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Tina drove the Beast as only a country girl could all the time keeping up a conversation with her family till for reasons unknown the connection terminated. She didn't allow any of her worries or fears to cloud her judgment knowing that her family the Lancasters would endure as they had since that rainy day in 1733 when they'd landed on the shores of Savanna.

She'd tried to be as polite as conditions had allowed as she drove to her shop only having to shove or threaten a few little cars into submission. "It's the Big dog's prerogative to push it's way to the bowl" she could remember hearing pop-pop telling her while forcing his way into traffic.

Soon she was backing into the the trailer to hitch it up and once that was done running in and our of the little mechanic's shop she'd rented to load truck an trailer. She didn't have a lot of food, perhaps enough to last a couple of weeks if she didn't find game or fish to supplement the mostly dried beans and rice which a lack of water could prove problematic.

Then she topped off her two 40 gallon tanks to make sure that range wouldn't be as important a factor. Then that done she climbed into her truck cab an flipped open her laptop and selected a 32 gig stick and inserted it.

The stick had been one of her brother Todd's more useful going away present as it contained a huge map file which she'd Used to navigate from Georgia to LA. It could work with or without GPS though it was more efficient with a satellite connection. She knew from her three hour ordeal driving from the loading dock to her shop that the main roads and secondaries would be choked so she studied it very carefully then made the decision to stay put for at least a day. Her decision was based on the fact that like after a Georgia Tech football game the cars leaving would cause more trouble in the beginning than if she patiently waited.

She was relatively safe from whatever was going on because the shop was surrounded by an 8 foot number 9 chain link fence topped in razor ribbon. She didn't know when she picked the shop for it's security against intrusion that it would serve as a disaster refuge. So she hopped out and decided she'd eat the perishable foods she hadn't packed.

She felt a. bit silly as well as safer walking around the second story office of her mechanic's shop with her Browning semiautomatic 12 gage slung over her shoulder and her Colt at her hip.

She didn't have long to wait for her first crisis and it was in fact an expected one; the power failed. She figured it was due to an accident knocking down a pole but no matter it's cause she required electricity to maintain her security systems and general comfort both of which were critical to helping her maintain a sense of well being in view of the present disaster.

She went down stairs and cranked the salvaged diesel generator she'd rebuilt from a trailered construction power plant. It purred to life as expected then once it showed it was operating in a sustainable condition she flipped the power supply of her shop from city to remote after which she did a check of the property.

She was stunned later to hear on the TV that the city had lost it's collective mind as a pandemic of some sort swept through the population. Then two hours later the local broadcast was replaced by a military officer declaring Martial law.

Once the military was in control of communications the reports became more orders and repetitive so Tina headed down to her fuel plant and started cooking up her last batch of vegetable oil into bio fuel. She estimated she'd get about a 127 gallon yield from the plant which she could transfer to the empty plastic 5 gallon bladders and put atop the trailer an in the truck bed; all in all she figured she could make her escape with about 300 gallons of fuel if she wanted but only had enough stowage for about 230. At 15 miles to the gallon and figuring in idling delays the Beast had a 3,000 mile top range.

She heard one of her alarms chirp and pulled up her pad an saw it was on the street gate so she chose the facing camera and studied the image for a moment seeing four people attacking someone on the ground.

So she checked her shotgun to make sure it was loaded and secured her ammo bag on her opposite hip from her Colt 1911.

She was well aware of the six and a half pounds of weight split between gun, shells and the three clips at the small of her back and was thankful that she'd bought her weapons belt with suspenders.

What she found when she approached the scene was that the attack was breaking up their victim dead. 

Then she saw that each of the attacker's looked like they'd survived attacks as well. At first the horrid condition of them made Tina want to shot them but her brothers and other teachers in her family had taught her that in every dangerous situation where a gun was critical to survival to waste ammunition was to waste chances.

They were gross to look at but informative and what she saw filled her with dread that Todd was right, the dead were moving around. She knew this because one woman hade her throat torn open at the jugular and the volume of blood on her shirt showed she'd bled out.