I heard grunts of desperation and whimpers of pain. I heard the moans. And I heard the heavy thud of something hitting flesh—crushing it, breaking bone. Hitting again.

Baskerville moved into line-of-eyesight with me and I gave him two hand signals—a loose hand and then a cutting motion. The loose indicated that he was allowed to attack the zombies, and the cut was to remind him to use his body armor. We’d spent thousands of hours over the last six months on that. He was smart and experienced and he wanted to fight.

He ran, and I ran.

On the far side of the copse there were three living people and nine zombies. All three of the living were bleeding. All three had already been bitten.

They were dying; they were lost. I saw one of them, a medium-sized guy with brown skin and an Arab face. He saw me and hope flared for one terrible moment before it was replaced by a clear awareness that we weren’t going to be able to save him.

Baskerville and I attacked anyway.

— 5 —: DAHLIA AND THE PACK

— 5 —

DAHLIA AND THE PACK

Dahlia liked being the queen. She deserved to be the queen. Not that she called herself that, or required any of the members of the Pack to call her that, but it’s how she thought of herself. Queen of the Apocalypse.

Besides, probably everyone who was an actual queen was dead. Ditto for kings, princes and princesses, dukes, earls, and all of those royals. The same was likely true of presidents and prime ministers. Dead. If any of them were alive, they were keeping a low freaking profile about it. The news reporters said that the President of the United States was going to give a speech one night, but that never happened. Air Force One went down somewhere. Nevada, maybe, if the reporters were right; but you couldn’t ask them, because they were dead, too. She’d actually watched MSNBC the night Rachel Maddow bit the throat out of that guy with the glasses and bowtie. The news went off the air after that, and nothing came back on. Not even the Emergency Broadcast thing, and that’s what it was supposed to be for. Times like this.

Except, there really weren’t times like this, were there? Never before, and definitely not now. Or ever.

The world was dead. Mostly.

Practically everyone she knew was dead. There were a couple of people in her Pack who’d been kids in her own school, but they weren’t friends. Not family either.

All dead. All eaten down to the bone or walking around looking for warm meals. Not her family, though. She’d seen to that. Knife to the head. Mom, aunts, all of them. Knife, knife, knife. The actual mechanics of it had been easy. After the first time it was rinse and repeat.