PRAY TO STAY DEAD

Mason James Cole

NEW ORLEANS

2011

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are fictitious,

and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Pray to Stay Dead

First printing by Creeping Hemlock Press, February 2011

ISBN-10: 0-9769217-1-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-9769217-1-4

Pray to Stay Dead copyright © 2010 by Mason James Cole

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof,

in any form.

Cover artwork by Zach McCain (www.zachmccain.com)
Cover design & book design by Julia Sevin

A Print Is Dead book
Print Is Dead is a zombie-themed imprint of Creeping Hemlock Press

Editors: R.J. & Julia Sevin

Creeping Hemlock Productions, LLC

www.printisdead.com

www.creepinghemlock.com

This book is lovingly dedicated to George A. Romero,
Tobe Hooper, Jack Ketchum, and Richard Milhous Nixon;
and to those wise few who know the truth:

The world ended in 1974.

PRAY TO STAY DEAD

One

Her mother had been dead for three days, but Colleen couldn’t quite get a grip on the idea. It was slick and slippery and it didn’t seem real at all, even as it churned her stomach and wore her down with bureaucratic busywork and morbid decision-making. It was smoke and razor blades: she could not touch it, but it could open her flesh to the bone.

“I’m glad she’s dead,” said her brother.

She sneered but said nothing. In truth, Colleen had thought the same thing at several points over the past few days: shortly after someone from the hospital called to inform her that her mother was dead; while she made arrangements with the gaunt-faced funeral home director; while she stared at her mother lying in the casket, waxen and unreal. And again, moments ago, while sitting in the hush of the living room with her brother and waiting for Guy and the others to arrive. She had thought it more times than she knew, but she hadn’t been able to say it. Daniel had no such reservations.

He sat on the edge of the sofa, hands hanging between his knees, head low. Staring at the floor. She didn’t say anything until he looked up at her. His eyes were dry.

“How can you say that?” The expected response. It popped out like a cuckoo clock bird. It was bullshit.

“Come on,” he said, throwing himself back against the cushions, sandy hair in his eyes. “You haven’t thought it?”

“I just think that—”

“Of course you have.”

“I just—”

“And you are glad, right?”

Her eyes were dry too. She could cry only so much.

She nodded, but that wasn’t enough for him: “Then say it.”

“I don’t think—”

“Say it,” he said, whipping his hair from his face with a snap of the neck—a well-practiced move. “She isn’t listening.”

Colleen didn’t bother fighting him on this. Daniel declared himself an atheist three years ago, at the age of fifteen, shortly after he read an interview in which one of his idols—she couldn’t remember if it was Bowie or Lennon—mentioned Nietzsche. The next day, Daniel had returned from the library with a small stack of philosophy texts, and that was it. And he hadn’t let them forget—not even as Dorine Brockenbraugh lay on her deathbed asking for her children to pray with her. A derisive sigh, a roll of the eyes, a flip of the hair, and he was out of the room.

“Well?”

“What?”

He was still on it.

“Okay,” she said, thinking of her mother, not long before her death, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed following another invasive and humiliating round of tests, her brow shining with sweat, her needle-punctured arms dotted with small round band-aids. She’d looked her daughter in the eyes and exhaled once—whoo—her cheeks puffing, a marathon runner pausing a few miles from the finish line. The blasted look in her eyes: she was ready for the race to end.

“Okay, what?”

“I’m glad she’s dead.”

“I know you are,” he said, smiling, his teeth a jumble. “But why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah. Why are you glad she’s dead?”

“Because...” Colleen groped around for the right response. All that came to mind, however, all that seemed safe and right to speak, was the canned one, and Daniel knew it. Cuckoo on deck.

“Don’t you dare say ‘because she’s in a better place.’ I swear to God if you do I’ll come across this coffee table and give you a fat lip.”

“Because she’s in a better place?” She said, half smiling and shrugging.

“Yeah.” He shook his head and then whipped his hair into place again. He fished a joint and a lighter out of his shirt pocket and lit up.

“Jesus, Dan, here?” she said. He filled his lungs and blew smoke toward her. She waved it away. “You’re such a child.”

“Yeah, I really am.” He held up his joint. “This right here is why I’m glad. I’m glad because I can sit in my own damned living room and smoke grass if I want to. I’m glad because I don’t ever have to help bathe her and wipe her ass again. I’m glad because I don’t have to listen to her scream because the morphine isn’t doing shit.”

She looked down. He blew more smoke at her. She didn’t bother waving it away. Inhaled a little.

“And yeah, I’m glad she’s not in pain anymore. She’s not up in the sky, playing harps and bowling with Moses, but ceasing to exist is better than screaming yourself to sleep and shitting your pants.

“Most of all? I’m glad my life starts now. I’m glad that yours starts now. You’re twenty-three, Colleen. What if she’d lived another three years? Or maybe five? Jesus. Can you imagine that?”

“You wouldn’t have hung around.”

“But you, see, you think that’s a virtue. You’d have stayed by her side, holding her hand and talking to Jesus, all because she refused to allow anyone but her babies to care for her. And what about us? What if she had lived another five years and if both of us had stayed right here with her? Did she even think about that? Did she think about us, about what that would do to us—what it was doing to us? No, she didn’t.”

Colleen remembered the disappointment in her high school advisor’s eyes when she’d told him that she would not be starting college the following year. Her line about no longer having enough money wasn’t entirely true—her mom’s medical bills had taken a bloody chunk out of her college savings, yes, but she’d been awarded a healthy scholarship, and there simply had been no financial reason to postpone college. It was only for one year, she’d assured him and herself and her friends, thinking in the shadows of her head that her mother would surely be gone by then. One year had turned to four, and now she was where she was. Her brother was right. He was an asshole, but he was right.

They sat without speaking for a few minutes. Daniel offered her what was left of his joint. She shook her head. He shrugged, tossed his hair back, and finished it himself, pressing it out on the bottom of his shoe. She watched the ashes fall to the carpet and wondered who would pass the vacuum cleaner. Daniel leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Colleen got up and went into her bedroom, pausing for a moment outside of her mother’s bedroom. The door was closed and she had to beat back the habit to lean in and listen for the rhythmic and labored sound of her mother’s breathing. She made herself grab hold of the slippery idea: there was only silence in there. She walked on.

In her bedroom, she gave her dresser a once-over, making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, then went into her bathroom and grabbed a few more pads, just in case. She was beginning to cramp up, and she was grateful that their plans for the coming week involved skis and not bathing suits.

She returned to the living room and stuffed the handful of pads deep into her duffel bag, beneath the light blue slip and panties that she probably wouldn’t be modeling for Guy. She sat across from Daniel. His eyes were closed.

“You really still believe all of that shit?” He asked, sounding like less of an asshole and more like someone who was genuinely interested in what she thought. “Life after death?”

“Sure,” she said, and followed her words with a shrug. “I guess.”

He leaned forward, eyes on her. She saw from the look in his eyes that he wanted to say something, that he was having a hard time holding back. “What?” She asked.

“Nothing.” His coiled, about-to-strike energy dissipated, and he sank back against the couch.

“Nothing my ass, man. And since when do you not speak your mind.”

“I’m tired of the conversation, is all. We’re running in circles, and that’s just a waste of time.” He smiled. “Besides, you’re a smart girl. You know the truth, even if you pretend not to.”

“All right, already.”

“That mom’s in the ground. That you’ll never see her again.”

Colleen looked away, stared at the front door. Where the hell were the others already?

“That dead is dead.”

It was more than he had spoken to her in months, and it was there that the conversation dropped and didn’t get up. A few minutes later Daniel heard the rumble of an engine outside. The doorbell rang, and Colleen hopped up and opened the front door. There Kimberly, Colleen’s best friend since childhood, grabbed Colleen and squeezed.

“You okay, Brock?” Kimberly asked, touching Colleen’s cheek. Daniel wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Kim call Colleen by her first name.

“Yes,” Colleen said. “I just want to get out of here. Are we all set up?”

“Mm-hm! You ready to have a good time?”

“I’ve been ready.”

“Good.” Shifting into hushed tones, his sister and her best friend stepped from sight. Outside, someone said something. It sounded like Guy.

Daniel shoved himself up from the couch, picked up his bag, and shuffled toward the front. Colleen’s bag was where she left it, either on purpose or accidentally, just inside the door by his mother’s godawful wrought iron umbrella stand. Wishing he were higher, he dropped to his knees and unzipped her bag and rummaged around until he found Colleen’s pads. He pulled them out, chuckled once, and stood up. He tossed the pads behind the couch and, picking up their bags, left the house.

Outside, Colleen was greeting Guy. Adjusting his shoulder strap, Daniel stepped toward Kimberly.

“Hey, Kim,” he said, and wanted to punch himself in the nuts. He wondered if he sounded as puppy-dog wistful to Kimberly as he did to himself.

“Hello, Daniel,” she said, and his face grew hot. The dismissive tone of her voice said it all, and as he stepped past her and toward the back of the van, he wondered if she’d rolled her eyes. He was used to it. The manner with which she treated him was dependent upon how many of her friends were around. If it was just the two of them, she treated him like a person, an equal. If the whole gang was in tow, well, he merited only condescension and distance or outright indifference.

He’d known Kimberly since he was five, when she’d sleep over along with Colleen’s other friends. Most of them came and went, but she remained, year after year. She was only a year older than he, and their bodies had begun to mature at roughly the same time. He’d watched her fill out her pajamas over the course of countless sleepovers, and on two flushed occasions he’d seen her naked.

When he was eleven, he’d awakened in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. His business complete, he’d opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hall, and there she was, wearing only her cotton undies and a sleepy-eyed look of surprise, her hair a mess. She’d covered her small breasts, and eased past him into the bathroom, shutting the door and locking it. Three years later, déjà vu: middle of the night, same hall, same bathroom. Only her breasts were larger, and she wore nothing at all. She didn’t cover herself that time. A Mona Lisa smile on her lips, she had allowed his eyes to take in every inch.

Though both incidents had seemed accidental, he came to believe otherwise. For whatever reason, either to throw him a bone or simply to tease and torment or possibly to stroke her own ego, she’d elected to provide him with years of masturbatory fuel.

Making matters worse, they’d kissed once, not even a year ago. The party had been dim and loud, and they’d been drunk and high and rubbing against one another while, on the stereo, Arthur Brown bade them to burn. He was sure that the kiss had meant nothing to her, that it had been no different from the time she’d allowed him to stare at her tits, just as serendipitous, just as empty, but that was fine. When it came to Kimberly, he’d apparently take what he could get.

“How’s Sunny?” Kimberly asked him as he pressed his duffel bag into the back of the van, atop everyone else’s luggage.

“She’s doing fine.” It was a load. His girlfriend for the past seven months was drinking too much, and when she wasn’t drinking she was dropping acid and screaming at the spiders on her arms or some shit, and the wall that had always existed between them was growing a little thicker each day.

He saw no reason to tell Kimberly any of that.

“She still coming?”

“She’s meeting us sometime tomorrow, I think.”

“All right.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen,” she began, and he knew what was coming. It had to, they both knew it, but it was fine—at least she was talking to him with the spurs off. “You doing okay?”

“What, you mean because of my mom?”

“Yeah, you know...”

“Yeah, I’m doing just fine, thanks.”

“Okay, that’s good.” She shuffled her feet, looking down, to the left, to the right—pretty much anywhere if it meant she didn’t have to hold his gaze for more than three seconds.

“What?” He asked.

“What?” She answered.

“You want to tell me something,” Daniel said. “So tell me.”

“You smell like grass.”

“I know,” he said.

“You got any more?”

“A little, but it’s shit. I got it from Greg.”

“Shit.”

“That’s all he sells. Doesn’t matter. We can get some more. You were saying?”

She looked over at Guy and Colleen, who stood talking, their faces close. Guy’s hand was on Colleen’s ass, pressing her to him.

“Richard is coming,” She said. “We’re going to pick him up.”

“I know.”

“I know you know, it’s just that…”

“What?”

“I don’t, you know…?”

“No,” he said. His face was still hot, though for different reasons. “I don’t think I do.”

“Richard and I are pretty serious, okay?”

“That’s great. Sunny and I are pretty serious, too. It happens sometimes when you put boys and girls together.”

“I just didn’t want you to get jealous. I know how you feel and—”

“I don’t think you do, Kim, but everything’s fine,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

He left her standing at the rear of the van and slid himself across the back seat. Crap or not, he was feeling Greg’s cheap grass. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The van rocked as the others climbed into it.

“Look at this,” Guy said. “You didn’t save any for me, you dickhead?”

“I got a little more,” Daniel said, indicating the back of the van with his thumb.

“But it’s shit,” Kimberly said. Daniel didn’t open his eyes, but he could tell from the sound of her voice that she was sitting on the seat in front of him.

“He get it from Greg?” Guy asked.

“You know it,” Kimberly said.

By the time they picked up Richard, Daniel was having trouble staying awake. He nodded off, opened his eyes. Guy drove, laughing about something with Colleen. Bowie was on the radio, and Kimberly was making out with Richard. “Diamond Dogs” gave way to “Sweet Thing”—one of guy’s 8-track tapes, then, not the radio, and when the tape was over, Colleen popped it out and pressed in Alice Cooper.

They drove north, exchanging civilization for dense redwood forest, laughing and talking and listening to one tape after another, never tuning in to the radio to hear the weather or to listen to the Top 40 or to check in on the general state of world affairs.

Daniel woke up at some point and rolled a fat one from the dwindling stash of Greg’s shitty grass in his bag, which they passed around. Only the front seat—Colleen and Guy—didn’t partake, until the joint was mostly spent, anyway. Colleen took it from Kimberly and, closing her eyes, filled her lungs. She coughed, of course, and everyone laughed.

Less than an hour later they arrived at their first stop on the road to three snow- and sex-filled days in Tahoe, a campsite in Sutter Creek, not far from Sacramento. Kimberly had talked it up, and it was as nice as she’d promised, and empty. Not a soul in sight.

They cooked hot dogs over an open fire, tried to skinny dip in the river but quit at about ankle level due to the cold (Daniel sat it out, opting to remain at the campsite and read a dog-eared Frederik Pohl paperback), and when the sky darkened they fed the fire, hastily pitched three small tents, and retired.

Mercifully, Colleen had not yet started her period, so there was love, slow and steady and ever so quiet. Kimberly and Richard went at it like animals, grunting and panting and, in the end, laughing like maniacs. Daniel popped a few downers, even though he didn’t really need them, and passed out.

They slept in and spent the next day lazing about. Kimberly and Richard walked into the woods and did not return for several hours. Colleen and Daniel argued while Guy silently watched, opening and closing his mouth at certain intervals, as if he’d had something to add but figured it just wasn’t worth it. Daniel stomped away before long, and Colleen lay in Guy’s arms staring up at the sky through the trees.

That night, they laughed around the campfire, and when the sound of gunfire popped in the distance, Kimberly asked when deer season opened. None of them knew. Later, pressed close to one another in their tent, Colleen and Guy tried to have sex.

“What?” Guy asked, his cock hard, pressed to her stomach.

“I can’t sop thinking about her tonight,” Colleen said, feeling around for the flashlight.

“Oh, jeeze,” Guy said, and Colleen wasn’t sure if he sounded sympathetic or annoyed. His dick certainly felt pissed off.

“I was fine last night,” she said, finding the flashlight and clicking it on, illuminating the red interior of the tent. “Tonight I just keep seeing her face.”

“Oh, hon,” he said, holding her close, any trace of annoyance gone from his voice, his cock softening between them.

They talked for a little while and she fell asleep with the flashlight on.

The following morning, they were on the road by nine. Daniel was in a groggy daze, and by nine-thirty he was asleep again. They didn’t tune in to the radio for several hours, by which point the world was already falling apart.

Two

They came upon a half-red heap on the roadside. Colleen realized it was a deer, saw the glistening red knot bulging from its mouth, and looked away.

“Oh, God!” Kimberly said.

“Poor thing,” Colleen replied.

“It’s alive,” Kimberly said, twisting in her seat. Still asleep, Daniel slumped against the window, his head tipped forward, his face entirely obscured by his hair.

“That’s not possible,” Richard said.

“He’s right,” Colleen said. “Its guts were hanging out of its mouth.”

“Uh, not its guts,” Daniel said, looking up and clearing his throat. He sounded amused. “That’s not really possible. Maybe its stomach or something, but not its guts.”

“Oh, who cares?” Colleen said. “You know what I mean.”

“Guts are probably hanging out of its ass,” he added, as if he hadn’t heard her. He looked at Kimberly. She covered her mouth with her hand and watched as the deer disappeared from sight. “Kim, forget about it.”

“I saw its legs moving. I’m telling you, I did,” Kimberly said, looking at Colleen. “Come on, Brock, we have to do something.”

Daniel shrugged. “Whatever.”

Richard put his arm around her. “It looked dead to me,” he said.

Kimberly looked like she was about to cry.

Guy moved the van onto the side of the road and brought it to a halt. “It was pretty messed up,” he said, looking back at Kimberly. “I think it’s dead, too, but if you think you saw it moving, I’ll check it out, okay?”

Kimberly nodded.

Guy hopped out . He went to the back of the van, opened the doors, and, after a few seconds of rummaging, removed the tire iron from the spare tire well. They watched him walk in the direction of the fallen deer. Daniel grunted something, stirred, and went right back to sleeping.

“Damn.” The deer was alive. God help him, he had no idea how the hell it could be, but it was.

The large doe had surely been struck, and by something big; its midsection was crushed and twisted almost entirely around, its hindquarters mashed flat. A dozen angles of pink ribs splayed open its torso. Its guts were indeed hanging from its ass. They were strewn across the ground behind the animal’s broken hind legs, speckled with dirt. Pine needles clung to them, flies buzzed, and the air reeked of scat. The creature’s front legs worked, the hooves digging into the dirt. Its head lolled. Its jaw worked as if it were trying to swallow whatever it was that bulged from its mouth. Its eyes slowly rolled in their sockets.

“Ugh,” he said, slamming the tire-iron into its skull until its forelegs stopped moving.

Back at the van’s open rear, he wiped the tire-iron clean with an oil-stained rag.

“It was alive?” Kimberly asked.

He nodded once and tossed the rag into the ditch. “Poor thing was damned tough.”

Kimberly watched him put the tire iron away. “Thank you,” she said.

Guy closed the doors.

As he slid into the van, Richard opened the side door and hopped out. “I gotta go,” he said, and walked toward the edge of the road.

Daniel sat up, jerked his hair from his face, and blinked. “Piss break?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Sure,” Guy said. They got out.

Richard peed onto the crumbling base of a fallen redwood, making a paste of the dust. He wanted to be someplace else. He didn’t like Kimberly’s friends and they didn’t like him. They thought he was an idiot and he guessed they weren’t totally unjustified in this opinion. They talked politics and literature and movies, things about which he knew little and cared less, so there Richard sat like a sack of potatoes waiting for it to break.

Sometimes when they were all around, Kim would ask him for his two cents, trying to make him a part of things, and if he was lucky he’d be able to parrot something she’d said to him earlier. It always seemed like they could tell. They made him feel dumb. And things weren’t much different when it was just the two of them. He tried to keep up, tried to pretend to care about the things that turned Kimberly on, statistics and movements, but he couldn’t—he just wasn’t wired that way.

It was all made more rough by the recent realization that he didn’t love her. He loved fucking her, for sure, and he liked her company when they were just hanging out, getting high or talking small. He didn’t like having to fake it, having to play the quiet type, but he did it if he had to, and he didn’t want to do it anymore.

If only for the sex, he could have gone on this way for God knew how long. His general apathy toward all things carried over into his own life, and though he didn’t care for the way things had gone whenever they all got together, he could deal with feeling like an idiot around Kim and her friends if he could still go to bed with her and have those pressure-free moments together.

He’d met Tatum Morrish nearly two months ago while at a party he and Kimberly were attending, and all that had changed. He felt at ease with Tatum, never in danger of being judged or evaluated. He didn’t feel stupid when he was with her, and the sex was as good as it was with Kimberly.

Richard didn’t care about much but he had no interest in hurting anyone, least of all someone as goodhearted as Kimberly. So he had avoided the breakup, juggling both girls for as long as he could. He clued Tatum in just last week, promised her that he’d return from the trip to Tahoe free of Kimberly.

He would tell her. He would tell her soon. It would hurt, he knew, wishing there was some other way around it.

He zipped up and walked back toward the van.

“Hey,” Kimberly said when she saw him.

“Hey,” he said, and she leaned forward and kissed him. They were the same height, which was nice. He looked into her eyes and wondered if maybe it would be easier to just let her find out.

“I can’t believe you threw out my pads.”

“I didn’t,” Daniel said, looking down, hair in his face, trying and failing to suppress an idiot grin.

They stood at the back of the van, which was parked on the side of the road at the base of a densely forested hill. The van’s doors were open, revealing their heaped luggage. Colleen’s bag was opened, its contents strewn across the other bags: clothes, a hair drier, a brush, a small zipper bag containing make-up. No pads.

Guy was a few yards away, pissing onto pine needles, his back to them. Kimberly and Richard had taken a walk, down a slope and out of sight.

“You lying asshole,” Colleen said, pushing him with both hands. She didn’t know why he bothered trying to lie to her. He wasn’t very good at it—always shuffling his feet and looking around—but even at his best, his most bald-faced, she could see through him. She could see the lie in his unblinking eyes when he finally stopped looking around and decided to make eye contact, and she could hear it in his voice, which became stripped of emotion and oddly tremulous, the voice of the seven-year-old who’d broken her porcelain ballerina and blamed it on a non-existent earthquake.

“Hey,” he said, stepping backward and rubbing his chest. “I said I was sorry.”

Colleen laughed. “What the hell are you talking about? You didn’t say you were sorry.”

“I was going to, okay?” He looked around. Kimberly and Richard emerged a few hundred feet behind them, gazing up into the redwoods and walking close. Kimberly looked back at them. Daniel’s voice fell to a whisper. “And then you started screaming and shit, and I just—”

“Enough,” she said, and took a quick step toward him. He stepped back, flinching. He had a good five inches on her, but she was still his Big Sister. As a child, she hadn’t been above petty cruelty; she’d enjoyed making him cry on more than a handful of occasions. She wasn’t proud of this, not necessarily, but she’d established herself as the boss then, and it was sometimes easy to slip back into the role. Daniel enjoyed battering people with his words, but when he thought he was maybe going to get posted, he was all nervous twitches and apologies.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He shrugged, whipping the hair from his face, and she really wanted to punch his crooked teeth in.

“You’re such a child,” she said, and walked away, toward Guy, who was all zipped up and standing near the front of the van. He raised his eyebrows and opened his arms. She diplomatically sidestepped the embrace.

“You really think he did it on purpose? Maybe they fell out.”

She looked back at Daniel, who shuffled away in search of a tree to piss on.

“They didn’t fall out.”

“You gotta go?” Guy asked, nodding toward the woods.

“Yeah.”

“You need a hand?” He smiled.

“I’ll manage.”

She let him kiss the corner of her mouth and turned away, crossed the street and crab-walked down the slope. Twigs snapped beneath her feet. Somewhere nearby, in the direction from which they’d come, by the sound of it, an engine rumbled. Twenty or so feet down, the ground leveled out. She stopped there, dropped her pants and squatted, relieved to see that her disposable pad was spot free. They were about ninety minutes south of the nearest gas station/five and dime. They’d make it before she got messy.

Her urine pattered the ground. It smelled like her morning coffee. She stood, pulled up her pants, and took her time working her way up the incline, steadying herself, leaning forward and touching the ground before her. Some seemingly sturdy bumps in the terrain turned out to be thick rifts of gathered pine needles that fell apart under the barest pressure, sliding in a scatter down the hillside.

She reached the road and stood, wiped her hands on her jeans. The van’s driver side door was open. Guy was half in, half out, as if he’d paused on his way out or in. Completely still.

He listened to the radio. Colleen could barely hear it, the drone of news. He looked at her and slid entirely from the seat, crossing over to where she stood. He was pale. He looked frightened. She wasn’t used to seeing him that way.

“Come here,” he said, looking around. He took her by the arm and led her to the van. Daniel approached them, a paltry joint hanging from his lips. Guy looked in the direction Kimberly and Richard had gone. “Hey, you two,” he yelled. “Get up here. Now.” He reached out and pulled the joint from Daniel’s mouth, brought it to his own, inhaled.

“Hey,” Daniel said. “What are you—”

“Shut up,” Guy said. Daniel shut up and took his diminished joint when Guy passed it back to him.

Colleen said: “What’s wr—”

He cut her off with a look, leaned in and turned up the volume. “Listen.”

She listened, pressing herself closer to him. He held her. A moment later, Daniel leaned closer. He looked at Colleen, frowned, started to say something but didn’t. Eventually Kimberly and Richard joined them.

“What the hell,” Richard said, and no one responded.

“Oh, God.” Kimberly said, looking at Colleen with tear-filled eyes. “The deer.”

“It can’t be,” Daniel said, after the grim-voiced man reading the news looped around to the beginning of his report and began to repeat himself for the benefit of those just tuning in. “That’s not possible.”

They huddled around the driver side door and listened as the man on the radio once more announced that the CDC in Atlanta had confirmed countless reports over the last forty-eight hours that the recently dead were returning to life and attacking the living.

Three

Reggie Turner slept through the first twelve hours of the end of the world.

He’d been in Houston, taking it easy after a sixteen hour haul from Tucson, Arizona when the job offer came: deliver a load of industrial chillers to Sacramento within forty hours. It was a thirty-hour run with no trouble and no sleep. He slept for five hours and got to Sacramento in a little over twenty-eight hours, popping Black Mollies all the way.

Reggie didn’t like the way speed made him feel—like a big rodent or a small monkey was trapped behind his ribs and was panicking, trying to tear its way out—but he did what he had to, and he got to Sacramento not long after sundown. This was a good thing, too—he hated walking around in the daylight after a long haul. Too damned bright.

He dumped his load and picked up another for a short run down to Fresno that didn’t need to be there for twenty-four hours. Still flying from the Mollies, he tried to cool his heels in Frank’s, a small, smoky bar and grill not far from the rest stop where he’d get the last good night’s sleep of his life.

Frank, whoever he was, was nowhere to be seen, but the blinds and the smoke made the waitress—her name was Maxine—look at least thirty-five. He smiled and she smiled. He ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a beer, and he decided he needed to fuck. First things first, though.

Sliding away from the bar and letting his eyes linger over Maxine’s ass (nice for a white woman who’d already given forty a healthy push), he went to the pay phone, which was located between the bathroom doors (the combined smell of piss and urinal cakes and crap lingered here, as it did outside the bathrooms in every truck-stop bar and grill in America). No one looked at him as if he should get his black ass the fuck out the door and on the road. If they felt that way, and he was sure some of them did, then they did a better job of hiding it than the assholes in Houston.

He fed the payphone and dialed home. His mother answered on the third ring. They talked small for a few minutes and then he asked to talk to Nef. Nefertiti’s mother had been on an Africa kick when she’d gotten pregnant and she’d insisted on giving their child a name that evoked the majesty of Ancient Egypt. When he’d asked her why they couldn’t give their kid a normal name that wouldn’t get its ass kicked at school, she’d called him an Uncle Tom and then tried to gouge out his eyes. Her Africa kick came around the same time as her cheap hard liquor kick, and she was a mean ass drunk.

He didn’t miss her.

“Hey, daddy,” Nef said.

“Hey, baby. You have a good birthday?” She’d just turned seven.

“Yeah,” she said, and it was such a short word, he didn’t have time to decide whether he could hear sadness in her voice.

“You coming home soon?”

“Soon, honey.”

“When?”

“I got one more job to do tomorrow, a little one, and then I’m on my way home. How’s day after tomorrow sound?”

“Great!”

They talked and laughed. He asked her how school was, and if she’d gotten the present he’d mailed from Texas, and then she asked him how long he was going to stay home. As long as he could afford to, he told her. They wrapped it up and then he said a few more words to his mother. Yes, she’d picked up the check he’d wired her; yes, Nef was going to bed early and doing her homework and eating good. He said goodnight and when he returned to the bar his food was waiting for him.

He downed the food along with three more beers, eyeing Maxine and talking to her whenever she came by. Both of them knew the game well enough to tell that the other was playing it. He asked her what time she was getting off, and she spun it into a joke.

“I clock out at eight.” It was fifteen after seven. “So I’m thinking maybe twenty minutes after eight?”

“And again at eight thirty.”

She smiled, and they walked out to his truck a few minutes after eight. In the cramped sleeping quarters behind the seats, they undressed separately and got to work. She hadn’t been off in her estimation, nor had he. They went at it with something like tired desperation, and when they were done no one said anything. The smell of cigarette smoke and charred meat clung to her hair; the smell of their bodies filled the small space in which they lay, side by side, like relations.

She sat up to light a cigarette and spied his dog-tags, and he readied himself.

“You were over there?”

“Yes I was.”

“What was it like?”

“Like you heard it is.”

“Something you don’t like to talk about?” She’d never come right out and ask, not without an opening (they never did), but it was pretty damned obvious: she wanted to know if he’d killed anyone, and if so, how many; and what did it look like, smell like, feel like? He saw her eyes crawl over his body, scavenging for overlooked scars. Everyone was a ghoul, eager to wrench the bones from the dirt and see if there was anything wet left to suck out. Everyone wanted to hear about the bad stuff, about the brains popping and the blood flying. This had once surprised and disappointed him.

“No,” he said. “Bad dreams.” This was bullshit, the kind she wanted to hear and enough to make her uncomfortable. He didn’t dream of Vietnam. He never dreamed of Vietnam, not of the good moments, the quiet moments in which it was possible to believe that you were not a second away from eating a bullet or being obliterated by a landmine; nor did he dream of the screams of the dying or of the asshole reckless superior he and a few of his fellows had gotten away with fragging. He hadn’t had nightmares before combat, and he did not have them now. Combat, he believed, did not change a man: it magnified him. He came out a bigger, truer version of himself, for better or worse.

No nightmares, but sometimes the images from 1965 would come to him when he was awake, and with total clarity: the sight of a cluster of VC coming apart in spurts and chunks as his M14 spat fire and tried to shake itself from his grip; the heaps of bodies, the crying children; the old man laughing and telling unintelligible yet obviously raunchy jokes on a Monday and lying waxen and still the following Wednesday, a mangy wild dog lapping clean the hollowed-out ruin of his skull.

Reggie yawned. The Mollies were out of his system, the animal that was his heart had calmed, and the long haul was catching up with him. He sat up.

“You heading out?”

“I’m exhausted,” he said, his eyelids heavy. “I need sleep.”

“You can stay parked right here,” she said. He could see the hope in her eyes, or thought he could. Maybe she wanted more dick; maybe she wanted to press him for more about the war. Maybe she just wanted to be held, but he wanted her out of his truck.

“I know, but I need real sleep, and I bet this parking lot gets noisy.”

“Yeah.” She gazed at his chest, and the look of hope in her eyes had turned to a look of disappointment. “You going to the rest stop?” She nodded in its general direction.

“Yeah. Nice and quiet.”

“Coming through town again?”

“Probably one day.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Okay,” she touched his chest and leaned in for a kiss. They dressed, and it was as awkward as it ever was.

“See you around,” she said as she walked away from his truck and toward her car. A Mac tractor rumbled through the parking lot. Good old boys with too little sense in their heads and too much beer in their bellies leaned against a pick-up truck and hooted at Maxine as she got into her car.

Reggie got behind the wheel of his Kenworth, locked the doors, and fired her up. He drove to the rest stop, left the air running, and crawled into the back. He fell asleep to the sound of the truck’s idling diesel engine.

Four

The ride up the hill was long, made longer by hairpin curves. Daniel’s threat to upchuck was the only thing spoken since they started listening to the radio. Guy clutched the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his forehead creased. Kimberly looked dazed. Richard held her close. He looked confused. The radio buzzed with static, and Colleen adjusted the dial until the hiss broke.

A few minutes into a report on the looting going on in Detroit, Daniel said, “I want to see the deer.”

Guy said, “Why? It’s dead. I took care of it.”

“Right,” Daniel said, amused. “I know, but don’t you see what you’re saying? It’s dead now. So… let’s see if it’s come back.”

“They’re not saying anything about animals,” Richard said.

“It was already dead,” Kimberly said, glancing at Richard and then looking at the back of Guy’s head. “Right?”

“I think so,” he said. “It was in bad shape.”

“So it was dead, and it came back, and you killed it again?” Daniel said, sneering.

“Yeah,” said Guy. “I think so.”

“So it’s dead again.”

No one said anything.

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” He laughed, his tone derisive and devoid of humor. “What’s going to stop it from coming back again? This is bullshit.” He threw himself back against the seat and allowed his hair to obscure his face. He pulled out more of Greg’s shitty pot and lit up without offering to share. The van filled with the smell of grass and the radio’s lone hiss.

Kimberly squeezed Colleen’s shoulder. Richard spaced out.

The man on the radio continued. There were more reports of attacks from assorted cities across the US, and Colleen felt her head grow light. Daniel was right about one thing: nothing made sense. They’d left home not even forty-eight hours ago. How could the world get turned inside out within two days?

Following a wrap-up of events, the other side had their say: a noted biologist from London disputed the reports that the dead were returning to life. Such a notion was preposterous, he said, and he promptly went on to blame the explosion of misinformation on the US media.

“See?” Daniel said, looking hopeful. “I told you.”

A little over ten minutes later, he didn’t look quite as hopeful. The radio host played an interview with a doctor in Austin, Texas. The doctor confirmed that he’d been on hand for at least four revivals over the past two hours, and no, what he’d witnessed could not have been a living person reacting to the affects of an as-yet-unidentified viral or chemical agent that lowered vital signs and created the illusion of death, because in one of the three revivals the revived had been eviscerated in a construction site accident. The good doctor in London needed to get out of his office and go into the field.

Daniel grunted, finished his joint and mashed what was left of it against his sole. He coughed once and resumed his slump.

The interview ended, and the man on the radio actually broke for commercials.

“I knew it,” Kimberly said. “I knew the bastard was going to pull something like this.”

No one had to ask who the bastard was. For several months now, Kimberly has assured them that Tricky Dick would not be leaving office, no matter what truths came to light, and no matter how ready Americans were to get the hell out of Vietnam. He was here to stay, and he’d manufacture a disaster in order to permanently lodge himself in office.

Colleen had no love for Nixon, unlike her mother, who’d thought the man a saint—if they did something illegal at the Watergate, they probably had a very good reason for doing so—but she didn’t think Kimberly was right about this. Whatever this was.

The commercials ended. The man on the radio cleared his throat. After a short lead-in for those just tuning in, he described video footage that was aired, only minutes ago, on CBS television affiliates across the country. The announcer didn’t sound composed any more. His voice was lower and softer and getting a little ragged.

In the footage, he said, that he had watched himself just now, a naked woman stumbled around an unidentified morgue in Gainesville, the Y-incision running down her torso, just flapping, her internal organs sitting in a heap on the stainless steel table beside the gurney, her stomach cavity clearly empty. Just an empty black hole.

“Oh, God,” someone said. Daniel stomped his foot once.

A large blue pick-up truck appeared behind them, quickly closing the distance. Its grille was dented, its headlights smashed. The driver blasted the horn, and Colleen swallowed down a shriek. He would run them off the road, and the last thing she’d see would be the face of the driver, slack and dead above the steering wheel.

Guy slowed the van and hugged the side of the road. When the stretch ahead was fairly straight, the truck shot past them, blowing its horn once more. In no time, it was gone from sight, and they were alone on the road.

The man on the radio interrupted himself once more, this time to read a report confirming that the walking dead were eating the flesh of the living.

“Fuck,” Guy said, and nobody added to it.

The report was quickly followed by another. Countless law enforcement officials (not to mention armed citizens) had confirmed that the revived dead could be put down with a blow to the head or a bullet to the brain. It was, the newsman said with more than a touch of sarcasm, a morning of revelations.

Guy shot a glance back at Daniel, who continued to sulk. Colleen looked out at the world around them—just trees and blue sky, and dammit, it looked like it was supposed to look, there was nothing wrong with the world—and suddenly she never wanted to leave the van. It was safe here, and it always would be, as long as they didn’t budge. Guy’s right hand was on her shoulder, and she was crying, and she could see her mother’s heavily made-up corpse at the wake, plastic and unreal in the dim light of the funeral parlor viewing room, the smell of flowers barely concealing the stale and antiseptic reek of the place.

Her thoughts advanced one more step and overtook her.

“Oh, God,” she said, her chest heaving.

“What?” Asked Guy. “Are you going to throw up?”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat. “Daniel.”

He didn’t respond. He was asleep again.

“Daniel, oh my god.” She was going to pass out. Guy pulled over and the jerk was enough to shake Richard from his vacancy long enough to turn in his seat and push Daniel once, hard.

Daniel’s eyes sprang open. He jerked away, frightened.

“Daniel,” Colleen said once more and wondered if maybe she was going to throw up after all.

“What?”

“Mom,” she said.

Kimberly gasped.

“Damn,” Richard said.

“Lord,” said Guy.

And then it just hung there for a moment.

“I know,” was all Daniel said, slumping into himself once more.

Colleen wept. Guy snapped off the radio and held her. After a few minutes, she pulled away, palming tears from her face. “We should keep going,” she said, turning on the radio. She felt everyone else’s gaze on them, on her.

“I know.”

“So let’s keep going.”

He checked his side-view mirror and took off.

“Where?” Daniel asked.

“There’s a little town at the bottom of this hill,” Guy said. “And a bigger one about twenty miles east.”

“Do we really want to go where people are?” Colleen asked.

“What else can we do?” Guy said, giving her a reassuring smile. “We need to get to a phone. I need to talk to Chris.”

“Oh, God,” Colleen said, punching her thigh. How had she not thought of Chris? Guy adored his little brother, a charming and hilarious six-year-old who was the spitting image of his big brother, right down to the ridiculous dimples, and she was too busy assembling fears about her dead mother for the boy to even cross her mind. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even—”

“He’s going to be okay,” Guy said, more to himself than to anyone in the van with him, and Colleen lost it. Her tears came fast and hard, her shoulders rocked.

“Brock,” Kimberly said, reaching for her friend. “Come here, honey.” Colleen crawled into the back seat, sat beside Kimberly, who peeled away from Richard’s embrace and settled into hers. They held each other until they got to town.

Five

Harlow was little more than a mostly-straight stretch of road bounded on both sides by redwood forest and located in the dip between two large hills. There were no houses visible through the trees, though several dirt roads broke off from the main road, marked by mailboxes perched atop leaning posts.

There was an old Baptist church that seemed to have been abandoned at some point, a small garage whose fading sign proclaimed it to be the location of Mr. Kim’s Mechanic and Towing Services, and nothing else. Nothing else and no sign of life until they drew near the end of the mostly-straight stretch of road.

“Here,” Guy said. “Good. They’re open.”

The parking lot was empty. A pale blue rust-spotted Crown Victoria sat on the side of the two-story building. The sign in the door was turned to OPEN.

An old man of forty or sixty (his wild beard, unkempt hair, and densely wrinkled face made it difficult to tell) sat on a bench next to the door leading into MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. A large brown dog of no particular breed slept near his feet. In the shade of a tin overhang, the old man watched their approach from beneath bushy eyebrows. As they crunched into the gravel parking lot and past the two pumps (they were probably older than the Crown Vic), he raised his right hand, held it there, beside his head, for just a second before allowing it to drift down to his lap.

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Daniel said, and Richard gave a chuckle that started as a grunt and died as a sigh.

“You see what I see?” Guy asked.

“No,” Kimberly said. “What?”

“He’s got a gun,” Colleen said. A rifle rested behind him on the bench, its butt and barrel visible to the left and right of the old man’s narrow hips.

“Oh,” Daniel said.

“Should we just keep going?” Kimberly asked.

“We need gas,” Guy said.

“Food and gas,” Richard said, as if it were a punch line meant to revive the chuckle.

“I need pads,” Colleen said, and shot a hateful glance back at her brother, who looked away, his veil of hair dropping.

“Nobody do anything,” Guy said.

“It’s a good thing you said that,” Daniel said. “Because I was about to rush out there and beat his face in with my bare hands.”

“Your brother’s an asshole,” Guy said to Colleen, opening the door and getting out of the van. He stood with the door between him and the man on the bench, returned the old man’s wave. “Hey, man.”

“Hey, man.” To the old man’s right, barely seen in the gloom, something moved on the other side of the glass door leading into the place.

“Guy,” Colleen said, her voice an inch above a whisper.

“Everything cool?” Guy asked the old man. Either he hadn’t heard her or he was choosing to ignore her.

The old man sat up and leaned forward, his bushy brow knotted. His fifties, Colleen thought. He was maybe in his early fifties. “Everything sure as hell ain’t cool, my man. You haven’t heard?”

“We’ve heard,” Guy said, stepping from behind the door, his hands held at chest height. “I mean between us, is all.”

The big dog lifted its head and surveyed the visitors. Finding them of little to no interest, it seemed, it settled its snout onto its paws and closed its eyes.

“Is everything cool between us, you mean?” The man laughed, and Colleen realized that he was older than fifty. “I guess so. You’re not dead and you don’t look like you want to eat me, so, yeah. We’re cool.”

“Okay, good.”

“You see any of them yet?” The old man asked.

“Just a deer,” Guy said. “A few miles back. But no people. You?”

“Nothing, except on the news.” The old man sounded disappointed. He nodded toward the door. “Food inside. Misty cooked it a few hours ago, but it’s good.”

“Sounds good,” Guy said. He looked at Colleen. “Let’s go in.”

They filed out of the van. Colleen looked from the road to the store and back again, expecting to simultaneously be assaulted by walking corpses from the road and gunfire from within the shadowy confines of Misty’s Food and Gas. Guy walked over to her, placed a hand on each of her shoulders.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Not really.”

Nearby, Richard and Kimberly went through a similar ritual, their words hushed. Daniel shuffled along behind them, head low, hair in his face.

A bell jangled as they entered the store. The smell of food greeted them. The woman behind the counter—sixty-ish with a head of thick, closely-cropped silver hair—regarded them with an expressionless face and unblinking eyes. She looked like the guy on the radio had sounded: completely shaken. Behind her, a small black and white TV droned and flickered, the antenna atop it a mad jumble of tinfoil and coat-hangers.

“Hello,” Guy said, and the woman gave a curt little nod, the corners of her mouth barely twitching into the shadow of a smile. A short, portly man with a neatly-trimmed beard, a receding hairline, and thick glasses stood near the counter, hands perched on his round hips. He’d been watching the television, and Colleen suspected he was the form she’d seen moving around within the store.

“Can I use your phone?” Guy asked.

The woman gave him a disappointed little head shake and pushed the phone across the counter him. “You can, but you won’t be able to reach anyone.”

Guy took the phone, dialed, waited. He looked hopeful for a second, his eyes wide, and then his hope was washed away by disappointment. He went through the ritual once more before placing the phone onto the cradle.

“The lines are busy,” he said, facing them.

“Dammit,” Richard said. Kimberly lowered her head. They all had loved ones somewhere, all but Colleen. There were relatives, yes—her uncle and cousins in San Diego, her Aunt in Vermont—but relatives weren’t always family, and everyone who mattered was right here beside her.

This was calming. This was devastating.

“Can I use it?” Kimberly asked, giving a little shrug. “You never know.”

While Kimberly sought out her own private disappointment, Colleen looked around, took the place in: three aisles of groceries, a cooler, red-and-white-checked tablecloths draped across three tables located on the other end of the small room, just before the glass case filled with deli meats and cheeses. Behind the deli case, a small kitchen. Aside from the woman behind the counter and the short man looking at them like they were a stain on his best shirt, there did not appear to be anyone else there.

Kimberly placed the phone in the cradle, thanked the lady, and drifted over to Richard.

“Where you all from?” The woman behind the counter asked. Behind her, a wall of cigarette packs and a colorful quilt, neatly folded within a clear plastic baggie and covered in a kaleidoscope of geometric designs. The hand-written sign taped to the baggie said, LOCALLY MADE HAND MADE ANGEL BLANKET.

“Fresno,” Colleen said, her eyes moving from the woman’s grim face to the television behind her. It sat atop a file cabinet covered in magnets that held various faded and curled papers in place. A fluttering cramp closed a painful fist in her stomach.

“Fresno,” said the portly guy, shaking his head. “You won’t be going back there any time soon. Why the hell are you way up here?”

“Charles,” the woman behind the counter said, and Colleen heard the warning in her voice, a warning laced with tired familiarity.

“Now, now, Misty,” Charles said, waving a shushing hand at the stone-faced woman behind the counter. “Just let me talk to the kids, all right?” This, Colleen had no doubt, was a routine in Misty’s Food and Gas: Charles hung around and annoyed the customers, and Misty tolerated it while tossing out idle threats.

“What are you doing up here?” Misty asked, overriding Charles, who got as far as opening his mouth.

“Well,” Guy said, and Colleen pressed close to his side and gave the woman a weak smile and a nod. “We were on the way to Tahoe. Now?” He shook his head.

Seen through an undulating haze of static, the newscaster on the small television had the same look on his face as everyone else. A map of Africa was superposed over his left shoulder.

“It’s everywhere,” Guy said.

“Seems like it.”

“They say what’s causing it?” Daniel asked, sliding up to the counter.

“Not yet,” she said. “Someone said it might be germ warfare.”

“Who’s saying?” Daniel asked.

“This guy on TV,” the woman said. “But someone else that there wasn’t any proof of that. Falwell was on earlier, talking about Revelations.”

“Revelation,” Charles said.

Misty shot him another look. “What?”

“It’s Revelation. The Revelation of Saint John. Not Revelations.” He adjusted his glasses, looked at each of them, and nodded once. “No s.”

“Whatever,” Misty said. “Falwell’s a windbag, and you’re an idiot if you buy his shit.”

Daniel laughed once.

“It apparently started all at once, at the same time everywhere, so it’s not a germ,” Misty shrugged. “At least they think it’s not. I’m Misty, by the way.”

Colleen gave a half-hearted smile and introduced herself. Nobody followed suit.

The newscaster droned on:

“…from South Africa and the Middle East confirm earlier reports that th—” Static obscured his face and dissolved his words, and Misty leaned back and slapped the side of the television. The image came back, and the man’s voice came through: “…of China is denying that the phenomenon is occurring there, despite the fact that one of the earliest confirmations the World Health Organization received came from a doctor in Beijing…”

“I don’t think he did this,” Kimberly said, sidling up to Colleen pressing close to her. Colleen was talking about Nixon again.

“No,” Colleen said. “I don’t think he did.”

Pressed between the man she loved and her best friend, Colleen felt safe; she felt as safe as she had earlier, when she was certain that all they had to do was stay in the van.

“What about here in town?” Guy asked.

“What about it?” Charles said, sounding a little too suspicious.

“Anyone see anything?”

“No, hon.” Misty said. “Connie Willits had a heart attack about three hours ago. Her husband and kids drove her out to Beistle. About twenty miles from here. There’s a police station and a hospital.”

“And more people,” Charles.

“Yeah,” Misty said, casting a tired glance at the television. “More people. And more people means more trouble, so we’re in a good place.”

“How many people live here?”

“I don’t know,” Misty said. “People around here stick to themselves, for the most part. Maybe two hundred?” She looked at Charles, eyebrows raised.

“Less than that,” Charles said, shaking his head. “About a hundred.”

“Jackass says about a hundred,” Misty said, shrugging. Richard laughed.

“God,” Charles said, disgusted. “This again.” He turned away from the television and stomped toward the tables, where he pulled out a chair and sat down, his back to them.

Following a stern warning from the network anchor, a reel showing various shots of walking corpses was played.

“Oh,” Guy said.

“My God,” Colleen said. Beside her, Kimberly gasped.

“Jesus,” Richard said. “No way, man.”

Slack jaws, dead eyes; skin like wax. Impossible wounds dry and gaping and roiling black with flies. There was the elderly woman they’d heard about on the radio, shambling naked through a morgue with her chest and stomach laid open in a clean Y-incision. There was a well-dressed man whose jaw and throat had either been ripped or blown away; the tip of his tongue rested atop the blood-soaked knot in his necktie. A man with no arms walking between stalled traffic on an interstate somewhere. A woman who held the stump of a severed arm to her eager and gnashing mouth. And so on, until the images of walking death were replaced by the grim face of the news anchor.

Colleen felt something churn in her stomach. Kimberly pulled away at some point and now wept in Richard’s embrace. Guy held Colleen’s hand too damn tight. Daniel left the store without a word, the bell jingling above his head.

“Do you have—” she began, making eye contact with the woman behind the counter.

“Bathroom’s right there, hon,” Misty said, nodding toward the back of the store, toward the kitchen. “To the left.”

That’s not what she was going to ask—not yet, anyway, that was going to be her next question, after she found out where the pads were, but suddenly she had to be someplace else, someplace away from the television, someplace away from the woman behind the counter and the round man who clearly didn’t want them there. Someplace away from her friends, even. She needed to be alone.

“Be right back,” she said, stepping away from Guy and Kimberly, shouldering past Richard, and walking toward the deli. Through the entrance, she could see her brother loafing toward the road, his hands in his pockets, head down, dealing with things however he dealt with them. She walked down a short aisle, her eyes drifting across boxes of cereal, bags of rice, canned soup, canned fruit, and so on. She held out her right forefinger and left a trail through the road dust atop a box of Raisin Bran, and the menstrual cramps in her abdomen got together with the shocked nausea in her stomach and threatened to light fireworks.

The bathroom was small and neat. There were no obscenities scrawled upon the walls and the scent of the air freshener wasn’t struggling to conceal smells of human waste. She stared at herself in the mirror, suddenly seeing her mother’s features—her mother’s face—embedded within her own. She’d heard it all of her life, “Oh, you look just like your mother,” but it had never really meant much to her, and she wasn’t sure she ever really saw what they were talking about, anyway, or if they were just saying the kind of obligatory shit people say when they don’t really have anything of value to say.

But she did. She looked like her mother. Not just like her, of course—her jaw was not as wide as her mother’s jaw, and her nose wasn’t quite so long, but she was as close to a dead ringer as one could be, and now she was all that was left of the woman. The rest, the sad, dead thing she’d watched her mother wither into, was—

What was her mother doing right now? Was she lying dead, her arms crossed on her wasted breast, as she had been when the funeral parlor attendant had gently closed the casket? Had her mother’s overpowered body been spared the effects of whatever the hell was going on, or was she now awake somehow? Colleen hoped the cancer might stop it, as they had stopped her life, but perhaps the alien tissue would twitch to life and follow the same commands as the natural tissue, finally working in concert and giving her mother increasing strength.

Colleen splashed water on her face and when she was certain that her breakfast wasn’t going to come jetting up from her throat in an acidic gout, she turned from the mirror and lifted the toilet lid. The seat was clean, but she wiped it down anyway before sitting.

“Dammit,” she said. There was a small red spot on her pad. A drop of blood tinked into the toilet bowl, and through the V of her thighs she could see the water in the toilet bowl turning pink.

The door was within reach. She opened it, just a crack, called for Guy, and shut the door again, locking it. A few seconds later, she heard him brush against the door. “Everything okay?” He asked.

“I forgot to get pads,” she said.

“Have you asked Kim?”

“She didn’t say anything when I said I needed them, so I figure she doesn’t have any on her.”

“Okay,” he said. “You think they’ll have some?”

“It’s a store, right?” She snapped back, immediately sorry. She opened her mouth to apologize but he was already gone.

She sat there, feeling the world twist and coil into something unrecognizable beneath her feet, wondering how long it would be until she saw one of the dead things with her own eyes, wondering what the hell tomorrow would bring. Wondering what it would be like to be pulled down by a group of them and eaten alive, as was apparently happening across the globe, if the horrors being coughed up by the news were to be believed.

“Hon?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s out of stock.”

“Aggh.”

“Yeah. She says most of the woman in town use cloth.”

“Agh,” she said, suddenly enraged. She roared: “Fuck you, Daniel.”

“He probably heard you,” Guy said, a few seconds later, sounding both light and worried.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hope he did.” She wanted to punch her brother more than she ever had in her entire life, and that was saying something.

“Sorry,” Guy said. Empty words—he had nothing to be sorry for—but she let them slide.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll manage.”

“You sure?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I guess not,” he said. “We’ll find you something.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, her tone telling him to get the hell away from the door. He did.

The pad in her panties had some life left. She pulled up her pants, flushed the toilet, and, washing her hands, stared at her face in the mirror until he flesh looked too white and her pores looked too large and she felt like maybe she were going crazy. Her stomach churned, at last giving up its contents, which arced out of her mouth and into the sink, spattering her hands.

“God,” she said, crying.

Daniel stood where the gravel parking lot met the road, his back to the store. He could feel the old man’s eyes on him, wanted to turn around and tell the old bastard to find something else to look at.

No weed left. He needed to get drunk. If ever he needed to get utterly smashed and spread to the four corners of the earth, it was now.

He looked back at the store, wondering if maybe they had vodka. He hadn’t gotten a decent look around. They probably did, but you never knew with middle-of-nowhere dives like this. Maybe they were into Jesus, and would tell you to look elsewhere if you came looking for booze.

Some part of him was holding out hope that someone on the television would start making sense, hope that someone would figure out they’d been wrong and dead people could not get up and walk because they were fucking dead. But he’d seen the footage, and he didn’t want to see it again, and he could do without seeing Richard pawing all over Kimberly, without their glances and their hushed whispers. It was more off-putting even than seeing his sister get felt up.

He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, pinching the soft flesh between his eyebrows. Hard, with his fingernails. It was a stupid thing to do—he was awake, dammit; this was no dream—but he did it anyway. He shook his head, turned to face the store, and saw a lone form walking down the street and toward him.

“Fuck,” he said, taking three steps backward, and the form lifted its arm and waved.

Six

Reggie opened his eyes and sat up, blinking into the gloom and looking around. Had he actually been dreaming about Vietnam? About trudging beneath the dense jungle canopy and through the mud while insects buzzed and stung and bullets tore the foliage into green confetti?

He rubbed his face, tried to wipe away the remnants of the dream with hands that had taken many lives over the course of twelve fevered months in Vietnam. A stutter of distant gunfire opened his eyes. It sounded like a machine gun.

What the hell?

Another volley of gunfire sounded somewhere nearby. Suddenly alive, he shook off clinging exhaustion and pulled his sawed-off shotgun from beside his mattress. It was a double barrel, and it was always loaded.

He parted the thick curtains separating his sleeping hovel from the tractor’s cab.

“Shit,” he said, squinting, sunlight pouring in. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. A little after eight in the morning. He pulled on his boots and moved up to the front, keeping his head low. He pulled his sunglasses from the passenger seat and put them on, looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The rest-stop looked like any other. There was one other truck nearby—a monstrous new dark red Peterbilt emblazoned with blue flame patterns. The driver side door was open, though he saw no sign of the driver.

He waited for more gunfire. When none came, he exchanged his shotgun for his pistol, a Colt Combat Commander that had been at his side throughout his tour in ‘Nam. He tucked it into his pants, covered it with his shirt before sliding out of the truck. The last thing he needed was for a cop to drive by and see him stalking around a rest-stop with a sawed-off double-barrel clutched to his chest.

A car shot by on the interstate. It was going seventy or higher. Not long after, another car passed, weaving dangerously between lanes. More gunfire somewhere, though not nearly as close as before. Now a caravan of cars and trucks shot by, all of them heading northeast, the same as the others. Away from Sacramento.

He walked toward the interstate and looked in the direction of the Capital city.

“What the fuck,” he whispered. The sky above Sacramento was thick with smoke and studded with helicopters. Gunfire popped, closer this time. He returned to his rig and reached for the wheel when movement at the other end of the rest-stop parking lot caught his eye. Near the bathrooms, a man walked, head hung low. His shirt was in tatters. With his right arm he clutched his left bicep, and his shirt and arm were stained with blood; it was unnaturally bright against his bone-white flesh. He was bleeding bad, and would die without help.

“Hey,” Reggie said, peeling away his shirt and walking toward the man, whose head moved in his direction, bobbing upward. “Hey, buddy, you okay?”

It was a stupid thing to say—the man clearly was not okay—but what else could he say? The bleeding man said nothing.

“Come on.” Reggie looked the man in the face, and something black took root in his soul. Shadows like snakes coiled in the corners of his vision, and his heart did something nasty. He felt cold, cold and afraid like a child.

The man walking toward him was dead.

Once, in ‘66, he’d come upon a South Vietnamese girl sleeping against a tree, her chin resting upon her chest. Only she hadn’t been sleeping. There had been no blood, none that he could see, anyway, and he never found out how she had died. To the casual eye she was just a girl sleeping against a tree, but there were no casual eyes in Vietnam, and that girl had not been sleeping. She’d been dead for not even an hour, but there was no mistaking the lifelessness of her face.

And there was no mistaking the lifelessness of the bloody man walking toward him. The dead man walking toward him like something out of a nightmare, the dead man walking like some abomination, some blasphemy so great that to look at it was to go a little crazy.

A noise like a frightened yelp escaped Reggie’s mouth, and he took a step backward, away from the dead man, and the ground threatened to hop up and slam into his face.

“Urrn,” the dead man said, peeling his hand away from an arm covered in bite marks and reaching for Reggie, who stepped backward until his back bumped into his truck. He didn’t think to pull his Colt and shoot the dead man, and he later realized that he was lucky to have backed into the truck. If he hadn’t, panic might have driven him to leave behind reason and any chance of survival and run screaming into the woods behind the rest-stop bathrooms.

The walking dead man didn’t move correctly. It didn’t move like a man. Life was movement; movement was born of life, came from within, damn it all, and this thing was not alive. Its lurches and jerks came from elsewhere, from outside, surely they did. For one deranged moment Reggie looked into the sky in search of the glimmer of strings that would lead up, through the clouds, and to the hands of some leering and godless puppeteer.

The thing tripped on its own feet and crashed to the ground. It made no effort to raise its hands and prevent its face from bouncing off the cement. A sound like a dry belch escaped its throat, and why not? Dead bodies belched all the time, especially when you hefted them onto more dead bodies, heaps of them stacked six or seven deep, bloating and changing in the heat and the moisture.

Reggie reached through the cold and smothering panic and got a hold on himself. By the time he slid behind the wheel and closed the door, the dead body was struggling to its feet. It stood, tottering, spinning in place, and it occurred to Reggie that the dead man was looking for him. It hadn’t seen him crawl up and into the truck. He looked at the shirt balled up in his fist and then slipped it on.

Reggie watched the thing until he thought it would creep away and into someone else’s nervous breakdown. He watched it until its eyes found his—there was nothing there, of course: a corpse does not look back, even when its eyes are wide and looking right at you. A labored and obscene imitation of an expression moved across the thing’s face. Having found what it was looking for, the dead body threw itself against the side of the truck and scratched at the door like a cat looking to come inside for the night.

Reggie turned on the radio and sat there for nearly thirty minutes, listening and watching. It was happening everywhere, whatever it was. The thing outside pawed at the door, weak and ineffectual. Before Reggie threw his truck into gear and rolled out of the rest stop, four other dead bodies had joined the first. He watched their steady advance with mute and detached horror. One of them was missing a good portion of its face and all of its left hand. Reggie heard the splintered edges of its radius and ulna scraping across his paint job. Two of them were unmarred, just like the long ago dead girl sitting against the tree in that far away jungle. On the radio, news of a massive power outage on the East Coast broke. As evening approached, the newscaster reported, panic and violence were overtaking the citizens of New York City.

President Nixon had issued an Executive Order: all military personnel, either Active or Inactive, were to report to their nearest base. All Military Service Obligations, whether expired or not, had been indefinitely extended.

It wasn’t happening, no way. Not a chance. Uncle Sam had gotten all he was gonna get from Reggie. Getting to Nef was the only thing that mattered now. To hell with everything else.

Again the utter senselessness, the madness, hit him. The dead did not walk, and, by virtue of the fact that they were, indeed, walking, one could only assume that somehow reality had been fractured. Soon the earth would boil blood and the sky would be sick with dragons.

A convoy of National Guard trucks rolled southwest, toward Sacramento, and Reggie knew that no matter what was true, what was really happening: he had to dump his load and get his ass home.

He rolled away from the dead people, out of the rest stop, and onto I-80, east-bound, away from whatever hell was happening in Sacramento. Half a mile down the road, he pulled over and got out, looked around. A speck shuffled across the interstate in the direction from which he’d come. There was no sign of anyone or anything else. No cars, no military convoys, no dead people. Sounds from somewhere: a dog barking, gunfire, sirens, the deep-bass thump of an explosion.

It didn’t take him long to drop the straight-legs, detach the pneumatic brakes, ditch the trailer, and get a move on. He passed the aftermath of a three-vehicle accident, choking back the urge to stop and help. A man leaned against the trunk of the least-damaged car, a hand pressed to his bloodied face, a crowbar hanging from his other hand. A dead woman struggled to free herself from the wreckage.

He passed several slow-moving vehicles, sedans and station wagons and pick-up trucks loaded down with personal belongings. He passed a stalled car. Its hood was open, steam billowed. A large collie watched from the backseat, and the car’s driver waved to him. Please help me, the wave said, and Reggie kept moving. He couldn’t afford to act a fool.

Further along, traffic bottlenecked. Folks drove their vehicles around a five-car pile-up.

It would be this way from here to home, if not worse. By nightfall, the interstate could be a stalled bumper-to-bumper hell, and people would leave behind their belongings and go on foot.

Laying into his horn, Reggie eased his truck across the grass median separating the east- and west-bound lanes and onto I-80 West. The westbound lanes were all but deserted, and he wondered how long it was before those driving east decided to claim them. He pulled over and opened his road-map. He’d have no trouble getting off of the interstate near Citrus Heights. From there he’d go south to Fifty, the El Dorado Freeway, which he’d take most of the way home to Nevada.

Nef must be scared—surely both of them were, but Reggie’s mother was strong. She would be able to comfort Nef. He took solace in the fact that he was currently in a hell of a lot more danger than they were. Carlin was a small town, and that had to count for something, if the news on the radio was to be trusted. A small town contained only so many dead bodies at any given time.

“They’re safe,” he said, hoping he was right.

From the east-bound side of the interstate, the man with the overheated car and the collie watched him pass.

Seven

Kimberly sat at one of the tables, her face pressed into her palms, shuddering. She stared at the greasily polished wood grain. Richard sat beside her and hung his arm around her neck.

Colleen looked at Kimberly rocking, looked at Guy, looked at the television, which didn’t really have anything new to report: things were still falling apart, increasing rate, colorful variety. Just like in the poem she’d read in high school. The center had not held. It had spun, disintegrating, into oblivion, and now they were all left standing around, blasted and waiting to be eaten.

Guy pulled his eyes from the television long enough to meet her eyes. His lips were a thin tight line, his brow creased. He shook his head once and went back to the TV.

“Something to eat, honey?” Misty asked.

“I don’t know,” Colleen said, ill. “Maybe in a little while.”

“Anybody?”

There were a few shrugs. After no one answered, Guy spoke. “Probably later. Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Richard said, barely a mumble.

“Just let me know,” the old gal said, and when the portly guy sighed, she shot him an ugly look. “Why don’t you go home?”

“You’re making a mistake,” he said, with an exaggerated gesture.

“What the hell are you going on about, Charlie?” Misty asked, clearly tired of his bullshit. Unmindful of this exchange, Richard got up and went to the phone. He picked it up and dialed.

“You need to send them on their way and lock up,” he said, nodding toward the television. On the screen, a haggard-looking scientist was pointing to a diagram of the human brain and saying something about the limbic system, whatever the hell that was. “This isn’t blowing over, and you shouldn’t be giving your food to outsiders.”

“Shut the hell up and sit down, Charles,” Misty said, and rolled her eyes at Colleen. She turned a murderous look back to Charles. “Before I shoot you.”

“You don’t believe in guns,” Charles said.

“I’ll go outside and tell Crate to shoot you,” she said. “He’d be happy to. Now get out or shut up.”

Charles walked over to one of the tables, grabbed a chair, dragged it close enough to the counter to get a view of the television, and sat down.

The news cut from the scientist to a live shot of a reporter in the streets of Brooklyn. He was flanked by armed soldiers and behind him, a car burned. He said something about civil unrest, and then the soldier to his left opened fire. The soldier to his right followed suit, and the reporter crumpled to the ground, yelping. The camera shook. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read that President Nixon would be addressing the nation at six p.m., Atlantic time.

“This can’t be real,” Kimberly said, on the edge of hysteria. “It can’t be.”

Richard hung up the phone and returned to Kimberly’s side, stroked her back a bit, but wasn’t good for shit, really.

“Oh, hon,” Colleen said, sitting across from Kimberly and taking her hand. Richard looked dazed and stupid, and Colleen wanted to punch him in the nose. “We’re going to be okay. I promise.”

“You mean it,” Kimberly said, and she was a little girl again, all wide-eyed and hopeful.

“Yes, Kim. I promise,” Colleen said, realizing that her words were just as empty as Richard’s, she was just a better liar, as the best liars are those who are convinced they’re being truthful. What the hell could she say? What could any of them say?

The bell above the entrance jingled. Daniel stepped in, reeking of pot and followed by someone else, a boy of roughly his age. He was sort of handsome, this new arrival, his features even and well-placed but a little droopy, as if he were made of wax and had been left by some careless god to sit in the sun for a little too long. His close-cropped hair was nearly black. His dark brown eyes took in the place. He gave them a little smile and a little nod as he shuffled in behind Daniel.

“Hey,” he said to Misty. A massive revolver hung from his hip, an old cowboy number, by the looks of it. Just like that, it was the wild, wild west.

Misty said. “Crazy shit, huh, Samson?”

“Unbelievable.”

“How’s Huff?”

“You know him. Nothing gets him down.”

“Yeah,” Misty said, and for just a second there it seemed to Colleen that the world had been righted. They were on their road trip up to Tahoe, and they’d stopped at this rustic little dive for some Food and Gas and they were listening to two rubes talk about some third rube and how nothing ever got him down. Rube Number Three would keep on truckin, and so would they.

“Hungry?”

“Maybe in a little,” Samson said, turning to face Colleen. He smiled, less handsome now. His teeth were worse than Daniel’s. Tombstones. “Hey, there.”

“Hey,” Colleen said.

“Hey, man,” Guy said, moving forward and putting himself between Colleen and the new guy. It was an unnecessary move, but a cute one. She made a note to tease him about it later. If she got the chance.

“Samson Niebolt,” the new kid said, a little embarrassed. “After the guy in the Bible, if you were about to ask. My mom was weird. Just call me Sam, okay?”

“Sure,” Colleen said, a little uneasy. This Sam guy allowed his gaze to pass over all of them, but Colleen felt as if he were only really looking at her.

Another round of introductions later, they settled down and compared notes and watched television. Aside from a few radio reports, Sam wasn’t up to date on what was happening.

“…discuss your findings?” Asked an exhausted looking black man who Colleen remembered seeing in a report on the Watergate break-in.

“Yes, well,” said a man identified by the text on the screen as Doctor Robert Fuller, via satellite from New Orleans. He wore a crisp white lab coat above a suit and tie and thick glasses that reduced his eyes to small shiny points of light. He looked as exhausted and dazed as everyone else. He scratched his mustache, unmindful of the camera. “The revival window seems to be five to seven days.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Revivals worldwide happened at precisely the same time,” the doctor said, looking at his watch. “I don’t remember the time of occurrence off hand because I haven’t slept since then and I really could use some coffee.” He looked off screen, annoyed, holding an invisible cup to his mouth and making drinking motions.

“Doctor Fuller?”

Fuller shot a give-me-a-second glance into the camera. A disembodied hand passed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it, winced. “Fuckin’ hot. Jesus.”

“Doctor Fuller.”

“Yes,” the doctor said, facing the camera, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “You were saying?”

“You were explaining what you meant by this window of reviv-”

“Yes, the window of revival. The first corpses to revive, two days ago, had been dead for no longer than a week. The specimens we’ve seen thus far bear this out, and we’ve examined several corpses whose time of death—that is to say, o-original death—goes back a week and a half, two weeks, three weeks from the point of revival, and so on, and, well... well, there you go.”

“Are we any closer to—”

“That’s not to say that there isn’t some marginal brain activity in older corpses. There may very well be, and I’m pretty sure we’ll find out that there is, but this won’t matter for most people’s purposes. For whatever reason, these older intact corpses simply aren’t getting up and biting people.”

The camera held on Doctor Fuller while the newsman spoke: “Are we any closer to knowing what’s making this happen?” The doctor tried to sip his coffee again. Shaking his head, he tossed aside the cup, stood up, and walked away, trailing his microphone wire.

The image cut back to the frazzled newsman, who recapped what Fuller had said. Then, following yet another warning, they again rolled the montage of walking corpses, and everyone looked away. Everyone but Sam, who got up from the table and walked over to the counter for a closer look at the television.

“Wow,” Sam said, looking back at them, mouth open. “That’s just… man. Daniel told me about it when we were out there, but Jesus, there’s nothing like seeing it with your own eyes.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Misty said.

“Oh, get real, Mis,” Charles said. “It won’t be long before one of them comes walking down the road.”

“You should talk less,” Misty said.

“Ah, jeeze,” Guy said. “Can you turn it up?”

Misty turned up the volume. Standing in a deserted press chamber complete with empty chairs and a podium bearing the Presidential seal, a harried reporter elaborated on an earlier report that the Soviet Union had declared the use of nuclear weapons an “option” that was “on the table.”

“Use them on who?” Richard asked, looking around at them. “What the hell, man? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense.” Daniel said, turning on the condescension.

“A good time to live up in the hills,” said Charles, laughing and shaking his head.

Outside, the dog barked.

Daniel leaned close to his sister.

“What are we doing?” He asked, his voice low, his stale breath on her ear.

“I don’t know,” she said, picking at the tablecloth. “Waiting here?”

“Waiting here for what? If any more people show up, this place is going to get out of hand. You know it.”

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “But where can we—”

“Sam said we could stay at his place. He lives right up the hill.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He lives with his dad and brother. He says they got a few acres, and there’s only one road leading to the house. He says we could ride out the whole thing there.”

“What’s up?” Guy asked, leaning in close on her other side. She told him.

“I don’t know,” Guy said. He sounded unconvinced. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Colleen glanced over at Sam, who looked down at his hands, as if they were the most interesting things ever, curled as they were before the salt and pepper shakers. He’d been watching her. She opened her mouth to tell Daniel that they’d find some other way, and her words were interrupted by the sound of the bell above the entrance. The dog was frenzied.

“Hey, there,” Crate said, standing in the doorway, holding the rifle close to his chest, the barrel pointing at the ceiling. Colleen saw that she’d been right from the start: he was old. His early seventies, easy.

“What’s going on, Crate?” Misty asked.

“I just—Hush, Bilbo!” The dog quieted down, and Crate faced them once more. “Any of you want to come take a look at Mark Willits before I shoot him?”

The walking remains of Mark Willits were in bad shape. The dead man’s hair—oily black going to gray at the temples—was matted to its forehead with dirt and blood. Its face was slack, the skin pale and bluish. Its throat was ragged and bloody, as were its lips. The front of its shirt was smeared dark with blood and gristly little chunks of something. Some of the blood was its own, Daniel knew, and some was far too fresh to rightly be on such a dead man.

The thing’s right arm had been picked clean from the bicep down. Its left arm was in slightly better shape. A few bloody crescents were stamped into the meat of its forearm, and its fingers were intact. They slowly kneaded the air.

The corpse’s pants and underwear, also heavily bloodstained, were pooled around its right ankle. Its left shoe was gone, and the flesh above its rumpled sock was bulging and discolored with settling blood. Its genitals were gone.

In a few seconds, Crate’s words had sunk in, and then they all leapt up and made for the door. All except for Kimberly and Colleen, who’d held hands across the table. Kimberly, with tears in her eyes and a bubble of snot on her upper lip had said, quite simply: “I don’t want to.”

“Neither do I,” Colleen said, looking back at Daniel and Guy, who’d lingered near the door. Richard was long gone.

“I,” Guy had said, looking down for a second and then lifting his face to meet Colleen’s eyes. “I have to.”

A brisk nod had sufficed as Colleen’s blessing.

“Okay,” Crate said, looking back at them. Pacing near his master’s feet, the dog barked again, and dead Mark Willits reacted, its jaw dropping, its eyes shifting left and right with reptilian slowness. Though its mouth worked, it was silent. Save for the sound of its feet dragging through the gravel, the dead man made no noise.

“Bilbo Baggins,” Crate hissed, made a face at the dog. “You shut the hell up right now.” Bilbo whined and sat on his haunches and piped down, and Crate looked at them again. “Stay put. All of you.”

Samson took a few steps forward, his right hand resting atop the large pistol hanging from his belt.

“You, too, Lash La Rue.” The old man said, “You’ll get your shot before this is over.”

“Okay, Crate,” Misty said, worried. Dead Willits was no more than three feet away from the old man, its good arm extended.

“Humph,” Crate said. He lifted the rifle, pressed the barrel to Willits’s chest, just above the heart, and gave him a push. The dead man ambled backward, nearly losing its balance. “Nothing to worry about,” Crate yelled back, over his shoulder.

“I never really liked you,” Crate said to Willits, nudging it once more with the rifle, nudging and poking, hard. He pressed the dead man’s stomach, and a lifeless belch rattled in the thing’s throat. “Always talking bullshit.”

“Stop having fun and do it,” Misty said.

“I like having fun, woman,” Crate said. He pressed the barrel to the dead man’s heart once more and pulled the trigger. The report was muffled. Nothing happened. He stepped back a few feet, steadied the rifle, and squeezed off a round into its left knee-cap.

“Woo,” Crate said as Willits tottered and toppled and hit the ground face first, struggling like an infant to right itself. He stepped up to the fallen dead man, placed his left foot onto its back, pressed the barrel to its head, and pulled the trigger. Willits stopped moving even as everyone else jumped from the gun’s shout.

Crate looked back at them.

“Christ,” Richard said.

Guy gasped, like he’d been holding his breath. He looked a little pale.

Daniel understood how Guy felt. His head spun. He wasn’t ill. He didn’t think he was going to throw up. But he felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.

“Nope,” Crate said, stepping away from his kill. “I don’t think the news is making this up.”

“Ah, crap,” Misty said. “Is that Nelli?”

Another dead person shambled up the road.

“Looks like it,” Crate said. “Damn.”

“Mark’s daughter,” Samson said. “Nice girl.”

Nelli was in pretty much the same shape as her father: bluish white, covered in blood and bites and moving with slow, clumsy deliberation. The dead girl’s clothes had been ripped away—all that remained were the tattered collar and sleeves of its dress, its panties. Its shoes were gone, its socks were filthy. Its bare chest was a baby’s food-crusted bib.

Crate walked toward it, taking his time. He looked back at them, yelled to Misty: “I don’t see Mark Junior anywhere.”

Misty looked down at her feet, and Daniel wondered if maybe the chunks of meat clinging to Nelli’s bloodied chest were all they’d see of Junior.

“Okay,” Guy said beside him, his voice a dry croak. “I’ve seen enough.”

He went inside. The bell jingled. Crate leveled the rifle at the dead girl’s face, and Daniel looked away. The shot seemed louder than the others.

“We need to get out of here,” Guy said.

Colleen looked up at him and wiped tears from her face. Kimberly wept, her head lying atop her arms, which were folded atop the table. She looked like a kid taking a nap in class. “Where will we go?”

“I think maybe we should take that guy up on his offer.” He shrugged, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He rubbed the fingers and thumb of his right hand and thumb together, fast—something he only did when he was nervous. “I don’t know.”

“He’s weird.”

“He may be,” Guy said. “But what choice do—” The door jingled, and Daniel crept in. Before the door could fully close, Samson eased it open and stepped in behind him. Guy’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We don’t have much of a choice. We need to lay low someplace for a little while, before we…”

“You want to go home, too.” She said.

“I do,” Guy said. “I have to.”

“Aw, look at that,” Crate said from outside. He somehow sounded both disappointed and satisfied. “Here comes junior.”

Eight

Sam—he really didn’t like to be called Samson; Colleen could see it in his face whenever Misty called him by his complete first name—looked happy when they agreed to come back to his place.

“Far out,” he said, smiling at them. “We’ll have a good time. My dad sells doors and windows that he pulls out of old houses set for demolition. Refinishes them and sells way marked up. He and my little brother are down in Elk Grove right now, on a salvage run, but they should be back soon.”

“Is your dad going to mind us being there?” Colleen asked.

“Oh, no way.” Sam said, shaking his head and looking solemn. “He’s cool, man. We bring friends home all the time. Dad likes to party.”

No one said anything, and Sam’s smile relaxed. It really wasn’t party time. Colleen glanced at Guy, hoping to silently communicate what she’d told him not long ago: she didn’t like this kid. He was weird. Guy’s barely perceptible shrug was a reiteration of his previously-stated response to the matter: what choice did they have? Any port in a storm, and the dead were only going to keep coming to Misty’s.

The group talked idly, their conversation shifting back and forth from what was happening in the world to what they’d do once they got to Sam’s house, and Colleen tried to tune them out. Daniel mostly listened and watched. Kimberly, no longer crying but still watery-eyed and pale, sat close to Richard, whose eyes shifted over to the front door as if he expected a dead body to come stumbling through it at any second, and he wasn’t exactly crazy to suspect that.

Crate was outside cleaning his mess and keeping watch, Charles sat behind the counter, watching television, and Misty was in the kitchen, making a bit of a racket and filling the air with the scent of flame-broiled beef. Lunch was on her.

They ate their burgers and fries with little comment, aside from the obligatory restrained moans of satisfaction.

“Thank you,” Colleen said, despite the fact that her burger was too greasy, the fries were over-cooked, the bun was stale, and she was trying to be a vegetarian. “You didn’t have to do this for us.”

“She’s right,” Charles said from behind the counter, and Misty’s gentle expression crumbled into one of annoyance bordering on rage. “Get your ass from behind my counter and get out.”

“All I’m trying to say is—”

“Out,” Misty snapped. Charles winced, and Colleen realized that he and Misty were in some way involved with one another. Or had been. The casual hostility with which Misty spoke to him could come only from familiarity, from intimacy.

Charles took his time leaving. They finished their food, gathered and threw away their trash, and thanked Misty for her hospitality.

“It was nothing,” she said. “But I think I’m going to close up after you leave.”

“Yep, you should,” Sam said.

“I’ll be here if you need anything, though.” She spoke to all of them, flipping a thumb toward the back of the room. “Just go around back and knock.” She looked at Colleen, lowered her voice and leaned close. “Sorry about not having the napkins, honey.”

“It’s okay. I’ll make it,” Colleen said, glancing at the television screen. A live shot showed the Tel Aviv skyline. Fire churned, spitting black smoke into the night. “I hope so.”

Outside, Crate had piled what was left of the Willits family into an ugly heap and was dousing them with gasoline. Colleen got the briefest glimpse of Junior before looking away, and her impression was of an armless flayed thing, its face frozen in an expression of wide-eyed surprise, and of a madly grinning blood-shiny mouth, the lips either pulled back in a startled death-throe-rictus or simply chewed away.

Bilbo Baggins sniffed at a small pile of what must have been brain-matter, and Crate threatened to shoot him on the spot if he did a stupid fuck thing like eating that dead thing’s diseased brains. His tail between his legs, Bilbo padded into the shade beneath the awning and threw himself onto the weather-worn boards.

“Take it easy, Crate,” Sam said, crawling into the van behind Daniel.

“You, too.” He squinted at them, fluffing his beard with one boney hand. He lifted his rifle and gave it a little shake. “First line of defense right here. They’ll come from that way, if they come. You all should be safe up the hill. I’ll hold them off.”

“How many bullets you got,” Richard asked, walking past Crate, leading Kimberly along as if she were blind.

“Enough for every man, woman, and child in town.” He smiled. “About three or four times over.”

“Jesus,” Richard said.

“Him too.”

Daniel was the last of them to climb into the van. He slid the door shut and sank into the seat next to Sam. Crate returned to his kills, tossing on a little more fuel.

Guy backed the van into the road and looked into his rearview mirror. There were no dead people. A gush of fire engulfed the Willits heap, and Harlow fell behind them. The trees pressed in, and the road twisted, angling upward.

“How far up?” Guy asked.

“About two miles, I think,” Sam said. “Not far. I’ll let you know.”

Colleen turned on the radio. A weary-sounding black man with the vocal affectations of an evangelical preacher was urging people to work together, to stop fighting, and to face the crisis at hand with faith and solidarity. She pressed a tape into the player, listened to about five seconds of Black Sabbath before turning off the radio.

“Everything is going to be okay,” Sam said, sounding a little too happy. Colleen turned around to face him, and she wondered if she was able to conceal her dislike for their new friend. His smile faltered, and she knew she had not been successful.

She did not care.

“Why do you say that?” She asked.

“I just do,” he said, shrugging. “Because I feel it. We’re going to be okay. You’re going to relax, and we’re going to be okay. And that—” he wagged a hand in the direction of the radio “—is all going to pass us by, just like every other horrible thing in the world has come and gone.”

“You really think so?” Kimberly asked.

“I do,” he said, holding his gaze on Colleen a little longer than he needed to before turning to face Kimberly. “We have the advantage. We’re up here, away from the cities and the hatred and the desperation.”

There was a joyous calm to his voice, the kind she imagined she’d hear in the confident tones of the pussy-hunting campus guru, or in the hushed proclamations of a religious zealot. Is that where they were going? To some oddball religious commune? Was Samson Niebolt going to try and woo them onto his dick with nonsense whispers of the hills and the trees sheltering them from the storm?

Kimberly looked at Sam with something like hope. Colleen faced forward. She looked at Guy and didn’t bother trying to whisper.

“We’re not staying long.”

She shifted her weight, uncomfortable. She could feel her flow increasing, feel her pad, her one last pad, goddammit, growing heavy with menstrual blood.

“Right up here,” Sam said.

The small handmade sign said NIEBOLT DOORS AND WINDOWS, and the narrow road was unpaved, just two well-worn wheel-ruts matted with pine needles. The van rocked and swayed up the hill. A dilapidated shed eased by on their right, and then the ground leveled out and the house came into view, a sprawling ranch-style brick structure that was easily fifteen or twenty years old. It looked completely out of place, as if it some giant had plucked it up from suburb on the outskirts of L.A. and Frisbee-tossed it up into the redwoods.

“It’s kind of funny,” Sam said. “My mom’s idea. She wanted a house that looked like a real house, is what my dad said she told him. I’m not quite sure what that means, but…”

“Is your mother…” Kimberly said, leaving her query unfinished.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “She died when I was five. In childbirth.”

“Oh, God,” Kimberly said, and Colleen knew that her friend was all but in Sam’s bed. “That’s horrible. Did the baby live?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, looking pleased and proud. “Connor. You’ll meet him. He’s, like, totally crazy, but I love the little bastard.”

Kimberly laughed for the first time in what seemed like forever, and Colleen looked at Richard in an effort to find some understanding in his eyes, some knowledge of what was happening. If such knowledge existed, she could not find it.

Guy brought the van to a halt beside the house and looked back at Sam, eyebrows raised. Sam nodded.

They filed out of the van. The road they were on continued, past the house, past several well-kept sheds, arcing right, vanishing into the trees.

“Where are the windows and doors?” Daniel asked, doing his patented head-whip.

“Back there,” Sam said, lifting a hand toward the sheds. “His workshop is further up the road. He makes cabinets and tables, and my mom had him build his shop way up the hill so she wouldn’t have to hear him sawing and hammering.”

There was a light breeze and the air smelled of smoke. Colleen looked in the direction from which they’d come, at the trail sloping away until the woods swallowed it, and for the third time in less than twenty-four hours she was overcome with the certainty that she was safe. She was safe and they were safe, and they would remain safe for as long as they stayed put. This time, however, her certainty did not seem desperate or irrational.

For reasons that she or anyone else may never know, the dead were getting up and society was falling apart. By providence or blind and meaningless coincidence, they were in the middle of nowhere when the shit hit the fan, miles away from any major population center, not home in Fresno. And they were safe.

They’d heard no news regarding their home town, but she knew it would vary only in small, inconsequential details from the news coming out of every major city on the face of the earth. She wondered if she would ever see her house, and again came the thought of her mother, not really dead and not really alive, lying in darkness six feet beneath freshly churned dirt.

Sam helped unload their luggage, which he placed in the dim entry room of the squat brick house he apparently shared with his father and brother. The place looked nicer on the outside than it did inside. The tile floor was dirty. To the left, just inside the front door, an old umbrella leaned in the corner, a heap of dirt-crusted boots lying before it, their laces splayed and entangled. The walls were bare. An empty vase sat atop a featureless little table. It was one of those quiet houses with a loud clock. A bead curtain obscured the dimly-lit room beyond the vestibule.

They followed Sam through the beads and into a large living room that smelled stale like the inside of the confessional at St. Anthony’s. Sam clicked on a lamp. The place hadn’t been redecorated since the fifties. With its boxy art deco cabinet and nearly round screen, the television sitting atop four skinny legs across from the stained and sprung couch looked to Colleen like it may have been older than the house.

“That thing work?” Daniel asked, reading her mind.

Sam made a face. “Not so great, man, but we never watch it all that much, anyway.”

There was a low coffee table between the couch and the television, its surface furry with dust.

“You can all crash here, I guess,” Samson said. “No one really stays here anymore, not since mom died. Dad lives in his workshop, mostly, but he still comes down here when he misses her. It’s pretty sad.”

“Where do you and your brother stay?”

“My dad built us all a little place further up the road. I’ll show you later.”

The place felt like a frozen moment, a fading memory grown soft around the edges and losing definition.

“I think I’d just as soon set up our tents and enjoy the fresh air,” Guy said, and Daniel murmured his assent. “We really don’t want to impose.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “I don’t blame you. The place is a mess. You can’t camp out forever, though, so maybe we can clean up a bit later on, right?”

“Maybe so,” Guy said. “Is there a phone here?”

“There is, in the kitchen, but it’s disconnected.”

“Okay,” Guy said, after a moment. “Is there a phone that isn’t disconnected?”

“Up at my dad’s workshop, yeah, but I don’t think you’ll reach anyone. I think they’re all dead now.”

“I’d still like to try.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “We’ll head up that way in a bit. Last stop of the tour. Come on.”

“Wait,” Colleen said. “Can I use the bathroom?”

Sam looked uncertain for a second, uncertain and maybe a little worried, and then he brightened. “Of course.” He indicated the hallway at the other end of the living room. “First door on the right.”

Three of the four bulbs were dead, and the remaining one burned weakly behind frosted glass, offered little light. A dingy shower curtain concealed a claw-foot bathtub that seemed out of place even here, and the toilet bowl was dry, the water having long since evaporated, leaving behind a brown ring as the only evidence that it had been there at all.

Colleen pressed the plunger and watched as the bowl filled with the stagnant contents of the toilet tank. Pipes gurgled and knocked. She waited for the tank to refill completely and then flushed again.

In the cabinet beneath the sink, she found a roll of toilet paper and a stack of neatly folded face-cloths. She placed the toilet paper on the counter and took one of the towels from the middle of the stack. She thought about it for a second, took four more, and pressed them into her pockets. She removed a fifth towel and wiped down the toilet seat with it.

A few minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom, having disposed of her bloated and leaking pad and replaced it with one of the face-cloths.

In the living room, Sam tried to get the television to work. The screen displayed only a dim haze of snow. He battered the side of the old beast and tussled with the rabbit ears, and a voice and face emerged from the snow, another grim network newscaster.

“…dent Nixon is urging Americans to cooperate with local and state law enforcement. Sources close to the President say that tonight’s speech will outline his administration’s ‘plan of attack’ regarding the current situation, in addition to addressing concerns over recent statements by Russian President Nikolai Podgorny that—”

The rabbit-ears tipped backward and rattled to the floor behind the television, and the blizzard returned.

“Eh,” Sam said, turning off the television. The circle of snow shrank to a small wavering point of light. “We’ll get it working later, come on.”

They followed him out of the house and up the trail.

“He’s got a few hundred unfinished doors in there,” Sam said, indicating one of the sheds. “Some of them are good, but most of them are no good for anything but a nice big bonfire. We do that sometimes.”

They passed another shed, and Sam droned on about his father’s doors and windows, but Colleen tuned him out. Daniel moved close and tugged her shirt once.

“What?”

“How are you?” He asked, giving her his best puppy dog face.

“I’m fine.”

“Still mad at me?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m sorry, okay,” he said, and she rolled his words over in her mind a few times. Not the words themselves, but the tone in which they were uttered. He sounded like he meant it.

“Okay,” she said.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I already did it.”

“Did what?”

She nodded toward Sam. “Stole a few facecloths from his bathroom.”

Daniel laughed, and things were okay between them again. Maybe things wouldn’t stay okay between them for long, but they were okay between them for now, and that made her happy. Guy looked back with confusion on his face, and she stepped away from her brother.

“What’s funny?”

“Just patching things up with my idiot brother, is all.”

“He is an idiot,” Guy said. “But that’s good.”

They walked a bit more, and Colleen’s thighs and calves burned. The incline was gradual, but it was taking its toll on her underused leg muscles.

“Where the hell are we going?” Richard asked, stopping to reach down and massage his right calf. Colleen wasn’t the only one feeling it.

“Just a little more. I want to show you something.”

A little further along, they came across the first of the doors: thick metal beasts with small glass windows inlaid with wire mesh, rust-spotted and stacked three or four thick and leaning against several of the young redwoods that made up this part of the forest.

“What’s this about?” Daniel said, stepping up to one of the doors and touching the small window placed into the door at head height. Beneath the window, the number 17, now faded from exposure to the elements, had been painted. “These come from a prison or something?”

“You’d think so,” Sam said. “I thought the same thing, too, but they’re just from a school. Dad got them cheap, but now they’re rotting out here.”

“This what you wanted to show us, man?” Daniel said. “Some doors leaning against trees?”

“No, no,” Sam said. “I mean, yeah, I wanted to show you this, but I really want to show you where I live.”

“How far is it?”

“Not much. And when we get there, we’ll tighten our wigs, okay? All of us.”

“Okay,” Daniel said, sounding less annoyed.

Kimberly looked back at Colleen and, eyebrows raised, mouthed the words: “Tighten our wigs?”

Colleen pinched her thumb and forefinger together before her lips, sucking in her cheeks.

“Oh, yeah,” Kimberly said. “Good.”

The ground leveled out again, and three small cabins came into view, one in the center, at the end of the road, and one on either side of the path. There was a pick-up truck parked next to the cabin on the left.

Colleen took Guy’s hand and stopped. Kimberly looked back at them, and Colleen waved them on.

“We’ll catch up.”

“What’s on your mind?” Guy asked, stroking her cheek.

“I miss you,” she said, trying to gather together everything that was on her mind and say it in some way that made sense.

“You want to rest here a little while and then hit the road?” Guy said.

Colleen was momentarily confused, unsure if he meant here, in the middle of the road, or here, at Sam’s father’s place.

“I don’t know,” She said, after realizing he’d meant the latter. “I don’t think so. I don’t like Sam, but I think we’re safe here for now.”

“And then we’ll go home.”

“Home,” she said, and just like that, she needed him. She needed his mouth on hers, his arms around her. She needed to touch him and to be touched by him, and she cursed her body for betraying her with its poorly-timed reliability. She had friends who didn’t let their periods stop them—they’d fuck while lying naked on the grass somewhere or they’d spread a beach towel on the bed, or something, but that wasn’t for her and it wasn’t for him. It hadn’t been for her before, anyhow, but now?

In the face of what was happening, did it make sense that she was suddenly horny? That she wanted to find a clearing somewhere and bloody fuck like her nasty friends or, if Guy refused, simply pin him against a tree somewhere and suck his cock? She needed him inside her, one way or another, needed the comfort of that wet and awkward act to confirm that some things were as they should be, and there was happiness to be found.

“I can’t stop thinking of Chris, and I want to scream,” he said, and unknowingly shamed her. “He must be so scared. And my mom, God.”

“Your dad will take care of them.”

“I know,” he said, his eyes losing focus. He blinked several times, and she saw that he was crying. They pulled each other close and stayed that way until Guy told her that they should catch up.

Daniel and the others were in the clearing, laughing over something. Richard rubbed his calves, and Kimberly was doing squats.

“Damn good workout,” Guy said.

“I’m used to it,” Sam said, putting his fists on his hips like Superman.

“I’m not,” Richard said, sitting down in the dirt.

The curtains in the window of the cabin to their right fluttered. Colleen opened her mouth to say something, and her words became a scream. The door leading into the center cabin burst open, and a man with a shotgun rushed at them.

“Get down,” he screamed, sweeping the shotgun left and right and kicking Richard in the face. Head low, Sam walked over to the man and stood behind him, pulling the cowboy revolver from his belt. “Get the fuck down, all of you.”

Colleen screamed and Kimberly screamed, and though she held onto Guy, strong hands pried her away and pressed her to the ground. Richard rolled in the dirt, his hands pressed to his face, blood flowing between his fingers.

More men appeared, each brandishing a shotgun, and Colleen screamed and screamed, and someone punched her in the stomach. She tasted dirt and rolled onto her side and squeezed her eyes shut.

“God,” someone screamed. It might have been Guy or it might have been Richard, but it wasn’t Daniel, she knew that much, because she heard him crying. Kimberly’s squeals became pained and inhuman, and their attackers laughed and taunted and roared with animal pleasure.

“Hold him down,” someone said, and Colleen heard what sounded like the hollow-metal thud.

“No, no, please—” It sounded like Guy.

“Why the hell are you—” Daniel.

“…going to fucking kill you, you son—” It was Guy.

“Going to what, man?”

“Whose is he?”

“Right there.” This sounded like Samson.

Kimberly’s screams crumbled into sharp, muffled gasps, and now someone’s fist balled into Colleen’s hair and wrenched her head back.

“Open your eyes.” A growl.

“You’re going to kill me?”

The whoof of exhalation that could only come from a blow to the stomach, and still Daniel wept somewhere, between blows.

“He said open your eyes.” Hot breath in her ears and large hands on her face, fingers prying open her eyes. She jerked her head left and right, thrashing, slamming it backward in the hopes of busting a lip or smashing a nose. No luck, and through the tear-streaked flicker of her eyelids she saw two men pinning Guy to the side of the truck while another knelt before him, a shotgun resting in the dirt beside him.

“Come on,” someone said, and: “Wow, man, I’m impressed.” And: “God, no, please no, please God…” And: “No, no. Please, no. No, no, no.”

Colleen squeezed her eyes shut and screamed until her screams became one with the screams of those around her. The fist in her hair tightened, and she was lifted and dragged forward.

“Open your eyes,” someone said.

“Open them, you cunt.”

She did. Shriveled and pale, Guy’s genitals were inches from her face. She could smell him. She looked up, and through her tears found his face, his eyes.

He tried to say something, but it was little more than an animal growl. Tears streamed down his face. The cords stood out in his neck. He struggled. He was strong. They were stronger.

“Put it in your mouth.”

She screamed, and her face was thrust into Guy’s crotch.

“Do it.”

She opened her mouth, took him in, sobbing around Guy’s limp penis.

“Do it,” the voice screamed, the fist at the back of her head a knot of pain.

She closed her lips around Guy and worked him, gasping. Unseen, those around her yelped and hooted. Someone screamed, raw and incoherent and insane.

“Why?”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s it.”

“Stop stop stop.”

“Open your fucking eyes.” Again her eyelids were pried open. Guy’s penis was small and pitiful, his testicles tight and close to his body. A large hand reached in and seized Guy’s penis, tugging it forward. A blade flashed, and Guy roared in pain and someone laughed and Colleen screamed and screamed, her eyes clenched, her mind collapsing.

One of them smeared something warm and wet across her face, tried to press it into her mouth, but she locked her jaw and wrenched her head away. Another blow to the stomach, and she gasped and one of their attackers crammed something—god, oh god it can’t be it can’t be—into her mouth. She wretched and gagged and it fell from her mouth and onto the ground between her splayed fingers.

A heavy boot pushed her to the ground. Colleen rolled, her head lolling, the stink of blood in her nose, her mouth filled with its taste. Guy’s dick lay curled and bloody and dirt-speckled on the ground. She frantically smeared blood from her lips.

And then thunder. Thunder and blood, and one of their attackers crumpled to the ground, a ragged hole in his chest. She rolled and clambered to her feet, and then someone was on her, hammering her back and neck and face and head. She struggled, but not for long.

Nine

He rolled through the small business district of Citrus Heights, eyes forward, trying to ignore what he saw. There were dead bodies in the streets, both walking and strewn across the road in tatters. Eyes forward, on the road, and a dead woman with a bloody smear for a face lifted its mouth from the open belly of a large dog to watch him pass. A bearded man clutching a small pistol walked toward her. Reggie rolled on, barely heard the pop of the gun behind him.

A heap of bodies burned in the parking lot of an In-n-Out, and a group of armed men clustered around a pick-up truck, stuffing their faces with burgers and fries, knocking them down with sodas. They tried to flag him down. Maybe they just wanted to ask him something—to see if he’d passed through Sacramento, perhaps, or if he knew just how bad things were on the interstate. Maybe they wanted to know what he was doing in their town. Maybe they wanted to pull a nigger from his truck and add him to the pyre. Who knew?

He wasn’t taking any chances. He kept on keeping on, and no one followed him. He wondered if maybe he should have taken a chance and stopped. He was getting hungry.

A line of abandoned cars and trucks blocked his path to the highway, stopped him in his tracks and cranked his heartbeat up a notch or two. His sideview mirrors were empty for now. If this were a trap, it had been abandoned. He contemplated pushing through, but the blockade was two cars deep, and he did not want to get stuck. He had no choice but to leave the main road. He consulted his map, and when he looked up, he saw three dead bodies walking toward his truck. One of them, an older man with a sunken stomach and a black and bulging post-mortem erection, was naked. One, a child still wearing a baseball hat, dragged its twisted right foot behind. Its small right arm dangled and spun from a thin strand of gristle. The third, trundling up the rear, was an obese man wearing only a pair of shorts. His enormous belly had been ripped open. Yellow fat and purple innards bulged.

Reggie turned left, slowly passing the dead bodies, which lifted their arms in an unintentional display of supplication, slack-jawed peasants begging for even a scrap of moldy bread. The small business district fell behind him. He passed an abandoned gas station. A hand-lettered sign taped to the pumps declared:

OUT OF GAS

PRAY TO JESUS!

He consulted his map once more.

“Shit and fuck,” he said, tracing a finger along Hazel Avenue. He was approaching the American River. There were two small bridges between him and Highway Fifty. If one of them was closed or cut off, he just might be fucked.

“Oh, well,” he said “Cross ‘em when I get to ‘em.” He turned right into a neighborhood comprised of small ranch style houses. Barring any unexpected obstructions, this was the quickest route to Hazel Avenue, which would take him south to a place called Nimbus, where he’d get onto Fifty.

Half the neighborhood had flown the coop, if the empty driveways were any indication. Aside from a few smashed windows, there was no sign of the wholesale looting and pillaging mentioned on the radio. Curtains parted and frightened faces watched his passage. A few folks had been smart enough to nudge their cars or trucks right up against their houses, barricading their front doors while making a quick escape easy.

He turned on the radio, caught the tail-end of a report from the Middle East. Over the past twelve hours, the powder keg of Israel had erupted. Within days, someone from within the PLO was reported to have said, Israel would be no more, and her people would be killing themselves upon the sands where the land met the sea. Gerald Ford said that Israel’s allies would not forsake her in this time of trouble. When asked about Vietnam, he was terse: complete withdrawal from Vietnam was possible within weeks. American troops were needed right here, in the cities and streets of the United States of America. No one challenged the contradiction inherent in his words.

“Mother fuckers,” Reggie said, not entirely sure who he was cursing, and that’s when he saw the kid. Just a chubby white kid riding a yellow bicycle with blue wheels up and down the deserted street. It was a girl’s bike with a banana seat. Sparkly tassels hung from the handlebars.

As Reggie passed him, the kid looked up and flashed a listless smile. Ignoring the guy and his dog on the interstate had been one thing, but this?

“Dammit,” he said, bringing the truck to a halt. He looked around. The coast was clear. He watched the kid approach the truck in his side-view mirror.

Beneath Reggie’s window, the kid brought the bike to a halt in style, braking hard with his right foot and planting his left foot on the ground, his back wheel skidding a blue half-circle across the concrete.

“Nice move, kid,” Reggie said, rolling down his window. “Now what the hell are you doing?”

“Riding my bike.”

“I can see that, but what the hell are you doing? Don’t you know what’s going on?”

“Yeah,” the kid said, and Reggie could see from the look in his eyes that he wasn’t very smart. He looked dull and stupid, like the kind of kid who would grow up to kick his dog and punch his wife, and Reggie cursed himself for stopping. To hell with this dumb white boy. He had a daughter to get home to. “Dead people are coming back to life.”

“Right.” Reggie said, opening the door and getting out. “So why are you out here on your bike?”

“I don’t know.” The kid shrugged. His eyes fell to the pistol at Reggie’s hip. “I guess I wanted to see one for myself.”

“Have you?”

“Yeah,” the kid said. “There’s one down at the end of the road. It’s trying to get up. I think a car hit it. Its guts are all smooshed out.” He made a face.

“There are more back that way,” Reggie said, tossing a thumb over his shoulder.

“You use that yet?” The kid’s eyes were still on Reggie’s Colt.

“No,” Reggie said, looking around. “You should be home right now.”

“I guess so,” the kid said. “Do you think you will?”

“Will what?”

“Use your gun.”

“Jesus, kid, I don’t know.” Now it was his turn to shrug. Why the hell was he wasting his time like this? “Probably.”

“You should go down the road,” the kid said, turning in place, looking back toward the end of the road. “Thataway. Shoot the thing. It’s pretty sad.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Can I come see?”

“That something you want to see?”

“I dunno.” The kid scrunched up his face. “I guess so.”

“You don’t,” Reggie said. “It’s nothing you ever want to see. Where’s your house?”

“Back there,” the kid said, tossing his thumb over his shoulder in obvious imitation of Reggie.

“Are your parents home?”

“My dad moved out last year,” the kid said. Somewhere far away, a machine gun ripped through someone or something. The kid winced, crouching.

“Where’s your mother?”

“She left.” The kid stared into space, his eyes going distant. More gunfire. The kid snapped back, looked Reggie in the eye. “She drinks a lot. She ran out of Blue Nun. She went to the store to get more.”

“Jesus,” Reggie said. “How long ago?”

“You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain, mister.”

“How long ago?”

“I dunno. This morning. She told me to stay inside, but…” He shrugged.

“Damn it,” Reggie said.

“You think she’s dead?”

“I’m going to take you home, okay?”

“You think she’s dead?”

“I don’t know, kid. I’m just going—you got a name?”

“Steven.”

“I’m just going to take you home, Steven, and then I’m going to go. My little girl is waiting for me.”

“How old is she?”

“Seven,” Reggie said, remembering the last time he spoke to her. The radio said that the phones were out across most of the country, but suddenly he had to try. At the very least he had to try. “How old are you?”

“Eleven. What’s her name?”

“Nefertiti.”

“Weird name,” the kid said, and looked instantly sorry. “I mean, it’s kind of pretty.”

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get you home.”

“I just live a few blocks that way,” the kid said, flapping his hand in the direction of his house. “I can get there.”

“I’m sure you can,” Reggie said. “But I’m going to take you, anyway. And you’re gonna stay inside. Give me this.” Reggie put his hands on the bike’s handlebars.

“What do you want with my bike?”

“I’m just going to strap it to the back of the truck. Do you know if your phone is wor—”

“Hey,” someone shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

Reggie turned, and it was too late to go for his Colt. The guy standing in the door of one of the houses that Reggie had taken to be abandoned had him in the sights of his hunting rifle.

“I’m helping the kid, man,” Reggie said, freezing, raising his hands. “Just put the gun down and—”

“You fucking sick bastard,” the guy said. His voice was slurred, and he was having trouble holding the rifle steady. Jesus, is that how people everywhere were reacting to this? By getting shit-faced?

“Listen, man, I was just—”

“You were just trying to get your dirty black hands on a little white boy, is what you were doing, you sick faggot. Get on your bike and go home, kid.”

“Do it,” Reggie said, glancing at the kid.

“Is that what you were…” the kid began, letting his words trail off. He looked at Reggie, fear and confusion dawning on his face.

“Jesus Christ, no, kid, now would you—”

The guy opened fire, squeezed off five frenzied shots. At least two of them struck Reggie’s truck.

It was over quickly: Reggie leapt to his left, dropping and rolling and pulling his gun. His first two shots went wild, turning brick into powder and shattering a window. The last one caught the asshole in the stomach. The rifle hit the ground and the guy followed, wailing, his hands pressed to his belly.

Reggie got to his feet, looked around. The kid lay on his side in a spreading pool of blood, gasping. Reggie dropped to his knees and inspected the damage. The bullet had missed the kid’s heart, but judging by the sound of his breathing it had collapsed one of his lungs. Reggie could not find an exit wound. The bullet had bounced around inside the kid’s ribcage.

“Hey, Steven.” Reggie took his hand. The kid was going to be dead within minutes. “Just close your eyes and take a nap, okay? You’re going to be fine.”

The kid’s eyes found him, and his body jerked. He tried to get away from Reggie.

“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Reggie said. “You have to know that.”

The kid coughed, his lips glistening red. A line of blood ran from his right nostril. There was fear in his eyes, and then the fear was gone and there was nothing there at all. His chest heaved and rattled. There was a rush of blood and bile from his mouth, and then it was over.

“Damn it,” Reggie said, standing up. Behind him, the asshole was on his knees, trying to grasp his rifle with blood-slick fingers.

“Aggh,” he said, dropping the gun and falling back onto his ass. Reggie stomped toward him.

“You no good piece of shit,” Reggie said, seizing the man by the shirt, pulling him to his feet, and slamming him into the doorframe—once, twice, again, again. The man reeked of blood and shit.

“I was just helping him,” Reggie screamed, nose to nose with the man, who sputtered and yelped and clutched Reggie’s wrists. Reggie tossed him to the ground, glowering. He paced back and forth on the lawn and, deciding, grabbed a handful of the man’s hair and dragged him over to where the dead boy lay.

“What are you—” the man said, and Reggie kicked him in the ribs. He thought about kicking him in the stomach but didn’t want a foot covered in shit and blood.

“You deserve this,” he said, and crouched beside the man. He closed his right hand around the asshole’s throat. “You fucking deserve this.”

He let go, stood, and walked back toward the man’s house. He stopped to pick up the hunting rifle, a well-kept pre-’64 Winchester. A good gun.

“Help me,” the man said, weeping. “I’m sorry.”

Pistol raised, Reggie entered the man’s house and closed the door behind him. He stepped into the dimly lit living room. Against the wall, a large color television displayed the image of a burning building. Reggie glanced at the television and stepped into the kitchen. Placing the Winchester onto the couch, he walked to the sink and threw up.

Outside, the asshole screamed.

Reggie checked every one of the rooms, yelling out that any bastards hiding in here better throw their guns down and come out or he’d murder them on the spot. The place was empty. There were no family photos on the walls. A stack of magazines with names like DUDE and SWANK sat atop the toilet tank.

Back in the living room, Reggie sat down on the chair before the television and buried his face in his hands, tried to steady his breathing, to get his hands to stop shaking.

Why the hell had he stopped? The kid would be alive now, and the lonely son of a bitch outside would maybe be rubbing one out into the toilet right now instead of getting ripped apart.

Reggie lifted his face. There was a small table next to the chair. On it sat a lamp, a TV GUIDE, a half-empty bottle of Jack, and a telephone.

The lamp was off, the TV GUIDE was of no use, and the Jack lit a fire in his belly. Knowing what he’d hear, he picked up the receiver and brought it to his ear.

There was a dial tone.

He dialed home, cursing the slowness of the rotary dialer, pushing each number along. There was a distant-sounding click followed by the faint ghost chatter of someone else’s frenzied conversation, and then the phone rang. And rang. On the eighth ring, someone picked up. Reggie’s heart sank as quickly as his hopes had risen: a pre-recorded message informed him that all circuits were busy. He hung up.

In the kitchen, he found paper bags in the pantry and filled four of them with provisions: canned goods—beans and soup and, God help him, SPAM—and dry cereal and potato chips. Bottled soda and a half-eaten loaf of bread. A jar of pickles from the fridge. A can opener from the drawer next to the sink. A fork, a spoon, and a knife from the drawer next to that one.

He arranged the grocery bags beside the front door, walked into the living room, and tried the phone once more. Same story.

Outside, the asshole was still alive, lying on his side and curled into a ball, whimpering, quivering in shock, his arms shielding his face and head. Steven gnawed on a deflated length of intestine trailing from his stomach. The dead kid with the baseball cap sat beside him, tugging something from the asshole’s stomach with his one good hand. They looked like best buddies sitting there like that, and Reggie wondered if they’d known each other.

The naked dead man was fifteen or so feet away. The fat one wearing shorts trundled along behind it. Steven looked up at him with stupid awareness, a knot of gut-rope hanging down across his chin. The other kid dropped the glistening thing it had pulled from the asshole’s stomach, picked it up. Dropped it.

“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he told Steven, and blew the top of the dead kid’s head off. He put another bullet between the eyes of the one-armed kid, and then pointed the barrel of the gun at the asshole’s head.

“Puh-puh-puh.”

“You don’t deserve this,” Reggie said, and shot him.

Reggie walked toward the naked dead man, put a bullet between its eyes. He climbed into this truck, started it up, and backed it into the dead man’s yard. He loaded most of the supplies he’d stolen from the man’s house into his truck and then went back inside. He rummaged around until he found the rounds for the rifle. He inspected the window he’d shattered when returning the asshole’s fire, and then he realized that the guy probably wasn’t as asshole—just scared and stupid. What was he supposed to have thought, seeing Reggie taking the kid’s bike?

“Dammit,” Reggie said. Wanting to hit the road, to get to his daughter as quickly as possible, he instead sank into the chair before the television and brought the bottle of Jack to his lips. For now, it might be best to just lie low.

Reggie watched television and drank himself into a stupor but he never fell asleep. He tried to—he closed his eyes and tried to push everything out of his mind, but sleep would not come. At some point during the night he got up from the chair and went to the window, watched dead bodies shuffle by in the buzzing glow of the streetlight. Then he watched more television, tried and failed to fall asleep.

He rose from the chair in the quiet hour before dawn, ate food from the fridge, freshened up in the dead man’s bathroom, and was on the road by sunrise.

Ten

“I’m locking up,” Misty said, and Crate looked up at her from his place on the bench. His rifle rested across his scrawny legs. Bilbo Baggins slept at his feet, snoring.

“Yeah?” Crate said, looking away, squinting.

“Yeah,” she said, lifting the neck of her shirt and covering her nose and mouth. “God. How can you stand it?”

The air reeked of cooked meat. When she was a kid growing up in Mississippi, her grandfather roasted whole hogs on the spit after church on Sundays. Folks would come from all around town, and the smell in the air brought her back. She need only close her eyes, and it was like she was there. But the smell on the air was the smell of what was left of the Willits family, and that was wrong.

“Eh,” Crate said, sounding a little confused. “It’s really not all that bad a smell, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at her. “Don’t you think?”

“I’m gonna lock up now, okay?”

“I still remember how to let myself in, woman,” the old man said, scratching his beard. “That piece of shit staying?”

“I think so,” she said. Crate was right. Charlie was a piece of shit, but he was a well-meaning piece of shit. And he was better company than her husband had been in years. “He isn’t admitting it, but I think he’s scared.”

“No shit,” Crate said, tapping his long fingernails on the stock of his rifle. “We’re all scared, honey. But being scared ain’t no reason to be a fucking coward, and that’s all he ever was.”

“I’ll be in the back, Crate.”

“I’ll try to remember to knock,” he said, looking up at her with that look in his eyes, the one that said he was about to say something hurtful. “Don’t really want to walk in on you sucking his little yellow dick.”

“That’s nice,” she said, deciding that defending herself wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot. She messed around with Charlie sometimes, when both of them couldn’t really take messing around by themselves any longer; she couldn’t remember the last time Crate was interested in sex. None of them were very happy about the whole thing, but beggars could not be choosers, and sometimes you just needed to sleep beside someone other than yourself. “Try not to fall asleep out here, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m serious,” she said. He slept out here all the time, sometimes so deeply that, upon discovering him, several of her customers had come into her store to inform her that the old dude on the porch had died. “It’s dangerous.”

“Really now,” he said, and the look in his eyes was the look she used to see just before he would hit her. She saw the look at least five times a week now, but Creighton Mumsford hadn’t raised a hand in anger to her in nearly two decades, long before they’d stopped fucking. “How damned stupid do you think I am? Get your ass inside before I shoot you and burn you for one of those things. No one would know, Misty.”

“Maybe you should just lie down and take a nap,” she said. With her shirt over her nose, she could still smell the burnt-hog aroma of Mark Willits and family, only mingled with the scent of her own body. Sweat and armpits and the burgeoning stench of old age. “You want me to get you a pillow?”

“Run along,” he said, pursing his thin lips and miming fellatio with his knotty right hand. He belched into his mouth, his sunken cheeks puffing. He blew it out and made a face. “Whoo,” he said, waving at the air in front of his face. “That’s rotten.”

She closed the door and locked it, wondering how long it would be before things got worse. On the television, things were getting worse everywhere, and she’d lived long enough to know that things never really got better. The bad shit merely took time off, every so often, giving you a chance to feel like things were looking up. But they weren’t. They never were. And now, well—there would probably be no more time off for the bad shit.

She turned the sign around, letting the world know that Misty’s Food and Gas was CLOSED, by God. Not that the sign would do any good. Locals knew to come around back and bother her, and, given the current state of things, newcomers looking to stock up in preparation for the end of the world would simply let themselves in. If Crate didn’t shoot them, of course. And judging by the look in his eyes after he’d taken out the pitiful things that had, only this morning, been the Willits, he’d almost certainly enjoy it.

After the kids from Fresno had driven away with Samson Niebolt, there had been no more dead visitors from Beistle. “Why would there?” Crate had said, an hour later, after she’d wondered aloud why that might be. “Mark and his kids were coming home. Whatever it was that they’d become, they still knew where home was, honey.”

“That’s…” she’d said, unable to finish.

“That’s goddamn awful is what it is,” Crate had said, his eyes haunted. He’d placed a hand on her knee.

It had been three hours since Junior had shown up and the kids from Fresno had gone up to the Niebolt property to smoke dope and mess around. The television said the same shit, only worse, worse and worse by the hour. She stepped behind the counter and retrieved the bottle of Jamaican rum she kept on the bottom shelf. She fished around for her glass, couldn’t find it, and opted to take her poison straight from the source.

“…can’t stress this enough, people.” An angry-looking man with a shiny bald head, thick glasses that seemed to catch and hold the studio lights, and a ratty salt-and-pepper beard yelled on the television screen. “These are dead people. How and why the dead are returning to some reduced form of life is something we haven’t figured out yet, but it’s a fact, despite what this godforsaken imbecile sitting across from me is saying. I know it—”

The godforsaken imbecile tried to cut in, but the bald guy ran him down with words.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard for some of you to believe this,” he said, looking into the camera. “I mean, how many people in this country believe that a Jew who died two thousand years ago is still alive and planning his big comeback special. Come on, people, let’s just look at the facts—”

Misty turned off the television. Bottle in hand, she went into the back.

Charlie lay across the bed. He’d taken off his shoes, and the bottoms of his socks were dirty. His shirt was tight against his large belly. The fingers of his right hand were closed around the neck of a bottle of gin. On the television, the guy she’d silenced out front continued his personal crusade against stupidity.

“...I am calm, you brick-headed son of a bitch,” he said, his upper lip curled back in disgust. “I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. With all you’ve seen, with all each and every one of us has seen, you’re going to tell me that—”

“I’m just saying that we don’t have the facts yet, is all.” His opponent said, leaning forward. “There’s no reason to be so damned belligerent. And there’s no reason to start blaming this on the supernatural. We can-”

“The supernatural,” the hothead screamed. “The supernatural? Who the hell said anything about the supernatural?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fallows, but the dead only come back to life in ghost stories, and there must be some other explan—”

Misty silenced the discussion once again.

“I was watching that,” Charlie said.

“And you can go out front if you want to keep watching it,” She said, walking over to the bed. He was lying on her side. She slept alone most of the time, but she still had her side of the bed. Charlie scooted over.

“I was waiting for the crazy one to punch the other guy,” he said, and knocked back some gin.

“There’s the door.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, drank deeply of her own bottle. When she’d had enough, she capped it, set it on the nightstand, and lay back, kicking up her feet.

“No,” Charlie said. He set his bottle on the other nightstand and, grunting with the effort, scooted over to her side and pressed himself close. She tensed.

“Not right now,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forearm across her face. “Are you nuts?”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said, rolling onto his side and placing an arm around her. “I just need to be held.”

“Yeah,” she said, relaxing.

They were asleep within ten minutes. Less than an hour later, they were both awake.

“Jesus,” Misty said, sitting upright, her heart hammering. Crate stood in the bedroom doorway, rifle in hand. She blinked, realizing that the sound that had awakened her had been that of Crate hammering his fist against the bedroom door.

“Damn, Crate,” Charlie said, rubbing his chest.

“Sorry, you two,” Crate said, not looking particularly sorry about anything. “But you really need to wake up.”

“What is it?” Misty asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“Officer Tasgal is here.”

“He—who?” she said. Her mind felt like it was made of mud. She’d been dreaming, just seconds ago, though she could not remember of what. Images and sensations faded and were lost, and now there was only the bedroom and Crate and Charlie and dim evening light sifted through the curtains and the liquor on the nightstands. “Tasgal?”

“Yeah,” Crate said, nodding, talking to her as if she were a child. “Officer Tasgal. From Beistle. The one who looks like he’s sixteen. Ringing any bells?”

“Yeah,” she said, and of course she knew who he was talking about. She’d closed her eyes and thought of Eric Tasgal more than once while with Charlie. “I’m a little fuzzy. I was asleep.”

“He’s in trouble,” Crate said.

“Mnn?” she said, standing. Her head spun. The rum had put her down, and it wasn’t through with her.

“I think he’s been bitten.”

“Hey, Eric,” she said, stepping from the back and into her store. Eric sat at one of the tables, picking at the frayed and stained red and white checked tablecloth with his right hand. His left rested on his .357 Magnum, which lay on the table between the salt and the pepper.

“Miss Misty,” he said, looking up at her. Crate was wrong. Tasgal didn’t look sixteen. Typically more like eighteen, she thought, but today he looked a hard thirty. His skin, usually a healthy pink, was pasty. The flesh around his eyes was dark and puffy. The gauze bandage around his right forearm oozed blood.

“You okay?”

“I need a drink,” he said.

“Some coffee?”

“A drink.”

“Okay” she said. “Rum or gin?”

“Rum,” he said. He picked at the blood-soaked bandage and winced.

“Be right back,” she said.

She stepped past Crate, who stood watching Eric Tasgal with weary eyes. As she left the room, Tasgal said something to Crate. She wasn’t sure what it was.

In the bedroom, Charlie sat rooted to the edge of the bed with booze in his hand and fear in his eyes. She grabbed her rum from the nightstand.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, his eyes wide beneath a creased brow.

“He needs a drink,” she said, and left. As she walked down the hall, Charlie turned on the television. From the sound of it, the screaming lunatic with the giant glasses was no longer on. The bell above the door rocked back and forth. Crate was gone, no doubt hunkering down on the bench with Bilbo Baggins at his feet.

“Thanks,” Tasgal said, grasping the bottle of rum by the neck with his left hand. His right hand rested on the table. Misty twisted off the bottle cap and set it on the table. “Double thanks.”

He took a hit from the bottle, just a little one. He made a hissing sound.

“My pleasure, Eric,” she said, touching the back of the chair before her, steadying herself. She wondered if he could tell how drunk she was. “What happened?”

“Beistle is a madhouse,” he said, looking up at her and shaking his head, slack-jawed. “It’s just… it’s just gone.” He extended his left hand toward the chair. “Sit down.”

She pulled out the chair, sat down, and watched as he gathered his thoughts. He stared down at table, and she allowed her gaze to drop to the seeping bandage. There was blood on the tablecloth. Tasgal sighed, and the mother inside of her, the mother she never got to be, wanted to place her hand on his. The wound on his arm—the very fact that he’d probably been bitten by one of those things—dictated otherwise. She would not touch him.

She looked at her bottle of Jamaican rum with a sense of loss, wishing she’d grabbed a glass on the way into the store.

“They’re all dead,” Tasgal said. She looked up from his arm, worried that he noticed her staring at it. He hadn’t. His eyes were on the bottle of rum, which he knocked back once more.

“Everybody in town?”

“God, no,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Jim, Clark, fucking Cardo. Sheriff Kosana. Every cop in Beistle.”

“My God,” she said. She brought her hand to her mouth, mostly because it was what she was probably supposed to do. In truth, the news did not shock her. It saddened her, yes, but shocked? No. She’d watched the news for the past two days. She’d seen the mutilated dead bodies of three people who bought from her several times a week staggering through her parking lot. She was officially through being shocked.

Eleven

“We got the first call, God, was that just yesterday?” Tasgal stared at her, eyes wide, not waiting for an answer. She saw the gears of realization grinding behind his eyes. “No, yeah. Two days ago. I’d just come into the station. Was expecting another day of doing nothing, you know?”

“I know,” she said, suddenly wanting to hear what he had to say. Needing to hear it.

“It started at the hospital. It came through the switchboard as an assault, but by the time I got there, there was more than one report, and…”

He drank a little more rum, and then held the bottle out to her. She shook her head.

“No. You should pace yourself.”

“Gah,” he said, looking at the bottle as if it were a bee that had just stung him. “You’re probably right.”

“I drink a lot of water when I drink,” she said, and just like that they were talking casual. Just shooting the shit.

“Huh?”

“Yeah. No hangover the next day.”

“Huh,” he said, looking around. “There anything to eat?”

“Of course. Cold cut sandwich okay?”

“Perfect.”

“Coming right up,” she said, wishing he’d said a candy bar or a bag of chips would do. Her eyes felt like they each wanted to do their own thing, and she wasn’t convinced that she could make it to the deli.

She managed to get there, taking her time, laughing once when she knocked over some canned soup. She downed a cup of water and made Tasgal a hearty sandwich, piling ham and roast beef and three different cheeses high between slices of home-baked bread. She grabbed a bag of chips from the rack, and served it all up with a cup of ice water.

He downed the first half of the sandwich in silence then looked up at her.

“Mm,” he said, pulling a napkin from the fingerprint-stained silver dispenser and wiping his mouth. A drop of blood fell from his bandage and onto the table. He wiped it up. “God, this hurts.”

“Oh, damn,” she said, hopping up and returning to the table with a bottle of aspirin. She shook two into his hand, and when he asked for more she tapped out three more. He downed them with ice water. He was done with the rum for now.

“I was listening to the radio on the way over here, and let me tell you, I don’t give a shit what some of those jokers are saying. These are dead people.”

“I know,” she said. “You probably saw the…” she nodded toward the front door.

“Yeah.”

“Mark Willits and his two kids.”

“God,” he said. “I saw Connie at the hospital. She was dead. I saw Mark and Junior a little later, I think it was.” He frowned, looking around the room and blinking his eyes. He looked like he was about to pass out. She wondered if it was booze or blood loss that was taking hold.

“Did you lose a lot of blood?” she said, nodding toward his arm.

“No,” he said, shaking his head and looking hard at the rum. “It hurts like a bastard, but it’s not that bad. Still, you know, what the hell does this mean?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I think it’s starting to get infected,” he said, eyeing his right hand curled atop the table like some dead thing. Were the fingertips a little bluish? “Think maybe you can cut it off for me? I’m sure you got something in the deli that could do the job fast and clean.”

She opened her mouth, and that was all. No words came. Tasgal’s smile surprised her. “Kidding,” he said. He frowned again. “I think. And look at this,” he indicated the bottle of rum. “I contaminated your rum.”

“No,” she said, trying to sound as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. “It’s—”

“I understand,” he said. “I should have asked for a glass.”

She waited for him to resume his fractured tale, and suddenly she wanted another hit from her rum. She was grateful for the other bottle in her kitchen.

“I watched Mark Willits and Junior pull Nellie to the ground,” he said, and his chest heaved once. She thought he was going to cry. He didn’t. “I wanted to shoot them, both of them. Nellie too, because by then there was no helping her. She was still alive, but, you know?”

Misty nodded once, trying to remember what the news had said about bites. She’d heard so much over the past forty-eight hours, so many conflicting reports, so much confusion.

“By then, I’d already gotten this,” he shook his head. “We were at Proust’s. You know Proust’s, right?”

“Yeah,” Misty said. Proust’s was a large supermarket owned and operated by Eddie Proust and his family. Proust was a loudmouth and an asshole, and Misty wouldn’t lose any sleep if Tasgal’s tale ended with Proust getting his windpipe eaten out.

“We answered a call there,” he said. “Clark and me. This was after the hospital, I think.” He looked confused. “Wait, yeah, of course it was after the hospital. After the hospital and the funeral home. By then the National Guard was in town. Not a lot of them, and I got the idea that they were just as confused and messed up as the rest of us. Things weren’t holding together all that much.”

The bell above the door rang. Misty jumped, and Tasgal’s hand twitched toward his gun. Crate shuffled in. He saw the looks on their faces and raised his eyebrows, amused.

“More of them?” Misty said?

Crate shook his head, looked at her as if she were stupid. “You should drink a little more,” he said. “Me? I’m gonna smoke. Want some?”

Misty blinked at him.

“What?” Crate asked, half grinning. “You afraid the Beaver here is going to slap on the cuffs if we break out the grass?”

Tasgal laughed once.

“See?” Crate said, and vanished into the back.

Tasgal looked at her, his face scrunched up, trying to remember where he was.

“Proust’s,” she said.

“Yeah, Eddie Proust had a line of about fifty people outside of his store, and he called us out to make sure nobody went nuts and looted the place. There were two of us. Kosana was dead by that point, so things were already falling apart.”

“How?” She asked. She’d had a short fling with Mac Kosana, back when she was young and he was a deputy.

“Some drunk from up in the hills blew his chest out with a shotgun.”

Misty gasped. Despite her earlier feelings, real shock was setting in. Tasgal made sense, but he wasn’t telling a complete story, but what he was saying was real, it had all happened to him. She could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It was in the air, and she suddenly found herself quite afraid. It was just outside her door, and before long it would be inside, looking for something to eat.

“Eddie had the doors locked, and he was standing behind the glass all horse-faced and stupid, hollering for everyone to get back. His brothers were in there with him, and each of them had shotguns. Hell, I think Ella had one, too. Cardo was in there with him, trying to keep the peace. Talk some sense into the idiot, or something.”

Crate walked back into the room with a joint hanging from his lip, nesting in the fibers of his beard.

“Here,” he said, and handed another joint to Tasgal along with a pack of matches. “On the house. It ain’t shit, too.”

“Thanks,” Tasgal said. He lit up and sucked in, eyes closed. “That’s nice. I don’t do this so much lately.” Crate left and the bell jingled. When Tasgal offered the joint to Misty, she shook her head and waited for him to go on.

“Oh, yeah—sorry.” He shrugged. “Clark and I got separated, and when Eddie opened the doors, everyone rushed in, and then it was just me and Clark, looking at each other. I remember looking around, making sure there weren’t any of those things around, and that’s when the yelling started inside.

“We went in, and Proust was standing there with Keith, um, I’m not sure what his last name is, the little red-headed guy.”

Misty nodded even though she didn’t know who he was talking about.

“That Keith guy was screaming in his face, and everyone else was yelling, and that’s when I realized what was going on. Eddie had hiked prices.”

“Oh, jeeze,” she said.

“Yeah. Through the roof,” Tasgal said. He grabbed the rum and took a shot, followed it with water. “Ah.”

“How’s your arm? Aspirin kicking in yet?”

“I think so,” he said, and held the joint up to his face, crossing his eyes a bit to look at it. “The idiot was asking something like five bucks for a dozen eggs. Two dollars for a can of beans. Like he was in his right mind.” Tasgal shook his head, fell silent.

“What happened?”

“That Keith guy shot him is what happened. Just reached up with a little pea-shooter and popped him right in the face. He dropped, and then everyone with a gun started shooting. I saw Cardo on the other side of the crowd, falling back, and then they charged the exit. I did the only thing I could do. I ran like hell, out of the store and around back.

“Things quieted down eventually, and then they came back and started cleaning the place out. There were a few gunshots inside, but I think they were just shooting the dead ones who were coming back, you know?

“I got back to my car. Clark was sitting in the passenger seat, holding his leg and leaning against the door. He was bleeding real bad. I should have thought, but I didn’t, I just wanted to get the hell out of town. I drove this way for about ten minutes, I guess, passing up those things, passing up people who waved for me to stop and help them. They looked confused, like ‘Where the hell is the cop going?’ and I just kept going, talking to Clark, telling him that he was going to be okay. He’d grunt, and when he stopped grunting, I guess I just figured he’d passed out.”

He shook his head, laughed once. He looked at the bottle of rum as if were someone he didn’t trust.

“Then he sat up and, well, there it is.” He indicated the blood-soaked bandage with his left hand, which shook. “I screamed and emptied my gun into his head.” Tasgal crinkled his nose. He looked like a little boy who’d just stepped on a caterpillar. “He’s still in the car.”

He placed the joint in the ashtray. He considered the forgotten remnant of his sandwich, picked it up, and took a bite.

“You should probably lie down,” Charlie said from behind Misty. She looked back at him. He stood near the door leading into the back, the bottle of gin in his right hand.

“Oh, hey, Charles,” Tasgal said.

“Hey,” Charlie said, walking over to them. He placed a hand on Misty’s shoulder. “Misty has a First Aid kit in the bathroom. You want me to take a look at that?”

Misty looked up at Charlie, surprised. Sitting on his ass and running his mouth was Charlie’s speed. Actually offering to chip in and help? She thought maybe a call to the Vatican was in order, for surely she’d been on hand for a bona-fide miracle. Then again, Charlie was scared, and Eric was an authority figure, an honest to God police officer charged with serving and protecting. Charlie felt safer with him around.

“No,” Tasgal said. “Not now, anyway. I have a kit, too, in the car. I pulled over and took care of it. Burns like a bastard. I don’t know why I didn’t pull him out of the car back there.”

“We can take care of that,” Misty said. “Crate will be happy to light him up.”

“No,” Tasgal said. “Just wait. Things might, you don’t know… things might be better tomorrow. His wife will want to bury him. His head is mostly gone.”

Misty felt Charlie looking at her. She kept her eyes on Tasgal. He looked up at her, and then to Charlie. “Yes,” Tasgal said. “I need to lie down.” He looked at Misty, heavy-lidded, face pale, eyes dark. “Would that be okay, Miss Misty?”

“Of course,” Misty said. She didn’t think she sounded very enthusiastic.

“Okay,” Tasgal said, standing up a little too quickly, tipping over his chair. “Sorry. I just, I’ve been awake for, shit, how long?”

“A long time,” Misty said. She picked up the joint, careful not to touch the end that had been in his mouth. She mashed it into the ashtray.

“A long time, yeah,” he said, looking down at his arm. “Let me take care of this first. Don’t wanna leak all over your sofa.”

Forgetting his gun at the table, he left, dragged himself along like a dead thing. The bell jingled. Misty walked over to the television and turned it on. Tasgal returned with his First Aid kit and disappeared into the bathroom. The news bounced from one disaster to another, and it wasn’t long before Misty realized that five minutes had gone by without a single mention of the walking dead. Riots, looting, open war in the Middle East, Soviet saber-rattling, and cities going up in flames. The dead may have triggered these events, but they sure as hell weren’t doing the looting or firing the guns or threatening to fill the sky with nukes.

“Okay,” Tasgal said, holding up his arm. He’d replaced the bandages. “Good as new.”

Misty nodded toward Charlie.

“Follow him,” she said. “Get some rest, Eric. We’re good for now. We’ll wake you if we need you.”

“Thanks,” Tasgal said, and took a step toward Charlie. “Oh,” he said, and grabbed his gun from the table before disappearing into the back.

She watched the news for a few more minutes, turning the dial from channel to channel, hoping to hear more on what to do about bites. No luck. They then showed dimly lit footage of a severed human head trying to bite the hand of a man who, laughing, waved his fingers inches from its mouth. She sighed and turned the damned thing off.

“Nothing we can do for him,” Crate said. The sun had gone down, and the street lamp painted the parking lot a sickly piss yellow. Bilbo Baggins sat on his haunches, watching the road. Misty could smell the blackened heap on the gravel, but it no longer bothered her. It could be the lingering aroma of a cookout—hot dogs and ribs and half-pound burgers. The charred bodies were far enough away from her to look like dirt or compost or something in the gloom.

“No,” she said, and that wasn’t really true. Admitting to herself, much less to Crate, what she knew they should do was about as easy as admitting that the smell of the Willits going up in flames had actually made her mouth water a little. “Well, there is but it’s ugly.”

“You think I should shoot him.” Crate said, leaning forward and scratching Bilbo Baggins on the back of his head. The dog looked back at them, exhaled. It sounded a lot like a sigh.

Misty looked at Crate. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing. Crate could take that however he wanted to.

“I’m not going to do that,” he said. “Make too much of a mess in there.” He shrugged. “And I’m not really all that comfortable with shooting a sleeping police officer, particularly a nice boy like Eric.”

“I know, Crate, and I feel the same way. What if we—” She stopped, tensing as the distant sound of an engine reached them. The sound swelled, headlights illuminated the road, and a truck passed, breaking before it left their view, backing up, and turning into the parking lot.

“Hm,” Crate said, stood up, cocked his rifle.

“I think it’s Huff,” Misty said, squinting into the headlights, which were promptly extinguished.

“Oh,” Crate said, letting his aim go limp.

The truck stopped and Huffington Niebolt got out, all six foot six inches of him. Strong thick arms and skinny legs and a gut that stretched the fabric of his blood-stained sleeveless t-shirt. The yellow light gleamed on his bald head, and his beard hung in a single braid, rested on the bulge of his belly.

“Hey, Huff,” Crate said.

“Hello.” Huff looked tired and lost. He sniffed the air and shot a glance at the remains of the Willits family. “Everybody okay here?”

“Not everybody,” Misty said. “But we are. Where’s Connor?” Three days ago, Huff’s youngest son had been with him when they stopped in for Cokes on the way south.

Huff shook his head. He looked down at the bloodstained fabric of his shirt for just a hair of a second and then resolutely looked elsewhere.

“Oh, God,” Misty said, walking to him, wrapping her arms around him. “Oh, Huff.” He was stiff. He didn’t return her embrace. She pulled away and looked up into his pock-marked face.

“How many have you seen in town?” he asked, and his breath stank of whisky.

“Just those three,” Misty said, stepping back and indicating the blackened heap. “The Willitses.”

“Huh,” Huff said. “Three?”

“Not sure where Connie is.”

“Any of my boys come through here?”

“Samson was here earlier. He met up with some kids from Fresno. Took them up to your place.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Safe. How’re you, Crate?”

“Been better, been worse,” the old man said, shrugging. “I’m sorry about your boy.”

“Me, too,” Huff said. “He didn’t really suffer, so I guess we should be grateful for the little things.”

“We should,” Crate said. “It’s really bad out there?”

“Worse than bad,” Huff said, knotting his brow. “It’s the end.”

“You need anything, Huff?” Misty asked, attempting derail one of Huff’s end of the world spiels before it really got rolling. What was happening was worse than anything Huff could prattle on about; she didn’t care to hear him tack any of his insane ideas onto it. “Something to eat?”

“Nah,” the big man said. “I got everything I need at home. I just saw you two sitting here and figured I’d check in.” He looked back at the road. “I can’t see why there would be many of them out this way, but if you feel safer, you’re both welcome up at our place, okay?”

“Thanks, Huff,” Misty said. “I think we’re gonna stay here for now. Charlie is inside, drunk on his ass, and Eric Tasgal is asleep on the couch in the back.”

“He’s bit,” Crate added.

“Oh,” Huff said, drawing back his head. “That’s not good.”

“No,” Misty said.

They exchanged a few more words, and then Huff left. Misty and Crate sat down. Bilbo Baggins farted and whined.

“That bite,” Misty said.

“We really don’t know anything about it.”

“The television says the bites get infected.”

“I haven’t watched a lot of TV since this started, but I watched a little, and here’s what I heard: someone talking about UFOs and aliens, someone else blaming it on Tricky Dick and voodoo at the same damn time, and Pat Robertson saying that Jesus was getting back at us for of Roe vs. Wade. You’ll understand if I don’t put a lot of stock in what I hear on that television in there, honey,” he said, scratching his beard. “Now, infection? Bites do that. I could bite you right now, and if you didn’t take care of it, it would get infected.”

“We’re talking about a bite from a dead man.”

“I know,” he said, knotting his brow. “I know. But we have to wait.”

“For?”

“Wait to see how he is in a few hours.”

“Wait for him to die,” she said.

“Yeah,” Crate said, eyes wide. “Maybe so, yeah.”

“We could try to get him some antibiotics.”

“In town? In Beistle?” He looked at her until he was sure she would not answer. “No, we can’t.”

No one said anything for a few minutes. The night air was cool. Not too cool but Misty shivered anyway. She drew close to Crate, resting her head on his bony shoulder and closing her eyes.

“Hup,” Crate said, nudging her. She sat up and blinked at him.

“I fell asleep?”

“For a few minutes. Look.” He nodded toward the road. A dead body shuffled through the parking lot. Crate nudged Bilbo Baggins with his foot, but the dog was out cold.

“Dumb dog,” Crate said, standing up and stepping from the deck and onto the gravel. He cocked his rifle.

At first glance, she thought maybe Tasgal had died in his sleep. He was sprawled across her couch on his back, his left arm hanging to the floor, his mouth open. His gun lay on the floor, beneath his hand. He seemed even paler than before, but that could just have been a trick of the dim light cast from the standing lamp next to the couch. His wounded forearm rested on his chest. A quarter-sized circle of blood had seeped up through the fresh bandages. His bleeding had all but stopped.

Misty took a step backward, into Crate, and then Tasgal snorted and changed positions. His eyes drifted open, fluttered, and for a second her heart turned to ice. Then he mumbled something, closed his eyes, and was asleep once more.

“He got a fever?” Crate said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Check him.”

“I really don’t want to.”

“Jesus, woman,” Crate said. He leaned his rifle against the wall and walked over to where Tasgal lay, blocking her view of him.

“Nnn.”

“Hey, Eric,” Crate said. “It’s just me, okay?”

“Mm.”

“Just checkin to see if you got a fever.”

Misty waited, heart racing, waiting for Tasgal to take a bite out of Crate’s hand, wondering if she’d be able to use the rifle on both of them.

“Okay, you’re good,” Crate said, picking up Tasgal’s gun. “Here’s your iron, cowboy.”

He stepped away from the couch, picked up his rifle, and looked at Misty. She raised her eyebrows.

“Mild fever,” Crate said, nudging past her. “We should keep an eye on it. Poor kid.”

Misty stood there for a while, watching the steady rise and fall of Tasgal’s chest until Charlie spoke up behind her, making her jump.

“What’s going on?” His words were slurred. She wondered how hard he’d hit the gin. She wondered how much was left, and how the hell she was going to get more, once the bottle was dry. “He okay?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at Charlie. He leaned against the wall, eyelids heavy. “You’re messed up.”

“You look worried.”

She sighed. Tasgal stirred again. She held her breath, stared at his chest until she was certain that he was still alive. “Do you have any rope?”

“Now, don’t let your head...”

“I have an extension cord somewhere, I think.”

“You ought to come to bed.”

Charlie didn’t drink much, but when he did he got as horny as a teenager. He thought he did, anyway. His dick was about as useful as a banana slug.

“You ought to go to bed, you useless turd,” she said, and left. Behind the counter, she turned on the television and watched the end of Nixon’s address to the nation. The criminal bastard looked frightened, far more so than he had while getting publicly grilled over the Watergate fiasco. This pleased her.

Outside, Crate’s stupid dog barked. The door opened and Crate came through and strode toward the back, noticed her behind the counter and skidded to a halt.

“Oh. Four more coming. I think the party’s starting.”

Twelve

The men burst from within the small buildings at the end of the road, pointing their shotguns and screaming at them to get down, get the fuck down, right now, and Richard did the only thing that made any sense. He got down, and just like that his face met with a gritty boot. He hit the ground with blood erupting from his nose.

One of them was on his back, knee pressed into his spine, prying his bloodied hands from his face, binding his wrists and ankles. He screamed and he tasted dirt and blood, but he did not fight. They had shotguns, and you did not fight shotguns.

There were four of them, including the one they’d picked up in town, and they moved with awful speed and precision. To Richard’s left, Kimberly rolled and shrieked, her ankles and wrists also bound. Samson was on Colleen’s back, clutching her hair in his fists, breathing into her ear in a very ugly way, and the man who had broken Richard’s nose and bound his wrists had now planted his foot firmly in the middle of Richard’s back, pinning him to the ground.

Also bound, Daniel screamed and struggled, rolled away from his own attacker, who pumped a foot into his stomach. Guy was big and it took two of them to slam him against the pickup truck—Daniel’s attacker joined in, ramming the stock of his shotgun into Guy’s stomach.

“Guh,” Guy said, buckling forward. They slammed him against the truck once more. Richard closed his eyes and waited for it all to end, and when it didn’t he opened his eyes and watched as Colleen was dragged toward Guy. Samson and his friends sounded happy, and Richard screamed, and Kimberly screamed, and Daniel writhed in the dirt. The pressure on Richard’s back went away, and his attacker stepped away.

Now all four of them clustered around Colleen and Guy, and a shotgun leaned against the truck. Guy screamed and Colleen screamed. A shotgun leaned against the truck, and Daniel sat up, his hands free and working the rope binding his ankles.

A shotgun leaned against the truck, and Daniel crawled toward it.

Guy saw the knife descending toward his genitals. He thought: Oh, God, please let me die right now, please let my heart stop. And: Please let the blade be sharp.

God met him half way: his heart did not stop, but the knife separated his penis from his body as easily as a cruel child plucks the wings from a dragonfly. The pain was pretty much everything that ever was, all at once, and everywhere. Later, while lying in the dark and waiting to die and trying to navigate the minefield of his confused and fevered thoughts, he thought that the pain had been divine, if such a thing was possible.

Something exploded. His ears rang. Wet chunks of something pattered his bare legs.

They let go of him and he slid down the truck and onto his bare ass, blood jetting from the hole between his legs. Screaming, screaming—everyone was screaming—he raked his hands through the dirt, brought up handfuls, and pressed them into his wound. His pants and underwear were pooled between his thighs. He seized them and pressed them to his mud-packed wound. He was knocked to the ground, and the black spots throbbing at the corners of the world got bigger. Guy went away.

He spent most of the night swimming in and out of consciousness, and when clarity came, it brought one simple and terrible realization, an unwelcome and searing thing that he turned over again and again, tried to make sense of: They’d cut off his dick. They’d cut off his dick.

And: he’d slowed the bleeding. Somehow he had. He was still bleeding, he could feel it, but it was a stinging trickle. He could last a long time like this.

He spoke occasionally to Daniel and Richard, who were nearby, but mostly he slept and quivered and cried out in pain, and when the birds sang and the world around him emerged in shades of darkest blue, he swam up from the haze of shock and delirium long enough to ask God to let him kill at least one of the bastards before they killed him.

The idiot, the fucking idiot, he didn’t knot the rope tight enough. Now it slipped away and Daniel’s hands were free, and he had a chance, damn it, they all had a chance now, because the idiots were crowded around Colleen and Guy, they were watching her, and he could see her between their shifting bodies. He could see what they forced her to do. The ropes came away from his ankles with ease. Guy screamed threats and Colleen wept and Daniel crawled. His fingers touched polished wood, and the shotgun felt heavy in his hands.

He roared like some animal and rose and pressed both barrels to the upper back of the one with the knife, the one who didn’t know how to tie a knot, the one who’d been stupid enough to set down his shotgun. He pulled the trigger.

They were on him, screaming and cursing and kicking and punching. His head lolled, and the world went black, and at some point he realized that he was lying in the back of a pickup truck, bouncing and jostling and no doubt being driven to his death. He screamed around the rag packed into his mouth. It reeked of oil and gasoline. His tongue burned.

Richard, similarly muffled and screaming, stared into his eyes. Guy lay next to Richard, quivering. The truck bounced and rocked, and eventually it came to a stop.

They dragged Daniel from the back of the truck, took off his clothes and tied him to a tree. Two of them. Just two. The other was someplace else. The other was with Colleen and Kimberly. He’d never see either of them again.

Samson and the other one pulled Guy from the truck first. He was as limp as a rag doll, a corpse before rigor mortis sets in. His wrists and ankles were bound, the bloodied wad of his pants and underwear clamped between his thighs. He still wore his shoes and socks. Richard came easier, helping himself along. Both were thrown onto the ground facing Daniel.

“You’re so dead, man,” the other said, holding a knife to Daniel’s stomach. He looked a lot like Samson, only older and shorter. His nose was crooked, a bad break that had never been properly set. “I ought to open you up right here, you mother fucker. Watch your guts pop right out.”

“Stop, Max,” Samson said, walking over to them and putting a hand on the other one’s shoulder. “I want to do it as badly as you do, but we gotta wait for Dad.”

“With all the shit that’s happening, do we even know he’s gonna be back?” He pressed the tip on the blade into Daniel’s chest, etched a short line across his breastbone. Samson pulled him away, and Daniel allowed his head to hang forward. He closed his eyes.

“We’re waiting.” Samson said again, and Daniel heard the threat in his voice. “Okay?”

“Faggot,” Max whispered, punching Daniel in the stomach.

“Hoo,” Daniel said. A thick rope of blood and spit spun to the ground.

“Get in the truck,” Samson said. Daniel opened his eyes and lifted his head in time to see Max stomping away toward the truck. He stopped and kicked Richard in the lower back. Richard writhed, his face red, the veins standing out in his forehead.

Daniel started making blubbering sounds under his breath.

“What’s that shit,” Samson said. “You praying? You believe in God?”

Daniel felt a warm slick of saliva fall out of his mouth and separate from him. He breathed twice. “No.”

“No? Huh.” Samson seemed a little surprised. “You looked to me like maybe you did. Oh, well, I was just gonna let you know that he probably wasn’t gonna help you. Guess you know that already though, huh?”

Samson walked away, got into the truck, backed out, and drove away, the truck rocking along the path, moving downhill and away from them.

There the three of them sat in the falling dark for a long time, under the bats and breezes.

“How tight are your ropes,” Richard asked at last.

“Tight,” Daniel said, wriggling in place, the bark of the tree grinding into the flesh of his back. He was bound across the chest, beneath the armpits. The rope was looped around, circled his arms at the elbows, looped around again and again, above and below his knees. His feet and hands tingled, sensation fading.

“God,” Richard said, and gave himself over to panic. He thrashed and screamed through clenched teeth. After a while, he fell quiet.

Guy grunted, his hands twitching behind his back. He fell silent, grew still. He said something, little more than a mumble. Something about Colleen, maybe. It was hard to tell.

Colleen. And Kimberly. God.

Daniel let panic take him, as well, screaming and crying and struggling against the ropes binding him to the tree. The cut in his chest burned, and his face felt like a toothache. The rope and the bark dug in, and yet somehow he eventually nodded off.

“Gah,” someone said, and Daniel opened his eyes. Night had fallen. The forest floor was awash in moonlight and shadow.

“Wuzzat?” Daniel said, and tried to move. His feet and hands were no longer tingling, they were simply dead. Something moved upon the ground before him.

“Get,” Richard said, growling. “Get away.”

Daniel blinked into the black and silver gloom, and the form before him suddenly made sense. The coyote tugged at the blood-stained bundle of denim and cotton pressed between Guy’s legs.

“Go,” he tried to say, his voice ragged, like his throat. He coughed, and the coyote twitched, its plume of a tail dropping between its legs, its head low. It growled, tugged the cloth once more. An engine hummed, light played across the trees, and the coyote vanished.

Daniel raised his head. The pickup truck crunched to a halt, pretty much in the same place as before, and the doors popped opened. The headlights blinked out and were replaced by the single bobbing beam of a flashlight. It drew close, its circle of light gliding over Richard’s body, pausing for a moment upon his glowering face before leaping over to Guy’s curled and still form, and then moving toward Daniel and filling his eyes.

He squinted, and the person holding the flashlight stepped up to him.

“You killed my boy,” the man said, dropping the hand holding the flashlight to his side. Turning it off and pocketing it. He stared at Daniel in the scattered moonlight. Blinded by the flashlight’s beam, it took a minute for Daniel to take in the full shape of man. He was tall and bald, and his grey beard hung in what looked like a triple-braid down his chest and across his fat gut.

“Eh,” Daniel said. He cleared his throat, said the only thing that came to mind. “Fuck you.”

“Oh, stop that,” the man said. His voice was soothing, calm. “I’ll bet you’re smarter than that, son.”

“Huh-huh-huh,” Daniel said, and realized that he was shaking. Samson stood close behind the man who Daniel assumed was his father. Daniel let his head hang forward.

“You killed Marcus,” the man said. Stepping closer. His breath reeked. “Marcus wasn’t very smart, but he was my son, and you killed him. He’s the second child I lost since all of this started.”

“Good,” Daniel said. His mouth was dry. This was a shame. He wanted to spit in the creep’s face.

The man seized Daniel’s hair in his left hand and slammed the back of his head against the tree. With his right he pressed the barrel of a small revolver to Daniel’s cheek.

“Do it,” Daniel said.

“Not a chance, little boy,” the man said. He stepped back and holstered his gun. “You’re gonna die tomorrow morning, badly, and I just want you to spend the next few hours thinking about that, okay?”

Thirteen

“Brock?” Kimberly said, staring into Colleen’s face. They were somewhere; she didn’t know where. Maybe in one of the three small cabins, impossible to be sure.

Her friend stared back, but her eyes were empty. There was blood on Colleen’s face, a thick crimson stipple and a small drying coil of something on her right cheek.

“Come on, Brock,” but Brock had nothing to say. She just stared and stared, and sometimes her eyes fluttered shut, but mostly she just stared, silent and unmoving except for her bottom lip—it quivered once or twice.

At some point, a semblance of clarity returned to her eyes, and Kim thought that she’d gotten through. That was important, getting through to her friend. If she got through, they could figure out how to get out of this.

She never got through. They came and took Colleen, who mumbled and screeched and slapped her own face, and Kim lay alone, her hands and ankles bound, but she was not alone for long.

“You’re not good enough for my daddy,” one of them said, and soon she learned that he was Daniel’s brother, Jacob.

“You’re good enough for me, though,” he said, grinning, and Kim screamed and struggled against the ropes binding her ankles and wrists. “Oh, yeah.”

She cried and she screamed some more, and Jacob freed her hands and her ankles and wrists and waved a gun in her face. She stared into the barrel and knew it would be better if the bastard pulled the trigger but she wasn’t brave enough to wish for it.

He didn’t. Instead, he led her into the forest and to a house of doors, where he bound her to a stinking and stained cot. She wept and she screamed and she wanted to sink her fingernails into his eyes, but the gun was in her face and that was really all it took. She let it happen, God help her—she allowed him to bind her to the cot, and that was it, at least she was still alive. She had a chance yet, she just had to take it. If she fought, she’d be dead.

There were two dead bodies in the house of doors. They hung writhing from chains and Jacob bragged that it was so easy, driving down to Santa Cruz and picking up homosexual men and taking them back here. No one cared about them; no one ever looked for missing fags.

And no, he wasn’t one, he told her, slamming the handle of his gun into her face, breaking her nose, and that’s when she realized that she probably should have fought back or simply refused to lie on the cot. At the very least, she’d be dead.

They carried Colleen through the forest. She kicked and she screamed, and the trees spun and jerked and marched by in a blur. There was pain, distant and dull, and there were faces, enraged and scowling and cursing. Samson was no longer among them, she knew that much. There were four or five or six of them, she did not know how many, but she knew that one of them was dead. His blood was cool and tacky on her face. She’d looked into the open ruin of his chest, her ears ringing, the air heavy with the reek of gunpowder and blood and shit.

“That bastard,” one of them said, and it sounded to Colleen as if he were crying.

“Fucking bastard,” someone else said. “Fuck.”

Her head jerked to the right, hard.

“Don’t hit her again,” someone said, but the words didn’t really make sense to her. She slept for a while, and for a time Kimberly was there and then she wasn’t, and when Colleen opened her eyes there was no night and no day, only darkness. She lay in darkness, seemingly alone, a soft mattress beneath her. There was a pillow beneath her head. She rolled onto her side, pressed her face into the pillow and inhaled. Fresh. It smelled so fresh, like home, and soon she would be slaughtered. The world and hell had switched places, they were all going to die like animals, and she was lying in a freshly made bed that smelled like fabric softener.

Forms churned in the dark, not-really-there afterimages like birthday party flash-burns taking shape, and with them the ghosts of sensations. The feel of Guy in her mouth, and his smell, his unwashed smell in her nose, the little soft mound of flesh below his navel pressed to her face, the hairs tickling her nostrils, and then the knife and the screams, the thunder and the blood.

What the hell had happened?

Colleen closed her eyes, for what it was worth, which was nothing: she could still see Guy’s penis lying in the dirt, see a work-boot clad foot coming down onto it. She slapped at her face and screamed until screaming wasn’t really possible anymore. She didn’t fall asleep so much as shut down, and, mercifully, she did not dream.

She opened her eyes. Her left arm was extended, her hand resting on what could only be a bedside table, the small room in which she laid cast in the cool hues of early morning. Thin curtains covered the small room’s only window. They fluttered. The air was fresh. She smelled dew and grass and dirt.

She sat up, looked around. There was a lamp on the bedside table. She turned it on. There was a door leading outside and a door leading to what she assumed was a bathroom. There was a chair in the corner and a glass of water beside the lamp. She brought it to her lips, and only after it was half gone did she consider that it may have been spiked with something. She considered it, and decided it didn’t matter. Things could not get worse, she reasoned, and finished the rest of the water.

She looked down at herself. She still wore her jeans. They were filthy, the crotch dark with menstrual blood. She remembered Guy, the knife, and the flash of red blossoming just before she’d squeezed shut her eyes. Her stomach hitched, and the water she’d just swallowed arced out of her mouth and onto the floor. The strength to stand left her and she collapsed onto the bed, moaning.

Time passed. She went away again, and when she came back, it was brighter. There was a new smell in the room—cheap cologne. She sat up. Two people stood, watching her. A man of maybe sixty-five, tall and bald and built like a fortress, a fluffy grey beard hanging down to his stomach. A woman, early fifties, her dark hair pulled back from her face, her body concealed in a shapeless red dress that looked homemade.

“How are you feeling?” The man said, pulling up the chair from the corner. It creaked beneath his weight. The woman remained behind him.

Colleen’s head swam. Her gaze drifted from the man and the woman to the lamp. She lay on her side, staring at it. Guy’s screams seemed to have gotten trapped in her head, bounced around, kicked up echoes of echoes. The smell of blood was in her nose.

The woman stepped toward Colleen, sat down beside her, reached for her hand. She didn’t pull away, let her hand be held, but regarded the new hands holding her own like the jaws of a pit bull playing nice.

“I’m Huffington Niebolt, Sam’s dad,” said the man with the craggy face and the ridiculous beard. “But they all just call me Huff, so you can, too, okay?”

Colleen’s body rattled. She was shaking now. When had that begun, and when would it stop? The woman scooted closer, put an arm around her. “Shhh,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“This is my wife, Embeth,” The man said, and Colleen allowed her eyes to drift from the lamp and to his face. He smiled. His perfect teeth seemed out of place in the weathered, wrinkled bed of his face. “She’s going to take care of you, okay? Get you all cleaned up. What’s your name?”

Colleen closed her eyes, pressed her face into her hands. Her chest heaved once, twice, and the tears came.

“You’re upset, I understand,” the man said. “I’m upset, too. This is hard enough for you, I know, without everything else that’s going on. But we have to work together here, okay? What’s your name, honey?”

Colleen allowed the woman to guide her into a sitting position. She touched Colleen’s chin, gave it a little nudge upward. “Tell him.”

“Cuh,” Colleen said through her tears, snot bubbling from her nose. She tried again, her words barely a mumble.

“Colleen? A pretty name for a pretty girl,” he said. “Am I right, Beth?”

“Yes,” the woman said. She stroked Colleen’s hair from her face, wiped her eyes and nose with a soft cloth.

“And the other girl? Kimberly, is it?”

Colleen looked up, met his gaze for the first time.

“Fu-fu-fuh,” she said, her eyes losing focus.

Huffington Niebolt smiled, shook his head. “What is it with you kids and your potty mouths? My boys are all the same way. It’s all fuck this and fuck that, man. Fuck you and fuck me.” He laughed, and it was the warm and welcoming laugh of a favorite uncle.

Colleen crushed her eyes shut and started keening, crushed her hands into each other and used them joined to beat her chest as she howled and the howl turned into a long, strained gasp.

“Okay, listen here,” he clapped his hands once, rubbed them together. “This isn’t going anywhere, but that’s okay. You’re a little messed up right now, and who can blame you? I don’t know what the hell is going on out there in the world, but I can promise you this. It will not reach us here. We’re safe.”

She heard the chair creak, heard his footfalls moving toward her, felt his fingers beneath her chin. He smelled of soap and cologne and mouthwash. Colleen looked up at him. She tensed, and the woman, her right arm around Colleen, pinned Colleen’s hands to her lap with her left hand.

“I got someplace to be this morning. Work to do. Gotta bury my boy. The one your brother killed.”

Colleen gasped. The man’s eyes widened.

“You didn’t know?” He asked, genuinely surprised. He seemed to think about it for a second, then shrugged. “Makes sense, I guess. From the sound of it, things were out of hand.” His face darkened. “You were not supposed to see what you saw. You weren’t supposed to be forced to do what they forced you to do, darling, and I want you to know that I’m sorry.

“My boys can get a little crazy when I’m not around.” He took a deep breath. “They don’t always listen to me, and one of them paid for it with his life because of this.”

He stood up, scooted his chair back into the corner and stepped toward the door.

“I lost another son, too, you know? My youngest.” he said, looking back. “Him I don’t get to bury. Now clean yourself up and take a look around afterwards. We’ve got a nice place here.”

Huffington Niebolt left, closing the door behind him. Colleen wept until no tears would come, and the woman remained at her side, holding her hand. She stopped crying, drifting away once more, the world retreating.

“Come on, honey,” the woman said, startling her.

“Huh?”

“You really need to get cleaned up. Down there especially,” the woman said, once more easing Colleen into a sitting position. “Don’t want to get an infection.”

She stood, allowed herself to be led from the bed and to the bathroom, where the woman turned on the shower and peeled away Colleen’s clothes, balling them up and putting them on the floor next to the toilet.

The water was warm. Colleen allowed her face and her hair and her body to be washed, and when a voice in her mind told her to attack this strange bitch whose hands were lathering her hair, she ignored it. It was so distant, this voice, and she could barely tell that it said.

The woman dressed her—clean panties with a thick cloth pad, a bra that did not quite fit, and a red dress not unlike the one the woman wore. She saw that her own filthy clothes had gone from the bathroom, surely out with the rubbish. She sat her on the edge of the bed, and when the woman tried to slide socks onto her feet, Colleen took them away and did it herself. The woman, Embeth, handed Colleen a pair of slippers. They were comfortable.

Somewhere, a child laughed, and that wasn’t possible. Colleen shook her head once, sharply, like a horse trying to shoo a fly.

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked the woman.

Colleen blinked. No more tears. She was all cried out. She didn’t have to close her eyes to see Guy’s dick lying in the dirt, but she could nudge the image away and to the side, and when she did that the voice urging her to lash out was louder. She’d listen to the voice. It was her only choice.

“No,” she said. She searched for something else to say, felt that other words were in order, but her mind was buzzing and empty at the same time. She choked down the urge to scream.

“Okay,” Embeth said. “Would you like to take a walk? The fresh air will be good for you, Colleen, and there’s really something you should see.”

“Sure,” Colleen said, wondering where Guy’s dick actually was now. Still in the dirt, in the same spot, drawing ants and flies? Where was Guy? Could you die from blood loss that way?

More laughter, more than one child, and she stood up, wondering if she’d gone insane.

“Good,” Embeth said. She opened the door and stepped into the morning light, and Colleen saw that her hair was pulled into a braid. It hung down past her waist. Squinting, she trailed Embeth into a fenced-in yard roughly the size of a basketball court. The façade of the building behind her was part of the enclosure. Across from her, a door led into a building that ran the entire length of the courtyard. There were picnic tables and scattered toys and a flowerbed exploding with color. A see-saw, a swing-set, a slide. The voice urging her to attack this woman was choked into silence.

Three women sat on a bench, each of them wearing the same damned amorphous red dress, their hair pulled back tight. One of them, clearly the youngest of the three, was very pregnant. They watched four laughing children chase one another around the courtyard. Embeth walked over to the other women. She looked back at Colleen, smiling.

One of the children, a plain-faced little girl no older than six, ran up to her.

“Are you Miss Colleen?” She asked. Her front teeth were missing. She grinned. “Wanna play with me?”

Colleen’s legs gave out, and she crumpled to the ground.

Fourteen

Scott Ardo, known to everyone in Beistle as Cardo since he was nine or ten, was the first police officer to arrive at Proust’s. Ignoring the cries and the taunts of those gathered outside of the store, he shouldered his way to the entrance and rapped on the glass until Eddie Proust stopped ignoring him and came over to the glass.

“What?” Proust yelled, red-faced.

“You need to open up.”

“What for? We’re closed. Come back later.”

Proust stomped away and Cardo was left staring at the ghost of his reflection in the glass door. He rubbed a hand over his stubbly head, leaned in close, looking over the top of his sunglasses. Proust reappeared, eyebrows raised.

“You see what’s going on out here?” Cardo said. As if to accentuate his point, someone bumped into him. His nose bent against the glass, left a greasy smear.

Proust scowled. One of his meathead sons came over. He also scowled. Looked just like his dear old dad, too. If he looked around, Cardo was sure he’d see Proust’s meathead grandsons lurking about, as well, each of them scowling.

“Looks to me like the problem is out there,” Proust said, pressing his forefinger to the glass once for out and again for there.

“You’re right,” Cardo said. “And you’re making it worse. These people are coming through, one way or another. The longer you keep these doors locked, the worse it’s gonna be when they come through.”

“I’ll shoot them if they break through these doors,” Proust said. “We’ve got guns.”

“I’m sure you do, now,” Cardo said, closing his eyes and leaning his forehead against the cool glass. He opened them and looked at Proust. “When are you gonna open for business?”

“When we’re ready,” Proust said. He looked at his watch. “Maybe an hour.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready.”

From what he could tell, Proust and family had moved things around. Bags of rice and beans and canned goods stood in heaps near the front of the store, and some of the aisles had been roped off. A hand-written sign declared:

“CASH”

ONLY

!!!NO CHECKS!!!

Someone bumped into Cardo again, and this time it felt intentional. He looked back, and everyone looked everywhere but at him. He asked those nearest him to back away. They did. He didn’t expect that level of courtesy to last. He pointed to his ear and then to the door, cupped his hands around his mouth and pressed them to the glass. It took Proust a few seconds to catch his drift. He pressed his ear to the glass.

“Listen,” Cardo said. “I understand where you’re coming from, Eddie, but you gotta help buy us some time, okay? Tasgal and Clark just radioed. They’re on the way. They’ll help control the crowd, but you at least have to let me in, make it look like we’re negotiating, buy ourselves some time.”

He pulled away from the glass. Proust regarded him with mistrust.

“Okay?” Cardo asked, not bothering to raise his voice.

Proust looked back at his son, who stepped away and vanished from sight.

“You leave your gun outside.”

“No, I don’t,” Cardo said.

Proust glowered at him.

“Open it.”

“Okay,” Proust said, jabbing a finger at the crowd. “Make them get back.”

Cardo told everyone to step back and quiet down for a second, and they listened, though there were many taunts, and more than a few of the people in the crowd cried bullshit.

“I’m going in,” Cardo yelled, palms held before him. “Just, please, everyone calm down—he’s opening the doors soon, okay? We’re going to figure this out. I can’t stop all of you from smashing these doors, but I’m asking you not to. Proust and his sons are looking for a reason to start shooting their guns. Don’t give them one, okay?”

Cardo turned away from the crowd and stared at Proust through the glass, raised his eyebrows. Proust unlocked the door and Cardo slipped into the store without incident.

“Jesus,” he said, leaning across the counter and looking Eddie Proust in the eye. “This is a bad idea, man. You’re messing up big time.”

“This is America is what it is,” Proust said, sliding his holstered gun onto his belt. “A lot might be changing out there, but that hasn’t.”

“Damn,” Cardo said, putting the customer service desk between himself and the entrance. Proust’s boys carried shotguns in plain sight of the people pressed against the glass storefront. They’d paraded them around for the last five minutes, after Proust let them know the doors were opening in ten. He’d given the crowd time to spread the word.

“Open up,” Proust said a few minutes later, and his son did. They filed in, giving the shotgun a wide berth, looking around, eyes wide. There was a Proust family member stationed the head of every aisle, each carrying a gun.

“Hey, Troy,” Eddie Proust said as Troy Matthews walked by and picked up a can of kerosene. Proust smiled as if it were any old day. Matthews looked dazed. There was a spot of blood on his cheek.

Bodies pressed in, and Cardo backed away. Tasgal and Clark were outside. He saw flashes of them between jostled throng pouring into the store. They wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing. Cardo looked behind him, down the empty aisle and toward the back of the store. Wouldn’t be long now before someone noticed the prices.

“Oh, come on, Eddie,” a short man with close-cropped red hair and a nose that seemed too small for his face yelled, indignant. “This is ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry, Keith, it’s just business,” Proust said, speaking to the short man in the same tough-luck tone he probably used on folks who tried to get a refund on an open box of detergent. “You know as well as I do that the trucks aren’t coming anytime soon. This is—”

Everyone yelled at once, and then the little red-head lifted his arm. There was a muffled pop, and the back of Eddie Proust’s head flapped open as if on a spring-loaded hinge. The crowd surged. By the time the air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.

He pushed through the swinging doors and into the back hallway, his gun out and ready. He put his back to the wall and looked left, right—there was no one around. At the end of the hall, a door led to the alley behind the store. It was chained and padlocked shut. He could shoot the lock, but that might draw unwanted attention.

The door to his left was labeled WOMEN. He wasn’t sure where MEN was, but considered lying low in the ladies room but then decided that he needed to be higher. There was a two way mirror located at the center of the store, between the meat display and the bank of coolers containing milk and juice.

A door at the end of the hall led right. He pushed it open, revealed a staircase—eight steps leading up, a right turn, eight more steps.

He opened the door at the top of the stairs, and one of Proust’s meathead grandsons turned and lifted the large gun in his small hands. Cardo looked right town the barrel. It bobbed and weaved. There was a puff of smoke, and in the close quarters the sound was like cannon fire. The bullet thrummed past Cardo’s right ear and slammed into the wall behind him. His hands took over, squeezed three rounds into the kid’s surprised face, pummeling it into some kind of spurting cubist mess. The kid’s body hit the ground, the misshapen sack that had been his head flopping forward onto his chest.

“Gah,” Cardo said, backing out of the small office and sliding down the wall, watching a sticky wad of what must have been brain matter roll slowly down the fabric of the boy’s Superman t-shirt. The dead boy’s hands twitched in his lap, and he pissed his pants.

Cardo leaned sideways and vomited onto the top step, and continued to stare into the ruin of the kid’s head until the sight of it ceased to make sense.

“Stupid bastard,” Cardo screamed, looking at the gun in his hand and throwing it onto the floor as if it were something hot. He wasn’t sure he was cursing—Proust, Proust’s dumb grandson, or himself.

Downstairs, there were more gunshots. Someone screamed in pain, and the place sounded as if it were being ransacked. It quieted down eventually. He waited for the sound of people—alive or dead—finding their way into the hall and onto the stairs, but it never came.

Cardo stood up, took off his uniform shirt, stepped into the small office, and used the shirt to cover the dead boy’s obliterated head. He picked up his gun, holstered it. The massive gun that Proust had left in the care of his twelve-year-old grandson lay on the floor between the boy’s splayed legs. Crouching, Cardo lifted it, wiped a spot of blood from the barrel onto his pants, and set the gun atop the desk placed before the window that looked down upon the interior of the store.

He dragged the kid’s remains into the hall, careful to not upset the placement of the shirt that concealed the damage that he’d done. He stepped into the small office; shut and locked the door.

For two hours, he watched as a steady stream of Beistle residents filed into Proust’s Supermarket and picked the shelves clean. There were dead bodies everywhere, and not the walking kind. As far as he could tell, all of them were in about the same shape as the kid out on the landing.

He reached for his radio and found that he had lost it somewhere along the way. He picked up the phone to confirm it was dead, and it was. There was a small television on the floor beneath the desk. He picked it up, set it atop the blotter, and plugged it in. The picture was a fuzzy mess, and no amount adjusting the antenna made a difference, so he turned it off and sat staring into the store.

By the third hour, the place was empty. A dead body wandered in, seemed to take the place in, and then backed out and dragged itself someplace else.

There were bullets for Proust’s gun in one of the desk drawers. He stood up, replaced the bullet the kid had fired, pocketed the others. Sliding his new gun into his belt, Cardo opened the door and left.

Downstairs, a dead man stood before the bathroom door, tugging at the knob. A large piece of broken glass jutted from its throat. Smaller shards glistened like jewels across its forehead. Its cheeks hung in tatters, revealing the musculature of its jaw. Cardo was past the dead thing before it realized he was even there.

His shoes crunched across broken glass. The acrid reek of blood and pine oil and bleach hung in the air. He nearly slipped on blood. It pooled on the tile, mingled with soft drinks and beer. Behind him, someone gasped—a raspy exhalation that could have come from either the living or the dead. Unseen feet shuffled across something that crinkled and crunched, and Cardo was certain-absolutely certain—that it was a bag of Lays potato chips.

There was life in the parking lot, actual living life. People rummaged through the products strewn across the ground. They stopped what they were doing long enough to give him a once over and promptly got back to their work.

Not far from his cruiser, a dead woman lay near an overturned shopping cart. The cart, no doubt once brimming with looted goods, was empty. A plastic gallon jug lay empty in a puddle of milk mixed with the blood surrounding the woman’s diminished head.

“You okay, Cardo?”

“Not really,” Cardo said, looking back at the person addressing him. Jerry Smith, a long-haired stone-freak who’d never gotten the news that the Summer of Love had actually ended. They’d shared a few grades in high school, but nothing more. Sometimes it seems like no one in Beistle was going anywhere. If this were so, then Jerry Smith was getting there a little faster than the rest of them. “You?”

“Not really, man.” Smith had a case of beer under each arm. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, indicating the beer.

“It’s no big deal,” Cardo said, walking over to his cruiser and cursing. The front left of the car was crumpled in. The headlight was smashed and half of the grille lay on the ground. The front wheel was both flat and twisted in such a way that told him the axle was screwed.

Good thing home was a ten minute walk.

“I saw that happen,” Smith said. He sounded proud, eager to talk.

“Yeah?”

“You wanna know who did it?”

“Not really,” Cardo said, shrugging.

“It was Carl Perkins, from over in Harlow?”

“This is a damn mess. Could still use the radio.”

“He got bit,” Smith said. “He was in bad shape.”

“You see any more pork around?”

“Pork?” Smith asked, and the confusion in his eyes cleared. He laughed, obviously surprised to hear Cardo using a word typically reserved for folks who didn’t like the police. He shook his head. “No. Oh, yeah, wait. Tasgal. He got into his car. I was still in there, but I saw him through the window. I think Clark was with him. Clark got shot.”

“Oh,” Cardo said. “Damn it. Where did they go?”

“Away,” Smith said.

“Okay. How’s your mom?”

“She died yesterday.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cardo said, sliding behind the wheel of his cruiser and checking the closed band radio. Dead air, distant voices muttering, and no more.

“I got no place to go, really.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Smith opened his mouth to say something, but Cardo silenced him with an upheld hand.

“Go home and drink your beer, Jerry,” he said, walking past the man and toward Main Street. “Try not to get eaten.”

Cardo walked toward his house. Before he got there, he’d have to pass through the heart of town. From the looks of it, that’s where all of the action was.

He walked, and in his mind he saw the kid’s head open up and deflate. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter: the kid was right there.

What else was he supposed to have done? Well, he didn’t want to think too hard on that. He could have kicked the gun out of the kid’s hand. He was close enough to do that. Kick the gun or kick the kid in the chest. Step to the side and just pluck the gun out of his little hands.

The way the kid’s arms had quivered, it was obvious that he was having a hard time holding up the hand cannon. Did he really think the kid had been strong enough to cock the gun once more before Cardo could take two steps and close the distance between them?

After firing, did the kid even have a decent grip on the thing? Had the gun already left his small hands before Cardo opened fire?

Three shots?

“God,” he said.

There was a large crowd gathered before the fire station. He walked through them, head low, making eye contact sparingly. Bodies parted around him like the Red Sea around the Israelites. Familiar faces turned to watch him pass, eyes wide and eyes weary. And guns, lots of guns. Rifles and shotguns; pistols hanging from hips like it was Dodge City. The folks who didn’t have guns had baseball bats and pitchforks.

“Hey, Cardo,” someone said, and he just walked. It sounded like Mike Hanson, and this was good. He liked Mike, and was happy to know that Mike was alive, but that’s where it ended. He had no desire to hang around and swap war stories and speculate about what tomorrow would bring. He needed to be home and drunk and in his chair, and he needed the Proust kid out of his head.

They didn’t really need him around anyway. If he stopped walking and joined this band of survivors, it would be as one of them, not as the law. They were the law now. Out there, he’d just be another gun, and they had more than enough of those.

Across the street, bodies were lined up three rows deep in the BEISTLE BAKE parking lot. Their faces were covered in sheets or blankets or shirts. Sheets of paper and cardboard bearing hand-written names were pinned or taped to their chests, identifying the corpses for any relatives who wished to claim them. People sat weeping beside a few of them. A woman knelt, the rag-doll body of a toddler across her lap. The baby moved, but its movements were all wrong. A man knelt behind the woman, his face pressed into her shoulder.

Further down, a tangled and charred heap of limbs and torsos smoldered in the evening light. Not everyone had friends or family. He wondered if anyone would find the Proust kid, and what his name had been, anyway.

It wasn’t until he got past the throng that he realized what was wrong—he hadn’t seen any soldiers. The National Guard had pulled out.

Cardo lived in a two room hovel at the end of Main Street. Despite its size, the place was not an embarrassment. It was relatively new, and in very nice shape. Cardo kept it nice and neat, inside and out, and he was happy to bring women here on the rare Saturday night that found him knocking back beers at the Redwood Tavern and looking for a little love. Better than all of that, it was paid for.

The dead body standing in Cardo’s yard looked as if it had been dragged through fire and broken glass. The parts of its body that were not charred were stripped to the muscle. The corpse had a hard time walking, and he wondered who it was and where it had come from. So much was missing that he could not tell if he were looking at the remains of a man or a woman.

He stepped into his yard and looked around, pulling his gun and leveling it at the side of the thing’s head. Like the corpse trying to get into the bathroom at Proust’s, this one had not yet noticed him. It tried to turn in place and stumbled on its own twisted ankles, collapsing to the ground and lying facedown upon the grass. A belch rattled through the dead thing’s throat, and Cardo felt his stomach tighten.

He shot the thing through the back of the head. This close, he noticed an ornate jade earring nearly lost in the blackened remains of the thing’s left ear.

“Oh.” It was Kora Wareheim. She lived three blocks down the road, worked at the bowling alley on weekdays, told fortunes on the weekend, and was the single mother of two small girls.

He went inside and looked around for a sheet of paper. Not finding one, he ripped the front from a Raisin Bran box and, using a black marker that he found in a cluttered drawer to the right of the kitchen sink, scrawled her name upon it.

Outside, he placed it upon the dead woman’s back. He looked around, frowned at the stone frog that sat in the flower-free flowerbed to the right of the front door. It had belonged to the previous owner, and he’d seen no reason to get rid of it. He placed it atop the placard on the dead woman’s back and went inside, locking the door.

Five minutes later, Cardo sat in his recliner, two guns resting on the tray next to his chair and a fifth of good whisky tipped bottoms up. For some reason, the local CBS affiliate was playing an episode of The Honeymooners. He didn’t bother changing the channel. There was news on the other channels, but the news made him remember the sight of the stupid, scared Proust kid’s face turning inside out. Ralph and Ed Norton and the whisky burning its way down his throat helped him to forget.

The events of the last two days caught up to him. He closed his eyes and slept for nearly eight hours. The news was on when he opened his eyes, and he’d spilled half of the whisky between his legs. The sun was down. It was nearly nine.

He got up and went to the bathroom, returned to the living room and ate stale Rice Krispies dry from the box. On the television, an obviously tired and annoyed doctor was explaining that life had simply been redefined, that these things could not be considered dead because dead bodies could not possibly walk or see or do any of the things that these creatures were doing.

Cardo nodded off again, opened his eyes four hours later to the whupping sound of a helicopter. He stood up, legs tingly and stiff, and stumbled toward the door, opened it. Kora’s body made him jump. He’d forgotten about it. He’d forgotten his guns, too, but that was okay—aside from Kora, there were no dead bodies within sight, walking or otherwise.

A large low-flying helicopter circled the town. It was military, he knew that much. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was looking at. It had two rotors, and it looked a lot like the choppers he’d seen in news footage from ‘Nam, dropping down from the sky and extracting injured soldiers, dumping off fresh ones.

He watched, expected the chopper to set down across town, on the Beistle High football field, or to maybe fill the night sky with parachutes. Neither happened. Instead, the chopper looped around, away from where he stood, toward the highway. It spun around once more and headed back toward Beistle. At first he thought something was wrong, that the helicopter had caught fire: a white plume trailed from the underbelly of the helicopter, billowing out and descending upon the town.

“Oh, God,” he said. He ran into his house, grabbed his guns, and was out the door. He didn’t bother closing it behind him.

Fifteen

The bridges were not a problem. On the first one there was a burning car. A black thing stumbled in the middle of the road, clutching at the air with hands that had no fingers. Reggie ran it down, wincing at the sound it made coming apart beneath his truck, but that was it. No Army blockade, no blown out bridge, no road choked bumper to bumper with abandoned vehicles.

On an empty stretch of Highway 50 some fifteen miles east of Nimbus, he pulled over to the side of the road, threw together a sandwich, and found himself thinking about Erma, his ex-wife.

They’d met in line at the bank. Six months out of ‘Nam and he had already purchased his truck. It was his, almost fully paid for. He’d been depositing a check, and she’d been trying to get a small loan so that she could prevent her father’s house from going into foreclosure. They’d hit it off as well as one could expect: she spent the night at his place, and they didn’t waste any time. He was impressed with her body, and she was impressed with the fact that he was self-employed. “I never met a self-employed man who wasn’t a pimp,” she’d said, adding that all of her other men had been freeloaders and bums.

Reggie had no idea how he stacked up as a parent, but if he had one ounce of wisdom to one day impart to Nef, it was this: never marry someone simply because the two of you were good at fucking. At the end of the day, that’s all he and Erma had. Before and after, they talked, sure, but if they made the mistake of talking too much, it became plain: aside from their ability to make the other one’s head explode in bed (or in the kitchen or on the living room floor or in the backyard), there was just nothing else there at all, nothing but bullshit.

By the time he admitted this to himself, it was too late. She was pregnant, and drinking, and her claws had come out. He tried to get her to stop drinking while pregnant and she threatened to have an abortion.

His mother asked why he didn’t tell her to go ahead, do him a damned favor. Cut his losses and move on, but no, absolutely not. People could do what they wanted to do, he really didn’t care, and what he wanted to do was be a father. He wanted to raise the child growing in Erma’s stomach, and didn’t think it should be denied a chance at life simply because he’d fucked up and married the wrong woman. Besides, he’d told himself, they’d figure out a way to make things work. Once the baby came, things would be better.

No such luck. She put up a fight, but the judge had no trouble deciding where Nef belonged. By then, Erma had been arrested for assault and battery after mopping the floor with another woman at a pool hall, and Reggie had established himself as someone who was taking care of business. He thought maybe it had hurt some of the beady-eyed white jurors to have to side with a highway-bound black man, but what else were they going to do? Rule in favor of an abusive alcoholic who got into bar fights and actually referred to them as slave masters and crackers while on the stand?

The last time he saw her was at his mother’s house. It was Nef’s fourth birthday. She called ahead, asked if she could come see her baby girl. She sounded sincere, so he said yes. Did it count as violating her restraining order if he told her that she could come?

She came with her new man in tow, a real jive turkey who wore a threadbare suit and who reeked of grass. Erma was visibly drunk, and neither of them left when he told them to. Reggie ruined the party, called the police. By the time they arrived, he’d already punched out Erma’s new man, and was two inches away from popping her one in the lip, as well.

He wondered where she was now. Not now, really, because she was either dead or huddled somewhere, afraid and waiting to die. But three days ago, before all of this—what had she been up to? She wasn’t with the joker who’d taken her to the party, her knew that much. Beyond that, he knew nothing. She could’ve been six months in the ground or selling herself on street corners, or maybe she’d pulled herself together and had been singing in Church every Sunday morning and looking for a real man and a second shot at being a mother.

Not likely, but he sincerely hoped it were so. He never wanted to see her again, but he didn’t wish her any pain or harm. He’d done his best to protect her from both, and she’d rewarded his dedication with abuse—of herself, of Reggie, and of Nef. Amazingly, she had never struck their daughter—lucky for Erma—but drinking yourself stupid and passing out facedown in your vomit while under the same roof as your child is abuse enough, and it was heading in that direction, anyway. She would have put her hands on Nef, and Reggie would have put his hands on her, and where would any of them be now?

Erma was either alive or dead or neither, and that did not matter. Nef was the only thing that mattered, and he would get to her. He had to get to her. Beyond that, who knew?

He did too much last night and it was catching up with him. A hangover was taking root behind his heavy eyes. He finished off his sandwich and moved on to a bag of potato chips. Against his better judgment, he washed it all down with Coke quickly followed by a long hit from the bottle of Jack.

He ate a few more chips and knocked back a little more whisky, and soon regretted it. His movements were already slower, his eyes feeling as if they were moving around in syrup. He was warm all over, and in spite of everything that was going on, he had to sleep. Not one to mix poisons, he didn’t spend much time contemplating the bottle of Black Mollies in his glove compartment. Maybe later, but not now.

He got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the road, where he pissed onto a smashed Budweiser can. The road was empty in both directions. A few miles back, development had given way to trees, which now rose up on either side of the road for as far as he could see. Sacramento could be an inferno and he wouldn’t know it, not from here. From here, everything looked and sounded right. It was nice out.

Ten minutes later he rumbled past the exit to 49. A few hundred feet away, someone walked down the center of the road. As he drew closer, he saw that it was a woman covered in blood pretty much from head to toe. Closer still, and he could tell that she was dead. She moved in the same lifeless and unnatural manner as the others he’d seen. He sped up, inching the truck to the right so as to avoid her, and she lifted her head and seemed to look directly at him. Her face was a blank. Her eyes were empty.

Further along, he brought the truck to a halt, just outside of a town called Placerville. Positioned diagonally, a trailer bed blocked both lanes. The front of the trailer was on the side facing away from him, otherwise he could have backed up, hitched it, and pulled it out of the way. Pushing it out of the way would have been an option, were it not for the cars parked three deep on the other side of the trailer.

Placerville had pulled up the Welcome mat and locked its doors. He could see no one, but he didn’t rule out that he was being watched from the trees. In fact, his face could at that very moment be in the crosshairs of some sharp-shooter’s thirty-ought-six.

He backed up and turned around, and once more found himself facing the blood-smeared woman. Where the hell had she come from, anyway? Pulling up alongside her, he rolled down his window and waited for her to get close enough to guarantee that he would not miss. She scratched at his door and he put a bullet between her eyes, blowing away the silence and rousing a churning cloud of birds into the air.

Reggie rolled up the window, placed the gun on the passenger seat, and unfolded his map. 49 would take him north, back to I-80. So far, he’d encountered two roadblocks. How many similar obstacles dotted the map between here and home?

He threw his truck into gear and headed toward the 49 North exit, feeling it happen with each passing mile marker: he was shutting down. His mind and his body were going under, fast. It had happened to him in Vietnam, not long after his first real action. He’d been in a few firefights before, yeah, but those had amounted to little more than spraying lead into the foliage and watching trees come apart in chunks. This had been real:

Murdock had been making some kind of joke about the size and lean of his own prick—it was tailor made for the small and slanted poon he’d be slamming, come leave this weekend, and then the air was thrumming with lead, and Murdock’s face had vanished in a pink burst of skull bits, brain matter, and blossomed scalp. Bullets buzzed and buzzed and Kaufmann had taken one in the thigh and Reggie had spun and whirled and crashed through the foliage, screaming and tripping, and there, right there, not even ten feet from where he stood, the little yellow bastard who’d done this to them, frowning and fidgeting with his smoking machine gun, which had jammed up, or something. His gun was caked in dried dirt, just like him.

“Motherfucker,” Reggie had said, raising his machine gun and opening fire, keeping his eyes open no matter how badly he wanted to squeeze them shut, needing to see the way the little man simply unzipped.

Somehow they all made it back to base alive, all save Murdock, of course, who had been reduced from a self-deprecatingly hilarious mule-faced boy to a lifeless tangle of limbs with no face. That night, lying on his cot and staring up into the darkness of the tent that served as their sleeping quarters, Reggie wondered just how the fuck he was going to get to sleep. How could he, when to close his eyes was to see Murdock’s face coming apart, to see it lying there, utterly unrecognizable as anything human, save for the single brown eye glistening from the pulp, in a glued state of surprise?

And then he’d shut down, just like that, and slept through into the following afternoon.

It was happening now, and the Jack Daniels was not helping. To make matters work, compulsively, awfully, he downed even more. His hands were a blur on the steering wheel. His eyelids felt swollen.

He drove until he encountered a flat brick building that had once been a bakery of some sort. The sign above the boarded shut front entrance was faded, and Reggie could not tell if it said BUNNY BREAD or SUNNY BREAD. He wasn’t sure if it was the sign’s fault or the fault of his eyes. He pulled the truck to the side of the road, checked the road for walking corpses, and, seeing that the coast was clear, maneuvered the large vehicle across the broken paved parking lot and around the back of the building, where four rust-colored loading doors thrust over a trash-strewn loading bay.

Parking the truck and killing the engine, he crawled into the back of the truck with his shotgun and his pistol and his newly-acquired Winchester. Pushing aside the supplies he’d taken from the asshole’s home, he spread himself across his bed and, taking one final draft from the bottle of Jack, closed his eyes and checked out.

When he opened his eyes, it was full dark outside, and nearly thirteen hours had passed. Thirteen hours during which, by the grace of God or by sheer godless chance, no one had stopped and broken into his truck while he slept. Thirteen hours during which his daughter could have died a thousand times.

“I’m coming, baby,” he said, not liking the sound of his voice in the silence. The darkness outside of the truck was complete. There was no starlight, no moon. No ambient spillover from a nearby town. Just pure, primal night—an utter and perfect darkness in which anything could move, unseen, and wait.

He sat, awake and wide-eyed, pressed toward the back of his sleeping quarters, staring out though the windshield and into the blackness, the sound of his breath and the wet sounds of his mouth the only sounds in the universe, both unnaturally loud within his head.

Slowly the sky distinguished itself from the black obelisk of the bakery, and soon after the world emerged in shades of dark blue.

There were no dead around. He ate breakfast—a SPAM sandwich on sliced bread, chips, and dry cereal chased with orange juice—and then took a leak and a dump in the weeds at the place where the concrete met an overgrown field littered with trash and scrawny trees.

As he crawled into his truck, the early-morning silence was undone with the unmistakable staccato burst of machine-gun fire. Silence followed by more bullets, and had that been the sound of someone screaming in the hushed and breathless moments between bursts of gunfire?

“Shit,” he said, looking around, dipping his head down a few inches, shoulders raised, old habits taking over. He retrieved his Colt and his shotgun and got low, waited in silence.

Not ten minutes later, the sound of engines—lots of them—grumbled in the silence. As he waited, the growl grew louder, and soon a large convoy rumbled by. His heart raced; fear twisted and squirmed, tried to take hold, but logic won: he couldn’t see them. The bakery blocked them from his view and he from theirs. They’d be gone in a minute—he just had to wait.

“Dammit,” he whispered, his curiosity getting the better of him. He peered around the edge of the bakery, knowing full well what he was about to see yet unable to resist. It was an Army convoy. Four Sheridans trundled by, one after another, followed by several Jeeps. He was about to ease himself out of sight when a civilian truck rolled into view, trailing the Jeeps: a panel truck followed by a pick-up truck pulling a trailer used for transporting livestock. He could not see what the livestock trailer had carried, but he had no trouble making out the huddled human forms packed into the back of the panel truck. Men and woman pressed shoulder to shoulder, and he had no idea if they were alive or dead.

Another panel truck came into view, and Reggie moved out of sight, put the building between himself and his brothers in arms. He grabbed his tags and tossed them into his collar. The metal was cold against his bare skin.

He sighed. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He had no idea what the Army was up to with their commandeered civilian trucks and their strange cargo, and he did not care. All that mattered now was that they were in his road, and that they be permitted to get a good lead on him before he struck out.

One more night. He had to stay put one more night.

“Goddammit,” he said, kicking dust and pebbles into the air.

In the truck, Reggie listened to the radio for a while, learned that there was nothing new to learn. The hours passed slowly. He read a three-week-old issue of Time for a little while, found that he could not focus, and swapped Time for Penthouse and tried to jerk off and failed. Ready to bust out of his skin, he downed some more Jack and passed out for a little while, opening his eyes a little before three in the morning.

Just before dawn, he opened the glove compartment and fished out a single white-capped amber pill bottle. Twisted off the cap and poured the little red and black bitches into his large palm. Twelve left. He returned the pills to the bottle and twisted the cap until it clicked several times. Placed the bottle onto the passenger seat. There were a lot of miles between himself and his daughter, and his ass was done with sleep.

Sixteen

Guy died just after dawn. Following hours of unresponsive silence interspersed with incoherent mumbles, his breathing had become labored and thick. Phlegm rattled in his throat, a weak quiver passed through his body, and that was it.

“Guy,” Richard said, jabbing his right elbow into Guy’s back. “Hey, man, you okay?”

Daniel hung from the tree, his legs rigid beneath the thick ropes that had scoured his flesh raw in the night. His head hung forward, his hair stubbornly shrouding his face, and for a moment Richard was certain that he was utterly alone in the swelling light of morning. Daniel had died, as well, suffocated by the ropes encircling his naked chest.

No: his chest rose and fell beneath the ropes.

“Daniel.” Barely a croak. He cleared his throat and managed to yell this time.

“Hn,” Daniel said, lifting his head.

“He’s dead,” Richard said.

Daniel made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a dismissive grunt, allowed his head to drop forward once again.

“We need…” Richard said, allowing his words to wither in his mouth. We need to do something is what he’d meant to say, and no words had ever tasted more false crossing his tongue. If they were lucky, they’d die quickly today. There was little hope for much else.

Less than five minutes after dying, Guy tugged at the ropes binding his hands behind his back and to Richard’s wrists. For a small and fleeting and pitiful moment, Richard assumed that he was wrong, that Guy had not died, that he’d merely passed out once more. Maybe he was going down for the count, but he was not out yet.

Then the other half of the nightmare asserted itself. Its warmth rapidly fading, the dead body to his back struggled against its restraints.

“God,” Daniel said, his voice little more than a whisper. He made a half-hearted attempt against the ropes, gave up.

Richard screamed and struggled and the ropes holding him to the writhing corpse gave no quarter, seemed, in fact, to tighten.

“Guh,” Guy said. The sound was little more than air passing over vocal chords grown taut in death. There was nothing behind it; it was as devoid of intent and intelligence as the sound made by the wind howling through the attic of a crumbling and abandoned house.

The ropes did their job. None of them slipped free. Night and shadow retreated. The dead man to his back repeated the same listless motions, gently rocking against Richard’s back. By the time the sunlight touched his face, he had slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“Wake up.” Someone slapped his cheek.

Richard opened his eyes, blinking. It was so much brighter now. The sun was nearly directly above them. Samson stood over him, looking down, his face blank.

“How long’s he been dead?”

Richard stared. He wasn’t sure who Samson was talking to, nor did he care.

“Hey,” Sam said, nudging him with his foot and pointing at Guy, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t know,” Richard said. “A few hours.”

Sam had the same look of fascination Richard had seen on his face back at Misty’s, a million years ago. They were all there, Sam and Max and the other one, who was pale, taller and older than the brothers. If he were related to them, he didn’t look it.

The old man with the braided beard was there, too, his muscular arms folded above his gut. He was in incredible shape for a man his age. Even his round gut looked hard. He was leather and stone.

Max stood before Daniel, his arms at his side. The old man walked over to Sam, looked down at Richard. “Morning,” he said, smiling. His teeth looked too straight and too white to be anything but fake.

“Why?” It was all Richard could manage.

“Why?” Huffington Niebolt said, crouching. His knees popped, though he did not seem to notice. His braided beard hung between his legs. He tilted his head sideways. “I’ve seen a lot of people die, son, and the one thing they always ask in the end—the ones who get to see death coming, of course—is why. Why?”

He smiled again, his face beaming, and looked at each of them, in turn, except for Daniel, who was awake and alert and watching. To Richard’s back, Guy writhed, agitated.

“Why, why, why?” Huffington Niebolt shook his head and laughed, garrulous and genuine. Once more he met Richard’s eye. The old man’s smile vanished. The humor bled from his eyes. “Why is all there is. Why is all there ever was.”

He stood up. “Jacob,” he said, his voice as devoid of humor as his face. The taller one, Jacob, stepped over to him, looking like a child in need of instruction.

“Cut them loose,” Huffington Niebolt said, indicating Richard. “Put him over there. And don’t let that one bite off your fingers, Jacob, because I will blow your head off before the damned thing has a chance to swallow your pinky.”

“Come on, Huff,” Jacob said. “I’m not—”

“You’re not talking back to me, son, is what you’re not,” Niebolt said, showing Jacob the back of his hand. “I’ve seen these things at work with my own eyes. You haven’t. I watched them rip your little brother’s belly open and fight over his guts while he screamed for me to help him. So shut the fuck up and be careful, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jacob, related to the other after all, leaned over, reached into the hollow between Richard’s and Guy’s lower backs, where their bound hands touched, and seized the ropes. They gave with little effort.

Large hands seized Richard beneath his armpits and lifted, dragged him over to a nearby tree.

“Sit,” Jacob said, leaning Richard’s back against the tree trunk. Richard’s lower spine seemed to have fused in the night. A barbed spike of pain twisted between his shoulder blades. He stared down at his bound ankles, wriggling his toes within his shoes. They tingled.

Richard looked up. Jacob glowered, the muscles in his thick neck standing out, his jaw clamped tight, his small dark eyes fixed on Richard. Behind him, the other two looked from Daniel to Richard to Guy’s writhing corpse. Each of them held a shotgun.

“This is not something that I ever anticipated,” Huffington Niebolt said, looming over Guy’s writhing corpse. Using one booted foot, he rolled the dead man onto its back, pinning it with a well-worn heel to the breastbone. Guy’s corpse opened its mouth and gnawed on air. Niebolt smiled once more. Like his voice, his smile was warm and inviting. “Unanticipated and terrible, but much deserved.

“Yes,” he said, took his foot off of the living corpse, and turned to face Daniel. “Terrible, but much deserved.” He brushed a square fingertip across the scabbed cut on Daniel’s breastbone. “Who did this?”

“Me,” Max said.

“Hunh,” Niebolt said, picking at the cut until it glistened with fresh blood. Daniel jerked left and right, as if maybe he could wiggle all the way around to the other side of the tree. “Impatient.”

“Whu,” Daniel said.

Niebolt looked back at Richard. “I think he was trying to ask why,” he said. Richard held his gaze until he looked away, faced Daniel. “Okay. Let’s make this happen.”

Richard sat at the base of the tree and did the only thing he could do: he watched.

Daniel kept his eyes on the ground. Somewhere inside, the child he once was, the one who believed his mother’s words to be nothing less than the gospel, the truth, cowered and prayed. Begged the God who was not there to save him, to take this cup from his lips. There or not, God’s response was as it had been when His own Son had wept for a way out of pain and torment: He didn’t do shit.

“Why? I’ll tell you why, son,” Huffington Niebolt said, once more clutching Daniel’s hair in one large fist and pressing his head to the tree. “Open your eyes. Good.

“Because I can, that’s why. And because it is what you deserve.” He released Daniel’s hair. Eyes closed, Daniel did not have the strength to hold up his head. It hung forward, and he became aware for the first time of the stench. He’d soiled himself in the night.

“Let me tell you something, all of you,” Niebolt said, his voice swelling with pride. Daniel would not set eyes upon the man ever again, not if he could help it, but he saw him nonetheless, leering and prideful, his chest puffed out. “Most of you know this story. At least two of you don’t, so.

“I was twenty-two years old,” Niebolt said, “Not much older than you, I think,” tapping a finger against Daniel’s bare chest, “I killed a man with these hands.”

Daniel did not lift his head, did not open his eyes, yet he knew: the old man’s tight fists hovered in the air between them.

“Nineteen thirty-one, if I’m not mistaken. I killed him in the ring in a smoke-filled joint outside of New Orleans while the rabble screamed for more. Harry Cordeaux. The poor bastard called himself Harry ‘The Hammer,’ and I humiliated him in the third and took his life in the fourth.”

A hand closed around Daniel’s throat.

“I beat a man to death with my hands, boy,” Niebolt said, his voice shot through with awe and fascination, the voice of a convert. “I beat him until he was nothing, no more. Just an empty body with a stupid look on its face.

“I’m sixty-five years old, and I don’t feel a day over thirty, son, and I want to beat you to death against this tree. I want to snap your ribs and tear your organs. With these hands.”

Niebolt drove his fists into Daniel’s stomach three times, maybe four. Daniel gasped.

“I want to, but I’m not. You remember me telling you about Charlie, Max?”

“Yeah,” one of the others said. Shotgun in hand, he took a step forward. He was built like the old man, but his skin was darker, olive-skinned. His dark eyes were set wide in a round and unpleasant face.

“His name was something Gui, but we all called him Charlie, just like our boys call the gooks over there in that useless war. Charlie Gui.”

“Gah,” Daniel said, coughing. His stomach muscles were loose and hot. Colors swirled behind his eyes. God continued to do nothing.

“He was a Chinaman,” Niebolt said, and Daniel could tell that he was talking directly to him once more. “An old yellow thing made of wrinkles and bones. He lived in the same building as me and my mom in San Francisco. This was a few years before I hit the road and saw the country and figured out just what it was I was supposed to be doing while the planet grinded its way toward death.

“God, I guess I was fourteen. Charlie used to sit out in front of the building on this little folding chair, just looking off at whatever, and he and I got to talking one day.” Niebolt laughed. “He got to talking, I should say. I just listened. His English was pretty good. I understood just about everything he said, except for the times he’d launch into some lightning-fast Chinese, of course. He told me all sorts of things I really didn’t hold onto. Things about his time spent working on the train tracks or logging out near Mendocino. Things about his time in China.

“But there’s one thing I never forgot: When he was a child, I think he said ten or twelve, he attended a public execution. His father made him do it, told him that he had to know what happened to those who spoke out against the dynasty. You know anything about Ling Chi?”

Daniel lifted his head, opened his eyes, looked at the old man despite his vow to himself. His eyes were dry, and his vision was blurred. He found the old man’s face and held it.

“Just kill me,” he gasped.

“Oh, look at you, educated boy,” Niebolt said. His cruelty notwithstanding, Huffington Niebolt was an honest man. He was impressed.

The last of his strength depleted, Daniel could no longer hold his head up. It swung forward. He licked his lips with a tongue that seemed to have been fashioned from sand. His mind turned away from those two words, Jesus, God, Ling Chi, the Death of a Thousand Cuts, the Slow Slicing, and retreated into the darkness, far, far into the darkness, but not so far that the old man’s words did not reach him. And not so far that he could escape the pain that would soon define his final moments alive.

“Charlie told me he kept his eyes closed for most of the execution. He said it was bad. I saw some pictures of the act, once. From just before I was born, actually. Right before it was banned. Charlie was right—it was bad. And I saw it again, with my own eyes, in a Chicago basement in 1942. That was worse than those black and white photos. You can see the pain in the photos, but you can’t hear it—the sound of blade slicing through flesh. The whimper coming from the poor bastard’s throat. Like a baby.”

“Jesus,” someone shouted. “Stop this!”

It took Daniel a moment to realize it was Richard, the asshole who was fucking Kimberly.

“Shut up,” someone else yelled. Richard gasped, the wind crushed from his lungs.

“So last night,” Niebolt said, “after I came out here and introduced myself to you, I went back to my home and fell asleep wondering how I was going to kill you. On the one hand, I’ve got these.”

Another volley of fists to Daniel’s stomach. He gagged and felt his bowels empty down his thighs in a hot liquid rush.

“And I’ve got this.”

Cold steel pressed to the flesh above Daniel’s right nipple, just beneath the rope. Daniel tensed, preparing himself for the pain, struggling to retreat deeper into the darkness. He’d reached the wall—he could go no further. He waited, eyes clenched, lips drawn back from his teeth, far too weak to struggle. There was no pain. The blade withdrew.

“The world you and your friends come from is not the real world, and you are not human beings. Not as history defines them, anyway. Humanity, like life, is cruel. Nothing is true but pain and blood, and your flowers and your happenings and your protests and peace marches flail in opposition to that truth. And one does not oppose truth.”

For an immeasurable moment, Daniel thought that maybe Niebolt had splashed ice water onto his chest. Then the pain hit and he opened his mouth and screamed.

Samson Niebolt’s words washed over Richard. In one ear and out the other, as his and everyone else’s mom used to say. His words did not matter. What did was the fillet knife in his hand, and the way he waved it so close to Daniel’s bare chest, brandished it inches from his face. The way he punctuated his sentences with it and described arcs in the air while speaking to Daniel, slicing deeply into nothing, inching closer and closer to Daniel until—

The strip of flesh curled away from Daniel’s chest with shocking ease. It hung from his stomach like an elongated and bleeding tongue. Daniel screamed. Richard screamed, too, and Samson muttered something while the one named Max laughed.

Richard closed his eyes, squeezed them shut and begged for death, just a quick death, please God, a heart attack or a stroke, and Daniel’s screams soon disintegrated into wet, choking gasps.

“Come here, you,” the old man said. “Hold his head.”

Daniel no longer sounded human.

Richard opened his eyes. He didn’t want to but he did. He opened his eyes and he screamed and he screamed and Daniel wheezed and gurgled and choked on his own blood.

Niebolt stepped back, admired his work. Max stood beside him, wiping his bloody hands on his shirt. Daniel’s nose was gone, just two bloody skeletal slits now bubbling blood. His lips were gone. So too was one of his ears, maybe both of them—Richard could not tell. So were his eyelids.

“Wait,” Niebolt said, stepping once more toward Daniel. Richard stared at the ground while the old man scalped Colleen’s brother, wincing at the wet-towel sound of Daniel’s flesh being peeled away from his skull. He looked up when he knew it was over, unable to do otherwise.

Daniel shook, gasped and bubbled, his face raw and glistening, a surprised and grinning skull pouring blood down his naked body. His scalp was draped over his shoulder. The old man wiped the knife clean on one denim clad thigh, slid it into its sheath, and pumped another left hook into Daniel’s abdomen. The tongue-like flap of meat hanging from Daniel’s chest waggled. Richard leaned forward, his stomach twisting itself into an acid tangle.

“Get back,” Niebolt said, waving his sons away. Plucking the scalp from Daniel’s shoulder, he strode over to Guy’s corpse, rolled it onto its stomach, and untied the ropes securing its arms and legs.

“Here, here, you filth,” Niebolt said, waving Daniel’s dripping scalp above Guy’s mouth. The bound corpse clamped its teeth onto the offered treat. The dead thing tugged on the scalp like a dog trying to pry a saliva-soggy scrap of rawhide from its master’s hand, and the old man wrenched it away. A hairy scrap of flesh hung from between Guy’s lips.

The old man circled Guy’s corpse, cut the ropes binding its wrists. He placed Daniel’s scalp onto its head, an oozing and bloodied wig, Daniel’s bangs hanging into its eyes like a parody.

Daniel whimpered and gurgled and wheezed. Blood flowed from his head and from the long wound on his chest, and the flap of flesh glistened in the morning light and rocked gently back and forth, slapped against his stomach. No one said anything. All eyes were on Guy’s corpse, which struggled to its feet. It fell three times, right onto its face.

“Holy shit,” one of them said. Another laughed.

At last, Guy’s body found its feet. It tottered, Daniel’s scalp dripping blood into its eyes, the bloody pants falling to the ground and revealing the wadded underwear dangling from its crotch, glued in place with caked-on blood.

“Ur,” it seemed to say, stomach gases passing over its vocal cords. Its head wavered. Its fingers worked the air. It seemed confused.

“Hey,” Samson said, loud, and Guy’s corpse looked in his direction. Its eyes widened, and it took a step toward him, its bare ass facing Richard.

Huffington Niebolt stepped behind the thing that was Guy and seized the back of its shirt in one fist. “This way.” He guided Guy’s corpse toward Daniel, who had slipped beyond the realm of screams. His shiny butcher-shop head hung low, and if not for Daniel’s heaving chest, Richard would have thought him dead.

“This way, you piece of shit,” Niebolt said.

“Don’t touch it,” Jacob said. “Who knows what kind of diseases it has.”

“Shut up,” the old man said, pushing the dead thing closer to Daniel, closer, closer still. It swayed from left to right, and for a moment Richard thought it was going to pitch sideways and sprawl once more upon the ground. It steadied itself, its wavering head growing still, its groping hands descending toward the crimson swath dangling across Daniel’s stomach, seizing it in both hands and tugging.

The meat came away with little more than a moist whisper. Daniel did not respond. He quivered and gasped and wheezed, but there would be no more screams. Stumbling backward, Guy’s corpse pressed the dripping strip of meat to its mouth. It took a few drunken sideways steps, its jaw working. Smacking like a child, it sank to its knees.

Niebolt took one tentative step toward the dead thing and its meal. Daniel mewled once.

“Stay back,” Samson said.

Richard struggled with his ropes, falling at last onto his side, where he grew still and hopeless.

“Shut the hell up,” the old man said, easing himself toward the feasting corpse, standing at last within its reach.

“It’s got food,” he said. “It doesn’t care about me.” He clenched his thick right hand into a fist and drove it into the side of the dead thing’s head. It toppled, the remains of its meal trailing from its mouth.

Niebolt stepped back, watched as it struggled onto its knees and pawed at its bloody mouth. The remains of the strip of flesh sliced from Daniel’s chest lay on the ground. The dead thing grabbed it, brought it to its mouth once more. Nibbled once, and then tossed it away. Its eyes settled on Niebolt, who stepped to the side, revealing Daniel, bloody and naked and warm.

“God,” Richard said. “Enough. Kill him, at least, you bastard.”

“Shut up,” one of the shotgunners said, waving his weapon toward Richard.

Guy’s corpse stood, stumbled up to Daniel, and threw itself upon him like a lover, its eager mouth exploring his throat. Daniel’s breath came and went in blood-choked whistles through the ragged hole in his windpipe.

Guy’s corpse slowly spun in place, face and hands slick with blood and little wads of flesh. Richard did not close his eyes. He did not look away, could not shut out the horror simply because he did not want to open his eyes and find it moving toward him, inches away, its lips peeled back from blood-streaked teeth. Because of this simple fear, he watched Daniel die.

There were no final screams. Daniel went slack, utterly and completely slack, a rattle working its way from within his chest. A watery surge of vomit issued forth from his mouth and onto the ground, and he was done.

Guy’s corpse didn’t bother returning to its meal. It took a few steps away from Daniel, probed its mouth once more, and looked down at the length of its body. It grabbed the blood-stiff briefs clinging to its crotch and peeled them away, revealed the circle of open flesh where its penis had been. It dropped the underwear and looked around once more, its heavy-lidded gaze finding Richard.

“Uur,” it said, the left side of its mouth twitching into something that would have looked like a half-smile on someone alive.

“No,” Richard said, turning a pleading face to the old man. “Don’t let this happen, man, I’m begging you.”

Huffington Niebolt stared at Richard with unblinking eyes. He folded his arms across his chest, tight, like he was trying to contain himself. His muscled forearms rested atop the shelf of his gut, pinning his braided beard to his shirt.

Guy’s corpse tripped on its own feet and stumbled once again to the ground. It struggled for a few seconds, gained its bearings, limited as they were, and once more settled its eyes onto Richard. Like it knew he was helpless, and that to make a play for the others would be pointless. They had guns and fists. They could fight back.

Not bothering to stand, the dead thing dug its fingers into the dirt and the grass and crawled like a baby toward him.

“I’m serious,” Richard said, panic unraveling his heart. Soon he would be braying like a madman. “I’ll do anything, okay? Just don’t let this happen. Don’t let this happen.”

The old man raised his eyebrows. Guy’s fingers found the soles of Richard’s shoes. Samson and his brothers watched with grim anticipation. Max smiled. Richard writhed and kicked and fell onto his side. Guy’s corpse stopped fumbling with Richard’s feet and, reorienting itself, crawled toward his face. Heart hammering, he lashed out with his bound feet, sunk his heels into the ground, and pushed himself away. He opened his mouth to beg Niebolt for mercy. Instead, he screamed. To his own ears, he sounded like an animal.

“Enough of this,” Niebolt said, pointing at Max. “Pull it away.”

Scowling, Max stomped over, seized Guy’s corpse by the ankles, and dragged it facedown away from Richard.

“That’s far enough,” Niebolt said.

Max let go of the thing’s sock-clad ankles. He rubbed his hands on his jeans, cursing under his breath, stepping forward and pressing his right foot onto the back of the dead thing’s head. It flailed, pawing Max’s shoe.

“Tie it up,” Niebolt said, walking over to where Richard lay. He stopped, his large hands on his hips, looking down at Richard. “You got a name, boy?”

Richard opened his mouth, and Niebolt pressed the worn sole of his right boot to Richard’s lips, mashing them against his teeth.

“Just so you know: if you tell me ‘fuck you,’ I’m gonna kick your face in right here. And that’s not just some figure of speech bullshit, or anything. I’ll goddamn kick it in, you hear?”

Richard blinked up at the old man.

“You hear?” Niebolt said, his leathery forehead creasing over his raised eyebrows. He gave Richard’s face a painful nudge.

“Yes,” Richard said against the bottom of the man’s boot, his words muffled. Dirt crunched between his teeth.

“Mm?” Niebolt pulled his foot away from Richard’s face.

“Okay.”

“So?”

“What?” Richard asked, his mind not letting go of the image of the old man’s boot kicking his face until it was a ragged and bloody hole.

Niebolt laughed, looked around at his sons. Settled his gaze once more on Richard. “Your name.”

“Richard.”

“Richard?” Niebolt asked, nodding. “Richard. Just like the good man in the White House. You vote for him, Richard?”

“Nuh,” Richard said, spitting. “No.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so,” Niebolt said, scratching his chin. “A young man like you. Of course you didn’t.”

Behind Niebolt, Daniel’s corpse lifted his head and looked around. Niebolt followed Richard’s gaze, looked back at him.

“Happens fast, doesn’t it, Dick?” Niebolt said, shaking his head. “Amazing.”

Max sat on Guy’s back, straddling him. He placed his left hand in the dead thing’s head and forced its face down into the dirt.

“You probably get called Dick all the time, huh, Richard?”

“Sometimes,” Richard said. “When I was younger.”

“Probably didn’t like it.”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you, Rich. Can I call you Rich?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” Niebolt said, reaching down and pulling Richard to his feet and slamming him against the tree to his back. Richard’s knees buckled.

“Stay on your feet, now, Rich. Be a man.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Not that again. You should know better.”

Niebolt punched him in the stomach. Gasping, Richard sank to the ground, a white-hot knot of pain spreading through his guts.

“I got better things to do, Rich,” Niebolt said. “Big things happening out there, as you know. Jacob?”

“Yeah?” Jacob asked, stepping up beside his father.

“You take care of Rich here, okay?”

Jacob regarded Richard, his face a heavy-lidded blank. “Okay,” he said.

“But—” Sam said, appearing at Niebolt’s other shoulder.

“But nothing,” the old man said. “Don’t make me knock your teeth out, Samson.” The old man looked down at Richard, one last time. He smiled. “Have fun.”

A few minutes later, Richard was alone with Jacob. Guy’s corpse tried to roll onto its back. Daniel’s scalp slid from its head and lay rumbled upon the ground. Tied to the tree, Daniel’s corpse looked left and right, left and right, as if it were still trying to shake the hair from its eyes.

“My dad’s old,” Jacob said, dropping to his knees beside Richard. “He does things his way. We don’t always agree, but he’s old, and I think he may be a little crazy, because I really don’t believe most of the things he tells us. Most of it is just nuts, man.” Jacob shrugged. “Sometimes, though, he lets us do things our way.”

Jacob slid a large serrated knife from the sheath at his hip. He held it up, between them, looking past the blade and into Richard’s eyes.

“Like now,” Jacob said, pushing Richard down and onto his chest. His fingers moved up Richard’s back and into his hair, and he pressed Richard’s face to the ground. Richard screamed.

Jacob moved down. Richard squeezed his eyes shut, his scream dissolving into an incoherent prayer. He tasted dirt. He begged God and cursed God, and he waited for pain that did not come. There was a tugging at his ankles, his wrists. Steel touched his flesh but did not open it. The ropes fell away. Jacob stood, rolling Richard onto his back with his right foot.

Richard held his hands before his face, wiggled his fingers, stared at the rope marks on his wrists, felt blood tingling back into his limbs.

Jacob smiled, took a few steps back.

“I’m not the kind of guy who likes things handed to me, all nice and wrapped up,” he said, looking Richard up and down. “I like to earn what’s mine. I’m gonna give you five minutes.”

“What?” Richard asked, sitting up and massaging his calf muscles.

“Five minutes,” Jacob said, producing a cigarette from a box in his shirt pocket and lighting up. “Then I’m coming after your ass. Or you can sit there and rub your leg for five minutes, and I’ll just kill you right here, but I’d really like you to run.”

Using the nearest tree, Richard pulled himself to his feet. He flexed his leg muscles, wiggled his toes. Looked at Jacob.

“Don’t think about it,” Jacob said, sheathing the knife and pulling the pistol from his hip.

“You’re all insane,” Richard said, taking a step away from the tree. His feet had not stopped tingling.

Jacob tapped his bare wrist. “Four minutes,” He said. “You should really go.”

“I’ll kill you,” Richard said.

“I’m sure you will,” Jacob said, bringing the cigarette to his lips with his left hand and shooing Richard with his right.

Richard took three uneasy steps away from Jacob and, bumping into a tree and stumbling once, ran into the forest.

Seventeen

Tricky Dick was on the tube, urging Americans to be vigilant in this time of trouble, to do what needed to be done and to cooperate with local law enforcement.

At Misty’s, local law enforcement was unconscious on the couch in the living room behind the store, an infected bite on its arm. Crate was outside. Charlie sat at the middle table, drinking his fourth beer since Tasgal had passed out. Misty sat across from him, looking down at the table and listening to the television while working over her own beer and wondering just what the hell they were going to do with Eric Tasgal.

Not long after Crate had taken out the four corpses loafing their way across the parking and toward Misty’s place, Stacy Knox had bicycled in on a cloud of self-importance and body odor. She’d given the burning heap of bodies a wide berth, muttered under her breath, and asked Misty if she could come inside for a bit—she was feeling lonely, her equanimity was crumbling, and she needed to be around other people.

“Sure,” Misty had said, wanting to kick herself in the ass. Stacy rarely came by, and when she did, it was merely to gossip, to speak in hushed tones about which planet was in retrograde that month, and to speculate on the whereabouts of her husband’s spirit, which was, she assured all who would listen, moving onward and upward through the astral planes. He still managed to send messages back to her, messages that filtered down through higher realms and entered their own in the form of a single leaf resting on a windowsill or the bird calling out in the silence of evening. Or the patterns made by whisky spilled across the kitchen table, or maybe even the shape of her crap, for all Misty knew, all curled and flakey at the bottom of the toilet bowl. If, that was, Stacy Knox didn’t do her business in the woods behind her house, and Misty wouldn’t have placed money on it.

As for Stacy’s husband, Misty marveled over the fact that he was the first man to sail into the astral plane via a self-imposed mouthful of buckshot. Stacy had been hard enough to swallow before, but now?

Misty’s nastier side was sorry that Stacy hadn’t come stumbling up to the store dead and hungry. At least Crate could have shot her then…

On the television, Nixon said that they were doing everything within their power to confront the crisis at hand, as well as the other crises that had arisen in the hours since the dead began to rise. When asked to comment on the rumors that the phenomenon was the result of a Department of Defense-funded biological warfare experiment gone terribly wrong, Nixon denied it without hesitation.

“That is patently ridiculous,” he said. “Reports from around the globe have confirmed that this event began taking place everywhere at the same time. That’s not how germ warfare works, Ted, and you know it.”

“Lying snake,” Stacy Knox said, sitting alone at one of the tables and holding the crystal that hung from a length of twine around her neck, gazing into its multifaceted depths. She wasn’t even forty, though she could easily pass for thirty. She had that much going for her, even though she told folks to call her Starshine. Most everyone in town obliged, of course, even if they thought it was bullshit, but Misty had little tolerance for such nonsense. Not then, and especially not now. The time for nonsense was over.

“Shut it,” Misty said, what little patience she had going up in flames.

“I’m sorry,” Stacy said, dropping the crystal against her chest, where it found peace in the valley. “You don’t have to be so negative, though.”

“She’s not, Starshine,” Charlie said, continuing to pile beer atop hard liquor. Misty had taken away the gin bottle, and Charlie had simply gone to the cooler. He looked at Stacy’s face, which was pretty enough, before staring at her large chest. “Jesus, you’re annoying.”

“Okay, Charlie,” Misty said. “You should probably go into the back and lie down. I’m not in the mood to hear your voice any more.”

“I’m not tired,” Charlie said, his words slurring together. “I’m wide awake and listening to the President and he’s telling us what to do.”

“You’re shitfaced and you’re going to pass out at that table.”

“He’s telling us how to get out of this mess and I’ll be damned...”

“And I’m not gonna help your ass to bed.”

“...damned if I’m gonna miss it, this is the broadcast of the decade,” but he was already facing away from the screen, rolling his eyeballs in search of his bottle.

“Go lay down, Charlie,” Misty growled.

Charlie wavered like an out-of-use marionette before turning slightly and saying, deliberately, with the authority of a man who has just won the argument, “Tasgal is on the couch.”

“The bed,” Misty said through clenched teeth. “Now please let me listen to this, dammit.”

“Who’s Tasgal?” Stacy asked. Misty didn’t even bother looking at her—just rolled her eyes and shook her head and continued to stare down Charlie. He weathered it for a few seconds then gave in, got to his feet, and took his time getting to the back.

“If Crate were in here, he’d take you for one of them and shoot your ass.”

“Urm,” Charles said, reaching the door that lead to the living quarters behind the store. He looked back and shook his head, eyelids heavy. “We should tie him up.” He shrugged and belched. “I guess.” He turned and left.

“What’s he talking about?” Stacy asked.

“He’s drunk,” she said, downing her beer and getting up from the table, walking to the counter, where she paced, her eyes on the television. “Now just be quiet a second, okay. Get yourself something to drink from the cooler.”

“Oh,” Stacy said, eyes wide, acting surprised, like she hadn’t been waiting for the invitation. “You sure?”

“Please.”

“Okay, then,” Stacy said. She pushed away from the table and went over to the cooler. Glass tinked against glass, and she returned with a bottle of Miller Lite. “Thanks.”

“Mnn,” Misty said, staring through the television. Richard Nixon attempted to field questions from a gang of reporters all trying to out-shout the others. The President lifted his hands and begged for silence. The Secret Service guys to his left and right were getting shifty, looking nervous. To Misty, it looked as if they were about to drag their boss out of the room, or maybe put a few rounds into the ceiling to quiet down the commoners.

Neither happened. The room got itself under control long enough for someone from CBS to ask Nixon to confirm the report that Soviet submarines had been detected just off the coast of Alaska.

“To hell with that,” another reporter shouted. “What about the Gulf of Mexico? They’re in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. President, or are you unable to comment on that at this point?”

“I’ll be back,” Misty said. “Stay right here.” Stacy looked at Misty down the length of the bottle held to her lips. She raised her eyebrows. Misty stepped outside. The bell did its thing.

“Yeah,” Crate said, drinking from an old liquor jug filled with water. Misty could not remember the last time he’d gotten drunk, and the joint he’d smoked earlier was, as far as she knew, the first he’d had in months. He was on the ball, the old bastard, and if they survived this, it would probably be because of him.

“When do you want to do it?”

“Sooner the better, I guess,” he said, frowning up at the light illuminating the parking lot. “Think I ought to shoot it?”

She read his gaze. “Why?”

“This place stands out at night. We could use a little darkness.”

“We won’t be able to see them.”

“My eyes are just fine, woman. I’ll see them when I need to see them. Better than theirs, leastways. With the lights out, maybe they’ll just keep on walking by,” he said, leaning forward and looking toward the door leading into the store. “Gotta turn out the lights in the store, too. Move everyone into the back.”

“You sure about this?”

“I’m sure I don’t want to know what it feels like to be eaten alive. I’m tired, Mis. I need some sleep.”

“But I think we—”

Crate waved an annoyed hand at her face. “I didn’t say now, dammit. I know what we need to do right now, so let’s do it.”

They stepped into the store. Stacy opened her second beer. She looked up at Crate, let her eyes drop down to the rifle in his hands for a second, and smiled. “You coming in here to shoot me, Crate.”

“You should be so lucky,” he said.

Misty locked the door.

“What’s going on,” Stacy asked. “Are there more?”

“Not yet there aren’t,” Crate said, leaning his rifle against the waist-high ice cream cooler. He stepped over to the counter, his eyes on the television. An anchorwoman with her face cinched up like a purse spoke of Soviet troop buildup along the border of someplace she’d never heard of.

“Nothing’s looking good,” Misty said.

“Huh,” Crate said, and shrugged. “No real surprise there.”

Misty kept her eyes on the screen. Crate watched television a little longer, before grabbing his rifle and stepping toward back of the store.

“Where you off to,” Stacy asked.

“We got a little business to take care of, Starshine,” he said, frowning at her. “You stay put. Come on, Mis.”

“I hope I’m as frisky as the two of you when I’m your age,” Stacy said. She smiled and knocked back her Miller Lite.

“Yeah,” Crate said, and left. Misty followed.

Tasgal lay with his injured forearm across his face. His gun lay on his stomach, his left hand resting atop it. His mouth was open. He’d kicked off his boots.

“Eric,” Misty said, nudging him. “Wake up, kiddo.”

Eric Tasgal mumbled, shifted. Misty stared at the gun on the young policeman’s chest, hoping his fingers would draw away from it. They didn’t.

“Eric.” Louder this time, with a little more force. He jerked his right arm away from his face. His left hand seized the gun and his eyes opened. He blinked up at her, his eyes devoid of comprehension, and she yelped, backing away, nearly stumbling. Certain that he would open fire.

He didn’t raise the gun. The confused look on his face gave way to awareness, and he licked his lips, blinking.

“Sorry I startled you,” she said, stepping toward him. Behind her, unseen in the darkened hallway, Crate sighed. She wanted to punch his teeth down his throat.

Tasgal looked down at the gun in his left hand. “I... I startled you,” he said, sitting up. He placed the gun beside him on the couch and moaned softly, working the fingers of his right hand.

“You okay?” Misty asked.

He made a fist and winced, looked up at her. His face was too pale.

“No,” he said. “This hurts like hell.”

“All I have is aspirin,” she said. “Aspirin and grass.”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning back and staring down at his right forearm, which rested upon his lap like a dead fish. Above the place where he’d been bitten, the gauze was stained deep red bordering on brown. Gingerly, he poked at the bandage with his left forefinger. He sucked air between his clenched teeth, looked up at Misty. “Now would be good.”

“Okay,” Misty said. “You should stand up. Come for a walk.”

“What?” Tasgal asked, leaning forward.

“On the television, they were saying, they said that people who had been bitten should keep as active as possible.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

She shook inside but held to it. “Something about blood flow. I’m... I’m just telling you what they said.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know. Bastards’ll say anything to try and keep you in line and not asking questions,” but he got up anyway. “Well, I do have to take a piss,” he said. His voice was slurred. He was groggy and weak, and maybe still a little drunk, and if they were careful they’d get through this. “Got to change this bandage.”

He rose, arms outstretched, and Misty stepped close, offered to steady him.

“I’m okay,” he said, seeming to get his bearings. “Thanks.”

He took a step away from the couch, leaving his gun behind. Misty held her breath. This was going to work. Tasgal took another step toward the hall, and stopped, looking back at his gun. Dammit.

“Okay,” Misty said, stepping into the hall, away from Tasgal. Crate emerged from the shadows and leveled his rifle at Tasgal’s face.

“Leave the gun where it is,” he said.

Tasgal froze, mouth open. He wavered in place, blinked his eyes. “Whu,” he said.

“Get on your knees,” Crate said. Misty lingered behind him, biting her lip, her heart hammering. “I’m serious, Eric. Get down on your knees and don’t go for the gun, or I’ll kill you.”

Something clarified slightly in Tasgal and he went into officer mode. “Let’s be calm, sure we can talk about—”

“You’re bit, Eric,” Misty said.

“TV says you’re going to become one of those things,” Crate said. That also wasn’t entirely true. Different people had said different things, but who could be trusted? “There’s no helping it. I’d probably be doing you a favor, shooting you, but you never know. They might find a cure.”

“I’m a police officer, Crate,” Tasgal said, holding his hands at chest level, palms outward. His fingers shook. He took two small steps toward Crate, who backed into Misty. “You’re breaking the law.”

“I’m protecting myself,” Crate said. “You might be dangerous.”

“Then why don’t you let me get in my car and leave?” Tasgal said, starting to sway from side to side. “I’ll drive on out of here. Just… jus…”

“Get on your knees, boy,” Crate said. “I’m about to shoot you.”

“Hurts,” Tasgal said. “I really need to use the bathroom.”

“Let him,” Misty said, moving past Crate and toward the couch. “Don’t move.”

“Don’t move,” Crate said. “I will shoot you.”

Misty seized the gun from the couch and stepped backward, away from Tasgal. She looked down at the gun and found that she hated the feel of it in her hands. Not knowing what to do with it, she slid it into her waistband and stepped into the hall.

“Bathroom is that way,” she said, looking to her left. “Come on, Crate.”

Crate backed out of the living room, gave Tasgal enough room to creep by and work his way to the bathroom.

“Three minutes,” Crate said.

Tasgal closed the door behind him.

Crate turned to Misty, his bushy eyebrows drawn together. “You think he can get out the window?”

“Not without making a racket,” she said. The window was behind the toilet, and was covered by a rack of shelves cluttered with shampoo bottles, cream, and other assorted bathroom items. “Tape’s in the washroom.”

Misty stepped into the store. Stacy was on her third beer. Nixon was no longer on the television. Yet again, the news was showing footage of reanimated corpses. A head connected to a horribly mutilated torso by little more than a strand of gristle looked around, its jaw silently working.

“This is horrible,” Stacy said. “Goddess must be angry.”

“She’s fucking furious,” Misty said, picking up one of the chairs.

“What are you doing?” Stacy asked, her words running together like sand.

“Changing a light bulb,” Misty said, opening the door and stepping into the back. She heard the toilet running. Crate was gone. She brought the chair into the living room, placed it before the television.

Tasgal stood just outside the bathroom, leaning against the wall, and for a second Misty thought that he was dead. “Hurts,” he said, peeled himself from the wall, and took a step toward her.

“Now,” she said, touching the gun awkwardly jutting from the waistband of her pants.

“Now, now.” Crate appeared at her side, handed her a thick roll of duct tape. “You’ll shoot your stupid self in the twat,” he said, sliding the gun from her waistband and into one of his baggy front pockets.

“On your knees,” Crate said, pointing the rifle at Tasgal’s chest. When the young cop didn’t react, Crate cocked the rifle and raised his eyebrows.

Tasgal knelt, assuming the position. He placed his hands behind his head, wincing.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Crate said. “I promise, Eric. This is just for our safety. You understand, right?”

Tasgal stared at them.

“Here,” Crate said, passing a clean face-cloth to Misty. She looked at it, looked up at him, confused. Crate pointed to his own mouth. “Gag.”

“Oh,” Misty said, eyeing Crate.

“What?”

“Why the hell are you making him get down on his knees, Crate?” She threw a thumb over her shoulder. “I can tape him to that chair from here.”

“Aw, fine,” Crate snapped, making a face.

“I’m sorry,” Misty said, looking at Tasgal. He leaned against the wall. “We need you to stand up, okay?”

“This isn’t right,” Tasgal said. He looked tired and confused, but there was something else, now, just underneath the pain and exhaustion: anger. “You shouldn’t do this.”

“We have to,” Misty said, giving Eric Tasgal a smile that felt like dirt on her lips. The kid was dying, and they were treating him like an enemy. She looked at Crate. “Do we?”

“What?”

“Do we have to do this?”

“Oh, come on, Misty.” Crate rolled his eyes. “You said it yourself. We can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. We have to sleep and we have to watch the place.”

“And we can’t throw him out,” She said, looking back and forth between Crate and Eric, who climbed to his feet.

“Right,” Crate said, looking at Tasgal. “So for now we tie you up. If help shows up, or something, we’ll let you go, okay?”

“Enough talk,” Misty said, wanting to be done with it.

“Yeah,” Crate said. “Enough talk. Let’s go.”

Outside, Bilbo Baggins piped up.

“Ah, hell,” Crate said. “More of them.”

“Nothing we can do about it now,” she said.

Tasgal leaned against the wall. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Come on,” Misty said, and Tasgal’s legs curled beneath him. He slid down the wall. His head lolled toward Misty and Crate. He glowered at them, shivering.

“Get up,” Crate added, poking at the air with his rifle.

“Not going anywhere,” Tasgal said, and closed his eyes.

“Okay,” Crate said. “What are we going to do now?”

Misty pushed the barrel of the rifle toward the floor. She opened her mouth to speak. Out front, someone hammered on the glass door leading into the store. Misty heard Stacy yelp once, and then the hammering resumed.

“Shit,” Misty said, looking at Crate. “Let’s go.”

“What abou—”

“He’s not going anywhere.”

She stepped into the store and almost slammed into Stacy, who was walking toward the back door. Her eyes were bulging out of her sockets, her mouth was open, working like a fish sucking air, and Misty thought she looked like a person whose equanimity was definitely shot all to hell.

“There’s someone outside,” Stacy said. “I think it could be them.”

“Them who?” Crate asked, stepping toward the door.

“The dead.”

“I don’t think they knock,” Misty said, following Crate. She looked back at Stacy, who inched toward the door leading into the back. “Stay out here.”

“Misty?” Someone said from the other side of the door—a man, by the sound of it, though Misty could not tell who. “You in there?”

“Yeah,” Misty shouted back. “Wait a second.”

Crate unlocked the door and then stepped back, raising the rifle. By now, Misty realized, his wiry old arms must be tired. “It’s open,” he said. “Come in.”

The door opened and Jeff Karlatos popped his head in. He saw the gun and fell to his knees upon the threshold, his hands held up before him.

“God,” he said. “It’s me, Jeff, I—”

“Okay,” Misty said, once more pushing the barrel of Crate’s rifle toward the ground. “I’m sorry, Jeff.” She helped him up, though he didn’t need it. “We’re all a little jumpy.”

Crate grunted something and shuffled over to the table, where Stacy had returned to her beer.

“God, yeah,” Jeff said. He was in his early thirties, skinny except for a soft pot-belly, and half bald. Toss in the Coke-bottle glasses, and you had yourself a perpetually single guy. He worked for the phone company in Beistle, but came by at least once a month for a roast beef sandwich with sour cream and onion potato chips. This summed up Misty’s knowledge of him. “Have you heard yet?”

“Heard?” Misty said. She looked back at Crate, who was sitting across from Stacy and staring at her tits. “What happened?”

Before he could answer, the sound of a rattling muffler zipped by, moving northward. Another car followed it.

“They gassed Beistle.”

“What?” Misty said, cold with fear. Crate pushed away from the table. His eyes were bloodshot, and Misty noticed for the first time that he was pale. He was crashing. “Who?”

“The Army, I guess. About thirty minutes ago. A helicopter.”

“I heard the chopper,” Crate said.

“It passed over town. Circled it. We went out into the street and watched, thinking maybe they were dropping supplies, but no. It was a gas of some kind. Looked yellow, but it was hard to tell.”

“Jesus,” Crate said.

“You know what it is?” Misty asked.

“No,” Crate said, shaking his head. “But I’m sure it isn’t good.”

“I saw something on TV about that,” Stacy said. Her eyes were still saucers, and she no longer sounded drunk. “Just before coming over here. Reports about a gas being tested on the dead in some places.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said, jittery and impatient. “Right here.”

“What did it do?”

“Look, man, I got in my car and peeled out. I wasn’t the only one.” As if to prove his point, more vehicles raced past the store. “Hey, I’m getting the hell out of here. The wind’s blowing east, mostly, so you should be all right. I just wanted to let you know and to see if you could sell me some food.”

Misty looked over at the deli case, and for the first time Charlie’s earlier complaints made sense. “Of course,” she said, and made her way to the deli.

“Thanks. Just a little something to tide me over until I get where I’m going.”

“Where is that?” Crate asked, rising from the table and walking toward them.

“North?” Jeff shrugged.

“I’ll make you a sandwich,” she said.

“Thanks,” Jeff said.

Crate peeked through the blinds and then stepped out of the store. Jingle jangle.

Jeff stood before he counter and watched television. Cronkite was pressing a Defense Department official for confirmation on reports that Soviet nuclear subs were in place along both coasts as well as in the Gulf of Mexico, that one of them had actually made it nearly one hundred miles up the Mississippi River before being intercepted and escorted back into international waters.

The sliced meat would not last, so she made two heaping roast beef sandwiches, as well as a turkey and Swiss on French bread.

“Insane, huh?” Stacy said. Misty looked up in time to see Jeff look from the TV and toward Stacy, who sat holding her fourth beer, if Misty’s tally was good.

“Yeah,” Jeff said, sounding as stiff and awkward as he looked. “Insane.”

They fell silent. Finishing the last of the sandwiches, Misty saw Jeff shoot a few glances back at Stacy, and she hoped that he’d get over his shyness and keep talking, if only so she could see his face when Stacy opened her mouth and told him about her husband’s spirit speaking to her from within her crystal or some shit.

There would be no small favors: even in the face of the collapse of civilization, Jeff was too ill-equipped to talk to a pretty girl. And Stacy was too lost in her beer to care. More so, she was clearly terrified. It took a lot to keep her quiet.

Misty bagged the sandwiches, grabbed a second bag, and on the way to the counter tossed in a can of baked beans and a can of Vienna sausage, as well as a large sack of chips.

“Oh,” Jeff said, taking the bags. “I can’t buy all of this.”

“Take it, Jeff.”

Either he was slow or he was faking it. He made a show of realizing what she meant, and then thanked her. He shot another glance at Stacy, and Misty wondered if he’d ever been with a woman. On the television, the Manhattan skyline spit flames into the night sky. Misty figured that if Jeff hadn’t gotten any yet, he probably wasn’t going to.

“You got an ice chest?” She asked.

“In the trunk,” Jeff said, holding the bags of food to his chest. “It’s empty.”

“Get a bag of ice and get moving.”

He did.

“I think I can smell something on the air,” Crate said, locking the door. Tongue lolling and tail wagging, Bilbo Baggins seemed to be trying to trip him. “Taste it maybe. Could just be my imagination.”

“There’s no saying it would even have a smell,” Misty said. “Don’t they add something to propane to make it smell like that?”

“If it’s one of Uncle Sam’s home brews, it could probably smell like a burger and fries if they wanted it to.”

“We should stay in for awhile.”

“Wind’s still blowing east,” Crate said.

“We should move his car,” Misty said.

Crate scratched his cheek and grunted.

“Someone could come looking for him.”

“Well, then, he was here for a little while today, and then he went out into the woods because someone was yelling for help.” Crate looked pleased. “Never came back.”

“Yeah, okay,” Misty said. “That’s fine, but people see a cop car and they see help.”

Crate laughed: a brief, low rattle. “You and me, we know different people.”

It made her smile. Sometimes the old man wasn’t half bad. She stretched with a yawn. “You know what I mean. It’s like a beacon.”

“Oh,” Crate said. “So now you want to start turning folks away.”

Her smile broke. She allowed herself to look at the TV, which showed a throng of corpses stumbling around the parking lot of what appeared to be a hospital, then back to Crate, who seemed to be expecting an answer.

She squeezed her hands together. “I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

“Yep,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “We need to get the lights off in here, and I should go out and shoot out the big light.”

“Fuck, Crate.”

“What?”

“Shoot out the big light?”

“Yeah.”

“You can turn it off at the breaker box, you lunatic.”

“Oh,” he said, grinning. “Yeah. But first, we have to finish things up.”

In the bedroom, Charlie snored. Tasgal was fast asleep when they’d left him, his face pressed to the carpet. No longer clammy and cold, he burned with fever.

“We should shoot him,” Crate said.

“We’re not going to shoot him.”

“We wouldn’t be shooting him, Mis. I would.”

“You’re not shooting him,” she said. “Not now you’re not. If you have to later, then you have to, but not now. Maybe there will be a vaccine or something.”

“You never know,” Crate said. There was not an ounce of hope in his voice.

“Right,” Misty said.

She dropped to her knees and bound Tasgal’s ankles with tape.

“We should move him,” Crate said. “Get him out of here. God, we could be infected already, keeping him in here.”

“Then there isn’t much point in moving him, is there?”

“You know what I mean, woman,” Crate said, looking down at her, frowning. “We can’t keep untying him every time he has to take a piss, and eventually he’s gonna shit his pants. You want to deal with that?”

Misty stared at Crate.

“I’m not wiping his ass,” he said.

“Dammit, Crate, what do you want me to do?”

“He’s gonna die, and then he’s going to wake up or whatever it is they do. He’s already dead. He needs to be put out of his misery.”

“We’ll move him.”

Crate stared at her, frowning deeply, his bushy eyebrows drawing together. He clutched his rifle, the forefinger of his right hand less than an inch from the trigger, the skin over his knuckles taught. She thought he was going to do it, anyway, just pump a round into the back of Tasgal’s head and be done with it—and what could she possibly do then?

But he didn’t shoot Tasgal. He listened to her, as he always did, head down, like an old dog long broken.

“Okay,” he said, the tension going out of his withered old frame. He seemed to melt a little. “My place?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Your place.”

Crate’s place was a small one-room apartment out back—little more than four walls, a roof, a bed, a fridge, and a window with a rattling window unit. It had started as a shed, and Crate had gradually converted it to a more livable environment, a place where, he said, he could go when they weren’t getting along, where he could read in peace while she watched her soap operas and her game shows. Eventually the place became his place, and she slept alone.

“Okay,” he said, following a few strained and silent moments. “How?”

“The wheelbarrow.”

“That’ll do it,” he said. “When?”

“Right now.”

Sprawled on the floor with his hands bound behind his back, Tasgal grunted.

Eighteen

“Are you okay?” The girl asked. Colleen opened her mouth and tried to speak, and if any words came out, she did not hear them. She looked down at the amorphous red dress spread around her like blood in a crime scene photo, and felt the soft moist blades of grass beneath her knees and between her fingers, like gravel and broken glass. She tried and failed to make sense of the scene before her.

It was a playground. There was grass and a concrete path and a swing set and some monkey bars. A bench and a picnic table and a barbecue pit and trees and potted plants and a sandbox, and she was being held captive by the very same people who had forced her to suck her boyfriend’s cock before they sliced it off inches away from her face.

And now there were children. A smiling girl of maybe six, cherubic twin boys with yellow hair and eyes blue like the sky, and a toddler banging together two from a vast array of brightly-colored blocks.

She opened her mouth again, and nothing came out.

“I think she’s sick,” said the girl, looking back at the women seated side by side on the bench, and they all stood, their dresses fluttering like ghosts, it seemed to Colleen, but her eyes, sticky with tears and imbalanced with delirium, had invented the flutter. The air was still. Still because of the high wall encircling the courtyard. The wind sighed through the tress around her, around the enclosure in which she found herself, failing again and again to blink away the image of her boyfriend’s dick lying in the dirt, but it barely reached her—was little more than a whisper against her scalp.

The women approached and encircled and settled around her, their dresses pooling and mingling with her own, a crime scene photo of a massacre.

Guy screamed defiance and she took him into her mouth and the blade came down and the blood was so damned bright and hot. It spilled in a hot gush across her hands, where it cooled in a heartbeat and dried and flaked away.

She blinked, and it wasn’t all of the women before her, just the girl and the first woman, the one the man had called… what had he called her? The other women watched. So too did the twins, who approached Colleen. One of the women on the bench called to them, told them to step back, and they did.

The girl said her name was Lissa. Colleen tried to hold onto that, saying the name over and over in her head, like a mantra, holding it to her heart like a talisman. Lissa, Lissa, Lissa, and the dead are coming to life and eating the living and the last time she saw Guy he was sitting with his back to the truck and packing his groin with dirt and grass. Blood pumped through his fingers like water from a hose on a hot summer day.

Lissa said something and then Beth or Embeth or whatever her name was spoke and Colleen looked from one to the other, one to the other. She struggled to make sense of their faces and words. Lissa was six years old, and she spoke with the intelligence and maturity of someone much older. She found her brothers to be terribly annoying, and was thrilled to have Colleen around. Lissa took her by the hand, and Embeth asked the girl if she’d keep an eye on Colleen for a second.

“Sure,” Lissa said, and Colleen wondered how many times her mind could cave in upon itself before she was screaming at the sky and ripping out her own eyes. She wondered if her mom was blinking into the darkness of her casket, and if the old man with the gun, Crate, was still enjoying himself. She thought of Daniel and Kimberly and Richard and the corpses heaped upon the gravel outside of MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. Or had it been GAS AND FOOD? She couldn’t remember, just as she couldn’t remember when the last time things had been normal.

Her mouth was open. She had no idea how long it had been open, and she closed it. The woman—Embeth, her name was Embeth, though the old guy with the beard had called her Beth—floated away on her dress like a ghost, and the girl talked and talked and talked. She must have been six, with her sexless body and her little boy’s face and her missing teeth. Her hair was in a braid down her back. Smiling, she asked if Colleen wanted to play Pat-a-Cake. Colleen said nothing and lifted her hands. She barely felt the girl’s little hands upon hers.

The boys watched.

“You’re my new best friend,” Lissa said, nearly whispering. “I like Sally but she’s quiet and doesn’t like to play. Do you know some games?”

Colleen blinked, her head spinning. She tried to focus on the girl’s face, but she just kept seeing the shot they were playing on the TV at Misty’s. The woman stumbling around the morgue with her chest splayed open, her breasts peeled away in symmetrical folds from her ribcage.

“It’s going to be okay,” the girl said, and Colleen tried to smile. It felt like a wound on her face and she choked back the impulse to throttle the girl, to sink her thumbs into her windpipe. To listen to it crunch beneath her hand. “You’re safe here. We’re all safe here.”

Safe here. Safe here. Did the girl know what was going on outside? Colleen closed her eyes, and there was Guy’s dick again. Guy’s dick, and Daniel’s face framed against the fabric of the couch in her mother’s house, head jerking, hair dancing. Pot churning in the air. And Kimberly.

She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Kimberly, Kimberly who had been coming apart since the deer; her best friend since childhood, a sweet and honest girl, a friend, was not here in this strange place of women and children. Why was this, and where was Kimberly right now?

Was she alive? Were any of them alive?

Her heart hurt, her stomach tore at itself, and still the girl talked and talked, holding Colleen’s hand and stroking it and assuring her that she was just a little sick and that she’d be better in no time.

Colleen stared at the girl, trying not to want to kill her. Her mother was dead and her friends were gone and the dead were walking around, but this girl, this not-very-pretty girl had done nothing wrong. Colleen put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, a gesture of intimacy, and stared harder. Colleen stared and told herself not to hurt the girl, she was innocent, even as she felt the tips of her thumbs come to rest on the girl’s collarbones and then give a slight little crush, like testing a pear for ripeness. She intended for it to be harder but couldn’t get her fingers to obey.

The girl seemed surprised and Colleen let her back away.

The twins were running in circles and babbling. The women on the bench went on sitting, kept on watching her. There was a second bench nearby, totally empty, but they were packed together on the other bench. Embeth loomed over them, watching Colleen. The little boy with the blocks could not be bothered to do anything other than bang them together upon his colorful blanket. Colleen wasn’t sure, but she thought Sally was the youngest one, the pregnant one who looked like she was about to burst. And there was something about the blanket, dammit, with its candy-colored geometric patterns.

Lissa prattled on, talking about her brothers and the time her father took her down to the river to fish and she fell in and almost drowned. Colleen tried not to vomit, tried to keep the image of the heap of corpses in the parking lot. She waited and waited for the next horror, and all that came was the girl’s smile and the laughter of the twins. The thok thok thok of the toddler banging his blocks together.

“Papa Huff made those for him,” Lissa said.

Colleen stared at her.

“The blocks. He makes the neatest things.”

The twins raced by, screaming laughter. They looked no older than four, straddling the line between toddler and big boy, their faces big-cheeked and baby-like, their bodies beginning to elongate. Identically dressed and chasing one another in endless figure-eights, they looked like some kind of optical illusion.

They ran up to Colleen and stood watching her, panting. One of them had his small hands splayed on his knees. Their eyebrows were so blond they were nearly invisible, standing out only because their faces were nearly purple with exertion.

“Hey,” one of them said.

“Hey,” said the other, smiling.

“Are you Miss Colleen?” The first one said.

“You’re our new mommy,” the second one said.

Colleen felt her face go numb and wanted to ask what they meant but her tongue was made of… she couldn’t really tell, but it wasn’t made of tongue, that much was certain. “No,” she finally made the non-tongue say.

“You’re not?” They both asked, just out of sync with one another.

“Sure she is, you dummies,” Lissa said, beaming.

“I’m Jack,” the first one said, jabbing a small thumb into his chest.

“I’m David,” said the other, showing her a mouth full of little white baby teeth. “We kill giants.”

Colleen moved her eyes away from the twins and across the courtyard, expecting actual giants to lumber from the trees and into view. Why not? It made as much sense and anything else. When she was certain that no goliaths would appear, she looked at the kids.

“Giants are real,” Jack said, looking grim.

“I’m the giant,” David yelled, shoving Jack, who plopped onto his bottom. Laughing, David ran away. Laughing, Jack hopped to his feet and took chase.

Colleen watched them dumbly and then realized that her feet had gone to sleep. She was on her knees in the dirt, and shifted her weight onto her rear. She looked at the small boy who sat on a colorful blanket before the four women on the bench.

“That’s Huff Junior,” the girl next to her said. “He’s almost two. He’s pretty nice. He—oh, what’s wrong?”

The little girl’s small warm fingers on her face and on her shoulders.

“You’re frowning. You look sad.”

Colleen kept on frowning and looking sad. She opened her mouth again to say something, but all that came out was a scratchy little yelp that reminded her of the sound of dying puppies.

“You should talk,” the girl said, and already Colleen found herself wondering what the girl’s name was, dammit. She’d held onto it and held onto it, but there it was, gone.

Embeth and the other three women sat watching the child and speaking to one another in hushed tones that barely reached Colleen’s ears. She let her eyes drift into the grass before the pool of her dress, and when she looked up, Embeth stood directly over her. She smiled with her eyes.

“Can you give us a few minutes, Lissa,” Embeth said, and there it was—Lissa. Yes, Lissa. She was a nice girl, and Colleen was wrong to imagine her thumbs crumpling the girl’s windpipe.

“Okay, Mama Beth,” Lissa said, hopping up, planting a quick kiss onto Colleen’s forehead, and running over to Jack, who’d pinned David to the ground, tickling him. David’s laughter sounded a second or two away from becoming screams of terror.

“How are you?” Embeth asked, looking down at Colleen. The sound of her voice sliced through the fog churning around Colleen’s head. Like the man whose sons had violently taken them captive, this woman seemed sincere. It made as much sense as the dead walking.

When Colleen didn’t answer, Embeth reached out to her. “Help you up?”

She took the woman’s hand. It was warm and comforting, like Lissa’s, and that didn’t make sense, either. And it was alive and vital, so much more alive and vital than her mother’s hand in the weeks before her death—bones sheathed in papery flesh. Holding this living and vital and senseless hand, Colleen allowed herself to be lifted to her feet.

Embeth guided her toward the women seated on the bench. One of them now held the small boy, Huff Junior, on her knee, bouncing him. Blood flashed in her mind, and Colleen saw herself seizing the child by his small ankles and slamming him against the top of the picnic table until he came apart in her hands like a broken doll.

Lissa chased Jack and David, who laughed and ran a few times around Colleen and Embeth before racing to the other side of the courtyard.

“They’re something else, aren’t they?” Embeth said.

Hanging above the television in the living room of her mother’s house, there was a photograph of her and Daniel playing in a heap of fallen red leaves at the base of a slide. She didn’t remember where or when the photo was taken, but she remembered the way she’d felt then, the way she felt whenever she looked at the photo.

Watching Lissa and the Giant Killers tumble across the grass, she thought of that photo, and reminded her once more that these children had done no wrong.

The three women stood. “Whoo,” Sally said, holding her right hand to her lower back, legs bowed beneath her formless dress, stomach bulging.

“This is Colleen,” Embeth said.

“Hello, Colleen,” the pregnant woman said, bowing her head once.

“This is Sally,” Embeth said.

“Sally has been with us for, how long is it now, Sally?”

“Almost seven months now.”

Been with them. Been with them. Sally had been with them for seven months. Colleen held Sally’s gaze, unsure just what it was she saw in the woman’s eyes, and try as she might, she could not focus on the moment. The realization—what’s she’d been forced to do, what she’d seen, what they’d done to her and to her brother and to her friends—hit her once again. The fiery knot in her stomach tightened, and her head plunged into fog.

The other women rose, and Embeth introduced them.

The woman holding the child was Mathilda. She was thirty-five, with sandy hair and thin lips. Her plain face was deeply-lined and tanned from years spent in the sun. Unlike Sally, Mathilda shook Colleen’s hand. Her hands were rough. She’d been there since she was fourteen.

Evie didn’t nod or shake hands. She held Colleen’s gaze for a few seconds before looking down. She was a few years older than Mathilda and had been with them since she was twenty-two. Her black hair was going gray at the temples, and she was the prettiest of the four women. Her naturally olive skin did not appear to have been toughened by the sun, and Colleen knew that if she shook her hand, she’d find it soft.

“It’s nice to meet you, Colleen,” Sally said. She took one of Colleen’s hands in both of hers. “Be strong, girl.”

“Oh, honey,” Embeth said, stroking Colleen’s cheek. “Sit down.”

The bench was warm. Sally sat beside her, leaving a person’s width between them. Embeth said something about her and the other women having things to do, and that Sally would take care of her for now. Mathilda rocked the child, and Lissa and the twins laughed and played, and Colleen tried to hold on to what they said to her, tried to make sense of their words, but she could not—the words came apart at the seams, the letters rearranging themselves into pig latin.

Colleen stared at her hands, folded together as if in prayer on her lap, and when next her awareness expanded enough to encompass her surroundings, the shadows were a little longer, and she was alone with Sally.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Sally said.

Colleen’s head took a thousand years to turn upon her neck. Sally’s face was unreadable.

“You’re drugged,” Sally said. “You will be for some time, until they’re sure you’re not going to freak out and try to get away. No, no—don’t try to talk. Just listen, okay?”

Colleen nodded once.

“Mathilda was a nurse before Huff got a hold of her. Huff knows people in town. Gets all the medical supplies we could ever need.”

No one said anything for a little while or for longer—Colleen could not tell.

“Anyway, yeah. I’ve been waiting for you.” Sally said, sliding closer to Colleen and speaking quietly. “Not you specifically, but someone like you. Someone new. I’m not one of those brainwashed bitches, so don’t let the act fool you.”

There was hope, just like that. The fog around her mind still held sway, but it had thinned enough to allow Colleen to find her tongue. “Oh, God,” she said, and bit her tongue, hanging on Sally’s next words.

“I’ll make this quick, because one of them could come back at any moment, and you never know where one of the boys are creeping around. Huff steals women. He steals women and he knocks them up and he raises the kids to think he’s some kind of wiseman, and he takes each of the women as his brides.”

Colleen opened her mouth. Closed it. Sally took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“We were on vacation, my husband and me and our son. William. They were both named William,” Sally said. Her eyes were on Colleen, but Colleen could tell that she was looking someplace else. “Driving down to San Francisco for the week. Huff and one of his youngest boy, the one who got killed yesterday, were on the side of the road. Huff said his truck was broken, and asked for a ride up the hill. We said sure, an old guy and his son, why not? It was just up the hill.”

Tears welled in the woman’s eyes, and she wiped them away. “Oh,” she said, sitting back. Using both hands, she smoothed the cloth of her dress tight across the bulge of her stomach.

“What is it?” Colleen asked, finding her voice.

Sally raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Watch,” She said, biting her lower lip. A single tear inched down her left cheek. The child inside of her kicked. Something—an elbow or a knee or its small butt—traced a path across the tight dome of her belly.

“That’s…” Colleen said, not bothering to finish. She wasn’t sure what it was. It was either beautiful or terrible, depending upon how she looked at it. It made as little sense as anything else, and, like the sight of Lissa playing with the twins, somehow made things so much worse.

“My son isn’t going to grow up here,” she said, placing both of her hands atop the swell of her stomach, fingers interlaced. She chuckled bitterly. “Listen to me. My son, as if I have any idea what it is.”

“What happened?”

“Same thing that happened to you,” Sally said, staring forward, lips tight. “They attacked us as soon as we got up here. They dragged my husband and my son away, screaming and crying, and I never saw them again.

“They took me here, and I went through what you’re going through right now. I met Huff and Embeth and then the others. The kids.”

Sally looked at Colleen, her brow creased, tight like her lips. There was strength in her eyes. Fury.

“Embeth has been here for over thirty years. She believes everything he says. She’s no different from him. Mathilda buys it and eats it too, and so does Evie, for the most part, but she’s starting to see holes in the wall he’s built. She’s noticed…” Sally paused, thinking. She smiled. “Evie has noticed inconsistencies in the bastard’s stories. Maybe she’s starting to see the big picture.” She shrugged. “Maybe she isn’t.”

Sally sighed. Colleen could not tell that Sally had been wound tight until she saw and felt the tension go out of the woman’s form.

“I don’t dare tell her what I’m planning. She’d hear me, and she’d know I was right, but his fingers are in her like she was a wad of dough. She’d run to him, and I’d be dead.”

Sally’s stomach bounced. She smiled, and looked over at Colleen, who pulled her hand away.

“No,” Sally said. “You can touch it. Here.” She took Colleen’s hand and placed it onto her stomach. Within seconds, the little life within moved beneath her fingers.

“Wow,” Colleen said.

“Yeah, really, huh?” Sally said, nodding. “All of the kids here belong to Huff. All but this one.” A gentle tap upon her stomach, and the child within leapt. “I was pregnant before I got here. I was going to tell William as soon as we got to San Francisco.” She smiled at Colleen, blinking away tears. “Huff’s good, the bastard. He has a way about him. You met him, right?”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “Once. This morning.”

“Then you know what I mean. He soothes and he comforts, and you believe everything he says, because it’s so damn smooth, right?”

“I guess so,” Colleen said, and she wanted to close her eyes. Her mind was still made of soup. “He seemed sincere. So sorry that—” She couldn’t finish, and Sally didn’t seem to notice.

“You’ll see just what I mean tonight.” Her words were coming quicker now, tighter, as if she wanted to get it all out and was running out of time. “And if you’re here long enough, you’ll start to buy it. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I think it would be easier if I gave in.” She shrugged. “They seem happy.”

She stroked her belly and gazed into it, her eyes someplace else. Her voice was jagged with anger. “He lies, and his lies are getting more and more ridiculous. I mean, they’ve been far out from the start—you’ll hear the one about the angel, I’m sure—but he’s slipping. He’s pushing it.”

“What,” Colleen said, struggling over her words. Sally watched her, waited. “What do you mean?”

“The whole point of this place is so that a family, his family, can survive the end of the world. He likes to say sometimes that he’s like Noah, which is funny because he doesn’t believe in God.”

“But you said something—”

“The angel?” Sally shook her head. “Crazy never really makes sense, does it? But that’s just it—when Evie was taken, back then? He told the angel story, only it was just about a woman who helped him when he was hurt, not an actual angel from Heaven. At least, that’s how she remembers it, and that’s why she’s having her doubts.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, my point is, since I got here, he told us that the end would come in our lifetimes. Not the end of the world, but of civilization.”

Colleen stared at the woman’s face, a chill moving through her body.

“Since I’ve been here, he’s told us that nuclear war was around the corner. But just this morning, he changed his tune. His kid got killed somehow, I have no idea how, and maybe that pushed him over the edge. But he spews the crap and they lap it up. They all believe him, Jesus, probably even Evie.”

“About what?” Colleen asked, knowing what would come next.

“He told us this morning that the dead were coming back to life. Can you believe that?” Sally’s eyes were wide. “Coming back to life and eating people.”

“Unbelievable,” Colleen said, deciding instantly, without consideration, that she would let this woman go on believing that up was still up. “What did you mean earlier?”

“What?” Sally said. She sounded a little disappointed, as if she expected Colleen to comment further on Huff’s mad claims.

“When you said you were waiting for me.”

“Oh,” she said, looking around, rubbing her stomach with her right hand, fingers splayed. “I’m getting out of here, and I need help. I can’t trust anyone. You’re the only one whose eyes aren’t glazed over.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet,” Sally said. “But I do know this: I’m having my child, I’m healing. We’re going to lie low for a little while, and then we’re gone.” She looked at Colleen, eyebrows raised.

“Okay,” Colleen said, dropping her gaze. Sally’s stomach jumped three times. They sat in silence until the sun reached the top of the sky and the clouds parted and the heat became too much to bear.

“Come on,” Sally said, rising to her feet, bowlegged and grunting. She held each of Colleen’s hands in her own and helped her to her feet. “Let’s go inside.”

“Jailbreak,” Colleen said.

“Yeah,” Sally said. “Jailbreak.”

Nineteen

Their living quarters were clean and spacious and cool. Devoid of all but the most basic artistic touches—a few earthy rugs, thick matching curtains, and oil paintings that could have been done by anyone there, even the children—the place was nearly Spartan.

A sofa flanked by simple wooden end tables sat across from three large bookcases brimming with hardbound books, paperbacks, and heaped, tattered magazines. There was no television. Mathilda sat on the sofa, an infant attached to her bare right breast while Little Huff sat on the rug, as deeply engaged in hammering together his blocks as before.

“Colleen,” Mathilda said, adjusting the child at her breast.

“Hello,” Colleen said, walking alongside Sally.

The adjacent room was far more colorful, its walls adorned with posters depicting smiling cartoon characters. There were a few small desks in the center of the room, each of them facing a large chalkboard mounted upon the wall. Scrawled in purple chalk atop the overlapping powdery ghosts of previous lessons were the words: THE CIRCLE IS PURPLE. If there was ever a circle, it had been erased.

They children lay on mats, motionless, down for a nap between lessons.

In another room, Evie sat before a sewing machine, her foot pumping away, the needle punching thread into the colorful quilt taking shape before her. Again the colorful geometric patterns, hanging from the walls and draped across the furniture.

Colleen paused, realizing why they were familiar. “I saw some of these for sale in town.”

“Huff likes us to have a hobby,” Sally said, leading Colleen past the sewing room and into a room containing two beds, a dresser, and a window. “We all work on the quilts, and he sells them to stores all over northern California.” Her voice dropped low as she drew close to Colleen. “The patterns are more of his bullshit. Some mystical nonsense.”

“Oh,” Colleen, said, also whispering. She stepped to the window, which looked out on a large yard with various planting beds and caged bushes, sloping up toward the thickly forested hills beyond.

“Pretty, huh?” Sally said.

“Yeah,” Colleen said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“That one’s mine, actually,” Sally said, then pointing to the other bed. “This one is yours.”

“Oh, I didn’t... this isn’t the room...”

“That’s Embeth’s room, the one you woke up in,” Sally said, easing herself onto Colleen’s bed. “For when she’s not staying with Huff, which is rare.”

“Oh.”

“You should lie down a while.”

“I’m not tired,” Colleen said.

“Trust me, you’ll fall asleep.” With her right hand, Sally mimed sticking her left arm with a syringe.

Colleen opened her mouth to reply.

Sally shushed her, and her excitement from earlier was visibly drained. “Lie down a while,” she said. “I’ll wake you before Huff gets here.”

“Okay,” Colleen said. “I’ll try.”

“You do that,” Sally said. She stood up and waddled out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Colleen waited a few seconds and got to her feet a little too fast, and the world rotated beneath her feet. She steadied herself against the wall and wondered when they had drugged her. When she was asleep? She’d considered the water a possibility, but it hadn’t tasted funny, and Sally had indicated that she’d gotten an injection of some kind. Still, she didn’t feel tired, or even high. Rubbery, but nothing more.

She went to the window, focusing not on the view but on the window itself. It did not appear capable of being opened. She looked around the room a few times and then sat on her bed. After a few minutes, she lay back. Staring at the ceiling and expecting not to fall asleep, she closed her eyes.

When she opened them, Mathilda’s hand was on her shoulder. “Rise and shine,” she said.

“Mnn,” Colleen said. “How long…?”

“A little over two hours.”

“God,” she said, sitting up. There was a lingering, tingling pain in her left bicep, and Colleen knew the woman in her room, formerly a nurse, had just shot her up. Her hands felt light and heavy at the same time. Stronger dose, whatever it was. Maybe they would make her into a junkie. That wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she could even find the needle on the bitch who stuck her. That would be better.

“Listen, honey,” Mathilda said, sitting next to her and taking her hand once more. They kept doing this, and it never felt okay or good. “You’re going to be okay here. Huff is a great man. You’ll see. Now come on.”

Mathilda led her to the bathroom, and for the second time that day she allowed herself to be undressed and showered by another woman. Unlike Embeth, Mathilda disrobed and joined her beneath the hot spray of the shower head. She let her eyes trace the contours of Mathilda’s body, her heavy yet well shaped breasts, her thighs and stomach soft and dimpled from motherhood. The woman lathered Colleen’s body, her hands lingering upon her breasts, and Colleen could do nothing to stop any of it. Another layer peeled back, and through the cloud encircling her mind she saw where things were going. Huff had himself a nice little harem out here in the middle of nowhere, and before she fed him his balls she would be taken lower and lower still.

It was over and then she was dressed. Same bra, new underwear and cloth pad to replace the fresh one from earlier, now heavily soaked. New red gown. She sat down as the woman dried her hair, and though Colleen expected Mathilda to attempt to weave her shoulder-length hair into a tight braid, it did not come to pass. Seated at the back of her mind and peering out, she knew that it too would come later, in the form of what Kimberly liked to call ritualized nonsense.

Kimberly. Always talking. As ready and eager to have fun as she was to launch into a political diatribe. As incensed as she was happy. But since the deer and the news that came after, only shocked and stunned silence. And now?

Dressed and dried and wearing soft slippers that hissed across the carpet, Colleen drifted behind Mathilda, out of the bathroom and into the living room, where she settled like a snowflake upon the couch and stared at the bookcase while the women floated in and out of her field of vision. At some point, Baby Huff hobbled over to her and, placing a small hand upon each of her knees, gazed smiling into her face. She tried to pick him up, but he darted from between her hands, his trailing squeal breaking into a giggle that followed him out of the room.

“Doped you up pretty good, huh?” Sally said, seeming to have appeared beside Colleen.

“Yuh,” Colleen said. She said something else, too, but forgot it the moment it came into the air. She sat and tried to remember it and when she looked to her left Sally was gone.

The light outside changed. The day wore on. She thought of the dead. She thought of her mother and of her brother. She tried and failed to remember something about Guy other than her final bloody moments with him. The scene played out behind her eyes, again and again, a hellish snake devouring its tail, but the dope made it seem less horrible, and she was grateful for that.

The details of her surroundings came to her. She could hear Mathilda giving the older children their lessons in the next room. Further away, the sound of the sewing machine. Sally sat at a chair to the left of the bookcases, a hardback opened before her. Colleen tried to make sense of the spine. Stamped in gold foil, the letters made little sense, and she wondered if perhaps Sally were reading a foreign language edition. She tried again, frowning, her head tilted, nearly resting upon her left shoulder.

Mathilda stared at Colleen above the book.

“Doing okay?”

“Sure,” Colleen said. “Feel like a million bucks.”

“It’s good that you can joke.” Sally set the book on her lap.

“Good book?”

“Eh,” Mathilda said, shrugging. “I’ve never cared that much for him.”

“Who?” Colleen asked. She pointed to her eyes. “I can’t tell. They’re all blurry.”

“Nietzsche.”

“Oh,” Colleen said, thinking of her brother, the little shit. She hoped he was alive, God.

“What is it—” Sally began, her words cut off by the sound of the door opening. Her head whipped left, and Colleen followed her gaze, but not before seeing the look on Sally’s face change. Just like that, she went from looking like the defiant woman Colleen had met mere hours ago to wearing the mask of an adoring believer. She was good.

“Papa Huff,” Sally said, trying to stand.

“No, God, no,” the big man with the strong arms and the large gut said, waving for her to stay the hell where she was. “Jesus, woman.” He walked over to her, took her hand, and, bending forward, kissed her on the cheek. His braided beard swung away from his chest, and Colleen noticed that his hair also hung down his back in a single braid.

“Oh, Papa,” Sally said, her voice spinning somewhere in deepest space. She sounded a little like Mathilda.

“How’s my baby?” Huffington Niebolt said, dropping to one knee.

“I’m fine, Papa,” Sally said, looking at Colleen over the top of Niebolt’s head, which rested now upon her bulbous stomach. Sally stroked his head, traced a finger along the ridges of his braid. What would he do if he knew the child in her stomach didn’t belong to him?

“Aren’t you a funny girl?” Niebolt said, opening his eyes. They were on Colleen. He stood, grunting. One of his knees popped. Face expressionless, he assessed her. She held his gaze until she no longer could. Just as she was about to look down at her heavy hands resting upon her lap, his vacant expression pulled itself into a smile that spread up from his mouth and reached his eyes.

“How are you?” Niebolt asked, took a tentative step toward her, his brow creased in a look of sympathy as apparently genuine as the concern in his voice.

“Not too good,” she said. No point in lying.

“Oh, now,” he said. “I know you’re hurting, darl—”

Little Huff squealed, running toward his father.

“Hey, big boy!” Niebolt said, scooping up the child and tossing him into the air.

“Deeee,” the child cried, laughing.

“Deeee,” Niebolt said, smiling, tossing his son into the air—once, twice, and again. Spinning in place, the braid at the back of his head nearly horizontal. Colleen watched, sure there could be no other explanation: she was in hell. A trite response. Kimberly would have been disappointed.

“Now, now,” Niebolt said, coming to a stop and wagging a stern finger in the child’s face, panting. “Enough of that, son. Dad’s gotta—”

The kid’s face grew sour and red. His laughter collapsed into tears.

“Where’s the thing,” Niebolt said, holding the child to his side with his left arm and snapping the fingers of his right hand inches from Sally’s face.

“Oh,” she said, looking around. Not finding what she sought, she pulled herself to her feet, legs bent at the knees, her right hand pressed to the small of her back. “It’s—I’ll be right back.”

Sally crept out of the room. Niebolt held the child to his chest now, his left hand beneath the Little Huff’s bottom, his right gently patting the child’s back, enveloping it. “Shhhh,” he said, not taking his eyes off of Colleen. Still crying, the boy rested his head upon his father’s shoulder.

“Now, now,” Niebolt said. Sally returned, pressed a pacifier to the child’s lips, silencing his whimpers.

“Thank you, doll,” Niebolt said, staring Colleen into the couch. He smiled, just a half smile, and this time it did not reach his eyes.

“Can I get you anything, Papa?” Sally asked, pressing as close to Niebolt as her massive stomach allowed.

“You can take this sack of potatoes,” he said, passing Little Huff to Sally. He walked over to the couch upon which Colleen sat, throwing himself onto the far end. A single seat cushion separated her from him, and Colleen wondered how long it would take him to glide across to her and place his hand upon her knee.

“Agh,” he said, throwing his head back, rubbing his eyes, and staring at the ceiling. “Terrible damn day, ladies. Terrible damn day.”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” Sally said, easing herself into her chair.

“Mnph,” Niebolt said, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes before sitting up straight and looking at Sally. “Where is everybody?”

“Evie is sewing,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that she no longer heard the sewing machine. She hadn’t gotten a close look at the blankets, but she assumed that some of the more intricate designs were easier accomplished by hand.

“Ah, yeah? And Mattie—still in class?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, good,” he said, leaning back. “I’m going to close my eyes for a few.” He looked at Colleen, half-smiled once more and closed his eyes.

Colleen and Sally watched one another for what felt like several minutes, at which point Colleen realized that she was holding her breath. She let it out, slowly, and permitted her body to relax. She didn’t need to look at her palms to know that her fingernails had stamped little crescents into them. She looked around and it wasn’t until she became aware of Sally slowly shaking her head left to right, left to right, that she knew what she was looking for: a weapon.

Not now, Sally’s eyes whispered, and Colleen held her gaze. Across the couch from Colleen, Niebolt snored gently, his massive gut rising and falling in the corner of her eye. The minutes stretched into years and she found herself wondering just what this pregnant woman had in mind when she said jailbreak. Was it so common for their captor lay asleep with his throat exposed? Why were they passing this moment up?

Colleen stared at Sally and Sally started at Colleen while big Huff and his little son slept, and eventually the door leading into the classroom opened and Mathilda stepped out, followed closely by Jack and David and the girl—once more, Colleen could not remember her name.

One of the boys—Colleen could not tell whom, nor did she care—leapt onto Niebolt’s lap, waking him.

“Oh, hey,” he said, laughing. “Watch the stones, boy.”

He went through the routine, playing with each of them in turn. He bounced the girl on his knee and stroked and nuzzled her hair, and Colleen looked away, uncertain whether or not what she saw was fatherly adoration or something malignant. Soon Evie shuffled out of the back room, and from somewhere there came the sound of a crying infant. Yes, the infant—Mathilda’s child. Colleen had forgotten about it.

“Not a lot of time, girls,” Niebolt said, snapping his fingers again. “Make it happen.”

Mathilda led the twins and the girl outside, to the courtyard, urging them to occupy themselves until the grownups were done talking. Little Huff slept and sighed across Sally’s chest, his small legs parted over the swell of her stomach. Evie went into the back and returned with the crying infant, whom she passed off to Mathilda shortly before relieving Sally of the sleeping potato sack and sitting between Colleen and Niebolt. Colleen watched all of this, out there in faraway, her mind aflutter at the outer reaches of itself, her body little more than a hum fashioned from meat and bone.

Then: silence. Little Huff asleep in the arms of Evie; the infant sucking at Mathilda’s breast, its tiny fists kneading pale, veined flesh, and Sally merely watching, her fingers interlaced atop her bulging stomach, interlaced like a prayer, like armor.

“Okay,” Niebolt said, standing, looking from woman to woman to woman to woman. He scratched at his chin, and the braid hanging across his chest jerked like a dying snake. “None of this is going the way it usually does, and that’s, well, it’s inconvenient, but that’s also life, right, Sal?”

“Yes,” Sally said, not missing a beat.

“Yes. Damn right,” He said, pacing. “Life, by definition, is inconvenient. If it’s not, if it’s convenient it’s not life at all. It’s routine and complacency and it’s a lie. So this, this new thing, this is life.”

He strode over to the bookcase, walking with a purpose that was, Colleen knew, all a part of the show. She looked left and right, scanning the spines, brushing his fingertips across them. Finally, he faced them, once more meeting every line of sight. He nodded.

“The men who wrote these books knew that,” he said, and Colleen imagined Kimberly at her side, could practically hear her: men and women, you sexist piece of shit. Then again, maybe not: Colleen had not taken the time to inspect the books heaped helter-skelter upon the many shelves. “They knew that, and we know it, too. Sometime we forget it, though.

“So we don’t get to do things how we used to, but who cares? Our family has a new member,” he said, extending one hand, palm up, fingers and thumb held tight together. “Colleen. Mama Colleen. She came to us through blood and pain, and for that I am sorry. Really, I am.”

Again the apology. Only now it felt less real and more like a line in a play. Maybe it had always been such, and Colleen was only now able to discern the truth behind the façade.

Niebolt grew silent and became occupied with his right hand. With his thumbnail he picked at dirt beneath his fingernails, starting at the pinky and working his way to the forefinger. When he was finished, he looked up, his gaze falling upon Colleen, shrinking her.

“Blood and pain,” he said, pursing his lips. “Blood and pain have always been the common language of mankind. Always, from the very beginning, from the start. But now? Now it is so much more than language. It is everything. It is the only thing there is. Colleen?”

Colleen sat pressing herself into the sofa. And into the back of her mind, but it was so much harder now to remain there. The shit in her blood was losing its edge, and she found herself inching forward, closer and closer still, in small measures, to the man before her and the world into which she had been delivered.

“Colleen?”

“Yuh,” She began, licking her lips. “Yes?”

“You may have noticed that we have no television here.”

Colleen blinked and nodded agreeably, thinking of the old television in the abandoned tomb of a house at the bottom of the hill.

“Nothing even remotely associated with the truth can be found upon its screen,” Niebolt said, turning once more to face the bookcases. He waved an encompassing spiral at the shelves. “Here, there is, at least, an attempt. These men sought truth, as we seek truth. Many of them discovered only lies and, finding those lies to be sweet, allowed themselves to stumble from the path. The path that leads to truth.”

Niebolt laughed. “Forgive me, ladies, there’s a point here, I promise. You’ll see. Now, doubt is a valuable thing, right?”

“Right,” Sally and Evie and Mathilda each said, in unison. Colleen looked at Sally, who met her eyes but for a half-second, the time in which it took her to lift and lower her eyebrows.

“Right, right,” Niebolt said, stepping past Sally and brushing his fingers across her stomach as he had brushed them across the books lining the shelves. “Doubt is a good thing. Doubt it a tool in the search for truth. I mean, where would we be if we believed everything everyone told us? We’d be like everyone else, right?”

“Right,” they all said, and Colleen felt a chill ripple up and down her spine.

“Sure. So I understand, trust me, I do,” Niebolt said, dropping the hammer. “I know that some of you have come to doubt my words.”

Colleen looked at Sally, and Sally met Colleen’s gaze, and neither of them were fast enough to sever their connection before Niebolt noticed. He smiled, lifted an admonishing finger.

“Stay with me now, I’m coming to my point.”

He held out both hands, fingers splayed, made a show of balling them into fists. Bobbing and weaving, he jabbed the air with his left three times, four times, six times, fast, wrapping up his display with a solid right uppercut.

“I was a boxer, Colleen,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left, distant eyes upon the ground at his feet, as if soaking in the unconscious sprawl of some fallen opponent. “A long time ago. A pretty good one, too. They called me The Nightmare. Huffington “The Nightmare” Niebolt. Silly, but hell did it look good up there on the marquee.”

He beamed, gaze somewhere far beyond the room in which they gathered.

“God, did it ever. And it made the mooks I had to fight nervous. Helped build my reputation, even if I was just knocking out bums. Who the hell wanted to get into the ring with a nightmare?”

He shook his head.

“A lot of guys didn’t,” he said. “And a lot of them did. One of them, this young wop called Tony ‘The Fire’ Faraci, he wanted it bad. He was a little thing, man, I tell you…” Niebolt shook his head.

His women kept their eyes on him, and Colleen wondered if any of them had noticed how the cadence and the rhythm of his voice had changed as he began speaking of his days in the ring. He no longer sounded like someone pretending to be wise and all-knowing: he sounded like a dumb kid from the streets looking to punch his way to happiness.

“This little bastard, I mean, not everyone was enforcing the weight class back then, and we were fighting in some Chicago dive, so who gave a shit, right?” He paced faster now, the years carrying him away. “The point is, the guy was too small to be fighting me, and he was taking a risk getting in that ring. He was too small to be fighting The Nightmare, and he had no business almost killing my ass.”

Niebolt bobbed and weaved, unleashed another flurry of punches upon his unseen and long gone opponent, and stopped, just like that, his hands limp at his sides, his head down. Then he looked at Colleen, and it was as if no one else were there. The other women had heard this story—God knew how many times. Some of them had even heard different versions, if Sally was to be believed, but this—this was just for her.

“He knocked me out in the third,” Niebolt said. “He was fast and strong, and I was full of myself. I knew he was strong, and I knew he could take a punch. His face was messed up enough to testify to that truth, Colleen.”

Niebolt mashed his grizzled features together between his large hands, smiling, and curiously enough it was only at this moment that Colleen was slammed with the certainty that he was insane.

“I expected to pound his face into something uglier than it already was, maybe over the course of seven or eight rounds, before laying his ass out,” Niebolt said. “Instead his fucking hands worked my head like a hundred little bees, and I almost died. Between the ring and the hospital, that’s when I saw the angel.”

He looked from woman to woman, and Colleen knew that she was seeing something else, a remnant, something unfinished.

“I don’t really want to get into how I can believe in angels and not believe in God, Colleen, despite what some of these ladies would like,” he said, holding out his hands. They were perfectly still, like stone. “Her hair was yellow and orange, like fire, and it was in a braid.” He fingered the braid hanging from his chin, looking a little embarrassed. “And she held me in her arms and told me that I was going to live forever. She said I was going to live forever, and that I would see much pain and blood, and that it would be up to me to go into the wild and to start a family, one that would escape the pain and the blood.”

He smiled once more, revealed his white mouthful of fake choppers, rubbing his hands together. “And that brings us to the end of this little digression: the angel was real, and the pain and the blood are upon us.”

He let the silence drag out, watched his women, the expression on his face a dare to all of them: say something right now and see what happens.

“Doubt,” he shouted. Little Huff jerked in his sleep, whimpered. The sermon was back on. “Some of you have the seed of doubt in your hearts.”

The women made faces that said otherwise, but Niebolt wasn’t having it. He waved them away. “No, no,” he said, the boxer gone. “It’s okay. Doubt is natural. I encourage you to doubt, but in this there can be no doubt. Its time is passed. Colleen?”

“What?” She asked. Her blood was cold and her body was not elsewhere. It was right here and it was made of stone.

“Blood and pain.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen it, out there.” He thrust an accusing finger toward the front door. Again Little Huff stirred. Sated and asleep, the infant resting in Mathilda’s arms jerked, its small arms rigid and quivering.

“Yes,” Colleen said. Niebolt wasn’t talking about the attack on her, her brother, and their friends. Colleen glanced at Sally, saw fear in her eyes, and once more looked down at her hands. They shook.

“The time is upon us. The dead walk the earth and eat the flesh of the living. I’ve seen them,” Niebolt said, walking over to Colleen, dropping to his knees, folding her hands into his own. “You have, too. Haven’t you, Colleen?”

“I don’t…” Colleen said, stammering. She felt Sally’s gaze upon her face and met it. The pregnant woman’s eyes shone with the promise of tears.

“You don’t nothing,” Niebolt said. “The dead walk, and the world that you knew, only days ago, crumbles and burns. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Colleen said, tears streaming down her face. “Yes.”

“Pain and blood,” Niebolt said, triumphant. “Pain and blood.”

Mathilda’s infant cried. Colleen didn’t look up from her hands, but she didn’t have to. She knew. Sally was crying too.

Twenty

His arms and legs were sore from the night spent bound upon the forest floor, but Richard had the upper hand: he was in better shape than the man hunting him. Jacob was tall and strong, but he had the beginning of a beer belly and no stamina, no focus. Richard was a swimmer and a runner and had even gotten a few trophies wrestling in his freshman year of college. If the two met, face to face and hand to hand, Richard would easily take him out.

But Jacob had guns and knives. So Richard ran; he ran and ran, pacing himself, breathing, occasionally stopping, bent low, his breath coming and going in controlled, measured inhalations and exhalations. He ran for five minutes, ten minutes, leaping over fallen branches, smashing through low branches, small red openings forming on his hands and face and forearms. He ran and he ran, and eventually he did the only thing he could do: he stopped.

Panting, he leaned against a tree. His lungs burned. His leg muscles burned. His heart was like a hummingbird beating its wings behind his ribs. His stomach was a hot fist driving up. He was starving. His mouth was dry. The heat in his legs melted into a steady quiver.

Every direction offered the same view: trees. The clouds and the canopy diffused the late morning light, made it hard to tell east from west. He could discern the general direction from which he’d come only because he had been running downhill. The ground had leveled out some. A few hundred yards ahead of where he stood, the ground once more angled upward. He was in a bowl.

He held his breath and listened, hoping to hear an engine, something, anything that would give him an idea where the road was. He heard only forest sounds, and exhaled, scanning the trees, looking for movement. Jacob was dressed in a drab green thermal shirt and bark-brown pants. He’d blend in.

Richard’s pants were brown, too, but his shirt was blue, and the only thing worse than leaving the shirt on was taking it off. He was tanned but not so tanned that he wouldn’t stand out like a ghost against the slate-colored oaks.

He looked at the sky again, cursed the clouds. He had to get to the highway—had to get back to town, to the little store and tell them what was going on here. God, were the girls even alive? And even if they were, would anyone in town care? No doubt the local police force had problems of its own right now, and a few kidnapped kids were the least of them.

Look at it this way, he thought, now you won’t have to break the news to Kimberly, and immediately wanted to punch himself in the face.

“Goddammit,” he said, wincing at his voice in the still of the forest.

There was a twang. An arrow struck the tree a few feet to his left, a simple thing with a brushed silver shaft and bright orange feathered fletching.

“Shit,” he said. His mind went blank and he hit the ground, clambered on his hands and knees to the nearest tree, rising to his feet and trying to angle himself so that the tree trunk concealed his entire body.

Twang. Another arrow cut silently through the air to his right, sank into the skinny trunk of a sickly looking pine tree.

“Dammit,” he said, and now he could hear the snapping of branches. His hunter was nearby and closing in.

“Whoo,” Jacob yelled, his voice seeming to come from everywhere. A bird called out, took flight.

“Bastard,” Richard screamed.

“Thanks,” Jacob laughed and in a second there was another twang and Richard felt the arrow strike the tree to his back.

He spun, pressed his nose to the rough bark, and held his arms close to his sides. His hunter was somewhere directly in front of him. He would not be able to circle around without crossing Richard’s peripheral line of sight—and if he did, Richard would simply move along the curve of the tree. They could be here all day.

Richard sucked in a deep breath, held it. Silence spinning out for what felt like forever. Another twig snapping, somewhere nearby. He could turn and run, weave madly between the trees, or he could face the bastard head on.

He exhaled, long and steady, through pursed lips.

“To hell with this,” he whispered, pulled in another deep breath and stepped from behind the tree, screaming, roaring, his fists clenched at his sides, charging toward his unseen attacker.

He saw Jacob a split second before he heard the twang of the arrow’s release. Richard cut to his right, and a white-hot spike of pain pierced his left forearm. He glanced down, saw the arrow bobbing—it had entered the palm-side of his forearm halfway between his wrist and his elbow, and had gone a third of the way through before stopping. Blood flowed, but he hammered forward, his eyes on Jacob, who took two steps back and readied another arrow for launch.

Twang. He moved left, and the arrow zipped past the right side of Richard’s head, a lover blowing into his ear. Leading with his right shoulder and ignoring the pain dancing up his left arm like a heart attack, he slammed into Jacob, drove him into a tree. Something struck Richard’s face, smashing his lips against his teeth. He tasted blood.

The bow hit the ground between them. Richard took a step back, grabbed the arrow that had gone through his arm and, screaming his way through the pain, slid it free. It was needle-point and came out clean. Jacob went for the knife at his waist and Richard quickly slid his right hand along the shaft of the arrow, stopping when he felt the feathers touch his palm. He whipped the arrow through the air, swung it like a sword—right, left, right, the tip opening a bloody Z across Jacob’s face and chest.

“Mother fucker,” Richard screamed, using the arrow like a switch now—whap whap whap—scourging Jacob as he rolled away from the tree and crumbled to the ground, screaming, his four remaining arrows sliding from the quiver on his back, his welt-covered forearms shielding his bleeding face. Richard swung and swung, hammering lashes across Jacob’s back, the pain in his left arm long since forgotten, the scream pouring from his mouth sounding more and more like laughter. Criss-crossed lines of blood seeped through the cloth of Jacob’s shirt.

At some point Richard threw aside the arrow and kicked Jacob—he drove his foot into the bastard’s balls and into his stomach, and when Jacob’s arms fell away from his face, Richard stomped his nose into a bloody lump.

Panting, Richard stared down at the dazed and bloody mess at his feet.

“God,” Jacob said. “Stuh-stuh…” His bloody fingers twitched atop the grass. The yawning gash on his cheek and forehead glistened. He coughed, rolled onto his side. Pawed feebly at the sheathed knife hanging from his belt.

Falling to his knees, Richard slapped away Jacob’s hand and removed the knife from its leather sheath. Rolling the dazed and bloodied man onto his back, he pressed the serrated blade to Jacob’s throat.

“Kill you,” he said once more. The pain in his left arm returned, intensifying with each galloping beat of his heart. Black spots pulsed before his eyes, also in time to his heartbeat, just like the blood pumping from the wound in his arm.

“Guh,” Jacob said, bringing a hand to his face and probing the gaping wound in his cheek, pressing it shut.

Richard’s hand shook. He drew it back, slowly, and the blade opened a small, shallow furrow in the flesh of Jacob’s throat. Beads of blood formed. Jacob’s pulse thrummed beneath taut, blood-slick flesh. He grunted.

Richard returned the knife to its starting position and pressed harder. Thought for a moment, and then altered his grip on the knife, brought it up, his fist tight on the hilt, the blade pointing downward. One swift plunge, and it would be over. Jacob opened his eyes, blinked away blood. Coughed once.

Richard’s hand quivered, his stomach seemed to collapse upon itself, and he leaned forward, gagging, a small line of bile flowing from his mouth and onto the ground. He heaved once more, and this time the bile contained a few small chunks of what he could only assume was all that was left of the last food he’d eaten.

He placed the knife on the ground between his knees and inspected the wound on his arm. It was clean—two simple holes like the wounds of Christ in some painting. Blood welled in each of the holes but it did not flow.

He slid Jacob’s gun from its holster.

Drawing back the hammer with his thumb, he pressed the barrel of the gun to Jacob’s temple.

“Guh,” Jacob said again, drawing himself into a ball and trying to push away the barrel with trembling fingers. A bloody snot bubble swelled from his right nostril and burst. Richard closed his eyes, opened them. Gently pulled the trigger and, using his thumb, guided the hammer to its original position. If they hadn’t already heard the screaming lunatic laughter of his assault upon their brother, they’d hear this. If he pulled the trigger, the others would hear him, and any chance he had of getting away would be lost.

He could smother Jacob or slit his throat.

Richard stared at the shallow cut he’d opened across Jacob’s throat, at the throbbing pulse beneath the dirt and the blood. Jacob coughed once more, and that was all Richard needed—he stood, looking around, sliding the gun into his pocket and trying to decide upon a path. He’d hurt the bastard, hurt him badly. He was dying, and it would take a long time. He didn’t deserve the mercy of a quick kill.

He walked, eyes forward, his left arm curled to his stomach, the gun hanging like an unfulfilled promise from his right hand. The tress flowed past him and over him, unchanging.

Less than ten minutes after leaving Jacob to his fate, Richard came across the shack. It sat in a clearing like something organic and ancient, its tin roof peppered with orange rust blossoms and covered in patches of thick green moss—a squat, oblong building covered on all sides by doors. Simple pre-fab bedroom doors; heavy wooden doors; rust-streaked metal doors stenciled numbers beneath wire-mesh inlaid windows. Door after door after door.

He stepped up to the building and tried one of the doors. It would not open, and this close he could tell that it had been bolted to the side of the building. A stench hung in the air, something heavy and sour—the reek of sun-baked roadkill.

He moved down the line, trying door after door, rounding the corner, until he came upon a wooden outhouse door. It was set a little deeper into the building than the other doors, and he slid his fingers beneath the black metal loop, placed his thumb upon the latch. He leaned close, peered into the crescent-shaped hole that had been cut into the wooden slats, and the smell punched him in the face. He recoiled.

There was something dead inside the shack, and dead was dangerous. He stepped back, looked around for something, for anything, and that’s when he heard it. Someone inside the shack coughed. He listened. The seconds ticked by, and when the cough came once more, terror and hope surged through Richard’s core. He wrenched open the door.

Framed in the light cast through the open door, Kimberly lay naked and bloody, roped and chained to a thin soiled mattress that sat atop the metal frame of a small folding cot.

“God,” he said, stepping into the dim confines of the shack, into the reek of death and human waste. There were flies, so many little buzzing wings that it sounded as if he were in a beehive.

Kimberly’s blackened eyes were closed. Her nose was crooked. Her lips were swollen, split, and bloodied. Her hands were cuffed above her head, the cuffs bound with twine to the wire mesh upon which the mattress lay. Also bound to the cot frame, a rope encircled her waist. Her legs were spread wide and bent at the knees. Her toes touched the ground. Twine bound her ankles to the legs of the cot.

His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Richard looked around: to the left of the cot, two dead bodies hung writhing from chains, buzzing with flies, their stiff fingers silently working, their cloudy and shriveled eyes rolling slowly in their sockets. They were naked, their flesh sallow, jaundiced, their feet and ankles bloated and bruised and leaking dark fluids onto ground.

To the right of the cot, a deep bloodstained sink hung from the wall, which was lined with warped shelves bearing paint cans, tools, and other assorted garage items. A pencil-thin line of water ran from the faucet.

There was another door directly across from the door leading into the shack. It was shut but did not appear to be locked. A filthy orange hunting jacket hung from a hook on the door. The wall to the right of the door was covered with warped and tattered pornographic images.

He stepped to the cot and sank to his knees.

“Kim,” he said, stroked her face. Her swollen eyelids fluttered. She licked her lips and turned her head toward the sound of his voice.

“Rich,” she said. “Oh, God, Rich.”

“Shh,” he said, allowing his eyes to move from her face and across her naked body. There were bite marks on her breasts and stomach, livid with infection. The work of the living, not the dead, they were shallow and arranged in a way that suggested intent and intelligence—one around each nipple, and several stamped in an uneven line down her stomach, toward her crotch, which buzzed with flies.

“He hurt me,” she said. “B... bastard. I gave up...”

“I’m going to get you out of here, Kim,” he said, tugging at the rope binding her waist to the cot. He slid his fingers along its length, followed it beneath the cot, and found the knot. It gave with little effort. He slid the rope away from her stomach and threw it to the ground.

“Oh my God, oh my God, are you really there?” She asked, coughing once more, spraying blood. “God, are you there?” Her hands hooked into claws. The flesh around her wrists was raw.

“I’m here, Kim,” he said, leaning close, his left hand on her right shoulder, his right hand atop her head, stroking her hair.

“God,” she said, turning her head and trying to look at him.

“No, no,” he said, gently pushing her head to the cot. “I’m going to find something to cut these chains.” He stood up.

“Don’t go,” she said, panic infusing her listless voice. “Don’t you fucking leave me.”

“I’m not leaving, Kim,” he said, walking to the closed door and removing the hunter’s jacket from the hook. It was old and rotting and filthy, but it would do. He draped it across Kimberly, covering her from breasts to thighs.

“What is that?”

“Just a jacket,” he said. “To keep you warm.”

“I hurt,” she said. “He hurt me.”

“I know, honey,” he said, and the words hurt him. He’d covered her to give her a sense of comfort, yes, but that wasn’t the only reason. Guilt and lousy feeling washed over him. He didn’t want to look between her legs again.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking over his shoulder, through the open door and into the forest beyond. “I got away. I killed one of them.”

“You did?” She asked, her body tensing.

“I think so.”

“Good,” she said, relaxing. “That’s good. They deserve to die. All of them. Where’s Brock? Have you seen her?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s still alive.”

“Is she?”

“Yeah.” She sucked in air, quivered, her arms breaking out in goosebumps. “The one who did this to me said so. Said they were keeping her.”

“Oh, God,” Richard said.

One of the dead bodies grunted, and Richard jumped, his heart pounding. Never mind Jacob and whether or not he was dead—there were others, and they could arrive at any moment.

Just get the fuck out of here, he thought. Get help. Come back. But get out now.

Kimberly coughed again. He fingers quivered above her head.

She’s just gonna slow you down. Get you killed.

“They killed Guy, didn’t they?” Her chest heaved beneath the jacket, and tears squeezed between her swollen eyelids.

“Hey,” he said, trying to sound as soothing as possible and succeeding only in sounding terrified. “Just calm down, okay? I’m going to find a saw, or something.”

“Urr,” the other corpses said, watching him.

“Okay,” she said, and he stepped away from the cot and toward the closed door. “Rich? What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said, seizing the doorknob, turning it, pushing open the door, and revealing a smaller room. Three of its walls were lined with shelves. The ground was strewn with junk—boxes, an old lamp, a bicycle without wheels. Very little light reached the small room. Richard looked up, stared in disbelief at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Oh,” he said, reaching up and pulling the small chain that hung from the porcelain socket. The bulb flared to life and dim light filled the room. Kicking aside the bike frame, he stepped to one of the cluttered shelves and pushed things around. Spark plugs and screwdrivers and nails pattered the ground between his feet.

“Rich,” Kimberly said.

“I’m here,” he said, pushing a stack of warped paperbacks to the ground. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Grunting, she struggled, rattled her chains. Richard moved on to the next shelf. Behind him, the cot creaked.

“Goddammit, Kimberly,” he said. “Just stop, okay? I’m right here. I’m looking for a fucking saw. Dammit.”

He ransacked one shelf and moved on to the next. Lightbulbs shattered at his feet. Rusty nails and screws showered the ground. He sliced open his thumb on a razor blade.

There was no saw.

He could shoot Kimberly’s chains, but he neither wanted to attract the attention of the others or waste valuable ammunition. He had six shells, and he wanted to make them count.

“Dammit,” he said, turning around.

Jacob knelt on one knee beside Kimberly, who writhed. He’d tossed aside the old jacket. His left hand covered her mouth. His right hand clutched the knife that Richard had left behind. It was buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of her stomach. He drew it downward, toward the thick tuft of hair between her legs.

“No,” Richard said, pulling the gun from his pocket.

Jacob looked up a second before the first of three bullets tore into his chest and throat. Spurting blood, he collapsed onto Kimberly’s gaping stomach. The dead bodies hanging from the ceiling kicked their feet, rocked and spun and dripped.

Richard dropped the gun and rushed to Kimberly’s side, nearly tripping on Jacob’s feet. He pulled Jacob away, dropped him into a gurgling heap.

“No,” he said, kneeling beside Kimberly. Blood welled around the dark fissure in her stomach. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. The smell of Kimberly’s insides filled the air, mingled with the stale mildew reek of the shack and the stink of the bound dead bodies spinning in place at the ends of their chains.

“It’s cold,” Kimberly said through clenched teeth. “It’s getting cold.”

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he said loudly in an attempt to drown out the voice in his head, the one that told him that this was too bad, sure, but at least he had a chance of getting away now.

“You fucking Tatum?” Kimberly said.

Mouth open, Richard stared at her, certain that he was hearing things. She wouldn’t be. No, not now.

“Tatum?” she gasped, her head lolling, her rolling eyes mere slivers of light and dark beneath swollen eyelids. He allowed them to find him.

He stared at her, blinking, unable to answer, and it was answer enough.

“Asshole,” she said, convulsing. Dark fluid arced from her mouth and her final breath rattled into silence. Her back arched, relaxed. Gas escaped her body and the flies gathered between her legs took flight. And that was it.

Shaking, he stared at her until Jacob pawed at his ankles, startling him. He yelped, hopping away. Jacob sat up, head lolling, eyes wide and vacant. He kicked Jacob in the face.

Jacob’s corpse tried to crawl to its hands and knees. Richard kicked it again, looked around. A hammer lay on the floor in the corner beneath one of the hanging corpses. Its head was sheathed in rust, but a hammer was a hammer.

It was heavy in his hands. The handle was filthy but solid.

He picked up the orange jacket and kicked Jacob’s struggling corpse onto its back, draped the jacket across Jacob’s head. Kneeling beside the living corpse, he swung the hammer until the dead man’s skull became lumpy beneath the jacket and the loud orange cloth was chilled with red blood.

The cot creaked. Kimberly’s fingers worked the air. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Her head moved from side to side. Her swollen eyelids quivered but did not part. Her dead gaze did not find him.

He peeled the jacket from Jacob’s ruined head and draped it across Kimberly’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

When it was finished, he stepped outside and, his hands on his knees, vomited. He took a few steps away from the shack when he remembered the gun. When he stepped into the stinking building, the dead bodies hanging from the ceiling jerked and swayed and followed his passage with listless eyes. He picked up the gun.

Three bullets.

Ten minutes later, he looked back. There was no sign of the shack. The clouds had burned away. The sun’s position in the sky told him that it was going on two o’clock. The shadows told him that he was moving west.

He moved downhill, in the direction in which he was certain he would find the highway, but after nearly two hours of moving he accepted the fact that he was lost. He backtracked for a while, veering south, and within thirty minutes he came to accept the very real possibility that he’d gotten himself completely turned around.

He came across a steep drop, one far too steep for him to attempt alone with no gear and no help. A sloped jumble of rocks, tree trunks, and fallen branches large enough to crush a car, with no way to tell what was solid and what was delicately balanced.

He worked his way along the edge, hoping the ground would level out and the shack would come into view again, or something, anything at all aside from this edgeless, featureless hilly country. The clouds were gone and so were the shadows. The sun was headed down. No way to keep track of time now. He walked as long as he could but if he walked in the dark, he would fall in the dark. He settled against a redwood towering from a particularly steep incline. His back to the ground, the tree beneath his feet, he lay watching, the gun held to his chest, as the last of the light bled away.

He swatted bugs and saw shapes that weren’t there. He may have cried. He tried to keep his eyes open, but in the end he was like any tired living thing. He fell asleep.

Twenty-One

It was a little after three in the morning. The overhead fluorescents were off, and inside, Misty’s was lit just by the glow of the signs above the beer coolers and the green electric face of the 7-UP clock hanging upon the wall at the back of the deli. The hands stopped working at 4:17 a long time ago, but the bulb had worked fine a long time and wasn’t going to quit now just on account of the end of the world.

Misty could hear one of the things moving around outside, its dead feet whispering across the wooden boards of the porch that ran along the front of the store. She wondered who it was, who it had been, and her heart did something fast and funny behind her pendulous old breasts. She stared at the door, expecting at any moment for it to rattle in its frame and swing inward. The bell would jingle and sway, and the dead would spill in with outstretched arms and blood-smeared lips.

Crate was asleep in her bed. After another long day spent sitting on the porch and guarding the store, he’d come inside with Bilbo Baggins at his heel, locked the door, and informed her that he was going to sleep and that she had better not wake him unless the dead bastards were in the store and stepping on the Rice Krispies. Not long after, Charles had staggered from the back and thrown himself grunting onto the chair across from Stacy, who sat fingering the crystal that hung from her neck. Neither of them seemed to have noticed one another. Stacy’s gaze had been on the television, and Charles—palms pressed to his temples, clutching fingers splayed—looked like a man trying to hold something broken together.

Now both were asleep, Stacy on a cot that Misty had retrieved from the bedroom closet, Charles on the three large seat cushions he’d removed from the sofa and arranged on the ground before the coolers. “I don’t want to be away from you,” he’d told Misty, voice slurred and stifling a belch, placing the cushions on the floor with slow determination, his face grim.

After Stacy and Charles had sailed into drunken oblivion, Misty had turned off the television and sat alone in silence, her ass hurting from sitting in the same chair all damned day, her eyelids growing heavy with exhaustion. She wanted to go into the back and crawl into bed next to Crate and sleep until this was over, or, at the very least, until tomorrow. Let Charles and Stacy Starshine serve as their frontline defense—there was a sturdy lock on the door leading from the store and into her house.

Even though she’d reminded him that the large light over the parking lot could be shut off at the breaker box, or perhaps because she’d done so, Crate had taken it out with one well-placed shot from his rifle. The place sat in darkness. The store would not be a beacon to the dead. The living, on the other hand, well. A lot of people knew where it was.

She turned on the television and clicked through the channels, hopeful that some programmer would be merciful enough to give them a break from the endless stream of horror. Was an Andy Griffith rerun at three in the morning too much to ask for, even one with a ticker at the bottom of the screen letting visitors to Mayberry know just how much closer they were to drowning in their own blood?

No such luck. Each of the network affiliates were going full steam, twenty-four seven, exchanging one jumped-up or dead-eyed anchorman for another every five or six hours and pouring forth a steady stream of pundits and experts, each of whom seemed to have exclusive ideas about just what the hell was happening. And a lot was happening, all at once. The dead rose and walked and devoured the living; and the kings of the earth reacted in the only manner known to them: they rattled sabers and readied the war machines.

None of it made a lick of difference, and every word and image and implication washed over her. In Crate’s small apartment out back, Eric Tasgal lay unconscious atop a blanket, hands and ankles bound, an infection smoldering in his right forearm. He was dying, she knew, and because of her actions his final moments would be needlessly worse. He’d come to her for aid and had instead become a prisoner. And why?

Misty killed the TV, got up, and stepped around the counter and to the door looking out upon the parking lot. She cracked the blinds, just a sliver, and peered into the night in time to see the black form of the dead thing stumble from the porch. It crept along between the burn pile and Tasgal’s car, and not for the first time she cursed herself for not moving the car sooner. In a few hours, at first light, she’d go out and move it herself, if she had to. Even down the road, just a bit, would be better—abandoned, door thrown wide, glove compartment turned out. And there was still the matter of the body in the passenger seat.

She watched the dead thing until it was consumed by the shadows, until her eyes tricked her into believing that the darkness was alive and churning with the dead, churning by the hundreds and pressing in on her. Heart racing, she slid her finger from between the blinds and backed away from the door until her ass bumped into the waist-level ice cream cooler.

Charlie snored and snored, and Stacy did not stir. Misty looked at her place, at her meager little slice of life, and suddenly she wanted both Charlie and Stacy gone, out, anywhere but where they were. Anywhere but her place, where they would drink her beer and eat her food, never mind that there would be no more supply trucks, no more fresh bread or peanut butter or quart cans of apple juice.

Could she make them leave? Could she really do that, send them on their way with a little water, a little food, and her best wishes? Both of them had houses within walking distance, but both of them were terrified.

Crate certainly could send them on their way, and he would, too, if only she gave the word.

She stepped over Charles and eased open the beer cooler’s glass door, plucked out a bottle of Bud and popped its top using the opener affixed to the wall to the left of the cooler door. Downing half of it in three large gulps, she left the store behind and walked past her living room and down the hall. There was a scrap of duct tape on the floor. The ruts pressed into the carpet by the wheelbarrow were still visible, trailing down the hall and toward the back door. She took her time going up the stairs.

Crate lay in bed, right in his old spot, like he’d never given it up to emptiness and other men. He reeked of smoke and sweat and charred human flesh, and he hadn’t even bothered to take off his boots. His rifle was at hand. Bilbo Baggins was pressed close to his side. Both of them breathed gently, seemingly in unison.

She watched them for a while and then loafed back downstairs and into the store, past her sleeping guests and into the deli, where she threw a few slices of ham and cheese between two slices of mashed white bread and stood eating, her gaze locked on the door leading outside. She belched, loud, like a man, not bothering to stifle it. She chased her sandwich with a bag of potato chips.

She paced the aisles, running her fingers along the dusty lids of the canned baked beans and canned soup. Light passed across the blinds and moved in horizontal stripes over the adjacent wall. An engine purred and was silenced. Doors slammed, feet crunched on gravel, and a single gunshot popped in the pre-dawn silence.

“Dammit,” Misty said, taking an indecisive step toward the door leading into the back, into her house. Someone hammered a clenched fist against the glass.

“Miss Misty,” someone said, and he sounded like Jeff Karlatos, but that couldn’t be right—he was long gone, up north, having moved on to parts unknown.

“Jeff?” She said, stepping toward the door and touching the small keyring in her pocket. “That you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Can you open up?”

She held a pause. “What’s wrong?”

“Just open up, okay?” He sounded scared. “I got a flat and I hurt my hand changing the tire. I’m bleeding bad.”

“Oh,” she said, slipping the key ring from her pocket. It took her a few moments to find the right key. She slid it into the lock, turned it, and that’s when someone who wasn’t Jeff Karlatos laughed. “Fuck.”

The bell rang and Jeff shouldered past her. His hands were neither hurt nor bleeding. He was followed by Drew Baker and Greg Haggarty. Karlatos and Haggarty each carried a rifle, and Baker was dressed in a tight California State Trooper uniform, the left shoulder and collar of which were rigid with dried blood.

Baker was a drunk who did odd jobs around town and who mostly kept to himself. Haggarty was the son of Greg Sr., pastor of the now defunct Harlow Baptist Church, some six years in his grave. Baker was thin and pale and wiry. Haggarty was fat, so fat that Misty often wondered how he bathed and did his business, what with those short arms.

“What the hell is going on, Jeff?” She said, though she knew exactly what the hell was going on. “Hurt your hand?”

“Listen, Misty,” Jeff said, looking a little disappointed in himself. He glanced down at his hands, and at the rifle held in their grasp. “We’re not going to hurt anyone, okay? And we’re not going to take everything. We’re just going to take a few things.”

“We’ll take what we need,” Haggarty said, loafing by and tainting the air with a noxious blend of sour sweat and improperly-wiped ass. He went straight for the candy aisle and slid various chocolate bars into the pockets of his baggy and stained sweatpants.

Baker followed, briefly making eye contact with Misty as he walked by. He stopped, hands on his hips, and surveyed the store. The gun hanging from his belt looked big enough to knock him over, should he fire it. He adjusted the collar of the ill-fitting State Trooper uniform.

“Playing dress-up, Drew?” Misty said, lacing her words with as much ridicule as possible. It wasn’t a wise move, but fuck it and fuck him. He spun on his heel and pointed a long finger at her face.

“You just shut up, you old bag,” he said, shaking his finger once. His eyes were dumb and distant, his words smeared around the edges. “Keep your mouth shut and we’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeff Karlatos said.

“Save it,” Misty said.

“Turn on the lights,” Baker said, and Misty didn’t move from where she stood. Stacy and Charles stirred, and Misty’s gaze moved to the door leading into the back. She’d left it open. Could Crate hear any of this?

Karlatos went to the front door and flipped the light switch. The fluorescents stuttered to life. Charles sat up, what little hair he had a frenzied mess. He fumbled for his glasses and, sliding them on, looked up in open terror at their visitors. The color drained from his alcohol-flushed cheeks.

“God,” he said. “What? What is this?”

“Shut your fool mouth, Charles,” Misty said. “Just sit right there and shut up.”

Baker walked over to Charles. “She’s right,” he said. “You should shut your mouth, but you can’t stay there.” Baker snapped his head toward the coolers. “You’re in the way.”

“Drew?” Charles said. He looked disgusted and terrified and confused. “Why the hell are you dressed like that?”

“Move,” Baker screamed. Chuck’s face crumpled, and he scrambled away on his hands and knees, kicking apart his makeshift sofa cushion bed. He reached one of the tables and pulled himself to his feet, swaying.

“Sit your ass and calm the hell down,” Baker said, removing a can of beer from the cooler and tossing it to Chuck, who didn’t bother trying to catch it. It hit his chest and fell to the floor, where it popped and hissed and sprayed a drift of foam between his feet.

Baker retrieved another beer from the cooler, this time for himself.

“Don’t kill me,” Chuck said, tears spilling down his cheeks.

“Jesus,” Misty said. Stacy grunted once, readjusted herself upon the cot, and went right on sleeping the sleep of the righteously shitfaced.

“You sure you want to leave?” Haggarty asked, mashing a Snickers bar into his mouth.

“Time to go shopping,” Baker said, popping the top of his beer and knocking it back. He nodded once to Karlatos, who stepped out of the store and returned a few seconds later, pulling a rattling Proust’s shopping cart over the raised threshold. The right front wheel spun.

“Where’s the old man?” Baker said, looking from Karlatos to Misty and back. Misty wondered the same thing, but didn’t let it show.

“He’s asleep,” Misty said. “Out back in his apartment, stone cold drunk.”

“He wasn’t drunk earlier,” Karlatos said, frowning. Stacy grunted again, and Karlatos’s gaze played across her covered form. Baker eyed Misty. Haggarty tugged the cart away from Karlatos and, laying his rifle across the place where a small child could sit, pushed it to the canned food shelves.

“Guys?” Haggarty said.

“No,” Misty said. “But we all know what a few hours and a bottle of Jack can do to a man.”

“Yes we do,” Baker said, an idiot grin spreading across his face.

“I can bring you out back, if you like, and show you,” she said, hoping that Crate was laying low, listing, waiting to take action. More likely, he still slept, and it was probably for the best: had he been awake and standing guard outside with Bilbo at his feet, he’d probably be dead. “But if it’s all the same I’ll have you let him be.”

“Not necessary,” Baker said. He noticed the television and nodded toward it. “Anything new?”

“No,” Misty said. “Same stuff, just worse.”

“We’re going to leave you with enough,” Baker said, softening his tone.

“I’m sure you will,” she said. “And the next guys to come around will take the rest.”

“I doubt it,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because next time you’ll have your guard up,” he said, looking away from Misty. “Put some of those cans back, fatso.”

“My ass,” Haggarty said, looking at Baker, a can of baked beans clutched in his plump hand. “We’re going to need this food. And why the hell are we leaving, anyway?”

“What?” Baker said.

“I’ve been saying since we left your place, but you don’t listen to me.”

“No wonder,” Baker said. “You’re an idiot.”

“We should stay here,” Haggarty said, tossing the can of beans into the shopping cart.

“We need to keep moving,” Baker said.

“Bullshit,” Haggarty said, and Misty felt a shift. Whatever plans these assholes had laid were tenuous, at best. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, and we’ve got a load of supplies and food and the lights are still on, for God’s sake.”

“For now,” Baker said, as if that shot down Haggarty’s entire point.

“Oh, God,” Charles said, weeping into his hands.

“Doesn’t matter,” Haggarty said. “We lay low here for a while, wait to see how things go.”

Baker stared at Haggarty, his fingers playing across the grip of the stolen gun resting upon his hip. Karlatos hovered beside Misty, silent and unmoving, his gaze distant and unfocused. Haggarty stood with his arms crossed atop his massive gut. “You know I’m right,” he said.

“You’re not staying here,” Misty said, staring at the side of Baker’s head until he turned and met her gaze. She could tell by the look in his eyes that his fat friend was winning him over.

“Oh?” Baker said, taking a step toward her, his face a coalescing swirl of emotions. He didn’t know what was going on or what the hell he was going to do from one moment to the next, but he was getting angry, and for guys like Baker (Misty had known her share of them), nothing cleared up a confusing matter like a nice shot of anger.

“It’s my place,” she said, holding his gaze, her legs growing weak. She hoped he couldn’t tell how terrified she was. “You don’t stay here unless I ask you to.”

“Is that so?” He half smiled, looked at Haggarty, who laughed once. “You hear this shit, Jeff?”

Jeff didn’t say anything, but Misty didn’t wait for him. “That’s right,” she said, nodding, trying to soften her tone, loosen her brow. “But you’re welcome to stay the night if you want to. Get some rest. I can fix everyone a hot meal and then send you on your way with supplies, no charge.”

“Generous,” Baker said, his fingers tapping an erratic little number on the grip of his revolver. He looked back at Haggarty. “Fill the cart. We’re leaving.”

“But I thought—”

“I don’t give a shit what you thought, you tub of shit, just fill the damn cart,” Baker said, wheeling to face Karlatos. “And why don’t you help him?”

“Huh?” Karlatos asked, blinking, surfacing from somewhere else. Misty followed his line of sight. Her heart grew cold.

Stacy had pulled herself into a sitting position. Her bare feet were on the floor. She looked around, her eyes listless, her movements labored. Her hair was a mess and her shirt had been pulled taught, the v-neck collar stretched down to reveal the swell of her right breast. The cloth of her shirt was thin, and her nipples pressed against its surface.

This was Stacy—you got used to the way she dressed same as you got used to her nonsense claptrap about crystals and spirits and Bigfoot taking a crap in the hills: bare legs, short shorts, and a loose-fitting white shirt that hung like a ghost.

“Oh, hey,” Baker said, taking a step toward Stacy, who pawed sleep from her eyes with one hand while massaging her temple with the other. “Stacy Starshine.”

She looked up, blinking, shielding her eyes with one hand and taking in Baker’s uniform, the look of bewilderment on her face changing. She went from looking like a woman who had no idea where she was to one who knew exactly where she was. Misty glanced at the doorway leading into the back.

Charles sat at the table blubbering into his hands, his shoulders hitching.

“Come on,” Karlatos said, waking up to what was in the air. He stepped past Misty and put a hand on Baker’s shoulder. “Let’s just pack up what we need and go, like we planned.”

Baker shrugged him off. “Haggarty was right. I think we should stay a while,” he said, his voice taking on the singular flat quality Misty associated with men whose minds had been wiped clean simply because their balls needed emptying.

“Drew,” Stacy said. “What’s going on? Why are you dressed like a cop?”

“I found it,” he said, glancing at Haggarty. “I like the way it looks on me.”

“Oh,” Stacy said. “Yeah. It looks nice.”

“So do you, look nice,” Baker said, and Haggarty chuckled.

“No,” Misty said, stepping toward Baker. Karlatos grabbed her by the shirt and pulled her toward him, his large hands closing around her flabby biceps and pressing her arms against her sides.

“Don’t,” Karlatos whispered, close to her ear.

“You can’t do this,” Misty said.

“I can do whatever I want to do,” Baker said, shooting a spiteful glance in her direction. He lifted the beer to his mouth and finished it off, crushing the can. “And if I get a few more of these in my blood, I just may be able to do it to you, too.”

He threw the can across the store. It clattered onto the floor behind the deli counter. Charles jumped, his watery eyes large above his fingers, which tugged at his cheeks and eyelids.

Misty struggled to free herself from Karlatos’s grasp but he was stronger than he looked. His fingers sank into the flesh of her arms and she knew that she’d have bruises, if she lived long enough.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“I know,” he said, pulling her away and turning her around to face him. For the first time, she wondered where he’d placed his rifle. He shook her once, made eye contact. “Stop. He’ll kill you.”

He let go of her and retrieved his rifle from the checkout counter. She took two backward steps away from him. The barrel of the rifle wavered. He was incapable of pointing it at her.

Baker spoke in hushed tones to Stacy, who giggled once, uncomfortably. Haggarty laughed again. He’d left behind the cart and was slowly approaching Baker and looking down at Stacy, his fat head cocked to one side.

“Dammit,” Misty said. “Just take what you want and go.”

“Yeah,” Baker said, looking back. He held Stacy’s right hand in his left, like a man asking a lady to dance. Her other hand was pressed to the crystal resting upon her chest. “Jeff?”

“What?” Karlatos said.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“This right here,” Baker said, yanking Stacy to her feet. “I saw the way you were looking at her. So come on. You can go first.”

Baker slid behind Stacy, who swayed on her feet, her face a pale mask of fear. He placed his hands on her hips and eased his fingers up her sides, her shirt bunching up ahead of them.

“No, God,” Karlatos said as Baker pulled Stacy’s shirt over her head and tossed it over his shoulder. Her hands went up to cover herself. Baker pried them away with little resistance. Next Baker dropped to his knees behind her and pulled her shorts down to her ankles. She was not wearing panties.

“Okay,” Baker said, standing up and pressing his entire body against Stacy’s back, his own hands rising up to cup her breasts. “You don’t want to go first, you don’t get to go at all.”

“Wait,” Karlatos said, stepping forward, rubbing his dick through his pants.

“Jesus,” Misty gasped.

“I won’t hurt her,” Karlatos said, meeting and holding her shocked and withering gaze for less than a second. “I promise I won’t.”

“Right here,” Haggarty said, holding up a hand. Karlatos tossed him the rifle and stepped up to Stacy, who stared down at her crystal.

“Jesus,” Karlatos said, his voice distant and flat now, not much different from Baker’s voice. Baker slid his hands away from Stacy’s breasts and Karlatos replaced them with his own. His fingers were long and thick and clumsy, and he kneaded Stacy’s breasts in a pitiful imitation of a schoolyard tit-squeezing pantomime: honk honk.

Some part of Misty hurt for Karlatos, for the fact that this was surely the first set of tits he’d touched, but mostly she wanted him dead. She wanted all of them dead, and she wanted to kick Crate in his old balls for sleeping through this, the bastard.

She glanced at Charles, and she wanted him dead, too—he no longer cried. His face was red, his eyelids puffy, but the tears had dried up. His eyes were on Stacy’s naked body, taking it all in, up and down, down and up, and by the time it was over he’d probably get in line.

“I won’t hurt you,” Karlatos said. “I mean it.”

“Get back down there,” Baker said, kicking the cot toward Stacy. It struck her, and her knees buckled. Karlatos caught her, pressed his face into her hair, inhaling. She sat on the cot, listless, her eyes elsewhere.

“I won’t hurt you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Baker said, slapping Stacy across the side of the head. She didn’t go down, as Baker had probably intended her to. Instead, he’d merely slapped on a light switch. She threw herself at Karlatos and raked four bloody lines across the soft contours of his face, knocking his glasses to the floor.

“Nobody!” She shrieked. “Nobody!”

Karlatos closed one of his large hands into a fist and punched her in the forehead. With a yelp, she fell onto her side. Baker grabbed her knee, wrenched open her legs, and waved a hand at the thick patch of hair between them. “Get to it.”

Karlatos fumbled with his belt. He wiggled his pants down around his ankles and then kicked away his boxers. Baker looked at what Karlatos was packing and sniggered, just once. Haggarty said nothing, just stood there sucking on his bottom lip and rubbing his dick through his pants. It occurred to Misty that the candy bars in his pockets must have already begun to melt. Charles remained silent, his eyes locked on the scene that was unfolding before them.

Dazed, Stacy pawed at her forehead. Karlatos knelt at the foot of the cot and tried to position himself between her legs. The cot creaked beneath their combined weight.

“I don’t think that thing is going to hold me,” Haggarty said, smiling, and there was a deafening pop. His left eye vanished, the back of his head flapped open. He crashed into the shelf behind him and rolled to the floor, aspirin bottles and bandage rolls and tubes of antibiotic salve raining down around him.

“Ho—” Baker said, and there was another loud pop. His forehead burst and he crumpled into a heap, his ruptured face jetting blood.

“That’s right,” Crate said, stepping into the store. Bilbo Baggins was at his feet, growling. “Lousy fucking assholes.”

Now it was Karlatos’s turn to yelp. His pants and underwear bunched around his sock-clad ankles, he took one step back and stumbled, his naked ass slamming into the ground, his skinny dick bobbing up and down.

Bilbo Baggins growled and barked, and Crate stood over Stacy, looking at Karlatos down the length of his rifle.

“You okay, honey?” Crate asked.

“Yeah,” Stacy said, covering her breasts with her forearms, and Misty rushed to her side.

“Please don’t,” Karlatos said, his wavering hands held up before his bloodied face. His small pecker retracted and was little more than a pale nubbin perched above his balls. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. Don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—”

Crate shot him. Lifeless, he flopped backward, his skull and the tile floor coming together with a sickly wet crunch. Blood spread in a circle around his head and urine pooled on the floor between his legs. By the smell of it, one of them had shit himself just after dying. Misty’s money was on Haggarty.

“God, Crate,” Charles said, stumbling to his feet and then falling to his knees, his legs entangled with those of the chair upon which he had been sitting. He looked up at Crate, and the tears were back now, chasing one another down his cheeks. His bottom lip quivered. “You saved us. Thank you, oh, God, thank you.”

“What did you do?” Crate asked.

“What?” Charles said. He was on his hands and knees now, and he crawled toward Crate, face red and glistening.

“Come on,” Misty said, helping Stacy to her feet and leading her away from Crate and Charles, who had come at last to a confrontation long overdue. They avoided Haggarty’s fallen bulk, skirting blood and a few curls of brain, rounding the tables. She picked up Stacy’s shirt and led her into the deli.

“You didn’t do a fucking thing,” Crate said. “You just watched.”

Despite the fact that she knew it was coming, Misty still jumped when Crate pulled the trigger.

“Oh, man,” Stacy said, pulling her shirt over her head, snaking her arms through the holes, and covering her nakedness. “This wasn’t a good night.”

“No,” Misty said.

The fingers of her right hand bushed against her crystal and Stacy folded her arms across her breasts.

“You all right, woman?” Crate asked.

Misty looked at him.

“Good,” Crate said. He walked to the door leading into the parking lot, killed the overhead fluorescents, and peeked through the blinds.

“Anything?” Misty said, suddenly whispering, as if the darkness magnified sound.

“No,” Crate said. “The coast is clear for now. I’m going back to bed. You’d both best come into the house and lock the door. We’ll clean up in the morning.”

Twenty-Two

“What’s his name?” Colleen asked. Their meeting with Niebolt had ended in a rush. Maxwell, the spirit and image of his father and his number one fan to boot, had interrupted them, his face stony. The two of them had gone outside for a few minutes, and then Huff had returned, his face now as stony as Maxwell’s, but his eyes wet with tears barely held in.

“We’ll finish this,” he’d said, eyeing Colleen. “Something has happened and I’ve lost another son.”

The women had looked at one another, and there’d been no need to feign surprise. Huff left, and now, nearly three hours since his hasty departure, Colleen sat on the couch, holding the infant to her chest.

“He doesn’t have a name,” Sally said, closing her book—a tattered paperback of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Mathilda had gone to bed, leaving her child in their care. There had been no sign of Embeth at all for several hours, and Evie was in the other room, perched once more before her work. Colleen found the muffled whirring of the sewing machine somehow comforting.

“Why not?” Colleen asked, tracing her right forefinger along the child’s forehead and down to the tip of his nose. Not for the first time, she pressed her nose into his stringy brown locks and inhaled. There was something about the smell of a baby’s scalp—as well as the breath of a kitten, God help her—that she loved. As a child, she’d loved the smell of gasoline, and she’d told her mother that someone should bottle the smell, that it would make a wonderful perfume. She wasn’t so sure about that anymore, but kitten breath and baby head? Pure bliss.

“Why else? Huff.” Sally said, readjusting herself upon the chair. She looked like she was about to burst. Colleen wondered how she slept. “He usually names the kids right there on the spot—he’ll have two names picked out, a boy’s and a girl’s, and he’ll go with whichever one is called for. Doesn’t seem to bother him one way or another. Not this time, though.”

“What happened?”

“He took one look at this one and said that Ezekial was not his name,” she said. “It was a good name, but this child had no name. He’d have one before long, once he had a chance to establish his personality.”

“Oh,” Colleen said.

“Yeah,” Sally said. She opened her book and resumed reading.

It was a little after ten and Colleen could see moonlit shapes outside. The trees and the hills were so black and formless they drew you forward, made you want to lean forward and peer deep into them and see if anything was there at all.

“How is it?” Colleen asked following several minutes of silence. Sally held up her finger: give me a second. She turned a page, read on until what Colleen assumed was the end of a chapter, and, frowning slightly, looked up. “Hm?”

“The book. How is it?” In light of all that had come, in light of all that was yet to come, it felt good—asking a mundane question. A normal question: how’s that book you’re reading?

“It’s okay,” Sally said, staring at the cover, looking like a person who was looking for the right thing to say. “It’s a lot to think about. I picked it up thinking it was like the old movie. It’s not.”

“No,” Colleen said. “It’s one of the books I managed to not read in college, but I picked up enough to know it’s not like the old movie.”

“I started to put it down when I realized it wasn’t, but I decided to keep going. I guess I’m glad I did.”

“Huh,” Colleen, said, and she felt her one normal conversation of the day wither on her tongue. She and Sally looked at one another for a moment, and then Sally looked down at the book and picked up where she’d left off.

The child with no name stirred, grunted, its face contorting into something that looked like a smile. Colleen retrieved the pacifier from the small table beside the couch and pressed the translucent rubber nipple to the child’s lips. He took it eagerly and grew still. Looking at the child, Colleen felt something stir in her heart, a fluttering sensation that felt akin to love of some kind. Maybe it was just pity. Even before the dead had risen, the child’s world had been upside down, and the saddest part of all was that, growing up, he would never know better.

Niebolt was smart. The children were a part of whatever twisted Noah’s Ark repopulation fantasy he was feeding, but they were also a tool, a means by which he calmed and soothed his victims. A tool for which she was, at this moment, most grateful—she had not thought of her mother, down there in the dark, or of Guy. Or of her brother, her friends.

“Are any of them still alive?” Colleen said, repositioning the sleeping child, which belched once and briefly opened one of its eyes before settling down. Sally looked up from her book once more. The look on her face was answer enough, but she spoke anyway.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Huff lets his sons do what they want to the men. He tells them to make it fast and painless, but you know how men can be, especially in groups, feeding off each other.”

“How do you know?” Colleen said. “That they’re dead, I mean.”

“I don’t,” Sally said, shaking her head, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Not for certain, anyway. All I know is what Mathilda told me one night, after she had a few drinks and was actually talking about her time here, about her life before Huff. She told me that Huff lets the boys have the boys. Their job is to make them disappear, fast and clean.”

“What about Kimberly?”

“Kimberly?,” Sally said. “I didn’t know there was another girl. Who was she?”

“My best friend,” Colleen said. “Since we were little.”

“Oh.”

“You said was.”

“I did,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I never saw my husband again, Colleen, and I never saw my son again.”

She set her book aside, rose from the chair with nearly comical slowness, and sat close beside Colleen. They held hands.

“I never saw them again and I never will,” Sally said, her voice cracking. “You’re probably not going to see your man or your brother, and Kimberly is probably dead, too. At this point, you can only hope she is, because if Huff didn’t want her to live here, then he gave her to his boys, and that...”

Sally didn’t have to finish. She looked like a woman who’d said too much, anyhow—embarrassed and ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

Colleen’s anger returned. Suddenly she hated the child in her arms, this nameless bastard offspring of Huffington Niebolt—she wanted it dead as much as she wanted him dead. She stared at its face until her rage abated, aware only at the end that she was hurting Sally’s hand.

She stared at Sally, letting go.

“It’s okay,” Sally said.

Colleen looked down at the child, blinking away tears and feeling her heart beneath her ribs, pumping to burst.

“It’s going to be okay,” Sally said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning in close, like a lover. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Getting out of here,” Colleen repeated, with realization unfolding like a death letter in her mind.

“Yes,” Sally said. “We’re going to get away from this place.”

“And go where?”

“I, uh,” Sally said, looking around. Colleen watched the older woman’s face. She could see the light dawning there, as well.

“There’s no place for us,” Colleen said. “Not anymore.”

“It’s really over?” Sally said, on the verge of tears once more. “Everywhere.”

“Seems like it,” Colleen said, touching Sally’s hand. “This is the safest place. We just need to take it.”

“Huff’s losing his grip.” She sounded almost hopeful.

“I’m going to kill him,” Colleen said, maybe a little too loudly, surprised by her sudden thirst for violence. She saw herself cramming the bastard’s cock into his mouth with the knife she’d used to slice it off.

“I hope you get the chance, honey,” Sally said, letting go of Colleen’s hand and struggling once more to her feet. “And I hope I’m there when you do it.” She held out her hands, indicating the sleeping child. “Here.”

Colleen passed the nameless boy to Sally, who held him to her chest and slowly shuffled out of the room, her slipper-clad feet dragging across the deep carpet. Colleen stared into space, her mind racing, the images in her head overlapping into jumbled and bloody chaos. Is this what it felt like to go crazy?

The place where the child had been pressed to her chest felt empty and cold now, damp. She stood, felt the carpet beneath her bare feet and between her toes, and stepped over to the bookshelf. So much information, and so much of it conflicting and varied, not something she associated with cults. Not that she knew much about them, aside from what she’d heard about Manson and his bunch on the news.

She plucked a Poe from between Steinbeck and a book about the Wright Brothers, fanned its musty pages, and returned it to the shelf. She wasn’t in the mood for death, so she opted for Steinbeck. She’d read Of Mice and Men twice already, not counting the times she’d skimmed its contents or re-read her favorite passages. She was ten pages in when Sally returned.

“Tell me about the rabbits again,” Sally said, easing herself into the chair.

“My brother said that Lennie represented us. That we were all looking forward to some farm that we’re probably never going to have, and that we’d all be better off if we had a George in our lives. Someone with the balls to put a bullet in our heads.”

“Sounds like an upbeat guy,” Sally said, realizing her mistake. She frowned. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Colleen said. “It’s okay.”

“Goddamn dumb of me.”

“No, you’re right,” Colleen said, looking down at the opened book in her hands and staring through the words printed upon the pages. “He wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with sometimes.”

“But you loved him.”

“I did, the bastard,” she said, looking up at Sally. “What if he’s still alive, somewhere right out there?”

“I, uh,” Sally said, stammering. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Colleen.”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just thinking aloud, is all, wondering if maybe—”

She stopped, looked around. The sound of the sewing machine had stopped. Evie appeared, met Colleen’s eyes for a second, and then vanished into the kitchen. Colleen heard a cabinet open and close, heard the kitchen tap go on and then off, and Evie stepped into the living room with a glass of water in her hand.

“Can I get you two anything?” she asked, fidgeting, not making eye contact with either of them.

“No, thanks,” Sally said. “You finish up?”

“Yeah,” Evie said. “I finished those four I had going. They came out nice.”

“I bet.”

“Are we going to be okay?” Evie asked, and it took Colleen a few seconds to realize that Evie was talking to her, looking right at her.

“What, uh,” Colleen said, stumbling over her words. “What?”

“The things Huff said, are they true? You really saw them?”

“I saw them,” Colleen said.

“What’s making it happen?” Evie asked.

“I don’t know,” Colleen said. “The people on the radio and the television didn’t know. They didn’t know anything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Evie,” Sally said. “It doesn’t mean Huff is anything other than what he is.”

“And what is that?” Evie asked, somehow managing to sound both hopeful and accusatory.

“He’s just a man,” Sally said.

“Just a man,” Evie said, staring past them and through the window for a few seconds. “Yeah, okay. I’m going to bed.”

“We are too,” Sally said, holding up her book. “Just want to get a little more reading done.”

Evie nodded, looked down at her feet, and loafed out of the room.

“She knows,” Sally said. “She’s been here forever. When we bash in the bastard’s skull, she might cry a little, but you won’t get any resistance from her.”

“What about Mathilda and Embeth?”

Sally made a face. “They’re going to be a problem.”

They read for nearly an hour without speaking to one another. Colleen wasn’t sure how Sally was making out, but she was struggling. She’d read three or four sentences, and then the words stopped being words, really. Would she get another shot at Niebolt as perfect as the one she had today? And if she did, and if she was successful, what then?

They went to bed.

Wondering if, when, and how her chance would come—wondering if her brother was alive somewhere nearby or already rotting in a shallow grave or in the new and horrifying state that existed between life and death—Colleen fell asleep.

“Wake the fuck up,” a man said.

Nearby: muffled keening, and the creak of bedsprings.

Colleen opened her eyes, blinked. The bedside lamp was on. She tried to sit up and someone pressed her head into her pillow.

“Sally?” Colleen said. “What’s—”

“She can’t help you,” someone said, and a second later she realized who it was. Not a man, not by any reasonable standards, anyhow—just a boy no older than her brother. Samson’s breath was hot on her cheek; his hand slid away from her face, down her neck, and across her shoulder. “No one can.”

Fear burned away the fog of sleep.

“Samson,” she said.

She tried once more to sit up. A cold ring of steel pressed into her cheek.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I will. Just test me and see if I don’t, you dirty cunt.”

He rolled her onto her back and stood up, the enormous barrel of the cowboy revolver in his right hand pointed directly at her face. He wore the same shirt he’d had on when they first met him at Misty’s, and little more. His left knee rested on the foot of the bed, near her feet. His pale legs were covered in dark hair, and his massive erection pointed to the ceiling, bobbing, its thick head like a shaking fist.

“No,” she said, her mind tearing itself apart at the edges. She sucked in air, fuel for a scream that would awaken everyone in the house, consequences be damned, and it was the cold ring of steel against her cheek that pulled her back from the edge: if she screamed, she would die: if she died, she would not be able to kill Samson Niebolt or his goddamned father.

“No,” Samson said through clenched teeth, but she had already fallen silent.

Motion caught her eye, and she pulled her gaze from Samson’s cock to Sally, who writhed upon her bed, her lips stretched around the gag in her mouth, her left eye swelling shut, her hands bound behind her back.

“You too,” Samson said, swinging the gun toward Sally’s tear-streaked face. “I’ll shoot you in the stomach. You know I will.”

Again the barrel of the gun was in Colleen’s face, and it was such a small thing, really, such a small little empty circle. How could such a tiny thing be so terrifying, so all-encompassing? She yelped once, unable to stop herself, and then squeezed her eyes shut expecting to be blown into nothing.

“Open your eyes,” Samson said, and she listened. Sally wept around her gag, and Samson Niebolt spit into his left hand and worked his cock while leveling the gun at Colleen’s face with the other. “Take it off.”

She knew what he meant, and she did what he said, sitting up and pulling her formless red gown over her head and throwing it to the floor. She sat in her bra and panties, looking up at Samson.

“Keep going, keep going.” Wagging the gun.

She did. Samson sucked in air when she removed her bra, held it for a little too long, his eyelids heavy.

“More,” he said, releasing the held breath.

Her panties came away from her crotch, the cloth pad taped into them stained deep red. He passed the gun to his slick left hand and pressed his right hand between her legs.

“No,” she said, but it was useless: his fingers were already inside her, working her.

“My dad says we can’t touch a woman when she’s like this,” he said, holding up his hand. His middle and ring fingers were gloved in blood. Leaning over, he pressed them to her face, smeared the salt and copper of her own menstrual blood across her lips. “Now, I don’t mind blood.”

Sally struggled and screamed a muffled scream, rocking on the bed. Samson pressed his bloodied fingers into Colleen’s mouth, raking his fingernails across her tongue. He pulled free. She gagged and spat and palmed blood from her lips, but already Samson was moving forward, his free right hand seizing the hair at the back of her head, his left pressing the barrel of the gun to her right temple, his cock inches from her face, fewer still.

She opened her mouth and took him in, eyes clenched shut. One scene played out behind her eyelids: she seized it and held it to her heart and played it again and again and again. She retched and gasped, and Samson did not stop. He did not tell her not to bite down—the gun to her head was warning enough, but none of that mattered, anyway, because in her mind it was no longer Guy’s dick lying in the dirt, and the hand holding the bloodied knife was her own.

The head of his cock slammed into the back of her throat. She gagged, and he pulled out, unfinished. She leaned forward, choking.

He hit her with something—his fist or the gun, she did not know. There was a flash—light and pain—and then nothing for a while, and when she came to he was between her legs and ramming into her. He was thick, far thicker than Guy, who was the only man to have ever been inside of her until now, and there was pain, so much pain. She clenched her thighs and threw her arms up and over her face, biting the flesh of her right forearm, trying not to scream, trying not to scream, trying to hold on to that one image, that single sliver of hope in all of this—the hope that she would get her chance and that she would take it.

“God,” she said, mashing her face between her palms, and he pulled out of her once more, rolled her onto her stomach. She had a second to register that he’d used both hands to do so, and then the barrel of the gun pressed into her lower spine as his fingers once more slid into her, worked her, sliding out and up, slick with blood, and toward her asshole, which they massaged and probed and pressed into.

“Filth,” he said, working her ass with two fingers, maybe three—she could not tell. However many, they hurt her, and when he eased them out of her, there was little reprieve. Something else pressed against her, and she squeezed shut her eyes, balled her fists around the bed-sheet, bracing herself. “I’ll bet your fag boyfriend never did this. I’ll bet you wanted him to, though.”

She didn’t scream. The pain was everything, but it did not last.

“You dirty fucking bastard,” someone roared, and the head of Samson’s cock was no longer inside of her. His weight was gone from the bed. There was a crash, a thud—the sound of something heavy slammed against the wall, and Colleen rolled onto her back and sat up in time to see Huffington Niebolt stride toward his son, who sat in a crumpled heap against the wall, naked legs splayed, his rigid cock and tight balls a bloody exclamation point. There was a hole in the sheetrock roughly two feet above his head.

Samson lifted his arms and tried to shield himself from his father’s blows, but it did little good: Huff stomped and stomped, bringing his boot-clad right foot up and down, up and down, and then swinging it in tight arcs, its pointed tip connecting with Samson’s ribs and ass and head and thighs. He stomped Samson’s erection. Through it all, Huff was silent.

He delivered one final kick to Samson’s stomach and leaned over his fallen son, a hand on each knee. The braid hanging from his chin swung toward Samson, who writhed in pain. His dick was no longer hard.

“I should have expected this from you,” Huff said, panting.

Samson grunted something that wasn’t really words, looking up at his father, tears and blood flowing down his cheeks, his lips wrenched into a tortured grimace. His lips were split and bloodied, as were his eyebrows. He pulled himself into a sitting position, the wall once more to his back, the crumbled sheetrock halo positioned directly above his head. His head bobbed; his eyelids were puckered and swollen.

Somewhere nearby one of the children cried. Outside the bedroom, Evie lingered in the hall, eyes wide, one hand pressed to her mouth.

“Get going, Evie. Tend to the kids.” He closed the bedroom door and looked down at his son. “Filthy degenerate.”

Colleen moved to stand, looked over at Sally, and then Samson lashed out, seizing the old man’s beard. Huff tipped forward, and the two men rolled, legs and arms entangled, punching and clawing and growling like mad dogs. Huff drove his knee into Samson’s balls, and the kid screamed, a bright yellow stream of urine arcing from his flaccid penis and onto the carpet. Sam rolled onto his side, drew his knees to his chest.

During the struggle, Colleen slid from the bed and to the narrow strip of floor between the bed and the wall, where she knelt, pulling the sheets toward her naked reddened flesh. Across from her, still lying atop her bed, Sally struggled against her restraints but otherwise kept her eyes on the confrontation. Colleen leaned forward, eyes darting across the floor in search of Samson’s fallen gun.

Stumbling to his feet, Huff leaned against the window between the beds. He looked at Colleen, gasping, and though his eyes skimmed across her, his gaze was elsewhere, distant. His lips were sunken and mashed together like pink slugs, his false teeth having been lost in the struggle.

“Dammit,” he said, sliding a long serrated blade from the sheath at his hip and sitting at the foot of Colleen’s bed. The bedsprings creaked, the headboard rocked, tapped three times against the wall. He pointed the knife at his son. “Don’t make me do this, Sam.”

Samson lay curled upon the floor and whimpering.

“I’m losing too many sons,” Huff said, his voice distorted for lack of his dentures, moist and hollow. “Your little brother—I watched those things bite him. He screamed and he cried and he reached out for me, but there were too many of them. I couldn’t even put him out of his misery—I could only run.”

Huff’s chest heaved, and he cried, great muted sobs that rocked his shoulders and shook the bed. He buried his face in his left hand. The knuckles of his right hand were white around the hunting knife’s hilt. The blade quivered.

Sam mumbled something, rose to his elbows for one quivering second before his face hit the carpet. He seemed to tighten, his knees and arms drawing closer to his chest.

Colleen did not see the gun.

“Like a coward,” Huff said. “I ran like a coward while he screamed for me. I come home—I barely get home, dammit—to find that another of my sons is dead. Connor and Marcus, each on the same day, and now Jacob, the piece of shit.”

Colleen shot a puzzled glance at Sally, who shot one right back at her.

“He was a repulsive animal, and he’s probably better off dead, but he was my son.” Huff raised his arm, pointed at the wall. “He wasn’t theirs to kill. Sam?”

Samson stirred, mumbled.

“Samson?”

“Yuh,” Samson said. “Yes?”

“I knew this was coming, even before all of this. I knew you’d make a go at me, but things are different now. It’s just you and Max and the little ones now,” Huff said, gesturing with the massive hunting knife. “Don’t make me use this, okay? I need you. We all do.”

“Mnn.”

“Okay?” Huff said, rising to his full height and taking a step toward Samson, who rolled onto his back and looked up at his father. The gun clutched in his bloodied hand roared three times.

So close, the noise was deafening. The window behind Huff shattered and rained down in small glistening chunks, and it would not be until later, after the children had gone back to sleep and she had washed the blood from her hands, that Colleen would realize that it had been made of safety glass.

Dropping the knife and clutching his stomach, Huff took two steps backward and fell ass-first through the window. His feet rested in a V upon the low windowsill.

Face battered and swollen, Samson stumbled to his feet. He looked around, picked up his wadded pants. He fired another shot at his fallen father, but it went wild, striking the wall and sending up a small cloud of plaster dust.

Three more shots, each somehow louder than the others, like thunder right there in the room and inside of Colleen’s head. There was another puff of plaster dust, but this time behind Samson, who crouched and, having no other choice, opened the bedroom door and stumbled half-naked into the hall. Someone screamed, and Samson Niebolt was gone. Colleen thought she heard the front door slam shut, but she wasn’t sure.

Things got quiet, but just for a second. More than one child was crying now, and Evie appeared once more in the doorway, pale, eyes wild. There was a bloody handprint on her left shoulder.

Colleen rose to her feet, clutching the thin fitted sheet to her chest. She looked around for her fallen dress but did not see it. No longer caring, she stepped out of her safe little trench between bed and wall and, letting the sheet fall to the ground, stepped naked around the bed and toward Sally, who’d managed to sit up.

“Bastard,” Huff said, mostly outside, his boots sliding from the windowsill. Glass crunched, and for the first time Colleen became aware of the green scent of pine easing in through the shattered window to mingle with the 4th of July stink of gunpowder.

Colleen sat beside Sally, plucked the gag from her mouth, and tried to untie the twine encircling her wrists.

“The knife,” Sally said, nodding toward Huff’s dropped weapon, which lay on the floor amidst a scattering of pebbled glass. Colleen brought the blade to the twine, sliced through it. Sitting up, Sally massaged her wrists.

Huff stepped into the room clutching both hands to his bleeding stomach, his own pistol—a modestly-sized revolver, unlike Sam’s hand cannon—hanging from one of his fingers.

“Thilda,” he said, going first to one knee and then the other. The gun fell to the ground. He sat on his heels. “Get her. She can patch me up. Gotta stop this.” He held out one blood shiny hand, considered it for a few seconds and, cursing under his breath, pressed it to his stomach.

“I’ll get her,” Sally said, standing, kneading the air with her fingers. She reached the door and, turning to face Colleen, nudged it shut. The bolt clicked behind her. Eyes on Colleen, she reached back and locked it. Huff’s head hung forward—he had not noticed.

Understanding, Colleen bent over and plucked Huff’s gun from the floor. With the knife in her left hand, she pointed the gun at his head with her right. Poked him with it. He looked up. Realization dawned upon his pale face.

“What are you going to do with that, little girl?” He said, smiling his sunken old man’s smile.

She leveled it at his face.

“You’ve never killed anything,” Huff said, shaking his head. “Now be serious and put some clothes on, for God’s sake.” He leaned against Colleen’s bed.

Colleen stared down the barrel of the gun, shifted her focus from Huff to the gun, a gun that held only, what, three or four bullets?

Huff’s large eyes were weary and pained, tinged with amusement.

“If you’re going to do it, go on already.”

She tossed the gun aside, out of his reach. She passed the knife to her right hand, her strong hand. He smiled, shook his head once more: silly girl.

Colleen stepped around Huff, seizing the braid that dangled from his chin and wrenching it back across his face, exposing his neck.

“Gah,” she said, and slid the blade across his throat, pulling it toward her body and wrenching it to the right. The serrated edge skipped across his Adam’s apple, and she pressed her knee into his back and pushed him away from her. He hit the floor, blood jetting from his throat and onto the carpet. A scream came out, ragged and through bubbles.

The world went away. Colleen leapt onto Huff’s back, spinning his pony-tail around her left fist and bashing his face into the flowering pool of blood. He gasped and wheezed and gurgled. His feet kicked, he bucked between her naked legs, and his fingers pawed at the back of his neck, looking for purchase, as if they could hold his head in place. They could not.

Gasping through clenched teeth, she sawed and sawed. Blood flowed hot over her hand, loosening her grip on the knife and filling her nose with its metallic stink. She hit bone, found her way around it or through it, and she twisted Papa Huff’s head like a hangnail. It came away from his body with a tug, the final strand of flesh and sinew stretching and tearing and popping.

Panting, she stood, still clutching Huff’s braids. His severed head swung back and forth, tapped against her left leg. He lifted her arm and stared into Huff’s eyes.

She wondered if he could still see her, if the dead ever stopped seeing at all, even for a second, and then tossed his head to the floor. It bounced, gave half a roll and settled against the wall.

Dropping the knife, she looked at Sally, who stood staring at Colleen, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

Sally said half a word, pressed her hand to her mouth, and, leaning forward as much as her condition would allow, vomited onto her stomach and onto the floor between her feet.

Colleen sat on the edge of the bed, gasping and naked, her right hand gloved in Huff’s blood, her inner thighs tacky with her own blood. She pulled the blanket toward her and wiped the blood from her hands. The blanket wasn’t very absorbent, and for a second it seemed like she was just smearing the blood around.

“It’s not over yet,” Sally said. “Max will be here soon.” She squatted, picked up the knife. Wiped the blade on her own blanket. “Be back,” she said and left.

Raking her hand back and forth across her pillowcase, Colleen stared at the body of Huffington Niebolt, lying headless upon the floor at her feet. To her left, the shattered window was a black door leading into the night, and Huff’s neck ended in a puddle of blood that looked too bright, too red, pooled there on the thick carpet. There was blood and there was blood: Huff’s blood, and her own, stamped upon his back as she rode him. His severed head lay in the corner, eyes searching, toothless mouth working.

Out front, children cried. Sally spoke and Evie yelled, and someone else—maybe Mathilda, maybe Embeth—screamed. The tumbling sound of a struggle rolled toward the bedroom. Colleen dragged her gaze from Huffington Niebolt’s impossibly alive head to the door, where Evie stood, enraged, a small lamp from one of the living room end tables in her hand. She lifted it and lashed out, and the lamp spun end over end toward Colleen, the shade striking her shoulder.

“You killed him,” Evie screamed. “You fucking bitch, you killed him.”

There was motion behind Evie. She gasped, stumbling into the bedroom, reaching around and clutching at her back. Her hands came away bright red. She spun, and Sally, pregnant and massive, her lips pulled back from her teeth in an animal sneer, pressed the knife into her once, twice, again and again and again.

Evie hit the wall and slid to the floor, gasping and wheezing, sputtering and twitching and spitting crimson from five or six different holes in her back and chest. She slid to the floor, tracing thick red lines down the wall to her back.

Her lips glistening a whorish shade of red, Evie coughed once and looked up at Sally, who bent over and pressed the knife into her throat three times quick. Her hand was a blur. There was one last jet of blood, garishly bright, like a cartoon splash of red paint, and she fell facedown onto the floor, her head inches from Papa Huff’s neck stump. Their blood mingled.

“I guess I was wrong about her,” Sally said, dropping the knife and stepping over to where Colleen sat, shaking, a bloody wad of blanket clutched to her stomach. Sally grabbed Huff’s gun and left Colleen alone with the dead.

“Wait,” Colleen said, but Sally was gone.

“Thilda,” Sally cried. “Just stay where you are. Stay with the kids. Everything is okay.”

Colleen stood, her body wracked with the shakes, aware only that she had to get out of this room. Her eyes drifted across the blood, Huff’s and Evie’s—God, Evie, she was just finishing up some quilts, and now she lay in a bloody rag-doll sprawl, her mouth open and her blood unfurling, her eyes wide and dead, if only for a little while.

Out front, the door opened, and a voice boomed, and at first Colleen thought it must be Huff, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Huff was right here, his severed head lying on its side and gumming the air, his headless body facedown with dark menstrual blood smeared in a line down the middle of its back.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Oh, God, Max,” Sally said, hysterical. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Don’t go in there. It’s awful. Samson attacked him and he’s—”

“Shut up,” Max roared, and Colleen winced. She looked around, wondering just what it was she should do. Huff’s head stared at her. Her body quivered. She couldn’t feel her fingers. It had to be shock. Maxwell Niebolt stepped into the bedroom. He looked down at his fallen father, and his face contorted. He groaned. Sally appeared behind him and pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of his head. Another deafening roar, and Maxwell Niebolt’s forehead burst. He crumpled to the floor, his face a shining and spurting red mask, his arms flopping this way and that.

The place was silent again, but for the sound of one of the kids crying somewhere. Or maybe all of them.

“Get his gun,” Sally said. A gun identical to Huff’s lay near Max’s curled fingers. “Oh,” Sally said, pressed a hand to her stomach, and winced.

“G-guh,” Colleen said, standing, quivering, a woman lost naked in a blizzard. She expected to see her breath churning in plumes from her mouth. She tiptoed shaking through blood and retrieved the gun. She pointed a finger at Sally’s stomach with a question dangling on her lips.

“No,” Sally said, frowning. She gripped her large stomach in both hands. “Not now. But soon.”

Colleen leaned down to pluck her bra from the ground. It lay mere inches away from Huff’s blood, from Evie’s socked foot, which twitched.

“Jesus,” Sally said, taking a bowlegged step toward Evie’s corpse.

Colleen offered Max’s gun to Sally.

“I already have one,” she said, incapable of looking away from Evie’s stirring corpse.

Colleen looked up, and together they watched Evie’s corpse struggle to its knees. Its movements were labored and heavy and confused, like those of some thing moving for the first time after a life of paralysis. It didn’t look like the others Colleen had seen, hadn’t taken on the wan, waxy sheen of death. It looked alive, vital, if not for the eyes. Its pupils were massive; its irises thin blue circles.

Adrenaline shot through Colleen, burning her.

“Jesus,” Sally said, looking from Evie’s corpse to Huff’s head and back again, her gaze settling on Colleen. “It’s real.”

Evie’s corpse looked around, mimicking something like confusion, and when it found Sally, recognition of some sort replaced confusion.

“Ung,” it said, and tried to stand.

The final gunshot of the night. Colleen jumped and shrieked and dropped her bra, which she realized she had been twisting and kneading.

Evie slumped forward, the left side of her head misshapen, her brains spread in a thick line across her back.

“Get dressed.” Sally said.

Twenty-Three

“He’s dead?” Mathilda asked for the third or fourth time. In the children’s room, someone wept. “He’s really dead?”

“Yes,” Sally said, tugging Mathilda toward the couch “Come on.”

Colleen looked around, unsure what to do with herself. The gun felt unnatural in her hand. It felt wrong. But putting it down felt worse. Leaving it behind felt like suicide. She’d gotten as dressed as she could, but dressed consisted of her bra and panties—her gown lay beneath Huff’s headless body, soaked through with blood.

Down the hall to her left, the sound of weeping reached a fever pitch. Mathilda looked back at her, but Colleen was already on it. She stepped into the nursery to find Lissa sitting on the floor in the dim glow of a Mickey Mouse nightlight, holding the wailing and nameless child to her chest and rocking him back and forth. The twins sat on a mat in the corner, looking puffy-faced and confused. One of them drank from a sippy cup; the other held a stuffed bear to his chest. Huff Junior sat behind the bars of his crib, a little convict with snot on his lip and tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t crying now, but it didn’t look like it would take much to set him off.

“Hey,” Colleen said, placing the gun atop the diaper changing table to her left.

“Mama Colleen,” Lissa said. “Is everything okay?”

“We’re going to be okay,” Colleen said. “How is he?”

“I can’t get him to stop.”

The nameless boy wailed, his angry little red hands held up before his face, rigid fingers splayed. Lissa pressed the pacifier into his mouth. He swatted it away and it bounced off of Lissa’s knee and onto the carpet.

Colleen stepped to where the girl sat and reached down for the child.

“Oh, God,” Lissa said, pulling the child away. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Colleen said, looking down at her hands. She didn’t get it all – there was dried blood beneath her fingernails and in the creases of her knuckles, the thin lines at the back of her wrists.

“What happened?” Lissa said. “We heard a gun.”

“Yes,” Colleen said, not knowing what to say, holding her hands to her naked stomach. “Someone shot a gun, but we’re okay.”

“Who shot a gun?” Lissa said, hysteria gnawing at the edges of her voice. “Who got shot?”

“Just wait, okay?” Colleen said, suddenly firm. “Just be quiet for a second and let me help.”

Lissa snapped her mouth shut and angled her body so that her shoulder, and not the infant in her arms, was facing Colleen. In his little cell of wooden bars, Huff Junior pawed around in search of something. Finding it, he plopped his pacifier into his mouth and sat watching Colleen as she returned to the changing table and searched for wet wipes.

The blood came away with ease. Colleen pressed her right foot to the lever that raised the lid of the diaper bin, letting loose the odor of baby shit. She tossed the pink-stained wads atop the old diapers and let the slid slam shut. Her hands clean, she went first to Little Huff’s crib, sliding her fingers through the child’s hair and whispering to him.

“Everything is okay, kid,” she said, stroking his forehead. The results were instantaneous: Little Huff’s eyelids grew heavy. “Good. Now got to sleep.”

Lissa rose to her feet and held out the weeping infant, who grew silent within seconds of being held to Colleen’s chest.

“He likes you,” Lissa said.

“I guess so,” Colleen said, looking around. She was suddenly cold. “Can I have a blanket?”

“Sure,” Lissa said, and walked over to the small dresser next to the changing table. One of the twins yawned. The other, the one holding the sippy cup, had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. The nightlight to his left threw his misshapen shadow across the wall in a black arc. His brother took the sippy cup from him and knocked it back. Liquid sloshed, and the kid’s fat cheeks deflated.

“You should get back in bed,” Colleen told him.

“I tired,” he said. “Carry me.”

“Arms full, little man. Why don’t you—” Colleen stopped. Throughout her time in the kids’ room, she had been aware of the hushed voices of Sally and Mathilda in the next room. She could not make out what they were saying, not all of it, only that Sally was doing most of the talking, and that both of them seemed calm. A new voice had joined them, one considerably less calm.

“Oh, damn,” Colleen said, facing Lissa, who stood with a blanket in her hands and a frown on her face. Her eyes were on the door leading into the hall. Out front, someone screamed:

“Let me in there right now.”

“Stay here, okay?” Colleen said, gently placing the infant next to Huff Junior. The infant’s eyes popped open. He looked confused and terrified.

“That’s not where he goes,” Lissa said, and someone grunted, slammed against a wall.

Colleen hissed low. “Stay here. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lissa said, sniffing once. “You don’t have to yell.”

Colleen grabbed the gun, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind her, locked it. On the other side, the infant wailed, but Colleen barely heard it over the sound coming from the bedroom in which she had killed Huffington Niebolt.

Sally stood near the couch, her hair a mess, her left eye swollen from Sam’s attack, a line of blood running from her nose. Mathilda stood in the bedroom doorway, looking in.

“What happened?” Colleen asked.

Sally touched her nose, winced. “She elbowed me. No big deal.”

“Who?” Colleen asked, but it was a stupid question. Unless there was someone she’d yet to meet, who else could it be but the bride closest to Huffington Niebolt, the one who’d been with him longest?

“Embeth,” Sally said. There was sweat on her forehead, and she was pale.

“Are you okay?” Colleen asked.

“No,” Sally said. “But I’m okay for now.” She held her stomach in both hands, caressed it.

“Sit down,” Colleen said. Sally listened.

At the bedroom door, Colleen peered past Mathilda and at the horror playing out upon the floor. Kneeling beside his headless body, Embeth clutched Huff’s severed head to her chest, rocked it like one would rock a baby, like Lissa had rocked Huff’s nameless child.

Huff’s face was paper white. The wet flesh and exposed muscle beneath the shelf of its bearded jaw was the color of ground beef. Its blood-soaked braids wagged, and its cheeks were pressed together like those of someone on the receiving end of an intense hug. Its pursed lips revealed toothless gums, and its eyes lolled.

“Beth?” Mathilda said. “Beth, honey, you need to calm down.”

Embeth didn’t hear this. Colleen barely heard it over the sound pouring from Embeth’s mouth, a ragged warble that sounded like a mind snapping.

Colleen found herself thinking about the gun hanging from the end of her arm. It was weighted in two directions: the natural heft of gravity tugging her hand toward the ground, and a second, unaccountable force, subtler and maybe stronger, the gun wanting to ease her arm upward, telling her to aim and fire.

“Easy now, Beth.” Mathilda said, her voice crumbling. She took it all in, and Colleen braced herself. Mathilda was about to lose it, too. The pull of the gun grew stronger.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” Mathilda said, and took an uncertain step into the bedroom. She nearly tripped on Max’s splayed legs, and stumbled onto Sally’s bed. She began to gag. Yelping, she clambered from the bed and, hopping over Max’s legs, pushed past Colleen and down the hall.

Embeth exclaimed something that was prayer or curse or both. She stopped rocking and held up Huff’s head, her thumbs on its cheeks, her fingers cupping the back of its head. Its braids hung straight down, their frizzy ends touching the bloody carpet. Embeth gazed into her dead husband’s eyes.

The severed head bit the air. The braid hanging from its chin swung back and forth. Gasping, Embeth crushed the head to her breasts and covered the top of its head in kisses. The gun said: this woman was insane, hysterical. And if she ever came down, she’d be a problem.

Colleen listened as the nursery door was unlocked and opened, the sound of the weeping child momentarily growing louder. She heard Lissa greet her Mama Sally, and her thumb tightened on the pistol’s hammer.

Mathilda appeared at her side, stepping once more over Max’s legs, far more gracefully now, her slipper-clad feet sinking into the pooled and congealing blood soaking into the carpet. She stepped past the ruin of Evie’s head and placed a hand on Embeth’s shoulder. She stood between Colleen and Embeth, so Colleen did not see the syringe until Mathilda had tossed it aside. It landed on Huff’s back.

“Hey,” Mathilda said.

Embeth grunted. Huff’s severed head hit the ground, and Evie pitched forward, arms at her sides. Mathilda tried to catch her. She lost her grip, and Embeth collapsed face first onto Evie’s back.

Mathilda looked back at Colleen. The look on her face told Colleen all that she needed to know: she was in shock, she was shutting down. This was too much for her, and soon she’d have no choice but to leave it behind for a little while. But first, there was work to be done.

“Can you help me?” Mathilda asked, her face pale, her bottom lip quivering. Her hands were shaking, just like Colleen’s.

Colleen placed the gun atop the dresser, grateful to be free of it. Together and with some effort they cleared a path, beginning with Max. Mathilda took his hands, Colleen his feet. He was heavy and limp. When they lifted him his head lolled and what was left of his brains slid from the hole in his forehead and fell to the floor in a series of moist plops. Mathilda backed into the narrow strip between Sally’s bed and the wall, easing him to the floor. Colleen did the same on her end.

Mathilda crawled over the bed, and they repeated the process with Huff’s body, though less thoroughly. Max had been the primary obstruction in their path. Each grabbing an arm, they tugged the headless body into the space between beds. Cautiously, Colleen lifted Huff’s head by one of its braids and tossed it onto Sally’s bed. It bounced once and came to a stop facing them, expressionless, unmoving, like something truly dead.

Colleen stared at it. She couldn’t get used to this.

“God,” Mathilda said, bringing her right hand to her mouth. “Is it…?”

Colleen said nothing. Huff’s severed head closed its mouth and worked its jaw like that of an old man gumming oatmeal. It blinked its eyes once, a slow, laborious process. The eyes drifted, unfocused, until it found them. The mouth drew open once more, a thick rope of pink saliva connecting the bottom lip to the upper lip, and the skin between its eyebrows bunched into a frown.

“Come on,” Colleen said, looking away and tugging on Mathilda’s arm.

Their path clear, they carried Embeth into the living room. She was smaller than Max, though just as lifeless, and she was easy to move.

“Not on the couch,” Mathilda said, stopping and easing her half of the unconscious older woman to the floor. Colleen followed suit. “Not until we clean her off.”

Colleen shrugged. Even now, in the face of all that had passed and all that was to come, Mathilda was concerned with getting a little blood on the couch.

“I’ll take care of her,” Colleen said. “Can you find me something to wear?”

Mathilda looked her up and down once. “No problem,” she said, leaving the room.

Colleen stepped into the kitchen and tore away two sheets from the thick paper-towel roll. At the sink, she soaked one of them completely through and then squeezed it out.

Kneeling beside Embeth, she wiped Evie’s blood and little chunks of brain from the unconscious woman’s face. Folding over the wet and stained paper towel, she wiped once more, erasing the last smears of blood. With the other sheet, she patted dry Embeth’s face.

The unconscious woman did not stir but her big chest continued to rise and fall. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were not fully closed. Colleen considered pressing them shut with her index and middle fingers, like someone in an old Western, and decided otherwise.

In the kitchen, standing over the trash can, she opened the moist paper towel and stared at the small curl of brain matter and wondered if there were still thoughts living within it.

“Here.”

Colleen looked up. Mathilda tossed some faded jeans and a long sleeve shirt over the kitchen counter. She walked to the couch and sat down, staring at Embeth.

Colleen closed her fist around the bloodied paper-towel and dropped it into the trash can.

“Thanks,” she said, washing her hands and then slipping into the clothes. The shirt was baggy and the pants were a little too tight, but they would do. She needed shoes.

“Kids are quiet,” Mathilda said.

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “Shouldn’t we get her off the floor?”

“She’s fine,” Mathilda said. She had yet to regain her color. She stared at Embeth and chewed on her bottom lip.

The door leading into the nursery opened and Sally stepped out, easing the door shut behind her and ambling into the living room, her massive stomach leading the way.

“Good work,” Sally said, stepping over Embeth and sitting next to Mathilda.

“You okay?” she asked Mathilda, drawing one of the woman’s hands into her own. Mathilda stared down in Embeth’s direction, but it was clear that her gaze was not on the unconscious woman, but somewhere else entirely.

“I’m not surprised he did it,” Mathilda said.

Colleen glanced at Sally, frowned. Sally nodded once.

“He and Huff didn’t get along,” Mathilda said, looking at Colleen and wringing her hands together upon her lap. “I expected something, but not this.”

Mathilda no longer needed to be strong. Her face crumpled. “The bastard,” she said, and Colleen was certain that she was talking about Samson, that her devotion to Huffington Niebolt was as strong, or nearly as strong, as Embeth’s.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Mathilda said, shattering Colleen’s certainty.

“The bastard.” A tear ran from her left eye, and she wiped it away, her face contorting, lips twitching, pale cheeks blossoming red. “I loved him, I did, but he took my life away. Didn’t he?”

“He did,” Sally said, reaffirming her hold on Mathilda’s hand. “But he’s gone now.”

“Why did he kill Evie?” Mathilda asked, and Colleen had no idea which one she was talking about: Sam or Max. As Colleen had tried to comfort the children, Sally had given Mathilda an explanation of events that did not involve Colleen seizing an opportunity and beheading Huff, nor Sally’s executions of Evie and Max. This, Colleen decided, was for the best.

“He was out of control,” Sally said. “Like an animal. Like he was insane. He did what he did to Huff, and when Evie came in he—oh, you don’t need to hear this again.”

There, Colleen thought, watching as Sally sat beside Mathilda and wrapped an arm around her. Sally had pinned it all on Samson. God knew where he was.

“We’ll have time to cry later,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that, should they need one, they had a leader. “For now, we need to get ready. He’s out there, and we’re going to have to deal with him.”

“Embeth,” Mathilda said.

“What?”

“She’ll know where the guns are. Huff told her everything.”

Colleen knew where her gun was, and she excused herself long enough to go once more among the dead and retrieve it.

“Tomorrow,” Sally said, looking at Colleen. “We’ll find out tomorrow, and you and Colleen will go get them. We’re okay for now.” She touched her own gun.

Colleen looked down at Embeth. Her cheeks were red, her chest visibly rose and fell, and her eyes danced behind her eyelids. Colleen didn’t like it.

“What if he comes back?” Mathilda asked.

“We’ll kill him,” Colleen said, infusing her voice with as much confidence as she could muster.

Colleen poured Mathilda a straight double shot of whisky, and within twenty minutes the older woman had returned to the kids’ room, where she crawled into bed beside Lissa and passed out, as much from shock as from the booze.

“What do we do now?” Sally asked.

“We wait,” Colleen said.

“Do you think he’ll be back?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down at her gun, traced her left hand along the barrel. “He took a pretty bad beating.”

“Yeah.”

“If he’s okay, he’s going to want the place.”

“Our place?”

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “Our place.”

In the bedroom, they watched Huff’s head gum the air. There was something reptilian about its eyes, its lips, its movements.

“Bastard,” Sally said and pressed the barrel of her gun between its eyes.

Colleen said, “Don’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

“He said he was going to live forever,” Colleen said. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Sally said, and Colleen really didn’t have to say any more. She saw the light of understanding in Sally’s eyes.

“Let’s make sure he does.”

Colleen grabbed a pillow from the bed and slid it from its case. Tossing it aside, she seized one of Niebolt’s braids and picked up the head, dropped it into the pillowcase. She spun it shut and tossed it under the bed.

“Good enough for now,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They closed the door behind them.

“What about her?” Colleen asked.

Embeth lay where they’d left her.

“She’ll be out for a while. Mathilda gave her a big dose.”

“Yeah, still.”

“Wait,” Sally said, and left the room. Colleen sat down on the couch and stared at Embeth, whose hands rose and fell upon her chest. She inspected her own hands, which were still stained here and there.

Sally returned with one of the stupid red gowns. She wondered what, if anything, they represented, and realized just as quickly that she did not care. Let Huffington Niebolt’s insane bullshit die with him.

Sally had a pair of scissors. Colleen watched her take them to the fabric, wanting to help but not knowing where to find a second pair. They used the strips to bind Embeth’s wrists and ankles.

“Gag her?” Colleen asked, holding up a wad of red cloth.

“No,” Sally said. “No need. She’s going to be a groggy mess tomorrow.”

“You mean today.”

“Yeah,” Sally said.

“What do we do now?”

“We need to sleep,” Sally said. “We need-” Her face crumpled. The tears came. They hugged one another, and Colleen wept, too. She squeezed her eyes shut, and there was a new image in her mind: Huffington Niebolt facedown in the center of a spreading pool of blood.

They cried until no more tears came, and then they drank a little whisky, ate what food their stomachs could hold, and, at last, in the thin darkness before sunrise, fell asleep pressed against one another upon the couch.

Twenty-Four

Richard opened his eyes and blinked into the darkness, felt the dew on his face and the ground beneath his back, saw the pre-dawn sky through the black canopy, and jerked, screaming, struggling against ropes that were not there. He clambered to his hands and knees, and screamed again when the pain in his left arm—seconds ago little more than a dull throb—erupted.

He fell onto his face, his wounded arm pressed to his chest, teeth clenched, his heart throbbing in his chest and in his neck and behind his eyes.

He waited for his brain to burst, and when it didn’t, he rolled onto his side, gasping. Water pattered against his face, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly moistened earth, wet leaves.

In time, the sky lightened, and the darkness of the canopy seemed to grow darker still. Somewhere, a woodpecker did its job, and Richard’s heartbeat slowed enough. The pain in his left arm eased down, too, but not by much. He sat up, and as the world around him emerged in shades of blue, he stared at the hole in his arm. There was dirt stuck to the edge of the wound. There was dirt in the wound. Both the exit and the entry were in pretty much the same shape, and both thrummed with the promise of infection.

The gun lay nearby. He scooped it up and opened the cylinder, inspected the three remaining unfired bullets. He dropped the spent casings to the ground between his thighs. After a few seconds consideration, he dug a small hole and placed the empty shells into it, covered them. As an act, it didn’t make much sense—he’d been asleep in the open for ten, twelve hours. If they were looking for him, he’d have already been found—but it made him feel better, anyway.

His back ached and his joints hurt. His face ached from the beating he’d taken. He felt like he was coming down with a cold. There was an itch at the back of his throat and with each breath mucus bubbled in his sinus cavity. Eventually he got up and walked around in a circle, stretching his legs and getting his bearings. It was impossible for him to tell which way he’d gone yesterday, or which way he’d come. He couldn’t tell east from west. The clouds were thick, the light dim and heavy, and all around him, hills and trees, the same goddamn trees and hills in every direction.

But he had to move, and now. He had maybe twelve hours of daylight ahead of him.

He walked for a little over an hour, steadily moving downhill, climbing over massive fallen branches and lichen-covered stones. He heard the stream before he saw it, and when he reached it the water was cool around his hands and crystal clear. It rushed over rocks and pooled and churned in small, twig-choked dams.

Richard cupped both hands together—the left trembled noticeably—and brought the water to his lips. He stopped, his mind racing. What if one of those things—human or deer or some other dead animal—was dead in the waters somewhere upstream?

He had larger concerns and he was thirsty. He drank until he could drink no more and with his right hand he splashed water onto his wound, rinsing away flecks of dirt and dried blood.

Fifteen minutes later, his stomach clenched. He buckled, hands planted on his knees, and the tainted water came back up.

“Fuck,” he said, and vomited some more. One final searing clench and nothing more would come. He tasted bile. He wandered, and his sense of time was lost alongside his sense of direction. He walked and he walked, and at some point he came across a dead squirrel or chipmunk. It lay on its side, its gaping mouth swarming with ants, its one visible eye sunken within its socket. Its stomach had been torn open, and insects trundled and raced across its innards. Its tiny little forepaws, so much like little hands, moved up and down, up and down. Its nose twitched. Its skull crunched like a walnut beneath his heel.

He stood there for a while, gazing at the sky between the towering trees. Dark clouds hung, and somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled. One direction was as good as the others, he reasoned. Choosing one, he walked.

Twenty-Five

For the first time in years they shared a bed. Crate was quick to pass out, but Misty had trouble and took an hour or more before falling asleep, the night’s bloody events repeatedly playing out in her mind. She saw Karlatos and his pals preparing to rape Stacy, their pitiful little spit-slicked dicks bobbing within their clutched fists. She saw them fall and die, pumping blood and piss, and none of it bothered her. Crate had done what needed doing, and now they were dead. As they should be.

And she saw Charles, weeping the entire time, weeping and begging, doing nothing, not a damned thing, to stop what was happening. She saw his grateful, tear-streaked face afterward, gazing up at Crate, and then she saw him go limp, a series of spasms rocking his body, blood jetting in a crimson rainbow from the top of his head and spreading in a pool on the grimy linoleum.

She saw Charles die, Charlie, the man she’d fucked right under her husband’s nose for nearly a decade. She saw him die and the only thing she really felt bad about was the fact that she didn’t really feel bad at all.

Sleep came at last, and it was no surprise that she dreamed about the walking dead. When Crate shook her awake, it was nearly nine in the morning.

First things first, Crate drove Tasgal’s Beistle Police cruiser around back and parked it next to his one-bedroom shack. It couldn’t be seen from the road, and until Crate made room in the garage, this would have to do.

The truck out front did not belong to Karlatos. Crate found the keys in one of Baker’s pockets and moved the truck to the empty church parking lot down the road. He drove Charlie’s car to Charlie’s house.

As Misty waited for him to return, she checked on Stacy, who was still fast asleep on the couch. There were three empty beer cans on the floor—Stacy must have gotten up at some point and ventured into the store, among the bodies of her attempted rapists, to retrieve them. Her chest rose and fell. She looked peaceful.

Not wanting to venture into the store until Crate returned and they could go about the task of removing the bodies and mopping up the blood, she gently raised Stacy’s feet from the couch, sat down, and rested the woman’s calves across her thighs. She grabbed the remote control from the standing tray beside the couch and, clicking on the television, worked her way through the channels.

Channel 4 displayed only the CBS eye, and nothing else, and it was somehow terrifying in this context. On NBC, a frizzy-haired scientist in a blood-stained lab-coat pointed to a human brain, which sat limp and formless in a puddle of blood on a stainless steel surface. ABC wasn’t all that far from Mayberry: they aired an episode of I Love Lucy. There was no sound, only a silently scrolling ticker that informed the world in hastily-typed, mistake-laden copy that regular programming would resume as soon as possible.

She played with the control for a few seconds, pressing buttons and even slapping the bulky metal rectangle before she realized that the sound problem was not on her end.

The UHF stations were no longer on the air. They offered only a churning white snow pattern, all but WCAL, which depicted the static image of the American flag blowing in the wind accompanied by an electronic whine that reminded her of cicadas.

She turned off the television, sat in contemplation for a minute, and then eased herself from the couch. Stacy did not stir. She walked to the front door and peered through the blinds, careful not to slip in any congealed blood, careful not to look at the bodies strewn throughout her store. There was no sign of Crate; there was no sign of anyone, alive or otherwise, save the heap of charred bodies, each of which were merely dead.

She returned to the living room and, not really wanting to, opened the back door and looked around. There was nothing, no walking corpses, anyhow. The morning air was cool and damp, the sky thick with clouds that seemed frozen in place. The slumped form in Tasgal’s car made her jump, and then she remembered the body—who was it?

Clark. His name was Clark, though she could not remember if it was his first name or not.

“Doesn’t really matter,” she said, looking away from the car and stepping up to Crate’s little shack. She fumbled with her key-ring, found the key she was looking for, and slid it home.

Tasgal lay on the floor, where they’d left him. The air inside smelled of human waste, and he’d bled onto the carpet. He lifted his head, and she opened her mouth to ask him if she wanted her to clean him up. She wasn’t sure if she’d be capable of doing that, for God’s sake, but she had to offer. She had to do something. She felt nothing regarding Crate’s murder of Charles, but she felt this. This was wrong. They’d made a mistake.

Tasgal looked at her. His eyes widened. She closed her mouth and took a single step backward. Tasgal was dead. The side of his face that had been resting upon the carpeted floor was deeply bruised, the other side deathly pale. There were dried chunks of something clinging to his nose and cheeks, and lying on the floor. At some point during the night, he’d vomited and drowned and now here he was, a living dead man bound upon the floor of her husband’s shack.

Whether or not she felt bad about his death, she hadn’t killed Charles. Eric Tasgal’s blood was on her hands.

“I’m sorry,” Misty said. She shut the door and locked it. She went inside and stepped over Charles, grabbed a beer from the cooler, and sat at one of the tables, drinking her beer and staring into space until the bell above the door jingled and Crate stepped into the store, Bilbo Baggins at his heel.

“Why the hell are you sitting in the dark, woman?” Crate asked, snapping on the light. The fluorescents flickered to life. “We got work to do.”

They started with Karlatos, the smallest of the bunch. Holding his hands and his feet, they were actually able to drag him out of the store and lay him beside the burn pile. By that point both of them were already winded. Bilbo Baggins yelped and sniffed at Karlatos’s crotch. Crate yelped back and kicked the dog away from the corpse.

“What are we going to do about that fat one?” Crate asked, and it was obvious from his tone that he wasn’t really asking her. He was asking the air, or asking himself, and when his eyes widened beneath his bushy eyebrows she knew he had his answer.

“A chainsaw,” he said, and Misty winced, looking away.

They rested for a few minutes and were in the process of carrying Baker over the threshold when they heard the car.

“Here we go,” Crate said, dropping Baker’s feet onto the porch and grabbing his rifle from the bench. Baker’s corpse lay across the threshold in its stolen California State Trooper uniform, half of its face a gaping dark hole, the other frozen in slack-jawed surprise.

The car pulled into the parking lot, tires crunching. Misty did not move. She watched it all, every single moment, from her place just within the entrance to her store. The car came to a stop, an old Ford rust-bucket with a rattling muffler. Leaving the engine running, the driver stepped out, arms raised, palms outward, an uncertain smile on his face.

“Hey, there,” the black man said, standing behind the shield of the driver side door, and Misty recognized him. He lived up the road a bit, past the Niebolt property, and had been in the store on a few occasions over the past year. He worked in Beistle, at a furniture store, or something like that, and he mostly kept to himself.

“Hey yourself,” Crate said, raising his rifle and squeezing the trigger. The window on the driver side door shattered, and the black man fell to the ground in a graceless heap. Crate stepped forward and put another shot through his head, and Misty moved before she realized she was going to move. She stepped over Baker’s corpse, across the porch, and onto the gravel, stomping toward Crate, who barely had time to turn before she was upon him, pushing him with both hands.

He fell to the ground, dropping his rifle. Bilbo Baggins yelped and barked and circled his fallen master.

“What the hell are you doing?” She screamed, picking up the rifle and throwing it over the burn pile. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“I’m protecting us, you stupid bitch.” Crate said, sitting up and wincing. He massaged his left elbow.

“Protecting us? He didn’t even have a gun.”

“I didn’t know what he had.”

“He probably wanted food.”

“Yeah,” Crate said, struggling to his knees. His fingertips were stained red with blood from his elbow. “And we’ve got an endless supply of food, right? Let’s just set up a table out here and give ham sandwiches to everyone who drives by.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

“It’s our food and there isn’t much.” He got to his feet, leaned against the dead man’s car, and eyed Misty, frowning. “We have to make it last, and we need to do whatever it takes.”

She stared at him, gasping, her heart pounding.

“You know I’m right,” Crate said, leaning into the car, killing the engine, and pocketing the keys. He walked over to his rifle and picked it up.

His words rang true, and the blood on her hands suddenly felt thicker.

“Tasgal is dead,” she said.

“Good,” Crate said, nodding. He frowned, seemed to be thinking, and then he looked at her, his eyes wild. “He come back?”

“Yeah,” Misty said. “Of course.”

“Huh,” Crate said.

“What’s going on?”

Misty turned to see Stacy standing upon the porch, squinting, shielding her eyes from the morning light with one raised hand.

“Everything is okay, honey,” Misty said. “Go inside.”

“Oh, God,” Stacy said. “That’s Clarence.”

“Ah, jeeze,” Crate muttered.

“I know,” Misty said. “Just get inside.”

“What happened?” Stacy said, taking a step toward them.

“He had a gun,” Crate said. “He pointed it at us. I had no choice.”

“God,” Stacy said, her face knotting.

“Go inside,” Misty said.

“God,” Stacy said once more, touching the crystal that hung from her neck. Misty wondered which God she was talking about—regular God or some weird shit that had something to do with crystals and UFOs. It probably didn’t matter anymore, one way or another, if it ever had.

“Go,” Misty said, and Stacy went.

“Okay,” Crate said, crouching to scratch Bilbo Baggins behind the ear.

Misty strode right to Crate. “What if someone else shows up?” She asked low and hard. “You gonna just keep shooting people?”

“If they look like they could be trouble?” Crate said, throwing a thoughtful glance toward the morning sky. After a few seconds, he looked at Misty, nodding. “Yeah. The rest I’ll send on their way.”

She stared at him, unsure of what to say and deciding at last upon nothing.

“Don’t put your hands on me again,” Crate said. “Okay?”

They worked without speaking, only gasping and grunting, and within minutes Baker lay beside the burn pile, his feet resting atop the back of Karlatos’s head.

“I’m done for now,” Misty said. She went inside, where she closed herself in the customer bathroom and sat on the toilet and cried, her face in her hands. She cried for Charles and for Tasgal and for the man outside, the man Clarence, whom Stacy had known. She cried for the world and for all that had and would happen. She cried for all of these things, but mostly she cried for herself, and for the line that she had crossed.

She’d done horrible things, and she’d seen horrible things, but the most horrible thing of all was that she was happy to be alive and that she’d do whatever it took—even more horrible things—to stay that way.

When no more tears would come, she joined Crate outside, where the three bodies—Clarence, Karlatos, Baker—had all been placed onto the burn pile. A misshapen human teepee, they encircled the base of the charred heap, their arms spread above their heads, their feet pointing toward the sky.

“Come on,” Misty said. “Let’s get Charles.”

Twenty-Six

Two miles out of Beistle, Reggie passed the first walking corpse he’d seen since shooting the blood-covered woman. He rolled by, and the dead man didn’t bother to watch his passage, merely shuffled along, head hung low, its bare purple feet scraping across the blacktop. Shortly after, he drove past a group of three corpses—two men and a child. One of the men was naked, the other was dressed in the oil-stained uniform of a mechanic. The child wore a sleeveless Scooby Doo shirt and nothing else.

It wasn’t until he’d passed the next cluster of walking corpses—eight of them, for God’s sake, walking along like drunks bumping into one another—that Reggie realized what was wrong, aside from the obvious: only two of them had borne any wounds at all. The rest were, quite simply, unmarked. Yes, several had worn little to no clothing, their thighs dark with voided waste, but none of them appeared to have shed a drop of blood. There was not a bite wound to be seen, let alone any sign of traumatic death.

“God,” he said, though prayer never really was an option—not when he was a child cowering in the night nor when his body was pressed to the ground and bullets chewed through the air above him. God, real or imagined, was not his concern. He’d either face God when he died or he wouldn’t. There was no point in wasting time worrying about it now.

Ahead, a throng of walking corpses encircled a car, weakly pushing and shoving at one another. All of the car’s windows had been smashed, and the dead seemed to be searching it. Several of these dead bodies were slick with blood, though not from any visible wounds. Those corpses not interested in the car fought over a scattered skeleton. One of them brandished a long pink leg bone like a club.

A sprawl of low buildings spread before a horizon of trees, Beistle sat in a mostly flat valley between two large hill ranges. A single double lane road bisected the town, the road that would lead Reggie to the Interstate and, he hoped, to his daughter, and it was alive with the walking dead.

“God,” he said again, slowing down. He tried a quick head count and stopped at forty-three. They were everywhere, and like the ones he’d met on the outskirts of town, they were mostly unscathed. No doubt, with the order of things fallen into ruin, there were hundreds, possibly thousands of people across the country dropping dead from heart attacks, but a whole damned town?

He took it slow, allowing the truck to coast along at just around fifteen miles per hour. To his right, several dead bodies—real ones, not the walking variety—had been laid out and covered in sheets and towels. Handmade signs lay upon or beside some of the corpses. This remnant of an ordered response to the situation told the story of folks who’d had their shit together, not all that long ago. Now they were dead, all of them, dead and walking.

Was it like this everywhere? Could whatever was causing the dead to come back now be causing the living to simply drop over? Fear surged through him, and a new thought, persuasive and reasonable: suicide.

“No,” he said, turning on the radio. Two men debated something Nixon had said earlier that day, something having to do with Soviet troops massing near—

He turned off the radio. Whatever had happened here had been isolated, probably accidental. Possibly intentional. Someone had gassed the town of Beistle, California.

As he rolled along, another detail emerged: several bodies lay here and there, scattered—in the street, on the sidewalk, between abandoned cars in parking lots. Each of the bodies seemed to have been shot through the head and lay in a ragdoll sprawl, arms and legs bent this way and that. Someone hadn’t gone out without a fight.

“No way, man,” Reggie said, bringing the truck to a halt before BEISTLE TV AND APPLIANCE. “No fucking way.”

A crowd of twenty or so corpses had gathered before the large window in which several color televisions, as well as a few small black and white models, were displayed. The window had been smashed, and one of the televisions lay on its side in the road, but the power was still on and each of the television screens depicted the same thing: the grim face of Walter Cronkite, who was droning on about something dire.

The gathered dead swayed, but with their backs to Reggie they could almost have passed for living men and women. He rolled down his window and listened.

“…ports that the phenomenon is not taking place in Australia and New Zealand are, in fact, no true,” Cronkite said, continuing to speak over footage that depicted walking corpses on the streets of Sydney.

“Hey,” Reggie yelled to them. He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Can you turn up the volume?”

Some of the tv-watchers drifted over to him, joined the others surrounding the truck, arms raised, hands clutching. Hands splayed toward him in a mosaic of decay—gray, or bluish and purple and bruised, or livid and bloated, or stained with blood. Some were missing fingers. Wedding rings tinked against the windshield. The faces of the dead were rigid and waxy. Reggie tried to ignore them.

It was harder to ignore the smell, meat just starting to turn. And gas. The dead were quiet, very quiet in a bad way, but the sounds of escaping gas were all over. Reggie was surrounded by belching and farting corpses who wanted to eat him. If it wasn’t so fucking horrible, it would be funny.

Cronkite was talking about the Middle East. All order was gone. Tel Aviv had gone black less than two hours ago, and there were several unconfirmed reports of a massive explosion of some sort and of a mushroom cloud rising above the Gaza Strip.

“Dammit,” he said.

One of the corpses jostled the passenger door handle, and the truck rocked. It was time to move on. Reggie gave Cronkite and his audience one last look and began to roll up his window.

“Hey,” someone yelled. “Hey!”

Reggie rolled down the window and leaned out, looking around. Gray hands clutched the air beneath his face, just out of reach. Flies buzzed. A few of the dead people had makeshift weapons—sticks and bottles and rocks—which they hammered against the truck. A nearby corpse ripped a long wet fart. They were really pressing in now. Even the television generation was catching on—only five of them remained glued to the tubes.

“You in the truck,” the voice said, and Reggie saw the form of a man several buildings back standing upon a roof, arms in the air, his hands moving in blurred arcs above his head. “Hey!”

“Hey yourself,” Reggie yelled.

“I need help, God,” the man yelled. He sounded frantic. “Don’t leave.”

“Dammit,” Reggie said, looking forward, past the gathering sea of corpses and down the road, his road. The guy on the roof was behind him, and he was moving forward.

“Come on, please. I’m gonna die up here,” the man yelled. “I don’t want to die up here!”

Reggie rolled up the window and threw he truck into gear, inching it forward through the crowd. The man on the roof screamed and cursed. Reggie turned up the radio.

He wanted to step on the gas, to plow right through the dead—just get the hell out of here as quickly as possible—but he couldn’t. Running one or two bodies down at full speed might not be a problem, but plowing through scores of them? It could be dangerous. He’d lose control of the vehicle or wind up with one of them in his lap.

The dead were not entirely stupid. They seemed to get the idea. This large thing was moving toward them, and getting out of the way was probably the best course of action. They parted, slowly, and he allowed his foot to grow a little heavier on the gas.

The guy on the roof had sounded just like Taylor Lincoln. Not his voice, but the desperation in his voice—Reggie had heard it before.

Lincoln was an ox of a black man that Reggie had known in ‘Nam. They hadn’t been friends, not really, but Reggie had liked him well enough. Lincoln was meaner than he needed to be, and he enjoyed combat more than any man ever should, and he had died screaming and crying like a little girl. Reggie hadn’t seen it happen, but he had heard it. Crouched behind a tree and waiting for a Viet Cong bullet to drill through his thoughts, Reggie had listened as Lincoln cried out—I been shot, God, I been shot.

A spray of gunfire had turned his thick right thigh into pulp, and he’d sat alone against the side of a jeep for probably forty minutes. Bullets zipped by, and no one could get to him.

“I’m dying,” he’d screamed. “God, I’m dying. I don’t want to fucking die.”

“Shit,” Reggie said, and brought the truck to a halt, threw it into reverse. The path he’d opened had begun to close. Bodies fell. The truck rocked. Meat and bone scraped across the undercarriage. He pulled his eyes away from the side-view mirror and looked through the windshield in time to see the first of the fallen bodies come into view. Some of them lay motionless, skulls crushed. Others writhed, their mouths and eyes wide, their fingers clutching the air, guts spreading between their broken legs.

He cut an uneven and bloody path two blocks long, stopping when the building on which the man stood was to his left. The sign over the tattered green awning read: AUBREY’S FURNITURE. Reggie rolled down the window and looked up at the man, who stood slump-shouldered and slack-jawed. He looked dead.

“How do you want to do this?” Reggie said. A fat dead man carrying a length of pipe shuffled toward the truck. Reggie pulled his Colt and blew away the right half of the thing’s head. The pipe clattered to the ground, and the fat man fell, knocking down three stumbling corpses in the process.

“Jesus, man,” said the guy on the roof. “I thought you were leaving. I thought—”

“How you wanna do this, man?”

“Yeah,” the man said, looking left and right, his hands on his knees. “If you can pull close enough, I can jump down onto the top of the truck.”

“If you fall off and break your leg, I’m not getting out to help you. I’ll shoot you between the eyes and leave.”

“I understand.”

“Okay.”

Reggie rolled up the window, threw the truck into reverse once more, and backed up another twenty or so feet before moving forward and driving onto the sidewalk. Moving slowly, he took out two parking meters and crushed the pipe framework supporting the green awning, which crashed to the ground. To Reggie’s left, seen through the large windows fronting the store, dead bodies moved within the dim interior of Aubrey’s Furniture. One of them stood before a dresser and pawed at its reflection in a large, oval mirror. A dead child sat before a ceramic statue of a leopard, tracing its fingers along the indented spots. A naked woman drifted between plush chairs and couches, its discolored hands modestly covering its breasts.

“Okay,” the man shouted. Reggie stepped on the brakes. A second later, the man landed atop Reggie’s truck, buckling the ceiling above his head with a hollow metallic thump.

Reggie leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. Two scuffed dress-shoe-clad feet fell into view, and the man on the roof, a skinny white man with a thin face and close-cropped blond hair, snaked through the window and into the passenger seat, panting. He wore a sleeveless white shirt, black slacks, and a policeman’s belt, its holster empty. Reggie reached into the back, grabbed a can of Coke, and handed it to the man, who took it from Reggie and stared at it as if it were some strange thing he’d never seen until now.

“You’re supposed to drink it,” Reggie said.

The man looked up, dazed. He shook his head. “Thanks. Thank you. I thought I was going to die up there.”

“You probably were,” Reggie said. Several dead hands came into view, just behind the man. “You wanna roll up the window?”

“Huh?” The man asked, following Reggie’s line of sight. “Oh, shit.” He rolled up the window, looked at Reggie, then opened his Coke and downed it in a series of noisy gulps. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he let loose a thunderous belch.

“You sound like our friends out there,” Reggie said.

“Haha, well,” he cleared his throat. “I excuse myself.”

“Good enough,” Reggie said, easing his foot off the brake and inching the truck back onto the road. By now, the path he’d cut had healed, and the dead stood shoulder to shoulder twenty deep around the truck.

“We going?” The man asked, nervous.

“Yeah,” Reggie said, strangling the steering wheel, “Trying to figure this shit. The last thing we need is to break down out here.”

“Yeah,” the man said, looking at the empty Coke can in his hand. He rolled the window down, just enough to accommodate the can, which he crushed and tossed out.

“There’s food in the back,” Reggie said, taking his time. As before, the dead seemed to figure out what was happening. Their reaction time was slow, not non-existent.

“Okay, thanks, maybe in a bit,” the man said, leaning forward, watching the dead faces inch by.

“You from here?”

“Yeah,” the man said.

“So you know them?”

“Not by name, not all of them, but yeah. That one there,” the man tapped the glass, and Reggie couldn’t tell which of the corpses he was indicating. “That’s Hank Prescott. Over there, the one in red, that’s Maria Jameson. God, she was a nice lady. I shot as many of them as I could, the ones I could recognize.”

“I saw that,” Reggie said.

“I got down to one bullet, and I sat up there with the gun to my head, playing with the trigger. Then I saw a kid, I can’t even remember his name, but he’s this damned cute kid I see around town sometimes, walking with his mom. I saw him down there, looking lost. Both of his arms were gone. I missed.” He sat back, closed his eyes.

Reggie grabbed the bottle of Jack and placed it on the man’s lap. “You got a name?”

“Cardo,” the man said, laughing. “Short for Ricardo.”

“You don’t look like a Ricardo,” Reggie said.

“I know,” Cardo said. “It’s stupid. My name is Scott Ardo, but the kids at school used to call me Cardo Ricardo, like there was anything funny about it. So I became Ricardo for a little while, and then just Cardo. You know how it is.”

“I guess so,” Reggie said. “What did you do here?”

“Cop,” Cardo said, opening the Jack and going bottoms up. “Whoo. Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, stepping on the gas a little harder. A dead man carrying what appeared to be a chair leg had no interest in getting out of the way, so Reggie gunned it, slowing down only once the dead man had vanished beneath the truck. “Oh, come on—get the fuck out of the way.”

Suddenly impatient and needing to be as far away as possible from this dead town, Reggie pulled on the horn, long and hard. Eyes wide, heads jerking left and right, hands swatting at the air, the dead peeled away from the truck.

“That’s not a good idea,” Cardo said.

“It’s working,” Reggie said, yanking out another long, deep bray.

“Sure it is,” Cardo said, pointing past the corpses backing away from the truck. “See?”

Along the street, as far as Reggie could see, dead bodies streamed out of doorways and from within alleys.

“Aw, shit,” Reggie said, stepping on the gas, getting it up to ten miles per hour, fifteen, and now twenty. The truck rocked and bounced, and the dead vanished beneath it. His foot grew heavier on the gas, and soon the dead were slamming into his grille.

They broke free of the thickest cluster and Reggie moved the wheel to the left and the right, weaving between smaller groups. It wasn’t easy, and he drove right over several of them, but Beistle and its teeming population of dead people fell behind them. Looking in his side-view mirror, Reggie gave his horn one final, long pull.

The road outside of Beistle was deserted. No corpses. No survivors. No sign that anything was going on anywhere, save the occasional abandoned car. Cardo crawled into the back and made himself a sandwich with the last of an opened can of SPAM.

“You want half?” he asked, returning to his seat.

“It’s yours,” Reggie said. “Needs to be eaten up anyway.”

Cardo froze in mid bite, drew the sandwich away from his mouth. “How old is it?”

“I don’t know,” Reggie said. “It’s SPAM. It’ll keep.”

“It smells fine.”

“Ha!” Reggie said, slowing down as they passed another abandoned car, looking for any signs of supplies left behind. There was nothing. He looked at Cardo evenly. “Don’t worry. If you get food poisoning, I’ll shoot you. Won’t have to worry about walking around afterward.”

“Oh,” Cardo said. “Great.” He smelled the sandwich again and took a bite. “Mm.”

“Reggie Turner,” Reggie said, extending his right hand toward Cardo, who wiped his hand on his pants before shaking Reggie’s.

“Pleased to meet you, Reggie,” Cardo said. “You—I can’t thank you enough.”

“Stop with the shit,” Reggie said. “What else was I supposed to do, leave you up there?”

“You wouldn’t have been the only one.”

“Huh.”

“I was asleep, too,” Cardo said, taking another bite of his sandwich. When he’d swallowed most of it, he continued. “The sound of the engine woke me, and when I looked up, I heard you yelling at them to turn up the volume. Thought I was dreaming. Damn, man.”

“I don’t wanna hear any more, okay?” Reggie said. “Or I’m gonna throw your ass out of this truck right now.”

Cardo smiled and took another bite of his sandwich.

“What happened back there?” Reggie asked, inspecting the exterior of his vehicle. Bloody little bits of meat were speckled like bugs across the front of the truck, and the grille looked as if someone had taken to it with a mallet. Both of the headlights were smashed. “How’d everyone die?”

“A gas of some kind,” Cardo said, walking along behind Reggie. “Things were crazy. There was a riot at the grocery store. I barely got out of there, but other than that things were pretty much under control.”

“I saw the bodies, lined up under sheets.” Reggie said, dropping to his knees and inspecting the undercarriage. There were bits of meat caked atop dirt and black oil but no damage he could see.

“Yeah,” Cardo said, helping Reggie to his feet. “The people were doing it, man. They were pulling together and making it happen. After the riot, I went home and passed out in front of the television. The sound of the helicopter woke me.”

“Good thing you’re a light sleeper,” Reggie said, circling his truck. It would need diesel soon, and driving at night would be a problem until he could fix the headlights, but it was fine. “What kind of helicopter?”

“I don’t know,” Cardo said. “Army, maybe.”

“What color was it?”

“I couldn’t tell. It was dark, and as soon as I saw the gas cloud, I ran.”

“Let’s go,” Reggie said, nodding toward the dead man emerging from the forest behind the truck.

He climbed into his truck and closed the door. The passenger door opened and Cardo got in. He shut the door, frowning into the side-view mirror. The truck jerked forward, and they were off.

“You familiar with this route?” Reggie asked.

“Yeah,” Cardo said. “Harlow is this way, about twenty-five miles.”

“Big town?”

“Barely a town,” Cardo said. “I’ll bet they’re doing just fine there.”

“Huh,” Reggie said. “Anyway. You were saying?”

“Yeah,” Cardo said, nodding. “I ran. People were running and screaming, getting into their cars and barrel-assing out of town. My car was wrecked in the riot, so I just had my feet. I tried to flag down a few cars, but they just kept going. A lot of people came out of their houses and just watched the shit drift down.” He shook his head.

They rounded a sharp curve and passed the site of a collision between a pick-up truck and a large sedan. Three dead people shuffled along the road. Reggie weaved to the right, but the shoulder was too narrow, and he only managed to miss two of them. The third slammed into the grille and seemed for a time to be stuck there. Black blood and strands of brain fanned out across the windshields.

“Son of a—” Reggie said, and the dead thing dislodged, rattled beneath the truck, and was gone.

“Can’t take too much more of that,” Cardo said.

“No,” Reggie said, grabbed the Jack from Cardo’s lap. He took a swig and passed it back to Cardo. “Keep going.”

“I had an idea what I was seeing,” he said. “So I ran for the department store. The windows and doors had already been smashed out. They sell these thick yellow haz-mat suits, you know those?”

“Yeah,” Reggie said.

“I put one of those on, got a fancy respirator, the kind with replaceable filters, and put some swimming goggles on. By then the cloud was already in the street, but the wind was tearing it up pretty good. I found the back office, turned off the AC, and hunkered down all night.

“I have no idea if the mask and all the other shit protected me or not, or if the wind just carried away all of the gas, but I made it,” Cardo said, knocking back a little more whisky. They were going to run out, at this rate. That was probably a good thing.

“I walked out of the store a few hours later, just before dawn, and they were everywhere. I ran,” Cardo said, shrugging. “What else could I do? I ran into an alley, not really thinking. I saw the ladder and crawled up, and, well, that’s it.”

“How long ago?”

“Day before yesterday. You care if I put on the radio?”

“No.”

“Thanks,” Cardo said.

The news was bad. At least three sources had confirmed that a nuclear warhead had been detonated in the air above Israel, and someone pointed out that the view outside of the window behind Nixon in his most recent Oval Office address to the nation looked suspiciously artificial. Reggie weathered a wave of dizziness, and Cardo grew pale. His hands shaking, he lowered the volume.

“It’s over,” he said, shaking his head and taking a long pull from the bottle.

“Looks like it,” Reggie said. “Ease up on that, okay?”

“Okay, sorry.” Cardo said, capping the bottle and tossing it into the back.

“Nothing to be sorry about. Where we going?”

“That way,” Cardo said, pointing forward.

They drove in silence. Their road, for now, was empty.

Twenty-Seven

It took them nearly twenty minutes to get Charles onto the burn pile.

Crate stood panting, looking down at their handiwork while Bilbo Baggins paced around his feet.

Stacy was inside. Misty had urged her to stay in the back and to just take it easy. Mostly because she didn’t want to hear the silly bitch prattle on about karmic this, that, and the other, but also because she knew Stacy was soft and didn’t want her to see what was happening out here.

But she had seen things, and would see more. That was the world now. Stacy would harden up.

Misty stepped into the store to find Stacy standing beside the yellow rolling mop bucket, wrenching down the lever and wringing soapy pink water from the twisted mop. The air smelled of pine-scented cleanser.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, surprised.

“I want to,” Stacy said. Her voice quivered as if she were holding back tears.

“Okay.”

“Why did Crate shoot Charles?”

Misty opened her mouth, unsure.

“It was his idea,” Misty said. “While you were asleep, he told them to do what they wanted with you instead of stealing our supplies.”

Stacy stood staring at Misty and clutching the mop handle. She didn’t bother with her crystal.

“He deserved it,” Misty said. “They all did. You’re doing a great job. Thank you.”

Stacy mumbled. Misty turned and left, stepped onto the porch and sat down. Crate leaned against one of the posts, his hands on his hips.

“Good going,” he said, his voice low. “That was smart.”

“It’s not far from the truth.”

“Mm.” He wiped his neck with a rag from his pocket. “That fat son of a bitch in there is going to kill us if I don’t find a chainsaw,” Crate said, settling his bony ass onto the bench. His dog lay nearby, watching.

“Want to light them up?” Misty asked. She was tired of seeing their faces, such as they were.

“Not until Moby Dick is ready,” he said, and laughed. Misty didn’t care much for the sound of it. “Goddammit. It’s going to be a fucking grease fire.”

A car raced by. Crate held the rifle across his lap, ready to spring into action like Jimmy Stewart in one of the old Westerns they played on Sunday afternoons. Winchester ’73 maybe.

“First one in over three hours,” he said, as if this suggested something. Maybe it did.

“Maybe they have the right idea.”

“Now, we’re going to sit tight. Wait and see what happens.” He shrugged. “What else can we do? We’re going to protect what’s ours. You should learn to use a gun. We got that Ruger now, that cop’s gun?”

That cop’s gun. As if he’d forgotten Eric Tasgal’s name.

“We’ll see,” she said, and Crate’s eyes widened.

“Cornwell has a chainsaw,” he said. Thomas Cornwell lived nearby, and came in every Sunday for sliced turkey and to talk about his wife, who’d been dead for seven years now. He and Crate got on well, once they got to drinking.

“He also has a shotgun,” Crate added, shaking his head. “He’s the shoot first type. Hell, I’m surprised we haven’t seen him yet. What about your knives?”

“What?”

“Your deli knives? Any of them up to butchering that hog back there?”

“God, Crate,” she said, shaking her head.

“Eh? Need something.”

“I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “Maybe so, but who’s going to do it? You? I sure as hell won’t.”

“Eh,” Crate said, dismissive. His tired old arms weren’t up to the job, and he knew it. “I’ll be back then.”

Carrying his rifle, he got up and walked to the dead black man’s car. He whistled once, and his dog followed him.

“Where are you going?”

“To borrow Cornwell’s chainsaw,” he said, sliding behind the wheel of the old Ford. Bilbo Baggins hopped across his lap and into the passenger seat. “Go inside and lock that door.”

He started the engine, backed out of the parking lot, and was gone.

After a few minutes sitting alone, she went inside and locked up.

“Can I use the Lysol on the shelf? It would help.” Stacy asked, holding the mop handle. The floor looked significantly better.

Misty shrugged and flapped her hands. “Sure. Don’t finish up yet, though. The mess is about to get messier.”

“Huh?”

“Crate’s gone off to borrow someone’s chainsaw.” Misty said, and when she saw the confused look on Stacy’s face, she nodded to Haggarty’s massive form lying by the candy rack.

“Oh,” Stacy said, and Misty wasn’t sure it had really sunk in. Then Stacy’s eyes widened, and her mouth twisted into a sour knot. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Misty said. She left Stacy, walked into the back, into her bedroom, where she stood looking down at Tasgal’s gun. It lay on the bedside table, where Crate had left it. She picked it up. Not liking the feel of it, she put it down.

She got halfway to the bedroom door before she stopped, walked back to the bedside table, and picked up the gun once more.

Misty didn’t like the feel of it at all, not one damned bit, but she liked the idea of getting into trouble without it even less.

Twenty-Eight

Colleen sat up, instantly awake, heart racing; clutching the gun, her finger on the trigger. She stood up, and her brain spun behind her eyes.

The curtains were drawn, and the light coming in through them wasn’t very bright, though she felt as if she’d slept for hours.

Embeth lay on her back. Her bound hands rested upon her stomach, and there was a pillow beneath her head. There was no sign of Sally, who’d fallen asleep beside Colleen some six hours ago.

Gun raised, Colleen was halfway to the kitchen when the sound of laughter fluttered within the nursery. The door opened and Mathilda stepped out.

“Whoa,” she said, raising her hands, motioning for Colleen to lower her weapon.

“I’m sorry,” Colleen said, pointing her gun at the floor. “What’s going on? What time is it?”

“It’s a little after noon.”

Colleen looked at the curtains again.

“It’s cloudy,” Mathilda said. “Been raining off and on all morning.”

“Oh,” Colleen said, suddenly eager to get rid of the gun growing sweaty in her hand. She set it on the kitchen counter and dried her hand on her shirt.

“Sally is in labor.”

“Oh.” It was no real surprise—the woman was immense, clearly ready to pop—but the reality of it nearly stung: there would soon be another baby in this house, in this world. “Is there anything I can do?”

“For Sally? Not at the moment,” Mathilda said. “I’ll need you soon enough. For now, you can go say hi to the kids. Lissa is taking good care of them all. She’s a good girl.”

“What are we going to do?”

“One thing at a time.”

“She waking up soon?” Colleen asked, looking at Embeth, who hadn’t moved since Colleen had risen from the couch.

“Any time now, I think,” Mathilda said, eying the unconscious woman. “I hope she doesn’t give us trouble.”

From somewhere in the back, Sally spoke, though Colleen could not make out her words.

“Go see her,” Mathilda said.

Sally lay propped up on pillows in what must have been the bedroom that Mathilda had shared with Evie, a bedroom much like the one meant for Colleen and Sally—two beds, a simple dresser, and a single window. A few books on the dresser, no rhyme or reason: A Bible, a book on advanced trig, a dog-eared paperback of something seedy titled Lust Slum.

“Hey,” Sally said, smiling. An open book lay on the swell of her massive stomach. Her gun—Huff’s gun—was within reach.

“Hey,” Colleen said. She glanced at the book on Sally’s stomach. “What are you reading?” It was a perfectly normal question, the kind you asked when everything in the world was as it should be.

Sally held up the book so that Colleen could see the title on the cover: Lolita.

“I’ve never read it,” Colleen said.

“It’s my fourth time,” the pregnant woman said, closing the book. “I think it might be my favorite book. I asked Huff to get this for me on one of his trips to San Francisco.” She smiled and shook her head, handed the book to Colleen. “Look at the title page.

Colleen opened the book. A hand written note was scrawled beneath Lolita in blunt, graceless letters:

Beautiful Sally-

A little too young for my tastes, but here she is, my bride. I hope you enjoy it again. Maybe you can read your favorite passage to me one day. You will come to love me as I love you.

Huff

“He was a sick bastard,” Sally said.

“Yeah,” Colleen said.

“How are you?”

“I’ll live,” Colleen said, looking down. She could still feel the knife in her hand.

“You did good.”

Colleen’s voice dropped. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

She frowned, fell silent.

Sally looked down at the book in her hands.

“Kimberly hated it.”

“What?” Sally asked, and then a look of realization flashed across her face. “Oh, this. Yeah.” She nodded, and the look in her eyes went a little distant. Colleen could tell that she was thinking about the book, not about everything else.

“Yeah. Some people do, but I think there’s something beautiful about it. And the language. You’ve never heard a blow job described like that.”

Colleen smiled. “My high school lit teacher said that the main guy—”

“Humbert Humbert. Crazy name.”

“Yeah—she said that Humbert was Europe, and that Lolita was America, that the whole thing was a metaphor.”

“For old Europe fucking young America?”

“I don’t know,” Colleen said, and it was true. She wasn’t sure what her teacher had meant, based on her limited knowledge of the novel.

“It makes sense, I guess,” Sally said, looking genuinely surprised. “Never thought of that.”

“How are you feeling?”

Sally shrugged. “I feel fine, I guess.” The look on her face changed. Before, there’d been a touch of hope, perhaps something like good cheer, but now there was nothing. “I’m a little worried.”

“About?”

“Everything. He was pretty messed up, wasn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Samson.”

“Oh,” Colleen said. “Yeah.”

“Huff put a hurting on him?”

“He did. A serious hurting.”

“Maybe he won’t be back,” Sally said, her eyes downcast. She picked at the spine of her book for a second, looked up, and attempted a smile.

“Maybe,” Colleen said, but like the smile on Sally’s face, Colleen held little hope.

“Ooo,” Sally said, letting go of the book and gripping her stomach.

“Should I get her?” Colleen asked, meaning Mathilda.

“It’ll pass,” Sally said, her face scrunched into a pained knot. As Colleen watched, Sally relaxed, smiled. “See?”

“I’m still worried.”

“I’ve done this before,” Sally said. “Now get out and let me read a bit. America and Europe, huh?”

“Tell me if you need anything.”

“Huh.”

“I mean it.” Colleen left. She locked herself in the bathroom for a little while. She cried, pressing her face into a towel to muffle the sound of her weeping.

The kids were happy to see her. Little Huff stomped over to where she stood, demanded to be held, his small hands opening and closing at the ends of his outstretched arms. She scooped him up, and he rested his head upon her shoulder and sighed.

“Hey, Mama Colleen.” Lissa said, flashing an awkward but endearing smile—a mix of baby teeth, grownup teeth, and missing teeth.

“Hello.”

One of the twins—Colleen could not tell Jack from David—sat quietly pushing wooden blocks back and forth upon the rug while the other tossed an orange foam basketball to Lissa. Laughing, she encouraged the boy, told him how much of a good job he’d done.

The little blond laughed. Lissa rolled the ball toward him, and after much fumbling he seized it and threw it at his brother. It struck the other child’s face and bounced to the floor, vanishing beneath the bed. Both boys laughed, and the one who’d thrown the ball ran to the bed and tossed himself to the floor, wriggled the upper half of his body beneath the bed in search of his lost ball.

“I’m scared,” Lissa said.

“I know. I am too.”

“Mama Thilda said something bad happened.”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “A lot of bad things have happened.”

“What?”

Damn this kid. The look in her eyes, the tone of her voice—there was nothing childish about either. She was a child, but speaking to her now was like speaking to a woman, someone who knew and understood the gravity of adult life. For a second, Colleen considered telling the girl just what was what, but then she remembered Daniel when he was nine or ten. A natural mimic, like all kids, he could do a fairly mean grownup imitation, despite the fact that he was a child who cried when he skinned his knee and sometimes wet the bed.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Colleen said, and the girl stared at her, blinking, her face now entirely unreadable.

“You promise?”

Colleen tried not to miss a beat: “You betcha.”

“Okay,” Lissa said, and she was just a little girl again, no imitative mask of maturity, just a small girl of seven who still believed what the grownups in her life told her.

Little Huff gurgled nonsense into Colleen’s ear, writhing to be set free. She eased him to the floor, and he wobbled away, dropping to all fours and vanishing beneath the crib in which the nameless boy slept. She was happy to be rid of him—an irrational feeling, she knew, but no less real. They were all Huff’s children, as far as she knew or could tell, but he was the only one to bear the man’s name.

The twin who’d taken the ball to the face had gone back to playing with blocks, and his far more adventurous brother scooted out from under the bed with smears of dust on his shirt and the ball in his hand.

“Got it!” He yelled, looking up at Colleen and flashing a lunatic grin.

“Hey,” she said, “look at that,” and clapped.

The boy chortled and once more tossed the ball at his brother. It bounced off his forehead, and this time the other boy bunched his face into a red knot and screamed.

Colleen helped to calm the child, and when he returned to his blocks Colleen excused herself, said that she had to check in on Mama Sally.

“Will you be back?” Lissa asked, and Colleen realized that she didn’t really like the girl. There was nothing specific, and Lissa certainly seemed sincere, but there was something else, a know-it-all-quality that Colleen associated with kids from her childhood, kids she hadn’t liked, for whatever reasons children have for not liking other children.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

“Good,” Lissa said, proceeding to make Colleen feel like shit: “I love you so much, Mama Colleen. I’m glad you came.”

Mama Sally was fine, drifting off to sleep with a pained look on her face. Her contractions were roughly thirty minutes apart now, and the window was easing shut.

Outside, the sky opened up, and rain pelted the window. Colleen parted the curtains and stared into the downpour, wondered where Samson was, if he’d survived the beating he’d received.

Please, God, she thought, unmindful of whether or not she still believed in God. Let him be dead.

“You should close the curtains,” Mathilda said. Colleen looked at the older woman, imagined bullets smashing through the glass. She closed the curtains.

Mathilda prepared lunch for the kids just before two, and brought it in to them. Colleen sat and stared at a book she’d taken from the large bookcase, a nonsense horror story from the thirties with writing so dense that she’d taken ten minutes to work through the first three pages before giving up.

She looked up from the cover of the book to see Embeth lying there upon the floor, eyes open, staring at her.

“Oh,” Colleen said, tossing aside the book and leaning forward. “Are you…” Her words trailed into nothing, and she struggled for something, anything, that would make some kind of sense. Finding no such thing, she closed her mouth. Embeth looked around, back to Colleen.

“You tied me up.”

“We did,” Colleen said, sliding from the couch and to her knees. She reached toward Embeth, froze, drew back her hand, as if the bound woman were dangerously hot to the touch. “You were upset.” She said this a little louder than she needed to, in the hope that Mathilda would hear her.

“Huff,” said the woman, her bloodshot eyes spilling tears. Her bottom lip quivered. “He’s really dead.”

It wasn’t a question, but Colleen answered her anyway. “Yes.” She steadied herself. “Samson killed him.”

“Oh, God,” Embeth said, and just when she seemed poised to collapse into hysterics, she composed herself, took a deep, snot-choked breath. “Samson...”

“Yes. He killed Evie and Max, too.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Samson.”

“We don’t know,” Colleen said, glancing at Mathilda, who’d just entered the room and stood with her arms crossed. “We’re hoping…”

“Hoping what?” Embeth said.

“Hoping he’s dead,” Mathilda said. “Huff hurt him.”

“He did?” The nerves in her face did a little dance, and for a second she looked immensely proud.

“Yes. How do you feel?” Mathilda asked, walking toward them, looking down at Embeth.

“Dizzy and hungry.” She licked her lips. “Thirsty. Why should I be tied up? Untie me.”

Mathilda walked to the kitchen, returned with a glass of water. With Colleen’s help, the bound woman sat up. Mathilda pressed the glass to Embeth’s mouth.

“Stop that.” She jerked away. “What are you doing? Untie me!”

Mathilda drew a long breath. “You need water, come on.” Embeth still resisted, and she sighed. “We can’t have you freaking out again. We need you to keep your head together, if we’re all going to get out of this.” She paused, and Colleen wasn’t sure if she meant what she said next, or if she were just trying to calm Embeth: “Huff would want it that way.”

“I’m okay. I just want to see my babies,” Embeth said, and Colleen realized for the first time that she had no idea who’d given birth to each of the children, with the exception the unnamed boy, who was Mathilda’s.

“Sally is in labor.”

“Now?” Embeth asked, eyes wide, and Colleen feared that something was wrong. The woman was off-kilter. By now, they were all a little off-kilter, but Embeth was the only one who’d sat clutching the severed head of her kidnapper, her husband of nearly two decades, the man she loved—or had been brainwashed into loving—cradling it to her chest.

We shouldn’t, Colleen thought, wanted to say, but she couldn’t, because maybe she was just being paranoid. And maybe they’d need help soon, and they were short on hands. Besides, it just wasn’t right, keeping her tied up like that. How long could they keep it up?

“I’ll need your help,” Mathilda said. “Colleen and I can’t do this alone. She hasn’t delivered a child.” She looked up at Colleen. “Have you?”

“No. Puppies.”

“You have,” Mathilda told Embeth. Her face hardened. “Where are his guns?”

“Whose guns?”

“Huff’s.” She looked away.

“I don’t,” Embeth began, frowning, considering what she could and couldn’t say, should or shouldn’t. “I don’t know—”

“You do,” Mathilda said, leaning in close, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I’m not untying you unless you tell me.”

“But this—”

“We’re in trouble, Beth,” Mathilda said. In the back room, Sally yelled something about pain, dammit—it was really starting to hurt. Mathilda looked over her shoulder, toward the back, and yelled, “Be there in a minute.” She looked back at Embeth. “Even if Samson is dead, we’re going to need those guns eventually. With all that’s happening out there.”

“Okay,” Embeth said, swallowing. She licked her lips again and looked around. “You’re right. They’re in the house. He keeps them locked up.”

As far as Colleen knew, there was only one house on the property—the deserted ranch-style house they’d gone into shortly after arriving. She remembered the locked door at the end of the hall.

“Okay,” Mathilda said. “The keys?”

Embeth looked toward the bedroom in which Huff’s body and head lay, and once more Colleen was certain the woman was about to crack. She said, “He has them,” and that was all.

They untied her, and Embeth moved from the floor to the couch, and let herself break down. She wept, her shoulders hitching, tears streaming down her face. Mathilda wiped tears from her own eyes, sat beside Embeth and held her and stroked her hair.

Colleen left them, drifted past the door to the room containing the bodies. The keys—she had to search Huff’s body for a key-ring, but she wasn’t ready.

“What’s going on?” Sally asked as Colleen entered the room in which she lay waiting to give birth.

“We untied Embeth. Can I get you anything?”

“How is she?”

“They’re both crying,” Colleen said, shrugging.

“They loved him,” Sally said. “They’ve been here so long.”

“It kind of worries me. I don’t know what we should do.”

“Do?”

“What if they, I don’t know—freak out?” Colleen said.

“We keep an eye on them. We do what we have to do,” Sally said, and Colleen didn’t like the look on her face. “We take care of them if we have to.”

Colleen’s shoulders fell a half inch and she nodded.

“Do you think you’ll be able to, if it comes to that?”

“Yes,” Colleen said, and the word was out before the realization had an opportunity to make itself at home. She may die soon, and in some horrible way, but she would no longer be a victim of Huffington Niebolt’s insanity. “I’ll do what I have to do. You know I will.”

Sally assessed her, and Colleen wondered just how long the woman had been this way. Had her time here hardened her, or did it go back to her life before? “We need Mathilda. I won’t get through this without her.”

“She’s taking it okay. Embeth?” Colleen shook her head. “I’m not so sure about her.”

“We’ll take it as it, oh—” Mathilda scrunched up her face, eyes squeezed shut, fists clutching the thin blanket draped over her stomach. When the contraction passed, she looked Colleen in the eyes. “Getting shorter. What? What’s that look on your face?”

“I don’t think Samson is dead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I’ve been thinking. The dead ones I saw in town, at the little store, they’d come from the other town.”

“Beistle?”

“Yeah, they came from Beistle but they were from right there in Harlow.”

“They came home.”

“Seems like it.”

“If he were dead, you think he’d have come right back here?”

“Maybe,” Colleen said. “I don’t know.”

“You might be right,” Sally said. “But this isn’t his home. It’s ours. He’s rarely here.”

“He’s got his own apartment, right?”

“Yes,” Sally said. Colleen thought of the three small apartments they’d encountered following the exhausting uphill walk with Samson, the trap he’d led them to, the attack that followed.

“Then he’s probably there,” Colleen said. “We need to get to the guns before he does. I need to find him. I need to kill him.”

“You’re right,” Mathilda said, appearing beside her. She no longer cried, but her moist eyes were red, the skin around them puffy. “But this comes first.” She looked at Sally. “How are you?”

“About twenty minutes apart.”

“Good,” Mathilda said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “The sooner we get this one out of there the better.”

“How is she doing?” Colleen asked.

“She’s having a drink,” Mathilda said, “She can’t believe he’s dead,” and now her eyes were on Colleen, pinning her in place. Mathilda looked old and tired. “I can’t either.”

The seconds ticked by without response, and Colleen suspected that Sally’s reasons for silence were much the same as her own—so as to not say anything that had the potential to set off Mathilda.

“He was insane,” Mathilda said. “I know that. You know that, Colleen—you just got here. Sally, too. But me and Beth and Evie, we’ve been here so long. Evie suspected it was all a farce, but Embeth? She fell for it a long time ago. She was his, pure and simple. She was his.”

“And you?” Colleen said.

“Sometimes it made it easier to believe. I loved him, yeah, as sick as that is, and as much as it hurts me to admit it, but I did,” Mathilda said, and then she laughed without humor. “I loved the son of a bitch. He was good to me. And some part of me, the part that remembers when he took me—that part of me wishes I’d been there to see him die.

“So,” she looked at Sally. “You popping soon?”

“Soon enough.”

“Okay,” Mathilda said, placing a hand on Colleen’s shoulder, squeezing once. “I’m gonna check on her.”

Sally waited until Mathilda was gone to speak in hushed tones: “She can’t know what we did. Not ever.”

“She doesn’t have to.”

They talked nonsense for a little while, mostly about the book that Sally was reading, and whether or not it was genuinely sexy, whether or not it was right to find it sexy. Mathilda held up her right forefinger in a just-you-wait gesture, and fanned through the pages. Finding what she was looking for, she read aloud. A few words into the passage, somebody screamed.

The scream went on, like a siren, and Colleen bolted from the room, down the hall, and into the living room, where she spun in place, tried to get a fix on the sound of the scream. Looking at the nursery door, she realized with complete clarity and utter lucidity that the sound was not one scream but several, overlapping and weaving into one another.

She burst through the nursery door, gun raised, and her scream joined the chorus. The horrors of the past several days were behind her, but she was not done with horror, nor it with her:

Little Huff and the unnamed child screamed in their cribs, screamed and screamed and screamed, their faces red and quivering, little Huff standing at the wooden bars and looking like a deranged lifer. The nameless boy lay on his back, kicking like a turtle baking in the sun.

One of the twins—she was not sure which and would not learn which for several hours, long after it was all over—lay facedown in a pool of blood, his fat little pink hand twitching like a dying spider.

Mathilda leaned with her hack to the wall, between the cribs containing the wailing children. One of her arms was held before her, fingers splayed and gloved in blood. The other hand was pressed to her face. Blood oozed through her fingers.

Lissa was wrapped around something, wrapped around the other boy, the other giant killer, David or Jack, shielding him as Embeth, raging and screaming, sank the blade of a blood-slicked knife into her back again and again. There was so much blood, and Colleen realized what Embeth had yet to realize, that the girl was dead; that she need only throw her aside to reveal the hysterical child beneath, cringing and screaming, screaming, wailing.

Colleen raised the gun. She jumped, screamed when it roared and spit fire, when a section of the wall above the mad woman’s head burst in a powdery cloud. She squeezed the trigger again and Embeth’s head spat a runny starburst of blood and brains onto the wall. Blood jetting from her skull, the dying woman collapsed in a heap of tangled limbs, pinning the girl and the small boy beneath her.

Mathilda pulled herself from the wall and took an uneven step toward Embeth, and Colleen pushed past her, seizing Embeth’s twitching body by the shoulders and pulling her away from Lissa, who held the surviving twin in her dead arms.

“God,” Colleen said, dropping to her knees beside the children. To her right, the other twin lay dead. The pool of blood around his head had stopped spreading. His small hand no longer moved, the fingers curled and still.

“Blinded me,” Mathilda said, and Colleen looked at her. Mathilda’s right hand was pressed to her right eye. She sucked in air between clutched teeth. “Hurts.” Kneeling beside the dead twin, she checked his pulse with the fingers of her quivering left hand. Her face was deathly white.

“Gah,” Colleen said, her head a mess. She placed her hands on the dead girl’s shoulders and still the small boy screamed and cried.

The knife—a kitchen knife, just a simple steak knife, there was probably a whole drawer of them—jutted from between the girl’s shoulder-blades. Her shirt clung to her back, dark and sticky, and Colleen could not tell how many times Lissa had been stabbed.

As Colleen gently pulled Lissa’s body away from the crying boy, a sigh gurgled within the dead girl’s throat. Her head jerked once, to the right. Colleen grabbed the handle of the knife and tried to pull the blade from the girl’s back. It was wedged between two ribs, and at first it didn’t want to budge. Wincing, Colleen twisted the handle a few times, yanking hard, and the knife slipped free. Blood droplets seem to hang in the air, and Colleen’s stomach clenched. She’d felt the grind of blade against bone, or heard it, or both.

She yelled something incoherent and tossed the knife aside, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and pulled the wailing twin into her arms; pressed him to her chest. The past few days pressed in. The kids cried and screamed, and Colleen tried not to join them.

“…alive.”

She looked up at Mathilda, tried to make sense of the woman’s words, and the boy, the little blond boy who may have been Jack and may have been David, who’d only a few seconds ago had been lying facedown in his own blood, was on his hands and knees, head hung low and dripping blood. Mathilda knelt beside him, the right side of her face covered in blood. Her hands, now on the child’s shoulders, were also covered in blood, and Colleen fought to hold it all back: the deer, the walking dead on the television and in the parking lot of Misty’s Food and Gas; Guy and Huffington Niebolt’s gurgling screams as she sawed through his larynx.

“He’s still alive,” Mathilda said, drawing her hands away from the child and looking up at Colleen with an utterly helpless look on her face.

“No,” Colleen said, rising to her feet with the crying child in her arms.

“But he—”

His small fingers writhed in the pool of blood around his head, and his tiny feet kicked. His butt rose and fell. He tried to stand, slipped in his blood. His face hit the ground.

“Get them,” Colleen said, nodding toward the cribs, and Lissa opened her eyes and stared at Colleen. The dead girl opened her mouth and frowned, worked her fingers, and sat up.

“Get up,” Colleen said, and Mathilda stared up at her, realization dawning in her remaining eye. The boy pressed to Colleen’s chest wailed and his dead brother rolled onto its side and pawed at its own congealing blood, wriggled its small body toward Mathilda.

“Ur,” Lissa’s corpse said, its drifting gaze settling upon Colleen, who stepped past it and out of the room, where she placed the crying twin onto the couch. Returning to the nursery, she lifted the unnamed boy from his crib, held him to her chest, and looked down at Mathilda, who stared at the dead children before her. Lissa’s corpse was on its knees, its hands hanging uselessly at its sides, its head lolling left and right, as if it weren’t in complete control of its body. The dead twin writhed in its own blood like a worm in mud.

“Come on,” Colleen said, and when Mathilda didn’t acknowledge her, just kept her eyes on the kids, Colleen said it again, louder. Mathilda’s head snapped in her direction. Her face dark with drying blood, she looked at the dead kids again, and then at Colleen.

“Oh,” Mathilda said, getting to her feet. “Oh, God.” They were saying that a lot, Colleen realized, and He didn’t seem to be listening. Daniel would be pleased.

“Come on,” Colleen said, and Mathilda lifted Little Huff from his crib. Out front, the surviving twin wailed, and so too did the unnamed child in Colleen’s arms. Little Huff, on the other hand, fell silent as soon as Mathilda pressed him to her breasts.

“Uuurb,” one of the dead kids on the floor gurgled, and Colleen turned her back on them and left the room, plodding to the couch, where the twin sat, screaming his dissatisfaction, his face bright red, just like it was the first time she’d met him, his yellow eyebrows stark on his livid face. She sat next to him, pulled him into her arms beside the other child.

“Shh,” she said, aware suddenly that Sally was yelling from the other room.

“What’s happening, dammit?”

“It’s okay,” Colleen said, and that was more nonsense, more fucking nonsense. Nothing was okay. Not even close. Also a lie, but closer to the truth: “We’re okay.”

Mathilda emerged from the nursery with Little Huff in her arms, her blind eye oozing blood, the other wide and wild. She looked back at the door, and again to Colleen, pulled the door shut behind her, locked it.

Mathilda placed Little Huff beside Colleen, and though he whimpered and scrunched his face into an ugly knot, he did not cry. Instead, he leaned against her and sighed. The unnamed child would not relent, and the twin had fallen silent. He clung to Colleen and looked around with large and probing eyes.

“Be back,” Mathilda said, pressing her bloody hand to her wounded eye and leaving the room.

Colleen looked around for a pacifier, certain that there had been one on the table beside the couch, finding none. She slid her forefinger into the nameless child’s mouth, and soon he too was quiet.

She sat, her eyes on the locked nursery door, the children pressed close around her. Mathilda emerged from the bathroom, a white band of gauze encircling her head. There was pea-sized spec of red in the gauze above her right eye, and Colleen suspected that, before long, it would be much larger.

She sat across from Colleen, quivering and pale, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“I’m in shock,” she said.

“Yes,” Colleen said.

“This is, I mean—how much—” Her confused words dissolved into broken, hitching sobs. Colleen watched the older woman cry until there were no more tears.

Moving with the measured deliberation of a drunk trying to walk a straight line, Mathilda got up, and walked toward the bedroom. Her right hand sliding across the wall, Mathilda looked at Colleen and was gone. A few seconds later, Colleen heard her talking to Sally, who was in the throes of another painful round of contractions.

She returned a short time later and helped feed the children. Little Huff and the nameless child eagerly sucked from their bottles. The twin stared into space, accepted the food that Mathilda spooned into his mouth with little resistance and no enthusiasm. When the children were fed and burped, Mathilda returned to the bedroom.

Held to her chest, the nameless child closed his eyes and fell asleep. Little Huff did the same beside her, and Colleen heard the bubbling hot sound of his diaper being filled. The twin looked at her, eyes wide, and when she smiled and asked him how he was doing he closed his eyes and lay his head against the armrest.

Something brushed against the other side of the nursery door, and the knob rattled. A short time later, Mathilda stepped into the living room. The look on her face was grave.

“Come on,” she said. “Baby’s coming.”

Twenty-Nine

“Where are you headed?” Cardo asked.

“New Mexico,” Reggie said. “Where are you headed?”

“Nowhere, now. What’s in New Mexico?”

“My daughter,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Cardo said. “So you got a daughter. Is she little?”

Reggie balked. He had to keep Nef out of his mind or it would drive him crazy. One mile at a time. “Yeah.”

“A little girl, that’s nice. What’s her name?”

“Listen, I don’t care to get into specifics if it’s all the same to you.”

“Okay, man, sorry.” Cardo pulled back.

“That’s fine.” Reggie’s shoulders softened. “Just trying to keep this shit tight, you know?”

Cardo was silent for a while. “Well, it’s good you got somebody to care about. She’s with her mom, then?”

“She’s with my mom,” Reggie said. “I have no idea where her mother is.”

“Oh,” Cardo said. “Because of all this?”

“No. Long before. Bitch was crazy.”

“Oh,” Cardo said.

Nobody said anything for a while. They passed an abandoned car and, a few hundred yards later, a walking corpse, a tottering fat woman with short dark hair and flabby pale arms cratered with bite-marks. The dead thing reached out toward the oncoming truck, and they rumbled by. Stumbling on its way, its mutilated arms once more hanging at its sides, it dwindled in the side-view mirror and was soon gone from sight.

“Which way?” Reggie asked, bringing his truck to a stop at an intersection. The sign they’d passed less than a mile back had welcomed them to Harlow.

“Right,” Cardo said, and Reggie turned right.

Compared to Beistle, Harlow was a ghost town. There was no one to be seen, living or dead, and Reggie had the idea that today wasn’t much different than any other day in Harlow. Empty streets, nothing happening.

“Just about everyone who lives here works in Beistle,” Cardo said, seeming to read his mind. “The ones who work, anyway.”

“Yeah?”

“They don’t have a police force of their own,” Cardo said. He sounded happy to have something to talk about. “So we get to do the dirty work.”

“Let me guess. Some domestic abuse, and some drunk and disorderly.”

“Pretty much nothing else, but not all that often.” Cardo shrugged. “Once a month, and usually the same damned assholes.”

“The usual suspects.”

“Yeah,” Cardo said, leaning forward. “Oh, hey—stop here.”

The sign outside the corner store said MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS, and Reggie was certain he wasn’t the first person to feel the urge to crack a joke.

The parking lot was empty except for a burn pile.

“You sure you want to stop here?” Reggie asked, slowing down.

“Yeah,” Cardo said. “It looks like Crate has everything under control here. Crate’s the old dude who lives here with his wife.”

“Misty?”

“Yeah. They own the place. Good people.”

“Okay,” Reggie said, turning into the parking lot and bringing his truck to a halt to the right of the burn pile. Four fresh bodies lay atop the charred ones. There was something else, too.

“Notice anything?”

“What?” Cardo said, leaning close and looking down at the bodies.

“It’s hard to tell with the others, but the brother wasn’t dead when they shot him.”

“How can you tell?”

“He’s too fresh,” Reggie said, wondering if maybe he should get the hell out of there. “How well do you know these people?”

“What?” Cardo said, looking uncertain. “You’re wondering if maybe—”

“Things are different now, is all I’m saying. A brother needed to be careful where he showed his face before everything went to hell. And now? Shit, man—you know what I’m saying.”

“I do, yeah,” Cardo said, and now he seemed either offended or defensive, maybe both. “But this isn’t Alabama, man.”

“And neither is Phoenix. That didn’t stop the boys at the truck stop from looking at me funny when I walked in looking for a burger. I just want to be careful.”

“I hear you,” Cardo said. “But people are different here.”

“You’re a cop. You know better.” Reggie said. “People are the same everywhere.”

“Misty and Crate,” Cardo said. “They’re not like that.”

“As far as you know.”

“As far as I know, yeah.”

“Okay, let’s go,” he said, handing Cardo his Colt Commander. “Here.”

Reggie grabbed his shotgun, slipped four extra shells into his pocket, and got out of the truck. The rocks crunched beneath his feet. A bird sang somewhere, as if nothing had changed in the world, and the air smelled like every burned-out Vietnamese village he and his platoon had passed through. There was always some asshole who said that the smell of burned human bodies reminded him of barbecues back home, and that it made him hungry. Sometimes it was funny, a laugh to get their minds on something else, but most of the time Reggie found it annoying. Most of the time, he wanted to punch the idiot cracking jokes about the smell of burning flesh or the funny look on some dead gook’s face.

As they walked to the door leading into Misty’s, Cardo said nothing. It was a dumb reason to start feeling all warm toward the guy, but there it was. With things as they now were, a friend wasn’t a bad thing to have.

“Wait,” Cardo whispered, holding up one had and waving it at Reggie, motioning for him to move to the left of the door. “Just wait right there.”

Standing to the right of the door, Cardo rapped the knuckles of his left hand on the glass, rattling the orange SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign. The Colt’s safety was off. Misty and Crate may not have been like that, but Cardo wasn’t taking any chances.

“Misty, open up. It’s Officer Cardo.” He looked at Reggie, frowning, head cocked. “You okay in there?”

A finger parted the blinds. Cardo nodded and smiled, and both gestures seemed lunatic.

“What do you want?” Someone said, and Reggie assumed it was Misty.

“We just need to rest for a little while, Misty.”

Another hand came into view, widened the part in the blinds. Reggie could see eyes now, and they looked right at him, assessed him, and looked away.

“How many are you?”

“Just the two of us, Misty.”

“I have a gun.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” Cardo said. “I hope you have more than one.”

“Ma’am,” Reggie said. “I’m just trying to get home to my daughter, and I want to use your phone and your bathroom and maybe watch some television, if you have one.”

“The phone is dead,” the woman behind the door said. She kept looking past Cardo and Reggie, as if she were looking for something.

“Even so, ma’am.”

Her eyes were on him again, but only for a second. She stared at Cardo for a little longer, and then her fingers retreated and the blinds snapped shut. There was the sound of a key sliding into a lock, a click, and then the old gal opened the door and looked both of them up and down. The gun in her left hand was pointed at the floor.

“Officer Cardo,” she said. “Shit, I’m sorry. Things are bad.”

“Yeah, I know,” Cardo said, glancing back at the bodies upon the burn pile. “Is that Charles?”

“Yeah,” she said, her face tightening into a sour knot. “And Karlatos and Baker.”

“And Clarence Shaw?”

“Was that his name?” she asked. “I couldn’t remember.”

“What happened?”

She looked at Reggie again, nodded toward him. “Who’re you?”

“My name is Reggie,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”

“He saved my life,” Cardo said.

Misty stared harder at Reggie, and then her stare broke and she nodded.

“Misty?” Cardo asked. She looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“What happened here, and where’s Crate?”

“Come on,” Misty said, motioning with a single nod for them to follow her. The bell above the door jingled, and Reggie trailed Cardo into the store. It smelled harshly of a pine-scented cleaning solution. Beneath it, the stink of blood. The corpse of an obese man lay sprawled upon the ground near a shopping cart half-full with a mix of candy bars, bread, and canned goods. There was a rolling mop bucket. A dingy mop was fanned out upon the bloodied floor, its handle leaning against one of the shelves.

“Is that Greg Haggarty?” Cardo asked.

“It is,” the woman said. She looked to be in her mid-sixties, and was cut from the same coarse cloth as a thousand women Reggie had seen waiting tables and working grills at truck-stops across the country. Treat her right, she was sweet as syrup. Step on her toes, you’d be eating your balls.

“Where’s Crate?”

“Out getting a chainsaw.” She looked at the dead fat man.

“What?” Cardo asked.

“He’s too heavy for us to carry,” She said, annoyed, as if it were obvious.

“Oh,” Cardo said. He looked at Reggie, who shrugged. He was starting to wish they’d just kept going.

“What happened here?” Cardo said.

She extended a hand toward three tables. “Sit down. Want something to drink?”

“No, thank you,” Cardo said, taking her up on her offer to sit down. Reggie followed him, easing into a chair that creaked beneath his weight. Three shelves containing bagged rice and bagged beans and assorted boxes of easy-to-make meals and cake mix blocked his view of the fat guy facedown in his own brains, and he’d never been happier to see a box of Rice-A-Roni.

“You?” She asked Reggie.

“No, ma’am,” Reggie said. “I’m good. But thank you.”

“Help yourselves if you change your minds,” she said, sitting down at the table farthest away from Reggie and Cardo. She placed her gun on the table, resting her hand atop it.

“Stacy is in the back,” she said, lifting her hand from the gun and rubbing her eyes. She looked tired. Her hair was a mess, and the flesh around her eyes was dark.

“Stacy?” Cardo asked.

“Starshine,” Misty said, rolling her eyes.

“Oh,” Cardo said. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, but they tried to rape her, and Crate killed them.”

“All of them.”

“Yeah. He shot them all,” she said, half-smiling again. She looked a little crazy, and Reggie wondered if maybe that’s the way things would be from here on. “He can be a mean son of a bitch.”

“No,” Cardo said. “They all tried to rape her? Charles tried to rape her?”

Reggie listened, the shotgun resting across his lap, his eyes moving back and forth from Cardo to Misty.

“No,” Misty said, looking down at the gun on the table before her. She traced a finger along the barrel, and Reggie realized that his hands were sweating. “But it was his idea.”

“His idea?” Cardo asked.

“Did you know Charles?”

“Only a little,” Cardo said. “I’d seen him here sometimes, and in town, and we’d talk every so often. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Misty said. “Well, he was a coward. They showed up and started filling that shopping cart, and he told them that she was in the back, told them to take her instead. Crate was in the back, too, hiding and listening, and when he came out…”

“He shot them all,” Cardo said. “Even Charles.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking down, folding her hands together upon the table.

“And Clarence?” Cardo asked, looking at Reggie. “He was involved?”

“No,” she said, and glanced back at the door.

“What happened?”

She took too long to answer.

“We were out there, Crate and I,” Misty said, making an attempt to look Cardo in the eyes for more than three seconds. “We were trying to get Charlie onto the burn pile when he drove into the parking lot. He got out of his car and before we knew it he pulled a gun and started shooting.”

Reggie watched Cardo’s face. If he’d noticed her lie, Reggie could not tell. Cardo’s look didn’t change. A poker face. A cop’s face.

Misty looked at them, and there was pain in her expression, pain and sadness. She wasn’t telling the truth, not entirely, but that didn’t change the fact whatever had happened had taken its toll on her. She shrugged.

“Crate shot him. It was horrible. It’s all horrible.”

“You got that right,” Reggie said, trying to sound as warm as possible. Reggie could tell that Cardo was watching him, but he kept his eyes on Misty. “You see many of those things around?

“Not today,” she said, and Reggie wasn’t sure if he was imagining things or not—she seemed to relax, just a bit, with the previous topic of conversation behind them. “A few this morning, I think. What’s it like in Beistle?”

“Hundreds of them,” Cardo said.

“Jesus. The Army really gas the town?”

“Someone did.”

“Can I ask two favors, ma’am,” Reggie said, moving to drain the remaining tension from the air by asking two wholly normal questions, the kind this tough old gal no doubt heard several times a week.

She looked at him. “Can I ask you for one?”

“Sure.”

“Enough with the ma’am nonsense,” she said, and Reggie caught the glimmer of a look in her eye, a look he’d gotten used to, living so much of his life on the road. Older white women got a little stupid around him. “Call me Misty.”

“Okay, Misty,” he said, leaning back in his chair. Cardo continued watching him. “May I use your telephone, and can you please point me to the bathroom.”

“Phone is dead, like I said, but you’re welcome to try. Bathroom’s right there. If it were a snake, it would’ve bitten you.”

The door to the left of the deli was visibly labeled RESTROOM with a gold foil sticker, and it had been one of the first things his eyes had fallen upon after entering the store—the dead fat guy lying beneath the candy shelf had been the very first.

“Oh,” he said, trying to sound a little surprised. “Yeah, look at that. And the phone?”

“Behind the counter. Go right on back. I trust you not to rob the register.”

Reggie stood. “Can’t rob nothin’ without this,” he said, placing his shotgun upon the table. Not wanting to, he left it behind. He was standing behind the counter, looking out at the store with the receiver in his hand, when a pretty white girl—Stacy, he assumed—stepped through the door to the left of the drink coolers.

She was a hippie, that much was obvious, and while Reggie didn’t think highly of hippies, he’d been with his share of hippie broads. They talked all sorts of spaced-out shit but they put out like it was the end of the world, and when they looked like this girl, a guy really didn’t mind putting up with an avalanche of spaced-out shit.

She saw Reggie and froze, jerked left and right, just a bit, like she wanted to run but couldn’t because her feet were rooted to the floor. She opened her mouth.

“Hey, hey,” Reggie said, setting down the receiver and raising both hands to chest level, palms outward. “Everything’s okay, baby.”

“He’s okay, Stacy,” Misty said, standing up. “He came with Cardo.”

“Cardo?” Stacy asked, but then Cardo stood up and the confusion on the girl’s face turned into recognition. “Oh, Officer Cardo. What’s happening?”

“Uh,” Cardo said, looking a little perplexed. “Quite a bit. Are you okay?”

“No, no,” she said. “But they didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re talking about. They didn’t get the chance to.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Yeah,” Stacy said, folding her arms across her chest. “Thanks for asking.”

“This is Reggie. He saved my life.”

“Wow.” She looked at Reggie and almost smiled. It was little more than a shy twitch at the corners of her mouth. “That’s far out.”

Reggie, resisting the urge to look her up and down, picked up the phone again and brought the receiver to his ear. There was a hiss, steady and faint, broken by some distant clicks.

“Told you,” Misty said, walking up to the counter. She’d left her gun at the table, too. “It’s been like that since, oh—the second or third day.”

“Can I turn this on?” Reggie asked, indicating the television.

“Sure,” Misty said. “That’s three favors.”

“I’ll have to return one of them,” Reggie said, smiling. Either she was playing along, or Misty didn’t see him as a threat. Which meant that they might get out of here without anyone shooting at them.

“Oh, God,” Stacy said. “He’s still here.” She looked at the dead fat guy.

“Yeah,” Misty said. “Crate’s still looking.”

“We’ll get him,” Cardo said, looking at Reggie with raised eyebrows. “Right?”

“Sure,” Reggie said. “No problem. Just give me a second.”

In the bathroom, he splashed water onto his face and stared at himself in the mirror. His skin, usually a healthy shade of milk-chocolate brown, looked ashen and puffy. The flesh around his eyes was darker than usual, and his eyes were bloodshot. His teeth were filthy, and his breath smelled like dog shit. He was vile.

He sat on the toilet but nothing happened. He’d crapped in the woods behind the abandoned bakery that morning, and had eaten precious little since. And he was tired, damn it. Despite the sleep he’d gotten, he was exhausted to his very bones.

Misty waited for him with a pair of large yellow rubber gloves. They were a tight fit. Stacy had already vanished into the back, and Cardo, also wearing rubber gloves, stood near the dead man’s feet.

“You ready?” he said.

“Sure.”

Reggie took the hands. Rigor mortis had set in, and it was a chore just prying the fat bastard from the floor. Something inside the body’s massive bulk sloshed, and when they got it off the ground, a long and noxious fart bubbled out.

“Ack,” Cardo said, dropping the feet and stepping away, waving his hands in front of his face.

“Come on,” Reggie said, motioning for Cardo to join him. “Let’s just drag the bitch.”

Misty opened the door wide, jingling the bell. She stood holding it, blocked from their view by the blinds. The each took a hand and, grunting, dragged the body to the threshold.

“Can’t both fit,” Reggie said. “Get the feet.”

Cardo hopped over the body, grabbed its feet once more. They got it through the door and dragged it the rest of the way. Their guns were in the store. If Misty was going to act, she’d do it now, and when Crate returned they’d have two more bodies for the heap.

Within five minutes, their job was done. They were winded and sweaty, and the massive corpse sat with its back to the burn pile. Its right eye gazed heavenward. Its left was gone.

“Damn,” Reggie said, peeling the gloves away from his hands and tossing them at the burn pile. One of them landed on the fat corpse’s head, the empty fingers draped down across its good eye.

“Heavy son of a bitch,” Cardo said, leaning against Reggie’s truck and peeling away his own gloves and tossing them atop the corpse heap. “Maybe we should have waited for the chainsaw.”

They washed their hands more than they needed to, and when Misty offered them beer, they accepted. Stacy returned, said a few words, and then went about mopping up the last of the blood.

“Anything to eat?” Misty asked him.

“No,” Reggie said, smiling. “You hold on to your food. I have more than enough in the truck.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I stocked up before leaving town.”

“Cardo?”

“Reggie is right—we really shouldn’t be eating your food.”

“That may be, but I have about five pounds of deli meat left in that case, more than we can eat before it goes bad, so…”

“Good point,” Cardo said. “I’ll take a chicken sandwich.”

“I’m all out of chicken,” she said. “One ham and cheese.”

Reggie got up and walked over to Stacy, who flashed the shy smile again.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You want a hand with that?”

“Nope,” she said. “Thanks. You really save Officer Cardo’s life?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“That’s amazing,” she said, and now her smile was a little less shy.

“I was in the right place at the right time. That’s all.”

“Wow.” She shook her head, eyes wide and distant. He knew the look. Next she’d be stroking the crystal around her neck and going on about the karmic wheel of life.

He went around the check-out counter and turned on the television. With the exception of the leering CBS eye on channel 4, there was nothing to see, only snow.

“It’s been like that since last night,” Misty said, who sidled up to the counter and stared at the television screen. “The eye. Bad shit going down.”

“There was something about a nuke going off in the Middle East,” Reggie said, remembering the crowd of corpses gathered around the TV display in Beistle.

“They said it might not have been nuclear,” Misty said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think anyone knows what they’re talking about. And I don’t think they’re coming back on.”

No one had anything to say to that. Stacy rolled the mop bucket into the deli.

“Do you have a radio?” He asked Misty.

“Yeah,” she said. “In the deli. What are you hoping to hear?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Good news, I guess.”

Reggie left the television on and returned to the table, where Cardo sat finishing up his sandwich.

“They’ve got to come back on,” Cardo said around a mouthful of food. “I mean, it’s only been, how many days now? Damn, I’ve lost track of time.”

“We all have,” Misty said.

“They’ve got to come back on. I mean, we’re still here, right? They must be too.”

“I don’t know,” Reggie said, looking closely at his new friend. Cardo’s face was red from the sun, but his eyes weren’t as glassy as they’d been when he crawled into the truck. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” Cardo said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m better.”

“You look better.”

“This was good.” He tapped his paper plate.

“You eat like a pig.”

“Ha,” Cardo said. “You should have one.”

“I might,” Reggie said, looking at the scrap of sandwich on Cardo’s plate and feeling his stomach twist.

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know. Not long. You coming?”

Cardo frowned, looked down at his plate. “I need some sleep.”

“You can sleep in the back while I drive.”

“You’re going to need some sleep, too.”

“I’ll be okay,” Reggie said.

“Molly going to get you through?”

“When I need her to, yeah.”

Cardo finished his sandwich, and when Misty swooped by and asked Reggie if he was ready for one yet, he said sure, thank you, he was. Stacy stepped out of the deli and walked past them, head low, eyes downcast, the fingers of her right hand touching her crystal. She vanished into the back, and both men watched her go. A minute later, Misty brought his sandwich. He’d taken his first bite when someone pulled into the parking lot. A car door slammed. A dog barked.

“Shit,” Reggie said, grabbing his shotgun and putting the canned goods shelf between himself and the entrance.

Cardo stood, gun raised.

“It’s just Crate,” Misty said and walked to the door. She looked through the blinds and disengaged the lock.

“Crate,” she said, and a wiry old man carrying a chainsaw in one hand and a gun in the other stepped into the store. A dog—a shaggy mixed-breed—padded in behind him, sniffing the floor and sneezing once. Frowning, the old man placed the chainsaw on the counter and looked from Reggie and Cardo to Misty and back again. Sitting at his feet, the dog sneezed again.

“Ah,” Crate said, recognition relaxing his face. “Officer Cardo.”

“Hey, Crate.”

“How the hell are you?” the old man said.

“I could be better,” Cardo said.

“Yeah. A little too much sun, huh?”

“I was stuck on a roof for over thirty hours, until this guy saved me.” Cardo nodded toward Reggie.

“Oh,” the old man said, barely glancing at Reggie. “You two boys get that whale out of here?”

“Yeah,” Cardo said. “It wasn’t easy.”

“No shit,” Crate said, opening the door and whistling once. “Out, you.”

Tail slowly wagging back and forth, ears down, the dog listened to its master. The bell jingled, and Crate locked the door.

“What’s his name?” Reggie asked.

The old man looked at Reggie, his smile barely visible within his wooly beard.

“Bilbo Baggins.”

“Good one,” Reggie said, laughing. He didn’t know what the hell a Bilbo Baggins was, but he didn’t really care enough to ask. They were making a good impression, or so it seemed, and he was beginning to allow himself to relax.

Crate extended a long-fingered hand. It was thin-skinned and covered in veins, and the nails needed to be clipped. Reggie shook it, and was surprised by the old man’s strength.

“Creighton Mumsford,” he said. “But you can call me Crate.” This close, Reggie could smell the old man—the sour stink of an unwashed body beneath the clinging herbal aroma of grass.

“Reggie Turner.”

“That your rig out there?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Nice.” His eyes flashed down to the tags hanging from Reggie’s neck. “You were over there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Crate said, walking away. “Bullshit war.”

“How was it?” Misty asked, and for a second Reggie thought that Misty was talking to him—that she was actually asking him about ‘Nam.

“How was what?” Crate said.

“Did you see any more?”

“Not a single one,” the old man said, shaking his head. He got a beer out of the cooler and sat down where Misty had been sitting. “I saw Lester Coleson and his wife and kid. They’re all doing fine. Didn’t see anyone else.”

“What about Tommy Cornwell?”

“He wasn’t home,” Crate said, annoyed. “Car’s gone. Shed was unlocked.”

No one spoke for a few minutes. Crate vanished into the back, and Misty went into the deli and returned with a radio, which she plugged into an outlet behind the counter. On the television, the CBS eye stared and stared, and on the radio voices crackled in the static. Misty worked her way through the dial: preachers declaring the imminent return of the Lord and Savior, radicals calling for their surviving comrades to take to the streets and use the chaos to their advantage. On one of the few stations with clear reception, a scientist discussed the rapidity with which the phenomenon was spreading and recited dire extrapolations.

“No, no,” someone said, infuriated. “Jesus, why don’t you understand this? It’s simple. Everyone who dies gets up, not just those who are bitten. The infection from the bite kills you, yes, but it’s not the bite that—”

A familiar-sounding voice on the NBC station discussed the Middle East news blackout and what it might mean. On the CBS station, a White House official insisted that the President would soon be addressing the nation and that he had not been killed, despite the ridiculous rumors stating otherwise.

“No good news,” Misty said.

“No,” Reggie said, and knew: Nef was dead. She had to be. Part of him hoped she was, and that it had been quick, because he’d never make it, he would never find her. Both of them would die wondering if the other was alive.

“I guess I always expected to be around when it all went to shit,” Misty said. “I just never expected it to be like this.”

“We never expect it to be the way it is,” Reggie said, walking away. A little radio went a long way—he’d heard enough. He grabbed another beer from the cooler and sat down. He downed half within seconds and told himself that now was probably the time to take it easy. Things could go south fast, and he’d pretty much been drinking off and on throughout the entire day. His eyes felt heavy, his movements sluggish. The beginnings of a headache crawled between his brain and his skull.

Crate crept out, carrying his rifle. He wore a different shirt and his long hair was wet and brushed back from his haggard face. He brought the stink of cheap cologne splashed upon days-old filth, and Reggie was grateful when the old man excused himself. The bell jingled, and he was gone, though his memory lingered upon the air.

Stacy emerged from the back, got a beer from the cooler, and sat at the middle table, next to Reggie. At this rate, they’d all have no choice but to stop drinking. Or to keep on knocking it back until the bloody end.

They exchanged small talk, and Reggie tried to fight it, but there it was: he wanted Stacy, plain and simple, just like that. He barely knew her, he had no idea if he’d even be able to tolerate her for more than a day, but already the gears were turning deep down within his mind—it was a new world, a dangerous one, and she needed someone to protect her. Not a very Women’s Lib idea, he realized, but it wasn’t a very Women’s Lib world anymore.

Hell—maybe he just needed something to take his mind off of Nef. If that was the case, fucking was about as good a distraction as he could hope for.

“…about you saving this guy’s life.” Sitting across from Cardo, Misty stared at him, blinking.

“What?”

“Let’s hear it. Your story.”

They spent the next hour swapping stories, starting with Cardo, who told of the riot at Proust’s, the gassing of the town, and the nearly two days he spent on the roof while the dead residents of Beistle moved like ghosts through the streets. Reggie wasn’t sure if Cardo had left out any details, but when his own turn came, he didn’t mention the dumb kid or shooting the asshole and looting his kitchen.

He suspected Cardo had indeed left out a few things, and that was his right. Misty’s apparent lie, too, was probably just that—a willfully omitted detail, a terrible little something no one need ever know. He suspected they all had their own terrible little somethings, each and every one of them, and before long, they’d probably have more.

“I need sleep,” Cardo said, and Misty told him to take the couch. It only had two cushions—one of them had been soaked in blood and had to be thrown out, but he was welcome to what was left.

Not yet moving from where he sat, he thanked her, rubbing his eyes. Misty excused herself, got up, and joined Crate on the porch, leaving Reggie alone with Stacy and Cardo and forgetting her gun on the table.

Reggie considered grabbing it, and from the look on Cardo’s face, he had similar thoughts. They looked at each other, and something unspoken passed between them: leave it. They’d gotten in good with these people. They had a place for the night, and no one was pointing guns at anybody. The old man outside still had his rifle, and who knew what else?

Stacy—some people call me Starshine, for Christ’s sake—looked at the gun as if it would bite off her fingers. She wouldn’t be picking up a gun anytime soon.

He got up and walked to the television, once more flipping through the entire dial. The CBS eye remained, though for how much longer was anyone’s guess. He killed the television and returned to the tables, sitting across from Stacy.

“So?” Cardo said.

Reggie looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“You leaving?” Cardo asked, but Reggie could not keep his eyes off of Stacy. She sat staring at the beer bottle in her hand, and when she looked up and found Reggie’s eyes upon her, the shadow of a smile touched her lips. A little bit fearful.

“Yeah.”

“When?” Stacy asked.

Reggie looked at his watch. It was almost five. They’d been here for nearly six hours—the sun would be down within three. “Tomorrow,” he said, looking at Cardo. “Get some sleep, man.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Stacy said, touching his hand. “When you leave, can I go with you?”

Thirty

“What are we going to do?” Misty said.

Crate circled the burn pile. He carried a red aluminum gas can and swung it back and forth, splashing gasoline onto the corpses, saturating their clothes and filling their gaping mouths and skulls. The wind changed, and the stink of gas and death washed over her. She took a few steps back, but that did no good—the smell was everywhere.

“We’re going to take care of this,” he said, starting to cap the spout, thinking differently, and then pouring a little more fuel onto the fat man’s legs. Bilbo Baggins kept his distance.

“You know what I mean,” she said through clenched teeth. The wind changed, but the smell lingered. In the south, dark clouds tumbled together. They were in for another round of storms—heavier than the last, by the looks of it.

Crate capped the can and took a few steps backward. Setting it down, he fished a pack of matches from his pocket. The match flared up between his fingers. He flicked his wrist, and a surge of fire engulfed the bodies, which crackled and hissed. Misty watched as Charles leaned forward, his hair ablaze, a thin line of dark fluid running from his gaping mouth and bubbling upon his chest, his clawed hands curling toward his chest.

She looked down at her feet, and eventually Crate was beside her and leaning in close. She didn’t have to look at him to know that his eyes were on the fire.

“Where is your gun, woman?”

Misty looked down at her pants, certain for some reason that the gun had been crammed into her right hip pocket.

“I think I left it on the table inside.”

“That’s smart,” he said, shaking his head. She winced, certain that he was going to hit her. It had been years since he’d given her a shiner, but the look in his eyes made it seem like yesterday.

“How much have you had to drink?”

“A few beers,” she said.

“A few beers, yeah. You need to lay off for a while, Misty.”

He rarely called her by her real name anymore—these days it was all woman and you and hey and, when she was lucky, honey—and whenever he did say that, she could not help but feel a little swell of some kind.

“You can’t kill them,” she said, and he stiffened beside her. She felt his gaze upon her.

“We can’t keep taking in strays.”

“I know, but you heard them—they’re leaving tomorrow.”

“That’s a good truck,” Crate said, eyeing the newcomer’s rig. “I can drive that truck. We may want to use that truck.”

“Jesus, Crate,” she said, and it occurred to her that she could march right into the store, right now, and tell Cardo and the colored trucker that Crate was crazy, that he meant to shoot them and take the truck. They’d gun him down before he got one foot in the store. She could do that, but she wouldn’t. There was another way, of course—she just had to get his guns, and that would be that. Without his guns, he was just a skinny old fart with a filthy bird’s nest of a beard hanging from his face.

“Jesus nothing, woman,” he said. “I looked in the truck. There’s a lot of food in there.”

“There’s a lot of food in the store.”

“Not for long, if we keep opening our doors to everyone.”

“What did you want me to do? Cardo’s a cop, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah, and his buddies are lying dead out back. All it takes is for one of them to get nosy, and we’re done for.”

“They’re leaving,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Just let them. Don’t do anything. Okay?”

He drew his chin back, sized her up, like he was wondering if maybe she had just threatened him. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t.

The fire raged, pumping smoke into the air in a churning black column. Crate had been right about the grease fire: liquid fat boiled out of Haggarty’s corpse and pooled flaming around the burn pile.

Feeling Crate’s eyes boring into her, she went inside. Cardo was nodding off at the table, and Stacy and the trucker were talking in hushed tones—she was looking at him as if it were all she could do to keep from fucking him right then and there. Not that Misty could blame her.

She showed Cardo to the back, where he lay on the couch with his upper body on the two remaining seat cushions and his feet in the dirty, coin- and dirt-filled hollow where the now burning third cushion had once rested.

“Want the TV on?” She asked.

“Hunh?” He said, looking at her with confused, bleary eyes.

“TV?”

“God, no,” the cop said. “That damned eye has always freaked me out.”

She laughed once. “Me too,” she said. Cardo mumbled something in response, and was silent. He rolled onto his side, his back to her, and she stepped around the couch and to the window. Her feet felt too heavy, and her head felt like it was somewhere else, far away and spinning. Crate was right—she needed to stop drinking.

She parted the curtains and peered out. Tasgal’s car was gone. She wasn’t sure when Crate had moved it, but he had. The garage door was closed, and that was that. Cardo would never know.

Feeling a little better, a little more at ease, she went upstairs and into her bedroom. She sat down and knocked back the bottle of whisky she’d slipped under her side of the bed, telling herself that it would be her final hit of the day and realizing as she drew it from her lips that Charles had been the last person to drink from it.

Charles. Stupid annoying Charles who didn’t mind how she looked naked, who went at her like a young man and who never complained, not even when she pushed his face down between her legs and told him to go to town. Charles, who’d wept and cried while Karlatos and his pals had begun to clean the place out, and who’d fallen silent as they’d peeled away Stacy’s clothes. Charles, who hadn’t looked away.

She understood. Part of her understood everything—his fear, his cowardice, even his lust. What else was a coward to do in such a situation, but weep and beg? And what else should such a man—a man who’d probably never touched beautiful flesh in his life, not even once—do when witness to such a sight, but stare?

And yet she felt nothing, nothing at all. He was gone, now little more than ash and bones, and she felt nothing. She took another long draw from the bottle, capped it, and returned it to its place under the bed.

There was a sound, muffled and familiar. She held her breath, tilted her head to one side, as if that actually helped one to hear, and there it was. It took her a few more seconds to realize what it was: Crate’s dog was barking.

The whisky burning in her chest, she stood up and looked around, realizing that she’d forgotten where she’d placed her gun. The bedside table was empty, as was the bed.

“Stupid,” she said, remembering that it was downstairs, on one of the tables. She took a step toward the bedroom door, and that’s when Crate’s rifle popped two times. By the time she reached the stairs, gripping the railing and walking nearly sideways, with her shoulder pressed to the wall, Crate had squeezed off three more rounds.

Thirty-One

Reggie felt his eyes glazing over. His conversation with Stacy had gone well enough so far—about as well as anyone could expect, anyway, given the circumstances. Then he mentioned his daughter, and things took a turn. Hippie nonsense wasn’t new to him, and though he really wasn’t surprised to hear it rolling out of Stacy’s mouth, he was disappointed nonetheless. She’d gone from making sense to telling him that he could sense if his daughter was still alive, if he just believed enough, to regaling him with the details of her dead husband’s communications with her from the astral plane. From there she’d moved on to the nature of the soul, specifically as related to the ever expanding population of walking corpses bringing civilization to its knees.

The souls of the walking dead were earthbound, she’d assured him, and a blow to the head not only killed the flesh but freed the soul to move into the light. She knew it, she just knew it. More importantly, she felt it.

Throughout it all, he could not tell if she actually believed what she was saying or not, or if it was all just a nonsense security blanket. He was almost happy when the dog piped up and the first two shots rang out, bringing her spiel to an abrupt end.

“Oh, God,” she said, and they were both on their feet. She stood too quickly, and her chair tipped backward, striking an end-cap display of beef jerky. She looked at him, eyes wide, opened her mouth to say something.

“Shh.” He held up a silencing hand. “Behind me.”

Outside, the old man’s dog barked and barked, without pause. Face frozen in an almost comical expression of worry, Stacy listened, and they stood that way for a few interminable seconds, before the next three shots were fired, one immediately after the other. With the third shot, silence fell. Crate’s dog no longer barked.

Shotgun ready, he took one step toward the entrance. To his right, Cardo burst into the store through the door leading into the back. Reggie wheeled in his direction. His hands were tight around the gun—his right forefinger hovered above the trigger—but did not raise it.

“What’s happening?” Cardo said, his words slurring together. His hair was a mess and the look in his eyes was one that Reggie had seen many times in Vietnam, often in the mirror and in the tired and dirt-streaked faces of those on both sides of the battle.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Reggie said. He looked at Stacy. “Stay right here.”

“But we should probably get upst—”

“Stay right here. We may need to make a fast getaway, and you won’t be able to do that from upstairs.” He looked at Cardo. “Let’s go.”

Before they reached the door, Crate slipped into the store, reaching up and muting the bell with one cupped hand. He eased shut the door, locked it, and slapped off the light. The overhead fluorescents winked out, casting the interior of the store into twilight.

“Shhh,” Crate said, pressing the forefinger of his left hand to his lips. His beard plumed around his gnarled hand, threatened to consume it. His words came in a frenzied whisper. “Shut up. Don’t make a sound.”

“What is—” Reggie began, also whispering, but the panic on the old man’s face shut him up.

Misty emerged from the back, stumbling, a stupid look on her face, her eyes perfect cartoon circles in their wrinkled nests of flesh.

“Shut up, woman,” Crate said, before she even had a chance to open her mouth.

Reggie and Cardo exchanged a glance, and then they slowly closed the distance between themselves and the old man. Crate watched their advance with baleful eyes, and when he opened his mouth to hiss a warning, Reggie touched his index finger to his own lips.

“Shh,” he said, nudging past the old man and to the door. He cracked the blinds, leaned close. To his left, a few slats down, Cardo did the same.

The fire no longer raged, but it had not burned out. Flames danced, and smoke wafted into the air. Untouched by the fire, the fat man’s leg’s were intact from the knees down—they rested upon the gravel, turned inward, the tips of his shoes pointing at one another.

Four corpses, actual dead corpses, were sprawled like fallen dolls near the place where gravel met black asphalt. Five more corpses shuffled by, moving slowing, aimlessly in the dull evening light. One of them sank to its knees beside the body of Bilbo Baggins, prodded its stomach.

“Why’d you shoot your dog?” Reggie said, his voice a hair above a whisper.

“Be quiet, you stupid idiot,” the old man snapped.

“You shot Bilbo?” Misty said, and Reggie realized for the first time just how drunk the old gal was. The beer from the cooler hadn’t done the job, and she must’ve gone up top to hit the hard stuff.

“He wouldn’t shut up.” The old man’s voice cracked. “There are so many of them. I tried to get him to, but he wouldn’t. I had to. He wouldn’t…”

“So many?” Stacy said, and Reggie could tell that she was closer now.

“…he just wouldn’t shut up.”

“Oh, shit,” Cardo said. There were now eight walking corpses shuffling within one hundred feet of where they stood. While Reggie watched, another dead body—a topless woman whose breasts had been chewed away and now hung from her chest in ragged, deflated sacks—stumbled from behind his truck. Her wounds glistened in the flickering orange glow of the burn pile, and she raised an arm to shield her eyes.

“I recognize a few of them. That woman,” Cardo said. “That’s Marietta Stolf.”

“What do you mean,” Misty asked, trying to squeeze between Reggie and Cardo. Crate growled something incoherent and pulled her away.

“They’re from town.”

Reggie pulled his finger from between the blinds and turned around, looked at Cardo.

“You did this,” the old man said, glowering, and for a second Reggie wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Crate leveled a curled finger at Reggie’s chest. “You did this.”

“What?” Reggie asked, though he knew exactly what the old man was talking about. “How could I—”

“You led them right to us, you black son of a bitch.”

That answered that. And suddenly, Reggie was staring down the barrel of the old man’s rifle. Not missing a beat, Cardo raised his gun. It wavered before the old man’s face.

Reggie pressed the barrels of his shotgun to the old man’s chest.

“We don’t need to be doing this,” Reggie said, cocking both barrels.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” the old man said, spittle bursting from his mouth and clinging in shiny beads to his beard.

“Goddammit, Crate,” Misty said, placing a hand on Crate’s shoulder. He shrugged her off, jabbed the business end of his rifle to Reggie’s throat.

“He’s right,” Cardo said, leaning forward. His hand was steady now, the barrel of his gun less than an inch from Crate’s nose. “We really shouldn’t be doing this. Got to stick together if we’re going to make it out of this.”

“Stop this,” Stacy whispered. “And be quiet, all of you.”

“They don’t know we’re in here,” Cardo said, glancing at Reggie. “I’ve watched them, remember. I know how they work. Crate?”

The old man would not take his eyes from Reggie’s face, and as he stared into their frightened depths, Reggie was certain that Cardo was wrong. Somewhere not far beneath the surface, the old man was exactly like that.

“Crate?”

“What?” he whisper-screamed, his eyes darting toward Cardo and back to Reggie—back and forth, back and forth. The barrel of Crate’s gun pressed harder into Reggie’s throat.

“I’m sorry,” Cardo said. “We didn’t know they were going to follow us here, okay? How could we?”

After several seconds of loaded silence, Cardo repeated his question: “How the hell could we?”

“Okay,” Crate said, lowering his rifle, de-cocking it. Reggie and Cardo followed suit. “Now what the hell are we going to do?”

Reggie stared at the old man, running scenarios through his head. He could get to his truck, no problem. He could get to his truck, and he could be gone, fuck these hillbilly assholes. Cardo could even come along—they could be out the door and inside the truck before the dead fucks outside even knew what was happening, and that would be it. To hell with the old folks and the hippie chick…

Only thing, he felt a little bad—a little, not a lot—for leading the dead folks to the store, and he thought maybe there was some hope for the space-case. God help him, he kind of wanted to keep her around. She was dumb, but she didn’t deserve to be abandoned here, left to die.

“Listen,” he said, adopting the voice of authority, a shut-up-and-listen-to-me tone he’d used more than once when things in Vietnam had gone to shit and everyone around him was turning into Jello. “We can survive this. I’ve survived worse. Those dead motherfuckers out there don’t have guns and hand-grenades.”

He looked outside. From where he stood, he could see more than twenty walking corpses. The dead didn’t like the fire—that much was obvious. They kept their distance, and as such hadn’t come near the porch. Most of them wandered in the middle of the road. They’d worked over Bilbo’s carcass, but had since abandoned it. The dog now stood on all fours, head low, glistening legs quivering like those of a newborn calf, tattered innards hanging from the ruin of its stomach.

“About twenty,” Reggie said, looking back at the others.

“Bullshit,” Crate said. “After I shot the first two, I walked to the edge of the parking lot. I looked down the road. There were a hell of a lot more than twenty coming. It’s why I shot my damned dog. He just would have kept on barking, the dumb bastard.” The old man shrugged. He looked defeated. “Would have led them right to us.”

He stepped away from them, toward the tables, where he sat down and fished a lighter and the twisted remnant of a joint from his breast pocket. After a few sparking flicks of the lighter, the joint flared up. Smoke plumed around the old man’s head, churned in the dim glow of the coolers, and he looked to Reggie like some prophet who’d been to the mountain one time too many. He raised his eyebrows, stared Reggie into the ground.

“Well?” He said.

“They can’t all have followed us,” Reggie said, looking to Cardo for conformation.

“He’s right,” Cardo said, looking at Crate. “How many did you see down the road?”

“Hard to tell,” the old man said, drawing deep on his crooked joint. The tip flared. Crate held his breath and closed his eyes, opened them a few seconds later. “A lot.”

“There weren’t more than five hundred in the streets when we left town,” Cardo said. “They’re not smart. I doubt even half of them followed us.”

“And I’m sure some of them went south when they reached the intersection.”

“How many bullets you have?”

“For this,” Crate said, lifting his rifle. “A few hundred.”

“A few hundred,” Reggie said, the tone of his voice suggesting that he really didn’t need to say any more. “Not counting our guns.”

“Yeah,” Crate said.

“Then here’s what we’re doing…”

Thirty-Two

The wound in his left arm was infected. It throbbed in time with his racing heartbeat. The flesh around the holes was livid and swollen. He’d need antibiotics before long, but at this rate he’d die of starvation first.

Richard’s legs quivered. He was beginning to wonder if he could eat handfuls of grass, or maybe from one of the many clusters of waxy mushrooms he’d encountered. He dropped to his knees and clawed through a layer of decomposing leaves and pine needles, revealed the dark and rich soil beneath, released an aroma that called to mind his uncle’s compost heap, down in Texas, back when he was a boy who’d eaten dirt once or twice, for no other reason than to see what it tasted like.

His fingers slipped into the soil. He pawed and scooped like a dog in search of a long-hidden bone, and eventually he found what he was looking for. Dirt-speckled, the earthworm slid like wriggling sandpaper down his throat. He found another, its accordion-ringed length bulging and fat. It got stuck and split in half as he tugged it from the earth, and the other half flapped back and forth. He pinched it between his fingers and tossed it into his mouth, swallowing it whole.

He took a break, and when he was certain that his stomach would not betray him, he dug and he dug, plucked a thick grub from the dirt and quickly swallowed it. Chew your food, his mom always told him, but he couldn’t—not now. Not yet.

His knees were still weak, but his stomach felt better. Time oozed by. He walked and he walked, stopping once more to fish the meager protein of a handful of worms from the earth. When he pissed, he did so with regret, watching the stream leave his body and patter onto the ground, where it was quickly absorbed. Rainfall had been steady but light, barely a drizzle most of the time, and he could only stand around for so long barely feeling droplets spatter his tongue. He wasn’t taking in as much as he was letting out, and if the sky didn’t open up real good real soon, he was in trouble.

A few minutes before he saw the shed, he knew he’d gotten himself turned around. It was the tree, the fallen one with the branch that looked like a dick. Silly, totally juvenile, the kind of puerile stuff Kimberly gave him a hard time him for, but he’d seen it on the way out of hell, and even though he was in the roughest shape he ever had been, those words—looks like a dick—had nonetheless shot through his head as he stumbled past it.

There it was again, and there was the shed, goddammit all to hell.

The gun seemed promising for a second—it would not take much. He need only bring it to his head and pop, it was all over—he could die twitching on the ground with raindrops on his face and a bellyful of earthworms. But that wasn’t his thing. He messed up, same as anyone, but quitting, giving up, it just wasn’t an option. Kimberly playfully mocked this attitude, called it macho nonsense, but it was probably the one thing they’d actually had in common, aside from a love of each other’s bodies: Kim hadn’t believed in giving up, and though she may have dressed up this determination in a slightly more righteous and noble garment, at the end of the day it was the same damned thing.

He’d save his remaining bullets for the bastards who’d done this to them, if he had the chance. And if he ran out before they were all dead? Fine.

He reached the clearing at the top of the hill, the three buildings. The place where the attack had come. The winding road leading down to the highway.

He stood in the clearing, looking around, brazen. He tried the door leading into one of the apartments, found it unlocked. Stepping in, he turned on the light and shut the door, locked it. The air was stale and meaty.

There were two rooms—a bedroom with a tiny kitchenette and a small bathroom. The bedroom looked like a hundred dorm rooms he’d partied in during his five ill-spent years at college. A bed with rumpled sheets spilling onto the floor. A scattering of beer cans, an uneven stack of skin magazines. He found a .38 Special in one of the bureau drawers, the kind of weapon a woman would keep in her purse. It was fully loaded—five bullets—and it slid neatly into his pocket.

He opened the small fridge, which contained only five cans of beer and a pack of sliced ham. The ham was slimy and smelled bad. He checked the torn label and was not surprised to see that the ham had come from Misty’s.

There was a can of beans in the cabinet, a can-opener on the counter. There was a fork lying in the sink, crusted with the remains of some other meal. He rinsed it off and shoveled beans into his mouth, downing the contents of the can within minutes. He drank water directly from the tap, and when he got tired of that he looked around until he found a plastic cup on the floor next to the bedside table.

The walk downhill was, in its own way, as difficult as had been their initial uphill trek. He was weak and tired, and he resisted the urge to give up and simply tumble downhill. Gravity tugged him along, too hard sometimes, and eventually he reached the truck he and Guy and Daniel had been thrown into, and not far from it, Daniel’s corpse, still bound to the tree.

He looked around. There was no sign of Guy.

Daniel’s corpse lifted it head, stared with lidless eyes at Richard.

“Gah,” it said.

He considered his remaining bullets, but not for long. The highway was within reach, and he was not willing to risk drawing attention to himself.

“Not now,” he said, and left.

Soon after, he reached the ranch-style house, stopping long enough to stare for a few seconds at the van, parked just where they’d left it, and he simply kept going, the gun at his side.

The ground leveled out, the sun sank into the west, and when he reached the highway, he turned left, south, toward town.

Thirty-Three

They helped Sally out of bed, out of her clothes and onto the floor, where she got down onto a padded vinyl mat and lay on her side. When the time came, she’d get on her hands and knees. She refused drugs, though Mathilda offered, and when Colleen asked about her position, Sally informed her between contractions that she’d delivered her first two children that way, and that she’d do the same now.

Mathilda launched into a spiel about natural childbirth and the disadvantages of lying on one’s back, never mind the fact that the position was the preferred choice of most doctors. She spoke with the surety of someone who knew exactly what she was talking about and wanted to make sure you knew it, and Colleen could not help but think of Kimberly. She sounded like that when she went from simply talking to educating, to opening your eyes, if she could, to the truth.

Feeling useless, Colleen stood looking down at the two women, Sally on her side, wearing only a bra, her massive stomach smooth and somehow beautiful, her back arched and her ass pointing at Mathilda, who knelt behind her, hands resting upon her thighs.

“Hey,” Sally said, looking up at Colleen and smiling. She nodded toward the floor. “Come on.”

Colleen sat beside the pregnant woman, tried to smile, could barely hold the woman’s gaze.

“We’re going to make it,” Sally said, and Colleen could only stare at her. She reached out and took Sally’s right hand.

“Does it hurt?” It was a stupid question, but Sally did not seem to care.

“Yeah,” she said. “But it’s the good kind.”

“Oh.”

Behind Sally, Mathilda said something about dilation. The child was not crowning yet, but would be soon. The window between contractions was drawing shut. In the living room, one of the children wept.

“Dammit,” Mathilda said. “Poor kids.”

“What should we do?” Colleen asked.”

“Can’t do anything,” Mathilda said. “They have to wait.”

“To hell with that,” Sally said then grunted, teeth clenched. “Get out of here. See to them.”

“I may need her here,” Mathilda said.

“Bullshit,” Sally snapped. “Need her for what? Go.”

Colleen looked up at Mathilda, eyebrows raised. Mathilda shrugged.

“Go on.”

“I’ll be back,” Colleen said, bending over and kissing Sally on the cheek. “I’m going to calm them down and—”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

She did.

The unnamed child was asleep where they’d left him, on the floor, lying on his back and supported on either side by pillows taken from one of the beds. Little Huff sat at the base of the bookcase, an oversized book containing photographs of Northern California opened before him. He’d torn out several pages.

The twin leaned against the door leading into the nursery, wailing. Above his head, the doorknob rattled. Thankfully, the deadbolt was well out of his reach.

“Hey,” she said, sliding down the wall and sitting beside him.

“I want Jack,” he said, answering the question on Colleen’s lips.

“I know, Davy,” she said, unsure if that was one of his nicknames. She patted her thigh. “Come here. I want to hold you.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s sick, baby.”

“Is he gonna be okay?”

“I think maybe he just needs his rest, kiddo.”

“He needs a nap?” The kid asked. His face was still red, his eyes wide and watery. His bottom lip quivered, and he threw himself into her arms, unleashed another round of tears.

“Aw,” she said, rocking him, her own lip quivering, her own tears flowing. She held back a scream, as much for her own sake as that of the child clinging to her chest. To their right, the doorknob turned and turned. “Come on, honey.”

She took him back to the couch, sat him down. He looked up at her, and she wondered if maybe he was cried out for now. In the bedroom, Sally gasped and growled and cursed, and Colleen stood looking down at David.

“I have a job for you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, sounding confused.

“You want to be a big boy, right?”

“Yeah,” David said, smiling. He lifted his right arm and curled his small fist toward his shoulder. “I got muscles.”

“Yes, you do,” she said, realizing with horror that the boy would bounce back a lot quicker than any of them. He was too young to have any expectations of the world. He’d never known normal, not as she and her friends had defined it, and he never would. “Strong muscles.”

“Yeah!” He flexed both arms now. She raised a finger.

“Now listen.”

“Okay.” He lowered his arms, folded his hands on his lap.

“I need to do something,” she said, and David watched her, eyes wide. His face was no longer red. His pale eyebrows no longer stood out. “I need you to watch the babies, and stay right here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t follow me.”

“Kay.”

“Okay,” she said, bending over and kissing him on the cheek.

In the hall, she slid back the deadbolt on the nursery door, watched the knob as it rattled and turned. She wondered how long Lissa’s corpse would stand there on the other side of the door, going through the same motions, trying and trying and trying to turn the knob, trying to get out.

Colleen seized the knob and, turning it, pushed into the nursery. The dead girl tumbled backward, tripped over the other dead child, which had yet to get to its feet, and landed butt-first on the floor.

“Urk,” it said, looked up at Colleen, heavy-lidded and slack-jawed, its legs across the dead twin’s back. Colleen closed the door behind her, moving quickly. Stepping around Lissa’s corpse, getting behind it, she slid a hand beneath the dead girl’s armpits, picked it up, and quickly moved to one of the cribs, where she sat it down facing the wall.

The dead twin had managed to crawl less than a foot since last she saw it. Its little bloody hands tugged at the carpet. It tried and failed to lift its head. Though its fat arms were an unhealthy shade of light gray, its tight blond curls still looked the picture of health. They bounced as the dead child’s head rose and fell, rose and fell, quivering.

It peeled away from the bloody carpet with a wet thwack. She lay it in the crib beside the dead girl, careful to not look at its face. Lissa was bad enough—the sight of the boy’s face might provide that final bit of pressure: the twig would snap, and she’d be done.

At the diaper-changing table, she scrubbed her hands with wet wipes, dropping them to the floor when she was done with them. She hadn’t gotten much blood on her fingers, but she wiped and she wiped as if her hands had been doused, stopping at last once she’d gone through nearly half the box of wipes.

The dead twin’s fingernails made little zipping noises on the surface of the small vinyl mattress within the crib. Colleen moved fast, gathering toys into her arms and dropping them into the other crib. She gathered more toys, more still, and topped them off with diapers and other items from the changing table—creams, wipes, and powder; handfuls of clothes from the chest of drawers.

The dead girl stood, wobbling, her hands gripping the plastic-covered rail running along the tops of the bars. There was a single red blossom on her blouse, just beneath her left collarbone, where the knife had gone clean through. She pressed her stomach to the bar, and Colleen winced. The crib would not hold her. Soon, gravity would do its job.

The twin struggled, a wind-up toy incapable of winding down, and the dead girl watched as Colleen opened the door, wedged it open, and pulled the other crib from the nursery and into the hall. Its wheels whispered across the carpet, and when she entered the living room, Little Huff still sat tearing pages from books. David held the unnamed child in an awkward sprawl. The infant stared into space, tugged at its spit-slick bottom lip. David looked at the crib brimming with toys, and his eyes lit up.

“Mr. Timmy,” he said, beaming, and Colleen had no idea who Mr. Timmy was, or how the kid had bounced back so quickly. There was a thud from the nursery, a wet gasp, and Colleen realized that David’s recovery was temporary. He’d remember what he’d witnessed—tonight, tomorrow night, and every night for the rest of his life, short as it may be.

“Be right back,” Colleen said, and returned to the nursery.

The dead girl lay on her back staring up at the ceiling, her lips red with blood, her cheeks stippled. The red droplets were cartoonishly bright against the pale skin of her face. The child turned its head toward Colleen and tried to sit up. Colleen considered throwing it into the crib again, but figured there was little point in that.

Tossing one of the colored blocks into the crib holding the struggling dead twin, she left the nursery, locked the door. David had set the infant aside and now reached through the bars of the crib, reaching for a plush blue caterpillar with a head of frilly pink yarn and stick-on eyes that wobbled when you moved its elongated body. Colleen retrieved the toy and handed it to the boy.

“Mr. Timmy,” he said with something like adoration.

“You did a good job,” Colleen said. In the back, Sally gasped.

“Colleen?” Mathilda said.

“Coming. One sec.”

She placed the clothes, diapers, and changing supplies on the kitchen counter, gathered all but a few of the toys to her chest and dumped them unto the floor. She placed Little Huff into the empty crib, and he immediately set upon the toys. The unnamed boy had fallen asleep upon the floor.

“Keep an eye on them,” she said to David, who sat on the couch engaged in a hushed conversation with Mr. Timmy the stuffed caterpillar. “David?”

He looked up at her, mouth open.

“Keep an eye on them, okay?”

“Okay.”

In the bedroom, Sally was on her hands and knees, inhaling and exhaling in deep, measured gasps. Blood pattered to the mat between her legs and pooled in the indentations beneath her knees. Mathilda knelt behind Sally, her hands hovering beneath the pregnant woman’s vagina. She looked like a quarterback waiting for the snap.

Colleen didn’t know where to look, suddenly felt as if she were intruding on the woman’s privacy somehow, violating her dignity. Her face grew hot.

“Blow, blow,” Mathilda said, placing a reassuring hand on Sally large left buttock. Mathilda shot a glance at Colleen. “They okay?”

“For now, yeah.”

“Good. Get down here,” Mathilda said. “Up front.”

Sally’s eyes were closed, her face a tight red knot. Beads of sweat were scattered across her forehead. Colleen knelt before her, placed a hand atop one of the woman’s hands, which were planted upon the floor, fingers splayed.

Sally’s eyes popped open, and the look in her eyes was nearly feral. Her lips drew away from her teeth, and Colleen pulled her hand away, gasped, but what she mistook for anger was actually pain, intense, unimaginable pain. Sally squeezed shut her eyes again, and her face darkened, red washing to purple.

“Okay,” Mathilda said. “It’s coming.”

“Nnnnggggh,” Sally said, quivering, regaining composure and resuming her practiced breathing exercises. She opened her eyes, looked at Colleen, and now there was only recognition and gratitude in her eyes.

“Hey,” Sally said.

“Hey.”

“We’re doing it,” she said. Colleen wasn’t entirely sure what the woman meant, but she nodded nonetheless.

The moment of serenity passed, as if it hadn’t existed at all. Sally’s face bunched up again. “Push,” Mathilda said, and Sally’s face darkened still, hundreds of small blood vessels bursting into a scattering of purple freckles across her cheeks and forehead. Sally screamed and gasped and hissed, and Mathilda told her she was doing great, one more push, one more push. The pools of blood around Sally’s knees were deeper, and the baby slipped into the world. Colleen caught a glimpse of the child’s head, bluish and bloodied and covered in meaty chunks of something, and she wondered why it was so silent—wasn’t Mathilda supposed to lift it up by its tiny feet and slap its ass, make it cry? Where was the hot water—didn’t they always need that in the movies?

Sally gasped and eased herself to the floor, onto her side once again, taking one of Colleen’s hands in both of hers.

Mathilda worked, clamping off the umbilical cord, which looked silvery-blue and oddly beautiful. She snipped it, and a bright red jet of blood spattered her face.

“Come on, come on, come, on,” she said, springing to her feet and taking the child to the place she’d prepared atop the dresser. Colleen had not noticed it until now.

The seconds dragged out, and she watched Mathilda’s hunched shoulders, aware that Sally’s eyes were on her. There was a sucking sound, followed by a moist gasp that bubbled into a quivering, puppy-like mewl. The mewl became a cry, a healthy, hearty cry, and she laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She looked down at Sally, and they cried.

Mathilda stepped toward them, the crying child wrapped tightly in a blanket, a knit cap covering its small head. Its face a tight red knot, it looked a lot like its mother.

“Say hi to your daughter,” Mathilda said.

Less than an hour later, Sally lay in bed, resting easy, her child in her arms, her gun and her copy of Lolita within reach. She was drugged, but only enough to kill the pain—she’d torn during delivery and had required stitches. Mathilda sat on the couch, shirtless, the unnamed child pressed to her breast. David sat next to her, staring into space, one bright blue wooden block clutched in his hand. Little Huff sat in the crib sucking on a teething ring.

It was a little after six. Less than two hours before dark.

“This can wait until morning,” Mathilda said with very little conviction.

“Maybe it can,” Colleen said, looking at the woman and shaking her head. “But I can’t. We need guns. We need ammunition.”

“He might be dead.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. We can hope.”

She’d gone into the bedroom, searched the pockets of both Max and his father. There’d been a small keyring in Max’s pocket, but the three keys on it matched three keys on Huff’s larger ring, which contained eleven keys. She’d pocketed the small ring, just in case, and held the larger ring in her left hand. In her right she clutched Huff’s pistol.

Three shots. She had three shots, if she ran into Samson on the way to the house. Three shots, and if those went wild and she was still alive, there was Huff’s knife, the one that she had used to slice his head from his shoulders. It was sheathed, strapped to her right ankle, atop her jeans, where it hung loosely.

“Okay?” Mathilda asked.

“Yeah,” Colleen said, nodding. Her stomach curled into something sharp and wounded. Her hands shook. She walked to the kitchen, chased a shot of whisky with another shot of whisky. The shots went down like fire, and Colleen wondered where Samson kept his pot. Something, anything, to make the next step easier; something to kill the edge.

You don’t need that stuff, she could hear her mom saying, the dead woman’s words an amalgam of countless past lectures. She could see Daniel now, rolling his eyes, and the hurt on their mother’s face. It’ll just turn you into an idiot. You just need God and the strength He gives you.

Colleen closed her eyes. “Help me,” she said, not entirely sure who she was talking to. “Please.”

Before leaving, she piled a third shot of whisky atop the other two. She needed all the help she could get.

The fourth key she tried opened the lock on the lone door leading into the courtyard. She pushed it open, saw only trees and a path where part of her expected to see walking corpses. There was the whisper of the breeze through the trees, the occasional chirp of a bird, the snap of a twig, but little else. She walked downhill, eyes darting from shadow to darkening shadow, tree to tree, but soon she realized that Samson could be anywhere, just anywhere at all, and she was wasting her time, jumping at every shadow and shape. If he were out here he’d come, and she’d face him, whatever the outcome.

She moved downhill with ease, branches snapping beneath her feet, and soon she came to place where the ground leveled out before the three small buildings, the place of the attack. The truck was gone, and though she tried for a minute to resist the urge, she could not stop herself from searching the ground. There was no sign of Guy’s severed penis. If one of their attackers had not taken it, the elements had. She froze, and it all came raging up like vomit, threatened to kick her legs out from under her and leave her crying and screaming in the dirt.

“No,” she said. There would be time to panic and cry later, time to mourn, time to scream herself to sleep, if that’s what she needed to do. But not now.

She tried the door leading into the cabin on the right. It was locked. The door leading into the middle cabin was not. Raising the pistol, drawing back the hammer, she turned the knob and stepped into the small apartment.

She moved quickly, finding nothing save tattered pornographic magazines beside the bed, moldy smelling towels in the bathroom cabinets, and an empty bean can on the counter beside the small kitchen sink. The cold cuts in the fridge had come from Misty’s, and had long since gone bad.

Outside, she scanned her surroundings. Between the trees there were only trees. Between those, trees, and so on. The sky was gray with the threat of rain, and she could not get a handle on which way was which. She moved downhill, and though she repeatedly thought of herself as moving south, that was probably not the case. It wasn’t long before she spotted the truck, somewhere far along a winding trail that moved to her right, away from the main road in whichever direction.

She reached the truck, the same truck they’d thrown Guy against. There was nothing in the glove compartment, and the rifle rack in the back window was empty. The keys were in the ignition. She touched them, considered it for a second, shot it down. They may need the truck later, and she needed to move in silence.

She eased the driver side door closed, turned around.

“God,” she said. She was not praying.

Guy stumbled toward her, head low. His face was a marbled bluish-grey, his hands bound behind his back and trailing a single length of rope. A smaller length of rope trailed his left foot. He wore no pants, no underwear. There was a dark round hole where his penis had been. He wore socks and shoes. His upper legs were the same bluish-grey as his face. His ankles were dark and swollen and covered in seeping black blood-blisters.

“No,” she said. “Jesus, no.”

Her lover’s corpse lifted its head, and its sunken and faded eyes widened. It opened its mouth, closed it. It picked up its pace, nearly stumbling.

She raised her gun, got Guy’s face in her sights, weeping as the distance between them closed.

“Guy?” She asked, though she knew there was no point, that she was doing exactly what the news had urged everyone to not do. This was not Guy.

It opened its mouth again, and its shoulders jerked left and right, left and right with its struggles to be free of its bindings, the space between them closing, closing…

Tears blurred her vision, and she brought her left hand to her face, squeezed her eyes shut. Sobs rocked her body, and when she opened her eyes her dead boyfriend’s face was inches from hers and moving in, mouth open, lips drawn back in a snarl that suggested neither anger nor hunger. There was nothing there—nothing in its face, nothing in its eyes.

Gasping, she took a step back, pressed the barrel of her gun to its forehead and pushed, hard. The dead thing stumbled away from her, opened its mouth again, moaning in silence.

She lowered the gun, looked at it. Her hands shook.

Three bullets.

“I’m sorry, hon,” she said, pocketing her gun and stepping around and behind Guy’s corpse. It tried to spin in place, followed her movements, tottering, nearly stumbling once more. “I just can’t do it. Not now.”

Seizing the long rope that hung from its wrists, she walked to the nearest tree, gently tugging Guy’s walking remains toward her. The dead thing’s head swung from side to side, and it took a single shaky step backward.

“Come on.” Another tug, more forceful this time, and the thing seemed to listen. It took a second step backward, a third, and Colleen wound the rope around the trunk of a young but sturdy pine, tied it off, three times for good measure. As she finished the final knot, Guy’s corpse moved in, leaning forward, mouth open and eager, the same nothing look on its face.

“I’ll come back,” she said, looking into its oddly sunken eyes, wondering what—if anything—remained of Guy. Was there a soul in there somewhere? Had there ever been? “I promise I won’t let you stay like this.”

A few minutes later, she found another living corpse. It had been scalped. Its nose was gone, as were its lips and ears. Its grinning face was a cracked mask of dried blood.

It was naked, bound upright to a tree, its skin mottled and jaundiced, deeply bruised where the rope had worn into the flesh. Its feet were black and swollen. There was a massive oval-shaped wound on its chest, and its throat had been torn out. It looked at her, leaning forward and opening its mouth, snapping like a weak and dying animal.

“Daniel,” she said, and her dead brother stared at her. She saw him as he’d been just a few days ago, sitting on the couch and smoking a joint, flipping the hair out of his face, always flipping the fucking hair out of his face.

She raised the gun and shot him between the eyes, and that was it. He was just a dead kid tied to a tree now.

“Come on!” she roared, and the forest spun around her. “Come out, you mother fucker. Come on!”

No one came. Down the trail, Guy’s corpse turned toward her. She walked back to the main road, head low. Her dead boyfriend’s head turned to follow her.

THIRTY-FOUR

The plan was simple enough: go upstairs and shoot every last walking corpse from one of the windows. They had enough guns and enough bullets within the store to get started, but not enough bullets to finish the job. Reggie had several cases of bullets and shells in the back of his truck, but there would be no going out front to retrieve them—too risky. The old man claimed to have enough bullets for his rifle in his apartment out back, and for now, none of the dead things had found their way back there.

Cardo sat at one of the tables, sipping tepid Coke from a can and watching the old man pace. He’d taken a revolver that had belonged to one of the men who’d tried to rape Stacy, and Reggie had seemed happy to have his Colt back. Misty stood by the blinds, silently watching as the crowd of walking corpses grew. Stacy—God help him, Cardo actually thought Starshine was a pretty name for her—sat across from Cardo, staring at him with worried eyes and going back and forth between chewing her thumbnail and plucking at the crystal hanging from the twine around her neck.

He looked her in the eyes, gave her a half-hearted smile, which she mirrored before looking down. His gaze crept to her breasts, to the cloth above her nipples, and he thought that maybe he’d do just about anything to make sure she made it through this with him.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said, whispering.

“You think so?” Her voice was so low it was as if she were mouthing the words.

“I do.”

Crate walked over to the door. Misty drifted away, and the old man gently parted the blinds and stared through the opening. Then he walked over to where Cardo and Stacy sat and looked down at them.

“Well,” he said, a little too loud. Cardo winced. “Let’s do it.”

“Okay,” Cardo said, standing.

As planned, Misty and Stacy retreated upstairs, where some medical supplies, drinks and canned goods had been carried. If the dead got into the building, they’d move the fight to the narrow staircase. Cardo hoped it would not come to that, despite the fact that it could make things easier.

He followed Crate into the back room, past the door leading into the walk-in freezer and to the door leading into the back yard. The old man unlocked the door, moving slowly. Easing it open, he looked back at Cardo.

“Wait right here,” he said.

“I know,” Cardo said, annoyed. When Reggie had said that he’d be willing to go out to Crate’s house and retrieve the bullets, the old man had insisted upon doing it himself. When Cardo offered to accompany him, he’d refused. “I don’t like people in my house,” he’d said, glancing at the old lady. Nothing more had been said.

The old man crept into the trash-strewn back yard, looking left and right and creeping away from the store. They had a little less than three hours of daylight left, but dusk seemed to have come early. In the shadowy clearing behind the store, the air was cool and damp and reeked of charred wood and burnt flesh.

The ground gradually sloped upward moving away from the back of the store, and the small shack was located about one hundred feet from where Cardo stood. There was a single window on the side of the building facing him, the east facing wall. He couldn’t see the door leading into the shack, and assumed it was to the left, on the south facing wall, an assumption that proved correct: the old man reached the south side of the tiny building, there was the jangle of keys, and he slid from sight.

Cardo held his breath, stepping from beneath the doorframe and onto the bleached shells that lined the back of the store, head cocked, listening. Waiting and watching.

“Come on,” he said, checking his watch again. The old man had been in there for nearly two minutes. There were footsteps above and behind him. A floorboard creaked.

Two gunshots punched through the silence.

The unused and cluttered guestroom was perfect. Sitting on the edge of the box-covered bed, Reggie looked down through the window and at the walking corpses below.

He dry-swallowed a single Black Molly and thumbed the safety on his Colt. It was accurate, and he was a good shot, but from this high and in this light? He was bound to miss. His shotgun was useless. If he were down there, in the thick of it, then yeah, the shotgun would come in handy. But not here.

The old man’s rifle would do the trick, and the old man’s rifle was downstairs with the old man.

When the shooting started, he’d have to be accurate. The noise would no doubt draw the dead people to the building. If Cardo’s descriptions were correct, it merely took one of them to recognize the front door for what it was, a door, and then they’d follow suit and swarm the place. He had to be accurate and he had to be fast, because he’d be unable to shoot any dead folks who slipped beneath the protection of the angled tin overhang that ran across the front of the store. Once they were on the boardwalk, it would not be long before they were inside.

He leaned forward, slowly, and watched the congregation of walking corpses drift and sway in the street below. The burn pile smoldered and flickered. Save for the lower legs with shoe-clad feet that radiated from the circle of the burn-pile like spokes from the center of a wheel, the shapes in the pile were no longer recognizably human.

“They’re doing it,” Misty whispered behind him. He got up and followed her into the hall. She took his place at the window and he made his way to the rear facing window near the top of the stairs. It was located directly above the back door, and offered a clean view of the little shack the old man called home and the two-car garage beyond.

The floor creaked beneath his feet, and when the shots came he did not move. Instead, he took a single step away from the window and stared, watching. Gun drawn, Cardo ran across the yard toward the little shack.

Reggie took the stairs two at a time.

Someone cried out in pain, cursed and gasped. It did not sound like the old man.

Gun raised beside his head, Cardo stood with his back to the small building, breath held, listening. The sound of hammering feet caught his attention, and Reggie appeared within the store’s back door. Cardo waved him back, brought a silencing finger to his lips. He cast a quick glance to either side of the building. From where he stood, he could not see down the right side of the building, but his view of the left side was relatively unobstructed. So far, the coast was clear.

There was another pained gasp. Cardo moved along the building, rounded the corner, and nearly bumped into Crate as the old man stepped out of his shack.

“Jesus fuck,” the old man said, slamming the door behind him, the pistol in his right hand twitching toward Cardo. A cloth sack hung from the old man’s left hand.

“Shh,” Cardo hissed, baring his teeth. “What the hell happened?”

“Come on,” the old man said, setting down the bag and advancing along the side of the shack, toward the rear.

A man lay curled beneath a tree, both blood-slick hands pressed to his stomach. Cardo shot a quick glance back at the old man’s shack, tried to get a read on what had gone down. The lone window on this side of the building was shattered. The old man had seen movement from inside and had opened fire.

Crate took three quick steps toward the man and kicked at something. A gun spun away from the fallen man, who looked up at Crate and Cardo, his face pale and twisted.

“The fuck you creeping around back here for, son?” Crate said, and then he stiffened. “Oh.”

“What?” Cardo said, standing beside the old man. The kid on the ground was a filthy and battered mess. From the look of his face, Cardo figured he’d taken quite a beating. There was a hole in his left forearm, which was livid with infection.

“He was here a few days ago,” The old man said. “He and his friends. Damn.”

“Help her,” the wounded kid said. “They’re crazy.”

There was a footfall behind them, and Cardo whirled, raised his gun. It was Reggie.

“We need to get inside right now,” Reggie said, looking past them and to the kid writhing on the ground. “The hell?”

“Crate knows him.”

“I didn’t know,” the old man said. “I saw something moving and—”

“Save it,” Reggie said. “We got to get back.”

While Cardo hadn’t been looking, two dead men had crept along the right side of the store and now advanced toward them.

“Take care of them,” Reggie whispered, and when the old man moved toward the two dead men Reggie slapped a hand onto his shoulder. The old man shot him an ugly glance, looked down at his large brown hand as if maybe it was a smear of shit on his shoulder.

“No shooting,” Reggie said, and recognition drained into the old man’s eyes.

“Oh,” Crate said. “Right.”

Crate vanished into his shack, closing the door behind him and locking it. Reggie looked at Cardo, frowning.

“He said he doesn’t like anyone in his house.”

“Oh,” Reggie said, dropping to his knees beside the fallen man, the smell of a fresh gut-shot filling his nostrils and threatening to drag him into the jungle.

“You know how crazy old people can get.”

“Hey,” Reggie said, tapping the wounded kid’s cheek.

“Yuh,” the kid said, looking up at Reggie, pale lips quivering.

“We’re going to move you.”

“Christ.”

“It’s going to hurt, and I need you to bite down on something, okay—” Reggie thought for a second, pulled his leather wallet from his pocket. “Bite down on this, okay? Don’t scream.”

“Don’t scream,” the kid said, sucked air through clenched teeth. Tears raced across dried blood, cut clean little tracks through the dirt on his swollen cheeks.

The old man emerged from his shack wielding a hammer. He stomped over to meet the first walking corpse, and with three quick whacks the thing crumpled to the ground. The second one took only two whacks, and the old man looked back at them, gasping, the wiry thicket of his beard rising and falling upon his heaving bony chest.

Reggie squeezed the wounded kid’s hands in his own, and it was as if both of them were trying to break bones. He found his eyes darting toward the kid’s neck in search of dog-tags, and he wondered if this is where it would all come to an end.

“What’s your name?”

“Ruh,” the kid said.

“Rick?”

“Richard.”

“Okay, Rich,” Reggie said, letting go of the kid’s hands. “It’s almost time, man.”

“Heads up,” Cardo said, and the old man turned, watched as the third corpse—an elderly woman whose breasts hung from her ribs in a wet fold of torn flesh and yellow fat—walked toward them. He took her down with one swing.

“Okay.” Reggie held his wallet before Richard’s face. The kid looked at it for a few seconds, as if he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Then he opened his mouth, and Reggie slipped a corner of the wallet between his teeth. Richard bit down hard, and Reggie looked up at Cardo.

“Let’s go.”

Thirty-Five

After the first five or six shots, Reggie found himself wishing for earplugs. By the time he got to twenty, it didn’t really matter. His ears had been pummeled, and the world was now set to the sound of a constant, muted hum.

Outside, the dead fell. They fell and they fell and they fell. A few of them seemed to have some idea what was happening: they looked up, toward the sky, and backed away from their fallen brothers and sisters. Most of them simply shuffled along and fell. A few noticed Reggie and looked up at him with nothing on their dead faces. At that moment, they gained focus and moved on the building, and Reggie blasted their brains onto the faces of those standing behind them.

“Like fish in a barrel,” the old man said, sitting on the bed beside Reggie, gaunt hands on his knobby knees. He was close, far too close. He smelled old and sour and between blasts Reggie could hear him licking his lips.

“There,” Reggie said, finishing the first box of bullets. “Twenty rounds, and I missed once.”

“Good. My turn,” Crate said, and Reggie handed him the rifle. While the old man reloaded, Reggie worked the crowd with his pistol. He was less accurate—a few shots went wild, tearing through shoulders and throats—but he managed to drop four of the corpses nearest the overhang before the old man was done.

“Okay,” Crate said, settling in, raising the rifle, leaning forward.

Before going upstairs, Reggie had done what he could for the kid, cleaning his would with peroxide and packing it with gauze. He hadn’t been a medic in Vietnam, “But by the end,” he’d told Cardo, “we all knew how to push guts back into someone’s stomach.”

Crate had fired twice, but only one of his rounds had connected, entering the kid’s abdomen less than three inches above the base of his penis and blowing a portion of his lower intestine through his back. His spine was intact, but that didn’t matter—the kid was going to die. The sooner the better, for his sake.

Cardo sat beside him in the back room, holding his hand. The kid shook and wept and ground his teeth against the pain, and Cardo fed him shot after shot of rum from a paper cup.

Upstairs, Reggie and the old man rained lead down upon the walking dead, and the kid jumped every damned time gunfire pierced the silence. He’d tried to stuff wads of toilet paper into the kid’s ears, but Richard had only picked them out with quivering, bloodstained fingers.

“Gah,” the kid said, his eyes wild and searching.

“Hey,” Cardo said. “I’m here.”

“Oh. The pain is fading.”

“That’s good, man.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

He could see the distrust in the kid’s eyes, right behind the pain and the confusion.

“I’m dying.” It was not a question.

“You just,” Cardo began, looking for the right words and finding only the expected ones, the obvious ones: “You just need to rest, Rich. Save your strength.”

“Cardo.”

“Yeah?”

The kid looked down at Cardo’s belt, dragged his gaze back up to his face. “That your car out there?”

“Shh.”

“The cop car,” the kid said. “In the garage.”

“What?”

“You’ve got to go there,” Richard said, and his hand sought the bottle of rum. Cardo poured him another shot, fed it to him. He coughed, spraying most of the liquor onto Cardo’s hand. “You have to help her.”

“Who?”

“They’re all dead,” the kid said. “Except for Colleen. She’s still alive. One of them said she was still alive.”

The kid fell silent. Cardo tried to give him another shot of rum, but most of it ran down Richard’s swollen face. He said a few more things, none of which made much sense, and then he passed out.

Cardo sat with him for a few minutes, watching his chest rise and fall and listening to the train of gunfire from above, wondering if maybe he should put one round into the kid’s head.

The old man burned through twenty rounds and passed the rifle back to Reggie, manned the window while Reggie reloaded. Crate had been wrong: he’d had fourteen boxes of bullets in his shack—two hundred and eighty rounds. Two forty left, and there were maybe seventy walking corpses down below, give or take.

He took his place at the window and opened fire. The bodies fell, were heaped like sandbags across the parking lot.

They had this. They had it by the balls.

Cardo stepped from the back room and into the store. Stacy sat behind the counter, watching television with the volume down, and Misty stood at the door, watching through a slim opening in the blinds. She looked back at him.

“How is he?” She whispered, and someone upstairs fired the rifle.

He waited until he was standing beside her to answer: “Dying.”

“Poor kid,” she said, pausing as another volley of shots popped through the silence. “They were all pretty nice. I wonder what happened to them.”

“Same thing that’s happening to everyone else.”

Bang. Bang, bang.

“I would have though Huff’s place was safe.”

“Who’s Huff?”

“Huffington Niebolt,” she said. The shots were so loud here, directly beneath the room in which Crate and Reggie took turns at bat. “Not too far up the road. You can’t miss it. He sold doors and windows and things. Lots of land. Up the hill and out of the way. That’s where they all went. One of Huff’s sons took them.”

“Oh,” Cardo said, leaning forward and gazing though the blinds in time to see one of the dead things go down face first. In places, the bodies had fallen three deep. “He said they were all dead, all except for someone named Colleen.”

“Colleen was one of them,” Misty said, looking up at him. “She seemed nice.”

They’re insane, he’d said, and Cardo wondered if that had just been delirium and pain talking.

“Need anything?” He asked, and Misty shook her head. Another gun blast, and Stacy looked at Cardo. On the TV, words ticked by beneath the CBS eye.

“Huh?” She asked, wincing in anticipation of another gunshot.

“Get you anything?”

“Get us out of here, maybe.”

Two shots, back to back.

He stepped into the back, crouching beside the kid. Richard looked dead but wasn’t. His chest rose and fell, and Cardo knew that he could go on this way for a long time. He touched the kid’s boiling forehead and then stood, meaning to go upstairs and take a look at the action from above. He glanced at the back door and the kid’s words stopped him.

The cop car. In the garage.

He eased open the back door and stepped outside, looking around. Aside from the three bodies, there was no sign of the dead. He stepped across the shells and onto the grass, retrieved the hammer from where the old man had dropped it, and walked past the shed and to the ramshackle double garage.

Both doors were down, but the small side door was unlocked. There was very little light inside. The place smelled of grease and gasoline, wet earth and mold, and something else. There was an old pickup truck in front of him, jacked up on cinderblocks. Beside it, a Beistle police cruiser.

Glancing back to make sure the coast was clear, he walked to the front of the truck and lifted one of the garage doors, let in some fading evening light.

Cruiser number four—Tasgal’s car. Bloated and nearly unrecognizable, Clark’s body was slouched in the passenger seat. All four windows were up, holding back most of the stench.

Bang, bang, bang—the shots just kept on coming, and Cardo backed out of the garage, looked around. The broken window caught his eye, and he walked toward Crate’s shack, peered into the window.

I don’t like people going in my house.

The smell hit him. Bound and gagged and visibly dead, Eric Tasgal lay upon the floor of the old man’s apartment, staining the carpet at the foot of the bed and trying to sit up.

“God,” he said, and his dead partner looked at him. Its eyes widened. Cardo pulled his gun.

“Oh, shit,” the old man said.

“What?” Reggie asked, sitting on the other side of the bed, facing the hall and pressing the tip of his right forefinger into his ear, working it.

“Two of them are on the porch.”

“Just two?” Reggie asked, getting up. There were fewer than forty of the walking dead things left, and they were having trouble getting past the bodies heaped before the entrance to the store.

“I think so,” Crate said. “Hard to hell.”

Checking his gun, he stood up and left the room. Misty and Stacy were at the bottom of the stairs. They looked terrified.

“They’re at the door,” Misty said.

“I know,” Reggie said, following Stacy’s gaze. The wounded kid had rolled onto his side and drawn his knees as close to his chest as his condition would allow. Blood spread in a dark splotch upon the surface of the bindings. “How many?”

“Four,” Stacy said, and the back door slammed open.

“You old fucking bitch,” Cardo said, pushing past Stacy and pinning Misty to the wall, pressing the barrel of his gun into the soft flesh of her cheek. Stacy screamed, got herself out of the way, and Reggie raised his Colt, pointed it directly at Cardo’s face.

“Hey, man,” he said. “The fuck are you doing?”

“What did you do?” Cardo growled, pressing harder.

The kid on the floor moaned, and the old man just kept shooting.

“I don’t know what—”

“You’re lying,” Cardo said, twisting the barrel of his pistol against Misty’s cheek, like he was trying to drill into her head.

“Cardo,” he said, not wanting to kill this man he’d just saved. His trigger finger was slick. “Put the gun down and tell me what you think she did.”

The old lady wept, and upstairs Crate squeezed off another round. Stacy stood with her mouth open and her hand pressed to her crystal. At her feet, the wounded kid mumbled.

“My partner,” Cardo snapped, shooting a glance at Reggie. His eyes were wild, a look Reggie had seen before, and he was no longer trying to control his volume. “Two cops are out there, and they’re both dead.”

“God,” Misty said, bringing her veined and wrinkled hands to her face, mashing her cheeks and pressing deep lines into her brow. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. It was Charles. And Crate. He, he—” Her words dissolved into unintelligible sobs.

Cardo let go of her, stepped back, and she slid down the wall, silently weeping.

Reggie stared at Cardo, lowered his weapon. Out front, the door rattled in its frame. Upstairs, Crate fired two more rounds.

“He didn’t hear us,” Cardo said, speaking once more in hushed tones, his breathing rapid. Reggie could see the hammering pulse in the man’s neck.

Reggie looked down at the old woman, unsure whether or not what he felt was anger or pity. She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, and Stacy screamed.

The wounded kid had seized her ankle in both hands and tried to bite her calf. She kicked his face with the other foot, lost her balance, and stumbled through the open back door and onto her ass.

Reggie shot Richard’s corpse through the head.

“Damn it,” Cardo said, rushing past Reggie and helping Stacy to her feet. Behind her, four dead bodies crept toward the back door—a shirtless boy in swim trunks, no older than ten when we was alive, now a pale and wasted thing with a ragged and empty black hole where its stomach had been; a lipless naked woman covered in deep bite marks. A man in a hospital gown, its head bound in stained bandages, its left arm in a cast covered in sketches, names, and scrawled messages; a jawless, handless, sexless thing with a wild shock of bloodied blond hair and surprised, lidless eyes.

Conserving bullets, he shot the most able-bodied among them, slamming the door in the faces of the handless thing and the child. The lock clicked home, and one of the things threw itself against the door.

“Should have shot them,” Cardo said. “They’re going to draw more.”

“Dammit,” Reggie said, frozen in place, unsure of what his next movie should be. Too much was happening too fast, and it was like he was on his stomach with mud in his mouth and bullets buzzing overhead. Out front, the door rattled and rattled. Soon it would give, the bell would jingle, and however many of the things were left would get inside.

There were footfalls on the stairs, and Crate appeared, eyes wild, rifle at the ready.

“Get upstairs,” the old man said, and then he noticed Misty sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. He bent over, helped her to her feet, and Reggie watched Cardo.

“Upstairs,” Cardo said to Stacy, who nodded once and hammered up the stairs.

“What’s wrong, woman?” Crate asked.

“Oh, God, Crate. They know we—”

“They know we’re in here,” Cardo said, taking the woman by the shoulders and gently leading her to the foot of the stairs. “Now go.”

She looked back, frozen.

“Go,” Crate said. “I’ll be up in a little while.”

She went.

Reggie looked at Cardo, eyebrows raised, and the old man left.

“What are we doing?” Reggie asked. It sounded like there were now more than two dead things outside the back door.

“Go upstairs, keep shooting them,” Cardo said, looking toward the door leading into the store. “I’m going to take care of this.”

“You need a hand?”

“No,” he said, looking away, eyes distant. “Won’t take long.”

“Okay.”

Cardo stepped into the store, and Reggie plodded up the stairs. The bedroom door at the end of the hall was closed, and Stacy sat on the edge of the bed in the spare room, where Reggie and Crate had launched their assault.

She looked back at him, eyes wide, and her expression of fear softened when she realized it was him.

“She’s in her room,” Stacy said. “I heard her crying.”

Reggie walked to the window. Most of the dead folks down there were actually dead, but the crowd pressing in on the front door was large enough to break through and overwhelm them.

“What’s happening?” She asked.

“We’re waiting on Cardo.”

“Then what?”

“I really don’t know,” he said.

He checked his Colt. Three bullets remained, and the magazine in his pocket was full—he had a total of eleven shots.

Reggie tossed the four shotgun shells from his pocket onto the bed, grabbed his shotgun from where he’d left it atop the cluttered dresser, and offered it to Stacy.

“I really don’t want that,” she said.

“Watch.” He cracked the barrel, removed and replaced the shells, snapped it shut, and went through it once more. “And here’s the hammer. You cock it like this. Got it?”

“I don’t want to.” She was almost crying.

“Take it.” He said, taking his place at the window. “Wait at the top of the stairs. Don’t cock the thing until you know it’s one of them coming up.”

“And if it’s Crate?”

“It won’t be.”

“God,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, and Reggie turned his back on her. He took aim, steadied his hand, and pulled the trigger.

The interior of the store was dim. What little light remained outside was blocked by the bodies pressed against the door, rattling it in its frame.

The old man grunted behind the ice cream cooler, pushing it toward the door, and Cardo crushed down the desire to shoot him on the spot. Before he did, he had to know, had to get some idea of what had happened here.

“Hey,” the old man said, looking up. His rifle rested on the checkout counter, between the large jar of pickled eggs and the chainsaw. “Give me a hand with th—”

Cardo thrust his left hand into the old man’s beard, wrapped his fingers around Crate’s throat.

“Gah,” Crate said, going for the pistol hanging from his hip. Cardo beat him to it, wrenching the gun from the holster and pressing the barrel to the side of Crate’s head.

“What happened?”

The old man croaked. Spittle flew from his mouth, beaded in the wiry yellow hair of his beard. Cardo loosened his grip.

“What the hell?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

The old man stared at him, and Cardo could see the indecision in his eyes, the guilt. “Oh,” he said, and Cardo tightened his grip, dug his fingers into the old man’s flesh. Crate brought his hands up and tugged at Cardo’s wrist. Failing that, he pawed Cardo’s chest.

“Oh?” Cardo asked, and he felt himself unraveling. He’d been here before, not four years ago, when a perp had smashed a glass beer mug across his face, breaking his nose. When Cardo had gotten out of the hospital, he’d gone to the police station and confronted the man in his cell, got his hands around the bastard’s throat. Reality had set in before he’d gotten to do any lasting damage, a reality that no longer existed.

“Huh,” the old man said, gasping. He tried to claw at Cardo’s face, and Cardo pushed him against the ice cream cooler. The door rattled and rattled, dead hands slapping at the glass. The old man’s boots kicked and skidded across the tile, and Cardo pushed him over to the door, slammed his back to the blinds, which bent and parted. Dead eyes peered through the openings.

“What happened?” Cardo growled, and the fear and pain in the old man’s eyes did something to him, made him feel good, like what he was doing—what he was about to do—was the right thing. The only thing. “Why did you kill them?”

He loosened his grip again.

“We didn’t kill anybody,” Crate said, his bushy eyebrows drawing together. There was fear in his eyes, yes, but there was also anger. “The one in the car was dead.”

“Clark.”

“Yeah. He came back. Tasgal shot him.”

“And Eric?”

“Clark bit him. We were scared, goddammit.” There was no apology in his voice. “We took care of him, but when he fell asleep—”

“You tied him up.” He pulled the old man toward him, drove him into the door. The blinds came free and crashed to the floor at Crate’s ankles. The first dead man to have reached the door was pressed to the glass, its right arm pinned against its chest, its nose broken and mashed to its face. Its mouth hung open. Its lips were dark with dried blood. The glass was streaked with filth. The dead pressed in around it.

“Yes.”

“He came to you for help and you tied him up and let him die?” Cardo growled, spinning the old man around and pressing him to the glass, so that he was face to face with the dead man and those behind it.

The old man screamed, tried to push himself away from the door. Cardo let go of him, took several steps backward. Crate jerked away from the door, turned to face Cardo, massaging his throat.

He looked at the rifle on the counter to his left, and the look on his face was not one of hope but of acceptance. He was not fast enough to reach it.

Cardo put a bullet through Crate’s right leg, all but severing it at the knee. The old man screamed and collapsed to the floor, long fingers probing his ruined knee, blood spurting and pooling. Cardo’s aim was perfect—his hand was like a rock. The second bullet tore through Crate’s left shoulder.

His mouth contorting into a pained rictus, the old man squealed. It was a horrible sound, somehow infant-like in its raw simplicity. Crate collapsed onto his wounded shoulder, gasping.

Cardo’s next bullet shattered the glass door and punched a hole in the face of the dead man that had, a second before, been smashed against the door. The lifeless thing crashed forward in a chirping rain of glass, and the dead behind it followed, tumbling and spilling, uncoordinated limbs flapping.

Pocketing the old man’s pistol, Cardo retrieved the rifle from the counter and took a few steps backward. He heard the others hammering on the back door and the sound of heavy footfalls overhead.

“I’m okay,” he yelled at the ceiling. “Everything is okay.”

The corpse Cardo had shot lay facedown in a spreading black puddle. The three who’d tumbled in behind it had yet to regain their feet. They crawled toward the wounded old man, mouths open and eager.

“Mother fucker,” Crate said. His left arm lay useless beneath him. His right reached, fingers clawing at the tile. He pumped his left leg, tried to find some purchase, to push himself along the floor, away from the dead, who stepped and stumbled into the store, one after another.

Five, eight, twelve, and then Cardo stopped counting. They saw the old man. In whatever strange way that they discerned the living from the dead, they saw their wounded prey and they moved in, encircled him, grabbing and tugging and biting.

The old man screamed and screamed, went from sounding like an infant to no longer sounding human at all. A dead woman with a swollen bruise for a face managed to tear away what little tissue held his right leg together at the knee, sliding the severed limb from his blood-soaked pants leg and pressing the wet stump to her lips, sucking and gnawing. The dead were the only ones who enjoyed things now.

They rolled Crate onto his stomach and tore away his shirt and pants. The old man looked at Cardo, tears streaming from his eyes. He tried to say something but managed only to scream garbled nonsense. Cardo raised the rifle, got the old man’s face in his sights. Crate looked hopeful.

Cardo lowered the rifle and watched the hope on the old man’s face twist into something else. He watched a little longer, and then he left. By the time Cardo was halfway up the stairs, the old man had stopped screaming.

“They’re in,” Reggie said. There were maybe thirty walking corpses left outside. They clambered over the heaped dead and vanished beneath the corrugated tin overhang.

“Oh, no,” Stacy said, standing up and looking at the door, an expression of pure terror on her face.

“Hey,” Reggie said, walking to where she stood and taking both of her hands, leading one of them to the crystal that hung between her breasts. “Hey?”

“Oh, God...”

“We’re going to be okay, okay?”

There were footfalls on the stairs, slow and plodding.

“No...”

“Yes,” he said. It felt like a lie. “Wait here.”

Pistol raised, he stepped into the hallway and approached the stairwell. Cardo loafed toward him, head hung low. He held the old man’s rifle.

“They’re inside,” he said, looking up at Reggie.

“I know.”

“Here,” Cardo said, handing the rifle to Reggie, who followed him into the bedroom. Stacy gasped and threw her arms around Cardo. He held her, and the two of them stood there for a few seconds, eyes squeezed shut, upper bodies rocking back and forth. Reggie loaded the rifle, his eyes on Cardo and the woman. Jealousy stirred in his chest, and he choked it down. It didn’t make sense, not now. Or maybe it did, more than ever, he really wasn’t sure. Whatever—it wasn’t something he had time for.

Cardo pulled away from the embrace and sat on the edge of the bed, pressed his face into his hands, and wept. Reggie stood in the doorway, listening, waiting.

“I left him,” Cardo said, looking up at Reggie with tears running down his stubbly cheeks. “God. I let them… I let them…”

“I know, man.” Reggie said, and he thought of the guy in Citrus Heights, the guy who’d accused him of trying to kidnap and rape the boy. “You did what you had to do. It’s okay.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It is, man. It’s gotta be.”

Downstairs, in the back room, something—a broom or a mop or something—struck the floor. Cardo stared at him. His cheeks were wet with tears, but Reggie thought maybe the man was done crying for now. Stacy sat beside him, wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Yeah, for a time there it could have gone either way—she could have been his or she could have been Cardo’s, and she was Cardo’s now.

“I’ve got this,” Reggie said and left, took his place at the top of the stairs.

“Come on,” he yelled. “I’m up here. Come on.”

The first corpse came into view. Reggie did not miss.

It didn’t take very long. Within an hour, the last walking corpse was taken down, and as the sun dipped behind the trees and the shadows reached from within the forest to reclaim the world, they took what they needed and, carefully stepping over the heaped and fallen dead, packed the truck with supplies and left.

Thirty-Six

Colleen reached the van as the last few drops of light bled from the sky. The world around her faded into ever-darkening shades of blue. The van was unlocked. The keys dangled from the ignition. She could leave, yes, but where would she go? What would she do?

She allowed her fingertips to linger on the chrome-plated door-handle for just a few seconds more and then she faced the sprawling ranch-style house, a squat remnant from fifties suburbia utterly out of place perched here at the mouth of hell.

The front door was unlocked. She stepped into the entry room, left the door open behind her to let in what little light remained. The air was stale, same as before, but there was another scent in the air, a lingering trace of something new. She could not put her finger on it.

Her eyes adjusted, and a shape coalesced at her feet. Her heart jerked in her chest, she grew cold, and then she realized that the heaped and malformed body on the floor was merely their bags, left there just days ago.

She felt the wall, found the light switch. One functional bulb remained in the chandelier. Its glow was weak and sickly, and the ornate curls of the chandelier were furred with dust. She closed the door behind her, locked it, and stared at the travel bags at her feet.

She dropped to her knees and pulled one of the bags onto her lap, unzipped it, and pressed her nose into the clothes within. It was Kimberly’s bag, and it smelled just like her, just like her house. Crying, Colleen inhaled until the smell of her friend was no more and there was only the old and musty reek of the house and the barely-there hint of whatever it was.

Zipping shut her friend’s bag, she rose to her feet and moved through the bead curtain and, pressing close to the wall, into the living room. She found another light-switch, but the overhead bulbs in the living room were dead. There was a standing lamp on the other side of the room, near the television, but she did not want to pull away from the wall to cross the open space. Suddenly, she did not want to be there at all, and she cursed herself for not getting into the van and simply leaving.

The guns could be anywhere, even here in the living room, stashed beneath the large couch, but she didn’t think so. They were in the back, down the hall and past the bathroom, somewhere behind the door with the heavy padlock.

Gun raised and cocked, she reached the bathroom and realized what she had smelled: shit and piss. She turned on the light and gasped. The sink was spattered with dried blood and bloody, wadded facecloths. The toilet seat was up, and a large black curl of human waste rested at the bottom of the bowl.

Colleen reached out to flush the toilet and then pulled her hand away. Samson had been here, and he may yet still be here.

She stepped out of the bathroom, looked around, and moved down the hall, past the closed bedroom doors and to the last door on the right. The padlock was in place, but the surface of the door around it had been nicked and scratched and smeared with blood. There was a large crimson half-mask stamp where Samson had rested his battered face against the cool surface of the door. His enormous gun lay on the floor.

The door to her left was closed. There was no padlock, just a simple bloodstained doorknob that turned with ease. She raised her gun, reached across herself and beneath her right arm to flip the light-switch. Both lights burned just fine, revealing what must have been a child’s room. The walls were barren. A single model airplane hung from the ceiling above the small bed wedged into the far corner.

Samson Niebolt lay on his side atop the bed, his back to the door, his knees drawn to his chest. He looked like a kid, and Colleen realized that he had been one, not all that long ago. So had she.

She held her breath, stared at him, certain that he was dead, but no—that was the old way of things. If he was dead, he’d be on his feet. She took one step toward him and became aware of the slow and steady expansion and contraction of his ribcage.

The door eased closed behind her, and the click of the bolt engaging caused Samson to jump. He lifted his head and groaned, tried to sit up, kicked one foot over the edge of the bed and, gasping, drew it back, as if he’d dipped his feet into hot water.

“Daddy?” he asked, and Colleen wondered if he always referred to Huff in that way, or if it were the beating and his surroundings talking. “That you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not your daddy.”

“You hurt me, Dad,” he said, oblivious to her words. “Hurt me real bad. I can’t—” He grunted in pain once more and struggled to sit up, pawed at the blood-streaked wall before him. After a minute of trying and failing to sit up, he laid his head upon mattress and took a deep breath. “I can’t see.”

He rolled onto his back and faced her. His nose was bloated and crooked. A blood-crust encircled his nostrils. His right eye was swollen shut, the lid shiny and purple. His left eye had not yet swollen completely shut, but it would, and what little she could see of his eye was not white but darkest red, almost black. A line of blood ran like a tear from the corner of his eye.

“Can’t really see you. Who is it? Evie?” He tried to smile, and Colleen was not sure what it was supposed to mean. One of his front teeth was missing, and she could feel his hands on her body, his cock inside her. His breath in her ear.

She raised the gun, got his face in her sights. Her heart raced, and she could not feel her fingertips. In sync with her heart, a hammer slammed into the inside of her skull, right between her eyes, and there was only anger and fury and the sensation of his fingers sliding into her ass.

“I need help,” he said, blinking away blood and pawing at his battered face. He probed his lips, sucked in air, and pulled his fingers away from his face. “Thilda has drugs. This hurts so bad. My head, it feels like…”

“You bastard,” she said, tears blurring her vision. Her hand rocked, and the gun seemed so heavy now. Her finger was taught upon the trigger. It would take so little effort to finish this, to finish him, but this isn’t what she wanted. She’d wanted to look into his eyes, wanted him to see what was coming, to know who was doing it.

She crossed the short distance between herself and the bed, climbed onto it, and straddled his chest, pinning his arms beneath her knees. She placed the gun on his chest and clutched his throat with her right hand.

“Aaah,” he yelped, and she tightened her grip.

“Open your eyes, you piece of shit,” she screamed, prying open his swollen eye with the fingers of her left hand. “Look at me.”

She released his throat and he gasped, spattered her hand with blood and spit. His body rocked beneath her weight, and his eyes rolled in their sockets. She pried open both eyes now, screaming.

“Look at me.”

His right hand slipped from beneath her knee and clawed uselessly at her hands. He stopped struggling.

“Oh,” he said. “Is that you, Colleen?”

“It is.”

Seizing the gun from his chest, she drove a knee into his balls. He gasped, and she did it again, and when he screamed she thrust the barrel of the gun into his mouth, shredding his bottom lip against his teeth and pressing, pressing and twisting until his teeth crumbled and Samson wretched and heaved and vomited around the intruding steel cylinder.

She squeezed the trigger and watched Samson Niebolt’s head come apart. She squeezed it again and watched what was left of his head come apart a little more. The third squeeze brought only a faint click, and she squeezed it four more times.

click click click click

She got up, leaving her gun where it was, jutting from the crimson ruin of Samson Niebolt’s head, leaving Samson’s cowboy cannon where it was, on the rug in the hall, and drifted out of the room and out of the house. It was fully dark now and the air was cool.

She threw up between her feet and sat with her back to the van’s rear bumper. When mosquitoes landed on her arms and sank their tiny needles into her flesh, she did not swat them away.

She sat that way for some time, until the rumble of a diesel engine broke the silence and the headlights of the great truck burned through her splayed fingers. Three people got out of the truck—two men and a woman, just silhouettes against the glare of the truck’s lights.

One of the men stepped toward her.

“Are you Colleen?” He asked.

Thirty-Seven

Not long after the screaming had stopped, Misty got onto her hands and knees and reached under the bed, fished out the last of the liquor her bedroom had to offer—a quarter of a bottle of cheap Canadian whisky that tasted like piss if piss were made of fire.

She drank it all, knocked it down with Olympian speed, and slept through the night and well into the next day. She awoke to an explosion of sunlight and the sensation that there were chunks of brick embedded in her brain.

She sat up and put her feet on the floor and rubbed her eyes and waited to die. When that didn’t happen she got up and stepped into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and did her business, and her eyeballs seemed to toy with the idea of popping within their sockets. Flushing the toilet and pulling up her pants, she rinsed her hands and then grabbed the cup that contained her toothbrush and a tightly rolled tube of toothpaste, dumped its contents into the sink, and filled with cup with cool water from the tap. She emptied the cup, filled it once more, and took the second cup a little slower, setting it down long enough to rummage through the medicine cabinet and produce two aspirin tablets.

In the bedroom, she looked through the window and into the back yard, which was littered with fallen corpses. She picked up her pistol and looked at it, wondered if she had the strength. She doubted it. The previous night, she lay in bed drinking and listening to Cardo and the black guy slaughter the dead in the stairwell. By that point, she’d been certain that Crate was dead, that he’d been murdered by the cop, and though she’d lain with a loaded gun in her hand, the barrel inches from her lips, she’d hoped on some level that one of them would make it easy on her—just kick the door in and put one between her eyes.

This had not happened, and now she was alone. She searched the folds of the blanket strewn across her bed and discovered her gun beneath her pillow. She checked the cylinder. She had five shots left.

The hallway outside the bedroom was empty. Before reaching the stairwell, she stepped into the cluttered guest bedroom. Spent shell casings littered the floor and the bed. The window was still open. The air smelled like morning dew on grass and leaves. Only a trace of the scent of charred flesh reached her nose, and as she looked down at the mad scattering of dead bodies in the parking lot, she knew that the air would not smell so nice for much longer.

Two walking corpses walked strange and uneven circles before the store, their feet tracking blood from the burst remains of the dead things that had been unable to get out of the way when the big truck had rumbled out of the parking lot.

Downstairs she found the back door wide open. Two bodies lay huddled together across the threshold, and she would not be able to close the door until they were gone. She stepped into the store and realized that there’d be little point in closing the back door: the front door was shattered. Anyone or anything that wanted to get in would have no trouble doing so.

Between herself and the shattered door, there lay a twisted and flayed form, barely recognizable as human. Its clothes had been peeled away and were strewn around it in blood-blackened tatters, and its body had been pecked clean. It was little more than a skeleton caked in dried blood and gristle.

She remembered the scream, the wailing and inhuman scream.

“Oh, Crate,” she said, stepping toward her husband’s remains. A sound to her left made her jump.

A dead boy sat before the cooler farthest away from where she stood. It looked to be ten or twelve and held an unopened bottle of chocolate milk in its bloodless right hand. Its face was taut and multi-colored—the right side bone-white, the left bruised with settled blood, deepest purple washing to crimson at the edges. It looked up at her, dropped the milk bottle, and tried to stand.

She walked up to where it struggled to find its footing and shot it through the head.

“God,” she said, stepping back and jamming a finger into her ear, working it. She looked back at the front door and realized her mistake. Walking past the thing on the ground—maybe it wasn’t Crate… maybe—and through the broken glass door, she looked out into the parking lot and saw that the two corpses she’d seen from the upstairs window had given up their aimless wandering and now moved toward the building.

She turned her back to them and walked over to the thing on the floor, dropped to her knees beside it. She saw the matted tuft of hair on the floor next to the thing’s raw skull and any doubt she’d had was laid to rest.

“Crate, honey,” she said, and rolled the thing onto its back, winced at the feel of it, like something from a butcher shop. Its face was mostly skull. One of its eye sockets was empty. The other contained a blue eye that moved left and right, following her every move.

Feet crunched on broken glass and she looked up to see the first of the walking corpses stepping into the store. She got up, walked toward it, and shot it between the eyes. She waited for a moment and shot the next one as it shuffled along behind its partner.

She stepped to the door and looked out, stepped onto the porch, looked around. The only dead were the truly dead.

She went back into the store and looked down at what was left of her husband. The blue eye moved left to right, left to right in its lidless red socket.

“You dumb old shit,” she said.

Two bullets.

Thirty-Eight

On the morning following her final encounter with Samson Niebolt, Colleen went down to the place where her brother and her boyfriend had died. The black man and the cop accompanied her, and the woman had stayed behind with Mathilda and Sally and the children.

They cut down Daniel while she stood facing Guy’s tethered corpse. It looked at her, mouth silently working.

“You don’t have to do this,” Reggie said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

She pressed the barrel of her gun to the dead thing’s forehead. She said nothing, not even a hushed goodbye. Guy was not here. This was not him. This was what he’d left behind and he was no longer here.

She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Reggie and Cardo removed the bodies from the bedroom, took them far away from the courtyard and burned them. All but Huffington Niebolt’s head.

Colleen worked alone.

She found a five gallon plastic paint bucket in one of the supply sheds. It took a while to wash away the remaining paint, and when she was done Colleen dried out the inside of the bucket and dug the hole. She was sorry that Sally could not be there with her. Once Sally had healed, Colleen would bring her to this spot.

She opened the pillowcase and removed Huff’s head. It blinked its eyes and opened its toothless mouth. She’d thrown away Huff’s false teeth.

She placed the head into the bucket, and it looked up at her, blinked once, slowly. She pressed on the plastic lid, encircled it with duct tape. It was an airtight seal, and would last forever. Nothing would get in—not worms, not bugs.

The bucket fit nicely into the hole. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt.

“Live forever,” she said.

They found the door-covered shack and the bodies within. They buried Kimberly alongside Daniel and Guy. They burned the rest.

No one wanted to deal with Lissa and Jack. The doorknob rattled and rattled, and though Reggie volunteered to take care of it, in the end, Mathilda went into the nursery and did what needed to be done.

Sally named her daughter Lolita.

“You sure you want to do that?” Colleen asked, laughing.

“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, touching her daughter’s cheek. “I mean, before this I wanted a girl. I’ve always wanted a girl, but over the past few months I’ve wanted a boy.”

She stared at Colleen, tears in her eyes, and Colleen closed her mouth. She could tell that Sally was not finished.

“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, weeping now. A tear dropped onto the face of her sleeping daughter, and she wiped it away. “I wanted a boy because I thought maybe a boy would look like my son or my husband, either of them. I just wanted to see their faces again.”

“I don’t know what to call him,” Mathilda said, holding the unnamed boy to her heavy breast.

“It’ll come to you,” Colleen said

“What was your brother’s name?”

“No.”

“Why not? A name is just a name.”

“My brother was an asshole.”

“That’s okay,” Mathilda said, easing the child from her breast and placing him on her shoulder, patting his small back. “He doesn’t have to be.”

Reggie and Cardo retrieved the guns from the house. Huff had been planning for the end of the world, and they were the beneficiaries of his sickness. There were enough rifles, pistols, shotguns, and ammunition to hold off an army.

Colleen woke up screaming a lot. She wanted to get drunk and she wanted to get high. Sometimes she did, there was booze and there was grass—the Niebolt boys had known how to have a good time—but mostly she didn’t, and her mother’s words hung like a fog in her head: that stuff just makes you stupid. You need to stay sharp in this world if you want to make it.

She thought about them a lot, all of them. Guy was dead, and so was her brother. Her friends were dead. Her mother was dead, too, but maybe not the old kind of dead. Daniel and his heroes Nietzsche and Lennon and Bowie had probably been right. There was nothing after life—dead was dead, but not anymore.

Huffington Niebolt deserved to spend eternity gaping into the darkness. Her mother didn’t. Colleen wondered if she could get down to Fresno one day with a shovel and a gun.

Stacy was a natural with the kids. They called her Mama Starshine. She and Cardo weren’t exactly falling in love but they spent time together. A lot.

Reggie and Cardo drove down into Harlow and cleaned out Misty’s. There was no sign of the old woman. Her bedroom door was still closed, still locked, and the old man’s remains were gone.

Reggie refilled his truck from Misty’s diesel pump.

They encountered only three walking corpses.

They brought Richard’s body back to the compound and buried it beside the others.

There was a new TV in one of the three small apartments at the top of the hill. They brought it back to their dwelling and plugged it in, gathered round.

The CBS eye was gone.

On the following evening, the lights went out.

Thirty-Nine

Reggie was with them for three weeks, and though he was helpful and kind and resourceful, he was rarely actually there. Even when they gathered together for dinner or to play with the children, he had the air of a man whose heart was elsewhere. He was silent and often seemed to be lost in thought. Colleen knew why—they’d shared their stories—but she was still surprised when he told her that he was leaving.

They were alone. Everyone had gone to bed, everyone but Colleen, who didn’t get all that much sleep these days. He’d crept out of the room that still contained Evie’s sewing machine and seen her sitting on the couch, trying to work her way through Sally’s copy of Lolita.

“Are you sure?” She asked.

“I am,” he said.

“Damn.”

“Look—I’m not stupid, okay? I know I probably won’t get there, and if I do get there, I know what I’m gonna find. It’s just something… something I have to do.”

“Wish you didn’t,” she said. “Soon?”

“As soon as the sun comes up.”

“Damn.”

The sun rose and he loaded up his truck, taking only his own guns and several boxes of compatible ammunition from Huff’s enormous stash. They all hugged and waved. They asked him to stay and he told them he wanted to, he couldn’t, and he would be back, if at all possible.

Unable to turn around, he backed the big truck down the hill. He blew his horn and was gone.

“God,” Sally said, on the third morning after Reggie’s departure. The night before, the sky had flickered orange in the south, and they’d feared a raging, lightning-born forest fire. Now, staring into the leaden sky, their fears were greater.

Colleen walked over to the park bench and ran a finger through the fine layer of ash that coated its surface.

“Is that radioactive?” Sally asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “Do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Colleen said. She smiled, shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”

“We should probably get inside.”

Colleen followed Sally into the house. She stepped into the living room, closing the door behind her, and looking around, feeling lost.

David walked out of the nursery. He looked up at her, a smile erupting across his face.

“Mama Colleen,” he said, rushing toward her and throwing himself into her arms. “Wanna play with me?”

She held him close, pressed her face to his curly yellow locks. “Sure.”