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had made their way up Mayberry Street.
    She’d hidden behind a car, a rusted old thing with no windows, and for the barest second she felt certain she was about to see it. If the mailbox was here then the car had to be here, and oh God, God—where was she, exactly? Where was this?
    But more importantly—where was Blake?
    She clutched the tree branch tighter and went lower, focusing on the things that currently made sense. In situations like this you had to keep out of sight and be quiet—and especially when zombies had definitely taken Blake.
     
     
    What other explanation was there? They’d grabbed him and dragged him off someplace. They sometimes did that—she’d seen them do that!—because a lot of them were smart. The ones on Mayberry Street had been smart—hunting in packs like that, searching behind things to find the juicy, blood-filled humans. And here it was worse, much worse, because there were plenty of places to hide, but all of them felt weird, and wrong.
    She didn’t want to go near that thing, over there. The grey thing, that looked like the edge of a tent, flapping. It didn’t make any sense that the tent was here—the one they’d found, with the people inside—and it didn’t make any sense that the mailbox was here and oh, how stupid she’d been.
    She’d let her guard down, gone out running without a weapon, then let herself get lost in these nonsensical woods. She could have punched herself in the face, if her body had actually allowed her to bend that way.
    And if Blake hadn’t been missing, missing, missing.
    Lord, how she wanted to call out to him. Just in case it was a joke and they’d all laugh and maybe afterwards she could murder him in a bathtub of acid for scaring the fucking life out of her.
    But the thing of it was—she couldn’t call out if the zombies were around. She couldn’t, God no. Calling out would attract hundreds of them immediately, and any chance Blake had would be shot to hell. They’d descend on him and fight over him and rip his body into little bits.
    She’d seen that happen, too. Man, there was just nothing she hadn’t seen, nothing, and something about that seemed so grossly unfair she wanted to tear it into little bits. Just grab a hold of it with her teeth and wrench it around and…
    Blake. He was there, standing by the chain link fence. The one she’d hoped didn’t exist, back when she’d frightened herself with ideas that this place wasn’t really an island. The place had gone on forever and ever inside her head, instead—the way it seemed to right now as she looked past Blake and through the links, to the rolling fields beyond.
    She couldn’t stop it. Her body started shuddering all on its own. It wanted to lose control and she had to follow it. The fields, the fields—they looked just like the ones she’d had to pelt across, when the zombies had busted into the park’s bathroom and almost got a hand on her.
    Jamie and Blake—they’d lied. Oh no, they’d lied. It wasn’t an island at all and now they’d made her run to this awful echo of her worst memory with no weapon and nothing to help her and oh, why was Blake just standing there at the fence, staring?
    No, no, no, why? He wouldn’t be able to hear her because she’d become an expert at stealthy creeping. But even so he was motionless and dead seeming, and there was blood on the metal in front of him. Lots of blood and bits of stuff, and was that blood on his arm, too?
    Thirty seconds , she thought, thirty seconds , then pinned down the sob that welled up inside her as though she was a champion wrestler, and it had no more fight than a dry leaf.
    She was going to give him a chance. She had the stick—it would go into his temple, no problem at all. Her nerves were still steel. She could still hold onto herself if he turned and snarled. All she needed was one moment, one moment of seeing his turned face then in, in, in.
    She just had to reach out a hand to him, first. Slow, slow.