The Fires of Atlantis

1 Keo

The scar tingled whenever it got cold. And it was cold at night, even in October in south Louisiana. If he thought about something else — like Gillian, or better yet, Gillian in a bikini walking along a stretch of beach waiting for him — it was easy to forget that someone had very recently tried to carve his face like a jack-o’-lantern. The scar was a reminder of three months of running and fighting.

Remember when you didn’t give a damn about anyone but yourself?

You’re really getting soft, pal.

The earbud in his right ear clicked, interrupting the silence he had been enjoying for the last hour while waiting for darkness to fall. A voice said, “You’re putting your life in the hands of some girl you don’t know from Adam. If that doesn’t make you the dumbest man still alive, it’s gotta be pretty close.”

“You know what they say about lives,” Keo whispered into the throat mic. “The only thing certain is death and taxes. And since good ol’ Uncle Sam isn’t around anymore to collect the latter, where does that leave us?”

“You and us up a creek, San Diego.”

“So what else is new?”

“Leave the man alone with his death wish, Shorty,” a second voice said.

“We should be on Song Island right now, Zach,” Shorty said. “Wasn’t that the point of coming down here in the first place? But instead, we’re stealing people’s silver and turning them into bullets. What a big ol’ waste of time.”

“Song Island’s not going anywhere,” Zachary said. “It’ll be there when we get there. Besides, if the lady on the radio’s right, this could change everything. We might actually be able to kill these things. What did she call them?”

“Ghouls,” Keo said.

“Sounds about right.”

“We could have at least tried this closer to the water,” Shorty said. “Safer.”

“Since when did you start playing it safe?” Keo asked.

Shorty snorted. “We should have stayed on the boat. Wait for one of them to get close to the pier and test this theory out. Coming out here is stupid, Zach.”

“We tried that last night,” Keo said.

“This is too risky…” Shorty insisted.

“Life’s a risk, especially now,” Zachary said.

Keo couldn’t help but smile to himself. Shorty called him crazy, but he wasn’t the one who had voluntarily spent his nights in the ground wearing a ghillie suit while the bloodsuckers were running around — sometimes on top of them. He had been calling them creatures, monsters, and bloodsuckers, but the woman on the radio referred to them as ghouls. He guessed it was as good a name as any.

The woman on the radio also told him silver would kill these things.

I guess we’ll find out tonight…

He focused on the creature in the center of his weapon’s optic. It had been a good nine seconds since he acquired his target and laid the red dot directly over something that used to be a forehead. It was pruned, like someone’s asshole. He shouldn’t have been able to see the creature from this distance, but there was a full moon out tonight and he had a good perch.

“You guys could have stayed on the boat,” Keo whispered. “You didn’t actually have to come out here with me. I could have done this myself.”

“Someone had to watch your ass,” Zachary said in his right ear. “You’re used to working alone, kid, but we’re not.”

“Your funeral.”

“What a nice thing to say,” Shorty said. “I should have stayed at the park. You know what’s the best thing about sleeping on a boat? Not being surrounded by a few thousand ghouls.”

“A few thousand?” You’re being overly generous there, Shorty. There’s got to be a few tens of thousands of the bloodsuckers out tonight…

“Well?” Zachary said.

“Well, what?” Keo whispered back.

“The one you got in your crosshairs right now. I assume it’s the same one I’m looking at. You going to shoot it or not?”

“Why so anxious? The two of you don’t even believe it’ll work.”

“Can you blame us?” Shorty said. “Silver bullets? Come on. That’s crazy.”

“Right. Silver bullets is crazy,” Keo said. “Because all of this is perfectly sane.”

Zachary chuckled. “He’s got you there, Shorty.”

Shorty wasn’t buying it. “I’m just saying. Why would silver bullets work when good ol’-fashioned lead don’t?”

“The lady on the radio says it works,” Keo said.

“You don’t even know who she is.”

“She sounded pretty sure of it. And she got the rest of it right. Sunlight, bodies of water… We know for a fact those work, too.”

“All right, all right,” Zachary said impatiently. “So get it over with and let’s see once and for all. I’m freezing my ass off out here, and Shorty’s all pruned up so much I might not be able to tell the difference between him and those ghouls pretty soon.”

“Just don’t accidentally shoot me in the ass,” Shorty said.

“No promises.”

“Relax,” Keo said. “You’re hiding inside the building while I’m up here on the rooftop. The only one who should be worried right now is me.”

“Don’t miss,” Shorty said. “As I recall, you’re not much of a long-distance shooter.”

“This isn’t much of a shot.”

“You hope.”

He tuned out the two men, along with the soft wind blowing through his hair and across the rooftop, scattering loose gravel around him.

Nice and slow. Breathe.

Keo tightened his forefinger against the trigger of the MP5SD. The long barrel of the submachine gun was steady against the brick edge in front of him. From his vantage point, he had a clear look at everything for a good block and a half. There were, at the moment, a handful of the creatures moving from building to building, but he didn’t have any illusions that that was the full extent of their numbers.

Where you find one, you find a hundred…or a thousand…

The one he was staring at stood underneath a streetlight. He imagined a pool of white circling the thing’s head, but of course there was no such thing. The city was pitch black at night, and had been for the last few days ever since he and Allie’s two boys arrived.

Nice and slow.

The creature was forty meters farther down the street. It wasn’t a terribly difficult shot. Your average Boot Camp graduate could have made it standing on his head with an M4 rifle. But he didn’t have a carbine. The MP5SD was a close-quarter combat weapon and was not designed for long-distance shooting.

Still, it was only forty meters. Even an up-close-and-personal shooter like him could probably make this shot.

Probably.

Breathe. Nice and slow.

Just breathe…

He squeezed the trigger and the 9mm round was away, the soft pfft! sound of the gunshot echoing slightly in the darkness, most of it muffled by the highly effective stainless steel suppressor connected to the end of the gun barrel. The noise made by the bullet casing as it ejected, then flicked through the air, before clinking on the rooftop was almost louder than the shot itself.

He watched through the scope as the creature jerked its head back and slumped to the sidewalk in a pile.

Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Zachary repeated in his right ear.

“Sonofabitch,” Shorty said, sounding slightly breathless.

Keo pulled the submachine gun back just in case the moonlight decided to give away his position on the rooftop. Below him, the creatures were converging on the dead one, their black-skinned and gaunt forms more silhouetted shadows than actual figures. What were they thinking now? Shock? Fear? Confusion? Did they even still think at all?

“So, was it worth it coming out here tonight?” Keo whispered into the throat mic.

“Yeah, yeah,” Zachary said. “Stop gloating and get back down here before they spot you.”

Keo grinned, got up, and moved across the rooftop, keeping his profile as low as possible by bending at the waist. He snatched up his pack along the way, very aware of the crunch-crunch of his boots against the loose gravel floor. He slung the MP5SD as he reached the stairwell door and pulled it open, careful not to make a sound — or more than necessary, anyway, since it was impossible to be completely silent these days — and slipped inside.

He flicked on a small LED flashlight to navigate his way down the enclosed room, the only noise the soft tap-tap of his boots against concrete. He fought against the instinct to turn and flee when faced with darkened corners. Not too much, though; that instinct was what had kept him alive all these months, and it didn’t pay to water it down.

He flicked off the flashlight and entered the fifth floor through another door.

Zachary and Shorty were exactly where Keo had last seen them — still crouched at the window on the far side, peering through night-vision binoculars at the streets below. Zachary’s beaten and well-used Browning BAR rifle rested against the windowsill, while Shorty’s Winchester rifle was on the floor within easy reach. Both men wore jeans and black shirts, far removed from their ghillie suits and Robertson Park.

Chilly air filtered in through some of the broken windows up and down the floor, including the one in front of Zachary and Shorty. The office building was nestled in the heart of downtown Lake Dulcet, and in the daylight, it looked hauntingly abandoned like all the rest around it. The place didn’t look any better at night, but it was one of the few large structures that hadn’t revealed any signs of ghoul occupancy. It also had everything he needed, including a tall enough perch with an easy view of the area and a place to shoot from that couldn’t be traced back. Or at least, he hoped not.

“Silver bullets. Now I’ve seen everything,” Zachary said, looking over his shoulder at Keo. He was in his forties, with a thick patch of beard and a face, like Keo’s and Shorty’s, that hadn’t seen a decent soap or shower in weeks. “Maybe we should call you Tonto from now on.”

“Because I’m half-Korean that means I can’t be the Lone Ranger?” Keo said.

“I was thinking more because you’re a smartass troublemaker.”

Keo grinned. “I hate horses, anyway.”

The young man sitting next to Zachary, Shorty, remained fixed outside the window with his binoculars. “Man, you really stirred them up. They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. You better hope they didn’t hear that gunshot.”

“Did you hear it?” Keo asked.

“No.”

“Then I’m guessing they couldn’t hear it, either.”

“You hope,” Shorty said. “You know what I say about hoping these days?”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Because there is no hope. Get it?”

Keo smirked. “You suck at this.”

“Whatever,” Shorty said. He lowered his binoculars and glanced at Zachary. “We locked the lobby doors, right?”

“Yup,” Zachary nodded. “Why?”

“Nothing, just wanted to make sure,” he said, and Keo thought the young man might have shivered slightly in the semidarkness, but that could have just been his imagination.

Keo crouched next to them at the window. He looked out at the shadows gliding up the street in their direction. After all these months, he still couldn’t quite get used to watching them moving around at night. This was their world now. There was no mistaking that. They — he, Zachary, and Shorty, and all the other humans still running around out there — were the outliers. The exception to the rule.

Santa Marie Island. That’s where you should be. With Gillian. On the beach.

Soon. Soon…

He could see the dead ghoul he had shot, farther down the sidewalk and left to lay where it had fallen. He had done that. Killed it. With a silver bullet. The reality of it was still a little hard to grasp.

But there it was. The evidence.

Daebak.

It had taken them days to collect enough of the valuable metal and find an Archers store in the city with the right bullet-making supplies. Despite Zachary’s and Shorty’s doubts (which he shared, if he was being honest), they all wanted to believe. The creatures had been unkillable except by sunlight for so long that just knowing you could take them out even at night was a game changer.

“You can kill them with silver,” the recording had said. “Stab them, shoot them, or cut them with any silver weapon, and they will die.”

Damn straight.

“Silver bullets,” Keo said. “If she’s right about that, what else do you think she knows?”

“The bodies of water and sunlight we already know,” Zachary said. “I don’t know where we’d get industrial strength ultraviolet lights, though.”

“I knew a couple of guys that grew some plants using those,” Shorty said. “I don’t know if they were industrial strength, but they looked pretty big to me.”

“I know one thing. We’re making a lot of silver bullets tomorrow.”

Shorty glanced at Keo. “Nice shot, by the way. I didn’t think you could hit a trash dumpster with that German peashooter.”

“You’d be surprised what a peashooter can do in the right hands,” Keo said.

“I bet. You ever gonna tell us what you used to do before all of this?”

“This and that, and some of those.” Keo leaned back against the wall and pulled a half-eaten granola bar from his pack and took a bite. “Next stop, Song Island?”

“After we make a shitload of silver bullets,” Zachary said. “As much as we can carry.”

“What about knives?”

“Silver knives?”

“Yeah.”

Zachary nodded. “Good idea. Give me a day, and I can come up with a lot more silver-based weapons.”

“Take your time,” Keo said. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere tonight—” He stopped in mid-sentence.

Zachary glanced over. “What?”

Keo looked across the empty floor at the stairwell door. He was still chewing, but there was no taste anymore. “Are you sure the lobby’s sealed?”

“Like I told Shorty, yeah. Why?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“Like what?” Shorty asked.

“Moving.”

“What kind of moving?” Zachary said.

“Moving.”

“That narrows it down,” Shorty said just before he picked up his rifle and laid it across his lap.

Zachary pulled away from the window and faced the stairwell door. He stopped moving — even stopped breathing entirely — and listened. After a moment, he shook his head, eyes searching out Keo’s again. “I don’t hear anything. You sure you heard something?”

“Pretty sure,” Keo nodded.

“Shorty?”

Shorty shook his head. “Maybe all those months being chased through the woods by that Pollard guy’s got him spooked.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“Nope.”

Zachary looked back at Keo. “What do you think it was?”

“I told you. Movement.”

“From the floor below us? You mentioned the lobby…”

“Somewhere below us.” Keo dropped the unfinished granola bar and tightened his hands around the MP5SD. “Definitely below us.”

“Maybe you’re just imagining things,” Shorty said. “Maybe killing that bloodsucker’s got you overly excited.”

“I don’t get overly excited.”

“First time for everything, San Diego,” Shorty said.

Keo flashed him a slightly annoyed look. He didn’t really like Shorty all that much, and he was sure the feeling was mutual. Keo preferred the older Zachary’s company. Shorty was a couple of years younger, and his insistence on calling Keo San Diego was getting old real fast. The only reason the kid had come along with them in the first place was because he was tied to the hip with Zachary, who had his own reasons for wanting to reach Song Island.

“Are you guys loaded with silver?” Keo whispered.

“We just made the nine mil rounds for your peashooter, remember?” Shorty said.

Zachary’s eyes remained focused on the door across from them. If he heard or saw anything, he didn’t say it. After a while, he looked down at Keo, sitting to his right — Shorty was to his left — and said, “Are you sure—”

He never finished because Zachary’s words became slurred, then stopped becoming words entirely, and instead took on the form of a scream as his body jerked backward toward the window, as if he were being sucked out by a vacuum.

Keo lunged away from the wall and unslung the MP5SD as he watched, with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as two of the creatures clung to the windowsill outside the building and pulled Zachary through the opening.

One of them had a fistful of Zachary’s scruffy long hair while the other had a viselike grip over the lower half of his jaw, quickly clamping down on Zachary’s screams and turning them into muffled cries for help instead.

And all Keo could think was, How did they get up here? Did they…crawl up the side of the building?

He didn’t know they could do that. He didn’t know the ghouls could do a lot of things.

“Zachary, fuck!” Shorty screamed as he too stumbled away from the wall, spinning around and lifting his rifle.

Shorty fired, his first shot splattering the left eyeball of one of the ghouls outside, the round punching through the back of its head and disappearing into the cold October air, continuing on. The creature, too, kept on going — pulling Zachary’s struggling body through the window along with its partner.

Then Zachary disappeared from view.

Keo stood, frozen, even as he heard Zachary screaming like a banshee from outside. The screaming went on for what must have been two or three seconds, though it sounded more like two to three minutes.

Jesus Christ, how long does it take a man to fall down five floors?

Both he and Shorty flinched involuntarily when they heard the thump! of flesh and bones striking the sidewalk outside.

“Shorty,” Keo said. “We gotta go.”

“Zachary,” Shorty said.

If he had more to say, he never finished it. Instead, he might have gasped audibly when two of the creatures — different ones, this time (or were they?) — reached up from below the windowsill, grabbed the frames, and pulled themselves upward until their faces were visible in the opening. Grotesquely deformed features, like nothing that could possibly be mistaken for human, peered through the window at them.

“We gotta go!” Keo shouted.

Keo backpedaled from the glaring eyes, lifted the submachine, and fired. He hit one of them in the face and the creature let go of its grip, dropping back into the night. Keo was momentarily shocked by what had just happened. He had shot these things more times than he could count and they never reacted that way. He had even seen Shorty put a.308 round through one of them a few seconds ago, and it didn’t even flinch.

But this one…this one went down.

Silver bullets. Silver bullets!

The second one had managed to hook its spindly legs into the window frame, like some kind of insect, and was in the process of pulling itself through the opening when Keo shot it in the chest. It let go and dropped backward, swallowed up by the darkness.

“Shorty!” Keo shouted. “Let’s go!”

But Shorty didn’t move, not even when deformed shapes began climbing through the windows to their left and right along the floor. It was too dark for him to see anything beyond moving shadows. Not that Keo had to guess what was happening around him, because as soon as he killed the first two bloodsuckers, two — three—five more were trying to crawl in through the exact same space that had just been vacated.

Gather some supplies. Make some silver bullets. Go find Gillian.

What could possibly go wrong?

He flicked the fire selector on the submachine gun to full-auto and opened fire.

“Shorty!” he shouted over the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings falling against the tiled floor around him.

Silver 9mm bullets ripped through flesh and kept going, and the creatures fell like dominos in front of him, others swan diving back out of the window.

Then Boom! Boom! as Shorty began shooting. It was a bolt-action rifle, and each shot required him to manually reload. Keo remembered all those days on the road trying to convince the kid to switch to something more practical. But Shorty wouldn’t go for it. He was married to his Winchester.

Stupid kid, Keo thought, shouting again, “Shorty, come on!”

Because Shorty’s.308, as devastating as it was to a human body, was like throwing pebbles at the ghouls. His bullets tore through them, and some even hit the ones behind them — and it still kept going even then — but it didn’t stop them. Not for a moment. Not even for a millisecond. Keo wasn’t sure if the creatures even felt the bullet impacts.

“Shorty!”

He was backpedaling and firing, spraying from left to right, watching the bounding forms stumbling and falling. They were converging from every side now, literally pouring in through the windows across the floor, the tap-tap-tap! of bare feet against the carpet like a dozen stampeding herds at once.

Too many. Always too goddamn many…

Even as they collapsed left and right and over each other, more were climbing through the windows every second. Every half-second. He found breathing difficult as the floor began filling up with their stench. There was a never-ending stream of them, and he guessed this must be what it was like trying to hold back a flood with your bare hands.

And Shorty was standing in front of him, shooting and smashing the buttstock of his rifle into the creatures as they surged toward him. He was backpedaling, but not fast enough. Too slow. Way too slow.

“Shorty, goddammit!”

He didn’t know if the other man could hear him. Probably not. Shorty didn’t seem capable of moving any faster, and soon—

They were on top of him. Driving him to the floor.

Shorty started screaming.

Then the sea of black tar began changing directions and converging on Shorty. He saw Shorty’s hand sticking out of the squirming mass of shriveled skin and bony limbs.

Keo turned and ran, reloading at the same time, dropping the long, slender magazine. He didn’t have to look to perform the task. It was second nature by now.

He made a beeline for the same stairwell door he had come through earlier.

The tsunami of bare feet slapping against the floor burst through his eardrums as the creatures gave chase. He guessed not every one of them was going for Shorty anymore. How many were back there on his heels? A dozen? Hundreds? How many undead things could fit into one floor, he wondered.

Too many. Always too damn many…

Keo didn’t look back. It was pointless because he knew what was back there. And he didn’t want to see Shorty’s death. He couldn’t even hear the kid’s screams anymore. He couldn’t hear his own breathing, for that matter — only the relentless pounding in his chest.

Around him, their stench overwhelmed the stale odor of the abandoned floor.

They were fast, but he was faster. A steady diet of beef jerky and protein had kept Keo lean, and the nearly three-month long jaunt through the woods, being hunted by psychos with assault rifles, had forced him into the best shape of his life. He was also blessed with a long stride, one of the benefits of being six-one.

He grabbed for the stairwell door with his left hand, his right still wrapped around the MP5SD with the forefinger against the trigger. He twisted the doorknob with one fluid motion, pulled the door open with another, and was greeted by total darkness—

— except for the pair of yellow, crooked teeth coming at him.

He squeezed off a burst, slicing the creature in half. It fell soundlessly, thick clumps of black liquid splashing the wall behind it.

Silver bullets. Silver fucking bullets!

Keo jumped over the shriveled-up dead thing.

Sounds — coming from below this time. That meant he couldn’t go down. Which wasn’t his first choice anyway, but it would have been nice to actually have a choice.

So what was left?

He glanced up the flight of stairs, just as—

— THOOM-THOOM-THOOM as they crashed into the stairwell door behind him with the intensity of rabid dogs that hadn’t eaten in days, weeks, maybe months.

He went up.

They were coming. Fast-moving bastards. The manic tap-tap-tap! of bare feet slammed against the solid concrete of the stairwell, echoing along the length of the confined space. He didn’t look back, didn’t look down. The rush of wind caught up to him from behind as the fifth-floor stairwell door was flung open and they poured inside, the very distinctive splatter of feet against black blood spilled by the dead ghoul ringing in his ears.

He reached the rooftop door faster than he expected and burst outside, boots crunching against familiar loose gravel. He darted across the wide-open spaces, intimately aware that he was going to run out of space soon.

Very, very soon.

Darkness, moonlight, and a pair of smaller buildings around him, including one directly in front. A two-story building, with a bar on the first floor and living quarters on the second. He had scouted it earlier in the day with Zachary but hadn’t gone inside because the windows and doors were locked. The most important thing, though, was that the windows were not covered, which meant there were no nests inside.

That was the good news.

The bad news? The building was three stories down, with just over four meters of empty space between rooftops. It was going to be a hell of a drop if he couldn’t make the jump.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down…

Shut up!

They flooded out of the stairwell behind him and were battling against the loose gravel. He wondered if it looked nearly as comical as it sounded.

I should have brought a camera.

He unslung his pack, and with a meter left until he reached the end, flung it and watched it disappear into the night. He glimpsed the edge — was he running to it, or was it coming to him? — and lunged forward with his left leg, landed solidly, and catapulted himself up and over and forward through the cold, chilly Louisiana air.

So this is what it feels like to fly.

The rooftop of the building next door came into view as he plummeted back down through the darkness, way faster than he had anticipated. He tried to pick up where his pack had landed while he was still in the air so he wouldn’t have to waste time looking for it later—

— If my legs aren’t broken when I land—

— and saw it lying almost near the far edge. Jesus, how the hell had it gotten that far?

I must be stronger than I look.

He almost laughed out loud, but before he could put thought into action, the flat rooftop was there and he managed to land in a crouch, his momentum carrying him forward into a tuck and roll. He snapped back up on one bent knee, shocked and joyous that he was still alive, that neither one of his legs were broken even though pain shot through both and up his thighs, his entire body seeming to vibrate for a few seconds afterward.

Daebak!

He was on his feet instantly and rushing toward his pack. He snatched it up and slipped it through his arms as—thoomp! thoomp! — two of the creatures landed on the rooftop behind him.

He glanced back, saw them floundering like fish out of water, bony arms and legs snapping in every direction and at one point actually became entangled with one another. But that didn’t last, and they quickly became two separate creatures again—

He shot them and watched them drop, even as more fell out of the inky black sky like raindrops, landing one after another…after another. Bones snapped and broke, then another, then another still — not that it stopped any of them.

They kept coming — falling over and over, then actually on top of one another when they ran out of space. And still they kept dropping out of the sky…

Keo backed up until cold air was brushing against his backside. He looked over his shoulder at empty space, having nearly backpedaled right off the edge. There was a catwalk below him.

He emptied the remaining 9mm rounds into the mass of creatures in front of him, watching as they stumbled and fell, still amazed that they were going down, that he was actually killing them for once.

Killing them again? Re-kill? Whatever.

When the submachine gun ran empty for the second time, he slung it and dropped off the edge without looking back. It wasn’t a steep fall, only a few meters, though it felt like more. He landed on the catwalk with a loud bang!, the structure threatening to buckle under him, to pry itself free from the brick wall it was fastened to.

But it held. Miraculously, it held.

The window in front of him was closed and Keo was prepared to smash it open with his weapon, but when he grabbed the bottom and tried to open it, it actually slid up for him.

Hallelujah!

He pushed it all the way up and dived inside, turned, and slammed the glass back down just as one — two—five of the creatures landed on the catwalk outside. Whomp-whomp-whomp! There were so many coming down at once that they started falling on top of each other’s heads and shoulders, then bounced off and tumbled over the railings.

The first creature to right itself slammed its fist into the window and cracked it, but it must not have been strong enough because the window held. At least, until another one of the ghouls joined the first one with its own flailing fist. Then a third and a fourth began ramming their entire bodies — one was using its skull — until the glass panes began cracking under the frenzied assault.

Keo took a couple of steps back, ejected the magazine, shoved it into his pack, and pulled out a fresh one from a pouch around his waist and slammed it home. He shot the first ghoul that made it through the jagged opening in one of the panes. It fell forward into the room, landing awkwardly on its skull.

The others continued scrambling inside, undeterred, fighting to be the first one in.

He strafed the window, emptying the magazine, and watched with morbid fascination as the mass of black, pruned flesh and skeletal bodies corralled within the four walls of the catwalk outside. The congestion didn’t slow them at all, and even more were falling out of the sky like endless raindrops.

Silver bullets or not, he wasn’t going to stop them. Not even close.

He fled, making a run for the door, grabbing it and pulling it open without a problem, and lunged into darkness. His eyes quickly adjusted, picking out the banisters at the other end of the hallway. Keo ran for it when his forehead hit something soft. He slid to a stop and looked up at a rope dangling from the ceiling.

Crash!

From below him on the first floor, the unmistakable noise of glass breaking.

Then another crash!, followed by another…

He grabbed the piece of rope and yanked it. The frame of the attic door appeared in the darkness as it opened up from the ceiling. Keo grabbed the ladder and pulled even as something smashed into the door behind him.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

He shut the noises out — from below him, from behind him—everywhere.

Scrambled up the stairs and ignored the last few steps and jumped upward onto the wooden scaffolding above. Clouds of dust that had been gathering for the last year erupted around him. Twisting, he grabbed the ladder and pulled it up, making sure to bring the dangling rope along with him. Before the door could slam shut and join the tumultuous symphony of chaos exploding below him, Keo grabbed it at the last second, slowing its speed, and cautiously — painfully slowly, almost as if in slow-motion — tapped it shut.

Darkness swamped him, taking away what little light he had with the attic door open. The tap-tap-tap of bare feet against the wooded hallway floor filtered up from the room below him, overwhelming everything, including his own ragged breathing. There were no peepholes, so Keo had to only go with what his ears could pick up.

Footsteps on the stairs, rushing down, then up, then down again.

They were searching for him, an endless wave of the creatures moving through the hallway below, in and out of doors and rooms.

Keo moved into a sitting position facing the door in the floor, the submachine gun resting between his legs. Something small and furry scrambled next to him in the darkness, brushing up against his right arm. It was all he could do not to open fire on it. Instead, he gritted his teeth and listened to the creature burrowing through attic insulation, more afraid of him than he was of it. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on his part.

He glanced at his watch, the hands glowing in the suffocating darkness.

It was hours yet before morning.

He sat and waited and did his best not to breathe in the dust around him. The place probably had asbestos, too. Just his luck. He had survived the end of the world only to get mesothelioma. Now that would really suck.

His body had already begun to itch from the close proximity to insulation. He battled the urge to sneeze and had to cup his mouth and nostrils with one hand.

Below him, the endless tap-tap-tap of bare feet continued unabated, like an ocean’s wave lapping against a beach, soft and soothing and promising safety and shelter from the darkness.

He wondered if Gillian and Jordan and the others had made it to Santa Marie Island after all. If they were waiting for him on the beach right now, wondering why he hadn’t made it there yet like he had promised. Would Gillian understand when he finally arrived and explained what took him so long?

“See, there was this crazy guy with a small army hunting us…”

She might have even found someone else after giving up on him ever showing up. It would serve him right. Maybe Mark was the lucky guy…

“Keo. You promise me. You’ll follow us to Santa Marie Island,” Gillian had said to him when they had their last conversation.

“Yes,” he had answered. “I promise. Reserve a spot on the beach for me. I also wouldn’t mind if you were wearing a bikini when I get there.”

How long ago was that? It seemed like another lifetime now.

This’ll teach you to make promises you can’t keep, pal…

2 Lara

“This is your way of making me hate you, is that it? Because it’s working. First you let me think you were dead, then I learn you’re alive, and now you’re telling me you’re not coming home. Are you purposefully trying to piss me off, Will?”

He didn’t answer right away, and for a moment she wondered if hearing his voice for the first time in nearly a week had been just an illusion, something her grief-stricken mind had conjured up in order to spare her the pain of believing she had lost him for good. Maybe it was all a bad dream. She’d had plenty of those since he left the island with Gaby on Jen’s helicopter.

“Will? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” he said finally.

He sounded so close, as if she could reach out and touch him. She had to remind herself that he was alive, something she hadn’t been sure of until yesterday when Danny found him outside of Lafayette. That should have been all that mattered, but at the moment she couldn’t stop her anger from boiling to the surface.

The guilt immediately washed over her, and she struggled to control it.

“So say something, Will…”

“Lara, you know there’s nothing in this world I want more than to come back to you right now. I just can’t. Not yet.”

Of course not, Will. If you did what you wanted instead of what you needed to do, then you wouldn’t be Will, would you? You wouldn’t be the man I love.

She sighed. “Forget for a moment that I’m this close to getting in a boat and hunting your stupid, inconsiderate ass down for leaving me hanging. Forget that for one moment. Take emotion out of it and think about this logically, Will. You’re hurt. You’re bleeding. You’ve been shot. You need to come back to me. I need you to come back here so I can make sure you don’t die.”

“I will.” He sounded tired, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Which was to say he sounded exactly the way he always did. “But I can’t. Not yet.”

“Can you even trust this Kellerson? What if he’s leading you into another trap?”

“He’s not. I’ve made sure of that.”

“How?”

He didn’t answer, and Lara realized she didn’t want to know.

Will does what he has to. What he needs to. Like he always does.

That’s why he’s Will.

“No, don’t tell me,” she said. “What about Roy?”

“He should be back at the island in a few hours with a passenger. Her name’s Zoe. She’s hurt, so you’ll have to take care of her for me.”

“Carly warned me you’d find someone else out there.”

He laughed, and Lara couldn’t help but smile.

“We were sort of thrown together,” he said. “I think you’ll like her.”

“Is she okay?”

“She was shot, too.”

Who hasn’t been shot these days? Lara thought, but said, “How bad is it?”

“I wasn’t sure if she would live, but she’s a tough one. She was in one of those blood farms when all of this began.”

“How did you two meet?”

“She was working in one of the camps the collaborators were running. The one Josh was in charge of.”

Josh.

Lara still couldn’t believe it. Eighteen-year-old Josh, who followed Gaby around like a lost puppy when she first met them all those months ago. But as difficult as it was for her to believe that Josh had changed so much, it had been even more of an ordeal for Gaby.

Will’s hurt. Gaby’s missing. And Josh has become the enemy.

How did it all go so wrong?

“When I was shot, she saved my life,” Will was saying. “I owe her everything, Lara.”

“Then I’ll have to thank her when she gets here.”

“She’s a doctor, so once she’s better, she’ll be a big asset to the island.”

“Oh, a doctor. A real doctor, you mean.”

He laughed again. “It’s not like that.”

“No?” she teased.

It had been so long since she’d had the opportunity to have a little fun at his expense. The fact that he was still alive made her a bit giddy, and Lara was glad she was alone in the third floor of the Tower so no one could see. She could be herself with Will, but these days, other people expected more out of her. Too much, sometimes.

“She could never replace you,” he said. “No one could. Not in a million years.”

“Good answer,” Lara said. “Though I’m sure if she wanted to replace me, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge. She is, after all, a real doctor.”

He went quiet again, and she wondered if she had gone too far.

“Will, it’s just a joke.”

“It’s not that, Lara.”

“What is it, then?”

“You can do this. It’s in you to lead.”

“That’s not my job. That’s yours.”

“I’m just a grunt.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. I’ve always been just a grunt. Give me a gun and a target, and I can handle it. But you… You’re smarter and stronger than I’ll ever be.”

Her chest tightened. The way he had said it — so earnestly and with so much conviction, as if he believed every word of it with every fiber of his being. At that moment, she wasn’t sure if she should be proud or scared. It was probably a little of both.

“Danny told me how you handled the West and Brody problem,” Will said. “You did good, babe.”

“Thanks.”

“Just like I knew you would.”

“Then you had more faith in me than I did.”

“Don’t doubt yourself, Lara. You survived The Purge.”

“I was lucky.”

“It wasn’t luck. It was persistence and that strength I mentioned before. You have it in you to lead, Lara.”

“Will…”

“That’s why I know the island will be fine without me for a few more days. Or however long it takes to find Gaby. When I’ve done that, I’ll come home. There’s nothing I want more. Nothing in this world than to hold you and kiss you again.”

“You still love me?” she asked.

It sounded like something only a lovesick teenager would come up with even to her own ears. But she couldn’t help herself, and she wasn’t the least embarrassed by it. Not here. Not with Will.

And she had to know…

“More than anything,” he said. “More than anything in this world. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Absolutely nothing.”

His voice was steady, heartfelt, and she wanted to cry but didn’t. Because that was something a teenage girl would do, too, and she hadn’t been that in a long time.

She sat up straighter in the chair instead.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“But I need to find Gaby first. I have to try.”

“I know.” She took her fingers off the transmit lever and took a breath, then gathered herself, grateful for the cool wind sweeping into the Tower through the four open windows around her.

“Lara,” Will said.

“Yes…”

“I’ll see you soon.”

She smiled, pressing the transmit lever. “Go find Gaby, then come home. The island and I will still be here when you get back. I promise.”

Hours after her conversation with Will over the radio, Lara stood at the end of the pier and watched the pontoon through a pair of binoculars. Blaine and Bonnie were standing on the boat, with Roy and the woman sitting in chairs as they glided smoothly across Beaufont Lake. Blaine was behind the steering wheel, Bonnie leaning to one side, her long auburn hair blowing wildly in the breeze.

Lara smiled at the sight. Even on a fast-moving boat, her face splashed with too-bright sun and no makeup, Bonnie still looked like a supermodel that had just stepped off a runway. It was almost unfair for every other woman on the island.

“As milady requested, the infirmary’s ready for its newest customer,” Carly said, coming up behind her. “Though I have to say, it’s a good thing Roy’s bringing back medical supplies, because we’re running dangerously low.”

“I know,” Lara said.

Their dwindling medical supplies. It was one of the reasons Will and Gaby had gone out there in the first place. There were other reasons, but there was no getting around the fact that they had suffered too many injuries lately.

Everyone’s hurt. Everyone’s shot up. Every day, surviving gets harder and harder.

I could use you back here with me right now, Will.

“You know, there’s an easier solution to this problem we keep having,” Carly said.

“I’m listening…”

“Stop getting shot or stabbed.”

“Now that’s an idea. I’ll bring it up at the meeting later tonight.”

“I get credit for it, right?”

“Absolutely.” Then, Lara added, “Danny’ll be all right, Carly.”

“I know,” Carly said. “I just realized this is the first time we’ve really been apart, that’s all.”

Carly watched the pontoon coming toward them and absently played with her red hair. Lara was always surprised how much older her friend looked despite being just twenty. Carly had been a teenager when they first met, but then you grew up fast or you didn’t grow up at all these days.

Adapt or perish, right, Will?

Lara took Carly’s hand and squeezed. “He’ll be fine. The two of them out there? Those collaborators don’t stand a chance.”

Carly smiled back at her. Or tried to. “I know. So why does it take me so long to go to sleep, and I keep waking up in the middle of the night?”

“Because you love him.”

“So that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She sighed. “Love’s depriving me of my beauty sleep.”

“Amen, sister.”

They both laughed.

“Please don’t say that ever again,” Carly said.

“Shoot me if I ever do,” Lara said.

“Deal.”

Lara glanced down the pier at Jo, who was standing on the boat shack at the other end with a shotgun poking out from behind her back. The sight of the tall, skinny girl with the weapon was borderline absurd. Lara waved, and Bonnie’s little sister waved back.

“Has she fired that thing before?” Carly asked, looking back at Jo.

“Not yet,” Lara said. “I don’t want her to, either. She might hurt herself.”

“I’m more concerned about her hurting me with that thing.”

“Let’s all hope it doesn’t come to Jo saving us with a shotgun.” Lara unclipped her radio and said into it, “Maddie, what do you see?”

“The lake’s clear from up here,” Maddie said through the radio.

Maddie was back in the Tower, pulling overwatch with the M4 rifle equipped with the ACOG scope. Just like with the beach, someone was always in the Tower to keep an eye on the surrounding lake and the shore to the east and south of them. Another one of Will’s protocols that everyone had taken to heart, because the alternative was unacceptable.

We’re like a well-oiled machine. If by machine you mean a bunch of amateurs with dangerous weapons they don’t actually know how to use.

“No traffic on the roads?” Lara asked.

“None that I can see,” Maddie said. Then, “Lara, when you’re done down there, I need to see you back up here.”

“Something wrong?”

“Something good.”

Carly and Lara exchanged a curious look.

“I was playing around with the radio and I heard something that you’re going to want to hear,” Maddie continued.

“What is it?” Lara asked.

“I think you should hear it for yourself. It’s hard to explain. But your message, the one you sent out into the world? Someone just responded to it.”

“Is that good?” Carly asked.

Lara shook her head. “I have no idea. Can you…?”

“Go. A boss lady’s work is never done.”

Lara sighed.

Boss.

The very idea that she was the “boss” of anything, much less an island full of desperate survivors, still sounded wrong in so many ways. Despite what Will had said this morning, Lara had doubts. But then, she always had doubts. It stuck with her when she went to sleep and when she woke up.

Doubts. There were always doubts.

Carly must have seen the look on her face. She smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “Get used to it. When Will comes back, we’ll have to call you guys co-bosses. You’ll be CBL.”

“CBL?”

“Co-Boss Lady.”

“How long did it take you to come up with that?”

“I spent all night thinking it up. I mean, I couldn’t sleep anyway. Awesome, right?”

“Yeah, no,” Lara said.

“This is the United States government, trying to reach the person or persons responsible for the message that has been broadcasting across the radio frequencies. If you can hear us, please respond. I repeat: This is the United States government, trying to reach the person or persons responsible for the message that has been broadcasting across the radio frequencies…”

“The United States government?” Lara said.

“That’s what they’re claiming,” Maddie said. “Though Uncle Sam sounds like a sixteen-year-old virgin if you ask me.”

Lara was back on the third floor of the Tower, staring at the ham radios sitting on the table. She had used one of them to talk to Will earlier. There were three, with the most visually interesting one connected to a laptop by a tangled mess of wires duct-taped together. That radio was still broadcasting, sending out the recorded message, though they had muted the sound on their end.

The second radio sat undisturbed on its own part of the table. It was tuned in to a very specific frequency — their little private designated emergency channel, because no one else but Song Island’s residents knew to monitor it.

The voice they were listening to now was coming from the third radio. The all-purpose one, free and clear of any special use.

“…trying to reach the person or persons responsible for the message that has been broadcasting across the radio frequencies…”

“Is it a recording?” Lara asked.

“Doesn’t sound like it,” Maddie said. “You can tell he’s reading from a script, but he’s definitely doing it live on air.” Then, “Should we answer it?”

“I don’t know.”

What would Will do?

“The less people that know about the island, the better,” Lara said. “It’s fine to bring new people like Bonnie’s and Benny’s groups every once in a while, but when we start opening the place up to just anybody….”

“Lollapalooza,” Maddie finished.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s an alternative rock concert. I went to it once when they came to Austin a few years back.” She waved her hand. “Never mind. Neither here nor there. But is it possible? Do you think the United States government really is still functioning out there?”

Lara shook her head. It had been nearly a year since they knew of anything even remotely resembling an official government broadcast. To hear it now, out of the blue, was unreal. The fact that they were responding to her message was, frankly, unsettling.

“Is it just on the FEMA frequency?” Lara asked.

“As far as I know,” Maddie nodded.

“How long have they been broadcasting?”

“No idea. I heard it about thirty minutes ago while playing around with the radio.” She shrugged. “It gets boring up here by yourself.”

“…this is the United States government,” the voice repeated on the radio, “trying to reach the person or persons responsible for the message that has been broadcasting across the radio frequencies…”

Lara reached for the radio’s microphone and lifted it to her lips but didn’t press the transmit lever right away. She took a deep breath, and then, only then, answered. “This is the person responsible for the broadcast, responding to your message. Over.”

She released the lever and waited, but the only response was silence from the other end. The “sixteen-year-old virgin” had stopped broadcasting.

Lara pressed the transmit lever again. “Hello. If you can hear me, please respond. Over.”

She waited five seconds, then ten…

“Hello,” a voice finally answered. It was different from the one she and Maddie had been listening to. Older, with an authoritative tone that came through even over the radio. “Who am I speaking to. Over.”

“Identify yourself first,” Lara said.

“Colonel Beecher,” the man said. “Commanding officer of what currently remains of the United States of America.”

She looked back at Maddie, who frowned. “That can’t be a good sign. My dad used to say the military is good at a lot of things, but running a democracy isn’t one of them.”

Lara turned back to the radio. “I wasn’t aware the military had taken charge of the country, Colonel.”

“I assure you, I didn’t come to this command voluntarily,” Beecher said. “As far as I know, we’re it. We haven’t been able to make contact with any other civilian or military authority. So I’m left to assume there is no one else out there. Now that I’ve identified myself, would you mind responding in kind, Miss?”

“My name is Lara.”

“Lara, it’s good to hear your voice. We have a lot of questions.”

“Such as?”

“Are you in charge over there?”

No. Far from it. I’m so out of my depth I feel like I’m constantly drowning, except people keep telling me I’m doing fine. Great, even.

God help us.

“Yes,” she said into the microphone.

“Where are you currently located?” Beecher asked.

Nice try.

“That’s not information I’m willing to divulge at the moment, Colonel.”

“Is there a reason?”

“I don’t trust you.”

Beecher chuckled. “Fair enough. It’s a dangerous world out there. It’s difficult to know who to trust.”

“Agreed.”

“So what can you tell me, Lara?”

“Ask, and we’ll find out together.”

“All right.” Beecher paused for a moment. Then, “First of all, the silver. We’ve been trying to kill these things for nearly a year, then overnight your broadcast changed everything. How in God’s name did you know about silver?”

“Trial and error and a lot of experience,” she said. “My turn, Colonel.”

“Fire away.”

“Are you willing to say where you’re located?”

“We’re in Colorado. Five miles out of Denver.”

“Are you in some kind of bunker?”

“Nice try,” Beecher said.

She smiled. “Your turn.”

“Now that you brought it up, are you under or aboveground?”

“Aboveground. You?”

“Both.”

“Now who’s being cute?”

Another chuckle. “I don’t mean to be. Have you ever heard of Bayonet Mountain?”

“No.”

“It’s an old 1950s Cold War bomb shelter designed to withstand an atomic bomb. As it turns out, it works just as well against ghouls, as you call them. That’s where we are now. My men and a sizable civilian population.”

“What’s your definition of sizable, Colonel?”

“At the moment, just over 4,000 military personnel and civilians,” Beecher said. “How about you? How many do you have over there?”

She looked back at Maddie, who mouthed back, “Four thousand?”

Lara took a breath and said into the microphone, “We have, uh, just slightly less than that, Colonel.”

“Can you say how many?” Beecher asked.

“Not at this time.”

“Fair enough. So tell me, Lara. Any ideas about how to take back the planet from these bloodsucking bastards?”

That made Lara pause.

“Lara?” Beecher said. “Are you still there?”

“I’m still here, Colonel.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No. I’m just not sure why you’re asking me that question. You’re the one with 4,000 people with you, including soldiers. I’m just a civilian.”

“You’re more than that. Your message saved our lives, Lara. Learning about silver has turned the tide for us.” He paused again. Then, “You don’t have a clue what you’ve done, do you?”

She didn’t, because she had put out the message at Danny and Roy’s insistence. Lara was still grieving what she thought at the time were Will’s and Gaby’s deaths. The radio message was supposed to give whoever was still out there hope, but in so many ways it was to give herself hope.

“No,” she said finally. “I guess I don’t.”

“You gave us a fighting chance,” Beecher said. “Your broadcast changed everything, and I’m willing to bet there are others monitoring this frequency right now, who have been waiting for someone to lead them…”

3 Gaby

The spork was white and plastic and flimsy in her hand. It was one of those disposable utensils that came in cases of a thousand. It barely held together as she picked her way through the baked potato, so it was a good thing the toughest food on the brown cafeteria-style tray were strips of shriveled bacon, dirty brown rice, and two buttered biscuits.

As for its ability to penetrate the human skin, well, she didn’t have very high hopes. They didn’t even trust her enough to give her one of those plastic butter knives. As if she could actually stab anyone with it. Of course, that wouldn’t have kept her from trying, though the point was moot since she didn’t have one.

“You barely touched your food.”

She rubbed her thumb along the teeth of the spork. The two middle claws were probably too weak to puncture anything as tough as human skin, but the two flanking teeth were twice the size and just as sharp. Better yet, they were reinforced by the oval-shaped spoon connected to them. So, pretty tough, as far as flimsy plastic utensils went.

“Gaby?”

Even if she couldn’t get the plastic teeth through flesh, she might still be able to dish out some hurt. It wouldn’t be a killing blow and she probably couldn’t dig deep enough to sever a major artery, but there were possibilities—

“Gaby!”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“You hardly touched your food,” Josh said. “You should. We’re celebrating.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“My birthday.”

“Your birthday?”

“I turned nineteen last month. I was going to tell you when we met in the park, but… Well, you know.”

She nodded. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks. Too bad we don’t have any cake. Do you guys have cake on the island?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter.” He smiled. “We’re not kids anymore. Do you realize that? We’re both nineteen. Damn. When did that happen?”

She sat across from him, the frail portable table between them. The tabletop space was so limited that a quarter of their trays dangled off the ends. Josh had eaten most of his potato, wrapped in aluminum foil and baked over a grill, and was shoveling a sporkful of brown rice into his mouth. He seemed to have grown since the last time (Days? Weeks? How long have I been here?) she had seen him back at the camp in Sandwhite Wildlife State Park. In another couple of weeks, his hair would be long enough to tie in a ponytail. She wondered if he had left it long on purpose, or if he was too busy for a barber because of the demands of his new job.

What was the job interview like, Josh?

“I know it’s not a lot,” Josh said, almost apologetically. “But it’s more than most of the people here get to eat. We have to ration the food until we can grow more in the fields. Most of them are still eating MREs and stale bagged chips. Cans of SPAM, if they’re lucky. We found cases of those in a warehouse outside Shreveport. Mountains of them. I guess it’s true what they say. When the world ends, only the cockroaches and SPAM will be left.”

I’m supposed to be grateful for this. Potatoes baked over a grill. Strips of bacon. Dirty brown rice.

“Where did you get the bacon?” she asked.

“Wild hogs. They’re all over the place. Somehow, they managed to survive all this time; I have no idea how. We already have farmers raising them, and in a few years they’ll be plentiful and everyone will be eating bacon and biscuits in the mornings. Oh, and eggs, too. Plenty of chickens are still running around out there. When we’re done, the farms will be the biggest part of the towns.” Josh picked up his water bottle from the floor and twisted it open. “You never asked me how I found you at the pawnshop.”

“How did you find me?”

“She told me. The blue-eyed ghoul. Kate.”

“Will’s Kate…”

“Uh huh. After the black-eyed ones located you, she told them to stay back, to wait until I got there. I guess they sort of jumped the gun a bit, but I arrived just in time, didn’t I?” He smiled, probably expecting her to acknowledge it. “She knew you were important to me. Because you are, Gaby.”

She rubbed her thumb against the teeth of the spork again before glancing over at the closed door to her left. There was a man on the other side named Mac. He took turns walking around the second floor hallway with another one of her guards, Lance. It was afternoon and sunlight was visible through the open window across the room, so Mac was out there because Lance had the night shift.

She turned back to Josh. He was wiping his hands on a handkerchief before stuffing the wool cloth back into his shirt pocket. Josh didn’t wear a hazmat suit when he came to have lunch with her. She wondered if he still did. Mac and Lance didn’t wear one, either. In fact, it had been a while since she had seen a hazmat suit on one of the collaborators.

“What do you want from me, Josh?”

He didn’t answer right away. Maybe he didn’t have an answer. Or, more likely, he just wanted her to wait. Josh did that these days. He had the power, and he knew it. The old Josh, who would do anything to please her, was long gone. The transformation showed in the way he walked, the way he sat, and in the way he looked at and talked to her. She used to adore his shyness, but there was none of that anymore.

This Josh…he knew who he was. What he was. And most of all, he understood and embraced the authority he wielded. Over the others, over the town, and most of all, over her.

Finally, he said, “I just want you to understand what I’ve been doing here, that’s all.”

“And what’s that, Josh?”

He stood up and walked across the room to the window, looking out at the street below. Her eyes went to the chair and she wondered if she could take Josh out with it, then break off a leg and use it on Mac.

Maybe…

“How many times have you stood here and looked out this window?” he asked.

“What does it matter?”

“Just answer me, please, Gaby.”

“Plenty of times.”

“And what do you see?”

“I don’t understand what you want me to say.”

“It’s just a conversation, Gaby.” He sounded a bit exasperated. “When you look outside, what do you see?”

“People.”

“That’s right. People going on with their lives. Little kids not scared of walking in broad daylight. This, Gaby, this is what we’ve always wanted, don’t you remember? To live freely. To not be afraid. Isn’t this what we talked about all those times in every dark and stinky basement we’ve ever hid in since the world ended?”

She stared at him, trying to understand. This new Josh, who was so different from the boy she had known. Where did this Josh come from?

“I did this, Gaby,” he continued. “I helped them put all of this together. Those people down there, they’re going to live out the rest of their natural lives. And all they have to do is give a little blood every night and teach their children to do the same.”

You’re breeding a race of slaves, Josh.

“What’s so bad about that?” He was watching her face intently. “Tell me, Gaby, what’s so bad about what I’ve done here?”

You don’t know. You’re so deep in it, you’re incapable of seeing it.

“What?” he said, narrowing his eyes at her.

Gaby realized she had been smiling at him.

“Share with the class,” he said, the annoyance creeping back into his voice.

“I get it now,” Gaby said.

“Get what?”

“That you’re delusional.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but stopped and sighed instead. “Don’t say that, Gaby.” He sounded genuinely hurt. Or maybe it was just more playacting. “Please don’t say that. I did all of this for you.”

“Stop saying that.”

“It’s true.”

“Stop saying that, Josh. I want nothing to do with this place.” She could feel her patience slipping and did her best to rein it in. Emotion was the enemy here. (Stay in control!) “Get it through your head, Josh: I don’t want any part of this.”

He walked silently back over and gathered up the sporks, dumped them on her plate, over her uneaten potato and strips of bacon and dirty brown rice, and stacked the trays together. “I’m leaving tonight to help out with another town.” His voice was still calm, even-keeled. Josh had mastered his emotions. Somewhat. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks.” He picked up the trays and walked to the door without another glance in her direction. “Mac!”

The door opened and Mac leaned in. He had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and was wearing a camo uniform that made him look almost like a soldier, though she guessed Will and Danny would disagree. Lance had been wearing the same identical clothing the last few days, and so had other men with guns she had seen on the streets.

Is this another one of your doing, Josh? Turning collaborators into soldiers?

“Grab the chair,” Josh said before stepping outside the room.

Mac came inside and walked over to the bed. He gave her a sharp look, almost daring her to do something, as he picked up the chair.

“How’s the head?” she asked. “Stitches holding up?”

He smirked. “Keep it up. Your boyfriend won’t be here forever.” He had said that last part almost in a low whisper, as if afraid Josh would overhear.

He’s afraid of Josh. This grown man is afraid of a nineteen-year-old teenager who was in high school last year.

Mac exited and slammed the door after him. She heard the familiar click-chank of the deadbolt sliding into place on the other side.

When she was alone again, Gaby stopped fighting and let her stomach growl and wished she had at least eaten the potato. Or the bacon. When was the last time she was going to get a chance to eat fried bacon again?

At least they had left her the water bottle. She picked it up from the floor and drank greedily. It was warm — but then, they all were these days. The liquid helped soothe her throat, which still hurt from the night at the pawnshop when one of Josh’s people had struck her with the butt of his rifle. It was Josh who had wrapped her up in a ball, his hazmat suit saving the two of them from the horde of ghouls rushing into the room. He had saved her, but what about…

Nate.

He had been there too, though Josh refused to tell her what had happened to him. Josh wouldn’t even tell her if Nate was alive or dead. Or worse — if he had been turned. It was Josh’s way of punishing her, letting her know that, ultimately, he held all the cards.

Because he did. All fifty-two of them.

She walked to the window, hoping that staying active would keep her hunger temporarily at bay. They had left her plenty of clothes. Or whoever used to live in the room before her had. The jeans and T-shirt fit fine, and there were even socks, but no signs of shoes of any type. Not that she needed to wear shoes at all. The only place they would allow her to go was a single bathroom two doors down the hallway. She hadn’t even made it far enough to the end of the second floor to see down to the first.

Gaby looked out at the sun-streaked streets below, just in time to catch Josh emerging from the building and climbing into a waiting green Jeep. As far as she could tell, they were keeping her in some kind of boarding house. Not exactly a hotel, but one of those bed-and-breakfasts. That explained the other rooms. She heard plenty of people coming and going over the last few days, even if she never actually got the chance to lay eyes on them. If this was some kind of prison, she was the only one locked up.

Her view of the outside world was revealing, even through the metal burglar bars fastened over the window. She didn’t know if hers was the only one secured like a prison cell. The bars were so tightly pressed against the frame that it was impossible to stick her head out far enough to see around her.

The driver waiting for Josh wore the same type of uniform as Lance and Mac and looked at least twenty years older than the kid he was picking up. The two men exchanged a perfunctory nod, but nothing resembling a salute. As the Jeep moved away from the curb, she waited for Josh to look up, perhaps sensing her, but he never did. She watched them drive off until they disappeared up the street.

“I’m leaving tonight to help out with another town,” Josh had said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks.”

And maybe I won’t be here when you get back, Josh.

She looked around at the room.

Of course, getting out of this place was easier said than done. Besides the round-the-clock guard outside her door, she had no weapons, and they had taken away anything that could even remotely be used as a weapon ever since she had nearly killed Mac with the nightstand the first day she woke up.

But Gaby didn’t for a second think about giving up the idea of escape. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. Surrender wasn’t a part of her DNA. It had never been, and the end of the world hadn’t changed that.

Take all the time you need, Josh. I won’t be here when you get back…

She didn’t get another visitor for the rest of the afternoon. There were no clocks in the room, so she had to use the sun outside to tell time. That and the noise, because the people on the streets were most active in the mornings and afternoons, but as it got darker, the activity died down and the town became ghostly quiet.

They still remember. This place might have become a safe haven, but they still remember what’s out there when the sun goes down.

After four days in L15, she had become used to the sight of people on horseback and kids in shorts running around the street. There wasn’t any danger of getting run over because there were so few cars in town. And you knew when a car came, because it was usually one of those big Army transport trucks settling yet another group of people. She wondered how long those vehicles had been coming and going. Sooner or later, the space would run out, and then what?

Another town. L16, maybe. Or L20.

L30?

How long had they been building these places, she wondered, and how many more were out there right now? In Louisiana, and in the other states?

What about around the world?

The sight of pregnant women had also ceased to become a novelty. She watched them from her window with a mixture of sadness and pity. Did they know what they were getting into? Of course they did. Josh had told them. Or whoever ran this place when Josh wasn’t here. She didn’t think Josh was actually responsible for the day-to-day operations. He was like an overseer, coming and going as needed.

The sun was already fading over the rooftops across the street. She didn’t need a watch or a clock to tell her that it was almost six. It would be dark in less than thirty minutes. Sometimes sooner, when you least expected it.

Night is not our friend. Not anymore.

She glanced back when the doorknob behind her jingled and Mac pushed the door open. He looked in cautiously, as if expecting her to be lying in wait for him. Gaby almost grinned at his reluctance.

“Dinner, your highness,” Mac said, with just enough of a smirk to get across his disdain for her.

A young girl who Gaby had never seen before squeezed her way past Mac. Gaby’s entire world in L15 up to this point had revolved around Josh coming in the afternoons and evenings, and Mac standing outside her door in the day and Lance at night. The girl brought a newness that stirred curiosity and suspicion in Gaby.

And who might you be, little girl?

She wore a white sundress and had short black hair cut to complement a round face. She looked all of thirteen, with big brown eyes that gave her a rare vibe of innocence, something that was in short supply these days.

She smiled at Gaby. “I brought you dinner.”

“Thank you,” Gaby said.

The girl was carrying a brown plastic tray with a red apple, a baked potato in aluminum foil, (Potatoes again? she thought, just as her stomach growled), and two pieces of bread with something that looked like ham placed with care between them.

“Where should I put it?” the girl asked her.

“Put it anywhere,” Mac said impatiently behind her.

“But I don’t want it to get dirty.”

“Just put it anywhere, for God’s sake.”

“On the bed’s fine,” Gaby said.

She smiled at the girl and got a pleasant response. “Are you sure?” the girl asked. “Peter would kill me if he saw food on my bed.”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

That elicited another bright smile. The girl walked over to the bed and put the tray down over the duvet. She stepped back and seemed to hesitate for a moment.

“Get on with it,” Mac said behind her.

“I’ll come back later — for the tray — when you’re done,” the girl said. There was something about the way she looked at Gaby — a strange, almost anxiousness in her voice — that made Gaby even more curious.

“Okay,” Gaby nodded when the girl didn’t say anything else.

“Come on,” Mac said. “I don’t have all day.”

The girl hurried back to the door. Mac held it open for her then slammed it shut after them and immediately pushed the deadbolt into place on the other side.

Gaby stared at the door after them.

What was that about?

She sat on her bed, eating everything on the tray. She devoured the potato skins and apple core and crumbs from the two slices of bread. Homemade bread. She could tell. Her mom couldn’t make bread to save her life, but her friend Anna’s mom could. The ham was delicious and fresh. They weren’t from a frozen package like on the island. She guessed the townspeople got it from the same pigs as the strips of bacon Josh was boasting about earlier.

She thought about the girl as she ate and watched nightfall blanket the world outside her window. She had gotten used to leaving it open. The sight of candles and flickering lanterns from the buildings around her brought a sense of normalcy she didn’t realize she had missed until now.

But it was the girl in the white sundress that stayed at the forefront of her mind. The kid had wanted to say something, but the presence of Mac had discouraged it. What was going on behind those big eyes?

It was pitch-dark outside when she finished her meal and found herself back at the window, looking past the buildings and at the woods beyond. L15 was ringed by woods. Dark and natural, their trees teeming with things she couldn’t see. Things other than the animals on the branches, the birds perched among the crowns. Things that were moving on the ground, restless…

Ghouls.

She shivered involuntarily. They were out there right now. Somewhere. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel their presence beyond the town limits. The people around her could, too. That was why L15 shut down well before nightfall, why everyone — despite the arrangement, despite the promised safety — still operated under the assumption it wasn’t safe to wander outside in the dark.

How many were out there right now, in the woods? Hundreds? Thousands? Easily thousands. The creatures always seemed to know where people congregated. And there were a hell of a lot of people here, right now, in these buildings around her. What was keeping them from coming in one of these days?

Or maybe the better question was, who was holding them back…

The girl with the round face and the big eyes came back five minutes later, still wearing the sundress, while Gaby was at the window. Mac did his usual look-inside-first move before letting the girl in. Then he stayed behind at the open door, watching Gaby like a hawk. He was so consumed with her that he didn’t pay any attention to the girl.

“Get it and let’s go,” Mac said.

The girl hurried inside and picked up the tray, glanced briefly at Gaby — sideways, so Mac couldn’t see their brief exchange (Okay, now what was that about?)—before leaving again without a word.

“Sleep tight,” Mac said. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite, princess.”

“Can I ask you something, Mac?” Gaby said.

That caught him by surprise. He hesitated, then said guardedly, “What?”

“Have you lived it down yet?”

“Lived what down?”

“Almost getting your head bashed in by a girl with an end table.”

He grunted. “Yeah, you keep bringing that up, princess. Like I keep telling you, one of these days your boyfriend might not be in charge anymore. Those things out there? Those bloodsuckers? They’ve been known to change their minds.”

Mac gave her a big grin, one that was intended to scare her.

It didn’t work. “Josh thinks you’re a pussy. He told me himself. Can’t stand you. Says you don’t bathe.”

His face turned slightly pale even in the semidarkness of her room, and he was about to respond when he apparently decided against it and left without a word instead. Gaby sighed when she heard the deadbolt snapping into place. She didn’t think very highly of Mac, but the man was damn good about always locking her inside.

The girl had left without a word while she was talking with Mac. Gaby cursed herself. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the kid instead of wasting her time with—

Then she saw it. A piece of folded paper, tucked underneath the duvet near where the tray had been.

She hurried across the room, suddenly terrified Mac might choose tonight, of all nights, to come back in for a last-minute check before turning the shift over to Lance. She picked up the paper and walked toward the door on tiptoes, making as little noise as possible, and leaned against the wall and listened.

Mac, moving around, the creak of his heavy combat boots against the floorboards.

Gaby unfolded the note. It was a small piece of what looked to be from a sheet of 8.5x11 piece of writing paper. There was writing on it in black pen, the letters drafted in fine, almost elegant cursive letters. Which meant the girl didn’t write it. Gaby had known plenty of girls at thirteen — herself included — and none ever had this kind of penmanship.

She scanned the letters, her eyes widening with every line she read:

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you? Destroy this when done.”

Gaby re-read the note again just to be sure her desperate mind hadn’t accidentally (purposefully?) “rewritten” the note for its own purposes:

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you? Destroy this when done.”

No. It was still the same.

“If we help you escape, will you take us with you?”

Gaby folded the note back up until it was barely the size of her thumb, then slipped it into her mouth and swallowed.

She woke up sometime in the middle of the night to the sound of footsteps outside her door. They were too quiet, someone walking on tiptoes, to be Lance. So quiet, in fact, that she only heard it because she had been sitting on the bed waiting for it, or something like it, for the last few hours.

The second floor was partially lit by a portable LED lantern hanging from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the hallway, between her door and the staircase on the other side. It was rechargeable, and she had seen Mac taking it down to recharge every morning when he showed up for his shift.

There was definitely a figure moving against the hallway light now, visible as elongated shadows through the slit under the door. The figure stopped, shifted (crouched?), then the sound of paper sliding across the floor.

Gaby climbed out of bed and raced toward the door just as the figure stood up and turned to go. “Wait,” Gaby said, whispering just loudly enough to be heard. She snatched up the paper — the same size as the other one — and pocketed it. “Don’t go.”

The shadow turned, then someone pressed against the door. A soft, familiar voice whispered, “You’re awake.”

Gaby smiled. It was the girl in the sundress. “What’s your name?”

“Milly.”

“Milly, who sent you—”

“I have to go,” Milly said, cutting her off. “He’s coming back.”

“Wait—”

But Milly was gone, the barely audible tap-tap of bare feet against the hallway floor, before a door opened and closed softly seconds later. Gaby was certain Milly had disappeared into a room somewhere further down the hallway, which meant she lived in the building and was one of the many unseen neighbors that came and went every day.

A few seconds later, loud footsteps — like thunder compared to Milly’s — climbed up the stairs and moved across the hallway.

Lance.

She got up and tiptoed back to her bed, lay down, and pulled the duvet over her chest and under her chin as the footsteps got closer. Lance moved with all the grace of a bear wearing combat boots.

Gaby closed her eyes when she heard the metal scraping — the familiar noise of the deadbolt sliding free. The door opened a crack and dimmed LED lights flooded into the room. She imagined, but didn’t open her eyes to see, Lance’s familiar hulking frame in the doorway, making sure she hadn’t escaped while he was gone.

A few seconds later, the door closed and the click-chank of the deadbolt once again locked her in.

She sat up, took out the note, and unwrapped it.

It was the same black ink written in the same careful cursive handwriting:

“First light. Be ready. Destroy this note.”

Gaby re-read the note again, making sure she didn’t miss anything, before folding it back up and swallowing it.

She looked over at the window and the darkness outside.

“First light” was sunrise. The “Be ready” part was obvious.

What wasn’t clear was what they were planning. She didn’t believe Milly was acting on her own, and the careful handwriting proved it. So Milly was working with someone. Who? Maybe her father. Or a brother. Maybe just a friend. Gaby was no expert, but the handwriting looked like a man’s. Then again, for all she knew, it really could just have been little Milly. Was that possible?

She lay back down and closed her eyes. If there was some kind of escape being planned for tomorrow, she had to be ready. And that meant getting as much sleep as possible now so she would be alert for tomorrow.

“First light…”

An hour later, she was still awake.

An hour after that, she gave up trying to sleep altogether.

Gaby climbed out of bed and did push-ups on the floor. She had been keeping up her strength ever since she first opened her eyes in L15, knowing that eventually the time would come when she would need it, so the sudden burst of physical activity wasn’t anything new to her body.

She did thirty push-ups, then threw in fifty sit-ups, hoping to tire herself out enough to get the sleep she needed. When that still didn’t work, she shadowboxed in the dark, careful to stay away from the window where someone outside could see her.

She didn’t stop until she was covered in sweat and her body was sore all over.

When she lay down on the bed for the second time, she had no trouble falling asleep.

“First light. Be ready…”

4 Will

“We go in, hit the bars, deflower the virgins, and we’re outta there with no one the wiser,” Danny said. “Easy peasy.”

“What about the guys with guns?” Will asked.

“Weekend warriors. We’ll be nice and give them a couple of rounds’ head start. But that’s as far as I’m willing to bend over for these bozos.” He glanced back at Kellerson. “What do you think? That strike you as fair?”

Kellerson stared blankly back at him. He couldn’t have said a word even if he wanted to, not with a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His hands, resting limply in his lap, were bound at the wrists. The pinky and ring finger of his left hand were missing, and blood was seeping through the fresh gauze Will had put on the man this morning. Kellerson was quickly becoming more trouble than he was worth.

“Not much of a conversationalist, huh?” Danny said.

“He’s shy,” Will said. “Cut him some slack.”

“‘Cut him’?” Danny snorted.

Will smiled. “No pun intended.”

“What pun? Oh, you meant those missing fingers of his?”

They were hidden in the woods, looking out from cover at what used to be a small town called Downer Plateau. There was a good kilometer of open clearing and small roads between them and the town, now referred to by the collaborators as simply L15. Behind them, hidden by trees for at least another three kilometers, was Interstate 49, the primary road through this part of Louisiana.

L15—or what parts of it he could see — had been a good-sized place once upon a time. Big enough for thousands of people to call it home. It was connected to the interstate by a state highway, and from what he could see most of the buildings were concentrated around a central main street. The place gave off an old-fashioned vibe, which was exactly what the ghouls and their human collaborators were going for.

“We think it’s because they want us to start over,” someone had once told him. “A fresh start. The cities are filled with reminders of the old world. Our achievements, our art, our evolution as human beings. Out here, surrounded by farmland, woods… It’s like going back to our roots. No power, no electricity… It’s easier to believe the last two centuries never happened.”

It wasn’t a bad place, if you were looking to start all over without actually beginning from scratch. The people moving around the streets were there willingly. Children poked their heads out of apartment windows, and every now and then he heard the clop-clop of horseshoes on roads meant for cars. The last collaborator town he had been this close to had armed men on rooftops and walking the streets. But there was a noticeable lack of anything resembling “the enemy” at L15.

He looked back at Kellerson again, leaning lifelessly against a tree. The man’s face was white, his eyes hollow, and Will kept expecting him to bolt any second, but losing two fingers must have taken all the fight out of him. That, and he just didn’t look like he had the strength to stand up, much less think he might be able to outrun them.

“L15,” Will said to Kellerson. “That means there are fourteen more towns just like this one?”

Kellerson nodded and mumbled something behind the duct tape.

“How far does the number go? Twenty? Higher?”

Another nod.

“Thirty?”

Kellerson seemed to think about it, then shrugged.

“You don’t know for sure.”

Nod.

“I guess you were right,” Danny said. “Little buggers have been busy while we were twiddling our thumbs back on the beach and drinking piña coladas.”

“Looks like it.”

Will glanced at his watch. 4:14 p.m.

Two hours before sunset. Even with the ATVs Kellerson and his men had been using (when they weren’t tooling around in their armored Humvees), it had taken him and Danny too long to travel from Lafayette, where they had parted company with Roy and Zoe earlier this morning. He couldn’t afford to let Zoe go yesterday after she had been shot, not until he was sure she wouldn’t die on Roy while they were en route. Zoe was a doctor, and those were more valuable than bullets these days.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” Will said.

“Of course it is,” Danny said. “If it didn’t, then this would just be another boring jaunt through the woods. And I forgot my jaunting pants at the island.”

“Shoulda packed appropriately.”

“Shoulda, coulda, but didn’ta.”

Will gestured at Kellerson, who pushed himself off the tree with some effort, turned around, and began marching back through the woods. There was enough light splashing through the trees around them that Will didn’t feel like he was walking through a nest of ghouls, something that you had to take into consideration these days, especially when you were close to an area filled with humans — or prey, to the creatures. They crunched dried leaves and snapped twigs under them, the noise swallowed up by birds perched along branches.

“You think he’s back there?” Danny asked. “Our little buddy Josh?”

“If she’s there, he’s probably there, too.”

“Kid’s got it bad. I remember the last time a girl had me so head over heels. Of course, it never occurred to me to sell out the human race for her affections. Then again, Dad always did say I lacked ambition.”

“If only he could see you now.”

“Yeah. Take that, Pops.”

They hadn’t gone more than a few minutes before Will heard it — felt it, really. He grabbed Kellerson and pushed him down onto one knee, while at the same time he and Danny went into a crouch and looked to their right through a small grouping of trees.

They were less than forty meters from the highway that connected the town to the interstate, and Will had previously spotted a couple of vehicles — both trucks — coming and going. At the moment, he caught a flash of red paint, then dull green. A pickup truck up front, followed by an Army five-ton transport, its thick tires kicking up clouds of dust in its wake.

“Haven’t seen those in a while,” Danny said. “My ass hurts just looking at them.”

Will reached over and peeled the duct tape half off Kellerson’s mouth. The man sighed with relief and sucked in a deep, fresh breath.

“Those five-tons,” Will said. “Are they always full when they show up at these places?”

“Yeah,” Kellerson nodded. He sounded hoarse, even though he had just drank some water a few hours ago. “The kid believes in efficiency, and he’s been organizing everyone into a military mindset. Thinks he’s a major or something.”

“The kid.” Josh.

You actually entrusted one of your operations to an eighteen-year-old kid, Kate? Really?

“How many does a town like L15 hold?” Will asked.

“Maybe two or three thousand,” Kellerson said.

“How many dickheads do they have watching that many people?” Danny asked.

Kellerson shrugged. “Anywhere from ten to twenty.”

“Ten to twenty for a few thousand?” Danny wrinkled his nose. “You telling a fib, Kellerson? Want Willie boy here to start working on those toes next?”

“He doesn’t get it, does he?” Kellerson said, looking at Will.

Will slapped the duct tape back over Kellerson’s mouth.

“Get what?” Danny said. “You BFFs have a joke you wanna share with me? Come on, I’m starting to feel like the third wheel here.”

“He means they don’t need a lot of guards,” Will said. “The people in these towns are here of their own free will. They don’t want to leave. My guess is, ten is more than enough, and twenty is overkill.”

“So what you’re saying is, when we finally get around to going in there guns blazing, they won’t be throwing their virginal daughters at us?”

“That’s an affirmative.”

Danny grunted. “Well, damn. I certainly signed up for the wrong road trip, didn’t I?”

They walked for another hour until they reached the spot where they had stashed the camouflage ATVs earlier — a small group of buildings about half a kilometer from I-49. It was a homestead connected to the highway by a spur road that hadn’t looked traveled even before The Purge. The house’s main building was a bungalow flanked by an empty garage. A long red barn, the paint badly chipped by neglect and weather, squatted in the back with a rusted-over tractor out front. The place was as out-of-the-way as they could find on short notice.

The ATVs were hidden inside the barn among the unused bales of hay and horseless stables. Walking the rest of the way to L15 had been necessary. Sound traveled these days, and the roar of all-terrain vehicles would have been obvious to even a deaf man.

There hadn’t been much of the bungalow to explore, and their biggest worry was the decayed sloping roof falling down on them. They found what they were looking for in the back of the house, hidden behind rotting twin doors that opened up into an underground cellar. There wasn’t much inside except for old tractor parts and stacks of cinder blocks under dust-covered tarps. They cleared out just enough space in one corner and dropped their bedrolls and supply packs.

Kellerson sat down in one corner on the dirt floor. Will let him eat a stick of beef jerky and gave him a bottle of water to wash it down with. When he was done, Will covered his mouth back up before he could say a word. The fight had gone out of Kellerson about the same time Will threatened to take the collaborator’s third finger.

They found a way to lock the doors by looping coiled steel cables around the handles and snapping a padlock in place. When that didn’t look like it would hold against a prolonged assault, they stacked the cinderblocks in front of the entrance, then threw the heavy tarps over them to make sure not a single inch of space could be seen from the other side. The creatures had proven themselves too smart at detecting people to take any chances.

If their luck did happen to run out, at least they had plenty of the right ammo to fend off an attack. Danny and Roy had left Song Island well prepared, and Will had taken all of Roy’s before they parted company this morning. Roy took the regular ammo because in the daytime, any ol’ bullet would do. Will and Danny carried two heavy bags and two tactical backpacks with them, stuffed with a combination of what Danny and Roy had brought and what they had salvaged from Kellerson’s dead crew. Dead men didn’t need beef jerky, bottled water, and spare ammo. The portable ham radio he had been using to communicate with Song Island was among the supplies.

Will looked down at his watch’s glow-in-the-dark hands: 5:34 p.m.

“You think she’s still alive in there?” Danny asked. He was chewing loudly on a stick of jerky.

“Gaby?”

“No, Yoko Ono. Yeah, Gaby.”

“She’s Gaby.”

“Yup. That’s her name, all right.”

“What I mean is, she’ll be fine. She’s a survivor. You should have seen her at the hospital.”

“Yeah?”

Will nodded. “Yeah.”

Soon, the only evidence that Danny was even leaning against the dirt wall next to him was the sound of chewing. Somewhere to his right, Kellerson was breathing deeply. How the man could make so much noise while only inhaling and exhaling through his nostrils was a mystery. Will had considered removing Kellerson’s duct tape to make it easier on him, but it never took long for the man’s crimes — those that Will knew for a fact, and likely more he didn’t even know about — to come up again, and it took all of Will’s strength not to execute him on the spot.

Night came, and they heard scurrying outside almost immediately. The soft patter of bare feet against hard ground vibrated through the dried dirt around them.

Will flicked the fire selector on his M4A1 rifle from semi-automatic to full-auto just in case.

“You nervous in the service, son?” Danny whispered somewhere in the darkness.

Will smiled.

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your flimsy cellar doors down,” Danny whispered.

A soft click as Danny flicked at his carbine’s fire selector.

Will sat back against the cool dirt wall and groped his pack for the all-too-light bottle of painkillers. He shook out two Tramadol and popped them into his mouth, then swallowed without chewing. He pulled up his shirt and ran his palm over the stitching along his right side and considered it a good sign he didn’t feel any wetness. His left arm had numbed over since yesterday, and he hadn’t felt anything more than the occasional slight tingles coming from his left hip in a while. Either the pills were working, or he had become used to them.

What he wouldn’t give to have Lara look him over. The last thing he needed was an infection. Battlefield wound treatment was a crapshoot at best, but leaving them for days was just asking for it.

Of course, having Lara treat him meant going back home. Back to Song Island.

And he couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not while Gaby was still out there…

Around midnight he drifted off, waking up two hours later to let Danny sleep.

Each time Will woke up, he could hear Kellerson moving erratically in the darkness, possibly from a nightmare. Or it could be the bugs and hairy legs of spiders crawling up and down his body. Will felt them too, but they were small enough that he didn’t bother chasing them off. He did slap a few that wandered too close to his neck and face, squashing them against his palm, then wiping the leftover goop on the floor.

When he was awake, he listened to the occasional movements on the other side of the cellar doors, like rats scratching in the walls. He wasn’t surprised they were out there, though it did make him more than a little uncomfortable they were this close. There was no one in the house, and surely they must have already searched it a hundred times since The Purge, so why were they back?

But the creatures’ presence in the area didn’t surprise him at all. There were people nearby in L15. Humans that had given up liberty for salvation. Blood for safety.

“They’re not like you, Will,” Zoe had said to him once. “They’re not soldiers. They’re just trying to survive the end of the world the best they can.”

I would rather die first.

Danny woke up two hours later, and Will went back to sleep.

He felt the heat building inside the cellar with the morning, and small slivers of sunlight flitted through the barricade in front of him when he opened his eyes. Not much light, just enough to illuminate parts of the room.

He sat up and soaked in the peace and quiet of a waking world. The birds had already begun chirping, and Will thought about Lara, about waking up next to her and wishing he were there now instead of sitting inside a room literally dug out of the ground.

After about an hour of tranquility, he stood up and woke Danny, who had been sleeping soundlessly next to him.

“I’m up, I’m up,” Danny said. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Beef jerky.”

“That’s what we had yesterday.”

“Ain’t life grand?”

“I could have stayed on the island and eaten pancakes. Speaking of which, you know what else Sarah found in the kitchen freezer?”

“What’s that?”

“Jimmy Hoffa. Turns out he was in there this whole time.”

“You don’t say.”

“I just did. Sheesh. You never listen.” Danny looked over at Kellerson, sleeping awkwardly on his side across from them. “Should we wake up Sleeping Beauty?”

Will looked at Kellerson for a moment. He had been thinking about what to do with the collaborator for some time now and had even devoted one of his two-hour awake times last night just to mull over the question. The possibilities were endless. Some were bloody, others were cruel, and there were a few merciful options in there, too. Each time he had to weigh the lives Kellerson had taken against the man’s fate…all the bodies Will knew about, and all the ones he didn’t…

Finally, Will said, “We should put him out of his misery. He’s already served his purpose.”

“Kinda rude to just kill the guy after he’s been so helpful,” Danny said. “But hey, you know what they say about karma and bitches and all that good stuff.”

Will was reaching for his Glock in its hip holster when a faint noise from outside the cellar drew his attention.

“You heard that?” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Will said. He moved toward the doors and began removing the barrier they had put up there last night.

The noise they had both heard was a faint wet pop sound, something they wouldn’t have detected eleven months ago when the world was still alive.

As he and Danny were throwing cinderblocks out of their path, they heard it again. This time it wasn’t a single sound, but a continuous rattling pop-pop-pop. They knew exactly what it was and where it was coming from.

Behind them. L15.

Gunshots.

5 Gaby

She stood next to the door, just out of the path of the sunlight pouring across the length of the room through the open window. Her back was pressed against the wall, and Gaby willed her breathing into slow beats to allow her senses to concentrate on what was outside the second floor at this very moment.

Mac was out there again, moving around loudly. He might as well be stomping cockroaches in boots. The man would be carrying his usual gear, including the AK-47, a belt with full ammo pouches, and a sidearm.

“First light. Be ready.”

It was first light, but no one had come.

Not Milly the girl or her accomplice. She knew Milly wasn’t working alone because of the first note she had received: “If we help you escape, will you take us with you?”

The “we” was the dead giveaway. If this was real. She didn’t put it past Josh to play games with her, though that was a worst-case scenario. There was no reason for Josh to deceive her now. Not after he had won. She was locked inside a room and not allowed to leave for any reason except to use the bathroom. In every way that mattered, she was at his mercy, so it was doubtful he would stoop so low as to mess with her head.

No, this wasn’t some elaborate trick. It had to be real.

Probably.

She wished she had a weapon, something that could break bone — or at least puncture skin. She had her hands, but it wasn’t nearly as easy to incapacitate someone with your fists as the movies made it out to be. She had learned that the hard way during sparring sessions with Will and Danny. Regardless of what kind of an advantage she had over a man, when it came to hand-to-hand fighting, she was still shorter, smaller, and weaker than her opponent. Girl power be damned, she would rather have a weapon.

Gaby glanced down at her watch: 7:36 a.m.

More than twenty minutes since the sun rose over the tree lines (“first light”) and bathed the town in a welcoming orange glow. To look at it, you wouldn’t know L15 was a town built on lies and desperation—

Voices, coming from the hallway outside.

About time.

Gaby slid closer to the door, leaving just a foot of space between her and the hinges, the doorknob on the other side. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with socks but no shoes. Josh hadn’t responded to her requests for shoes. Just another way to control her, to keep her at his mercy. He was good at that these days.

“Already?” a male voice said. Mac.

“I gotta go do something after this,” a soft female voice answered. Milly. There was a hint of anxiousness. Gaby hoped Mac didn’t notice.

“Like what?” Mac said.

“What do you care?” Milly countered.

“Don’t be a smartass.”

“I’m just saying, if I don’t give her her breakfast now, I won’t be around for another couple of hours. Peter’s got me busy today.”

“Okay, whatever,” Mac said. “Hurry up.”

The familiar sound of the deadbolt sliding, then the doorknob turning. A second later the door opened, followed by something hard and plastic clattering against the floor. She recognized the sound. It was one of the food trays.

“What—” she heard Mac start to say a split-second before Milly backpedaled through the open door, fumbling with a handgun in her small hands.

Oh, hell, this is the plan?

Mac was moving quickly through the door after Milly, reaching one hand out toward her. “Give that back to me, kid. What are you doing? Are you crazy? Give that back to me!”

He was so concerned with Milly — no, about his gun in her hands—that he didn’t do his usual due diligence. He didn’t look around to make sure she wasn’t lying in wait for him.

Now now now!

Gaby pushed herself off the wall and had gotten one step toward Mac — the sound of her bare feet pulling Mac’s eye away from Milly and over to her — but neither one of them managed to do anything before a fourth body slammed into Mac from behind. Arms snaked around Mac’s waist as the new figure’s head buried itself into the small of the guard’s back. The whole thing was so awkwardly executed that Gaby actually found herself staring in astonishment.

Mac let out a loud surprised grunt as he was thrown forward by the surprise attack. He slammed into the wooden footboard of the bed with his stomach and bent over awkwardly at the waist, the AK-47 slung over his shoulder swinging wildly around him. He attempted to right himself when the other man hit him in the back of the head with a brown maple wood rolling pin, swinging the kitchen object like some kind of hammer, and thwack!

Another burst of pained sounds sprung from Mac’s mouth as he slumped forward again, his body draping over the bed’s footboard. The attacker staggered back, gasping for breath, while Milly stood nearby holding the handgun, looking impossibly frightened.

Gaby took a step forward and the attacker whirled on her, rolling pin rising to strike. Gaby ignored him and made a beeline for Mac. She grabbed the AK-47 and pulled it free. A small pool of blood had clumped at the back of Mac’s head, and he didn’t fight her as she took his rifle away.

The man and Milly were looking at her, their labored breathing filling the room as if they had just run a marathon. The man was in his mid-thirties and tall. He wore slacks and a T-shirt, but what got her attention was the Garfield apron around his waist. He opened his mouth as if to say something but ended up just sucking in more air instead.

Gaby held out her hand to Milly and the girl anxiously gave up the handgun. It was an automatic, almost entirely stainless steel except for a strip of laminated wood along the grip. Smith & Wesson SW1911TA was engraved along the side. It looked a hell of a lot more expensive than the Glocks she had been trained on, and she wondered where Mac had gotten something that fancy.

“What now?” the man said, his eyes focused on her. She couldn’t tell if he looked disappointed or confused. “Jesus, I thought you’d be older.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said.

“I didn’t mean — I just thought—”

“That I’d be older. I got it. Close the door,” she said to Milly.

The girl stepped over the plastic tray and the spilled food and closed the door. Gaby grabbed Mac and hauled him off the footboard, dropping him to the floor on his back. Dull, pained eyes stared up at her, but if she was afraid Mac would fight, she didn’t have to be. It was entirely possible he wasn’t even seeing her at the moment. He was alive, if barely, because she could still hear him breathing.

“What are you doing?” the man asked behind her.

She didn’t bother to answer him. Instead, she unclasped Mac’s gun belt and pulled it off, along with the holster and ammo pouches. She cinched it around her waist and instantly felt better with the weight. These last few days, walking around without weapons was like being naked in front of the world. The Smith & Wesson slid easily into the hip holster, and though it didn’t have silver bullets in the magazine, it was better than no ammo.

“How many of you are there?” she asked, busying herself with Mac’s boots. He was a few inches taller than her and she expected his boots to be a little larger as a result, but she was surprised when they fit her as well as they did.

“Just us,” the man said. “What are you doing now?”

“Stop asking stupid questions,” she snapped. “You know what I’m doing.”

Gaby pulled off Mac’s camouflage jacket and slipped it on. It was slightly big around the shoulders, but luckily Mac wasn’t fat. She took off his watch and put it on her wrist.

“Maybe I should take the rifle,” the man said.

“You know how to use one of these?” she asked.

“How hard could it be?”

“Right. I’ll keep the rifle.”

She got up and walked over to the door and opened it just a crack. She looked out at the empty second-floor hallway with Milly standing next to her, eyeing her curiously.

“Where is everyone?” she asked the girl.

“At work,” Milly said.

“Work?”

“Everyone has assigned work details,” the man said. “I work in the kitchen downstairs, and Milly is the server girl.”

“Hostess,” Milly said.

The man smiled. “Sorry. Hostess.”

She glanced back at the two of them. There wasn’t much of a resemblance, so she crossed out father and daughter. Not brother and sister, either.

“I’m Peter,” the man said, holding out his hand.

She shook it. “Gaby.”

“Milly told me. How are we getting out of here, Gaby?”

She stared at him for a moment. “You don’t know?”

He shook his head. “We were hoping you might have a plan.”

“Are you serious? You’re the ones who are supposed to be rescuing me, not the other way around.”

Milly and Peter exchanged a look.

“Never mind,” Gaby said. “Tell me about the town. How many collaborators are here?”

“Collaborators?” Peter said.

“The guys in the uniforms with guns.”

“Oh.” He thought about it. “Seven. Four left yesterday, but four more came with the new group of arrivals.”

“Is that too many?” Milly asked eagerly, still watching her face closely.

Gaby shook her head. “No. Seven is doable.”

I hope…

They were keeping her in a bed-and-breakfast just as she had guessed. That accounted for all the rooms on the second floor. According to Peter, except for her, everyone came and went as they pleased, though the building was reserved for singles.

Milly and Peter had their own rooms, and they disappeared inside them while Gaby stood watch at the top of the stairs. The first floor below her was empty, with everyone having already left for their “jobs.” Peter was still around because he worked in the kitchen while Milly assisted him.

“It sort of worked out perfectly for us,” Peter had said. “Besides Mac, there won’t be anyone here to stop us from leaving.”

“What about outside?” she had asked. “Where are all the other guards?”

“Walking around most of the time. You probably already know this, but this isn’t exactly a prison. They’re not going to stop anyone from leaving. Well, except you.”

Gaby had seen the way Peter looked at her more than once. He had questions, but he had (smartly) decided to keep them to himself for now. He didn’t really have the look of a chef, but then most of the people around L15 were probably doing things they didn’t think they would be doing before The Purge. She certainly had no idea she would be sneaking around a bed-and-breakfast with an AK-47.

Milly and Peter came back a few minutes later, both carrying large backpacks. Too large.

“What’s in there?” Gaby asked.

“Clothes,” Milly said. “And other stuff.”

“What kind of other stuff?”

“Deodorant, tooth paste, toothbrush…”

“Get rid of the clothes.”

“Why?”

“Take only what you need.”

“But I need my clothes,” Milly said.

“Get rid of the clothes,” Gaby said again.

Milly sighed and went back into her room.

Peter looked after the girl, then over at Gaby. “I, uh, just have socks and underwear. And some personal stuff.”

She nodded. “That’s fine.”

“How old are you, anyway?” he asked. She guessed that was one of the questions that had been swirling around in his head since they met.

“Old enough,” she said.

“I thought you’d be older.”

“You said that already.” Gaby glanced over as Milly came back out of her room with a noticeably lighter backpack. “Is there a back door?” she asked Peter.

He nodded and moved to take the lead, but she put a hand on his arm.

“I’ll go first,” she said, stepping ahead of him. “Just tell me where to go.”

“Down the stairs, turn right into the back hallway,” Peter said.

She moved down the stairs, the rifle in front of her. She didn’t particularly like the AK-47, but she knew how to use it. Although she was more familiar with the M4, there were other rifles on the island she had trained on over the months. Will always told her it was fine to have a favorite, but not at the risk of being ignorant of the rest.

As Peter promised, there was no one on the first floor. The emptiness made her nervous, with the main entrance looming in front of her. She glimpsed two figures standing across the street, both wearing camo uniforms similar to the ones Mac and Lance wore and the jacket she had on now. The uniforms made it easier to pick them out from the civilians. The last thing she wanted was to shoot someone who was just trying to survive the end of the world. The ones with guns, on the other hand…well, she could live with putting them down.

She turned right and led Milly and Peter into the back hallway. They followed (too) closely behind and made too much noise. There was a door at the end, sunlight filtering in through a security window. She reached it and looked out, past the sidewalk and at the buildings across the street. Large trees encircled the town in the near distance. Figures — men and women, and some children — moved along the sidewalks.

She looked back at Peter, then Milly. They were watching her anxiously.

“We’re going to walk out of here like we belong,” she said. “Act normally. Walk normally. You belong here. Don’t draw attention to yourselves, but don’t look away from anyone, either. Got it?”

They nodded back.

“If anyone calls your name, respond,” Gaby continued. “You’re doing what you’re supposed to do — going about your business.”

“Okay,” Peter said.

“Got it,” Milly nodded.

“I don’t see any vehicles except the ones the guards drive,” she said to Peter.

“There aren’t that many still left in town,” Peter said. “There are a couple of trucks and some ATVs parked near the administrative building.”

“Can we get to them?”

“I don’t see how. Besides you, those are the only places they actually guard.”

She could see it in Peter’s eyes again. It was the question that had been going through his mind: “What’s so special about you?”

But he didn’t voice it, and she was glad. Gaby didn’t feel like explaining her relationship with Josh. It was complicated. “See, there’s this guy, and he’s in love with me, but he has a really screwed up way of showing it.”

It sounded messed up even in her head.

“What about the horses?” Gaby asked. “I’ve seen them around.”

“There’s a stable on the south side, but there are people watching it. They’re not armed, but I don’t think they’re just going to give the animals to us.”

“They won’t have a choice.”

“Can you really just shoot them?”

She stared at him, wondering if the shock on his face was real. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I don’t want to do that,” Peter said, and shook his head. “Can’t we find another way?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“I want to leave this town, but not if I have to kill to do it.”

“You bashed Mac’s head in pretty good upstairs.”

He flinched. “That was different. He’s one of the guards, and it was necessary. These other people…they’re not dangerous.”

She could see the conflict on his face, and he reminded her very much of Nate.

Where are you, Nate? Are you dead? Are you out there somewhere? Are you one of those things now, lurking in the darkness?

“All right,” she said. “Then we’ll have to go on foot.” She looked back down the hallway. “The highway is back there.”

“The interstate,” Peter nodded.

“Then what’s on this side?”

“The farms, woods, and Hillman’s Lake, where they get the water.”

“And beyond that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never gone past the lake. I don’t think anyone has except the guards.”

Gaby took a breath. Milly smiled back at her, looking strangely confident in what they were about to do. Gaby couldn’t fathom what was going through the kid’s head at the moment. The last thing she was feeling was confidence. She wanted to escape, but she always thought she’d only have herself to take care of. Dragging a thirty-something guy and his, well, whatever it was Milly was to him, was never part of the plan.

Finally, she nodded. “All right. Remember: You belong here. Act normal.”

“Normal,” Peter said. “Right.”

She turned back around, opened the door, and stepped outside into the bright sun, gripping the AK-47 tightly in front of her, forefinger sliding comfortably close to the trigger.

Seeing and feeling the warmth of the sun from her apartment window (prison cell) was one thing; actually being outside walking under it was another. She had forgotten how freeing and comforting the daylight was. Even with all the potential dangers around her, Gaby couldn’t help but take a moment to soak in the clean air.

The first sound that reached her after stepping out onto the sidewalk was loud hammering from across the street. A dozen men were carefully lowering a large rectangular sign — a gaudy monstrosity featuring a woman lying on her side, barely clothed — to waiting hands below them. There was a second, plainer sign leaning against the building with writing that read: “Housing #14.”

Other buildings around her were being similarly repurposed, their old signs either already redone or in the process of being replaced. They seemed to be working from right to left, probably depending on what they needed. With the constant arrival of new five-ton transport trucks on a regular basis, she imagined they had dozens, maybe even hundreds, of new people in need of homes every day.

Salvation comes at a price. Your blood. Your soul. Your future.

I’d rather die first.

“Let’s go,” she said quietly.

They started up the sidewalk, making a beeline for the end of the street. The road curved left out of town, but the tree line in front of her beckoned, promising safety within the woods beyond. Gaby set a calm, almost leisurely pace, smiling and nodding and exchanging looks with everyone they passed. No one wore uniforms, which helped to set her mind somewhat at ease, and she allowed herself to lessen the pressure against the AK-47’s trigger.

She expected to see men on horseback, but there were none. Instead, the streets and sidewalks were filled with civilians. Men, women, and children. And pregnant women. It wasn’t hard to pick them out of the crowd. There were a lot of them.

“How many pregnant women are in town?” she asked Peter.

“A lot,” he said. “Over a hundred. There are more women here than men. I asked around, and it’s the same in all the other towns.”

She could see for herself that he was right. For every man or boy she saw, there were at least two females. Some pregnant, others not. And there was something else she noticed: They were all young and healthy.

Perfect birth-giving age. To squeeze out babies for the monsters.

Gaby’s mood darkened.

I’d rather die first…

“Peter!” a female voice shouted.

Gaby looked over as a woman in her twenties walked briskly across the street toward them. She was slim and attractive, with long black hair that fell all the way to her waist. She wore a white one-piece dress and beamed at the sight of Peter. Gaby searched for the telltale signs of a baby bump, but there wasn’t one.

“Hey, Anna,” Peter said, smiling back at the woman.

“Where you off to?” Anna asked.

“Um, to the lake.”

“What’s going on at the lake?”

Peter glanced at Gaby, and she could see him struggling for an answer. Lying, apparently, didn’t come easily to Peter.

“They wanted me to look at some plants they found,” he said. “To see if they’re edible.”

The woman stopped in front of them, and bright green eyes settled on Gaby. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Gaby said.

“I haven’t seen you around before. Did you just arrive?”

“You know everyone in town?” Gaby asked, injecting just enough annoyance into her voice to let the woman know it wasn’t her job to question her. She was, after all, the one wearing a uniform (or at least, Mac’s boots and jacket) and holding a rifle.

The woman was properly chastised. “I guess not.”

“Right,” Gaby said, and looked away.

Anna smiled at Milly instead. “Hey there, kid.”

“Hey, Anna,” Milly said. The girl smiled, playing along. She was definitely a more convincing liar than Peter. “How’s Bobby?”

“He’s okay. Working at the barn with the horses now.”

“That’s cool.”

Anna looked back at Peter before her eyes shifted over to Gaby again. “So, I’ll let you guys get back to work.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “See you around.”

“Yeah, sure.” She gave Gaby a pursed smile before walking off.

Gaby looked after her.

She knows.

She must have been unconsciously raising the AK-47 when she felt Peter’s hand on the rifle’s barrel. “No,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Please. She’s a good person.”

They’re all good people until they shoot you in the back, she thought, but said instead, “Whatever. Let’s go.”

She started up the sidewalk again. Peter and Milly followed in silence for a moment, their quickening footsteps sounding almost in tune to the hammering across the street.

Gaby risked a quick glance over her shoulder.

Anna, farther back down the street, was watching after them, and her eyes met Gaby’s again.

“Pick up the pace,” Gaby said.

She began moving faster, dodging people in their path. If they were indifferent to her before, they became slightly alarmed as she moved aggressively around and sometimes through them. Gaby measured the distance between them and the woods.

Fifty yards, give or take.

Her pace quickened and she was almost moving at a trot now. “Hurry.”

“What’s happening?” Peter said.

“Just hurry!”

Peter and Milly already looked out of breath and they weren’t any closer to the tree lines. The girl probably hadn’t built up much of a stamina delivering food, and Gaby could already see the strain on her round face. Peter didn’t look any better. She guessed cooking for people in the bed-and-breakfast hadn’t done him any favors, either.

Forty yards…

…thirty-five…

“Hey!” a male voice shouted behind them.

Gaby looked over her shoulder a second time.

Anna was standing next to a uniformed guard, the woman pointing after them. The man was too far back for her to make out any details, but she could easily discern the M4 hanging at his side.

“Stop where you are!” the man shouted.

The hell with that.

She took off, shouting, “Run!”

She knew Peter and Milly were close behind because she could hear them gasping, their sneakers slapping against the pavement. People stumbled out of their way, others hurrying into open doors. Men working on a building across the street stopped what they were doing and stared curiously.

A gunshot pinged! against a metal sign hanging four feet above her head. Gaby ducked reflexively, even though she didn’t really need to.

She picked up even more speed.

Twenty yards…

She glanced back and saw Peter holding onto Milly’s hand, the two of them somehow keeping pace despite the sweat and veins popping out along their temples and foreheads.

God, they’re out of shape.

Gaby didn’t stop. Didn’t waste precious seconds shooting back at the guard. The first gunshot would already be bringing other collaborators. One or two, she might have been able to prevail against in a stand-up fight, but if even half of those seven showed up, she was a goner.

No, not seven. Six. Because Mac was probably still bleeding on the second floor of the bed-and-breakfast right now.

Death by roller pin. Now that’s a hell of a way to go.

Ten yards…

…five…

She finally reached the end of the sidewalk and darted into the woods just as the man fired again, the pop-pop-pop of a three-round burst chopping into the branches above her head. She heard Milly scream and glanced back at the girl’s terrified face. Peter had picked her up and was cradling her like precious cargo as he struggled to catch up.

“Keep running!” she shouted.

He might have nodded, she couldn’t be sure. But he didn’t stop, and that was all that mattered. Milly was clinging to his neck, her face shoved against his chest. She might have also been whimpering, but Gaby couldn’t be certain with her own heartbeat slamming against her chest.

As she ran, Gaby wondered how long it would take Josh to hear about her escape and come after her. How many men would he commit to getting her back under his thumb? That would probably depend on how badly he wanted her. At the moment, she didn’t particularly care. She had weapons again and freedom, and she’d be damned if she was going to give up both of those things now.

Come and get me, Josh.

Come and get me if you can…

6 Keo

Sunset Deluca Drive, with its commercial buildings and vast parking lots to one side and the crystal clear waters of Lake Dulcet on the other, made for a great morning walk. The only sounds came from the soles of his boots against the pavement, a welcome distraction after last night’s near miss. The wind blew through the palm trees and birds glided through the air with all the time in the world. He could almost believe there was nothing wrong with the universe, that at any moment the area would be filled with tourists snapping photos.

Keo walked under streetlights and alongside dead cars, most of them still with keys in their ignitions. But minus gas or working batteries, they were useless. There was surprisingly little traffic, with only the occasional sedan or abandoned truck to break the monotony of gray concrete and random spurts of weeds. He had traveled this stretch of the city dozens of times, and the silence never failed to make him just a little bit uncomfortable.

It was noon by the time he finally made it back to the marina.

He stepped out of the street and onto the cobblestone walkway, dodging the same three white trucks that had been parked there since the day he had arrived with Zachary and Shorty. He took note of each truck’s windows and their current positions and was satisfied they hadn’t been moved or tampered with since yesterday morning.

The marina had three long docks and sixteen slips, with the middle section capable of hosting eight vessels while the outer two were able to hold four each. There was only one boat in the entire place at the moment. A sailboat with blue along the sides, about thirteen meters long. It was spacious enough to house five or six comfortably, with an American flag fluttering proudly at the stern. Inside the cabin, they had found photos of a family of six. A nice-looking group of people with blue-blood genes in expensive polo sweaters and Ralph Lauren slacks.

The fact that there was only one lone sailboat in the entire marina was a bit of a mystery. Inside, they had found emergency rations, nonperishable food, and cases of bottled water, which led Keo to believe the cruisers had arrived only recently. Maybe they docked, went into the city, but never made it back onboard. In a way, it was similar to how Mark and Jordan had been surviving since the end, which would mean the previous owners knew about water being a sanctuary from the monsters.

So where were they now? Maybe out there, somewhere.

Or dead, like Zachary and Shorty.

That wasn’t entirely true. There were worse things than death these days…

The problem with the sailboat was the size. Thirteen meters was big, and the vessel wasn’t designed for single-handed sailing. Even with Zachary and Shorty, two men who were even more novices at this than he was, it would have been a chore to manage the boat along the veins of the river heading south—

Engines.

Keo was about to climb over the boat’s fender when the noise cut through the silence of the city. It was impossible to miss. Sound already traveled long distances these days, but mechanical noise was like shouting through a bullhorn.

Car engines.

He finished the climb and dropped down, flattening himself against the sun-bleached white deck. He unslung the pack and slid it in front of him, then laid the MP5SD on top of the nylon fabric. He pulled the zipper and took out the small binoculars and peered through it, past the railing in front of him.

He tracked two vehicles moving fast down Sunset Deluca Drive.

Trucks.

A sleek black GMC Sierra and a white Honda Ridgeline. They were staying close together, clearly moving in tandem. He waited for both vehicles to flash by and keep going, but instead they began to slow down—

Crap.

— before stopping completely in front of the parking lot and behind the three white trucks.

And my luck keeps getting better and better.

Two men, wearing clothes Keo didn’t think he’d ever see again, climbed out of the GMC in camo uniforms and combat boots, with sidearms and ammo pouches attached to web belts. They looked like soldiers, but Keo knew better. There were no American soldiers anymore. You would need an American government to still be around for that. Besides, these guys didn’t actually look like servicemen. Keo had been around guys in uniform almost his entire life, and these jokers looked more like civilians dressing up for Halloween. Even the shade of their camo was wrong.

One of the men reached into the large GMC and pulled out a tan-colored FN SCAR assault rifle. The second, bigger one had an M4. He was wearing some kind of an assault vest with a radio in a pouch, which the man pressed now. A loud squawk, then muffled voices, but they were too far away for Keo to eavesdrop.

He was caught in no man’s land. Escaping into the cabin behind him was a non-starter. He had only two real options at this point — fight or flee. He couldn’t flee. There was nowhere to go unless he wanted to go for a swim.

Which left fight.

Because there was no way these men were going to leave now. Even if they didn’t know the boat existed before showing up, they would have to be blind not to spot the white-painted forty-meter mast sticking up into the air like a beacon. If these bozos came any closer and looked for more than a few seconds, it would be impossible to miss the only boat in the entire marina.

So he wasn’t terribly surprised when the fat man began walking up the middle dock toward him.

If it weren’t for shitty luck…

He watched Fatty turn sideways to move between two of the trucks in the parking lot, barely making the tight squeeze. His eyes, predictably, saw the docked sailboat right away as soon as he was through.

Keo slipped the binoculars back into the pack and picked up the submachine gun. He pressed as much of his body against the deck as he could in order to lower his profile even further. The railing would hide him somewhat, but if the man came any closer…

He flicked the fire selector on the MP5SD from fully automatic to semi-auto. The sound suppressor would do a lot to hide the gunshot, but the other guy standing outside the Ridgeline would notice pretty quickly when Fatso fell down.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…

He couldn’t see up the dock anymore, so he had to rely on his ears. Heavy footsteps approached him at a slow pace. Keo didn’t think the man could hurry if he wanted to because of the girth he was carrying.

How do you stay fat at the end of the world? Now, that’s a nice trick.

“—see the boat, but I don’t see anyone,” the man was saying.

“Well, someone’s gotta have sailed that thing here,” a voice said through a radio. “The kid said it wasn’t here a month ago when he last came by.”

“Maybe he got it wrong.”

“Kid swears by it.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll check it out.”

“Careful you don’t slip and fall into the water,” the other man said, chuckling. “I’m not jumping in there after your fat ass.”

“Har har,” the fat man said. “You’re a funny guy.”

Keo had been counting the man’s loud footsteps, and when he got the right number, he rose up on the deck of the boat with the MP5SD in his hands.

The man was halfway up the dock when he froze at the sight of Keo.

A painful second, then two, ticked by.

The man groped for the radio and tried to lift it to his lips when Keo shot him once in the chest. He watched the man stagger for a moment, a shocked expression spreading across his generous face. Keo shot him again between the eyes, and the big man dropped to the wooden boards, his bulk making a loud thump!

Keo quickly threw himself over the boat’s fender and onto the dock. He raced back toward the parking lot with the MP5SD in front of him.

The man with the SCAR was running up the parking lot when he spotted Keo and slid to a stop.

Keo squeezed the trigger twice, putting both rounds into the man’s chest. The “soldier” stumbled but didn’t go down. Instead, the man actually put a hand back against one of the white trucks to steady himself.

Bulletproof vest? Cheater!

Keo put the third bullet in the man’s face, the silver 9mm round obliterating the nose in a shower of blood and bone. This time, the man dropped.

He reached the end of the marina and pushed on, passing the second dead man, whose radio squawked, a voice shouting through, “Milton? What’s going on out there? Milton?”

He slipped around one of the trucks instead of going between them. He flicked the fire selector to fully automatic as soon as he reached the parking lot and came up on the Ridgeline just as both front doors opened and two more uniformed men clambered outside. The passenger was trying desperately to unsling an M4 carbine, while the driver had managed to get a silver Colt 1911 automatic out of its holster and was aiming it over the hood of the truck.

Keo shot the passenger first because he was the closer target, stitching the moving man with a quick burst and catching him in the chest with three rounds. His fourth, fifth, and sixth bullets shattered the Ridgeline’s window and Keo glimpsed faces inside the truck, in the back, and heard screams.

Female screams.

The driver fired over the hood of the truck. Too fast and his hands were shaking, throwing his aim off. Barely. Keo still heard the zip! as the bullet nearly took his head off anyway.

He went into a crouch and lost sight of the driver on the other side of the truck momentarily. Not that that seemed to stop the man from shooting. He fired off two more shots, then a fourth one, the clink-clink of his bullet casings landing on the ground.

Keo stayed low and crab-walked sideways when the driver appeared from around the hood. Keo shot his legs out from under him, and the driver screamed as he slammed into the parking lot.

He got up and rushed over, kicking the fancy Colt under the Ridgeline. He ignored the driver’s screams and circled the truck before leaning into the open driver-side door and looking into the backseat.

Two faces, both draped with long hair, peered back out at him.

One of the women, a brunette, held out her hands — showing scarred palms — as if to let him know she wasn’t armed. The other one had dirty-blonde hair and seemed to be trying to disappear into the floor of the truck.

“Outside,” Keo said.

He stepped back and waited for the women to come out. They did, reluctantly, shaking with every step. They clung to one another, staring at Keo, then at the driver rolling around on the ground next to them. The driver’s eyes, like the women’s, were glued to the bloody stumps that used to be his legs.

Keo made a quick tour of both vehicles, searching for hidden passengers that didn’t exist. He gave the area a once-over and listened for sounds other than the driver screaming behind him. His own gunfire had been suppressed, but the driver’s Colt might as well have been artillery fire against the stillness of the city.

He walked back to the women. Both wore cargo pants and cotton undershirts underneath long-sleeve work shirts covered in sweat. They looked dirty, but then again, he was probably not much of a prize himself at the moment, especially after running for his life and spending all night inside a smelly attic.

“We should go,” the brunette said.

“Go where?” Keo said.

“Anywhere, as long as it’s not here.”

“Why?”

“There are others out there. Nearby.”

“How near—”

He hadn’t gotten the question out when he heard them.

Car engines.

And they were coming in his direction…fast.

“Are they after you or me?” Keo asked.

“These new guys? I don’t know. The ones from earlier were taking us back,” the brunette, Carrie, said. “But it’s not like we’re important or anything; we just had the bad luck of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. What about you? They went to that marina looking for someone. Are you important or something?”

“No. I’m just some guy trying to get to Texas.”

“What’s in Texas?”

Gillian.

“Be quiet for a moment,” he said.

They were inside an abandoned lakeside bar called Bago’s, about half a kilometer from the sailboat that Keo needed. From here, using a pair of binoculars, he had a direct line of sight to the marina across Lake Dulcet. Carrion birds were gathering in the air above the parking lot waiting to feast, except they couldn’t because there were men below them. Living men, moving around in familiar camo uniforms.

One of the men that had arrived five minutes ago started shooting into the air, scattering the birds. At least for a little while. Soon, the creatures had circled back around to where the bodies were. It didn’t look as if they were going anywhere anytime soon.

There were two new vehicles in the marina parking lot, and they had dumped six more men with assault rifles. Keo watched them from the safety of Bago’s for nearly twenty minutes as they searched through the bodies, the vehicles, and then the lone sailboat at the end of the dock. When they were satisfied he wasn’t there, two of them opened fire on the boat with their carbines, the pop-pop-pop filling the air for ten full seconds. When they were finally empty, they reloaded…and poured more rounds into the vessel.

Shit. There goes my ride to Texas.

They didn’t stay behind to watch the boat sink. Instead, they headed back to the parking lot, where one of them drew his sidearm and shot out all four tires on the already bullet-riddled Ridgeline while his friends picked up the bodies and loaded them into the trucks. Two of them climbed into the GMC and the three vehicles drove off.

Except they didn’t all go in the same direction. Instead, they headed off in separate paths, spreading out into the city. That was a search formation if he ever saw one. The closest truck came within 200 meters of Bago’s before turning and disappearing eastward. The only bright spot was that not a single one of them headed south, which was the direction he needed to go.

Yeah. Bright side. Get it where you can, pal.

“They’re gone,” Keo said, lowering his binoculars and putting it away.

“Thank God,” Carrie said behind him.

She and the blonde teenager, Lorelei, sat at a booth eating canned food from the supplies they had salvaged from the two trucks before running off. There were boxes of ammo and more weapons in the back of the vehicles, but Keo kept things efficient — as much supply as they could carry and still run. Everything else was superfluous, including two women he didn’t know until very recently.

He had thought about leaving them behind but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe it was losing Zachary and Shorty last night, or maybe it was the thought of what Gillian would say if she found out he had abandoned two desperate girls just to get to her.

Gillian.

Was she even still alive out there? Did she even make it to Santa Marie Island months ago?

He didn’t know, but that only meant he had to go there and find out. Whatever happened, he had to find out for sure…

Of course, doing that would have been much easier with the supplies he had left behind on the sailboat. The silver rounds they had made, the bullet-making materials, and those stacks of silverware they had collected but never got around to melting down. Losing the boat hurt in more ways than one.

In the boat’s place, he had two women he didn’t know from Adam and a world of trouble. Those uniformed men definitely hadn’t come looking for him. They had gone there looking for a boat, but not him specifically. Besides, the only person who knew he existed at all and wanted him dead was, himself, dead.

Burn in hell, Pollard. You and your son.

“I don’t understand why we didn’t just sail away on your boat,” Carrie said. “I almost had a stroke running here, and we barely made it before those guys showed up.”

“Not enough time,” Keo said.

“How long would it have taken to get a boat ready to sail?”

“More than what we had.”

“Oh.”

He sat down on a stool and finished off the can of peaches he had left open on the bar counter. He ate while trying to ignore Carrie as she watched him intently. She was an attractive girl, mid-twenties, with high cheekbones and a long, slender figure. The other girl, Lorelei, looked all of sixteen and hid behind her long hair. She barely talked, and for a while Keo thought she might have been a mute, but no, she just had very little to say, at least to him. She did whisper into Carrie’s ear every now and then. They acted like sisters, but there was no obvious resemblance.

“Those guys back there,” Keo said, “the ones that went looking for my boat. You said they were taking you somewhere?”

“They were taking us back to the town.”

“What town?”

“L11.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s what they call it,” she said and shrugged.

“L11,” Keo repeated. “Sounds like something the military would come up with.”

“You were in the military?”

“God, no.” Then, “Those guys back there. They weren’t soldiers, either.”

“No. They just started dressing in those uniforms recently. Before then, they ran around in hazmat suits and gas masks.”

Hazmat suits and gas masks? Now that rings a bell…

“You say there are more of them around?” Keo said. “Besides the ones we’ve seen already?”

“A lot more.” She looked anxiously toward the window. “How long are we going to stay here?”

“Until I’m sure no one else is going to pop up. Then we’ll leave.” He glanced at his watch. “Still six more hours until nightfall. Relax.”

“Relax. Right.”

“Do your best.”

Carrie went back to scooping syrup-drenched pieces of fruit into her mouth with one of the cheap plastic sporks they had found in the back of the Ridgeline. Lorelei, meanwhile, ate ravenously from a can of SPAM.

“Tell me about this town,” Keo said to Carrie.

“What about it?”

“Why did you run away?”

“You really don’t know? About the towns?”

“‘Towns’? So there is more than one?”

“That’s why it’s called L11,” she said, watching him carefully, maybe trying to gauge if he was messing with her. When she was certain he wasn’t, she continued. “There are dozens of them in Louisiana alone. That’s what I heard, anyway. The one we escaped from was called L11.”

“L11,” Keo repeated again. “So there are ten more before it. And more after it?”

“Yes, I think so. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard the stories.”

“And there are people in these towns? How is that possible? What happens at night? How do they keep the bloodsuckers out?”

“You don’t know?” she said again. “Where have you been all this time?”

“In the woods. I guess I’m a little behind the times.”

“Have you ever been to the camps?”

“These are different from the towns?”

She nodded and told him, and Keo listened intently.

Carrie explained the camps filled with survivors. The towns like L11, where the creatures stayed out. And humans donating blood every day. “The agreement,” as Carrie put it. Then there were the pregnant women. He found that the hardest to swallow, but when he stared at the women and saw the very real fear on Lorelei’s face underneath her hair, he believed it. Every single word of it.

“Goddamn,” he said when she was finished. “So they’re working for those things? The enemy?”

“Yes,” Carrie said. “They watch over us in the daytime.”

“But that’s not all they do.”

“No. They do a lot of other…things.”

Keo nodded. Suddenly the presence of those men in hazmat suits and gas masks trying to kill him in Robertson Park made sense. Or as much “sense” as selling out your own species to bloodsucking creatures made any sense, anyway.

“You’re taking this well,” Carrie said, watching him closely.

He shrugged. “I’ve seen some crazy things in my life.”

“Crazier than this?”

“Not this, but I’ve seen people do some crazy things to survive.”

He spent a few minutes rolling all the information he had just absorbed over in his head in silence. A year ago he wouldn’t have believed a single thing Carrie had just said, but what was possible and impossible had been upended for good in the last eleven months. These days it seemed anything was not only possible, but likely.

After a while, he glanced back at her. “You said they wanted to impregnate you.”

“Yeah. That’s why we ran.”

“Were the guys too ugly?”

Carrie rolled her eyes. “It’s not the sex. It’s what happens afterward. With the babies.” She looked almost imploringly at him. “You understand, right? Why we couldn’t stay? Why we ran?”

He nodded and thought about Gillian. “I understand.”

She nodded back gratefully then returned to eating her canned fruits with the flimsy utensil.

“One of the men I shot mentioned a kid over the radio,” Keo said. “Was that why they were there?”

“I heard them talking on the radio,” Carrie nodded. “One of the kids spotted your boat at the marina. That’s why they were checking it out.”

“‘Kids’?”

“They have eyes everywhere. Kids. Eleven, twelve-year-olds. They’re all over the cities on bicycles. Some on skateboards.”

“Skateboards?”

“Whatever they’re used to and can get them from place to place the easiest, I guess.”

“What do these kids do, exactly?”

“They’re spies. Lookouts. Their job is to go around the city looking for survivors. The guys in uniform come later. That’s how they found us. One of those stupid kids spotted us and the trucks swooped in.”

“Kids on skateboards, towns, camps, and pregnant women carrying babies to feed the ghouls,” Keo said, shaking his head. “Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are real, too.”

“‘Ghouls’?” Carrie said.

“That’s what she calls them.”

“Who?”

“The woman on the radio.”

Carrie stared at him like he had a third eye. Then Lorelei joined in.

Keo sighed. “My turn, I guess.”

He told them about the woman on the radio. The repeating message. Bodies of water. Sunlight. Ultraviolet. And silver.

“Is she right?” Carrie said. “About everything? I know about sunlight, but the others…”

Keo nodded. “She’s right about pretty much everything. The only thing I can’t be sure of is the ultraviolet light. Hard to test that one out without the right equipment, and I have no idea where to get those.”

“But silver…”

“It works. I was testing it out last night.” And got Shorty and Zachary killed doing it, he thought, but left that part out. Instead, he said, “The boats at the marina. Do you know what happened to them? That sailboat was the first and only vessel I saw since I arrived in the city.”

Carrie shook her head. “I don’t know. I spent most of my time in the camp before they relocated us to L11. It’s weird, though. Those marinas are usually filled with boats.”

“You used to live around here?”

“The east side,” she nodded. “That’s where we were headed when they grabbed us.”

“What’s over there?”

“My old house.”

“That’s it?”

She looked embarrassed. “I couldn’t really think of anywhere else to go. I don’t even know what I expected to find there. Everyone I know is gone. I just didn’t…know where else to go.”

Lorelei reached over and clutched Carrie’s arm tightly. The two girls exchanged a brief private smile, an attempt to give each other strength that he wasn’t entirely sure was successful.

Keo watched them closely for a moment. The teenager, hiding behind her hair as if it were an invisible force field, doing her best not to draw attention. The older Carrie, who would have been pretty if not for the dirt and grime. They looked beaten and tired and in so many ways were the exact opposite of Gillian.

Or, at least, the last time he saw Gillian.

Was she even still alive out there?

He had to know. And that meant finding a boat. Maybe somewhere down south.

He had to go down there anyway…

“Have you ever heard of Song Island?” he asked Carrie.

“Yes,” Carrie said, looking back at him. “It’s on Beaufont Lake. I used to go fishing with my dad down there when I was a kid. Those were some of the best times of my life. Why?”

“I was told there might be people there. The plan was always to find out one way or another if they’re still there before I headed off to Santa Marie Island.”

“An island,” Carrie said. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Because the creatures — the ghouls — wouldn’t be able to cross the lake. Do you think that’s why all the boats are missing? Maybe the soldiers are going around destroying them so no one can use them to get to these islands?”

“That’s one theory.”

“You said going to Song Island was the original plan. Is it still the plan?” Carrie asked anxiously.

He nodded, thinking about Zachary, who had come with him specifically to find out what had happened to his friends who had gone to Song Island, following the siren call of a radio message promising shelter and security many, many months ago.

“I owe it to a friend to make a pit stop there first,” Keo said.

7 Gaby

Horses. They sent the guys on horses after her.

Like a posse in a Western. Now I’ve seen everything.

But instead of six-shooters and Winchesters, this posse was carrying assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. They were wearing identical uniforms, combat boots, and two of them had caps to keep the sun out of their eyes. There were four and they were spread out in pairs of two, which told her they weren’t complete dummies.

She kept that in mind as they moved slowly through the woods, sometimes ducking to get under low-hanging branches. The only positive she could find was that they didn’t appear to be expert trackers and seemed to be searching randomly, perhaps hoping to just stumble across her. So there was that. It had been hard enough keeping Peter and Milly on course, but it had been downright impossible to get them to stop stepping on every twig in their path.

This is what it’s like to run around with civilians. How did Will and Danny ever do it?

She gripped the AK-47 tighter. Mac had done her a favor and kept two magazines in his pouches, with two more for the M1911. Unfortunately all the bullets were regular ammo, which meant she had to get out of the woods by nightfall. If she was caught in here without silver to defend herself with…

Gaby looked down at Mac’s watch: 9:13 a.m.

Plenty of time.

That was the other good news. Night wasn’t her friend anymore, but she had plenty of time to find shelter. Of course, that might be harder to do than she had expected, given the lack of civilization inside the woods—

“What now?” Peter whispered behind her. He was so close she could feel his breath against the back of her neck.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe we can wait them out.”

Milly moved nervously behind them. They had been crouched in the same spot for the last thirty minutes, waiting to see how the guards would proceed. She had expected a stronger chase and was surprised they had only sent four. Then again, she had to remember they didn’t have that many in town to begin with.

You don’t need a lot of guards when no one wants to leave.

Well, almost no one.

She looked back at Peter and Milly. She had a lot of questions for them: Why leave and why now? The questions had been nagging at her ever since they entered the woods. No one else in town had seemed interested in abandoning the safety of L15. The woman Anna, who had sold them out the first chance she got, was proof of that.

“What?” Peter said when he caught her staring.

Gaby didn’t say anything. She turned away and took in their environment for the tenth time in as many minutes. They were surrounded by trees and bushes, with the sound of Hillman Lake behind them. Forty yards from the shore, give or take. Close enough to make the heat just slightly bearable.

The closest two men on horseback were moving away from them before turning right. Gaby listened to the fading clop-clop-clop of the horseshoes against soft earth. Every now and then there was the squawk of radios as the men communicated back and forth in muffled voices.

Gaby glanced back at Peter again. “How big is the lake? Can we go around it?”

He shook his head. “It’s big. Half a kilometer. It would take too long to circle it.”

“How deep?”

“You mean you want to cross it?”

“Where else are we going to go? If we can’t go around it and we can’t head back toward town, there’s only one direction left — across the lake.”

“It’s pretty deep,” Peter said. “There are shallow ends—”

Crack! A bullet slammed into a tree trunk two feet from Peter’s head, cutting him off. He flinched with his entire body, instinctively dodging flying bark as the gunshot echoed loudly around them.

“Go!” Gaby shouted.

Milly and Peter launched to their feet and raced off behind her. She stood up slightly, gripping the AK-47, and searched out the source of the gunfire the best she could, though it was like looking for a needle—

There! A man sitting on a horse sixty yards away.

He was taking aim at Milly’s and Peter’s fleeing forms when her movement drew his attention. She was still swinging the AK-47 around when he snapped off a shot with his M4, but his horse was moving under him and his bullet sailed harmlessly over her, chopping a branch free above her head.

Gaby took careful aim and fired — and missed!

Dammit! she thought, and was about to fire again when the horse, responding to her near-hit, reared up on its hind legs and tossed the rider as if he were nothing more than a nuisance. Long, luxurious brown mane flashed in the air as the animal turned around and galloped off, leaving its rider on the ground.

The man had lost his rifle as he went down, and he was scrambling to find it when Gaby shot him in the back, right over the ass. Or did she actually hit him in one of his cheeks? The man screamed, whether in surprise or pain, she wasn’t sure. He gave up on locating his weapon and began crawling to safety, his bleeding backside in the air, facing her.

Now that’s a sight.

She lifted her rifle to shoot when the man somehow half-crawled, half-lunged behind a big tree.

Gaby took a step forward to finish the wounded man off when another horse pushed its way through a thick bush in front of her, with another uniformed figure swaying in the saddle. They were still far away — almost eighty yards — and hadn’t seen her yet. Gaby decided not to risk a shot at this distance and instead turned and fled in the same direction that Peter and Milly had gone.

Or, at least, the same general vicinity. Her only hope was that Peter was smart enough to grab the girl before she could get too far ahead of him and lead her somewhere safe.

The first thing she had noticed when she fled into the woods earlier was that it was a massive place. It reminded her of Sandwhite Wildlife State Park, but minus the trails, which made it wilder and more unpredictable. If she thought every inch of Sandwhite looked exactly the same, she couldn’t imagine getting lost in here. Thankfully, there was Hillman Lake to her right, so if nothing else, she always knew which direction would lead her away from the town and the pursuit.

She had been running for two straight minutes at a full sprint before she finally heard the noise she had been waiting for. The clop-clop-clop of horseshoes, bearing down on her fast.

She looked over her shoulder. Nothing. But not being able to see the incoming rider wasn’t the same as him not being there. She could almost feel him gaining on her, and she could definitely still hear him getting closer.

Clop-clop-clop!

Clop-clop-clop!

Gaby pulled up to a stop and slid behind a tree. She hugged the gnarled trunk and waited, using the momentary respite to suck in air and did her best to control her breathing, but it was like trying to hold back a freight train.

She was still gasping for breath, trying to temper the adrenaline coursing through her like wildfire, when a man on a horse galloped past her. Like the others, this one was wearing a camo uniform and he was holding onto the reins for dear life with one hand while clutching an M4 rifle at his side. He didn’t look entirely comfortable in the half-second or so that it took him to ride past her.

Gaby didn’t let him get too far ahead. She pushed away from the tree, took aim, and shot the man in the back. He must have pulled on the reins reflexively because the horse let out a furious whine as it slid to a stop, horseshoes digging trenches into the ground.

As the animal settled and the man on top of it hung on, Gaby took two quick steps forward and took aim again, but before she could squeeze off another shot, the man collapsed from the saddle. He crumpled onto the ground on his belly, legs twisted awkwardly under him, and lay still.

The horse didn’t stick around. It turned and ran back—right at her!

Gaby stepped into the animal’s path and threw her hands into the air, waving them wildly to gets its attention. She got it, all right, not that the large brown charging thing with magnificent flowing mane had any intentions of stopping for her.

“Whoa!” Gaby shouted. “Whoa, horse!”

She didn’t have time to process how stupid she must have looked (or sounded) before the horse came within a foot of running her over like she was an annoying gnat. She lunged out of its path, going sideways at the last second, losing the AK-47 at the same time she crashed into some underbrush headfirst.

By the time she picked herself back up, the horse was running freely through the woods until there was nothing left of it but the gradually fading clop-clop-clop echoing back and forth among the trees.

She sighed and struggled to her feet. “Stupid horse.”

Right. The horse is the stupid animal and not you, who just tried to flag it down like it was a taxi. Keep telling yourself that, girl.

She snatched up the assault rifle and jogged over to the dead rider. Gaby robbed him of the M4 and pocketed his spare ammos and a small first-aid kit. She pulled out his holstered sidearm — a 9mm Glock — and stuffed it into her waistband.

Voices, coming from behind her. “Greg! Where the hell are you?”

She didn’t hear galloping, so the man had to be on foot. Gaby didn’t stick around to find out for sure. She slung the newly acquired carbine and hurried off, feeling much better with her pouches stuffed with spare magazines and an extra handgun in her waist. The extra weight made her move slower, but she didn’t want to risk throwing anything away.

“A soldier who complains about having to carry too much firepower is a dead one,” Will liked to say.

Will and Danny had taught her a lot of things on the island, but tracking people wasn’t one of them. She had no idea where Milly and Peter had gone, and although there were clues — a broken branch here, a snapped twig there — each time she thought she had picked up their trail, it suddenly changed again.

She entertained but quickly dismissed the idea that Peter was purposefully mixing up his footprints in order to throw her off. He didn’t strike her as someone who had a lot of experience in the woods. She didn’t either, but compared to him she might as well be one of those frontier woodsmen she had learned about in school. Peter was one of the town’s cooks, for God’s sake. A guy like that probably didn’t spend a whole lot of time learning tracking — or in this case, hiding his tracks — from pursuers.

Of course, she could be wrong. What did she really know about them, anyway? What did she know about the girl? Besides the fact they were both clearly desperate to leave L15. They were the only two, from the looks of it. Was that suspicious? Maybe. Right now, though, she owed them for saving her life. Maybe she would have gotten out anyway on her own, but they had made it easier.

Even so, after about fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, the idea of heading off by herself was becoming more and more feasible.

What did she really owe them, anyway? Yes, they had helped her escape, but if they had run off on their own, they were beyond her help. The smart thing would be to keep going, cross Hillman Lake, and somehow reorient herself and head back south, back toward Beaufont Lake…

…and Song Island.

How long had it been? It felt like years since she had seen the white beaches and eaten the fresh fish and stood watch in the Tower’s third floor—

Snap!

She spun around, lifting the AK-47 to fire—

“It’s just me!” Peter shouted.

She sighed and lowered the rifle. He had come close to dying. Too close.

“Where’s Milly?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“Follow me,” he said, lowering his voice to match her pitch. He started off and Gaby followed.

“Where’s Milly?” she asked again.

“We found a place to stay not far from here.”

“Is it safe?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“It looked pretty safe.”

They walked in silence for a while, and Peter seemed to know where he was going.

“You’re pretty good with that rifle,” he said finally.

She remembered missing the horseman with her first shot. “I’m not that good with the AK. I was trained on an M4.”

“Which one is that?”

“The black one.”

“Oh.”

“Where did you put Milly, Peter?”

“It’s a cave, but it’s pretty well hidden. I left her to come look for you.”

Gaby grabbed his arm and spun him around. “You left her inside a cave?”

He didn’t answer right away, and she could tell he didn’t understand the accusatory tone in her voice. “Why? Isn’t a cave safe?”

“Caves are dark, Peter.”

The realization spread across his face. “Oh God,” he said, and jerked his hand away before running off at full speed.

She fell in behind him, keeping one eye in front of her and the other scanning the woods. Her ears were up, listening for the familiar clop-clop-clop of horse hooves on soft earth. She didn’t believe for a minute the remaining two guards on horseback hadn’t converged toward all the gunfire. The fact that they weren’t here yet worried her. Then again, maybe like Peter, they were more terrible at this whole woods thing than she initially attributed to them.

“Are we close?” she asked Peter.

“Almost there,” he said, already sucking in air with every step.

She didn’t know why he was breathing so hard. She was the one carrying two rifles, two handguns, and nearly half a dozen magazines. Even with all that weight, she was still matching him stride for stride. A part of her wanted to ask him what he did before all of this, but the other part — the survivor in her — didn’t want to know. If he and Milly died today or tomorrow, it was better if she didn’t know too much about them. It was a cold thought, but Gaby had gotten progressively good at detaching herself from her emotions these days.

Except with Nate.

What happened to you, Nate? Are you dead…or worse?

Peter finally slowed down as they came up on the mouth of a cave, partially hidden among the trees and bushes. It was impossible not to notice the suffocating darkness staring back out at her.

“Milly,” Peter whispered. He had stopped near the entrance. When there was no answer, he whispered louder, “Milly.”

Gaby moved past him with the AK-47 in front of her, wishing badly for the magazine to be full of silver bullets. She flicked the fire selector to full-auto. Regular bullets didn’t do a damn thing against the ghouls, but maybe enough of them at once…

“She’s not answering,” Peter said.

No shit, Peter.

Gaby took a deep breath and stepped into the pitch-black. Peter moved behind her, his footsteps tentative, his breathing too loud despite the fact he had stopped running more than a minute ago.

She stepped cautiously, allowing her eyes to adjust to the nothingness. The sunlight only penetrated the cave for a few precious yards, and it wasn’t nearly enough to see with. She only managed four, then five steps before she was swallowed up by the pitch-black nothingness.

What are you doing? You don’t know these people. You don’t owe them this. You don’t owe them dying.

Go back. Go back now!

She kept moving forward instead.

“Milly,” Peter whispered behind her. “Where are you?” Then, much louder than he should, “Milly!”

Even as Milly’s name echoed off the walls, the creature lunged out of the darkness at her, reaching with one hand, black eyes glistening (That shouldn’t be possible) and a mouth full of devastating brown and yellow teeth lit up in a staccato effect as she pulled the trigger and the AK-47 leaped in her hands.

The creature jerked as bullets riddled its chest at almost point-blank range, and she heard a ping! as a round bounced off bone. That, more than anything, stunned and sent the ghoul tumbling to the damp cave floor. Not that it stayed down there for very long. It was back on its feet and moving toward her again a heartbeat later.

“Go!” she shouted. “Get out of here, Peter!”

Peter might have turned and ran, or maybe he just backpedaled. She didn’t look back to make sure because she was too busy firing again. Split-second lightning flashed with every round she discharged, allowing her to see—

Them.

Because there was a nest. They had stepped right into a nest.

She fired from side to side, backing up, always moving, never standing still. The assault rifle got lighter in her hands as the magazine emptied. She held on and kept shooting and moving until she finally felt the warmth of the sun (mercifully) against the back of her neck.

Click!

She didn’t stop moving, didn’t think about the empty magazine, and instead swung with the empty rifle. She caught a creature in the cheek — its face broke in front of her, cheekbone crunching—and the blow tossed the ghoul into two others in the process of lunging at her.

Gaby swung again — this time to the right — and the barrel pierced the chest of a ghoul and impaled it all the way up to the hand guard. The creature staggered back, stunned by the blow, but somehow still managed to rip the assault rifle out of her hands as it fell away to the side.

She stumbled her way out of the cave and lost her balance, landing on her ass.

The sun! She was outside!

One of the creatures followed her out, mouth opening, jagged teeth snapping in an attempt to clamp down on her exposed arm—

The creature squealed as sunlight descended on it. The ghoul’s flesh turned ashen and it vaporized before her eyes, and a second later bleached white bones that looked deformed for some reason tumbled out of the air and landed on the ground in a pile. The acidic smell enveloped the surroundings, and Gaby forced herself to start breathing through her mouth to keep from choking.

Hands grabbed her from behind and pulled her back, back, then finally up.

She unslung the M4 and pointed it at the silhouetted forms squirming inside the darkened mouth of the cave, just beyond the reach of sunlight. They had stopped their pursuit, the sun holding them at bay. She could sense their desperation, their rabid desire to get at her. It drove them crazy and they squirmed restlessly, and for a moment, just a moment, she thought one or two — or possibly all of them — might try to get her anyway.

But they didn’t.

“Dead, not stupid,” Will always said.

How many were in there right now, looking back at her and Peter? A dozen? A hundred? Was Milly one of them? The girl with the round face. Thirteen. Or twelve. She didn’t know for sure. She should have asked, but Gaby hadn’t wanted to know, didn’t want to get too involved, to become committed to people who could die on her at any moment.

Because everyone died these days. Everyone…

Like Nate.

“Peter?” a soft female voice said behind them.

They spun around and saw Milly, wide-eyed and standing there, looking back at them.

Peter ran to her and scooped her up in a bear hug. She wasn’t prepared for it and barely had time to register what Peter was doing before she was in his arms. Confusion gave way to happiness, and Gaby watched them embrace each other for a long five seconds.

Peter finally put her down. “You left the cave…”

“I heard noises,” Milly said. “It was too spooky, so I left to wait for you out here. Then I heard all the shooting. What happened? What’s in there?” She looked past them and toward the mouth of the cave and saw the bones, twisted and white against the daylight. “Oh.”

“Come on, we have to go,” Gaby said. “Everyone heard those gunshots.”

She hurried off, and Peter and Milly followed.

“Where to now?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said. “You have any ideas? You live here.”

“But we’ve never actually been this far out of town.”

“Never mind, then. We’ll figure it out as we go.”

She glanced down at her watch: 9:41 a.m.

Still plenty of time…

8 Lara

“Kinkasan Island,” Takeshi said. His English was good and came through crystal clear over the radio. “There are a few thousand of us here. Most are from Ishinomaki, but I’ve met some from Sendai and as far as Osaki.”

“How did you know to get to an island?” Lara asked.

“We didn’t,” Takeshi said. “Not consciously. I think most of us just thought we needed to get as far away from the cities as possible. The ferries were running for hours…until they just stopped. That was the last I’ve seen of anyone from the mainland.”

Lara looked over at Bonnie leaning next to the window with the binoculars. The former model had been listening to her conversation with Takeshi for the last few minutes, both of them riveted by his story. All these months of trying to survive on the road and to finally get confirmation that there were others out there like them who had managed to continue on, despite the odds, was exhilarating.

Takeshi, like the last few strangers who had contacted them over the radio, had responded only because of her broadcast. In so many ways, something she hadn’t even wanted to do but did anyway at Danny and Roy’s urging was becoming the most important thing she had ever done since The Purge. She couldn’t help but feel a little pride in that.

“How did you know about FEMA, Takeshi?” she said into the microphone.

“American history,” Takeshi said. “I’ve always been fascinated with your country. I told my girlfriend that once I graduated university, we would get married and move to Silicon Valley and start a new life. I’d work at one of your tech companies and she would teach Japanese in school.”

“Is your girlfriend…?”

“Mako’s here. We fled together. It was actually her idea to come to the island, where her family still lives.”

Another pair of lovers lives on!

She smiled at the silly thought and was glad Bonnie couldn’t see.

“Have you made contact with anyone else before you heard our recording?” she asked.

“Yes, there were a couple of Frenchmen, a few Englishmen, and I think some Chinese,” Takeshi said. “It’s been a while since I heard back from the Chinese, though. I didn’t know about the islands, how the creatures — ghouls, as you call them — couldn’t cross water. Which leads me to this thought, Lara; there are other islands nearby. Aji and Tashiro, to name just two. I should bring this up with the elders, tell them what I’ve learned. There must be survivors there, too. If not from the mainland, then those who never left.”

“I hope so, Takeshi. It’s worth finding out. Just…be careful.”

“Yes. Always. We’re always careful these days.”

More survivors in and around Japan. How many were out there? More than she had imagined, as it turned out. The last year had seemed so dark and hopeless, and there were so many days (and weeks and months) that she thought they might have been the only living souls still moving, looking for safety from the darkness.

“How are you for food and water?” she asked.

“Kinkasan has everything we need,” Takeshi said. “Food, water, even wildlife. We can survive here for centuries. We were lucky. Very lucky. A lot of people weren’t.”

She thought about all those months on the road, the loss of Harold Campbell’s facility in Starch, Texas, and fighting for the island. Luck had a lot to do with it, but sweating blood and tears did, too.

“What else have you heard, Lara?” Takeshi asked. “I’ve been listening to your conversations with the American government.”

He means Beecher. The Colonel from Bayonet Mountain.

“Not much,” she said. “Everything I know was in the message and what I told Beecher.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but as with Beecher, she didn’t think Takeshi or anyone else listening to them at the moment needed to know everything. While talking to Beecher, she had to constantly remind herself that anyone could tune in.

Anyone, even the enemy…

Dead, not stupid, right, Will?

“I told the others about these blood farms and the camps you discovered,” Takeshi said. “Why would anyone surrender their future like that? I don’t understand it.”

He must be young, she thought.

Before she could reply, a voice she hadn’t heard before joined them. “Sorry to cut in without an invitation, folks, but glad to hear Japan’s still in play.” The voice belonged to an older man with an accent she couldn’t place. “My name’s Miller. Radioing in from San Francisco. I wanted to let everyone know we’re still fighting the good fight over at the Bay, too.”

“Good to hear your voice, Miller,” Lara said. “Where in San Francisco are you?” Then she quickly added, “If you can reveal your location.”

“It’s no secret,” Miller said. “They already know we’re here, anyway. You won’t be surprised to hear this, given your bodies of water theory — well, not theory anymore, I guess — but we’ve been getting by on Alcatraz.”

“The prison?”

“It’s more of a tourist attraction these days. A lot of us managed to grab a ferry when everything went to shit. Pardon my language. You’re right; the bloodsucking bastards don’t seem capable of crossing the water. Their human lackeys, on the other hand, don’t have that aversion. They’ve dinged us up over the months.”

“Collaborators. That’s what we call them.”

“As good a name as any. We’ve managed to fend off every assault so far, mostly because it’s hard to approach the island without being seen and some of the survivors brought weapons with them.”

“How many are on the island with you?”

“A few hundred. Mostly civilians. A pair of ex-law enforcement, like myself.” He paused, then, “So, what’s next, Lara?”

“What do you mean?”

“You started this. What do we do now? How do we take the planet back from these bloodsucking bastards?”

She pressed the microphone to answer, but when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. Instead, she let go of the lever and stared at the radio in silence.

“Lara?” Bonnie said behind her. “Something wrong?”

She shook her head. “No.”

It was a lie. There was something very wrong here.

She didn’t have any answers for Miller, and the fact that he and all the other strangers listening to them at the moment thought that she did didn’t just perplex her, it terrified her.

“Am I going to live, Doc?” Zoe asked.

“I don’t know; you tell me. I’m just a third-year medical student and you’re the doctor, Doctor.”

Zoe smiled back at her. The woman had very deep green eyes. “I’ve never been shot before. It’s…a revelation. Have you ever been shot?”

“Once.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Like a sonofabitch.”

“Good. I thought it was just me.”

Lara helped Zoe sit up on the small bed, then stacked two fluffy pillows between her and the wall. She looked better than yesterday when she first arrived with a hole in her side. Color had returned to her cheeks and her lips didn’t look as deathly pale anymore.

Zoe let out a slightly pained sigh and looked around the room. It was an office that Lara had converted into an infirmary and stocked with beds taken out of a couple of unused rooms in the hotel. The shelves and cabinets were recently restocked with medical supplies that Roy had brought back with him along with Zoe.

“You came here just to check up on me?” Zoe asked.

I needed to get away from the radio, from all the questions, from people who wanted answers that I didn’t have.

She didn’t say any of that, of course. Instead, Lara said, “It’s part of the job description. I don’t have to tell you this, but don’t do anything to aggravate the wound until it heals completely.”

“What about a hot shower? Will promised me a hot shower.” Then, quickly, “I don’t mean with him. I mean, you know, by myself.”

Lara smiled, feeling strangely pleased with the other woman’s awkwardness. “I know. And there’ll be plenty of those later. As soon as you can get up and walk around.”

“You know what they say, Lara. The worst patient is a doctor.” Zoe looked down at the hospital gown she was wearing. It was really just bed sheets that Liza, Stan’s wife, had sewn for them. “Is this…?”

“Bed sheets.”

“Looks better than the hospital gowns I’m used to.”

“When you’re better, you can pick out some clothes. There are more than enough to go around, and I’m sure there will be plenty in your size.”

Lara didn’t tell her where the clothes came from. She, Carly, and the other survivors had brought clothes to the island with them, but a lot of it was already piled high in the basement under the Tower. The shirts and shoes and pants, along with equipment and weapons and ammo, belonged to people who had come to Song Island seeking salvation but had found a nightmare instead. Lara didn’t like reusing those clothes, but Will was right about keeping them so they could focus their supply runs on the essentials like silver, food, and ammo.

Especially the silver. You could never have enough of that these days.

“Where did you go to medical school?” Lara asked.

“LSU,” Zoe said. “You?”

“University of Houston.”

“What are you guys doing in Louisiana?”

“We heard a voice on a radio. It’s a long story.” She picked up a bottle of water and handed it to Zoe. “Bottom line, we’re here now.”

Zoe’s eyes widened when she touched the bottle. “Oh my God, it’s cold.”

Lara smiled. No matter how many times she heard that response, it never failed to amuse her. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Oh my God,” Zoe said again. She fumbled with the cap and took a sip, then sighed with pleasure before drinking some more.

“We have plenty more where that came from.”

“What is this, tap water?”

“The hotel has a huge water purification and filtration system. As long as we have power, we have drinkable water.”

“I can get used to this.” She took another gulp and spilled some on herself but didn’t seem to notice. “I can definitely get used to this.” Then she looked around the room again. “Where’s Will?”

“He’s still out there.”

“He is?” She looked stunned. “I thought he was the one who brought me to the island. That wasn’t…?”

“That was Roy.”

“Roy?” She shook her head. “I don’t know who that is, but I think I might have called him Will a couple of times on the way over here.”

Lara chuckled. “He mentioned that.”

“You said Will’s still out there? That’s surprising. Every chance he got, he talked about coming back here. To you.”

Lara felt a flush of embarrassment. Or was that pride? “He’s looking for Gaby.”

“The teenager?”

“Yes. She’s still missing. Will’s not coming back until he finds her.”

Zoe nodded and took another sip of water. “He treated her like his little sister. I can see him going back out there for her.”

There was a brief moment of awkward silence, and Lara thought Zoe might be purposefully trying to avoid looking at her for some reason.

What happened out there with her and Will?

She said instead, “You saved Will’s life. Thank you, Zoe.”

Zoe finally looked over and might have actually blushed a bit. “We’re even. I wouldn’t be here without him.”

“Still, he told me what you did for him out there. Thank you for bringing him back to me. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“He loves you,” Zoe said, and gave her a smile that seemed a bit too forced. “I’ve seen a guy in love before, but that man of yours…” She shook her head and laughed softly. “I hope he comes back okay.”

“He will,” Lara said with absolute certainty. “As soon as he finds Gaby, he’ll come home.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Zoe said, and looked away again.

The radio clipped to Lara’s hip squawked just in time to spare the two of them from another round of awkward silence.

They heard Maddie’s voice. “Lara. I got Will on the emergency frequency.”

“Speak of the devil,” Lara said.

“Say hi to him for me,” Zoe said.

She nodded and got up to leave. “I don’t have to tell you, right?”

“Hey, I have a comfortable bed and cold drinks,” Zoe said after her. “I’m not going anywhere. Ever.”

“Good news and bad news,” Will said through the radio. “What do you want first?”

“Will, how many times have I ever chosen the bad news first?” Lara asked.

He chuckled. “We found where they’re keeping Gaby.”

“That’s great.” Then, with reluctance, “So what’s the bad news?”

“She escaped before we could bust her out.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Well, we’re tracking her through the woods at the moment. The problem is, the woods over here are big. Massive. Twice as thick as Danny’s head and three times as messy.”

“Hey,” she heard Danny say in the background.

Lara smiled.

She was on the second floor of the Tower with one of the radios. It was slightly smaller and more portable than the two above her on the third floor right now. She sat on the windowsill and looked toward the south side of the island, at the girls on the beach with Roy standing watch on the boat shack.

“Can you find her?” she said into the radio.

“That’s the plan,” Will said. “It’s just going to be a little bit more difficult than we expected, that’s all.”

“Will, you took Danny with you because you thought you might have to fight your way into a town full of collaborators. Now all you have to do is find Gaby in the woods, and this, somehow, is more difficult?”

“I see your point.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“They’re wearing uniforms now.”

“Who?”

“The collaborators.”

“What kind of uniforms?”

“Army camo. Close to real thing, but not quite. With their names and from what I can tell, their state designation.”

“State designation?”

“Louisiana for this lot. A boot-shaped patch. Real craftsmanship, too. They probably have a whole room of sweatshop kids putting them together. Oh, and a white star.”

“What does that represent?”

“I don’t have a clue, babe. Maybe it means they’re all destined for stardom.”

She smiled. “That doesn’t sound likely.”

“No.” He paused for a bit, then, “How’s Zoe?”

“She says hi.”

“Up and about already?”

“Up, but not about just yet. You did a good job stabilizing her after she was shot, Will. Waiting a day before moving her was also smart.”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Long story short, she’ll be fine with time and a lot of rest. You’re right; it’ll be nice to have a proper doctor on the island for a change.”

“Is that real enthusiasm or self-pity?” he asked. She could almost imagine him smiling on the other end of the radio.

“Don’t be an ass,” she said.

He laughed. “She’ll be good for us, Lara.”

“We can definitely use someone with her skills. Which I guess is good and bad. Having it, and needing it.”

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” Then, without skipping a beat, “Tell me about this Beecher guy.”

“He says he’s an Army Colonel, so I guess he outranks you.”

“Only if the United States government is still in operation.”

“He says it is.”

“Anyone can say anything these days. Danny thinks he’s the President of the United States.”

“Hey, I was fairly elected,” Danny said in the background.

“See?” Will said. Then, “Where did this Beecher guy radio from?”

“Someplace called Bayonet Mountain,” Lara said. “Have you ever heard it?”

“Yes,” Will said, but she noticed that he didn’t elaborate.

“You’ve been there before…”

“Once or twice. Did he say how many were there with him?”

“He says over 4,000 people, including civilians. Is that possible? Is that place big enough for that many people?”

“The Bayonet Mountain I knew could easily fit twice as many. Three times, if necessary.”

“So you really have been there. What for?”

“It’s a long story, and right now I need to go hunt down Gaby. When I get back, I’ll talk to Beecher. Try to suss him out.”

“You think he’s lying about something?”

“I don’t know, but we have a civilian authority for a reason.”

“This is coming from a soldier…”

“Exactly,” Will said.

They didn’t say anything for a moment.

Finally, she said, “Will.”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Barf,” Danny said in the background. “Get a fucking room, you two.”

She ignored Danny and said, “Hurry up and find Gaby and come back home. I like hearing your voice and I’m not quite as pissed off as I was the last time we talked, but I need more than this. You understand? I need to see you in person.”

“I’ll be home soon. Leave a light on for me.”

“How about a big lighthouse?” she smiled.

“That’ll work, too,” Will said.

9 Will

The ATVs would have taken them back to L15 faster, but the roar of engines would have exposed their approach. That meant they were forced to trek back through the woods on foot. They jogged as much as they could with their full gear but spent most of the time walking at a brisk pace before reaching the same clearing from yesterday just beyond the edge of town. They took out binoculars and peered through them.

The place looked calm, and he wouldn’t have known a gunfight had taken place less than an hour ago if he hadn’t heard it for himself.

“Everything looks pretty hunky dory in there,” Danny said next to him. “What gives?”

“Two possibilities,” Will said. “Either the fight’s over, or it’s just getting started.”

“Which one of those is better for us?”

“That depends on who was doing the shooting and who was being shot at, and if Gaby is involved. And if she is, that means she made a run for it.”

“That’s a pretty big leap, chief.”

“What else could it be?”

“Maybe the boys in uniforms were just letting off steam with some target practice.”

“Could be. But it was pretty short for target practice.”

The lack of activity around the town was disturbing. A place filled with that many people shouldn’t be that calm. There was no one running around, no one shouting or pointing, and no men with assault rifles searching buildings. It made him wonder if he had been wrong about Gaby being involved somehow. But if it wasn’t her, then what was the gunfire all about?

It had to be her. The Gaby he knew would try like hell to escape, even if it cost her everything.

The girl’s a born fighter.

“It’s gotta be Gaby,” Will said after a while.

“If she did make a run for it,” Danny said, “wouldn’t we have run across her? The first thing she’d do would be to head for the interstate.”

“Maybe. They could have been keeping her on the other side of town. Kellerson didn’t know her exact location.”

“I’m glad we finally ditched that guy. Terrible conversationalist.”

They hadn’t really ditched Kellerson. He was still waiting for them in the cellar behind the house. Not that he had much of a choice. Will had left him on the same patch of dirt floor he had been sleeping on last night, still duct taped. The look on Kellerson’s face had been a mixture of concern and elation when he saw them leaving without him. It wouldn’t be long now before he realized they might not come back. Whenever Will started to feel sorry for the collaborator, all he had to do was think about Mercy Hospital, and it went away.

Clop-clop-clop.

Will looked up. “You hear that?”

“Are you kidding me?” Danny said. “What is that, a posse?”

Two men on horseback rode down the town street, the clop-clop-clop of metal horseshoes against cobblestone echoing in the quiet morning. The riders wore camo uniforms with assault rifles bouncing against their backs. Neither man looked entirely comfortable on top of the animals.

“Horses,” Danny said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “What is this, the Dark Ages? What’s next, guys with bows and arrows? Pooping in the woods?”

Two more riders appeared from down the street, meeting the first two halfway for some kind of powwow. After a moment, they turned and headed off toward the other side of town, picking up speed as they went.

“That’s definitely a posse,” Will said, lowering his binoculars. “And they’re headed to the other side. What’s back there?”

Danny took out a folded map from one of his pouches and spread it on the ground. “Woods. Lots of woods. So many, they should call the place Woodsville. And there’s a lake.”

“The lake would explain why they chose this place. It gives them a water supply.”

Danny folded the map back up and put it away. “What’s the plan, Kemosabe?”

“Wait and see?”

“I’m not good at waiting and seeing. I’m more of an action man. That’s what they used to call me back in college. Action Danny.”

“Skirt around the woods, see what’s happening on the other side, then?”

“Sounds like a better plan. Action Danny approves.”

“Glad to hear it,” Will said.

He got up and began moving alongside the clearing while still sticking to the woods. Danny kept pace behind him.

“You didn’t tell me we’d be running this much,” Danny said.

“Hey, I’m the one with bullet holes in me.”

“Stop yer bitchin’. Those bullet holes are already a few days old. Plus, I was thinking…”

“Uh oh.”

“Shaddup. Anyway, I was thinking, we shoulda brought Kellerson along. I’ve always wanted my own personal pack mule. You think he could have carried me, too?”

“Not without two fingers. Hard to get a grip.”

“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”

“He hesitated when I asked him a question.”

“He said, ‘Huh,’ just before you cut off his pinky finger.”

“What are you, Amnesty International?”

“I didn’t tell you? They even sent me a membership card. That shit was laminated and everything.”

It took them another twenty minutes of steady jogging before they reached the highway. It wasn’t much to look at — two lanes with fading yellow dividers. There were steel guardrails along the sides that they had to climb over before darting across the open to the other side.

Back in the comfort of the woods again, they continued around trees and bushes before risking a run across open ground with L15 fading to their right. After another thirty minutes, they finally reached the other side of the woods.

Will didn’t breathe easier until he had trees around him again.

They hadn’t come to a complete stop when they heard gunfire from somewhere further ahead. The unmistakable clatter of assault rifles, and this time it wasn’t a one-sided fight. There was clearly a back-and-forth gun battle going on.

They went down on one knee and listened.

“AK-47?” Will said when the shooting finally stopped.

“And at least one other rifle,” Danny said.

“How many shooters?”

“Two, possibly three.”

“Sounds about right. If it is our girl, it’s four against one. I don’t like those odds.”

“She’s a lot tougher than you think, Danny. You should have seen her at Mercy Hospital.”

“Yeah?”

Will nodded.

“Damn,” Danny said. “We should definitely open up that school we’ve been talking about. Danny and Will’s School of Badassness. My name goes first, of course. Purely based on awesomeness, you understand.”

“That goes without saying,” Will said.

They got up and moved forward, toward the source of the gunfire.

More gunshots, this time coming from a different section of the woods, which told him they were going in the wrong direction and had been for some time. Either that, or the action was on the move.

There was something odd about this new round of gunfire — there was just a volley, the very clear indication of a single rifle firing on full-auto.

“AK-47?” Danny said.

Will nodded. “Yup. Plus, we’re going the wrong way.”

“That’s the last time I let you drive.”

They changed course, heading even deeper into the woods.

There was blood on the ground. Fresh. Small splatters that led them to a brown horse grazing on grass next to a big oak tree, shading itself from the morning glare. The animal lifted its head when they approached, nostrils flaring in warning. When they didn’t do anything, it went back to blissfully feeding.

The blood belonged to a man in a camo uniform sitting against a tree. His eyes stared off at nothing in particular, face frozen with an oddly perplexed expression. A still-wet pool of blood seemed to originate from his bottom.

“Ass shot,” Danny said.

“Yup,” Will nodded.

“Gregson” was written on a nametag over the man’s right breast pocket, with a large but simple white star-shaped patch on the right shoulder. There was another patch, this one in the shape of a boot on his left side. After scrutinizing the “boot” for a moment, Will realized it was actually the state of Louisiana.

“Look at this,” Will said.

Danny, who was busy watching the horse dine out, glanced over. “Whatcha find?”

“They’re organizing. Names on uniforms. Regional declarations.”

“Well, damn, it’s about time they got their shit together.” Then, “Hey, you know how to ride a horse?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever ridden one.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re from Houston.”

“So?”

“And we’ve never ridden a horse before.”

“And I’ve never owned a Stetson or cowboy boots or a belt buckle the size of my head. What’s your point?”

Danny shrugged. “Seems kind of wrong, that’s all.”

Will stood up and pointed at the ground. “There was another horse heading south. Let’s see where it leads.”

“Famous last words,” Danny smirked.

The trail didn’t lead him to Gaby as he had hoped. Instead, it took them to two of the men on horseback they had seen earlier. One of the riders had climbed off his mount and was peering cautiously into the mouth of a dark cave. He saw something in there that he didn’t like, and it kept him from getting too close to the opening.

Then the man took a step back and kicked at some bones on the ground.

A dead ghoul.

Will glimpsed nametags on their uniforms, along with the same white star and the Louisiana boot. He didn’t bother trying to make out their names, though he and Danny were close enough that they could hear the two men talking just fine.

“Are we going in there to make sure?” the one still mounted asked.

“Fuck no,” the one on the ground said. “I’m not going in there.” He kicked at a deformed skull as if it were a soccer ball and watched it roll all the way into the cave, where Will saw something (somethings) squirming within the darkness.

“You see that?” the mounted one said.

“Yeah,” the second one said before walking back and climbing into his saddle. “Freaks me out every time.”

“What are we going to tell the kid?”

“The kid”? Will thought.

The second man reined his horse around. “We tell him the truth — that his girlfriend had the misfortune of trying to hide inside a cave full of the bloodsuckers and didn’t come out.”

“Girlfriend”? “The kid”?

They’re talking about Josh and Gaby…

“Just like that?” the first one said.

“But more tactfully, of course,” the other one said, chuckling.

“Of course.”

Will and Danny watched them go.

When they couldn’t hear the horses anymore, they stood up and made their way over to the cave.

“One guess what’s in there,” Danny said. He kicked dirt at the bones. They were almost pure white under the sun and looked malformed. He sniffed the air. “Lots of them, too.”

“Why don’t you go in to make sure,” Will said.

“Maybe later. So now what?”

“Those guys are either smarter than they look and she’s dead, or they’re just as dumb as they look and she’s not.”

“That’s so convoluted I bet you think it actually made sense, huh?”

Danny peered into the dark cave opening while Will looked around for tracks.

The ground was soft and malleable, which was both a good thing and a problem, because there had been a lot of activity around the area very recently. There were more than one set of tracks, both on foot and on horseback. He noted then quickly dismissed the horseshoes, along with the newest pair of boots belonging to one of the dismounted (wannabe) soldiers. With those out of the way, he was able to focus on three separate pairs of shoes. Two sneakers and one pair of boots.

“What’s your Injun skills tell you?” Danny said, coming up behind him.

“Three people went inside — either separately or together, but they all went inside — the cave, and the same three came back out later and headed south.”

“That’s a good sign. Everyone who went in came back out.”

“That’s a very good sign.” Will stood up and followed the tracks until they vanished through some underbrush. “Those two seemed convinced one of those tracks belonged to Gaby.”

“The ‘girlfriend’ in question?”

“Yup. If they go back to town and tell Josh she’s dead, that means she’s free and clear of him.”

Danny chuckled. “Now who’s Captain Optimism?”

Will grinned. “Let’s go find our girl.”

“Let’s,” Danny said.

They headed off, Will feeling more hopeful than he had in days.

Gaby was out there. If he had to guess, the two with her were friendlies. That was the good news. The thought of Gaby having to face all of this alone bothered him more than he wanted to admit. It was his fault she was out here in the first place. Also his fault that she had gotten caught, because he had sent her on ahead of him.

Hang on, Gaby. Hang on a little longer…

After about twenty minutes of steadily tracking Gaby and her two companions, it became clear they were using the lake — Hillman’s Lake, according to the map — as a guide while traveling further south.

“We’re going to have to stop so I can call in to Song Island,” Will said. He glanced at his watch. “I promised Lara at least two contacts a day.”

Danny made an exaggerated whipping sound.

Will grinned. “Until then, what’s up ahead?”

Danny fished out the same map. “If they keep along the lake, they’ll run across a place called Dunbar about thirty-five klicks south. If they turn left between here and Dunbar, they’ll be heading toward a place called Harvest.”

“I know Harvest.”

“Fun times?”

“Oodles.”

“Tell me about it never. In the meantime, what the hell’s in Dunbar?”

“No idea. She either has a map or one of the people she’s traveling with knows the area. Anything smaller that’s worth stopping for between us and there?”

“We’re in the sticks, buddy. They probably have towns out here that have been around since the days of Tutankhamun.”

“Who?”

“Tutankhamun.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Egyptian pharaoh. He’s the dude all you uneducated types call King Tut.”

“You been sneaking off to read again?”

Danny smirked. “It’s amazing what you can shove into your learning hole when you’re bored.”

“Carly know you’ve been shoving things into inappropriate places?”

“Oh, the things you don’t know about that little demon redhead—”

The whine of an engine cut Danny off and sent both of them into a crouch among the tall grass. They scooted over behind a large tree and put it between them and the lake just as the noise turned into the roar of an outboard motor.

It was an aluminum twenty-footer, gray sides reflecting back the sun as it skidded smoothly across the lake’s surface. There were two men onboard, one sitting on a swivel chair on the bow cradling an M4 while the other stood behind the steering wheel near the center. Both were wearing the same uniforms as the ones they’d seen so far.

They watched the boat disappear up the lake, the man up front glancing around and talking into a radio.

“Lake patrol?” Danny said.

“Looks like it,” Will said.

“First uniforms with nametags and now this? Looks like our boy Josh has really whipped these naughty buggers into shape.”

“Looks like it.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Better.”

After the boat faded into the distance, they got up and continued alongside the lake, but this time sticking closer to the thicker parts of the woods to keep from being spotted. The good news was that they could hear the motors coming from a distance, which gave them plenty of time to hide. After all, no one had ever accused the collaborators of being subtle.

“You know what this means, right?” Danny said after a while. “About the kid.”

Will nodded. “Yeah.”

“We see the kid, we gotta pop him. He’s getting too dangerous to let run around out here. Him and his newfangled ideas are begging for a reckoning.”

“A ‘reckoning,’” Will said, grinning at him. “What are you, John Wayne?”

“I’m just saying. The kid’s become a royal pain in the butt cheeks.”

“Even if we popped Josh, it still wouldn’t stop what’s happening out there with the camps and towns. Kate probably has a hundred more like him running the show for her in the daytime. Take one of them out and she’ll just replace him with another eager beaver.”

“Yeah, well, I’d still like to put the kid over my knees and give him a good spanking,” Danny said. “Bad boy, Josh. You’ve been a very bad boy.”

Will recalled that day when he thought Josh had died. The eighteen-year-old had done something stupid and stood up during a boat chase and had gotten shot as a result. He had ended up falling into Beaufont Lake. How was Will to know the teenager would float back up later and turn into…this?

I should have put a bullet in him while he was drowning in the lake.

Still not too late for that, Josh.

Still not too late for that…

10 Gaby

“He had a Mohawk,” Gaby said.

“A Mohawk?” Peter thought about it for a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t remember seeing anyone like that. And I would definitely have remembered a guy with a Mohawk. Milly?”

“What’s a Mohawk?” Milly said.

“You don’t know what a Mohawk is?” Peter asked, slightly amused.

“No.”

“It’s a hairstyle. Like in those cowboys and Indians movies.”

“I don’t like cowboys and Indians movies.”

“Okay, um.” He paused, then, “It’s mostly a shaved head, except for the middle that stands up.” Peter demonstrated by flattening his own hair and leaving just the middle section standing up. “Like this.” He looked over at Gaby. “Right?”

She nodded. “Something like that. But shorter. You didn’t see anyone with hair like that in town, Milly?”

The girl shook her head. “Nope. Was he your friend?”

“He’s my friend, yes.”

Was. Nate’s dead. You know it. Stop pretending he’s not. Josh would never have let him live even if he had survived that night. Maybe the old Josh would, but that Josh is long gone.

I’m sorry, Nate. You shouldn’t have been there with me that night…

She walked on in silence and could feel Peter’s and Milly’s eyes on her back. She ignored them and continued to set the pace through the woods, moving close enough to the shoreline to their right to get some of the cool breeze, but far enough that they couldn’t be seen. Peter told her there were boat patrols along Hillman’s Lake.

They had been walking for the last two hours, keeping to the shade provided by the trees. Every now and then she looked around her, expecting an attack by someone in a camo uniform. Josh’s people. Or maybe Josh himself.

He’ll never let me go. In his deranged mind, he’s doing all of this for me.

“Where are we going?” Milly asked after a while.

“There’s a place called Dunbar up ahead,” Peter said. “A small city with a state highway running through it. We should be able to find shelter and food there, then figure out where to go next.”

Song Island. Where else but Song Island?

“Are there a lot of people in Dunbar?” Milly asked.

“Well, there was supposed to be about 10,000 people,” Peter said. “I’m not sure now.”

“Is it close to the interstate?” Gaby asked, looking back at him.

He shook his head. “It’s about thirty miles from Interstate 10.”

“You’ve been there.”

“I used to live there before I went to New Orleans for work.”

“They took you from New Orleans?”

“Uh huh.”

“What were you doing there? What was ‘work’?”

He smiled. “What, you don’t think I was a cook in my previous life?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“Human Resources,” Peter said. “Boring job, but it made use of my degrees. Of course, I wish I had spent more time in the woods hunting or something. What about you? What did you do before all of this?”

“I was in high school.”

“Oh,” he said.

She smiled. “I’m nineteen, Peter.”

“I thought you were older.”

“You keep saying that. Why?”

“Why?”

“Why did you think I was older? Don’t I look nineteen?”

The question was rhetorical, because Gaby knew she didn’t look nineteen. The Purge aged you and she hadn’t looked — much less felt — nineteen in a year.

“I don’t, I’m not…” he stammered. “I wasn’t sure, that’s all.”

“Sure of what?”

“Milly didn’t tell me you were so young.”

“I didn’t?” Milly said, surprised. “I thought I did.”

“You didn’t,” Peter said.

“Oh.”

“What did she tell you about me?” Gaby asked.

“Not much,” Peter said. “Neither one of us saw you when they first brought you into town. Yesterday was the first time Milly had actually seen you up close.”

“So who did you think I was?”

“I just thought, because…you know.”

“Because of what?” She watched him struggling with an answer. She took pity on him and said, “Because they had me locked up, you thought I was dangerous and you assumed dangerous meant older.”

He nodded, grateful for the rescue. “Yes.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“You didn’t. That’s not what I meant at all. I just couldn’t figure out why they had you locked up in there, that’s all.”

“It has to do with him,” Milly said.

“‘Him’?” Peter said.

“The kid. The leader.”

“Oh,” Peter said. Then, “Is she right? What’s his name? James?”

“Josh,” Gaby said.

“What did he want with you?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she kept walking.

Peter took the hint and didn’t ask again.

I’m not yours, Josh. Get that through your thick head.

I was never yours, and now I’ll never be.

They crouched behind tall grass and watched the boat pass. There were two men in uniform riding on top, both heavily armed. The one up front looked bored, occasionally turning his head left and right.

“How often do they go up and down the lake?” she whispered to Peter.

“Once or twice a day, I think,” Peter whispered back. “In the morning and in the afternoon. Everyone tries to get back to town before nightfall.”

She glanced at her watch. “How far is Dunbar?”

“Probably four more hours of walking.”

“‘Probably’?”

“I’ve never actually walked there. If we pick it up, maybe three hours?”

“So let’s try to pick it up.”

She stood up and started off, but this time made sure to angle left for a bit until they had put more space between them and the lake. Milly and Peter followed as best they could, the girl already looking as if she was struggling with her pack. That didn’t surprise Gaby. The thirteen-year-old was painfully thin, even though she and Peter had been living in L15, according to them, for over two months now.

They’ve had it too easy. Got soft. Meanwhile, I was in the woods with Will and Danny eating bugs and sleeping on dirt.

She sneaked a look back at them. They were moving too slowly, hampering her pace. Every now and then, she had to fight the urge to run off and leave them behind.

They saved your life. You owe them a little bit of patience.

For now…

Hillman’s Lake had ended about an hour back, and they were now walking alongside a two-lane state highway somewhere at the outskirts of the Dunbar city limit. They had passed a dozen or so farm houses along the way, with old structures that appeared barren from the road. Most of the city was still ahead, but at the moment there were just the walls of trees to the left and right of them.

Milly’s pace had flagged even further and the girl was straining, both hands hooked around the straps of her backpack. The heat, simmering against the hot concrete road, didn’t do them any favors, and they were all soaked from head to toe in their own sweat. It was October in Louisiana. When the hell was it going to get cold? She couldn’t wait, though she was starting to wonder if she would actually live long enough to see the seasons change. What she wouldn’t give to be able to wear a jacket these days…

Peter was doing better than Milly, but that was probably because he wasn’t always a cook in a nondescript town in the middle of nowhere. For a former Human Resources manager (whatever that was), he kept up with her well enough that Gaby stopped worrying about him. As he walked beside her, she couldn’t help but think about Nate and that day in Sandwhite Wildlife State Park as they fled the men in Level B hazmat suits.

Are you still alive out there, Nate? Or are you one of them now?

“Was he a friend of yours?” Peter asked, his voice intruding on her thoughts.

“Who?” she said, though she already knew the answer.

“Nate. The man you were looking for. He was a friend of yours?”

“He is.”

Was. He’s dead. Why can’t you accept it?

“Why?” she asked.

“I was just wondering,” Peter said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could have told you more about what happened to him.”

“It’s okay. I don’t even know if—” he survived “—they brought him back to the same town as me. They might have split us up.”

Now you’re lying to a stranger about Nate? Someone’s delusions have gone into overdrive.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know exactly know how long I’ve been in your town. The days are a little fuzzy.”

“Maybe he’s out there somewhere. You never know.” He shrugged. “Look at me and Milly. Who would think we’d still be around? So many people have died, and we somehow managed to keep going.”

“There’s an island,” Gaby said. “Down south. Have you ever heard of Beaufont Lake?”

“I’ve heard of it, but I didn’t know there was an island on it.”

“There is. I have friends there. After we spend the night in Dunbar and gather some supplies, that’s where I’m going. You and Milly are welcome to tag along.”

“Okay,” Peter said quickly.

“That’s it? You’re not going to ask me any more about it?”

He grinned. “Gaby, you seemed to know a hell of a lot more about what’s going on out here than I do. And you’re damn well more prepared than I am to survive it. If you say this island is preferable to staying out here, then yeah, I’ll take you at your word.”

She shrugged. “Your funeral.”

“Whose funeral?” Milly said behind them.

“Nothing,” Peter said, smiling back at her. “It’s just a figure of speech.” He looked over at Gaby. “Right?”

“Right,” Gaby nodded, but thought, Maybe…

“See?” Peter said.

Milly didn’t look convinced.

“You never told me why the two of you decided to run,” Gaby said, hoping to steer the conversation away from less depressing subjects.

“I was wondering when you were going to ask,” Peter said. “What took you so long?”

“There were more pressing matters until now. Like staying alive.”

He didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Things weren’t what we thought they were. Back in town.”

“What did you think it was?”

“Don’t get me wrong. We went there with our eyes wide open. We accepted the contract with those ghouls, as you call them. But then people started disappearing.”

“Disappearing?”

“Men, mostly. Guys who were more — I guess you would say — opinionated than most.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“They asked questions. Too many questions, as it turned out.”

“Troublemakers?”

“Yeah, I guess you could call them that.”

“Just the guys?”

“Just the guys,” Peter nodded. “One day they’re there, the next they’re gone. Whenever anyone asked, the guards just said they were moved to another town. It wasn’t like anyone could verify it. We were allowed to leave whenever we wanted — or so they said — but you know what’s out there, so no one ever did. Plus, they never told us where these ‘other towns’ were.”

“So you decided to run because some loudmouths were going missing?”

“No, it wasn’t until someone I knew disappeared. A guy named Jake. He was a cop from New Orleans. Milly and I met him in one of those camps. Good guy, tough.”

“How big was the camp?”

“What?”

“The camp you were in.”

“Oh. Pretty big.”

“How many people were there?” Gaby asked, remembering the size of the one at Sandwhite Wildlife State Park. All those people in one place, like rats looking for salvation from a sinking ship. Thinking about it always made her angry and sad at the same time.

“A few thousand, probably,” Peter said.

She nodded. “So what happened to Jake?”

“He disappeared one night. Milly saw it happen.”

Gaby glanced back at the girl, who confirmed it with a solemn nod. “What did you see?” Gaby asked her.

“The soldiers took him,” Milly said.

“She has trouble sleeping,” Peter said. “It’s all those nights we spent running after everything happened. It still gives her nightmares sometimes.”

Milly looked away, apparently no longer interested in the topic. Or trying her best to avoid it. In so many ways, she wasn’t even close to being as tough as Lara’s Elise, or Carly’s little sister Vera. Thirteen or not, Milly didn’t have either of those girls’ survival instincts.

“What happened to Jake?” Gaby asked Peter.

“I don’t know, exactly. I asked around — as discreetly as possible — but no one could tell me where they took him. The closest thing to an answer I got was from Howard. He’s one of the guards. A good guy, as far as guards go.”

Gaby wondered if “good guy” guard Howard was one of the men she had shot in the woods while Peter and Milly were fleeing. She said instead, “What did he say?”

“That I should stop asking about Jake.” Peter walked quietly for a moment before continuing. “The day after that conversation, Howard started avoiding me. I figured it out pretty fast that I was going to be next.”

“So you decided to escape.”

“It seemed like the thing to do.”

Gaby sneaked a glance back at Milly, then said quietly to Peter, “Why did you drag her with you?”

He shook his head, clearly offended by the suggestion. “I didn’t. But she wouldn’t stay behind. We’ve been together since all of this began, and I guess I’m the closest thing to family she’s got left. I tried to talk her out of it. Hours and hours of conversation.”

“He goes, I go,” Milly said loudly behind them, with all the confidence a teenage girl who didn’t know any better could muster. “Case closed.”

Peter gave Gaby an exasperated “See?” look.

Gaby almost smiled but managed to stop herself in time.

People die around you, remember? These two can die at any moment. Don’t get too attached.

Don’t get too attached…

The city of Dunbar, according to Peter, had a population of 10,000. That was twice as many as Ridley, Texas, where she had spent the first eighteen years of her life. She expected the city to look more impressive given its size, but it reminded her too much of her hometown — spread out and unspectacular and…country.

After passing the empty acres of unattended farmland, they moved through the suburban areas filled with old and new houses. The bulk of the city was in front of them, gathered around State Highway 190. The highway was flat to the ground and would have looked like any other road if not for the signs. One pointed south toward I-10.

And beyond that, Song Island…

They stuck to the roads, maneuvering around the occasional abandoned vehicle. Homes, businesses, and gas stations flanked them. The afternoon sun continued to beat down mercilessly, further soaking her in her own sweat. All of it just made her miss Song Island more.

For a city that 10,000 people used to live in, Dunbar was abandoned and empty and dead. They waited thirty minutes near the outskirts and listened for noise or anything resembling life but didn’t hear a single thing. The stillness continued as they made their way inside. Instead of making her feel better, the quiet only gnawed at Gaby, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched from the very first moment they stepped foot into the city limits.

“Ten thousand people?” she said.

“Doesn’t feel like it, does it?” Peter said.

“No, it doesn’t.” She walked in silence for a moment. Then, “Look for a place to stay the night.”

“Already?” Peter said, glancing down at his watch.

“We took too long to get here. And it’s harder to find a safe place than you think.”

Peter nodded. “What kind of place are we looking for?”

Gaby thought about the pawnshop. About Nate… “Something with a basement. Just to be safe.”

“I’m hungry,” Milly said.

“Can we look through the gas stations for food first?” Peter asked.

She stopped in the street as her own stomach growled. On cue, Peter’s and Milly’s joined in. The three of them exchanged smiles, and this time she wasn’t able to stop herself in time.

“Yeah,” she said. “We should probably find something to eat.”

Gaby took out the Glock and handed it to Peter. He took it hesitantly, as if he was afraid it would go off if he gripped it too tightly. She gave him two spare magazines and he put it in his pocket.

“Be careful,” she said. “If you run across one of them, don’t fight or shoot, just run.”

“Just run?”

“Shooting them will just piss them off. You saw what happened in the cave.”

He nodded and turned the gun over in his hand.

“Have you ever fired a gun before, Peter?”

He gave her an embarrassed look. “Is it that obvious?”

“Just point and shoot.”

“Where’s the safety? I thought guns have safeties?”

“Glocks don’t.” She held up her forefinger and twitched it in front of him, the way Will had done to her all those months ago back on the island during the first phase of her weapons training. “That’s your safety.”

“My finger?” Peter said, slightly confused.

“You don’t pull the trigger, and the gun won’t go off. Simple as that.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Here,” Gaby said, and took the Glock back and handed him Mac’s 1911 instead. “This one has a safety.” She showed him the switch, then took back the magazines she had given him and passed over two new ones. “Be careful.”

Peter felt a little better, and it showed on his face.

“Milly, stay with me,” Gaby said.

The girl nodded quickly. “Don’t gotta tell me twice.”

“Nice,” Peter said.

They settled on an Exxon gas station at the corner of Tripps and Meer and walked around a white pickup truck in the parking lot before passing two more vehicles frozen at the gas pumps. The convenience store was long and advertised “Beer Cigarettes Liquor.” They were just hoping for some nonperishable food.

Gaby went inside first, Peter behind her, while Milly stayed outside on the curb, looking worriedly back at the empty street. There was an auto body shop called George’s on the other side, flanked by two big red buildings, including a Mexican restaurant called Rosita’s.

Peter fidgeted behind her, and she prayed to God he didn’t accidentally shoot her in the back.

“Don’t shoot until you’re sure,” she said quietly.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay,” he said again.

For some reason she didn’t believe him, but she kept that to herself. “Let’s stick together, okay? You watch my back and I’ll take the front. Try not to stray too far.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She rolled her eyes. Was she being bossy? Probably. Then again, she was the one who had been out here for the last year. According to him, Peter went to sleep in one of those blood farms on the very first night of what Will and the others called The Purge and didn’t wake up again in one of the camps until two months later. He wasn’t exactly equipped to survive out here, especially dragging around a thirteen-year-old girl who had about the same experience as he did. Maybe that was a bit harsh, but she had no time to pussyfoot around when her life was at stake.

Gaby headed down the first aisle they came to, scanning and listening for sounds other than their own footsteps and Peter’s slightly loud breathing. There was enough sunlight that she wasn’t too worried about ghouls hiding behind the shelves. But there were other things just as dangerous as ghouls in the daytime.

The city’s too empty. So why does it not feel empty?

They went through the aisle and found nothing of interest except some melted chocolate on the floor, little more than puddles of black and brown spots now. The M4 she had taken off one of the dead guards felt more at home in her hands than the AK-47, and it moved in front of her as they finished up with the second aisle. Despite the comfort level, the fact that the rifle wasn’t loaded with the right ammo played havoc with her confidence.

“What’s that smell?” Peter asked.

“Rotten food,” she said.

“Oh.”

“The freezer’s at the back. They should have some water, too.”

“Good, because I’m thirsty as hell. I know I should have prepared something last night, but it never entered my mind. I guess I’m not very good at this.”

“I guess not,” she said. “Stay alert.”

“Can I ask you something?”

She sighed. He was talking too much. She didn’t know why he was talking so damn much. Didn’t he know they were in a precarious situation here? That there could be bad things waiting for them in the next aisle? Or in the next room? Or outside?

Why does this city not feel empty?

When she didn’t answer, he said, “What’s it like to kill someone?”

“You killed Mac,” she said, hoping that would nip the conversation in the bud.

It didn’t work.

“I think he’s still alive,” Peter said.

“He’s probably brain-dead if he is.”

That made him go quiet, and in the few seconds that followed, she felt a pang of guilt.

Jesus. What’s wrong with me?

“It’s okay,” she said. “You did what you had to.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

She wasn’t the least bit convinced he was okay with what he had done to poor Mac, but Gaby didn’t know how else to comfort him. This wasn’t the time, either. They were still moving inside a building they had never been in, in a city that may or may not hold dangers they didn’t even know existed yet.

Later. I’ll talk to him about it later.

They were turning toward the third aisle when a scream pierced the air, coming from outside.

“Milly!” Peter shouted.

He was already running before Gaby could turn fully around. She hurried after him, just in time to see him shoving the glass doors open and lunging outside.

Christ, she had no idea he could move that fast!

Gaby burst outside onto the sidewalk after Peter, the M4 swinging up and sweeping the large parking lot for threats.

There’s something wrong with this city. Dammit, I should have listened to my gut instinct!

Everything was where it should be — the white truck and the two vehicles at the gas pumps. There was nothing out here that could pose a danger to them, so why were alarm bells exploding inside her head?

But everything was where it should be—except for Milly. The girl was gone.

“Where is she?” Gaby asked.

Peter was whirling around, the Smith & Wesson gripped too tightly in his right fist.

“Peter,” Gaby said. “Where’s Milly?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know!”

The girl’s backpack was leaning against the curb. Gaby bent to pick it up when a loud cry streaked across the air, coming from down the street. Peter took off running in that direction with the same deceptive speed she didn’t know he was even capable of.

Where the hell had he been hiding that?

She ran after him. Or tried to, anyway.

Another scream, this one just as pained and shrill, rocketing up the street and prompting Peter to run even faster. He seemed to know where he was going, where Milly’s screams were coming from, and soon he had abandoned the highway and was turning into a side street with long, smooth strides.

Gaby followed as best she could. Gray and red and white buildings flashed by on both sides of her. Store and restaurant signs. Windows, some painted, others barren, reflecting back a streaking figure — her. Thank God she had tied her hair in a ponytail.

She swerved around vehicles in the streets, keeping sight of Peter in front of her. He had somehow added to the distance between them.

God, he’s fast. Where is all that speed coming from?

She blamed her lagging pace on the rifle she was carrying along with the Glock in the hip holster. There were also the pouches around her waist, still stuffed with spare magazines even though she had dumped the ones for the AK-47.

Milly’s voice, shouting, “Peter!”, coming from their left, and very close by.

Without hesitation, Peter turned into the mouth of an alley. Gaby was on his heels, and she was surprised to see that Peter had slowed down in front of her. As she began to catch up to him, she could hear his breathing hammering out of him in quick, pained bursts, flooding the narrow space along with their pounding footsteps.

There was a dead-end in front of them, along with a metal door that was opening and a figure darting through it with Milly thrown over its shoulder.

“Peter!” Milly shouted, looking back at them with hands outstretched and eyes wide with terror.

Gaby had never seen someone look so frightened in her life. Well, that wasn’t true. Her mind flashed back to the kids from Mercy Hospital being taken away in the back of the Humvees. She had failed to save those kids. She didn’t even know where they were at the moment or what had become of them.

Not again.

She didn’t know where she got the burst of speed, but suddenly she was running past Peter. Then she was halfway up the alley when the steel door slammed shut in front of her. She didn’t stop for one second. As she neared it, she reached out with one hand and grabbed the knob and twisted it and jerked the door back and slipped inside in one continuous, blurring motion.

Darkness.

It was pitch-black inside.

She stopped, the only sounds coming from inside her chest and through her mouth as she struggled to breathe. She swiveled the carbine left, then right, then behind her. Not that it did any good.

She couldn’t see a goddamn thing.

Her eyes tried desperately to adjust to the blackness, but she could only see a few inches in front of her. It looked like some kind of hallway. She listened for footsteps, prepared to hear the soft patter of bare feet against tiled floor.

Ghouls! her mind screamed. There are ghouls in here!

Her finger tightened against the trigger.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, swallowed up by darkness, but it must have only been a few seconds, because the alleyway door opened behind her and sunlight flooded inside. Peter hurried through, his breath flooding out in long gasps. In the brief few seconds that the door was opened, she confirmed that she was inside a hallway with old walls, peeling paint, and a vinyl-covered floor.

“Milly!” Peter shouted.

His voice echoed just before he let the door slam shut behind him and they were, once again, swallowed up by the same black void as a few seconds ago.

“Oh my God,” Peter said, his voice breathless.

“What is it?” she said, keeping her eyes forward at…nothing. There was a big fat nothing in front of her.

“The door,” Peter said, the panic rising with each syllable. “There’s no doorknob on this side of the door, Gaby. I can’t open it!”

Gaby glanced behind her, searching out the door, trying to find the doorknob in the sea of nothingness. She couldn’t locate it, and the only reason she even knew Peter was standing next to her was the smell of his sweat and his out-of-control panting as he ran his hands over the metal door.

It’s a trap. They led us right into a goddamn trap.

She heard a click before a stream of light flashed across her face, illuminating the peeling and old faded multicolored patterns over one side of the wall. Peter, with a flashlight, swiveled the light back to her. She winced, and he quickly took the bright light away.

“Sorry,” he said.

“You brought a flashlight?”

“Yes. Why?”

“You’ve had it this entire time?”

“I—”

“The cave, Peter,” she hissed. “Why didn’t you use it when we were back in the cave?”

“I…forgot I had it.”

“Jesus,” she said, and looked away. “Never mind. Show me where we are.”

He turned the flashlight down one side of the hallway, then swiveled around and did the same to the other side. There was a nightstand with a vase and dead flowers draped over the lid behind them. And beyond that, just a solid wall. The other side, on the other hand, showed an intersection about twenty yards further down, pointing left and right.

“Can you hear her?” Peter whispered.

She shook her head but then realized he probably couldn’t see. “No. Can you?”

“No…”

“There’s only one way to go. Can you find any windows?”

He moved the flashlight along the walls. First one side, then the other. They only saw old, discolored, peeling wallpaper. “Nothing,” he said.

Of course not. Because it’s a trap. They lured us in here.

You idiot!

“Keep beside me with the flashlight,” she said. “If I turn, you turn. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Do you have your gun out?”

“Oh.” She heard him pull the 1911 out of his waistband and cock back the hammer, the soft click sounding overly dangerous in the blackness. “Okay.”

God, she hoped he didn’t accidentally shoot her. The chances of that happening had been pretty high back in the gas station with the lights to see with. Now, with only the flashlight, she had a very bad feeling.

“Peter,” she said.

“Yes?”

“See what you’re shooting at before you shoot, okay?”

“Okay,” he said uncertainly.

She sighed, then said, “Let’s go,” and started forward into the darkness.

11 Keo

Lake Dulcet was a city of 23,000 or so people, about half the size of neighboring Lake Charles. It had a decent downtown and the surrounding areas were a concrete jungle like every other city. Despite the sun, it would have been a pleasant walk if Lorelei, who hadn’t said a word when they first met earlier in the day, didn’t suddenly transform into a chatterbox.

The teenager talked about everything. The ghost city around them, the fact that they were walking instead of driving, or how she needed a haircut. Keo tuned her out the best he could, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

“Can’t we get a car?” Lorelei asked. “There are so many cars around. Can’t we use one of them? I’m tired of walking. How long have we been walking? It feels like days. Weeks. Months. Right, Carrie?”

“Uh huh,” Carrie said absently.

Lorelei reminded him of Shorty. Annoying. Carrie was more like Zachary. Quiet, unless she needed to say something. Lorelei liked to talk, even if no one was responding to her.

“Look, there’s a truck,” she said behind him now. “It’s nice. I like the color. Can we use that truck? Keo? Are you listening to me?”

“No,” Keo said.

“Carrie?” Lorelei said. “What about the truck? Can we use that truck? My feet are so tired. I think my legs are about to fall off.”

“We’ve only been walking for three hours,” Carrie said.

“It feels longer. It feels like months.”

“Well, it hasn’t been months. Now be quiet for a bit, okay?”

Lorelei sighed and lapsed into silence. Keo was able to once again enjoy the stillness of the city and their unhurried footsteps. They kept to the shades provided by the buildings while Keo kept both ears open for the first sound of pursuing vehicles.

There were three trucks, likely more than two men in each one. Well-armed men playing soldiers. The uniform didn’t bother him, but the weapons did. He had the submachine gun, but he was now saddled with two civilians, which put him at a disadvantage. All it would take was one of those cars to stumble across them by accident and he was screwed.

He thought about Zachary and why he was following up on a dead man’s promise.

You really are the dumbest man alive, you know that?

Carrie had walked up beside him. “She’s got a point.”

She had light brown eyes, and despite the bruising around her mouth and cut lips, she was more attractive than he had given her credit for this morning. Like most women he had met since the world went to shit, Carrie had very few extraneous pounds on her, which helped exaggerate what he guessed was a generous B-cup under that white T-shirt.

He looked away before she could catch him sneaking a peek. “What’s that?”

“Why didn’t we circle back to the marina after the soldiers left and take one of those trucks? They looked in pretty good shape.”

“They weren’t. I checked when I first got there. No gas, and the batteries are dead.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, listen.”

She did. “What am I listening for?”

“It’s quiet.”

“And?”

“Sound travels these days. Even if we could find a working vehicle, you don’t think your friends would hear a car rumbling down these streets? There are three of them out there looking for us. All it takes is one. Right now, they don’t have a clue where we’re going. That’s our advantage.”

“Do we know where we’re going?”

“South.”

“I was hoping for a more concrete answer.”

“South, until we fall into the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Funny,” she said, then glanced up, shielding her eyes against the sun. “You think we’ll make it out of the city before nightfall?”

Keo didn’t have to look at his watch before he answered, “No.”

“What time is it?”

“Two in the afternoon.”

“You didn’t even look at your watch.”

“I don’t have to.”

“It doesn’t get dark around this part until after six. So we have four hours or so?”

“Sounds about right.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Behind them, Lorelei was loudly unwrapping something. A few seconds later, he got a whiff of one of the Teriyaki-flavored Jack Link’s jerky he had given them before taking off. One of the few foods he was carrying around in his pack from last night.

“She’s eating again?” he asked.

“She eats like a horse,” Carrie smiled. “Were you in the Army?”

“What makes you think I was in the Army?”

“You’re really good with that rifle.”

“It’s a submachine gun.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One’s a submachine gun, and the other’s a rifle.”

She smirked. “So were you in the Army or not?”

“Not.”

“So how are you so good with that…submachine gun?”

“Experience,” Keo said.

“Were you living in the marina?”

“I was lying low on the sailboat that they sunk. Me and a couple of guys. After we tested out the silver bullets, we were heading south down the lake. First Song Island to check up on it, then the Texas coast for me.”

“What happened to your friends?”

The same thing that happened to the rest of the world. Their numbers came up.

“Bad luck,” he said instead.

“That’s it?”

“Yup, that’s about it.”

She didn’t say anything after that, but he caught her sneaking a look at him every now and then. Not really at him, but at the scar along the left side of his face, very visible under the bright sunlight. Pollard’s good-bye gift.

“What?” he said.

“How’d you get that?” she asked.

“I cut myself shaving.”

“Must have been one hell of a shave.”

“You have no idea.”

They made it to the outskirts of Lake Dulcet around five. Not quite within the city limits anymore, but not quite in the boondocks just yet, either. Lorelei was still grumpy about having to walk, though Keo was impressed with her and Carrie’s stamina. With the sun already starting to dip in the horizon, he began looking for a place to hide.

They walked under the open sky along a street flanked by ancient looking power poles. Trucks were sprinkled in the parking lots of businesses and industries around them. He glanced backward, remembering the suburbs they had passed an hour ago, and thought about going back. Last night’s run across the rooftops had convinced him he needed a place with a basement. Or, failing that, a place that could be easily defended. He couldn’t hope to survive in attics the rest of his life.

“What?” Carrie said, walking beside him.

“The suburbs,” Keo said. “I’m thinking we might have to backtrack to one of the houses we passed earlier. One with a basement.”

Lorelei had stopped in the middle of the street. She put her hands on her hips and looked around. With her hair in a ponytail, she was actually a very pretty girl, if a bit too thin. The boots she was wearing that they had liberated from a shoe store a few kilometers back looked two sizes too big, but that was only because her legs were toothpicks.

“What about that?” Lorelei said, pointing.

Keo looked over at a large building inside some hurricane fencing.

“The warehouse?” Carrie said.

“No, the RV,” Lorelei said.

It was a white recreational vehicle housed inside a garage with an open wall attached to one end of a warehouse. The RV sat in the shade, which only reminded Keo that he was sweating badly under the heat.

Carrie glanced over at him. “What do you think?”

Keo walked over and scanned the area. The grass inside the fence was burnt, mostly dead, with the occasional spots of weed. There were two, maybe three dozen groupings of gray cinderblocks, as if their owners had planned to build something in the wide-open spaces but never got around to it. Two swinging gates were closed tight with rusted-over chains and a large padlock. There was a gas station next door, its windows broken some time ago.

“What do you think?” Carrie asked again.

“Let’s check it out,” Keo said.

The fencing was cheap and stood only six-feet high. It was easy for Keo to scale; he waited on the other side as Carrie and Lorelei did the same.

“Couldn’t you just shoot the lock?” Lorelei said as she struggled up the fence one inch at a time.

“Too noisy,” Keo said.

“This is so hard…”

“It’ll be easier if you climbed without talking.”

“Whatever,” she said, and threw her legs over the top and dropped down into his arms.

He set her down. “See?”

She made a face and looked around them.

Next, he caught Carrie as she came down. She was surprisingly light and he probably held onto her longer than necessary. He also noticed that her arms had conveniently gone around his neck as he lowered her to the ground.

“Thanks,” she said, and actually blushed a bit.

“Sure.”

He thought about Gillian, waiting for him on the beaches of Santa Marie Island…probably. For all he knew, she had never made it to the island. For all he knew, she and Jordan and the boat were somewhere at the bottom of a river…

Keo unslung the MP5SD as they moved across the wide-open spaces. Like the last five hours, the only sound he heard was a minor wind and their footsteps. The warmth against his face was growing unbearable, and he wiped at a fresh bead of sweat.

There were zero vehicles (other than the RV) inside the lot, which told him that the place was being used for storage. The lack of a sign or company logo was a bit confusing, though. Then again, if they weren’t doing business out of here, the people who ran it wouldn’t necessarily need to advertise. Even with all those excuses, the emptiness, combined with the encounter with the soldiers this morning, made him jumpy.

And I thought the woods were dangerous…

“You think the fence can keep them out?” Carrie asked, glancing backward.

“Not in this lifetime,” Keo said. “But maybe it’ll deter them anyway. If they’ve been through here before — and chances are they have — they won’t bother coming in again unless we give them a reason to.”

She gave him a doubtful look.

“What?” he said.

“You talk about them like they’re smart. Like they can think.”

“Carrie, look around you. What do you see?”

She did. Then, “I don’t understand.”

“They did this. One night. That was all it took. Now tell me — can stupid, mindless creatures that can’t think do something like this?”

“I guess not.”

“These things — these ghouls — might not be the smartest kids in class anymore, but they can still think and reason. Never, ever underestimate them.”

She nodded solemnly.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s see what’s in the bus.”

“It’s an RV,” she smiled.

“Same difference.”

The RV used to be white, but it was now a faded gray color with long brown and black patterns, like the Nike swoosh, from front to back. It was about thirty feet long and eleven feet high, give or take a few inches, and parked along the length of the garage, taking up the entire space with a few feet to spare up front. Despite the deflated tires and dust-covered windows, it seemed to be in relatively good condition.

“It looks cool,” Lorelei said. “I’ve always wanted to travel around the country in an RV. My parents used to—” she stopped and didn’t say anything else.

Carrie walked over and put an arm around the girl, and the two of them exchanged another one of their brief, private smiles.

“Stay here,” Keo said. “I’ll check the warehouse first.”

He left them at the RV and walked around the warehouse. He ran his free palm along the building’s side, feeling the heat that the metal walls had been absorbing all day. There were closed windows at the top, but too far to reach from ground level. Both front doors were locked, and pulling at them didn’t get him anything. More layers of dust along the doors themselves and there were no telltale signs that they had swung open recently.

He located a smaller side door and two large ones at the back, but all three were similarly locked. It wouldn’t have taken much to pry them open, but if the creatures — or one of their human lackeys — stumbled across the damage, they might know someone had taken up residence. If that happened, he’d have to defend a large property by himself. He could probably count on Carrie to lend a hand, but Lorelei, not so much.

I should just dump them. Both of them. Gillian would understand.

Probably…

He headed back to the girls.

“Anything?” Carrie asked when he reached them.

“Doors are locked.”

“Can we break into them?”

“We could, but we shouldn’t. It’s a big warehouse with too many access points. I doubt it’ll have a basement or anything more secure than an office or a bathroom. If they catch us in there, we’re sitting ducks.”

“So where, then?”

“Let’s check the RV first.”

He wiped at the thick layer of dust over the security window on top of the RV’s door. He peered through it, but despite the bright (falling) sun, he couldn’t see more than a few feet inside. He glimpsed the driver’s seat, the big steering wheel, and what looked like an empty can of Diet Coke on the floor.

“Stay out here,” he said to the girls.

They looked back at him, as if to say, “What, you thought we were going to go in there with you?”

He smiled to himself then tried the door. It clicked open without a fight. He pulled it all the way open and slipped inside, sweeping the immediate area with the MP5SD. He took out an LED flashlight from one of his pouches and ran the beam over the seats in the middle. He was greeted by the very good sign of dust along the headrests and the smooth surface of a table to his right, half-encircled by a booth with plastic seats.

He moved up the aisle, boots squeaking softly against the vinyl flooring. There was a small kitchen complete with sink and range to his left. A dining table was fastened to the floor across from it, and more booth seating. Two doors at the very back. One opened up into a small bathroom and the other into a surprisingly spacious bedroom with a twin-size bed that had a wooden frame in one corner and an oak dresser on the other. There was a single window at the back, but it was blocked by the warehouse wall on the other side.

He rasped his knuckle on the solid fiberglass door and liked the sound he heard. It had a 12x21-inch tinted window at the top and a deadbolt lock on the inside. The odds of it withstanding a prolonged assault were good, especially with the dresser and bed as reinforcements.

Keo headed back to the front door.

Lorelei was leaning through the opening, giving him an anxious look. “Is it safe?”

“Safe enough,” he said.

Carrie followed Lorelei up the steps. “Okay?” she asked.

He nodded. “It’ll do. We only need it for one night, anyway.”

“So,” Lorelei said, “can we eat now? I’m starving.”

Carrie smiled wryly at Keo. “I told you. Like a horse.”

“Hey!” Lorelei said.

As dusk fell, visibility inside the RV began to drop. Carrie sat in the booth across from Keo while they listened to Lorelei snoring inside the bedroom in the back. The teenager had gone to sleep almost instantly. Keo wondered if she was tired from all the walking or the talking. Maybe both.

Carrie had her legs pulled up against her chest, sneakers resting on the seat. “What now?” she asked after they had been sitting there in silence for a while.

Keo reached into his pack and pulled out a Glock, then handed it to her butt-first. “Just in case.”

She took the gun and laid it on the table between them. Keo took out two spare magazines and placed them next to the weapon.

“How many of these things are you carrying around with you?” she asked, sounding amused.

“Plenty. Now, pay attention. It doesn’t matter where you shoot them. As long as you hit them with a silver bullet, they go down. Understand?”

She nodded and picked up the magazines, putting them into her pocket. “So, you’re like Chinese or something? I know you’re Asian. But not the whole way.”

He smiled. “‘Not the whole way’?”

“You know what I mean.”

“My mom was Korean.”

“Ah. What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

“Chuck was taken.”

She stared at him, unsure how to process that response.

“You can take the bedroom with Lorelei,” Keo said. “I’ll sleep out here and keep an eye out.”

“You sure?” she asked, the tiredness coming through.

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Keo. For everything.”

She picked up the Glock, stood up, and headed to the bedroom in the back.

Alone again, Keo pulled the tab on a can of Dole pineapple and sporked himself a nice big chunk dripping with syrup. He finished the entire can in a few minutes, watching as night fell outside the window like a canvas draping over the streets, the Spartan grounds within the hurricane fencing, and finally, the RV itself.

He picked up his MP5SD and put it on the table next to him, then leaned back against the wall. There was another window behind him, but it was blocked by the garage wall so there was no chance of anything coming through it. That only left three possible points of entry — the window directly across from him, the door to his left, and the front windshield. The windshield was mostly concealed by one of the other three walls, which really left just the window and door.

He closed his eyes briefly and thought about Gillian to help pass the time…

Keo wasn’t asleep, but he had settled into a peaceful state somewhere been dozing off and wide alert. It was an old trick he had learned a long time ago, something that had become very useful when he found himself stuck up a tree recently.

When he heard the noise, he knew immediately what it was before he even opened his eyes, slid off the plastic seat, and glided across the RV to the other side and pushed up against the window.

Headlights speared the street, cutting across the fading light outside. From the sounds of it, a truck. Despite his limited perspective, he could tell it was moving erratically, headlights swaying left and right as it got closer.

One of the trucks with the soldiers? How did they find us?

Keo watched it near, wondering what was going to reach him first — the truck or the falling night. If he were a betting man…

Click.

Carrie squeezed out of the partially open bedroom door and looked across the darkened vehicle at him. He lifted a finger to his lips, hoping she could see, and when she quietly closed the door and walked on her tiptoes toward him, he guessed she had.

She flattened her body against the wall next to him. “I heard a car…”

He nodded.

“Did they find us?” she asked. “The soldiers?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The pickup finally came into view. It might have been red, but it was hard to tell against the falling night. The vehicle had begun to slow down a bit, but it was still swerving from lane to lane, clearly out of control.

“It’s in trouble,” Carrie whispered.

As if on cue, the truck flipped and a figure — thin, gaunt, and unmistakably ghoul—flew off the bed where it had been holding on and was slingshot across the night sky as if shot out of a cannon. It landed somewhere further up the road, well beyond Keo’s line of sight.

The truck rolled on its side like a ball of steel and metal and aluminum, chunks of its frame firing off in every direction like missiles. Its bright front and rear lights shattered against the asphalt, showering the road with fireworks.

“Oh God,” Carrie gasped.

Finally, the truck came to a stop, settling on its roof with a loud groaning noise as smoke flooded out of its crumpled hood. They heard the metallic clinking of car parts big and small rolling around the road and dropping from the overturned vehicle.

“We should go out and help them,” Carrie said.

Keo didn’t say anything.

“Keo…”

“It could be a trap. I can’t tell if the truck is one of the three we saw earlier…”

A figure crawled out of the truck. It was a man. Or, at least, it had the size and large shoulders of a man, though Keo couldn’t make out details in the darkness. The man (?) crouched and reached into the truck and was pulling something out (another person, maybe?) when he suddenly let go and staggered back, and two loud gunshots exploded across the empty city.

The man fired again and again and again.

Until he finally stopped, turned, and ran—right at the fence in front of them.

He leaped desperately and reached out for the top of the fence, just barely managing to get a handhold, and began to pull himself up. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt. Definitely not one of those camo uniforms.

“He’s not one of them,” Carrie whispered next to him. “We should go help.”

“It’s too late,” Keo said. He kept his voice calm, measured, and unyielding. “He’s on his own.”

“We can’t do this. We have to help—” She gasped again when she saw them. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

There was a tide of them, so many that at first he thought the night was actually moving, that it had somehow come alive. But no, it wasn’t the darkness that had changed into a living thing, it was the living things inside it.

Ghouls. Hundreds, maybe more. Thousands?

He didn’t know where they had come from, only that they weren’t there one moment and then there was nothing but them. They swarmed toward the man, swallowing him up as if he were a fish trying to outswim the ocean itself. But he couldn’t, and Keo heard the scream, the sound of gunshots that wasn’t quite as loud as before because this time they were muffled by suffocating flesh.

Something grabbed onto Keo’s arm. He looked down at Carrie’s hand, her fingers digging into his skin. She stared out the window, face frozen in horror, the sight too frightening to comprehend yet too fascinating to look away from.

“Carrie,” he whispered when he felt a trickle of blood along his arm.

She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were transfixed by the amorphous blob moving outside the window, just beyond the flimsy hurricane fencing that would fall in a split-second if the creatures ever knew they were in there—

“Carrie,” he said again, a little louder this time.

That did it. She looked over at him, then down at his arm, and quickly unfurled her fingers and pulled her hand back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.”

He slid down to the floor and took a handkerchief out from one of his pouches and wrapped it around his arm.

Carrie sat next to him, clutching her knees to her chest. She stared forward and rocked absently back and forth. “What were they doing out there, Keo? What in God’s name were they doing out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Everyone knows not to be outside at night. Everyone knows. Even Lorelei knows. Everyone…” Her voice trailed off.

Keo put his arm around her and pulled her against him. She came willingly, anxiously, and leaned her head against his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and it wasn’t because of the slightly chilly night air inside the RV.

“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “It’ll be better tomorrow.”

“Will it?”

“Yes. I promise.”

Carrie’s body slackened against him and Keo tightened his grip on her with one hand, the other holding the MP5SD in his lap. He kept his eyes and ears open and knew he wasn’t going to be getting sleep anytime soon. Which was okay. He was used to not getting a decent amount of sleep these days. Hell, these last few weeks and months…

He thought about Gillian, walking on a white sandy beach, barefooted. He wondered if she had given up on him by now or if she still looked off at the Gulf of Mexico every day, waiting for him to arrive, for him to finally make good on his promise.

“You promise me,” she had said. “You’ll follow us to Santa Marie Island.”

“Yes,” he had answered. “I promise.”

“I’ll wait for you. Just hurry.”

That had been months ago. Did she still remember the exchange between them as vividly as he did? Was she even still waiting for him? There was only one way to find out.

First, though, he had to make good on a dead man’s promise, and that meant going to Song Island…

12 Gaby

What are you doing, you idiot?

Turn around. Right now. Run back to the door.

Do it.

And then what? There was no way out. No way to open the door. (She would need a doorknob for that.) No windows to climb out of, either. Not even a vent to crawl into.

They were inside the building, just like whoever had led them in here had planned it.

You’re screwed. You’re so screwed.

She must have sighed out loud because she heard clothes rustling as Peter, somewhere in the darkness with her, turned in her direction. Or she thought he did, anyway.

“You okay?” he whispered.

She shook her head before realizing he probably couldn’t see, not with the flashlight beam in front of them instead of on her face. “I’m fine,” she whispered back. “Keep the flashlight in front of us.”

“Okay…”

They had been walking down a long, empty hallway toward another intersection for the last ten minutes, though it didn’t seem as if they had gone very far from the alleyway door. That probably had something to do with the inability to see beyond the end of Peter’s flashlight. She must have gripped and re-gripped the M4 at least a dozen times.

At least there was a window in front of them this time, even though it was covered up so thoroughly with thick slabs of wood that not a single sliver of sunlight managed to slip through. Peter’s circle of light illuminated the occasional paintings of birds and ducks and flowers on the wall, along with end tables that held delicate-looking vases with nothing inside them.

It continued to be deathly quiet inside the building, not helped by the normal silence beyond the walls. It seemed as if she and Peter were the only two people still alive in the world at that moment, moving in the dark.

Moving in the dark…

She had trouble figuring out what kind of building they were in, much less its size. Maybe some kind of boarding house, judging by the hallways? Or an apartment building, maybe. Was there more than one floor? She hadn’t come across any stairs yet, and there were no sounds above her. She had been so busy chasing Peter through the streets and then the alley that she hadn’t taken even a second to take a look at the buildings around them. Her situational awareness, Will would say, had been utter shit.

How long had they been moving through the darkness? Twenty minutes? More? Less? Hard to tell. Hard to breathe.

But it wasn’t hard to sweat. She was doing a lot of that. The thickness in the air was made worse by the boarded-up window. She assumed the rest of the windows in the place were similarly covered, which would explain the complete lack of ventilation. Peter was sweating almost as much next to her; she could tell because whenever they accidentally brushed up against each other — which was about once every other step — his sweat rubbed off on her exposed arm and vice versa.

They waited to hear from Milly or her captor the entire time. Noises, movements, as long as it was something (anything) that told them that she was still alive in here, somewhere. There was nothing except their dual labored breathing.

Crash!

Gaby spun around. Peter mirrored her action, his flashlight spinning a full 180 degrees until it exposed a small figure standing behind them.

A boy. Barely a teenager. His eyes bulged against the light, though he didn’t look scared — just guilty, as if he had been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He wore dirty slacks and a sweat-stained T-shirt, bright blue eyes looking back at Gaby through stringy brown hair that fell over his face. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and he stood next to one of the end tables, the vase on top of it having fallen down and broken on the floor.

The boy turned and ran.

“Wait, kid, stop!” Gaby shouted before chasing after him.

Peter was slow to react, but eventually his flashlight moved and the beam bounced up and down the dirty floor, erratically picking up the fleeing form. Gaby was close enough that she could see the kid — or at least, the outline of his shape — as he scrambled down the hallway.

Damn, he was fast. Which was becoming a theme today. First Peter had outrun her in the streets, and now this boy. Was she really that slow, or was the ammo really dragging her down? Maybe she should—

The boy glanced over his shoulder back at her while never breaking his stride.

“Wait!” she shouted. “We’re not going to hurt you!”

If he heard her, he didn’t care, because he soon turned right and kept going.

She grabbed for the corner and slingshot around the turn so she didn’t have to slow down. The M4 bounced against her chest, all the magazines and equipment in Mac’s web belt weighing her down like a ton of bricks. She was used to carrying the load, but not running full speed with them.

She glimpsed the boy’s back up ahead. Jesus, he was fast. By the time she saw him again, he was already halfway to the side door, the same one they had come through earlier. Did he know it didn’t have a doorknob?

“Wait!” she shouted. “Stop, goddammit!”

The boy didn’t respond to her commands, but he was moving with purpose, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Which was where? More importantly, how had he gotten behind them in the first place? There was nothing back there…right?

Peter was still slow to catch up, and he was just now making the turn behind her when she was already ten feet up the hallway. She couldn’t see where the alleyway door was, which wasn’t a surprise since she couldn’t see much of anything anyway. Finally, Peter’s flashlight appeared, throwing a pool of light on the tiled flooring, peeling wallpaper — and up there, the boy again, racing like a little demon through the darkness.

The kid took another right turn.

Gaby primed herself to do the slingshot maneuver again, reaching out with one hand to grab the wall as she approached the corner—

Her vision — or what little of it there was — exploded as something smashed into her from the side just as she was starting to make the turn. She was flung across the narrow passageway and smashed into the wall on the other side and crumpled down to the cold, dirty tiled floor in a heap. She wasn’t sure if most of the pain was coming from the blow that sent her flying, the impact, or from the M4 unwittingly digging into her stomach and chest as she slammed down on top of it.

She hurt. All over.

Was her back broken? That would explain why she could barely move her arms and legs. Maybe her spine had been snapped. Was that possible? She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t breathe without feeling stabs of brutal pain, and it took every effort to turn her face away from the floor and to her side just so she could suck in a lungful of air.

Get up. Get up!

“Gaby!” Peter shouted, his voice not quite clear because he was still around the corner.

She managed to move her head, looked up, and saw the shape of a large figure standing over her. Was this what had hit her? A man? It hadn’t felt like a man. It had felt more like a speeding train…or a dozen.

The man turned his head down the hallway as a bright beam of light splashed across his broad chest. She wanted to tell Peter to lift the flashlight up a bit so she could see the man’s face, but she couldn’t form anything that even sounded like words. Was she even still breathing? Of course she was. Wasn’t she?

“Get away from her!” Peter shouted somewhere from the other side of the universe. “I’m warning you!”

Peter, just shoot him, you idiot.

The man’s large legs backpedaled as Peter came closer, his footsteps getting louder.

Shoot him, Peter, shoot him!

She wanted to shout it out, but whenever she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out were short, labored gasps. God, her chest burned…

“Gaby—” Peter said, when there was the loud sound of something wooden hitting flesh and the bright beam of Peter’s flashlight fell away from the big man hovering over her.

She heard the clatter of metal falling against the floor and rolling around before settling against a wall and illuminating the big man’s shoes — well-worn Nike sneakers — standing next to her head.

Those same shoes squeaked as they moved past her and a thick male voice said, “Damn, you saw that, Harrison? Bam! She never had a chance.”

“You idiot, get her weapons,” another voice snapped.

“Oh, right,” the first one said.

Gaby felt herself being turned over onto her back and rough, meaty hands pawing at the M4 and pulling it away. The same pair of hands groped her web belt and drew the Glock.

She was starting to get some semblance of feeling back in her arms and legs. She could move her fingers, which was a good sign. So she wasn’t paralyzed after all. Right? God, she hoped so. She could only think of a few worse things these days, and being paralyzed was one of them.

“Did you kill her?” the second voice asked.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” the first one said.

“You don’t think so?”

“She looks alive to me.”

She was on her back, but Gaby couldn’t see much of anything. These people seemed to be able to move around in the darkness just fine, though. She wasn’t sure how that was possible. At least, not until a figure crouched next to her and leaned over. She looked up at a pair of round and green lights staring down at her.

Night-vision goggles.

“She’s still alive,” the man behind the goggles said. “She might wish she wasn’t pretty soon, though.”

More movement around her. There were at least four pairs of feet in the hallway now. Where did they all come from? And more importantly, how the hell did that kid get behind them in the first place?

So many questions. Pointless, stupid questions, because none of it mattered. Not to her. Not now.

It was a trap. A big, stupid, elaborate trap.

Milly. The kid in the hallway. The door that can’t be opened.

And you fell for it like the big, stupid girl that you are.

Will would be so disappointed in you right now. So, so disappointed…

She struggled to keep her eyes open. The pain had become unbearable, and it was easier to lay still and absorb it, let it sweep over her entire body and think about how stupid she had been, how clueless, as she stumbled into their elaborate little trap.

Stupid. So stupid.

She found it easier to ignore all the voices around her. Ignore all the footsteps moving back and forth. Ignore the rough hands grabbing her and pulling her up from the floor as if she were a rag doll without any feelings.

There was the boy — the same one that had lured her down this path — as he played with her M4 rifle as if it were a toy. He looked up as they dragged her away, and she couldn’t tell if that was innocence on his face or just a kid beaming with pride at a job well done.

She woke up lying on her side. Her bones ached and she wasn’t sure if she could still move her legs, but when she tried extending them, they seemed fine. She couldn’t pry them apart, though, because they were pressed together at the ankles by a rope. Her head throbbed and opening her eyes to blinding LED lights didn’t help.

She was inside some kind of basement. She could tell that much even while looking at it from the floor at an angle. The floor was cold and uncomfortable but that didn’t stop her from feeling the sweat along her face, neck, and arms anyway. Someone had removed the camo jacket she took off Mac, and her web belt was gone.

And she was unarmed again.

Dammit.

A small figure was crouched in front of her. A girl, maybe fifteen, though it was hard to tell her age with the long, dirty-blonde hair covering half of her face, reminding Gaby of the boy from the hallway.

They use the kids. The bastards use the kids.

That immediately got her thinking of Milly. Where was she now? Was she fine? Safe? In danger? Given her own situation, Gaby thought it was probably too much to think that the girl was fine…somewhere out there.

The girl in front of her now was wearing cargo pants and sneakers and had a rifle lying across her lap. She recognized the weapon from the movies. Westerns with cowboys and Indians. Winchester? Was that what those were called? You cranked the lever to load a new round after you fired. Give her a carbine with a thirty-round magazine any day.

The kid had bright blue eyes that reminded Gaby of Lara. She was short, barely five feet, and there was a seriousness about the way she eyeballed Gaby that convinced her the girl meant business. Or, at least, she was putting on a hell of a game face.

She couldn’t tell how large the room was because there was only one portable LED lamp in the entire place. It dangled from a hook along the ceiling, casting an ethereal halo around her, the girl, and…blood.

Why is there blood?

There was coughing next to her. Gaby pulled herself up from the floor and sat on her butt. It was difficult with the thick rope binding her hands, pulled so tight that it dug into her wrists. She looked to her right.

Peter was leaning back against the wall, his own hands bound behind his back. His face was red and purple and some other color Gaby didn’t have a name for. His cheeks were puffy, his right eye swollen, and he peered back at her through fresh bruises that covered every inch of his face. His lips were cut and fresh blood clung to his sweat-stained shirt, and Peter didn’t look as if he was breathing at all. There was surprisingly very little blood on the floor, which told her whatever had happened to Peter hadn’t been inside here. He had been taken outside, then brought back…after.

“Peter, God, what happened?”

He shook his head, as if he wanted to talk but couldn’t. His mouth quivered, and although she had only known him for a few hours (has it only been half a day?), she felt something shattering at the pitiful sight of him. He looked in so much pain and his entire body seemed sapped of energy.

This wasn’t the man who had rescued her this morning.

This man was…broken.

“Who did this to you?” she asked.

All he could manage was to shake his head. Barely.

She turned to the girl, still crouched in front of them, staring with those blue eyes. “Who did this to my friend?”

The girl stared blankly back at her.

“Can you talk?”

Nothing.

“My name’s Gaby. What’s yours?”

She saw something — a flicker — and was hopeful…for a brief second. Then it was gone in a flash.

Instead of replying, the girl stood up and took a step back, then another. She didn’t look frightened, but there was a clear need to disengage herself.

She knows what’s been happening. She knows what’s going to happen. She’s probably seen it before.

The trap. The boy in the hallway.

They’ve done this before…

The girl vanished into the part of the basement that was enshrouded in darkness, which happened to be most of it. There was a rustling of clothes as the girl settled back down. Then there was just silence.

“Gaby…” Peter whispered.

She looked over at him. Just saying her name seemed to have taken everything he had. “Peter, don’t say anything. Just rest.”

“Dangerous…”

“I know, Peter, I know.”

He nodded — or tried to — and closed his eyes. He rested his head against the brick wall and seemed to drift off.

She looked around her again, taking in the room with a new eye, but didn’t see anything remotely useful the second time around. Concrete floor, walls, and ceiling. Some kind of bomb shelter, maybe. Or just a really sturdy basement. She could imagine people in here surviving through The Purge and the months after. The door would probably be somewhere on the other side. And the only thing between her and it was a teenage girl with a rifle…

Her ears perked up at the sound of loud, grinding metal moving against concrete. Something opening. A door.

Then, footsteps approaching. Boots. Heavy combat boots.

A figure emerged out of the wall of shadows like some ghostly vision. But it wasn’t a supernatural creature. It was just a man. He was large, in his early thirties, with short red hair and stubble that made him look older. He wore cargo pants and a sweat-stained T-shirt and had a Glock in a hip holster.

The man stopped in front of her and seemed to evaluate Peter for a moment. “I’m sorry about that,” he said finally. “The boys got a little carried away.” He looked at her. “My name’s Harrison.”

His voice sounded familiar.

The man in the night-vision goggles.

She remembered the bigger man, the one who had tackled her in the hallway, calling someone “Harrison.”

“What did you do to Peter?” she asked.

“We had to be sure,” Harrison said.

“Be sure of what?”

“What you were doing here.”

“We’re just passing through.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what he said, too. I believe him. But we had to be sure you weren’t dangerous, that’s all.”

“So you beat him half to death?” The anger rose inside her, surprising even herself. “While he’s tied up? That takes a real man.”

She expected indignation from Harrison, but instead he just shrugged indifferently. “You’re not the first ones to come through here. And, like I said, there couldn’t be any doubts. We had to be absolutely one hundred percent sure.”

“So do you still have any doubts?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then why are we still tied up?”

“We’re sure there’s just the three of you and you’re passing through, but that’s it.” He went into a crouch and stared at her with dull brown eyes. “It’s a dangerous world out there. The types of people who survive these days aren’t to be trusted. You’d do the same in our shoes.”

“Is that how you justify it?”

“I don’t need to justify it. My people depend on me. Three strangers who I’ve never seen in my life aren’t going to change what’s worked for us for the last year.” He stood up. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

Bullshit.

“You can believe it or not,” Harrison said, as if reading her thoughts — or maybe he just saw the look on her face. “It doesn’t matter to me. Tomorrow we’ll debate about what to do with you two — whether to cut you loose and send you on your way…or not. That’s more than most people will do for you these days, so count your lucky stars. For now, sit tight.”

“And the girl? Milly? What about her?”

“She’s being taken care of.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“She’s staying,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Did she tell you she wanted to stay?”

“No. But she’s young, and she’ll get over it.” He looked behind him at the shadows — at the girl, who neither one of them could see at the moment but Gaby knew was still back there, watching and listening intently. “They all do, eventually. Kids are useful.”

The boy in the hallway…

“What about him?” Gaby said, nodding at Peter. His eyes were still closed and it didn’t look as if he had moved or made a noise — or even breathed — at all during her conversation with Harrison. “He needs medical attention.”

“Like I said, it’s a tough world out there,” Harrison said, with all the sympathy of a lion feeding on fresh prey. “You gotta be strong to make it these days. It’s up to him if he’s walking out of here with you…or if you’re going by yourself.”

“You heartless fuck.”

He snorted. “You should thank me. I could have found plenty of uses for you, too, but we’re not that far gone yet.” He leaned toward her and let his eyes bore into her soul. “But I can always change my mind later.”

She didn’t say anything. She also didn’t look away. If he was trying to scare her, it wasn’t going to work. At least, she hoped it wasn’t working…

He stood back up. “Sit tight,” he said with something that looked like a crooked grin before turning and leaving without another word.

She listened to the sounds of his heavy footsteps fading, doing her very best to control her rage. She wanted to leap up and lunge after him, bound wrists and ankles be damned, but that would have been stupid. He wasn’t just bigger than her, she was also bound and hurt, and it wouldn’t have taken much for him to beat her back down.

And she couldn’t afford that right now. Beaten and bruised was okay, but she had seen what Harrison was capable of — saw it on Peter’s face and God only knew what was happening under his clothes. If she wanted to save Peter, to save herself and Milly, too, she couldn’t let that happen to her.

No, she had to bide her time, and that meant sitting still and listening to the same grinding metal moving on the other side of the room. Then the door slamming shut.

Finally, she allowed herself to breathe, to let all the anger flow away.

Stay alive. Nothing matters if you can’t stay alive right now.

Gaby looked over at Peter again and felt a sickening knot in her gut. He looked even more awful than a few seconds ago, the discoloration around his face seemingly changing color at least a dozen times. The flesh around his right eye was now the size of a giant fist.

He’s going to die. Tonight. Tomorrow morning. But he’s going to die.

I’m sorry, Peter.

She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes and tried to think.

Options. What were her options?

Limited. But Will always told her there were options, some that were obvious, but most that were hidden. She just had to find them.

So what were her options right now?

She had to think.

Think!

Then it came to her.

The girl.

Gaby tried to find the small figure in the darkness, focusing in on where she last heard the girl moving around, the soft rustling of clothes.

“Hey,” Gaby said.

There was no answer.

“Have you ever heard of Beaufont Lake?”

Still nothing.

“There’s an island on it. Song Island. It’s safe. There’s even a hotel—”

The girl stepped out of the blackness with her head cocked slightly to one side. She had moved so quickly that Gaby was momentarily taken by surprise. There was a fleck of interest in the girl’s eyes. “You said an island?”

“Yes,” Gaby said. Be careful. Don’t spook her. “Song Island. Have you ever heard of it?”

“No.” She glanced behind her, as if trying to decide how to proceed. Maybe she was afraid of Harrison finding out she was even talking to the prisoner.

Easy does it. You have her attention now. Don’t lose it…

“It’s safe there,” Gaby said. “There’s a hotel. Electricity. Hot showers. Frozen food. And ice. When was the last time you had ice?”

The girl didn’t answer.

“I can take you there,” Gaby said.

The girl looked over at Peter, then back at her. “It’s near here?”

“It’s not far. A day’s drive. Maybe a couple of days on foot.”

The girl looked back into the shadows behind her a second time. With her hair out of her face, she was a lot younger than Gaby had first thought. Thirteen, maybe, like Milly.

“I know you don’t want to be here,” Gaby said. “I know you’re just staying because you don’t have a choice.”

The blue eyes seemed to confirm everything Gaby had just said. Or was she reading the kid all wrong?

God, please don’t let me screw this up.

“You can come with us,” Gaby said. “With Peter and me. And Milly, too. Did you see Milly? She’s about your age.”

“They took her,” the girl said.

“We can get her back and leave here, and you can come with us.”

“To the island?”

“Yes, to the island.”

Gaby did her best to control her rising excitement. She could almost imagine the girl’s brain working, absorbing the information. But she had to tread lightly. The girl was taking a risk. She knew that much. Harrison had left her here because there was no way Gaby or Peter could escape in their condition. Certainly Peter had no more fight left in him, and it was hard for her to do anything when she couldn’t even walk.

Even so, it bothered her that he had just left a little girl behind to watch them. Were the adults all busy somewhere with something else? Maybe there were guards on the other side of that door Harrison had gone through twice now. Maybe—

Concentrate on the girl! She’s your opening! Seize it!

“What’s your name?” Gaby asked.

“Claire,” the girl said.

“I can take you with me, Claire. You’ll be safe on the island.”

“Because the bloodsuckers can’t go there,” Claire said.

“Yes,” Gaby said. “How did you know—”

Claire whirled around and disappeared into the shadows.

“Wait, Claire,” Gaby said, but the girl was gone. She wanted to shout but was afraid of making too much noise in case there were guards outside the basement door.

She sighed and leaned back against the wall, crestfallen. All her hopes of escaping with Peter and Milly died inside her and all she could do was look at Peter, asleep — or somewhere between asleep and dead — next to her.

I’m sorry, Peter. I’m not good at saving people. Nate could have told you that.

And Matt.

And Josh…

There was the quick patter of footsteps just before Claire reappeared out of the darkness. The rifle was slung over her back, looking absurdly big against her slight frame. There was something else, too: Claire was clutching a small black microcassette voice recorder.

Gaby opened her mouth to ask what was happening when Claire shushed her by holding up her hand. The girl crouched in front of her and pressed the play button on the recorder and held it out as a familiar voice came through the tiny speaker:

“To any survivors out there, if you’re hearing this, you are not alone. There are things you need to know about our enemy — these creatures of the night, these ghouls. They are not invincible, and they have weaknesses other than sunlight—”

Lara! It was Lara’s voice!

“—One: you can kill them with silver. Stab them, shoot them, or cut them with any silver weapon, and they will die. Two: they will not cross bodies of water. An island, a boat — get to anything that can separate you from land. Three: some ultraviolet light has proven effective, but flashlights and lightbulbs with UV don’t seem to have any effect. We don’t know why, so use this information with caution. If you’re hearing this message, you are not alone. Stay strong, stay smart, and adapt. We owe it to those we’ve lost to keep fighting, to never give up. Good luck.”

The message ended, and Claire clicked off the recorder. “You said an island. Not far from here?”

Gaby nodded anxiously. “Yes. It’s called Song Island.”

“And she’s right? The creatures can’t go there?”

“Yes. She’s right. They can’t.”

“She’s not lying? You promise?”

“She’s not lying. I promise.” Then, “Where did you record that from, Claire?”

“Donna has a small radio that she listens to every now and then. It’s our father’s; he used to listen to talk radio on it. Donna thinks the government might still be out there, but I told her it wasn’t. A few nights ago, we heard this. It keeps changing channels, so I decided to record it just in case we couldn’t find it again.”

“Did you try to radio them back?”

“Can’t. You can only pick up stuff with the radio.”

“Do the others know about it? Harrison?”

“Donna tried telling him, but he doesn’t believe it.” She frowned. “I think he doesn’t care. He likes it here. The way things are.” She looked at Peter. “We don’t, though.”

“Who is Donna?”

“My sister.” She glanced back at Gaby and narrowed her eyes a bit. “How do I know the woman on the radio isn’t lying? How do I know you’re not lying? Everyone lies. Especially adults. Harrison lies all the time. He uses the kids to watch the roads and trick people. Like he did with you.”

“I swear I’m not lying, Claire.”

Claire watched her intensely, blue eyes squinting as if she could read Gaby if she stared long and squinted hard enough.

She’s too young to look so old.

“And you’ll take me with you?” Claire asked finally. “To the island? Swear it?”

“I swear it,” Gaby said.

“And Donna?”

“Donna, too, if she wants to come.”

Claire nodded, seemingly satisfied. She pocketed the voice recorder.

“Do you keep that with you all the time?” Gaby asked.

“Uh huh,” Claire nodded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess it gives me hope.” She stood up and flicked another quick glance back at the shadows behind her. “What now? How do we get out of here?”

“Are there people on the other side of the door? Guards?”

“No. They left before you woke up.”

Why? What’s happening out there? Where are all the adults?

All those questions raced through her mind, but she forced them away. No guards. That was all that mattered. There were no guards outside the door!

“I need my guns, Claire,” Gaby said. “Do you know where they took them?”

The girl shook her head. “No, but there are others.”

“Others?”

“Guns. There are lots of guns on the other side of the door. How many do you want?”

“How many you got?” Gaby said, grinning back at her.

13 Will

“How many?” Danny asked.

“A dozen, give or take,” Will said.

“How many is ‘give or take’?”

“A dozen or so?”

“Remind me to never let you do my taxes, Mister CP-Or So.”

They were crouched just beyond the tree lines, watching the trucks roll by and up the road — Route 13, according to a sign they had passed earlier — and toward the city of Dunbar.

Lucky number 13.

The trucks were of various sizes and colors, some beat up, others brand new. They included a shiny silver F-150 that was hauling an orange and white U-Haul truck in the middle of the pack. Will glimpsed a couple of white stars and the state of Louisiana on the sweat-drenched uniforms of a couple of the men sitting in the back of the Ford as it flashed by him.

Josh’s boys.

What are they doing here?

“Fourteen,” Will said when the last truck had passed.

“You think they’re tracking Gaby?” Danny asked behind him.

“I don’t think so. Way too many cars for just one girl.”

“Maybe our boy Josh is in one of them. Kid’s in love. You remember what that was like? With the hormones going nuts? I wouldn’t put it past him to commit this kind of force to recapturing her. Sounds like something a teenager would do.”

“You’re assuming he thinks she’s still alive.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“The cave, remember?”

“Oh, right. I forgot about the cave.”

“It was this morning, Danny.”

“It’s hot out here. My brain turns to soup in the heat. Give me a break.”

Will grunted, then glanced down at his watch: 3:14 p.m.

Three hours until nightfall. Gonna be close…

“Did you see anything I might have missed?” Will asked.

“Like what?”

“Like something that’ll tell us where they were coming from, or going?”

Danny thought about it, then shook his head. “Can’t say, but then again, I don’t know the area. You?”

“Nope.”

“So, I have a question.”

“Did you raise your hand?”

Danny raised his hand. “So, I have a question.”

“What is it?” Will smiled.

“How do you think the ghouls know to avoid those betraying buggers now that they’re no longer wearing the hazmat suits and gas masks?”

“Probably the same way they knew not to attack the guys in hazmat suits and gas masks in the first place.”

“The whole hive mind thing. Someone gives the command and it goes out to the infantry. Someone high up. Like your buddy Mabry.”

“Or one of his acolytes.”

“Like, for instance, your ex-ghoulfriend Kate?” Danny grinned at him.

Will sighed. “Don’t rub it in.”

He sat back down on the hard ground and looked up Route 13. Dunbar wasn’t a particularly big place, but like most country cities, it was spread out and separated into districts, with the suburbs circling the main business area. The whole place sounded dead at the moment, and Will could still hear the engines of the soldier’s caravan moving away from them, fading with every passing second.

“Gaby probably went in there,” Will said.

“Likely,” Danny nodded. “If she’s still alive…”

“Those soldiers seemed to think so back at the cave. So let’s go find out, one way or another.”

“Not like I got anything else to do.”

Will got up and moved through the woods, keeping parallel to the road on his right. Danny followed, but only after making sure no one had sneaked up behind them while they were waiting for the cars to pass.

Gaby and her two companions had clearly been heading for Dunbar since leaving L15 behind. He had picked up multiple tracks moving alongside Lake Hillman and in this direction. If one of those prints had belonged to Gaby, that is. He still wasn’t sure, but the odds were in their favor. This was Gaby, after all. If he knew one thing about her, it was that the teenager was a survivor.

“How’re your wounds?” Danny asked after a while.

“My guts are still where they should be. Thanks for asking; I didn’t know you cared.”

“I don’t, but Lara made me promise.”

“You scared of Lara?”

“Hell yeah, she’s five-five of balls of fury. I told you she’s running the island now, right?”

“You mentioned that once or twice.”

“Yeah, you really know how to pick them, buddy.”

“What does that mean?”

“First Kate, and now Lara. I guess you have a type.”

“Is that right?”

“Ball busters,” Danny chuckled.

Will grinned. Danny probably had a point there.

They passed a train track, then a slew of old houses with peeling paint and rooftops that didn’t look strong enough to withstand a harsh wind blowing in the wrong direction. There were too many open spaces, forcing them to dart from building to building as they followed the motor oil trails of the collaborator caravan up Route 13 toward the center of Dunbar.

After about an hour of skirting around the open, keeping to the same stretch of road but never on it, they finally sidled up to an orange building called Gaine’s Meat Market near the very center of what Will surmised was the busy business section of town. A streetlight swayed back and forth in front of them, while half a block along Highway 190’s four-lane stretch the trucks and ATV had made camp in the mostly barren parking lot of a strip mall. Heavily-armed men milled about the vehicles, doing…what?

Will and Danny leaned out from the corner of Gaine’s with binoculars and watched the soldiers for a moment. The U-Haul sat almost in the center of the parked vehicles, but no one had pulled open the back doors, which further piqued Will’s curiosity. It couldn’t have been people inside, because trailers didn’t have air conditioners and it would be suffocating under the heat.

“You think it’s a coincidence they’re here at the same time as us?” Danny asked.

“I’m not a fan of coincidences,” Will said.

Danny sniffed him. “Not a fan of hygiene, either, from the smell of it. When was the last time you showered?”

“It’s been a while.”

“I can smell that.”

“Stop sniffing me and take a look at the U-Haul.”

“I am,” Danny said, peering through his binoculars. “What about it?”

“They haven’t opened it yet.”

“You think there’s something worthwhile in there?”

“Gotta be. Why haul it around?”

“Maybe it’s dirty laundry. Or a washer and dryer to wash those sparkly uniforms. Look at them; they almost look like soldiers. How precious.”

“Where would they plug the washer and dryer in?”

“Details, details.”

“Look at the way they parked it. In the center.”

Danny chuckled. “Isn’t this what got you in trouble in the first place? This need to know everything about everything?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say. Curiosity killed the curious idiot.”

“I’m not sure that’s quite the saying.”

“Details, details.”

The men (wannabe soldiers) began spreading out along the streets, moving in pairs of two. He counted ten, then twenty — ten pairs in all. They were searching the buildings around them while a dozen or so remained behind with the caravan. It was a mixed bag of men — old and young, fat and skinny, and some sported ponytails or unruly long hair that stuck out underneath ball caps.

Try getting away with that in Basic Training, boys.

Weekend warriors or not, the fact that each man was carrying military-grade firepower made them just as dangerous as any enlisted man he had been around. They were wearing sidearms and he glimpsed the barrels of M4s, a couple of AK-47s, and one was hauling around a Belgian FN FAL battle rifle. Will wondered where he had gotten that. The weapon that people called “The Right Arm of the Free World” was a rare sight these days.

“Heads up,” Danny said.

One of the pairs had come out of a Shell gas station in front of them and was moving up the street in their direction.

They pulled back from the corner.

“What’s the call?” Danny said.

“Find out what they’re doing here and if Gaby’s still around.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“Quietly.”

“Oh, that’s cute. When did you get so cute all of a sudden?”

“Must be the extra bullet holes,” Will said.

“So that explains the whistling noise I’ve been hearing,” Danny said.

What’s in the U-Haul?

There was a gas tanker directly below them, and Will wondered how much fuel was left inside it and if it would be worth it to somehow drive it down to Song Island as an emergency reserve.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

A tanker full of fuel would definitely help in a worst-case scenario. Of course, getting it there was the problem. That was, if they could get it working in the first place, which wasn’t a given these days with cars sitting around collecting dust and rust for the last eleven months.

He fixed his attention back on the camouflaged pair walking on the street below them, carbines cradled in their arms.

Will and Danny had circled back around and headed up to the second floor of Gaine’s Meat Market, using a catwalk in the back, but only after they had witnessed the soldiers searching it and, finding nothing, moved on. The last thing they wanted was for Josh’s boys to show up unexpectedly and get them involved in a gunfight. That would bring everyone down on them, as well as stopping their search for Gaby in its tracks. They couldn’t afford that. Not now. Will didn’t know for sure, but he felt as if she was close. Now all he had to do was find her before someone else did…

He glanced at his watch: 4:15 p.m.

Two hours and change before nightfall. So was this it, then? Had the soldiers only stopped at Dunbar to spend the night? Did that mean they didn’t have protection after nightfall the way they used to when they wore those hazmat suits? Or was he right and the ghouls just knew to ignore them?

Dead, not stupid.

“They coming back?” Danny asked behind him.

Will shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“Good. Oh, by the way, I call dibs on the chair.” Danny had settled down on a big, comfortable-looking black felt couch in the corner of the room and was stuffing his mouth with beef jerky from a bag of Oberto.

“How many of those do you have?” Will asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” He threw his boots up on an ottoman and leaned back. “Turn on the AC, will ya?”

“I’ll get right on it.”

There was enough light coming through the curtains over the closed window in front of Will to see with, but it did nothing to help with the heat or the lack of circulation. Opening the window for some wind was a no-go after the soldiers had searched the room earlier. There was a chance one of them might remember that the window was closed if they should walk back in this direction. It was a small risk, but there was too much at stake to do something that stupid just because he couldn’t stand a little (or a lot of) sweat.

Will glanced to his left, down the state highway and back toward the strip mall. He couldn’t see much of anything from this angle. The soldiers left behind hadn’t moved from their spots as far as he could tell, and the ones that had fanned out in pairs had begun to drift back one at a time as the hour dragged on.

What’s in the U-Haul?

“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” Danny said behind him.

“What’s that?”

“The U-Haul.”

“Nope.”

“Let it go. We’re here to find Gaby and get the hell outta Dodge. Keep your eyes on the prize, Kemosabe.”

“You’re not curious?”

“Of course I’m curious. But I’d also like to get home to Carly. This little adventure is fun and all, but I’m frankly tired of walking around with sweaty balls.”

“Good to know, good to know.”

“I’m just sayin’. A man needs more in life than a wet scrotum.”

Will caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. It came out of nowhere and forced him to take a step back from the window before sliding against the wall.

A second later Danny was standing across from him with his rifle. “Company?”

“Not the kind I was expecting.”

Danny followed Will’s gaze to the rooftop of Tom’s Billiard, a one-story building across the street from them. A lone figure in jeans and a black T-shirt was hurrying across the gravel floor toward the edge, where he went into a crouch and peered up the street with a pair of binoculars. He was looking at the same strip mall parking lot.

The one with the U-Haul...

What the hell is in there?

“Now how’d he get up there?” Danny said.

“Probably a ladder in the back.”

“Not one of Josh’s boys, from the looks of his outfit.”

“Maybe a local.”

The man unclipped a radio and raised it to his lips and spoke into it.

“I guess he’s not alone,” Danny said. “What are the chances that Gaby’s with him, that she’s drinking lattes somewhere around here?”

“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.

Danny chuckled. “Hey, we’re due for a little luck.”

“Gaby said that, too. Then she disappeared.”

“You and your half-empty glasses. Can’t you think positively for once?”

The man stood up and jogged back the direction he had come — the other side of the rooftop — where he leaned over the edge.

“What’s he doing now?” Danny said.

“Taking a leak?”

“Should we be watching that?”

“What, you’re not confident enough with your manhood?”

“Hey, the kid could be packing a cannon.”

“Is that what Carly calls it?”

“She calls it lots of things. Paul Bunyan, her favorite glow stick, the nightstick to end all nightsticks…”

The man was pulling up a second figure from the side of the building. This one was bigger, with a round gut, and also wearing civilian clothes. He was carrying a faded green duffel bag over his shoulder.

“Oh, look, he’s got a BFF,” Danny said.

“Look at what he’s carrying.”

“About fifty extra pounds. So the poor guy has an eating disorder. Give him a break.”

“No, over his back.”

“Oh, yeah.” Danny looked for a moment, then, “Looks like they’re up to no good, these two.”

“Yep.”

“Should we stop them?”

“Nah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Besides, I really wanna know what’s in that U-Haul.”

“What if it’s people?”

“People?”

“Like captives.”

That hadn’t occurred to him. “Good point.”

“Really?”

“Hey, even the sun’s gotta shine up a dog’s asshole at least once.”

“And I got a pretty bright asshole, too.”

“Good to know, good to know.”

The two men moved back over to the edge overlooking the street. The fat one put down the duffel bag and unzipped it. He reached in and took out something long and metal. Will knew what it was before the sun glinted off the green camouflage barrel of the M40 rifle. Not the original M40, but a later model. Likely an M40A3 from the looks of it.

The fat man handed the Marine sniper rifle over to his friend, who took it and extended the tripod underneath the barrel before lying down on the rooftop on his stomach. He settled in behind the long scope and positioned his shoulder against the stock.

The kid’s done this before.

“It’s all fun and games until someone breaks out the peashooters,” Danny said. “Then it’s eyes and balls getting popped. Never good.”

“They got friends, too.”

Will nodded down the street, where two more men had appeared and were leaning out from the side of Tom’s Billiard. One had an AR-15 with an ACOG scope and he was zeroing in, while the second one stood behind him peering down the street with binoculars while talking into a radio.

“Oh boy,” Danny said. “Looks like we done run right into a good ol’-fashioned gunfight at the OK Corral. Question is, we wanna get involved in this?”

“Let’s steer clear and see who comes out on top. The Clantons, or Doc Holliday and the Earps.”

“Which one is the Clantons and which ones are the Earps, though?”

“Hell if I know. Does it matter?”

“Hey, you’re the one who made the half-assed analogy. You tell me.” Danny peered up and down the street for a moment. “You think there are more of them hanging around?”

“Gotta be. Whoever’s coordinating this seems to know what they’re doing. Probably a couple more snipers on a few more rooftops. If they’re locals and this is their city, they’ll know all the good spots, including all the ins and outs of the surrounding buildings.”

“Ambush.”

“Looks like it, yeah.”

“Can’t say I’m feeling sorry for the Earps.”

Will grinned. “Josh’s boys are the Earps?”

“They have the uniforms and the lot down there kinda look like outlaws, what with their sweat-stained shirts and AR-15s and whatnot.”

“Let’s go with that, then.”

The sniper on the rooftop fired, the gunshot impossibly loud in the still city. The shot was still echoing when the man with the AR-15 below them began sending rounds up the street, the clink-clink-clink of his bullet casings flickering into the air and dropping one after another like loud metallic raindrops on the sidewalk.

“I wish we had popcorn,” Danny said, dipping into another bag of Oberto and pulling out a big stick of jerky. “But I guess this’ll have to do.”

“Seriously, how many of those things do you have?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

The gunfire continued unabated, the steady pow!, pause, pow! of the sniper rifle banging out a tune with the rapid pop-pop-pop! of the AR-15 as its melodic companion. They were clearly shooting at something, and Will wished he could see what, but his angle was all wrong.

He thought about moving, going to find another window in the building, when someone up the street unleashed with another rifle and the brick wall the two men were hiding behind flew apart. One of the men ducked behind cover, while the second one calmly pulled himself back and reloaded.

Then all hell broke loose, and the all-too-familiar rattle of dozens of assault rifles firing at the same time on full-auto filled the air. It was like rolling thunder, sweeping up and down the streets of Dunbar, Louisiana.

And all the while, Will’s thoughts kept going back to the parking lot. To Josh’s soldiers. And that one vehicle they seemed to be surrounding like precious cargo.

What’s in the U-Haul?

14 Gaby

Claire returned to the basement about ten minutes after disappearing up the stairs. She came back with a tall blonde girl, the two of them racing down the steps as if they were afraid of being caught. Which, Gaby guessed, wasn’t too far from the truth.

The new girl looked all of seventeen and fresh-faced. Gaby couldn’t remember when she last looked that innocent. The girls were definitely sisters — blonde, slender, and one of these days (probably soon) Claire was going to sprout and become just as tall as her sister. In the time it had taken them to come back, Gaby could tell Claire had already filled Donna in.

“When are we leaving?” Donna asked as soon as she climbed down the stairs.

“Now,” Gaby said.

While waiting for the sisters, Gaby had time to take stock of their surroundings. She and Peter were being kept in the basement of a Veterans of Foreign Wars building somewhere in the center of Dunbar. Someone had converted the room into a bomb shelter, with two sections — the interior where she and Peter were being kept and an exterior portion with the stairs. There was plenty of light out here thanks to LED lamps hanging from hooks. Nearly thirty percent of the space was filled with weapons and ammo, with the rest reserved for nonperishable canned goods, cases of bottled water, plastic red cans of gasoline, an entire corner of propane tanks, and stacks of MREs in crates.

Gaby had grabbed one of the M4 rifles off the rack as soon as she saw them. The carbine had a nice pistol grip under the barrel and a decent, if not great, red dot scope mounted on top. She’d worked with worse all day, so this was definitely an upgrade. She had also snatched up a web belt and began stuffing the pouches with magazines. She was still choosing and adding supplies, shoving them into tactical packs and feeling better with every additional pound, when the girls returned.

“Grab Peter,” she told them.

Claire and Donna helped Peter up from the floor and he hung between them, looking even paler and weaker than when Gaby had first managed to shoulder him into the outer room. His right eye was almost completely shut now, the skin around it giving off an abnormal appearance. Donna looked uncomfortable being this close to Peter, but she didn’t say anything.

Gaby picked up a heavy-duty nylon bag from the floor and stuffed food and water into it before handing it to Donna. “Can you carry this?”

Donna nodded, taking the bag with her free hand. “It’s either me or Claire, right? I mean look at her. She can barely carry herself.”

“Hey, I can carry myself just fine,” Claire said. “I’m still growing.”

Gaby turned back to the gun racks and picked up an additional Glock, this one smaller than the one she already had in her hip holster, and held it out, butt-first, to Donna.

The girl looked at the gun, then at her. “I don’t know how to use that.”

“You want a rifle instead?”

“I don’t know how to use one of those, either.”

Gaby glanced over at Claire and the rifle slung over her back.

“Claire’s been using that since we were kids,” Donna said, picking up on Gaby’s unasked question. “Our dad taught her.”

“And he didn’t teach you?”

“I didn’t want to learn. I wasn’t a tomboy like her.”

“You were just lazy,” Claire said.

“Keep telling yourself that, daddy’s girl,” Donna said.

Gaby stared at them for a moment. If she had any doubts they were actually sisters before, that would have gone away after listening to them. Only siblings bickered like that. She was pretty sure they weren’t even aware of it because it came so naturally at this point.

“I’ll take it,” Claire said, nodding at the gun in Gaby’s hand. “You can teach me how to use it.”

“Later,” Gaby said.

She shoved the spare Glock into her tactical pack, then flicked the safety off the M4. She walked over to the stair landing and glanced up at the closed door at the top. She stood perfectly still and listened but couldn’t hear voices or sounds of any kind from the other side. Definitely no telltale signs that Claire and Donna’s arrival had triggered some kind of an alert from upstairs.

“How many men did Harrison leave behind?” she asked.

“None,” Donna said. “Just the women and children. Harrison took all the men to the north side of town.”

“What’s happening there?”

“Some soldiers showed up.”

“Soldiers?”

“They looked like soldiers, anyway, but I don’t know what soldiers would be doing around here. I didn’t even know they were still around.”

Because they’re not. They’re Josh’s people.

She remembered the town guards in their nice and clean uniforms. She knew they weren’t actually soldiers, just collaborators playing dress up. Not that it mattered now. What was important was that Harrison had marshaled all his forces to deal with it.

What was that saying? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”?

“Are the women up there armed?” Gaby asked.

“Some of them,” Donna said, before adding with some concern, “You’re not going to shoot them, are you?”

“Only if I have to.”

“They’re good people. You don’t need to hurt them.”

“I won’t if I don’t have to.” Donna didn’t look convinced, but Gaby didn’t care at the moment. “What’s Harrison going to do? With the soldiers?”

“He’s going to attack them.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he does.”

“He’s done it before,” Gaby said. It wasn’t a question.

“He says this is our city, that we have to fight to keep it.”

Like with Peter, Harrison?

Gaby looked back and stared at the three people standing behind her. Really, really stared at them.

They looked back at her intently, anxiously.

Except for Peter, who hadn’t looked any better since she handed him off to the girls. Despite their size, Donna and Claire were holding Peter up surprisingly well, but she could see Claire grimacing with the heavy weight. Peter was limp between them, as if he would fall and never get up again if they let go even just a little bit.

At first she had thought Harrison’s people had only beaten Peter around the face during the interrogation (because Harrison “needed to know for sure”), but she knew better now. When she had helped him up from the floor, he had flinched with every contact regardless of where she touched him. And walking from one side of the basement to the other had been an ordeal she wasn’t sure he would even survive.

At the moment, Peter was looking back at her with his one good eye. His right was never going to open again. He seemed to know what she was thinking, and he nodded. Or, at least, he motioned with his head in something that resembled a nod. It was mostly just a slight tremble.

“It’s not just the broken ribs,” he said. His voice was very low, coming out almost a whisper, because that was all he could manage, and even that seemed to take a great deal out of him. “I’m bleeding internally, too. This is the end of the road for me, kid.”

“Peter…”

“My right eye’s gone. I can barely see out of the left. I can’t walk without feeling like every bone in my body’s going to break apart at any second. I don’t think I’ll even make it up those stairs.”

“What are you saying, Peter?”

“I want you to go. Take the girls, find Milly, and go.”

He struggled against the sisters then somehow managed to untangle himself from them. They looked on worriedly as he stumbled over to the nearest wall and sat down. He let out a loud sigh, actually managing to smile back at the girls.

“Go,” Peter said. “I’ll be all right.”

“You’re going to die down here, Peter,” Gaby said. She was surprised by her own matter-of-fact tone.

Damn. When had she gotten so cold?

He shrugged back, almost indifferently. “I’m thirty-six. You’re just kids. This is your world now. Go.”

“Peter…”

“I’m not having this conversation, Gaby. Go, now, before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?” Gaby was about to say when the first gunshot reached them as a slight echo — a wet, barely noticeable pop noise.

She knew it hadn’t come from the hall above them. It originated from across the city, and it was quickly followed by a burst from an assault rifle. Then there was another shot and suddenly the city of Dunbar exploded with gunfire, the noise so intense that Gaby and the sisters found themselves standing perfectly still and listening to it, transfixed, for almost an entire minute.

Gaby finally snapped out of it. “How many soldiers are out there?” she asked Donna.

“I didn’t see all of them,” Donna said, “but it couldn’t have been that many if Harrison thinks he can take them.”

“How many men does he have?”

“Twenty-five.”

Gaby glanced up at the basement door, this time with more urgency. “Is Milly out there, Claire?”

“Yes,” Claire said.

“Are you sure?”

“I saw her.”

“Okay.”

Gaby looked back at Peter. He was holding his hand under his chin and there was blood in his palm. More red liquid coated his bloated, pale lips, and some trickled down his chin.

“Peter,” she said softly.

He wiped the blood off on the floor and met her eyes. She saw resoluteness in them. A courage she didn’t know he even possessed. “Get Milly, Gaby, and get her to the island. Please do that for me.”

She took a step toward him. “Peter…”

He held up his hand to stop her. “I’m going to stay down here for a while. Rest.” Then, he cracked a grin. Or tried to, anyway. “Enjoy the show for a while. Sounds like they’re really having a blast, huh?”

She gave him a half-smile back. It was the only response she could come up with.

How did you say good-bye to a man whom you barely knew, but who had saved your life? And now she was going to leave him down here to die, because she knew there was no way Peter was going to get out of the basement.

Not alive, anyway.

A loud, suddenly intense burst of pop-pop-pop from outside drew their attention again. The gunfire seemed to be coming at a faster clip now as more people were adding to the chaos. Twenty-five of Harrison’s people were out there, according to Donna, and how many of Josh’s soldiers?

All those people, all those guns, gathered in one place…

But she noticed something very clear about it, though: it was all coming from the north side, just like Donna had said. That left the rest of the city as a viable escape route, with the south in particular being, at this very moment, wide open.

“Go,” Peter said. “Go now, Gaby. Save Milly, please.”

Gaby nodded. She looked at him one last time, then turned and headed back to the stairs. “Let’s go, girls.”

Donna and Claire followed.

Gaby took the steps one at a time, her eyes fixed on the door, the M4 at the ready, the fingers of her left hand tightening around the pistol grip. She wondered if Peter was looking after them, if he would scream for her to stop at the last moment, just before she reached the exit. She didn’t know if she wanted him to or if she was afraid he would.

Could she keep walking if he began calling her name? Could she just abandon him down here to die?

The hellacious back and forth continued outside, indifferent to what was happening with them in the basement at the moment. Those combatants out there didn’t know and didn’t care that a good man was dying, and that they (me) were going to leave him down here because he had become useless.

And in this new world, useless was the same as dead…

The basement door opened up into a back hallway that joined with the main area of the VFW hall. There was another door to their left leading to some kind of office. The sound of gunfire, no longer constricted by the basement’s concrete walls, was much louder and harder to ignore up here.

Gaby closed the door behind them and looked over at Donna. The girl wore shorts and a plaid long-sleeve work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She had on a belt with a knife in a sheath but no other weapons. Donna seemed to be carrying the bulky supply bag just fine — at least, for now. Gaby would have to keep an eye on her. She didn’t want to lose anything in that bag, depending on how long it was going to take them to get to Song Island. If they couldn’t locate a working vehicle along the way, it was going to be a hell of a walk.

Claire still had her lever-action rifle, which she gripped tightly in both hands. Gaby couldn’t tell if the girl had ever used the weapon before (or at least, on a real live person), but she certainly held it as if she had and was willing and ready to put that experience to work if need be. Gaby wasn’t quite sure if entrusting her life to a thirteen-year-old-girl and her seventeen-year-old sister was madness or desperation.

Oh, who are you kidding. It’s definitely a lot of both.

The three of them stood very quiet for a moment and listened to the gunfire raging back and forth from the other side of the city. She couldn’t tell who was winning. Hell, she couldn’t even tell how many sides there were at the moment. There could just be two — Harrison’s and Josh’s — or a dozen, for all she knew. She was sure of one thing, though: it was definitely coming from behind them — not too far away, but not close, either.

“We need to head south,” Gaby said. She glanced down at her watch: 5:09 p.m. “We’re going to be cutting it pretty close, but we can’t stay here tonight or we might never leave. So let’s get Milly and get out of here.”

She headed up the hallway toward the opening. Donna and Claire followed silently behind her.

“It’s just the women and kids?” Gaby asked.

“Last time I was up here, yes,” Donna said behind her.

As it turned out, the last time Donna checked wasn’t recent enough, because when Gaby stepped out of the hallway and into the large main area of the VFW hall, the first thing she saw was a tall man sitting on a chair next to the twin front doors all the way across the room. He was cradling an AK-47 and looked bored, his head craned to one side as he listened to the gun battle outside with an almost wistful expression on his face.

Oh crap, Gaby thought when the man launched up from the chair at the sight of her.

But he had moved too fast, and instead of getting a grip on his assault rifle and putting it to use, he instead fumbled with it for a split-second. It was just long enough for Gaby to lift the M4 and shoot him once in the belly. The man stumbled back into his chair, tipping it over. He looked more stunned than hurt.

She shot him a second time, and he crumpled to the floor, the rifle clattering away.

There were kids in the hall, and they began screaming. The instant increase in decibel was so startling for everyone, including Gaby, that for a moment even the sound of gunfire from outside the building was drowned out by the cries.

Move move move!

Horrified faces turned toward her as Gaby rushed out of the hallway, the M4 in front of her, sweeping the room, looking for a target, anything that even resembled danger. Her left hand tightened around the grip as her right eye settled behind the sight.

The large hall was built to accommodate hundreds of people at one time, though at the moment there were only a couple dozen inside. Half of them were kids, the other half adult women. They all looked unarmed — or at least, no one reached for a weapon — when they saw her.

That is, except for the woman sitting at the bar with a shotgun resting on the countertop next to her. The woman was reaching for the weapon when Gaby swiveled the carbine around and stared at her. The woman froze and for a brief second, Gaby was sure the woman’s hand would keep going.

But it didn’t. Thank God it didn’t.

Instead, the woman took her hand away from the shotgun as if it had become hazardous to her health.

“Sit down,” Gaby said.

The woman did as ordered.

“Gaby!” a voice shouted.

Milly scrambled up from the floor across the room where she had been sitting with some kids and rushed toward her. A woman made a grab for her, but Milly managed to slip through her hands.

The thirteen-year-old practically barreled into Gaby and grabbed at her waist, almost knocking her over. It was a good thing Milly was barely eighty pounds soaking wet, or she might have sent both of them tumbling to the floor.

She put a hand around the girl’s neck and hugged her back briefly. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” Milly said. “Where’s Peter?”

“Peter’s gone.”

“‘Gone’?” She squinted up at Gaby. “Gone where?”

“He’s gone,” Gaby said again, hoping the girl would understand.

Milly did. Or she understood enough to frown.

“This is Claire and Donna,” Gaby said. “We’re leaving this city, okay?”

Milly nodded back mutely.

The kids had stopped screaming, but some were still sniffling. The women held them, fear and anger flashing across their faces as Gaby and the three girls moved toward the doors. They, like the windows around them, were reinforced with slabs of wood, with burglar bars on the outside.

“Keep moving to the door,” Gaby said. She picked up the shotgun from the bar counter as they passed it by. The woman glared at her but didn’t say anything. “Move from that stool and I shoot you, understand?”

The woman didn’t respond, but she “understood,” all right.

“Claire, the rifle,” Gaby said.

Claire rushed forward and picked up the AK-47 from the dead man. She already looked ridiculous lugging the Winchester around, but now with the assault rifle too, the sight of her was almost comical.

Gaby turned around and backpedaled after the girls. She scanned the faces looking back at her. Some of the children were still crying, and others had their faces buried in the women’s chests.

“Tell Harrison not to come after us,” Gaby said loudly.

No one responded.

Donna had already led Claire and Milly outside. Gaby walked backward, careful not to step over the dead man (or into blood spreading out like tentacles from under his still body) and slipped through the opening. She was instantly reassured by the warmth of the bright sun (It’s still light out, thank God) splayed against her back.

Donna pushed the doors closed as soon as Gaby stepped outside. “What now?”

“We head south. After that, we’ll figure it out. You lead the way.”

She tossed the shotgun down on the sidewalk and took the AK-47 from Claire. They jogged across the street after Donna, who was already moving swiftly ahead with the heavy supply bag slung over one shoulder. She was definitely stronger than she looked.

Gaby glanced back at the VFW building, expecting the doors to open and the adult women to rush outside, guns blazing. Maybe they had hidden the guns somewhere and were scrambling for them now. Or maybe they had run to the basement and gotten the rifles down there. She wondered how they would react when they saw Peter bleeding to death down there. Did they know that was part of Harrison’s MO? Claire knew, and so did Donna. She had a hard time believing a group of adult women didn’t know, too.

I’m sorry, Peter. I’ll take care of Milly for you. I promise.

The VFW hall’s doors remained closed behind her, so she spun around before stealing a quick look down at her watch: 5:15 p.m.

Too close. We’re cutting it way too close…

They left the streets as soon as possible in case they were being pursued. Fortunately, both Donna and Claire seemed to know where they were going. The two sisters led them through alleyways, then empty buildings, stores, and even diners. Whenever Gaby thought they had run into a dead end or cul-de-sac, the girls found a side or back door or knew a way around a fence or wall.

Gaby didn’t know the path, but she knew where they were headed: south.

That was all that mattered. South took them back to Song Island.

South took her home.

South.

They spent almost thirty minutes steadily making progress toward the city limits, and the entire time Gaby could hear gunfire continuing unabated behind them. The battle seemed to just keep going and going, growing in intensity with every passing minute. She kept expecting it to die down as the fight wore on, but it never did.

Gaby kept her eyes on the sky. There were no clouds, and the sun was still bright. She guessed they had an hour, tops, before nightfall. Probably less than that. More like fifty minutes. A part of her wanted to start looking for a place to hide, but they couldn’t afford that. Not yet. Not yet.

“The soldiers,” Gaby said to Donna as the teenager guided them through a series of empty buildings near the edge of the city. “Have you ever seen them before?”

“Not these ones,” Donna said. “But I’ve seen others come through in the past. Not soldiers, but guys with guns. Some of them wore those weird CDC suits.”

She means collaborators in hazmat suits.

“They would search for supplies and keep going,” Donna continued. “We have early warning systems all over the city, so when someone shows up, we know right away. Usually we can hear the vehicles coming for miles. Harrison decides how we react — either hide from them, or if he thinks they’re easy prey, then lure them into a trap.”

Donna glanced over at her almost apologetically when she said that last part.

Like with Milly, and the boy in the darkened hallway…

She wondered whatever happened to the boy. She hadn’t seen him back at the VFW hall. Then again, she had been moving so fast, looking for adults with guns, that it wasn’t as if she had actually paid attention to the kids.

“What makes these soldiers different?” she asked.

“Harrison says they’re here for something and we have to stop them. But he always says that when he wants us to do something dangerous. It’s always ‘we this,’ ‘we that.’ He’s good at rallying the troops.”

“But not you.”

Donna shook her head. “Harrison’s a bullshit artist. He’s out for himself, and he’s just using the rest of us to do it. Claire and me, and a lot of the others back there, just go along with it because it’s safer in there than out here.”

Gaby nodded and didn’t ask anymore. She didn’t blame the sisters for siding with Harrison. Donna was right. It was easier to survive in there, even under Harrison’s thumb, than out here alone with just the two of them.

I would probably do the same.

They stopped to rest inside a Sonic Drive-In and Gaby looked out the front windows at train tracks. There were a couple of houses scattered on the other side of the streets and more businesses to the left and right of them. She listened, but the only sounds were the distant echoes of gunshots behind her.

Donna pointed at a two-lane highway with wide shoulders that ran across the tracks. “That’s Route 13. It’s got other names, but we just called it Lucky 13.”

“Lucky 13?” Gaby said.

“You know, teenagers. Anyways, it leads straight through the countryside. Lots of fields, farms, that kind of stuff. On the other end is Interstate 10.”

“How far?”

“About thirty miles. It’d be easier and faster if we had a car.”

“You know where to get one that still works?”

“Harrison has garages around the city where he stashes working vehicles and gasoline.”

“Back in the city?”

“Yeah.”

“Any of them close to us now?”

Donna thought about it, then shook her head. “No, sorry. I should have told you about them earlier.”

“It’s my fault for not asking you sooner,” Gaby said. Then, “What’s between here and I-10?”

“Not a whole lot, unless you count farms. Guys from town used the highway for drag racing because it’s essentially thirty miles of nothing. Sometimes the farmers complain, but most of the time they don’t care. The Dunbar cops don’t bother going out that far, either.”

Gaby looked over at Milly, crouched silently next to her. The girl was glancing over her shoulder. At first Gaby thought she was listening to the fading gunfire but quickly realized Milly was turned in the direction where she assumed Peter was at the moment. Gaby didn’t want to tell her that after all the back alleys and side streets and zigzag turns they had taken, Milly was looking in the wrong direction.

Instead, she put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Milly pursed her lips into an attempted smile. “Peter wanted me to get you to the island,” Gaby said. “And that’s what I’m going to do, okay?”

Milly nodded back in silence before looking away again.

“Okay,” Gaby said. “Let’s go. Once we’re out of the city limits, we need to start looking for a place to stay the night, so keep your eyes open.”

The others nodded.

Gaby lifted her M4 and slipped out through the Sonic’s glass doors. The three teenagers followed closely behind her with no one saying a word.

Behind them, the shooting continued in sporadic bursts, but now there were noticeably long lulls between sustained volleys. The gunfight was almost over. Gaby wondered who was winning before deciding that she didn’t care. They could all go to hell as long as she was on her way south…

The darkening sky was like a physical heaviness trying to bury her along the shoulder of the road. She pushed on with the girls because there was no other choice. They couldn’t turn back now. It was much too late for that. They had to keep going forward.

South.

Toward home.

Claire walked with the Winchester in her hands, looking every bit like a soldier. Her sister Donna remained up front, leading the way, even though there wasn’t really much in the way of navigation. There was only forward. Milly kept pace alongside Gaby but was flagging with every passing minute. Pretty soon, the girl was going to ask to sit down to rest. Gaby kept waiting to hear those words and was surprised she never did.

Maybe she’s tougher than I give her credit for.

The shooting behind them had mostly faded with time and distance. There were still occasional echoes, but it took a lot of effort to actually pick them out of the silence now. Instead of focusing on what was back there, she had been concentrating on what was around them. Or, to be more specific, what wasn’t around them.

Gaby searched for a building, a house, or a store. Hell, even a shack. Someplace where they could get out from under the open skies.

Too close. We’re cutting it too close…

Donna wasn’t wrong when she said there wasn’t much between Dunbar and I-10. Route 13 was barren and low to the ground. The highway was surrounded by vast, flat, and empty scenery, and they were still too close to town to spot any farmland, not to mention the houses (shelter) that would be sitting on them. There were also no vehicles in sight. She hadn’t spotted a car since they left the city behind twenty minutes ago.

“Donna,” Gaby said. “We need to find shelter.”

Donna nodded and glanced around them, turning a full 360 degrees. Gaby could practically see the gears turning inside the girl’s head.

“Donna,” Gaby said. “We need a place.”

“I’m thinking,” Donna said.

“Think faster,” Claire said, sneaking a look at the darkening clouds above them.

“Shut up already,” Donna said. Then, after a while, she turned to Gaby. “Okay, I know a place. It’s not far from here, but you might not like it.” And at Claire, “You’re definitely going to hate it.”

“I can take it if you can,” Claire said.

“We’ll see.”

“Does it have a basement?” Gaby asked.

“It sort of has a basement,” Donna said.

“Sort of?”

Donna shrugged. “We don’t have a whole lot of choices, do we? It’ll be dark in half an hour.”

“Okay,” Gaby nodded reluctantly. “Take us there.”

Donna led them over to the ditch, then down into it and back up again onto the other side. They followed her across flat, undeveloped land for five, then ten minutes. With every step they left the highway behind, but there was no way to leave the graying sky above them. It chased them wherever they went, undeterred and inevitable.

Donna wasn’t kidding when she said they might not like the place she had in mind.

It was a cemetery.

Milly’s face grew paler as they neared the wrought-iron fences that surrounded the place. They walked alongside it for a minute or so before entering through the open front gates with a big sign that read, “Dunbar City Cemetery.”

Donna seemed to know exactly where she was going.

“How far?” Gaby asked.

“Not too far now,” Donna said. She glanced over at Claire. “So?”

“So what?” Claire said, putting as much defiance into her voice as possible. Gaby thought she wasn’t entirely successful.

“You scared yet?”

“No.”

“We’ll see.”

Donna led them off the main pathway and across the grass, all four of them moving with obvious urgency. No one had to say it. Not Gaby, and not Donna. Even Claire and Milly knew that time was running out for them. If it wasn’t the skies above them, it was the tombstones jutting out from the weed-infested ground, along with the long-dead flowers and personal keepsakes scattered nearby.

How appropriate would it be if everything ended here tonight? It would be poetic if it weren’t so damn depressing.

Gaby pushed the thought away and concentrated on the steps ahead of her instead, doing her best to ignore all the reminders of the dead and the grieving from their loved ones around them.

“How much farther?” she asked Donna.

“There.” Donna pointed at a white structure flanked by two large trees that looked like ancient sentries that had been there long before man and would remain there long after.

Oh God. She wasn’t kidding.

It was a crypt, and it was made of either concrete or white marble. She had a hard time distinguishing the material under the fading light. It wasn’t particularly big, maybe the size of a small backyard shack. The front entrance was shaped into an arch and a rusted-over metal gate covered the front doors. “Evans” was engraved at the top in Roman alphabet.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Gaby said.

“Hey, it’s the only thing I could think of,” Donna said. She turned to her sister. “So? You still not scared?”

“No,” Claire said, though this time she didn’t have a prayer of making it sound the least bit convincing.

“How are we going to get inside that thing?” Gaby asked.

“There’s a key,” Donna said.

“You have a key to a crypt in a cemetery?”

“No, but I know where they keep it. Well, these guys I know.” Donna hurried over to one of the trees and crouched in front of it. She groped the ground around its base, pushing aside blades of overgrown grass. “It should be buried around here somewhere…”

Buried. She just said ‘buried’ in a cemetery.

Gaby waited for Donna to give her a hint that she had used ‘buried’ on purpose, a pun to break the ice. But she didn’t.

She looked over at Milly, whose face had grown deathly pale during the walk from the front gates to the crypt. Even the usually taciturn Claire looked just a little bit disturbed as they watched Donna rooting about the grass.

“Eureka!” Donna said. She stood up and brushed dirty hands on her shorts. “I thought someone might have taken it for a moment.”

She gave Gaby a half-terrified, half-elated grin before walking to the crypt and sticking a large old key into the lock and twisting it. The gate unlatched with a loud craaaank, like giant metal cogs grinding against each other. The painfully brown metal bars squeaked loudly as Donna pulled at them.

Gaby gave her a hand. It was heavy, like pushing boulders.

“You guys, um, played here?” Gaby asked.

“Not really, well, played,” Donna said, grunting with the effort while trying to hide a bit of embarrassment at the same time.

She means they made out here. And…other stuff.

With the gate open, all Donna had to do was push the thick doors of the crypt inward. These, surprisingly, moved without much effort. They looked inside, using what little light was left to make sure the place was empty. Not that Gaby expected it not to be. Who would be hiding in there, with the doors locked? The place gave off the smell of an enclosed space that had been sealed for almost a year — maybe even longer.

It was surprisingly roomy inside, with a large rectangle-shaped concrete block in the center. There were none of the cobwebs or scampering bugs she always envisioned invading crypts like these. It looked amazingly well-kept, the people who owned it clearly having shown great care with whoever lay inside the coffin at the moment.

She looked back at Milly and Claire. They stared back at her, perhaps hoping she had changed her mind. “Let’s go, girls.”

The two girls stepped inside first, Milly groping the walls for support. They went all the way into the back, keeping as much distance from the coffin as possible. Gaby and Donna pulled the heavy metal gate closed after them. Donna stuck her hand out between the bars and locked it back up. She had clearly done all of this before. They stepped into the crypt and pushed the doors closed from the other side.

Gaby was prepared for it, but as darkness enveloped her inch by inch, she felt dread rushing down her body anyway.

We’re inside a crypt. We’re going to hide from the night inside a pitch-black crypt.

God help us.

Somewhere in the darkness, Milly might have sniffled. Then Gaby heard a click just before the beam of an LED light splashed across the walls, then illuminated the coffin and Donna, who was standing nearby. Claire was holding a small flashlight in the back.

“Where did you get that?” Donna asked.

“It’s the same one I always carry with me,” Claire said.

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

“Let me have it.”

“It’s mine. Get your own.”

Donna sighed at Gaby, as if to say, “See what I have to deal with?”

Gaby smiled back. This very human moment was a welcome absurdity when they were trapped — voluntarily, too — inside a crypt with a dead body. How old was the body, anyway? And was it a man or a woman? Maybe they should find—

I’m going to throw up.

She unslung her pack and weapons, needing to move, to be doing something so she wouldn’t entertain more idiotic thoughts like opening up a coffin to find out who was inside it. Claire helpfully shined her flashlight over so Gaby could see what she was doing.

She pulled out the bags of MREs and handed the girls one each. “Be careful with them. They can be pretty messy. Claire, help everyone with the flashlight. Why don’t we all sit together so Claire doesn’t have to move around too much?”

They moved to the very back and sat down on the floor. Claire’s flashlight appeared as Gaby opened her MRE.

At least the room didn’t smell too bad. There was a musty aroma, but none of the death stench she was expecting. Did all crypts smell this…nice?

“You, uh, played in here?” Gaby asked Donna.

“It’s really not that bad,” Donna said, again with just a shade of embarrassment. “It doesn’t smell at all. You’d think a room with a dead body would smell, right?”

“It’s probably the coffin. It keeps the body from the elements, so it doesn’t…you know.”

“I guess.”

“No one ever found you guys out?”

“Nah. We always cleaned up after ourselves and we only came here at night. There’s not a lot of people here at nights.”

Gee, I wonder why.

“Where’d you get the key?” she asked. She didn’t really need to know, but she felt it necessary to stave off the silence for as long as possible.

“It’s a copy,” Donna said. “This guy we know used to work here one summer. He made a duplicate and after he went off to college, it sort of became a thing within our group. Anyone who wants to use it can. Pretty cool, right?”

If you like making out in crypts while surrounded by the decaying bodies of other people’s dead loved ones, then yeah, it’s pretty cool.

She said instead, “I guess so.”

“I mean, there’s not a lot to do in Dunbar,” Donna said.

There’s less to do now.

“You guys lived in the city?” she asked.

“We had a farm about two miles on the other side of town. Dad, me, and Claire. Our mom passed away a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, she was the lucky one, as it turned out. I guess we’ve always kind of been stuck around Dunbar our whole lives.” Donna paused for a moment to eat, the sound of chewing and the (grateful) aroma of food filling the crypt. “I was really looking forward to getting out of town, too,” Donna said after a while. “I guess better late than never.”

They didn’t say much after that, and there was just the sound of everyone eating.

After a few minutes of silence and darkness, Gaby heard Milly crying softly next to her. She put an arm around the girl and was glad Claire hadn’t shined the flashlight at them to see what was happening. She knew enough to give them their privacy.

Gaby squeezed Milly’s shoulder tightly and thought of Peter.

Probably dead now, back in the VFW basement. If not from his injuries, then when Harrison went back and found him. Or if not Harrison, then whomever he was fighting with and had killed him and his men.

There was another soft click from somewhere in the darkness, then Lara’s familiar voice, slightly muffled by the recording, reverberated against the hard walls around them:

“To any survivors out there, if you’re hearing this, you are not alone. There are things you need to know about our enemy — these creatures of the night, these ghouls…”

Gaby smiled and thought of Song Island.

South leads home.

Go south, young girl…

15 Will

“Looks like this party’s going to go all night,” Danny said. “Are you sure our invitation didn’t get lost in the mail?”

“Anything’s possible,” Will said.

“This is why you should always tip your friendly neighborhood mailman during Christmas. That, or invite him in for tea.”

“I always knew you were a teabagger.”

“I’ll try anything once. Or thrice.”

The gunfight had raged on for the better part of two hours, with Will and Danny content to watch (and listen) from the safety of Gaine’s Meat Market. The sniper on the rooftop of Tom’s Billiard across the street had left, replaced by two men with AR-15s who fired up the street at the soldiers, the clink-clink-clink of their empty brass casings pelting the street below them like never-ending raindrops. The two down on the sidewalk were also gone, and a woman with a ponytail firing calmly with an M4 had taken over.

Every now and then Will saw figures in civilian clothes running up and down the streets that were visible from his limited angle behind the window. They were almost always moving in pairs, all of them well armed, and he often saw them talking into radios. Which told him these weren’t complete amateurs. Either they had been well trained or they had been out here surviving long enough to know how to fight as a unit.

Or, well, a unit-ish.

He was never going to mistake them for a Ranger battalion, that was for sure. Like Josh’s soldiers, these were civilians playing at being weekend warriors. That didn’t make them completely incompetent, but he had seen real soldiers, and these weren’t them.

About an hour ago, they heard footsteps moving on the rooftop above them. The man (or woman) stayed up there for almost thirty minutes, pouring fire up the street. Eventually, he (or she) left, too, maybe for a better position elsewhere. The locals were moving around like busy bees, never staying in one place for too long.

The phrase “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” flitted across his mind throughout the two hours, but he had learned not to put too much stock in strangers with assault rifles. They could turn on you at a moment’s notice, especially given the number of fighters he saw just outside his window alone. From the intensity and spread-out nature of the chaos, there were more of them across the city. The fact that they were fighting the ghoul collaborators from multiple angles was further proof these were dangerous people not to be underestimated.

And maybe the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy…

“You getting flashbacks, too?” Danny said after a while.

Will smiled across the window at him. “Just a little bit.”

They were intimately familiar with the whole scenario playing out before them. The fact that the faux soldiers were clearly outnumbered and outmatched, fighting in a city they didn’t know, facing what, from all appearances, were people who called this place home. People who knew all the angles and how to get to all the rooftops.

It’s Afghanistan all over again. Minus the camels.

“It’s almost just as hot, too,” Danny said, pulling at his shirt collar for effect. “The only thing missing? That wonderful goat smell. Of course, you’re making up for it.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“I’d settle for you taking a shower once per century.”

“Yeah, well, can’t do anything about that now.”

Danny snorted. “Guess not. Who you think’s winning, anyway?”

“If I was a betting man, I’d put money on the locals.”

“That seems kind of wrong.”

“You think?”

“I mean, I’m no fan of Josh’s boys, but still… Uniforms and everything. I’m partial to a man in uniform, but don’t tell Carly.”

“Mum’s the word.”

The fight continued, gunshots like firecrackers, the insistent pop-pop-pop without end. But this gunfight had been going on for some time, which meant the soldiers were dug in, the strip mall parking lot they were calling a base likely providing plenty of protection. Was that on purpose? Had someone chosen that spot for its defensive capabilities? Probably not. He hadn’t found the collaborators to be especially good at tactics. Then again, Kellerson had been pretty smart, and Will was quickly learning not to underestimate Josh.

Not that the fight was going to last for very long either way. Well defended or not, the soldiers were at a great disadvantage. They were pinned in, and sooner or later Dunbar’s fighters would get just close enough to finish it. He could already see the locals surging up the street, taking over new buildings as they pushed forward. Already, the fight had almost completely abandoned their window, and they were now listening instead of watching what was happening.

Will glanced down at his watch: 5:52 p.m.

“They’re cutting it close,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

“Speaking of which, we got a place to go when it’s night-time time?”

Will looked around the room. He had been thinking about that, too, especially since it was becoming obvious they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. “This room looks decent. Barricade the door and window. Push comes to shove, there’s the bathroom.”

“Hide in a bathroom with you all night?” Danny wrinkled his noise. “Talk about torture.” Then, “The kids still going at it out there? I can’t see them anymore.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I guess they really, really want to kill Josh’s boys.”

“Or maybe they’re just really curious about what’s in that U-Haul, too.”

Danny smirked. “You and the U-Haul. Remind me never to ask you to help me move.”

Will peeked up at the darkening skies above them. Patches of shadows were spreading and the sun was dipping in the horizon like a giant orange ball. “Thirty minutes before nightfall. Give or take.”

“Checked in with your girlfriend on the radio yet?”

“Aw, hell, I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me—”

The crack! of a rifle cut him off.

It had been a few minutes since he last heard or saw anyone firing nearby, with the fight having progressed up the street, so the shot made Will instinctively jerk his head away from the window just as a neat hole appeared in the glass pane in front of him. The bullet kept going and embedded itself into the ceiling across the room. The point of impact had been so clean that the glass somehow managed not to break apart.

Will was twisting backward and almost fell. He turned his rifle into a crutch at the last second and just barely managed to stay on his feet.

Danny was already spinning away from the wall on the other side of the window and was firing down, shattering the glass panes as he squeezed off two, then three shots at whoever was down there.

Danny stopped shooting and pulled back. “You hit?”

Will reached up and wiped at a trickle of blood on his forehead. A small cut, barely a graze. “I’m good, I’m good.”

“You don’t look so good.” Danny grinned, adding, “Oh, wait, never mind. That’s just how you normally look.”

“Tell me you got him, pretty boy.”

“I dunno. He was pretty fast.”

A loud series of gunfire from outside was proof that Danny had missed. The remains of the window exploded, showering them with pieces of glass. Danny yelped and dived to the floor before crawling away on his hands and knees. Will backed away as fast as he could, the zip-zip-zip of bullets slashing through the air around him.

Through the sound of shooting, Will picked up the unmistakable noise of pounding footsteps rushing toward them from the other side of the door. He spun around, dipped to the floor on one knee, and lifted his M4A1.

He waited one second, two—

The doorknob started to turn.

He fired, stitching the door with the carbine on full-auto. Left to right, then right to left, putting bullets in the walls around the door as well as the door itself just in case there were more than one and they were waiting in a stacking formation. That’s what he and Danny would do if it were them out there.

He heard the telltale sounds of falling bodies and the clatter of weapons against wooden floor.

“Go go go!” Will shouted.

“Gee, and here I was going to take a nap!” Danny shouted back.

Danny scrambled up to his feet and raced to the big comfortable felt chair and snatched up his pack and slipped it on. He took aim at the door as Will jogged over and did likewise with his own pack. It was stuffed with emergency rations and ammo, but the rest of their supplies were in two other, thicker bags still on the floor.

The shooting behind them from outside the window had stopped.

“Radio?” Will said.

“I got it,” Danny said. “Plus, some more Oberto.”

“Seriously, how many of those did you bring?”

“That’s for me to know and eat, and for you to look on enviously. The rest?”

“Ditch them.”

Danny stood up and moved toward the door. He threw it open and Will slipped out into the darkened hallway first, stepping over two crumpled forms in jeans and T-shirts. Local fighters. He was careful to step around their pooling blood, too.

The stairs were down the hall in front of him, and he glided toward them now, listening for more footsteps besides his own and Danny’s. They weren’t really just going to send two into the building after them, were they? If so, whoever was in charge was either very confident or was strapped for manpower. After two hours of slugging it out with Josh’s soldiers, maybe the locals had suffered their own share of casualties. He could only hope.

Either way, visibility was minimal without any source of light inside the narrow hallway, but he was lucky his eyes had adjusted to the state of semidarkness inside the room while he was watching the show outside for the last few hours. Somewhat, anyway.

He heard it: The muffled sounds of someone speaking through a radio floating up from the first floor.

The building was split into two sections — the store below and living quarters on the second, accessible only by stairs in the back of the property. To get to it, you had to move through a kitchen with linoleum tiles.

He heard the squeaks of tennis shoes racing across those same tiles now.

Will made it to the top of the stairs and looked down just as two figures appeared below him with rifles aiming up in his direction. They fired as soon as he poked his head out into the open, and the newel directly in front of him shattered, slivers of wood flashing around his head like missiles.

He pulled his head back, then stuck the M4A1 out into the open space and squeezed off a burst. He didn’t expect to hit anyone, but scattering them was just as good. He was rewarded with more squeaking noises as the two below scrambled for cover.

Danny was crouched behind him, keeping a safe distance. “How many?”

“Two.”

“Not so bad.”

“They have position on us and they can afford to wait us out.”

“That’s bad.”

“Any other way outta here?”

“There’s a catwalk behind us that might work.”

“Go for it,” Will said, leaning around the staircase again. He glimpsed a head mirroring his action at the bottom of the stairs and opened fire, shredding a part of the handrail but missing the patch of sweaty dark hair completely.

He pulled back and listened to more muffled voices communicating back and forth below him. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but it sounded as if someone was giving an order and someone didn’t want to follow it.

Weekend warriors.

Danny had moved toward the other end of the hallway and Will backpedaled after him now, reloading his rifle as he went. He kept both eyes on the stairs in front of him the entire time, ears open for the familiar squeaking of shoes. He stopped briefly when he stepped into a pool of blood, cursing as he changed directions to circle around the dead bodies.

“We good?” he asked, just loud enough for Danny to hear.

“Getting good,” Danny said. A window opened and there was a brief silence for about five seconds, then, “You waiting for an invitation?”

Will turned around and ducked under the open window and stepped out onto the metal catwalk. Danny was already racing down the stairs below him, toward the familiar back alley of Gaine’s Meat Market. Will knew it was getting darker from the second-floor window, but actually being outside and underneath the blackening skies told him he had underestimated the approaching nightfall.

Shit. This is gonna be tight…

He had been hoping they could hole up inside Gaine’s until morning. It wouldn’t have been an ideal situation, but given the gunfight outside and the need to find Gaby, who was probably still in the city somewhere (he hoped, anyway), leaving Dunbar now wasn’t in the plan.

All that was out the window now after being discovered.

And now the sun was almost gone. What else could go wrong?

Cutting it close. Way too close.

A flicker of motion caught his attention just before a shadow appeared over one of the handrails down the hallway. Will flicked the M4A1’s fire selector to semi-auto and waited patiently.

One second…

…two…

…three…

A head appeared up the stairs, peeking out curiously.

Will shot the man square in the forehead and watched the body disappear back down the stairs, the thump-thump of a full-bodied adult male sliding his way down each step until he finally landed at the very bottom.

“You coming?” Danny called from below.

Will slung his rifle and raced down as Danny pulled security in the alleyway. From back here, the only path was forward into the street. Will hopped the last few meters and landed behind Danny.

“Took you long enough,” Danny said.

“Great view, I was just enjoying myself.”

“Yeah, well, save that for your own time, buddy.” He glanced at his watch and his face darkened. “Gotta be scootin’, scooter. We’re gonna be SOL in a few minutes unless Mister Sun decides to stay put.”

“That ain’t gonna happen.”

“Way to be optimistic.”

“Fuck optimism,” Will said, slipping his rifle free, and together they moved toward the mouth of the alley.

The snap and pop of gunfire from up the street continued, though they were now coming at a much slower pace. Will imagined whoever was in charge of the locals were caught at two fronts — he and Danny down the street, and Josh’s soldiers further up. The fact that they had only sent, as far as he could tell, three men was proof of that.

Then again, you know what happens when you assume…

Danny peeked his head out and scanned the street while Will looked back up at the catwalk behind them. There was still one more man up there, though it was probably a fifty-fifty chance he would continue onto the second floor alone. The smart move would be to backtrack and wait for reinforcements. He wondered how smart (or suicidal) the man was.

“Anything?” Will said.

“Looks clear,” Danny said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure. Well, mostly sure.”

“Good enough.”

Quick movement as a head poked out of the window above him. Will fired, but the man pulled his head back inside just in time, and Will’s bullet harmlessly chopped loose some pieces of brick.

Suicidal, then.

“That’s our cue,” Danny said, slipping out onto the sidewalk.

Will followed and they turned right, moving away from the fighting.

“We need to find shelter,” Will said.

“Thanks for that suggestion. And here I was gonna run around like a moron for the next thirty minutes. What would I ever do without you?”

“I’m glad you finally realize that.”

“It’s Lara’s fault. She’s been filling my head with how great you are and shit. Frankly, I think she’s delusional.”

Danny turned left and darted across the empty street, then skirted around a large six-wheel gas tanker with “Shell” written across its side parked in the middle of the road. Will was following him when—

Ping! A bullet ricocheted off the side of the tanker and disappeared into the wall of a coffee shop.

“Incoming!” Will shouted, ducking and sliding behind the large vehicle for cover.

“Ya think?” Danny said.

Bullets slammed into the other side of the tanker, the ping ping ping! ringing out one after another after another. More rounds missed the vehicle entirely (how that was possible given its size, Will couldn’t fathom) and slammed into the sidewalk and street around them instead.

Danny dropped, hugging the road, then peered underneath the small space that separated the gas tanker and asphalt.

“How many?” Will asked.

“Three,” Danny said, rising back up.

“How far?”

“Sixty meters, give or take. Now would be a good time to flex some of that mush you call brain muscle.”

Will was about to do just that when he realized that his shadow was gone and the suffocating heat had lessened noticeably. He didn’t have to spend a precious second or two looking at his watch, either. An inky black coating had fallen over the streets and the last trace of sunlight had dissipated almost entirely.

Ah, shit…

“We gotta get out of the streets,” Will said. “Danny—”

“Bar,” Danny said, nodding at a building called Ennis further up the sidewalk. “They always have basements in bars, right? To store the beer and kegs and peanuts and all that good stuff?”

“You better hope so. Go!”

Danny went first and Will followed, ignoring the persistent ping ping ping! from behind him.

Ennis looked intact, and the door opened without a fight. The tables and counters had been put to use recently, and Will guessed the beer tap was either empty or had gone bad. Old bags of peanuts were scattered about the place, and someone had been using the custom-made coasters as Frisbees.

Danny flicked on his flashlight. He had slung his rifle and drawn his Glock, moving cautiously toward a back hallway. Will kept pace behind him, keeping his eyes on the front door. He could barely see the street anymore with the gloom that had fallen outside.

“The best laid plans of mice and men…”

The locals had stopped shooting, probably realizing Will and Danny were no longer at the gas tanker. Either that, or they had taken a look at the sky and realized for themselves what was about to happen. You didn’t survive for this long without knowing when to run and when to stick around, especially in the evenings. More than he and Danny, it was entirely possible the locals had simply lost track of time. Anything and everything was possible during the heat of battle, and the locals had been fighting Josh’s soldiers for a few hours straight now.

There was a metal door at the end of the hallway, the smooth surface glinting against Danny’s flashlight. “Nice,” Danny said. “Looks like a tough little hombre.”

“Does it open?”

“Of course it opens. Why wouldn’t it—” He grabbed the lever and twisted it, but the door didn’t budge. “Aw, shit.”

“No?”

“Locked.”

“That’s not good.”

“I’d say it’s fucking awful myself, but ‘not good’s’ good too, I guess.”

It had gotten even more miserably dark in front of Will, and in the same instant he noticed that, he also heard a sudden burst of gunfire and something else. Something loud and sharp, like a knife slicing through the heart of the city.

Screaming.

“You hear that?” Will said.

“I got ears, so yeah,” Danny said, his voice dropping slightly.

Will scanned the hallway and saw two rooms. One was marked “Office,” the other “Bathroom.” He moved toward them and tapped on the office door. Solid wood, which was good. He knocked on the bathroom door and got back a dull, satisfying thud.

Metal. Much better.

“Bathroom,” he said, and pushed the door open just as he caught movement coming from the front of the bar out of the corner of his right eye.

Will spun and squeezed off a burst as the first ghoul lunged at him. He shredded it, but even as it collapsed, he was already opening fire at the dozen (two dozen?) that followed it inside the building, little more than moving black silhouettes coming in through the windows and doors, scrambling over chairs and tables because that was apparently faster than running around them.

“Shenanigans!” Danny shouted just before he opened fire next to Will, the loud blasts of his Glock just a bit too close for comfort.

Their silver rounds tore into the creatures, ripping through yielding flesh and shattering the windows and pecking at the walls in the background. The last of the ghoul wave fell in front of them, caking the floor with flesh and bone and black, oozing blood.

Will quickly ejected the magazine and slapped in a new one. Danny was reloading the Glock behind him. They moved on instinct, without thinking.

Then he saw it: a pair of bright blue eyes staring at him from outside the bar.

It stood tall, like a human, outside in the falling night. He thought he would have gotten used to the sight of them by now — or, at least, not be as surprised to see them anymore. That wasn’t the case, though, because they were such an anomaly. In a world overrun by undead things, these blue-eyed bastards remained freakishly supernatural in his mind.

There was something different about this one. The second he saw it, Will knew that it wasn’t Kate or even Mabry, the only two blue-eyed ghouls he had ever seen. No, this was another one entirely, which prompted him to think with more than just a little bit of dread. Jesus Christ, how many of these fuckers are running around out there?

It stood proud and tall while the other ghouls flooded across the streets and up the sidewalk and crouched and kneeled around it like children worshipping at its holy feet. There had to be hundreds of them outside now, but since the initial attack, the rest hadn’t come into the bar yet. They were forming a wall, their gathered mass blotting his view of the streets entirely until the only thing he could see was pruned black flesh moving under the growing darkness.

Will moved fast — faster than he had ever moved before, faster than he thought even he was capable of moving. He snapped the rifle up and squeezed off a single shot without the benefit of aiming—

— and hit the blue-eyed ghoul right in the shoulder.

It flinched at the impact, turned slightly, but it didn’t go down.

It didn’t go down.

Instead, it just grinned back at him.

Then the wall of black-eyed ghouls came unglued as the individual creatures broke into a run. They vomited through the windows and doors and moved like one single black entity, indistinguishable from the hundred others around them. They were not the least bit slowed down by the shards of glass clinging to the window frames that ripped into their flesh, or the bodies of the dozen or so dead already caking the floor in front of them, or even the furniture in their path.

“Aw, man, this isn’t fair,” Danny said behind him.

“Go go go!” Will shouted.

Danny pushed his way through the bathroom door as Will backed up and fired, putting ten rounds into the surging blob before he heard gunfire coming from behind him. Danny, firing, but not at the horde in front of Will — he was shooting into the bathroom.

Will knew what that meant even before Danny shouted, “No go! Bathroom’s a no go! They’re coming through the windows!”

He continued backing up, firing into the sea of ghouls. There were so many that their number suddenly became a problem as they tried, like rabid animals, to all jam themselves into the narrow passageway at the exact same time. The first creature that somehow managed to get through slipped on the congealed blood of the previous dead and flopped to the floor. But then it quickly righted itself and was moving up the hallway again, bringing more behind it.

Danny was backing up and firing beside him as the bathroom door, now in front of them, flew open and skeletal figures poured out of it. These new ones were quickly swallowed up by the unrelenting tide already pushing through the limited space. That, more than anything, was what held the creatures back, taking away their one superior asset: their sheer numbers.

Temporarily, anyway.

Danny was opening up with the M4A1 now, pouring silver rounds into the quivering mass alongside Will. The only source of light was the staccato effect of their nonstop weapons fire.

“Office!” Will shouted.

Danny spun around, but Will heard shooting behind him — again not directed up the hallway — before Danny shouted, “No go! More windows!”

Goddamn windows!

Will stepped into a pool of blood and stumbled over twisted bones that snapped apart under his boots. He ignored it, reloaded, and kept shooting.

They kept backing up, firing and moving, the creatures coming out of the office door in front of them now, too. They were so thin, their skin so weak, that the bullets punched their way through and hit one, two, sometimes three more of the undead things behind them.

But as effective as the silver ammo was, they still weren’t effective enough. At least, not against the sheer volume of cracked teeth and black eyes literally filling up the hallway, growing bigger and higher in a pile of writhing flesh and tangled limbs. The creatures stumbled and fell and stepped over each other. Blood splattered the walls and floor and even the ceiling.

And still they came, climbing over their dead.

Relentless. Murderous. Rabid.

Will emptied his magazine, shouting, “Changing!”

Danny stepped up and unloaded into the freight train of flesh and bone and brown and yellow-stained teeth. There were so many bodies now that the creatures had begun to pile on top of one another, threatening to reach all the way up to the ceiling.

“Changing!” Danny shouted.

Will resumed shooting as Danny moved behind him and reloaded. He hadn’t had time to look back to see just how close they were to the basement. A part of him didn’t want to know, because as soon as they reached it, it would signal the end, because the locked door would seal their fate.

This’ll teach me to run to the basement every time.

“Live by the basement, die by the basement.”

He almost laughed out loud. Almost.

Instead, he just concentrated his full attention on killing as many of the pressing monsters as he could. They were close. Too close. He oscillated his fire from side to side, shooting at almost point-blank range. There was a surreal quality to the sight of them toppling back one after another as they climbed up on the growing mountain of bodies. But as soon as one disappeared over the pile, another — five—ten more took its place.

Then, finally, Will felt it.

The harsh and brutal cold of the basement’s metal door pressing against his back, the chill seeping through his clothes and into his bones.

End of the line.

“Hey!” Danny shouted.

“Yeah?” he shouted back.

“You still wanna find out what’s in that U-Haul?”

Will laughed this time as he stepped back and grabbed a fresh magazine out of his pouch and slammed it into the carbine. “Hell yeah!”

Danny was laughing, too, before the sound of his M4A1 firing on full-auto swallowed up every noise in the back of the hallway, with the locked basement door at their backs and the growing cemetery of dead (again) creatures in front of them.

They kept coming and climbing, pushing the layers of their own dead forward.

Now I’ve seen everything.

Will waited for Danny to finish shooting when he heard a soft click-clack behind him. It was such a small sound that it was almost completely drowned out by Danny’s weapons fire, and Will wouldn’t have heard it at all if he weren’t standing directly against the metal basement door.

He spun around, lifted the rifle, and saw darkness gaping back at him.

The basement door was open and he could just make out the top of a flight of metal stairs leading down. But there was nothing down there — just a sea of empty blackness.

Behind him, Danny shouted, “Changing!”

“Door’s open!” he shouted.

“The fuck?”

“Let’s go!”

“You first!”

Will hurried inside and turned, waiting for Danny to dart in before he slammed the door shut. He turned the metal lever and heard the lock sliding into place a split-second before the ghouls crashed into it from the other side.

The impact staggered Will for a moment, but the door held.

They smashed into it again and again, the thoom-thoom-thoom! ear-splitting at such close proximity. The metal door and the surrounding brick wall shook and trembled with every impact, but they, too, held.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will turned around. Danny was already facing the stairs behind them with his rifle aimed down into the darkness.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will stepped up beside him. “Anything?”

“I saw movement,” Danny said. He wasn’t quite whispering, but it was close.

Will could hear his own heartbeat racing in his chest, and Danny’s next to him, despite the nonstop banging coming from behind them.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

“How many?” Will whispered.

“More than one.”

“Human?”

“I couldn’t tell ya.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

There was a click and a bright LED flashlight beam sliced through the darkness and down the stairs, illuminating a dirty concrete floor. Danny moved his flashlight left then right, up and down, until the round beam washed over the barrel of a rifle pointing up at them.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

The figure standing behind the weapon was a woman in civilian clothes, and she wasn’t alone. Two other forms flanked her, both men, both armed. One of them, a familiar-looking lanky teenager, had an M40A3 rifle pointed up at Will’s chest. The second man was peering behind the iron sights of an M4, and Will couldn’t help but notice that the man’s forefinger was trembling slightly against the trigger.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

“This brings back memories,” Danny said.

“Good ones?” Will said.

“Not so much.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

Will saw additional movement out of the corners of his eyes, figures (not ghouls) emerging from the darkness to their left and right. Two more on his side and a third on Danny’s. Assault rifles. Slacks and T-shirts.

Dunbar’s locals.

“This is how it’s gonna go down,” the woman said. “The two of you put down your weapons and step back, and we won’t shoot you down like dogs.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom!