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Tune stood outside the cafeteria door, having a smoke in the warmth of the humid summer night. It had rained last evening, and the air was clean, if still close. The power had gone down for the third time six days ago. They were using a generator to keep the lights on, but the air was out. The school, so full as it was of refugees, was sweltering, and the odor festered thickly in the heat. He walked over to the top step, took a long drag, and turned his gaze upward.

The stars, now that the power was out, were bright, clear flecks of twinkling blue against a dark velvet background. They showed sharply here and there amid the tattered remains of the clouds drifting above.

A tank moved slowly down the street below, and Tune waved to the soldiers hitching a ride. He was glad to have drawn this duty station; a buddy of his in another unit had been chosen to guard the off-ramp from I-70. That poor joker was out there in the weather, and wide open to attack. All it took was a moment's miscalculation. Not that anything was moving on I-70, anyway. When the worst had finally begun to hit, most people had tried to get out of the cities, and that had only served to clog all the major arteries. The I-70 bridge through Wheeling, and the tunnel before (or after, depending on which way you were coming) it, was just as clogged as the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, or the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The jam had been horrendous, and many people, suffering from the stress and heat, actually had died in their cars, only to come back to "life" minutes later. The jam had created a kind of smorgasbord for the zombies, and a large crowd of perhaps three or four dozen of them had swooped among the stalled and jammed, but still occupied, cars in a frenzy. Stories of the Wheeling police's adventures on the bridge were quickly becoming the stuff of local legend. They had had to fight their way onto the bridge itself, then, as they went from car-to-car, they simply shot the "zombified" people through the windows. It was feared that many who were not zombies at the outset might have become so a few minutes after the cops arrived and took care of things. But then, accidents do happen.

Tune continued to smoke his cigarette, letting the smell of the tobacco (and who knew what else) slowly crowd out the sick odor that had settled into his nasal passages. He squinted against the smoke, and considered what he knew.

Things weren't looking good for the living. The scale was beginning to tilt in favor of the dead. According to official reports, several nearby cities had been lost to them; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was a deserted husk, occupied by wandering crowds of mobile corpses. Weirton, West Virginia had been a battleground for several days; but then the steel mill there had caught fire and had raged out of control. More than half the city was gone, so what was left had been abandoned to the dead. Chester and Follansbee, the first places Tune and his unit had come to, being smaller areas, were still in human hands, but it was starting to go flaky there, too. Directly across the river from Wheeling, Bridgeport, Ohio, was in control, but for how long was anyone's guess. There were just too many of them.

The problem, of course, was that people died every day. From illness, old age, injury, whatever. They died and, unless action was taken immediately, then got up again. They then became part of a vast army; an army that had, at long last, found a way to shrug off its political, social, religious and/or ideological differences. In Israel, Muslims, Jews and Christians marched together at long last; Catholics and protestants, skinheads and blacks, gays and straights, Republicans and Democrats, cops and robbers, gun nuts and anti-gun nuts, pro-choice and pro-life. They all marched together now. And they killed. And killed. And their ranks grew.

It had become a matter of course to shoot a corpse in the head just after death had been confirmed, but how many people died alone, where such precautions couldn't be taken? How many had tried to escape, and had found themselves trapped by the hordes of dead cannibals? Too many, it seemed.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, he considered his family, and wondered how they were faring. His father had died just over nine months before, and not for the first time in the past couple of weeks, he wondered if, given the present circumstances, he might not bump into the old man somewhere along the way.

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