Free Days With The Undead (Book 1) by Julianne Snow Page A

behaves like “normal” tissue. What if it doesn’t? What if everything I know about natural decomposition has changed when it comes to the Undead? Sure, we have seen putrefaction occurring on their bodies and certainly smelled the odor of decomposition on them, but I am seeing corpses walking around that just shouldn’t be.
    Forget the fact, for a moment, that they are dead and walking. Consider the fact that the way in which their bodies are decomposing should render them immobile. Where is the bloat? The formation of adipocere due to the wet conditions they are likely to encounter? If the bodies are in fact in active or advanced decay, how can they still be moving?
    Nothing is truly following the natural order of decomposition. It’s almost as if some of the laws of nature are being expunged, disregarded and have become obsolete in the face of this. If that’s the case, there may be no hope in stopping them except for total eradication.
    But even that poses problems. Once they are totally and completely eradicated, once the earth is no longer home to the Undead, we will forever need to be vigilant. There is no way to know how long the infection will remain virulent outside of the host, or how long it will be able to survive as part of the archaeological record. We could eradicate it now only to have someone come into contact years or decades later and trigger the whole thing over again. There is just too much that we don’t know to be sure of anything.
    While we have no way of knowing how long it can survive outside of its host, we do know that it has the ability to cross species. That’s a huge thing too. Not many organisms have done that and once they do, they become far nastier. When it jumps from species to species it’s a generally due to mutation, a coping mechanism it develops to survive.
    Thinking about it scares me to death.
    At some point someone has to come up with a plan. We as a species can’t just sit back and allow ourselves to be annihilated, can we? I have to trust that our flight has been worthwhile. That we’re fighting for something…
    As I mentioned earlier, the Internet has been very active today with news, most of it covering the attack on Washington. In case you hadn’t heard yet, in the early morning hours, throngs of the Undead marched right into the city. Washington was just waking up for the day and it was like no one seemed to expect that anything so horrific could ever happen in to them in the Capital. There had been no preparation against a potential imminent bombardment despite their proximity to New York, Delaware and both of the Virginias.
    One would have imagined that there would have been some level of precaution taken to protect the country’s seat of power. The shaky videos on the Internet showed us otherwise. I would include the links for the videos but for some reason I can no longer access them. A service provider may be down, or maybe someone, somewhere has decided that access to what occurred in the Capital should be kept to a minimum. If so, this is what I saw…
    The Undead strolled in just before dawn, coming right up one of the boulevards as if they were part of some sort of elaborate homecoming celebration. They just shambled along the streets, almost unconcerned with what was going on around them. A few of the Undead could be seen attacking anyone that happened to be out in the street at that early hour but for the most part, they appeared as if they were moving with a purpose. The procession marched right up to the steps of the Capital in some perverse parody of pomp and circumstance and then scattered as if they were blown away like fallen leaves on a windy autumn day.
    One could almost believe that the Undead had a shared sense of consciousness but it seems too foreign to credit them with any intelligence.
    Albeit, there was a time when we trusted the dead to stay dead…
    The online news outlets were clogged with reports about that short space of time; the