Mort was glad to be on the move again. Truth was, he hadnever wanted to stop in the first place. It simply wasn't in his nature. He hadalways been a mover. Whenever he felt the urge to be gone, he had gone with it.But now, he couldn't survive on his own. He needed other people. So when Louhad brought up the idea of escaping from the movie theater, he had backed him.Maybe it was a selfish move, but Mort would rather die moving than rot away insome movie theater. Plus, with the death of that little girl and the big man,he was pretty sure the place was cursed. Mort wasn't the most educated person,and he knew that some of his thoughts and ideas bordered on the superstitious,but they had never led him wrong.
The amount of dead in the city was a bad thing, a sign ofsome sort of change. Something in the world had gone wrong. He didn't knowwhat, but he knew something was severely out of whack with the world. When hewas little, his father, during one the more lucid moments of drunkenness hadsat him down and told him about the dead, about how when people died, theydidn't just leave the earth. They ranted against it. They railed against it.When something bad happened to you, that was just the dead taking their revengeon you. Right now, the dead were ready to take their revenge on the entireworld. Even the ones that had been put down for a second time, like Zeke andthat little girl, they were still around. He didn't want to be near their presence.It was always better to move on.
For a while, as they walked, weaving through the dead, hewondered what had happened to his father. Had he died? Was he out there, makinglife miserable for someone. Or was he better now? Was he the person that healways should have been now that he could no longer drink? Then anuncomfortable thought skipped across Mort's mind. What if he had died long ago?What if Mort's constant need to move, and his uncanny knack for survival werehis father's way of helping him in death, in a way that he never could have inlife?
It was a ridiculous notion, but he wanted to believe it.His father had been a mean son of a bitch, but there had never been any doubtin his mind, that in his own twisted way, his father loved him more thananything else. Yeah, he probably would have killed Mort at some point, but thatdidn't mean he didn't love him. The world was messed up that way, which is whyhe had always preferred to be on his own.
The train tracks were silver and embedded in the blackasphalt so that the rails were even with the pavement. They took a sharp turnto the north after they had gone three or four blocks. They turned with it.They jumped at every sound and conversation was nonexistent. Mort looked overhis shoulder to find that the crowd of dead they had waded through wasfollowing behind them, their groans catching on the wind.
Shit, he thought. That's going to be one hellof a crowd to escape from in the morning. The plan was to move as far asthey could throughout the day, and then find someplace to hole up once the sunstarted going down, preferably a place with multiple exits. By the looks of thecrowd they had gathered, they were going to need as many options as they couldget.
Mort stopped looking behind him, and as he turned hisattention forward again, he caught Joan looking backwards as well. She waschewing her lip, obviously nervous, her eyes wide with fear. They shared aglance, and then Mort shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "What are yougonna do?" They kept walking.
Chapter 5: Into a Building
It was the ones trapped inside that bothered her themost. Being dead and still walking around seemed like a terrible fate. Beingdead and trapped inside a building with locked doors somehow seemed even worse.She could see their faces in the lobbies of the buildings they passed. Therewasn't a single building that didn't have one of them standing there, theirfaces pressed up against the glass, hands screeching down the smooth panes inan effort to escape and do what they needed to do... feed.
Joan hoped that, if she ever did get turned into one ofthose things, it would at least be outside somewhere. She would rather becompletely dead, but if she turned, then she would want to do so in the freshair. She doubted it mattered. From what they had seen and heard, the deadseemed to retain no memories of their former lives. Clara had been first handproof of that. When she had ushered Clara into the quarantine room with herboyfriend Courtney, there had been nothing, not the slightest glimmer ofrecognition. The only thing that Courtney had recognized was a meal. Her faceflushed red at what she had done to Clara, using her like a guinea pig.
The only good that had come out of the whole situationwas this: she was sure that the dead were truly that. Despite her surety aboutthe memories of the dead, on the off chance that some of them did retain theirmemories somewhere in the back of their heads, she decided that if she was everbitten, it would be outside. Watching the dead stand behind the glass, slowlyrotting away made for a pitiful sight.
