Hong suspected the cars’ owners had fled their homes as the virus rapidly spread. He speculated that they were already infected. People contracted TSJ many ways, not just through a bite. Sex, the carrier’s mucus from a sneeze, or just a kiss could infect an entire family in a matter of hours. Most of the Undead were exposed in the early days of the pandemic. Every time Hong saw one of those wrecked cars, he pictured a guy speeding out of town with his family, his car loaded down, in a panic. As the hours went by, he felt worse and worse, until… Even the hard-hearted colonel found that image disturbing. The charred human remains with their grinning skulls lying by the side of the road proved his theory.
Hong and his men’s search for fuel had become a nightmare. To run on regular gasoline, the engines of their Soviet-era BTR-60 tanks needed filters, which eventually got clogged. Even filtered, the fuel took a toll on the engines. They’d had to abandon two tanks along the way. Their crew had to squeeze into the remaining tanks, which caused the army’s first casualties as they drove cross-country. Two soldiers had sat too close to the engine and died from breathing carbon monoxide.
Hong lit another cigarette and watched as the bulldozer rumbled over the bridge toward the wreckage. A soldier walked in front guiding it. They’d had to go through this maneuver at least twice a day.
How many cars were there in the US before the pandemic? Hong wondered. Judging by the number of cars on the roads, every American must’ve had at least three.
The colonel took a drag on his cigarette. One of the few good things about their mission was the American tobacco they’d found. It was so much better than the Chinese crap they were used to. Who knew what that stuff was cut with? Like most North Koreans, his men were heavy smokers. The smoke trail they left behind could have led a tracker right to them.
The bulldozer drove alongside the wrecked truck, raised its giant fork-like shovel, and started to push. At first there was just the roar of the dozer’s engine, but little by little, the truck slid along the bridge, amid a chorus of shrieks, scrapes, and the biting smell of burning plastic. The driver of the bulldozer lifted the cab of the first truck and pushed it over the edge of the bridge. The trailer dangled halfway over, swaying dangerously, but the cabin was caught on a steel pole connected to the railing and wouldn’t budge. The driver backed up and charged the twisted chassis, like a thirty-ton metal ram.
When the shovel struck the truck, it set off a chain reaction. The pole was torn loose, freeing the cab of the truck. As it started to fall into the void, its trailer spun around and hit the charred remains of the other eighteen-wheeler. That truck then shot forward and plowed into the bulldozer. Before the driver of the dozer could react, it skidded a foot and slowly tilted over the other side of the bridge.
“No!” Hong roared, flicking his cigarette on the ground and watching helplessly.
The bulldozer teetered on the edge, as if fate had reconsidered at the last moment. But the driver panicked, pushed open the heavy door, and climbed over the chassis, trying to escape what seemed like certain death. Had he stayed put, the bulldozer’s momentum would have righted it, but that sudden movement disrupted the fragile balance. With a screech of metal scraping on cement, the bulldozer dragged down its driver and the mangled wreckage of those two trucks, abandoned so long ago.
The tangled mass of bulldozer and truck crashed into the ravine with a roar that must have carried for miles. A huge plume of smoke rose from below. For a moment, all the soldiers froze and stared in disbelief.
“Sir.” Lieutenant Kim cautiously approached Colonel Hong. He knew that his superior was very dangerous when he was angry, and it didn’t take a genius to see that Hong was seething. “Although we lost a bulldozer, the road is clear.”
Hong took some deep breaths, his jaw tense. Losing a tank was bad, but losing one of their two bulldozers was a tragedy. They were specially designed to break through clogged roads. Their cabs sat up higher than normal and had reinforced glass to protect the driver from the Undead. They were invaluable to the operation.
Obsessing over it won’t do any good, thought Hong. Plus, we’ve got a deadline.
“We’re done here,” he said to Kim. “The person to blame is dead.” He waved his arm over his head, signaling to the drivers to start their engines. “Move out!”
The column thundered across the bridge single file, leaving behind a burning pyre in the ravine, consuming the bulldozer and its driver.
An hour later, Hong sighed and slumped in his seat. The trip was turning into a tactical nightmare. He’d decided to use secondary roads to bypass major population centers where he assumed there would be higher concentrations of Undead. Those alternative routes were also less likely to be blocked by wrecked cars. Satellite images had detected several spots where the main highways were completely impassable. In some places, the local authorities had blown up bridges and tunnels in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease, just as they did in the Middle Ages to stop the bubonic plague. In other places, massive traffic jams of abandoned cars stretched for several miles. Some major highways crossed areas so populous that Hong and his men would have faced a battle just to gain a couple of miles.
So they drove on state or local roads. They even drove across fields. South Texas was flat and open, so they traveled quickly. Once they crossed into Louisiana, the trip got a lot more complicated and their progress slowed.
The most chilling part was the towns. The back roads passed through dozens of small towns. There was no way to skirt them. When they came to one, Hong gave the order to seal up the tanks and drive through the streets at top speed. The scene was always the same: tanks speeding down the deserted main street in tight formation, dodging cars, fallen trees, and trash. When the Undead in those towns sensed the presence of humans, they awoke from their stupor and blocked the tanks’ path. But since the towns’ populations were usually under a thousand, they didn’t pose a big problem. The convoy drove through the streets so fast there wasn’t time for more than a couple hundred Undead to gather. Only once did they have serious trouble, in the remote town of Livingston, Texas, near the Louisiana border.
Livingston, population five thousand, had been the county seat and the largest town in Polk County. Hong knew that but decided to drive through it anyway. Detouring would’ve taken them seventy miles out of their way. That was his first mistake.
His second mistake was to divide the group into two to search for fuel. That doubled the risk, but it also doubled the chances of finding fuel. Since the side streets were narrower than the main street, Colonel decided to send the bulldozers with that group in case they got stuck. Hong knew he was taking a huge risk, but he had no choice. After speeding across Texas in just two weeks, their fuel tanks were very low, and they’d run out of diesel thirty miles back. Livingston was the only town for miles. If they were going to find fuel anywhere, it would be in Livingston.
The third mistake was not anticipating the large number of Undead they would find in the town. The colonel wasn’t to blame for that one. He couldn’t have known that most of the people in the area distrusted outsiders and the federal government, and had ignored the order to evacuate to the Safe Zones. Instead, they’d congregated where they felt safest: the county seat in Livingston.
When the North Korean convoy entered the town and separated into two groups, they had no idea they were driving straight into a hornets’ nest, where fifteen thousand Undead had been waiting for human victims for nearly two years.