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There was a clear evacuation and flight from the eastern US towards the west in an effort to outrun the disease, but there were no front lines as such to the conflict. The army had to fight the things wherever it found them, and that was all around, in territory that had been completely human 24 hours earlier. They sprouted almost spontaneously, usually without warning. The families lucky enough to be saved yesterday were mindless, murderous cannibals today. A mother going to the crib to say Good morning to her child still in diapers might have a very different thing waiting for her, and if she lapsed into denial, she would soon lapse into living death, maybe even visiting the same fate on the rest of the family. A frightened toddler running to his parents for protection might be was scooped up and devoured, screaming until he bled out, mercifully ignorant of what was really happening.

It was in this level of hell that what would become known as the Battle of the Saints took place.

Saint Pass, elevation 4,234ft., was an artery into the east Rockies. About 200 feet lower than the pass and to the north, down a steep, treeless slope and often visible from the interstate itself was the always beautiful Saint Lake, about six miles in circumference. Only 20 feet up from the lake, a ledge had been carved into that slope to support a single railroad track that had been all but abandoned years earlier for financial reasons. Except for the slope, Saint Lake was surrounded by trees, and nestled within them on the north side of the lake was the small town of Eden.

Eden was physically connected to the rest of civilization by a couple of turn-offs from the interstate and a railroad spur that split off the main line just before Saint Lake. It ended at a concrete platform on the edge of town once used to facilitate loading. There wasn’t much to do in Eden, but the residents wanted it that way. In fact, the glitziest part was out of sight of the town proper: the two motels and restaurant near the highway that catered mainly to traffic going through the pass – or, more accurately, traffic that couldn’t get through the pass for one reason or another. Five miles back was a truck stop with another motel attached to it, along with a small supermarket for the sparse local population. Near the turn-off was a large, fenced-in compound where the state highway department kept snow-removal equipment.

There was an old but small hotel by the firehouse in town that had a lot of atmosphere, but none of it was designed or remodeled to appeal to souvenir- or experience-hunting tourists. It didn’t do a lot of advertising, so few people outside the area even knew about it. In fact, most people who actually drove into Eden looking for a "nice place to stay the night" saw the only hotel and then turned right around and headed for one of the motels near the highway. Eden was just a main street, a few side streets, some houses and businesses and streetlights, and that was it. They didn’t even have cable.

The inhabitants weren’t heavily dependent financially on jobs outside the city limits, as confining as those limits were. Extra money trickled in from seasonal transportation, logging, and recreational sources, but they lived life without the rivalry and competition that comes with being money-obsessed, either socially or individually. They owned their homes. They were a generally older group: their kids couldn’t stand it in Eden and left as soon as they could.

At first, the residents of Eden didn’t believe the reports of the Plague. They eventually accepted it, but then couldn’t believe it was as bad as all that. The dramatic increase in traffic headed west through the pass convinced them otherwise. Some of the residents themselves packed up and left, but most had nowhere to go. Most incredible were the stories of people dying and then coming back as murderous cannibals, and it didn’t take long for Eden to dismiss almost any news concerning the disaster as being almost anything other than what it purported to be. As far as they were concerned, the only circumstances under which the undead were remotely possible were Biblical in nature: the Rapture; the End of Days; the Last Judgment; angels, cherubs, seraphim, horns, and Charlton Heston; and they were all nowhere to be found.

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