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winked up at New
Crozet’s gate and elevated watchman, the bones sizzling and gasping almost
invitingly when untapped treasure troves of marrow or gristle, or likely both,
were licked up by the fire’s diminishing tongue.
    The flames wanted more, were asking for more, but there was hardly anything left. The bones that were now being
crisped had formed the framework of a living animal once, with ample meat and
not an indecent amount of fat for burning, but that was more than a decade ago,
before the end of the world.
    Corks watched the changing pattern of
light play in the clearing, his trained eyes searching the ground for other zombies,
but none appeared. He’d expected them to come a while ago, and now, as they kept
on not showing themselves, his agitation grew. Squinting at the fire, he knew
that Alan’s flare and the charging deer’s noise should have been more than
enough to attract others, and the fire’s crackling should have been enough,
too.
    What did it mean? Where were the other
zombies? Market day was still two days away, so it was too early for the
traders’ caravans to be attracting the forest zombies.
    Corks thought that Alan and Senna had
been surprised by the lack of zombies too, but he was too far up in the
watchtower to tell for sure. He’d been the night sentry on many nights when children
were brought to the outer gate for this exercise, and he couldn’t remember a
single time when Alan’s flare had brought only one zombie from the forest.
    Definitely too early for the traders to
be getting close, Corks thought. Where are the animals? The zombies, he
corrected himself.
    The more he thought about it, the more
it bothered him. Why hadn’t Alan and Senna made more of a fuss? He hadn’t seen
any discussion take place, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either,
because Alan and Senna had been focused on Rosemary.
    It wasn’t that he wanted more to come,
of course. It was bad enough that Rosemary had to deal with any at all. At her
age, she should have been excited about Halloween coming up in just a few days,
putting up ghoulish decorations with her family and thinking about the costume
she’d wear and all the candy she’d get to eat.
    Did she even know that it was October,
or what year it was? For that matter, did Senna and Alan know? Sometimes Corks
thought he was the only one who still tracked time on a calendar. And was that
a strange thing to do now, rather than just live by the sun and seasons?
    Shaking his head, he wished that Rosemary
wouldn’t have to see any more than what she’d just seen, or to do any more than
what she’d just done. But it was necessary, and she would likely be required to
kill again in order to survive, in an uncontrolled environment much more
dangerous than the practice field to which she’d been brought tonight.
Childhood had to be cut short for her to survive, or at least to stand a better
chance.
    It was something the children had to
experience, something they had to see with their own eyes and do with their own
hands. Their small fingers had to be the ones pulling the triggers, because
that was what it took to really understand the world beyond the fence, and that
it and the zombies living there were real, and always trying to get in. If his own
son had had such training, Corks knew, he might still have been alive.
    His thoughts turned back to the scant
response to Alan’s flare, and he decided he might bring it up at the town hall
meeting the next day. He told himself that it was nothing, a meaningless
coincidence, but trying to dismiss it, unusual as it was, made him even more
uncomfortable.
    Might as well get settled into unease
now, he thought. There was a long shift ahead of him to dwell on what he hadn’t
seen.
    The thermos of chicory coffee caught
his eye and he picked it up. Unscrewing the top to let the earthy smell of the
fake coffee reach him, he began to pace.

10
    Aside from the crackling of the zombie deer, the night was sounding