"So you just happened to have the family gun shop nearby? You made it out of the school, took everything from the gun store, and headed home, taking your chemistry teacher with you?"

"Well it sounds silly and made up when you say it like that, but yeah. My dad had moved into the building like five years before I started at that school, and Casey really just happened to be there with me. I'm not really sure why he was there, but I swear he was with me.

"And you weren't talking much to him?

"No, we were discussing the weather and the game last night. Jeez, no, we weren't talking much! There were dead people shambling around eating living people! Casey himself had to shoot a guy in the head! We were both a little weirded out, you know? Add that to the fact that he was a teacher whose class I was failing and we didn't really know each other, and you get a fairly quiet car ride!"

"Ok, ok, I get it, not many words shared between you two right then. So what happened after you got home?"

"I don't know what happened there. Neither me nor Casey ever made it to the house."

TWO

~In which the Car Breaks Down~

I may or may not have mentioned it before, but I drove a Jeep Wrangler back then. Nowadays, of course, I drive whatever is around, but back when I had a choice, the Wrangler was my top pick. The Jeep didn't run when I first got it. My dad and I spent like a year fixing it so that it would work, and even then it still had leaks in the coolant pipes, a non-existent AC, and this weird electrical drain issue. So things may have been going fine for most of the day: I wasn't dead and now had a gun and had met up with my family, and was heading for home, but of course we can't have everything go right, 'cause that would be a boring adventure.

We were driving down a street, dodging cars in the middle of the road, cussing out the other drivers, and occasionally swerving around people. You may think I'm a horrible person for not stopping to shoot every zombie I saw right then and there, but I had stuff to do, you know? Plus I was majorly freaked out.

There's not much in this world that scares me, but I've always been awful with dead humans (and whales too, but seeing as there aren't many of those in Missouri, that wasn't as big of an issue). Just keep that tidbit in mind: I don't do well with dead people. Which, as you might imagine, was kind of an issue.

Anyways, I have to make a detour, because right after my dad drives through an intersection no less than four cars ram into each other, completely blocking the street. I barely managed to hit the brakes and yank the wheel to the left to avoid becoming a casualty in that little misfortune. As it was, we had turned right into a parking lot filled with yet more dead people and screaming crying living people.

I'm not proud that I hit some of those people with my car. I'd rather not talk about the people that I let get eaten and die. But I was asked for an honest account of what happened, so there it is. I'm no hero.

We did eventually make it out of that parking lot, with a lot more dents in the front bumper than we had when we went in. When I got us out, we had been directed south when we should have been going west. I took the next road we came to, but I hadn't realized that there was housing behind the shopping center, and those stupid little neighborhood roads never go in a straight line. So we ended up further south than west, which was not in the plan.

The car was not doing well with the beating it had taken from the parking lot, and the stress I was putting on that old engine. I guess it had started smoking for quite a while before I finally noticed it, and by the time I did, it was a bit too late. We hit one last body on the little neighborhood road (one that was actually dead, this time), and that was it. When the car slammed into it and came back down on the other side of it, the engine shut off. It was just too much for my old jeep to take.

So Casey and I were carless, and even though we had several bags of guns and ammo in the back of the jeep, we were in trouble. (If this was a TV show, the show would end right here and we'd pick back up on the thrilling adventures of Rick Grimes next week. But this isn't the Walking Dead, unfortunately.)

That was when our argument started. Casey I guess had finally realized that he and I didn't know each other, and he had his own family to find. Me breaking my car probably also didn't help. I was fine with him wandering off on his own, but he wanted to take a bag with him.

Look, I'm a reasonable guy. I would've given him another couple boxes of ammo for his gun. Hell, I would've tossed him another couple magazines! But I couldn't let him go off with an entire bag of goodies from my dad's shop. That's over two hundred dollars' worth of stuff! (This is back when I still measured things by their monetary worth, mind you.) 'You owe me for saving your life!' he says, probably referring to the Incident at the School. And he's right, but I paid him back for that by getting him out of there, and he was saving himself at the same time, so it doesn't really count. The rule goes like this: if you're saving somebody's ass, but you're also saving yours at the same time, then the other guy doesn't owe you anything. If you're walking along fine and dandy, and go out of your way to save somebody else, then the guy owes you. But if you're a decent guy then you don't try to use that as a bargaining chip later on, you just grow up and move on.

Words were exchanged. Most of them cuss words (I'm trying to keep this interview relatively clean, so I won't go into huge detail on the argument). Casey shoved me—make a note of that, he started it and made it physical. But he shoved me, so I shoved him back. Shoving turned to actual fighting. Remember how I said I liked the guy? Yeah, toss that out the window now. I was pissed, and he wasn't backing off. It ended the only way it could have; we drew on each other. Almost at the exact same time, actually. We couldn't have timed it better if we'd tried! Of course, what with the adrenaline thumping and the fact that he was kind of smaller than me (and the Glock 19 is bigger than the 43, even though they're the same caliber), I finally convinced Casey to run off.

I'm not a killer, alright? I'm just a twenty year old kid from Missouri. Plus I still remembered that he wasn't a bad guy, and I don't know, I must have felt bad. So I let him go and climbed back into the Jeep to pull out the two bags. When I had them situated on my back, and had stuffed the first aid kit from the back of the Jeep into one of the bags, I started walking.

I could have made it home. It was only twenty miles off, through a (small-ish) city full of the dead and dying. I really think I could have made it.