Like that.

  Every single one of the bodies around him was a person. Each person had a story, a life, details, specifics. Things that made them people instead of nameless corpses. As he lay there Sam felt the weight of who they had been crushing him down as surely as the mound had done minutes ago. He didn’t know any of them, but he was kin to all of them.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried not to see anything. But they were there, hiding behind his lids as surely as if they were burned onto his retinas.

  Then he heard a moan.

  A sound from around the curve of the mound. Not a word, not a call for help. A moan. A sound of hunger, a sound of a need so bottomless that no amount of food could ever hope to satisfy it. An impossible and irrational need, too, because why would the dead need to feed? What good would it do them?

  He knew what his employers had said about parasites driving the bodies of the victims, about an old Cold War weapon that slipped its leash, about genetically modified larvae in the bloodstream and clustered around the cerebral cortex and motor cortex and blah blah blah. Fuck that. Fuck science. This wasn’t science, anyway. Not as he saw it right then, having just crawled out of his own grave. This was so much darker and more twisted than that. Sam didn’t know what to call it. Even when he believed in God there was nothing in the Bible or Sunday school that covered this shit. Not even Lazarus or Jesus coming back from the dead. J.C. didn’t start chowing down on the Apostles when he rose. So, what was this?

  The moan was louder. Coming closer.

  Get up, asshole, scolded his inner voice.

  “Why can’t I just lay here and say fuck it?”

  Because you’re in shock, dickhead, and you’re going to die.

  Sam thought about that. Shock? Yeah. Maybe. Concussion? Almost certainly. Military helmets stopped shrapnel but the stats on traumatic brain injury were staggering. Sam knew a lot of front-line shooters who’d been benched with TBI. Messed up the head, scrambled thoughts, and …

  A figure lumbered into sight. Not crawling. Walking. One of them. Wearing mechanic’s coveralls. Bites on his face and nothing in his eyes but hunger and hate. Walking. Not shuffling or limping. Not even staggering, like some of them did. Walking, sniffing the air, black and bloody drool running over its lips and chin.

  Sam’s hand immediately slapped his holster, but there was no sidearm. He fumbled for his knife, but that was gone, too.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He swung his feet off of the mound of dead and immediately felt something like an incendiary device explode in the muscles of his lower back. The pain was instantly intense, and he screamed.

  The dead mechanic’s head snapped toward him, the dead eyes focusing. It snarled, showing bloody, broken teeth. And then it came at him. Fast. Faster than he’d seen with any of them. Or maybe it was that he was slowed down, broken. Usually in the heat of combat the world slowed down and Sam seemed to walk through it, taking his time to do everything right, to see everything, to own the moment. Not now.

  With a growl of unbearable hunger, the ghoul flung itself on Sam.

  He got a hand up in time to save his skin, chopping at the thing’s throat, feeling tissue and cartilage crunch as he struck, feeling it do no good at all except to change the moan into a gurgle. The mechanic’s weight crashed down on him, stretching the damaged muscles in Sam’s back, ripping a new cry from him, once more smothering him with weight and mass.

  Sam kept his hand in place in the ruined throat and looped his other hand over, punching the thing on the side of the head, once, twice, again and again. Breaking bones, shattering the nose, doing no appreciable good. The pain in his lower back was incredible, sickening him even more than the smell of the thing that clawed at him. The creature snapped its teeth together with a hard porcelain clack, but Sam kept those teeth away from him. Not far enough away, though.

  He braced one foot flat on the mound and used that leg to force his hips and shoulders to turn. It was like grinding broken glass into whatever was wrong with his spine, but he moved, and Sam timed another punch to knock the ghoul over him, letting his hips be the axle of a sloppy wheel. The mechanic went over and down and then Sam was on top of him. He climbed up and dropped a knee onto the creature’s chest, pinning it against the place where the asphalt met the slope of corpses. Then Sam grabbed the snapping jaw in one hand and a fistful of hair at the back of the thing’s head with the other.

  In the movies snapping a neck is nothing. Everyone seemed to be able to do it.

  That’s the movies.

  In the real world, there is muscle and tendon and bone and none of them want to turn that far or that fast. The body isn’t designed to die. Not that easily. And Sam was exhausted, hurt, sick, weak.

  There was no snap.

  What there was … was a slow turn of the head. Inch by inch, fighting against the ghoul’s efforts to turn back and bite him. Sam pulled and pushed, leaning forward to get from gravity what his damaged body did not want to provide. The torsion was awful. The monster clawed at him, tearing at his clothes, digging at the Kevlar limb pads.

  Even dead, it tried to live.

  Then the degree of rotation passed a point. Not a sudden snap, no abrupt release of pressure. More of a slow, sickening, wet grinding noise as vertebra turned past their stress point, and the point where the brain stem joined the spinal cord became pinched inside those gears. Pinched, compressed, and then ruptured.

  The clawing hands flopped away. The body beneath him stopped thrashing. The jaws snapped one last time and then sagged open.

  After that Sam had to finish it, to make sure it was a permanent rupture and not a temporary compression. The sounds told him that. And the final release of all internal resistance.

  Sam fell back and rolled off and lay side-by-side with the mechanic, their bodies touching at shoulder, hip, thigh, foot, Sam’s fingers still entwined in the hair as if they lay spent after some obscene coupling. One breathed, the other did not. Overhead the moon peered above the treetops like a peeping Tom.

  -4-

  The moon was completely above the treetops by the time Sam got up.

  His back was a mess. Pulled, strained, torn or worse, it was impossible to tell. He had a high pain threshold, but this was at his upper limit. And, besides, it was easier to man up and walk it off when there were other soldiers around. He’d seen his old boss, Captain Ledger, brave it out and even crack jokes with a bullet in him.

  Alone, though, it’s easier to be weaker, smaller, to be more intimate with the pain, and be owned by it.

  It took him half an hour to stand. The world tried to do some fancy cartwheels and the vertigo made Sam throw up over and over again until there was nothing left in his belly.

  It took another hour to find a gun, a SIG Sauer, and fifteen more minutes to find one magazine for it. Nine rounds. Then he saw a shape lying partly under three of the dead. Male, big, dressed in the same unmarked black combat gear as Sam wore. He tottered over and knelt very slowly and carefully beside the body. He rolled one of the dead over and off so he could see who it was. He knew it had to be one of his Boy Scouts, but it still hurt him to see the face. DeNeille Shoopman, who ran under the combat callsign of Shortstop. Good kid. Hell of a soldier.

  Dead, with his throat torn away.

  But goddamn it, Shortstop’s eyes were open, and they clicked over to look at him. The man he knew –his friend and fellow soldier—did not look at him through those eyes. Nothing did. Not even the soul of a monster. That was one of the horrors of this thing. The eyes are supposed to be the windows of the soul, but when he looked into Shortstop’s brown eyes it was like looking through the windows of an empty house.

  Shortstop’s arms were pinned, and there was a lot of meat and muscle missing from his chest and shoulders. He probably couldn’t raise his arms even if he was free. Some of the dead were like that. A lot of them were. They were victims of the thing that had killed them, and although they all reanimated, only a fraction of them were whole enough to rise and hunt.

  Sam placed one hand over Shortstop’s heart. It wasn’t beating, of course, but Sam remembered how brave a heart it had been. Noble, too, if that wasn’t a corny thing to think about a guy he’d gotten drunk with and traded dirty jokes with. Shortstop had walked with him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death so many times. It wasn’t right to let him lie here, ruined and helpless and hungry until he rotted into nothing.

  “No,” said Sam.

  He had nine bullets and needed every single one of them if he was going to survive. But he needed one now really bad.

  The shot blasted a hole in the night.

  Sam sat beside Shortstop for a long time, his hand still there over the quiet heart. He wept for his friend and he wept for the whole goddamn world.

  -5-

  Sam spent the night inside the food distribution warehouse.

  There were eleven of the ghouls in there. Sam found the section where they stored the lawn care tools. He found two heavy-bladed machetes and went to work.

  When he was done, he was in so much pain that he couldn’t stand it, so he found where they stacked the painkillers. Extra-strength something-or-other. Six of those, and six cans of some shitty local beer. The door was locked and he had the place to himself.

  He slept all through the night.

  -6-

  When he woke up he took more painkillers, but this time washed it down with some trendy electrolyte water. Then he ate two cans of beef stew he cooked over a camping stove.

  More painkillers, more food, more sleep.

  The day passed and he didn’t die.

  The pain diminished by slow degrees.

  In the morning he found a set of keys to the office. There was a radio in there, a TV, a phone, and a lockbox with a Glock 26 and four empty magazines, plus three boxes of 9mm hollow points. He nearly wept.

  The phone was dead.

  Sam turned on the news and listened as he loaded bullets into the magazines for the Glock and the single mag he had for the SIG Sauer.

  He heard a familiar voice. The guy who had been here with the lady cop. Skinny blond-haired guy who was a reporter for a ninth-rate cable news service.

  “This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse …”

  Trout had a lot of news and none of it was good. His convoy of school buses was in Virginia now and creeping along roads clogged by refugees. There were as many fights among the fleeing survivors as there were between the living and the dead.

  Typical, he thought. We’ve always been our worst enemies.

  At noon, Sam felt well enough to travel, though he considered holing up in this place. There was enough food and water here to keep him alive for five years, maybe ten. But that was a sucker’s choice. He’d eat his gun before a week was out. Anyone would. Solitude and a lack of reliable intel would push him into a black hole from which he could never crawl out. No, the smart move was to find people.

  Step one was finding a vehicle.

  This place had trucks.

  Lots of trucks.

  So, he spent four hours using a forklift to load pallets of supplies into a semi. He collected anything that could be used as a weapon and took them, too. If he found people, they would need to be armed. He thought about that, then went and loaded sleeping bags, toilet paper, diapers, and whatever else he thought a group of survivors might need. Sam was a very practical man, and each time he made a smart and thoughtful decision, he could feel himself stepping back from the edge of despair. He was planning for a mission, and that gave him a measure of stability. He had people to find and protect, and that gave him a purpose.

  He gassed up at the fuel pump on the far side of the parking lot. A few new ghouls were beginning to wander in through the open fence, but Sam kept clear of them. When he left, he made sure not to crash into any of them. Even a semi could take damage and he had to make this last.

  Practical.

  Once he reached the crossroads, though, he paused, idling, trying to decide where to go. Following the buses was likely pointless. If they were already heading south, and if Billy Trout was able to broadcast, then they were alive. The last of the Boy Scouts were probably with them.

  So, he turned right, heading toward the National Armory in Harrisville, north of Pittsburgh. If it was still intact, that would be a great place to build a rescue camp. If it was overrun, then he’d take it back and secure it.

  It was a plan.

  He drove.

  There was nothing on the radio but bad information and hysteria, but there were CDs in the glove compartment. A lot of country and western stuff. He fucking hated country and western, but it was better than listening to his own thoughts. He slipped in a Brad Paisley CD and listened to the man sing about coal miners in Harlan County. Depressing as shit, but it was okay to listen to.

  It was late when he reached Evans City, a small town on the ass-end of nowhere. All through the day and into the evening he saw the leavings of the world. Burned towns, burned cars, burned farmhouses, burned bodies. The wheels of the semi crunched over spots where thousands of shell casings littered the road. He saw a lot of the dead. At first, they were stragglers, wandering in no particular direction until they heard the truck. Then they walked toward him as he drove, and even though Sam didn’t want to hit any of them, there were times where he had no choice. Then he found that by slowing down he could push them out of the way without impact damage to the truck. Some of them fell and he had to set his teeth as the wheels rolled over them, crushing and crunching things that had been people twenty-four hours ago.

  He found that by driving along country roads he could avoid a lot of that, so he turned the truck out into the farmlands. He refueled twice, and each time he wasted bullets defending his truck. Sam was an excellent shot but hoping to get a head shot each time was absurd, and his back was still too sore to do it all with machetes or an axe. The first fuel stop cost him nineteen rounds. The second took thirteen. More than half a box of shells. No good. Those boxes would not last very long at that rate.

  As he drove past an old cemetery on the edge of Evans City, he spotted smoke rising from up ahead. He passed a car that was smashed into a tree, and then a pickup truck that had been burned to a shell beside an exploded gas pump. That wasn’t the source of the smoke, though, because the truck fire had burned itself out.

  No, there was a farmhouse nearby and out in front of it was a mound of burning corpses.

  Sam pulled the truck to a stop and sat for a while, studying the landscape. The moon was bright enough and he had his headlights on. Nothing moved except a tall, gently twisting column of gray smoke that rose from the pyre.

  “Shit,” said Sam. He got out of the truck but left the motor running. He stood for a moment to make sure his back wouldn’t flare up and that his knees were steady. The SIG was tucked into his shoulder holster and he had the Glock in a two-hand grip as he approached the mound.

  It was every bit as high as the one under which he’d been buried. Dozens upon dozens of corpses, burned now to stick figures, their limbs contracted by heat into fetal curls. The withered bones shifted like logs in a dying hearth, sending sparks up to the night where they vanished against the stars.

  Sam turned away and walked over to the house.

  He could read a combat scene as well as any experienced soldier, and what he was seeing was a place where a real battle had taken place. There were blood splashes on the ground and on the porch where the dead had been dropped. The blood was blacker even than it should have been in this light, and he could see threadlike worms writhing it in. Sam unclipped a Maglite he’d looted from the warehouse and held it backward in his left hand while resting the pistol across the wrist, the barrel in sync with the beam as he entered the house.

  Someone had tried to hold this place, that was clear enough. They’d nailed boards over the windows and moved furniture to act as braces. Many of those boards lay cracked and splintered on the floor amid more shell casings and more blood spatter. He went all the way through to the kitchen and saw more of the same. An attempt to fortify that had failed.

  The upstairs was splashed with gore but empty, and the smears on the stairs showed where bodies had been dragged down.

  He stepped to the cellar door, which opened off of the living room. He listened for any kind of sound, however small, but there was nothing. Sam went down, saw sawhorses and a door that had been made into a bed. Saw blood. A bloody trowel. Pieces of meat and bone.

  Nothing else.

  No one else.

  He trudged heavily up the stairs and went out onto the porch and stood in the moonlight while he thought this through. Whoever had been in the house had made a stand, but it was evident they’d lost their battle.

  So, who built the mound? Who dragged the bodies out? Whose shell-casings littered the yard?

  He peered at the spent brass. Not military rounds. .30-30s, .22, some 9mm, some shotgun shells. Hunters?

  Maybe.

  Probably, with a few local police mixed in.

  Why come here? Was there a rescue mission here that arrived too late? Or was it a sweep? The armed citizens of this rural town fighting back?