He was a brute. A monstrous mix of white shepherd and Irish wolfhound. One hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and fang.

I stood there and stared.

It was Baskerville.

He caught sight of me and for a moment we gaped at each other across a sea of the dead. His pale coat was crisscrossed with cuts and crusted with blood and dirt, but he looked strong. Terrified, too, because there was no way for him to get down from his perch without being torn to pieces. Against a pack of living people, he might actually have stood a chance because they bleed, they feel pain, and they would be individually terrified of the dog. The dead have none of those vulnerabilities. They are simply driven by an all-consuming need to feast on the flesh of the living. Human, animal, insect. Anything except plants. They don’t tire and they don’t fear anything at all. Given time, they would pull Baskerville down and eat him.

Like I said, I was unarmed and more than half out of my mind.

But something in me was awake now. I am not a normal person. I’m not nice and I’m not sane. Even before all this shit. At best I’m usefully batshit crazy, and I have done awful things more times than I could count. Not to the innocent. No. My kind of crazy edges a different way. If you’re a bad guy? Different story.

I could feel something shift inside my skull and inside my chest. Here was an animal I knew. A dog. Alive. More than that, he was the grandson of the best dog I ever had. Ghost. A true hero dog.

All of this was processed in my brain in less than a microsecond. The dead cop was still turning toward me, just beginning his reach for my throat when I went from shock to action. I bashed his arms aside, spun him, grabbed his chin and the back of his hair and gave his head a vicious sideways twist. In the movies everyone seems able to do this, to break a neck. It’s actually extremely hard because the neck muscles don’t want to turn that far, and the bones don’t want to break. You have to know how to do it, and you have to put real speed and muscle into it. Which I did.

I let go and snatched the baton from his belt loop as he puddled down.

Then I was moving.

I am over six feet tall and over two hundred pounds. Even with days of hysterical madness, dehydration and starvation, I was fit and fast and strong. They had no consciousness, no understanding of how to fight. They turned toward noise and movement; they howled out their hunger; they surged toward me.

A fool rushes into the center of a crowd. I fought the edges of it, moving, moving, moving. Turning and deflecting, knocking them into one another, never remaining still and so never getting caught. I used the club to smash arms and break knees. Even the living dead need their bones intact in order to stand, walk, grab, hold. I smashed skulls, aiming as often as I could for the base of the skull, working to damage the nerve conduction down the brain stem. They stumbled and fell. Some of them died.