Dedication

For Melissa

Epigraph

I’m the earth, I’m the water you walk on

I’m the sun and the moon and the stars

Phantogram, “Mister Impossible”

Flower-guided it was

That they came as they ran

On something that lay

In the shape of a man.

Robert Frost, “Spoils of the Dead”

Oh, the thinks you can think up

if only you try!

Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

Prologue

When they came to kill the Zed, it was a nice day.

It was Illinois, probably, or one of those states that start with an I. Indiana. Iowa. wIsconsin. Fields, but not the postcard kind. No picturesque barns. No aesthetically rusted farm equipment. Just stubbled field. The sky was very blue. The rubbled end-of-season wheat fields were very bright and pale. Everything was very clear. It was like an ocean vacation, without the ocean. Bisecting the landscape was a highway: very flat, very straight, gray-white with salt.

A single vehicle was visible, a semi truck with a clean red cab and a trailer that read LIVING SOLUTIONS • ATLANTA • NEW YORK • NASHVILLE. These words were accompanied by a black-and-white line drawing of an Edwardian chair, but there were no chairs inside the truck. They were inside it. The Moderators. The home team, the winning team, the ones who were working hard every day to keep the end of the world at bay. Or at least that was what the writing on the tin promised: an assemblage of reasonable adults gathered together to stop a supernatural menace most people were unaware existed—Zeds.

Zed, as in z, as in zzzzz, as in sleep, which was when Zeds became weapons. Zed, as in zero, as in how much of the world would be left if the Moderators didn’t step in.

Not many noble callings left in the world, but surely this was one.

Bellos drove the furniture truck, even though he had freshly lost his arm. Ramsay rode in the passenger seat. He was picking his nose and wiping it on the door in an aggressive way, daring Bellos to say something. Bellos did not. He had other things to think about, like missing his arm. He also thought about the creatures that had torn it off in Declan Lynch’s townhome not too long before. Those hounds! Inky black hounds with eyes and mouths of baleful fire, the stuff of myth. What had come first? Had Zeds dreamt the monsters who became the thing of legend? Or had legends inspired the Zeds to make the imaginary reality?

Somewhere, he was thinking, those monsters still existed. Solid and gas, living and deathless. They followed entirely different rules than humanity, so humanity couldn’t defeat them.

This was why the Zeds had to die. They were breaking everything.