away, almost tripping onto the dead weeds of her yard. Mark looked at her sadly—he’d assumed the monsters were the infected people down the street, but now he realized he was wrong. This woman wasn’t any more right in the head than the last guy they’d found, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she really did think monsters were living under the beds.
Mark left the woman in the front yard and followed Alec inside only to be stunned by what he saw. The interior looked more like a back alley from one of the worst parts of New York City than a suburban home. Pictures had been drawn—with what looked like black crayon and chalk—all over the walls. Dark, terrifying pictures. Of monsters. Things with claws and sharp teeth and vicious eyes. They were messy, as if they’d been done in a hurry, but some had vivid details. Enough to make the hair on Mark’s arms stand up.
He gave Alec a grim look and followed the older man past them, to the stairs to the basement, and went down, weapons held at the ready.
They found more children below—at least fifteen, maybe more. And they were living in filth. Most of them were huddled together in groups, cowering as if they expected some horrible punishment from the new arrivals. They were all dirty and poorly clothed and, by the looks of it, starving. Mark hardly registered the fact that the people he was looking for were nowhere to be seen.
“We … we can’t leave them here,” Mark said. He’d let go of his weapon, and it hung from the strap on his shoulder. He was dumbfounded. “There’s no way we can leave them here.”
Alec seemed to sense he wouldn’t be able to make Mark budge on this. The soldier stepped in front of him and spoke gravely.
“I understand what you’re saying, son. Where you’re coming from. But listen to me. What can we do for these children? Everyone in this godforsaken place is sick, and we don’t have the manpower to get them out. At least they’re … I don’t even know what to say.”
“Surviving,” Mark said quietly. “I thought surviving was all that mattered, but I was wrong. We can’t leave these kids here.”
Alec sighed. “Look at me.” When Mark didn’t, Alec snapped his fingers and yelled, “Look at me!”
Mark did.
“Let’s go find our friends. After that we can come back. But if we take them now, we’ll have no chance. You hear me? Absolutely zero.”
Mark nodded. He knew the old man was right. But something had torn in his heart at the sight of these kids, and it physically hurt. He didn’t think it would ever mend.
He turned around to gather his thoughts. All he could do was focus on Trina. He had to save Trina. And Deedee.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Let’s go.”
Mark and Alec moved from house to house, searching them from top to bottom.
It all became a big, hazy blur to Mark. The more he saw, the more numb he grew to the strangeness of the new world. This sickness that had been spread on purpose. In each house, on each block, he saw things that kept topping what he’d thought untoppable. He saw a woman jump off a roof and land, broken, on her front steps. He saw three men drawing circles in the dirt and jumping in and out of them, like kids playing a game. Except something was making them more and more upset and they finally erupted into a crazed brawl. There was a room in one of the homes where twenty or thirty people were lying in a heap in complete silence. Definitely alive, but not moving.
A woman eating a cat. A man chewing on a rug in the corner of his living room. Two kids throwing rocks at each other as hard as they could, bloodied and bruised from head to toe. Laughing all the while. People standing still in their yards, staring at the sky. Others lying facedown in the dirt, talking to themselves. Mark saw a man bull-rushing a tree, slamming himself into the trunk over and over, as if he thought eventually he’d win some battle and knock the thing down.
But on they went, quickly searching each and every home as they got closer to what Alec had called the party. The strangest thing, though, was that so far no one had attacked them. Most people actually seemed scared to death of them.
They were approaching their next house