"I'm not a nurtitionist," Abby said, eyeing the men moving bodies out of the building,  She was going to need to find out where they were taking those.  She had some questions about the rate of decomposition - not to mention that she needed to collect more specimins.

"I think I said that wrong.  What I meant was I've spent most of my life in the bush, and I've made a point of knowing that I can eat.  I can find edible plants, mushrooms, shellfish, all kinds of nutritious and delicious things.  So when the IMPs and canned baby corn or whatever the Walmart run comes up with are running out, I'll be happy to be teaching anyone who wants to learn to forage to do so."

She checked a few of the open lockers until she found a clean one - number forty-three.  She placed her backpack inside, careful of the contents.  It felt wonderful to have even the limited security of four thin metal walls again.  Not for the first time, she wished she had a car instead of arriving on foot.  

"Thank you for letting me share your laboratory.  I'm not a medical doctor, but I have some questions that need answering about this whole "zombie" plague and I figure a scientist is ascientist, right?"

She locked her locker and turned to face the Japanese sergeant.  "But I think you have some misapprehensions about how this apocalypse thing is going to play out.  As of two weeks ago, we're back in the dark ages.  We've got no electricity - even if we find enough gas to run the generator, it'll have gone stale in a year or two and be no use to us.  We've got no infrastructure for mass production of food, either.  At least three quarters of everyone is dead.  Even if the rabids were gone tomorrow, we're going to have a monumentally hard time just keeping basic life running.  There's never been a disaster like this.

"So, what I'm saying is, everyone's going to have to pull their weight.  Your soldiers are great at what they do, and they're a far sight better than some civillian with a hammer, I agree."  She patted the hammer at her side.  "But we're going to have a lot of other things that need doing.  We're going to need people bringing in water from that lake; we're going to need people watching the children; before long we're going to have to start farming if we want to stay alive.  And we're going to need craftspeople, construction workers fortifying our settlement, we're going to need to find out of there are other survivors out there we can trade with.  There isn't going to be any room for just being alive and happy, Sergeant."