"Noah, are you telling me, that David is some fucking brain dead maniac, like, more than he was before?" Michael spluttered out. The truth of his sarcasm stood out in his face, he could hear the banging on the door as loud as Nick and I could. The three of us sat in silence for a few seconds, trying to string together what was happening.

"Where's James?" Nick questioned. Suddenly panic clouded my mind, I had completely forgotten about the groom to be. I stood up frantically and checked the front of the house, James' car was gone. I scrambled around all of the rooms, upturning cushions for my phone, finding it by a shattered plate near the fireplace. The battery was looming at just over ten percent, swiping the screen and unlocked it, but everything was down, no signals at all. Just a pop up floating on the screen read "One Missed Call".

"It's useless." I called over to the others, "I can't check my messages if the lines are down". Michael was peaking around the hallway to get a glimpse of the guest bedroom door. "Why the fuck is there blood on the doorframe?!" he yelled, his voice echoing through the house. I explained what happened when I opened the door, how David had tried to bite at me, and was incoherent, violent. How he knocked his head as he fell from the mattress.

"What happened to him?" Nick wondered out loud. I explained the bite, which only Michael remembered, he sat leaning against the wall, laughing about the sickly girl at the pub from the night before. His face turned with a sudden realization, "She bit him". We all looked grimly at each other, it seemed impossible, it seemed like something from the countless movies and books and tv shows we'd grown up watching and reading. These sorts of things didn't happen, not here, not in reality. "The landlines are down, Nick exclaimed from the kitchen, he held the receiver in his hand hopelessly." I decided to go down to the outside of the house and check the power inlet, everything was down, and the power was tripped too. My mind was going through everything I knew about the electricity, I wondered if it was just for our immediate area, and so going with that theory I asked Michael to help me drag the generator upstairs with me from the basement, while Nick stayed upstairs and secured the guest bedroom door. After moving some of the obstacles in the basement, we arrived upstairs, shifting the heavy generator into the lounge room, Michael headed back down for a second trip to get the jerry-can and extension leads. Nick was busy building a barricade in front of the guest bedroom, completely blocking the door with a large shelf he had upturned. Michael and I spent a few minutes tinkering until we got the generator running. At last it let out a roar, pouring smoke into the room, I hastily connected the television and flicked to the first channel that popped up. Abruptly the blaring sound of the emergency broadcast service poured from the television speakers, the Australian coat of arms flickered across the screen, in a broken digital signal, pixels out of place. The following script repeated lengthways along a red strip:

INTERNATIONAL EMERGENCY – STAY IN YOUR HOMES – CONTAMINATION ALERT – EMERGENCY SERVICES HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED TO PREVENT FURTHER OUTBREAK – QUARANTINE STATUS ACTIVE– STAY IN YOUR HOMES – INTERNATIONAL EMERGENCY – STAY IN YOUR HOMES - EMERGENCY SERVICES HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED TO PREVENT FURTHER OUTBREAK – STAY CLEAR OF THE INFECTED –

It was real, from that moment, everything changed, I walked outside and looked out onto the street, my neighbour's cars were mostly gone, and some had left their houses in several states of evacuation. I walked out onto the pavement and looked into the sky, great plumes of smoke rose on the horizon, the sirens still screamed in the distance, no sign of them dwindling any time in the near future.

I ran straight back inside and called to the others, and instructed them to follow me to the basement, one thing my father had left to me before he moved north with mum, was his prized collection of rifles. Luckily for me, I had had a shooters license myself, and I was allowed to keep them. I lead the guys to the large bricked wall, in the basement, and progressed behind a large pile of clutter, to the steel gun case that stood, heavily coated in dust, in the back of the low lit room. I turned the worn dial on the case, and opened it up, four long rifles stood adorned in the cupboard, Michael gawped over my shoulder, and I passed him the long double barrel shotgun that rested in the corner of the safe. He looked at me with grave concern. This was a strange initiation of sorts, we were preparing for a real uncertainty, this was the changing of the world, and we were only on the doorstep. I passed Nick a scoped 30-30, a decent calibre rifle, and he held it in his hands with an odd reluctance. I grabbed the other rifle, a Winchester, and a small box that lay at the bottom of the safe, which contained a small 22 pistol. I instructed the guys to grab anything from the basement that might be useful. With that I headed back upstairs to my bedroom, retrieving all the ammo I had from the bottom drawer in my bedroom, about seven boxes of various shells.

I stood looking at a picture for a moment, of myself, James' David and my brother Evan, we were holding large fish we'd caught that day, the cool blue of the waves behind us, I escape there for a moment, not fully appreciation that moment, the care free-ness of it, until then. A horn rang out from out the front of the house, I jolted out of my thoughts and sprang to my window, Michael and Nick had already rushed outside. James' car was parked haphazardly on my steep drive way, his windshield shattered, and covered in smears of red and brown and black. He climbed out, his face was whiter than death.

We all stood staring at the macabre scene, and suddenly he spoke, urgency flowed from his voice like a piercing sword. "We need to leave right NOW!"