sacrifice. Heated trailer loaded with sleeping bags and plenty of leg room. I was a little pissed to say the least, maybe more envious too. I wanted to stretch out and get some sleep. After the frigid conditions of the past few nights it was going to take a lot of warmth and rest to take out the chill that had settled deep in my bones. Little did I know at the time that the chill I felt had less to do with the weather and more to do with my condition. Well time, as they say, is the great narrator, all things are laid out before her whether you want them to be or not.
CHAPTER 4
With no general plan in my mind except to put as much distance between us and our previous home we headed North on Interstate 25 and then East on Interstate 70. We’d be relatively safe for a while, east of Denver would bring us into the plains of Colorado and then into Kansas, during the heyday of humanity this was not a densely populated area so the corollary (see I did learn something in the 6 th grade that I could use later in life) was that the likelihood of coming across a great brood of zombies would be slight. That was the thought anyway. Getting out of Denver proper was a nightmare. It looked like any natural (or unnatural) disaster movie you’ve ever seen in your life. Cars and trucks, motorcycles and scooters, hell I’d seen a rickshaw a few miles back, were everywhere. It looked more like the world’s largest used car lot than a highway of any sort, that is of course if you took away the bullet casings that littered the ground like so many metallic insects or the blood splattered remains of the zombies that were merely trying to garner a meal or even the thousands of humans that had become, for lack of a better word, Spam, (do you get the reference? Meat in a can?). I know its gross, but that was the only way I could think of it (of them) without blowing chunks. It looked like an all you can eat buffet had opened up right next to a fat camp with a damaged fence. The battle had been savage and quick, with non-infected people clearly on the losing side. This I garnered by the sheer number of cars stuck on the roadway, if people had won they would not have hung around.
At some points I would drive ahead of the truck, scouting out potential routes, other times Alex would need to lead just to push some slag out of the way. For eight excruciating hours we navigated through the worst rush hour traffic known to man, by the time we reached a small town called Bennett, about 30 miles east of Denver I was wiped. Tracy had volunteered on more than one occasion that she would take over driving but I couldn’t get over the sneaking suspicion that she had an ulterior motive. I could see her sideswiping a sign just for a small measure of payback for what I had done to her car. Most likely it was my deep-seated paranoia rearing its ugly head, but then again maybe not. I was paranoid, how the hell would I know. Not once on our 8 hour trek did we spot a living person. Zombies though, that was a different story. There weren’t many of them that we saw, but each and every one turned and walked towards us drawn like a fine metal filament to a powerful magnet.
We stopped at Bennett to stretch our legs, top off our tanks and possibly try to choke down a power bar or two. My brain was completely against the idea of eating anything after witnessing the destruction a few miles back but my stomach wasn’t listening. Travis, Tommy and Henry for that matter had been sleeping for most of the morning. Of that small favor I was thankful. Although what I was shielding them from I don’t know. They had already seen everything we had passed in spades and then some. Bennett looked surprisingly untouched, as if the tidal wave of shit that had hit the rest of the state had completely missed this small oasis. At least that was how it looked. How it felt was a completely different story.
Alex hopped off the big rig, rubbing his arms for warmth, but more likely to ward