Third generation military. Stationed at Mt. Home AFB, Boise, Idaho where he lived in base quarters with his wife, Kathleen and his 14-year-old son, Mike, Jr. Mike is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and the son of a US Senator who retired from the Army after a long and lucrative career that his son was trying very hard to live up to. From his father, Mike inherited a strong sense of duty and a fear of being an absent father, something that he saw himself becoming even as he hated himself for it. He would try to make it up to Mike, Jr. whenever he could with camping trips, ball games and mountain biking but he carried a lot of guilt for the time he spent away from home due to his career. He served in Desert Storm, has racked up an impressive array of medals but he's not pushy about his accomplishments, though he's serious about his military career. Mike doesn't mind a good Scotch malt whiskey.
When Captain Trips broke out he was TDY in San Diego, and conscripted to take out a squad of hastily put together soldiers, both Army and Air Force, an odd mix of half-sick men who were mostly afraid and worried about their own families, to quell a group of newscasters who were intent on breaking into a locked military facility. Most of the facility's staff had succumbed to the superflu and lockdown procedures had failed, so the news group was on the verge of breaking through when Mike and his ragtag squad arrived on the scene.
The two groups went head to head and the news group refused to back down. Mike's orders were to disperse them at all costs and to dispatch with extreme prejudice if necessary. With all the death going on around them, and the world in chaos, he saw no reason to kill more people over a facility that was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. He withdrew his squad and let the news group have it.
He spent the next few days trying to get medical help for his soldiers, watching them die, one by one. When the last man coughed his last breath, Mike outfitted himself at the same facility he had been ordered to guard with MREs, weapons, and all-weather clothing, found a Harley that fit his needs and headed for home. One habit he takes into the new world with him is smoking. Gotta have those cigarettes!
On the trip home, he was single-minded in his journey, skirting around any signs of other survivors or encampments, wanting only to get to his family, so he has no news about the state of the nation or the world by the time he arrives in Boise. He found Kathleen and Mike, Jr. both at home. Mike, Jr. was in his bed, the covers pulled up solicitously to his chin as if his mother had just tucked him in, brown smears of dried blood still streaked down his thin, dead face, his sightless eyes open, staring at nothing. Kathleen was slumped over in a chair beside his bed, her chin resting on her chest, her raven hair spilled over her shoulders hiding the pallor of death on her beloved face. They had only been dead maybe a day, maybe a day and a half. If he had left just a little earlier.
He sat there in the bedroom, knowing he would never have the chance now to even say goodbye and cradled his 9mm in his lap wondering if he had the guts to put the barrel in his mouth and put just enough pressure on the trigger. Just a little pressure, that was all it would take.
He fell asleep then, sitting up, the gun in his lap, and had his first dream of a little old black woman in a Nebraska cornfield, telling him about a new home in Boulder. When he woke up, he placed Kathleen in the bed beside their son, covered them both with the quilt, and mounted the Harley and headed for Colorado.
