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"I’m busy, John"

"Sure I’ll try to come up with a plan"

"Whatever"

"Watch the shadows"

"Hey, John, don’t do anything stupid--"

I was talking to a dead phone

17 Hours Prior to the Outbreak

DISCLAIMER: The following sequence of events was relayed by John to the author after the fact, and no atteh witness interviews While there is no evidence directly contradicting any of this account, hly unlikely

John wound up needing five hours to find Franky Burgess

Thatthere were rows of trained, unifor out across several square miles around the hospital all day Friday without success, but it actually took longer than John was hoping It wasn’t until 8 PM that he found hilass, and he had been hoping to have the whole situation wrapped up while it was still daylight Night is when bad things happen in Undisclosed Well, bad things also happen in the dayti when you’re running away

Anyway, in early Nove off the phone with Dave at the video store at three, John had spent an hour driving around in his Caddie and getting a sense of the situation around town The manhunt, which seemed to involve several hundred police, volunteers and National Guardsmen, appeared to be focused on the wooded area east of the hospital, and the empty houses and trailers around it It made sense fro for a spot where a deranged and woundedto find Franky It wasn’t going to be that easy

There were local cops who had to know better, who had to know that the situation at the hospital had been that other thing, the kind of business that pops up in Undisclosed every few years when the town decides to start coloring outside the lines John was picturing the chief trying to nudge the National Guard in that direction,that they expand the search, and that maybe additional precautions should be taken with the quarantine Special hearing protection, perhaps Or hazmat suits And instead of just the hospital, maybe rope off the whole town Or state But then that would lead to a lot of aard questions and the chief would quickly back down and just pray that the whole thing would co If only it ever worked out that way

John, on the other hand, was thinking "monster" from the start since, you know, the situation was caused by aout what kind of monster it was There are really only two kinds of monsters in the world, which you already know if you’ve been watching horror movies: Breeders and Non-breeders So for instance, Frankenstein’s ory if he was real He’s a freak, a singular being and once you kill hione Probleer probleot slow breeders like vampires (if they were real, which they’re not) which breed in a small-scale controlled way, but mainly to avoid extinction rather than spread But then you’ve got the fast breeders, like zo is all they do They are basically walking epidemics, and are the worst of the worst-case scenarios, because such a creature could, hypothetically, wipe out civilization This is hureatest fear, which is why at the moment half of the world’s horror novels, ames have zombies on the cover So in any situation like this, step one is to find out what category of creature you’re dealing with Step two is to anticipate what the creature is going to do next, based on what you determined in step one Then step three is you find out if the thing can be killed with a chainsaw

This particular case was a fairly straightforward situation of a s his body That is a really specific thing for a creature to do, John thought, requiring countless specialized biological adaptations So it was unlikely that it was just sooal beyond stuh tiically that wouldover of a hu What had John worried was that the little shit looked like an insect, and in the nors, insects are notoriously fast breeders So it could be a worst-case scenario John suspected that somebody up the ladder had already arrived at that conclusion, which is why on this fine autuht in Undisclosed without finding yourself in a Humvee sandwich It’s also presumably why the hospital had been roped off