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Chapter 115


Who would have guessed that I – a hemophiliac with no wilderness survival skills whatsoever – would be one of the sole survivors of the zombie apocalypse? Certainly not me. If I had crunched the numbers back in the beginning, I would have said the probability of someone like me surviving long-term would be slim to none. The odds were stacked against me, yet here I am, still alive. Somehow, I survived.

It hasn’t been easy. There have been close calls, too many to count, but the fact that most of our original group has made it ten years speaks to our strength, in every sense of the word. We are strong – physically, mentally, emotionally, and collectively. As a group, we’ve never been stronger.

Slowly, we’ve started to rebuild and reestablish society. Our goal now is not just to survive, but to plan for the future, so that mankind can continue to survive long after we are gone. For too long, we were living in the moment, fighting for our lives every second, but finally, we can move forward. Even as we look back on the last ten years, we are also looking ahead at the decades to come.

I know there’s no guarantee we’ll all be around to see what the future brings. The world is still a dangerous place, especially for someone like me. But life is a gift, and I don’t want to waste one day of the time I have left.



Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Ten years after Infernal Friday

Howie sat in the supply room of the base infirmary. He examined his fingernails curiously as he wound a strip of fabric around his finger. They were overgrown and grimy-looking, with gray gunk embedded beneath the once-white crescents projecting past his fingertips.

There was a time - over ten years ago now, he realized - when he had kept his nails clean and impeccably trimmed. Once a week, he’d paid for a professional manicure and hand massage at the finest Vietnamese nail salon in Orlando. His hands had been almost baby-soft and so very smooth. Now they were rough with calluses that had built up over a decade of doing the kind of manual labor he had once detested. No amount of soap seemed to be able to remove the dirt from underneath his nails now, yet he rarely clipped them, knowing even a hangnail could cause him to bleed or contract an infection. He couldn’t be too careful, now that all of their antibiotics and clotting drugs were long past their expiration dates. Selena had been experimenting with making her own herbal remedies out of plants and fungi, but Howie wasn’t about to become her lab rat.

“Here’s another one,” said Selena, tossing him a fresh wad of fabric from the t-shirt she was shredding to make bandages. Howie finished rolling his first, tucking the end neatly into the wrapped bandage before adding it to the stock on the shelf in front of him, then started on his second.

For a while after the dead had stopped walking, the survivors had enjoyed a surplus of medical supplies, but as the decade wore on and more babies were born, their stock had started to diminish. It helped to have homemade bandages on hand now that there were five little kids bumping around the base. Skinned knees and scraped elbows occurred almost daily, but on that day, it was one of the overgrown kids who needed patching up.

“AJ!” Howie heard Selena gasp, and he looked up to see her husband being half-carried, half-dragged into the infirmary by Kevin and Gabby. “What in the bloody hell’s happened to you?”

Howie followed her into the next room, where AJ, grimacing in pain, hobbled to the examining table and hoisted himself on. “Got ambushed by a gator on my hunt.”

Selena, who was usually so hard to rattle, gasped again. “Did it get you? Did it bite you?”

“No.” AJ smirked. “I got it,” he replied grimly, pulling back on an imaginary bowstring. “Arrow through the eye. But... I jacked up my bum leg again in the process.” He gritted his teeth as Selena gingerly rolled up his left pant leg, revealing an ankle that had swollen to double its normal size.

Howie blanched at the sight of it, imagining how much it must hurt. “Hey, at least you still have it,” he joked, earning a weak chuckle out of AJ. They both remembered how close he had come to losing that leg after his fall from the tree. He would always walk with a limp, but at least his broken leg had healed without becoming infected. Between that and the zombie bite that had also failed to infect him, Howie was starting to believe AJ was invincible. The trouble was, AJ seemed to believe it, too.

“You’ve got to start being more careful,” Selena scolded, as she prodded his inflamed ankle. “You’re a father now; you can’t keep going out and almost getting yourself killed. Imagine if I had to explain to our daughter how her dad’s been eaten by a bloody alligator!”

She was being serious, but Howie couldn’t help it; he started to laugh and was quickly joined by Kevin, Gabby, and even AJ himself.

“Relax, babe. The only one getting eaten is that alligator. By us. Tonight.” AJ grinned triumphantly. “Kev here hauled his carcass into the plane before he and Gabs flew me back - you can thank them for finding me, by the way. I figured Gretchen could fry him up for our feast tonight.”

“Ugh, gross,” said Gabby, wrinkling her nose.

Selena sighed in exasperation. “Wiggle your toes for me?” AJ complied, wincing again as she gently rotated his foot from side to side. “Well, looks like you got lucky again - it seems to be sprained, but not broken. I’d better wrap it.” She looked over her shoulder at Howie. “Guess we’ll be needing those bandages.”

Howie shook his head. “I swear, you’ve got more lives than a cat, AJ,” he said, as he went back into the supply room to fetch some freshly-rolled strips of fabric.

AJ laughed, as Selena set about immobilizing his ankle. “It ain’t just me, bro. I think we all do.”

Howie had to agree.