Bar Harbor, Maine

George W. Bush is widely considered the worst president in American history. His formerly leftist political leanings aside right now, Thomas Luke was desperately thankful that Georgey had let the ban on assault weapons expire. The 16th casing spun out of the receiver of his Sig Sauer 556, and if its firer had cared to pay attention he would have noted the think trail of smoke still wafting from it's neck, held in place by the damp, chill air of the Maine dawn. Luke's ears rang slightly as the dull roar of the weapon's report faded into the foggy morning, replaced by the thumping of the zombie's body hitting the pavement. Were it not for restored glory of the 2nd amendment, he would have needed to reload after his tenth shot, a delay in the life saving, recently habitual cycle of aiming at a shambler's forehead and squeezing the trigger. There had been twelve of them, coming for him with wounds whose blood had darkened their sallow skin to a ghoulish maroon, desiring nothing more than to rip into him with their jagged yellowed teeth, rending clunks of his still living flesh before he succumbed to whatever nightmare pathogens flooded their saliva and blood, rising shortly thereafter to join in their demented search for food. Speaking of, it was time for breakfast. Luke headed for his favorite place in town, slinging his rifle over his back.

Ever since the concern in the media had shifted from the Swine Flu to its more fearsome cousin, Acute Delusional Cannibal Syndrome, getting a table at the Harborside Hotel was a lot easier for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that some lunatic had crashed a Jeep Wrangler through the front door. This precluded using it as a barricaded location, but since the power was inexplicably still on and the place had stockpiled massive amounts of frozen ingredients in preparation of the tourist season, Luke had been eating like a king. He wasn't sure if anyone who wasn't dead was left in town; it was probably safe to assume that at least a few hardy, solitary souls were eking out a living in the dense forests that grew on the slopes of the mountains to the town's south and east, but as far as Bar Harbor itself was concerned, he thought he was the only resident, just fine with him after spending unpleasant weeks doing his best to avoid the panicked masses as they fled north, bringing infection and violence with them in their hysteria. When he had first picked up his rifle in a completely looted Sam's Club, where he had found it strapped to some paramilitary whacko's partially eaten corpse, it had been far less weathered, not to mention used.

Luke had been planning to destroy the causeway onto the island for almost as long as he'd been there; the occasional pack of zombies that made its way into the deserted streets of town wasn't a major problem, but he suspected he'd have that attitude for only as long as it took for one for him to get bitten and thereby doomed by a ghoul he would fail to notice. Certainly he didn't need a road that was almost completely block by abandoned cars to be there in order to make a quick exit overland, since he could just walk out at low tide if the necessity arose. There were entire cases of plastic explosives in the wreckage of National Guard humvees at the town's exits, which he had neglected to do anything with aside from making sure the doors were closed as securely as they could be. A little effort digging up the pavement and then letting her rip would certainly keep anything lacking the dexterity of a living person from getting in via the road, and a satisfying blast would pair well with some choice whisky as one took in a nice sunset...

The unaccustomed and almost incomprehensible noise of a two-stroke engine pulling up to the hotel snapped Luke out of his whimsical breakfast. With reflexes honed by necessity he he abandoned his danish (no doubt intended for some fat tourist who would have paid $8.95 for it) and moved for the savaged entrance, his rifle at the ready. He could see around the holes in the structure that what he had taken for a lawn mower was in fact a piece of shit Honda Civic, piloted by, it was revealed as she stepped out, an amazingly attractive blonde girl with an AKMSU. He shuddered at the boom it made, then swung his rifle scope's red to to see the very end of a zombie's final fall to the pavement.

“Do you have enough the share?” she called out, her voice muffled by the fog.