I spent my days sitting on the rocks and watching through binoculars what was going on in the city. No one was extinguishing the fires, the shots were less and less frequent, and the streets, although there were few of them, were staggering around with the infected, whom I recognized by their shackled jerky movements. After some time at night, I began to hear a howl. He was clearly neither human nor animal. Even the infected, hearing him, tried to hide, wandering around the empty entrances and basements.
One night, in the light of the raging fires, I even managed to see a gorilla! It was a gorilla, I definitely saw it! She deftly jumped from the roof of the house to the balcony and disappeared into the darkness of one of the apartments. At that moment I was sure that I saw her, but now I doubted. Worse, the power went out. Whereas before I cooked on an electric stove and kept open cans in the refrigerator, now I had to cook on a campfire.
The place where I took shelter had enough food and water to last a whole construction team for a month, working on a cell tower and building a large communication center. For me alone it would have been enough for three months, no less.
However, it was strange that electricity did not disappear everywhere: in some parts of the city it was still available, appearing from time to time, and in other places, like on my construction site, it completely disappeared.
The position of the chief communications engineer I held required me to go on business trips to various cities and accept objects for rent, the construction of which my company TeleSeti carried out on a subcontract basis for large cellular companies.
In this mining town, my task was to accept the next node from the builders, as well as control the installation of the BS on top of the cell tower. I thought that it was the installation of the BS that would be the most difficult for me on this trip, since more than anything in the world I was afraid of great heights. Now, against the backdrop of the horror that was happening around me, the fear of heights seemed pitiful and insignificant to me.
My construction camp consisted of only three blue-colored cabins with white windows, four stone walls covering the cabins from the wind from the west side, and a huge bright yellow five-axle aerial platform weighing sixty tons, if my memory serves me right.
Alone, the hours and days dragged on slowly, and it became easier to convince myself that this place was not worth leaving.
I thought a lot about what was happening, and longing drove me crazy. Sometimes I was amused by the memories, for example, about my mortgage, which is now unlikely to have to be paid. True, and a decent area in which I bought an apartment, perhaps, it is already difficult to call it calm and prosperous. According to the sister, when the connection was still there, now everything was teeming with the infected.
At the entrance to the city, I saw a gas station and, not reaching it about two hundred meters, out of habit, turning on the turn signal, turned to the side of the road.
The city looked dead and abandoned. I tried to catch the details of the picture that formed such a feeling, but in vain – it was just felt in my gut. The smell of burning, to which it seemed that he was already accustomed, struck with renewed vigor. You could feel it even with the windows closed. It is not surprising, because half of the city was shrouded in black smoke, because somewhere in its other part a large factory or warehouses had been burning for a long time, and there was no one to extinguish them.
