Date: 2019-07-05 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post-Apocalyptic | Infected
Description: Luke is not a nice man. He's not a good person. But he's a fighter . . . a survivor. A former MMA fighter who was sent to prison for attempted murder, Luke is accepted into a crime family run by Vincent, and during his years there he's trained in weapons and the art of delivering pain. When civilization collapses, Luke is sent to protect Vincent's brother and his family. Luke finds the family slaughtered and the brother responsible, already infected by the Ripper Plague. After killing the brother, Luke knows he needs to flee the city. But with martial law declared and Vincent vowing revenge, s

EXPOSURE

DARK DAYS: BOOK THREE

A post-apocalyptic series by

MARK LUKENS

Exposure: Dark Days Book 3—copyright © 2017—Mark Lukens

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reprinted without written permission from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (or in any other form), business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by: Extended Imagery

Special thanks to: Jet, Ann, Joe, Kelli, and Mary Ann—your help is invaluable to me and appreciated more than you know.

OTHER BOOKS BY MARK LUKENS:

ANCIENT ENEMY – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD4SP8M

DARKWIND: ANCIENT ENEMY 2 – www.amazon.com/dp/B01K42JBGW

HOPE’S END: ANCIENT ENEMY 3 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07G1MS6RK

EVIL SPIRITS: ANCIENT ENEMY 4 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07L8KLXVB

SIGHTINGS – www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAI31KW

DEVIL’S ISLAND – www.amazon.com/dp/B06WWJC6VD

WHAT LIES BELOW – www.amazon.com/dp/B0143LADEY

DESCENDANTS OF MAGIC – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWYYYYC

THE SUMMONING – www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNEOHKU

NIGHT TERRORS – www.amazon.com/dp/B00M66IU3U

THE EXORCIST’S APPRENTICE – www.amazon.com/dp/B00YYF1E5C

POSSESSION: THE EXORCIST’S APPRENTICE 2 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07NCZQTNR

THE DARWIN EFFECT – www.amazon.com/dp/B01GRA8ZYC

FOLLOWED – www.amazon.com/dp/B078WYGMJN

GHOST TOWN: A NOVELLA – www.amazon.com/dp/B00LEZRF7G

THE VAMPIRE GAME – www.amazom.com/dp/B07C2M72X9

A DARK COLLECTION: 12 SCARY STORIES – www.amazon.com/dp/B00JENAGLC

RAZORBLADE DREAMS: HORROR STORIES – www.amazon.com/dp/B076B7W252

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I started writing this series as a novel years ago, but then I abandoned it for some time. That first draft had most of the same main characters as the series that it has now become: Ray and his family, Josh, Emma, Luke, and Wilma. That story was similar to this one, yet still different. I loved the characters, but I was never satisfied with the story, and I won’t publish a story unless I’m as happy with it as I can be. A year ago, I had a new idea for this series, a different direction to take it in, but the characters were still there, still alive in my mind through the years. But there was a problem. When I told the story from the multiple viewpoints of these characters, the book got way too long. So I had the idea to tell the story of the beginning of the collapse from these main characters’ points of view in their own books. So, the first book is told from Ray and his family and Emma’s points of view. The second book is told from Josh’s point of view. And this third book is told from Luke and Wilma’s points of view. In the fourth book, they will all come together (this isn’t really a spoiler because it is alluded to in all three of these books). I know many readers may skip this Author’s Note (and I’ve heard some readers even skip prologues, even though I can’t understand why—it would be like going to see a movie ten minutes after it has started), so I imagine some readers may get upset if they don’t see much of the characters from Book 1 in Books 2 and 3. And maybe this approach is a little unusual, but I really felt I needed to write these books this way. Does this mean that the first three books could be read out of order? Yes, but I had intended them to be read in order because information is revealed along the way as you get deeper into the series. I do hope after you finish reading the first three books that you will continue with this series.

Thank you!

Mark.

CONTENTS

OTHER BOOKS BY MARK LUKENS:
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
PART TWO
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
PART THREE
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
A THANK YOU:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Cleveland, OH – October 21st

They were all dead—that thought kept echoing in Luke’s mind as he maneuvered his car around the other vehicles clogging the streets of Cleveland. Traffic lights were out everywhere, and it seemed like there was a pileup of cars and trucks at nearly every intersection, backing traffic up for miles. Cops were parked on sidewalks with their lights flashing, many of them stationed at the entrances to side streets, blocking those exits off. Most of the cops were dressed in riot gear, many of them wearing gas masks and rubber gloves. Emergency vehicles struggled to get through the jammed-up streets, but most of them weren’t making it very far.

Luke had driven back from Ashtabula County, and it had taken him nearly all day on the interstate before he was able to take the off-ramp down into this mess. After a few more hours of waiting in traffic, Luke drove through the parking lot of a restaurant and found an alleyway in the back that led to a side street—at least it was one place that the police hadn’t blocked off yet. He drove down the side streets of Parma, making his way towards his house.

His house—it was just a rental. And he wouldn’t be living there anymore now. He needed to get to his house, get his shit, and get away. That was if Vincent’s men weren’t already there waiting for him. He hoped that Vincent’s men were having as tough of a time navigating the streets of Cleveland as he’d had.

They were all dead.

Luke saw the mutilated bodies in his mind, the slaughtered children, blood everywhere. It was late afternoon now, and night was coming quickly. It seemed as if society had deteriorated in those hours. He’d heard the news reports over the last few weeks about the economy failing, the massive protests and riots in major cities across America and the world. Violence had been springing up everywhere. He’d heard of the seemingly random murders across the country, and there were rumors about some kind of pandemic.

This morning he had seen that random violence first-hand. Something was going on . . . something bad was happening to people.

After leaving Howard’s house this morning, Luke had driven thirty miles and then parked at a gas station after pulling off the highway. He’d made the phone call to Vincent from the gas station parking lot. While on his cell phone, he’d watched the lines of frantic people at the gas pumps waiting to fill up their cars, trucks, and gas cans. Luke didn’t need any gas—he always kept his car’s tank full, a habit of his profession.

Luke’s profession was an enforcer; a leg-breaker; a practitioner skilled in the art of pain. He worked for Vincent Perone. Not Vinnie Perone—never Vinnie; no one called him that. Vincent felt that the name Vinnie reduced him to some kind of stereotypical cartoon version of a crime family boss.

And Vincent Perone was a crime family boss, but he was no cartoon character; he was a dangerous man. And now he was very upset with Luke.

The conversation with Vincent on the phone replayed itself in Luke’s mind as he drove, Vincent going ballistic after Luke had told him what had happened at the house, after telling him that his brother and his brother’s family were all dead.

“Howard killed his wife and daughters,” Luke told Vincent. “He slaughtered them. Cut them up. Mutilated them. And then he came after me.”

It was like Vincent hadn’t even heard him. “You were supposed to protect my brother, Luke! You were supposed to protect my family!”

Luke watched the people at the gas station, hurrying back and forth from the store to the gas pumps in a panic, some of them running.

“I need you to get back here to my house,” Vincent said, his voice suddenly calm.

“Vincent, this wasn’t my fault,” Luke said. He was angry that Vincent wouldn’t believe him after all these years, wouldn’t even give him a chance to explain.

“I want you back here right now,” Vincent said again, but Luke could read between the lines; Vincent was really saying: You fucked up. You got my family killed. Now I’m going to need to make an example out of you.

Yeah, Luke thought. I’ll be right over so Jacob and the other guys can strap me down to a chair in the warehouse basement; a chair bolted to the concrete floor with a drain under it for easy cleanup. No thanks, I’ll skip that part. He’d been in that basement many times; but he had always been on the other side of the chair—he’d been the one inflicting the pain.

He told Vincent that he would be right over. Maybe it would buy him a few hours, but probably not. Vincent wasn’t stupid—he knew that Luke wasn’t going to follow orders this time; he knew that Luke was going home to get his go-bag and get the hell out of town.

After Luke hung up his cell phone, he watched two men get into a fight beside the gas station store where he was parked. He thought the fight was over the bag of groceries the one man carried—maybe the other man wanted them—but it just seemed like the only thing the other man wanted to do was beat the crap out of the man with the groceries. Even after the man was an unconscious mess lying on the cracked walkway next to the side of the store, his groceries spilled out of his bag, the other man wouldn’t stop kicking him.

And then the man had done something that Luke hadn’t expected; he’d gotten down onto all fours next to the man’s head and started biting him, tearing away at his neck and face, ripping away pieces of the man’s flesh with his teeth, chewing those pieces and swallowing them down.

Rippers. That’s what the news had labeled these people who had suddenly gone crazy. Of course Luke hadn’t believed the stories or rumors on the internet; there’d always been a fair amount of fake news and sensationalism going around. He wasn’t one to watch the nightly news or pore over internet articles, but the collapse of America couldn’t be ignored anymore. Some people had begun panicking in the last few weeks, and others had tried to continue on with their lives like everything was still normal. But even those ostriches had to lift their heads up out of the sand now; it couldn’t be denied anymore—there was no disputing that something terrible was happening. There was no disputing what he’d just seen at the gas station store.

And there was no disputing what he’d seen at Howard’s house earlier this morning.

Luke left the gas station and tried to make his way west on the interstate. But it had taken many more hours than it should have. Now the afternoon shadows had grown long, the air had gotten colder, the sky cloudier. Vincent would send someone after him—probably Jacob—and Jacob would have a pretty good head start on him.

Jacob was an enforcer like Luke was. He and Jacob were the best around. But if Luke had to be honest with himself, he knew that Jacob was even better at his job than he was.

Luke had worked for Vincent for the last ten years, most of his adult life since he was twenty-two years old. Of course five of his adult years had been spent in prison. His first stint of two years was for nearly killing a man in a bar fight when he was nineteen years old. During his second stretch, this one for three years, he’d kept his mouth shut and took the rap for Vincent and the family. And, as promised, Vincent had rewarded him financially when he’d gotten out. He’d also rewarded Luke’s loyalty with his trust, letting him train under Jacob, who was eight years older.

Even though Luke had grown up on the mean streets of Cleveland, and even though he’d been an amateur mixed martial arts fighter, there were still a lot of things that Luke needed to learn for the job, a lot of things that Jacob could teach him. Jacob had taught Luke dirty fighting tricks: sucker punches and brass knuckle technology; how to kill people with everyday objects. He also trained Luke how to shoot. Luke had spent hundreds of hours at the shooting range, becoming an expert shot with many firearms.

Ten years of working for Vincent, and now the man wouldn’t even let him explain what had happened at Howard’s house. Something was wrong with that. Maybe something was wrong with Vincent. Maybe whatever was infecting all of these people around here was infecting Vincent, too.

Maybe I’m infected now, Luke thought. After his exposure at Howard’s house, there was a good possibility of it.

But what could he do about it now? Obviously there was no cure. And if he didn’t get his shit at his house and make a run for it, he was going to be a dead man, anyway. He could worry about being infected later—first things first.

Luke drove down the neighborhood roads of Parma, passing darkened houses as the night blanketed the city. The electricity was out everywhere. A lot of people were gathered in their driveways, some of them on their front porches, some on their front lawns. A bonfire raged in the front yard of one house and drunken revelers danced around the fire like pagan worshippers. There were other people who seemed to be partying and cheering the end of the world, maybe one last debaucherous celebration before Sodom and Gomorrah were annihilated. But these revelers were going to wake up tomorrow sober and hungover, they were going to wake up to the realization that the electricity was still out, that martial law was still in place, and that some mysterious airborne disease was supposedly turning people into raging lunatics who murdered and ate other people.

Finally Luke reached the end of his street, driving past it slowly, checking it out. Everything looked clear down the street; his street was oddly peaceful compared to the bonfires and parties on some of the other streets only a few blocks away. He imagined that a lot of his neighbors on his street were locked up inside their homes, coolers of beer next to their armchairs, shotguns within easy reach, sitting in the darkness and waiting for anyone stupid enough to break into their homes.

Luke circled back and turned onto his street. He drove a little way down the street and parked his car in front of a dark home two blocks away from his house. He got out of his car and stood there for a moment in the dark. His gun was a reassuring weight inside his jacket, the piece shoved snuggly down into his shoulder holster. If he needed to, he could draw his gun as fast as any Old West gunslinger.

Luke walked down the street towards his house for one block and then darted down the side yard between the two homes. He was only a few houses away from his own now, and he worked his way there through the back yards. When he was in his neighbor’s back yard, he waited for a moment, watching the line of shrubs that surrounded his own back yard like a fence. He moved through the darkness, cutting across the narrow side yard between the homes and stood right beside his house, hiding in the darker shadow of the house. He moved down the wall and peeked into the window of an empty spare bedroom. It was too dark inside to see anything, but he didn’t hear anyone moving around in his house.

He kept close to the walls of his house as he entered his back yard, creeping towards the sliding glass doors that opened up to a small wood deck built three feet off of the ground. He climbed over the railing of his deck, silent as a cat. He peeked into the sliding glass doors. The vertical blinds were still partially open, just how he’d left them. The aluminum lock bar was still in place. He studied the dark interior for several minutes, but he didn’t see or hear anything inside.

He moved past the sliding glass doors and shuffled down the three steps to the grass. He darted to the corner, and then he crept down the side of his house, moving towards the front where the attached garage was. He peeked inside each window as he passed, but he still couldn’t see any movement inside.

When he got to the front corner of his house, he looked out at the street.

Everything was quiet. Everything seemed okay.

He heard a noise—someone walking, a man stumbling down the street. The man, a teenager probably, wore a gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head. It seemed like the boy was talking to himself, gesturing wildly, stumbling a bit. Maybe he was drunk or high.

Or maybe he was one of the crazy ones . . . one of the rippers.

Luke watched the man walk down the street, and then he focused back on his own problem of getting inside his house. He was a master of focusing his attention on a task. He believed the reason most people weren’t experts at something or successful was because they just didn’t focus on the tasks that needed to be done. You had to tune out the noise of your own thoughts and doubts, the distraction of random thoughts and daydreams; you had to filter out all distractions around you and focus entirely on what you were doing at that moment—that was the key to success; you focused on catching that touchdown pass and nothing else; you focused on driving and nothing else; you focused on flying the airplane; you focused on the takeout order you were putting together in a fast-food restaurant.

You focused on pulling the trigger.

And Luke was focused now, focused like a laser beam. The memories from earlier today kept trying to invade his thoughts—all the blood, the children lying in pools of their own gore—but he pushed those images away for now. He needed all of his senses to be on full alert if Jacob was waiting inside his house for him.

Luke let himself in the side door that led inside the garage. He closed the door softly and locked it. He stood inside the darkness for a long moment, nearly a full minute, listening for any noises inside the house. There was nothing in his garage except a punching bag hanging from the rafters, a weight bench, and a few sets of dumbbells. There was nowhere for anyone to hide in here.

He drew his handgun from his shoulder holster and fished out the silencer from his jacket pocket. He screwed the silencer on slowly as he moved across the garage towards the door that led into the house through the kitchen. He got to the door and tested the doorknob gently. Still locked. But Jacob would have locked the door once he was inside; he would try to leave everything just the way Luke had left it.

After silently unlocking the door with the key, Luke pushed the door open, crouched a little to the side, letting the wall block most of his body. He aimed his gun inside at the kitchen, his finger caressing the trigger, ready to shoot. He scanned the dark kitchen for a moment. No one in there. From the doorway, he could see part of the dining room and the living room. No one hiding in the shadows that he could see.

He entered the kitchen.

No one there.

No Jacob.

Luke moved through the house like a shadow, hurrying down the hallway to the bedrooms. He checked each of the rooms and then the bathroom off of the hall. Everything was clear, and he let himself relax just a little.

He went back to the living room and then into the kitchen. He closed and locked the door that led to the garage.

Luke had rented this house six months ago. It had come partially furnished with a bed, a dresser, a couch and loveseat, and a four-chair dining room set. Luke hadn’t added any additional furniture except for an entertainment center where he kept his TV and video game system (which helped keep his reflexes sharp). Other than the entertainment center, the only other things Luke had brought into the house were his punching bag, weightlifting equipment, and a couple of duffel bags. Everything else he owned could fit inside those duffel bags, which were stashed in the bedroom closet. He had two extra weapons inside one of the duffel bags, along with four boxes of ammo, two changes of clothes, an extra pair of hiking boots. He also had several envelopes of cash and a fake ID taped underneath a dresser drawer.

A crashing noise sounded from outside. Luke spun and aimed his pistol at the sliding glass doors that led out to the back yard.

CHAPTER 2

Luke crept through the living room towards the sliding glass doors. The vertical plastic blinds were drawn to one side, and he could see outside because the moonlight made it lighter out there than it was inside the house.

A moment later he was beside the sliding glass door, his gun up and ready, his finger on the trigger. He waited, listening for another sound from out there.

Could it be Jacob?

No, Jacob wouldn’t be so noisy, so careless—unless Jacob was trying to trick him into looking out the door, or possibly creating some kind of distraction so he could enter the house from somewhere else.

Luke waited a moment longer, listening for more sounds. Even from inside the house he could hear the sounds of people partying a few blocks away. Cheers rose and fell. A siren blared somewhere in the distance. A speeding car raced down another road. There was what sounded like an explosion from far away.

But he didn’t hear anything else in the back yard right now.

He was about to move away from the sliding glass doors, but then he froze.

There were more noises from the back yard. People talking. A man and a woman.

Luke peeked out the sliding glass door and saw a middle-aged man and woman crashing through the bushes on one side of his back yard, colliding with some rusty patio furniture that he never used. The man and woman didn’t let the patio furniture slow them down—even though the man had fallen down after running into the table and chairs, he was back up on his feet in an instant. The couple was an explosion of panicky movements, their eyes wild, and they kept looking back the way they’d come, like they were being chased.

They looked terrified.

What were they running from?

But Luke had a good idea what it might be. The crazies. The infected. The rippers.

A moment later, the couple was gone, crashing through the shrubs on the other side of the back yard.

He breathed out a sigh of relief. Rippers were bad, but better than Jacob right now. He darted across the living room to the hallway. He needed to take a piss that he’d been holding for a while now. He entered his bathroom. It was almost pitch-black inside the small room. There was one small window near the toilet and he pushed the curtain back to get a little more moonlight into the room. He set his gun on the bathroom counter and relieved himself, his bladder finally unclenching.

As he stood there in front of the toilet, the images from what he’d seen earlier today crept back into his mind.

He had gone to Howard’s house that morning to protect Howard, his wife, and his daughters—a personal favor for Vincent. With everything that had been happening in the last week, Vincent wanted to make sure his brother was protected. Vincent’s parents had died years ago and his sister was already with him at his mansion. His only family left that he wanted personally protected was his brother Howard, who had refused Vincent’s invitation to his mansion, choosing to remain at his home in Ashtabula County. Howard worked as an “accountant” for many of Vincent’s businesses, and Vincent adored Howard’s three little girls.

Vincent had tried to get a hold of Howard on the phone late last night, but he wasn’t answering, and that was worrying Vincent even more. So Luke got up early this morning so he could get to Howard’s home before he went anywhere.

Suddenly Luke was there again . . . back at Howard’s house.

When Luke got to Howard’s house, he noticed that Howard’s car was still in the driveway with his wife’s car parked right next to it, and that seemed to be a good sign. They parked their cars in the driveway because the three-car garage was reserved for Howard’s ‘58 Corvette and his Harley Davidson.

Luke rang the doorbell and then knocked on the front door several times, but Howard wasn’t answering. The door had a big Halloween decoration hanging from the top of it, a witch. There were a few pumpkins at the edge of the concrete steps, waiting to be carved into jack-o'-lanterns when Halloween came in a few days. He called Howard’s home number from his cell phone as he waited by the front door. He could even hear the home phone ringing inside the house, but nobody answered. The ringing led to a cheerful voicemail created by Howard’s three girls, screaming and laughing as they instructed the caller to leave a message.

He disconnected the call without leaving a message. He’d already called Howard’s cell phone a few times on the way to his house. No answer from his cell phone, no answer from his house phone. Now he was beginning to worry a little.

Howard lived right on the shores of Lake Erie, his home built on five acres of prime real estate. Luke walked around to the side of the house, heading to the gate that led to the back yard. The gate was unlocked. He pushed it open and stopped at the windows on the way to the back yard to peek inside. The blinds and drapes were all drawn.

A beautiful view of the lake was off to his left. The back yard dropped off to the narrow beach area. Small waves rolled in and out endlessly, lapping at the rocky shoreline.

Luke walked past the large pool to a set of three massive sliding glass doors, the interior of the house hidden by vertical blinds. He ignored the sliding doors and walked over to a set of French doors that led into a dining area, which was right off of the kitchen. He knocked again, peeking in through the window panes of the doors.

Splashes of blood were smeared all over the tiled floor. There were more bloodstains in the kitchen—a lot of bloodstains.

Luke ripped his pistol out of his shoulder holster and smashed a pane of glass out next to the doorhandle. He reached in and unlocked the lock and opened the door.

Because all the drapes and blinds were closed, the house was gloomy. The smell hit him immediately, the unmistakable smell of death, of blood.

“Howard!” Luke yelled.

No answer from Howard.

“Deanna!” he yelled, calling Howard’s wife’s name.

She didn’t answer, either.

Luke knew he might be giving away his position by yelling if someone was still in the house, but he didn’t care. His mind was racing with possibilities: enemies of the family, looters, or just another senseless murder among the hundreds that he’d heard about lately. Or the rippers.

A large family room was off of the kitchen with two overstuffed couches opposite a gigantic flat screen TV mounted to the wall above an entertainment center. There were no signs of violence in that room, no smears of blood or disrupted furniture, and there was nowhere for anyone to hide in there.

He looked back at the kitchen, still standing in the small breakfast nook. Smears of blood and shoe prints were all over the tiled floor in the kitchen. The blood was a shockingly bright red against the white tiles and marble of the kitchen, but there were darker puddles of blood with what looked like small pieces of meat mixed in. Bloody handprints were painted all over the refrigerator door.

“Howard! Deanna!”

Still no answer, just an eerie silence and the overwhelming smell of death hanging heavy in the air.

Luke crept to his left and entered the living room. He saw the first of the bodies sprawled out on the floor—one of Howard’s daughters. As he ventured deeper into the vast living room, he saw two other bodies: another one of Howard’s daughters and Deanna. A wide trail of blood indicated that this daughter’s body had been dragged into the living room from the hallway. He couldn’t tell which daughter was which because of their mutilated faces.

Howard had three young daughters, the youngest was four years old, and the oldest was nine—and now two of those daughters were lying dead on the carpeted floor, the blood so thick and dark on the light-beige carpeting. They were the two youngest daughters, had to be because of their size. Both of them had been butchered. The face of what looked like the youngest girl was mangled like it had been beaten to a pulp, the head misshapen and flattened. The other girl’s head was split right in half like someone had cleaved it with an ax. Half of Deanna’s face was caved in, the one eye she had left stared blankly out at the world in bulging horror; her hair matted with blood was caked to her pale face.

The weapons that had caused the damage were strewn around the room like toys discarded by a child after he’d become bored with them: a bloodstained ax, a handheld hatchet, an aluminum baseball bat, an assortment of kitchen knives.

But there was more. There were pieces of flesh missing from the two children and Howard’s wife, chunks of meat ripped away. The belly of Howard’s wife had been torn open, intestines pulled out and stretched out along the floor.

Luke moved through the living room silently, trying his best to avoid any of the sprays or puddles of blood soaking the carpet. The walls were smeared with blood, splattered with it in other areas. Bloody shoe prints were everywhere, like someone had run back and forth through the house. It looked like the person wore sneakers, size ten, Luke guessed. All the shoe prints looked like they were from one person.

Howard and one of his daughters weren’t here in the living room—they had to be somewhere else in the house.

Luke followed the shoe prints around the corner to the right and back into the kitchen. There was no one in the kitchen, nowhere a person could hide. He studied the floor where the tile from the kitchen met the carpet in this hallway area. This hall led to two small bedrooms that had been turned into a workout area and an office, both free of any blood or signs of violence. The other door led to a laundry room, and another door in that room led out to a three-car garage where Howard kept his Corvette and his Harley. But again, there were no bloody shoe prints or smears of blood anywhere on this side of the home. Luke checked these back rooms anyway, praying he would come across the monster that had done this.

He went back into the living room, following the bloody shoe prints which led to the hallway, the shoe prints disappearing in the wide trail of blood from where the one daughter’s body had been dragged.

Howard and his oldest daughter’s bodies must be back in these bedrooms, but he prayed that somehow they were still alive, that Howard had managed to defend himself and save at least one of his daughters.

Luke moved down a wide hallway area and checked each room along the way, pushing doors open with the muzzle of the silencer on his pistol.

In the second bedroom he found the third daughter. It looked like she had tried to run towards her bedroom window. But she hadn’t made it there. She was face down on the carpet in a pool of blood. She was still wearing her nightgown like the other two girls.

That just left Howard. Luke expected to find Howard dead along with his family, another victim of whoever had murdered all of them; he hadn’t expected Howard to be the murderer just yet.

Howard was in his master bathroom, seated on the toilet, his body and clothes covered with blood, his arms hanging down loosely in his lap where he cradled a butcher knife in his hands. He looked up at Luke with an evil grin. Insanity danced in his eyes. His face was smeared with dark blood, tiny bits of flesh caught in his thick mustache, blood and bits of meat staining his teeth as he smiled.

“You did this?” Luke asked in shock.

“They needed . . . gone . . .” Howard said in stilted words, his voice practically a grunt of effort. He spoke slowly, scrunching his bloody face in concentration, like he was confused and struggling to find the right words he wanted to use, getting them mixed up.

“You killed your family,” Luke said, his stomach twisting with nausea. “You killed your whole family.”

But Howard hadn’t just killed his family, he had mutilated them. He had chopped them up; he’d beaten them to a pulp with a baseball bat. He’d slashed away at their flesh with kitchen knives and eaten some of those pieces. Tracks from his New Balance sneakers were everywhere, leading right here to his bathroom. Howard must have killed his wife and daughters early in the morning—maybe even waking them up in the middle of the night to kill them. He might have killed his wife first with the bat, then chased his children down one by one as they ran, chopping them down with one terrible blow. And then he’d gone back to mutilate each one of them. He had gone back to eat parts of them.

Howard stood up from the toilet. The unsettling and insane smile was still on his face. “Darkness . . . coming,” he said, his words practically grunts now. “He and the dark,” Howard barked out. “They are coming. You . . . you see, don’t you?”

Luke didn’t know what Howard was rambling about.

“You . . . see . . . him, don’t you?” Howard yelled.

“Why would you do this?” Luke asked.

Howard took another step forward from the toilet, gripping the butcher knife in his blood-soaked hand, his mouth moving now as he grunted, but no intelligible words came out anymore.

“Stop right there, Howard.”

But Howard wasn’t stopping. He was still smiling, and he was actually giggling now as he raised the butcher knife up, ready to slash and cut.

“Howard!” Luke warned as he took a step back, aiming his gun at him.

Howard rushed Luke with a growl in his throat.

Luke didn’t have a choice; he shot Howard twice in the forehead, his weapon making a spitting sound with each gunshot. Howard dropped like a bag of sand, collapsing down onto the bathroom floor, his eyes still wide open under the two neat little holes in his forehead. The back of his head was a gory mess from the exit wounds.

Luke pushed the memories from his mind as he stood in his bathroom, forcing himself not to think about it anymore. Howard had gone crazy; he had slaughtered his family and then Luke had killed him. End of story. It was over and done with now. Vincent would never listen to any excuse Luke had. Vincent’s men would strip him naked and strap him to the chair in the basement, torturing him for hours, maybe even days, before finally killing him. Luke had seen it before. He needed to get out of Cleveland. He needed to get out of Ohio.

He hurried into his bedroom and took his duffel bag out of the closet. The two extra guns, boxes of ammo, a change of clothes, and his extra pair of shoes were already inside the bag. He added his laptop, his extra throwaway cell phone still in the package, and then his envelopes stuffed with cash and his fake ID that he’d taped underneath the bottom dresser drawer.

There, that was it—his entire life was packed into the duffel bag now.

He decided to leave his house the same way he’d come in, through the side door in the garage. He would also go back to his car the same way, through his neighbors’ back yards.

A few minutes later he was back out in the chilly night air, dressed in dark clothes and a dark hoodie, his gun and silencer jammed down into the shoulder holster underneath his jacket. He waited in his neighbor’s back yard for a moment, looking out at the street for any sign of Jacob, but he didn’t see him.

Feeling a little better, Luke hurried to the back of his neighbor’s house, and then he kept going through more back yards until he was closer to his car. He ran down a narrow side yard between two homes and saw his car parked right where he had left it.

He was going to make it.

He was almost to the back of his car when he heard a cold voice from the dark. “Luke, stop right there.”

CHAPTER 3

Luke stood very still. He held his duffel bag by the strap. His gun was still tucked into his shoulder holster, the handle within easy reach. He was a few feet away from the sidewalk and his car was only a few steps beyond that.

Jacob’s voice had come from somewhere behind him. Maybe ten or twenty feet away, Luke guessed. Jacob’s voice had been steady and confident, the voice of a man who knew he had the upper hand.

“Is that your go-bag?” Jacob asked Luke from somewhere behind him. It almost sounded like Jacob’s voice had come from a slightly different direction, but not any closer yet. Jacob wasn’t approaching just yet; he was waiting to see what Luke would do.

Luke didn’t answer Jacob’s question—the answer was already kind of obvious so he didn’t bother wasting his breath. He sized up the situation, going through his options in a nanosecond. One option: he could drop his duffel bag and bolt for his car.

And then Jacob would shoot him before he had even made it two steps.

But if Jacob wanted to kill him, then he would have already shot him—he wouldn’t have even bothered to speak to him. Jacob could have killed him already and Luke wouldn’t have ever seen it coming.

Jacob had obviously been instructed by Vincent not to shoot him yet; he’d been instructed to bring him back unharmed and in one piece, so he could be harmed later. If that was the case, then Luke still had a chance.

“You got some cash in that bag?” Jacob asked in a conversational voice.

“Some,” Luke answered without turning around or moving a muscle. He stared at his car parked in front of him—his freedom, and it was only a few steps away. He was sure that on any other night if his neighbors had looked out their windows and seen Jacob holding a gun on him, they would have called the cops. But this was the night that the world was falling apart and people were probably seeing this kind of violence at their local supermarkets, banks, and gas stations. No one was going to get involved tonight. There would be no distractions for Luke to take advantage of.

“I need you to listen to me very carefully,” Jacob said, and now he sounded like he was a few steps closer even though Luke hadn’t heard him move.

Luke just waited.

“I want you to walk towards your car. I want you to open the back door on the passenger side and throw your go-bag in the back on the floorboard. Is that understood?”

Luke just stood there.

“Here’s what I don’t want you to do. I don’t want you to turn around and look at me. I don’t want you to reach for your gun that’s in your shoulder holster. Is all of this understood? Nod if you understand me.”

Luke nodded slightly.

“Okay. Let’s begin. Walk to your car and throw your bag in the back. And after you’ve done that, I want you to wait there for further instructions. Is everything clear so far?”

Again, Luke nodded.

“Go.”

Luke walked the eight steps down the sidewalk to the rear of his car, his black hiking boots barely making a sound on the concrete. He opened the back door on the passenger side and threw his duffel bag into the car, dropping it down on the floorboards as instructed. He waited by the back of his car with the door still open.

“Good, Luke,” Jacob purred from somewhere behind him. “You’re doing really well so far. You’ve always been so good at following orders.”

Luke just waited.

“Okay. Now I want you to pull that pistol out of your holster with your left hand. Just two fingers. I want you to throw your weapon on top of your duffel bag.”

Luke moved his left hand to the handle of his pistol.

“Slowly,” Jacob warned. “Even slower.”

Luke tugged his gun out of his holster, using only two fingers, then he tossed it into the back of his car. The weapon bounced off of his duffel bag and fell onto the floorboard with a thunk.

“Okay, Luke. Now close the back door.”

Luke closed it.

“Good. Now walk around the rear of your car to the other back door and open that one up.”

Luke walked around his car and opened up the back door on the driver’s side, staring down the dark street.

“Okay. Leave that door open and get your car keys out of your pocket.”

Luke pulled his keys out and held them in his hand in plain view.

“Now step to the driver’s door and open it. Sit down inside, but don’t shut the door yet. Do everything nice and slow.”

Jacob sounded so much closer now, probably right at the back of the car. It was possible that Jacob didn’t even have his gun out, not wanting to arouse suspicion from anyone looking out their windows, but Luke didn’t want to take that chance. He opened up his driver’s door and sat down inside.

He heard Jacob sitting down in the back seat and shutting his door.

“Shut your door, Luke.”

As soon as Luke shut his door, he felt the barrel of Jacob’s gun shoved against the back of his neck. “Is this where you’re going to do it?” Luke asked in a calm voice.

“No,” Jacob answered. “Vincent wants to see you. You’re going to drive to Vincent’s house and see him like you were told to do.”

“I didn’t kill Howard’s family. I killed Howard, but I had to. He’s the one who killed his family.”

“I don’t care. That’s none of my business. Vincent asked me to bring you to him, and that’s what I’m doing.”

Luke sighed.

“Start the car, Luke. Drive and don’t turn around. Don’t make any sudden movements or reach for anything. Put your seatbelt on.”

Luke put his seatbelt on and started his car. He shifted into drive and drove towards the stop sign. He stopped and looked both ways, trying his best to get a glimpse of Jacob in the back seat, but Jacob was directly behind him and scrunched down a little, out of sight of the rearview mirror.

After turning left, Luke drove past the dark homes. Partiers were still out on their front lawns, dancing around bonfires. Some of the partiers shouted at them as they drove by; some shouts were drunken revelry, and some were threats. One of the shadowy figures threw a beer bottle at Luke’s car—it crashed against the rear fender.

Jacob seemed unfazed by all the chaos around them. He sat in the back seat in silence, but at least he had removed the barrel of his gun from the back of Luke’s neck. Luke was sure that the assassin’s gun was still aimed at him.

“I know Vincent wants to blame me for this,” Luke said as he drove slowly down the streets. He had to maneuver around a car that looked like it had been abandoned in the middle of the road, its headlights still on and the driver’s door wide open.

Jacob didn’t respond—Luke couldn’t even hear the man breathing.

“Howard’s family was dead when I got there. They were slaughtered. Mutilated. Howard came at me like an animal, talking crazy shit. He’d been eating parts of Deanna and the girls.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I don’t care.”

Luke drove past the abandoned car and kept driving down the street. He kept both hands on the steering wheel.

“Fucking thing,” Jacob muttered.

Luke heard the rustling of fabric in the back seat as Jacob moved around.

“Cell phones aren’t working now,” Luke told him.

Jacob didn’t comment.

“Nothing’s working,” Luke said. “Electricity’s out everywhere. Internet. Phones.”

Jacob still didn’t say anything.

Luke saw something blocking the road up ahead, and he slowed his car down as he got closer. When he was ten yards away, he saw that the blockage was two vehicles in the middle of the road, tipped over on their sides, creating a barrier in the middle of the road.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.

“Two cars are turned over,” Luke said as he brought his car to a stop twenty feet away from the overturned cars, his headlights shining on the underside of both vehicles that were nose to nose.

Five men armed with shotguns and rifles ran out from behind the barricade of vehicles. The men were dressed in camouflage and dark clothing. They had rags and bandanas tied around their faces, belts of ammo around their waists. One man aimed his shotgun at Luke’s car.

“What the fuck?” Jacob whispered.

Luke slammed the shifter into reverse and stomped on the gas pedal. The tires screeched in the night air as his car sped backwards down the street. Luke had no choice but to turn around so that he could see what he was doing.

Shots rang out, some of the buckshot pelting the grill and the windshield of Luke’s car.

“Crazy fucking hillbillies,” Jacob said, but his gun was still aimed right at Luke.

Luke had a few seconds to see exactly where Jacob was sitting and where his own gun and duffle bag were.

More rifle shots echoed in the air. One bullet smashed through the passenger side of the windshield, making a neat little hole in the glass with a cobweb of cracks radiating from it. The bullet whizzed through the car and exploded through the rear window, shattering it.

Jacob ducked down as bits of glass rained down, and for just a moment the aim of Jacob’s weapon was off just a little.

Maybe this is my chance.

But, as if Jacob had read his mind, he aimed his gun right back at Luke while still lying down on his side in the back seat. “Get us the fuck out of here!”

“Hold on,” Luke said. He stomped down on the brake pedal and the car spun around in the middle of the road, the tires yelping. He shifted into drive as the car was still spinning and then he jammed the gas pedal down. He raced to the stop sign and took a left, barely slowing down as he took the turn, the back end of his car sliding out of control for just a second.

The five masked men chased them down the street for half a block before giving up.

Luke sped down the street, his headlights the only lights in the darkness. He thought about turning off the headlights in case the masked men decided to run through the back yards and cut them off, but he decided against it—there were too many abandoned cars in the road, along with other debris.

“The world is ending,” Luke said as he drove.

“Thanks for your opinion. Just get us to Vincent’s house.”

Luke slammed on the brakes, his car skidding to a stop. An old woman stood in the middle of the street, illuminated in the glare of his headlights. Luke knew she didn’t have any weapons because she was completely naked. She looked towards the car like she’d just noticed them, her stare blank, her mouth smeared with blood. She looked confused, and her mouth worked like she was trying to say something but had forgotten how to pronounce the words.

“. . . the fuck?” Jacob said. “What are you stopping for?”

“There’s a woman in the road.”

“Fuck her! Run her over!”

Luke drove again, passing by the woman who followed them with her eyes, still muttering something to herself.

“What the hell’s wrong with her?” Jacob asked.

“She’s one of the crazy people,” Luke said. “Haven’t you been listening to the news? There’s some kind of virus that’s turning people into animals. They call them rippers.”

“I don’t believe that shit. News is all fake these days.”

“I think that’s what happened to Howard. I think he got infected with that virus that’s going around. He went crazy and killed his family.”

“That’s all bullshit,” Jacob said.

Luke turned on the radio, pressing the buttons for the stations he had programmed, hoping to catch a news report to convince Jacob, but there was nothing but silence and emergency signals.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jacob yelled. “Did I say you could turn on the radio?”

“You hear anything on the radio?” Luke asked as he switched through the stations. “There’s nothing there. All communications have been shut off. There’s something bad happening. The smart thing is to get out of here before we all get infected.”

“Just shut up and drive.”

“It’s a total blackout,” Luke said. “Everything’s collapsing, people are going crazy, and the only thing you’re worried about is following Vincent’s orders. I think we’re way past that now.”

“Just get us to Vincent’s place,” Jacob said. “We can all hole up there. Vincent will know what to do.”

Yeah, but I’ll be dead before sunrise.

“You should get out of Cleveland,” Luke said. “Get out of Ohio.”

Just then the interior of Luke’s car lit up with blue and red flashing lights.

“What the hell?” Jacob said, turning around in the back seat to look out the shattered rear window.

“It’s the cops,” Luke said.

CHAPTER 4

“Turn the fuck back around,” Jacob said, aiming his gun right at Luke.

Luke turned around and watched the rearview mirror as the cop car sped up behind him. It looked like there was another cop car right behind the first one.

“What the hell?” Jacob said. He kept low, just poking his head up and staring out through the smashed-out rear window. “What the hell is this shit?”

“Hold on,” Luke said and slammed on the brakes. The car nearly slid to a stop as he turned the steering wheel at the same time, the rear end sliding as he took the turn too quickly onto a side street, smoke drifting up into the night air behind them, a red wraith glowing in the brake lights.

The two cop cars followed them down the side street.

A male voice on a megaphone called out from the cop car right behind them. “Pull your vehicle over!”

Jacob sat up a little straighter in the back seat and jabbed the barrel of his pistol at Luke’s shoulder. “Fucking lose them!”

“I’m trying.”

Sirens wailed, whooping in the night air. The red and blue flashing lights bounced back at them from the dark houses they were speeding past at nearly fifty miles an hour. If someone were to wander into the street right now, there was no way Luke would be able to avoid hitting them.

“This is your last warning!” the male voice shouted from the megaphone in the cop car. “Pull your vehicle over NOW!”

Luke saw another side street coming up at the farthest reach of his headlight beams. He sped towards it, his skin crawling as he waited for the barrage of gunfire to begin from the cops. The side street was coming up fast, and at the last second Luke slammed on the brakes and skidded into the turn, nearly colliding with another car that was abandoned close to the intersection.

Jacob struggled to hold on in the back seat, but he tumbled over to the other side of the car in the whiplash turn.

Luke thought that maybe these cops tailing them might be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity for him to get away from Jacob somehow; he just needed to wait for the right moment.

Gunshots popped from behind them, peppering the back of Luke’s car. Two of the bullets whizzed right through the interior of the car and put two more holes in the windshield, not too far away from the bullet hole left by the rifle-toting madmen they had run into earlier.

Luke scrunched down as low as he could in his seat, but his driver’s seat would offer no protection if a bullet struck it. He was on edge, just waiting for the thud of a bullet that he was sure he would feel before he even heard the shot. He kept his foot stomped down on the gas pedal, the motor roaring.

And then he spotted something down the street—perhaps a way out of this.

“They’re shooting at us!” Jacob screamed from the back. “They can’t do that! Cops aren’t allowed to just . . . just fucking shoot at us!”

“I think things have changed,” Luke muttered, but he had a feeling that Jacob wasn’t really listening to him.

Another few shots rang out from the cop cars behind them. A bullet tore off the driver’s side mirror, bits of plastic and glass flying away into the darkness. Luke shifted away from the door, feeling more vulnerable than ever. Sooner or later a bullet was going to rip into his back. But then again, maybe Jacob’s body would stop the bullet for him—that would be one good thing about Jacob being back there.

He got closer to what he had spotted a few seconds earlier—a large work van parked in a driveway on the left side of the street, the rear of the van almost poking out into the street.

Luke began veering slightly to the left as he kept his speed constant down the road, angling towards the driveway with the van. When he was only one house away from the driveway with the van, he slammed on his brakes and turned the steering wheel with all of his strength. The back of his car fishtailed, but he kept the path of the speeding car pointed right at the van. His car jumped the curb of the sidewalk and then slid across the front yard, slamming right into the side of the van with a screeching of rubber on concrete and then a sickening crunch of metal on metal as glass shattered like an explosion.

Jacob had kept his attention on the cops behind them, not expecting the crash. He slammed into the rear passenger door on impact, his head smacking the window and shattering it.

Luke sat for a second in the driver’s seat, a little more stunned than he had expected from the crash. But at least he’d been ready for it. Nothing seemed to be broken, and there was no excruciating pain anywhere. He flexed his fingers and moved his legs. There was no pain in his abdomen. He thought his mouth or nose might’ve been bleeding, he could feel wetness there—probably from the impact with the airbag. His body felt okay, probably running on adrenaline right now—but his mind felt fuzzy and he needed to get his thinking straight if he was going to do this; he probably only had a few seconds if he was going to get away.

He turned around in the driver’s seat and saw that Jacob’s gun was on the seat beside his crumpled-up body, lost from his grip in the crash. Jacob was woozier than he was, blood pouring out of multiple lacerations in his scalp and face, half of his face and the front of his shirt covered in blood. His eyes were fluttering like he was fighting to regain consciousness.

Luke saw his own gun on top of his duffel bag—he grabbed his duffel bag and gun and then turned back around to leave the car.

“Hey,” Jacob muttered as he opened his eyes again.

Luke ignored him as he opened the driver’s door, praying for a second that it hadn’t jammed shut in the crash. It opened easily.

“Hey,” Jacob said, his voice louder now, his grogginess beginning to fade. “Hey, whatthefuckareyoudoing?” he slurred.

Luke was out of the car in a second, running in a crouch as he darted in front of the work van with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, his gun tucked back into his shoulder holster. The bag was cumbersome and heavy, but he didn’t want to toss it unless he absolutely had to. Maybe if he could catch a breather a few blocks away, he’d go through it and ditch anything that he didn’t absolutely need—the laptop computer, his cell phone, and maybe the extra pair of shoes came to mind right away.

“Hey!” Jacob called from the wrecked car. “Hey, don’t leave me here!”

Luke was at the other side of the work van. He ran to the car parked in front of the van, using it as cover from the cops as he made his way to the house.

The two cop cars screeched to a halt in the street, the sirens still whooping and the lights still flashing. “Stay inside your vehicle!” the voice on the megaphone ordered.

Luke was at the front of the third car in the driveway. He spotted a chain-link fence beginning at the side yard. He didn’t even think about it, he darted from the car to the corner of the house, tossed his duffel bag over the chain-link fence and then hopped it, not even wasting time with the gate. There could be a dog back here, but he didn’t hear one barking, and right now he figured the cops were more dangerous than a dog protecting its territory.

A few seconds later he was at the other end of the back yard, ready to hop that fence into the neighbor’s yard. He heard the sound of gunfire from the front of the house. He was sure the cops had gotten Jacob. He didn’t feel bad about it. Good riddance. He was sure that what Vincent, Jacob, and the boys had planned for him tonight wasn’t too pleasant.

Luke ran through the next back yard, and then through several other yards before running out onto the street, and then across it, and then into another back yard. He wanted to put as much distance between him and the cops as he could. He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he was pretty sure he was heading west. But he wanted to veer to the south more and stay away from downtown Cleveland. He was trying to work from memory right now, and he really wished he had thought to bring a map along in his go-bag, but he had always figured he would just use his phone. His phone still worked, but the internet connection had been dead for a while.

He would just keep heading south, down to the next county where the population wasn’t so dense, where there wouldn’t be so many cops and soldiers, and where there wouldn’t be so many rippers.

And then what?

He wasn’t sure right now. He would worry about that later . . . if he lived that long.

CHAPTER 5

Luke kept to the side streets as the neighborhood turned into downtown Parma. Businesses, restaurants, and apartment buildings lined the dark streets. He tried to stay in the deeper shadows that the buildings created, avoiding anyone he saw. When he came to the corner of one street, he froze, waiting between a stand of trees and the wall of a building, hidden in the darkness. He lowered his duffel bag to the ground and pulled his pistol out from his shoulder holster.

He heard voices—male voices. His first thought was a patrol of soldiers or cops, but then he saw them, and they weren’t cops. There were five men in the group, all of them young and wearing hoodies and dark clothing. They all carried weapons. One of them carried a baseball bat, one carried a machete, and the other three carried guns: a rifle and two handguns.

Luke watched them from the trees as they approached. He wasn’t worried about a gunfight with the men; he would win that fight against ninety-nine percent of the people in the world. Even three of them wouldn’t be much of a match for him. But he didn’t want a gunfight. He wanted to stay low and out-of-sight right now.

The men walked by, never even looking his way. They seemed to be some kind of quickly formed neighborhood patrol. Luke was sure the men were either high or drunk, or both.

After the men were gone, Luke made himself wait a few more moments, looking around. A helicopter flew right over top of the buildings, the aircraft was mostly dark, but it shined a spotlight down at the buildings as it roared by. There were a few other helicopters and airplanes in the distance, towards downtown Cleveland. Normally there would have been a glow at night from the lights of the city against the night sky, but right now there was nothing but darkness in every direction.

There were other sounds in the distance—a voice shouting through a megaphone, the man too far away from Luke to make out the words. It might even be the same cops that had chased him and Jacob. There was a scattering of gunfire from an automatic weapon. Luke thought maybe the cops or soldiers were shooting at people, but then he figured it could just as easily be some redneck who had amassed an arsenal, praying for a day like this so he could use his weapons.

Luke left the stand of trees and hurried to the corner of the next building. He looked down the dark street, listening for sounds, looking for any movement. He hurried down the sidewalk, keeping close to the front of the buildings. He crossed the street, still working his way west and south.

There was a large vacant lot between the buildings that was scattered with brush and weeds and trash. A shopping cart was tipped over, the sides of it crushed in, one of the wheels gone. There were old chairs and cinder blocks around a pit where someone had lit a fire recently. He hurried through the lot, keeping close to the wall of the brick building.

When he got closer to the next street, Luke stopped for a moment and waited, listening again for any noises in the darkness. He still had his gun in his hand, his duffel bag over his shoulder. It was time to rest for a moment, and he stood with his back to the wall. He was tired and hungry. It had been a while since he had eaten anything. But his thirst was worse than his hunger right now; he wished he would have thrown a couple of bottles of water into his go-bag.

It was getting colder by the hour. He had on a dark hoodie sweatshirt that he’d left his house in (which helped him blend in with so many of the other men prowling the streets right now), and that kept him somewhat warm. He wore a T-shirt underneath his hoodie and a pair of black jeans, thick socks, and his black hiking boots, which he always wore because they provided the comfort of sneakers but the durability of work boots. A knit hat on his head and the thin black leather gloves on his hands was the extent of his cold weather clothing. But at least all of his clothes were dark, and even his duffel bag was black.

As he rested by the brick wall, he heard a noise—someone shouting.

No, it was more like a man screaming in terror.

Luke hurried down to the corner of the building, closer to the street, and peeked around the corner. Four men chased a man down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The rippers tackled the running man, on him in seconds like a pack of wild dogs. They clawed at the man, bit at him. The man tried to fight back, but he was no match for the four of them.

Luke gripped his gun even harder, but he didn’t aim it at the men. He knew he could shoot those four men right now within seconds, hitting each one of them from this distance easily. He could even kill the screaming man on the ground and put him out of his misery. But he didn’t do it. He needed to conserve the bullets he had; he needed to save them for when he really needed them. He might get backed into a corner soon.

Ripping sounds came from across the street—the rippers were tearing the man’s clothing away. One of them had his face buried in the man’s abdomen, trying to chew at it. Another one of them was chewing on an arm of the man, tearing away at the flesh, the blood dribbling out and down his face and the front of his shirt.

Luke needed to move. If those rippers saw him, they would charge him and he would have no choice but to shoot them and use four of the bullets in his gun. He went back the way he had come, crossing the vacant lot to the next set of buildings. An alleyway divided the two biggest buildings, and he hesitated for just a moment, not sure if he should venture down the alley. Who knew how many rippers might be waiting in there? Or at the other end.

But he wanted to keep heading south.

The alley was wide, more like a side street. He hurried down the path, keeping close to the wall of the one building. He passed large dumpsters and piles of garbage bags. Something darted in front of him and Luke froze, aiming his weapon at the blur of movement—but then he realized it was a cat.

He continued down the alley. He saw the street that the alley opened up to ahead, the moonlight brighter out there on the street. A moment later he ducked out of the alley and onto the street. He looked up and down the street; there were a lot of storefronts on the street level, with some apartments and offices above them. Many of the storefront windows and glass doors had been shattered. Garbage was strewn along the sidewalks and out into the street.

About half a block down Luke spotted a neighborhood drug store. Maybe there would be some food and drinks in there. He had to try. If he could just find a bottle of water . . .

Luke took a deep breath. He looked around one more time, listening for any sounds, and then he darted out onto the sidewalk, hurrying down to the smashed plate-glass window of the drug store. Jagged pieces of glass stuck up all around the edges of the large metal window frame like the teeth of a monster’s mouth—a monster waiting for Luke to step inside.

He was through the shattered window in a flash, careful to avoid any of the pieces of glass sticking up from the bottom of the window frame. He darted over to the inside wall at the edge of the window so he could hide in the shadows yet still see out through the glassless window.

There was a noise out there in the street, a man shouting.

Luke set his duffel bag down on the floor that was littered with broken bits of glass and trash. He made himself wait there beside the open window for a moment. He knew someone could be hiding in this store already, so he wanted to be ready for that, alert for any sounds deeper in the darkness of the store, but he needed to focus his attention first on the man shouting in the street.

It could be one of the rippers. And if there was one of them, then there could be more of them.

The man in the street was getting closer to the store, and Luke could make out what he was saying now. He wasn’t screaming for help, he wasn’t shouting gibberish like some of the rippers did. No, his words were clear now, echoing throughout the night.

“Repent, you sinners!” the man shouted from what sounded like half a block away. “Repent! For our Lord hath given His judgment unto us! We are retched sinners, and we have displeased our Lord!”

Luke didn’t move a muscle. He could see the sidewalk outside the window from this vantage point. He could see the shards of broken glass littering the floor just inside the window and the sidewalk outside of it, the pieces of glass glittered in the moonlight that shined its bluish-white light down on this now cold and dark world. He could also see part of the street and the line of buildings across that street from where he stood.

A moment later the man was in Luke’s sight. He walked right down the middle of the street, a slow and purposeful walk. The man was old, at least in his sixties, maybe even early seventies. He had a long gray beard and long hair that blew around in the chilly night breeze. He wore a white flowing robe that seemed almost luminous in the moonlight. He only wore sandals on his feet and they made a shuffling sound as he walked. The man reminded Luke of an old wizard from a fantasy movie, or maybe a prophet from the Bible.

“The End Times are upon us!” the prophet shouted. “We had our chance. We had our chance to change, to come together as one, to love each other. But now that time has passed. It’s too late now. This is your last chance to get right with the Lord before the Evil One comes.”

The Evil One? Did that old man mean the devil?

Luke still had his gun in his hand, his finger on the trigger guard. But he didn’t aim it at the man. The prophet seemed harmless enough. Crazy? Most likely, but Luke didn’t really think the man was a ripper.

Maybe not yet. But maybe this was how the disease started, a downward spiral into madness before the virus took full effect. Luke wondered again if he might be infected. He wondered if everyone was infected now, everyone exposed to whatever plague filled the air. But what could he do about it now?

Another movement in the moonlit street caught Luke’s attention. A lone man wearing a dark hoodie was slinking up the street from the other direction towards the prophet. The man was average height and slim, his clothes baggy on him. It was difficult to tell the man’s age, difficult to tell much about him because of the blood and gore smeared all over his face. The man was a ripper.

The ripper crept towards the prophet, moving like a jungle cat stalking its prey.

Either the prophet didn’t seem to notice or care that the ripper was approaching him. The prophet continued preaching his message: “The End Times are here! Repent now! Save yourself while you still have time!”

Who’s going to save you, prophet? Luke thought. Where’s your God now as certain death is coming right for you?

The prophet stopped walking. He froze. He had stopped shouting. It was like he had finally spotted the man approaching him, like he had finally noticed the blood all over the man’s face and stained on his hands and clothes.

Luke aimed his gun at the ripper. He didn’t want to use his bullets, and he didn’t want to take a chance on giving his position away, even if he was using a silencer. But he wasn’t sure if he could watch another person be eaten alive.

The prophet still hadn’t moved. He didn’t look scared—he wasn’t putting his hands out and warding off the ripper. He wasn’t crying or begging, or turning to run. He just stood there in the street. Maybe the prophet was in shock. Maybe he was too crazy to even realize the danger he was in. Or maybe he saw his death coming, his path to God, and he was welcoming it with open arms.

Luke thought about telling the old man to run, but again he thought about how it would give away his position. The ripper would charge the store and Luke would have to shoot him anyway.

Maybe God was helping the prophet out, Luke thought. Maybe, in a strange way, God’s hand was working through Luke’s hand to save the old man. Maybe there was something to the old man’s message after all.

Nah, Luke thought. It’s all random. No God . . . nothing but dumb luck.

The ripper ran straight at the prophet.

Luke tracked the ripper with his gun, his finger beginning to squeeze the trigger.

There was a sound from down the street from behind the prophet, the sound of a powerful vehicle approaching quickly. The street was awash in bright light, but the prophet hadn’t turned around to see who was approaching, and the ripper was still running straight towards him.

A second later an armored military truck roared into view with a soldier perched in a turret at the top of it. He had a rifle in his hands aimed at the approaching ripper. One shot from the rifle rocked the ripper’s head backwards as if the Hand of God Himself had smacked the ripper down. The back of the ripper’s head exploded from the impact of the bullet tunneling through his head, bits of brains and slivers of skull exploding out among the mist of blood, all of it captured in the bright headlights of the military vehicle. The ripper collapsed, splayed out and lifeless on the street, steam rising up from his ruined head into the night air.

The military vehicle kept on going right past the prophet. The soldier turned in his turret, aiming his rifle at the old man as they drove on by. Just like when the ripper had been approaching, the old man stood his ground, staring at the soldier like he was waiting for the bullet.

But the soldier never took the shot. The vehicle sped down the street and out of Luke’s view.

Everything was quiet for a long moment. Luke watched the prophet, realizing that he still had his gun aimed in the old man’s direction, his finger still on the trigger. Gunshots echoed from another street—the soldier shooting at other rippers, Luke guessed.

A moment later the prophet took a step forward, and then another, his sandals scuffing on the street. He raised his stick-thin arms in the air, the sleeves of his robe slipping down to his elbows, and he began shouting again as if nothing had just happened. “Repent, all ye sinners! Repent, for the End Times are upon us! Ye have displeased our Lord. The Lord has given us many chances to come together in peace, but it is too late now . . . the End Times are upon us! Repent, ye sinners! Repent!”

Luke relaxed as he watched the prophet walk out of the view of his shattered window. He could still hear the prophet, but the old man’s words were almost indecipherable now. Luke imagined that the prophet would walk to the next street and probably be attacked by another ripper. Or maybe the rippers would get him on the street after that.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe the old man would just keep on walking and preaching his message.

Luke turned his attention to the interior of the store. It wasn’t a huge place, but he could only see a few feet into the gloom before everything turned to darkness. There were food wrappers, trash, canned goods, liquids, and glass all over the floor in the splash of moonlight. He could just make out the aisles between the shelves that had been practically wiped clean.

His stomach rumbled just at the sight of the food wrappers and packaging all over the floor, but it looked like the place had been picked over pretty good now. Still, he hoped to find something to eat. He needed calories to keep going, especially in this cold weather.

As Luke got closer to the shelves towards the rear of the store, he saw that two of them had been knocked over into each other, creating a teepee over a wall of darkness. Maybe there were some containers of food or bottles of water down in that darkness underneath the leaning shelves, something the scavengers or rippers had overlooked.

Luke felt like he was making too much noise with his footsteps, but he couldn’t help it, his hiking boots crunched over the crackling garbage, plastic wrappers, and bits of glass—it was impossible to avoid all of it.

He was about to push one of the shelves upright so he could see what was hidden underneath it, and that’s when he heard the noise coming from down there in the darkness. There was something hiding in that darkness, something growling at him.

CHAPTER 6

Luke froze. His body was tense as he listened to the noise coming from underneath the stacks of shelves leaning against each other. Someone was moving around down there underneath those shelves.

He stepped back, aiming his gun at the dark space between the shelves, at the triangle of darkness.

The movement stopped.

“Come on out,” Luke said. “I’ve got a gun aimed at you.”

He heard a whimpering sound from the darkness, but not the whimpering of a person. It was a dog . . . it had to be.

“It’s okay,” Luke said.

The dog hidden in the darkness whined again.

“It’s okay,” Luke said again, lowering his gun. “Come on out. It’s okay.”

The dog’s face emerged from the darkness. It was a medium-sized dog, light color. It looked kind of like a Labrador to Luke, but maybe a mutt. Its coat was tan, its big brown eyes stared up at Luke as it whimpered again.

“It’s okay,” Luke whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The dog shot out from the darkness at Luke, crouching down in submission, its tail wagging.

Luke reached out to pet the dog, but it slinked back for a moment, whining some more.

“Come on,” Luke whispered. “It’s okay.”

The dog came closer and let Luke pet it. As soon as Luke petted the dog, it was jumping on him, the tail wagging furiously now.

Luke saw that the dog was a girl, and that she had a collar with a tag around her neck. She was licking at him, still whining.

“It’s okay,” Luke whispered “It’s okay, girl. Everything’s okay.”

Luke stuffed his gun into his holster and then stripped his gloves off, stuffing them down into his pockets. He kneeled down to check the tag on the dog’s collar. He hoped the dog wasn’t going to start barking with excitement, but it almost seemed like the dog understood the danger of making too much noise right now.

“Okay, girl. Let me see your collar.”

The dog sat down obediently and Luke checked the tag, turning it a little in his fingers so he could read the words etched into the metal in the moonlight. Most of the words were too small to read in the dark, but he read the largest word: SANDY.

“Sandy,” Luke whispered. “Is that your name?”

Sandy’s tail thumped against the garbage on the floor.

“You hungry, Sandy?” Luke asked.

The dog whined a little, her body trembling. She stared at Luke with big brown eyes that looked like dark liquid pools reflecting the moonlight.

“No promises,” Luke said as he stood back up. “But let’s see what we can find.”

Luke went back to the tipped-over shelves that Sandy had been hiding under and righted both of them back up with some effort. Sandy stayed back a few feet, just watching him.

It was time to scrounge.

Luke had a penlight in his pants pocket and he turned it on, keeping his other hand cupped over the front of it to cut down on the light so it wouldn’t be noticeable from the street. He panned the light beam over more debris and garbage. He crouched down, inspecting all of it more closely. He found three unopened cans of beer, a can of sardines, and two plastic bottles of water. He also found two bags of potato chips and a small bag of beef jerky.

After finding a cloth bag on the floor with the store’s logo on it, Luke set the cans of beer and bottles of water inside, along with the few items of food he had found. He went back to his original spot near the window where he could stay hidden from the street yet still see outside. He turned a plastic crate over and sat down on it.

Sandy was right beside him, still quiet, but still wagging her tail constantly, watching his every move.

“I know you’re hungry,” Luke whispered. “But we didn’t score too much. Do you like potato chips?”

He swore he saw Sandy nod. She licked her chops, already drooling. Luke opened the bag and ate a few of them, and then he tore the other bag open down the side and set it down on the floor for Sandy. She munched on the chips, chewing them up quickly and swallowing them down. And then she licked the bag, pushing it through the garbage on the floor a little as she did so.

The salt felt good on Luke’s tongue, and he knew he needed the salt and the calories. He opened a bottle of water and drank half of it down. Then he carefully poured some water into the potato chip bag for Sandy, and she lapped it up.

He gave Sandy pieces of the beef jerky so he could eat the can of sardines, spooning them out with a small piece of thick cardboard. After they were finished with their meal, he tucked the can of beer under his hoodie so he could pop the top without making too much noise. He sipped the beer and looked at Sandy. “You can’t have this.”

Sandy just stared at him.

“Where are your owners?” he whispered to Sandy.

She cocked her head as if listening to him.

Sandy’s owners were probably dead. Or maybe they had turned into rippers. Sandy was on her own, like so many others now.

Luke felt a little better. He was still hungry, but the meager amount of food had helped. But at least the water and now the beer had helped with his thirst. He stowed the other bottle of water in his duffel bag along with the other two cans of beer. He knew beer wasn’t the best thing to drink because it could dehydrate him, but it was better than nothing right now until he could find more water. While putting the drinks into his bag, he thought about emptying out the laptop and the extra cell phone from his bag to lighten the load. But he decided not to do that right now. What if the electricity came back on? What if somehow order was restored? He didn’t want his laptop out here among the trash where someone could find it. He would get rid of it later.

Right now he needed to assess the situation. He was tired, already feeling groggy now that he’d had some time to rest, and the can of beer wasn’t helping too much. But he wasn’t safe here. He needed to find somewhere else to crash, a place where he could sleep for a few hours, somewhere where he could protect himself better.

“We need to go,” Luke told Sandy.

Sandy laid down right beside him, snuggling up close to him. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing heavily, but Luke didn’t think she was sleeping.

A dog. What was he supposed to do with a dog? It wasn’t like Sandy was an attack dog, either. She would be more of a hindrance than a help, but so far she had been quiet, and he just couldn’t turn his back on her.

He was going to have to find a house to sleep in for a few hours, some abandoned place where he could hole up for a while. As he rested, he had a chance to wonder what had happened to the world. How had everything turned to shit like this in a few days? He knew the economy had been collapsing for weeks, and he’d heard about the banks closing earlier in the morning, people panicking. He’d heard about the random acts of violence all over the country, all over the world, and the rumors of some kind of plague sweeping the Earth. He wondered again if he was infected. He wondered if he should search for a gas mask and gloves. But what was he supposed to do—run around in a hazmat suit?

No, if he was infected, then there wasn’t much he could do about it now. Maybe if the signs started showing, if his mind began scrambling, he could put a bullet in his head rather than becoming one of those ripper things. But would he be in control of his actions at that point?

He didn’t want to think about it. Not being in control of himself sent waves of panic through him. Not too much scared Luke, but that did—the thought of some dreaded disease or madness turning him into someone else . . . something else.

Instead, he focused on the tasks at hand. He didn’t know what time it was; he didn’t wear a watch, usually he used his cell phone to tell the time, but he guessed it was about one or two o’clock. It would be dark for a few more hours, and he might as well use the cover of dark to look for somewhere to sleep for a little while.

He got up and Sandy jumped to her feet immediately. Luke picked up his duffel bag and looped it over his shoulder. He walked past the shattered windows to the shattered glass doors. They opened easily, and he stepped out onto the street. He thought about telling Sandy to stay, but she followed him outside, jumping through the shattered window and out onto the sidewalk. She landed right on the bits of glass, but the crushed glass didn’t seem to bother her paws. She ran right up to him, wagging her tail—she wasn’t going to be left behind.

Luke looked up and down the street. “You can come,” he whispered, “but the first time you bark, I’m ditching you.”

They walked down the street in the direction the prophet had walked, and the same direction the military vehicle had gone. Luke would be able to hear the trucks coming. Helicopters were still flying around, some of them with searchlights beaming down on the earth, but most of the aircraft were more to the north, towards Cleveland in the distance. Two jet fighters roared by, but they were high up in the night sky. Luke still heard the sounds of gunfire in the distance, screams, shouts, car alarms going off, police and emergency sirens. There was a glow of fire from somewhere to the west that Luke could see better when the business area turned into a neighborhood and the buildings were lower. He was getting closer to that fire now, and he could smell the smoke in the air.

He used that fire to help with his sense of direction, along with the moon’s path in the nearly cloudless sky. He still tried to keep going south, walking down a wide street with trees lining both sides of the road in the strips of grass between the street and the sidewalk. Large two and three-story homes lined both sides of the street, the homes just dark monoliths in the darkness. If there were people in those homes, they didn’t dare light candles or use flashlights right now.

So far he’d been pretty lucky—he’d only seen a few stragglers, most likely rippers, but he couldn’t be sure, and he wasn’t going to take a chance to find out. He studied the homes as he walked past them, looking for empty driveways and signs that the homes had been abandoned for a while.

Sandy stopped walking. She’d been great so far, not making a sound at all except a slight panting while she walked. But she froze now, looking back the way they had come.

Luke stopped, too. He stared down the dark street, trying to see what had alerted her. There were no lights, but then he heard the sound of footsteps. A lot of them. People running. It sounded like a stampede coming their way.

CHAPTER 7

A stampede, that’s exactly what it was.

Sandy whined, backing up just a bit. She looked up at Luke and whined again. But then she began to growl as she looked down the street again.

Luke looked around at the houses, focusing on the home closest to them. He looked back at the street. He could hear the screeches and screams of the rippers as they approached. And then the herd of them turned the corner down the street.

He needed to get off the street before those rippers saw him and Sandy, and the rippers were coming fast. He ran up the front lawn of the closest house, a two-story Victorian with a large front porch decorated with two jack-o'-lanterns and other Halloween decorations, including a lifelike plastic skeleton hanging from a corner of the porch that gave Luke a start for a second. The windows of the home were dark, and there were two vehicles parked in the driveway to the right—a car with a large pickup truck parked right behind it.

The front porch had a knee wall all the way around it with columns holding up the porch roof. He could duck down behind the wall and maybe the horde of rippers would pass him by, but then again, Sandy might growl or whine, and those rippers would rush up to the front porch—and then he would be a sitting duck on the porch, boxed in.

The screams and shouts were louder now, the pounding feet closer. He needed to do something before he was spotted. Sandy stayed close to him, a growl still low in her throat.

“Shh,” Luke hissed as he hurried to the front door with his pack slung over his shoulder. There was a glass panel in the door so at least he could break the glass and unlock the door if he absolutely had to, but the noise was going to be loud.

He decided to try the doorknob.

It was unlocked.

He turned the knob and slipped inside the house, holding the door open for Sandy, who rushed inside, her nails clicking on the hardwood floor of the foyer they were in. Luke eased the door shut and twisted the lock. He set his duffel bag down beside him on the floor, letting out a slow breath as he did so. He watched the street from the window in the door, crouching down to the bottom of it.

The horde of rippers raced past the house. They didn’t even look Luke’s way. He’d been afraid one of them had seen him run up onto the front porch, but apparently they hadn’t.

The rippers ran like a pack of predators on the hunt. There had to be at least sixty of them, maybe even a hundred. There were men and women in the group, a few older people, and a dozen children straggled near the back of the herd. Some of the rippers carried sticks or pieces of wood, broken-off table and chair legs. A few of them carried kitchen knives. One of the men in the front of the group had a baseball bat, and another one had a claw hammer.

Luke watched the street until the rippers were gone. He stood by the front door a moment longer, listening for any other sounds out in the night. Sandy had stopped growling now—she was silent, not even wagging her tail.

A helicopter flew right over the house, washing everything in bright light for just a moment, and then it was gone.

Luke turned around and looked at the foyer he was in. There could be people in this house. Maybe a terrified family was hiding in the dark. They could be watching him right now, maybe even aiming a weapon at him. His skin prickled at the thought, the hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck standing on end. Something didn’t feel right inside this house—he didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. He had learned to trust his instincts over the last ten years, and right now his Spidey senses were signaling an alarm.

He picked up his duffel bag from the floor and hooked it over his shoulder. The bag was still cumbersome, but he couldn’t leave it behind. He wished he had a backpack instead. Maybe he could find one in this house.

With the duffel bag over his shoulder, his hands were free. He left his gun in his shoulder holster and pulled his penlight out and turned it on, keeping the beam of the light low so he could see around him without putting out too much light that would be noticeable from outside. He shined the light down at Sandy. She stared back up at him with her big brown eyes. She whined softly.

“Shh,” Luke whispered again as he shined the flashlight beam around the foyer. Ahead of him was a set of stairs that ascended up into blackness. To his right was a sitting room. He could just make out some furniture in there and what looked like a piano, but his narrow light beam only reached so far into the darkness.

To the left of the foyer was what looked like some kind of living room.

Sandy whined again, and that whine turned into a low growl. Obviously Sandy didn’t feel comfortable in this house, either.

They needed to leave. They needed to find another house, take their time and scout out a better place to crash for the night. He felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. He knew it was a combination of a few things: he hadn’t eaten very much, he was dead tired, and all the stress he’d had to deal with in the last twenty-four hours—ranging from having to shoot Howard (whom he had liked before he had turned into a ripper), the veiled death threat from Vincent, being abducted by Jacob, chased by the cops, and then running for his life from these bands of animals called rippers. Things had been changing for the last few weeks, everything deteriorating into chaos and shambles, but it had all fallen apart this morning, collapsing completely, not just for him, but for everybody. He wondered again if this was just specific to this area, or if it was all over America, all over the world. He had listened to the radio reports this morning on the way to Howard’s house—he’d heard about the banks closing all over the east coast and moving west by the hour. He’d heard about the riots and protests breaking out everywhere, martial law being declared in most major cities. He’d heard about society collapsing.

He waited a moment for the lightheadedness to pass.

Luke was about to open the front door again so they could go back outside, but Sandy took off into the living room, the growl still rumbling in her throat.

For a second Luke thought about leaving the dog. If she couldn’t listen to him, then she wasn’t going to be any use to him. But before he knew what he was doing, he followed Sandy through the living room, using the beam of his penlight to guide his way.

He heard what had alarmed Sandy—there was a noise coming from deeper in the house—a moaning sound. Someone was moaning in pain.

Luke found Sandy at the doorway to the kitchen. Her growls were louder, the fur on the back of her neck standing up. Luke was afraid the dog was going to start barking any second now. Even though that large group of rippers had passed them by, there could be other rippers wandering around outside and Luke didn’t want Sandy to alert them. Hell, there could be rippers inside this house right now.

He moved through the dining room towards the doorway where Sandy stood guard; she still hadn’t gone inside the kitchen yet. The moaning was coming from the kitchen, and Luke knew there was something bad in there. When he stood beside Sandy at the doorway and shined his light inside, he saw what it was.

CHAPTER 8

A man was staked to the linoleum floor in the middle of the large kitchen. The man was naked except for a white tank top stained with blood, his pot belly a mound under the shirt, like a small mountain. His arms and legs were spread wide, almost spread-eagle. His wrists and ankles were nailed to the floor, the nail heads sticking up out of his flesh among the crusted blood. The tool that had nailed him to the floor, a battery-powered nail gun, lay discarded a few feet away from the man.

The man was nearly bald, and what hair he had left was wild and soaked with sweat, his fleshy face was shiny with it. A rag was stuffed down into his mouth, blood staining the rag. A strip of cloth was tied tightly around his face to keep the rag in place. His eyes were nearly swollen shut, and they looked purplish in the flashlight’s beam. He seemed delirious with pain, his eyes still closed as he moaned into the rag.

It looked like the man had been there for quite a while, judging from the crusted blood. Maybe even a full day. His naked crotch was a bloody mess, but Luke could tell that the man’s testicles had been cut off. His penis hung down between his legs. If his penis had been cut off the man would have bled out a long time ago. But whoever had done this to him didn’t want him to bleed out too quickly—they wanted him to die slowly and suffer.

“He didn’t think I knew,” a woman’s voice said from the darkness.

Luke shined his beam of light to a doorway that led out to some kind of mudroom. A door in that room led outside to the driveway. The light from his flashlight was weak, but Luke could see the woman clearly as she stepped into the doorway from the mudroom. She looked to be in her fifties, like the man staked to the kitchen floor. Her graying hair hung down around her face, her skin slick with sweat even though it was cold in the house. She was dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She had a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves on her hands that were stained with blood, and she held a pair of small pruning shears in one hand, the blades smeared with blood.

Luke didn’t say anything to the woman—he drew his gun from his shoulder holster and aimed it at her.

“He cheated on me,” the woman continued speaking, not alarmed about the weapon pointed at her. “He didn’t think I knew, but I knew. I knew about that tramp he was sleeping with. He’d been with her for the last two years.”

“I just needed to hide in here for a minute,” Luke said. “There were some rippers outside just a few minutes ago. Right out in the street. A lot of them.”

The woman seemed about as concerned about the rippers as she did about Luke’s gun. She just stood there in the doorway to the mudroom, staring at him, not moving a muscle.

Sandy was still trembling, a growl rumbling in her throat. Luke was afraid she was going to start barking at any moment. He wanted to pet her, try to soothe her, but he didn’t want the distraction.

“You know what the rippers are, don’t you?” Luke said to the woman. “The infected ones. The ones that have gone crazy.”

The woman still didn’t answer him.

Luke realized that he was probably talking to a ripper right now, or someone turning into one.

The man on the floor rolled his head back and forth, moaning louder into the rag stuffed down into his mouth. He was getting more agitated now, like he was coming fully back into consciousness now that he heard Luke’s voice.

Luke didn’t shine his flashlight down at the man—he kept it trained right on the woman in the doorway. “Is there anyone else in this house?”

The woman shook her head no. “Just us. Our kids are grown. They have their own houses. Their own families. They never call us anymore.”

“What’s your name?”

“Valerie.”

“Okay, Valerie. I didn’t mean to come into your house. I had to get away from those rippers out there. You’re sure no one else is in the house?”

She shook her head no again, still not moving. She held the pruning shears in one gloved hand. “I told you, it’s just us.” There was no anger in her voice. “The world is ending,” she added.

Luke nodded in agreement. “I think so, too.”

“We’re all going to die.”

Luke didn’t respond.

“I wanted to make him pay before we all died.”

Luke realized that Valerie might not be one of the infected ones like Howard was, or like those rippers outside. Maybe Valerie’s mind had just snapped.

“He hurt me,” Valerie said. “So I wanted to hurt him.” She left the doorway, moving towards the cabinets lined up in front of the kitchen window.

“Careful,” Luke said, still aiming his gun at her. Sandy’s growl was louder.

Luke followed Valerie’s movements with the beam of his light and the barrel of his gun. She stopped next to a large glass jar on the countertop—there were two bloody lumps at the bottom. She caressed the glass jar with one hand, smearing the sides with blood from her gloves.

“These are his balls,” Valerie said. “I’m going to shove them into his mouth. Make him eat them before he dies.” She turned and looked at Luke, her eyes blank and expressionless in the flashlight beam, her words emotionless and monotone. “Will you help me with this?”

Valerie’s husband moaned louder into his gag, screaming into it. He thrashed his head back and forth. Luke trained the beam of light down at the man as he struggled to free himself from the nails holding his wrists and ankles down to the floor, but there were too many nails, and they had been shot into his flesh at different angles; some of the nails had probably shattered his bones and severed his tendons. The man’s swollen eyes were wide open now as he screamed louder than ever.

Then Luke heard another scream, a scream from Valerie as she rushed towards him.

Luke raised the flashlight beam back up at Valerie as she charged him, holding her pruning shears up high like they were a knife. Her mouth was open wide in a roar, her eyes bulging with insane rage.

Sandy darted into the kitchen, barking and snarling, but she stopped right in front of Luke, like she was too scared to go all the way into the kitchen.

Luke shot Valerie before she had made it four steps away from the cabinets on the other side of the kitchen. His gun made two spitting sounds as he put two bullets in her forehead. She collapsed down onto her husband’s legs in the middle of the room, her bloodstained pruning shears flying out of her hand and sliding across the floor in front of the lower cabinets on the other side of the kitchen.

Valerie’s husband was still thrashing, still screaming into his bloody gag, managing to make a lot of noise. Sandy continued barking. Luke crouched down beside Sandy and held her around her neck for a moment, shushing her and trying to calm her down. She was trembling, but at least she had stopped barking. Her growls turned into whines.

“It’s okay,” Luke whispered to Sandy. “It’s okay. I won’t let them hurt us. You did a good job, girl.” He was just whispering words to the dog, trying to get her calmed down enough so she wouldn’t start barking again. Luke had never had a pet—he’d always considered them liabilities—so he didn’t really know what to say to Sandy, but he kept whispering to her, trying to get her to stop shaking. “It’s okay,” he said again. “He can’t get you.”

When he was sure Sandy wasn’t going to bark again, Luke stood up and walked over to the man on the floor. He aimed his flashlight beam and gun down at the man’s face.

The man stared up at Luke through his swollen eyes. He moaned something into the rag stuffed in his mouth, like he was trying to say something. He looked insane with pain, and Luke wondered if he had turned into a ripper at some point during this torture. Or had he already been turning when Valerie staked him to the floor with framing nails?

Luke couldn’t understand what the man was trying to say, but he seemed calmer now, and he had stopped thrashing. Luke imagined that Valerie’s husband was begging for it to end, so Luke obliged the imaginary request and shot him once in the forehead. The man was instantly still. A few seconds later the blood from the back of his head began to pool underneath him, the blood looked dark in the beam of the flashlight, like an oil slick.

Sandy had finally entered all the way into the kitchen, but she stayed low like she was about to bolt back into the dining room at any second. She approached the man’s naked foot, sniffing at it hesitantly.

“You stay away from that,” Luke hissed at Sandy as he hurried to the kitchen window that looked out onto the driveway. He looked at the driveway, making sure no one was out there, making sure that Valerie’s scream and Sandy’s barking hadn’t drawn any rippers to the house.

He didn’t see any of them.

He looked at Sandy who had backed up to the doorway again near Luke’s go-bag. There was a car and a pickup truck out in the driveway. Luke didn’t want to spend any more time in this house than he had to, but he searched the countertops and drawers for sets of keys. He found two sets of keys in a drawer near the doorway where he’d first seen Valerie standing. He found the ignition key for the pickup truck on one of the key rings and he pocketed the entire set.

Sandy watched him, whining just a little.

“We’re going to get out of here soon,” he promised her, still talking to her, still trying to keep her calm. He rushed back toward her and she skittered back like she was suddenly unsure about him.

“It’s okay,” he whispered as he grabbed his bag from the floor. Sandy was obviously traumatized, and Luke could only imagine what she had experienced already, but he didn’t have the time to pet her and comfort her. They needed to get out to that pickup truck and get out of this neighborhood.

He did a quick search of the cabinets and the refrigerator, gathering a quick collection of canned food and a hand-operated can opener. He used a plastic freezer bag to collect a few eating utensils, wrapping them a few times with paper towels so the sharp points of the knife and fork wouldn’t poke anything else. The electricity had been off for hours, but he touched the milk in the refrigerator and it was still a little cool. He gathered a few cans of soda, opening one of them and drinking nearly all of it down in a few gulps. There were six bottles of water in the refrigerator and he added five of those to his bag, but he didn’t want to make it too heavy—it was already cumbersome enough.

Luke opened the sixth bottle of water and found a plastic bowl in an upper cabinet. He poured the water into the bowl and set it down in front of Sandy. She was still skittish of him suddenly, but after a moment she came forward to inspect the bowl. Once she knew it was water, she began lapping at it. The noise of her lapping the water sounded so loud to Luke—every noise sounded so loud to him.

He checked all the drawers again, grabbing anything that might be useful and not too heavy: a bottle of aspirin, a bottle of chewable multi-vitamins, a small pair of scissors, toenail clippers, various batteries, another larger flashlight (after he checked to make sure it worked), half a roll of duct tape. At the last second he grabbed the battery-powered nail gun and added it to the duffel bag after making sure the power switch was turned off. He didn’t know what he would use it for, but it might come in handy.

It would probably be a good idea to check the rest of the house, but he didn’t want to waste too much more time. There was a free-standing garage in front of the car, and Luke was sure there were plenty of tools inside, but he was ready to leave. If that large group of rippers came back . . .

Sandy had slurped up most of the water.

“You ready to go?” he asked her.

She just stared at him from the doorway, still not wanting to enter the kitchen.

“It’s okay,” he told her for the millionth time. “We need to go out to that pickup truck out there.” He had decided on the pickup because it was parked right behind the car. Also, it was a bigger vehicle if he needed to run a ripper down. He just hoped there was gas in it.

Luke closed his duffel bag, making sure it was secure. He thought about searching for a backpack, but Valerie and her husband didn’t look like they would have a backpack in the house, and he didn’t want to waste the time searching for it. His duffel bag would have to do for now. He slipped the bag over one shoulder and shoved his penlight down in his pants pocket. He held his gun with the silencer attached in his hand as he moved to the doorway that led to the mudroom and the exterior door.

Sandy still waited by the doorway to the dining room.

“Come on,” Luke whispered as he stood next to the exterior door. This door, like the front door, had a glass panel in it. He pushed the curtain to the side just a little and looked out the door. Either the moon was brighter than he remembered or his eyes had adjusted well to the darkness now, because the moon’s light allowed him to see pretty well. There was a wooden deck right outside the door, with three steps leading down to a narrow concrete path that connected to the driveway. The lawn looked freshly cut, the shrubs maintained well (with Valerie’s pruning shears, no doubt). The house next door was pretty close to the other side of the driveway. Luke studied the dark windows, looking for any flashes of light from inside or any movement, listening for any noises.

Everything seemed still and quiet out there.

Sandy still wasn’t coming.

“I know you don’t want to stay here by yourself with Psycho Valerie and her cheating husband, do you?”

Sandy cocked her head just a little.

“I’m leaving,” Luke said as he unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Stay if you want to. I’ll leave the door open for you.”

Sandy rushed into the kitchen, skirting around Valerie and her husband, staying as close to the cabinets as she could on her route to the mudroom. She was beside Luke a moment later. He rushed outside and onto the wood deck, and Sandy was still right beside him. They froze, listening. The unmistakable screeches and screams from the rippers filled the air.

The rippers were close, and they were coming this way.

CHAPTER 9

Luke didn’t have time to hesitate—those rippers sounded like they were right on the other side of the house. It was the herd; they were coming back—had to be.

Luke shuffled down the steps of the deck, running towards the pickup truck. There were buttons on the key fob, but he didn’t want to push them in case the headlights or the interior lights automatically came on when he unlocked the doors.

He got to the truck and saw that it was unlocked—Valerie and her husband obviously did not believe in locking their doors. He yanked the door open and the dome light came on, it seemed so bright in the darkness.

“Come on,” Luke hissed as he held the door open for Sandy.

More screeches, howls, and whoops filled the night air. They were the same sounds he’d heard earlier from that group of rippers when they’d been coming up the street like a herd of animals. It was definitely a human cry, but it also sounded like the cry of an animal—the animals that these people had become. The howls sent shivers through Luke, not only because of their alien sound but also because of how close they were. That herd must have turned around and come back this way. Maybe they had heard Valerie’s scream or Sandy’s barking; maybe those sounds had carried easily through the silent night and had reached the rippers.

“Get in,” Luke said a little louder to Sandy.

Sandy had heard the cries from the rippers too, and obviously she could tell they were close. Like the panic that had seized her earlier when she had bolted up to the front porch of this house, she darted across the yard and jumped up into the truck, settling down at the far end against the passenger door.

The rippers were getting closer.

Luke threw his go-bag onto the passenger seat, right in the middle between him and Sandy. He sat down in the driver’s seat and shoved the key into the ignition, praying the truck would start.

The truck started right away. Luke searched for the headlight switch and found it, turning it one click so the dashboard lights illuminated. He checked the gauges; there was only a quarter tank of gas, and he was sure this truck would burn through that pretty quickly judging from the sound of the powerful motor.

A flash of movement in the rearview mirror caught Luke’s eye. He glanced at the mirror and saw a group of rippers out in the street, running towards the driveway, drawn to the sound of the truck’s engine.

Luke shifted into reverse and stomped his foot down on the gas pedal. The back tires of the truck barked on the concrete driveway, spinning for just a second before grabbing traction. The truck lurched back and Luke held on to the steering wheel, turning around and looking out the back window as he sped backwards, rushing towards the mob of rippers that were approaching.

At the last second Luke turned back around and braced himself as the truck slammed into the rippers, knocking some of them out of the way. The truck jolted a little from the impact, but not as much as Luke thought it would. Sandy tried to brace herself too, but she almost slid off of the passenger seat and onto the floorboards.

There was the unmistakable thump-thump as the tires rolled right over the bodies. Luke hoped the truck wouldn’t get stuck or bogged down on the bodies, but the driveway had been fairly long and he was pretty sure he had built up enough speed. At the very least he had probably taken out half of the ten or twelve rippers just from the first impact, knocking them back and to the sides of the driveway.

Luke didn’t let up on the gas. He gripped the steering wheel, trying to keep it straight as he backed out into the street. He didn’t bother turning on the headlights just yet, but he saw the mass of bodies in the driveway and the yard. Not all of them were dead, the ones that had been knocked out of the way were struggling back to their feet, and some of them hadn’t been hit or run over at all—and they were charging towards the truck.

He shifted into drive before the truck had even come to a stop in the street. The transmission thunked into gear as he shifted. He took his foot off the brake and stomped the gas again, steering the truck west, the direction they had been traveling in before.

A few of the rippers slapped at the rear of the truck, one of them trying to grab on to the tailgate, but the pickup had built up speed too quickly and the ripper couldn’t hang on, falling off and tumbling down the road in the darkness.

Luke turned down a side street and then another, speeding past the dark houses. He saw another bonfire (or maybe even a house fire) down at the end of the next street so he went down another street to avoid the blaze.

Again, as he drove, that wave of dizziness passed over him. He felt suddenly light-headed and shaky. He needed to get somewhere safe so he could sleep for a few hours. It had to be only a few hours away from dawn right now.

He wanted to drive farther south, but he wanted to rest for a while before he did so. As he turned the corner onto another street, he saw the house he wanted to check out. It was large and there were no cars or trucks parked in the driveway. There was an empty lot next to it, and it seemed far enough away from the other houses in case Sandy barked.

Slowing the truck down, Luke cruised past the house, studying the windows and the front porch. Everything looked silent and dark. He drove past the empty lot and parked his truck on the street against the flow of traffic. He’d been driving without his headlights on, only the parking lights, but he shut those off and then killed the engine.

He sat there for a moment, his fingers still on the key, ready to start the truck up again and drive away if he heard any noise. The farther south he had driven, the less ripper activity he had seen. It seemed like they had been somewhat concentrated near Valerie’s home, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t really care right now.

Luke looked at Sandy, and she looked right back at him. She wasn’t growling or whining, and maybe that was a good sign.

“You ready to get some rest and some food?” Luke asked Sandy.

She licked her chops.

Luke grabbed his go-bag and his gun and then opened the driver’s door. He had already smashed the dome light earlier so it wouldn’t come on when he opened the door again. He got out of the truck and looked up and down the sidewalk. He looked over at the empty lot that stood between him and the old house. There was a wooden fence around the back yard, but he didn’t hear a dog barking.

Sandy wasted no time getting out of the truck. She was on the sidewalk in seconds, her nails clicking slightly on the concrete.

Luke hurried across the vacant lot, listening for any sounds. He could still hear the helicopters in the far-off distance, scattered machinegun fire, some of it coming from those helicopters, Luke guessed.

They were at the gate of the back yard fence in seconds. Luke whistled lowly, checking if there was a dog right on the other side of the gate, but he didn’t hear any barking or any noises. He didn’t want to shoot a dog, but he would if one tried to attack him or Sandy. But Sandy seemed to be content that there was no dog, and Luke was sure she would have picked up a dog’s scent immediately.

The gate was locked from the inside, but Luke’s arm was long enough that he was able to reach over the top and unclasp it. He opened the gate and peeked inside, ready in case a snarling dog (or a ripper) came. But there was nothing.

He looked back at the windows at the side of the house, and then at the windows on the upper floor. The windows were dark, but he couldn’t help feeling like he was being watched by someone. He looked across the vacant yard towards the next house, and then out at the street. It was possible there were people huddled together in some of those homes, families hunkering down by the windows, peeking out through the curtains when they’d heard his pickup truck rumbling by.

Luke shook the feeling off. He wanted to get inside and scope the house out, set up a defensive place to sleep and establish all exits. The thought of it made him weary, but it needed to be done.

They went into the back yard and closed the gate. There was a big back porch added onto the old house. It looked like it needed painting, and one of the screens had been knocked out. He climbed the steps and tried the screen door. It was unlocked and creaked just slightly when he opened it. Sandy followed him inside the screened back porch.

The back door of the house led into the kitchen. He checked the doorknob, but the door was locked. He wouldn’t get lucky enough to find two houses with the doors unlocked, would he? There were little panels of glass in the door. Luke elbowed out a square of glass and then carefully knocked out the jagged pieces around the wood frame with the silencer of his gun. He reached in and unlocked the door. He opened the door and entered the home. Once he and Sandy were inside, he dropped his duffel bag on the floor and closed the door, locking it.

Sandy didn’t seem nervous like she had in Valerie’s house, so that made Luke feel better, but he still wanted to do a search of the home.

Twenty minutes later Luke assured himself that no one was there. The house was abandoned, but a family had lived there recently. Luke saw the signs of harried packing upstairs in the bedrooms—clothes and shoes strewn everywhere. In a boy’s bedroom, Luke found a dark blue backpack. He would have rather found a black one, and one that was a little larger and sturdier, but this one would have to do for now. It would be easier than toting the duffel bag around.

The bathrooms and kitchen were a mess, too. Food on the counters, a few drawers open, big bags of Halloween candy ready for the holiday.

On the mantle over the fireplace in the living room, there were a few photos of the family—a dad, a mom, a teenaged boy and girl. There was also a dog in one of the photos, a little white fluffy one, but Luke didn’t know what kind it was. The family looked happy in the photos, and Luke wondered if they were terrified right now, stuck in traffic as they tried to make their way out of the city. Or maybe the soldiers had detained them. Or maybe the rippers had gotten them.

He went back to the kitchen and set his go-bag on the table, taking everything out. He repacked most of his stuff into the backpack, starting with the weapons and extra ammo first, then the nail gun. He kept an extra magazine for his gun in his pocket along with the penlight. Next, he stuffed his wallet with the fake IDs and the three envelopes of cash down into the backpack. He added the extra shirt and the pair of pants and socks and underwear to the backpack, so he could have one extra change of clothes, but discarded any other clothing. He was already beginning to run out of room, but he stuffed a few cans of food down into the backpack on top of his clothes and then added the can opener along with the other utensils and supplies he’d gotten from Valerie’s house. He added three bottles of water. Now the backpack was almost full. He closed it and secured it. He hefted the pack and slipped it onto his back, adjusting the straps until it felt comfortable. Not the best, but it would have to do until he could find something better. He took the pack off and laid it back down on the table.

He couldn’t fit his laptop, the extra clothes, his extra pair of shoes, or his throwaway cell phone still in the plastic case into the backpack, so he stashed them in a lower cabinet. He didn’t want to leave them here, but he really didn’t have a choice.

After a quick search of the kitchen, Luke added a few smaller supplies to the pockets on the outside of the backpack: a box of kitchen matches, the extra batteries that he’d found in Valerie’s house, another small flashlight.

He was getting pretty tired now, but he wanted to eat something before he tried to sleep. He opened a few cans of food and found some doggy treats that used to belong to the little white dog in the photos. Sandy gobbled the treats down and then watched him as he opened a can of chili and ate it with a plastic spoon he found among the utensils in the drawer next to the refrigerator. He opened a can of beer and drank it with his food. After the chili, he opened a can of beef stew, ate half of it and then gave the rest to Sandy.

After they were done eating, Luke chose the couch in the living room for his bed. He wanted to be downstairs and in a corner of the living room where he had a view of the front door and the archway that led to the kitchen. He grabbed a blanket from the master bedroom upstairs and crawled underneath it, taking his leather gloves off and stuffing them into the pockets of his hoodie.

He had his backpack beside the couch on the floor. He had his gun on the coffee table next to the couch, a bottle of water next to the gun. Sandy lay down on the other end of the couch next to his feet. Luke was afraid he might accidentally kick the dog in the middle of the night, but he didn’t have the heart to make her get off the couch.

They both lay there in the darkness for a few minutes. Luke listened to the silence, wondering if he was going to be able to fall asleep . . . and that was the last thing he remembered before drifting off.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 10

Luke woke up with a gun pointed at him—his own gun.

Judging by the golden light filtering in through the closed blinds over the living room windows, it was late afternoon. He had slept through most of the day.

The woman pointing the gun at Luke stood at the other end of the living room.

“What are you doing in my house?” the woman said.

Moving very slowly, and with his hands in full view the entire time, Luke maneuvered himself up into a sitting position against the arm of the couch. In the few seconds that it took him to sit up, he tried to clear his groggy mind as the cobwebs of sleep faded away. He had been dreaming about something, but all he could remember about the dream was that there had been a beautiful blond woman in it. She had a glow of light around her, and she’d had dark glasses on her face, like she was blind. And then the dream had turned into a nightmare when he saw a tall man hiding in the darkness, like he was a shadow himself. Except for his eyes—those were shining brightly in the dark, like two pinpoints of bright yellow light. But those bits and pieces of the dream were fading away quickly as he assessed the situation he’d suddenly found himself in. He stared at the woman. She was the only other person in the living room, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others with her somewhere else in the house. He listened for any other voices or noises.

Luke’s backpack was on the floor beside the woman.

“Why are you in my house?” the woman asked again. Her voice was even, not panicked or frightened. She stood with her feet slightly apart, her stance balanced, the gun steady in her gloved hands—obviously an experienced shooter. And that wasn’t good for Luke.

The woman looked small, maybe five foot four inches and a hundred and twenty pounds. She looked to be in her late twenties. She was dressed from head-to-toe in black: a hoodie sweatshirt, tight black pants, combat boots, fingerless gloves. A black headband held her dark hair back. She had her own backpack on, but it was much smaller than Luke’s. He could tell that she was lean and athletic even with all the clothes she had on. He could also tell she was confident and tough.

“I needed a place to crash for the night,” Luke said. His tongue felt swollen from thirst. He really wanted a swig from his bottle of water, which the woman had so graciously not stolen from him.

This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that someone had aimed a gun at him. First it was Jacob, and now it was this woman.

Luke looked at the end of the couch, but he didn’t see Sandy. He looked back at the woman who still hadn’t moved a muscle. “My dog.”

“Lab mix?”

Luke shrugged. “I guess so. I’m not a dog expert.”

“You don’t know what kind of dog you have?”

“Well, she wasn’t exactly my dog. I found her last night in a looted store. She just started following me around.”

“That’s sweet. Your dog bolted out the back door as soon as I came inside.”

Luke tried a smile on the woman. “Some watchdog she turned out to be.”

The woman didn’t say anything, and she certainly wasn’t falling for his smile. Luke was a little dismayed that he had slept through someone entering the house, taking his gun and go-bag from right beside him. He wasn’t normally a heavy sleeper, but he must have been passed out. He couldn’t believe that Sandy hadn’t barked, or even growled. She could have done something to wake him up.

Of course the woman must have been sneaky about her entry. She looked like she was trained in this kind of thing. She wasn’t with the police, but she seemed to have served in some kind of authority position, maybe she was ex-military.

“I didn’t see you in any of the family photographs,” Luke said, nodding over at the fireplace.

The woman glanced that way for a second and then looked back at Luke.

“You said this was your house,” he reminded her.

“It’s my cousin’s house.”

Luke didn’t believe that, either.

“Is there anyone else with you?” the woman asked.

“Just me and Sandy.”

The woman raised her eyebrows a little.

“That was the dog’s name. So it’s just me now.”

“You have quite a few weapons on you,” the woman said, nodding down at the backpack next to her feet.

Luke didn’t answer. It didn’t appear to be a question.

“What kind of guy runs around with a silencer on his gun?”

Luke just shrugged. “A guy who wants to be quiet.”

“What’s with the nail gun?” Again, she gave a slight nod down towards the backpack at her feet.

“I was going to build a doghouse for Sandy,” he said. There, that did it. That got her to crack a smile, maybe he could soften her up a little more, get her to let her guard down just a bit. “What’s your name?”

The woman’s smile slipped away as quickly as it had come. She just stared at him for a second. “Look, it’s been a real blast talking to you, but I’m going to have to take your stuff and go now.”

“You’re not leaving me much to protect myself with.”

She hadn’t moved a muscle yet, still aiming his gun at him. She seemed to be thinking over his statement. “I’ll throw this gun somewhere in the back yard when I leave, but I’m taking the other guns and everything else in this bag.”

Luke didn’t believe that the woman was going to throw his gun away in the back yard; it was just a ploy to get him to waste time looking for his gun while she got farther and farther away.

“Could you leave me the change of clothes from the backpack?” He didn’t really want them; he was just trying to stall a little longer so he could think of some way to get his weapons back. “You can keep everything else in my backpack: the weapons, the ammo, the nail gun. Even the cash.”

“I don’t want your money,” the woman said. She seemed to finally be growing a little weary of Luke’s mental games. “Money’s no good anymore since the collapse. I don’t want your clothes, either. I’ll leave them on the street a few blocks from here.”

“Which direction?”

Her smile returned. “Now where’s the fun in that?”

Luke tried to think of a way to stall a little longer. He tried to think of a way to gain the woman’s trust or gain some kind of slight advantage. He had the keys to the pickup truck in his pants pocket, so at least the woman hadn’t forced him to stand up so she could search him—she seemed satisfied with the backpack of weapons. As soon as she left, Luke planned to go out the front door, get in his truck, and follow her. He planned on getting his weapons back.

“How many others are with you?” Luke asked the woman.

“You don’t believe I’m by myself?”

Luke wasn’t sure.

“My boys are right outside,” she said.

Luke knew she was lying now. He was sure now that this woman was alone.

“I’m going to leave now,” she said. “But first I need you to stand up very slowly and dig into your pockets for the keys to that pickup truck outside.”

Luke didn’t feel like he was doing a very good job of hiding his shock. It was like the woman had read his mind.

“Yeah, I was in the house across the street last night when you parked there,” the woman said. “I watched you and your dog enter this house, and I watched and waited for the right time to come pay you a visit.”

Luke remembered feeling like he was being watched last night as he opened the gate to the back yard.

“Okay, stand up now.” There was a sudden impatience in her voice. She could joke around for a little while, but now she was all business.

Luke stood up.

“Reach into your pockets and pull everything out.”

Luke did as he was ordered. The keys, the extra magazine of ammo, his balled-up leather gloves, and the penlight fell out onto the carpeted floor.

“You can keep your flashlight and the gloves. Bend down and throw the clip to me. An underhand toss.”

Luke hated it when people called magazines clips, but he decided not to confront her about it. He moved slowly as he picked up the magazine and tossed it to her. She caught it with one hand and stuffed it into the pocket of her hoodie.

“Now the keys. Slowly. An underhand toss just like last time.”

He picked up the keys and tossed them to her. She caught them in the air with one hand, just like she had done with the magazine. She was smiling again.

“Sit back down on the couch.”

He followed her instructions, sitting back down on top of his rumpled blanket.

“You just sit there and be cool for about fifteen minutes.”

“I’m cool.” He lowered his hands just a bit. He was pissed at himself for allowing himself to get into this situation, but it could have been worse, the woman could have shot him while he’d been sleeping, or she could even shoot him right now. She definitely looked like she had the nerve to do it.

The woman backed up towards the kitchen. “Count to one hundred before you get off that couch.”

“What makes you think I can count that high?”

The woman had backed up into the dining room now; she was almost to the kitchen.

“Can I at least get your number?” Luke asked.

“Cute,” she answered back, but she couldn’t help smiling. “Start counting.” And then she disappeared into the gloom of the kitchen. “I want to hear you.”

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

Luke stopped counting. He looked towards the windows of the living room. He heard footsteps out there, and then he heard screeches and whoops from out in the street. The rippers were out there now, maybe a lot of them.

The back door in the kitchen slammed shut, the glass in the door rattling.

Luke jumped up from the couch and darted over to the front door. He pushed the curtain over the door to the side just a little so he could peek out through the window. The street was filled with rippers—it looked like there were a hundred of them. Many of them were turning towards the house, like they’d just spotted the woman. Now they were all running towards the house.

The woman was going to be torn apart in minutes.

Luke hurried through the house to the kitchen. He already heard the spitting shots of his own gun. He heard the screeches and screams of the rippers in the back yard. He got to the kitchen door just as the woman bounded back up the back porch steps, running to the door. At least she still had his backpack clenched in one hand.

He opened the back door for her, but the rippers were right on her heels, reaching for her. She got in through the kitchen door just as one of the rippers tried to grab at her, grabbing hold of her backpack. Luke pushed against the door, pushing against the ripper, bringing an elbow down on the ripper’s wrist, and that got the ripper to let go of the woman’s backpack. The woman was right beside him in a flash, helping him push against the door with all of her weight.

More and more rippers were running onto the porch, piling up on the door, adding their weight to the first one, all of them pushing. Others were at the windows, smashing the glass.

With a growl, Luke summoned all of his strength and pushed the door all the way shut. He twisted the lock on the door.

One of the rippers stuck his hand in through the glassless hole in the window of the door, grabbing at the woman, trying to claw at her, but she pulled free from him and shot the ripper in the forehead right through the glass panel in the door, shattering that pane of glass.

Luke and the woman both backed away from the kitchen door. The woman turned and aimed Luke’s gun right at him.

CHAPTER 11

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

The woman didn’t say anything. She had her finger right on the trigger as she aimed the gun at Luke. She looked scared, but not too scared to fire the gun.

“I saved your life,” Luke told her. “I could have shut the door on you. Locked it. I could have left you out there.”

The woman seemed to be considering Luke’s argument. She glanced at the rippers right outside the kitchen door. Many of them had thrust their hands through the panes of glass, shredding their skin, blood leaking out, dripping down the door and onto the floor as they pawed at the doorknob, trying to figure out how to open it—and it would only be a matter of time before they untwisted the lock and turned the knob, even if by accident. The rippers screamed and screeched as they crushed themselves against the door. Some of them yelled something almost similar to words, but most of it was just unintelligible gibberish. Their eyes were wild, mouths open, drooling, blood smeared on their faces and teeth. Their clothes were ripped and soiled with stains.

Other rippers were smashing the two windows in the kitchen on either side of the door. Rippers had been pushed through the glass like they were battering rams, their bodies bent down over the window sill with pieces of jagged wood and glass sticking into them. It almost looked like the rippers had been pushed into the window purposely, like they had been sacrificed and were now a safe ledge that the other rippers could crawl over.

The woman lowered Luke’s gun and looked to the archway that led into the living room. “The front door,” she said, already running for it.

“They’re out there, too,” Luke said as he caught up to her.

The rippers were at the front door, and they were at the two front windows that looked out onto the wide front porch. Two more rippers were pushed through the living room windows, shattering the glass and strips of wood that divided the window panes. They were pushed forward, flopping down over the window sills, probably already dead. Other rippers were using the baseball bats and metal bars they had to clear the jagged glass away and beginning to crawl over the other rippers as they pushed the curtains out of the way.

“Shit,” the woman said.

“We need to get upstairs,” Luke told her. He was already at the foot of the stairs.

The woman shot at the rippers crawling in over the first ones through the windows. She hit two of them—one in the forehead and the other in the neck, dropping both of them.

“You’re just wasting ammo,” he told her.

As she shot the next wave of rippers trying to get through the windows, Luke realized that their dead bodies were beginning to clog up the windows, buying him and the woman a little extra time.

She was at the foot of the stairs in a flash. They ran up the steps that led to an upstairs hallway.

“Down here,” Luke said. He had already searched the house last night and figured their best bet was the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

The woman didn’t argue with him—she ran right behind him down the hallway. They darted inside the bedroom and closed the door, locking it. The rippers hadn’t climbed the stairs yet, but it would only be a few more seconds before they were up here and at the bedroom door.

“The backpack,” Luke told her.

The woman looked a little wary, she raised Luke’s gun again, aiming the weapon at him.

“Please, we don’t have time for this. I need the nail gun out of the backpack.”

The woman seemed to sense immediately what Luke’s plan was. She dropped his backpack to the floor and opened it up. She found the nail gun and tossed it to him.

Luke caught the nail gun and flipped the switch on it, hoping there was still enough juice left in the battery for him to use it. He pressed the tip of the nail gun at the edge of the bedroom door and pulled the trigger, toe-nailing a long framing nail through the door and into the door jamb, nailing the door in place. He shot several more nails up and down the edge of the door. Maybe it wouldn’t hold forever, but it would hold for a little while.

“Help me with the bed,” Luke said after he tossed the nail gun across the room, dropping it on the floor. The bed was on the same wall as the door, the foot of it pointing towards a TV on top of a long dresser that sat between two windows.

The woman was right there beside Luke, helping him turn the bed towards the door, shoving it against the door long ways. They also piled the end tables on top of the bed for a little extra weight. Luke ran over to the dresser, and the woman was already on the other side of it, helping him push it across the carpet. The dresser was even heavier than the bed. They pushed it right up against the bed, adding more weight to their barricade.

Just as Luke and the woman stepped back from the barricade, they heard the rippers thundering down the hallway, screaming and screeching. A moment later they were pounding at the door.

Luke turned back to the woman. She had Luke’s backpack over her shoulder again, Luke’s gun aimed at him. He put his hands up a little. “This is getting a little old, don’t you think?”

“Just stay back,” she warned, taking a few steps back towards where the dresser used to be. The flat screen TV that used to be on top of the dresser was leaning against the wall with a trail of cable wires snaking across the carpet.

“What’s your name?” Luke asked. “My name’s Luke.”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I could’ve locked you out there on that back porch, but I didn’t.”

The woman just nodded. She seemed to be giving in a little to his reasoning.

“We’re in this together now,” Luke told her. “What’s your name?”

“Wilma.”

“Okay, Wilma,” he said, smiling. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You said this is your cousin’s house.”

“That was a lie.”

Luke nodded—he already knew that. “Okay. So what are you doing running around alone? I see you’ve already got your own weapon, your own backpack of supplies.” He could see the butt of a pistol poking out from a shoulder holster underneath her zippered hoodie, the zipper pulled halfway down now.

“What are you doing running around out here alone?” she asked. “Why do you have a silencer on your gun? Why does the tip of your nail gun have dried blood all over it? Why are you carrying around all of this extra ammo, the extra two weapons, and thousands of dollars of cash?”

“It’s a long story.”

She didn’t say anything. She waited for an answer.

“Look, I’ll tell you everything when we have some time, but right now we need to figure a way out of here.” He lowered his hands all the way, testing her. “We need to trust each other for a little while. Work together on this. And when we’re out of here, then we can part ways. Deal?”

She lowered the gun, but didn’t offer to give it back to him. But it was a start.

“Okay,” Luke breathed out. He looked around the bedroom. The door was fastened with long framing nails and barricaded with most of the furniture. The rippers were pounding on the door, but it would hopefully be quite a while before they managed to get through that door. They could always start tearing away at the drywall on the walls, get into the room that way, but they didn’t seem to be trying that yet.

Luke walked across the room to the master bathroom. He turned one of the faucets on, hoping for water—but it was bone-dry and only made a gurgling sound from somewhere deep down in the pipes. There was a small window in the bathroom, a small closet loaded up with towels, extra sheets for the bed, half a pack of toilet paper, and other bathroom supplies.

He went back out to the bedroom. Wilma stood in the same spot, the backpack by her foot, the gun still in her hand. He rushed past her to the closet, which had bi-fold doors on the front of it and a dreamcatcher hanging on the wall next to it. The closet wasn’t very deep. There was a line of clothes on hangers, the floor stacked up with boxes and plastic tubs. The top shelf was overflowing with more boxes and plastic containers. He pulled a box out and searched through it, and then he searched through the plastic storage tub underneath it—packs of financial papers, extra shoes, stacks of old DVDs, some kind of collectible toys and baseball cards. Nothing of much use to them.

Luke darted across the bedroom and inspected the two windows; they were both on the one side of the room. One window looked down onto part of the back yard where the gate was, and the other window was farther down the wall and looked down onto the side yard and the vacant lot beyond that. There weren’t any rippers in the side yard, but there were some milling about in the back yard. And there were a few more still in the street. Some of the rippers were heading down the street, past where his pickup truck was parked. Maybe they were losing interest in this house, searching for other prey. The rippers walked right past the pickup truck, not paying any attention to it, and that was good.

“Okay,” Luke said as he turned back to Wilma. “The rippers are still out there, but some of them are moving down the street. Maybe the ones outside the door will get tired of pounding on it and go away, eventually.”

Wilma didn’t seem too convinced by that idea.

“If they don’t go away, we’re going to have to go out through this window,” Luke said. “I don’t suppose you have a rope among the supplies in your backpack, do you?”

CHAPTER 12

Wilma didn’t have a rope in her backpack, but they decided to make a long rope out of the bedsheets in the bathroom closet. Luke and Wilma sat on the floor across from each other, cutting and tearing the bedsheets into long strips. They each used their own knives to cut the sheets into strips. Luke used his pocketknife, and he noticed that Wilma had some kind of survivalist knife. They each sipped the last two bottles of water that Luke had in his backpack, and they split a bag of pretzels.

“Nice knife,” Luke said as he watched her for a moment. “Did you rob Rambo before you got to me?”

“Funny,” she said, but she smiled.

“Where does someone get a knife like that?” he asked.

“Where does someone get a silencer for his gun?”

Fair point. Wilma obviously didn’t trust him yet, and he couldn’t blame her. He needed to steer their conversation in a different direction. “Do you know what happened to all of these people? Do you know what turned them into these rippers?”

“It’s probably some kind of plague,” Wilma said. “Best guess is some kind of airborne virus. Maybe a mutated rabies strain.”

“Rabies.” That didn’t sound good. Luke was quiet for a moment, already braiding some of the strips of cloth together and tying them into knots. “I thought people and animals that got rabies foamed at the mouth. You know, like Cujo.”

Wilma didn’t smile at his joke. “It might not be actual rabies, but something like it. A manufactured virus maybe, something that mimics rabies in some ways.”

“So you’re saying it’s something manmade?”

She shrugged as she braided the strips of cloth, working quickly, her fingers nimble and even quicker than Luke’s. “Could be natural. Viruses and plagues mutate all the time in nature. But governments and militaries like to do their own tinkering these days, and that could be much more devastating than anything nature comes up with.”

“You’re thinking this was a bioweapon? An attack of some kind?”

“Could’ve been an accident, a plague that seeped out of a research facility.  It could’ve been some amateur terrorist playing around with viruses. You ever heard of biopunks?”

“No.”

“They’re amateur scientists that like to play around with viruses, bacteria, genetics. They buy used scientific equipment online and then buy live viruses and bacteria, then they play around with them, try to mutate them.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Of course my favorite theory is that our own government let this disease loose purposely.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Population control. That’s what they ultimately want. They know that the population on Earth is getting out of control; it will only be a matter of time before we run out of resources to survive. Scientists and governments know that the herd has to be culled. Culled quite a bit, actually.”

“So you think our own government unleashed a disease to kill a bunch of us off?”

“Yeah. It’s the best way to kill off a lot of people without irrevocably destroying land and resources like a nuclear or chemical war would. I bet the elites are safe and sound right now, hidden away in their bunkers; the leaders of the government, the super-rich. They probably knew it was coming and had time to plan for it. Now all they have to do is wait six months or a year, wait until most of the human population is dead, and then they can come back out and start over.”

“If they wanted to control the population, then why did this disease turn the people into animals, into the rippers? Why not just kill them off with some kind of disease?”

She shrugged. “Maybe the rippers will die soon. Maybe the disease was designed to kill them off, eventually. Or maybe they will kill each other off. Kill most of the survivors off, too.”

Luke just nodded.

Wilma shrugged. “Or maybe this plague really was just an accident or some kind of miscalculation.”

“You seem to know a lot about viruses and plagues.”

Wilma didn’t respond.

“You’re some kind of doomsday prepper, aren’t you?”

Wilma kept braiding the strips of cloth, still not answering.

“You’ve obviously been trained somewhere. I was thinking cop or military at first, but you’re a prepper, aren’t you?”

“It doesn’t hurt to be prepared,” she said, but there wasn’t much strength in her words.

“Well, this is the day you guys have been praying for, isn’t it? Society has finally collapsed.”

She stared at him. “We didn’t pray for this day, we were just prepared for it.”

Luke could tell that he’d hit a sore spot with her. “I was just kidding.” He was quiet for a few minutes as he worked on another section of their homemade rope. “If this is an airborne virus of some kind, then how come we’re not infected?”

“How do you know we’re not?”

A chill danced along Luke’s skin. “Why don’t you have a gas mask?” Luke always pictured preppers wearing gas masks and sporting AR-15s.

“I had one, but I lost it.”

“You lost it?”

“I was with two others from my . . . my group. They didn’t make it.” Her voice cracked just a bit on the last word. She didn’t meet Luke’s eyes, concentrating on the braids in the rope.

Luke took a moment to study Wilma. She was very attractive, striking in a way. “What were you guys doing? Looking for supplies?”

She gave a slight shake of her head. “We have plenty of supplies. I needed to find someone and the other two volunteered to go with me. Now they’re dead.”

Luke didn’t bother asking how they had died. “Who were you trying to find?”

“My cousin. I wanted to get to her and her kids. I wanted them to come back with me.”

Luke didn’t bother asking her where they were going back to. “Your cousin lives across the street?”

Wilma looked at him and the ghost of a smile played at her lips. She seemed impressed that he had figured that out.

“You knew the people that used to live in this house, didn’t you?” Luke said.

“Not really. I met them a few times. I’m sure my cousin knew them pretty well.”

“What happened to your cousin? Did she turn into a ripper?”

Wilma shrugged. “I don’t know. She wasn’t there. Her kids weren’t there. The house was empty.”

Luke was quiet. He could tell she was lying about her cousin, but he didn’t want to call her on it.

“There was blood in her house,” Wilma added in a whisper. “A lot of it.”

“I was at a friend’s house yesterday morning,” Luke said, deciding to volunteer his own story—maybe it would help ease Wilma’s tension a little. “He had turned into one of those rippers at some point. He killed his wife and his three daughters. Slaughtered them. Ate parts of them. When I saw him, he was just talking gibberish. He was covered in their blood. It was all over his face. All over his teeth.”

“You kill him?”

Luke nodded.

If his story had helped her trust him more, she wasn’t showing it. They were quiet for a long moment. The rippers were still pounding at the bedroom door and walls of the hallways. It sounded like some of them were clawing at the door. Some of the rippers were in the other bedrooms—Luke could hear them trashing those rooms, throwing stuff around as they screeched and screamed.

“I saw a lot of police last night,” Luke finally said. He didn’t bother to mention the fact that he had been chased by them. “I saw helicopters in the sky. A few fighter jets. I watched a military patrol drive by and kill a ripper. But I haven’t heard any sirens at all today. I haven’t heard a helicopter or airplane over us at all. Nothing.”

“This area could be a dead zone now.”

“A dead zone?”

“Yeah. The police and the military could be concentrating their efforts in certain areas, either more populated areas or areas where they have already set up camps.” She hesitated for just a moment. “Or the disease could have spread to too many of the cops and soldiers, turning too many of them at the same time and crippling their armies.”

“It’s going to get all of us, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could be immune.”

Finally, a ray of hope. “Immune?”

“Usually, in any plague, there is a certain percentage of the population of people or animals that are naturally immune. Even deadly diseases of the past like the bubonic plague didn’t kill all the people that got it. People can either be outright immune to the disease, or they get it and their immune system is able to fight it. Certain strains of Ebola viruses, even the most deadly, still spared at least ten percent of the people it infected.”

“So how many would you say are immune to this disease? Ten percent? More?”

“It’s hard to say. Could be ten percent of the population. But many of those immune could be attacked by the rippers, or they could starve or be shot by the police and the military accidentally. I’ve heard some cities were bombed. Many immune could’ve been killed in bomb blasts if they stayed in the cities. Some of the immune could’ve been young children or the elderly, people that can’t take care of themselves. Some could’ve been in prison. If the disease doesn’t kill them, then the rippers will. And if the rippers don’t kill the survivors, then starvation or thirst, or diseases from drinking bad water, or freezing to death will eventually kill them.”

“I get it,” Luke said—there was no need for Wilma to keep going; he understood she was trying to say that even if ten percent survived the plague, far fewer would still be alive a few months from now. “What got you into prepping?”

Before Wilma could answer, they both looked at the bedroom door. The door had just splintered from the latest poundings. The door wasn’t going to hold much longer, and once the rippers were in through the door, it would only be a matter of seconds before they pushed the furniture back.

Luke jumped to his feet and hurried to the closet. He pulled one of the bi-fold doors off and kicked at the corner of the doorway, kicking a hole in the drywall at the bottom of the wall. He crouched down and pulled the drywall away, opening up a hole near the floor at the base of one side of the closet doorway, revealing the wood studs of the wall. “We can tie one end of the rope here,” he told Wilma as he hurried back to her.

She stretched the rope out to him.

The rope wasn’t as long as Luke would have liked, but they’d had to braid enough of the strips of bedsheets together to make it strong enough so that it would hold their weight and not shred apart as soon as they climbed down. He took one end of the rope and threaded it through the hole at the bottom of the wall. He wrapped that end around the doorframe several times and then tied it in place. It would hold, but it already looked like the rest of the rope wasn’t going to reach all the way to the ground.

“You’ll go first,” Luke told her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

She nodded and handed him his gun back.

Luke accepted her token of faith. He reloaded his gun with an extra magazine from his backpack. He slipped another magazine down into his front pants pocket, and then he tucked the gun into his shoulder holster. He slipped his backpack on, tightening the straps.

The door crashed open, bumping into the bed. The rippers were poking their fingers in through the crack in the door, all of them pushing on the door. The furniture was already beginning to move.

“Now or never,” Luke said.

Wilma went to the window and looked out. It was almost dark, just after sunset, the sun well below the houses in the distance. It was still light enough to see, but the shadows were taking over now. “Only a few rippers in the street,” she said when she looked back at Luke. “None in the back yard anymore.”

Yeah, they’re all inside the house now, Luke thought. He handed the rest of the rope to Wilma as the bedroom door pushed open a little more.

CHAPTER 13

Wilma threw the knotted, homemade rope out the window. It didn’t even come close to reaching the ground, just as she had suspected. It would be a good eight-foot drop to the ground near the bottom of the rope.

But what other choice did she have?

She made sure that she didn’t see any rippers in the back yard or the side yard before throwing the rope out the window. There were three or four rippers down the street, well beyond Luke’s pickup truck right now. The afternoon was long gone, approaching twilight—those magical few minutes between late evening and true night, a dark blue tint to everything. The cold air blasted her through the open window.

She wasted no time climbing onto the sill, slipping her legs over the edge. She grabbed the rope, turned around and prayed the rope would hold—if not, then she was going to be on the ground in a hurry.

The rope held.

She shimmied down the rope, hand-over-hand, using her legs only a little. She had practiced on a rope in the gym many times, and she was more than strong enough for this. As she worked her way down, she tried to glance around, making sure that there weren’t rippers from the front yard racing towards her. She was halfway down now, and she glanced back up at Luke, who was framed by the window, already positioning himself to come down the rope right after her—the rippers had to be almost inside the bedroom by now; she could still hear them slamming against the door up there.

When she was close to the end of the rope, she had no choice but to drop to the ground. It wasn’t that far down, so she should be okay. But as soon as she landed, she felt a popping in her right ankle. She went down immediately.

God, please don’t let it be broken.

The air was cold and her body hadn’t been loose, or maybe she had just landed wrong. She rolled onto her side and grabbed her ankle, wiggling her toes inside her boot to make sure she could move them. Her ankle wasn’t broken, she was pretty sure of that, but it was sprained or jammed badly. She hoped it was just a nerve stinger.

She had to get up and put her weight on it—the true test. She pushed herself up from the ground, standing, but keeping most of her weight on her left foot. As she shifted her weight to her right, she felt the stabbing pain in her ankle moving down her foot and up her calf.

A thudding noise startled her—footsteps. Someone was running. At first she looked towards the street where she had seen the other rippers, but no one was coming.

And then a ripper slammed into her from behind, knocking her off her feet.

The ripper was on top of her, and Wilma struggled to think of where he had come from.

From the vacant lot—had to be. Maybe he had been hiding behind the fence.

The ripper was a man. He was scrawny, but so much stronger than he looked. He held her down, pinning her arms to the ground. His mouth was open wide, drool dripping down onto her face, a fog of rotten breath rolling towards her. His eyes were wild with madness. He screeched, and the sound of his voice was almost inhuman.

Was he calling more rippers, or was he crying out in victory?

Wilma didn’t care; she flipped her body to the side with all the strength she had, knocking the ripper off balance enough to kick him off of her with her good foot. She was back to her feet in an instant, and she heard the thudding sound again—running footsteps. Only this time, there were six of them running down the side yard towards her.

She struggled to get her gun out of her shoulder holster. One ripper she could fight. But seven of them?

And there would be more. There had been hundreds on the street before, and there were still dozens of them inside the house. Some of them had to have seen her through the window climbing down the rope.

There were rippers in the back yard now, pounding at the gate, pushing on it. The whole fence was wobbling back and forth, sections of it about to collapse.

A second ripper slammed into her before she could get her gun out, tackling her from behind like the first one had done. She was down on the ground again with this ripper on top of her, snapping his jaws at her. But this one was heavier and much stronger. She wasn’t going to flip this one over as easily as she had the first one. This ripper looked like he was in his mid-thirties, and he had large muscles under his dark skin. His teeth looked so large and strong.

As the ripper bent down to bite her throat, his head was rocked back and to the side, a pink mist exploding from the side of his head. His eyes rolled back, and he slumped over, falling to the side of her.

Wilma wriggled out from under the man and got to her feet as the scrawny ripper launched himself at her with another screech.

Spit. A bullet tunneled through the scrawny man’s forehead, knocking him down to the ground.

She pulled her gun out and aimed it at the other six rippers running towards her.

Spit. Spit. Spit. Spit. Spit. Spit. She watched as all six of the rippers, four men and two women, dropped to the ground, all six of them with bullet holes in their foreheads.

Wilma looked back at Luke; he stood next to the house, right underneath the dangling rope. He had his backpack on, his gun aimed at three more rippers heading their way. He shot all three of them from twenty yards away, all three dropping to the ground in the increasing darkness.

“You okay?” Luke asked as he rushed to her.

“You got them all,” Wilma said.

“Come on, we need to go. There’s gonna be a lot more coming. Can you run?”

“My ankle. I think it might be sprained. But I’ll run if I have to.”

More screeches sounded from the front of the house, and then the crashing of doors, windows, the thrumming of dozens of running feet on the front porch. They were coming from the house, and more were coming from the street.

Wilma and Luke took off running. She tried to run as fast as she could on her bad ankle.

Luke ran slightly ahead of her, aiming his gun as he sprinted towards the pickup truck. They were almost to the truck when Wilma saw four more rippers running down the street towards the pickup truck from behind it. One of them was carrying what looked like an aluminum baseball bat.

Luke shot all four of them while he was running, dropping all four of them.

Where did he learn to shoot like that?

“Keys!” Luke yelled as he darted around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.

Wilma dug the set of keys out of her pants pocket and threw them at Luke.

Please catch them.

Luke caught them even though it was almost dark. He opened the door, slung his backpack inside, and jumped inside the truck. He was already starting the pickup when Wilma opened the passenger door and slung off her backpack and pulled out her gun. She plopped down in the seat and slammed the door shut. The door locks thumped down after Luke put the truck into gear.

He turned the headlights on and Wilma saw the group of rippers from the house right in front of the truck, with more of them still jumping off of the front porch of the house. The other rippers had already torn down part of the back fence and many of them were scrambling over top of the fallen wood panels.

Luke shifted into reverse and glanced at the rearview mirror as he stomped down on the gas pedal. The tires barked in the night air for just a second and then the truck’s motor roared as they drove backwards, running right into the rippers behind them, running two of them over. Two rippers, one from each side, clamored over the side of the bed of the truck, falling down into the back.

Wilma turned around and rested her arms over the back of the seat, aiming her gun at the two rippers in the back of the truck. She shot both of them in the head, the first bullet shattering the back window in the process. One of the rippers was knocked back and out of the bed of the truck by the impact of the bullet. The other one collapsed down into the bed, lying motionless.

“Hold on!” Luke said as he hit the brakes and spun the truck around in the middle of the street, turning around so they could drive away from the house, away from the larger horde of rippers running towards them.

More rippers were pouring out from the front yards of other houses, racing towards their truck, drawn by the noise and commotion. Some were throwing rocks and chunks of concrete as they ran towards the truck, the projectiles bouncing off the side of the truck, but none of them hitting the windows yet.

When the truck had skidded into the other direction, Luke shifted into drive and stomped down on the gas pedal, speeding towards the rippers that had formed a line across the street.

“Holy shit,” Wilma said. “Where the hell did all of them come from?”

CHAPTER 14

A line of rippers stood in the street in front of their pickup truck as Luke raced towards them—they weren’t moving. He glanced at the rearview mirror as he sped down the street and saw that there were a lot more rippers behind them. They had no choice but to drive right through this line of humans spanning the entire street, stretched out like children playing a game of Red Rover. If he could have, Luke would’ve tried to drive around them, maybe even up on the sidewalk, but there were too many other vehicles on the sides of the road.

“Hold on!” Luke told Wilma again, but he could see out of the corner of his eye that she was already bracing herself, her seatbelt already on.

Luke plowed into the rippers like they were bowling pins. The line wasn’t single file, and there were more rippers behind the first line of defense. It was only going to be a matter of time before the dead and injured bodies he ran into slowed the truck down, their crushed-up flesh clogging up the wheels.

As the truck tore through the mass of bodies, Luke saw flashes of limbs. Faces were contorted in pain, rage, and madness. Wild eyes glared back in the light of the headlights for a millisecond before being run down, mouths open in screams, hands slashing at the truck with knives, bats, golf clubs, pieces of wood and rocks, and other weapons. Other chunks of blocks and rocks still pelted the truck from both sides as they continued on through the mass of bodies, the engine screaming, drowning out the wails and cries of the rippers being torn apart and crushed.

One chunk of concrete bounced off the windshield on the passenger side, leaving behind a spider web of cracks. Wilma instinctively shrank back from the impact, but then she was back up again, her gun in her hand, ready to shoot. She kept looking back at the bed of the truck, making sure that other rippers hadn’t climbed onto the back of it.

Luke kept going. He kept his foot pressed down on the gas pedal, his hands gripping the steering wheel as it bucked, the whole truck bouncing back and forth as if he were driving along a heavily rutted road. The back tires spun on the street, already spinning in pools of blood and slick muscle and fat.

He was sure they were going to bog down at any second and get stuck—the truck was beginning to lose traction, the blood and other fluids slowing the truck down as if he were trying to push through an oil slick. The mass of rippers behind them was going to catch up to the back of the truck at any moment, and then they would be trapped inside.

“Come on,” Luke yelled through gritted teeth as he kept his foot jammed down on the gas pedal.

For just a moment Luke was sure this was the end—the truck was going to bog down and the other rippers would catch up to them. He was sure his death was coming. And then the truck lurched forward, somehow catching traction on a dry area of the concrete road, the last of the rippers falling to the side. The other rippers in front backed away.

Not all of them were so willing to sacrifice themselves, Luke thought.

They were free from the rippers, the truck gaining speed as they raced down the neighborhood street. Luke swerved slightly to avoid hitting a few other stragglers, but most of the rippers were backing off of the street towards the tangle of parked and wrecked cars, and the front lawns beyond them.

It’s like they all decided to step back at the same time, Luke thought. Like they had all thought the same thing at the same time.

But communication like that was impossible, wasn’t it? The disease or plague, or whatever the hell it was, had turned them into mindless animals. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were all pulling back now, watching and waiting as he sped down the road.

One of the truck’s headlights had been knocked out, but the other headlight still provided enough light for Luke to make out the road in front of them through the narrow shaft of light, enough light to avoid hitting any more rippers unless he had to, and to avoid parked, stalled, and abandoned cars and trucks in the middle of the road.

They came to an intersection where two cars had crashed head-on into each other and had been left there. The windows were all smashed out and both driver doors of the cars were wide open. Luke saw dark bloodstains all over the interior of both cars as the truck’s lone headlight splashed over the wreck when they passed by it.

Luke turned left onto the next street, skirting the wreck that was clogging up the intersection. He saw little flashes of movement out of the corner of his eyes in the darkness, rippers moving in and out of the deeper shadows of the night. One ripper—he looked like a young man or even a teenager—ran alongside their pickup for half a block, like a dog might do, before giving up and slowing down.

When they got to the next block, a few more rocks and chunks of concrete pelted the truck, bouncing off the driver’s door and side panels. Luke flinched, shrinking back from the driver’s window, expecting it to shatter at any second.

Wilma still had her gun clenched in her gloved hand, and she held her right knee with her other hand. She was breathing heavily, but Luke couldn’t tell if it was from the pain or the adrenaline of running through a blockade of rippers. Maybe it was a little of both.

“You okay?” he asked her.

She nodded and winced. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Heading south. Trying to get as far away from that mob of rippers as I can.” He glanced down at the instrument panel. The lights were flickering. The gas tank was a quarter full, and that would be a problem down the road, but they had an even more urgent problem coming up much sooner than that.

“I know a place we can go,” Wilma said, wincing again. “A place where we’ll be safe.”

“Where is it? How far away?”

“It’s about thirty miles south.”

“Well, that sounds great, but we’re not going to make it thirty miles.”

Wilma was about to ask why, but then she looked out through the cracked windshield at the steam rising up from the front of the truck, collecting and drifting towards the windshield like a wraith floating on the night air. “Oh,” she said, immediately understanding what the steam meant.

“It’s already running hot,” Luke said. “Something must have jabbed the radiator or torn a hose loose. Maybe one of the rippers stabbed it with a broken stick or a knife.” Or maybe the sharp end of a snapped bone, he thought. “We need to ditch this truck in the next few blocks. We can drive it as far as possible until it seizes up, but we’re going to need to start looking for another truck or a place to hide.”

Wilma nodded in agreement, already looking out through her passenger side window.

CHAPTER 15

The truck was really overheating now. Even more steam was pouring out from underneath the hood.

“We’re going to have to do something soon,” Luke told Wilma. At least he didn’t see as many rippers as before. But a lot of them could still be hiding in the darkness, waiting for them to get out of the truck before running after them.

“There.” Wilma said, pointing at some houses off to the left.

The neighborhood was thinning out a little, the yards becoming larger, the houses larger and farther apart.

Luke killed the one headlight they had left as he drove the last half a block, then he slowed the truck down. The motor was clicking, something knocking inside; the sound of the engine was loud in the night. He put the truck in park and got out. Wilma got out at the same time, grabbing her backpack and slipping it on. She looked like a shadow with all of her black clothing on.

“What are you doing?” Wilma asked as she raced around the back of the truck to Luke. He grabbed a chunk of concrete that one of the rippers had thrown at them—it was right next to the dead ripper in the back of the truck. He took the chunk of rock to the cab of the truck and flipped the headlight back on. He set the chunk of concrete down next to the gas pedal. He held the brake down with his left hand as he shifted into drive, then set the chunk of concrete down on the gas pedal, wedging it there. The motor screamed, the back tires beginning to spin. Luke let go of the brake pedal and jumped back out of the way as the truck lurched forward, the wheels barking just a little. The truck continued down the road, gaining speed, the lone headlight lighting the way, steam drifting away from it like an Old West locomotive.

“Giving them something to follow,” Luke said, finally answering Wilma’s question. “Come on,” he said as he pulled his gun out of his holster.

Wilma followed Luke as they ran towards the closest house, hiding along the side of it in the deeper shadows. She was right behind him when they stopped at the rear corner of the house for a moment.

Everything was quiet and all the houses in sight were dark. The back yard of the house they hid next to opened up to a long field that separated this line of houses with the next line of houses on the next street.

Wilma was in obvious pain, gritting her teeth as she put her weight down on her bad ankle.

“Wait here,” Luke whispered as they crouched down by the corner of the house. He stared at the line of two-story homes silhouetted against the night sky beyond the field. The open field was lit up slightly from the stars and the nearly full moon that was already high in the sky in the east, even this early in the night.

“I’m going with you,” Wilma said between clenched teeth. She even managed a smile. “You’re not ditching me just yet.”

Luke just nodded, but didn’t return her smile. He looked around, studying the houses and the field around them. He wanted to wait a few more seconds. He took the time to reload another magazine into his gun so it would be fully loaded again. He also wanted to give Wilma a few seconds to catch her breath. She was in great shape, but the pain in her ankle was slowing her down a little.

He concentrated on the line of houses beyond the field again, the roofs and second stories making black geometric shapes against the night sky. There were no lights flickering in any of the houses, but if there were people hiding in those houses, they would be crazy to use candles or flashlights in the darkness—lights like that would be beacons out here in the dark for the rippers to spot. But that didn’t mean that the houses were empty. There might be survivors in some of those homes, a single person hiding in the darkness, maybe even down in the basement with the door barricaded.

Some of the houses could have rippers in them. Rippers might be sleeping in some of those houses, making some of those homes into dens. Or the rippers could be going from house to house, scrounging for food. The rippers had to sleep somewhere, and Luke found himself wondering where they slept, and when they slept. They seemed to be active at all times of the day and night. Maybe they didn’t even sleep. Maybe the disease kept them awake, their brains boiling in madness, propelling them onward until they eventually started dropping dead from pure exhaustion.

Luke realized that he was thinking of the rippers as animals again and no longer human beings. He needed to constantly remind himself that the rippers were physiologically still human beings, with the physical limitations that came with being a human being.

Yet they didn’t act like humans anymore; this disease had turned them into animals. He would have to learn more about them, their behavior, especially their group behavior. Why did they move in large herds but also in smaller packs? And there were others that seemed to be on their own. He remembered the large herd of rippers he’d seen coming up the street when he and Sandy had gotten into the house where he had found Crazy Valerie in the kitchen, the woman who had nailed her husband down to the kitchen floor with the nail gun. And now he had seen another large herd tonight.

He didn’t have time to think about this—he could ponder these questions later. Right now they needed to find somewhere safe to hide for a little while, and then they needed to find another vehicle to drive to this safe place that Wilma had mentioned.

He studied one of the houses beyond the field, and he could make out a child’s playground set in the back yard. There was also what looked like a small boat on a trailer near the rear corner of the house. In the back yard next door to that house was a big deck built around an above-ground pool.

“Those houses over there,” Luke whispered to Wilma, nodding his head towards the field beyond the back yard. “I’m gonna check them out and come back to get you.”

“Nope. I’m coming with you.”

“Your ankle—”

“I’ll be fine. You’re not ditching me now.”

“I saved your life,” Luke whispered. “Twice. Why would I ditch you now?”

“Because I’m injured. Because I’m a liability. Because I’m dead weight now.”

Luke sighed softly. “Okay. I got it.” He looked back at the field, then back at Wilma. She was hidden in the shadow of the house, her black clothing hiding her even more; he could barely make her out even this close to her. She was breathing easier now, barely making a sound. “Have your gun ready, but don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to. I don’t hear any rippers right now, but that doesn’t mean that a gunshot won’t bring them running right at us.”

She didn’t say anything, but Luke assumed she was nodding her head.

I can’t hear your head rattle, he almost said to her. It was a phrase he’d never said before, never even heard before, and he wasn’t exactly sure why it had popped into his mind so suddenly.

“If you see a ripper behind us, let me know and I’ll take him out,” Luke whispered. “Only use your gun if a whole herd of them gets after us.”

“Got it.” She seemed a little annoyed with his instructions; these were obviously things she already knew.

“Okay. There are two houses over there. See that one with the boat and the playground in the back yard?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll get to that boat and hold up there for a minute. I want to check the doors and windows of that house, or the house next door if those doors are locked. We need to be careful, there could be rippers scavenging inside. Or there could be someone holed up inside the house, scared and with a shotgun or some other kind of weapon.”

“I got it.”

Luke just nodded. He had to remind himself that he was dealing with a woman who was trained in combat. Maybe not in the military, but she had been trained by someone. “I wish I had some night vision goggles or something like that.”

“There might be some at the safe house.”

“Safe house?”

“Yeah. That’s the place I was telling you about earlier. The place we can go. We’ll be safe there.”

Luke didn’t bother asking any more about it. He wasn’t sure if he believed her about the night vision goggles, or even this safe house she was talking about. She could be saying anything right now to get him to go along with her while she was injured. She could be making up things to seem like more of a valuable asset to keep around. Maybe she could even sense that he was a criminal, a no-hearted bastard who would leave someone behind without hesitation if it came down to it. He wasn’t going to leave her behind, but he wasn’t going to bother pleading his case right now, wasting time trying to convince her.

“You finally ready?” she asked.

He smiled at her, not sure if she could see it in the dark. He couldn’t help liking her in a way, even though she was abrasive and a smartass. But it wasn’t like he wasn’t a smartass, either.

“Yeah, let’s go,” he said.

CHAPTER 16

Luke stepped away from the house, looking up and down the field between the back yards of the houses. Darkness stretched as far as he could see. The moon’s light bathed some of the world in a milky-white light, but there were still a lot of areas hidden in blackness. They were going to be exposed in that moonlight when they ran across the field. The field looked like it was only sixty or seventy yards wide, less than the length of a football field.

There were few sounds now, only the occasional screech or call from somewhere in the distance—the inhuman sounds coming from humans that Luke still couldn’t get used to. They sounded like some kind of primates communicating with each other. He also didn’t hear any helicopters or airplanes in the distance, no scattering of machinegun fire, no one yelling on a megaphone. He didn’t see the red and blue flashing lights of cop cars and emergency vehicles anywhere. Not a single airplane in the night sky. He hadn’t realized how strange the night sky looked without those small red, blue, and white dots moving slowly across the sky.

To the northeast, there was a slight orange glow on the horizon—and he could almost imagine that they were lights of downtown Cleveland, but this wasn’t the glow of electric lights, this looked more like the glow of a massive fire. But maybe not, maybe they were campfires and battery-powered lights. Maybe Wilma had been right about the military and police concentrating their efforts on smaller areas of the city, areas where they had camps set up, and leaving the rural areas to fend for themselves. What had she called an area like this—the dead zone?

Luke bolted out into the field. Wilma was right behind him. She was limping a little, but keeping up with him. He didn’t see any rippers coming their way.

A minute and a half later Luke and Wilma were crouching down next to the boat on the trailer. Wilma’s breathing was a little heavy again, but he could barely hear her. Luke studied the house with the playground in the back yard. The windows on this side of the home were all intact. A small wood deck led up to two glass doors and neither one of them was shattered. These were all good signs.

In the driveway, two vehicles were parked—a dark SUV of some kind, and a smaller car. Both looked newer.

“I’m going to check the back door,” Luke whispered to Wilma.

Wilma stood up, ready to go. She didn’t even bother telling him that she wasn’t going to wait behind.

Luke darted across the back yard to the small wood deck, climbing the steps silently. Twin deck chairs were situated near a stainless-steel barbeque grill in the corner of the deck. He hurried to the doors. Large glass panels were set in the doors with the blinds drawn down on the inside. He tried the doorknobs.

“Locked,” he whispered to her.

He didn’t really want to break the glass, worried that the noise would—

“I’ve got a lock pick,” Wilma said, already removing a small pouch from her front pants pocket. She pulled out two slim metal tools and inserted them into the door lock, twisting and moving them around for a few seconds. A second later there was a loud click as the door unlocked.

Luke knew the basics of lock picking, and he could usually use a credit card to jimmy a flimsy lock free, but Wilma’s skills far surpassed his.

She slid the tools back into the pouch and stuffed it into her pants pocket. She twisted the doorknob gently and pushed the door open and entered the home.

Luke went in right behind her. He closed and locked the door behind them, standing there for just a moment, listening. He didn’t hear anything in the house, and more importantly he didn’t smell that odor of gore.

Those were both good things.

He pulled his penlight out of his front pants pocket and turned it on, holding it with his left hand over the front of it, keeping most of his fingers over the light so that it barely illuminated the room in front of them.

They were in some kind of family or TV room that had been decorated with a maritime theme. Shelves held model ships and there were paintings and photographs all over the walls of lighthouses. An old imitation anchor hung on one wall. The room was messy, but it looked messy because of hasty packing rather than being ransacked by scavengers or rippers.

Rippers would get to this place—they were going to get to every place, eventually. But maybe he and Wilma could crash here until morning. Maybe they could find a set of keys to one of those two vehicles in the driveway. And then they could drive to this safe house that Wilma was talking about.

If she was even telling the truth.

But she had to be going somewhere. She had to be from somewhere. So maybe she was telling the truth.

There was a bedroom off of the family room that had been turned into an office. Drawers were pulled out of the desk in the corner. Books were pulled off of some of the bookcases against the wall, and plastic tubs and cardboard boxes had been pulled out of the small closet, papers and large envelopes all over the floor, only the most valuable and sentimental paperwork and photos probably taken when whoever lived here had abandoned this place.

Luke followed Wilma from the family room into a hall that led to a kitchen and dining room to the left and a living room to the right. A grandfather clock stood against the wall in the dining room, ticking away in the silence. The ticking seemed so loud. A set of stairs off of the living room led upstairs. He motioned to her that he was going to check upstairs and she just nodded.

After checking the three bedrooms upstairs, Luke relaxed a little. No one home, no one hiding. No signs of violence, either. The rooms were messy, clothes pulled out of the master bedroom closet, an open suitcase left on the bed, perhaps left behind because they already had too much stuff packed. He searched through the drawers in the end tables next to the bed, looking for sets of keys. He didn’t find any—they were probably downstairs in the kitchen somewhere.

In the bathroom Luke found an elastic bandage that looked new. He also found a roll of white cloth tape. He brought those with him downstairs.

Wilma was in the living room when he got to the bottom of the stairs.

“What did you find?” he whispered to her, already shoving his gun into his shoulder holster.

“A garage off of the kitchen. There’s a sports car and a motorcycle in the garage. I didn’t see a door to a basement anywhere.” She looked at the objects in his hand. “What did you get?”

Luke handed her the cloth bandage and tape. “I found these upstairs. For your ankle.”

“Thanks.”

He looked over at the couches against the far living room walls, both of them meeting up with each other in the corner. “We should rest over there for the night. I’ll see if I can find us some food and something to drink.”

Wilma nodded and hobbled over to the couch. She slipped her backpack off and plopped down on the couch, wincing a little.

Luke dropped his backpack down in front of the other couch and went back to the kitchen. He checked the fridge, but there wasn’t much in there that he would trust to eat or drink. He opened the cabinets and pulled out boxed and canned food, setting them on the countertop. He found a large plastic container in a bottom cabinet and used that to collect the food. He added a few utensils and a handheld can opener, a few plastic plates and bowls.

Before bringing the food and drinks to the living room, Luke inspected the garage. He shined his flashlight around, not bothering to shield the light with his hand because the only window in the garage was covered with a drawn shade. The Harley Davidson was parked right next to a sixty-nine Chevy Camaro that Wilma had called a sports car. Luke would call it more of a muscle car, but let’s not split hairs. The car was in pristine condition. Maybe if they couldn’t find the keys to the vehicles in the driveway, they could drive this.

Cabinets were built onto the far wall of the garage. There were shelves on another wall where the washer and dryer combo was hooked up. He panned his light over the stuff on the shelves and the floor below them. He saw some camping gear, which gave him hope that he might find something useful. Maybe these two liked to hike and camp, along with their obvious love of boating. Maybe they’d had an RV parked here, and they had taken that instead of their vehicles. He could picture the older couple in their RV, driving to their kids’ houses, picking up their kids and grandkids, and then driving up as far into Michigan as they could, getting as far away from civilization, or what used to be civilization, as they could.

Luke swept his flashlight beam over some rolled-up sleeping bags, tents in packs, coolers stacked up on top of each other, and then he shined his beam of light on a large object sitting on the floor in front of the shelves.

“That might help,” he whispered to himself.

CHAPTER 17

“I brought you a surprise,” Luke said as he carried the large object into the living room. He set it down on the wood floor and pushed the coffee table back away a little so he could keep it close to them.

“A heater,” she said. “Where did you find that?”

“It was in the garage. Buried behind some stuff. Still has some kerosene in it.”

Wilma had her black hiking boots and gloves off. She had already wrapped her ankle in the elastic bandage and then pasted some strips of tape around it. Her foot and the bandage looked so pale compared to her black clothing.

Luke lit the little pilot light of the heater and it fired right up. It didn’t put off too much light, but he double-checked all the windows, making sure they were locked and making sure all the blinds and drapes were closed. He was pretty sure the faint light from the heater couldn’t be seen from outside.

After he was done checking the windows and doors, he came back with the plastic tub of food and drinks. He set the plastic container of food down on a table between the two couches where they met in the corner. He also found two blankets in a hall closet. The blankets still smelled fresh with whatever laundry detergent the couple who used to live in this house had used.

Wilma opened a can of bean and bacon soup and a package of crackers. “Cheeze-Whiz,” she said, practically squealing with delight when she saw the can.

“Only the best for us,” Luke said. “I also found something else.” He got up and came back with a few cans of beer. “They were in the garage, but they’re as cold as if they’d been in the fridge.”

“I don’t drink much,” she said.

“It might help with the pain. I found some ibuprofen, too.” He handed the bottle to her.

She opened the bottle and swallowed three pills down dry, then opened the can of beer and took a sip. “Thanks.”

Luke sat down and ate his own can of soup.

Wilma pulled her sock back on and then put her hiking boot back on, wincing in pain as she did so, but tightening up the laces anyway, like she wanted to be ready to run if she had to.

“It doesn’t look too swollen,” Luke said, watching her.

“It’s just a sprain.” She looked at him as she sat back on the couch. “Did you find the keys to the cars?”

He nodded. “They’re on the counter. One vehicle has two sets—must be the car.”

“It’s already getting warmer in here,” Wilma said. “I’m glad you found the heater.”

The heater was nice. It wasn’t cold enough for them to freeze to death in their sleep, but the heat, and even the bit of light it put off, helped with their morale.

“You feeling a little better?” Luke asked after a few more minutes.

Wilma crunched on a cracker loaded with Cheeze-Whiz and nodded. “My stomach is full. I’m resting. My ankle isn’t throbbing as much as it was. I’m finally halfway warm. And I think I’m getting a buzz from one can of beer. Yeah, I’m feeling better.”

Luke couldn’t help smiling.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Wilma asked. “You hit everything you aimed at. All head shots. All in the dark and on the run.”

“I’ve practiced a lot.”

“Yeah, me too . . . but . . .”

Luke sipped his beer, saying nothing.

“Were you in the military?”

Luke shook his head no.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. You don’t seem like the military type. So where did you learn to shoot?”

“What about you?” Luke said, trying to change the subject. “What’s this safe house you were talking about?”

Wilma drank the last of her beer and set the empty can on the table between their couches. “It’s one of our safe houses.”

“Safe house. What, like in a spy movie or something?”

“No, not spies. You were right earlier. I’m part of a group of preppers. A large group.”

“Like a militia?”

“You could call it that. I know the word militia is a dirty word these days, even though the right to form a militia is right there in the Constitution of the United States.”

Luke sipped his beer. “How large of a group are we talking about here?”

“Thousands all over Ohio, western Pennsylvania, southern Michigan, and parts of Indiana, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. Different chapters. My dad ran the chapter here in Cuyahoga County.”

“But then he turned?”

“No. he died two years ago. Massive heart attack. Killed him before he hit the ground. My mom died seven years before he did. Cancer.”

“Who runs your chapter now?”

“My brother Matt. He’s the only family I have left now.”

Luke was quiet for a moment. “Most of your group, they will have turned or died by now.”

She nodded in agreement. “Some will have turned. But a lot of them were prepared with bunkers and gas masks and hazmat suits.”

“I guess your dad was involved with prepping for a while.”

“Yeah. Matt and I were brought up that way. We lived on a large farm down in Medina County. We learned to hunt and fish. We learned to shoot. We learned different self-defense tactics. We learned to farm and live off the land. We learned how to survive.”

“And how to pick locks.”

Wilma smiled, closing her eyes for just a moment. “I shouldn’t have left the safe house, but I wanted to find my cousin. Her name was Doris. I wanted to get to her before, you know, the disease got to her and her kids. She wasn’t a prepper. Hated the idea of it. So I knew she would need some help.”

“That’s when you lost your gas mask?”

She nodded.

“And you said you went with two others. You said they didn’t make it.”

She shook her head no and sighed slowly. “I was going to go by myself. Matt didn’t want me to go at all, but I wasn’t going to leave Doris behind. Like I said, I don’t have much family left. Tommy and Giles volunteered to go with me. I told them I could go myself, but they insisted. Giles was driving the van when he started to turn.”

“He turned?”

“Yeah. He was wearing his gas mask, and he turned.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you said this plague was airborne.”

“That makes the most sense. But it got to Giles, and he wore his gas mask faithfully when we were outside.”

Luke just nodded, storing that information for later.

“Giles turned into a ripper while he was driving. He ran the van off the road. He started talking gibberish, trying to get at us. We had to leave him behind. He was wedged in the driver’s seat from the wreck.”

“You didn’t shoot him?”

Wilma shook her head no. “I couldn’t do it. Tommy didn’t want to, either. And the sound of the crash drew a horde of rippers. Me and Tommy got out of the van and ran away before the rippers got to the van. We ran through some yards and I got to a wood fence. Tommy helped me over it, but he couldn’t climb the fence in time. I tried to shoot at the rippers, but there were too many of them. I couldn’t get them all.”

Wilma was quiet for a moment, struggling to hold back tears. She swallowed hard and went on. “The rippers were pushing against the fence, about to knock it down. I couldn’t see Tommy, but I could hear him screaming as they ripped him apart and ate him. I had no choice but to run. I got away and eventually made it to Doris’s house.”

“But she wasn’t there,” Luke said, remembering what Wilma had told him a few hours ago when they had been braiding the bedsheets into the rope.

“I lied about that,” Wilma whispered.

Luke just nodded. He had known at the time that she had been lying about it.

“She was there,” Wilma said in an even softer voice. “She had already turned.”

He didn’t need Wilma to say any more, and she didn’t. Luke thought of the horrors he had seen at Howard’s house, and he was sure Wilma had seen something similar at her cousin’s house.

She snuggled down deeper into the couch, pulling the blanket up to her face, lying on her side and facing the kerosene heater.

As much as he hated to, Luke knew he would have to turn the heater off soon. The warmth was intoxicating, even the meager reddish light the heater put out made him feel a little better. But it was also making him a little sleepy, and he couldn’t fall asleep with the heater on. Not only because of the fire hazard but also because of the possibility that the rippers might somehow see the glow of light from the house even though he had made sure all the blinds and drapes were shut tight. Still, the rippers might even sense the heat coming from the house somehow.

They’re still human beings, Luke had to remind himself again. They’re not superhuman creatures now, some kind of new species.

“Don’t leave me while I’m sleeping,” Wilma muttered.

Luke thought she had already fallen asleep. Her breathing had gotten a little heavier and harder, but she was still awake. Her eyes were still closed, and Luke studied her for a moment. In the red glow of the heater, she looked a little younger than she was. Luke guessed she was maybe in her late twenties, but now she looked like she could have been a teenager, even a child. Suddenly she wasn’t the tough and capable woman Luke had known for the last few hours—now she looked small and vulnerable and fragile.

“I won’t leave you,” he told her.

“Promise?” she asked. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I promise. I’m going to stay awake for a while and keep watch. You get some sleep.”

She seemed to relax even more. Her face seemed even smoother and younger, that scowl she’d worn for so long was gone. She seemed to finally be at peace for the first time since Luke had met her, the tension eased. She deserved a few hours of peace, he thought. They both did.

“I told you about myself,” Wilma mumbled.

Again, he thought she’d been asleep. Several minutes had passed. Maybe she was testing him, pretending to be asleep, seeing if he would keep his promise and stay with her.

He didn’t reply to her.

“It’s your turn now,” she mumbled.

Luke still didn’t answer her. He watched her for a few minutes, listening to her breathing.

He was pretty sure she was sleeping fifteen minutes later.

“I’m not a good person,” Luke whispered, finally answering her question. But at least she was asleep now and hadn’t heard him.

CHAPTER 18

Wilma woke with a start. She sat up on the couch, the blanket falling off of her. For a few seconds she didn’t know where she was, but she knew she wasn’t safe. She felt for her gun in the holster under her hoodie. It was still there. She pulled it out.

It was cold and dark in the living room, almost pitch-black. It was so dark because they had pulled all the drapes and blinds closed because . . .

Because they had been using a kerosene heater that Luke found in the garage.

It was all coming back to her now. She moved her right foot and felt a blast of pain from her sprained ankle. Her muscles were stiff. She was thirsty and hungry. And cold.

She remained still and listened for a moment. She didn’t hear anything in the house except that grandfather clock in the dining room ticking. Thank God it wasn’t one of those clocks that chimed every hour—the chiming noise might have been heard outside.

Luke was gone. She stared at the couch, but all she saw was the blanket bunched up at the end of the couch.

He had left her in the night.

My backpack.

She felt along the floor and her hand touched her backpack. At least he hadn’t returned the favor and taken her backpack like she’d done to him.

I’m not a good person. Luke had said those words as she had been falling asleep. He probably thought she’d been asleep by then, but she remembered him saying that. Or maybe he hadn’t really cared if she’d heard him or not.

Luke wasn’t a good person. She had already guessed that judging from the silencer on his pistol, the dried blood on the nail gun, and the extra weapons, envelopes of cash, and fake ID he was carrying around with him. No, he was some kind of criminal, and maybe not a good person, but at least he hadn’t taken her backpack when he’d left.

He probably took one of the vehicles in the driveway, but at least there was another one. If he was really a bad person, he could have done so much more to her. Like he’d said yesterday, he could have locked her outside on the back porch of that house when those rippers had chased her back to the house. He had saved her life then, and he had saved it again when they had climbed down the rope from the second-story bedroom window.

She was on her own now, and she would survive. And maybe it was better for both of them this way. She could imagine Matt’s face if she would have shown up with Luke, who would’ve set off alarm bells with Matt and the others immediately—Luke kind of had that vibe about him.

A few seconds ticked by as she sat on the couch, still listening. No sounds inside the house except that annoying clock in the dining room. There were no distant screeches or howls from outside, no footsteps on the front porch or back deck, no one clawing to get inside the house, no windows shattering. She could relax for a few seconds while she got her bearings.

She’d been dreaming right before she woke up, dreaming about her father, mother, and Matt. They’d all been at the house in Medina County, out back at the shooting range where her father had set up hay bales with targets pinned to them. Wilma had been shooting, and there had been an assortment of weapons laid out on the top of an old wooden wire spool turned up on one end. Wilma was firing a weapon at the target in the dream. Her father, mother and Matt were right behind her. She never turned around to look at them, concentrating on shooting, but she couldn’t hit the target no matter how hard she tried. She should have been able to hit the target with no problem, but she couldn’t.

“Take your time, sweetie,” her father said from a few feet behind her.

Wilma wanted to turn around so badly. She wanted to see her mother and father again, she wanted to hold them. But for some reason she couldn’t turn around.

“She doesn’t have time,” Matt said. “She needs to hurry. The rippers are coming soon.”

Wilma focused on the paper target, the silhouette of a man’s upper body, attached to the side of the hay bale. She squeezed the trigger over and over again, but she still kept missing the target, the bullets hitting the hay bale and even pelting the dirt and grass around the target. Why couldn’t she hit the target?

Just then she heard the roar of a crowd—it sounded like the yells of a marauding army in some old movie about medieval Europe.

The rippers—they were coming, just like Matt had said. Soon she would see the rippers pouring over the low hills all around the property, all of them approaching from every direction. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Every ripper in the world.

She knew she needed to hit the target. If she couldn’t hit the target, then she wasn’t going to be able to hit the rippers when they came. But when she looked back at the target, it had changed. It wasn’t the silhouette of a man anymore, now it was the symbol for anarchy painted in bright red spray-paint—the letter A with a circle around it.

“Take your time, baby,” her mother said from behind her, only it wasn’t her mother’s voice anymore, now it was Doris’s voice. “You couldn’t save me, Wilma. I wanted you to help me, but you couldn’t save me.”

“I’m sorry,” Wilma whispered in the dream, still trying desperately to hit the anarchy symbol spray-painted on the hay bale.

“They’re coming!” Matt yelled from right behind her. “The rippers are coming!”

“I know!” Wilma snapped back at him.

“But that’s not the worst thing,” her father told her. And now he sounded like he was right behind her, only inches away. His voice was right in her ear. She swore she could feel his breath on her skin and smell his aftershave. “There’s something worse coming. The Shadow Man is coming.”

She looked up at the hills in the distance and saw a line of people standing there, but these weren’t rippers, it was some kind of gang of men and women, all with weapons. And standing in front of them, shrouded in darkness, was a tall man wearing a black trench coat and a large floppy hat. His face was just a shadow, but she could see his eyes—they were shining like two pinpoints of light.

And that’s when Wilma had snapped awake. Had she heard something that had roused her from sleep? Maybe she had heard Luke start one of the vehicles in the driveway and drive off. Or maybe she’d heard some of the rippers around the house, inspecting it, trying to find a way in.

Wilma stood up in front of the couch, testing her ankle, slowly putting her weight down onto it. She winced as the pain shot up her leg, but she could stand it if she had to. She picked up her backpack and slipped it over her shoulders without a sound. She fished her fingerless gloves out of her pocket and slipped them on. She picked up her gun from the couch. She was ready to go now.

She checked the ticking clock in the dining room. It was easier to see in the dining room because the waning moonlight was filtering in through the blinds over the two doors that led out to the deck in the back. She stared at the clock face and saw that it was a little after five o’clock—but probably still at least an hour away from dawn.

A sound from the kitchen. No, from beyond the kitchen. Out in the garage.

Wilma hurried into the kitchen and then froze when she looked down at the countertop near the door that led out to the garage. There were sets of keys there; it looked like all of them were still there. Hope surged through her. She heard that sound from the garage again, the soft sound of someone moving something around out there.

It was Luke. She was sure of it. He hadn’t left her. He’d kept his promise.

She hurried over to the kitchen window over the sink that looked out to the driveway. Both of the vehicles were still there.

“Luke,” she whispered when she entered the garage.

“Over here,” he whispered back.

She saw the dot of light from his penlight, his one hand cupped over the front of it.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just looking around again. I couldn’t sleep. I was upstairs earlier, seeing if there’s anything we might need.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I wanted you to sleep for a little while. You need your rest.” He walked towards her. “I was going to wake you up in about ten minutes.”

“You didn’t sleep at all?” she asked.

“Yeah. About four hours. I woke up a little while ago.”

“Did something wake you up? Did you hear something outside?”

“No. I just woke up. Had some bad dreams.”

She felt a chill dance across her skin. “Yeah, me too.”

“You okay? How’s your ankle?”

“It’s better,” she lied.

“You ready to go? I think it’s better if we leave around this time of the morning. It seems like this is the time the rippers are least active.”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

Wilma backed up into the kitchen as Luke entered. He picked up a set of keys and then walked over to the end of another line of cabinets and picked up his backpack. She hadn’t seen the backpack there earlier.

“These keys are for the SUV,” Luke said. “I think that’s our best bet, but we’ll take the other set and check out the car. See which one has the most gas.”

“See which one starts,” she added.

“Yeah.” He went into the living room, and she followed him, trying not to limp too badly.

“I’m going to use the bathroom upstairs before we leave,” he told her. “There’s one down here. You should try to go, too.”

She nodded. There would be bathrooms at the safe house, only those would have running hot water, and a shower. But she didn’t want to argue with him.

“I got a box of supplies to take with us,” he said. “Some extra food and drinks. Extra water and batteries. The old couple cleaned the place out pretty good, but there was probably no way they could have taken everything they wanted to take.”

Luke headed upstairs.

CHAPTER 19

Both vehicles started right up, and both were nearly full of gas. But the SUV was bigger and more powerful, so they decided to take that one.

“I’m driving,” Wilma said. “I know the way there.”

Luke didn’t argue with her. He loaded the box of supplies he had gathered together into the back seat, along with both of their backpacks, both of them within easy reach. He got in the passenger side, and she got in the driver’s side. They had to move quickly. Even though the SUV’s engine was pretty quiet, any sound out here in the silent morning seemed amplified.

The world was still dark, not even beginning to lighten up in the east yet. The nearly full moon had shifted towards the western horizon and the air seemed even colder than it had only a few hours ago.

Wilma only turned on the parking lights so she could see the instrument panel. She shifted into reverse and backed out of the driveway, backing out onto the street and then she shifted into drive.

They drove down the street, passing the dark homes until they reached a county road, where they turned south. Already the neighborhoods were thinning out, subdivisions giving way to small farms here and there; there were more fields and patches of woods. The farther south they drove, the more rural it got.

Luke turned the heater on, warming his hands in front of the vent—the heat felt wonderful. Wilma kept her gloves and knit cap on as she drove. He tried the radio, first pushing the buttons for pre-selected radios stations, and then slowly turning the knob. There was mostly static on the radio, a few voices faded in and out, maybe ham radio operators, but it was hard to tune them in. One man with a southern accent sounded like he was preaching, and it reminded Luke of the prophet he had seen walking down the street a few nights ago. He wondered if the old prophet was still alive.

No, probably not.

He wondered how far the prophet had gotten that night after he had walked away from that street Luke had been on. He wondered if the prophet had made it another few blocks. Another mile. Had the rippers gotten to him? The military?

Thinking of the old prophet made Luke think of Sandy. He wondered if the dog was still alive. Maybe her chances of surviving were better than the old prophet’s, but maybe not that much better. He wanted to imagine that Sandy had fallen in with a pack of dogs that would help her survive in this new world, but he highly doubted that had happened.

The world was beginning to lighten up enough for Wilma to see without the headlights.

“How long will it take to get to this safe house?” Luke asked.

“About another forty-five minutes maybe,” she said. She seemed antsy, speeding up a little. “We need to make it there before seven o’clock.”

“You think they’ll leave without you?”

“I don’t know.”

“They won’t wait?”

She just shrugged. “They’ve got their instructions to follow. No one told me to go out and look for my cousin. I knew the risks and the consequences.”

Luke didn’t know how to respond to that. He stared out the passenger window at the lightening world as Wilma cruised down the road, doing at least fifty-five or sixty miles an hour now. There were quite a few cars and trucks pulled over onto the side of the road, but not too many blocking the road. Some of the vehicles were wrecked into telephone poles, and a few had crashed right into houses and buildings, others crashed into each other, rear-ended and sideswiped. Two of them were flipped over into a shallow ditch.

“Look at all these cars,” Luke said.

Wilma nodded. “Most of them abandoned. Just think of how many people began to turn into rippers as they were driving.”

“Yeah. Do you know what the symptoms are?”

“It starts with confusion, almost like a person has sudden dementia or something. They start talking gibberish, forgetting words, unable to communicate what they want to say. And they start getting angry and violent.”

Luke thought of all the news reports he’d heard about, all the violence all over America in the weeks before everything collapsed: families being slaughtered in their homes, violence at workplaces, at public places. The signs had been there, all of it leading up to this.

“They might have snapped while they were driving,” Wilma continued, nodding at the abandoned cars and trucks they were passing. “They could’ve been driving and then ten minutes later forgot where they were going. Or maybe even forgot how to drive.”

He wondered what happened when they turned into rippers. He wondered if they were trapped inside their minds somehow while they turned. He wondered if Howard’s mind was still there somewhere when he’d been slaughtering his wife and kids, eating them, unable to control himself, unable to do anything but watch what he was doing.

Luke focused on the buildings they drove past instead of the abandoned cars and trucks. He saw a few rippers wandering around, and again he wondered why some traveled in large groups and others were alone. Some of the buildings had been destroyed: windows broken, doors wide open, trash all over the yards and parking areas.

One parking lot in front of an auto parts store had three dead bodies lying in the middle of it. Crows and buzzards were already out this early in the morning, picking at the bits of flesh they had left on their bones.

Another brick building had the word REPENT spray-painted across the side of it in big green letters. Other messages had been spray-painted including: ALL DEAD HERE and ABANDON ALL HOPE. He noticed the same symbol painted on a few of the houses and buildings, the letter A with a circle around it.

“What do you think that is?” Luke asked Wilma, pointing at the next house he saw with the symbol painted on it.

“It stands for anarchy,” Wilma said.

Luke nodded. “Yeah, I know. But why are people painting that symbol over and over again?”

She shrugged while keeping both hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t know.”

He sensed that she was lying, but he didn’t want to call her on it. He looked back out the window again, watching the early morning mist roll by. He stared at the devastation of the businesses, houses, farms, cars, and trucks. This didn’t look like Ohio anymore, or even America, it looked like a country that had just been bombed or attacked, leaving behind battle scars and death everywhere.

“Smells like smoke,” Luke said.

“Yeah. I smell it, too. Look.” She pointed out the windshield, to the left. “See that up there? It looks like those crops in that field are on fire.”

Luke saw it. The fire was probably a quarter of a mile away from the road, back in the fields, but a large part of the fields were burning, the smoke drifting up from the fires and adding to the mist, creating a dense wall of fog across the road ahead.

Wilma slowed the SUV down a little.

“Is there another way around it?” he asked.

She sighed and gripped the steering wheel harder. “I’m going to try to go through it. The fire doesn’t look that big. Maybe once we get past that field . . .” She let her words trail off.

Luke didn’t want to argue with her, but he also didn’t want to slam into a jackknifed semi-truck that they wouldn’t see until the last moment in the fog and smoke.

“Fires are something we’re going to have to get used to,” Wilma said as she sped towards the wall of smoke. “Fires are going to keep burning all over the place. Fires that were set purposely, like this one probably was. Fires from cities being bombed. Eventually there will be fires from lightning strikes or nuclear power plants shutting down. No fire department to put them out anymore.”

Anarchy, Luke thought. That’s truly what the world was now. Maybe that’s what all of those symbols were supposed to mean, that they were trapped now in a chaotic world with no rules anymore.

Wilma drove into the smoke, slowing down even more. She turned on her headlights, but then turned them back off—they didn’t seem to be doing any good. She gripped the steering wheel hard as she concentrated on the road.

Luke didn’t say anything as she drove; he just kept watching out the windshield, trying to help her spot any objects in the road before it was too late.

The abandoned cars and trucks had thinned out a little the farther south they drove, the areas less populated, so maybe their odds of getting through the next mile or two of smoke would be pretty good. They had seen fewer rippers, but Luke was ready for rippers to materialize out of the smoke at any moment. He could imagine them rushing up to their slow-moving truck, smashing the windows with clubs and pipes and hammers. He braced himself for some of the rippers to run out into the road, sacrificing a few of themselves so the rest of them could eat.

So far so good. They had to have driven at least a mile now. He knew Wilma was nervous about getting to this safe house in time before her brother and the rest of them left, but she still needed to be careful. If they wrecked the vehicle, they weren’t going to get there at all.

“What’s that?” Wilma said.

Luke saw it, too. The smoke was beginning to fade a little, but not enough to see clearly. There were two cars tipped over on their sides, nose-to-nose, facing each other, blocking the road.

Luke had seen a roadblock like that before.

CHAPTER 20

“Slow down,” Luke said. He had his gun out. “I’ve seen this before.”

“Look,” Wilma said as she slowed the SUV down even more, creeping towards the two cars on their sides. One of the cars, the white one, had a big anarchy symbol painted on the roof with orange paint.

“Get ready to punch the gas,” Luke told her. “And stay down. That’s a barricade. I’ve seen it before. There will be people hiding behind those cars with guns. Go to the left. It looks like we can get around them there in that ditch.”

Wilma veered to the left as she approached the two vehicles.

When they were only thirty feet away, two men stepped out from each end of the barricade, both with machine guns aimed at their SUV.

“Get down!” Luke yelled. “Go to the left! Punch the gas!”

Wilma slouched down in the driver’s seat and yanked the wheel to the left, gunning the gas at the same time.

Luke rolled down the window and stayed low, using the top of the door to aim his pistol at the closer man, who was already shooting at them. The attacker was dressed in a mixture of camouflage and black clothing with a bandana over his face and sunglasses or goggles on.

The men fired their automatic rifles, the bullets flying at them and pelting the side of the SUV. Luke concentrated on the man closer to them, the one on the left side of the barricade, squeezing the trigger as their truck sped to the left.

Luke got the closer man in the forehead. He aimed at the other man, shooting twice, hitting the man in the forehead and then the neck, dropping him instantly.

Wilma hit the brakes as their SUV skidded off the side of the road, right towards the ditch. The SUV came to a stop right at the edge of the ditch.

They were still and everything was quiet.

Luke kept his gun aimed out the window, staying low, waiting for others to come running out from behind the two cars. They were almost even with the two tipped-up vehicles, but not behind them yet, so he couldn’t see who else was hiding back there. “You okay?” he asked without taking his eyes off of the cars.

She didn’t answer right away, only breathing heavily.

“Wilma!”

“Yes,” she said, breathing the word out. “Yeah. I’m not hit. You?”

“No. They hit our vehicle, though. You see any steam coming out of the front? I don’t want to take my eyes off those cars.”

“No. Gauges are all good right now.”

Luke just nodded slightly. “Let’s just wait here for a few seconds. If there are any others behind there, they might think we’re injured or dying. They’ll peek around the corner soon enough to check.”

Wilma waited in the driver’s seat, her hands on the steering wheel, her foot on the brake, the selector still in drive. The engine was still purring.

“Okay,” Luke said after another minute. “Let’s drive around this vehicle over here, see what’s behind the barricade. Just go slowly, but be ready to punch the gas if we need to.”

Wilma crept forward, maneuvering away from the edge of the ditch and back onto the road. As she crept towards the end of the barricade, Luke glanced down at the first man he had killed, getting a better look at him this time. The man was dressed in layers of clothing, some camouflage, some black leather, with belts across his jacket holding different pouches—he looked like something out of a Mad Max film. He had some kind of goggles over his eyes and a red bandana over his face. But his hat had fallen off when he’d hit the ground, his long hair splayed out under his head, already soaked with blood. And now that the hat was gone, Luke saw that the man had the same symbol on his forehead, the anarchy symbol. At first Luke thought the symbols might have been drawn there in red marker, but then he guessed that it might have been burned or etched into the man’s skin. Luke’s bullet had traveled right through the middle of the symbol.

When they were behind the barricade, Luke saw a construction tractor parked right behind both vehicles, holding both of them up on their sides. Just beyond the construction tractor a box truck was parked. The rear end of the truck was facing them as they drove by and the door was rolled all the way up, but there were no other men inside. The back of the truck was half-filled with boxes, plastic tubs, suitcases, and other supplies.

“Slow down for a second,” Luke told Wilma, still keeping his eyes and his gun on the truck.

“We need to go. There might be more of them.”

“Just go a little farther, just so I can see the front of the truck.”

Wilma crept forward, then slowed the SUV down to a stop. Luke opened the door and got out.

“What are you doing?” she hissed at him.

Luke saw that the side of the panel truck had a big anarchy symbol painted on the side of it, but the symbol looked strange, the circle around the letter A more angular, almost like a capital D. The cab of the truck was empty. No one else seemed to be around, unless they were hiding in the ditch or they had run off down the road. The smoke was lighter here, but still hovering in the air, the air stinking with the smell of burning crops. He took a few steps towards the truck, still aiming his gun at it.

Nobody else around. There had only been the two men here, both with machine guns, both with the symbols carved on their foreheads.

“Come on,” Wilma yelled. “Get back in here.”

He looked back at the SUV, walking back to it. He inspected the damage to their SUV. There were a few bullet holes in the side of their vehicle, more towards the rear. The tires all looked good, none of them flattened. The rear back window was shattered, but that was the extent of the damage.

Luke got back in the SUV and shut the door. He rolled the window back up. “Tires are okay. Most of the bullets hit the rear of the truck. Let’s get going.”

Wilma was happy to hear that. She put the SUV back into drive and stomped the gas pedal down. They sped up quickly, and a moment later they were out of the smoke, the air clearing up right away.

“They weren’t trying to kill us,” Luke said as they drove. “They wanted to scare us, get us to stop or drive us off the road into the ditch. They wanted the stuff we had inside. You see all of that stuff they had in that truck? All the cars and trucks on the side of the road back there? They were taking stuff from people.”

Wilma didn’t say anything.

“What did they do with the people after they took their stuff?”

Wilma still didn’t say anything.

“I think they’re part of some kind of gang. You ever heard of a gang that has an anarchy symbol?”

She just stared at him like a gang might be more his area of expertise. “No,” she said.

Again, Luke sensed that Wilma was lying. He sensed that she knew what that symbol really meant and who those people really were. He felt like confronting her about it, but decided to hold that card for now.

“You did great back there,” he told her.

She relaxed instantly. “You, too,” she said, smiling again.

CHAPTER 21

“It’s not too far now,” Wilma said as she drove.

Luke stared out the window, watching the farmland and a scattering of trees whipping by. At least none of the other crops were burning, and the road was pretty clear of abandoned vehicles and debris. He saw a few rippers here and there, wandering around. He saw one large group in a field of crops, many of the rippers uprooting plants and eating them. A lot of the rippers looked their way as they drove past them, but they never ran after their truck.

“Is the safe house on the farm where you grew up?” Luke asked, turning to Wilma.

“No. My dad sold the farm about seven years ago, right after my mom died. He took the money he made from the farm and built two safe houses for this county and fortified a small home he bought for himself. He also bought a lot of supplies, guns, ammo, vehicles.”

“Is this safe house underground? Like a bunker?”

“No. His house had an underground bunker on the property, but not this one. It’s really more like a time-share property that he bought with a lot of other preppers. It was a meeting place, and a jumping-off point for the ultimate destination—a camp down in West Virginia.”

“Where in West Virginia?”

“Not too far into West Virginia, just a few miles south of the Ohio River.”

Luke just nodded and looked back out the window. The day was brightening up a little, the mist beginning to clear even more, but he could already see that the day was going to be cloudy and gray. There might be rain later, or maybe even sleet. It felt cold enough to snow.

“Okay, here we go,” Wilma said, turning onto a smaller road. “It’s just down this road about a mile.”

Luke still had his gun in his lap. He studied the houses they passed. Most of them didn’t look demolished, and he didn’t see any more anarchy symbols. But most of the houses looked abandoned, some of the front doors wide open, most of the windows shattered or busted out. Rippers had probably gone from house to house around here, scavenging for food and fresh meat.

A black and white cat sat on the back of a car, watching them intently as they drove by.

Wilma pulled down a dirt driveway of the last house on this street. She looked anxious, her gaze shifting out towards a large field in the distance beyond the safe house.

“You think they already left?” Luke asked her.

“I don’t know. We’re a little late. I hope they waited for me.”

She drove towards the safe house at the end of the dirt driveway; it was set way back from the street on three acres of land, much closer to the edge of the field of crops. The safe house was a brick home with several vehicles parked in front of it on the grass: three pickup trucks, an old Chevy van spotted with rust, and two cars.

Wilma pulled up right next to one of the pickup trucks that was jacked up on large tires, and she shifted the vehicle in park. The nose of their SUV was pointed towards the safe house. She sat there for a moment, her hands still on the steering wheel, the engine still running.

“What now?” Luke asked.

Wilma didn’t answer. She looked more nervous than ever. She flashed her headlights on and off in some kind of code.

“You okay?” Luke asked her.

She shook her head a little. “I . . . I just feel so bad about Tommy and Giles. I hate to tell them what happened to them.”

“You said Giles turned. You can’t help that.”

“I know,” she said.

Luke couldn’t help feeling that Wilma was nervous about something else. He looked around, but didn’t see any rippers nearby. He looked back at Wilma. “Let’s get out and knock on the door.”

Wilma shut the truck off and pocketed the keys. She grabbed her gun and opened the door.

Luke got out on the passenger side, his gun in his hand. He looked around as he walked to the front of the SUV. He didn’t hear any sounds, no screeches or cries in the distance. There was still a mist hanging around, but it wasn’t as thick as it had been an hour ago. But still, the mist could hide the rippers until they were less than fifty yards away.

He looked at the safe house. It was a one-story home with solar panels attached to the metal roof and sturdy steel bars on the windows. Very few plants or shrubs decorated the front of the house. The grass was beaten-down and going dormant for the winter. A large block structure was right behind the house, like it had been added on to the home at some point.

The front door opened and three men rushed out, two of them with AR-15s and the other one with a shotgun. All three men wore camouflage fatigues, gas masks, and rubber gloves. “Stop right there,” the leader of the men said.

“Matt,” Wilma yelled. “It’s me.” She froze and put her hands up.

The leader took a few steps forward and lowered his shotgun a little. “Wilma.” He glanced at Luke, then looked back at Wilma. “Where’s Giles and Tommy?”

She shook her head slightly. “They didn’t make it. Giles turned and Tommy . . .” She let her words trail off.

Luke could hear the sigh coming from behind the gas mask as Matt lowered his head a little, and he lowered his shotgun even more. But the two men behind him still kept their AR-15s steadily aimed at them.

“I told you not to go out there,” Matt said.

Wilma’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I know. I wanted to find Doris and the kids.”

Matt didn’t respond.

“They . . . Doris had already turned . . . and . . .” She didn’t need to finish—Luke was sure Matt could guess what had happened to them.

“Where’s your gas mask?”

“I lost it when me and Tommy were running from the rippers.”

“Who’s this?” Matt asked, gesturing at Luke with his shotgun.

“His name is Luke. He saved my life. Twice. He’s a good person.” She took a step forward. “I want him to go with us down to the camp.”

Matt let out another sigh that sounded like a rush of gas coming out of his mask. “I can’t . . . I can’t let you come with us. You know that.”

Wilma didn’t say anything. Her body was rigid, and she was doing her best not to cry. Luke was sure she had been expecting this reaction from Matt.

“You disobey orders and go out there into this . . . this shit,” Matt said. “You take Tommy and Giles with you, two of our best men, and you don’t come back with them. You lose your mask. You come back with a stranger.”

Luke gripped the handle of his gun a little harder, but he kept it down by his side. He was sure that Matt had already noticed the silencer on his gun, and he was probably having the same questions about a silencer that Wilma had had. Luke glanced around, looking for any rippers emerging out of the fog all around them.

“We’re not infected,” Wilma told Matt, taking another step towards him. “If we were infected, we would’ve turned by now.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about this plague.”

“I know we would’ve showed symptoms by now. I think everyone who is going to turn already has over the last week or two. You know a certain percentage is going to be immune to any plague. It could be ten percent, or even more.”

“Not if it was an engineered plague.”

“We can’t take the chance, Matt,” the man to Matt’s left said, still aiming his rifle at Luke.

Matt’s shoulders slumped even more. “You know Rick’s right, Wilma. You know that.”

“Matt . . .”

“You knew the risks when you left.”

Wilma fought back tears. For a moment Luke thought she was going to argue, or even beg. But she stiffened up and nodded. She looked like a soldier resigned to her fate now.

“We need to get going,” the other masked man said.

“You can stay in the safe house after we leave,” Matt told Wilma. “But go wait in your truck first. Give us fifteen minutes to leave. Then the place is all yours.”

She nodded. “I love you, brother.”

“Love you, sister.”

Luke heard the hitch in Matt’s voice even through his gas mask.

Matt turned and walked back to the front door of the house. The other two men backed up slowly towards the door, never lowering their rifles.

Luke stayed very still, but he knew he could raise his gun up like a gunslinger and pop a bullet in each man’s forehead in a nanosecond. But he wasn’t going to shoot unless they did first.

Once all three men were back inside the house, Luke and Wilma got back in the SUV. Luke thought Wilma might be crying, but she wasn’t. He looked out through the windows, studying the fog for any rippers. He didn’t see any.

“It’s my fault,” Wilma said.

He looked at her.

She still wasn’t crying. She was strong again, resolved now. “I didn’t listen to Matt. I never listen.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Luke said, but it sounded like a weak attempt at comforting her.

They sat in silence for fifteen minutes and then Luke heard the buzz of dirt bikes racing away from the back of the house. Matt and the other two men rode the bikes out to the edge of the field. Each bike had a pack on the back held down with bungee cords. Clouds of dust drifted up from behind the bikes as they sped down the dirt trail beside the field of crops. Soon the bikes were blurring into the mist that still hung close to the ground.

“They’ll take that trail into those woods over there until they get to the railroad tracks. They can take the tracks for at least sixty miles. We figured once the collapse happened, the railroad tracks would be free of trains and safer than the main roads. There are other back roads and trails that we’ve mapped out all the way down to the camp.”

Luke just nodded. He heard a screech from somewhere in the fog behind them. Some of the nearby rippers had heard the whine of the dirt bike motors and they were coming now. “We need to get to that house.”

Another screech, this one closer, got Wilma’s attention.

Luke jumped out of the SUV and opened the back door to grab the backpacks. He slipped his on and ran to the front of the truck to give the other one to Wilma. She shrugged into it quickly and then drew her gun. Luke, much like the two men only moments ago, backed up towards the house with his weapon aimed at the fog.

“You got the keys to the house?” Luke asked Wilma.

“Yeah.”

“Get to the house and I’ll cover you.”

Wilma started running as fast as she could on her injured ankle.

Luke kept backing up. A few seconds later he saw the rippers running towards them, materializing out of the mist in the distance. “They’re coming!”

Spit. Spit. Spit. Luke dropped three of them, but there were dozens more coming.

Where are they coming from? Luke couldn’t remember seeing any rippers hanging around the houses on this street. It almost seemed like they had been hiding, like they had been waiting for the right time to attack as a group.

They’re getting smarter. Luke wasn’t sure where those words had come from, but the thought had just popped into his mind like someone had just whispered the words into his ear.

Spit. Spit. Luke dropped two more runners, two young rippers who were a few steps ahead of the others in their group. One of them had a length of rebar and he dropped it when he collapsed to the ground.

Luke was backing up faster down the concrete path through the dead grass towards the front door. He was only a few feet away from the front door now. “You in yet?”

“Not yet,” Wilma called back from the door.

Luke wondered for just a second if Matt and his two buddies had barred the front door somehow, leaving them out here to get torn to shreds by the rippers that were coming. “You in yet?”

Spit. Spit. Spit. Spit. Four more bullets from his silent gun. Four more rippers dropped: two men and two women. But there were at least thirty or forty more coming. More rippers than he had bullets in his gun. They were getting closer and closer, screaming and screeching, waving clubs and sticks. One of them near the back of the group threw a softball-sized rock that didn’t even get near Luke.

Those bastards, Luke thought. They locked us out here.

CHAPTER 22

“I’m in!” Wilma yelled.

Luke backed up to the door, practically running, shooting five more times before ducking backwards into the doorway. Wilma slammed the door shut as soon as he was inside and locked it.

Outside, the rippers slammed into the front door, pounding on it.

“It’s a reinforced metal door,” Wilma said, breathing heavy, not putting too much weight on her bad ankle. “They can’t get through it.”

Luke nodded, but he kept his gun aimed at the door.

“This is a solid brick house,” Wilma continued. “It’s got a metal roof. Hurricane-proof glass windows with bars that lock from the inside. They can’t get in.”

Luke lowered his gun down to his side. “I guess you guys were prepared.”

“This is only a safe house. We’re much better prepared down at the camp.”

He looked around at the room they were in. It looked like it had been a living room at some point in the past, but now it looked more like a classroom. There was a wall at the far end with a whiteboard bolted to it and a few rows of folding metal chairs in the middle of the room, all of them facing the board. A long bar with four stools in front of it separated the classroom from a galley-style kitchen. On the walls of the “classroom” there were maps and one flat screen TV. The place smelled like cigarette smoke, gun oil, and stale coffee. But at least it was warm.

Luke walked towards the bar where a coffee maker and a plate of pastries were sitting.

“There should be plenty of food and water stocked in here,” Wilma said. “Enough for a few months at least. They might have moved some of the supplies down to the camp, but they wouldn’t have had time to move everything.”

Or the manpower to move it all, Luke thought. His stomach grumbled at the sight of the coffee rolls. His muscles felt like they were melting just a little, like this was the first time he could actually relax now that they were safely locked behind the metal doors and barred windows.

He pulled his backpack off and set it on a bar stool in front of the bar. He rummaged through the pack and pulled out another magazine. He expelled the mag from his gun and exchanged it with the full magazine.

“How about some coffee?” Wilma asked as she went behind the counter into the kitchen.

“Sure.”

She pulled out two paper cups from the cabinet below the countertop and poured two cups of coffee into each of them. “It’s still hot,” she said. “Cream or sugar?”

“Both,” he answered. He wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but just the thought of it, the normalcy of it, appealed to him.

Wilma tore open an individual packet of creamer and poured the liquid in. She added two packets of sugar to each cup and stirred them with a plastic spoon. She slid one of the cups towards Luke.

He sipped the coffee. It was better than he had expected, and still warm as Wilma had promised. It quenched his thirst but only intensified his hunger.

As if she’d read his mind, she pushed the plate of sweet rolls towards him.

Luke tore the wrapper open on one of the sweet rolls and broke the cake in half, stuffing it into his mouth. Nothing had ever tasted so good. He stuffed the other half in before even swallowing the first half. He looked at Wilma. She had done the same thing, stuffing an entire sweet roll into her mouth.

They stared at each other for a second, their mouths full, their cheeks expanded, like they were chipmunks gathering nuts for the winter. They both burst out laughing, both spraying out bits of coffee cake onto the laminate countertop.

Luke had to stop laughing for a minute so he could swallow his food, afraid for a few seconds that he might choke. But then he finally swallowed the lump of mush.

“Sorry,” Wilma said, after swallowing her food, still laughing. “None of this is funny in any way.”

“I know,” Luke said, catching his breath.

They stared at each other and started laughed again.

“Stop,” she said. “No more laughing.”

Luke drank some coffee, washing down the last bits of the chewed-up snack cake. He looked at Wilma; she had stopped laughing now. “I’m sorry your brother left you.”

“He had to. He had no choice.” The laughter was gone now and the soldier in Wilma was back. She brightened a little. “Hey, how about a tour of the place?”

Luke sipped a little more coffee and grabbed another snack cake. “I’m ready.”

“Well, you’ve seen the classroom and the kitchen.”

He walked around the bar and met her in the kitchen. Wilma opened up a few cabinets. “We’ve got food stocked up in these cabinets. More in that pantry over there. The water comes from a solar-powered well and pump. All the water is sent through a filtration system. All electricity comes from the solar panels on the roof, some of it stored up in batteries.”

“Yeah, I saw the solar panels when we were outside.”

Wilma led him down the hallway. “Here are the bedrooms, but we called them quarters. The bathroom’s over here. That bedroom down there at the end of the hall has its own bathroom. Gravity flush system for the toilets and a septic tank. This bedroom was made into a communications room.”

He followed her into the small communications room. Two desks met in a corner each holding desktop computers, monitors, different kinds of radios, microphones, and a few other pieces of electrical equipment that Luke couldn’t name. Some of the monitors were still turned on.

“Can we reach anyone with this equipment?” Luke asked.

“No internet connection. Everything was severed on Friday morning when the collapse started. Most of the radio stations are just static now; a few are playing pre-recorded stuff, especially the president’s last address. Same thing with TV. We’ve got an analog antenna, but it isn’t picking up much. But we do have a ham radio over here.” She led him to the other side of the room where another desk housed radio equipment stacked up on the desk and on the floor beside it.

Luke didn’t know what any of the equipment did or was supposed to do. He looked at her. “Can you reach anyone?”

“No one that can help with anything. Nothing but silence from the government and military and police. We reached out to a few other operators from around the country, but they’re saying pretty much the same thing is happening there that is happening here.”

“So this is happening all over the country?”

Wilma nodded. “All over the world, as far as we can tell.”

“All over the world?” he repeated, trying to imagine that. “So you don’t think this was some kind of terrorist attack or an attack from another country?”

“Doesn’t seem like it. Could still be an attack of some kind, maybe a suicide mission for the whole world, some group that wants to kill off everyone. Maybe some kind of religious or environmental group that thinks humans are a virus on this planet. Or there’s always my favorite theory, the elites wanting to kill off most of the population so they can start over.”

Luke didn’t respond. He didn’t want to get into a philosophical debate with her.

“I’m going to keep monitoring the ham radio a few times a day, see if there’s any new kind of information about what kind of disease this is. But a lot of the ham operators have gone silent.”

“You think they turned?”

“Or they’re dead. Or they’ve just gone silent, so no one picks up their signal. That’s what our camp is doing; I can’t reach them now—they’re not going to respond.”

Luke just nodded.

“Come look at the garage.”

He followed her down the hall in the other direction, through the kitchen again. A door opened up to a massive garage.

“This structure was added to the house two years ago,” Wilma said as she stepped down into the garage.

The garage looked almost like an airplane hangar to Luke, and he now knew what the massive building was that he’d seen behind the house when they first pulled up to it. It looked like it could have easily held ten cars inside, but instead of cars there were ten dirt bikes parked, all of them pointed towards the two large garage doors.

“Those doors are reinforced steel,” she told Luke. “Not your normal garage doors. Walls are block construction. Bars on the windows here are just like the ones in the rest of the house. We’ve got a cache of weapons over there in that locker. Plenty of ammo. All kinds. You can load up on ammo for your gun.”

Luke just nodded. He looked over at the row of lockers, shelves holding cardboard boxes and crates of supplies. There were tools hanging from a pegboard, and more toolboxes on the floor, along with extra gas cans, metal barrels, motorcycle gear and parts. He walked towards the group of dirt bikes, all of them propped up on kickstands. Some of the bikes had packs strapped to the back of them.

“I hope you can ride one of these,” Wilma said with a smile.

He nodded. “I’ve ridden motorcycles before.”

“Dirt bikes?”

“Yeah. A long time ago.”

“You should be fine. We’ll make sure the two we take are fueled up, and we’ll take a little extra fuel, but at some point we’re going to have to find some more fuel along the way. But there are plenty of abandoned cars and trucks—we’ll find something.”

“Why dirt bikes? I would’ve thought four-wheelers or a dune buggy or something would have been better.”

“We wanted something off-road. We figured the roads would be clogged with wrecked, stalled, or abandoned vehicles. The roads would also be the places where the military or police would set up checkpoints. Most people only imagine roads when they think of traveling, but there are so many other routes: fields, farmland, neighborhoods, alleyways, bike paths, railroad tracks. And maybe dirt bikes seem like an odd choice, but there are several reasons we selected them. The first thing is how versatile they are; you can drive them on the street, on the dirt, through mud and water. They can also go through trails in the woods, narrow places where cars and even four-wheelers can’t go. They’re pretty easy to work on and they can go quite a ways on a tank of gas.”

Wilma walked over to a side door in the garage. “When it comes time for us to leave, we won’t even have to open one of the garage doors, we can open this door and push the bikes right out into the back yard.”

“But they’re noisy,” Luke said. “And they don’t offer much in the way of protection.”

She smiled at him. “Well, you can’t have everything, I guess.”

CHAPTER 23

As Wilma took her shower in the master bathroom, Luke took a shower in the guest bathroom. He stood under the water for ten minutes after washing up; he never realized how much he had missed hot water, soap, and shampoo. He had always considered himself pretty tough and adaptable; after all, he had done two separate stretches in prison. But even being locked up was nothing compared to this new world he found himself in now. He couldn’t believe how much everything had changed, and how all of it had changed so quickly.

When he was done with his shower, Luke stepped out and dried off. He had his backpack on the counter with his extra change of clothes inside. His dirty clothes were on the floor and Wilma said she could wash their clothes later. He shaved and brushed his teeth.

He felt better now. He remembered last night when he had asked Wilma if she was feeling better. She had answered that she was full, halfway warm, her pain was subsiding, and she was getting a buzz from a can of beer. Well, he had half of that list checked off right now.

When he left the bathroom, he went down the hall to the kitchen. Wilma was already done with her shower. He could smell something cooking.

“Just whipping up some dinner,” Wilma said and then frowned. “Or lunch. Hell, I don’t even know what time it is.”

“I’ll take either one,” Luke said. His stomach was rumbling again.

Noodles were boiling on the stove, and there was tomato sauce simmering in another pot.

“I’ve got some bread heating up in the oven,” she told him. “We’ve got plenty of butter and garlic.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” Luke told her. “Get off your ankle for a little bit. I can get the rest of this.”

She smiled at him. “I’ll take you up on that.” She went to the small kitchen table and sat down.

Luke pulled the bread out of the oven and laid the cookie sheet down on two potholders on the countertop. He found two bowls in the upper cabinet and dished up the pasta, then he ladled the sauce over top of it. He brought the bowls to the table and put a few pieces of the bread on a plate.

“There’s some water, sodas, and beer in the refrigerator,” Wilma told him. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Luke grabbed two cans of beer and brought them back to the table and sat down across from Wilma.

For the next ten minutes they hardly spoke, both of them wolfing down their bowls of pasta and sauce, wiping up the sauce with the bread.

After they were done, they left the bowls and plates sitting on the table in front of them. Luke finished the rest of his beer and got up to grab two more for them. He set one down in front of Wilma and sat down again across from her. “Why don’t you tell me more about this camp down in West Virginia?”

“Like these safe houses, the money for the land, supplies, and structures at the camp was spread out among the entire group. The camp sits on fifty acres of land, much of it wooded. The camp is right in the middle of the property, all of it completely fenced in, and there are turrets every thirty feet with a walkway just below the top of the fence. There are twenty buildings in the camp: barracks, cabins, a kitchen and dining hall, a church, an armory, storage, two greenhouses. We have a small farm for vegetables and fruits, pens for livestock. Everything runs off of solar power with backup generators for emergencies. We have a stockpile of weapons, ammo, explosives, medicines, canned goods, food staples like flour and sugar and rice. We have enough food already stored to feed a hundred people for at least twenty years.”

“And you plan on going down there?”

“Yeah. I’ll wait a few days, make absolutely sure I’m immune to the plague, and then I’m going down there.”

“What if no one’s there?”

Wilma just stared at him. “Matt will be there. And Rick and Mario. They just left. They had their gas masks and gloves on.”

Luke didn’t say anything, but he was sure she knew what he meant. That was a long way to travel through possibly millions of rippers. The odds weren’t that good of making it.

“Matt will make it,” she said. “They’ll wear their masks.”

Giles wore his mask, and he still turned, Luke thought, but he didn’t want to remind her of that.

Wilma reached across the table and touched Luke’s hand, giving it a squeeze, then resting her hand on top of his. “I want you to go with me.”

“I don’t know.” Luke didn’t pull his hand away. He felt a stirring inside of him just from her touch. He held her gaze. “They might not want me. I’m not part of your militia. You saw how your brother and the other two reacted when they saw me this morning.”

“They’ll want you. There will only be a fraction of us down there after this plague. We’ll still need people. Especially people with your skills.”

“I don’t know how to farm or hunt or fish.”

“But you know how to shoot. How to kill.”

Luke sighed.

Wilma drew her hand back. “I know you said that you’re not a good person. I heard you say that last night before I fell asleep. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.”

“Not like me.”

Wilma sat back and folded her arms, waiting for Luke to explain.

“Okay,” Luke said. “You want to know my life story? Is that it?”

“Yeah, that would be nice.” She finished off her beer.

Luke got up and went to the refrigerator. “This is going to require two more beers.” He was already buzzed, and one more beer sounded pretty good.

CHAPTER 24

“I got in trouble all the time when I was a kid,” Luke said. He opened his third beer and took a sip.

Wilma sipped her beer, saying nothing, just waiting for him to continue.

“I was a bad kid. I liked to fight. Not just fight, but I liked to hurt the people that I fought. I had a violent streak. A mean streak. I got into so much trouble they kicked me out of school. I was hanging out with older kids anyway, and one of my friends got me into MMA—mixed martial arts.”

“I know what MMA is,” she said with a small smile.

“I started going to a fighting gym, working out with weights and on the bags. I started sparring with some of the guys, picking up everything I could learn. In a few years I had turned my fists and feet into lethal weapons. I got as good as the guys that trained me. I was probably good enough to turn pro, but I got in a fight and nearly killed two guys outside of a bar. I got arrested, and then I got a pretty harsh sentence from the judge because I was a trained fighter—three years, but I only did two because of good behavior.

“I was a tough guy, and I could handle anyone one-on-one, or even two-on-one, but I couldn’t fight the whole prison population. Right away two older Italian guys took me in under their wing, teaching me the way of prison life. These were made men, and they had some protection in the pen, but they saw another solider in me. I protected them, and they in turn protected me. Nobody messed with our group in prison.”

“You’re in the mafia?” she asked.

Luke saw the shock and disgust on Wilma’s face—she couldn’t hide it. Maybe she had been bracing herself for stories of bar fights and maybe even some drug use, but probably nothing like this.

“It’s not like what you see on TV or in the movies,” Luke told her. He was sure she had her preconceived ideas about the mafia just like he’d had his own preconceived ideas about militias. “It’s much more organized and low-key than that, more like a business.”

“Yeah, right,” she said with a smile.

He could tell she was getting a buzz from the beer.

“So, what did you do for the mafia when you got out of prison?”

“Well, I was never truly a member of the family—I could never be because I wasn’t related to them, but I could be like an adopted member. I became what they called an enforcer.”

Luke stopped talking for a moment. He could see that he didn’t need to offer much of an explanation about what an enforcer did. He could see that she was already using her imagination.

“And you wanted to do that?” she asked. “To be an enforcer for a mafia family?”

“My MMA career was over by then. I couldn’t get sponsors. I had violent felonies on my record so I couldn’t get any kind of good job. I felt like I had no choice but to work for them. A man named Jacob trained me. I already knew how to fight, how to kill with my bare hands in various ways, but he taught me a few street-fighting tricks. I had some experience with firearms, but I trained with Jacob at a gun range twice a week, learning to shoot just about every kind of weapon there is. But it was more than just shooting and fighting. Jacob taught me how to dress presentably, but more importantly how to carry myself, how to control my temper. We were only to use violence when necessary. There were many times that just the presence of either me or Jacob would get other men spilling their guts and begging for forgiveness. The whole point, Jacob told me, was to intimidate them without using violence. It was so much easier that way.”

“But I’m sure examples had to be made along the way.”

Luke nodded. “Yes. There were times when violence had to be used.”

“So why are you by yourself and not with this . . . this family?”

“Jacob tried to kill me the night before last.”

“The guy that trained you?”

“Yeah. Vincent sent him to bring me to the house. I tried to run, but Jacob caught me before I could leave.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s dead. He made me drive my own car while he was in the back seat with a gun on me. But then the police started chasing us, shooting at us. I wrecked the car and got away. The police got him.”

“Why was he sent to get you?”

“Because of what happened at Howard’s house earlier that morning—the morning of the collapse. I told you a little about it when we were making the rope to get out of that bedroom.”

Wilma just nodded.

“Vincent sent me to go protect his brother and his family. He lived in Ashtabula County, right on the lake. When I got there, I saw that his wife and girls were slaughtered. I found Howard in the bathroom with blood all over him. He was talking gibberish. Just staring at me like he was an animal. He charged me, and I had no choice but to shoot him. When I called Vincent, tried to tell him what had happened . . .” He let his words die away.

“He didn’t believe you,” Wilma said.

“I don’t think so. Actually, Vincent wasn’t even acting like himself. Now I think he was just beginning to turn at that moment.”

“What happened at that guy’s house . . . that’s kind of what happened at my cousin’s house. She had already turned when I got there. She already . . . already killed her kids.”

Luke nodded, letting her know that she didn’t need to go on.

“You’re still not a terrible person,” Wilma said after a moment. “You were just doing your job. And like you said before, you could have left me outside back at that house. You could have locked the kitchen door.”

“You had my guns with you.”

“Funny,” she said, but she stared at him like she was trying to figure out if he was joking.

He was only half-joking. “You stole my stuff. You aimed a gun at me. You tried to steal my truck and leave me stranded in that house.”

“Yet you still let me back inside the house.”

Luke smiled. “Yeah.”

“Looks like neither one of us are good people.”

He didn’t disagree with her.

“You never know what you’re really going to do in a situation until it presents itself,” she said. “You can prep and train and get ready, but when something terrible finally happens, when something like this happens, you find out that you weren’t as prepared as you thought you were. You find out that you weren’t as decent as you thought you were.”

“People will do just about anything to survive.”

She stared at him. “I tried to take your stuff. I’m sorry about that.”

“Apology accepted.”

“So you can go down there to the camp with me. Nobody needs to know your full story.”

“And they’re going to take in an outsider like me?” Luke asked.

“They’ll accept you. They’ll need people. People like you. And I’ll vouch for you.”

Luke just smiled at her.

Wilma didn’t return his smile—she was serious. “I know you’re strong and tough and deadly, but it will only be a matter of time before you get cornered by those rippers out there on your own. It happened to Tommy, and he was the best I ever trained with. It would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t found you. It will eventually happen to you, too. You need to be in a group. So do I. We all do.”

Luke was quiet.

“Come down there with me,” Wilma whispered.

He nodded. “I’ll go with you.” Hell, he had planned on going south, anyway. If this militia camp didn’t want him, then he would just walk right on past it and keep heading south.

“Did you have a wife?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No. Not in my line of work.”

“One-night stands?”

“Occasionally. What about you? You got a husband or a boyfriend?”

“Nope.”

He smiled at her.

“Look at us,” she said. “Two swinging singles.” She reached out and touched his hand again, squeezing it gently, staring at him.

She stood up, still holding his hand.

Luke stood up and followed her down the hall to the bedroom.

CHAPTER 25

Wilma lay in bed next to Luke after sex, both of them naked and still slick with perspiration. The sex had been impulsive. It wasn’t lovemaking, just a release, just a way to feel normal again for a little while, to forget the horrors that waited outside the house. The sex was an intoxicant much like the beer they had drunk. And a sedative—Luke was already sleeping.

Wilma was attracted to Luke in some strange way. He was ruggedly handsome, and he had an amazing body, but it was more than just his looks. She knew she was falling for him, and she wasn’t sure why. There was something about him, something deep down inside of him that was good and pure, whether he wanted to believe it or not.

He was good. Yes, he had wanted his guns back when he had let her in the kitchen door, but he had saved her a second time when she had fallen outside the window in the side yard of the house, when that ripper had been on top of her. Yeah, she still had the keys to his truck in her pocket (she still hadn’t been entirely trusting of him at that point), but he could have run and left her there with all of those rippers approaching. He could have left her there as a diversion while he got away.

But he hadn’t done that. He’d risked his life to help her even though dozens of rippers were running towards them by then. He’d known that she was hurt, that she would slow them down, but he still killed those rippers and helped her get to the truck.

And after the pickup truck had overheated, he’d had another chance to ditch her. He could have run—she would’ve never been able to keep up with him on her bad ankle. He could have also left her in that house when she had fallen asleep. He could have taken one of the cars and driven away. Hell, he could’ve shot her at any time.

But he hadn’t done any of those things.

She watched him as he lay on his side with his back to her, the early afternoon light shining in through the closed blinds, the faint lines of the blinds drawn in the patch of sunlight on the bed and part of his body. She stared at the back of his head, his dark hair buzzed short. She traced the lines of the muscles of his back with her eyes, down his spine to his buttocks, and then to his legs. He was breathing heavily, sleeping deeply.

I’m not a good man. His words echoed in her mind.

And I’m not a good woman anymore. We’ve both changed. You for the better, me for the worse, both of us changing in fundamental ways. And we’re going to keep on changing in this new world.

She looked back up at the ceiling, thinking about how Matt had rejected her that morning. She knew he was just being cautious and she couldn’t blame him for it. But she was going to prove to him, and the rest of them, that she and Luke were immune to this plague.

God, only Matt, Rick, and Mario had left from this safe house. Just three of them. She wondered how many others had left from other safe houses, how many had survived the plague, how many had survived the rippers after that. She did some quick math, assuming only three made it from each group, and then she multiplied that number to all the branches in the militia. Possibly a hundred had made it down to the camp or were on their way. But probably less. Maybe seventy, or even fifty.

Luke moaned in his sleep.

She looked at him again, staring at his back, watching him breathe. He twitched and moaned again, his body jerking, muscles bunching up in his upper back and shoulders. He turned over quickly after another long moan. His eyes popped open, and he seemed to be fighting to catch his breath for a second. He looked like he had been about to sit up, but then he realized where he was, his eyes settling on her.

Wilma touched his shoulder gently. “Hey. You okay?”

He stared at her for a few seconds, swallowing hard like his throat was dry. “Yeah. Sorry. Just a bad dream.”

“You had a nightmare? I didn’t think anything scared you.”

He smiled. “I never used to have nightmares. But when all of this shit started happening a few days ago, now every time I sleep . . .” He let his words hang in the air.

“Were you dreaming about the rippers?”

“No.”

“That family you found yesterday morning?”

He shook his head a little. “It was sort of like the dream I had when you woke me up to steal my stuff.”

“I said I was sorry.”

He smiled, letting her know he’d been joking.

“Tell me about your dream,” she said.

“There was this guy in the dream. A black guy. Maybe in his late thirties, but in real good shape. Real muscular. And he has a kid with him. A boy. Maybe eleven or twelve years old. And there was this other guy, a white guy. He was kind of skinny. Long hair down to his shoulders. A scraggily beard. A lot of tattoos. And there was also this woman in the dream. A blond woman. She wore dark glasses like she was blind. And she was beautiful.”

“Should I be jealous?”

Luke smiled again. He seemed to be able to tell that she had just been kidding and trying to lighten the mood. He was quiet for a moment as he stared up at the ceiling like he was seeing the dream in his mind again, or at least the parts that he could remember. “It was like the woman could see me in the dream even though I’m sure she was blind. She was talking to me.”

“What did she say?” Wilma felt a chill run across her naked skin, and she was suddenly cold even though it was warm in the house. She pulled the blanket over her naked body, feeling suddenly exposed even though Luke had just explored every part of her body earlier. She thought of the dream she’d had, when Matt had been telling her that the rippers were coming while she tried to shoot the target pinned to the hay bale, the target that had turned into the anarchy symbol.

“She told me I needed to go south. She said that I needed to find her and the people she’s with.”

“South where?”

“She didn’t say. She just said I needed to find them.”

“And that was a nightmare?”

“No. There was someone else in the dream. When I saw the woman and the people she was with, there was this glow around the woman, almost like she was an angel. And then when she was gone, I realized that everything had gotten dark. I was in this, like this big store, like a Walmart or something. It seemed like the place was empty, but I knew someone was there in the dark with me.”

Wilma got another tingling sensation along her skin—she already knew who Luke had seen in his dream, the same man she’d seen in her dream.

“I saw the man standing in the shadows,” Luke continued, still staring at the ceiling as he talked. “He was tall. Taller than me. He was kind of thin, but he had wide shoulders. And I could tell that he was muscular and powerful. His hair was kind of long and it seemed to be blowing around a little, even though there was no wind inside the store. But the strangest thing was his eyes—they were shining in the dark. There was this energy coming from him, this negative energy, this evil. I don’t even know how to describe it.”

Wilma just lay there, saying nothing, thinking of her own dream and how she had seen a similar man in her own dream last night. She was about to tell him about it, but he turned to her, staring at her.

“Those guys we saw this morning,” he said, “the ones that tried to ambush us, the ones with the anarchy symbols carved into their foreheads, you know who they are, don’t you?”

CHAPTER 26

Luke watched Wilma’s face after he had sprung the question on her. He’d been waiting for the right time to challenge her lie. She had already admitted to lying to him before, and he was certain she was lying about not knowing about that anarchy gang. He watched her face as she stared at him, gauging her reaction.

“I don’t know who they are,” she said.

So she wasn’t going to be truthful with him.

“But I’ve seen that anarchy symbol before,” she continued quickly. “I’ve seen one exactly like it.”

“Where?”

She hesitated for just a moment, and then: “I saw it in my dream last night.”

Luke didn’t say anything; he waited for her to explain more.

“When we were in that house last night, I had a dream,” she said. “I was at my family’s farm and I was shooting at a target pinned to a hay bale. We had a shooting area there at the farm and I used to practice all the time. My mom and dad were there in the dream, still alive. They were right behind me. And so was Matt. They were all talking to me. I wanted to turn around, but it was like I wasn’t able to do it. I kept aiming at the target instead of turning around to look at them.”

Wilma stopped for a moment, trying to keep herself from crying. She swallowed hard and continued. “I couldn’t hit the target no matter how hard I tried. Matt told me I needed to hurry because the rippers were coming. And I could hear them in the dream, this roar of a crowd, like an army rushing over the hill at us. It seemed like in the dream that I needed to hit that stupid target to stop the rippers from coming, but I couldn’t hit it. But then the target changed. First it was a silhouette of a man’s upper body—a standard shooting target.”

Luke nodded—he knew the kind she was talking about.

“But then the target turned into that anarchy symbol painted on a large white piece of paper pinned to the hay bale. The symbol had been painted in bright red paint, like blood. It was an A with a circle around it, just like the one we saw painted on that overturned car.”

Luke nodded again.

“I heard my father’s voice then; it was like he was right behind me and whispering in my ear. He told me that there were worse things coming, worse than the rippers. And then I saw the group of people on the top of the hills all around us, but they weren’t rippers, they were men and women, like some kind of gang, almost like barbarians or something. I couldn’t see them too clearly. There was a mist or something, and it was . . .” She stopped talking, like she was searching for the right word.

“Obscuring them?”

“Yeah,” she said and smiled. “Obscuring them. But a man stepped away from the crowd of people and I could see him clearly. He was the same man you just described from your dream. Tall, dressed all in black, like he was a living shadow. But his eyes were shining, like they were two little pinpoints of light underneath the brim of his hat. He was like a living shadow. The Shadow Man.”

“The Shadow Man?”

“Yeah. I read a book a few years ago about a killer that could read minds, and he had locked on to this woman. She saw him in her dreams, and she called him the Shadow Man.”

“Did the Shadow Man say anything to you in your dream?” Luke asked.

“No.”

“And you didn’t see the blond woman or those other two guys and the boy I told you about?”

“No.” She sounded a little frustrated.

“But this morning was the first time you actually saw that anarchy symbol besides the dream you had? You’ve never heard of a gang like that around here before?”

“We don’t have gangs out here in the country.”

“Just militias.”

She shrugged. “Militias aren’t gangs. This anarchist group could’ve been a militia at some time, but I’m sure I would’ve heard of them before. I would’ve remembered that symbol. An anarchy symbol doesn’t really make sense; it’s kind of the opposite of an organized group like a militia.”

She had a point. Luke thought about it for a moment. “What we saw today was definitely some kind of gang, or a part of it. And they were organized. You saw the way they were stocking that truck up with supplies.”

Wilma nodded.

“Did you see their foreheads?”

She shook her head no.

“The guy I shot that was closer to us, he had the same symbol on his forehead. I couldn’t tell if it was carved into his skin or burned into it. Or maybe even tattooed there. I’m sure the other guy had the same symbol on his forehead. And that symbol was on a few houses and buildings before we even got to their barricade. It’s like they are marking their territory.”

“I’m sure a lot of gangs and groups are going to form,” Wilma said. “It’s safer to be in a group. That’s why you should come down there with me to the camp.”

Luke didn’t answer. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

They both had the blanket over their bodies now, and she touched his shoulder gently. She moved a little closer to him. “I really want you to go down there with me.”

He looked at her and kissed her, a long and slow kiss. He could feel himself stiffening now.

She stared at him for a moment after he stopped kissing her. “I want to ask you for a favor.”

“Name it,” he whispered.

“I think we’re both immune, I’m almost sure of it. But if we aren’t, and if I start turning, I want you to shoot me in the head.”

Luke just stared at her, saying nothing.

“I don’t want to be one of those things out there, one of those animals.”

Luke nodded, but didn’t say yes. He wasn’t sure if they were immune or not, but he would keep his promise to her. He kissed her again.

She moved closer to him underneath the blankets.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 27

Two days later they were ready to leave the safe house. Wilma felt that two days (and then the days it would take them to travel down to the camp) would be enough time to prove that the two of them were immune to this plague—whatever it was.

They had eaten well during the last two days, resting and building their strength up. Wilma’s ankle felt a lot better, but she kept an ankle sleeve on it for support.

In the last two days Wilma had tried to reach others on the ham radio, but she hadn’t reached anyone who had any kind of information, and that furthered her belief that this plague was at least nationwide, but more likely worldwide. Luke took the time to study the rippers that waited outside the house, many of them sleeping in the house closest to the safe house.

As Luke watched them through the windows, he made mental notes of their behavior. He realized that he had been correct earlier when he had surmised that the rippers seemed to be least active from four o’clock a.m. to about seven or eight a.m. It didn’t mean that there weren’t any rippers roaming around during those hours, just that there weren’t as many.

The rippers seemed to act like animals, grunting and screeching at each other, yet their grunts and screeches also seemed to be some kind of rudimentary communication. They were still wearing clothes for the most part, a few had tattered clothing, like they’d gotten into fights with other rippers. Some had soiled themselves, but others were obviously pulling their pants down to go to the bathroom, because they weren’t stained. Some of them even had newer and cleaner clothing on, pieces that they had scavenged from houses and businesses, clothes to keep them warm. They didn’t seem to wear any kind of protective clothing like hats, gloves, or scarves, but a lot of them wore jackets, coats, and some of them even wore boots and shoes. It was cold outside, but not freezing yet. Luke couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen to the rippers once temperatures got below thirty degrees. Even if they found coats and blankets, would a lot of them die off from the cold if they couldn’t find adequate shelter? He hadn’t seen any of them make a fire yet for warmth or cooking—in fact, they seemed to be afraid of fire.

Even though the rippers seemed to communicate somehow and use simple weapons like clubs, rocks, and knives, it didn’t seem like they had mastered much above those rudimentary weapons, like the use of tools. They seemed like they had the intelligence of apes, or something between apes and primitive man—maybe like the missing link between the two. Luke had heard of the missing link before, a species that scientists had been looking for, a link between humans and primates, and now Luke felt like he was looking at what scientists had been searching for.

The rippers outside knew that he and Wilma were still in the safe house; their memory was good enough for that. There always seemed to be a few rippers watching the house, usually with some kind of weapon in their hand. They would watch the house for hours, like some kind of guard dog. Luke figured after a day or two the rippers would get tired of watching the house or even forget that he and Wilma were inside. But they were always there, always watching.

After the third day, Luke didn’t see too many rippers roaming around out there. He wondered if this particular horde had moved on after scavenging all the houses nearby. Eventually they would have to move on in search of more food. Of course the rippers could be hiding somewhere nearby, watching and waiting to attack, just like they had done the first morning that he and Wilma had shown up here.

This morning when Luke got up he checked the windows, looking for more “guard dogs,” but he didn’t see any. The mist was heavy again this morning, so they were going to have to do their best at spotting the rippers.

“You ready to go?” Wilma asked when Luke met her in the garage.

They had packed their backpacks and the packs on the bikes last night. Wilma had selected the two best bikes out of the ten dirt bikes left in the garage—a red Honda 250 for her, and a blue and yellow Yamaha 250 for him.

Luke used his backpack for his own supplies: a change of clothes, an extra pair of socks and a pair of thicker gloves, his extra gun, his extra magazines, the extra boxes of ammo he’d gotten from one of the storage lockers, a rain jacket, a few MREs, and two extra bottles of water. The pack wasn’t too heavy.

The pack on the back of Luke’s bike held a rolled-up tarp, a thermal blanket, a LifeStraw for drinking water, a packet of water purification tablets, a box of waterproof matches, electrical tape, a small roll of cordage, and a first-aid kit. Luke also had a small leather pack strapped to his handlebars that held his third gun (an H&K 9mm), an extra magazine of ammo, and another bottle of water.

The dirt bikes had just the bare essentials, more like racing bikes than street bikes, but they had been enhanced for this purpose. The bikes didn’t have a headlight or a speedometer, but they were equipped with a compass and a fuel gauge, and Luke’s bike had a metal scabbard welded to it so he could shove a shotgun down into it with a leather strap to hold it in place. Wilma’s bike also had a small leather pack strapped to the top of the handlebars where she stowed her extra gun, extra ammo, and a bottle of water.

They had dressed as warmly as they could without constricting their movements on the bikes. They decided not to wear dirt bike boots or helmets, but they wore gloves, goggles, and bandanas over their mouths and noses to cut down on the wind and dirt.

For the last two days they had gone over the route they would travel down to West Virginia, and Luke was already trying to visualize the first leg of the journey in his mind.

Luke was as ready as he was ever going to be.

“I’ll take a look outside while you get the bikes ready,” he told her.

Luke drew his gun from his holster and went to the side door. He already had his backpack on, ready to jump on the bike. Wilma was already pushing his bike towards the side door right behind him.

He unlocked the side door and opened it. He stepped outside, his hiking boots crunching on the cold grass. It was definitely light enough outside for Luke to see, but the morning mist was still pretty heavy. He listened for a moment, but he didn’t hear any screeches or calls in the distance; he didn’t hear any movement in the mist. But the rippers could be out there—they could be watching and waiting.

Luke unzipped his hoodie and pulled out a pair of binoculars he had hanging around his neck. He raised them to his eyes, searching the vast field of crops beyond the back yard of the safe house, looking for any sign of movement out there in the mist.

He didn’t see anything.

Wilma pushed Luke’s bike out into the back yard a few feet and handed it over to him. Luke stuffed his binoculars back down inside his hoodie and pulled the zipper all the way up to his throat. He slipped his goggles back down over his eyes and held on to his bike, waiting while Wilma got hers.

She pushed her bike out and leaned it against the wall for a moment while she shut the door to the garage as quietly as she could and locked it. They had already made sure all the electricity and water was shut off inside the safe house—not that it mattered much now.

Wilma pushed her bike over to where Luke stood. She got on her bike, put it in neutral and stomped down on the kickstart. The bike started up immediately. Little puffs of white smoke shot out from the exhaust pipe. The bike sounded amazingly loud and Luke couldn’t help looking around, expecting to see rippers materializing out of the morning mist.

Luke made sure his bike was in neutral and he squeezed the clutch as he stomped down on the kickstart. His bike started right up, making a tinny sound that echoed back at him from the block walls of the garage.

Wilma took off towards the field of crops, racing across the grass of the back yard. Luke used the toe of his boot to put the bike into first gear and goosed the throttle a little too much. The front tire came up off the ground and he let off the gas a little as he shifted into second gear and then into third. This bike was a little more powerful than he had anticipated. It might take a few minutes for him to get used to this.

They raced across the field of grass, and Luke could almost feel the rippers coming now. He looked back to his right, back towards the safe house as he sped away. He saw the rippers coming, at least two dozen of them. He looked back at Wilma who was so far ahead of him, already at the dirt trail that ran parallel with the edge of the field of crops. She was fast on the bike, and he could admit that she was far more skilled on a dirt bike than he was. It had been years since he had ridden any kind of motorcycle, but it was beginning to come back to him.

As long as he didn’t dump the bike right now.

CHAPTER 28

Luke caught up to Wilma on the dirt trail. She was at least thirty feet ahead and riding even faster. She had to have seen the rippers running towards them. Some were throwing rocks as they ran, but they were still too far away to hit them.

They were going to make it.

Luke followed Wilma down the narrow dirt trail next to the edge of the field. He saw the faint tracks from where Matt and the other two had ridden a few days ago. He watched Wilma in front of him, and he kept glancing back to his left, watching the horde of rippers. But they were already slowing down and giving up.

Even though the morning mist was beginning to fade, the sky was slate-gray and the wind at this speed was icy; his face and hands were so cold even though he had the bandana covering his face and the gloves on his hands. It didn’t matter; he would just have to tough it out.

They were nearing the end of the trail where it disappeared into a stand of trees—the beginning of the woods. Wilma entered the woods first, slowing down a little, following a trail only she seemed able to see. As the minutes ticked by, Luke became more relaxed, he was sure that they wouldn’t see as many rippers in the woods as they had in the city. He figured most of the rippers would stay near the cities where the food was more plentiful—both the salvageable food in the abandoned houses and buildings, and the living food they seemed to love so much: other humans.

Luke and Wilma slowed down in some areas of the woods, slowing down to ten or twenty miles an hour as they navigated a tricky turn or squeezed through a narrow gap between a thick stand of trees. They only had to stop once when Wilma came across a fallen tree. She found another way around it and stopped once more for a moment to get her bearings on the compass. She looked at him before taking off, and Luke didn’t bother saying anything to her; he just gave her a thumbs-up, and they were riding again.

An hour later the woods began to thin out a little, which allowed them to ride a little faster. Wilma slowed down when they came to a two-lane road. They stopped at the edge of the road in the woods, looking for any sign of trouble, but there were no buildings, cars, or anything else in sight. Wilma made a right onto the road, goosing the gas, her bike screaming in the morning air. Luke followed her.

In no time at all they were back up to at least fifty miles an hour, racing down the road as it dipped down into a valley, the woods thinning out and giving way to vast fields. While they were still at the top of the hill, Luke had a few seconds to scan everything down in the land below, which was made up of farmland, crops, dairy farms, barns, houses, vast acreage, and stands of trees in the distance. But there were no fires on the horizon, no hordes of rippers, and there wasn’t any sign of the anarchy gang.

When they had been going over the route last night on the map, this road was where they had anticipated the most danger, because it ran through a small town. But all they had to do was get through the town and then they would reach the railroad tracks. Luke kept his head on a swivel as he followed Wilma down the road into the valley, the two-lane road like a black ribbon snaking through the green grass and fields below.

About halfway down into the bottom of the valley, Luke saw two rippers standing in front of a home that was set back a hundred feet from the edge of the road. The place wasn’t a farm, but there were several tractors and other farm equipment in front of a massive garage. Luke figured that the person who used to live in that house had been some kind of local mechanic who worked on tractors.

The two rippers, a man and a woman, stood as still as two deer on the steps that led up to the front porch of the home. They stared blankly at Luke as he passed by. Both of them were overweight, and neither of them seemed interested in trying to chase their bikes, almost like they already knew there was no hope of catching up to him and Wilma. Their clothes were torn and soiled with dirt and blood. Their faces and hands were soaked in blood. The front door of the home was wide open, and the doorway looked like a black rectangle in the morning light, a black rectangle that led to horrors hidden inside that house.

Luke didn’t see any other rippers once they were past that home, and he didn’t see any more rippers once they reached the bottom of the valley. There were large fields to their left and right. A barbed-wire fence ran alongside the road on the right-hand side, a cow pasture dotted with dead animals in the distance, rib bones sticking up from the rotting carcasses. Flocks of birds swarmed the dead cows.

As they began to ascend the next hill, the road veering slightly to the right, Luke saw a white building in the distance that was at least a hundred yards beyond a two-story farmhouse; the place had to be some kind of barn. On the side of the barn was a large anarchy symbol painted in bright red paint. But there was something strange about this symbol; the circle around the A didn’t look exactly like a circle, it looked more like a capital letter D; he was sure of it this time.

They were past the farmhouse and barn in a few seconds. Luke wondered why there were so few rippers in this area besides the few stragglers he’d just seen. Could it be that this area was too rural for the rippers? Maybe there weren’t enough houses to scavenge or people to eat. There would be plenty of farm animals to eat, but it looked like many of those animals had already been slaughtered and eaten. Maybe the rippers had migrated to the urban areas where the food and shelter was more plentiful. It was strange to think of the rippers being that organized, but Luke found himself thinking of them as animals again, and he had to remind himself that the rippers were still humans; even though this disease had turned them into raging animals, they were still smart in some basic and instinctive ways.

They’re getting smarter.

Luke didn’t know where that thought had come from again; it almost sounded like someone had just whispered those words right into his ear, penetrating right into his mind. He was pretty sure he had heard those same words in his dream last night. It had been the skinny guy with the beard and the tattoos on his neck who had said those words; Luke suddenly remembered that part of the dream.

He’d had dreams of the two men, the boy, and the blond woman every night, but when he woke up, he could only remember bits and pieces of the dreams. But then sometimes, like right now, a piece of the dream would swim to the surface of his mind and he would remember that part of the dream so vividly he was amazed that he could have ever forgotten it.

Even though Luke was sure the blond woman was blind, it was like she could still see in some way, like she had psychic powers. He had never been a believer in anything supernatural, but after everything that had happened in the last few weeks, he found himself open to just about anything right now. He could feel things in his dreams. He could feel that the men, the boy, and the woman were all good people and that he needed to be with them. He felt that it was inevitable that all of them would be together. But what about Wilma? He hadn’t seen her in the dreams. Did that mean that Wilma wasn’t going to go with him? She seemed dead-set on getting to her militia’s camp. If Luke wanted to leave the camp, he wasn’t so sure Wilma would go with him.

His mind continued to wander as he rode up the next rise into a stand of trees that crowded both sides of the road. He thought of that anarchy symbol he’d just seen on the side of the white barn, a symbol that might not be an anarchy symbol but something else entirely. The letter D and the letter A. DA or AD. Wilma had seen that same symbol in her dreams again last night, but Luke hadn’t seen that symbol in his dreams. They were both having recurring dreams, but their dreams were so different from each other’s.

Except for the Shadow Man—he’d been in both of their dreams, the shadowy man with the shining eyes. He hadn’t spoken in either of the dreams, but he always seemed to be there at the edge of the dream, watching and waiting.

Wilma told him yesterday that she had tried to run from the Shadow Man in her dream, but no matter where she ran to, the Shadow Man was right there.

They were through the thickest part of the woods, and the trees soon gave way to more farmland, and in the distance there was the small town that Luke had seen on the map last night—just a cluster of buildings. As they got closer Luke saw small family farms, then small neighborhoods of homes, a one-street trailer park, a strip plaza, a veterinarian’s office, a feed store, an elementary school, a lumberyard, a country store, a church, and a few gas stations.

Luke and Wilma sped towards the first intersection in the town. The railroad tracks would be after the next intersection. Once they were on the railroad tracks, they would ride them until dark, looking for a place to spend the night.

There were more DA symbols spray-painted on some of the buildings in this town, the symbols painted on the sides of buildings, on driveways, and on abandoned cars in bright red paint. There was no doubt about it now; it wasn’t a circle around the letter A, but a D around the letter A. He wasn’t even sure how he had ever thought the D was a circle before.

Luke thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye as they closed in on the intersection. At first he thought it might be a ripper, but then he heard the gunshot ring out in the air.

CHAPTER 29

Someone was firing a rifle at them.

Wilma swerved a little, keeping low on the bike yet still speeding through the intersection. Luke kept right up with her.

Three more gunshots rang out and Luke swore he practically felt one of the bullets whiz right by his head. He pulled his gun out of his holster underneath his hoodie and aimed it across his body towards the other side of the street where the gunshots were coming from. He fired blindly three times, his gun spitting and recoiling slightly in his hand. He didn’t even look at where he was shooting; he just wanted these yokels to realize that he would fire back.

He kept his eyes on Wilma as she raced through the intersection. She was still crouched low on her bike, trying to make herself a smaller target. The next intersection was in sight—only two blocks away.

The gunshots were coming from behind them now, so they had to be well past their shooter, who had probably been aiming at them from a window or up on a roof. If they could just get to the next intersection, then they might be out of his line of sight and be safe.

Luke heard the roar of the engine before he saw the pickup truck pull out from between two buildings a block ahead of them, trying to block them off from the next intersection. The truck was an older Ford pickup, jacked up on large tires. A driver and a passenger were in the cab and a man with a rifle was in the back, already trying to aim his rifle over the top of the cab at Luke.

Wilma swerved to the right immediately as the truck bounced out onto the road. She slid sideways on her bike just a little, the back tire screeching in the air. Luke still had his gun in his hand and he aimed at the man in the back of the truck, shooting him before he ever got a chance to draw a bead on Wilma. The man flew back when the bullet hit him, dropping his rifle as he flipped over the side of the truck, landing in the street, his arms and legs flapping around as he rolled away.

Luke followed Wilma around two parked cars next to the sidewalk and the strip of grass, but he still managed to shoot four times into the front of the truck as he rode away. Two of the bullets hit the front grill and the other two went through the windshield. Luke was sure he’d hit the driver, but he couldn’t get the passenger because he had ducked down too far below the dashboard. The pickup truck sped across the street and rammed right into a parked car, caving the whole side of it in. Steam shot up from the wreck like a geyser.

Speeding back up, Luke caught up with Wilma at the next intersection. The railroad crossing was right past this intersection. A dead traffic light hung above the intersection from the wires. Wilma turned sharply at the railroad crossing, her back tire skidding, her left foot down and guiding her in the turn. She straightened the bike out and goosed the throttle, her front wheel coming up just a bit, and then she bolted down the tracks, disappearing behind some trees. Luke was right behind her a few seconds later, keeping fifteen feet behind her.

The railroad tracks were bumpy, but not as bad as Luke had expected. He glanced behind him, but he didn’t see anybody back there. He didn’t see any vehicles on the road that ran parallel with the tracks a block away as they sped past the houses and groups of trees between that road and the railroad tracks. But after a mile, the houses were farther and farther apart, and there were more fields and trees.

They came to another railroad crossing. This intersection was still part of the same small town and Luke was tense, expecting gunshots at any moment, or maybe a group of trucks and cars waiting for them.

But no one was there at the railroad crossing. Either this group of anarchists, or whatever the hell DA was supposed to be, was small or the other gang members had been scared away when Luke killed two of them.

Wilma shot across the road that crossed the railroad tracks. Luke followed right behind her, trying to catch up to her. He looked to his right and left as he crossed the road, looking for any of the gang members or rippers. He didn’t see anyone, just a single car thirty feet down the road, parked right in the middle of the street with both of its front doors wide open. A flock of buzzards picked at scraps inside the car and on the pavement; they flapped their wings and cried out when he and Wilma sped down the tracks across the road, but they didn’t take flight away from the bits of meat they were feasting on.

After the intersection was behind them, Luke relaxed a little, but he kept his eyes peeled. They were still in the limits of the small town, and there were a few more buildings and businesses for another mile, but then the neighborhoods and commercial buildings turned into single-family homes on large pieces of land, and then small farms, and then just pasture land with stands of trees among the open fields and meadows.

Thirty minutes later Wilma began slowing down a little after rounding a bend in the tracks around a small patch of woods. Luke slowed down, too. He was already tensing up, ready to draw his gun again if he needed to.

And then he saw why Wilma had slowed down. There was a stalled train on the tracks up ahead. Even from where they were, Luke could see that part of the train up ahead had derailed from the tracks.

Wilma rode her bike closer to the last car of the train, practically idling when she got to the rear of it, and then she stopped her bike. Luke pulled up beside her on the railroad tracks.

“What do you think?” she asked over the sound of her idling bike.

Luke gave a slight shake of his head as he pulled his bandana down from his mouth and lifted his goggles up. “Could be some of those DA people around here. Or maybe some rippers.”

“DA?” she said.

“Yeah. That symbol. I noticed that it’s not a circle around the letter A, but the letter D. DA or AD. It must stand for something. The name of their gang, maybe.”

Wilma nodded slightly, like she was seeing the symbol in her mind and agreeing with him.

Luke listened for the calls of the rippers, but he didn’t hear anything. He was more worried about the DA gang than the rippers at the moment.

Wilma put her bike in gear. She puttered up to the edge of the tracks; she drove over the rail and then down the embankment to a wide and shallow ditch of grass. Luke followed her. He glanced over at the line of trees twenty feet beyond the wide ditch; they couldn’t really be called woods because he could see glimpses of a vast field beyond the trees.

Wilma rode her bike back up the ditch, and then alongside the tracks, watching the train cars as she passed them. Many of the car doors were open, and the containers looked empty. Some of the containers were semi-trailers secured on flatbed cars. A lot of the boxcars had graffiti on them, ranging from simple initials and profane words and drawings to intricate artwork in dazzling displays of colors. And then Luke saw what he’d been waiting for—the DA symbol.

Up ahead, the tracks turned sharply to the right, and at least six or eight of the boxcars had derailed, some of them uncoupling from the other cars, lying on their sides, and one was far away from the tracks, tossed into the trees on the other side of the tracks.

Wilma stopped her bike again, letting it idle. She pulled her bandana down from her face. She sniffed at the air, looking around.

Luke pulled up beside her. “What is it?”

“I was just making sure I didn’t smell any kind of chemicals.”

All the train cars had been boxcars so far, no cars holding liquid, so at least they didn’t have to worry about some kind of chemical spill. Or course that didn’t mean there wasn’t something as equally toxic inside the boxcars. But most of the boxcars seemed to be empty, like the contents had been looted already.

“I smell something else,” Wilma said. She looked at him for a few seconds. “You smell it?”

He nodded. There was no mistaking the odor of blood and rot in the air . . . the smell of death.

CHAPTER 30

Luke followed Wilma across the gap in the railroad tracks where the boxcars had broken free from the others. They pulled their dirt bikes up next to a tipped-over railroad car and stopped their bikes again.

Luke killed his motor and got off his bike. He pushed the bike over to the boxcar on its side, leaning his bike against it. He pulled his gun out of the holster underneath his hoodie sweatshirt as he kept his eyes on the line of trees thirty feet beyond the side of the tracks.

Wilma shut her bike off, too. The silence was a heavy thing pressing down on them now that the tinny sounds of the dirt bike engines weren’t there. She got off of her bike and leaned it next to Luke’s bike against the boxcar. She drew her weapon, sensing Luke’s tension.

Twenty feet away there were two bodies chained to the overturned boxcar halfway down the hill. The men were both sprawled out on the grass and weeds, their hands were shackled together above their heads with handcuffs and attached to metal bars on the undercarriage of the boxcar. Their feet were staked to the ground with pieces of rebar.

Luke glanced back at Wilma and then walked towards the two dead men. His senses were buzzing—he knew they were being watched right now.

When he was ten feet away from the two bodies, Luke stopped. “They’re from that gang,” he whispered without looking behind him at Wilma.

“Killing their own?” she whispered back.

Luke stared at the two men’s faces. Their eyes were gone, both of their mouths wide open. It looked like part of the closest man’s tongue was gone. They were both missing most of their ears, noses, their lips, and pieces of their cheeks and throats. But their foreheads were untouched and Luke saw the DA symbols carved into their flesh.

“Maybe punishment,” Luke told Wilma.

“Something’s been chewing on them,” Wilma said. “Rippers?”

Luke shook his head a little, still not looking back at Wilma. “I don’t think so. I think the rippers would’ve eaten more of them.”

“Seems like something’s made a meal of them.”

Luke knew Wilma was referring to the big holes in both of the men’s torsos with dried blood crusted around the wounds. Their pants legs were ripped to shreds along with the flesh underneath. Splashes of dried blood were all over the grass and weeds.

A rustling noise in the brush caught Luke’s attention. He turned and aimed his weapon at the line of trees. He heard Wilma doing the same thing right behind him.

“A dog,” Wilma whispered.

A German shepherd poked his head out from the brush, his muzzle stained with blood. He watched them, but wouldn’t come all the way out of the brush.

“Dogs,” Luke said. “That’s what’s been eating these guys. There are more dogs in those trees. Gone feral, I guess. Maybe starving.”

“Looks like more than those dogs have been feasting on these guys,” Wilma said. “Rats probably. And maybe birds picking at them, too.”

Luke nodded and turned back to Wilma. He walked a little closer to the two dead men, studying the DA symbol on their foreheads. The symbol was definitely etched into their skin.

The German shepherd growled from the edge of the woods.

Luke stood back up and glanced at the dog, but so far the dog wasn’t charging. “He doesn’t like me so close to his food,” he muttered.

Luke and Wilma walked back to their bikes.

“Let’s get past this train,” Wilma said as she got to her bike. “I don’t like it here.”

She unstrapped the gas container on the back of her bike and poured some into her gas tank, and then she poured the rest into Luke’s gas tank. “Empty,” she said as she strapped the plastic gas can back onto her bike. “We’ll need to keep an eye out for some more gas.”

They got back on their bikes and rode down into the opposite dry ditch until they were past the train. Luke saw a few more DA symbols painted on the train, but there was no other sign of the gang around.

*

An hour later they entered the boundary of another small town, crossing over a road, and then another one. At the second road, Wilma turned left and followed it into a neighborhood where the houses and doublewide mobile homes were spaced far apart. She rode up to a car in the middle of the street and then stopped her bike, but she left it idling for a moment while she looked around.

Luke didn’t see any movement. He shut his bike off and kicked the kickstand down to lean his bike on it.

Wilma was off of her bike a moment later. They walked up to the car; the stench of decay coming from the open car doors was as bad as the smell from the two dead men chained to the boxcar. Luke already had his gun out, still glancing around as they approached the car.

“Two dead bodies,” Wilma muttered as they stared in at the open door.

Luke couldn’t tell who the two used to be—they were mostly skeletons with bits of meat stuck to them and shredded clothing bunched up on the floor. Parts of the arms and legs were gone, leaving only the torsos and heads behind.

The keys were in the ignition and Luke reached in gingerly to turn the key. The dashboard lights came on, the gas gauge shooting up to the halfway mark. “There’s plenty of gas in the tank.”

Wilma hurried back to her bike and got the empty gas can and a length of rubber hose. “You want to draw straws?” she asked. “See who has to siphon the gas?”

“I’m a better shot,” he told her with a smile. “I’ll cover you.”

“Yeah,” Wilma admitted. She opened the metal flap over the car’s gas cap. She unscrewed the cap and shoved the hose down into the tank. She sucked on the end of the hose for a minute and then spit out the gas and then quickly shoved the end of the hose down into the red container.

“Yuck,” she said, still trying to spit out the gas in her mouth. “I hate siphoning gas.”

Luke handed her a bottle of water as he watched the houses and trailers in the distance all around them, listening for any of the rippers’ calls or screeches. It seemed strange not to see so many rippers around after seeing so many in the city. But maybe there were just less of them out here. He still couldn’t help thinking that the DA gang had something to do with driving the rippers away from this area.

After Wilma topped off the bikes’ gas tanks, she filled the plastic gas can up again, mixing the small container of oil she’d brought with her into the gas and giving it a little shake. She put the gas can and siphoning hose on the back of her bike, strapping them down on the modified metal cage welded to the back of the bike.

Luke glanced up at the gray skies. Clouds had been moving in over the last few hours, chasing the blue sky away. The air had gotten chillier, and the wind was picking up. He wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed later in the night.

They got back on their bikes and rode to the railroad tracks. Luke knew that at some point, if he was remembering the map correctly, they would get off the tracks and into a small neighborhood, and then into more trails in the woods; but that leg of the journey wouldn’t probably be until tomorrow.

After another hour of traveling down the railroad tracks, Luke sped up next to Wilma, startling her. He pointed at a large farmhouse and barn in a field. “There!” he told her.

CHAPTER 31

Thankfully there were no anarchist symbols or DA symbols, or whatever they were, painted anywhere on the house or the barn, and the place didn’t look like it had been ransacked yet by rippers—the windows were intact and the front door wasn’t smashed in.

Luke and Wilma leaned their bikes against the side of the house near the driveway where only one car was parked—a fifteen-year-old Toyota with a few worn-out bumper stickers on the back.

Wilma used her lock-picking skills to get the front door open, and Luke followed her inside. They did a thorough search of the house, but it was empty. Like many of the houses Luke had been in, the place looked like the owners had packed a few suitcases quickly—only taking the absolute necessities—and then abandoned their home.

There was no electricity or running water. Wilma said she had hoped that the farm house’s well pump ran off of solar, but it was obviously an electric pump. But at least they could still flush the toilets, and they each used them.

In the kitchen, Luke and Wilma made a half-hearted attempt to look for anything of value, any extra supplies that were small enough to take with them. Wilma found some boxes of matches and two rolls of electrical tape.

“Once stuff like this is gone, it’s gone,” she said as she stuffed the matches and tape down into her backpack. “Nobody’s going to make this stuff again for a long time.”

Luke just nodded as he walked towards the front door of the house. “Let’s check out that barn.”

They crossed the front yard and walked towards the barn a hundred feet away. Wilma used her lock-picking skills once again to open the side door.

“You’re going to have to teach me how to do that,” Luke told her.

“Oh, I think we’ll be teaching each other a lot of things.”

The barn was a surprise; it had been remodeled into some kind of game area or gigantic family room. A long sectional couch was curved around a flat screen TV mounted on a wall that looked more like a movie screen than a television. A wet bar took up much of one wall with a mirrored wall and shelves behind the bar, the shelves stocked with glasses and bottles of liquor. There was a pool table in the middle of the gigantic room, and a Ping-Pong table a few steps away from the pool table. Against another wall was a line of old-fashioned arcade video games, a pinball machine, and a 1950s juke box. The walls were decorated with paintings, sports memorabilia, and a few stuffed animal trophy heads. There was a loft on the far side of the vast room with a wooden ladder leading up to it.

“Nice place,” Wilma said.

“We could crash up there for the night,” Luke said, pointing at the loft. “We could pull the ladder up there with us. Make sure there’s a window up there we can get down out of if we need to.”

“Another window?” Wilma joked, wincing.

“We’ll make sure we have a longer rope this time.” He gestured at the wall opposite the loft. “We could put the bikes over there.”

“Bike’s won’t do us any good if this place gets rushed by rippers or that gang.”

“They won’t do us any good outside, either.”

Wilma nodded in agreement. “I found a set of keys that must go to that car in the driveway. We could use that car if we have to abandon the bikes.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“You know what they say: Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

Luke didn’t know who “they” were, but he was pretty sure that there weren’t many of “them” left now.

They went back outside and pushed their bikes to the barn. The sun was setting, but because the sky was so cloudy, the light was just a muted gray with shadows growing and the temperature dropping.

After they got the bikes inside the barn, they locked the doors and checked all the windows.

“They didn’t take their booze,” Wilma said, checking out the wet bar as Luke climbed the ladder to explore the loft.

“I’m sure you guys have your own still at the camp,” Luke said from the top of the loft.

“You know it. We make our own beer and wine, too.”

“You find any food behind that bar, or are we just going to drink ourselves silly for dinner?”

Wilma rummaged through the cabinets as Luke looked around the loft, which was much larger than he had expected. There was a queen-sized bed against the far wall with a closet on one side and a small bathroom on the other side. Both of the longer walls had a window with curtains drawn over them, but no blinds.

He walked over to the closet and opened the door. Mostly clothes and a few boxes and plastic tubs. The clothes were too small for Luke and looked like they belonged to a teenager. In fact, this whole barn looked like some teenaged boy’s fantasy, but that teenaged boy was probably really in his mid-twenties, Luke guessed. Who would want to grow up and leave home with a place like this?

The bathroom was small, but it had a shower, a toilet, and a sink. He knew the water would be off, but he tried it anyway. Nothing came out of the faucet.

He went back down the ladder to the wet bar where Wilma had collected drinks and food from the cabinets. The barn was getting murky with the evening coming on quickly, but it was still light enough to see.

“Found some crackers, bags of chips and pretzels, snack cakes, sodas, a few gallons of water, and a case of warm beer.”

Luke picked up a bottle of garlic-stuffed olives.

“And olives,” Wilma added.

“Looks nutritious,” Luke said.

“We’ll eat this stuff and save our MREs,” Wilma said, opening a bag of potato chips.

Luke opened the olives and fished one of them out, popping it into his mouth, savoring the salt.

Wilma found some plastic utensils and paper plates. She opened the mini-fridge but then closed it again because of the smell. She looked through some of the other cabinets. “There’s a bunch of board games in here. Scattegories. Parcheesi. Scrabble. A few decks of cards.” She brought the deck of cards back to the bar and sat down next to Luke.

Luke drank a can of soda while eating chips, olives, crackers, and a snack cake. After he was done, he opened a can of beer. It was starting to get pretty dark.

Wilma had been sipping from a small bottle of whiskey and chasing it with a can of Coca-Cola. She dealt out a hand of cards for each of them.

“What are we playing?” he asked her.

“How about strip poker?”

Luke smiled at her. “Is that all you think about?”

“We need to find a way to stay warm tonight.”

A few minutes later they climbed the ladder, taking their backpacks and a bucket full of drinks up with them. Luke disconnected the top of the ladder and pulled it up into the loft, laying it on its side against the longest wall. The ladder was narrow enough that they might be able to use it to get out of the window if they had to, but Wilma had taken a long rope from the safe house when they left—she wasn’t going to get caught upstairs again without one.

Wilma cleaned up in the bathroom first, using some of the water out of one of the gallons to take a sponge bath. Luke went in after her and cleaned up. When he got out of the bathroom, it was nearly too dark to see, but he spotted Wilma sitting in one of the two chairs on the other side of the room, where the closet was.

“I found a shirt in the closet,” she said. The T-shirt was the only thing she was wearing.

Luke sat down in the other chair and Wilma offered him some whiskey from her bottle. He took a swig and then opened a can of soda to chase the harsh liquid with. He felt better after washing up, even though he had to put the same clothes back on.

They shared a few sips of whiskey for ten minutes, neither of them saying anything. Then Wilma got up and went to the bed, sliding underneath the blanket.

Luke’s eyes had adjusted well enough to the darkness. The moon was out, but it wasn’t that bright with the cloud cover. But Luke could see Wilma in the bed. She was under the covers as she took her T-shirt off, then she threw the shirt onto the floor.

“Aren’t you cold?” Luke asked.

She nodded. “Why don’t you come under the covers with me and keep me warm?”

Luke got up and stripped his clothes off. He crawled into bed with Wilma. Their naked bodies touched under the blanket—cold flesh against cold flesh. He felt himself stiffening immediately.

Wilma grabbed him and kissed him while Luke explored her body with his hands, taking his time.

CHAPTER 32

Wilma woke up in the bed. It was still dark in the loft, and she was still naked and only had the T-shirt on she’d found in the closet. She must have fallen asleep after sex. She reached for Luke, but he wasn’t in the bed with her.

“Luke,” she whispered.

No answer.

A noise came from downstairs.

The moonlight was brighter than before. Wilma sat up, staring across the room, noticing that the ladder was back in place. At some point in the night Luke must have put the ladder back to go downstairs. But why?

“Luke?”

Still no answer, but she could hear the creaking of wood as someone climbed the ladder.

“Luke, answer me.”

She heard heavy breathing, and she knew right away who it was climbing the ladder—the Shadow Man from her dreams. He had been following them somehow, picking up their trail from their dreams, and now he was here.

“Wilma,” the Shadow Man whispered. “Wilma, I’m coming for you.”

Wilma scrambled across the bed, looking for her backpack on the floor, for her gun, but she couldn’t find it.

“Wilma,” the man whispered.

She looked back at the ladder. The Shadow Man stared at her from the top of the ladder, his eyes shining in the darkness.

“I’m coming for you,” the Shadow Man said as he let his hands go from the ladder and began to float on the air up to the loft.

Wilma snapped awake in the bed. She was about to sit up, but she stopped herself.

It was just a dream.

She lay there for a minute, just listening. Luke was right beside her, breathing heavily, practically snoring. She looked around the room, then at the wall where the ladder was—it was still there. She breathed out a sigh of relief.

It was just a dream. The Shadow Man wasn’t here.

Maybe she would be able to go back to sleep, but she didn’t think so. The dream had freaked her out too much.

She needed to think about something else besides the dream. She thought of the conversation she’d had with Luke a few days ago when he had challenged her belief that groups of elites were safely tucked away in underground bunkers, or inside mountains, or even on their own private islands. Luke had said that the elites could only rule for so long before the stronger took over, and the elites could only rule if they had something valuable to lord over the rest of the people’s heads. If Luke was going to believe Wilma’s theory, then he was sure there would be others besides just the elites and their families in those bunkers: soldiers (or at least some kind of security detail), scientists, doctors, engineers, technicians—people to start society over with. Maybe even some laborers. What good would starting over be without knowledge and labor? The elites certainly weren’t going to be fending for themselves, Luke had said. And now that Wilma thought about it, she found it hard to imagine families of elites out in the fields farming or running the factories and trying to manufacture the items they needed.

Maybe she had been wrong about the elites controlling this plague. Maybe this plague had taken the elites by surprise as much as it had everyone else. That still left the possibility of a bioterror attack. Maybe some radical religious group wanted to go to heaven, nirvana, or some other kind of paradise, and they had decided to take the rest of the world with them.

But they hadn’t taken everyone with them. There were people immune to this disease, and she was sure that she and Luke were two of them. And that anarchist gang—they must be immune to the plague; she hadn’t seen any of them wearing gas masks, rubber gloves, or any other kind of protective gear.

Giles had been wearing his gas mask when he had turned. She remembered him slowing the van down when they had been speeding through the neighborhood streets of Cleveland. Giles had become suddenly confused about what he was doing, taking his hands off the steering wheel, his foot off the gas pedal, speaking gibberish through the filters of his mask.

“He’s turning!” Tommy had yelled at her.

Giles then clawed at his gas mask, like he didn’t know why it was on his face, panicking like an animal would. The van ran off the side of the road and plowed into another car. The front of the van had folded inward from the crash, trapping Giles in his seat. But he didn’t seem to be in pain as he ripped his gas mask off and threw it into the passenger seat.

Tommy was in the back of the van with Wilma by then, getting out of Giles’s reach, ready to open the side door and run.

She closed her eyes in the darkness for a moment—she didn’t want to remember any more of what happened after that, after the rippers rushed their van.

But she wondered how Giles had turned even though he always wore his gas mask. She wondered if it was possible that this disease wasn’t airborne. No, it had to be. How else could it have spread so quickly? Maybe Giles’s mask had been defective. But that didn’t make any sense, either. They had always bought the best equipment, military-grade in most cases. Maybe Giles had stepped outside at some point without his mask on. Or he had lifted it up for just a moment when she hadn’t been looking. Or maybe someone else in their militia group hadn’t been as careful and they had infected Giles.

She couldn’t think about it anymore; it was just going to drive her crazy. She didn’t have enough information to wonder about these things. Maybe when they got to the camp, one of the others would have more information, maybe enough of them would have enough pieces so they could fit them all together for some answers.

Thinking of the camp made Wilma wonder about Luke. Would he stick around once they got there? He seemed dead-set on finding these people he kept dreaming about. He didn’t even know if those people in his dreams were real—he could be chasing phantoms he had made up in his own subconscious mind while sleeping.

But then there was the Shadow Man. They had both dreamed about him, and he sure seemed real enough to Wilma. She couldn’t explain how she was so sure that the Shadow Man was real, but she was just certain of it, like a truth she felt in her bones. She wasn’t scared of much; she had been trained (and had trained herself) not to be scared. But something about the Shadow Man frightened her, but the fear was on a different level, not physical but more like an irrational fear, like a child afraid of the dark or monsters under the bed.

The Shadow Man was the monster under the bed, the monster that roamed the darkness, a monster that could see in the dark with his shining eyes.

She looked at Luke, watching him sleep for a moment. He was breathing heavily, and his eyes and the corner of his mouth twitched just a bit as he dreamed. He was probably dreaming about the blond woman right now, the beautiful woman as he called her, the blind woman. She was calling to him like some kind of mermaid calling to a sailor at sea.

Or maybe he was having his own dream about the Shadow Man right now.

It bothered her a little that they were both dreaming about the Shadow Man but she wasn’t dreaming about the blind woman, the two men, and the boy. It was like Luke was destined for a different path than she was. And she wanted to be with Luke.

It didn’t matter. She would make Luke stay with her once they got to the camp. They just needed to get to the camp. Once he saw the place, he would feel safe and he would become part of the group in no time. All they had to do was get there.

She was falling hard for Luke; there was no doubt about that. And she knew he was falling for her, too. They were a perfect match in these dark days. He was capable, strong, tough, and dependable. He used to be a criminal, an enforcer as he called it, and in other times she was sure they never would have hooked up. But things had changed, and people like Luke were valuable now. And so was she.

The night was quiet. She wanted to go back to sleep—they had a long day of riding tomorrow—but she was still too rattled by her nightmare to go back to sleep. Like Luke, she had never had nightmares before. She used to laugh at people who were frightened by their own bad dreams, but she found herself terrified to go back to sleep, afraid the Shadow Man would be waiting for her, his eyes shining in the darkness, his voice a raspy hiss.

I’m coming for you—that’s what he had said to her in the dream.

She rolled over on her side, snuggling up closer to Luke underneath the blanket. She hoped she might wake him up, but he never stirred, still breathing heavily. He was lost in his dream right now. And she felt like she was losing him, or they were losing each other. Losing everything.

The nightmare was just getting her depressed. Once they got to the camp, once she was reunited with Matt, she was sure she would feel better.

You’re sure Matt will let you in the camp? Luke had asked her that question before. He was never afraid of being blunt. She assured Luke that Matt would let them in, but here in the dark right now, she wasn’t entirely sure.

What if Matt didn’t want to let them in the camp? Luke would want to continue south to look for his new “dream friends.” If Matt wouldn’t welcome her back, then maybe she would just go south with Luke and try to find the blind woman.

Yeah, maybe she would.

She smiled and felt a little better. She closed her eyes, snuggling up closer to Luke, already beginning to drift off to sleep again.

CHAPTER 33

Luke woke with a start as the sun poured in through the window of the loft on the east side. He wasn’t sure what time it was, maybe almost seven o’clock.

His dreams from last night came back to him as he lay there in bed, too cold for a moment to crawl out from underneath the blankets. He had been dreaming about the blind woman, the two men, and the boy again. For some reason he didn’t think all of them were together yet, but he had an unshakable feeling that all of them were supposed to come together in the future, including him.

And then there was the Shadow Man. The Shadow Man knew all of them in the dream were supposed to be together, but he didn’t want that because he knew they would be stronger together than apart.

We need to go south. That’s what the blind woman had said in the dream. She wore a white dress and there was an angelic glow all around her, softening the outline of her blond hair and body, blurring the background. But she wasn’t an angel; he was sure of that—she was just a person. And if she was just a person with some kind of psychic power, then maybe the Shadow Man was only a person, too.

The dream seemed like it had lasted all night, even though Luke was sure it hadn’t. He could only remember bits and pieces of it. The Shadow Man was in the dream too, but Luke couldn’t recall much about the dream now.

There were two disturbing things about these dreams he’d been having for the last few nights, besides the appearance of the Shadow Man in all of them. The first disturbing thing was that Wilma hadn’t seen any of the others he’d seen in his dreams. He still wondered if that meant they were going to part ways once they reached the camp. Luke still had his suspicion that even if Matt and the others at the camp let Wilma inside the gates, they might not let him inside. But he had agreed to go down there with her, and he would stick to his word. Besides, he had planned on traveling south pretty much from the moment he had gone back to his house to collect his go-bag. At least he and Wilma could cover each other’s back to the West Virginia border.

He was attracted to Wilma, and he was sure she was attracted to him. But they were adults. The sex was just a release for both of them, a small bit of pleasure in this dark world they suddenly found themselves in. He had to accept the possibility that she was just using him to accompany her down to the camp. If she was just using him, then so be it—he would know the truth when they reached the camp, and if she had been using him then he would just move on south.

But he might keep moving south, anyway. He wasn’t sure if he could live week after week, month after month with these dreams haunting him every night—he was afraid he’d go crazy if he didn’t find the people he saw in the dreams.

There wasn’t much he could do about any of it right now besides keep heading south with Wilma.

The other thing that bothered him about his dreams, especially in the last two nights, was that he’d begun dreaming about two other people: a woman and a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old. They didn’t know each other, but they were going to meet soon. Luke wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he was certain of it. And then all of them would be together at some point in the future. He couldn’t help thinking that the blind woman had visited the woman and the girl in their dreams, he couldn’t help thinking that she had been calling to them in whatever part of the country they were in. He didn’t know why this woman was calling all of them together (or exactly how she was doing it), but he believed it had something to do with the Shadow Man and something to do with this plague. There was some kind of journey all of them were supposed to take, a place to go where there would be answers.

At least he and Wilma had slept through the night without being attacked by rippers. He looked at her as she slept. She looked so peaceful; he hated to wake her up. But they needed to get as much riding done during the day as they could. He doubted they would find as nice a place as this loft to sleep when the night came, but they would find something.

It was so cold he still didn’t want to get out from under the covers. He had put his underwear, socks, pants, and two shirts on before falling asleep last night, so all he needed to do was put his boots and hoodie on.

“Wilma,” he whispered, nudging her gently.

She jumped, gasping as her eyes flew open. She was on the verge of panicking, looking around for a second like she was trying to remember exactly where she was. Then her eyes found his, and she was still.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

“The worst so far,” she muttered and then sat up, pulling the blanket a little tighter around her body.

Luke got out of bed and stood beside it. “You want to tell me about it?”

Wilma shook her head no and got out of bed. She was only wearing the T-shirt she’d found in the loft owner’s closet; she grabbed her clothes and backpack, and then she hurried to the small bathroom.

Luke slipped his feet into his hiking boots and laced them up. He slipped his shoulder holster on and checked his gun, making sure the magazine was full, then he holstered it. He checked his backpack, making sure everything was secure, then he put his hoodie on and his thin leather gloves. It was so cold that he could see his breath.

He walked over to the wall where the ladder was lying. He pushed the curtains back a little and peeked out the window.

Nobody out there in the fields. It had snowed last night. Not a lot of snow, just a light dusting that would probably melt away before the afternoon.

He grabbed the ladder and lowered it down over the edge of the loft, then hooked the top of it to the metal slots, pushing down on it to make sure it was firmly in place. He grabbed his backpack and climbed down the ladder. He went to the wet bar where the liquor, drinks, and food were still right where they had left them last night. He sat down on a stool and opened a snack cake, the cellophane wrapper so loud in the silence. He ate the snack cake in a few bites, wishing he had some milk to go with it.

After he had finished his snack cake, he heard Wilma coming down the ladder. She had her coat, gloves, and backpack on. She walked over to the bar and sat down beside him. He pushed a snack cake toward her.

“I’ll fill up the gas can and bikes from that car in the driveway,” Wilma said as she opened her breakfast. “The gas we get from that car should last us most of the day before we need to find some more.”

*

Thirty minutes later they were on the road. Luke’s body was finally beginning to warm up a little from moving around, but the icy wind as he rode the dirt bike wasn’t helping. He was still a little edgy from his dreams last night. And he was sure Wilma’s nerves were still a little frayed from her nightmare. She had dreamed of the Shadow Man just like he had, he was sure of it.

At least they wouldn’t be riding on the railroad tracks all day like they had yesterday. They would take a few back roads until they reached the edge of the next town.

Wilma turned off of the road into a field and Luke followed her. They drove through the field towards a patch of woods. The trail through the woods was narrow, the trees close together and the brush thick, slowing them down considerably. Luke plowed through the brush, running over roots and small fallen tree branches. The brush was beating at his legs, and he thought if it got too much thicker they were going to have to get off of their bikes and walk them through. But then the woods began to thin out, and then the trees opened up to a field.

The field was some kind of cow pasture dotted with cow patties and a few dead cows, mostly stripped of their meat. Off in the distance there was a farm house, a barn, another even larger building that might be some kind of stables. Luke kept an eye on the house as they drove through the field. He had a feeling that someone was inside the house, maybe a family member or someone who had squatted there when the world turned to shit. He was sure the person was watching them as they rode through the field, probably praying that he and Wilma would just keep on going.

The field ended with a barbed-wire fence, with more woods and a dirt trail beyond it. Wilma came to a stop, then she puttered along the fence until she found where the strands of barbed wire had been cut by Matt, Rick, and Mario. Their tire tracks were still faintly visible in the dirt on the other side of the fence.

Ten minutes later they were riding down the dirt road through the trees. Luke knew it shouldn’t be too much farther before they were at the edge of the next town, and he knew the best chances of running into more gang members or rippers lay in that town. And he was already seeing houses set off in the woods every mile or so.

Everything had been smooth sailing so far, but then Luke saw the buzzards circling in the air above a house in the distance. They rode towards the house, and Luke saw what the buzzards were so interested in—a mound of dead bodies piled up at the edge of the road.

CHAPTER 34

Luke slowed down and pulled his bike over next to the side of the road. The buzzards picking at the bodies flapped their wings and took off, flying up to the nearby trees, perching on the branches. Wilma stopped her bike, waiting for Luke.

Luke killed his engine and kicked the stand down, leaning the bike against it. Wilma circled her bike around and pulled up next to him. “What are you doing?” she yelled.

“Looking at this,” Luke said as he got off of his bike. He pushed his hood back and yanked the bandana down off of his face. He lifted his goggles up to his forehead.

There were at least twelve bodies in the pile, mostly older people and young kids. Flies dotted the bodies, buzzing so loud they sounded like a swarm of bees.

In the distance, beyond the curving driveway, the house looked abandoned. The front door was halfway open and a lot of the windows were smashed out. An older minivan was parked in the driveway on the other side of the house that curved around towards a garage poking out from that side of the home. There was an even older pickup truck parked in front of the minivan, jacked up on jack stands with one of the front tires off of it. Junk was piled up along the other side of the house: old tires, bundles of metal poles, slats of wood coated green with mildew, other pieces of garbage and trash.

“We should go,” Wilma said, still sitting on her bike with it running. She pulled her gun out, glancing at the house two hundred feet back from the road. “There could be rippers in that house.”

Luke took a few steps towards the mound of dead bodies. At first he thought the DA gang had done this, but he didn’t see the DA symbols painted anywhere on the house, and he hadn’t seen any sign of them for a while now. He also thought of how the two DA men were killed yesterday, handcuffed to the overturned train car so they could die a slow and miserable death. These people’s throats had been ripped open, their bodies left here in a big pile for the birds, rodents, and insects to pick at.

Wilma turned off her bike and leaned it against the kickstand. It was suddenly quiet except for the wind, the buzzing flies, and the occasional impatient fluttering of wings from the buzzards in the trees. She huffed out a sigh as she walked over to Luke with her gun in her hand. “Why are you looking at them?”

“These people were rippers,” Luke said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Look at their clothes, the way they’re ripped up and how dirty their skin and hair is.”

“So somebody killed a bunch of rippers and left them here.”

“No,” Luke said, still staring at the bodies sprawled out on the blanket of dead leaves near the road. “I think rippers killed these rippers. Look at their throats—they’re all slashed. Torn open.”

Wilma didn’t say anything for a moment. She still had her gun in her hand, still glancing around nervously. The wind had picked up a little more, blowing through the tree branches. Dead leaves fluttered to the ground like giant snowflakes, some of those leaves landing on the dead bodies. “So they’re culling their own herd,” Wilma finally said. “Weeding out the weak.”

“It’s like they’re getting smarter.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Luke shook his head a little, not bothering to answer.

Wilma frowned. “Something you heard in a dream? Is that it?”

Luke still didn’t say anything. He could hear the disapproval in her voice. He knew how she felt about these dreams both of them had been having. Luke could understand her skepticism at the meaning of the dreams, trying to deny the power in them, but at the same time he couldn’t help feeling like these dreams and what they meant were bigger than what either one of them could comprehend at the moment. He had a gut feeling about the dreams and he had always trusted his gut.

Wilma looked away, concentrating on the front of the home in the distance as another blast of icy wind shook the trees all around them, the leaves shaking and sounding like a hundred death rattles.

“You just said they’re culling their own herd,” Luke said. “So that must mean they’re getting smarter.”

“Or just acting on pure instinct. A lot of animals do things instinctively, which can make them seem smart.”

Luke didn’t want to argue about it, but he was pretty sure they could both agree that the way the rippers were changing, the way they seemed to be organizing into groups, made them even more dangerous every day.

At least he hadn’t seen any of the gang symbols painted on buildings or cars lately. Maybe they had finally traveled outside of their territory. That at least would be one good break.

“Come on, let’s get going,” Wilma said as she went back to her bike. She pushed her goggles down over her eyes and pulled her bandana up over her face, then she pulled her hood over her head. She got on her bike and kickstarted it, the motor firing up, startling the nearby buzzards perched in the trees.

Luke got on his bike and started it. They were only two days away from the Ohio River, as long as they didn’t run into any complications.

*

Thirty minutes later they were at the edge of the small town they were trying to skirt. The morning clouds had scattered, and the sky was mostly clear—a deep vibrant blue autumn day that reminded Luke of when he was ten years old, playing with his friends on Saturday mornings. That seemed like a million light-years ago, but at the same time it felt like yesterday. A pang of nostalgia hit him so hard and suddenly that he ached. Sometimes he longed for those simpler days of his childhood, wishing he could have made different decisions in life. But none of that mattered now. The weight of this new reality pushed down on him—the world had changed seemingly overnight, civilization had collapsed, and it wasn’t going to go back to the way it used to be for a long time, if ever.

Now that they were riding past neighborhoods and small businesses, Luke saw more rippers. Three of them burst out of the front door of a house, racing after them as they rode by. The three rippers were screeching and yelling, but Luke could barely hear them over the whine of their dirt bikes as they sped away. He had been tempted to draw his weapon and pick the three of them off, but he focused on following Wilma instead as she turned down the next road, climbing a hill through this rural neighborhood. The hills were getting a little higher the farther south in Ohio they went, and Luke guessed they were going to encounter even larger hills once they got across the Ohio River and into West Virginia.

A few more rippers ran at them from another house, one of them hurling rocks at them. Luckily Luke and Wilma hadn’t come across a horde of rippers yet, but he was sure it wouldn’t be long before they came across another large group like they’d seen back in Cleveland.

By the early afternoon, they were well beyond the town and up into some small hills, coming towards a river. They rode their bikes off of the road and well into the trees at the hilltop so they could look down onto the bridge below without being seen from the road. Bridges and tunnels were dangerous now—it was too easy for rippers or the gangs to close off one end or the other, trapping them in the middle. They wanted to take a few moments and watch the bridge through the binoculars.

They also took a few moments to grab a bite to eat and to drink a bottle of water. Luke ate a protein bar and finished off his bottle of water. He pulled his binoculars out of his hoodie and walked to the edge of the hilltop, standing by a tree. He peered down at the bridge below.

As Luke continued to watch the bridge, Wilma filled up their bikes’ tanks with the last of the gasoline in her plastic gas can, splitting the fuel evenly between their bikes.

The road they had been riding on curved down through the woods to the bridge below that spanned a wide but shallow river.

“How’s it look down there?” Wilma asked as she walked up next to him.

“Two vehicles down on the bridge. They both look abandoned. I don’t think they’re barricades or some kind of trap.”

Wilma stared down at the bridge with a hand shielding her eyes. “I think it’s safe enough.”

They walked back to their bikes. Luke was about to get on his bike and start it, but then he held a hand out to Wilma, stopping her. “Wait,” he hissed.

But she was already frozen; she’d heard the noise, too.

CHAPTER 35

“Quick,” Luke said. “Hide the bikes behind that brush over there.”

They wheeled their bikes behind the wall of brush, laying them down in the grass. Wilma grabbed the shotgun from the scabbard attached to the side of her bike and Luke had his gun in his hand. They crept towards the trees, watching the road where the noise had come from. The rumbling sound was getting closer, and now it was a roaring sound.

Luke was about to raise the binoculars up to his eyes to look, but Wilma laid a gentle hand on his arm and shook her head no. He realized right away that she was worried about the coming line of vehicles catching the glint off the glass of the binoculars in the woods as they drove by.

There were only four vehicles in the convoy, but the roar of the engines was loud. The first in the line of trucks was an old full-size van, a Ford Econoline; it was primer gray, and it had the now-ubiquitous DA symbol painted on the side of it in bright red paint. The windows were either tinted or just obscured with mud and grime.

The van was followed by a dark green garbage truck that was smeared with filth along the bottom and the back of it. Right behind the garbage truck was a rental box truck with the moving company logo right on the side of it, but the logo had been painted over with the DA symbol.

And bringing up the rear was an older pickup truck on large tires. The truck looked very similar to the one Luke had shot at in the small town yesterday, but this truck couldn’t be the same one. This truck had two men in the back with automatic rifles, probably M-16s they had taken off of some dead soldiers.

“Holy shit,” Wilma whispered.

The trucks passed by them and drove down the road towards the bridge that spanned the river. When the line of trucks got to the bridge, Wilma stood up. “Let me see the glasses.”

Luke pulled the binoculars off of his neck and handed them to her. She had her own pair of binoculars, but they were night vision so she needed to use his. She darted over to the large tree next to the steep drop off and leaned against the trunk, raising the binoculars up to her eyes and watching the bridge below.

Luke crept up through the carpet of dead leaves behind her. He could see well enough even without the binoculars—the trucks were already driving across the bridge.

“They didn’t even stop at either one of the vehicles on the bridge,” Wilma said with the binoculars still up to her eyes.

“They might set up a barricade at the other end,” Luke said.

Luke and Wilma kept watching the bridge. The four trucks continued along the road right after the bridge, climbing the road that wound up the next hill, all four trucks eventually disappearing into the trees.

“Shit,” Luke said. “I thought we were past these guys by now.”

Wilma kept watching through the binoculars for a moment longer and then she lowered them. Everything around them was quiet again now, the woods silent. “We can’t risk going across that bridge. Some of them could be up in those trees, waiting to pick us off if we try to cross.”

“You have another route in mind?” he asked her.

Wilma walked back to their bikes behind the brush and sat down on a fallen tree. She pulled her backpack off and pulled the map out of a zippered side pocket, unfolding it. She pulled another map out, an even more detailed map of this area of Ohio.

“We’re going to have to cross that river somewhere,” Luke told her.

Wilma nodded. “I think this is our best bet.” She pointed to the spot on the map. “We’ll ride west along this road.” She trailed her finger slowly along the map. “Try our best to skirt this town and then get to the river along this set of railroad tracks.”

Luke looked at the map. “Is that crossing a railroad trestle?”

“Yeah. It’ll be fine.”

Luke wasn’t so sure about that. “What about that town? Could be a lot of rippers there.”

Again, Wilma nodded in agreement. “We’re going to take this road around the town, up into these hills here until we get here.” Again, she traced the route with her finger as she spoke. “Then we’ll take this road to the railroad tracks, and hopefully that will be the only vulnerable area. Hopefully, we won’t run across too many of the rippers. But right now, I think the rippers are less of a risk than that gang is.”

Luke had to agree with her on that point. “Railroad tracks. My favorite.”

Wilma refolded the maps and shoved them down into the side pocket on her backpack and zipped it shut. She stood up and put her pack on. “Let’s go.”

*

They rode north, back the way they had just come not too long ago, and then they took a side street that led to the next town. Fifteen minutes later they drove by a gas station and a small store. A car was parked in front of the old gas pumps, the driver’s door wide open. Luke was tense, ready to grab for his gun if he needed to, but he didn’t see any rippers wandering around anywhere. He was sure the drone of their dirt bikes would bring them running out into the street soon enough.

They drove past a few houses and a couple of small businesses. Trash and papers drifted across the road, disturbed even more when they roared past the pieces of paper on their bikes.

As they passed two rows of mobile homes lining both sides of a small, narrow street, Luke saw a few dead bodies lying on the patchy lawns in front of two of the trailers.

Wilma didn’t even slow down—either she hadn’t noticed the dead bodies, or she didn’t care to stop and investigate again like Luke had done earlier.

But something felt wrong here.

As they ventured deeper into the edge of town, Luke saw more dead rippers lying in front of homes and businesses, their torsos riddled with bullet holes, splashes of blood on the walls behind them. One ripper, a young woman, was missing half of her face and was lying on her side in a pool of congealed blood.

Wilma still hadn’t slowed down. She turned left onto a street and Luke followed her. The road rose higher into the hills and there were a few homes far off from the side of the road. They curved around at the top of the hill, the woods thicker here as they got farther away from the edge of the town.

The railroad crossing was just down the street. Wilma hit her brakes at the last second after downshifting and slid into the turn onto the tracks. Luke slowed down a little more before making his turn, but he caught back up to Wilma quickly as she sped down the tracks, the trees and brush on both sides of them whipping by in a green blur.

The land was higher here, but it was beginning to drop off suddenly when they saw the rusty iron railings covering the railroad trestle. The river below was just as wide as it had been at the other bridge, the current swift, the water brown and dirty-looking. At least there were some kind of girders here and it wasn’t just a set of tracks on top of a trestle, but the spaces between the iron beams was definitely big enough for them to ride their bikes right off the edge and down into the river below. It looked like a fifty-foot drop to the surface of the water.

They were almost halfway across the tracks. Luke was beginning to get his hopes up—maybe they were going to make it across the bridge okay. But then Wilma skidded to a stop on the tracks in front of him, turning her bike sideways and almost laying it down.

Luke saw what had spooked her—dozens of rippers were rushing out of the brush at the other end of the trestle, rushing onto the tracks, running right for them.

CHAPTER 36

Luke stopped his bike right behind Wilma’s on the train trestle as the horde of rippers ran towards them. Wilma already had her handgun drawn, shooting at the mass of raging rippers rushing towards them. She hit three of them, knocking them down in mid-run, but the others behind those three jumped over their fallen bodies, some of them tripping up a little. Luke realized that Wilma was trying to jam them up, but there were too many rippers to hold off with gunshots right now—they had no other choice but to turn around and ride back the way they’d come.

The gunshots didn’t seem to be scaring the rippers off. Obviously that gang had killed a lot of the rippers in this town and the survivors had run down here to the tracks to get away. But now a small group of them were running right at him and Wilma, like a suicide squad, to kill the threat that had killed so many of their own. And the three rippers that Wilma had shot weren’t slowing them down at all.

“We’ve got to turn around,” Luke yelled at Wilma. He goosed his throttle and turned his bike around, the back tire sliding around until he was pointed back the other way. He glanced back to make sure Wilma was following him—she was. He raced along the tracks, trying to get off of this bridge. He was worried there might be rippers on the other side of this bridge, trying to seal them off.

And there they were, more rippers running out of the brush where they had been hiding when he and Wilma had first ridden onto the trestle. It had been a trap.

They’re getting smarter. They’re getting more organized.

Wilma was almost right beside him now and they were only forty yards away from the end of the trestle. Luke had his gun drawn. He pulled the trigger four times.

Spit. Spit. Spit. Spit.

Four rippers fell backwards before they even got near the end of the bridge, mists of blood spraying out from their heads before they collapsed to the ground.

Luke rode off the trestle right in front of Wilma. The rippers were on both sides of them now, rushing up the grassy and weedy hill toward the train tracks. Some of them had sticks, and some of them had rocks, already throwing the stones at them as they raced by. Most of the rocks were small, not big enough to do much damage to the bikes, but some of the rocks were big enough to hurt him and Wilma, maybe even knock them out if they struck the right spot.

Wilma fired a few more shots from right behind Luke, hitting a few of the closest rippers. Again, the gunshots weren’t scaring them off or making them hesitate at all. As Luke rode past the gauntlet of rippers, he saw a sea of angry faces, dirt streaking the skin and matting their hair, eyes wild and murderous, their clothes ripped and soiled. Some of them waved sticks and clubs at them.

Luke and Wilma never let up on their speed, racing past most of the horde before they could get all the way up to the tracks, but there were a couple of them that managed to get to him and Wilma before they could get all the way past them.

One man pawed at Luke as he raced by, trying to grab at his hoodie. Luke pointed the gun around his side, aiming behind him at the man and pulling the trigger twice.

Spit. Spit.

The ripper let go and rolled down the gravel hill of the train tracks and into the weeds below.

Luke glanced back at Wilma to make sure the rippers hadn’t closed in on her. She was almost right behind him now, her eyes dinner plates of fear and concentration behind her goggles. She didn’t have her gun in her hand anymore, and he wondered if she had lost it. She still had the shotgun in the metal scabbard attached to the side of her bike, but it looked like she had lost part of her pack from the back of her bike.

It didn’t matter, at least they were past the horde now. Wilma zoomed out in front of Luke on the tracks, racing toward the railroad crossing on the street in the distance. The rippers threw rocks at them in a last-ditch effort to knock them off their bikes. Luke felt two of the rocks hit him. One hit him on his left shoulder blade, but the bigger rock hit him right in the middle of the back of his head, and that one had actually hurt enough to take his breath away for a second.

Wilma turned left onto the road at the crossing, riding back the way they had just come. Luke thought it might be better to go the other way, but he had no way of arguing with her right now; he just followed her. They sped along the same road that skirted the edge of the town, passing the same houses and buildings, the same dead bodies of rippers. Luke counted at least thirty dead rippers that he could see from the road.

Soon they were back on the road that climbed up into the hills and woods, and then they rode up to the spot in the woods where they had been before, where they had watched the bridge with their binoculars. They killed their engines and leaned their bikes on the stands behind the wall of brush that concealed them from the road.

“You okay?” Luke asked Wilma as he tore off his goggles and yanked his bandana down. He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his jacket, then he pulled his hood down and touched the back of his head, finding what he had expected—a knot. He looked at the blood on his fingertips.

“Yeah,” Wilma answered. “What about you?”

“They got me in the back of my head with a rock.”

“Let me see.” She hurried behind him and inhaled a sharp breath. “Yeah, they got you all right. It’s bleeding pretty good.”

“I’ll be okay,” he said.

Wilma took her backpack off and pulled out an extra pair of her socks. She poured a little of the water from her bottle onto the balled-up sock, getting it wet but not soaked. She handed it to him. “Here. Use this.”

Luke accepted her impromptu compression bandage, and he pressed it gently to the back of his head. “I’ve got some old scar tissue all over my head and face,” he told her. “From my MMA days. It probably looks worse than it is. It’ll stop bleeding in a minute or two. I think my hood softened the blow a little.”

Wilma nodded, but she still looked a little concerned. “Those rippers were waiting for us. They set a trap for us.”

Luke nodded. He saw that she had reached the same conclusion he had on their drive back to these woods. “They’re getting more organized. They probably thought we were part of that gang that killed a bunch of them back there in that town.”

“Or they thought we were lunch.”

Luke couldn’t help laughing.

“Did you see all of those dead bodies in that town?” he asked her.

“Yeah. I was worried you were going to stop and investigate like you did the last time.”

“It seems like that DA gang drove through that town, killing as many rippers as they could, maybe picking them off as they drove by.”

“Which is a good thing,” Wilma said.

Luke nodded in agreement. “Yeah, and they shot at us a few days ago,” he reminded her.

She hadn’t forgotten.

“I don’t know what their plan is, but we just need to stay clear of them.”

Luke pulled out his binoculars and walked over to the same tree where they had studied the bridge before in the valley below. Everything looked the same as it had an hour ago; there was nothing on the bridge except for the abandoned car and SUV. He didn’t see any signs of movement in the trees.

“I guess we’re going to have to cross it,” Wilma said as she stood beside him. “Take our chances.”

Luke wondered if they should study the map again, try to pick out another location to cross. But without knowing where that convoy of trucks was going to be, without knowing how many rippers would be waiting for them, then this bridge looked as good as any other to him right now. It seemed to him like the convoy of trucks was on the move, traveling through towns and killing as many rippers as they could find. It made sense that they had kept on going after the bridge, going to the next town to kill more rippers. What didn’t make a lot of sense was that the DA gang would be hiding in the trees and watching the bridge. If they wanted to barricade it, then they would have done it out in the open, just like they had done before. Another problem was if he and Wilma hesitated too much longer, there was a chance the horde of rippers would follow them up into these woods, and then they would have no choice but to cross that bridge whether they wanted to or not—only with a horde of rippers chasing them.

“Okay,” Luke said, still holding the sock to the back of his head, trying to wait for the wound to clot and stop bleeding. “You ready to go now?”

Wilma drank a little more water and nodded. She stuffed her water bottle down into her backpack and then slipped it over her shoulders.

“They got your gas can,” Luke said as they walked back to their bikes.

“Yeah. One of them knocked it off. They were grabbing onto me, but I kicked one of them away. They didn’t get my whole pack, just the gas can.”

“What about your gun? Did you lose that?”

“Yeah. But I’ve got another one.” She did a quick inspection of her bike. “The siphon hose is still in this pack here with the 2-cycle oil. We’ll just have to find some gas tonight, and another gas can.”

Luke got on his bike and started it. Wilma started hers, revving the motor and smiling at him. He couldn’t help smiling back at her.

They rode out of the woods, onto the road, and then sped down the hill towards the bridge. Luke was tense, ready to draw his gun at any moment, but he kept both hands on the handlebar grips of the bike.

They raced across the bridge, the dirt bike motors screaming and echoing across the river below them. Wilma stayed a bike length behind Luke and to the side of him as he rode towards the first car, trying to keep it in front of them for as long as he could, using it like a shield. He also swerved just a bit as he rode, trying to make himself a more difficult target if a sniper was aiming at them from the trees in the hills beyond the other end of the bridge.

Once they were past the empty car, Luke tried to keep the SUV in front of them as they approached it. The bridge wasn’t that long, and they were already halfway across it, but it felt like they still had miles to go before they reached the other side.

They got past the SUV, a Chevy Tahoe, and sped to the other side.

So far, so good. No rippers. No DA gang. No convoy of trucks driving down from the hill of trees they were approaching. No gunshots ringing out.

A moment later they were both off of the bridge and back onto solid land, climbing the road up into the hills, the trees already blocking the sunlight, the air already colder.

Wilma pulled in front of Luke once they were a mile into the woods, following the trail she had memorized. After they drove up over the next steep hill, they coasted down until Wilma slowed down and pulled off the road and onto a dirt trail that led into the woods.

Once they were on the trail in the woods Luke felt a little better. He was sure they wouldn’t come across a convoy of trucks in the woods, but that didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some of the gang members, or even a group of rippers, roaming the woods. So far it seemed like the rippers stayed in the cities, towns, and neighborhoods where the packaged food and survivors of this plague were more plentiful. Right now it seemed like the woods were safer than most places, but Luke couldn’t let his guard down just because they were deep in the woods now—nowhere was truly safe anymore. Maybe not even Wilma’s camp down in West Virginia.

Luke followed Wilma along the trail for the next hour. She sped through the woods, slowing down only a little around the sharp bends and turns. Luke still managed to keep up with her, not getting too far behind.

Once the woods thinned out, and the trail opened up to a wider dirt road rather than a narrow path through the woods, Wilma sped up and Luke caught up to her. They sped along for a while, but then Wilma hit her brakes, skidding to a stop.

Luke thought of the railroad trestle when Wilma had skidded to a stop, and the first thought that came to his mind was a horde of rippers. He stopped beside her and drew his gun, looking around for the threat, but then he saw why Wilma had stopped so quickly—there was a dirt bike on its side at the edge of the dirt road where the woods began.

CHAPTER 37

“It’s Rick’s bike,” Wilma said as she turned off her bike and got off of it, laying her bike down on the trail, not even bothering to use the kickstand.

Luke turned his bike off and got off of it, following Wilma to the dirt bike a few feet ahead of them. He still had his gun in his hand.

“Maybe he wrecked,” Wilma said.

Luke heard the hitch in Wilma’s voice, the hope she was trying to raise.

But Luke already saw the blood on the bike—bright red splashes of it. There were bullet holes in the gas tank and one in the back fender. He shook his head a little. “I don’t think this was a wreck.”

Wilma let out an exhale that sounded more like a shudder, almost like she was doing her best to choke back a sob. She stepped past the bike and into the thick woods.

Luke knew what she was looking for, the other bikes—Matt’s bike.

“You’re sure this is Rick’s bike,” he asked her as he stepped closer to the trees.

She was already ten feet into the woods. “Yes,” she answered.

From the custom racks welded to the back and the homemade scabbard for a rifle on the side of the bike, similar to the modifications they had on their bikes, Luke was also sure that this was Rick’s bike. “Maybe he rode with your brother or the other guy they were with. Maybe he was just hurt, and they got him away from here.”

Rick’s body wasn’t here, so somebody had obviously taken him somewhere if he was hurt or dead.

Wilma came back out of the woods, nodding. “Yeah. Maybe he rode on the back of one of their bikes like you said.” She looked up and down the wide dirt trail through the woods like she might spot Matt somewhere. She followed a few of the dirt bike tracks, but they faded away and disappeared a few feet down the dirt road.

“We should get going,” Luke told her. He didn’t want to get too far away from their bikes. “It’s getting late and we need to start looking for somewhere to sleep tonight before it gets dark.”

*

They found an abandoned house behind a small business at the edge of the next neighborhood they came to. They each ate an MRE after mixing it with some water, chasing it down with bottled water. The food was cold and tasted like salty mush, but at least it was something in their stomachs. The night air was freezing, and they snuggled up together underneath the thermal blanket Luke had taken out of his pack.

“We’re not far now,” Wilma said after they sat there for a while in the darkness, propping each other up and trying to stay warm. “I think we could be at the Ohio River by tomorrow afternoon.”

Luke had already studied the maps with Wilma earlier before it had gotten dark. It didn’t look too much farther on the map to the river. He wasn’t sure exactly how they were going to get across the Ohio River, which had to be a lot wider than the rivers they had already crossed. Wilma told him that at least two people should be waiting at a particular spot with a boat. They were supposed to be there for a few hours every day, waiting for members of the militia to come.

“What if they aren’t there?”

Wilma had just shrugged. “They’ll be there. We all had an agreement.”

But what if there aren’t many left? What if most of the militia never even made the journey down there? But he didn’t want to say those things to her. If these two people she was so sure would be there weren’t there, then they would have to take their chances across a bridge—the last resort.

“I can’t believe that gang’s all the way down here,” Luke said after they were quiet again for a while. “It almost seems like they’re moving south, like they’re following us. I don’t understand how they got so big and organized so quickly. It’s like they started organizing before people even started turning into rippers.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s strange.”

“And you don’t think it could’ve been some kind of militia that was already formed?”

“I guess it could have been,” Wilma answered. “It just seems like only a handful of any group would be immune to the plague, yet these guys seem like they have been working together for a while, like you just said.”

“Maybe it is just random groups of people,” Luke said. “But it still bothers me that they’re so organized. And the way they moved through those towns back there, executing rippers, stringing them up in some places. Punishing their own gang members, torturing them.”

“If they were that big of a militia or a group, then someone in our own group would have known about them. Maybe when we get to the camp, they will have some information about them.”

Luke didn’t comment, and Wilma snuggled up closer to him. “I know this is hard, but I also know things will be so much easier and safer when we get to the camp.”

“I know,” Luke said.

*

When Luke fell asleep, he began to dream. Only these dreams weren’t about the blind woman, the two men, and the boy—this time he dreamed of two women, a man, and a little girl. He’d seen one of the women and the little girl in a previous dream, but the other woman and the man were new. The four of them were traveling together, struggling to survive this nightmare landscape just like he and Wilma were trying to do, just like the blind woman and her friends were trying to do. But unlike the blind woman, these four people couldn’t seem to see him in the dream like she could—it was more like he was watching them without their knowledge. And maybe they saw him in their dreams.

The dream shifted to a small, blasted-out town with dead bodies littering the streets and lawns. Some of the dead bodies were clothed, some wearing the stained and dirty clothing of the rippers, and others were completely naked. Some bodies were staked to the ground, just like Valerie’s husband had been nailed to the kitchen floor with the nail gun.

Others hung from telephone poles, some hanging by their wrists, some hanging by their necks, and others hanging by their ankles. Some were crucified to the poles and to the sides of wood buildings, large metal spikes pinning them to the wood siding.

There was blood everywhere in this town, splashes of it on buildings and across vehicles, staining windows and patches of lawns. Entrails were stretched across the street in one place. There were pieces of flesh and body parts in another area, large sections of skin drying like bedsheets on a clothesline. A large cloth bag was stuffed full of leg and arm bones, the bag of bones right at the edge of the road, a skull balanced right on top of it. A shoe was here, a glove there, discarded items of clothing tossed to the sides of the streets like garbage.

A slate-gray sky covered the town like a low ceiling of churning storm clouds. But these weren’t thunderstorm clouds; it was cold, and these clouds promised a snowstorm. The wind was fierce and the bodies hanging from the power lines swayed back and forth. Pieces of paper and other trash and debris rolled across the vacant streets like tumbleweeds.

But the town wasn’t completely empty of life. The Shadow Man was there. Luke could feel the man’s presence, he could feel his eyes watching him from some dark hiding place, his eyes shining in the darkness.

“You’re right,” the Shadow Man whispered from somewhere nearby.

Luke had his gun in his hand, the silencer attached. He turned around in a slow circle, trying to see where the Shadow Man’s voice was coming from.

“You’re right, Luke,” the Shadow Man whispered again.

“Where are you? Show yourself!”

“I’m coming for you, Luke. We’re all coming for you. Following you.”

Luke snapped awake in the darkness, breathing hard. He looked at Wilma, but she was still asleep, probably trapped in her own nightmare right now.

He’d never had dreams like these before, dreams where people like the blind woman and the Shadow Man communicated with him. These dreams, these nightmares, seemed to last the whole night, from the moment he closed his eyes until he opened them again. He was sure that wasn’t the case—he had heard that a person only dreamed in bits and pieces through the night—but these dreams felt like they lasted all night long, and they felt like they were driving him crazy.

He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he could tell that it was almost morning. His body felt rested, even if he also felt frozen—it was only his mind that felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

Trying to be careful, Luke got up. He made sure the blanket was still covering Wilma. He was shivering, but he needed to walk around and get his blood moving through his veins. He wished he had some hot coffee right now. He had a can of Coke in his backpack for a caffeine shot, but a hot cup of coffee would be so much better. He didn’t feel like fishing around in his backpack for the can of soda.

He walked to the window and looked outside, watching the darkness for a moment. The sky in the east was just beginning to lighten up. Soon they could get back on the trail. They had another large area of woods to go through today, and then they would only be a few miles away from the river, with just one last large town to get through. But the route that Wilma had planned took them around the edge of that town, out where a small airport and other businesses were. And from there, the Ohio River. He was ready to get going, yet he also felt an anxiety blanketing him.

It was the dream that was freaking him out, that’s all.

But the dream meant something, he was sure of that. The Shadow Man had been talking directly to him in the dream, and that was a first.

I’m coming for you, that’s what the Shadow Man had said. We’re all coming for you. Following you.

He’d said that they were all coming for him. That would mean that the DA group and the Shadow Man were connected, or that the Shadow Man was their leader. He wondered if he should tell Wilma about his dream, about what the Shadow Man had said. But no, he would just keep this dream to himself. She would only try to rationalize things, try to convince him that his subconscious was mixing the two things together: the Shadow Man (whom she believed wasn’t real) and the DA gang; she would tell him that he had fused those two things together in his mind, turning them into something intentionally evil.

He still couldn’t help being spooked a little, and he wasn’t someone who was easily spooked.

The sky was even lighter in the east now; he must have been standing at the window longer than he had realized while thinking about his dreams. It was time to wake Wilma up so they could get going. It was time to get Wilma home today.

CHAPTER 38

By the middle of the day they had gotten through the woods, the trees thinning out, opening up to fields. There were houses and then buildings as they got closer to the edge of the town. They were only a few miles away from the Ohio River now.

After another ten minutes of riding, Luke saw the airport off to their right, a vast open area that made him a little nervous, feeling exposed out here, but they had no choice but to ride past it. According to the most recent information Wilma had, the small airport had been closed down for years now, and a lot of the businesses around it had failed or were failing. And now the place looked like a ghost town.

The gunshots rang out as soon as they left the cover of a few buildings and began riding along the road that paralleled the vast field next to the airport. One bullet hit Luke’s bike and the other bullet hit Wilma in the stomach as they tried to turn their bikes back around.

As soon as the bullet struck Wilma, she fell off of her bike. Luke had seen the bullet hit her, he had seen it go through her body and explode out of her back in a spray of blood.

No! We’re almost there! We’re so close!

Luke slid to a stop, laying his bike down in the process. He left it on the ground and ran back to where Wilma lay on the gravel road. Another two shots echoed across the field, the shots almost simultaneous—there were two shooters, both firing from the same place, from the woods at the other end of the large grassy field. The two bullets pelted the brownish grass at the edge of the trail they had been riding on, neither one of them even close to him or Wilma.

But he still needed to get her behind some kind of cover. He looked back from where they had come. The buildings were too far away. There was an old semi container on rusted wheels with weeds and garbage underneath it, but that was also too far away to drag Wilma. The only cover Luke saw that was close enough was an old metal dumpster about twenty feet away; it wasn’t very big, but it would have to do for now. He grabbed Wilma’s arms and dragged her back toward the dumpster. He wasn’t sure if she was unconscious yet; her eyes were closed, and she moaned a little, but she didn’t fight against him as he dragged her across the grass to the dumpster.

Two more shots rang out from across the field as he dragged Wilma, but again, both of them missed them and their bikes by several feet. Luke knew then that he wasn’t dealing with a pair of sharpshooters; the bullet that had hit Wilma had probably just been a lucky shot for them.

When he and Wilma were safely in front of the dumpster, Luke sat Wilma up just a little so he could pull her backpack off of her. She moaned even louder but she let him do it. He laid her back down on the grass gently. She rocked her head back and forth, moaning. He was sure she was in pain, but he knew she was probably more in shock right now.

He unzipped his hoodie and used his binoculars to peek around the corner of the dumpster, looking around. Two more shots rang out, one right after the other. One of the bullets hit Wilma’s dirt bike tire, and the other hit the grass. He spotted the glint from a scope in the woods at the other side of the vast field.

Luke turned back to Wilma. “Hold on.” He touched her shoulder gently. “I need to get something on that wound, try to stop the bleeding.” He ripped off his backpack and tore it open, grabbing an extra undershirt and balling it up.

Wilma stopped his movements with a hand on his arm. She smiled at him, staring at him. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for bringing me home.”

We’re not there yet, he almost said, but didn’t. Maybe she believed they were at the camp . . . or she wanted to believe that.

“Let me stop the bleeding,” he told her. “The wound isn’t that bad.”

She gave a slight shake of her head, the smile still there—they both knew he was lying. “Listen to me,” she said, breathing hard as she fought to get the words out. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about the dreams. I know they’re real . . .I know the Shadow Man is real.”

“Don’t try to talk.”

“Be . . . be careful,” Wilma said, choking up a little. A line of blood dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. “Be careful of the dreams. He . . . he saw us in the dreams. He saw where . . . where we were going to be . . . and they were waiting for us here.”

Tears dripped down Luke’s face. He felt one of them sliding down his nose to the tip of it. He hadn’t even realized he’d been crying. “I’ll be careful,” he promised her.

“I know . . .” she said and then swallowed hard, gripping the sleeve of his hoodie. “I know we haven’t known each other long . . . but . . .”

He nodded. “I love you, too.”

Wilma smiled a little wider and closed her eyes.

Another shot rang out. A bullet hit Luke’s dirt bike, pinging off of the motor. Another bullet hit the dumpster right behind them.

Wilma exhaled a breath and a small cloud of mist formed in front of her face from the cold air. She inhaled again, exhaled once more, and then never inhaled again.

Luke stared down at Wilma for a long moment as two more shots echoed across the field, another one of them hitting Wilma’s bike. Obviously they were trying their best to destroy their transportation. Luke didn’t even flinch from the gunshots; he just watched Wilma. Her face was smooth, and she looked so peaceful, the ghost of her smile still on her lips. The blood leaked from the wound in her stomach, puddling on the grass underneath her, the blood shiny and dark in the late afternoon light.

He unzipped her hoodie and pulled her gun out of her holster. He checked the magazine to make sure it was full and then he stuck it down into the waistband of his pants. He searched their backpacks, stuffing an extra magazine for her gun and an extra magazine for his down into his pants pockets. He found the night vision goggles in Wilma’s backpack and he draped them over his neck in place of his binoculars. He holstered his gun and moved towards the other side of the large dumpster.

He was ready to run towards the abandoned buildings now. He was going to kill those two snipers, and anyone else who was with them.

CHAPTER 39

Luke shot the snipers just as the sun settled below the horizon and the last of the daylight lingered in the air. It took him an hour to get to the two men who lay in the brush, still aiming their weapons at the abandoned buildings across from the south end of the airport field. The two men had never seen Luke get from the buildings to the woods, never heard him as he made a wide circle around them, never heard him as he crept closer toward them through the trees. The men were still shooting occasionally, taking potshots at the dirt bikes two hundred yards away. But mostly they were laughing now and sharing a pint of whisky, getting ready to pack up their rifles and leave.

Luke stepped out from behind a tree, crackling the twigs and dry leaves that carpeted the ground. The men turned, swinging their rifles around, about to fire at him, but he shot both of them in the head before either man could pull the trigger.

An hour later Luke spotted the convoy of four trucks parked in front of an auto parts store at the end of a line of businesses closer to the edge of town. The trucks were parked in a tight line, nearly bumper to bumper, like a wall of protection in front of the busted-out windows and glass doors of the auto parts store. Five men sat around a campfire built on the pavement halfway between the trucks and the shattered windows of the store.

Luke crawled up behind a large mound of dirt near an abandoned car and waited there for a moment, using Wilma’s night vision goggles to watch the men at the campfire. He spotted one more man standing guard on the other side of the line of trucks. The sentry watched the darkness, armed with an M-16 assault rifle.

Luke studied the sentry for a few minutes, watching him as he walked a few paces away from the line of trucks toward the dark field of grass and debris. The sentry looked relaxed, even bored. Luke panned his night vision goggles over to the men around the campfire. They sat in lawn chairs around the crackling fire, drinking cans of beer from two large coolers, talking and laughing. From where he hid, Luke picked up only bits and pieces of their conversation that was carried on the cold wind.

“. . . think they got them both . . .”

“. . . those two should be back by now . . .”

“. . . probably drunk and can’t find their way back.”

Luke stuffed the night vision goggles back into his jacket pocket and crawled along the grass, moving closer and closer to the line of trucks, taking his time. Fifteen minutes later Luke was within ten feet of the truck at the front of the line, the old Ford Econoline van. He watched the sentry, who stared the other way, still watching the dark field like he was waiting for rippers to materialize from the darkness. But the sentry looked like he was lost in his own thoughts now. He had his rifle beside him, the butt of it on the ground, holding it by the barrel.

Luke was behind the sentry in a second, slapping the weapon out of his hand and putting him in a chokehold before he could even cry out. Luke’s arms were like steel bands around the man’s neck. The man struggled, kicked and elbowed at Luke, one of the strikes landing, but Luke knew how to circle back out of the way while still keeping pressure on the man’s neck, pulling him back a little at the same time, bringing him down to the ground slowly until he finally passed out. Luke pulled his knife out and cut the man’s throat while he was unconscious. The only noise now was the man’s gurgling as he tried to breathe through the blood.

Luke carefully wiped the blade of his knife on the man’s clothes, refolded it, and then tucked it back into his pocket. He waited a few minutes, listening for any rippers in the darkness. He could hear the chatter from the other men around the fire. He was still only picking up bits and pieces of their conversation, but he could tell that they weren’t alarmed in any way and hadn’t heard him kill the sentry.

Slowing his breathing down a little, Luke stared out at the darkness for a moment. It was freezing, but he didn’t feel the cold—he felt nothing right now except for a controlled rage and a burning desire for revenge. This was not a new feeling for Luke; he had hurt so many people in his life that he had lost count. He had broken bones. He had maimed people. He had killed before. And tonight he was going to kill all five of the men around that fire.

Luke looked down at the man on the cold ground, his arms and legs splayed out, his body still, his weapon on the grass five feet away. Luke picked up the weapon, inspecting it for a moment. It was an M-16, probably stolen off a dead soldier, or a weapon abandoned by that soldier when he’d turned into a ripper. He checked the man for a walkie-talkie or whistle or any other kind of communication, but he didn’t find anything like that. But he found two hand grenades. He stuffed those down into his jacket pockets; he had a plan for them.

The moon shined down on the earth now as the swiftly moving clouds parted. The guard’s dead face looked so pale in the moonlight, his eyes closed, his hat knocked off in their tussle, his throat a gory mess. The DA symbol was etched into the man’s forehead, the two letters a dark and ragged contrast against his flesh. For one insane moment Luke felt like flaying that piece of skin from the man’s face like a Sioux warrior might take a scalp. Luke would keep the piece of flesh with the DA symbol on it as a souvenir for this kill tonight, leaving behind the skinned faces as a message to their leader—the Shadow Man.

Luke stood up, waiting a little longer, listening to the men at the campfire twenty yards away beyond the line of trucks. He pointed the M-16 up at the night sky and squeezed off a few shots, absorbing the recoil from the weapon.

“Hey!” Luke yelled. He was sure he couldn’t match the sentry’s voice, but a one syllable shout might sound like any other man’s shout from this distance.

Luke took the rifle with him as he ran toward the mounds of dirt and grass fifteen yards away. He crouched down behind the mounds, finding a slight valley in between two of them where he could see the line of trucks, where he could aim his pistol at them.

Two of the men came around the trucks from the rear of the convoy, and the other two came around from the front. Only four men. Luke had seen five of them so one must have stayed back at the campfire. There could even be more of them, but Luke was only going to concentrate on these four at this moment. He didn’t care about anything else; he didn’t even care if he died, just as long as he took these five men out first.

Spit. Spit.

Luke shot the two men at the rear of the convoy first, the ones the farthest away, dropping them immediately. They were both probably dead before they even hit the ground.

The other two men at the front of the convoy tried to turn back, but from this position Luke could see the front of the van.

“He’s got a silencer!” one of the men yelled. Those were his last words.

Luke was up and running, firing at the two men as he sprinted toward them. He got one of the men in the back of his head as he ran away, trying to get around the front of the van to the other side of it. Luke wounded the other man in the side of his neck.

The wounded man fell to the ground as soon as he was shot, losing his weapon in the process. But he was back on his feet in a second, holding on to the front of the van, clawing at the cold, slick metal for support.

Luke shot the man in the back of his head and the man went down again. This time he was dead.

A bullet hit the front corner of the van, ricocheting off of it, making a high-pitched whine in the night. Luke ducked down at the other side of the van, using it for cover. Two more gunshots from the direction of the campfire followed. One of the bullets hit the front quarter panel of the van on the other side, and the other one smashed out the driver’s side window.

Luke crouched low on the other side of the van.

“Carson!” the man from the campfire yelled. “You still there? Brent?”

Luke didn’t say anything. He stayed in the same spot, listening, trying to tell where the man’s voice was coming from. The man was farther away from the campfire now, and the sound of his voice echoed just slightly—like he was inside the auto parts store, hiding in there and ready to shoot.

“Anyone?” the man called out, his voice cracking with fear. “You . . . you call back to me or I’m going to keep firing.”

Luke still didn’t answer or make a sound. He waited another moment, listening, trying to tell if the man was on the move or if he was still hiding in the same spot.

“Carson!” the man called out again. “Brent! One of you two answer me!”

Luke wasn’t going to give himself away by saying anything. He was sure the man already knew his comrades were dead now. Luke wasn’t sure how he was going to get to this man without getting shot, but he would find a way.

CHAPTER 40

Luke had a plan. He didn’t want to run straight at the man because he knew the man would probably kill him before he could get to him. Luke wasn’t afraid to die, but he didn’t want to die before he killed this man—it was the only thing he could think about now, the only purpose he had left in his life.

The man in the auto parts store might be waiting for a chance to get into one of the vehicles so he could get away. Luke didn’t have any idea which one of the vehicles the man might have keys for. He could search the dead bodies for keys, but he didn’t want to waste time doing that. He decided instead to disable all of them.

“Come on out!” the man yelled. He had given up calling for his friends. “If you come out, I’ll just let you go!”

Luke was a little surprised that the man hadn’t run while he had a chance. But maybe the man was more afraid to abandon this mission and face the Shadow Man than he was of death.

Luke still needed to be careful. The man might have night vision goggles with him. But the nearby campfire could disturb his line of vision if he was using goggles. Still, Luke couldn’t take the chance that the man might be watching the undercarriages of the vehicles with a pair of night vision goggles, lying on his stomach and waiting with an automatic weapon or a rifle, waiting to shoot at his feet.

After waiting another few minutes and listening, Luke moved toward the front of the van and put two bullets into the radiator, his gun spitting twice in the night. He ducked back to the side of the van again and pulled his knife out, stabbing it into the tire, flattening it.

His gunshots into the radiator triggered a few shots from the man who was probably hoping to get a lucky shot. But the man only shot twice. Maybe the man was being careful with his bullets now; maybe he only had so much ammo left.

Luke moved quickly down the line of vehicles to the pickup truck at the other end. He flattened the two tires on this side of the truck and then put two more bullets into the grill, puncturing the radiator. He moved to the end of the pickup, keeping down below the bed of the truck. He moved around to the rear of the truck and holstered his pistol. He aimed the dead sentry’s M-16 towards the auto parts store and pulled the trigger, firing a few rounds at the store.

The man fired back from beyond the campfire, a barrage of bullets pelting the pickup truck as Luke darted back around to the side of it again, using it for cover. He worked his way back to the front of the truck, and then he hurried to the box truck parked right in front of the pickup truck.

So the man had both a rifle and an automatic weapon. He also probably had a handgun on him, and maybe even a few hand grenades. Even with all of his weapons, Luke had a feeling the man wasn’t a trained soldier.

After the gunfire was over, Luke crept towards the front of the box truck. He busted out the passenger window of the truck with the butt of his rifle. He moved down alongside the garbage truck and busted out that passenger window. He pulled the pins from both of the grenades and tossed them into the cabs of both of the trucks, and then he hauled ass towards the mounds of dirt and grass fifteen yards away. He dove behind the mounds just as the grenades exploded inside the trucks, lighting up the night with a fireball.

This was his chance.

Luke was up and on his feet, the M-16 still in his hands. He ran as fast as he could in a diagonal line toward the line of businesses, firing the automatic rifle at the campfire and the auto parts store as he ran, emptying the weapon of bullets as he made it to the last business at the other end of the plaza.

The man returned fire. Luke heard the gunshots, and he even felt a few bullets whiz by his head—way too close. Luke slammed his body against the brick wall of the building, breathing hard but trying to be quiet, his breaths were little clouds of mist in front of his face.

After a moment his breathing and heart-rate slowed down to normal. He didn’t hear any more gunshots, and he figured the man was trying to conserve his ammo again. Maybe there was more ammo in one of the trucks, but the man might be too afraid to take a chance right now to get it.

Maybe the man wasn’t sure if Wilma was alive. The only way he would know if Wilma was dead was if the snipers had radioed him somehow with a walkie-talkie. Maybe they had notified him, but Luke’s best guess was that these guys had been waiting for the snipers to get back to camp with news that they had killed both of the targets. Luke assumed that this little group had used their two best shooters as the snipers, so that gave him a better chance in a shootout with this man.

The M-16 was out of bullets. He laid it down on the ground and made his way to the back of the building. He used his night vision goggles as he peeked around the corner, looking everywhere, watching for the man and for any rippers nearby.

He darted down along the rear of the buildings, keeping close to the wall and in the deeper shadows of the building. It took ten minutes of slow moving to get to the back of the auto parts store. He pried a lock on the back door and opened it, slipping inside. He waited by the door, crouched down, using his night vision goggles to search the back room he was in—some kind of office.

A moment later he was out of the office and down a hall that led to the aisles of auto parts and supplies. He moved down one of the aisles, listening and still using the goggles to see in the dark. He approached the counter, and beyond the counter there was the lobby area and the busted-out windows and doors. The campfire burned a few feet beyond the front of the store, the lawn chairs tipped over now, along with the coolers and the cans of beer.

It took another fifteen minutes of waiting in the dark before Luke heard the man moving, shifting his weight slightly. The man was somewhere in front of the counter, probably on his stomach, his weapon aimed at the front of the store. Or the man could be in a corner where he could see Luke if he jumped over the counter, covering both vantage points from the same position.

Luke waited a little longer. He listened as the man moved around again. Maybe the man was getting antsy. An hour had gone by now, maybe the man was willing to take a chance at running to either the van or the pickup truck. They had flat tires and punctured radiators, but the man could probably make it a few miles down the road before the engine seized up.

Or maybe the man was about to go on the hunt for Luke, tired of waiting.

Finally, the man stood up slowly. He was dressed in a mishmash of army fatigues with some kind of camouflage paint smeared all over his face, obscuring the DA symbol on his forehead. He had his M-16 in his hands and a pair of night vision goggles strapped over his eyes. Now that the campfire had burned down low, the man would be able to see better with the goggles. He probably wasn’t counting on Luke having a pair of his own goggles.

The man turned his head just a little and spotted Luke. For just a millisecond the two of them stared at each other through their goggles . . . then they both fired.

Luke fired three shots and hit the man with all three of them: one in the abdomen, one in the thigh, and one that blew his knee apart.

The man collapsed to the floor, dropping his weapon. He screamed and turned over, trying to crawl toward his M-16 a few feet away.

Luke hopped the counter easily and was on the man in the seconds, kicking the man’s weapon away that he tried to grab. The man went for a handgun on his hip, but Luke grabbed the man’s hand and smashed his arm down to the floor, the man squeezing off four shots before Luke brought his knee down onto the man’s abdomen, right down on his gunshot wound.

The man howled in pain, his body going limp as he nearly passed out.

“Not yet,” Luke growled at him, wrenching the man’s wrist around until he dropped his gun. Luke kicked the pistol away and searched the man for other weapons. He didn’t find any.

Luke holstered his own gun and grabbed the man by his long hair, dragging him across the glass-littered floor, taking him outside next to the dying campfire. The fire was low but still bright enough for Luke to see the man clearly. He yanked the man’s night vision goggles off of his head and tossed them away. The man lay on his back now, staring up at the night sky, breathing hard and fast, barely clinging to consciousness.

“Stay with me,” Luke said. “If you pass out, you’ll wake up to something much worse. I guarantee that.”

The man lifted his head up a little and looked at Luke, smiling at him.

Luke punched him in the face, rocking his head back down to the pavement.

The man smiled again, only this time he had blood smeared all over his lips and teeth.

“Who are you guys?” Luke asked him.

The man continued smiling.

Luke stood above the man and pressed his foot down on the man’s ruined knee, applying just a slight pressure.

The man howled, his body trembling.

Luke glanced around, making sure that a horde of rippers wasn’t running up to them through the darkness. Everything looked clear as far as he could see.

“We got your lady, didn’t we?” the man said, still smiling.

Luke pressed his foot down on the man’s ruined knee a little harder, but he let up after a moment, afraid the man might pass out from the pain. “Who are you guys? What does that DA on your foreheads stand for? Where did you guys come from?”

The man continued smiling. “He’s coming for you. He wants all of you very badly.”

Luke felt a chill run across his skin. He thought of the nightmare he’d had last night, he thought of the Shadow Man’s words: I’m coming for you. And then he thought of Wilma’s last words. She’d told him to be careful of the dreams; she’d told him that the Shadow Man saw them in their dreams.

“You already . . . already know, don’t you?” the man said, fighting for breath yet managing to keep his smile on his bloody lips. “He told us to come here. He told us . . . told us that you would be here.”

“Who is he?”

“Our master. The Dragon Lord. He’ll be your master, too. He’ll be everyone’s master in this new world. You won’t have a choice.”

“What does DA mean?”

“Dark Angels. We’re his army . . . the Dragon’s army of dark angels.”

Luke stared at the man. “Why us? Why does he want me and Wilma?”

The man managed to laugh just a little in spite of the pain, spraying out a spittle of blood. “Not her. He wants you. You and the others.”

“Others?”

The man’s smile widened even more, his eyes insane. The last of the firelight flickered in his dark eyes. “You know who I’m talking about.”

And Luke did—the man was talking about the people he had seen in his dreams. “Where is this Dragon Lord of yours?”

“He’s everywhere.”

Luke pressed his foot down on the man’s knee again.

The man screamed and thrashed, shaking his head back and forth. “I don’t know,” he moaned. “He’s just . . . he’s just everywhere.”

“Where are his headquarters?” Luke kept steady pressure on the man’s ruined knee.

“I don’t know,” the man moaned.

“He’s assembling an army?” Luke asked, lifting his foot up off of the man’s knee for a moment. “An army of dark angels?”

“Join or die,” the man grunted. “That’s the choice you get. And there are many terrible ways to die.”

Luke nodded in agreement—there were certainly many terrible ways to die. But he was going to make this man’s death easy. He drew his pistol from the holster under his hoodie and aimed it down at the man’s face. He pulled the trigger, shooting the man right through the DA carved into his forehead and hidden underneath the greasepaint on his face. The man smiled right up to the end.

CHAPTER 41

It was almost noon when Luke walked towards the Ohio River with Wilma’s body cradled in his arms.

He had gone back to her after he had killed the last of the Dark Angels. He had cleaned her up as best he could, and then he had wrapped her body in a roll of plastic he’d found in the auto parts store, securing it with duct tape. He repacked his backpack with his weapons, Wilma’s handgun, both of the night vision goggles (Wilma’s and the Dark Angel’s pair), a few bottles of water, his extra change of clothes.

Both dirt bikes were inoperable after being shot numerous times by the snipers, and all four of the Dark Angels’ vehicles weren’t going to run very far, or at all.

He had no choice but to walk. And he didn’t care. He would walk with Wilma in his arms. He would bring her home to her brother—it’s the only place she wanted to be.

The walking was tough, the pain growing unbearable, the fatigue setting in after a few miles. But he pushed the pain away, and he didn’t rest, he stumbled on until he saw the river, until he came to the place where Wilma said the boat would be waiting for them.

Two men ran out of the brush, both of them dressed from head to toe in camouflage, both aiming assault rifles at him.

Luke didn’t care if they shot him. He knew they were Wilma’s people. They could take her home from here. He pulled the plastic away from Wilma’s face, revealing her to them.

“Put her down!” one of the men yelled. Neither one wore a gas mask. Luke guessed everyone was way beyond that now. If you hadn’t turned by now, then it meant you were immune to whatever plague hung in the air all over the world.

“It’s Wilma,” the other man said.

Luke stood with Wilma in his arms, refusing to put her body on the ground. “They killed her,” he told the two men. “I’m bringing her home to her brother, to Matt. She just . . . she just wanted to go home. Help me. Help me get her in your boat.”

Both men hesitated for just a moment, unsure of what to do.

“I don’t want to set her on the ground,” Luke said. “I don’t want to do that to her.” He could feel tears slipping from his eyes: tears of sadness, of fatigue, of misery, of rage.

“You alone?” the closest man asked.

“Yes,” Luke said. “I’m alone.” And he was alone—truly alone now.

The other man kept his weapon aimed at Luke while the closer one took Wilma into his arms and carried her into the brush where the boat was stashed.

“Drop your weapons and your backpack,” the remaining man said with his assault rifle still aimed at him.

Luke did as he was ordered. The man might shoot him now, but he didn’t care. Wilma would be back home now; she wouldn’t be out there where the rippers and the animals could pick her body apart.

“Put these on,” the man said, tossing a pair of handcuffs on the ground at Luke’s feet. “Behind your back.”

Again, Luke followed orders, clicking the cuffs in place with his hands behind his back, his sore shoulders aching from the movement. The man closed in quickly behind Luke, checking to make sure the handcuffs were secure. He stepped in front of Luke and lowered his weapon.

“Who did that to Wilma?” the man asked.

Luke was so exhausted, so close to passing out. He felt like he’d fought ten championship fights in a row. “A gang,” he said, his voice just a croak now. “They call themselves the Dark Angels. They’re all over Ohio.”

The man didn’t seem to recognize the name, but Luke was sure the man and the others back at their camp would come to know them very soon.

The other man walked toward them. “Let’s get him in the boat.”

The first man picked up Luke’s backpack, and they walked him into the brush, to the boat by the edge of the river. Luke passed out as soon as they set him down in the boat.

The two men woke Luke up on the other side of the river and made him walk a mile through the woods while one of the men carried Wilma’s body. The thick plastic she was wrapped in crinkled as they walked. The sound was driving Luke crazy; he’d heard that sound for hours and hours as he’d walked with her cradled in his arms. He wanted to ask the man to stop, but he knew the noise was unavoidable.

Soon Luke was strapped into the passenger seat of one of two Polaris vehicles. The other man drove the second four-wheeler with Wilma’s body on the back of it. Again, Luke barely clung to consciousness, and he hung forward against the seatbelt as they drove over the rutted trail through the dense woods.

After a period of time had passed that Luke couldn’t guess at, they arrived and parked in front of a metal gate in the middle of a wall constructed of metal panels, all of them welded and bolted together, all of them painted dark green. Two men stood above the twelve-foot-high fence on each side of the gate, both men armed with machine guns. The large gate slid open, the metal wheels squealing just a bit.

Luke passed out again as they entered the compound. He woke up again, and it felt like he’d only been out a few seconds, but he knew that some time must have passed because they were parked in front of a long, rectangular building with a metal roof that had been painted the same dark green as the compound’s walls.

He was almost out again when he felt hands on him, unbuckling his seatbelt, pulling him out of the vehicle, pushing him from room to room as he stumbled along, still handcuffed. A few men asked him questions, some of them barking orders at him. Others told the men to back off, that they weren’t going to get any kind of information in the state he was in.

Luke woke up for a few moments and realized that he was in some kind of block room with no windows. There was only one door; it was made of metal with a rectangular slot in the middle of it. This was some kind of jail cell. The metal ceiling above him had a metal grate right in the middle of it and a Plexiglas skylight above that allowed sunlight to shine down into his small room. Besides the cot he lay on, there was only one wooden chair and a plastic bucket in a corner. His handcuffs had been removed at some point, and he turned over on his side, pulling the blankets over his body.

A woman shined a penlight into his eyes the next time he came back to consciousness. She was talking, but she wasn’t talking to him. There were three other men in the room, and one of them was Matt.

“He’s dehydrated and physically exhausted,” the woman said. Luke figured she was some kind of nurse.

“Leave a few bottles of water and some MREs in here with him,” the older man standing next to Matt said. He was a little taller than Matt, standing ramrod straight with a full head of gray hair that was buzzed short. He wore military fatigues and a gun on his hip. “We’ll try to question him later.”

Luke passed out again.

When he woke up, the jail cell was dark, the skylight dark with the night sky. He realized someone was in the room with him. He stared at the corner near the metal door and saw Wilma standing there, staring at him.

He sat up, about to get up, about to reach out for her. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “They . . . they saved you.”

There was a glow around Wilma, illuminating her slightly. She smiled at him, but she didn’t approach him.

“She’s in a better place now,” a woman’s voice said.

Luke turned toward the sound of the voice and saw the blind woman standing there, another glow of light illuminating her. She was beautiful in the soft light that wrapped her in a warm aura. The cell seemed so much bigger now, the doors and walls gone. He felt like he and his cot were floating in an unending darkness now.

He looked back to where Wilma had been standing, but she was gone.

“You need to come find us,” the blind woman said.

Luke looked at the woman again. “They killed her. The Dark Angels killed Wilma. They serve him, the one they call the Dragon.”

The woman nodded. “They won’t stop. He won’t stop. We’re stronger together. We need to be together.”

Luke felt an overwhelming feeling of rage building inside of him. He wanted to explode at the unfairness of it all. He’d finally found a woman he loved, and now she’d been taken away from him. “They weren’t even after her,” he muttered. “They were after me, and now she’s dead.”

“Come south,” the woman said. “We’re not far away from you now. Come south and find us.”

“Where are you? I don’t know how to find you. Why won’t you tell me where to find you?”

The blond woman didn’t answer him.

And Luke knew why she wasn’t answering him—she didn’t want the Dragon to hear her. If she told Luke where they were, the Dagon would know. He would send his Dark Angels to find them.

“Just come south and you will find us,” the woman said. The light around her was beginning to fade quickly.

“No. Don’t go. Can you . . . can you bring Wilma back for just a few minutes?”

The light faded away completely and Luke was left in the darkness.

CHAPTER 42

The next afternoon Luke woke up on his cot. He looked across the room and saw his change of clothes from his backpack folded up neatly on the seat of the chair.

He sat up and rubbed his head. He had a headache and the spot where the rock had hit him in the back of his head was still a little tender. Every muscle in his body ached, and he had to move slowly at first. His mouth was dry, his breath bad. He grabbed the plastic bottle of water next to his cot and drank half of it down. After his thirst was quenched, he realized that he needed to pee badly.

After relieving himself in the plastic bucket in the far corner of the room, Luke shuffled back to his cot and sat down. He saw the MREs on the floor next to his bottles of water. He opened one up and added a little water, using the pre-packaged plastic utensils to stir up the food. The MRE was some kind of noodle and tomato sauce dish, but he didn’t care. It was cold and a little too salty, but right now it tasted great. They had also left him a few packs of cheese crackers and a few pieces of hard candy. He ate all of it.

He changed his clothes and refolded his dirty ones, leaving them on the seat of the chair. He slipped his hiking boots back on and tied the laces. He felt a little better now that he’d eaten and was up and moving around. But he also felt alone and hollow. The cell was a little chilly, but not too bad. There had to be some source of heat coming from somewhere, and he spotted a small vent up near the corner of the ceiling.

Forty-five minutes later the locks on the metal door disengaged. A man armed with a rifle swung the door open. He waited just inside the cell as the older man Luke had seen yesterday and Matt entered the cell. They both had handguns holstered on their hips.

“You going to give us any trouble?” the older man asked. “Do we need to handcuff you?”

Luke shook his head. “No, sir.”

“You remember me?” Matt asked.

Luke nodded. “You’re Wilma’s brother.”

“Stepbrother, actually. But she was like a sister to me.”

Luke swore he saw guilt in Matt’s eyes. Matt had rejected Wilma when she’d needed his help the most, when she had begged for it. Wilma understood it was a protocol she had agreed to follow, and that the camp couldn’t be endangered if they thought the disease could spread to them. Yet Luke couldn’t help thinking that Wilma would still be alive if Matt had trusted her, if he had helped her and taken her with him.

“We need to ask you some questions,” the older man said. “You think you’re up for that?”

Luke nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Luke.”

“You get enough rest, Luke?”

Luke nodded. He still felt tired and sore.

“You get enough to eat and drink?”

He nodded again.

“I see you found your extra set of clothes and the latrine bucket. Sorry we couldn’t make the accommodations more comfortable, but we need to be sure we can trust you first.”

Luke nodded again. “You can trust me.” He met Matt’s eyes. “Wilma trusted me.”

Matt bristled a little, but he didn’t say anything.

“We’d like to take you to another building where we can talk. A meeting hall, rather than here in the cell. Are you ready to go?”

Luke stood up. He followed the older man and Matt down the hall, and the armed soldier followed all three of them. They walked down a hallway, then turned left into a wider hall that led to a set of double doors. They all stepped outside and Luke winced a little at the sunlight.

As he followed the two men toward a large building, Luke glanced around at the compound. Most of the buildings were constructed from wood and metal, most with metal roofs. The buildings were painted either dark green or beige. There was minimal to no landscaping and the paths around the buildings were hard-packed dirt or gravel.

Now that Luke had a view of the compound from the inside, he saw scaffoldings set up and attached to the metal perimeter walls so guards could stand at the top of the fence line and keep watch.

Luke guessed some of the buildings off in the distance were some kind of living quarters. There was what looked like a greenhouse near a large building with smoke drifting up from behind it; Luke guessed that was the kitchen or cafeteria. There were a few gardens and pens for animals beyond that building. A line of Polaris vehicles were parked near the metal wall that surrounded the camp, and there were other larger trucks parked off by themselves.

Three men practiced with bows and arrows, shooting at targets as Luke walked by. He figured they were learning with weapons they could make themselves—ammo that could always be found and made from nature.

Everything served a purpose inside the compound, no space seemed to be wasted.

Luke followed the older man and Matt through a door of another long building with metal and wood walls, a few tinted windows set into the walls. They entered what looked like a lobby, then he followed the two men into a large room that looked like a theater, rows of cheap metal folding chairs stretching out to a stage at the far end of the room. They walked to the front row of seats and the older man gestured at the seats for Luke to sit down.

A woman joined them. She had a battery-powered tape recorder and a notepad and pen. The armed guard waited by the stage.

“This is Marjorie,” the older man said, introducing the woman with the tape recorder. “She’ll be taking notes and recording this. My name’s Chandler, and that man over there by the stage is Harold. And of course you’ve already met Matt.”

Luke nodded.

“You’re not a criminal here,” Chandler said. He remained standing even though Matt and Marjorie had each taken a seat, pulling the metal chairs out a little so they could face Luke. “We just want to understand what happened out there.”

Luke told his story, telling them how he had met Wilma. He left out the details of his personal life and his criminal past—he didn’t feel that would help him in any way right now. He told them how he had saved Wilma’s life—twice. He told them that they had grown close to each other and left it at that.

Then he told them about their run-in with a group he now knew to be the Dark Angels. But he said nothing of his dreams or Wilma’s dreams. He said nothing of his urge to go south now, to look for the blind woman and her companions.

“The Dark Angels are a large group, from what I’ve seen,” Luke said. “We saw evidence of their group from Cleveland all the way down to the Ohio River. They seem to follow a leader they call the Dragon Lord.”

“And how do you know all of this?”

“I killed the group of men that killed Wilma. I killed them all, but I wounded the last one so I could question him.”

“How did you question him?”

“I got my answers,” Luke said, locking eyes with Chandler. “I got my answers, and then I killed him for what they did to Wilma.”

Chandler and Matt glanced at each other.

“You’ve heard of the Dark Angels before, haven’t you?” Luke said.

“I haven’t seen them myself,” Chandler said. “But a few people have gotten here in the last few days and they told us about them. They’d seen their symbols that you were talking about painted on houses and cars. They also saw the symbol carved into a man’s forehead, as you also described.”

So they knew he was telling the truth. “I don’t know how they got so big and organized so quickly,” Luke said, “but the man I questioned said they were moving south.” It was a bit of a lie, but Luke knew he had to be careful about what he said, careful not to say anything about the dreams he’d been having—they would think he was crazy.

“Were you ever in the military, Luke?” Chandler asked.

“No.” But he guessed Chandler had served.

“The gun we found on you . . . it has a silencer on it.”

“A man tried to rob me with it in Cleveland. The cops rushed us at the same time. I took the opportunity to blindside the man and take his weapon. I ran and I think the cops got the man.”

Chandler and Matt remained expressionless, and for some reason Luke didn’t think they believed his story. And he really didn’t care what they believed.

“Why were you traveling with Wilma?” Matt asked.

Luke stared at Matt. “Like I said, I saved her life. She’d hurt her ankle, and I wanted to help her. She said she knew a safe place where we could go. That’s when we showed up at the safe house.” He left it at that, not sure how much Chandler knew about Matt’s decision to ditch his stepsister.

“She agreed to bring you down here to this camp with her?” Chandler asked.

“Yes. She wanted me to stay with her.”

“And you wanted to stay with her?”

Luke hesitated for just a moment. “Yes, I did.” Another small lie that didn’t need to be explained. Luke couldn’t say for sure what he would be doing right now if Wilma was still alive. But he knew what he wanted to do now, he wanted to leave this place and head south.

“We examined Wilma’s body,” Chandler said. “The wounds match your story. Looks like she was shot with a high-powered rifle from a distance of at least a hundred yards.”

Luke didn’t say anything.

“Did she . . .” Matt began.

“No,” Luke answered. “She didn’t suffer. She was gone almost immediately.”

Matt breathed out a sigh of relief.

“We’ve already talked earlier and decided that you’re innocent of any crimes,” Chandler said. “But we still need to decide if we’re going to let you stay here with us.”

“Let me make it easy for you. I don’t want to stay here.”

Chandler almost looked offended, maybe not expecting Luke to reject their offer. “What are your plans, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No plans, really,” Luke said, shrugging a little. “I’m going to head south to warmer weather.”

“It’s almost winter,” Chandler said. “You’re in for some tough traveling through the mountains.”

“I’m aware.”

“You could stay here for the winter. See how you like it. Then you could leave after that.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I’d still like to leave.”

“Will you stay for Wilma’s funeral service?” Matt asked. “It’s tomorrow morning.”

Luke nodded. “Yes. I’ll stay for that.”

CHAPTER 43

Luke stood at the side of Wilma’s grave the next morning, watching the men lower the pine box down into the ground with ropes. A grave marker was already in place. They had asked if Luke wanted to say anything at the service, but he had turned them down.

A few hours later Luke met Chandler, Matt, and another man named Jerome at the gate. They had returned his backpack, his weapons (including his gun with the silencer attached to it), his change of clothes (which they had washed for him), and the night vision goggles he had taken off the last Dark Angel he had interrogated and then killed. Anything that had been Wilma’s they had kept. Along with his possessions, they had given him a few things to take with him: five MREs, three bottles of water, a pack of water purification tablets, a small first-aid kit, a pack of waterproof matches, a compass, a detailed map of West Virginia, and a few other odds and ends to help with his journey and his survival.

“I hope you understand that we can’t give you a vehicle,” Chandler told him. “You’ll find plenty of abandoned vehicles along the way, I’m sure.”

Luke nodded at him. His body was still sore from carrying Wilma’s body to the Ohio River, but the two days of food and rest had helped a lot. He’d taken three aspirins this morning and then stood under a long, hot shower. He was antsy now, ready to get going. He honestly didn’t know what he would have done if Wilma was still alive—maybe he could have talked her into going with him—but he knew he couldn’t stay here now.

“You guys just be ready for when the Dark Angels move south,” Luke told the three men. “I don’t know if they’ll find this place or not . . .”

“We’re hidden pretty well,” Chandler said with a smug smile.

Luke didn’t say anything, but he hoped he hadn’t somehow given anything away in his dreams.

“We wish you all the best,” Chandler said.

Luke looked at Matt. The man’s eyes were rimmed in red from crying at Wilma’s service. When he spoke, he choked up a little: “I wanted to thank you . . . thank you for trying to help Wilma.”

Luke did his best to hold back his own tears. He felt like he had failed Wilma as much as Matt had. They should have protected her, and he couldn’t live with that. Definitely not here, not in this camp, where everything would be a reminder of Wilma.

The men opened the gate as the two guards watched from their scaffolding—their homemade turrets. Luke walked out through the opening and then they closed the gate again quickly. He heard them putting the barricades back in place inside the gate, metal thumping against metal.

Luke stood in front of the gate for just a moment. It was cold, but it felt good to be outside the compound. As sad as he felt about Wilma, he also felt some sense of hope. He would go south now; he would find the blind woman who called to him in his dreams. And he would find the others who were with her.

A THANK YOU:

Thank you so much for reading my book! I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you’ll check out the other books in this series. Being an author is a dream come true for me, and it only happens because of readers like you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I love to hear from readers!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Lukens has been writing since the second grade when his teacher called his parents in for a conference because the ghost story he’d written concerned her a little.

Since then he’s had several stories published and four screenplays optioned by producers in Hollywood. He’s the author of many bestselling books including: The Ancient Enemy series, Devil’s Island, Sightings, Followed, The Exorcist’s Apprentice, and many others. He’s proud to be a member of the Horror Writers Association.

He grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. But after many travels and adventures, he settled down near Tampa, Florida with his wonderful wife and son . . . and a stray cat they adopted.

He loves to hear from readers! You can find him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Mark-Lukens-Books-670337796318510/

You can follow him on Twitter here: https://www.twitter.com/marklukensbooks

You can follow his blog here: https://www.marklukensbooks.wordpress.com

He can be reached via email at mark@marklukensbooks.com and at marklukensbooks@yahoo.com

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