A wicked wind kicked up dust limiting vision to less than a mile and making the wide open prairie feel like a confining box. Despite the dust in the air the sun was still heating up the land on the warm August afternoon as the man and the dog marched along the gravel road. 'Not that the dog seems to care.' Red thought to himself. Since walking away from a fight with the powerful zombie that had killed Nita and taken Hugh, Red had done a lot of walking. Walking and thinking. 'It isn't like me to complain about how unfair everything seems to have gotten. But here I am.'

"Here, Reilly, c'mon girl. Leave that alone." Red called to the dog. His words pulled it away from the corpse at the side of the road, a human body with a sizable head wound. Someone knew how to kill zombies around here. The dog still growled in Red's direction, but she left off gnawing on the old woman where she lay. "That's a girl. Good dog." It just didn't seem right to Red to have the dog eating human flesh. 'That's reserved for me.' Not that this flesh appealed to Red; it had been dead a long while and all the swirling energy that was contained in the body had long since fled.

The day he left the fight he had taken a motorcycle and driven up Highway 80 to southeastern Wyoming. Red ran out of gas half an hour after crossing the border, Red didn't bother looking for any more, walking would suit him just as well. He did prop the bike up next to one of the many accidents along the road. It was a good machine and might come in handy for someone else if they wanted to find gas for it. Red had nowhere to go, yet he still went on. The road signs giving the distance to Cheyenne told him he was less than eight miles out. After thinking about it briefly he decided to cut across country instead of heading through another city. Cities were full of zombies or people trying to kill zombies and he didn't want the drama.