Those broken fingers that reached for me but were unable to grab. Those broken hands. I could feel my mouth go dry. There was no other possible answer than the very bad one that was banging around in my head. Whoever had brought these people out here had crippled their hands and then tied them to these trees. They left their arms free even though there was no way these people could untie themselves or even remove the bindings on their heads to allow them to scream. It wasn’t just murder, it wasn’t just physical torture; these people had been left here to suffer. This was about torment.

All of these people had died in hunger and pain, in terror, surrounded by proof that no one else was coming, that no one else had escaped. The enormity of it was staggering. It was one of the most awful things I had ever seen, and I have seen humanity at its worst.

I wanted to throw up, but I forced it back down.

One of the dead was dressed differently than the others. He wore a heavy leather jacket with silver studs, and had leather pads on his knees and elbows. A biker, I judged. He had an enormous black beard and a crooked nose and looked like someone who, in life, was probably extremely dangerous. Now he was wasted and covered in bites and there was a lingering expression of desperation and fear on his features. I felt bad for him. I felt sick for all of them.

Baskerville must have caught my mood because he stood next to me, growling softly. He wasn’t directing it toward the thrashing corpses. He kept looking into the woods, and I realized that he was studying a narrow path of beaten grass that wandered between trees and vanished into shadow. In the direction of Happy Valley.

“Well, well,” I said, but my voice sounded wrong. A little too calm. A bit too ordinary. That was never a good sign. I took a couple of determined steps in that direction, but then I stopped as something occurred to me. I turned and stood looking at the dead faces.

The unlife that is the effect of Lucifer 113 tends to make the skin pale and leathery, creating a kind of homogenized sameness to skin tone. But it’s not really the same. The gray pallor is more often a product of dying skin cells and accumulated dust. Beneath it are the remnants of actual color. White and yellow, brown and black.

Except when I looked around me, I didn’t see any zombie who looked like they might have been white. I saw two Asian faces and a whole lot of shades of brown. Latino and African American.

None of them were white.

Which meant what?

Could those Nu Klux Klan sons of bitches have a chapter out here? Or was it something else?