Lone Star Zombie - The Battlefield Z series

CHAPTER ONE

Before.

I stopped watching the news because I read somewhere that successful people focused on things they could control.

It’s hard to control the news.

It’s designed for shock value, and in a game of ratings, most news reporting started to rely on shock value.

I feel I may have missed out on a lot.

Sometimes, I’d watch gas prices shoot up and wonder what happened to affect the price.

Then I’d click into a station and hear that the President was making remarks about the Middle East, which would make oil prices rise, and speculators would rush in to change the price of a barrel. Then gas stations which were owned by conglomerates working in the Middle East would raise the price of gas.

It made a lot of investment guys rich and took money away from most of the working people I knew at the time. Twenty bucks a week more for gas didn’t hurt someone who made six figures a year, but a single mom would suffer from the loss.

I thought about that as I stood guard over Brian.

He worked a hand pump he had rigged to siphon gas from a fuel tank at a gas station we had stopped the bus at.

I set up Tyler and the Boy to eyeball one direction on the road, and I covered the other. I kept the rest of our group on the bus.

This was a simple grab and go.

“It’s got water in it,” said Brian. “But I can make it work.”

Most fuel held in underground tanks have a layer of water in them. I didn’t realize that until we started scraping the bottom of the tanks for scraps of gas in hard hit areas.

“I don’t want to do it here,” I reminded him.

I didn’t need too. He wanted to get back on the road as much as I did.

“I can get us another twenty miles on the tank,” he said. “This will get us forty more.”

I nodded.

I wasn’t too worried about the twenty miles.

There would be a place we could pull off, set up camp and he could re-refine the refined gasoline.

The forty miles wasn’t a problem either. We’d make the Gulf Coast before then.

I wanted some gas for a boat.

And I was afraid a big boat would need diesel.

I glanced at his little hand pump.

Diesel fuel was thicker than the watery gasoline we were sucking up into five gallon containers.

I didn’t know if it would work.

“We’ll figure out the rest when we get there,” I told him.

I wasn’t sure who I was hoping would believe it more, him or me.

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