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After 'The Great Escape', as I called it, to the chagrin of both Rachel and Cash who thought the name unfitting and corny, we settled into a pattern of covering quite a few miles a day as we scavenged supplies, moving ever close to our destination over the next couple weeks as we picked our way through the twisted maze of abandoned cars that littered the roadway.

And that's how things progressed for a while. We followed the interstate, dropping off at certain points to check the smaller towns for supplies, but always moving fast and never staying long. The objective was Queen City and Rachel made it clear time was wasted every time we detoured off the highway. We took time to get more proficient with our guns, and developed strategies for dealing with large groups of walkers, mainly making sure no one got separated, and keeping a comfortable space between them and us as we took them down. More often than not we just ran as fast as possible in the other direction.

The narrow escape we had made was still fresh in our minds as well, so it took little convincing to keep us moving quickly through a town when we had to, and we had completely forgone camping inside the cities at all. We found cars to sleep in if it rained, or camped in the woods next to the road. We came across a few larger packs of the undead, but we stayed close to each other each time and remained calm, and luckily dispatched the ones we had to quietly and without much incident. Mostly we tried to simply stayed quiet and let them pass. Some sensed us and forced us to fight, but we fought as little as we could and simply ran for it a lot, taking advantage of the space the wide lanes the clogged highway afforded us, and the speed advantage we had over the walking corpses.

What kept worrying me was that we had come across no sign of anybody alive, even as we got into the bigger suburbs that ringed Queen City. No campsites, no recent fires, nothing. After a while we got closer into the city limits and things became more harried, more intense and a hell of a lot scarier. We began to take advantage of King's (limited) military training, and we moved through the urban areas like a small combat unit. We moved with purpose, always making sure one person could cover the other, and when we entered buildings we cleared them systematically, leaving no corner, closet or room unchecked. First it was to make sure no walkers were lying in wait for us behind a closed door, then as time went on it became more and more necessary to check every nook and cranny for ammunition, food, clean water, clothes.

The groups of walkers seemed to get bigger by the day, and it became evident very quickly that the guns had to be used one way or the other each day, regardless of the noise they made. I was glad we had packed so much ammunition, but it went fast, and we had to waste more and more time scavenging for new rounds. King said it was like what the old-timers on base told him combat was like. Hours of boredom broken up by minutes of frantic fighting. Luckily, at least for now, we were coming across lots of 'redneck stores' as Rachel jokingly called them that had been tightly locked from the beginning of the outbreak, so we had just enough ammunition for now. For now, I kept reminding myself, for now. At least we were all getting more accurate with our shots, at lot less rounds went wasted.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, we reached the fringes of Queen City. There we got our first real wake-up call. It was at at farmhouse (or ranch as Rachel kept calling it) that was across the street from a massive housing development. One of those guys that must have lived their forever, and valued the history of the land he owned more than the millions the developers had undoubtedly offered him to buy his property. He house was certainly out of place with the suburban sprawl we had begun to wander through, but the home offered the chance to rest, resupply, and hopefully avoid the constant fighting we had been having to do with the walkers on the more populated streets.

We walked up the long driveway, flanked by birch and oak trees and a simple low brick wall. Tastefully done, I thought. The house appeared untouched from the outside, no open doors or broken windows. The door was even still locked, but we had long since learned that either a solid kick to the door, or better yet, a good swing of a sledgehammer got most doors open, and it did the same with this one.

As the door swung open I knew we were not going to come across anything good inside this house. It was the smell. That never seemed to leave me anymore, I even smelled it when I woke up in the mornings now. It smelled like the auto shop had inside, a mix of blood and old gunpowder, the only way I describe it is the way your paws smell when you've held rusting metal in your paws for too long. It smells like like wet, sour, iron with just a sharp hint of sulfur. Bullets were fired inside here, but not too recently.

Sensing my hesitation, King offered to take the lead, and I offered no argument. Pistol drawn, all three of us moved inside taking different rooms, calling out 'Clear!' to each other to let everyone know the house was safe. When King went upstairs though, I heard nothing from him, not even when I called up to him.

Fearing the worst, I bounded up the stairs to the second floor, taking the steps two at a time, ending up in a large den set up as an entertainment room. A huge plasma TV plastered one wall, a small bar, complete with bar stools, glasses and a treasure load of wine and liquor lined the wall just to the left of the stairs. Vintage advertisements and art prints were framed here and there on the walls with a nice touch, the room was set up as the place in the house to kick back and relax with family and friends.

At first all I saw was King was sitting on the large couch, and as I went to ask him why he had such a dead, hollow expression on his face I rounded the end of the bar and saw it. I didn't need to ask and he didn't need to answer, why he had a thousand-yard stare fixated on the wall across from him.

The body of a large tiger sat in an easy chair across from the couch King was sitting in, blood splattered across the wall behind him, a hole through his forehead anad a .38 revolver on the floor at his feet. And neatly in a row in beside the cat were four more bodies, one adult female, and three little cubs, all with gunshots to the head, a large pool of dried blood making a stark contrast on the beige carpeting. I didn't see any bite marks on any of them from a distance, nor when I got up close. Then it really hit me. This is what happened when you lost the will to fight. It didn't just affect you; when you gave up it led others to do the same until no one felt the need to go on, and everyone just let go.

"Jesus," was all I could say, rubbing my eyes with one paw, the other on my hip, "fucking Jesus." I turned to attempt to say something to King, who had gotten up to roughly sort through the bottles behind the bar, when I noticed the message scrawled on the wall behind the couch. Over the clank and clatter of glass bottles, I read aloud.

"If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness," read the first message, written in thick, black marker. Then underneath, shakily written in blood, which had dripped slowly down the wall like raindrops on window glass were just two simple phrases, one below the other."Nihil dicit, Et In Arcadia Ego," were written side by side, next to each other. The second phrase I could not utter aloud, voicing it would add no more to its' impact. 'They do not suffer anymore.'

I walked over to the bar were King was now seated on one of the stools, a bottle of bourbon in front of him. As he took a long swig, I reached across and took one myself, and we passed the bottle between us for a time in bitter silence.

I didn't know what either of the phrases in the foreign languages meant, but those were not the ones eating at my mind. I was tiring of the death around me all the time, seeing things like this almost daily. While in the moment it must have torn this man's soul apart to kill his family, did they not now have peace while we still suffered?

"He says nothing," said a quiet voice from the edge of the den, "that's the first part." Rachel had apparently walked up the stairs after clearing the bottom floor. "The second one next to it, they're both Latin by the way, means 'death is present, even in utopia'."

"Who says nothing?" King muttered flatly, slightly slurring his words. "What utopia? These poor dead cubs, his wife, this coward that would rather shoot his whole family than try to save them? What reason does a father have to do this? Why? How?" I could tell by his voice King was nearly in tears. Without a doubt this had to remind him of the fate of his own large family, maybe none of whom had survived.

"Reason?"echoed Rachel, "There is no greater monster than reason, so try not to find any when you come across things like this. I told you I thought God left the lesser of us to survive as punishment. God made the world, but he didn't make it fairly." She walked behind the bar and took the bottle of bourbon from between us, continuing on to sit on the couch in full view of the massacre.

Rachel sat down heavily on the couch, slumped forward, her paws cradling the bottle between her knees as she sighed. "I told you when we got to the city you would see that the living were worse than the dead. I hate the walkers, I fear them, I pray every day I don't catch the bite that turns me into one. But at least the walkers are predictable, the more I see the living...it's the living that truly scare me now."

She rose and turned to walk out of the den, and I began to follow her, unable to stand the sight anymore, rising unsteadily as the heat and the liquor began to mix and take hold. "Maybe he thought God had been unfair to him," she half told King, half told me, "maybe he thought his family dying was the better way out, the easier way. His utopia."

She began to walk towards the landing, pausing to finally open the bottle. I expected her to take a swig, but instead she upturned the bottle, letting it splatter onto the carpeted floor. "This is the last time you get drunk, get high, or otherwise cloud your mind. You get one free pass but there's enough shit to worry about without corraling a couple drunks through a city full of walkers." And with that she stomped quickly down the stairs.

"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" King asked me quietly, once Rachel was out of earshot.

"Yeah of course," I said out of habit, rubbing the back of my head, feeling things getting lighter and more out of focus, "we sort of slipped up in that town but we got out okay, we seem to be doing all right."

"No," he said mutely, "I mean to keep going on like this. Why are we getting up every day to trudge the highway, fighting death all the way? This guy," he waved absently to the tiger in the armchair, "he made his peace with it all. It's over for him. No worries about food, water, walkers, he found his 'utopia'," he finished, adding a harsh bane of sarcasm onto the last word.

King never spoke like this, even to me, and his tone really concerned me. What we saw at this house was brutal, but what we did every day was brutal, hacking down what used to be living things to keep ourselves alive. We were both a little drunk, having walked all day in the heat with little food, so I tried to give him a pass the best I could.

"I just wonder if that's the test," he slurred, still looking at the bloodied armchair, "it's not how long you can survive, but how fast you wisen up and end your misery."

I walked back to the bar stool and sat beside the lion, taking hold of one of his paws. "The only test is here," I said, putting a paw to his chest, "it's within you to decide, no one can tell you the answer."

I got up and headed towards the staircase, pausing on the top step. "What I do know, is that I'm going to fight, even if it's just for the sake of fighting for now, but I can't do it without you. We're the good guys, the heroes of the movie or something like that, and they never stop fighting." I wasn't sure how much sense I was making, I never drank in the middle of the day unless I wanted a nap afterwards.

He looked away from the tiger finally and turned to me, "But if you can't keep surviving," I said seriously, as his eyes met mine "we do it together." And with that I got up, tottered down the soft carpeted stairs, hearing the creak of the metal and vinyl on the bar stool a second later as King rose to follow me unsteadily downstairs.

Rachel had already been hard at work in the kitchen, pilfering what supplies she could for us to pack up, and leaving some stuff out for us to eat before we moved on. Polished wooden cabinets lay open in disarray and refuse littered the floor. We were learning to pick through places fast and thoroughly, taking as much as we could. "You need to eat to soak up the alcohol, drink as much water as you can, you're both liabilities until you sober up."

We ate as much as we could stomach, taking advantage of the fresh water that the home's well provided, and then stashed as much food as we could carry back into our packs. Leaving the dishes in the sink for a wash that would never come, we finally ventured outside the house.

The food had raised our spirits slightly and lessened the drunk, but the sight upstairs was one of those things that would linger for a long time. I understood how you came to that point, but if one of us, if I even, got bitten, could I do it? Could I cradle someone bitten in my arms knowing in the same instant that I could save them from an eternity of wandering the earth undead, yet take their life myself? Would I have the courage to do it to myself if the time came?

Lost in thought we wandered for a while until we reached the first major overpass of the highway belt that ringed Queen City, and got our first taste of what Rachel had warned us about. The smell of death permeated the every iota of the streets, emanated from the pavement, crept out of every nook and cranny. I had to cover my muzzle for a while; Rachel seemed used to it, and King's nose was probably not as sensitive as mine, but it made my stomach churn, and the bourbon still sat hot in my stomach.

Passing through the littered streets it seemed violence and chaos had reigned supreme here. Walkers shambled here and there, but not in enough numbers to worry us at the moment. What did was the piles of bodies that lay like cordwood up against storefronts, riddled with bullets. Trails of blood striped across the ground here and there, ending in trickles and pools. Everything imaginable was strewn across the street, clothes, shoes, money, suitcases, like fallen leaves on the autumn grass you couldn't walk a foot without stepping on some memento of the past.

Posters and flyer were hung on every open space, some with large pictures of loved ones with 'Have You Seen Me?' and a phone number carefully cropped and centered on bright white card stock, others were just hastily scrawled messages on random bits of paper or poster. 'Michelle Whitehead if you find this guy to Uncle Gary's', 'Tyler Mom and Dad are dead so just meet me at our spot at the school.' I tried not to read them, but each one was a reminder of a person lost, afraid, panicked, and now probably dead. Or worse, dead and now walking around looking to kill anew.

King picked up some change of the ground as we walked, and snagged a newspaper from the first machine he came across. When I asked him why he wanted an eight-month old newspaper, he just gave me a funny, unfocused look. "Not every day you get to read about how the world ends."

Turning the corner, not really headed towards anywhere in particular for the time being, we rounded the end of a block and saw our first of the military checkpoints. Rachel had mentioned in passing that the military had tried to cordon off a safe zone for the uninfected, but that things had not gone well. Now we saw in full detail just how badly it had been.

Concrete berms barricaded the entire street from side to side, and three humvees flanked the street parked perpendicular, their huge .50 caliber machine guns swung out to a crowd of thousands of dead bodies. Even a cursory glance showed these people had not turned; the military had simply gunned them down where they stood to protect an ever-shrinking perimeter. Or that was the conclusion King and Rachel came to as we all trod across the stinking, shredded corpses. Behind the barricades thousands of spent shell casings glittered on the pavement, each one a tiny, symbolic brass coffin for whatever poor soul it had hit. I didn't want to believe the military would do that to innocent civilians, but it seemed like that was the case.

I wanted to listen to what they were saying about what had happened during the initial outbreak inside the city, but for the moment I was paying attention to the large billboards hastily erected on each side of the street behind the barricade. They contained basic health information for dealing with the 'flu-like symptoms', instructions on where to evacuate to and how to protect yourself from airborne pathogens, general CDC stuff. However they had been painted over with large lettering, painted over in blood.

Rachel and King's voices started to become distant, dull, I wasn't hearing them anymore. In fact I must have stopped walking entirely because they both finally stopped a ways ahead of me, calling out my name over and over until they finally turned around to gaze up at the signs for themselves.

' THE CREATOR SAVES US ALL' read one, 'WE ARE THE HOLLOW MEN, THE CREATOR MAKES US WHOLE' read the second. What scared me wasn't the vague graffitti, or the menacing feeling I got from it, but the half-dozen mutilated corpses that swung and turned from ropes beneath the signs, a giant red 'C' marked on each of their chests.

What really would have scared me the most however, had I known in that moment, was that four sets of eyes had followed our trio of travelers into the city from the second they passed under the first overpass. That they new The Creator, they adored him, wanted nothing more than to kill or die for him, and most importantly, knew that he was capable of horrors beyond comprehension. They were the Hollow Men, and they had just found their way to be made whole.