So he said the kind of thing you’d say if the world wasn’t broken.
“Shh,” he said softly. “Don’t let Santa know you can see him. He has to do everything in secret. That’s how it’s done. It has to be in secret or the magic won’t work.”
That kind of thing made sense to a six-year-old.
It damn near sounded reasonable to Dan.
Things had to be done in secret, or the magic wouldn’t work.
Survival was a kind of magic. At least it was these days.
He backed up very slowly. Without haste. Haste meant panic. He didn’t want that to be the message of his body language. He backed into Mason and gently pushed his brother out of the kitchen. Dan took the lantern with him.
Then he stopped, thinking it another step past the moment.
“Stay here,” he said. He reentered the kitchen. The back door was closed. It had a bar across it. There were shutters mounted inside the windows. Dan closed the shutters very slowly. They were heavy. Solid panels of wood that had been reinforced with strips of metal. The work was good. Someone knew what they were doing. The shutters completely blocked the windows. There was another shutter for the kitchen door. He shut that, too. Thick cotter pins hung on lengths of airline cable. Dan slotted them into place and felt his heart begin to beat normally.
He went out to the dining room. Mason was scooping handfuls of corn and peas into his mouth.
“Eat slow or you’ll get sick,” said Dan.
The boy nodded. He didn’t have the strength to eat fast.
Dan’s stomach churned. He wanted to eat. Needed to. Had to.
But he didn’t. Not yet.
Instead he went through the house and made sure all the shutters were pinned in place. He pulled the drapes over them to block out any stray splinters of light. The front door had brackets for heavy cross-grain timbers, and he hefted them into place. Oak. Heavy. Safe.
Then he took the lantern and went upstairs.
More candles. Sleeping bags. Stacks of boxed goods. Food. Medical supplies.
Guns.
Guns.
Jesus Christ.
Guns and ammunition.
Hundreds of gallons of water in one, two-and-a-half, and five-gallon bottles. Cases of soda. Cartons of powdered milk.
Dan was crying by the time he finished checking the rooms.
There were beds for nine people. All the beds had been slept in.
But there was nobody home.
Nobody.
It made no sense.
Why would they leave this place?
They’d found a way to keep themselves going. They’d found food and clothing and everything they’d need. There was enough to keep them safe for months. Maybe for years.
They’d even cut down and decorated a tree. Wrapped presents.
Cooked a feast.
So where were they?
Why had they left?
He thought of the man in the yard. Granddad.
Okay, so the old man had died. But there was no blood inside the house. No sign of violence. Nothing to indicate that the man had died and reanimated in here. No evidence that he’d attacked and killed his own children and grandchildren.
He was outside.
And where were they?
Dan stood at the top of the stairs. He held a shotgun to his chest tighter than if it was a talisman. Tighter than if it was Jesus on the cross.
“Dan—?” called Mason.
“Shh!” hissed Dan as he leaned down the stairs.
“Come on. It’s getting cold.”
Not the house.
The food.
Dan came downstairs.
He pulled out a chair for Mason. He sat in the one next to him.
“Is it Christmas?” asked the boy.
“I—I guess so.”
“Do we get to open presents?”
Dan glanced at the presents. There were so many of them. Surely some would have to be appropriate for a little boy. Maybe socks. Maybe a toy. What did it matter when you had nothing at all?
“Sure,” he said. “In the morning. Presents are for Christmas morning.”
He reached for the carving knife and fork.
Mason looked at him, his eyes wide and filled with light. “Don’t we have to say grace first?”
Dan wiped at the tears in his eyes. He bent and kissed Mason on the top of the head.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess we do.”
They said grace. It surprised Dan that he could remember how to say thanks.
The words came.
Slowly, in shuffling steps through his mind. But they came.
He said grace.
They said amen.
Outside the wind howled and the snow fell. Outside there were moans on the wind.
Inside it was warm.
Inside it was Christmas.
Dan stuck the tines of the fork in to steady the turkey and to steady his own trembling hands. Then he began carving.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON SURVIVING
(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)
Everyone always talks a lot about survival.
I’m not sure I understand what that means, though.
We survived First Night. When the plague started and the dead began attacking the living, some people survived. Thirty thousand people, as far as we know. Tom thinks there’s probably more, though. Other towns like Mountainside, Haven, and the other seven. Maybe too far away for us to have heard anything about them. Maybe in other countries. As Mom always says, “It’s a big world.”
She’s right. It’s really big.
There used to be seven billion people on Earth. Could all of them have really died?
Chong and I talk about this a lot. He’s like me—he doesn’t believe that we’re the only ones left. He says it’s “statistically improbable.” He says that natural barriers like rivers, canyons, deserts, mountains, and stuff would have given people a chance to escape or defend themselves. I think so too. But I also think that there are places that were built to be defended. Castles, military bases, underground bunkers, high-security places. Mr. Lafferty at the store says that there are hundreds of secret installations, and thousands of bases around the world. He thinks that maybe there are millions of people still alive.
But everyone’s cut off.
How will we ever find them?
How will they ever find us?
PART TWO
THE DYING YEARS
The Light That Never Goes Out.
First Night Memories
1
Pastor Kellogg
(On First Night, fourteen years before Rot & Ruin)
It rained the night the world ended.
A hard, bitter, soaking rain, as if God and all his angels were weeping. Fanciful, sure, but to John Kellogg, pastor of the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Church, it seemed likely that heaven should mourn the end of all those years of living, of building, of crafting laws and striving to refine the humanity of the race. The whole process, from dropping out of the trees to the mapping of the human genome, should have amounted to something more substantial, something not so easily smashed flat and brushed away.
But it didn’t, and the steady rain felt like tears to him. God’s tears.
It was a strangely religious moment for a man who had been gradually losing his faith, year after grinding year. Caring for the homeless. Running shelters for abused women and runaways. Watching people drop out, one by one, from the twelve-step meetings held in the church basement. Trying to comfort mothers of sons killed in deserts half a world away for reasons even the politicians couldn’t quite agree on.
That morning John Kellogg had argued with his wife about it. He told her that he just couldn’t do it anymore, that whatever spiritual reservoir he’d once possessed was now used up. Molly had a simpler faith, one whose unshakable nature Kellogg had always envied.
“Give it another year,” she said. “Go talk to the bishop. Get some help before you throw
away everything you’ve worked for.”
It had been a troubling conversation. Their son, Matthew, did not believe in anything. Or said that he didn’t. He’d sat at the breakfast table, head bowed over his Cheerios, and took no sides. Matthew thought it was all silly. Religion, spirituality, the whole works. On the other hand, he was too smart to risk siding with his father on this one. Not against Mom’s iron will.
That was this morning.
Now Pastor John Kellogg sat in his office behind the church and watched the falling rain through the open window. Behind the noise of the storm, threaded through the steady hum of the downpour and the detonations of thunder, he could hear the gunfire.
And the screams.
Kellogg looked out at the rain, silver droplets flickering downward against the purple-black sky, and as the heavens wept he continued to slowly, methodically, and carefully sharpen his knives. They were kitchen knives, but they were all he had. Kellogg did not own a gun and had never even handled one. He loved to cook, though, so knives were more comfortable in his hands. Or . . . had been more comfortable. Comfort of every kind, he judged, was over. He took his time, even as time melted away in the storm.
He tried not to listen to the sounds coming from inside the church. There were no more screams. Those had faded a long time ago. Now it was just moans. Low and constant and hungry. And the slow shuffle of clumsy feet.
He ran the edges of the knives along the whetstone. Kellogg was not really sure if the knives would work. He’d had to use a golf club earlier. That was terrible. Loud and messy and awful. Maybe the knives would be quicker and cleaner—for everyone.
Kellogg was careful with the whetstone, needing to get it right.
Because it was almost time to start the killing.
The moans were constant. And there was a dull, slack pounding on the door. Limp hands beating on the wood.
Whose hands?
Mrs. Kulp, the choir director?
Molly?
Matthew?
“God help me,” whispered Pastor Kellogg.
The only answer he heard, though, were the moans.
2
Fluffy McTeague
(Six months after First Night)
He wasn’t who he’d been.
He was certain of that.
The person he’d been, he was absolutely certain, had died back there in San Francisco.
That person had been too weak to survive.
That person would never have made the kinds of choices or done the kinds of things he’d done.
No.
When the dead rose, Ferdinand McTeague was still a good man. He was a good husband to Alex; a good father to their adopted sons, Quinn and Taye; a good manager at the hotel; a good employee of the corporation that owned the hotel; a good member of the community, the PTA, the condominium homeowners’ association; a good supporter of human rights, animal rights, and sustainable energy; a good son to his parents; a good brother to his sister, Claire.
That’s what he had been.
Good.
As he stood in the road and watched San Francisco burn, he wondered what “good” meant.
The fires reached upward with fingers of yellow and orange and red and clawed at the ceiling of clouds. Those clouds glowed as if they were about to burst into flame too.
From here, from this vantage point, Ferdinand could not hear the screams. Or the moans. All he could hear was a long, loud, sustained roar as tens of thousands of buildings and homes burned. He could not see the dead—or the living, if there had been any left before he began setting his fires. But he could imagine those souls flickering upward inside the flames, escaping through the clouds into heaven.
He leaned against the fender of an abandoned car. Electromagnetic pulses from the nukes that had wiped out most of the big cities had killed all the cars. Somehow San Francisco hadn’t been nuked, but the EMPs still turned off all the power.
That had made it harder to escape. The lack of power, of lights, of vehicles had probably killed more people than the plague itself. One of the last official statements had been some nonsense about using nuclear weapons to wipe out the main areas of infection. That hadn’t worked, and any bloody fool could have told the bozos in Washington it was a stupid plan. All it did was make sure the people had no way to flee. It turned off every light but the one that more or less said “Open Buffet—All You Can Eat.”
The smoke from the fire was being pushed around by the wind, and some of it was beginning to come in his direction.
He moved away, allowing himself to be chased into the darkness by the sooty evidence of his crime.
He was sure that there had to be some living people down there.
Had to be. Surviving, as he had survived for so long.
Now . . .
No.
Now San Francisco was going to burn to the ground. No engines would come, no burly firefighters would douse the conflagration. It would all burn.
Maybe it would spread, too.
Ferdinand had left trails of gasoline across the Golden Gate to coax the fires.
He wanted it all to burn.
That was the point.
Nukes didn’t kill the infection.
Fire always did.
It was just that there hadn’t been enough fire.
Now maybe there would be.
Fire purifies. They even set controlled fires on farm fields to restore and refresh the land.
Maybe it would do that here, too.
He hoped so.
He wiped at the tears in his eyes. Ferdinand was not in the habit of lying to himself. He never had. He didn’t try to convince himself that those tears were from the smoke.
No.
Down there, somewhere within those towering walls of flame, were Alex, and the boys, and his parents.
His sister, too.
All of them.
Or . . . the versions of them that had been left to haunt him once they’d contracted the plague. The versions of them that had attacked one another. The versions that had tried to kill him before he’d overpowered them and locked them in rooms.
Now they were burning.
Burning.
Fire purifies.
It ends.
It releases.
As he walked away, he wept.
He walked all night and well into the morning. He outwalked the smoke. He wondered how far he would have to go to outwalk the memories.
He was sure that there was no number for it.
As he walked—that day and over the many days that followed—he wondered who he was now. He was no longer the quiet, gentle, mildly funny and always agreeable hotel manager he had been for eleven years. He was no longer that good man. He was no longer a husband, son, father, or brother.
He had burned everyone he ever loved.
A good man did not do that kind of thing.
A good man does not slaughter his way out of town and then light a blaze that threatens to burn down heaven itself.
No.
He was not that good man anymore.
So who was he?
It was a question he could not answer.
Not yet.
He walked on, heading south and east. Toward the center of the state, toward the mountains. Maybe he could find somewhere where he could be a good man again.
Maybe.
But where?
3
Tom Imura
(Five months after First Night)
Tom heard the sounds of killing long before he smelled the blood.
He knew that this was killing and not just fighting. The screams told him that much. Men didn’t scream like that unless they were dying.
The woods were dark, and he knew how to move through them without making a sound. His older brother, Sam, had taught him that. Sam, who was almost twenty years older than Tom, had been a top special forces soldier, and he’d taught Tom a lot of useful skills. Tom, a change-of-life baby for their mother, had idolized Sam and hung on
every word, paid close attention to every lesson. He wanted to be Sam.
As he crept through the forest toward the fight, Tom wondered for the millionth time where Sam was. There had been one desperate phone call from his brother on the night it all fell apart. Sam had warned him to take care of the family.
After that, nothing.
Not a word.
Tom was sure that if Sam were alive, he would have found a way to make it home. But First Night was five months ago. The world had ended. Sam had never come home.
The sounds were close now, and Tom slowed as he approached the wall of trees, beyond which was a clearing. He left his sword sheathed and his gun holstered. He wasn’t coming to join the fight. Not yet. Tom had already learned hard lessons about assuming that every fight was a human defending against the living dead.
Most of the fights he’d seen over the last few weeks had been a lot different from that. Worse, in some ways.
He eased down into the black shadows beneath a twisted willow and watched with amazed eyes at what was happening.
The clearing was actually the backyard of a substantial house. There was a jungle-gym play set and an inground pool. The play set looked brand-new, like it had never been shared by laughing children. The pool, though, was a soup of polluted water, decaying leaves, and corpses.
Some of the corpses looked like they’d been floating in that muck for weeks.
Three of them, however, were horribly fresh.
There were five other corpses—two zombie and three human—sprawled on the grass. One of the humans was missing most of his head. The other two had multiple cuts to their faces, throats, and bodies. One of these was already twitching, a sure sign that he was about to reanimate.
On the grassy, overgrown back lawn, a fight was raging among six living people.
Five of the men were dressed in biker leather. They were filthy, bearded, and brutal-looking. They had a variety of weapons in their hands—pipe clubs, lengths of chain, and various deadly hunting knives.
The sixth was a big man dressed in loose black military pants, a black tank top, and combat boots. His hair was short and blond and shot through with gray. He looked to be north of forty, but he moved with the oiled grace of a much younger man. He had a short-bladed folding knife in his right hand, the blade barely three and a half inches long.