The gunshots outside stopped. I didn't hear any more voices. Either the men were dead, escaped, or found somewhere to hide like we did. My adrenaline levels dropped and I noticed the coldness around me, the way my spine protested against the uncomfortable position.

It was going to be a long night.

One moment I was staring into darkness, and the next sunlight infiltrated the blackness. I hadn't slept, but drifted in and out of a twilight state, constantly reminding myself not to cough or shift even the slightest.

So much for a restful night before Brickston. In fact, this ended up being the exact fucking opposite. Worst case scenario.

Beside the shrill sound of birds chirping outside, I heard nothing else. I tilted my head as slowly as I could, still wincing at the sound of my hood scraping against the plywood. Blaze's face was turned upward, her eyes closed.

She could sleep through anything if she wanted to.

I wiggled my fingers and toes, checking to see if the numbness I felt was severe. My body ached but I was okay. I rolled onto my stomach and waited.

Nothing.

I shimmied close to the edge of the rafters and looked down. I saw half the room from my vantage point and there were no undead. Our sleeping bags and packs were knocked over and askew, results of the zombies ruffling around last night, but other than that it was quiet.

But there was still the other side of the room and the supply room. And downstairs and outside. We were nowhere near clear yet.

"Blaze."

Her eyes were open and alert in an instant. I pulled myself far enough to the edge of the rafter to look underneath me. The upside down view of the room was the same. No Zs. But right at the edge of the extra room, I saw the tip of a shoe.

I raised my hand and signaled that there was one, and I pointed in the general direction of the Z. Blaze turned away from me, toward the window on her side. After a few moments she signaled a number of her own.

Twenty-six.

It wasn't as though we had many options, and it was always best to consider what was inevitable first. We had to drop down from the rafters. We had to go downstairs in order to exit through the back of the bar.

Those things were much simpler than what we had to decide after. We either did them successfully or we died trying. But the after part-would we still go to Brickston? Back to Arbuckle? Or would we go it alone? What were the advantages and repercussions of each option?

Yeah, I liked the live or die options.

I mouthed, on three, to Blaze and raised my fingers, counting down.

On three, we were in motion. My joints popped as I moved, dropping down into the room. My ankle rolled as I landed, sending me tumbling onto my side. The zombie I'd seen earlier activated, shambling out of the room. Her entire chest cavity was ripped up, all the organs gone or eaten to reveal glimpses of her spine on the other side. One leg was bent at an awkward angle, slowing her movements even more.

Blaze hoisted me to my feet and shoved my pack into my hands. I pulled it on and we were off, running down the stairs. Right at the landing, another slow lurched toward us. Blaze, in the lead, shoved it aside, knocking it flat on its back.

The back door was right by the stairs. As we entered the main bar area, at least ten Zs shifted towards us the second they saw us. Blaze had the back door open.

I'd just cleared the doorway when I felt a tug on my shoulder.

And there was Fuzz Face. Only his right cheek and eyeball had been gnawed away. His glassy white eye locked onto me. I brought up my forearm. The thick jacket stopped his bite from breaking through, but the pain was intense.

With pleasure, I thought as I withdrew my knife, held him back, and then rammed it through his temple. I tried to pull it out but it was stuck. I let him drop to the ground, taking the knife with him, as I caught up with Blaze who was already entering the forest behind the bar.

Scores of Zs rounded the corners of the bar, running toward us. I followed after Blaze, trying to stay light on my twisted ankle.

Set aside the complete slaughter of Arbuckle's men, the sleepless night, and the loss of my knife, we were in good shape. The cold air made my lungs and throat feel tight as we ran, but we were okay. The bar situation could've been much worse.

Blaze led us straight away from the bar, putting as much distance between it and us as we could. We jogged for about ten minutes before stopping. There was no visual on any Zs behind us, but if I listened hard enough I swore I could hear moans in the distance.

"Real clusterfuck," she said, like she was resuming a conversation. "If even one of them survived, I'd be surprised."

I nodded as I sat on a fallen tree, taking in ragged breaths. I felt lightheaded. No point in denying it. I needed food, and my tense body needed a moment to gain its bearings.

Blaze sat next to me and pulled off her pack, retrieving a silver package. She used her knife to slice open the corner.

Freeze dried beef chunks. Yum.

"Valtown and Brickston are about the same distance away," I said, after I swallowed a mouthful of the dry food. "What are you thinking?"

Apparently she'd put a lot of thought into it because she answered without a second thought. "Brickston."

I took a swig of water from my canteen. It made the flavor of the 'beef' more intense but helped wash the chunks down. "That's where the Zs probably came from."

"I know," Blaze said. "But most of them are out of the town now, and if there are signs of the Brotherhood, it's worth going. Say we go back to Valtown. Arbuckle would try to send us to Brickston anyway to look for survivors or retrieve supplies. We're just being proactive."

It was true. There was no point in returning to Valtown only to be sent straight back. After losing the support team we were given, I doubted Arbuckle would give us backup. He was like that.

"Let's take a wide loop around and enter through the old tunnel entrance," I said. "Zs or crazies, it will give us an advantage."

Blaze nodded. She downed another handful of beef before rolling the bag shut and returning it to her pack. One day back in the grinder and I was already missing my little apartment with all its conveniences.

And berber carpet. The berber fucking carpet.

Chapter 9.

3 years earlier One minute he was begging for his life, and the next he was on the ground, tomahawk embedded in his skull, bleeding onto the crisp fall leaves.

I squeezed my eyes shut as I brought my fingers to my temple and rubbed circles in an attempt to relieve stress. 'Interrogation' was one of the words Arbuckle used frequently before sending us off on a mission. Blaze happened to hear things selectively.

It was our first set of assignments from Arbuckle. After we agreed to help him and stay at Valtown, his requests were mundane. Talk to people, enforce rules. Then he told us about the supply hoarders, and how valuable they'd be for the town. He encountered two before and knew what they could yield. He wasn't specific on where he got the locations from, and they weren't exact by any means, but we took the opportunity as a way to search for signs of the Brotherhood and Beau.

"Arbuckle's sources know as much as the dirt under this sorry fucker's nails."

Coming from behind a cluster of bushes, Blaze went to the body and jerked her weapon free. It cracked and squelched. The gaping hole oozed blood. She wiped the blade on the back of his shirt.

"Nothing. No drugs, no food," she said. "Arbuckle is clueless. Supply hoarders, really? Some hoarder this guy was."

The guy hadn't put up a fight. He told us exactly where his cabin was, said he didn't have anything, and waited patiently on his knees while Blaze searched it. It was my policy not to kill anyone who cooperated fully, unless we had solid evidence we should do so. Or they really pissed me off. She knew that. This wouldn't be the first fight we had over a similar situation.

"Then why is he dead?"

"He was keeping one in the cabin." Blaze holstered the tomahawk on her hip. "A kid."

She didn't need to go into detail. Sometimes the ones who played nice were the ones hiding the biggest secret.

Blaze pulled a cigarette from her pocket and lit it. The smoke was a shade darker than the early morning fog surrounding us. "Well, what are we going to do? Wasn't he the last one on the list?"

"Last one of the four, yeah. We're going back to Valtown."

Blaze tapped ash onto the lifeless body at our feet, and gave me the bitter look of disdain she'd perfected over the past month we'd been looking for hoarders. It was the longest trip away from town we'd had since we arrived. I thought it would be call for celebration-what with the freedom and all-but the task was hopeless. Not only had we found no glorious supply cache, but we hadn't seen any sign of the Brotherhood.

And now that we were done, our efforts yielding nothing, it was back to base. Valtown was a day walk from the last hoarder we searched. The one still gushing blood that Blaze killed without any consent from me.

"Are you sure you checked the cabin completely?"

"Come on, Cyrus. I know what I'm doing."

I wanted to tell her I doubted it. There was a time when I never doubted Blaze. When I first met her, she was ruthless and calculated in everything she did. When she was angry like this, she made mistakes. Instead, I took a more indirect route.

"We're tired. We've been out here too long. It's easy to miss things," I said.

She shrugged. "Come see for yourself."

I skirted around the body and followed her to the cabin. It might've been a summer home at one point, the place you'd stay while elk hunting, but in the hands of the apocalypse and a crazy, it was dingy. The one story home had a roof covered in moss. The windows were shattered but boarded from the inside. When we arrived, he was outside chopping firewood. I watched him while Blaze investigated, so I hadn't gotten a look at the interior yet.

The child's body was the first thing I noticed. He was naked, his ashen skin taut against his bones. Arms severed at the elbows. Ragged tendons hung from the wounds. A rusty chain was wrapped around his neck, still attached to the old wood stove in the front room.

He'd been dead long before Blaze ended him.

"Kitchen's through there. One door goes to a bedroom, the other a bathroom," Blaze said. "Like I said, nothing. This place is small."

For a small place, he managed to have a lot of junk. But Blaze was right. It appeared to be nothing useful. There were assortments of hardware on the table by the stove. A wood bench was in front of it, where the bastard likely sat to watch his undead slave. In the kitchen there were traces of blood, a few animal pelts hanging over a curtain rod. A swarm of flies buzzed around the pelts. The bedroom held nothing more than piles of clothing and a filthy bed.

I stomped around the house. It was a long shot, but there could be a basement. Blaze almost laughed, the sight of me too much to bear apparently.

But when my boot landed with a hollow thud by the bench, the smirk fell from her face.

"You were right," she said, before I could beat her to it.

We lifted the bench and moved it to the side. I bent down to inspect the floor. The lines of the trap door were almost unnoticeable. If I hadn't been looking for them, I would've missed it. We had to use our knives to get the edge up, then we shoved our fingers underneath to lift up the panel.

We descended the creaking stairs into the damp basement. Shelves were packed in no organized manner with food, medical supplies, and miscellaneous junk. I pulled a couple. They were almost bursting, a telltale sign of botulism. One wooden shelf was rotting, and they sagged under the weight of their contents.

"You'd think he'd take better care of this stuff." Blaze crouched down and rifled through a metal box.

"They're sick," I said. Blaze glared at me and I quickly rephrased. "I'm not defending them. They've shut down mentally. They aren't even human any more. They're so used to doing whatever makes them feel good and in control, they give up everything else."

She didn't respond. Instead she shoved the box back onto the shelf and stood. "There isn't anything here."

My gaze caught sight of a large plastic tub on the ground. I yanked it free and peeled open the lid. Inside were neatly stacked boxes of .223 ammo. The plastic tub had kept them dry and in good shape. I bet they were still usable. Blaze hovered over my shoulder, eyeing the find.

"There's always something, Blaze. You just have to look."

Chapter 10.

I chewed a piece of wild mint I found on the way to Brickston and glanced up at the sky. It was probably early February, based on when the sun set. Winter had yet to give up its grasp to spring. The sky was blue with a brushstroke of milky white clouds, but the air held a chill, though not as bad as last night now that the sun bore down on us. I wondered if it was going to be a mild spring like last year, or if we were destined for freak bouts of snow in March.

We got our bearings after ditching the rest stop, then finally crossed the faint trail to Brickston. The path was overgrown with stinging nettles that caught on our clothes.

"You'd think Arbuckle would send more people out to maintain this trail," I said.

"Tim told me the last crew they sent out ran for it. One of the four wasn't in on it and came back. He said the other three wanted to go solo. Didn't want to be part of the settlements any more."

"Weird. That doesn't happen that often, does it?"

"Often enough to get the idea in people's head, I guess."

We lapsed into silence for the remainder of the walk back to the tunnel. Brickston was the second settlement Arbuckle built, and much smaller. Instead of having fortified gates as a primary way of getting in and out, he tried to dig a tunnel about a quarter mile long from a secret entrance into the outskirt of the town. It ended up being dangerous and ineffective and they built secure gates anyway.

It was situated a half mile off a highway and surrounded by vacant lots. Some of them might've been used for hay at some point, or perhaps had plans for industrial buildings. The area farthest away from the lots consisted of sparse trees and overgrown bushes before finally giving way to denser forest. The forest was where our tunnel entrance was.

Like Valtown, he built up a storage unit facility to create the settlement, but this one was devoted to farming. By the last count, about a hundred people lived in Brickston, and it was a tight fit. Bigger units housed up to six people in bunks, the smaller ones at least three. Unlike the laziness and sense of superiority many of the Valtown citizens had, Brickston reminded me of what Valtown used to be like in the beginning: hardworking, just trying to make something out of nothing.

All the people in Brickston were expected to contribute to the agricultural work in their town. They did a good job. A couple people were experts at year-round harvest growing techniques, meaning there was always work and there was always food. They lead the communities. Despite their efficiency and the addition of Surville, also an agricultural city, the new tiny settlements and growing population in Valtown put a strain on food production.

The trail split three times-right, left, right-and finally we were in a small clearing. I went to the center and felt around in the dead brambles until I found the heavy steel ring to the trap door. I yanked it up and was assaulted by the stench of decay.

"I think one got down there." The stink was earthy and foul. "Smells close."

Blaze nodded and pulled out her combat ax. I withdrew my handgun, dropping the mag to count four rounds. It would be enough because I'd make it be. We pulled out our crank lights and spun them, attaching them to our vests. We went into the tunnel, sealing ourselves in darkness once we shut the door behind us.

The tunnel to Brickston barely held up to the title. Arbuckle's workers dug it over the course of almost eighteen months, fortifying it with wooden beams every fifteen feet. Roots hung from the ceiling and protruded from the sides. Dripping water dampened the air. I felt the walls pressing in at me, as though they'd buckle at any moment and crush me.

I'm not claustrophobic, but the few times I went into that tunnel my body almost had a will of its own to turn and leave.

Dummy tunnels branched off every so often; an attempt to disorient potential raiders if they found it. It was stupid, if you asked me, because there wasn't enough of them to truly disorient someone who was determined. In fact, it just made it easier for zombies to hide.