300 Miles to Galveston Read Free Page B

not unheard of. The days were often too hot to socialize, so people gathered at sundown to chat, trade, or tell of good spots for berries or fish.
    As Kurt and Sophie walked down Preston Road, he repeated an old story.
    “Preston is the oldest road in Dallas.”
    Sophie nodded. She knew telling him that she knew all this would irritate him. She kept walking. He spoke in bursts, in timing with their fast pace.
    “Used to be a cattle trail. We’ve pretty much lived near Preston Road for the last three generations. Just kept moving north. From granddad’s place near SMU. To dad’s place in Plano. To our place in Frisco. Used to like going all the way down, where Preston turns into Oak Lawn. Gay part of town. Cool part of town. Great place to take a date. Don’t have to worry about guys hitting on her.”
    He nudged Sophie.
    And so it went, for the two mile walk.
    The Frisco-Plano corridor, at least along the north-south Preston Road, was usually safe. Most of the people who had not been felled by bullets or botulism two years after the first dead rose were cautious folk.
    In the 20th century, people gravitated to their own ethnic groups and worked vigorously to keep them distinct. In the mid-21st century, there were so many mixed marriages that people returned to an older tribal structure, defined by blood, marriage, and faith. No one assumed social status purely by skin tone. Strangers approached each other on equal and polite footing.
    In this area, a mix of white, Mexican, Guatemalan, black, and Filipino formed into clans of 50 to 200, sometimes raiding each other, but usually trading livestock, jewelry, homemade booze, and musical instruments peacefully.
    In the first few months after the Leonids, no part of town was safe. Terrified and well-armed men did most of the killing and dying. At the peak of the tech boom, many Dallas men had gun collections that would impress a Nigerian mercenary. One of Kurt’s best friends had over 300 guns, from 18th century black powder rifles to 19th century revolvers to 20th and 21st century semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles. The prize of the collection was a fully-automatic M16, purchased in the early 1980s before they were banned.
    When Bill died of food poisoning, Kurt took two of the .40 caliber pistols and a Plano® Zombie Max Ammo Can with 1,000 rounds of ammo, and went home. He couldn’t behead him, and he didn’t want to see him rise; whether he came back happy or angry, it wouldn’t be him anymore.
    Kristine and Sophie, who were 12 and 9 then, loved the ammo can – a rectangular black plastic box with a green handle – because it had a cool sticker on the side: “ZOMBIE MAX... Just In Case,” written in fat green letters with dripping blood. They wanted to put the puppy in it, but the look on Kurt’s face said no in a way that they never asked again.
    When Kurt went back to Bill’s place two days later, his friend, the guns, and ammunition were gone.
    Most of the gunfire happened in the first six months. The young male gangs killed themselves off quickly. You’d see them after rising, staggering around in their sagging pants and $300 NBA shirts with bullet holes in them, but no visible wounds. If their clothing was still in good shape, it was hard to tell the before-and-after difference until they wandered into traffic or fell into a ditch.
    The young female gangs lasted longer, but broke up and joined neighborhood clans before completely killing themselves off.
    It was during these early days that an important discovery was made. There was a way to truly kill someone.
    A risen gang-banger, somewhere in Pennsylvania, had stumbled into a construction pit and been decapitated by falling onto a rough-cut four-foot diameter metal pipe, left standing vertically. With his head inside the pipe, and his body outside, he never rose again. His body simply rotted away.
    The follow-up experiment was a YouTube sensation. The video, “Banga Be Headin 2,” opened with a