All that he remembered was the screeching of breaks...and then there was that booming of a noise, the sound itself almost seem to pierce his very soul. Afterwards there was only darkness, momentary and involuntary sleep. When his eyes finally opened everything that Cael saw was in a blur. As his vision returned he began to feel the stinging of minor cuts and bruises, and a faint warmth that he recognized as blood running down his arm. Cael inspected himself momentarily, looking himself over to make sure that those minor wounds were all that he had suffered in the incident...then he actually realized what was going on...his memory, its blurriness fading slower than that of his visions, came back to him and he understood exactly what kind of incident he was dealing with. Right then the crashing sound, the very noise that had pierced him deep into his soul was that of metal colliding, of two vehicles slamming into each other...he had been in a wreck, and he was one lucky bastard to even be alive.

Looking around his surroundings, Cael dipped his head down to look out of the small portion of his windshield that wasn't cracked in the shape of a spider's web, a small piece of glass only about a foot long and 6 inches wide. He could see the other vehicle, a shimmering blue Prius, it was forced and bent into the hood of his truck; almost like the two vehicles had become one. He could see smoke rising from both engines...and a little flame dancing around the motor of the pseudo-crushed Prius. He immediatley realized that it would be in his best interest to get the hell out of his truck...right now. Cael's hands rushed to reach for the door handle, his fingers, reaching out as far as he could stretch them, missed the mark by about half an inch. His seat belt was restraining him. He tried unfastening it, to no avail, and for a moment he yanked and struggled trying to break free from the "safety belt's" grasp...more like a death trap. Instinctively, he reached down to his belt loop where his knife's case held it in place, and ripping the velcro top open he slid his fingers around the thing, forcing it out and into his hands. Quickly he flipped the blade open and with a click it locked into place. Cael placed the serrated portion of the blade against the belt and with a few swipes was free from the damned thing. 

Opening the door he lifted his leg to get out of the vehicle, and in what could only be described as an awkward rolling motion, he fell out onto the pavement bellow. He was truly lucky that he hadn't broken anything, but he knew that he was definitely going to feel this in the morning...if he made it that far that is. Getting up to his feet Cael began waking over to the Prius that had so rudely ruined his already shitty day, it's windshield was split and cracked just like his, and so he had to go around to the driver's side window in order to get a peek inside. There was a girl, probably about 20 years old slumped in the driver's seat. As he looked on at her he could see the lines of mascara running down her face...she had been crying. Cael also realized that her chest was moving, that no air was pumping in or out of her lungs, he reached in to the broken window...doing all that he could to avoid the jagged shards of shattered glass, and placed his index and middle finger firmly on her neck to feel for a pulse. Then, as he searched for any sign of life in the young woman's body, he saw the large and jagged piece of metal sticking deep into her gut, as well as the blood that poured from her wound. She was dead.

He closed his eyes for just a moment, mourning a little but mostly letting out a sigh of relief that it hadn't been him that died in the incident. Before he could even open his eyes back up Cael felt hands grabbing at him, and immediately the sound moaning along with almost a growl boomed from the corpses mouth. The thing had gotten him by the collar of his shirt and was pulling him fast towards it. The, what he thought was dead, woman's mouth was open wide she chomped over and over at him like a dog trying desperately to get at its treat. He pulled back as hard as he could, but the dead bitch had a tight grip on him. He had seen this things before, but never this close, and he hadn't really embraced the concept that the dead were rising until this moment. Luckily he still had the open knife in his left hand and without little thought or hesitation he lunged the blade up through her chin and into her head. Always the head...or at least that's the only way that he'd seen these people, or creatures die. Pulling his knife out he jumped backwards quickly, getting away from the now really dead dead bitch, and he took another deep breath. He was already pretty used to things going straight to hell when he was around, but all of this chaos had taken things to a whole new level, and he didn't even know how to take it in, let alone what to make of it. All that he knew was that he needed to keep moving, and so ran back over to his totaled, all be it piece of crap to begin with, truck and grabbed his pack and the fire axe that he had obtained by breaking the glass on the fire emergency case in the bar that he figured he was no longer employed. That reminded him of the bottle he had stashed in his back pack. It was 750 ml of pure bliss in the form of Hennessy, something that he never thought he would indulge in again...in fact he had sworn off that kind of stuff completely, and to be honest he really wasn't sure why he grabbed the bottle in the first place, but the whole world seemed to be going to hell, and for some reason he didn't feel like being sober if that was the case.

Taking in his surroundings, trying to get a grasp of where exactly it was that his little wreck had landed him, and the first thing that he saw was a sign: NEA Baptist Hospital.