There was blood caked on her hands; dried now but clearly having run red and thick from the smashed fingers and metacarpals. Edges of bone stuck out through the skin and blood had crusted thick around them, dried now to a chocolate brown. There were bloody scrapes all over her face, and more blood on the ropes that held her to the tree and on the heavy leather belt cinched tight to keep her jaw shut. Her dead eyes were filmed over with a blue-white mist, but I swore I could see the last fading echoes of the panic and terror she’d felt as she died.

There was not a single bite on her that I could see. Not one.

The zombie thrashed and flopped and struggled but she was powerless to do anything. Not a goddamn thing. And instead of feeling scared by it, I felt a trapdoor of sadness open up in the bottom of my soul. Her smashed hands reached for me but there was so much damage to nerves and tendons that even if I was closer she couldn’t have grabbed me. She couldn’t do anything.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. There were mad lights in her eyes. Most people say that once a person turns there is nothing at all left of them inside. I don’t believe that. I think it’s far, far worse than merely having died of an infection and then having your body reanimated and hijacked by genetically engineered parasites. That kind of thing should, by any measure of reason, be worst case scenario. It wasn’t, though. Lingering self-awareness was so much worse, and I thought it’s what I saw; but there was no way to test the theory. There was no way to reach from where I was to where she was. No way on earth.

I turned away. Call it grief or cowardice or the impotence of being unable to help. I moved from one to another to another of them and saw the same thing in each case. The hands were mangled. Smashed. Fingers broken and twisted. Wrists cracked. None of them had bites. All of them were injured, though. I could see evidence of broken noses, cracked and broken teeth, bruises that were faded now to black smudges beneath leathery skin, broken bones, facial trauma.

But no bites.

The math was scaring me. It was making me sick, too. I counted them. I was wrong about there being about forty. There were fifty-three of them. They were thin, wasted, but their clothes were the wrong size for people who had been skinny. These people had been starved.

No. That’s imprecise. These people had been starved to death. They had been left to die out here from starvation and exposure.

But it went deeper than that. It was worse than that.