He’d been out of jail an hour when he found the gun store.

            It was in a strip mall outside of Sacramento, with a faded sign that proclaimed it was “Jackson Arms.” John found it by ripping a page out of the yellow pages at a phone booth, and he used what little money he had to get a cab out to the place.

            John had followed the news reports of what had happened in San Francisco roughly four years before. The electromagnetic pulse of the bomb had fried all the electronics for about 100 miles around San Francisco, so by the time they’d replaced the televisions John was eager for pictures of the city he called home. Newspapers described the demolition of the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge, and the hasty erection of a razor wire fence across the southern border of San Francisco. The official explanation was that whatever bomb that the terrorists detonated turned the inhabitants into murderous maniacs.

            That didn’t sound like any bomb John had ever heard of. He also didn’t buy the terrorist story.

            He had to get back to San Francisco. The only thing that he knew for sure was that his car was there, and that the town was full of raving lunatics that were killing each other. The only logical thing to do would be to take what money he had and buy a gun, then try to make his way back to San Francisco. He had no idea how he’d get there, but he had to try.

            Michael Jackson regarded the lanky kid with the shaved head suspiciously as he walked into the store. He’d considered closing up for the day to go target shooting at the range, but he had a strange feeling that this next customer would change his life. If there was anything that Mike Jackson needed, it was for his life to change.

            “Morning,” said Mike as John walked towards the gun case. “Can I help you with somethin’?”

            “Yeah,” said John. “I need to buy a gun, and quick.”     

            Mike eyed the kid even more suspiciously. “We do have to comply with the state’s waiting period, you know.”

            “How long is the waiting period?” asked John.

            “Ten days,” said Mike.

            “Wow. I might not have ten days,” said John.

            “What exactly do you need a gun for?” asked Mike.

            John was quiet, trying to think of a good excuse.

            “Are you afraid the zombies are all gonna come here from San Francisco?” asked Mike.

            “Zombies?” said John. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

            “Have you had your head under a rock?” asked Mike.

            “Honestly, I’ve been in jail,” said John.

            “No gun for you, in that case, “said Mike.

            “But I have to go to San Francisco!” said John. “My friends are there, my car is there!”

            “Your friends are dead, according to the Internet,” said Mike.

            “The Internet still works?” asked John.

            “Hell yeah,” said Mike. “And it’ll come as no big surprise to you that the official stories in the newspapers about people becoming maniacs and killing each other are total lies. Anyone with a computer can read the stories that people trying to keep those zombies contained are leaking out on the Net.”

            “I have to go!” said John, “My friends are still alive, I know it!” 

            “Exactly how do you know they’re still alive?” asked Michael Jackson.

            “How much time do you have?” asked John.

                        ###

            By the time John had recounted his fantastic story, Michael Jackson was hooked. The big man had listened while John told him all about the statues that formed a pentagram when you connected the dots with them, and the cadaver tank, and the spell book they had found. He told them all about the weirdness in San Francisco in the days before the explosion, and although he didn’t know what had caused the explosion he was pretty sure that his friends had something to do with it. It was all so incredible yet detailed, and Michael Jackson didn’t know what to make of it.

            “Are you sure you haven’t been watching horror movies or something?” he asked.

            “I kinda wish that was the case,” said John.

            “So, what are you going to do now?” asked Mike.

            “I’m going to San Francisco,” said John.

            “You’re going to need some backup,” said Mike.

            “I don’t know anyone outside of San Francisco,” said John.

            “Well, now you know me,” said Mike. “And I know lots of people that would help.”

            “Oh really?” asked John.

            “Really,” said Mike. “I’ll send out an email to my pals, and we can spend tonight putting together some weaponry to help us. We’ll head down in the morning.” 

            ### 

            Golden Gate Park was relatively unscathed by the fires and destruction wrought by the neutron bomb. It was starting to get a bit overgrown, and parts of the park were dying off because of lack of water. Some parts of the park were on automatic sprinkler systems, and it was here that Lloyd Stark had come to plant a truckload of cannabis seedlings he had started.

            Lloyd carried two forty-five caliber Heckler and Koch USP handguns in shoulder holsters, and a pair of sawed off Remington pump action 12 gauge shotguns strapped to his back. At one point, he had considered a chainsaw but realized that it was heavy and was probably only cool to use in the movies. He tried to kill one of the zombies with a chainsaw, and the only thing it did was attract more zombies. The biggest problem was that they could smell blood, and the chainsaw made a lot of it. The shotguns weren’t much better but at least he could handle more than a few of those things with them. He also had a samurai sword, something that he thought was a real set of samurai swords because he’d found it in the ruins of the Asian Art Museum. If he were approached by a single zombie, he was more likely to use the katana to behead the thing than his shotguns – he had to conserve his ammo. There wasn’t much left in his armory, although he suspected that he could find more if he really needed it. He hadn’t gone down to the jail on Howard Street yet.  

            Over the past month, Lloyd started the seedlings in the house he had taken over from the rabid Satanist cult he used to hang with. He was kind of glad they were all dead, because they really were a bunch of assholes. He had very little respect for people who got into a religion because there was no other way for them to get laid, but in hindsight he’d been guilty of that on more than a few occasions. The one saving grace to the whole lot of useless bags of skin was that they’d been paranoid enough to armor plate the Victorian they lived in.

            Lloyd had gotten extremely fed up with people about two years before, and he blamed this on a lack of fresh marijuana. The rest of his compatriots left him alone and he had not seen any of them since. He assumed the zombies had gotten them, because they were loaded down with that kid of Derwood and Cathy’s. What kind of a person brought a kid into a world infested with zombies anyway?  It was a bit of a moot point – when they had conceived the kid, things seemed fairly normal. Everything after that was far from normal.

            He’d lost a lot of weight on his own in San Francisco. He still towered over most of the zombies, but the constant struggle to live had converted most of his mass into muscle. He had taken to referring to things as B.Z. and A.Z. – “before zombies” and “after zombies.” Lloyd had been a six-foot-seven inch behemoth with thirty-five percent body fat weighing over three-hundred and fifty pounds Before Zombies. After Zombies, he was now holding steady at two-hundred and thirty pounds, and it was literally all muscle. He wore BDU pants and sweaters that he found in the rubble of Kaplan’s on Market Street, but he wore engineer’s boots and a large oilskin duster for the San Francisco weather. It was literally no problem finding food or water in the ruins of the city. If he really needed water, he could dunk a bucket in one of the many cisterns that the city planted in the middle of intersections – all he had to do was look for a manhole labeled “CISTERN”. He finally figured out how to grow food when he got tired of canned vegetables. He hadn’t had fresh meat in over two years, but if he wanted some canned meat or vegetables it was all there for the taking. The zombies sure weren’t going to eat them.

Lloyd couldn’t understand why the zombies hadn’t rotted away yet, but he chalked that up to magic. He’d spent a long time studying them, trying to figure them out. He found that the basic zombie maxims held true – you could only kill them with a brain shot, basically. They were faster than you would expect. They ate everything, not just your brains. They tended to swarm, rather than appear one at a time. They were so stupid that you could use their stupidity against them – Lloyd used to get large numbers of them away from him by shooting a zombie a zombie further away than him in the head. He discovered that the zombies couldn’t tell the difference between old zombie blood and fresh human blood. They would invariably run to the freshly fallen zombie and consume him.

It was kind of easy to stay alive once you learned the basic rules, in other words.

            Lloyd brought the bomb squad truck to a stop on the Golden Gate Park polo field. He’d managed to find the San Francisco Police Department car yard, and was instantly attracted to the armor plated diesel with six wheels. It had a good flatbed for hauling things, and there was no way that any zombie would ever be able to get into the cab. The thing was built like an armored car and even had gun ports like one. He could get it going fast enough to flip any zombies off if he slammed on the brakes. The only bad part was that diesel was getting hard to find in the city. After two years of driving around with the truck, Lloyd had the thought to convert the thing to bio-diesel. His main problem with that was that he wasn’t sure what the effect on the engine’s power output would be. The other problem in his mind was that only dirty hippies drive bio-diesel cars.

            Lloyd set about the task of planting his seedlings in the ground. He knew that he really should just toss that big bag of seeds around and let the marijuana grow wild – it was literally a weed and would probably take over as long as there was water. That would only be good if he wanted to make rope, though. He wanted to get high.

            He planted the female seedlings he had started exactly two feet apart from each other in rows. In about two hours, he had planted over three hundred of them, without a zombie in sight. He still had the feeling he was being watched, though.

            ###

“What is he doing now?” asked the colonel.

            “He seems to be planting a crop of something,” said the corporal.

            “That makes sense,” said the general. “He’s got to get food from somewhere.”

            “He’s got to be aware of the others in the city if he’s planting that much,” said the corporal. He leaned back as the general angled to get a better view of the screen – the corporal had never been in a room with this many high ranking officers before.”

            “How come he has never asked for help in this disaster?” asked the highest ranking person in the room.

            “We’ve never received any communication from any of the people in San Francisco that we assume are still living and breathing,” said the colonel.

           “But why?” he asked again.

            “Mr. President, we wouldn’t have known they were there if this corporal hadn’t taken it upon himself to analyze satellite photos of San Francisco last month. He noticed that cars were moved in some of the photos. From there, the corporal requested to access better equipment and we brought him here, to the most sophisticated monitoring system we have,” said the colonel. 

            The colonel pointed at the screen, at the image of the top of Lloyd Stark’s head and the tray of plants he was diligently planting in the Golden Gate Park polo field. The corporal zoomed the image out, showing the bomb squad truck at first, and quickly moving out to the rest of Golden Gate Park and ultimately San Francisco itself.  

            “We’ve found approximately twenty people that are making judgmental actions in San Francisco,” said the corporal. “The rest seem to be infected with the same… virus that causes the dead people to seem to come to life and attack anything in their path.”

            “Just say zombies, son,” said the President. “We all know the score in this room. We’re going to save them. That’s what we’re going to do.”

            The president sounded like he was just trying to convince himself. The corporal considered all this dubiously.  

            “Mr. President…” said the corporal. “There’s just something that scares me about the whole thing.”

            “What’s that?” asked the President.

            “Well, it’s this,” said the corporal.

            The corporal zoomed in on the financial district of San Francisco. There were hundreds of thousands of little black specks peppering the entire downtown area. The corporal zoomed in on the bridge, then moved it slightly west to the Ferry Building. As he clicked further and further down, you could see that the place was thick with shambling bodies. He finally got to the highest resolution possible on the screen, and the President gasped.

            Every single zombie was staring straight at the sky, as if they knew they were being watched.  

Chapter 2: Guns, Drugs, and Guns >>