It took us several days of stop and go travel on interstate 85 to reach a sign welcoming us to South Carolina, and a bridge over looking A body of water called Tugaloo Bay. The closer we got to the bridge the more pungent the unmistakable odor of death was. Death was already in the air as we traveled through what seemed like a ten mile long bumper to bumper traffic pile up. There were bodies scattered along the highway, hanging out of cars, laying under cars, and in a couple of spots, corpses hanging lifeless from tree limbs, but the odor of death lingering now was that of freshly reanimated dead.
The bridge over looking the bay was the source of the pile up. A turned over big rig, and about fifty smashed to hell cars made the bridge impassable by any wheels means of transport. So me and the girls had to resort to climbing over the true dead, and their vehicles, to stand on top of the turned over rig. I made it first and my gut dropped at the sight that the lager truck had shielded us from. At least seven or eight dozen of the newly risen flesh eaters milled about on the far side of the truck. When Felicity finally heaved Violet up on the truck and joined me, she stopped and just stared wide mouthed for a long time.
Amazingly the sight of us fools standing there, jaws wide open and catching flies, didn't seem to stir even the slightest flesh crazed frenzy from the horde of dead in front of us. When we finally took notice of their disinterest, we backed down the side of the truck we had come up to collect ourselves. There wasn't much the three of us could do against nearly two hundred dead. So we took a less direct route, and jumped over the side of the bridge and headed out onto the banks of the water to follow it just out and around to the other side of the dead.
A brilliant idea I thought for all of a few moments till I realized what lay just down past the trees. A rest area also teaming with the dead. "They must still be lingering thinking that more of the living would be stupid enough to cross this way." I thought not entirely to myself.
As true as it might have been, I knew we were the stupid they usually prayed upon. Almost as soon as I had completed the thought, a shot rang out, and the dead found their focus. No longer wandering aimlessly they all lumbered at varying speeds towards the main building in the center of the rest stop, where the shot had echoed from.
We got just close enough to see two guys and a female child standing on top of the green slated roof, Taking pot shots at the horde below. If they had been safe at any point they no longer were. The dead from the highway joined the dead from the lots surrounding the rest stop. As they grouped around the building the corpses in back began to use the corpses in front as blood crusted stepping stones to reach the three kids on the roof.
Felicity looked at me as if to say we need to do something, but before we could even make a move to, several more shots rang out, and the children were dragged screaming over the side of the building to act as both lunch, and a morbid diversion. Felicity scooped up Violet and ran with her piggie back style, and we ran till we couldn't will ourselves to move another step, putting well over two miles between us and that morose scene, before finally setting up a make shift camp to rest. Felicity and Violet crashed from exhaustion, but there was no way I was going to sleep. I sat and kept watch all night and into the early hours of the morning before Felicity took over to allow me a short rest before we moved on.
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