Felicity: Run Out.

I ran....
Till breath turned to fire in my chest.
I ran....
Till muscles ached, and my body wouldn't carry me even one step further.
I ran....

Till a sign took me out of my mind, and landed me solidly back in unwelcome reality.

And while I ran, I kept Violet at my hip, or over my shoulder, but always within sight. Violet's tendency to wander in search of human prey became almost uncontrollable. And so, I kept control, by over stuffing her with whatever animal I was able to hunt down at a moments notice.

Now, Violet sat in the midst of an impromptu meal of stray dog, while I contemplated an odd sign, with a very straightforward message. 

"BOSTON HAS THE CURE"

Boston was more than eight hundreds miles away. It would take two weeks on foot to get there, assuming Violet's condition stays the same. Assuming that she can hover in this strange limbo between human, and the flesh eating dead for that long.

I watched her continue to eat the tangled mass of canine viscera, the look on her face a mix of feral hunger, and absolute contentment, and I weighed options. Option one involved a long and difficult trek north, and a possible cure for my sister's condition. Option two was simple, feed her till the last of Violets humanity gave way, and then end her. 

I had already run too far, and protected her for too long to even consider option two for more that a few fleeting moment. I pray Boston is the answer. But I have saved a few bullets in case it's not.

FELICITY: Born To Run

It's strange how quickly my senses betrayed me. My fingertips went numb, my vision blurred, and my breath seemed trapped in my chest. I fell to my knees as anxiety washed over me in burning waves. The situation was irreversible. However I tried to bury the trauma of it all, Violet had killed her first human. This was a point from which there wasn't even a hope of return in the eyes of HIM. He had told me of his intent, made it know that if Violet made a feast of any human, he would end her.

So now the question of my sisters protection becomes complicated. If I return to the camp, it will be more difficult than ever to hide this secret. Stray animals would no longer be enough. Hunger had consumed Violet,  forced her to hunt the appropriate meat down on her own. If we run we will be hunted.

I sat weighing our options, and watched Violet pick the remains of her kill from her teeth. I knew she wasn't one of the undead, but she was definitely showing signs of being more zombie than human. So even if it meant denying the protection that HIM provided us, I had to put Violet first. It was time to run.

Felicity: Finding Violet

It isn't natural to worry like this, toss and turn, and sleep this lightly. It isn't natural watch someone you love gnawing and biting at the live flesh of small woodland creatures, like it was perhaps the most delectable meal they had ever had. It isn't natural to watch that same loved one clean the blood from themselves in utter embarrassment. Things with Violet lately have been completely unnatural, and by morning things would be far worse than unnatural.

I woke to the sounds of birds, winds, and distant animals, but other than that just silence. That was the first sign of something wrong, and quick scan of our little camp brought a second issue to light, Violet was gone. I left HIM fast asleep, and followed Violet's obvious trail off into the woods. Several shredded rabbits later I found a clearing where a basically fortified trailer sat, door wide open. At first glance it looked as if it had been recently inhabited, and upon poking my head carefully just inside the front door, that unnatural fear sunk in.

I heard unmistakable and stomach wrenching sounds coming from the back of the trailer. Violet had found something to feed on. I held on to a  fleeting hope as I made my way through the mass of scavenged crap the trailers owner had amassed. The hope that there had been a pet, a small dog of cat maybe, that had caught Violet's eye, but when I made my way through the door at the end of the hallway, My hope was dashed to hell.

Violet sat crouched on the floor over the fresh corpse of the trailers former owner, dining on his entrails. She took a thoughtful but nauseating moment offer some of the spoils, and I proceeded to empty, what little there was of the previous nights dinner in my stomach, all over the wall in the far corner of the room. This was going to have to remain a secret.

Him: A Road Too Well Traveled

    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.

Felicity: Sister Pangs

     We have a long way to walk, and to make things worse Violet has me stopping every few miles to find something to chew on. She had a rabbit today. Still living and breathing, she bit a chunk clean out of it's throat and ended all that. It was gruesome to watch her go at the once living little creature like it was perhaps the last thing she would ever eat. I cleaned her off after the meal, and she continued to walk as if nothing even remotely out of the ordinary had happened. How can she do that? I pray that she doesn't start craving human, HIM already has his reservations about keeping her alive.

     We haven't quite made it out of Georgia yet, even after days of walking. We had gotten ourselves lost a few times, not sure if the back roads of main streets were easier to travel, but since finding Highway 106, the road signs were a lot clearer, easier to follow.

    The odd thing about this whole trip is that we have only really run across a handful of those walking corpses. I had always thought the undead were everywhere, that leaving home meant risking our lives in encounter after encounter, but outside of maybe two dozen of these zombies the roads were empty. No living, and barely any living dead. I am not sure if that is a good sign or not. I hope that there are a lot of smart people out there tucked away in their homes, and that we are not as alone as all this feels.

I am HIM

     I am Him. It's a name I had taken for myself in place of the one I had long since forgotten. Another name, another life I guess.

     I have been traveling for days now with two girls with whom I have been through a lot with, and things are tense. Violet was bitten a while back, her sister Felicity is insistent that we keep her alive....Alive, really? She was bitten, alive isn't even an issue any more.

     I have been keeping a really good eye on her. It's been a couple of days, and outside of the need to eat a live animal here and there, she doesn't seem any different. She's not stupid like the other dead that we've seen. No vacant stare either. I am still worried, but she hasn't given me a reason to shoot yet.

    We have spent days traveling north...following highway signs. They say there is large facility in Mass. that is taking in survivors. We found maps scattered in the belongings of a savage that we came across. They lead somewhere north of Boston. That is where we have been heading for the past few weeks. Hopefully this isn't just a giant waste of time.