“Caleb, come on!”

I had stopped moving and was staring at the corpse, its skull shattered, brain tumbling out, dirt sticking to the shriveled tissue. A large, fat fly circled down and landed among the mess, its wings buzzing as it walked excitedly over its feast. My feet felt leaden, vision gray and black around the edges, mind blank, disconnected, a numb tingling creeping up my face. Something constricted my chest, making my breath come in short, stuttering gasps. Mike yelled again, and when I didn’t respond, he slapped me across the cheek hard enough to make my eyes water.

“Wake up!”

I did, blinking against the pain. “Son of a bitch.”

He bent, picked up my rifle, and shoved it against my chest. “Take your gun, dammit.”

I grabbed it and brought it to my shoulder, muscle memory putting my hands in the proper places.

“Back to back,” Mike said. “We’ll shoot our way out of here.” He took a couple of seconds to raise the metal and concrete club over his head, take aim, and throw it like an axe. It spun end over end three times before striking a ghoul in the chest and knocking it to the ground. I heard ribs shatter from fifteen feet away.

Shaking the last of the fuzziness from my head, I adjusted my VCOG to its 1x setting, aimed, and began firing. My breathing was even now, hands steady, the trembling in my legs gone. I let fly ten rounds in ten seconds and dropped ten ghouls. Behind me, I heard the shuck, snap, and clack of Mike reloading.

We moved steadily toward the western field, keeping each other in our peripheral vision, checking our flanks and corners every few shots, dropping anything trying to angle in on us from the side. By the time I had burned through my first magazine, there were only fifteen or twenty walkers left standing. A minute later, they were all down.

Mike and I stood among the once-human wreckage, bodies strewn around us, spray patterns of coagulated blood and brain tissue contrasting sharply with the pale dirt under our feet. We gripped our rifles and looked around dazedly, hardly believing what just happened.

“We watched this place for a long time,” Mike said. “I saw nothing.”

“Neither did I.”

“Not a stir, not a peep, not a damn thing. They came out of nowhere.”

I looked at the stables and the fields beyond. “It’s like they were waiting for us.”

Mike thought a few seconds, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I talked to some of those soldiers from San Antonio. The things they told me are starting to make sense now.”

“Like what?”

“This one guy told me they don’t like sunlight, especially when it’s hot outside. Said if they can’t find food they look for shelter, or just kind of drop like they’re hibernating or something. Might explain why they’re more active at night.”

I thought of the ghouls emerging from the field and stables, faces confused, swaying and turning circles as though punch drunk, angling their heads to vector in on me. There was no way they could have known we were headed this way—we didn’t know we were headed this way—and none of the undead’s behavior thus far indicated they were intelligent enough to plan an ambush.

“I see your point. But it’s early morning, Mike. Why weren’t they out last night?”

“Maybe nothing worth eating came along in a while.”

“So you think they were sleeping?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what the man said. Your guess is as good as mine.” He removed the half-spent mag from his carbine and replaced it with a full one. “Think we got ‘em all?”

“Could be more in the fields. Crawlers.”

“Have to keep an eye out.”

I turned toward the Humvee. “Yes, we will.”

*****

It took us an hour to stack the bodies in one of the stables.

That done, we used shovels liberated from the tool shed to scrape the leftover gore into small piles, which we then carted away in a wheelbarrow and dumped out of sight in the fields. Last, we made makeshift brooms with bundles of grass and erased both our tracks and those of the undead.

From a distance, our location would look abandoned and undisturbed. But up close, the striations left by the grass stalks would be a dead giveaway. All we could do was hope the weather helped us out with a strong wind or an afternoon thunderstorm.

After cleaning up, the three of us looked at each other, each one waiting for the others to speak. Finally, Mike said, “Well, anyone feel like sleeping in one of the stables?”

Sophia and I said, in unison, “No.”

We looked at each other and laughed. “Kind of seems like a lot of work for nothing, doesn’t it?” I said.

Mike shrugged. “I’ve done a lot harder work for a lot dumber reasons. At least the next person who comes along won’t have to worry about those things.”

“Walkers,” I said, more to myself than the others.

“What?”

I looked at Mike. “That’s what the soldiers called them. Walkers. Walking corpses, walking dead, you know. Like an abbreviation.”

He turned his head toward the stable loaded with dead bodies. “Makes as much sense as anything, I suppose.”

“Walkers, schmalkers,” Sophia said. “I’m tired. Let’s get out of here.”

Mike and Sophia slept under the shade of a lodgepole pine near the Humvee, the engine making the occasional faint ticking as it finished cooling. I stayed close for a while, perched atop the wide vehicle, binoculars focused on the small ranch up the hill until it became clear no more infected were nearby. Thanking fate for small favors, I put my ghillie suit back on and conducted a slow, careful sweep of the surrounding area.

I’m a firm believer people overuse the word ‘surreal’, often applying it to situations out of context with its definition, but that’s exactly what the next five hours were like. Surreal. No airplanes droned overhead, no cars buzzed along the highway, no voices drifted to me on the wind, nothing manmade. The only sound was a light breeze sighing through the dry brush and the rustling of sparse evergreen limbs. Sometimes a rodent or lizard skittered away at my approach, a bird took flight with a flap of feathered wings, or a door to one of the open stalls beat against its frame. Otherwise, I heard nothing.

After a while, I realized that other than Mike and Sophia, I was probably the only living person for miles. All the sneaking and crawling and straining of ears began to feel silly. So I stood up in the middle of hundreds of acres of open terrain, made a pile of my gear, and removed my ghillie suit. Rolled it up. Tied it to my assault pack. Tilted my head back and closed my eyes to the sun.

Orange spots raced across my vision, the amber glow of faraway nuclear fusion backlighting my eyelids. The wind ruffled my hair and flapped my collar against my neck, carrying the scents of warmth, dry grass, pinesap, and the faint, earthy undertone of decay. The field around me was a static crackling of brown stalks gently colliding in the breeze, dipping and rising like the surface of a lake, flashes of white reflected at a cloudless, azure sky.

My eyes stung when I opened them, forcing me to blink to restore sight. When I could see without large, multi-colored spots obscuring half the world, I picked up my gear, finished my patrol, and headed back to camp.

It was a refreshing, clear-minded peace I felt that morning, alone in that bright field. It was pure. Undiluted. An instant of hopeful clarity amidst a maelstrom of chaos and fear.

No peace has found me since.

FORTY-FOUR

Two more days on the road brought us to the outskirts of Colorado Springs.

The first day was downright boring. We set out at night, Mike and I taking turns driving, and after seven hours of dodging wrecks, abandoned vehicles, fallen trees, dead bodies, and a crashed single-engine airplane, we spotted a cluster of buildings. Drawing closer, I could see the buildings comprised one of those parasitic road towns that once earned a bleak subsistence siphoning money from tourists and passing travelers.