After three days she came to the place where the desert ended and the mountains began again. She bore no illusions about what lay ahead'she still had the map she had taken from Charles' car and she knew there was another desert on the far side of this new mountain range. Not just another valley but a high plateau of desert that went on forever. Still she was glad to be climbing upward, even when her legs complained, even when her thighs burned with the unrelenting effort. Getting up into high country meant the nights were cooler, the daytime sun less punishing.
In the absence of anything else the mind grows to fill the landscape it observes and in turn it takes on the aspects thereof. After days of walking nearly non-stop she had learned to stop thinking about every individual thing she saw, the swaying branches of every Mormon tea bush, every tiny yellow flower of a brittlebrush. Instead she had come to understand everything as process. In constant motion she began to see the world in terms of movement and change, and any change for the cooler, the wetter, or the rockier was for the better.
She used her hands and feet to pull her way up the Amargosa mountains and into Nevada. There was nothing to mark the border'she had to guess, based on what sense she could make of the map in a place with no unique landmarks. She was well off the paved roads that cut Death Valley into quadrants and the gas station map had very little physical detail to guide her.
Did it matter? If you walked across the country, from one ocean to the other, did it matter at any point what state you happened to be in? She had been holding Nevada in her mind as a goal, an escape'a place where she would be safe from the military and the police and everyone else who wanted to destroy her. Had anything really changed, though? Surely the people of Nevada hated the walking dead as much as the Californians. The desert was providing for her, it was a safe place for her. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe she should ignore Mael Mag Och's offer, forget about finding her name, just live underneath the cottonwoods, spend the rest of time getting more and more crusty and dry, eating kit foxes and tortoises and coyotes in the smell of sagebrush and baking rock. Maybe she should stay there forever.
She stopped to ponder that and just to sit down for a second. Her feet were killing her. Perched on a rock her body stopped complaining so loudly and her mind began to settle, to gather itself back up. Returning to concrete thought she slowly became aware that the armless corpse was gone. She felt his disappearance as a sudden shock of absence, the way she might have felt on having a tooth knocked out of her head.
Why had he gone? Where had he gone? She spun around, searching the high ridge then closed her eyes and tried the same search again but' nothing. He was gone. She turned and faced eastward'maybe he had gotten ahead of her somehow? No. No, but there was something. She stood at the top of a wandering canyon, the imprint of some ancient mazy river. At the head of the canyon stood a simple wood-frame house. Smoke dribbled out of the chimney to be torn apart by a gusting wind.
People. Living people. Who had somehow scared off the armless freak.
Monster Nation
Chapter Two
CDC almost certain they can be pretty sure about one thing' maybe.
So the Centers for Disease Control sayshere that it's not a virus. Which builds on what we already knew fromthis spectacularly useful press release from the National Institute of Health, which claims it isn't a bacterium. So what the hell is it? In the meantime, here's your conspiracy theory of the week from Romenesko's:Man in Oklahoma claims rapture happened, only no one was fit to be saved.
[blog entry, DiseasePlanet.org, 4/8/05]
Clark ordered the HEMTT to a stop and leaned out his window to listen. In the distance, past a line of trees he heard a noise like paper being crumpled, over and over, interspersed with sharp bangs. He knew that sound. It was an automatic grenade launcher blowing the hell out of a city block. 'That's the Stryker group,' he told the driver and comms. After three days of hard fighting they both just looked numb.