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.

The rain was ending, and I clearly saw four gloomy figures on the territory of the gas station. One of them was a woman in a long white dress. She stood with her head resting on the gas station. Three more were near the motorcycle lying on its side. I knew for sure that they were infected: they seemed to be sleeping standing up, and I didn’t want to wake them up at all. The head ached a little. The morning came out painfully saturated, fatigue made itself felt.

Anyway, if I go to the gas station, I have to deal with these four ghouls, and that was the last thing I wanted in the world. It was clear that sooner or later I would have to face the infected and have to kill them, but I so wanted to postpone this unpleasant moment for later. I started making up excuses for not going to the gas station and thinking about the best place to get gas. The arguments "against" were very logical, in my opinion. What if the gas station is closed? After all, the speakers are turned on from the control booth, in which the armored glass, the lattice on the window and the reliable door are clearly not made of cardboard. In addition, I had no idea how gas stations are generally arranged and work. My knowledge in this area was limited to inserting a gun into the tank hatch and paying for gasoline at the checkout. And the devil knows how many more infected there are,

After looking around and making sure that there was no threat, I settled in a chair more comfortably and began to think about what other safe ways there were to get hold of gasoline. It seemed the most obvious to drain it from other cars, but for this, at least, a hose was needed, which would not be a fact that would help, because modern cars, as far as I knew, had a mesh installed in the tank chute. Although I didn't know for sure. The next idea, much more viable, in my opinion, was the opening of garages in some garage cooperative. Theoretically, in garages, people could store gasoline even in barrels, and, by definition, there should not be many infected there. I already liked the idea! I remembered how I passed one garage cooperative on the western outskirts of the city.