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Agony swept across my body as if my blood was filled with acid. Only the morning breeze brought small comfort. I did not intend on rising from that spot but the thought of becoming like them fueled me and allowed me to put my aching muscles to good use. My bones and joints seemed to grind like rusty gears as I shifted onto one knee. Pain prevented me from rising any further for a few moments so I just knelt there and struggled to catch my breath.

Again, the cool autumn breeze blew but this time it carried a few red and yellow leaves with it. As the colors floated past me I began to think how much I loved the autumn or how much I used to love it before things changed.

Death never seemed so bad in the fall because of the beauty it brought along with it. No one seemed to like the autumn winds to blow away the heat away but I always saw past the gray skies and dying trees. There was something about death that still held beauty back then. Now it was so hard to believe in places like heaven when hell erupted across the earth, everywhere.

Funerals that once gave the living a chance for closure and a taste of that beautiful peace was a thing of the past. The closest event you could attend was a few words being uttered by a self proclaimed holy man while watching your loved one being devoured by the hungry flames of the furnaces that every citadel was equipped with.

The cracking of your friend's bones would always fill the only sacred moment you had left but I was away from that all now. I was free. Free like that foolish rambling teenager, William, would rave about in the days before he left. Now I was amongst them, amongst the fields of the walking dead, chasing a shadow of cure for the disease that threatens me with the horror of conformity.

We were the minority and the hole in my shoulder, that was leaking puss, was my invitation to join the mindless crowds that would soon rule the earth. Letting go of the fantasy that I would find the miracle vaccine, I studied my pistol and prayed that I would have enough presence of mind and motor skills to put it against my skull when I felt myself changing. I wrestled with the notion of doing it then but for some unknown reason I stood on my two feet and began to head down the dimly lit forest trail.

My thoughts quickly shifted from my sad fate to thoughts of William. I was penetrated with deep concern for him despite the fact that he had almost handed me this death sentence. I still can remember the first time I laid eyes on him he was talking to the one of the Sentinels on the eastern wall of the citadel.

My job was to patrol the eastern wall of our concrete kingdom from nine AM to Five PM. That was the function of a Century to make sure the alive stayed in and the dead stayed out. There were only a few citadels within good old America because Pride had gotten the better of us. We should have thought of a plan the second the first corpse took his initial baby steps but we didn't. We cried "To arms men," and began to fight this civil war that was destined for failure. Perhaps if we all banded together and fought the creatures as one we would have prevailed but such a thought is a mere dream. We could not make them our enemy because the animated bodies were once our families, friends, teachers and leaders. How could we kill them with human emotion and God's fifth Commandment hanging around our neck like the Ancient Mariner's Albatross.

Only a few visionaries realized that the problem would sweep the nation like a rising tide covering a sandcastle. Those men were the ones who came up with the concept of the citadels, walled cities surrounded by three rows of electric fence that would give humans a chance to survive.
They began construction only about a year or two after the President had declared Marshall law. In the beginning it was hard. Creatures would come lurching into the sites every day and Man power was at a minimum but as the years staggered by more investors looking for a chance to rule, supplied enough fire power to level a city.

After the building was taken over by corporation big wigs it was only a matter of another five years before we all could sleep peaceful nights within our concrete Noah's Arc. Ten years had past since that day we put down our trowels and set juice flying through the electric fences and since then I have walked the same step across the same wall until one cool September afternoon when I saw William standing there talking at a Sentinel

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