“Better just to keep your head down, keep your nose to yourself. For us, and for you and your friends. You don’t want them knowing you’re poking around. You’ll get us in trouble, you’ll get yourself in trouble. And you don’t want that, ma’am.”

Rachael watched the workers all turn away, pretending she didn’t exist, and her heart sank. This wasn’t the world she wanted. Not at all.

— 19 —: THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG

— 19 —

THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG

There was movement in the clearing, but there was no threat.

Well, not an immediate one. So much was implied, though. I kept my palm resting on the handle of my sword, but this was less of a combat situation than it was a crime scene. I was a cop before I was a soldier, but really anyone could tell that bad things had been done here.

This wasn’t a slaughter scene of the kind I’d seen a thousand times since the dead rose. It wasn’t zombies versus human survivors. It wasn’t gangs of roaming asshole humans doing harm, either. Seen enough of that, too.

No, this was something else. Something wrong in an entirely different way. Maybe something evil.

With Baskerville beside me I walked into the clearing and stood there, turning in a slow circle, trying not to vomit.

There were bodies there. Maybe forty of them. They were not sprawled on the ground as they might have been after a battle. There was no sign of a fight here at all. And yet there was violence and death everywhere I looked.

The bodies stood around me. They looked at me. They reached for me with withered arms and grasping hands. Their eyes stared with that grotesque blend of vacuity and hunger.

They were all zombies.

They were all tied to trees.

But it was worse than that.

None of them could open their mouths. Not to scream, not to moan, not to bite. You see, someone had made that impossible. There were ropes or belts or strips of leather tied around their heads, the loops under the chins and neat bows or shiny buckles on the crowns of each head.

Ropes lashed them each to a separate tree, with coils of it around waists and chests, leaving the legs free to kicks and stamp, and the arms free to . . .

To do what?

I stopped by one of them—a woman of about thirty, with long black hair and Mexican features. I studied every detail and the more I looked the more bizarre the evidence became, painting a picture that was as strange as it was hideous.