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It was a dog barking.
Terrified, angry. A deep-chested sound. It reminded me of Ghost, though he was long dead. Old age. He’d run through hell with me all over the world. Wish to fuck I’d had him with me now. He could track anyone or anything. Ghost could have found my family. One way or another, he would have found them. Given me an answer. Not closure, though, because the mouths of some wounds stay open so they can scream at you day and night.
This dog wasn’t Ghost. I knew that.
But it was alive. The first living thing other than squirrels and birds that I’d seen since I reached my uncle’s farm.
And so I ran toward the sound of the barking. Blocks away. I was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and a Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt that was several sizes too small, and boat shoes that were too big. No weapons at all. My mind hadn’t recovered enough for that to have been a thing. Barehanded. Stupid with shock. Running toward the sound of a frightened dog and endless hungry moans.
When I rounded a corner by the Antietam Tractor and Equipment store in Hagerstown, I nearly ran into a shambler. In life this person had been a cop of some kind—deputy or state trooper—but now there were only rags left of a tan uniform. He wore a gunbelt, though, but no gun. A rubber baton, the kind with the handle jutting out at a right angle, based on the old Okinawan tonfa, was looped through his belt. I skidded to a stop. Beyond him was a throng of dead ones all clustered around an overturned Ram Mega-cab four-wheel-drive pickup. The dog stood on the top, on the passenger door, just out of reach of the grasping hands.
He was a brute. A monstrous mix of white shepherd and Irish wolfhound. One hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and fang.
I stood there and stared.
It was Baskerville.
He caught sight of me and for a moment we gaped at each other across a sea of the dead. His pale coat was crisscrossed with cuts and crusted with blood and dirt, but he looked strong. Terrified, too, because there was no way for him to get down from his perch without being torn to pieces. Against a pack of living people, he might actually have stood a chance because they bleed, they feel pain, and they would be individually terrified of the dog. The dead have none of those vulnerabilities. They are simply driven by an all-consuming need to feast on the flesh of the living. Human, animal, insect. Anything except plants. They don’t tire and they don’t fear anything at all. Given time, they would pull Baskerville down and eat him.
Like I said, I was unarmed and more than half out of my mind.
But something in me was awake now. I am not a normal person. I’m not nice and I’m not sane. Even before all this shit. At best I’m usefully batshit crazy, and I have done awful things more times than I could count. Not to the innocent. No. My kind of crazy edges a different way. If you’re a bad guy? Different story.
I could feel something shift inside my skull and inside my chest. Here was an animal I knew. A dog. Alive. More than that, he was the grandson of the best dog I ever had. Ghost. A true hero dog.
All of this was processed in my brain in less than a microsecond. The dead cop was still turning toward me, just beginning his reach for my throat when I went from shock to action. I bashed his arms aside, spun him, grabbed his chin and the back of his hair and gave his head a vicious sideways twist. In the movies everyone seems able to do this, to break a neck. It’s actually extremely hard because the neck muscles don’t want to turn that far, and the bones don’t want to break. You have to know how to do it, and you have to put real speed and muscle into it. Which I did.
I let go and snatched the baton from his belt loop as he puddled down.
Then I was moving.
I am over six feet tall and over two hundred pounds. Even with days of hysterical madness, dehydration and starvation, I was fit and fast and strong. They had no consciousness, no understanding of how to fight. They turned toward noise and movement; they howled out their hunger; they surged toward me.
A fool rushes into the center of a crowd. I fought the edges of it, moving, moving, moving. Turning and deflecting, knocking them into one another, never remaining still and so never getting caught. I used the club to smash arms and break knees. Even the living dead need their bones intact in order to stand, walk, grab, hold. I smashed skulls, aiming as often as I could for the base of the skull, working to damage the nerve conduction down the brain stem. They stumbled and fell. Some of them died.
It was brutal work. I don’t know how many there were. Fifteen? Twenty?
I had so much rage in me. Grief is a terrible fuel because it burns hot and never seems to burn out. Frustration stokes that fire. Desp
eration pours gasoline on it. And yet beneath all that were skills honed over a lifetime in jujutsu, the police, the army and then Special Forces. I am a killer, and I proved it right there, witnessed only by a dog and the milky eyes of the undead.
I killed them all.
Every single one.
There was a strange time of stillness afterward. The dog stood on the overturned truck and stared at me. I stood and looked up at him. Maybe neither of us was all that sure we recognized the other. It was that kind of world. Birds sat in rows on telephone wires and the edges of roofs and watched us.
I cleared my throat and then spat dust and fear onto the ground.
“Baskerville,” I said. Not a question. Saying his name. Letting him hear it and know it. Then he did something that absolutely broke my heart.
He wagged his tail.
That was six months ago. That was when he didn’t die, and I no longer wanted to.
— 2 —
THE WARRIOR WOMAN
