Free The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) by James Cook, Joshua Guess Page A

was doomed to failure.
    The morning was clear and sunny, the kind of day your average person wouldn't mind taking a walk in. I would have been right there with them if the horde hadn’t come upon a town. For most of my time as a dead guy, I'd been walking in the woods, or at least rural areas. But a few hours after dawn, my swarm came to a little hamlet. Or maybe it was a village. Possibly both.
    I joke because thinking about it too seriously only makes the whole thing worse. In the dead of night , it's easy to forget just how far we've fallen. The cloak of darkness softens all the hard edges and makes the world a place that might have just run down on its own, so long as you don't stare at it for too long. In the harsh light of day, however, the facts were impossible to ignore.
    The plague came suddenly, that I remember with perfect clarity. There wasn't a lot of space between the beginning of the violence and the total dissolution of modern society. You'd think it would have been a slower process in the sleepier parts of the world, but that was exactly the problem. When i t became obvious some major-league shit was tumbling down, everyone had the same thought: Go to the little places. Find somewhere out of the way. Everyone knew of some one-horse town they'd been to as a kid, or where they rented a room at a bed and breakfast.
    The thing about the metropolitan majority is there were a whole fucking lot of us. Between us, we knew of virtually every place most city dwellers only rarely ventured to. The result was the rapid and cataclysmic destruction of small-town America. It happened faster than even the large cities. People had flooded places like the little town I was walking through, a sea of humanity that would have been an impossible burden even in the best of times, which these definitely were not. Everywhere I looked, bodies lay in piles.
    Even though I was dead, with little movement of air through my sinuses, the stench still reached me. The image you might get is of neatly heaped corpses, just like living people , but unmoving.
    No. Not that. These were old and decaying, shredded and more rot than good flesh. Bones stuck out where animals and ghouls had worried the skin and muscle away. They were steaming p iles of putrid meat, liquefying in a stew that only got worse over time. Not just a few of them either. They lay in numbers beyond counting. One particularly towering example had a snowplow parked halfway through it. Some survivor had scraped the dead off the street, leaving what became a dark brown streak of blood and shit and spinal fluid and God knows what else behind.
    Cars were everywhere, like old pictures of Woodstock where traffic was backed up for a dozen miles. Many of them were wrecked, the dents and crumpled metal already browning to rust. The buildings were either vandalized or unkempt, not yet as decayed as the people or even the vehicles, but still on their way to a state that could only be thought of as post-civilization.
    The grass was high, weeds invading every crack and crevice. I began to realize how much effort it took for human beings to impose their will on the world now that the gears had stopped turning. Nature, the other hand, was equally (if not more) determined to have her way. Green things crept across what appeared to have been a quaint little town, reclaiming it for the earth.
    If there was a ny better proof the world had ended, I couldn't think of it. As my swarm walked through the town, the overwhelming evidence of human suffering and tragedy reached a critical mass, like listening to music so loud that increasing the volume stops making a difference. At a certain point, the saturation reaches its maximum and you arrive at a state of rough balance. My mind couldn't turn away from what I was seeing, and forget about trying to get my body to do it for me. There was no escape.
    It hurt, that walk. There is no better way to put it. I've never been the type to cry over ads on