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out for herself. Ana hoped they’d be as nice as Adam insisted they were. She hated the thought of someone having fun at her brother’s expense, like what used to happen back home and in regular school all too often — kids making fun of the daft kid because they figured he didn’t get it.
    Adam wasn’t daft. He was damned smart. Just quiet, and had some trouble communicating with others in a normal way. That didn’t make him stupid.
    If Ana found out these kids were messing with him, they’d have hell to pay — even if it meant her getting thrown into The Rock’s basement for a spell.
    Ana pushed open the door on the 25th floor and passed two girls chatting in the hall, ignoring their cries of “To Jonah!” along with their fist salutes, and headed straight for the restroom and a private stall.
    Ana went to the farthest stall, sat to pee, then slid the note from her pants pocket and carefully opened the note.
    It read:
    874 Stone Street Church
    Sunday
    Come alone
    And don’t let The Watchers see you.
    It was the address of the small church with the slightly crooked sign, across the street from Ana’s old apartment.

CHAPTER 4 — Jonah Lovecraft
    The Barrens
    the next morning
    J onah felt like his heart would burst. Then it did.
    He stopped, clutching at the burning in his chest. Once he realized nothing had erupted, and that it only felt as if he were going to die, but he wasn’t yet dying, he pushed himself to run faster.
    It had been a while since Jonah had heard any zombies, and even longer since he had felt them. After another 20 minutes, he stopped again, just long enough to catch his breath, sucking fresh, cold air into his lungs like the last swallow in a canteen. Once he caught his breath, Jonah looked behind him, scanned the snow-capped tree line for zombies, then turned back and started walking quickly toward the Final Area.
    He passed a lake, walked the long way around the same wooden shack that had been used as a makeshift hospital, a camping ground, and a last stand more times than he could count, or at least remember, in the more than 36 years since he first started watching The Darwin Games. Jonah didn’t go inside the shack, but as he passed, he smelled something inside that made him want to vomit. Past the shack, Jonah reached the large black wall surrounding a clearing — two empty acres in the middle of the forest.
    Jonah wondered how much longer he could continue breathing. His heart was still beating like a jackhammer and threatening eruption. His lungs were a bucket of magma. His throat was dry and raw, and his eyes dry and tired, but he couldn’t risk letting his guard drop now, of all times.
    This was the staging area of the Final Battle.
    Jonah found the gateway into the clearing and then swallowed as he saw the goliath that had beaten him there.
    Bear stood on top of the Mesa, heaving. Massive shoulders rose and fell with the silent threat of a sleeping lion.
    Bear was too far off for Jonah to see his smile, but he was no less certain the giant was wearing one. For a man Bear’s size, who crushed skulls like fruit in his palm, he wielded a surprising amount of mirth. Jonah had caught the screen captures from the orbs on the replays each night. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Bear was the first survivor in history to get his own spinoff show — if he beat Jonah.
    Three days before, Bear had survived a midnight zombie attack by wrapping his arm around a monster’s neck, squeezing it tight enough so that the zombie couldn’t bite him.
    Bear was sleeping soundly when the first zombie made it into his camp, so he wasn’t able to grab a weapon before the first zombie was on him. Bear used the zombie’s body as his only weapon until he tore an arm from another charging zombie, then used that as a bat to fend off the approaching swarm long enough to get his store of weapons, starting with a gun that he fired to empty before switching to an axe that left a littered heap of zombies