"Mattie, don't go!" he yelled, then cried out in pain from the sting in his arm. "Stop, please!"

He was desperate. He didn't know what else to do. So, he took the machete in his hand and started to saw away at his arm at the shoulder, moaning and crying from the pain that didn't seem much worse than the sting already in his arm.

"Don't take Cole," he cried, tears streaming down his face. "Please."

Before long, his arm was as severed as the zombie's head in front of him, continuously pouring blood onto the floor and onto his clothes. He shrugged off the bag on his back., reaching into it with his remaining hand. Luckily, there was the last blanket. He wrapped what he could tightly around the spot where his other arm should have been, hands shaking so bad that he struggled with putting it on.

"Mattie," he called out. "Don't leave me."

---

Jacob's main concern was to find some booze. If he had to live through this terrible new life he was being forced to live, he at least wanted to live as much of it as he could drunk. He was shocked at the amount of people along this street who didn't seem to own any type of alcohol at all, not even a simple can of beer. It frustrated him. It was as if the world was condemning his drinking habit. To hell with that, he thought. There was alcoholics much worse off than he was.

On the opposite end of the street, the end he hadn't been down, there was a lot of open space. That's mainly why he hadn't been that way. Not only was he kind of vulnerable to the infected that way, but there were hardly any houses worth looking at. He'd noticed a kid walking down the street for a couple of days, going into houses. It was kind of unexpected when the kid came to his door, tried it and found it locked, that he turned away and left. If it had been Jake, he would have kicked down the door and looted what he could have.

Then again, it was a good thing that the kid hadn't done that. For his sake, not Jacob's. He wasn't the type of person who would kill someone who was alive, but if he had to, he would. He was trying to survive through this mess just like everyone else was.

He'd watched that same kid walk past his house, this time accompanied by a girl. He was carrying a bundle of blankets that looked like a baby, and he made the connection in his head that these two must have been together and that was their kid.

'[i]Poor baby,[/i]' he thought.

It wasn't long after the couple had passed that Jacob decided he'd go after them. While he preferred to be alone during a time like this, mainly because he didn't trust anyone not to abandon him or use him as a human shield, he knew that he would need help eventually. Or, you know, maybe. He'd been a roofer most of his life, and that taught him how to get stuff done and fix things by himself. However, a little company never hurt. It'd been a while since he'd had company.

He saw the girl backing out of a house a little down the street, and right away he sensed danger because the boy was nowhere in sight, nor was the child. While he had been walking at a quick pace, he slowed and almost came to a stop just a few yards away from her.

"Hey!" he yelled, "Everything alright?"