So what went wrong?

Well, like I said, we started with one ultimate goal.

Protecting Maria.

Everything else came second. Including our own survival.

Maria felt uneasy about it. She didn’t like being treated differently. She didn’t want the preferential treatment and I love her for that. You should’ve seen the fight she put up when we decided that she should be the one wearing my NBC suit.

But the reality of our situation - she was different. She had survived a bite from an infected person. She was immune to the Oz virus.

So we had to protect her.

This was our only goal. This was all that mattered.

Maria.

This goal has torn our group apart.

I’ve come to realize the problem with goals and decisions and choices is that emotions get in the way. People start thinking with their heart instead of their head. Take Jack for example. Jack is an emotional guy. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to think with his head. But I guess Maria is no different. And I guess I’m no different.

Anyway, to protect Maria, to save her, we needed to escape from the island nation of Australia. To do that, we needed to find Daniel’s secret camp, located somewhere in the outback, somewhere in a place called the Nullarbor plains. The camp had been set up by Daniel’s crack team of mercenary soldiers. It had been their base of operations. Their mission had been to infiltrate and move inside the borders of Australia, avoiding detection by the military, avoiding the wrath of their ‘containment protocol’. Their mission was to locate Maria and rescue her.

They had failed.

They had met their end in the crumbling ruins of Sydney. They had been ambushed and surrounded by the infected. And something else. Something bigger. Daniel was the only remaining member of that team. He was the only one to make it out of Sydney alive, the only one smart enough to run.

This meant that now it was up to us to get Maria out of here. It came down to Kenji, Jack, Daniel and me.

We were the rescue team.

In Daniel’s camp we would find shelter, food, water and guns. But most importantly, waiting for us in that camp, was the X wing. The X-wing is a hypersonic jet capable of flying at speeds of up to Mach sixteen. With this jet, Daniel could fly us out of Australia to any place in the world. We could be safe on American soil in a matter of hours. Or England. Or anywhere really. Any place that was safe.

We knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get there. Standing in our way was the ever present danger of the Oz virus and the infected. Not to mention about a thousand miles of semi-arid and completely arid desert. The Australian Outback is a harsh place. Food and water are scarce. Dangers and the presence of death are not.

The one bright spot was the dust storm that had covered almost all of Australia had finally cleared up. It was weird. One day the sky was red, the dust storm thicker than ever. And then the next day it just vanished. We had been walking around in the red dust for so long, constantly covering and shielding our faces, it was like we forgot what normal weather was like. It was an amazing relief to experience clear skies.

Early on we decided that we would sleep in shifts. Two people awake at all times. At least one of those people had to be Kenji or Daniel. These two guys have proven their worth to the group time and time again. We wouldn’t have made it very far without them. Whenever we needed them, they answered the call. They never complained. They protected us like gun toting, sharp-shooting guardian angels. Whenever we came across a town, Kenji and Daniel would move ahead to scope it out and make sure it was secure. Jack, Maria and I would remain hidden. Safe. Well, as safe as you can be in this place.

Most of the time the answer was always the same.

The town was overrun.

Crawling with infected.

They seem to stick to the population centers, the towns. I don’t know why.

So yeah, we all knew this would be hard. Like Jack said the other day, “walking across a desert, in the midst of a zombie apocalypse is not something to be taken lightly.”

But I don’t think any of us knew it was going to be this hard. I think in the back of our minds we were secretly hoping to find a car, or maybe even a ‘Winnebago’.

Then all we’d have to do is stick to an isolated back road and follow it all the way to Daniel’s camp.

Fire up the X-wing.

Fasten our seatbelts.

Stow our carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment.

Position our food trays and seats in their upright position.

Funny thing was, we actually found a few cars that we were able to drive. But none of them had much fuel. So we never got very far.

Over the next couple of days, we started running low on water. Rationing became really strict. It was so bad at one point we were only allowed a few sips of water over the course of a day. It wasn’t enough to survive on. Not for long.

Daniel knew how to find water in a desert. He told us to look for insects and birds. If there was wildlife in the area, there would be a water source.

But we never found any wildlife.

We also looked for water in dry rivers and creek beds. Daniel told us to dig under the top soil. If the soil was damp, we would eventually find water if we kept digging. But the creek beds were always dry. And the more we kept digging, the more we kept sweating. Eventually the digging became counter-productive, dangerous.

To make matters worse, our food was almost gone. We only had a few cans of peaches and baked beans left. Daniel was in charge of rationing. And he ruled with an iron fist. As with the water, we were only allowed a few mouthfuls of food in the morning for breakfast. That was it. We went hungry for the rest of the day. The hunger pains were awful. They came in waves, making it hard to think straight.

As we headed west, we began to notice emergency signs on the roadsides. The signs were instructing people to evacuate the area, to make their way to the major cities of Adelaide and Melbourne. Head for the military safe zones.

One road sign listed the nearest towns. The distance to those towns had been covered in black spray paint.

The following message had been written:

Hope is abandoned.

Hunter is dead.

Beware the black smoke.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but these were warnings. And we should have listened to them.

The road sign was situated right next to an intersection in the middle of nowhere. The road turned off into the distance, heading north. There were two huge signs that warned of possible nuclear fallout and possible viral contagions.

“What do you think this means?” I asked. “Beware the black smoke? It was on the sign we saw the other day as well.”

“Not sure,” Daniel said. “Could be nuclear fallout.”

“Is nuclear fallout black?”

“A few days after the attack on Hiroshima,” Kenji said. “Back in World War Two. There was a black rain. It was radioactive. Maybe the fallout has combined with smoke and ash from the fires in the cities, and maybe the dust storm.”

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Daniel said. “Be on the lookout for it.”

The other warning signs simply read:

Do not proceed. Viral contagions ahead. Turn back immediately.

The military has been authorized to use deadly force.

Now that I look back, I realize we were in way over our heads. We hadn’t even made it halfway and we were already starving and dying of thirst. We were getting desperate and careless. But there was no turning back. We had no choice but to push on. So that’s exactly what we did. We kept walking to the next town. We kept rationing our water.

Unfortunately, towns were few and far between. And it was always the same old story. The smaller towns were empty. No people, no food. Nothing. The bigger towns on the other hand were full.

Full of danger, full of death, full of infected.

At the intersection with the warning signs we made the desperate and stupid decision to head south, closer to the bigger towns and the major cities. Hopefully we would find a town that had supplies. We knew it was a long shot; we knew there would be more infected the closer we got to the population centers, but we had no choice.

Risk vs. reward.

Life vs. death.