The others spoke in her dream, but she could not understand them. Fear began to fill up the empty places inside her as the four of them advanced cautiously through the charred remains of the city, under a lowering sky of poisonous clouds turned the colour of bad blood and meat sickness. She clutched Papa’s hand tightly as dark shapes flitted at the edge of her vision.

The dead and the Disappeared. They had all come back from wherever the damned go when the world is done with them.

She was a little girl again, tugging on her father’s arm to gain his attention. But he seemed not to notice. Like he didn’t know she was there. No matter how hard she tried to pull him away, he just led them deeper and deeper into the dead city. And then she lost her grip on him. It didn’t slip or falter, he was just gone.

No . . . he was up ahead, but holding hands with Maive, and leading Adam into the ruins of a 7-Eleven that had somehow escaped the worst of the conflagration. It was as if he had forgotten her. Had left her behind.

She was suddenly paralysed with terror. There were wolves stalking them, along with the spectres of the dead and the Disappeared that lay in wait inside the shell of that building. Why was he going in there? Why had he left her?

Increasingly she was able to make out the features of the ghouls and shadows circling them at a distance, drawing in more tightly with each pass, like sharks intending to feed. She saw the shape of Cooper Aronson, his neck bent at an impossible angle, his eyes just dark ragged holes. Insensate fury twisted the rotting remains of his face into a rictus of ill-favoured rage as the animated corpse contemplated the vision of his wife walking hand in hand with Miguel Pieraro.

Sofia tried to call out to her father, but then Aronson was gone, and she shuddered as she felt the cold claws of a dead man brush her shoulder. Turning, somehow as swiftly as the flight of an arrow, but as slowly as specks of frozen dust floating through the vacuum of space, she turned and turned . . . and her mouth fell open in a silent scream when she saw Orin, the young Mormon boy they’d found ten miles downstream of where the flood had overtaken them, his body suspended in a tree as if crucified. He reached out to her, his black bloated hands closing around her throat.

‘Sofia!’

She came awake, gasping and trembling. Cindy had one hand on her shoulder, shaking her lightly.

‘Sofia, are you all right?’