Amazed that they still held a charge, and hoping that it would last through his hair cut, he started buzzing his head. He clipped the sides and back first, leaving a Mohawk strip down the center of his head. A little of Kelly's mousse stood the strip straight up, and for the next hour, Ryan paraded around his house feeling like a bad-ass. In his garage he found his old halligan. It was a half crow-bar and half axe; the tool was left-over from his days as a volunteer fire-fighter the summer before he left for college. He stood in the mirror and admired himself, and for a minute, thought maybe he should start a journal.

"I could call it "Ryan's Undead Diary,"" he said out loud and laughed. He allowed himself to laugh for a long time before deciding that it was time to get moving before he did anything else ridiculous. He set the halligan down on the entry table and went back upstairs to remove the rest of his Mohawk. He didn't want people to see him and think he was some hoodlum.

Just after sunrise, Ryan stepped into the garage and rummaged through years of collected sports equipment. He donned a black plastic chest and spine protector; a hold-over from riding motocross all over the mountains as a teenager, and the matching black motorcycle helmet.

From a huge blue and white duffel bag, he put on his old football shin, thigh, and kidney pads, and then strapped a pair of soccer shin-guards around his forearms. Finally, from the rack of metal shelves by the door, he pulled out his softball bat. It was used in the yearly "Staff Vs Seniors" school softball game. The staff lost every year, but it was great for the kids. He felt a pang of sadness as he realized that he would never participate in another game.

Ryan rolled the garage door open, and moving quickly, pushed his old 4wheeler out onto the driveway and closed the garage. The battery was long-dead, so he pulled the choke and looked around him. Kelly was on the opposite side of the driveway, and had started towards him. He yanked on the cord, the old Honda sputtered and died. Kelly was now seventy-five feet from him.

He pulled again, heard the motor turn over on its own a couple of times and then it died again.

"Come onnn, baby," he said, yanking the cord a third time. Kelly was closing quickly, less than fifty feet away. Once again the engine sputtered, sounded like it might catch, and then died.

Ryan pushed the choke in and pulled it back out, reached down and ripped the cord one more time, yanking with all his might. The engine sputtered, missed a few times, but kept going. Kelly was twenty five feet away. He hopped on the quad and gave it a little gas. The engine bogged down, not ready to run yet, so he quickly let off the throttle. Seconds passed as Kelly closed the distance. When she was ten feet away, Ryan tried the throttle again, and the engine responded.

He shoved the choke in, hit the thumb lever to put it in first gear, let out the clutch and gunned it down the gravel driveway, spraying rocks out behind him. Kelly's cold, outstretched fingertips brushed his helmet as he roared past. Ryan rode down the mountain with tears running down his face. He was grateful for the black-out visor on his helmet. To be so close to her and so afraid of her at the same time was torture. He had to find some people, or next time he might not come back from his depression.

It was a beautiful summer day. The temperature was in the mid-eighties, and the sun was shining. Even with the heat, Ryan was glad he'd opted for long sleeves. After being cooped up in the house for so long, sunburn would have been a guarantee. The quad rolled along about thirty miles per hour, making good time down Highway 7 towards the city of Gander Valley.

At the corner of Highway 7 and 613, he made a right, and rode the four miles into town. It was weird being out on the road on a quad, and even weirder not seeing a single thing moving. Usually this road was packed with cars. The houses along the highway were all overgrown and the grass in the yards had all grown tall and spindly. Every fourth or fifth house was boarded up. Some of them had the boards torn down but some of them still looked sealed. The ones that looked sealed up would be the most promising houses.

At the edge of the town proper, the speed limit dropped to twenty five, and Highway 613 became Valley Street. Two blocks later, he pulled the quad into an old 1950's strip mall and stopped at the front door of Thornton's Hardware.

His family and the Thornton's went way back. Mr. Thornton was a little older than Ryan's grandfather, and the two of them had practically built this town together. When times were tough for Ryan's family, Mr. Thornton always extended them a line of credit for whatever they needed to make it until the harvest. In addition to always paying back the loans, the Fullerton's kept the Thornton family well fed; no Thornton ever paid for produce at the local farmers market.

Ryan removed his helmet and cupped his hands to the window, peering inside. He was looking for any sign of movement or struggle, but with the power out, it was so dark inside that he couldn't see more than a foot or two inside the glass.

The armored man pushed on the door and was relieved to find it unlocked, although the sound of the brass bells hanging from the handle sounded as loud as the bells of Notre Dame in the silence. With a cringe, he wrapped his hands around the bells to silence them. Ryan tightened his grip on his bat and stepped inside the store, gently closing the door behind him.

Ryan grew up in this store. All through middle school and the first year of high school, he spent most of his free time sitting on a stool behind the counter talking to Charlotte Thornton. When they were little, they roamed the shelves, playing hide and seek or tag, but later Charlotte's father put them to work stocking the shelves, probably at the behest of Ryan's father. Ryan never got paid for the work he did at Thornton's, he considered the time he spent with Charlotte payment enough.

The two of them shared their first kiss at MacDougal pond, laying in a field of dandelions on a day much like this so many years ago. Ryan was convinced the two of them would get married, until the middle of their freshman year of high school when Charlotte met that moron Josh Binghamton. Josh and Charlotte started dating, and she virtually never spoke to Ryan again. Ryan was crushed, and swore off women until he met Kelly, and his life was completed.

He crouched and moved slowly, keeping his head below the shelves. If there was something in here, there was no reason to let it know where he was. He scoffed at himself. The bell on the door was like a damn dinner bell. Bon appetite. Even though it was pointless, he kept his body low. It made him feel better.

Due to the years spent in the store, there was no question in Ryan's mind where he was going. He crouch-walked down the center aisle to the third row, then halfway down the third row he stopped and picked all five rolls of duct tape off the bottom shelf. On the way out, satisfied that he hadn't heard any noises inside the hardware store, he stopped at the front counter.

Thornton's was an old-fashioned store. You paid at a bar rather than a conveyor belt. At one end of the bar was an old fashioned cash register, one of the first electronic types. Ryan set the rolls of duct tape on the counter and opened the first one. He tore off five strips, each about eighteen inches long, and stuck them up and down his chest protector. He put one more strip down each forearm, and two strips down each thigh. When he was finished, he put the remaining half-roll in the cargo pocket of his canvass work pants and pulled out his wallet. He dropped a twenty on the counter, and slid a pen and paper over. On the paper he wrote: 5 Rolls of Duct Tape @ $3.49 each.

God Speed, Thorntons. Ryan He slid the paper under the cash, and tucked both under the edge of the cash register. Even in these times, taking the tape felt a little like stealing. Just before he left, he stopped at the information rack and pulled out a three-fold map of the city of Gander Valley.

Chapter 4.

Ryan rode his quad to the far side of town, towards the newest subdivision. It was a fancy place. A huge brick wall surrounded the entire subdivision. The area even had a pool and a golf course. He passed the guard shack, where normally he'd have to tell the guard his name and which family he was visiting, and pulled onto the circular road that followed the edge of the central lake.

He drove to the back of the subdivision, all the way on the far side of the lake and parked his quad. His plan was to move like a postal worker, parking the quad on the corner, walking down one side and up the other looking for survivors.

"Special delivery for Ms. Watson," he muttered to himself.

It was odd that he hadn't seen a single infected person on the entire trip. He figured, when he was making his plans, that he'd see dozens of them wandering out on the street. Kelly had survived outside this long; it didn't make any sense that there weren't any others.

"Quit stalling, Ryan," he said to himself as he turned to walk up the walkway to the first house. "It's gonna be fine. No one will be in there."

He knocked on the door, and called out, "Hello? Anyone home? I'm looking for survivors!" Ryan's hopes were momentarily up when he heard the sound of footsteps coming towards the door. He opened the glass front storm door and stood in the doorway waiting for the people to answer. Then there was a thump on the door, and some scratching. He waited, but it became very clear to him that there wasn't anyone uninfected inside.

"Shit. First house," he groaned. He knew he couldn't leave the infected in there. If they got out, they could bite someone else. He reached down and loosened the tape on his chest and then turned the knob on the door. He shoved the door, hoping to push the person back. It worked. As his eyes adjusted, he first saw a middle aged black woman in a ruined pant-suit moving towards him. The second thing that hit him was the smell. The house reeked of death. The stench almost knocked him off his feet as he tried to control the urge to vomit right there on the doorstep.

Almost out of instinct, he ripped the tape off of his chest and held it out horizontally in front of him. When the zombie crashed into him, he wrapped the tape around her head, sealing off her mouth. The length of tape made almost two complete wraps around her head. The two of them struggled; she was much stronger than Ryan had anticipated. She pushed him backwards into the door frame, bouncing his head off the edge of the doorway, cutting his scalp.

It wasn't a major cut, but the sight of blood on the door jamb seemed to excite her. Her foggy eyes got a little bigger, and her nostrils flared as she fought on. He finally got the tape secured over her mouth, and was able to use the wall to push himself off and gain the upper hand.

Ryan reached up and grabbed one of her hands, twisting it off of his neck. He ripped the strip of tape off his forearm with his other hand and wrapped it around the wrist he was holding. Once the tape was on one of her wrists, he deftly brought her other hand down and wrapped them together, rendering her almost completely harmless. He thought briefly about taping her feet together, but decided against it because he only had five rolls of tape. Instead, he shoved her backwards through the house to the powder room under the stairs to the second floor. Ryan pushed the woman into the small bathroom, closed the door and wrote "INFECTED INSIDE" on the outside of the door in big, black letters.

Then, he surveyed the rest of the first floor, deciding to start with the kitchen. Surprisingly, it was much cleaner than he'd expected. The closest thing to a sign that there was an apocalypse going on was an overturned chair at the eat-in table and a plate with a dried out waffle and a dark stain of what was probably syrup sitting on it.

He went through her cabinets and piled all the food on the counter before he moved through the den, office, dining room and living room. Ryan ascended the stairs, absently thinking about what nice carpet they had, like this was some kind of home tour. He refocused himself, and pushed open the first of four doors on the second floor. He assumed there were three bedrooms and a bathroom up here.

This bedroom appeared to be for a young teenage boy. Clothes, books, magazines, and other odds and ends covered every available surface, sometimes in layers of books on top of clothes, and sometimes the reverse.

The next bedroom was probably for a little girl, based on the pink bed linens and rainbow colored pony dolls that filled the shelf. This room was clean, and empty, so Ryan headed to the third. As he neared the third bedroom door, he realized that's where the smell was coming from. Ryan forced himself to open the door. Inside was a large master bedroom. Against the center, opposite wall was a king sized, mission style wooden sleigh bed with matching dresser, night stands and a huge chest of drawers.

Ryan sank to his knees right there in the doorway. On the far side of the bedroom there were three people sitting on the floor. A man, a young teenage boy, and a little girl, all three of them dead of gunshot wounds to the head. Ryan crawled closer. Something inside him needed to make sense of this horrific scene as tears flowed down his cheeks. The two children were sitting in the father's lap. His face was covered in blood, except for two streaks, where tears that were now long dried washed the blood away. Behind them, a white leather couch was coated in gore, with three spots where stuffing had exploded out of the back.

In one hand, the father had a gun, some kind of pistol, like a police officer would carry. His other hand was resting on his daughter's lap, with a bloody bandage wrapped around his arm.

There was no way to know for sure what happened in this house, but Ryan would have bet money that the bite mark under that bandage would fit the teeth of the woman downstairs. She'd bit her husband. He locked himself and the kids in the bedroom, and when he started to turn he shot his children and then himself.

The enormity of that wasn't lost on Ryan. As the woman thumped and banged in the bathroom downstairs, he sat and wept for this man and his family.

Chapter 5.

After only one house, Ryan rode home and locked himself in. It was just too much to deal with. That poor man and his children. He didn't sleep much; Ryan couldn't shake the images of their bodies from his mind. It was exactly a week before he was able to force himself to leave again. This time, he started the quad in the garage, so he didn't have to worry about Kelly coming for him.

Back in the neighborhood, he sat on the quad for nearly a minute looking at the house he'd been in the previous week, knowing what was inside. He could still see the white couch and he felt his stomach turn. Ryan shook his head and tightly set his jaw, refusing to get sucked into that again. He wrapped the 4-wheeler's tow-strap around their mailbox, put the powerful machine in gear and pulled their mailbox over. That was his signal to himself that he'd searched the house.

Every house on the street was inhabited by the infected. Not one single house had a living person in it. At the end of the day, he'd knocked over fourteen mailboxes and left thirty-four people duct-taped in their bathrooms. The worst house had had six people in it. Ryan had been forced to use his bat in that one, hitting one of the infected in the leg to slow them down while he taped up the rest of the family. He hoped that whenever there was a cure for this, that person's leg would heal up.

Over the next five weeks, Ryan finished the neighborhood. Out of one hundred forty-three houses, only fourteen houses were empty, not counting those that had for-sale signs in the yard. He lost count of the zombies somewhere in the middle, but riding home in the middle of September, he guessed there were somewhere near three hundred zombies.

The first house was the worst by far, but three other houses had tiny infected newborns. Ryan hadn't had the heart to tape them up; they lacked the muscle coordination to walk anyway, so he just left them laying silently in their cribs. Unless he came close, they didn't move. There was no kicking, no looking around. They just laid there. He thought the first one was dead until it reached for him; he was able to get within two feet of the first tiny infant boy before it realized he was there. It was horrifying and seeing them only reminded him of his own empty nursery back in his house. They were the embodiment of everything he had already lost. In those nurseries, he wrote the same "INFECTED INSIDE" on the doors and never looked back.

It was heartbreaking work, but he was determined to find survivors. Until day forty-seven of his search, it never occurred to him that in the tiny town of Gander Valley, survivors might not be so happy to see him. It was unseasonably cool for the beginning of fall. The high that day was only about forty degrees when he hopped off his quad and heard a gun-shot. The bullet hit the driveway just behind him, taking a large chip of the concrete with it.

Ryan threw up his hands and screamed, "I'm not armed! I'm not infected! Don't shoot!"

The next shot was a little closer. It looked like it was coming from a church steeple on the next block. He waved his hands in the air, trying frantically to figure out some way to pantomime that he was alive. The third shot was even closer, causing Ryan to give up and run as fast as he could around the back of the house.

In the back yard, there was a huge pile of trash under the kitchen window. There had to be more than a hundred black trash bags, which were buried under white grocery bags, and then finally, there was a layer of loose trash on top. Cans, cereal boxes, juice boxes, soda and beer cans littered the yard. He sneezed, uncontrollably, three times in a row, wiped his nose on his sleeve and approached the sliding door on the back of the house.

As he peered through the door, he heard a shout from behind him. "Get down on the ground, face down, hands behind your head." Without hesitation, Ryan dropped to his belly and put his hands on his head.

Six men ran up, each yelling at him. "Who are you!"

"Why are you by our house!"

"Identify yourself!"

"Don't fucking move!"

"Stay down!"

"What's your name!"

All of the voices barking orders, Ryan didn't know who to answer first, so he just started talking. "My name is Ryan Fullerton. I'm just looking for survivors. I've been alone since all this happened; I just wanted to know that there are other people out there. I've been looking for survivors for almost two months."

"Hey Tommy, I think this is the duct tape guy," said one man. Each of the men were dressed in all black tactical clothes, carrying military rifles. They were the kind with the big curved magazines hanging out the bottom. Ryan was more terrified of these guys than he was of the zombies.

"Yeah. I duct tape all the infected when I search a house. I don't ever take anything, I just round up the infected and inventory the food," Ryan said.

"Why would you do that?"

"Do what? Tape them up? So they can't bite anyone. So they can't infect anyone else."

"They're dead, dude. Walking corpses. Just shoot them in the head and put them out of their misery."

"I can't believe that. My wife..." Ryan stopped himself.

"Your wife was bitten? And you hope there's going to be a cure? All of our wives were bitten. There is no cure."

"Who are you? Why did you shoot at me?"

"You're in our territory. Can't have people stealing our food."

"I haven't taken anything. Let me go. I won't come back to this neighborhood," said Ryan.

"What if he's one of them smart ones, Tommy? We can't let him go in case he's one of them. Remember Ron? Ron was with us for a week before anyone figured it was him that took out Jonesy and Bill. What if he's a Ron?"

The man that ordered Ryan to get down spoke. "He's not one of them. He's just a dumbass." Then Ryan recognized the voice.

"Tommy Rivera? Graduated last year? Is that you? It's me, Ryan. I'm the guidance counselor. I helped you get into college."

"Oh shit," said Tommy. "Mr. Fullerton?"

"You know this guy?" asked one of the other men.

"Yeah, he was the college-man at school. Tried to make everyone go to college," Tommy replied.

"I didn't make anyone do anything. I just tried to help people. Have you seen Donte? He came by my house about two months ago," Ryan said, and slowly sat up.

"Donte Jackson? Not possible, man. Donte got bit on day one."

"Can't be. He came by my house. He said he was looking for survivors. We heard shots and he ran off before we could finish talking."

"Sorry about this, Mr. Fullerton," said Tommy as Ryan felt something hit the back of his head. His forehead bounced off the deck just before everything went black.

Chapter 6.

Ryan woke up shivering. It was raining, and he was soaking wet. He was lying face down on asphalt, but the only sensation he could discern was the pain in his head; as if someone was pounding on his forehead with a large sledgehammer.

He took an easy breath and tried to relax. He could feel water lapping at his mouth as he breathed, and the sound of rain was intensifying. He got to his knees and looked around; he was in the parking lot just outside Thornton's hardware. They moved him the whole way across the town and left him with nothing. His pockets were empty; his gear was all gone, except for his wallet. Ryan struggled to his feet and stumbled towards the store, looking much like a zombie himself. He opened the door, stepped inside out of the rain, and was immediately beset by a massive sneezing fit.

When he finished sneezing, his nose was stopped up and his headache was renewed. He was having trouble focusing on anything farther away than his hands, any time he tried to look across the store his vision was blurry.

Ryan knew there was a small kitchen and break room in the back of the store. With great effort, he slowly made his way back there. It had been a long time since he'd been in the stock room, but for twenty years there was an old gold couch with dark wood arms back there. There had always been an afghan on the back of the couch, and as a single bright spot in what was otherwise the second worst day of Ryan's life, it was still there. He stripped off his clothes, hung them up on a shelf, wrapped up in the old musty smelling blanket and went to sleep.

When he woke up, he had no idea what time it was, but he was still shivering uncontrollably. He felt his forehead; he was definitely running a fever. As if to punctuate the thought, he was seized by another uncontrollable sneezing fit.

"Shit. Just what I need, a cold," he said to himself. His throat was raspy and hurt. Still wrapped in the old crocheted blanket, he got up to check his clothes. Still wet, and now they were cold. It couldn't be more than fifty degrees in the store. Ryan laid back down on the couch and spent the next two hours drifting in and out of sleep. All at once, waves of nausea overtook him.

He bolted for the bathroom. On the way across the storeroom he debated whether he should sit or face the toilet. At the last moment he opted for sitting, and was grateful he did. The force of the explosion from his rear end was so intense it seemed as though it might lift him off the commode. At the same time, he reached for the trash bag, and hurled his innards at the liner. He vomited until his stomach was empty, and sat there until the lower half of his digestive tract stopped cramping. Liquid snot poured out of his nose. There was no sense in sniffing it back; it would have been like trying to keep half a cup of water in his sinuses.

Every time Ryan sneezed, various bodily fluids ejected from whatever orifice happened to be nearby. After half an hour on the toilet, he tried to get up. As soon as he stood, his bowels were seized in a horrible cramp, and he sat back down to repeat the entire process. This time there was nothing to vomit; he just dry-heaved over the trash can as diarrhea filled the bowl beneath him.

He had to get home. There was simply no other choice. Ryan knew he would die of dehydration or hypothermia here.