Lincoln was born Dec 12 in Boca Raton. HIs father was a police officer and his mother was in retail. Lincoln was an only child, like his mother and father before him. He had more than a few friends growing up in school. School itself was relatively easy, and he found he didn’t have to study much. For the most part, Linc didn’t seem to have much direction in what he wanted to do. He did know that he wanted to help people, much like his father. When he graduated, he enlisted in the military. After basic, he became a damage control officer, learning the techniques to firefighting, safety, prevention, thinking outside the box. He found that he liked the work, and applying brain to bad situations. When his term was up in the military, he returned to Florida, moving to Miami. There, he was able to quickly secure a position with the metro fire and rescue department. The skills easily translated over, and after a brief run through of civilian training, he was quickly on a fire crew.

It was during this transitional period that Linc met Karen. A gorgeous, charming, and funny young lady who he took a shine to. Karen was a local entertainer, doing voice work, some media in commercials, and singing gigs. The initial idea of having a firefighter for a boyfriend was alluring, and they both hit it off. After a few months the two of them had gotten engaged, and were still heavily involved with each other. A few months after the engagement, they were married. They honemooned in Puerto Vallarta for a month. Coming back as newlyweds, they enjoyed themselves and each other quite a bit.

Linc’s work began to pick up, and Karen’s career picked up, and soon both were busy, unable to be with each other as much. As a result they drifted. Their lives seemed to be moving in different directions for the time being, as they had little time for each other. Karen resented it a little, but Linc didn’t seem to as much, perhaps because of his military background. Being an emergency lifesaver has it’s demands, and it seemed that even when they were both home, their midns were on their jobs, especially Linc. He began to gain weight from stress eating, and began having trouble sleeping, suffering from insomnia, and when he did sleep, he often had bad dreams. He’d seen two friends of his die in a house fire, the fire chief had opted for a two in, two out play and during ventilation part of the attic had fallen in. Linc had been on the pumper crew that day, and still felt helpless as two friends burned alive. He still hears their screams in his sleep sometimes… except that there was no way they could have been heard. One had their neck broken by the falling debris. The other was buried, and between the roar of the fire and the hoses, and all the other noise, it would have been covered up.

Linc went on fighting fires, and became tireless in his efforts to keep his brother firemen alive as well as save lives, often pushing his limits. Soon the already distant marriage he shared was on the rocks, and Karen was filing for divorce. It was a wound to his heart, but at the same time he understood. Eventually the papers were signed, and they went their separate ways. They still talk time to time, and as Karen has told her friends, she still cares for him, and the same is true in reverse. They simply drifted because of other factors and choices.

Since then, Linc has worked to get himself back to good, stopping the stress eating, getting back into ‘fighting’ shape. Over the last three years or so he’s made leaps and bounds. These days he doesn’t work so much on the fighting crews directly, but is a team leader and is slotted to become an assistant chief. He works with the fire investigators, picking through the wreckage to find the causes of the fires

Linc has also paid his dues as an EMT-B, or a Basic, helping deal with victims from fires, wrecks, and other accidents. He’s sutured wounds, administered CPR, done plenty of intubations, dealt with shock, and had to drive a rescue ambulance through insane traffic. He’s been shot at and missed, and come through all of it. Before the turn, he had just gained his EMT-I certification or became an “Intermediate” EMT.

When the Turn started, he had been working an upswing in fires, and some of the crew were down from illness. A couple others had been injured, both of them bitten by a crazed patient. Word from their buddies was that they had been patched up but were now having some kind of raging fever, and were fighting off some kind of infection, so they were still at the hospital. As a result of being short-handed, Linc had been put on the inside crew. They were fighting a fire that had cropped up at an elementary school which was starting to be used by the CDC as a field hospital.

They weren’t able to move the sick very far, but were able to clear enough space to be safe and create a workzone around the school for the fire department. Whether it was deliberately set, or not, Linc never really knew. Part of the building sagged and collapsed as they simply weren’t able to create enough ventilation fast enough. A lot of the building was fire resistant, but eventually the heat weakened the structures. He was buried in a classroom that he had been working on venting under part of the sub-ceiling and between two girders, one above his head and one below his feet. Most of the windows had been shattered so the temperature in the room had been brought down significantly, and most of the fire was crushed and buried left only to smolder with minimal fuel. His gear protected him from the heat, and his SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) fed him clean cool air, until suffocation forced him to wake up. Realizing he was out of air, he peeled the mask off, or at least he felt he was suffocating. The air was still oppressively hot, but not enough to sear his face and lungs. The metal around him had cooled. His SCBA tank had been an 88 cubic foot one, designed to give him an hour of breathable air. That was designed to be at a resting standing rate of consumption, or at least that was how the manufacturer measured things. Being unconscious he used less, so he had no idea how long he had been out, maybe an hour and a half, to two hours.

The smoke had been thick, but he’d recovered his axe. Where he was, he had barely enough room to stand, but didn’t have enough room to make it out through a window. But he had air, so working quickly he evaluated what his best plan of attack would be. He could bust through the cinderblock with his pick on the axe, but there might be rebar to deal with. The ceiling was sheet metal, insulation, and roofing materials. Sturdy too. Deciding to try his luck with the wall, he began chopping the frame out of the window that he could. Once he had the useless metal out of the way, he began busting into the cinderblock, making quick work, he soon had a space big enough to crawl out, even with a few pieces of rebar sticking up. They were short, and thin enough for him to bend with his bodyweight and good old leverage and muscle.

Once out of the building, he made his way back to the trucks up front to find a scene of chaos. Several of his firefighter buddies were struggling with what looked to be sick people from the field hospital and maybe some of the doctors or nurses, or volunteers. Some of them had grievous wounds, gaping gashes, or chunks of flesh missing from limbs, necks, torsos… but it seemed to not affect them. As he watched, they grappled with his friends, and tried to bite, like crazed animals. One of htem did bite his friend Tim Van Buren, clamping down onto his bunker jacket. Tim gave a shout of pain and punched the young latino woman who had bitten him in the side of the head, hard. Tim was the kind of bulky firefighter that could carry two unconscious men out of a burning building and go back for two more like it was nothing. The woman reeled from the blow. She should have probably been knocked out, but she turned back and grappled the much larger man again who seemed to struggle with the sheer power the girl exuded. Finally he planted a boot in her chest, sending her flying back, onto her ass. But she seemed unphased as she got up and came for Tim again. Linc made a move to intervene putting himself behind the woman, and bringing the handle of his axe across her neck and shoulders, restraining her, but she turned with murderous strength in his arms and began to attack him, grabbing on to his bunker to pull closer and try to bite. He got his arm under her chin and lifted, locking the spine in place, until Tim hauled her bodily off him, warning her all the while to calm down.

They were doing their best to not hurt the woman. Their job was to save lives, treat injury, not cause death and pain. Climbing back to his feet, Linc let out a determined sigh and hefted his axe. “Last time, lady… calm down,” he warned. When she came again, he parried her hands away and slipped to the side, hooking his arm around her neck, sweeping around and locking her into a sleeper hold, a blood choke guaranteed to put her out in eight to ten seconds. Which ticked by as she clawed at his arm, struggling fiercely. Twenty seconds went by, as Linc clamped down with all of his might. Thirty… nothing. The woman was not passing out or even slowed down. “She’s not going down,” he grunted to Tim. Finally he let her go, giving the woman a shove. As she caught herself, he turned sideways and gave a slight hop, landing on one foot while his other snapped out in a sidekick, connecting his bootheel with the back of her head, with enough force to knock her flat. It was a perfect kick, one that he’d had hours and hours of kickboxing training, as well as what he’d picked up in the military and from his LEO buddies. A moment later she was getting back up, despite what had to have been a knockout blow, and probably severe neck injury. That blow could have even killed the woman. She seemed unphased again as she came for them. Linc looked over at Tim questioningly. “I’m out of options..” Tim nodded, then cracked her across the back of the head with the flat of his own axe in a sickening crunch. The woman reeled, but seemed to recover and keep going. “What the fuck,” Tim exclaimed in shock and fear. That blow should have been pretty much fatal. Linc hauled back on his axe and swung for the fences. The blow took the woman in the neck and blew out the other side, lopping her head off. “Well that’s gonna be a lawsuit,” he said, then noticed that the woman’s head was laying there, working its jaw as though attempting to bite thin air. When it didn’t stop after a few moments he looked over at Tim.

Gunfire drew their attention as several cops and a couple national guardsmen were resorting to hand to hand and small arms to try to deal with the unruly sick. He watched a national guardsman dump a three-shot burst through an elderly gentleman’s chest, blowing fleshy chunks out the man’s back, only he kept coming, didn’t even drop. The soldier fired again, and to no effect. A moment later he was grabbed as the old man began biting and gnawing into the terrified and agonized soldier.

He and Tim had split from the scene after realizing that just pushing and punching and kicking and all would not work, and the crazies were piling up too fast. They gathered some of their gear, and radiod back to station, but it seemed that there was chaos back there. They had fought the sick off of their fire brothers and went to regroup, realizing they couldn’t fight a fire adequately in a combat zone, and it had wiped most of the building out anyway… they had opted to make back for the firestation.

The streets were crazy getting back and more than once they witnessed people being attacked by others. Most of them were bound by their Hippocratic Oath, but the way they could do the most good was to get back to base and get reorganized, and talk to emergency services dispatch. When they returned to the station there were a few of their bretheren, attacking others. One or two had downed a couple of the sick. They informed them that at least two of their guys had been completely without pulse or other sign of life, and had gotten back up a while later and began attacking. A short bit later they received official instructions from the CDC to restrain the sick, and if they reanimate to stay away from them. If given no option, severing the brain stem or massive brain trauma should be inflicted as they were clinically dead and proven to reanimate. Police were hesitant to fire on citizens but had seen the results of trying to cuff or restrain them, when some had pulled off their own hands, or de-gloved their hands of skin and flesh. Military weren’t quite so hesitant, but the number of walking dead was growing greatly. The mayor was calling for evacuation by now, and emergency personnel and police were instructed to facilitate.

Soon the fire department and police had school and city buses, gravel haulers, semis, and the like conscripted to haul people out of the city, getting them away from any adhoc evacuation point they could. Eventualy it didn’t matter. The military began sweeping fireteams through the street, shooting anything that moved. In a few places aircraft were droping white phosphorus and napalm, usually among highrises where fire control wasn’t as much an issue, seemingly trying to stem the tide.

Eventually, he made it to the store where Karen worked, which was Academy sporting goods, but found her gone, and people were looting. He managed to break into the gun case himself and snagged a pistol with boxes of ammo. and some magazines. Once he was locked and loaded he headed back out, and continued on, making his way to where Karen lived, but again found her gone. There was a small evac site near there he went to, but it seemed his ex-wife had evaporated. It was then that he picked up an AR-15 off of a police officer that had expired. A shot to the head made sure. From there he picked up several mags, and fortunately was able to scrounge up more ammo occasionally as the AR platform in .223 uses the same ammo as the military’s M-16 or M-4 carbines, or HK416. It was a familiar platform, simply lacking burst or automatic selections, he was able to battle his way through the streets. That was weeks ago.

Occasionally he hears gunfire around the city. There are still survivors out there. He’s no exception, but ammunition is very low. He’s only got a little water left, food ran out yesterday.. his last Power Bar. For a while, he was holed up in a loft apartment above a coffee shop. The place had been abandoned. He needed to get back to Boca Raton to see how his folks were doing. Karen had evaporated into thin air, just like she had done, leaving his life, for the most part. So it was that he’d gathered what supplies he’d could carry. He removed the reflective tape from his thin bunker gear and had set out across the city, figuring he’d find a vehicle along the way he could use. He’d been careful and fast, doing his best to avoid gunfire. It had been a rough three days. But now he found himself confronted with a converging group of walkers. Drawn perhaps by the gunfire he’d heard a short distance away. There were people nearby.