We stopped on the near side of a gully about a mile into some overgrown woods. All around us the birds had fallen silent. Never a good sign. The sounds of some kind of fight were coming from the other side of a thick stand of maple trees, with the gully in between. Baskerville wanted to run, his body quivered with that kind of excitement, but he wasn’t running yet. Not because I’d given him the command to stay, but because his instincts were at war with his desire to fight. This was a combination I’d seen in him time and again. It meant that there were living and dead threats.

Before the run-in with the NKK goon squad, I’d go running in any time I thought a living person was fighting for his or her life. That’s when I naively thought that the worst things out here were the zombies. The sad truth is that the living dead have no choice in what they do; they’re driven by parasites and there is no human control left at all. No will, no choice, no animus. It’s totally different with the living. When they bring hurt and harm, when they rape and steal and beat and torture, it’s because they want to. People have always scared me more than any of the monsters I’ve ever fought.

I clicked my tongue for him and we moved forward more slowly, going down one slope, stepping across the narrow trickle of runoff from yesterday’s rain, and then climbing the far side. An old oak climbed precariously to the edge with too many of its roots exposed by erosion. Worked for me, though, and I used the thickest ones as handholds. Baskerville ran slantwise up the slope and met me at the top, looking pleased with himself.

I scrambled over the edge and we went off around the copse of trees, but we didn’t get far before the shape of things began to emerge. Bodies lay tangled in the tall grass and weeds. Some of them were pale and withered, gray-skinned and bearing the marks of the bites that had killed them the first time and the blunt-force trauma that had stilled them forever. Mixed in among them were bodies painted in blood, with throats torn out or such traumatic injuries that blood loss killed them. These bodies twitched and jerked as the parasites transferred into them from the bites sought to rewire the central nervous system. Soon all of them would rise and join the fight, changing sides from defenders to relentless attackers.

That’s how we lost. Every one of us that died became one of them.

There were no gunshots. Ammunition was rare. In the old monster movies, the heroes never seemed to run out unless it was for dramatic effect. In the real world, you could burn through three or four full mags in a minute or two.