Read Dead Hunger V: The Road To California for Free Online Page B

backpack.
     
    *****
     
    Cars were driving crazy, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why.  Some people had clearly been on their way to hospitals when the person in their car with them made their terrifying conversion into something that wanted only to attack.  I couldn’t imagine the horror that ensued at that point then, and I don’t like to think about it now.
    But I will, if only for those reading about this later.
    If you were driving when it happened, you’d be helpless to do anything with one arm on the steering wheel and the other fending them off.  As it turned out, the BMW motorcycle was the perfect escape vehicle.  I dodged around several crashes and was able to avoid more than my share of vehicles driving even crazier than is typical in Florida.  Season was already over and most visitors from up north had already gone home to suffer their transformations there.  That was good, but for six months out of the year, Floridians saw a ton of visitors from Indiana, New York, Minnesota, Ontario, Canada, New Jersey, and everywhere else, so we were used to people driving like they owned the road.
    This was different.  It wasn’t just possible that a car was going to careen toward you at any given moment; it was likely.
      The Beemer had a GPS that I figured out how to use while I guided the bike down more open stretches of road, but I didn’t need a bitch in a box to tell me how to get to my sister’s place, just to guide me around blocked roads should I come across any. 
    The helmet had an intercom system with Bluetooth, and luckily, it had automatically paired with the system on the bike.  This meant I could mess with the radio and try to get signals, but also could hear the GPS lady when she had the urge to tell me things I mostly knew.  I had ridden maybe thirty minutes and had only gotten just over two miles.  It was almost immediately after turning onto East Avenue when I first saw these new creatures in greater numbers.  I was struggling with the process of accepting the truth about the once-humans, but they were doing their share to convince me what I and the rest of the uninfected world faced.  I can tell you that at that time I kind of looked at it like a horrible fire or a riot or something; the blind faith that ultimately, our government would find a quick cure and put everything back to normal.  After all, I wasn’t catching it yet, so there had to be a lot of people like me working on this.
    But as I rode on, I realized I wasn’t seeing a lot of people like me.  As I worked my way north up East Avenue, I took the horror in that surrounded me.  I could see the colorless, vein-riddled skin of the afflicted from a distance; the way they moved as though stiff – somehow unpracticed in the art of walking.
    I slowed the bike initially, a morbid curiosity or maybe just spacing out a bit as I observed them – I’m not sure which – but soon snapped to reality and remembered that to allow any of them to reach me was to die at their hands.
    I’d seen my share of them feeding and tears ran from my eyes beneath the helmet’s shield as I watched what was happening.  I never saw an uninfected person actually get taken down, but I did see them fleeing for their lives.  I saw uninfected people locked in cars, obviously without keys, looking out at me in desperation as I rode past; me avoiding their faces like they were dirty, homeless people on the corner looking for a buck.
    The truth was, I gave those guys a buck.  I could not risk my life for these doomed souls.  Not at the risk of letting my sister die.  No way.  I put on my heartless fucking mental  blinders and stopped looking, and I used my high-aim steering to chart my path through the more congested parts of East Avenue, anticipating my arrival at US 231 that would roll me onto the 431 into Dothan, Alabama.
    The whole trip was around 500 miles, so I’d need gas sometime, and that I’d play by ear.  If I came across