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were dotted with lakes and road-less stretches that would hamper the movements of any pre-modern military force. The best choice for the hunter-army, once across the Ohio, would be to head northeast into the flatlands of eastern Indiana. Once the flesh-eaters made it to that point, there would be nothing but a few small rivers between them and Fort Wayne.
    And Fort Wayne wasn’t the only concern—back in Noble County, farmers from Utah and Indiana were finishing up the harvest, now focusing on the hard seed corn needed for animal feed. Building up supplies of horses and livestock was also a priority out in the county. They were attempting to accomplish all of this with a minimal labor force, guarded by an even smaller security contingent, covering a substantial rural expanse. Still, thanks to the Battle of the Castle, and the mass routing of the infected at nearby Chain O’Lakes State Park, Noble County was relatively infected-free. That would certainly change if Barnes could find a way to march his massive hunter army into Northern Indiana; Fort Wayne would be his first target, but it wouldn’t be his last.  
    Jack realized that he was building prediction upon presumption several times as he tried to determine Barnes’ march to the north, but with absolutely no information coming out of Tennessee and Kentucky , he had to form some type of response to the threat. The safe play was the destruction of all the bridges over the Ohio River, and even though that was the plan, resources were extremely limited, and it would take time to wreck them all. He had to pick the most likely places where Barnes would move and act on his best guess; there was no other choice.
    With two choppers still running from the three captured at the airport during the Battle of Fort Wayne , there was transportation for a second mission. John and Tina Shea were leading a team of explosives experts and a structural engineer from the Mormon contingent in a second Blackhawk. John had been Jack’s platoon leader in Afghanistan, and his wife had been an Army MP who had already demonstrated her combat and leadership abilities since the outbreak began. Their mission was to fly directly onto the I-64 bridge east of Jack’s landing zone, and render every span over the Ohio between Louisville and Cincinnati unusable. Everyone had agreed that they were better off safe than sorry when it came to preventing Barnes from crossing the river with his hunter-army. Nobody believed that the general would lead his host of infected in any direction other than Indiana, but they were determined to prepare for the possibility.
    Bridge-blowing was going to be a d ifficult job for both teams since the river was spanned in more than thirty locations in Ohio and Indiana. There were fewer bridges leading from Kentucky into Illinois, but Jack strongly suspected that they would have to be destroyed as well. Some of the people at the settlement had claimed that blowing the bridges would hurt future economic growth once the war was won, but ultimately they’d accepted the opinion of Jack and the others who argued that victory on a continental, or even state-sized scale, seemed unlikely at this point in the conflict.
    A mill ion Mormons and other citizens of Utah had managed to secure the Salt Lake Valley through a fortunate combination of great leadership, favorable geography, and a fierce will to resist the hordes of infected in the weeks following the outbreak. Their leaders believed that several hundred thousand more Americans were surviving in the Rockies, but ultimately such a large group of people was going to have food-supply problems in the mountainous region. They would need the agriculturally blessed Midwest if they were to survive in the long term.
    The main problem was that the folks living in the American heartland, urban and rural, had likely been close to wiped out in the first few weeks of the outbreak. Jack’s group had survived because he and Carter had