As Rick sat in the front seat of his cruiser, he mentally went through his short checklist again. He had his clothes from his house, as well as a hell of a lot of police supplies all stuffed into the car - now all he needed was to find out where Lori and Carl and everyone else went.
Unfortunately he wasn't sure how to go about finding that. Nothing in the police station had said anything about an evacuation order, so it must have happened suddenly. He couldn't narrow down the destination for any hypothetical evacuation either, because he still wasn't sure just how bad the situation was outside of town - hell, maybe it was only Georgia that was this bad.
In a worst case scenario though, where would they take people? They would probably want to get as many people together as they could, so it would have to be a central, urban area. Atlanta? But then, if the disease was so viral, then surely they would want to quarantine people, and not pull everyone together into one area, so maybe they would use an army base or something for that?
Until he was ready to get out of town and search for his family, the station was a safe place to stay, and unlike his house it still had running water and some power. It didn't have any food though, so Rick was going to go out and see what was left in the town's supermarkets and other stores. He had to get his strength back, so that he could be at his best.
He decided to leave the car he had loaded full of equipment at the station, and take one of the other cars into town. Taking just a handgun for protection, he took off and found himself in a surreal experience - driving around in a patrol car as if he was on the job on a regular day in a regular world.
He figured that the cars had limited gas, and it was unlikely that he would find any at a gas station, but hell he just didn't feel like walking any more today. If he ran out, he could funnel some from one of the many abandoned cars.
The drive through town went quick, and soon Rick was in the main business area, the large chain store he looked at first had it's doors busted in, and a quick look inside showed mostly empty shelves. He turned his flashlight on though and stepped inside.
It was eery in an empty store. Not only was there nobody around, but it seemed like people had looted the place of almost everything. There was junk strewn over the floor, but nothing important. Thinking about it, almost everything they sold here was useless in the current apocalyptic situation.
Eventually he made it to where the food would have been, chocolates and candy and chips and jerky and all the other junk snacks; it was just as empty as everywhere else in the store, though he did find a few tiny packs of mixed nuts on the ground, half-way hidden under the shelves.
"Hope I can find a bit more than that" Rick said to himself quietly, and went on to the next store. He found the same lack of supplies there, and in all of the others, until he went into a small video store, the last one in town, which people from the next town over liked to make fun of them for still having.
The main part of the small store was just racks upon racks of DVDs, even a few old piles of VHS tapes in a few places, and a section for video games that he could remember Carl renting a few new games from over the years.
As he turned a corner in the maze of DVD racks, he was knocked over by a body tackling him, and through the light of the flashlight that had been knocked out of his hand, Rick saw the illuminated half-eaten face of a man staring down at him.
He managed to hold the man's head up so that he couldn't bite him, though he felt some of the diseased blood drip down onto his forehead, and then using his police training Rick rolled the man over so that he was on-top.
While keeping the rabid corpse down, he managed to pull out his revolver and shoot the man in the back of the head.
He sat there for a few moments, taking deep breaths, before getting up and searching the rest of the store. He ended up finding some candy, but that was all. Not a great haul, and while he made his way to the squad car, he saw more of the infected walking coming towards him - the noise from the car and gun might have attracted them?
Rick shot the few that were between him and the car, figuring that if it attracted the freaks to this spot, that was fine as he wasn't going to be here any longer, and then jumped in the car and sped off. He had only found some nuts and a few bits of candy, but it was better than nothing.
On the way back to the station, Rick considered his next move - the town seemed like it had been picked clean. Did that mean there were other survivors out there who had been living off of what they could find? Or had the townspeople taken everything they had with them when they left?
He hadn't seen signs of anyone else alive in the town, but he hadn't searched much of it. While back at the police station, he started planning his search of the town - if there was someone else out there, maybe they knew where everybody went?
In the end, after a rather forgettable meal he settled down for the night in a couch in one of their break rooms. Not the most comfortable place, but the building was secure, and he felt safe sleeping there, and it had been a long day.