And so I ran toward the sound of the barking. Blocks away. I was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and a Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt that was several sizes too small, and boat shoes that were too big. No weapons at all. My mind hadn’t recovered enough for that to have been a thing. Barehanded. Stupid with shock. Running toward the sound of a frightened dog and endless hungry moans.

When I rounded a corner by the Antietam Tractor and Equipment store in Hagerstown, I nearly ran into a shambler. In life this person had been a cop of some kind—deputy or state trooper—but now there were only rags left of a tan uniform. He wore a gunbelt, though, but no gun. A rubber baton, the kind with the handle jutting out at a right angle, based on the old Okinawan tonfa, was looped through his belt. I skidded to a stop. Beyond him was a throng of dead ones all clustered around an overturned Ram Mega-cab four-wheel-drive pickup. The dog stood on the top, on the passenger door, just out of reach of the grasping hands.

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.