“Do you ever notice,” Doc Cedeno shouted, “that they don’t rot?”

“What?” Jack demanded. He looked over at Doc Luis Cedeno. He wore combat fatigues, not a lab coat, but the brown-haired man still looked more like someone’s kindly uncle than a multi-degree professor. Two of those degrees were information technology and accounting, but he also had teaching certifications in physics and biology. Jack liked bouncing ideas off the man, who seemed to have plenty of brain cells to spare for any problem.

“The undead,” Doc Cedeno waved a hand at his operating table. The corpse of the old man fought at the restraints and snapped broken teeth at them. It didn’t stop, nor had any of the other possessed that Doc Cedeno had collected for investigation. “They don’t rot. When I take a sample, there’s no bacteria, no fungi. I can’t understand it.”

“I dunno, Doc,” Jack said. He found it vaguely interesting in a sort of ‘things are trying to kill me and I’m way out of my league, but that’s a random fact that I don’t need right now’ sort of way. “How we looking on fuel?” Technically that was more Tim’s job, but Doc Cedeno had a better head for the exact numbers.

“Oh, we’ll make the rendezvous point, no problem,” Doc Cedeno waved a hand. “And from what your scouts reported, we should have plenty of fuel there.” He walked over and tapped on the possessed’s chest, which seemed to have no effect on the thing’s mindless attempt to escape.

Their next rendezvous point wasn’t far and Jack wasn’t really worried about fuel, not just yet. They’d found dozens of trains along their route, pulled aside on split junctions, most parked out in the middle of nowhere. Those trains had provided fuel, food, and other supplies and Jack had taken to using them as rendezvous points for their scouts. They’d meet up, everyone would refuel and restock, and then they would roll out again.

Most times they would pause for a day or two, everyone would get a break. Their next spot wasn’t far, only twenty miles. The train could have traveled there much quicker, but they kept the speed down so the advance team could sweep the tracks ahead of them for raiders or anything that the scouts might have missed.

Ten miles an hour was normally sufficient to outpace possessed. It was also easier on the passengers and kept the noise and vibration down enough that people could sleep.

“How did this happen?” Doc Cedeno grunted.

“What do you mean?” Jack asked. Sometimes he wasn’t certain that the professor was entirely in the real world anymore.

“This,” Doc Cedeno waved a hand through the air, “all this. Billions dead… the dead rising, how did it all happen?” The professor looked back at Jack and for a second, his eyes had an odd light. “How have we come to this?!”

Jack spoke slowly and kept his voice level. Luis wasn’t particularly unstable, but everyone on the train had their moments of crazy. That was just a way of life, now. “Doc, you know as much as I do, right? A billion dead Chinese from their civil war gone nuclear. Hundreds of millions more when the Russians and Indians got pulled into it… a few hundred million more North Koreans, and terrorist attacks in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.”

They didn’t know they were terrorist attacks. For all that Jack knew, someone in the US government had freaked out and nuked the three cities to stop possessed outbreaks. The results, though, had been plain enough for most people to see. Mass hysteria and a complete breakdown of society. It had been a slow, but steady crumble after that as people didn’t go into work and as undead outbreaks spread. Food and water became matters of survival and those who died from starvation or thirst or disease… well, they rose as undead, too.

No one knew what caused it. It wasn’t a virus or contagion, not that anyone had been able to identify. The dead simply rose, and the undead sought out the living, any living creatures they could find, to kill. The more people who’d died in an area, the faster they rose. In major cities, especially out east, it happened almost instantly. Even in smaller cities, like back in Springfield, it could happen in just seconds.  They called them possessed because that was how the undead acted: as if they were possessed by some malevolent force that drove them until they were destroyed.

The military had been extremely effective at containment at first. The problem was, they used up a lot of supplies. Jack had been there as they started to run out of bullets and fuel. Smart commanders had shifted to using melee weapons and conserving ammunition, but fuel had been the hardest part. Without fuel, units were stuck to moving on foot and they couldn’t power generators. Without power from generators, they’d lost radio contact with other units… and the collapse had continued from there.

Besides, the tiny five point five six millimeter bullets didn’t do much against the undead. Headshots didn’t stop them, you had to destroy the possessed’s ability to move and attack. Grenades, rockets, and explosives worked well. Driving over them with heavy vehicles, crushing them with heavy equipment, that was the best way.

That’s why we’re on a train, Jack reminded himself. Trucks, even tanks, could get stuck in piles of bodies. The train had far more mass, it could carry far more people… but it was also limited in the routes they could take.

“Yes,” Luis Cedeno said after a moment, “you are right. It just seems so… strange. And some of the stranger rumors…”

“What, like the portal to Hell over Chicago?” Jack snorted.

“Exactly that,” Doc Cedeno nodded, his face intent. “And blood raining from the sky in Cincinnati. We all experienced that, Captain.”

Jack scowled, but it was as much for the use of his rank as the reminder about Cincinnati. In his mind, he didn’t deserve the title. Jack didn’t command a company, not anymore. He’d been a combat engineer. He’d fought in wars for his country and he was proud of his service… but he sure as hell didn’t feel worthy of the rank, not anymore.

“There could have been any number of explanations…”

“It was blood, Captain,” Doc Cedeno said, his face intent. “Blood, raining from the sky.”

“Do you want to go back and investigate?” Jack snapped.

“Of course not,” the professor snorted. “I’m just saying that strange things are afoot.”

Jack gave the man a level look, “Doc, there’s millions of possessed undead roaming the countryside. Tell me something I didn’t know.”

***

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