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Staying Human

JODY LYNN NYE

Nora Fulton lay on the cold dirt and leaned over the sight of her rifle. Turn, you bastard! Turn!

She had spotted the gaunt naked man through the thick trees while he was hunting the squirrel he now gnawed. He was the right size and shape, and his pasty white ass and reddish hair fit the colors of the man she wanted to kill.

Turn!

She raised her head to glance around for her partner, Lou Hammond. She spotted his broad, dark forehead, and wide black eyes as dark as hers just peering over a fallen log. He caught her glance, and nodded. If she didn’t take him with the first shot, he would finish the job.

A crack, as if of a branch that had broken off in the wind, made all of them jump. The zombie turned, squirrel guts hanging from his jaws, and stared wild-eyed in the direction of the noise. Nora moaned, but she squeezed her finger on the trigger. The man dropped.

Lou scrambled out from his hiding place and came to stand beside her and looked down at the corpse with its shattered skull leaking brilliant red blood and corrupted gray and purple brains.

“You got him?” he asked.

Nora shook her head. Her stomach felt like it had crept up her throat. It took her a minute to get her voice back.

“It’s not him. It’s just some other poor soul.”

“Well, waste not, want not,” Lou said. He unfolded a body bag from his backpack and laid it on the ground, then pulled on a bright yellow temporary hazmat suit. “C’mon. We don’t have a bunch of time before other zombies hear the shot and come running.”

“I know.” Nora put her gun down and put on her own protective gear. She wound her long dark braid up into the cap before she brought the hood down and settled the clear panel in front of her face. They checked each other’s fastenings to make sure there was no chance of exposure to the stinking body. Taking the time to yank the spine would leave them exposed too long in the woods without backup. Better let the team back at the lab dissect it out. She sent up an apology to the spirits for this man’s soul, and thanked God that he would be able to help a lot of people with his earthly remains.

She passed by a tree whose upper branches were heavy with fruit just about ripe. It was September fifth. That had been her wedding anniversary, her and Troy’s. Eight years. She had hoped she could give him a memorial that day by killing the bastard who had killed him. Not yet, though. Not yet.

They set out down the crest for the Foresight Genetics compound. Nora kept a dozen paces behind Lou’s comforting yellow bulk, her shotgun cocked and leveled, scanning the woods as they went. With the coming of dusk, the zombies were moving around again, looking for food. Every so often they found a few unlucky people who thought by holding out in the hills above Nashville that they’d be safe. Most of the time, the zombies caught deer and rabbits. She’d seen the corpses of the ones that had taken on raccoons or coyotes. The claw marks and bites were deeper than anything that a human being could inflict on one another. Nora hated to think it served them right, but it did. Her Choctaw grandmother had told her that harboring feelings of revenge did more harm to her spirit than to her enemies, but Nora refused to let go. Not until that zombie was dead.

The arrival that morning of the government helicopter to pick up the weekly load of vaccine had brought the zombies out of hiding. A whole group of zombies had tried to batter their way in through the compound gate. The electric fence took care of a couple of them. The volunteers and Homeland Security people shot as many of the rest as they could and drove off the remainder. Management sent teams out to clean up survivors. When the cameras had picked up this man, with his red hair, Nora insisted that he would be their quarry.

Rustling in the bushes put her on higher alert. She and Lou had been vaccinated, once, but the immunologist on staff reminded them that they still needed another shot in a couple of days. Nora dreaded the effects of a bite, but she was determined to take down that red-headed zombie.

* * *

If it hadn’t been for footage on their security system that Sid had insisted on installing in their house up in the hills, she would never have known what had happened to him and their son. Nora still cursed the day that she had had to stay overnight to monitor an experiment. It was common practice for any of the scientists, but her timing had been fateful. When she had called down to see how things were going, a neighbor had answered the phone, weeping. Nora had downloaded the contents of the security cameras off the web, before they went down for good. The zombie that had attacked Sid and Charlie on their own doorstep had been their longtime mailman. The bastard had even grinned up at the camera as if he knew she would see it.

The news reports were way behind the pace of the zombie epidemic. It had spread so fast that whole communities were wiped out in a matter of weeks. The police, what was left of them, advised her to stay where she was.

Foresight Genetics had always been a leader in research. They had several facilities in Tennessee, mostly centered in Nashville, but that had become a no-go area fairly early on. To her horror, Nora had watched an otherwise dignified corporate executive and scientist strip out of her clothes and go crazy while on an Internet conference call.

Luckily, Nora’s facility had been situated on the edge of the city, not in the center of town, where everyone at the Grand Old Opry or any of the tourist sites became infected or died in a matter of days. The management of Foresight Genetics lived up to their name and moved their electron microscopes and centrifuges, along with the scientists and technicians to run them, and anyone else who had remained uninfected, out of the city, up to a small factory on the ridge northwest of Nashville that was powered by a dynamo in the river below. When the grid went down, they could still keep running. Foresight was one of the facilities tapped by the government from the Hole to stop every other project and work on a vaccine. Along with her fellow technicians, Nora had junked all her precious experiments and started to work on isolating and eradicating the bloodborne pathogen.

Lou had a similar horror story to tell. His wife and kids were returning from visiting her parents in Denver on a Greyhound bus. They came back infected. Lou had been lucky to escape a few days later with his life when all of them turned at once. He had set up a cot behind his desk in Receiving and refused to talk with anyone for days.

As a result, all of them had cringed when they got on the heavily guarded bus to take them up to the new facility, cleaned out and secured by grim-faced soldiers who wouldn’t talk about their experiences, either. They collected as many family members and stragglers as they could who showed no signs of bites or symptoms. Only a couple disappeared in the first few days. No one talked about what had happened to them. Denesa Campbell, head of Human Services, took over organizing child care and housing. People who had lost loved ones paired off or created ad hoc family groups. Someone brought in a few chickens, five cats, nine dogs and a goat.

* * *

Using human spinal tissue for the vaccine weighed heavily on everyone’s conscience. The management did their best to deal with the ethics, offering counseling and advice to the researchers and other staff. In the end, they established a parallel research track. Half the facility would keep on with vaccine manufacture, but Foresight would begin working to develop a treatment to give humans immunity against the microorganism that didn’t require anyone to die for their manufacture. In the meantime, the zombies, unaware anyone cared that they used to be human, kept on hammering at the perimeter, trying to get at Foresight’s employees to turn them or eat them.

Nora had been squeamish at first about the formula for the vaccine, but came to terms with it in short order. She thought it was hypocritical of the others to wail on and on about the source of tissue, when each of them going through high school and college biology, not to mention previous research programs, had sacrificed dozens, if not hundreds, of rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, even chimpanzees, in the name of science. This wasn’t just science; it was survival. On a personal and spiritual level, she had been horrified beyond belief to have to kill people. An eye for an eye was a bad idea and bad practice. Wiping out a predator was not. When management had asked for volunteers to help defend the compound and bring in more “samples,” Nora sucked it up and stepped forward. She had brought down her first buck at eleven. Mild-tempered Lou, from the middle of Indianapolis, turned out to have hunted rabbits with his granddaddy from the time he had been a tot. He couldn’t kill the person who had caused his family’s deaths, but he had volunteered to help wipe out the zombies around the compound.

They’d eyed each other askance when management teamed them up, the skinny little half-Choctaw woman and the big African-American man, but they turned out to be a good team. Her small, lithe figure allowed her to slip in between trees and rocks to take tricky shots. Lou never ran out of energy, and he was strong enough to haul a body on his shoulder for miles. They never talked about their mutual losses. It was just too painful. At least, they could do something to avenge them.

* * *

When they were a couple hundred yards out, they were in range for the radios to work. Nora clicked on her walkie-talkie and spoke against the hiss.

“Nora and Lou with a delivery.”

“Gotcha.”

The National Guardswoman on duty at the gate saw them coming and put out the call to the others. As soon as they got inside, two technicians with a gurney were waiting to take their kill. Gratefully, Lou and Nora stripped off their plastic suits and tossed them into the incinerator pit on top of a pile of yellow already there. That part of the lot was fenced off to keep the facility’s flock of chickens from falling in or getting contaminated. Eggs and the occasional stewing hen were important sources of healthy protein for the inhabitants.

“Everyone else come back already?” Nora asked Brenda Hatton, one of her fellow lab rats, as they followed the wheeled table into the main building.

“Most of ’em are still out,” the heavy-set young woman said. “Courtland Jones got bit. He’s in isolation.”

“How bad?”

“Dunno,” Brenda said, her hazel eyes welling with tears. “He’s only had the same one inoculation that the rest of us have. I hope he makes it.” Nora squeezed the young woman’s shoulder with sympathy. Brenda nodded. Everyone knew the risks.

She tossed her head in the direction of the side door, short blond braids swinging. “There’s some chicken stew in the cafeteria, and fresh sweet tea. Y’all can go get some, but management wants to see you right after.”

Nora exchanged a glance with Lou. “Anything wrong?”

“Not wrong,” Brenda said. She grinned, an expression few of them saw those days. “Maybe right. Lincoln’s got a breakthrough, he thinks. Go on and eat. Management will bring you up to speed soon’s you finish.”

“Hey, come and sit down!” Management, in the person of Lincoln Fairbrun, had held the whole group together for the last few months. He was a tall man, with weather-beaten, creased red skin, a high forehead and a little fringe of brown hair mixed with gray on top. For the first time, Nora saw how the strain all of them had been carrying was telling on their boss. His little sleeping room, the only real office he had anymore, smelled of stale tobacco. It was a polite fiction that nobody smoked anymore. Cigarettes from abandoned houses were almost as prized as untainted food. He played with a burned-out, crushed stub at the melamine table. A raft of folded metal chairs leaned against the wall. Only three were unfolded, including the one he sat in. He wasn’t expecting anybody else.

“What’s up, sir?” Lou asked, holding one of the chairs for Nora, then sliding into the last.

Management’s gray eyes, swallowed up in nests of wrinkles, held a light. “Paul and Sarah are pretty sure they’ve got a working bacteriophage. It’s one that normally goes after blood parasites. They’ve adapted some that seem to attack the microorganism. They’re working to develop enough for ongoing therapy. If this works out, it could stop the zombie plague in its tracks.”

Nora felt hope rising in her soul. “That’s great news, sir! Do you need us to help them?”

Management waved his hand. “Not much you can do. I’ve got volunteers already to staff every shift and watch its development. If this was happier times, we’d be waiting to get approval from the FDA for animal testing. But it isn’t.”

“No, sir,” Nora said. She narrowed her eyes at Fairbrun. “What do you need from us?”

Management sighed. “These are desperate times, Nora. We’ve got a couple of hunters who have been bit, and we’ll try the therapy on them. We need subjects for testing. Live subjects.”

“Bullshit, man,” Lou said, his eyes burning with fury. “You want us to bring zombies into the only place maybe in the state where there aren’t any?”

Fairbrun threw up his hands. “We have to be able to observe them, Lou. If we treat and release, we can’t track their progress. They could get eaten by other zombies. They could go into spontaneous remission that has nothing to do with the treatment. We need to know.”

“These people are murderers,” Nora said. “You know—” She stopped talking as tears filled her eyes and throat. Fairbrun reached over and took her hand.

“I know what I’m asking. We might be able to save a lot more people, reverse this plague. Six of the others have agreed to try to bring back live, er, specimens. You’re the best team we’ve got out there. Will you help?”

Nora turned to look into Lou’s eyes. He was torn. So was she. But to be able to go home, or to what was left of home, was something she ached for. She nodded. Her heart was full of anger and resentment, but it was a way forward.

“Good. Julian is leading the pack. Get some sleep. We’ll start out at dawn, when the alphas are still out.”

* * *

“Did you sleep?” she asked Lou the next morning, as they gathered in the predawn chill. The eight hunters and volunteers from among the nonemployees stood in the front lot near the gate, along with the six hunting hounds who had been among the dogs brought in. At least the dogs looked eager.

The big man’s face looked slack with exhaustion. “No, but does it matter?”

“I guess not,” Nora said. Julian Ferrar, a stocky man with silvering hair and tawny skin who ran the electron microscopy lab, handed out ammunition and stun guns.

“Shoot to kill only if you’re threatened,” he said. “We need survivors. Try not to get bit, okay? You’re at your most vulnerable as the pathogen load dips in your bloodstream. Tomorrow everyone lines up for their second dose of vaccine. I don’t want anyone to have to get stuck in isolation next to the specimens.”

Specimens. No one was going to call them what they were: captive infected people to be used as laboratory experiments.

“How many of ’em do you want?” asked Patricia Strauss, belting her hazmat suit tight. The slim woman had been head receptionist and administrative assistant to Management, but she was a good shot.

“No more than twenty. No fewer than twelve. Truss ’em. We’ll haul them back in the bus into Shipping. Daniel’s got cages set up that ought to hold them. We ride the Jeeps.”

“Can we shoot to wound?” Ricky Pirelli asked. He was a big man whose beard was usually confined in a hairnet. Like Nora, he worked as a senior lab technician.

Julian glanced around at his hunting party, and nodded sharply. “Let’s go.”

The situation called for the use of the company vehicles, and as much of the precious supply of diesel as it took. Nora and Lou boarded a jeep with Julian and Pat and two of the dogs. A big brown Basset hound flopped itself across her lap and demanded petting.

They drove down the ridge road as the sky started to turn deep blue. A waning moon was in the western sky over the treetops. The sky smelled fresh, with no bitter, sharp scent of decaying flesh or urine from the zombies.

All that changed as they descended into the river valley. The zombies needed water, a lot of it, and they made more mess than a million pigeons. Broken branches, scattered rocks and other debris blocked the main road into Nashville. Abandoned cars showed how effective the obstruction had been at trapping victims for the alphas to carry off. Nora and the others rarely came down this way. They would be too badly outnumbered. She shook with nerves.

“Now, remember, we don’t have to get them all today,” Julian cautioned them as they drove. “Get in, get out alive.”

“Got it,” Nora and Lou chorused.

“Here we go.”

He had a boombox strapped to the front of the Jeep. As they hurtled down the hill, twangy country music rang out, echoing from point to point in the valley. Even as little as six months ago, the sound would have been swallowed up by the noise of traffic and a million other sounds of modern life. That day, that and the engine roars broke upon the ear like the last trump.

And it brought out the zombies, just as Management had said it would. Before they drove two miles, a group of filthy naked people broke out of the undergrowth and pelted after them. The second Jeep screeched around in a bootlegger’s turn and drove straight for the trio. Mike and his squad leaped out, yelling. Several of the zombies continued to run for the uninfected humans, seeing a potential meal. Julian brought his car around, too, seeking to herd the zombies toward the approaching bus. He slowed down enough for Pat, Nora and Lou to leap out.

Zombies might not be strictly human anymore, but they weren’t stupid. They saw that they were outnumbered. The smallest, a woman with a slack belly and pendulous breasts, one badly bitten and infected, tried to make a break for it. Pat went after her, brandishing the stun gun. The woman dodged away from her, hissing like a cat. Pat triggered the stun gun, sending a crackling blue tongue out like a whip. The woman shrieked as the electricity hit her. She leaped for Pat, jagged nails out. Pat dodged her until the stunner regenerated enough for a second charge. Another blast of lightning, and the woman dropped on the road. Troy Stokes and Brenda piled out of the bus and went to collect her, careful to bind up her hands with wire ties before she came to.

The three men, crusted with feces and scabs, looked like they had once been in good enough shape to be athletes or soldiers. Nora thought the latter was more likely, since they worked together like a pack of wolves. Once they figured out the humans weren’t trying to kill them outright, they feinted here and there at the circle of hunters, looking for a way out. Mike had a stun gun in his left hand and a Luger in his right. He sent a tongue of lightning lashing out toward the biggest of the males. The stream missed, but it blinded all of the humans long enough for the zombies to rush at Julian, who was at their three o’clock. They brought him down on the pavement, tearing at his suit. Lou, Nora and the others rushed to try and drag them off.

The zombies might be naked, but they still had fingernails and teeth. The male sitting on Julian’s chest gnawed at the neck of the hazmat suit and clawed at the yellow plastic, shrieking with hunger. Lou raised the butt of his rifle and brought it down on the creature’s head. The zombie slid sideways at the last minute, so Lou’s blow hit him in the shoulder. It lashed out at him. The big man jumped backward. The second zombie leaped off Julian and grabbed Lou around the legs. Lou fell sideways. His rifle hit the ground with a clatter, but he never let go of it. He and the zombie struggled. The dogs circled, snarling. The Basset hound closed its teeth on the zombie’s arm and shook it. The zombie wailed. It bit at Lou’s face, arms, chin, anything within reach. Nora moved around, looking for an opening to strike the man in the head. When he came up with a mouthful of yellow plastic, Nora swung the butt of her gun right in his face. Crunch! The zombie dropped backward, its eyes wide open, blood streaming out of its nose and mouth.

“I killed him!” Nora cried, disappointed in herself.

“Good for you,” Lou grunted, pushing the body off. He stood up. “Thanks, little sister.”

“Goddamn bastards!” Mike said. He rushed in and tased the third infected male. It quivered and fell over. Ricky kicked the body aside and heaved at the first zombie under its arms.

The male twisted in his hands like an eel, kicked him in the belly, and ran for the pine trees. Ricky looked at his empty hands in surprise. Nora, feeling that she had let the team down, dashed after the fleeing zombie. Lou and Pat pelted after her.

“Come back, Nora!” Lou shouted.

The sun was starting to rise above the ridge. She could see that the zombies’ path was an old animal trail that led down to the river. The brush was thin enough to step over or plunge through. She didn’t want the zombie to escape. He was yards ahead of them, taking the slope with insane leaps like his tail had been lit on fire. The shadows were tricky, though. She was a good woodswoman, but she had to slow down or break a leg.

“Let him go,” Pat called out to her. “We got two! Come on, honey. Let’s get back to the others.”

“Dammit!” Nora said. But her mind was cooling off. They turned around and headed uphill toward the blaring music. Lou led the way, brushing aside branches with his big arms and holding them for Pat and Nora to pass. He was a good man. If this went on long enough to get lonely, she would ask if he wanted to be a couple with her.

The path thinned down and diverged into a half dozen gaps in the greenery about twenty yards from the road. Lou made for the loudest noise, beyond a bunch of bushes.

As he pushed past a massive red oak, a skinny arm looped down out of the branches and grabbed him around the neck. With amazing strength, it hauled Lou off his feet. He kicked, trying to free himself. The arm hauled upward. Lou’s rifle dropped to the ground.

Pat screamed. They ran to take his legs and pull, but he disappeared up out of their reach. Through the leaves, Nora saw glinting eyes, one pair after another. At least three other alphas had been waiting there. They hauled Lou upward. He flailed and kicked at his captors.

“Help!” she screamed. “They’ve got Lou!”

“We’re coming!” Julian bellowed.

Luckily, no other trees stood close enough that the zombies could escape. They had to come down, but what would they do to Lou in the meantime?

Nora slung her gun over her shoulder and climbed after them. The red oak was thick and broad. Its rippled gray bark had plenty of hand- and footholds, obviously why the zombies had chosen it as their lookout. If it had been a month later, she could have taken a shot at the zombies and been sure of missing Lou, but the foliage was so heavy she could only see movement through the gaps.

The branches were thicker than her arms as steady as the earth, so she might as well have been climbing up stairs. She had spent plenty of years clambering around in the trees on her family’s property with her brother and sister.

“Do you see them?” Pat shouted.

“Yeah! Up about thirty feet,” Nora called back. She felt for another handhold.

“Go back down there!” Lou yelled. The zombies had dragged him up to the highest branch that would support them and hung him over the branch on his belly. Nora counted four, all men, their filthy hides soiling the sunlight that touched them. One of them leered down at her, grinning. His red hair was caked with blood and dust, but she would never in her life forget that face.

“It’s him!” she screamed. She braced herself on the branch under her feet and brought her gun up and around. The zombie mailman was no fool. As soon as he saw her rifle barrel, he moved up behind Lou. “The one who killed my family!”

“Damned fools for going up there where they can’t get out,” Mike said, moving around the oak’s huge bole. The dogs quested back and forth, some of them leaping for the lower branches. The odor of zombie excited them into a frenzy.

“It’d be smart if there were only a couple of us,” Julian said. “They could jump down on any side and run away before we could catch them.”

“Help me!” Nora shouted. “We have to save Lou!”

“We’re working on it, darlin’,” Julian called. “Somebody go get Troy. He’s got the beanbag gun.”

The big man was fighting to free himself. He had to choose between keeping his hazmat suit or his balance, and decided on the latter. One of the zombies yanked the yellow hood off with a triumphant howl. Lou scooted away on the branch and set his back against the tree trunk. The zombies clambered around like monkeys, making the same kind of hoots and grunts they did in the zoo. They made grabs for his face and ears. He bellowed as one of them gashed his cheek with a handful of ragged fingernails.

Nora couldn’t stand it any longer. She levered the gun to her shoulder and fired. The zombie that had scratched Lou gasped and dropped. He plummeted down through the branches, narrowly missing her. The body landed among the dogs, who swarmed over it.

The other zombies paid no attention to the fall of their neighbor. Lou took advantage of the distraction to swing down to the next branch and try to escape.

“Come on!” Nora shouted. “I’ll cover you.”

“I’m doing my best,” he said. The gash ran with blood. The zombies followed him avidly, trying to bite him. When she cocked her gun, the naked males’ heads perked up, and they scattered to hide behind branches. Nora tried to keep track of the trio, but they moved like squirrels. Lou gripped the trunk with both arms as he sought for a place to put his foot. Going up was a lot easier than coming down.

A shadow fell over his left shoulder.

“Look out!” she shouted, and raised the gun. One of the zombies, hanging head down, tried to hook Lou around the neck. His skinny chest was exposed for a perfect shot. Nora went to pull the trigger.

The gun flew up out of her hands. She looked up. The mailman grinned down at her and swung the rifle at her like a bludgeon. Nora turned her head just in time not to take the stock full in the face. The blow to the side of her head made her ear ring.

Another ringing sound echoed through the narrow valley. A body hurtled downward past her. Nora shook her head to try and clear it.

“Got him!” Troy cried.

When Nora got her wits back, she peered down through the leaves. The mailman lay unconscious among the milling dogs. Troy lifted the beanbag gun and aimed through the leaves, tracking yet another zombie. He fired, and the zombie attacking Lou dropped like a rock. On the ground, Brenda strapped the zombies’ arms and legs with the long plastic ties.

“Come on down here,” Julian said, beckoning. “C’mon, I’ll catch you.”

Nora clutched the bark with hands running with sweat under her protective gloves. Mike caught her and swung her off the tree as if she was a child. When he set her down, Pat came to pull her into a comforting hug.

“You okay?” she asked.

Nora looked up. “Not yet.” But as soon as Lou had dropped off the last branch and hit the ground, she ran to him and threw her arms around him. She felt his heart pounding hard in his chest. Then he put his arms around her, too. He dropped a kiss on top of her hood.

“It’s okay, little girl. We both lived, this time.”

The last zombie didn’t give a damn about its fellows, but it understood that it was defenseless. It had no intention of being a target for the big gun. Screaming like a chimpanzee, it fled up into the crown of the tree and vanished among the foliage.

Julian shook his head. “We’re not gonna get him. But we got four. That’s a good start. Management’ll have to be happy with that. Sun’s up. Every other zombie is gonna be hiding out until dusk. Let’s go back.”

Mike shooed the dogs to one side and picked up their rifles. “Thought you’d like to have these back,” he said.

Nora almost snatched hers out of his hands. “You had better believe I would,” she said.

She marched over to the red-headed zombie. Brenda had rolled him onto his belly and hogtied him so he couldn’t run away. When he saw Nora coming, he grinned up at her. Nora lowered the barrel of her gun until the mouth was touching the zombie’s forehead.

Julian came over and touched her lightly on the arm.

“You don’t want to do that, honey,” he said.

“I sure do,” she said. “I’ve been looking for this bastard for months.”

“Step back a moment,” he said. “This man’s a human being.”

“No, he’s not!” Nora screamed. All the horror of the security footage from her home came bursting back in her memory. Her husband and son, torn to pieces. “He’s a monster!”

Lou stepped up and crouched down beside the struggling zombie. The creature tried to bite him. Lou stayed out of reach.

“You could shoot him,” he said, looking up at her with the blood still wet on his cheek. “But that’s not you. You don’t kill out of vengeance. You’re sorry for every one of these zombies you’ve had to shoot. An eye for an eye’s wrong, remember? This is how you know you’re still a human being. Not like them.”

Nora’s eyes filled with tears. Charlie. Sid. She squeezed her eyes shut and let the hot drops spill down her cheeks. He was right. Badly as she wanted to take revenge, it wasn’t decent, and it wasn’t necessary. She was better than that.

“Let the scientists use him. If he dies, it won’t be your fault. It’ll be because the microorganism killed him. You’ll get justice. One way or another.”

“All right,” Nora said. She lowered the gun and handed it to Lou. Then she brought her heavy boot back and kicked the zombie square in his face. Blood spurted from his nose. She kept on kicking him until the grin no longer looked like the grin in her memory. She turned away into the embrace of Lou’s other arm. “Let them have him now.”


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