There was no answer. No sounds inside. No signs of movement.

Using her police training, Isabel kicked the door and burst inside with her flashlight and service pistol at the ready. This shack had been slightly upgraded compared to most of the others. She had seen to that, wanting her boy to have a better life than sleeping in the dirt. She saw Tyler’s birth mother’s body where she had been sleeping on a pull-out couch.

Isabel fought the urge to vomit.

They were all dead.

But she still had to see for herself. She ran toward the back of the shack where Tyler had his own “room,” the size of a small closet. Still, her boy loved having his own space. She saw the blood coming out from beneath Tyler’s door, and she knew.

There was nothing more she needed to see. Constable Isabel Price of the South African Police Service, or SAPS, had seen enough crime scenes and enough victims and enough pools of blood to know when someone was not walking away. And she knew that Tyler—like his birth mother, like everyone else inside this all-white South African squatter camp—was dead.

Isabel stumbled out into the crisp morning air, knocking over half the furniture in her wake. She felt the whole world spinning. This had to be a dream. A nightmare. Any second she would wake up in the hospital after having endured a car crash or a gunshot wound or a brain aneurysm, and she would realize that this whole scene had been nothing but a bad dream brought on by some slightly less horrible trauma.

But this felt real. Too real.

She didn’t know what to think or believe. She just fell to her knees in the middle of the dirt path, dropping her pistol and her flashlight and not caring about dirtying up her nice, new pantsuit. She crawled through the dirt, weeping, her tears flooding down her face and staining the ground.

She didn’t scream or say a word.

Constable Isabel Price merely fell over on her side and curled up into a ball. Then she closed her eyes and prayed to wake up from the nightmare.

But all she could think about was Tyler. Her boy. With his head, hands, and feet chopped off. Just like the nearly 300 other residents of the camp.

Chapter 2

One month later …

He heard the low growls before he saw the beasts. The sound of paws in dirt, bushes rustling. Then the roars and the screams. He ran, and one stepped in front of him and Zarina. It batted a paw, toying with them more than attacking. His mother shrieked and dove at the beast, yelling for him to run. He felt warm blood on his clothes, but didn’t know to whom it belonged. He ran and hid and listened as his mother was eaten alive.

But since the recent deaths he had witnessed in a South African squatter camp, the dream had changed.