Day One (Book 3): Alone by Michael Mcdonald Page A

how did you plan on using my truck to get there? I mean that sounds a little sketchy, don’t you think? You even said yourself that you waited around for the broadcast, but never heard it again. I’d be willing to bet that if it were a real broadcast, then they would have played it more than once.” I said.
    “The broadcast said once you were on the interstate to head west, you’d see the signs,” he said pointing toward the interstate behind us. I didn’t take my eyes off of him.
    “There’s a sign a few hundred yards up with directions on it. We saw it a few hours ago and that’s why we came here, to get some food and not long after that you showed up. We thought your truck would be perfect, as we could load up as much of the shit in that store and take with us, that way they’d welcome us in for sure.” His words were still up in the air. “Besides, it beats where we were.”
    “And where was that?’ I asked.
    “A local place around here that I’d rather not go back to empty-handed,” he replied.
    I wanted to believe what he said was true. I wanted to believe it more than he did and head there this very instant, but like I had found out for myself in the past week, that there was no safe places anymore. It was all an illusion used by those that wanted nothing more than to take what wasn’t there’s and put you in the ground, and what better way to ensure you would reach a wide spread audience than to use a radio station to increase your victims. If the broadcast had really taken place that is. And that’s a might big if to begin with.
    I’m not saying that a few good people could put together a community and build walls around it to keep the undead out, but that would take a lot of cooperation. And cooperation between survivors was never and easy task to achieve. There were always one or two bad apples in the bunch that would do whatever they could to sabotage what the others were putting together. It was simply because those few bad apples had to be in charge or everything was stupid and wouldn’t work. It was people like that who ruined it for the rest of us and I despised them with a passion. There was also the virus or disease, whatever the hell this thing was. No one in their right mind he didn’t understand what was going on or how to spot the early symptoms of this would allow anyone to just enter into their perfect little town with no questions asked. I might have been dumb to some degree, but I sure as hell wasn’t stupid. There’s no way in hell these people were real and if they were, then going there would be no different than going to the high school where I had just recently escaped from.
    “What place?” I asked him.
    He shrugged his shoulders to me. “It really doesn’t matter now.”
    “There is no safety, kid. All of that shit went to hell when the rest of the world did,” I told him in an unfriendly tone.
    “But I heard it! I heard the damn broadcast with my own two ears,” he argued.
    “No, what you heard was a group of people hoping for easy and unsuspecting targets looking for any way out of the hell they are currently in. People taking full advantage of other’s with no intentions of helping them,” I told him. “You go there; they rob you, kill you, and bury you in a shallow grave… that’s the truth.”
    His expression changed and he looked hard at me. “What bad thing happened to make you this way, because you don’t strike me as a bad guy?”
    It was none of his business what had or had not happened to me. I was the way I was because of the Young Woman, because of Smith, and Officer Morris. I was this way because I had lost my family and the will to continue forward, yet here I was still pressing onward even though I really had no reason to do so. I could try and hide from the fact that my son was dead all I wanted to, but eventually I’d figure that out. Johnny and Kember were gone and I had a long way to go to get back to them, if they were even there.