She ran through the trees toward them, intending to cut past them and head west again.

However, the closer she got, the more her frown deepened, because it became quickly apparent that they were not rocks at all. Nor was it an old building.

Lilah slowed from a jog to a walk, and as she emerged from the trees she stopped stock-still. Her mouth dropped open in shock.

“No . . . ,” she whispered.

The thing lay there. Huge. Ugly. Impossible.

The thing was perched precariously on a shelf of rock that overlooked a long drop into a cleft that was thick with dark scrub pines and creeper vines. Someone had taken red paint—or perhaps blood—and written these words on the broad, white side of this impossible thing:

WOE TO THE FALLEN

Nearby, on a mound of dirt, three bodies in ragged military-style uniforms were hung on wooden posts. Zoms. They thrashed against the ropes that bound them.

Lilah turned quickly and looked back the way she’d come, staring at the woods as if she could still see Nix and the others. Indecision tore at her. Should she tell her friends about this, or steer them away from it and never say a word about it?

She thought about what it would do to Nix and Benny. Even to Chong.

Lilah shut her eyes for a moment and ground her teeth in helpless frustration. It was so much simpler living alone. You never had to hurt anyone you cared about, because there was no one to care about. Telling her friends about this would be exactly like stabbing them through the heart.

She lingered there, thinking it through, wrestling with it, aching with doubt.

Then a voice behind her said, “There’s one!”

Lilah instantly leaped to one side, twisting in midair to land facing the way she had come, her spear ready in her strong hands.

Thirty feet down the path she had just come stood a pair of men dressed in black with red streamers tied to their clothes.

Reapers.

Lilah gaped.

Not at the reapers, but at the figures who milled behind them.

Zoms!

There were at least a half dozen of the living dead—men, women, even a child. All newly dead, some of them glistening with blood that had not yet dried.

Lilah’s heart sank. Now she knew what had happened to the other people who had camped here. The zoms moaned in freshly awakened hunger. They staggered through the tall grass, hands reaching awkwardly toward her, completely ignoring the two reapers as they shuffled past.

“Hey, girl!” yelled one of the reapers. “Drop your spear and give yourself up to the darkness. It wants you. The darkness wants to open the red door in your flesh. Why fight it? The darkness is beautiful. The darkness is eternal. The darkness is yours if you stop fighting and allow it to enfold you.”