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them.”
                  “What’d you do for them?”
                  “Nothin’ I want to talk about.  You done with that beer?  Here have another.  You sure pound them down for somebody that doesn’t drink.”
                  I took another.  There were still two left.
                  “Yeah, I quit a few years ago.  This’ll be my last.”
                  Al looked away from the computer.  He looked me straight in the eye.
                  “So why start back up now?”
                  I was trying to come up with the answer when he said “Never mind, I want to show you this.  I think it may be something you’ve already seen.”
                  With that he put a flash drive in and clicked the mouse.  There it was.  Nothing I’d seen already.  This was worse.  Zombies were everywhere.  Groups of them chasing after the living.  Whenever someone was caught they were ripped apart and devoured.  Ones that were able to get away without being tore up too badly soon joined the hordes.  Every once in a while I’d see one go down, shot in the head.  There were instances where groups of zombies were walking right into soldiers who were firing point blank into them.  They would just keep coming. The only time one would go down was if they were shot in the head.
                  Al stopped the playback.  “You’ve seen anything like this?”
                  “Yes.  But nothing quite as graphic.”
                  “I thought so.  I still got some buddies over there.  None in the service but some guys just can’t get the life of being a soldier out of them.  They’re mercs.  You know, mercenaries.  A bunch of these guys are in Africa but they find work wherever they can.  I tried it but didn’t like it.  Decided to give it all up.  Came back to the States.  I grew up in St. Charles.  It was different then.  This was all farmland.”
                  “How come I couldn’t find anything like this on the internet?”
                  “All this came straight from the guys I served with.  They wanted to let me know what’s coming.  Besides, the government’s got their hands in everything.  They control the news media and they got pretty good at shutting down anything on the internet.  They got guys just sitting at computers waiting for this shit to hit.  Then as soon as they find it, it’s gone.”
                  Al turned the computer off.  “Never leave these things running.  They get in them and root around looking for shit.  If not them then it’s those goddamn hackers.  Let’s go sit in the front room.  Get comfortable, Steve.  We need to talk.”
                  Al wanted to know what I was planning on doing.  I told him my whole story.  He liked the part about Tim.  He thought he was “a hell of a man,” taking the chance he had to let me know what was going on.  He wasn’t thrilled about Gina not believing me but said he understood.  This whole scenario was pretty unbelievable.  I told him I was planning on loading up and getting out of St. Charles; try to find a place where there weren’t so many people.  I wanted to find a place I could defend myself and try and ride this thing out.
                  We talked for hours.  Al’s original plan was to hide in his bunker for a few months and wait for it to get cold.  He was hoping the “bastards” would freeze and then he was going to “head for the hills.”
                  In the end we decided to pool our resources.  Al was going to come with me.  He said “I don’t want to sit in some hole in the ground for six months if I don’t have to.”  So that was it.  Tomorrow we were going to start emptying his bunker and get loaded up and ready to go.  All I had to do was convince Gina.  And I had