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wife suddenly turned her head away. She leaned toward her door, as if somehow she would pass through the metal and still end up whole on the other side.
    “This was nice,” she said, “but can we please just go home?”
    Outside, those dead insects had gone silent, as if they had sensed the sudden tension inside the car and wanted to hear every word.
    “Conrad?” Her head still turned away from him, her body still leaning closer and closer toward the door. “I want to go home.”
    Conrad was turned toward her in his seat, his hand still on her knee, and he wanted to tell her everything. Not just about how he’d hesitated the other night, or his fear about Kyle, or what had almost once happened between him and Jessica, but about how he sometimes thought about writing poetry too. That he once sat there alone with his own pencil and paper but could never get past the first word, could never find the beginning, no matter how much he wanted to, how hard he tried. Because even though he was successful, even though he had killed over nine hundred zombies, he never felt like any of it came half as close to the risk Denise had taken by writing him a poem and then actually letting him see it, the evidence of her crime. He wanted to do something that matched that risk, that showed her his true love. But he could never get past that damned first word, and he sometimes wondered what kind of husband that made him, what kind of father, what kind of man.

 

     

     

     
    Chapter 6

     

     

     
    The subbasement of the Hunter Headquarters was almost never used. It was dark and murky and everything was covered in dust. But it was where they kept extra storage, and where Conrad found himself that Monday morning, a dim bulb flickering above his head, as he tried finding a large enough box to pack his things.
    Most of the cardboard boxes were filled with miscellaneous files. When he found the box he wanted, he took out all the files, set them aside, grabbed the box and started to stand up, started to turn toward the steps, when the sealed metal door in the back of the basement caught his attention.
    It was this building’s entrance into the Labyrinth, those subterranean passages that serpentined their way underneath Olympus. They had been constructed over two centuries ago, after the Zombie Wars, when the dead had conquered this part of the world and began rebuilding the city. The fear of another zombie attack was still fresh, so the architects devised a plan to move around politicians and celebrities and anybody else deemed important enough to save if another such attack was imminent.
    The passageways were narrow and tight, and only had entrances to a handful of buildings around the city—the Herculean, town hall, all the police precincts—but there were occasional doors that exited into parks, gardens, any place that might be the easiest and safest way for escape. They had never been used, except the few times the police sent men down into the tunnels to make sure no animals or homeless had found their way inside. Occasionally a Hunter would accompany the police, and his first year in Olympus Conrad had requested to go along and had walked the miles upon miles with only a flashlight to light his way. And when he had come back to Headquarters, when he had made sure nobody else was around, he had used the tip of his broadsword to carve CONRAD LOVES DENISE into the cinderblock wall right beside the door.
    When he’d told Denise later that night what he’d done, she asked him why and he’d said because it was true.
    Now as he stared at that sealed metal door, he thought about the real reason he’d carved those three words into the wall. Normally he wouldn’t remember, but being with his wife last night, driving out to the country and then thinking about the poem she’d written him, and how once he’d tried writing his own poem before giving it up, before realizing it was a terrible mistake—those three words had been the