Dead Earth (old version)

Chapter Four - Thorne

Thorne and Natasha survived on pure luck.

The fact that Natasha was a die-hard video gamer who was ready for a zombie apocalypse, though not so much the next day's math test? Pure luck. 

The fact that she always made sure both of them had a pack under their beds ready for that impossible moment? Pure luck.

Thorne just happening to be friends with Natasha out of 196 countries and over 7 billion people? Pure luck.

It didn't matter that Natasha now had nightmares every night because she had to bash a guy's brains out to survive, it just mattered that they were alive. 

It didn't matter that she didn't know what had caused this onset apocalypse. 

What she did know was that if she and Natasha didn't get the hell out of dodge they were  going to die, or un-die. Whatever. 

 They didn't need to have deep philosophical debates about whether the undead were still living and just diseased. They didn't need to argue about whether the undead still had souls or if those went to the afterlife before the body was reanimated.  What they needed to do was hope that someone, somewhere was making a cure, and they needed to survive. 

At first they were planning to head to the Appalachians as they were closer than the Rockies, but once they had been safely locked in Thorne's house that Friday all they did was stay glued to the T.V. and watch the news for anything that could help them, which was good because they were warned away from the east. 

Eventually the news channels went of the air and the power later went out of course, but before that they learned that part of the east didn't quite exist anymore. Since too many people were heading to the east, to the coast and the mountains there, they attracted lots of undead, or walkers as Natasha called them. 

These people basically got themselves trapped there, including that reporter they had been watching, and almost all were turned. As far as anyone knew, no one escaped and there were nown hundreds of thousands of undead wandering around the east, including the appalachian mountains. 

So Thorne and Natasha were heading to the Rockies, they knew there were probably closer mountain ranges, some likely in Canada, but Natasha had an aunt and an uncle that lived in the Rockies near the border of Canada who might have survived. Their whole house was an underground bomb shelter in the middle of a forest at the base of the mountains after all. 

So here they were, in some part of Indiana trying to find a gas station with actual gas in the tanks. 

 Thorne's car, a shiny black Camry that they'd named Colt, had gotten them out of Detroit and from Michigan to Indiana, but it was now running on empty and they still hadn't found an unlooted gas station. 

Between the rioters, looters, and those who actually figured out what was happening, there wasn't much left at the popular gas stations. 

"Tasha, I see another up ahead." Thorne sighed as she coaxed the car on. 

Natasha squinted through her blue framed glasses. "It's another Shell station, but it only has one car out front, maybe nobody's cleaned it out."

When they got there Thorne saw that Tasha was correct, it was another Shell station with only a single car, and a plus: it looked like there were no walkers. 

Thorne turned off the car and climbed out carefully, incase there actually were some undead lurking about, and waited for Natasha to pull her handgun out of the glove box. 

Thorne's family only owned one gun, a rifle that was currently in the backseat, but Natasha's father was a gun collector, so they pretty much had their pick of what they might need. They'd both decided that the walkers seemed to be attracted toward sound, so the loud guns were out. The handguns, however, all had silencers, and Natasha possessed a compound bow she used for competitions.