8 The guy at the gas station (1/2)

Judith had just turned 22, she comes from a family of 3 children and grew up in the cozy town of Coatesville.

A town of just 13,000 inhabitants where there was little to see except The National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum.

As a child, she wanted to see something other than this prison from which she had never left and she gave herself the means.

She dreamed of going to university in a big city while her brothers were going to chose the same vocation as her father.

He worked in a helicopter factory, it was the main activity supporting the economy of the city.

5 years ago, the company which owned the factory was bought.

Although the factory didn't close, Judith was afraid that it was only a matter of time and she didn't want to know what was going to happen to her family if her father and brothers were unemployed overnight.

This turned into an additional motivation to go to university so that she would later obtain a job that would allow her to shelter her family from need if the case arose.

Thanks to her relentlessness, she was received at George Washington University in Washington DC in finance and was even entitled to a scholarship covering all of her study expenses.

She may have had disagreements with her family who considered that she almost abandoned them when she left Coatesville, but her place wasn't there and she knew it.

However, that didn't change the fact that they remained united and that they loved each other even from a distance.

Before she started her last year what she feared happened.

It was announced that the factory was going to close by the end of the year, of the 465 positions, it was said that only 70 were going to be kept but elsewhere in the country.

Her father and brothers being adamant about the fact that they don't want to leave Coatesville clung to the idea of ​​preventing the closure.

But being in the finance, she knew well that it was a lost fight.

As a result, the first half of her last year was by far the most stressful.

She was studying all the time, was no longer eating properly and had put her social life on hold. But her efforts paid off.

A huge conglomerate offered her an effective contract as soon as she had her diploma, she hastened to sign it, but she felt dirty.

She was going to be employed by the same kind of company that would put her brothers and father unemployed.

And yet her loved ones were very supportive of her.

Although they hate the fact to only saw her once every 3 months because of her studies, she was their pride, the first person in the family to go to university.

Her brothers surprised her to come and take her home by car themselves.

But it turned into a disaster because they found themselves in a traffic-jam barely 400 yards from a certain bus during a certain event.

Before Heimdall's horn announced the end of the world she and her younger brother Josh were still carelessly laughing at the rejection that their eldest Ewan had taken when he tried to pick up a girl on the campus as soon as he arrived.

A few minutes later, they found themselves with a weapon in their hands having to fight against one of the monsters that had come out of the crater because their car got stuck next to the wooden highway barrier just after they hit it.

The monsters around them had physical similarities to humans.

Two legs, two arms, however, they were taller and more muscular than humans and the fact that parts of their skin were burned and their bodies were everywhere mutilated and deformed limited the resemblance they have with humans.

They didn't seem to have a gender at first, but being naked, an attentive person would have seen that the mutilations went so far as to have removed their sexual organs.

They could barely disregard the madness that was going on around them.

These monsters were pure evil, they killed everyone without making distinctions and weren't satisfied with just this.

They continued to mutilate them even after death as if they wanted them to look like them and while she was fighting she saw one devouring the body of an old man.

Not wanting her brothers to end up the same way, she decided to manage the situation.

She asked Ewan to stop trying to get the car out of the mud on its own so that he came to help Josh and her.

Because as long as they wouldn't kill the monster in front of them it wouldn't let them go like that.

They took care of the monster quickly in 3 against 1.

It was Ewan who had killed it by thrusting his sword into his chest, Judith saw that something seemed to have intrigued him right after he had done it.

But he pulled himself together fast enough that she didn't have to ask him to help them to push the car.

They managed to get the car out of the mud and fled from this massacre in extremis, but they were only temporarily saved from these monsters.

There were always more monsters coming out of the craters, so that for hundreds of yards what they saw was nothing else than a horde of these things running from all sides in search of humans.

She and her brothers came to the conclusion that as soon as these things had killed everyone left here, it would be entirely possible that they would decide to move elsewhere.

Technically it wasn't so serious as a problem, these creatures run fast, certainly, but they were far from the speed of a car.

The problem was that their car couldn't exceed 50 miles/hour and was only slowing down.

Judith understood what the problem was and was cursing their bad luck.

She didn't know when it happened but it was certain.

”One of our fucking tires is flat!”

She believed that she could rest a little after what she had been through, but no!

”Let's see what we can do about it.”

They quickly identified which tire had a problem.

Ewan was the one who knew best about cars and he wasn't at all optimistic about their chance to quickly reach Coatesville with a tire in this state.

”With a tire like this, in 10 miles we will have slowed down so much that walking will become more efficient.”