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latching both arms around one of LS's and trying to haul him away.
     
    She was about as effective as trying to move a mountain single handed; LS was as rigid as a marble statue and impervious to Alexa's efforts.
     
    “I'm not kidding around here, LS,” she hissed as she kept tugging, the first edges of real concern slipping into her voice. “We have to move, now–if they see us...” Alexa could hear the moaning now too, which meant they were close . Too close for comfort.
     
    And then the first of them came around the corner two intersections away, and Alexa felt dread drop into her stomach like a heavy weight, felt the first fingers of an icy terror gripping her heart.
     
    Back in the day, Alexa had actually been a bonafide geek, and like every other geek alive she'd loved zombies. She'd always thought zombie horror flicks and video games were awesome, and marveled at the creative details they would always get into the zombie designs, with the rotting flesh and missing eyeballs and bony protrusions and occasional weird extra mutant abilities.
     
    Real zombies were not like that. But in some ways it was a lot worse. Unless the animated corpses were particularly old, or distended or burst from consuming too much flesh, or had been damaged somehow in a fight or an accident, they rarely showed such obvious and grotesque signs of decay.
     
    Actually, other than a bloodless pallor, empty expressions, and the disjointed, shuffling movements of bodies that lacked the coordination to move fluidly, zombies typically looked like normal people, which in Alexa's opinion was what made them far more frightening.
     
    When you were regularly attacked by people that looked like your soccer coach or your best friend or the nice girl at the cafe that used to give you refills for free, it started getting harder and harder to stave off growing paranoia of living human beings.
     
    Alexa had even heard stories of other survivors who finally just snapped , assuming everyone around them was a zom in disguise, only to break down or–in nastier situations–go postal, killing other innocent survivors in the process.
     
    These zombies shuffling around the corner were the same as any others Alexa had seen. There were at least ten of them, and any one of them could have sat on the plane next to her three years ago when they flew into D.C., or served them at the restaurants, or taken them on tours through the museums.
     
    She could even take a few guesses at the things they'd done before they were turned. The one with the blood-stained black suit might've been secret service, the woman with the badge still miraculously pinned to her shirt had to be a reporter, and the kid with the torn Batman T-shirt–school kid, definitely.
     
    That last one made her cringe, because the kid was eternally frozen at around twelve years old–that could have been Alexa if things had gone down differently.
     
    “LS, come on! ” she rasped, more desperately now, and gave another useless tug at the clone's arm. “Before they–”
     
    But it was too late. The zombies had caught on that they were there, somehow–Alexa was still not sure if it was sight, sound, smell, movement, or maybe a combination of all four that let them hunt–and the guttural moans increased in volume and regularity as they started to shuffle forward faster.
     
    Alexa wasn't ashamed to admit she was getting closer to resorting to begging, as she circled around LS and tried to forcibly push him back with both hands. LS still didn't budge, and his gaze was violently intense as he watched the walking dead shambling closer to them. “We have to go , LS! Remember what I told you down below!”
     
    He didn't even appear to hear her, and he was obviously not going anywhere. Alexa was ashamed that a very tiny part of her–the primal part that had whipped her into shape and kept her alive for the past three years–had already written him off as a loss, and was insisting now that she run