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squeezed the trigger, and he fell. The only witness to one of the worst moments of my life was the rustling murmur of the wind through the trees.

Chapter 4
    After I shot that man, I stood there looking at him, fighting off the urge to touch him. I could almost feel the cold, wet sponginess of his skin against my fingertips, and the thought turned my stomach.
    I still couldn’t believe what was happening. When I left for work that afternoon, the world had seemed normal. Now, everything was upside down.
    Were those people really zombies? I fought against the idea, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I had seen horror movies. I watched them and I laughed at how stupid they seemed, because the zombies in the Hollywood movies never looked real. Once you’ve seen death in all its splendid horror, a movie version just doesn’t cut it. The walking disasters I had seen certainly looked worse than anything I had ever seen on film.
    As I stood there thinking about it, my doubts continued to grow. The way I understood it, zombies were dead people that went around eating living people. The man I shot under the tree had been doing that. God, he had been doing that. But was he dead? That part I didn’t believe. It went against everything that made up my reality. Besides, he’d bled when I shot him. Dead bodies don’t bleed.
    And that made the horror of what I’d seen even worse. It wasn’t enough that the world was crashing down around my ears. Worse than that, I had actually shot somebody. I’d shot several people. How was I supposed to live with that? They’d been trying to kill me, sure, but that didn’t make it any easier. Killing somebody ain’t easy, not under any circumstances.
    My head was swamped by the enormity of it. I’d seen a lot of good men and women die in the fight at the top of the hill, and I had just stumbled blindly through the worst of it. I was lucky to be alive, and I knew it.
    I turned and headed west, where I hoped to find my car again.
    But I didn’t have far to walk before I saw just how badly my shift had been gutted.
    As I got closer to the spot where Chris and I ran into trouble, I started to see wrecked cars and broken glass and every kind of debris spread out over the lawns and into the street. There were hundreds of bodies strewn across the battlefield, and many of them had faces I recognized.
    An echo of the fight still covered the street like smoke.
    Not far from where I was, a man with useless legs pulled himself along through the grass, trying to reach me. There was gravel in the noise that came from his throat.
    I had to look away, but it took an act of sheer will to do it. He was a human train wreck.
    My police car had been demolished. All four windows were smashed in, and the front windshield was a spiderweb of cracks. It looked like the front fender on the driver’s side had been hit with a shotgun blast. There was a jagged, gaping hole in the metal, and the tire below it was flat.
    The driver’s-side door was open, and the inside was even worse than the outside. The shotgun was missing. My briefcase was in pieces and spread all over the floorboard. A bullet had pierced the steering column and the ignition wires were hanging from the hole. Somebody had knocked the computer out of its mounting bracket. My cell phone was nowhere to be found.
    “Fucking perfect,” I said out loud, and slammed the door closed. What little glass was left in the window frame collapsed and came tinkling down on the pavement. “That’s just great.”
    I stood in the street beside my car with my fingers in my hair, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do.
    There were no other police cars at the scene.
    I could see long skid marks leading back up the hill. I guessed the officers who came down this far did the same thing Chris and I had done and got the hell back up the hill as soon as they realized their little .40-caliber cap guns weren’t doing the trick.
    But they had left their dead behind. I