Baskerville sniffed around and seemed content that all was kosher, but then a breeze rolled our way from deep within the trees. The dog lifted his big head and sniffed it and immediately went into his aggressive fighting stance—wide-legged, head lowered, ears pivoting to hear everything, nose sniffing out the complexities of odor. I smelled it, too. A sickly-sweet stink I knew too well. Rotting flesh. But there was something else mixed in, an underlying strangeness or something.

The dead rot for a bit, but they don’t completely decay. The genetically-altered parasites prevent that, keeping the infected in a state near death but not actually dead. You see, that’s the thing. There are the living, the actual dead, and the living dead. It’s a third state of existence. The body is in a semi-hibernative state, with all nonessential organs and tissues shut down so that the essential systems can stay online. There is actually some respiration and blood flow, though it is almost impossible to detect. Otherwise the zombies would have rotted to piles of goo within a week or two after the outbreak.

The upshot of this is that the stench of decay for them is different than that of an ordinary human body left to rot. It isn’t as sweet because the parasites need the energy of those sugars.

The smell riding the forest breeze was very sweet. Which meant that it was not infected flesh. It could be an animal, although most animals have their own aromatic signature if you have the experience to discern one from the other. This smelled like human flesh.

I touched Baskerville’s shoulder and bent low to whisper to him. “Find. No hit.”

He was off like a shot. In the months we’d traveled together, I’d spent hundreds of hours teaching the mutt a lot of tricks. Verbal commands, finger snaps, and silent hand signals. He didn’t yet have the vocabulary that my first combat dog, Ghost, used to have, but Baskerville was learning. He was a damn smart dog, and we were a pack now. As he vanished into the woods I took a moment to look around and let my own—admittedly less acute—human senses do their jobs. There were a lot of birds singing in the trees, including two noisy crows. There were no moans that I could hear; no voices or cries for help, either.

I left the cart where it was, loosened my sword in its sheath, and followed Baskerville.