

THE SCAVENGERS

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

BOOK ONE

GEN GRIFFIN

### If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

### THE SCAVENGERS

### AFTER THE APOCALYPSE
### Copyright © 2014 by Gen Griffin

All rights reserved.

ASIN: B00QQQ9FV2

ISBN13: 978-1505498691

ISBN-10: 1505498694

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### Also By Gen Griffin

The Possum Creek Series

Lord Have Mercy (Prequel Novella)

Hot Southern Mess

Hissy Fit

Hot Southern Nights

Pretty Is As Pretty Does

Give Me Some Sugar

After The Apocalypse

The Scavengers

Church of Chaos

False Idols

After The Apocalypse: The Complete Series Box Set

#  DEDICATION

To Stephen, I love you always.

To Kahylan, follow your dreams and write for yourself.

Special Thanks To:

To Brenda and Karen, for being amazing, supportive and always having my back.

Ateshi Shellorne and Jon Bruner, for their support.
Prologue

"Oh great. It's _you_. I thought you'd given up on trying to sneak into our parties. You know you don't belong here." The brown haired girl who guarded the entry to Cell Block B hadn't changed much in the last 6 months. The tips of her stringy curls were pink now instead of black. Her blueberry printed t-shirt was as tight as a second skin. It clung to every ripple on her skinny stomach and showed every rib, as was the fashion lately. She held out her hand expectantly.

It took me several seconds longer than it should have to realize that she wanted to see the little scrap of blue paper Drake had pressed into my hand as we'd left the assembly. I stuck my left hand into my bag, almost hoping I'd lost the sweaty little piece of paper.

"Ugh." The girl sighed with obvious irritation as she watched me dig. "Why don't you spare us both the embarrassment and just go back to Block E. I know you don't have an invite."

I was incredibly tempted just to walk away. Losing the invite would give me an excuse to turn around, go back to my own bed and crawl under the covers for the next three days. Except that, as of yesterday evening, I didn't have my own bed anymore. I shuddered and pulled the invite free of the purse lint. I pressed it into the girl's outstretched hand and smiled at her, not kindly. "Actually, I do have an invite."

The girl raised a heavily plucked eyebrow at me as she took it. "Who'd you beg this off of?" She dangled the invite in the air as if it were a particularly disgusting bug that needed inspection.

"No one. Drake Bledsoe gave it to me." I wasn't trying to brag. I just couldn't see any point in standing around at the entrance to the party while the door guard debated whether or not I was truly cool enough to be let inside.

"Drake invited you?" The girl did a double take. She looked me up and down. I could feel disapproval, maybe even disgust, radiating off of her as she took in my chaotic, frizzy curls and the frayed hem of my favorite, and only, party dress. The blue taffeta skirt had been heavily beaded twenty or thirty years ago. Now half of the beads were missing. Most had fallen off as the glue that held them on had aged. Some had torn off when the dress had snagged on one object or another. Missing beads or not, the dress was still the nicest piece of clothing I owned. Unfortunately, it was shabby and borderline ugly compared to the dresses that the girls who lived in Block B owned. I should probably have been ashamed, but I was too exhausted to be embarrassed.

Instead I nodded and shrugged at the girl. "Why would I lie?"

She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something and then thought better of it. "I think you're telling stories-," she started as a burly guy in a tight black shirt joined her at the door.

"You having problems Danni?" He asked. He had short, close cropped orange hair and flat, black eyes. He stared down at me for a minute as Danni held up my invite. His look wasn't nearly as unfriendly as I had been expecting.

"She says Drake invited her," Danni the door guard told the newcomer. The disbelief was clear in her voice.

"Of course he did," the new guy replied. He smiled down at me. He had a lot of teeth. Far too many for his mouth. "You don't know who she is?"

"Um, no. Should I?" Danni stared at him with obvious distaste.

"Get out of the way, Danni." The guy put one arm across her midriff and pulled her to the side of the door. He gestured for me to walk past her. "This is the girl who stood up in the middle of the assembly today and called the Powers That Be 'bloody fucking liars'." He grinned at me.

"What?!" Danni gaped at me and then looked back up at him. "I heard about that but I thought Noah was screwing with me. She's that girl?"

"I am," I admitted with barely a nod.

"Well, that changes everything." Danni smiled at me and held out her arm. "Come on in. Let me show you around."

"I'll be fine on my own," I said as I walked past her into the crowded, sweaty blue-tinted chaos of my very first Block B party.

The wall-to-floor projection screen that covered the back wall of the large community room I'd just walked into was the largest I'd ever seen. A movie I recognized, Grease, was playing on the screen while music wailed from a heavy duty speaker system that had been set up a few feet away from where the screen ended. The band that was occupying the makeshift stage – a collection of cafeteria tables that had been shoved together for the occasion- was doing more screaming and wailing than singing. The drummer was pounding out heavy, tribal beats that echoed hard against the cement block walls. The light bulbs on the ceiling had been painted blue, creating a twisted, dim light that made me feel like my head was being held under water.

People were tripping all over one another as they danced to the thick, heavy music. This was one of the largest rooms in the Cube but the crowd was so large that there was barely enough space for me to walk without bumping into people. Glitter covered the floor. It was blowing out of fans that had been set up on the edges of the room to try to alleviate the suffocating heat. The fans weren't doing much for the heat but I could see sparkles flickering off my own nose as I walked past one.

I fought the urge to bolt right back out the door I'd just come through. This was nothing like the modest, polite parties Blocks E and D held twice a year. Parties where everyone stood around, sipped watered down punch and chatted about what their neighbors had been doing last night. Of course, no one was fighting to get invitations to the Block E parties. I took a deep breath and choked on the glitter in the air. Glitter, if you have ever wondered, tastes terrible.

Someone laughed beside me. I turned to see a guy with pink hair wearing a sequined tank top. He was shaking his hips at me and then thrusting. He grabbed my arm and began to pull me further into the throbbing, pulsing crowd. I started to pull away from him. I wasn't used to being grabbed by anyone, let alone by strange men. He frowned at me with pink painted lips and gestured to the crowd. He tried to speak but the beating of the drums drowned out his words. He held one hand out to me again. I cast a glance back towards the door I'd entered through and was stunned to realize that the crowd had overtaken it. I wasn't going to be able to leave now, even if I wanted to. I looked back down at the strange boy's hand and then I put my own palm in his. What did I really have to lose by dancing with this stranger?

Nothing.

Especially considering that I'd already lost everything in my life that mattered.

I closed my eyes and focused on losing myself to the beat of the drums. I didn't want to think about my life right now. I didn't want to think about Julie and the ridiculous lobster costume she'd worn the last time we'd tried to gain entrance to a Block B party. I didn't want to remember her fire engine red hair or the loosely knotted scarves she'd fashioned into a bikini. Julie, running barefoot through the halls and howling with laughter after we'd been caught trying to sneak into Block B through the kitchen. Julie had only had a handful of goals in life. One of them had been to get into a Block B party. Another had been to get Drake Bledsoe to notice she was alive.

I'd accidentally accomplished both in a single day. Turns out, all a girl had to do to catch Drake's eye was lose her mind during the assembly session that followed the monthly public meeting of the Powers That Be.

I hadn't meant to cause a scene. Truly, I hadn't. My intention had been to simply get up to the podium and request assistance in locating my missing parents. I hadn't lost my temper until Bud Moon, chairman of the Powers That Be, had told me that my parents elected to leave the Cube without me. He'd told me he felt sorry for me because Mom and Dad had abandoned me, but that there was nothing he cared to do about it.

I opened my eyes and shook my head, trying to focus on the dancing mass of humanity in front of me. I'd come to this party so I wouldn't have to spend the rest of the night lying in bed remembering that Bud Moon was a heartless liar and I'd said as much. With over 4,000 people watching.

The beat of the music slowed slightly. The pink-haired boy disappeared from in front of me. He was replaced with a brown-eyed girl wearing a dress made of plastic wrap. She put her hands on my hips and waltzed me through the crowd, crashing into half the other couples who were attempting to do the same thing. A boy in a blue jacket cut in between us, taking the brown-eyed girl away from me. For a moment I was alone in the center of the throbbing crowd of dancers and then a man I recognized took hold of my arm.

Conner Vaughn was a legend in the Cube. At 27, he was the oldest member of the Scavengers. He was also the most frightening. Well over 6 feet tall, Conner was easily 300 pounds of solid, hairy muscle. Tonight, he was wearing a pair of black leather pants with no shirt. A knife studded weapons belt wrapped across one shoulder and down towards his stomach. Thick gold chains were looped around his neck. His bleached-white beard was so long that it brushed the top of my forehead when he pulled me into him with a savage grin.

"Hello, little one." Conner sneered down at me. "You're not so special, you know."

"I never said I was." I forced myself to meet his fire-kissed brown eyes. Conner Vaughn was the kind of guy you crossed the room to avoid. He had a reputation for having his way with girls from the other Blocks. Heat rolled off his skin and the aroma of his body odor threatened to knock me to my knees.

"Drake wants you," Conner informed me. He began to tow me back through the crowd, heading towards the back of the room.

Fighting would have been futile, so I let him drag me across the dance floor. People literally tripped over themselves in an effort to get out of Conner's way. One of my flat silken shoes twisted and came halfway off my foot. I tried to stop to fix it and Conner nearly yanked me off my feet. His grip bit down into my upper arm. "Let me fix my shoe," I told him.

He grunted but paused momentarily so that I could slip the fabric shell back over my heel. We were only twenty feet or so from the exclusive fenced off area at the back of the room. I could see Drake Bledsoe, Captain of the Scavengers and god with a little 'g', stretched out across a couch with his bare feet propped on a thin girl's back as if she were an ottoman. A short blonde girl was rubbing his toes while another held his drink up as if she were a human cup-holder. Drake Bledsoe and his loyal worshipers. Funny how much I would have given to be one of those worshipers six months ago. Funny how I didn't care now. I straightened my shoulders and tugged my arm loose of Conner's grip. "I'm going to him willingly. You don't have to drag me like I'm an insolent toddler."

"You're a stupid little girl," Conner said as he leered down over me. "If you had any sense, you would run away now."

"I wouldn't be here if I were smart," I said as I sucked in my breath.

Conner lowered his head until we were very nearly eye level. I didn't flinch despite the horrible, fetid aroma of his breath. Not much could make me flinch after 6 years working in the hospital wing of the Cube. Conner let out a low laugh. "You will get yourself killed."

"At least I'll have died for a reason," I replied. I took a step back from him and began walking towards the gate that separated the gods from the rest of us mere mortals. The green-haired kid guarding the gate started to hold up his hand and stop me, but then he caught sight of Conner and stepped out of our way. Two seconds later I was in the heart of Block B. The Scavengers den. The chain fence that separated this part of the room from the rest of the party was topped with razor wire. There were countless knives and blades tethered to the gaps in the chain. The weapons weren't decorative.

I didn't even hesitate as I walked into the chaos. I didn't allow myself to stop and stare at the lushly carpeted floor or the half-naked girls dancing on massive wooden spools in the corners of the room. I didn't allow myself the luxury of comparing their sleek clothing with my fluffy old dress. Running away had never been so tempting and yet I knew I would never do it. Instead, I walked over to where Drake was sitting and elbowed cup holder girl out of my way.

Drake grinned up at me. "Hello Beautiful. I was wondering how long it would take you to find your way to me."

"He was almost too beautiful for my eyes to process. Thick dark blonde hair that fell in delicate waves despite a short haircut. Skin the color of coffee with too much creamer in it, stretched out over thick muscle. Golden eyes rimmed with thick black lashes. He shot me a wide grin and held one hand out to me.

I put my palm in his, relishing the warmth of his calloused skin against mine. "You said you wanted to talk to me?"

"I said I wanted you," Drake clarified. He stood up, brushing away his followers as if they were nothing more than moths that were drawn to his light. He was significantly taller than I was. My head only came up to his shoulder.

"I said I wasn't for sale," I reminded him.

"Never said I was buying," Drake countered. "You impressed me today in the assembly."

"My parents didn't flee the Cube," I said flatly. "They wouldn't have run away. They wouldn't have left me behind if they had."

"I can't do anything about your parents, Pilar. The Powers That Be have already given you an official judgment on your parents-."

"The Powers That Be are wrong." I interrupted him. My voice was more forceful than I had meant it to be.

Drake pressed one finger against my lips. The pressure he applied wasn't exactly gentle. "Hush Pilar. I'm about to make you an offer that I won't make twice. Are you listening to me?"

I nodded. His skin tasted strange against my lips.

"I want you to become a Scavenger."

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. A lump appeared instantly in my throat but I swallowed it. "I've heard the waiting list is three years long."

"The waiting list is three years long for people who want to be Scavengers. It's a little different when I'm the one doing the wanting. We're leaving the Cube for our next hunt in two days. I want you with us."

"You're asking me to join the Scavengers." My hands started to shake and my knees quivered. Being asked to join the Scavengers was unheard of. "I don't have any training," I whispered.

"I'll teach you everything," Drake replied.

"When do we leave?" I asked.
Chapter 1

It has been 28 years, 14 weeks and 9 days since a virus turned more than half the world's human population into flesh eating zombies.

Between the people who were turned into zombies and those who were eaten by the zombies, more than 95 percent of the population died within 6 months of the initial infection. Those who survived holed up wherever they could find safety.

My parents had found safety in the Cube. According to my father, the building had originally been intended as a prison for extremely violent offenders. Construction hadn't quite been finished when the Cube had been re-purposed as housing for survivors. Life inside the Cube is just as restrictive as you would imagine life in a maximum security prison would be, but we are safe.

Mom and Dad have always told me the sacrifices we made to live in the Cube were worth it because we were safe.

It's been 13 days, 12 hours and 42 minutes since my parents disappeared without a trace from our apartment inside the Cube.

In two hours, I was going to leave the Cube for the very first time in my life. My hands refused to stop shaking as I ran my fingers against the laces on my father's old hunting boots. The soles were cracked and the leather incredibly frail. The laces had been knotted together in the places where they have worn through and the gray-white cord in the center is showing on the outside. The boots are easily 3 sizes too big for me, but I'm going to have to make do. You can't get new boots inside the Cube. There's no leather for the uppers. There's no rubber to make the soles out of.

If I'm lucky I'll be able to find a newer pair that fit me better on the hunting trip. If I'm unlucky, I'll trip on the stupid things and get eaten by a zombie.

It's the luck of the draw.

Shame I've never been real lucky.

I was so nervous that I'd already thrown up all the spoonfuls of my nasty little refried bean and cheese breakfast. The beans tasted better on the way up then they did going down. Probably because they were moving at a faster rate of speed.

"I'm glad you decided to join us." Drake's voice echoed through the early morning darkness from behind me. I turned around and forced myself to smile at him. His golden eyes almost matched the dark amber pendant he wears chained around his throat. His chest, legs and arms ripple with muscle under a fitted black jacket and seamless black pants. His boots are beautiful shiny black leather, polished and free of the wear and tear that plagues almost everything in the Cube.

Drake has always been beautiful and I suppose he always will be, but I no longer stop and stare whenever I catch sight of him. I stopped openly drooling after Drake when Julie died. Turns out the frivolous amusement of unrequited love isn't nearly as much fun when you have no one at all to share your obsession with.

"I like your boots," I told him. It seemed rude not to reply when he spoke to me but the truth was I didn't have any idea what to say to the boy who I'd spent hundreds of hours holding fantasy conversations with inside my own head.

"The Scavengers always have the best things," Drake pointed out calmly. "Of course, we're also the most likely to die."

"Is it worth it?" I hadn't meant to ask the question but the words spilled out of my lips on their own.

"Dying?" Drake asked.

"Being a Scavenger."

"I've got a waiting list with three hundred and fifty names on it. That means there are at least 350 other people in the Cube right now who would be willing to take your place here today if you don't want it. Must be worth something." Drake pulled a heavy knife off his belt and began polishing the blade with the hem of his t-shirt.

"I didn't ask how long the waiting list was," I clarified. "I asked you if you think it's worth it. If you went back in time and you had to do it all over again, would you become a Scavenger?"

Drake hesitated for a brief second and then shrugged. "I'd rather be a Scavenger than a sheep."

"A sheep?" I asked, confused.

"Sheeple," Conner said as he strode into the room. He was dressed head to toe in worn out leather and carrying a heavy backpack slung over his right shoulder. A gun, strictly forbidden by the Powers That Be, was proudly displayed on his hip.

"Sheeple?"

"That's what we call-."

"No, we don't." Drake made a slicing gesture at Conner's throat. "We don't."

Conner laughed harshly. "I do."

"You don't either."

Conner leered down at me. "We're the Scavengers. Everyone too scared to go out and fend for themselves in the big bad world-."

"Sheeple," I said. "Sheep people."

"We don't really call them that," Drake snapped. I looked up into his gorgeous golden eyes and realized he was lying.

"It's okay. I get it." I swallowed the taste of burned out beans on my tongue and hoped my voice came out as steady as it sounded in my head.

Conner laughed and thumped me hard on the shoulder. My knees nearly buckled. "It's okay, Drake. She gets it."

Drake raised one of his beautiful, perfectly arched eyebrows at me and shot me a look that could only be described as skeptical. I knew what he was seeing: a stocky girl with little muscle tone, olive colored skin, frizzy hair and sunken brown eyes with deep, dark circles underneath. My clothes had been my Dad's and they were all about 4 sizes too big for me. My own clothes simply weren't suited for leaving the Cube. I'd treated too many newly initiated Scavengers for frostbite and incurable infections during my years in the hospital ward.

"Seven out of ten cadets die within their first three hunting trips," Drake informed me of a fact I already knew. "Nine out of ten die within the first year. It's not too late for you to run away."

"I don't run away." I tried my best to ignore the churning in my stomach. Throwing up stomach acid on Drake Bledsoe's boots wouldn't earn me any bonus points.

"Everyone runs away when shit gets real enough," Conner said with a shake of his head. "Hell, we're running away right now. I am anyways. How about you, Kennedy?"

A slender boy with spiky red hair and too many freckles had just come through the door. He was wearing a baggy dark green military style jacket and rumpled jeans. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes for the last three weeks. "How about what?"

"You running away?" Conner asked.

"From the Cube?" Kennedy tossed his own backpack through the open door of the armor plated school bus that they used to carry supplies during their hunts. "Hell yes. I hate it in here. It's so stuffy. Too many people in here. I can't breathe air that someone else just exhaled."

Conner and Drake both laughed. For the first time wondered if maybe I was in the right place after all. "I always feel like I'm choking," I whispered.

Kennedy looked directly at me for the first time. His eyes were bright blue and slanted. "Everybody always feels like they're choking in the Cube. If I weren't a Scavenger, I'd have clawed my way through the walls after the Brickyard burned."

"Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage," Conner hummed the words.

Without thinking about it, I touched the outside of the jacket pocket to confirm my secret weapon was still safely secured against my skin. I could feel the cool metal barrel through the coarse fabric and I smiled.

Dad's secret was now my secret. It was also my truth. The Powers That Be could lie through their teeth about how my parents must have escaped the Cube in search of a better life but I wasn't about to buy their story. If Dad had left the Cube on his own, he would have taken his gun with him.

He wouldn't have left me behind either.

"I'm ready to go," I told them.

"Us too," Conner said. "We can leave just as soon as Shayla drags her slutty ass out of bed and-"

"Who are you calling a slut, you whore?" A female voice demanded as the door opened one more time. Shayla Coppervox strode into the room like she owned it. Her long cherry streaked hair hung almost to her hips and her neck was thick with chains and gemstones. The jewelry almost made her look like she was wearing an actual shirt when in reality she had a gray silken scarf tied across her chest so that it just barely covered her breasts. Her entire midriff was exposed down to the waistband of her very low-rise and skintight blue jeans. Dark brown thigh high boots overlapped the jeans.

"At least I don't bring my toys on hunts with us," Conner snapped back. He gestured to the tall, slender boy with blonde hair was following closely at Shayla's heels. His black jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt were practical but lacked the quality seen in the other Scavenger's wardrobe choices. He appeared to be lugging both his bags and Shayla's.

I couldn't remember seeing him at any of the recent ceremonies where the Scavenger's bounties were displayed for the citizens of the Cube. He had to be new to the Scavengers, though judging by the sword on his hip, I was assuming this wasn't his first hunt.

"Your loss," Shayla told Conner as she blew him a kiss. She focused her attention on Drake. "Time to go?"

"Almost. Waiting on one more," Drake said.

"Tell me it's not that whiny, worthless little blonde again," Shayla said.

"Cya Gree," Drake said.

"We need to cut that one loose, Drake." Conner had taken Shayla's bags from the blonde boy. He began loading them onto the bus. "She can't fight. She can't run. She isn't strong enough to carry no supplies. She's weak."

"Shush," Kennedy said. He pointed down the hallway. "She's coming."

"I don't care if she hears me," Conner said as an almost impossibly petite girl entered the room.

I hated to admit that I could see why Conner thought this girl was weak. She was under five feet tall and built so slightly that she would likely always have the physique of a young girl rather than a mature woman. Her white-blonde hair was chopped short just above her jaw line. Her t-shirt was a shockingly bright lime green compared to the dark browns and blacks that all the other Scavengers were wearing. It even had sparkles sewn into the fabric. Her pants were purple with fabric so thin that it might as well have been see-thru. Her shoes were impractical silk slippers with no sole. I couldn't see any weapons on her person, but I hoped she'd tucked them in the bejeweled lilac purse she'd opted to carry instead of a backpack or duffel bag.

"Hi," Cya said.

"You're late," Conner snapped at her.

She blinked at him and then narrowed her pretty blue eyes. "No, I'm not. We're not scheduled to leave until 8 am. It's only 6:23 now."

"Everyone else was ready to leave 20 minutes ago," Drake said mildly.

"Our schedules say we leave at 8," Cya repeated.

"I say we leave now," Conner said.

"Not arguing," Kennedy agreed.

I took a deep breath and nodded when Drake looked over at me.

Drake bared his teeth in a false impression of a smile. "Time to go hunting."

Chapter 2

The bus had heavy bars welded over the busted glass windows and frayed blue vinyl seats. The engine coughed and hacked as the bus rumbled through the heavy garage door and into the brickyard. I focused my attention on the other Scavengers in hopes of not seeing the scorched black earth and scalded, crumbling wall that made up the outer wall of Cube.

Up until last year, the brickyard had been my favorite part of the Cube. I loved going outside into the bright sunlight and sitting in the warm air watching people walk, talk and play in the long field of dirt that surrounded the Cube.

The Powers That Be had welded the door between the Brickyard and Cube closed after the fire. We weren't allowed to go outside anymore. It was too dangerous.

As the ancient bus rumbled into the sun I involuntarily took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I had missed the feeling of the sun on my skin so badly since the fire. I could taste the fall air on my tongue. I had crisp, fresh, moist air in my lungs for the first time in a year and a half. It was ecstasy.

"Feels good, doesn't it?"

I opened my eyes to see that the blonde haired boy who had been trailing after Shayla earlier was now sitting in the seat behind me. He grinned from ear to ear as he took deep, gulping breaths of the fresh air.

"It almost makes it worth signing my life away to the Scavengers," I admitted with a guilty smile.

He shrugged his shoulders. "I think they make it out to be worse than it is," he told me. "Last time we went out we were outside the Cube four days and never even saw a single zombie."

"Really?" I had a hard time believing that. Mom always told me you could hardly take two steps outside the Cube without getting snapped at by a zombie. I'd expected the bus to get mobbed with rotting flesh the moment it passed through the heavy gates.

The quiet, cracked asphalt road and surrounding trees were a bit of a letdown in comparison to the monstrous images that had kept me awake all of the previous night.

"Really," the boy confirmed. "I'm Jeb Moon, by the way." He held out one hand and I shook it.

"Pilar Augustus," I introduced myself. You would think that you wouldn't meet a whole lot of strangers when you'd grown up in a giant concrete box that no one ever left, but the opposite was true. The Cube was severely overcrowded. My Dad had always told me that the Cube had been built to house roughly 3,000 people. It was currently occupied by approximately 7,674 people. Over 4,000 too many for the facility to hold comfortably.

Certain groups of individuals, like the Scavengers or the Powers That Be, were celebrities. Everyone else was just someone you had to elbow out of your way on food distribution day.

I still couldn't remember if I had seen Jeb on stage with the rest of the Scavengers during the last assembly. Not that it really mattered if he'd been there or not. I did remember the feeling of my Mom's fingers squeezing all the blood out of mine as a truck load of canned goods were brought into the cafeteria. The Scavengers had delivered 3,492 cans, to be exact. It seemed like a lot of food but it hadn't been nearly as much as we'd needed. 3,492 cans of refried beans and creamed corn didn't do much to feed 7,674 people long term.

Dad said it was only a matter of time before we ran out of food inside the Cube. He'd been very vocal in trying to draw attention to what he saw as a serious problem with the way the Powers That Be were handling our ever worsening food shortage.

Dad had said we, the citizens of the Cube, could not survive another 30 years on increasingly rancid and mushy canned goods. He said it was impractical and unrealistic of the Powers That Be not to have figured out another way to feed the masses by now, especially since no new canned goods had been manufactured since the apocalypse.

Dad had been loudly critical of the decision to close off the brickyard and discontinue the vegetable garden after the fire. Granted, the meager crop of veggies that had been coaxed out of the less than fertile soil hadn't been nearly enough to feed everyone but it had been something. When I was a little girl there had been animals as well, livestock like chicken and cows, but a bad storm had come up and caused a food shortage. The animals had all been eaten.

The fire that had destroyed the brickyard and killed 356 people had started when the generator used to power the boiler that sanitized our contaminated water had suffered some kind of electrical malfunction and exploded. Julie, my best friend since before I could walk, had died because the boiler exploded.

"What kind of weapon did you bring?" Jeb's question brought me back to reality.

I frowned and debated whether or not to reveal my big secret. Guns were illegal in the Cube. All firearms had been confiscated by the Powers That Be as people entered the Cube all those years ago. I didn't know how Dad had gotten the .45 caliber revolver into the Cube and quite frankly, I didn't care. I was just glad to have it.

Admitting I had the gun might impress Drake. Or it might inspire him to confiscate it as his own. Weapons were incredibly valuable. It was a lesson I'd taken a harsh reminder about during the last few days. Making my decision, I gestured to the large, wobbly, rusted machete I had strapped to my hip.

"Not too bad," Jeb nodded at the machete. "I have a sword. Blades work fine on zombies as long as they are sharp. Is it sharp?"

"Sharp enough." I had made sure of that much when I'd traded half my parents' belongings for the blade. I cringed when I thought about how the housing commission had wasted exactly no time in kicking me out of apartment E3976 after I had reported my parents missing. The apartment was all I had ever known. It was also zoned for two to four residents. When Mom and Dad had disappeared the housing commission had given me 4 days to pack up their belongings and move into the single woman's dorms. I now had a small bunk bed and a single locker to house all of my belongings until I got married and had children of my own. Assuming I didn't die during this hunt.

I touched the barrel of the gun through the coat again. It offered cold comfort as the bus coughed and choked its way into the woods and left the Cube behind in the distance.

"It's my second hunt," Jeb confided. "The first one was pretty boring, if you want to know the truth. I'm kind of hoping we'll see some action this time. You ever been outside the Cube before?"

"No," I said. "I work, I guess worked, in the hospital ward."

"Oh. Damn. That sucks."

"I didn't mind it until after the brickyard burned," I confessed. "I wanted a new job after the fire."

"I guess you found one, huh?" Jeb gestured to the bus.

"I guess I did." I honestly hadn't thought about joining the Scavengers that way, but it was the truth. Assuming I could make it as a Scavenger for a few years, I'd never had to see the inside of the hospital ward again except as a patient.

"Alright, listen up." Drake stood up in the middle of the front seat of the bus. "I'm thinking this is going to be a simple trip. There's a decent sized neighborhood in Johnesville and...What?"

Kennedy turned his attentions away from the road in ahead. He released his grip on the steering wheel so he could thump a gauge on the dashboard of the bus with his right hand. "We don't have the gas, boss."

Drake turned to glare at Kennedy. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that unless you think you can get some fuel from somewhere, this bus doesn't have enough juice to get much past Titusburg."

"That's not going to work," Shayla said. She turned to Kennedy. "We have to get past Johnesville or we're wasting our time. There has to be a gas station somewhere nearby."

"We've already raided all the gas stations between here and Butcher Hill."

"Then go past Butcher Hill."

"We can't. That's...not possible." Drake cast a glance towards where Jeb and I were sitting. I could tell there was something else he wanted to say but for some reason he didn't seem willing to say it. Instead he put one of his elegant fingers against Shayla's lips and shook his head. "It's not a good idea."

"We need more cans." Jeb seemed to have missed out on the subtly of the conversation.

"We can't haul cans without the bus." Conner was stretched lazily across one of the bus seats. His booted feet hung out into the aisle.

"I'm tired of hauling cans," Shayla said. "We can't keep doing this forever. It's bullshit that they sent us out again this soon. We only just got back last week."

"We got sent back out because our last hunt was a failure," Cya chimed in unexpectedly from the very back of the bus. "Our job is to bring home more canned goods to the people back in the Cube. They'll starve without them. Not that you seem to give two shits."

"Canned goods heavy and they taste revolting," Shayla shot her a nasty look. "All we found on our last hunt was refried beans, broths and cranberry sauce. No one wants to eat that crap."

"We need those cans to survive," Cya argued. "I still don't understand why we didn't bring everything we found back with us after the last hunt."

Drake frowned at Cya. "It's like I tried to explain to you at the time, we keep a few things back just in case we don't find anything the next trip. The Powers That Be expect us to be successful every hunt. Sometimes the hunts suck and we don't find much, like what happened last time. When our luck goes south we go back to the storehouse and get a few thousand junk cans just to shut everyone up back at the Cube."

"The Cube goes through more than 3000 cans a day."

"Why not just keep your emergency stash at the Cube?" Jeb asked.

"Because the Powers That Be..." Kennedy cursed loudly as the bus let out a loud cough and began to slow.

"What the hell?" Drake demanded. "I thought you said we had enough gas to get to Titusburg."

"We do. Gas isn't our problem." Kennedy was glaring at the hood of the bus as the 50 year old vehicle lurched to a stop and smoke began to pour out of the engine compartment.

"Fuck," said Conner as he stood up.

"That smoke is going to attract zombies." Shayla narrowed her eyes at Drake. "You better get this thing fixed ASAP."

"Be easier to work on the engine if you weren't in my way." Drake pushed Shayla away from him none-too-gently as he and Conner pried open the door of the bus and stepped out onto the open road.

"Should we try to help them?" I asked Jeb. He shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know anything about motors," he told me.

"One of you needs to get up on the roof and keep a look out for zombies," Conner interrupted us.

"On the roof?" I repeated.

Jeb gestured to an area above our heads. I could see an emergency trap door leading onto the top of the bus. "You want to go or should I?"

If I had been braver I would have offered to go, but the fact of the matter is that I still wasn't sure I'd done the right thing when I'd said yes to Drake's offer to become a Scavenger. Now that I was out of the Cube and facing the very real possibility of running into a live zombie, I was terrified of my own shadow.

"You can go," I told Jeb.

"I'll go," said Cya. She stood up and shoved her way past us to the trap door. I had time to notice once again that she was wearing the type of thin, easily torn clothes that I had opted to leave back in my drawer at the Cube. I got a good look at the bits of colored glass that had been glued to her worthless shoes as she stood on the seat, pushed the trap door out and scurried onto the roof.

Chapter 3

It was getting downright hot inside the bus when a lone zombie appeared on the horizon. I missed seeing it come out of the woods 50 yards to the left of the bus because I was too busy watching Conner, Kennedy and Drake dig around in the bus's engine without their shirts on.

Drake's chest was made of sleek, clean cut muscle. His dark skin was flawless and almost glowing with good health. His beautiful body made for a stark comparison to Conner's thick hairiness and Kennedy's scrawny white chest and visible ribcage. Kennedy's chest was probably a lot more normal than Drake's sculpted abdomen and chiseled biceps were, but it only served to remind me of exactly why Julie and I had spent months stalking Drake from afar.

I wondered what Julie would have said if she'd lived long enough to see the day when Drake knew my name. I desperately wished I could tell her. I also desperately hoped Drake was too occupied by the motor to notice my drooling at him.

Shayla certainly didn't make any attempt to disguise her own lust. She had been watching Conner like a hawk. She made a big show of licking her plump lips with the tiny tip of her pierced tongue whenever he happened to look up from the smoking heap of an engine.

Conner encouraged her behavior by flexing his muscles or rubbing the tips of his fingers across his own nipples with a lazy grin whenever he caught her looking.

"That's a little sick," Jeb muttered the second time we caught Conner playing with himself for Shayla's benefit.

I nodded in agreement. "Are they always like this?"

"Unfortunately, yeah." Jeb shook his head and leaned back against the smoldering hot vinyl seat. I could see sweat beading on the back of his neck and darkening the fabric of his practical long sleeved black t-shirt. "Wait until you're stuck with guard duty and wind up having to listen to them have sex all night."

"Gross." I felt dirty just watching them tease one another through the bus windshield. I could only imagine how nasty I would feel if I actually got stuck watching them do the deed.

"What does he see in her?" I'd asked the question rhetorically.

"She's hot. And she's easy," Jeb shrugged his shoulders in silent apology. "Really easy."

"You've slept with her, haven't you?" I belatedly remembered that Jeb had walked to the bus this morning carrying all of Shayla's luggage.

"She doesn't make it optional," Jeb confessed. He looked away from me as a dark red blush traveled down the back of his neck. "She told me I wouldn't live through the next hunt if I didn't do exactly what she wanted. I think she'd intentionally get me killed."

"Jesus Christ. You're kidding right?" I asked disbelievingly.

Jeb shook his head no. "A lot of Scavengers die during their first five hunts. I'm pretty sure zombies aren't the only cause of death."

"Crap," I muttered. "You slept with her because you were afraid she'd kill you?"

"I slept with her because I'd rather have her as an ally than an enemy," Jeb clarified. "I don't think she'd kill me so much as she'd let me be killed, if that makes sense?"

"Kind of," I admitted with a nod. I got the gist of what he was trying to say and I didn't want to think about the repercussions it could have. What if Conner wanted me to sleep with him? Would I die if I turned the creep down? I didn't want to dwell on it.

Shayla untied the knot that held her top on.

Drake happened to look up from the engine at the exact moment her nipples popped out. He grinned and let out a loud whistle.

"Give it to me, baby!" Cooner jeered at Shayla.

She waved her makeshift shirt through the air like a flag of welcome. Drake punched at Conner playfully.

"Will you guys quit?" Kennedy gave all of them an irritated glare. "This radiator is shot and I'm going to need both of you paying attention if we have any chance of getting back on the road today."

"We're working. We're working." Conner smirked back at Shayla. "At least, some of us are working."

Drake opened his mouth to reply when Cya spoke calmly from the roof of the bus. "Somebody needs to get to work," she said. "We've got company."

Instantly Drake, Kennedy and Conner were on alert. Shayla immediately stopped fondling herself and stood tensely at the front of the bus. Jeb tensed beside me and my own heart went racing. I couldn't see Cya from my seat inside the bus but everyone outside the bus had turned to face the left side of the vehicle. I twisted in the seat and stared hard out the windows as Kennedy grabbed a knife that he'd left lying on the side of the engine compartment and Drake drew a large ax from a holster at his side.

I touched the barrel of my gun through my jacket. Jeb stood up.

"Should we go outside?" I asked him.

He shook his head no. "I don't think so. There is only one that I can see. They should be able to handle it. Drake always says that we should only fight when we absolutely have to. He says no one who isn't absolutely necessary in a fight needs to be involved. Getting needlessly involved in a fight can get us needlessly killed."

I forced myself to peer over Jeb's shoulder until I finally located the zombie with my own eyes. A cold sweat was leaking down my spine and soaking the back of my shirt.

The zombie was old. Really old. She'd probably been a grandma or a great-grandma before she'd died. Her back was so far bent that she appeared to be folded in half as she lurched past the tree line towards us. Her gray hair was tangled with sticks and bits of bushes. Half of her head had dissolved into bloody mush. The blue house dress she wore was filthy with dirt and gore. Her left leg was gone at the calf but the ancient zombie was oblivious to pain. She lurched towards Drake on the stump.

I was anchored to the floor with my own dread as I watched Drake grin at Conner and Kennedy. "Paper, rock, scissors?" he asked them. He swung the ax loosely at his hip.

"Nah." Kennedy shook his head and turned to look at the top of the bus. "That the only one?" he asked.

"As far as I can see," Cya replied. I could hear her feet hitting the roof as she turned to scan the horizon in all directions.

"It's probably a loner." Conner sneered nastily at the zombie. There was a dark hunger in his cruel eyes. "Look at the leg. They've already started to cannibalize it."

"Will one of y'all just kill the damn thing already?" Kennedy asked with an annoyed humph. "We have real problems to worry about and that thing is distracting me with its smell."

"Whatever your pleasure." Drake grinned handsomely as he took three quick steps towards the zombie and swung his ax without any further posturing. The blade hit the zombie's neck cleanly and a moment later her ancient head was laying in the dirt next to her crumpled, completely rigid torso. Drake kicked the head with the toe of his boot so that it rolled up against the side of his body. He reached into his pocket and deftly pulled out a matchbook. He struck the fire and dropped the tiny stick on the corpse. A moment later the smell of burning, decomposing flesh hit my nose and I saw Julie again, screaming with agony as the burns that refused to heal rotted her alive. I felt her skin flake off against my arm as she clung to me with the nubs of her charred hands. Her chest had rattled with the effort of her last breath. Her blind eyes had staring into mine as she rose from the bed, free of pain and hungry.

"You've never seen a zombie before, have you?" Jeb's concern jarred me from my hideous memories.

I flinched as he took my arm and gently eased me back into my seat. "It's okay," he said. "I promise it gets easier. You get used to it."

I swallowed the charred lump in my throat. "It's not that," I croaked out the words. Jeb stared at me doubtfully. He clearly thought I was trying to save face. I ducked my head back into the seat of the bus and rested my forehead against the hot seat.

"Really. It's not the zombie. I've seen enough zombies." I was afraid he'd think I was weak and tell the other Scavengers that I didn't have what it took to be a member of the team.

He raised one eyebrow at me skeptically. "It's okay."

"It's the fire," I whispered. "I worked in the hospital ward when the brickyard caught fire. I've seen plenty of zombies. I just can't stand the smell of burned skin."

"Oh. Shit. I'm sorry." Jeb blinked in surprise and sympathy. He opened his mouth to say something else but a loud, angry shout from outside took us both by surprise. A horrified scream echoed through the woods and blood spurted against the side of the bus, coating the glass windows with bright red ichor.

Jeb and I rushed for the back of the bus in time to see that a huge male zombie had gotten within biting distance of the three men working on the engine without Cya noticing his approach. Shayla was screaming obscenities as she jerked on the lever to open the bus door.

Someone cursed and a loud thump sounded as a weapon connected with the side of the bus. An angry shout echoed through the metal wall.

"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." Cya kept repeating the same words over and over again from above our heads.

Drake rolled out of the way as the doors opened and Shayla rushed the zombie with her long bladed knife clutched in her left hand.

"Die, you bastard!" She howled as she jabbed the knife straight through the zombie's right eye. The massive man twitched once and dropped to the ground. Shayla stood tall above the body, shaking with rage as she spun to face Drake. "Are there any more?"

"No," Drake was shaking his head furiously as he stood next to the front of the bus. "Just that one." He gestured to the man Shayla had just dispatched.

"How bad did he get bit?" she demanded as she turned her attentions to Kennedy. Her green eyes were focusing on everything around us except for the dying man directly in front of her.

Conner was laying on the ground at Kennedy's feet with his arm ripped off of his body. The arm was laying in the dirt next to the bus. Conner was making a strange gurgling noise in his throat as blood covered the cracked asphalt. His eyes were rolling around inside their sockets. Kennedy shook his head no. His skin had gone pale except where drops of Conner's blood had landed on his bare skin.

Drake picked up his ax from where it was leaning against the bus's tire. Conner had been attacked so quickly Drake had never had the chance to grab his weapon.

"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I am so sorry," Cya's faint pleas to a higher power were going unheard by the group surrounding Conner.

With a grim look on his handsome face Drake took two steps towards Conner. "Rest in peace," he muttered just loudly enough to be heard as he swung the ax down and severed Conner's head from his body with a loud thwack.

Conner abruptly stopped gurgling.

"Oh my God. Oh God please. Oh my God." Cya's mantra was the only noise to be heard other than the sizzling of the burning zombie flesh.

Drake, Kennedy and Shayla were exchanging looks with one another over Conner's corpse. Kennedy was shaking his head no. Drake had his lips pursed closed in anger. Shayla spun around and glared at the roof of the bus.

"Shut up you stupid bitch!" She screamed at Cya. "You stupid worthless bitch. This is all your fault!"

I couldn't see Cya from where I was standing inside the bus and I wasn't about to draw attention to myself by moving. Shayla was staring at the roof of the bus with murder in her eyes. The next thing I knew, she had planted one of her feet on the metal rack that ran down the side of the bus and snatched Cya down from the roof by her ankle.

The tiny blonde squealed in pain and fear as she hit the bloody pavement next to the tires. Shayla still had hold of her bony ankle and she gave Cya a vicious yank. Cya kicked out instinctively but her worthless fragile slipper shoes did nothing to loosen Shayla's grip.

"You killed Conner!" She practically spat the words at Cya. "You were supposed to be standing guard you worthless bitch!"

"I'm sorry. Oh God I'm sorry." Cya was whimpering pathetically as Shayla drug her across the pavement. Her thin clothes were tearing on the rough ground and I could see fresh blood welling up from scrapes on her legs and sides. "I'm so sorry. I didn't see him. Oh my God I didn't see him."

"Shut up!" Shayla dropped Cya's foot so that the smaller girl was lying flat on the ground. Shayla planted a vicious kick in Cya's side. "Shut up you worthless piece of trash!"

I felt pressure on my fingers and realized Jeb was clutching my hand so tightly his knuckles were turning white. I made no attempt to pull away from him.

Shayla's round face was flushed with fury. Her necklaces and bracelets jangled, clanked and tangled against her reddened skin as she kicked Cya repeatedly with the toe of a pair of wickedly pointed boots. She kicked Cya six, seven, eight, I don't know how many times.

"Shayla, stop." Drake's voice cut through Cya's screams as she flailed around on the ground.

Shayla planted another kick in Cya's ribcage. "She killed Conner."

"I know." Drake moved in between Cya and Shayla. He gently placed his arms around Shayla's shoulders. "But you can't kill her. We need her."

"No we don't," Shayla hissed. "She's worthless. She can't even stand guard. She deserves to die."

Drake didn't say anything. He simply stood in front of Shayla and held her immobile while Cya whimpered behind him on the ground.

"We need her," he repeated. There was an emphasis on his words that I didn't understand. Cya had screwed up royally, that was for sure. "We can use her."

"We need a new radiator," Kennedy spoke softly from behind Cya. "I can't fix this bus without new parts."

Shayla opened her mouth and then shut it abruptly. She stared up at Drake through tear-filled eyes and shook her head. "You can't be serious? It would be suicide to go to Ra Shet now, with this." She jerked her chin at Cya's huddled form.

Ra Shet? I was confused. I'd never heard of Ra Shet before.

Drake shook his head no and gestured to Cya. "She has value, Shayla."

"Not enough." Shayla shook her head, visibly angry and frustrated. "We're not in a good position right now."

"We don't have a choice," Kennedy said. "Unless you're willing to deal with the Church of Chaos."

Jeb turned to face me, a look of confusion and surprise on his face. It was clear that the others had forgotten about us for the moment. "Church of Chaos?" He mouthed the words at me silently. I shrugged my shoulders and turned my attention back to the conversation. We could figure out the meanings of words and phrases later on. My gut told me something extremely important was being decided outside the bus.

"No," Drake scowled. "The Church's prices are too high."

"The Church wants weapons," Shayla said flatly.

"Like I said, they want too much." Drake didn't look at Cya this time but I got the distinct feeling his words had something to do with why he felt we still needed her. I wondered if Drake was going to make Cya trade her weapon to this Church of Chaos in exchange for the parts to fix our bus. I wondered if she could make up for causing Conner's death so easily.

Cya halfway sat up. "My skin is burning," she moaned.

"You deserve worse than that," Shayla spat at her before turning her attentions back to Drake. "Going to Ra Shet is a mistake. We'll make fools of ourselves."

Drake opened his mouth to reply but Kennedy cleared his throat, loudly, and interrupted him. "We need a radiator," he said purposely looking directly at Jeb and me. I took an involuntary step backwards as his cold blue eyes landed on me. "We can't haul cans back to the Cube without the bus."

Drake and Shayla followed his stare from Cya to us and nodded.

"We need cans," Drake said calmly. He looked at Shayla as if he was wondering if she was going to challenge his statement the way she had earlier on the bus. Shayla glared at him for a moment and then down at Cya again.

"We need cans," she agreed. The smile she pasted across her angry features sent chills from the top of my skull to the tips of my toes.

Chapter 4

I hadn't realized that Drake knew about my years working on the hospital ward until he handed me an overstuffed duffel bag of medical supplies from somewhere in the back of the bus and charged me with treating Cya's wounds. Jeb was ordered to take over guard duty on top of the bus while Kennedy and Drake finished their work on the ailing engine. Shayla burned the bodies of the new zombie and Conner. I couldn't help noticing that she searched her fallen lover's body and pocketed all the weapons and valuables before she dropped the match on his shirt.

Cya slapped at my hand the second time I attempted to apply a bandage to her ribs. I grabbed her wrist roughly in one of mine. "Quit," I told her. Cya had dissolved into a sniveling, snotty mess as I made her remove her thin, shredded t-shirt so I could rub burning alcohol on the bloody scrapes she'd gotten when Shayla had yanked her off the roof of the bus.

"You're hurting me," she whimpered. Her reddened eyes were filled with misery. I strongly suspected her ankle was severely sprained or even broken due to the heavy swelling and deep purple and black bruise that had formed around the joint, but she kept insisting it was fine and wouldn't let me anywhere near it.

"If I don't get the dirt out of your cuts you could get an infection," I told her.

"I don't care." She crossed her arms over her bare chest.

"I care," Drake's voice came from behind me. I hadn't even noticed him come back into the bus. He was standing in the aisle putting a box of tools back into the storage box under the second seat from the front. "We can't risk you getting an infection. We don't have any medicine."

"You all want me dead anyway." Cya hiccuped and more tears ran down her cheeks. "Don't you?"

"Of course not." Drake smiled gently as he stepped up beside me and sat down on the seat next to us. "What happened to Conner was an honest mistake. We don't blame you." He took Cya's hand in his own. "We've all made mistakes. Horrible mistakes. Being a Scavenger is a scary job and we have to take a lot of risks in order to get the supplies the folks back at the Cube need to survive. You just have to remember that everyone is counting on us. You can't let yourself be held back by a single mistake."

Cya was staring at him in hopeful disbelief. "You don't hate me?" There was so much hope in her voice I could scarcely look her in the face. He did hate her. All of them hated her. I was sure of it after I'd watched them have that strange conversation outside less than two hours ago.

"No, I don't hate you." Drake smiled warmly at Cya. The sunlight reflected off of his golden hair and cast his face in a warm glow. He looked so much like the hero lover Julie and I had always made him out to be in our fantasies that I wondered if I had misunderstood the undertone of the conversation between Drake and Shayla. "Let me take care of you."

"You won't hurt me?"

"Of course not."

"Am I going to be okay?" Cya asked.

I frowned and stared down at the alcohol soaked rag in my hand. I remembered the way Drake had said we needed Cya. It hadn't sounded friendly to me but today had been a bad day in an otherwise shitty year. Maybe I was reading things into Drake's words that weren't really there.

He certainly looked kind enough right now as he took the alcohol soaked rag out of my hand and gently began to wipe dirt out of the abrasions on Cya's skin. She closed her eyes and let him run his hands all over her petite, well-proportioned frame, including the damaged ankle that she had refused to let me touch.

Drake frowned when he saw how severe the swelling was in the joint but he didn't say anything negative as he gently began to massage Cya's injured leg. "You'll be just fine," he told her. She looked up at him with pure adoration.

"You promise?" she asked.

"I promise." Drake took Cya's dainty little hand into his own and squeezed her fingers affectionately. "Go ahead and get dressed, it's almost time for dinner."

He turned to face me. "Thanks for taking care of her.

I nearly opened my mouth to tell him that I hadn't been of any real use but the intimacy in his eyes stopped me.

"You're going to be a real asset to the Scavengers," Drake said as he leaned across the seat and planted a quick and completely unexpected kiss on my cheek.
Chapter 5

The pressure of someone standing on the edge of the seat I was using as my bed jarred me back to full consciousness just when I had finally managed to doze off. I sat up abruptly to see a man's shining black leather boot resting against the edge of my seat. It was attached to a long, muscular leg wearing tight blue jean pants.

"Sorry," Drake said as he adjusted his grip on the trap door that led onto the roof of the bus.

"It's okay," I told him. "I can't sleep anyway."

He hesitated for a moment and then smiled gently at me. God the boy was beautiful. My cheek suddenly burned with the memory of the quick kiss he'd unexpectedly put on my skin earlier in the day.

"Come talk to me." Drake issued the invitation so quietly I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. Then he held out his right hand to me, palm up, and I processed that he was asking me to go up onto the bus's roof with him. I looked around the inside of the bus to see that Drake and I were the only two occupants who weren't dozing fitfully on the hard vinyl seats.

I nodded and took his hand. He pulled me onto my feet and a moment later I found myself sitting on the rusted roof of the Scavenger's bus. The air around us was smoky from the burned corpses and the woods were silent. I took a deep breath and choked on the air. Drake turned and frowned at me with a concerned look on his face. I shook my head at him.

"I tasted fire for months after the brickyard burned. I have horrible dreams of flames and charred skin when I sleep and I wake up with ghost smoke smoldering in my mouth." I wasn't sure why I was confessing my worst nightmares to a man I barely knew other than by reputation but I wanted him to know that I wasn't the zombies that were bothering me. "I should have known the Scavengers would burn the bodies of any zombies we encountered and killed."

"Turning flesh to ash is the only way to make certain a zombie is truly gone," Drake confirmed. He was scanning the woods around us with a practiced eye.

I nodded at him. I knew the why and I knew the how of it. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that, by trying to escape the burning ghosts of my job in the hospital ward, I'd be jumping both feet first into my reoccurring nightmare of flaming corpses.

I'd been the one to decapitate and burn Julie's corpse after she had turned. She'd made me promise that I would stay with her while she died. She'd said it would be too embarrassing for anyone but her very best friend to see her turned into a zombie. It had hurt so badly to watch her turn into a charred monster, but I'd stuck with her out of love. She would have done the same for me.

"The truth is that I've killed hundreds of zombies within the very predictable clinical setting of the hospital ward," I told Drake. "Dr. Zeb normally knew ahead of time when a patient was likely to die and he'd order us to chain them to their beds in preparation for the change. Once the patient stopped breathing it was a simple matter to use one of the three long blades we kept on the south wall to decapitate the body. The gurney men would then remove the body from the hospital ward and take it down the hall to the pit for burning. On particularly bad days the smell of burning flesh would fill the halls of the hospital ward but most of us learned to ignore it. The smell had never really bothered me until the brickyard fire." I shuddered involuntarily and Drake surprised me by putting his arm around my shoulders. He pulled me against his chest. I snuggled into his warmth without meaning to. I'd felt so alone lately it was an incredible comfort to have someone to lean on. I pushed my earlier misgivings about Drake out of my mind. He'd been kind to Cya when we'd been talking in the bus. He'd been nothing but friendly during dinner while he'd been discussing his plans of searching the surrounding area for the parts we'd need to repair the bus as soon as the sun came up.

"The brickyard fire really upset you, didn't it?"

"I knew a lot of the people who died." The truth I'd kept so close to my chest and hidden behind a smile while I worked in the hospital ward spilled out of me before I realized what was happening. "I grew up in Block E and the fire happened on our day. The only reason I wasn't there when the explosion occurred was because the hospital ward was shorthanded that day and I'd been asked to work. My best friend was burned in the fire. I had to watch her die slowly in the hospital ward while I changed her dressings and prayed she'd start to recover. I stood there and watched a lot of people I cared about die. I couldn't do anything to help. It was awful."

"I'm sorry." The sympathy in Drake's voice sounded genuine. He rubbed the flat of his palm up and down against my spine. His touch was gentle and deceptively soothing.

"I had to get away from the hospital ward," I confessed. "Every time I walked down the hall all I could think about was who had died in what bed and how many times I'd watched loved ones turn into monsters." I didn't realize I was crying until Drake stroked his thumb across my cheek and wiped my tears away.

"You agreed to join the Scavengers to get away from the hospital?"

"You made me an offer I couldn't refuse," I admitted. "Julie died and then less than 6 months later my parents up and disappeared from our apartment. I have no one left. I needed to get away before I went crazy. You offered me a way out and I took it."

"I saw you as an asset to our team." Drake ran his index finger across my jawline and tilted my chin up so that I was looking directly into his dark eyes. "I'm glad you decided to join us."

I moved my mouth but my tongue was suddenly so dry that no words would come out. I forced myself to nod instead. My heart was beating itself silly against my ribcage. I didn't know how I would ever manage to keep breathing when my mouth was only inches away from Drake's.

His lips were soft and tasted like mint when they brushed against mine. The pressure of the kiss was deliberate as Drake traced his tongue against the edges of my lips. His arms wrapped around me and turned my body into his as his lower lip invaded my mouth.

"Relax," Drake whispered in my ear as his hands slipped across my back. "Haven't you ever been kissed before?"

I hadn't, but this didn't seem like the ideal time to bring up that my only sexual experiences to date involved rubbing my tongue all over a pillow I was pretending was Drake while Julie compared my efforts to the kisses we'd seen in the movies the Powers That Be occasionally showed during major holidays and celebrations.

Instead, I slid myself slightly forward and aimed my lips for Drake's. He met me halfway and before I knew it my tongue was in his mouth and his tongue was working its way down the back of my throat. I couldn't breathe very well but I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy a moment I'd always thought would be spectacular. I was alone in the dark with Drake Bledsoe, kissing him on top of the Scavengers' bus. The night air was crisp and a little bit damp. The birds in the forest were chirping and faint strands of music were coming from somewhere off in the distance.

I froze mid-kiss. Was I really hearing music? Drake's tongue was still exploring my mouth but I stopped reciprocating as I focused all of my attention on the faint melody coming from somewhere to the left of the bus. I pulled away from Drake abruptly and wiped his spit off my chin without really thinking about it.

"Pilar?" Drake was obviously surprised I'd pulled away. "What's wrong?"

I held up my fingers to silence him. I tapped my finger against my right ear indicating he should listen. His expression immediately changed. He jumped up from his sitting position and grabbed hold of the knife on his belt.

The music stopped abruptly and someone in the darkness laughed.

"You better show yourself," Drake demanded angrily as he stared into the woods. I reached for my machete and was horrified to realize I had forgotten it inside the bus. It was lying next to the seat with my jacket. And my gun.

"What are you going to do if I don't, Drake?" The laugh echoed again. I could almost see the silhouette of a man's shadow next to the base of a fat tree 30 feet to our right. "Stand on the roof of your busted bus all night and make threats?"

"How did you...?" Drake let out a low growl of annoyance. His shoulders relaxed slightly and he changed the grip on his knife from a stabbing hold into a throwing grasp.

"I could smell you." The shadow man took several steps into the clearing and I gasped.

Zombies weren't supposed to be able to talk.

He laughed again and took another couple of steps towards the bus until he stood tall and strong and decidedly on display in the moonlight. He spread his arms and looked directly at me. Or, at least, his left eye focused on me. The right eye was milky white and distinctly dead in appearance. It had been bisected with a thick, nasty looking ridged scar that sliced through his features in a straight line that started at his square jaw line and ran across his cheek, through his eye and eyebrow and turned into a thick streak of gray-white hair that ran through his otherwise jet black waves. The eye that was watching me was the coldest, cruelest shade of blue I had ever seen. His nose was perfectly straight and his smiling lips were thin. A section of the lower right hand side of his jaw appeared to be missing. A chunk of flesh on the left side of his neck was wrinkled like a badly healed burn and it ran under the collar of the black leather jacket he was wearing. He had a cross bow strapped loosely to his shoulder and an assortment of weaponry hung from a belt that dangled off his slender hips. I guessed he was taller than Drake by a couple of inches and his shoulders were significantly slimmer. I got the impression of lean muscle and speed as he twisted to face me squarely. He couldn't have been more than a couple of years older than I was.

"Don't trust him," the mutilated stranger told me bluntly as he jerked his chin towards Drake.

"Excuse me?" I blinked at him in stunned horror. The injuries and scars on his body were those of a zombie and yet the way he was standing and speaking were definitely not the mannerisms of one of the dead.

"Go away," Drake practically spat the words at the stranger. "You have no right to be here."

"I think you're forgetting your manners, Drake."

"You don't know a damn thing about manners." Drake adjusted the grip on his knife and stepped forward to the edge of the bus as if he were preparing to throw the weapon.

"No one has ever claimed that I had any manners. It was awfully rude of me to interrupt you when you were trying to suck that poor girl's face off, wasn't it?" Zombie boy chuckled again. "I was just a little concerned that you had indulged in too much of the forbidden bounty."

Drake growled again as he raised the sharp blade into throwing position.

"Go ahead. Throw it." Drake's tormentor held his arms out so that he made a bigger target. He made no move for any of the weapons that dangled from his belt. I counted at least four knives, some wicked looking barbed circles I'd never seen before and one medium sized sword. "I really could use another knife," he taunted.

Drake stood frozen. His handsome face had become a mask of fury and the snarl that escaped his throat made me take a step backwards. The hand holding the knife dropped back down to Drake's side without releasing the blade. "What do you want?" Drake demanded.

"Want?" The tone implied there was nothing Drake could possibly have that the monster would want.

"Why are you here?" Drake clarified.

"Thought you might enjoy some music so you could serenade your latest lover." He laughed again and reached into the front pocket of the leather jacket. I tensed, expecting to see a weapon. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a small rectangular piece of metal. He raised it to his lips and blew the faintest bit of air through the harmonica. I recognized the beginning bars of a melody my father had used to sing me to sleep with when I was a little girl. A wave of homesickness hit me so hard I thought for a moment I might collapse.

I forced my attention onto the man who was holding the instrument. I focused my gaze on his blank, white eye until the urge to cry was replaced with the slightest stirrings of fear.

"Stop that!" Drake hissed at our tormentor. "You'll draw them to us."

"There aren't any of the dead nearby. If there had been, you already would have attracted them with all the screaming you did earlier."

"I didn't scream," Drake snapped.

"Your girls did." He shifted his single good eye to me. "Was it your first zombie?"

"I wasn't one of the ones screaming," I practically spat the words at him. I surprised myself with the vehemence of my own defense. He hiked up one of his jet black eyebrows and I was startled to realize he was coldly handsome if I didn't look at the disfigured side of his face. "Really?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter who was screaming," Drake cut in abruptly. He put one of his hands on my shoulder and pulled me back away from the edge of the bus's roof. He placed himself squarely between me and the stranger. "You shouldn't be here."

"I go wherever I want to. You seem to like to forget that you're the one crawling around like a pitiful little worm in the middle of my valley."

"Your valley?" I couldn't hide my shock at the tone of his words. I didn't know who this man was or how his existence was even possible but I'd had enough of his blatant scorn and disrespect. "Do you realize who you're talking to?" I demanded. "We're Scavengers. We were appointed by the Powers That Be. We don't just follow the law of the Cube. We are the law of the Cube."

"I see." The stranger dropped his arms to his sides and frowned at me. "You're awfully brave aren't you?"

His words took me by complete surprise and I didn't know how to respond. Drake choked on whatever words he had been about to say. "Leave her alone, Seth." He spoke the monster's name with a familiarity I knew I didn't trust.

"You leave her alone," Seth countered. "I'm not her enemy."

"You aren't her friend," Drake said.

"Neither are you," Seth replied. He focused his one-eyed gaze back on me. "Don't trust him. He'll lead you to slaughter, little lamb."

"Go to Hell, Seth." Drake made dismissive gesture at Seth and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me back against his chest. I hesitated for a moment and then allowed him to draw me to him. The pity in the stranger's – his name is Seth, a voice in my head reminded me - one good eye was igniting the unsettled feeling I'd had in the pit of my stomach ever since I'd come back to our apartment from my shift at the hospital ward to find Mom and Dad gone without a trace.

Our timing is all wrong for a trip to Ra Shet, Shayla said.

The Church of Chaos wants too much, Drake told her.

We need her.

I shuddered hard but it did nothing to dislodge the growing suspicion that everything I'd thought I'd known about the world outside the Cube was wrong.

Drake tightened his hold on me. "Leave." He told Seth. "You're scaring her."

"I'm not the one she should be afraid of," he replied with a small shake of his head. I felt his one-eyed gaze burning into the top of my head but I refused to look up from my scuffed boots. I didn't want to see his horrifying, half-zombie stare again. The last fragile piece of the little girl I had been before the brickyard had burned was insisting that as long as I didn't look at Seth again I could pretend he wasn't really there. If I didn't have to see that dead eye again then I could go back into the bus and tell myself that zombies were zombies and people were people and there was no gray area in between the two.

I swallowed a lump of panic that was growing in my chest but I couldn't help the low whimper that came out of my throat.

"Go." Drake told Seth.

After another moment of silent staring, Seth disappeared back into the trees far more quietly than he had come.
Chapter 6

"What the hell was he?" I fought against a months' worth of unshed tears and a hurricane's worth of barely contained emotions.

"Don't worry about him. You don't want to know." Drake gently rubbed my back. I could feel the steady pressure of his heart beating against my cheek. He smiled down at me and as I stared up into Drake's beautiful, soulful eyes and remembered Seth's warning not to trust him.

I put both my hands on Drake's chest and pushed him away. "What was he?" I asked again.

"You don't need to know."

"I want to know."

"It's complicated."

"Explain it to me."

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me. I'm smarter than you think." I crossed my arms over my chest and decided to try a different tactic. "What is Ra Shet?" I asked.

Drake opened his mouth and then closed it abruptly. "Where did you hear about Ra Shet?" He demanded.

"You were talking about it earlier today, after Conner was killed."

A muscle in Drake's jaw twitched as he turned his back to me under the guise of scanning the tree line for more uninvited guests.

"If I'm going to make it as a Scavenger then I need to know what I'm dealing with," I pointed out. Drake hissed in annoyance.

"You don't know anything about being a Scavenger," he said angrily.

"Obviously not. You don't want to teach me." I couldn't keep the tears from stinging my eyes. I was exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed. Drake frowned at me as a single bead of salty moisture leaked out of right eye and traveled down my cheek.

"I'm not trying to hurt you, Pilar," Drake said as he stepped towards me and pulled me back into his arms. "It's not personal. It's just that most new recruits can't handle the truth. It breaks them."

It was the first time I'd heard him use my name. Funny how the Spanish syllables didn't sound nearly as dreamy coming out of his beautiful mouth as they had in all my fantasies back in the Cube.

"I want honesty, Drake. When my best friend was dying in the hospital ward no one wanted to tell me that she wouldn't make it. Everyone kept lying to me and telling me that Julie would pull through because they didn't think I would be able to do what I needed to do to take care of her if I knew I was losing her." The tears were escaping freely down my cheeks now. "My parents disappeared from our apartment in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. The Powers That Be keep telling me that Mom and Dad must have gotten tired of Cube living and escaped to the outside. What the Powers That Be don't realize is that Mom is terrified of her own shadow. She watched her first husband turn into a zombie during the middle of dinner. He chased her into the bathroom and tried to eat her. He killed her little sister when she couldn't make it out the door in time. He killed their daughter. Mom is so completely petrified of zombies she wouldn't even go out into the brickyard. Dad couldn't even get her to go out onto one of the patios without physically carrying her outside. My Mom didn't leave the Cube on her own two feet and Dad wouldn't have made her go."

"I see," Drake said after a long hesitation. I very much doubted that he did. I considered telling him about the gun that I had hidden in the pocket of my jacket but Seth's warning suddenly came back into my mind.

Don't trust him.

I was surprised to realize that I didn't trust Drake. Not enough to reveal I was in possession of an illegal weapon and plenty of illegal ammunition. I couldn't trust him until he trusted me with the truth about the world I had just walked into.

"I want the truth." I spoke the words so quietly even I could barely hear them.

After another moment, Drake nodded. He gestured for me to sit back down on the roof of the bus. "Have a seat, this is going to take a while."

When I sat down on the cold metal roof, Drake settled down on his knees beside me. He took both my hands in his big, warm palms and gave me a small smile. "If I try to explain everything we'll be here for the next year and half, so I'm going to give you the basics. If you still want to hear more once I'm done we'll have plenty of time to go over the details during the next few weeks." He squeezed my fingers. "Is that okay with you?"

I nodded.

"Okay, then." Drake sighed and chewed on his lower lip as if he were having trouble deciding where to start with his explanation. We sat in silence for several minutes while Drake stared at the trees, the moon, and the clouds covering the moon and finally down at the roof of the bus we were sitting on. The smell of smoke brushed past us every time the wind blew. The smoke served as a constant reminder that I hadn't dreamed this whole mess up and I wasn't going to wake up curled up under my blanket on the couch in our apartment come morning.

"Do you know why we only eat canned foods?" Drake's question took me by surprise.

"They're the only food left," I replied.

"Not exactly true," Drake shook his head. "We can grow food, you know. Fruits, vegetables and grains will all still grow if you try hard enough and manage to get enough water to the plants."

"Okay, if that's true, why did the Powers That Be destroy our garden?"

"Everything is contaminated by the zombie virus. Every single plant, animal, building, even the air and the water are contaminated."

"We're contaminated." I remembered Dr. Zeb's explanation from my first few weeks at the hospital ward. "Even if we don't show any outward signs of the virus we're still contaminated by it. That's why we still change into zombies when we die even though we were never bitten."

"Right," Drake nodded. "I don't know if you're old enough to remember it but the Cube used to have livestock as well as a garden."

I shook my head. "I was just a baby when they killed off all the animals."

"Did anyone ever tell you why they killed the animals?" He asked.

"I was always told that there was a bad storm and we ran out of food and had to eat them all."

"The part about the storm is true, but the reason they killed off all the animals was because they had started showing the effects of the zombie virus."

"The animals turned zombie?" I was confused. "I thought animals couldn't turn into zombies."

"Animals don't turn into real zombies, but if they consume enough food and water that are contaminated with the virus then they will start to change."

"Change how?"

"Did you get a good look at Seth?" Drake asked. I shuddered and nodded. He tightened his grip on my hands. "Seth is one of what we call the Changed. He's human, but he's lived off food and drink that contain the virus for so long that he's starting to turn into a zombie without ever actually being bitten by one."

"Oh God. How awful." A million of my worst hot, sweaty nightmares came rushing up at me out of the blackness. How many nights had I dreamed of waking up to discover that I had been turned into a zombie but somehow could still think my own thoughts and still had feelings?

Drake must have seen my distress because he instantly hugged me close. His chin came to rest on top of my head. "I know. Can you imagine how panicked people would be back in the Cube if they ever found out?"

I nodded, recalling how terrified some of the people in the hospital had been when they were facing relatively minor injuries. "I can't imagine what would happen if someone told everyone there was a chance they might start to very slowly and gradually become a zombie. There would be mass hysteria."

"Now do you understand why we keep it a secret?"

"Wait?" My head jerked up abruptly. "Are you trying to tell me that we are all turning into zombies? That we're all, Changed?" I would have bolted if Drake hadn't been holding me so tightly.

"No. No, I'm not. We aren't."

"But then, why would other people be changing?"

"Canned foods were sealed before the virus outbreak. If you only eat cans, then you're only eating foods that haven't been contaminated."

"Oh my God." I put my hand over my mouth. "The Powers That Be killed all the animals because eating fresh meat was turning us in to zombies?"

"Basically," Drake released his grip on me slightly. I noticed that my skin was bright red where he had been holding me.

"Then, that guy, Seth – he hasn't been eating cans?"

Drake hesitated. "I'm not sure I need to tell you any more tonight. I'm afraid you might have a hard time handling everything. In the past we've had recruits go crazy when we told them the truth."

"Trust me when I say anything I can imagine is probably worse than the truth," I told him honestly. "I've always had an overactive imagination. The nightmares I had about monsters under my bed were 1,000 times worse than any zombie I've ever seen, including the two today."

Drake hesitated for a moment and then nodded. It was apparent that he was gathering his thoughts and I didn't try to rush him. I was having a hard enough time accepting that the flavorless 30 year old canned food I despised so much was the only thing keeping me from looking like Seth. I couldn't get his dead, white eye out of my thoughts.

"You realize that you'll never be able to go back from here?" Drake asked me unexpectedly.

"Huh?"

"Once I tell you everything, you won't be the same girl. You won't look at things the same way. Even if you run screaming away from the Scavengers and go back to the Cube and your job in the hospital ward, you'll see things that will remind you about what you learned tonight. You'll understand things you don't want to understand." Drake shrugged his broad shoulders. There was sympathy in his eyes.

"I already see things I don't want to see. Maybe understanding them will help me figure out how deal with what I see," I told him.

He chewed his lip for a moment longer, then raked his fingers through his glossy hair.

"What did you think you would be doing when you joined the Scavengers?" he asked.

"Um, I don't know, really. Just whatever was needed of me. Why?"

"What did you do at the hospital ward?" He switched tactics.

"I was a nursing assistant."

He shook his head no. "Nursing assistant is just a job title. What did you do?"

"Oh." I understood what he was asking now. "Mostly I took care of people. I dressed a lot of wounds. Brought water and food when people asked. Changed bandages. Changes bed pans." I made a face at the last one. "Why?"

"What did you think you would be doing when you joined the Scavengers?" he repeated his original question but now I understood the context of his words.

"I guess just helping find supplies and bring them back to the Cube," I said. "My Dad always told me the name Scavenger comes from the idea of a scavenger hunt. He said that the Scavengers kept lists of supplies that were needed in the Cube, things like food and medicine, and went out to search the outside world for those items – kind of like a big scavenger hunt. With zombies thrown in for a bit of excitement," my voice wavered a little bit as I attempted to make light of the situation.

Drake shook his head at me. "Your Dad was probably right about 20 years ago."

"Twenty years ago?" I repeated in disbelief.

"Yeah. The description you just gave me is what the original Scavengers did do, back when finding food was just a matter of locating your nearest zombie-infested grocery store and clearing out the aisles. What we do now is a lot more complicated. And a lot more political."

"Political?" Now I was really confused.

"You already met Seth. He's the leader of...well, we don't need to go into that right now, but let's just say he's kind of my antithesis."

"Antithesis?" I wasn't familiar with the word.

"To put it simply, I'm the good guy, he's the bad guy." Drake smiled at me and this time it was genuine.

"Oh, I get it," I said, pushing away the memory of Seth telling me not to trust Drake. Drake was telling me the truth now and according to him, Seth was the enemy. It only made sense that the enemy wouldn't want me to trust Drake.

"Good. I hope you never see him again, but if you do then you'll need to remember how dangerous he is."

"He said we were in his valley." The words came back to me unbidden.

"Yeah," Drake scowled. "The Cube is located inside the area of land he considers to be his turf."

"What?"

"Don't worry about it right now. It's really not important."

"But?"

Drake shook his head fiercely. "It's not important, Pilar. It really isn't. They don't bother the Cube and we avoid them when we go outside of it. We almost never cross paths."

"Why did he come here tonight?" I countered.

Drake kicked at the bus. "He was probably hoping I'd need his help. Seth would like nothing more than to see me beg."

"His help?" I asked.

"It all goes back to what we do," Drake shook his head in frustration. "You see, the Scavengers were scavengers originally but useful goods are becoming harder and harder to come by. The grocery stores are pretty much empty now. We're down to searching through individual houses and hoping like hell no one beat us to it. The thing is..." he trailed off but I didn't think I needed him to finish explaining anyway.

"We're in Seth's turf." I filled in the blanks in his sentence.

"Yeah. We're in Seth's turf. He and his people have already raided most of the houses and businesses in the valley. The only supplies that are left are the ones they don't want."

"Oh my God." The severity of our situation was easy to grasp with far reaching consequences.

"It's not a good situation," Drake confirmed.

"But, if they have all the canned goods, then why is Seth-? I mean, why does he look the way he does?"

Drake was quiet for several minutes before answering.

"There aren't enough cans," he said finally.

"What?"

"You wanted to know why Seth is turning into a zombie. It's because we're almost out of canned goods. Pretty soon no one is going to have a choice about whether or not they're going to eat contaminated food."

I was struck speechless by Drake's admission. The implications of running out of canned goods were almost too much to take in. If I hadn't already seen Seth – that dead eye – I would have accused Drake of lying to me.

Drake kept right on talking. "You asked me about Ra Shet earlier. Ra Shet is a city a hundred or so miles from here. It's supposed to be the only city within a thousand miles."

"A city?" I was stunned by his revelations.

"Yeah." Drake nodded. "A pretty big one."

"But, I thought there weren't any cities left?" I asked. "I was always told that the Cube was the closest thing left to a city."

"Maybe that was true when the Cube was first occupied, but it's not true now. Ra Shet is bigger than the Cube and it has a lot more people in it."

"Do they have canned goods?"

"Not enough." Drake's eyes searched mine, but I didn't know what he was hoping to see. "But they have more cans then we do."

"Oh, wow."

"Ra Shet is struggling in a lot of the same ways the Cube is. There isn't enough food. Not enough supplies left over from before the apocalypse. The difference between Ra Shet and the Cube is that the king of Ra Shet is trying to promote growth and industry within the city. He's been working with his people to produce new goods, medicines and more food."

"Okay." I took a deep breath and struggled to understand all the information that he'd given me. "I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out where all of this leaves us."

"What do you mean?"

"You just told me that if we can't find more canned goods, we're all going to be forced to eat food that will slowly turn us into zombies."

"Right," Drake nodded.

"You also told me that we're unlikely to find very many cans because Seth and his people have already taken them."

"Now you're starting to understand."

"I don't feel like I understand anything. What are we supposed to do to get more food?"

Drake shrugged his shoulders. "It's a lot to take in, but what the Scavengers mostly do now is trade. We go back though the houses and stores looking for valuables that earlier searchers might not have thought to take. We trade anything we can find for more food."

"You've actually been to the city?" I asked.

"Plenty of times. If we can't find parts for the bus tomorrow we're going to have to go to Ra Shet to get them."

"But if we don't have any cans to spare, then what would we trade for the parts?"

"The upper class in Ra Shet have a thing for luxury items. They like jewelry, statues, and dishes, pretty much anything pretty or shiny enough to catch their attention."

"And they'll actually give up their canned food for baubles?" I asked in disbelief.

Drake nodded his head. "If you have enough power in Ra Shet, you don't have to worry about food."

"That doesn't make sense." I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts. My gut instinct was telling me that I was missing something and that Drake wasn't giving me the whole story, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what kind of information he might be leaving out.

"It will. Give the idea a little time to sink in," Drake said.

The idea that there was an entire city nearby was shocking in and of itself. I wondered what it looked like. I wondered if everyone was crammed into tiny little apartments or if people had their own homes. I wondered if the king of Ra Shet would kick you out of your house if you didn't meet an occupancy requirement.

Maybe I was wrong about Mom and Dad's disappearance. If Dad had known about a city nearby he would have left the Cube. He hated the Powers That Be. He thought they were idiots who made bad decisions for the people of the Cube. He'd never been shy about sharing those thoughts either.

Drake's arms went around my waist and suddenly all I could feel was the proximity of his skin to mine. His lips brushed against my neck. "You're taking this better than I thought you would," he told me.

I sighed and leaned back against him. "Right now none of it seems real," I admitted.

"How about this part?" He turned me around so that my eyes were even with his chin. He ducked his head down so that his lips were even with mine. "Does this feel real?" he asked as he kissed me.
Chapter 7

It was raining when the sun came up. The weather was doing absolutely nothing to improve anyone's lousy mood. I was exhausted as I zipped my jacket up and wrestled my frizzy, tangled hair into a somewhat manageable braid that ran down the center of my back. I kept sneaking glances across the bus at Drake, wondering if he would be as affectionate this morning as he had been last night on the roof of the bus. So far, aside from a wink he'd shot me as he'd handed me half a can of creamed corn for breakfast, he was acting like last night had never happened.

I wished I could act like last night had never happened. Drake had been telling the truth when he'd said what he told me would change the way I viewed the world.

"We need to try to find a working radiator for our bus today," Drake announced as I scraped the last of my cold, miserable meal off the walls of its corroded can. "I want to split up into groups of two. We have three experienced hunters and three newbies so I'm thinking we'll split up by experience. I'll take Pilar with me since this is her first time out of the Cube."

"I'm not taking that girl," Shayla announced loudly. She pointed to where Cya was huddled in a shivering lump against the side of the bus. Her thin, fragile clothes were providing her with no protection at all against the steady drizzle of rain. I'd assumed she would have brought a jacket in her bag, but if she had then she wasn't making any move to go get it and put it on.

"Me neither," Kennedy said. "Don't even think about sticking me with her, Drake. I'll have to pull a radiator if I find one. I can't lug it and her back here. If I have to choose between carrying a radiator and carrying a recruit who can't carry her own weight, I'm fixing our bus."

Cya let out a low moan as she tried to stand up. It was clear that she couldn't put any weight on her leg. "Just leave me here."

Drake scowled. "No one gets to stay here. We have to go out on foot then we all have to go out on foot. No one gets special treatment in the Scavengers."

"I can't-can't walk." She pushed out her swollen, purple ankle so that we could all see it. She'd used a knife to cut the leg off of her thin pants. Her foot had swollen along with her ankle and her little shoe had been discarded.

"Too damn bad," Drake said. "You're walking. We're all walking."

"She's not walking with me," Shayla reiterated.

"Or me."

"Fine," Drake snarled. "How do you two want to split up?"

"We have to stick to one experienced hunter and one newbie?"

"Yes."

"Me and Jeb. Kennedy can take the other girl, Pilar." Shayla stood up and crossed her arms over the front of the thick black shirt she was wearing. "You can take the cripple."

"Fine," Drake snapped even though his tone clearly said that it wasn't. "Let's get moving. The sooner we get a radiator, the sooner we can get on with our real hunt."

With that decided, I now found myself trudging out into the wet, cold woods with Kennedy approximately an hour after the sun had come up. Kennedy wasn't talkative so I found myself with plenty of time to think about what Drake had told me the night before.

Canned food was gross. The older it got, the grosser it was. When I had worked in the hospital ward, we'd made a game of looking at the expiration dates on the cans we fed our patients. Whoever found the oldest can won the right to give it to the least pleasant patient we had. Some of the food was so disintegrated it was impossible to match the image on the wrapper with the contents. A lot of the cans didn't even have wrappers anymore, making guess the vegetable-meat-soup game another hospital ward favorite.

I wasn't in nearly as good of physical shape as Kennedy was and my poorly fitting gear wasn't helping. The too big boots were rubbing blisters on my heels by the time we came across our first abandoned house thirty minutes into the walk.

Kennedy was carrying a massive backpack and had insisted I do the same. He said that even if we didn't find anything that could be used to fix the bus, we might find something that had some trade value in Ra Shet.

Drake had provided Jeb and Cya with the short explanation about Ra Shet this morning during breakfast. He'd left out the part where eating any food that wasn't canned would turn you into a zombie. He hadn't mentioned Seth at all. I wondered if Kennedy and Shayla would be upset if they knew about Seth coming to the bus last night. I suspected they would.

The first house we searched was full of moldy clothing, sagging furniture and rats. The second house netted us a handful of canned green beans and Kennedy picked up a tool box he apparently thought was worth lugging the weight. The third and fourth houses yielded more of nothing. I was really starting to see what Drake had been talking about when he'd told me everything had already been picked over by scavengers. I got lucky on the fifth house though. There were faded pictures hanging throughout the hallways and living room walls. Most of them depicted three teenage girls with slanted green eyes and red hair. The oldest was a little wider around the middle than I was but both of the younger girls looked to be almost the same size as me.

I was halfway through raiding their closets when I heard a door open behind me. "Don't come in here, I found some clothes," I called out, not wanting Kennedy to see me half-naked. I had my back to the door as I yanked my new jeans the rest of the way over my hips and hurriedly buttoned the fly.

Someone laughed from behind me and I froze with one foot half-way into a cowboy boot that was a whole lot closer to the right size than Dad's hunting boots had been.

I'd heard Kennedy laugh yesterday when he and Conner had been working on the engine. His laugh was a high pitched bray, not the low chuckle that had just come from the other side of the room.

My machete was laying on the bed, still attached to my belt. I knew there was no way I could reach it in time as I turned to face Seth.

He was leaning against the chest of drawers next to the bedroom door and watching me with an amused smirk on his face. In the dim light of the rainy morning I could see that his skin was too pale to be considered normal and his hair, except for where the scar cut into his skull, was blacker than night. I slid my hand into the pocket of my wet jacket, glad I hadn't gotten around to taking off the damp leather yet. The grip of the gun was comforting in my hand.

"How did you get in here?" I demanded as I yanked the gun out of my pocket and pointed the barrel at him.

Seth eyed the gun impassively. "Good morning to you too, little lamb."

"Where's Kennedy?" I asked. "What did you do to him?"

"Kennedy? I didn't do anything to him. He's in the garage of a house three doors down from this one trying to figure out how to crank a motorcycle that doesn't have a carburetor on it," Seth replied. He appeared completely unconcerned by the weapon, which made me even more concerned.

"He left me?" I jammed my foot down into the boot and it immediately tried to fold in half. I stumbled and nearly fell over. I would have hit the ground if Seth hadn't caught my arm and pulled me back up right.

"Kennedy likes motors better than he likes people." His touch was surprisingly warm on my arm. I'd assumed he would feel as cold and dead as he looked. My heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest as I pulled away from him, trying my best to make sure I didn't accidentally look him in the eyes. I was staring at the floor as I took a hurried step backwards. My shin caught the edge of a small box I hadn't noticed sitting at the end of the bed and I lost my balance. I tried to grab the edge of the wall but the gun in my hand was too clunky. I missed and landed with a thump on the bed. On top of the machete.

"Ouch!" I yelped and jumped back up, dropping the gun in the process. The boot folded over for a second time and next thing I knew I was on my butt on the floor.

Seth started laughing again as he bent down and picked up the gun. He examined it for a moment and then gently laid it down on a small table that was next to the bed. He held out his hand to me. He had what my Dad called musician's hands. Long, slender fingers with short, neatly kept fingernails. Scars crisscrossed his knuckles and palms in all directions. There was a scar straight down the inside of his middle finger that looked like he'd run it down the tip of an extremely sharp blade.

I didn't want to touch him again so I ignored his hand. Instead I grabbed the edge of the box I had tripped over as I kicked off the offending boot and scooted my knees underneath me. A moment later I was on my feet again and oops, accidentally looking directly at Seth's disfigured jaw.

I could almost see his teeth from the outside of his skin through the quarter sized hole in the side of his face. The blank, mottled eye blinked at me once and then I forced myself to focus both of my eyes on his good eye before I lost my creamed corn all over his heavy duty black lace-up combat boots.

"You're a zombie," I spoke without even realizing I'd said the words out loud.

"Am not." Seth crossed his arms over his chest and very purposely scowled down at me.

"Are too," I told him. Much to my surprise, his left eye, the blue one, wasn't all that scary to look at. There were little flecks of gold mixed in with the blue that surrounded his pupil. His lashes were far longer and darker than my own. Really too pretty for a boy. Especially one who was scaring the shit out of me.

"Am. Not." He shook his head at me and suddenly I realized that he was enjoying scaring the shit out of me. There was something in his demeanor that was intimately familiar.

"Are. Too." Maybe it was the way he kept cocking his head at me when I kept tripping over my own two feet. Or the causal way he was invading my personal space. Or maybe it was the smirk that just barely showed at the edge of his narrow lips that reminded me so much of my Dad when he was teasing me.

"Not."

I stopped dead in my tracks. Jesus Christ did this monster really remind me of my Dad?

"You're missing a chunk of your face," I pointed out as I forced myself to really look at Seth. To look at him without looking at him, screaming zombie and running away.

"Shit happens." Seth shrugged his shoulders and smirked. "You just sat on a machete."

"That wouldn't have happened if you hadn't snuck up on me." I had been right last night. He wasn't nearly as muscular or as broad across the shoulders and chest as Drake was. He was lean almost to the point of too skinny under the nubby-textured long-sleeved cotton shirt he was wearing. The cross bow was absent from his wardrobe today but he still had the weapons belt slung low against his slim hips.

"How was I supposed to know you were running around in here naked?" he asked. I guessed he was easily over 6 feet tall and most of the height was in his legs. His hips were easily six inches above mine.

"You knew."

"Not the naked part," he said. "That was a lucky bonus. Nice underwear."

"Ugh." I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last three minutes I had quit being afraid of Seth. I was still wary of him and I definitely didn't like him much, but he wasn't going to hurt me or he already would have done it. He'd had all the opportunity in the world to kill me in between my dropping the gun and my less than graceful landing on the machete.

"Maybe we should start over," he suggested, holding out his hand to me. "I'm Seth."

"I know." I glared down at the cowboy boot that had tripped me twice in less than ten minutes. I needed new boots but not at the expense of my life. If Seth had been a real zombie I would have been dead.

"I was being polite," he clarified. "I didn't catch your name last night."

"Maybe I'm not sure you need to know it."

"Fine," he eyed me for a moment. "If you won't tell me your name, I'll have to give you a new one."

"Oh, this ought to be good." I decided it was safe enough to turn my back on him as I headed back to the closet. The cowboy boots weren't going to work for me, but maybe I could find another pair of shoes that would. My toes were freezing after slogging through mud puddles in Dad's leaking boots all morning.

I could feel Seth's cold, dead eye on me as I pushed hangers of clothing out of the way of the shoe rack that hung next to the door.

"You look Hispanic," Seth decided from behind me. I knew he was taking in my tan skin, short, stocky build and long brown hair.

"I am Hispanic. My Mom was from Mexico." Some girl had really loved her high heels that was for sure. And it did me no good.

"You look like a Carolina," he used the ethnic pronunciation.

"No," I whispered, frozen in place with chills running down my spine and shoes forgotten. He'd said Carolina exactly the same way my Dad always had when he was teasing my Mom.

"No?" he asked.

"My name is Pilar," I told him, shaken to the core as I turned back to face him. "Carolina is my Mom's name."

"Oh." I could tell by the sound of his voice he knew he'd said something wrong. The air was charged between us for a moment and then he broke the silence. "It's been a pleasure to meet you, Pilar."

"That's a lie," I muttered.

"Is not." Seth approached the closet and pulled out a pair of lace up boots I hadn't noticed because there was laundry kicked over beside them. "Try these," he told me. "They're made well and they won't slip around like the ones you've been wearing."

"How do you know my boots have been slipping?" I argued with him for the sake of arguing as I took the boots he handed me. I didn't want him to be right about anything.

"Your feet are rubbed raw," he looked purposely down at my toes. There were bright red patches of skin next to both heels and on the edges of my big toe.

I couldn't argue with that, so instead I sat down on the edge of the bed and began untying the laces on the boots so I could try them on. A pair of socks were sitting next to me on the bed so I pulled them onto my feet and purposely ignored Seth as he rattled around in the closet while I put the boots on.

Five minutes later I finally had to admit he'd managed to pick a pair of boots that fit me well. He handed me a neat looking pink backpack that had the appearance of being stuffed to the point of bursting the zipper.

"What is this?" I asked him.

"Practical clothes," he replied. "I took the liberty of going through the closet and packing up everything I thought you would be able to use."

"That was," I paused and considered him carefully. His shaggy black hair was falling across his good eye and I thought I saw a hint of apology in his expression. Had he realized how much his calling me Carolina had disturbed me? I thought he had, because the bag of clothes seemed like a kind of apology. "Nice of you," I finished. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." He held out a second item to me. It took me a minute to realize it was a medium-thick light brown canvas jacket. "Take this too."

"I like mine," I said as I shook my head. Dad's jacket still smelled like him. Wearing it was as close as I could get to feeling like I was back safe in my Dad's arms. I wasn't willing to part with that feeling yet.

"It's too bulky. It's going to get snagged on something at the worst possible moment. You could get hurt," he said. He thrust the other jacket at me. "Don't get yourself killed for a stupid reason."

"Why do you care?" I couldn't stop myself from blurting out the question that was now weighing heavily on my mind. Seth had been easier to understand when I'd thought he wanted to hurt me. Now it was obvious that he didn't and I had no idea why he was still around.

"I like you." He returned my bluntness with some of his own. "You have guts."

"Guts?" I asked. I rubbed my hands down the outside of Dad's jacket once more and reluctantly realized Seth was right. It was too much fabric. I slipped it down off my shoulders and laid it gently on the bed.

"Courage. Spirit. Whatever. You're smart and you're brave. I like that." Seth held the new jacket out to me again. This time I took it.

"Drake hates you." I wasn't sure why I kept opening my mouth and blurting out things that were better kept to myself.

"Don't trust Drake."

"Drake's a hero, why wouldn't I trust him?"

"You only think he's a hero because you think you're in love with him," Seth countered. I nearly choked on my own spit. I didn't know which part of that comment I wanted to argue with him about first.

"Drake is a hero and I am in love with him," I finally managed after I stopped coughing.

"Liar." Seth shook his head at me. "You're not in love with him. You're in love with the person he's supposed to be."

"What is that supposed to mean?" I demanded.

Seth opened his mouth to answer but before he could the door downstairs banged open loudly.

"Pilar! You ready yet?" Kennedy called up the stairs. "Ain't nothing here that we can use."

"Just a minute!" I called out quickly. I expected Seth to try to bolt out the door or duck into the closet but instead he took a step towards the table he'd set the gun on.

"Hey!" I hissed at him. "Don't you dare..."

He stuffed the gun into the pocket of the jacket he'd just made me put on. I was surprised to find it slid all the way in to the pocket and slipped past the lining into a hiding place deep in the depths of the quilting. I blinked up at Seth as I realized he'd modified the jacket to fit the gun before he'd handed it to me.

"Oh," I breathed out softly. He winked at me with his dead eye. It was a distinctly disturbing gesture but I didn't have time to think much about it.

Kennedy came stomping into the open doorway without knocking and let out a yelp of surprise when he saw Seth standing in the middle of the room with me.

I'd expected Kennedy to react to Seth the same way Drake had. I stood nervously next to the bed, waiting for scrawny little Kennedy to pull one of his knives and attack Seth the way I had sensed Drake had wanted to the night before.

It didn't happen.

Instead Kennedy grinned and walked the rest of the way into the room. "I wondered if you were around here somewhere," he said to Seth. "I saw the tracks from your chopper in the mud outside."

Seth shrugged. "Just having a look around."

"Your stomping grounds," Kennedy said with notable deference. "Fine by me."

I noticed Kennedy wasn't looking Seth in the face. It suddenly occurred to me that there probably weren't too many people who were willing to look into that cold, dead eye, regardless of how pretty the opposite iris might be.

"You know you're not going to find a radiator big enough for that bus just laying around out here, right?" Seth asked.

I slipped my hand back into the depths of the jacket and felt the gun resting snugly against my mid-section. Seth had done a hell of a job creating a hiding place for it. I was willing to give credit where it was due on that. Dad would have respected Seth's quick thinking.

"I know that. You know that. Damn Drake is just wasting our time making us slog around in the mud when I've already told him we're not going to get that lucky." Kennedy sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "I'd bet my best pair of boots that the real reason he wanted us all to leave was so that he'd be alone with that slutty little blonde bitch."

I tensed, hoping like hell Kennedy was just joking around. He didn't laugh. In fact, he looked pissed off. Seth shot me a quick, pointed glance and then turned his attention back to Kennedy. "Drake still screwing everything he can get his dick in?"

"Hell yeah. You know how he is," Kennedy seemed completely unaware that he was taking the last part of my girlish innocence and smashing it into tiny little shards of broken glass. "You should have seen Shayla yesterday while we were working on that engine. Crazy bitch was taking off her dang top and messing with herself just to get his attention. She played like it was for Conner but I know it was Drake she was after."

"Fun for everyone."

"Man, I wouldn't touch that nasty hoe with a ten foot pole and your dick."

I choked on my own saliva again and Kennedy suddenly blushed bright pink. "Aw, shit. Sorry Pilar. I don't guess you wanted to hear that."

"It's fine," I told him even though it wasn't. Suddenly all I could remember was the minty taste of Drake's tongue in my mouth. I purposely avoided looking at Seth. I felt like a completely fool, especially since I'd just wasted entirely too much of my breath arguing with him about how much I loved Drake.

I hoped like hell Kennedy was wrong about Drake and Cya, but I knew he was telling the truth about Shayla. I'd seen that spectacle with my own eyes.

I bit my tongue and tried to swallow my own hurt pride as I forced myself to focus on what Kennedy was saying now.

"Been meaning to get up with you," Kennedy was saying to Seth.

"I don't have a radiator for that bus. Maybe in the Mylon Junkyard but that place is so damn full of zombies it's not worth walking in to. I'd get a new bus, if I were you." Seth was fiddling with a box on the dresser and he almost had the lid open when Kennedy shook his head no.

"I wasn't meaning about the radiator," Kennedy clarified. "I was wondering if y'all were still wanting a mechanic?"

Seth paused, visibly surprised. He nodded. "We could always use another mechanic. You thinking about retiring?" He put heavy sarcasm on the last word.

"Conner got ate yesterday." Kennedy frowned down at his feet. "It wasn't worth dying for. Stupid girl who was supposed to be on watch was too busy staring at Drake without his shirt on and didn't notice the dang zombie coming until it was right on us."

"It's never worth it," Seth replied. He pursed his lips for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. "You know my rules. You want to play by 'em, you're in."

"I haven't decided for sure yet. I still got family in the Cube, ya know?"

"You know where to go when you make up your mind," Seth told him.

Kennedy nodded. "Thanks man, I appreciate that."

"Nothing to it," Seth replied. "You've earned it."

Kennedy turned to face me. "We need to get headed back to the bus."

"Okay." I had to force myself to move. My new boots felt like they were glued to the floor. I didn't know what to make of anything that had happened in this house today. None of it made any sense, especially not when it was combined with what Drake had confided in me last night. I wondered if Drake had been lying to me after all.

I wondered if Seth was lying to me now.

I didn't have the chance to ask him as Kennedy gestured for me to follow him out the door of the room and into the hall, but as Seth began to walk past me he leaned in so close that his jaw was nearly resting in my shoulder.

"Don't ever let Drake know you have that gun," he said. "It's worth more than your life."
Chapter 8

Kennedy and I slogged down the wet clay road in awkward silence for a good 10 minutes before he broke the silence.

"You're smarter than Drake and Shayla are giving you credit for," Kennedy informed me with a hint of bitter admiration in his voice.

I frowned, unsure how to take his compliment and downright confused about why he was giving it to me. "Is that so?" I asked, hoping to sound merely curious. I was afraid the hurt, anger and confusion in my heart would leak into my words.

Kennedy choked back a short, hard laugh. "It took you two days to figure out that being a Scavenger isn't the good deal everyone in the Cube makes it out to be. It's taken me damn near three years and a best friend."

"I'm sorry," I told him. His boyish face was a mask of frustration and anger.

"Conner wasn't my blood but he was my big brother," Kennedy said, staring down at his boots as he continued to put one foot in front of the other on the roadway. "We shared an apartment. Dated the same girls. Went to the same parties. Played the same freaking games. I was trying to go to sleep last night and I wound up laying on my back counting the rivets in the ceiling and wondering who I was going to play chess with now that Conner was gone?"

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything at all. It didn't seem to matter if I replied or not. Kennedy was lost in his own world of memories and I was simply a sounding board for his emotions.

"Conner always talked about getting out of the Scavengers. He said all the secrets made him feel dirty. He wanted to jump ship and switch allegiances to the Church of Chaos pretty much from the first time we found out there was a world outside the Cube. He kept saying how the Powers That Be had a really short-sighted view of what survivors needed to do long-term compared to the way the Church operated." Kennedy's voice cracked slightly.

The Church of Chaos wants too much.

Drake's words from yesterday rang in my ears.

"When Jeremiah died and Seth took over as the head priest of the Church, I had to beg Conner to stay. He respected the hell out of Seth. Thought he was brilliant. He thought we'd have a real future if we left the Scavengers for the Church."

"Seth is the leader of the Church of Chaos?" I couldn't stop myself from asking. I needed to clarify his position in my own head.

Kennedy nodded. "Conner and I had made a pact to stick together when we were kids. Now Conner is dead and it's all my fault. He only agreed to stay with the Scavengers because I didn't want to just abandon my sisters, you know?" Kennedy ran one long fingered hand through his shaggy, strawberry blonde hair. I noticed his fingernails were dirty and chewed to the quick. "We were supposed to be figuring out a way to get my sisters out. We talked about it a lot and Conner even though he knew how to do it, but we never followed through. We always thought we'd have more time. God, I never thought Conner would go out that way. Eaten by a fucking loner zombie"

"Zombie attacks happen." I shrugged my shoulders in a helpless gesture. My parents were gone and while I didn't think their disappearance was my fault, I understood his grief. I also knew there was absolutely nothing I could tell him that would alleviate the obvious misery he felt over the loss of his friend.

Kennedy frowned at me and shook his head. "If we'd have joined the Church when Conner wanted to, we would have been safe. I still remember the first night we ran into one of their patrols. It was so damned cold I could see my breath. My fingers were like chunks of ice and Hampton Block kept insisting that we tough it out until we'd collected 100 cans a piece," Kennedy let out a disgusted huff. "Shit I wish I had known half the things I know now back then. I woulda walked. I woulda told Conner that being a Scavenger was bullshit, regardless of what we'd thought when we was kids talking about what we was going to do as grownups. Stupid fucking cans." He shook his head. "A kid died that night. Her name was Lisa. We used to be friends. Her feet were too numb to run when the zombies came out and when she went to grab her sword her fingers were frozen and she dropped the blade right there at the zombie's feet. It ripped her face off. One minute she was Lisa. The next minute she was a bloody hump of meat surrounded by a giant red stain on the snow."

I swallowed a lump in my throat but made no attempt to interrupt. In the back of my mind I heard my Dad talking about how being a good listener was worth three times as much as being a smooth talker.

"I was sure I was dead. I had on my jacket and Conner's, because he'd lied and told me he wasn't cold and that I should take it. I couldn't even get to the knife on my belt because there were too damn many layers of clothing blocking the holster. The stupid bag of cans was heavier than hell and when I tried to run away it put me off balance." Kennedy shivered from the memory. I doubted he even realized I was still standing beside him.

"All of a sudden the zombie falls over in front of me and I'm looking up at a girl. A really pretty girl with curly blonde hair and she's got a fucking chain saw in her hands and she's grinning down at me. I thought I was hallucinating until she offered me her hand to help me up. That was when I saw her skin. It was all shredded looking like raw meat, but she was still using it like nothing was the matter. I started screaming and she smacked me in the face. Told me I'd better get my knife out if I was going to be howling like that and attracting more zombies."

"She was like Seth," I guessed. "Part zombie."

"They all are. They do it to themselves on purpose."

I gaped at him in surprise. "On purpose?" I asked disbelievingly. "I thought...Drake said they were turning into zombies because they eat food that's been contaminated with the zombie virus."

"Yeah, but your skin doesn't just start rotting or decaying without an injury," Kennedy shrugged at me as if what he was telling me was common knowledge. "You have to have eaten enough of the virus that your immune system is infected, too."

"Oh." I supposed the explanation was scientifically possible from a medical standpoint. I wondered what Dr. Zeb would make of it.

"Yeah." He shook his head again. "It's creepy as fuck. Especially Seth's face. That eye of his gets to me."

"It's creepy," I agreed, vaguely relieved I wasn't the only person who found the zombification repulsive. Of course, I was pretty sure Drake found it even more repulsive than I did. I wondered why he hadn't explained to me how it worked. Not that the process behind the effects really mattered much in the long run.

Or did it?

The pieces of the puzzle that had seemed to fit together rather neatly when I finished talking to Drake last night were beginning to get jumbled again. "You said they disfigure themselves on purpose?"

Kennedy nodded. "Conner wanted to do it. He thought it was worth it. I guess he was right. He'd be alive right now if I hadn't been such a freaking pansy about messing up my own sorry skin." He choked on his own tongue as he visibly fought back a sob.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again, my mind racing as I searched for the logical application of the information he was giving me. Kennedy clearly thought I knew more about life outside of the Cube than I did and I didn't want to lose his confidence by asking too many questions.

Instead I tried to focus on a logical reason why someone would want to be infected with the zombie virus. It surely wasn't to improve their looks. Zombies were everywhere and there were so few humans as is.

Holy Shit. The answer suddenly popped into my head like sunshine breaking through the clouds. "Zombies won't eat zombies," I said in awe. It made perfect sense. "Zombies are only interested in fresh meat, not meat that has already been contaminated with the zombie virus."

"Right." Kennedy nodded, almost bored by the information. "The girl who saved me, Sierra, explained it all to Conner. I didn't really understand the medical part of it, I've never been smart except when it comes to machines, but turning yourself just a little bit zombie makes the real zombies lose all interest in eating you."

"It's really clever." I was still in awe but a million questions were starting to surface in my mind. If there was a way to avoid being attacked by zombies then why were we all still living inside a fortress like the Cube? Turning a little bit zombie was unappealing but it would open up a world of other possibilities. A world where people could live in their own homes and not be constantly tripping all over one another because we were crammed into the Cube with no room to spare. A world where I wouldn't have been kicked out of my apartment within days of my parent's disappearance due to a waiting list for rooms.

It took all of my energy to focus my attention back onto Kennedy and away from the possibilities of a world without the fear of zombie attack. Kennedy was still talking and I was suddenly realizing that maybe I had a lot to gain from listening to him.

"I still thought the Scavengers were noble back then," he was saying. "I didn't know about Ra Shet and no one had ever said a word to me about the Church of Chaos. When Conner wanted to leave the Scavengers to join Seth's crew I told him he was taking too big of a risk. Hampton Block kept telling us how important it was for us to gather up all the cans we could to feed our families. I guess Drake still tells people that – though you knew better already, didn't you?"

I thought about the canned goods. Drake had made it seem like he and Seth were at war because of the limited amount of cans available and I'd believed him.

Had he been lying?

I felt more confused and betrayed than ever as I fingered the straps of my new pink backpack. I hadn't taken the time to open the bag yet but I was fairly certain I would find it full of practical, useful items similar to my new boots and jacket.

I changed the subject because I didn't have a good answer to give Kennedy. I hadn't known about the Church of Chaos before yesterday and, in all likelihood, it was plain old ignorant luck that had gotten me this far.

"You're really going to leave the Scavengers now?" I asked.

"Yeah. I think so," Kennedy nodded, he didn't seem to have noticed that I'd shifted the conversation back to him. "It's stupid how much I counted on having Conner around to watch my back when I never even realized it. Without him around, I'm just another piece of meat."

"Isn't Drake going to be upset?" I asked. "I got the impression he doesn't exactly get along with Seth."

Kennedy looked up at me in surprise. "I'm not stupid enough to tell Drake I'm leaving. Drake hates Seth with a passion," he said. "He'd kill Seth in an instant if he ever got the upper hand on him. Hell, who am I kidding? Drake would kill Seth from behind in cold blood if he ever had the opportunity. He'd probably piss on the corpse."

"Why?" I didn't understand the animosity between Drake and Seth, especially if Kennedy's scorn about the important of collecting canned goods was an indicator of their true worth. I didn't know who to trust, either.

"Hell if I know. The Church of Chaos and the Scavengers haven't ever been friends, exactly, but Jeremiah didn't fight with Hampton Block. The fighting started after Hampton died and Drake took over." Kennedy leaned back against a tree on the side of the trail, his expression troubled.

"You're smarter than me, Pilar. You probably have better instincts about people than I do," Kennedy was choosing his words carefully. "I can't tell you what to do with your life, but things outside the Cube aren't the way you think they are. Trust your own feelings and don't second guess yourself." He met my eyes. "If I had been honest with myself, my best friend would still be alive right now."
Chapter 9

Kennedy and Seth had been wrong about Drake spending the day romancing Cya. The petite blonde was curled up in a miserable ball in the back seat of the bus when Kennedy and I got back from our strange trip down the soggy dirt road.

Drake was sitting on the hood of the bus, scowling viciously as he repeatedly sunk the tip of his knife into a soggy looking lump of cloth in his lap.

"I'm guessing you didn't have no luck?" Kennedy surmised as we emerged out of the woods.

Drake let out a choked laugh then looked directly at me. "I've been waiting for you to come back for an hour."

"Me?" I blinked at him. "Why?"

"You have the most medical training. Go deal with that worthless, miserable girl. I think her leg is broken." He jerked his thumb towards the bus. "We didn't make it a quarter of a mile before she started crying and screaming and moaning that her foot hurt too bad to go on. She screwed up our entire search today." His golden eyes flashed with frustration and anger.

"I'll see what I can do," I said with a sigh. "Time is the only thing that heals broken bones."

"She doesn't have time," Drake said. There was a cruelty to his tone that made me pause.

I desperately wanted to trust Drake, but my Dad hadn't raised an idiot. Seth's dislike of Drake was understandable, I supposed, even though I was clearly missing a very large piece of that particular puzzle. Kennedy's distrust was a bit harder to brush off. Kennedy had been a Scavenger for the better part of 3 years and he'd been on plenty of successful hunts with Drake.

Knowing Kennedy didn't trust Drake made me second guess my own feelings towards him. I chewed on my lip as I headed towards the door of the bus.

"Cya," I called her name softly as I entered the bus.

"Go away." Her voice was choked with tears and hoarse from crying.

"Drake asked me to check on you." I kept walking down the aisle towards her even as she visibly curled into a tighter ball around her injured foot.

"I wanna go home," she moaned. "Tell him to take me home."

"Let me see your foot," I said trying to speak as gently as possible.

"No," she shook her head vigorously. "Hell no."

"You're hurt, I may be able to help you."

She stared up at me through bloodshot red eyes. "Don't lie to me. I know you're on his side. I saw you with him last night."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're with Drake. You woke me up when y'all came back in to the bus. I saw him kissing you." She glared at me with a look of pure hatred. "I want Drake so badly. He's the entire reason I signed up to become a Scavenger. I needed him to fall in love with me when he met me. I would do anything to be with him."

"Just let me see your leg." I tried not to sound as flustered as I felt. Too many people knew about what I had assumed had been a very private moment with Drake. I definitely didn't want to think about Cya's fantasies starring the same man. Those were too close to the daydreams Julie and I had once giggled about while lying in our beds.

"Why?" Cya had tears flowing down her chipmunk cheeks. "You're just trying to give him an excuse for killing me."

"Killing you?" I repeated. "I don't know what you're talking about. He just asked me to check your leg and see how badly you're hurt."

"Stop lying. Drake wants me dead. I'm worth more to him dead now than I am alive."

"Cya." I took another step towards her and put my hand on her shoulder.

She shoved me roughly backwards. "Get away from me!"

I stumbled and caught a hold of the bus seat to steady myself. She wasn't my first angry patient. "I'm here to help you," I told her.

"He's going to sell me to them!" She wailed. Her tears were coming hard and fast now. "I can't walk. Conner's dead. The last hunt was a failure. He's not going to fail twice. The Scavengers aren't allowed to fail twice."

"Sell you?" I was still stuck on her first sentence.

She nodded, still sobbing. "All Drake cares about are his damned drugs. He doesn't care about me and don't think he cares about you either. All that matters to him is getting his next fix. He'll trade me for rock candy."

"Rock candy?" I repeated dumbly.

"It's a drug," she practically spat the words at me.

"Drake is on drugs?" I was stunned. "He can't be. He's the captain of the Scavengers. The Powers that Be would never tolerate drugs."

"Shh! Don't say it out loud or he'll kill us both. The Powers that Be don't care what Drake is on so long as he gets results. It doesn't matter how many girls he sells for drugs so long as he keeps bringing cans back to the Cube," Cya whispered. "The drugs are all they care about. Drake was already pissed off before we even left the Cube because the last hunt we went on was a bust. We didn't find anything good enough for him to trade for more drugs in Ra Shet. I heard him talking to Conner when they were getting the bus loaded. He kept saying how this hunt needed to go smoothly or they were going to run out of their special rock candy."

"Drake isn't going to sell you or trade you for drugs," I tried to sound as calm as possible."

"Drake isn't the only one on drugs," Cya said as she shook her head vigorously. "They all are. Him. Shayla. Kennedy. Conner was too. They carry them around in little brown fabric bags. Didn't you see Shayla get Conner's bag off of his body before they lit him on fire?"

I frowned, struggling to remember. I had seen Shayla searching Conner's body but I didn't remember what it was she had taken from him.

But I had just seen Drake holding a little brown sack just a few minutes ago when we'd walked up.

"Why would Drake want to take drugs?" I demanded, keeping my voice low. "Drugs make you slow and distort your ability to function. Drake needs to be at his best when he's on a hunt. Why would he take something that would make him weak?"

Cya sniffled and narrowed her eyes at me. "Because rock candy doesn't make them weak. It works by speeding up your perceptions so that everything else around you looks like it's in slow motion. You see zombies coming but they're moving so slow that all you can do is laugh at them. Everything moves so slowly. Rock candy turns the hunts into a game. It turns this hellish world we live in into a violent playground for the sadistic."

"You've taken it?"

"I already told you, I would do anything to make it as a Scavenger. I would do anything to be Drake's girl." Her expression was hateful as she straightened her spine and looked me dead in the eye. "Conner offered a piece of rock candy to me on my second hunt. He said it would make me a real hunter. A real Scavenger. It was so awesome. I felt so incredible."

"You like the drugs?" I had never felt more confused.

"I loved the drugs," Cya emphasized. "But at the end of the hunt, Conner took the other three recruits who had come with us on the hunt and he sold them to a flesh broker out of Ra Shet. He got an entire pound of rock candy per girl."

"What is a flesh broker?" I asked.

Cya laughed bitterly. "By the time you find out, it'll be too late for you."

"Cya, you really need to let me take a look at your leg," I said as I tried to bring the conversation back on track. As much as I wanted to try to fit rock candy drugs and flesh brokers into the crazy puzzle of information I'd already gathered today, I didn't figure I had that much time before Drake boarded the bus and demanded a report on Cya's medical condition. I didn't want to have to explain to him that I'd been listening the patient accuse him of being a drug-addicted human trafficker.

"My leg doesn't matter," Cya said as she wiped tears from her cheeks. She attempted to use her torso to shield the leg from my sight but her efforts were futile.

Walking on the injury clearly hadn't done it any favors. I hadn't seen an open wound on the leg yesterday but the massive swelling made me wonder if she was developing an infection. Her entire lower left leg was purplish black and swollen to easily four times the size of the right leg. "Shit," I muttered.

"Go away." Cya growled at me. "Leave me alone. We're both dead, Pilar. Don't you know that we're both already dead?"

"Your leg..."

"Are you deaf?" Cya snapped. "They're going to kill us and you're still talking about my leg."

"No one is going to kill you," I tried to sound comforting. Blood poisoning sometimes made people paranoid. Maybe I hadn't gotten her wounds clean enough yesterday when I bandaged them. The thought was worrisome. Cya's skin was red and splotchy from crying so I couldn't tell whether or not she was feverish. She wasn't about to let me touch her.

"If you only knew the truth," Cya laughed bitterly. The sound was brittle like broken glass and ended with a miserable, choked sob. "Go away. Leave me alone. Tell Drake I'm fine."
Chapter 10

"I've been waiting to be alone with you all day," Drake said as I finished burying the empty cans that had made up our meager dinner. He put his arms around my waist and leaned down so that his breath was hot on my ear. "You look good now that you've found some clothes that fit. Must have been a good hunt for you today."

"I did alright." I fingered the neckline of the fitted shirt I'd found amongst the clothes Seth had selected for me. I wondered what Drake would think if he knew he was complimenting Seth's taste, not mine. I'd been right about the kind of items I'd thought I would find in the bag. Everything was close fitting and practical. No loose fabric to snag on tree branches. No thin, fragile fabrics. And yet everything had been distinctly feminine. The shirt I was currently wearing was pink and interwoven with shiny, silver threads. It fit like a glove and left very little to the imagination.

Drake nibbled my ear.

"Not now, Drake. We can't." I tried to ignore the shivers that his touch sent down my spine. I desperately wanted to trust Drake but it was rapidly becoming apparent that there was more to him than the hero that I'd worshiped from a distance since I was 12 years old.

"Now," he told me. He leaned down until his lips were a fraction of an inch from mine. "Unless you've suddenly gotten shy on me?"

"I'm not shy," I admitted as I put my hands on his chest and pushed him back a couple of inches. I gestured back towards the campsite that was a scant few yards away from the tree line where we were standing. "We need to talk about Cya."

"I don't want to talk about Cya." Drake's smile instantly faded into an irritated scowl. It wasn't the most flattering expression and the cruel cut of his brow made it easier for me to control my raging hormones. It was starting to disturb me how my hormones kicked into gear every time Drake came near me, even when the logical side of my brain was becoming increasingly aware that Drake Bledsoe simply wasn't the man I wanted to believe he was.

"She told me that everyone wants her dead, including you. And they may get their wish. Her leg looks awful. It's definitely broken and I'm starting to wonder if it's infected as well."

"Fuck," Drake cursed and crossed his arms over his broad chest. "Did you disinfect it again?"

"No, she wouldn't let me touch it." I frowned, trying to decide whether or not I should confront him about Cya's accusations.

"She wouldn't?"

"No," I took a deep breath, unsure of what else to say.

"She was making accusations again, wasn't she?" Drake asked unexpectedly.

I didn't even try to hide my surprise. "You know?"

"I know everything about my Scavengers, Pilar. Everything. Don't ever think you could possibly keep a secret from me." Drake reached for me again.

"She thinks you want to kill her," I admitted after a moment. The pressure of his arms around my hips drew me against his broad chest and it took all the strength I had not to just melt against him. I was exhausted, both physically and mentally. I desperately wanted Drake to be the good guy in all this. He was so damn handsome and it just felt so good to be with him. I wanted nothing more than to trust that Drake was the hero and Seth was the villain. Seth deserved to be villain, with his badly scarred face and blank, dead eye.

"She'd deserve it if I did," Drake said. "She's been on five hunts, counting this one. She's been a liability the entire time. She screwed up on her second hunt and got three other girls killed. When she was questioned about why she'd locked her fellow recruits in a warehouse full of zombies, she tried to blame it on Conner."

"She did what?" I asked.

"She, Conner and three other girls who were all on their first or second hunts were down in a small grocery store warehouse we'd found. They were supposed to fill their bags with cans and then come back up to the bus. Simple pick up and deliver."

"Something went wrong?"

"An entire family of zombies were in the basement. Conner was loading the bus when one of the girls inside the warehouse opened the basement door. Our girl Cya ran out of the warehouse and locked the front door behind her. The other three recruits were torn apart by ravenous zombies."

"Oh god." I sucked my breath through my teeth.

"Cya tried to tell the Powers That Be that we'd traded those girls for rock candy crystals," Drake said. "Is that what she told you?"

"Yes," I admitted after a moment of hesitation.

"I'm glad you told me." Drake gently stroked my cheek and then gave me the tiniest peck kiss. "Thank you."

"Drake, is rock candy real?"

Drake smirked. He released his grip on my waist and reached into one of his back pockets to extract the little burlap sack I'd seen earlier. "Can you keep a secret, Pilar?"

"Depends on the secret," I told him.

He reached for my hand, pried my fingers open and dropped the little bag into my hand. "Rock candy is real."

"Do you have to sell people to get it?" I pulled away from him.

"Absolutely not." Drake pulled me back. "Have a little faith in me, Pilar. I'm the captain of the Scavengers, not a murderer."

"I'm sorry. Her story just freaked me out." I allowed Drake to wrap his arms back around me.

"I wish you'd come to me right away," he said as he stroked my frizzy curls. "Rock candy is an asset to us but it's not something I would kill for."

"Does it work the way she said it worked?" I asked.

"Depends on what she said." Drake shrugged his broad shoulders at me. He was still smiling. "Cya doesn't seem able to grasp rock candy's true value, but I think you'll be able to understand a little bit better. I mean, this isn't your first job where you needed to stay on your A-game all the time, is it?"

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You ever work an 18 hour shift at the hospital ward?"

"I've worked a 72 hour shift," I admitted, recalling gritty exhaustion and sticky hands covered in salves that rarely worked the way we needed them to.

"Exactly." Drake opened the bag I was holding. I hesitated for a moment and then peered inside. A small, hard lump of bright green crystals were bunched together at the bottom of the sack. When I shook the bag, they bounced against one another and rolled to the side.

"What do they do?" I asked.

"Take one."

"What?" I eyed the contents of the bag skeptically.

"It's too hard to explain. You wouldn't understand unless you tried one."

"Explain anyway," I allowed my hips to slide against his. "Then maybe I'll take one."

Drake shook his head at me but he was smiling. I loved the way his amber eyes sparkled when he was happy. It was so hard to imagine him being anything but the hero I'd always been told he was. Right this moment I was willing to brush all the criticism I'd heard about him away as jealousy. Unfortunately it did appear that Cya had been telling the truth about the drug usage.

"You don't get tired anymore," Drake told me. "You take one of these babies and you'll be more awake then you've ever been in your life. You can see better, hear better, hell, you can smell better than you ever have. If there's a zombie within 1000 yards you'll know it. It's like being yourself, only 400 times better."

"It heightens your senses." I gave the bag another thoughtful shake.

"Basically," Drake shrugged easily. "It makes you like a superhero. Stronger. Faster. Smarter."

"Cya said all of you take them."

"All of us?"

"You. Kennedy. Shayla. Conner."

"Ah, yeah. Well, not Conner anymore. You know, if he'd taken a rock candy yesterday he'd still be alive right now." Drake frowned, obviously disturbed by the thought.

"Why didn't he?"

"They're expensive. It's best to save them for when we really need them."

"When you really need them?"

"Yeah. Like tomorrow, we're going to need them. Kennedy thinks we might be able to find a radiator for the bus in the junkyard in Mylon, but Mylon is full of zombies. Bad. We go into Mylon, we can't make a single mistake. Not one." He reached for the sack in my hand and held it up thoughtfully. "These little beauties are the difference between life and death out here sometimes."

"What are you going to do about Cya?" I asked him. "She's not going to be walking anywhere tomorrow."

"I'll deal with Cya," Drake told me. I didn't miss the grim expression in his eyes.

"Drake, don't hurt her." I wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

"I won't have to hurt her, Pilar. She'll hurt herself." Drake's golden eyes settled hard on mine. "Never forget that you're not safe outside the Cube. No one survives for long without a protector."

"You're going to stop protecting her?" I asked.

"She's made her choices," he said firmly. "I advise you take note of the mistakes she's made and be careful not to make the same ones. I don't take kindly to betrayal."

The cruel look in his golden eyes sent an entirely unpleasant shiver down my spine as he kissed me.
Chapter 11

The sound of Kennedy jumping off the roof of the bus woke me. I looked out the window just in time to see him slipping into the trees on the side of the road, leaving us entirely unguarded. I took a quick look around the bus to make sure that no one else was awake. When I confirmed everyone was still snoring, I carefully made my way to the nearest exit and slipped outside to follow him.

The woods around me were thick with darkness. I could hear small animals scurrying through the darkness and bugs kept flying into my face. I stepped on a branch and it cracked loudly under my boot.

"You really need to work on your stealth," Kennedy said to me. "You're making too much noise."

I blinked and spun around, trying to figure out where he was hiding. I couldn't see him. He dropped down from a low hanging tree branch above me. I stifled a scream.

"You scared me."

"I had to be sure you weren't Drake or Shayla," he replied. He brushed his short red hair back away from his face. He was shouldering a huge backpack I hadn't noticed him carrying when I'd watched him walk into the woods only minutes before.

"You're leaving?" I asked.

He nodded.

"You're going to join Seth?"

He nodded again. "Going into Mylon is suicide and Drake knows it."

"He told me it was your idea," I said.

Kennedy snorted with disgust. "Drake lies. Have you ever seen Mylon?"

"I'd never been outside the Cube before yesterday," I reminded him.

"Right." Kennedy shook his head and leaned against a tree. "When the zombie virus first became an epidemic, the citizens of Mylon thought they could keep zombies out by building an impenetrable 8 foot tall concrete block wall all the way around the town."

"Kind of like the outer wall of the Cube?"

"Exactly like the outer wall of the Cube. Except zombies got into Mylon and no one could escape because the military locked down the town and permanently sealed the gates. They shot anyone who attempted to climb over. Now there are literally thousands of zombies inside the city. They've been trapped inside that fence for almost 30 years."

"Oh god."

"Very few people have ever managed to get into Mylon and get back out without being bitten."

"If Mylon is so dangerous, why would Drake order us to go in to it?" I asked.

"There's a junkyard on the far edge of the town next to the river. It has its own fence within the fence so it's not quite as heavily populated with zombies as the rest of the town is. We've gotten parts from there before when we've had no other options," Kennedy explained. "He's going to send everyone he wants dead into Mylon tomorrow and hope that someone makes it out with a radiator before they finish turning zombie. It's the perfect way for him to clean up all his problems."

"You mean like Cya?" I asked.

"Cya's pretty high on that list," Kennedy said. "But I don't figure anyone is really safe. Drake knows I won't stay a Scavenger with Conner dead. And you, well...."

"What about me?" I asked.

"You should come with me," Kennedy said after a slight hesitation. "Don't worry about your bags or your weapons. Just come with me. Walk away and don't look back."

"I can't," I said. "I can't just abandon my parents."

"Your parents are gone," Kennedy said. "Isn't that why you threw that screaming hissy fit in front of the Powers that Be last week?"

I nodded and took a deep breath. "They wouldn't have left me alone, Kennedy. My Dad didn't just get up out of the bed he'd occupied for the last 20-odd years and decide to go on an adventure. He might have left the Cube if he'd known there was a city nearby, but he wouldn't have left voluntarily without me."

"Pilar-."

"They wouldn't have left me. I know they wouldn't have left me." I sounded desperate but I didn't care. "Someone or something in the Cube took my parents. I'll never find them if I don't go back."

"Pilar, they're gone." Kennedy grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me none-too-gently. "People who disappear from inside the Cube don't ever come back."

"What do you mean, people who disappear from the Cube? Has it happened before?"

"It happens all the time," Kennedy said brokenly. "You're not going to find them. You're not going to see them again. Give up and focus on saving yourself."

"Who took them?" I asked. "Why have I never heard about other disappearances?"

"You've never heard about the disappearances because most survivors have the sense not to go screaming at the Powers that Be in front of 7,000 people," Kennedy said. "You're the smartest stupid girl I've ever met, Pilar."

"Kennedy, please." I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt.

"I can't. I'm sorry. We've already stood here too long. I can't risk Drake finding me right now. I'm leaving now, Pilar. If you have any sense, you'll come with me. If not, I wish you the best of luck in Mylon tomorrow. I hope you don't die. You're a sweet kid."

"Kennedy-."

"No." He pried my fingers off of his shirt. "I'm sorry. I want to live, Pilar. If you change your mind about being a Scavenger then you should go to the church."

"I don't know where the church is," I stammered.

"Follow the river."

"What river?"

"You'll find it," Kennedy said dismissively. "Goodbye. For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

"Kennedy please. I have so many questions. Do you know what happened to my parents?" I pleaded with him.

"I don't want to know what happened to your parents," Kennedy said. "I don't want to know what's going to happen to my mother and my sisters when Drake realizes I've run."

"Kennedy-."

"Goodbye," he said again as he turned his back to me. I tried to grab for him again but he knew I was coming and he dodged me. Within seconds I was alone in the dark woods.
Chapter 12

The sound of something slamming forcefully into the sheet metal side of the bus startled me awake. I sat up in my makeshift bed, gasping and looking around.

"Son of a bitch!" Another crash. The bus shuddered.

"What's going on?" Jeb sat up from the seat behind me and rubbed his bleary eyes. "Are we being attacked?"

The bus shook again. Cya moaned from the very back seat. "Make it stop."

"That sneaky little weasel!" A female voice joined the male one outside. Drake and Shayla, undoubtedly. "I always knew he was a coward."

"What are they talking about?" Jeb asked.

"I don't know-," I said and then stopped myself as I remembered my late night in the woods with Kennedy. Jeb looked at me curiously but I ignored him as I stood up. Outside, Drake and Shayla had progressed to screaming at one another.

"How could he have left us?"

"I don't know but he did."

"He'll come back."

"Like hell he will. He was gone the minute Conner died. Kennedy has always been a spineless coward."

"What are we supposed to do now?"

"Nothing's changed."

"Can you fix the bus?"

"Not without a radiator."

"We won't get a radiator without Kennedy." Shayla was snarling as I walked out of the bus and into the sunlight.

"We don't have a choice," Drake told her. His face was florid with anger. His knuckles were bleeding from punching the metal armor that covered the bus. He focused his angry gaze on Jeb and I. "Get your weapons."

"What's going on?" Jeb asked. He looked around. "Where is Kennedy? Did something happen?"

"Yeah. Something happened. The little coward ran off last night when he was supposed to be standing guard for us."

"He wouldn't ditch us," Jeb said. "Where would he even go? Are we sure someone didn't take him?"

"He took all our backup weapons," Shayla announced as she dug through a cargo component that had been retrofitted into the side of the bus. "Little coward ran."

I swallowed the lump in my throat but stayed silent. I had no doubt that Drake would be furious with me if he knew that I had watched Kennedy walk away.

"Why would he run?" Jeb asked. "That doesn't make sense. Kennedy has been a Scavenger for years. Why abandon us now?"

"Because he didn't want to-."

"It doesn't matter," Drake cut her off mid-sentence. "Kennedy doesn't matter. He won't survive long on his own and there aren't many places he can go for shelter. He can be dealt with later."

"You know where he went?" I couldn't help asking.

"Of course I do. I already told you, I know everything about my Scavengers." Drake focused his cold eyes on me and for a moment I wondered if he knew that I was aware of where Kennedy had gone. I steeled myself to keep my expression blank.

"Where did he go?" Jeb asked. "That city you were talking about? Ra-whatever?"

Drake shook his head. "It's not important. We'll deal with Kennedy after we get back up and running. Today, we need to focus on getting our bus fixed as quickly as possible. We need gas and we need a radiator. We still got a gas can, Shayla?"

"Yes." She pulled the large plastic canister out of the storage area. "But we need tools too. Kennedy knows how to cripple us and he's done a damn fine job of it. We're lucky he didn't cut up our tires."

"He knew I wouldn't sleep through that kind of destruction," Drake snapped. He slammed his first into the bus again. The metal rippled under the pressure.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't see our situation improving until our bus is fixed." Shayla tucked the gas can underneath her arm and began striding away from us on the paved asphalt road. "I'm going to get us a radiator, if anyone else cares to tag along?"

We all hesitated for a minute and then Jeb shrugged and began jogging after her. I didn't dare not follow. I ran back into the bus to get my machete, my jacket and my hidden gun and then followed after them.
Chapter 13

"No. No. Nooo!" Cya flailed against Drake's back and shoulders. She had been sobbing and wailing for the last 30 minutes but he had yet to show any sign of emotion as he carried her towards what I was beginning to believe would be certain death.

Kennedy hadn't even begun to explain the horror that was Mylon when he'd been describing the town to me last night. I stood on the bank of the river and stared down at the walled-off city below. Almost every visible inch of ground inside the massive fence was covered with twitching, rotting flesh and decaying bones.

"We only have to go into the junkyard," Shayla said. She pointed to the closed off area to our far right. It had been surrounded by a humongous chain link fence prior to the outbreak of the zombie virus. The gate that lead into the rest of the town was open, but it was pretty clear the zombies mostly didn't care for ambling through piles upon piles of rusting cars. I could only see maybe 10 or 15 zombies inside the junkyard. It sounded like a lot until you realized that there were easily 500 on the area immediately outside of that chain-link fence.

"I won't go," Cya wailed. "You can't make me go!

"I can and I will," Drake said as he abruptly dropped her onto the ground at his feet. Cya let out an earsplitting scream as she hit the dirt broken leg first. The zombies below us looked up in a single, disturbing gesture. Several of them began slowly ambling towards the edge of the wall closest to us.

"Stupid girl," Shayla snapped. She kicked Cya hard with the toe of one of her pointed boots. Cya wailed.

I swallowed a lump in my throat and considered simply making a break for it. Kennedy had said the Church of Chaos was up the river. I'd clearly found the river. Thirty feet of bubbling water and frothing rapids at the narrowest point.

"How do we get across?" Jeb asked.

"Swim." Shayla pointed down at the churning rapids below us.

"I don't know how to swim." The words were out of my mouth before I realized I'd spoken.

"Well, doesn't it suck to be you?" Shayla sneered at me. "Should have grown up in Block A. We had a pool."

"Must have been nice," I muttered under my breath. "The only water I've ever been in was in the showers."

"We can walk across the railroad tracks." Drake pointed to a high, rotting railroad bridge that was swaying slightly in the breeze over the river. The cloudless blue sky above us gave no indication to the pit of hell waiting within the fence below.

"The railroad tracks will put us 20 feet above the junkyard," Jeb pointed out. "I guess we can use them to get across the river and then climb down the support beams once we get to the other side."

"I'm not- I can't-. I won't go." Cya had curled into a ball on the ground. Her broken leg was three times the size of the normal one. I no longer had any doubts that the limb was badly infected. If Cya didn't get real medical treatment soon, she would die.

"You'll do what I order you to do," Drake told her.

"We can't take her," I said. "She'll slow us down. Please, Drake. I don't want to watch her get ripped to pieces."

"She's right, Drake. We can get in and out faster without her." Jeb pulled his knife out of a holster on his belt.

Drake tensed and for a minute I thought he was going to argue but then he stepped back. His eyes went from me to Jeb and then back to me. "We can't leave her behind. She'd be defenseless against any zombies that are nearby in these woods. You guys don't want her to die, do you?"

Cya moaned again.

I took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. "Leave her here, she might die. Take her with us, we can try to protect her but she'll probably die. There is no right choice here, is there?"

"How about I carry her?" Jeb offered.

"You would do that?" I didn't even try to hide my surprise.

"I'm not going to leave her to die." Jeb knelt down beside Cya and gently reached for her. "Hey. It's okay. We're going to get through this."

"Bad idea, Jeb." Shayla shook her head as she and Drake exchanged identical looks of disapproval.

"We can't leave her."

"You don't have enough experience dealing with zombies to keep her safe and yourself alive. Your brother was very clear when he told me he wanted you brought back to the Cube alive, Jeb. You know he has big plans for you. The Scavengers are just a pit stop for you."

"Yeah. I know. He expects me to take Uncle Eddrick's place in the Powers That Be," Jeb said as he shrugged his narrow shoulders. "He doesn't think Uncle Eddrick is going to be alive too much longer. The old man's heart keeps giving him fits."

"You're going to be initiated into the Powers that Be?" I gaped at Jeb.

"Assuming I survive long enough," Jeb nodded and smirked. He stared up at Drake and then looked pointedly down at Cya's quivering form. "If I'm going to be one of the Powers That Be then I have to start worrying about other people, right?"

"Maybe," Drake acknowledged. "But today isn't your day. It's mine. I'll carry the girl."

"Drake-."

"No. I'm the leader here. You are all my responsibilities. I can't let you put yourself at risk for her. I'll do it."

"But then you're putting yourself at risk."

"That's part of being in charge." Drake's smile should have been comforting but I hadn't forgotten the look he'd had in his eyes when we'd talked about Cya's accusations against him last night. Drake didn't plan on allowing Cya to survive this hunt. Why would he tell Jeb that he would take care of her?

"No," Cya said. "Please no. I don't want to die. Drake will let me die."

"Drake won't let you die," Jeb said confidently. He reached out and took Cya's hand in his own. "Drake's a good man. He's a good leader. He'll get you through this."

"He won't," she whimpered. "Oh God. I'm going to die. I don't want to die."

"You're not going to die," Jeb promised her with a squeeze of his fingers. "Drake, tell her she's going to be fine."

Drake knelt down next to Jeb and smiled brilliantly at Cya. His golden eyes flashed with a strange light as he reached for Cya. He picked her up by the waist even as she squirmed and struggled to get away from him. He leaned close her to her ear and whispered something too low for any of the rest of us to hear. Cya tried to pull away once more and then went limp. Tears were running down her filthy cheeks as Drake picked her back up, cradling her in his arms like a small child. "It's time to go," Drake said.

Chapter 14

The railroad tresses were made of rotting wood. The entire structure shook under our feet as we picked our way across the fragile, broken boards. I wasn't particularly afraid of heights but the 30 foot drop from the railroad tracks to the jagged, partially submerged rocks below had made my mouth go dry and my palms start to sweat as we crossed the bridge.

Shayla was in the lead as we arrived on the Mylon side of the river. I was three or four feet behind her. Drake was hot on my heels with Cya still snugged against his broad chest as if she were precious cargo. Her face was hidden against the fabric of his leather jacket. Her blonde hair was still covered in dirt from where he'd dropped her on the ground earlier. Jeb was at our rear, watching the opposite bank in the unlikely event that a zombie had the coordination to make it across the tracks and attack us from behind.

Personally, I thought we were probably in more danger from the bridge than we were from the zombies. My legs were shaking as Drake set Cya down on the edge of the bridge. He set down his backpack and pulled out a long yellow coil of rope. It didn't look nearly as sturdy as I wanted it to. Drake began tapping on the beams that supported the bridge we were standing on, searching for one that would be strong enough to support our weight.

"Try the one on the far left," Shayla suggested. She pointed to a beam near the edge of the bridge.

Drake looked over at the beam in question, nodded and moved to it. He quickly and deftly tied the rope off. He dropped the end of the rope down into the junkyard below. "Who wants to go first?"

The only sound to be heard was that of the wind blowing through the beams of the bridge.

"I'll go," Jeb said after a second of hesitation. His face was incredibly pale as he sat down on the edge of the bridge and grabbed hold of the rope with both hands.

"Get your weapon ready," Drake told him. He gestured for Jeb to pull the knife off his belt.

"I can't hold it and slide down," Jeb said.

"Put it in between your teeth," Shayla instructed him. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a burlap sack almost identical to the one Drake had shown me last night when he'd been explaining what rock candy was. She upended the bag and several of the green crystals fell into her hand. She knelt down beside Jeb. "Open your mouth."

Jeb did as he was told and Shayla popped one of the crystals into his mouth. She smiled as she placed a second crystal in between her own lips and then passed the bag over to Drake. "Conner's stash," she explained.

"I'll see you guys on the ground." Jeb put his knife between his teeth and then slid down the rope. We all watched as he landed solo on the ground below.

"Four crystals," Drake said quietly. He took one of the crystals himself and then rolled the bag in his fist. He gestured for me to hold out my hand and then placed a single green crystal in my palm. He tucked the burlap bag back into his own pocket. "Hold it under your tongue."

I hesitated, holding the pokey little stone in my sweaty hand. My countless hours in the hospital ward had given me intimate familiarity with what could happen if you took the wrong drug or reacted badly to the right drug. I swallowed and took a deep breath. I started to open my mouth to tell Drake thanks but I would pass when Cya spoke.

"Where's mine?" She asked. Her voice was quavering.

Drake snorted back a short, bitter laugh. "You don't get candy."

"Drake, please. I'm already weak," she begged. "It will help with the pain. I might be able to run."

"I guess you should have thought about that before you complained about us to the Powers That Be," Drake told her. He grabbed hold of the rope and pressed it into her hands. "Time for you to go."

"Please, no. I'm not ready." She purposefully splayed her fingers out, refusing to grab the rope.

"Take the rope or I'll throw you down without it," Shayla hissed at her.

"I'll go," I said. I popped the rock candy crystal Drake had given me into my mouth, stuck it under my tongue and reached out to take the rope from Cya. "I want to go."

Drake raised one eyebrow at me and then passed the rope over. "Hold on tight and use your feet to control your descent. Wrap the toe of your boot in the rope."

I did as he said, terrified to go down into the junkyard but unwilling to watch someone I'd spent so much time idolizing torture a frightened, hurt girl who he was supposed to protect. I felt nauseous as I slid off the side of the bridge and immediately got blown to the left by the wind. I skidded down the rope too fast, unable to create enough friction with my feet to slow my descent. I landed hard on the ground below with my hands burning from rope burn. The impact sent shocks of pain all the way through my back and I gasped with the pain.

"You okay?" Jeb asked.

"Fine," I lied.

"Get your machete out," Jeb told me. "There are zombies thirty yards to our left."

I nodded and used my throbbing, bleeding fingers to free the machete from underneath my belt. My hands shook as I held it out. "Do we need to kill them?"

"I don't know," he admitted. He looked up at the three members of our team who were still on the bridge. His blonde hair was thin and I could see the pink scalp underneath. "Drake's told me that attacking one zombie when others are nearby can alert the others to your presence. He thinks they can smell the blood."

"Oh." I hadn't known that.

"Shayla says kill everything I see."

I frowned and looked to our left. I could see one zombie rattling around in what appeared to be a box of junked, rusting vehicles. A car had fallen off of one stack and blocked the zombie's path of exit. If it wanted to get to us, it would have to climb. "Can zombies climb?"

"I don't think so." Jeb frowned. "What's taking them so long up there?"

"Cya doesn't want to come down here," I explained.

Jeb sighed. He ran one hand through his hair. "I don't blame her. She's not going to be able to protect herself and I don't think Drake's going to go out of his way for her. Shayla told me they both want her dead because she got Conner killed."

"I volunteered to come down here because I couldn't stomach listening to her beg anymore," I admitted.

A loud wail echoed from above. I could see Drake forcibly wrapping the rope around Cya's midsection. The zombie to the left of us looked up.

"I don't want to watch her die," I confessed to Jeb. Cya's wails were turning to screams.

"Maybe we should just start trying to find a radiator. Kennedy showed me what we were looking for yesterday. I've helped my Dad with the generators in the Cube for years. I'm sure I can get the radiator out of whatever vehicle we find it in without Drake's help. So long as you can watch my back." The look in Jeb's eyes was almost pleading.

"We can do it," I confirmed. "I've killed a lot of zombies in the hospital. It can't be that different out here, right?"

"Shouldn't be," Jeb agreed. We both cast another glance upward. Cya was clinging to the railroad bridge with both hands while Drake attempted to shove her off. She was making a lot of noise doing it. More zombies were starting to approach from the south of us, undoubtedly attracted by the racket.

Jeb grabbed me by the elbow as Cya let out another earsplitting wail. The horror in his eyes was real as we walked rapidly to the north, clambering up a tall pile of rusted and busted cars so that we could survey the entire junkyard. The view was horrifying. Miles of rusted cars being eternally patrolled by dozens of drooling, rotting monsters.

"I'm scared," I whispered. Jeb squeezed my arm reassuringly.

"Just look for something big. A bus. A big truck. Something with a big motor." He swallowed visibly as he scanned the tangled masses of metal surrounding us.

"All I see are zombies." It was the truth.

"We're not on high enough ground yet." Jeb gestured for me to follow him across the tops of several broken cars. The metal was gritty and malleable underfoot but I supposed it was preferable to walking on the ground itself. I focused on making my way from vehicle to vehicle. One foot in front of the other. Right foot landing exactly in the places where Jeb's left foot had just vacated. Left foot hood. Right foot windowsill. Left foot roof. Right foot roof. Left foot trunk. Right foot trunk. Jump to next car. Left foot seat. Right foot door. I felt like I had when I was a child playing hopscotch with Julie in the corridors of Block D during exercise hour. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.

Jeb stopped. I stopped with him. He turned to face me but I felt like he was moving in slow motion. He pointed at a truck roughly 20 feet away from us. Three zombies were between us and the truck. Two men and a woman whose head appeared to be permanently bent to the left. "There," he said.

I nodded. "We're to have to jump down and make a run for it."

"We're going to have to kill the zombies." Jeb tucked his knife back into his pocket and removed a short sword from a sheath underneath his shirt.

"You've been carrying that on your back?" I stared at the sword in shock.

"It was a gift from my Dad when I joined the Scavengers," Jeb winked at me. "We all have our secrets, Pilar."

I thought of the gun that was still carefully stowed in the secret hidey-hole Seth had created for it. We certainly did have our secrets and I wasn't about to tell mine to a guy who was slated to become a member of the Powers That Be. Possession of an illegal weapon carried a harsh punishment in the Cube.

Jeb jumped off the roof of the pick-up truck we were standing on and landed hard in the dirt. The zombies turned as one to face him. I closed my eyes and jumped.

I should have been terrified as my feet hit the ground but I wasn't. The zombies were moving impossibly slowly as Jeb and I walked up to them. Jeb swung his sword and neatly beheaded one male zombie. The head rolled across the ground and tripped the second zombie. All I saw were blank eyes and gnashing teeth as the creature fell towards me. I swung my own blade, but I didn't do it hard enough. The machete got stuck in the zombie's shoulder blade. I squealed and pulled my blade loose, swinging it a second time as the zombie fell the rest of the way to the ground. She tried to grab my ankle and I cut her arm off out of sheer reflex. The hand twitched for a second and then died.

Jeb cut down the second zombie, slicing it rather cleanly in half. I spun back around and finally managed to chop the head off my own zombie. It took nine strokes but I did it. I felt stupidly proud of myself as I joined Jeb at the grill of the big truck he'd noticed.

"You got my back?" He asked as he pried the vehicle's hood open with a squeal of hinges.

"You're safe," I promised. "But how are you going to get the radiator out without tools."

"Who said I didn't have tools?" Jeb asked. He dug a thick knife-like multi-tool out of his pocket. It was roughly 6 inches long and had multiple blades that could be extracted from it. He winked at me, flicked a pair of pliers out of the multi-tool and began working at getting the bolts on the radiator loose while I stood guard.

The sky was the most perfect, clear blue that I'd seen in a year. The light breeze that was blowing kept the rotting smell of zombies away. I could smell the murky water of the river several hundred feet to our left. I had time to appreciate that it was a beautiful day, despite our task.

I could remember that I'd been upset recently but right this minute I couldn't recall why I'd been feeling so much angst.

Two more zombies came stumbling around the nearest corner. They perked up when they saw me standing in their path. I raised my machete and smiled. Zombies were scary but not that scary. After all, they couldn't think very well and they had fairly limited physical capabilities. I was well armed against such painfully slow moving opponents.

The zombies were taking forever to reach me. I got bored waiting for them and met them halfway. Thwack, thwack, thwack! Six swings with my machete and they were motionless on the ground. Four hits for the one that had been an old man before he died. Two hits for the petite woman.

"This is kind of neat," I mused out loud. I wondered if there were any other zombies nearby that I could kill. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

"Having fun, are you?"

I turned to my right and saw Seth leaning against the side of a severely smashed van. His ruined white eye practically shone in the sunlight and I could see the molars on his lower jaw clearly through the side of his face. "Maybe," I admitted.

"Think you're hot stuff?"

"I killed those zombies." I pointed to the dead zombies near his feet.

"They were weak. They're trapped inside this junkyard. Haven't fed in years." Seth shrugged at me. "No real challenge in killing them."

"How can you know that they haven't fed?" I demanded, partially insulted by how easily he brushed aside my triumph and partially curious how he could possibly know when a zombie had last eaten.

"They didn't bleed." He gestured at the corpses. "Zombies dry up when they can't feed. The sunlight leeches all the moisture out of them as the days pass."

I stared down at the corpses. He was right. They hadn't bled. I scowled at him. "Are you just here because you enjoy mocking me or did you show up for a reason?"

"You really think I'm stupid enough to leave Scavengers wandering around unsupervised in my valley?" He asked. He had a sword in his left hand. It was similar to the one Jeb was carrying except it was half as thick and twice as long. There was blood on the blade.

I blinked at him as the realization set in. "You've been following us this whole time?"

"Not just me," he said. "But you're never alone, Pilar. Never."

"Guess life outside the Cube isn't that different from life inside the Cube after all," I complained sullenly.

Seth laughed. "Life outside the Cube is very different from life inside the Cube."

"How would you know?" I asked. "I bet you've never been inside the Cube."

"I've heard pretty vivid descriptions of what life in there is like," Seth said. "Communal dining. Communal bathing. Apartments that started life as prison cells. The Powers That Be watching every move you make. Not enough food. Not enough water. I have to be honest with you, the entire lifestyle sounds abhorrent."

"It's safe," I said.

"You don't really believe that," Seth countered.

I was about to argue with him but then I hesitated. "How do you know what I think?"

"Why would you leave the Cube if you were happy living inside it?"

"I never said I was happy." I brushed my thick hair back up into the ponytail I'd trapped it in. It was easier to fight without all those curls in my eyes. Four more zombies appeared from behind a stack of cars on our immediate right. I lifted my machete and then turned and smiled at Seth. "Can you even fight?"

"Can I fight?" He seemed to be both insulted and amused by the question.

"I heard that you don't have to worry about being attacked by zombies because they aren't interested in eating one of their own kind. I figure that means you're probably really out of practice." I had no idea why I was taunting him or why it felt so good to do it.

"You don't think I can fight?" Seth stepped in between me and the approaching zombies. Two of them were huge. They had been thick bodied men when they were alive and one still had most of his muscle. The other had a big chunk missing out of his shoulder but was still making rather impressive progress as he bore down on us with drool frothing from his lips. The two following on that one's heels were smaller but just as ugly. The one on the right was wearing a red shirt and kept snapping its jaws at me.

"Let's just say I'm not counting on you to save me," I told Seth.

He shook his head at me with obvious disbelief. "Stand back."

"And watch you get eaten?"

He jerked his chin at the zombies and bared his teeth in a look that barely passed for a smile. "Keep your eyes open, little lamb. You might miss something if you blink."

"I'm waiting," I said as I crossed my arms over my breasts.

Seth was downright graceful as he turned to face down the zombies. He lifted the sword high into the air and then spun so fast that I could barely keep track of the trajectory of the blade as he took two steps forward and decapitated the first zombie. The muscled monster man lunged for him but Seth ducked neatly underneath the zombie's outstretched arms and then brought his blade cleanly upwards through the center of the undead man. It had never occurred to me to cut a zombie lengthwise but I supposed it was just as effective as I watched Seth's sword come up through the top of the skull. He pulled it loose with a twist of his wrist, kicked a third zombie to the ground and cut its spine loose of its body before the fourth zombie could get halfway to him. The fourth zombie was the smallest of the pack but it was also the quickest. Not that speed did the creature any favors. Seth beheaded it the second it got within range of the sword. It crumpled to the ground beside its counterparts.

Seth wiped the blade of his sword on what was left of the zombie's red shirt. He smiled as he approached me but didn't speak until his nose was only inches from mine. "Did you really think that the high priest of the Church of Chaos would be weak?"

I blinked up at him. "I think there's a zombie behind you."

It wasn't a lie. It was a woman who had clearly been fat in life. Her massive bulk was preventing her from moving easily through the gap between two of the cars. In fact, the zombie appeared to have gotten herself wedged in between the hood of one car and the trunk of another.

"Kill it," Seth told me. His words were clearly meant as a challenge. I stepped around him, adjusted my grip on the machete and approached the struggling zombie. I raised the blade of the machete and prepared to strike. Seth grabbed my wrist.

"Hey!"

"You're holding your weapon incorrectly," Seth informed me. He slid his arm down the length of mine and grabbed the handle of my blade. His arm looked amazingly pale, almost translucent, when pressed against my own tanned limb. "Strike upwards, not downwards. And slide your hand closer to the top of the handle."

"Why?"

The stuck zombie hissed angrily at us and tried to bite.

"It'll give you better force for your blow." Seth physically took my hand in his and slid it up the old wooden handle. With my fingers stuck under his, he drew my arm back and then thrust the machete forward and up into the zombie's throat. Her head came off much more cleanly than those of my previous kills.

I looked sideways at Seth. I was eye level with the hole in his jawline. "I should swing the blade upwards?" I tried another practice swing at the air. Seth's hand was still on top of mine.

"Yes." He released me and then demonstrated the gesture for me. "And keep your hand near the hilt of your weapon. You'll have better control that way. You'll be less likely to drop your blade if a strike doesn't go as intended." He tilted his head at me curiously. "Didn't Drake teach you how to fight?"

"He said he didn't have to teach me. I work- I mean worked – in the hospital ward at the Cube. I've been decapitating zombies for the last 3 years." I practiced the swing again. The machete did feel a lot sturdier in my hand when I held it as Seth had instructed.

"You didn't have to fight zombies in a hospital ward," Seth said flatly.

"No, I didn't. But it's not that different." I wasn't sure why the tone Seth had used to ask the question was bothering me so much.

"Do you know how to defend yourself against a zombie?" Seth asked.

"Sure. The hospital ward trained us extensively. Curl into a ball and expose your least important body parts first. Don't let it access your neck, head or chest because none of those can be amputated to save your life after the attack."

"Not the worst advice I've ever heard but that's not going to do you any good in battle." Seth was frowning now. He twirled his sword through the air several times and then slid it back into the holster that crossed over his shoulder. "I thought all the Scavengers were supposed to go through basic combat training before they ever left the Cube."

"I was an exception to the rule." I knew I sounded just a little bit smug but I didn't care. I felt pretty good about myself right this minute.

"You were an exception to the rule?" Seth asked.

I nodded and smiled at him. I wondered if he was impressed.

"Why?" Seth asked.

"Why what?"

"Your hospital training wasn't extensive enough to justify skipping your combat training. Why didn't they teach you how to fight before they brought you out here?" Seth leaned back against the side of the car beside us. "You should have received at least a month of training when you signed up."

"I never signed up," I told him.

"What?" He furrowed his eyebrows and scowled.

"I didn't sign up to become a Scavenger. I was invited to join. All the usual training requirements were waived for me so that I could start hunting immediately. Drake told me we'd make up my training later." I shrugged at Seth. "I guess I just have talent."

"I don't think so," Seth shook his head at me. "Drake invited you to become a Scavenger?"

"I already said that."

"Why does Drake care if you're a Scavenger?"

"Maybe he thinks I'm special." I decided now wasn't the time to admit that I'd kind of wondered the same thing.

"No one is special to Drake Bledsoe except Drake Bledsoe," Seth said flatly. "Tell me why he wanted you."

I intentionally diverted my eyes away from Seth's disturbing one-eyed gaze. "Tell me why you keep following me around?"

Seth hesitated for a minute and then shrugged. "You intrigue me."

"Me?" I frowned at him.

"Most Cube girls run away screaming the first time they see me or someone like me. You confronted me. You didn't even try to hide behind Drake."

"I don't hide," I said flatly. "I wasn't raised to hide."

"Which makes me all the more curious how you were raised," Seth countered. "You're carrying weapons you don't know how to use. You're fighting a war you don't understand. You tell me Drake wanted you and yet I can't see any advantage in him having you."

"Maybe you just don't know me well enough." I debated throwing my machete at his head. I wondered if I could hit the streak of white hair in the middle of his skull. I was debating my odds when I realized how unlike me the thought was. How wrong it was. I dropped the machete and stared at him. "What's wrong with me?"

"You're misunderstanding me. I'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with you. I'm just confused as to why you would be valuable enough to Drake that he'd bring you out untrained-."

"No. I don't mean-." I blinked frantically and tried to clear my head. Suddenly everything around me felt overwhelmingly fuzzy. I slid down to my knees in the dirt beside my machete. "Seth, please. I don't feel right."

He closed the distance between us in a heartbeat. His hands were warm as he took my face into his palms and tilted my head up. "Tell me what you feel."

"Homicidal." I blurted out the truth before I could think better of it. "It's not me. I help people. When people are sick with fever, I wipe their faces down with cold cloths. I bring them painkillers in the night when they cry out. I don't enjoy blood, Seth. I don't enjoy pain."

"And yet?" His tone was surprisingly gentle as he knelt down in front of me. I kept my eyes closed so that I didn't have to look at him.

"I want to kill you," I whispered.

"Well, I'm not very likeable." Seth's hands were gentle against my skin.

"No. No, you don't understand. It took me two years to stop crying when I had to give a patient stitches or a shot without using a numbing agent because I couldn't stomach listening to them scream. I still cry when I know my patients are suffering but I can't bring them any relief from the pain and the agony because we don't have any pain medication left or the doctors don't feel the patients' injuries are bad enough to justify using the meds." I tried to turn my face away from him but he held on to me. "I've watched so many people suffer and I can't stand it. I left the hospital ward because I didn't want to see any more death. Why do I suddenly want to see blood? What's wrong with me?"

"Ah." Seth stroked one hand down the side of my cheek. "Drake fed you some rock candy, didn't he?"

I nodded, not sure what the rock candy had to do with my sudden and unexplained desire to commit cold blooded murder.

"Now you're having fantasies about killing me?" He sounded quite calm about it.

"I'm not like this," I whispered.

"It's the rock candy," Seth explained. "It has side-effects. Don't worry, they pass."

"What?" I stared at him in total disbelief. "The rock candy is making me want to kill you?"

"The rock candy is making you want to kill everything," Seth clarified. "I just happen to be the only living thing around at the moment so you're focusing on me. Don't worry, if you're noticing that you're not behaving like yourself then the effects are already starting to wear off. You'll be back to yourself in a couple of hours."

"I don't have a couple of hours," I whimpered as my world spun in circles before my eyes. The strength rushed out of me and I collapsed forward. Seth wrapped his arms around me and held me against his chest. I wanted to fight against him. I knew I should fight against him. I tried to push myself upwards and away from him but the entire world dropped out from underneath me and went dark.

A memory tugged at my mind as I felt myself dropping down into a dark abyss within my own mind. I had taken the rock candy for a reason. I had made a promise. A promise that had been important. I had been doing something important before I'd found myself here, cradled against the chest of a terrifying monster who insisted on being ridiculously kind to me even when I told him I wanted to watch him bleed. "No, I can't."

"Lay down little lamb, you're going to be okay." Seth's voice was like a bright light driving away my fear.

I had a sudden moment of clarity as I opened my eyes abruptly. "Jeb," I gasped and struggled to sit up. "I told him I'd protect him."

"He's fine." Seth pushed me back down into his lap.

"No, I promised!" I succeeded at sitting up only to fall back down. The sunlight was burning into my eyes and I felt hot all over.

"I'll protect him. Trust me." Seth put his hand over my eyes and pushed me back down.

"I don't trust you," I said as I folded into him and lost all consciousness.
Chapter 15

"Pilar! Pilar, get up. We have to go!"

My skin felt like it was on fire. My heavy jacket was suffocating me. I tried to paw it off but when I reached for the sleeves they were gone. My eyes popped open and just as soon as I did, a splitting headache crashed through my skull. I gasped for breath, fighting the pain as it shot through every inch of my body. I wanted to scream but my throat wasn't working.

I sat up abruptly and had just enough time to realize that some time had passed before a splintering rush of pain blew through my veins and I collapsed back down.

"Pilar!" Jeb was leaning over me now. His bright blue eyes were wide with fear. "Can you stand?"

I moaned and curled into a ball.

"She's not strong enough to run." Someone picked me up and my first thought was that he smelled like my Dad. I folded willingly against him even though in the back of my head I knew that whoever was carrying me, whoever was running with me, was too strong and too fast to be my Dad.

"Why is she like this, what did you do to her?" Jeb's high pitched, nearly panicked voice demanded.

"She had a bad reaction to the rock candy. It happens." The person carrying me sounded pretty winded, but it was hard to really tell over the screaming.

Someone was screaming at the top of her lungs. A girl's voice. A voice I recognized. Cya's voice.

We were still running. I could feel the impact that the person carrying me made every time his feet hit the ground. Every so often he would jump. I couldn't imagine how strong he'd have to be to be carrying me at this speed. The only person I could imagine being this strong was Drake.

Drake was saving me.

Cya screamed again.

"We have to save her." Jeb had to yell to make himself heard above the screaming.

"Can't."

I had the sensation of falling quite some distance, but the man carrying me landed on his feet with an oomph. It took me a minute to realize we must have just cleared the massive fence that separated Mylon from the outside world. The smell of the river intensified abruptly. "Can you swim?"

I tried to say no but my mouth wouldn't work.

"Not great," Jeb answered. Maybe they hadn't been asking me. I whimpered and curled tighter into my savior's chest. I desperately wanted to close out the sound of the screams and my wish seemed to be in the process of being granted.

"Can you swim?" Jeb asked. I thought it was a strange question for him to ask Drake.

"Worry about yourself," the person I hoped was Drake said. "The water isn't deep this time of year but the current is always strong. Use the rocks to keep from being swept down river. Try to stay on your feet as you make your way across. I can't keep you from being swept away."

"I'm not sure if I-," Jeb hesitated. "What if I drop the radiator?"

"You have a rope?"

"Yes. In my pack."

"Tie one end of the rope to the radiator and leave the damn thing on this side of the bank until you make it across. Pull it on over after you've made it to safety. You're more important that a rusting hunk of metal."

Jeb didn't respond but I assumed he was doing what he'd been told. I struggled again to open my eyes as my rescuer carried me slowly and steadily into what I could only assume was the river. Cold water splashed and then submerged my booted feet. Water ran cold across my legs and then across my hips. My eyes sprung open and I gasped.

It was late. The sun was setting in a blast of red and orange light against the western sky. The river water was horribly, terrifyingly cold against my burning hot skin. I felt sick. Incredibly sick. I looked up into Drake's golden eyes, hoping to find comfort and reassurance in him. Seth's ruined white eye looked back down at me. Drake wasn't the one carrying me. Seth was.

I let out a small scream and tried to thrust myself away from him. Seth clasped me so tightly in place that I couldn't flail against him. He stumbled briefly and then regained his footing. "Shit. Don't struggle. You'll drown both of us. Seriously. I can swim but not that fucking well. Especially when I'm carrying someone else."

"Let me down."

"You can't stand," Seth said flatly. "Hold onto my neck. Let me focus on getting us across the river to safety and then you can panic."

Cya screamed again. She sounded further away this time. The water was up to my chest now and bitterly cold. Seth stood completely still in the river. It took me a minute to realize that he was waiting for me to agree to his terms.

"I don't want to drown," I said finally. It took all the strength I had to reach up and put my arms around his neck. My muscles felt like they were being torn to pieces. I had no doubt that Seth was right about me being unable to stand. I pressed my cheek against his shoulder as he shifted the position he was using to carry me.

"Hold your breath," Seth said.

A second later we were underwater. The current was pushing us hard enough that I felt as if I were being torn away from him. His arm was solidly locked around me but I could feel him scrambling for purchase against the rocky river bottom. I realized, with a stark sense of poignancy, that Seth was a lousy swimmer.

He kept pushing towards the opposite bank. The rocks kept getting in our way and the water kept pushing us back down like dirt pouring in through the mouth of a grave. My lungs were starting to burn. I wanted to gasp. I wanted to scream. I wanted air.

Someone grabbed my arm and yanked me away from Seth. I gasped as my head surfaced. I was being drug onto the muddy bank of the river. My clothes were pouring water. My hair was covering my face in a tangled swampy mess. I pushed it out of my eyes just in time to see Jeb go back for Seth.

Jeb grabbed Seth by the back of his shirt and pulled him into the shallow water. His streaked hair had fallen in his eyes and he was coughing up water as he collapsed down onto his knees and elbows.

"Seth," I barely realized I had said his name. I crawled across the ground until I reached him. He blinked at me, his good eye surrounded by tangled black eyelashes. Water dripped down his chin and off the tip of his nose.

"Thanks for not drowning us," he whispered in between hacking coughs. "You did good, little lamb."

"I'm sorry," I said as I knelt beside him in the water. "I wasn't trying to drown you. I can't swim."

"Me neither," Seth admitted with a reluctant snort. "But we made it."

"We did." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "You saved me."

"I keep my promises," he said.

It took me a moment to remember what promise he was referring to. "I didn't ask you to protect me. I asked you to protect Jeb for me.

"You asked him to save me?" Jeb appeared beside us abruptly. "Pilar, do you know who he is?"

"He was the only person around for me to ask," I muttered. "I couldn't just leave you unguarded. The rock candy hit me hard. I felt invincible for all of thirty minutes and then everything went black and I started to feel like I was literally on fire. Like I was burning to death." I shivered despite the memory.

"Are you sure it was the rock candy?" Jeb eyed Seth uncertainly.

"It happens sometimes," Seth told him. "The side effects are why I don't let my followers take rock candy crystals. The chemicals used to create them hit too many people the wrong way. You only have to watch one person go crazy on rock candy to lose your appetite for the stuff forever."

"Rock candy is safe," Jeb argued. "Drake told me-."

"Drake will say anything he needs to say at the time when he needs to say it," Seth snapped. He was still struggling to regain his breath. "Why do you think so many Scavengers die horrible deaths?"

Jeb looked like he was going to argue but then he stopped abruptly. "Drake told me I should kill you on sight."

Seth sat back in the water. It was only around 6 inches deep. His long legs were splayed out in front of him and he was leaning back with the palm of one hand propping him up. The leather holster he kept his sword in had slipped down around his chest so that the blade was underneath his armpit. He pulled the sword from its holster and held it out to Jeb, hilt first. "Go ahead."

"What?" Jeb actually took a step back away from him.

"I'm tired. I've drank half the river. You'll never have a better opportunity. If you'd been Drake, you would have drowned me as I was trying to get to the bank with Pilar. I was at my most vulnerable then."

"I wouldn't have. I couldn't." Jeb was still staring hard at the hilt of Seth's sword. "At least stand up and fight me."

"No," Seth spoke remarkably calmly, considering the situation. "I promised Pilar I'd watch your back, so I did. You want to cut my heart out of my chest after I helped you, have at me. Drake will be real proud of you. Killing an unarmed man who just went out of his way to save your sorry ass is just his style. Of course, if I were you, I might ask myself one little question before I killed me."

"What question is that?" Jeb made no move to take the sword and his voice trembled with uncertainty.

"Why won't Drake kill me himself?" Seth asked. He quirked his head at Jeb and winked.

"Maybe you haven't given him the chance," Jeb said. "Maybe he hasn't had the opportunity."

"He's had plenty of opportunities," Seth said. The water was lapping at the ankles of his boots and I knew he had to be horribly uncomfortable but he was making no move to improve his situation. "Just ask Pilar."

"Me?" I blinked at him in confusion.

Jeb looked at me expectantly. "What is he talking about?"

I started to say I didn't know but then I remembered the way Seth had stood below the bus on the first night I had met him. Arms wide open, chest exposed, daring Drake to throw a knife at him. Daring Drake to kill him.

"Jeb, don't." I moved so that I was between Seth and Jeb. I pushed Seth's sword back into its holster. "He's right. Drake won't kill him. Seth gave him the chance the first night I met him. Drake and I were on the roof of the bus and Seth came out of the woods. Drake threatened Seth and he just stood there in front us and taunted him. Drake could have killed him but he didn't. He didn't even try."

Jeb frowned down at me. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." I was sure.

"Drake told me to kill him on sight. He's the high priest of the Church of Chaos."

Seth adjusted the sword's sheath and stood up. He raked both hands through his short, dark hair and gave it a spiked look. It was one of those moments that I knew would forever be burned into my mind. Seth was silhouetted by a sunset so bright that the orange light seemed to burn against the back of his soaking wet leather jacket. His dark jeans clung to his skin and his boots were still mostly hidden beneath the shining blue river. He'd turned the scarred side of his face way from me so that I could only see the bright blue of his good eye, the sensuous curve of his wicked smile and the strength in his squared jaw.

He was beautiful. My heart nearly stopped beating as my voice caught in my throat. "Seth."

He smiled as he turned to face me. The white streak through his hair bled down into the scar that had ruined his eye. I took a step towards him just as a terrified scream echoed out through the night air.

The three of us turned towards the sound. It was coming from the railroad bridge that Jeb and I had used to enter Mylon earlier in the day. I could make out a three figures climbing the rotted wooden framework that supported the bridge. A massive horde of zombies appeared to be hot on their tails. Some of those zombies were climbing the tresses after them.

"Shit!" Jeb exclaimed.

"I didn't think zombies could climb," I whispered, horrified as watched one of the zombies reach for Shayla and snatch hold of the ankle of her boot. She kicked that one loose but three more came clambering up in its place.

"You'll be amazed what a zombie will do if it gets hungry enough," Seth commented quietly.

"We should try to help them," Jeb said. He started towards the bridge. Seth caught him by the wrist.

"Don't." Seth shook his head at Jeb. "Watch."

Jeb tensed visibly but he didn't take another step. He pulled his wrist loose of Seth's grip and then rubbed his skin as if Seth's touch had burned him.

Drake had made it to the bridge itself now. He laid down on the tracks and reached down for Shayla. She was only a few feet behind him. Drake locked his hands with hers and pulled her up onto the bridge beside him.

Cya was clearly having more difficulty climbing than the other two had, but she had managed to get more than halfway to the top of the bridge. I could hear her constant, unending screams and moans as she clawed her way across the rotting wood. Her broken leg dangled uselessly from her hip, forcing her to rely completely on her other three limbs.

Cya's ascent to the top of the bridge was painstaking to watch. The zombies were climbing faster than she could. It was clear they would make the bridge around the same time.

"What happens when the zombies get on top of the bridge?" Jeb asked.

"It won't happen," Seth said flatly. He reached into his pocket and pulled a small object out. He smiled as he flicked the lighter and a flame spurted up despite having been soaked only minutes before. Seth walked towards the railroad bridge. "No zombies will be getting across this river."

Shayla cut the rope we'd used to lower ourselves down into Mylon earlier. It fell to the ground and landed amongst the zombies that hadn't managed to start climbing. The rope was torn apart in a matter of seconds.

Cya had succeed at climbing to the top of the railroad tracks but it was obvious she was having a problem getting over the edge and onto the safety of the actual bridge. "Help me! Drake! Help me!"

She was frantically waving one hand at Drake. He was less than 2 feet away from her. I watched as he reached out and grabbed her hand. Cya released her grip on the bridge so that Drake could pull her to safety.

I unconsciously let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding.

"Oh, thank Jesus." Jeb said from beside me.

Drake was holding one of Cya's hands in his own. She swung in the air for a brief moment and I waited for Drake to pull her up. I knew she wasn't very heavy. He'd had no problems carrying her earlier in the day.

"Why isn't he pulling her up?" Jeb's question echoed my own thoughts.

Seth stayed silent. He stood with us and yet apart from us as Drake continued dangling Cya in the air. Three of the zombies were clawing the air in efforts to reach her. One actually tried to jump. It fell past her and landed in the horde below. It was torn to pieces in seconds.

"Help me! Get me up! Help me." Cya sounded utterly terrified as more zombies began climbing towards her.

Drake let go of Cya. Intentionally. He laid across the bridge and watched her fall, screaming and terrified, into the waiting zombies below.

I clapped my hands over my ears so I wouldn't have to hear her screams. My hands did little to keep out the terror in her voice as I watched Drake and Shayla sprint across the bridge to safety. They never looked back at Cya.

"He dropped her. He fucking dropped her." Jeb's voice was thick with disbelief. He turned green and dropped to his knees, puking into the river.

Seth walked over the bridge and very calmly lit it on fire.

My knees went out from under me. It was odd because I couldn't even remember standing up to begin with. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to fight back the horror I felt as I watched the flames catch the dry, rotted wood and travel upwards through the supports of the bridge. Within minutes the entire railroad bridge was burning as brightly as any funeral pyre ever had. As I watched the flames shoot up into the sky, I knew that last of my innocence was burning up right along with that old bridge.

Chapter 16

"We need to go."

I didn't know how long I'd been kneeling in the shallow water next to the burning bridge, but when I focused my eyes on Jeb I realized that it was now fully dark out.

"Go?" I asked. I couldn't even feel my legs. They had gone numb sometime around the same time as the middle section of the bridge had collapsed into the river. All that was left of the bridge were a handful of burning piles of wood. The remains of the support beams that had held up the railroad tresses.

"Drake and Shayla are up there somewhere." Jeb pointed towards the bluff above us. "The bus still needs the radiator we pulled."

"The bus." I frowned at him and at the massive radiator that he'd propped against a nearby boulder. It seemed like the bus had broken down so long ago. It didn't seem possible that it had only been three days since I'd left the Cube.

Jeb nodded. "We can't do anything without the bus."

I looked around. "Where's Seth?"

Jeb shrugged. "He wandered off a little while ago saying he had some business to take care of. Told me to stay put and take care of you. Said he'd be back but I don't really think I want to wait on him."

"I'll wait for him," I said. I tentatively tried to make my right leg move. Pins and needles shot through my nervous system and made me moan.

"Pilar?" Jeb looked alarmed.

"I've sat here too long. My legs are asleep." I forced myself to stretch out both legs. I felt incredibly woozy. "The rock candy isn't helping either. My head feels like someone cut it in half with a blade."

"I didn't know rock candy could make you sick," Jeb said.

"Me neither," I said. "Jeb, I don't think I can walk yet. If you want to go back to the bus without me, I'd understand. I can just stay here until I feel better. I'm sure Seth will come back. He's been pretty hard to get rid of so far."

"He said you were with Drake when you met him?"

"I was," I confirmed. "We were on the roof of the bus...talking."

"Talking." Jeb sighed and held out his hands to me. He pulled me onto my feet and held me upright when my knees tried to buckle. "You can't trust Seth. He's not a friend of the Cube."

"We can't trust Drake either."

"I never said we could. Drake was pissed off at Cya after she got Conner killed but no one deserves to be torn apart by zombies."

"Drake told me Cya left some other girls to be torn apart by zombies. He said she'd done it on her second or third hunt, I think. He was pretty angry when he was telling me about it. He said she'd tried to blame Conner and then she'd let Conner die. Maybe this was his way of paying her back for everything he felt she'd screwed up?"

"I don't know. He never told me any of that." Jeb rubbed his face with his hands. "Not that it changes anything. We have to go back. We've already been gone a long time. Drake and Shayla may think we died."

"They haven't come looking for us."

"I don't think they would. Scavengers die all the time, remember?" He sounded incredibly bitter. "I want to confront him."

"What?"

"I need to confront him. About Cya. He promised he would take care of her and then he dropped her to her death. He's not supposed to do that. He's the leader of the Scavengers. The Powers That Be have entrusted him with the responsibility of making decisions for the team. He can't just make the decision to execute someone by zombie. It's inhumane. If he felt she'd committed crimes against the other Scavengers then he should have brought it to a hearing in front of the Powers. She would have been dealt with appropriately,"

"No one trusts the Powers That Be to handle anything," I muttered.

"I do." Jeb looked insulted and I belatedly remembered what Drake had said about Jeb being slated to become a member of the Powers That Be.

"I guess it's different when your family runs the Cube," I said awkwardly.

"Pilar, if this is about what happened to your parents, I'm sorry. You have to understand that the Powers that Be are responsible for over 7,000 lives. It can be hard to keep track of everyone. No one could have helped what happened to your family."

"My parents went missing from inside what is supposed to be an impenetrable prison." I purposefully looked away from him. It was difficult to resist the urge to scream in his face but it wouldn't do me any good. I seriously doubted that Jeb had any better idea about what happened to my family than I did. "I've gone over that day in my head a thousand times. Mom was in our apartment getting ready for Dad to come back from his night shift in the generator room. She had already brought his coffee up from the dining hall. She did that every morning because Dad liked to get his shower before he sat down with his coffee. I didn't see him before I left to go on duty at the hospital ward, but I know he came back to our apartment that morning because his boots were there when I got off duty. His only pair of shoes."

"He only owned one pair of shoes?" Jeb seemed startled.

"He gave all his redemption points to Mom. She loved books, so he had one pair of shoes and she had 200 paperback romances."

"He loved her," Jeb said.

"He did." I said as I blinked back tears "My best friend Julie and I used to pray we'd meet boy who would love us half as much as my Dad loved my Mom. He adored her. He used to make her jewelry down in the mechanics shop. He'd take surplus materials, scraps, and bend them into bracelets, necklaces and rings for her. He'd do it for us too. For me and Julie. One time he made princess crowns. They had all these crazy spirals and twists. We used to run through the hallways of the block wearing our crowns and asking everyone to bow to us."

"Did they?"

"Bow to us?" I smiled at the memory as I nodded. "They did. They laughed but they bowed to us. We laughed because they laughed at us."

"Sounds like you were happy."

"I was. Maybe that's why my life seems so wrong now, Jeb. Six months ago, I was happy. Maybe Block E wasn't the nicest block, but the people who live there treat one another like family. We watch out for one another. We take care of one another. We lived a decent life. Maybe my day-to-day life wasn't epic or amazing, but I had my parents and they loved me. I had my best friend and I loved her like a sister. I always thought I'd meet a good guy and I'd fall in love. Maybe it sounds pathetic to a guy whose destiny is to become one of the Powers That Be, but I couldn't wait to have the love and the life my parents had."

"Nothing about you is pathetic, Pilar." Jeb wrapped one arm around my shoulders and pulled me away from the river and towards the still burning remains of the bridge. My knees tried to go out on me but Jeb held me up and kept me on my feet until we were within 5 feet of one of the smaller fires. He guided me to the nearest boulder and helped me sit down on the side of it. "You're freezing. You need to get your wet clothes off."

"I don't have any dry clothes," I pointed out.

"We'll figure something out. Maybe we can use the remains of the fire to stay warm and dry our clothes out. I think our things would dry if we laid them out across these rocks." He patted the boulder I was sitting on. "Seth told me we'd be safe from zombies for a little while, if we wanted to get some sleep. He says they won't come anywhere near open flames."

"Sleep sounds....dangerous." I rubbed my bare arms and realized I was cold because my jacket was missing. "Have you seen my jacket?"

"No," Jeb said as he pulled his t-shirt off and laid it flat on the boulders. "Not since we were in the junkyard. Did you lose it?"

"I remember being burning hot. I must have taken it off." I cursed under my breath as I thought about my Dad's gun. Either Seth had it now or it was lost in the depths of the junkyard. "Seth didn't have it with him when we crossed the river, did he?"

"If he did, he lost it." Jeb shook his head at me as he peeled off his boots, socks and jeans. His thin, bare legs were almost blindingly white in the glow of the fire. "He nearly lost you. Heck, he nearly lost himself. I turned around once I reached the bank and looked back for you guys. He was struggling. Badly. I thought you were both going to drown."

"He's a bad swimmer." I remembered how hard Seth had been breathing as we'd crawled out of the river. I took a deep breath. "But at least he didn't let me go."

"You mean he didn't sacrifice you to save himself, the way Drake did with Cya."

"You said it yourself. Seth nearly drowned the both of us. The both of us. I might have drowned but-."

"But he would have drowned too. I got that. I had to pry you out of his grip so I could pull you on shore. I'm surprised you don't have bruises from how tightly he was hanging on to you." Jeb gestured at my arms.

I looked down but I didn't see any bruises. I did, however, feel sore all over. I decided to worry about the gun later. Regardless of whether Seth had it or it was lost on the other side of the river, there was nothing I could do about it. "Do you really think we're safe enough here that we can sleep?" I asked Jeb.

"Depends on whether or not you trust Seth," Jeb admitted. "He knows we're here. He says we're safe."

"What happened in the junkyard this afternoon?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" Jeb asked. He sat down on the ground, positioning himself so that the fire was in front of him and boulder was guarding his back. He laid his sword on the ground a few inches to his right.

"I remember us going into the junkyard and finding the truck. I remember killing a couple of zombies and Seth appearing like he'd been conjured by black magic. He was critiquing my zombie slaying skills. He found them lacking. I was arguing with him when I realized I was feeling sick and then I collapsed. I vaguely remember being carried. I guess we were running?"

"I was working on getting the radiator loose when Seth came up behind me. The rock candy hit me funny too, I think. I'm normally pretty good at working with mechanical equipment but it took me a long time to pull the radiator. I can remember just staring at the bolts that were holding it in for a long, long time. I remember counting all the spirals on the bolt. Why would I do that?"

"The rock candy was messing with your head," I said with a sigh. I began pulling my own soggy clothes off. My boots were full of water and my toes were wrinkled beyond recognition. The dirt felt fuzzy underneath my toes. My wet jeans felt like they were glued to my skin. Goosebumps blossomed across my flesh as I pulled my pants off and then smoothed them flat against the hard surface of the boulder. I very much doubted they would dry anytime soon but it did feel better to have them off. The fire's heat felt good on my bare skin.

"I guess. I don't remember when you walked off, but the next time I turned around, Seth was at my back. He was just sitting on the hood of a car about 12 feet from me." Jeb shuddered. "I knew who he was when I saw his eye. Drake has described him to be me before. He said the easiest way to recognize Seth Ra was his eyes. He said one was blue and one was dead. I asked how an eye could die. He told me I'd know when I saw it. I guess he was right because I did know. I saw that white, scarred eye and I knew who he was."

"What did you do when you recognized him?"

"I asked him what he'd done with you," Jeb said with a small laugh. "He told me the rock candy had made you sick, so he'd hidden you somewhere where you would be safe. He said you'd made him promise to watch my back while I finished getting the radiator. I didn't believe him. I thought he'd killed you. I said as much and he laughed at me."

"Sounds like Seth," I said as I started to take off my shirt and then hesitated. It was bad enough to be sitting in front of Jeb in my panties. I wasn't sure he needed to see my bra too. Of course, my legs were already a lot warmer than they had been. "Is it better to be modest or warm?" I asked abruptly.

Jeb looked down at his boxer shorts. "Warm. A lack of modesty never got anyone killed. Hypothermia, on the other hand, can be fatal."

"You're right," I said. I stripped off my shirt and laid it next to my pants. "Now about Seth?"

"I couldn't get one of the bolts loose for the radiator. My hands kept slipping and then I'd lose focus and forget what I was supposed to be doing altogether. I guess Seth got sick of watching me stare at the sun, because he finally pushed me to the side and pulled the radiator out of the truck himself."

"Helpful of him," I muttered.

"He'd put you in the bed of a truck that had one of those shell things over it. We were walking back to get you when this massive horde of zombies suddenly came flooding into the junkyard. It was like someone had opened that main gate between the junkyard and the rest of the town. There had to have been a hundred of them. Maybe more. They were moving fast too. Seth grabbed me and pulled me on top of a pile of cars just as they first came past us. We got you out of the truck and just started running as fast as we could. There were way too many of them for us to fight. I remember hearing someone screaming, probably Cya. We were just running and running. I couldn't keep track of where we were going or how we were getting there. Seth said to follow him and I didn't see a better option. He had you and I had the radiator. He got us to the fence and then over the fence. You remember the rest."

"Unfortunately, yes. I do." I sunk down beside him in the sand. "I don't know who to trust, Jeb."

"Me neither," Jeb admitted. "Maybe we should sleep on it."

"You think we're safe to sleep?" I asked.

"If Seth wanted us dead, he'd have left us to die in the junkyard. Seeing all those zombies bearing down on us was like something out of a nightmare, Pilar. There were so many teeth. Just so many teeth, gnashing at me." He closed his eyes and hugged himself.

"It's okay. We got out alive." I reached on hand out and put it on his arm, trying to be reassuring.

"We did. The way I figure it, Drake and Shayla can't go anywhere without a new radiator for the bus. I didn't see them carrying one with them when they were running back across the bridge. I'm assuming they still need this one." He patted the radiator he'd salvaged from the junkyard. "I vote we stay here for tonight. Try to get some sleep and let the last of the side-effects from the rock candy wear off. Figure out what to do in the morning."

"What about Seth?" I asked. "Do you think he's coming back?"

"If he does, I have some questions to ask him."

"If he doesn't?"

Jeb shrugged. "We have the radiator. Drake needs it. I'm sure he'll be happy to see us."

I let out a short, bitter laugh. "I guess you're right."

"You know I'm right, now get some sleep."

"I will," I promised as I closed my eyes and curled into a ball in front of the fire. Within seconds, I was asleep.
Chapter 17

The stress of the last three days caught up to me while the moon was still high in the night sky. Not wanting to wake Jeb, I stumbled away from the dwindling fire. My body was dripping with sweat and my lungs were struggling to breathe as I fought off the nightmare I'd just woken from. Images of my mother screaming my name as she was fed to a horde of angry zombies were freshly engraved on the backs of my eyelids.

The cool night air offered only mild relief as I made it to the tree line that separated the riverbank from the surrounding woods. I flung myself onto my knees in the brush and gagged. My stomach churned and heaved until nothing was left in it except yellow bile. My throat burned from the retching. Hot tears were streaming down my cheeks as I continued to gag long after I'd finished throwing up.

The wind was blowing harder now that it had been earlier. I could hear branches popping and cracking all around me as I laid down in the dirt and wondered why I'd ever thought joining the Scavengers would be an improvement over working in the hospital ward. I was still surrounded by death. Being a Scavenger just meant that the likelihood of it being my own death were significantly higher than when I'd been nursing the mildly-ill back to full health.

I didn't know how long I'd been laying on the ground when I realized that the cracking noises coming from the wood were getting louder but the breeze wasn't increasing. It took me a minute to notice that someone was walking through the woods towards us. I needed to get back to Jeb. I needed to wake him up and warn him that we were no longer alone. I sat up and felt woozy. I couldn't stand, so I started to crawl back towards Jeb and the fire.

The sound of Drake's voice made me freeze right as I was about to leave the safety of the trees for the exposure of the riverbank.

"Jeb. Wake up."

"Humph."

"Jeb." I heard a thump, as if Drake had kicked him. I took the risk of crawling 10 feet to my left, finding cover in the leaves of a large, scruffy flowering bush. I had a fairly clear view as Drake kicked Jeb in the ribs for a second time.

"Ow. Shit. Stop." Jeb sat up blinking. His blonde hair was ruffled and he had dark circles under his eyes. He held his arms up to defend himself as he slid backwards until he was touching the boulder. "Drake?"

"I see you got us a radiator," Drake said. His shirt was torn in multiple places and I could see long scratches under each of the tears. His pant leg had a long rip down one side.

"Yeah. I did what you told me to." Jeb squinted in the darkness.

"You set the bridge on fire too?"

Jeb hesitated for only a fraction of the second. "Of course I did. Those zombies were climbing, man. We couldn't risk them getting across the tracks. You and Shayla had already made it to safety. I set the bridge on fire and then swam across the river."

"And decided to take a nap?" Drake gestured to the spot on the ground where Jeb had been sleeping.

"Swimming across the river with the radiator took all my strength," Jeb explained. "I was freezing cold and it was dark. I didn't think I could find my way back to the bus in the dark, so I decided to wait here until daylight."

Drake considered Jeb's words and then nodded. "You were coming to find us in the morning."

"Of course." Jeb used the side of the boulder to pull himself upright. "Are you okay?"

"Me?" Drake frowned at him.

"You look pale," Jeb said.

"I've been better," Drake admitted. There was something dark and sticky covering his clothes.

"Where's Shayla?" Jeb asked.

"We had a disagreement after we got back to the bus," Drake said. "She told me this hunt has gone too far south to be salvaged. Said she thought her luck would be better in Ra Shet then it would in the Cube."

"You mean she went to find a radiator?" Jeb asked.

"No. I mean she took a long walk off a short bridge." Drake gestured to the rips in his shirt. "You don't really think I would let a second member of my team just up and walk away from me, do you?"

"What did you do to her?" Jeb's dawning horror was clear in his eyes.

"She betrayed me. She betrayed us. She betrayed the Scavengers." Drake snarled as he spoke. "She's been with me since the beginning and today she just turns around and says she's had enough. She said she was tired of living in fear of what would happen when we ran out of cans. She said she was tired of worrying about being eaten by zombies when she could disfigure herself and never have to be afraid again. She said Kennedy had done right when he'd run off last night. She said she wished he'd have told her he was going so that she could go with him."

"Drake?" Jeb took a step backwards, intentionally putting distance between himself and Drake. "What happened to Shayla?"

"She tried to run. I chased her down and slit her throat." Drake gestured down at the stains that were covering his clothes. "She bled out while I watched."

"You-you killed Shayla?" Jeb stuttered.

"I had no choice, Jeb. She made me kill her. She knew I couldn't let her walk away. Not after Conner died and Kennedy betrayed us. If your brother saw her in Ra Shet, he'd kill her for being there and me for letting her go."

"My brother?" Jeb frowned at Drake. "Bud knows about Ra Shet?"

"Of course he does. He's the one who makes the runs from the Cube into the city. You know that."

"I know Bud leaves the Cube from time-to-time, but he's never told me where he went. He's just said it was Cube business and I'd find out when I was older." Jeb reached for his pants, pulling them off the top of the boulder and slipping his bony legs into them.

"Oh. Well, I guess you're older now." Drake shook his head at Jeb and smiled bitterly. "I'm trusting Bud did tell you that you're supposed to take my place as the captain of the Scavengers."

"He said you wanted to retire. He said you would train me to take over." Jeb buckled his weapons belt back around his waist. He took another step away from Drake as he did it.

I crouched even further down into the bush and tried not to breathe too loudly. If Drake had killed Shayla then none of us were safe.

"Damn right I want to retire," Drake said. "I bought my house last year. Its pure white. The color of bones that have been left out in the sun for years and years. It has windows all over it. Huge windows that look down over the city and at the bottom of the view, you can see the bluest lake you've ever laid eyes on. It has 13 rooms. Thirteen rooms and no one else lives there but me. I love being alone, Jeb. Its heaven, being alone."

"You bought a house?" Jeb sounded just as baffled as I felt.

"Technically, the Powers That Be bought me a house. They'll buy you one too. Any house you want. All you have to do is keep the façade of the Scavengers alive for a few years. The price of peace is five years of staring 7,000 people in the eyes while you pretend to care about how many cans you've brought back to the Cube. While you pretend like you're doing anything except fattening them all up for slaughter."

"What?" Jeb jerked back away from Drake. "Fattening them up for slaughter? What are you talking about?

"Aw, damn it to hell. Bud didn't tell you anything, did he?" Drake slammed his fist down into the boulder. "He left all the dirty work to me. Just like he always does."

"I don't know-," Jeb started and then changed tactics mid-sentence. "I didn't want to be a Scavenger. I thought going ass deep in zombies to collect a bunch of disgusting canned slop was stupid. When Bud offered to make me the captain, I told him I didn't want the job. I told him that the Scavengers' survival rate is too low for my tastes. You want to know what he told me?"

"I can think of a few replies that would have been appropriate," Drake chuckled darkly. "Considering that I had to kill six other candidates to get the same job you were offered clean and turned down."

"You killed for this job?" Jeb was now more than six feet from Drake and trying to increase the distance. His feet were nearly in the fire itself.

"Not everyone can take their luck for granted the way you can. I was born in Block C. You know what happens to kids from Block C?"

Jeb shrugged. "I never thought much about it. Isn't Block C zoned to work dining service?"

"You're damn right it is. Before I joined the Scavengers, my job was to operate a hand-twist can opener. Can opener number 17, to be exact. I spent 8 hours every day peeling the metal lids off canned goods. I was so bored I thought I'd go insane. And then my name came up on the Scavengers list and everything changed for me. I went from being can opener number 17 to being a hero. I'd kill a hundred people before I'd open one more can. You can stake your life on that, Jeb Moon."

"No one would ever expect you to go back to opening cans." The hesitation was clear in Jeb's voice.

"You'd be amazed at what people will expect you to do," Drake replied with a snarl. "You think its been easy to spend every waking day of your life living a lie?"

"I don't understand," Jeb said. "What lies are you living?"

"Everything you've ever heard about me is a lie," Drake said bluntly. "I'm not a hero. I'm not a god. I've betrayed almost everyone who has ever trusted me."

"You mean like how you dropped Cya into a horde of zombies today?" There was no mistaking the anger in Jeb's words. He had one hand on the hilt of his sword. "Or are you talking about how you snuck up behind Kennedy in the woods last night and chopped his head off?"

"You scared of me?" Drake laughed bitterly. "Kennedy betrayed us. He deserved to be hunted down like the dog he was."

"I liked how you pretended to be surprised when you woke up this morning and found him missing. I would have believed you were truly upset if I hadn't been with you when you killed him," Jeb said bitterly. He made no move to release his sword. "From where I'm standing, four Scavengers have died this trip. You killed three of them. I'm not exactly feeling the love from you."

Drake grinned at him through the darkness. "Leading the Scavengers is an ugly job. Personally, I don't think you have what it takes to be a Scavenger. I think you're too soft. Too spoiled. Too lazy. Too stupid."

"I don't have the stomach to kill people just because they want to leave the Cube," Jeb said. "They should have a right to choose."

"And what would happen if everyone chose to leave?" Drake countered.

"I don't know," Jeb admitted with a shrug. "I guess we wouldn't have to worry about hunting down canned goods anymore."

Drake laughed again. "Don't have to worry about hunting down canned goods. You still think this is about the cans?"

"I don't know what this is about," Jeb admitted.

"Like I said, you're stupid. You can't even recognize the Cube for the meat factory it is."

"The what?"

"Meat factory. Feed lot. The place where all the stupid little sheeple live until they're fat enough to be slaughtered and served up on the tables of all the rich people in Ra Shet." Drake sneered at the shocked expression on Jeb's face.

"Slaughtered and served?" Jeb whispered.

I tightened my grip on the bush I was hiding behind. I couldn't breathe as Drake continued to speak.

"The zombie virus is transmitted through food, Jeb."

"I know that. The contamination is the reason we eat cans."

"Cans taste like shit," Drake said.

"I know, but-."

"The upper class in Ra Shet doesn't want to eat cans. They want to eat fresh meat. Meat that hasn't been contaminated by the zombie virus. They'll pay good money for that meat, Jeb. Real good money. The kind of money that has made your family amazingly powerful in both the Cube and Ra Shet. You can stop pretending you don't know about the city, Jeb. I know you've been to the mansion. I saw you playing on the lawn there too many times when you were a child."

"I never said I didn't know about Ra Shet," Jeb admitted reluctantly. "I like Ra Shet. It's a hell of a lot nicer than the Cube. I learned how to swim on the lake at Ra Shet. How do you think I made it across the river with that radiator?"

"You ever stop to wonder what was on your dinner plate in Ra Shet?"

"No. I didn't." Jeb looked nauseous.

"Well, maybe you should have," Drake said pointedly. "Because Bud is a flesh broker."

"Bud is a what?"

"Your brother sells people. For slaughter. He takes them out of the Cube and sells them at the meat market in Ra Shet."

"No." Jeb shook his head. "No. Bud wouldn't."

"Bud would. He does."

"No."

My knees completely and totally collapsed underneath me. I was shaking all over as I watched Jeb stagger backwards and nearly fall over.

"Yes," Drake said. He closed the distance between himself and Jeb. "Why do you think we had to kill Pilar?"

"What?" Jeb asked.

I had to jam my own fist into my mouth to stop from gasping.

"She did die today, didn't she?" Drake asked. "When I opened the gates between Mylon and the junkyard and let all the zombies in, Pilar died, didn't she?"

"She-. You never said anything to me about killing Pilar." Jeb looked around once, as if double checking to make sure I was no longer sleeping by the fire, and then seemed to pull himself together. "You let all those zombies into the junkyard? On purpose?"

"I wanted it to look like an accident," Drake said with a nod. "But yes, I let the zombies into the junkyard. I needed to kill a couple of people and I try not to get blood on my own hands if I don't have to. I'd rather let zombies do my dirty work."

"Why-why Pilar?"

"Because she stood up in front of everyone in the entire Cube and asked some very valid questions about how her aging, decrepit parents could have possibly gotten through our top-notch security."

"So you killed her?" Jeb demanded.

"Her father was already an issue. He'd asked too many questions too many times," Drake said. "You may have been too busy spending summers on your family's yacht to notice George Augustus, but most of the nice folks who spend their days operating can openers knew his name. He'd been in the Cube since the beginning of the apocalypse. He refused to swallow the load of bullshit that the Powers That Be stuffs down all of our throats. He kept records of all the disappearances. He ran test runs for different methods of escaping the Cube. He knew there was no way out unless we let him out."

"Was he trying to escape?"

"No. His wife was terrified of her own shadow. She was so afraid of zombies that she wouldn't even go out into the brickyard when it was still open. Bud said she was so hysterical with fear that she pissed herself and then fainted when they were carrying her out to the meat wagon."

"The meat wagon?" Jeb asked.

"It's our pet name for the truck Bud uses to carry the sheeple to slaughter. He keeps it parked just outside the view of the Cube. Can't have anyone looking out their window and seeing all the screaming little sheeple being loaded up the ramp to die."

"Jesus you're sick," Jeb said as he turned away from Drake. "You are really, really sick."

"Sick or not, you're the one in line for my job."

"I don't want it," Jeb said. "I won't. I can't. We don't slaughter and eat people."

"But they taste so good." Drake closed his eyes and blissfully licked his lips as he taunted Jeb. "You'll never again be able to eat a steak without wondering who is on your plate."

"I'm going to be sick," Jeb said.

Drake laughed. "Be sick then. And hurry up with it. We have a bus to repair and a whole lot of cans to load before we go back to the Cube and report how all the other Scavengers were gobbled up by zombies during our noble quest to feed the masses."

"You want us to go find cans and then go back to the Cube?" Jeb asked with obvious disbelief.

Drake shrugged his concerns off. "I'm not too worried about finding cans. We keep a few pallets hidden in a warehouse a couple miles north of the Cube especially for smoothing over situations just like this one. You and I will be going back to the Cube victorious. Two lone survivors who managed to come home with 5,000 cans despite the vicious attacks we endured. Heroes."

"I can't."

"You will. Unless you want die the same way Kennedy and Shayla did?" The threat was clear as Drake pulled a bloody knife out of his pocket.

"Bud would kill you," Jeb said flatly. "The entire time you've been standing here talking, I've been trying to figure out why you would tell me all of this. It's because of Bud. You won't kill me because Bud will kill you if you don't bring me home alive."

"Maybe you are smarter than I gave you credit for." Drake smirked at him and put the blade back into his pocket. "You're right. Bud told me to bring you back alive or I'd never see my pretty white house on the hill again. He said I'd wind up on his plate as a rib-eye if you died in a hunt."

"Remind me never to eat dinner with Bud again," Jeb said as he turned away from Drake. "We should go fix our bus. We have cans to haul."

"Now you're talking like a real Scavenger," Drake said with a grin.

"Right. Yeah. Sure. Let me go take a leak and then we'll head out." Jeb gestured for Drake to look the other direction. When Drake turned towards the river, Jeb walked straight over to where I was hiding in the bushes. He unzipped his fly and stared straight ahead while he spoke through gritted teeth.

"Run," Jeb said to me. "Run."
Chapter 18

I ran.

I ran as fast and as hard as the adrenaline pumping through my veins would let me. I ran as bushes and trees cut through my skin. Running blindly in the dark, I fell down an embankment next to a small creek and scraped my hands, stomach, knees and face. I drank the water from the creek and I then I ran again. I ran until the adrenaline wore off and I collapsed at the base of a huge sycamore tree, sobbing and gasping. When I could breathe again, I ran some more.

I ran up hills and down the sides of mountains. I ran across grassy fields and through woods that were thick with brush. I ran until my hands and feet were cut to ribbons from the thorns of vines I'd pushed my way through. I ran until I didn't think I could run anymore.

And then I remembered the way Drake had described my mother's screams of terror, and I ran some more.

I suppose it was only by luck that I stumbled across Kennedy's corpse. I certainly hadn't been searching for him. To be honest, I didn't even know what direction I'd been running.

Drake had disemboweled Kennedy and then cut off his hands, his feet and his head. He'd burned the torso, pelvis and thighs, but he'd arranged the parts he'd cut off in a sick shrine. Kennedy's hands were being stepped on by his feet. His head, eyes glazed and mouth open in a silent scream, was below his hands. I gagged hard as I turned away, determined to keep running.

Kennedy's backpack was laying a few feet away from the scorched remains of his chest. I started to walk past it, but then I stopped myself. The pack looked like it had been flung to the side during the attack and then forgotten about. If Drake hadn't raided the supplies then there was a good chance I might be able to use the items Kennedy had so carefully packed when he had chosen to flee the Scavengers and the Cube for good.

I unclasped the heavy buckles that held the bag shut and pulled it open. The first thing that greeted my eyes was Kennedy's brown leather jacket. He'd been wearing it the last time I'd seen him. He must have gotten hot hiking and put it into the bag. I pulled it out and laid it gently on the ground beside me. Below the jacket were a spare change of clothes. The fabric of the cotton shirt stuck to my scrapes and cuts almost as soon as I put it on and the pants were both too tight and too short for me, but I was glad to have protection from the elements again. My own clothes were still on the river bank where I'd fled from Drake.

Below the clothes were a small supply of canned sausages and bottled water. I pulled the tab on the can of sausages and forced myself to swallow each and every one of them. I washed them down with the stale water and felt better for having something in my stomach. No one could go on for days without eating. I knew I was running near the end of my strength as I kept rummaging through the belongings of someone I had almost been willing to consider a friend.

Kennedy's tools were wrapped carefully and lovingly in a blanket in the center of the bag. I had no real use for them and didn't know what half of them were for, but I knew they had to be valuable if he'd taken them with him when he'd left. I tucked them back into the bag, shoving them down into the bottom where they wouldn't get in my way.

The bag also contained several spare weapons, including a vicious looking knife that was entirely too long to comfortably carry anywhere on my person. I stuck it in between my spine and the waistband of my pants. I'd rather be uncomfortable than dead.

Kennedy's boots were the hard part. Drake had left them on his feet. I needed shoes. I'd already cut my feet up pretty badly when I'd been running and I knew my tenderfootedness was slowing me down. I wasn't safe from Drake yet. If he'd followed Kennedy this far and killed him, he could do the same to me. For all I knew, he might be watching me right now.

The thought terrified me. I scanned the trees and the grass surrounding me and saw no sign of Drake or any other threat, but I knew how easy it would be for him to overpower me. I was nowhere near as strong as Drake. No one was as strong as Drake, except maybe for Seth.

I hadn't thought much about Seth since I'd fled the riverbank. I hadn't had time to wonder what he'd thought when he'd come back to find us gone. I wondered if he thought I had gone back to Drake. I wondered if he cared.

I knew I was allowing my mind to wander away from the necessary task at hand. Steeling my nerves, I grabbed Kennedy's booted feet and removed the feet from the boots. With a silent apology, I left his feet beside his head and put his shoes on. They were a little too big, but the thick soles would give me protection from the rocks and thorns I kept stepping on.

I shouldered Kennedy's pack, adjusted the straps so that it would ride comfortably and I ran.

I ran and ran until I could run no more. When my legs finally gave out, I laid on the ground in a grassy field and cried.
Chapter 19

"You've really made a mess of this one, Pi." Julie was leaning against the stump of an old tree. Her long red hair was gleaming in the sunlight and she was wearing a sheer, silken lace dress that I'd only ever seen in the drawings she used to sketch in between our shifts in the hospital ward.

"You're dead," I told her.

"Doesn't mean I'm not watching you. Drake turned out to be a real jerk, didn't he?" Julie asked.

"Yes." I looked down at myself. I was surrounded by fluffy green grass and wearing a white gown that looked suspiciously like a wedding dress. "He turned out to be a homicidal maniac."

"I guess I'm glad I never did get him to kiss me," Julie said whimsically. "How was it, by the way?"

"He was a homicidal maniac. Why do you care what it felt like to kiss him?" I asked.

"I care because kissing him was our dream. We spent all those afternoons practicing. Don't you remember?" Julie laughed.

"I remember my Mom asking me what we'd done to get my pillow so slobbery," I admitted. I reached for her hand. "Julie- I'm so sorry. I couldn't save you."

"You tried, Pi. It wasn't your fault I died." Julie laced her delicate, artist's fingers through my thick, stumpy ones. Julie had always been the beautiful one.

"I always thought you would be the one who'd get to kiss Drake," I whispered.

"I'm kind of glad it was you," she replied. "I would have fallen in love with him if he'd ever kissed me. He would have lead me to my death like a lamb to slaughter."

"Lamb." I frowned as the word got caught in my memory. "Little lamb. He calls me little lamb."

"You mean Seth?"

"You know about Seth?"

"I watch you. Always. I watch over you." She squeezed my fingers reassuringly.

"Is he evil? Seth, I mean. Not Drake. I know Drake is evil."

"No one is ever truly evil," Julie told me. "We're all just victims of our circumstances and reflections of our characters."

"How very philosophical of you."

"Death changes the way you look at things," she said. "But as for Seth, I can't answer your question."

"Are you not allowed to?" I asked. "I mean, is there some kind of rule or God that won't let you?"

"No. I just don't know the answer." Julie smiled at me and shrugged. "I don't want to lead you astray. After all, I'm the one who once said Drake was a god with a little 'g', aren't I?"

"You did."

"I'm thinking maybe you shouldn't follow my advice on men," Julie suggested. "I already failed you once. You never really wanted Drake until I sold him to you. I spent so many hours convincing you that he was the perfect man. You didn't really like him at first, remember?"

I did remember, vaguely. "I thought he was arrogant."

"You were right."

"Lot of good that did me. I fell right into his trap."

"A lot of people have fallen into his trap," Julie said. "He's betrayed and killed more people than you could possibly imagine. There is no one who he won't lie to."

"He's afraid of Bud Moon."

"Everyone is afraid of Bud Moon. With good reason, I might add." Julie shook her head and frowned. "He took your parents, Pi."

"And killed them. I know."

"No. He hasn't killed them. Not yet."

"Mom and Dad are still alive?" I stared at Julie in shock. I barely dared to believe she might be telling the truth.

"I would know if they weren't," she said softly. "You can't give up, Pi. I know you want to, but you can't give up."

"I'm not giving up," I said even though in my heart I knew that I wasn't exactly telling the truth.

"I wouldn't be able to talk to you now if you weren't," Julie said. "I've tried to get through to you, to talk to you, so many times since I passed. You've never been able to hear me or see me until now. You can see me because you're giving up. You're losing your will to live and that's why I can reach you."

"I'm tired and I'm scared, Julie." The words came out before I could stop them. "You're gone. Dad's gone. Mom's gone. Drake's a monster. I'm a monster. I'm wearing shoes that I took off the feet of a dead friend. I'm hungry but all that's left in my pack is a bag of jerky and I don't trust it. It probably started out its existence as someone I knew."

"You are not a monster." Julie's fingers didn't feel as solid in my hand as they had a moment before. I looked down and saw that they were fading from my grasp. She was disappearing right before my eyes.

"Then what am I?" I asked as I squeezed her hand even more tightly. I wanted to beg her not to go but I knew it would do me no good. The world around us was dissolving just as rapidly as my best friend was.

"A survivor," Julie said. "You'll always be a survivor. I love you, Pi."

"I love you too," I whispered. The words were still on my lips when I woke up, alone in the woods but no longer nearly as afraid as I had been when I'd first come into them.
Chapter 20

"You better wait your turn in line." The man who I had been about to walk past reached out and caught my ankle, nearly snatching me to the ground.

"This is a line?" I asked. The scattering of people dotting the hillside in front of the massive stone church didn't appear to be arranged in any particular order. Most of them appeared to have set up small, individualized campsites for themselves. Several were using fire pits to cook breakfast. The smell of the cooking food wafting through the early morning air made my stomach rumble hungrily.

"Darn right, this is a line. And you ain't taking my place." The man in front of me was old and grizzled, with a hunched back and a filthy face. He needed a haircut desperately, but I supposed I didn't have much room to talk. I was fairly certain I had sticks tangled into my hair. Sleeping outside for the last few days hadn't done my appearance any favors.

"I don't think I even want to be in your line," I told the man. "I just need to talk to someone. A friend. This is the Church of Chaos, isn't it?"

The man spit on the ground next to my boots. "Of course this is the Church of Chaos. You don't think we'd all be waiting around out here for a blessing if it wasn't, do you?"

"A blessing?" I asked.

"From the high priest," he said. "He comes out here every Thursday and blesses each and every one of us. He can heal with his touch, if he chooses to and the belief of the person being healed is strong enough."

"When you say the high priest- wait, what day is it now?" I used my fingers to try to brush some of the sticks out of my hair. I hadn't put much thought into Seth's actual role with the church. I'd spent the last three days focused on finding my way back to the river and then following it upstream. It had been such a relief to actually find the church, I hadn't thought much past that.

I certainly hadn't considered the possibility that I might not be able see Seth when I got here.

"Saturday," the man replied scornfully.

"I can't wait five days to see the high priest," I said flatly as I stared at the massive wooden doors that loomed above the front steps of the church.

"You will wait as long as the high priest deems necessary. You cannot rush a god."

"Seth is many things. A god is not one of them." I stepped sideways around the grubby man and began walking straight towards the doors. I ignored several shouts of protest as I jogged up the stone steps and knocked politely on the wooden doors.

Nothing happened.

I knocked again, louder this time.

A woman grabbed me from behind and physically threw me back away from the door. I landed hard on top of Kennedy's pack, the tools inside doing no favors for my already bruised spine. I rolled to the side and hissed at her.

"You cannot bother the priests!" She was wearing a long, stained yellow ball gown that was missing more than half its sequins. Her hair was twisted up on top of her head in some kind of a combination of a braid and bun. She was twice my age and missing most of her teeth.

She had inserted herself between me and the doors of the church.

I decided I could take her.

"Sorry, crazy lady, but you're going to have to move." I stood up and slipped the pack off my back. I pulled Kennedy's knife out of my waistband and waved it in her direction.

"You shall not bother our priests. It is unholy."

"I never claimed to be holy," I said as I tried to walk past her. She flung her arms out wide, as if standing spread eagle on the stairs would stop me. I shoved her backwards and then dodged around her.

This time I got in a solid three knocks on the door before she grabbed me. On the plus side, I was ready for her. I grabbed her by her hair and yanked as hard as I could. "I don't have time for you," I told her as she squealed in anger. I launched her back down the steps.

At this point, the other dozen-or-so psychotic religious campers had taken an interest in what I was doing. I had the time to reflect that I was pretty severely outnumbered and not a particularly talented fighter before the woman in the yellow dress charged me again. She head-butted me in the stomach as I drove my knee into her ribs as hard as I could. The impact knocked the air out of both of us.

I slid onto my butt and she landed on top of me.

"You cannot bother the priests," she hissed.

"Go away crazy lady," I hissed back as I pushed her off of me. She rolled down to the bottom of the stairs and didn't get back up. I breathed a very short-lived sigh of relief. The rest of Seth's worshipers had formed a semi-circle at the base of the stairs and they were all looking up at me with pretty obvious malice.

"Crap," I muttered under my breath as two decidedly scary looking men with long beards and ragged clothes began walking up the steps towards me. I still had the knife in my hand but I really didn't want to have to try to use it.

The doors of the church opened behind me.

"Who dares disturb the Church of Chaos?" A female voice boomed over my head. The men who had been coming up the steps after me retreated so quickly that one tripped over his own two feet and fell the rest of the way down the stairs. The worshipers began backing slowly away from the church, eyes directed to the ground as if they couldn't bear the sight before them.

I twisted around to see a slender girl in a clean, white shift-style dress was standing behind me. She had alabaster skin and long, jet black hair that hung down past her hips. Her eyes were the color of the clearest blue afternoon sky. Her pouty red lips were pursed with disapproval as she stared down at me.

"You will not be blessed," she informed me.

"I'm not here for a blessing," I told her as I forced my bruised and aching legs to support my weight once more. "I came to talk to Seth."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "You dare to speak the high priest's given name?"

"I suppose so," I acknowledged with a shrug. "He didn't tell me not to."

Her eyes narrowed even further. "I should have you thrown down the mountain for your disrespect."

I hesitated. I needed Seth's help if I was going to try to save my parents' lives. I didn't have the skills or the knowledge to rescue them from Bud the Flesh Broker on my own. At the same time, I wasn't interested in humiliating myself in order to earn the pleasure of Seth's company.

"I don't bow to false deities," I told the girl. "I've learned my lessons about worshiping gods with the little 'g'."

"Leave." The girl began to close the doors in my face.

I shoved them open. They moved far more easily on the hinges than I had expected them to. "I want my gun back."

"Your what?" The surprise on her face was evident.

"Seth took my gun. I understand and appreciate why he did it, but I need it back. Get it for me and I'll go."

"You'll go because I told you to go," the girl replied with a shake of her head. "I don't know anything about a gun."

"Go ask Seth."

"He's not here," the girl replied. "Or I would."

"Where is he?" I demanded.

"How should I know?" The girl asked. "It's not Thursday."

I closed my eyes and tried not to scream with frustration. "I thought he was your high priest. You don't know where he is?"

"He's not the most cooperative high priest we've ever had," she spat back at me through gritted teeth. "I know where he is on Thursdays." She pointed down at the gathered worshipers in the church yard.

"Did he say where he was going?" I asked.

"He's the high priest. He doesn't have to tell anyone where he's going. As much as I'd appreciate it if he would." She sounded utterly exasperated. "Last I heard, he'd let himself become obsessed with some Scavenger girl who he'd seen in one of his dreams. One of our followers told me he was trailing her around in the woods. She's probably slit his lovesick throat by now."

"Oh for crying out loud." I pushed past her into the church and slammed the doors shut behind me. The room was instantly shrouded in darkness. I had a brief second to enjoy the sudden rush of coolness and silence before she interrupted it.

"I didn't invite you inside!" The girl snapped at me. Her voice echoed loudly through the large stone chapel.

"Sorry, but those people out there were giving me the creeps. I can't argue with them at my back. I feel like one of them is going to stab me while I'm not looking."

"They don't have any weapons. We don't allow them to own weapons," the girl I'd been arguing with replied. She crossed her arms over her breasts and glared at me. "You're going back outside."

"No. I'm not." I shook my head at her. "I need to find Seth."

"I already told you, I don't have your gun."

"Seth does."

"Seth might," the girl acknowledged. "Not that he would mention it to me if he did. He's an infuriating bastard."

"Finally," I muttered.

"Finally what?" She asked angrily.

"Something we agree on," I replied. "Seth is an infuriating bastard."

The girl snorted and then shook her head in disgust. "I'm Vera."

"Nice to meet you," I lied.

She frowned at me. "Who are you?

"The Scavenger girl Seth was following through the woods," I told her.

I was surprised by the number of expletives that came out of her pretty red lips. After all, we were in a church.

"Are you sure you're the right girl?" Vera finally asked when she had gotten done damning Seth to hell in at least four different languages.

"I think the options are pretty limited," I told her. "So yes. Though you're wrong about him being in love with me. I think he just finds it amusing to torture me."

"He has a sadistic side," Vera agreed after a moment. "But he has plenty of people to torture right here at home. No need to be trailing you around. You are sure it was you that he was trailing around?"

"You tell me." I gave her the recap of what had happened to me since leaving the Cube, including all my interactions with Seth.

"I thought you'd be prettier," she told me when I had finished my retelling. "Gerard, he's one of the followers who helps us keep an eye on the Scavengers, described you as being quite exotic."

"I looked better before I spent three days sleeping in the woods and running for my life," I said flatly. "I need a bath and a change of clothes."

"Well, why didn't you say so?" Vera asked. "All you had to do was ask."

"You're offering me a bath?" I asked, baffled by her sudden change in attitude.

"Yes. Try not to drown in it. My brother would be pissed if he found out I'd managed to kill you off after he's clearly spent so much time working to earn your trust." She began walking through the chapel, heading into the depths of the church.

I didn't move. "Your brother?"

She twirled around in front of me, the skirt of her dress swirling around her as if she were some type of exotic flower that had just bloomed. "My brother. Surely you can see the resemblance?"

She covered her right eye with her hand and blinked at me with her left. She had a large chunk of permanently missing flesh on the inside of her right arm, but the intentional disfigurement wasn't what made me curse under my breath. Vera wasn't one of Seth's followers. She was his sister.

She started walking again and this time I followed her. She led me through the chapel and then out a door at the back of it. We moved briskly through a series of dark passageways and darker stairwells until we finally reached a large room with an elaborate bubbling hot spring in the center of it.

"Here you go," Vera said as she gestured to the tub. "I suggest you get yourself cleaned up. You smell like a hog that's been wallowing in slop for a week. I'll have someone bring you clean clothes. Yours don't appear to fit you very well."

"Thanks." I bit my tongue on all the nasty replies I wanted to respond with. After all, this girl was Seth's sister and presumably in charge until he returned. She was offering me a bath, clothes and shelter. It was more than I was likely to get from anyone else.

"I don't see what he sees in you." Vera eyed me with obvious skepticism. "You're not pretty enough or smart enough to deserve my brother's love."

"Seth doesn't love me," I told Vera as I stared into the depths of the hot spring. "He took my gun and left me behind on the riverbank. You did catch that part, right?"

"You don't really believe he abandoned you," she countered. "He told your friend he was coming back for you. You should have waited for him. My brother always keeps his word."

"If I had stayed on the riverbank, Drake would have found me and killed me." My voice still quivered from the strength of the fear that accompanied that memory.

"What a tragedy that would have been," Vera replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

I wondered what Seth would say if he came back to discover I'd drowned his sister in the bath.
Chapter 21

A girl with wavy blonde hair and kind smile arrived in the bath room shortly after Vera got bored with asking me questions I didn't have the answers to and wandered away.

"My name is Miriam," the blonde said. She was holding a tray of food-type items. Thick, crusty bread, a sliced up tomato and cheese. She set it down on the side of the bath. "I thought you might be hungry."

I looked down at the food and gagged slightly. I looked away. "I'm sorry. I haven't been able to eat since-."

"You have to eat." She slid the plate back to the edge of the thick rock ledge that surrounded the hot spring. She gestured for me to move to the very edge of the pool. I hesitated until I realized she was holding a hairbrush and a bottle which most likely contained some kind of shampoo.

"A Flesh Broker has my parents," I said. "I haven't been able to look at food since I found out."

She poked the plate at me again. "It's vegetarian. I promise. Only one tomato was harmed in the preparation of this snack."

I almost smiled. "I know. I just-."

"Try. Please?" Miriam smiled prettily at me. She had a gentle beauty to her. I suspected she wasn't much older than I was, but her brown eyes were wise and kind as she held out a piece of bread to me.

"Okay." I took it because I felt bad for disappointing her. It was dry and felt like a ball of lead in my mouth, but I managed to get it down. The next slice, layered with a piece of cheese and one of the tomato slices, wasn't nearly as difficult.

Miriam began stroking the brush through my tangled, snarled curls. "Vera tells me you're the girl that Seth sees in his dreams."

"If Seth dreams about me, he hasn't told me the details," I admitted. I was trying not to think about the dream conversation I'd had with Julie. "Not that I'd expect him to share those kind of private thoughts with me. We aren't close."

"You told Vera he saved your life when he didn't have to," Miriam said as she raked the brush rather forcefully through the knots in my hair.

"He did."

"Then you mean something to him. He wouldn't risk his life for someone who didn't matter."

I closed my eyes and ignored her implications. Within seconds, I was sound asleep.

Chapter 22

The yelling woke me up. It echoed through the stone walls of the church and boomed in the open chambers. I whimpered and pulled my pillow over my head.

"You stupid fool! Why would you risk everything?"

I abruptly occurred to me to wonder where I'd gotten a pillow. I sat up and looked around. I was sitting in a nest of bedding. Thick, plushy comforters and pillows had been heaped onto the largest bed I'd ever seen.

"I needed a purpose."

"You're an idiot. You already have a purpose. The lawn of church is filled with worshipers begging for your blessing. Groveling for your touch."

I slid out of the bed and noted that I was wearing a shift-dress that was nearly identical to the one that Vera had been wearing earlier. I felt strangely exposed as I made my way to the doorway of the bedroom and then followed the echoes of the shouting out into the hallway.

"I never wanted to be worshiped!" Seth yelled as I stepped into the big chamber at the end of the hall.

Seth looked rough. His clothes were filthy and torn. His arm had a fresh, oozing scrape that went from his exposed shoulder all the way down to his wrist. It didn't look like the kind of wound that would heal on someone who was already gradually turning into a zombie. Dark circles underlined both of his eyes and the white of the scar on his face stood out starkly against his skin.

"You're a fool," Vera snapped at him. "Taking off for days at time because you thought you saw the girl you've been dreaming about since we were children. Leaving everyone here to fend for ourselves while you chase one wild goose after another. What kind of a high priest abandons his followers?"

"You and I both know that everyone on that hill is crazy as a fucking loon," Seth snarled. "I'm no more sacred than that pot in the corner is." He pointed to a fat blue vase that was just left of the doorway I was standing in.

His jaw dropped when he caught sight of me. He took two steps towards me and then stopped dead in his tracks. "Pilar?"

"Hi." I gave him a small wave and a small but genuine smile. "The hospitality here is really something."

"I can only imagine." Seth closed the distance between us. He grabbed my chin in his right palm and put his left around my hips. "I thought you were dead."

"I'm sorry?" I swallowed a lump in my throat and leaned against him. I could feel how hard his pulse was pounding in his throat as I laid my cheek against his neck. His skin was so hot I was surprised touching him didn't burn my fingers.

"I went back to the river and you were gone. Your clothes and your machete were there, but you were gone," his voice shook as he spoke.

"Drake found us." I didn't even try to hide the bitterness I felt. "Did you know that he only invited me to join the Scavengers because the Powers that Be had told him to kill me?"

"You know I had questions about why you were on an active hunt," Seth reminded me. "But no. To answer your question, no. I didn't know he'd brought you out of the Cube to kill you until Jeb told me."

"Jeb told you?" I sucked in my breath. "You saw Jeb? Is he okay?"

"I followed his tracks from the river to the bus. He was loading thousands of cans from Drake's not-so-secret stockpile onto the bus when I caught up with them. I offered to get him out of there, bring him back here with me, but he says Drake won't hurt him. I don't know if I agree with his assessment, but it's his choice. Drake's gone insane. He killed Shayla and Kennedy both."

"I know," I said with a nod. "Kennedy was trying to get away. He wanted to leave the Scavengers for good. Drake slaughtered him in the woods before he even made it halfway here."

"It's my fault. I knew he wanted to defect. I should have stayed with him." Seth turned his head to the side so that he wasn't looking me in the eyes. "But I didn't. I was more worried about you."

"Vera says you dream about me?" I asked.

"Vera has a big mouth." Seth narrowed his eyes at his sister.

"You told me she was the girl. Why else do you think I let her shove her way in here?" Vera crossed her arms over her chest and glared back at Seth.

"You shoved your way past Vera?" Seth looked mildly impressed.

"She also got into a fight with the worshipers on the stairs," Vera explained. "I would have thrown her out, but she started talking about you and guns, so I decided to listen to what she had to say."

"Me and guns." Seth smiled slowly and reached down into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out my father's revolver. "Missing this?"

"I didn't figure you'd been dumb enough to lose it in the junkyard," I said as I took it back from him, only to belatedly realize I had nowhere to carry a gun in this dress.

Seth noticed my problem and let out a short laugh. "You want me to hold on to it for you?"

"I want you to come with me," I told him.

"Come with you?"

"Drake talked a lot the other night on the river bank. He told me Bud Moon took my parents to Ra Shet. He says they're-."

"Being sold in the meat market."

"You already knew?" I pulled away from him in horror.

"No." Seth pulled me back to him. "I just know what Bud Moon does for a living. He's a flesh broker."

"I have to save them."

"Pilar-."

"I have to save them. At least, I have to try." I stared up into his eyes, trying to focus on the very alive blue one rather than the ice cold dead one. "I came here to ask you to help me. You don't have to. I know its dangerous. Whether or not you come with me is your choice."

"When do we leave?" Seth asked.

CHURCH OF CHAOS

## AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

## BOOK TWO

Chapter 1

"Pilar! Pilar, wake up!"

I jerked awake on my rock-hard prison cot. My mother's chocolate brown eyes shone with a worry that was comfortingly familiar as she hovered over my bed.

"Mom?" I gasped and flung my arms around her rounded shoulders. Her hair smelled vaguely of coffee. I pressed my nose into her shoulder.

"Pilar, what's wrong?" Mom rubbed both her hands through my hair, soothing me as she smoothed down my unruly curls. "You look frightened."

"I don't know." My heart was pounding in my chest. I wanted to cling to my mother and never let go, but I couldn't remember why I felt this way. It wasn't very mature behavior for a girl who was just a few days shy of her sixteenth birthday.

"You don't know what's frightening you?" Mom pushed several wayward strands of hair away from my eyes.

"I guess I had bad dream." I managed a shaky smile as I reluctantly released my death grip on Mom. "I'm fine."

Mom looked as if she didn't believe me. She gave my shoulders one last gentle squeeze and then stood up. "I'm sorry for waking you up. I need your help shutting the door."

"Why do we need to shut the door?" I frowned at the heavy metal barred door that separated our apartment from its neighbors. The Cube had been a prison before it had been turned into long-term housing for survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Most of the apartments still had cell doors. No one ever closed them.

"I don't know. The alert came through the intercom system a few minutes ago. I didn't want to wake you but that rusty old door won't budge." Mom looked at me apologetically. I could see the slightest hint of fear in her dark eyes. "I'm scared. The last time we had to close the doors it was because some fool down in cell block G got sick and died in his cell rather than going to the hospital ward. He turned into a zombie and killed four people before they were able to stop him. I'm afraid it must have happened again."

"I'm sure we're fine, Mom." I pushed my favorite worn-soft blue blanket off of my legs and stood up.

"We probably are, but you know me. I worry." She shivered. I put my hand on her arm.

"We'll be fine. Let's get this door shut." I walked over to the heavy cell door. The concrete floor was chilly under my bare feet. I had to slide my mother's bookshelf out of the way before I could even grasp the door by its hinges. I began to shove at the door, leaning my full weight against it and grunting. The rusted metal creaked and groaned with protest. I slammed my hip into the very edge of the door and was rewarded by it moving all of two inches.

"Pilar, let me help." Mom was hovering and wringing her hands together a few feet to my left.

"I've got it. You don't need to hurt your back or your knee again." I slammed my hip into the door a second time. This time it moved six inches. I'd have a bruise tomorrow but I was making progress.

"Aaaaaah! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" A girl screamed from the end of the hallway. "Help me! Someone please help me! Aaaah!"

I should have shoved the door the rest of the way closed but I didn't. The girl screamed again as I slid through the foot-wide gap that remained between the heavy door and the wall.

"Pilar, no!" Mom called out behind me. "Don't go. It's not safe."

"Someone needs help," I said.

"Pilar! You can't save everyone."

"I have to try. I love you. I'll be right back."

Another scream echoed through the air. I ran down the hallway towards the sound of her screams.

I rounded the corner just in time to see a thin girl with blonde hair clinging to the door frame that separated Block D from the main corridor. Something was yanking her backwards as she screamed. I ran towards her. I had almost reached her when whatever was pulling on her succeeded at ripping her hands free of the door frame. The girl disappeared into the main corridor with a soul-piercing scream of agony. The thick metal door slammed shut behind her. Her screams abruptly stopped.

I stared at the freshly closed door in horror. The smart thing to do would be to go back to our apartment and hide. The Cube's guards had been trained to handle loose zombies. I hadn't.

Against my better judgment, I crossed the last ten feet between myself and the door to the main corridor. I was well aware that I didn't have any weapons as I pulled the door open. The corridor was covered in blood. Bloody hand prints covered the front of the door and the walls. I could see bright red drag marks leading down the hallway.

"Get back to your apartment!" Three members of the guard came rushing past me from the direction of Block E.

"What's happening?" I demanded as I gestured to the blood. "There was a girl. She was screaming."

"You can't save her." One of the guards stopped in front of me while the other two kept running ahead. The guard was a thin older man with a bushy gray mustache and small tufts of hair sticking out of his ears. "Go back to your cell, child. Lock the door behind you and stay away from the bars."

"Is there a zombie?" I asked.

"A zombie?" He made a bitter, snorting noise. "Darlin', there must be a thousand of them. The garage bays are open and they're pouring into the cafeteria. We've already lost Block B and the cafeteria. They're all dead."

"No," I gasped, horrified by his words.

"Get to safety," the guard told me. "Get to safety and start praying. It's all you can do."

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing as the guard nodded to me one last time. He took off jogging in the same direction as his contemporaries had gone. After a second's hesitation, I turned the opposite direction and headed for the hospital ward.

If there was an emergency, Dr. Zeb would need all the nursing staff to help treat the wounded. I might only be 15, but I take my job seriously. I have to take it seriously if I want to keep it. The hospital ward is considered one of the more desirable work wards, especially for teenagers. If I showed anything less than total dedication and willingness to work, I could be demoted onto one of the cleaning crews and someone else would get my job. That wasn't about to happen, zombies or no zombies.

I hurried through the familiar corridors and then ducked into the seldom used stairwell that was my customary shortcut between my family's apartment in Block D and the front doors of the hospital ward. I didn't see any other people or any more blood as I jogged barefoot down three flights of stairs. I could hear people yelling when I reached the second floor of the Cube. It didn't sound particularly scary, just noisier than usual. I pushed my way out through the door and into mass chaos.

The corridor that lead to the hospital ward was wall-to-wall with people. Men and women were shoving and pushing at one another as they headed for the main stairway that would lead them back to the upper cell blocks.

I needed to go in the opposite way from the direction traffic was flowing. I slid out the doorway and began easing my way down the hallway. I periodically had to duck or flatten myself against the wall to avoid being trampled. I was just congratulating myself on having made it through the front door of the hospital ward when I saw the zombies.

All the patients in the hundred bed ward had turned into zombies.

Approximately half of the zombies had been attached to the bed restraints before they had turned. It was standard procedure to restrain anyone we thought was on the verge of death. Someone had tried to do their job. Approximately sixty zombies were in various stages of trying to escape their restraints. Zombies in nearly every bed were yanking, gnawing, pulling and chewing on leather straps and metal chains. The one nearest to the door had actually succeed in getting one leg loose from his chains by chewing his foot off at the ankle.

Roughly a dozen zombies were completely loose. Fortunately for me, their attention was focused on the boy who was standing in the center of the room. He was tall, lean, muscular and holding a very bloody sword. He looked like he was a few years older than me. His jet black hair had a strange white streak running straight through the center of it. A pile of decapitated zombie corpses were laying on the ground near his feet. Another dozen headless zombies were chained to the beds closest to him.

One of the zombies charged him. He swung the sword neatly over his head and spun so that the charging zombie impaled itself on the blade. He drew the sword upwards through the zombie, slicing it in half.

Another zombie came up behind him, snapping its jaws next to his ear. He didn't flinch as he elbowed the zombie in its throat and smashed it backwards. Two new zombies fell on the fallen one, ripping it to shreds as they attempted to get the black-haired boy.

He was good with the sword but I didn't think he was good enough to fight his way out of the horde of zombies that were rapidly beginning to surround him. Several more of the restrained zombies had broken loose.

I suddenly had a zombie in my face. Its hot breath coated my skin as its teeth snapped together less than a foot from the end of my nose.

I screamed, took a step backwards and accidentally knocked into a tray of surgical equipment that should not have been left in the middle of the walkway. Someone was going to get in trouble for leaving it there. Assuming they hadn't already been eaten.

Eaten the way I was about to be.

The tray fell to the ground with a metallic clank. The zombie swooped down towards me, blood dripping from its teeth. It had chewed its own arm off to escape its restraints.

"Stop!" I screamed. "Get away!"

The zombie stopped mid-motion. It stared at me through glazed, confused eyes as it took two steps backwards and snapped its teeth again.

The black-haired boy stopped fighting the zombies. He turned around and saw me sitting on the floor less than three feet away from the zombie that had just inexplicably stopped attacking me less than two seconds before it would have ripped my throat out.

The black-haired boy grinned at me. His left eye was dead and white. A chunk of flesh was missing from his jaw. I could see his jawbone and his teeth through the hole that it had left behind. "Pilar," he said.

I screamed.

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