As I'm spending the afternoon with my friends, enjoying my Dark & Stormy, I get a text from my girlfriend asking if we've checked the news. We check our phones, and apparently violence is happening at a lot of hospitals around the country, but not in our immediate area. Sucks for them, but the bar doesn't turn the movie off. The GM, my friend and I turn back to our drinks and chatting. Gradually, people start getting up to leave, low cursing, and we hear a couple sirens, but that's not abnormal for our area. Nothing really gets our attention until a call comes from my girlfriend, and connection's ok, but she isn't responding on the other end. There's just garbled commotion and screaming in the background. "Something fucked is happening at my house. I can't hear her, she's not responding to me. I have to leave now!" (IRL: Symptoms of genuine low-level panic creep into the group) The three of us run out of the bar, and the street is already filling with traffic; it looks like rush hour, but it's the middle of the day. We run up a couple of blocks and see that some residential streets are clear, so run back to the car and make it a half mile or so before we hit gridlock. (IRL: The GM has his iPad out and is using Google Maps Satellite View as a general info narrative tool)
As we consider what to do, we hear an oncoming, semi-regular percussion of metallic crashes, and a convoy of emergency vehicles is barrelling down the street behind a fire truck acting as a battering ram, bashing cars out of the way. My friend has the presence of mind to fall into the wake of this convoy and we cover a lot more territory than any of us thought we would be able to. Cars start filling in behind us, and we're effectively trapped in a fast-moving pocket of hair raising driving for several miles before we're able to peel off and do some potentially debilitating offroading of our own through side streets and sidewalks.
We get almost all the way to my house before my friend manages to drive over the median (no mean feat in a '98 Corolla) where we get T-boned by a pickup doing the same thing from the other direction, disabling the car and badly bruising my friend's ribs. While the GM takes care of him, I sprint the four or five blocks from there to my house leaving all my stuff behind. Even though I know the neighborhood's short cuts, I have to stop a half block away from my building because a frantic crowd is running down my street away from the direction of the hospital, a group of teenagers firing handguns back up the street at a group of slowly advancing people in suits, gowns, and civilian clothes. Three people are shot and killed in my intersection, and in a lull in the firing, (by virtue of a roll that miraculously doesn't leave me paralyzed with terror at having watched people shot and killed fifty feet from me amidst pandemonium) I'm able to dash across the street past a felled woman reaching for help and get through the front door of my building.
Three of the four doors into the lobby are open: one has blood all over the knob, one is my door without blood, the third is open and there's yelling and the sounds of messy combat coming from inside. I scramble up the stairs calling for my girlfriend. She isn't there, and the cat carrier is gone, but her phone is on the stairs. She's left a note on the table: "Went with police to marina to go to Alcatraz Island." I pocket the note and the phone, grab a big chef's knife from the kitchen and run downstairs to the fight in my neighbor's house. The GM and my friend have caught up to me from the car, and they're at the front door banging on it, my friend leaning back to break one of the glass panels with his carabiner when I let them into the lobby. They follow me into my neighbor's hall where he's down on his back, desperately clawing at a person atop him who's biting him horribly, blood everywhere, his wife and child nowhere to be seen. I'm able to succeed a highly challenging roll and I lunge forward, burying the whole knife into the lower neck of the attacker, who tries to turn and look back at it, giving my neighbor a chance to shove him off and stand up, gored, bleeding, and livid. The stabbed person gets up, grabs him from behind, and they struggle into the dining room, toppling out the window and landing on the ground outside. I chase them to the window and look out to see my neighbor with the attacker back on top of him, wrenching away at his throat, a large shard of glass sticking out of my neighbor's neck spurting thick dark blood as he struggles, dying. I freak and backpedal, and we try to get out of the apartment, but are met at the door by two more people "who are clearly 'off.'" Before we can do anything, their heads explode from being shot from behind by a stranger in the doorway. The GM and I are frozen in shock, covered in head gore and face, but my friend is somehow able to have a conversation with this guy.
Once we're able to move again, the GM and I get upstairs, hurriedly gather what supplies we can, and meet the driver and the stranger in the back by my neighbor's garage. My friend is able to break into the garage, we get bikes, grab tools. The stranger says, "You got all the supplies?" The GM says yes. The stranger shoots the GM in the head and grabs his backpack. My friend is able to get his hammer in the spokes of the stranger's wheel, and he goes down. I'm able to grab the gun, and I point it at him, but I blow the roll and can't bring myself to shoot him in the head despite the GM's (IRL: a really good friend of mine) corpse lying right there in my driveway. The stranger drops the bag of supplies, and is able to scramble away. My friend angrily takes the gun from me, checks the mag. 4 rounds. He pockets the gun, and I'm staring at my dead friend, the GM, in shock when we see a crowd of weird people moving down the block toward us.
We get on the bikes, each with a backpack (mine has fucking garbanzo beans, canned tomatoes, a gallon of water, and 4 cans of cat food, which is what I had on hand IRL. YOU DON'T KNOW TO GO SHOPPING BEFORE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.). We get as fast as we can to an out of the way place on the frontage road next to the water a few miles away where we're able to regroup.
IRL pause: Time for another round (I move definitively from beer to whiskey at this point), a pee break, and a minute to try to shake it off and get our hear rates back to normal. All of us are legitimately stressed out. Our characters have taken a bunch of stress, and are able to convert some of the stress built up over the course of our rolls into lingering traumas (mine was designated as "loss of loved ones") so as to avoid the impending nervous breakdowns.
Unpause: I break off a branch from a bush, tie my undershirt to it, and I wave it like a flag of surrender as my friend and I ride up the frontage road toward the marina. We see helicoptors overhead, dozens of police boats, coast guard, and national guard transports out in the water, and a sea of people massed in front of the marina outside what is clearly a hastily-erected chain link fence connecting to more established fences of the park and tennis course. Soldiers and police are trying to contain a wide group of people trying anything they can to try to swim, climb, or fight their way past the cordon.
Some of the helicoptors have long ladders extending down from them with a person standing on the lower rung, usually holding, sometimes dropping a flare into the huge mass of people on the otherside of the clogged, but abandoned freeway. Some of the helicoptors have made their way inland, and they're starting to arrange themselves in a rough curve facing away from us.
We gradually make it through the processing bottleneck, turning in the handgun and the knives that I threw in the backpack at the gate, and start moving toward the shuttle boats. We hear gunfire at the back of the crowd, screams and people gather like a wave moving toward us, and the helicoptors have assumed a broad, hovering, convergence when from the north we hear the approach of rapid aircraft. Massive explosions detonate beneath the curve of helicoptors: following the path of flares, the military has just bombed a huge number of people, shaking the earth. The marina becomes an open stampede, and my friend and I break for the boats.
Since we both have experience sailing, we're able to get a 20' sailboat out of its mooring and into the bay. Supplies and a young girl with a kitchen knife are found below. Because she doesn't speak English and is only about 7 years old, it takes a while to convince her that we aren't a threat, and we learn that this is her parents' boat, but they're gone. We spend the next two days off of Alcatraz Island in a huge floatilla of some 200 boats corralled by coast guard, watching the fires spread on the shore, and buildings topple in flame on the peninsula. We eat cat food and tomatoes. There's cell service but the network is full.
Eventually, we're processed on the more habitable Treasure Island, but separated because my friend's ribs are all fucked up and he's taken to the medic. After being severely interrogated and physically examined, the girl and I are assigned housing and driven out to it by a US marine who promises he'll look up my girlfriend for me. Family reunification is something the military was taking very seriously. The girl and I get settled, and go for a walk. After a while of walking around and fretting, I see the cat carrier sitting by a door. I recognize the blanket inside, I smell the blanket to be sure. It's unmistakable! My girlfriend walks out, and I collapse in weeping. She was transferred there after spending a day and a half on Alcatraz Island during an outbreak of whatever is out there on land. She managed to lock herself in a cell and survive until the island was contained, meanwhile murderous people reaching through the bars at her the whole time. Our cat has died, and she can't explain it, but she's kept the carrier. I'm reduced to nothing but misery, relief, and sobbing.
Unbeknownst to me, my friend has somehow managed to piss off his guards and get locked in his interrogation room when a text from his wife comes in, asking where he is. He's able to send an OK and location just before the battery dies. He's wracked, but knows she's OK. Somehow (IRL: I'm not clear on this because I was buying beer and trying to compartmentalize the RPG aspects of this intense and frantic game) he finds out that his doctor is not who he says he is, that it's weird that he was put in here without having been bitten and is starting to get a really bad feeling about this, but is left alone for hours. During that time, he is able to make friends with Phillips, the US marine guarding him. Abruptly Phillips leaves the room. Contact has gone dead with his superiors. Contingency is to get to the boats, and my friend is able to convince Phillips to let him out and (amazingly) to hand over his side arm, while he keeps the automatic rifle. They get to a jeep together. Apparently, some infected had arrived by bus, and the contagion is beginning to spread. Sirens and gunfire are heard near the parking lot, and are beginning to move west.
My girlfriend and I have been able to trade texts with the dead GM's girlfriend who was with my friend's wife when he got the text that she was OK. The dead GM's girlfriend has just arrived on the island by bus. She's able to meet us ahead of the growing swarm, and the jeep and we manage to convene near the shuttles as the garrison's marines fan out and fall back as slowly as they can before the advancing crowd that quickly widens to span most of the island. Most of the shuttle boats are overflowing with people. There's figting on the majority of them, and one has people jumping by the dozen into the water to excape the marauding infected mauling the nearest person.
As a group we run up the dock to one of the abandoned boats, and my friend takes aim at the blood-soaked, savage mutilator. He fires. He hits him in the back. He fires again. The infected's head blows apart, its body and the body of the person it had been feeding on topple into the water. We charge for the boat, my friend holding the dock against a group of approaching infected. I help my girlfriend and the girl into the boat, but the dead GM's girlfriend and I fall into the water as my friend falls back to the boat, and by jumping on, is able to get it far enough from the dock to be inacessible to the infected. However, they start walking into the water after me and the dead GM's girlfriend. We swim as hard as we can alongside the floating shuttle boat, and are helped aboard, soaked, panting, and terrified.
My friend goes up to the raised cockpit and finds a body on the floor. He goes right to it and aims the gun at its head. It opens its eyes. He shoots it at point blank range, and tosses the body overboard. He gets the boat out into the bay and drops anchor. He rejoins us on deck. We're all silent. The dead GM's girlfriend hands my friend's wife's cell phone to him. "I'm sorry." (IRL: His head drops and he and the GM have to fight to not start crying. I dismally stare at the table.)