Free The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse by Nicholas Ryan

had served in the Air Force, working law enforcement, and I had military training – a week at M60 School, eight weeks as an infantry grunt, another eight weeks of security at the police academy. I was trained to use an M203 grenade launcher… and a bunch of other stuff the military taught me. I was torn between my duty to my country and my responsibility to my family. I could have stayed; I could have volunteered to help the police and military.”
    “But you didn’t?”
    “No.”
    “Can I ask why?”
    Mike sniffed, then straightened his back and drew his shoulders square like he was bracing himself. “Because I have a wife and two daughters,” his voice softened with compassion. “One of my girls is sixteen, the other just twelve years old.”
    I nodded, understanding. Then my eyes narrowed curiously and I played Devil’s Advocate. I suspected I already knew the answer to my next question but I threw it out there.
    “Given different circumstances… if you had no family. Would you have stayed?”
    “In a heartbeat,” Mike Jackson smashed back his reply. His answer was so passionate and adamant that it sounded to me as though he almost regretted not being on the front line of the fight.
    I drew my notebook out of my pocket and jotted a couple of pages of notes. I realized suddenly he still hadn’t answered my first question. I doubled back over what we had spoken about so far.
    “So… why did you pack up and leave?” I re-asked the question. “Why didn’t you try to wait out the ‘Affliction’?”
    He made another irritated face and stabbed his hand at those nearby trees once more. “I knew the ‘Afflicted’ were going to sweep through here,” he said in slow words as though he were talking to a child. “Because Laurel Fork straddles the Danville Pike, and besides that we’re basically in the path of a line between Winston-Salem and Roanoke. To the west of us is a barrier of national parks and forests. I saw this tide of infection and death coming up from the south, heading right for us. I knew we weren’t safe here.”
    “And you were right?”
    Mike inclined his head grimly. “Those trees… the land… it’s all evidence,” he said softly. “The ‘Afflicted’ came sweeping through this area, killing the ground, killing the plants, even poisoning one of the creeks that run through the property.”
    “The water?” That shocked me. I had seen the scorched dead earth left behind by the virulent contagion, but I had never heard of a water supply being contaminated. If this shocking revelation were true, it would mean the ultimate death of everyone who had endured.
    “There were bodies in the creeks,” Mike explained. “I saw a dozen or more of them in a stream down by the bottom of the property. They had all been headshot,” he shrugged his shoulders like he didn’t have an explanation. “Maybe the military got them in an ambush, or maybe it was a few vigilante fighters who fled up into the mountains when the ‘Affliction’ broke out. I don’t know. But they were decomposed.”
    “Have you tested the water from any of the other creeks?”
    “It’s fine,” Mike said. “It was just that one stream where the infected had been killed. The water was the color of rust and all the plants along the bank were covered in a frothy scum, like detergent.”
    “Fish?”
    “They were all dead, floating belly up. I followed the stream for miles. It was the same.”
    We lapsed into another silence, although this one wasn’t fraught with the same bristling tension that had greeted me on my arrival. Now we were both contemplative. Maybe Mike was thinking about how his life would have turned out if he had stayed behind and joined the fight against the ‘Afflicted’. His expression became dark for a while and then he sighed like a man about to start on a long weary journey.
    “I have a journal,” he said. “It’s my wife’s actually. She wrote it.”
    “A journal? You mean a