Clark aided the overwhelmed medics and wrapped bandages around the hands of one of his soldiers. Her fingers, like so many of the guards, had been worn raw by the near constant firing of her bow.

Over the past thirty hours, the defenders of Walton had been ceaselessly engaged in battle to hold their city against an unending tide of undead. Building by building, the zombies had pushed the living defenders back, and the soldiers were exhausted, their strength and morale depleted.

The lumber mill, heavily barricaded and locked tight, was turning as much of its stored lumber into arrows as it could. Since the metal was lacking for proper arrowheads, the sticks were simply sharpened on one end. Although crude, they were effective enough to put down a zombie with a headshot. Despite the best efforts of the mill's workforce, the supply of arrows was being expended by the guards faster than they could be replenished.

Because of the undead piling up when killed in large numbers by the defenders, Walton was slowly being buried. The crop fields were no longer visible, and the front porch of the Governor's house had been covered up to the eave of the second floor. Regardless of how many walking corpses were returned to death, their force continued slowly forward. Clark felt as if he were watching a tidal wave in slow motion, gradually sweeping away everything in its path until only the drowning waters remained.

"Ryan?" the female guard Clark was tending said questioningly as she looked over the approaching zombies.

Clark followed her gaze and saw someone familiar. One of the long term scouts Walton had employed was a man named Ryan. He'd stopped reporting in five weeks ago. He looked decidedly different than Clark remembered him.

The left leg of Ryan's pants had been torn off at the knee, and ragged flesh and exposed bone were visible. His left arm was missing at the shoulder, leaving only a stump of bone and ripped muscle. The black hair on his head had been pulled away on the right, and some of the skin was also gone, leaving his skull showing through.

The guard tried to stand up, but Clark grabbed a hold of her and forced her back down.

"That's not your husband, Mary," Clark told her forcefully, but she continued staring at the man she'd loved, her eyes brimming with tears. "It's not him!"

Mary shook off Clark's grip and jumped from the platform above the zombies. Landing hard, she rolled to dispel unwanted momentum and started killing zombies in her path. When she reached the thing that had previously been her husband, Mary stopped her assault and stared at him.

"Do you remember me?" she asked softly. "It's Mary."

The zombie took a step in her direction, then another.

"Kill it!" Clark screamed at her. "Kill it now!"

The undead version of Mary's husband reached out the only hand it still had and gently placed it on her shoulder. She smiled slightly.

"You do remember me," Mary breathed, smiling wider as her long dead husband drew near to her.

Clark drew his sidearm, knowing full well what was coming next, and took careful aim.

The fingers resting on Mary's shoulder suddenly clenched into a fist, grabbing a handful of her shirt and pulling it slightly away from her neck as the zombie opened its mouth to take a bite. The dead man's face suddenly snapped back and away from Mary, a smoking hole in its forehead. Mary screamed incoherently as what had been her husband fell at her feet. In a blinding combination of rage and loss, she turned toward Clark, his pistol still smoking. Raising her bow, she took aim at her husband's killer.

Clark fired his gun a second time, and Mary joined her husband on the ground. The arrow she'd readied was released. It struck Clark in the shoulder, and he pitched back against the wall of the lumber mill. He slumped to the second floor balcony, his hand clutching the place where the sharpened projectile was lodged in his shoulder. A medic rushed to his aid and removed the arrow, patching the wound and stopping the bleeding.

Paying no attention to the medic putting him back together, Clark watched the undead step on and over two people he had known and considered friends. A slight tremble shook his jaw as he tried to restrain his grief. He'd killed undead before, but shooting a friend who was still alive was something else entirely.

"Governor?" a soldier questioned.

"Yes," Clark answered.

"We're out of arrows," the soldier reported.

"Use the guns," Clark instructed.

"We already used them up while defending the power station," the soldier explained.

"Right," Clark said as he remembered. "Do we have any explosives left?"

"A few grenades," came the reply.

"Well, it looks like it's them or nothing," Clark said. "Throw them far."

The soldier nodded and departed. A few moments later, a series of explosions occurred among the zombies. Blasts of fire and shrapnel pushed over crowds of zombies, turning others into sprays of red mist and chucks of unrecognizable debris. Zombies and pieces of them quickly slid down the small craters the grenades had made in the blanket of dead bodies covering the town, filling them back in as if they'd never been there.

Clark watched as several zombies got back to their feet and continued heading toward the lumber mill as they'd been doing moments before, completely unfazed by the explosions. One zombie caught Clark's attention. It had been obliterated from the waist down and only had one arm remaining. The entire right side of its face was blood and bone, but it dragged itself forward, trailing its intestines like the streamers on a gory parade float.

The realization of why all the world's armies couldn't stem the tide of the undead became abundantly clear to him, and Clark knew nothing could be done. They were all going to die.

Clark grabbed hold of the iron bar serving as a railing for the second story walkway of the lumber mill, pulling himself into a standing position. Pain burned in his shoulder, but he gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore it.

"You need to rest," the medic suggested.

"What for?" Clark grumbled as leaned heavily on the railing. "Our ranged weaponry is completely spent, and our food supplies won't last more than a few days. We have two choices available to us. We can either stay up here, out of reach, and slowly starve to death, or we can grab a melee weapon of some sort and die down there, probably taking a few with us."

Clark took a fire axe off the wall and tested its weight by swinging it around a few times. His wasn't left handed, but with the damage to his right shoulder, he was having to make do. Looking toward his people, Clark found them holding swords, baseball bats, and even metal pipes and wooden boards ripped from the surrounding structure. They weren't willing to wait for death, and they'd follow him out to meet it head on.

Nodding to the lead guard, Clark gave the order to proceed. The man kicked a metal partition, and it fell down to create a ramp against part of the barricade below. The first ranks of soldiers slid down the metal ramp, kicking the zombies out of the way who had been standing at the opposite end. Swinging their weapons, they started putting down more of the undead.

A quick slide down the ramp brought Clark down to join his troops. His axe sliced through the air in a backhanded swing. It connected under the jaw of a zombie and relieved it of its head. Bringing the axe back in the other direction, he slammed it down on the skull of another, splitting it in two. Clark's shoulder screamed with every movement, but he couldn't stop. He wouldn't let the men and women under his command fight alone. His actions had led them into this mess, and he would stand with them as long as he was able.

The lead soldier used his bat like a professional home run hitter, smashing the shambling corpses out of his way as he slowly moved forward and deeper into their ranks. A zombie fell off the barricade to the man's right and tackled him. Clark lunged forward and ended the horrid thing with the sharpened edge of his weapon. Although the soldier was unharmed, being pinned under a corpse prevented him from taking action against the other zombies approaching his position.

The second rank of guards rushed to the defense of their fallen comrade, using brute savagery to batter back the undead. More and more of the zombies closed in on them from all sides. The guards used their weapons efficiently, but they could only reach so many opponents in a single moment, leaving others free to attack.

Clark was helping the downed guard back to his feet when he heard the first of the screams. He spun around and saw a guard smash a zombie that had latched onto his ankle with its teeth, but while the man disposed of the zombie below, another staggered close enough to bite his forearm. The surrounding soldiers tried to help, but they were being swarmed and couldn't break away long enough to do anything without endangering their own lives.

Being the only one available, Clark moved in with his axe. He struck the zombie latched on to the soldier's arm, and although the hit wasn't lethal, it broke the contact of the bite, freeing the guard to fight back. Clark did his best to support the troops where he could, but too many of them were being surrounded. They simply didn't have enough people or weapons to fight them all.

When the end came, it was abrupt. One guard went down, three zombies clinging to him. A second got bitten, and while trying to fight off the zombie, she received another from her blind side. Three and four went down at almost the same instant as the zombies seemed to be in a heavier concentration and moved forward as one. A few undead were dropped, but the rest latched onto the guards and dragged them to the ground, clawing and biting at any exploded flesh they could reach.

Clark swung his axe in a wide circle, not taking the time to aim. He yelled as his movements became wild and desperate. Sometimes he hit an enemy, but his axe occasionally whistled through the empty air. When his axe came back around, it struck and lodged in one of the zombies. He tried to pull it free, but he lacked the strength with only one arm. The delay cost him as the undead came after him.

Pain lanced through his right arm as disease ridden teeth sank into his flesh. Another bite dug into his shoulder. The zombies piled onto him like ants trying to claim a sandwich at a picnic. Clark thrashed about, attempting to shake them loose, but there were too many. They weighed him down and made it impossible to move, let alone fight back. Clark could do nothing as the zombies began to consume him. In his last moments of life, over the raw screams tearing from his own throat, he could hear others as the men and women under his command joined him in the throes of death.

***

The stench of rotting flesh filled Clark's nose as he took a ragged inhalation of air. The smell alone was enough to make him want to vomit. His first coherent thought was to consider any reason why he might still be alive. He couldn't find one.

His body lifted off the ground, but Clark couldn't feel anyone touching him. He didn't know how he was being moved. His feet shuffled forward at a slow pace, his knees unsteady. The pattern was all too familiar, and he frantically tried to look around.

Although his head and eyes wouldn't turn where he wished, he was granted a view of his surroundings when his body, moving on its own, turned away from the lumber mill. The remains of his fallen troops were slowly rising from the ground, their torn uniforms and mangled flesh testifying to their very violent deaths.

As he passed the corner of the mill, a reflective piece of metal caught his eye, and he managed to get a look at himself. The sleeve of his shirt had been torn away along with the majority of skin and muscle underneath. His face has suffered the worst of it as his nose was an empty hole in his face, and both lips were missing, exposing his blood covered teeth in the ghoulish grin of a skull.

Horror and dread warred for dominance in his mind. No matter how much he wanted to deny it, Clark had become a zombie. His body moved of its own accord, slowly heading out of the city the way the horde had come in. The food supply of the undead had been depleted, so all who were still able to move, headed off in the direction the evacuees had taken earlier.

Clark wanted to scream, to force his body to obey him again, but it ignored him. Trapped in the mangled and undead form, Clark had no choice but to helplessly watch as his own body pursued the survivors he'd fought to protect. He could only hope that someone would kill him before he caught up with them.