John didn't know what the fuck was going on, but he had a gun and a flask and a pack of cigarettes. Between him and his vices, he could kick the ass of anything coming to bite him. Those ugy motherfuckers were gonna get dead if they came near him again. He also had a bigass car that he stole right off the street; being a cop meant knowing the best ways to hotwire just about anything, but he hadn't had to. The keys were in the ignition. Covered in blood.

Well, a little blood never bothered him, and he had to get to California, to Holly and the kids somehow. No radio, but the car came equipped with a tape deck and a shitload of Def Leppard, so he belted out "I Wanna Be Your Hero" and shot the face off everything that came near him as he sped through the Holland Tunnel, out of New York, onto I-78.

There were crazy motherfuckers everywhere. This wasn't like Nakatomi Towers or some bullshit--this was literally, actually, very real crazy people, who were all about biting each other and rubbing blood on each other, and, frankly, John just couldn't handle it. He traded his car in continuously until he was in the biggest refrigerated truck he'd ever seen.

He drove slow for the first few days, figuring this was a skill upon which he could stand to approve, and then hit the gas. It had room for everything--food, gas, survivors. Every once in a while there were people who weren't infected, staggering around unhappily, looking for their family, looking for purpose in the end of the world.

John tries to tell him: there's no purpose here. This isn't god. This isn't anything. This is just death. Once they accept that, they'll be less unhappy--he's not happy, but he's not like them. All of them except one eventually throw themselves out of the truck. But the one who doesn't he found standing on top of a pile of dead infected, holding more weaponry than he'd seen since he was standing in the middle of a bunch of bad guys.

"Claire," she says breathlessly when she climbs in, and he loves her already.

She's hysterical, and steals his sunglasses the first day, and switches off driving the rig with him. In exchange for being his brand of crazy, he teaches her, as they drive toward the other side of the country, everything he knows about being a badass and how to kill. He knows, he realizes, a lot of ways to kill.

It takes him two months to reach Missouri, and then there's a problem. He and Claire stare at the smoking ruins of St. Louis in complete dismay: they have got to, somehow, get over the motherfucking river. And they can't. St. Louis is burning, a cloud of thick grey smoke over it.

This is almost worse than all the abandoned cars, all the dead babies, all the flesh rotting away and stinking up the air. This is almost worse than all the people who threw themselves at the infected, just because they were brother, sister, lover, parent.

John can't believe the idiocy of people, and sometimes he wants to leave them to it--but no one could survive this cloud of smoke. It smells acrid--like it's not just smoke.

"There was something else mixed in here," says Claire darkly. She says everything darkly. The sunglasses slide down her knows and she looks over the top of them. "Let's get out of here."

They kill the few infected lingering around--Claire had found an army munitions plant in Indiana, and they were stocked up. John even had C4--when Claire started handing him the bricks, he wanted to cry and snuggle it like he did to baby Lucy. Det caps, wires, everything the modern man needed to blow shit up.

John wasn't one to brag, but he may have told Claire some stories about all the shit he blew up without C4.

"The problem is," says Claire darkly, "that there's no way to get across the fucking river."

"We're gonna have to drive to wherever the river stops," says John, feeling like a total jackass. "What the hell river is this?"

"The Mississippi." Claire doesn't even look at him or make a joke about New York City public schools. Too bad. He could use a joke. She pulls a map out of the truck, through, and plots out a route for them--they'll drive through the river, at a place where it's only a foot deep, so even if it's chock full of infected goodness, they'll make it across in the rig.

Once they cross the river, the radio really starts crackling. There are survivors everywhere, but they're all down in the desert. There's even a bunch of renegade Raccoon City commandos.

John only knows that Raccoon City is the creepy walled city the Umbrella Corporation runs, like that Christian Disneyland he read about, and he has no desire to be part of it.

"I want to go to the others," Claire tells him darkly. He's getting mighty sick of her darkness all the time. "They need leaders, and people to teach them how to survive."

John looks around. He's no expert, but he's betting that Iowa isn't supposed to look like Puerto Rico's sandy beaches. Everything's grinding down--way faster than it fucking should be.

"No way," he says.

"I'm going."

When he wakes up the next morning, she's gone with half their food. At least she left the truck--she took the big oil rig that John had filled up the night before. And he'll be honest, he knew she would, and that's most of why he filled it up.

He isn't under any illusions. He's not an idiot, for all the jokes people make about New York City cops. Hell, he almost trained for SWAT. Those people need her if they need anyone, and he hopes she doesn't die. He'd also hoped she'd stay with him. It's been three months--if Holly and Lucy and Jack are alive, they're probably alive like the infected.

He's not under any illusions. Holly's not the type of woman, for all that she's a fighter in some ways, to know what to do in this situation. Maybe Lucy--she's a pisser for such a kid. She's the most like him. But he'll never find her, not like this, just driving around.

Claire doesn't leave a note or anything, but he hears only four days later the message "This is Claire Redfield's convoy, broadcasting for any survivors. Is there anybody out there?" So she made it, and found actual people, and he only misses her a little.

And the next day, in Nebraska, he kills a shitload of the infected with a shitload of C4--only half to blow some steam--and meets Alice. Alice, who is even more covered with weapons than Claire had been. Alice, who doesn't want to meet more survivors. Alice, who can drive a rig effortlessly, fight in hand-to-hand without getting her ass kicked, shoot straighter than John himself, and knows too much about the infected. Way too much--and that's just what she lets slip.

But John stays with her, or, maybe, she stays with him. Just for a little while, he knows--she's marking time until he fucks up and dies.