“Oh fucking hell,” Angela said. When Lilou glanced at her she felt a surge of anger towards her for bringing them into this. She’d taken them from the safe, boring cabin in the woods and put them in danger once again. If they got out of this, she would make her pay.

Bone led them as if he knew the layout of the drowned town, glancing around as he ran, moving confidently left and right until he signalled them to stop.

“There,” he said, pointing at a low mass from which a brick wall protruded.

“What’s that?”

“Convenience store. It had a big walk-in fridge out back.”

“There’s no way that’ll still be in one piece,” Lilou said.

“We can see.”

They slipped past the wall and into what had once been a large store. Like all the remains in the town it was open to the elements now—roof gone, walls fallen, nothing recognisable inside. The uneven surface of cracked, dried mud hid anything that might have survived, but Bone led them towards a higher mound near the back, to one side of which a tall thick wall still stood solid.

“This way,” he said. “I think.”

“Sammi,” Angela said, and she hated that she was asking anything like this of the girl. Sammi grabbed her hand. It felt hot. Her skin was burning, and Angela noticed for the first time that the trace-work of fern-like scars had emerged once again on her forearm. The memory of the lightning strikes had come to the fore.

“I’m still not sure,” Sammi said, and she sounded so lost.

“Get sure,” Bone said. “Francine’s here.”

The ragged werewolf had mounted a small hillock close to the store’s remains, and now it stood looking down upon them, breathing hard, mucus and dust dribbling from its nose. It displayed no human attributes that Angela could make out. The sounds it made, the way it stood, indicated that its greatest desire right then was to eat them.

“Look at its eyes,” Lilou said, and Angela looked closer. The werewolf’s eyes seemed to glow a gentle yellow, as if backlit with a flashlight. The yellow dripped, a discharge that left twin sticky trails down either side of its long, thin snout.

It looked sick and old, furious and hungry.

“That’s the infection,” Bone said. “Don’t let her bite you. Don’t let her scratch you.”

“You’ve seen this before,” Angela said.

“She’s going to jump,” Bone said. “You have to keep her occupied.”

“It’ll be occupied eating my face off.”

Bone went for the thick wall, picking up something that might have been an old metal chair leg. He started scraping and hacking at the mound of silt washed up and hardened against the facade, and within a few seconds Angela heard a sharp rapping sound.