“I don’t care. What did you see?”

“I saw you as an old man,” I lie. “You were on your deathbed. People surrounded you.” I looked at the cigarette butt on the floor. “You were coughing. Wheezing. Cancer, I think.”

“Heh,” Scarecrow seems amused by this. “Better cancer than one of those greyskins, I guess. How do I know you aren’t lying?”

“You don’t.”

He chews the inside of his lip as if he’s thinking about something. I can’t tell if he wants to try to kill me or keep me around, but a frantic knock at the door interrupts his thoughts.

“Sir,” a man says, “we’ve got greyskins getting into the warehouse.”

“Greyskins, how?”

“We think it’s the others that got away,” he says. “They’re opening doors and making all kinds of noise to draw them in.”

“Why didn’t you stop it?” Scarecrow says angrily.

“There’s only a few of us, sir,” the man says. “But they’re coming in fast. We’ve got to get to higher ground.”

Scarecrow lets out a curse and grabs my arm, dragging me to my feet. We run out of the room and into a narrow hallway. At the end of the hallway we go up a flight of metal stairs to a door. On the other side of the door I see a giant open room. I look at the metal walkways that spread out all over the room, wondering which one I will dangle from. As the greyskins crawl in like bugs, I wonder which one will sink its teeth into my leg, setting me up for an illness that will destroy me in the next twenty-four hours. I feel numb at the thought. In this world, there was always a possibility that my life would end like this. I just never wanted it to be this way.

The sound of the undead grates on me like nails on a chalkboard. I wish there was enough firepower to just kill them all right now, but I know there isn’t. I wish I could just shove Scarecrow and all his men over the side to be eaten. His men spread out as Scarecrow shouts orders to kill any of my friends on sight. He pulls me by the wrist and leads me to a railing so he can watch his men. Shots fire with loud bangs as they try to set up barricades at the stairs, the greyskins crawling at them like mad dogs.

I search the first floor, looking for any sign of Ethan, Gabe, or Gilbert, but I see none of them. Scarecrow shoves me against a wall and tells me to wait there.

“Like that’ll happen,” I say.

My snide talk earns me a slap across the face. “Brandon,” Scarecrow calls out.

An ugly man with spiked hair comes out from the group of raiders forming the barricade. He’s holding a crowbar.