Date: 2019-11-25 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post-Apocalyptic | Infected
Description: Ray, Mike, Emma, Luke, and Josh think they've found their refuge at the West Virginia cabin, but it all falls apart when Luke finds tracks in the snow at the edge of the woods. Someone has been watching them. A ripper? A Dark Angel? Someone else? Soon they find their stalker, a young woman, but is she who she says she is? Can they believe her story? To the south, in North Carolina, Lisey brings a horde of rippers to Kate's parents' home where Kate, Brooke, Petra, and Max are holed up. They don't have time to pack their truck as they try to get away from the mob of rippers. But even if they get

SURVIVORS

DARK DAYS: BOOK SIX

A post-apocalyptic series by

MARK LUKENS

Survivors: Dark Days Book 6—Copyright © 2018 by 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, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by: Extended Imagery

Special thanks to: Jet, Ann, Joe, Kelli, Valerie, and Mary Ann—your help is immensely valuable to me, and I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate it.

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

DESCENDANTS OF MAGIC – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWYYYC

SIGHTINGS – www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAI31KW

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

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

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

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

THE DARWIN EFFECT – www.amazon.com/dp/B01G4A8ZYC

GHOST TOWN – www.amazon.com/dpB00LEZRF7G

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

FOLLOWED – www.amazon.com/dp/B078WYGMJN

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

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

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

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

COLLAPSE: DARK DAYS BOOK 1 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07SCPL6QB

CHAOS: DARK DAYS BOOK 2 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07TVYNW19

EXPOSURE: DARK DAYS BOOK 3 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07TY5S1S8

REFUGE: DARK DAYS BOOK 4 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07VR8KNJ6

SLEEP DISORDERS – www.amazon.com/dp/B07XX9WVGM

Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY MARK LUKENS:

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART 2

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART 3

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

PART 4

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

PART 5

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

PART 6

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Luke

West Virginia

Luke waited beside a tree ten feet inside the woods at the edge of the clearing. He studied a set of footprints on the ground. It had snowed again last night, just a light dusting, making the prints easier to see. If the weather pattern was going to stay like it had then it would warm up for a few days, melting any snow, and then it would get cold again.

He looked back at the clearing, at the large cabin in the distance where they’d been staying for the last few days. He thought back to his journey to the cabin, beginning with the panic in Cleveland and running from Jacob, the assassin Vincent had sent to kill him. And then he met Wilma. He and Wilma had worked their way down to the Ohio River, but the Dark Angels shot her before she could cross the river to the compound where her stepbrother and her people had been waiting for her. Luke had killed all six of the Dark Angels, torturing the last one and making him tell him everything he knew. Maybe it should have made him feel a little better that he’d killed them, that he’d enacted some slight revenge on those men for what they’d done to Wilma, but it hadn’t. He was sure he wouldn’t feel truly satisfied until their leader, the Dragon, was dead, and preferably dead by Luke’s own hands.

But he didn’t want to think about Wilma or his few days in the compound, or his journey south into the mountains of West Virginia. He didn’t want to think about the two men from the compound the Dark Angels had tried to use as bait in the middle of the street of Heaven, West Virginia. And he didn’t want to see himself again shooting both of those men, one of them Wilma’s stepbrother, to put them out of their misery. No, it was better not to think of those things, of the arduous journey to this cabin, to this refuge. It was better to focus on the here and now, on the moment. He’d always prided himself on being able to focus on the task at hand, and right now he needed to focus on these tracks in the woods.

He looked back down at the set of tracks in the dusting of snow. The snow wasn’t everywhere in the woods like it was in the clearing, just spots here and there. But the ground was still soft enough to be moist in some places, and Luke was sure he could follow those tracks for a while through the dirt and snow.

He wasn’t an expert tracker by any means, but from what he could tell there was only one set of tracks on the ground. The footprints were small, maybe a woman’s prints, or even a teenager. Judging from the one really clear print, it looked like the person was wearing some kind of sneakers. The tracks stopped at this tree, then they returned from where they had come. Whoever this person was, they had stopped near this tree.

To watch their cabin for a while?

Luke looked back at the cabin again, seeing what the person would have seen. The van he and Josh had taken, the one they had driven here to the cabin a week ago, was parked inside the freestanding garage, right next to the newer Jeep Cherokee. The windows of the garage were dark and the vehicles couldn’t be seen from here in the woods. No smoke drifted from the chimney of the cabin. There was no sign that the cabin was occupied. The light dusting of snow covering the field of grass in front of the cabin was pristine from here, no footprints anywhere in the snow. Whoever had made these tracks had only come to the edge of the woods, no further than that.

Luke hadn’t left any tracks in the field because he had used the longest tunnel from the underground bunker that led into the woods. From there, he had walked through the woods with his H&K pistol and suppressor shoved down into his shoulder holster and a rifle with a scope in his hands. He wore mostly black clothing and a dark backpack with just a few items inside: some extra ammo, a first-aid kit, a notebook with a hand drawn map he was slowly creating of the surrounding woods, a pack of food, and a canteen of water. It was a pretty light load, so light he barely felt like he had a backpack on. He also had a hunting knife in a sheath on his hip and a small compass inside his jacket pocket.

It was only a few hours after sunrise, and this was Luke’s usual route through the woods in the morning; he liked to walk around the perimeter of the clearing, staying well inside the trees, looking for any signs of rippers or Dark Angels, or anything else, looking for tracks like he was seeing right now.

He waited by the tree for a few more minutes. There was no sense hurrying right now. Only one person’s tracks in the snow, a small person, and Luke doubted that person had been a ripper. Rippers went where they wanted, and the tracks would have been more erratic, the path not so stealthy. A ripper wouldn’t have waited here by this tree watching the cabin.

A scout would, though.

Luke’s thoughts turned to the Dark Angels. Could one of the Dark Angels have followed them here to the cabin somehow, maybe following the tracks of their van on the dirt road? Or did they just know where they were, their leader coming to visit them in their dreams and revealing their location. He thought of Wilma’s dying words, how she had told him to be careful what he dreamed, that the Dragon was watching, waiting to find information.

The tracks could be from a Dark Angel scout; that was certainly possible. But again, the tracks were small. Luke couldn’t help thinking they were a woman’s tracks. So far he hadn’t seen a woman among the Dark Angels. He was sure there were women in their group, but he just hadn’t seen any so far.

There were some other possibilities. It could be a different gang or a group of survivalists, and they had sent a scout ahead of them, someone to report back their findings. Or it could be a lone survivor, a straggler, much like Luke had been when he’d left the compound near the Ohio River over a week ago.

He sighed softly, the exhale of his breath misting up in front of his face. He looked around at the woods, still searching the trees for any movement, still listening for any sounds. A few birds chirped, but not many. Maybe many of the birds had already flown south for the winter, or maybe they had flown south early because of the rippers. The woods were very quiet; there wasn’t even much of a breeze disturbing the leaves and branches.

It would probably be best to retrace his steps and get back to the hatch, get back down into the tunnel and to the bunker underneath the cabin. But he didn’t want to take the chance that the scout or survivor was watching him from somewhere.

A twig snapped somewhere deeper in the woods.

Luke raised his 30.06, peering through the scope, fanning the weapon slowly toward the direction the sound had come from, studying the brush. He had the pair of binoculars tucked down inside the front of his shirt, hanging from his neck by the strap, but he used the scope for now, wanting to be ready with his weapon if he needed to be.

He didn’t see any movement in the woods, but he kept his rifle trained on the brush for a few more minutes, studying the landscape through the scope. He lowered himself down to one knee to steady the rifle, part of his body blocked by the trunk of the tree.

Maybe it was an animal.

He wondered if he should follow the person’s tracks in the snow. Maybe they led to a camp, or maybe they led to a small army of Dark Angels waiting to attack. Or even a horde of rippers. He wasn’t even sure he could follow the tracks. Footprints in the snow were one thing, easy enough to follow, but the deeper into the woods he got, the thicker the brush would get and he might lose the trail. And if he got too far into the woods, he might not even find his way back unless he marked his trail well enough. And there was always the chance that he’d get too far into the woods while this group circled back and attacked the cabin from a different direction.

No, he couldn’t leave the others vulnerable like that.

He decided that he wouldn’t venture too deep into the woods, only another few hundred yards, marking his trail with his knife on the trunks of the trees. He’d see how far the tracks went, at least until he lost sight of them. He’d look for any other clues: cigarette butts, trash, etc. Or tracks of other people. He’d wait a while in the woods, wait for a few hours at least, to see if anyone else came snooping around, and then he’d go back and let Ray know that someone had been scoping their cabin out.

CHAPTER 2

Ray

Over the last few days they had been at Doug’s cabin Ray had taken a detailed inventory of the food and supplies they had down in the “bunker,” as they had begun calling it. The inventory didn’t need to be done, but Ray felt compelled to do it. He used a spiral notebook and an ink pen he found among the paper supplies on one of the shelves. He made lists of the firearms, ammo, medical supplies, entertainment, clothing, tools, radio equipment, camping and survival gear, blankets, and food. There were cases of water and powdered drink mixes, and he counted those, but water wasn’t going to be much of a problem for the foreseeable future because they had a well that ran off a solar-powered pump. And even if the well stopped pumping, there was a large storage tank of water inside the bunker and a rain barrel to collect rain at the back corner of the cabin. And as a final backup, Luke found a stream about half a mile into the woods on his daily patrols. Ray wasn’t sure if the stream’s water was safe to drink, but they had the water purification tablets and the LifeStraw filter tubes if they really needed them.

For the millionth time Ray marveled at how prepared Doug had been for all of this, and for the millionth time he felt a little guilty that Doug wasn’t here taking advantage of all his hard work. It amazed him that Doug had been so complete in his preparations, seemingly leaving nothing out. But Doug had been a dedicated doomsday prepper, maybe even obsessive about it. Of course he would have educated himself on every facet of prepping; he would have read books (some of which were no doubt among the books in the bunker), he would have watched videos, maybe even taken some kind of survivalist courses—if there was such a thing as that. Ray imagined that Doug would have done a lot of the training himself, teaching himself how to shoot, how to hunt and fish, how to tan hides and preserve meat, how to start a fire in the woods if he didn’t have his firestarter, or if the firestarter broke. Ray was going to have to become just as skilled as Doug was; he was going to have to immerse himself into the ways of survival, learn these new skills as quickly as he could. And he’d already begun reading one of the books on the shelves, an outdoor survivalist’s guide. He read at night, underlining and highlighting passages as if it were a college textbook. But it was one thing to read about things and another to actually do them.

It was strange how Doug hadn’t been so secretive about this bunker. He’d told Ray about it a few times, and had mentioned to some of the others in the office that he was going to buy a bugout property in West Virginia. He made no bones about admonishing everyone else in the office for not being as concerned as he was about the “shit hitting the fan.”

“Can’t you see the signs?” Doug had asked so many times. Ray had actually listened to Doug more than the others in the office; most of the others made fun of Doug behind his back. They didn’t think Doug was crazy—they knew bad things could happen. Bad things had happened throughout history many times. They knew about the Black Plague in Europe during the 1300s. They knew about the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918. They knew wars and plagues had been part of humanity since the first cavemen battled each other with sticks and stones. And they knew that humans had developed the technology to literally wipe us out as a species. But they also worked for the government, and most of them put their trust in their employer. Most of them believed that we lived in civilized times and that we, as humans, were far beyond the troglodytes of the past.

“The government will know what to do,” John had told Doug so many times, countering Doug’s rants about getting ready for the collapse of civilization. “There are procedures they will follow, safeguards in place. Backup plans, and backup plans for those backup plans.”

Doug had argued that it was foolish to put all of your trust in the government. He cited many examples where our own government had turned its back on its own people, times our own government had experimented on its own citizens. He cited experiments with LSD the CIA had performed on mental patients, prisoners, and even johns who had visited prostitutes.

“And some of those people were volunteers,” John had challenged.

“Do you really think they knew exactly what they were volunteering for?” Doug had asked him.

There was an experiment, according to Doug, where the CIA had expelled a bacteria-infected gas into the subway system in New York City to see how long it would take for the bacteria to reach the people, mimicking a bioweapon attack. There were the MK Ultra mind control experiments. And of course, there were the Tuskegee experiments, where they purposely withheld treatment for syphilis on older black men to see what the disease would do to them.

“So, don’t tell me that our own government hasn’t done cruel and terrible things to its own citizens many times in the past,” Doug had said. “Don’t tell me that there aren’t more cruel and terrible things that we don’t even know about. Don’t tell me to trust them to save me if something catastrophic happens.”

But even in Doug’s wildest dreams, he probably hadn’t envisioned something like this, a plague that turned humans into flesh-eating predators, a plague that didn’t seem to have any kind of microbial agent like bacteria or viruses, a plague where its method of transference from one human to the next was unknown. Doug had talked mostly about EMPs—electromagnetic pulses that could fry the electrical grid in America, along with anything else that had electronic components. Doug said he kept his batteries and electronics in something he called Faraday cages—metal containers lined with tin foil so the EMPs wouldn’t render them useless (and Ray had seen some of those containers in the bunker).

Ray understood a little about EMPs, mostly stuff he’d heard from Doug, but he’d learned more about them from some of the books in Doug’s bunker. EMPs could come from a nuclear blast detonated a few hundred miles above the earth’s surface, the energy from the explosion doing no real physical damage to the earth because it was so high in the atmosphere, but the energy pulse from the blast, as it roared toward the earth magnified, frying everything it touched on the earth’s surface. Scientists had first noted EMPs when detonating and testing the first nuclear weapons. But back then electronics weren’t as sensitive as they are now. An EMP blast would knock America right back to the Dark Ages in an instant.

But EMPs didn’t only come from a nuclear blast, they could also occur naturally from the sun, from coronal mass ejections or CMEs. One of these massive solar flares, if directed right at the Earth, could knock out electronics just as completely as a nuclear blast. Or the CME could be even stronger—much stronger. CMEs had happened before, and it would only be a matter of time before they happened again. There was a reported CME in 1859 called the Carrington Event that wiped out many telegraph lines. If a CME that strong happened in modern times, it would have the same EMP effect as a strong nuclear blast, but possibly affecting a much larger area, perhaps half of the Earth. Many people, including Doug, believed that CMEs happened on a pretty regular schedule, and that there was only a matter of time before another one as strong as the Carrington Event hit the Earth.

CMEs and EMPs didn’t matter now—everyone was already blasted back into the Dark Ages. Yes, their cars and trucks still ran, their batteries still worked. But there were no electrical power plants running anymore, no water and sewage lines working anymore, no cell phone service, no GPS, no landline telephones, no internet service. And how long would it be before they ran out of gas, siphoning up the last of it from abandoned cars and trucks? How long would it be before the gas in those tanks started going bad? How long before nuclear power plants started melting down, creating radioactive dead zones in those areas? How long before all the food ran out, and survivors were forced to hunt and gather again, to plant small farms and defend them?

Not much longer, Ray thought.

Yes, it seemed Doug had been prepared for many different end-of-the-world scenarios, but Ray guessed Doug had probably never dreamed of something like the Ripper Plague. The closest thing seemed to be a zombie apocalypse, which Mike had seemed to accept almost immediately as soon as they’d gotten away from their house and seen all of the rippers in the streets. Of course rippers weren’t really the undead walking around, but there seemed to be something monstrous about them, something unworldly, something mythical.

The idea of a plague turning people into rippers still seemed surreal to Ray. Everything about this collapse seemed surreal to Ray: how quickly this plague had spread, how quickly a group like the Dark Angels had formed and scavenged resources, how psychics like Emma and the Dragon were so powerful, how so many of their dreams were interconnected.

Ray looked over at Josh and Mike. They were seated on pillows on the floor in front of the TV in the corner of the bunker, playing a zombie-fighting game. Mike was laughing, taunting Josh for losing. Obviously Mike had more experience at these video games than he’d let on. Ray wondered how many of these games he had played down at Eric’s house. He wondered how many horror movies those two had watched.

Enough to know the rules of horror movies, Ray thought.

In some ways it seemed like those horror movies and video games had prepared Mike for this apocalypse, his almost immediate acceptance of it.

Ray’s inventory list was finally complete—sixteen pages of his small, neat handwriting. He wasn’t sure what the inventory had accomplished, but it had made him feel better to do it, maybe it was the same way playing video games made Mike and Josh feel better, and like listening to books and music on her headphones made Emma feel better, and like patrolling the woods every morning made Luke feel better. They all had their ways of coping with things now.

He set the spiral notebook on the metal shelf next to a row of canned foods. He walked over to Mike and Josh.

“You wanna play, Dad?” Mike asked. “I need some real competition.”

“I’m just letting you win, buddy,” Josh retorted.

“Uh huh.”

“I don’t think I’d be better competition than Josh,” Ray told Mike.

“I can show you how to play,” Mike said.

Josh set his controller down and got to his feet. “I need to stretch my legs anyway. I can’t sit like that for hours like you can,” he said to Mike and then looked at Ray, giving him a smile. “Good luck.”

“Come on, Dad,” Mike urged.

For a second Ray was reminded of Mike begging him to play a game of pool in Craig’s basement. But Ray hadn’t had the time then to play games; they’d been too busy securing the house, looking for food, searching Craig’s laptop for clues to this apocalypse.

But now Ray had the time. “Okay,” he said, sitting down in Josh’s spot on the pillow. “Show me how to play this game. I want to kill some zombies.”

Mike beamed at him and restarted the game.

Yes, Ray had the time to play with Mike now—his inventory was complete; there was enough food and water for the winter, enough supplies, medicine, and weapons. For the first time since the Collapse had begun, Ray felt like they were somewhat safe; he felt like things were finally going their way for once. Maybe they would get through the winter just fine here at the cabin.

CHAPTER 3

Josh

Josh thought it was good that Ray was playing video games with Mike, spending some time with him. Ray had been inventorying their supplies, even though Josh wasn’t sure why. But Josh could admit that Ray was much smarter than he was, and he was sure that Ray had his reasons for doing what he was doing. But now he seemed to be done with his list and he could play Zombie Takeover with Mike.

They’d had a meeting last night—their newly-christened weekly status meeting (of course Ray had coined that term). Mostly the meeting had consisted of Ray and Luke spit-balling ideas about what to do over the next three to four months as they waited for winter to pass. But talk had turned to beyond the winter, to the months and years ahead.

Ray, ever the Debbie Downer of the group, reminded all of them that even the large supply of food and staples in the bunker would only last a finite amount of time (finite was another of Ray’s words, by the way). They needed to prepare themselves for surviving off the land eventually.

“Think of how the early settlers in America had survived,” Ray had suggested. “The colony of Jamestown, for instance.”

Josh was no history buff, but there were plenty of books on the subject in the bunker, which he was sure Ray would deem required reading soon.

But Ray was right; whether they lived in this cabin through the winter, or for a year or two after that, or if they found Avalon to be some kind of rekindling of civilization, or even if they started their own new society somewhere warmer, they were going to have to learn how to live off the land. They were going to have to learn how to farm, how to hunt, how to build and maintain law and order. They were going to have to learn how to identify herbs and edible plants, and medicinal plants. Ray was thinking extremely long-term; he was thinking of Mike’s kids, and Mike’s grandkids. Maybe a day would come when the rippers were completely wiped out, and then people could rebuild industry again, start over from these dark days they lived in right now.

Luke, however, was thinking about more immediate tactics. He suggested they each learn how to use the different weapons in the bunker, especially the silent weapons like the bows and arrows, knives, spears, and even the Molotov cocktails. He had suggested that they spend a few hours a day practicing with those weapons, learning how to make new arrows and spears. He suggested that they set up booby traps around the perimeter of the clearing, and even some kind of alarm bells. Even if they still planned on going down to Avalon in northern Georgia, they still needed to protect themselves here, and they needed to hone their skills.

Ray agreed whole-heartedly with Luke, and they both were committed to getting ideas on paper (Ray was a big fan of pen and paper), hoping to start on these projects and practices. Mike was excited about learning how to shoot arrows and carve new weapons out of wood. They agreed that they would set up targets behind the garage to shoot at. Luke also agreed to show them some basic MMA moves, another thing Mike was excited about.

“There always needs to be a lookout when we’re outside,” Luke had said last night at their meeting. “We can never let our guard down.”

Then Luke’s talk had turned to escape plans. He believed it was only a matter of time before the Dark Angels found them, or even other gangs or groups of survivors. He believed they should run escape drills, all of them getting completely familiar with the three tunnels that led out of the bunker: one to the garage, one to the shed, and the longest one that led into the woods at the edge of the clearing, the one Luke used to begin his patrols each morning.

Yes, Josh agreed that these plans needed to be implemented as soon as possible, but he also wanted a few days to catch his breath. It seemed like ever since October 21st, that Friday morning he’d been arrested for trying to get to the pharmacy to get Kyle his meds, he’d barely had a chance to stop and rest, to even think, to mourn the loss of his sister and nephew. He felt that they needed to not only rest their bodies, but to rest their minds as well.

Josh went upstairs from the basement. It wasn’t freezing in the house, but they kept the heat off most of the time upstairs, leaving it on in the bunker. Luke felt that a warmer and lighted house at night would draw rippers, and even gangs, eventually.

He found Emma in her bedroom. She sat near a window on a wood chair in a patch of sunlight. She had her eyes closed, her face pointed toward the window, her earbuds in her ears and the small cassette player in her lap.

As Josh snuck up to her, she opened her eyes a little and fumbled for her dark glasses, slipping them back on. She pulled her earbuds out and Josh could hear the squawking voice coming from them, a man narrating the book. Her fingers searched the buttons on the cassette player until she found the right one, stopping the audiobook.

He wasn’t sure how she could have heard him approaching her, but it was like she’d just known.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, frowning at Josh.

“Yes. I just came up here to see what you were doing.”

She shrugged. “Listening to a book.”

Josh couldn’t help thinking that something was bothering Emma, but he didn’t want to press her about it. He pulled up another chair closer to hers and sat down. “What are you listening to?”

She had the audiobook case next to her and she handed it to him.

Josh read the title. “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.” He looked at her. “Stephen King? Isn’t that a little graphic to be reading right now?”

Emma smiled. “I’ve always loved Stephen King books. And this one isn’t that scary, but it’s still intense.”

“What’s it about?”

“About a girl who gets lost in the woods.”

“Yeah, doesn’t sound scary at all.”

“I’m hoping there’s a happy ending,” she said with a smile. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Luke’s out on his patrols. Ray and Mike are down in the bunker playing video games.”

“Ray’s playing a video game?”

“Yeah. Me and Mike finally talked him into it. I’m sure Mike’s going easy on him.” Josh chuckled, because he knew it wasn’t true. And so did Emma. “So I thought I’d just come up here and check on you.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, her voice softer and deeper.

Josh gently removed her glasses. “I like to see your eyes . . . your face.”

“You do, huh?”

He leaned in and kissed her lips. She grabbed on to him, holding him as they kissed again, a longer and more forceful kiss.

Josh pulled away and stood up, taking her hand and helping her to her feet.

“Is the door locked?” Emma asked.

“Yes,” he whispered.

They went to the bed, falling onto it, kissing and groping each other.

CHAPTER 4

Emma

Emma lay in bed beside Josh. Their lovemaking had been intense, but they had tried to be quiet. She was sure Ray and Mike were still down in the bunker, and she hadn’t heard anyone downstairs, but she was still a little embarrassed at how fast she and Josh had gotten together. She wanted to scream out while they had sex, but she didn’t dare. It was the first time she’d felt this kind of pleasure in such a long time, so long since she’d felt safe in someone’s arms, loved by another. Neither one of them had said those three words to each other, and it was definitely too soon for that, but she could feel herself falling hard for him.

Being with Josh was easy. He was so relaxed, so funny, always looking at the bright side of things.

“You think they know about our secret romance?” she asked him as she snuggled up next to him.

“Uh, yeah. I’m sure they do. When you’re stuck in a house twenty-four hours a day with three other people, I think it’s hard to hide secrets.”

She just smiled. She didn’t care, but they still snuck around. It was kind of fun.

“How’s your arm feeling?” she asked him.

“Better.”

She was proud of Josh, happy that he hadn’t touched a pain pill since he’d been on the antibiotics. He relied on aspirin every eight hours and that was it. According to Ray, probably meant as a warning to her, there was plenty of pain medication and booze down in the bunker. Maybe his inventory was partly inspired by keeping track of the pain pills and alcohol—he seemed determined to catch Josh in the act of giving in to his urges. But Josh hadn’t. So far, at least. Yes, she could tell Josh was healing, not only his arm, but every part of him. He’d said several times that he was happy they’d had a few days to relax, to finally let their guard down for a little while.

And she was happy about a break from the stress, the chance for a few days to feel almost normal again. But she felt something bad coming, like a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon, more danger coming their way. This cabin seemed safe, but it wasn’t. Nowhere was safe. The Dragon was always looking for them, always on the hunt.

“Hey,” Josh said, jumping out of bed. “I’ve got something for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

She heard him slipping his pants on, then his socks and shoes, then his shirt. “It’s a surprise. Just wait here for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

And Josh was gone, running out of the room like an excited child.

She lay in bed alone, closing her eyes and sighing. Even with the oppressive feelings plaguing her, she was going to revel in this moment and bask in the happiness that she felt right now.

Josh was back a moment later. He hadn’t sat back down on the bed—he was just standing there beside it.

“What?” she asked him.

“Sit on the edge of the bed.”

“What is it?” she asked again, and she couldn’t help giggling. She thought of what he might have gotten for her, but she couldn’t even guess. She sat up and scooted to the side of the bed, swinging her legs over and waiting.

“Here, hold your hands out. I made something for you.”

She held her hands out and felt a wooden stick placed in her hands, the wood worn smooth.

“It’s a cane,” Josh said. “I know it’s probably stupid, but I remember that you lost your cane back in that town.”

She nodded, letting the end of the cane drop to the floor and feeling the curved handle. It was a sturdy cane.

“You could also use it as a weapon,” Josh said. “It’s heavy, and the end is tapered a little to a point. I wanted to make one of those canes that you can pull the handle out and it’s like a dagger or a sword, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it.”

Emma ran her hands along the cane. “I love it, Josh.”

“You’re just saying that. You don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

“No,” she said, standing up and leaning on the cane with one hand, reaching to him with her other hand, pulling him a little closer so she could give him a long kiss. He had taken the time to make this, thinking about her, about her safety. She loved it; she wished she could make him believe her. Those three words almost rose up out of her throat, but she clamped them back down. For now, at least.

CHAPTER 5

Luke

Luke had ventured a few hundred yards deeper into the woods, working his way through the wet brush slowly. A lot of the trees were either thin or bare, leaves dropped off weeks ago, carpeting the hilly terrain with rotting vegetation under the snow. At least the ground was moist and Luke hardly made a sound as he walked.

He stopped at a deadfall and crouched down. He’d been marking his trail along the way, notching the bark of trees with his hunting knife. And now he was glad he had marked a few trees because every direction looked the same to him—nothing but trees and brush. He’d come across the occasional small clearing down in a valley, but then the land would rise back up sharply on the next hill and the woods would begin again. Higher mountains were somewhere in the distance beyond the unending trees. He wasn’t a woodsman or a tracker—he’d already lost the woman’s footprints at least two hundred yards back. He was no longer sure he was even walking in the right direction. The snow wasn’t as thick the deeper he got into the woods and the ground was nothing but leaves, weeds, and grass.

This was far enough. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t go too deep into the woods, giving them (assuming this person he was following was part of a group) a chance to circle back around to attack the cabin while he was way out here.

As anxious as he was to get back to the cabin, he made himself wait by the deadfall. He watched the woods, alert for any flashes of movement, listening for any sounds. But everything was quiet and still—nature holding its breath. Luke didn’t bother looking through the scope on his rifle or through the binoculars that hung from a strap around his neck inside his hoodie. He got to his feet, ready to go back to the cabin.

He waited a moment. It felt like he was being watched. He couldn’t spot anyone, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. Maybe it was the forest animals watching him: deer, squirrels, birds; all of them statue-still, waiting to see what he would do, waiting for him to leave.

And then he left, hurrying back through the woods, no longer trying to be so quiet. He followed his own faint tracks, referring to his compass every so often. He stopped only once to drink some water from his canteen.

Moments later he was back at the edge of the woods. He stayed in the tree-line, keeping an eye on the cabin as he made his way through the woods to the dirt drive. He crossed the driveway and entered the woods on the other side. The cabin looked undisturbed, and he took his time getting around the clearing to the metal hatch in the ground hidden among the brush. He waited near the hatch for a few minutes, hoping no one was watching him. He didn’t want to give away one of their escape routes.

Finally, when he felt comfortable enough that no one was around, he opened the hatch and slipped down into the hole, closing the metal door behind him. He locked the door and pulled out the small flashlight from his pants pocket, turning it on, shining the beam down the narrow metal tunnel that led to the bunker under the cabin.

A few minutes later he entered the bunker. He stepped inside and closed the door to the tunnel, lowering the metal bar in place to lock it. He looked down an aisle through the metal shelves of supplies and saw Ray and Mike sitting on pillows, playing a video game.

Ray looked up as Luke approached.

“Dad, watch out,” Mike said, his eyes still on the TV. “The zombies are going to get you.”

Ray ignored Mike, keeping his eyes on Luke. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

“Dad . . .” Then Mike sighed. “Too late. He got you.”

Ray glanced at Mike. “Go ahead, son. You take over. I need to talk to Luke for a minute.”

Mike paused the video game and turned to look at Luke, staring right at him.

“Everything’s okay,” Ray said quickly before Luke could say anything.

Luke figured it would be better to just tell Mike what was going on instead of sneaking around behind his back, but he knew Ray was still so protective of his son.

Ray got up and Luke followed him up the basement stairs to the kitchen. Josh and Emma weren’t in the kitchen or the living room, probably upstairs in Emma’s bedroom again. They thought they were sneaking around and nobody noticed, but it was kind of obvious. Luke wasn’t sure why the need for secrecy; it didn’t bother him one bit if the two of them wanted to hook up. They were both adults, they didn’t need anyone’s permission or blessings.

“What’s wrong?” Ray said.

“I saw tracks in the woods.”

“Tracks?”

“Just one set. A person. Small prints. I think it might have been a woman or even a kid.”

“Just one set,” Ray repeated to himself.

“That’s all I saw.”

“Where in the woods?”

Before Luke could answer, he heard Josh shuffling down the steps in the living room, sounding heavier than he was as he thumped down the stairs. A moment later he strolled up to them, and then he stopped when he saw the expressions on their faces.

“What’s going on?” Josh asked.

Luke could see Ray practically bristle as soon as Josh entered the room. He knew Ray still didn’t like Josh even though Josh hadn’t touched the pain pills or liquor since they’d found the bunker and the antibiotics he needed. Maybe Ray would eventually warm up to Josh, but who knew how long that would take? Luke suspected that Ray didn’t like him much either. But the difference between him and Josh was that he really didn’t care whether Ray liked him or not.

“Luke found some tracks in the woods,” Ray told Josh.

“Where in the woods?” Josh said.

Luke pointed at the front door of the cabin. “That way. Just inside the woods. One set. One person. I think it might have been a woman or maybe a teenager. Looks like the person was wearing sneakers, not boots.”

“So the tracks were only in the woods?” Ray said. “None in the clearing or around the cabin?”

“None that I could see. Looks to me like the person came to the edge of the woods and watched the cabin.”

“And then left?” Josh said.

Luke nodded. “I went deeper into the woods, trying to follow the tracks, but I didn’t want to go in too far in case she was with a group and they came back around from a different direction and attacked the cabin while I wasn’t here. I wanted to get back and let you guys know.”

Ray seemed to be deep in thought for a moment.

“Maybe a ripper?” Josh asked.

“I don’t think so. The tracks looked too . . . too deliberate.”

“But part of a group?” Josh said. “Maybe the Dark Angels.”

“Could be,” Luke agreed. “Or could be another group of survivors.”

“Or another gang like the Dark Angels.”

Luke just shrugged. Nowadays a group of survivors or a gang might be the same thing. A group of survivors turned into a gang soon enough, willing to pillage and kill to protect themselves.

“Let’s go take a look at the tracks,” Ray said. He looked at Josh. “You cover us from the front porch.”

CHAPTER 6

Ray

While Josh waited on the front porch with a rifle, Ray and Luke crossed the field to the edge of the woods, crunching on the thin layer of snow. Ray looked for other tracks as they walked toward the woods, but he didn’t see any. The blue sky was quickly turning gray with the coming clouds, promising more snow.

Luke led the way into the woods. He had his rifle slung over one shoulder, his pistol and silencer holstered under his hoodie. Ray wore his pistol holstered on his side. He’d gotten the holster from the bunker, and he was still using the same gun he’d taken off the Dark Angel in the small town where the three Dark Angels had almost abducted them. The weapon felt strange on his hip at first, like a weight he couldn’t get used to, a weight making his movements cumbersome, but the more he got used to it the more those feelings went away.

On the other side of Ray’s hip he had the small walkie-talkie. Josh had the other one, and they were to only use them in absolute emergencies. There could be others listening on the same channels, others within range that might pick up their signal.

Josh was still on the front porch near the railing with a 30.06 rifle. Ray wasn’t confident that Josh knew how to shoot. He claimed he was a good shot, but Ray didn’t believe much of what Josh said.

Luke made no small talk as they trekked through the woods—Luke wasn’t a small-talk kind of guy. And Ray was fine with that. He glanced around as they walked, a tingling feeling dancing along his skin, a hyper-aware state that he had adapted ever since the world had gone to shit on a Friday morning not too long ago.

It took a moment for Luke to find the tracks again, but then he stopped and pointed down at the ground. The tracks were faint, but Ray could make them out in the snow.

“Looks like she waited by this tree,” Luke said.

Ray noticed Luke was using the word she. “Watching the cabin,” he said. “She could’ve been scouting the place.”

Luke nodded but didn’t seem too convinced of that. “Seems strange Dark Angels would send a woman or a kid as a scout.”

“They might,” Ray said. “Maybe she’s got the most experience in the woods. Maybe they sent someone nonthreatening. Or maybe they drew straws.”

“Or this person is alone. Maybe lost and scared.”

Could be, he thought. “If that’s true, why didn’t she come to the cabin? Why didn’t she try the cabin door? See if she could get inside, even get to the front porch and under the roof.”

“Like I said, maybe she’s scared.”

“The cabin would look cold and dark, even at night. We don’t keep any lights on. We don’t use the fireplace. The drapes are all closed. No vehicles parked outside. I mean, why come all this way, find a possible refuge, then go back into the woods? She must be with others.”

Luke didn’t respond.

“You didn’t see anything else in the woods?”

Luke gave him a look that said: If I had, I would’ve told you by now.

“Maybe we could set up some kind of alarm system,” Ray said. “In case she comes back around. Or anyone else.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“We just need to stay alert. Maybe sleep in watches for the next night or two.”

“I’ll check the woods again in the morning.” Luke glanced up at the tree branches. “Looks like there might be some more snow coming.”

It sure felt cold enough to snow, Ray thought.

*

After they got back to the porch and told Josh what they’d found, he had an idea for an alarm system.

“What is it?” Ray asked.

But Josh didn’t explain; he was off and running back into the house.

Ray and Luke went back inside the cabin and locked the door. Luke went over to the window next to the door and looked out through the drapes, studying the woods in the distance.

“You heard what Josh said a few days ago,” Luke said to Ray when he looked away from the window. “These doors are made of metal. This place is solid. Even if it’s a group or the Dark Angels, we’ll be safe in here.”

Ray thought about the fortress Luke had told him about near the Ohio River, the compound the Dark Angels had overtaken, bringing two of the men to the town of Heaven to be used as bait. But he decided not to remind him about that.

“Dark Angels?” Emma said.

Ray turned around and saw Emma walking toward them from the stairs on the other side of the room. He hadn’t heard her come down the stairs. She moved like a ghost, slipping up to them silently.

“We don’t know if they’re Dark Angels,” Ray told Emma.

“Who?”

Ray briefly explained to Emma about the tracks Luke had just shown him in the woods.

Josh was back, and of course Mike was tagging along, carrying some metal cans. Josh had more metal cans and spools of string.

“I’m gonna set up these cans under the steps,” Josh said with a proud grin. “They won’t see them until they trip over the string on the steps.”

“You see that in a movie?” Luke asked.

Josh ignored Luke.

“Can I help?” Mike asked, looking right at Ray for permission.

“No,” Ray said a little too quickly. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know who’s out there in the woods. How many of them there are. What they want.”

Mike pouted a little, but he didn’t argue.

Luke still had his rifle slung over his shoulder. He went outside with Josh to cover him while rigging his tin-can alarm system.

Ray wasn’t sure they would hear the cans rattling from inside the cabin, but it was better than nothing. Ray had already decided that they would sleep in watches, one of them in the living room at all times, waiting.

He looked at Mike, feeling bad for snapping at him a few minutes ago. He’d told Mike that it was too dangerous for him to be out on the front porch with Josh, but he wondered if it had more to do with keeping Mike away from Josh and Luke.

“Come on, Mike,” Ray said. “Let’s go downstairs to the bunker. You can help me with something.”

“What?” His eyes lit up; he was happy to have some responsibility, happy to contribute in some way, happy to be a part of the team.

“Come with me and you’ll see,” Ray said. He could hardly hide his smile. He looked at Emma. “Let me know if you hear anything out there.”

She nodded at him. “Of course.”

“We’ll be right back up in a few minutes.”

She nodded again, waiting on the edge of the couch.

Mike followed Ray down to the basement and then into the bunker. Ray went right to the gun case and opened it. He pulled out two more rifles and a handgun. He handed one of the rifles to Mike.

Mike held the rifle with reverence, like he was finally allowed to touch a priceless artifact. “What are we doing with these?”

“We’re going to take them upstairs and put them in the living room and the kitchen, have them ready in case we need them.”

Ray told himself that he was going to ask Luke to teach them all how to check the weapons for bullets, how to load them, where the safeties were. Even Mike would need to learn these things.

It had been nice to rest for a few days here at the cabin. It had been a nice break from the constant stress since the Collapse. But Ray knew it was never going to last very long. And here it was, danger literally at their front door again.

*

Josh’s alarm system seemed to work pretty well. The jingling of the cans could be heard pretty well from inside the cabin. It wasn’t a terribly loud alarm, and Ray pointed out that a rabbit or some other small animal might stumble across the strings on the steps, but their improvised alarm system would have to do for now.

They ate dinner at the dining room table situated between the kitchen and the living room.

“I’ll take the first watch tonight,” Luke said.

CHAPTER 7

Ray

Ray and Mike went upstairs to bed. Mike was asleep pretty quickly, but Ray lay in the near-total darkness, staring at the ceiling. He was too tense to sleep, wondering if the person from the woods was going to try to get to the cabin, wondering if this person would bring others . . . bring an army.

But eventually he drifted off to sleep.

And he dreamed.

In Ray’s dream he was alone in a vast fog. He stumbled up to a sagging chain-link fence, the gate halfway open. The mist hung all around, clinging to everything, making it hard for Ray to tell where he was.

But he didn’t need to see the building blurred by the fog beyond the chain-link fencing. He already knew what the building would look like, where that building would lead to . . . Avalon.

He’d made it to Avalon. And he should have been thrilled, but he wasn’t.

He was alone.

Where was Mike? Where were Emma, Josh, and Luke? Were they already inside the building, already underground in the bunker? Inside Avalon?

No, that didn’t seem like the right answer.

Were they somewhere else? Had he gone ahead of them, like a scout, like the scout in the woods that had watched their cabin? Was he far ahead of them making sure Avalon was safe?

Were they dead?

Ray waited by the open gate for another moment as tendrils of fog drifted by.

“Daddy!”

Ray froze. A child was calling him. And he knew that voice. It was Vanessa.

She came running from the fog, from the direction of the building, materializing from the grayness, her arms out wide as she ran to him, her eyes round, a big smile on her face.

“Vanessa . . .” he said, too shocked to speak her name any louder than a whisper.

Vanessa slammed into him, hugging him, crying and laughing at the same time. She was squeezing him so tight.

He pulled away from her, holding her back at arm’s length so he could stare at her, so he could make sure it was really her. He stared down at her beaming face, her cheeks wet with tears.

“Vanessa . . . how?” He realized he was crying too. “You’re cured.”

She nodded, still smiling.

“How?”

“Some men came and got me. They drove a white van and they had masks and . . . and some kind of army clothes. They shot me and I woke up in a helicopter.”

“They shot you?”

“Yeah, with some kind of dart thing. I fell asleep, but I woke up in a helicopter. I got to ride in a helicopter. And then I was here. They gave me some medicine that fixed me. Medicine that made the bad thoughts go away.”

“You remember being a . . . you remember changing?”

She nodded.

“You remember me leaving you?” He had to choke back a sob, barely able to get the words out.

“Yeah,” she said, her smile slipping, turning into a frown.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I didn’t know there was a cure. If I’d known . . .”

“It’s okay, Daddy. The important thing is that we’re all back together again.”

“All back together?”

“Yeah. All of us.”

“Who else are you talking about?”

Just then Ray heard a noise coming from the mist in the direction of the building, the same direction Vanessa had just come from. It was a shuffling noise, like someone walking but dragging their feet, shoes scuffing the concrete.

“Ray . . .”

He saw the woman materializing out of the fog just like Vanessa had done moments ago.

“Kim?”

“Ray . . . we can all be together again.”

Kim stumbled toward him, her dark skin an ashy gray, her eyes pure white—the eyeballs completely gone. Vomit crusted her mouth and stained the front of her shirt. She still had strips of the bedsheets tied to her wrists and ankles, hanging down like the loose wrappings of a mummy.

“You killed me, Ray. And you left our daughter with those animals in that intersection. But we forgive you. We can all be together again . . . a family again.”

Ray heard a growling noise. He looked down and saw that the throaty snarl was coming from Vanessa. Her face had changed into a sneer, her eyes wild, teeth bared, her little hands formed into claws.

“Vanessa, no!”

She attacked like a rabid dog.

Ray sat up in the darkness, a scream trapped in his throat. For a moment it felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he couldn’t inhale enough air. For those few seconds he sat in bed, frozen in panic, his body rigid, his skin covered with a film of sweat, his heart pounding.

Then he could move. He could breathe again.

Had he cried out in his sleep? He looked at Mike next to him in the bed; he was still sound asleep, breathing heavily, nearly snoring.

Ray swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He looked at the digital alarm clock next to the bed, the only source of light in the bedroom, but just barely enough for him to make out the table, the lamp, the walls, the door that led out to the balcony. The time on the clock was almost three a.m.

It was time for him to go downstairs and take over the watch for Luke.

He slipped his sneakers on and then put his hoodie on. The house was pretty cold because they kept the heat to a minimum, not wanting anyone outside to feel any warmth coming from their dark cabin, no signs that anyone was here. But now it was more than just the chill in the air that gave him the shivers—it was the nightmare he’d just had.

God, what a dream. He’d seen Vanessa again, something that should have made him happy, but then the dream had turned bad. And then Kim had come stumbling up to him from the mist.

He wondered how he could have dreamed something like that. And then he wondered if the Dragon had manipulated his dream somehow.

But he couldn’t think about the dream right now; he needed to focus on what he was doing.

Ray went downstairs and found Luke slumped down on the couch. Maybe he was sleeping. He crept toward him.

“I’m awake,” Luke whispered.

“Everything’s okay?”

“So far.”

“I’ll take over. Go ahead and get some sleep.”

Luke got up from the couch, grabbing the rifle he had leaned against it and headed to the spare bedroom Josh had been using before he and Emma had gotten together.

CHAPTER 8

Luke

Luke stretched out in the spare bedroom downstairs since Josh was up in Emma’s room now that their secret had been exposed. He had taken off his holster with his pistol and set it on the bed beside him. He kept his hiking boots on in case he needed to jump up and help Ray.

Moments later he was sleeping, and he was dreaming.

He saw the woman and the girl again, the ones he’d seen in the motel office, sleeping behind the check-in desk. He remembered them, how they’d been in danger. He remembered the men pulling up outside the lobby doors in a black van. Two men. Dangerous men. Dark Angels? Perhaps. Luke hadn’t seen that far into the dream. He had wanted to warn the woman and the girl, shout at them to wake up, to run, but his feet had been rooted to the floor, his body frozen with paralysis, and his voice would never reach their ears.

He’d never known if they had gotten away from the two men in the van, but they must have because he was watching them now and they weren’t in the motel lobby anymore, but in front of an older home.

They had gotten away from the two men in the van. They were safe from them, but not totally safe. None of them were totally safe. None of them would ever be totally safe again.

The woman and the girl stood next to each other in front of the old house in what seemed like a small town. There were mountains all around, no other homes in sight. There were two other people with the woman and the girl, a man and a woman. Luke had seen the two of them before in his dreams. The man seemed to be quite a bit older than the woman. He had the beginnings of a gray beard and salt and pepper hair. He was tall, with long arms and long legs, a potbelly that was diminishing in this new wasteland they all found themselves in. The woman was thin but compact, strong and sure of herself. Tough.

Luke stood in the street. It was misty with the drizzling rain. There was danger coming for the four of them. They thought they were safe at this house. And maybe they were safe for the moment, but a wave of horror was coming their way very soon.

He wanted to warn them, run toward them, but before he could call out to them or move, he was somewhere else—he was back in the hell town, the place where the Dragon ruled.

Luke stood in the middle of the street. The surroundings were familiar now: dead and dying bodies hung from porches, trees, and light poles like large, bizarre ornaments. Others were stretched over the tops of cars or staked to the sides of wood buildings, their clothing ripped away, their wounded and tortured flesh exposed to the drizzle and the sky of solid clouds. There were always clouds here, always churning and moving, always windy and cold.

In this place Luke could move. The tortured could see him here, hear him. They moaned and sobbed, struggled hopelessly against their bonds, begging to be freed, begging for a moment of relief, begging to be killed, for the pain to end.

Luke walked down the middle of the road, walking past the tortured, passing the ruined and blasted buildings. He could do nothing for the tortured—he walked toward the sound of the crowd. The Dragon had amassed his followers again, a dark congregation to worship him.

The Dragon would be up on the stage, ready to cleave another captive’s face in with an ax or to preach about those who would try to stop them.

Luke would find the Dragon this time, and he would kill him. He headed toward the sound of the people, the cheers erupting into the cold air from beyond the buildings like a rock concert. He looked down at his side, then slipped his hand inside his hoodie. His gun and holster weren’t there. His hunting knife wasn’t on his belt. No weapons at all.

Then he would kill him with his bare hands.

Suddenly Luke was running, the rage building inside of him as he turned down side streets, passing rows of houses that had been built close together, clapboard houses that were falling apart.

He was getting closer to the crowd, getting closer to the Dragon . . . he could hear them.

He rounded the corner of the next house, running out onto the street. And then he stopped.

There was no noise, no sounds coming from anywhere. The roar and cheers of the Dragon’s congregation were silent now. The Dragon’s fiery speech had stopped. Everything was silent except for the constant cold wind blowing through the skeletal trees and brown brush.

Where were they? He’d just heard them a few seconds ago.

The house right across the street caught his attention; it was larger than the other homes, in better condition. It was a three-story Victorian with a garage attached to the right side of it. A large brown lawn stretched from the grand front porch down to the edge of the street. The front door was hidden in shadows underneath the wide porch roof, but even from where Luke stood he could tell the front door was halfway open.

Something waited inside that house for him.

The Dragon? Could it be him?

No, Luke didn’t think so. He thought it might be something else.

Something worse?

A sudden spike of fear struck Luke, a sensation he wasn’t used to. But even though his skin crawled with chills, he found himself walking across the street, up the lawn, and then up the wooden steps to the front porch. Now that he was closer to the house, he realized that it wasn’t in quite as good of shape as he’d thought: the paint on the siding was flaking away, the wood on the front porch was gray and rotting, part of the floor sagging. One of the windows had a large crack in it, nothing but darkness beyond it—nothing but darkness beyond the half-open door.

No, there was more than darkness beyond that doorway, there was something waiting for him.

“Luke,” a voice whispered.

He knew that voice. It wasn’t the Dragon, he was sure of that.

“Luke!” the voice snapped.

Yes, he knew who that was waiting in the darkness for him.

Someone grabbed his shoulder. He turned to see who it was, but there was no one there. Yet he still felt the person’s hand on him.

“Luke, wake up.”

It was Ray.

Luke jumped, sitting bolt-upright in bed, reaching for his gun and shoulder holster on the bed beside him.

Ray stood beside the bed. He had stepped back when Luke had sat up. He seemed tense, ready to react if Luke swung at him.

“Outside,” Ray said.

Luke heard a sound coming from the front of the cabin, the tinkling of the metal cans out there.

He was on his feet in a flash, following Ray back out to the living room. The cans were still clanking outside, but settling down now. There was silence for a few seconds and then a thump out on the front porch.

Luke looked out the window to the left of the front door and Ray looked out the window to the right of the door. It was dark on the porch and the porch roof made it harder to see, but Luke could make out the body on the front porch lying on the floorboards. The body was small and thin, long hair spilling out from under the hood of a sweatshirt. A woman, had to be. She was curled up in a fetal position on her side. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. He couldn’t tell if she was resting or if she was passed out. Or if she was dead. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.

“You see her?” Ray asked as he crept up behind Luke.

He nodded. “Yeah. Only one so far.” He looked at Ray. “What time is it?”

“Almost dawn.”

Luke held Ray’s stare and swore he could read the man’s mind: We’ll wait it out, wait until first light. See if there are any others in the woods.

CHAPTER 9

Josh

Josh’s eyes snapped open. It was just before dawn, that twilight between dark and daylight. The room was still dark, but he could barely make out the room around him as it lightened up minute by minute.

He wasn’t sure what had woken him up. Maybe a bad dream. He was sure he’d been having a bad dream, but he couldn’t remember much about it. He thought he might have seen Marla and Kyle in his dream. He hated dreaming about them even though he loved seeing them again—it was those few seconds when he woke up and realized all over again that his sister and nephew were dead that caused the agony, and then he would experience that heartache all over again.

Emma was awake. Her eyes were still closed, but he could tell just by the way she was breathing that she wasn’t asleep.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I heard some noises downstairs a few minutes ago.”

“Noises? You should have woke me up.”

“I just did.”

Josh was ready to jump out of bed, but she laid a hand on his arm. “I think it’s Ray and Luke moving around down there.”

Josh remembered the two of them were on watch tonight. He was supposed to take the early morning watch. He got up and slipped his pants on, then he pulled his hoodie on over his layer of shirts. It was cold in the bedroom; he could nearly see his breath. He put his hiking boots on, tying the laces quickly. He grabbed his shotgun from beside the nightstand then went around the bed to Emma’s side and gave her a good-morning kiss.

“I’ll go check on things.”

She nodded and lay back down, closing her eyes again. “Let me know what’s going on.”

“I will.”

Josh left the bedroom and hurried down the steps. He carried his shotgun in his left hand. His right arm still hurt a little, but it was definitely healing. At least the antibiotics were working to clear the infection up.

Ray and Luke were at the windows that looked out onto the front porch, one on each side of the door. Josh froze for just a second at the bottom of the stairs, tensing up. Ray and Luke both had their guns with them.

He hurried over to Luke. “What’s up?”

“Someone’s on the front porch.”

“Who?”

Luke moved aside so Josh could look out the window. It had lightened up quite a bit in the last few minutes since he’d gotten out of bed, but everything was still the dark blues and black shadows of pre-dawn, the sun nowhere near above the mountains yet.

He saw a woman lying on her side on the floorboards of the porch. She might even be a teenager. She was bundled up in a hoodie sweatshirt, blue jeans, cloth gloves, and sneakers, but she couldn’t have been warm enough out there. She was either sleeping or knocked out. Maybe even freezing to death.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Josh said. “The one who was out in the woods watching the cabin. The tracks you saw.”

“Seems like it,” Luke replied in a low voice.

“Nobody else?”

“None that we’ve seen so far. But it could be a trap to get us out onto the porch.”

Josh looked beyond the front porch at the woods in the distance, but the woods were just a mass of darkness, the tops of the trees silhouetted against the dark blue morning sky.

Ray came over to them.

“We need to help her,” Josh said.

“She could be a scout for the Dark Angels,” Ray said. “Or some other gang.”

Luke didn’t say anything, but he seemed to agree with Ray.

“Or she could be alone,” Josh argued. “She could be looking for a place to sleep, a place out of the wind.”

They didn’t say anything.

“We can’t just let her freeze to death because we’re not sure if she’s alone.”

“We have to be careful,” Ray said.

“She could be one of us,” Josh said. “One of the ones we’ve seen in our dreams.”

Ray just stared at him, and Josh thought he could tell what he was thinking: the last time Josh thought a little girl was someone they’d seen in their dreams, it had almost gotten them killed by a swarm of rippers.

“We have to think about ourselves,” Ray said, still calm, still arguing his case logically. “We have to think about Mike and Emma right now.”

“Yeah, I get that. But we can’t turn into animals, either. We can’t become like those people out there.”

Ray shook his head—a doctor delivering a bad prognosis. “It’s too risky. We need to wait them out. Keep watching the woods. See if she wakes up.”

“Yeah,” Josh said, his voice rising. “If she wakes up.”

“We need to wait,” Ray said, his tone suddenly firmer. “We can’t risk what we’ve got here.”

So you’ve become our elected leader? Josh almost spat out, but didn’t. Instead, he said, “We should vote on this.”

Emma was coming down the stairs, surely alarmed by their arguing. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“There’s a woman passed out on the front porch,” Josh told her as she walked up to them. “A girl, really. She’s probably freezing to death.”

“Oh God.”

“But she might be a scout,” Ray said. “She might be with the Dark Angels. She might be bait to get us to go out there.”

“Ray wants to wait for a while,” Josh said. “See if we can spot some people in the woods. I think we should go out there and get her.” He paused for just a second. “Hell, I’ll do it. I’ll go out there by myself. You two can wait by the door with the rifles.” Josh was sure Ray wouldn’t be too heartbroken if someone shot him while he was dragging the girl back inside. Ray would probably gloat, stand over him while he was dying and saying, “I told you so.”

“Fine,” Ray said. “We take a vote.”

“All in favor of bringing her inside,” Josh said. “Raise your hands.”

Josh and Emma raised their hands.

“All in favor of waiting,” Ray said and raised his hand.

Ray and Josh looked at Luke.

“You didn’t raise your hand,” Josh said.

“I think we should compromise,” Luke said. “Maybe wait thirty more minutes. Wait until it’s a little lighter out there. Scan the trees with binoculars first when we can really see. When it’s light, we’ll go out there. You can drag her back inside and I’ll be out there with the rifle. I want to help her, but I also want to be smart about this. But even more than that, I want to see what kind of information she might have.” He glanced at Ray. “But we can’t get any information if she dies out there.”

“Even if we go out there in thirty minutes,” Ray said, “and nothing happens, it doesn’t mean that she’s not with some other people. They could be waiting for her to get inside.”

“People are going to find this place eventually,” Josh said.

Josh looked at Emma. She seemed to be able to tell he was looking at her.

She nodded slightly. “I think Josh is right. Eventually they’ll find us. If not the Dark Angels, then some other gang or group of people. Or even rippers. At some point we’re going to have to either run or fight.”

“Fine,” Ray said. “It’s three to one. Even if Mike voted with me, you’d still have the majority.”

Emma stepped closer to Ray and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I know you’re just trying to protect us. Thank you.”

Ray sighed, showing his displeasure at their decision, but he nodded in agreement. “Let’s get the binoculars and watch the woods for a little while, see if anyone else is out there.”

CHAPTER 10

Ray

Thirty minutes later Ray stood at the window with the binoculars up to his eyes, studying the woods in the distance. The sun still wasn’t up over the mountains yet, but it was much lighter than before. Ray could see well into the trees and brush, but then it became nothing but murky shadows. He had panned back and forth with the binoculars slowly, looking for anyone in the woods, any signs of movement. All he’d seen so far were two rabbits and a few birds fluttering around.

But that didn’t mean that there weren’t others waiting somewhere out there in the woods, far deeper in the trees, maybe watching the cabin with their own binoculars, or looking through a high-powered rifle scope. Or they could be in the woods off to the side, just out of view of the edge of the windows.

Mike hadn’t woken up—at least he hadn’t come downstairs yet. Ray wasn’t sure if he should let Mike sleep or wake him up. He needed his sleep, and if this was just some young woman on her own, lost in the woods and no danger to them, then there was no need to wake him up yet. But then again, if they needed to react, if they needed to fight back, then he wanted Mike awake and alert. He still wasn’t sure what to do, and he hated being mired in indecision like this.

“Looks clear to me out there,” Luke said.

Ray glanced at Luke, who handed his binoculars to Josh as he got his 30.06 with the scope ready. Ray hoped Luke was as good of a shot with the rifle as he was with his handgun. Luke said he was, and Ray was sure it was true.

Josh had volunteered again to go out and pull the girl inside. Ray felt like obliging Josh, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to let Josh go out there alone. The quicker they got this woman inside the cabin, the quicker this was over. And he couldn’t let Josh pull the woman by himself, even if she was pretty light. There was always the chance of Josh reopening the wound in his arm.

After one last look at the woods, Ray set his binoculars on the table and went over to Luke.

“We’ll all three go out there,” Ray said.

Josh looked surprised, but for once he didn’t have anything sarcastic to say.

“You go out there first,” Ray told Luke. “Then Josh and I will be right behind you.” He looked at Josh. “We’ll each grab one of her hands. We’ll need to be careful. She could have a weapon on her, maybe even a hand grenade.”

Josh’s eyes grew wide—he hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, Ray thought, leave it to me to think of the worst possibilities.

“Luke will have his handgun on him as well as the rifle,” Ray continued. “We’ll each have a gun on us, too. If she’s able to wake up, we’ll let her know right away that we’re trying to help her. Maybe even get her up on her feet. If she’s not conscious, we’ll drag her inside. We’ll each take a hand and pull her at the same time, keeping her head up above the threshold so she doesn’t bump it on anything. Once we’re all inside, Luke will come in behind us and close and lock the door.”

“Sounds like you’ve got everything worked out to the second,” Josh said.

“It’s better to go over it now than to waste time out there trying to figure out what to do.”

“Okay,” Luke said, cutting off Josh before he could say anything else. “Let’s get this over with. I’ll go out there first.”

Luke didn’t waste any more time. He unlocked the front door, opened it, and then stepped out onto the front porch with his rifle in his hands.

Ray and Josh glanced at each other. Josh nodded at him, and then he went out through the door. Ray was right behind him.

The cold bit into Ray immediately. It wasn’t quite the shock it could have been because they kept the cabin pretty cool inside, but it certainly seemed cold enough to freeze to death out here.

He couldn’t help glancing around once he was on the front porch. Someone could be in the trees right now, maybe even up in the branches, aiming a rifle at him, sighting him through the scope. It made his skin tingle, his nerves jumping just thinking about it, like running through a thunderstorm knowing at any moment you could see a flash of light, feel a blast of pain for just a millisecond, and then it was all over, lights out, dead.

But he needed to focus on their task. If someone took a shot at him, then they took a shot. It was too late to worry about it now—they were already out here.

Luke was at the railing of the front porch, only a few feet away from the steps, behind one of the thick logs, the poles holding up the porch roof. He stared through the scope, slowly scanning the woods, his index finger caressing the trigger, his muscular body tense.

“Hey,” Josh said to the woman on the floor.

She was still in the same position on her side, curled up nearly into a ball, her knees drawn up tight. Her light brown hair poked out of her hoodie, the hair and the hood partially covering her pale face.

“Hey, lady,” Josh said. He bent down and nudged her shoulder.

Ray wanted to warn Josh to be careful, but he waited, ready to pull his gun out if he needed to. He knew Josh didn’t believe this woman could be a ripper or a suicide assassin, a way to get the rest of her people into the cabin, but Ray wasn’t ruling out the possibility.

No response from the woman.

Josh pushed on her shoulder again, harder this time. “Hey, lady. You need to wake up.”

Still no response. She didn’t make a noise, open her eyes, or move. It looked like she was barely breathing.

They were wasting time, the seconds ticking by, exposed out here on the front porch.

“Come on,” Ray told Josh. “Let’s get her inside where it’s warm, where we can help her.” He said these things in case the woman was awake and scared, playing possum. He wanted her to know that they didn’t mean her any harm.

Josh picked up one of the woman’s arms, grabbing her gently by the hand. Ray grabbed her other arm, holding her by the wrist. He didn’t want to grab her hand because her cloth glove might slip off while they were dragging her inside the cabin. She was pliable. If she was playing dead, she was doing a hell of a job.

He and Josh pulled the woman across the front porch, walking backwards to the front door, which they had left ajar. Ray kicked back gently with one foot, pushing the door open all the way. They pulled the woman in through the doorway, making sure to keep her head up off of the threshold, even though her head was flopped down, her hoodie still covering most of her head, her long hair dragging across the floorboards.

Ray was alarmed at how cold the woman’s clothes felt. He wasn’t wearing gloves and he could feel the iciness of her sweatshirt sleeve, and even her flesh underneath, drifting up into his fingers. He wondered if he had waited too long to bring her inside the cabin, if he had, in his cautiousness and wariness, let her slip away out on the front porch, curled up in a fetal position.

After they were inside, Luke darted in behind them, shutting the front door and locking it.

“Who’s that?”

Ray looked over at the bottom of the stairs where Mike stood, watching them.

“She passed out on the front porch, buddy,” Josh told Mike.

“Let’s get her over to the rug,” Ray said.

The woman moaned as they gently dragged her to the area rug in front of the couches.

“Get a heater for her,” Ray said.

“I’ll get the one out of the bedroom,” Luke said.

“Wait,” Ray told Luke. “She’s waking up. We might need you here.” He looked at Josh. “You get the heater.”

Josh seemed like he was going to say something sarcastic, but he didn’t; he was off and running to the bedroom he used to sleep in.

“Maybe a blanket,” Emma suggested.

Ray looked at Mike who had wandered over closer to them. “Would you help Josh? Get a blanket, a pillow, a bottle of water.”

Mike nodded, his expression serious now.

Ray knew Mike wanted to do something to help in some way, but Ray had an ulterior motive for getting Mike out of the living room—he still couldn’t be one hundred percent sure this woman wasn’t playing possum, ready to brandish a gun or other type of weapon now that she was inside. He couldn’t be entirely sure she wasn’t some kind of Trojan horse.

Luke seemed to be having the same thoughts Ray was.

They looked at each other.

Luke sighed. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“You probably have more experience at that kind of thing than any of us,” Ray said.

Luke didn’t argue. He crouched down next to the woman on the floor and nudged her shoulder, much like Josh had done outside on the front porch. He pushed her hood back, revealing her face and mop of long brown hair. She couldn’t be much older than a teenager, mid-twenties at the oldest.

“No DA mark,” Luke said.

That was one good sign.

“Look at her eye,” Luke said, pushing her hair back a little. “Her lips.”

Ray saw it. The woman had a deep cut at the corner of her lips and her left eye was bruised. The bruise could have come from the fall she’d taken on the front porch a little earlier, but the bruise looked like it had been there for a while, fading now, an older injury.

Luke patted the woman down quickly. He stood up and backed up toward Ray, standing beside him a moment later. “No weapons on her.”

Emma stood behind the couch. She turned to Ray. “Sounds like her breathing’s a little labored.”

“Like she might have an infection?” he asked her. “Pneumonia?”

“Maybe some fluid in her lungs,” Emma said, nodding.

Once again Ray felt a little guilty for making the woman stay out on the porch so long, but he had to be sure there wasn’t anyone else in the woods; he had his son to think about, and Emma, Luke, and Josh. They were all his responsibility. They were each other’s responsibility now.

Josh and Mike were back. Josh carried the small heater that looked almost like a small radiator from an apartment wall. He also had a length of electrical cord looped over his shoulder. Mike carried a blanket, a pillow, and a bottle of water.

A few minutes later they had the heater set up near the woman, a blanket draped over her, a pillow under her head, the bottle of water on the coffee table. She had moaned a little when they had lifted her head to slide the pillow underneath, her eyelids fluttering. She coughed, a rough and phlegmy cough.

“Can you hear me?” Ray asked her.

The woman didn’t say anything, but she scrunched her eyebrows.

“You’re inside our cabin. You were on the front porch this morning. I think you might have passed out.”

No response. Another cough.

“We’re friendly,” Ray told her. “You don’t have to worry about us. But we need to know who you are. Who you’re with.”

The woman kept her eyes closed, but she scrunched her eyebrows again, breathing heavier.

“My name’s Ray Daniels. What’s your name?”

She didn’t answer.

“My son’s name is Mike. Emma’s over there. And Luke and Josh. That’s all of us in the cabin. What’s your name?”

The woman whispered something.

Ray leaned in a little closer. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand you.” He looked at Mike. “The water.”

Mike handed Ray the bottle of water. Ray opened it and held it down close to the woman’s hand. “Here’s a bottle of water. Are you thirsty?”

The woman opened her eyes a little and looked down at her hands. She wrapped her fingers around the bottle and raised it up to her lips, her body trembling. She drank from the bottle, spilling some of it down the side of her face.

“Be careful,” Ray said. “Drink it slow. We have plenty more water.”

The woman slowed down, taking a few more sips, then she set the bottle of water down beside her, her body going limp again.

Ray took the bottle from her before she knocked it over.

The woman looked like she was going back to sleep again, but she whispered something again.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

But the woman was out, breathing heavily.

Ray turned to Emma who still stood behind the couch. “Did any of you hear what she just said?”

The others shook their heads, but Emma nodded. “I think she said, ‘all gone.’”

PART 2

CHAPTER 11

Kate

Kate Crawford collected the six eggs from the chicken coops on her parents’ property. Her parents were gone now, her brother and sister, too. Only the house was left . . . and these chickens.

She’d left the city over a week ago, but it felt more like months since Ted, the old man on top of the building, had helped her escape from the horde of rippers. And then he’d helped her get a truck and get out of there. And then when her truck had run out of gas, and she was sure she was dead, nine-year-old Brooke had saved her, leading her down into the tunnels under the building where her parents used to run a business. She had convinced Brooke to leave with her, getting attacked in an abandoned motel office by two Dark Angels, and then they had met Petra and Max at a clubhouse in a trailer park. They had agreed to travel together to the town she’d grown up in, to her parents’ home, because she believed—or wanted so badly to believe—that they were still alive.

But they weren’t. They were gone, most likely euthanized by Lisey Foster and the other crazy townspeople here in Astorville, somehow believing all of this was the will of God.

And now no one was left in this town, no one except the rippers that roamed the streets and Crazy Lisey a few miles down the road.

They had stayed a few nights in her parents’ house, resting up, eating some of the food and drinking the drinks they had taken from Lisey, who had hoarded the town’s supply after they were killed one by one, burned and used to attract rippers so they could be killed. Kate felt a little better after the few days of rest; she felt a little stronger, a little safer.

Even though they had plenty of food for at least a month, Kate was able to lure the chickens back to their coops with the feed she had taken from Lisey’s home. Six eggs wasn’t a lot, but it was going to be a feast for them.

She stood there for a moment with the basket on her arm. The chickens clucked inside the coop, flapping their wings, flustered by her presence. She felt bad taking their eggs, but she was a carnivore now, a scavenger, and she and the other survivors would be those things for a long time now; she might as well get used to the idea if she wanted to keep on surviving. Collecting eggs had been a chore of hers when she had lived with her overly-religious parents. She’d never liked this chore when she’d been a child, and she still didn’t like it.

The morning was cold, the sky overcast. It had rained a little yesterday and they had collected some water in the plastic buckets to filter and boil later on the charcoal grill. Kate wasn’t looking forward to drinking the rainwater, but they needed to collect the water while they had the chance. Petra wanted to go back to Lisey’s house and take more food and drinks. Petra was also antsy to get back on the road, to start traveling south before the winter really set in.

The rippers had stayed away from the town for the last few days, maybe because Lisey and the townspeople had poisoned themselves as they turned into rippers, burning some of the bodies and attracting more rippers. Maybe the rippers were smart enough to stay away for a while, but they wouldn’t stay away forever. Eventually they’d get hungry and desperate enough to raid this town.

Lisey and the other townspeople (including her parents, Kate was sure) believed this was the Tribulation mentioned in the Bible, and that the Dragon, who Lisey admitted she’d seen in her dreams just like Kate and the others had, was the Antichrist that the Bible had prophesized.

Maybe the religious teachings that had been pounded into her went deeper and were more entrenched than she had ever realized because Kate felt the lure of that story, of God controlling all of this, that all of this was the Final Test and the Tribulation for those left behind, a struggle and a last chance at salvation, a battle between the scattered good and the increasingly overwhelming forces of darkness.

The idea of the Rapture and the End Times were nothing new to Kate. She’d heard the warnings many times as a child. The pastor of their church had preached about the signs of the End Times, warning that we were all living in the End Times now. Her family had believed in that whole-heartedly.

But not Kate. She couldn’t wait to get out of this town. She had studied her ass off in school to get a scholarship for college and her goal was to become a professor of anthropology. And she’d accomplished her goals, teaching at Duke University. She’d been happy not so long ago, before the Collapse, before the End Times. She’d seen the signs: the economy nosediving, social unrest, persecution, the erosion of laws and kindness, wars, droughts, famines, disease.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Didn’t they have something to do with the Tribulation? Didn’t one of them bring a plague?

She couldn’t be sure, and she needed to stop thinking about it.

A chill ran through her and she shivered, her breath misting up in front of her face. She had refused to believe in the scary bedtime stories of the End Times, but deep down inside those stories had always frightened her.

This wasn’t the Rapture; it was just a plague, like so many other plagues in human history. She knew about human history. She had studied it. She was a scientist and she knew there were rational answers for things.

What was the rational answer for the dreams she shared with the others, the people they all saw in their dreams, the blind woman who glowed like an angel and talked to them in their dreams? What was the rational explanation for the Dragon and his group of Dark Angels who obviously followed him to the extreme point of carving the letters D and A into their foreheads?

Nothing about this felt rational.

She looked at the chicken coop again. She would let the chickens go when they decided to get back on the road and head down to Florida. Petra was pushing to get going, but Max was resisting. She knew Max had grown comfortable here because they hadn’t seen any signs of rippers, Dark Angels, or any other survivors for a few days. The town was remote, nestled up in the mountains of western North Carolina. But eventually the rippers would come. And eventually the Dark Angels would find them. The Dragon would eventually be able to tell where they were from their dreams, and then he would send his legion of soldiers and followers after them.

“Stop it,” she whispered to herself, startling herself by speaking out loud.

She looked around again, jumpy and jittery. The field where her father had planted crops was bare now, most of the corps already harvested well over a month ago before the Collapse, fruits and vegetables sold and/or traded. At least the townspeople would have had a lot of fresh food while they waited for each other to turn into rippers. Maybe that’s why Lisey had so much food in her house. They had taken so much from Lisey, but they had also left so much behind.

The day was brightening, but the sun hadn’t made it up over the mountains on the horizon just yet. It didn’t feel like the sun was bringing much warmth with it today. There seemed to be just the faint smell of smoke in the air, like something might be burning. Kate guessed that fires were going to happen, and there would be no one to put them out.

Kate walked back to the house, to the back porch, and then she went inside.

CHAPTER 12

Kate

“We need to leave pretty soon,” Petra said as they ate their scrambled eggs with corned beef hash and slices of bread. It was the last of their bread.

Max had boiled a little of the rainwater on the charcoal grill on the back porch to use for washing the dishes and washing their faces and hands. The smell of the charcoal seemed so strong as they cooked, an invisible wave reaching out from their temporary home, attracting any rippers within a mile radius. But they still hadn’t heard a single screech or call from the rippers so far this morning.

“It’s going to get cold, and we’re going to freeze to death in here during the winter,” Petra went on, staring at Max.

“I know,” he said.

“We’ll find a better place down south,” Petra said. “Maybe an island where the rippers can’t get to us.”

Kate wondered if the rippers could swim. If rippers used to know how to swim before they were rippers, could they still swim now? Was it like a muscle-memory thing, just like walking, running, and eating seemed to be for them? Would they really be any safer on an island than in the mountains? Would they really be safe anywhere? She remembered seeing the thousands and thousands of rippers in the city when she had stayed the night on the roof with Ted. She was sure there were still hordes of rippers like that, waves of them leaving the cities as they ran out of food and water. When they had escaped the trailer park a few days ago, they’d seen a small horde of rippers, but she was sure there were much bigger hordes than that. She could imagine thousands of hungry rippers swimming to their island like a school of fish, surrounding it. And was Florida really such a good idea? It was the third most populated state in America—there would be a lot of rippers there.

They had talked about many of the rippers dying off during the winter. Kate had gone into professor mode yesterday when she had lectured on how the cold might kill many of them off. Or starvation or dehydration. The easy food was quickly running out. Then the rippers would have no other choice but to hunt, or even turn on each other.

“They’ll breed,” Petra had suggested.

Yes, that was possible. But how many rippers would die during childbirth? Would the rippers care for their young like wild animals did? To Kate, the rippers seemed like the primitive species of humans she had studied, something before the homo sapiens, or even before the homo erectus, a missing link between modern humans and the primates we had evolved from millions of years ago. Now she was actually seeing what she had studied for so many years, an ancient species, the sudden devolution of humans, the prehistoric here now.

“Disease will dwindle their numbers,” Kate had said. “Even things we take for granted like salmonella and influenza, botulism and pneumonia. They will have accidents, break bones and injure themselves, get infections. If we wait through the winter, even a few years of winters, then their numbers should dwindle significantly.”

“If so many are going to freeze to death,” Max said, “then wouldn’t it make more sense to go north instead of south?”

“Yes,” Petra said. “Maybe. But maybe both of you are right. Maybe we go south for a few years and wait it out, let nature do its thing and kill off most of the rippers. Then we travel north again, somewhere way up there where almost all of the rippers will be dead.”

“But the rippers might not die off quickly enough in Florida,” Kate said. “The winters won’t be cold enough to kill them. Yes, diseases will get some of them, a lot of them, and hunger, but they might thrive better in places like Florida and the south.”

Petra seemed crushed that her idea was shot down.

“And the rippers may begin migrating south.”

“You think they’re that smart?” Petra asked.

“No. Not smart, more like instinctual. I think a lot of what they do is instinctual.” She thought of how humans had survived in their early years. Even though humans had evolved from apes, they didn’t have the natural strength and agility apes had. And humans didn’t have sharp claws and teeth like some animals did. Humans had been a fairly delicate species, but like many mammals, they lived in social groups and mated to survive. But it was a wonder that primitive humans had survived as long as they had. It seemed like they had found a way to survive. Life was tenacious, and Kate wondered if these rippers would find ways to survive hunger and the cold weather, even hibernating somehow through the freezing winter. It wasn’t that preposterous of an idea; humans weren’t that different genetically than bears, and bears hibernated. Somehow Early Man had survived winters, survived long-term hunger, survived diseases, survived predators. Maybe they could do it again. Maybe the rippers were doing it right now.

“Yeah, maybe we go north and wait out the rippers,” Petra said. “But how do we survive with no fires? No heat? Fires and smoke would bring the rippers. How would we stay warm? How would we cook food? Boil water?”

“Maybe we find a more remote place up north or around here,” Kate suggested. “Meet somewhere in the middle. Travel a little farther south, maybe southern Alabama or northern Florida, in the panhandle, somewhere where there’s adequate rainfall but where the winters aren’t too harsh, somewhere remote enough and far enough away from the cities so that there will be less rippers. Find a large building to hole up inside. Maybe even a place underground.”

Petra nodded—she seemed to like the idea.

Even Max seemed to be thinking Kate’s suggestion over.

“Then we should do it,” Petra said. “Make plans to go there. We just need to get out of here. I feel like we’ve pushed our luck enough here.”

Kate didn’t answer Petra. She glanced at Max, who was silent, and then she looked at Brooke, who only seemed to be half-listening to them, drawing again in her sketch book, Tiger curled up beside her.

“Come on,” Petra said. “We need to go. We can’t stay here much longer. We need to at least make some plans. We can’t wait a few more weeks until we’re too low on food. Right now we’ve got food, drinks, ammo for our guns, medicine. All we need is some more gas for the truck.”

Max sighed, looking away for a moment.

“She’s right,” Kate said. As much as Kate hated to admit it, she’d grown as comfortable here as Max had. But this place was no fortress.

“I still think we need to go back down to that old lady’s house before we leave,” Petra continued. “Stock up on some more supplies. See if she’s got some gas. Maybe a siphoning hose. Make a list of the things we need and get them from her. She’s got more than enough for one person.”

“No,” Kate said, surprised by the strength and conviction in her voice. “We’ve got enough food and drinks for at least a month, maybe two months if we conserve wisely. I think we should just leave Lisey alone.”

“She’s right about that,” Max said. “It will be too dangerous to get more stuff from Lisey. She’ll see us coming this time. She’s got a lot of rifles in her house. She might even be expecting us to do just that, waiting at a window to pick us off as we come up to her house.”

Petra didn’t argue.

“One more day,” Max said. “We’ll go into town, try to find some gas and gas cans. Get a few of them at least.”

Max had already siphoned the gas out of Kate’s dad’s pickup truck, but he seemed to want to go into town and find more gas to top off the SUV’s tank and to fill the two cans they’d found in the garage.

“We can find gas on the way,” Petra said.

They were quiet for a moment while Max thought it over.

“Okay,” Max said. “Okay. We should start packing everything up. We could leave either this afternoon or early tomorrow morning. I don’t want to drive at night. Tomorrow morning would probably be better. We could get the truck packed up today, though.”

Petra smiled, about to agree with Max’s plan. But before she could get the words out, a booming noise sounded from right outside the house.

CHAPTER 13

Kate

Kate raced to the front windows of the house. Max and Petra were at the other window. They both had their pistols in their hands. Brooke was on her feet, the cat had been startled awake by the noise outside.

“What was that?” Brooke asked, getting closer to Kate, only a few steps away from her.

“Get back,” Kate whispered at her.

Kate looked back out the window, on her tippy toes so she could see above the plywood Max had screwed in front of the glass. Beyond the front yard, out in the middle of the street, Lisey stood with her shotgun in her hands. It had begun to rain, just a cold drizzle, but Lisey didn’t seem to notice or care. Her gray hair was matted down from the rain, her clothes wet and sticking to her skinny body. And even from the window, Kate could see the madness in the woman’s eyes.

“Katie!” Lisey called out. “I know you and your heathen friends are in there!”

“Shit,” Petra muttered. “We should’ve killed that woman when we had the chance. Put her out of her misery.”

“I’ve burned my house,” Lisey screamed. “It’s on fire right now. I set fire to the Bennetts’ home too.”

Kate remembered smelling the faint smell of smoke earlier when she’d gotten the eggs from the chicken coop.

“They’ll be here soon!” Lisey yelled. “The rippers will smell the smoke. They’ll see it in the air! And then they’ll come for you! I can hear them coming right now!”

“Shit, she burned all that food,” Petra said. “I told you we should’ve taken more.”

“We need to get packed right now,” Max said.

Kate kept watching out the window. Lisey pointed her shotgun up at the air and pulled the trigger. It was the booming noise they’d heard before. The shotgun blast seemed to echo through the valley, shaking the old bones of her parents’ home.

“Can you hear them?” Lisey asked with an insane smile.

Kate could—she could hear the rippers now, at least she thought she’d heard a screech in the distance. And then another.

“Rippers,” Brooke whispered. She was almost right behind Kate now.

Max darted to the dining room, collecting the cardboard boxes. He had backed their SUV right up to the side of the home last night, away from the view of the street and closer to her dad’s old pickup truck, but the path was clear to the street—they could drive across the front yard and right out onto Appleton Road where Lisey waited with the shotgun, then they could drive to Creekbend Drive.

“I’m waiting right here for the rippers!” Lisey yelled. “I’m going to let them take me. I’ll be with Bud again. I’ll be with your family again. I’ll tell them about you, Katie. You can take that to the bank. I’m gonna let them know all about you and your friends in there.”

“I could shoot her right now,” Petra told Max. “Right from the front porch.”

“No,” Max said. “Only if she attacks. We’re not animals. We’re not like her.”

A ripper called out. They sounded so much closer now.

“We need to get going,” Max said again with a cardboard box in his hands. “Now.”

Kate tore her eyes away from the front window as Lisey fired off another blast into the air.

“I’ve got a lot of shells,” Lisey screamed from outside. “I’m gonna bring all of them rippers right to you!”

Brooke’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. Kate hurried into the dining room and grabbed the small cardboard box with a lid Max had found for Tiger. Brooke had helped him decorate the box with holes in the lid and a small towel in the bottom for Tiger to lie on. It had become his bed for the last few days, so he was used to the box now.

Kate took the box to Brooke. “Get Tiger in his bed and put the lid on. Hold the lid down tight, but don’t try to carry the box, okay? Someone else will carry him.”

Brooke nodded. It didn’t take her long to get Tiger into the box—he was spooked by the shotgun blasts from outside and seemed more than willing to hide in his bed. Brooke held the lid in place while Kate used a few pieces of duct tape to hold the lid down.

Max stacked their boxes and bags by the back door, and Kate added Tiger and his temporary home to their stash.

“I told you we should’ve left a few days ago,” Petra said.

“Okay,” Max said.

“I told you the rippers would get here eventually.”

“Yes, you’re right. Is that what you want to hear?”

Kate folded up a few blankets and stuffed some bedsheets down into two pillowcases. Their stack of boxes and bags was getting large. She wasn’t sure all of it was going to fit into the back of the SUV.

“We need to go with what we have,” Max said.

Another blast from Lisey’s shotgun outside.

More calls and roars from the rippers. It sounded like there were so many of them—a tidal wave of them coming. Panic surged in Kate. They needed to leave now, but she couldn’t help feeling like she was forgetting something.

Max was out the back door and onto the back porch. He had a cardboard box under one arm and his gun in his hand. He raced outside to unlock the back hatch of their SUV.

Let’s start stacking the boxes and bags by the screen door,” Kate said.

Petra nodded. Brooke grabbed the box Tiger was in even though Kate had told her to let someone else carry the cat—but Tiger was her number one priority right now.

Max was back at the screen door with his gun tucked down into the waistband of his pants, his hoodie wet, his gray hair glistening with the droplets of rain, his eyes so wide and bulging, his mouth open, breathing hard.

What are we doing? Kate thought. We’re wasting time loading up this food and drinks, wasting those precious seconds while the rippers close in on us.

And then a horrible thought came to her: What if Lisey had done something to their truck? She could have flattened the tires or blasted a hole in the radiator. But thankfully, Lisey’s mind wasn’t all there anymore, and she might not be thinking straight.

But Lisey would see them now when they ran to the truck.

“Let’s go,” Max said. “Just grab what you can. We gotta go.”

They were all out the back door, rushing to the back of the SUV.

“Trying to get away before the rippers get here?” Lisey yelled as she ran across the front yard, her shotgun aimed right at the front of the truck.

Max’s eyes widened as he shoved his box into the back of the SUV and pulled his pistol out.

“I’ll cover you,” Petra yelled. She was right beside Max in a flash. “Move!”

Lisey lowered her shotgun just a little. She was only thirty feet away now. But she didn’t shoot, like she knew she didn’t have the range. Or like she was waiting for something.

She smiled.

The rippers were here.

CHAPTER 14

Max

Max felt numb. He’d never been one to freeze up when it came to danger, and even as rough as his childhood had been, he’d faced more danger in the last two weeks than he had in his entire life. But for just a second he froze when he saw Lisey with the shotgun aimed at them, and when he heard the rippers coming. For a second he didn’t feel like himself, like none of this was real, like he was trapped in one of those nightmares he’d been having so frequently. He wanted to act, to move, to think, but he just couldn’t.

But then he glanced at Petra, and then at Kate, and then at Brooke who stood near the back corner of the SUV. Brooke’s eyes were wide with fear, but there was hope in them, a hope that he and Petra were going to do something to help her, to save her. He saw that plea in her eyes and he acted. He’d always been a fighter, and if this was the day he was going to die, then he’d go out fighting.

Petra darted right past him while he’d been focused for just a second on Kate and Brooke. She got to the front of the SUV, shooting at Lisey twice.

“Petra, wait!”

Lisey shot back, the roar of her shotgun drowning out the sounds of the rippers for just a second.

Max grabbed the doorhandle on the rear door, opening the door wide. “Get in!” he yelled at Brooke.

Brooke jumped into the back seat. Kate closed the hatch and turned toward the back of the house, then she looked back at Max, locking eyes with him for a split second. “They’re coming around the back!”

“Get in!” Max roared at her.

Kate was around the other side of the truck. She got into the passenger side of the truck and slammed the door shut.

Time seemed to slow down for Max as he opened the driver’s door to get inside the SUV. Petra was a few feet away from the truck now, shooting at Lisey a few more times.

Max had no idea if Petra’s shots had hit Lisey or not—she was still standing and aiming the shotgun at them, that insane smile on her face and the insane light in her eyes—but it didn’t really matter because the first of the rippers were getting to her.

Max had the key in his hand without remembering when he’d taken it out of his pocket; he slipped it into the ignition, twisted. For just a second he didn’t hear anything, but then he realized that the truck had started but he couldn’t hear it over the roar and footfalls of the rippers, over their screeches, and Lisey’s wails of pain and terror. The dashboard lights were lit up.

“They’re coming,” Brooke squealed, turned around in her seat and staring out through the rear window.

Max saw the blurs and darts of movement from behind the house, he heard the pounding of their running feet, he saw them running through the fields. They seemed to be swarming in from every direction on that side of the house.

“Go, go, go,” Kate yelled.

Max shifted into drive and stomped his foot down on the gas pedal. The truck shot forward, down the side lawn, still close to the house.

Max drove to the corner of the front of the house; he veered to the right toward the gravel driveway and collections of shrubs and bushes, and skidded to a stop. He jabbed his thumb down on the button to roll his window down, yelling at Petra: “Get in!”

Petra was at the back door on the driver’s side in a flash, jumping inside and slamming the door shut.

“There are hundreds of them coming,” Petra said, breathing hard, her gun still clenched in her hand. “Maybe thousands of them.”

Max pushed the button down for the door locks and then stomped on the gas pedal again. The back tires spun for a moment in the muddy ground, then gained traction. The truck shot toward the mass of bushes, away from the horde that was coming, the horde that had swarmed all over Lisey, dragging her down.

Petra was right—there were hundreds of them, their caravan stretched all the way down the street, but they were fanning out as they got to the house, going around the house like it was a rock in the middle of a river. Some of them were across the street: men, women, children. Many held some kind of weapon: kitchen knives, crowbars, golf clubs, tire irons, pieces of wood, chunks of rock and concrete.

Lisey twisted and fought as she was pulled down by dozens of hands. She screamed, her words unintelligible now. Her clothes and hair were torn away in strips. One of the rippers wrenched the shotgun out of her hands and struck her in the knee with it, driving her all the way down to the ground. A woman, maybe even a teenager, was on Lisey’s back, hacking at her with a meat cleaver, digging her fingers into the wounds to pull skin back and tear muscle away. Others were digging at other wounds, opening them wider, peeling skin away in sheets.

“Go, go, go,” Kate said, muttering the words like a mantra.

Max looked away from Lisey—he couldn’t watch anymore. The rippers had grabbed the woman’s arms and legs like she was on a medieval torture rack, about to be pulled apart. He focused on the street only twenty feet ahead of them, but their narrow gap of escape was filling quickly with rippers.

A rock pelted the back door of their truck, bouncing away.

Petra rolled down her window, shooting five times at the approaching mob, driving a few of them back, but not enough.

Max ran into one ripper, and then another, knocking both of them back and out of the way. He was on the street, driving too fast as he cut the wheel, the back end sliding, the tires spinning and trying to find traction on the wet pavement.

Petra shot again and then barked out a scream as a rock hit her in the head, knocking her back into the vehicle, her gun slipping out of her hand and falling down to the floorboard.

“Petra!” Max yelled.

No answer.

“She’s hurt,” Brooke cried.

Max couldn’t worry about that right now. Even though he was already on the street, the rippers were all around them. They seemed to be pouring in from the sides, like they had run farther down the other side of the road to head them off, clogging their escape route.

He gunned the gas, the six-cylinder motor roaring, yet also making a loud, unhealthy ticking sound. Rippers bounced off of the front of the truck, falling away to the left and the right. Max only got a glimpse of their wet, bloodstained faces, filthy and wild hair matted down from the drizzling rain, clothing hanging like rags, dark stains all over them. Knives and sticks bounced off of the hood and grill. One piece of wood bounced off the windshield, cracking it along the bottom.

“Go, go, go, go!” Kate yelled. “Just keep going!”

What else could he do? He kept his foot jammed down on the gas, the pedal down to the floor. But it felt like they were driving through mud, like a force was sucking them down, pulling them back into the horde. Fists and weapons beat at the rear of the SUV, and Max wondered if the rippers were clinging to the vehicle, their weight holding the truck back, the tires spinning uselessly on the wet street.

And more of them were coming.

But maybe it had been an illusion, because Max could feel the Honda SUV picking up speed as more and more rippers bounced out of the way. He ran some of them over, the truck bumping along. But there weren’t enough of them yet to bog the truck down. And it seemed like the wet pavement was helping, like it was easier for the truck to push the fallen ones out of the way and to the sides, like a cowcatcher on the front of an old steam locomotive.

The seconds seemed to stretch out forever as rippers grabbed at their truck, arms and hands trying to reach in through Petra’s open window, sticks jabbing in, knife blades. Somehow Petra had fallen far enough back to be out of the way, and somehow Brooke had pulled her back down onto her, farther down onto the back seat to be out of the way of their grasps. But as their truck picked up speed, the rippers’ arms were smacked away from the open window—Max even heard the snapping of bones and joints, screams of agony. He pushed the button down on his door to roll Petra’s window up.

The herd was thinning out. Max saw the gray daylight ahead. Some of the rippers were even backing away now as he drove the truck faster and faster.

They were in the clear now.

CHAPTER 15

Kate

Kate felt like she could finally breathe again. Those few moments with the rippers around them were just a blur of angry faces and fists, weapons swinging. Max was driving even faster down the road now, leaving her parents’ home behind, leaving the herd of rippers behind, the trees whipping by out her passenger window.

“Slow down a little,” she told him.

He was gripping the steering wheel so hard, facing forward, his mouth a thin line amid his gray facial hair. He glanced at her with eyes of shock, and life seemed to be coming back into his eyes. He nodded, showing that he’d heard her, but it seemed like he had to force himself to lift his foot up off of the gas pedal.

“Where do we go?” Max asked her.

Kate didn’t even understand what he was asking for a moment, unsure if he was talking about traveling south or north.

“Where does this road lead to?” he asked.

“Petra’s hurt,” Brooke said from the back seat, her voice hitching. “She won’t wake up.”

Tiger meowed from the back of the truck, a sickly sound coming from the cardboard box he was in.

Kate’s mind was spinning—there were so many things she needed to focus on right now. Too many.

“I don’t want to keep driving down this road if it ends in a dead end and we have to circle back,” Max said. “The rippers will be on us by then if we have to turn back around.” He was talking so fast his words were running together.

“She won’t wake up,” Brooke said again. “She’s bleeding.”

Tiger howled.

First thing first, Kate told herself. Petra was hurt, and they would need to find out how serious it was, but she had to calm Max down first. They were still on Appleton Road because Max hadn’t had time to turn right or left onto Creekbend Drive. Where did Appleton Road go? What other road would they eventually get to? It had been so long since she’d been here, since she’d been down this road. Was it a county road? A road that led to Perry—the nearest town of any size. Yes, Perry. That’s where they used to go once a month to do shopping when she was a kid. She had loved those monthly trips into “town,” as her parents had phrased it. They would often eat at a fast food restaurant, even ordering desserts. There was a mall with a book store in it, and her dad would let her roam around in the store for a few minutes. But she never bought anything there. She’d never been allowed to.

“Yeah,” Kate told Max. “Just keep going down this road. You’ll come to a county road.” She almost said that the road led to Perry, but they wouldn’t want to go there; Perry was much larger, it would probably be crawling with rippers. They wanted to try to avoid as many towns as they could.

The map. She checked her hoodie pockets. She had the envelope with her mother’s letter in it, but not the map. It was in one of the boxes in the back. At least she hoped it was. When they’d been ready to leave the house only minutes ago, she had felt that she was forgetting something. And now she had a sinking feeling that that thing was the map.

“Okay, good,” Max said. “At least we’re not going to get cornered.”

“Petra,” Brooke said, still crying. “Petra, wake up.”

Max glanced in the rearview mirror.

“I’ll check on her,” Kate said. She climbed into the back a little so she could get a look at Petra.

Brooke’s face was shiny with tears. Her drawing tablet was crammed down beside her between the seat and the door.

Tiger was still meowing from the back. Kate wondered if the cat might be hurt.

Petra lay slumped against Brooke, her face covered with blood, her short and spikey hair wet with rain and more blood.

“Let me get her sitting back up,” Kate told Brooke. She wanted to get Petra up off of Brooke.

After a moment, Kate had Petra sitting back up and then leaning against her door, her head hitting the window with a soft thump. Her hands were limp in her lap, her gun on the floorboard along with the rock that had struck her.

Kate looked at Brooke. “We’ll all be okay.” Her words sounded dishonest to her own ears, a platitude said to calm kids down. “Are you hurt?”

Brooke looked down at her hands and her lap, her eyes wide with shock, a blank look on her face. She shook her head no.

“Does your neck hurt?” Kate asked. “Your back?”

Brooke shook her head no.

“Do you think you can unbuckle your seatbelt and check on Tiger?”

Brooke nodded, unfastening her seatbelt with shaking hands. She was up and over the back of the seat in a flash, in a similar positon that Kate was in. Her hands and arms moved frantically as she searched through fallen boxes and bags to find Tiger’s box.

“How is she?” Max asked.

Kate turned her attention back to Petra.

Petra’s eyes were still closed, her skin smooth, her constant scowl gone for once. She looked so much younger now. Was she unconscious? Dead? There was so much blood.

“What happened?” Max asked, that panic beginning to creep back into his voice again. “Was it the rock? She’s not shot, is she? That crazy old lady shot at Petra when she was at the front of the truck. Some of the buckshot might have gotten her.”

“I don’t know,” Kate snapped. She wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road and let her worry about Petra, but she didn’t. “Give me a second.”

Brooke was tearing at tape and pieces of cardboard, and then she had the box open. “Tiger,” she cooed.

The cat was free and he jumped out of the back and onto the seat between Brooke and Petra, his ears flat and a miffed expression on his face, but he didn’t seem terribly injured in any way. Brooke turned back around and sat back down, pulling Tiger closer to her, holding him.

Kate felt that Tiger was a good distraction for Brooke. She focused on Petra again, feeling for a pulse in her wrist, but she couldn’t find one.

“Kate, how is she?” Max demanded.

There it was—a pulse. It was weak, but it was there.

“She’s not dead, is she?”

“No.” Kate felt tears in her eyes. “No. She’s alive, but she’s unconscious.”

Max breathed out a sigh of relief.

Yes, Petra was alive, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t still in danger; she could have some kind of brain injury, swelling in her brain—she could even be in a coma.

“I don’t see any county road,” Max said. “I don’t see anything except fields and woods. Hardly any houses. There are more woods up ahead. And more mountains. You sure this leads to a county road?”

Max was talking fast again, rambling.

Kate tried to think of how far away the county road would be, trying to remember how long it used to take them to get to Perry. Forty-five minutes? An hour? She really couldn’t remember.

Kate felt Petra’s arm twitch in her hands. And then her eyelids fluttered as she moaned.

“Petra,” Kate said, her voice loud and commanding. “Petra, can you hear me?”

Petra’s eyes opened just a little more and she moaned again. She winced and closed her eyes, her breathing heavier now, her pulse a little stronger.

“Brooke,” Kate said, “do you think you could look for any of the medical stuff in the back?”

She gave Kate a blank look, still holding Tiger close to her.

“Some bandages. Gauze. Tape. Aspirin.”

Brooke’s eyes lit up. She let go of Tiger and was back up and over the seat again, digging through the boxes. Tiger growled lowly, his ears still flat, bracing himself on the seat like he was expecting to be jostled around again in the moving car.

“Petra, are you awake?” Kate asked.

She just moaned again, not moving much.

Brooke was back down in the seat. She had a pack of gauze pads, some white adhesive tape, a towel. “This was all I could find.”

“Thanks,” Kate said, taking the towel from her. She dabbed the towel at Petra’s face, wiping some of the blood away, trying to see where the blood was coming from.

A loud popping noise sounded from the front of the truck, then a loud hiss.

“Oh shit,” Max said.

CHAPTER 16

Kate

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Max said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Kate didn’t know what Max was so upset about, but she had a feeling it had something to do with that popping and hissing noise, something to do with the truck, because it was beginning to slow down.

Petra’s eyes opened again for just a second, like she’d heard those popping and hissing noises, like she’d known instinctively what they meant.

“Can you find me a bottle of water?” Kate asked Brooke.

“We blew something,” Max said.

Kate looked back around to the front and saw the steam pouring out from under the hood, the road in front of them almost invisible through the haze.

“Temperature’s in the red,” Max said as he slowed down to a crawl, pulling over onto the side of the road.

“Is it the radiator?” Kate asked. It was the first thing she could think of.

“I don’t know,” Max said. “It could be a blown hose if we’re lucky. Maybe we could tape it up after the engine cools down.”

How long will that take? How long before those rippers caught up to them? She wished they had turned right onto Creekbend Drive when they’d left her parents’ home, but it hadn’t been like Max had had much of a chance to really think about where he was going—he’d been driving in a blind panic. And Kate hadn’t been much of a help in the navigating department. And she was pretty sure she’d left their map behind at the house.

“I got some water,” Brooke said, handing the bottle to Kate.

“Thank you,” Kate said. She wondered if the box with the other first-aid stuff was in the back. Maybe they’d left that behind, too. They’d gotten antibiotics, painkillers, antiseptics, and other medications from Lisey’s house—things Petra might really need right now. They hadn’t been prepared to leave; they should have had all of their most important stuff ready to go. But they’d been caught unprepared, and they had just grabbed a few boxes and bags in a panic when they had run out to the truck.

Petra had been right. They should have left a day or two ago. They should have been ready for something like this. And maybe she’d even been right about going back to Lisey’s house and taking more of her stuff. But Kate had wanted to do the right thing; she’d wanted to leave Lisey with enough supplies to survive. But Lisey hadn’t wanted to survive; all she’d wanted was revenge and to sacrifice herself and go to Heaven.

Now Lisey was gone, and all of the stuff in her house was either burnt up or taken by the rippers.

Kate poured out a little of the water onto the corner of the towel and wiped at Petra’s face gently.

Petra moaned and moved a little, her eyelids fluttering again.

“I’m going to check it out,” Max said from the driver’s seat after putting the truck in park and turning off the motor. “Try to see what’s wrong.” He opened his door and got out.

Petra pushed at Kate’s hand, moaning again.

It was too difficult to clean Petra’s face from between the front seats. Kate crawled back into the passenger seat and got out of the truck. Max already had the hood up, staring down at the engine as a wall of steam drifted up around him. There was a puddle of water underneath the front of the truck.

“I’m much more knowledgeable about houses than cars,” Max said.

Kate left Max to the engine. She went around Max, walking through the mist of steam, then to Petra’s door. She opened the door gently, catching Petra before she could fall out.

“Petra, can you hear me?”

Petra’s eyes were open, but she didn’t look like she was focusing on anything.

Tiger raised his head up, curious about the door being opened, but maybe too scared to escape just now. Brooke, sensing Tiger’s possible plan to flee, grabbed him and put him on her lap.

“Petra?” Kate said as she wiped her face, getting most of the blood off. There weren’t any cuts or damage to her face; it looked like her wound was somewhere in her hair. It was still bleeding, but only a little now, just one line running down the side of her face.

Petra’s eyes seemed to clear. She looked right at Kate.

“Here, drink this,” Kate said, handing Petra the bottle of water.

Petra took a sip and handed the bottle back. She touched her face, then the wound on her scalp, wincing.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Petra gave a small nod. “One of those fuckers hit me with a rock.”

“You know who I am?”

“You’re Kate.”

“You know where we are?”

“In hell.”

Kate smiled. Petra seemed to be returning to her old form. Kate handed Petra the bloodstained towel. “Here. Hold it against the cut on your head.”

Petra took the towel, wadded it up and pressed it to the side of her head.

Kate knew she should check Petra for a concussion, at least ask a few more questions. But what were they supposed to do if Petra had a concussion? She didn’t seem to be in excruciating pain, and she’d only been knocked out for a few minutes. She seemed to be able to move all of her limbs okay and her faculties seemed to be all there. Maybe her injury wasn’t too serious; maybe she’d just had her bell rung a little from the rock.

“I’m going to look in the back for some of the first-aid stuff,” Kate told Petra.

“Find me a bottle of tequila, would you?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Petra pulled the towel away and sat up a little straighter, looking around. “Why are we stopped? Where are we?”

“Something’s wrong with the truck,” Kate told her.

Petra looked out the windshield, the open hood blocking most of the view. “How far away from the rippers are we?”

Kate saw that Petra was already on the defensive, preparing for another attack. Kate couldn’t help looking at the woods all around them, looking for any rippers hiding in the brush. She opened the driver’s door and pushed the button to open the back hatch. She closed the driver’s door and then went to the back.

After a few minutes of moving boxes and bags around, reorganizing things as best she could, she realized that they’d not only forgotten the box with the medical supplies in it, and the map, but also their backpacks. None of them had any kind of pack to take with them if they needed to walk, which it looked like they would need to do eventually. They could take some of the food and a few drinks, but only what they could carry. She was already imagining them taking turns carrying a cardboard box of food and drinks. And Brooke wasn’t going to let them leave Tiger behind. Another box they would have to carry.

Kate was already trying to figure out how she was going to tell Brooke that they would have to let Tiger go and hope that the cat followed them when they left. She had a quick mental picture of Brooke screaming in the middle of the road, throwing a full-blown temper tantrum if they didn’t take Tiger with them, her screams like a siren drawing any nearby rippers toward them.

Damn, Max. Why did you have to find that damn cat?

Kate closed the hatch with Brooke staring at her over the back of the seat, almost like she was reading her mind about the cat. And who knew? Maybe she was. Would that be any stranger than all of the other things that had happened so far?

She went to the front of the truck, glancing at the woods all around them. Everything was still quiet, even the hissing sound from the engine had died down. The steam had dissipated quite a bit, enough for Max to inspect the engine more closely.

“Petra seems to be okay for now,” Kate told Max, starting off with the good news. “I think the rock just knocked her out for a few minutes. She’s got a gash on her head, but I don’t think it’s too serious. Except for the threat of infection. And that brings me to the bad news.”

Max just stared at her, letting out a long exhale. His expression said: Go ahead, lay it on me.

“In our haste to leave, we didn’t bring the box with the medical supplies in it.”

“Great.”

“And I think we left the maps behind.”

“Awesome.”

“And our backpacks.”

Max looked surprised. “Our packs?”

Kate nodded. “I don’t even remember where they were.”

Max seemed to be trying to remember. “God, this just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

Kate could see that Max was having the same thoughts she’d had only minutes ago, trying to figure out how they were going to take food and drinks with them, how they were going to carry them. And Tiger.

“We should’ve been ready,” Max said in a low voice. “We should’ve listened to Petra.”

Kate nodded. No sense in beating themselves up about it now. “What about the truck? Please give me some good news in exchange for all of the bad news.”

“Might be good news,” Max said. “See this hose right here on top? See that tear?”

Kate saw it; the hose was practically severed.

“It ripped somehow. I don’t know how.”

“So we can fix it? Tape it up?”

“I don’t know. That’s a pretty big tear.” He hesitated for a moment.

But Kate could tell he wanted to say something else. “What is it? There’s more, isn’t there?”

He nodded and crouched down in front of the grill of the truck. “There’s a lot of damage to the front.”

“The rippers—”

“I think Lisey might have got the radiator with some of the buckshot when she shot at Petra.”

“Shit.”

“She didn’t hit Petra, did she?”

Kate wasn’t sure. She hadn’t checked anywhere else on Petra except for the wound on her head. “I don’t think so.” But Kate was going to go back and ask Petra, make sure she wasn’t hurt anywhere else.

“What are we going to do?” Kate asked.

“I can’t fix that hose. I could try to tape it, but it will only blow again.”

“Can we tape it enough to drive a few more miles?”

Max shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. We could drive a little down the road and look for another vehicle. But it doesn’t look like there’s much around here. But I’m not sure we’re going to make it very far before the engine seizes up. It already got pretty hot. Might not even start again.”

Kate glanced back down at the engine.

“I could walk,” Max said. “I could go alone and try to find a vehicle, or try to find a hose and some tools. You guys could stay here with the food.”

“No,” Kate said. “We need to stay together. If we’re going to walk, then we all need to go. We need to get ready, decide what we can carry. You know Brooke is going to want to bring Tiger with us in his box.” She stared at Max, hoping he could sense her displeasure about having Tiger with them.

“Is Petra okay to walk?” Max asked.

“I think so.”

“We could leave the windows rolled up and the doors locked in this truck,” Max said. “Maybe we’ll find a vehicle down the road. Maybe we’ll be able to come back here eventually and get the stuff out of the back.”

Before Kate could answer, a screech sounded from far down the road. Maybe less than a mile away. They hadn’t really driven that far. If some of those rippers from the horde were running, they could be here in a few more minutes. A spike of panic lodged in her chest.

“We need to go,” Max said.

Kate grabbed Max’s arm, turning him around to face the road in the direction they had been going before the hose blew. She’d heard a sound, the growling sound of trucks, powerful engines.

“Shit,” Max whispered as the trucks crested the hill down the road, speeding right at them.

CHAPTER 17

Kate

“Get the guns,” Max said as he slammed the hood shut.

Kate watched as the two vehicles, a van and a pickup truck jacked up on large tires, came to a stop in the middle of the road thirty feet away at an angle to each other, nearly nose-to-nose and creating a V in the road.

Max was behind the open driver’s door in a flash, using it as a shield, his gun in his hand.

Kate got to the passenger side and grabbed the shotgun from the floorboard. She glanced back at Petra who had her pistol in her hand, then she looked at the trucks again. The doors opened up and one man from each truck got out, using the open doors as shields. The men were dressed in sweatshirts, fatigue camo pants, boots, and gloves. The clothing looked fresh and new, not stained and ripped like everyone else’s that Kate had seen. The man who had gotten out of the passenger side of the van wore a knit cap and sunglasses. He had a thick mustache that reminded Kate of the cowboys in western movies she’d seen. The man who had gotten out of the driver’s side of the pickup wore a baseball cap pulled down low and what looked like some kind of plastic mask—either a mask for dirt bike racing or for paintball; Kate wasn’t sure. Both men had rifles with scopes, and the man with the mustache had a pistol holstered to his hip.

“Shit,” Petra hissed, still aiming her pistol at the men.

Kate watched the two men. Neither one of them left from behind the open doors of their vehicles. She could see another person in the van and another one in the pickup truck, four of them altogether.

“We can’t outgun them,” Petra said in a low voice. She wasn’t giving up or lowering her gun, just stating a fact.

“What are they doing?” Kate whispered. “Why are they just standing there like that?”

“They’re waiting,” Max said.

“Waiting for what?”

Max didn’t answer.

A ripper from far down the street called out. And then another one.

“Those rippers are coming this way,” Petra said.

Brooke moaned in fear, still holding on to Tiger in the back seat.

“We don’t have time for this,” Max said. He stood all the way up from behind his driver’s door, raising his head above the top of it, but still keeping his gun aimed at the men. “What do you want?”

Neither man answered.

“We just want to get down this road,” Max yelled at the men. “We don’t want any trouble.”

The men still didn’t answer. They glanced at each other, just the flicker of movement from each of them. Obviously these men had worked together for a while.

Kate was sure the men were some kind of gang. Not Dark Angels; she didn’t see the symbols painted on the van or the pickup. But maybe the symbols were on their foreheads; she couldn’t tell because of the knit cap and the plastic mask.

“Just let us drive out of here,” Max yelled. “Nobody needs to get hurt.”

“Your vehicle isn’t working right now,” the man with the mustache yelled back. “You blew a hose or the radiator. We saw the steam.”

Were they watching them? For how long?

“Lower your weapons,” Mustache Man said. “Throw them out of the vehicle. Onto the road and the grass. All of the weapons you have.”

Kate thought of the food in the back of their SUV, the boxes of supplies they had managed to get out of her parents’ house before Lisey had brought the rippers to them. Maybe these guys just wanted to take their stuff, rob them and then move on.

“We’ve got food and drinks,” Kate called out. “You can take them. You can have it all. Just let us walk away with our guns.”

“Throw the guns down,” Mustache Man said. “We don’t want your food. We want to help you.”

“Help us?” Max asked. “How? You’re aiming your rifles at us.”

“And you’re aiming your weapons at us.”

The man had a point, but could they trust him? He might be saying anything to get them to put down their guns.

“We don’t know who you are,” Max said. “We don’t know if we can trust you.”

“You can trust us. But we don’t want any of you accidentally shooting at us. You’ll get your guns back. But first you need to throw them out of reach.”

“I don’t believe them,” Petra growled.

“How are you going to help us?” Max asked.

“We’ll talk about it when you throw your guns away.”

“See?” Petra said. “I told you.”

Kate’s stomach twisted. The rippers’ calls were getting louder.

“You hear them,” Mustache Man said. “The rippers are getting closer. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Tell us how you’ll help us and then we’ll throw our weapons down,” Max said.

The two men glanced at each other again, then Mustache Man looked back at them. “We have a place. A safe place we can take you.”

Again, Kate’s stomach clenched as she thought about getting into the back of that van. She couldn’t put Brooke into that kind of situation again. She stood up taller behind the open passenger door like Max was doing, but she still had the shotgun in her hands aimed at the men, perched between the door and the car. She wasn’t even sure if the blast from the shotgun would reach the men or cause much damage from this far away. She didn’t know if the recoil would knock her on her ass, or if it would jolt the weapon out of her hands. She had a feeling the two men could tell she wasn’t familiar with firearms.

“Where’s this safe place?” Max asked. “What is it?”

“It’s a big store,” Mustache Man said. “A Super Bea’s.”

“What the hell’s a Super Bea’s?” Petra grumbled.

“It’s a store around this area,” Kate said. “Kind of like a Target or a Wal-Mart.”

“We don’t have much time,” Mustache Man added. “We can’t wait for you much longer.” He glanced at the masked man again—they seemed to be communicating just by the expression in their eyes.

“Let me see your face,” Kate yelled at the masked man. “And you. Lift your hat up. Let me see your forehead.”

“We’re not Dark Angels,” the man said.

“Let me see!”

Mustache Man pushed up his knit cap and pulled off his sunglasses, revealing a clean, pale forehead and close-cropped hair. He looked at the masked man who lifted up his mask, revealing a boyish face—he couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen years old.

“Satisfied?” Mustache Man asked.

Kate heard the clattering sound of a gun hitting the road. She looked over the roof at Max; he still had his gun in his hand. Kate leaned down and looked through the open door at Petra; she had thrown her gun down and then walked a few steps away from the SUV with her hands raised up halfway.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked her.

“We don’t have a choice. We’re out of options.”

Once again Petra was right. She seemed able to make accurate predictions and assessments at lightning speed in this new world of horror they now lived in. Maybe she had been meant for this. She kept her hands raised up halfway, a relaxed gesture but definitely one of surrender. She stared at the men in the trucks. The wound in her hair was bleeding again, a line of blood trickling down the side of her face.

Kate sighed in defeat and tossed her shotgun to the side. It landed with a clatter in the strip of dry grass between the road and the beginning of the woods.

Max set his gun down on the street and then kicked it away from him, the gun sliding across the pavement.

“Stay where you are,” Mustache Man said as he came out from behind the door of the van. The other man had replaced his mask and kept his rifle aimed at them.

The rippers called out from down the street, the sound of an angry mob. They were almost within sight now.

“You have any other weapons in your vehicle?” the man asked as he approached cautiously.

“No,” Max answered.

“Who else is in the vehicle?”

“A little girl,” Kate said.

“And a cat,” Max added.

The man stopped when he was only fifteen feet away. He hadn’t lowered his rifle yet, still antsy and tense.

Kate was beginning to regret tossing their weapons away.

“I’m going to need all of you to get in the van,” the man said.

PART 3

CHAPTER 18

Ray

The woman Ray and Josh had dragged inside the cabin had slept nearly all day. It was late afternoon when she finally woke up. Ray, Josh, and Luke had been taking turns keeping watch. Mike had gotten bored and went down to the bunker to play his video games. Ray kept peeking out the front windows every so often, using the binoculars he kept on the floor in front of the window to study the woods at the other end of the clearing in front of the cabin. It hadn’t snowed any more, and the weather had gotten warm enough to melt the thin layer of snow that had coated the ground.

“I could check the woods,” Luke suggested.

“Might be a good idea,” Ray said. “But maybe we should all stick together right now.”

Josh and Emma were in the kitchen making dinner. Emma managed to help him somehow. She got around so well it was easy to forget she was blind. Josh had carved a cane for her, and Ray had to admit he’d done a pretty good job. Emma used her cane every once in a while, but now that she was familiar enough with the cabin, she didn’t need it very much.

The aroma of food cooking drifted into the living room, some kind of spaghetti sauce and the smell of baking bread and butter.

Maybe it was the smell of the food cooking that had awakened the woman. She opened her eyes, blinking. She sat up quickly, the blanket falling off of her. She looked around, her eyes and hair wild.

Ray and Luke rushed over to her. Ray smiled at the woman, but he didn’t feel like he was comforting her much. He could imagine her waking up in a cabin with two men hovering over her, one with a gun in a shoulder holster and one with a gun on his hip.

“You’re safe,” Ray said before the woman could freak out. “You’re inside our cabin. I don’t know if you remember, but you came up onto the front porch early this morning and passed out.”

The woman sat motionless on the floor, propped up by her arms. She looked like she was ready to bolt into action, but she also looked like she was thinking things over, maybe remembering that she had walked from the woods to their cabin.

“Do you remember any of that?” Ray asked. He wondered if she might have some memory loss, or even some slight brain damage from the fall onto the front porch, or even malnutrition or some other injuries, whatever had caused the cut on her lips and the bruise around her left eye.

“The cans,” the woman whispered.

It took a second for Ray to understand what she meant, but then he got it. “Yeah, we set up some metal cans under the stairs out there. Like a kind of alarm system.”

She nodded. She seemed to be relaxing just a little.

“My name’s Ray Daniels. This is Luke. What’s your name?”

“Rose,” she whispered.

“Rose,” Ray repeated, trying the smiling-thing on his face again. “Rose, I’m pleased to meet you.”

“She’s finally awake,” Josh boomed as he entered the living room with Emma. He smiled at Rose, a beaming and welcoming smile that was natural for Josh, a smile that seemed to set her at ease a little more than Ray and Luke had been doing.

“Her name’s Rose,” Ray said. He looked back at Rose. “That’s Josh and Emma. Mike, my son, he’s almost twelve, he’s downstairs in the basement.”

Rose looked back at Ray, startled for just a moment.

Ray imagined how that must have sounded—like he had locked his son away in the basement. “He’s playing video games down there,” he added quickly.

Rose looked confused, her eyebrows scrunching a little. “You . . . you have electricity?”

“Runs off a solar-powered generator,” Josh said.

She just stared at him.

“It’s complicated,” Josh told her. “But yeah, we have electricity.”

“And running water,” Emma said as she reached out and touched the shorter couch so she could locate it and sit down.

“My friend built this place,” Ray said. “He’s not here with us, but he told us we could stay here as long as we wanted to.”

“Where is he?” Rose asked, her voice still just a whisper.

“I don’t think he made it,” Ray said and left it at that.

Rose seemed to understand what he meant.

“His name was Doug,” Ray continued. “He kind of suspected something like this was going to happen. He built this cabin to be ready for it.”

“We’ve got food and water,” Josh said. “We’re making dinner right now if you’re hungry.”

Rose nodded, still sitting in the same position on the floor with her blanket all around her.

“We have hot water,” Emma said with a smile. “You could take a shower or a bath if you want to before we eat. We could wash your clothes. I’ve got some clothes you could borrow while your clothes are being washed.”

“Shower? Washing machine?” Rose seemed unable to accept these things, like they were visions from the past that she figured she would never see again.

“Rose,” Ray said. “We helped you. We brought you inside.” He wasn’t trying to smile anymore. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

She nodded.

“Are you alone? Are you with a group?”

“I’m alone. I was with a group, but I got away.”

“Were they Dark Angels?”

Rose shook her head no, but she seemed to recognize the name.

“So you were in another group?”

“Yes. A group of survivors. It was a small group. Thirteen of us. But . . . but they weren’t good people.”

Ray could guess where the bruise and the cut on her lip had come from.

“We’re good people,” Emma said.

Rose looked at Emma on the couch, staring at the dark glasses on her face.

Josh was standing right beside Emma at the end of the couch. “She’s blind.”

Rose just nodded.

“Where are your people now?” Ray asked, trying to get Rose’s attention again. “Are they looking for you?”

She shook her head a little. “They’re far away. I got away. They didn’t follow me.”

“How do you know they didn’t follow you?” Luke asked.

Rose shrugged. “It’s been days now.”

“Days since you got away from your group?” Ray asked. “How many days?”

“I don’t know. A few. Three. Maybe four.”

“And they weren’t part of the Dark Angels?” Ray pressed.

“No.”

“But you have heard of the Dark Angels?”

“I’ve seen the symbols painted on buildings and cars. Some of the guys in my group, they saw their vehicles. Military vehicles.”

“Why don’t we let her get a shower and let her eat,” Emma said. “Then we can interrogate her.”

“I’m just asking a few questions,” Ray said.

“I’ll go get you some clothes,” Emma told Rose and got up from the couch to go upstairs to her room.

CHAPTER 19

Ray

After Rose took her shower and Josh got the laundry going, they all sat down at the table to eat. The table sat six, and the usually empty chair was taken by Rose now. She sat at one end of the table and Ray sat at the opposite end. Josh and Emma sat next to each other on one side, and Luke and Mike sat next to each other on the other side.

Rose dove into her food, eating rapidly, shoveling food into her mouth. “I can’t believe this,” she said around a mouthful of food. Then she stopped and looked at everyone, smiling sheepishly. She wiped her mouth with a piece of towel they had ripped up for napkins. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually eat like this. It’s just that it’s been so long . . . so long since . . .”

“It’s okay,” Ray said.

“I know I haven’t said it yet,” Rose said, “but thank you for taking me in this morning. I remember seeing the cabin. I wasn’t sure if anyone was home, if anyone lived here. I was just so tired. So cold. I just wanted to get out of the wind.”

“But you’d seen our cabin before,” Ray said.

Rose stopped, her motion frozen, her fork halfway up to her mouth. “Uh, I don’t think so.”

“We found tracks in the woods,” Ray said, glancing at Luke.

Luke nodded. “Someone was in the woods yesterday. They waited by a tree. Seemed to be watching the cabin, then they went back into the woods.”

Ray was sure that Rose had just tried to lie about being in the woods yesterday, but he didn’t call her on it just yet.

Rose looked confused, like she was trying to remember. “Maybe. I think I remember seeing your cabin before, but I was scared. I didn’t know if people lived here. If you were friendly, or if you were people like Zeke.”

“Zeke?”

“He was the leader of the group I was in.”

“How did you join up with them?” Ray asked.

Rose was nearly finished with her dinner. She mopped up the last bit of tomato sauce with a piece of baked bread and ate it. She drank a few swallows of water. “I’m from Maryland, a small town about forty miles outside of Baltimore. I lived in an apartment with my boyfriend, Sayid. I remember how everything was going bad. There were riots on the news. Businesses shutting down. Murders everywhere. Rumors about a plague. We stocked up on some food and water, but we didn’t really have a lot of money. Sayid had been out of work for a while, and my hours had been cut way down. I worked at a gas station store, and my boss was talking about closing the place down. We found a dead body behind the store; the guy had been mauled, half-eaten, like a pack of wolves had attacked him.”

Rose paused and took another sip of water. “And then Friday came. The banks closed. There was martial law. The military was everywhere, the police. Planes and helicopters were flying everywhere. People in our building and our town were starting to leave. We thought we should leave, too. And we knew by then that the disease was real, the disease turning people into rippers. The electricity went out. Our phones hadn’t been working the whole day. We didn’t know what else to do, so we went to my mom and dad’s house. But my parents weren’t too welcoming.”

“Why not?”

“They had never liked Sayid. They actually hated him, hated that I was with someone like him. My parents had money, but they vowed never to help me as long as I was with Sayid. But as bad as this was, they said they would let me in, but not Sayid. But I told them I wasn’t going to stay without Sayid.”

Rose paused, beginning to cry. She shook her head. “They told me to go ahead and leave then.”

Emma reached a hand out and patted Rose’s hand, holding it for a few seconds.

“I even told my parents that I was pregnant,” Rose said, laughing a little through her tears. “I don’t know what I was thinking, that maybe me being pregnant might change things, that they would have some sympathy for me, or know how serious me and Sayid were. I wasn’t really pregnant, but I thought it might make them take us in. But all it did was make things worse. My parents went ballistic. They weren’t even acting like themselves anymore. I’d never seen them get so angry, so venomous. My dad could hardly spit the words out. Looking back now, I know that he was beginning to turn into a ripper. They both were. And I guess they couldn’t help how they were acting. That’s what I want to believe, anyway.”

Ray remembered how Kim had acted when she’d begun to turn, how her emotions had flipped on a dime from one extreme to another. And he remembered Vanessa, her anger, how she had gotten her words mixed up, how she had kept saying the words bad moon over and over again, how she had bitten Mike’s arm, how she had tried to attack him.

His dream from two nights ago came back with a sudden force, his daughter attacking him all over again.

“So you and Sayid left,” Josh said.

“Yeah,” Rose answered. “We had some stuff in our car. We tried to get on the highway, but it was packed. Cars were stalled and abandoned. Cops were everywhere. We drove to the next town. By then we started seeing the rippers everywhere. We found a house to stay in, a basement where we could hide. We boarded up the door. Rippers got into the house, they tried the door, but they gave up eventually, moving on. We were safe for a little while. We had some food, some water, but not enough to last a long time.”

“Where’s Sayid now?” Luke asked.

Ray was afraid he already knew the answer.

“He started to turn in the basement.”

CHAPTER 20

Ray

“I didn’t want to leave Sayid,” Rose said. “But he knew he was turning into a ripper. He tried to convince me to be strong, trying to form a plan. He told me I should head west, into the mountains of West Virginia, to a remote place, a place where there wouldn’t be many rippers, where the military wouldn’t be bombing cities.”

Rose paused again. She looked like she was about to cry again, but she choked back the tears, continuing with her story. “Sayid asked me to kill him.”

Again, Ray was brought back to Emma’s condo. He was in the bedroom with Kim again, where she’d asked him to kill her. And he had. He had poisoned his wife. He’d seen her die. He had wrapped her body in a shroud. And her body was still there, still in that bedroom. Unless rippers had gotten to it.

God, he couldn’t think about that right now.

“I couldn’t do it,” Rose said as tears slipped from her eyes. “I couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to turn into one of those monsters, but I still couldn’t kill him. Then he wanted me to leave before he turned. But I was too scared. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be out there in that world with those monsters. I could hear them every so often, running past the basement windows like a herd of horses, calling to each other. The screams. The yells. I heard them in the house above us, jiggling doorhandles. But by then the house must have been picked clean, because they usually moved along pretty quickly.”

“But you obviously left Sayid,” Josh said.

She nodded. “While I was asleep, Sayid found this thick chain and padlock. He chained himself to the heater somehow. He was practically a ripper by then, yelling at me to go, to pack a bag and take the car. His yells, when he was more ripper than human, were attracting other rippers. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. I had to leave. Sayid wasn’t Sayid anymore. But I had almost waited too long. By the time I grabbed my small bag and the claw hammer, by the time I was at the top of the steps trying to pull the boards off the door that Sayid had nailed there, he was almost free, screaming and pulling at the chain, pulling parts of the heater apart. Yeah, Sayid had nailed those pieces of boards on the door pretty good. I almost didn’t get out in time. Somehow I got out before he got loose. I got to the car, got inside and started it. The windows were smashed out, glass everywhere, but at least the tires weren’t flat. I just got in and drove, heading west. I didn’t even stop and look at a map until I was far outside of town.”

“And how did you find this group you were with?” Ray asked. “This Zeke that you were talking about.”

“They found me. I thought I was dead at first when they found me. I figured they were going to rape me and kill me.” She glanced at Mike. “Sorry.”

Ray didn’t say anything—Mike was going to have to understand that evil things happened in the world, part of his rapid path into adulthood now. He waited for Rose to continue.

“Then I thought maybe I was saved. But it was neither heaven nor hell, somewhere in between. I was safer with the group, but I was also trapped there.”

“Is that when you got that?” Josh asked, pointing to his own lip. “Zeke did that?”

“Not Zeke. Another man.”

Rose didn’t expound and Ray didn’t ask for further details in front of Mike. He could imagine how the rest of the story would go.

“How’d you get away from them?” Luke asked.

Ray swore he could hear the suspicion and doubt in Luke’s voice, the same suspicions he felt—like they were looking for holes in her story.

“I just left in the middle of the night. They didn’t really guard us; they figured none of us would actually go out into that hell the world had become. The abuse was bad, but maybe they figured it was better than being eaten alive by a pack of rippers.”

“So you took a bag and left?” Luke asked.

“No. They kept the supplies and weapons guarded. I just left with the clothes on my back and my coat. I left at night, almost at dawn. It seemed like the time when the rippers were least active."

“You didn’t have a vehicle?” Luke asked.

“No. I left on foot.”

“And they couldn’t catch you?”

“We were in a small town. A rural area. I found a pickup truck at a house. Found the keys inside. It was almost dawn by then. I found a can opener in the house and about five cans of vegetables and two cans of tuna that weren’t beat to shit by the rippers.” She shrugged. “They might have chased me. I don’t know. I’m sure they did. But they had two other women with them. And two children.”

Ray felt a chill dance along his skin. He figured the group of survivors Rose was involved with had been good people once, most of them anyway. But eventually a leader emerged, a leader to control the group, a leader who would eventually become a dictator. He would have a few henchmen or enforcers—much like Luke used to be in his prior occupation—and he would rule with an iron fist. He would show no weakness or mercy, so no one would even think about trying to usurp him.

This Ripper Plague and the collapse of civilization had sent the world back to the medieval times, maybe even back to the cavemen times. Groups of people had turned savage to survive, becoming gangs of highway robbers and bands of pillagers, a nearly overnight devolution of human society.

These groups, like the one Rose had been in, were dangerous. But the Dark Angels were still the main concern for Ray because they were so organized and because they had organized so quickly. He was sure that had something to do with their leader and the psychic net he entangled them in.

Which brought Ray to his next question.

But Luke continued his questions first. “How’d you end up in the woods?”

“I did what Sayid told me to do. I headed into the mountains, into the woods. I left the truck, took the little bit of food and supplies I had in a pillow case. I had a hammer and a kitchen knife for weapons. I just kept walking deeper into the woods, away from the rippers, away from the world.”

“Where’d you sleep?”

“I found a small cave one time. Another time I curled up at the bottom of a tree. I found a stream to drink out of. I thought I was going to get sick, but I didn’t. I . . . I can’t really remember everything that happened. Once I got into the woods, time became like a blur. I got so hungry. So thirsty. So tired.”

“And then you found our cabin,” Luke said.

She nodded.

“Have you had any strange dreams?” Ray asked her.

CHAPTER 21

Emma

Emma sat at the table beside Josh, with Rose to her left. She’d been listening to Ray and Luke’s interrogation of Rose. And that’s exactly what it was. Of course she understood why they were doing it—they were just being cautious. Ray was a cautious man, and it was that same cautiousness that had probably kept her and Mike alive when the three of them had been together. But she couldn’t help thinking that they had already made up their minds about Rose’s guilt. She could hear the suspicion in their voices.

“I don’t really remember what I dreamed,” Rose said. She sounded thrown off for a moment, Ray’s question rattling her. And now she seemed a little shaky, like these questions had taken some kind of bizarre turn that she couldn’t understand.

“I don’t dream very much,” Rose added. “At least I don’t remember them much. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Ray said.

Rose seemed to leave it at that.

But Emma knew why Ray was asking that question. Ray had seen Josh and Luke in his dreams, and he’d even seen her. Josh and Luke had seen her, Ray, and Mike in their dreams. And now they were seeing others in their dreams: two women, a man, and a young girl. And maybe those people were seeing them at the same time. Maybe she had visited those four in their dreams and spoke to them like she’d done to Josh and Luke. She couldn’t be sure—that part of her mind was shut off when it happened, and for good reason, because the Dragon was always lurking, always trying to worm his way in, to control their dreams, to see where they were so he could find them.

She’d had a few oppressive dreams about the Dragon, but none the last few nights that she could remember. Maybe the relative safety of this cabin had set her at ease, or maybe the Dragon was targeting others besides herself. She couldn’t be sure.

“Everyone get enough to eat?” Josh asked. He stood up, collecting plates and silverware.

“Thank you so much for the food,” Rose said.

“You like to play video games?” Mike asked Rose.

“I used to play them with Sayid.”

“You ever play Zombie Takeover?”

“Yeah, he played that one.”

Emma heard the laughter in Rose’s voice, the feeling of warm nostalgia at the memories of her and Sayid, a past that now could never be experienced again.

“You wanna play?” Mike asked her.

“She might want to rest,” Ray said.

“No, that’s okay. I could play. I don’t mind.”

“Just go easy on her, killer,” Josh told Mike from the kitchen.

Ray got up and went into the kitchen. Emma heard Ray whispering something to Josh, but even her sensitive hearing couldn’t pick up what he was saying.

“We could help with the dishes first,” Rose said. “It’s the least I could do.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed.

“I got it,” Ray said. “Why don’t you two go ahead?”

“You sure?” Mike asked, suddenly incredulous, like he was being set up somehow. Ray usually didn’t let Mike shirk any chores.

Ray was already running water in the sink for the dishes.

“Come on,” Josh said. “I’ll go down there with you two.”

Josh led Mike and Rose down into the basement. Emma could hear Mike talking excitedly. She knew now that Ray had asked Josh to go down into the basement with them, to keep an eye on Rose. Ray had already locked the gun case earlier when Rose had been in the bathroom taking a shower, but he was probably hesitant to leave her alone with Mike.

They had decided earlier that Rose would sleep in the bedroom that Josh had slept in before he moved into her room. Luke offered to take the couch and Emma was sure that was so he could keep an eye on the front door, back door, and the door to the basement. Even if Rose wasn’t part of her group anymore (and Ray and Luke seemed to suspect she still might be), it didn’t mean that she might not pack a bag and leave in the middle of the night. Her leaving wouldn’t be a big deal, but if she was part of a group, or if she stumbled onto another group or the Dark Angels, she could reveal where this cabin was.

Emma believed Rose’s story, most of it anyway. But Ray and Luke were right to be suspicious. You had to be now.

Ray cleaned up the dishes and Emma dried them, handing them to Luke to put away.

“You believe her story?” Ray asked after the water drained out of the sink.

“Yes,” Emma said. “Most of it.”

“Same here,” Luke said. “But I’m not totally convinced.”

Ray led them into the living room, farther away from the door to the basement. Emma knew the three of them couldn’t hear them talking up here, but Ray was being extra-cautious as usual.

“Are you picking up anything from her?” Ray asked.

“Picking up anything?” she said.

“Yeah. Like psychically?”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’m not a radar machine.”

“You must feel something,” Ray pressed. “Sense something.”

Emma sighed. “I do. Not from Rose specifically, but I’ve been having this feeling, like something bad is coming, like a storm or tidal wave, something large and destructive.”

“Like the group she might still be with,” Ray suggested.

“Or the Dark Angels,” Luke added.

“I don’t know,” Emma said.

“She hasn’t seen us in her dreams,” Ray said.

“You don’t know that for sure,” Emma said. “She said she couldn’t remember her dreams.”

“Yeah, I never used to remember my dreams much,” Ray said.

“Me either,” Luke said.

“But I remember them now,” Ray finished. “They’re kind of hard to forget. It’s almost like they’re real, more like they’re memories or premonitions than dreams.” Ray paused for just a second. “It’s weird she didn’t recognize any of us, or that we haven’t seen her in our dreams. And she never mentioned the Dragon when I asked her about her dreams.”

“Maybe not everyone is having those dreams,” Emma said.

“Wilma, the woman I was with before, she didn’t dream of me or see Ray, Josh, or you in her dreams. But she dreamed about the Dragon. Those dreams scared the shit out of her.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “That’s what I mean. It’s weird that everyone we know has these dreams except her.”

“Maybe she’s not one of us,” Luke said. “Maybe she’s not like the others we’ve been seeing in our dreams lately.”

“Maybe not,” Emma said. “But that doesn’t mean we should kick her out into the cold. It doesn’t mean she might not be a good person. Maybe not every survivor is involved with this. Maybe they’re not meant to be. Or maybe they’re not sensitive enough to these psychic forces. Maybe the Dragon isn’t visiting every survivor. Maybe he’s not able to. He can’t possibly visit hundreds in their dreams. He can’t be that powerful.” She almost added: Can he?

“Maybe,” Ray said, but didn’t sound convinced.

“Maybe she’s not a part of this, whatever this is, whatever we are. Whatever the Dragon and his followers are. Maybe there are a lot of people who have nothing to do with this, even a lot of the Dark Angels. Maybe they’re just recruited by their leaders and they go along just to survive.”

“I still don’t trust her,” Ray said. “I still can’t help thinking she’s some kind of Trojan horse, weaseling her way inside, scoping this place out, scoping us out. Waiting for the rest of her group to show up and attack. I might be wrong, but we just need to be ready for it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“If we’re attacked,” Luke said, “we need to think about a way out. We should have go-bags ready in the Jeep and the van.”

“Yes,” Ray agreed. “We should do that. I’m not saying Rose is a mole, but we just have to be careful. That’s all I’m saying. I told Josh to make sure she doesn’t find out about the tunnels. That has to be a secret we keep from her.”

“If she is a mole,” Luke said, “even if she’s being forced to do this, then she has the choice right now to come clean and warn us. And if she doesn’t, then that makes her our enemy.”

“I think we need to sleep in watches again tonight,” Ray said.

“You take first watch,” Luke told Ray. “And Josh can take the morning watch. First thing in the morning, I’m going to check the woods again.”

CHAPTER 22

Luke

Luke jumped awake when Ray touched him on the shoulder. Josh stood right beside Ray, barely awake but ready to take over the morning shift from the night shift so Ray could go upstairs to get some sleep for a few hours.

“It’s been quiet all night,” Ray said. He looked at Luke. “You okay? Bad dreams?”

“Yeah,” Luke said.

Luke was already dressed, he just needed to put his hiking boots on and lace them up, grab his coat, his pack, his rifle, and his handgun and shoulder holster. He slipped the holster on, then his black hoodie. He grabbed his dark backpack; it had the same stuff he’d had with him before: extra food, a canteen of water, extra ammo for his handgun and his rifle, a map, and a notebook in which he was making his own map of the woods. He had the small pair of binoculars hung around his neck, a compass and a small flashlight in his pants pockets, and a folding hunting knife in a case on his belt.

Ray had brewed coffee during the night. Luke poured a cup and walked back into the living room, sipping it. Ray hadn’t gone upstairs yet and Josh was settling down on the couch.

Ray wore his pistol holstered on his hip. Luke knew Ray wasn’t comfortable wearing the gun, but he seemed to be getting more and more used to it. He had shown Ray how to load the gun, how to hold it, how to aim it, even how to take it apart and clean it—everything except actually shooting it. He wished he could work with Ray and Josh, and even Mike, on shooting the guns, but it was too risky. The sound of target practice would travel for miles, bringing anyone within earshot: the Dark Angels, gangs, rippers, other survivors. Emma was right, people were going to stumble on this place no matter how remote it was—no sense in advertising the location of their cabin with the sound of gunshots.

Ray was a quick learner, and Josh already had some experience with firearms, not a lot, but a little was better than nothing. And Mike was going to have to learn soon. Even though they couldn’t shoot the guns, Luke wanted to start practicing with other weapons, silent weapons like a bow and arrow, knives, fighting sticks, anything at hand that could be used as a weapon.

But those training plans would have to be set on hold for a little while until they either learned more about Rose or trusted her more.

Ray was still suspicious of Rose, and Luke was too, but he didn’t want to charge this woman with crimes before there was proof. Yet it was still difficult for Luke to buy all of Rose’s story. He believed some of it, but he found it hard to believe she had been living for days in the woods. It wasn’t impossible, but the chances of running across other survivors or rippers in the woods seemed pretty high.

But Ray had managed to survive for days without weapons, and with a child and a blind woman, so nothing was impossible.

Still, it would make him feel better to check out the woods, look for fresh tracks or signs that there were others in the woods.

After he finished his cup of coffee, he stood next to the door to Rose’s bedroom for a few seconds, listening. No sounds inside; maybe she was asleep. He looked back into the murky living room. Ray was upstairs now and Josh was still sunk into the couch. He hoped Josh was going to stay awake.

Luke went downstairs to the basement, not turning on any lights down there, using his small flashlight to guide his way. Inside the bunker, he went to the door that led to the tunnel to the garage, the shortest tunnel. He wanted to leave for the woods from the garage. If there was anyone watching, they might think he had stayed the night in the garage. The last thing he wanted to do was give away the hatch in the woods.

The garage tunnel was short and it led to a metal ladder bolted to the block wall. He climbed the ladder up to a small deck where he pushed a small door open that led into the garage. This small door was hidden under one of the wood work tables, with fake boxes attached to it. When the door was closed it was impossible to tell there was a door under the table.

He crawled out from under the table and stood up. He didn’t use his flashlight in the garage even though it was still dark. There weren’t a lot of windows in the garage, just the one in the door and the small rows of windows at the top of the two garage doors—just dark blue rectangles of early-morning light in the darkness right now. The Jeep Cherokee and the beat-up Dodge van he and Josh had taken from a house in the town of Heaven were just dark hulks in the gloom. Luke had mentioned to Ray that they should load up the vehicles with go-bags in case they needed to leave in a hurry, and he had every intention of doing that today.

It seemed like something bad was coming, a tidal wave of destruction, that’s what Emma had said. And Luke swore he could feel that wave coming, too. They had been somewhat safe here for a few days, but Rose showing up twenty-four hours ago had disturbed that feeling of safety. Now the paranoia was back, and it would always be a part of their lives. Paranoia is awareness—he’d heard that expression somewhere before. Paranoia keeps you alive; that’s what Luke liked to think.

The dream had come back to him, making his skin crawl. He’d been in the hell town (as he called it) again. Like the dream the night before last, he found himself in the middle of the street with the carnage and destruction all around him, the wintery trees, the brown grass and weeds, the trash and debris everywhere, the looted-out stores and abandoned cars, the dead and dying people, tortured men and women twisting in the cold wind, writhing hopelessly against the bonds that held them in place, and the gray churning clouds above it all.

Once again he found himself without his guns, without even his hunting knife. And once again he heard the sound of the Dragon preaching his evil to his congregation of Dark Angels. They were somewhere deeper in the town, deeper in the neighborhoods of homes.

He ran toward the sound, hoping to get to the Dragon before the Dark Angels killed him. If he could just kill the Dragon first . . .

But when he ran down the streets and came to the intersection, the sounds of the Dragon and his followers had stopped; everything was silent except for the ceaseless wind.

He saw the dilapidated three-story house across the street. The house seemed to be a living thing, a haunted place possessed by evil. The house looked run-down, the whole structure seeming to lean dangerously to one side, but it was all a trick to make him think the house was weak and harmless. But the house wasn’t weak; it was strong under its rickety façade. And it wasn’t harmless; it waited like a predator in the brush for unsuspecting prey to come along so it could pounce.

In the last dream, Luke had walked across the street to the house. But in this dream, he didn’t want to go. He knew there was something terrible waiting inside that house. But a moment later he found himself floating across the street toward the house. It felt like he was both being pushed toward the house by an invisible force and also being pulled there. His feet and legs didn’t seem to be moving, more like he was floating an inch or two above the street. But he didn’t look down to see if he was floating—he kept his eyes on the house, then the front porch, then the half-open front door.

“Luke . . .” the same voice from the dream before called out to him. A male voice, a voice he recognized immediately.

It was Jacob.

Luke was on the front porch, aware again that he was unarmed. Jacob was somewhere inside the house, and Jacob would surely be armed. There weren’t many people in the world that Luke feared, but Jacob was one of them. Maybe Luke could outfight him . . . maybe, but he wasn’t sure he could outshoot him, outthink him, outmaneuver him. Jacob was his superior, his teacher, the one who had trained him to be an enforcer, the one who had taught him to shoot, the one who had taught him all the dirty tricks.

Luke didn’t want to go inside the house.

Jacob was in there. But Jacob was dead, wasn’t he?

Could Jacob be alive? Could he have survived the shootout with the police? It was possible he’d gotten away from the cops on that Friday night when everything had started collapsing. It was also possible Jacob was immune to the Ripper Plague. Quite a coincidence, yes, but not impossible.

Or was the Dragon doing this, bringing Luke’s greatest fears to life, trying to scare him, rattle him? Was the Dragon that powerful?

Luke hadn’t entered the house, and Jacob hadn’t come out. But Luke remembered Jacob’s words from the dream: “I’ll be here waiting for you, Luke. I’ll kill everyone you know, everyone you care about.”

His skin crawled as he heard Jacob’s voice in his mind.

“Just a dream,” Luke muttered as he got ready to leave the garage. They’d found extra sets of keys for the house doors and garage on their first day here, and Luke had one of those keys to the garage door in his hand. He wanted this door locked when he left for the woods.

And now it was time to go.

CHAPTER 23

Mike

Mike woke up when his dad entered the bedroom. His dad was trying to be quiet, but Mike heard him. Mike lay on his side, facing away from the bedroom door. He didn’t move or turn over to look at his dad. He listened to him take off his shoes, then his gun and holster, then his flannel shirt.

“You awake?” Ray whispered.

Mike didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure why, he just didn’t.

Ray slipped into bed under a separate blanket.

Mike wanted to go back to sleep, but after a few minutes he realized he couldn’t. Within those minutes, his dad was breathing hard, nearly snoring. His dad had been awake most of the night, keeping watch in case any of Rose’s people—or anyone else—came out of the woods to the cabin.

Mike couldn’t believe he’d slept up here in this dark room by himself while his dad had been downstairs. He hadn’t even woken up once during the night. He’d always been afraid of the dark even though he didn’t like to admit it. But over these last few weeks he’d overcome his fear a little. Yes, the dark could be scary, the unknown, but he’d learned that there were scarier things in the light: there were rippers; there was a disease that turned your mom and little sister into monsters; there were survivors who wanted to kill you; or there were Dark Angels that wanted to abduct you and take you back to their leader.

Mike had seen their leader in his dreams—the Dragon, a tall shadow with glowing eyes. He’d felt the evil and the power coming from the Dragon. He’d seen the place where the Dragon lived, a small town ravaged by war and destruction, a cold and gray place. And in the last few nights Mike thought he’d seen the actual place where the Dragon lived, a haunted house, a place of evil. Terrible things had happened in that house through the years, and the Dragon had been drawn to that house by those terrible things. Somehow it made him stronger. But it wasn’t just the house that was evil, it was the entire town. There was a dark history there, the ground hallowed by blood and pain.

He might have dreamed about that town last night—he often did. Or he might have seen the woman and the little girl he’d been seeing in his dreams lately. But he was sure of one dream he’d had last night, the one where he seemed to be older . . . a man. He’d looked down at his muscular arms and legs in the dream, he’d seen the gun he held in his hand. The world was still destroyed, civilization still collapsed, but there were some places of hope, small pockets of rebuilding. Was he helping with that?

It wasn’t necessarily a bad dream, but the worst thing about it was that his dad wasn’t there. Neither was Emma, or Luke, or Josh. Not even the woman and the girl, and the other two they were traveling with. Were they all gone? All dead? Maybe he was just out on his own and the rest of them were somewhere safe.

He liked to think that.

His thoughts turned to Rose. She was pretty, and only a few years older than he was. He knew his dad and Luke didn’t trust her, but Mike couldn’t help feeling that she might be okay, just some girl who had escaped bad people and now needed their help.

They had played Zombie Takeover yesterday, with Josh keeping an eye on them. Rose had definitely played the game before, and she was definitely his best challenge so far.

His stomach growled a little. It was nice to think that there was plenty of food downstairs and that he could eat anytime he wanted to. The thought of it only made him hungrier.

Being as quiet as he could, Mike slipped out of bed. He pulled on his pants that he had crumpled up on top of the dresser, and then he grabbed his sneakers and his hoodie. It was cold in the cabin; he would need his hoodie.

He thought his dad was going to wake up as he crept to the door—he was lying on his side and Mike watched his eyes. He thought he was going to hear his dad speak even with his eyes still closed, asking where he was going. And if that happened, he would just tell him he was going downstairs, that he couldn’t lie in bed any longer. He’d tell him he was going down to eat some breakfast and to hit the “books.”

The books in this instance were some of the books his dad had selected from the bunker, books about survival skills, hunting and fishing, building shelters, identifying edible plants, stuff like that. Those books were going to be his new schoolwork, his new curriculum. Mike had never been a huge fan of reading, but these weren’t books about plant cells or American history, these were books that would teach him things, skills that he could practice, skills that could save his life and other lives one day, so he was interested in them.

And he promised himself that he would indeed hit those books, but maybe he’d get a quick game in before he did.

His dad didn’t wake up as Mike slipped out the door, closing it quietly. He was kind of glad his dad hadn’t woken up—he needed his sleep. Before they’d gotten to this cabin, his dad had barely slept for several nights.

Emma’s bedroom door was still closed. Maybe she was still sleeping. He snuck down the stairs with his sneakers in one hand.

Josh was on the couch in the living room, on watch, but nearly asleep. He opened his eyes a little wider. “Hey, buddy. You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

The living room was lighter now as the sun rose. No one else seemed to be up yet. The door to Rose’s bedroom was still closed. Luke wasn’t on the other couch.

“Where’s Luke?” he asked.

“On his morning patrol of the woods,” Josh said.

Mike should have figured that.

“You hungry?” Josh asked. “I could whip up some oatmeal. Put some maple syrup in it.”

“I’ll just eat some cereal,” Mike told Josh as he went into the kitchen. He wished they had milk to go with the cereal, but all they had was some powdered stuff that did not taste like milk after it was mixed with water.

Mike tried to be quiet as he got the box of cereal from the pantry and poured some into a bowl. He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. He sat down at the table, already munching on the cereal.

A moment later Rose’s door opened and she came into the kitchen. Her hair was pulled back into some kind of braid. She was dressed in the clothes she’d come here in, the ones Josh had washed for her. She looked like she’d been awake for a while.

“You want some cereal?” Mike asked her, keeping his voice low. “There are a few boxes in the pantry.”

“Thanks.”

Rose got a bowl for herself.

“We don’t have any milk, though,” Mike said. “Except for the powdered stuff. Believe me, don’t try it.”

She smiled at him.

He felt a tingling inside when she smiled at him. He looked away even though he really wanted to keep staring at her.

She had her bowl of cereal and came back to the table, sitting down next to him.

They ate in silence. When they were nearly done, she looked at him. “You want to go downstairs and play some more Zombie Takeover?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sure.” This was his kind of girl.

CHAPTER 24

Josh

Josh got to his feet when he saw Mike and Rose heading for the basement door. He hurried over to them.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked Mike.

“Just going down to play a little Zombie Takeover.”

Josh nodded. “Uh, yeah. Cool. I’ll go down there with you.”

“You want to play?” Mike asked, smirking.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I need the practice.”

Mike snorted out a that’s-for-sure laugh. But then he stared at him like he was trying to say: You don’t have to go down there with us.

But Josh was pretty sure he should go down there with them.

He followed Mike and Rose down to the basement and then into the bunker. Mike turned the video game system and the TV on, getting it ready to play. He and Rose sat down on pillows on the floor in front of the TV.

Josh pulled up a metal folding chair near them.

Mike started playing, going first.

Josh sat there for a few minutes. He wondered if he should be down here or upstairs. Maybe he should be at the windows, watching the woods. It was light enough to see everything out there now. He began to get an itchy feeling that he was screwing up again, that he was doing the wrong thing, making the wrong decision like he usually did.

“Look,” he told Mike and Rose. “I’m going to go back upstairs for a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Mike answered without looking at him, concentrating on his avatar in the video game.

“You kids be good. Don’t go messing around down here. Okay? I’ll be back down in a few minutes.”

“We’ll be fine,” Mike groaned.

Josh had a suspicion that Mike wanted to be alone with Rose. She was a pretty girl and he was sure Mike was attracted to her.

“Okay,” Josh said as he left the bunker.

He went back upstairs and grabbed the binoculars. He would be furious at himself if something had happened while he’d been babysitting Mike and Rose in the bunker.

He looked out the window to the right of the front door, parting the curtains just a little.

No activity out there. Just the usual morning forest activity: birds chirping and fluttering around, squirrels racing along the tree branches and the ground. He moved over to the other window to watch the woods from that angle, but he didn’t see anything suspicious.

Luke was somewhere in those woods right now, deep in the woods. He went on his morning patrols, but Josh knew this morning’s patrol was different; this time Luke would be looking for clues to corroborate Rose’s story—or dispute it.

He turned when he heard the sly sounds of Emma coming down the stairs in the living room.

“Alone?” she asked as she walked up to him.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

She gave him a quick kiss, and then a longer one. Her breath smelled and tasted like minty toothpaste.

“Sorry,” he told her when they finished kissing. “I know I’ve got coffee breath.”

“Mmm,” she said. “What a turn on.”

“Me or the coffee?”

“The coffee.”

“I’ll get you a cup.”

Emma sat down at the dining room table while he fixed her coffee—he knew exactly how she liked it now. He put just the right amount of the powdered cream and sugar in the cup of coffee and brought it to her.

“You want some oatmeal?” he asked her. “I’m really pushing the oatmeal this morning.”

“Maybe in a little bit.”

“The kids didn’t want any. They already had some dry cereal.”

“Rose is awake?” Emma asked.

For just a second Josh thought he’d caught a trace of alarm in Emma’s voice.

“Yeah,” he told her. “She’s downstairs with Mike. They’re playing video games again.”

Emma sipped her coffee. She wore her dark glasses this morning like she usually did. Josh knew she was a little self-conscious about showing her eyes. He’d told her that her eyes were beautiful, a light shade of blue. But she felt she looked weird when she wasn’t looking right at people when speaking to them. But even though she wore the dark glasses now, he could tell her brows were slightly furrowed as she frowned.

And Josh knew that expression. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

But Josh knew this wasn’t “nothing.” He waited, hoping she could pick up on his impatience for her to continue her thoughts. She’d laid out the first part, now she needed to say the rest.

Emma took another sip of her coffee and then sighed. “You know that feeling I was telling you about before? That overwhelming sense of dread.”

He knew what she was talking about. Even though they’d finally found a refuge, a place where they felt safe, she couldn’t help feeling that they weren’t safe at this cabin, that they’d never be safe here—the refuge had been an illusion they’d fallen for, something that allowed them to drop their guard.

She hadn’t wanted to say anything about these feelings she’d been having because she didn’t want to seem like a downer, dashing any hopes after they’d gone through hell to find this place. But in the last few days her feelings of dread had become so strong she couldn’t ignore them anymore. She’d told him that last night.

“Remember last night when we talked about it?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You asked if my feelings of dread had anything to do with Rose showing up.”

“I remember.”

Emma set her coffee cup down. She was trembling now. No, she was actually shaking.

“Emma,” he said, touching her shoulder. He took one of her hands in his, trying to calm her down. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“How could I not have felt it before now?” she said. She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him.

“Feel what? That tidal wave that’s coming?” Tidal wave—that was how she had described the feelings of dread to him yesterday.

“No, not coming,” she whispered. “Already here.”

“Oh God,” he said, pulling his hands away from hers. “Rose.”

CHAPTER 25

Mike

Mike watched as Rose took her turn at the video game. He snuck a few peeks at her. He couldn’t stop looking at her, and she’d caught him a few times. But instead of scowling at him or asking what the hell he was doing, she just smiled.

Now she let herself get killed by a zombie.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I’m tired of playing.”

“Okay,” he said.

She got up and moved around, walking over to the gun case. She seemed bored but also restless—maybe nervous.

“You always lock your weapons up?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Mike said, lying. He didn’t want to tell her that they’d just started doing it since she’d shown up.

“You have a lot of weapons,” she said. “A lot of stuff. It’s crazy this guy built this place. Stocked it with all of this food and stuff.”

“Yeah. His name was Doug.” Mike wasn’t sure if Doug was dead, but he figured he must be or he’d turned into a ripper. Otherwise he would have gotten here by now. “My dad used to work with him.”

“I wonder why he built this place.”

“It’s like he knew all of this was coming,” Mike said.

She didn’t say anything—she just walked away.

Mike felt a little awkward around Rose. He was attracted to her, he could admit that. And he wanted her to be attracted to him, but he wasn’t sure if she was.

“How old are you?” she asked as she walked away. “Thirteen? Fourteen?”

“Twelve,” he said. Another little lie. He wouldn’t actually be twelve for another few days, but she didn’t need to know that.

“You’re tall for your age,” she said, turning around to look at him, staring at him like she was appraising his height, his build, really looking at him for the first time.

Mike couldn’t help smiling.

“You’re almost as tall as I am,” she said and smiled back at him. She walked over to one of the doors that led to a tunnel—this one leading to the garage. “What’s this door lead to?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you.”

“I’m not a spy,” she said, laughing like the idea of it was childish. Then she frowned, her smile disappearing. She gave him a serious look. “You think I’m a spy?”

“No,” he blurted out. And it was the truth—he didn’t believe she was a spy.

She seemed to be waiting for him to tell her what lay beyond the door, yet she also seemed nervous about something.

“Those doors lead to tunnels,” Mike said. “Like escape tunnels. This guy, Doug, he had them put in when he built this cabin.” He didn’t see the harm in telling her about the tunnels. She was probably going to find out about them soon enough.

“Wow,” she said. “You ever go in there?”

“No. Not yet. I know where they lead to. That one there leads to the garage. There’s this little door up there under one of the tables against the wall. But you’d never know a door was there.” He was babbling. He stopped.

“That’s crazy,” she said. “So, you guys are planning on living here for good? Making this place your home?”

“Just for the winter, I think.”

“Just the winter? Then what?”

“Then we leave.”

“Why would you leave? You’re not going to go through all of this stuff in one winter. There’s plenty here.”

Mike shrugged. “We’ve got somewhere else to go.”

“Somewhere better than this?”

“Safer.”

“Safer?”

“I think so. It’s a place that has the answers.”

“Answers to what?”

“To everything that’s happened. To the disease out there, the Ripper Plague. There’s this place called Avalon—” He stopped talking abruptly, not sure if he should be talking about Avalon.

“Avalon? What’s that?” She came closer to him, her voice lower, her eyes wide and on him the whole time.

“It’s . . . it’s a place we want to go to.”

“When you leave, what are you going to do with all of this stuff?”

“I don’t know. Take some of it with us, I guess.”

“You can’t take all of this with you. They’ll be so much left behind, so much going to waste.”

Mike hadn’t thought about that. He wondered if his dad had thought of that.

Rose moved behind Mike, still talking in that low, husky voice that gave him a tingling sensation. “Where’s Avalon?” she asked.

Just then Mike heard someone rumbling down the basement stairs. Someone was coming their way in a hurry. Josh? His dad? Luke?

He was about to turn around when he felt Rose grab him from behind. She was quicker and stronger than he had expected. He felt something hard and sharp against his throat.

“Don’t move an inch,” she growled into his ear. “I’ve got a knife up to your throat. I’ll cut you wide open.”

Josh rushed into the bunker and stopped cold. He had a pistol in his hand, his eyes wide, his jaw dropping. “Oh God,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 26

Luke

Luke had followed his tracks from yesterday through the woods. He also followed the notches he’d made in the trunks of trees, his “breadcrumbs.” He remembered a few of the clearings from yesterday, the stream he’d passed by, and a few other landmarks: a big rock covered with moss and mildew, a twisted tree that looked like it had been struck by lightning.

He’d gotten to the deadfall, the place where he’d stopped yesterday. He stopped there again now, resting for a minute, listening to the woods.

This was the way he’d thought Rose’s tracks had gone yesterday even though he’d lost them. Yet he felt this was the right path through the woods. And today he wasn’t in as big of a hurry to get back to the cabin, so he took his time to study his surroundings. He noticed a scuffing along the top of the fallen tree, areas where it looked like the mold and rotting bark had been disturbed, where someone had crawled over it.

Maybe Rose had come this way yesterday. It was a good sign to keep going this way. He took his pack off and got his canteen out, drinking a few swallows of water, resting for another few minutes.

He put the canteen back into his pack and slipped it on his back again, tightening the straps. He crawled over the deadfall and continued on, making his way slowly through the woods. The trees had gotten closer together, the brush a little thicker. The dead leaves carpeted the hilly terrain, but they were wet from the snow that had melted, so they didn’t crunch under his boots. It was cold, but his body had heated up from the movement and his tension. He still kept his hoodie on, and his knit cap and gloves.

After a few more minutes of walking, he stopped, noticing a few very faint tracks on the ground. He couldn’t tell if they were Rose’s tracks—they weren’t clear enough for that. But it was something to follow, and again he just felt like he was on the right path.

For the next thirty minutes Luke trekked through the woods, coming down into another small clearing where he felt exposed for a moment, but he was across the clearing in seconds and back in the cover of trees.

He went up the next hill, and the top of it leveled off a little. There were big rock formations all around, small gorges, then another clearing down below. He remembered Rose saying something about a cave she had stayed the night in, and he saw the evidence of that now.

But there was a lot of stuff down there in the clearing: trash, debris, a pit with rocks around it for a fire, a small stack of twigs and branches for the fire, and a dark blue backpack.

Rose had said something about taking a pillow case with her when she had abandoned the pickup truck and took to the woods. She hadn’t said anything about a backpack.

Something was wrong here. It looked like several people had camped here, and now it looked suddenly abandoned, like something had scared them off. Had to be. Who would leave a backpack like that behind? Even if it was empty, it could still be useful for carrying stuff.

Luke stayed down behind the tree he’d been crouched behind. He fished the binoculars out from under his hoodie, unzipping the jacket so he had access to his pistol if he needed it.

He got a better look at the campsite below, at the rock formations that must be the mouth of the cave. Rose said she’d stayed at a small cave, but this one looked big.

Maybe this was a different cave. Maybe Rose hadn’t stayed here, maybe these were other people. Not rippers, obviously, but other survivors. Maybe many others had followed that same logic Sayid had suggested—going into the woods, into the mountains, remote places where there would be fewer rippers, or maybe none at all.

There could be small bands of survivors everywhere out here, two or three people, some larger groups.

Or it could be Dark Angels down there.

But it looked too disorganized to be Dark Angels. No, he still had the feeling this place had been abandoned quickly.

He needed to get down there and look inside the cave; that was the only way he was going to know for sure. He had scanned the trees with the binoculars but hadn’t seen anything or heard anything. If people were hiding, they were hiding well.

This was it. This was what he’d come this far for. He had to know. At the very least, it seemed like Rose might have been lying about being alone in the woods.

After a few more minutes, he slid down the hillside, moving slowly, holding on to tree trunks as he made his way down to the small clearing without a sound.

As soon as he was in the tiny clearing, only about the size of a small house, in front of the cave, he could smell the unmistakable odor of death, of flesh and blood, of fresh kills.

He jerked his rifle up into a shooting position, ready to fire. He inched closer to the opening of the cave. Flies were buzzing around, making a swarming sound like bees—the same sound he’d heard when he and Wilma had come across the pile of rippers in front of a house.

And after he was closer to the cave, he saw the bodies inside, three of them. But rippers hadn’t done this—human beings had.

This wasn’t a mound of dead bodies like he’d seen before, like some discarded trash. These were three people naked and staked down to the hard dirt floor of the cave, hands tied to the other’s feet, laid out like big X’s. Chunks of their flesh were gone, like they’d been tortured, but also like rodents and other creatures had been feasting on their rotting flesh.

Luke backed away from the cave. It didn’t seem to go back very far, like it wasn’t really a cave but more like a recess into the rock formation.

He got back into the trees, needing the cover right now. He worked his way to his right, around to the other side of the huge rock formation and the shallow cave. He saw things hanging from the tree branches on the other side of the formation, three men and a woman, all naked, all hung upside down, their hands bound behind their backs, their faces beaten to pulps. Someone had had fun using them as batting practice while they hung upside down, helpless to defend themselves.

And painted in blood that had turned dark on one man’s torso was a big DA symbol.

This was a trap.

As soon as that thought entered Luke’s mind, he heard gunshots ringing out, bullets pelting the tree trunks around him.

PART 4

CHAPTER 27

Kate

I’m going to need all of you to get in the van, the man with the mustache said.

Kate stood next to their SUV, which had overheated from a busted hose, stranding them on this lonely road in the middle of the woods as the rippers Lisey had summoned headed their way.

The man with the mustache stood only fifteen feet away, his weapon still in his hands, still aimed at Max. The man with the paintball mask was still behind the open door of his pickup truck, still aiming his rifle at them. Another man got out of the pickup truck—a teenager really—and hurried up to Kate with a pistol clenched in his hand. He kept his eyes on Kate as he darted to the strip of grass to grab her shotgun. Then he backed away, quick as a fox. He was around the SUV, giving them a wide berth as he grabbed Max and Petra’s weapons from the street. Then he was back to the pickup truck a few seconds later.

“Okay,” Max said. “You’ve got our weapons now. You can lower your guns.”

Mustache Man lowered his rifle down and seemed to relax just a little. “We’re not going to hurt you. Please, you have to trust us.”

The rippers called out, the shrieks and screams filling the air.

“You need to come with us,” Mustache Man said. “Those rippers are coming. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Kate wasn’t sure about this. But Petra was right: What other choice did they have? She glanced into the back seat at Brooke; she held Tiger on her lap, Tiger’s eyes big and round.

“What’s your name?” Mustache Man asked. “My name’s Lance. That’s Dale and Zak back there in the pickup, and Crystal’s driving the van.”

“I’m Max. This is Petra behind me. Kate over there. Brooke is in the back seat. We’ll go with you. We’ve got food and supplies we could take with us. We don’t have everything from the house.” He smiled just a little. “We had to leave in a hurry.”

The rippers were getting closer. Kate heard their calls, the roar of a crowd. It was an eerie sound, almost like it wasn’t coming from humans at all but from some other species.

“Okay,” Lance said. “We’ll load up your stuff, but we need to leave right now.”

Lance looked back and nodded at Dale. He jumped back into the pickup and drove forward, passing them and then turning around in the road so that the truck was facing the same direction as their SUV, but parked a car-length behind them. Zak got out and hopped into the back of the truck with the rifle Dale had been aiming at them only minutes ago. He aimed his rifle down the road, waiting for the herd of rippers to crest the hill.

The van turned around and then backed down the road, parking right beside the SUV. Lance opened up the sliding door on the side.

Max and Petra were already at the back of the SUV, grabbing cardboard boxes and bags.

Kate looked in at Brooke through the open passenger door. “We’re going to need to get Tiger back into his box, okay?”

She nodded.

“I hear ‘em coming,” Zak called from the back of the pickup truck. “They’re almost here!”

Kate hurried to the back of the SUV and found the box for Tiger. She got into the back seat and helped Brooke get the cat into the box. Tiger didn’t like the idea of being stuffed back into the box, but he didn’t fight too much.

“Don’t be scared,” Kate told Tiger, but she kept her eyes on Brooke. “Okay?”

Brooke nodded again.

“We’ll be all right,” Kate told Brooke. “I promise. They’re going to take us somewhere safe.”

Two quick rifle shots sounded from the back of the pickup. The roar of the crowd of rippers was loud. They were running, rising up over the hill, the crowd as wide as the road. Some of them were running in the woods, moving through the trees and brush like animals.

They had everything from the SUV and they piled into the van through the side door. The pickup was right behind them, the motor rumbling. Crystal already started taking off as Lance was getting inside and shutting the passenger door.

Kate finally exhaled. It felt like she’d been holding her breath for minutes, her head was light but also throbbing. Everything seemed slightly out-of-focus but also hyperreal. Her heart pounded, her hands shook, her muscles twitched.

The van had no windows on the side, just windows in the doors at the back. It looked like it used to be some kind of work van or delivery van. There was only one bench seat; Brooke and Petra took the seat, Petra holding the box Tiger was in. Kate and Max sat on the floor among the boxes and bags they had taken from their SUV.

Lance turned around in the passenger seat with a big smile on his face. “That was close, huh?”

Kate looked at Lance, then at Crystal. She hadn’t turned around or said anything, focused on driving the van. She was small and trim, compact and strong-looking, like Petra. Her blond hair was short like Petra’s and she had a big tattoo on the side of her neck.

“Here,” Lance said. He had a first-aid kit he’d gotten from the glove box. He handed it to Petra. “You’re bleeding.”

Petra accepted the kit without a thank you. She opened the case and pulled out a gauze pad, opening it and holding it against the gash in her hairline.

“It might need to be stitched up,” Lance told her. “We have a doctor at the store.”

“A doctor?” Max asked.

“Yes. Well, a nurse, but we call her our doctor.”

“Why are you helping us?” Kate asked.

“The manager wants to help people.”

“The manager?”

“We go out on scouting missions every so often,” Lance said. “We have a year’s worth of dry food and drinks at the store, among other supplies and weapons, but we’re always looking for more.”

“And you’re looking for people?” she asked him.

“Yes. When we can find them. Which isn’t very often anymore.”

“Why people?” Max asked. “If you don’t mind me asking. Believe me, we’re grateful.”

“All of us are going to need to band together to survive. I guess you know by now that no one is coming to save us. There’s no government anymore, no military. Nothing nowhere. Not here in America or in any other country. It’s up to us now to survive, and to eventually rebuild.”

“And you’re going to rebuild at a Super Bea’s?” Kate said.

“To begin with. The store will get us through the winter. In the spring and summer we’ll look for other places, eventually branch out. Hopefully a lot of the rippers will die off in the winter, maybe even kill each other off as they get hungrier. But we have another threat that’s worse than the rippers.”

“The Dark Angels.”

Lance nodded. “Yes, you already mentioned them. I guess you’ve run across them, then.”

Max and Kate nodded. Petra kept the gauze pad pressed against her head.

“The Dark Angels are roaming around and pillaging anything they can find,” Lance said.

“What about your store?” Kate asked. “The Dark Angels haven’t attacked you there?”

“They’ve tried a few times, but we pushed them back. We have our defenses.”

“What kind of defenses?” Petra asked.

Lance smiled at her. “Oh, you’ll see when we get there.”

Kate found it strange that the Dark Angels had been pushed back and given up so easily. She was surprised that they didn’t keep watch when these guys went out on their scouting missions. It seemed suspicious to her, but she didn’t want to say anything.

“Do you know who the leader of the Dark Angels is?” Kate asked Lance. She wondered if he had seen the Dragon in his dreams like she had, like Max and Petra had, like Brooke had.

“We haven’t seen him,” Lance said. “But we’ve heard he calls himself the Dragon. He wants to control all of the resources in this area. There’s a rumor he controls a town about a hundred miles south of here. Somewhere in northern Georgia.”

Kate saw the town he spoke of in her mind, the wastelands she’d seen so many times in her dreams.

“We hope to eventually set up a parlay with the Dark Angels,” Lance said. “Maybe in the spring. Try to come to some kind of truce with them. Maybe eventually turn some of their followers to our side, let them know that there are alternatives to survival besides being with the Dark Angels.”

Kate sat back against a box. She was happy to be headed somewhere safe, but this all seemed too good to be true. With the bad luck they’d been having, she was happy with this stroke of good luck, but she figured something bad was going to happen, and she was waiting for the hammer to drop. She was still suspicious of this whole thing, but what could they do right now besides go along for the ride?

“You said you were taking us to see the manager,” Kate said. “He’s your leader?”

“She,” Lance corrected. “Her real name’s JoAnne, but everyone calls her Miss Jo or just the manager. She was the general manager of the store when the Collapse began.” Lance and Crystal exchanged glances. “She’ll want to meet you when we get there, I’m sure of that.”

*

Thirty minutes later they entered the town of Perry. Crystal drove the van down the streets on the outskirts of the town where the newer buildings and businesses had popped up over the last twenty years, keeping the downtown historic and untouched. Like all of the other towns Kate had seen, this place was trashed. Stores had been looted, some of the buildings burned, trash and debris everywhere. Abandoned and wrecked vehicles clogged the roads, but Crystal seemed to be following some well-traveled route through the wreckage, swerving in between the cars and trucks. The two pickups were right behind them, Dale and Zak’s pickup, and another one with the “spotters” inside, the ones who had been up in the mountains. They all communicated by walkie-talkies.

Kate could only really see out through the windshield and back windows of the van, so she didn’t get much of a view.

“So the Dark Angels don’t mess with you guys?” Max asked.

Kate glanced at him, but couldn’t read his eyes. He looked at Lance, waiting for him to respond. But Kate could tell he was as suspicious of their story as she was. It just didn’t make sense. If the rippers hadn’t attacked, then what were they waiting for?

Us? her mind whispered. The Dark Angels are waiting for us to get there.

A chill danced along her skin, making her shiver, and she wondered where that thought had come from.

“Like I said,” Lance said, turning around in his passenger seat to look at Max. “A small group of them have tried a few times, but it wasn’t anything major. Only a few of them at a time. Easy enough for us to shoot at them from the roof and drive them off.”

Max scrunched his face just a little like he was confused about something. “But you said you had enough food and water in your store for a year. I mean, if they’re pillaging for supplies, wouldn’t your store be a goldmine for them?”

Inside her mind, Kate was pumping her fist in victory. Yeah, explain that, Lance. At that moment she loved Max for voicing her suspicions, for thinking just like she was, and for being bold enough to ask about it.

“I think they’re concentrating on grabbing up some of the other little stuff, maybe saving our store for later. They know it’s always going to be there. Maybe they’re making plans right now.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s all I can tell you.”

Kate still didn’t buy it.

“Like I said before, we’re going to try to make a truce with them. Maybe even set up some sort of trade. We’re all going to have to do that eventually.”

“We’re going to have to plan way beyond just the winter,” Crystal said.

Lance nodded in agreement. “That’s what the manager says. A lot of people, maybe like the Dark Angels, are thinking short-term, and that’s perfectly understandable, but we’re thinking of the future, years into the future.”

The walkie-talkie stuffed down into the center consoled blared static, then a voice squawked from it: “We’ve spotted a herd of rippers. Off to the left. Down Chestnut Street. At least a hundred of them. They’re coming this way.”

CHAPTER 28

Kate

Lance picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the button on the side. “Roger that.”

“Are we close to your store yet?” Max asked.

“It’s right up there,” Crystal said, pointing out the windshield.

Kate saw the large building in the distance. It had a big yellow sign at the top with a cartoon bee next to the name of the store. The sign used to light up at night when they still had electricity.

There were no other buildings around the Super Bea’s store, and the woods weren’t too far beyond the rear of the building, a ridge of mountains set a little farther back forming a ring around this large valley that Perry had been built in.

A road branched off from the road they were on, a dead traffic light strung across the intersection. The road that led to the Super Bea’s looked newer and fields had been cleared beyond the road where once developers had planned to build more businesses. One building was partially built, some of the block walls constructed with scaffolding set up all around them, construction materials piled up near the construction site.

“How close are the rippers?” Lance said into the walkie-talkie.

“Close,” the person responded.

“Can we make it inside?”

“I think so. Gonna be close, though.”

Lance and Crystal glanced at each other as she turned right onto the newer road that led to the Super Bea’s in the distance.

Kate saw a line of cars and trucks blocking the entrances to the vast parking lot into the store. Part of the parking lot had a big ditch naturally blocking it off; other areas had trees and block walls.

Crystal raced up to the line of cars and trucks, some of them smashed up, glass busted out, metal crunched in, tires flattened, old bloodstains smeared on the interior. She stopped the van in front of two cars parked nose to nose.

“Why is the entrance blocked?” Kate asked.

Lance had two sets of keys in his hands. “We put them there. It’s one line of defense for us.” He got out and slammed the door shut.

Kate saw Lance and another man who must have been from the spotter’s truck. They each got into a vehicle, started them and backed them out of the way.

Crystal grabbed the walkie-talkie and flipped to a different channel. “Miss Jo, we’re coming in.”

She shifted into drive and drove through the opening. The pickups followed right after her.

Kate heard the rippers coming. So many of them. They would be up and over the wrecked line of cars and trucks in a flash, flooding the parking lot.

“Look,” Max whispered to Kate, pointing out through the windshield at the top of the building.

Kate saw what he was pointing at—there were people up there with guns, snipers on top of the flat roof of the Super Bea’s building.

“There’s a lot of them up there,” Kate said.

“We keep a constant rotation of spotters on the roof,” Crystal said. “They’ve got walkies and rifles. But most of those you see up there are mannequins with clothes from the store. They’ve got cargo netting and tarps over them. Some of the guns are just metal barrels poking out from the tarps to make it look like they are rifles. We move the mannequins around every so often. It makes the Dark Angels and any other survivors think we’ve got a lot more people up there.”

“Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,” Petra said.

Crystal didn’t seem to know what she was talking about, but Kate recognized the reference. She’d read the book a long time ago, and she remembered something about an army lighting hundreds of fires at night to make the other army think there were more of them than there were.

Lance was back in the van. He shut the door as Crystal drove across the parking lot, then raced alongside the building. Most of the parking lot was empty of cars. There was trash and a few overturned shopping carts. Crystal drove toward a chain-link fence that ran off the back of the building. There was a box truck parked in front of the huge gate, but someone was already backing the truck out of the way as they got closer to the gate. Another man inside the fence pushed the gate open for them. He wore thick black rubber gloves that came up to his elbows, the kind of gloves used for cleaning fryers.

“The fence is electrified with wires hooked up to car batteries,” Lance explained. “We unhook the wires from the terminals when we go in and out, but we don’t want to take any chances.” He nodded at the man with the rubber gloves. “But the current keeps the rippers away when they get close.”

They drove through the opening, passing the man with the gloves. The two pickup trucks followed them inside the huge area behind the store that was completely fenced in with rolls of barbed wire on top. Kate looked out the back windows of the van. The box truck had been parked back in front of the gate and a man was sliding the gate shut and locking it with a chain and padlock. One of the pickup trucks had waited for the two men, and they jumped into the back when the gate was secure.

“That’s quite a barricade of cars you’ve got there,” Max said with a smile.

“Yeah, you see that semi-truck that was out there in front?”

Max nodded.

“That was Jackson’s truck. He made a delivery here right before the Collapse. It’s the main reason Jo had so much stock here right before she closed the doors on a Thursday.”

“She closed the doors a day before the Collapse?” Max asked.

Lance just smiled. “I’ll let her tell you about it.”

Crystal drove down the back of the building, heading toward a long concrete ramp. She pulled onto the ramp and drove up to the building as a large garage door opened up. She pulled inside the building, the van’s headlights splashing across stacks of boxes and crates on the other side of the vast loading area. There was only enough room for the van in the space with all of the stacks of boxes—the two pickups parked outside next to the concrete ramp that they had just driven up into the loading bay.

Lance was out of the van, pulling the side door open. Kate and Max were out first. Kate helped Brooke out while still trying to hold the cardboard box Tiger was in.

“Here,” Crystal said. She came up to them with a plastic carrying case for an animal. “We had a lot of these. You can put the cat in here so it will be easier to hold him.”

“Thanks,” Kate said, not really sure how they were going to do that.

“I’ll help,” Crystal said as if sensing Kate’s reluctance. “We had a lot of cats growing up. A lot of all kinds of animals.”

Lance was at the open garage door, barking orders at the men in the pickup trucks. “Get those wires hooked back up to the batteries.”

Kate let Crystal take over the transferring-of-the-cat duties. She walked over to where Max stood, watching the men from the pickup trucks scrambling into action. There were some boxes and plastic tubs in the backs of the trucks—supplies they had gathered from other places before coming across them and their stranded SUV. Dale and Zak worked quickly, handing the boxes and tubs to the other two men from the pickup truck, the spotters. The man in the long rubber gloves crouched down on the other side of the loading ramp, hooking series of wires up to four car batteries attached to a wooden pallet. The whole contraption was hidden under the long eave of the edge of the roof, protected from rain and snow.

The whole operation only took a minute or two. Lance grabbed boxes and tubs from the edge of the loading bay, and Max jumped in to help.

The roar of the rippers from beyond the chain-link fencing and the barricade of cars was getting louder—they were coming this way.

“We need to hurry, guys,” Lance yelled.

A few minutes later the rest of the guys were inside and the metal garage door was pulled down, then the locks on each side were engaged.

It was suddenly dark inside the loading bay, but Kate’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. She realized that there were a few battery-powered lanterns lit on the other side of the room and two dingy skylights in the ceiling of metal beams. Lance clicked on a flashlight, pointing it across the large room at where the lanterns were.

The room was huge. Stacks of boxes, tubs, crates, and bags swam into view from the darkness, edges of the monoliths of supplies. A forklift was parked in front of one of the tall stacks of supplies.

“Most of this stuff is just extra stuff we brought out from the store,” Lance said. “Stuff we really don’t need, so we could make more room inside the store.”

“We stacked it up with the forklift until it ran out of juice,” Crystal said. “No way to recharge it now.”

Dale had pushed up his paintball mask revealing his boyish face. He spoke into the walkie-talkie he had in his hand as they all walked across the room toward a large set of double doors.

“Come on,” Lance said. “Let’s get you guys inside the store.”

CHAPTER 29

Kate

Kate held Tiger’s carrying case that Crystal had gotten the cat into and she held Brooke’s hand with her other hand. Petra was right behind her and Max was in front of her when they walked through the open double doors into a wide, dark hallway.

“Sorry,” Lance said. “We don’t keep many lanterns on back here. Trying to conserve the batteries. Batteries are something we’re always looking for.”

Kate didn’t respond. She just walked along with the group down the dark hall. It felt like she was in a castle now as the savages raged outside, like they were working their way deeper into the castle, deeper into the dungeons.

No, they’re not going to hurt us, she told herself. If they were going to hurt us, they would have done it by now.

From seemingly far away, Kate heard the pops of gunshots. The spotters on the roof shooting at the horde of rippers coming toward the building.

“The bathrooms are back here,” Crystal said. “Down that hall there. We use the rainwater we collect to wash up and to flush the toilets.”

“You have toilets that work?” Max asked. His voice echoed slightly in the dark halls.

Lance’s flashlight beam bounced around at the front of their group. It provided just enough light for Kate to see Max right in front of her, his broad shoulders and wide back blocking a lot of her view.

“They work so far,” Lance said. “We keep flushing them with buckets of water, let gravity do its work. I’m sure the sewers will eventually back up, but we’ll use the toilets until that happens.”

“We only go number two in the toilets,” Crystal said. “We use buckets for number one.”

“We’ll go over all of the rules here soon enough,” Lance said as he led them through another set of double doors opening up to the light. “We all work together here. We all have jobs and we all help each other. That’s all we ask.”

“You got it,” Max said.

The doors opened up to the store. For just a second Kate thought they had electric lights working inside the store, but then she realized that the light was coming from skylights in the ceiling far above them among the rafters, all of the metal painted white. Even with the cloudy light coming down through the skylights, it was still gloomy inside the vast store. And maybe it was only her imagination, but the light shining down from the skylights made it actually feel warmer inside the store.

“We’ve cleared out a lot of the unnecessary stuff over the last few weeks,” Lance said. “All of that stuff you saw stacked up in the loading bays. We took it all back there, and we dismantled a lot of the shelves, consolidating stuff to make a big living area right over there.”

“Yeah,” Crystal added. “There’s a lot of stuff we don’t really need at this time: toys, car accessories, at least half the clothing, jewelry, vacuum cleaners, lawn equipment, office supplies, most paper products, DVDs, computers, printers—anything that needs electricity to run. It’s surprising how much room we made.”

Max nodded in agreement.

“We reorganized the things we needed into different areas,” Lance continued. “Food and drinks over there.” He pointed at the far end of the store where cases and boxes were stacked up like monoliths in the distance. “It’s over there by the deli and the freezers. We’ve also got all the bathroom supplies, laundry and cleaning supplies, and medicines over there. On that side over there, we’ve got the camping supplies, clothing we’ve kept, other cleaning supplies, tools, and any battery-powered devices.”

“What about the weapons?” Petra asked. “They used to sell guns here?”

“Yeah, they did,” Lance answered. “Mostly rifles and shotguns, a few handguns. A lot of ammo. Some other things like bows and arrows, knives, things like that.”

“We keep the weapons and that kind of stuff in the back by the offices,” Crystal said.

Petra didn’t seem to like that idea. Kate thought she was going to ask about their weapons, but she didn’t.

Lance walked over to the cleared area of the store where several tents and temporary housing had been set up. The area was the size of at least three houses.

“We call it tent city,” Crystal said.

The tents were in a big circle, close to each other, but not too close. Some of the flaps of the tents were open, sleeping bags inside. Some people slept in the tents now, but others were outside of the tents, some of them sitting in plastic chairs or lawn chairs.

Beyond the tent city there were two scissor-lifts raised all the way up to skylights with ladders attached to the sides of them with rope.

“Those skylights are removable,” Lance said, noticing that Kate was staring at them. “That’s how we get up and down off the roof.”

“The spotters are up there,” Max said.

Kate could hear the gunshots more clearly now that they were inside the main rooms of the store.

“We collect rainwater up there,” Crystal said. “We have barrels and buckets up there, whatever we can collect water in. They’re all over the roof. We lower a few buckets down at a time with ropes.”

Crystal had hardly said anything when she’d been driving the van, but Kate noticed that she was much more talkative now, much friendlier. Maybe she’d been stressed while driving the van, focusing solely on that task. She found herself liking Crystal—she seemed to be a friendlier version of Petra.

“We’ve also got some potted plants growing up there,” Crystal added with a smile. “We’re trying to get some tomatoes growing before the weather gets too cold.”

Kate saw a young woman and a boy in front of one tent. The woman sat in a lawn chair and the boy was right beside her on a blanket, an open children’s book in his lap. The boy stared at them, but Kate realized his eyes were on Brooke, transfixed by her.

“That’s Rebecca and Patrick,” Lance said. “We found them in a house about a week ago.”

“This is amazing,” Max said, turning around in a slow circle. “You guys have thought of everything.”

“Not everything,” Lance said. “There’s always room for improvements.” He smiled at Max. “Come on. Let’s go meet everyone else.”

CHAPTER 30

Max

Max couldn’t believe what Lance and the others had created in this superstore. And the manager. Lance and Crystal gave the manager most of the credit for what they had done here.

Max had hoped to find somewhere safe—that had been his plan ever since he’d left his home in Virginia. That had been his plan ever since he’d met Petra on the road. And Kate’s parents’ home had provided a little safety, some rest for a few days to collect their thoughts and to let their bodies recover. But he never would have dared to believe they’d ever find anything like this place, something so organized like this, a fortress, like this place seemed to be.

Kate still held Brooke’s hand and carried Tiger’s carrying cage that Crystal had given to her. The cat let out a few meows, but he didn’t seem to be freaking out too badly yet; maybe even Tiger could sense that they were safe here in this building—the store, as Lance called it.

Yet, as amazing as this was, Max could sense Kate’s unease. He’d seen the suspicion in her eyes when Lance and Crystal told them that the Dark Angels had attacked a few times and then retreated. He had to admit that he hadn’t been buying their story while riding in the van. But now that they were here at the store, he could see how it could be defended quite well. It was like a fortress. But it wasn’t impenetrable. And if the Dark Angels eventually brought enough forces here, they could set up camps in the distance, wait them out and pick them off when they went out to look for supplies, killing those scouts or abducting them, using them for ransom or to draw the others out.

The Dark Angels might even try to burn this place down and smoke them out. No, they would want the supplies in here, the food and water, so maybe they wouldn’t do that. Maybe that made them safe for a little while in here.

Maybe Lance was right. Maybe the Dark Angels were saving this place for later, collecting the easier food and supplies, knowing this place was always going to be here, like it was their savings account. Or maybe, if Max wanted to be truly hopeful, Lance, the manager, and the others here could strike a truce with the Dark Angels, develop some sort of trade with them in the spring. Warring tribes and nations had done the same thing countless times throughout history. Why not here? Why not now?

Because the Dragon wasn’t going to let that happen. He wanted it all.

A man with a bandage wrapped around the top of his head walked up to them from his tent. He was short and skinny with long dark hair cascading down from under the white bandages. He had a pinched, weasel-like face, small dark eyes, and a small slit of a mouth curved up into a humorless grin. Even though he wore new clothes (they all wore new clothes here—obviously procured from the nearly-endless supply in this store), he still seemed to be dirty and grimy.

“Name’s Neal,” the man said, offering his hand to Max first.

Max accepted the man’s greeting, the man’s hand swallowed up inside of Max’s hand.

“These guys saved my life,” Neal said, the sneering smile never leaving his face. He turned to Petra and proffered his hand to her.

Petra took Neal’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze and a pump, even though Max could tell she didn’t want to touch him. She didn’t smile at him or say anything to him.

Neal turned away from Petra’s cold reaction to Kate. She set Tiger’s carrying case down on the floor beside her so she could shake his hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” Neal told Kate.

“Me too,” she answered.

He seemed to hold on to Kate’s hand a second too long.

He looks like a petty criminal, Max thought.

“And who’s this?” Neal asked, leaning down with his grubby hands on the knees of his new tan pants, new work boots on his feet.

Brooke shrank back from Neal, still holding Kate’s hand.

“She’s a little shy,” Kate said, and then added: “She’s been through a lot.”

Neal straightened back up and the smile was gone from his face, a serious look replacing the grin that lacked sincerity, like a bad actor trying to pull off a performance. He gave a solemn nod. “Yes. We all have.”

“That’s Sophie over there,” Lance said, hurrying the introductions along.

Sophie was a tall, thin woman in her mid-thirties. She had big blue eyes and a severe overbite. Her blond hair was stringy. She wore new jeans and a pink hoodie, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket. She pulled one hand out and waved at them, not bothering to come forward or to shake hands as Neal had done.

“That’s Jeff,” Lance said.

Jeff was a pudgy, middle-aged man with light curly hair and glasses. His cheeks were fleshy and red. He reminded Max of some kind of office worker. Jeff gave them a warm smile and a weak wave. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, constantly adjusting them—it seemed to be some kind of nervous habit. “Welcome, guys,” he said.

Max nodded at Jeff.

“That’s Fernando over there,” Lance said.

Fernando was as tall as Max and looked like he used to be heavier, just like Max had been. He looked like he had lost some of his fat over the last few weeks, losing most of it in his arms and legs first, just like Max had done.

“Pleased to meet you,” Fernando said in a deep, heavily-accented voice. He gave them a wave.

“Tina Yang,” Lance announced, pointing at a small woman.

Tina smiled sheepishly and waved at them, remaining beside her small tent.

“There are others in the tents,” Lance said. “Some work the night shift up on the roof or in other areas in the store. You’ll meet the ones in the tents and up on the roof eventually.”

Max turned to Lance. “Thank you again for helping us.”

Lance stood next to Crystal. Dale—who had his paintball mask hanging down under his chin on a strap—stood a few feet beyond them. The other guys from the pickup trucks weren’t around. Maybe they were off doing something else.

Tiger meowed from his cage. Kate picked up the carrying case, Brooke watching her every move.

“How many do you have here?” Max asked Lance.

Lance glanced at Crystal, their eyes locking on each other for just a moment. He shrugged. “I haven’t counted everyone up.” He seemed to be running names through his mind at lighting speed. “Maybe almost thirty.”

“A little over thirty now,” Crystal said. “With you four.”

Neal was back at his tent, sitting down on an overturned bucket.

Patrick had lost interest in his children’s book and scooted right up closer to Rebecca.

For some reason Max didn’t think Patrick was Rebecca’s son—actually, the odds of two people being immune to the Ripper Plague in the same family seemed pretty high to Max. But Patrick seemed to latch on to Rebecca like she was his mother, much like Brooke had become attached to Kate.

“Alright,” Lance said. “We’ll go to the meeting room where you can meet Miss Jo, the manager.”

CHAPTER 31

Kate

Once again Kate followed Max as he followed Lance and Crystal, with Petra behind them all. Kate held Tiger’s carrying case in one hand and she held Brooke’s hand. They left the store and walked back through the double doors they had come through before. They took a left down another hall, heading toward a light in the distance shining out of a doorway.

“The meeting room’s in there,” Lance said, gesturing at the doorway. “I’ll go get Jo. She must be in her office.”

Crystal led them into the meeting room. The battery-powered lantern on the middle of the table gave off a surprising amount of light, enough for Kate to easily see the whole room. On one wall beyond the head of the table was a whiteboard, about the size of a schoolroom chalkboard, with writing all over it in different-colored markers.

“Have a seat,” Crystal said. “You want something to drink?” She walked over to a few cases of water stacked up on a side table. She didn’t wait for an answer, pulling out a few bottles of water and setting them on the table.

Kate set the carrying case down on the table in front of Brooke, sitting down right beside her. Max and Petra sat next to each other on the other side of the table. Crystal sat down at the opposite end of the head of the table, obviously saving that seat for the manager.

A flashlight beam shined from down the hall, growing brighter in the doorway. A few seconds later a large woman entered the room with Lance right behind her. Lance stepped to the side of the doorway, waiting in the corner of the room like a guard.

“Hello, all,” the manager said with a big smile. She was at least five foot ten and had to be over two hundred pounds. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a bun. She looked like she could be anywhere from her early forties to her late fifties, her pale skin free of wrinkles but ruddy. Her light green eyes were piercing but warm. She wore black clothing, a new baggy sweatshirt and slacks. She wore clogs with thick socks. She had a quiet confidence, the air of a natural leader.

“Hi,” Kate answered.

“Hello,” Max said.

Petra just grunted a greeting that was almost inaudible. She eyed the woman suspiciously.

“My name’s JoAnne,” the manager said. “But everybody calls me Miss Jo, or just Jo. Whatever you prefer.”

“I’m Kate.”

“Max.”

“Petra,” she grumbled.

“And this is Brooke,” Kate said.

Jo’s face lit up when she looked at Brooke. “Pleased to meet you, Brooke. How old are you?”

Brooke didn’t answer, but she didn’t look away from Jo—it was almost like she was hypnotized by her.

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “She doesn’t talk a lot.”

“At first, anyway,” Max said with a smile.

“She’s been through some terrible times,” Kate said.

“Yes, of course,” Jo answered, nodding like she understood—her eyes said she’d seen some terrible things herself. “You have a cat.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “We found him in a trailer park. We call him Tiger.” Then he stiffened, suddenly tense and worried. “Do you allow pets here?”

Jo thought about it for a second, frowning. “We never really made a rule about that. So many things were overlooked or never even considered. Especially at first.” She smiled. “But we’re learning as we go.”

“Well, I’d say you’re doing an incredible job,” Max said.

Jo looked at Tiger in his pet carrier. “We don’t have any pets here now. But I don’t think it would hurt to have Tiger here.”

Kate watched Brooke, waiting for her to crack a smile, but she didn’t.

“Maybe Tiger could help catch some mice around here.”

“You have mice here?” Max asked.

“Well, probably more like rats,” Jo said. “We haven’t seen too many, and we’ve put some traps out, but I’m sure they’ll eventually try to get to some of the dry goods. We have to be so protective of what we’ve got here.”

Max nodded like he could definitely agree with that.

“What do you think?” Jo said, turning back to Brooke. “You think Tiger could help us catch some rats?”

Brooke just shrugged, staring at Jo.

“I haven’t seen many cats,” Jo said. “Or dogs.”

“I’ve seen a few dogs,” Max said. “But most seem to be feral and travel in packs for protection.”

“I’ve seen a few of those packs out on our runs,” Lance said. “And believe me, they’re not pets anymore. I think cats might have been more suited to survive in this case than dogs.” He nodded at Tiger in the carrying case.

Kate could tell that Max was breathing out a sigh of relief that Jo wasn’t forbidding the cat to be there. She couldn’t imagine having to set Tiger free outside and Brooke losing it. Kate was certain that caring for Tiger had helped Brooke cope somewhat with this nightmare they were living in.

Brooke moved closer to Kate and whispered into her ear.

Jo smiled, waiting patiently for an interpretation.

“She wants to know if you have any cat food,” Kate said.

“Of course,” Jo said, looking right at Brooke. “We probably have more cat food than Tiger could eat in five years.”

Brooke finally cracked the ghost of a smile. Kate put an arm around her thin shoulders, giving her a squeeze.

“We didn’t get our guns back,” Petra said.

Jo’s eyes flicked to Petra, and then she looked at Lance.

He nodded at her.

“You can have them back if you want them,” Jo told Petra. “But what we usually do is pool all of our weapons and resources together. We share.”

Petra looked dubious about that.

“Lance said you’re rebuilding here,” Max said quickly, like he was trying to change the subject.

Jo nodded. “That’s our intention, our long-term goal. We have long-term goals, but we also have short-term goals like surviving the winter, shoring up our defenses, looking for supplies and resources that we don’t have here, or just restocking our supply. Collecting what we can before others take it.”

“Like the Dark Angels,” Petra said.

Jo nodded again. “I see you’re familiar with them.”

“We’ve all run into them before.”

“And lived to tell about it,” Jo said. “That’s impressive.”

“So, you really think we can rebuild eventually?” Max asked.

“We have to,” Jo said. “We’re all that’s left. We’re the survivors. It might take ten years or it might take a hundred, but we have to defeat the rippers. And we have to defeat gangs like the Dark Angels, and others like them. Or we have to make some kind of truce with them.” She paused for just a moment, glancing at each of them, but her eyes finally steadied on Kate. “That’s why we need more people. People are just as valuable as food and water. Not just for labor, but also for ideas. We need to stand together as survivors. Stay strong and work together.”

“So, we can stay?” Max asked.

“Of course,” Jo said, almost like his question had hurt her feelings. “For as long as you want to.”

“We’re planning on going down to Florida,” Petra said.

“Or up north,” Max added. “Kate thinks a lot of the rippers might freeze to death up there during the winter.”

Jo nodded. “I guess that’s possible. But from what we’ve seen, the rippers seem to have adapted pretty well to the cold and the elements.”

Kate thought once again of how primitive humans had been able to survive harsh winters in the past.

“But going north eventually is something to think about,” Jo added quickly, like she was afraid of offending their suggestion.

“What you’ve got here,” Max said, “what you’ve done so far, it’s absolutely amazing. How did you do it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I wouldn’t want to bore you with that,” Jo said with a smile.

“Please,” Max said. “We’d like to hear it.”

CHAPTER 32

Jo

Jo thought back to when it had begun, the day the world collapsed. It had been coming for weeks: society deteriorating, the economy crumbling, mobs of people protesting, military and police presence everywhere. Jo had seen reports on the news, but there were even more worrisome reports on the internet, reports that weren’t matching up with what they were saying on the news.

She lived in the small town of Perry, but she’d seen the meltdown even here in this usually peaceful mountain town of twenty thousand people.

Jo had grown up forty miles east and knew these counties well. People were friendly in this area, small towns dotting the valleys and hillsides. She’d worked as a manager at a Wal-Mart for fifteen years in Carsonville, and when she’d heard they were building a Super Bea’s in Perry, closer to where she lived, she jumped on it, hoping to get a general manager position, but willing to take a cut in pay to be closer to home.

She lived alone; it had been a long time since she’d had a relationship. She’d had a few relationships when she was younger, tumultuous affairs, and she just wasn’t ready for that again. Her parents were dead and her younger sister barely spoke to her anymore. She got a few token calls or cards on holidays from distant relatives. She lived in her small apartment and squirreled away her money into a retirement account, but a lot of good that money was doing now that the economy had collapsed. Her work had been her life for the last fifteen years, and she took pride in running this store. Maybe some might see her life as empty, but she felt like she had an impact on people’s lives, on her customers’ lives and her employees’ lives. She was fair with them but firm.

In her apartment Jo had watched some of the footage from riots around the country, and around the world. They seemed like big-city problems, hopefully not something they would have to deal with in Perry, North Carolina.

But as the days went on, things got worse. By Tuesday Jo had created big signs in the food department of the store, limiting customers to only two cases of water, two cases of soda and beer, three loaves of bread, among other restrictions. But the people weren’t listening. Families would show up in the checkout lanes with carts full of food and drinks, begging or threatening the cashier.

Jo had been called so many times to help out the cashiers. She remembered a tall man with a big bushy beard and glasses. He had the acrid stench of nervous sweat. “I have to think about me and my family first!” he had yelled at her.

Jo had called the cops. The police were spread thin, but they were able to send two officers. Jo asked two of her more burly stockers to act as “security.” Many of her employees hadn’t shown up and the cashiers who had were dealing with a nightmare.

By that Wednesday the internet was in and out, so credit cards and debit cards weren’t working. Jo had more signs made up, both inside and outside: CASH ONLY.

Jo had to turn so many families away who didn’t have cash. Children cried. Adults cried. Some of them threatened to sue. Some of them threatened violence. She hated to do it, but she had the orders from corporate—she couldn’t give the stuff in the store away.

The shelves were getting bare by Wednesday night. Jo had more stock in the back, but she’d made the decision not to restock (one of the reasons was that her stockers were now mostly working as cashiers or as security, including watching the double doors by the electronics department that led into the back, and to the loading bay doors—a few customers had tried to storm their way into the back, swearing they knew food and water were being hidden from them).

Jo was sure martial law was going to be declared soon. Many large cities had already implemented martial law and curfews, states of emergency. She’d seen footage shot from helicopters of people looting drug stores and supermarkets, crawling in and out of broken windows. They looked like ants from the vantage point of the helicopter, little ants carrying whatever they could. Most of the people down there wore masks or cloths over their faces, some to hide their identities, but others wore them to help protect themselves against a plague that was rumored on the internet to be going around.

At this time Jo wasn’t so sure the plague was real. She’d checked out a couple of videos online, but who could believe what you saw online these days? She remembered hearing about Orson Wells broadcasting War of the Worlds on Halloween night in 1938, but pretending that it was a real radio broadcast, like an alien invasion was really happening. She’d heard it had caused a lot of panic, and she thought these rumors about the plague might be like that—at least she hoped it was. Fake videos and rumors could spread through cyberspace at light-speed, reaching every corner of the world, inciting fear and panic. And it seemed like people wanted to believe the worst—they wanted to be ready for it.

By Wednesday night Jo was sure a state-wide martial law was coming and that her store would be controlled by the police and/or the military. Until then, she wanted to make sure that all of her customers got a fair chance at purchasing food and supplies, and that they were safe inside her store.

By Thursday she couldn’t guarantee that safety for her customers or her employees. She had opened the store for a few hours, then closed it down again. The two police officers there had actually helped her get the customers out of the store and help her lock the doors. Jo had closed the rolling metal security gates in front of the doors, locking them in place. The security gates were meant for hurricanes and other disasters, but they would be useful now in case the looters tried to get in through the sliding glass doors. They might be able to break the glass of the doors, but they weren’t going to get in through the metal mesh security doors. Two of her “security” stockers had helped her make large CLOSED signs. They taped those to the windows along with black poster boards and a few pieces of plywood they’d found in the loading bay. Hopefully all of these barriers would be a deterrent. She hoped the looters wouldn’t try to break into the store. She didn’t think it would get that bad.

But she had no idea how bad it was going to get.

While the phones had still been working, she’d been in touch with the district manager that morning; he had told her to close the store down until further notice. Stores were getting ransacked in Asheville and Greensboro, people were attacked, several killed. Police had come in riot gear. People were panicking, grabbing food and water from the shelves, trying to run out of the store with shopping carts full of food and water.

There had been reports of small gangs with guns, and of mobs of people acting like animals. Murders. Even reports of people trying to eat the dead people.

She had closed the store down, leaving Cynthia, her assistant manager, in charge. She drove home to her apartment. She packed an overnight bag with a few changes of clothes. She added a photo album, an envelope of important papers, two paperback novels, a small plastic pouch with bathroom stuff in it, her cell phone charger, the one thousand dollars in cash she had in a locked metal box in her closet. She made sure everything in the apartment was shut off. She had no pets, nobody to take care of, nobody to notify. She took one last look around the apartment and then locked the door and left. She planned on going back to her store and staying there for the next few nights.

On her walk back downstairs, she stopped by an apartment with the door wide open.

It was Miss Ruth’s apartment. She knew right away that something was terribly wrong.

CHAPTER 33

Jo

Jo hesitated by the open doorway of the apartment. The apartment complex she lived in was made up of six buildings, each of them three stories high. She lived on the third floor and now she was on the second floor where Miss Ruth lived, her door wide open. The apartment door across the landing was closed and the stairs that led down to the ground floor were straight ahead.

An urge to get back to the store pulled at Jo, an urge to ignore the open door and to just keep moving—she had people at her store waiting on her, people depending on her. She’d never been one for premonitions, but she had the feeling that something awful lay inside the gloom of that apartment.

But she couldn’t go down the stairs. She had been casually friendly with people in her building, but she knew Miss Ruth the best. Miss Ruth was an old woman who lived alone. Her husband had died years ago in a car accident, a sudden death that had left Miss Ruth without much money. But she managed to make ends meet, stretching her social security paychecks and scrimping when she needed to. And she always kept a brave and happy face, never asking for anything.

Jo liked Miss Ruth, but she also felt sorry for her. She saw a little of herself in the old woman, a possible glimpse of her own future. But she also looked at Miss Ruth as a cautionary tale. Miss Ruth hadn’t saved her money when she was younger, and she had depended on a husband who hadn’t managed their money well at all. Jo loved Miss Ruth dearly, but she didn’t want to end up like her, finding a motivation from her to make different choices in life.

And now Miss Ruth was alone in her apartment while society broke down all around them. She wondered if Miss Ruth was going to have enough to eat and drink. She wondered if she should take the old woman to the store with her. Of course it was against company policy, and other employees might argue that they should be allowed to bring their loved ones to the safety of the store.

It couldn’t hurt to at least check on Miss Ruth, make sure she was okay. With the recent surge in crime, Jo wondered if someone had broken into Miss Ruth’s apartment. Maybe she was hurt and needed help.

“Miss Ruth?”

Jo moved closer to the doorway, her overnight bag hung over her left shoulder. She had a thousand dollars in her bag and it was probably foolish to be standing out here in the doorway if there were desperate criminals inside the apartment. But she couldn’t leave without knowing that Miss Ruth was okay—it just wasn’t in her DNA to leave the old woman alone.

“Miss Ruth?”

Jo knocked on the open door.

There was a scuffing noise inside the dark apartment, like someone was moving around, perhaps feet shuffling along the floor. It could be Miss Ruth making those noises, or it could be the burglars.

You don’t know there are burglars in there—Miss Ruth could’ve just left her door open.

“Miss Ruth, are you okay?”

Jo took a step inside the apartment. The doorway led into a short hall that branched off to a living room on the right and the kitchen and dining area to the left. She had to walk all the way down the hall to see the rooms. It was dark in the apartment. All the lights were off and it seemed like all of the curtains and blinds were drawn, shrouding the place in shadows.

When Jo got to the end of the short hall, she stopped cold. She saw someone in the gloom in the living room, a short and stooped figure. It was Miss Ruth, had to be, but she looked like she was crouched down.

“Are you okay?” Jo asked her.

The old woman didn’t move. She was whispering something, but Jo couldn’t make out the words.

“Miss Ruth?”

Something smelled bad, like raw meat and the coppery scent of blood, the smell of something rotten, and a sewage smell, like a backed-up toilet. Now that Jo’s eyes had adjusted a little more to the darkness, she could make out that Miss Ruth was kneeling in front of a large object on the floor.

“Miss Ruth, are you okay?”

The old woman was definitely whispering something. Jo could make out a few of the words. She thought she’d heard the words bad moon.

“Are your lights not working?” Jo asked. She made out the light switch on the wall in the gloom. It worked either the lights in the hall or the lights in the living room. “I’m going to turn on the lights, okay? I want to make sure you’re all right.”

Jo flipped the light switch and the overhead lights in the living room came on, shining a spotlight down onto the horror in front of her. A dead man was lying on the floor and Miss Ruth was kneeling right beside him, facing Jo, the body between her and Miss Ruth, only ten feet away. Miss Ruth’s face and hands were smeared with blood, with bits of flesh stuck to the blood. There were more bits of flesh stuck in Miss Ruth’s teeth and in her gray hair that had come loose from the bun she always wore it in, thin strands hanging down in front of her bloodstained face.

Jo wanted to ask what had happened—it was the first natural reaction that came to mind. But a more primitive reaction was overriding that one, the urge to flee. It was fairly obvious that Miss Ruth was eating the person in front of her. Most of the person’s face was gone, just chewed bits of meat and gristle stuck to a skull, the eyes deep black holes, the mouth hung open with bright white teeth that contrasted the dark and bloody gore around them.

Miss Ruth shot up to her feet.

Jo ran. She backed down the short hall, trying to turn as she went out through the doorway, tripping over the threshold and falling down. A pain flared in her lower back, triggering a sharp pain shooting down one leg.

The sound of running feet down the hall. The sound of an inhuman screech.

Jo had to get up. She had to run. She was on all fours, then up on her feet, grabbing her overnight bag from the floor and looping it over her shoulder. She hurried down the stairs, trying not to stumble and fall. Miss Ruth was still making that screeching sound, a sound Jo would become all too familiar with soon. It sounded like she was trying to say something through her screeches, words mixed in with the grunts and screams.

Jo was not a swift runner, but she would have bet she could outrun an old woman with a bad hip. But Miss Ruth was so much faster now. So much stronger.

After getting to the bottom of the steps, Jo shot out into the parking lot, running for her car that was backed into a space. She had the keys in her jacket pocket; she pulled them out, trying not to drop them.

Miss Ruth was coming—racing across the parking lot. She looked like something that wasn’t even real, something from a horror movie that shouldn’t be possible in the daylight of this cloudy and cold day, a nightmare ripped from the dream world.

Keys . . . she had them in her hand, the door locks popping up. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the charging old woman, but she had to see what she was doing. She couldn’t stumble again. She wasn’t sure if she could fight off the sudden insane strength of Miss Ruth.

She was inside her car. She slammed the door shut and pressed the door lock button down, locking all the doors. Miss Ruth was at her window two seconds later, beating at the glass, leaving dark bloody smears behind.

Jo had to get out of there—the old woman was going to break the glass any minute. Jo started the car, shifted into drive and pulled out into the parking lot. Miss Ruth tried to hold on to the driver’s door, but as Jo picked up speed, the woman slid off the metal and fell away, rolling over a few times on the pavement.

Once she was out in the street, Jo realized that there was a lot more traffic than usual. Cars and trucks were abandoned in the street, some on the side of the road. The vehicles ahead of her were slowing down to get around the abandoned vehicles, many of the motorists honking their horns, some of them shouting out through open windows. Jo kept her hands clenched on the steering wheel, following the minivan in front of her.

She needed some gas—she only had half a tank, but she didn’t want to stop. She passed two gas stations. One had long lines and the other one had big signs announcing that they were out of gas. Two people were fighting each other near the gas station building. Jo saw other people milling around in the distance in front of a housing development. In the cold air there was the unmistakable smell of smoke—she could smell it even inside her car.

A cop directed traffic at an intersection only a mile away from the short road that led to the Super Bea’s. She had to wait through two traffic lights before she could get through. While she waited, as she constantly glanced around to make sure nobody was running up to her car, she dialed Cynthia’s number. It took seven tries; the first six either went to voicemail or led to a robotic voice telling her the number was not in service, but Cynthia finally answered.

“Miss Jo, are you on your way back?”

“Yeah,” Jo breathed out. “Don’t leave the store. There’s something really bad out here.”

CHAPTER 34

Jo

Cynthia was the one person at her store that Jo could truly trust. Like Jo, Cynthia lived alone and didn’t have much to do with her family. Like Jo, this store and her job were really her life. And like Jo, she was scared that the company was going to collapse in the next few weeks like so many other businesses had recently. It seemed impossible to believe that a big business like this would suddenly close its doors, but maybe the passengers of the Titanic had felt the same way as the unsinkable ship began to sink, those passengers frozen in moments of unbelievable shock as the gigantic ship pitched up into the air.

Jo drove down the side road and then into the parking lot of the Super Bea’s. There weren’t a lot of cars in the parking lot, but there were some near the front doors. And there was a crowd of people there, demanding to be let into the store. Jo drove to the back of the store, in through the gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded the huge back area where the trucks were unloaded once a week. She stopped her car and got out, leaving the car running. She dragged the gate closed and locked the padlock. She had the key to the padlock on her car keys and another key in her office.

She felt a little calmer now that she was locked inside the back fence. The fence wasn’t an impenetrable wall, but there was rolled barbed wire strung across the top of it, and that should deter the most determined shoppers.

But would it deter someone like Miss Ruth?

She didn’t want to think about that. She’d told Cynthia on the phone to have the back door unlocked in the next few minutes, that she would be coming in that way.

Jo parked her car on the other side of the loading ramp and got out, grabbing her overnight bag. She hurried over to the single metal door beside the ramp, running up the steps. She still smelled the smoke in the air and she heard sirens in the distance and a few car alarms going off. But at least she hadn’t heard the crowd that had been at the front doors coming around the side of the building.

The door opened before Jo could even pound on it. Cynthia opened the door wide and Jo dashed inside.

“What’s wrong?” Cynthia asked as she closed and locked the door.

“My . . . my neighbor tried to attack me,” Jo said. She stared at Cynthia. They were in the loading bay with the fluorescent lights on above them. She looked over at the garage door to make sure it was locked.

“What? Did you call the police?”

Jo shook her head no. She was about to tell Cynthia about the dead body in her neighbor’s apartment and that the old woman had been eating the person’s face, but she didn’t. A chill crossed her mind as she thought of the rumors she’d heard on the internet about the plague that turned people into flesh-eating crazies. Was she infected now? Had she come into the store and infected Cynthia? Was this how the plague spread so easily? She felt like throwing up.

“Come on in here,” Cynthia said, guiding Jo out of the loading bay and into the hallway, down to the office.

Jo decided that it was too late to worry about the plague now. Maybe they were all infected already. Who knew how many people each one of them had come in contact with over the last few days in this store? Right now she needed to concentrate on keeping this store locked, the products safe, and her employees safe. That was her only job right now.

“Where is everybody?”

“They all left.”

“All of them?”

Cynthia shrugged. “Most of them.”

Jo shook her head. Didn’t they know how dangerous things were out there? “Who’s left?”

“Three of the stockers are already here for the night shift. Tina Yang’s still here. Betty in the deli. Marie in the bakery. Al’s still here.”

Al was the janitor. He had come over with Jo from the Wal-Mart in Carsonville.

“Let’s get everyone together,” Jo said. “We need to have a meeting.”

Cynthia nodded.

*

Fifteen minutes later all nine of them met by the cash registers. The doors and hurricane shutters were still locked and hadn’t been breached yet. Cops had come by and run most of the people off, but every once in a while Jo could hear the sounds of people out there in the dark. But she didn’t think they were customers trying to get in—she thought some of them might be people who were like Miss Ruth, people who were infected. One of the stockers, Rodney, had called them rippers. He had the only cell phone that was picking up internet service at the moment and he showed Jo some articles from websites.

“I’m not telling any of you to stay here,” Jo told her employees. “I know some of you’ve got families to get to.”

“I ain’t got nobody,” Al grumbled.

“Me either,” Tina Yang said. She had come to America as a student and worked part time so she could get her degree; her family was still in China.

Jo looked at the three stockers. “If any of you want to leave, I promise that you’ll still have your job. But I can’t promise how much longer we will be in business. Again, I’m not telling anyone to do anything, but I am asking for help.”

Rodney shrugged. “I’ll stay the night.” He looked at Cam and Nick.

Both of them nodded back at him.

“This is really happening,” Cam said. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and Jo suspected that he had toked on a joint recently. “This is like one of those zombie apocalypse movies.”

“Thank you for staying,” Jo told the three stockers. “You know we’re supposed to have a truck coming in tonight, but I’m not so sure it’s going to get here. If, by some miracle, it makes it here, I’m not stocking the shelves. We’re not opening again. Not for the foreseeable future. But when that truck comes—if that truck comes—I’m going to want to get it unloaded as quickly as possible.”

The three young men nodded.

“Like I said, I’m not telling any of you to stay. But if you want to leave, you need to do it pretty soon. Maybe go out the back. Or you may want to wait until the morning.”

“I’m not going out there,” Rodney said, shaking his head. “No way, man.”

“Okay,” Jo said. “I could really use everyone’s help. Even with the hurricane shutters in place, we need to make sure those front doors are secure. We need to pile as much stuff up in front of the doors as we can. Same thing with the doors in the back and the one on the side. We’ll move the stuff in front of the garage door out of the way if the truck makes it here later tonight.”

She didn’t have a lot of faith in the truck making it. She could imagine the truck being run off the highway, overrun by looters. Or maybe those ripper things that Rodney had showed her on his phone, the ripper things that Miss Ruth had become.

CHAPTER 35

Jo

The delivery truck made it to the store by five o’clock a.m. The driver, Jackson, had called ahead on the store phone, letting Jo know he was on the way. He was only five minutes away when he called, but it was the first time his cell phone had had service. Rodney and Cam went out to the gate with the key to the padlock. Tina volunteered to go out there with them to keep watch as they guided the semi-truck into the back so they could close and lock the gate again. The early morning air still smelled like smoke, and there were still noises in the distance: police sirens, car alarms, gunshots, and an explosion every so often. A few planes roared by far overhead, just blinking lights in the night sky.

Jackson got his truck backed up to the loading bay, the air brakes hissing. He got out and opened the back. The gate on the chain-link fence was closed and locked again. Tina was still at the corner of the back of the store where she could watch the gate. She had a walkie-talkie with her.

“All clear so far, Miss Jo,” she said into the walkie-talkie.

“Okay,” Jo told Tina on the walkie-talkie, and then she looked at Jackson and her three stockers. “We need to get this stuff inside as quickly as possible. We’ll stack it all here in the loading bay for now, dry goods over there, and any fresh or frozen foods over there by the door.

Jackson’s truck had two compartments, a refrigerated section toward the front of the truck and a larger section at the back for dry goods. Jackson was at the doorway of the refrigerated section while Rodney, Cam, and Nick went to work unloading the pallets of supplies from the dry goods compartment. Jo had never seen the boys work so fast. Rodney was the leader of the crew and he took over the job of ordering where to set the pallets of boxes down. Jackson stacked boxes up at the edge of the doorway of the refrigerated compartment.

Jo and Cynthia grabbed the boxes Jackson had stacked up and handed them to Al and Marie. Betty could only carry the lightest of the boxes, but she was doing the best she could. They were all chipping in even though they knew the dangers of looters prowling around out there somewhere in the dark, and the worse dangers of rippers, of even breathing in this possibly infected smoky air.

Within thirty minutes they had everything unloaded from the truck. Jackson closed and locked the doors on his truck, and then he and Tina came inside. Jo and Cynthia closed the garage door, sliding the locking mechanisms in place on each side. It was a steel door and much stronger than a typical garage door, but it still looked flimsy to Jo.

But she couldn’t worry about that right now—they needed to get the products put away. “Let’s get the cold stuff into the refrigerators,” she told the stockers.

“We got this, Miss Jo,” Cam said.

Rodney was already shoving a pallet jack under the first stack of boxes and pumping it up so he could wheel the load into the store.

“Thanks, guys,” Jo said as she watched them push the pallet away. Rodney and Nick held the double doors open for Cam. Cynthia got another pallet jack ready, and Brenda and Marie did their best to help her.

Jo turned to Jackson. “What are your plans?”

He shrugged. “Dispatch isn’t answering at all now. I have no idea what’s going on back there. I thought I might wait it out here for a few hours until I get some word from them.”

“Of course,” Jo said.

Jackson shook his head slowly. “I heard there were riots and looters, but this was worse than I ever thought it would be. Some of those people out there . . . it’s like they’ve gone crazy.”

Jo thought of Ruth in her apartment building.

“I just kept plowing ahead,” Jackson said. “The roads were a madhouse, but I took some back roads I knew and stayed off the interstate.”

“I’m just glad you’re okay. I had visions of looters running your truck off the road.”

“Yeah. I had that in mind too.” He opened his coat and revealed a small handgun holstered to his belt. “That’s why I brought protection with me. Ever since a buddy of mine got robbed at a truck stop a few months ago, I started carrying one.”

“I need to go and help those guys.”

“I can help too,” Jackson said. “Just tell me what to do.”

*

An hour later, they had all of the refrigerator and freezer food put away and they were working on the last of the dry goods.

After they were done, they gathered at the deli near the bread and vegetable section. Betty served up some sandwiches and Jo let everyone pick out whatever they wanted to eat. They grabbed a few plastic chairs and set them up in a circle with a cooler of drinks in the middle. They weren’t too far away from one of the two main entrances to the store. The glass doors were still unbroken and locked, and the steel hurricane shutters were still pulled shut in front of them. They had the OUT OF FOOD and CLOSED signs taped to the windows. They had also hung as many dark drapes and sheets over the mesh doors so the looters couldn’t see in, and then they had pushed a lot of the shopping carts in front of the doors. They were as secure as they could be, but Jo felt that maybe they could do more. They kept most of the lights off as the skylights began to provide some morning light—enough to see by. But they still heard pounding on the glass doors every so often.

By noon their cell phone service had been out for nearly twenty-four hours. Rodney checked his phone constantly. They had a battery-powered radio in their little circle, but most of the radio stations were either static, unending music, or the loop of the president of the United States declaring martial law.

“Well, I guess that means it’s official now,” Jackson said. “The shit has definitely hit the fan.”

After martial law had been declared, Nick and Marie left, both of them leaving out the back door. Rodney and Cam went with them so they could unlock the gate and keep an eye on them as they hurried to their vehicles. Nick was worried about his parents and his younger brother, and Marie was worried about her husband. Jo let them pack some food in a duffle bag to take with them.

“If you need to come back,” Jo told them, “if you need to bring your family, then come back.”

They nodded and then they were gone.

Neither one of them ever came back.

By early afternoon the electricity went out, plunging most of the store into gloom and the back rooms and loading bays into near-darkness. Jo hadn’t expected the electric to go out, but she should have thought of it, and she chastised herself for it.

They collected lanterns, batteries, and even a few candles—but Jo didn’t want any unattended candles; a fire right now would be catastrophic.

Everything had collapsed. They had no electricity, no internet or cell phone access, no radio or TV stations, no information at all. If help was coming, it might be days or even weeks away. Jo knew then that she needed to start thinking of long-term preparations.

She asked Rodney and Cam to get as many coolers as they could find, then get the bags of ice from the ice machine. They would take a lot of the cold food from the refrigerators and keep them on ice for as long as they could, at least until the ice melted. They would leave the freezer stuff alone—they would probably lose all of that, and much of the refrigerated food. The vegetables, eggs, and breads would be okay for weeks, and the dry goods would be okay for months or even years.

God, she was thinking weeks into the future now. Months. How long was this going to last?

The afternoon turned into night. They ate their dinner from the deli foods at their circle of chairs. Each of them carried a flashlight in case they needed to go to the restrooms. There were public restrooms up front and employee restrooms in the back.

“Eat as much of the food as you want,” Jo told them. “It’s not going to stay good much longer.” They already knew the dry and canned food and drinks were off-limits for now. They drank milk and orange juice to conserve the canned and bottled drinks.

Jo wondered if she was going to extremes with her planning, but she couldn’t help it. With what she’d seen yesterday—Ruth attacking her, other rippers wandering around, police losing control of order in the streets, all utilities being shut off—she knew this wasn’t going to end anytime soon. And she felt a little guilty being locked here inside this store with all of this food and water while others out there ran out of supplies. But what could she do about it? She couldn’t open her doors to that madness again; she couldn’t risk the safety of her employees.

*

They slept in watches. Around three a.m. Jo and Jackson sat on watch, farther away from where Rodney, Cam, and the others had set up sleeping bags they’d gotten from the sporting goods section. They sat on the floor, both of them leaning their backs against the deli counter.

“This is bad,” Jackson said in a low voice.

Jo nodded in agreement.

“You’ve done a lot here,” Jackson said. “You’ve done an amazing job organizing everything. Planning everything out.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a great leader. And a great manager. I can tell that.”

Jo just smiled in the dark. “Well, thank you, Jackson.”

“But I think we’ll need to do more.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We need to set up some kind of defenses,” Jackson said.

“You have something in mind?”

“If we could get up to the roof, get up through one or two of the skylights somehow, then we could have a few people up there with rifles and binoculars. Like soldiers in turrets guarding a castle.”

Jo had an idea of how they could get up there. They had two scissor lifts Al and the maintenance crew used to change lightbulbs and do any other repairs, even to load heavier items up on the top shelves.

“You’ve got more rifles in the sporting goods area,” Jackson said. “And plenty of ammo.”

“Yeah. Some.”

“Guns and lookouts up there on the roof would help a lot. And there’s another idea I had.”

She waited for him to continue.

“I was thinking we could block the entrances and exits off to the parking lots. There are a lot of trees and shrubs around, and a big ditch on the one side, so just getting those entrances blocked would help keep vehicles out of here. It won’t keep a gang of looters on foot out. Or a pack of rippers. But it will keep the vehicles out.”

“How are we going to block the entrances?”

Jackson smiled. “I’ve got an idea how to do that.”

CHAPTER 36

Jo

The next morning, just before dawn, Al worked with Jo and Cynthia to get the scissor lifts in place, lifting them up to two of the skylights. Al got the skylights opened, rigging them so they could latch them shut again. The scissor lifts weren’t going to move much longer, and when they ran out of juice they wouldn’t be able to be charged back up. They used extension ladders tied to the sides of the lifts to get up and down to the skylights. Not the safest thing in the world, but the best they could do.

Cynthia, Tina, and Al went up to the roof with binoculars, a walkie-talkie, and a rifle. Al had been in the military for four years when he was much younger and volunteered to shoot if he needed to.

Once the lookouts were in place on the roof, Jackson, Rodney, and Cam went out to block the entrances to the parking lot. Jo didn’t think this was such a good idea, and she told Jackson as much, but the three of them wanted to do it. She told them the air could be infected out there; she gave them construction respirators, dust masks, and latex gloves (she’d also given the same personal protection gear to the lookouts on the roof, but Al refused to wear the “damned silly” things). But Jo knew deep down inside, as well as the others, that they were all most likely infected already. Jo knew it more than the others—she’d been in an infected person’s apartment.

Jackson used his semi-truck to push the cars and pickups that were left in the parking lot to the entrance and the exits. Some of the abandoned vehicles still had keys in them and Rodney and Cam moved those that would start. They both had handguns with them and Rodney also had a rifle. Jo had let them take the weapons from the sporting goods department. It didn’t take them too long to move the vehicles in place, but the sound was so loud even inside the store that Jo was sure it was going to draw every looter and ripper around.

Rodney saved the last running box truck to park in front of the gate to the fenced-in area in the back of the store, keeping the keys to the vehicles that still ran. And then they were back inside just as Cynthia called down that she had spotted a large group of people running toward the store from the street. She wasn’t sure if they were looters or rippers, she just told them to get their asses back inside the store.

*

Hours later Jackson and Jo were on watch again, letting the others catch some sleep. Cam and Rodney were up on the roof, taking their watch.

“I’m sure you smashed up your truck doing that,” Jo told Jackson as they sat in the same place as last night, this time with pillows behind their backs.

“A little.”

“You gonna get in trouble?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything to go back to.”

They were quiet for a long moment, but Jo could tell that Jackson had something to say, something he was mulling over, trying to find the right way to say it.

“I’m not feeling too well,” Jackson finally said.

She didn’t say anything, but she knew what he meant; she saw it in his eyes. He was scared that he was infected now, scared he was turning into a ripper. He had been in a hurry to shore up their defenses because he’d known for a while now, maybe even for the last twenty-four hours that he didn’t have a lot of time left.

“You don’t know for sure,” she finally whispered.

He just nodded and smiled at her. “I know.”

Jo didn’t know what to say to that. He was being brave about it; she just hoped the rest of them could be that brave when the inevitable came.

“There’s something I always wanted to tell you,” he said. “I always had a crush on you.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

He shrugged. “Who would want a guy like me? My wife left years ago. She couldn’t handle me being on the road all the time, being alone so much. I don’t blame her.”

“I would’ve liked to have known you liked me,” Jo said.

“Maybe we could’ve made it work,” he said. “Even with the long distances.”

“I would’ve liked that,” Jo whispered, and she meant it.

“I would’ve liked knowing someone was there waiting for me when I got home,” Jackson said.

“I wish you would’ve said something sooner.” She leaned toward him to kiss him.

He held up a hand, smiling at her. “Better not. You know I’ve got whatever’s going around out there.”

“If you’re infected, then we’re all infected.” She almost admitted that it might have been her who had brought the plague inside the store to everyone. And if she turned into one of those monsters out there, then it served her right. “I think we’re way past that now.”

They kissed, hugged, and then kissed again.

It was nice holding Jackson, a big bear of a man. It was nice having a little comfort in these dark days. It was nice having human contact, knowing what was coming.

CHAPTER 37

Kate

“Jackson started turning a few hours later,” Jo said.

Kate stared at Jo. They were all silent, all of them watching her as she told her story.

“Jackson took himself out about six hours after that. Shot himself in the loading area. We all heard the gunshot. We all ran back there and saw what he’d done. And we all knew why he had done it. I took his gun and kept it. I knew when we began to turn we would have a choice: we could either shoot ourselves like Jackson had done, or we could leave the store, banish ourselves so that we wouldn’t be a danger to everyone else. We had all agreed on those choices. We swore to each other.”

“And everyone else turned?” Max asked.

“Almost everyone,” Jo said. “Everyone except me and Tina Yang. After Jackson it started happening quickly.”

Kate tried to imagine Jo stuck in the store with the others as they turned.

“Betty showed signs right after Jackson killed himself,” Jo continued. “We all saw the signs. And she saw the signs too. She couldn’t shoot herself—she told us that. She was afraid she’d screw it up somehow, shoot herself and not kill herself. She was afraid the gun would jump in her hand and throw the aim off. She begged one of us to do it for her. Al offered, but I wouldn’t let him do it. So we banished her. Took her out the back, walked her to the gate, unlocked it for her. She was sobbing the whole time. I watched her walk away.”

Jo paused while she wiped at tears for a moment. She took a sip of water and then kept talking. “The others started turning more quickly. Rodney didn’t want to believe he was turning, didn’t believe his symptoms were real. Cam panicked too. They fought with each other. Al had to shoot them both. Then he killed himself. Cynthia and Tina helped me clean up all the blood. We used the pallet jack and pallets to take their bodies outside beyond the fence early in the morning. The next day their bodies were gone, just a blood trail left from when they’d been dragged away.”

“Rippers got them,” Petra said.

Jo nodded.

“But the others,” Max said, looking at Crystal and then at Lance.

“Lance was Cynthia’s friend. He and Dale came to the fence when we were getting rid of the bodies. They had their guns out, but they didn’t aim them at us. They asked for help, and they asked if they could help us. Their families and everyone they knew had turned or were turning. They didn’t have the symptoms, and neither did we. We figured some of us might be immune, or even carriers. It had gone too far by then. If we were going to be infected, I figured there was no stopping it, then. We let them in and went over the rules with them.”

“They were immune like us,” Max said.

Jo nodded. “I couldn’t help thinking that some of us were carriers of the disease, that I was a carrier, that I had brought this Ripper Plague into this store. If I hadn’t gone home to pack a bag, get clothes I didn’t need, papers that don’t mean anything anymore, money that’s useless now, maybe some of them wouldn’t have gotten sick.”

“You couldn’t have known that then,” Kate said.

Jo wiped at her eyes and nodded. “I know. But it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“If they weren’t immune, they were going to get infected one way or another,” Petra said in an emotionless voice—her attempt at comforting Jo.

“Petra’s right,” Max said. “It seems like nothing can stop this plague from infecting people. Maybe it’s airborne. It has to be.”

“Well, after a few days of just the four of us,” Jo said, “after Cynthia started turning and chose to leave, we knew we needed more people. Sophie happened along, but we couldn’t wait for people to come find us. We knew we had to go out and look for more survivors—make ourselves stronger. Lance and Dale agreed to go out and look. They had rifles and handguns from the sporting goods department, and they had the keys to the pickup truck in back and a full tank of gas. They found Crystal on their first run. Then they found Rebecca and Patrick on the next run. And then they found all of the others here. Neal and Tamara are our newest, besides you four, of course.”

“We also found Dark Angels,” Lance said. “We battled with them once, got away and they followed us here. We shot at them from the roof until they finally went away. We saw that they were grabbing up anything they could find of value, shoving supplies and canned food into their vans and box trucks. That’s when we knew we needed to do the same. We had a lot here, but we still couldn’t let them have everything. Let them control everything. So we got maps out and started going on runs. We took two vehicles at first, and then three, using one as a spotter. We knew the dangers out there, but we had to do it. The supplies, that’s the new money. The new power.”

“We do have a lot here,” Crystal agreed. “A lot of what most people need, but we were still lacking some things. Like gas. We siphoned all the gas out of the vehicles into the gas cans we had, but we knew we would need more. And more weapons. And any ammo we could find.”

“And now you found us,” Max said. “You saved us. You helped us, and we’d like to help you in any way we can.”

“You’re welcome,” Jo said. “We’re all survivors now, and we all need to help each other.” She looked at Petra. “Speaking of help, we need to get the doctor to take a look at that cut on your head.”

“I’m fine,” Petra said.

“It might need stitches,” Jo said. “Or it might get infected.”

“She’s right,” Max said, turning to look at Petra. “You should go.”

Petra blew out an annoyed sigh.

“I’ll take her to see April,” Crystal offered, already standing up.

CHAPTER 38

Petra

Petra felt fine, but she knew Max wasn’t going to stop bugging her until she went to see this “doctor” of theirs.

“She’s really a nurse,” Crystal explained as they walked down the wide hall, walking away from the meeting room they’d just been in. Crystal used a flashlight to guide their way.

Petra remembered Lance mentioning something about a nurse when they’d all been in the van on the way to this store.

“But she knows a lot more than any of us about medicine. We all have our talents, our ways to contribute and help.”

“What about you?” Petra asked. “What are your talents?”

“I do a shift on the roof. I go on runs with Lance and Dale. I’m a good driver, a decent shot, maybe not quite as good as Lance or Dale, but still pretty good.”

“How often do you guys go on runs?”

Crystal shrugged. “Maybe once every few days. Like Lance said, we’re trying to get some of the supplies before the Dark Angels get everything. At first we were getting a lot of stuff, but it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff we need.”

“It seems like the Dark Angels are everywhere now,” Petra said.

Crystal nodded. “At first the rippers were our main concern. The sound of our trucks drew them. But then we noticed the Dark Angels around. We saw their symbols painted on buildings and on the trucks they drove. We saw the symbol on their soldiers, branded on their foreheads. It’s like they just started moving in so fast, getting so big and strong, so organized. And we don’t know how they did it.”

Petra thought she knew how—the Dragon and the dreams; he seemed to reach out and find the immune. But Crystal didn’t mention the Dragon or the dreams so Petra didn’t say anything about them. Maybe Crystal wasn’t having the same dreams she was, and Max, Kate, and Brooke. Maybe none of them here were having those dreams.

“How do you know so much about the Dark Angels?” Crystal asked.

“We’ve had a few run-ins with them.”

Crystal seemed to be waiting for her to expound on her statement, but she didn’t.

“April’s office is just down here. It used to be Jo’s assistant manager’s office, but we turned it into a doctor’s office. We’ve got a lot of the medical stuff stacked up in there, and stuff from the pharmacy: Zanax, painkillers, stuff that might tempt people. Miss Jo’s office is right over there. Crystal pointed to a door at the end of the hall.

Petra looked at the door to Jo’s office (she wasn’t going to start calling her Miss Jo), then she looked at Crystal. The woman was her height and all lean muscle like she was. She had tattoos on her arms and neck, holes where her nose and ears had been pierced. The blond dye in her short hair was beginning to fade. She seemed tough and capable, probably always was, but maybe even more so now that the world had collapsed.

They stopped outside the door to April’s office. Someone had taped a piece of paper to the door with the words DOCTOR’S OFFICE written on it in black magic marker.

“Next run you go on, I’d like to go with you,” Petra said.

Crystal couldn’t hide her surprise at the request.

Petra didn’t really feel like explaining herself. She wanted . . . needed to get out again. While most might crave the safety of this store, to Petra it felt like a giant cage. It wasn’t that she was truly claustrophobic, but if there was one fear she had, that would be it. But it was more of a restlessness that she’d always had. She felt okay now, but she knew in a few days she would be crawling the walls. She needed to do something, to be outside in the open air. At least this store was huge. That helped. And there was definitely plenty to do here.

“I’ll talk to Lance. It’s usually just us.”

“I’m a good shot. I survived mostly on my own all the way from Maryland. And even when I joined up with Max—”

“It was more like you took care of him than he took care of you,” Crystal finished for her with a knowing smirk.

To be fair, they had taken care of each other. They had each saved the other more than once. But she didn’t say anything.

“You’re sure you want to be back out there again?” Crystal asked. “We don’t get a lot of volunteers to go on runs. None, in fact.”

“Yeah. Jo said we all need to help. That could be my way of helping. And I’ll volunteer for shifts on the roof.”

Crystal smiled again. Petra felt like she was being appraised by Crystal, like she might be seeing her in a new light now.

“Like I said, I’ll talk to Lance about it. But I’ll convince him to take you with us.”

The door swung open and a small, older woman dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt stood in the doorway. Her gray hair was pulled back. She looked older than Petra had expected, maybe in her mid-fifties. She had fine wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, her eyes a blazing blue magnified by her glasses.

“I thought I heard voices out here,” April said. She had a throaty, pack-a-day sound to her voice.

“Doc, this is Petra. Her and her friends just joined us.”

April’s eyes shifted to Petra and widened just a little. “Yeah, I see why she needed to come see me.” She opened the door wider to invite them in.

“You want me to go in there with you?” Crystal asked.

“I think I can handle it,” Petra said. “Thanks.”

Petra entered the office and April closed and locked the door. There were no windows and the office was maybe less than two hundred square feet. One side of the office had a recliner and a small desk and chair shoved into the other corner. The other side of the room was a collection of tables and bookcases (from the furniture department, no doubt) that held boxes and bottles of medical supplies.

April plucked a pair of blue nitrile gloves out of a box on the desk. “Sorry, I was just trying to reorganize everything. Not a lot of room in here as you can see.”

Petra noticed a duffel bag and extra pair of shoes on the floor beside the desk, a radio and battery-powered lantern, a stack of paperback books. “You sleep in here?” she asked.

“Doctor’s perks, I guess. Get my own room. At least when we don’t have a patient in here.” She gestured at the recliner with the long trail of paper pulled down across it—the closest thing they had to an exam table. “We’re still trying to get things organized better. I’ve made a list of items for Lance and Crystal to look for on their next run.”

And me, Petra thought as she sat down on the recliner.

“Go ahead and lean back,” April said as she grabbed a small but powerful flashlight and a magnifying glass. “Rudimentary, I know,” she said with a smile.

Petra liked April’s smile—she liked the “doc” immediately.

After wiping the dried blood off of Petra’s face and neck, April inspected the wound just into the hairline of her head, prodding it a little.

Petra winced.

“Tender?”

“A little.”

“It’s swelling a bit. What happened?”

“Got hit with a rock. Rippers attacked.”

“Well, they got you pretty good. Did you lose consciousness?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes at least. That’s what Max said.”

“Max is someone you were with?”

“He’s here now. And Kate and Brooke. We all came together. Lance and Crystal picked us up when our truck broke down.”

April nodded. “I just want to shine a light in your eyes for a moment, check to see if your pupils are dilating.”

“Sure.”

April shined the light in Petra’s eyes, moving it away and then back again. “Looks good.” She turned the flashlight off. “You feel dizzy or lightheaded?”

“No.”

“Any muscle weakness? Memory problems?”

“Nope.”

“I think you’ll be okay. I’d like to put a few stitches in the cut and wrap it up. Put some antibacterial cream on it. Okay?”

“Whatever you think is best.”

April went over to the stacks of medical supplies and products, looking for a few things. She grabbed two tubes of cream and a suture kit and came back to Petra. She spread some cream on the cut.

“That’s cold.”

“It will help numb it a little so I can stitch it up.”

Petra remained still while April went to work stitching up the wound. It didn’t take her long, and then she spread the antibacterial cream on the cut. She gently pressed a gauze pad against the wound, and then she wrapped a cloth bandage around Petra’s head to hold the pad in place.

“We’ll just need to check on it in a few days,” April said. “Make sure it isn’t getting infected. Change the bandages.”

Petra thought she looked like Neal, the one who looked like a weasel and had a bandage wrapped around his head. “You do the same thing for Neal?”

April’s face turned to stone, her body tensing. She shook her head no. “He came in here like that. He won’t let me touch him. I told him his wound could get infected, but he said he’d taken care of it. I can’t force treatment on him.”

Petra wondered if Neal was really wounded, or if his bandage was covering something up that he didn’t want anyone else to see—something like the brand of the Dark Angels.

CHAPTER 39

Kate

Max helped Kate set up a tent for her and Brooke, and then he set up a tent for himself and one for Petra a little farther away, more toward the edge of the tent city.

Once the tents were set up, Max came back with plastic food bowls and a litter box for Tiger. He poured kitty litter into the plastic tub and some food into one of the bowls and water from a bottle into the other bowl. Kate had set the carrying case with Tiger inside at the front of their tent, letting the cat get used to it. He’d been pretty quiet and calm so far, but when he saw Max pouring the food into the plastic bowl he started meowing to be let out.

“We’re going to have to let him out,” Max said.

Kate knew he was right, but she also knew there was a chance Tiger might run off as soon as he got out. He might wander around the store, getting lost.

“Tiger’s going to be scared when we let him out of the carrying case,” Kate told Brooke. “He’s going to want to wander around. You know how he did in the house?”

She nodded. She remembered.

“But this place is a lot bigger than the house. Tiger may be gone for a while. Exploring. I don’t want you to get worried about him, and I don’t want you to go looking for him by yourself. Okay? And definitely no climbing on anything.”

Brooke nodded, and then looked down at the carrying case. Tiger was meowing louder, moving around inside.

“Okay,” Kate said. “Go ahead and let him out. He needs some food and water. Probably has to go to the bathroom.”

After Brooke unlatched the door to the carrying case, Tiger shot out, bolting right to the food bowl, sniffing at it for just a second and then devouring the hard food. After a few minutes of eating, Tiger came right back to Brooke, rubbing against her.

Brooke smiled.

“Okay,” Max said. “I think we’re set up for the night. I need to go check out this indoor plumbing they’ve been raving about. Maybe check on Petra, too.”

“Alright,” Kate said. She watched him walk toward the double doors.

“Cute cat.”

Kate jumped at the sound of the voice, not aware that someone had crept up behind them. She didn’t need to turn around and look because she already knew it was Neal.

He beamed down at them with that strange smile that made him look more sinister than friendly, like he was hiding a secret from everyone. His small dark eyes seemed to dance with excitement just under his dingy white bandage. His face was flushed, and he was sweating just a little even though it was cold in the store.

“What’s his name?” Neal asked.

Brooke wouldn’t answer.

“His name’s Tiger,” Kate said. “Hope you’re not allergic to cats.”

“Naw. But cat allergies are way down the list of worries these days, I’m sure.”

Kate just nodded and turned her attention back to Brooke, hoping Neal would leave. But he didn’t.

“Hey, Kate,” Jeff said from a few tents over.

Kate stood up and looked at him. He stood outside his tent, gesturing her over.

“Come on, Brooke, Jeff wants to talk to us.”

Neal just nodded, letting them pass.

Brooke held Tiger in her arms, the cat purring now that he’d eaten some food and drank some water.

“I’m sorry,” Jeff said when they got to his tent. “I didn’t really have anything to talk to you about. I just figured you needed a break from Neal. He can be . . . overwhelming.”

Kate smiled at him. “Thank you.” She looked over at Neal who had wandered over to Fernando, bugging him. She could hear them talking but couldn’t make out what they were saying from this far away.

“Where are you from?” Jeff asked.

“I grew up in Astorville, but I moved to Raleigh as soon as I was eighteen and got into college.”

“Which one?”

“Duke.”

His eyebrows shot up behind his round glasses. “Wow. What did you study?”

“Anthropology.” She saw the usual blank stare she got when she told people about her profession. “It’s the study of ancient humans.”

He nodded, his expression still a little blank.

“You could say I study cavemen,” she said. “I’m a professor now.” She stopped herself, and then corrected her statement: “I mean I was a professor.”

“Did you like teaching?”

“Yeah. I mean I still did some field work in the summer. Published two books and a few articles. I was even a guest on one of those Discovery TV shows once.”

“That’s impressive.”

Kate shrugged. “Not really. I never made any groundbreaking discoveries.” She was starting to feel a little uncomfortable talking so much about herself.

“You were married?” Jeff asked.

“No. I guess I was too busy with my work. What about you?”

A rustling of the tent behind them grabbed Kate’s attention. She turned and saw Brooke inside the flap of Jeff’s tent, coming back out with a wooden box in her hands like she’d found a treasure in a cave.

Jeff lunged at her, grabbing the wooden box out of her hands. “No,” he snapped at her. “You can’t play with that.”

Brooke’s eyes widened in shock as the music box was snatched out of her hands. She backed away from the tent, staring at Jeff.

Jeff cradled the box in one hand, pushing his glasses up his nose with one finger, swallowing hard, closing his eyes for just a second.

Kate stared at Jeff, then at Brooke. “What were you doing, Brooke? That’s his stuff. You can’t go inside someone else’s tent and take their stuff. Okay?”

Brooke just stared at her.

“I’m sorry,” Jeff said. “It’s okay. Really. This music box, it’s the only thing I have left from my daughter.” He closed his eyes again, almost like he could see his daughter again now that his eyes were closed. “My wife and daughter. They didn’t make it. I saw them getting sick. I thought it would pass. I know it doesn’t sound rational now.” He opened his eyes and looked at Kate—his pale blue eyes were watery. “I tried to convince myself that they were going to get better. I even prayed. I prayed so hard. But nothing happened. I had to get out of the house. They were coming after me. I grabbed a few things on the way to the car. One of the things was this music box.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I know it must mean a lot to you.” She wondered if she should make Brooke apologize to Jeff. Wouldn’t a mother do that? Kate wasn’t sure. She’d never been a mother. She didn’t know how to be a mother. And it wasn’t like Brooke had been stealing the music box; she’d just been looking at it.

“It’s okay,” Jeff said and looked at Brooke, smiling at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Brooke stared at him like she was wary of him now.

“I just . . . I just never open it,” Jeff said. “I just . . .” He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head like he was having difficulty forming his thoughts into words. “I wish I would have taken other things from our house. Photographs. Other things. But this music box, it’s all I have.”

“I’m sorry about your wife and daughter,” Kate said. “We’ve all lost so much.” She thought about her own parents. Her brother and sister. The letter from her mother in her pocket and how much that meant to her.

“I really didn’t mean to act like that,” Jeff said, wallowing in shame.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I understand. Believe me. And I’m sure Brooke—” She turned to look at Brooke, but the girl was gone. She wasn’t by Jeff’s tent anymore. She wasn’t back at their tent. Kate stood up and looked around, then she spotted Brooke in front of Neal’s tent.

What was she doing over there?

Neal was crouched down and seemed to be feeding Tiger something.

It seemed innocent enough, but Kate felt her skin crawling. A sudden anger burned in her and she marched over to them.

Neal looked up at Kate with that creepy smile, his pinched face sweaty, his little dark eyes dancing, the stubble heavy on his cheeks and chin, the dirty bandages wrapped around his head.

“Look who came over to see me,” Neal said.

At first Kate thought he was talking about Brooke, and then she thought he was talking about her, but then she realized he was talking about Tiger.

“Come on, Brooke,” Kate said.

“Tiger got away,” Brooke whispered.

“I know. Just go ahead and get him and we’ll get back to the tent.”

Brooke looked back at Tiger as he nibbled at the food on the floor.

Kate didn’t know how to explain that she didn’t want her around this man.

“The doc got Petra all fixed up,” Max boomed as he and Petra walked up to them, Petra had a bandage wrapped around her head similar to Neal’s—only her bandages were clean.

“Another one of the walking wounded,” Neal said with a grin that seemed too wide for his face.

Petra didn’t return his smile, but she didn’t look away from him. “How did you hurt your head?”

Kate was sure Petra had meant her question to come out as a curious inquiry, but it sounded more like some kind of accusation.

The smile on Neal’s face finally faltered a bit. “I . . . I fell.”

“You fell.” Petra sounded as accusatory as ever.

“Yeah. I was running from some rippers and I fell. Hit my head on the ground.”

“Where’d you hurt your head?”

It seemed like it took Neal a moment to think about his answer. “My . . . my forehead. Why?”

“I want you to show me.”

“Show you what?”

“Your wound,” Petra said, stepping up to him. “I want you to take your bandages off and show me your wound.”

“I’m not doing that,” Neal said, his ever-present smile finally slipping away, his eyes narrowing, making his face seem more pinched than ever.

Petra was close to him now. Even though she was much smaller than Neal, she seemed to be making him cower back. He even took a step back toward his tent.

Max moved in swiftly on the other side of Neal, like they were boxing him in. Kate stepped back and pulled Brooke away gently, moving her back. She had scooped Tiger up into her arms without Kate seeing it.

“Take the bandages off right now,” Petra said.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Neal growled.

Petra grabbed his shirt. Max was right on the other side, grabbing Neal as Petra tore at the dirty bandages on his head.

Other people were coming out of their tents, watching the assault.

For a moment Kate didn’t know what Petra and Max were doing, or why. And for that second, she was about to tell them to stop. But then it clicked in her mind. The bandages were covering a lot of the top of his head, his entire forehead—they were looking for the Dark Angel brand. Why hadn’t she thought of that? But she’d known something was creepy about Neal; she’d felt that right away.

Neal screamed like he was being beaten, but Max was only holding him while Petra pulled the last of the bandages away, then she stepped back. Max let go of him.

There was no DA brand on Neal’s forehead, just a deep and thick gash that looked like it was festering, the skin puckered and black around the wound, most of his forehead a deep shade of red.

“What the hell is going on here?” Jo screamed at them.

CHAPTER 40

Kate

Kate froze. Everybody did.

Jo stood ten feet away, staring at them, her eyes wide with shock and fury, her face flushed, her fists on her hips.

“We needed to be sure,” Petra said, breathing hard, one hand still gripping a fistful of Neal’s sweatshirt. She never looked away from Jo, matching her stare, not showing an ounce of shame at what she’d done or an ounce of backing down from her decision.

“Sure of what?” Jo asked.

“We needed to see his forehead,” Petra said. “We needed to make sure he didn’t have the brand.”

Jo glanced around, seeing that others were standing around and watching them. Lance had come up beside Jo, her right-hand man.

“We need to have a meeting right now,” Jo said. “All of you.” She pointed at Max, Kate, Petra, and Neal. “In the meeting room.”

Petra let go of Neal’s shirt. He nodded at Jo, bending down to pick up the dirty lengths of bandages from the floor.

Kate bent down and whispered to Brooke, telling her to stay in the tent. Brooke shook her head no, staring up at Kate with wide eyes of fear.

Jo sighed. “Just bring her with you.” Then she turned and stormed off toward the double doors, Lance falling in right beside her.

Max gathered Petra, Kate, and Brooke (who was still holding on to Tiger even though he was squirming a little in her arms), and they followed Jo and Lance down the hall to the meeting room, all of them filing inside.

Lance closed the door and waited by it like a sentry. Kate and Brooke sat down on one side of the table, Tiger curling up in Brooke’s lap under the table. Petra took the seat at the end of the table, opposite from the head of the table where Jo stood. Max sat down near Petra.

Jo stopped Neal before he could take a seat next to Max. “You need to go see the doc.”

“I’m fine,” he said. He smiled, but his face was flushed and sweaty. He was trembling, balling his dirty bandages up in his hands.

“No you’re not. Have you looked at your wound in the mirror? Tried to clean it?”

Neal didn’t answer. He shifted his weight from one foot to another.

“It’s infected. I can smell it from here.”

Neal barely nodded. He looked like he might pass out at any second.

Jo looked at Lance by the door. “Will you make sure Neal goes down the hall to see April?”

Lance walked forward, waiting for Neal. They left the meeting room without any further arguments from Neal.

Jo took her seat at the head of the table, the white board on the wall behind her.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Max said.

“What the hell was that out there?”

“We needed to be sure he didn’t have the Dark Angels’ brand,” Petra said, her gaze unwavering.

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“We couldn’t be sure,” Max said. “We asked him to take the bandages off, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“The doc said he wouldn’t let her treat him,” Petra said. “Seemed suspicious to me.”

Jo sighed. “This isn’t how we do things here. We don’t threaten people. We don’t strong arm them, force them to do things.”

“I know this looks bad,” Max said. “But those Dark Angels are dangerous. Like Petra said, we needed to be sure. Maybe being out there beyond these walls, surviving, it’s made us a little paranoid.”

Jo stiffened, and Kate wondered if she’d felt insulted, like Max had just thrown a jab at her for hiding inside her store while the world went to hell.

Kate spoke up: “Max and Petra asked him to show his forehead,” Kate said. “I heard them. But he wouldn’t do it.”

“Obviously he’s afraid it’s bad,” Jo said. “He wanted to keep it covered up. Afraid to face the truth.”

Kate knew Neal’s infection was bad; she had smelled the rot just like Jo had. And this wasn’t a hand or a foot that could be lopped off to save him. She shivered at the thought of it.

“You should’ve come to me,” Jo snapped. “You should’ve talked to me about this.”

Max just nodded, not even bothering to defend himself anymore.

Kate knew Jo was a sweet and caring woman, but she’d just seen the Mr. Hyde side of her, an almost scary anger.

“If you want us to leave, we understand,” Max said.

Jo let out another long sigh, and this time all of her anger seemed to flow out of her with that exhale. She shook her head no. “I don’t want you to leave. We need you. We all need each other. But we have rules here, and they need to be followed. We can’t turn into animals. We can’t become like them out there. Understand?”

Max nodded. So did Kate. And even Brooke. And finally Petra.

“Okay,” Jo said. “Why don’t you guys go get some rest?”

“I’d like to volunteer for a shift on the roof,” Petra said.

Kate looked at Petra, then at Jo, waiting for her answer. Kate guessed Petra was trying to make up to Jo by volunteering for a job most of them around there didn’t want.

“Okay. That’s fine. We need as many up there watching as we can get.”

After the meeting was over, Kate took Brooke back to their tent. She wasn’t sure exactly what time it was, but it had seemed like a long day. She was ready to go to sleep.

As she unzipped their tent, she looked over at Neal’s tent. She didn’t think he was back from seeing the doctor yet.

Inside the tent, Brooke snuggled up inside her sleeping bag with Tiger crawling up next to her, curling up into a ball and purring. Kate crawled in beside her.

“You think you’ll be okay to sleep?” Kate asked Brooke.

She nodded as she stroked Tiger.

“We’re safe here, okay?”

Brooke nodded again and Kate felt like a liar. They were safer than they’d been at her parents’ house, and definitely safer than some of the other places where they’d stayed the night, but they weren’t truly safe here or anywhere else.

“If you wake up, don’t go wandering around the store by yourself. Okay, Brooke? Wake me up first.”

She nodded.

“Promise?”

She nodded again and cracked a smile.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you about Jeff’s music box earlier.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered.

“I know you weren’t trying to steal it.” And frankly, she thought that Jeff might have overreacted just a bit. “You just wanted to look at it, right?”

She shrugged.

“Did you used to have a music box like that?”

She shook her head no.

“Maybe we’ll try to convince Jeff to open it so you can look inside. When he’s ready.”

“I don’t want to look inside.”

“Why?”

She just shrugged again.

“I know you’re upset about what happened. We’ll all forget about it soon.”

Brooke yawned.

“You get some sleep.”

Brooke closed her eyes, snuggling up closer to Tiger.

Kate lay down on her sleeping bag. She had the large flashlight right next to her. She wasn’t sure if they kept some kind of battery-powered lantern on around these tents—she guessed that they did, but she wanted to have a light beside her if she needed it.

Her sleeping bag was surprisingly comfortable. A mattress would have been better, but mattresses were one of the things they didn’t sell at this store; they just sold smaller furniture: desks, office chairs, bookcases, end tables. Still, as tired as she was, she didn’t think she was going to have any trouble falling asleep, even though she knew the dreams would haunt her.

She had expected to pay another visit to the Dragon’s hellish town, but she found herself in the mountains, in a beautiful clearing surrounded by trees all around her in the distance. About a hundred yards away was a large log cabin with a free-standing garage next to it, also constructed from logs. The place looked newer and sturdy with a massive stone fireplace on one side of the home. A concrete path led up to a wide front porch. A light dusting of snow covered everything under a deep and clear blue sky.

No smoke drifted from the chimney, but she knew people were inside—the people she’d seen in her dreams over and over again were in that cabin. And, even though this place looked like a mountain paradise, she knew there was terrible danger here . . . a terrible danger coming.

Then she heard the voices in the woods, men shouting, the sound of gunfire. They were Dark Angels, she was sure of it, and they were coming this way.

She was about to run to the cabin, ready to pound on the door so the people inside could let her in, but then something roared past her like a missile. It slammed into the front of the cabin and the place exploded.

Kate stifled a scream as she watched the cabin fall in on itself, engulfed in flames. She was frozen in place, but she could see the people inside the cabin in her mind, trapped under fallen walls and screaming as their bodies roasted and brains boiled.

Then she saw movement in the flames . . . one of them was escaping the fire, slowly walking out of it.

The man was tall, dressed in black, a hood up over his head that kept his face in shadows, only his eyes glowing, seeming to reflect the firelight. He stepped out of the wreckage like the Devil stepping out of Hell.

“They’re gone,” he said. He was still a hundred yards away, but his voice seemed like it was right behind her, whispering into her ear. “They’re all gone.”

Kate jumped awake in the dark. She sat up on her sleeping bag, her hand shooting out, searching for the big flashlight. But she couldn’t find it. She felt the sleeping bag on the other side of her, feeling for Brooke and Tiger, but they weren’t there. She’d told Brooke not to go out by herself, but she’d gone anyway.

She heard the unzipping of her tent, the flaps tearing open. A large shape filled the opening.

Max?

No, the man’s eyes shined in the darkness.

Kate woke up then, sitting up, reaching for her flashlight. She found it and turned it on, shined it around inside the tent. Brooke and Tiger were lying on their sleeping bag next to her. Brooke was still asleep, but Tiger’s eyes opened a bit when the light splashed across his face—he looked annoyed at being woken up.

She sat there for a moment, trembling. She felt horrible, a loss almost as great as finding out her entire family had turned into rippers. She turned the flashlight back off and set it down beside her.

Then she heard Brooke whispering in the darkness. She was talking in her sleep. “All gone,” she whispered. “They’re all gone.”

Kate realized that Brooke was having the same dream she’d had. Could it be true? Could all of the people they’d seen in their dreams be dead now?

PART 5

CHAPTER 41

Ray

Ray jumped awake when he heard Emma call his name. Her voice was sharp, an urgency to it. He sat up in bed, suddenly wide awake and staring at Emma as she stood beside the bed. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Because he knew instantly that something was wrong.

“It’s Mike,” she said. Even with her dark glasses on he saw her expression of fear and panic. “Rose has him in the basement.”

“Rose?”

“She has a knife to his throat.”

Ray jumped out of bed.

“Josh is down there,” she said quickly.

Ray had to force himself to freeze, to keep himself from bolting out the door and down the stairs to the basement. Every fiber of his being told him to move, to go save his son, but he waited for Emma to continue—she had more to say.

“Josh is down there and he has his gun aimed at her,” she said.

A thousand questions raced through his mind: How did this happen? Why had Rose attacked Mike? What did she want? Why were they down in the basement?

But he didn’t have time to ponder those things. He grabbed his pistol off of the end table next to the bed and bolted down the stairs to the ground floor. He didn’t bother to wait for Emma—she could make it up and down the stairs well enough by herself.

Even though it only took a few seconds to get down the basement stairs, it felt like forever, like time had stretched out. He found himself praying, begging God not to take Mike from him.

He’s all I’ve got left.

A moment later he stood beside Josh just inside the bunker doorway. Josh had his pistol aimed at Rose who stood behind Mike with a kitchen knife up to his throat. The harsh fluorescent lights bathed them in a bright light, deepening the shadows, the light winking off the long and sharp blade of the knife.

Mike looked scared, but not terrified. Rose had been crying, but her face was scrunched in anger. Her hand holding the knife trembled, the knife blade so close to his son’s flesh.

“Rose,” Ray said in a gentle voice.

Her eyes were on Josh and his gun, and then they flicked to Ray.

“Rose, please put the knife down. We can talk about this.”

Rose didn’t say anything.

Obviously her intentions weren’t to kill Mike; she was just using him for some reason. If she wanted to kill him, she could have done so already.

“Why are you doing this, Rose? Are you mad about something?”

“I . . . I can’t . . .” she said.

“Just move the knife away from my son’s throat a little so we can talk about this.”

Rose didn’t move the knife.

Mike was frozen, his arms down at his sides, his body tense, bent back slightly, his eyes wide, his mouth closed in a tight line as he breathed through his nostrils.

“Why are you doing this, Rose?” Ray asked.

“They made me,” she snapped.

Ray knew he had to tread carefully. He didn’t want to make Rose madder than she already was. He crouched down and set his gun on the floor, the metal clinking slightly on the concrete. “Look, I’m setting my gun down. Why don’t you put your knife down just a little? Okay?”

She seemed to be thinking it over. Tears flowed from her eyes. “They made me do this. They said they’d kill all of them if I didn’t do what they wanted.”

“Kill all of who? The people you were with? I thought you said you had to run away from them.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Who’s going to kill them?” Ray asked. “The Dark Angels?”

Rose nodded and sniffled.

Emma was somewhere behind Ray, a few feet away at least, but he didn’t turn around to look at her.

“What did they want you to do?” he asked Rose. Obviously they had wanted her to infiltrate this cabin, but he wanted to keep her talking. She had lowered the knife down from Mike’s throat just a little, but he would feel much better if she would lower it some more.

“They wanted me to get in here.”

“Get in here and what? Kill us? Hurt us?”

Rose didn’t answer for a moment.

“What did they want you to do, Rose?”

“They wanted me to get in here and look around. Find things out. And then dream.”

“Dream?” Ray said. “Have you had strange dreams lately?”

Rose just nodded.

“Have you seen the Dragon in your dreams?”

She nodded again.

“Have you seen us in your dreams before you came here?” Ray asked. He’d never seen Rose in any of his dreams, and no one else had mentioned seeing her in their dreams.

“No,” she answered.

“What about the others here?” he asked her.

She shook her head, just a slight movement.

“What about others? Have you seen them in your dreams? A woman and a little girl? A man and woman with them?”

“No,” she said. She sounded like she was getting impatient with his questions.

“The Dark Angels told you to come in here and dream,” Ray said. “Your dreams would bring them here? Is that right?” Ray knew it was more complicated than that. The Dragon would see inside their cabin through Rose’s dreams. He would see their bunker and supplies. He would see their tunnels.

“You’ve seen everything here,” Ray said more to himself than to Rose. It wasn’t a question. He looked at Mike, locking eyes with his son, and in that split second he knew Mike had told Rose about the tunnels.

“Look, Rose,” Ray continued. “Can you put the knife down? We don’t want to hurt you. We understand you’re scared. The Dragon is scary, but he’s just a man.”

“No,” Rose said, spitting the word out, her eyes wide again, her expression fierce. “He’s the Devil, and he came from Hell to take over.”

“He’s not the Devil,” Ray said. “He’s just a man with psychic powers, that’s all. Emma,” Ray said, turning around and gesturing at Emma, “she has those psychic powers too. She can sense what the Dragon really is, and he’s scared of that. He frightens his followers into being loyal to him. He can visit people’s dreams, scare them, make people think he’s more powerful than he is. That’s all he can do.”

Rose seemed to be thinking over what Ray had just told her.

Ray turned and looked at Emma. “Right, Emma?”

“It’s true,” she said. “The Dragon is a powerful psychic, I admit that, but he’s just a man, just a human being like you and me.”

“Let me ask you, Rose,” Ray said, “have you ever seen the Dragon’s face in your dreams?”

Rose didn’t answer.

“You just see a shadow because he wears a hood. Right? And his eyes shine. That’s because he doesn’t want you to see his face. He wants you to think he’s some kind of monster. He wants you to think he’s bigger than he is, stronger than he is, scarier than he is, more powerful than he is.”

“We’re not afraid of the Dark Angels,” Josh said. “We’ve fought with them a few times already, killed several of them. They’re afraid of us. The Dragon is afraid of us.”

“We can help you,” Ray said. “But you have to let my son go. We won’t kick you out, I promise. But you can’t hurt my son.”

“The people I was with . . .”

“We can help them too.”

Ray looked at Josh. “Lower your gun.”

Josh didn’t move.

“Come on, Josh. Show her that we’re not going to hurt her.”

Josh waited a moment longer then exhaled a long, slow breath, lowering his gun down to his side.

Ray turned back to Rose. “See?”

Rose still didn’t look too certain. She still held the knife to Mike’s throat, but she had lowered it a few more inches over the last couple of minutes, her hand still trembling.

At that moment Mike did two things at the same time: he stomped his foot down on top of Rose’s foot, and then he rocked his head back, smashing it into Rose’s face. Then, in a blur of movement, he moved to the side away from the knife while Rose was too stunned to react. He spun around and pushed her back. She dropped the knife as she fell backward down to the floor, sitting down hard on her butt.

“Mike!” Ray shouted.

Mike bent down and grabbed the kitchen knife from the floor, gripping it like the weapon it had become.

“No,” Ray yelled. “Mike, no! Don’t hurt her!”

Mike was about to rush Rose.

She put her arms up in defense, her nose already bleeding from his head butt.

But then Mike stopped. He looked back at Ray with tears in his eyes.

“It’s okay, Mike,” Ray said. “Don’t hurt her. She’s just scared.”

Mike calmed down in seconds, but he still held on to the knife.

Josh had his gun raised again, aimed at Rose who still sat on the floor in shock, her arms still up and ready to ward off Mike.

“That was slick, Mike,” Josh said. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

“Luke showed me a few MMA moves.”

“I guess so,” Josh muttered.

Ray still had his attention on Rose. “We’re not going to hurt you, Rose. I made a promise and I’m going to keep it. Okay? We’re not going to throw you out of here.”

“You hear that?” Emma asked as she looked up at the ceiling like she could see where the sound was coming from.

And then Ray heard it—the unmistakable sound of gunshots coming from somewhere outside.

CHAPTER 42

Luke

Luke waited beside a tree in the woods. Minutes ago he had come across the makeshift camp down in the clearing below at the mouth of the shallow cave, which was actually more like a giant rock outcropping that provided shelter. These people had made a temporary home here, but then the Dark Angels came and tortured them, and then eventually killed them. But not before forcing Rose to go to their cabin.

Or had Rose really been forced? Or had Rose’s whole story been total bullshit? Maybe she wasn’t with those dead people down there—maybe she’d been part of the Dark Angels all along. If so, then he needed to get back to the cabin and warn Ray and the others.

Of course that was going to be a little tricky since the Dark Angels had waited in the woods (like they’d known he was coming) to take him out.

But they’d missed and now he had escaped up into the hills surrounding the clearing and rocks below. Even up here the smell of death was somewhat noticeable. The gunshots had stopped as the Dark Angels moved in closer to pursue him.

Now that winter was almost officially upon them, a lot of the foliage in the trees and brush had fallen off, decomposing on the forest floor, and that made him more visible. But it also made the Dark Angels more visible.

Luke waited for a moment behind the thick, gnarled tree trunk, using it as cover. He had his rifle down beside him and leaning against the tree, ready to grab it in a second if he needed to. He used his binoculars to watch the Dark Angels in the valley below. Like the other Dark Angels he’d seen, these men were dressed in a mishmash of camouflage, military, and black clothing. They were all ages and sizes, moving through the woods with amateurish skill.

He tucked the binoculars back inside his hoodie jacket and zipped it back up. He picked up the rifle and raised it up to shoot, crouching down on one knee and leaning his shoulder against the tree trunk. It took a few seconds to find the closest Dark Angel down the hill—a young man, maybe in his mid-twenties, with a mean and determined look on his face. The Dark Angel brand was visible just under the edge of his knit cap that he’d pulled down tight onto his head. Luke saw the man in the scope of his rifle, tracking him slowly, his finger squeezing the trigger gently, his grip firm, his breath held for just a second, all of these movements were second-nature to him now from all the years of practice. He pulled the trigger and felt the weapon buck just a little in his hands. The gunshot echoed through the trees. The Dark Angel in the lead fell back, part of his head disappearing in a spray of blood, dead long before he hit the ground.

Luke turned around quickly with his back to the tree trunk, his rifle up close to him, trying to make himself as small as possible as the bullets flew. The men were firing wildly, probably not even sure where the kill shot had come from. A few bullets pelted the tree trunk on the other side, and other bullets tore into the ground a few feet away from him, little puffs of dirt exploding up from the impacts.

Luke waited for the shooting to die down. All they were doing was wasting their ammo. He’d already spotted his next hiding spot just up the hill—a collection of large rocks next to an ancient tree with branches dipping down to the rocks. If he could get behind those rocks he’d have a better barrier than this tree to hide behind.

But the run up the hill would be dangerous.

He twisted around to the other side of the tree and got down on his belly, pointing his rifle down the hill, but not really aiming it at anyone in particular. He shot six times, one right after the other, and then he was up and running toward the rocks, hoping his shots had backed the Dark Angels down long enough for him to get to better cover.

He made it behind the rocks just as more shots rang out, a few of the bullets pelting the rocks, one of them pinging off the top of the rock Luke had crouched down behind. He set his rifle down and tore off his backpack. He grabbed the ammo box and canteen out of his pack, reloading his rifle and then taking a few swigs of water. He also pulled his walkie-talkie off of his belt and turned it on; no sense in staying quiet now.

“Josh, pick up,” he yelled into the walkie-talkie after pressing the button down.

No response.

“Josh, you there?”

Still no response.

He left the walkie-talkie on and clipped it back to his belt. He put his pack back on and raised his head up between two of the large rocks, pulling the binoculars up to his eyes to scan the hillside that sloped down to the valley, trees everywhere.

The sunlight glinted off a pair of binoculars or a scope about fifty yards down the hill and Luke panned over to it, spotting a man hiding in some brush next to a tree. He stuffed the binoculars down into his hoodie and picked up his rifle, finding the man in the scope of his rifle. The man was getting up and looking back to others hidden in the brush behind him, signaling at them to get up and start approaching.

Luke shot the man then panned just to the left, looking for another one of them. He got the next man in the leg as he dived back behind a tree. The man screamed, dropping his weapon and clutching his leg. Luke wondered if the people hanging upside down from the trees had screamed like that when they’d been tortured to death by these men.

“Good,” Luke whispered.

He ducked down behind the rocks again as more gunshots pelted the rocks. He couldn’t do this too much longer—he needed to get back to the cabin. He had the feeling that there were more Dark Angels in these woods, others coming from different directions.

Behind the rocks there was cover from the brush up a steep incline into some trees. He could use that cover to get up to the next ridge and then he could be off and running.

It was now or never. The dead and injured man had frozen the Dark Angels down there, and now it was his chance to move.

In a few seconds he was up and over the ridge, scrambling up the grassy incline and into the trees. A few gunshots popped off, but they seemed random, none of the bullets getting close to him, most of the shots still hitting the rocks below where he’d been a moment ago. There was a chance someone had spotted his escape through a pair of binoculars or a scope, but that was a chance he’d have to take.

Once he was in the trees, he ran back the way he’d come from. Within fifteen minutes he was back at the fallen log where he’d stopped to check his compass and inspect the signs that Rose had climbed over the deadfall.

He stopped by the fallen log, crouching behind it, listening for the sounds of Dark Angels following him.

The woods were silent.

The Dark Angels were being cautious, but they would come eventually. He grabbed his walkie-talkie off of his belt again, ready to call Josh again, but then he froze.

He heard a noise. It wasn’t the Dark Angels advancing through the woods from where he’d run. This sound was coming from another direction, from behind him somewhere. It sounded like machinery, like trucks.

“Shit,” Luke breathed out.

He was up and running again, pressing the button of the walkie-talkie. “Josh, come in. It’s Luke.”

No answer.

“Fucking pick up!” he yelled into the walkie-talkie.

What the hell? Where was Josh? Was he up in Emma’s room fooling around instead of standing watch like he was supposed to? Luke turned his walkie-talkie off now so a blast of static wouldn’t give his position away. He hooked it on his belt again.

When he got near the edge of the woods, close to the clearing where the cabin stood, he kept on rushing through the woods toward the dirt drive. The noise was coming from down that drive, and he was sure it was the sound of trucks now, then a crashing and wrenching sound, like one of them had just rammed through the metal gate.

The Dark Angels were coming and they were bringing trucks. Big trucks by the sound of it.

Luke darted across the dirt trail into the woods on the other side. He’d get through these woods to the hatch and take the long tunnel back to the bunker. He couldn’t take a chance on one of the Dark Angels seeing him enter the garage and not come back out again, figuring out that they had a tunnel in there.

There could be Dark Angels in other parts of the woods, and they might see him get to the hatch, but Luke figured that the Dark Angels weren’t being stealthy anymore—they were driving right up the driveway.

He got close to the hatch and crouched down, taking a minute to look around at the woods and clearing with his binoculars. He didn’t see anyone close, but he could hear the trucks racing up the driveway, skidding to a stop, men shouting, shooting guns at the cabin.

Luke darted to the hatch, opened it, and slipped inside. He closed it and locked it, plunged into darkness.

CHAPTER 43

Josh

Josh heard the same thing Emma had, the sound of gunshots. They sounded distant down here in the bunker, but he knew they were shooting at the cabin.

“Luke’s still out there,” Josh said. His hand brushed by his hip and he realized he’d left the walkie-talkie upstairs in his haste to get down here to the bunker. Maybe Luke was trying to call him right now to alert them, or maybe he’d been calling for help.

Ray was still negotiating with Rose. He looked at her now. “Rose, we need to get upstairs. The Dark Angels are here now. We need to see what’s going on, but we need you to come with us.”

Rose was still seated on the floor where she’d been pushed down by Mike.

“We can’t leave you down here by yourself with what you know now,” Ray told Rose.

For just a second Luke didn’t understand what Ray was talking about, but then it hit him. He looked right at Mike. Mike had told Rose about the tunnels.

“You . . . you promise you won’t send me out there?” Rose said.

“I promise,” Ray said. “We won’t do that. But I can’t leave you down here by yourself. You understand that, don’t you?”

Rose finally nodded.

Something nagged at Josh about the way Rose was acting. Ray seemed to believe her little act, but Josh wasn’t so sure.

“Rose, please,” Ray said. “We need to hurry.”

She got up and walked toward Ray. Mike fell in behind her. Josh watched as the three of them walked to the basement stairs and headed up to the ground floor.

Emma was about to follow them upstairs, but Josh touched her shoulder gently. She turned to him.

“Something’s coming,” she told him in a low voice like he had asked her a question. “Something very bad.”

“What about Rose? Can we trust her?”

“I don’t know.”

Josh sighed. “Okay. Let’s get up there and see what they’re doing. I want you to stay near the kitchen, okay?”

She nodded.

He wanted to tell her to stay in the basement, but he knew she wouldn’t. He glanced back at the bunker and the doors to the tunnels. He wondered if the Dark Angels knew about the tunnels. Could they be in those tunnels now, coming to invade the cabin? Maybe they could lock the doors somehow, or block them off, but what about Luke? How would he get back inside?

If he was still alive.

First things first—get upstairs and see what the Dark Angels were doing out there.

After Josh made sure Emma was safely in the kitchen, he rushed into the living room. Rose was crouched down behind the edge of the couch, Mike near her with the kitchen knife still in his hand. But he wasn’t watching Rose—he was watching Ray who stood at the window to the left of the front door, peeking out through the curtains with his pistol still clenched in one hand.

Josh spotted his walkie-talkie on the shorter couch. He grabbed it and pressed the button. “Luke, come in. It’s . . .” He couldn’t remember if he was “base” or “home.” Shit, hell with it. “It’s Josh. Come in. Where are you?”

He let the button go and listened, but got no response.

Maybe Luke didn’t have his walkie-talkie on. Maybe he couldn’t have it on right now.

He clipped the walkie-talkie to his belt and stared at Rose.

She knew he was staring at her.

“How many are out there?” Josh asked Rose.

Rose started crying.

Ray looked back from the window. “Looks like four trucks. Big ones. I think there are some Dark Angels in the woods, too.”

“How many?” Josh snapped at Rose.

Ray moved to the side of the window and waited for Rose’s answer.

She didn’t say anything.

“I gave you my word,” Ray told Rose. “I won’t throw you out there. We’ll help you, but you have to help us.”

“I don’t know how many,” Rose said. “A lot. Twenty. Maybe thirty. They’ve got guns and trucks.”

“Yeah, thanks for the info,” Josh said. “I think we’ve figured that part out.”

“They attacked our camp in the woods,” Rose said.

“So all that stuff you said about escaping a bad group was all a lie.”

Rose just stared at him.

Ray walked over to them. “We understand why you had to lie.” He shot a glance at Josh then looked at Rose again. “What really happened? Did the Dark Angels just stumble onto your camp?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. They found us, but they were asking us about you.”

“About us?” Josh asked.

She looked at him and nodded. “They were looking for you guys, but Zeke, our leader, he swore that none of us knew anything about any of you, had never seen you before. But they said he was lying. They took one of us, Heather, and they hung her upside down from a tree branch with her arms tied behind her back. They took turns beating her with sticks and rocks, kicking her. I could hear her bones breaking. Her screams were so loud.”

“But you knew something, didn’t you?” Emma said as she came toward them from the kitchen.

The shame on Rose’s face was unmistakable. She nodded. “Right after they . . . they hung Heather upside down, I was going to tell them. But I was afraid they were going to do the same thing to me. But I told them that I’d seen a cabin, and that I thought people might be inside. They stopped beating Heather while I told them everything I knew. I told them I’d been exploring in the woods and I’d seen your cabin in the clearing.”

Josh remembered Luke finding the tracks in the snow yesterday.

“But it was like they already knew that, wasn’t it?” Emma prodded.

Rose’s eyes widened in shock. “Yeah. It was like they knew something, but just wanted me to admit it.”

“Or fill in more details for them,” Ray suggested.

“They told you to come here,” Emma said.

“Yeah,” Rose answered. “They told me to find a way inside this cabin or they were going to do what they’d done to Heather to every one of us. So I did what they wanted.”

“And why did they want you to get inside?” Ray asked. “To hurt us? To kill us?”

“They didn’t tell me to do that,” Rose said.

“Then why did you put a knife to my son’s throat?” Ray said.

“I . . . I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew they’d be coming, and I wasn’t sure I was doing what they wanted. I just wanted out. I just wanted help.”

“Hell of a way to ask for help,” Josh grumbled.

“We can still help you,” Ray said, taking another step closer. “But you have to help us.”

“I am,” Rose said, nearly breaking down in tears again.

“There’s more,” Emma said, facing Rose, seeming to stare at her through her dark glasses even though she couldn’t see.

Josh knew it was freaking Rose out because she kept looking away from Emma.

“What did they want you to do when you got in here?” Ray asked, still keeping his tone even.

“It . . . it just seemed so strange.”

“What?”

“Like I said before, they wanted me to look around, to see everything, to remember everything. Find out as much as I could.”

“But there’s more,” Emma pressed. “Isn’t there? What else did they tell you to do?”

“They told me to dream.”

“So he could see,” Emma said. “So the Dragon could see, and then so he could show the Dark Angels outside our defenses and the supplies we have.”

Rose didn’t bother answering.

“Luke’s still out there,” Josh said. He stared down at Rose. “If we’d known about this attack sooner, he’d still be in here. We could have planned for this.”

“We should’ve already been planning for this,” Ray mumbled. “We all knew they’d find us eventually. We knew they’d never give up.”

“She still should’ve told us.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think you’d be able to fight back.”

“Why?” Josh snapped. “Because you guys couldn’t fight back?

“Okay,” Ray said. “That’s enough. We can’t change what’s already happened.” He went back to the window near the front door and peeked out between the curtains.

Josh went to the other window. He saw the trucks at the far end of the clearing near the dirt drive. They were parked in a line, much like they’d been parked in front of the buildings in that small town where they’d met Luke. But there were more Dark Angels in the woods—Josh saw them moving around in the brush and trees, crouching down, aiming rifles toward the cabin. Then they opened fire.

As bullets pelted the cabin’s log walls and the metal front door, Josh dove to the floor. He suspected the glass on the windows was bullet-proof, but he didn’t know for sure, and standing in front of it was crazy.

He looked across the floor at Ray who was also down on his side.

The gunfire stopped.

“I guess we’re about to find out how much money your buddy really put into this place,” Josh told Ray.

CHAPTER 44

Ray

The shooting stopped for a moment, and for those few seconds Ray had been rattled. He’d faced more life-threatening and unthinkable situations in the last few weeks than he had in his whole life. He thought he might have been prepared for the Dark Angels shooting at the cabin, but he wasn’t. His mind was scrambled, and for a panicky few seconds he was afraid he couldn’t think straight, that he was never going to think straight again.

But then he calmed down. It was like the alpha waves in his brain had kicked in and time seemed to slow down. It used to happen to him on the football field, time would seem to slow down, the game would seem to slow down, and his mind seemed to work on autopilot for a few seconds as he tackled a player or tried to intercept a pass.

And that had happened now, an eerie calmness washing over him.

First he needed to make sure the bullets hadn’t penetrated the two windows or the front door. Like Josh had said: They were about to see how strong this fortress really was.

The door seemed okay; there were no holes in it, no shafts of daylight shining through.

“The windows?” he asked Josh.

“Looks like they held,” Josh answered back from below the other window.

Ray looked toward the kitchen where Mike, Rose, and Emma were huddled. He was up on his feet and across the living room in a flash, keeping low even though the shooting outside had stopped and none of the bullets had penetrated the cabin.

“You guys okay?” Ray asked.

“The windows and door held?” Emma asked.

“Yeah,” Ray answered. But what if the Dark Angels used a more powerful weapon? What if they used some kind of machine gun? Or some kind of explosive? How much could the cabin really stand?

He needed some kind of plan. But what? Fight back? They couldn’t shoot from the windows because they were sealed shut, and they couldn’t take a chance on opening the door—they were trapped in here.

Hunker down and wait the Dark Angels out? They had plenty of supplies down in the bunker. Even if the Dark Angels managed to destroy the solar-powered well, they still had a few large storage tanks of water in the bunker, along with the pallets of bottled water. And they had enough food to last for years.

But the Dark Angels weren’t going to wait around outside. Eventually they’d try to ram their way in, or burn down the cabin, or use bombs.

Josh came up to Ray. “They stopped for now, but I’m sure they’ll start again soon.”

Just then Ray heard a noise from the basement. Someone was coming up the stairs. Was it the Dark Angels? Had they found the tunnels?

Josh must have had the same thought. He looked at Rose. “Do they know about the tunnels?”

Rose was crying again, shaking her head no. “I don’t think so. I don’t know how they would.”

Ray looked at Mike. “When did you tell her about the tunnels?”

“Just a little while ago. Right before she . . .” He let his words trail off.

Ray knew Mike felt bad about Rose attacking him, embarrassed about being swindled by her. He’d wanted a friend so bad, but it was more than that. Mike had been attracted to Rose; Ray had seen that right away.

The noises from the basement were louder now.

“Okay,” Ray told Mike. “Take Emma and Rose into the bedroom.”

Mike didn’t argue about it; he led them to the bedroom.

Ray and Josh backed up toward the couches, crouching down and aiming their guns at the basement door.

The noises beyond the door were a little louder.

What were they going to do if Rose was lying about the Dark Angels knowing about the tunnels? Or maybe she really wasn’t sure. Maybe the Dragon had seen things through her eyes while she was awake—maybe he was more powerful than Emma suspected.

Backup plans tried to form in Ray’s mind, but nothing was coming together. The tunnels were their only escape. They couldn’t go out the back door. Even if the Dark Angels hadn’t surrounded the clearing yet, they would spot them running across the field to the woods—they’d be picked off one by one. Ray saw an image of Mike being shot down from behind, his arms flying up, falling forward in slow-motion like a scene from a war movie.

The walkie-talkie on Josh’s belt crackled with static.

“Josh, come in,” Luke said on the walkie-talkie. “It’s Luke. I’m coming up from the bunker. Don’t do anything stupid like shoot me.”

Ray and Josh glanced at each other, standing up quickly and dropping their weapons down to their sides.

The door to the basement opened slowly and then Luke stepped out. He had his gun in his hand, his backpack on, his rifle slung over one shoulder. He walked up to them in the living room, looking right at Josh. “What the hell? Why weren’t you answering me earlier on the walkie?”

“Why weren’t you?” Josh said.

“I had to turn it off for a little because of our friends out there. What’s your excuse?”

“Rose took Mike hostage down in the bunker. I left my walkie up here when I went down there.”

Luke’s face fell in shock.

“It’s okay now,” Ray said. “We got things worked out.”

“Why would she take Mike hostage? How?”

“She had a knife to his throat,” Josh said, his voice low, his eyes flicking to the bedroom door.

“Let’s go over by the stairs,” Ray whispered.

They all hurried to the foot of the steps that led upstairs.

“Why didn’t you kill her?” Luke asked.

“We don’t need to kill every person we see,” Ray said. “She was just scared, that’s all.”

Luke stared at Ray. “What exactly did she tell you?”

“She said the Dark Angels came to their camp and threatened them. They hung one of them upside down from a tree. A woman. They tortured her. Rose said she’d seen our cabin the night before and it was like the Dark Angels knew about it. She told them she’d seen our cabin and they told her to get inside somehow or they were going to kill everyone in her camp.”

“Does that make sense to you?” Luke asked. “Why not make her tell them where this place is and then storm it like they’re doing now?”

“She said they wanted her inside. They wanted her to look around, to see what we had.”

Luke shook his head like the idea of it didn’t make sense to him.

“What about her people at her camp?” Josh asked.

“All dead. Some were hanging from trees and others were staked to the ground inside a cave. I thought she said she had to escape from some bad group.”

“She told us she’d said that because she was scared.”

“Then why attack Mike?”

“She said she was afraid of not doing what the Dark Angels wanted, afraid that we’d throw her back out to them.”

“She didn’t think we could fight back,” Josh said.

“Speaking of fighting back,” Ray said. “We need to make a plan. Our only hope is that the Dark Angels don’t know about the tunnels.”

“No one saw me enter the hatch,” Luke said. “I’m sure of it.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” Josh said. “You don’t know how long they’ve been in the woods watching us.”

“I’m sure,” Luke said. He looked back at Ray. “We need to go out there and pick them off one by one. I could go alone or take dipshit here with me.”

“Thanks,” Josh mumbled.

“We could go out when it gets dark,” Luke continued. “They’re right out there by the driveway now. They’ve got trucks. I don’t know how many are in the trucks, but I guessed about ten in the woods at the camp. Fifteen at the most. But I don’t think any more than that. And I already killed two of them and wounded another.”

“Rose said she thinks there could be twenty to thirty of them,” Josh said.

“Yeah, sounds right to me,” Luke agreed. “Probably closer to thirty, counting the guys in the trucks.”

“And you think you can take thirty of them?” Ray asked Luke.

“I don’t see what other choices we have. As long as we can get in and out of those tunnels we could spread the attacks out over a few days if we had to. We could use the crossbows and bows and arrows. Rig up some kind of explosions, or Josh’s favorite, the Molotov cocktails.”

“I don’t think we have a lot of time,” Ray said. “I’m sure they’re thinking of the same things: explosives, bombs, fire.”

Luke nodded. “They might try to burn us out.”

“I’m sure they’ll try,” Ray said.

“At least the doors and windows have held so far,” Josh said. “It could buy us some time.”

“We need to think about an escape plan,” Ray said. “We still need to get the van and the Jeep loaded up and get ready to leave if we can. It’s only going to be a matter of time before some of those Dark Angels get into the garage and steal any supplies we have in the vehicles, or steal the vehicles or disable them.”

“That’s why it’s even more important that we pick them off like Luke said,” Josh offered.

“They’ll figure out that we’re getting in and out of the cabin,” Ray said. “They’ll figure out we have some kind of tunnel system.”

“Maybe not,” Luke countered. “They know I was out there in the woods not too long ago. They spotted me at Camp Rose and shot at me. As far as they know, I’m still out there. And maybe even Josh.” Luke paused, staring at Ray. “Something’s bothering you.”

“Rose was sent here to see what we had,” Ray said. “Our supplies and defenses. They told her to get inside and dream.” Ray saw Luke’s face light up with revelation.

“So he can see,” Luke said. “That makes it even more important that Rose doesn’t ever know about the tunnels.”

Ray and Josh glanced at each other, but didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What?”

“Mike told Rose about the tunnels.”

“Why?”

Ray shrugged. “They were down in the bunker playing video games. I think she might have been snooping around and pumping him for information. I think he may have been trying to impress her.”

“Has she seen the tunnels?”

“I don’t think so, but she knows about them. She’s seen the doors down there.” Ray shrugged again. “I don’t know what happened down there, but something scared her enough to take Mike hostage.”

“She had it planned,” Josh said.

Ray turned to Josh. “How do you know that?”

“She didn’t get that knife down there in the bunker; she got it from the kitchen when she and Mike were eating breakfast. She hid it on her and took it with her when they went down there to play video games.”

“So she went down there to attack Mike, but she was looking specifically for something.”

“Let’s not jump the gun here,” Ray said. “I think she was just doing what she thought they wanted her to do.”

“She can’t see the tunnels—even if she knows they’re there, we can’t let her actually see them,” Luke said. “But it’s more than that. We can’t let her dream. We can’t let her send any information she already has to them. You know what we have to do to her.”

CHAPTER 45

Ray

Ray’s heart jumped for just a second, his skin tingling. Was Luke saying what he thought he was saying? “Kill her?” he asked Luke. “Is that what you’re talking about?”

Luke just stared at Ray, not answering.

“We can’t just kill someone.”

“Ray, the rules have changed. We don’t live in a civilized society anymore.”

“I don’t think you ever lived in a civilized society.” Ray had always had his concerns about Luke, but he realized now that he had vastly underestimated what lengths Luke would go to. “She’s just a teenager. A girl.”

“She’s the enemy.”

“Wait a second here,” Josh said. “I kind of agree with both of you. But I think Ray’s right; we can’t just kill a teenage girl.”

“She broke in here,” Luke said.

“No, we let her inside. The worst she did was trespass on property that none of us even own.”

“She got in under false pretenses,” Luke argued, his voice rising just a little. “You even said yourself that she admitted that she lied about getting away from the supposed bad people at her camp.”

“I think we know why she had to lie,” Ray said. “She was scared. They were torturing people, threating to kill all of them.”

“Or everyone in that camp was already dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe she’s with the Dark Angels.”

“You think she’s one of them?”

Luke didn’t bother answering.

“I haven’t seen any women among the Dark Angels so far,” Ray said. “And no children.”

“And she doesn’t have the adorable matching logo on her forehead,” Josh reminded them.

“So she’s a mole,” Luke said. “A spy. Maybe they don’t mark their spies. Maybe only the soldiers or grunts are marked. Maybe she turned against her camp and joined the Dark Angels. We don’t know enough about the Dark Angels to make any of those conclusions. What we know is that she lied to get in here and that she snooped around in here and then attacked Mike.”

“But she didn’t kill him,” Ray said. “She could have slit his throat in a heartbeat if she wanted to.”

“And to be fair, Mike got away from her on his own,” Josh said and looked at Luke. “He said he used some moves he learned from you.”

Luke almost cracked a smile.

“Maybe we can solve this problem in a different way,” Josh said.

Ray looked at Josh, waiting for him to continue.

“Maybe we don’t have to kill her. But we can’t have her in here with us. So we just make her leave.”

“Send her out there with them?” Ray said.

Josh nodded.

“They’ll kill her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I told her I wouldn’t send her out there. I gave her my word.”

“Killing her would be easier,” Luke said. “We shouldn’t even take a chance on opening the door to let her out.”

“We could send her out the back door,” Josh suggested.

“They might have the clearing surrounded by now,” Luke said. “They’ll be communicating with each other. I know they’re not an elite military unit, but they’re not something to be taken lightly either. It’s too dangerous to open any of the doors, and we can’t let her go out through any of the tunnels because what she sees eventually the Dragon will see.”

“We take her out through the tunnels, but we blindfold her,” Josh said.

“We should just kill her. I’ll do it. She’ll never see it coming. She won’t feel a thing.”

Ray’s stomach clenched and turned. He felt suddenly nauseous, like the food he’d eaten hours ago was going to come back up. Luke talked about killing someone like he was talking about crushing a cockroach under his shoe. Ray understood that Luke used to kill for a living for some Mafia family, but he was starting to get the idea that Luke had enjoyed his job, that killing was as basic to him as breathing, that other lives had no meaning for him. He was starting to believe he was dealing with a true psychopath.

“Maybe we should vote on it,” Josh said.

“Vote with her standing right there in front of us?” Ray said.

“No. We leave her in another room.”

“She shouldn’t be left alone,” Luke warned.

“Well, maybe we could lock her in a room. Like a jail cell. Maybe tie her hands and blindfold her if we have to.”

God, this was getting crazy. But Ray knew Luke was right—this wasn’t a normal civilized world anymore with rules and laws to follow. But he didn’t want to become a complete animal; he didn’t want to become like the Dark Angels, or even the rippers.

“Look, we don’t have enough evidence to kill her or banish her,” Ray said. “Maybe detaining her for a little while—humanely—and then questioning her more is the right answer.”

Josh beamed with pride, obviously excited that his idea was being considered. But Luke didn’t look happy about Ray’s decision. He obviously wanted to go with the easy answer, whether it was the right or wrong thing to do.

A scattering of gunfire sounded from outside. Bullets pelted the front of the cabin.

“We need to see what they’re doing out there,” Josh said.

“We need to go out there and pick them off,” Luke said.

“Yeah,” Ray said to Josh. “Luke’s right.” He felt that if Luke was outside killing the Dark Angels, then maybe his thirst for blood would be quenched. But would that thirst ever be quenched?

Luke took off to the windows at the front of the cabin.

Ray and Josh went back into the kitchen just as Rose rushed out of the bedroom with Emma and Mike right behind her. Mike still had the kitchen knife in his hand. He looked scared.

“What’s going on?” Ray asked.

Josh seemed to know immediately that something was wrong with Emma. He ran up to her, ignoring Rose as she bolted for the living room.

“It’s coming,” Emma said in a breathless voice, like the air had left her lungs. Her mouth was drawn down into a frown. “It’s coming to kill us.”

Luke yelled from the living room, already running back from the windows. “Get down into the basement!”

Ray grabbed Rose as she tried to run past him into the living room. Luke bolted right past them.

Josh already had the basement door open, getting Mike and Emma inside the landing and down the stairs.

“Dad, come on!” Mike yelled from the basement stairs.

Rose wrenched out of Ray’s grasp, throwing a wild punch at him.

“Let her go!” Luke yelled at Ray. “Run!”

For one second Ray thought Luke was going to shoot Rose right then and there, that he wanted him to let her go so he could have a clear shot. But then Luke ducked inside the basement door.

Rose panicked as she ran away from Ray, running past the couch toward the front door. “No!” she yelled at the front door. “Wait for me! You promised!”

At that moment Ray knew that Luke and Josh had been right—Rose was a mole, she was a spy for the Dark Angels. Whether she had joined them after the slaughter at her camp or she’d always been with them didn’t matter—she was definitely with them now. And at that second everything exploded. Ray was knocked off his feet from the shock wave, the world around him suddenly engulfed in flames.

CHAPTER 46

Emma

Emma had known something terrible was coming. It had been like a flash of light in her mind’s eye exploding in the darkness that was her world. She’d almost seen the flash and felt the danger too late. But then again, maybe it had been too late . . . too late for Ray.

Somehow Rose had known what was coming before Emma had. She had run out of the bedroom without warning, suddenly frantic about getting out of the cabin. Maybe Rose could tell that something catastrophic had been about to happen. But Emma had heard her as she ran to the front door, fighting with Ray along the way. That moment of trying to stop Rose, trying to save her, that’s what had gotten Ray stuck up there.

Luke hadn’t had time to explain what was coming, he had just yelled at everyone to get down into the basement. But something had frightened him that badly.

Josh had wasted no time getting her and Mike into the basement, leaving the door open for Luke and Ray.

Where was Ray now?

The world above the basement had exploded. The basement stairs had trembled as they ran down to the basement floor. She swore the stairs were going to shake apart and spill all of them down into the rubble. She heard a roaring above them, felt the immediate heat, the sound of a massive crackling fire.

Oh God, Ray was still up there. Trapped in that fire, maybe trapped under a fallen wall, pinned by a giant burning log.

She felt Josh’s hands on her. “Come on,” Josh said. “We need to get into the bunker.”

Emma knew Mike was beside her, helping her. His hand was in hers, and then he squeezed her hand. “The lights are all out,” he said.

“Solar panels got destroyed in the blast,” Josh said. “Here.”

She realized that Josh had probably just handed Mike his flashlight, giving them a little shaft of light to see by down here in this pitch-black darkness.

“Where’s Ray?” Emma said, stopping suddenly. She knew they needed to get to the bunker, but she needed to know what had happened to Ray.

“He’s not down here,” Josh said.

“Josh!” Luke called from the top of the basement stairs. “Get back up here.”

“It’s Ray,” Emma said, holding on to Josh’s arm for just a second, gripping it hard. “Help him.”

“I’ll help,” Mike said.

“No,” Josh told him. “I got it. Me and Luke’ll get him down here, buddy. You help Emma into the bunker.”

Emma wasn’t sure if Luke and Josh were trying to help an injured Ray down into the basement or a dying Ray, or even just trying to get his body down the stairs. She couldn’t sense Ray and that scared her. But she was rattled right now. The intense flash of warning in her mind had rattled her—she’d been feeling a building pressure for a little while, the feeling that something large and ominous was approaching. And then that light had flashed in her mind, so intense it had been painful.

“My dad . . .” Mike said.

“He’ll be okay,” Emma said, but she felt like a liar.

“It’s dark in here,” Mike said, his voice echoing slightly.

“Did Josh give you a flashlight?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we can find some battery-powered lanterns down here. All of you will need some light down here.”

“I’m going to go look. I think I remember where they are. You going to be okay?”

“I’m fine, Mike. Go ahead and get the lanterns turned on.”

She heard Mike darting away to the metal shelves, rummaging around.

“I got some,” he said, but he kept his voice low.

Emma concentrated on other sounds from above as Mike got the lanterns turned on. She could tell the bunker was made of even stronger walls and ceilings than the cabin; the noises of the fire above and the groaning and popping wood weren’t as loud down here in the bunker. She was waiting to hear a thundering crash as the whole cabin collapsed down onto itself, filling the basement with burning wood and logs.

Come on, guys. Get down here. Get into the bunker.

She heard them coming, shuffling along the concrete floor of the basement, breathing hard. She heard them get inside the bunker. One of them closed the door that looked like a wall on the other side, the magnetic locks clicking loudly into place, creating an airtight seal to keep the smoke and some of the heat out.

“Rose,” Ray mumbled. He sounded like he’d been unconscious and was now coming awake.

“She ran for the front door,” Luke told Ray.

“What happened?” Ray asked.

“They had some kind of anti-tank weapon,” Luke said. “Like a rocket launcher or something. I saw one of the men with it in the back of the pickup, aiming it right at the cabin.”

“I guess the cabin wasn’t built to withstand that,” Ray said.

“What is?” Luke replied.

“At least it held up a little,” Josh said. “The floor held. Most of the walls. It’s still holding up.”

“For now,” Ray said and gritted his teeth, still breathing heavy.

“Even if the cabin collapses, I think we’ll be safe in here,” Josh said. “Part of this bunker is actually beyond the cabin and underground. Walls and ceiling are concrete with reinforced steel. It’ll hold.”

“A tomb,” Luke said.

“More like a vault,” Josh shot back.

Emma wasn’t sure if Josh was telling the truth or just trying to ease everyone’s minds a little.

“Ray’s hurt,” Emma said. She could tell from the sound of his breathing that he was injured.

“Dad?” Mike said.

“My leg,” Ray said. “My ankle.”

“Broken?” Emma asked.

Ray grunted in pain. She figured he was testing his weight on the injured ankle.

“I don’t think so,” Ray answered. “I think it’s sprained. It’s the one I hurt playing football years ago.”

“Mike, see if there are any wraps in one of those first-aid kits over there,” Emma said. “And your dad’s going to need something for the pain.”

“No painkillers,” Ray snapped. “Just aspirins.”

Emma wondered if that was a dig at Josh.

Mike was back in the aisles of shelves. She heard him rummaging around, opening plastic cases.

“I wish we had some ice down here,” Emma said.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Luke said. “They’re going to strike again. Maybe they’ll hit the garage and destroy the Jeep and the van. We’re going to need those vehicles to get out of here.” He paused for just a second. “I need to go out there and pick them off. At least the ones in the truck first.”

“I can’t go with you,” Ray said. “I’ll only slow you down.”

Emma swore she heard Mike breathe out a sigh of relief as he came back, rattling a bottle of pills. “I got bandages,” he said. “And some aspirin.”

“Thanks, son.”

“I’ll go with you,” Josh told Luke.

Emma’s heart skipped a beat, but she knew Josh was going to go with Luke to help; she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk him out of it.

“Okay,” Luke said.

She heard Luke opening up the gun closet, taking weapons and ammo out.

“You’ll need to barricade these doors to the tunnels down here as best you can,” Luke said.

“The doors have locks,” Ray said. “We’ll unlock them when you come back. Just let us know on the walkie.”

“We’re not coming back until all the Dark Angels are dead,” Luke said. “And only then. After that, we’re going to need to get the hell out of here. The smoke from this cabin is going to draw rippers for miles. And maybe more Dark Angels.”

“Okay,” Ray said. “Just keep your walkies with you.”

“We’ll keep them off until we need to use them,” Luke said. “But you keep yours on all the time in case we need to get a hold of you.”

Ray didn’t say anything—Emma figured he was nodding at Luke. She almost said: Can’t hear your head rattle.

Josh came over to Emma and held her. They kissed, a long kiss. She felt tears in her eyes. “We’ll be back in a flash,” he told her.

But she knew that wasn’t true. She was scared. She didn’t want to let go of him.

“We never got the Jeep and van loaded with supplies,” Ray said. “While you’re gone, we’ll get as much stuff together as we can to take with us.”

“Good idea,” Luke said. “All the ammo we can carry. Medical supplies. MREs. The LifeStraws and water purification tablets. All the most important stuff.”

“Got it,” Ray said. Emma detected just the trace of annoyance in Ray’s voice—he was a smart man and more than capable of deciding which supplies to take with them. “Mike will help me get the stuff together.”

“Yeah, I’ll help,” Mike said.

Emma thought of the stuff they’d had upstairs, the personal items they’d had, the things that had meant something to each of them. She knew her small tape player and earphones were up there, the Stephen King audiobooks she’d been listening to. She figured Mike’s comic books were up there. Their clothes. The things they’d had in their packs during their travels here to the cabin. But now those things were all gone, burning up in the fire raging above the concrete roof of the bunker.”

“Okay,” Luke said. “You got your pack ready?” he asked Josh.

“Everything locked and loaded,” Josh answered.

“We’re going to take the long tunnel into the woods,” Luke told Ray. “Whatever you do, don’t go into the tunnel to the garage. I’m sure they’re watching the garage.”

“Got it,” Ray said again, even more annoyed. “We weren’t planning on going into the tunnels.”

“Well, if you absolutely have to escape, use the tunnel to the shed. It might be your only hope.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Josh said.

Emma knew that Josh was trying to sound brave for her sake—for all of their sakes—but she could hear the fear in his voice.

CHAPTER 47

Luke

Luke felt the most difficult part was going to be getting out of the hatch and into the woods. Even if the Dark Angels didn’t know where the hatch was or how many tunnels there were, or where they were located, it didn’t mean that they weren’t watching from somewhere in the woods and might see them opening the hatch and crawling out.

He and Josh had walked down the tunnel. There was only enough room for them to walk single file, and Luke was in front of Josh. He led with the flashlight. He still had the same pack he’d had on earlier in the woods, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his gun with the silencer holstered under his hoodie.

Luke stopped when he reached the hatch and turned to Josh. “I’ll go out first and close the hatch. Let me look around for a few minutes, okay?”

Josh nodded. “Yeah, man.”

“Just be patient for a few minutes. I’ll come back and open the hatch.”

“Whatever you say, man.”

Luke turned to the hatch door and spun the large metal wheel, opening the door. He pushed it open slowly, the leaves and branches attached to it as cover pulling apart. He looked around and then opened the hatch all the way. The hatch was hidden in a large section of brush, so he felt he would be mostly hidden as he laid his rifle down and crawled out.

After lowering the door closed, Luke waited there for a few moments. He was at the far side of the clearing, but even from where he was he could smell the smoke and hear the crackling flames of the cabin fire. He also heard voices, one man barking orders to others, but the voices were far away, over by the line of trucks blocking the driveway.

Luke made himself wait a few more minutes, still scanning the woods all around him. He didn’t see any Dark Angels, so maybe they hadn’t completely surrounded the clearing yet. Maybe they didn’t have enough manpower for that.

Maybe they were confident that they had killed everyone in the cabin, letting their guard down a little. But then again, the men who had chased him earlier in the morning, they might think he was still somewhere out in these woods. They couldn’t be sure he had gotten back to the cabin. Maybe the longer he and Josh waited, the more the Dark Angels would believe he had gotten back to the cabin and that he was dead now.

He moved to the edge of the brush, silent as he pushed small branches out of the way. From where he crouched he could see the four trucks in front of the driveway. There were two pickups and two military Humvees. One of the pickups had the man in back who had shot the rocket launcher.

The log cabin was still standing, but for how long? The wind sweeping across the clearing was blowing the flames toward the free-standing garage. It was only a matter of minutes before the garage caught on fire.

Luke hurried back to the hatch and opened it. Josh crawled out.

“Get two of your Molotovs ready,” Luke told him.

Josh pulled off his backpack and went to work. He had already filled the glass jars up with gasoline and cut a hole in the metal lid then placed a piece of duct tape over it. He peeled back the tape and stuffed a strip of cloth down into the hole, letting some of the cloth hang out as the “wick.”

“We’re going down into the trees over there,” Luke whispered. “We’ll stay on this side of the driveway. You hit two of the trucks with your cocktails, but not the truck blocking the driveway. I’m going to need you to get to that truck and move it out of the way.”

Josh didn’t look too happy about that idea.

“We need to move that truck away from the driveway so we can get our vehicles out,” Luke explained. “I’ll cover you.”

Josh nodded.

“Things are going to move fast, okay? You just throw those Molotovs when I tell you and then run for the truck. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“After you move the truck, you get back to the hatch. Get Ray, Emma, and Mike into the tunnel that leads to the garage. Get them to the Jeep and the van.”

“Got it,” he said again.

“You sure that bunker’s going to hold?” Luke whispered.

“Yeah,” Josh answered.

But Luke wasn’t too confident about that. Even if the cabin didn’t collapse or if the bunker held the weight of the collapsed cabin, the fire was going to spread to the garage at any minute, maybe even catch the whole clearing on fire.

“We don’t have a lot of time to do this,” Luke whispered. “You ready?”

Josh nodded. Swallowed hard. “If anything happens to me, take care of Emma. Make sure she’s safe.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you. I got your back. You just worry about doing your part. Nothing else. Focus only on your job and we’ll be okay.”

Josh nodded again, saying nothing this time.

They moved through the brush. It took a few minutes to get to the edge of the dirt drive. Luke took off, moving silently through the woods, closer to the trucks, Josh right behind him.

The Dark Angels seemed preoccupied with the burning cabin, all of them watching it like the flames were hypnotizing them. Maybe they were still waiting for burning bodies to claw their way out of the fire, or they were just waiting for the flames to die down. It was too hot to get near the cabin right now.

Luke could imagine how hot the bunker might be getting. And when the cabin collapsed . . . but he didn’t want to think about that.

Just focus on the job.

He nodded at Josh, signaling him to throw the Molotov cocktails.

Josh lit the firebombs and then rose to his feet. He threw one right after the other, like he was throwing a deep pass down the football field. The Molotov cocktails hit their targets, one hitting each truck, erupting into flames, catching two men in the back of the truck—the one with the rocket launcher in back—on fire. The men flailed, screaming as they tried to pat the flames out, falling out of the truck.

The Dark Angels ran around in a panic, the leader of their group shouting something incoherent into the bullhorn.

Luke shot the man who had the bullhorn, then he shot two others. He didn’t shoot at the burning men as they rolled around on the ground—he wasn’t going to waste a bullet on them.

Josh bolted for the pickup truck at the end of the line of vehicles. He ran crouched down, like he was running underneath spinning helicopter blades, but still running fast. Bullets flew, but Luke got the shooter, putting a bullet in the man’s face, dropping him immediately to the ground.

Luke ran toward the vehicles, still covering Josh. He saw a few of the Dark Angels fleeing into the woods and he went after them. He hit one, then another, and wounded a third.

The sounds of approaching rippers echoed through the woods. The fleeing Dark Angels were going to run right into the rippers, which was good. But the horde of rippers might get to the clearing before they could get to the vehicles in the garage and get away, which was bad.

And it sounded like a hell of a lot of rippers were coming.

CHAPTER 48

Josh

Josh got the pickup truck moved across the clearing, out of the way of the dirt driveway and into the woods. He’d been surprised to find the keys hanging in the ignition, and he hadn’t really even thought about the keys not being there on his run from the woods to the truck. But it made sense that the keys were in the ignition. Why not leave them in the ignition? Who was going to steal the trucks?

Once the truck was moved and parked, Josh got out. He needed to get back to the hatch, back down in the bunker to get Ray, Emma, and Mike to the trucks in the garage.

Luke had asked him if he thought the bunker would hold. Josh figured it would, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure. The cabin was minutes away from crashing in on itself, at least the roof and the second floor, a lot of burning weight coming down into the basement. The heat of the fire in the basement might be enough to kill them in the bunker. The force of the collapse could even cause the tunnels to cave in.

Panic coursed through him as he ran into the woods. He needed to stop thinking about what might happen and just get to the hatch.

Just focus on your job, that’s what Luke had said.

Josh jumped out of the truck. The coast seemed to be clear—he didn’t see any Dark Angels. No live ones, anyway. Two burnt bodies smoldered on the ground next to the burning trucks. Another dead Dark Angel lay closer to the woods. The gunshots had stopped, and that had to be a good thing.

Maybe Luke had already gotten all of the Dark Angels. Josh wouldn’t be surprised. And the ones that got away from Luke, the ones running into the woods, they were going to run smack into the herd of rippers coming this way.

Josh got to the woods, working his way deeper into the trees and brush.

And then he stopped when two Dark Angels stepped out from behind a large tree, both of them smiling, both of them raising their assault rifles up to shoot at him.

This was it. He was dead.

Spit. Spit.

The Dark Angels dropped to the ground, their rifles slipping out of their dead hands.

“Told you I had you covered,” Luke said from the brush twenty yards away.

“Uh, yeah. Cool. Thanks.” Josh turned and ran.

He got to the hatch, opened it, and crawled inside. He closed the hatch and locked it. He turned on his flashlight and grabbed his walkie-talkie off of his belt, turning it on.

“Ray, come in. It’s Josh.”

“I’m here, Josh.”

“I’m coming down the tunnel. Get ready to leave.”

A moment later Josh was in the bunker.

“Did Luke get all the Dark Angels?” Mike asked.

“A lot of them,” Josh said. “Most of them, I think. But the smoke and fire is bringing a lot of rippers this way. We need to hurry.” He didn’t bother mentioning that they were probably only seconds away from the cabin caving in and possibly trapping them down here to cook in a gigantic oven.

It was already uncomfortably hot in the bunker, and it was only going to get worse very quickly.

“I’ve got a few bags packed,” Ray said, pointing at four duffel bags that were packed full.

“Okay,” Josh said. “To the garage. We’re going to get the van and the Jeep and drive out of here.”

“But the trucks out there—”

“I moved one of them. There’s enough room to get to the driveway.”

Ray nodded quickly.

Josh looked at Mike. “You and Emma first. There will be a ladder at the end of the tunnel. You go up first, then help Emma. Me and your dad will be right behind you guys.” He looked at Ray. “Your ankle?”

“I can make it.”

“We need to go now,” Josh said. He swore he caught a look in Ray’s eye, like Ray knew Josh wasn’t telling them everything, but he didn’t say anything.

Mike unlocked and opened the door to the tunnel.

At least this was the shortest tunnel, Josh thought. But it was also the one most vulnerable to collapsing when the cabin caved in. Even the doors could shift from the weight, wedging in place and trapping them inside. Or debris from the cabin could fall on the garage, crushing the workbenches and creating a pile of rubble in front of the hatch door that they couldn’t get through.

Focus on the job. Nothing else.

Mike grabbed the lightest of the duffel bags, and then he and Emma were inside the tunnel.

Ray picked up one of the duffel bags.

“You want me to get the bags?” Josh asked him.

“It’s my ankle that’s hurt, not my arm,” Ray growled. He picked up the biggest duffel bag and two rifles.

“Okay,” Josh said, grabbing the other two canvas bags. Each one was packed full and they both had a plastic bottle of water tied to the handle, weighing them down even more.

“Maybe we can make a few more trips back down here,” Ray said. “Get some more supplies.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Josh said. He didn’t want to tell Ray how close the garage was to being destroyed—he was sure Ray would figure that out as soon as they were up there.

Josh followed Ray into the tunnel and then closed the door behind him, sealing them in darkness. He had his flashlight in his hand—he turned it on. Mike already had his flashlight on at the front of their line.

At least it was a little cooler in the tunnel. So far, anyway.

Moments later Mike was up the ladder and out in the garage. Then Emma. Then Ray. And finally Josh.

“Dad, the garage is on fire,” Mike yelled.

Josh saw the flames at the far end of the garage, the side with the door in it. Smoke was already pouring into the large room.

“The garage doors,” Ray said, already hobbling over to the doors in front of the Jeep and the van.

Josh helped Ray unlock the doors and roll them up; it helped with the smoke right away, but it also exposed them to any Dark Angels out there.

The Jeep had been backed into the garage and could be driven out, but the van was going to have to be backed out of the garage.

“I’ll take the Jeep,” Ray told Josh. “You take the van.”

Josh nodded.

Mike jumped into the passenger seat of the Jeep, already claiming the seat next to his father, after throwing his bag into the back seat. Josh guided Emma to the side door of the van and got her inside, and then he threw the duffel bags into the back. For just a second he wondered if he could make it back down to the bunker to get some more water and supplies, but he couldn’t risk it. So much was going to be left behind in the bunker, so much wasted.

“You okay?” Josh asked Emma as she sat down on the bench seat.

“Yes. We need to go.”

Josh couldn’t have agreed more. He slid the door shut and ran around the front of the van, getting in on the driver’s side and slamming the door shut. He fetched the keys out from under the seat and jabbed them into the ignition and twisted. The motor tried to turn, whirring slowly.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Josh said.

“Josh . . .” Emma moaned.

“It’ll start,” he told her. He twisted the key again. “It’s just a little cold, that’s all.”

The motor whirred again, then finally turned over, the engine running. Josh whooped with delight and shifted into reverse, giving the van gas before it stalled, backing the van out of the driveway and turning it around to follow Ray’s Jeep to the driveway.

CHAPTER 49

Ray

“Dad,” Mike said.

“I hear them, son.” He knew Mike was worried about the approaching mob of rippers. They were loud, like a crowd at a football game. And now Ray could see the rippers in the woods, darting through the trees.

Ray raced to the burning trucks and the space between them that Josh had made when he had moved the last truck. It wasn’t a big space, but Josh was right, they could make it through.

Where was Luke? Was he still out in the woods chasing Dark Angels?

A crash from behind them sounded as the cabin finally collapsed. Ray’s stomach clenched as he thought of how close they had been to being trapped down there in the bunker.

Just as Ray got to the trucks, he heard the rattling of machine-gun fire. Then he saw Luke shooting into the woods, fanning the weapon in his hands back and forth slowly, mowing down any approaching rippers from the woods.

Ray stomped on the brake pedal. The Jeep skidded to a stop on the dirt, a cloud of dust behind them in the cold air. Josh stopped the van right behind their Jeep.

Luke ran to the back door of the Jeep and opened it. He had two metal boxes and another large assault rifle in his hands. “Got some goodies from one of their trucks,” he said as he loaded the boxes and weapons into the back, then he got inside and slammed the door shut. “Go!”

The gunfire had only held the rippers back for a few seconds. They were charging again.

Luke rolled the back window down and leaned out of it with his M-16. “Cover your ears!” And then he shot at the rippers.

Ray sped away. He didn’t glance at Mike, but he knew he was holding on as they sped down the dirt road.

A moment later Luke was out of ammo.

Ray rounded bends in the narrow road, taking the turns as quickly as he dared. Josh was a little ways behind, but he managed to keep up in the old van.

The rippers were coming again, screaming and yelling, carrying sticks and throwing rocks.

“We’re almost at the gate!” Ray yelled. He saw that the gate had been smashed open by the Dark Angels so they had a clear path through, but the hundreds of rippers were going to clog their point of escape in seconds.

“I’ve got one last surprise left,” Luke said as he opened up one of the army-green metal boxes.

Ray kept his hands on the steering wheel. He hit a few of the rippers that ran out into the road, knocking them back out of the way with the front of the Jeep.

But more and more were coming.

Luke was back at the window again throwing something that Ray couldn’t see. Then rippers exploded apart to the front and side of the Jeep, the explosion backing them up. Luke had a box of hand grenades.

The explosions froze the herd of rippers just long enough for Ray to get through the gate, and then the van followed them. Luke threw one more grenade back the way they had come, the explosion booming in the woods.

Luke turned back around. “Those are going to come in handy.” He laughed like a maniac.

Ray was surprised that Mike had joined in with the laughter. And then Ray couldn’t help it, he started laughing too. They had made it. The blasts had held the rippers back long enough for them to get down the dirt road.

Moments later Ray turned onto the dirt road that the driveway ran into. He didn’t really know where he was going, just away from the direction the rippers had come from. But that wasn’t true—he knew what direction they were eventually going to go, the direction they’d been meant to go from the beginning. South, where Avalon lay. And there were others waiting for them, waiting to join them.

But the Dragon would be waiting for them too.

PART 6

CHAPTER 50

Kate

Almost a week had passed since they’d first arrived at the store. They had settled in pretty well after their rocky start when they had torn Neal’s bandages off of his head to see if he was a Dark Angel hiding among them. They hadn’t found a brand under Neal’s dirty bandages; instead they had found a festering wound. And his wound had only gotten worse. He’d been taking the antibiotics that April had given to him, but she wasn’t sure they were working—she was afraid Neal had waited too long to get treatment.

Max helped in the kitchen and did an occasional shift up on the roof. He also helped with any reorganizing of food and supplies in the store. He seemed more relaxed now that he had jobs to do.

Brooke had opened a little, talking a little more. She seemed more like a little girl again, maybe more like she used to be before the Collapse. But she would never really be that girl again. None of them would ever be who they used to be. Brooke had begun drawing again. She drew the people she saw in her dreams: the father and his son; the mean-looking muscular guy with the crew cut; the thin man with the long, scraggly hair; and of course the beautiful blind woman with a glow around her. Brooke’s skill as an artist was amazing—she had captured their faces perfectly. Kate knew because she still saw those people in her dreams. And the Dragon.

As Kate had suspected, Tiger went on trips around the store, exploring. And like Kate had figured, Brooke was eager to follow the cat. Kate went with Brooke a few times to follow Tiger, and two days ago they’d had a rough few hours finding the cat. But Brooke didn’t freak out; she knew Tiger couldn’t get out and that he would eventually come back to her.

Petra had gone on one run in the last few days with Lance and the others. They’d found a few supplies, but their hauls were getting less and less productive. They had planned one more run for this morning. They wanted to do one more run before winter really set in and while the Dark Angels weren’t around. Kate was sure the Dark Angels were out there somewhere, but they seemed to have moved on to other towns now.

But they would be back. They had to suspect that this store was a goldmine, stocked with food and supplies. Even if they figured that the store had been looted in the first few days after the Collapse, they had to guess that there were still plenty of supplies in here. But then again, maybe they’d seen the runs from here and maybe that made them think that this place wasn’t as stocked as they might imagine. Maybe they believed that Jo and the others stayed here because it was a fortress that was easier to defend than other places.

Even though Lance argued that the Dark Angels had taken off (or he liked to believe that they had run them off), Kate believed that the gang was still out there somewhere, still watching. She didn’t think they would give up that easily.

With less of the Dark Angels around, the rippers had gotten bolder. Two nights ago a pack of fifty of them came into the parking lot in front of the store. They tried to get into the fenced-in area in back, but the jolts from the electrified fence scared them off. They threw rocks at the spotters on top of the building and tried in vain to climb the walls, even using each other as steps, making a human ladder. They were getting hungry. They were getting desperate.

If the rippers got too high up on the wall, one of the spotters on the roof would throw a heavy object down at them to knock them off the side of the wall. Crystal even practiced with a bow and arrows, seeing how many she could hit. Maybe it was cruel, but they couldn’t risk gunshots unless it was absolutely necessary, and all of them needed the practice with the bows and arrows. Any arrows that missed could be picked up later, but a lot of the times the rippers would find the arrows and snap them in half or throw them back at the building.

Eventually the pack of rippers moved on. More rippers were spotted, other groups and some stragglers. But last night and this morning the coast had been pretty clear.

“You be careful out there,” Max told Petra as she got ready for the run. He was taking a break from the kitchen. He’d been helping with the meal planning, trying to utilize the food that was going bad first. Taking food from the dry storage was not allowed unless they all agreed on it. Even with the large supply they had, they knew that they needed to conserve—thinking long-term as Jo liked to say.

“I’m always careful,” Petra said. She had her black hoodie on, her dark backpack, her black hiking boots, her black gloves. She had a gun holstered on her hip and a rifle in her hands.

Lance and Crystal walked up to them. “Jo’s on her way here now.”

Petra nodded.

Kate had a sinking feeling in her stomach as she watched Petra get ready to go with Lance and Crystal. Fernando and Tina had volunteered to help them leave; they would move the truck out of the way of the gate and unhook the wires from the car batteries. Everything would be coordinated with the spotters on the roof who kept watch with binoculars.

“I know you’re always careful,” Max said. “Just be even more careful.”

“You know something I don’t know?” she asked with a smile.

Kate couldn’t smile back at her. She’d never believed in premonitions or psychic feelings before, but since the Collapse things seemed to have changed. There was no denying that those supernatural powers existed now, and some—like the Dragon and the blind woman she saw in her dreams—seemed to have strong powers. And now Kate felt the pull of those feelings. Maybe it was just a gut feeling or intuition, a logical reasoning of the odds of survival and the chances of getting hurt or killed. The brain worked in funny ways. Whatever it was, she chose to pay attention to it, and to be ready because it felt like something bad was coming, like a calm before the storm.

Jo walked up to their tent city with Dale and Zak at her side. She had a small notepad in her hand. Everyone had come out of their tents, all of them gathered together by the tents except for the three spotters on the roof.

“We’re going on another run,” Jo announced. “We’ve hit most of the areas in town. We’ve worked south to Astorville and Starke. Does anyone know of any place we could try, somewhere that might have a basement or someplace that the rippers couldn’t get to or maybe a place the Dark Angels might have overlooked?”

For a moment no one volunteered any suggestions, but then Jeff raised his hand halfway up, a timid gesture as he glanced around.

“Jeff?” Jo said.

“I . . . I don’t know if it might help . . .”

“Anything will help,” Jo said.

“I know a place that might have stuff in the basement.”

“A business or a house?”

“A house.”

“What kind of stuff do you think is there?” Jo asked him.

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. My uncle . . . this person was a friend of his. I think he was like a hoarder or something. I only went to his house a few times. I didn’t even think of going there until just now.”

Jo looked at Dale, then at Lance.

Lance nodded. “I guess it’s worth checking out. We’re kind of running out of options these days.”

“I can’t promise that it hasn’t been ransacked by now,” Jeff said.

“I know,” Jo said. “We understand. Where is this place?”

“Up in Keystone.”

“Do you know the address?” She approached him with her notepad.

He nodded and took the proffered notepad, jotting down the address and directions. “Like I said, I can’t promise that there’s going to be a lot of supplies there.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jo said. “This will be better than just wandering around out there.”

Lance and Crystal nodded in agreement.

“And we haven’t really been up to Keystone yet,” Jo said. “It’s kind of far.”

“Maybe it’ll be worth it,” Lance said. “We’ll scope out places along the way.” He turned to Petra. “You ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she told him.

Lance looked at Jo, and then they were off, walking to the double doors that led to the loading bay out back.

CHAPTER 51

Petra

Fernando moved the truck away from the gate as Tina and Bill stood guard with rifles. The three vehicles Lance and the others were using for the run—two pickups and the van—were lined up at the gate and ready to go. Tyrone and Tamara were in the lead pickup. Petra rode with Lance and Crystal in the van. And Dale and Zak were in the pickup behind the van.

They were out through the open gate in less than a minute, Fernando waiting to move the truck back in front of the gate. After he was parked, he darted back inside the gate and they slid it closed, locking it and attaching the wires to the car batteries to electrify it.

Crystal had a small notepad with a list of things they needed to look for on their run: weapons and ammo, gallons of gas, car batteries, any other types of batteries, anything solar-powered. Jeff said his uncle’s friend was a hoarder, maybe even a doomsday prepper—maybe he’d have some or all of the stuff they needed on their list. Of course, like Lance had said, they would check houses and businesses along the way—it would add time to their trip, but it might be worth it.

They had marked their route on a map of the county. Petra looked at the map and saw that they were heading north from Perry to an even more remote area.

As Lance drove, Petra watched out the windshield from the seat right behind Lance’s. They drove past a large group of rippers picking over a decimated store. Some of the rippers ran in vain after their small convoy of trucks, a few of them throwing rocks and screeching at them.

“They’re starving,” Lance said.

“I’m sure they’ll start eating each other soon to survive,” Petra answered.

They passed more businesses: bars, a flower shop, a strip plaza, a dollar store, a dentist’s office, a restaurant, a used car lot, a pawn shop, a western clothing store, houses, apartment complexes. It was a war-torn landscape now, taken over by the rippers.

As they got out of town they saw less and less groups of rippers, but there were a few stragglers. They had to swerve out of the way of two rippers who stood in the middle of the road like they were daring Lance to run them down. It was a man and a woman standing side by side, their skin covered with grime, their hair matted and greasy, their clothes torn and soiled, nearly rags now. The man held some kind of stick in his hand, possibly a broken-off shovel handle, but he didn’t seem to have the energy to raise his weapon up at them as they roared past. Petra thought she saw a spark of humanity in the eyes of those two rippers, like a human mind was buried deep in their brains somewhere, aware of what had happened to them and what they had become, and now they could only stare out at the world in shock, hoping to be run down, hoping for their nightmare to be over.

They passed more looted houses and buildings, more cars and trucks abandoned along the sides of the road and in parking lots, some of the vehicles riddled with bullet holes from either military or police during the Collapse, or maybe from the Dark Angels afterwards. One car was tipped over on its side from a large truck that had plowed into the side of it. There were dead bodies lying in the road and on lawns and walkways, pieces of carcasses that had mostly been stripped of any meat by rippers, and then the birds and rodents, and then eventually by insects. A ripper was hunched over one of the carcasses trying to pick at any scraps of dried meat left, swiping his arms at the buzzards that tried to swoop in for a scrap of flesh. The ripper’s blond mustache, beard, and hair were stained brownish-red with dried blood.

These were things that Petra had seen many times since the Collapse. She thought she would be used to the horrors by now, but she wasn’t. She probably never would be. But she was stronger now than she had been a few years ago when she was with Diego, much stronger now.

When they were past any signs of towns, Lance and Crystal seemed to visibly relax.

Crystal turned around in the passenger seat and looked at Petra. “I don’t know too much about you.”

Petra didn’t answer because it wasn’t really a question, even though Crystal seemed to be waiting for a response.

“Where are you from?” Crystal asked. “Where’d you grow up? Here in North Carolina?”

“No. I’m from Philadelphia originally. But I moved to Baltimore right before everything went to hell.”

“Okay,” Crystal said, smiling. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What did you used to do for a living?”

“Waited tables,” Petra said. She’d never really waited tables, but it sounded better than telling Crystal that she used to live with a drug dealer and gang leader. She decided not to reveal that little tidbit about her life right now.

“Did you like waiting tables?”

“Nope.”

Crystal went into a long story about a time when she had waited tables for a few months at a pizza joint.

“Leave her alone,” Lance said. “Obviously she doesn’t feel like talking.”

“I do,” Crystal said.

“We need to keep an eye out.”

“I can watch and talk at the same time,” Crystal grumbled as she turned back around.

Petra stared out the windshield as memories of living with Diego came to the surface whether she wanted them to or not.

She’d been young when she first met Diego, only twenty-two years old. She’d been a wild child through her late teens, partying and skipping school, no real plans for the future. When she met Diego she was infatuated with him. He wasn’t a large man, maybe barely five foot nine and well under two hundred pounds, but he seemed taller and bigger than he was. A strength and power came from him that intoxicated her. Diego was impulsive and exciting. He flashed an endless supply of money around. He drank and snorted lines of coke. People respected him and loved him, but later she would realize that they were just afraid of him. She thought she could tame the wild animal he was. But she was wrong.

Diego carried his intensity into their lovemaking . . . sex, really—quick and brutal sex, but she was fine with it; it’s what she wanted from him, what she had expected and hoped for from him.

As the months went by she figured she would see a softer side of Diego, but his hardness was no façade. He never talked about himself much, he never told her where he was originally from and how he had become involved with the cartel. He didn’t talk much at all, never wasting words or energy when he didn’t need to.

Before long Petra realized she was in too deep with Diego. She knew too much about the cartel, a cartel that had branches up and down the east coast, a cartel that ran drugs and prostitution rings, human trafficking, money laundering, a cartel that had cops and politicians on their payroll, a cartel that possessed true power.

Diego set her up in a beautiful house on the outskirts of the city with a spectacular view. He was there sometimes, but often he traveled down to Mexico or Miami, or to New York and Boston. She knew he had women on the side. She had confronted him about it once and he’d beaten her. He hit her over and over again. She begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. She’d seen the detachment in his eyes as he meted out her punishment; she realized that he didn’t care about her, that she wasn’t even a human being to him.

It was at that moment that she became truly frightened of him.

The beatings continued off and on. He abused her mentally, physically, and sexually. Anything could set him off. She’d gotten pregnant a year later, hoping the idea of a son or daughter would calm him down, hoping that he wouldn’t dare touch her while she was carrying his child, but he beat her anyway and she lost the child.

Eventually he was going to kill her. And he seemed to be tiring of her. She knew he had a string of women lined up to take her place. Her days were numbered. She’d heard of the young women they used as drug mules, women who, when they were used up, were dumped in a mass grave, sometimes buried alive. That would be her fate. Leaving Diego would be dangerous, but staying with him would be even more dangerous.

She didn’t like the person she had become, cowering and afraid all the time. She used to be strong, she used to love life, she used to be happy. Now she was just a quivering mass of fear. She couldn’t live like that anymore. After one last beating for no reason, her mind snapped and she made the decision to leave the next time Diego went out of town.

She didn’t have to wait long—he left three days later. She’d been making plans in her mind, going over them again and again, looking for flaws or mistakes.

After she was sure Diego was in Miami, she had her bag packed, just a few changes of clothes, a few personal items, and the cash she’d gotten out of the safe in Diego’s office. Not all of the cash, not nearly even half of it, but enough to get her out of town and get her a new identity, enough to support her for a few years.

She left the house and drove down I-95. She chose Baltimore randomly. She didn’t know anyone there. She found a place where she could get a fake ID and a different car. After a few months of living in a shitty motel room, she left Baltimore for a town thirty miles away, a small town where no one would be able to find her. She rented a small apartment on top of a mechanic’s garage.

The first few weeks she was there, she stocked the apartment with food and booze and locked herself inside, curling up and afraid on her bed, waiting for Diego and his men to find her. She cried and slept, then woke, drank, and cried more.

And then at the end of the second week in her apartment, her mind snapped again. She woke up with a bad hangover. She looked into the mirror at herself. Her face was puffy from alcohol and crying. This wasn’t the person she wanted to be. She decided at that moment to change. She’d heard of people reinventing themselves, and that’s exactly what she planned to do.

She poured out the booze and threw out any junk food. She went to the store and bought clippers and scissors so she could cut her hair short. She went to a hardcore gym a few blocks away and signed up for Krav Maga self-defense classes. She worked out with weights at the gym, learning from others there how to create a routine to get stronger. She used some of her cash to buy a gun. She went to a shooting range once a week. She got tattoos. Every day she became harder, stronger, tougher. She became a little more like Diego without even realizing it. He’d been the one who had frightened her and she was becoming more like him—quiet and brooding, calculating and cold, aloof and paranoid. She didn’t date. She didn’t do anything for pleasure. If she watched a movie or read a book, it was only to learn more. She ate food only for fuel, not for taste. Her whole life was a preparation for when she met Diego again.

A few months later she contacted her relatives in Philadelphia on a burner phone. Her father had been murdered, her mother beaten. One of her cousins was missing. An uncle’s home and business had been burned down. Diego and the cartel had done it, and they weren’t done yet. They were trying to get her to come back home, trying to draw her out of hiding.

She was miserable about what had been done to her family, ashamed that she’d hidden while they had suffered. She was harder and tougher now, but she was also dead inside. She swore she would go back and kill Diego for what he’d done to her, to her family, and to so many others. She knew she was going to die in her confrontation with Diego, but she would make damn sure she killed him first.

But that confrontation never came. The Collapse came first. She’d seen the signs of the collapse of society and the economy, but she had ignored it, so focused on her own training and her own fate.

When the Collapse finally came and the Ripper Plague drifted over the world, she was more prepared for it than most, prepared to defend herself, prepared to fight, prepared to run. In a strange way Diego had prepared her, and in a strange way she was thankful to him for that.

CHAPTER 52

Petra

Petra had seen Diego in her dreams a few times. When she woke up she was afraid that Diego was still alive, immune from the Ripper Plague like she was, afraid that he was still looking for her. But then she assured herself that the Dragon had somehow seen Diego in her mind and used her worst fears against her.

Fine. She’d been prepared to fight Diego to the death, and the Dragon couldn’t be any scarier than Diego had been.

Yes, she was pretty sure Diego wasn’t immune like she was. What were the odds of that? But in a strange way she hoped he was—she would be ready to settle the unfinished business she had with him if he was still around. Nothing would make her happier.

“This place is way the hell out here,” Lance said as he drove the van.

Lance stayed a few car lengths behind Tyrone’s pickup so he could get a better view of the road. They traveled through the woods, the trees giving way to clearings every so often. Sometimes the landscape would drop away into a valley below as they wound around a mountain, sheer rock faces rising up steeply on the other side of the road. Signs warned of possible falling rock and there were bright orange nets to catch the smaller rocks.

“See those nets?” Lance said. “Eventually all of that netting will break down and deteriorate. Everything mankind has ever done, every manipulation of nature, will eventually rot and degrade away. Buildings will fall, metal bridges will rust and disintegrate, weeds and brush will cover the roads and even buildings. Nature will take everything back, little by little, like the endless tides of the ocean eroding a beach.”

It made Petra sad to think about what Lance was saying. She didn’t see a future for humans. Maybe all humans and rippers would eventually die away and the animals would inherit the planet again. Maybe small packs of humans would live on and rebuild a society again, maybe even build it up to what we once had, even if it took hundreds of years. But Petra wasn’t too optimistic about that—she was just being a realist.

“You’re quite the philosopher,” Crystal said, smiling at him, then looking back at Petra and giving her a wink.

“I know we’re out here on runs to get guns and ammo and other stuff,” Lance went on, ignoring Crystal’s comment, “but I think we need to preserve history too. What if we forget all the things we learned in the past? What if we have to learn them all over again?”

“Good,” Crystal answered.

“We should collect books when we’re out on these runs. How-to manuals and history books.”

“We’ll raid the next library,” Crystal said.

“I’m just saying we should keep an eye out for that kind of stuff,” Lance said. He glanced at Crystal as they passed a side road. “Farmington Road. Check the map. See how far away we are.”

Crystal checked the map. “Seems like it’s a few more miles.”

“This place is way out here. Pretty far north. It better be worth it.”

Moments later they turned down the next side road that ran through a thick patch of woods, the land sloping down gradually with another line of mountains in the distance. The trees gave way to a small clearing with a gravel driveway meeting the road. In the clearing sat a two-story house.

“No Dark Angels spotted so far,” Tyrone said on Crystal’s walkie-talkie.

She picked up the walkie-talkie and answered him. “Yeah, we didn’t see any sign of them. No rippers, either.”

Lance followed Tyrone’s Dodge Ram pickup down the gravel drive. The Ram pulled off into the grass then veered back over to Lance’s van. They parked together in a V. Petra remembered Lance and Dale parking their vehicles like that in the road when she and the others had broken down after leaving Kate’s parents’ house with a herd of rippers following them.

Dale parked his truck on the other side of Lance’s van. He got out of the driver’s side, wearing his baseball cap and paintball mask, his rifle in his hands. Tyrone was out of the other pickup with his rifle aimed at the house. Tamara was out and backing up to the back of the vehicles to cover them from behind.

Lance rolled down the windows and waited, listening to the silence all around them.

“I’m in position in the woods by the end of the driveway,” Tamara said on the walkie-talkie. “I don’t see anyone on the road.”

“Thanks,” Crystal said. “Keep on the lookout.”

“Copy that.”

Lance still waited, watching the front of the house. It was a newer-looking home with white siding and dark trim. A two-car garage was built on the right side of the home with a pad of concrete in front of it. The house looked well-kept. The front door was painted red and it didn’t look smashed in. The windows were all intact.

“What do you think?” Crystal asked Lance.

“Seems quiet so far. Just want to make sure Jeff’s uncle’s friend isn’t in there with a rifle, watching us.”

Petra knew this situation was pretty tricky. They needed to be both decisive yet cautious. If the man in this house was a doomsday prepper like Jeff had seemed to believe, then he could have a cache of weapons inside and he might be ready to use them against a perceived threat. Or the house could even be booby-trapped.

But these were the risks they had all been willing to take on these runs.

Lance opened his driver’s door and got out, his pistol still holstered to his hip. Crystal got out on the other side. Petra slid the side door of the van open and got out.

The three of them walked to the front porch while Dale, Zak, and Tyrone covered them, all three of them fanning out toward the corners of the front of the home.

The front porch was neat and tidy. Two rocking chairs flanked an old wood table probably meant for lemonade on warm summer afternoons. Faux antique lights were fastened to the wall on either side of the front door with a welcome mat in front of it.

Petra was beginning to get a strange vibe about this house. Jeff said this was a hoarder’s home, maybe even a prepper’s house. Petra had expected something different, something not so suburban, more junk piled up around the house and porch, maybe old cars and trucks and parts. For some reason Petra had assumed the man lived alone, but this place looked like a family’s home.

Crystal moved to one end of the front porch and Petra moved to the other end. Lance approached the front door, but he stayed to the side of it like he expected a gun blast to come through the door at any second. He tried the doorhandle, twisting it gently.

“Locked,” he whispered, glancing back at Crystal and then at Petra. He turned back to the door and knocked on it.

Petra hadn’t expected the knocking to be so loud. The pounding seemed to echo out to the woods. She was sure that the sound would alert every ripper within two square miles. She saw a quick picture in her mind of rippers standing up straight and alert like meerkats, all facing in the same direction the sound had come from.

Crystal nodded to Dale.

Dale darted around the front corner of the home, running down the side yard to the back.

Lance knocked on the front door, not as hard this time.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” Crystal said.

“You sure this is the right place?” Petra asked. The neat and tidy front porch was still bothering her.

“Same numbers on the mailbox that Jeff wrote down,” Lance said. “Same street name. Same city. This has to be it.”

Crystal’s walkie-talkie crackled with a burst of static and then Dale’s voice came from it. “I got in through the back door. I’m inside the house and coming to the front door. Hold your fire.”

A few seconds later the front door opened wide. Dale had pulled his mask down and it hung around his neck. He beamed at them.

Petra understood Dale’s excitement. She felt the same way, addicted to the adrenaline rush. She was afraid she’d go bat-shit crazy this winter if they were cooped up in the store and didn’t have any runs to go on.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Dale said, stepping aside and making a sweeping gesture with his arm to invite them in.

Petra glanced back at Zak who was still near the other corner at the front of the home. Tyrone had fallen back by the vehicles. They both had their rifles in their hands, both of them ready to fire if they needed to. And Tamara was somewhere in the woods watching the road for anyone coming.

Lance and Crystal entered the home. Petra followed them inside. Crystal had an empty duffel bag, ready to fill it with any supplies they might find. They had more bags in the van. They needed to work quickly because it had taken them a few hours to get here and it would probably take them a few hours to get back. That gave them about an hour and a half to search this house and get what they could.

But as soon as Petra was inside the house she knew something was very wrong with the place.

CHAPTER 53

Kate

Kate knocked on the door to Jo’s office.

Jo opened the door and seemed a little surprised to see Kate. “Hey, Kate.” She frowned just a bit like she was bracing herself for bad news. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh . . . yeah. I just wanted to talk to you about something. If you’re up to it.”

“Yes. Of course.” Jo’s eyes dropped down to the sketch pad Kate had tucked under one arm.

“These are drawings Brooke did,” Kate explained.

Jo smiled, but didn’t ask why Kate was carrying around Brooke’s drawings. “Come on in.” She opened the door wider.

Kate hesitated. “If you’re trying to rest . . .” She knew Jo was taking a break, but she also knew this was probably her only chance to talk with Jo alone. With Lance, Crystal, Dale, and Zak on a run, it was an even better chance to catch Jo alone; it seemed like one of those four, or even all of them, were always around Jo, like they were protecting her or maybe feeding off of her energy.

“No, it’s fine,” Jo said, closing the door to her office after Kate stepped inside.

Jo’s office was larger than the assistant manager’s office, which was now the doctor’s office, and not nearly as cluttered. Jo had kept her desk and chair in the office, and the two chairs in front of her desk. She had set up an air mattress on one side of the room with a blanket, sheets, and pillows. There was also a three-shelf bookcase (probably a piece of furniture they used to sell at this store), and Jo seemed to be using it like a table. There were flashlights, batteries, one lamp, a few books, some balled-up papers and other trash, a few water bottles, and one air-freshener stick.

Jo gestured to the chairs as she sat down behind her desk. “What’s on your mind?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain.”

Jo nodded at her to go on.

“It’s like a bad feeling I’ve been getting.”

“Bad feeling?”

“I don’t feel good about this run Petra and the others went on this morning.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I’m getting. Like something bad is going to happen.”

“What? Like a psychic feeling? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“I’m not a psychic,” Kate said quickly. “I never believed in that kind of stuff before. But lately . . .”

Jo clasped her hands together in front of her on the desk like a psychiatrist might do. She leaned forward, her large shoulders hunched; it made her seem bigger than she already was. “Look, I understand your fears. I have the same fears every time they go out on a run. It’s dangerous, no doubt about that. That’s why this will probably be the last run for a while.”

“I know it’s dangerous, but it’s more than that.”

Jo didn’t say anything. She was still hunched forward like she knew Kate had more to say.

“You’ve been having bad dreams since the Collapse, haven’t you?” Kate asked her.

“Uh . . . yeah. I guess it’s understandable . . .”

“Dreams about the Dragon.”

Jo just nodded.

“Yeah, I think we’ve all had dreams about him. But have you had dreams about other people?”

Jo seemed to be thinking it over.

“How about a blind woman? She’s young and pretty, long blond hair. Dark glasses. She seems to have a kind of glow around her.”

“No. I don’t remember any dreams like that.”

“What about a man and his eleven-year-old son? Another man with real short hair. And a thin guy with long hair down to his shoulders and a mustache and beard and tattoos.”

“I can’t say for sure. I really can’t remember.”

“Did you see any of us in your dreams before we came here?”

Jo looked shocked by the question.

“Me or Brooke?” Kate pressed. “Or Max or Petra?”

“No. I definitely don’t remember dreaming about any of you. Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I’ve had dreams about the five people I just mentioned. And maybe they’ve had dreams about me.” She laid Brooke’s sketch pad on the desk and opened it up. “It might be easier to explain if you look at Brooke’s drawings.”

Jo’s eyes widened in surprise. “Brooke did these?” She pulled the tablet closer to her, studying the drawings. She flipped the pages gingerly, then looked at Kate. “This is a man and his son. And the other two men you described. The blind woman.”

Kate nodded. “Brooke also drew drawings of Max and Petra before she met them. At first I thought she had drawn her parents or some people she knew. But then when we met Max and Petra, I recognized them. But the drawing tablet with those drawings in them got left behind when we had to run from two Dark Angels and a bunch of rippers at a motel.”

Jo just stared at her.

“I’m telling the truth. I swear. In that tablet she also had a drawing of me before I met her. And look at the last drawing.”

Jo flipped another page and nearly drew back.

“The Dragon,” Kate said.

Jo shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing.

“You haven’t seen any of those other people Brooke drew in your dreams?” Kate asked her. “Any of us?”

“Not that I remember. What do you think this means?”

Kate shrugged. “Maybe it means that all four of us were supposed to be together. Maybe it means that the four of us are supposed to be with the five of them.”

“But I haven’t seen all of you in my dreams and you haven’t seen me, but all of you are here.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said with a sigh.

“Does that mean we’re not supposed to be together here, or that the four of you are supposed to be somewhere else? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“No, I don’t think of it in a negative way like that.”

“It’s strange, though, because we have all seemed to share the one dream—the Dragon,” Jo said.

Kate was beginning to regret that she’d brought this up to Jo.

“But you said you wanted to tell me about the bad feelings you’ve been having.”

“I know there’s nothing we can do about it now,” Kate answered. “I’m just worried, that’s all.”

Jo surprised Kate by reaching across the desk and taking her hand, holding it gently, like a mother would hold a daughter’s hand to ease her anxiety. The gesture made Kate think of her mother’s note in her jacket pocket, the one valuable thing she had from the old world, the one thing she would always keep with her.

“They know what they’re doing,” Jo said. “They’re strong and smart. They’ll all make it back. You have to believe that.”

Kate nodded and almost felt tears brimming. The only problem was that she didn’t believe they were all going to be fine and that they were all coming back.

CHAPTER 54

Petra

Petra knew something was wrong with the house as soon as she stepped inside. The front door, still wide open, led to a living room with a set of stairs off to the left leading upstairs to a landing and then making a sharp turn. A sitting room was off to the left beyond the stairs. The dining room and kitchen were beyond the living room.

“Still seems quiet in here,” Lance said, his voice just above a whisper. He had his gun in his hand. “I’ll go check upstairs.”

Lance didn’t wait for a reply—he rushed up the steps, fast but quiet.

Crystal glanced around the living room and then was off to the kitchen.

Petra moved slower than Lance and Crystal, taking in the details of the living room. Everything seemed to move in hyper-real slow-motion for her. She heard Lance moving around upstairs, no longer trying to be quiet—obviously he hadn’t found anyone up there.

“I don’t see a door to a basement,” Crystal called out from the kitchen.

Because there’s no basement here, Petra thought as she walked over to the fireplace, concentrating on the mantle where framed photographs were lined up.

“I don’t see anything in here,” Crystal said in a disgusted voice as she came back into the living room with her empty duffel bag.

Lance bounded back down the steps.

Petra stared at the photographs on the mantle of Jeff, his wife, and their two daughters.

“Maybe Petra’s right,” Crystal said. “Maybe this is the wrong house.”

Lance pulled out the folded-up piece of paper from his front pants pocket. “This is the address Jeff gave me.”

“It’s the right house,” Petra said, turning around to look at them. She had one of the framed photos in her hand. “It’s Jeff’s house.”

Lance and Crystal rushed over to her. Crystal took the photo, staring in disbelief and then she passed it to Lance.

“Why would Jeff send us to his house?” Crystal asked.

“Maybe he’s got some weapons stashed here,” Lance said. “Hidden somewhere.”

“This is a set-up,” Petra said, that tingling sense tickling her skin, warning her that she was in danger. “We need to get out of here.”

Lance and Crystal weren’t moving.

“Wait,” Lance said, refusing to give up. “Maybe he wanted us to find something here.”

“Then why not tell us we were going to his house?” Petra asked him. She felt antsy and jumpy, ready to move, ready to run. “Why make up a story about his uncle’s friend, a doomsday prepper?”

They didn’t have an answer for her.

“Because he’s the mole,” Petra said more to herself than to them. “It wasn’t Neal, it was Jeff all along. He wanted us here, far away from the store.”

Petra was getting a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach, that feeling you get when you’ve put yourself into actual danger with the very real possibility of death looming. She saw that Lance and Crystal felt the same way she did.

The walkie-talkie on Crystal’s belt crackled with static. She jumped, grabbing it with lightning-quick reflexes. Tamara’s voice screeched from the speaker: “Get out of the house! It’s a trap!”

“Tamara,” Crystal yelled into the walkie-talkie, already running for the front door.

Lance dropped the framed photo of Jeff and his family, the glass shattering and sounding like a gunshot, but it was only a prelude to the real gunshots that sounded from outside and on the walkie-talkie simultaneously.

“Tamara!” Crystal screamed as she dropped down behind the living room furniture.

Petra was right beside her as bullets shattered the windows at the front of the house.

Lance was up and running at the front door.

“Lance, no!” Crystal screamed, ready to follow him out into the gunfire.

Petra grabbed Crystal, stopping her, guiding her to the back of the house, into the kitchen, both of them keeping low. “Out the back,” she told her.

They went out the back door, running for the edge of the backyard where the woods began. The gunfire had stopped at the front of the house and there was no one in the backyard. They got into the cover of the trees.

Petra was breathing hard from the adrenaline and the short run across the backyard, but even over her breaths she heard sounds from the front yard: a truck skidding to a stop on the gravel drive, people running around, a man yelling and telling someone not to move.

“Lance,” Crystal moaned. “They’re going to get him.”

“Don’t do it,” Petra said, trying to grab her before she took off, but Crystal was too quick.

As soon as Crystal was halfway to the side yard, two Dark Angels came around the corner, aiming their M-16s at her.

Petra stayed silent as she aimed her gun at the closer of the two men, aiming right at his head even though she’d been taught to aim at the chest when shooting at the gun range. But she wasn’t taking a chance that they might be wearing bullet-proof vests.

Crystal dropped her weapon and froze.

Petra fired, the bullet tearing through the man’s left eye and exploding out the back of his head.

The other man turned to fire, but Petra got him first, dropping him with a bullet to his forehead.

Two more Dark Angels came around the corner, already firing. Crystal dropped down to the ground, curling up and holding her hands over her ears.

Petra dived deeper into the woods as bullets pelted trees all around her. She wanted to help Crystal and Lance, but there was no way she could get to them now. She had no choice but to run; if she stayed she would be shot.

She ran blindly, not sure where she was going. She kept her pistol in her gloved hand. Her backpack was light but still felt like a hindrance, but she didn’t dare ditch it just yet—she had her extra ammo and bottles of water in there. She’d been in the habit of carrying a backpack with her since the Collapse began, always carrying basic supplies with her. Maybe later, if she survived, she could go through the contents and evaluate what was absolutely critical to carry with her.

After five minutes of running, Petra stopped to catch her breath. The woods had thinned out a little and she could see a few hundred feet in every direction. Some of the trees were bare, the foliage long dropped during the fall. It wasn’t the best coverage, but she didn’t see anyone yet. She could hear them, but they sounded far away, off in a different direction.

Petra had no idea which direction she was running in—she just wanted to put some distance between her and her pursuers. She felt bad for running, but it had been a split second decision. She had tried to help Crystal; she had tried to keep her in the woods. Maybe they could have gotten around to the front of the house through the woods and picked off more of the Dark Angels, made the odds a little better. Maybe they could have gotten to the van or to one of the pickup trucks. Maybe they could have gotten back to the store. But Crystal hadn’t waited—she had gone after Lance. She was probably dead now. They all were.

A fury burned in Petra. She knew there’d been a mole in that store—she should have taken her instincts more seriously. Jeff . . . she never thought it would have been Jeff. She vowed to kill Jeff if she made it back to the store without being killed by Dark Angels or eaten by rippers. Yes, she would kill Jeff as soon as she saw him.

CHAPTER 55

Kate

It was getting late, almost an hour and a half from sunset, and Petra and the others weren’t back yet. Kate was getting worried; that overwhelming feeling of doom was weighing down on her again.

They should have been back by now.

Even Jo was starting to get a little worried because she couldn’t reach them on the walkie-talkie, and they should have been within range.

“Maybe something happened,” Jo said. “Maybe one of the trucks broke down.”

“Wouldn’t they all just pile into the other two trucks?” Kate suggested. She figured that was the point of taking three vehicles. “Maybe the Dark Angels pinned them down somewhere.”

Jo didn’t respond—it was like she didn’t want to speak those thoughts aloud, like voicing them would somehow make them real. “I’ll keep trying to reach them. They’ll be back soon.”

Kate went back to the tent to check on Brooke. She was curled up inside the tent with Tiger. Brooke hadn’t been sleeping well and it was good that she was catching up on her rest. She lay motionless. Kate hoped she wasn’t dreaming, that the Dragon had left her alone for a little while.

Maybe the Dragon had other pressing issues to get to.

She wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. She tried to push it away.

For a moment she thought about crawling into the tent with Brooke to lie down next to her, but she didn’t want to wake her. Besides, she was too restless to lie down. She felt like she needed to walk, to move, to do something to prepare for this dark tidal wave that she felt was coming. But what could she do? How else could they shore up their defenses more than they already had?

Most of the tents in their little “neighborhood” were empty—most of the people were either helping in the deli kitchen or up on the roof as spotters. In the last few hours Jo had asked for three more volunteers up on the roof.

Kate thought about going to the kitchen to help, but really just to talk to Max, something to help ease her anxiety. But Max was impossible to talk to when he was working; he poured every bit of his energy and focus into his tasks. Maybe it was his way of coping these days, his way of escaping for a few hours.

She passed by Neal’s tent. The flaps were open and he was lying down inside.

“Kate,” he said.

She stopped and kneeled down outside the tent. Even from outside the tent, and even with fresh bandages around his head, she could smell the rot coming from him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“I wasn’t sleeping. I’ve slept enough the last few days. Can’t sleep anymore.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good.”

She knew it was a lie. Neal was dying. She knew it. April knew it. Jo knew it. She supposed that Neal realized it by now.

“Neal . . . I just wanted to say again that I’m sorry Petra went crazy about your bandages. All three of us, really. I’m sorry we suspected you.”

“It’s okay. I understand.”

Yes, paranoia was a new way of life now.

“What did you used to do for a living?” Neal asked, still not coming outside the tent or even moving toward the open flaps. “You know, before all of this.”

“I was a professor at a university.”

“Really. What did you teach?”

“Anthropology. The study of people from the past. Distant civilizations and cultures.” She paused for a moment, thinking he might ask her something else. But he didn’t, so she said: “But I was raised around here. Not too far from Perry, actually. What about you? What did you used to do?”

“I was a construction worker. A lot of labor work, really. Jack of all trades, master of none.”

“Rough work, I guess.”

“Yeah. Sometimes. I did some work in Raleigh and Charlotte. Down in Charleston. In Georgia and Florida. All over the southeast. Did a lot of commercial construction: office buildings, apartment complexes, nursing homes, stores like this one. I used to do a lot of the high work. I used to run along those beams like a cat. A lot of the guys never knew how I did it. I was never afraid of heights.”

“Wow,” Kate said, not sure what to say. She figured Neal was just remembering his past, wanting to tell someone a little about his life before it was gone.

“It’s weird,” he said. “Because I was always kind of afraid of dying. You know, getting cancer or a heart attack or something. But I knew I was never going to fall. I don’t know how I knew, but I was so sure that falling wasn’t how I was going to die. I just never even thought about falling when I was up there. That’s what I used to tell the guys, that I just couldn’t fall. It just wasn’t going to happen. You had to really believe it.”

Neal paused for just a moment.

Kate waited silently—she knew he had more to say.

“I keep trying that now. I keep telling myself that this isn’t the way I’m going to die, slowly eaten away by bacteria. I don’t know how to explain it, but I know I’m not going to die from this infection.”

Kate begged to differ, but why argue with him about it now? Let him believe his fantasy in the little time he had left.

“No,” he said, his voice a little lower now. “No, my death will be from something else.”

Kate thought of that dark tidal wave that was coming. She wondered if Neal was right; she wondered if he had truly seen another death coming for himself, a more abrupt and violent death, maybe an attack from the Dark Angels.

Just then Jo came running up to Kate.

Kate jumped up to her feet. “What’s wrong?”

“I just got word from the spotters on the roof . . .” She was out-of-breath from her run to the tent city.

“What? Is it Petra and the others? Are they back?”

“No. It’s the Dark Angels. They’re out there beyond the parking lot. A lot of them.”

CHAPTER 56

Kate

“What did the spotters say?” Kate asked Jo.

“They said the Dark Angels are out there. At least twenty trucks and cars. Who knows how many Dark Angels are inside? There are some pickups with guys in the back. They’re picking off any rippers that get too close.”

“What are they doing? Trying to get into the parking lot?”

“No. They’re just waiting.”

“You said it’s hard to get into the parking lot, right?”

“Yeah. With vehicles because of the ditches and trees and the trucks we moved in front of the two entrances. But if they have something big enough, like a military vehicle or a dump truck, they could push our barricades out of the way.”

That weight of dread was pressing down on Kate. She’d known something like this was coming. “This place . . . it will hold, won’t it?”

Jo didn’t answer. Her walkie-talkie came to life and she grabbed it, pressing the button and barking into it: “Go.”

“They’re still waiting in their vehicles,” Fernando said on the walkie-talkie. “Some of the trucks have their headlights on now.”

“Okay. Let me know if they start coming towards us. Keep on standby and keep all of our shooters ready.”

Kate figured the Dark Angels were listening to their conversation on the walkie-talkie’s channel, and she realized that Jo was playing up their defenses even though their best shooters were all gone on the run.

Jo clipped the walkie-talkie back to her belt. “At least this might be good news. It might be why Lance and the others haven’t come back yet. Maybe they saw the Dark Angels on their way here. They might be out there, either waiting or preparing to attack them from behind.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, “but wouldn’t they have contacted you to warn you?”

Jo didn’t answer, her hopes suddenly crushed.

“You said the Dark Angels are just out there waiting,” Kate said to change the subject.

Jo nodded.

“Waiting for what?”

She shrugged.

“Maybe they know those guys went on a run this morning and they’re waiting for them to come back, to catch them before they get to the parking lot.”

“Yeah, maybe. But if Lance sees that, he won’t take a chance on coming to the store. He won’t jeopardize this place.”

“Jo, come in,” Fernando’s voice squawked from the walkie-talkie.

Jo picked up. “What’s going on?”

“Some of the Dark Angels are walking into the parking lot from the vehicles.”

“How many?”

“Only a few . . .”

Jo waited.

“Oh God,” Fernando whispered.

“What is it?”

“I can see them with the binoculars,” Fernando said. “It’s two Dark Angels and three hostages.”

Kate’s heart skipped a beat. She heard a noise behind her and turned around. Brooke was at the front of Jeff’s tent a few feet away.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked Brooke as she rushed over to her. “I told you to stop going through Jeff’s stuff.” She couldn’t deal with this right now—there was too much going on.

Brooke stared at Kate with wide eyes.

“What are you looking for, Brooke? That music box?”

“It’s gone,” Brooke whispered.

“You need to stay out of Jeff’s tent.”

“There’s something bad in that box,” Brooke whispered.

Kate froze. “What are you talking about? Did you see what was inside? Did you open it?”

Brooke shook her head no.

“How do you know? Did you see it in your dreams?”

She nodded.

Jo rushed over. “I need to get up on the roof. The Dark Angels are coming and they’ve got three hostages.”

“Petra?”

“No. Fernando said it’s Lance, Crystal, and Dale.”

“Oh God.”

Jo turned to leave.

“Jo, wait.”

She turned back around, impatient.

“Where’s Jeff?”

For just a second it looked like Jo couldn’t understand what Kate had just asked her. “Jeff?”

“Yeah. He’s not in his tent. Is he up on the roof?”

“No. He . . . he said he was sick. April checked him out, just told him to rest.”

“He’s not in his tent.”

“Maybe he went to help in the kitchen.” She shook her head like she didn’t understand what Jeff had to do with anything, how anything could possibly be more important than what was happening outside. And then she was gone, hurrying for the ladder attached to the scissor lift that led up to the skylight.

Kate turned back to Brooke, kneeling down in front of her. “Do you know what’s in that box Jeff had?”

Brooke shrugged. “Something bad.”

“Did you draw a picture of it?”

Brooke shook her head no.

Kate thought about asking Brooke to draw what she’d seen in her dreams, but for some reason she didn’t think she had enough time for that. She realized that Petra had been right about the mole; she had just suspected the wrong person. It hadn’t been Neal—it had been Jeff.

“Do you know where Jeff is?” Kate asked. “Did you see where he went?”

Brooke pointed to the double doors across the room that led to the offices and the loading bay.

CHAPTER 57

Jo

Jo stayed low as she walked across the roof to the edge where Fernando and Tina waited; they were between two of the mannequins hidden under tarps with rifle barrels pointing out. The Dark Angels hadn’t fired any weapons so far, most of them still remaining with their vehicles beyond the parking lot.

“Here,” Fernando said when Jo got to him, handing her a pair of binoculars.

The day was fading fast, the air much colder, the western horizon a blaze of yellows, oranges, and reds, blending into purples and deep blues, the first visible stars twinkling. Jo crouched down behind the concrete knee-wall that ran the perimeter of the roof; it made a nice shield—not impenetrable, but something was better than nothing, and they could rest their arms on the top of the wall to shoot. She adjusted the binoculars, panning them slowly until she saw the two approaching Dark Angels with their three hostages.

Even in the fading light Jo could tell that Fernando had been right about who the hostages were: Lance, Crystal, and Dale. Where were the others? Were some of them dead? Were the rest caught and held in one of the trucks or at another location, being tortured for information? Had some of them, or any of them, gotten away?

The Dark Angels had rifles slung over their shoulders and pistols holstered on their hips. One had a powerful flashlight and the other had a battery-powered lantern to provide enough light to see. One of the Dark Angels, the one to the right, also had a bullhorn in one hand.

The hostages’ hands were bound behind their backs. They were gagged with rags stuffed in their mouths and tied around their heads. Jo saw through the binoculars that the three of them appeared to be uninjured, but they looked miserable. They were forced to walk to the middle of the parking lot in front of the store, about fifty yards from the entrance, and then they all stopped.

Jo waited for the Dark Angel with the bullhorn to speak, but the two of them just stood there, the plumes of their breath visible in the glow of their flashlight and lantern.

“What are they waiting for?” Fernando asked.

Jo didn’t know the answer, but she would wait too.

Finally, the Dark Angel raised the bullhorn to his mouth and yelled into it. “We’ve got your people!”

Tina handed Jo the megaphone they had on the roof. “Where are the rest of them?” Jo shouted back.

“They’re safe for now.”

Jo raised the binoculars back up to her eyes. Lance shook his head no vigorously, his eyes wide as he grunted into his gag, trying to say something.

The other Dark Angel slammed the butt of his rifle into the small of Lance’s back. Lance staggered from the blow, nearly dropping down to his knees.

“They’re lying,” Fernando said as he watched through his own pair of binoculars. “They don’t have the others. That’s what Lance was trying to tell us.”

That could mean that the others were all dead, Jo thought. And she knew Fernando was thinking the same thing.

Jo brought the megaphone up to her mouth. “You hit him again like that and we won’t have any kind of a deal.”

In the distance the screeches and calls of the rippers sounded. The sounds of their voices yelling through the bullhorns were bringing them toward the store.

“You’ll deal,” the Dark Angel said. “If you want to keep these three alive, you’ll deal. We’ve treated them well. So far. The rest is up to you.”

“Show me the others,” Jo told him. “Bring Petra and Zak out. Tyrone and Tamara, too.”

“You’ll get them all when we reach a deal,” the Dark Angel said.

“What do you want?” Jo asked. But it was a silly question; she knew what they wanted—the store and everything inside.

“You know what we want. All of you out. You’ve got a few minutes to decide. Or we kill these three right in front of you. Then we bring out the next two. And then the next two.”

“He’s bluffing,” Fernando said. “They don’t have the other ones.”

Jo lowered the bullhorn and sat down with her back to the wall. She couldn’t bring everyone out of the store. They would all be killed. She couldn’t trade everyone’s lives in the store for the three out there. If she’d been in their place, she wouldn’t want everyone else sacrificing themselves for her.

“They’re going to kill them whether we give ourselves up or not,” Fernando said. “They’ll kill all of us once they get in here.”

Jo knew he was right. She looked at Tina and saw the same answer in her eyes.

Damn, she shouldn’t have let them go out on this last run this morning. She’d had her reservations about it, like Kate had expressed, but she figured they were just normal anxieties, just the same anxieties that she felt every day—a normal part of life in this bleak new world.

“They seem pretty patient,” Jo said. “Those rippers are coming soon. You figure they would want to get in here before the rippers come. It sounds like there’s a lot of them.”

“They’re on the move,” Fernando said, perched at the wall with the binoculars up to his eyes.

Jo got back up and looked through her binoculars. The two Dark Angels were still in the same spot; Lance, Crystal, and Dale were still in the same spot.

“No, over there by the entrance,” Fernando said.

Jo panned over just a little and saw ten Dark Angels moving on foot along the edge of the ditch and through the decorative trees that lined the grassy strip. They moved like a military unit.

“They’re going for the back,” Fernando said.

“Why?” Jo asked. And then she heard an explosion from somewhere inside the store.

For a second Jo thought the Dark Angels had just shot something at the store, a missile of some kind. But then she realized that the explosion had come from inside the store.

One of the rippers was inside. A mole. She remembered Kate asking her where Jeff was. Kate had looked so scared when she’d asked about Jeff, so worried. And Brooke had looked worried too. Jo had dismissed it at the time, too concerned about getting up to the roof. But Kate had been right, and Petra and Max had been right—there was a mole inside the store. Had it been Jeff the whole time? He was the one who had suggested the place for Lance and the others to go to on their run.

“Oh God, no,” Fernando said.

Jo heard the gunshots before she could pan back to Lance, Crystal, and Dale again. There was a blur of motion before she found them. They were lying on the ground, all three of them dead from gunshots.

Lance, Crystal, and Dale were dead. Something had exploded down in the store, and now their store was breached. The Dark Angels were coming. It was all over now. She’d lost it all, the store, everyone inside. She had tried so hard, but she had failed all of them.

A fury suddenly rose inside of her. “Kill them,” she ordered.

It didn’t matter now. Fernando was right; the Dark Angels were going to kill all of them once they got inside. But Jo decided that they would take out as many of them as they could.

Fernando and Tina fired their rifles. Jo watched through the binoculars with a small sense of satisfaction as the two Dark Angels who had gunned down Lance, Crystal, and Dale were shot down in the parking lot.

CHAPTER 58

Kate

“You stay right here in this tent,” Kate told Brooke. “You need to keep Tiger safe, okay? Tiger’s scared and you need to protect him.”

Brooke nodded.

“Get in the tent and zip it up. I’ll be back for you.”

“Promise?”

“I swear.”

But Brooke didn’t look too convinced.

“Come on, Brooke. I need to go. I need to know that you’re going to be in here and safe.”

Brooke got into the tent and zipped it up.

Kate bolted to the double doors, then into the hall, then through another large doorway to the loading bay. They always left a few lanterns turned on in the back, but the room was so large that it left much of it in darkness. There were a few skylights back here (not nearly as many as there were in the main shopping area of the store), and they helped a little in the quickly-fading light of day.

She saw Jeff. He stood near one of the garage doors where they unloaded stock from the trucks. He had the music box in his hands.

“Stop,” Kate said, rushing toward him.

Jeff froze, staring at her. “Don’t come any closer.”

Kate stopped twenty feet away from Jeff. “You don’t have to do this. Whatever you’re planning on doing, you don’t have to do it.”

“But I do. You don’t understand.”

“Just . . . just wait a minute, Jeff.” She remembered reading somewhere that it was important to use a person’s name when trying to negotiate with them. “Let’s just talk for a minute.” She realized that in her haste to stop Jeff she hadn’t even formulated any kind of plan. She didn’t have a weapon on her, not even a walkie-talkie to call for help.

“You can’t stop this,” Jeff said. “You can’t stop what’s coming.”

“Stop what? What are you supposed to do? What’s in the box?”

Jeff hesitated for a few seconds then he opened the box.

Kate saw something dark inside the box—it looked like a black ball.

“It’s a hand grenade,” Jeff said. “They want me to blow a hole in the garage door so that it can’t be locked again. So they can get inside.” He took out the grenade and let the box fall to the floor. He pulled the pin and flicked it away, still holding the lever down.

“Wait!” Kate said. “Hold on. You sent Petra to that house this morning. You sent them into a trap, didn’t you?”

“I had to.” His face contorted in misery.

“You’ve been planning this all along.”

“Not me,” Jeff cried. “They made me do it.”

“But you don’t have to do it now. We’re safe in here. We can fight them.”

“No. You don’t understand. You can’t fight him. He’s too powerful. He can . . . he can do things you can’t even imagine.”

“And we’re powerful, too,” Kate said. “And there are more like us. More coming. We’re all meant to be together. I’ve seen them in my dreams. We’ll all be stronger together. We can fight them together.”

For just a moment Jeff seemed to think about what he was doing, maybe ready to give in. But then he shook his head no.

“No. Jeff, please. Don’t do this.”

“He said . . . he said he’d let me see my family again. Let me be with them again.”

“Your family is alive?”

“No. They turned. But he said he can turn them back again. He said I can be with them again. We can all be together again.”

“He’s a liar, Jeff. Please. You have to believe me.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t take the chance.”

Kate knew she couldn’t get to Jeff in time as he lifted his thumb up off the lever. It was too late.

A dark shape fell down from the rafters in the ceiling, landing on top of Jeff, knocking him to the ground. Both men crashed down to the floor, the grenade underneath them. It was Neal. He had snuck inside and climbed up to the rafters, just like he used to do when he’d been a construction worker.

“Run!” Neal shouted at Kate from on top of Jeff.

Kate just had time to turn away when she heard the muffled explosion from underneath both their bodies. She was splashed with a fine spray of warm blood. She looked back and saw the blood splashed all over the garage door, a shiny sheet of blood and fat, bits of flesh dripping down along the corrugated metal. But the garage door had held.

Neal had saved them. They had suspected him and accused him of being a mole, but he had saved them anyway.

Kate ran out of the bay, down the hall and then through the double doors. She heard the gunfire now from the roof and from outside.

Max met her near the tents. “What was that noise?” he asked with wide eyes.

Kate didn’t have time to explain. “It’s okay. They didn’t get the door. You need to call Jo.”

Max pulled his walkie-talkie off of his hip. “Jo, it’s Max. Come in.”

“Max,” Jo said in an anguished voice. “It’s over. They killed Lance, Crystal, and Dale. They blew something up in the store. They’re going to get inside.”

“The blast didn’t get the doors,” Kate said.

Max didn’t understand what she was saying, but he passed the message on. “The blast didn’t damage the doors. We’re still safe.”

“How?” Jo asked.

Max handed the walkie-talkie to Kate. She could hear the gunfire in the background. “It was Jeff. I found him in the loading bay. He had a hand grenade with him. He was going to blow one of the garage doors open. But Neal was in the rafters. He dropped down onto Jeff, both of them covering the hand grenade. Neal saved all of us.”

Jo was silent for a moment.

“They won’t get in,” Kate said. “We can hold them off.”

“The rippers are coming. The Dark Angels can’t stay out there too much longer. But we need you up here. Everyone needs to get up here. And bring as many battery-powered radios as you can and some CDS. We need to blare some music. Keep attracting the rippers here. It’s our only chance.”

Max was already off and running for the CD players.

Kate climbed up the ladder to the roof. She would grab a gun and shoot, or she would play the music and attract the rippers. She would throw things off the roof if she had to. Whatever she could do to help. She only wished that the Dragon was down there with the Dark Angels. She just wished that he was in danger of being shot or killed by the rippers. But she knew he wasn’t out there, and she knew he would never call his troops back—he would want them to fight to the death, fight until the horde of rippers coming overwhelmed them.

Her heart was heavy about Lance, Crystal, and Dale. That probably meant that Petra and the others were dead. Max and Brooke were going to take it hard. But all of them would have to keep on going, keep fighting and help Jo protect this store.

Maybe Jo was right. Maybe one day they would be able to negotiate with the Dark Angels, learn to live in some kind of peace with them, but not tonight. No, tonight they would kill every one of them that they could.

CHAPTER 59

Petra

Petra found a house to stay the night in right before sunset. The Dark Angels might have followed her, but she was pretty sure they had gone back with the others, back with the hostages they had. She was sure they had gone back to the store. They couldn’t worry about her anymore—they had other plans.

Coming to this house had been a trap, a way to get the best shooters far away from the store and to abduct some of them.

And who knew what Jeff was going to do inside the store? Grab a weapon and start shooting inside the store? Open the doors for the Dark Angels? De-electrify the fence? Call out to the Dark Angels somehow?

Her mind raced with possibilities as she sat in the looted home, feeling alone and helpless. There was no vehicle here and it was too dangerous to travel at night with the rippers out there.

She had inspected her pack moments ago, taking an inventory of what she had: protein bars, three bottles of water, a box of ammo. She would be okay for a little while, but she would need to conserve what she had because she hadn’t found anything else of value in this house.

It was cold and she curled up in a corner with a musty old blanket over her. The house was dark and the only noises were the rodents skittering around, and the bigger animals outside in the brush.

She tried to become cold and hard again, tried to become the tough machine that she had trained herself to be, the one who traveled alone and didn’t need anyone.

But then she broke down and cried. She knew it wasn’t all her fault, but she still felt like she had failed all of them. Those same helpless feelings came back, the ones she’d fought so hard to suppress. Once again everyone she cared about had been killed by a very bad man. Once again everything had been taken from her. Once again a cold rage and a thirst for vengeance took over inside of her.

An hour later she fell asleep and she dreamed.

In her dream she was in the hell-town, the blasted landscape where the Dragon ruled and lived. The dead and dying were there, the tortured, but the Dark Angels had deserted the town. And she knew why . . . they were on their mission to slaughter everyone she knew.

She had her pistol in her hand, clenching it tightly as she walked down the street, passing burnt cars and wrecked trucks, passing bodies staked down over the roofs of cars, their arms and legs stretched out cruelly, their eyes wild with insanity and pain as they stared up at the swirling gray sky.

Yes, she had her gun and she would find the Dragon. She would kill him.

But was the Dragon gone, too? Had he left his kingdom to follow his Dark Angels to the store, to walk through the aftermath of battle and claim the supplies inside?

Petra stopped walking, already defeated. She fell to her knees in the middle of the street, overcome with the guilt and sadness that had overwhelmed her only an hour ago. She felt so miserable and alone, so cold.

But then she felt a warmth on her skin, sensed a light in the grayness. She looked up and saw the blond woman in front of her that she’d seen before in her dreams. She seemed to be staring down at her from behind her dark glasses.

“We’re coming south,” the blind woman said. “We’ll all be together soon.”

“They’re all . . . all gone,” Petra said through her tears.

“No,” the blind woman said. “No, not all of them. Some are safe.”

“At the store?”

The blind woman didn’t answer. She started fading away.

“No. Don’t go. Tell me. Please, I have to know.”

The blind woman was gone.

Petra woke up and rubbed at her eyes. She’d been crying in her sleep.

The blind woman had said that some were safe.

Petra felt the first flicker of hope. She wasn’t alone. The blind woman and the people she was with were coming, and some were safe—she had said so.

“We’ll all be together,” Petra whispered into the cold darkness. “We’ll be strong. And one day I’ll kill the Dragon. I swear I will.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Thank you so much for reading my book! I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you’ll check out the next books in the Dark Days series. I’m working hard to get them done and hope to have the next two in the series done by early 2020.

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. Please feel free to follow either my blog or newsletter (or both!) for updates, sales, articles, and more. Just click on the links below. Thank you!

Blog:  https://www.marklukensbooks.wordpress.com

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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 several bestselling books including: The Ancient Enemy series, Devil’s Island, Sightings, The Exorcist’s Apprentice, The Dark Days Series, Followed, 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 marklukensbooks@yahoo.com and mark@marklukensbooks.com

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