But the mechanics were the smallest part. It was Mom. It was her family. Dahlia had screamed and screamed and screamed. And thrown up. And gone black inside. For days. Curled up on the floor of her living room, surrounded by dead things that she used to love.

It was her own hunger that brought her back. Not hunger for flesh, but a raw hunger for anything. She woke up, covered in sweat and dried blood, smeared with her own piss and shit, trembling and alone. For a while all she could do was lie there and watch the flies as they flew in endless patterns through the broken front window, crawled over the faces of her family, and flew out through the open front door. Like a machine. Like a video on some kind of loop.

Then Dahlia heard voices and when she got up, she saw that the kids she’d saved at school—the ones who followed her here—were sitting around the table in the kitchen. They’d eaten their way through most of the food in the cabinets. They were drunk off the bottles from the upper shelves. They hadn’t gone away, but they hadn’t helped her, either. They waited like idiots for her to snap out of it and tell them what to do.

Weak, trembling, faint with hunger and dehydration, Dahlia had nevertheless beaten the shit out of all of them. Five of them. They didn’t even try to fight back. They screamed and wept and cowered, but they didn’t fight back. She kicked their asses and left them all bleeding on the floor. Then she staggered upstairs, found that the water—against all expectations—was still on. No heat, though. She took a cold shower, screaming into the stinging spray. The water washed away the filth and the blood and the acid stains of her own tears.

Later, dressed in clean clothes, she went downstairs to find the five of them sitting at the table. Wounds dressed, eyes crusted with dried tears, faces turned toward hers like kicked dogs hoping for a forgiving pat.

That’s when Dahlia understood that she had to be a queen. Their queen. She had to keep them alive because left to themselves they were going to die. Three girls, two boys—both of who towered over her. None of whom had ever been nice to her in school. Maybe that’s why they took their beatings. Maybe they knew it was their due.

Whatever.

That was then.

Now she had the Pack.