character :: Edward 'Ted' Craw
The world went to shit. Ted threw the bullshit flag on the news stories early on, but it didn’t keep his wife, Kelly, from getting sucked into the hype. Facebook, television, even the boys down at Carl’s wouldn’t shut up about it. Something about rabies, but it looked to be trapped in some third-world country. It wouldn’t make it here. When his two daughters, Samantha married with two kids of her own and Victoria in graduate school, both came to visit on his birthday; the conversation eventually turned in that direction.
“Girls, if anything happens, which it won’t, I’ll meet you at lakeside.”
So, when it turned out that Ted was wrong, and he sat trapped in his truck while monsters beat on the glass trying to make their way in, an old and familiar feeling rose in his chest: this is war. Grabbing for a machete he kept behind the seat at all times (to his wife’s endless bitching), Ted climbed through the back window of his truck, into the truckbed, and began hacking his way home. Even for a retired army man like himself, the work was grueling, and it took nearly a week to make it home. By the time he found his house, the door had been left ajar and every last one of his belongings lay scattered across the front lawn. She’d died quickly, Kelly, and she left no animated corpse; looked to Ted like the work of the living. Somehow that made him more angry than if she’d been eaten.
or how we're gonna get there
but I'll meet you at lakeside.
So, to lakeside he went: a small house he sometimes rented with his girls during those long, lazy California summers while on leave. It took weeks, maybe more like a month to get there; and for five long months, he waited. And waited. When he ran out of food, he scavenged. When he ran out of water, he did what he could. But finally, exhausted, and with only a note painted on the door: he made it back out into the world in hopes of finding some kind of safe point where maybe his girls awaited under the protection of the military or FEMA. “I’ll be back in June.”
But a safe point didn’t look so great after miles and miles of white tents and temporary barriers passed by him, covered in stinking blood and overrun with infected. With the resignation that he’d just die here, Ted kept walking back into the city; one morning, just as the sun rose, the ripping sound of some kind of music got his attention. Birds flew into the air as the unusual sound permeated the empty streets, and Ted found himself drawn to it (which is a shame, because he hated the band). Soon, he stood under the outcropping of a Wal*mart, speakers blasting music over the parking lot, a red-headed girl staring wordlessly down at him. He nodded, not saying a word, and turned to walk away from the woman who made no motion to have him join her; but then, a rope ladder flopped listlessly behind him.
Now, Ted spends his time taking in all the world has become. Heidi, the young woman who gave him asylum, food and water has made him second in command; even though she easily takes every piece of advice he gives. New people come in every couple of months, it seems; maybe, just maybe, one of his girls will be walking up. Just any day now.
