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.“Do you want to take a look?”I nodded as he pulled the vehicle to a halt.I wanted to go first, but Mac insisted on two of the younger men going first, leaving me to follow in their wake.It bothered me – I had never thought of myself as a General, or someone too important to risk – and there were times when I wondered if some of them saw me as a coward.The lead man looked into one of the cars and looked sick; I followed his gaze.The bodies might have been human once, but they’d been stripped and torn by something, leaving only skeletons.Their deaths hadn’t been the end of their suffering.Wild dogs, or cats, or something else had gnawed their rotting flesh.The entire ecology is going to be screwed up, I thought, grimly.I didn’t know much about ecology – and most of what I’d been taught at school had been progressive bullshit about the pristine condition of America before the white man arrived – but I knew that all kinds of animals would have been released since the war.Dogs and cats might be the least of our problems.What about animals from the zoos? They could have been eaten too, but would their keepers know that? I wouldn’t have wanted to eat any of my pets when I’d been growing up, so why would they have decided to eat their tigers, or lions? Oh my…“We’d better make sure that everyone carries a gun with them at all times,” Mac said, when I outlined my thoughts for him.I’d hoped that he would poke a hole in them, but he seemed to take them seriously.“There really can’t be too many of them, relatively speaking, but what if they breed?”The wind changed as we started to drive down the remains of the Interstate down towards Clarksburg, carrying with it a sickening stench that I recognised from Fallujah, the sickly-sweet smell of decaying human flesh.I gagged and coughed, reaching for a facemask desperately and covering my nose, trying not to breathe it in any more.It was a ghastly smell and its presence now, two months after the war, suggested that whatever had happened in Clarksburg had happened more recently than that.We held a brief council of war.“They’re still dying,” one of the nurses said.She had been unbothered by the stink, which made her unique among the team.Everyone else was covering their faces as best as they could.“We should go investigate and see if there is anyone we can save.”I frowned.“It’s a good thought,” I said, “but what about the risk of diseases?”“We should be fairly safe as long as we take precautions,” the nurse insisted.She was a pretty little thing, in her way, but there was no give in her voice.“We need manpower and we need to know if they were attacked by someone else outside Clarksburg, someone who might come after us.”She’d found, deliberately or otherwise, the argument that would sway me.“Very well,” I said, calmly.“Let’s go to town.”The smell refused to fade as we drove onwards towards the outer buildings, but thankfully we started to get used to it, although I felt dirty and unwashed every time I thought about what was causing it.We’d have to be careful when we returned to Ingalls.If they caught a whiff of us, they’d probably open fire, just on general principles.Some of the final waves of refugees had smelled pretty rank as well.I found myself dragging up facts from the deeper recesses of my memory.Clarksburg was a much larger place than Ingalls, at the crossroads of Route 50, the main arterial route for Clarksburg, and Interstate 79.It also linked to West Virginia Route 20, West Virginia Route 58, U.S.Route 19, and West Virginia Route 98, all of which meant that it had a pretty low chance of survival.Ingalls was easy to defend with enough firepower.Clarksburg had far less chance of surviving the influx of refugees, unless its government took quick and decisive action, but from what we were seeing, it had clearly failed at that.The silent accusing glare of countless skeletons bore mute witness to the end of an era
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