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grounds for the creatures and Ram wouldn't be caught dead in one.
    Still, despite the zombies, he had a job to do and it was why he slunk down below the level of a waist high chain link fence and eyed the mobile home. It was brightly lit and that was something. The other places had been dark house after dark house. Two had been booby-trapped and two others had been the home of living corpses. Fillmore had punched his ticket getting bitten on the shoulder in one of them.
    No one had known what to do with him. They had tried the county hospital, but when they had rushed into the Emergency Room it was their first inkling that the city was lost. The zombies came at them from every door and some even fell from windows to get at them. They had fled with poor Fillmore and in the end, when the fever was burning bright on his skin and no one wanted to get too close, he had shot himself in the head and t hey had left him there on some nameless side street.
    That had been only the night before, though to Ram it felt like days ago. They had gone from lead to lead without rest and this was going to be the sixth house since his death that they would search, and with each the team had shrunk.
    “Who's going first?” Ram asked in a whisper.
    “ Man, I don't even know why we're bothering anymore,” Shelton hissed back. “Look at this place! The city is fucking toast.” To accentuate his point, or so it seemed, gunfire erupted on the next block and each slunk lower.
    Gunfire had become almost as ubiquitous as the zombies and Ram had ceased getting worked up over it. “You got a point. The city is toast, but what about the state? And what about the country? And what about Fillmore? I never even liked that guy and for some reason I'm pissed off that he died the way he did.”
    “ I'll go first,” the federal agent said. “It's my turn.”
    “ Damn straight it's your turn,” Shelton said angrily. Despite his talk he wasn't leaving his partner. “You've been hanging back all fucking…”
    Ram put his hand out. “He said he's going first, so let it drop.”
    The Fed, a member of the weak Homeland Security force ignored Shelton and Ram both. He was too keyed up. His breathing began to race in and out, and then he nodded and took off for the door with the other two agents right behind. There was no polite knock or even a 'hello', the agent went right at the door and slammed his bulk against it and immediately fell forward; the door hadn't been locked.
    “ Allah's will,” rasped out a thick accented voice. “My work must be complete.”
    Ram stepped over the Fed and leveled his piece at a middle-eastern man who eyed him blackly. “Hands where I can see them,” Ram ordered.
    The man sat at a little table and before him were wires and a glass jar of nails and a little test tube filled with blood. “Or what?” the man asked. “Or you'll shoot me?” He laughed at this and Ram glared.
    “ Or I'll shoot you and then roll you in bacon before burying you with a dog. How does that sound?”
    The man cursed in a foreign language and Ram stepped forward to let the Fed get up. Shelton stayed outside, watching their backs.
    “Where are the others?” Ram asked. “We got Al-Fadl two hours ago and Amir last night. So?”
    “ The others? Denver, Chicago, Dallas, but it does not matter now. They can do no more harm. Allah has seen to it that only the most faithful will survive.”
    “ How is he going to do that?”
    “ Thou bringest forth the living from the dead and thou bringest forth the dead from the living, and thou givest sustenance to whom thou pleasest without measure,” the man said with a smile and hard black eyes.
    He had turned slightly in his chair when the door had burst open and Ram had a clear shot with his Beretta. When it came to how prisoners were dealt with, things had changed considerably with the declaration of Martial Law, and without the least warning Ram pulled the trigger on his gun, sending a bullet speeding