Oh, yeah, and don’t get me started on radioactive walking corpses. If I ever find anyone alive who was party to the decision to try nukes, I’m going to fucking kill them and when they wake up as zoms, I’m going to kill them again.

If I could fly or drive I might have gotten home in time. If the phones worked I could have called.

Instead it took weeks to go from California to Maryland. A lot of weeks, because I had to fight my way through some places, and circle way the hell out of my way to avoid others. When I got to my uncle’s farm in Robinwood, Maryland, I found nothing but ashes and bones. I don’t know if any of those bones belonged to my wife. The fact that I didn’t find the charred bones of an infant gives me hope. A slender needle of hope that is buried all the way into the center of my broken heart. That’s not poetry. It’s a fucking tragedy.

I think I went a little crazy.

I mean, I guess I had to.

Days are gone. Maybe weeks. Time stopped having any meaning for me. There are days when all I have left are fragments. Shivering in a rainy ditch near the farm, covered in vomit and rainwater. Kneeling in the ashes, screaming, punching the ground, punching my own face. Wandering down roads I no longer recognized.

One day I woke up naked and covered in scratches, in a creek miles and miles away from anywhere. I had a dog leash clutched in one hand and when I could focus my eyes I read the name on the heavy steel tag: Baskerville. I knew that dog. He belonged to a neighbor and was one of the many descendants of my old combat dog, Ghost, and an Irish wolfhound named Banshee. I think he was Ghost’s grandson, out of a litter of seven. We’d gifted the dog to the teenage girl, Sandra, daughter of a neighbor, a lovely girl with Down syndrome.

I made my stumbling way to the farm where Sandra and her folks lived, but there was only heartbreak waiting for me. All the sweet gentleness that was Sandra was gone from the thing I had to fight in the living room of the old house. I buried her and five other members of her family, stole her uncle’s clothes, and began drifting along the Maryland back roads. Finding no one alive.

Not. One. Person. There are some blank spots in my memory there, too. There is absolutely nothing in my brain to fill in those blanks. Even now, months later. My voice was gone, though. Raw. I spat blood onto my hands. Screaming can do that, if you do it long enough and put your heart into it.

The leash stayed with me, wrapped around my waist. Don’t ask me why. I was wearing it when I became aware of who I was again. Days blurred by. I had the sense that I was being hunted, and gradually my old skills came back to me. Not on a conscious level at first, but instinctually. The lizard brain working toward its goal of survival while the monkey brain still went mad at times.