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like they had rabies or something. We had to shoot them—there was no other choice.
    “Dogs? But—”
    “It didn’t end there. One night after that, some of our regiment was attacked. We were asleep in our tents when we heard footsteps outside. Thinking it was Taliban, we started shooting, but the sick-looking bastards just kept coming. There were dozens of them, walking straight towards the gunfire. You couldn’t stop them—unless you scored a head shot. The attacks went on for days and some of my buddies were killed. But the odd thing was, when one of them slipped past the guards into camp, they left most of us alone. They were usually just after the garbage…or the wounded. My buddy, Jeff, had shrapnel in his leg. They couldn’t get it all out, and it got gangrene. One night, an Eater came in…and…and ate his leg.”
    Cheryl shuddered, knowing that it would be a long time before she got some of the gruesome images out of her head that she had seen and heard today. This was all so much to digest. She tried to wrap her mind around what Mark was telling her and make some sense out of all of it. “So you think whatever the dogs had, it somehow jumped species and spread to humans?”
    “What else could it be? There’s more…I found out later that those dogs weren’t normal to begin with. They’d started out in a lab, some type of genetic experiment. They’d originally been created to sniff out cancer.”
    “Cancer?”
    “Yeah. Think about it. Bred to search for something rotten…”
    Cheryl thought again about Paul. He’d devoured that putrid burger like he was a starving animal, and it was a delicacy plucked from the Queen’s table. Just before that, he’d been so cold. He’d been dead. She knew it. There hadn’t been a pulse.
    “…but what no one knows is how this disease, or whatever it is, transferred from the dogs to people. And, it seems to have mutated, turning people into these rotting eating machines.”
    “Why weren’t they quarantined when it started?”
    “It happened too fast. You probably heard on the news a few months ago that a whole village was bombed. They were all infected, wandering the streets, just eating, eating, eating…any rotten thing or creature they could get their mouths on. Whatever this virus was, we tried to contain it, tried to keep it from spreading to the rest of the world. But from the looks of things here, apparently we failed.”
    She let that statement sink down to the pit of her stomach and was silent for a moment, taking in the hushed jumble of voices around her, and the backdrop of the shrieks outside. She squeezed his hand, hoping for some kind of hope to come out of him next. “What are we going to do? We can’t stay here forever…”
    “Well…we got food. We got water. I say we stay put for now. Try to find out what’s going on. Maybe someone will come restore order. Maybe the Guard.”
    “The Guard? You’re the Guard. And, you’re here with me instead of out there.”
    “I had to find you, Cheryl. If I’d reported like they wanted me to, where would you be right now? Splattered all over the sidewalk out there?”
    She winced. He was right . If he had gotten there even just a few seconds later, she would have been trampled by that crowd...then maybe eaten by one of the infected. She shuddered at the thought. There was no doubt that Mark had saved her life by going AWOL from his duty.
    Suddenly, the darkness retreated as a fluorescent light popped on in the back of the store.
    Mark jumped to his feet. “I thought I said no lights!”
    All twenty plus people turned and looked at the silhouette of a person standing in the back hallway among the shelves of bread loaves and gallons of mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, and pickles, backlit by the rectangular glow of sunlight coming in from the open back door.
    Mark grabbed his rifle and yelled, “There’s a back door! Nobody locked the damn back door!”

Chapter Five
     
     
    The heavyset