Chapters (52)
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Epilogue
- An excerpt from Halfway to the Grave
- An excerpt from One Foot in the Grave
- An excerpt from At Grave’s End
- An excerpt from Destined for an Early Grave
- An excerpt from This Side of the Grave
- An excerpt from One Grave at a Time
- About the Author
- By Jeaniene Frost
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Then we went back underground and torched the rest of the facility. My DNA was on file with these people, and I didn’t want to leave more of it as proof that I’d been involved in the destruction even though I’d be the first, second, and third guess for Madigan’s shadowy backers. That’s why I was calling my mother as soon as I had a working cell phone. Madigan might have been bluffing about her being at our old house in Ohio, but if he wasn’t, I wasn’t about to test his drone strike threat. If we were ridiculously lucky, Madigan’s backers would believe the cover story we implanted in the survivors’ minds: an internal malfunction triggered the Dante machine’s explosion, which ignited other flammable gases in the compound and resulted in a fiery chain reaction.
It was a plausible theory unless someone bothered to autopsy all the bodies.
Madigan still hadn’t woken up yet. The delay wasn’t unheard of, Bones told me, but it didn’t bode well for his chances of rising as a ghoul. Most did within minutes, as Dave had. Maybe Madigan had managed to escape us after all. If so, I could only console myself that he wouldn’t escape God.
So, blood-spattered and weary, the seven of us emerged from the igloo that contained the secret elevation shaft. Spade was waiting nearby since Fabian gave him the all clear to enter the wildlife area. The ghost had been overjoyed to see we were all alive and well since, like me, he hadn’t known that my arrival with my husband’s corpse had been a setup.
That was something I intended to address as soon as I was alone with Bones. Right now, we had to walk out of here without getting stopped by reinforcements, then we had to search for a pint-sized, multi-species pre-tween who might be the deadliest thing on two legs.
What we didn’t need was to encounter a group of young, wannabe cryptozoologists who were wandering around the preserve swapping Mothman stories.
“I’m tellin’ ya, right there I saw something,” a freckled boy wearing an “I want to believe” tee shirt was saying as he pointed at a sealed igloo.
He stopped talking when he saw us. The three girls and two boys he was with at first stared, then giggled nervously.
What happened to them? Is that blood? raced through their thoughts.
I was about to start mesmerizing the group when Denise spoke.
“You’ve got to try zombie larping,” she said to them. “It’s the only way to live-action role-play.”
“Ah.”