We All Fall Down

We All Fall Down Part 2

FIVE YEARS EARLIER...

The apocalypse, as far as David Black was concerned, started at a very inconvenient time. He'd thought a lot about global disasters. He had a fairly long commute to work and it gave him plenty of time to think on the drive in and the return drive home. And he traveled a fair amount for his company. He could never seem to remember to download a movie to his iPad or find a book to download to the Kindle app on it. So he spent a lot of time looking out airplane windows and thinking. Lots of times he thought about problems at work. Other times he thought about his family and the various issues he had to deal with there. His oldest was about to get her driver's license. He thought about that a lot. But he also pondered a fair amount about problems that he assumed were never going to happen, just because to him they were fun to think about. Like an epidemic. Or the Chinese invading like in Red Dawn (the second one, not the first, obviously). Or a zombie apocalypse.

David had thought about how to deal with it when he was home. The whole family watched The Walking Dead and World War Z and iZombie and all the rest. And they talked at dinner about all manner of things, sometimes what they'd do differently from what the characters in these shows did. They had a lot of ideas about how they'd do things differently. And David was the kind of father that, when things occurred to him, no matter how unlikely, he mentioned them to his kids. Just in case. For example, they lived in a two-story house. He told his kids, if they ever had to hole up in the house, from zombies or whatever, knock the staircase out. He'd even found the opportunity on a family walk down to the Dairy Queen one day to take them all into a house under construction and show them how stairs were constructed and how to deconstruct them. His kids always seemed interested in that sort of knowledge and they didn't seem to think it was odd that he shared it with them. At least he didn't think they did.

In all the scenarios he'd run through in his head, however, he'd always assumed he was home. It had actually occurred to him he might be at work, and he thought about how he'd get home (he'd just get home, somehow). It had even occurred to him that he might be traveling when it happened. But again, he didn't get much past the basic thought that he'd just somehow have to get home. In retrospect, this was a rather large oversight. Because when the zombie apocalypse broke out for David Black, he was on a business trip. In Los Angeles. Stuck in traffic on the 405.

It was a typical California day in that it was sunny and beautiful and there was traffic and he was stuck in it. He had the air conditioning in his rental car cranked up and his tie was choking him. This particular shirt was a tiny bit too small. If he was going to be completely honest, the shirt was fine; his neck was a tiny bit too fat. He was overall in pretty good shape but lately work, no time for the gym and looking at 40 in the rearview mirror had all conspired to give him a touch more, well, more him than he was quite used to.

He sighed and stuck a finger in his collar and pulled at it in a vain attempt to stretch the fabric. He kept meaning to throw this shirt out because it was the only one he had that choked him. But it was a nice shirt, and he hated to throw it away because then he'd be forced to buy a replacement and he really, really hated spending money on things he had already spent money on. He looked over at the car's radio, which was currently off. The car was what the rental companies called a full-size and everyone else in the US called a mid-size and David called a piece of shit. It was new but very cut-rate and cheap feeling. David was a car guy. He liked cars. He was good at driving them. He typically drove them fast. But this thing had no power to speak of and a crappy suspension. The only thing it had going for it was that its air conditioner worked well. David liked music but hated commercials and this car did not have satellite radio. That was why he was eyeing the radio disdainfully. That was also why it was off. Which was why he didn't hear the news talking about the huge pile up on the 405, about five miles down the road from where he currently sat in his crappy rental, inching forward at about four miles per hour. He cursed out loud to himself when the four miles per hour became no miles per hour. Goddamn traffic.