Silence...

There's 10 of us up here on the 12th floor, overlooking what used to be Dayton Street and the rear entrance to the HQ of the Madison Fire Department. The trucks just sit there while papers blow by in the wind. Cars sit there, from that day they thought they could make it somewhere safer, anywhere.

They said people would be safe at the Dane County Coliseum by the Beltline Highway, that there would be madical help, food, a place to sleep. That too was overrun.

I look down on the street below from a room lit now by sunlight. The building's generator provides power for a couple of outlets in the hallway as well as the elevators. The silence kills me, how this all happened so fast in the space of a month, and how the flesh-eaters shuffling through the streets four weeks ago were just people thinking they're ahead of the game because the rent's paid three months ahead, the fridge is full and the car is topped off. Now they want to fucking eat me. Unreal. Sad.

In the living room of this apartment that was once home to someone that didn't want to eat me sits a box full of MRE's pilfered from a sporting goods store on the West Side. What tasteless shit will sustain me tonight? Well shit, I just looted a Starbucks, so there's at least good coffee percolating on the camp stove. Bob Seeger's "Turn the Page" plays softly from my I-Pod hooked up to some small speakers i snagged from a Walgreen;s when the shit hit the fan.

The ten of us actually get along though we met by chance. We try to keep each other's spirits up but in the back of our minds we know that even if this blows over tommorrow our friends, families, and co-workers aren't coming back to us. That we became looters and thieves in the space of a day just to stay alive is something we'll have to live with.

But hey, speaking of pilfering and stealing I have to head to the old city bus yard to get more diesel for the generator. I could have snagged something really awesome I guess to drive when the world ended but I stuck with a base '95 Toyota pickup, can't get too greedy I guess.

Sieze the tim