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It was eleven o'clock at night in 1968 in a Pennsylvanian farmhouse and the clouds had broken, revealing soft moonlight on the countryside. The risen dead surrounded the house, growing in number, making no noise except for that of their slow, shambling shuffle and the obscene wet sounds of gas and fluid escaping their lifeless organs.

Inside Ben and the other men were fidgeting with the television, a glowing band appearing and flickering on the screen.

"Play with the rabbit ears," said Harry, "we should be able to get something!"

Ben had the gun and now the TV, and he refused to let his mind wander back to the last five hours: the howling and screaming at Beakman's Diner, the old woman torn apart upstairs, the tire iron he buried into that thing's pale and cold head. They had been inside once, maybe just a few hours ago, murdering and eating. It made him shudder. They were gone now, all outside or dead, finally dead. Only their carrion stench remained; the stench, and their diseased blood crusting beneath Ben's fingernails.

It was just the way things were now, he thought, just another struggle to deal with. He was not a man of authority, just a traveling salesman, a black man among white people in the rural North, but he fell into leadership and those with him, shaking and shocked, let him. All except Harry, that bald-headed pig, who questioned his every move and eyed the gun enviously.

Ben didn't want it. Not any of it.

He fussed with horizontal and vertical, with brightness and contrast. On one station, he finally got sound; he adjusted the volume. The picture tumbled; he played with it and finally brought it in. Hushed, the people in the room settled back to watch and listen, except for Barbara in her blood splattered overcoat, who sat gape-mouthed staring at the walls beneath a blanket Ben had brought her.

"....ASSIGN LITTLE CREDIBILITY TO THE THEORY THAT

THIS ONSLAUGHT IS A PRODUCT OF MASS HYSTERIA...."

The first thing Ben noticed was that the smell was gone and it was daylight. He was sitting at the counter at Beakman's, sipping a cup of coffee. His mind was screaming with deja vu. Some overcoated thing shuffled up next to him. It was a young blonde woman. She looked harried and familiar.

"They're coming to get me," she said quietly.

"Excuse me?" Ben said. She looked at him and grinned sheepishly. Her face was flushed. She looked all messed up, somewhere in-between laughing and crying.

"They're coming to get me," she said. "But not until tomorrow. My brother doesn't want to drive the six hours out of Pittsburgh tonight! My bus breaks down out in the middle of nowhere and he doesn't even want to come pick me up until tomorrow. I'll never travel by bus again, I can tell you."

"You need a ride somewhere?" Ben asked. He looked over his shoulder. People looked at him sideways through cool eyes. This wasn't his native South but it was the countryside, and he knew he was still a black man talking to a white woman. He didn't give a damn.

"I'm going to Willard tonight, I can give you a lift there. You can call home then."

"I'd be grateful," she said.

"Maybe," he said, "maybe I can take you to Pittsburgh when I'm done."

She put her hand atop his on the cold counter. "I'm Barbara," she said.

Traveling cross-country was a lonely line of work. Ben and Barbara fucked all night in their room at the Motel 6, the noise sounding like they were tearing the place apart.

The next morning they tried to sneak out at dawn, but a semi-circle of people out on the perimeter of the parking lot saw them. It was like they had waited for them all night. Ben gunned the engine and plowed past them toward Pittsburgh.

Barbara's family despised Ben because he was low class and hadn't gone to college and they had just met, NOT because he was black they said, but Barbara and Ben got married and moved into a nice house in the suburbs anyway. It was a neighborhood where their neighbors didn't talk to them, except for Tom and Judy across the way. Ben quit his nomad's job and got work at the slaughterhouse. Their daughter Karen was born nine months later.

When Karen turned twelve, she became sick and missed school for months. She was bedridden and weak, as if she were just shutting down. Ben and Barbara took her to doctors they couldn't afford, who told them after countless lab tests and visits that all she needed was bed rest, more bed rest, and two of these pills daily, thank you.

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