She felt something poking her slipper, tap-tap-tap. She saw blood there—red blood—and realized she had nicked herself somehow, her left arm, though she felt no pain. She raised it for inspection, dripping fat, red plops onto the plywood.

White?

She saw something dark and small, slithering. She was bleary-eyed and blinking, still in the grip of a homicidal rage. She couldn’t trust her sight.

She felt an itch on her ankle, underneath her bloody slipper. The itch crawled up her leg and she swatted at her thigh with the flat side of the sticky white blade.

Then—another tickle on the front of her other leg. And—separately—her waist. She realized she was having some sort of hysterical reaction, as if bugs were attacking her. She stumbled back another step, and almost tumbled off the plywood walkway.

There was then a most unnerving wriggling sensation around her crotch—and then a sudden, twisting discomfort in her rectum. An intrusive slithering that made her jump and clench her buttocks, as though she were about to soil herself. Her sphincter dilated and she stood that way for a long moment, paralyzed, until the feeling started to fade. She allowed herself to unclench, to relax. She needed to get to a bathroom. Another wriggle distracted her, inside her blouse sleeve now. And she felt a burning itch over the cut in her arm.

Then a wrenching pain, from deep within her bowels, doubled her over fast. The machete fell to the plywood and a scream that was a shriek of anguish and violation came out of Glory’s mouth. She felt something rippling up her arm—beneath her flesh now, her skin crawling—and while her mouth was open and still screaming, another thin capillary worm slithered from behind her neck and across her jaw to her lip, darting inside the wall of her cheek, wriggling down the back of her throat.

Freeburg, New York

NIGHT WAS FAST approaching as Eph drove east, over the Cross Island Parkway, into Nassau County.

Eph said, “So you’re telling me that the passengers from the city morgues, the ones the entire city is looking for—they all just went home?”

The old professor sat in the backseat with his hat on his lap. “Blood wants blood,” he said. “Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their ‘Dear Ones.’ Like a homing instinct, I suppose. The same animal impulse that guides lost dogs hundreds of miles back to their owners. As their higher brain function falls away, their animal nature takes over. These are creatures driven by urges. To feed. To hide. To nest.”

“Returning to the people who are mourning them,” said Nora, sitting next to Eph in the front passenger seat. “To attack and infect?”

“To feed. It is the nature of the undead to torment the living.”