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.

It was brutal work. I don’t know how many there were. Fifteen? Twenty?

I had so much rage in me. Grief is a terrible fuel because it burns hot and never seems to burn out. Frustration stokes that fire. Desperation pours gasoline on it. And yet beneath all that were skills honed over a lifetime in jujutsu, the police, the army and then Special Forces. I am a killer, and I proved it right there, witnessed only by a dog and the milky eyes of the undead.

I killed them all.

Every single one.

There was a strange time of stillness afterward. The dog stood on the overturned truck and stared at me. I stood and looked up at him. Maybe neither of us was all that sure we recognized the other. It was that kind of world. Birds sat in rows on telephone wires and the edges of roofs and watched us.

I cleared my throat and then spat dust and fear onto the ground.

“Baskerville,” I said. Not a question. Saying his name. Letting him hear it and know it. Then he did something that absolutely broke my heart.

He wagged his tail.

That was six months ago. That was when he didn’t die, and I no longer wanted to.

— 2 —: THE WARRIOR WOMAN

— 2 —