The Survivors: Book One

Marc listened intently, heard only wind. The silence pressed in, like something was wrong, but other than the river trying to kill him, it was the same here as in every small town he had passed briefly through since the War - empty, over.

He scouted the next intersection, landing on a charred metro bus still full of rotting corpses, and he was thrown back in time to his escape, to his first brush with the walking dead…to what he'd seen when he rolled out from under the greyhound bus.

"Help!"

Oh my God!"

"Aahhh!"

Marc stared in horror at the people stumbling past the bus as he stood up. Soldiers and civilians alike, faces bloody, stumbling blindly... shooting at random.

"Help!"

"No!"

The screams were deafening and there were other noises too, ones that made him want to sick his guts up, but the gunfire was the clearest to his trained mind. Marc backed away from the walking corpses who were firing out of reflex, mowing down others like themselves.

Eyes wide and feet unsteady, Marc looked for even one other survivor, but found only more breathing dead. He turned suddenly, sensing movement.

"Uuhh!" Marc threw himself back from the outstretched fingers of a uniformed man tightly gripping his pistol. He tripped over a bloody pile, landed hard on his ass.

"Please, what happened?"

The soldier's deadened green eyes dripped blood. It ran over his lashes and cheeks in small torrents, and Marc hesitated, almost overcome with his first ever case of panic. This wasn't a foreign land - it was America!

"I can hear you breathing, you know," the Army man stated almost casually, head tilted.

Marc watched the scarlet drops roll from his dead sockets, creeping down his pale cheeks to hit the dirt before disappearing - all of it seeming to be happening in slow motion. "W-w-war… a bomb."

"But, where? North or south?"

Marc considered, aware that a muscle in the blind man's jaw had begun to twitch erratically while he waited for the answer. "South."

"I thought so," the soldier's voice was without emotion. "Thank you."

Calmly, without any indication he was going to, the wounded man raised the gun to his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

Blood sprayed wildly, raining across Marc's face, and then he was running, trying not to scream and not sure he was succeeding.

Crunchhh!

The water's destruction of debris pulled him from the flashback, and Marc shook his head, wishing the images would go away. He had begun moving carefully on foot after that, headed determinedly for the family home, only to discover no one there despite the funeral being set for that very day. The house had no signs of a hasty retreat, no letters of explanation, and there were no fresh graves at the family plot. What the hell had happened?