THE UNDEAD RUINS.

The Undead Situation.

Eloise J. Knapp.

For my dad.

I know you would've been proud.

Prologue.

When the dead rose and turned the world into a massive graveyard, it seemed like the universe was finally on my side. A world with no rules, no social norms, or obligations? Perfect. But when I met Blaze Wright, the only person besides Frank Bordeaux that I gave a fuck about, I knew the universe had a sick sense of humor, too.

After we discovered each other's dirty secrets on that tiny sailboat, it all got worse. I left her brother, Beau, to die at the hands of cannibal crazies. Blaze tricked me into thinking Gabe, the girl I protected in the earliest days of the apocalypse, skipped out on me. Turns out Blaze drugged her out of spite and cruelty, leaving her to die in a shed. Can't really blame Blaze though. Gabe epitomized everything I hated about humanity. She was weak and manipulative. A liability really. But what Blaze did to her still haunts me.

Instead of sailing off into the sunset, Blaze and I got caught in a November storm and were tossed and turned for days until we managed to crash on the mainland.

Now, seven years later, society is trying to rebuild itself, dredging up foggy memories of what life used to be like in their attempt to recreate it. No matter how much we resisted, reality was nipping at our heels. The world was turning into its former self.

PART I.

Monsters in the Dark.

Chapter 1.

So this is what it feels like to know every person in the room hates you.

132 people-soon to be 131-crowded the main hall of the settlement. They were a single entity, breathing and hating me in sync, wishing I was the one who had to die instead of...

Katie? Cassie? I didn't even know the girl's name. Then again, I didn't care. I stood on the center stage, trusty Glock in hand, waiting to execute the sixteen year old girl who defied the town's rules. They'd set up old tarps around her to catch the blood.

Months from now, some poor soul would find a stray drop and think of Candy. Or Katlyn, or whoever she was.

It was better to forget her humanity.

Jon Dynan's town chose to opt into the execution plan Valtown offered newly developing settlements two years ago. No exceptions. If you didn't like it, you didn't move there. Once you were in, you had to abide by the rules forever. Yet the settlers acted like it was some unwanted force taking her away.

Dynan himself stood beside me delivering an obligatory pre-execution speech. He gently reminded the town that the girl hid her mother's death for two weeks, resulting in the demise of her brother and father. It could've cost everyone their lives if the Zs escaped. In the small confines of the settlement, all it would take was one zombie. There was no room for people who didn't follow the rules. If a neighbor hadn't smelled the rotting corpses and reported them, who knows what would've happened.

Scratch that. I knew what would've happened, because I'd seen it before.

Valtown offered the execution plan after an incident in Surville three years ago. Someone turned into a zombie, someone didn't report it, and half the town was wiped out. It was devastating to everyone in Valtown. Surville was second in food production next to Brickston. The plan was incentive to be a good, tattletale citizen. Be a functioning member of society or the big baddies will come and put a bullet through your head.

At first it was an exaggerated warning that no one thought the town leaders would follow up on. Then some people broke the rules, and Blaze and I came to execute.

I'd been to this settlement, too useless to even have an official name, four times before. They whispered 'savage' and 'murderer' when I walked by. Seven years after the apocalypse and people were still looking for new sources to blame. Zombies weren't good enough any more. They were piles of papery skin and bones, millions of them turned to dust, only some capable of moving. Now it was me, or Arbuckle, or Blaze that became the enemy.

"Carrie was a good girl, as we all know. One who would always lend a helping hand to anyone who asked." With a smile, Jon Dynan looked at each of his townspeople. Just the right amount of sorrow, hope, and insight. "It is unfortunate we have to lose such a bright person."

I bet he was a politician in his previous life.

Carrie was stoic. She slumped in the chair, her breathing shallow. The resignation coming off her scared me. Children of the apocalypse were strange.

Really, he could have said anything about the girl because he wasn't the one doing the dirty work. I doubted a single fucking person was listening to him. It's me they were looking at. Cyrus V. Sinclair-mercenary, and now child killer.

"How did it go?" Blaze didn't stop sharpening her combat axe to look at me when she asked.

"It went great. The whole town cheered when I squeezed the trigger, thanked me as I left, and asked me to kiss their babies on the way out. Like they do every time."

She made a noise between acknowledgment and an indifferent grunt. "If someone hadn't reported it-"

"I know," I said.

"No one in that town even remembers how to use a gun, or any weapon for that matter. They would be massacred in a heartbeat." Blaze ignored me and rested the axe against her leg. "They're the beginning of how things used to be. Before. It's funny how their settlement is so well fortified, but they're also the least essential to the survival of the rest of the towns. Surville and Brickston are agriculture. Valtown is the big hub, controls everything, and houses all the firepower. What the fuck does Dynan's settlement do? Plant flowers and have barbeques to raise morale?" She shook her head and resumed sharpening.

I agreed with her completely. She knew that. But bitching about how society was becoming a bunch of lazy reliant idiots again was one of our common, and favorite, conversations.

"That's what happens when they don't have to protect themselves," I said. "Valtown never should've started doling out protection. That was the beginning of the end. As soon as these towns could exist without a purpose, it was over."

Blaze's eyes bored into mine. After all these years, I still couldn't read her when she didn't want me to. "It gets easier to kill the young ones."

Ah. A topic shift. Hadn't seen that one coming.

"I hope so. At the rate we come here, I'll be tossing babies over the wall next month."

I hadn't killed someone alive who was as young as Carrie before. It was beyond me how, after a decade since the first dead resurrected. Blaze always did it, should need arise. I wondered if she liked it or if she was saving me from the job.

I hoped for the latter, worried it was the former.

She sheathed the axe and pulled a hand rolled cigarette from its shiny tin case. Lighting up was her way of signaling the end of a conversation. "We're headed back then?"

"No. Arbuckle radioed while we were at Dynan's. Someone thinks they saw a hoarder in a house on the way back. We're checking it out before returning. Give a report."

"Great. None of those have panned out in months." Blaze took a drag and blew it between her teeth.

I rolled down my window. It was one of those days I wished we could've ridden motorcycles, but Valtown made us take medical supplies and food to Dynan. Our bikes were too small to carry the crates. The cold wind rushing around me was what I needed to shake the fog of what I'd just done.

After two tries, the truck sputtered to life. We drove in silence to the main gate. It took thirty minutes before they let us out. A rare smattering of zombies had gathered and were being dispatched with melee weapons while we waited. Eventually they moved us through the primary and secondary entries and we were on our way.

The forests blurred by as we sped back to our next destination. The landscape shifted from dense trees to open fields of overgrown grass. We were in the flood lands.

"Arbuckle is training more people to do what we do. Doesn't need us as much these days," I said, breaking the silence. "If he doesn't have anything else for us, and I don't think he will, we could leave."

I could feel sadness emanating off her, coming at me in waves. I knew what she thought. I regretted mentioning anything to do with the future, so I tried saving myself. "We could do whatever we wanted."

"Maybe. Or maybe you were going to say 'let's gather supplies and leave next year' like you always do?"

I steered around a shambling zombie in the middle of the road. It was an old rotter, his skin stretched so tight across his bones it looked like he'd crumble any second. The right tire caught in a bad pothole, sending us lurching forward before we evened out. I watched in the mirror as he made a futile attempt to follow the truck.

Blaze took a deep breath, exhaling smoke at her reflection in the window. "Things aren't like they used to be, Cyrus. Fuck, it's like we're having a midlife crisis. Unhappy with our jobs but what else are we going to do?"

She was right. We weren't necessarily captive to Arbuckle. We could leave whenever we wanted. But sometimes it felt easier to be a part of the developing society he'd made than to go back to suffering like before. It wasn't like the first year of the apocalypse, where we always had food and ammo. Back then you could hotwire almost any car and know the gas was still good.

"We could leave the state and try killing crazies somewhere else. We've got so many supplies in the nest egg, bet we could survive off that alone for at least a year," I said.

"Or we could start looking for Beau again."

We both knew this was always on her mind, the thought of him forever lurking. It was in the dull lifelessness of her eyes, the flatness of her voice. Above all else, Blaze was rational. Her fervor in searching for him was admirable, but even the strongest people were worn down with time. She'd never said she'd given up, not directly. Yet she didn't search buildings quite like she used to. Before their execution, she used to interrogate the crazies for any useful information.

Not any more. Getting no closer to finding him took its toll on her. She hadn't brought it up in weeks. I was surprised she did now.

"Yeah, we could. If you wanted to." I spotted the hoarder house in the distance. "Hey, there's the place. We'll talk about this later, okay?"

She nodded and put her game face on. She pulled deeply on her cigarette twice to finish it, then crushed it in the ashtray.

I never told Blaze I believed Beau was as good as dead. I never righted the lie I told her to stop her from leaving me. As long as I had leverage, she wouldn't go. But the longer I lived with it, the harder it was to tell her. It was impossible now.

People always say, if you love something set it free. I found that keeping it captive worked just as well.

But not a day went by that I didn't regret it.

Chapter 2.

5 years earlier After we landed the boat, there was no time to fight or discuss why I had the photo of Blaze. We were in survival mode. We had little food and only a small amount of ammunition. The cities close to shore were densely populated with undead, forcing us to be on guard for days until we'd trekked outwards into the forests. The only words we spoke to one another regarded zombies and day to day survival. But I knew it was a matter of time before she snapped. I wondered if she was plotting, or just letting the rage build up.

When we wandered into a huge stretch of the snowy forest of the Pacific Northwest, finally away from any threats, Blaze laid it straight for me. We were gathering wood for a fire when she pressed her knife to my throat.

"Tell me where you got it and where my brother is," she whispered in my ear. "Or it ends right here, right now."

If it wasn't for the snow that slid off the branches above us, she would've done it, too. As she reacted to the ice pelting her eyes, her grip loosened. The knife ran against my skin, catching enough to draw a line of hot blood. I dove away from her, almost falling, then caught myself on a low hanging branch. I trained my gun on her.

We both knew I had a last resort bullet. No matter what the circumstances were, I saved one bullet because I knew this day would come. What she didn't know was that the bullet wasn't my only card to play. I had to use it then, or I knew the next time she had a chance she would succeed in killing me.

"I stole the photo. I admit it." Starting off with the truth was easy. "We met in Everett. He saved my life. When he showed me the picture of you two, I had to take it."

Blaze's grip was still tight on her knife, but she didn't move. Snow caked her black hair. Her lips, pursed tightly, were chapped. The murky light from the setting sun cast deep shadows on her blank face. "Where is he?"

"Cannibals captured me. Their leader was the most insane man I've ever met. You were captured by a convoy of them, weren't you?"

She nodded.

"Maybe they were somehow related. These guys are everywhere. Kevin, the leader, he was obsessed with eating redheads. But, for whatever reason, he decided he wanted me to be his right hand man. Some religious thing. When he captured me, he got Beau, too. I escaped eventually and I beat him until he told me where Beau was. Before I knocked him out, he told me he would never kill Beau. He would keep him forever because he knew Beau meant something to me and I'd come back for him. Then I had to run."

It was a blend of truths and lies that, if she believed it, would work deeply in my favor. Truths: Beau was taken away. I did beat Kevin. Lies: Beau was sent away to be eaten by another Brotherhood, traded for ammo and guns. I didn't spare Kevin and he didn't mention a word about Beau at his death.

"Then where is he?"

"If I tell you, you're going to kill me."

She nodded. "You left me to die. You left my brother to die. If anyone is insane, it's you."

That hurt. It wasn't true, either. I kept my cool. "So I'm not going to tell you. What I said on the island is true, Blaze. I care about you. Give me a chance to show you. I'll take you to the city he's in. I'll help you track down Kevin and he'll know where Beau is. I'll make this right."

"The only way for you to make this right is for you to disappear and for me to find Beau."

"Then that's what we'll do, but in the other order."

The lie was perfect. There was no way Beau was still alive, but as long as Blaze thought he was I could string her along for-forever, I hoped. The common cause unified us. If I could keep her from killing me, we could be together.

It was a tentative agreement, but it held us together for another month while we traveled to Burlington. Here, one of Kevin's crazies told me the destination of the truck Beau left in. Beau wasn't there, but signs of the Brotherhood were everywhere. Groups of crazies straggling behind hunted survivors that came into town, or were already hiding there. Their faces were often branded with the flaming sword.

We fought them and were forced to retreat. The crazies always seemed to have the upper hand with their weaponry and numbers. Fatigued, desperate, and hungry, we ran away. Our successful withdrawal was a miracle.

It didn't stop Blaze. She had experience making molotovs-from high school, she said, not the military-and after careful planning, we killed every crazy in Burlington. We tortured four of them until they gave us information on the location of other developing branches of the Brotherhoods.

Months later, Blaze and I had killed more crazies than I could count. I was living my dream-killing all the crazies that made life so unfair-and Blaze felt like she made progress toward finding her brother. We were happy.

Or at least I was. In the afterglow of a raging gunfight, there was nowhere I'd rather be than with someone like me. But I always saw the disappointment clinging to her crow's feet and the corners of her mouth. No Beau. Still no Beau.

As time wore on, it got harder. The undead world, growing quieter each day, was a difficult place to live. Survivors and crazies came out of the woodwork, looting buildings for all they could. They were an unseen presence, consuming everything left from the world before. I wondered if, this late in the game, anyone was growing their own food or trying to create a life built out of something other than foraging.

That was fodder for my daydreams. Something like Frank's cabin, with big gardens, which I'd return to after a day of busy work killing crazies. I imagined Blaze in that lifestyle, and it made me laugh and feel gloomy at the same time. She'd never want to live like that, not with me, and especially not until Beau was found.