In the few weeks that followed the infection, the world was on fire. You wouldn’t notice it now. Most people turned before they had time for any of the anarchy. But that certainly helped with the anarchy. I missed a lot of it. I was floating on the outskirts of town when it all began. I was asking myself the hard questions and trying to determine the direction of my life. You know. Soul Searching. Better known as Time Wasting. Anyway, the infection seemed to answer my questions. I’d like to say that I was lucky, and that my survival is a total fluke, but part of me thinks that I was made for this. Maybe that’s just the way the brain works. The people who had actually planned for an apocalypse found themselves surviving without purpose, and they didn’t last too long that way. If you get depressed, you make mistakes, and you die. I don’t know any of those stories for sure, but I’ve seen the aftermath. Barricaded rooms with nothing but remains, and sometimes the people who didn’t die because of the infection. There’s a certain dignity to those, but they’re not much fun to find. Me, I’ve lived most of my life without purpose. Call me a student of Camus. I certainly tried. Even the good jobs didn’t satisfy. So this suits me, as horrible as that might sound. I hope that if you’re out there, you understand.

When I finally came back into town, most of the real horror had blown over. Most of what I found was remnants. A crashed car here and there. Some traffic that wasn’t moving. Spray paint. Bullet holes. Bodies. Some of them still moving. I don’t remember everything that happened at first. I spent a lot of time alone. I drove for a really long time. I wound up driving through the whole city, I think. I did okay, on my own. Managed to move quickly, and avoid them. I met up with another group for a little while. They were surprised to see me. I had never met any of them before. I did my best to help them, and I think I did a pretty good job, but ultimately, I wasn’t one of them, and when someone needed to stay behind as a diversion, I was elected. Did the best I could at that as well. I was in an alley, and they left me what they could to fend for myself. But the music was loud, and they were certainly coming. I found a strange sense of calm come over me. I wouldn’t call it bravery. Partly, I think I was just happy to be alone again.

They came, but they weren’t as fast as they used to be. Something had changed. I started with the shovel. Gotta have a shovel, right? It broke. My arms were in more pain than they had ever been. Then I used a few other blunt objects from around. They were thinning, but I was exhausted, so I used my last resort. I had a glass bottle, filled with gasoline, and I lit them all on fire. I hit the center of a group of three, and the fire spread. They ran into each other, and soon enough, they were all ablaze. It seems that it actually stops them for a while. They start to get concerned about the fire, and they stop attacking. I think it goes back to Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. Just before food comes “not being burned-the-fuck-alive.” His words. There was the potential that they would attack me still, but I walked through them all on fire and didn’t run into a single one. I made it through the crowd of them, which just spread the fire from one to another. There was a car parked across the street, and the group that had just abandoned me taught me how to hot wire.

Sometimes, what you expect to be the fight of your life just never comes. I can’t really explain that either, I guess. I think it’s funny sometimes how I was left behind to save them, but I survived, and I have no idea if they did. I can hope.