From the journal of Manny Stone, May 20

May 20, 2017

We have been traveling slowly for three days. I guess we have to be that we are in the mountains and not near a major city. The cars blocking the roads are a problem here and I can't imagine how bad they are in and around the cities.
We moved fairly quickly, at first, since there weren't many people living in the area near my cabin. The first day we made a good thirty miles and found an old farm house to stay the night in.

When we pulled up in the yard, I honked the horn and we waited to see if anything moved. It didn't take long. A zombie shambled around the corner of the house from the direction of the barn. It had been an older man dressed in overalls and a short sleeved plaid work shirt. He was short and round and had a pitchfork sticking out of his chest, presumably from someone trying to protect themselves from him once he turned.
A short distance behind him came a small female zombie in a torn and dirty housecoat. Her abdomin was a dark, bloody hole with bits of her intestines and other organs sticking out and dragging on the ground behind her with every step. Her left arm was hanging on by strips of flesh, muscle and tendons, but the bones were broken and useless. Marny gasped when she came into sight and Alex and I told her to stay while we took out the undead farmers.
Once we had them taken care of, I moved the truck behind the house, so it wasn't visible from the road, and then we went into the house. My first thought was that it smelled a little musty, but not as bad as it would have if the couple had played out their little dying and turning drama inside. You've got to be thankful for the little things.
The rest of that night and the next day were mostly uneventful. There was the occasional zombie to kill and the occasional block on the road from cars or trees to remove. But other than that, we made a respectable twenty two miles. We found an old gas station and general store at a cross roads to sleep in the second night. From the way it looked and the amount of deterioration, it was abandoned long before the pandemic hit. We had to pry one of the back windows open and there was nothing useful inside except a concealed place to sleep.
This morning, we ate some instant oatmeal and piled back into the truck, hoping to make at least another twenty miles. That was wishful thinking, though. We had only been on the road for a mile and a half when we hit the first road block created by a four car crash where one of the cars knocked a tree down onto the road as well. There was no way to go around the blockage because the sides of the road were solid forest down to the edge of the asphalt. It took us three hours to clear enough space to get the truck through and we still managed to scrape paint off the sides as we squeezed by.
A little over two miles later we found ourselves stopped on one side of a downed bridge with no way to keep going forward. We back tracked to where the crash had happened and searched the cars for any maps we could find. Alex had to kill a zombie that was smashed behind the steering wheel but found a local map that showed us a round about way to keep heading west. We had to drive back to the gas station and take a different direction, but it would eventually get us back to the road we wanted on the other side of the downed bridge.

Three traffic blockages, four downed trees, one flooded creek and at least fifteen undead later, we had only made it fourteen miles and it was already late afternoon going on evening. I made the command decision that we needed to stop for the night and we started looking for somewhere to sleep. Who knows what we would run into in the dark if we kept going, it just wasn't worth the risk.
This time, we found an abandoned hotel, again abandoned long before the shit hit the fan, and we parked around back. By searching the rooms, we found one with two beds that wasn't completely open to the stars or torn to pieces. We going to use sleeping bags on the old mattresses and hopefully, we won't end up with any small visitors looking for warmth in the middle of the night.
Today just sucked the big one, no other way about it. Tomorrow better be a better day.

As a writer and artist, I appreciate any readers and their comments. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog. Please, come read the other blog I write for our artisan collective, Raven's Castle Creations, on our website at www.ravencastlecreations.com. It includes posts on art, the mythology of symbols we use in our art, history and more! Also, come see the art we produce in our Etsy store at etsy.com/shop/RavenCastleCreations. Follow us on Twitter at @ravencastleart and on Facebook at @ravencastlecreations.