"Step forward. Stand on the red square."

I did that too.

"Stand still for the dogs."

Three big black German shepherds were led out of the guard shack and began circling me, sniffing me. Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out necrotic tissue. No surprise there. Even the smaller compounds use them, and the one I was about to enter was no minor league operation. Dave Ashcroft controls the largest baronage in South Texas, and his security is top notch.

"I'm Andrew Hudson," I said. "I'm here to see Heather Ashcroft. We're going out on-"

Somebody called off the dogs and two of the guards came forward. One of them used the barrel of his weapon to point me towards a table next to the guard shack.

"Stand on that green square. Face the table."

"You fellas sure put a guy through a lot of trouble for a first date," I said. I gave him a winning grin. He wasn't impressed.

"Move," he said.

He asked me what weapons I was carrying and I told him.

"Put them in there," he said, and pointed to a red plastic box on the corner of the table.

"I'm gonna get those back, right?"

He ran a metal detector over my body, taking extra care to get up inside the flaps of my denim jacket, under my hair, up into my crotch.

A guard field-stripped my weapons.

"I am gonna get those back, right?"

"When you come out," he said. "n.o.body's allowed to be armed around Mr. Ashcroft."

"But I'm not here to see Mr. Ashcroft," I said. "I'm taking his daughter out for a date."

He rattled a smaller box. "Ammunition, too."

I unloaded my pockets. There was no need to tell him about the extra magazines in my bike's saddle bags. They were already searching those.

He looked me over again, and I could tell by his face that he didn't see anything but a street urchin from the Zone. "Get in that Jeep over there," he said. "We'll drive you into the compound."

Several machine guns turned my way.

I shrugged and got in.

I hadn't been allowed within the inner perimeter fence on my earlier visits, so what I saw when I did finally get inside took my breath away. Outside the compound, downtown San Antonio was an endless sprawl of vacant, crumbling buildings, lath visible in the walls, no doors in the doorways, every window broken. Everywhere you turned there were ruins and fire damage and rivers of garbage spilling out into the streets. It's been sixteen years since the Fall and the streets are still full of zombies. But inside Ashcroft's compound, life looked like it was starting to make a comeback. He controlled most of the medicines, weapons and fuel that South Texas needed, and it had made him rich enough to carve his own private paradise out of fifteen square blocks of h.e.l.l.

Sitting in the back of the Jeep, I rode down what had once been Alamo Street and tried not to look like a barefoot barbarian gawking at the wonders of Rome. Ashcroft had preserved a few of the main roads from the old days, and he left a few of the old buildings intact, but he had changed a lot more than he left alone.

Off to my left was what had once been Hemisphere Park. It was farmland now. Beyond that was a huge field where cattle grazed, their backs dappled with the golden copper hues of the setting sun. Men on horseback patrolled the edges of the fields, rifles resting on their shoulders.

Most of the housing was on the other side of the river, off to my right-small cottages, comfortable and clean, a few children playing in a garden under an old woman's watchful eye.

But the crown jewel in Ashcroft's compound was the Fairmount Hotel. He'd turned the ancient four-story building into his private domain. It was flanked on one side by the ruins of the Spanish village of La Villita, the crumbling adobe buildings converted into horse stables. In front of the hotel was a Spanish-style garden fed by a large, circular stone fountain. A fork of the San Antonio River curled around the rear of the hotel, supplying fresh water for the whole compound.

As we pulled to a stop in front of the hotel I said, "Looks like you guys have got room for what, about five, six hundred people here?"

"Do yourself a favor," one of the guards told me, "and don't ask no questions. You ain't gonna be here long enough to worry about it. Now get out of the Jeep."

A few minutes later I was standing in what had once been the hotel's lobby, waiting on Heather, checking the smell of my breath in my palm. I'd cleaned up as best I could, but that wasn't saying much. When you live in the Zone, in the rubble between the compounds, it shows. A lump of coal is still a lump of coal, no matter how much you polish it.

I didn't bother to make small talk with the guard off in the corner, watching me.

Eventually, Heather came down the stairs. I watched her descend, my mouth watering. She was wearing a short denim skirt that showed about a mile of bare leg and a tight black camisole that got my Adam's apple pumping in my throat. Her eyes were gray as smoke, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that made her jaw and throat seem delicate as spun gla.s.s.

And she was wearing makeup. You never see that anymore. Her lips were so red they actually shined. I couldn't look away, and I'm just glad I didn't start drooling.

She dismissed the guard with a wave.

"Hey," she said to me.

I tried to speak, but my throat had gone dry. "Hey," I said. I couldn't stop looking at her lips. G.o.d, how they shined. "You look great," I managed to say.

She blushed.

"They didn't give you any trouble at the gate, did they?"

"No," I said. "Well, maybe a little. No big deal."

"You sure?"

"Really," I said. "No big deal."

She smiled. "My dad wants to see you before we go. You don't mind, do you?"

Mano a Mano with Big Dave Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. "I guess I don't get to say no, do I?" with Big Dave Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. "I guess I don't get to say no, do I?"

"Um, not really."

I watched golden rays of light scatter from her hair and said, "Sure, why not?"

She led me back to her father's office.

"Daddy," she said, "this is the boy I told you about."

Dave Ashcroft wasn't the giant I was expecting to meet. You hear stories about these guys, growing up in the Zone, and they're like G.o.ds, reshaping the world in their own image. You expect them to be six and a half feet tall, neck like a beer keg, arms like a gorilla's. But Dave Ashcroft, he was just a normal looking guy in a white work shirt and khaki slacks, a donut of gray hair around the back of his head.

He didn't offer to shake my hand. He pointed me to a chair opposite his desk and ordered me to sit without saying a word.

"What kind of name is Andrew Hudson?"

"It's just a name, sir."

"Yeah, but I know it from somewhere."

"My dad, probably."

"Who was your dad?"

"Eddie Hudson. He was a cop in the old days."

He perked up. "You mean the one who wrote that book about the Fall?"

"That's right." I get that bit about my dad from some of the old-timers. Dad wrote a book about the first night of the outbreak, about how he had to fight his way across the city to get to my mom and me. But his book only covered that first night. He left off at a point when it looked like we were actually going to contain the zombie outbreak. Well, he was wrong, obviously, and sometimes the old-timers who remember my dad's book look at me and I think maybe they're remembering what it was like back then, back when it seemed we might win this thing. I think, at least for some of them, the memories make them angry, resentful, like they blame people like my dad for the naivete that allowed the Second Wave to happen. But there are others who recognize my dad and they tune out, they become distant, like they've gotten over the anger and now they're dealing with something else.

Big Dave Ashcroft-he was one of the ones who just get distant.

"What happened to your dad?" he asked.

"He and mom died in the Second Wave, sir."

"You would have been what, about six when that happened?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did they turn?"

"Mom did. Dad got swarmed trying to stop a bunch of them from breaking into our house. Mom got bit, but she managed to stash me in a hall closet before she turned."

"And you've been on your own ever since, living off the streets?"

"That's right."

"So what do you do now? How do you live?" But I could tell the question he meant to ask was, How the h.e.l.l did a Zoner like you meet my daughter? How the h.e.l.l did a Zoner like you meet my daughter?

"Special deliveries. I take private packages all across the Zone. I've even done some work for you, sir. That's how I met your daughter."

He frowned at that.

"Where do you plan to take my daughter, Andrew?"

"Dinner, sir. And dancing. On the Starliner Starliner. Out on the lake."

He looked impressed, though I could tell he didn't want to be impressed.

"The Starliner Starliner's not cheap," he said. "Special deliveries must pay pretty good."

"Business is fine, sir." I paused, then said, "But that's not really what you're asking, is it?"

He raised an eyebrow and waited.

"Listen," I said. "Heather's a special girl. That's not something you have to tell me. I mean I already know it. I recognize a cla.s.s act when I see one, and I intend to treat her accordingly."

I'd guessed right. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He knew as well as anybody the dangers waiting for his daughter outside his compound's walls, and he knew he wouldn't be able to keep her from them forever. Sooner or later, with or without his permission, she was going to brave that world. Maybe sending her out with me, somebody who had proven their ability to survive, was his way of hedging his bets.

But whatever his thoughts, he gave his consent. He called in his senior security officer, a slender, bowlegged man named Naylor, and Naylor drove us out to the main gate in an air conditioned utility vehicle. He told the guards to give me back my gear and my motorcycle, and while they were doing that, he pulled Heather aside and gave her a little talk.

After that, to me, Naylor said, "She has a portable radio equipped with a GPS tracker. My people will be monitoring it all night. We'll be close." Then he fixed me with a meaningful glare and said, "All she has to do is call."

The message came through loud and clear.

"I'll try to be on my best behavior," I said.

Heather jumped on the back of my bike and pressed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s into my back. I could feel the hard pebbles of her nipples through our clothes. "You better not be on your best behavior," she whispered into my ear. "Now drive fast, Andrew. Get me out of here."

In the days after the Fall, when the necrosis virus emerged from the hurricane-ravaged Texas Gulf Coast and turned the infected into flesh-eating human train wrecks, the old world collapsed, and men like Dave Ashcroft stepped up to fill the power vacuum. They built compounds like the one Heather and I had just left to protect their interests, and everywhere else became a wasteland known as the Zone of Exclusion.

After my parents died, I became one of the fringe people, a Zoner. I was too young to be of any use to the bosses who were just then consolidating their power and building their compounds, and so there weren't any other options open to me.. These days I know the Zone better than most, and what I know I learned the hard way, fighting it out every day with the infected in the ruins of San Antonio.

I survived that way for ten years. Then, right after I turned sixteen, I stole a motorcycle. And before long, I'd worked up a reputation as someone who could get packages delivered anywhere in the Zone.

That's how I met Heather. About two months before our first date I brought her a package from a dying woman out in the Zone. How that woman got the money to pay me I don't know, because I don't come cheap, but she did pay me, in gold, and I made the delivery.

Heather opened the package in front of me and took out a badly worn pink blanket with her name st.i.tched on it. There was a note attached, and she read it four times before she asked me about the woman who sent it.

"She's not doing so hot," I said, which was being charitable. The truth was the effort it took her to tell me what she wanted nearly killed her.

Heather nodded quietly, and then the tears came.

She told me her parents divorced when she was little, before the Fall, and when the world turned upside down, her father took her away because he could protect her better than her mom.

She didn't have many memories of the woman, but from the looks of that blanket, I figured her mom had plenty of memories of her.

Heather gave me a long letter to take back to her mother, and though she could have paid my fee ten times over with what she carried in her pocket, I didn't charge her.

I took the letter to her mother, and because she couldn't see well enough to read, I read it for her. She died a few days later, but I think she was happy during those last few days. Happier than she'd been in years.

Heather and I got close after that, though we had to steal the moments we spent together.