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the Glock and stood, walking towards the fiend, extending the 9mm and targeting the zombie with the green laser sight, firing once. The beast keeled over onto its side, motionless, half in and half out of the stream. He approached it and prodded it with his boot. A good chunk of its head had come off and floated away. Looking across the water, he spotted a handful of undead gathering there, none daring to cross the watercourse, motioning and groaning. No threat to him or Nadjia or anyone on this side of the river at this point. He reached down and gripped the zombie by its ankle, dragging its carcass from the water, letting it lie unceremoniously a few feet from the stream.
     
    Bear returned to the saddle bags and his equipment and checked the bundle. Satisfied, he returned to his ablutions.
     
     
     
    Fifteen or twenty people had emerged from the town and formed a circle around Nadjia. They were disheveled and emaciated—faces marked by sunken eyes and pronounced cheekbones. Their clothes hung off them and their skin was sallow. Some were yellow-eyed. The men all wore beards of varying lengths.
     
    “…and he wrestled a lion, tearing it limb from limb,” the wild-man spoke as if not to himself but to an audience, though these men and women largely ignored him. “This son of Manoah on the road to Timnah...”
     
    She sat on a crate among them, her weapons holstered but within easy reach. From her seat she could see Bear squatting beside the stream that passed under the bridge. She looked upon a consumptive woman with ratty hair, two grubby children clinging to either side of her.
     
    “How many of you are there?”
     
    At first no one spoke, as if they had forgotten how. Then a wasted man with brown hair and eyes deep in dark sockets spoke up.
     
    “All of these people here are more than I knew about. We were separated…holed up in different places.”
     
    “There were sixteen with me,” a jaundiced man said. “Plague killed all of them. Except me. That was early on.”
     
    “…and in the valley of flame the mighty red warrior came upon Moon Boy, he of the Small-Folk,” said the wild-man, “and together they withstood the onslaughts of the invaders from the sky and their damned zoological ministrations…”
     
    “Who is he?” a woman with several teeth missing asked Nadjia, pointing to Bear.
     
    “I don’t really know.” Bear knelt down by the stream, with the enormous expanse of his back to them. He was a preternatural monstrosity in his own right. “He found me a few months ago. I’ve fought with him since.”
     
    They stared at her, these haggard and pallid faces.
     
    “He’s called Bear.”
     
    “This is what you do?” another in the crowd asked incredulously.
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “…and with nothing more than the jaw bone of an ass this son of Manoah did slay an army of Philistines from Askhelon, and they fell before him in trepidation and disquiet, for his was the wrath of the Lord visited upon them…”
     
    “Incredible.”
     
    “Just the two of you?”
     
    Nadjia looked at the man who had asked. “There were more of us…once.”
     
    “My wife is back in one of the buildings,” a high-voiced man spoke up. “She’s too weak to move. Do you have food?”
     
    “How about cigarettes?”
     
    “Toilet paper? God please let them have some toilet paper…”
     
    “How long have you been here?” Nadjia asked.
     
    “Since the beginning,” the dark eyed man who had spoken first answered.
     
    The wild-man spoke. “He is in the world and he is of the world, yes, but he is with the world, as are we all. He is a creator and maker of a world, and a destroyer, as are we…”
     
    “Who are you?” Nadjia said.
     
    The rag-clad man looked at her askance and replied, “And he who dared to trick Zeus at Sicyon was chained to a rook in the Caucasus, his liver eaten daily by an eagle, ever awaiting Heracles to free him from his beshaklement…”
     
    Nadjia looked