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living.
    At first they had a few detractors who had made fun of the girls, calling them Nat’s Brats behind their backs. That teasing had ended when Robson finally chose the name by which everyone now referred to them. During a pre-brief for one of his raids, he had used it when asking Natalie if the girls could provide armed back-up. Natalie and the girls loved it because they knew he had meant the name as a sign of respect.
    The Angels of Death.
    Swinging her legs back onto the wall, Natalie continued her rounds along the perimeter. The more their prestige grew, the greater became the uneasiness that nagged at her. She tried to ignore it, writing off the feeling as her own natural pessimism bubbling to the surface, but deep down she knew there was more to it than that. Natalie would never downplay the Angels’ success. Her Angels had kept the camp safe from the few rotters that wandered too close for comfort. Even when they accompanied the raiding party, they never encountered more than thirty or forty at a time. Not the kind of odds from which legends are made.
    That was the problem. The Angels had become legendary at camp for no good reason, in her opinion. Fighting off the living dead at three-to-one odds was not extraordinary. It created false expectations among the others. Worse still, some of the Angels had begun to believe the hype, which threatened to make them over confident and sloppy. Natalie trained them relentlessly, but still she would occasionally overhear some of her girls talk about how they were invincible.
    This feeling of impending doom had gotten much stronger since Paul announced that the raiding party would head into Portsmouth to pick up an important group of survivors. Although the rational part of her brain tried to convince her that these feelings were just paranoia, her woman’s intuition warned her to listen. Something told her these survivors were bad news for the camp, for her, and for her girls. If only she knew why.
    Arriving back at the gated tunnel, Natalie used the inside ladder to climb down off of the wall. Wiping her hands together to brush off the dirt, she made her way to the blockhouse for breakfast.

Chapter Five

    The knock on the container door echoed through the room’s confines, jarring Elena awake. She stirred and sat up on her cot, wondering if she had only imagined it. A moment later a second knock confirmed that someone was outside.
    “Miss Elena, are you in there?” The question was accompanied by a third knock, slightly louder.
    “I can’t open the door. It’s daylight.”
    “I understand, Miss Elena. Paul sent me to tell you that Dr. Compton and the others have arrived.”
    “Thank you. Please tell Paul I’ll join them after sunset.”
    “Of course, Miss Elena.”
    Elena settled back onto the cot and stared up at the ceiling. She wished she could have been there to greet Compton, but the raiding party’s late return had prevented that. Now Compton would have an entire day with Paul to tell his version of how the vampires had stolen the R Virus and used it to destroy civilization, a version that in all probability would undermine, if not completely shatter, the fragile accommodation between her and Paul. She feared how the coven would be treated once night arrived. A part of her expected the humans to burst into the containers sometime during the day and drag every member of the coven into the sunlight.
    Elena sighed. She would not blame the humans if they did.
    Elena found it ironic how events had played out. She had never supported stealing the R Virus and releasing it against mankind, even when the idea was being bantered about by some of the more extreme covens. Her objections had not been based on any emotional bond to the species she once belonged to, nor were they derived from any sentimentality to what a zombie outbreak might do to the humans. Her objections had been entirely cynical and selfish. She had considered humans as a source of nourishment,