Free DEAD: Reborn by TW Brown Page A

stuff and I guess even sponsored some cage fighter with the stipulation that he train her!
    Now, I have never seen her in action, but her group that she arrived with vouches for the fact that she is a certified bad ass. I guess I will find out for myself soon enough.
    And that is the group that rolled out in the truck. I stared out the back as we left and waved at Thalia as she jogged along b ehind us until we reached the end of the parking lot.
    Seeing the group all standing out front of the cabin as we rounded the corner, I wondered if Jon realized that we were not just surviving here. We were living. We were building a co mmunity. Sure we’d suffered a setback, but we also rebounded. And pretty soon, we would be welcoming a new life to the group. What about that does not constitute living?
     
    ***
     
    Looking down into the small town that nobody knew the name of, the train sat there beckoning. Of course, there were several hundred zombies down there as well.
    “We pull this off and we can basically march into La Grande. Everybody there will fall in with us. Maybe out of fear at first, but eventually they will come to see that it was the right choice,” Jon announced to the group.
    “But what is keeping the undead down there?” Jamal asked the question we were all thinking.
    Zombies have no real focus. Except for those creepy child-zombies, they seemed to act on the last thing to get their attention. This was simply not typical zombie behavior. A terrible thought came to me. What if they were somehow learning or changing? Nothing good could come from something like that.
    “We just don ’t know,” Jon answered. “In fact, when we found this little gold mine, I had Jake go down to the far side of town where the remains of a makeshift barricade sits across the only road on that end. The hope was to lure them that way while I went in to take a look.
    “They reacted typically at first. Jake pounded on a big piece of sheet metal and they started to wander off to investigate. I moved in and had just opened the rear car when Jake started banging out S-O-S. I jumped out of the car and was ready to rush to his aid when I came face-to-face with a walker. The entire herd was coming back!”
    I had to admit, that was some freaky behavior for a zombie. The one thing that we had always been able to rely on was the fact that they were predictable. They reacted to the newest stimuli which was something that we were always able to use to our advantage.
    “How come you didn ’t say anything about the tanks?” Jerri asked as she studied the train with her binoculars. “Those would be awesome!”
    “No fuel,” Jake said. “The little we were able to salvage was enough for the truck. Those tanks would gobble that down in no time.”
    “Where do you think this train was headed,” Shelly asked.
    “If I had to guess,” Jon brought his own binoculars back up and resumed scanning the length of the train, “I would say Fort Lewis up towards Seattle.”
    “So if those things came back so quick,” Carol joined in on the discussion, “then how did you get a truck, all those supplies, as well as so much fuel?”
    “In short bursts,” Jon answered without taking his eyes off the train below. “The y still reacted to the noise, but only temporary. Funny thing is…we thought initially that something must have happened that we were not aware of to bring them back. It wasn’t until Jake repeated the action that we realized something was off. Each time, the zombies wandered away, but they would turn around and come back…almost like they were on a tether, because it was very consistent.”
    “I marked it,” Jake spoke up. Everybody looked his way and he acted all embarrassed. He wasn ’t fooling me, though. I had learned that the soft-spoken good-old-boy he pretended to be was a front. “They were pretty consistent with where they would stop pursuing and just return to the train.”
    “So they seem concentrated around those