NaNoWriMo Prep 2017

Minor Character Profile

Dax Nesbitt

One of the hardest things in my life is the memories I have. Remembering life before the outbreak are often some of the worst. I was only seven when the outbreak took my family. We had all kinds of money too and none of it helped save them. What good is having it if it can't do anything when you really need it to? My parents and all of my older sisters all...what? Died? Succumbed? Changed? They became a thing. Feral, Cathari, Zombie, whatever the f*** you want to call them. On top of losing my family everything I considered normal, I was tossed into some orphanage on the outside of Concord. The ugly side of Concord if you disregard the irony of it. It had been a private run orphanage until the outbreak and all of the major orphanages became State and even Federal run. We were all heavily monitored there and we were checked twice a day. They ultimately failed in trying to find some kind of cure or preventative. There would be no restoring humanity to them and no quick way to find a way from preventing it from being taken away.

The only good thing during my time there was finding Brodie. He grew up two hours away in some s***hole of a town and had come to the orphanage a few days after I did. We became friends and grew to be brothers. I had a reason to keep going when I had Brodie in my life. Such a sad state when you hear a child wonder the point of life, isn't it? Why not when you see not just your life fracture and crumble, but society as well. No one knew where or how it started, or even why. Just one day someone began to spread some weird...bacterium I think they called it, and everything began to unravel. Anyone would think the Government did it and was trying to cover it up, but if you got a look at their faces like I did, you'd see the fear in their eyes.

We left that orphanage when we were sixteen. We moved from one settlement to another, afraid for our lives. We thought, at first, like everyone else too I imagine that the Ferals were like zombies. They're after your brains and they fumble and shuffle about. f*** that. They're cognizant and alert and f*** me if they fumble or shuffle. Those bastards run when they need to. They move in packs and they're often just loitering about, but when you catch one of those assholes running after some animal or another...There is no God that can protect you. If you're smart, you can walk about and not have any worries. But it just takes one of those hungry beasts to think you're just right or if they smell something cooking...

It took Brodie and I eight years before we decided to run with a plan we had been thinking of for the last few years. We started locally, moving stragglers and those who wanted to move from small settlements to the large ones. We found a bus that hadn't been damaged and carried people on that. A few years later, we added another bus and another person to our little group. The same age I was when I got out, another orphan. She seemed to harbor a lot of anger like I did, but she never shared and we never asked. She, Julessa, worked hard too. She was much more mature than her young face portrayed.

A year later we brought Cynthia on board, and a couple years after that, Colin, came aboard too. It has become much bigger than I had ever imagined. We do trips all over the country now and we have near twenty others who help us. There are Guard Posts that have electric charge stations for our buses, food and places to sleep for us and those we carry. We have members who stay at these places and help out the settlements and keep the posts running smoothly. We have eight buses in total which are going nearly all the time. It's amazing.

I'm two years away from forty and I feel like I've accomplished much more than I thought I would ever do when I was that little lonely boy sitting in that orphanage. Those happy faces on those I help are all the requirement I need to know I'm doing a good thing. My twisted little heart can beat a happy tune, finally.