Neither saw the shooters, but stayed frosty with rifles at the ready. In the twilight when whoever those idiots were had either moved on or been eaten, they unloaded as many weapons as they could and stashed the rest of it in a trailer at a construction site.
    MODOT had been repairing a section of bridge over a creek due to a recent mild tremor from the New Madrid Fault Line. The quake had damaged many of the roads and bridges in the tri-state area, but had set Missouri up with a lot of FEMA equipment that had been instrumental in delaying the spread of the infection in the early days.
    Night came just as they reached the outskirts of Sullivan, only then had they been certain no one was following them. Keith broke into an ATV store and stole the keys to what amounted to an off-road golf cart. They stashed more guns in the storage shed to the dealership before heading out to explore the town and hopefully reach Ethan’s home. From there they’d rescue his family… then what? Tough it out in his parent’s loft like they were hiding from the Nazis? That was actually not a bad idea.
    What the y found in the town was far from what either had expected. About half the citizens were still there, some in the process of looting the last bits of food and supplies from the Wal*Mart, and others looting the hardware stores. People were even taking the last bit of foodstuffs from the roadside restaurants, something Ethan hadn’t actually considered.
    A lifetime supply of Jumbo Mac’s did appeal to him in a macabre sort of way. The journal entry he could write would say, Day One Hundred and Seventy. Made fort out of MacChickens in living room. Used MacPoppers as people… Ate most of my citizens. Not a very good overlord and despot after all. Welcome to the demented mind of Ethan Cally, sometimes science fiction writer and a grand master in the art of sarcasm.
                  Everyone in town was packing a gun, too. There were pickups in parking lots with extremely well armed children guarding them while their parents looted. It was semi-organized chaos really, but no one was shooting at each other. “An Armed Society is a Polite Society.” Ethan muttered. He and Keith walked up to a truck with children who seemed more interested in barter than looting. "Who's in charge around here?" Ethan asked, eyeing a hunting scope on the tailgate. None of the items had price tags in dollars, but there were small flash cards with items listed on them in purple and red marker that they would be willing to trade for.
                  "Like we know." A little girl with an overdramatized southern accent said. She was kind of fat and filled her father's old Air Force uniform well, if she’d been six inches taller of course. "Everyone's takin' what they can, we got to keep an entire police cruiser from the Highway Patrol yesterday. Daddy says they have better engines than our cars, and that we