Name(s): Derek Strapp
Nickname: n/a
Gender: Male
Age: 41
Originally From: Flat Rock, Alabama, U.S.A.
Current Occupation: Rancher and Hunting Outfitter



Personality: Derek has predicted for a long time that one way or another, the bonds that hold society together would be cut. Be it a Russian nuclear attack, natural cataclysmic events, to the dissolution or corruption of the American government, Derek has prepared himself mentally. He puts great stock in his family, particularly his wife, Carolina. As long as Derek has his family to care for, he is an impenitrable wall, a steadfast, unbreakable companion.

He is both loud, and cheeky, preferring direct confrontation to what he calls "Sneakin' n' Peakin'" Derek has little time for headgames, nor does he care for those that can't haul their own weight. He can come across as somewhat chauvinistic, but this owes a great deal to his wife, Carolina, who shares many of the same traits that Derek does, and is fully capable of taking care of herself, be it in the woods, or in the home. Accordingly, the overly feminine, or "City Slickin'" don't sit well with him.

These days, Derek is more lugubrious

History: Derek grew up in the the small farming hub of Flat Rock, Alabama. He inherited both a fair sum of money, and the family ranch when his parents passed away in an ultralight wreck while boar-hunting on their property. Their loss nearly crippled Derek mentally, but his then girlfriend Carolina pulled him through that dark period. In time, they were married, and had a happy, if hectic life together. Eventually they had three sons, Derek Jr., Brando and Han, whom Derek shared every possible moment with, from hunting in the scrub lands at the edges of their property, to fishing in the numerous watering holes and streams that dotted their sprawling ranch.

Many would say that there's was a happy, content life, but Derek always held that there were certain, immutable maxims for life. The bacon is always better when you don't drain the fat, if you didn't break it, the boys did, and you can't trust the government or society at large. With this last point in mind, Derek has been a long time proponent of both citizen militias, and preperations not necessarily for the "doom's day" but for the transitional periods that one cannot immediately predict. Hence, he personally built and provisioned a bunker under the northern pasture that could serve to protect his family. His sons and wife learned how to shoot, and how to repair basic machinery, such as ventilation systems, water-reprocessing and waste-management sub-systems. Derek's family lived, prepared for any eventuality they could imagine.

Derek was out with his eldest son Derek Jr. leading a hunting expedition on his land for a pair of wealthy South African's looking for trophy-sized boar on the western edge of the ranch when he heard over the radio of some odd news coming out. Something about an evacuation. He called off the hunt to the muted protest of the South African businessmen and dropped Jr. off at the house and told him to tell his mother to think about "preparing" which was obvious parlance for getting everything ready to go, just in case. Derek then drove the South Africans back to airstrip, having called their pilot enroute, requesting that he take them back to Atlanta, Georgia, promising that if this was all a mistake, he would comp their next hunt. This seemed to quiet the South Africans enoughso that Derek heard his old radio crackle out the order for evacuations to take place, that epidemic everyone had been whispering about in town was both real, and significant.

Without another word Derek unceremoniously pushed the South Africans' luggage out of the bed of his truck and sped off, wheels spinning in the loose red dirt of the airstrip. When he got home, Carolina and the boys had everything packed, the fresh food and water, several of the family mementos and keepsakes, as well as their favourite rifles. Without a word, they loaded everything into the back of Derek's truck, drove the half-mile to the entrance to their bunker and offloaded, and stowed all, well below the ground. With Carolina and the boys safely tucked away underground, Derek punched the lockdown code a keypad on the wall and watched as the door slowly closed shut, the whine of the hydraulics momentarily dulled as his ears closed and he had to pop them from the pressure change as the HVAC system kicked on with a low drone.

The family stayed down there for what felt like weeks, but in reality was only days. The bunker was not large, nor was it small. It had enough space that everyone could more or less stay out of each others space, and supplies to last over two years. All the systems were self-sufficient, as waste water was re-processed and purified, human waste, in the event of an extended stay, could be reprocessed in bio-reactors into compost and nutrients for crops grown in the long trenches running throughout the building. The bunker even had a backup generator with a eight-thousand gallon diesel tank, in the event that the main power system's solar-panel banks on the surface were blocked by nuclear winter, or volcanic ash.

After many days, and many nights, blending into the monotony of living underground, the family unit started to show cracks; the boys would stop playing and just stare at the wall, Carolina would stare wistfully upwards, and wonder what was going on up there. Derek shook his head and thought he had been foolish to forgo something as simple as a closed-circuit television system, whose cameras would provide some tangible link to the surface.

One quiet evening, the family was sitting at dinner, another rendition of spaghetti with canned sauce and meatballs, when the lights flickered twice and blinked out, only to slowly come back on as the diesel generator hummed to life under the rear-most room's floorplates. "Well... I guess we have our answer then. Them rooskies must've hit us. Gosh I'm ah hopin' that Washintun is given as good as it's gettin'" Carolina mumbled, looking downward at her plate, slowly pushing pasta around on her plate. Nothing more was said that evening, the gravity of their situation sinking in. Only Derek seemed perterbed. If it had been nuclear winter, or an ash cloud, it would takes weeks to dim the solar panels, not seconds. These thoughts kept him from sleeping and so he occupied himself with checking the hoses and filters on the diesel generator. Working on it was noisy, as he had to open the floor-plates and climb down into the sub-floor space that it occupied.

The only idication that something was amiss was when his ears popped. There was only one thing that would cause that sudden of a loss in pressure.... and that's when he heard the door alarm shrieking through the bunker's cramped hallways. Derek jumped so fast, and so hard that he hit his head on the floor-plate that was half removed above him, knocking him out cold. He awoke several moments later to the sound of terrified crying; "MOMMY! MOMMYYYY!" Derek's youngest Han was wailing. He thought he heard a shotgun go off once, twice, three times and crying, cutoff by a wet gurgle that sounded like "Daa..." Derek tried to move his feet, but they seemed to be made of stone, his arms held down by invisible weights, so he crawled forward under the floor-grates. Through the grating, he saw his second-born son, Brando holding his little twenty-four gauge shotgun, the barrel coughing sparks at a dark shape that moved ever-closer to him, with no effect, even though he could hear the buckshot hitting whatever the shape was with a wet report.

The shape made lurched forward at Brando and fell on top of him, muffling the terrified whimpers of the boy. At that moment, Derek found his strength and burst through the floor-grate, launched himself out of the hole and onto what looked like a homeless man. He grabbed ahold of the man and tried to hurl him backwards, but the skin on the man's shoulders slipped off as a sock does a foot, leaving Derek with handfulls of skin. The man barely noticed, as he thrashed his head from side to side as he bit at Derek's son. He grabbed Brando's shotgun, put it to the man's head and pulled the trigger, which caused the man to roll to the side and onto his back, revealing both the man's lack of discernable features, as he had no eyes, nose or lips, and more distressingly, his sons lifeless eyes staring up at him, Brando's throat having been torn apart.

Derek coughed, fell to his knees and started to cry, cradling Brando's head, covering Derek in his son's blood. It was at that moment that through the numbness of shock, Derek felt a hand on his shoulder. As he spun around, another thing like the one he had just dispatched fell forwards at him. He shoved the man aside, and lunged through the doorway into the bunkers main hall, where he found the bodies of his two sons, twitching as several of these creatures ate them. Derek took one long look, and made a break for the bunker's entrance, half-blocked by more of those things, hunched over a body that had to Carolina's.

Derek ran, he stepped on the back of one of the creatures, launched himself through the open portal and onto the steps leading to the night sky outside. When he arrived at the top, he looked back, and the one he had stepped on was coming up the stairs after him. Derek jumped into his truck, grabbed the keys from above the sunscreen, jammed them into the ignition and pinned the throttle to the floor. Derek hasn't been back to the bunker since.



Equipment:
Head- Camouflage ballcap
Torso- Camouflage hunter's jacket, blaze-orange t-shirt, bandoleer for shotgun shells and strap-boxes for rifle bullets
Back- Camouflage backpack Containing Food, Water, Ammunition, 50' of climbing rope, snare wire, detonation cord and stump-jumpers (crude dynamite) photo album of family
Waist- Hunting belt, camouflage canteen, skinning knife and black rubber gloves.
Pockets- Keys, old nokia cellphone, wallet, pictures of family
Legs- Camouflage pants, 8-shot custom-made revolver, Ranching gloves
Feet- Camouflage hunting boots, two pairs of black socks, small 9mm pistol

Truck- Black Rancher's truck, 10' lift kit, large off-road tires, 25,000lb winch on front and back, shotgun, rifle, 200rounds of rifle ammunition under passenger seat, twenty-five rounds of 12gauge ammo in glovebox. 300' of barbed wire in the back, large bedmounted fuel tank, various ranching tools.