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“I’m sorry,” I told her. There were mad lights in her eyes. Most people say that once a person turns there is nothing at all left of them inside. I don’t believe that. I think it’s far, far worse than merely having died of an infection and then having your body reanimated and hijacked by genetically engineered parasites. That kind of thing should, by any measure of reason, be worst case scenario. It wasn’t, though. Lingering self-awareness was so much worse, and I thought it’s what I saw; but there was no way to test the theory. There was no way to reach from where I was to where she was. No way on earth.
I turned away. Call it grief or cowardice or the impotence of being unable to help. I moved from one to another to another of them and saw the same thing in each case. The hands were mangled. Smashed. Fingers broken and twisted. Wrists cracked. None of them had bites. All of them were injured, though. I could see evidence of broken noses, cracked and broken teeth, bruises that were faded now to black smudges beneath leathery skin, broken bones, facial trauma.
But no bites.
The math was scaring me. It was making me sick, too. I counted them. I was wrong about there being about forty. There were fifty-three of them. They were thin, wasted, but their clothes were the wrong size for people who had been skinny. These people had been starved.
No. That’s imprecise. These people had been starved to death. They had been left to die out here from starvation and exposure.
But it went deeper than that. It was worse than that.
Those broken fingers that reached for me but were unable to grab. Those broken hands. I could feel my mouth go dry. There was no other possible answer than the very bad one that was banging around in my head. Whoever had brought these people out here had crippled their hands and then tied them to these trees. They left their arms free even though there was no way these people could untie themselves or even remove the bindings on their heads to allow them to scream. It wasn’t just murder, it wasn’t just physical torture; these people had been left here to suffer. This was about torment.
All of these people had died in hunger and pain, in terror, surrounded by proof that no one else was coming, that no one else had escaped. The enormity of it was staggering. It was one of the most awful things I had ever seen, and I have seen humanity at its worst.
I wanted to throw up, but I forced it back down.
One of the dead was dressed differently than the others. He wore a heavy leather jacket with silver studs, and had leather pads on his knees and elbows. A biker, I judged. He had an enormous black beard and a crooked nose and looked like someone who, in life, was probably extremely dangerous. Now he was wasted and covered in bites and there was a lingering expression of desperation and fear on his features. I felt bad for him. I felt sick for all of them.
Baskerville must have caught my mood because he stood next to me, growling softly. He wasn’t directing it toward the thrashing corpses. He kept looking into the woods, and I realized that he was studying a narrow path of beaten grass that wandered between trees and vanished into shadow. In the direction of Happy Valley.
“Well, well,” I said, but my voice sounded wrong. A little too calm. A bit too ordinary. That was never a good sign. I took a couple of determined steps in that direction, but then I stopped as something occurred to me. I turned and stood looking at the dead faces.
The unlife that is the effect of Lucifer 113 tends to make the skin pale and leathery, creating a kind of homogenized sameness to skin tone. But it’s not really the same. The gray pallor is more often a product of dying skin cells and accumulated dust. Beneath it are the remnants of actual color. White and yellow, brown and black.
Except when I looked around me, I didn’t see any zombie who looked like they might have been white. I saw two Asian faces and a whole lot of shades of brown. Latino and African American.
None of them were white.
Which meant what?
Could those Nu Klux Klan sons of bitches have a chapter out here? Or was it something else?
One thing I knew for sure was that if Mr. Church was anywhere around her
e, he would not have let something like this stand. No sir. Which meant that either he wasn’t at Happy Valley or he wasn’t able to stop this kind of savagery. Either way, I had to find out.
I clicked my tongue for Baskerville and we faded into the woods. Hunting for more than answers.
— 20 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Days became weeks. And Dahlia became something else.
She knew it. She could feel it happen.
After that one afternoon in the Arena, something inside Dahlia shifted. Maybe inside a lot of the others of the Pack, too. Outwardly she looked the same—big boned, carrying a lot of weight and a lot of curves, lots of black hair. But the eyes that looked back at her from the mirror each morning were different. Older, maybe, though not in years. Or, maybe it was that she looked wiser. If that was something that could show in the eyes. There was less outward fear, fewer flickers of uncertainty, and more visible confidence. All of that.
Some sadness, too. Dahlia missed Trash so much. She missed what he could have become if he’d stayed and learned from Old Man Church. Trash’s own father had been a brute, and that’s the lesson about manhood he’d learned. Church was so different. So much stronger, but he didn’t reek of testosterone and anger. Dahlia liked who she was becoming, but it was hard to go there alone. At night, alone in her bed, she ached for Trash. For the surprising gentleness of which he was capable when no one else was looking. Of his kisses and the way he touched her—with strength but with respect, his big hands gliding over her skin rather than grasping or grabbing.
Where was he? Was he even still alive? There hadn’t been a single sign of him, or of the others who went with him. Serena and Nathan, and a handful of others from the Pack. The rest had stayed, waiting for Dahlia, and then joining Old Man Church’s little army.
Now, the Pack really was an army. Fit and fast, coordinated and efficient. Neeko, freed from his fear of the older and bigger Pack members, had proven himself to be a good fighter and a natural leader. Church taught him a lot of useful skills about tracking, spying, gathering intelligence. Neeko’s group—which now ran under the nickname of Bravo Team—had found more than a dozen groups of survivors. Some of them were part of Church’s army, while most had been sent on—provisioned and with reliable maps—toward Asheville. With every life saved, Neeko seemed to swell, to become physically larger and more self-assured. Dahlia asked Church about that one morning while the two of them were out on a patrol in the deep woods.
“It’s validation,” said Church.
Dahlia frowned. “Of what?”
