<strong>CAL SNYDER</strong><br/><br/>Cal cocked an eyebrow and seized the metal object lying at his side, before starting in on his melodramatic address.<br/><br/><strong><em>"Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up!  See this?  This is my boomstick!  It's a twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington, S-Mart's top-of-the-line!  You can find this in the sporting goods department.  That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan -- retails for about $109.95.  It's got a walnut stock, cobalt-blue steel and a hair trigger.  That's right.  Shop Smart.  Shop S-mart!  Ya got that?!  Now I swear, the next one of you primates even touches me ... Yaaa!  BLAM!  BLAM!"</em></strong><br/><br/>Lacking the necessary bullets, the forked sausage rammed repeatedly into the zombie scrambled eggs and sent them reeling back across Cal's plate.  Fortunately his Aunt Ginny had the television up too loud in the living room for her to overhear his breakfast drama, or she would surely have reproached him for playing with his food.  Cal's eyes were still bleary from the poor sleep he'd gotten after staying up late the previous night, rewatching for the thousandth time one of his favorite horror flicks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Darkness) in its latest super-extra-limited-ultra-blu-HD-collectors-only DVD edition.  He'd always had a knack for reciting bits of dialog from movies more or less verbatim, and it was more interesting than listening to the local news-bimbo describe the sleepy doings in old Rockford town.<br/><br/>Except by the time he'd finished half his pancakes and sated his appetite, a few unusual phrases emanating from the other room had gotten his attention away from his scene reenactment.  He poured himself a glass of skim milk and wandered out of the kitchen, assuming he must have heard the report wrong, but that wasn't likely considering how loud his elderly Aunt usually kept the volume.<br/><br/><strong>"Did she say 'cannibalism'?!?"</strong>he asked, entering the living room of the modest home he occupied with his grandparents, who were also his guardians.  Ginny -- actually his grandmother, though he'd known her since childhood as "Aunt" Ginny -- was standing in the middle of the room, her mouth agape and covered with one hand in a gesture of astonishment -- never a promising sign.  Cal joined her in front of their 32-inch set and marvelled at one of the freakiest news reports he'd ever seen.  Haley Alls' loss of composure and the images of white tear-gas clouds and fleeing bystanders immediately took Cal back to the last time he'd witnessed such shocking live footage on television.  He got the same prickles at the base of his neck, too -- the same ones he'd had nearly a decade ago, huddled in front of the TV with his grandparents, who did their best to make the horrors of 9-11 comprehensible to his ten-year-old mind.<br/><br/>(Some might have questioned the propriety of exposing a youngster to those nightmare scenes on TV, but Cal's "Uncle" John and Aunt Ginny had sensed his mature sensibilities early on, so they never shielded him from the facts of the world around him, instead encouraging his inquisitiveness and letting him develop at his own advanced pace.  Those might have been deeply traumatic sights for a lesser mind, but Cal had more than his share of sophistication and sensitivity to draw upon; he'd been one of those kids who more or less raised themselves, although his doting guardians could always be counted upon to truthfully answer his questions and keep a watchful eye.)<br/><br/>With no sources of information beyond the local TV and radio stations -- all presently preoccupied at the site of the developing riot -- Ginny and Cal called his Uncle John to see if anything unusual was happening on the eastern side of town.  Bright and early that morning, before the others were even awake, John had driven northeast from their neighborhood to the 24-hour pharmacy where he worked part-time as a cashier.  Now a couple hours into his shift, he reported that the buses seemed to be running like normal and everything was quiet -- unusually so, in fact, because so many locals were currently indoors, anywhere where they could observe the developments on TV.  The CVS Pharmacy was located not far from the Royal Hotel, a little north and west of Cal's destination that day.<br/><br/>Neither John nor Cal saw any reason for the Rockford City College sophomore to skip his morning Geometry lecture, although it took Cal an extra 15 minutes to convince Ginny to let him go, once she realized he couldn't be reached on his cell phone in case of an emergency.  Since their drug-addicted daughter had given her infant son to them to raise, John and Ginny had sacrificed a lot to make ends meet on John's government pension, but they'd never felt a moment's regret, so deep was their affection for their only grandchild.  They'd given him more than his share of freedom growing up, but that was only because he'd always stayed out of trouble anyway, risking nothing more contentious than frittering away his allowance on comic books or the occasional dinner date.  After their daughter's recklessness as a teen, Cal's safety was a primary concern for his guardians, but after promising to check in with her by phone in the afternoon, Cal was released just in time to make his bus.<br/><br/>He had to jog to the bus stop but made it with a couple minutes to spare, or perhaps the bus was a little late.  Either way, he had time to notice en route how eerily quiet the sidewalks were, just as Uncle John had reported.  What the hell was going on?  Was this the dreaded sequel to the first big terrorist attack, the larger catastrophe that everyone had predicted back then?  Such notions were still nagging at him as he boarded the Good Street line and surveyed the unusually-empty bus.  Melba Henderson, the familiar driver, greeted him with an amiable smile that put him a little more at ease, but as he took his seat, those prickles started crawling down his back again.<br/><br/><br/><hr/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 8pt;">OOC:  In case it wasn't obvious, that wasn't my speech at the intro.  I only wish I could write like that.</span>