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Still, the pass traffic increased, and some of the motorists who wandered into town began staying at the hotel. When it filled, others just parked their vehicles on the street and slept in them. Then suddenly, the tracks between the lake and the pass started seeing trains again, jarring some of the good ol’ boy residents into action. After meeting at Cal’s Tavern, they snuck out to the highway turn-offs one night and stole all the signs indicating Eden’s presence.

After that, large freezers commonly found in hunting and fishing families were prudently filled to capacity with game and frozen foods in Eden, just-in-case. Almost every house had one. The ‘just-in-case’ happened a couple weeks later as too many strangers were showing up in town again. One morning, a mysterious, impossible slide blocked the only road in from the interstate. There was something of a path around it that was barely usable, but it was known only to the locals, some of whom had never been more than 15 miles outside the city limits and saw no need for that to change anytime soon. The good ol’ boys correctly anticipated that clearing the road would be a low priority for the state, especially since Eden wasn’t complaining to anyone and didn’t even appear on some maps. They were partly right, but government services had much, much bigger fish to fry – bigger than the good ol’ boys could ever imagine.

But it still wasn’t enough. Emboldened by their apparent victories so far, the Eden Irregulars delivered the coup de grace to any future perceived transient problem by sabotaging the highway department’s snow removal equipment -- conveniently assembled in its staging area -- and rendering it absolutely useless. In what the residents of Eden regarded as a typical slap in the face from the federal and state governments, the department had always been forbidden by regulations to use the same equipment in Eden itself, even though it was only a mile or so away. When the first snowfall closed the pass this year, however, it would stay closed. It was fitting.

A freakish early snowstorm had already blasted through the northeast, blanketing northern Pennsylvania, New York, and most of New England. It was severe enough to have killed a few dozen people in more normal times, but these weren’t normal times, and the other contributing factors simply weren’t there: there was no commercial traffic to speak of, let alone commuters who had to get to work each morning; there was no one to suffer a heart attack shoveling the snow. There wasn’t even anyone to count the bodies of those who may have died outside from exposure.

The undead were still around in numbers, but the snow limited their mobility. It didn’t seem to have a lasting effect, but that may have been because it was unseasonable and melted too quickly as temperatures returned to the normal geographic ranges for late October. The human survivors in the ravaged areas couldn’t decide if the snow was a help or a hindrance.

To anyone left who may have wanted to leave the area, the snowmobile would have been a logical choice for a vehicle. Since the Plague started in the late spring, no one used them to escape west, so there were still a lot of them around, but locked away in garages and warehouses. Any user would have to find one first, and then know something about prepping it – especially if it was new and still in the crate. Their range was limited, too, by the short-lived snow.

In a rural area without any kind of usable motorized transportation a natural alternative might have been the horse, maybe with a wagon of some sort or a sleigh. Right now, horses were easier to find than snowmobiles: many stables were emptied when the nature and scope of the Plague became apparent, as were barns and pens, so all kinds of stock ran free. Horses weren’t fast enough, though, and they were too visible and too noisy, and any rider was too vulnerable. Besides, they needed a lot of care themselves to function; more than fleeing survivors were prepared to give.

But it wasn’t that motor vehicles were difficult to find – there were driveables all over the place. The first challenge would have been getting an unoccupied one started, since it might not have run in months. Finding a safe and passable route was difficult, usually because by now the only way a person could tell if it was safe and passable was by actually taking it. Earlier, it would have been common sense to avoid major population centers, but all that was changed now.

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