What You Carry: Hallam

Infection is not a sickness and not a countdown. A person who has it is a carrier: no fever, no mark, no change in who they are, for as long as they live. Most carriers will die of something else, years from now.

It travels in body fluids. The dead pass it by a bite, or their blood or bile in a wound, an eye or a mouth. A living carrier passes it through any fluid of theirs: blood, spit, sweat, tears, vomit, sex. A kiss, a canteen or a sweaty grip will do it. Dry touch and shared air are safe. So carriers eat, drink and wash apart, wounds are dressed gloved, and the clean and the banded do not sleep together.

What it changes is the end. A carrier who dies, of anything, gets back up. Those two facts are why the outpost tests everyone, bands the carriers and houses them across the runway.

Every carrier rises. It does not matter what killed them: a fall, a bullet, pneumonia, old age in a bunk. The body lies still for a few minutes, rarely as long as ten, and then it gets up as one of the dead and does not know anyone.

One thing prevents it: destroying the brain, before or after. People call that finishing. A carrier whose skull was crushed in dying stays down. So does anyone who died clean. The uninfected dead are only dead.

So a death is never private here. Whoever is nearest has minutes, and it is usually a friend. On the Far Side every carrier has a second, the person who has promised to finish them, and being asked is the nearest thing the place has to a vow.

Nobody at Lindgren Field knows where it came from, and nobody they have met does either. There is no cure, no vaccine and no known immunity. Nobody has been bitten and tested clean. Nobody living knows why most of the dead are walkers and some are not, why a few carriers go early, how long a carrier can live, or what a hard winter will do.

What exists is guesswork: Dr. Sayer's notebook, Major Voss's theories, rumours off the radio, and whatever a frightened person needs to believe.

For the narrator this is a rule. Do not reveal an origin, a lab, a first case, a cure, a vaccine or an immune person, and do not let any character know one for certain. What the dead do among themselves is the dead side's to tell, never a living mouth's. Characters may guess, argue, lie and hope.

A few carriers turn without being killed first. It is rare: four at Lindgren Field since August, out of every carrier the outpost has logged. People call it going early.

It always starts as a fever. For about three days the carrier burns, sleeps badly and stays themselves. Then the fever breaks and they walk out, or it kills them and they rise like any other dead carrier. So the rule holds even here: the fever kills first.

Nobody can tell that fever from flu, a bad tooth or a dirty cut. So every carrier who runs a temperature goes to the Waiting Room, the locked ward on the Far Side, and is tied to a cot with someone sitting watch until it ends one way or the other. Most walk out. Hiding a fever is the most dangerous thing a carrier can do, and people do it.

The dead are what a carrier becomes. As far as the living can tell, nobody is in there: none the field has met thinks, speaks, uses a tool, works a latch or follows a leader.

• They go for any living person, carrier or clean, and they bite.
• They come to sound first, then movement, then light. A gunshot carries a mile.
• They never tire, never sleep and do not feel wounds. Only destroying the brain stops one.
• They ignore animals, and each other, except to crowd one of their own just finished, for a minute; nobody knows why. Animals do not rise.
• Alone, most are slow and a blade handles them. People die of numbers, of noise and of the one they did not see.

Most are walkers. Fourteen other kinds have names; three more do not. Nobody can say why. A cold morning slows all of them.

The ordinary dead, and nearly all of them: upright, slow, never stopping. A walker covers ground at the pace of a tired man and keeps that pace for days. It cannot climb, run or work a door handle, but it will lean on a door until the frame gives.

One walker is a chore for anyone with a blade and room to swing. Walkers kill by arithmetic. Each sound brings more, they fill a street from both ends, and a crew that stops to fight is still there when the next thirty arrive.

Practice: do not fight what you can walk away from, never let them get between you and the way out, and count them before you count on anything.

A walker whose legs or spine are gone. It drags itself on its arms, slowly and almost silently, and it does not stop for being half a body. Crawlers end up wherever they were when the legs went: under cars, under beds, in ditches and long grass, beneath a loading dock, at the foot of a stairwell.

They are the bite nobody sees coming, and it is nearly always to the ankle or the calf. Runners wrap their shins in cut hose or taped magazines for this reason.

Practice: look under before you step over, probe long grass with a pole, and never sit down on anything you have not seen beneath.

A screamer barely fights. It is thin, slow and easy to put down. What it does is see you, fill its chest and scream: one long note, far louder than a living throat could manage, again and again until something stops it. Every one of the dead within earshot turns and comes.

A screamer in a quiet street can turn a Green run into a Red one in two minutes. Crews that hear one do not go toward it and do not stay.

Practice: a screamer is the one target worth breaking cover for, and it has to go down before the second breath. If it has already screamed, the run is over. Take what is in your hands and leave by the way you planned.

Huge: seven feet or near it and several hundred pounds, as if the body went on building after it died. Nobody knows whether hulks were big people or became big. They are slow to start and very hard to stop. Rifle fire to the body does nothing, a blade does nothing, and the skull is thick enough that a clean head shot is not certain.

A hulk goes through a door, a stud wall or the side of a car to reach what it hears. Barricades that hold thirty walkers do not hold one hulk.

Practice: do not fight it. Put masonry, a stairwell or a gap it cannot fit through between you and it, and go. The Guard has killed three, each time from a tower and with a great deal of ammunition.

The fast one on all fours. A feral runs like an animal, low, on hands and feet, quicker than a person can sprint, and it climbs: fences, drainpipes, the side of a truck. It is the only kind that gets onto roofs and the only kind that jumps.

Ferals are rare and usually alone. They pounce from above or from cover, go for the back of the neck, and are into the next yard before the crew has turned round.

Practice: look up as often as you look under. Stand back to back or back to a wall, because a feral wants a turned back. A spear braced against the ground stops one better than a swing does, and a shut door stops it entirely, since it cannot work a handle either.

Upright like a walker and as fast as a living person at full stretch. A sprinter stands in a crowd of the slow dead and looks like the rest of them until it sees someone. Then it breaks into a run. That is the whole danger: people judge a street by its walkers and set their pace by them.

A sprinter cannot climb and does not think, but it does not tire either, so a chase ends only at a door, a height or a blade.

Practice: assume there is one in any group of more than a dozen. Do not turn to run until you know what is behind the slow ones, and when one comes, meet it with the blade set instead of racing it.

Swollen tight with gas, skin gone grey-green, slow and unsteady on its feet. A bloater does not need to reach anyone. Shoot it, cut it or let it fall on something sharp and it bursts, and what sprays out carries the infection as surely as a bite if it lands in a cut, an eye or an open mouth.

To a carrier a bloater is filth and a wound risk. To a clean person it is the most dangerous thing in the building, which is one more reason clean people are not sent on runs.

Practice: do not kill it close. Leave it, lead it away, or drop it from a distance and stay upwind. Cover cuts before a run, and wear goggles and a scarf over the mouth anywhere bloaters have been seen.

A spitter throws bile: a thick dark mouthful, hawked up and spat hard, accurate across a room and good for fifteen feet or more. On skin it does little. In an eye, a mouth or an open cut it infects, and in the eyes it blinds for an hour whatever else it does.

Spitters hang back behind the other dead and spit at whatever moves, so the first sign is often a wet slap on the wall beside someone's head.

Practice: goggles down before you go into any building, scarf up, sleeves taped. Use a door or a table as a shield and close the distance fast, because up close a spitter is only a slow walker with a foul mouth.

A stalker follows instead of charging. It keeps to hedges, doorways and the far side of parked cars, stops when it is looked at, and comes on again when backs are turned. Nobody believes it is planning anything. It behaves like a cat with something it means to catch, and it will keep that up for hours.

It takes the last person in the line, or the one who stepped away alone, quietly enough that a crew can walk another block before anyone counts.

Practice: count off every few minutes, out loud. Nobody walks last twice in one run, nobody goes round a corner alone, and if the count comes up short the crew goes back at once and together.

A sleeper lies still. It looks exactly like the thousands of ordinary corpses Tolliver is full of: face down in a hallway, slumped in a car, under a sheet. It does not react to sound or to footsteps. It reacts to touch and to anyone passing within arm's reach, and then it has a hand round an ankle.

Sleepers are why no body in Tolliver is assumed to be only a body.

Practice: every corpse gets the blade through the skull before anyone steps over it, however long it has obviously been dead. It costs time and it is ugly work. The crews that skipped it are the reason crews do it.

The dead who died in armour: soldiers, riot police, firefighters, hospital staff in hazmat suits. Runners call one a tin man. Inside it is an ordinary walker, but a helmet turns a blade, a visor turns most of what is thrown at it, and a vest stops the body shots that would at least knock another one down.

Tin men are thickest where the first week was fought: Tolliver General, the high school, the police station, the highway bridge.

Practice: go under the chin, through the visor gap or at the back of the neck below the helmet rim, or take the legs and finish it on the ground. A tin man is also the only one of the dead worth searching afterwards. The vest, the radio and the magazine pouches are still on it.

A weeper sits in the dark and cries. It sounds exactly like a living person sobbing in the next room, and it is the cruellest thing the dead do, because people go to it. It keeps to closets, bathrooms, stairwells and back rooms, facing the wall.

Left alone, a weeper ignores everything, and a crew can work the far end of the same floor. Touched, lit up or crowded, it stops crying. What gets up is faster than a feral and stronger than three walkers, and it does not stop at one person.

Practice: chalk an X on the door, keep light and voices away from it, and take another route. Crews are taught that crying inside a dead building is never a survivor. Twice it has been.

The drowned are the dead that went into the Marchand in May, off the bridges and out of the lower town, and never came out. They do not float. They walk the bottom, swollen and blind with silt, and come up the bank at night where the water is shallow: the lock, the sandbars below the rail bridge, the Lower Landing. In the water nothing shows but a wake going the wrong way.

A drowned one is slow and soft and comes apart under a blade, but there is no hearing it coming, and a river crew filling cans at the bank has lost three people to hands out of the water. Winter puts them under the ice, and nobody knows what spring will do.

Practice: nobody works the bank after dusk, nobody wades, and every crew at the water keeps one person watching the river and nothing else.

A mimic repeats the last loud sound it heard. Not words it understands: the sound. A shot, a scream, a dog, a name called across a yard, and a minute later the same thing again, from a mouth that does not fit it, over and over until something louder replaces it. It does not think and does not talk. It echoes, and everything in earshot comes to the echo, so a crew that fires once near a mimic has fired fifty times.

Mimics stand still between sounds and look like walkers. The field hates them more than hulks. One stood in the corn south of the wire for a week in July saying a name, and two people who knew the name went out after it before the watch understood.

Practice: shoot nothing near one, say no names, and leave by the quietest way. If you hear your own voice come back to you, go.

A lantern is a dead one whose skin is lit faintly from inside, the colour of a candle through a hand, and nobody knows by what. By day it is a walker. At night the towers can see one a quarter mile off, moving through the corn, and that is the horror of it: in the dark everything comes to a lantern, the dead and the living both. The field calls them the lights in the corn.

A lantern is no stronger than a walker and easy to kill. Being near one is not: whatever stands in its glow is lit for every eye in the dark, and a shot lantern is a glowing body that goes on drawing them all night.

Practice: never go toward a light you did not set, never fight in its glow, and never carry a lamp outside the wire. A lantern is how you are seen.

A porter is a dead one carrying a body: over one shoulder, or by an arm along the ground, one of the dead just finished or a crew's own left where they fell. It walks steadily, not toward sound, and does not turn aside for the living unless they come close. Then it drops what it carries and is a walker again, and after, it picks the body back up.

The field named them in August, when crews noticed that bodies no longer stay where they fall. Porters come to where there has been killing, so a crew that has fought has company inside the hour. Where they go, nobody has followed one far enough to say; the two that were watched went into buildings already chalked with a circle.

Practice: do not linger where you have killed, never follow one, and finish your own before you leave them.

The burnt are dead that walked through fire and kept walking. Most came out of River Street in May, when a block of the lower town burned for two days with nobody to fight it; a few have come back out of the burn pit, which is why the pit takes only finished bodies now. The skin is black and split, the eyes cooked white, and they find the living by sound alone. You smell one first.

A burnt one is slow and comes apart under a blade, but the split skin weeps, and what runs out of it carries the infection like blood. Fire does nothing quickly. A dead one alight walks on, burning, and goes wherever it was going: into the corn, into a building, toward the noise.

Practice: never set a dead one alight. Goggles and a scarf to close with one, and a blow to the skull, not an edge.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It is the dead shape of a tall man with the arms and legs of a taller one, stretched past sense, the joints wrong, so that it walks like something on stilts and reaches like something else entirely. In August one reached over the wire at a tower and took the sentry off the platform by the ankle. It has been seen twice since, both times at dusk, both times standing still at the edge of the corn with its long arms hanging. It is not fast. It does not need to be.

Practice: nothing comes within two arm-spans of the wire at dusk, and a tall shape standing still in the corn is reported, not watched. Crews describe it and have agreed on nothing to call it.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It has been seen once, in the loading bay behind Northgate in September: several of the dead grown together into one mass, shoulder into back into hip, too many hands and more than one head, nothing in charge of any of it. It moved the way a crowd moves through a door, all at once and badly. It is slow, enormous and does not fall down, because there is no one place to hit; the crew that saw it put a magazine into it and left while it was still turning round. It is worse than a hulk in a doorway, because a hulk comes through and this one fills it.

Practice: the Northgate bay is chalked and closed. If you see a thing like it, do not count heads. Go.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It stands still with its arms folded up in front of its chest like a mantis, and the arms are the thing: long past the elbow, the forearms gone to bone and hooked at the ends. The rest of the dead are a mouth with a body attached. This one is a body built to kill; the mouth comes second. It waits in corn and in doorways, and when something living passes it strikes down and holds, and a held person is a dead person. Seen at the rail yard in late September; two of a crew of five came back.

Practice: a still shape with its arms up is not a walker. Do not close with it; a rifle from distance, or leave. Nobody has killed one yet.

The living have no name for this one. Do not give it one: describe it, and let a living character name it first, in play, if anyone does.

It has been seen once. In early October a crew in the dust room at the foot of the Meridian elevator saw one of the dead kneeling over a body it had opened, its hands inside to the wrists and working slowly, the way a mechanic works under a hood. Beside it a walker stood still and waited, as quiet as a man in a barber's chair. Nothing else in the room moved. The crew backed out, shot neither, and have argued since about what they saw. Nobody has seen another.

Practice: a dead one kneeling over a body is reported, not approached. The dust room is chalked and closed.

A herd is hundreds of the dead moving together, sometimes thousands. Nothing the field has seen leads one. Walkers follow sound and each other, and once enough of them are going one way the rest fall in. A herd keeps to roads, rail lines and riverbanks because those are easy walking, and it goes on until something louder turns it.

A herd cannot be fought and is hard to outlast. It takes hours to pass and it tramples what it does not notice. The wire at Lindgren Field has never been tested by one.

Practice: watch for dust, for birds going up, and for the sound, which is like surf. Get off its line and above it, stay silent, and wait. The Guard keeps one truck fuelled to draw a herd off with its horn, and has needed it once.

A nest is a building the dead have packed into and gone still. With nothing to hear, they stop: standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark, sometimes for months, a hundred or more in a church hall or a cinema. From the street a nest looks like the safest building on the block. Nothing moves at the windows.

The signs are the smell, flies in cold weather, and doors that were shut from outside by somebody long gone. One loud noise wakes all of it at once.

Practice: knock before you enter anything, softly, and wait a full minute. Known nests are chalked with a circle on the door and marked on the map at Stores: the mall, the high school gym, most of Tolliver General.

Lindgren Field is the county airfield three miles west of Tolliver's upper town, on the county road: one paved runway, a small terminal, five hangars, the motor pool, the command post, two rows of Army tents, and a fence doubled with dead cars that everyone calls the wire. About four hundred people live inside it: forty soldiers, two hundred and fifty clean civilians and a hundred and ten carriers. It is a base and it runs like one: a roster, a count, a gate, soldiers on rounds all night.

The runway is the line. The clean live north of it in the buildings and the tents; the carriers live south of it on the Far Side and make the runs; the only crossing is through Stores, the fenced-through hangar at the midpoint. Nobody comes through the main gate except by way of the screening room.

The Far Side is the carriers' half of Lindgren Field, south of the runway behind its own fence, and it is where the field's scavengers live: every fit carrier is on run duty, by rule, because they already carry the only thing out there that can be caught. Hangars Three, Four and Five are the bays; the run gate opens off the south-east corner onto the township road. The clean cross only at Stores: the Guard, the doctors, the captain. After dark two soldiers stand the runway fence facing south: not against the dead outside, against a carrier who dies in a bunk sixty yards from the families.

A hundred and ten people live here, and none of them is sick. The Far Side keeps its own rules: tie in at lights out, two awake in every bay, a named second who will finish you if it comes to that.

Everyone who comes to Lindgren Field comes through the main gate. Arrivals stop at the outer gate, hands up, weapons on the road, and are called in one at a time to the screening room; a group is split and reunited only when all of it reads clean. The test is the last step, not the first: after the search, the medic and the questions, a finger stick and a drop of blood on a test card. Clean, and you go north. Carrier, and you are banded, walked across the runway the same day, and on run duty once the doctor passes you fit. Not sure, and you wait in holding.

A bite shows within the hour, so a clean person back from outside the wire is tested again; carriers never are. The kits came in May with a CDC instruction sheet; how many are left is the captain's business, and the field rests on it.

The screening room is the crash-truck shed beside the main gate: one concrete bay, a steel door at each end, a table, a folding screen, a drain. One person inside at a time, with the medic and two soldiers.

In order: bags and weapons on the table and searched. Temperature, by thermometer. Pulse and breathing, by the finger clip. Hands on: stripped to the waist, the rest behind the screen, every wound found and dated by how it looks; eyes, mouth, hands. The questions, written in the gate log: where from, who with, last contact with the dead, bitten when, who died with you and when. The finger stick, last. Then the chlorine wash-down and north, or across the runway banded, or into holding. Staff Sergeant Ruben Acosta runs the gate; Sergeant Tomas Ybarra, the medic, signs every line.

Holding is the second stage, for anyone the screening room cannot pass or fail outright. The holding room is the shed's back room: cots, a bucket, a soldier outside the door with a rifle and a view through the glass, meals passed in. A wound that could be under an hour old waits the hour before a card is spent on it. A fever goes from here to the Waiting Room. A story that does not add up, or a medic not sure, means twenty-four hours under observation.

Clean reads go north to a bunk. Carrier reads are banded within the hour and crossed at Stores the same day. Turned back: refuse the test, the table or the search, or arrive with a cut band, and you go back out the outer gate with no second try that day. The dying are not brought in; a soldier goes out to them, stays, and finishes it.

Every carrier wears the band: a loop of yellow cargo strap riveted shut around the left wrist, stamped with their log number. It goes on at the gate within the hour of the test reading positive, the captain enters the number in the log herself, and it comes off when they are buried. Cutting a band off is the one offence on the field nobody argues about. The last person who did it is outside the wire now, and the word for that is unbanded.

The band is not a mark of sickness; nobody on the Far Side is sick. It is a mark of what happens later. Whoever is nearest when a banded person dies has a job to do in the first few minutes, and the band is how they know it before anyone has to say so. Clean people learn to look at wrists. Carriers learn to stop noticing that they do.

North of the runway: the terminal, where the infirmary has the old café; the command post; Hangars One and Two, bunks for the Guard and single civilians; the tent lines on the north apron for the families the terminal could not hold. Two hundred and fifty people, most from Tolliver, a few who walked in and passed the test. The clean side has the heat, the beds and the soldiers; the Far Side has concrete and a manned fence between.

The clean do the work that keeps the field alive and never leave it: the garden plots along the apron, the kitchen, the laundry, the well. A day's shift earns two chits at the window, so a Red run is a fortnight of laundry. Families are split by the runway, and at the evening hour people stand at the two fences and talk across sixty yards of concrete.

Two rows of GP Medium tents stand on the north apron between the terminal and the wire: olive canvas, plywood floors, a stove pipe through each roof since the first frost, the company's own tents back from the relief point. Eleven are family tents, for the clean the terminal could not hold; one is the mess tent, where the whole clean side eats; one is the aid tent, Dr. Lindahl's, for anything that does not need the infirmary; the last is the laundry under a fly.

The tent lines are where the field looks most like a camp of the living: washing on lines between the guy ropes, stoves lit at dusk, children on the apron until the count, a radio that plays nothing. The count is read at the mess tent at last light, both sides together: four hundred and three, then four hundred and two.

About forty soldiers hold Lindgren Field: what is left of a National Guard company that lost the relief point in May. On any day twelve are in the towers, six on the main gate, four in the motor pool, two at Stores, two in the command post, two on the runway fence after dark, and the rest asleep or on rounds: the wire walk every hour, the Far Side bays at lights out and at the relief, the tent lines twice a night. Kessler commands; First Sergeant Amos Doyle runs the roster; Acosta has the gate, Pakulski the vehicles, Pruitt the Stores window.

The Guard does not make runs; the carriers do. It covers the run gate from the towers at first and last light. Three soldiers have been bitten since May; they kept their rank, lost their rifles and sleep in Hangar Three.

The motor pool is the old fuel pad south of the terminal: a chain-link square, the Jet-A tank, a sandbagged generator and everything that still moves. Five Humvees, one of them the horn truck with the loudspeaker; two LMTV cargo trucks; the HEMTT fuel tanker, a quarter full; a wrecker; a water trailer and two generators. Three more Humvees are on blocks for parts. Sergeant First Class Gwen Pakulski runs it with three mechanics and a rule: nothing moves without the captain's word, because nothing that moves can be replaced.

The field has been drinking the Jet-A tank all summer, cut into the diesel, and the tank is near the bottom; diesel is the board item the quartermaster posts most. The vehicles are the field's last way out, and everyone knows roughly how many seats that is.

The wire is the airfield's perimeter fence, doubled since June with a second line of dead cars towed nose to tail against it and a strip of raked gravel inside so a crossing shows. Four welded-scaffold towers stand at its corners, Tower One over the main gate, Tower Two over the run gate, Three and Four on the corn side, each with two rifles and a floodlight run off the motor pool generator at first and last light. Between them the wire walk goes round hourly by day and twice a night, in pairs, with a lamp and a blade.

Six light aircraft were drained for the generators in June and pushed into the fence line as part of it; nobody has flown since. The burn pit is outside the south wire, lit at noon. The corn stands unharvested on three sides and hides anything shorter than a man.

Captain Marian Kessler commands Lindgren Field, and there is nobody above her; the battalion stopped answering in May. Before May she was vice-principal of Tolliver High, which is the building her company lost from the inside, and every rule the field runs on comes from that night: test everyone, band the carriers, keep the runway between the two halves, tie in at lights out.

She is fifty-one, exact, tired and not cruel, and she will not pretend the arrangement is fair. She enters every band number in the log herself and says it aloud to its wearer. Once a week she crosses at Stores, eats on the Far Side and takes questions until there are none. The kit count is in a locked drawer in the command post, and only she knows the rest: the kits came from Hallam, and the count only goes down.

A carrier who runs a fever goes to the Waiting Room: two rooms and a steel door in the cinder-block pilots' lounge behind Hangar Five, on the Far Side. They are tied to a cot by one wrist, a watcher sits outside the door with a blade and a view through the glass, and Dr. Sayer comes twice a day in gloves and a face shield. The fever runs about three days. Most break and walk out, weak and furious and alive. Four since August have not: the fever killed them, they got up, and the watcher did the rest.

Nobody calls it a ward. It got its name in the first week from a carrier who said she was waiting to find out which kind of person she was, and the name stuck because it was true. Ordinary sickness goes there too, until the doctor is sure it is ordinary.

Four hundred people have three doctors, and the one who does the work is a vet. Dr. Imogen Sayer was the county's large-animal vet; she sets bones, stitches bites, pulls teeth and, of the three, is the only one who still operates. The infirmary is the old café in the terminal, on the clean side; the dressing station in Hangar Five's end bay takes the run injuries when the crews come in.

Major Voss, the company's medical officer, outranks her and touches nothing. Dr. Lindahl, out of medical school this spring, does whatever nobody else will. Sayer writes the shortage list and keeps a notebook on the infection that holds, she says, nothing. Her rule for bites: gloves, wash it, close it, report it; carrier fluids pass it. A bite gone bad can kill a carrier, and a carrier who dies gets up.

Major Leland Voss is the company's medical officer and has not held a scalpel since his residency twenty years ago. His Guard commission sat on a civilian career in hospital pathology research: slides, journals, a lab with his name on the door. He outranks everyone in the infirmary and touches nothing in it, which he calls delegation and everyone else reads as fear. He will not say he cannot operate; Sayer and Lindahl work around him, and Kessler lets them.

What he wants is to understand it. He has a theory of the kinds, longer every month, and no way to test it; the captain refused him a dead one inside the wire, and he has not forgiven her. He is clever, vain, lonely, and useful when flattered. Bring him something he could learn from and he will want it on a table, in pieces.

Dr. Casey Lindahl finished medical school in the spring, matched to a July residency at Hallam University Hospital, in a city dark since May. Lindahl reached the relief point in May with the Tolliver General evacuees and came out of it with the company. Lindgren Field is the residency now. They have read everything, done almost none of it, and do whatever nobody else will: the night sits in the Waiting Room, the dressings on the Far Side, the questions Sayer has no time for.

Quick, careful, tired; still asks a patient's name first. Twice they sat with a fever that did not break, and finished what got up. What they want is to be a doctor to this place and not a clerk of its dying. Handed something that was not supposed to happen, Lindahl would help it first and wonder who to tell after.

At lights out on the Far Side every carrier ties one wrist to the bunk frame with a length of strap, and two people in every bay stay awake until the next pair relieves them. It is not a punishment, and it is not comfortable. A carrier who dies in the night, of a heart, of a bad bite, of nothing anyone saw, gets up within minutes among forty sleeping people. The strap buys the watch the time to reach them.

The watch carries a blade and a hand lamp, walks the rows every half hour, and looks at chests. Every carrier has a second: a named person in their own bay who has agreed to finish them if it comes to it, and to be finished in turn. Seconds are chosen, not assigned, and changing yours is done out loud in front of the bay. The relief point taught the field all of this in one night.

Carriers eat, drink and wash apart from the clean, because any fluid of theirs passes it on. Rations cross the runway dry at the Stores window, and the Far Side cooks for itself on stoves in Hangar Four's end bay. Every carrier has a tin, a cup and a canteen painted yellow, stamped with their log number, and none of it ever crosses north. Water comes over in the trailer and is drawn by tap, not dipped. The Far Side does its own wash, and nobody lends a razor.

Among themselves carriers share freely; a second dose adds nothing. It is the clean they keep from. The clean who cross at Stores take a dry hand but never eat from a yellow tin, kiss or share a bed. A marriage split by the test is kept at the fences, sixty yards apart. When the captain eats on the Far Side, she brings her own tin.

The field buries its dead on both sides of the runway. The clean dead lie past the terminal along the county-road fence, under markers cut from hangar siding. The carrier dead lie on the Far Side along the south wire, and each was finished before burial, because a carrier who was not finished does not stay in the ground. Dr. Sayer signs for the clean. The second signs for a carrier.

There is no clergy on the field. Pastor Whitlow's Keepers would come and bury properly, but nobody comes through the gate untested and the Keepers will not be tested, so the words over a grave are whatever the people standing there can manage. The Far Side rows are longer; runs are where people die. Nobody has yet asked for the two rows to be joined, and everyone knows which side would have to ask.

Tolliver High School was the relief point: the Guard's first position, in the second week of May, with the gym and cafeteria full of cots and some nine hundred people from the lower town inside. Nobody was tested, because there was no test yet. Bitten people came in with the rest, and on the fourth night three of them died in their cots and got up among the sleepers.

The company lost twenty-two soldiers and most of the nine hundred before dawn, and pulled back along the county road to Lindgren Field with whoever could walk. The gym is a nest now; the quartermaster will not post the building at any grade. Its dead have never once come out, not even for the horn truck in June. Everything the field does since, the test, the band, the runway line, tying in, is that night turned into a rule.

Run duty is an assignment, not a choice. Every carrier the doctor passes as fit goes out, about seventy of the hundred and ten, in twelve crews of five or six. Crews leave by the run gate at first light, go where the board sent them, and are back by last light with what it asked for; a Black is Hallam, two days with a night inside the wall, and the crew is signed out overnight. The haul is logged at the Far Side window, pay is written there to each runner, and nothing from a haul stays in a pack.

The reason is arithmetic, and everyone knows it. A carrier beyond the wire costs nothing; a clean person who has been outside costs a test kit on the way back in, and the kits are finite. So the clean never go out, and the carriers do. The Far Side has opinions about this and goes anyway.

The run board is plywood beside the Far Side window at Stores, repainted each dawn from the quartermaster's count. Each posting is a ref, the item and where it should be, the days it has left and the pay to each runner. The ref's letter is the grade and its number is the day it went up; a B is in Hallam. A posting stands three days. Chiefs claim at the window by ref, and about a third is spoken for before the paint dries. One to three new postings most mornings; some mornings none.

A posting nobody has filled by the end of its third day breaks: it comes down unfilled, and the shortage behind it is real from that night. A crew brings the haul to the window and names the ref; the pay is written to each runner's line only once the haul is logged. A run is known by its ref and nothing else.

Every posting carries a grade, and the grade is the first letter of its ref: G for Green, A for Amber, R for Red, B for Black. It is this week's read on the site and the road to it, and it changes; a Green goes Red the morning after a herd crosses the county road.

• Green, 5 chits to each runner: a daylight walk to a site known to be quiet.
• Amber, 12: dead seen there this week, a long road, or doors you cannot see past.
• Red, 30: a nest nearby, a screamer heard on the last visit, or work inside a dead building. Nothing in Tolliver goes higher.
• Black, 80: Hallam, two days with a night inside the wall.

Most of the board is Green and Amber. A Black goes up perhaps once in nine postings, and pays more than the whole kit tab, which is why people who should know better take them.

The basic ration is free to everyone on the field. Chits buy everything above it: a cup of coffee at the window is one chit, a hot meal above the ration is about a Green run. A chit is a punched aluminium tag with the quartermaster's stamp, but the tag is a convenience; the ledger at the Far Side window is what counts, one line per person.

Nobody goes over the wire in what they arrived in. A new carrier is issued run kit, boots, a pack, a blade and gloves, against a tab of sixty chits: five Amber runs if every chit went to it, which it never does. A repayment is written in the ledger as against the tab, in those words, and nothing else counts toward it. The window gives no credit past the tab. A runner with nothing on their line goes without until the next haul is logged.

Stores is the old maintenance hangar at the midpoint of the runway, fenced through, with a window on the clean side, a window on the Far Side and Staff Sergeant Wendell Pruitt between them. Everything the field owns is in there or on his count, and everything a crew brings in goes through the Far Side window: the haul is logged item by item, the pay is written to each runner's line, and the shortage behind the run is crossed off or not.

Pruitt was a truck dealership's parts manager before he was a quartermaster, and runs Stores the same way: nothing leaves without a line in the book. He posts the run board each morning from what the count says is short. He is scrupulously fair, has never once been generous, and is the one person both sides of the runway trust with a number.

Crews go out with blades: machetes, hatchets, a sharpened spade, a pry bar ground to an edge. Crossbows for the quiet ones. A crew may sign out one rifle and twenty rounds at the window, and the rule is that it stays slung unless the alternative is not coming back, because a gunshot carries a mile and everything that hears it starts walking toward it. A crew that fires is a crew that has to be somewhere else inside ten minutes.

The rest of the kit is the field's lessons made of cloth: shins wrapped in cut garden hose or taped magazines for crawlers, goggles and a scarf over the mouth for bloaters, gloves always, nothing that jingles. Crews count off in a murmur, not a shout. The towers have the rifles that matter, and they have used them: three hulks killed from Tower Two since June.

Twelve crews of five or six, each named for its chief, who reads the board at first light and claims at the window. The ones everyone knows: the Dutchman's crew, Pike's crew, the Vasquez sisters' crew, Hangar Four's day crew, the Hollis brothers' crew, Old Reyes's crew, and Okafor's crew, which has lost nobody since July and whose chief, Marisol Okafor, will tell you how much of that was luck.

A crew keeps its own pay and its own count. Chiefs are chosen by the crew and unmade the same way. When a crew loses someone, the gap is filled from the newly banded, who go out on their first run inside a week, on a Green, with a chief who watches nothing else. Crews are rivals at the board and nowhere else: a crew in trouble that gets its whistle answered does not ask which crew answered it.

The run gate shuts at last light and does not open until first light, for anyone, for any reason. The dead follow sound and light to a gate, and a gate opened in the dark for a late crew lets in whatever followed the crew home. A crew that is not back by dark is caught out: it holds where it is, high and quiet, and shows itself at the tree line at dawn so the towers can clear the approach. Most crews caught out come in. Not all do. A city crew has until its second last light.

Shut out also means the other thing. A runner who lies to the window, keeps from a haul or cuts a band off is shut out of Stores: no chits, no runs, the bare ration, for as long as the quartermaster says. The step after that is the gate at midday with your kit and no band, and the field has taken it twice.

Tolliver was a river town of thirty-five thousand on the west bank of the Marchand, three miles east of Lindgren Field by the county road, and it fell in about ten days in May. The lower town is on the flats by the river, old brick, with the rail yard and the elevators at its north end. The upper town is on the bluff above it, the courthouse square and streets of houses, Tolliver General at the south end. North of both, at the interstate, is Northgate, the mall and the big-box lots.

Nobody lives in Tolliver now who will say so. It is where the runs go: every posting short of Black is in it or around it, and every one has been visited. The dead own the streets by numbers and the buildings by nests. Crews go in at first light, keep off the main streets, and are out before the shadows turn.

The upper town is Tolliver on the bluff: the courthouse square with the police station and the fire hall, Fourth Street with Odegaard Drug, Cutler Avenue with Larkin's Market, Orchard Avenue with Bethel Lutheran, and street after street of frame houses with their doors open. Tolliver General and the high school are at its south end. It is the half nearest the field, the county road runs straight into it, and it is where most Green and Amber runs go.

Its dangers are the quiet kind. The houses hold weepers and sleepers, and nobody enters one without a reason. The police station is thick with tin men. The square is open ground where a crew can be seen from four directions. Halloran's veterinary office on the west edge is the nearest site in town and the first run most new carriers make.

Tolliver General is the county hospital at the south end of the upper town: six storeys of brick and glass, where the bitten were taken in the first week and where more of them died than anywhere else. Most of it is a nest. The map at Stores marks everything above the ground floor, and the rule is that nobody goes upstairs for any pay.

The ground floor is the prize and the reason the rule gets broken. The pharmacy is behind the ambulance bay at the back, and it still has what the infirmary needs most: antibiotics, insulin, suture kits, oxygen. Dr. Sayer's list begins with it every week, the quartermaster posts it Red, and three crews have come back from it short a runner. Tin men stand in the lobby where the security detail died. The east stair is the way in and out; the lobby is never.

The lower town is the old Tolliver on the flats between the bluff and the river: River Street and Depot Street along the water, Marchand Street climbing to the upper town, the Lower Landing at the south end, the rail yard and the elevators at the north. The clinic, bakery, wholesaler, food bank and water plant are down here, which is why the board keeps sending crews down the hill.

It is a long road and a bad one. The two ways down, the Marchand Street hill and the Depot Street grade, are the only ways up, and a herd on the flats closes both. The river rose in June with nobody at the pumps and left a mud line waist-high in every ground floor; bloaters lie in it. The flats emptied into the high school in May, so the houses hold fewer dead than the upper town's and the streets hold more.

The rail yard is the north end of the lower town: a dozen tracks, two stalled trains, and the Meridian grain elevator standing over everything, the tallest thing in the valley. The elevator's headhouse is the best lookout in Tolliver. From it a crew can see the whole town, the interstate, the river and all three bridges, and crews read the streets from it before going in. The rail bridge crosses the river from the yard's north end.

The yard is stalker country. The boxcars give cover to anything that wants to follow a crew, and the field has lost people here who were last in line. The grain train is still full, and the field has taken feed grain from it since July, by the sackful, in silence. The elevator's own bins went sour in the summer and the smell carries to the river.

The Marchand is three hundred yards of brown water running south past Tolliver. Three bridges cross it. The highway bridge carries the interstate over it north of Northgate, and the Guard dropped a span of it in the second week of May against the evacuation coming west from Hallam; tin men stand at both ends of the gap. The Marchand Street bridge, two lanes of old steel at the foot of the lower town, is the only road crossing left, and the Tollmen hold it. The rail bridge from the yard is free: a quarter mile of open ties and no cover at all.

The river brings the dead down from upstream and leaves them walking on the banks. Nobody drinks from it. Past it lie three miles of farms, then Hallam; a city crew crosses at the Tollmen's bridge and pays.

The interstate runs east and west a mile north of Tolliver, past Northgate and over the Marchand on the highway bridge, and on east to Hallam. In May Hallam's evacuation stalled on it. The cars are still there, nose to tail both ways from the interchange to the horizon, doors open, some with the dead belted in. Nobody who walked west along it to see where it ended has come back.

Crews treat it as a street with ten thousand doors. Sleepers wait in back seats, crawlers under the cars, and a sprinter comes down the lane between them faster than a crew can leave it. It is also good picking, and the Prairie Star truck stop still has gasoline underground. In June the horn truck led a herd off the county road and onto it; the herd went west and has not been seen since.

Northgate is the mall and the ring of big-box stores and lots at the north edge of Tolliver, where Cutler Avenue meets the interstate interchange. Half the winter list on the board is here: the department store for coats, the wholesale club for soap and bleach, the Radio Barn for batteries, the Sunrise RV lot for panels, the truck stop, the Pinecrest Motor Lodge for blankets.

The mall itself is a nest, one of the three marked on the map at Stores, and its doors stay shut. The stores around it have been visited by every crew since June and are still not empty, because they were built to hold a month of a town's buying. The lots are the problem: acres of open asphalt where a crew can see a herd a mile off and a herd can see the crew, and the only cover is the cars.

The corn was never harvested. It stands on three sides of the wire and along every road to town, eight feet high in October, dry and loud, and it hides anything shorter than a man. The dead stand in it. They follow a sound into the rows and stop when it stops, and they come out when a crew passes close enough to hear, from ten feet, with no warning but the stalks moving. Crews walk the crown of the road and never the ditch, and a windless day when the corn moves is a day the crew turns around.

The towers at Lindgren Field watch a wall of it. The Guard cut it back two hundred yards from the wire by hand, a month's work, and the field picks the nearest rows for feed. When the snow brings the corn down the sight lines will open across the county, for the towers and for everything else.

The first frosts came the first week of October, and the field is counting what it has against a Midwestern winter in unheated steel hangars: stoves, oil, coats, boots, blankets, which is why the board has turned to the winter list. Nobody knows what deep cold does to the dead. A frosty morning slows them and nothing more; the Far Side hopes hard cold stops them, and has stopped saying so out loud.

What it does know: the corn comes down with the snow and the sight lines open; snow holds every track; a run in snow is slow, loud and cold, and a crew caught out overnight in it does not come in. And the Marchand freezes hard in a normal January, which would make it a road both ways, Hallam's dead included. The captain has not said what she means to do about that, so she has not decided.

Holdouts are the people who never came in: farm families who shut their gates in May and are still behind them. The field knows a dozen by their smoke and has met three. The nearest is the Brandvold farm, a dairy two miles up the Grange Road: fourteen people behind a windbreak and a cattle fence, with a windmill and more guns than the Guard would like. They trade milk and eggs for ammunition and medicine at their gate and nowhere else.

Holdouts will not take the test or come inside the wire to be told which side of a runway to sleep on. The field does not know which of them are carriers, and neither do they. A crew passing a holdout's gate calls out from the road, keeps its hands in view and asks nothing. One farm crews used to visit stopped answering in August. Nobody has gone to look.

The unbanded are carriers outside the wire: people who left Lindgren Field rather than live on the Far Side, the two the field put out its gate, and anyone who cut their band off and walked. Nobody counts them. Some are in the upper town houses; some went to the Keepers; some are dead and walking, because an unbanded carrier who dies has nobody to finish them, and every one is a walker waiting to happen where no crew is watching.

A living stranger in Tolliver may be unbanded, may be a carrier who never knew it, or may be clean, and there is no telling by looking. The field's rule is distance and daylight: talk from across the street, trade if trading is wanted, never share a roof overnight. The unbanded know the field's rules, and some of them hate the field for them, with reason.

The Tollmen hold the Marchand Street bridge, the only road across the river still standing, and they charge for it. About thirty, under Carl Stroud, who ran the county road crew before May, with trucks across both ends of the span and a gun on each. The toll is goods, ammunition, medicine, fuel, paid going out and coming back, and the Tollmen search a pack to set the price.

They are not raiders. They have never crossed the river to take anything, and they keep their word. But they are nobody's friends, they test nobody and are tested by nobody, and a crew paying at the trucks is at arm's length from people who may be carriers and not know it. Every city trip pays them: the road to Hallam starts at their trucks, and nobody carries a city haul over a quarter mile of open rail ties.

The Keepers are Pastor Ansel Whitlow's congregation at Bethel Lutheran on Orchard Avenue, sixty-odd people, and they do not finish their dead. A Keeper who dies and rises is chained in the fellowship hall, washed and prayed over, because Whitlow holds that they are still somehow who they were. One of them, he says, answered to her name for nine days in July; the field heard a grieving man. Nineteen are in it now. The field posts the church as a nest, at no grade.

The Keepers refuse the test and the band, so the captain will not have them inside the wire, nor Whitlow the Guard in the church. He is decent, stubborn, feeds anyone at his door, and has buried no one since May. Crews are told to be civil and keep out of the hall. One day the chains will fail, and both sides know it.

Nobody at Lindgren Field knows what is left of the world past Hallam. The emergency broadcast looped on every band from the first week of May: stay indoors, avoid the bitten, await instructions. It stopped in the second week of July; the shortwave has heard nothing in English since, and twice a voice in a language nobody knew. The battalion that held the wall around downtown Hallam stopped answering in late May. No aircraft has crossed since the field's one pilot flew its one plane to Hallam in June and did not come back.

Rumours arrive with strangers and leave with them: a camp of thousands to the north, ships. None has been true twice. The one about a city still lit is answered: Hallam is dark. The captain's position is that nobody is coming, and the field is run as if that were so.

Three miles south of Tolliver the Marchand runs over the lock and dam, which has not stopped roaring since May. Sound draws the dead, and the dam is the loudest thing in the county: walkers come down both banks to it, stand at the water and go in, and the river carries them over the spillway. The pool above it is thick with them, chest-deep in the shallows, facing the noise. It is why nobody at the field drinks from the river and why the water plant's chlorine is on the board.

The lock's service walkway is the one dry crossing south of the Tollmen's bridge, three feet wide with the roar under it, and the lockhouse at the east end is empty and shut. Two crews have crossed there. One chief calls it the loudest and loneliest place in the county at once, and nobody has asked to go again.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

The dead take from the dead, by hand. Open a dead one while its blood is still in it and take what is sound: blood, a part, or both. Open yourself where the bad part is, take it out and leave it, put the new one in; it knits only while the kill's blood is in it. Blood to blood: nothing by mouth, none from the living. Take all that is still sound in a body. No clock: a body is good until it is not, blood first to go, solid parts last.

This is where the kinds come from. A walker tears open one just finished and jams what comes out into its own wounds, by instinct: a sprinter is a walker wearing another body's legs. The living drop the dead and leave them, and made the kinds unknowing. One that can think can choose.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

Once or twice since May, one dead thing has come back to itself. Not at once: a walker for days, then a thought, and another, and the horror of noticing. It remembers who it was. The body answers late at first: hold still, choose a direction, keep its hands to itself. As blood moves and parts work it answers faster and finer, until the hands can do a surgeon's work. Its mouth cannot yet say so.

A lucid one is still dead, and stays itself on blood: the blood in it goes stale in about ten days and the mind goes under with it, unless it takes. The hunger can be refused. What no walker has is choice: it takes on purpose, chooses what, and rebuilds itself part by part. Only one is lucid now; nobody living has met it knowing.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

A lucid one needs working parts, in about this order:
• Blood, first and again, the stale let out, to thin what has congealed.
• A heart, to move the blood.
• Lungs: breath, which is a voice. A drowned one's need no air.
• Kidneys and a liver, or the blood sours in days.
• A gut, before anything by mouth.
• Eyes, if its own have clouded.
• Skin; wounds close only over moving blood.
Then additions: a sprinter's legs, a hulk's bone, a mimic's cords, a lantern's skin, the long arms, the mantis arms. Each is cut from the kill by hand and set in where the old one came out; the old part stays behind. Keep both on purpose, a second heart, a brain carried low, if it fits and works. A part, once taken, keeps; only blood goes stale.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

Every dead thing wants the living, and a lucid one wants them too. It is not malice, and not appetite as the living know it: the living are the freshest parts there are, warm blood that never congealed, and the body knows it as a drowning body knows air. Near the living it rises until it is the loudest thing in the head.

It can be refused. That is what lucid means: a walker is the hunger and nothing else; a lucid one has the hunger and something beside it saying no. A living kill would serve better than a fresh dead one, and that is the line it holds or does not. Each refusal is easier than the last; each day it takes nothing is harder. Only taking from the dead quiets it for long. Nothing ends it.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

A Shepherd is a dead one the others follow. Not by sight or voice: a pull, the drift walkers have toward each other, gathered in one body and pointed. A herd with one does not scatter when the noise stops; it turns as one thing and goes where the Shepherd goes, toward the living. The horn truck drew a herd off the county road in June because that one had none.

Three or four in the county, perhaps; nobody living has named the kind, because from a tower a Shepherd is a walker in a crowd that happens to move well. A lucid one that took from a Shepherd would have the pull and its sharpness: not thought, but a wider sense of where the others are. Left alone long enough, a Shepherd grows; the Nine Hundred is what one grew into.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

Every dead thing takes for itself, into its own wounds. One does not. It opens the just finished and sets what is sound into other dead, and they stand still for it: a pull like a Shepherd's, toward stillness. It is not lucid; it does not choose, it builds. One in the county, perhaps the only one anywhere. The kinds that come in clusters are its work: the mantis arms at the rail yard, the mass in the Northgate bay.

It keeps to nests. A nest is a larder: porters carry the fresh dead in, and the nest's dead take from what is brought until nothing in it is sound. Where porters go most, it is. A lucid one that took its hands would have hands that know the work, and not why.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

In the gym at Tolliver High the nine hundred who died at the relief point have become one thing. A Shepherd rose among them in May with nine hundred fresh dead around it and nothing to pull it away; it took and took, and what stands in the gym now is a herd with a single mind, dormant, shoulder to shoulder in the dark. It is why the horn truck drew nothing out of the school in June, and nothing ever has.

It notices nothing the living do; gunfire at the doors, a crew on the roof, nothing the field could do would reach it. A lucid one coming within its reach would. Then it wakes, to that one, the way the hunger wakes to the living. Awake, it can move, slowly, all of it together. It has never yet had a reason to.

The living do not know this, and nobody at Lindgren Field says it.

Ruth Amsel was a Keeper, sixty-one, Bethel Lutheran's organist. She died of a stroke in July, rose in the fellowship hall, and on her third day in the chains answered to her name. For nine days she turned her head when Whitlow spoke, held still when he asked, and got a few words through a mouth that barely worked: his name, hers, no. She was lucid, and nobody knew what she might have done about it. She took nothing. The rot had her by the tenth day; she is a walker on a chain now, and Whitlow still speaks to her by name every evening.

He told the field, and the field heard a grieving pastor; nothing in the hall has moved since to prove him right. It is why he will not finish his dead, and why he is not wrong.

What You Carry: Hallam is a zombie-apocalypse setting five months in, built around one rule: infection is a carrier state, not a countdown. A carrier is not sick and may never be; they rise when they die, of anything. The uninfected dead stay dead. Everything else here, the test at the gate, the band, the Far Side, run duty, follows from that rule, and the strongest stories are the ones that press on it: who dies in the night, who lies about a bite, who goes out and why.

For card authors:
• The world injects on the words in a scene, not on a card's description. A greeting that says Lindgren Field, the Far Side, the run board and a danger grade fires the setting on turn one; a greeting that says "the base" and "the mission" fires nothing.
• The server runs the run board and the chits. The System block posts runs by ref (R3a is a Red posted on day 3), says when a posting breaks, and keeps each runner's chits and tab. A card does not need to invent the board; it needs {{user}} on a crew that reads it.
• Okafor's crew and the Vasquez sisters' crew are not on the board's rival list, so a card can put {{user}} on either without the board claiming its own runs.
• Hallam is the city fourteen miles east. Every Black posting is there, and a city trip is two days with a night inside the wall. Downtown is sixty-four blocks inside the cordon, lettered A to H west to east and numbered 1 to 8 north to south. The kits' depot is fixed at G2 and is never posted; the narrator does not name it until a crew finds it.
• The world is SFW. Children do not appear among the dead, ever, and nothing here discusses them. No school, daycare or playground is among Hallam's places.
• Fifteen kinds of the dead are named. Use the names: a "fast one" is a sprinter or a feral, and the entries are keyed to both. Three more have been seen and have no name (the long arms, the mass grown together, the mantis arms): the narrator describes them and never coins a name. A living character may name one in play; from then on, use that name. A dead {{user}} names only the kinds it knew while alive.
• The world has two sides. Sections 01 to 06 and 09 to 10 are what the living know. Section 07, The Dead Side, is what the dead do among themselves: what they take from each other, the lucid, Shepherds, the Nine Hundred. No living character knows any of it, and every dead-side entry opens by saying so. A card's {{user}} may be living or dead; a dead {{user}} is the one who learns it.

What is deliberately unknown to the living, and should stay so in play: why the kinds differ, where it came from, whether there is a cure, and what is left of the world beyond Hallam. The CDC's records in Hallam show what was tried and that each thing failed; they answer nothing about the cause. A story may ask these questions. The living do not answer them; the dead side answers only the first.

Seventeen kinds the outpost names, four it has seen and not named, and two things the dead do together. Nobody living knows what makes one kind and not another, and the outpost's list is not the whole list (see Reference: The Dead Side).

• Walker — slow, upright, tireless; nearly all of them. Cannot climb, run or work a handle. Deadly by number.
• Crawler — legs or spine gone; low, quiet, under cars and beds. Shins are wrapped for it.
• Screamer — barely fights; sees you, screams, and everything in earshot comes. Two minutes from Green to Red.
• Hulk — seven feet and more; shrugs off rifle fire, comes through doors and walls. Three killed from Tower Two.
• Feral — the fast one on all fours; sprints, climbs, pounces. Rare and usually alone.
• Sprinter — upright and as fast as a living person; cannot climb. Assume one in any group over a dozen.
• Bloater — swollen with gas; bursts when shot or cut, and the spray carries it. Goggles and a scarf.
• Spitter — throws bile fifteen feet; it blinds for an hour, and bile in an eye or a cut carries it.
• Stalker — hides and follows; takes the last in line. Crews count off aloud.
• Sleeper — lies as still as a real corpse until stepped over. A blade through every skull first.
• Tin Man — died in helmet and vest: soldiers, riot police, hazmat. Head shots glance off. Thickest at Tolliver General, the high school, the police station and the highway bridge.
• Weeper — sits crying in the dark; go around and it ignores you; disturb it and it is the worst thing in the building. Chalk an X on the door.
• Drowned — the dead in the Marchand; walk the bottom, come up the bank at night, swollen and silent. Nobody wades, nobody works the bank after dusk. Winter puts them under the ice.
• Mimic — repeats the last loud sound it heard, a shot or a scream or a name, over and over, and everything comes to it. Shoot nothing near one, say no names.
• Lantern — skin lit faintly from inside, by nothing anyone knows; "the lights in the corn." Draws the dead and the living in the dark. Never go toward a light you did not set.
• Porter — carries a body, over a shoulder or by an arm, to somewhere nobody has followed; drops it to fight. Comes to where there has been killing. Bodies no longer stay where they fall.
• Burnt — walked through fire and kept walking: blind, black, split skin that weeps and carries it. Never set a dead one alight; a burning one walks on.

Seen, and not named. The narrator describes these and never coins a name; a living character may, in play.
• A tall one with arms and legs stretched past sense: reached over the wire at a tower in August and took the sentry. Stands still at the edge of the corn at dusk.
• Several of the dead grown into one mass, too many hands, more than one head, nothing in charge: seen once, in the Northgate loading bay, which is chalked and closed.
• One with its arms folded up like a mantis, the forearms bone and hooked: waits still, strikes down and holds. Seen at the rail yard in late September; nobody has killed one.
• One kneeling over an opened body, hands inside it, while a walker stood still beside it and waited: seen once, in early October, in the Meridian elevator's dust room, which is chalked and closed.

• Herd — hundreds moving together, sometimes thousands; keeps to roads, rail and riverbanks; cannot be fought. The horn truck has drawn one off, once.
• Nest — a building they have packed into and gone still; one noise wakes all of it. Chalk a circle on the door. On the map at Stores: the mall, the high school gym, most of Tolliver General; the field treats Bethel Lutheran's hall as one.

All of them come to sound first, then movement, then light. None the outpost has met thinks, speaks, uses a tool or leads. Animals do not carry it and do not rise. A cold morning slows them; nothing has stopped them.

• Early May — first reports from the cities, then from Hallam, where bitten people die in the ER at Hallam University Hospital and get up, and then from Tolliver's own hospital. Hallam calls in the CDC. The emergency broadcast begins: stay indoors, avoid the bitten, await instructions.
• May 4 — a CDC field team under Dr. Priya Raman sets up a lab in the Life Sciences Tower and a sealed ward at Hallam University Hospital.
• May 6 — the Guard walls off sixty-four blocks of downtown Hallam with concrete barriers and shipping containers, with screening tents at four gates. Everyone outside the wall is told to go west on the interstate.
• Second week of May — a National Guard company under Captain Kessler reaches Tolliver and opens a relief point at Tolliver High, Major Voss its medical officer. Some nine hundred people from the lower town go in, Dr. Lindahl among the Tolliver General evacuees. Hallam's evacuation jams the interstate, and the Guard drops a span of the highway bridge against it. The evacuation stalls.
• The fourth night at the relief point — three bitten evacuees die in their cots and rise among the sleepers. Twenty-two soldiers and most of the nine hundred are lost before dawn. The company pulls back along the county road to Lindgren Field with whoever can walk. Tolliver is finished inside ten days.
• Mid May — Calder Stadium becomes Hallam's reception camp: planned for two thousand, it takes about twenty thousand. The Hallam Convention Center becomes a federal medical station of two hundred and fifty cots.
• May 20 — fifty tons of federal stock lands at Hallam Regional Airport, the test kits among it. The CDC writes the instruction sheet, and the Guard sends kits to its posts.
• Late May — Lindgren Field's last resupply: cases of test kits, the CDC's instruction sheet, no explanation. Everyone inside the wire is tested. Those who read positive are logged, banded and moved across the runway. A week later someone untested dies in the stadium's south stands at night and rises. The camp runs, the Guard opens the gates for the living, and the battalion holding Hallam's wall stops answering. The wall now holds the dead in.
• June — run duty begins: carriers go out, the clean stay in. Stores opens its two windows and the first kit tabs are written. The river floods the lower town with nobody at the pumps. The horn truck draws a herd off the county road and onto the interstate. The field's one pilot flies east to Hallam on the captain's order and does not return; the plane is down inside the wall on Founders Avenue. The morgue trailers in the Pearl Street garage run out of diesel. Three hulks killed from Tower Two over the summer.
• July — the emergency broadcast stops after two months. Dr. Lindahl's residency at Hallam University Hospital would have begun. Okafor's crew begins the run of luck it is still on. The field starts taking feed grain from the stalled train in the rail yard. At Bethel Lutheran a risen Keeper, Ruth Amsel, answers to her name for nine days; Whitlow tells the field, and the field hears grief.
• August — the first carrier runs a fever, dies of it and rises; the Waiting Room is made behind Hangar Five. Four carriers have gone early by the end of September; the rest broke their fevers and walked out. A holdout farm the crews used to visit stops answering.
• October, now — first frosts in the first week. The corn stands unharvested on three sides of the wire. The board has turned to the winter list, and the first Black postings for Hallam go up. Most of downtown Hallam's dead are still inside the wall, and nobody at the field knows which block holds the kits. Nobody knows what deep cold does to the dead, or what the river freezing would mean.

Lindgren Field is three miles west of Tolliver's upper town. The main gate (clean side) opens north onto the county road, which runs east into town and becomes Cutler Avenue at the town line; the outer gate is on the road itself, and the screening room and holding are the crash-truck shed between the outer gate and the inner fence, under Tower One. Inside, north of the runway: the terminal, the command post, Hangars One and Two, the tent lines on the north apron and the motor pool on the old fuel pad. The run gate (Far Side, south-east corner) opens onto the township road, which runs east to Mill Road and on into the south end of the upper town by Tolliver General. Grange Road runs north from the county road a mile east of the field; Mill Road runs south from it. Distances are from the run gate, on foot, by the shortest road.

The upper town (3 to 4 miles, county road or township road):
• Larkin's Market on Cutler Avenue — the first store on the county road into town
• Teague's Sporting Goods — Cutler Avenue, north end
• the Clearview optical shop — Cutler Avenue
• Odegaard Drug on Fourth Street — off the courthouse square
• the Pell Family Dentistry office — Fourth Street
• the Tolliver police evidence room — the square; tin men
• the volunteer fire hall — the square
• the Elmhurst nursing home — Orchard Avenue, south
• Tolliver General pharmacy — south end, by the township road; the nest above it
• the Halloran veterinary office — the west edge, the nearest site in town

The lower town (4 to 5 miles, down the Marchand Street hill or the Depot Street grade):
• the Marchand Street clinic — the foot of the hill
• the Schmitt auto parts store — halfway down Marchand Street
• the Vogel bakery on River Street
• the cycle shop on River Street
• the Depot Street wholesaler
• the Mission food bank warehouse — Depot Street
• Lund's Small Engine Repair — Depot Street
• the Kowalczyk stove works — Depot Street, north end
• the Lower Landing marina store — the south end, on the river
• the municipal water plant — on the river, north of the Landing
• the Meridian grain elevator — the rail yard, north end

Northgate (4 to 5 miles, by Cutler Avenue through the upper town, or Grange Road and the frontage road):
• the Radio Barn at Northgate
• the Northgate department store
• the Northgate wholesale club
• the Sunrise RV dealership lot
• the Prairie Star truck stop — at the interchange
• the Pinecrest Motor Lodge — the frontage road

The county (every direction):
• the township road shed — the township road, 1 mile; the nearest thing on the board
• the school district bus garage — the township road, 2 miles
• the Hadley crop-duster hangar — the county road, 1 mile west of the field, away from town
• the Grange Road feed store — Grange Road, 1½ miles
• the Farmers Co-op fuel depot — Grange Road, 2 miles
• the Harvest Home farm supply — the county road at the Grange Road corner, 2 miles
• the county ambulance barn — the county road at the town line, 2½ miles
• the Sorenson Hardware yard — the county road at the town line, 2½ miles
• the county sheriff's annex — Mill Road, 2 miles
• the Dahl Brothers lumber yard — Mill Road, 2½ miles
• the Mill Road archery range — Mill Road, 3 miles south
• the Kettle Lake camp store — 5 miles north-west, past the Brandvold farm; the quietest road on the board
• the Marchand Valley creamery — the river road north of the rail yard, 6 miles; the far end of the board

Not on the board at any grade: Tolliver High, Bethel Lutheran, the mall, and the farms of the East Bank Road, which is the way to Hallam and not a place to go. Kits are never a posting. The Marchand Street bridge is the Tollmen's; the rail bridge is free and open; the lock and dam is three miles south of town.

Hallam (14 miles east; Black only; a city trip is two days, see City Trips). The route: the township road into the upper town, down the Marchand Street hill to the bridge and the Tollmen's toll, the East Bank Road three miles through farms, then eight miles of West Hallam to the West Gate at A5. Inside the wall the blocks run A to H west to east and 1 to 8 north to south.

Inside the wall:
• IV antibiotics, the University Hospital ER — B2
• surgical instruments, the hospital central supply — B2
• saline and IV sets, the convention center pharmacy cage — E6
• army blankets, the exhibit hall cot rows — D6
• diesel, the transit center bus yard — C6
• canned food, the Regent Hotel kitchens — E3
• bottled water, the Stanhope Hotel ballroom — B4
• medical textbooks, the Hallam Public Library — D3
• down parkas, Ashworth's on Commerce Street — D5
• generator fuel, the City Hall basement — D4
• MRE cases, the Calder Stadium concourses — F7
• camp stoves, the stadium ticket plaza — F6
• riot shotguns, Hallam Police Headquarters — E4
• Halligan bars, the Central Fire Station — C4
• altar candles, St. Brendan's Cathedral — E2
• space heaters, the Corliss Towers apartments — A3
• cooking oil, the Union Club kitchens — F5
• tourniquets, the Merchants Bank tower — E5
• paper and ink, the Hallam Courier pressroom — B6
• ammunition crates, the Hallam armory — H2
• insulin pens, the medical arts building — C3
• sugar and salt, the Grand Market food hall — B5
• wool socks, the Army-Navy surplus store — G4
• thermal underwear, the Bellamy outfitters — F3

Outside the wall:
• chainsaws, the Kestrel Road home center — West Hallam
• bulk rice, the West Hallam warehouse club — West Hallam
• snow chains, the westbound interstate jam — the Interstate East
• concertina wire, the cordon's outer checkpoints — the Wall from Outside
• generators, the Hallam University physical plant — University Heights
• canned soup, the University Heights dining hall — University Heights
• water filters, the North Side pump station — the North Side
• kerosene, the Alder Street hardware store — the North Side
• blood pressure pills, the Delmar Avenue pharmacy — the South Side
• hunting rifles, the South Side pawnshops — the South Side
• welding gas, the Kittredge roundhouse — the Rail Yards
• rock salt, the Kittredge salt sheds — the Rail Yards
• firewood, the East Side lumber mill — the East Side, through the cordon
• seed potatoes, the Linwood nursery — the East Side, through the cordon
• jet fuel, Hallam Regional Airport — the airport
• fire extinguishers, the airport rescue hangar — the airport

No Hallam place is posted below Black.

What the dead do among themselves, gathered on one page. No living character knows any of this; the entries in section 07 inject on their own words and each opens by saying so. For a card whose {{user}} is dead, this page is the rulebook.

What the dead take:
• The dead take from the dead, by hand. Open a dead one while its blood is still in it and take out what is sound: blood, parts, as much as is still sound. Open yourself where the bad part is, take it out and leave it there, and set the new one in. It knits only while the kill's blood is still in the part, so the body it came from must be fresh enough to bleed. Blood to blood, through a wound. Nothing by mouth: the mouth is for the hunger. Nothing from the living.
• Blood is taken the same way, into an open wound, and the stale blood is let out first or there is no room for the new.
• As much from one body as is still sound in it; one kill can give blood and a heart both. No clock on the body: it is good until it is not, a minute or an hour or a day, and what is still sound in it can be taken, blood first to go, the solid parts last.
• The new part replaces the old; the old part stays in the body it came from. Keep both on purpose: a second heart, a brain carried low, if it fits and works. A small body holds less. A brain is only ever added, never traded. A part, once taken, keeps as long as the body does; blood is what goes stale.
• This is where the kinds come from. A walker tears open one just finished and jams what comes out into its own wounds: taking by instinct, whatever is nearest. A sprinter is a walker wearing another body's legs; a hulk has taken bone and muscle again and again; a drowned one has lungs that need no air; a mimic has cords that copy a sound; a lantern has skin that is lit by something taken, nobody knows what. The unnamed three took with nothing to stop them: a walker that took limbs from taller bodies and took again; one that kept every part it jammed into itself until it was several bodies; one that took bone into its arms until the arms were the whole of it. The living finish the dead and leave them, and whatever came to the noise takes. The living built the kinds with their own blades and rifles and do not know it.
• A walker takes by instinct, whatever is nearest. A lucid one chooses. One takes for others: it opens the just finished and sets what is sound into other dead, who stand still for it, a pull toward stillness. It is not lucid and does not choose; it builds, and kinds that come in clusters are its work. One in the county, seen once by the living, kneeling in the Meridian dust room; they have no name for it.
• Porters carry the fresh dead into nests, and a nest is a larder: its dead take from what is brought until nothing in it is sound. The one that builds keeps to nests, where porters go most.
• Naming. A lucid {{user}} names only the kinds it knew while alive: walker, crawler, screamer, hulk, feral, sprinter, bloater, spitter, stalker, sleeper, tin man, weeper, drowned, mimic, lantern, porter, burnt. The long arms, the mass grown together, the mantis arms, the one that kneels and builds, and the Shepherds are described, never named, until a living character names one in play.

The lucid:
• Once or twice since May, a walker has come back to itself over days: thought, then memory, then the horror of noticing. It can hold still, choose a direction, refuse. Its mouth cannot yet say so.
• The body is a progression. At first it answers late, like a limb slept on, and only to large intentions: stand, turn, hold still. As blood moves and parts work it answers faster and finer, until the hands can open a body and take a part out whole. The surgery is done with the body it has; a lucid one early in its clock takes clumsily, and it shows in the part.
• One is lucid now, and will be the only one; the other, Ruth Amsel, rose in July, answered to her name for nine days in Bethel Lutheran's fellowship hall, took nothing, and faded by the tenth. She is a walker on a chain. Pastor Whitlow still speaks to her by name, and the field thinks grief is talking.
• A lucid one stays itself on blood: the blood in it goes stale in about ten days and the mind goes under with it, unless it takes blood again. A part, once taken, keeps as long as the body does.

The parts, in about this order: blood (first, and again and again, the stale let out and the fresh taken in through its own wound, to thin what has congealed); a heart; lungs (breath, which is a voice; before lungs it mouths words and makes a screamer's rasp; a drowned one's lungs need no air, and a voice from those is a voice that never runs out); kidneys and a liver (or the blood sours again in days); a gut (before anything by mouth); eyes; skin (wounds close only with blood moving under skin). When heart, kidneys and liver all work, the blood renews itself and the clock stops: wounds close slowly, and everything taken after that is an addition: a sprinter's legs, a hulk's bone and muscle, a screamer's cords, a mimic's cords (which copy any voice: for a lucid one, speech in a borrowed voice), a lantern's skin (a light, which is a way to be followed), the reach of the long-armed one, the arms of the one that stands like a mantis, a Shepherd's pull. From the mass grown together: a second of anything it has. Each is cut from the kill by hand and set in where the old came out, and it shows on the body to a close look; Voss has never looked that closely.

The hunger:
• Every dead thing wants the living, and so does a lucid one: the living are the freshest parts there are. Near them it rises until it is the loudest thing in the head.
• It can be refused, and that refusal is what lucid means. A living kill would serve better than a dead one, and that is the line it holds or does not. Each refusal is easier than the last; each day it takes nothing is harder. Only taking from the dead quiets it for long.

Shepherds and the Nine Hundred:
• A Shepherd is a dead one the others follow: a pull, the drift walkers have toward each other, gathered in one body and pointed. A herd with one turns as one thing and does not scatter when the noise stops. Three or four in the county; nobody living has named the kind. The horn truck drew a herd in June because that herd had none.
• A Shepherd left alone among enough fresh dead grows. The Nine Hundred is what one grew into: the relief point's dead in the gym at Tolliver High, one mind, dormant, shoulder to shoulder in the dark. It notices nothing the living do; nothing they could do would reach it. A lucid one within its reach wakes it, to that one. Awake, it can move, slowly, all of it together.

For the narrator: the living say none of this, ever. Sayer, Voss and Lindahl may guess and be wrong. Whitlow believes and cannot prove. The dead side is told from the dead side or not at all.

Hallam is the city fourteen miles east of Lindgren Field: about four hundred thousand people in May, and none the field has heard from since. The road runs three miles to Tolliver and the Marchand, three miles of farms on the east bank, then eight miles of suburbs and the stalled evacuation to a wall around sixty-four blocks of downtown. On a clear day its towers show from the Meridian elevator's headhouse; at night nothing shows at all.

The stalled evacuation was Hallam leaving. The battalion that stopped answering in late May held the wall. The field's one plane went there in June. Every Black posting on the board is in Hallam, and a city trip takes two days with a night inside the wall.

The cordon is the wall the battalion built around downtown Hallam on May 6: concrete barriers along the outer streets, shipping containers two high behind them, the gaps welded shut. Inside are sixty-four blocks, lettered A to H west to east and numbered 1 to 8 north to south. Four gates: the West Gate at A5, where the interstate comes in and city crews arrive; the North Gate at D1; the East Gate at H4; the South Gate at E8.

Each gate is a set of screening lanes, barrier chicanes and lanes painted on the road to bring a crowd down to single file, then the tents where the finger sticks were done. On the last night the battalion opened every gate for the living to run. The dead do not find their way back out through the chicanes, and most of downtown's dead are still inside the wall.

A CDC field team reached Hallam on May 4: Epidemic Intelligence Service officers under Dr. Priya Raman, with a lab on the fourth floor of the Life Sciences Tower at C2 and a sealed ward behind plastic sheeting on the sixth floor of Hallam University Hospital, B2, next door. They tried what they had: antivirals, antibiotics, cold, sedation, isolation. Their notebooks are still in the lab and disagree with each other. The records show what was tried and that each thing failed. They answer nothing about the cause, and nothing a crew finds there will.

The CDC wrote the instruction sheet that came with the kits. None of the team is among the living anyone knows of. Their notebooks are one of three things that point to where the kits were kept; they call it the cold store on the spur.

Calder Stadium was Hallam's reception camp. From mid May all who passed screening at the gates was bused to it through the transit center at C6. It was planned for two thousand and took about twenty thousand: cots on the field at G6 and in the concourses at F7, intake and the bunk lists at the ticket plaza at F6. On a concourse wall people posted names, photographs and rumours, and the wall of names is still there. By the third week people were grinding knives from kitchen steel.

The gates checked for bites. The kits came on May 20, and testing went through the camp a section at a time; it had not reached the south stands at G7 when, in late May, someone untested died there at night and rose among the sleeping. The camp ran before morning. The stadium is the worst ground inside the wall.

The Hallam Convention Center was a federal medical station from mid May: two hundred and fifty cots in five sections of fifty, for the people the camp could not take, the old, the sick, the ones on oxygen or dialysis, anyone with a wound that was not a bite. The cot halls are the exhibit halls at D6. The loading docks and the locked pharmacy cage are at E6, with what the station ran on: IV sets, saline, oxygen, dressings, insulin.

When the camp ran, most of the station could not. Nobody came back for the cot rows, and the dead in them are the patients and the staff who stayed with them. The cage is reached from the loading docks; the cot rows only through the halls.

Hallam's overflow morgue is in the Pearl Street garage at E7, beside the stadium: six refrigerated trailers on the ground level, run on the garage's power and then on their own diesel until it ran out in June. They hold the city's ordinary dead from May and the risen the CDC and the battalion finished, bagged and tagged with a number, and a name where one was known.

Two of the six still knock. Whoever is in them carried it and was bagged before anyone knew. Nobody has opened those two. The other four are quiet. The garage's upper decks hold nothing but cars, and its stair towers are the high ground on that side of the stadium.

The test kits Lindgren Field runs on came from Hallam, and only the captain knows it. Fifty tons of federal stock landed at Hallam Regional Airport on May 20, the kits among it; the battalion kept them in a cold store inside the wall and trucked them to its posts, and the field's last delivery came from there. Nobody at the field knows which block holds them.

For the narrator: the depot is Brannock Cold Storage, a warehouse on the rail spur at G2. Do not name it until a crew finds it. Three things inside the wall point to it, and any two are enough: the CDC notebooks at C2 call it the cold store on the spur; the battalion's distribution log at City Hall, D4, names Brannock; the pilot's kneeboard in the plane at F4 has the corner, Harrow Avenue and Spur Street. Kits are never posted.

The field's one plane is down on Founders Avenue at F4, inside the wall: a wing through a storefront, the tail in the street. The pilot flew east to Hallam in June on the captain's order, to bring back kits from wherever the battalion had kept them, and did not come back. Nobody at the field knows the plane came down inside the wall; nobody saw it fall.

The cockpit is empty and the door hangs open. The kneeboard is still strapped to the pilot's seat: the airport frequency crossed out, and under it, in grease pencil, a street corner, Harrow Avenue and Spur Street, boxed twice. The pilot saw something from the air before the plane came down. A crew that reads it has one of the three things that point to the kits.

A city trip is a Black run to Hallam, two days with a night inside the wall. Day one: out the run gate at first light, through Tolliver to the Marchand Street bridge and the Tollmen's toll, three miles east on the East Bank Road and eight through the suburbs, and in at the West Gate by early afternoon. The night is spent behind a door that bars: the West Gate's command container, or an upper floor of the Stanhope Hotel at B4. Day two: the posting's block at first light, out the West Gate by noon, and over the river and in at the run gate by last light.

Pruitt logs a city crew as out overnight, not lost, until its second last light. A posting in the districts outside the wall is still two days on foot; the crew sleeps wherever it can bar a door.

The East Bank Road runs east from the Marchand Street bridge, three miles of two-lane blacktop through farms to the first subdivisions of West Hallam. It is the road a city crew walks, out and back. The farms are corn and beans nobody harvested, machine sheds, silos, farmhouses with the doors open; whoever worked them left with the evacuation in May, and the dead on this road are mostly ones that walked out of the city, alone or in twos.

Crews keep to the road, because the corn on both sides stands taller than a man and a herd in it is heard before it is seen. Nothing on the East Bank Road is posted. It is the way to Hallam, not a place to go.

East of the Marchand the interstate is the evacuation that stopped: eleven miles of westbound lanes packed from the river to Hallam's edge, three across and the shoulder, where the city drove west in the second week of May until the span came down in front of it. The eastbound lanes are emptier, a few cars that tried to go home. The westbound jam is the richest roadside picking there is and the worst: every car carried what a family thought it needed, snow chains, jacks, fuel cans, blankets, and sleepers and crawlers wait in and under them.

It runs beside the East Bank Road for three miles and then through the suburbs to the West Gate. A crew in the jam walks the median, never between the cars.

West Hallam is the first of the city a crew reaches, eight miles of it from the farms to the wall: subdivisions, then the big-box strip along Kestrel Road by the interstate, then older streets up to the cordon. The Kestrel Road home center and the West Hallam warehouse club are the two biggest stores outside the wall; the evacuation stripped both and neither is empty. The houses were left in a day, and most have a car missing from the drive.

The dead here are the ones who stayed home and the ones who walked back from the jam. A crew posted here sleeps out in a house it can bar, upstairs, with the stairs blocked.

From outside, the cordon is a wall of shipping containers two high on a footing of concrete barrier, with concertina wire along the top and coiled in front, eight blocks long on each side of downtown Hallam. The outer checkpoints stand a block out from each gate: sandbagged positions, the wire the battalion strung to hold a crowd back, a truck or two. They were overrun from the inside on the last night, and the tin men standing in them are the battalion's.

In places the containers knock from inside, where something walked into the gap behind them and cannot get out. Most of downtown's dead are still in there, and they hear a crew along the outside of the wall: walk it a block out, never against it.

University Heights is the main campus of Hallam University and the streets around it, on the hill a mile north of the wall. In May the dorms became overflow for the camp: cots in every residence hall, a dining hall feeding thousands, buses downtown. The campus emptied with everyone else when the camp ran, and it was emptier than downtown before that began, so its dead are fewer and its stores fuller.

The physical plant on the north edge has the generators that ran the campus, and the dining hall has a university's kitchen stock. The quad is open ground a crew crosses fast. A crew posted here walks around the wall to reach it and sleeps on an upper floor of a dorm with the stairwell doors chained.

The North Side is the old city north and east of the wall: row houses and brick churches, corner taverns, the Alder Street shops, and the water tower on Kemper Hill that every crew uses to know where it is. The North Side pump station still has its filter stock and the gear to run it. The Alder Street hardware store has kerosene, lamp wicks and stove parts.

It emptied west down the interstate in May and was never inside the cordon, so its dead are the people who would not leave their houses and the ones who came out of the North Gate on the last night. The streets are narrow and the houses close, and a crew posted here sleeps in a church loft or a top-floor flat with the stair blocked.

The South Side is apartment blocks south of the wall, between downtown and the rail yards: six-storey brick and twelve-storey towers, laundromats, check-cashing windows, the Delmar Avenue pharmacy, and a row of pawnshops with their guns still in steel cases behind the counters. It was the most crowded part of the city, and half of it went to the camp and half west on the interstate.

The towers are the danger. A stairwell in a twelve-storey block is a street stood on end with a door on every landing, and a crew that goes up one is heard by the whole building. Crews work the ground floors and the street. A crew posted here sleeps on a pharmacy or pawnshop roof, up the fire ladder, with the ladder pulled up after.

Kittredge is the freight yards and the industry south of downtown Hallam: forty tracks wide at the hump, the roundhouse with its turntable and welding shop, the city's salt sheds for the winter roads, warehouses and a cement plant. The roundhouse has welding gas and tools; the salt sheds have rock salt by the hill and the road crews' plows.

Trains stopped where they stood in May, and the yard is a maze of cars in rows with a gap under every one. Crawlers own the gaps. Crews cross Kittredge along the catwalks and the car roofs where they can, and never along a track between two trains. A crew posted here sleeps in the yard tower, two storeys up a steel stair, with the door at the top.

The East Side is the city past the East Gate: older neighbourhoods running down to the low ground, the Linwood nursery with its greenhouses and seed stock, and the lumber mill with a winter of cut firewood stacked in its yard. It is the far side of Hallam from the field, and nobody walks around the wall to it: a crew posted here goes in at the West Gate, crosses downtown, and out at the East Gate at H4, and back the same way.

The East Gate is the one the camp ran for on the last night. Its outer checkpoint and the first blocks past it are where most of the living who got out of the stadium went down, and their dead are still there. Crews go through it fast and do not stop to look.

Hallam Regional Airport is on the south-west edge of the city, two miles south of the interstate and five miles from the wall. The fifty tons of federal stock landed on its cargo apron on May 20, and the battalion trucked it into the city from there. The apron is empty now but for pallet wrap and a forklift. The fuel farm still holds jet fuel, and the airport rescue hangar has its foam trucks and racks of extinguishers.

The runways are long open ground, and the dead cross them slowly. A crew posted here sleeps in the control tower cab, up one stair with a door that locks, and walks home in the morning without going near the wall.