Serene dreams in a chaotic world. Pt 7 already!!

Pedal mashed to the floor, we drove straight through the horde of zombies. To be honest, it was like surfing in a sea of dead folks. Some with arms gone, some with half of their faces missing. All of their eyes glazed over at various stages of undeath... some were pure white, some with the yellowing that occurs shortly after the white phase, others still were rotting right out of their skull. Either way, they were all staring intently on their fleshy prizes awaiting them inside the truck- the fleshy prizes I would deny them on this day. I kept driving, and handed back my bag to Kelsey. "Get the molotovs out of there" I instructed to her. She got a worried look on her face, but did as she was told. Kelsey and I had played many first person shooter games before (most of them being zombie related), and she knew the power of a molotov on a video game. My idea was to burn some of the fuckers down, if not all of them. I know throwing fire on zombies wasn't going to stop them, but it would help slow them down. The man in the seat next to me looked a tad worried, like he wasn't so sure of my idea either. "What are you going to do? If you open that window we're done for. They are going to get you....... there's no way around it." I looked up. Thankfully we had put a moon roof in the truck about three months before the first sign of outbreak. It was a manual open one too, just slide it open. He looked up as well, and knew what I was proposing. After all, I was driving, and really couldn't throw it accurately myself. He said "I have a better idea." and took out his own bag. Opened the front of the hiking pack, took out some sort of explosive devices. "These should work a little better than fire." he said, opened the moon roof and chucked two of them out into the street ahead of us. "You might want to hit reverse" he said, and I did. We were going blindly backwards when it detonated. There was two flashes, and the sound was loud. Not deafening, but loud enough to make anyone's ears ring. There was a massive wave, as the horde lurched with the explosion, and bodies started to disintegrate around us. I was afraid the truck was going to melt under the heat of the bomb, but no melting occurred. The truck just rocked a little. He reached over, threw the truck into Drive, and we sailed over the burning parts laying on the street. We were out of the horde. "That was great! What the hell was that??" I asked him. He just looked at me and smiled. "I don't kiss and tell." was all he said. Pedal still to the floor, I kept driving. We had to make some sort of time, had to get to safety. We were still 59 miles from the Rocks, and if we decided to get a boat we would have to search. My plan was if we needed a boat, to get the biggest boat we could possibly find so we could get as many supplies on board as it could carry.

The stranger startled me out of my thoughts. "You may want to slow down just a tad. This beast isn't going to grow wings and fly any time soon." he said. I looked down and realized I had let the speedometer creep in excess of 100 miles per hour. I let off the gas, and glanced in the back seat. The kids had fallen fast asleep. They were leaned on each other, with Kelsey leaning on Fred. It was actually a moment in which I forgot we were in the middle of hell, and really wished I had my camera still. Sadly enough, it was broken when I was almost attacked at one point. "Caden." He said one word. I almost didn't hear him at first,
it took a second to realize that the man had just told me his name. "Nice to meet you Caden. I'm Dawn. The kids in the back are Kelsey, Kayla and Liam. The dog is Fred." He reached over and grabbed my hand to shake it. Shook it gently, and released.

We rode in silence for the next twenty miles. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Caden looking at me every now and then. A question played on his mind, and he wasn't asking me for some reason. This went on for another five miles before I spoke up. "Ok. I know something's on your mind. What's up?" He looked
like he was thinking for a second, playing the conversation over in his head. He cleared his throat, and shifted uncomfortably. "Where....... where is the childrens' father?" he finally asked quietly. "He was bitten." was all I said. He seemed to understand, and sat quietly for a few minutes longer. When he
spoke again, I almost had to strain to hear him. "It was when the virus first showed. I had a son, he was about Kayla's age." he paused, took in a deep breath. It was hard to talk about for him and I could tell there was going to be a bad ending to this story. "His name was Alex. When they started putting people at
Camp St. Theresa, he was moved there. He and my girlfriend. I was mandated to stay at work. They wrote to me, about how horrible it was there. I got the letters in a way that the military couldn't read it. Typical child game. Write on a piece of paper with another under it, then send the blank one. I just colored with a crayon over it so I could read it. Usually they would talk about how aweful it was there. People going into their rooms and not coming out, and the horrible noises at night. It was heart wrenching reading the letters. They were terrified." He paused again, getting his bearings. When he spoke again, he had a distant look in his eyes. He was reliving the events he was about to speak of. "Then one day, the letters stopped coming in. They just stopped. I went to St. Theresa,but they couldn't do anything. They were freaking out about losing some of the infected. It was then that I saw Alex, and my girlfriend. Undead. No recognition of love or memory. Just their dead eyes." He looked out the window. "I'm so sorry." was all I could get out of my mouth. I knew what he had lost, what he had felt. I knew the look he was talking about in their eyes. We were quiet the rest of the way to Pictured Rocks.