Third Battalion

Third Battalion is a military unit recalled in a report about the settlement of Homer, an encounter that left behind an unresolved disappearance and a changed understanding of where infected creatures could be found. The unit’s experience gives the story a wider view of post-cataclysmic survival: communities can vanish without the expected signs of violence, while the infected become less evenly dispersed across the landscape.

Homer and the Battalion’s Encounter

About ten years before the conversation in which its story is recounted, Third Battalion came upon Homer, a settlement in the Oklahoma panhandle with more than eleven hundred men, women, and children. The account describes its inhabitants as living in a manner that seemed a century out of date: they had no lights or fences and appeared not to know what the infected were. They welcomed the soldiers, but declined the commanding officer’s offer of transport. Third Battalion was not equipped to move so large a population south to Kerrville, so it left a squad behind and continued north toward Wichita.

The Disappearance

The expedition to Wichita ended badly: the unit lost half its men, and the survivors retreated. When they returned to Homer, the settlement was empty. There were no people and no bodies; dinner dishes remained on the table, and the squad left behind had disappeared as well. The tidiness of the abandoned town makes the absence harder to explain rather than resolving it. The account offers possibilities—perhaps the inhabitants chose a safer place, or perhaps the infected took them too quickly to leave time to clear the dishes—but confirms neither. What happened to Homer and the missing squad remains unknown.

A Changing Pattern of Infected Activity

The Homer story is set against a longer military history. Thirty years before the conversation, when the First Expeditionary Force went out from Kerrville, infected creatures were so common that a soldier could scarcely travel a hundred meters without encountering one. The First Expeditionary Force lost several men on a good day; after Niles Coffee’s unit disappeared, the expeditionary force largely disbanded. By contrast, Peter’s party had managed to travel from California, a journey that would once have been extraordinarily dangerous. The difference suggests a changed distribution, not the disappearance of the threat. Reports from two supply lines run during the preceding sixty months—one reaching Hutchinson, Kansas, and another passing through New Mexico into Colorado—indicate that infected creatures now tend to gather in clusters and burrow into mines, caves, and other concealed places. They remain numerous in cities, but stretches of open countryside may go for days without a sighting. In this account, Third Battalion’s missing squad belongs to a history of uncertainty: the threat persists, but its whereabouts and behavior have become harder to predict.