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This is Jack Hutchingston from the United Federal Shipping Company on frequency twelve-point-two, giving the heads up to all you truckers headed east on the Interstate towards Wisconsin. I’m heading west right now through Idaho and I just went through a big thunderstorm that’s heading for the Great Lakes. Had to go through it while I was traveling through the Dakotas, and boy was it a bitch.

Speaking of the Dakotas, I would advise anyone heading northeast to avoid the two states altogether. Better to take a detour through Canada, if you can. I just made it out of that graveyard with my life. Fucking zombies.

For those of you border truckers who never take a trip to the Midwest, I can’t help but feel sorry for ya. It’s turned into a beautiful piece of land, and it seems like new, towns are popping up every day. I don’t mind the cross-country assignments. It gives me time to get away from the old ball and chain.

Like I was saying, it was storming pretty damn hard all through last night, and there I was at the border of South Dakota and Minnesota. It’s an impressive sight; twenty-foot tall fencing around the entire boundary of the both Dakotas, guard towers every five miles or so.

I suppose not all of you know much about the Dakotas nowadays. No one ever really talks about them, except a few truckers who deliver to the small towns on the inside and a few more who gotta travel through to deliver their shipments. Like me.

It’s all about the Nitrate-twelve, folks. Everyone used it in their bombs during the last war, until they realized that the gas crept back into the atmosphere. Then it started coming down in the rainwater. At first, everything seemed okay; the chemical didn’t have any side effect on humans at all. But then a couple people started making reports to the local authorities, saying their long-dead relatives were standing outside their door asking to come in for a cup of tea. I think it was about forty years ago when this first happened, somewhere around twenty-six-ten or so.

So this happened every time it rained, and it started getting worse. Zombies were popping up everywhere, and it didn’t matter how long ago they died, because they always came back, always with a hunger for meat. The Nitrate-twelve would seep through caskets and enter the pores of the dead and it would bring back brain activity. The chemical would infect their entire bodies and there they’d be, walking around like nothing ever happened. Authorities would send out teams to "purify" the cities and burn the bodies, but that just meant that the Nitrate-twelve would become airborne again and come down in the next rainfall.

Worse, it would spread like a disease. After chewing on someone, the nitrate-twelve in the zombie’s saliva would spread into the recently deceased and they would wake up, usually with more than a few chunks of flesh missing across their bodies.

Finally, the powers-that-be decided that they had to band together to fix the problem, so they fenced off the entire states of North and South Dakota and transported all the dead there. Once a week, forty trucks per city make a run to the border and dump off thousands of dead bodies into giant water-tight apartments.

Damn, I’m probably boring half of you to death, which is exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do. So anyways, I’m at the border of the Dakotas not ten hours ago. It was about nine o’clock in the evening when I reached it.

And right there at the gate is the State Patrol car. Old William Prince the third, all two hundred-fifty pounds of him leaning against the squad car in the pouring rain. He’s chewing on a damp cigar like he always does. For those of you who aren’t acquainted with Deputy Willy, you’re missing out. The man is a classic character from head to toe. Anyone who’s gone through the Dakotas knows exactly what I’m talking about.

So I pull over and step out of my truck. I leave the engine running, because there ain’t no way I’m not going through that gate.

"What’s goin’ on here, Willy?" I asked. I was soaked head to toe with water before I even reached him.

Willy spat on the ground. "Got a big infestation from the rain in the Southwestern quarter. Shitload of them buggers from one of the apartments."

The apartments are what most of us Interstate trucker folks call the buildings where dead bodies are stacked ten, twenty, even fifty-high instead of being buried. Less Nitrate-12 rainwater can reach ‘em, and when it does, it’s damn-near impossible for them to break out of their caskets. Some of the older buildings don’t work so well anymore, though. Acid rain really takes a bite out of the concrete. If it’s a bad storm, you can bet more than a few are going to get out of their tombs.

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