And here is the character that I plan to play:<br/><br/>Name: Jake Curtis<br/>Age: 28<br/>Hometown: Paterson, NJ<br/>Height: 6’2”<br/>Weight: 210lbs<br/>Hair: Black<br/>Eyes: Brown<br/>Primary Occupation: Soldier (Staff Sergeant, M2 Bradley Gunner)<br/>Secondary Occupation/Skill set: Mechanical engineer<br/>Physical Description:  Jake is a physically fit and well built man with dark skin and shortly cropped black hair.  A thin layer of dark stubble covers his face.  He wears well weathered ACU fatigues, a floppy camo boonie hat, dark sunglasses, combat boots and a large army issue backpack.<br/>Notable Equipment:  M4 Carbine, 3 full magazines (90 rounds 5.56mm), 6 empty magazines; M9 Pistol, 3 full magazines (45 rounds 9mm); Binoculars; Night Vision Sights; Ballistic Helmet; First Aid Kit; Portable Army radio.<br/>History:<br/>Introduction:<br/>“I was born in and grew up on the outskirts of Paterson, NJ.  It wasn’t the best neighborhood in the world, but it was home.  I started working in my father’s appliance store when I was 12, which is where I picked up most of my interest in mechanical and electronic devices.  I knew it was what I wanted to do when I got older but when the time for college came around I couldn’t afford it.  I could have stayed at my father’s shop, but I wanted to make my own way so I enlisted in the Army after high school.”<br/>“I had hoped to do radio or electronics work, but for a variety of reasons I was slotted for the infantry.  I managed to get assigned as a Bradley gunner, which was a little bit of good news.  I was never a big fan of walking, and I did appreciate that extra armor even if it was a bit thin.  I was deployed to Iraq with the 1st Cav, in early 2004.  That was back in the early days of the war when things were pretty rough.  We had a couple big battles, in Najaf and Sadr City; real rough street to street fighting.  I was damn glad I was inside a Bradley for those battles.”<br/>“I got out of the Army soon after I returned from the Sandbox, and used by GI Bill money to go to school and get an engineering degree.  Now those were good days man.  With the restrictions of military life behind me, I was free to do what I wanted and I had enough cash in my pocket to make it happen.  When I got out of school I got a job and settled in to a nice relaxed life.”<br/>Jake frowned and scratched the stubble on his chin as he continued, “Then shit hit the fan and I was recalled to duty as part of the ready reserve.   I only had a few months to mothball my life before I was whisked away to a base in Texas to train up for another damn war in some sandy hellhole.  We were just about ready to deploy when Z-Day hit.  We had a few incidents on base, but it was mostly contained by nightfall.  In a few days my unit was packed up and shipped to St. Louis to help control the horde.”<br/>“I’m not sure why, but St. Louis survived the initial problems of Z-Day a lot better than most other large cities.  Maybe their police were on the ball, or the citizens were better armed.  Either way, they managed to contain their own problems, only to be flooded by refugees from further east.  By Z+3, Chicago had completely fallen and millions of zedheads were sweeping west and overrunning the refugees.  We were given orders to make our stand at the Mississippi River, and my group was assigned to hold the line at the Poplar Street Bridge, right where I-70 and half a dozen other highways cross the river.”<br/>“We took position about half way over the bridge, with the screening team ahead of us to filter out the infected from the healthy refugees.  By nightfall of Z+4, we got word the horde was only a mile or so from the river.  We could hear the panic in the voices of refugees, and tried to get as many over the bridge and into the St. Louis camps as possible.  The loud ‘thump-thump-thump’ of outbound artillery echoed across the terrain as we tried to slow down and break up incoming horde.”<br/>“Around midnight the first ones showed up at the screening station and attacked those waiting to be checked.  We pulled our guys back and set up behind the barricades.  All I could do was look through my thermal sights and watch Zack attack the remaining refugees until we couldn’t tell who was who.  At that point a wave of people infected and not pushed past our initial line and swarmed across the bridge.”<br/>He paused his take for a bit, took a deep breath and continued, “Our unit was fairly small.  We had maybe a hundred dismounted infantry, half a dozen humvees, two Bradleys and an Abrams tank.  However the bridge was only 8 lanes wide which allowed us to focus our fire power.  The swarm got within 100 meters of our line when the order came down to open fire.  I hated doing it, I could see desperate women, children and families trying to get to safety, but we had to hold the line, or so we thought.”<br/>“Have you ever seen what a Bradley can do?  It started life as a glorified battle taxi and turned into a very effective killing machine.  We started firing with our 7.62mm coax machine gun which was our normal anti-infantry weapon.  We knew then that only head shots would do, so I tried to get short controlled bursts out at about head level.  Folks dropped but a lot of them got right back up.  The roar of all those guns managed to hold back the tide for a while, but it didn’t last.”<br/>“At 50 meters I abandoned the coax and went to the cannon.  If you haven’t seen one before it fires about 3, 25mm high explosive rounds a second.  It was originally designed to engage trucks, or light armored vehicles but we used them against infantry more than once before.  When one of those rounds hits a person, it explodes; leaving a pair of smoking boots and a fine pink mist.”<br/>“The cannon blew huge holes in the incoming horde but there were just too many of them and not enough ammunition.  The tank commander must have seen the same thing I did because he stopped firing into the crowd and starting using his main gun to blow through the bridge deck.  He put some big holes in the blacktop but it wasn’t enough.  The horde ran head long into our barricades and swarmed over us.  My vehicle commander was pulled out of his hatch before I could seal the thing up.”<br/>“Out of ammo and out of options, the driver and I just sat in our little armored box and watched as tens of thousands of them surged past us and into the city.  We watched through our expensive optics as the refugee camps turned into feeding frenzies, and then we saw the worst part, the part that still makes my blood boil.”<br/>“Out of the inky darkness of the Mississippi River came hundreds of zombies.  In our idiocy, we had somehow expected the living dead to maneuver like a mechanized army, one that had to cross bridges at rivers or fords,” he stops and taps the side of head for emphasis, “but you have to think differently when dealing with Zack.  He doesn’t need to breath, and doesn’t care if the water is cold, or moving.  He just walked right into the river and popped out a while later down stream.  We thought we had them forced into choke points we could hope to defend, when in truth the battlefront was just as wide and open as if we were in a prairie.”<br/>“We could have sent the refugees on, but instead we clustered them into the ‘safety’ of the city.  In the end we just made it easier for Zack to find everyone.  As far as I know, that battle marked the end of organized resistance in that area.”<br/>“During this whole fiasco, I just sat in my Bradley with Pvt. Kelly, my driver.  We thought about trying to help out, grabbing a few people to shelter in the back or trying to fight, but we saw the situation was hopeless.  Even if we could find someone who hadn’t been bitten, how would we separate them from the crowd?  As for fighting back, we were down to a few rounds in our rifles and it was painfully obvious it wasn’t going to make a difference.  The other vehicles that were with us pulled back in the initial chaos, leaving us alone on the bridge in a sea of screaming, moaning Zack.”<br/>“We must have sat there for half an hour as the city burned and we tried to figure out what to do.  For a while I listened to the radio traffic until one of the buggers broke my antenna.  Eventually we decided to head west, and try to link up with any other elements of our unit.  We drove right through the city, since the freeways were too clogged with cars to pass.  Instead the side streets were clogged with Zack, but they are much easier to driver over than cars.  We must have crushed thousands of them before we broke free onto a country road.  I figure we got about thirty miles out of the city when we ran out of gas.  That’s when we gathered what we could and started walking.”<br/>“Two days later, I lost Kelly in a farmhouse.  We were foraging for food in what looked like an abandoned house when he got bitten.  Some little girl, the family must have locked in the pantry before they ran…or were killed themselves.  She took a chunk out of his leg before I capped her…and then I shot him.  I knew he was doomed and I didn’t have the stomach to watch him turn.  I’ll never forget the look of fear and surprise on his face as I leveled my pistol at his head and pulled the trigger.”<br/>