I hate to admit it, but I was glad to have those Vostok microbes back in our heads. It was like a superpower of sorts, the kind that lets you sense danger or gives directions, but one that comes with a terrible price. I couldn’t focus on the end game because for the moment our goals were the same. For some reason the Parasites wanted us to live as much as we did.
We could feel some of the dead around us in the trees but for the most part they stayed hidden. Well, everyone except that ridiculous thing in the Snuggie/Slanket/Oversized housecoat. Jesse thought it was brown, but she didn’t see the bits of fuzzy pink that peaked out here and there. That whole outfit was covered with mud and putrid viscera. I could imagine some middle-aged housewife met her end watching reality TV in the most comfortably ugly thing she owned. I had a feeling that body moved more in death than in life.
We weren’t sure where to go. My mother used to take me to the Planetarium when I was twelve and we took one of those “Know Your Constellations” classes. I got a certificate to prove I passed it, but that didn’t mean I remembered anything beyond Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper. So it was a good thing we had Ghost with us, who was a super-survivalist with an ironic name. He remembered where the prison was on the map and where the cabin was in relation to that, so he just steered us by the stars in the general direction. It would have been better if we could have stopped and studied the map again, but we wanted to get as much distance between us and the prison as possible. We also didn’t want to draw any attention with a flashlight. So we just listened and followed the voices in our head till our feet throbbed and our minds shut down from exhaustion.
Before we knew it, we had walked right up to the mouth of a cave. Our decomposing followers must have sensed our need for rest and led us here. It wasn’t a very big cave, but it was deep enough for us to lie down and sleep out of the way of prying eyes. We unpacked our sleeping bags without a word and fell asleep as soon as our heads hit the floor. We didn’t even bother to blow up our pillows; we just used the softest part of our split kit to rest our hijacked heads on and tumbled into a deep sleep, confident in the knowledge that our undead sentries would watch over us and keep us safe.