Nothing in her expression suggested comprehension. I sighed, pondering how a pharmacological virgin could have survived this long. Perhaps she was some Unabomber nutcase only now out of bullets. Since she seemed to be a newbie I took pity and opened one of the bags.

"You're going to have to take something, or the Minister over there is going to wake up and make you take something, maybe the glue again, and the glue is a harsh and caustic mistress."

She blinked in silence. I continued.

"We have amyls . . . Mescaline . . . Some weed, but that's recreational rather than safety related . . . The last of the Green Shrieker . . . Some skinpatches with Mayhem Tweed and Strict Blue . . . Some meth, which will sort you out properly but rots your head and your teeth . . . A decent amount of acid and shrooms . . . Hard liquor and speed-"

"-Booze will save you from zombies?"

Incredulous hostility came from her in waves. It gave me a headache, and even more in need of my own dosage.

"Are you from the past?" I yelled, grabbing some gear from the supply bags and leaning over the Minister, punching him on the shoulder a few times. "Hang on," I said to her, before returning to Dogwood. "Come on, Minister, breakfast dosage!"

He mumbled something unhelpful; I cracked an amyl under his nose and held it there.

"Come on, breathe deep . . . Good man."

He went limp, which is always more comfortable when you're already lying down. I grabbed one myself and turned back to her.

"Anything that'll f.u.c.k you up properly will work," I said, aiming for patience. "Booze will do, but you need a lot of it. You'd need to be utterly wasted."

She chewed over the idea, then defaulted to the familiar: "I guess I'll go with the booze."

Handing over a bottle of tequila, I cautioned, "You're going to need to be dedicated with this, and if they come after you again it's back to the glue."

Gamely enough she took a big swig and grimaced. Hardly surprising; it wasn't very good tequila. I cracked my own amyl and breathed deep, carried away by the biting chemical scent and a delightful tide of dizziness. Purple haze hung in my vision, suspended in a timeless silence in which the world turned around me.

The main wave pa.s.sed, leaving me with ongoing light-headedness and a sudden awareness of hunger. Food! Yes! I craved sugar and fat, perhaps caffeine. During a visit to the Minister's sprawling family in the U.K. before the dead rose, I had encountered the deep-fried Mars bar: molten delectable battered money-shots from some chubby G.o.d of cardiac arrest. Couple of them, some speed or ecstasy and perhaps a pint or two, and I'd be fuelled for another ten hours of experimental hooliganism.

The Minister maintained the same effect could be achieved with just the speed-with beer to flavor-but the man lacks an artists' soul, any respect for the culinary arts, and a basic knowledge of nutrition.

Alas the issue was moot: there was no access to the pinnacle of Western civilization that was deep-fried chocolate bars. Not without the underlying substrate of Western civilization. That ship had long since sailed, carried away by a rising tide of the walking, hungry dead.

The woman took another swig from the bottle and woke me from my reverie. "If it's just us against the zombies, I'm going to need to know what to call you. I'm Chantal."

"He's the Horse," interjected Dogwood, putting the lie to his apparent coma.

I jerked a thumb at him. "The man who is full of lies is Dogwood, my Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving, long term companion and sidekick."

I noticed that the woman had made a healthy dent in the tequila and was looking rather green. Heavy booze on an empty stomach. I saluted her enthusiasm, but she was going to geyser.

"Whoa!" said I. "Slow down or you're going to lose it all!"

It was hard to say whether she heard me. Wordlessly Dogwood began loading our gear into the car and started the long road to actually getting the engine running.

"Why are you two out here?" she asked, clearly bilious. "Where are you going?"

"The Minister and I are on a quest for more Safety Drugs for our community of Bad Axe."

"We're heroes," Dogwood said sagely, fiddling vaguely with the car.

"We head west, seeking population centers which might have a pharmacological bounty for us. But not into central Chicago itself. No, that might be a little too exciting. We seek the outlying regions."

Dogwood added, "Detroit would have been way too exciting."

I saw in that moment that she understood, but in retrospect it was probably somewhere between my experience with the amyl, and hers with rising bile. She took another swig and shuddered.

"So that's your plan? Survivors just taking drugs forever?"

The Minister and I exchanged a glance and started to laugh. It was not an unreasonable question. h.e.l.l, I'm the first to admit that we had not hit upon an ideal long-term solution. Kids, for example. Kids could not be expected to be as Resilient as the Minister or myself, and yet the situation remained. Any given babies had the choice of being pulled apart like some struggling, gut-filled jelly-donuts, or growing into dribbling addicts with skulls full of bad cheese.

I'm not saying we had the answers then, but this was a bridge to cross another day. However, Chantal had inadvertently stumbled onto the larger path that the Minister and I walked, a n.o.ble plan to which our current holy mission was but one small part.

"Nah," Dogwood said. "We're going to get Twisted."

It was a simple statement, perhaps too simple by the blankness in Chantal's eyes, and as Dogwood said it he popped the engine cover. At the time I wasn't paying attention, but in hindsight the signs of the car's doom were all there. But leaving that aside, the Minister was absolutely right. Our larger quest was to get Twisted, like those n.o.ble leaders of men, Presidents Ozzy and Tommy Lee. I believe myself to have been more attached to the notion and disciplined in its pursuit than Minister Dogwood, even then.

"Twisted," I said sagely, "is when you take enough different drugs over enough time that you-you-"

"Smell different than people," called Dogwood, from somewhere inside the car.

"-Thank you, Minister-enough that your body-chemistry changes. Then they never find you, even if you're straight."

Dogwood straightened up and mused, "Sounds useful, but I don't see the point of that bit."

As I say, the Minister lacks true vision.

I remember waxing lyrical, but can't remember precise details. To be Twisted is to be truly free in this new benighted world of ours, untouched by the dead. Transcending natural human body-chemistry to become divine acid-casualties walking the world at will, spreading the word. Why do you think Ozzy and Tommy Lee are probably President? n.o.body wants a Commander-in-Chief who might get eaten. It's just sense.

I was about to go into my theories about why cocaine doesn't seem to work when the Minister proclaimed, "Car's b.u.g.g.e.red."

He was right. Upon investigation, the battery reeked of sulfur.

I'm sure that to someone who knows anything about cars, that'd mean something important. As it was, we were instantly reduced to moving by foot.

"Everything out of the car, Minister," I said, knowing he was already working on it. "This will not slow us down, for we are Resilient."

"True," he said, "unless you mean in overland speed."

Manfully, I ignored him, for we did actually have a plan. I went for our supply bags. Moving by foot was going to expose us to more zombies, so we needed something good and nasty, with fundamental endurance of effect. I went for the acid; the Minister went for a skinpatch of the Mayhem Tweed. He slapped the patch onto a forearm, giving himself a temporary tattoo like a piece of living couch or librarian's jacket which sank slowly beneath his skin. Dogwood's face flushed and paled in rapid succession while his irises bloomed darkness.

"That's good Tweed," he breathed. I eyed him sidelong while peeling a decent chunk of blotter free. Under Tweed, he was going to need watching, but that was hardly new. After the amount of acid I was intent on taking, I wasn't going to be up for sainthood myself.

Chantal hid behind her tequila bottle when I offered her the bag, drinking more before vomiting copiously into the bushes. With the wad of blotter tucked into one cheek, I began sizing up westward angles to take-it's always easier to take downhill trends on acid-when she spoke up and wiped her lips.

"You're looking for drugs, right?"

The Minister and I exchanged a glance.

"Why?"

"Jackson. Lots of drugs in Jackson." She straightened up and took another pull from the bottle. "Police station lockup is full of stuff. I just came from there."

Dogwood snorted. "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks you did, not on foot. That's way the h.e.l.l back east and-"

"-You have a better idea?"

He deflated with a shrug and looked at me.

"She raises a compelling point."

So without a better idea of destination, and a limited timeframe to decide before polysyllabic demons got a vote, Jackson it was.

Retracing the path towards Jackson wasn't hard. The trail of patient zombie steps and sporadic corpses was pretty clear, but six hours of blisters later and the Minister was on the verge of mutiny. A rising column of anger seethed from him and stained the sky above the bleeding footsteps left in his wake.

The Tweed had taken him to a dark place without words or otherwise numbed his tongue. He stalked in silence over the dusty ground while the world throbbed and hummed nameless tunes around us. Chantal obliviously clutched her bottle like a savage cactus-based teddy-bear. She was a metronome vomit-fountain, staining the dust with stinking neon horrors that ate into the ground and sang of vague malevolence.

Me? I just felt kind of mellow.

The air was filled with the scent of dust and dry vegetation, along with crushed parsley and burning insulation rising in waves from the Minister's every bleeding footstep.

It was when the ground stood up and started yelling that I thought I was really freaking out. I can't explain the terror I felt when vaguely humanoid figures the color of dirt were suddenly there, shedding dust and trailing vines, reeking of anger and the cruelty man poured into the very soil.

Several things happened in rapid succession.

The Minister collapsed into a paralyzed crouch, a high keening in his throat, his eyes glistening white with fear as the compost beasts came for us.

I screamed in what I was later a.s.sured was an appropriately masculine manner.

Chantal dropped her bottle, raised her hands and said, "They're harmless, sir! Phillips reporting!"

One of the creatures spoke, each word a hideous Darth Vader rasp of Inescapable Doom. It was at that point I believe I dropped to the dirt and began to grovel, but in a clearer mind I remember it said, "Christ, Phillips. You go for bullets and find mouths."

"Civilian drug-fiends, sir. They saved me . . ."

The conversation was ongoing, but I stopped paying attention when I noticed the monsters encircling the Minister as he wailed wordlessly against their dusty existence. The outrage pulled me to my feet.

"You can't have him!" I roared. "He's mine!"

Chantal and the dirt-beast looked around.

"Mother of-" it said, pausing before making a cutting motion. "Fine. We'll sort these two out. You smell of puke."

"They think intoxication keeps them safe, and weren't happy unless I played along . . . I drank enough that I kept throwing up most of it."

Treachery!

The thought thrilled electrically through me, but by now I was already making efforts to dodge the monsters coming after me like they were herding a rabbit. The wrongness of their presence made me shrill and dizzy, but I am no rabbit.

Some fiend threw a sack over my head, the fabric membranous and alive, softly mewling. I crashed to the ground and hauled part of it off in time to see one monster touch the Minister.

The physical contact told him whatever he was seeing was tangible. In an instant he went from paralyzed silence to a gargling howl. One hand flashed to the fractal-blade at his throat and then he waded into the offending monster's leg like a kid into red-spurting birthday cake.

Shouts, then. Noise and bad confusion.

Next thing I remember is finding myself in restraints on a gurney.

A relief. This had happened before.

But where was the Minister?

I shifted as the restraints would allow, and there was no sign of Dogwood. Some medical personnel were d.i.c.kering nearby, a woman and middle-aged man. I overheard, "-what Phillips says it's a miracle they survived this long, but we'll soon sort them out."

"You can't threaten me!" I shouted, channeling the stern hybrid spirit of Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston. "I deal with scarier things than you in my shoes every morning, and that's only the stuff that's real!"

He knelt down beside the stretcher then, one of those paternal doctors you just want to dose with something vivid and enduring, then set free in a shopping mall. We'd see who's so smug then.

"My poor boy," he said truculently. "What have you been doing to yourself?"

"No negotiation with terrorists, doc! Return my Minister to me immediately, and we'll be on our way."

"In your current state, you'll poison any Reanimates who bite you!" he laughed, rotund and jocular.

"Ha. Ha. Yes. I f.u.c.ked your daughter."

I could see this statement displeased him as he backed away, so I tried to figure out these restraints now that I lacked his gaze. Curses! The Minister was much more talented than I in this area. I fiddled and tested and pulled, only to overhear: "-flush their systems and clean out the muck, straighten them out good and proper."

"Wait, what?"

Silence and blankly hostile faces. The Fear began to rise in me from some chill and murky underground well.

They couldn't do that! They mustn't! I was so close to being Twisted I could taste it in the very air. A few more months! That was it! The Minister and I had started on this path long before the zombies provided a reason.

We were ahead of the game!

It became obvious that I was thrashing and probably yelling when they came with glinting unfriendly needles to silence my uncomprehending horror.

I howled out, "The drugs are good for meeeeeee!" before icy oblivion climbed up a vein, put the chairs on the tables and turned out the lights.

I woke to the smell of smoke, who knows how long later, under a sense of vague, watery sedation. Unrestrained, which meant they were getting careless or trusting, but confronted with a mutinously solid door. However, I guessed that the smoke meant that the Minister was nearby, and about to teach them Proper Caution.

I dragged myself upright and everything felt wrong. The criminals had leached the drugs from my system and replaced them with weakness-fat and heavy metals, weighing me down. Peering through the door's little window, I banged and hollered as best I could: "Fire! You can't leave me in here with this maniac! Fire!"

A disorganized pack of people came and let me out, suspicious but fundamentally uninformed of my basic nature. There was something on the air along with the smoke, some primal trapped terror and confusion. These people had far bigger problems at the moment than even myself and the Minister could provide. It was at that moment I remember thinking that we might get out of this yet.

We'd had a lot of practice dealing with panic and disorder as it all came down, and this felt like a flashback or a sequel. First thing's first, however, I had to locate Dogwood. I harnessed my rescue crew with a cry of "Dear Lord! Smoke!" and ran towards it, leaving nothing more than a startled, "Hey, wait!" in my wake. I figured they'd be keeping the Minister nearby, and that if I could keep these people off-balance enough, they'd forget to be too suspicious.

The smoke coincided with frantic hammering on a heavy door. I turned to the confused pack following me and cried, "What are you waiting for? Get the poor man out!"