Date: 2020-06-22 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Thriller; Post-Apocalyptic | Infected
Description: IT BEGINS WITH A BREAK. Today is the biggest day of Cole Ristler’s life. He’s about to join his wife and unborn child in retirement, an event he didn’t think would ever happen. It’s a cause for celebration, and all that’s left is the ride home. Unfortunately for Cole, the world has other plans. When an unknown phenomenon strikes the planet, man becomes its own worst enemy, transforming into rabid crazies that strike out at the nearest victim, seemingly driven by a single urge: Kill. Cole and a handful of individuals were left mysteriously unaffected. They don’t know why, but more importantly,
Publisher: Independently published

The Break

Fall of Man Book 1

Sam Sisavath

The Break

Copyright © 2020 by Sam Sisavath

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC
www.roadtobabylon.com

Edited by Jennifer Jensen, Wendy Chan & Grace Kastens

Cover Art by Creative Paramita

Contents

The Fall of Man Series

Also by Sam Sisavath

About The Break

Day 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Day 2

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Day 3

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

From The Author

The Fall of Man Series

The Break

Homefront (2020)

Firebase (Late 2020)

Also by Sam Sisavath

The Purge of Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

The Gates of Byzantium

The Stones of Angkor

The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)

The Fires of Atlantis

The Ashes of Pompeii

The Isles of Elysium

The Spears of Laconia

The Horns of Avalon

The Bones of Valhalla

Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)

The Road to Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

Glory Box

Bombtrack

Rooster

Devil’s Haircut

Black

The Distance

Hollow

Daybreak

The Ranch

100 Deep

The After The Purge: Vendetta Trilogy

Requiem

Tokens

Remains

The After The Purge: AKA John Smith Series

Mist City

Run or Fight

Shoot Last

The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series

Hunter/Prey

Saint/Sinner

Finders/Keepers

Savior/Corruptor

The Red Sky Conspiracy Series

Most Wanted

The Devil You Know

About The Break

IT BEGINS WITH A BREAK.

Today is the biggest day of Cole Ristler’s life. He’s about to join his wife and unborn child in retirement, an event he didn’t think would ever happen. It’s a cause for celebration, and all that’s left is the ride home.

Unfortunately for Cole, the world has other plans.

When an unknown event strikes the planet, man becomes its own worst enemy, transforming into rabid crazies that strike out at the nearest victim, seemingly driven by a single urge: Kill. Cole and a handful of individuals were left mysteriously unaffected. They don’t know why, but more importantly, they don’t care—because right now, it’s all about staying alive.

The city streets run red with blood as those infected by the mysterious plague seek out more victims, forcing Cole to reawaken dormant skills from a past life in order to get through the day.

Then he has to do it all over again the day after that…and the one after that…

Cole only knows one thing: He will get home to his wife and unborn child, and God help anyone that stands in his way.

Book 1 in the Fall of Man saga, a new take on post-apocalyptic horror. Are you ready? Don’t be so sure.

Day 1

Chapter 1

When the shit hit the fan and the world started to unravel, Cole Ristler was oblivious. It didn’t help that everything started, as far as anyone knew, all the way out on the East Coast. Another world away as far as Cole was concerned. A big ‘ol shit-o-nothin’ that had little to do with him.

Besides, he had other things on his mind. Today was the beginning of his life. His new life. His new new life. The retirement after the retirement.

He was starting over. Again.

So what did he care about reports of killings and murders and craziness in New York?

He did what he always did when he left work; Cole called Emily, smiling when he heard her voice. He couldn’t help himself. She sounded sleepy, which told him she had just woken up from a nap. The old Emily would have been horrified that she would be tired enough in the day to do something as nonproductive as nap, but the old Emily wasn’t six weeks pregnant with their first child.

“I woke up, and you were gone this morning. Did you get any sleep yesterday?”

“A few hours,” he lied.

“What did we say about not lying to each other?”

He smiled again. No one knew him the way she did. She could tell when he was lying even over the phone. He used to think it was some kind of psychic power, but it wasn’t. Emily just knew him better than anyone in the world. It was why he loved her, why he couldn’t bear the thought of ever being without her.

“Too big of a day,” he said. “But it’s over now, and I’ll be home soon.”

“Any regrets?”

“Just that you’re not here with me to enjoy it.”

“Work and home should always be separated, sweetheart. Besides, I’ll be here to enjoy it with you.” Then, without missing a beat, “Was there a party?”

“There was.”

“A good party?”

“It went…well.”

“Just well, or pretty well?”

“Pretty well.”

“I know it wasn’t easy…”

“It was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he said.

“Thank you, sweetheart. I know it wasn’t easy. You built that company from nothing, and to give it up now, just for me...”

“I’m not giving up anything. I’m gaining more than I could ever have imagined.”

“Be careful, mister. Talking like that will get you into my pants.”

He glanced up, grateful that Donnie could only hear his side of the conversation. He said into the phone, “Isn’t that how we got into trouble in the first place?”

She laughed. “Sounds about right. Where are you now?”

“Traffic. I’ll be home in a few hours.”

“Hurry home anyway. Even if you have to fly, get back here. I think this baby’s about to come out at any moment.”

“Listen to you, as if you were in your third trimester and not just six weeks preggers.”

“Yeah, well, tell this little monster that’s really cramping my style that. If he wasn’t the bundle of joy everyone keeps telling me he is, I would take it out on you for putting him inside me in the first place.”

“I seem to remember you had a say in that.”

“Meh. I was drunk on Pinot.”

“Excuses.”

“It’s a good excuse. That was one yummy Pinot.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a Chianti man.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “How did Roger take it?”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He took it fine, babe.”

“Still don’t believe you.”

“He doesn’t have any choice.” Then, “You’ll be a wonderful mother.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. But I’ll let it slide this time. Now, get home already. I need you here with me, mister.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I just need you here with me. Home. Where you belong.”

He smiled. “ASAP.”

“You’re damn right, ASAP. Love you.”

“Love you more,” he said, without missing a beat.

In the front seat of the Mercedes, Donnie glanced up at the rearview mirror, and the twenty-something grinned at him. Cole should have been flustered by the lovey-dovey talk in front of other people, but not today. This wasn’t like any other day. Besides, he’d said and done worse things in front of the kid. Not that Donnie was really a kid, but anyone under thirty was still a kid to Cole.

He put the phone away. “How’s the home life, Donnie?”

“Good, sir,” Donnie said, “but no one’s calling to nag me about getting home early. Oh, to be loved.”

“All good things come to those who wait.”

“Amen to that, sir.”

Donnie called everyone sir or ma’am, the product of a strict upbringing, according to the driver himself. Cole was used to it and spent his time watching a warm orange glow spreading above the city’s skyscrapers outside his tinted window. He was going to miss these long drives home.

He yawned involuntarily.

“Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, sir?” Donnie asked.

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I don’t blame you. Big day today.”

“Very big day.”

“I guess this morning is the last time I pick you up at home. Which makes now the last time I drive you home. Lots of last times today, sir.”

“All good things must end eventually, Donnie.”

“Good point, sir. I guess that’s why you’re back there, and I’m driving you around.”

“Your turn’s coming.”

“I hope so, sir. By the way, you know if it’s going to be a boy or girl?”

“Not yet. It’s still too early.”

“You happy, sir?”

“It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“You sure, sir?”

Cole smiled. “Yes.”

Unlike Emily, Donnie wasn’t quite as good at detecting his lies. Well, it was mostly a lie. Cole really didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl…but he still liked the idea of having a son anyway. It was, of course, the opposite for Emily.

“I hear that, sir,” Donnie was saying.

Less than ten minutes later, they were stuck in gridlock traffic, with at least five blocks to go before the highway entrance ramp. Donnie was tapping the steering wheel. Not impatient, because the kid was never impatient, but wiling away the time.

“Are we stuck?” Cole asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“Looks like it, sir. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“We could try going around it, sir, but…”

“But what?”

“Traffic jams everywhere today.”

“Everyone wants to get home before the weekend.”

“Nah, it’s not that, sir.”

“You know something I don’t, Donnie?”

“It’s about what happened in New York, sir.”

“What happened in New York?”

“You don’t know?”

I was too busy signing away the life I’d spent years building in order to start yet another new life, he thought, but said instead, “A little busy today. So what’s happening in New York?”

“People going a little crazy. Some guy drove his truck into a mall in the morning and killed a bunch of people. Then some young kids beating people up in Central Park. All kinds of crazy shit—Oops, sorry, sir. Crazy stuff going on out there, I mean.”

“It was on the news?”

“Yes, sir. Morning and afternoon news. You didn’t hear about it?”

Cole shook his head. “Like I said. A little busy.”

“Oh, right. Your last day and all. They threw you a party, right, sir?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Must have been a great party.”

“It wasn’t bad.”

“Anyways. About the stuff going on in New York… Must be something in the water out there, you think?”

“Must be,” Cole said. He looked down at his watch, that long-dormant impatience creeping back to the forefront. It’d been a while.

“Good thing we’re all the way over here in Flyover Land,” Donnie was saying.

“Yeah, it’s a good thing,” Cole said. “Donnie, forget about waiting. Let’s try to go around this.”

“Side streets, sir?”

“Up to you.”

“I know a few shortcuts. I never told you this, but I used to live around here, sir.”

“You never mentioned that.”

“I mean, I was never in those high-rises or anything, but we got by.”

“I’m sure you did. You never told me about your family.”

“Not much to tell, sir. Just working folks.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“No, sir, nothing at all.” Then, “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll get you home lickety-split.”

“Thanks, Donnie.”

“No. Thank you, sir.”

“For what?”

“You’ve always been super nice to me. I appreciate that, sir. My mom used to say being a good human being is doing things when you don’t have to. Like, being nice to a dumb kid that drives you around when you don’t have to.”

Cole smiled. “You’re welcome, Donnie. Pay it forward, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

Donnie leaned sideways and poked at the car’s LCD controls until a grid map of the city popped up. As he beeped his way through the options, Cole yawned again.

“It’s gonna be a long trip, sir,” Donnie said. “I’ll wake you five miles out from home.”

“Don’t forget, we’re stopping by the flower shop first.”

“Gotcha. The missus will be happy about that.”

Cole smiled, then thought about taking out his iPad and checking those strange news stories Donnie had mentioned coming out of New York, but he didn’t have the energy. Besides, everything was always bad on the news anyway. “If it bleeds, it leads,” went the journalism motto.

He leaned back against the plush seat and closed his eyes instead. He’d just rest for a bit, try to catch up on some of that sleep that had eluded him all of last night and most of this morning. He wondered if he looked as tired as he felt. At least no one in the meeting had mentioned it; though of course they could have just been too polite.

The last thing he heard was the computerized voice of the GPS telling Donnie to make a right turn in a quarter mile.

Then he went to sleep.

And while he did that, the big ‘ol shit-o-nothin’ happening on the East Coast became a very big ‘ol shit-o-somethin’ around him.

Chapter 2

“Are you really going to quit?” Roger asked.

“I’m not exactly quitting,” Cole said. “I’m selling my shares in the company and handing everything over to you. That’s not the same as quitting.”

“You’re quitting.”

“I’m not.”

“Call it whatever you want. You’re a quitter. I never took you for a quitter.”

Cole smirked. He knew what Roger was trying to do, and it wasn’t going to work. “Is my severance pay going to bounce?”

Roger laughed. “Of course not. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Just wanted to make sure.”

“You sure, now?”

“No, but if it does bounce, I know where to find you.”

Roger laughed even louder. “You think I’m scared of you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re right. Only an idiot wouldn’t be if they knew half the things I know about you.”

“Let’s keep that on the down low, okay?”

Roger rolled his eyes. It was a patented Roger eye roll, an Oh, come on, this is Roger you’re talking to maneuver. “Stay another five years, and you’ll be ten times as rich.”

“I don’t need to be ten times as rich.”

“Is that you talking or Emily?”

“Emily is me.”

His partner mimed, then made a whipping noise.

Cole chuckled. “I’m going to tell Emily you did that.”

“No, no, don’t!” Roger said. Then, slapping Cole on the shoulder, “Come on, let’s not keep your party waiting.”

“No liquor,” Cole said.

“Of course not. Everyone knows Cole Ristler only drinks Chianti.”

They walked to the door, Cole looking back at his office one last time. He had everything he needed—which was to say, nothing he couldn’t carry with him at the moment. Besides, everything he “needed” was at home. With Emily. Everything else, in this cold space, could be co-opted by the person who took over his role.

“About the company name,” Roger was saying.

“What about it?”

“Well, RistWorks won’t work anymore now that you’re gone.”

“RogerWorks?”

Roger chuckled. “That has a ring to it.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Roger laughed even harder. “Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Then, making a gesture that he wanted Cole to believe he hadn’t been thinking about it ever since Cole made his intention to sell his stake in the company known, “What about RogWorks? That’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Cole didn’t think it did, but Roger was a good friend, so he said, “RogWorks. That could work.”

* * *

When Cole opened his eyes, the Mercedes was frozen in place on one of the many cramped downtown streets. It wasn’t the side street that Donnie was supposed to have taken in order to get him back to Emily faster. Instead, the car was nose-to-back bumper with a white SUV, and neither vehicle was moving. The red taillights were faded under the dripping afternoon sun, and Cole could just barely make out the silhouette of a woman behind the bigger car’s driver’s seat.

Except the streetlights three cars down weren’t red, but green, so there was no reason for them to not be moving.

The back of Donnie’s head, just visible above the lowered headrest, was similarly frozen in place.

Cole glanced down at his watch: 5:11 p.m.

It was clear by the traffic around him that Donnie hadn’t been able to find that side street he’d promised to locate earlier. Or, if he had, then he’d returned to the main thoroughfare for some reason. Cole couldn’t even see the highway from here.

He had been stuck in rush-hour traffic enough times to know that it shouldn’t have taken two hours for them to travel from his office to the highway, and, eventually, home. So what was going on up there? Some kind of accident? At this rate, it’d be nightfall by the time he got home to Emily.

“Accident, Donnie?” Cole asked.

There was no answer from up front.

“Donnie?”

Donnie continued looking silently out the front windshield, both gloved hands on the steering wheel, the back of his head still. Had he even heard a thing Cole had said? The kid was usually incredibly responsive. Sometimes too much.

Cole looked out his window at a red Porsche in the next lane. The driver-side door was facing him, the man on the other side of the window oblivious to his gaze.

Up the street, the lights switched from green to red.

Cole waited for the cross traffic to show up, but they didn’t. He could, though, hear horns honking, so it wasn’t just him noticing that people weren’t driving when they were supposed to.

He focused back on Donnie. “Donnie.”

Nothing.

“Donnie…”

Still nothing.

Then, louder, “Donnie!”

Like shouting at a brick wall. For a moment, Cole thought the kid might have died or passed out. But no, he could actually hear Donnie’s breathing—it was slow and steady. Cole wouldn’t have been able to make it out if it wasn’t so quiet inside the car, the windows blocking out the sounds of traffic and the slow churning of the engine.

The lights switched from red to green, and still no one moved.

Not the SUV in front of them or the man in the Porsche in the other lane.

Not Donnie, either.

“Donnie…”

Cole waited another five seconds.

Then ten…

…and still no one moved.

The lights changed from green to yellow…

He glanced to his left, expecting to see vehicles coming down the other side of traffic. But there weren’t any. The two lanes were empty.

There was no movement outside, even though he could hear horns honking. More than one. A dozen. Two dozen. There were a lot of angry drivers out there, but not a single one of them was named Donnie and sitting behind the wheel of a Mercedes that was supposed to take Cole back home one final time.

He glanced behind him.

A large beat-up semi filled up the universe back there. Someone—someones—was honking their horns to get the semi moving, but the driver, like Donnie, couldn’t hear it. He seemed to be staring off at nothing. Certainly he didn’t see Cole looking at him.

Cole turned back around. “Donnie.”

No response.

Cole leaned forward and between the two front seats. “Donnie!”

That seemed to do it. Donnie lifted his head slightly, then slowly looked left, forward, before turning to his right—then he kept going until he had twisted completely around and was looking straight at Cole.

That’s not right, Cole thought at the sight of Donnie’s eyes.

They were large and bulging, flaring. Blood oozed from somewhere behind the eyes, draping around the eyeballs until it looked like the scleras were engulfed in a sea of thick, red fire that threatened to engulf the brown of Donnie’s irises and the black of his pupils. Razor-thin rivulets of blood dripped from both eyes and down his cheeks, then ran along the angles of his chin before dripping in small amounts to the armrest between the two front seats.

Donnie’s breath had accelerated noticeably, and Cole swore he could hear the twenty-something’s heartbeat sledgehammering behind his chest, pumping an abnormal amount of blood to the rest of his body. That might have been why, when Donnie lunged into the back seat, reaching for Cole’s throat, he seemed to possess superhuman speed.

That’s definitely not right!

Cole reacted instinctively by jerking backward, and Donnie would have gotten ahold of him around the neck if not for the two front seats blocking his path. The driver’s body became stuck between the seats, and for a moment—just a brief, very odd moment—Cole thought he was looking at a child unable to understand the concept of barriers.

“Donnie, what the fuck!” Cole shouted.

Donnie didn’t answer. At least, not vocally. Instead, his lips twisted into a Joker-like smile, something Cole had never seen before.

This wasn’t Donnie.

This wasn’t Donnie anymore.

“Donnie!” Cole shouted again, hoping to get through…whatever Donnie had become.

With a snarling grunt, Donnie twisted his body and slid through the two front seats. Cole darted to the left and into the car door as Donnie deposited himself into the backseat with him.

Cole spun around, shouted, “Donnie! Stop!”

Donnie twisted at the waist, bloodied eyes zeroing in on Cole. There was nothing human in those eyes. Nothing that would lead Cole to believe there was once a kid named Donnie who called everyone sir and ma’am. No, this was someone else. Something else.

A voice from somewhere in the back of Cole’s mind, that he hadn’t heard in a while, said, “He’s gone. Can’t you see he’s gone? Now what are you going to do about it?”

Donnie attacked, throwing himself across the back seat like a wild animal. Cole didn’t have time to think. He just kicked out and caught the driver in the right shoulder with the sole of his loafer. The kick was strong enough to send the kid careening into the other side of the back seat.

Not that it stopped him from spinning around like some kind of freakish contortionist, able to make his joints do impossible things even in the confines of the back seat. With something that almost resembled an animalistic growl, with thin tendrils of blood dripping down to the expensive upholstery from his eyes, Donnie lunged across the cramped back seat. His bloodied red eyes, Cole saw, had widened into almost perfect round circles, which should have been impossible.

“He’s going to kill you,” the Voice said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Cole struck out with his right arm, landing his sharp elbow into Donnie’s left cheek. That momentarily halted the kid’s forward momentum.

But again, not for very long.

Cole kicked out one more time, this time connecting with his driver’s bent right knee. A sickening crack! as something gave, and Donnie crumpled off the seat, face slamming into the hump between the two floors.

“Donnie!” Cole shouted. “Stay down!”

But the kid didn’t.

“Stupid,” the Voice said. “Just kill him already.”

No! Cole thought.

“Do it!”

No!

“Just do it!”

Cole hadn’t taken a breath before Donnie picked himself up from the floor. Blood flicked wildly from his eyes as he whipped his head right and left. A low, deep growl came out between cracked lips.

Again, his eyes zeroed in on Cole.

Fuck, Cole thought.

“That’s right,” the Voice said. “It’s either you or him. So which one will it be?”

Donnie attacked, hands stretching out for Cole’s throat.

Cole smashed the heel of his left hand into the kid’s face, heard the crunch! of the nose breaking. He followed it with his right, driving the knuckles into Donnie’s left pectoral, which seemed to stun his attacker for half a second.

Just half a second, though.

But it was all the time Cole needed to cock back his left hand and, using the door behind him to push off with, drove forward and sent his elbow straight into the side of Donnie’s neck. That produced another satisfying crack! as bone broke under the assault.

Donnie fell sideways and to the right, slumping back to the floor of the Mercedes a second time. Except he didn’t get immediately back up. His eyes stared blankly up at the pristine ceiling of the car, the pooling blood around his eyes turning the windows into his soul into some kind of grotesque domino mask.

Cole spun, reached for the door lever, and pulled it.

He stumbled outside into the crisp evening air, and it took him exactly three seconds to realize he might have been better off staying inside the Mercedes.

Chapter 3

The car almost hit him as it roared past the intersection. At the same time, the streets around him came to life, almost as if it’d been on pause all this time as he fought for his life against Donnie inside the Mercedes. But now that someone had pressed the play button, the world came suddenly awake in a heartbeat, and everyone—and everything—suddenly snapped back to life.

And it was a glorious and bloody life.

Cole couldn’t have jumped out of the vehicle’s path if he’d wanted to, because he was too busy watching a homeless man hitting another man in an expensive three-piece suit with a beer bottle. It didn’t take long for the bottle to break and thick streams of blood to flit across the pavement.

“Deader than a doorknob,” the Voice said inside his head.

The Voice.

The Voice!

The persistent Devil on his shoulder. It was a blast from the past, one that Cole had done everything possible to forget. He was not the man he used to be, so the Voice hadn’t been necessary. It didn’t belong in civilized society, and for the longest time, the Voice had slept.

The Devil had slumbered.

But it’d awoken. Cole remembered hearing it back in the Mercedes, when he had killed poor Donnie.

“Stop daydreaming, and move!” the Voice shouted.

Cole did move, and just in time too, as another car came right at him. It clipped his right leg as it somehow managed to swerve around him at the last second, making a wide arc before smashing into a street lamp. The front hood crumpled, and the driver-side door opened as a woman wearing just one high heel, blood running down her forehead and over a silk blouse, stumbled outside. She glanced around for a moment, grabbing at her bleeding head, when she locked eyes with Cole.

The woman started to say something when a figure leaped out of the opened driver-side door and knocked her to the ground. Cole started to move forward to help, when the attacker, who was much smaller than the woman, straddled the driver and began digging into her eyes with her fingers.

The woman screamed.

Cole didn’t know whether to run to help or flee. He was stuck between two possibilities—

“Run!” the Voice said.

Cole didn’t run. He couldn’t. How could he? He wasn’t a coward, and this woman needed his help. She was having her eyes gouged out by a girl that couldn’t have been more than thirteen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she was digging, digging her thumbs into the woman’s eyes.

Cole didn’t hear the eyeballs pop, but he saw the streams of blood from twenty meters away. The woman let out a pained scream, and Cole began running toward them when the girl picked up the woman’s head and drove it back down—again, and again—into the pavement.

Blood. More blood. So much blood.

“What are you doing? Run away, not toward them! She’s a goner! Deader than a doorknob!”

The stupid Voice. Emily had helped him to calm it, but it was back now. He hated it, because it reminded him of another time, another place.

Another him.

Shut up, Cole told it.

“You need me,” it said.

No, I don’t.

“Yes, you do. I’ll prove it.”

The woman had stopped screaming and now lay still, and it didn’t take the girl long to understand that her victim was dead.

Cole stopped ten meters from them and watched the small figure climb off the bigger woman and turn around. Now that he could see her face, Cole noticed the resemblance between the girl and the dead woman. They could have been mother and daughter.

But that wasn’t what commanded Cole’s focus. It was the girl’s face. Streams of blood, like fingers, stretched from the corners of bloodshot eyes.

Just like Donnie’s eyes, earlier…

Cole started to turn away from the girl when something broadsided him and knocked him to the ground. He landed on the slightly cool pavement and looked up to find a hulking figure, dirty cap covering a sweaty, reddened face. Bulging red eyes—the bloodied scleras, like lakes of blood surrounding shrinking irises and pupils—zeroed in on him.

Like Donnie…

Like the girl…

Shit. I’m in trouble.

“You think?” the Voice said.

Shut up!

With the bigger body crushed against him, Cole could feel every thundering heartbeat from the other man. Those sledgehammering heartbeats were sending adrenaline through every inch of the man’s body. The speed. The strength. The things that made Donnie nearly unstoppable, until Cole broke his neck, was all adrenaline. Cole knew that now.

“Kill him. It’s either that, or let him kill you!” the Voice said. “Kill or be killed! Just like old times!”

I told you to shut up!

The Voice laughed. “You don’t mean that.”

Yes, I do!

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

It was the truck driver. The same one that had been staring out the windshield of his semi moments ago as it was parked behind the Mercedes. The man’s beefy fingers reached for Cole’s face, the thumbs going for his eyes, even as the thick lips twisted into a nasty snarl. Nothing that even resembled humanity shone on his face.

Cole swung, striking the much bigger man (the guy had at least five inches and a solid 100 pounds of fat on him) in the side of the neck with his elbow. He had learned his lesson with Donnie, and Cole went straight for the kill shot with the first strike.

“That’s my boy!”

Shut up!

“You need me!”

I said, shut up!

But unlike with Donnie, this time Cole met resistance—too much fat. The blow did stun the driver for a moment. Just a moment, before the man resumed reaching for Cole’s eyes again a half-second later. At the same time, the man’s bulk kept Cole pinned to the street.

He was fat. And big. Shit, he was fat and big!

Cole struck his target again, and again—and again—aiming for the same spot and waiting, waiting to hear the telltale crack! of the neck bone breaking. But he didn’t hear it on the second or third or even fourth blow, and now the driver’s greasy fingers had grabbed ahold of Cole’s face, and those same sausage-like thumbs were searching for a weak spot, even as the corners of the man’s lips curved into a giggling smile. Thin streams of blood flicked out of the man’s eyes and onto Cole’s face, drip-drip-dripping against his forehead, then nose, then cheek.

“Are you going to take this?” the Voice asked.

No…

“So do something about it.”

I’m trying…

“Do it, or don’t do it! Stop trying!”

A wild animal scream as the girl who had killed the older woman (Her mother? That had to be her mother. Jesus Christ, she just crushed her mom’s head into the pavement!) jumped onto the truck driver’s back and began biting his neck. A thick stream of blood arced through the air as the girl’s teeth came away with a chunk of flesh. That, more than anything Cole had done, made the big man relinquish his hold on Cole and scramble to his feet.

And Cole was free!

“Not for long, if you don’t get the hell out of here!” the Voice said.

Cole rolled away, thankful he could finally breathe again. He sat up just in time to see the driver reach back with one large hand, grab the girl by the head—it looked like an NBA player palming a smaller-than-regulation basketball—and lifted the girl off him. She had been going for a second bite when he snatched her off. She never made it, as the big man slammed her into the street, swinging her body as if she were a rag doll.

The girl let out a sound that didn’t quite resemble pain as she came into contact with the hard pavement. Not that the truck driver let go. He sat down on her much, much smaller body and began striking her face with both balled fists. All the while, a maniac’s smile formed on his face. Blood gushed out of the hole in the side of the big man’s neck, some joining the thick pools splattering the street around the girl’s pulverized face.

“Deader than a doorknob, that one,” the Voice said.

Shut up!

“You need me. Admit it.”

I haven’t needed you for years. I don’t need you now!

“We’ll see about that!”

Cole scrambled to his feet, fighting the temptation to throw up at the sight of the girl’s face as it disappeared under the onslaught. The man didn’t stop. He didn’t look like he wanted to stop or even realized he was just demolishing mush now, because the bone and muscle and flesh had been reduced to little more than—

Screams.

Screams from all around him.

Cole turned, re-locating the same homeless man that had been attacking the one in the three-piece suit earlier. He had moved on to another victim—a woman pushing a grocery cart out of a nearby store. She was screaming as the man dragged her down to the sidewalk and began ramming what little of the bottle he still had left into her neck. Men in aprons running out of the store tried to pull him off.

The squeals of something else.

Car tires.

“Move move move!” the Voice shouted.

Cole did, turning just in time to spot a car as it took the corner down the street. It had somehow managed to maneuver around the stalled traffic and had gotten onto the sidewalk. A yellow Honda. He hurried out of its path as it drove past, the driver—a man in his thirties, face frozen in horror—peering out the windshield at the chaos outside.

Smart guy, Cole thought as the Honda kept going for another twenty meters.

That was as far as it got, because a U-Haul truck made the turn and broadsided it, and both vehicles disappeared into the front store display of an Army surplus store.

I guess not that smart.

A slight grunt from behind him, and Cole spun as the truck driver picked himself up from the bloodied remains of the girl. What girl? There was nothing left that could have passed for a human being. The man’s fists were clenched at his sides, thick gobs of blood dripping down them and onto the street. It was impossible for Cole to separate the big man’s blood from the girl’s, or the other dying people around them.

Flaring bloodied eyes scanned the streets as the trucker’s chest heaved, the adrenaline-fueled heartbeats pumping so loudly that Cole thought he could not just see the results, but hear each and every rabid beat.

Bloodshot eyes scanning, scanning…

…until they fixed on Cole again.

The trucker’s lips—large, pale worms quivering underneath a thick mustache—tugged upward into a devilish smile.

Like Donnie’s, earlier.

Like the others, around him.

“You need me now, tough guy?” the Voice asked.

Tell me what to do…

“Run.”

Run?

“Run!”

He hated to admit it, but the Voice was right.

So Cole ran, while the thoughts, Get home. Whatever you do, whatever you have to do, get your ass home to Emily! running through his head like a runaway train.

Chapter 4

The crash! of metal careening into metal preceded the sight of a school bus as it smashed and rumbled its way through the frozen traffic, knocking cars and people out of its path. A woman who didn’t move fast enough was reduced to broken bones and pulverized flesh against the large vehicle’s grill.

The bus was either out of control or the driver was insane, but Cole didn’t get the chance to find out before the lumbering yellow vehicle tried to go over one car too many and lost control. It toppled onto its side but continued sliding up the street, casting sparks from grinding steel as it went. Bodies flew out of the windows and thumped and skipped their way across the street, some slamming into parked cars, others bouncing like rubber balls into the air. Teenagers in private school uniforms landed one by one by one, leaving bloodied splotches behind the skidding bus.

Not all of the discharged children died on impact. Some picked themselves up and, their clothes shredded, bodies and faces bloodied, started running around the street like wild animals. One of them landed within meters of Cole and the truck driver, but zeroed in on the big man first before racing toward him.

Cole backpedaled, then watched with morbid fascination as the trucker met the wilding teen halfway, the two colliding in a clash of swinging fists. The boy, of course, didn’t stand a chance. The driver grabbed him by the head and smashed it into the street. But he hadn’t followed through on the initial strike when one—two—three more—schoolboys leaped onto his back and began biting his face and neck and arms.

“Run, you idiot. Run!” the Voice shouted. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

I thought you wanted me to fight? Cole asked.

“There’s a time for fighting and a time for running. This is where you do the latter. Unless, of course, you want to die. Well? Do you want to die?”

No…

“Then run!”

Cole was about to do just that when a dark shadow fell over him. He glanced up. It was entirely possible he was the only one staring up instead of looking around him at that moment. Everyone else was too busy trying to murder each other, including the four schoolboys that were climbing over the truck driver, all five writhing figures covered in each other’s blood.

A plane.

A 747 passenger airplane.

White nose and sides, with red paint on the tail that he could barely make out because it was nosediving out of the sky with the fading sunlight in the background. The loud roar of its engines filled Cole’s eardrums, making his teeth chatter as it passed by overhead.

…it was nosediving out of the sky…

“That’s not good,” the Voice said, just before it started laughing.

No shit, Cole thought as he turned and ran.

“Faster!”

He ran as fast as he could, focusing only on what was in front of him instead of behind him. There had to be hundreds of people already in the streets, even more spilling out onto the sidewalks from stores and businesses and apartments and out of stalled vehicles. A blurry wall of faces—some covered in blood, others in terror and confusion.

“Help me!”

He turned.

A woman in a blouse, makeup streaming down her face, running in his direction. She was holding her heels in her hands for some reason, while a teenage boy in torn jeans chased after her. She reached out with one hand toward Cole, but she was still thirty meters away when an older woman with curly gray hair lunged out of a parked SUV and into her. The two forms went down in a pile.

Cole started toward the woman even as the old lady held up bloody car keys clenched between her fist like knives. She might have impaled the woman in the blouse if the teenager with the torn jeans didn’t dive forward and into her first, hurling her into a pair of trash cans. If Cole thought the teenager was going to save the woman in the blouse, he was sadly mistaken, because the teen instead whirled on the woman (who was still holding onto her heels, for some reason—Drop your heels, woman! he wanted to shout) and pounced.

Blood splattered, and the woman screamed.

A flurry of movements as the old woman scrambled up from the trash can, banana peel and garbage clinging to her hair and clothes. Her eyes, ringed by smeared blood like all the others, including the boy in torn jeans, snapped from spot to spot—before zeroing in on Cole.

Then she started toward him.

Cole turned and fled down the sidewalk, comfortable in the belief that he could outrun an old woman. He blocked out the image of the woman with high heels (“She’s a goner! Forget about her!” the Voice shouted.) and instead fixated on the 747 falling out of the sky as his legs pistoned. He knew there wasn’t an airport nearby and that sooner or later, the aircraft was coming down.

So what else was coming down? The next plane could fall right on top of his head.

He leaped over two figures fighting on the sidewalk, then darted around two young boys holding a much older and bigger man down while they drove screwdrivers into his body. For a split second, Cole wondered where they got those tools before he noticed the empty tool belt around the adult male’s waist. They were using his own equipment to murder him.

“Another goner. Run!” the Voice said.

Cole didn’t need encouragement, and kept running.

There were blood puddles all over the sidewalk, and Cole stopped trying to go around them because it was impossible. There was just too much, and they were everywhere. His loafers squeaked as they stepped in the wetness and made prints on the concrete pathway behind him as he fled for his life.

A fat woman in an overflowing cotton robe stumbled into his path, bleeding red eyes searching for victims. Thin trails of blood connected her eyes to the corners of her mouth, giving her the appearance of grinning madly. She reached for him, but Cole ducked at the last second and got by her slow-moving bulk.

He kept running, not expecting her to follow. She didn’t need to, not with all the other potential victims on the streets. And there were many. Some with bloodied eyes, others like him, without, fleeing for their lives.

A man and woman across the street saw him, and the man tried to say something when the woman stumbled and fell, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of limbs. Then the man was up and reaching for the woman as she cried, while clutching her broken right leg. There was a moment of indecision—maybe half a second—before the man made up his mind and kept going, the woman screaming after him—before a teenager began beating her in the head with an already-bloodied skateboard.

Cole kept going.

The world flashed by him in a blur of activity, frenzied movements, blood-curdling screams, and arcing blood. So much blood.

Vehicles parked along the curbs, others overturned in the streets.

Figures fighting, bodies falling, even more running like him.

Too many. And he couldn’t help any of them. He could barely help himself.

“This is no time to be a Good Samaritan, buddy!” the Voice said. “This is a time to run! So you better keep running!”

Cole didn’t argue with the Voice. Sometimes, the Voice was right.

“You’re damn right!”

Oh, shut up!

He ran past someone screaming for help. A woman, her hands stretching toward him as he ran by, while two people punched her repeatedly, their fists already covered in blood and flesh. And yet she still somehow managed to cry out to him when she should have been fighting off her attackers.

Cole saw all of it out of the corner of his eye as he kept going.

“There!” the Voice said.

There what?

“Look! Up ahead! To your right!”

He looked up ahead and to his right.

It was a local tavern. billy’s pub swung from a sign made to look old-fashioned, hanging over the front door.

It’s a bar. So?

“Bars serve drinks!” the Voice said.

So?

“Drinks are stored in basements. Get it?”

No…

“Basements are made of concrete and underground, you idiot!”

Oh, right.

The Voice laughed. “I told you you needed me!”

The door to the pub was wide open, but there were two people fighting in front of it. No, not fighting. It wasn’t much of a fight at all, as a man wearing an apron with a name tag (Rob) was using a baseball bat on a fat man lying on the sidewalk. Rob didn’t seem to notice that the fat man didn’t have much of a head left and was no longer moving. Pretty soon Rob wasn’t hitting flesh with the bat anymore; he was just striking the pavement under the remaining chunks.

Cole skirted around the flailing mass of flesh and blood and through the opening into Billy’s Pub. He grabbed the door and slammed it shut, then shoved the deadbolt into place. The door had a mosaic security glass on top, and Cole could still make out Rob already beating someone else with the bat. Someone trying to get into the pub, too, but unlike Cole, the poor bastard didn’t make it.

The man screamed, just before blood splattered the glass from the other side.

“Goners abound, buddy!” the Voice said. “Now it’s time for you to get hid!”

He expected people inside the pub—maybe hiding, maybe killing each other—but the place was empty. He hadn’t expected that, but the intense silence was a welcome respite from the chaos and screaming and dying outside.

Cole ran through the pub, making a beeline for the back hallway. He was almost there when he glimpsed something out the corner of his eye and slid to a stop and looked over at—

A girl, large green eyes wide against their sockets (but no blood pooling around the sclera!), looking back at him from underneath a pool table across the room. She was sitting on the floor on her knees and rocking slightly back and forth as they made eye contact.

He should have kept going, but he didn’t. The girl couldn’t have been older than eight. Still a baby, by most measures.

Still just a baby…like the one in Emily’s belly right now.

“She’s not your problem!” the Voice said.

She’s a kid.

“Not your problem!”

She’s just a kid.

“Listen to me!”

No…

“Listen to me!”

No!

Sudden sounds of shuffling feet broke through his thoughts, and Cole twisted back toward the hallway just as the woman swung the shotgun at his head. It was a sawed-off double-barrel twelve gauge, and it streaked right for his face.

He jerked sideways at the last second and reached up and grabbed the weapon by the barrels as it swung past his head. He waited for the inevitable discharge as the woman pulled the trigger anyway, but there was none.

He wrenched the weapon free, heard a pained scream, and took a step back before aiming the weapon at his attacker.

She had long blonde hair and was stumbling backward, until she bumped against the wall alongside the hallway and stopped. She cradled her right hand, pain on her face as she looked back at him.

Cole aimed the shotgun at her but saw that the hammers weren’t cocked. He did that now, pulling both back, though if he expected fear on her face, he was surprised when he didn’t see it. That didn’t make sense.

Then again, what did, these last few minutes? First Donnie, then the woman and her daughter, the truck driver, the school bus…

Then he heard it.

The reverberating and ground-shaking THOOM! he had been waiting for.

The 747. It had finally touched down, the impact like rolling thunder coming toward him from blocks away. But that wouldn’t last. It would eventually reach him, and when it did, there would be potential collateral damage.

“Oh my God, what was that?” the woman gasped.

“That was a plane,” Cole said.

How long did he have? Not more than a minute. Maybe half that. Thirty seconds, if he was lucky.

“A plane?” the woman said.

“Yeah, a plane. I don’t know what else will start falling out of the sky, so you better run.”

He uncocked the hammers on the shotgun and ran past her and into the hallway.

“Run where?” she screamed after him.

He stopped, even though he didn’t know why. No, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly why. She was a mother, protecting her child, and he knew with absolute certainty that Emily would have done the same thing.

“She’s not Emily,” the Voice said.

Cole ignored it and said to the woman, “Hide.”

The woman stared at him, then looked over in the direction of the girl hiding under the pool table. Then back at him: “Take us with you!” She didn’t wait for him to answer, and instead turned and shouted, “Ashley!”

The girl appeared beside the woman, and mother and daughter looked at Cole even as the walls and floor and ceiling around them continued to rumble, getting louder, and more intense.

“Get downstairs!” the Voice shouted. “Duck and cover, buddy! Duck and cover!”

I don’t think that’s going to help if another plane falls on top of us.

“It’s better than staying up here!”

“Come on,” Cole said to the two women, before turning around and grabbing the metal door at the end and pushing it open. There was a padlock hanging off a latch, but it was unlocked.

He flicked on the light switch near the top landing and held the door open for the woman and her daughter as they rushed inside after him. He slammed the heavy metal slab shut, pushed the deadbolt into place, and followed the two fleeing figures down the stairs.

“What now?” the woman said, out of breath. “What now?”

“Brace for impact!” the Voice said, even as it laughed maniacally inside Cole’s head.

Chapter 5

If all the pieces that made up the world as he knew it came apart, it would be close to what he was hearing above him. The only good news was that Cole couldn’t hear the screams of pain and death and madness anymore. Not that that stopped him from imagining what was going on up there anyway. His mind was filled with death and murder and blood.

But mostly blood.

Red, dripping blood.

It’d been a long time since he’d seen so much blood.

A long, long time ago.

He sat in the dark with the sawed-off shotgun on the floor between his legs and kept his eyes closed. He wasn’t too worried about having the roof cave in on him, though. The bar above would go first and even then, the basement would probably be able to withstand just about any blast that could topple the exterior construction.

Probably.

The basement was made of solid concrete on all six sides, including the hard floor under him and the equally tough wall behind him. He hadn’t had the chance to see what else was down here before the lights went out, but finding an open space in the darkness hadn’t been that difficult and he had only bumped into the woman and her child a couple of times while all three of them were stumbling around for a spot to settle.

Mother and daughter sat somewhere to his right at the moment, probably huddled together, finding comfort in each other’s presence. He had no such luxury, not that he needed it. Not too much, anyway. They were close, but not too close. After all, it was probably not a good idea to be too close to a stranger with a shotgun in a dark basement.

He couldn’t imagine what was going on up there, but the room didn’t seem to have gotten any hotter in the hour or so since the 747 slammed down to earth. Chances were the explosion was localized and the block above him was relatively intact, except for the initial damage from the concussive force of the impact. The only way to find out for sure, of course, was to head back to the surface. And he wasn’t about to do that.

At least, not yet. Or anytime today. Besides the damage, there were all the other dangers out there. The human kind.

Cole glanced down at his watch. The hands glowed brightly in the dark.

7:17 p.m.

Emily had bought him the watch for his birthday two years ago, about the same time they decided to have a baby. It was a big move for both of them, and the prospect of being responsible for a new life was…daunting, to put it mildly.

Emily…

He had tried calling her earlier. His cell phone was in his pocket, but he couldn’t get reception down here. The very thing that was keeping him safe was blocking any chance of getting a signal in or out. But he did see that she had tried to call him earlier when he was in the back of the Mercedes, except he had put the phone on vibrate before the meeting and hadn’t changed the setting even when he called her earlier.

There were two missed calls, both from Emily’s phone. The first one was an hour before Donnie tried to kill him, while Cole was napping, and the second came minutes after the attempted murder. He’d been outside on the street during that part, with the truck driver on top of him. No shock he hadn’t felt the phone vibrating.

The second phone call gave him hope, because it meant whatever had happened to Donnie, to the trucker, and all the other people with bloodied eyes, Emily had been spared. That second missed call had come after people started going mad around him.

Unless, of course, he was assuming he had the timetable correct. For all he knew—

No. I’m right. She’s fine, and home, and waiting for me.

“She’s probably crazy right now, like the others,” the Voice said. He was surprised to hear the Voice pipe up. It sounded much louder than before, but maybe that was because it was the only thing Cole could hear down here.

Shut up, Cole thought.

“I’m just stating the obvious.”

You don’t know shit. She’s fine.

“And how do you know that?”

I would feel it if she wasn’t.

“Bullshit,” the Voice said, before it started laughing.

Cole hated it when the Voice laughed, because it was usually laughing at him. It wasn’t a good feeling to have the Devil laughing at you.

I would feel it, Cole thought again.

For whatever reason, the Voice kept quiet this time.

With no phone reception, Cole couldn’t text or use the Internet, which left him staring at a picture of Emily on his phone’s background wallpaper. It was an earlier photo of her, minus the baby bump that would eventually come. Emily was the photographer in the family. Even the photo he was looking at now was a selfie she had snapped and transferred onto his phone in secret. Seeing her on his wallpaper had been a nice surprise.

There was the brief sound of clothes rustling from somewhere in the basement. Then the woman’s voice, soft, as if she was afraid someone might hear her. “Do you have a name?”

“Cole,” he said, putting the phone away.

He hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down. There was no point. No one upstairs was going to hear them anyway.

“I’m Zoe,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Zoe.”

“What happened? Up there, in the streets?”

“I don’t know.”

“People were trying to kill each other. Everyone…” She paused for a moment. Then, “I saw a woman beat her husband to death with a piece of loose brick.”

I saw schoolboys attack a 300-pound truck driver while he was busy bashing someone else’s head in. I win.

“Their eyes,” Zoe continued. “There was something wrong with their eyes. Did you see it? They were bleeding out of their eyes.”

He imagined the girl, Ashley, listening in on their conversation, and Cole didn’t want to think about what the little kid had already witnessed with her own eyes. He still couldn’t forget every bloody moment himself—Donnie, the truck driver, the couple, the old lady—and he’d seen more than most people even before today.

“I saw it, too,” Cole said.

“What happened?” Zoe asked again.

“I don’t know. Their heartbeat…”

“Heartbeat?”

“One of them was on top of me, and his heart was beating like a runaway train. Like he was swimming in adrenaline.”

“What does that mean?”

“Adrenaline lets us do things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

“I still don’t understand…”

“Have you ever heard the stories about mothers lifting cars to save their children?”

“Yes. Those are real?”

“It’s not because they’re superheroes. It’s adrenaline.”

“It lets you lift cars?”

“It lets you do a lot of things. Lift cars, attack a 300-pound man, or murder someone with your fists.”

And get shot and keep going, he thought, but didn’t add. He didn’t think she needed to know that much.

“Where’d you get the sawed-off?” he asked instead.

“The what?” Zoe said.

“The shotgun.”

“Oh. It was under the bar.”

“How did you get past the fighting outside?”

“We sneaked in through the back. I crashed our car nearby, trying to get away from a pile-up.” Then, almost as if in afterthought, “It’s not loaded, you know.”

“What isn’t?”

“The shotgun.”

Cole stared down at the sawed-off. He could barely make out its twin black barrels in the dark. He smirked. No wonder she was trying to hit him with it instead of just pulling the trigger and blowing his head off.

“You were lucky,” the Voice piped back up. “You might not be so lucky tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? I just hope I live through the rest of today.

“Now that’s cup-half-empty thinking.”

“It was still a dumb thing to do, attacking me like that,” Cole said out loud. “I could have really hurt you.”

“I’m sorry, but with everything happening …” Zoe said.

Emily would do the same thing, Cole thought.

No, that wasn’t true. Emily wouldn’t have pointed the shotgun at him and waited for him to see it and react. She would have just pulled the trigger.

“I know,” he said.

“What do you think happened up there?” Zoe asked.

“You already asked me that, and I still have no idea since the last time.”

“But did you see the way they were attacking each other? They were like animals. What would make people do something like that?”

He remembered Donnie and the sound of his neck breaking. Then the truck driver, who was nearly unstoppable thanks to a combination of fat and bulk and flooding adrenaline. It took those schoolchildren to save Cole’s life, and he was pretty sure they hadn’t done it on purpose.

Zoe continued: “A woman in a car next to us just started attacking the driver next to her with her phone. There was blood all over the window. It was horrifying. Everyone just started attacking each other. Teenagers on skateboards, shoppers… It’s like they were possessed by demons.”

“I don’t believe in demons.”

“Neither did I…”

“There’s an explanation for all of this,” the Voice said.

Like what?

“I don’t know, but there is one.”

Let me know when you find the answer.

“Sure thing, buddy,” the Voice said, laughing.

“Do you think help’s coming?” Zoe was asking him.

Help? Cole hadn’t even thought about that. In his experience, waiting for other people to save you was only begging for disappointment.

“Not if what happened up there is happening all across the city,” he said instead.

“It’s some kind of epidemic, you think? Maybe some kind of airborne virus, turning people mad. I’ve seen documentaries about something like this happening. Someone messes up in a lab somewhere, a super strain of disease from Africa mutates…”

“You’ve been watching too much TV.”

“So what do you think is happening out there?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t have any theories. Let’s just wait it out and see what happens tomorrow. Chances are there is probably water down here. Maybe spirits.”

“Spirits?” a squeaky voice said, alarmed. “Like ghosts, Mommy?”

Cole smiled to himself. “Alcohol. I meant alcohol.”

“So, not ghosts?”

“No, sweetheart, not ghosts,” Zoe said.

“Oh,” the squeaky voice said.

“This is my daughter Ashley.”

“Hi, Ashley,” Cole said.

“Hi,” the girl said, in that shy way kids spoke when talking to strangers. “I’m cold, Mommy.”

More rustling of clothes, followed by Zoe asking, “Better?”

“Better,” Ashley said.

No one said anything after that.

A minute of silence became two, then five, then almost an hour went by without anyone speaking. Cole swore he had detected a series of small explosions in the background, but he couldn’t figure out what had caused them. Gunshots, too, but again, he couldn’t be sure.

“Mommy?” Ashley said after a while.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Are we going to be okay?”

“Of course we are. We’ll be just fine.”

Zoe either believed what she had just told her daughter, or she was a very convincing liar, because Cole could barely detect any wavering in her voice.

“We’ll be fine,” Zoe said again, softer this time.

Cole wondered if the repetition was supposed to convince the girl or the mother. Maybe a little of both.

He thought about Emily instead. Alone, at the lake house. He would have been terrified for her if he didn’t know what she was capable of. Emily was the kind of woman who knew how to take care of herself.

Even so, he wished the damn phone would work so he could call her and tell her that he was coming home soon.

And like Zoe with her daughter, he would have been lying through his teeth, too.

* * *

He opened his eyes around midnight to the faint pops of gunfire. And this time, he was sure it was gunfire.

There weren’t a lot of gun-carrying citizens in the city, thanks to the state’s stringent gun laws. So who was doing the shooting? Cops? Military? Would the military be called in in response to earlier today? It was a reasonable conclusion.

Pop…pop…pop…

They were coming from a distance and sounded more like wet firecrackers than the familiar staccato of weapons. Cole would recognize the noise anywhere; he used to go to sleep and wake up to them.

But that was a long time ago, in a past life.

He wasn’t the only one who could hear the gunfire, as it turned out.

“What is that?” Zoe, her voice groggy, asked from somewhere in the darkness.

“Gunshots,” Cole said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Mommy?” Ashley’s voice, just as groggy—if not even more so—as her mother’s.

“It’s nothing, baby. Go back to sleep.”

The faded pop-pop-pop continued for some time, occasionally broken by the screeching of sirens.

Sometime around one in the morning, Cole thought he heard explosions, just close enough for him to know they were happening in the city.

This time, Zoe didn’t wake up to the noise. He knew that because he could hear her and the girl snoring loudly nearby.

“They’ve got the right idea,” the Voice said. “Go to sleep. You’re going to need all the rest you can get for tomorrow.”

He lay down on the cold and hard concrete, while still keeping the door at the top of the stairs within sight. He kept waiting for it to burst open, for a gang of men with bloodshot red eyes to rush inside and zero in on him to finish what they had begun earlier today.

But no one came.

At least, not yet.

Cole’s thoughts were of Emily as he went to sleep.

They were always about Emily.

Day 2

Chapter 6

“Anything?” Zoe asked.

Cole shook his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Is that possible? After everything that happened yesterday?”

He didn’t answer her right away. But it was a good question. Last night had sounded like a war zone, only to turn into…this. Whatever “this” was.

At the moment, “this” was the same eerie silence he had woken up to.

“What else happened last night?” the Voice asked.

That was a good question, too.

“Of course it is. Or I wouldn’t have asked it.”

Cole snickered.

“Did you say something?” Zoe asked.

“No.”

“I thought…”

“Just something in my throat.”

“Oh.”

“Nice save,” the Voice said, laughing.

Cole focused on the basement door. The metal surface was slightly cold to the touch and not the scalding hot of something that had been stewing in a forest of fire, which was one of his fears: That the bar, along with the neighborhood, had caught on fire either because of the plane crash or something else igniting last night.

He pressed his ear against the smooth stainless steel surface and listened. Nothing. Not a damn thing. He hadn’t expected voices or activity on the other side, but some hints that civilization had continued as he slept. If not directly outside the door, then in the vicinity.

Except, there was nothing.

“Not good,” the Voice said.

Nope.

“So be ready.”

For what?

“For anything. And everything.”

Gee, that’s helpful.

“Hey, I know what you know, buddy,” the Voice said with a short laugh. “Let’s not make this more complicated than that.”

Cole pulled away from the door and glanced back at Zoe. Ashley’s mother was three steps down the stairs behind him. Ashley herself was waiting farther down the basement.

“Nothing?” Zoe asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“What do you think that means?”

“It could be anything. Or nothing.”

“So what do we do now? We can’t stay down here forever, can we?”

He thought about Emily, about the baby growing inside her belly...

“No, we can’t stay here forever,” Cole said.

He turned back to the door and placed his hand on the cold lever.

Zoe’s hand grabbed his other arm. “Wait.”

He looked back. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t know what’s out there.”

“I thought we already went through this.”

“I’m…scared.”

She had taken another step toward him while his back was turned, and he could easily make out the fear in her eyes. Like her daughter, Zoe’s eyes were a deep shade of green, and her blonde hair made her easily visible even in the semidarkness of the basement.

“So am I,” Cole said.

“You’re scared, too?” Zoe asked. He thought he could detect doubt in her voice.

“I don’t know what’s happening out there, and I need to get home. I have to get home. My wife and unborn child are by themselves. So, yeah, I’m scared. For them. For us. For everyone.”

Zoe let go of his arm. “Maybe we should wait.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

He glanced down at his watch. “Just after eight.”

“Noon. Can we wait until noon?”

Cole didn’t want to wait. Besides, what was four more hours going to matter? But seeing the worry on Zoe’s face—not just for herself, but for her daughter, hiding somewhere down there behind her…

“Leave them,” the Voice said. “You don’t need the hassle. Get home to Emily. That’s the mission.”

I can’t just leave them.

“Yes, you can. You don’t know these people.”

Emily wouldn’t leave them.

“Emily’s not here. Don’t be an idiot.”

He sighed, and said, “We’ll wait two more hours. Then we have to find out what’s out there.”

She nodded, relieved. “Thank you.”

“You’ve gone soft, buddy,” the Voice said, laughing.

Oh, shut up, Cole thought.

* * *

He had two hours to kill (“Whose fault is that?” the Voice asked), so Cole spent most of it looking through the basement. Or feeling his way from one end of the room to the other, anyway. Although his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he still managed to bump into a few shelves and crates and boxes along the way.

Basements sometimes had emergency power, but Billy’s Pub wasn’t one of them. Which meant it probably didn’t have a refrigerator down here either. But it was still a bar, and though it took a while, Cole eventually found a shelf lined with bottles. He could barely read the labels, but they looked like a wide selection of imported and domestic whiskey. Not a single wine among the collection, though. He was hoping to find some bottled water but located crates of domestically brewed craft beers stacked on the floor nearby instead.

He considered quenching his thirst with a beer or two but decided he needed all of his awareness when he finally opened the upstairs door. Even though American beer was more water than alcohol anyway, he didn’t want to take the chance.

“Pussy,” the Voice said.

Whatever.

The lack of sounds beyond the basement bothered him. He had been hoping to hear activity—if not first responders, then some kind of signal they weren’t the only people still in the city.

And then there were the crazed people he had watched attack their loved ones and total strangers alike. Where were they? Surely some had to have survived yesterday’s madness.

And yet, it was dead quiet up there.

“Haha. ‘Dead,’” the Voice said.

Yeah, that was probably the wrong choice of words.

“It’s like they were possessed by demons,” Zoe had said last night.

Cole couldn’t disagree. He had seen a lot of things in his life, but yesterday—the sight of schoolboys swarming over the truck driver who weighed more than all of them combined, being just one—was something new.

“…Like they were possessed by demons…”

Cole wasn’t a religious man; he couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to church or prayed or picked up the Bible, much less read one. Right now, he wondered what the Old Testament had to say about what had happened on the streets not more than twenty-four hours earlier.

“Maybe something about the end of days,” the Voice said.

Maybe.

“Or the apocalypse. That’s popular, too.”

Let’s not go there.

“Just saying.”

Stop saying.

“Did you find anything?” Zoe asked when he sat back down at his spot next to her and Ashley.

“Just beer and liquor,” Cole said.

“I could use some of those.”

“Beer or liquor?”

“Either/or.”

He smiled. “Maybe in”—he glanced down at his watch—“thirty more minutes. If we don’t find anything up there, we’ll come back down and have a toast.”

“What do you expect to find up there?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

He took out his phone and stared at the backlit display. There was no reception, just as there hadn’t been when he looked at it immediately after waking up. He checked his voice mail anyway but couldn’t get a connection. He did, though, find an old recording of Emily, left for him yesterday morning when he was in a meeting with George and the others.

Cole put the phone to his ear and played the message. He’d already heard it, but he just wanted to hear her voice again.

“I know you’re busy right now, saying good-byes and probably drinking a little too much celebratory, ahem, juice, but I just wanted you to know that I miss you. I’m thinking about you. And I’m grateful for what you’re doing for me. For us. The three of us. I love you, sweetheart. Come home soon.”

He put the phone away and smiled at the darkness, glad that Zoe or Ashley couldn’t see him in the semidarkness of the room, because he imagined he must look like an idiot right now, smiling at nothing.

“Do you think some of them are still out there?” Zoe finally asked.

Them? he thought.

Then, quickly: Ah. Them.

The crazies. She was talking about the crazies.

“Is that what we’re calling them?” the Voice asked.

What do you want to call them?

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

Crazies sounds about right.

“Let’s go with that, then.”

“I don’t know,” he said out loud.

“What if it’s happening everywhere?” Zoe asked. “What if it’s all over the city? The state? The country? You think it could be happening all over the country? I heard news reports about killings in New York earlier yesterday. You think that had something to do with it?”

Donnie had said the same thing to him, before Cole napped and woke up to a nightmare:

“People going a little crazy. Some guy drove his truck into a mall in the morning and killed a bunch of people. Then some young kids beating people up in Central Park. All kinds of crazy shit… Must be something in the water out there, you think?”

Must be something in the water, he thought now. Or the air. Or the food. Or a hundred other possibilities.

I don’t know what’s happening, and that’s what scares me. What terrifies me.

“Cole?” Zoe was saying.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Say it one more time, then maybe she’ll get the hint that you don’t know squat,” the Voice said.

Cole didn’t say it one more time. He knew Zoe was just asking questions because, like him, she was scared about the uncertainty, the not knowing. What was happening up there? What had happened as they slept?

He looked down at his watch again. Twenty-five more minutes till ten.

Cole leaned back against the wall and let his mind drift beyond the basement and across the city, all the way to Bear Lake.

And to Emily.

His mind always went to Emily.

Chapter 7

The first time he killed a man, Cole was 18. It wasn’t an accident, but something he’d set out to do. He was a soldier, and so was the dead man. They wore different uniforms and fought for different causes but found themselves in the same place, at the same time.

At least, that’s what Cole remembered. He couldn’t recall what had brought them there, really. For himself, or the man he’d killed. But he knew there was a reason they were armed and looking to take each other’s lives that day.

The killing came swiftly and without thought. He saw a target and he squeezed the trigger, just like he’d been taught. Just like he’d done countless times on the range. He hadn’t even thought about it. It was less instinct and more muscle memory.

See target. Pull trigger.

Bang! and the man was dead.

Or, if he was being pedantic about it, it was more of a pop!, because an M4 carbine popped more than it banged. The shot echoed for what seemed like an eternity until finally, finally fading into the wide-open desert landscape.

The guy fell dead.

Or, Cole assumed, he fell dead. He’d only spotted the man’s head poking up from the top of the sand berm when he fired. He initially only saw rags, then dark black hair splaying underneath them, as the guy appeared in the ACOG. Two slits for two dark eyes followed. There was at least a good hundred meters between them, but Cole’s first shot had been true.

Cole saw a puff of red mist just before the man’s head snapped back, then disappeared out from view.

And just like that, he’d killed his first man.

Not that the Army ever confirmed it, but Cole knew what he’d done. The odd part about it was, he didn’t feel much of anything afterward. There was, though, a sense of confusion. An almost ethereal feeling of “That’s it?”

“What’d you shoot at?” his running buddy, Gaines, asked from nearby. Gaines was flat on his back, eating a homemade granola bar that he was sent in a care package about once a week, every week for the last two months since they had been in country. Cole rarely saw the man without a granola bar in his hands.

“Some guy,” Cole said, scanning the top of the berm for more targets. He didn’t see shit.

“You get ’em?”

“I dunno,” Cole said, even though he was pretty sure he had got ’em. But he couldn’t see a body, and he didn’t want to be caught claiming something that turned out not to be true. Besides, he just didn’t…feel anything.

Why didn’t he feel anything?

“Don’t shoot if you don’t see the whites of their eyes,” the LT said from somewhere behind Cole.

“Yes, sir,” Cole said.

“Wasting bullets,” Gaines said, chunks of granola falling out of his mouth. He scrambled to catch them, then popped the pieces back in. “Your momma never told you not to waste things like mine did?”

“Nope.”

“She should have.”

“Yeah, well, she should have said and done a lot of things.”

“You don’t know how long we’ll be out here. Gotta save every bullet. That’s in the manual.”

“What manual?”

“Some manual, somewhere.”

“Show me the manual.”

“When we get back to the base.” Then, without missing a beat, “We gonna spend the night out here, LT?”

“You’ll know when I know,” the lieutenant said.

“It’s getting boring out here is all, sir. The only one shooting at ghosts is Ristler here.”

“Don’t shoot if you don’t see the whites of their eyes, Ristler,” the LT said.

“Yes, sir,” Cole said.

He re-scanned the area where he’d spotted the rags earlier, but no one else popped up into his scope. After a while, Cole got bored and pulled his M4 back and leaned against the sand, blinking up at the hot sun. The body armor—all 16-ish pounds of it—was a pain in the ass to hump around in, but it wasn’t like the alternative was better.

“Try this, it’s awesome,” Gaines said, holding out one of his granola bars.

Cole took it and chewed on it. It wasn’t bad, but he was mostly thinking about the black of the eyes belonging to the man he’d shot and the puff of red mist that had appeared in his scope before the head snapped back and disappeared.

“You definitely got that fucker,” a voice said.

“What?” Cole said, glancing over at Gaines.

“Huh?” Gaines said.

“How do you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I got him.”

“Got who?”

“The guy,” Cole said, nodding over the berm behind them.

The nineteen-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, squinted back at Cole from underneath his slightly canted helmet. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“You said something.”

“What? What did I say?”

“I thought you said something.”

Gaines shook his head. “I didn’t say shit, man.”

“Oh,” Cole said, and went back to crunching on the granola.

“You getting heatstroke or something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You better be sure, ’cause it’s hot as fuck out here, and I have a bad feeling we’re gonna be out here for a while.”

“It’s the desert. It’s supposed to be hot.”

“Yeah, but this hot? Fuck,” Gaines said as he swiped at sweat dripping down his forehead.

Cole kept quiet. He’d been pretty sure Gaines had said something, but if he had, why would the self-proclaimed “Roll Tide Hick” deny it?

It was only later that night that Cole realized it wasn’t Gaines. Years later, he would come to accept that the day he killed his first man was the same day that the Voice first spoke to him.

And it hadn’t shut up since.

* * *

The door didn’t open easily because there was something on the other side—either something heavy or a lot of somethings heavy—but Cole kept pushing until it finally budged. He was covered in sweat and losing his footing when he finally managed to crack the metal door open just enough for a stream of sunlight to flood inside the basement landing.

Behind him, Zoe flinched at the sudden brightness and lifted her hand to shield her eyes. “What’s that smell?”

“Gasoline,” Cole said.

“Why is there gasoline inside the bar?”

“I don’t know.”

The opening was barely a few inches wide but plenty to glimpse the mostly intact interior of Billy’s Pub. The only change was a big hole in the ceiling that hadn’t been there the last time Cole had run through the place. It was a gaping crater, the result of something big having crashed through the roof.

That “something,” he discovered, was an overturned Ford F-150 squatting in the middle of the room, on its roof. Gasoline dripped from the open gas tank, joining the already-large pool underneath the vehicle.

“Is that…?” Zoe said.

“That’s a truck,” Cole said.

“How’d it get here?”

“I have no idea. Maybe the blast from the plane crash.”

Zoe took the final step up the stairs and leaned toward the opening. After a while, she shook her head and pulled back slightly. “I don’t hear anything. Do you?”

“No.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“So what now?”

Cole took out the sawed-off shotgun from his front waistband. “Just in case.”

She looked at the weapon, then at him. “I did tell you there weren’t any bullets in there, right?”

“Shells.”

“Huh?”

“Shotguns have shells, not bullets.”

“What’s the difference?”

He started to explain but shook his head instead. “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, you and I know the shotgun isn’t loaded, but whoever we meet out there won’t.”

“What if there are cops out there? Aren’t you afraid they might shoot you?”

He hadn’t thought of that.

“Suicide by cop,” the Voice said. “Or should I say, accidental suicide by cop. Now wouldn’t that be an ironic way to go?”

More like a tragic way to go.

“Tragedy, irony. Same difference.”

It’s not.

“Whatever.”

Cole grunted to himself. It’d been a while since he had gotten into a pointless argument with himself, and he didn’t miss it one bit.

“Did you say something?” Zoe asked.

“Just clearing my throat,” Cole said. He put the shotgun down on the floor. “But you’re right. Wouldn’t want to get shot for nothing. Ready?”

“Almost.” She looked down the stairs. “Ashley, sweetheart.”

The girl appeared at the foot of the stairs in the thin sliver of morning sunlight. Cole hadn’t realized it before, but she was dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform, which immediately made him flash back to those schoolboys climbing over the huge truck driver in the streets yesterday.

“Come on,” Zoe said, and Ashley jogged up the stairs toward them.

“How old is she?” Cole asked.

“Eight.”

“I’m eight,” Ashley repeated.

“So I heard,” Cole said. He looked at the mom for a second, then the child.

“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked.

“This is your last chance. You sure you wouldn’t rather stay here instead of going out there with me?”

“You think we should?”

“I think it’s the safer option.”

“But you’re not staying down here with us.”

“I can’t. My life is out there.”

“Bear Lake.”

“Yes.”

“Where your wife is.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you saying you don’t want us to go with you?”

He shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, before you risk your life and your daughter’s out there with me, you need to seriously consider all the dangers that might be waiting for you.”

“What if I keep Ashley down here, and no help comes?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“So we’d be left alone, with no food or water.”

“There may be food and water in the bar. I can search for you—we can search together—before I go.”

“Or maybe there’s nothing to find, and we’ll end up starving in a few days when no help comes.”

Cole sighed. “That’s a possibility, too. The other possibility is that a battalion of national guardsmen might show up an hour after I leave. Or ten minutes later.”

“Or never,” Zoe said.

He nodded. “Or never. But out there…”

“It’s risky.”

“It’s very risky.”

“I think it’d be riskier if we stayed down here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Like you said, Cole: We don’t know anything, do we?”

“No, we don’t.”

“So it’s settled.”

He sighed. “I guess so.” Then, “Stay close. Don’t stray. That goes for the both of you.”

“Okay,” Zoe said.

“Okay,” Ashley said with a nod.

“I mean it,” Cole said, putting enough into his voice to let them know that he did mean it, and not caring if it scared them. “If you stray, and I have to go look for you…” He shook his head. “I won’t go looking for you. I have a mission. Get home. That’s it. That’s the only thing on my mind right now.”

“We understand,” Zoe said. She sounded almost annoyed with him. Maybe she didn’t like being treated like a child. Or, in this case, like her eight-year-old daughter.

Cole would have apologized if he thought he was being unnecessarily harsh, but he didn’t think he was. He needed them to understand what would happen, because he wasn’t going to go back on his word.

Not with Emily out there, alone, waiting.

“You should have gone into the basement alone,” the Voice said.

But I didn’t.

“You should have.”

But I didn’t, so now they’re my responsibility.

That was partially true.

“Which part?” the Voice asked.

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

He said out loud, “I just need you to know where I stand.”

“You did that. And we both understand.” Zoe looked down at her daughter. “Tell him, sweetheart.”

The girl nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t stray,” Cole said again, this time staring at the kid.

Ashley, for some reason, saluted him back.

Chapter 8

Cole pulled his dress shirt up and over his mouth before he took the first couple of steps out of the basement. He hadn’t been able to push the whole thing open, just enough to squeeze through. Behind him, Zoe and her daughter followed, Zoe clutching tightly to the girl. It was probably just a bit too tight, but Ashley either didn’t feel it or would rather have it than not.

The reason why it had been so difficult to open the door fully was the pieces of the ceiling that had fallen down, creating a pile of junk on the floor, with chunks of the bar counter that had been split in half by the wayward truck making the bulk of it. Broken glass crunched under Cole’s loafers, and he was very mindful that the Italian leather shoes weren’t going to protect him very much if he happened to step on a large piece of sharp glass or metal sticking out of the ground. Which, in this case, could be every step he took, in every direction, because the pub was littered with all manner of dangerous items at the moment.

He looked back at the women. “Watch your step.”

Zoe nodded, and so did Ashley. Cole was struck by the resemblance—the blonde hair, facial features, green eyes. Mother and daughter were practically identical.

“Stay close,” Cole said.

“Understood,” Zoe said.

He turned and skirted around the badly-crumpled front grill of the Ford and squeezed through the remainder of the bar counter. Cole kept expecting to see bodies, but there were none inside the place, which meant no one had made it in during all the chaos of yesterday. A part of Cole dreaded to see what was out there. But dread or not, he had no choice because Emily was also out there. And right now, getting to her was all that mattered.

“Ouch,” Ashley said from behind him.

Cole looked back as the girl rubbed at her side, having accidentally bumped into a remaining blunt edge of the thick wooden bar.

“Stay alert, honey,” Zoe said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said.

“Hurt?”

“A little bit. But I’ll be fine.”

“That’s my girl.”

Cole scanned the blown-out windows in front of them. There wasn’t much glass left, but a few scattered remains managed to hang onto their frames. The lack of obstruction allowed Cole to look out at what awaited them outside.

And it was empty.

And quiet.

Too empty and too quiet.

Where the hell is everyone? he thought, when Zoe, echoing his thoughts, said, “Where is everyone? Where did they all go?”

“I don’t know,” Cole said. He looked back at mother and daughter again. “Remember, stay close.”

“We will,” Zoe said.

“Yes, sir,” Ashley said. This time, the girl didn’t salute him.

They walked the rest of the way to the front door, going around as much of the dangerous—and sharp—debris as they could. It didn’t take long—the bar wasn’t that big—but they were probably being more cautious than necessary.

Cole didn’t mind the slow pace. It allowed him to listen to what was going on out there (Nothing. That was what was going on out there. A big, fat, eerie nothing.) and feel the calm—too calm—air around him.

Where were all the screams? The noise of chaos? The reminder that yesterday had ushered forth something that Cole knew had drastically changed the way human beings lived on this planet?

But there was none of that.

And that absence, more than anything, gnawed at his gut.

Cole didn’t have to push open the pub’s front door. It was hanging off its hinges, nearly knocked free by one of the wrought iron tables that were stationed outside, the legs bent at odd angles as it stuck half-in and half-out of the place. There were red splashes along the white paint, and Cole didn’t have to wonder what they were.

He stepped out of Billy’s Pub and outside.

“Oh, God,” Zoe said from behind him. Then, “Look down at the ground, sweetheart. Look down at the ground.”

Zoe was talking to Ashley, because she didn’t want her daughter to see what was waiting for them.

Bodies.

Dead bodies.

A lot of them.

He could smell them even before he saw them. It was the same bloody stench that had invaded the pub through the blown-out windows and partially-open door, coming from the sidewalks outside, and the entire block as far as he knew. Cars littered the streets, more than a few of them resting on their sides or roofs, similar to the Ford squatting in Billy’s place behind him. Others were partially buried in buildings and storefronts, but the vast majority had simply been abandoned by their owners.

The shredded fabric of a familiar-looking apron flapped in the breeze, having somehow gotten hung up on one of the many downed power poles. For every tree, lamppost, and streetlight that had been left standing, another one was lying across the sidewalk or bent at odd angles along the street. Downed power lines crisscrossed from poles and draped over buildings, but Cole didn’t see anything that looked like live wires that could kill him.

Sunlight glinted off a carpet of glass up and down the block, and when he glanced right, he could still see smoke drifting lazily into the air in the distance. That would have been where the 747 passenger plane he’d witnessed falling out of the sky had, eventually, touched down. How many souls were inside when that happened? And how many of them were trying to kill the other passengers?

“Go left, young man,” the Voice said.

No shit, Captain Obvious.

“Just a suggestion. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Shut up.

“Is that what you want?”

Yes.

“I don’t believe you. You need me.”

Cole was reminded of old World War II footages of European cities in the aftermath of an aerial Allied bombardment. But where those footages were kind enough to edit out the bodies and only showcase the structural destructions, Cole couldn’t avoid that bloody reality this morning.

The dead were everywhere. Simply everywhere. Men, women, and children. Blood covered the streets and sidewalks and cars. Bodies that were still intact and others that didn’t look like bodies anymore.

“Mommy,” Ashley said, her voice barely audible.

“Look down, sweetheart,” Zoe said. “Look down, okay? Don’t look up until Mommy tells you to.”

Cole glanced back and saw that Zoe had stepped in front of Ashley to keep the girl from sneaking a look at their surroundings. There was a body in front of them, lying half-on and half-off the curb. Cole only knew it was the body of a dead woman because of the torso, arms, and legs; the head was gone.

“Don’t look,” Zoe said. “Don’t look, sweetheart.”

Ashley put her head against her mother’s chest as Zoe wrapped her arms around her smaller, frail body.

“Stay here,” Cole said.

Zoe looked back at him, her eyes suddenly alarmed.

“I need to find a weapon,” Cole said.

She nodded, looking very much relieved.

Cole pulled down the shirt he’d been using to cover his mouth and nostrils in order to suck in some air. He flinched at the sudden flood of stench. He had barely eaten anything yesterday—if anything, he’d mostly drank too much at the company good-bye party—and his stomach rumbled, threatening to puke up what little food he had managed to put down.

“Don’t throw up in front of the women,” the Voice said, laughing.

Cole didn’t have to go far before he spotted an aluminum baseball bat buried in the driver-side window of an overturned Chevy truck nearby. He pulled it out, avoiding the dry blood that caked the top half. The bat felt good in his hands, and he took a few practice swings, liking the almost singing sound it made as it cut through air. It wasn’t a sword or a knife, or best-case scenario, a gun, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It looked, he thought, very much like the same bat he’d seen Rob, the bartender, using yesterday.

Cole glanced around, but there were no signs of the bat’s previous owner. There were also no hints of anyone else on the streets except him and the two women standing on the sidewalk behind him. At least, there was no one he could see.

“It’s quiet. Too quiet,” the Voice said.

Cole scanned the windows along the apartments across the street. Then the overturned and parked cars and the alleyways squeezed between buildings. It was a bright enough morning that he wasn’t scared of things jumping out of shadows at him, but there were still plenty of dark spots around him to be wary of.

Too many. Way, way too many.

“Stop lollygagging and get moving,” the Voice said. “Emily’s not going to come to you, you know.”

The Voice had a point.

“Of course I do. Now git!”

He got, turning around, and walking back to the women.

Zoe and her daughter had obeyed his instructions and hadn’t moved from the pub at all. Or from the headless body lingering half-on and half-off the curb nearby. Mother and daughter were still holding hands, and Cole was pretty certain there weren’t a whole lot of things in this world that were going to be able to pry Zoe’s hands off Ashley’s. For a kid that had seen people bash each other’s heads in, the eight-year-old looked mostly fine. Or maybe that was just a coping mechanism. Having her mother nearby probably helped.

As he walked back to them, Cole took out his cell phone and turned it on. He waited anxiously for the device to power up, and when it finally did, he frowned at the empty bars.

What had he expected? Maybe a miracle.

“Miracles don’t happen to you, chum,” the Voice said.

Cole ignored the Voice and tried calling anyway.

“Really?” the Voice asked.

When he couldn’t get anything that resembled a signal, Cole tried texting.

“Seriously?” the Voice said.

Shut the hell up, Cole thought as he put the phone away.

“Anything?” Zoe asked when he finally reached them.

“Do you have your phone?” he asked.

“It was in my purse, but I left it back in my car. Did your phone work?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What does that mean?”

“Cell towers are down. Or something else happened.” He sighed. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know anything.”

Ashley peered around her mother’s waist to look at him. The kid didn’t exactly look traumatized, but Cole had a feeling she wasn’t going to forget the last 24 hours for the rest of her life.

“What now?” Zoe was asking him.

“I’m going to Bear Lake,” Cole said. “You said you knew where that is?”

She nodded. “My boss used to have a lakeside house up there. Is that where we’re going?”

“‘We?’”

Zoe looked down at her daughter, then back up at him. “We’re going wherever you’re going. If that’s okay with you.”

“That’s a firm ‘No’,” the Voice said.

But Cole didn’t say No.

“Tell her ‘No’,” the Voice said.

Cole didn’t.

“Tell her.”

I can’t.

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

I can’t.

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“Are you sure?” Cole asked the women.

“Yes,” Zoe said. “Something happened yesterday. Something that changed everything. In the city, maybe the state—maybe the country. All I know is that my daughter and I are safe with you.”

“You need to be sure about that.”

“I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.”

Cole nodded. “All right. Stay close.”

“Goddammit,” the Voice said. “You’re going to die, you know that? And Emily’s going to be left alone. Is that what you want?”

No.

“Then why are you dragging a mother and her daughter with you?”

I can’t leave them behind.

“You can do anything you want, but you’re choosing not to.”

Cole didn’t answer the Voice.

He said instead, “Let’s go, and hope we run into someone who can tell us what’s been happening up here.”

As they turned around, Zoe said, “Don’t look, sweetheart. Don’t look.”

Ashley didn’t as she walked on the left side of her mother.

Just to make sure the girl didn’t see the headless body as they passed it by, Cole slowed down until he was walking to Zoe’s right in order to block the girl’s view if she should attempt to sneak a peek. He never did find out if she tried to look or not.

As they walked, Cole loosened, then took off the tie he’d been wearing all day yesterday and most of this morning. In all the chaos and running, he’d forgotten all about it. It’d been a part of his life for so long that keeping it on had just been a natural thing to do.

He dropped the tie and let it flutter to the street behind him. It landed in a pool of blood and what used to be someone’s face. A man, this time. Cole glanced back and saw that the body was wearing an apron, and though it was mostly covered in dry blood, he could just barely make out the word ROB on a name tag.

Chapter 9

“It’s a butcher shop. Only gorier.”

Cole couldn’t disagree with that assessment. It was frank and to the point, and truthful. Everything the Voice did very well.

He’d been in war zones and seen cities that were turned into killing fields, but this…was something else. Maybe it was the fact it was all happening here, in his city, his country, and not some foreign soil where people spoke a different language that made all the difference. He thought he was prepared for the aftermath after witnessing the beginning of it yesterday, but he was wrong.

This was bad.

“That’s the understatement of the century right there, buddy,” the Voice said, before it started cackling.

The street beyond Billy’s Pub got progressively bloodier, with more bodies strewn about. Not all the blood was dry, and some of the bodies looked fresh enough that they hadn’t begun to smell yet. That was a sign the killing hadn’t stopped after yesterday, but had continued into this morning.

“Danger, Will Robinson, danger,” the Voice said.

Tell me something I don’t already know.

“You should have left the mother and daughter behind.”

Except that.

“You said—”

Shut up.

“What did I tell you about shooting the messenger?”

Just shut up.

Cole tightened his grip around the bat. The same alarm bells that had gone off inside his head when he first stepped foot outside the basement continued ringing, and he didn’t let his eyes linger at one spot for too long.

A body here, another there.

One underneath a car.

Another covered underneath debris.

Even more left to rot in the open morning sun.

Too many. If he started counting them all, he would never stop.

So he didn’t, and kept moving instead. That was the only thing left to do now—keep moving.

Get to Bear Lake.

Get to Emily.

Get—

“Should have left the mother and daughter behind,” the Voice said.

Didn’t I tell you to shut up?

“You know I’m right.”

Cole didn’t answer.

“You know I’m right,” the Voice insisted.

Cole still didn’t answer.

Instead, he focused on the lack of voices outside his head, or the sight of people other than him, Zoe, and Ashley. Someone. Anyone. There were also no car engines, sirens, or anything that told him he and the mother and daughter weren’t the only three human beings still alive in the city.

Behind him, smoke continued to drift from the plane’s impact site, well up the block. That direction was a no-go. He didn’t want to see what the 747 had done to that particular stretch of the city. He imagined charred bodies and worse.

“Worse than this?” the Voice asked.

Yes.

“Maybe…”

He concentrated on what was in front of him instead.

The bodies.

And blood.

…and more bodies..

Jesus Christ, there were a lot of dead people.

“Stay focused,” the Voice said. “This is going to get worse before it gets better. It’s not like this is our first rodeo.”

Isn’t it?

“Well…”

That was a new one. Cole rarely heard the Voice get tripped up.

He walked on ahead of the women, but kept his ears to the sounds of their footsteps behind him. Occasionally, he glanced back to make sure they were still back there and hadn’t strayed too far away. They hadn’t. They had actually gotten closer, with Zoe gripping Ashley’s wrist tighter, if that was even possible. The girl walked next to her mother, doing her best not to look at their surroundings, but Cole caught her sneaking a peek once or twice. Probably more times that he couldn’t see. He didn’t blame the kid. It was impossible to not notice the devastation and bodies around them. Even if she somehow didn’t notice them, she wouldn’t have been able to escape the stench.

He kept his eyes on the street around him but also on the skies. The very empty skies above them. There were no helicopters or airplanes or—

A flock of birds flew by in a V-shape.

Well, at least the birds were still out there. What else was still chugging along as if nothing had happened? And did he really want to find out?

They passed a man in a black blazer and white dress shirt slumped behind the wheel of a parked Dodge, with something that might have been a metal rod sticking out of his temple.

A woman with half of her head missing lay half-in and half-out of the broken window of a bookstore across from the Dodge.

A pickup truck partially parked on the sidewalk. Its driver was missing, but he or she—or they—had left behind a lot of blood on the open driver-side door, that joined up with a big puddle on the ground. Bloody boot prints, belonging to more than one person, went in separate directions.

After a while, Cole stopped focusing on the bodies. Instead, they passed by as a series of colorful blurs—the colors belonging to their clothes. He ignored how they died, their gender, and even their last positions. He was surprised how easily he had become desensitized to his bloody surroundings; a coping mechanism that had kicked in.

“Dead is dead. Soldiers or civilians,” the Voice said. “You can’t do anything for them now. Survive. That’s all you can do. Survive, and get back to Emily.”

Get back to Emily…

“That’s right. Emily. Remember her?”

I remember.

“Good boy. That’s a good boy.”

“Mommy,” Ashley said behind him, her voice turning squeaky again.

“I know, sweetheart,” Zoe said.

Cole glanced back as Zoe pulled Ashley protectively closer to her. Cole was a little afraid that if she held the girl any tighter, she might smother her.

“Look down, okay?” Zoe said. “Look down at the ground, sweetheart.”

Ashley obeyed, but Cole could see that she had already seen too much. It was in the kid’s face, in her eyes.

Zoe looked up at Cole. “Should we be looking for a car? Bear Lake isn’t exactly within walking distance. And it’d be safer to travel by car, don’t you think?”

They had been walking for a while now and department storefronts had given way to mostly apartment buildings and small mom and pop shops. It hadn’t occurred to Cole that they should be looking for a ride. Why hadn’t he thought of it? It was the obvious thing to do.

“Maybe she’s not so useless after all,” the Voice said.

Maybe not.

“Let’s look for a car,” he said out loud.

He began doing just that, heading straight for the nearest vehicle—a white Camry squatting between two lanes. The driver-side door was open, but there were no signs of the driver, dead or alive. There was also no blood around the vehicle, so it made for a perfect first choice.

Unfortunately, the key was gone when Cole leaned through the open door.

“Anything?” Zoe asked.

He pulled his head out and shook it before moving to the next vehicle. The problem wasn’t the available options; the problem was the usable available options.

“It’s not too late to go back to the bar,” Cole said.

Zoe glanced behind her, back down the street. She turned back to him and shook her head. “Yes, it is. Besides, would you walk us back there?”

“I can’t afford to.”

“Exactly. So it’s too late now.”

Cole nodded. He had to admit, Zoe was a capable woman. She was a mother with an eight-year-old child and had probably never seen a man being killed before in her life. And she’d seen exactly that—and God knows however many more gruesome things yesterday—and here she was…

What, exactly?

“Capable is a good word,” the Voice said. “The lady’s capable.”

Cole had seen grown men trained to kill who broke down in the middle of a firefight. He’d seen 250-pound meatheads crying for their momma when they saw their friends get torn to pieces in front of them by an IED.

But here was thirty-something Zoe, looking, acting, and talking very much like a rock for the sake of her daughter. The only other woman who had managed to impress Cole as much as Zoe was Emily. His Emily.

“What’s wrong?” Zoe was asking him.

Cole shook his head. “Nothing. Why?”

“You were staring at me.”

“Caught!” the Voice laughed.

“Just trying to decide what the chances of us finding keys in a car are,” Cole said.

“It can’t be that bad,” Zoe said. “People were just abandoning their vehicles yesterday. One of them has to have keys.”

“Let’s hope so.”

Cole went on ahead of them and peeked into a red Toyota SUV, then investigated a blue Ford crumpled up against a telephone pole. He bypassed a fallen Honda CBR motorcycle and went around a white van with JOE’S PLUMBING written on the side, complete with a cartoon of a balding man holding up a plunger while smiling broadly: Joe Does It Right was written in cursive letters underneath the caricature.

A few feet from the plumber’s van, Cole found a black and white Mini Cooper with the keys sitting on the bloody driver’s seat. The blood wasn’t the problem, because he could always clean the keys and use something to put between him and the wetness, but the small two-door was wedged between a semi and a Jeep. He could have put the Jeep in neutral and pushed it out of the way…if it wasn’t overturned on its roof. That was going to be a problem.

“Maybe we should spread out to cover more ground?” Zoe said.

He shook his head. “No. Stay close.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Don’t stray.”

She nodded, looking almost relieved. Maybe she was afraid he’d say Yes, in which case he wondered why she’d made the suggestion in the first place. Even though, when he thought about it, it was the smarter thing to do. If they spread out, they could definitely cover more ground and maybe finally find a car with the keys still in the ignition and nothing blocking—

Clink!

Something bounced off the pavement in front of him. Cole’s eyes snapped, following that “something.”

A small round brass coin, about the size of a penny, but slightly smaller and not like any penny he’d seen. It ricocheted off the ground and flipped back into the air before clinking! a second time against the street.

“Did you hear that?” Zoe asked.

Cole didn’t answer. Instead, he turned left, in the direction where the penny (some kind of collectible coin?) had come from.

What the hell?

Someone was waving at him from a window across the street. High up—the fifth floor—of an apartment building. Black, young, morning sunlight glinting off the lens of his wire-rimmed glasses. He was moving his arms frantically, trying to get Cole’s attention.

Then, when the kid saw that Cole had seen him, he began pointing frantically up the street.

Cole turned to follow his gesture.

Cars. He saw a lot of cars. There were bodies in some of them, but most were empty.

What was the kid pointing at?

He looked back at the teenager.

The kid was still pointing, practically jumping up and down now, but not quite. For some reason he seemed to be hunched down low behind the open window frame, almost as if he was kneeling on the other side. They were close enough—just across the street—that Cole would have heard the kid if he shouted something. Except he wasn’t, almost as if he didn’t want to be noticed.

“He’s scared,” the Voice said.

Looks like it. But why?

“Ask him.”

Cole was about to do that when Zoe, standing next to him, beat him to it. “What’s he doing?”

“Trying to get our attention,” Cole said.

“Why?”

The kid was still pointing down the street, but Cole didn’t see anything even when he looked a second time.

There were cars, and bodies, and…what? What was he supposed to be seeing?

“You see anything?” he asked Zoe.

She shook her head. “No.”

Cole took a step toward the apartment. The building was ten floors high, the doors into the lobby closed. No signs, but red brick and mortar lined the front and probably the other three sides as well.

“What?” Cole shouted up at the kid.

Something that looked almost like annoyance flashed across the kid’s face.

“What do you want?” Cole shouted.

The kid finally stopped pointing and leaned even farther out the window. “Get out of the street! Get out of the street, you idiot!”

“Idiot?” the Voice said. “Did he just call you an idiot?”

Yeah, I think he did.

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Cole took another step toward the apartment building and was about to shout back at the kid when he felt Zoe’s hand grabbing his arm and tugged on it anxiously.

“Cole,” she said, her voice rising slightly.

He glanced back at her. She was looking down the street, in the same direction the kid in the window had been pointing earlier. It took him a few seconds to notice what had caught her attention.

It was a man standing on the other side of a white Chevy truck sandwiched between two other vehicles, less than twenty meters from them. He was wearing white overalls with suspenders, his clothes splashed with gaudy red stripes—

No, not stripes. Blood. The red patterns on the man’s outfit was blood.

Cole had no idea how the man had sneaked up on them. On him. Jesus Christ. Had the guy been tiptoeing around the abandoned vehicles all this time, only revealing himself now when he’d been spotted by Zoe?

No, not Zoe.

The kid. The kid in the window had seen the man first and tried to warn them.

Cole stared at the man, but it wasn’t the man’s bloodstained clothes that caught and held his attention. It was the man’s eyes. They were bloodred.

…bloodred…

“His eyes,” Zoe said breathlessly. “Do you see his eyes?”

“Yes,” Cole said.

“What should we do?”

“Run!” the kid in the window shouted. “Run, you idiot! Run!”

As if on cue, the man with bloodshot eyes sprang into action, circling around the hood of the Chevy and running toward them. His arms swung wildly as he ran, and Cole noticed, with what could only be morbid fascination, that the man was missing almost his entire left arm at the elbow. The stump had since been cauterized and was no longer bleeding. There was nothing wrong with his right hand, though, as it gripped a bloodied wrench that gleamed under the bright morning sun.

“Kid’s got the right idea!” the Voice said. “Time to run!”

Cole agreed and shouted, “Run!”

“Where?” Zoe shouted.

“Run! Just run!”

Chapter 10

In his mind, Cole had meant to direct Zoe toward the apartment building where the black kid was staying, but when he opened his mouth, the only words that came rushing out were, “Run!” Then, later, “Run! Just run!”

“Run? Run where?” the Voice asked. “Run back? Run forward? Run side to side?”

Thankfully, Zoe was smarter than Cole or the Voice, and knew exactly where to go. She was already halfway across the street and to the apartment building, Ashley clutched tightly against her chest. Cole wasn’t sure how Zoe was lifting Ashley and running as fast as she was. Even he would have problems doing both those things at the same time—at least, as well as she seemed to be doing it. Then again, he wasn’t a mom, and with as much adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream at the moment, it probably wasn’t even close to what Zoe was feeling.

“Damn. Look at that woman run!” the Voice said.

Yeah, she was something, all right.

“Shouldn’t you be running, too?”

Right. He was standing there like an idiot, waiting to be bashed in the head with the wrench that was, no doubt, already covered in other people’s blood from yesterday.

As she ran, her daughter clutched tightly to her chest, Zoe glanced back at him, her eyes widening in a Well? Aren’t you coming, too? question.

“Go!” Cole shouted. “Don’t look back! Just go go go!”

Zoe may or may not have nodded back. He couldn’t be sure. But she turned around and went, went, went.

The Voice laughed. “Now it’s your turn, chum!”

Cole took off, but he hadn’t taken more than a few steps before he knew he wouldn’t make it to the apartment building in time. And Zoe and her daughter might not, either, because the one-armed crazy in overalls had gotten a hell of a jump on both of them. In fact, the crazy was already angling right, on an intercept course toward mother and daughter.

They won’t make it…

“Not your problem!” the Voice said.

They are.

“Since when?”

Since now!

The crazy might have been huge, but he had long legs and was making up the twenty meters or so between them in seconds. Even that bloodied stump where his left arm used to be didn’t seem to be doing a whole lot to slow him down. Cole couldn’t tell if the man was breathing hard at all as his legs pistoned and the wrench rose and fell, the sun glinting off the metal parts that wasn’t covered in dry blood, of which there wasn’t very much.

Christ. How many’s he killed with that thing already?

“Who cares? You want to be next?” the Voice asked.

Cole didn’t answer, but he couldn’t help but wonder how many heads the one-armed crazy had already bashed in with that wrench since yesterday. God only knew what the maniac had been doing all day while waiting for an idiot (“Like you?” the Voice asked.) to just waltz willy-nilly down the street and become prey.

“Should have been more careful,” the Voice said.

He should have done a lot of things.

“Exactly right. It’s not too late to change that.”

Yes, it was.

“Is it?”

Yes.

The Voice sighed. “You’re trying to get yourself killed, aren’t you?”

Cole didn’t answer the Voice. Instead, he shouted, “Hey, motherfucker!”

The crazy was halfway to Zoe—he would have reached her well before he got to Cole—when he stopped and turned around, and grotesquely wide, bleeding eyes zeroed in on Cole.

“Yeah, you, asshole!” Cole shouted. “Fuck you!”

The man’s cheeks seemed to flare, and blood—or some other dark, reddish liquid—flitted from both nostrils as he pivoted away from Zoe and her daughter, and ran at Cole.

“Oh, now you’ve done it,” the Voice said. “So what now, smart guy?”

The crazy maneuvered around the abandoned vehicles with amazing grace and speed, and for a moment—just a moment—Cole thought, Maybe drawing his attention wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Zoe had hopped onto the sidewalk, and there were only ten more feet left between her and the twin doors that would lead into the apartment building, when she glanced back at him, perhaps responding to the sound of his voice.

“Keep moving!” Cole shouted at her. “Get inside!”

This time, he was certain she nodded, before turning around and reaching for the doors and pulling one of them open—for a split second, Cole was afraid the doors would be locked, but thank God they weren’t.

And then the one-armed crazy was almost on top of him, the rancid warmth of the man’s haggard breath flooding against Cole’s face even before the man reached him.

Cole swung with the bat.

Ping! as the aluminum weapon landed solidly with the side of the charging man’s head. The crazy was six-four, three inches taller than Cole, so Cole didn’t exactly have to tiptoe to land the blow. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for the aftershock of the impact, and both his arms were still trembling as he watched the crazy (the name Joe was stenciled across his overall’s oval-shaped name tag) snap backward and into the partially-open front passenger side door of a black Audi.

The one-armed man crumped to the floor, the wrench flying out of his remaining hand. Blood sprayed the sedan, but if Cole (was hoping) thought that Joe would stay down, he was sadly disappointed. The man sprang right back up, letting out a loud growl even as blood flew from both eyes.

“I think he’s mad now,” the Voice said. “You just made him mad!”

Fuck him, Cole thought as he stepped up and cracked the bat over Joe’s head a second time.

The first blow had cut open the man’s temple, leaving a big, nasty gash behind. The second one did the same to Joe’s forehead, and Joe went down again.

Cole waited for the man to get right back up like last time, but he didn’t. Instead, Joe lay in a crumpled heap, half of his head folded inward, and the skull cracked. Blood—and possibly chunks of brain—oozed out of the crater in both the side and front of his head.

“Yeah, I think you got him,” the Voice said. “But better make sure.”

Cole stepped closer and smashed the bat into the center of Joe’s head, cratering the skull even further. Blood, and other things from inside Joe’s head, splattered Cole’s pants legs.

But because Cole had to be sure, he swung again.

“Again!” the Voice shouted.

Ping! as the bat struck the pavement.

“Again!”

Ping!

“One more time!”

Ping!

Then, from the other side of the globe, “Cole!”

Zoe’s voice, cutting through the fog.

What just happened?

He staggered away from Joe’s unmoving body. The bat felt suddenly heavy in his hands even though it shouldn’t have been. He’d held and used weapons that were much heavier than this one. So why did it feel so heavy? Why did it seem to take all of his strength to keep it raised?

“Welcome back,” the Voice said, just before it started laughing. “Welcome back to the shit, my friend.”

No…

“Don’t fight it.”

No…

“Don’t fight it!”

No!

“Cole!”

Again, Zoe’s voice, slicing through the wild wind rushing through his head and carrying on all the way down to the tips of his toes.

He looked over at Zoe, already inside the apartment building. She was holding one of the double doors open for him.

“Cole, come on!” she shouted.

He hesitated. He didn’t know why, but he did.

Cole glanced back down at Joe the plumber. Or what was left of Joe. There wasn’t very much still there from the shoulders up. Cole didn’t remember striking the head that many times in order to reduce it to…that.

Did he actually do that? Did he do that?

“Yes, you did, because you had to,” the Voice said.

Did he?

“Yeah, you did.”

But the guy was already down…

“You had to be sure.”

Was that true?

“Trust me. It was necessary.”

Yes. It was necessary…

“Now you’re getting it. So snap out of it.”

Yes…

“And get your shit back in the game!”

Cole did, and flicked blood and brains and whatever else was clinging to the aluminum bat off it before he stepped away from Joe’s unmoving body. Joe may have been big and strong and crazed, but he wasn’t going to get back up. He was dead. Deader than a doorknob, as the Voice was fond of—

“Cole!”

He looked up and across the street at Zoe. She was staring back at him.

“Behind you!” she shouted.

Cole turned around.

“Time to go!” the Voice half-shouted and half-laughed as one, two—no, three figures appeared out of nowhere and made a beeline for him. And only him, because he was the only idiot standing out in the street—in the open.

Crazies. All three of them.

They were too far for Cole to see every single face, but it was in the way they moved—reckless and fast, the adrenaline pumping through their veins, helping one of them to leap over a parked car hood while another all but plowed over a garbage can on the sidewalk and never once slowed down for even a second.

He didn’t know where they had been hiding all this time, but they were converging on him from different directions, almost as if they had all been waiting, separate from one another, to strike. And he, Zoe, and Ashley had just given them exactly what they’d been waiting for.

The one that had jumped over the parked car had emerged out of an alleyway between a bakery and a bookstore, the folds of his shredded blazer flapping behind him. He looked like some kind of office drone, complete with white dress shirt, black slacks, and flailing tie.

The second one had leapt through the broken windows of a McDonald’s, a knife clutched in his right hand. Behind him, back in the restaurant, Cole glimpsed bodies on the floor, some slumped over booths.

The third was wearing a blood-splattered apron and was swinging a large meat cleaver wildly as he burst out of a parked van and made a straight line for Cole. He was the closest of the three by far, and as big and short as he looked, the man still maneuvered around the vehicles that separated him and Cole with amazing fluidity. Joe, the now-dead plumber, had possessed that kind of agility earlier, too.

Their eyes—wide and beyond huge, the pupils clearly pulsating wildly even from a distance as blood flitted from the sockets—zeroed in on him.

“Run, dude!”

Cole turned, looking back at Zoe—then up the building to the fifth-floor window with the bespectacled black kid.

“Don’t just stand there!” the kid shouted. “Get your ass moving, man! Get outta there!”

“He’s got a point,” the Voice said.

Yeah, he does, Cole thought, taking off for the apartment.

He was almost on the sidewalk when he heard a loud, echoing clang! and glanced back.

Two of the crazies had collided and crashed into a parked SUV. The one from the McDonald’s and the butcher. They were locked in combat, sunlight flashing wildly as their hands swung and their weapons cut away at each other’s flesh. Blood arced through the air, not that that did anything to stop either one from continuing to slash and strike at the other, neither one giving up.

For a second—maybe two, or possibly three—Cole stood frozen and stared, trying to understand what was happening. These two had been waiting for him—or someone stupid like him—to walk into their sights, but they’d turned on each other instead.

No, that wasn’t true at all. They weren’t turning on each other—they’d never been allies to begin with. They were just waiting for victims, whether it was him, Zoe, Ashley, or anyone else. Even each other.

Crazies killing crazies…

“Watch out, watch out!” the kid in the window was shouting.

Cole glanced up at him, then followed where he was pointing—

The third crazy—the office drone in the blazer, clutching a long, black metal poker in one hand—had wound his way around the two battling crazies and continued running across the street toward Cole.

“Cole, come on!” Zoe shouted.

“Get inside! Get inside!” the kid joined in.

Cole didn’t need further encouragements from either one of them. He turned around and jumped up onto the sidewalk, then all but lunged through the door Zoe was holding open. He heard the bang! as she slammed it shut behind him, followed quickly by the clack-clank of a tumbler lock turning and sliding home.

Ashley was hiding behind one of the sofas in front of him, peering out from behind the armrest back at him. Cole glimpsed broken furniture, dried blood splashed across walls and mailboxes, parts of a broken cell phone, and a severed hand all in the space of a few seconds.

He turned around just as Zoe staggered toward him. He reached out to grab her, and she started to say something when there was a loud crash! and the office drone smashed the security glass on the right side of the double doors with his metal poker. Stray glass shards flashed across the lobby, singing like missiles.

Cole grabbed Zoe and swung her away from the glass, shielding her body with his own. Pieces of glass bounced off his thick blazer, and more pelted his pants legs. A few might have even ricocheted off the back of his head, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Go!” Cole shouted as he pushed Zoe back.

He followed her for a few steps before stopping and turning around. The office drone was reaching in through the broken security glass with one hand, trying to reach the lock nearby. His eyes snapped left to right before finally landing back on Cole. Blood dripped from his eye sockets, falling down his cheeks like sheets of rain.

Cole clutched the bat in his hands and began moving toward the doors.

The crazy snarled at him, pale and cracked lips almost forming something that looked like—

Was that a grin?

Did the motherfucker just grin at him?

“I think he did,” the Voice said.

Yeah, the crazy probably had.

Cole moved faster, but before he could reach the doors, the crazy pulled his arm out of the broken security glass. The man was still grinning at Cole when he turned and fled.

Cole watched the crazy bound across the street, passing the butcher, who had gotten the upper hand on the man from the McDonald’s and was chopping his victim repeatedly in the chest with his cleaver. Cole thought the office drone might slow down to strike the unaware butcher, but instead he kept running before disappearing into the mouth of an alleyway across the street.

“Sonofabitch grinned at you,” the Voice said. “What do you think he meant by that?”

How the hell should I know.

“Hey, just making conversation.”

You can stop now.

“Where’s he going?” Zoe asked as she reappeared behind Cole, then peered through the broken window alongside him.

“I don’t know,” Cole said.

“Did he just…? I thought I saw him…?”

“I guess she saw it, too,” the Voice said.

At least it wasn’t just him. For a second there, Cole was entertaining the idea that he’d been seeing things.

The butcher had stumbled up from the bloody remains of his victim. His clothes were covered in fresh blood, and thick gobs of red wetness dripped from the cleaver in his hand. Cole was grateful he couldn’t see the remains of the other crazy, not that his mind stopped imagining all the possibilities anyway.

“I might throw up,” Zoe whispered.

But she didn’t. Fortunately, because she was standing next to him, and he might have gotten more than a few chunks on him.

The butcher stared across the street at them, but there wasn’t the same mischievous look that the drone had flashed Cole earlier. At least, Cole didn’t see it. If anything, all he saw was a mask of blood and desire, though a desire for what, he wasn’t entirely sure.

“Who are you kidding? You know what he wants,” the Voice said.

Blood. The butcher wanted blood. His, or anyone’s.

“Bingo.”

The butcher glanced around, as if searching for a new victim. Finding none, he turned and ran off down the street. Cole followed the big man for as long as he could until the crazy disappeared behind a parked white van and was never seen again.

For now, anyway.

For now…

Chapter 11

“You’re bleeding,” Zoe said.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

Cole sat down on the edge of a desk that was parked near the middle of the lobby. There was a chair nearby, toppled over, with red and other colored liquids spilled over much of it. The man who had been monitoring this guard station, Cole thought, hadn’t met a very nice end. Either that, or he’d done most of the meting out of those not-very-nice endings.

He looked down at himself but couldn’t see blood anywhere. “Where?”

“Behind you,” Zoe said. She circled the desk to get a better look at him from behind. “It’s not too bad. It doesn’t look too bad, anyway. It’s just jutting out of your back.”

He tried to get a better look, but of course couldn’t see past his shoulders. “What is it?”

“A piece of glass. It’s near here,” she said, indicating the area between her scapula and clavicle. “It must have happened when that crazy broke the glass. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“For what?”

“You know what.”

“I don’t.”

“You shielded me with your body. You don’t remember?”

Cole shook his head. Did he do that?

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“Well, you did. So, thanks.”

“Okay.”

Zoe let out an amused noise. “That’s it? I thanked you for saving my life, and all you say is okay?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed like such an underwhelming response when someone thanks you for saving their life. Again.”

“You’re welcome?”

“That’s better.” Then, “Now don’t move. Let me get a better look at this thing.”

Cole sat still and tried to see if he could feel any pain, but there was nothing. And he hadn’t felt anything during the couple of insane minutes when the crazies attacked, either.

A couple of minutes? That was it? It’d felt like an eternity while it was happening. But Cole was used to that. Time always seemed to slow down when he was in the middle of combat. It’d been a while since he lived through that, though.

“Ah, the good old days,” the Voice said.

He wouldn’t exactly call those days good.

“We have different memories, then.”

No kidding.

The Voice laughed, but Cole ignored it and focused on the lobby doors instead. They remained closed, and he couldn’t see anyone or anything outside through the shattered security glass. The office drone crazy that had tried to come in hadn’t returned, and neither had the butcher—or anyone else—lurking, previously unseen, around the area.

Cole didn’t know how he knew, but he just knew that those two weren’t the only ones out there. He remembered how all three—the drone, the butcher, and the third one—had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Which wasn’t true at all. They hadn’t just blinked into existence.

No, they’d been hiding.

They’d been waiting.

They’d been biding their time.

“Crazies, but smart crazies,” the Voice said. “That’s gonna make getting to Bear Lake more difficult.”

Maybe…

“No maybe about it, buddy. We’re gonna have to rethink our strategy.”

Strategy? Cole didn’t even know they had one.

“We do,” the Voice said. “I just haven’t told you yet, that’s all.”

Cole waited for the inevitable laughter, but it didn’t come.

“Psych!” the Voice said a few seconds later, before it did, finally, laugh.

Sonofabitch.

Cole looked over at Ashley, who had sat down on a lime-green sofa next to the row of mailboxes embedded in the lobby wall. The room was huge, with a back hallway behind them and two elevators next to that. A door led into a staircase—Cole only knew that because of stairs written on a sign above it—but otherwise it was just the three of them inside the building.

Of course, Cole knew that wasn’t the case. The black kid that had warned them about the crazies hiding about was also around. He was above them, on the fifth floor. Cole made a mental note of that even as he tried to get a better angle on the piece of glass that was apparently sticking out of his shoulder. He failed, but fortunately Zoe could see better than he could.

“Is it bad?” he asked.

“You have a piece of glass sticking out of you,” Zoe said.

“I mean, is it bleeding? What’s the blood loss situation?”

“It’s not too bad. Just a trickle.” Then, after a brief pause, “What should I do?”

“Pull it out.”

“How?”

“With your fingers.”

“Just…pull it out?”

“First, see if you can find a rag or towel to stanch the bleeding, just in case.”

“Right. Just in case.”

She began opening drawers behind him one by one. Cole took the moment to check on Ashley, who didn’t look as if she could be pulled away from the couch she’d settled on. Her hands were in her lap, and she looked at Cole with those big green eyes of hers, as if waiting for him to tell her to do something.

“Are we going to die?” the girl asked him.

He gave her a forced smile, hoping it was at least semi-convincing enough to fool a child. “Not if I can help it.”

“What if you can’t help it?”

“No one’s dying,” Zoe said, her voice even more believable than his had been. “Will this do?” she asked as she held out a small roll of toilet paper from behind him.

Cole wondered what the building’s guard, or doorman, or whoever he’d been that sat at this desk day in and day out, was doing with toilet paper in one of his drawers.

Instead of asking that inane question, though, he said, “It should work.”

“You sure?” Zoe asked.

“Yes.”

Cole focused back on the front doors across the lobby from them. He could see outside through the broken security glass and couldn’t detect any movements out there. Of course, that didn’t mean there wasn’t any—

“Fuck!” Cole screamed when Zoe pulled the piece of glass out of him.

He heard it fall and break against the floor.

“I need you to—” Zoe said, but Cole beat her to it and took off his blazer.

Zoe pulled his dress shirt up and pressed a wad of the soft toilet paper against his shoulder.

“You didn’t give me a chance to get ready,” Cole said.

“Sorry. I thought it’d be easier if you didn’t know it was coming.”

“Well, it wasn’t.”

“Sorry,” she said again. “Anyway, it wasn’t that big. Just a small piece. Your blazer did a lot to protect you.”

“How small was it?”

“Three inches?”

“And how many inches was inside me?”

“About one managed to get through your blazer and shirt underneath.” She held the toilet paper against him in silence for a moment, before adding, “I guess it hurts more coming out than it did going in. You didn’t even feel it until I told you?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for saving my mom,” Ashley said from the sofa.

Cole looked over and gave her a half-smile. “Sure, kid.”

“So what do we do now?” Zoe asked.

“First, make sure you don’t bleed to death,” the Voice said.

I’m not going to bleed to death.

“Famous last words, buddy.”

Shut up. You’re not helping.

“I beg to differ.”

Beg all you want, but you’re still not helping.

“Har har,” the Voice said. “So funny I forgot to laugh.”

“We’ll rest in here for a while, then figure something out,” Cole said out loud.

His body had suddenly felt tired, his joints aching in spots he didn’t know was possible. He’d forgotten, he realized, what it was like to be locked in a life-and-death battle and acting on pure instinct just to survive. He’d forgotten, but it was all rushing back now.

“You got soft,” the Voice said.

I was retired.

“Another word for soft.”

Oh, shut up.

“They were like the others,” Zoe was saying. “The three out there. Their eyes… It’s the eyes, Cole. You saw it, right?”

“Yes.”

“They were like the ones from yesterday. Like they were possessed.” Then, almost whispering the question, “Do you believe in gods and demons?”

“No,” Cole said without hesitation.

He’d never believed, and yesterday and today hadn’t changed that. There was an explanation here, even if he didn’t know it. Or was even close to discovering it. But there had to be one. He knew it, even if he didn’t know it.

“Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better,” the Voice said.

“I didn’t use to either,” Zoe was saying. She’d lessened the pressure noticeably against his back with the wad of tissue paper.

“So you’ve changed your mind?” he asked.

“I don’t know what to think anymore. Things like what happened yesterday shouldn’t be possible.”

“But it did.”

“Exactly. It did.”

“Maybe it’s time to believe,” the Voice said.

No.

“You’re not even going to think about it?”

There’s an explanation. I just haven’t found it yet.

The Voice chortled. “Denial’s not just a river in Egypt, buddy.”

Instead of wasting his time with the Voice, Cole glanced around at the lobby before climbing off the desk and pulling his shirt back down and stuffing the hem into his pants.

“What are you doing?” Zoe asked.

“I’m okay.”

“You’re still bleeding.”

“You said it wasn’t bad.”

“It’s not, but…”

“Then I’ll be okay.”

“It doesn’t hurt?”

It did, a little, now that he knew it existed.

But he said anyway, “No.”

Cole took out the cell phone from his pocket and glanced down at it. He shouldn’t have bothered. There were still no bars, and pressing Emily’s prerecorded number didn’t do anything.

“Anything?” Zoe asked.

He shook his head and pocketed the cell phone.

“Is it possible all the cell towers can be down at once?” Zoe asked. “I thought technology had come a long way and something like that couldn’t happen. Don’t we have satellites and things like that circling around up in space?”

“It shouldn’t be possible, unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless whatever’s happening out there is worse than we thought, and affecting more things than just people.”

“Like technology?”

“Maybe.”

“What could do something like that?”

He could think of plenty of things, some more likely than others. The world he used to tread in was full of maniacs with insane ideas about how to kill people or topple civilizations that they didn’t agree with.

“I don’t know,” Cole said instead. “Let’s focus on what we do know.”

“And what’s that?” Zoe asked.

“The here and now. Getting through today.”

“Then tomorrow…”

He nodded. “Then tomorrow.”

And the day after that, and the one after that, he thought but didn’t add. He assumed Zoe already knew it, too. She didn’t look like a dumb woman. If anything, she’d shown herself to be capable. Or at least, not a huge burden on him.

“So what’s our next move?” Zoe asked.

He looked toward the rear hallway behind them. “Let’s look for a phone. Maybe a landline that’s still working.”

“You want to call someone?”

“I want to call anyone that’s still out there. Cells are down, but maybe the old-fashioned way still works.” He picked up the baseball bat leaning against the desk. “Same rules apply. Stay close, and don’t stray.”

Zoe nodded, while Ashley, once again, saluted him for some reason.

“Why does she keep doing that?” he asked Zoe.

Zoe smiled. “Her dad was in the Army.”

Cole nodded. He didn’t ask Zoe where Ashley’s dad was now, or if he was even still alive. Mostly because he didn’t want to know too much about mother and daughter.

“Good call,” the Voice said. “It’ll make having to leave them behind much easier.”

That’s not going to happen.

“Are you sure about that?”

Cole didn’t answer the Voice quite as quickly this time.

“I thought so,” the Voice said, before it started cackling again.

Chapter 12

He didn’t like leaving the front double doors unguarded, but he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like Zoe or her daughter could do anything if one of the crazies tried to come in anyway. (Okay, maybe Zoe, but for how long, against an adrenaline-charged maniac that didn’t seem to feel pain?) He was also somewhat comforted (“Really? Comforted?” the Voice asked, the mocking tone very much obvious) by the fact that he would hear any attempted entry all the way back in the building.

He hoped, anyway.

“We’re doing a lot of that these days,” the Voice said. “Hoping, I mean.”

I don’t have any choice.

“Don’t you?”

No.

“Don’t you?”

He didn’t answer the second time.

“That’s what I thought,” the Voice said.

Cole led Zoe and Ashley into the back hallway with him. There were two offices, both on the left side and a third door on the right marked staff. The first one on the left was marked super, while the one after that didn’t have anything to indicate what it was being used for. Cole guessed either a supply room or something similar.

There was a rear entrance into the building at the end of the hallway, but fortunately for them it was a metal door that was locked in place by a pair of locks. Cole sidestepped an old puddle of blood to get to it, to make sure the door was sealed tight. There was blood on the push bar, but as far as he could tell the door was solid. That was a good thing, because he hadn’t known it existed until now.

“Lucky for you, it was secured,” the Voice said.

Yeah, lucky for me.

He backtracked up the hallway to rejoin the women, but first sneaked a peek into the unmarked room. It turned out to be a laundry room, but one with OUT OF ORDER signs written in big, blocky markers on all the machines.

Cole continued on into the super’s office with Zoe and Ashley, where they found a mess. There was blood on the floor, and more sprayed across two of the four walls. A window that looked out into an alley next door was smashed, but there were burglar bars over it, so Cole didn’t feel immediately threatened by the opening.

“Look around, but be careful. Watch your step,” he said.

He left the door open behind them so he could keep one ear on the lobby. Mother and daughter went to the desk and began opening drawers, while Cole went into the bathroom in the back.

He opened the door and leaned in. It was surprisingly pristine inside and no signs that a fight had occurred, unlike the rest of the room. The office was just that—a place to work, with no extra spaces for sleeping.

When Cole came back, Zoe and Ashley had given up on the desk.

“Nothing?” he asked.

Zoe shook her head. “No phones.”

“I guess it was a long shot. Who uses landlines anymore?”

“What about that?” Zoe said, pointing to an old CRT TV sitting on a flimsy-looking nightstand in one corner.

“Try it,” Cole said.

Ashley walked over and gave the bulky square box a quick look. Cole was wondering if she’d ever seen something that old in her life. The girl pressed the power button, but the TV didn’t turn on. Ashley glanced back at them and shrugged.

“The power’s still out,” Zoe said. She looked over at Cole. “You think it’ll come back anytime soon?”

“Someone has to fix the poles first,” Cole said. “Just like the cell towers. Someone has to go out there and get them working again, fix whatever took them out.”

“Which could be anything…”

“Yeah. It could be anything.”

“What about the boy, Mommy?” Ashley asked. She’d wandered over to an ugly pink sofa and sat down.

“What boy?” Zoe said.

“The one in the window.”

Zoe apparently had forgotten all about the black kid that had warned them about the crazies. Cole didn’t blame her. He had, too.

“Yeah, what about him?” Zoe asked, turning over to Cole. “He’s in the building with us.” She glanced up at the ceiling. “I think he was on the fourth floor.”

“Fifth,” Cole said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was the fourth floor.”

Cole headed for the door. “Come on. Let’s go find the kid. Maybe he knows what the hell’s going on.”

“That’s a long shot,” the Voice.

Maybe, but it was a shot. It wasn’t like they had anything to lose by asking.

* * *

Zoe and Ashley followed Cole out of the super’s office and back into the lobby, where they moved the large desk and sofa over to reinforce the front doors. Or he and Zoe did, while Ashley did her best to hold up her end. The girl was a trooper and was actually sweating by the time they’d carried the sofa over and sat it in front of the desk, which they pinned against the door. Fortunately, the windows that flanked the doors had burglar bars over them, so he didn’t have to worry too much about them keeping unwanted entry out.

The combination of desk and sofa made a decent barrier, but it wouldn’t completely stop someone who was determined to get in from doing just that. But even if that were to happen, they would at least give him an early warning system when the crazies tried to batter their way inside. He wasn’t sure what he’d do after that, but he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

“You think it’ll hold?” Zoe asked when they were done.

“Yeah, sure,” Cole said.

“You don’t sound very confident.”

“It’ll do.”

“There’s the desk inside the super’s office. We can use that, too.”

“It’s too big. And it’ll take too long. Besides, I don’t think they’ll expose themselves so readily.”

“What do you mean?”

“You saw what happened out there? With the butcher and the other one?”

Zoe nodded. “Yes…”

“They don’t care who they attack, as long as it’s someone. Us, or each other. If one of them wants to get in here, he’ll have to spend a lot of time trying to batter the doors in. That’ll leave him open to attack by the others.”

“How sure are you about that?” Zoe asked.

I’m guessing—about that, and about everything else today, Cole thought, but he said, “Pretty sure.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Me too, Cole thought.

He started crossing the lobby and the women followed. “Same strategy,” Cole said. “Stay close, and don’t stray.”

They passed the bank of elevators and headed for the staircase next to it. Without electricity, the elevators would be useless. Besides, he didn’t feel like letting whoever was up there know they were coming up anyway. Elevators, especially when the entire apartment building was currently giving off the vibe of a tomb, would make a hell of a lot of noise.

“It’s a kid,” the Voice said. “What are you so worried about?”

The problem was that it might not just be a kid up there. All of this could have been a trick. One elaborate setup to get him in here with the women, and then… What?

“It’s just a kid. Relax.”

Yeah, right. Relax.

There was blood inside the stairwell and on the first couple of steps when Cole opened the door, but by this point he’d become so used to the sight that he didn’t even flinch. Neither did Zoe and her daughter, the two women keeping their distance behind him. Zoe had purposefully kept Ashley and herself far back enough from him that if he needed to, Cole could use the bat without fear of hitting them accidentally. He hadn’t told her to do that, but she’d figured it out all on her own.

He glanced over his shoulder at them and caught Zoe staring back at him, waiting patiently. She gave him a pursed smile, as if to say, “Whenever you’re ready.”

He nodded before turning forward again. Cole didn’t bother to reiterate the “stay close, don’t stray” mantra. At this point he was pretty sure both mother and daughter knew it by heart and had no plans to do anything else.

Cole entered the stairwell, then went up the stairs. He maneuvered around the blood splatters, obvious even with just natural lighting to see with inside the claustrophobic room. Cole stopped for a moment and glanced up, expecting a pair of faces to stare down at him.

Instead, he saw ten floors of empty stairs, and the only sounds were his own breathing and that of the women behind him. Their breathing was slightly accelerated, but he didn’t blame them one bit for that. His own chest was more active than usual.

“This isn’t your first rodeo, buddy,” the Voice said.

No, it wasn’t, as much as Cole wished that it were.

He continued up, choking up on the bat so he could swing it without worrying about striking the railing on his right or the wall on his left. He was used to close quarters combat, but usually he had more than just a bat to play with.

What he wouldn’t give for a gun right now…

It took them a while to reach the second floor, mostly because Cole kept expecting a crazy to pop up like something out of a horror movie and race down the steps toward him and the women. But it never happened, even when he purposefully made a lot of noise. He wasn’t sure if he was glad for that or disappointed. It’d been a while since he’d smashed someone’s head in with the bat.

“Getting a little bloodthirsty, aren’t we?” the Voice asked.

No, he wasn’t.

“Are you sure?”

Yes, he was.

He thought so, anyway.

When they finally reached the second-floor landing, Cole leaned into the stairwell door and used the security glass along the side to look out. A long hallway, just barely lit by an open window at the very end. A curtain fluttered against the breeze, but there was enough natural lighting for him to see that there were no threats out there. There were also no signs of people, though he could easily make out blood against the carpeted floor and along the walls. And there, an open door about three apartments down. A body lay half-in and half-outside the hallway, with just the legs visible.

“What do you see, Cole?” Zoe asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and continued up the steps.

On the third floor, Cole did the same thing, peering out at the hallway beyond the stairwell door. More blood on the walls and floor, and what looked like a stray boot resting just a few feet from the stairs. The door of an apartment two doors up was open, but beyond that there were no signs of occupancy. But he had to remind himself that he hadn’t seen people on the streets either, until those maniacs came out of the buildings and attacked.

He changed up his grip on the bat for the ninth time in as many minutes and continued up.

The fourth floor was uneventful, with nothing visible beyond the stairwell door.

By the time they reached the fifth, they were already moving faster, and both women seemed to have relaxed noticeably behind him. They weren’t breathing nearly as hard as when they’d began the trek, at least. It was the same with him.

On the fifth-floor landing, Cole exchanged a quick look with Zoe.

She nodded back at him, as if to say, “We’re ready.”

He returned it, then turned around and opened the door, and stepped outside.

* * *

He hugged the wall, doing his best to ignore the stale air around him. But stale was better than blood, which he couldn’t detect despite his best efforts. That was a good sign. There was, though, something that didn’t belong: a knife buried in the wall across from him. Cole briefly considered grabbing the knife and dropping the bat, but decided the bat was a better weapon—it was longer, stronger, and had proven reliable in the streets.

Zoe and Ashley followed behind him, and he thought Zoe would go for the knife, but she didn’t. Either the blood that covered the handle turned her off, or something else did. Either way, they moved past the knife without looking back at it. In his mind, Cole wondered how the blade had gotten there, and where the person who had put it there in the first place had gone.

“Focus!” the Voice said.

Cole did, concentrating on the long hallway in front of him.

There were five doors on both sides—10 in all—numbering from 501 to 510. The even numbers were to his left and the odd ones to his right. When they finally reached 501 after some careful tiptoeing, Cole paused and pressed his ear against the closed door and listened.

Silence.

Absolute silence.

He pulled his head back and moved on to the next one: Apartment 503.

The door was open, bright sunlight from inside washing out and splashing against the closed door of apartment 504 across the hallway from it. His destination was the door after 503. He’d worked out the layout of the building in his mind and knew that the kid that had warned them about the crazies would be in apartment 505.

Cole stopped and glanced back at Zoe and her daughter. He held his palm toward them (“Stay put”) and got an acknowledging nod back from Zoe.

He took the next five steps toward 503 alone, before leaning into the open door and peeking inside. Overturned chairs, broken furniture, and a smashed TV on the floor. All of it visible against sunlight coming in through an open window and a torn white curtain. It looked as if a hurricane had gone through the place. Except there were no bodies, and when Cole sniffed the air, he couldn’t detect the lingering scent of blood.

Cole pulled his head back and glanced over his shoulder at Zoe. She was looking at him, waiting patiently with Ashley just a little farther down the hallway. He shook his head and wasn’t sure what flashed across her face. Relief or concern—

The creak of a door opening, just before a dark and bespectacled head peered out of apartment 505 up the hallway.

Cole spun, raising the bat to strike.

“Well?” the kid said. He was low to the floor, and at first Cole thought the kid was kneeling, but that wasn’t it at all: He was sitting in a wheelchair. “You guys going to skulk around out here all day, or are you going to come in already?”

Chapter 13

“It started on the East Coast,” the kid in the wheelchair said. “They said it came from the Atlantic Ocean, maybe even all the way from Europe, but I don’t know about that. I just know that it started as a handful of wildings in places like New York and quickly spread like some kind of virus. New Jersey got it next, then the rest of the East Coast. By the end of the day, it was here, in our city, and the shit hit the fan.”

“Who is ‘they?’” Zoe asked. “How do they know all this?”

“I don’t know. I first saw posts about it in the morning on forums that I frequent.”

“What kind of forums?”

“Um, let’s just say, the kind that you probably have never heard of. Anyway, from what I could gather, it happened fast. Really, really fast. By the time noon came around…” He shook his head. “It happened really fast. I mean, lightning fast. I don’t think anyone was prepared for it. Not the cities, not the states, not even the government.”

Cole didn’t interrupt the kid. He was too busy replaying the conversation with Donnie not more than twenty-four hours ago in his mind.

“It’s about what happened in New York, sir,” Donnie had said.

“What happened in New York?” he had asked, because he didn’t know. He had bypassed the news in the morning and had been too busy in the afternoon to pay any attention to the outside world as he prepared to leave the company he’d built from the ground up one last time.

“You don’t know?”

“No. I was a little busy today. What’s happening in New York?”

“People going a little crazy. Some guy drove his truck into a mall in the morning and killed a bunch of people. Then some young kids beating people up in Central Park. All kinds of crazy shit—Oops, sorry, sir. Crazy stuff going on out there.”

No shit, Donnie. No shit.

“But you don’t have any idea what really happened,” Zoe was saying.

“No,” Dante, the kid, said. “I’m not sure anyone does. The news cut out pretty fast after the first reports of people killing each other in our city. I guess even the reporters had better things to do than go out there and try to get answers. Heck, half of them probably turned into crazed maniacs themselves.”

“Half of them?” Cole thought. Try most of them, kid.

He said, “How long before the news went offline?”

“Around seven,” Dante said. “After that, I had to resort to this.” He patted a ham radio sitting on a table next to him. “I was able to get reports from other parts of the country for a while. All the way up to about midnight. Then everything just went quiet.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Silence.”

“Nothing from the government?” Cole asked.

“Zilch. A big, fat nada.”

The kid leaned slightly forward in his chair and for a brief second or two, Cole was afraid he might fall off. It was unfounded fear, because Dante clearly knew everything about what his wheelchair was capable of. That was why the kid had seemed so low to the ground when Cole first saw him; because he was confined and couldn’t have revealed himself any higher via the window, even if he’d wanted to.

Sharp and intelligent eyes moved from Cole to Zoe, and even Ashley sitting in the back. “You know what’s happening, don’t you?” Dante asked. “Once upon a time, mankind was a wild animal. We killed, ate, and procreated. That was the full extent of our abilities; our needs. But we changed. We became civilized. Anthropologists have clever names and charts and all that good stuff to show you how it all happened. Basically, we left our reptilian brain behind and achieved a higher status. We evolved.”

“How do you know any of this?” Cole asked.

Dante shrugged, as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world. “There’s nothing good on TV, and it’s hard for me to go outside. I used to go to public school, but it was pretty lame. So I’ve been homeschooled since I was ten, got my high school equivalency last year, in fact. I’ve been thinking about college; but you know, money and access are hard to come by, so I’ve been doing a lot of online courses. That tends to get a little boring, too—way too easy—so I spend a lot of time reading.”

“You got all this from reading?”

“My aunt says I’m a sponge. She also says my biggest problem is that I absorb everything but don’t know what to squeeze back out.” He grinned. “She’s colorful like that.”

Cole and Zoe exchanged a look. She was like him—not quite sure what to make of Dante. The teenager was probably either fourteen or fifteen, and while he looked frail and helpless, Cole had seen the way he zoomed around the apartment in his wheelchair. Given a straight line outside, in the street, Cole didn’t think he could outrun Dante.

“What else did you sponge up about all of this?” Cole asked.

Dante shook his head. “That’s about it. Radio’s dead. Everything’s dead. All I know now is what I can see out that window.”

“Phones?”

“Dead.”

“Internet?”

“Dead. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“About what?”

“If this is some natural phenomenon, or if someone’s behind this. I mean, the way everything just went down…” He shrugged. “It makes you wonder. Or it makes me wonder, anyway.”

The kid had a point, even if Cole hadn’t actually been “wondering” about it until now. Then again, he’d been too busy trying to survive, fighting for his life. By comparison, Dante apparently had a lot of free time to “wonder” about why things were happening. The answers were out there, but Cole still couldn’t give it the attention it needed. Right now, he only had one goal: Get to Emily. Get to Emily at all costs.

“Where’s your aunt now?” Zoe was asking Dante.

“I don’t know,” Dante said, leaning back. “She’s a nurse at the city hospital. She didn’t come home last night; had to do an extra shift to pay the bills. I’m going to really miss her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“You don’t know that. She could be trying to make her way back home right now.”

“I hope not.” Then, off Zoe’s confused look, “I’ve been looking out that window all day. I know what’s been happening out there. Yesterday and all morning.” He shook his head. “I really don’t want to think about my aunt being out there alone, trying to come back here.” He looked over at Cole. “I’m pretty sure she’s not as good as you when it comes to self-defense.”

Cole wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Clearly, Dante had seen the way Cole had bashed in Joe the plumber’s head with the bat, even long after the man was dead. The look in Dante’s eyes as he stared back at Cole told him that the kid had seen everything. Every bloody second of it.

“I did what I had to,” Cole said.

“Of course you did,” Dante said. “I wasn’t trying to say anything else.” Then, just like that, “You guys want, like, something to drink or eat, or something?”

“Food!” Ashley said from her couch, just a little too loudly.

Dante, Cole, and Zoe all looked over at her at the same time.

The girl clamped her hands over her mouth, eyes bulging.

“It’s okay,” Dante said, glancing at the window he’d been leaning out earlier. It was closed, and the curtains were pulled in. “They don’t have super hearing or anything.” Then, with a slightly nervous—or was it mischievous?—smile, “At least, I don’t think so.”

* * *

“What else did you see from that window?” Cole asked between bites of turkey sandwich with warm lettuce and mayonnaise on whole wheat bread.

“Probably not as much as you,” Dante said. “I’m limited by that rectangle. But you were out there.”

“I’m curious what you saw, away from the chaos.”

“My perspective, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

Cole hadn’t realized how hungry he was until Dante pulled out the pack of turkey slices from the no-longer-working refrigerator and began slapping sandwiches together with practiced ease. Like the living room, the kitchen had been refitted with the counters lowered for Dante to access them easier. Cole had no trouble understanding how Dante had managed to survive by himself in the twenty-four hours or so since men started devolving to their “reptile brain,” as the kid put it. He had a feeling Dante had been surviving by himself for a while now, even when his aunt was still around.

“It was weird,” Dante said. “Like I was watching some kind of play.”

“Play?” Cole said.

“You know how in plays people would get into their positions, then wait for their cue to act, or talk, or sing? That’s what it looked like out there. It was really, really quiet for the longest time. Or it seemed like a long time, but it was probably not that long. Maybe thirty seconds. Or a minute. I don’t know for sure. It caught me off guard, and I don’t wear a watch. But it felt like thirty seconds to a minute.”

“Then what happened?”

“People started turning on each other. Screaming. It started with screaming. Then it got louder. Car accidents. People purposefully ramming into other people on the streets. It was madness.”

That was a good word for it. Madness. Cole had seen it for himself yesterday.

So had Zoe, who remained quiet as she sat next to her daughter, eating their sandwiches and listening.

“But not right away,” Cole said.

“No,” Dante said, shaking his head. “You noticed it, too?”

Cole nodded. “There’s a momentary switch. A sort of…pause before they change. Or, as you put it, before they get their cue to act. I saw it with my driver.”

“You had a driver?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, a cabbie?”

“No.”

“So you’re rich or something?”

“Or something.”

“So what happened with your driver?”

“He didn’t change right away. The others didn’t, too. As far as I could tell, they were frozen in place. Then they snapped.”

Dante nodded. “That’s what I saw, too. People walking around outside, then they just stopped moving, and stared at nothing. I could see people trying to ‘wake’ them up. Then the killings started.” He looked over at Zoe. “What did you see?”

“I’m not sure,” Zoe said. “I was driving down the street with Ashley, and cars just started ramming into each other. Others were parked in the middle of the road. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just kept driving, until I couldn’t anymore.”

Dante looked from her to Cole. “So did we learn anything new?”

“I don’t think so,” Cole said. “At least, nothing that helps us understand what happened. And nothing that helps us get through this alive, which is a lot more important to me right now.”

“There’s one thing that might help…”

“What’s that?”

“They don’t use guns. Did you notice that?”

“Guns?”

“Yeah. They don’t use guns. The crazies.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Are you sure? Because I heard gunfire last night.”

“I did, too, but I never saw any of the crazy ones using guns.”

“Maybe they didn’t have guns,” Zoe said. “We’re not in Texas, after all.”

“I saw a couple of cops down there. Crazed ones. And they still had their weapons in their holsters.”

“You’re 100 percent certain about that?” Cole asked.

The idea that the crazies had access to weapons but for whatever reason chose not to use them seemed absurd to him. Was that possible? If their minds had snapped and they were determined to kill, a firearm was a hell of a more efficient way to accomplish that.

“Because we would definitely use a gun if we had one,” the Voice said.

Damn straight.

“Definitely,” Dante said. “At first I thought they might have just run out of bullets, but then why’d they keep their guns in their holsters if they did?”

“Maybe in case they found more bullets,” Cole said.

Dante shrugged. “Maybe.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No.”

“Why?”

The kid seemed to think about it for a moment. Cole had no trouble believing he’d been thinking about it for a while now, even before they showed up.

“Dante?” Zoe pressed.

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have,” Dante said. “I think they prefer to use their hands, or things like knives, bats—whatever they can get their hands on. Something they can hold and feel.”

“Feel?” Cole said.

Dante picked up the baseball bat Cole had been carrying around and had leaning against the wall. The kid swung it—or as well as you could swing something while confined to a wheelchair, anyway—and the bat made a swoosh sound as it cut through air.

“When you swing this, it’s different, right?” Dante said.

“How so?” Cole said.

“You can feel it. When you hit that guy out there—the big one…”

“Remember him?” the Voice asked.

Cole remembered. He couldn’t forget. He’d bashed the guy’s head in, then kept on swinging until there wasn’t very much left. He’d lost control. It was the first time he’d forgotten who he was—who he had become—since he took on this new life with Emily.

“What about him?” Cole said.

“When you took him down with the bat, it’s different than if you’d shot him, right?” Dante said.

Cole didn’t answer right away.

“Isn’t it?” the kid said.

Cole finally nodded. “Yes. It is.”

“How?” Zoe asked. She was looking at him now. “I know there’s a difference between hitting someone with a bat and shooting them, even though I’ve never done either of those things. But it’s obvious there’s a difference.”

Cole nodded. “Yeah, there’s a difference.”

Dante and Zoe seemed to be waiting for him to continue. Even Ashley, sitting nearby, wiping her hands on her pants, looked like she was waiting for Cole to explain what that difference was.

“They’d never understand,” the Voice said. “They haven’t been where we’ve been. Done what we’ve done. They’d never understand.”

Cole agreed, and said out loud, “There’s a difference. The kid’s right about that. But I still don’t buy that those crazies had guns but weren’t using them. I heard shooting last night. And you told me you heard it too. Out there?”

Dante nodded. “Out there and in here.”

“In here?”

“It had to be Mr. Ellesway. He used to be a police officer.”

“Where does he live?”

“In 510.”

“You mean, on this floor?” Cole asked, probably a little more excited than he’d intended to.

“Yeah,” Dante said.

“What are you thinking?” Zoe asked, looking at Cole.

“I’m thinking I’d really like to get my hands on that gun,” Cole said.

Chapter 14

Apartment 510 was two doors down from Dante’s and across the hallway. It was close enough for Cole to decide to take the chance. He might not have been so gung-ho if his trip up from the lobby hadn’t been so uneventful. If Dante’s neighbors were still around (“You mean, still alive?” the Voice asked), then they were being very quiet about it.

Survivors other than Dante were entirely possible. Dante had managed, and he wasn’t exactly the most physically capable person Cole had ever met. The kid was confined to a wheelchair, for God’s sake. So how many others were out there right now, hunkering down and waiting for signs that things would get better? Maybe waiting for the state to step in? Uncle Sam? A cavalry of some sort?

“They’re gonna have a long wait,” the Voice said.

You don’t know that.

“Don’t I?”

No. It’s only been one day. Anything is still possible.

“Listen.”

Listen to what?

“Exactly.”

Cole understood what the Voice was trying to say, because he could hear it, too.

Or, in this case, not hear it.

It being every other thing in the universe right now save for his slightly accelerated breathing.

Christ, why was he breathing so hard? What was he, an amateur?

“Might as well be, as long as you’ve been retired,” the Voice said.

That wasn’t an entirely untrue statement. Cole had been retired, though it wouldn’t be considered that long by most people’s standards. But by his own standards, it’d been an eternity since his “retirement.”

Bottom line: There was a very real chance Dante still had neighbors in the building, waiting. Waiting for what?

Waiting for something.

Anything.

Cole didn’t have that luxury. He couldn’t wait to be told that everything would be okay, that Emily was fine and dandy.

No. He had to make it happen.

And to do that, he had to get to her.

And a gun would sure help in that quest…

Cole changed up his grip on the aluminum baseball bat, wondering how loud it was going to be if he had to hit someone with it inside the close confines of the hallway. He remembered the loud ping! when he struck Joe the plumber outside in the streets. In these tight hallways, it might be akin to a gunshot.

A gun. He wanted that gun. The only thing better than a gun was a sword, but a gun beat a sword every day of the week and thrice on Sundays.

“It’s been a while,” the Voice said. “You can feel it, can’t you?”

Feel what?

“Don’t fool yourself. You can feel it.”

Cole didn’t answer, not that that stopped the Voice. It was, after all, him, and it knew everything that he knew, including his hidden thoughts.

“Yeah, you can feel it,” the Voice said with a laugh.

He paused for a moment and glanced left toward the elevators and stairwell to make sure no one had sneaked onto the floor while he was inside Dante’s. Apartment 503 next door was still open, a wide shaft of light pouring out from the living room beyond. Cole couldn’t smell the telltale signs of dead bodies. Not that he would, just twenty-four hours after everything went to hell. It would take longer than that for the dead to start stinking up the joint.

“And we both know what bodies smell like, don’t we?” the Voice said.

Yes, they did. They knew it intimately.

Cole stood very still, with just the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. He was breathing a lot harder than usual, and he spent half a minute or so calming himself down. It wasn’t like he’d never been in this situation before. Well, maybe not this exact situation, but something close enough.

He tiptoed his way up the hallway, passing the other closed doors.

…506 on his left…

…507 on his right…

…508 on his left…

He stopped at 509, thinking he might have heard something moving on the other side.

Cole flattened his back against the wall and held the bat in front of him, choking up on the grip for a short swing, if necessary. The last thing he wanted was to go for a home run and smack the bat into the wall on the other side. Which was a real possibility, given the limited spaces he was dealing with.

He waited for the doorknob to start jingling, signaling that he hadn’t misheard the sound. It was possible he had, because the doorknob remained perfectly still.

He slowed down his breathing until he was barely breathing at all. Cole listened—really, really listened—and didn’t hear anything.

Not a damn thing.

“Jumpy, are we?” the Voice asked.

Maybe a little.

“Just a little?”

Okay, he was definitely jumpy. And by a lot, too.

Cole didn’t move from the wall for the next few minutes. If someone was on the other side of 509, maybe listening against it the way he was trying to eavesdrop on their presence, he wasn’t about to give himself away. Of course, if there was no one there, it meant he was standing out in the open, completely exposed, when he should be hurrying—

Cole pushed off the wall and moved toward apartment 510 on the other side.

Nothing—and no one—burst out of 509 at him from across the hallway. Even so, Cole kept one ear open for sounds coming behind him even as he lasered in on 510.

The door was closed, and when he got closer, Cole saw that the doorknob was covered in blood, as was the floor immediately outside it and the walls to the left and right.

“Oh, yeah. Ol’ Ellesway definitely had himself some action yesterday,” the Voice said.

No shit, Captain Obvious.

“Don’t shoot the messenger.”

He thought about returning to Dante’s apartment and rejoining Zoe and Ashley. Did he really need that gun? If there was even a gun still in there in the first place…

“A little too late to be talking yourself out of this, don’t you think?” the Voice said.

Maybe.

“Chickenshit.”

Go to hell.

“You first,” the Voice said, and laughed.

Fuck it, Cole thought as he reached for the door—the blood was dry and rough against his skin—and turned it and pushed it open without resistance, almost all in the same fluid motion.

Cole lunged inside, raising the bat to strike.

The living room was in shambles. One of the windows along the far wall was shattered, the pieces of jagged glass on the carpet in front of it stained with blood. The walls themselves were polka-dotted with craters, and an LCD TV had smashed on the floor. A large man wearing a Hawaiian print shirt, who had to be a good 300 pounds if not more, lay half on and off a sofa, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether to sit or lie down. There were bloody patches across his back and what looked like two holes in his shirt that shouldn’t have been there. A bloody knife lay on the floor exactly where the dead man would have dropped it upon collapsing onto the furniture after he was shot.

“Ellesway?” the Voice asked.

Cole had no idea because it had never occurred to him to ask Dante what the ex-cop looked like. Cole had just assumed an older man—he was, after all, retired ex-law enforcement—but the dead guy couldn’t have been older than forty-something. That was old enough to retire if Ellesway had a medical reason.

He glanced around at the living room, searching for some kind of picture of the apartment’s owner, but there weren’t any. Whoever this Ellesway person was, he had a spartan sense of décor.

Cole crossed the living room, pausing briefly when something clinked against his shoes. He followed the brass casing as it skidded across the floor and into the kitchen, where it disappeared behind a partially-destroyed dining table. It looked as if an elephant had sat down on it. Or a very, very heavy man carrying north of 300 pounds, anyway. Chairs were upended and more blood covered the tiles, leading into the back hallway.

He stepped over two more empty casings and made his way toward the bedroom, following the trail of blood and brass. Someone had clearly made his escape in that direction, disappearing into one of the rooms.

The main bedroom, from the looks of it.

The door was open, and Cole expected to see someone—maybe Dante’s ex-cop neighbor—pointing a gun at him, finger on the trigger. The thought of getting his head blown off was intimidating, but Cole pushed on and peeked inside quickly, fully prepared to jerk his head back out a split second later.

But he didn’t have to.

The bedroom was intact, even though the trail of blood led across it and to a dresser on the far wall. A man sat on the floor, back against the long and thick furniture, a black handgun laid between his spread legs. He looked to be in his sixties, with gray hair, and one of his hands was pressed against his stomach where something had slashed the flesh underneath, repeatedly. Blood had been pooling under him for some time and had only stopped recently. The dead man had made it in here but had only ended up bleeding out.

“Sucks to be him,” the Voice said.

Yeah.

“So let’s not end up like him.”

That’s the trick, isn’t it?

“That’s always the trick, buddy. That’s why you need me.”

We’ll see about that.

Cole looked around briefly, making sure there wasn’t someone else hiding inside the bedroom, before walking across and crouching in front of the dead man. Ellesway, probably. It was tempting to look for some kind of ID, but Cole picked up the gun instead.

It was a Glock 17, which wasn’t unexpected since the brand was popular with cops and ex-cops. It was just over eight inches, and the polymer grip felt good in his hand…and much too light.

He pulled out the magazine. The gun held seventeen rounds, but there were just ten left. If this was Ellesway, he was either a very bad shot or it had taken a lot to take out his uninvited visitor in the living room.

But Ellesway was an ex-cop with a gun. It was unlikely he was going to have just one magazine’s worth of bullets lying around. Bullets were cheap, and Cole would bet anything that Ellesway had more stashed somewhere, if just out of habit. Cole had learned the mantra “No such thing as too many bullets” a long time ago. Cops like Ellesway would have, too, during their careers.

He stood up and went hunting. Where would Ellesway put his extra ammo? Someplace he could get to it, if needed, but not someplace out in the open. Where—

He turned back to the dresser that Ellesway was propped up against. Maybe there was a reason Ellesway had found his way here and not just because he needed a spot to sit down and rest for a bit.

Cole began opening drawers, starting with the two to Ellesway’s left and right. To get to the ones in the middle, he’d have to move the ex-cop—

Bingo. There were two boxes of 9mm bullets shoved way into the back of the top right-side drawer. Why Ellesway had chosen that one, Cole had no idea. He pocketed the box that weighed the most, then opened the other (it was only half full) and reloaded the Glock with its bullets. He also scored two spare magazines in the bottom left-side drawer. Both were fully loaded and Cole pocketed them. Why Ellesway had put the ammo in one drawer and the mags in the other was a mystery.

“He took that mystery to the grave with him,” the Voice said.

Yeah. I guess so.

He headed back to the door, moving as quickly as possible, when he stopped and glanced back at Ellesway one last time. He was about Cole’s size, but like most older guys, Ellesway had put on some extra girth around the midsection that he probably didn’t have during his law enforcement days. He was barefoot, which meant he had been caught unawares by his large friend in the Hawaiian shirt.

Cole’s eyes drifted to the dead man’s feet for a moment before he looked down at his own loafers. It wasn’t the blood that covered the soles that bothered him, but the fact he was moving on, well, loafers. They hadn’t been all that effective against Donnie yesterday and had taken more effort than necessary to put the driver down. If he’d had something heavier…

He went to the closet and poked around until he found a pair of sneakers that looked big enough for him. Cole tried them on. Perfect fit.

Thanks, Ellesway.

Before he left, Cole took an extra moment to search Ellesway’s closet, looking for a shirt or pants that might also fit. Unlike the shoes, the ex-cop’s wardrobe was all too “comfortable.” Ellesway, apparently, didn’t see any need for slim-fitting clothes since his retirement.

Cole gave up and left the room.

He left 510 with the 9mm in his front waistband and the bat in his hand, feeling better and more capable of surviving the next few days than he had since he stepped into the Mercedes with Donnie less than a day ago.

“Told you this was a good idea,” the Voice said.

Yeah, yeah.

“It pays to listen to me.”

Do I have a choice?

“No,” the Voice said, laughing.

Cole smirked to himself and was about to turn down the hallway back to Dante’s apartment when he heard the slow creak of a door opening.

509!

The same apartment he swore he’d heard noises coming from inside earlier.

Cole quickly slid across the hallway and pressed up against the side of 509 as its door slowly, oh so slowly, opened.

Just a crack, enough for whoever was on the other side to see out into the corridor.

“Peeping Tom is doing some serious peeping,” the Voice said.

Cole leaned the bat against the wall and slid the handgun free, then held the pistol across his stomach with the barrel pointed in the direction of the ajar door. The Glock didn’t have a hammer, so it was squeeze the trigger and shoot. He’d had enough practice with different versions of the Austrian-made brand to feel very at ease with it in his hand.

He was so close—less than two feet—from the edge of 509’s doorframe that his target would have to be the size of a fly for him to miss at that range. And even then…

509’s door opened wider.

Just a little bit—the man continued to be, smartly, overly cautious—before a head of pink hair (“Pink?” the Voice said.) appeared outside.

Then it turned to look down the hallway—

Cole reached over and grabbed a handful of that short pink hair and pulled.

Someone screamed in pain, just before Cole threw the figure across the hallway into the opposite wall. As the person turned, Cole jammed the barrel of the Glock into their forehead, his forefinger against the trigger.

“Don’t kill me! Oh God, oh God, please don’t kill me!”

Early twenty-something, with blue eyes that were half-closed and half-peering back at him. Her hair was cut short, almost in a bob, and wasn’t entirely pink but just around the bottom edges. She was wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt, and a small silver cross dangled from a simple rope chain around her neck.

“Please,” she said again, the word coming out almost breathlessly, as if she had difficulty breathing.

“A girl,” the Voice said, cackling. “A fucking girl. With pink hair, natch!”

Cole pulled the pistol away and took a step back, then glanced down the hallway to make sure no one had heard the sudden activity and the girl’s (though she was really a grown woman—twenty-five or six, if he had to guess) loud gasps.

He lowered the gun and put a finger to his lips.

She nodded quickly, understanding. She clamped down on her lips with her hands as if she was afraid she might let out a sound if she didn’t physically restrain herself.

Cole gave her a quick look to make sure she wasn’t armed, then pulled her away from the wall and turned her around. It wasn’t like she had a lot of places to hide a weapon. The jeans were way too tight, and the shirt looked about a size too small for her, which only made her chest more prominent.

He whispered, “Don’t make another sound, and don’t move.”

She nodded.

With the gun at his side, Cole moved across the hallway and peered into apartment 509. Unlike Ellesway’s, the girl’s looked intact, even though it gave off a slight smell. Not of death, but…something else. The window on the other side was closed, the curtains drawn, and there were empty cans of food on the floor. It looked heavily lived in and could have used a maid’s touch.

He turned back to the woman. “Who else?”

She shook her head, her hands still clasped tightly over her mouth.

“You alone?” he asked.

Nod.

“Are you sure about that?”

Another nod.

He tucked the gun back into his waistband and held up his hand, palm facing her: the universal “Let’s relax and talk this out” gesture.

“I’m Cole,” he said, keeping his voice low enough that only she could hear.

She pulled her hands just far enough away from her mouth to squeak out, “Fiona.”

“Sorry about that. You startled me. You can put your hands down.”

She did, and gave him a forced smile that came out much worse than she probably intended.

“My friends and I are in 505,” Cole said. “You know Dante?”

She thought about it for a moment before shaking her head.

“Wheelchair?” he said.

That registered something, and she nodded. “I’ve never met him.”

“Maybe it’s time you did,” Cole said.

Chapter 15

Zoe opened the door before he even had the chance to knock on it. She had apparently been waiting on the other side, peering through the peephole, the entire time. She was calm as she stepped aside to let him and the girl, Fiona, in.

Zoe’s ability to adapt to what was happening around her continued to impress him. He wondered what kind of life she’d had before this; what kinds of trials and tribulations that her clothes and feminine demeanor didn’t immediately give away, that she’d survived?

“Watch out, buddy, you have a wife waiting for you, remember?” the Voice said.

Shut up. I wasn’t going there.

“You sure about that?”

Yes. 100 percent.

“I bet,” the Voice said.

Cole stepped back inside room 505, Fiona sticking close behind him. He had expected her to bolt and run back to her apartment at any moment, but she hadn’t. He wasn’t sure if that was because she was afraid he might shoot her or something else. She didn’t look scared, though. If he didn’t know better, he might think she was even…relieved?

“Everybody likes a guy with a gun,” the Voice said. “Especially when that gun isn’t pointed at them.”

Zoe looked at Cole first, then Fiona, and if she was surprised by the younger woman’s presence, she hid it well. “You found it,” she said instead, while closing and locking the door quickly (and as quietly as possible, he noticed) behind them.

Cole took it out. “Glock 17 and two spare magazines. Including one and a half boxes of 9mm bullets.”

Dante rolled out from the kitchen with Ashley in tow. The two of them had made new turkey sandwiches while Cole was in the hallway. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” Cole said.

“You find it?”

Cole showed him the gun.

“Nice,” the teenager said. Then, noticing Fiona for the first time, “Oh. Hi.”

“Hi,” Fiona said.

There was a brief, awkward silence as the two stared across the room at one another.

“You guys know each other?” Zoe asked, echoing Cole’s unspoken thoughts.

“No,” Dante said.

“No,” Fiona said.

“You live on the same floor,” Cole said.

“I’m not exactly a social butterfly, in case you haven’t noticed,” Dante said, patting one of his wheels with a free hand.

Cole nodded at the girl standing quietly behind him. “This is Fiona. She was in 509.”

“Hey,” Fiona said, waving awkwardly at the others. She looked lonely standing by herself near the closed door, one hand rubbing her other arm.

For a moment, no one said anything.

“Your hair’s cool,” Ashley finally said.

“Thanks,” Fiona said, grinning back at the girl.

* * *

“Any news on Mr. Ellesway?” Dante asked.

“Someone in a Hawaiian shirt stabbed him with a knife. He bled out in his bedroom yesterday,” Cole said.

“Hawaiian shirt?”

“Yeah.”

“Big guy?”

“North of three hundred easy.”

“That’s Mr. Miller,” Dante said. “From 508. He’s always wearing those Hawaiian shirts. Ironically, I don’t think he’s ever been to Hawaii. He and Mr. Ellesway were good friends.”

“Not anymore.”

“Yeah, I guess not anymore.”

“You knew him well, too?”

Dante shrugged. “As well as you could know someone who lives next door, but you saw only occasionally.”

“So no, then.”

Dante grinned. “No, not really.”

“I heard them fighting,” Fiona said from the sofa, where she was sitting with Ashley, the two of them sharing a bag of Ranch Doritos. The chips were from a stash that Dante kept in his bedroom and generously shared with the others. The twenty-something woman talked between crunches. “When it all started, Mr. Miller banged on our door, but I saw him through the peephole and didn’t open it. He was crazed. Bloody eyes. All the banging got Mr. Ellesway to open his door and, well, what happened, happened.”

“Why wasn’t Ellesway affected?” Cole asked.

“I don’t know. Why weren’t any of us affected?”

“That’s a good question,” Zoe said. She was standing against the wall across the room, next to the window that overlooked the same street they’d had the run-in with the crazies earlier. She’d been peering outside for a while now as if she expected something to happen. As far as Cole could tell, nothing had.

“They’re hiding,” the Voice said. “They’re waiting for some idiot to step out into the open so they can attack. They’re crazy, violent, but not stupid. Let’s keep that in mind, shall we?”

Cole had seen how the crazies attacked one another, but only after exposing themselves. Otherwise, they stayed hidden until an opportunity presented itself. That fact, in a way, made Cole feel slightly better. At least the crazies weren’t ganging up to come after them; they were just as liable to kill one another as they were him, Zoe, or the others.

“Maybe they’ll knock each other off and save us the trouble,” the Voice said.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

“Hope springs eternal.”

Not these days…

“How did you survive yesterday?” Cole asked Fiona.

She shrugged. “Luck, I guess.”

“That’s all?”

“Pretty much. I was working all night yesterday; graveyard shift. I don’t usually wake up until six, then shower and get ready for work again. Mr. Miller woke me up when he started banging on the door. I didn’t even know what was happening until later, when I looked out the window and saw the chaos outside.” She stared across at Cole for a moment between crunchy bites. “So, what’s going on out there? Why’s everyone suddenly homicidal and killing each other? Why don’t the TV or phones or anything work anymore?”

“Those are the $64,000 questions we’re all trying to answer,” Dante said.

“The what?” Fiona said.

“The $64,000 questions.”

“Why $64,000?”

“Uh, it’s a game show my aunt likes to watch sometimes.”

“Oh.”

Cole smiled to himself. Listening to a teenager like Dante talk about TV shows while a twenty-something like Fiona had no clue what he was going on about made Cole amused for some reason.

He got up, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall across the window from Zoe. “Anything?”

She shook her head but didn’t look back at him, as if she were unwilling to take her eyes off the streets for even a second. “No, but they’re still out there.”

Cole looked out. He saw a quiet street that would have been empty if not for all the bodies and abandoned cars. The remains of Joe the plumber were where Cole last saw him, on his back next to his van. Cole could only make out glimpses of the other corpses; there were too many for him to focus on any single one. Not that he wanted to, anyway. He had a feeling he was going to run across more of them in the coming days as he got closer to Bear Lake.

“Better them than us,” the Voice said.

Cole glanced down at his watch. Fifty-two minutes past two in the afternoon. In a normal day, the city should have been brimming with people and noise and smoke and the stink of gasoline. Some of the people were still there, along with the vehicles that made all the noise and emitted all the fumes, but the activity was missing—

A head of short black hair peeked out from an alleyway across the street, about two buildings down. Cole couldn’t be sure if it was the office drone in the suit and tie, because the man vanished just as quickly.

Cole scanned the rest of the buildings and alleys and parked cars, but if there were other crazies out there, they were doing a hell of a good job staying low.

“You saw him?” Zoe asked.

“Depends. Who are we talking about?”

“The one in the suit, in the alleyway. He’s been moving around out there, staying in the shadows.”

“For how long?”

“Since I’ve been standing here.” She might have shivered slightly, and wrapped both arms around her chest. “I can feel them watching us.”

“How many have you seen so far?”

“Just the one I can confirm. But…”

“…you can feel the others.”

“Yes.” She glanced across at him. “Can you? Or am I crazy?”

“You’re not crazy. They’re out there. And I don’t think it’s just the two that survived this morning. I think there’s more.”

Zoe didn’t say anything, but she looked even paler than before.

“You’re supposed to comfort her, not freak her out even more,” the Voice said.

She knows I’m right.

“She’s a woman. Like the girl and her kid. And the boy in the wheelchair. Speaking of which, what are you doing still standing here with them?”

What do you mean?

“What the hell do you think I mean? The priority is Emily and the baby. These four aren’t going to get you to Bear Lake any faster. If anything, they’ll just slow you down.”

What are you saying?

“What do you think I’m saying, genius?”

Cole didn’t answer the Voice. He knew exactly what it was implying, but the thought of abandoning Zoe and her daughter, along with Fiona and Dante…

He glanced back at them. Dante was playing with the ham radio, trying to reach someone on it (to no avail), while Fiona was helping Ashley fix up another turkey sandwich in the kitchen. At the rate they were eating, Cole figured they’d run out of the delicious meat pretty soon. Then again, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea; without electricity, there would be no way to keep the opened containers fresh, so they might as well eat all the contents before they spoiled.

“Or you could take them, and everything else the kid has, and split,” the Voice said.

I can’t do that.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

Can’t.

“Or won’t?”

Can’t, Cole thought again, but he wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince—himself or the Voice.

“You do know that you’re just talking to yourself, right?” the Voice said, laughing.

Cole ignored the laughter, and focused on Zoe as she said, “The gun’s a nice find.”

“The bullets, too.”

“You know how to use that thing, right?”

“It’s a gun, Zoe, not brain surgery. Pulling the trigger makes it go bang.”

“Ah, is that all?”

He smiled. “Just about.”

“I have a feeling you’ve used one before.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Once or twice,” Cole said.

“Or a few hundred thousand times,” the Voice chimed in.

He said out loud, “Anything happen while I was away?”

“Not much,” Zoe said. “I think that as long as we don’t make too much noise or attract attention to ourselves, we should be fine in here.”

“We can’t do that.”

“What?”

“Stay here.”

“Why not?”

“The bodies,” Cole said. “By the end of today, we’ll be drowning in the stink of rotting corpses. The day after that, it’ll get worse. We bury or cremate bodies for a reason, Zoe.”

Her face paled noticeably. “You’re right, now that I think about it. It’s already starting to smell.”

“It’ll get worse. Even if I wanted to, we don’t want to still be hanging around here—or anywhere in the city with all those corpses—by the end of the week.”

“You want to be in Bear Lake.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s her name? Your wife?”

“Emily.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

He took out his phone and handed it over to her.

Zoe looked down at Emily’s wallpaper. “She’s pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“She’s also pregnant?”

“Yes.”

Zoe gave him the phone back. Cole sneaked a peek at the reception—still nothing—before putting it away.

“I don’t mean to sound crude,” Zoe said.

“What is it?”

“How do you know she’s okay? Your wife?”

“She called me after everything happened. She wouldn’t have done that if she was affected like the others.”

“You sound very sure about that.”

“I am,” Cole said, and thought he sounded pretty damn convincing.

“Okay,” Zoe said, though he couldn’t tell if she actually believed him or not. “She must be going crazy wondering what’s happened to you.”

He nodded, even though he thought the idea of Emily “going crazy” was farfetched. Emily would be worried, yes—just as he was worried about her—but she was more than capable of dealing with this, whatever this turned out to be. But she would be much more capable if he were there, beside her.

“So get home already,” the Voice said.

I’m working on it.

Cole looked across the street at the bookstore and its destroyed front window display. The den of buzzing flies had grown around the bodies lying in the open, sweltering heat. That was a problem. A big problem. The dead brought diseases, and in a city this big…

“I don’t understand how it’s possible that everything’s down,” Zoe was saying. “The power, the cell towers, even Dante’s ham radio… Shouldn’t something be up? Shouldn’t there be someone out there broadcasting? Trying to make contact with survivors? How could the world just go dark in the space of one day?”

“I don’t know,” Cole said. “I just know that I need to get home.”

“So what’s the plan?” Zoe asked.

“What makes you think I have a plan?”

“Don’t you?”

“Maybe…”

“Let’s hear it.”

Instead of answering her, he looked over at the others.

Dante, in his wheelchair, showing off to Fiona and Ashley...

“They’ll just slow you down,” the Voice said. “You know I’m right.”

As if she could hear his thoughts, Zoe said, “I know you think we’ll slow you down, but I promise that we won’t. Ashley and I are faster than we look.”

He remained silent, looking back out at the streets below and focusing on the cars. A lot of them. They were just sitting under the sun, waiting for someone to claim them. He’d need just one of them to get to Emily. Any one would do.

“Cole,” Zoe said.

He finally looked at her, watching him intently across the window as if she could read every single conflicted thought that was flashing across his mind right now.

“We won’t slow you down,” she said. “I promise.”

“You’ll have to be fast.”

“We will.”

“You’ll need to take care of Ashley.”

“I will. She’s my responsibility. I’m not going to let anything happen to her. If that means I have to run faster than you, then I’ll run faster than you.”

He could tell she believed that, even if he didn’t. Cole wasn’t in the best shape he’d ever been in—“retirement” had its downsides—but he’d kept in good shape nonetheless since adopting this new civilian life. Certainly, he was fitter than most people at the office.

“What car are you thinking about?” Zoe asked, peering out the window and scanning the rows of vehicles.

“The Dodge Grand Caravan,” Cole said.

“The minivan?”

“Yes.”

“It’s big.”

“We need something big.”

“For Dante’s wheelchair.”

“That, too. But mostly we might need to barrel through a traffic jam or go up the sidewalk and over whatever obstacles we encounter up there. I can’t see any obvious damage; looks like the owner just stopped it in the street and jumped out. That probably means the key’s still in the ignition.”

“You can see the key from here?”

“No.”

“You’re hoping…”

“I’m making an educated guess.”

“And if it’s not there?”

He shrugged. “The van…”

“The plumber’s van?”

“Uh huh.”

“Next to the body…”

She hadn’t said “Next to the body of Joe, that you brained with the bat, and had trouble stopping,” but that was what he heard anyway.

“Yeah,” he said.

“So we go for the Dodge first. Then the van if that doesn’t work out.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Get in and make the drive to Bear Lake. That’s the plan?”

He nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“I guess it’s better than mine.”

“What was yours?”

“I don’t have one. Which is why I said yours sounds a lot better.”

They were exchanging a smile when they both heard a clinking noise and glanced back. Dante was now showing Ashley and Fiona how he could spin in a tight circle with his wheelchair. The noise was coming from the two smaller wheels up front.

Cole exchanged a look with Zoe.

“We can’t leave him,” she said quietly. “He saved our lives earlier.”

He didn’t answer her, and instead looked out the window.

The Dodge was less than fifty meters away from the front of the apartment building. Not too far, but not exactly a cakewalk, either, especially if there was more than just the office drone out there waiting. And Cole was pretty goddamn sure that was the case. The fight this morning would have drawn attention from others in the area. Right now, they were being pretty damn sly about hiding from sight, but that would all change when Cole showed himself.

“Not exactly a minefield, but pretty close,” the Voice said.

Definitely pretty close.

He scanned the bookstore across the street again. Then there were the other buildings, the other stores and alleyways, to worry about.

Too many hiding spots. Too many possible dangers.

“Cole,” Zoe said.

He looked back at her. “We have to be fast.”

“We will be,” Zoe said, with all the certainty in the world.

“You have to be.”

“We will be.”

“You have to be.”

She nodded, and gritting her teeth, said, “We will be.”

Chapter 16

“Ditch the woman and the kids, and get back to Emily.”

I can’t.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

We already went over this.

“You still haven’t answered the question.”

Both.

“Bullshit. You know this is the right call.”

Doesn’t matter.

“Doesn’t it?”

No.

“Why not?”

I’m an asshole, but I’m not a fucking asshole.

“Tell that to Emily. She’s back there by herself. Alone. With a baby in her belly. And here you are, lollygagging with a woman and her kid, a girl you didn’t know existed until a few hours ago, and a kid in a wheelchair. This is the wrong move.”

Shut up.

“You know I’m right.”

Yeah, well…

“You know I’m right,” the Voice repeated.

Cole didn’t respond the second time.

“You don’t have to, because you know I’m right,” the Voice said.

Whatever, Cole thought as he watched Dante, Fiona, and Ashley absorb everything he and Zoe had just told them about the plan. A part of him was hoping Dante would buck at leaving the sanctuary of his apartment and fridge full of turkey slices, not to mention giving up on his aunt ever coming back. Because if Dante said No, then it would spare him the guilt of leaving a crippled kid behind.

Unfortunately for Cole, Dante was too smart for that.

“When are we leaving?” the kid asked.

“Soon,” Cole said.

“Maybe we should wait,” Fiona said. She sat on the sofa next to Ashley, rubbing her fingers nervously. “Help might be coming.”

“Help’s not coming,” Dante said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Pretty sure help’s not coming.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“If help was coming, it’d be here already,” the teenager said. “Look outside, Fiona. There’s no help coming. This is TEOTWAWKI.”

“What?”

“The end of the world as we know it.”

“Yeah, but what’s that thing you said? Teet-something?”

“T-E-O-T-W-A-W-K-I. The end of the world as we know it.”

“Oh,” Fiona said. She looked from Dante to Cole, still leaning against the window across the room. “You agree with him?”

Cole shrugged. “I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to get to Bear Lake. I can’t waste any time. Whether any of you go with me or not is entirely up to you. Each one of you. Everyone has to make their own decisions.”

“Is Bear Lake safe?”

I have no fucking idea, Cole thought, but he said, “I don’t know. I just know that I have to get there.”

“Bear Lake is outside the city limits,” Zoe said. “It’s a residential enclave next to a lake and surrounded by heavy woods. It’s as close to the city as you can get while still being technically not a part of all this.”

“But is it safe?” Fiona said.

Zoe shook her head. “Like Cole said, we don’t know. But I’m taking Ashley there because I think it’s the safer option to staying here. And”—she looked over at Cole—“I think it’s safer to stick close to Cole.”

“Why?” Fiona said. She glanced from Zoe to Cole. “Why is it safer with him?”

“It’s not,” Cole said.

“It is,” Zoe said.

“Zoe…”

“It is, Cole.” She pursed her lips, and he could tell that he wasn’t going to convince her otherwise. “I’m betting my life, and that of my daughter’s, on it.”

He sighed, but he didn’t try to dissuade her. Instead, he focused on Fiona and Dante. “It’s your choice—”

“I’m in,” Dante said before he could finish. The kid spun in his wheelchair back to Fiona. “What about you, Fiona?”

The twenty-something shook her head and looked from Dante to Cole to Zoe. Then, for some reason, to Ashley sitting next to her.

Like she did to Cole earlier this morning, Ashley saluted Fiona.

Fiona forced a smile and turned back to Cole. “I guess I’m in, too.”

“You need to be sure,” Cole said.

“I am.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

She didn’t answer the third time quite as quickly.

Finally, Fiona said, “Yeah. I think I am.”

Dammit, Cole thought even as he heard the Voice laughing hysterically in the back of his mind.

* * *

After the meeting, he escorted Fiona back to her place to get what she needed, while Dante and Zoe, along with her daughter, did the same back at the teenager’s apartment. The hallway was as empty and eerily still as the last time he was out there. Neither he nor Fiona said a word until they were back in 509, and she reflexively closed the door and locked it. An odor that reminded Cole of a dead rat permeated the walls and floor. It wasn’t coming from Fiona’s apartment but the ones flanking it. Her neighbors.

He waited at the front while she hurried across the living room and disappeared into her bedroom. She came back out faster than he’d expected—just short of three minutes—with a ragged backpack that looked like it might bust at the seams if she pulled too hard or at the wrong spots.

“You live here alone?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s my brother’s. I’m just bumming with him until I can get back on my feet. He was a great—” She stopped in the middle of the living room and looked toward the window in silence.

“What is it?”

“I just said ‘was.’ Twice now. Not ‘is.’ Was.”

“I’m sorry.”

She looked back at him. “Did you lose anyone? Family or friends?”

“Friends, but Emily is my only family. She’s the only one that matters.”

“You were at work when it happened?”

“Leaving work,” he said, and stopped short of telling her all the boring details about his last day at RistWorks.

“But you still have your wife.”

I hope I still have a wife, he thought.

Cole said, “Yes.”

“You’re lucky, then.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.” Then, because he was finding the conversation trending in a direction he didn’t like, “Is that all you need?”

She looked down at the bag in her hands. “I think so.”

“Think some more. You were pretty quick.”

“I thought you wanted me to be quick.”

“No. Take your time and think about what you’ll need. The essentials. Nothing that will slow you down. When you’re done, come back to Dante’s.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

He left her standing in the living room by herself and returned to 505, glad to be out of the apartment. He thought Fiona felt the same way—she likely had some good-byes to say and probably would rather not have him watching while she did it.

* * *

Back at Dante’s, Zoe and Ashley had gathered all the unspoiled food and canned goods they could find and put them on the table, while Cole took another look at Dante’s and his aunt’s bedrooms. The woman was in her fifties, and as expected of someone that was a nurse, there was a fully-stocked first-aid kit in the bathroom. He also found a box with hospital supplies, including bandages, sutures, and threading needles. Cole cleaned out the medicine cabinets and found even more useful things hidden in the closet. He dumped all of it into a spare backpack that Dante had in his room, while the teenager was stuffing his own pack for the trip.

Cole took a moment to go back into the bathroom and take off his shirt and dress the wound in his back. He was trying (and failing miserably) to clean the cut when Zoe knocked on the door and leaned in.

“I thought you might need a hand,” she said.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

She closed the door behind her and used Dante’s aunt’s first-aid kit to clean, disinfect, then cover up the gash. He expected her to be queasy around blood, but then remembered how she had nonchalantly pulled the piece of glass out of him back at the manager’s office.

“You’ve done this before?” Cole asked.

“No.”

“You’re very good at it.”

“It’s barely a cut. Not exactly brain surgery. And the packages are clearly labeled.”

“Still…”

“What, you thought I’d be squeamish?”

“Most people are.”

“You mean women?”

He smiled. “Some women. I know a few who are better at it than most men.”

“Like your wife?”

He nodded.

“The way you talk about her,” Zoe said, “she must be an amazing woman.”

“She is. I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for her. She saved my life.”

“Are we talking literally or figuratively?”

“Both.”

“Now I really have to meet her.”

“You will, when we reach Bear Lake.”

When she was done, Zoe opened a warm bottle of water and washed her hands over the sink. Dante’s aunt had stocked up on spring water earlier in the week. According to Dante, they always had enough to last at least a month due to the aunt’s unpredictable hospital schedule that sometimes prevented her from going shopping for everything but the essentials.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You don’t have to thank me, Cole. You did more than that for my daughter and me. We owe you our lives.” She grabbed a towel off the rack and cleaned her hands. “Thank you, for not leaving us behind.”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“I mean it,” she said, staring intensely at him. “You could have just left us out there so many times, but you didn’t. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, pulling his shirt back on.

“Maybe Dante has a fresh shirt.”

“Not necessary.”

“Yours has blood on it.”

“I’m not worried about dirty clothes right now.”

“What are you worried about?”

“Everything else.”

“We’ll do fine,” she said, as she began packing the first-aid kit back up. “You’ll see.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She handed the kit back to him and smiled. It was somewhat convincing. “I know you underestimate him. Dante. But he’s a strong kid. He’d have to be, to have survived all this while confined to a wheelchair.”

“Strong or lucky?”

“Maybe a little of both.”

“We’ll see,” Cole said.

* * *

Back in the living room, he tossed the backpack on the sofa next to Ashley, who was eating corn from a can using a metal spork.

“Good?” he asked her.

The kid nodded back with a mouthful of corn.

Zoe came out of the kitchen behind him with a blue gym bag. It looked heavy. Maybe too heavy. “It’s everything I could salvage from the fridge. These should last us for a while.”

“It’s too big. You’ll have to take out half of it to lighten the load.”

She lifted the bag up and down, then frowned. “You’re right. What should I keep?”

“Nonperishables should be priority. Take out anything that won’t last past a few days.”

“You really think we’re going to need that much? Bear Lake’s only twenty miles away.”

“That’s twenty miles in a city gridlocked with cars and teeming with God knows how many crazies waiting for us to step outside.”

“You have a point.” She sighed at the bag and headed back to the kitchen. “I’ll go through it again.”

Dante rolled out of his room, his own backpack slung over one of his wheelchair’s handlebars. He had put on sneakers and a black leather jacket.

“Nice jacket,” Cole said.

“My aunt bought it for me for my birthday,” the teenager said.

“She’s got good taste.”

“Well, I sort of dropped hints the entire year that I wanted this, so…”

Cole chuckled.

“Thanks,” Dante said.

“For what?”

“Letting me come with you.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Don’t think I don’t know you’re taking a big risk. This,” he tapped the armrest of his wheelchair with his fists, “makes everything complicated.” He flashed Cole a half-smile. “So thanks, for not leaving me behind. Most people would.”

I was going to, Cole thought, but he said, “Sure, kid.”

Dante rolled over to where Ashley was sitting. She held out her spork, with corn in it, and he grinned and leaned forward to take a bite.

It took Cole a few seconds to realize Zoe was watching him from the kitchen. When she saw him looking over, she smiled, then went back inside.

He sighed and wondered if he’d just made the best decision of his life, or possibly the dumbest.

“We both know the answer to that one, don’t we?” the Voice said.

Oh, shut up.

Chapter 17

The office drone.

He was out there, somewhere.

Cole didn’t know where, exactly, but he knew—or as much as you could “know” something without, well, the actual knowing part—that the man was hiding, clutching that metal poker of his. The same instrument of destruction—innocuous in most settings, but not here—he had been brandishing as a weapon earlier today.

The butcher was also out there. Also in hiding.

And how many more that Cole hadn’t seen yet, but had been drawn to the chaos of this morning like a moth to the flame?

“Too many, probably, and you’ll be saddled with a kid in a wheelchair and a buncha women,” the Voice said. “That’s not a recipe for success, buddy.”

He ignored the Voice.

“Oh, come on. That’s childish. You do know that I’m you, right?”

Laughter, but Cole ignored that, too.

He focused instead on the streets.

Besides the buzzing of flies and swaying clouds of insects, it was deathly quiet outside. There was a slight wind, but it did nothing to deter the three dogs that had appeared among the cars. They didn’t look rabid or wild, but that hadn’t stopped them from eating the bodies. Cole was reminded of something a friend once said, that when pet owners died at home and no one was there to discover the body, the animal, having run out of food and unable to seek out any, would begin to eat its former master.

Cole hadn’t believed it at the time, but watching a large brown Labrador chewing on the thick, fatty wrist of Joe the plumber made him somewhat of a believer.

“Just somewhat?” the Voice asked.

Cole pulled away from the broken security glass. Behind him, Fiona and Ashley alternated between shuffling their feet and fussing with the straps of their backpacks. Further behind them, Dante sat quietly in his wheelchair, while Zoe poised herself behind him, both hands on the chair’s handles.

Zoe gave him a smile that was supposed to be reassuring, but it did no such thing, mostly because she looked utterly terrified.

“One last time,” Cole said. “Everyone clear on what we’re doing?”

“We make a straight line for the Dodge,” Fiona said.

“Which is?”

“The white minivan down the street.”

Cole nodded. “I go first. Fiona follows with Ashley.” He focused on Fiona when he added, “She’s your responsibility once we step through that door. Understand?”

“I understand,” Fiona said. She was holding Ashley’s hand, and the two exchanged a forced, brave smile. “I got her.”

“I got you, too,” Ashley said.

“That’s my girl,” Zoe said.

Cole looked past them and at Zoe and Dante. “What about you two?”

“We’ll be right behind the girls,” Zoe said.

Her voice was calm. Mostly. He could detect a slight tremor, but only because he was looking for it. It was easy to find when you’d been around men in combat. Try as they might, it was hard to hide. Cole thought he was doing a fine job of it himself, but maybe that was only because he’d been through this too many times to count.

“You never did this with a bunch of civvies, one of whom is in a wheelchair,” the Voice said.

He’ll do fine.

“You think so?”

Yes.

“You better hope so.”

Yeah, Cole thought.

Dante must have seen the way Cole was looking at him, because the kid leaned slightly forward in his chair and nodded back, a look of grim determination on his face. “We’ll be right behind you guys. Count on it. And if anything happens—”

“Nothing will happen,” Zoe said.

Dante continued as if she hadn’t cut him off. “—Zoe has my permission to dump me in the streets and save herself.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Zoe said.

“I give you my permission.”

“I don’t care.”

“Zoe—”

“Nothing will happen,” Zoe said, cutting him off for the second time.

Dante gave Cole a Well, I tried look and shrug.

He smiled back at the kid. “How much do you weigh?”

“A buck ten,” Dante said.

“110?”

“True fact. Why?”

Cole didn’t answer him. He met Zoe’s gaze instead.

She nodded back. “We’ll be fine. Just worry about getting that car started.”

“It’ll start.”

“What if you’re wrong about the keys being inside?”

“I’ll get it started.”

“You know how to hot-wire a car?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“You think you’ll have time to do that, though?”

“I’ll make time.”

He tried to make it sound cavalier, like he had no worries in the world, but the look on Zoe’s face told him she wasn’t buying it.

“Be careful,” Zoe said.

He nodded and smiled again. It must have been slightly more effective this time, because she returned it.

Cole turned back to the door and peered through the jagged security glass window.

Quiet.

Way, way too quiet.

“Fiona…” Cole said.

She let go of Ashley’s hand and stepped forward, then put one hand on the doorknob and the other on the deadbolt. She sucked in a deep breath and settled crisp blue eyes on him. Like Zoe, she was putting on a brave face.

And like Zoe, she wasn’t completely successful.

“On the count of three,” Cole said.

Fiona nodded.

“One…”

He changed up his grip on the polymer handle of the Glock, held at his side, and flexed his fingers. Ellesway’s gun felt good in his hands. Then again, any gun would feel good right now.

“Too bad we don’t have a rifle,” the Voice said.

Yeah, too bad. But this’ll do.

“Two…” he said out loud.

Cole took two steps back to give Fiona room to pull one of the double doors open. They exchanged a glance and quick nod. She looked even more terrified than before, if that was even possible.

“Oh yeah, it’s definitely possible,” the Voice said with a laugh.

“Three!” Cole hissed.

Fiona turned the lock and jerked the handle down and pulled the big slab of wood in almost the same fluid motion.

Even before the door had opened halfway, Cole had slipped outside into the chilly afternoon air, lifting the handgun until he was eyeballing the street behind its iron sights. There were no targets directly in front of him, so he swept right, down the street, before swinging all the way in the other direction.

The door clicked! closed behind him, the sound of the deadbolt sliding back into place.

He tuned everything out behind him and concentrated on what was in front and around him instead. Cole turned left and half-walked and half-ran toward the white Dodge Grand Caravan, which, at the moment, looked a hell of a lot farther than it had from the window of Dante’s apartment earlier.

“It’s not that far; don’t be so dramatic,” the Voice said. “And oh, watch out for the dogs.”

Right. The dogs…

The Labrador lifted its head when he came within view of its big brown eyes, but it continued sitting on its haunches. For a moment, Cole thought it might attack him, but the animal wasn’t some wild creature looking to kill. It was simply hungry. When it was sure he wasn’t a threat, the dog went back to eating, chewing its way through Joe’s meaty wrist until it began gnawing on the bone underneath.

Cole stepped off the sidewalk and onto the street and began moving toward the Grand Caravan.

He didn’t run, but he didn’t walk, either. He was making up the distance just fast enough that he could still see around him and shoot, if necessary. The Glock remained in front of him the entire time, one eye aiming behind the iron sights while the other searched for flickering telltale signs of motion—any motion—beyond his limited shooting angle.

Surely the crazies could see he was armed, and if they were as smart as they appeared to be, then they’d remain in hiding, knowing they couldn’t get to him before he shot them dead. Of course, you could never count on psychopaths to be smart about such things.

He paid close attention to the bookstore across the street and the alleyway beside it. The bakery, too, where one of the crazies had emerged yesterday. Slowly, the buzzing of flies and the sounds of dogs chewing, ripping flesh to shreds, were the only things he could hear.

The minivan appeared in the corner of his left eye, and Cole pulled himself away from the gun’s sights just long enough to glance into the open driver-side window.

The key.

It was dangling from the ignition, just as he was hoping.

“Hallelujah!” the Voice shouted.

There were five keys in the bundle, held together in a ring with a hand-decorated clay poker chip.

“Must be your lucky day,” the Voice said.

Must be.

Cole did a full 360-degree turn, snapping his vision from street level and up the sides of the buildings in his immediate area. There was another apartment building farther up, but everything else was one story. It would have been dead quiet outside if not for his slightly-labored breathing and the very loud sounds of chewing, and buzzing of insects, nearby.

He leaned around the hood of the Dodge and saw a second dog eating the remains of a man in khaki pants. Or half of the man, anyway. His entire upper half was missing. Cole had no idea what kind of weapon could have done that. Something very big and sharp.

The dog, a small brown and white mutt, didn’t bother acknowledging Cole’s presence. It was too busy eating, gorging itself on the dead man’s remains.

Cole grabbed the minivan’s doorknob and leaned inside, aiming the weapon into the roomy back seat first. It was empty except for the two grocery bags that had spilled on the floor. Familiar smells of fruits and vegetables hit his nostrils, but Cole pushed through them and climbed into the driver’s seat.

He put the gun into his front waistband and reached for the key and turned it. The Grand Caravan hummed to life. He looked toward the apartment and saw the lobby door opening and Fiona running out.

Ashley came out next, followed by Zoe, pushing Dante’s wheelchair.

Watching them moving on cue, Cole thought, Maybe we’ll actually get out of this alive, after all.

“Someone’s being a tad optimistic,” the Voice said. “Didn’t our mom tell us never to count our chickens before they hatch?”

Cole looked out the windshield, just to be sure no one had popped out from one of the many surrounding buildings or parked cars or alleyways in the few seconds when he wasn’t looking. He groped the length of the driver-side door and pushed all the buttons he could find, heard the series of pop! pop! as the locks disengaged around him.

Zoe and Dante were coming toward him, moving faster than he thought they were capable. Fiona, one hand clinging to Ashley’s arm, followed closely behind them. They were already halfway to him when Cole opened his door and jumped out, then circled the humming vehicle. At that moment, the Grand Caravan was the only working—and oh so loud—car in the entire city as far as he knew.

Cole grabbed the side hatch and pulled it open, said (as calmly as he could muster), “Go, go, go.”

Zoe abandoned Dante to Cole and grabbed Ashley with both hands, practically yanking the girl out of Fiona’s grip. The three women disappeared around the minivan while Cole nodded at Dante, who held out both arms like a child waiting to be picked up by a parent.

Cole felt exactly like that as he got a good grip on Dante (for a guy who weighed “a buck ten,” he was a handful) and lifted him out of the wheelchair, turned him around, and deposited him into the waiting back seat. Zoe had already climbed inside from another door and quickly helped Dante buckle in while Cole grabbed the wheelchair and pulled it toward the back. By the time he got there, Fiona had climbed over the back seats and pushed a button, resulting in the back door slowly lifting open for Cole.

“Goddamn, would you look at this, like a well-oiled machine,” the Voice said with what Cole thought was a mixture of amusement and…was that admiration?

Goddamn right, Cole thought as he lifted the wheelchair and placed it into the back and slammed the door shut (too loud) and hurried around the idling vehicle. He slid the side hatch closed first, then gave the street another last look.

The Labrador had lifted its head and was staring at them with curiosity, but it hadn’t moved from its spot. There were no other movements from the stores to the left of Cole, from the ones to the right of him, or any of the ones up and down the streets.

It was all going well.

Maybe a little too well.

“Captain Cliché,” the Voice said, laughing.

There was nothing out there, no imminent threats that he could see. It made him think they’d gone through all the trouble of rushing for absolutely no reason. He felt almost stupid, having fully expected to fight his way to the Grand Caravan when there was nothing—absolutely nothing—waiting for them outside the apartment.

There were no signs of the office drone or any of his fellow crazies.

There were just the dogs, the flies, and the insects.

Cole climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door—but didn’t slam it—and powered up the window. He looked into the back as Zoe was strapping herself in. Ashley and Fiona were already buckled up behind her, along with Dante.

“We good?” he asked.

Zoe looked up and smiled, and for the first time all day, it was genuine. “We’re good. We’re all good.”

He returned her smile, then turned around and put the minivan into gear and stepped on the gas.

The mutt nearby hadn’t bothered to leave when he turned on the engine, but it did now when the vehicle started moving. It took off, leaped onto the sidewalk, then turned around and watched them, maybe waiting to see what they would do or if they would deny it the rest of the half-man it had been feasting on.

Cole turned the minivan and maneuvered it around the mess of flesh and chrome and metal in the streets. There were a lot of cars. Too many. He had gone about fifty meters when the street became impassable, and he had to go up the sidewalk in order to pass a series of cars buried in each other’s sides and rear bumpers.

There were even more bodies up here, and more dogs and other animals trying to stay alive. Most of them scattered when the Grand Caravan rumbled toward them, Cole zig-zagging the lumbering vehicle around the various obstacles. When he couldn’t go around, he used the Dodge’s plentiful grill to pound his way through and its big tires to go over.

“How far to Bear Lake?” Dante asked from the back.

“Ten or so miles to the highway, then twenty more miles after that to Bear Lake,” Cole said.

He almost smiled to himself. All that worry, the calculations, and almost leaving Dante behind because he was afraid the kid would slow him down. If Zoe hadn’t insisted—promised him she would be completely responsible for the teenager—Cole might have done just that.

As he continued driving on the sidewalk—crunching bottles and garbage cans, then the whump-whump-whump of the tires going over bodies, the sheer number of which seemed to grow with every ten meters or so—Cole felt a euphoric surge of relief. He kept one eye on the rearview mirror, watching Dante beaming at Zoe sitting next to him, and Fiona and Ashley strapped in behind them. They were a happy bunch, like they had just survived certain death and were now headed to Disneyland or something just as fun.

Dante looked forward and caught his gaze. The kid smiled and nodded, and Cole returned it.

“And to think, you almost left him behind,” the Voice said.

But I didn’t.

“You almost did.”

But I didn’t.

“You almost did.”

It was useless arguing with himself, so Cole concentrated on the street outside the slightly dirty windshield. The roads were getting more clogged, forcing him to stay on the sidewalk longer than he wanted to. He had dropped the minivan’s speed to twenty miles per hour, and at this rate it was going to take hours to travel ten miles—

BANG!

Cole slammed on the brakes almost the same time he heard the sound of metal piercing metal, followed by a loud scream.

He looked back just in time to see a long, sharp object sliding upward, until it disappeared back through the slit it had pierced through the roof of the Grand Caravan. The scream was coming from Zoe, who was grabbing at her left shoulder as blood poured out between her fingers. Dante, sitting in the seat next to her, was wiping at his blood-smeared face, the lens of one of his glasses having somehow been sprayed with Zoe’s blood.

Inside his mind, Cole heard the Voice laughing. “Well, you didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?”

Actually, he had.

For a while there, he actually had.

Chapter 18

A sword.

Was that a sword?

“Yeah, I think that’s a sword,” the Voice said.

Are you sure?

“Yes.”

A sword?

“Yes!”

It wasn’t just any sword. In the second or two Cole glimpsed the blade, he could see it was slightly curved, with an elaborate floral pattern along the side. And sharp. It was impossibly sharp—and it’d just gone through Zoe’s shoulder.

That’s a katana. How the hell did he get his hands on a katana?

“Why don’t you ask him?” the Voice said.

“Mom!” Ashley’s piercing scream cut through Cole’s inner thoughts as the girl struggled to get out of her seatbelt. She looked like a fish out of water, trying to fight against a fisherman’s viselike grip and losing badly.

“Fiona, keep her down!” Cole shouted.

“Ashley!” Fiona said as she all but jumped on the girl.

“What should I do?” Dante shouted.

“Stay in your seat!” Cole said.

“Yes, sir!”

Cole glanced up when he heard the bang-bang-bang! of frantic movement directly above him, on the roof of the Dodge.

Fucker’s on the roof!

“Sounds like it,” the Voice said. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

Cole jammed his foot down on the gas, and the Grand Caravan picked up speed.

“That’s one way to do something about it!” The Voice laughed.

Another squeal of metal against metal—

Cole jerked his body sideways as the point of the katana pierced the ceiling above him and nearly embedded itself into the top of his skull. Instead, it only managed to nick his right ear, drawing blood. But it was better than if it’d taken the whole ear off.

He glanced up as the blade disappeared back up through the elongated hole that hadn’t been there just seconds ago. A pair of bloodshot eyes, semi-darkened against the bright canvas of the sun in the background, glared down at him through the slim opening.

“Holy shit, you’re bleeding!” someone shouted from behind him. Dante. That was Dante. Or Cole thought it was Dante, anyway, because he didn’t have time to acknowledge the Voice or stop the mild bleeding.

More scrambling above him as the crazy maneuvered around, trying to get—

An echoing thwump! as the front tires of the minivan went over something on the sidewalk, followed shortly by another thwump! as that same something went underneath the rear right-side tire.

“That’s probably a body,” the Voice said.

Probably, Cole thought, but of course he had no way of knowing.

Or caring, at this point.

A body was a body, and a dead man didn’t feel it when they got run over. Hell, a dead man didn’t feel much of anything, anymore.

“Cole!”

He snapped a quick look behind him.

Fiona, still struggling with Ashley, while nearby Zoe leaned over the sidearm of her seat as blood poured out of her. Her eyes had rolled up in her sockets, and she looked, for all intents and purposes, either dead or unconscious. He didn’t believe she was dead; the katana had gone through her shoulder and blood was dripping from it, but that wasn’t a killing wound.

At least, not yet.

Not for the next few minutes, anyway.

Bang-bang-bang from above him as the crazy moved around again, repositioning himself.

Fuck you, Cole thought as he slammed his foot down—but this time on the brake instead of the gas.

Boom! as whoever was up there lost his footing and slammed down on the roof. But Cole knew the man was still up there, because he didn’t see a body falling off either sides of the minivan. The man didn’t roll down the windshield or appear in the rearview mirror, either.

“He’s still up there, the determined bastard,” the Voice said.

Cole agreed and shoved his foot back on the gas pedal, and the Grand Caravan lunged forward and barreled through a newspaper vending machine, scattering sheets into the breeze. A screaming headline about trouble in the Asian market smacked against the windshield before being ripped away by the wind.

“Cole!”

That was Fiona.

Or Dante.

Or Zoe.

No, not Zoe. Zoe was in her seat, trying not to die. Or unconscious. Or already dead. Probably unconscious from the shock of pain and blood loss.

“Or dead,” the Voice said.

No, not dead.

“She could be dead.”

She’s not.

“What do you care if she is?”

I don’t.

“You sure?”

Yes.

“You sure?”

Cole focused on swerving around cars and obstacles as he began alternating between the streets and sidewalk. Zigzagging helped to keep the crazy on the roof off balance, not that Cole could shake the man despite how hard he was trying. The guy either had hands of glue or—

“Fuck!” a male voice (Dante. Cole was sure that was Dante that time.) screamed from the back just a split second before the familiar squeal of blade against metal echoed.

Cole glanced back as Dante recoiled in his seat, the long and glimmering point of a katana barely a foot in front of his face. The teenager stared past the blade’s point (“Damn, that is one sharp blade!”) and back at Cole.

“Stay down!” Cole shouted.

“I’m staying down, I’m staying down!” Dante shouted back, even as he clung to the seat of his chair. “But what about—”

“Shut up, and stay down!”

“Yes, sir!”

Squeeeek! as the katana disappeared back through the hole in the roof and another shaft of sunlight pierced through the newly-formed opening.

“That is one determined fucker, all right,” the Voice said.

No shit!

Whump! whump! as the Grand Caravan ran over a dead body, or something soft and fleshy, on the sidewalk. It didn’t matter where Cole turned the minivan; there was always something in his way, forcing him to slow down or go around it or right over it.

Bang-bang-bang! from directly above him as the crazy moved himself forward again to get a bead on Cole.

Not this time, fucker! Cole thought as he slammed on the gas.

For two seconds, anyway, before he shouted, “Everyone, hold on!” and smashed everything he had down on the brake.

The Dodge skidded, threatening to overturn as Cole jerked on the wheel. It might have actually gone down on its side before rolling over onto its roof if it didn’t crash into a parked white Land Rover first, and came to a sudden stop.

Thwump! as something landed on the hood in front of Cole.

The office drone.

The fucking office drone.

The man had managed to stay on the Dodge despite Cole’s erratic driving, but he hadn’t been able to stay on the roof after the crash.

The crazy landed on the hood on his stomach, his face already pointing in the right direction—straight at the windshield and Cole on the other side. The katana was gripped tightly in the man’s right hand, the curved blade moving—

Fuck! Cole thought as he jerked to the right as the blade, somehow, pierced the windshield.

Instead of going through Cole’s chest, the Japanese sword embedded itself into the seat half an inch from Cole’s left shoulder.

“Close one!” the Voice shouted.

Too close. Way, way too close.

Red eyes flared in the sunlight, and a mad grin, surrounded by a mask of dry blood, peered in at Cole through the cracked glass.

For what seemed like an eternity, but was probably just a few seconds—if even that—the two of them gazed into each other’s eyes. At that very moment, Cole realized that the crazies weren’t crazy at all—they were monsters. Maybe even demons from hell, as Zoe had said. This thing, right here, didn’t want anything from Cole or Dante or Fiona or Ashley or her mother.

It didn’t want them.

It wanted to end them.

And that was it. That was all it had come to this world to do.

To put an end to them.

…to put an end to them…

The drone pulled the sword out of the windshield at almost the same time Cole shoved the minivan’s gear into reverse and rammed his foot down on the gas. The car jerked backward, and the crazy did exactly what Cole thought he would: He scrambled to his knees, blood flitting from his eyes, as he lifted the sword over his head to drive it back through the windshield with the full force of both hands.

Cole slammed on the brake before the drone could do that, and the man, unsecured on the hood, lumbered forward and crashed into the windshield, flattening against it like a pancake. Blood from his face smeared the glass as Cole took out the Glock and shoved it against the windshield, the muzzle directly in front of the office drone’s face.

The bloodied eyes widened for a split second.

Bang! as the gun bucked in Cole’s hand.

The empty brass casing ejected into the front passenger seat as the crazy’s head snapped backward, before the body began rolling, and rolling…

Cole stepped on the gas, and the sudden momentum sent the body rolling off the hood and off the side.

A single, undramatic thwump! as the rear right tire ran over another corpse, this one just a bit fresher than the others.

Then Cole was back on the street, avoiding cars at twenty-five miles per hour, while Fiona did her best to keep Zoe from bleeding out in the back.

“Fiona,” Cole said. He glanced back once but was too paranoid another crazy might jump out at—or, like the last one, on top of—them to do it again.

He concentrated on the streets and sidewalks and buildings and alleyways. There were too many alleyways, too many buildings, and too many rooftops.

The rooftops.

He didn’t know why, but he was almost sure there were people up there, watching them drive by.

“Fiona!” Cole shouted.

“What?” the young woman shouted back.

“How is she?”

“She’s bad!”

“How bad?”

“Really bad!”

“Well, that explains a lot,” the Voice laughed.

Cole risked a look up at the rearview mirror.

Fiona was almost crawling over Zoe, pressing—or trying to—a bundle of shirts against her shoulder. But she was doing a bad job of it and looked as if she was afraid to hurt Zoe.

Zoe was still unconscious, her head lolling lifelessly to one side. Was she even still alive?

“Press harder,” Cole said.

“What?” Fiona said.

“Press harder! You have to stop the bleeding.”

“But I don’t want to hurt—”

“You won’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God, this is gross.” Fiona moaned, but she did what Cole told her, and pressed harder down on Zoe’s shoulder with the cloth.

Ashley had gotten out of her seatbelt and was kneeling on the floor next to her mother, crying while clinging to Zoe’s unresponsive hand. Dante remained in his seat, looking every bit like someone who hated his physical limitations.

“You’re doing good,” Cole said. “Just keep it pressed against her wound. You won’t hurt her.”

“Are you sure?” Fiona asked.

“The only way you’ll hurt her is if you don’t press hard enough and she keeps bleeding.”

“Okay. Okay…” Fiona said, more to herself than to Cole, he thought.

Cole wished he could have given her and the rest of them more assurances, but the truth was, there was none to give. What had just happened with the office drone was just the beginning, and the road to Bear Lake was going to be a long one.

A long, winding minefield.

“I guess you better be careful, then,” the Voice said. “We know how dangerous minefields can be, don’t we?”

Yeah, he did.

Unfortunately, he did.

Chapter 19

The katana had taken a nice chunk out of Zoe’s humeral head. That was where the bulk of the pain was coming from, though the blood that covered most of the left side of her chin, flowed down her arm, and sprayed parts of Fiona was the direct result of the extremely sharp sword piercing through flesh and muscle. For the most part, it looked worse than it really was, though of course that was open to interpretation. To Zoe, the shock of getting stabbed with a sword—which also happened to have come from an unexpected place, above her—was probably just as severe as the pain and sight of her own blood flowing freely. Cole wished he could have said he’d never lost that much blood or been skewered quite as emphatically, but he’d be lying to himself.

“Remember that time in Mogadishu?” the Voice asked.

Don’t remind me.

“Why? It made us stronger.”

Barely.

“Barely counts.”

Zoe was unconscious and lying on the reclined seat of the Grand Caravan as Cole tended to her wound with the first-aid kit from Dante’s apartment. It was reminiscent of when she’d done the same for him back at Dante’s bathroom. Only, well, he was conscious then, and he hadn’t lost nearly as much blood.

Outside the Dodge, Cole imagined it was taking Fiona most of her strength to keep Ashley from running back inside the car and into her mother’s arms. Even now, Cole could hear the eight-year-old sniffling, just barely keeping herself from full-on bawling.

When he was done, Cole cleaned some of the blood from Zoe’s seat, then the surrounding floor. He didn’t get all of it—and didn’t try to—but got enough to make the scene less gory. Not for himself, but for the others. Unfortunately for him, Cole had seen more blood than this before.

He dampened the same rag he had found in the glove compartment and wiped the specks of blood from Zoe’s chin and cheek. She woke up while he was doing that, her eyes fluttering open, the dazed look of someone still in pain very evident on her face.

“You’re alive,” Cole said. It seemed like the best thing to say; the only thing that mattered at the moment.

“Where are we?” she whispered. Just talking clearly took a lot out of her.

“A garage.”

“In Bear Lake?”

“Not yet.”

“Close?”

He shook his head.

She sighed and closed her eyes for a bit, before opening them back up again. “Bad?”

“No,” he lied.

“It feels bad.”

“It’s not.”

“Ashley?”

“She’s fine. We’re all fine.”

“Thank you,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

This time she didn’t open them back up.

Cole finished cleaning her, occasionally glancing over his shoulder and out the front windshield of the Grand Caravan at the closed steel door on the other side. The garage was part of an auto body shop, and every inch of it stank of years’ old grease and motor oil and human sweat. The important part was that its door was made of heavy 12-gauge steel and could be locked from the inside. The only other way into the place was through a side door that connected the garage to a small office. Cole had slid a heavy Craftsman tool shelf over that after locking it. If someone was determined enough they could pound their way in, but Cole didn’t think that was going to happen.

The crazies were insane, but not stupid. Assaulting the shop would make too much noise and bring even more crazies. More competition. More dangers. There was no unity, no we are the world bullshit among them. They didn’t care who they killed, non-affected people like him or affected like them. That was his advantage.

“You think so?” the Voice asked.

As long as they’re willing to kill each other, then yeah.

“What if that changes?”

I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, Cole thought, though the possibility left him more than a little cold.

When it didn’t look like Zoe would snap out of her unconscious state for the second time, Cole scoured the backpacks lying around and found a bottle of generic Vicodin in one of Dante’s bags.

“It’s my aunt’s,” the teenager said when Cole showed it to him outside the minivan.

Ashley was back inside the car with her mother, with Fiona accompanying her. Dante had remained outside in his wheelchair, looking over a map of the city. Cole wanted to tell him he didn’t need to do that; Cole knew every street and highway out there and exactly how to get to Bear Lake. But he didn’t, mostly because he wanted to give the kid something to do.

“Painkillers, right?” Dante said.

Cole nodded. “Uh huh.”

“Good stuff?”

“Pretty good.”

“She had them hidden in her dresser, in her room.”

“From you?”

The teenager shrugged. “From everyone, I guess. But it’s hard to hide something from a cripple that’s stuck at home.”

“Is that what you are?”

“What? Cripple? Yeah, pretty much.” Dante chuckled. “It’s cool. I’ve come to terms with it. You don’t have to dance around the subject.”

“How long have you been in that chair?”

“Since before I could remember.”

“Always?”

“Just about.”

Cole looked back when Fiona leaned out the open side hatch of the parked minivan. “How is she?” he asked.

“Still asleep,” Fiona said.

Cole handed her the Vicodin and a bottle of lukewarm water. “Make her take two when she wakes up.”

Fiona turned the bottle over in her hands. “The good stuff.”

“And how does she know that?” the Voice asked, chuckling.

Cole ignored the question and said to Fiona, “Stay by her side. We’re going to stay here for the rest of the night.”

“Is that smart?”

“No, but we’ll just have to make do.”

Camping out at the garage hadn’t been Cole’s first choice, but it was either that or let Zoe bleed to death in the minivan. Fiona had been doing her best to keep Ashley’s mother from bleeding out, but Zoe had already lost too much blood. Cole didn’t like the idea of staying at one place for too long and putting a target on their backs.

He couldn’t see them, but they were out there. The crazies. None had appeared as they found, then backed up into the open garage, but they were out there.

Watching, and waiting.

Patient. So goddamn patient.

“What now?” Dante asked him.

“We hunker down,” Cole said. “And we stay alert.”

* * *

He hated the idea of losing another day without reaching Bear Lake and Emily. Even though he’d last seen, kissed, and said his good-bye to Emily yesterday morning—not even forty-eight hours ago—it felt like two years.

Or two decades.

It didn’t help that the goddamn phones were still not working. He couldn’t get any bars on his mobile, and the landline inside the auto body shop’s garage just gave him a dead tone. None of the others had a working cell phone, either. Whatever had turned everyone into crazies had also done a real number on the technologies of the world. What could possibly do something like that? A part of him thought it had to be an attack of some sort, but he couldn’t fathom the kind of weapon that could achieve something like this.

Instead of driving himself crazy thinking about Emily or the reasons why any of this was happening, Cole decided to occupy his time by securing their temporary hideout. He’d done a half-assed job of it earlier, but only because he didn’t have any choice. He’d had to keep Zoe alive first.

The garage was linked to the office by a steel door with a one-foot-by-one-foot security glass at the top. The door was strong enough that it could withstand some kind of prolonged assault, but the glass was another matter. Thankfully, it was small enough that it would take an extremely slim man or woman to squeeze through. If one of the crazies attempted that, he’d leave himself open, and he didn’t think any of the maniacs out there were stupid enough to do that. Whatever had turned them crazed, it apparently hadn’t done anything to strip away their intelligence. Did it make them smarter? He didn’t think so. But it certainly hadn’t made them dumber.

After pushing the Craftsman tool shelf out of the way, Cole stepped into the adjoining office with the Glock in hand. He hadn’t seen anyone through the security glass earlier, but there was no telling who—or what—was waiting for him on the other side.

It turned out nothing, and no one, was.

There was blood on the floor and walls, but no signs of bodies. The front door was closed, and Cole quickly locked it, before pushing a chair underneath the handle. Not exactly the world’s strongest barricade, but it would do. At the very least, it would give him an early warning system in case someone tried to come in. The front door was identical to the one that separated the office and the garage—metal, with a one-foot-by-one-foot glass at the top.

Cole peered through that security feature now.

The city had darkened quickly outside, making the cars parked in the lot outside harder to make out than when he’d first driven past them to reach the garage. The streets beyond were quiet, and Cole couldn’t detect anything that even looked like movements. Not that he allowed the absence of crazies to convince him they weren’t out there.

“Tread lightly, buddy,” the Voice said. “They won’t show themselves until they have a bead on you. So let’s not give it to them.”

The office was dark, but Cole could see where he was going and what he was doing as he searched the place. There was a bathroom in the back, but it was empty—and stank of shit rather than blood. He wasn’t sure if that was preferable or not.

There were some forms on the counter, including someone’s insurance card. A pen, the front half covered in blood, lay on the floor next to an old swivel chair that squeaked when Cole pushed it out of the way. He searched the drawers but didn’t find anything of much use. Someone had left a couple of tools, along with a sack lunch that was already smelling.

Because he couldn’t help himself, Cole checked his phone again while sitting in the squeaking chair behind the counter. Like the last four times he’d looked at it, there were no reception bars.

He brought up the texting app anyway and punched in:

M. COMING HOME. STAY SAFE.

He pressed Send, then stared at the No Connection pop-up. He scrolled down and selected Keep Trying anyway, before putting the phone back into his pocket. If the cell towers ever came back online and Emily had her phone, then the message would get to her.

“Hope springs eternal,” the Voice said.

Cole got up and went back into the garage, where he pushed the Craftsman tool shelf into place against the door.

Back in the minivan, the women were sleeping, but Dante was eating a fresh turkey sandwich. He held one out, still in its plastic wrapper, to Cole when he climbed inside.

“Thanks,” Cole said as he settled into the driver’s seat up front.

“I didn’t put any condiments on it,” Dante said. “Didn’t know what you liked.”

“You got mustard?”

“You betcha.” The teenager dug out, then tossed a packet of generic mustard to Cole. “I kinda thought you’d be a mustard man.”

Cole squeezed the mustard onto the sandwich. “Why’s that?”

“You just kinda look like the type.”

“What does a mustard type look like?”

“Like you.”

Cole chuckled and took a bite from the sandwich. It wasn’t the best thing he’d ever tasted, but it would do for tonight. He glanced back at the women as he ate. Ashley sat next to her mother, leaning against Zoe’s good shoulder, while Fiona snored softly in a seat farther back, next to Dante.

“When did they fall asleep?” Cole asked.

“Ten minutes ago, I think,” Dante said. “I guess they’re tired. Guess I can’t blame them. A lot of excitement for one day. Heck, for one lifetime.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m good.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I didn’t have to push anyone while we were running for our lives. So I guess I don’t have much reason to be as tired as them.”

Cole took another bite from the sandwich while watching the teenager for a moment. He still didn’t think Dante was going to be much help in getting to Bear Lake and Emily, but the fact that the kid knew and accepted what a burden he was made Cole like him. If nothing else, Dante wasn’t acting like a spoiled, entitled brat. The only thing worse than someone who over-exaggerated their competence was someone who didn’t recognize their incompetence.

“Get some rest, kid,” Cole said.

“Not sure if I can.”

“Try anyway.”

“You know why they haven’t attacked yet?” Dante asked. He was chewing slowly on his turkey while looking out the open side hatch of the Grand Caravan.

“Why?”

“They don’t want to expose themselves. To get in here, they’d have to attack the shop. But that means revealing themselves to the others. It would take a lot of effort to get inside; time for the other crazies to sneak up behind them. So they’re not attacking, because, as crazy as they’ve become, they didn’t all of a sudden get stupid.” He paused for a moment, before continuing. “They’re smart. Maybe too smart.”

Cole smiled. The kid was just putting into words everything he was already thinking.

“You’ve been thinking a lot about this, huh?” he said.

Dante flashed a wry grin. “Not a lot of things to do when you’re confined to a wheelchair.”

“What else have you come up with? About these crazies?”

“They’re just theories…”

“Tell me anyway.”

Dante hesitated.

“We’re just two guys in a car, locked in a garage, talking,” Cole said.

The teenager grinned. “Yeah. Two guys locked in a garage.”

“What other theories have you come up with?”

“They’re predators. They say man is the ultimate apex predator. Have you heard that?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve killed just about every other living creature that’s walked or crawled or been born on this earth at one point or another. We’ve put a ton of them on the extinction list. So what happens when that apex predator loses all inhibitions? When he gets it into his head that he should be the last one standing? And everyone is fair game?”

“What happens?”

“I don’t know,” Dante said, “but I’m terrified just thinking about it.”

Chapter 20

Besides his dwindling turkey slices, Dante had also packed a stack of Lunchables with ham, cheese, and crackers. Everyone took a box and devoured their contents while Cole took his outside the minivan and walked around to stretch his legs.

A few minutes later, Fiona climbed out of the Dodge to join him.

“My legs are cramping up just sitting in there all day,” she said before he could protest her moving around in the semidarkness with him.

She had left the side hatch open, and Cole watched Dante, Zoe, and Ashley taking turns making different versions of ham and cheese and cracker sandwiches with each other’s Lunchables, then showing their creations off to one another. Zoe had woken up and was famished, and looked better. Or as better as one could look after having a katana shoved through her shoulder, anyway. He wasn’t sure how useful she would be when they had to move again, though.

“Kinda late to be thinking about that now, don’t you think?” the Voice asked.

Yeah, kinda.

“Should have left her and the cripple behind. The daughter and girl, too.”

I couldn’t do that.

“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”

We going to do this again?

“That’s my job, remember? I’m here to keep you from making stupid decisions.” The Voice laughed. “Though, I’ll admit, I’m doing a pretty shitty job of it these last couple of days. But hey, I’m just getting my sea legs back.”

Cole wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but he was able to ignore the Voice’s comments and focus on Fiona while she did yoga stretches on the floor next to him. She was surprisingly limber, and he recognized a couple of the poses. He winced, thinking about how much they would hurt if he tried them.

“Zoe told me your wife’s name is Emily?” Fiona was asking him.

Cole nodded. “Yes.”

“Is she pretty?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“You didn’t have to add the yes part. I figured out the answer when you smiled from ear to ear.”

Cole didn’t bother pretending she wasn’t right. Every time he said or even thought of Emily, he couldn’t help but smile. It was impossible not to. She’d changed his life in so many ways. She was, and still is, the best thing that had ever happened to him. He used to think that kind of sentimental thinking was just fodder for dumb country songs. Used to.

“Must be nice,” Fiona was saying.

“What’s that?”

“To be in love. Not that I’d know what that’s like.”

“You’ve never been in love?”

She shook her head and stood up for some more arms-heavy poses. “No. Never.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Close. Twenty-four.”

“And you’ve never been in love.”

“Nope. Not once.” She finished up and let out a loud, relieved sigh. “I’ve tried, don’t get me wrong, but it was just never there.”

“How do you know?”

“Huh?”

“How do you know it was never love?”

“Because I hear people talking about being in love. Butterflies in the stomach, always thinking about them. Then like you just now, smiling from ear to ear at the mention of their name. That’s never happened to me.”

“You’re young, and you have plenty of time,” was what Cole was going to say but didn’t.

Yes, Fiona was young, and she used to have plenty of time to experience love, but that wasn’t the case now. At least, not if what was happening outside was also going on in the rest of the city, the state, and the whole country. Hell, maybe the world. If everything he sensed was true, then no, Fiona didn’t have plenty of time left to experience love.

But of course he didn’t say any of that.

He said instead, “You’ll like Bear Lake.”

“What’s it like?”

“Peaceful. Wooded. There’s a lake in our backyard.”

“Wow. Did it cost a lot?”

“A pretty penny, yeah.”

“But you could afford it.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do before all of this, anyway?”

“I ran a security company called RistWorks.”

“RistWorks? Never heard of it.”

“Most people haven’t.”

“What do you guys do?”

What did we do, Cole thought, but he said, “We provided security around the world.”

“What kind of security?”

“All kinds of security.”

Fiona made a face. “You don’t want to tell me, is that it?”

“I would, but you wouldn’t understand anyway.”

“Why? Because I’m not smart enough?”

“No. That’s not it.”

“Why, then?”

He sighed.

“I wanna know,” Fiona said.

“Because it’s not part of your world,” Cole said. “What my company provides is not a part of a lot of people’s world. And that’s how it should be.”

She shook her head and squinted at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Be glad you don’t.”

“I feel like you’re patronizing me.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m not stupid, you know.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I could have finished college if I thought a degree in art history was useful.”

“Art history is always useful.”

Fiona smirked. “Yeah, if you wanna teach art history. Unfortunately for me and my student loan, that wasn’t something I wanted to spend my life doing.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Way too much.” She grinned. “You wanna help me pay it off?”

“No, I don’t think you have to worry—” he started to say, when a loud crash! cut him off.

He spun around, dropping the remaining Lunchables and reaching for the Glock in his front waistband, even as the very clear and unmistakable sound of glass pelting linoleum tiles filtered through the closed side door that separated the garage from the office.

The front door!

“What was that?” Fiona gasped.

“Get back inside the car!” Cole snapped even as he rushed toward the door.

“Cole—”

“Get inside now, and close the door! Lock everything!”

He thought he might have heard Zoe’s voice somewhere in the background, but Cole didn’t look back so he couldn’t be sure if Fiona had even obeyed his instructions. He didn’t have time because he could already see a round face filling up the security glass on the other side of the door in front of him. Bloodshot eyes, as wide as saucers, peered in through the glass that separated the garage from the office. And though he didn’t know how, Cole could swear he could hear the man’s heavy breathing as adrenaline coursed through his veins at impossible—and untenable—velocity.

Cole had been hoping the crazies would stay away, that assaulting the garage would leave them vulnerable to other crazies waiting to pounce. It would have been a tactically bad idea to open yourself up to a rear attack, and any general worth his salt could tell you that. Dante had come up with the same notion.

But apparently both of them had overestimated the intelligence of these crazies. Or, at least, this one, looking in at him.

One half of the man’s face was covered in dry blood, and his eyes were wild and bulging, veins popping like firecrackers along his forehead. There were barely any irises left and almost a sea of white ocean remaining. Those abnormal eyes zeroed in on Cole, and if there was any humanity left in them, Cole couldn’t see it. Not even a hint of it.

There was nothing looking back at him except a desire to murder him. To end him.

Cole was halfway to the door when the crazy smashed the window with something large and heavy and metal. A black Maglite flashlight, blood covering nearly 80 percent of its length, came through the suddenly created opening.

Cole lifted the Glock but didn’t shoot. He waited instead for—

The crazy disappeared from the window’s one-foot-by-one-foot frame. Not that he went anywhere. He backed up just far enough to—

Boom! as the man crashed into the door on the other side.

The door moved against the impact, but it held.

For now.

Boom!

The doorframe trembled more noticeably that time.

Boom!

The collision of flesh against metal didn’t just vibrate inside the garage, it had to be making a hell of a ruckus outside the auto body shop, too.

Boom!

And it was going to attract attention. If the other crazies hadn’t heard when the security guard broke his way through the first door—

Shit. The crazy had managed to bust through the other door, and they were made of the same material—

Even as that realization popped into Cole’s mind, the door in front of him broke loose, the locks and latch flying through the air, and snapped open. A big elephant of a man lumbered inside, slightly thrown off balance by his own ferocious forward momentum.

“Welp. Now he’s inside,” the Voice said.

The crazy quickly righted himself, twin nostrils flaring, while cheeks rippled with every movement and breath. He gripped the Maglite in his right hand, blood dripping down his cheeks. He was wearing a dark navy-colored security uniform, and something that looked like a smile creased his cracked and bloodied lips.

Cole let the man take two steps toward him, the Maglite rising as he moved to strike.

He still didn’t squeeze the trigger until the crazy was close enough that Cole was sure he wouldn’t miss.

He fired.

And he didn’t miss. He would have had to be blind to miss from this range.

The security guard’s head snapped back, and he collapsed in a pile about four feet in front of Cole, the flashlight clattering to the oil-stained concrete floor and rolling forward until it vanished underneath the Grand Caravan.

The clink! of the Glock’s spent brass casing as it sprang loose, then bounced once on the same floor, before finally settling a few feet away.

The gunshot was loud, like thunder inside the confines of the garage.

“Cole?” Zoe said from somewhere behind him.

“Stay inside!” Cole snapped.

“What—”

“Stay inside!”

He stayed focused on the open door—the smashed open door—into the office because he could hear it.

The thump-thump-thump of shoes pounding on the ground, getting louder and louder—

“Here they come!” the Voice shouted.

And they came.

The first one through the door wasn’t what Cole had expected. It was a girl, much too small for her age, long, black mane covered in dirt and debris, flowing behind her as she raced through the opening. Her right arm was cocked back, a long machete, blood covering the sharp blade, gripped tightly in her hand. A white shirt with a yellow smiley face greeted Cole.

But there was no mistaking her eyes. Those bloodied, red eyes.

“Forget what she used to be!” the Voice said. “She’s not that anymore!”

Cole knew that, but knowing and doing something about it—

“Emily! Think about Emily!”

He shot the girl in the chest, and her body jerked as if she’d been yanked backward by an invisible string. She slumped to the floor like a rag doll. The machete fell and clattered to the dirty floor—

A third figure rushed through the opening.

A man. Bigger than the girl. But then, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?

The crazy crushed the girl’s head under dark black boots as he all but lunged through the door, something that looked like a hammer in his right hand. It, too, was cocked back and in search of a victim.

“You gonna give it one?” the Voice asked.

Hell no.

He shot the man in the face. Like the girl’s, this crazy’s head, too, jerked back before the rest of his body fell in a pile on the floor, somewhere between the girl and the security guard that had opened the way for them.

Three bodies filled the garage now, but they weren’t going to be the end of it. Cole knew that because he could hear them coming. He also heard someone screaming from beyond the office, followed by the ping! of something metal striking something else with resounding fury. Maybe another human skull. Maybe an arm or a leg.

“Crazies killing crazies,” the Voice said. But that’s not going to last long, is it?”

No, it wasn’t.

Cole turned and ran back to the Grand Caravan. He didn’t have very far to go, and either Zoe or Fiona must have been watching him through the tinted window this entire time, because the side hatch slid open as soon as he made the move.

It was Fiona, looking out at him with wild, scared eyes that shouted, “What now?” even though nothing came through her slightly-parted lips.

“Get behind the wheel!” Cole shouted at her.

“What?” Fiona said.

“Get behind the wheel! We’re leaving!”

“It’s still dark—”

“Now! Now now now!”

Chapter 21

Cole grabbed the lever holding the garage door in place and yanked it, then snatched the handhold and began pulling the door up, up, up until there was enough momentum that the rollers took over and did the rest of the work for him. The thick sheet of 12-gauge metal slid up and curved backward along with the rails—

A silhouetted figure rushed toward him, a baseball bat swinging wildly in a stream of moonlight.

Cole barely managed to dodge the man, sidestepping to his right as the bat swooshed past his head. If it’d landed, it would have been a killing strike. Or, if not, then Cole probably wouldn’t have been able to get up from the oil-slicked floor where he would have fell in a pile.

But it didn’t connect, and he had avoided it in time.

“Lucky!” the Voice said.

The crazy immediately spun around. Another big man in dirty (bloodied?) overalls, bloodshot eyes, darker and even redder in the semidarkness of the unlit garage, locking in on Cole even as his mouth snarled.

Cole shot him, the 9mm round drilling through the space between those same eyes dripping with blood.

The body fell, and Cole immediately turned, the Glock in hand, ready for more.

He searched the darkness outside the garage for faces, but there was just the familiar sight of a trash-strewn sidewalk and the congested streets beyond. Cole had no illusions he had avoided detection when he sought shelter inside the auto body shop earlier, but he’d been counting on the crazies not attacking and exposing themselves to each other.

That had proven correct…until it didn’t.

“Time to vamos!” the Voice shouted.

Definitely time to vamos, Cole thought even as he heard the Dodge’s engine start up and bright headlights sprayed him from behind.

He turned, shielding his eyes with his empty hand.

Fiona was leaning out the open driver-side window of the Grand Caravan. “Come on! Get in already!”

Cole started to do just that when a bald man in a black blazer and white dress shirt emerged from the back bumper of the minivan. It should have been impossible for Cole to make out the fresh blood dripping from the man’s chin and clothes, but it wasn’t, thanks to the lights from the Grand Caravan.

The crazy didn’t bother going for the car. He’d spotted Cole and made a beeline for him, cocking back the butcher knife in his right hand. Dark liquids flitted from the blade and splashed the side of the vehicle.

Cole shot the man in the chest, and the crazy seemed to stumble and stagger but didn’t go down.

“Two’s the charm,” the Voice said.

Cole fired a second time, aiming for the man’s chest again—it was a massive target, the blazing white of the dress shirt making it easy to pinpoint in the black spot that the crazy had stumbled into. The 9mm bullet struck the man in the side of the neck instead of his chest, and a large spray of blood arced through the air and splashed the side of the minivan even as it lurched forward suddenly.

For a second, Cole thought Fiona was going to run him over and was ready to dive out of the car’s path. But the Dodge stopped barely a foot from striking him, the sight of a frazzled Fiona behind the steering wheel, visible through the cracked windshield, not quite giving Cole the boost of optimism he was looking for.

Sudden movement as something else came through the door that separated the garage and the office.

At the same time, Cole heard a shriek, followed by a scream, from somewhere outside the building.

More crazies killing crazies.

“As long as they’re not killing you!” the Voice said. “Which is what this one’s trying to do, buddy!”

Not that Cole spent more than a few milliseconds wondering if the man staggering toward him was friend or enemy. The figure was tall and seemed to be dragging a leg behind him. He appeared freshly wounded, but there was nothing wrong with the machete in his left hand as he struggled his way toward Cole.

Cole shot the man in the chest, and he went down but didn’t stay down. Instead, the crazy tried to get up, but was having trouble. Cole took aim to finish the man off.

“Save your ammo!” the Voice shouted. “You might need every single bullet before this is over!”

The Voice had a point.

“Just a point? It’s a goddamn great point, buddy!”

Cole agreed and didn’t fire. He didn’t have to anyway. The crazy was having trouble just getting back on one leg, never mind both.

The Grand Caravan’s side hatch slid open, and Dante leaned out. “Hey, you coming or what?”

Cole grinned at the kid and jumped inside, the teenager slamming the hatch closed after him with a resounding bang!

Cole hurried to the front, shouting, “Go, go, go!” even as he dropped into the passenger seat.

Fiona didn’t need any further encouragement. She stepped on the gas, and the car burst outside the garage port, down the driveway, and hit the drop that connected the auto body shop to the street, with wild indifference. Fiona immediately turned right, jerking on the steering wheel with, from what Cole could see, everything she had. Without him having to tell her, Fiona hopped onto the narrow sidewalk to bypass the street and the many cars blocking her path.

“Where are we going?” Fiona shouted.

“Keep driving!” Cole shouted back.

“But where are we going?”

“Doesn’t matter, as long as we’re not stopping! We do not want to stop in the middle of the street, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“I said, do you understand?”

“Yes!” she said, this time shouting it. “I understand, goddammit! Don’t stop! Don’t give those fuckers the chance to attack!”

“I guess she does understand,” the Voice said.

Yeah, I guess she does.

Fiona clutched the steering wheel with both hands, leaning slightly forward to see where she was going. Bright headlights lit their path, but it was like driving through the dark heart of the ocean, with no other lights outside except theirs in the entire universe at the moment.

He didn’t say anything as Fiona ran over debris on the sidewalk and crashed into obstacles. He didn’t say anything, mostly because none of it did anything to slow them down; either because they weren’t hitting anything big enough, or the Grand Caravan was just that big and unstoppable. He was wagering it was probably a little of both.

Cole checked on the others.

Ashley was holding onto her seat’s armrest as if she’d fall out of the moving vehicle if she let go even a little bit. But other than that, she seemed okay. Terrified, but okay. Zoe was strapped in next to her daughter, her injured arm fastened with the sling Cole had made for her out of clothing and strips of fabric, all held together with duct tape he’d found in a toolbox inside the Grand Caravan’s back.

Dante sat next to the closed side hatch, and gave Cole an It’s all good nod and a smile that Cole almost believed he meant it. Almost. The teenager was scared, just like the mother and daughter. Cole had seen too many kids in combat and could easily tell the difference between bravado and fear. This was a little of the former, but mostly the latter.

“Everyone good?” Cole asked.

“Fine and dandy,” Dante said.

Ashley nodded, but didn’t ease up on her seat’s armchair.

Zoe gave Cole a forced smile. “We’re okay. What about you?”

“Fine and dandy, too,” Cole said.

“So, um, do you know where we’re going?” Fiona asked from the driver’s seat.

Cole turned around—

Whump! whump! whump! as the minivan’s tires went over something that wasn’t supposed to be lying on the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, oh my God, what was that?” Fiona asked.

“Those were the tires going over bodies,” the Voice said.

Cole agreed with the Voice’s assessment, but he said, “Don’t worry about it. Concentrate on what’s in front of you.”

“But what was it? What did I just run over?”

Cole glanced at his side mirror, not that he could see much of anything beyond the fading red taillights of the minivan. “Looked like garbage. It’s just garbage.”

“Oh, thank God,” Fiona said. She sounded relieved, either because she believed him or…she wanted to.

Cole focused on the sidewalk in front of them. Storefronts to one side, abandoned cars to the other. Some vehicles had overrun the curb, forcing Fiona to slow down and go around them. When she had an open stretch, she gassed it.

“You’re doing good,” Cole said.

“Yeah?” Fiona said.

“Very good.”

“Maybe you should drive…”

“You’re doing fine.”

Besides, I want to keep my hand on the Glock, he thought but didn’t add.

“I should tell you something,” Fiona said.

“What is it?”

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

He looked over at her.

She met his puzzled expression with an almost embarrassed grin. “I mean, I know how to drive and everything. Clearly. But, well, I never took the time to get my driver’s license.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I? I don’t even own a car.”

“Still, why wouldn’t you want to have one? Don’t you need identification?”

“I have a passport.”

“You have a passport but not a driver’s license?”

“Yes. So?”

“It’s—”

“Shit!” Fiona shouted, cutting him off.

Cole’s eyes snapped back to the windshield just as the Grand Caravan swerved off the sidewalk and into the street. A tall figure in a baseball jersey and jeans had jumped out of one of the storefront windows at them, and something long and metallic thwacked! off the side of the minivan as Fiona drove past it.

Cole glanced out his side mirror just in time to see one of the red taillights exploding and showering the darkness with light, before going out.

“What happened? What was that?” Fiona asked. “Did he get us? Did he get us?”

“No,” Cole said. “Just a light.”

“Which light?”

“One of the taillights.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Better a taillight than us,” the Voice said.

Cole agreed, and said, “Better one of the lights than one of us.”

“I concur with that statement,” Dante said from the back.

Cole glimpsed a figure hiding behind a white Ford as they drove past. The man—or it might have been a woman; it was difficult to tell with only the moonlight to see with—raised himself up from the ground just enough to follow their movements.

He saw things in the streets that he thought might be more crazies, along with figures moving across the rooftops of buildings around them. They were always alone—solitary killers searching for victims, and wary of each other.

Cars flashed by in front and to both sides of them. The minivan just barely avoided striking a parked semi’s grill, then grazed the back bumper of a red truck. It ran over something round and lying on the street that felt more than just a pothole.

Other than that, Fiona was doing an amazing job. Certainly way better than someone who didn’t even have a driver’s license. But she was also hopped up on adrenaline. He could see it in the way she gripped the steering wheel, the almost viselike focus she looked out the front windshield with.

“Slow down,” Cole said.

“What?” Fiona said.

“Slow down. You’re going too fast.”

She looked down at the speedometer in front of her. “I thought you wanted me to go fast.”

“I want you to keep moving, not run us into a brick wall. Or a parked semi.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point.” She slowly eased her foot off the gas. “Better?”

“Yes. Now keep your eyes on the road ahead. Let me look everywhere else.” Cole glanced back at Dante. “Make sure the doors are locked.”

“They are,” Dante said.

“Sure?”

“They are,” Zoe said.

Cole nodded and turned back around.

Whump! as the tires ran over something else in the street.

“Shit,” Fiona said, and angled them back onto the sidewalk.

They hadn’t gone more than a few seconds when—

Whump!

Then, less than ten seconds later—

Whump!

“Oh, Jesus,” Fiona said. “Those aren’t garbage bags, are they?” Then, when Cole didn’t answer her fast enough, “Cole? Those aren’t garbage bags, are they? Are they?”

“No,” Cole said.

“I think I’m gonna throw up.”

Whump!

“Stay calm. You’re doing great,” Cole said.

Whump!

“Oh, Jesus,” Fiona said.

“Focus,” Cole said.

“I—”

Whump!

Fiona’s face paled noticeably, even in the semidarkness of the front seats.

“Fiona,” Cole said.

“What?”

“Focus.”

“Right,” Fiona said. “Focus.”

“You can do this.”

“I can do this.” Then, as if to convince herself, “I can do—”

Bang! as something struck the hood of the minivan.

“Jesus!” Fiona shouted. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Cole said. “Stay on course.”

“But what was that?”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stay on course, and keep us moving. Whatever you do, keep us moving.”

Day 3

Chapter 22

He could see the highway in the distance. It was a lot closer than he’d thought when they initially took refuge for the night. There was maybe half a mile between them and the path home, but the impassable nature of the roads between where they were and where they wanted to be might as well turn that half a mile (give or take) into ten—maybe more—miles.

But it was right there. Right there. And all they had to do was reach it and…then what? They’d be stuck on the highway anyway. Twenty miles to Bear Lake in that sea of stalled steel, aluminum, copper, glass, rubber, and God knows what else cars were made of these days, was going to take more than a day. Two days. Three.

A week?

Too long. Even one more day out here, while Emily was over there, was too long. Too damn long.

“That’s the spirit,” the Voice laughed. “Give up before you’ve even given it the ol’ college try! What would The Gipper say?”

Not much. He’s dead.

“I think he might still call you a pussy from the grave.”

Yeah, well, that’s his prerogative.

Just to reach the feeder meant barreling through enough abandoned vehicles to…make the minivan useless by the time they reached the elevated road. If they could even get close enough to sniff the entrance and escape more attacks by crazies along the way, which wasn’t a given.

Because they were out there. He couldn’t see them, but they were out there.

Waiting for the right moment to strike.

Waiting…

“Your pessimism is really starting to bring me down, buddy,” the Voice said.

But it was the truth. He knew it, and he knew that the Voice knew it, too, because it knew everything he did. That was how this worked, after all.

“What now?” Fiona was asking him.

Cole shook his head, not sure how to respond.

He was crouched at the edge of the rooftop, which gave him a nice view of the highway and the dead city surrounding them in the almost sensational glow of morning sunrise. Or it would have been sensational if he wasn’t looking at a graveyard, which was what the city was from up here. There were only the occasional flickering of movements in the varied colored ocean of glinting metal and concrete, either animals that had come in to feast on the bodies or crazies taking the opportunity to attack each other.

“Better them than us,” the Voice said.

Amen to that.

The smell was getting worse. Or maybe it was just worse because he was high up and couldn’t escape the sweltering stink. In a few days, it would be practically impossible to breathe in the air without choking on the stench of death. It was already bad, and they were only two days into…this. Whatever this turned out to be.

“The end of the world,” the Voice said.

That was certainly a good guess.

“What do you think it is, then?”

I don’t know.

“Any guesses?”

None.

“You do know that I can read your thoughts, right?” the Voice said.

Cole ignored the Voice’s mocking and focused instead on Fiona, standing next to him.

“It looks dead,” Fiona was saying.

“What a choice of words!” the Voice said, laughing.

“I’ve never seen it this quiet,” Fiona continued. “And the smell…” She shivered and wrapped her arms across her chest as if she were cold, even though it was warm.

Too warm, and that was going to make the stink even worse in the coming days.

He hadn’t seen how bad it was last night when they finally pulled off the sidewalk and roads and into the alleyway. They’d escaped into an antique shop through a side door, Cole expecting crazies to attack at any second and ready for it with the Glock.

But they hadn’t been pursued into the alley. He didn’t know why. Either they’d been lucky to pick a building that wasn’t crawling with crazies, or—

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, buddy!” the Voice had said, and Cole hadn’t.

The shop’s front door and windows were covered with burglar bars, which was one of the reasons Cole had chosen it in the first place. They wouldn’t keep someone who was determined enough to get in out forever, but they were better than every other option they’d driven past. Inside, the place smelled abandoned, until he realized that was just the product of all the refuse of society stacked on shelves and piled in corners. Which was to say, the place smelled like an antique shop housing old things people no longer wanted and only a select few would ever go out of their way to search for. What clinched the shop as a viable refuge was the lack of evidence that someone had died inside; the place hadn’t seen a soul since its doors closed, however long that had been.

The only other way in or out besides the heavily-gated front entrance was the side door they’d come through. The minivan was squeezed into a narrow corridor on the other side of that metal door now, and Cole, with Fiona’s help (and Ashley, who sorta lent a hand) had barricaded it with a pair of heavy steel shelves. Like the front door and windows, their extra efforts wouldn’t keep someone who was really determined to get in out forever, but it was good enough. Besides, Cole was counting on the crazies trying their best to limit their noises and not attract the attention of other predators.

All in all, he couldn’t have asked for a better spot to regroup. A part of him had wanted to drive right through the night, but it was pretty clear very early on that that wasn’t going to work. Either they would run into something unmovable by accident, or they’d cross a crazy that had more than just a baseball bat. Caution, then, was the smart move, even if it killed him to lose another day.

“Can we really drive through that?” Fiona was asking him.

Too many things, he thought but said, “We have to find another way around. Get to the highway somehow. Maybe another feeder that’s less congested to reach.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No, but the downtown roads are all laid out pretty much the same. We’ll use the smaller roads, pick our way through the side streets until we can find an easier path to the highway. If we have to, we can use the feeder roads all the way to Bear Lake.”

“Would that be easier?”

“No. I don’t think any of this is easy, or that there’s an easier option out there. But it’s doable. And right now, that’s good enough.”

He was about to turn around when he caught something in the corner of his eye and glanced down, then across the street.

A man in a white shirt was peeking out from the mouth of a dark alleyway and at him. The crazy was well hidden, and Cole wouldn’t have noticed him if the sunlight hadn’t reflected off a long, shiny metal object clutched in the man’s hand.

When he was spotted, the crazy stepped back—and disappeared into the alley.

“You saw that?” Fiona said, her voice dropping to almost a whisper.

“Uh huh.”

“There’s more of them out there, aren’t there?”

“Yup.”

“They’re just waiting for us.”

“Us, each other… Whatever they can target.”

“This is insane.”

“Yeah, it is,” he said, before turning and leading her across the rooftop.

Fiona followed. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Do you really think we’re going to make it to Bear Lake?”

“Absolutely,” Cole said, without missing a beat.

* * *

The antique shop was two stories high, with living quarters on the second floor and the store on the first. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs; only one of the bedrooms was being used for its intended purpose, while the other two had been converted into storage for the shop’s extra inventory.

Even as Cole climbed down from the rooftop access, he could already hear Dante’s wheelchair moving across the polished wooden floorboards to meet him at the bottom.

“Anything?” Dante asked even before Cole could see him.

Cole climbed down the rest of the way with Fiona behind him.

“It looks worse from up there,” he said.

“That’s possible? It looked pretty bad last night. And this morning from the windows.”

“Trust me. It’s worse from up there.”

“On a scale of one to ten…”

“Seven,” Cole said.

“I was gonna go with eight,” Fiona said.

“Not too bad, then,” Dante said.

“It’s pretty bad, Dante.”

“I mean, ten is bad. Seven or eight?” The teenager shrugged. “Not as bad.” Then, to Cole, “So, no way around it?”

“Maybe, but it’s going to be the long way from now on,” Cole said.

“Probably for the best.”

“How’s Zoe?”

“She’s doing better.” He nodded up the hallway. “Inside the bathroom with Ashley.”

“And the kid?”

“She’s a trooper, that one.”

“Should I be doing something?” Fiona asked. “All this standing around doing nothing is driving me crazy. Which is ironic, because that used to be my favorite hobby.”

“You can head back downstairs and see if there’s anything we can use,” Cole said. “Just be sure to stay away from the windows as much as you can. We didn’t get here undetected last night, and they’re already out there, but let’s not give them something to key on.”

“Don’t wave a fresh slab of meat in front of the hungry tigers?” Dante said.

“Something like that.”

“What am I looking for, exactly?” Fiona asked.

“Weapons, food, essentials. Anything we didn’t find last night when we did the quick search, that we can use.”

“You wanna come along and help me look, sport?” Fiona asked Dante.

“You gonna drag me back up here later?” Dante asked.

“Um. Pass.” Then, almost blushing, “Sorry.”

“No worries. I’ll check the bedrooms and closets again. People usually keep the good stuff in their dressers, right? And there’s all those boxes we didn’t hit last night.”

They split up, Fiona going downstairs by herself while Dante wheeled toward the first bedroom. They both looked as if they had a mission to accomplish. That was good. Cole hadn’t really expected either one to find anything worth finding, but it was always a good idea to keep people busy. That way they had less time to freak out and cause him headaches.

As for himself, Cole headed to the bathroom at the end of the floor. The door was closed, but he could hear Zoe talking with Ashley inside.

He knocked.

“It’s open,” Zoe said.

Cole peeked in. “Am I interrupting?”

Ashley was sitting on the sink counter, her legs dangling as she hummed some pop song that was always on the radio before everything went to shit. Something about high school love affairs. Zoe was wiping her own chin with a wet rag, getting off the last of the blood speckles that neither Cole nor Fiona had managed to completely remove last night. There was no electricity or working plumbing in the room, so Zoe had to make do with one of their bottles of water.

For someone who’d been stabbed in the shoulder with a katana, Zoe looked remarkably pain-free. Then again, the codeine he’d given her, from Dante’s aunt’s medical bag, probably had a lot to do with that.

Zoe had been inside the bathroom all morning checking on her wound. That required taking off her shirt, and though he’d told her to let Fiona help—she would have been uneasy around him—Zoe had insisted on doing it herself.

“Hey,” Zoe said, throwing the rag into a waste bin. “See anything good up there?”

“Depends on your definition of good,” Cole said.

“Something that won’t get us killed.”

“In that case, no.”

“And here I thought our luck was turning around.”

“Whatever gave you that crazy idea?”

“My mom used to tell me that anyone can be a pessimist, but it takes some serious courage to always look on the bright side of things. Serious courage. Either that, or a total lack of understanding of reality. I still can’t figure out which.”

Cole chuckled. “Your mom was probably onto something.”

“Maybe.” Then, “Where’s the others?”

“Fiona’s downstairs, and Dante’s checking the rooms again.”

Zoe turned to her daughter. “Wanna go help Dante, sweetie?”

Ashley saluted her mom, then hopped off the counter and squeezed past Cole into the hallway. Cole looked after her, before returning his gaze to Zoe.

She had turned around and was leaning against the counter, suddenly not looking as spry as just a few seconds ago.

“She was being ‘spry’ for the kid,” the Voice said.

Looks like it, Cole thought.

“You okay?” he asked.

She shook her head. “The codeine’s a lifesaver, but there’s still a lot of pain. I think I saw some blood, but I didn’t want Ashley to see it.”

“Can I take a look?”

“I’m not wearing a bra.”

“So turn around, and I won’t look.”

She gave him a pursed smile. He couldn’t tell if she actually believed him or not.

“I’ve seen naked women before, Zoe,” Cole said.

She turned around, and Cole removed her shirt as painlessly as possible, but even so, Zoe let out a few pained sighs. Fortunately, she was wearing a long-sleeve shirt with buttons, which made it easier to take off. The bandage he’d put on her was still in place, but some blood had seeped out from the edges.

“I’ll need to take it off and look at what’s going on underneath,” Cole said.

Zoe nodded.

“It’ll hurt a little,” he said.

“Would it hurt more if I don’t let you?”

“No, but your wound could be infected, which would then lead to death, and Ashley would be an orphan.”

“Since you put it that way,” Zoe said, turning slightly to give him better access to her wounded shoulder.

Chapter 23

Fiona was sitting behind the cash register near the back of the shop where she couldn’t be seen from the front windows as she ate—loudly, he noticed—one of Dante’s Doritos bags. She chased the Cool Ranch flavored chips down with one of the bottles of warm water they’d scored in the back room among more unboxed inventory.

“How’s Zoe?” Fiona asked when he joined her.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Cole said.

“She looked pretty bad last night. I was a little worried she might not make it.”

“She’ll be okay as long as we don’t ask her to do any hand-to-hand fighting.”

Fiona grinned. “That’s where you come in.”

“Why me?”

“Let’s face it, you’ve done this before.”

“‘This?’”

“Fighting. Kicking ass. You’ve done all this before. I can tell that much just watching you handle yourself. Then there’s the gun.”

“What about the gun?”

“You’re comfortable with it. Most people aren’t. Even gun people don’t look as comfortable the way you do around that Glock.”

“You know gun people?”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t always from here. Me and my brother—” She paused. Then, “I’m from the Midwest. I’ve been around gun people since I was a kid. Never got into it myself, but I can tell when someone isn’t shy around one.”

Cole didn’t deny anything she said as he sat down next to her on the floor. She offered him some of her Doritos, and he took a couple of chips. It was as if a grenade of flavors exploded in his mouth with each bite.

“Not bad,” he said.

“I used to live on this stuff. I guess I’ll be again.”

“Life’s a circle. You always end up back where you started.”

“Are we talking about her or us?” the Voice asked.

Cole ignored it and said, “Any luck finding something we can use?”

She shook her head. “Unless you think we can use a bunch of old junk.”

“What about weapons?”

“I don’t think this is that kind of antique shop. There isn’t even one of those old swords. Like the one that guy used last night.”

“Katana.”

“Is that what it’s called?”

“Yeah. Samurai used to carry them in feudal Japan as a sign of their status. Only blue bloods need apply, though. They come in sets—the katana, the longer of the two, and the wakizashi, which is slightly shorter. The latter comes out in close quarters.”

“Damn. You know a lot about this stuff.”

“I studied history.”

Fiona chuckled. “Not art history.”

“Nope. Just history.”

“Probably more useful than the degree I would have gotten if I’d stayed in school.” She held up the bag again. “More?”

“Please,” he said, reaching for it.

Fiona wasn’t wrong about there not being anything useful—at least from a combat point of view—in the shop. He’d noticed it last night even when he skimmed the place. The shop was end-to-end furniture and knickknacks from around the world, some older than others. Hand-made crafts from Europe filled one shelf, while wood carvings from Asia took up another shelf. One corner was reserved for clothing, while old bicycle parts, of all things, occupied another. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the shop’s contents.

In the time since she came down and started snacking, Fiona had opened the cash register—it was elaborately etched in ornate patterns and looked just as old as the rest of the shop’s offerings—and stacked some money on the counter.

“How much?” he asked.

“Let’s just say that whoever owned this place wasn’t doing very well even before the world went to shit.”

“Shop was still open. Along this street, you’d need steady income to pay the bills.”

Fiona shrugged. “Maybe there’s something here making money that we haven’t found yet. Did you check the back?”

“Last night.”

“Find anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like, say, pallets of cocaine or weed or gold bars?”

Cole smiled. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Then I have no idea how this place was staying in business. Everything is so…old. And useless.”

“They found a way, apparently.”

“Apparently.”

She passed the Doritos bag over again, and Cole helped himself to another handful of chips.

He glanced over at the front windows. Besides the burglar bars, there were no curtains, which was probably on purpose so passersby could check out the shop’s antiques. Because of that, Cole could easily see out at the street beyond.

And the cars.

So, so many cars.

Like everything else out there, they weren’t moving.

At least, nothing was moving that he could see. Not that he believed it for a second.

Because they were still out there, like the one in the white shirt hiding in the alley across the street. Even now, Cole wondered what the man was brandishing, waiting to either stab or bludgeon him over the head with. A baseball bat, maybe. Or a very long crowbar. Or possibly another sword.

The possibilities were endless.

And sure to be painful.

Cole got up and moved to the front of the store until he was standing against the door at an angle that allowed him to see out the windows but still remain mostly hidden. There was nothing happening on the sidewalk immediately outside or the street beyond. The quiet was unnerving, especially when all he could see were cars, refuse, and the bodies. Too many bodies.

The number two million flashed across his mind’s eye. That was how many people lived in the city the last time the government took a census. Two million souls. How many of those had become crazed?

Why had they been infected in the first place? Was it something in the water? In the air? In the food supply? Why was he spared? Fiona, Zoe, Ashley, and Dante?

And what about Emily?

He fished out his cell phone and stared at the screen. No reception. Of course, no reception. Not that that stopped him from trying to dial, then text Emily’s phone anyway.

Nothing.

Not a goddamn thing.

“What did you expect?” the Voice asked.

He didn’t bother with a response. Instead, he focused on the phone’s battery level. Low. Too low. And without a way to recharge it…

He put the phone back into his pocket. It was still his only lifeline to Emily. Until it ran out of battery, anyway.

“One bridge at a time, buddy,” the Voice said. “One bridge at a time…”

From somewhere behind him, Fiona said, “This place is cozy and all, but we’re not going to spend the rest of the day here, are we?”

“No. That’s not the plan.”

“So what is the plan?”

“Get back into the minivan. Reach the highway. Head to Bear Lake.”

“That’s everything?”

“Pretty much.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out.”

Cole smiled to himself. “Not quite.”

“Which part?”

All of it, he thought but said, “I’ll tell you when I figure it out.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense for too long,” Fiona said. “The wait is killing me.”

“More famous last words!” the Voice said, laughing its familiar, stupid laugh.

* * *

For two minutes and change, Cole watched two men trying to kill one another. They were in the alley across the street from the antique shop. The same one where he’d seen the man in the white dress shirt earlier. One of them might have been the same guy with the long metal weapon, but Cole couldn’t be sure. He didn’t have a clue how they’d come to clash, but maybe one of them was spying on him when the other one sneaked up on him from behind.

“Serves the bastard right,” the Voice said.

By the time their frantic movements snagged Cole’s attention as he stood on the rooftop, the crazies were already spilling onto the pavement in a tangle of arms and legs and sunlight flashing off their weapons of choice. They didn’t make any sounds whatsoever—or at least, none that he could hear from his perch—but he imagined a lot of grunting and growling until the one wearing a gaudy bright yellow jogging suit rose up, straddled the other, and ended their struggle. Jogging Suit drove something small but very sharp into the neck of the man underneath him, and Cole swore he could see the arc of fresh blood splattering the brick wall of some kind of gift shop nearby.

For about thirty more seconds, Cole watched Jogging Suit plunging his weapon into his victim’s chest, over and over. When he was done—finally—Jogging Suit stumbled to his feet and, like a drunk after a long night of drinking, backpedaled clumsily into the alley until Cole couldn’t see him anymore.

Jogging Suit’s victim—by now, Cole was certain it was the man in the white shirt he’d spotted earlier—lay dead underneath the setting sun, a bright red pool of blood spreading out on the sidewalk around him. The blood was amazingly red, or maybe that was just the sunlight playing tricks with Cole’s eyes.

“Seeing a way to Bear Lake?” a voice asked softly behind him.

“Not yet,” Cole said.

He looked back at Zoe, coming out of the rooftop access shack. She was careful not to let the door slam after her, even though Cole didn’t think it made much of a difference. Any crazies in the area would have already been alerted to their presence since last night. The fact that many of them hadn’t shown themselves yet—besides the two trying to kill each other seconds ago—didn’t mean a damn thing to Cole.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

Zoe pursed a smile. “Better.” She was favoring her left arm, her right dangling loosely at her side. “The girls and Dante are playing Monopoly. They seem to be having fun. Unfortunately, board games were never my speed.” She took a bag of Skittles out of her pocket. “Want some?”

He grabbed a fistful. “Where’d you get these?”

“Dante.”

“Kid’s well-prepared.”

“I don’t want to think about where we’d be if he hadn’t shown up yesterday. He didn’t have to do what he did, you know.”

Cole nodded. “I know.”

“And yet he did it. Do you think we owe him our lives?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m not sure about a lot of things these days.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

She shrugged—though did it mostly with her left shoulder. “For everything, I guess, but mostly for the not knowing about what’s happened to your wife. It must be driving you crazy. I’m lucky; I have Ashley with me. She’s the only thing that matters in my life.” Zoe sighed and peered out at the brightening and quiet city beyond the rooftop. “I can’t even imagine how crazy I’d be going right now if she wasn’t here and I couldn’t be sure if she was okay.”

Cole didn’t say anything. Instead, he popped some of the sugary junk food into his mouth.

“Fiona seems convinced you’d get us to Bear Lake,” Zoe said. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“You lied.”

“No.”

“But you don’t have a clue how to do it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Slow and carefully.”

“So, no.”

“Nope.”

“Can’t you at least lie to me, too? Give me some hope?”

She hadn’t said those words like a woman who needed him to lie to her; more like a grown woman who understood how the world worked, but nevertheless wouldn’t have minded a little white lie every now and then.

“Sure,” Cole said. “We’ll make it.”

“That’s better.”

She was about to say something else when he put one hand up to shush her.

“What is it?” Zoe said, her voice dropping to almost a whisper.

He saw it out of the corner of his eye, and Cole turned now to get a better look. He also moved closer to the edge of the rooftop and looked down, zeroing in on—

A white hoodie, bobbing its way through the throng of vehicles about sixty or so meters up the street. Cole hadn’t seen where the figure had come from, but it was already in the middle of the gridlock traffic when he first noticed it, crouching behind the crumpled back bumper of a black Ford.

“Where the hell did he come from?” the Voice asked.

That’s a good question.

“I know. That’s why I asked it.”

Oh, shut up.

At first, Cole thought the man—and it was a man, he could tell by the shape—was crossing the street and trying to stay hidden as he did so, but that wasn’t it. Instead of going from one side of the sidewalk to the other, the man was venturing up the street.

Then Cole saw it: a parked squad car about twenty meters away from the figure. At the angle the hoodie was moving, it would lead him straight to the law-enforcement vehicle.

“Cole?” Zoe said, stepping closer to him “What is it?”

“Someone’s trying to steal a police car.”

“Why in the world would someone be trying to steal a police car? You can’t drive anything off that street.”

She was right, he thought, as he watched Hoodie vanish inside the cop car, then come right back out moments later with a pump-action shotgun. Sunlight glinted off the long black barrel of the weapon as it slipped out of the open door.

“We could use that,” the Voice said.

Yeah, we could definitely use that…

Another flicker of movement as the crazy in the bright yellow jogging suit reappeared out of another alley down the street and charged through the stalled traffic. Pure adrenaline helped the man to make up twenty meters in almost the blink of an eye.

Damn, he’s fast.

Cole looked back to Hoodie—

The man hadn’t seen the crazy coming at him. Hoodie had no idea there was a crazed killer with a knife charging up the street from behind because he was looking in the wrong direction. Hoodie was slowly moving between cars, maintaining his low profile even as he headed back toward the other sidewalk.

“He doesn’t see him,” Zoe said almost breathlessly. “Cole—”

“Behind you!” Cole shouted as loudly as he could.

Hoodie froze at the sound of Cole’s voice before glancing frantically around him. Then the man turned and spotted Jogging Suit weaving through the abandoned cars.

“Thank God,” Zoe said.

The crazy still seemed to be moving at impossible speeds, making up ground between himself and his would-be victim in the blink of an eye.

Goddamn, he’s fast.

But not fast enough, because there was a loud ear-ringing boom! as the shotgun bucked in Hoodie’s hands. Jogging Suit flew off his feet as he caught the full buckshot load in his chest from less than five meters away. Pieces of buckshot pinged! off a nearby street sign and others pelted a storefront window.

Even before the crazy’s body had settled on the pavement, a second figure appeared out of the alley directly below Cole, which meant the man had been hiding next to the antique shop all this time. That was also where the Grand Caravan was parked.

So what did that mean? Was the minivan toast? How many other crazies were just waiting for them to poke their heads out into the alley?

“Another one,” Zoe said, spotting the second crazy running out from underneath them.

This one was barely a teenager, and he was grunting so loudly as he dashed through traffic toward Hoodie that Cole could hear it from the rooftop without even straining to listen. Something that looked like a sword but could have been a machete of some type swung wildly in the crazy’s hand as he flew across the street, zigzagging around cars.

This time, Hoodie didn’t need Cole to warn him. The man sensed the second attack and spun, racked the shotgun, and fired.

Boom! as chunks of a white sedan’s windshield spiderwebbed against an onslaught of buckshot. But enough of the deadly lead rounds found their target that the teen running alongside the vehicle was knocked off his feet and vanished between two cars.

“What’s he doing now?” Zoe asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Cole said.

He tracked Hoodie as he began moving again. The man didn’t get very far, before halting about ten meters later down the sidewalk. He lifted the shotgun and fired again—boom!—at something in front of him.

Cole followed the trajectory of the shot, just in time to witness a woman in a flowery one-piece dress collapsing between a van and a blue KIA.

Hoodie was racking the shotgun when a fourth figure—another woman, this one in jeans and black T-shirt—appeared out of nowhere and leaped onto the hood of a Chevy. The woman was catapulting herself into the air when there was another loud boom! and she seemed to fall out of midair as if she’d slammed into an invisible barrier.

Damn, he’s actually going to make it, Cole thought, watching Hoodie as the man ran up the sidewalk toward a store called Junior’s. Like the antique shop, Junior’s had burglar bars over its front windows and a gate over its front door.

Hoodie grabbed the gate and pulled it, but it wouldn’t budge.

Locked!

“Oh no,” Zoe said.

“Oh no is right,” the Voice said.

He’ll make it, Cole thought.

“What makes you so sure?”

He’ll make it…

“Wishful thinking?”

Cole didn’t answer. Instead, he watched as two more figures appeared down the street—one slightly ahead of the other. Both were racing toward Junior’s, though Cole wasn’t sure if the one in the back was chasing the crazy in front of him or not. But he had to be, didn’t he? Because the crazies didn’t cooperate. They simply killed, even if it was each other.

The one in front was a bald man in his late fifties, holding some kind of metal object, while the one behind him, ironically enough, had long hair that streamed wildly behind him. Cole couldn’t quite make out what Long Hair, wearing some kind of cargo shorts, was armed with.

Hoodie saw them coming and lifted his shotgun to fire, but before he could, Long Hair dove forward and caught Baldy’s legs with his hands. The two of them went flying, then crashing into a garbage can on the sidewalk. Both men went rolling on the concrete pavement not more than ten feet from Hoodie, their limbs tangled and flashing metal glinting in the sunlight.

Hoodie, showing amazing composure, ignored the two fighting crazies within a stone’s throw from him. The man took a quick step back from Junior’s front gate and fired a blast from the shotgun. The gate swung open.

Boom! as Hoodie “opened” the door with another shot, before lunging inside.

On the sidewalk, Long Hair was plunging a pair of scissors into Baldy’s face. The older crazy attempted to fight back, but to no avail. It was very much a one-sided battle. After another half-dozen stabs, Baldy finally went still, fresh blood pooling underneath him.

Long Hair stood up, chest heaving, fresh blood covering the front of his clothes and dripping from his face. He spun around like some animal in heat, before remembering where Hoodie had gone. He ran to Junior’s and pushed at the door, but nothing happened.

“How did he lock the door?” Zoe asked.

“He probably has something against it on the other side,” Cole said.

They watched Long Hair ramming his shoulder into the door, not that it did any good. Which meant Hoodie had found something to block the door with. Cole just hoped for the man’s sake that that “something” was big and strong enough, because—

A large, lumbering figure in well-worn gray work coveralls appeared, wielding something in one hand that was so large it could probably take a man’s head off with one swing. He had come out of nowhere like the others, but was making plenty of noise as he rumbled up the street toward Junior’s. Cole caught the glimpse of the letter G on the man’s left breast—some kind of name tag or maybe a company, but he was moving too fast for Cole to read the rest of the letters.

“Jesus Christ, look at the size of him!” the Voice said.

Yeah, it was a big one, all right. Gargantuan, even.

Long Hair saw how big the crazy was, too, and gave up on breaking down Junior’s door and fled up the sidewalk.

“Crazy, but definitely not stupid,” the Voice said.

Definitely not stupid, Cole thought.

Cole watched Long Hair for as long as he could before the man vanished out of his line of vision. The large man in coveralls followed, disappearing in the same manner.

Then, just like that, the city went dead silent around him.

“He made it,” Zoe said. “I can’t believe he made it.”

“Me, too,” Cole said, staring at Junior’s and wondering if Hoodie was very, very brave or very, very stupid.

There was a huge distinction between the two. Cole could use someone who was very, very brave, but he didn’t have much use for someone who was very, very stupid.

Now all he had to do was find out which one Hoodie was.

Chapter 24

A pained and eerily extended anguished scream, followed by the familiar pop of a single gunshot, came from somewhere down the street. The gunshot echoed for a bit before fading, fading…then gone.

And just like that, the city was dead again.

Cole had never hated silence as much as he did now, crouched on the first floor of the antique shop, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a plan to form that would save everyone, but most of all, himself. Because he had to go home. He had to get to Emily. That was all that mattered.

Emily and the baby.

“Leave them,” the Voice said. “Leave the girls and cripple and go home. You can do it. Alone, you can do it.”

I can’t.

“Stop saying that.”

It’s true.

“It’s not. You don’t owe them anything.”

I do.

“What? What do you owe them?”

Humanity.

“What happened? Did you suddenly get stupid all of a sudden?”

No.

“Then what?”

I’m not the man I once was.

“Bullshit.”

It’s true.

“Is it?”

Yes.

“Are you sure?”

Yes.

“Are you sure?”

He didn’t answer quite as quickly the second time.

Yes, he finally thought.

The Voice laughed because it didn’t believe him.

Cole pushed the Voice’s laughter into the background where it belonged. Where it’d been living since he retired to a life of suits and drivers and offices and home renovations. This was his life now. It was a life that the Voice didn’t belong in. The Voice was a product of war. Of violence. Of death.

“I’m what you need me to be,” it said.

You’re my past.

“I’m your present.”

No.

“You can lie to others, but not to me. Not to yourself.”

Maybe the Voice was right.

And maybe it was wrong.

Maybe.

So many maybes.

Cole took out his cell phone and stared at it. He’d lost count how many times he’d looked at it, hoping for some kind of reception. One bar. Two bars. Anything.

But there was nothing.

There was not a goddamn thing.

He didn’t know what was worse—the not knowing what was happening with Emily or the wanting to believe she was fine and had to deal with this all alone. Because he wasn’t there.

No, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t all alone. She was carrying their child.

His child.

“Leave them,” the Voice said.

What?

“The others.”

We already went over this. I can’t.

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

There’s no difference.

“Yes, there is. Emily needs you. Go to her.”

That’s what I’m doing.

“They’re slowing you down. The woman and her kid, and the cripple. Even the girl. They’re only going to slow you down further. Emily needs you. Now. She doesn’t need you playing protector to a bunch of civvies. You know I’m right.”

You’re wrong.

“I’m right.”

No.

“Do you deny that they’re slowing you down?”

They haven’t so far.

“Are you sure about that?”

Yes.

“Are you sure about that?”

It took him a few seconds to answer.

Finally, he thought, Yes. I’m sure about that.

“You don’t sound very convinced,” the Voice said.

I am.

“Are you trying to convince yourself or me?”

You are me.

“And I know the truth. I know what you’re really thinking.”

No, you don’t. You never did. You only knew what you needed to know, to keep me alive. That’s your job. That’s always only been your job.

“Hmm, sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself again.”

Yeah, well, you can shut the fuck—

He took a quick, almost reflexive step away from the window.

Some kind of light flashing from across the street, striking him in the eye. A blinding brightness, almost as if it was directed at him and not something incidental, such as the sun reflecting off one of the many seas of chrome in the streets.

He took refuge behind the shop’s front wall and peered out one of the second-floor windows, hunting for the source but unable to locate it.

Dead cars.

A dead street.

Everything dead—

There.

It looked like a flashlight, and while not amazingly bright, had just enough juice to pierce through the morning sun and catch his attention. It probably helped that it was being purposefully pointed at him.

…pointed at him…

Junior’s. The light was coming from Junior’s, the same store that Hoodie had vanished into not more than an hour ago. And it was definitely a flashlight, which was the only reason it could blink on and off, on and off.

Cole moved back to the window, to let Hoodie know that he’d gotten the “message.” The man could clearly see him, which was why he’d started the blinking signal in the first place—to get Cole’s attention.

“Hello, Mr. Hoodie,” the Voice said. “This guy must have a death wish. Reminds me of someone…”

Oh, shut up.

The Voice laughed just as the flashlight turned off for about five seconds.

Then it started up again.

At first Cole thought he was looking at an attempt at Morse code communications, but no, it was just random. Hoodie was just trying to get his attention.

“Well, he’s got it now,” the Voice said. “Now what?”

Good question.

“Ask him.”

Cole was wondering how to do just that when he caught a glimpse of a figure in a black T-shirt leaning out from an alley farther up the street, about two buildings from Junior’s. Cole could barely make out a dark face as the man looked up, then down the street. He turned and stared at the antique shop’s windows, likely trying to track the direction of the flashlight.

Cole and the crazy locked eyes, and Cole thought the man might have grinned at him.

“He’s waiting for you,” the Voice said. “Say hi.”

Fuck him.

“Now that’s just rude.”

Fuck you, too.

The crazy stared at Cole for a few seconds before he backtracked…and disappeared into the alley. He took with him something that looked like a machete, clutching it in one hand.

Cole stared at the mouth of the alley, trying to guess how many more were hiding around him right now, waiting for him to show himself so they could pounce. Maybe they were even in the next building over, like the teen had been. How many were all over the minivan in the alley at this very second?

He looked back toward Junior’s, but Mr. Hoodie had gone dark in the meantime. The flashlight had disappeared from the window, and there were no signs of anyone on the other side of the furniture store.

Movement, as a large figure rumbled across the street, appearing from somewhere underneath Cole’s window and making a beeline for a very specific alley on the other side.

“Now where did he come from?” the Voice asked.

Good question.

“I know. That’s my job.”

Better question: Where is he going?

“Dark Face.”

Ah.

“Let them kill each other. One less crazy for us to deal with. And we’re going to need all the advantage we can get, since you won’t do the obvious thing.”

What obvious thing?

“You know damn well what obvious thing.”

Cole didn’t respond.

“Ditch them,” the Voice said. “You know it’s the right call. It’s the only call.”

Cole kept quiet.

“Hoodie is a better option than the cripple and the women.”

Shut up.

“Why?”

Just shut up.

“This is what I’m here for.”

Shut up. I’m concentrating.

Cole focused on what was happening outside the shop. Apparently, he hadn’t been the only one who’d spied the man with the dark face. This crazy had, too. It was, Cole realized, the same large man from earlier. The one that had bashed in the crazy with the white shirt, who still lay underneath the sun now, his face pulverized into putty.

Cole watched the massive figure weave his way around the stalled cars, incredibly agile—not to mention fast—for someone of his generous girth. He hopped up the sidewalk, then disappeared into the same alley that Dark Face had gone earlier.

He waited to hear sounds of fighting, but there were none. Dark Face must have seen the big man coming and taken off. Not that it would have been hard to spot Gargantuan’s approach—

The flashlight had reappeared inside Junior’s, and this time it was accompanied by something else:

Seven pieces of white paper, each one with a giant, bolded capital letter written on them, had been taped to the window.

Cole grinned.

The letters, flattened against the storefront window, spelled out rooftop.

Chapter 25

Hoodie was standing near the edge of Junior’s rooftop, looking slightly down and across the street toward the antique shop. Because both buildings were two stories, they had an almost equal line of sight, and it was easy for Cole to spot the man when he appeared out of the rooftop shack and, he assumed, vice versa.

There was enough of a distance between them that Cole couldn’t make out the man’s face clearly. It didn’t help that the guy was still wearing his hoodie, like he was afraid Cole might be able to see all of him. Cole mirrored the man’s position at the edge of his own rooftop when he lifted his hand in a Hey gesture.

Hoodie responded with his own “Hey.”

They weren’t the only two people on alert in the area. Gargantuan—Cole’s nickname for the big man with the metal pole—was across the street, standing on the sidewalk as if he owned the place and didn’t give a damn who knew it. The man was focused on Cole, almost as if he wanted Cole to know he’d been spotted.

Oh, who was he kidding? That was exactly what Gargantuan was trying to do.

He wasn’t the only crazy out there, either.

A second man leaned out from the mouth of an alley six buildings up the street, while a third figure in a black baseball cap poked his head occasionally out of a Wendy’s. Both crazies could see Gargantuan—it was impossible not to—but neither man attacked. They were either cautious—

No, that was exactly it. The two crazies—and however many others were out there right now—recognized an alpha predator when they saw one. Gargantuan was just that. The man had to be well over six-five, with a neck that was bigger than both of Cole’s thighs put together. He gripped the bloodied metal pole—it had, Cole saw, a fresh coat of red on it that hadn’t been there earlier—as if it were a lollipop. He could have been holding two of them in the same fist and still fit in a third and possibly fourth.

Cole stared down at the man’s hardened, tanned face. Gargantuan sported a salt and pepper mustache, his one-piece work outfit splattered with blood and dirt and God only knew what else. (“Brains, maybe,” the Voice said.) Cole still couldn’t make out the name tag, but he was sure the first letter was a G, which was probably why Cole ended up calling him Gargantuan. It was apropos.

After about ten seconds of locking eyes, Gargantuan turned and walked slowly—almost leisurely—into the mouth of a waiting alley.

“See you next time, asshole,” Cole said softly, mostly to himself.

“You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean,” the Voice said. “He might take you up on that.”

Cole ignored the Voice’s mocking tone and looked for the other visible crazies—the one six buildings down and Mr. Wendy’s—but they’d also vanished.

“Hey!” Hoodie shouted at him from across the street. “Can you hear me?”

Cole focused on the man. “Yeah!” he shouted back. “You took a big risk earlier!”

“It was worth it!”

“You sure about that?”

Hoodie bent down and picked up the pump-action shotgun from the rooftop floor. “Yes, sir!”

“Can’t exactly disagree with that,” the Voice said. “What wouldn’t we do for a shotgun?”

“You safe over there?” Hoodie shouted.

“Safe enough, I guess! You got a name?”

“Barry! You?”

“Cole!”

“You don’t happen to have any food over there, do you, Cole?”

“I got Lunchables!”

Barry might have laughed, though it was hard to tell with the distance. “How far can you throw?”

Cole grinned. “Not very far! Sorry!”

“Yeah, me too!”

“You have water?”

“Kind of!”

“How’s that?”

“Toilet water!”

Click as the rooftop access door opened behind Cole and he glanced back at Zoe as she leaned out and looked around.

“I heard shouting,” she said.

“Hoodie,” Cole said.

“‘Hoodie?’”

“The man from this morning.” Cole pointed. “His name’s Barry. He’s got water—well, sort of—but no food.”

“And a shotgun.”

“And that, too.”

She walked over to where Cole stood and waved with her one good hand.

Barry, aka Hoodie, returned it.

Zoe looked over at Cole and grinned. “You want that shotgun, don’t you?”

Cole smiled. “I won’t lie. I’d like to have it, yeah.”

“Maybe if you ask nicely, he might trade it for your handgun.”

“I’d rather have him with us instead. Two guns are better than one.”

Zoe stepped closer to the edge and glanced down, then around. “They’re down there, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“I saw three before, including the big one. Gargantuan.”

“Gargantuan?”

“That’s what I call him.”

Zoe leaned back, then took an unnecessary step away from the edge. She looked across the street at Barry, shielding her eyes against the sun. “So now what? We’re over here, and he’s stuck over there. Unless he can fly.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t see a big S on his chest.”

A scream pierced the air, coming from one of the nearby alleys. It lasted too short for Cole to locate the exact origin, but Barry apparently had a better idea and was racing across his rooftop to the other side to get a better look, disappearing from their view.

About thirty seconds later, the man walked back to where Cole and Zoe could see him again.

“What happened?” Cole shouted across the street.

“Can’t see shit!” Barry shouted back. “They’re all over the place. Like cockroaches!”

Barry had just gotten out cockroaches when Cole caught a flurry of movement behind him, coming from the rooftop access shack.

“Oh, no…” Zoe said breathlessly. “How…?”

“Behind you!” Cole shouted.

Barry spun around, lifting the shotgun, just as a man in a butcher’s plastic apron, the morning sun gleaming against his balding head, raced across the gravel rooftop with a meat cleaver in his right fist.

Boom! as Barry fired and the butcher’s entire right arm detached from its body, the meat cleaver flipping through the air.

The man twisted against the impact, slowing down for just a brief half-second, but didn’t stop.

Christ, do they even still feel pain? Cole thought as he watched the man continue charging at Barry like a raging bull.

Barry was racking the shotgun when the butcher crashed into him and the two bodies went over the edge and down to the sidewalk below.

“There goes the shotgun,” the Voice said.

Or maybe not, Cole thought, because somehow between the roof and the street, Barry managed to reverse his position and landed on top of the butcher, whose melon-sized head exploded on impact against the concrete sidewalk.

Blood, bones, and flesh splashed the immediate area, along with the crack! of the shotgun splintering as it fell a few feet away from Barry’s grasp.

“The shotgun,” Zoe said.

“Yeah, that shotgun,” the Voice said. “We could have used that shotgun.”

Yes, we could have, Cole thought. We could have used a man who knew and was willing to use it even more.

“Get up,” Zoe was saying next to him. She was surprisingly restrained, almost whispering. But that didn’t last, because she shouted the next two words as loud as she could: “Get up!”

Cole was unable to look away, caught somewhere between desperately wanting to help Barry and knowing that the only way to accomplish that would be to run out into the open and make himself a target, too. Because that was what it would take.

But he couldn’t do that.

He had to get home.

He had to get to Emily.

Sorry, Barry, Cole thought as the man staggered up from the sidewalk, stumbling away from what remained of the headless butcher. It really didn’t look as if there was much still there; as if a watermelon had gone splat and all that was left were the insides—red flesh and black seeds. Except, of course, Cole knew that those weren’t “seeds.”

Barry was clearly woozy on his feet and having trouble gathering himself. Cole watched as the man grabbed one of the iron bars fastened over Junior’s windows in order to steady himself.

“Get inside!” Zoe was shouting. “Why is he just standing there?”

“He’s not,” Cole said. “He’s concussed.”

“Get inside, get inside,” Zoe said anyway, like she was reciting a chant, her words getting even louder. “Get the hell inside!”

Cole didn’t bother joining her plea. It wasn’t going to help. Barry wasn’t going to hear them; and even if he did, he wouldn’t understand what they were saying. He’d managed to survive the fall from the rooftop, but the impact hadn’t been kind. Barry was definitely showing signs of a concussion, and it was throwing him off. It was throwing everything off for the guy.

“He’s a goner,” the Voice said.

Cole agreed, but he didn’t say it out loud.

“Inside,” Zoe was saying. “Please, get inside,” she added, much softer that time. Maybe because, like Cole, she knew it was hopeless.

Barry was shaking his head like someone trying to fight off grogginess, but of course it was more than that. He was trying to figure out what had just happened and having difficulty. Without the hoodie obscuring his face, Cole could make out a big mustache and pale skin. Barry looked Hispanic, which probably explained the accent Cole had noticed earlier.

“He should be moving,” Zoe said. “Why isn’t he moving?”

“He’s doing his best,” Cole said.

“He should be moving,” she repeated, as if he hadn’t said anything.

A flurry of motion as something raced out of an alley two buildings down from the furniture store.

Gargantuan.

“Oh God,” Zoe gasped.

“He’s fucked,” the Voice said.

The massive crazy was swinging the large metal rod, the blood-caked surface glinting against the sun as he raced up the sidewalk. A man his size shouldn’t have been able to move that fast, but he was.

Somehow, he was.

It’s the adrenaline, Cole thought. The thing that turns them into killing machines. It’s driving him. It’s making him faster than he should be.

For a split second Cole reached for the Glock in his waistband, but then he calculated the distance—and the angle—and didn’t pull the pistol out. He had limited ammo, and there were no guarantees he’d hit his target. At least not the way the man was running up that sidewalk, because goddamn, he was fast.

Cole just watched instead, even as Zoe shouted, “Watch out! Oh God, watch out!”

Barry may or may not have heard her, but he turned anyway and saw what was coming at him. For a few seconds, time seemed to stand still as Barry stared, as if unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Maybe the sight of the crazy charging with the rod in his hand just seemed so out of place, so…impossible somehow, that Barry couldn’t get his head around it.

Gargantuan ran right past the lost shotgun Barry had dropped, not even giving it a second glance. Because he didn’t care. The metal in his hand was all the weapon he needed. It was all the weapon he wanted.

The talk with Dante, about how the crazies didn’t use guns, echoed in Cole’s head. Not that it meant anything at the moment. Certainly, it didn’t mean a damn thing to Barry.

Barry finally—finally!—snapped out of his stupor. The man turned, pushing away from the window, and lunged for the furniture store’s entrance nearby. He grabbed Junior’s doorknob and tried to wrestle it open, but it wouldn’t budge.

Of course it didn’t budge. Because the same thing Barry had used to keep the crazies out earlier was now keeping him out.

“Irony,” the Voice said.

Tragic is more like it.

“Same difference.”

No, it wasn’t. But instead of wasting his inner monologue answering himself, Cole wondered how the hell the butcher got into Junior’s and snuck up behind Barry in the first place? There had to be another way in. A back door, maybe. So if Barry could find it—

Cole grabbed Zoe while she was staring helpless down the street and turned her all the way around just as Gargantuan reached Barry and sunlight flicked off the moving steel pole as it swung with wild abandon through the air.

A very loud thwack! reverberated up and down the entire block and rang inside Cole’s ears even as Zoe sobbed uncontrollably in his arms.

“Don’t look,” Cole whispered, even as he thought, I should have tried to save him. I should have used the gun.

“You did the right thing,” the Voice said. “Getting to Emily is all that matters. And saving as many bullets as you can will help you accomplish that.”

But I could have saved him.

“Could you?”

Maybe...

“Maybe is a long way from yes.”

“Cole,” Zoe whispered.

“Don’t look,” Cole said. “Just…don’t look.”

Even as he kept her from looking, Cole heard the thwack! as Gargantuan swung with the pole a second time. Barry was already dead. Barry had to have already been dead, so why was he still swinging? Why—

Thwack!

Goddamn you, Cole thought.

Thwack!

Thwack…!

Chapter 26

They had enough food and water to last for at least a couple of weeks if they conserved as much as possible, but that wasn’t the plan. Cole had no intentions of lasting that long—at least, not stuck in an antique shop while Gargantuan and however many crazies lurked outside waiting for them to surface.

He had places to go, and people to see.

And he would accomplish both of those things even if he had to kill every crazy currently circling their position. The trick, of course, was to do that and stay alive himself.

“That’s always the trick, isn’t it?” the Voice said.

You’re damn right.

“So why don’t you listen to me more?”

I am.

“No, you’re not. If you did, we wouldn’t be stuck with three women and a cripple right now. We would be home, with Emily.”

You don’t know that.

“And you don’t not know that.”

Cole shook his head. There was no point in arguing with himself. The Voice had a bad habit of spinning everything to make Cole doubt his decisions.

“I’m the reason you’re still alive to even doubt yourself,” the Voice said.

Maybe.

“There’s no maybe about it.”

Maybe, Cole thought again and managed to silence the Voice’s nagging.

At least, for a while. But a while, for now, was good enough.

After the incident with Barry (“We could have really used that shotgun,” the Voice said.), Cole had Dante keep an eye on the streets from one of the second-floor bedroom windows. The kid was used to staring outside while sitting in his wheelchair and had proven to possess a sharp eye. Fiona, meanwhile, continued looking for supplies in the two floors, but by now she had pretty much exhausted every nook and cranny.

An hour after watching Barry get his head obliterated by Gargantuan (Cole wasn’t able to keep Zoe completely from seeing the aftermath, though he’d spared her most of the as it happened part), Cole found Zoe crying in the bathroom down the hallway. She was supposed to have gone to check on her wound, but he knew better.

She tried to wipe away the tears when Cole knocked on the door and, before she could tell him to come in, peeked inside.

“You okay?” he asked.

She flashed him a pursed smile. It wasn’t even close to being convincing. “Why? Don’t I look okay?”

“Not really.”

“Well, you’re wrong, because I’m just fine and dandy, like you and Dante.”

He stepped inside and closed the door. There was a small window on the other end of the room, providing enough light for him to see how pale she looked. Her eyes were puffy, the result of crying since, if he had to guess, she came in almost twenty minutes ago.

“Fine and dandy, huh?” Cole said.

Zoe picked up a small face towel and dabbed at her cheeks. “Maybe not quite so fine or so dandy.”

“It’s okay, you know.”

“What is?”

“To feel the way you’re feeling.”

“And what’s that? What am I supposed to be feeling right now?”

“A dark feeling that comes with having been witness to another human being getting murdered before your eyes.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah, that.”

She put the rag down and looked over. “You’ve seen it before. I could tell. Not just something like that, but worse things.”

He leaned against the counter. He wasn’t sure if this was what he’d come in here to talk about, but he was here now, and so was she. There were plenty of ways around the topic—and he’d used pretty much all of them since he “retired” and found himself in the company of “civilized people,” as Emily called them—but it didn’t seem appropriate here. At least, not if he wanted to keep counting on Zoe.

“You really think you can count on her?” the Voice asked.

Yes, I think so.

“You should reconsider.”

Why?

“She cares about her kid. That’s all. If it means leaving you behind to save the kid, she’ll do it.”

Maybe, Cole thought as he locked eyes with Zoe.

“It’s not an easy thing, you know, the last couple days,” he said. “But I think you already know that. It’s not easy for me, either. This…whatever this is—it’s unheard of. We’re in uncharted waters here. There are men and women outside this building waiting for us to poke our heads out so they can take them off at the shoulders. And for what reason?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone will know. Or care. At least, not in the next few days or weeks or months. If there are survivors out there like us, that’s exactly what they will be focusing on—staying alive. They won’t care about the hows or whys or whens. It’s about survival. And that’s why I need you to keep it together.”

“Me?” Zoe said. The surprise on her face and in her voice was obvious. “Why me?”

“I need someone I can count on. That’s you.”

“But why me? Why not Fiona? Or Dante?”

“For one, Dante’s in a wheelchair. And Fiona…” Cole paused for a minute, before continuing. “She’s done well so far, but you’ve been doing well for the last two days. I can count on you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so sure.”

“She’s got a point,” the Voice said.

Cole said anyway, “I am,” even though he didn’t fully believe it.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” the Voice laughed.

But he had to say it out loud for Zoe to hear, because he did need her. Not to help him fight crazies if they had to, but to keep the others in line. Her daughter, Fiona, and Dante. He needed someone he could count on, and Zoe had been that since all of this began. He’d committed himself, for better or worse, to these people (“Definitely worse,” the Voice snickered.), and he couldn’t just abandon them now.

He needed Zoe, but she also needed her confidence back. If not entirely, then enough for her to stay functional. To stay dependable. Even if he didn’t think it’d last for very long. All it had to do was last just long enough.

“Don’t tell her that,” the Voice said, still laughing.

No, I definitely won’t.

He said instead, “I need you to keep it together. Help me with the others. We’re going to have our hands full getting to Bear Lake, but we can make it.”

“You really think so?” she asked. She was looking at him with that hopeful gaze he’d seen on Fiona earlier. It was almost desperation.

“Yes,” Cole said. “We’ll get there. But I need every hand on deck to make that happen. That means I need you.”

Zoe nodded. He wasn’t sure if she fully believed him, but there was just enough conviction to make him think he could count on her when the chips were down. At least, until she either had to choose between him, Dante, and Fiona, and her own daughter. When that time came, he was pretty sure he knew her decision.

“And you still think you can trust her?” the Voice asked.

No, but I don’t have any choice right now.

“You did, but you blew it.”

Yeah, yeah, Cole thought, and just barely managed to suppress a regretful sigh in front of Zoe.

“Okay,” Zoe said.

“Okay?”

“Okay. You can count on me.”

“I know I can. Now, how’s the shoulder?”

“It hurts like the dickens.”

Cole smiled. “Good thing for you Dante’s aunt had plenty of codeine.”

* * *

“Where are they?” Cole asked, leaning against the wall next to the window across from Dante, who had been camped in front of it for a while now.

“Around. Everywhere,” Dante said.

Dante held up a notepad; the kid had drawn a rough outline of the street and buildings outside, and there were multiple X’s on it. Cole thought that was cute. He hadn’t taken Dante for a notepad sort of kid. Wasn’t that for old people who didn’t know how to use smartphones?

“That’s where I’ve spotted them in the last few hours,” the kid continued. “They come and go, depending on where the others are at any given moment. So, not exactly reliable, but you get the gist.”

“How many did you see?”

“Counting the one you call Gargantuan? About ten. Pretty sure there’s more. But ten is the number I can swear in court to. The others are just better at staying hidden.”

“And the ones you could identify; they never stay at one same place for long?”

“Nope. I think Gargantuan is hunting them, so the others have to constantly move around to keep from being picked off by him or another crazy.” He seemed to think of something, before adding, “I wonder why they don’t just team up against him?”

“That would require cooperation,” Cole said. “I haven’t seen anything that would indicate they’re capable of something like that. Not that they’re stupid, by any means. If anything, they seem to be very intelligent. But cooperation requires trust. And I think that’s one of the very first things that disappeared when they were infected. From what I can tell, they’re lone wolves. Singular threats. The good news is—”

“There is good news?” Dante said, grinning.

“The good news is, they’re just as dangerous to each other as they are to us.”

“I can dig that.”

Cole picked up movement along Junior’s, but it was gone before he could identify who had created it. It couldn’t have been Gargantuan, since it was next to impossible to miss the man’s hulking figure. He was fast, but he wasn’t that fast.

“You think it’s possible they might kill each other off for us?” Dante asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Hopefully?”

“That, too. You come up with any new theories with how this thing got started?”

Dante shook his head. “Not really. Been too busy trying not to get dead.”

Cole chuckled. “Good point.”

“Maybe if I had some free time, I could jot down some theories. But for now…” He shrugged. “I don’t think it matters much, do you?”

“No, not really.”

“We just gotta survive the day. Then the one after that. Then the one after… You get the idea.”

“Yeah,” Cole said, looking out the window at the sun-drenched streets. “Just survive.”

“Just survive,” Dante said. Then, reaching into the backpack slung over his wheelchair, he pulled out another box of Lunchables. “Hungry?”

“How many of those things do you have, anyway?”

“You don’t wanna know, so better get ’em before they run out.”

As Cole accepted his box of Lunchables, he wondered what would come first: running out of the pre-packaged meals or everyone getting sick of eating them.

“Or everyone gets dead first,” the Voice chimed in.

Cole ignored the Voice and pulled open his lunch, looking outside again. The cars were still, the streets just as empty as this morning. Nothing seemed to have moved at all, not even Barry’s body, which lay where it had fallen. There wasn’t anything resembling a head anymore, though.

“What do they eat?” Dante asked him as he pulled out another box for himself.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how do they survive?”

“I guess the way we do. Eating and drinking whatever they can find. They’re free to roam out there—for the most part—while we have to make do with what we can scavenge in wherever we end up. Truth is, the risk of being murdered by each other notwithstanding, they probably have it easier when it comes to staying fed. Staying alive, that’s another matter.”

“Crazy,” Dante said.

“And then some.”

Dante pulled open his Lunchables. “So. You figured out how to get us to Bear Lake without everyone dying yet?”

Cole sighed. “I’m working on it.”

* * *

Cole returned to the rooftop and walked over to the edge. The crazies already knew where he and the others were, so he didn’t feel like creeping around. Especially Gargantuan, whom Cole knew was still out there. The glass-half-full part of him wanted to think the crazy would abandon the area and go look for easier prey elsewhere, but the rest of him—the one occupied by the Voice—knew better.

There were plenty of prey here. Not just them, but the other crazies lying in wait. It was almost as if, by sticking around, Gargantuan was simultaneously waiting for him and the others to do something stupid, while slowly picking off the competition.

Either way, he was winning.

The fucker was winning.

“And we’re losing,” the Voice said. “But we can fix that. You know how we can fix that, don’t you?”

Cole didn’t answer.

“Oh, you know. Admit it.”

He didn’t. He refused to.

“Refusing doesn’t make it go away. Or untrue.”

Maybe, but he wouldn’t give the Voice the benefit of the doubt by responding.

The Voice laughed. “You don’t have to. I already know what you’re thinking. I’m you, remember?”

Cole pushed the Voice’s laughter aside and focused on Barry’s remains on the sidewalk, about twenty yards from Junior’s front door. There was just a bloody pool of blood and clumps of flesh and bone where his head used to be. Cole looked up the sidewalk and settled on the shotgun that Barry had dropped when he fell. It lay where he’d last seen it, between the entrances of some kind of travel agency and a bagel shop called Wally’s.

There it was. A police pump-action shotgun. Even if Cole couldn’t find more ammo for it, there had to be a few left in the pipe. Two or three. Or more.

Or less.

But maybe more.

…or less.

“Or none,” the Voice said.

Or none.

Not that it mattered anyway, because Cole couldn’t get to the weapon. Not in a million years. Not unless he felt like taking on Gargantuan and however many crazies were still waiting to strike.

Two? Five? A dozen?

Dante had seen at least ten that he could visually confirm, but he was pretty sure there were more out there. Cole agreed with the kid. And yet, it was so quiet that he could hear a pin drop. Right now, the soft, almost comforting sound of the wind whistling through the open car doors and buildings was the only thing that seemed to exist in the entire universe.

Wait. What just happened?

The wind. It had taken on a strange pattern.

What…?

Instead of whistling as it had been seconds ago—and minutes earlier before that—the sound of the wind had become choppy, and taken on an almost…whup-whup-whup sound.

Cole knew of one thing that could make a noise like that. He’d heard it often during his pre-retirement days. He’d heard it in the desert and in the jungles and in the city streets of Africa and the Middle East. He’d heard—

Whup-whup-whup!

He glanced up and across the skyline.

“No fucking way.”

From a distance, it almost looked like a bird of some kind, but birds didn’t make mechanical noises that went whup-whup-whup. Cole had no doubts that he might not have even been able to hear it coming if the city—and maybe the whole damn world—wasn’t so dead silent at the moment. Cole had seen enough of the machines to know what it was even if it was just a black dot in the sky at present.

He stood up and shielded his eyes against the sun and stared at the craft as it turned away from the highway…and began heading in his direction. It was blue in the back and white up front, and the large, bulbous camera hanging underneath became more obvious as it neared his position and grew larger, transforming from a bird-like dot into a flying machine.

A helicopter.

It was a goddamn helicopter, and it was possibly the most beautiful thing Cole had ever seen in his life.

Chapter 27

“Bolton,” the man said, sticking out a beefy hand that easily dwarfed Cole’s, for a handshake. “Thought I was the last non-crazy on earth.”

“You call them crazy, too?” Cole asked.

“Seemed like the appropriate description, what with the bloodshot eyes and all.”

“I agree.”

“You know what’s going on out there?”

“No. Do you?”

“Not a clue.”

“Join the party, then.”

“Swell,” Bolton said.

The man looked every bit like how a chopper pilot should look if you were to cook one up in a lab somewhere. Fifties and around six-three, and while he didn’t completely tower over Cole, his lanky frame made him appear taller. He had a thick beard and the kind of lined face that came with a lot of living. His hand was rough, just as Cole had expected from a man with Bolton’s grizzled looks.

“Gotta say, I’m glad to see you,” Cole said.

“Me or my bird?”

“Both.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Bolton said. He grinned anyway. “Thought the entire city was gone, nothing left by those crazies running around down there.”

“Just about. You see some bad things out there?”

“What else is there?”

“True.”

“A few close calls, but thank God they can’t fly, or I’d really be screwed. At least, they can’t fly yet, as far as I know.”

“Not as far as I know, too.” Then, glancing over at Bolton’s chopper, “Channel 7?”

“Yup.”

“Good newscasts.”

“I wouldn’t know. Been a chopper pilot for them since I left the Army twenty years ago. Couldn’t care less how good or bad their news is, long as the paycheck clears every month.” He looked around the rooftop. “You alone?”

“Not quite,” Cole said.

As if on cue, the rooftop access door opened, and Zoe and Fiona hurried outside. Cole imagined Dante wanting to join them but was stuck downstairs because of his chair. Ashley was also missing, so she was probably keeping him company.

The two women’s eyes widened at the sight of the helicopter squatting like a giant metal bird on the roof between them and the men. Cole hadn’t been sure the rooftop would hold the chopper’s weight, but Bolton had apparently landed enough times on rooftops that he hadn’t been hesitant to bring his aircraft down. Cole figured if the man knew what he was doing… Of course, the image of the civilian helicopter crashing into the building and through the second floor, then on top of Dante, who would be directly below them, had given him some pause.

But Bolton had seemed pretty damn sure of it, because he hadn’t slowed down even a little bit as he hovered for a perfect spot, then started coming down. Everything had gone according to plan, after all.

“Crazy motherfucker,” the Voice had said when Bolton climbed out of the cockpit.

Cole couldn’t disagree with that. Bolton even looked like one crazy motherfucker. Then again, maybe that was exactly what Cole needed right now: A crazy motherfucker to get him to Bear Lake and Emily.

The chopper was a civilian Bell 429, an aircraft Cole was familiar with. He’d had one at RistWorks and used it regularly, either when he didn’t feel like braving the traffic in Donnie’s company or he needed to be somewhere faster than a car could carry him. It was pricey, but more than worth every cent, especially when he had to impress a potential client. Cole wasn’t sure what a news channel was doing using one, but he didn’t really care, either.

“Oh, my God,” Zoe was saying as she circled the helicopter. “I must be dreaming.”

“This is amazing!” Fiona said.

“That’s Zoe and Fiona,” Cole said. “Guys, this is Bolton. Chopper pilot for Channel 7 News.”

“I love Channel 7,” Fiona said as she hurried over.

Bolton stuck out his hand for a hearty shake, but the woman instead jumped into his arms. The older man was momentarily taken aback but quickly recovered and hugged her back.

Zoe and Cole exchanged an amused grin.

“She’s happy to see you,” Cole said to Bolton. “We all are.”

“Glad to be wanted,” Bolton said, barely able to contain his smile as Fiona pried herself off him, looking just a little embarrassed. But not too much, Cole saw.

Zoe looked back at the helicopter. “Is that, uh, going to be fine?”

“You afraid it’ll fall through the roof?” Bolton said with just a slightly mischievous grin.

“Something like that, yes.”

“It should be fine, as long as the building was built to code.”

“Should be fine?” the Voice said. “That’s not quite the vote of overconfidence I was looking for.”

Me neither, Cole thought, but he said to Bolton, “What did you see out there?”

“Not a whole lot,” Bolton said. “I’ve been looking for survivors since all of this began.”

“We’re the first ones you’ve run across?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I was about to give up hope and head out of town until I spotted you standing up here. At first I wasn’t sure if you were one of them or not, so I had to get closer to check you out.” Bolton pointed to his own eyes. “Know what I mean?”

“Bloody eyes,” Fiona said.

“Exactly, little lady.”

“You’re with the news,” Zoe said. “Do you know what’s happening out there? In the rest of the state? Or even the country?”

Bolton shook his head. “A little, and it’s not good.”

“How not good?” Fiona asked.

“Really, really not good,” Bolton said.

* * *

Bolton wasn’t starving—he’d had plenty to eat since the world went to shit—but he accepted Dante’s offer of a Lunchables anyway. The pilot dug in, crunching crackers in his mouth and getting crumbs in his beard as he talked, not that he seemed to notice, or anyone cared. They, like Cole, were just happy to see him. Or, maybe, his chopper.

“One and the same,” the Voice said.

“I haven’t managed to raise anyone over the radio,” Bolton said. “As far as I can tell, there’s no city, state, or national government out there anymore. It’s more silent than whores in church, if I can be frank.”

“Is that possible?” Fiona asked. “Could the whole country be infected?”

“Has to be, or I would have gotten some kind of response. The radio works on multiple frequencies. But as far as I can tell, there isn’t even an amateur ham radio operator out there listening.”

“There’s me,” Dante said. “But, uh, I don’t have it with me right now.”

“Well, there’s a lot of frequencies, kid.”

“True.”

“None of it means there’s still not people out there,” Cole said.

“Nope. Doesn’t mean that at all. But if there are, they’re not answering. And haven’t, for the last couple days.” He shrugged. “Take that to mean what you will.”

“What about the federal emergency frequencies?”

“Dead.”

“Dead?”

“Deader than a doorknob. Not a peep. And I’ve tried. I’ve tried lots of times, believe me. I had nothing but time these last coupla days.”

“Is that possible?” Fiona asked again.

“You looked outside, little lady?” Bolton asked. “Anything’s possible, now.”

They were gathered in one of the bedrooms on the second floor, with the window open next to them. A cool wind, unusual for this time of year, blew through the opening, reminding Cole of the breeze that always accompanied the water back at Bear Lake.

Cole stood at attention near the window, occasionally looking out at the streets below. He’d spotted a couple of crazies dodging in and out of buildings, but there were no signs of Gargantuan. Not that Cole thought the man had succumbed to the others. No. It would take a hell of a concerted effort to take that bastard down. From everything Cole had seen, teamwork was not something the crazies had in them.

“I knew something was happening when Roger turned and came after me,” Bolton was saying. He, like the others, was sitting near the center of the room.

Bolton was camped on a sofa, with Fiona sitting next to him, while Zoe and her daughter occupied another loveseat. Dante, of course, was in his chair. If they noticed that Cole was standing slightly apart, no one had brought it up. At the moment, Bolton was the center of attention.

“Roger Newell, the reporter?” Zoe asked.

“Uh huh,” Bolton said.

“Who’s that?” Fiona asked.

“He’s a traffic reporter,” Zoe said. “I used to watch him every morning before I went to work.”

“Roger’s been around almost as long as I have,” Bolton said. “But I never saw him like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like someone turned a switch. He went from the Roger I’d known for twenty-two years to this crazed psycho. Killed Kyle, our cameraman, while I sat there in my cockpit, gawking like an idiot.”

“What did you do?” Fiona asked. She was staring at Bolton like a lovesick girl. Cole thought that was amusing; Fiona wasn’t exactly a kid, and Bolton was—well, he could have been her father. Or uncle.

“I got the hell outta there, that’s what,” Bolton said.

“How did you get away?” Cole asked.

“We were on the news station helipad when it went down, getting ready to take off for Roger to do his thing. I think he would have come after me, except Kyle was closer and he went after that poor kid instead.” He shook his head, staring off at no one and nothing in particular. “I hovered over the building for a while, watched as people I’ve worked with for years poured outside onto the rooftop and started murdering each other. I’d never seen anything like it. Goddamn, it was a trip.”

“It’s something, all right,” Dante said. “But you weren’t affected.”

“No. Neither were you folks, apparently.”

Everyone shook their heads, even Ashley.

“Why is that?” Bolton asked.

“We don’t know,” Dante said.

Bolton looked at the teenager, then over at Zoe and Ashley, before turning to Fiona next to him. Then, finally, across the room at Cole. “What’s the connection?”

Everyone else did the same—exchanging puzzled looks.

“No one knows,” Cole finally said. “As far as I can tell, none of us have anything in common.”

“No one has a clue?” Bolton asked.

“We’ve talked about it, but it’s all just guesses.”

“What do you think happened?” Fiona asked the pilot.

Bolton shrugged. “I dunno, little lady. At first, I thought it might be some kind of bio-weapon. You know, something purposefully dumped into the water supply. Roger was telling me about chaos in New York and some of the eastern cities when this first started.”

“I heard that, too,” Dante said. “What else did Roger know?”

“Not much more than that. He didn’t do current affairs.”

“Because he was a traffic reporter,” Zoe said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe there’s something back at the news station. Something that could tell us what’s happening, and why.”

“Maybe,” Bolton said, but he didn’t look or sound convinced.

Zoe glanced across the room at Cole. “You think it might be worth it to go find out? After all, we have a helicopter now. We could make it there without having to brave all those crazies down there.”

Cole shook his head. He didn’t even have to think about it. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t care why all of this happened. It doesn’t help me survive what’s out there.”

“That’s true enough,” Bolton said. “Besides, I’m not sure there’s anything left of the news station. I mean, nothing left besides those crazies.”

“So where should we go, then?” Fiona asked.

“The same place we were going before we met Mr. Bolton,” Cole said. “Bear Lake.”

“Bear Lake?” Bolton said.

“You know where that is?”

“A friend of a friend has a house down there. Lets me fish on the pier every now and then. Nice guy. Vietnam vet.”

“So you can take us there,” Dante said. He could barely contain his excitement.

“Sure, kid,” Bolton said. “But what’s at Bear Lake?”

“My family,” Cole said.

“No offense, but what’s that got to do with me?”

“Get me to Bear Lake, and I’ll keep you alive.”

“Again, no offense, but I’ve been staying alive pretty well even before I met you folks. What’s Bear Lake have that I don’t already? Or could get? Those crazies are bloodthirsty and dangerous as heck, but they can’t get to something they can’t touch.”

“What happens when you run out of fuel?”

“I refuel.”

“How? Where?”

“Plenty of stations where there aren’t those crazies running around. I know them all. The best part? I don’t got to pay money to fill ’er up these days.”

“You should still take me and the others to Bear Lake.”

“You’re not gonna offer me money, are you? Because I don’t think rectangular green pieces of paper matters much anymore.”

“Not money.”

Bolton chewed on one of his cheesy crackers, his eyes still locked on Cole. “I’m listening.”

“Before I retired to a suit and tie, I spent a lot of my time around the world, doing things I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t forget all those lessons I learned, even after I became…civilized.”

By now, the others had turned to look at Cole as well and were listening intently.

Cole continued: “Bear Lake has all the resources you and all of us will need to survive something like this.”

“No one knows what ‘something like this’ is,” Bolton said.

“No, but it’s close enough.”

“How so?”

“The end of the world.”

Bolton’s lips creased into a smirk. “You were prepared for the end of the world? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not quite, but I do have everything we’ll need to survive it.”

“At Bear Lake.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m doing just fine out here by myself. Like I said, those crazies can’t fly. Not yet, anyway.”

“No, but how long before your luck runs out? Sooner or later, one of your fuel runs won’t just be you standing alone next to a pump. The longer you stay out here, the higher your chances of running into them.”

Bolton looked over at Fiona, sitting next to him. “Is this true? About his setup at Bear Lake?”

Fiona didn’t answer right away. Instead, she turned to Cole—as if asking for his permission to talk.

“Go ahead,” Cole said.

“I don’t know,” Fiona said to Bolton.

“I didn’t tell them before, because I didn’t have to,” Cole said.

“Why’s that?” Bolton asked.

“They needed someone to take care of them, to get them through this. That was good enough for them to stick with me.”

“But you’re telling me now. Telling them.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because now I need that chopper of yours, and I never learned how to fly one.”

“Ah.”

“He wouldn’t lie,” Zoe said. Then, when Bolton turned in her direction, “My daughter and I wouldn’t be alive now without Cole.”

“Me neither,” Dante said. He pursed a smile in Cole’s direction. “I believe him.”

Cole gave the teenager a slight Thanks nod.

“Yeah, well, don’t get me wrong,” Bolton said, “you folks look like good people, but I’m going to need more than just your words—”

A loud bang! cut him off.

Bolton shot up to his feet, crumbs from the Lunchables he’d been snacking on falling out of his beard. “What the hell was that?”

“That was downstairs,” Cole said even as he ran to the door, the Glock already in his hand.

“Here we go,” the Voice said. “Here we go!”

Chapter 28

He ran past Zoe, who was already on her feet and looking after him. “The side door,” she said. “That sounded like the side door.”

She was referring to the same door they’d come through the night before, the one with two metal shelves blocking it. Like the front entrance, it would take something massive and constant to beat it down. Even a man as big as Gargantuan wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that.

“You sure about that?” the Voice asked.

Cole didn’t answer as he all but lunged through the open door—

Bang! from below.

—and ran to the stairs. He didn’t go down the steps but instead peered over the railing even as the others rushed out behind him.

Bang!

It very much sounded like someone was trying to come in through the metal side door, using something very big and very heavy.

Bang!

“Cole?” Fiona said, her voice barely audible behind him—

Another echoing bang!, but this one seemed to go on for a while, even as it was followed by the crash! of something heavy slamming into something else just as heavy, and both of those two somethings spilling to the floor.

…like a metal door being forced open, knocking loose two metal shelves he’d used to barricade it…

“Here we go!” the Voice shouted again.

“Kid, what’s happening?” Bolton said, standing behind him.

Cole turned around to face the older man. “Discussion’s over. How long will it take you to get that chopper started?”

“What?”

“The chopper! How long?”

Bolton seemed to struggle for a response. Thankfully not for too long. It took him about two seconds to answer. “I got her cocked these days. It’ll take me sixty seconds. Ninety, max.”

“Get up there and start it.”

“What are you—”

The very loud screech of metal shelves scraping against the floor, rising through the staircase like an ocean wave.

“They’re coming in,” Cole said, stepping closer toward Bolton. The older man actually took an involuntary step back. “You need to get everyone upstairs and into that Bell before they get up here.”

Bolton looked past Cole toward the stairs, but there was nothing to see.

Not yet, anyway.

“Fuck me dead,” Bolton said.

“Haha, the man’s got a way with them words!” the Voice laughed.

“Go,” Cole said. He turned to the others, gathered around them. “The rest of you go with him. Fiona, help Bolton with Dante. Zoe, you got Ashley.”

“What about you?” Zoe asked.

Cole faced Bolton again, squinting at the older man. “You understand what I’m saying? You understand what’s at stake here?”

“Yeah,” Bolton said quickly. “I understand.”

“So go do it.”

“Cole—” Fiona said, but Cole didn’t hear the rest because he was already hopping down the stairs with the Glock in his hand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the Voice asked.

What does it look like I’m doing?

“Something stupid?”

That’s open to debate.

“No, it’s not. Do you have a death wish all of a sudden?”

No.

“Sure seems like it.”

I need to give them time.

“You’re going to die, is what you’re going to do.”

Not if I can help it.

The Voice laughed. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

Cole concentrated on taking the steps in front of him two, then three at a time without tripping and rolling down the stairs like an idiot and, God forbid, landing on the back of his neck. Now that would have been embarrassing. Not to mention deadly.

He told himself that he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did. (“Yeah, right,” the Voice laughed.) He only knew there was no way they would all make it to Bolton’s chopper in time. He and Bolton might, and maybe Zoe and Ashley, and Fiona. But Dante wouldn’t. Not by a long shot. Not before whoever was down there (“Really? You’re pretending you don’t know the answer to that one?” the Voice asked mockingly.) made it up to the second floor.

He had to buy time.

How much time, was the question.

“I got her cocked these days. It’ll take me sixty seconds. Ninety, max,” Bolton had said.

Cole had no idea what the hell cocked meant when it came to choppers, but he figured out the sixty seconds or ninety max part easily enough.

He went with ninety seconds, just in case. But, of course, that was just Bolton prepping the Bell, ready to take off. It would probably take them anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute just to get to the rooftop with Dante. Loading him onto the chopper would likely take another thirty seconds to a minute. Or more.

The or more part was the problem.

“Just one problem?” the Voice asked.

Cole ignored the Voice and concentrated on hopping the last three steps and landing in a slight crouch on the first floor. He immediately turned left and ran past a series of shelves toward the side—

He saw the big, round head first, followed by the man’s impressive bulk, then the bloody metal object in his right hand.

Gargantuan.

But of course it was Gargantuan. Who else could have powered their way through the side door, knocking all the shelves free, then kicked them out of his path? It would have to be the biggest crazy out there.

Cole had been sure the man’s weapon was a metal pole earlier, and he was mostly right: It was actually some kind of rusted pipe, the seemingly random and slight bends along its length, sharing space with the patches of hair and pink flesh that clung to the weapon like notches, proof of Gargantuan’s continued victory over the other crazies.

And, finally, now that he had come face-to-face with the killer, Cole could read the name tag on the blood-splattered coveralls:

GREGORY.

Not Greg, but Gregory.

Not that Gregory looked like a Gregory at all. If Cole had been handed the task of giving the man a name, he would have gone with…

Well, Gargantuan worked pretty damn well, if he did say so himself.

Fortunately for Cole, he didn’t have to go hand-to-hand with Gargantuan because he would have lost. It didn’t matter how much experience he had in close-quarters fighting or how many times he’d killed bigger and tougher men than him. This was different. This wasn’t just a man. This was a crazed killer that, somehow, still managed to retain some level of intelligence, and was powered by adrenaline.

This was something else. Something new.

Something crazy.

Cole stopped on a dime and took a step back even as he raised the Glock. If Gargantuan was even the least bit intimidated by the pistol, he didn’t show it. Instead, the man charged forward, shelves clattering out of his path as he moved with the impossibly nimble speed of a man half his size.

“Goddamn, that’s impressive,” the Voice said.

Oh, shut the hell up, you’re not helping, Cole thought even as he fired.

His first bullet struck the running man exactly where Cole had intended—right in the chest. Center mass. It was the most obvious target, and it didn’t matter how big you were. Everyone went down.

Everyone.

Except, apparently, for Gargantuan.

“Well, shit, didn’t see that coming,” the Voice said as the crazy slowed down for exactly half a heartbeat…before he continued charging again.

Cole took a second—then a third—step back as he fired again, and again.

Both shots also landed where they were supposed to—right at center mass, inches from the first bullet—but neither additional 9mm rounds did anything to stop the rampaging madman. He had cut the distance between himself and Cole to five meters—

—four—

Cole backed up and fired again, and again, and again.

His seventh bullet hit the man in the neck as Cole moved the Glock up, going for the head this time now that the torso shots didn’t seem to be doing any good. Blood sprayed, tracing a still-standing shelf of old shoes as Gargantuan ran past it.

Even as Cole’s eighth bullet struck, then exited Gargantuan’s right cheek, taking a big chunk of flesh and bone with it, the crazy raised the rusted pipe in his hand and cocked his arm back to strike.

The ninth bullet hit, then seemed to ricochet off the man’s right temple, taking another patch of flesh and bone and some hair with it.

—three meters—

“If he lands that, you’re dead,” the Voice said.

Yeah, I know, Cole thought as he began squeezing the Glock’s trigger as fast as he could, over and over and over—

Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

—contact!

Gargantuan slammed into Cole and drove him back and to the floor, where Cole struck the dirt-covered linoleum tiles and slid along it for a good five feet or so. He might have kept on going if he didn’t crash into the counter. A cracking sound, and Cole hoped it wasn’t the back of his neck snapping.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, because he could still move his head, and looked down at Gargantuan, lying on top of him as if he were trying to smother Cole with his bulk. Except the big crazy was doing nothing of the sort, because he was dead.

Finally, the fucker was dead.

“Hallelujah!” the Voice shouted.

Cole didn’t have a chance to wallow in his success, because he could hear them—the fresh sounds of pounding footsteps coming from in front of him.

…from the now-wide-open side door!

He grabbed ahold of Gargantuan, the man that used to be called Gregory, and pushed the massive mound of flesh and fat off him. If the crazy looked huge when he was alive, he was practically an immovable juggernaut in death.

But not completely immovable. Just very, very hard.

Cole pushed—and slowly the body gave an inch.

He pushed some more—and Gargantuan slid off him another inch.

Cole looked up as a thin figure in a miniskirt that had been ripped to shreds, exposing a tattered pink G-string underneath, appeared out of nowhere. No, not out of nowhere, but from the side door. In order to reach Cole, the woman—she had long, flowing blonde hair, but the only thing he could really focus on was the rivers of blood dripping down her cheeks—had to leap over the fallen shelves.

She was in mid-air when Cole shot her.

Unlike Gargantuan, who took nearly a dozen bullets before he gave up the ghost, it only took one round to drop the woman. The 9mm actually went right through her chest, between her exposed breasts—she’d been wearing a pink blouse, perhaps to coordinate with the G-string; it, too, was barely still clinging to her frame—and pekked! off the wall behind her.

Even as the woman seemed to pirouette in the air before smashing back down to earth with a brutal thump!, then sliding along the tiles as Cole had seconds earlier, Cole went back to pushing Gargantuan’s dead weight off him.

He got the man moving another inch, then another.

A pained grunt, followed by the familiar sound of blades tearing into flesh.

Cole looked up as a man in a police uniform pulled a machete out of the collarbone of another crazy where it was wedged. The weapon had gone in too deep, and to get the blade out the cop had to step on his victim’s chest and jerk with both hands. But he got it out just the same and turned to focus on Cole.

A blade flashed behind the cop. The uniformed man never saw the weapon, and by the time he realized there was another crazy behind him, half of the cleaver had already gone into the back of his skull.

“Forget them! Let them kill each other!” the Voice shouted. “Get your ass off the floor, and get up to the rooftop! Bolton isn’t going to wait forever! If the fucker waits at all!”

The Voice was right. How long had he been down here? Thirty seconds? A minute? And how long would it take Bolton to get the others to the rooftop and take off?

Cole concentrated on Gargantuan, sliding the man another two inches off him, even as a woman in an apron with some kind of writing on it (Cole could only make out World’s Best something) and a shock of amazingly white hair struggled to pry her meat cleaver out of the cop. She was having a difficult time, having sunk it so deep into the dead man’s skull.

Plop! as, finally, Gargantuan’s bulk dropped to the floor next to Cole.

Cole scrambled up and thought about shooting the granny with the meat cleaver, but she was still struggling with removing her weapon from her prey. Even though the cop’s machete was right there and all she had to do was reach down and take it. But she didn’t, for whatever reason.

The granny looked up and locked eyes with Cole, and he swore the old hag smirked at him as if to say, You just stay right there, boy, I’ll be with you in a sec!

Cole almost shot her just for that, but he didn’t.

“Conserve ammo!” the Voice shouted. “Let the other crazies take care of that hag!”

The Voice was right. He had to conserve ammo. He had another magazine, but that was it. After that…

He turned and ran toward the stairs, hoping and praying that Bolton hadn’t taken off yet.

“That old bastard,” the Voice said. “If he’s gone, we’re gonna have to find him and cut his fucking head off!”

If we can find him.

“Now what kind of defeatist thinking is that? That’s my job!” the Voice said, laughing.

But its laugh was cut off by a bloodcurdling scream from behind Cole, followed by the echoing thwack! of something metal and sharp going into something soft and fleshy.

Was that the granny falling victim to another crazy that had come up behind her? Because at this point there was nothing to stop them. Gargantuan was gone, courtesy of Cole. And the side door into the shop was open, courtesy of Gargantuan. If there were any crazies in the area, they could be converging on the property right this second.

So Cole ran.

And prayed.

But mostly he ran.

Chapter 29

“Oh, you’ve done it now!”

Shut up.

“I’m just trying to help.”

Shut up.

“I’m starting to think you don’t appreciate me.”

Shut up!

The Voice laughed, but Cole pushed it into the background just as a kid in a Nirvana T-shirt appeared behind him. Barely five feet and probably not old enough to have even known who Kurt Cobain was. The boy had taken one step up the stairs when Cole turned and shot him in the chest.

“Got ’em!” the Voice said.

Shut up, I said!

The kid stumbled, as if he didn’t fully understand what was happening. He was still trying to figure it out when a whale of a man waddled up behind him and skewered him through the back with some kind of edged weapon that was somewhere between a homemade machete and a sword.

The boy gagged, blood spurting out of his mouth, as the fat man pushed him down in order to scramble over him to get at Cole.

Cole took his time, aimed, and shot the man in the face.

Even as the empty casing flicked out of the Glock and struck the wall to his right, then ricocheted and bounced down the steps to where the fat man was falling, Cole knew the pistol was empty.

He reloaded.

Quickly. Or as quickly as he could, anyway. Years ago, he would have been able to perform the act in less than a second while blindfolded. Reach back, grab the spare, then insert it into the now-empty mag well. But that was years ago.

These days, many moons into his supposed “retirement,” he had gotten slow and soft and—

“Here they come!” the Voice shouted.

And it was right. Here they did come.

A lot of them.

He wasn’t sure how the hell they were navigating each other down there—how many had managed to get past the ones in the alley, then through the first floor to continue up the stairs after him. He only knew they were doing it and seemingly one by one. The ones that he couldn’t see were too busy killing each other down there.

So the question was: How many of them were there, and did he have enough bullets for the ones that got past the gauntlet of crazies?

A slim woman in yoga pants appeared below and jumped over the boy in the Nirvana T-shirt, then stepped on the fat man’s pudding-like face. She was clutching a large hammer in one hand, bloodshot eyes zeroing in on Cole even as he pulled back the slide on the Glock.

“Too slow,” the Voice said. “You got way too slow in your old age, buddy!”

Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I don’t already know.

“You’re going to die if you don’t get up to the rooftop soon! How about that? You really think Bolton is going to stay up there forever? He’s going to take off. Does that help?”

Yup!

Cole shot the woman, and as she slumped to the stairs, he counted, Sixteen.

That was how many bullets he had left. The pistol had a standard 17-round magazine, and he’d just used one to take out the woman. That left him with sixteen.

Sixteen didn’t seem like very much at all.

Screams, mixed with the thwack! of sharp metal going into flesh and the crunch of breaking bones. All of it coming from the first floor, beyond the staircase, so he couldn’t tell who was killing who.

“As long as it’s not us!” the Voice said.

Damn straight, Cole thought as he turned and continued up.

He rounded the bend in the stairs and couldn’t make out anyone on the second-floor hallway. That meant the others were already on the rooftop.

The faded whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotor blades in the background. Slowly at first, then gradually getting faster, and faster.

“I got her cocked these days. It’ll take me sixty seconds. Ninety, max,” Bolton had said when Cole had asked how long it would take him to go from startup to lifting off. That, of course, wasn’t counting the time it would take them to reach the rooftop…with a wheelchair-confined Dante in tow.

Cole had lost track of how long he was on the first floor. Then there was that whole nonsense with being trapped underneath Gargantuan’s weight. That had probably cost him plenty of time. A few seconds? A few minutes? Somewhere in between?

But none of that mattered now, because he could hear Bolton’s chopper starting up, the whup-whup-whup getting even louder, making the walls around him vibrate.

Thump! as someone slammed into the wall from somewhere behind him.

Cole glanced back but couldn’t see anyone, because the sound had come from around the bend. Depending on how fast—

A head of red hair, blood pouring from a gash in the man’s right temple, peeked around the turn.

Cole took aim, but before he could fire, an aluminum baseball pinged! off the redhead’s skull, sending him careening into the stairwell wall. The person that had swung the bat—a small man in a suit and tie—stumbled around the turn. There was a knife sticking out of his back, but the man didn’t seem to notice it. He only had bloodshot eyes for Cole.

Cole shot the man in the chest, and Suit and Tie stumbled back and disappeared down the steps. Instead of waiting to see if he would stay down, Cole turned and continued up, hopping onto the second floor, then racing along the hallway to reach the access stairway on the other side.

“Run, buddy, run!” the Voice shouted.

What the fuck do you think I’m doing?

“Run faster!”

I am!

“Faster!”

Shut the fuck up!

Howling screams from behind him as crazies murdered one another, the sound of metal going into flesh and bodies falling coming, seemingly, one after another, after another. Cole didn’t even want to imagine the bloodbath. How many crazies were out there, waiting for someone to open the shop for them?

“As long as it’s not us, buddy!” the Voice said.

Damn straight!

Footsteps behind him pounding up the stairs, but Cole ignored it and reached out, grabbed, and swung up the steps to the rooftop access door.

He took the remaining fifteen steps two, then three, then four at a time, and reached the metal door at the end in a flash. It helped that there was no turn and it was a straight shot, unlike the steps up from the first to the second floor.

Cole grabbed the lever and twisted it downward. In the half a heartbeat between when he grabbed the lever and pushed it down, the possibility that someone had locked the door or managed to barricade it from the other side flashed across his mind’s eye.

But the lever moved just as it was supposed to, and the door snapped open, and Cole burst out into the airy rooftop.

It was airier than usual because of the Bell chopper’s rotor blades spinning, scattering wind in all directions as it powered up. Cole immediately located Bolton in the cockpit, while Fiona and Zoe struggled to help Dante up, the two women flanking the teenager on opposite sides while pulling him up and forward. Cole wasn’t entirely sure how Zoe was doing that with just one good arm; either she was feeling a lot better, or she was sucking up the pain. Ashley was already inside and buckled in one of the seats, and Dante’s chair was overturned on the gravel floor, forgotten.

“The kid’s probably gonna need that later,” the Voice said.

Yeah, probably.

“Sucks to be him. Even sucks to be us more, right now!”

Zoe was the first one to glance back and spotted him. “Cole!”

He could barely hear his name over the growing din of the helicopter’s whup-whup-whup. From what he could hear, Cole wasn’t sure if Zoe was relieved to see him or shocked that he’d made it.

Bolton spotted him next, and the pilot mouthed something through the cockpit windshield. Cole couldn’t be exactly sure what he’d said, but it “sounded” something along the lines of “You waiting for an invitation?” Of course, Cole could have been wrong.

He took one step, then two toward the chopper—

Slam! as the rooftop access door burst open behind him.

Cole spun, the Glock rising, and squeezed off two shots, striking the chest of a charging man in a bloodstained black suit at almost point-blank range. One of the bullets pierced the crazy’s body and pekked! off the metal door behind him, leaving a dent behind.

The body kept coming, its forward momentum continuing to carry it forward. Cole had visions of the repeat with Gargantuan, but this time he was able to sidestep the careening body before it crashed into him.

“Cole!” Zoe, shouting from behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the two women were already in the chopper with Dante spilled on the floor between them.

Slam! as the rooftop access door opened again.

Cole turned, and backpedaling, fired.

Bang-bang! and another crazy stumbled and fell face-first into the gravel.

Bang! as a third crazy appeared and fell with a hole in his forehead.

“Cole!” Zoe again. “Come on! Come on, goddammit!”

“The lady’s got the right idea, buddy!” the Voice said.

Cole spun and ran toward the open hatch of the Bell. Dante was scrambling up from the floor as Cole neared them.

“Go go go!” Cole shouted at Bolton. He hoped the pilot could hear him; or if he couldn’t, could read his lips.

The answer was Yes, because the Bell rocked slightly, just before it started to lift off from the rooftop. In the back of the suddenly-moving aircraft, Ashley was trying to help Zoe put on her seatbelt. Cole figured out why Zoe was having so much trouble when he saw a widening red stain on the right side of her shirt. Her wound had reopened, probably from helping Fiona get Dante into the chopper. She looked as if she was in great pain but doing her damnedest to fight it off.

Dante was glancing back at Cole even as Fiona dragged him up from the floor. Or attempted to. They were about the same weight, and it was pretty clear Fiona wasn’t going to be able to do it all by herself. Dante was clawing at the seats, trying to pull himself up, but he wasn’t exactly a gym rat, and it showed.

“Gotta get the kid into the gym later,” the Voice said.

Yeah. If we survive this!

“Glass half full, buddy! Glass half full!”

The chopper’s skids were a foot off the rooftop when Cole caught up and launched himself into the open hatch, angling just slightly to keep from crashing into Dante and Fiona in the process.

He landed on the hard metal floor on his chest and immediately rolled over, sitting up and glancing back—

A crazy bolted out of the access door, sunlight glinting off a bloody hammer in his right hand. The man streaked toward them, stepping on the other bodies in his path. Blood flitted from his eyes as he ran, the bright-red droplets immediately picked up by the spinning chopper rotors and vanishing into the air.

The man jumped, mimicking what Cole had done earlier, and reached out with both hands—

—and managed to grab onto one of the chopper’s skids!

The crazy swung below them, causing the chopper to turn slightly to one side.

“Get him off me!” Bolton shouted from the cockpit even as he fought with his stick.

Cole did just that, scooting forward slightly, leaned over the opening, and shot the crazy in the face.

The man released and dropped, crashing into the gravel below just as a woman in a bright pink shirt with the words Juicy written on the front burst out of the access shack. She was bleeding profusely from a wound in her side, not that that seemed to slow her down any as she chased after the hovering helicopter.

“Go go go!” Cole shouted at Bolton.

The Bell lifted higher and faster, and it was starting to bank when Juicy flung herself at it—

—and missed!

Cole leaned out of the open hatch and watched as the crazy flailed in the air as she dropped, dropped, and splat! onto the sidewalk below.

But it wasn’t the dead woman he was staring at, but the dozen or so crazies down there attacking one another in the streets and among the cars. It was almost as if the only thing holding them back previously was Gargantuan’s presence, and now that he was gone, the others were feeling brave enough to come out and claim their prey. A significant amount of unmoving bodies on the ground, Cole saw, made a jagged line toward the alleyway next to the antique shop.

“Jesus Christ, look at them,” Dante said. He was now strapped in—Cole didn’t know how Fiona had managed that—and was leaning slightly out of the hatch next to him.

Cole struggled to his feet, then crab-walked over to a seat next to Dante and Fiona and slumped into it. He grabbed one of the seatbelts and snapped it home, and leaned back. He was only vaguely aware that he was still clutching the Glock in his lap.

Zoe, sitting across from him, had a nice sheen of sweat covering her face. Blood was still seeping through her shirt, but she didn’t look like she was going to die on him anytime soon.

“You okay?” Cole shouted across at her.

She nodded. “You?”

“I’m okay now.” Cole looked around at the others. “How’s everyone?”

“Fine and dandy, and twice as randy,” Dante said.

Cole grinned.

“Yeah, what he said,” Fiona said.

Cole looked back at Ashley. “What about you?”

The girl grinned widely before saluting him.

Cole laughed. Then he picked up one of the headsets and put it on.

“How are we for fuel?” Cole asked into the mic.

“I loaded her up a day ago,” Bolton said, his voice loud and clear through the headset. “Unless we’re planning on making a long trip, I shouldn’t need to do it again anytime soon.”

“We’re definitely not making a long trip.”

“So where to?”

“Point her north. Bear Lake in twenty miles.”

“Roger that.”

Cole leaned back against his seat and closed his eyes. For the first time in what seemed like years, he could finally breathe easy.

For a while, anyway.

“Your wife,” Zoe said. Then, when Cole opened his eyes, “You really think she’s okay?”

That was what Zoe said, but what Cole heard was, “You think Emily is still normal? And not like one of those crazies down there?”

Cole smiled at her, and as convincingly as he could muster, answered, “Absolutely 100 percent.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Voice let loose with riotous laughter. Thankfully there was the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter blades around Cole to dim the sound.

Mostly…

From The Author

Hello readers, and thank you for reading! I hope you have enjoyed the first book in my new post-apocalyptic horror series, The Break. Book 2, Homefront, is now available for pre-order at Amazon and should be out very soon. And oh, if you’re so inclined, Book 3, Firebase, is also available for pre-order, and is planned for a 2021 release but probably will release sooner.

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