Free 100 Days of Death by Ray Ellingsen Page A

gratitude left me speechless. He opened the door to my room and looked around. “Actually, that’s my roo….” I started to say.
    Albert interrupted me, saying, “Cool Christmas lights. Bed’s kind of a mess though.” He walked in and shut the door.
    I stood in the hall for a minute, finally saying to myself, “Actually, that’s my room…”
    After Albert retired to my room I hung his wet towel and washed the dishes. I noticed that the water pressure had increased. I have no idea what to make of that. It was still rainy and overcast, but nothing like the night before. I was too wired to sleep so I decided to update my inventory list. Watching Albert eat made me realize that my three-month food supply probably wouldn’t last a month with him around (he finished off his soup then went through a can of chili, a sandwich, and a box of Oreos).
    I would have to have a talk with him about rationing, but after hearing what he had been through in the last sixteen days I didn’t have the heart to say anything to him yet.
    Frankly, I was pretty impressed that Albert had managed to survive until now. He had never struck me as particularly resourceful. The last time I had seen him was when I told him to take a patrol car to go find his sister.
    When he left the security office that day (it feels like a lifetime ago), Albert had driven out to Canoga Park. When he got there, apparently there was a riot in full progress. When the looters saw Albert’s patrol car they threw rocks at it and surrounded him, forcing him to either stop the vehicle or run them down. Of course Albert made the mistake of stopping.
    They pulled him out of his car and proceeded to rough him up until Albert drew his sidearm and, according to him, attempted to “fire a shot in the air to disperse them.” What wound up happening was that someone tried to grab the gun from him and Albert accidently shot two of his assailant’s fingers off. That evidently worked just as well.
    The crowd dispersed long enough for Albert to get away, unfortunately, not with his vehicle. Someone had driven off with it while Albert was showing off his marksmanship skills. Albert wound up walking over two miles to his mother’s house.
    He told me that when he got there no one was home. His little sister’s cell phone went straight to voice mail. Albert stayed at his mother’s house for six days waiting, but his family never returned.
    By then, the Infected were everywhere. Over a hundred of Them surrounded his mother’s house, trapping him inside. I think Albert figured out that he was probably never going to see his sister again. He couldn’t stay where he was for much longer because it was only a matter of time before they would break in by sheer weight of numbers.
    Albert’s escape plan was actually pretty creative. I guess the distance between Albert’s mother’s house and the next-door neighbor’s house was pretty narrow. He went up to his mother’s attic and pulled out several-eight foot long attic floorboards. He staggered them to form two sixteen-foot beams and nailed them together with shorter cross pieces to form a crude ladder like bridge. He then spanned the makeshift bridge from the ledge of the attic window to the neighboring roof.
    He went downstairs and made as much noise as he could to rile them up. When they started tearing through the front door, Albert went upstairs, shutting every door he could between him and his pursuers. He went out the attic window and across the bridge to the neighbor’s roof.
    A pack of Them, still outside, saw him and tried to get to him but were stopped by the fence separating the two houses.
    Albert went across the neighboring roof and down the other side to get away. He spent the next six days in an apartment building he came across. The building was full of infected people, but according to Albert, they didn’t know how to use the elevator, which gave Albert an advantage in getting around them.
    He somehow managed to