Couldn’t do it, though; I had two important reasons.

Charlene and Cash.

Bam! Right there it was. Cards on the table. I needed not to kill anyone so I could continue being a father to my children. They were, and always have been, my priority. My first and only priority.

Once it became crystal clear that a fucking Armageddon had hit our planet, I had only one goal. Get my kids.

Wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to leave them with my ex. She might be a good mother–-I never indicated anything otherwise, but in times like these, times where zombies are eating people like starving kids with Happy Meals, no, they needed their father. I knew I’d be able to protect them. I knew I’d protect them better than she or her aged husband ever could.

Add the fact that I knew both she and her husband had been vaccinated against swine flu, and my time-is-of-the-essence mode kicked into high fucking gear. Let me tell you, high fucking gear.

I had met my goal. It hadn’t been easy. Allison, my girlfriend and also a dispatcher from 911, and I had saved my kids. Charlene might only have been fourteen, but she’d taken care of Cash until we had reunited.

Then the military saved us; Border Patrol copter spotted us; Army rode in on a Humvee and got us off the plaza roof and into the vehicle.

Maybe that was why the worst thing I did was think; now we’re all safe, the nightmare has ended.

I didn’t really believe that. Might have thought it, but proof otherwise surrounded me.

We were packed tightly inside the Humvee. Two soldiers sat in front, with a gunner up top. My kids, scared to death, hugged me tight as shit. Allison looked as if she might start crying any second. Dave, well, he seemed all right. Back when Allison and I first met Dave and his brother on the way to rescue my kids, I thought he would be a hindrance, especially after his brother Josh was shot and killed. Dave kept an arm draped around that woman we’d saved outside the hotel, just prior to seeing the Border Patrol choppers--who in turn called the military out to help us. That woman was Sues Melia.

Sues, on the other hand, didn’t look good. Her body trembled. I was just too tired to react other than to tell Dave.

“Hold her tighter, man. I think she might be going into shock.”

“I got her,” Dave said. He made me feel claustrophobic. Built like an ox, the other five of us barely had room to turn our heads. He looked as if he didn’t have room to breathe.

A handful of days changed not just my entire life, but as best I could tell, the world’s. At the very least, our country’s. Here we were in Rochester, a previously dying city, sandwiched between two larger cities also in the midst of decay, and then in a blink, swine flu destroyed civilization.

Not the flu so much as the vaccination against it.

“Sir,” I said. The soldiers made it clear they weren’t answering questions. They didn’t even seem to want us talking. They were kids, really. In their twenties. It didn’t deter me, since I was at a point where I simply didn’t give a fuck anymore. “We were just on I-390 north, and now we’re on the parkway, east. Only thing I can think of is the Coast Guard station along the river. Is that where we’re headed?” Border Patrol was right in the same general area. It had to be one of the two, best I could guess.

“I am not going to tell you again,” the soldier in the passenger seat said. “Where we are going is classified.”

“You know what? We’re all in this together. Are you afraid I might share your precious intel with zombies? Give them a map with passwords and launch codes? You don’t have to be a dick, Private.”

Allison shot me a look. Felt it. Piercing blue eyes did just that. Pierced. I tried to shake off the intensity of the glare.

“Sir, your friend back there insisted we save you from the roof. We did. That’s after the helicopter spotted you, and sent us to save you from the field. I recognize we’re on the same side of the outbreak. Our mission, whether you like it or not, is to evacuate non-infected humans and to keep classified information, get this, classified. And I am not a Private, sir. I’m a Corporal.”

Evidently, I got under his skin with a simple insult to rank, because he came unraveled. We were all on edge, but his weakness was apparent, too easy to spot. That couldn’t be good. He was just scared. No different from anyone else. Didn’t necessarily make him a dick, but I at least had his number. That was good enough, for now.

I remember having heard all kinds of facts about the flu; the respiratory disease introduced to humans from pigs. Can you beat that? I think the first case of the swine flu showing up in humans was verified, out of all places, in Mexico in 2009.

Like any virus, washing hands and covering your face when you sneezed or coughed might have prevented the epidemic. You know what, though? People are gross. Filthy. No different from pigs infecting us, really. We are the epitome of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Just at a zombie-level. Wasn’t going to be long before our race stepped aside and let the next semi-intelligent organism have a shot at running things. That, unfortunately, I believed.

It was in the autumn of ‘09 when a vaccination was made readily available to the public, and this is what bothers me most. I didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to think this over the last several days. Here, now, sitting in the Humvee headed northeast, I did.

The call I’d taken the night all hell broke loose, pardon the cliché, is what got to me. The guy worked at some lab at one of the hospital campuses. He indicated that shipments of contaminated vaccination vials were shipped all over the U.S.

The contaminated vials still might have prevented people from getting the swine flu, but the side effects were more than bargained for. Anyone inoculated became a zombie.

My kids, Allison, Dave, Sues, I’m guessing, and these soldiers, must not have received the vaccinated shots. Therefore, we were not zombies.

The problem, and I am making this percentage up, is that like 80% of the country did receive their vaccination, were infected, and now spent their days trying to eat non-infected people. Unless it was raining. They hated rain, which would make Seattle residents generally safe in a holy fuck it finally pays off for all of the terrible weather kind of way.

The two things that seemed relevant--head shots killed zombies best, just like in all the b-horror films, and getting bitten, or scratched didn’t seem to turn non-infected humans into flesh eating monsters. At least, so far as I could tell that just wasn’t what happened.

So, again, what bothered me the most, I mean really nagged at me, and was the reason why I’ve never received the vaccination, ever? Here it is, kind of laid out in a nutshell:

How did the United States identify the cause of the flu in Mexico, develop a viable vaccination, and proceed to distribute it across our country in less than a year?

Science didn’t work that way. Government sure as fuck didn’t seem too, unless it served their best interest. Did that seem even remotely possible? Do we have a vaccine for the cold? A cure for headaches? I won’t even touch on cancers and MS.

The answer is no, we don’t. Yet, in months, we had a vaccination against the first outbreak of swine flu that, best I can remember, infected one Mexican?

We were close to Lake Ontario, worse, the Genesee River--so excuse me if I smelled something fishy. I think we were involved in the disease, the spreading of it, possibly its creation and it just happened to come back and bite the US in the ass is all, literally. In the ass.

Does that make me a conspiracy theorist? Or an asshole?

Me?

I didn’t trust the fucking government at all. This was their mistake. I felt it and I knew it. Now, we’re all just collateral damage. Collateral. Fucking. Damage.