The K-Town Outbreak

The call came in just 2 hours before the end of my shift. We had one last sweep and clear run to make before we could knock off for the day. Great. No biggie I suppose. What's another few hours tacked on to an 18hr patroll right?

I sent word to the squad and we diverted from the road home to the eastern most range of our secure zone. A place called K-Town.

The brass had issued the evac order of the villiage about a month ago but reports had come down that confirmed both creature sightings and a few survivors. Our job was to police both groups. Get the good guys home safe and clean out the bad guys. Just another day at the office.

This time out though what we found threw us off. And let me tell you, this group of hard chargers was not easily thrown. Most of us had seen action long before the outbreak. And all of us had seen a hell of alot of action since. Not much made any of my boys nervous. But this did. The town was... clean.

Most hot spots will have debris or the look of a tornado strike or at least a good firefight. But this place was erie. No signs of combat. No blood. No bodies. Hell there wasn't even a god damned candy wrapper on the ground.
The squad figured the Bio-Haz boys had already done a mop job. I let them think that. But I knew better. I had seen this kind of thing before. This was a starter colony. This was one of the towns where the outbreak began. This was one of the towns where the Government first dropped the Gas. This was the worst place in the world to be.

I told the boys to stay frosty and we moved out to sweep. It wasn't long before we encountered movementt. The town was made up of standard housing units with an adjacent packing facility where most of the former residants had worked. If only those poor bastards knew what was in the air when the clocked in everyday.

While there were pleanty of spots a goul could jump out from the bastards aren't really all that stealthy. So if you get one on your six and he's able to get teeth in you then you pretty much desrve to die. But that wasn't the case this time. Within minutes we saw them. They were all out in the open. They hadn't even caught our scent yet. It was a turkey shoot. 18 creatures popped up and 18 creatures went right back down to hell. Nice and clean. Hell I don't even think we got any blood on our unies.

As we were getting ready to pack it in and give the all clear, we spooted more movement near the packing facility. Jackobson and I went to check it out. What we found would have sent a cold chill down the spine of even the roughest roughneck out there.

We came around the far western corner of the packing facility near one of it's smokestacks and found a goul face down, twitching a bit, with a lead pipe taking up the area that it once used to hold an eyeball. And standing over the mess was a little girl of no more than 5 or 6 years old. She just looked at us. No fear, no relief, nothing. She just looked at us.



I tolder her my name and took a few steps closer to her. She made a move for the lead pipe and I stopped. I asked the kid her name but she didn't answer. Then from behind me I heard a voice say "It's Betty."

Jackobson and I wheeled around and trained our weapons on..get this..another kid. This one was around 15 and claimed to be the girls brother. He was a bit more talkative but no more happy to see us than Betty had been.

He told us that they had watched their mother being torn apart by gouls several weeks ago and had been hiding out here ever since. That was about all he was willing to share with us.

When we offered to take them back to base camp the boy declined insisting they would be safer there than with us. What really got me was what the boy told me "No disrespect sir but if Betty and me stay together here we'll probably out live you."

The funny thing is, that between the zombies, gang factions, road pirates, and government idiots, the kid was probably right.