Chapter Text
"Get out the back, Pop is on his way. Go go go!"
I don't know why people listen to me...they just always have, for some reason. And this was one time that I was truly glad to see everyone around me jump to attention and do what the fuck I told them, because the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end and I knew, knew, something bad was going down.
When the first of the dead, undead, infected, whatever they were started ambling up the street toward the pub, I wished for once that feeling had been wrong.
My wife and oldest daughter headed straight for the back like I told them, grabbing up my two younger girls on their way through while my best friend brought up the rear, keeping his eyes on them like I knew he would. He didn't even have to be told - if I wasn't right there with them, he would be, and I knew without a second of doubt that if we all got separated somehow, he would protect my family to the death.
As I closed the blinds to the front windows and saw those strange sick monsters begin to fill the streets, I realized that to the death might not be such an unrealistic thing before long.
My father met us in the alley behind the pub with a truck and a pile of guns on the front seat that none of us questioned. It didn't even seem ludicrous at that moment, when we were all piling in and getting the kids buckled...at some point between slow dancing with my wife to Rod Stewart and the emergency sirens going off, everyone's perception of normal had changed, as quickly and smoothly as the flipping of a switch.
And just like that, our new reality became real.
All we could think to do was head to the mountains. The population was less dense, there was more wilderness than civilization, and our cabin seemed like a fairly solid place to hole up and wait the whole thing out. What we didn't know was that the epidemic had started at the northern coast, and Big Bear and Arrowhead had already been hit hard. But it didn't matter, because in just a matter of hours the entire state of California was taken down by this...whatever it was. We were slightly better off than everyone else, but not by much.
We were barely in the cabin long enough to load the guns and take up defensive positions before the infected started coming through the woods.
To be continued...