Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

We flew into the night, knowing that no matter where we went or what happened, this was the world now.

And it wasn’t our world anymore.

— 17 —

NOW

You can’t outfly an electromagnetic pulse.

We tried.

We saw the flash over San Diego and we poured it on.

By then Air Force One was well out of range, flying at thirty thousand feet, punching along at five hundred miles an hour. We opened the throttle to the never-exceed speed of two-hundred and twenty-two miles per hour, but we flew low over the landscape.

The EMP rode the shockwaves and chased us like a pack of dogs. It killed the bird. Killed the avionics, the motors. Everything. The rotors stopped turning with anything except wind friction.

And we fell.

Fell.

All the way down.

Maybe if we’d been luckier the crash would have killed the three of us. But, we haven’t been lucky in a long time.

I stood there, watching the bird burn. Watching the sky burn. Feeling the blood run in lines down my face, my chest, my arms. Listening to the howling wind. Listening to the hungry moans.

Top and Bunny were hurt. We all were. Hurt. Not dead.

I slapped a fresh magazine into my Beretta and raised it as the first of the shambling figures broke through the wall of smoke.

Not dead yet. Not them. Not dead like they’re supposed to be. And we were still alive, too. Death sang its mournful, tuneless songs in the moans of the things that came to us. Death sang, but we did not know the songs, did not know those lyrics. Not yet.

Not goddamn yet.

We raised our guns at the unstoppable wave of death.

“Well,” I said, “fuck it.”

Top and Bunny laughed. Actually laughed. So did I.

We fired.

PART TWO

FAT GIRL WITH A KNIFE

JONATHAN MABERRY

DURING THE OUTBREAK

— 1 —

Dahlia had a pretty name, but she knew she wasn’t pretty.

Kind of a thing with the girls in her family. None of the Allgood girls were making magazine covers.

Her oldest sister, Rose, was one of those college teacher types. Tall, thin, meatless, kind of gray-looking, with too much nose, no chin at all, and eyes that looked perpetually disappointed. She taught art history, so there was that. No one she taught would ever get a job in that field. There probably weren’t jobs in that field. When was there ever a want-ad for art historian?

The sister between Rose and her was named Violet. She was the family rebel. Skinny because that’s what drugs do; but not skinny in any way that made her look good. Best thing you could say about how she looked was that she looked dangerous. Skinny like a knife blade. Cold as one too. And her moods and actions tended to leave blood on the walls. Her track record with “choices” left her parents bleeding year after year. Violet was in Detroit now. Out of rehab again. No one expected it to stick.