The fight went quickly. I batted its grasping hands aside, stepped behind it, and stomped its right knee ninety degrees the wrong direction. There were a rapid series of dry cracks, like snapping a handful of thin carrots in a dishtowel, and the ghoul pitched over on its face.

It had not been a large person in life—and I say person because its gender was impossible to guess—and burning to a crisp had done nothing to increase its mass. Nevertheless, it was a struggle to keep its arms pinned behind its back while I placed the tip of my dagger against the base of its skull and pushed. There was resistance at first, so I pushed harder until the blade went in with a crunch. The ghoul twitched a few times, then went still.

As I stood up and placed a boot on its skull to wrench my knife free, Mike came up beside me. “Should I put a bullet in its head just to make sure?”

“It’s dead Mike. Permanently this time. Besides, wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?”

I waved the knife in the air. He looked at it and let out a long breath. “Yeah, I guess. You sure that thing’s dead?”

“Sure as I can be. We still have work to do, Mike. Lead the way.”

He turned a final glance to the skeletal creature on the ground and nudged it with a boot. In a horrid sort of way, the creature blended well with its blasted, scalded surroundings. “You believe in omens?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Well I do. And I think that,” he pointed at the infected, “is a bad one.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

“It looks like a settlement,” Mike said, handing me the field glasses. I peered through them.

At the highway junction, there was a gas station, a farmers market, and an RV park, all separated from the forest by a broad asphalt parking lot. The fireproof buffer zone had kept the structures and recreational vehicles safe from the fires that had come through not long ago. From where Mike and I lay at the top of a rise near the treeline, we could see the people below had moved the RVs so they formed a ring around the two buildings. They had also packed the space beneath the vehicles with dirt and were using the wide trenches left behind as latrines.

Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.

I counted a couple of dozen people, some of them standing guard, others engaged in menial tasks, and still more doing nothing much at all. There seemed to be an even dispersion of men and women, even a few children here and there. I gauged the size of the small compound and the amount of work that must have gone into securing it, and decided something did not add up.

“There’s not enough people,” I said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Mike replied.

“All that dirt, the number of RVs, there must be others somewhere.”

“Or maybe there were, but they moved on.”

I put the field glasses down. “Could be.”

“Let’s give it a while. Keep an eye on them, see what we see.”

“Good idea.”

We settled in.

It was nostalgic, in a way, lying there among the torched foliage. During the years when Mike was imparting the lessons he had learned from his days at Quantico and on the battlefield, we had spent countless hours in the wilds, lying motionless, waiting, just like we were doing then.

In the early days, my targets had been javelina, deer, and coyotes. Those initial hunts were organized so Mike could teach me the basics. He figured since animals had better senses, better instincts, and are generally more perceptive than humans, if I could get close to them, I could get the drop on a man with no problem. Mike’s lessons took hold quickly, and it was not long before he decided I was ready for phase two.

Next, he began setting up targets in open fields and had me try to shoot at them while he watched for me through a spotting scope. By the time I was fourteen, I could consistently fire two shots on target undetected from two-hundred yards.

When I could do it from eighty yards, Mike decided it was time to up the ante with mock sniper duels.

I took on all of them: Mike, Dad, Tyrel, and Blake. Even a few of their students who wanted to try their luck against me. We would start on opposite ends of various landscapes in the Texas hill country, make our way to one of three pre-established destinations, and try to spot the other guy in the distance. If we did, we fired at a steel target hung above and away from them to stop the match. If the shooter hit the right target, he then had to walk a spotter via radio to where the other sniper lay hidden. If he was successful, he won. If not, we reset and started over. The match went on until one of us was victorious or it grew too late and we had to call it.

Mike was the only one I never beat. He taught me, after all, so he knew all my tricks.

The others I had much better luck with. Which is not to say I bested them on a consistent basis—I didn’t—but I got them enough times to know my skills were well above average.

So despite the heat, and the smell of charred wood clogging my nose, and the slowly building pressure in my bladder, I lay still and watched. Mike did the same, but he was not as still as I was. There was the occasional twitch and fidget and shift of torso, a surplus of unnecessary movement. The untrained eye would never have seen it, but to someone who had seen Mike lie still as a stone for hours on end, it was like watching him pace around wringing his hands. After a while, I grew tired of it.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Huh?”

“Something’s bothering you. What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Bullshit.”

There was a rustle of fabric as he turned his head. “I’m fine.”

“Mike …”

“All right already. You want to know what’s on my mind? I’ll tell you.” He leaned close so he was right next to my ear. “Did you sleep with my daughter, Caleb?”

My face turned to ice. “Um …”

“Well?”

“I wouldn’t put it in those terms, exactly.”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Mike, it wasn’t like that.” I met his gaze, and what I saw there made me want to back away slowly and avoid sudden movements. It hurt to see it; Mike was almost as much a father to me as my real one. I blurted out, “I love her, Mike.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Caleb, you’re only eighteen. You don’t know what love is.”

“Look, maybe I haven’t been around the block like you have, but I know how I feel. You talk about what’s between me and Sophia like it’s some sordid, tawdry thing. It’s not. We care about each other. I’ve had feelings for her for a long time, and she told me she feels the same way. We just never said anything to each other about it.”

Mike looked at me again, much of the hardness gone from his gaze. “Do you really care about her, Caleb? You’re not just taking advantage of her?”

“What? No, Mike. I would never do that. You know that.”

“She’s been under a lot of stress lately. Stress can make a girl vulnerable, make her do things she normally wouldn’t.”

“I told you, Mike. I would never do that to her, or any other girl for that matter.”

He sighed and turned his face back down the hill. “Sorry, son. I didn’t mean to … listen you have to understand what it’s been like for me all these years. Guys have been coming after Sophia since she was eleven years old. Fuckin’ hordes of them. All this time, it was all I could do to keep her from ending up like my mom, barefoot and pregnant by the time she was sixteen. I don’t want that to happen to Sophia.”

“You don’t think she’s smart enough to avoid that?”

“I think she’s a kid,” Mike said. “I think she’s made some bad decisions along the way. The partying, the drugs, the crowd she hangs out with … well, used to hang out with, anyway. For a while there, I thought I was gonna lose her.”

“But you didn’t, Mike. She did some crazy teenager shit like most teenagers do, and she got over it.”