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with Lisa that he hadn’t been thinking about it. I am the youngest in my family so I usually defer to my older siblings, but I didn’t live through yesterday just to sit by and wait for him to make the call.
    “Max, we only have an hour or so of light left. We need to finish boarding up the windows and doors.”
    He just stared at me for a minute.
    “Max?”
    He shook his head once and nodded.
    “That sounds like a good idea,” he said, finally snapping back to the present.
    Max had been a carpenter his entire life. There was no one I knew who was better with a hammer and nails. In very short order, we had completed the job and set about taking an inventory of the supplies in the house and those we brought with us, in preparation for the night ahead. The light outside was fading and I’d no idea what to expect.
    Would thousands of those freaks attack us as soon as it gets dark, or would they leave us alone entirely? I had no clue.
    With night looming, we sat in the living room to go over our stock. Max and Lisa came to the party with nothing but their clothes and a desire to live. We had plenty of food and enough water to last us through the night, thanks to Sarah and Tim. One tub of water upstairs was full, and there was still some left in the tub downstairs—though we wouldn’t be drinking that. There was no telling what came off of or out of Lisa during her bath.
    I brought two of the M4 rifles and the M9 from the ferry, courtesy of the National Guard. I managed to carry two bags of 30-round magazines, totaling about 600 rounds of .556 for the M4s. I had five 15-round magazines for the M9; seventy-five rounds of 9mm.
    I’d carefully packed five of the grenades in my backpack. I had no experience with them, and frankly, they scared the shit out of me. But Max’s eyes lit up when he saw them.
    “Shit, oh dear, little brother. Where did you get those?” were his exact words.
    We had two flashlights, my tactical 300-lumen that had been in my laptop bag and the small LED on my survival knife. We found a Coleman LED lantern with an extra battery in the garage and a few candles in the kitchen pantry. We laid out everything and split the weapons between us—Max and I that is, Lisa was still out of action. I was exhausted; Max said he was fine, so he took the first watch.
    “Wake me at midnight. No lights and no sound, Bro. We’ve got to act like a black hole here and hope we go unnoticed,” I said, and trundled off to collapse in the next room.
    I thought I would pass out as soon as I hit the bed, but once I was horizontal, my mind went into high gear. A panic attack struck me as I realized that this was for real. I’d been so focused on just making it through the day, my mind had saved up all its emotional baggage until I landed. I rolled over and puked my guts out; I didn’t have time to stifle the urge. It just came. Waves of worry about my wife and kids caught up with me and knocked me sideways. Tears spewed from my eyes as my breath came in gasps. The room was spinning and I thought for sure I was dying. I flopped back on the mattress and grabbed onto the bedding to keep from flying across the room. My heart rate soared as the primal fight or flight coursed through me.
    Then it stopped. Everything slowly ebbed and I felt the panic leave me. Face the fear, I told myself . My wife is strong and the kids are smart. If anyone stands a chance of making it, they do.
    “J,” my wife of twenty-seven years, would be with my son Mark and his wife, Patty. They had all my prepper supplies as well as their own bug-out bags. Mark had his .45 auto and my dad’s old Winchester 1894. I also remembered that Ann, his maternal grandmother, had given him his Pappy’s .357.
    My paranoia about our country’s economy collapsing turned out to be wrong, or at least avoided by this crazy scenario. After the last big crash of the stock market in ’08, I stocked the house with canned goods. I also bought an AR15 and a thousand or