CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Part One: A Fall of Angels

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Part Two: Broken Birds

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Part Three: Sanctuary

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Epilogue

About Jonathan Maberry

This one’s for the librarians everywhere.

(Okay, I’ll go sit in the back and read quietly now.)

And—as always—for Sara Jo.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to some real-world people who allowed me to tap them for advice and information, lean on them for support, and in some cases shove them into the middle of the action. My agents, Sara Crowe and Harvey Klinger; my editor, David Gale, and all the good people at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; Ashley Davis, Nancy Kiem-Comley, Tiffany Fowler-Schmidt, Rachel Tafoya, Greg Schauer, Rigel Ailur, Bubba Falcon, Jaime Noyola, Bob Clark, Jim McCain, Colin Madrid, and Dustin Lee Frye for technical advice; Michael Homler of St. Martin’s Griffin; Dr. John Cmar of Johns Hopkins University Department of Infectious Diseases; Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex (Simon & Schuster); Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books); Chris Graham, David Nicholson, and John Palakas of the History Channel documentary Zombies: A Living History; and the King of the Zombies George A. Romero.

Author’s Note

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel deals in part with the phenomenon of grief. Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong each have a reason to grieve; each has lost something they could not bear to lose. The people they left behind in Mountainside were all traumatized by loss, as are the people they meet out in the Ruin. Grief, in its many forms, is one of the themes that tie all four books of this quadrology together.

While I was writing this book, a great and dear friend of mine died. Leslie Esdaile Banks (aka L. A. Banks), a prolific author of romance, crime fiction, thrillers, and paranormal novels, lost her battle with a rare form of cancer. I’ve known Leslie since middle school, and we were colleagues in the Liars Club, a group of writers dedicated to promoting literacy and the love of reading. Leslie was a humanitarian, a fierce intellect, and one of the most joyful people I have ever had the great good fortune to have known.

Around the same time my brother-in-law, Logan Howe, also died. He was a good and decent man.