The Living Dead 2

Dating in Dead World by Joe McKinney

Joe McKinney’s latest novel, Quarantined, was a finalist for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award. His first book, a zombie novel called Dead City, was recently reissued, and a sequel, Apocalypse of the Dead, will be published in October. A third entry in the series, The Zombie King, will appear in 2011. McKinney’s short fiction has appeared in the zombie anthology History Is Dead, and a zombie anthology he co-edited, Dead Set, was published earlier this year. When not writing fiction, McKinney works as a Homicide Detective for the San Antonio Police Department.

Dating is hard, and that’s under the best of circumstances. Throw in a few unusual complications, and going out on a date can quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares. In the movie 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler attempts to woo Drew Barrymore, only to discover that she’s afflicted by a rare condition that causes her to forget they’ve ever met every time she falls asleep. In There’s Something About Mary, Ben Stiller goes to pick up Cameron Diaz for the prom, only to suffer a horrifying mishap involving a zipper. But at least those guys never had to deal with the situation presented in our next story.

The author says, “After I finish a novel, I’m usually struck by a sort of separation anxiety. So much mental effort is put into worldbuilding and getting to know the characters. So what I usually do is write a few short stories set in the world of the novel I’ve just finished. ‘Dating in Dead World’ was a part of that process.” He adds, “Right before I left for my first date, my dad gave me the only bit of parental sex education I ever received. He said, ‘Remember this, you will be held personally accountable for everything that happens to that girl from the moment she leaves her front door to the moment she walks back in it. Conduct yourself accordingly.’ It wasn’t until after I’d written this story that I realized I was channeling that advice. I guess it took.”

Heather Ashcroft told me to come to the main entrance of her father’s compound. She said the guards there would know my name; they’d be expecting me.

They were expecting me all right.

Four of them had their machine guns trained on me while a voice on a PA speaker barked orders.

“Turn off your motorcycle and dismount.” The voice was clear, sharp, professional.

I did what I was told.

“Step forward. Stand on the red square.”

I did that too.

“Stand still for the dogs.”

Three big black German shepherds were led out of the guard shack and began circling me, sniffing me. Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out necrotic tissue. No surprise there. Even the smaller compounds use them, and the one I was about to enter was no minor league operation. Dave Ashcroft controls the largest baronage in South Texas, and his security is top notch.

“I’m Andrew Hudson,” I said. “I’m here to see Heather Ashcroft. We’re going out on-”

Somebody called off the dogs and two of the guards came forward. One of them used the barrel of his weapon to point me towards a table next to the guard shack.

“Stand on that green square. Face the table.”

“You fellas sure put a guy through a lot of trouble for a first date,” I said. I gave him a winning grin. He wasn’t impressed.

“Move,” he said.

He asked me what weapons I was carrying and I told him.

“Put them in there,” he said, and pointed to a red plastic box on the corner of the table.

“I’m gonna get those back, right?”

He ran a metal detector over my body, taking extra care to get up inside the flaps of my denim jacket, under my hair, up into my crotch.

A guard field-stripped my weapons.

“I am gonna get those back, right?”

“When you come out,” he said. “Nobody’s allowed to be armed around Mr. Ashcroft.”

“But I’m not here to see Mr. Ashcroft,” I said. “I’m taking his daughter out for a date.”

He rattled a smaller box. “Ammunition, too.”

I unloaded my pockets. There was no need to tell him about the extra magazines in my bike’s saddle bags. They were already searching those.

He looked me over again, and I could tell by his face that he didn’t see anything but a street urchin from the Zone. “Get in that Jeep over there,” he said. “We’ll drive you into the compound.”

Several machine guns turned my way.

I shrugged and got in.

I hadn’t been allowed within the inner perimeter fence on my earlier visits, so what I saw when I did finally get inside took my breath away. Outside the compound, downtown San Antonio was an endless sprawl of vacant, crumbling buildings, lath visible in the walls, no doors in the doorways, every window broken. Everywhere you turned there were ruins and fire damage and rivers of garbage spilling out into the streets. It’s been sixteen years since the Fall and the streets are still full of zombies. But inside Ashcroft’s compound, life looked like it was starting to make a comeback. He controlled most of the medicines, weapons and fuel that South Texas needed, and it had made him rich enough to carve his own private paradise out of fifteen square blocks of hell.

Sitting in the back of the Jeep, I rode down what had once been Alamo Street and tried not to look like a barefoot barbarian gawking at the wonders of Rome. Ashcroft had preserved a few of the main roads from the old days, and he left a few of the old buildings intact, but he had changed a lot more than he left alone.

Off to my left was what had once been Hemisphere Park. It was farmland now. Beyond that was a huge field where cattle grazed, their backs dappled with the golden copper hues of the setting sun. Men on horseback patrolled the edges of the fields, rifles resting on their shoulders.

Most of the housing was on the other side of the river, off to my right-small cottages, comfortable and clean, a few children playing in a garden under an old woman’s watchful eye.

But the crown jewel in Ashcroft’s compound was the Fairmount Hotel. He’d turned the ancient four-story building into his private domain. It was flanked on one side by the ruins of the Spanish village of La Villita, the crumbling adobe buildings converted into horse stables. In front of the hotel was a Spanish-style garden fed by a large, circular stone fountain. A fork of the San Antonio River curled around the rear of the hotel, supplying fresh water for the whole compound.

As we pulled to a stop in front of the hotel I said, “Looks like you guys have got room for what, about five, six hundred people here?”

“Do yourself a favor,” one of the guards told me, “and don’t ask no questions. You ain’t gonna be here long enough to worry about it. Now get out of the Jeep.”

A few minutes later I was standing in what had once been the hotel’s lobby, waiting on Heather, checking the smell of my breath in my palm. I’d cleaned up as best I could, but that wasn’t saying much. When you live in the Zone, in the rubble between the compounds, it shows. A lump of coal is still a lump of coal, no matter how much you polish it.

I didn’t bother to make small talk with the guard off in the corner, watching me.

Eventually, Heather came down the stairs. I watched her descend, my mouth watering. She was wearing a short denim skirt that showed about a mile of bare leg and a tight black camisole that got my Adam’s apple pumping in my throat. Her eyes were gray as smoke, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that made her jaw and throat seem delicate as spun glass.

And she was wearing makeup. You never see that anymore. Her lips were so red they actually shined. I couldn’t look away, and I’m just glad I didn’t start drooling.

She dismissed the guard with a wave.

“Hey,” she said to me.

I tried to speak, but my throat had gone dry. “Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. God, how they shined. “You look great,” I managed to say.

She blushed.

“They didn’t give you any trouble at the gate, did they?”

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe a little. No big deal.”

“You sure?”

“Really,” I said. “No big deal.”

She smiled. “My dad wants to see you before we go. You don’t mind, do you?”

Mano a Mano with Big Dave Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. “I guess I don’t get to say no, do I?”

“Um, not really.”

I watched golden rays of light scatter from her hair and said, “Sure, why not?”

She led me back to her father’s office.

“Daddy,” she said, “this is the boy I told you about.”

Dave Ashcroft wasn’t the giant I was expecting to meet. You hear stories about these guys, growing up in the Zone, and they’re like gods, reshaping the world in their own image. You expect them to be six and a half feet tall, neck like a beer keg, arms like a gorilla’s. But Dave Ashcroft, he was just a normal looking guy in a white work shirt and khaki slacks, a donut of gray hair around the back of his head.

He didn’t offer to shake my hand. He pointed me to a chair opposite his desk and ordered me to sit without saying a word.

“What kind of name is Andrew Hudson?”

“It’s just a name, sir.”

“Yeah, but I know it from somewhere.”

“My dad, probably.”

“Who was your dad?”

“Eddie Hudson. He was a cop in the old days.”

He perked up. “You mean the one who wrote that book about the Fall?”

“That’s right.” I get that bit about my dad from some of the old-timers. Dad wrote a book about the first night of the outbreak, about how he had to fight his way across the city to get to my mom and me. But his book only covered that first night. He left off at a point when it looked like we were actually going to contain the zombie outbreak. Well, he was wrong, obviously, and sometimes the old-timers who remember my dad’s book look at me and I think maybe they’re remembering what it was like back then, back when it seemed we might win this thing. I think, at least for some of them, the memories make them angry, resentful, like they blame people like my dad for the naiveté that allowed the Second Wave to happen. But there are others who recognize my dad and they tune out, they become distant, like they’ve gotten over the anger and now they’re dealing with something else.

Big Dave Ashcroft-he was one of the ones who just get distant.

“What happened to your dad?” he asked.

“He and mom died in the Second Wave, sir.”

“You would have been what, about six when that happened?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they turn?”

“Mom did. Dad got swarmed trying to stop a bunch of them from breaking into our house. Mom got bit, but she managed to stash me in a hall closet before she turned.”

“And you’ve been on your own ever since, living off the streets?”

“That’s right.”

“So what do you do now? How do you live?” But I could tell the question he meant to ask was, How the hell did a Zoner like you meet my daughter?

“Special deliveries. I take private packages all across the Zone. I’ve even done some work for you, sir. That’s how I met your daughter.”

He frowned at that.

“Where do you plan to take my daughter, Andrew?”

“Dinner, sir. And dancing. On the Starliner. Out on the lake.”

He looked impressed, though I could tell he didn’t want to be impressed.

“The Starliner’s not cheap,” he said. “Special deliveries must pay pretty good.”

“Business is fine, sir.” I paused, then said, “But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it?”

He raised an eyebrow and waited.

“Listen,” I said. “Heather’s a special girl. That’s not something you have to tell me. I mean I already know it. I recognize a class act when I see one, and I intend to treat her accordingly.”

I’d guessed right. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He knew as well as anybody the dangers waiting for his daughter outside his compound’s walls, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her from them forever. Sooner or later, with or without his permission, she was going to brave that world. Maybe sending her out with me, somebody who had proven their ability to survive, was his way of hedging his bets.

But whatever his thoughts, he gave his consent. He called in his senior security officer, a slender, bowlegged man named Naylor, and Naylor drove us out to the main gate in an air conditioned utility vehicle. He told the guards to give me back my gear and my motorcycle, and while they were doing that, he pulled Heather aside and gave her a little talk.

After that, to me, Naylor said, “She has a portable radio equipped with a GPS tracker. My people will be monitoring it all night. We’ll be close.” Then he fixed me with a meaningful glare and said, “All she has to do is call.”

The message came through loud and clear.

“I’ll try to be on my best behavior,” I said.

Heather jumped on the back of my bike and pressed her breasts into my back. I could feel the hard pebbles of her nipples through our clothes. “You better not be on your best behavior,” she whispered into my ear. “Now drive fast, Andrew. Get me out of here.”

In the days after the Fall, when the necrosis virus emerged from the hurricane-ravaged Texas Gulf Coast and turned the infected into flesh-eating human train wrecks, the old world collapsed, and men like Dave Ashcroft stepped up to fill the power vacuum. They built compounds like the one Heather and I had just left to protect their interests, and everywhere else became a wasteland known as the Zone of Exclusion.

After my parents died, I became one of the fringe people, a Zoner. I was too young to be of any use to the bosses who were just then consolidating their power and building their compounds, and so there weren’t any other options open to me… These days I know the Zone better than most, and what I know I learned the hard way, fighting it out every day with the infected in the ruins of San Antonio.

I survived that way for ten years. Then, right after I turned sixteen, I stole a motorcycle. And before long, I’d worked up a reputation as someone who could get packages delivered anywhere in the Zone.

That’s how I met Heather. About two months before our first date I brought her a package from a dying woman out in the Zone. How that woman got the money to pay me I don’t know, because I don’t come cheap, but she did pay me, in gold, and I made the delivery.

Heather opened the package in front of me and took out a badly worn pink blanket with her name stitched on it. There was a note attached, and she read it four times before she asked me about the woman who sent it.

“She’s not doing so hot,” I said, which was being charitable. The truth was the effort it took her to tell me what she wanted nearly killed her.

Heather nodded quietly, and then the tears came.

She told me her parents divorced when she was little, before the Fall, and when the world turned upside down, her father took her away because he could protect her better than her mom.

She didn’t have many memories of the woman, but from the looks of that blanket, I figured her mom had plenty of memories of her.

Heather gave me a long letter to take back to her mother, and though she could have paid my fee ten times over with what she carried in her pocket, I didn’t charge her.

I took the letter to her mother, and because she couldn’t see well enough to read, I read it for her. She died a few days later, but I think she was happy during those last few days. Happier than she’d been in years.

Heather and I got close after that, though we had to steal the moments we spent together.

At least we did before tonight.

Now, sitting on the back of my bike, she squeezed my waist and put her lips to my ear. “I love the wind on my face,” she said. “Go faster.”

Dinner was the best thing I’d ever tasted, roasted mutton with wasabi mashed potatoes and asparagus. To this day I have no idea what the hell wasabi is, or where you get it, but I sure loved the bite it gave those mashed potatoes.

And the scenery was fantastic. The stars dappled on the surface of Canyon Lake. On the shore, the tops of the hills were silvered with moonlight. There was music, a few older couples dancing on the open air deck, glimpses of a world long gone.

The conversation, on the other hand, lagged. At least at first.

I’d never really talked to a girl. Not like you do on a date, anyway. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, how I was supposed to act. She knew little about weapons, or the Zone, and that pretty much exhausted what I knew. She was into growing vegetables and had plans for building schools.

But I told her dad I was going to treat her like a class act, and I did. The thing is, deep down inside, I am, and always will be, a Zoner. Life, as I had known it, was short and mean and cheap, and I spent a lot of time wondering if it was really worth the effort I put into it. When you think that way, it can be hard to look at a girl and think the two of you have a chance at romance.

She asked me if there was anything wrong.

“This world seems kind of pointless, don’t you think?” I whispered across the table to Heather as the waiter poured each of us another glass of wine.

“There may not be a point,” she said. “But even still, we’re here. You and me. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

Her answer surprised me, the simple practicality of it. “That’s true,” I said. “Here we are.”

After dinner we danced on the open deck of the Starliner. A cool, late spring breeze was in the air, carrying with it the thick, marshy smell of lake water. I held her body close to mine, the first time I’d ever held a real girl, and lost myself in the warmth of her green eyes and the smell of her skin.

That feeling, that comfort of absolute privacy, the romance of it, was why the Starliner cost so much. The infected were everywhere, and not even the strongest compound was completely safe from them, but when the Starliner was off her moorings and out on the lake, it was its own world, untouchable by the harsh realities of the Zone.

But of course there were other dangers in the Zone besides zombies. As the evening drew to a close, and the Starliner began her slow cruise back to the wet dock, Heather and I stood on the bow and talked about the future, about the stars, about anything and everything except the past. It was our night, and though our bonds had been forged in the heartaches of the past, we wanted our night together to be about the future. We wanted our own happy memories together.

There were no other boats on the lake. At least there hadn’t been during most of our date. But as we rounded a final elbow of land and entered the cove, we saw a large cabin cruiser waiting for us, the vague shapes of men ringing the rails of the deck.

Heather broke off in the middle of a giggle and watched them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not good,” she said. “I think that’s Wayne Nessel. Daddy warned me he might try something. Daddy didn’t think he’d do it out here though.”

I knew of Wayne Nessel. He was Ashcroft’s biggest rival, and a man with a lot of resources at his disposal. People in the Zone called him “The Bull.”

“He couldn’t know you’re here.”

“He knows,” she said, and then she guided me to the far side of the Starliner.

“But how?”

“He’s got spies everywhere, Andrew.”

She crossed to the opposite side of the deck and climbed the railing.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where are we going?”

She looked down at me. “Can you swim?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She waited till Nessel’s boat lit up the Starliner with its spotlights, then she gave me a wink and dropped herself over the edge.

I went in after her.

I thought we’d cling to the side of the boat and wait it out, but that wasn’t what Heather had in mind. She went under and kept swimming under the Starliner’s hull.

I followed.

Above us, through the green murky haze, I could see the glow of the spotlights and the shimmering outlines of men running on both decks. There were a lot of muffled popping sounds that I took to be gunfire, but none of that was directed down at us. It was all boat to boat.

We surfaced on the far side of Nessel’s boat and swam to shore. I’d hidden my motorcycle in the brush next to the Starliner’s docks out of habit, and now I was thankful for my instincts. As we swam, we decided it’d be best to come ashore a little ways from the dock, just in case Nessel had men covering his back on land.

We crawled up on shore and Heather pulled her black hair back with both hands, her camisole clinging to the curve of her breasts like wet paint.

There were voices nearby, just on the other side of the bushes. Nessel’s men, I thought, left here in reserve.

I spotted them a moment later. Four men, all armed with AR-15s. They were lined up on the dock, looking out at the boats, pointing and laughing.

“Amateurs,” I whispered. “Look at that. They’re just watching the show.”

“Can you get them all?”

“No,” I said. “Not all of them. Maybe one or two, but not all of them.”

“What do we do?”

The switchback road we’d taken to the docks led a short distance up a steep hill behind us before curving out of sight. Low, scraggly oaks and cedars lined the sides of it. I told Heather to go up around the curve and wait for me.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try not to get shot,” I said.

She frowned at that, but she made her way up to the road just the same, careful to stay in the shadows.

When she was safely out of the way, I made my move.

My bike was hidden in a clump of cedar behind an old rusted truck. I crossed behind the guards and made for the bike, praying they didn’t turn around.

I got most of the way there before I heard one of them holler something. The next instant, they were firing at me. Little chunks of concrete exploded around my shoes as I made for the truck, but they didn’t hit me, and if their lack of attention on the shoreline hadn’t convinced me they were just hired goons, their shooting certainly did. At that range, professionals would have killed me with ease.

I got down beneath the truck, pulled my Glock, and waited. They were running up the slope of the lot, straight for me. I steadied my sights on the lead guy and dropped him with my first shot. My next three shots weren’t aimed. I just sprayed the crowd to make them duck for cover.

It worked. They dived behind an old boat trailer, giving me enough time to pull my motorcycle out of the bushes, start it, and go racing up the road. They fired after me, but they never got close.

I slowed long enough for Heather to jump on the back, and then we sped off into the night.

We were still wet from the swim, and it was cold on that bike. What had been a lovely cool breeze while we were dancing was now a fierce cold snap, biting through us to the bone. Heather wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I could feel her body trembling.

I slowed the bike down enough for her to hear me. “Are you okay?”

“Uh huh.”

“Why is he after you?” I asked.

“Anything to hurt Daddy,” she said, her voice coming in quick, breathy stabs. “His people are always ambushing Daddy’s shipments. Maybe he’s upping the ante now to kidnapping. Or assassination.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“Warn my father,” she said. “Daddy told me Nessel always attacks on two fronts at once. If he’s coming after me here, he’s probably trying to attack Daddy somewhere else too.”

“The radio?”

She nodded. “I tried back at the lake. Nobody answered. We’ll have to get closer into town and try for my father’s safe houses.”

“You got it,” I said, and laid into the throttle.

When we got closer into town, I pulled off the highway and parked in a lot on the top of a small hill and Heather called Naylor on the radio.

“Are you sure it’s Nessel’s people?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said.

He told us not to use the radio any more than we had to. Besides a good share of the gasoline market, Nessel controlled the sale of most of the electronic equipment in the area. The radio Heather was using was probably stolen from one of his shipments, and there wasn’t much doubt he’d be able to overhear her transmission.

“Can you get to the pickup point?” he asked.

Heather gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. “I’m pretty sure we can,” she said.

We moved out, and as we rode, I thought about this old-timer I used to know who told me what life was like before the outbreak. He said people were pretty much the same then as they are now, and that turning into zombies hadn’t changed them much. What was different, he said, was the noise. It was noisy back then. There were cars and planes and trains everywhere, not to mention all the crowds. He said you couldn’t escape it.

But these days, there are so few cars left you can drive around all day and never see another driver. Heather and I hadn’t seen any all night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane fly overhead. I’d never seen a moving train. Life in the Zone was quiet, even though it was rarely peaceful.

That’s how I knew something was wrong. Heather and I got up on the highway again and started driving, but we hadn’t made it very far before I heard the high-pitched whine of a pack of sport racing bikes.

We glanced around, looking for them. They were behind us, coming down from an overpass and getting onto the freeway at top speed. I didn’t need to ask if they were Nessel’s men. All of them had machine guns slung over their backs, and the way they were riding, they clearly knew who we were.

I got my bike up to top speed, but they were faster. My bike was just a beat up Harley Sportster, but they were riding Honda CXRs-top of the line racing bikes. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of outrunning them in a dead sprint, so when they got close enough to take their shots, I did the only thing I could think of and veered over to the far left lane, let them come up on us, then downshifted and banked the bike hard to the right, taking the connector ramp to the Connelly Loop at almost a hundred miles an hour.

Heather yelled out in surprise. Nessel’s men overshot us. I saw them lock up their brakes and slide, but none of them reacted fast enough to take the ramp with us.

Their mistake bought us a few valuable seconds. The Connelly Loop led right into the heart of the Zone. There was nothing in there but crumbling buildings and legions of the infected. As a result, it was a low priority for the bosses who made it their business to keep the roads clear, and so it was still choked with long lines of abandoned cars.

My old-timer friend told me that rush hour traffic used to be so bad the freeways would turn into parking lots, and when it was really bad, you could sit in your car for half an hour or more and never make it more than a couple of miles. Looking out over the abandoned cars ahead of us I felt like I knew what he meant. It was a three-lane bumper-to-bumper junkyard as far as I could see.

As I slowed down to thread the gap between the cars Heather yelled in my ear, “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way.”

I looked behind us and saw Nessel’s men coming for us. They looked like a squadron of mad hornets buzzing down the ramp, shooting the gaps between wrecks at fantastic speeds.

“Hold on,” I said.

A zombie was stumbling along between two rows of cars about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us. I dug into the throttle and went straight for him, darting through the narrow gap, feeling a thump thump thump echoing in my ears as we passed all the cars.

Zombies are predictable. When they see you, they stumble after you. They don’t care if you’re on foot or driving a truck, they stumble after you just the same, which is exactly what the zombie ahead of us was doing.

And about ten yards ahead of the zombie was a gap in traffic. It looked like a driver in the middle lane had tried to turn into the lane to his right, and had hit another car in the process. The car was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle, with just enough room for me to slip alongside it and cross over to the gap between the middle and right lanes. But I had to time it just right. I had to get there just a fraction of a second before the zombie if I was going to make it work.

It was close.

When I got to the gap I hit the brakes, rocked the bike hard to the right, then hard to the left, feeling Heather gasping as she squeezed me. We threaded into the opening and took off at full speed.

I looked back just as one of Nessel’s goons hit that zombie. He must have been doing at least ninety miles per hour when he realized what was happening and hit his brakes. But at that speed, not even the Honda’s oversized racing brakes could help him. He hit the zombie, and both bodies went tumbling over the wrecked cars. The bike went sideways, hit the trunk of a car, and shot twenty feet up in the air, spinning end over end the whole way back to the ground.

That slowed the other three down, but not by much, and I knew I couldn’t play those games forever. I took us up another hundred yards or so until we came to a small box van. There I slowed, turned the bike around, and headed back the way we’d come.

“What are you doing?” Heather said.

But I didn’t have time to answer. I ducked my head and charged.

One of the remaining three riders was in our gap, and even though he was wearing a full helmet and face shield that kept his face hidden, I could tell by the way his body stiffened that his eyes were going wide.

I pulled my Glock and fired. I’m not sure if I hit him or not, but the bike shimmied beneath him, he lost his balance, glanced off a car, and crashed out.

I saw his head smack a bumper as he fell.

I stopped the bike and told Heather to get off. She looked panicked, but she did like I asked.

“What are you going to do?”

I pulled out my other Glock. “Just stay down, okay? I got this.”

Those huge green eyes of hers melted me.

“We’re going to be okay,” I said.

She nodded, and I moved out on foot. The other two riders were going slow now, practically walking their bikes through the cars, looking for us. I crouched down below the top of the cars and jogged into position. When the rider I was targeting got close enough, I stood up and fired both Glocks into his chest, knocking him backwards off the bike.

The other rider tried to react, but he was stuck between two pickups. I threw a lot of ammunition at him with both guns and managed to catch a lucky shot. He spun around, hit in the shoulder, and went down.

I ran over to where he fell and saw him rolling on the pavement, wounded. He pushed off his helmet and let it tumble away. He looked up at me, his eyes pleading with me. Most of the time my moral compass swings closer to the good than the bad, but some people just aren’t worth the effort.

I shot him in the head.

When I got back to Heather, she was holding that portable radio in her hands and crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“Daddy was right about Nessel,” she said. “The bastard used me as a decoy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Daddy sent a squad of his best men to the safe house where we were supposed to go.” She looked up at me and choked back tears. “Nessel was waiting for them. They’re all dead. Now he’s attacking the compound.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“He said for us to stay away.” She looked deep into my eyes. “But my God, Andrew. It sounded so bad. I heard explosions. And Daddy was screaming at people while he was talking with me.”

I had no idea what to say. She told me while we were dancing that she had begged her father for a week to let her go out on a date with me, and now his empire was in serious risk of crumbling and it was all because of our date.

I was feeling lousy, because I knew the role I played in wrecking her family, but then she surprised me.

“Andrew,” she said. “You were telling me the truth about my mom, weren’t you? You really did read her my letter?”

I nodded.

“You worked a miracle bringing her back into my life.”

I shook my head.

“You did,” she said. “I believe that. And I believe you can do it again. I believe you can give me my father back.”

I felt confused. “What are you asking me to do?”

“Help me save my father, Andrew. Please.”

She turned those big green eyes up at me, a tear welling up and running down her face, and in that moment, I knew I was powerless to refuse. I’d have handed her my soul for the asking.

“Let’s go get your dad,” I said.

I started toward the main gate because that was the only way into Ashcroft’s compound that I knew of, but when Heather saw where I was going she pointed me in a different direction.

She had me go to the west side of the compound and drive into a crumbling building that looked like it had been a bakery before the outbreak. It was the corner shop in a block-long strip mall. She told me to stop, got off the bike, opened a door that had been made to look like it was rusted shut, and ushered me into a freshly painted white corridor.

“This leads right into the compound,” she said.

I nodded, impressed. Concealed doors and hidden tunnels were the kind of thing you’d expect from a powerful boss like Ashcroft, but it was still weird to actually see it in real life. That kind of engineering was way beyond what most bosses were capable of.

We took the motorcycle all the way to the end of the corridor, where we were met by guards who took us to see Ashcroft.

Ashcroft and Naylor were watching the battle from the third floor of the Fairmount. Nessel had focused his troops around the main gate, but they were hitting the wall of flattened cars in a couple of different places, forcing Ashcroft’s troops to divide up their strength.

Heather and I stood back a little, listening, as Naylor relayed updates of the battle he was receiving over the radio to Ashcroft.

The outer perimeter of Ashcroft’s compound was made up of smashed and stacked cars. Nessel’s men had used rocket-propelled grenades against that wall and it had partially collapsed in two places. A large group of Ashcroft’s men were boxed in near the gate, fighting a close-quarters battle in the rubble left from the explosions, and Nessel’s superior numbers were starting to wear them down.

Ashcroft surveyed the scene with night-vision goggles. “Pull them back, Naylor,” he said. “Tell them to regroup around the courtyard.”

Ashcroft’s troops began falling back. Heather reached over and touched my hand as the soldiers ran back toward the hotel. I looked over at her and saw she was holding her breath.

Just then another blast from a rocket grenade lit up the night, and when the smoke settled, we saw there was a huge hole in the wall.

Naylor was watching the space beyond the wall. “Something’s happening,” he said. “They’re bringing up buses.”

“Buses?” Ashcroft said. He focused his binoculars on the hole. “My God,” he gasped.

Two yellow school buses broke through the burning debris that had once been the wall of flattened cars and rolled to a stop not far from Ashcroft’s retreating troops. Some of the men stopped to fire at the bodies getting off the buses, but took off running again when they realized they were the infected.

“That is fucking brilliant,” Ashcroft said, impressed despite himself. “Using the infected like that. I didn’t think Nessel had it in him.”

“Problem, sir,” Naylor said.

Ashcroft smirked. “What now?”

“There, sir. To the right of the main gate. See him?”

I followed Naylor’s finger to a high point on the wall. There was a man crawling to the top of it, but he was too far away for me to see what he was doing.

“Sniper,” Ashcroft said. And then, one at a time, Ashcroft’s retreating troops started to fall, the only clue as to why were the bright muzzle flashes of the sniper’s rifle.

In the confusion, Ashcroft’s men didn’t know which way to run.

“They’re getting slaughtered out there,” Ashcroft said. “Get some of your men back up to the front and take that sniper out.”

Naylor said, “I don’t have anybody, sir. Prescott is the only officer I have left, and he’s coordinating the retreat.”

Ashcroft said nothing. He gripped the railing and stared down at the battlefield.

“Mr. Ashcroft,” I said.

“What?” he growled.

“I can get him, sir.”

“Just stand still and shut up,” he said.

For the second time that night I met his gaze and didn’t look away.

It looked like his first instinct was to throw me over the railing, but then he stopped himself. “Okay,” he said. “You want to do it, go ahead.”

I turned to go.

Heather followed me.

“Andrew, wait.” She said, “You’re not serious? You can’t go.”

I nodded in her father’s direction. “Heather, do you really think he’d ever let us be together if I don’t do this? He’ll always have it in the back of his mind that this happened because of me. But I can change that if I do this.”

“Don’t be stupid, Andrew. He’s got people to deal with this.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I promise.”

“God, I hope you’re right,” she said.

“Yeah, me too.”

The battle had reached the courtyard right in front of the hotel. Ashcroft’s men had taken up defensive positions behind the fountain and the rows of small garden walls leading up to the front doors. Nessel’s men were still moving into position, using the infected as a moving barrier.

That sniper was the key to the battle. From his position he was picking off Ashcroft’s men no matter how well-hidden they were, and it was only a matter of time before he got so many of them that there wouldn’t be enough of them left to put up a fight.

I moved out across the right flank of the battle and headed for a ditch that ran through the cow pasture. I figured as long as I stayed inside it I’d be able to make it all the way to the wall of cars. I had no idea what I was going to do from there, though.

I got most of the way across the yard before I saw a small group of the infected wandering on the fringes of the battle. I was so intent on reaching the wall that I didn’t even notice them until I was right on top of them, and by then it was too late. I jumped out of the ditch and ran for it.

The infected followed me.

I veered right and ran along the inside of the wall until I got to a section where rocket grenades had blown it apart. I jumped over the debris and landed outside the wall-right in front of a military-style Humvee where Nessel and two of his lieutenants were watching the battle unfold.

I wasn’t wearing one of Ashcroft’s uniforms, so they didn’t know what to make of me for a second. I might have been a civilian, or even one of their own hired goons. That hesitation saved me. With the infected hot on my heels, I drew both Glocks and ran straight for Nessel, firing the whole way.

I wasn’t aiming, just spraying and praying, but I got one lucky shot and hit Nessel’s driver in the head. He went down onto the hood of the Humvee. The other lieutenant tried to break and run, but he got caught by the infected and went down screaming.

That left Nessel.

He fell over the back of the Humvee and landed face first in the grass. Before he had a chance to get up I shot him three times, once in the neck and twice in the chest. With Nessel dead, I turned to face the infected. There were eight of them, and using the Humvee for cover, I used up the last of my ammunition on them. That left me with nothing but my machete to fight the sniper.

I started to climb up the wall of flattened cars as quietly as I could. I heard him up there, popping off shots every few seconds with a bolt-action rifle. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I thought, he’d be so into his shooting rhythm that he wouldn’t hear me coming.

But that was just wishful thinking. I made it most of the way to the top when I heard something moving below me. It was one of the infected, and he was coming up after me. He made a gurgling, moaning sound as he bumped and clanged his way up the side, and I knew he was making enough noise that the sniper would be able to hear him even over the sound of his rifle.

I was stuck.

I couldn’t go up, because I would lose the element of surprise and probably get killed, and I couldn’t go down, either. But there was a little gap between two of the cars on the top row, and I ducked into that, facing outwards. I waited to see who would get to me first, the sniper or the zombie.

It was the sniper. He poked his head over the side, his face barely a foot above my waiting hands. I reached up, grabbed him by the back of the head, and yanked down as hard as I could. He came down the side of the wall like a snowball going downhill, picking up lose car parts as he hit the sides, trying to hold on, only to keep tumbling downward, right into the waiting arms of the zombie below us. The two of them hit hard, and both ended up on the ground.

I didn’t waste any time. I jumped over the top and picked up the sniper’s rifle. The sniper was fighting the zombie barehanded, and doing pretty well, until I shot them both.

Then I took up the sniper’s post. I looked through the scope and watched the battle taking place around the fountain. Ashcroft’s men, who had a reputation as the best private army in the Zone, were earning their stripes. I saw at least fifty of Nessel’s soldiers dead in the courtyard, and it looked like their advance was starting to break apart. Despite their numerical superiority, they just weren’t as well-disciplined, or as well-trained, as Ashcroft’s troops.

Ashcroft himself was leading the fight now. I saw him waving a machine gun over his head, yelling at his men to hold their positions.

I went to work on Nessel’s men, and as I started putting them down, one by one, I swept the scope across Ashcroft’s position. He stopped yelling long enough to look my way. All at once he realized it was me doing the firing now, and he gave me an exaggerated overhand salute.

The tide of the battle turned, and soon Nessel’s men broke ranks and ran. Ashcroft followed up their retreat, and his men carved the retreating enemy up into pockets, showing no mercy.

Gradually, the steady, thunderous roll of the battle faded, and all that was left was the occasional sporadic popping of small arms fire. Ashcroft’s men were still dealing with the infected, but those too were getting mopped up.

I could see the mood among Ashcroft’s men changing. They had won big, and now they knew it.

With nothing left to shoot at, I got down from the wall and went over to where I’d left Nessel to die. I tossed his body onto the hood of the Humvee and drove straight through the gates to the hotel.

I parked in front of the fountain.

Ashcroft’s men stopped their celebrations to watch me, and Ashcroft himself came over to see what was going on. He took one look at Nessel’s body and whistled. Then he looked at me and smiled.

Behind him, coming out of the hotel at a run, was Heather. She ran right past her father and straight into my arms.

Ashcroft came over to us. “You did real good,” he said, and offered me his hand.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I owe you big, Andrew.”

I shrugged.

In the background I heard Naylor giving orders to the men to start damage control. After he got the men moving, he came back to Ashcroft and gave a report. Ashcroft listened in silence, nodding his head, and when Naylor was finished, he gave him some more orders to relay to the troops.

Then he turned to me and said, “Andrew, it looks like we’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do.” He glanced down at Nessel. “And I seem to have inherited several new businesses. I’m going to need some good men to help me run them. You interested in a job?”

Heather was smiling.

“Uh, a job would be great,” I said.

“I heard a ‘but’ in there.”

“Well,” I said, “what I really want is a second date with your daughter.”