NAME
My name is Peter Gregory; Daddy didn't give me any middle names because he wanted to repay a man who saved his life.

AGE
I'm twenty years old, and currently the oldest member of my family.

GENDER
I'm a man.

GANG
I've tried to avoid all those gangs out there in the city; they're mean men and women and I don't want my family to have any part with them. But, folk say the boys in the east and west are trying to find a way to cure the "Big Disease".

APPERANCE
My wife says I'm approximately 5'7'', and I've got curly brown hair and a large beard that looks like Grampa's. My skin's tan from working the fields and tending the cows; Sarah says I'm starving, but from what I've seen, most people in the world are too. I've got enough meat on my bones to use my hands; nothing's gonna keep my kids from eating.

WEAPONS
My family is in possession of several farm guns that have passed down for generations, my dad from his dad from his dad from his dad. According to Daddy, Gregory men been loading their own cartridges, "since we had shit to shoot 'em through," and we still practice the art of making and reloading our own bullets to this day. We do a little trading with the blacksmith up the road every now and then and usually we can trade a basket of corn for enough slugs to fill all our brass.


Dad called it the "Enfield", and it's got a scope that can see from the back porch to the nearest cornrow, but it'll probably shoot from the back porch, around the earth, and ring the doorbell if I tried. I use this guy for killing coyotes and wolves other asshole animals that try to eat my cows.


It says "Remington 870 WINGMASTER" on the side, but I just call it, "Ol' Wingy". This is my favorite gun to shoot; it loads 6 shells in the tunnel and one in the moving part (Daddy knew all the right terms, he's got them in his book, I just can't remember them all the time) and it's also got these rifle sights that none of our other shotguns have.


It reads "COLT 1991A1" on the slide. It has a special grip on it and a flash-pusher-thing at the end of the barrel that helps with the recoil. Daddy always kept it in a shoulder holster that looked older than he was, and apparently it's from before the war. Since I've been travelling out further and further into the wasteland, it's been my number one asset; I've fired it at two people, but just to scare them away. Both times, they were just banditos looking for trouble, so I just drew it, assumed the stance, and shot it in the dirt, then they scampered off like my kids when a cow farted on them.

PERSONALITY
I don't really know what to talk about here. Daddy always said I was "tough as Grampa", and I guess that made me feel pretty good. I don't know if he was talking about my Grampa or his Grampa, but as far as I know they were both tough enough. Of course, Sarah always says to me that I talk too much, and I like to think that's from Mama's side of the family. Dad always thought it was strange how much I talked, but nobody else never said anything about it. Maybe Daddy didn't talk near enough; that actually makes a lot of sense, now that I think of it. See, I figure I'm a pretty down-to-earth fella, but there's a lot of bad in the world that I just don't want no part of. Lots of bad people doing evil things with nothing but bad reasons, and I can't expose my family to it, so I'm keeping them on our little farm as long as I can. They're the most important thing to me; my twin sons and my lovely wife Sarah. Sometimes, I wonder what I'd do if they weren't here, and I think about what I'm actually doing with my life. I guess what it all means, or what it's for, and they're all I can muster. If I didn't have my beloved and "tha chillins", I'd burn everything that belongs to me so the bad men couldn't get it.

BIOGRAPHY
Again, there isn't much to say here. My family's owned this farm for a few hundred years, and we ain't ever had the balls to leave. I guess it's kinda where we belong. Grampa always talked about the "old country" and how it was greener than any place anyone'd ever been. He used to tell me, "Peter, if heaven was made of grass, this would be Eden." Grampa was a funny guy; he called the squirrels "tree chickens" and used to bake these pies that had faces in them. He told us alot about the war, what it was like growing up in the middle of it, about the rationing and the draft notices for his older brothers, and how his father and Grampa seemed so collected in the face of something so catastrophic. He hated it all, he used to tell us, "Killing people is so stupid. People are so beautiful." Over everything else, Grampa was a kind man, and he died at 42 years old, when I was 8. It was a sad time, but we like to remember him more than we like to mourn him. We put him in the family plot, up on the far end of the ridge where we've started planting trees. Dad said there were six generations of Gregories buried up there, maybe more. He even thought there was a Gregory from the Civil War up there somewhere! We weren't about to dig our ancestors up to look for a wool uniform, but the idea of it was pretty neat.

Then there was Daddy. He said Mama died in childbirth, but I have these really vivid memories of a lady washing me as a baby, and as far as I know, Dad didn't have any sisters. There are such specific details I remember, like how my legs were moving in the water and how I was wiggling in her hand, and some specific color in her mouth as she smiled at me. It's so specific that I can't help but feel that it wasn't a dream or something I otherwise made up. Either way, Daddy was a smart man; he knew about math and he could read really well. He taught us how to read, but I have trouble with it sometimes. Sometimes, the letters get mixed up in my head and I can't read them straight, but otherwise I can spell things like 'arithmetic', 'constitution', 'Pythagorean theorum', and 'quintessential'. I know what they all mean, too; folk out here in the country often tell me I got a good vocabulary and I seem smart for an old hick, but I can't say much for myself. Dad read books all the time; we traded so much of our stuff for books, and he read every word of them, no matter what condition they were in. But, he always seemed to have the right answers, even when he was laying on his deathbed. He died a week after his 30th birthday, and I still miss him.

We grow corn here on my farm, and some livestock. Cattle seems to grow okay; goats don't do too well anymore, but occasionally we'll get some chickens to hang around long enough to turn it into a stew. We've also got a large plot of wheat up past this ridge my kids like to run around; we planted the wheat by Evans Pond, named after somebody that Grampa called "Old Man Evans" who used to have a little shack out there. There's also enough avian game around that I'll take the boys out to hunt for quail occasionally, and it tastes pretty good. Sarah even uses their feathers to decorate things in our home; I use one as a bookmark when I'm reading. Oh, and there's a little community around these parts; it doesn't really have a name, but we know the people up or down the road from us. Four farms down from our plot, there's a family called the Johnsons, and I fell in love with their only daughter, Sarah. It didn't take much to win her over, I guess she was afraid nobody would want her after awhile and she needed a husband to hold onto, but I married that Sarah Johnson and we've lived on my farm ever since then. We did have to pay her family a couple of cows and some stuff to grow wheat with in exchange (oh, and we gave them an old break-open shotgun that we don't have any shells for), seeing as they were losing a good worker. Either way, Sarah's been my darling esposita ever since; she's a cute woman and I think she loves me as much as I love her.

I surely hope so; she gave me two sons so far, and another little one on the way. My boys are twins, and they mean alot to me. I was watching them play in the cornfields one morning, and I was thinking about this disease that's rocking the world around. There's a war in the south, and apparently people in the cities don't live past 25. Grampa said that people used to be able to live past 100, but I don't believe that very much. I do know that they could live much longer than Grampa's 42, and even Dad's 30. Daddy said it probably had something to do with our lifestyle, the way the farm work treated our bodies and how our food nourished our bodies different than those in the city. It was definitely true that men were croaking out between 22 and no older than 25, and as I was looking at my boys, I just couldn't bear the idea of them dying at that age. We get travellers and nomads through these parts occasionally, looking for a place to ply their wares in exchange for some food or shelter from the elements, and they tell me about something in the city that everybody's fighting over. They say it'll cure "Big Disease" in no time, and it might even help bring things back to how they were before. I don't want my kids trying to rush things; how great would it be if we didn't have to rush our lives? 25 years maximum to be a kid, learn to work, and start raising a family? What if I even saw my grandkids grow up into men and women? That would certainly be a sight, and the moment I saw this bright future, I dug into our attic and found some old Army gear that must have belonged to great- or great-great-Grampa. I packed up some clothes in that big green duffel bag, got a big wool blanket and rolled it up, stuffed plenty of bullets where I could, and put on Daddy's old shoulder rig for his COLT 1991A1. I'm heading toward the big city to try and find a cure, and if I don't, I don't want to live in a world where there isn't one for my kids.

OTHER

This is a picture of my two sons, Connor James Gregory and Charlie Doolin Gregory. Their first names come from my Dad and Grampa, and their middle names are my favorite gunslingers from the Old Old West who fought cowboys and telegraph companies during the Civil War. This picture was taken and developed by my good friend, George Stewart, who makes photographs as a side job; he's a carpenter mostly, but he hates it. I've got this photograph of my sons in my back pocket, folded in with the photograph of my wife, Sarah Gregory.


She wrote a quote on the back of this picture of her; it was a part of a poem by a man named Alfred Tennyson that I read to her at our wedding, and I thought she had long forgotten it. I think it all speaks for itself.

'There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear; I hear;"
And the lily whispers, "I wait." '