I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me, though. It looked like they'd taken a prisoner. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck. It didn't matter - I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died. "Ifiyah," I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. "Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!" The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. "Three, is more," she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. "Three is dead. Ayaan k

I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the great pacifist's neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire. "They ate the flowers," Gary pointed out, almost as if he'd heard my thoughts. I looked back down at him. "Flowers?" I demanded. "Anything living." "Why, damnit? Why do they do this?" Gary shrugged and sat down at the base of the tree. "It's a compulsion. You can't fight it for long - the hunger just takes over. I have a theory about it, but it's still pretty vague... I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me." I glared at him. "Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By 'healthy' I mean 'in one piece'. I think when they eat living meat they get so

We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty swell but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.The first order of business was to secure the cafe door. We found the keys to the store in a manager's office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows and for a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their bodies but it held. They were terrible to look at - their faces bloated or congested with dead blood, their vacant eyes rolling wildly, their hands cut and broken a

In my dream I was driving.Big car, eight cylinders probably. Leather interior, chrome on the wheels. Hell, let's give it tailfins. A big-voiced throaty roar whenever I stepped on the gas and one of those radios with a luminous needle that rolled back and forth across the ozone layer scratching for hits. My hands on the scalloped steering wheel were huge and strong and brown.It was night, and I was driving through the desert. Moonlight picked out the brush and the weeds and the rolling hills of sand and the dead. It was dark inside the car except for that luminous needle and the reflections it made in Sarah's eyes. Inside, in the dark Sarah looked just like Ayaan but it was Sarah. It was Sarah. Outside the dead were running alongside the car, keeping up pretty well even though the speedo was pushing ninety. I poured on a little more speed and saw Helen smiling at me from the left, her legs pumping madly so she could match velocities with us. Her teeth fell out. Her skin peeled away,

Fingers digging, twisting, pressing open wound smell of frying bacon laughing dark dark dark cold hungry fingers digging, grabbing, tearing -Eggsy was losing. Dying. His spark, his animating force was draining out of him, out of the hole in his head.“Do better”A voice... a voice out of the silence, mocking him. Shut up, Gary thought. Just shut up and let me die in peace.Eggsy was falling.Falling, free and weightless for just a moment in the darkness, even the yellow cones of the flashlights lost to him now in this comfortable quiet blindness he tumbled as he fell, tossed from the railing, ejected from paradise into the depths of the megastore. Colliding, his back striking the soft rubber handrail of an escalator but at this speed everything was hard, so hard and brittle and he could feel his vertebrae snapping one after the other, T6, then T7, T8 all gone, pulverized as his body folded like a spring-loaded pocketknife across the handrail, never walk again ha ha ha.In the darknes