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feet.  He didn’t look at Dorcas.
    She touched him. 
Laid her one good hand on his one good arm.
    “I’m okay,” she
said.  “It didn’t get through my boots.”
    She lifted her
pants to show her thick work boots – now darker than they had been, the
double-stitched leather starting to fray.  But whole.
    Aaron stopped as if
frozen.  His foot caught in mid-grind.
    The child-thing
struggled.
    The mother-thing
pulled herself apart to get to them.
    The father-thing
yanked its innards out as if in offering to whatever deity had resurrected it.
    Aaron fell against
Dorcas.  She grunted as he hit her broken arm.  Grunted, but didn’t pull away.
    The cowboy wept.

  17
     
     
    Ken stared at the
older couple.  And realized he was jealous.
    They had found each
other.
    All of them had found each other,
of course.  But Buck had lost his mother.  Christopher had lost his family, had
seen his parents rip each other apart.
    Ken had lost
Derek.  Maybe the girls.  Maybe Maggie.
    Aaron and Dorcas
were holding each other.  Clinging to one another in one-armed, broken
embraces.  Weeping in relief and terror and pain.
    But they were
alive, and perhaps they had more now than they had when this all began.
    Ken hated them for
a moment.  Less than a second, just another frozen ash-fall of an instant.  But
it was real.
    Is that in
everyone?  Can we all hate not only for real injuries but merely for blessings
others have the gall to accept?
    He thought so.  And
didn’t know what that meant.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  If that kind
of hate was buried in everyone, that kind of selfishness resided in all hearts,
maybe the monsters that had come upon them weren’t unnatural after all.  Maybe
they were just the next evolutionary step.
    Swinging in the
trees to picking fruit off the ground.
    Picking fruit off
the ground to cultivating crops.
    Cultivating crops
to building cities.
    Building cities to
traveling to space.
    But the constant
through it all was warfare.  Murder.  The attempt to bring others down and bury
them beneath our feet.
    The zombies were
simply doing it with a bit more focus.  Casting off the subterfuge of
civilization and simply being their true selves.
    Ken looked at
Maggie.  She was standing by Buck and Christopher, almost leaning against them.
    Not me.  She
should be holding me ,
not leaning on them .
    Liz was still limp
in the baby sling.  Hope flopped loose and boneless in Buck’s thick arms.
    None of them
noticed the things rising out of the seats behind them.

  18
     
     
    “Look out!”
    The self-pity that
had been on the verge of battering down Ken’s last defenses vaporized at the
sight of the burning things standing behind Maggie.  He was moving even as he
shouted, shoving her behind him, then pushing Christopher to the side as well. 
The kid went sprawling into the remains of a – blessedly empty – row of mangled
seats.
    Buck was harder to
push.  But even the big man flew to the side under the adrenalized shove Ken
sent his way.  Ken saw out of the corner of his eye that the gray older man
fell sideways with his body curved around Hope’s still form.  Another
surprise.  Another connection found in the world of the lost.  The snippy,
selfish older man had somehow discovered someone in whom to subsume himself.
    In that moment Ken
started to think of the man as one of the group.  One of the survivors.
    Then he was past
them all.
    Throwing himself
into the three dead bodies that had struggled to their feet two rows down.
    The closest wasn’t
really on fire, he saw.  Just smoldering.  Steam venting from singed rags that
were the only funerary clothing the thing would ever enjoy.
    The whole world was
a cemetery.  But the dead were not going to stay buried.
    The steam hissed
and popped, and one of the thing’s eyes suddenly exploded under the internal
pressure of expanding gases and liquids.  A second later the thing started to
jitter.  Then it dropped suddenly,