There was another presence inside my head. Not a voice per se, though it did sometimes whisper to me. Usually at night when I was deep in a nightmare re-creation of Christmas Eve. Watching Santoro, dressed in a Santa hat and beard, deliver a box to my brother, Sean. Handing it to him. Smiling as he drove away in his stolen FedEx truck. The memory of my brother carrying the box inside, likely to set it down so his hands would be free for hugs with me and Junie Flynn. And then my realization that the port-wine stain on the FedEx driver’s face was not that at all but a healing bruise from the fight we’d had in Norway. The package exploded, killing everyone inside the house, nearly killing Junie, and Ghost, and me. And in the weeks of recovery that followed, I became aware of that new presence. Not another facet of my splintered personality. Nothing as sane as that. No, this was like a sentient and lightless cloud of dark energy that was trying to take possession of me, body, mind, and soul. A pernicious shadow thing born of a loss so deep that I could not and cannot process it. In the lexicon of my own damage, I called it the Darkness.

As the screaming people closed around us and we fired the tranquilizer darts at them, the Darkness kept trying to pull my hand down, to make me holster or drop the Snellig and reach for the Sig Sauer with its full magazine of copper-jacketed hollow-points.

That ache, that temptation, that need was so damned strong, and so much of me wanted to give in to it. Out of a weariness of fighting it. And out of a desire to be it.

The last of the technicians fell, and there was a moment of an awful silence. We were surrounded by a wall of bodies. There was no haze of gun smoke or shuddering gasps of the dying. The people lay in heaps, each of them sleeping.

Almost all of them were bloody, though, just not from us.

Rage is not targeted. It doesn’t direct the infected toward an enemy. All humans were the enemy, and so before we’d entered the scene, they had been attacking one another. Beyond the ring of unconscious people were a half dozen corpses, some badly dismembered. One man had almost no head, and from the shape of the pulped mass of what was left, someone had stomped his head to jelly. A woman lay against a row of filing cabinets, her skirt pushed up and her legs spread so wide they’d clearly become dislocated. She had been violated with a long-barreled flashlight. A man had dozens of pencils shoved into each of his eye sockets.

“Psycho wombat balls,” breathed Andrea.

Bunny shook his head. “Fuck me sideways.”