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gates.

Within a few blocks, the smell of the Living is nearly overpowering. It's as if the Stadium is a massive Tesla Coil crackling with storms of fragrant pink life-lightning. Everyone in our group stares at it in awe. Some of them drool freely. If they hadn't just eaten, our loosely constructed strategy would collapse in an instant.

Before we get within sight of the gate, we take a side street and stop at an intersection, hiding behind a UPS truck. I step out slightly and look around the corner. Less than two blocks away, four guards stand in front of the Stadium's main entrance doors, dangling shotguns over their shoulders and chatting among themselves. Their gruff, military sentences use even fewer syllables than ours.

I look at M. 'Thanks. For . . . doing this.'

'Sure,' M says.

'Don't . . . die.'

'Trying . . . not to. Are . . . ready?'

I nod.

'Look . . . alive . . . out there.'

I smile. I brush my hair back one more time, take a deep breath, and run for it.

'Help!' I scream, waving my arms. 'Help, they're . . . right behind me!'

With my best possible balance and poise, I run towards the doors. M and the other Dead lumber after me, groaning theatrically.

The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie's face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it, I look normal, alive, and so I snap neatly into a category: 'Human'. Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, 'Go! Get in there, man!'

Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. 'What the fuck . . . ?' one of them mutters.

Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. 'Close call, eh, friend? I'm going to need you to - '

'Ted! Look at this shit!'

Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. 'Wait right here.'

Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men's faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.

Momentarily forgotten, I turn and run. I run through the dark entry corridor towards the light on the other end, wondering if this is a birth canal or the tunnel to Heaven. Am I coming or going? Either way, it's too late to reverse. Hidden in the gloom under a red evening sky, I step into the world of the Living.
Chapter 11
The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event 'super-venues' built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium's soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they'd been designed by a modernist architect.

All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials - one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the