There’s an art to fighting the infected. It was almost a good thing that this mob had started off so large; we were cutting down the numbeapidly, since we had the ability to think tactically, but the survivors were still behaving like members of a pack. They wanted to eat, not infect. “They wanted to kill me” may not sound like much of an advantage, but trust me on this one. A zombie that’s out to infect will try to smear you with fluids. That gives it a lot more weapons, since they can bleed and spit—even puke, if they’ve eaten recently enough. A zombie that wants to eat you is just going to come at you with its mouth, and that means it has only one viable avenue of attack. That evens the odds, just a little.

Just a little can be more than enough.

I used my baton to sweep a constant perimeter around myself, shocking any zombie that came into range and trusting the Kevlar in my jacket to keep my arm from getting tagged before I could pull it back. The electricity slowed them down enough for me to keep firing. More important, it kept them from getting positions established behind me. I could track Becks and Alaric by the sound of gunshots, which came almost as regularly as my own. I was taking out two zombies for every three shots. Not the best odds in the world. Not the worst odds, either.

The zombies pressed forward. I backed toward the Jeep, letting them think they were herding me while I kept thinning out their ranks. I realized I was grinning. I couldn’t help it. Maybe facing possible death isn’t supposed to make me happy, but years of training can’t be shrugged off overnight, and I was an Irwin for a long time before I retired.

Aim, fire. Swing, zap. Aim, fire. It was almost like dancing, a series of soothing, predictable movements. When George’s gun ran out of ammunition, I switched to my own backup pistol, the motion as smooth and easy as it could possibly have been. I couldn’t hear gunshots anymore, so either Becks and Alaric had made the Jeep or my brain had started filtering out the sounds of their combat as inconsequential. I had my own zombies to play with. They could deal with theirs. Even George had fallen quiet, leaving me to move in a small bubble of almost perfect contentment. It didn’t matter that my sister was dead, or that the assholes who’d ordered her killed were still out there somewhere, doing God knows what to God-knows-who. I had zombies. I had bullets. Everything else was just details, and like I keep saying, I don’t care about the details.

“Shaun!”