We drove around for several hours. Nate shot any Darkseekers he saw on the way. At about three or four in the afternoon we had to get out of our vehicles and walk through a particularly congested street. The stench of death was everywhere. People who had died of the virus while scrambling to get out were scattered all over the place; in cars, on the side walks, and tossed onto barricades.

Decomposition acted with surprising speed. From the book I read the night before, Seize the Night, I had learned that a body could become a skeleton in two weeks under the right conditions, but I had a hard time believing it. The scene gave me more than enough proof. I saw dozens of bodies. However, some of them looked like they had been eaten on.

"Do you think animals could get it?" I asked tentatively.

Nate, walking cautiously up ahead, shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe." His next statement was startlingly grim; something I wouldn't have ever expected to hear. "Look at the teeth marks on the bones. You can tell pretty easy which ones are human and which ones are animal. I guess even most dogs on the loose now wouldn't want to eat a person."

My heart clenched and I sighed painfully. Why did this happen? I cursed quietly to myself.

"Hello?" Nate yelled out. He startled me, but I stopped to listen. "Hello?" He tried again.

On second thought, he fired a shot straight up into the air. His rifle was loud. After the incident in Walmart, my ears rang for about twenty minutes, or even half an hour. Still, nothing but the birds answered. Our hope dwindled as we walked on through the unceremonious graveyard.

When the answering shot came to me, I thought my ears were just starting to ring again. It takes a couple minutes to start sometimes, but the sound was fleeting enough be identified as a distant gunshot.

"Come on!" Nate said. He broke into a run through the cars, then started sliding over the hoods.

I was not far behind. Another shot called to us and Nate answered. Neither of us were worried about ammo. All the stores were open to us and he had surplus. We met two men and a teenage girl on foot roughly two blocks away.

The girl was about fifteen. She had short, curly blonde hair and blue-grey eyes. She was carrying a black backpack, lumpy and completely stuffed. It looked too big for her, like the brown jacket she was wearing.

The two men were in their late twenties, probably. They looked kind of similar in some ways. One had dark blonde hair and the other had light brown hair. Each had unbelievably dark brown eyes, though.

One of the two men strode up to meet Nate and immediately went to shake hands.

"Trevor Yates," he introduced happily. "This is my brother, Kyle. That's Samantha."

Nate nodded with a little grin of relief stuck to his face. "I'm Nate." He shook hands.

Before he could introduce me, I introduced myself.

"I'm surprised that I didn't hear you before. That's a nice gun." Trevor said.

"Well, yeah." Nate replied. "This one is actually my dad's. We collected them."

Samantha skirted around Nate and her companions with no other possible intent but one. She practically had the whole conversation in her mouth already. "You're really bloody."

I suddenly remembered just how much I had gotten on me and looked down. It had dried into varying shades of brown and rust. She got no answer but a nod.

"Right..." She sighed, then laughed. It sounded kind of like a gentle bark. "I- I can't believe this is happening."

I discreetly glanced over at her jacket out of curiosity. It was way too big and very heavy looking. It was only about sixty degrees out. It's not that the jacket was puffy, but it was just made of very stout material and well insulated. The name Brooke was stitched in red cursive on the left shoulder.

She glanced up at me with perfectly imperfect timing. She glanced down at the tag as I looked away. "It's my brother's. He worked on AC units and heaters." She said in a much more subdued tone.

"Anyways," she began again, "my name is Samantha, but you already know that. Cheers to formal introduction!"

I nodded, finally grinning a little bit. "And you already know that I'm René."

"I like that name. How old are you?" She asked.

"Um, twenty-five. Why?"

"I wrote in the school newspaper. You in college?"

I nodded again. "Digital art. Sculpting game characters, rigging them, that kind of stuff."

"Woah." She stared at me for a moment, eyes wide. Then, "Oh my gosh! That's so cool! Where were you going? What kind of degree were you going for? Bachelors? Associates?" And so goes the interview.

After a few minutes, Nate said that we were going to go back to our vehicles and meet in that same place. We said brief goodbyes and split up, but as I was walking away, I couldn't stop thinking about how they might disappear behind my back.

They didn't. When we met up again, Samantha opted for riding in my car. She said that she wanted to talk to another girl again. Nate took charge of the caravan/convoy and continued the search. Finding each other was a huge confidence booster for everyone.

Samantha and I continued to talk about my work in college, and eventually just gaming in general. As it turns out, she was a seasoned gamer herself. At four O'clock, Nate parked his truck and rolled out a plan. It wouldn't be dark for another three hours or so, but moving from one house to another might take some time. Before a debate could even start on who's place to go to, Samantha, Kyle, and Trevor invited us to their place. They had a two story house, which happens to be significantly bigger than Nate's apartment.

After a fairly short drive, we came to a neighborhood of mini-castles. My first thought was oh... my... gosh. I love these! And really I did always like those big houses in pristine, usually out of the way, locales. They always had nice architecture and lots of space inside. I had looked forward to getting a degree and making a life for myself that included one of these.

Our convoy parked outside of a parrot grey house with lapis lazuli blue shutters. It had a concrete walkway and bushes planted in red wood chips under the front windows; it looked like the rest of them until I looked up and saw the nose of a rifle poking out from one of the windows.

"I guess you guys can just head inside and check the place out first. Then we'll help you move in." Kyle said, getting out of his car and onto the driveway.

I walked around my car and looked up at the house. My eyes swept over our group of people, undecidedly fortunate or unfortunate. I glanced up and down the block of empty houses. This was an earth-shaking disaster. Things would be different from now on, and I knew that, so I stood in the strangers' front yard and bolstered my courage. We had to live through this.

I did the math on this and found out that if one percent of the population of the world is immune, that means that roughly ten thousand people should be immune in the Dallas area, which covers 385 square miles and holds over one million people. There would be ninety thousand Darkseekers (nine percent of the infected turn into them). So, by now, most of the immune people have been eaten, evacuated, or been killed during the evacuation in a car accident, or a helicopter crash or something like that. A lot of the Darkseekers might have been shot or killed in some other way, too. The number could be different, but René is very lucky to have survived, like everyone else.