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troop.”
    “You’re in Troop Three, too?” I asked.
    “Yup,” she said with a cutesy shrug of her shoulders. Could this get any worse? “I can’t wait to give those slimy worms a piece of my fist.” And for the first time Cassandra and I had something in common.
     

Chapter Six
    Pantry
     
     
    I flopped down on my cot, so exhausted that sleep quickly overcame me.
    I was twelve years old riding my purple ten speed bike. I was coming back home with Nathan and my best friend Jenny after a day of swimming at the river. As soon as we hit Main Street, we could tell something was wrong. My mind instantly went to the monsters I’d heard my parents talking about when they thought Nate and I weren’t listening. But it was all over the news and I’d seen enough to know that the bigger cities were in chaos. The government was responding to some kind of disease.
    But that was the big cities. That wasn’t Shawnee, Kansas. Things like that weren’t supposed to happen here. But windows were broken on the shops that lined the street. An elderly woman was sobbing on a park bench, a line of blood running down her hand. Sirens were going off. A car alarm honked repeatedly, and no one stopped it.
    “Hurry!” Jenny yelled, and we peddled as fast as we could down the side street that led to our houses.
    I was the fastest rider and took the lead, but I made sure that Nathan was keeping close to me. He had just turned ten that Sunday. His legs barely reached the pedals of the bike Dad had given him.
    “Stay close,” I told him. “If I stop, you keep going home.”Something horrible had happened in our town, and the danger could still be there.
    Nothing felt safe. Even the candy shop we usually stopped at to buy Swedish Fish and lollipops could hold any number of horrors now. We biked past the shop’s dark windows without pausing. Home was the only place we could go.
    A corpse lay on the sidewalk right ahead of us. There was some kind of green liquid smeared across the brick wall. I saw spots and felt bile rise in my throat. But I knew we had to keep moving.
    “Turn right!” I yelled back at Jenny and Nathan. I tried to warn them not to look, but they still saw it. Jenny screamed, her face turning ashen. Nathan made a sound somewhere between a gag and a whimper.
    I looked back over my shoulder. “Don’t stop!” I yelled and looked down both sidewalks. Jenny had stopped her bike in front of the body and was sobbing, her thin body shaking. Nathan had skidded to a stop to keep from crashing into her.
    Pedaling back to them, I stopped and cried, “Come on! We have to keep going!”Jenny just stood there. Nathan looked from me back to the body. I grabbed his hand. “Come on, Nathan. We have to get back to Mom and Dad.”
    A silent tear ran down his cheek. His lower lip trembled.
    “It’s going to be okay,” I told him, even though I knew it wasn’t true. The body lying next to us made me dizzy and weak, but I knew in my core that I had to be strong. I had to get Nathan home, had to get us to Mom and Dad where we could be safe. “Now, follow me back home. Can you do that?”
    Nathan nodded, his light brown hair rustling in a breeze that reeked of some strange metallic smell. I turned to Jenny, who had gone comatose. “Jenny, please come. We’ve got to go.”
    Her lips blubbered. She didn’t move. I heard a crash from the alley behind the candy shop. That was all the motivation I needed. “Nathan, let’s go. Now. I’ll follow you. Go!”
    Nathan struggled to get up onto the seat of his bike. I gave him a one-handed push to get started. “What about Jenny?” he asked as his bike picked up speed. There was a loud scream behind us.
    “Just go!” I yelled. We biked as fast as we could down the street, too petrified to look back.
    We reached the row of houses we lived on and it looked relatively untouched. There was still a sprinkler going in Mrs. Long’s front yard. It could’ve been just another hot August day.
    Our