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The following is a prequel to my first story, "That's all Folks", and details the manner in which the three Marines, Webster, Fox and Deaver, found themselves with the Army personnel. I can be reached at the address from which this was sent. Thanks.----Rob Denham

Malcolm Webster unwrapped a piece of gum and stuck it in his mouth, tossing the crumpled wrapper out of the back of the truck.

The stout, coarsely-muscled Marine Gunnery Sergeant watched with disinterest as it arced outward, glittering momentarily in the watery, cloud-shrouded midmorning sunlight. Then it was gone.

He sighed, bored, and listened to the sound of the engine. This part always reminded him of that song, "Turn the Page".

Hopefully, he mused, there would be fewer distractions on this trip, so they could get where they were going in fairly short order; the guys were getting tense. He’d already put a stop to one or two quickly escalating arguments. Just as hopefully, they would actually get where they were going.

The GPS system wasn’t working anymore; some problem with the satellite link, so the convoy had stopped at a deserted gas station and purloined a road atlas.

For the last week and a half, since President Harper had asked for Regular armed forces to be allowed to operate within US borders, they’d been travelling around this part of the country. Securing small towns and villages against the undead, putting down mobile corpses and relieving overworked, undermanned Guard forces, that sort of thing. Word had it, whatever it was, it was spreading, and rapidly. As shocking as it of course was to him at first, it was quickly becoming somewhat commonplace; he supposed a person could get used to anything, given proper time and frequency.

There were twenty-five Marines in the column, now; they’d lost a few since they’d started out. Some had died in the operation at hand, others had simply disappeared into the night, perhaps deciding that the world was ending, and there were better ways, maybe, to spend the Last Days besides re-killing the risen Dead. Webster the Human Being couldn’t really blame them, though Webster the Marine saw them as being in dereliction of duty, a dishonorable thing, at best.

So far it hadn’t been all that bad, really…at least, what he’d seen. The larger cities, though, from what he’d been told, were another matter, altogether. More places to search, bigger and more difficult areas to keep tabs on. More people lived there, which equaled more corpses that had died there.

Out here in the sticks, though, in the Big Wide Open, things were a little more peaceful; thanks, most probably, to the lower population levels.

Their next destination was called Remberton, a small Ohio municipality of perhaps 2,000 people. He admitted to himself a little anxiousness over this, despite the increasing banality of it all. Every time the truck stopped and the unit hit the ground, it was a tossup on what they might find.

He was always waiting to be dropped into the middle of a city of the Dead, where nothing at all was walking but huge crowds of silent, cannibalistic cadavers.

At last, the truck started to slow, and with a soft creak of brakes, drew to a halt. One of the Marines at the rear of the truck, a younger, pimply-faced kid named Kirk, stood up and looked out, peering around at the surroundings.

"What do you see, Kirk?" Webster asked.

The younger man shook his head. "Nothin’…..woods and open fields; couple barns and farmhouses, a ways off. That’s about it." They heard voices coming from the front of the short convoy, one of which they recognized as that of their commander, General John Mann.

Webster stood and stepped out to the rear of the vehicle. "You guys stay put; be back in a minute," he said, and hopped to the ground. He turned and saw perhaps eight or ten armed men, a mixture of local civilians and law enforcement, standing at a roadblock constructed of a school bus and several county maintenance vehicles, parked, staggered, across the road. Their weapons consisted mainly of shotguns and deer rifles, from what he could see. The front row of vehicles was carelessly strung with barbed wire; to the right was a road sign, which read "Remberton, 2 miles". Even from here, Webster could sense the tension, and the distrust some of the men felt.

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