He saw me coming and approached. I leaned over to the Jeep’s open window and said, “I’m gonna go check on Bob and Maureen.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I opened the door and he climbed in. Neither of us spoke as I sped north around the perimeter of the lake, only slowing down when the Kennedys’ house rose into view.

“Take a left at this alley,” Lance said. “We’ll circle the block and approach from the back.”

“Sounds good.” I turned onto the street he indicated, then took another right a couple of blocks later. When we were four houses down from Bob and Maureen’s place, Lance pointed at a wide expanse of yard between two houses. “Stop here.”

I did, approving of the location. We were around a bend in the street, the top of the Kennedys’ house just visible over their neighbors’ roofs. From where we were, no one in the immediate vicinity of the Kennedys’ property could spot us, allowing us to move in unseen.

After I parked, Lance hopped out and beckoned me after him. “I’ll take point,” he said. “Follow my lead.”

Lance knew the neighborhood better than I did, so I figured it best to defer to his wisdom. We leap-frogged from house to house, one of us covering the other as he moved, until we stood in the back yard of the home immediately behind the Kennedys’ place. I kept my back close to the wall as Lance crept to the corner and looked around.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“What?”

He rounded on me, a finger pressed over his lips. Quiet, he mouthed, then beckoned me forward. He stepped behind me and pointed ahead. I raised my rifle and pied out the corner, exposing as little of my profile as I could. The Kennedys’ back yard was empty, but past the front corner on the north side I saw a knot of about ten people walking slowly toward the front porch. There was a brief moment where I felt a thrill of excitement at the prospect of contacting other survivors.

Then I noticed how they moved.

It reminded me of Perry Torrance: the shuffling, lumbering gait, the stiff posture, the jerky, birdlike movements of the head, the tattered clothes, the mottled gray skin, the white-glazed eyes. From the front of the house, I heard moaning, beginning with just one, then spreading to the others like a contagion. In seconds, dozens of voices rose like a hellish chorus, pounding at my eardrums. I stood on shaky legs, the coldness in my stomach making me feel like I was falling down a mineshaft. Nervously, I turned to Lance.

Infected, I mouthed.

He leaned close. “Are you sure?”

“Gotta be,” I whispered. “They’re just like that Torrance guy. My Dad told you about him, right?”

He nodded. “Wasn’t sure if I believed him.”

“Believe it. They’re real.”

He stared at the shamblers, indecisive. “What do you think we should do?”

It was the first time in my life I can remember someone older than me asking for my advice. “If the Kennedys are in trouble, we have to help them.”

Lance nodded. “How do you want to do it?”

I thought for a moment, weighing what I knew against how I had been trained. “Those things are not like normal people. They won’t be armed, so we don’t have to worry about weapons. But they’re vicious, Lance. And they’re strong as hell. If one gets ahold of you, it’ll kill you. The only way to kill them is to destroy the brain, so don’t waste bullets shooting center of mass. Go for headshots.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” I wasn’t, but it was all I had to go on at the moment. If it didn’t work, we could always retreat and come up with something else.

I checked my rifle: round in the chamber, safety off, covers flipped up on the optics. Same deal for my pistol, minus the optics. Lance followed suit.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded. “Two-man skirmish line. You take left, I’ll take right.”

“All right. On three.” I counted down, and then we moved.

We got halfway to the Kennedys’ yard before the infected saw us. There were six of them in my line of sight around the corner of the house. I swung a few feet to the left to give Lance a better shot. He made the adjustment without even glancing in my direction.

The walking corpses looked confused for a moment. They swung their heads toward the house, then toward us, then toward the house again in unison. Under other circumstances, it might have been comical. It quickly became un-funny when they focused their ravenous gazes on the two of us and belted out ragged, throat-rending screams.

I stopped, peered through the Aimpoint scope, and centered the glowing red dot on the nose of a smallish round man who had been in his fifties or sixties when he died. Most of the meat on his chest, left arm, and upper left thigh had been eaten away, causing him to shuffle along with a limp. I let out half a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked a little—an M-4 does not have very much recoil—and a fine red mist erupted from the back of the dead man’s head.

He stiffened, shuddered in place for a few seconds, then collapsed. Well, at least I know that works.

Lance spared me a glance, then sighted down his rifle and fired a double-tap at a walking dead woman behind the man I had just shot. Rather than shudder first, she simply went limp and slumped to the ground.

Lance and I lowered our guns and looked at each other. “It worked,” he said, surprise in his voice.

“Told you so.” I returned my attention to the dead.

We advanced slowly, picking our shots. I missed a couple of times, but scored kills on the follow up. Although we dropped them quickly, we soon found ourselves backing up as more and more undead packed the space between the Kennedys’ house and the house to our left. When it was clear we couldn’t kill them fast enough to keep moving forward, we turned tail and ran about twenty yards.

It was a good thing we did because the undead on the other side of the house had circled the screened-in porch and almost had us surrounded. If I had been on my own, I’m not sure if I would have made it out of there alive. But when Lance saw the situation we were in, he slung his carbine, drew his pistol, walked within ten feet of the undead, and fired eight rounds quicker than you can count it out loud.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

Eight undead fell, newly-carved tunnels in their skulls. For a second, all I could do was stare.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Lance smiled, holstered his pistol, and waved a hand at the opening he created. “Shall we?”

We ran until we had established sufficient breathing room. “Hey,” I said, tapping Lance on the shoulder. “You see that?”

I pointed up the street and two houses over. There was a two-story colonial with a second floor deck accessed by an outdoor stairway. “Might be easier if we take the high ground.”

“Good thinking,” Lance said, and started toward the house at a jog. Once there, we clambered up the stairs and took a moment to assess the situation.

There were far more undead than I originally thought. We had killed more than twenty of them, but three times that many slowly converged on our position, watching us as they came, outstretched hands curled into grasping claws, moans filling the air.

“We don’t have much time,” I said. Lance nodded grimly. After taking a moment to kick away the balcony’s flimsy wooden rail, we assumed seated firing positions and started shooting.

It was harder than anticipated. All my life, I had trained to shoot center of mass; headshots were something I did for fun, just to show off. Aside from the men who attacked Lauren, I had only ever shot at paper targets, never at ambulatory human bodies. If my optics had had magnification, it would have been easier. But they didn’t, so I had to make due by firing more slowly than I normally would have. Lance seemed to be having a similar difficulty.

I quickly realized the undead moved faster than their shuffling steps let on. Their gait was slow, but constant, never stopping or slowing down. It reminded me of something Tyrel had once told me about a Navy cruiser he spent a few weeks on. The average cruising speed of the ship, depending on conditions, was usually around fifteen knots, or just over 17 MPH. Which may not seem very fast, especially considering the vast distances ships have to cross, but they travel at that speed twenty-four hours a day. As a result, they can cover a lot of miles in a relatively short amount of time. The effect was the same with the undead.