Do you remeber frozen microwave pizza? dear god that stuff was good. At least i remember it was. I havent had one in a long time. Totinos party pizzas. Like 3 for 10 bucks if i remember right. It will be a long ass time before we ever see anything like that again. Shit, it'll be a long time before we ever see a supermarket again.

well back to the past.


The third day dawned cold. it was probably 20 degrees outside if you were lucky. Both Jay and i slept in the living room near the heater. He slept on the couch and i dragged a mattress from the spare bedroom and put it on the floor. I was up early checking the windows for visitors but Jay slept until almost 9AM. I let him. He had suffered hard yesterday and still fought like a wildcat. "He'll do to ride the river with." i thought to myself. Guys like Jay are hard to come by. Smart as a MIT grad but with 1000 times more common sense. Got a backbone like titainium and guts of solid rock. Good man to have at your side when the going got rough. He stirred and opened his eyes.

"What time is it?"

"After 9AM. You looked like you needed sleep."

"Damn straight." He got to his feet and streched. "that fall yesterday sure tweaked me up." He popped his back and streched again. I tossed him a bottle of Aleve.

"that'll cut the worst of it. Dont worry about taking too many, i got plenty."

the fridge was still cool enough to provide drinkable apple juice and he washed down three pills. the milk had gone sour and i had eaten what leftovers were still good. Before long if it wasnt left outside where it could freeze it wouldnt be any good.

"does the water still work?" Jay asked. I glumly shook my head.

"theres botteled water to drink and boxes of baby wipes to clean up with. no showers or baths for now im afraid. If you need the bathroom theres a five gallon camp toilet in the shower. it works but its kinda ripe. i didnt get a chance to dump it yesterday. i poured in a little bleach to cut the smell but its still bad."

jay nodded. "better that that crapping on the floor."

I grinned. Jay took a lantern and closed the bathroom door. It was dark in there with no electricity.

Today we needed to come up with a plan. We needed more supplies if we wnated to hunker down for the rest of the winter or we need more survivors and wheels if we wnated to bug out. the river wasnt frozen yet we couldnt head west, but Jay had family east that had potential. if they werent already dead and reanimated.

We talked for hours. Hashing plan after plan. if all came down to information. we knew that we were potentially the only survivors of a town of 3500. two of us. Potentially a .1 percent survival rate. that would make the odds of any of our family surviving extremly remote. i had seen smoke from other places in town but had not investigated. i had also seen the signs of other taking from stores as well. Jay knew what happened to his close family (we werent going that direction agian and purposly gave her place of work a wide berth) but i didnt. If they made it, they made it. It would make no difference if i went hauling ass across the praire on some sort of rescue mission as if i stayed in place. We had plenty of supplies in town and now that the nights were below freezing, the dead heads were corpse-sicles until spring. then we would find out of whatver reanimated them could survive being frozen for a few months.