Cash’s skin was grey, peeling away from the bone. His eyes were not brown and bright, but cloudy and colorless. His white baby teeth looked like something inside the mouth of piranha and snapped as if trying to bite a chunk out of my shoulder.

I dropped him. I dropped my son. He landed on his padded bottom. The diaper absorbed the brunt of the fall. He didn’t cry.

He growled.

Cash thrust his hands at me, moaned and latched his tiny arms and hands around my leg. I watched in horror as his mouth opened wide and bit down on my jeans.

I felt a scream struggle its way up my throat before it actually exploded like a siren from my mouth. “No!”

“Dad! Daddy!” Charlene, my fourteen year old daughter, said. I recognized her voice. I could not see her. Where was she?

I thrashed side to side, wanting my son off my leg, his teeth out of my clothing and out of my flesh. “No!”

“Chase, it’s a dream. You’re having a nightmare.” A hand on my shoulder, another rubbed my back.

“Julie?” I said.

The hand fell away. I opened my eyes and looked around. It couldn’t have been a dream. Every detail had been so vivid, so real. It wasn’t my wife, Julie, who’d awakened me.

“Allison,” I said. “Honey, I’m sorry.”

Allison was my girlfriend. Julie, she was my ex-wife. Calling one the other was never a good idea. The reason and only explanation and possibly only saving grace for why I’d made such a mistake, I’d been asleep. Wasn’t on purpose, or even on accident. It was because I actually thought Allison had been her, had been Julie. But Julie was my ex, and she was dead, and I had been the one that killed her.

“What was the nightmare?” Allison said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” I said, but I wasn’t. My heart beat fast. I took deep breaths and tried to calm and control my breathing. “I…ah…where are we?”

I’d just asked the question, but I also remembered at that same moment. We were inside a Humvee. It came back to me fast, a flood of memories. My brain fought not to get sucked under as wave after wave of images forced themselves into my mind and crashed around loose and free inside my skull like a mental tsunami.

#  #  #

At a quick glance, you might think the outbreak came out of nowhere; as if one second, everything was normal and the next zombies were everywhere. The more I think about it, I realize it wasn’t how it actually happened. It had been gradual with the signs all there, just no one piecing any of it together. Even if someone had seen what was going on sooner, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. It couldn’t have.

However, all at once, it came to a head when an overwhelming, overpowering force of walking dead creatures emerged.

Allison and I worked at 911 as dispatchers. That day, I was on phones and took an emergency call from a scientist or a doctor, I can’t remember, but he claimed he was partly to blame for the, what would you call it? A problem? An Apocalypse?

The man said that contaminated vials of the swine flu vaccination had been shipped and administered to Americans across the country before the error had been recognized. Inoculated people didn’t catch the flu. Instead, they turned into zombies.

Zombie was the only word I could use to describe the completed transformation. Their veins darkened to black and stood out like morbid highlights on pale, pale skin. Eyes lost any vibrancy and color as a milky, cloudy film covered the iris and pupil.

At first, I didn’t think a bite could cause another to turn into a zombie. I’d been wrong. Getting bitten by one of those things was bad. Very bad.

Some of the creatures meandered toward you, slow as shit and sluggish. It wasn’t a joke. Get surrounded by enough of them, caught off guard, or backed into a corner, and they’d kill you. Eat your flesh and tear into your gut without pause. The others were fast like Kenyans. I’d seen a herd of them chase a man in a mall parking lot, take him down, and rip his flesh to shreds. The threat from either was equal and real.

Allison and I made it out of the 911 facility. I had one goal. I needed to make it across the city and save my kids. Charlene was fourteen, and Cash, who had been nine. By car, we could have made the journey across fifteen miles in twenty minutes, but the streets were littered with abandoned, disabled and crashed vehicles. Forced to trek the distance on foot, twenty minutes became several days. Zombies were everywhere and we had to find shelter often and for long periods of time to keep from getting devoured. It was during this time that we met up with Josh and Dave Rivera.

Josh died. Zombies never touched him. He’d been shot. Someone or some group armed with guns shot at us. They never came out from where they were hidden. They never attacked, but they did manage to kill Josh. Dave had been devastated. I couldn’t blame him. His saving grace was Sues Melia. She’d been in a courtyard by a hotel, running from a zombie when we found and saved her. Sues and Dave bonded. They were an odd couple, quiet and reclusive, but it worked for them. Whatever it was, they appeared happy together.

Charlene was a trooper. Tough as nails. I hated clichés, but there was no other way to describe her. She’d taken on some serious responsibility as a fourteen year old, watching out for her brother and she had learned how to use weapons. Not just use them, but used them effectively.

My son, Cash, got caught in the middle of crossfire and took a bullet. Johanna Erway, a paramedic with the Coast Guard, had done all she could to save him. She’d removed the slug, but the damage done internally was worse than we’d imagined. There was bleeding that couldn’t be stopped.

Charlene blamed herself. It hadn’t been her fault. She was a lot like me, hard headed and hard on herself. Don’t think there’s anything I could have said, or could say, that would ever change her mind. She was always going to carry the weight of that on her shoulders, as if she felt she was the only one responsible for the death of her little brother.

We were a group of survivors and only a week or so into this mess. We were a small band of people now forced to depend on each other. I often referred to us as a family. We were all we had left: Erway and Elysia Palmeri, a Private from the U.S. Army; Sues Melia, a front desk employee from a hotel; Dave Rivera, someone I consider (an unexpected) close friend; Allison Little, my girlfriend; and my 14 year-old daughter, Charlene, who was tough as nails.

That was it. This was my family.

Chapter One

Monday, November 2nd, 1315 hours

The seven of us were packed into the Humvee we’d confiscated from an internment camp in New York, up north along the St. Lawrence River. I had no idea how long we’d been driving, but I’d managed to fall asleep and have a nightmare about clowns, and my ex, and my dead son, Cash. “Where are we?”

“Not all that far from where we started,” Palmeri said. She was in the driver’s seat. Erway rode shotgun. “I remember something the Terrigino brothers said while we were with them, might have been at the dinner table.”

The Terrigino brothers were survivalists, preppers, hermits living in the woods by Cedar Point Park, where the military had set up a failed internment camp for medical and research purposes. The brothers had invited us into the log cabin they lived in. Place had been stocked with food and weapons. If the Terrignos hadn’t been stark raving mad, and the cabin burned to the ground, it would have been an ideal structure to hole up for the winter months.

“What was it they’d said?” Allison asked. She held my hand, had her head turned so she could look toward the front of the vehicle. I stared at her profile. The scraped up little nose, the mud-matted hair, and the scabbing cut across her forehead from an array of reckless car accidents. She was beautiful. I was lucky, and thankful she’d stuck it out with me. I could not be an easy person to love, and much of the time, tougher to even like.