chase. Their sad little brains just couldn’t extrapolate the logical conclusion that we were too far away and moving too fast. They saw us, they thought they could catch us.
Through the decay they ran.
Houses had burned, leaving surrounding yards and neighboring properties blackened. Trash blew across streets and open fields. Bodies, when they could be identified, or at least those smudges they left, discolorations, shredded clothes, and scattered bones were just about everywhere. On the two-lane country roads between the subdivisions and through the farms leading out into the country, cars littered the shoulders and roads, some alone, some stalled in convoys—crooked, metallic caterpillars. The contents of suitcases and provisions were scattered across the asphalt and into the ditches. Spreading out from the vehicles, like poisonous clumps of pollen, lay the smudges and bones, often close, sometimes forty, fifty, a hundred feet away.
For the people trying to get out of Killeen, driving to escape failed. Running to get away from cars jammed on the road failed them. Fighting the infected with whatever they’d had on their person failed too.
Futile struggle and death.
By the time we were over Stillhouse Hollow Lake, we were high enough that the coming extinction of humankind wasn't so obvious. I spotted the Bell County Expo center looking much smaller from up in the sky than I expected it to be. Interstate 35 slipped behind us, and then we were over farm country.
The morning landscape was peaceful. A fog filled the creek beds and low valleys in white—sometimes thick white, sometimes just a gossamer haze over the fields with cattle grazing, oblivious. In places, all I saw were treetops and roofs floating on clouds that hid the earth below.
Heading southeast, we paralleled the road Murphy and I had led the naked horde down on our way to Fort Hood. It was dotted with the houses we’d burned, and the ground all along it was scarred by the destructive passage of tens of thousands of naked Whites.
We didn't have a plan in the detailed sense for what lay ahead. We were going to fly over College Station and hope that showing up in a helicopter didn't spark an incident. The Survivor Army had given a lot of people in Texas good reason to greet them with bullets instead of talk. We needed to find a safe place to land—no Whites nearby, and none close enough to draw in. Of course, I suggested landing the Black Hawk on a roof on campus, but Martin told me the helicopter had an empty weight of five tons and a loaded weight twice that. Martin explained to me that he didn't want to die caving in a roof.
Not hard to understand.
Chapter 13
When the Texas A&M campus came into view, Martin turned the helicopter in a wide, clockwise circle so we could get a look at what we were getting ourselves into. I got out of my seat and stepped carefully through the narrow space in front of a forward-facing row of jump seats across the helicopter’s main bay. I looked over Murphy’s shoulder, out the window. Murphy had both hands on his machine gun, ready to fire. Everything new required caution. That’s just the way the world worked.
“What do you think?” Martin asked over the intercom.
“Looks like every place else,” Murphy answered.
“We’re about fifteen hundred feet,” said Martin. “You want me to take it down some?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t think we were going to see anything we needed from so high.
As we descended, the world below clarified into shit again. Disappointment festered through hopes I hadn’t realized I’d been fostering until they started to fracture. When Fritz talked about what his group had done in College Station I’d created a picture in my mind, unrealistic for sure, an idyllic oasis, a remnant of the old world surrounded by a tall-enough, tough-enough barrier to keep the grotesque savagery of the new world out.
And why the fuck
Through the decay they ran.
Houses had burned, leaving surrounding yards and neighboring properties blackened. Trash blew across streets and open fields. Bodies, when they could be identified, or at least those smudges they left, discolorations, shredded clothes, and scattered bones were just about everywhere. On the two-lane country roads between the subdivisions and through the farms leading out into the country, cars littered the shoulders and roads, some alone, some stalled in convoys—crooked, metallic caterpillars. The contents of suitcases and provisions were scattered across the asphalt and into the ditches. Spreading out from the vehicles, like poisonous clumps of pollen, lay the smudges and bones, often close, sometimes forty, fifty, a hundred feet away.
For the people trying to get out of Killeen, driving to escape failed. Running to get away from cars jammed on the road failed them. Fighting the infected with whatever they’d had on their person failed too.
Futile struggle and death.
By the time we were over Stillhouse Hollow Lake, we were high enough that the coming extinction of humankind wasn't so obvious. I spotted the Bell County Expo center looking much smaller from up in the sky than I expected it to be. Interstate 35 slipped behind us, and then we were over farm country.
The morning landscape was peaceful. A fog filled the creek beds and low valleys in white—sometimes thick white, sometimes just a gossamer haze over the fields with cattle grazing, oblivious. In places, all I saw were treetops and roofs floating on clouds that hid the earth below.
Heading southeast, we paralleled the road Murphy and I had led the naked horde down on our way to Fort Hood. It was dotted with the houses we’d burned, and the ground all along it was scarred by the destructive passage of tens of thousands of naked Whites.
We didn't have a plan in the detailed sense for what lay ahead. We were going to fly over College Station and hope that showing up in a helicopter didn't spark an incident. The Survivor Army had given a lot of people in Texas good reason to greet them with bullets instead of talk. We needed to find a safe place to land—no Whites nearby, and none close enough to draw in. Of course, I suggested landing the Black Hawk on a roof on campus, but Martin told me the helicopter had an empty weight of five tons and a loaded weight twice that. Martin explained to me that he didn't want to die caving in a roof.
Not hard to understand.
Chapter 13
When the Texas A&M campus came into view, Martin turned the helicopter in a wide, clockwise circle so we could get a look at what we were getting ourselves into. I got out of my seat and stepped carefully through the narrow space in front of a forward-facing row of jump seats across the helicopter’s main bay. I looked over Murphy’s shoulder, out the window. Murphy had both hands on his machine gun, ready to fire. Everything new required caution. That’s just the way the world worked.
“What do you think?” Martin asked over the intercom.
“Looks like every place else,” Murphy answered.
“We’re about fifteen hundred feet,” said Martin. “You want me to take it down some?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t think we were going to see anything we needed from so high.
As we descended, the world below clarified into shit again. Disappointment festered through hopes I hadn’t realized I’d been fostering until they started to fracture. When Fritz talked about what his group had done in College Station I’d created a picture in my mind, unrealistic for sure, an idyllic oasis, a remnant of the old world surrounded by a tall-enough, tough-enough barrier to keep the grotesque savagery of the new world out.
And why the fuck
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