Ricki stopped what she was doing and looked at me. Just for a moment. I knew without a doubt that she wanted to warn me against playing hero, but on the other hand we couldn't reach her mother or Carty, who was one of our best friends in the world. As much as I wanted to hide out with them-and as much as Ricki wanted that too-I couldn't abandon the people we loved. I had to check on them. There was no other way around it.

"Yes, son," I told him. "I'm going out to check on gramma."

"You need me as a backup?"

I didn't smile because he was serious. "No, stay here. Protect your mother."

"She's pretty tough. She doesn't need me."

Ricki was carrying another box down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. She was out of earshot. "She needs you more than you'll ever know," I told him. "When I leave, you lock that door down there. Don't let anyone in."

"What about you?"

"Well, yeah, me," I said, noticing and maybe not for the first time the platinum highlights in his hair he had gotten from his mother.

"Zombies can't reason much, Dad. All they are is stupid eating machines," Paul explained to me, an expert on the subject from all the zombie comics and paperbacks he devoured. "We're going to need a pa.s.sword. They can't think. If you get zombified, you'll never remember it. That's how we'll know you're okay."

Kids are amazing. Absolutely amazing. I knew d.a.m.n well that just about every adult (save the crazy ones) were scared s.h.i.tless at that moment and I was, too...but kids, man, they reorient themselves so quickly it can be frightening. I was willing to bet that while most adults were ready to p.i.s.s themselves, their kids were rising up to the challenge of the undead. Maybe that sounds silly, but I believed it. Kids are tougher and much more resourceful than adults. They are not so anch.o.r.ed to the physical reality of their world, they can adapt and improvise at the drop of a hat. You can spin their world 360 and they'll come up standing. We adults would be thrown on our a.s.ses.

"What do you suggest?"

He scratched his tawny head. "Hmm. Didn't you guys use pa.s.swords in Iraq?"

"Yeah, sometimes." I thought it over. "Zulu Foxtrot."

"I like that!"

I explained it was military phonetics for Z and F, in other words, Zombie Free.

"Okay," he said. "Watch it out there. Aim for the head."

I gave him a hug which he did not appreciate-there's no tougher soldier than a ten-year old fighting man-and went over to Ricki. I gave her a kiss and, surprisingly, she slipped her tongue in my mouth. "Give you a good reason to hurry back," she said.

Paul had the TV going. "I'm setting up the comm center, Dad," he said.

"I'll keep in touch with my cell. I should be back in half an hour," I told them.

"Then what, Steve?" Ricki wanted to know.

"Then we hold out until this is sorted out."

I wanted badly to tell her about what I'd seen in Iraq. But there wasn't time and I didn't want Paul knowing about it for some reason. Though, again, being a kid he would have probably just shrugged and said, "Gotta start somewhere, I guess."

"Please be careful," she said.

Then the door was closed and locked.

I wondered if I'd ever see them again.

I went up the steps and got my gun and went out into the world of the dead.

IMMEDIATE THREAT.

In the thirty or so minutes I'd been in the house, the war-if that's what you can call it-had not slowed down nor even taken a breath. In the distance I could hear gunfire, sirens, people shouting, and even a few thumping concussions like some real firepower was being used. The sound of it brought back memories of the war. I saw no zombies in the streets. Maybe they had pushed on. Not that it gave me much hope, because what I saw was devastation, minor maybe, but ugly for America. There were bodies everywhere. Bodies of zombies. A couple half-eaten dogs. Cars were stalled in the middle of the avenue, doors opened. Their drivers were nowhere to be seen.

What else was nowhere to be seen was the body of the mailman.

All I found was a single blood-spattered shoe which was being investigated by a couple flies.

Could he have risen so fast?

I scanned around looking for trouble.

I had my old man's gun, a Browning Hi-Power he had carried in Vietnam. I hadn't used it in a couple of years and then only for target practice. But it would do the trick. As I moved up the sidewalk, I heard someone clear their throat.

"Where you going, Steve?" Jimmy LaRue asked. He was hanging out of a second story window with his .22.

I looked up at him. "I'm going to check on Carty."

"You need me?"

"No, I can handle it," I told him. "I got Ricki and Paul barricaded in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Keep an eye on my house, will you?"

"You got it. I'll cover you."

Jesus, it was insane. In a matter of hours our peaceful neighborhood was like something out of Fallujah. Here I was patrolling the streets with a sniper above keeping an eye out for unfriendlies. Hour by hour the entire thing was becoming more and more surreal. And scary. My natural paranoia was whispering in the back of my head and it kept saying things like: What if this situation is not containable? What if this zombie plague keeps rolling until there are no people left? I had to force that stuff from my head. When I was in the war, we'd go out on these mounted patrols to see if we could draw fire from insurgents so we could hunt them down and kick their a.s.ses. The Army called it "Pacification" but the bullet-eaters and grunts on the ground called it "p.u.s.s.ification". p.u.s.s.ifying the enemy. Our officers called it "movement to contact" and what it consisted of, basically, was exposing your a.s.s to fire. Creep around in Stryker vehicles and see if any RPKs or RPGs opened up on us. Baiting, that's all it was. Like hanging your d.i.c.k in a piranha tank and seeing if you got any nibbles.

And that's what it felt like I was doing right then: baiting the dead.

Like I was a hooker or something, trolling my wares and seeing if any righteous zombies wanted to take a bite.

It was insane, yes, but it was only the beginning of the madness. Just a delirium fever compared to where it was all going.

I made it over to Carty's house. She lived next to Rommy Jacob, whom I knew was dead. I did a quick reconnoiter of Carty's yard, made sure no bad boys were hanging around out by the garage or under the shade of the sour apple tree picking maggots from their teeth. There was nothing. That was good. But what was bad is that Carty's back door was wide open.

Carty wouldn't allow that.

Carty hated flies.

Swallowing, I entered the house silently.

Like a mouse into a shoe, I moved with stealth and silence. My throat was dry. It felt like it had been powdered down with beach sand. My heart was hammering, my knuckles white on the grip of the Browning.

Carty was laid up after knee surgery which was one of the reasons I thought I better check on her.

Years back Carty owned a saloon, but had sold it off after her husband died. In her eighties, she was very spry, full of wit, off-color jokes and salty metaphors. She could cuss like a sailor and took her bourbon in a water gla.s.s. She had an ongoing battle with old Mrs. Hazen and her G.o.dd.a.m.n flowers-her and her G.o.dd.a.m.n flowers, Steve, you know how f.u.c.king sick I am of hearing about those p.i.s.sing flowers of hers? b.i.t.c.h called the cops for chrissake because my leaves blew into her flowerbeds last fall, you believe that s.h.i.t? You don't hear Rommy b.i.t.c.hing about it. Green G.o.dd.a.m.ned thumb...I'd like to stick it so far up her a.s.s she'd get a tickle in her throat-yeah, that was Carty.

I loved her like a mother.

She, along with Bill DeForest and his wife, had sort of adopted us when we moved into the neighborhood. I could remember the day we moved in. Bill and his wife had come over. Not to be undone, Mrs. Hazen had followed suit and brought us an apple pie. Very nice, I thought. But as I'd gotten to know her I realized the only reason for the kindness was to get a look at us so she could make some rash judgments as to the sort of people we were. Carty had brought no pies. She'd invited me in for a few fingers of Jim Beam. Told me if she were forty years younger, Ricki would have been in trouble, big trouble, because she would have stolen me away.

I felt tears well in my eyes.

Because I knew what I was going to find.

Soon as I got in the living room, I smelled it. That heady, metallic, almost savage stink of human blood. The living room was a mess-lamps knocked over, magazines scattered, end tables overturned.

Carty had two Chihuahuas. Nice dogs. Liked to bark a lot, but they were harmless creatures. Pathetic, really. Shivering and shaking, p.r.o.ne to colds and infections of all sorts. Bred by man to be pretty much s.h.i.t useless in the real world. Mimi and Momo. When I got into the living room, I called out to them. The very fact that they had not barked told me all I really needed to know about their fate.

I found them first.

I could never tell them apart and less so in death. One of them was mangled in a red-stained heap in the corner. There was a b.l.o.o.d.y splatter mark about three feet up as if somebody had picked the poor thing up and hurled it with serious velocity at the wall. I found the other one lying at the foot of Carty's rocking chair. It was nearly bitten in half.

"Carty?" I called out, just sick to my stomach.

Nothing.

I pressed my fingers against the kitchen door. Pushed it open.

Carty was sprawled on the floor in jogging pants and a collegiate sweatshirt that read UBP, and beneath that, UNIVERSITY OF BIG p.e.c.k.e.rS. Something had been at her and she'd been bitten repeatedly in the face, the throat, the wrists, the belly. She was almost unrecognizable such was the severity of the attacks. Her face was a bleeding, livid bruise.

An ocean of blood had spread around her corpse.

It was nearly dry. That made me think that Carty had been one of the first.

I can't say that she was eaten exactly. It was more like whoever had done it just kept biting her until she bled out. It seemed inconceivable, but if somebody had asked me what had happened to her I would have had to tell them she had been bitten to death.

There was nothing more to see.

I turned away and went back in the living room. I pulled out my cell and called Ricki. "Carty's gone," I said. "There's nothing I can do."

And it was as I stuck the cell back in the pocket of my carpenter jeans that I heard something. A noise from behind me that made a cold chill run up my spine and play down my arms: a wet, sticky sort of sound. Like somebody peeling up a rag that had been stuck to the floor.

That's what I heard.

As I turned, the Browning shaking in my fist, the kitchen door swung open and Carty was standing there. Her left eye was that same glossy white as I'd seen in the other walking corpses, her right eye glazed and staring off at the wall. Beneath the bruising and the bloodstains, her face was a cool porcelain white. The left side of her mouth was. .h.i.tched-up in a cadaverous grin, all teeth and gums.

"Carty," I said.

A couple flies buzzed about her face. She paid them no mind. Things like that no longer bothered her. She was driven now by forces that knew only appet.i.te.

She shuffled forward, her hands coming up like she wanted to caress me.

"Please, Carty," I said. "Just go away."

I tried backing towards the door but she followed me like my own shadow. I told myself this wasn't Carty any more than that dead thing in Rommy Jacob's backyard had been Bill DeForest. She came at me. Her mouth was open. Her lips had pulled back from the gums. Her teeth looked almost unnaturally long and white.

But what made me bring up the Browning was that she was drooling.

She was drooling for my flesh.

Biting down on my lower lip, I sighted in on her forehead. "I'm sorry, Carty," I said, and squeezed the trigger. The round was neat, efficient. It popped a nickel-sized hole dead-center of her forehead. Something sprayed out of the back of her skull. She dropped and hit the floor like a stunned steer, legs bicycling for a moment and then she stiffened up and was dead again. I felt a wave of remorse wash through me. But I had no business feeling anything: it wasn't Carty. It was walking meat. It was an abomination. Yet, my eyes were wet when I walked out of her house. It felt like something was stuck in my throat.

Outside, I had to sit on the porch a moment and catch my breath.

The streets were silent.

I heard plenty of commotion, but there on Holly Street, the hub of my little world, there was nothing.

I didn't waste any time. I went back home.

INHUMAN WAVE ATTACK.

Twenty minutes later, I was driving.

I was in my pick-up heading up to Dunwoodie to check on Ricki's mom. I figured if I found her-or didn't-that would be it for the day. I'd hole up in the bas.e.m.e.nt, see if Jimmy LaRue wanted to join us. What I saw as I drove was pretty much what I was seeing in my own neighborhood: cars abandoned in the middle of streets, bodies in yards. I saw a burning house and two zombies on a street corner feeding on a corpse, pulling entrails from its belly and stuffing themselves with them. No one was trying to stop them. I saw two teenagers running. I saw a naked woman with autopsy st.i.tching running up her torso in a Y just walking up the sidewalk. She paid me no mind. She just kept walking.

I saw three or four others.

It was unbelievable. Yonkers was being overrun by the living dead. I wondered what it was like in New York City which was just a few miles south of us. I thought of all the cemeteries there. The funeral homes. The morgues. The mortuaries. I thought of all the people there who had been bitten and were now waking up. It would be like some kind of insane geometric progression. If it wasn't brought under control and fast...

I called Ricki and pulled to a stop before her mother's house.

I stepped out with the Browning Hi-Power in my hand. Just up the block, hidden behind a delivery van there was a police car. Carefully, I went over there. I saw no one about, but I could feel eyes watching me and I didn't think it was my imagination. Like a lot of the other cars I'd seen, the driver's side door was open. There was blood on the seats. On the dashboard. Sprayed up onto the windshield. The police radio was still working and there was a steady chatter between dispatchers and mobile units. Some of the voices were hysterical and shouting.

I could hear gunfire in the distance. A lot of it. I didn't like that at all. There was a steady stream of traffic out on Central Ave and, realistically, it didn't look much different than any other day. But it was different. It was different now in just about every way.

I went over to Ricki's mom's house.

It was a trim little brick ranch with a flowering wall of white and pink tea roses. They were beautiful. Even I had to admit that. Ricki and I had stood before them and had our engagement picture snapped by her mom. The photo was up on the mantle at home. Thinking that, I felt something twist in my belly. I put it out of my head and went up to the door. I knocked three times, then I just went in.

A TV was playing away.

"Della?" I called out. "It's me, Steve. We've been trying to get a hold of you."

No response.

Nothing but the blare of the TV. I tracked the sound and went into the bedroom. Della wasn't in there, but I knew her well enough to know that she would not turn the TV on and just leave. She was frugal as all h.e.l.l. Della was manic about turning off lights if you weren't in the room and turning down the heat in the wintertime to the point where you'd be shivering. She did not waste electricity.

So where was she?

The feel of the house told me it was empty. It had that cavernous, deserted feeling that empty houses have. I detected no unpleasant smells that would have told me something awful had happened. There was nothing. It smelled like Della's house always did: flowery, fresh, a distant trace odor of something like baked bread and pots of soup. A good smell. The kind that made you feel at home. Made you want to kick off your shoes and curl up in a LA-Z-Boy.

I turned towards the TV to shut it off.

CNN was on and they were following stories about military containment operations in the continental U.S. I flipped to the BBC to see scenes of the British Army patrolling streets in armored vehicles. They looked like Panthers. I kept clicking and found FOX. One look at the screen told me all I wanted to know: DEATH VIRUS? I shook my head and turned the TV off. Death virus. Maybe that was a good name for it, but it sounded like tabloid s.h.i.t. Typical FOX. When they weren't stroking the Right Wing they were ladling out the bulls.h.i.t in great steaming heaps.

But none of that found Della.