He groaned, rolled onto his side, spat dirt out of his mouth, and clawed spiderwebs out of his eyes.

“Yeah, warrior smart,” he muttered.

The bottom of the ravine was much wider than the top and thick with mud, and Benny quickly understood that it was not a true ravine but a gorge cut by water runoff from the mountains. During the times of heaviest runoff, the flowing water had undercut edges of the slope above, creating the illusion of solid ground.

If he had kept running after he had leaped the gorge he would be safe. Instead he’d turned to gloat. Not exactly warrior smart.

Warrior dumb-ass, he thought darkly.

As he lay there, his mind began to play tricks on him. Or at least he thought it was doing something twisted and weird. He heard sounds. First it was his own labored breathing and the moans of the dead above him, but, no . . . there was something else.

It was a distant roar that sounded—impossible as that was—like the hand-crank generator that ran the power in the hospital back home. Still half-buried in the dirt, he cocked his head to listen. The sound was definitely there, but it wasn’t exactly like the hospital generator. This whined at a higher pitch, and it surged and fell away, surged and fell away.

Then it was gone.

He strained to hear it, trying to decide if it was really a motor sound or something else. There were all kinds of birds and animals out there, weird stuff that had escaped zoos and circuses, and Benny had read about exotic animal sounds. Was that what he’d heard?

No, said his inner voice, it was a motor.

Suddenly there was a soft sound from above, and a huge pile of loose dirt cascaded down on Benny, burying him almost to the neck. He began fighting his way out, but then he heard another sound and he looked, expecting to see more of the wall collapsing on him, but what he saw was far, far worse. The leading wave of pursuing zoms had reached the edge of the ravine, and the land had crumbled under their combined weight. Four zombies pitched over the edge and fell into the darkness with jarring crunches, the nearest one landing only six feet away.

Then another zombie—a teenage girl dressed in the rags of a cheerleader outfit—dropped right in front of Benny, striking the ground with a thud that was filled with the brittle crunch of breaking bones. The cheerleader’s gray and dusty eyes were open, and her mouth bit the air.

Broken bones wouldn’t kill a zom. Benny knew that all too well, and he dug through the loose dirt to find the hilt of his sword.