The man stood silent for a minute or so before responding to her, her words swirling around his mind.

"Amnesia..." He finally said, his tone tinted with sympathy.

[i]She must really be telling the truth. If this were some sort of trap or trick it would have been sprung by now. Still though, I'll keep my guard up until I have heard more from her. [/i]
He thought to himself.

He turned and walked across the room toward a raggedy looking recliner chair.
He slowly lowered himself into it and laid his shotgun across his lap.

He motioned his hand toward the couch nearby and spoke to her,"You might want to have a seat, for I have some shocking...revelations, for you. And this story is going to take a while."

He shifted himself comfortably as he could in the ragged, spring ridden chair.

"So,"he said,"I'm not even sure how to break this to you gently, so I am just going to be blunt about it; the world has ended. Civilization has fallen. Mankind is back to the food chain again, at least, what bit of food chain there is left. It all began about six months ago, when the outbreak happened, when that godforsaken Virus first appeared and spread like wildfire across the world. [b]Omega-13[/b], that is what they called it, they being the politicians who swore we would be safe, and the hundreds of thousands of scientists who pledged to find a cure. It was all lies. By the time the death toll was in the millions, and the scientists all had absolutely nothing to show for their weeks of testing and experimenting, we all knew there was no hope."

He stopped his story for a minute, allowing what he had said so far to sink in, and to see if she had questions.