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He began to reholster his Glock, but she held out her hand, her smile fading.

“Don’t. You need that. In fact, you need to get moving,” Jenni urged him.

“Shit. What’s going on?”

“They’re coming out of the east. They started walking this way a few weeks ago. They’ve grown in number. You have to warn the fort. ”

“Damn, Jenni, that don’t sound good!”

“You need to go now. ” Jenni was beginning to blur around the edges.

Rune fought to keep his teeth from chattering as the air around him grew colder. That she had appeared so realistically was impressive, but she was drawing all the energy from the air around him.

“I’m going,” he answered.

Jenni didn’t even answer. She was simply gone.

Whipping the trap door open, Rune dropped his motorcycle bags down onto the ground next the bike. It looked clear under the blind. Heaving his bag of grenades onto his shoulder, he swung his legs down over the ladder.

Faint moans made his skin crawl.

A gray, badly chewed hand reached out to grip his boot. A badly mutilated head missing large portions of its scalp and hair, drew close to his ankle, the rancid mouth of the zombie opening wide. Rune shot it and it fell away.

“Where the fuck were you?”

He kept his gun securely in one hand and dropped to the ground. He swung around in a circle and didn’t see anymore dead things near him.

Working quickly, he secured the motorcycle bags onto the bike. A few figures were struggling out of the trees off to his right. They moved slowly, but when they saw him their moans grew louder. The answering moans of what sounded like thousands of zombies made Runes’ bowels heave.

Swinging his leg over his bike, he quickly gunned the engine. He didn’t want to do it, but he turned on the headlight anyway. The bright light washed over the countless zombies filling hillside and valley.

“Shit!”

Pulling around, Rune raced the bike up the path, away from the shambling dead. His heart was beating fast in his chest and the Glock felt slippery in his moist hand. A few zombies were moving through the brush and reached out for him as he zoomed by. None were close enough to snag him, but their stench was rancid.

The night was full of the moans of the dead and Rune prayed hard as he made his way up the dirt path. He couldn’t go as fast as he liked and the path was nearly overgrown in a few sections.

He was beginning to fear he was lost when he saw Jenni standing near the path. The light sluiced right through her as she urgently pointed he should swerve to his left. It was not the way from which he had originally come from, but he obeyed. The new path led him up a hill away and was not easy going. Another rider may not have been able to traverse the terrain, but he managed to reach the top, breaking through a line of trees around a stately old house.

Looking behind him, the moonlight illuminated the countless zombies filling the world below. His original path would have led him straight into them. Jenni had saved him.

Yanking on his gloves and helmet, he looked around and saw a long drive leading down to a country road. It was clear of the undead.

Feeling like Paul Revere, he gunned the engine and roared off toward the fort. Too bad he wasn’t wasn’t going to get to deliver the same message.

Instead, he was going to have to tell them the zombies were coming.

5. The Long March Into The West For weeks the undead had been making a long trek toward the west of Texas.

It had all begun when a handful of zombies ignored the unexpected feast in a military truck trying to break through I-35 and wandered after an escaping truck lumbering up a hill. The fifteen zombies had walked determinedly after the truck, stumbling and struggling over miles of fields and roads.

The original fifteen swelled in number as they walked through the south side of Fort Worth, then dead towns and farms. Some were caught in fences and languished there until the crows plucked out their eyes and vultures ate their flesh. Others toppled off overpasses onto the streets below, their heads cracking open and rendering them finally, truly dead.

A tornado blew through their ranks one dark stormy night, sucking a large chunk of their numbers into the air and pulling them apart. In the aftermath, bits of the undead littered a swath of countryside a mile long.

Months of rot, decay and exposure had slowed the undead down.

Sometimes they would find the living and bombard their havens until they either broke in or moved on.