From two miles away, she could see the smoke, and she had prayed, instantly, that it was a funeral pyre.<br/><br/>It had been getting harder to take each step on the old gray-peppered asphalt of the service road-- she could see the highway most of the way, about thirty yards down and to her left, and it'd been clear of signs of violence.  No shattered safety glass, no bloody clothes.  No personal affects or wind-blown tufts of human hair she'd learned to spot for.  No sounds of shuffling feet... just the rustle of leaves when squirrels-- antsier since the outbreak, maybe afraid more than ever of being eaten-- would take to the trees suddenly.  She jumped, every time, the stock and grip of her daddy's shotgun meeting her hand in a vice-like grip, though she'd learned from a kid what it sounds like when a deer takes off, when a squirrel scrambles up a tree.  Now she'd learned what a dead man shuffling around sounds like.<br/><br/>But the smoke-- that was hopeful.  It only made sense, she thought-- whatever'd caused this sickness, it must have been necessary to burn the bodies-- burn the infected's articles, she supposed.  Like that book she'd read and hated, but loved, as a child-- the one where the Velveteen Rabbit had to be burned because the boy who loved it had scarlet fever.  She'd wept as a little girl at the thought of burning her own favorite toy, the unicorn with the velvet hooves.  The same little-girl heartbreak had become real when she'd burned her family's bodies.<br/><br/>It had to be like rabies.  Rabies that ate the mind, but suddenly.<br/><br/>Her feet weren't scraping at the asphalt anymore, they were pumping her, determinedly, toward that smoke.  She had the safety off already, a good mile out of town, just because it might be a trap, or the dead might smell the smoke.<br/><br/>She tried not to think of her parents as she pressed on toward town.