Read The Phoenix Trilogy (Book 1): World On Fire for Free Online Page A

together.
     
    I’ll admit, I’ve never
really had a lot of cause to consider it much beyond "don't get yourself
killed, kiddo," and I didn't spend a whole lot of time talking to other
survivors about it. Most of the time, the outbreak was the last thing anybody
wanted to bring up in casual conversation, so it’s not like it was a topic that
was hard to skirt around. Add to that the fact that I've tried to avoid people
as much as possible, and it seems pretty reasonable that I would be a little
uninformed.
     
    In fact, pretty much since
the dead started walking, I've been alone. Occasionally I spent a night with a
couple of strangers on their way from Point A to Point B, but I always left as
quickly as I could.
     
    Being around other humans,
getting to know them, it's painful. They all have such sad stories, about
people they've lost or the things they've seen, and I don't want any part of
it. Hard enough to keep my chin up without all of the extra heartbreak.
     
    I'm lucky, in a way. I
don't have any family left to worry over me, or for me to worry about. My mom
was a devout "Christian" who couldn't bring herself to abort her
pregnancy, but never wanted to have me, either. Soon as I was born and she had
the strength to leave, she shoved me off onto my dad and got the fuck out of
Dodge.
     
    Dad, bless his heart, he
didn't have a clue what to do with a baby girl. He did his best, but trying to
make enough money to support us ate up most of his time, so I was left to my
own devices when it came to learning about the world.
     
    We were close, don't get
me wrong, and I could talk to him about anything as long as it didn't have to
do with periods or boys. I just didn't get a lot of chances to have a
heart-to-heart, and when I was nineteen, he died. Heart attack, brought on by
stress, the doctors said.
     
    I spent a long time trying
not to blame myself for that.
     
    Anyway, my grandparents
had been dead for a while, I never had any siblings, and neither did Dad. I was
on my own, and given my experience with people up to that point, I wasn't exactly
keen on making friends. I'm friendly enough, always remember to be polite when
I'm supposed to be and everything, I just don't really like company.
     
    That was fine before the
end of days came along, but now I'm starting to see there are some serious disadvantages.
Like not knowing half of the things that are going on around the world, for
one.
     
    For a time, you could flip
on the TV and get a decent update on the news, but then stations started
getting abandoned as people moved to safer pastures. The internet was a total
clusterfuck of rumors and nonsense that made piecing together anything even
remotely resembling the truth an impossibility.
     
    Pretty soon, for one
reason or another, it got a lot harder to pick up on things unless you saw it
first-hand. You could listen in on emergency broadcasts, but finding a way to
hear them got harder and harder to do. Most places had lost power, and a car
was basically an express ticket to getting yourself killed with all the noise
they made, so using them just as a radio was inconvenient to say the least.
Unless you had some kind of portable equipment specifically designed for
emergencies, you were probably out of luck.
     
    The next best thing was
word of mouth, and like I said, I wasn't so fond of camaraderie. The end result
is I wound up being further out of the loop than I'd thought. There were a lot
of things that I just took for granted, but the more Marco talks about it all,
it sounds like this whole thing, all the undead and
people dying, it was definitely intentional. Somebody, or something, wanted to
make this happen.
     
    It's things like how the
zombies operate. Marco told me about how they only eat their own dead. If they
catch you while you're living, they'll rip you up a bit, but they're not after
food. They do just enough to kill and convert, for the most part. It gets
scarier when you start to realize they're only