A runner crawled its way towards me, dragging the remains of its legs behind. Its body was bloodied and riddled with shrapnel. Grenade victim. Flecks of metal and splinters covered its face, pierced its eyes. People stepped on it, but it kept coming. I aimed, fired. Aimed, fired again. My third shot finally took off the left side of its head.

"Cowboy the fuck up." This time it was Blaze. Her face hovered in front of mine. "You're going to make it through this."

A runner came from behind her-one of our own, the junk shop lady-and tackled her to the ground. I lunged forward, tearing the Z off her. Blaze rammed the spiked end of her knife down through her skull. A gush of blood squirted from the wound as she pulled it out, turning gray hair red.

Blaze stood again, while Lasko moved in front of her for cover. Seconds felt like an eternity, but the reality was that combat went fast. There were more bodies on the ground than there were standing. It looked like the fight was in our favor.

She hoisted me to my feet. We stuck together as a unit, Lasko mowing down anything that tried following us. I managed to use the rest of my mag to take down two more Zs before we reached an empty market stall on the edge of the fight.

Numbness overcame my body. My hands and feet tingled, and blackness crept into the corners of my vision.

Blaze guided me around to a side entrance, then set me down in the small space. From under a table, I watched feet scuffle.

Blaze took my hand and put it over my wound. "Keep pressure on it. It's almost over, Cyrus. Just-"

Chapter 19.

1 year earlier I almost didn't recognize her. Her skin was rotten. So different from the ivory I remembered. Her green eyes, the exact shade as my own, now shriveled in her skull. I imagined what they looked like before, the way they always gave her away. No matter how much she tried to lie, our grandparents knew.

"What are you waiting for?" Blaze asked.

Her body swung from the banister of our childhood home. She'd always been good at tying knots. When we were kids, she liked to untangle fishing line from grandpa's tackle box for fun.

"That's my sister."

Ivy reached out for me. A whispered groan escaped her lips.

We'd been in the area. I thought I'd stop by the house just to see if my grandparents kept any memorabilia from my childhood. Sometimes I wanted something to remind me of my life Before, as bad and unusual as it was. I hadn't expected Ivy to be there.

Before the dead rose, it had been five years since I saw her. Visits before that were sporadic, since I ran away. She spent most of her time in adult care homes. Psych hospitals on a few unfortunate occasions. I never thought she'd come back here.

A knot grew in my heart the moment I broke through the front door and saw her there, swinging. As dead as she was, I'd know my sister anywhere. And she didn't look that dead. A few weeks at most. That's what killed me. That she'd been trying to survive the apocalypse all this time and I never once came to find her. If I'd been there, I could've helped her. I could've erased whatever burden it was that drove her to suicide.

Out of sight out of mind. Apathetic. Thoughtless. I could come up with any number of reasons why I didn't go looking for her. None of them made as much sense as the truth.

I was selfish. So fucking selfish.

Blaze exhaled slowly. "Cyrus, you don't have to."

"It isn't her any more. I know that."

It was different with Frank. He would've killed me if I hadn't shot him. It broke something inside of me, but I did it. I could leave Ivy here and never experience the pain of putting down my own family. Now I knew why people couldn't bring themselves to do it.

You knew they were gone, but you didn't. You couldn't.

"Do you want me to do it?" Blaze said.

I gripped my machete. Ivy's shadow swayed across the wall, drifting over the photos of us as children, of our grandparents and parents. We have mom's eyes. Dad's skin and insanity.

"No. Go cut her down. I'll do it."

Blaze climbed the stairs. She seemed to walk slowly. I wondered if she was waiting for me to reconsider. At the top, she sliced through the rope, sending my sister's body crashing to the ground. One of her legs bent at an odd angle, breaking with a wet crunch. She didn't waste a second and began crawling towards me.

Ivy knew my secrets. She knew about the boy I had drowned. She listened to everything I did and never told on me. Never judged. Never asked for anything in return.

I promised a jailbreak when she went to a mental hospital for the first time. I never came. Too busy beating up kids who made my mad at school.

When she cried about our parents being dead, I held her as she shook. I should've told her they were in heaven, because that's what she needed to hear.

Not saying goodbye when I ran away to the mountains, I thought only of myself and my own freedom.

I brought the machete down. Split her skull. Remnants of her liquefied brain seeped from the crack. It was the only good thing I'd ever done for her.

Chapter 20.

"He's waking up."

"No shit he's waking up. His eyes are open."

Lasko and Ghost hovered over me. Ghost wore a solemn expression then disappeared from my view. Lasko's mouth split into a toothy grin.

"Shellshock much, Mr. Sinclair?" She tapped the side of my face. "Thought we were going to lose ya out there."

I was somewhere unfamiliar. A storage unit. Ghost sat at a table cleaning his rifle. Blaze ate something freeze dried out of a bag.

I felt fuzzy. Warm.

"What did you give me?"

"Vicodin," Ghost said. "Lots."

"You wouldn't believe the stuff Ghost has in here," Lasko said. "We got one of the docs to fix you up. No room in the hospital on account of all the wounded, so we're at Ghost's place. Plus, your place smells like a fuckin' corpse."

"What happened?" I asked.

"After you passed out like a little girl, you mean?"

"Lasko, there's plenty of time to make fun of him later." Blaze set her silver bag aside and came over "You bled out quite a bit. I'm surprised you kept going as long as you did. Doc doesn't think the shrapnel hit anything vital and the wound wasn't that big."

Lasko patted my shoulder. "Like I said, mostly shellshock. Nothing to be ashamed of."

The way she said it made it seem like I should be.

Blaze tried not to smirk. I felt like the butt of a joke, and it wasn't nice. "We lost forty, but we killed all the crazies."

"No hostages?"

She shook her head, looking grim. "Unfortunately not. When it became obvious we were going to win, they started killing themselves. It was..." She searched for the right words. "I don't know, Cyrus. It was fucked up to say the least."

Still not surprising. We'd lost a lot, but we won.

"The wall?"

"The hole was secured," Ghost said. "Patched over it with scrap. The undead from Brickston arrived and surrounded the town. We're holding off on shooting. Don't want to waste ammo unless we need to."

The loose feeling the drugs gave me grew irritating. I wanted to be on my game so we could press forward. I pushed myself up and pulled back the sheets covering me. The wound was patched up neatly with gauze. A tiny dab of blood blossomed from the middle of it. It hurt like a bitch, but I'd manage.

"Did the crazies attack anything important?"

"They were headed to the town hall by the looks of it, but only made it to the doors before it ended. Tossed some molotovs and burned down a bit of the market place though." Blaze smoothed hair back from her forehead and her brow furrowed. "Remember what Alex said?"

Memories of the past hours were blurred together, made more difficult to recollect from the hazy state I was in. "Before we left. Something about the base?"

"He said the old prisoner was lying. We questioned him again while you were out, but his story stayed the same."

"And Alex?"

"Claims the old guy is damaged. Stockholm syndrome, basically. He wanted us to take that route because it would be certain death if we did." Blaze went over to Ghost's table and picked up a map. She set it on the bed in front of me. Two red lines were drawn on it. One appeared to be the path the old man told us about, the other another NF road some miles away.

"While we were there, we talked to Alex more. He says there are mines under the factory and that one of them leads out near a road. That's what the old guy wasn't telling us."

An area around the NF road was loosely circled. There were no markings of another road.

"Alex didn't tell me that when I first questioned him," I said.

"One of them is lying, both are lying, or neither know what the hell they're talking about," Blaze said. "It's a huge risk approaching the base, no matter what route we take."

Lasko came to my other side. She pointed at the highway we'd need to take to get into the general area of the base. "Speaking of routes, we'd need to take Highway 2 through to Index."

"The bridge into Sultan has been destroyed, and so is the bridge out of Goldbar." I looked at Blaze. "You know that."

"They were, but the Brotherhood could've repaired them. They also could be taking a longer route around."

I shrugged. "True."

"Anyway," Lasko said, "if the bridges are broken, we can still get as far as possible via car. No matter what, we're hiking the rest of the way. If this mine entrance does exist, we can use it to infiltrate the base underground."

I sighed in frustration. "I'm hearing a lot of 'ifs' and a lot of 'coulds' and that's never good. We need to face the facts. We have no idea what we're up against. We don't know what kind of traps there will be, if this mine entrance exists, or what we're going to do once we get there."

"No," Blaze said. "We do know what we'll do when we get there. Ghost?"

"We're going to bomb them."

And was that any better than the fanciful hypotheticals we were running on? Plus I thought I'd had it with explosives. My eardrums felt bruised, if that was even possible, and throwing all our grenades at the place seemed dangerous and futile. I was beginning to think I should feign passing out for a while longer, rather than hear more of their 'plans.'

Ghost sensed my skepticism. "I know a man in the Index area. Name's Crow. He'd be considered a supply hoarder. Never reported him. It's his own business if he doesn't want to be a part of the settlements. He'll be able to rig something for us. Maybe daisy chain some claymores together. We plant them, clear the area, and wait for the brunt of the damage to finish. We'll have to eliminate the remaining targets manually."

"What about the prisoners, if they have any?" I asked.

A silence swept over the three. I sensed the tension between them and wondered what the argument was like while I was out.

"We have two options. Try freeing them and hope they can run into the woods before it happens, or we..." Lasko took a deep breath, staring hard at Ghost. "Well, collateral damage."

I'd never heard Ghost use a tone other than flat or informative before, so when he raised his voice and stood, all hulk and mass, it made me nervous.

"They're dead either way, Katie. We're giving them a better death."

"You're a coldhearted son of a bitch, you know that?"

"Enough." Blaze stood between the two, blocking Lasko's view of him. "Lasko, go get Alex. Walk it off."

Her chest heaved. Lasko stood and stormed out of the unit, slamming the flimsy door on her way out. Ghost sat back down, staring at his gun parts. Blaze had low tolerance for drama and barreled right over the incident.

"Alex said he would explain more but would only say it to you. Kids are finicky, so I didn't push him. Waste of my time."

"Okay." I felt a flicker of pride that Alex would only trust me. "Doc say anything about when I'd be good to move?"

Blaze laughed, returning to the cot where she took a handful of what looked like freeze dried strawberries. "He said a couple of weeks, but we'd like to move out first thing in the morning. Hell, the Brotherhood might not even know we beat them here yet. Are you up for it?"

"Of course I am. This is just a flesh wound. Once the drugs wear off, I'll be right as rain."

Had I passed out because of the wound? Or did the grenade and overall drama of the attack psychologically mess with me? Frank always had lapses of time where his PTSD got the best of him. He never fell unconscious, but sometimes he wasn't there. He was back in Vietnam, reliving the hell he experienced while serving.

"You'd better hope," Blaze said.

We sat a while longer. Blaze brought me some water, which quenched a thirst I didn't realize I had. Ghost finished reassembling his rifle and sat, staring stone cold at the wall. When Lasko returned with Alex, he acted as though she wasn't there.

Fuck. We needed to be a happy family again ASAP, or things were going to be tough.

Alex still limped as he walked. He sat on the edge of my cot as soon as Lasko let go of him. "Good to see you're alive, Mr. Sinclair." He smiled.

"It takes more than a grenade and some crazies to kill me. Alex, what else do you know about this mine entrance?"