LILAH WAS NOT AFRAID TO DIE.

Death was something she knew too well, too intimately, to fear. Annie and George were on the other side of death. So was Tom.

Only Chong was here, and in her heart Lilah believed that if she died today, then Chong would not survive very long. Not even with Benny and Nix. The Ruin was too hard for them. Too dangerous. They were all town kids.

Below her the boars grunted and milled around, agitated by the nearness of living flesh.

Lilah examined the thing she held in her tanned hands. It was not as powerful as the spear she’d lost; or as quick as the gun that lay somewhere in the gloom below, but she liked the heft of it.

Using her knife, she’d cut three of the straightest branches she could reach, then shaved off the twigs and smaller branches and trimmed the branches into four-foot-long poles. Then she removed her canvas vest, stowed the last useful items in her pants pockets, and cut the vest into many long strips. Once all the cutting and trimming was done, Lilah placed the crossbar of the knife between the poles and lashed it all together with turn after turn of canvas. Lilah knew a great deal about knots and binding. She preferred soft leather—deer hide was best—but a smart warrior used the resources at hand rather than wasting time longing for what she did not have.

It was a painstaking process, but Lilah did not hurry. A mistake in preparation would guarantee failure. The result of her work was a kind of long-handled ax. The blade of the knife protruded at a right angle from the tip of the ax, and a piece of hard, knotty wood was lashed to the back end to create a club. As long as the poles and bindings held, she could chop and smash.

The hogs crashed into the tree again.

Lilah climbed carefully down, limb by limb, until she stood on a stout branch seven feet above the circle of dead boars. They stopped ramming the tree and glared up at her, and Lilah’s smile flickered. There was intelligence in those eyes. Not human intelligence, but the cold and calculating intelligence of a predator. Animal cunning. Animal hate.

Why? And . . . how? The zombie plague, whatever it was, erased all intelligence when it reanimated the dead body. Right?

It was a problem she would have to think about later. Now she needed her entire mind to be focused on what would happen in the next few seconds.

Lilah tested the bindings, looking for loose knots and weak points. There were none.

A vagary of wind brought sounds to her, and she lifted her head to listen. Were there voices? Yells? She listened and listened, but all she really heard was the white noise of the endlessly moving trees and the chatter of birds and monkeys.

“Warrior smart,” she told herself.