Not so kindred of a spirit though, because when he reached them, as quick as a flash, he pulled out a blade and cut Susan’s throat. Jim told us the fight with the guy wasn’t long, twenty seconds, maybe thirty from the first swing at Susan to Jim killing their attacker. Jim got cut and broke his leg in an awkward fall while struggling with the guy, and still managed to pull out his own blade to kill his attacker. But it was all too late.

I’m pissed because I keep reliving Jim’s story whenever we rest and I have a moment to think. I can feel his loss as if I was him and it was my wife Simone that was killed by the stranger. Part of my anger, though, is guilt. I think most anger contains some form of guilt, but my guilt is because I have been doing so well. My whole family has survived this disaster for humanity. Of course I was a prepper, but the odds of us all surviving this long were not high at all, even with our preparations.

There are seven of us, and since the winter hopefully ended and encounters with the infected have dropped off, we all travel together. My wife and I figure any day could be the last one, and we want to be together if it happens. So either we all go at once or at least we will know what happens to our loved ones if they die.

I’m sure it sounds insane to take small children out into an infected world, but this is the reality we live in, and they have to grow up knowing what they must do to survive. This makes me think back to a movie I saw with my wife before the collapse. The movie was good, but it still pissed us both off, because the kid in the movie was so unprepared for the world he lived in. At the time we watched it, our kids were already more prepared to deal with a disaster, and weren’t born into it the way the kid in the movie was.

Because we did consider the negative possibilities in life and prepared for them, it just made the movie that much more unbelievable that a kid born after the end of the world wouldn’t have been toughened up by their parents’ to learn to survive in that new and dangerous environment.

Once upon a time, before this world descended into hell, our children were not only learning how to save money and find out which store had the best deal on milk. Those were the necessary survival skills of the modern age. But we also taught them things like knowing how to be quiet with approaching danger, how to hide effectively, and of course, how to shoot and how to fight.

Even if the world never fell apart, there were murderers and rapists in the world, as well as rabid animals or mountain lions when out hiking. My wife and I figured the children that were raised on the plains of Africa around lions, elephants, and hippos already knew the skills we were teaching our own kids. It’s too bad more people didn’t raise their children with a proper understanding of the dangers in the world, as opposed to trying to shield them from all mention of harm.

Looking back at the faces of my family around me in the store, I hope my five kids will live to be the start of a new human society. I’ve done what I can to give them the right start. Now I just have to keep them alive so they can grow into well-rounded adults. Well-rounded in this current version of the world, of course, means being able to scavenge, kill, and survive.

Our kids are young. They are Hannah, age 12; Olivia, age 10; William, age 7; Amelia, age 5; and Benjamin, age 1. Benjamin was born just four months before this disease started to hit.