The End

Part 4

  Part 4

 After dinner, the kids were playing flashlight tag and the adults were sipping the beer the guys had thoughtfully brought back.  David cleared his throat, “Since it’s just us, maybe we should talk about what we should do?  I don’t know about everyone else, but I think we should stick together as a group.  I know we haven’t known each other very long, but we have all been through quite a bit together in the last couple of days and that creates a bond, besides we stand a better chance of making it through this as a group.”  Everyone agreed.  

    For the next two hours, we made list of the resources we had and what we would need to make it through the next few months.  We  decided to stay put at the campground.  The power was still working, we were secluded in the back and there were plenty of game animals.  Shelter might be an issue, it was mid October.  Cold weather was coming.  David and Katie had a 36 foot camper, but everyone else had tents. Even though we were in South Carolina, it was still going to be too cold to live in a tent.  I had a space heater and a couple of electric blankets, but when it was below freezing it wouldn’t be enough.  Kevin had a plan though.

    There was a road, sort of, going from our section of the campground to the main road.  It was very overgrown and had only been used by four wheelers mostly, but he felt we could haul a trailer down it and sneak it in the back.  That way we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.  There was a RV dealership just down the road, we would go ‘shopping’ the next day.

   The next day came and we did not go looking for shelter.  The sound of screaming was coming from the main section.  We all cautiously made our way up there.  Some of the campsites that everyone thought the people had walked away from, had not been abandoned after all.  They were inside their tents and campers, dead.  There was chaos.  

    As I walked around the campground, I noticed a pattern.  All the campsites were the people were dead, had checked in only a day or two before the ‘incident’.  That’s what we were calling it, because we still didn’t know what ‘it’ was.  So, everyone who had been here for more than two days, had been saved.  What in the hell was going on?

    We all quietly made our way back to our end of the campground.  It was getting ugly out there.  A few people had started trying to remove the bodies and bury them, but others were trying to grab food and other supplies from the dead campers.  Since they had only been there a day or two, those sites had quite a bit of food, fuel and other supplies.  It was quickly becoming a riot.  

    The next day, we went out the back of the campground and to the RV dealership.  We picked out two of the biggest ones they had and pulled them back to the campground.  My boys were really excited about the camper, the tent was really getting old after almost three weeks.  David and Kevin set ours up on the site and helped us get settled.  Then they got to work on Kevin’s.  

    I slept so well that night.  I felt so much more secure in the camper, even though I felt guilty about taking it.  I hadn’t felt as badly about taking the food, because the store had already been broken into, but we broke into the RV place to get the keys.  We had also grabbed some extras for all the trailers.  But I knew that my kids needed shelter from the cold.  It had been fairly dry, but that wouldn’t last forever.  I just hoped that ‘stealing’ an RV, would be the worst thing that I would have to do to keep my kids safe, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be and that scared me.  At least we weren’t alone, I was so thankful that we had the other families to help us through this.  I hoped that my grandma had someone too.