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doorway of the bathroom, a matchstick tucked into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it out and held it up for Jacob to see. “Steve said you promised to talk to Frank Hartwell about getting more of these next time he’s outside the walls.”
    Jacob looked at him, confused. The words made no sense to him.
    He was still hugging the toilet, though he hadn’t thrown up again after that first time hours earlier. He stood up, lowered the lid, and sat down.
    Taylor pointed to the sink. “Wash your face off first. I want to talk with you.”
    Jacob ran water into his hands and splashed it into his face, scrubbing his mouth and cheeks with the heels of his hands. He took the towel down from the ring and dried his face. Then he put the towel back and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He didn’t recognize the face staring back at him.
    “You did well today.”
    Jacob turned to face his boss. “I killed a man.”
    “And you saved twenty more.” Taylor put the matchstick back in his mouth and rolled it over to one corner. “I’m proud of you.”
    “I feel sick.”
    “Yep. Just pray you feel that way every time you have to do it.”
    “I never want to do that again.”
    “I can’t promise you that.”
    Jacob nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
    “You know, I’m not the only one you impressed today. I’ve been talking for the last few hours with the town council about you.”
    Jacob didn’t say anything to that. All he wanted to do was drown himself in some of Kelly Banis’s infamous bathtub gin.
    “Folks have got questions, though.”
    “What kind of questions?”
    “What you did today, out there in the square, was reaffirm the Code that’s kept us alive all these years.”
    “I know that,” Jacob said. He sighed. The Code had been on his mind all day, and he’d already covered this ground many times. The whole sound of it was turning sour.
    “Now hold on. Give me a chance to speak. People want to know why a man who so ably filled the Code’s hardest task is so keen on leaving.”
    “Leaving? What . . . who said anything about leaving?”
    “Well, ain’t that what you and some of the others been talking about the last ten years? You and Kelly Banis and Nick Carroll.”
    “You mean the Expansionists? What . . . I don’t understand. You want to talk about this now?”
    “Why not?”
    Jacob started to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. He felt blindsided. “Sheriff, with all due respect, sir, I don’t really feel like a political discussion right now.”
    “And why is that?”
    Jacob stared at his boss. Where to begin? “Oh, I don’t know. Because I just put a man to death. Talking politics with that hanging over my head, it feels obscene somehow.”
    Taylor chewed on his matchstick a moment before taking it out and looking at it like a bad habit he couldn’t shake. He flicked it into the waste can with a practiced motion. Why he even bothered to throw them away anymore Jacob could hardly say. There’d be another in his mouth five minutes from now. Was it any wonder they were running out? Again?
    So he wanted to talk politics. Jacob shook his head. Fine. So be it. The expansionist question was endlessly complex, but really it boiled down to one simple truth. Arbella had survived the zombie apocalypse. They’d done well for themselves. They’d turned a deserted town into a new home, and there, they’d not only survived, but thrived. They’d walled up the town and turned every available resource toward the maintenance and the prosperity of their community. The Code was the formal statement of that purpose, its manifesto and its constitution, for lack of a better analogy. And the program had worked.
    Now, thirty years later, they had become so successful that Arbella’s old walls couldn’t hold them anymore. Jacob and quite a few of his friends, nearly all of them of the younger generation, now of age, believed that the answer to the problem was expansion. They were living in a Malthusian