Welcome To Strange: The Road to Cold Springs.

 

We rolled through the outskirts of Ridgeway without stopping, to say that the truck took significant damage would be an understatement, it wasn't zombies that were waiting for us, it was people. We had to plow through several abandoned vehicles and were hit with a barrage of bricks and rocks, most of the windows got cracked, but they held. Luckily for us the one thing that they didn't have were guns, but we did, and surprising even me Ashley took the bull by the horns and used The S&W auto shotgun, and Henry even used one of the Glock's, when we started firing back the people made themselves scarce. All except for one dude who found himself on the front bumper of my truck, which he ended up under as I ran him over, through the cracked glass of the side window, I could hear the snap and crunch of his bones, as the tires passed over him, muffling his screams. Unknown to us at the time, he'd left behind a little trinket for us as we discovered 10 miles down the road. We pulled over after we found a spot that we deemed safe, so we could assess the damage to the truck, and it was pretty much screwed. There, stuck between the bumper and the grill, was a working two-way radio, and as we listened to the crosstalk it became obvious the people in Ridgeway were working with Aaron Trickle in Cranston. We limped along highway 40 until 35 miles later, when we crossed over into rural Texas. Our luck was about to seriously change for the better. 

We turned off the highway onto a small pothole riddled dirt road that went out into what looked like empty fields, we pulled over where there was nothing on all sides, we found a good spot, we could see in every direction for miles, nobody could sneak up on us. I used the binoculars to scan the area off in the distance, there was a large group of trees at the end of a narrow gravel road, sticking up over the treeline was what looked the top of a grain silo. We drove to it and turned slowly onto the gravel road heading for the trees, when all at once steam sprayed upwards from the front of the truck, the radiator had been punctured, we weren't going to be getting too much farther. When we finally pulled up next to the silo there was a house and a barn along with two other smaller trucks in the driveway, water and steam poured out from our radiator, we needed a new vehicle. Cautiously I took the S&W auto, Ashley and Henry armed themselves with two of the Glock's with extra magazines. We slowly made our way up to the front porch, pausing slightly after every ten feet. No sound, no movement, I went to the front door and tried the knob, it turned easily as it swung open wide with a slow creaking noise.

I stepped inside and motioned for Ashley and Henry to move toward where I saw a long dining room table. I stepped into another room where there was a large desk with a man laying back in a chair, arms dangling off to the sides, a slight strange smell hit my nostrils causing me to cover my mouth, he'd been shot to death, judging from the smell, probably awhile ago. on the desk I found a tall, thick black leather-bound book with papers sticking out of it. As it turned out, the book was his journal, and it was loaded with tons of useful information. We were on the farm of Dr. Noah Crosby, and according to his diary he had returned to Texas a year ago, after working in a lab in New Delhi India, where a new, more deadly strain of the flu virus broke out, he helped to develop a new vaccine To help fight it, however later discovering that the vaccine only mutated the virus making it stronger and more lethal without ever curing it. His warnings however were ignored, so he packed it in and returned to Texas to begin preparing for what he knew was coming. He thought that he would have at least a year to prepare, but the virus got out into the wild, and nine months later it began to burn its way across the globe.

The economy collapsed, on a global scale, governments struggled to retain power, many declared martial law, many people died, the one's who weren't bitten stayed dead, the one's who were bitten, refused to die. The virus tore through Europe in a matter of weeks, everything collapsed, cities burnt, the militaries in most of Europe became infected, the parts that weren't were forced to retreat into pockets of civilization, within a few months, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Poland. Spain and Portugal, ninety percent of Europe and Asia fell. Ireland maintained for the longest, before it finally lost the battle. The virus wasn't done there, it found its way onto the airlines and their passengers, 15 different cargo ships, bound for several different ports in America, each with a crew of 30 to 40 people, and another 10 ships headed for Mexico, and 9 to Canada, all turned into undead monsters, just itching to reach out and bite someone. By the time those planes and ships reached their destinations, Ninety percent of the crews were already infected but had not yet turned. America, Mexico, North America as a whole and Canada, within a year it all fell to pieces. And nobody could stop it, those who survived, were left with bits and pieces of a world we no longer recognized. Now it was a day-to-day struggle. with no rules but the ones we'd made for ourselves.

  

I came into the dining room where Ashley walked through from what I guessed was the kitchen, she said that there were a lot of canned goods and such that we could use as long as no one was still there. I told her about Dr. Crosby and about how he had been shot to death and there didn't appear to be anyone living with him. We scoured the area for anything we could use, Ashley and Henry found a few more guns in the closet along with several boxes of ammo, we gathered all the food that we could carry, several gallons of fresh water, but it was in the locked shop behind the house that we found the mother lode. A one ton 4 X4 GMC truck completely outfitted as a bug out vehicle. We went from a 25 gallon fuel tank with one reserve, to a 45 gallon main with two 15 gallon reserves, plenty of side compartments for supplies and a quarter of an inch thick steel cage over an eight-foot six-inch bed, covered by a heavy canvas tarp, and a cutout over the tailgate, for firing weapons on the go. a full covered steel brush guard over the front grill with an electric wench, and bulletproof glass and covers on the side windows. Basically, the thing was a road ready tank.

The keys were still in the ignition of the new truck, so we put water in the radiator to get the old truck started long enough to move it in front of the shop doors, I opened the hood and hooked up battery cables, and turned the key on, the gauges all lit up showing that the main gas tank was almost empty, but the two reserves were full, as soon as we got it started, the battery indicator showed it was taking a charge, so I pulled it out of the workshop and beside of the old truck, and let the engine run to charge the battery, We finished the charge and turned it off, and I proceeded to drain the fuel tanks of the old truck while Ashley and Henry loaded up the food, water, new guns and ammo, the next town we were due to hit was a place called Middleton, about 195 miles to the Northwest of Pemberton, however it being late in the afternoon, Henry and I dug a hole in the backyard and gave Dr. Noah Crosby the best burial that we could, beneath an Alligator Juniper tree, Ashley even made a makeshift cross. We backed the truck inside the attached garage next to the house and opted to try to head out the next morning. The kids slept, I read through the journal of Dr. Noah Crosby.   

He wrote about a place in the upper northwest corner of Idaho, he called Cold Springs, in his journal he wrote, it was supposedly deserted, and there were no infected people there, There was a massive compound that could be easily fortified, built on a river with a working hydroelectric river dam that generates electricity, it supposedly had a large seasonal vegetable garden and there was an abundance of wildlife living there including Deer, Elk, and wild game birds such as chukar, grouse, pheasant, and wild turkey, and free-range chicken running everywhere, the only real problem we would face, would be getting there, the 1575 miles that they would have to cross to get there was going to be a problem. I would be discussing this with the kids. Dr. Crosby wrote that he'd learned about this place after listening to several ham radio broadcasts, over a period of two months gathering all the clues to figure out where it was, then one month ago the transmissions stopped. The night we spent at the Crosby farm was one of the most peaceful rests that any of us had had in the past year, Ashley and Henry slept through the night, and I managed to get a full 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep myself, the next morning we rose before the sun and helped ourselves to some breakfast, before I went to the garage and warmed up the truck engine. We left Crosby farm behind us at 5:30 AM, and headed for Middleton.

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