The Great Wreck Read Free Page A

                                   (Redacted)
    Incubation
Time:                                 (Redacted)
    Time of
first confirmed infection:       Injection
time +36 hours
    Subject
lost:                                         Injection
time +72 hours
    Confirmed
by:                                     (Redacted)
    Initiate
antiviral procedures:                (Y/N)?
    Initiate
antiviral procedures:                (Y/N)?
    Initiate
antiviral procedures:                (Y/N)?
    Signal lost.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    The First Days

 
                I was sitting the in parking lot of the
local supermarket when they came. I had been hearing about them for weeks:
marauding bands of people with some sort of disease, something like rabies the
news folks said. They’d get together in groups and riot or start getting up the Dickens as my mom used to
say, rushing around, biting others. Stories on the internet spoke of
cannibalism but I didn’t believe that. The police had a curfew and these riots
or outbreaks or whatever they were seemed far away. And we needed toilet paper.
                So I sat in my old, beat up ‘92 ford
pickup truck waiting form my sixteen year old daughter, Georgiana, who of
course we all called Georgie, to get the TP, water, food, and whatnot watching
the weird people drift in and out of the parking lot or the other people in
their cars next to me waiting, like me for their partner to finish up getting
the groceries so we could all get the hell out of town and back to our homes.
No one was getting up the Dickens here as far as I could see.
                It was warm and my truck didn’t have
any air conditioning so I had both windows open. An irritable hot breeze blew
in from the west doing absolutely nothing to cool me down. The fancy young lady
in the car next to me had her engine running and the windows rolled up. I could
almost imagine the cool air blasting from her dashboard keeping her as cool as
a cucumber. My truck was a good deal higher than her little sports coup, so I
got a serious eyeful looking down into her driver’s seat. She was a real
looker: short, black hair pulled back into a pert ponytail, tight white tank
top that clung to her body it was like a second skin, and cutoff shorts that
would surely violate some local morality ordinance if they were any shorter.
She had pretty blue eyes and a small button nose and was a good twenty years younger
than me. Somebody’s young wife, girlfriend, or such waiting in her pretty
little car without a care in the world. She looked up and saw me gawking. I
tried to smile and play it off: just looking around, ya’ see, and you happened
to look up at me at the right time kinda thing, yuck yuck, but she was having
none of it. She gave me a little sneer while cocking her head up and pulled her
tiny shorts down a bit. They wouldn’t go any further down and immediately rode
back up the top of her legs but the message was clear: quit your perving out at
me, grandpa. I blushed and looked the other way at some homeless guy working
his way down the line of cars to my right.
                This guy was a real wreck, not one
of your nicely dressed bums you see standing on every corner nowadays. His
cloths were filthy, torn, and threadbare draped in layer upon layer of
mismatched and ragged shirts and jackets covered by some type of robe or poncho
that must have been in continuous use for decades. I could imagine what he must
have smelled like. Something like a mixture of gasoline, old sweat, and rancid
grease. He was tapping on the window of any vehicle that was occupied. I
calculated he’d reach my truck in about five minutes. I’d start up the old girl
and move before he came into