Ben Sullivan

Bio
''Fives years, two months, and fourteen days ago. Manhattan, KS''

Ben and his wife Lily married three years before the outbreak, and spent those years working their hands to callouses and their backs to bent in order to fulfill their young dream: owning a true Irish Public House in their college hometown of Manhattan, KS. They made it too...with $5,000 down and locked into a 15 year at 5.2%, but they made it. The paint had just dried on the booths, the dozens of pictures of family, friends, and patrons had just begun to cover the walls...when the sickness began.

It hit hard in Manhattan, new home of NBAF, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility for the United States government. The outbreak’s earliest victims were rushed into the heart of the homey Midwestern city of 55,000, via flash frozen tissue samples and partially degraded corpses, to be studied at the high security facility in hopes of finding a cure.

But high security wasn’t enough. When the fanatics started to rise, when the death toll began to overwhelm minds, that’s when the city plunged into madness. Regular men and women, driven mad with fear, stormed the facility despite the strong military presence due to a rumor that cure had been found, but would first be directed to the nearby Ft. Riley and Leavenworth military bases. Thousands took to the streets early one Saturday morning, marching past the football stadium that would have usually been their destination, and pressing themselves against the gates and walls of the NBAF perimeter.

The soldiers fired, after men began tossing other men over the fence like a crude siege engine. They fired, and fired, but it only drove others forward, over the fallen. The soldiers fell back, to the inner, gates, but soon found vehicles overrunning the outer gates and crashing into their breastworks. Even when the Apaches, tasked from Ft. Riley, arrived...the people did not stop.

By sunset, an eerie calm had fallen over the scene, a storm boiling up from the southwest. Bodies lay covering the grounds, awash with drying blood like a black stain upon the world. Ground reinforcements from Ft. Riley had finally arrived, and along with civilian officials, they moved in on the smoking and cratered wasteland that was the former NBAF site. As the APCs, Hummers, and other vehicles came to a stop at the perimeter, men in body armor and helmets leapt out of a hundred doors and settled against hoods, frames, and cover, weapons up.

“Listen...” one of the men at the front line whispered.

A low noise was building, emanating from the shattered walls and gates of the NBAF grounds. It was near to the sound of a thousand voices, sighing in unison, but lower, more guttural.

As the sun slipped below the horizon, a pearl of thunder boomed across the city, the very edge of the storm whipping the trees and bushes into moving forms. “Move out!” came the order from the rear, and men stepped forward in formation, like crabs stalking across a beach in a line. In the growing darkness, at first it seemed like the ground, broken and black, had began to move. Men ground to halt, some cried out, but most didn’t even wait for the order to fire.

A sea of half-burned and smashed human forms were crawling, running, and slithering out from the broken works of the NBAF facility, and as a lightning flash added to the muzzle flares, the men at the front line saw an army rise up and turn their grey eyes in their direction.

That was when the exodus began; Ben and Lily grabbed supplies and headed south. The roads and interstate quickly became useless, and as the horde reached the bumper to bumper traffic, waves of people streamed into the trees and across the prairie. Small arms fire popped intermittently, but as the horde finished its business in among the lines of cars and started towards the trees, a different sound rose. Popping, and crackling, the famed Konza prairie was burning, the tall Buffalo grass and Bluestem dry with a summer heatwave yielded to the flame in a flash. A wall of flame six feet high now separated survivors and horde. After a moment of staring, lost for words, those who had remained to watch the flames turned and headed out across the endless sea of tan and brown. Ben and Lily were among them that headed southwest out of the devastation.

''Four years, 10 months, and six days ago. A farm near Herington, KS.''



Walking south, Ben and Lily had a few close encounters with the horde, but mostly found the cold shoulder of other survivors in the form of nervous rounds fired at them and sealed gates. The fame apocalypse silos dotted the area near Salina, with their fully sealed and sustainable environments. Or so they thought. From 500 yards, Ben and Lily watched through field glasses as the undead meandered in and out of a gaping mouth blown into one such underground stronghold by some form of explosive.

Later they encountered one of the new pillbox style convertible concrete bunker-houses first seen in Europe and the Middle East during the turmoil before the outbreak. Sighting it open to the sky and charging it’s panels in the early morning sun, Ben and Lily approached, only to watch as it sealed itself the moment they came within 100 yards. No amount of yelling raised a response from inside. The world after the outbreak was not a humanitarian one. But one of survivors safe in their boltholes and those still trying to forge their own.

But then, after months of wandering, they found the first friendly faces they’d seen since the days before the outbreak. Ben and Lily had sighted a tall building sticking out the scrub and hedgelines at the edge of a great abandoned wheat field. When they crossed out of the treeline, they were surprised to see a nine foot wall of solid concrete blocks in their way, with arrows every few yards pointing further to the west. As they walked the perimeter of what must have been several square miles of walled off terrain, they finally found the place where arrows from either side merged. A door. Within a gate. And within the gate, a little webcam peered at them. Crackling, a voice sudden squeaked out of an old car stereo speaker wired beside the camera. “If you’re willing to put those guns you got out inside the bars, we’ll come talk to you. If we like you, we’ll let you in. If we don’t, we’ll empty your guns, keep the ammo, and give them back. If you do anything funny, we’ll just kill you right there and have ourselves some new stuff to sort.”

The voice wasn’t unkindly, but Ben could tell from its tone that the final situation described had occurred previously and they had done just as they said. With a look at Lily, he shrugged, and then laid their weapons inside the barred gate and stepped back. Then they waited. To their surprise, they were greeted from behind, not from the gate. Six people had approached from some other way and had them neated surrounded and outnumbered in traft.

“Hi there,” said one of the men in the middle after a pause, an older man with bright, bird eyes. “Don’t suppose it’s likely you’re going to do anything stupid, is it?”

“No.” Ben said, and decided not to elaborate. The old man narrowed his eyes for a moment, and then lowered his rifle. As he did, the rest of his group relaxed. “Alrighty, we’ll take a chance.”

Inside, Ben and Lily found that the wall protected an old, broken-down farmstead that was in the midst of various repairs and augmentations by the 41 people that now lived on the 2,700 acres within the walls. When he started putting up the wall in the early 2000s, people thought Harry Jorgenson, the old man in charge, was off his rocker. Turns out he had to finish the last mile of construction in haste and barely had time to stock up the inside with equipment and a seed bank before the outbreak in Manhattan set Kansas on fire, literally and figuratively.

On the 4.48 square miles surrounding the farmstead and enclosed by the walls, Harry had a good, deep well, two ponds, a grain silo, both wind and solar power banks and a brand new subterranean bunker and housing system hidden beneath the seemingly rotten old farmstead. Shortly before the outbreak, Harry had even taken the pains to hire a local crop duster to fly him over the farm so that he could get a better idea of how to camouflage the installation. According to him, they were all as safe as could be, “Except for against poor schmucks hoofing it,” he said, eyeing their inappropriate footwear and dirty clothes.

More to come, will get to Colorado in the next segment