Red shot himself in the mouth with snub-nosed .38 revolver six months before the man met the girl. Six months ago, the end of the world was a fresh, palpable thing. They both carried guns then, both the driver and Red. The survivors in the village told stories about the Ruined Ones, how they ate flesh or drank blood, how their teeth carried poison. How they could change shape in the shadows. Not much was really known about them, what their limits were, how they thrived only in the darkest nights. Only stories. Stories could lie. Each man carried his weapon with fear-charged hands.

But that day the truck lurched unexpectedly and came to a sudden stop. Red, often asleep during the short, jostling ride to the pit, woke with a start.

“Whassthat?”

The man peered out his open window. “Nothing. Nothing I can see, anyway.” He scanned the rearview mirror, checking the load of corpses for movement. “Can’t tell.”

Both men gathered their guns, Red his .38 and the man a Luger older than either of them. They hopped from the cab onto the dusty, sandy ground, their boots grinding into the earth with a crunch. Heat shimmered in the distance, dancing from the horizon in all directions. The man held his gun in front of him in one hand. He walked with even, slow steps. By the time he rounded the end of the truck, Red knelt over a black mass thirty yards away.

Bodies slid off at times, especially those shrouded with cloth or plastic, unfortunates among the survivors. When the man reached Red, he knew without looking. A body had fallen from the side and the truck’s rear tires dragged it under, smashing the chest and lower abdomen. Crushed and twisted, the bag opened at one end to reveal a face, a young girl, pale and almost peaceful. The desert wind caught the plastic cloak and rattled it in the wind.

“Shit, man.” Red closed his eyes.

The man wrapped the corpse as well as he could and helped Red carry it to the truck. They finished the run at a slower pace, neither talking, just listening to the rattle of metal and grind of tires against rocky path until they reach their destination. The man’s eyes roved the horizon, scanning for a shift in the rough brown smudge of a world. Nothing but scrub grass, sand, and dirt. Wasteland.

Before them, the pit showed itself, a scar on the earth, a black, hungry mouth. The truck slid to a halt at the lip of the pit. Dust skittered across the landscape in a game of chase.

Both men continued in silence, tossing body after body into the smoldering remains below. The charred remnants of a thousand lives lay in the pit, broken and blackened bits of bone and scorched flesh. The bodies landed with tiny thumps. Without rain to quench its thirst, a fire burned at the bottom. At last they tossed in the girl’s body, the last body, each taking one end and heaving it together, until it hung in the air, suspended for a moment, then twisted and tumbled with the others into the reeking smoke below.

The man climbed into the cab.

Red didn’t move. He slid his .38 from his waistband. “Fuck this, man. I’m done.”

The gun made a tiny noise in Red’s mouth, a quick, muted pop. A spray of blood, flesh, bone and brain matter colored the sky momentarily, and then his lifeless body tumbled over, and slid into the pit.

The girl is gone when the truck lumbers toward the gate after the third consecutive night of attacks. There are mutters from the men near the fence, mutters of creatures not afraid of death, a host of horrors willing to run themselves onto a stake, clawed hands and yellow teeth snapping at the air. The black eyes, they say, are the worst. The Ruined Ones have lost their fear of the moon. Casualties are high, and the man looks away when a tiny, shrouded body is loaded on the truck.

He drives alone, in silence, the Luger sitting on the empty seat next to him. The grind of rubber tires against packed desert sings through the metal of the truck. At the pit, the work is hard for one man, but no one else will come. No one else dares the awful, pungent stench of burnt flesh. No one else carries enough courage to tread in the silent, dead places of the world. He pulls the bodies from the bed one by one, saving the small, shrouded victim for last.

He avoids it until—

It shifts.

He staggers back.

A thin hand pokes through the fold, and the man wishes for his gun. The girl’s face emerges from the shroud. Her cheeks are smudged and dirty, but her eyes steal the blue from the sky.

She doesn’t move for a few, sluggish seconds. “Sorry,” she says. She stretches and dusts off her clothes, and the cloth falls to the bed like a discarded shadow. Desert winds kick up and chase her hair across her face.

“I wanted to see outside the village.”

“Dangerous,” he mutters.

She nods. Her eyes soften. “Sorry.”

The man hoists the girl to the desert floor. Her body doesn’t weigh much. For a moment, they stare at each other, the girl with her blue eyes and the man behind his shell. Smoke winds from the bottom of the pit. The girl’s eyes follow a tendril of dark grey until it fades into the clouds. She climbs into the cab as the man brushes sweat from his face, realizing the girl must have crawled into that shroud before the night had ended, before the men near the gate had collected all the bodies from the night’s butchery. He climbs into the driver’s seat.

“Where’d you get that scar?” she asks.

The man touches his face, runs a finger over the shallow groove in his skin. “Before…this,” he says.

Neither speaks for a minute. The man pinches the wires together, starting the truck. The engine spits and growls to life. Another gust tosses some dirt into the air, and the dusty cloud gallops across the flats. Behind them, in the distance, the remains of the city stand out like a smudge of black in the tan wasteland not much different than the pit.

“What’s your name?” she asks, eyes forward.

“Does it matter?”

She studies him. “Not really, I guess.”

He forces the metal beast into gear. Neither speaks as they crawl toward the remnants of civilization. The flats stretch on, seemingly an endless plain of brown nothing.

“I’d like to help you.”

He shakes his head.

“When I’m older,” she adds quickly. “When I have to choose something for my life, I want to help you do what you do.”

He drives, thinking of the choices already made for her, for all of them. Back inside the fence, the truck slows. She glances at the man as the truck idles in front of her shack. The weight of her blue eyes presses against his chest. He looks away and watches the volunteers work the defenses, string barbed wire, and push sharpened stakes into the ground.

Less than a year, and the Ruined Ones are this strong?

He closes his eyes. “Maybe.”

Her hand brushes against the rough skin on the back of his. In a moment, she’s gone, running into the shack. A voice rises over the grumbling engine—her grandfather’s, berating her for being gone, asking why she was with the man in the truck. The reaper. The man who will always be unclean.

He smiles, pushes the shifter into gear, and rumbles away.

Tesoro’s Magic Bullet

Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.

“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.