I was on my way home from the airport.
My company had just celebrated a record-breaking quarter; we had doubled profits and decreased leakage to a half-percent of what it had been by automating a number of manual processes and then training the people who'd done those manual jobs to do analytics. Yes, number-crunchy job; what do you expect from an accountant?
My coworkers and I decided to get to our families and bring them to the office, because the building was secured with keycard access and it had thick walls. Lily lived closest, and her brother was already loaded when we got there; canned food, bottles of water, camp stove. Walter's wife brought non-perishables, Edgar's roommate brought a stockpile of chocolate, Amanda had medicine that her hypochondriac mother stockpiled.
By the time we dropped off and made the run to my house, my family was dead. They'd all gotten together to throw me a surprise party, Mom and Dad even came up from their retirement home in Branson. I opened the front door in time to see my husband get his face bitten off by my eight-year-old niece, and let me tell you *that* memory is burned into my brain. The cake was still on the table, untouched in the middle of the carnage.
After I smashed my niece's skull with Cam's nine iron, I finished the dead off with the French chef knife he got me for our anniversary. Warranty was accurate; it *did* last a lifetime. My brother was the hardest, though; knife snapped halfway into the decapitation, so I had to finish with the cake knife from the table.
Cam died the second he hit the floor. He never got up, and I thank my lucky stars for that.
Ironically, I never fired a gun before the Crash. Cam was the outdoorsy one, the husband who liked to fish and tie his own flies, to trap wild game in snares and prepare it in all sorts of lavish Martha Stewart inspired dishes. Yet here I am, while he's dead these five years.
That cake fed us for the first three days. It was lemon with a raspberry filling inside and buttercreme frosting.
Cam never owned a gun, and I figured it would take too long to figure out how to work that damned crossbow. I got a pistol three years later, from some other poor sap who got his face chewed off.
