here we go dear readers …. Zombie War!
The coffee had a habit of grounding you when the rest of the world had gone entirely off the rails.
I stood by the white 4Runner with my metal cup in hand, listening to the familiar, comforting glug-glug of the percolator sitting on the green Coleman stove. It was technically Raych’s truck, the vehicle we scrambled into on Day 1 while my Supra sat locked and dead in the garage, though I had spent enough miles behind the wheel that I just called it the 4Runner now. The air down here on the wooded rise just outside Franklin, North Carolina, had a sharp, clean bite to it. It smelled of crushed pine needles, cold granite, and damp autumn earth, a welcome change from the thick, rotting humidity of the Florida swamps we had left behind weeks ago.
For the first leg of our five-hundred-mile trek out of Florida, pushing up past Fargo, it had just been us. But when we met Earl and Kayla just short of Hazelhurst, Georgia, our little group gained a whole new dimension. Now, tucked tight into the tree line behind the 4Runner and Tom’s trusty F-150, sat Earl Thompson’s scarred, massive Peterbilt rig, its heavy steel bull bar gleaming dully in the pale morning light, radiating the faint, metallic scent of hot diesel and oil. Behind the semi, the modified trailer rode level, carrying hidden tanks of reserve fuel and Earl’s rolling quartermaster depot of carefully packed gear. Earl and Kayla were already moving quietly around the big truck, checking straps, the canvas squeaking softly in the cold air as they secured the lines.
For all those winding miles through the empty back roads and cracked asphalt, we had not seen a single living soul. Not a wandering traveler, not a farmer on a tractor, not a frightened face behind a windowpane. Just an endless, silent museum of a dead civilization. Burned-out cars parked at awkward angles, houses left open to the elements with screen doors banging lazily in the breeze, and the occasional solitary Walker shuffling aimlessly across a desolate blacktop, smelling faintly of old decay, before Tom or I put a clean, quiet round through its skull.
When ninety-nine percent of humanity vanishes overnight, empty space becomes the heaviest thing on earth. You start to feel like the last people left in a vast, echoing tomb.
Raych walked up beside me, handing over a small container of creamer before pouring her own cup. Her curly red hair was pulled back, freckles standing out against her skin, that quiet Viking-raider steadiness shining through as always. She looked out over the rugged terrain stretching north toward the mountains, the dark silhouettes of ridges fading into the pale sky.
“Quiet out there...” she murmured, blowing gently across her coffee, the steam curling into the chill air. “Almost too quiet.”
“Quiet is better than a horde,” I said, taking a sip of Stocking Mill’s Midnight Run. It was bitter, bold, and entirely civilized, coating the back of my throat with dark roast warmth. “Though according to Grok’s data pulls from the backup Instapundit mirror, the silence is about to end.”
From the back of the 4Runner, where his ruggedized server chassis hummed with steady, reliable power, radiating a faint warmth against the tailgate, Grok’s speaker chimed in, calm and precise:
“Good morning, Jack. Ambient temperature is forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Wind is light from the northwest. And satellite telemetry indicates we are approximately twenty-two miles south of our primary destination parameters in the Knoxville sector.”
Tom walked over, wiping grease from a knuckle with a stiff, oil-stained shop rag, his weathered mechanic’s face set in hard lines. He looked out toward the horizon. “You really think there’s anything left up there worth driving into a city for,Jack...? Most places we’ve checked are just graveyards with better plumbing.”
“Grok’s data streams don’t lie, and neither did those ping signatures,” I replied, setting my cup down on the cold metal of the tailgate. “There are people up in those mountains. Small pocket. Not a sprawling city, just a handful of folks who managed to stay alive.”
“Hunters, homesteaders, retired military,” Tom muttered, half to himself, thinking of his own boys out there in the chaos.”Folks who were already hard to kill before the world broke.”
What Tom didn’t know, what none of us fully understood yet, was the grim biological lottery that had spared them. The ones clinging to life in the Knoxville enclave weren’t just lucky. They were the extreme statistical anomaly, naturally immune to The Cough, combined with the physical resilience, speed, and sharp instincts to carve out a defensible redoubt while the rest of the world burned. They were survivors who had fought off the initial wave of the dead not by hiding, but by refusing to die.
And they were going to need every ounce of that grit. Because I knew the Walkers weren’t the slow, clumsy corpses we had dealt with back in the early days. Down in the swamps, we had learned the hard way that they were evolving, forming packs, executing tactical ambushes, and hunting like a hive-mind.
Surviving day-to-day by hiding in green fortresses was a dead end. We were down to the razor-thin edge of the human race, and the ninety-five percent were getting smarter.
Earl ambled over from the Peterbilt, a steaming mug in his hand, his eyes scanning the tree line the way a long-haul trucker scans a mountain pass in a blizzard.
“Big rig’s topped off, brakes are good, and the trailer’s riding level,” Earl rumbled, taking a slow sip. “So... what’s the play,Sergeant? Do we roll down into the valley and see who’s waving hello, or do we scout the high ground first?”
I looked around the clearing at our crew. Raych, Tom, Sarah, Mikey—who was busy checking his .410 shotgun by the truck, the metallic click-clack of the action sounding sharp in the quiet morning—and Earl and Kayla. We had crossed five hundred depopulated miles of dead America to get here. We had an AI in a box that had learned how to love a family.And somewhere up ahead in the Smoky Mountains, beyond the enclave, deeper in the dark folds of the high ground,whatever awaited us was yet to be seen, but certain to be as challenging as everything we had fought through so far.
I picked my coffee back up and looked out toward the northern road.
“We roll,” I said. “Let’s go see who’s still keeping the lights on.”