We Go On (THE DELL) Read Online Free Page B

months. My old Special
Forces training started coming back and I found I remembered a lot of things
I'd forgotten—how to organize, how to lead men and women in combat, how to
plan.
    And that's how it happened. I'm in charge of a group of
about two hundred survivors. It's been four years, eight months, and three days
since that Sunday in September. It feels like a lifetime ago. I'm not going to
write about all the things that happened during that time. I just wanted you to
know the history of how we got here.
    Here, is a small compound in the edge of Lebanon in middle
Tennessee.

Chapter 3
Hard Lessons
    We've been here about six months now. We found a warehouse
on the outskirts of Lebanon and made it fairly secure. This is the first time
things have been calm enough for me to even think about keeping a journal.
Kat’s been after me to write down all this stuff. She says it will be important
in the future. I'm just beginning to hope there's going to be a future. It was iffy
for a while.
    Okay, here's what we've learned in the nearly five years
since the Event. That's what we call it now, the Event. I guess it makes it
sound less horrific. Anyway, since the Event, we've learned very little about
what caused all this. The Plague, again that's what we call it. No one has a
clue what it actually is. All the people that were supposed to figure that shit
out are bones or worse now. We don't know if it’s manmade or natural or if it
came from aliens but we have to call it something. So, it's the Plague.
    The Plague took about eighty-five percent of the people in
the United States. We can only assume the same thing happened everywhere. There
has been no communication of any kind with other countries since the Event.
We've tried. One of our guy's has a ham radio and he's tried talking to
anybody. Nobody's listening or if they are they can't answer. Whatever the
case, we are alone right now.
    There's no help coming and the nukes didn't work. I didn't
think they would. I figure some General got a wild hair up his ass and decided
this might be the last chance he'd have to see the big fireball. Anyway, they
nuked New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., Atlanta, and Miami on
the East Coast. They did Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle on the west.
The bug got into those sealed bunkers and got the Generals before they could do
more damage than that. They tried to evacuate some of the top people. Put them
on U.S. Navy ships at sea to keep them away from their constituents that wanted
to eat them. That didn't work either. Seems someone forgot to do a bite check
before they let them on those big ships.
    Bite checks, very important. I started those a long time
ago. You only have to let an infected person into your group once to learn that
lesson. It was an expensive lesson too. We lost our first doctor that way.
    Now those ships float around out there with entire crews of Stinkies.
That's what we call the zombies. Again, had to call them something and it just
didn’t feel right saying zombies and they stink. Besides this was the only name
we came up with that the kids could use. And yes, there are kids here. We have
about fifty.
    Most of the other major cities burned on their own. Fires
started and there was no one to put them out. Whole cities just burned to the
ground. That’s what happened to St. Louis. Nashville's gone, too. We stay away
from the big towns that are left. The Stinkies own them.
    The Stinkies are an ever present danger. Everybody thought
they would eventually decompose away and it would be over. Well, that's not
happening. They decompose to a certain point, and then it just stops. No idea
why. So it looks like for the foreseeable future they’re going to be part of
our lives. If you get a bite, a scratch, or some of their blood in an open cut—guess
what? You get an address change and a bullet in the brain.
    Just like in the books and movies, destroying the brain,
more specifically, the medulla, is the only