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  He had two dozen lieutenants, all men. He relied on them to keep the community functioning. They relayed his orders to the community and made sure they were carried out.

  She often rented the lieutenant’s loyalty- some with drugs, some with sex, some with flirtatious appeals to their vanity. But until they feared her, until they knew she ran the place and was willing and able to run it with an iron fist and the threat of blood and death, she couldn't own them.

  If she tried to give them orders under her own authority they laughed and dismissed her as a woman.

  So she dared not kill Morgan and instead wasted two months bringing him to heel. She forbid him to touch her. She ridiculed him in public and subjected him to scathing tongue lashings in private. Finally, he broke. They drew up plans, put teams together, and handed down orders.

  In this new world, one where countless numbers of flesh-eating demons numbering in the tens of millions patrolled the landscape, their community was too spread out. The teams that left to scavenge and trade for food, seed, and weapons brought back Polaroids of other communities. In every case, they were small places enclosed all the way around with walls. Sometimes the walls were made of lumber, sometimes chain-link, sometimes sheet metal bound with bolts and wires. But in each one, a barrier existed between the people and the dead.

  The G-CORE territory, though, reached across over two square miles. The amount of material necessary to fence an area that large and the time it would take to build made it an impossibility. But an option existed.

  They could go underground. That was the plan, and Kayla had every detail worked out the moment Morgan agreed.

  The earthmoving equipment sat unused on farms, in factories, and at construction sites, rusting and falling into disrepair. Tractors and backhoes and bulldozers, dump trucks and loaders and excavators. The community had the farmers, contractors, and small businessman who knew how to operate the equipment and the diesel mechanics with the ability to repair it.

  The first dig created a main tunnel from the church grounds to the Robin Ridge entrance. When the workers shored it up and lit it with a row of flashlights hung from the ceiling (running electricity across the territory was in Kayla's stack of future projects), Kayla gritted her teeth and walked through first.

  Next, they dug another big tunnel, from the grounds to what would become the central area for the farming and livestock operations.

  That work took sixteen weeks from groundbreaking to completion. When it was done, workers made the initial digs in what Kayla envisioned as a vast network of underground passages for people to use anytime they needed to go from place to place within her territory.

  The noise of the machinery and the workers drew more dead to the compound than Kayla imagined existed. The crews put down hundreds every day. Robin Ridge and the grounds outside the fence grew so infested with the creatures that people were afraid to step outside.

  The dangerous labor and the creatures generated a tremendous death toll. Between accidents caused by inexperienced workers and demon attacks, they lost two or three people a week. One day a fourteen-year-old showing off for his girlfriend drove a bulldozer over the top of a connecting-tunnel that was still being shored up underneath. The earth gave way; falling dirt and rock and the four-ton dozer crushed ten men. That night, vengeful co-workers of those killed lynched the young Lothario.

  Kayla and Morgan watched as they marched the crying teen, still bleeding from a long gouge in his scalp from when his head smashed into the dozer's side pillar. At first she stood in his way, blocking him from going out and stopping the mob. He tried to push by and she held him back; finally, she took him to the ground, hanging on his back and entwining her legs around him until he fell.

  When it was over he sat with his back against the wall and his elbows on his knees, crying. He rested his forehead against his laced fingers and repeated the same phrase over and over. "This isn't us. This can't be us."

  Kayla sat beside him and pulled his head against her chest. "If we hadn't let it play out there would've been violence and dissension. Everybody would pick a side and work would have ground to a halt while they battled one another. That poor kid would have taken a beating every day until they either killed him or drove him off. This way, it's done. And now people will think twice before fooling around in a way that gets people killed."

  She used the same argument earlier in the day when she talked two of the bigger and angrier workers into inciting the mob that evening.

  More and more, Morgan's lieutenants saw Kayla as a source of power in her own right. They didn’t know their boss parroted her words and ideas. But they saw her manipulating and scheming behind the scenes and realized in many important ways she pulled the strings.

  One morning the two men who rebuffed her the most and refused to carry out her wishes didn't show up for the daily breakfast meeting. The other lieutenants thought nothing of it. They assumed the pair slept in or got an early start on an assignment from Morgan.

  But when they missed the evening meal too, and Morgan rebutted the notion they were out on a job for him, Mangus formed a small team to investigate. They returned with a mystery- the men were nowhere to be found, though all their gear, clothing, and weapons were still there.

  After five days they were assumed to have run off, though no one questioned how unlikely it was that they light out and leave their belongings behind. Mangus doled out their gear among the others and pulled up two guys from the ranks to fill their spots. The men began treating Kayla with more respect and doing her bidding with more enthusiasm.

  Seven

  * * *

  Danny Wilson concentrated on his breathing and watched the three creepers approach. He inhaled and exhaled, calm and even.

  Control your breathing and you'll control your nerves

  his alcoholic father used to say, one of the few things he said worth remembering before he took off for good when Danny was twelve.

  He stood on the balls of his feet, bent at the knees and waist, like a linebacker ready for the snap. His arms swung in front of him. One hand folded into a loose fist; the other held a savage-looking combat knife with a straight edge on one side and serrated teeth on the other.

  The dead advanced, looking at him through dead eyes covered with a soapy film. One shuffled toward him faster than the other two. It had been a teen-aged girl before the outbreak. Its skin was moldy and shrunken with decay. Sores that oozed thick, yellow pus pockmarked its skin. Filth and gore matted hair that was pulled back in a ponytail; chunks of it were ripped out at the scalp, leaving angry-looking bald spots that dripped more pus. Maggots crawled in and out of a pair of holes above its mouth, the holes all that remained of its nose. Gray, pasty skin sloughed off its cheeks and chin. It snarled at him in a rough and ragged tone that sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbed together. Broken teeth clacked behind cracked and yellow lips, revealing a blackened and swollen tongue.

  Close behind the former teenager lurched a creeper in the dirty and bloodstained uniform from a local factory and a tall, skinny male wearing a pair of bikini underwear and a shirt that read Bob Adams Ford. The tall had one good arm; its other was bare bone marred with teeth marks and a few random clumps of rotting flesh.

  The teenager grasped for him with an eagerness born of abject hunger, its hands twisted into claws. Always deal with the most aggressive first, Danny recited to himself. He waited until the lead creeper loomed in front of him to react, then burst into action.

  His arm shot out and grabbed it by the neck. Before he even had a firm grip on the dead teen his knife hand was already bringing the blade up and around in a short, brutal arc. He buried the hand-forged carbon steel in its ear almost to the hilt, flicked his wrist left and right, and pulled the knife free. The creeper took one half-step and crumpled.

  The factory worker was next; it emitted a thick, phlegm-filled snarl as it reached for him. He ignored its grasping hands; instead, he stepped to the side, ducked, and swept its leg
s out from underneath it. It fell in a heap. Danny ignored it for the moment and turned to meet the final ghoul. He snapped his leg straight out, a powerful blow that made and audible crack when it connected with the creeper's knee. It tilted sideways like a table with two short legs. Danny gave it a push and it fell over. It laid on the concrete snapping and snarling, oblivious its ruined knee faced the wrong direction.

  The second creeper, the one Danny had swept to the ground, crouched on one foot and both hands, trying to regain its footing. He approached and it growled and swiped at him. That was too much effort for the unbalance creature; it tumbled forward, cracking its forehead on the concrete. Danny raised his knee high and brought it down on the back of its head with all the force he could muster. It made a wet and sloppy sound and blood from its ears shot into the air. Danny stomped once more; blood and gore squirted in several different directions and the creeper slumped to the cold concrete.

  He eyed his remaining foe. It wallowed on its stomach, unable to rise. Danny planted a boot on the back of its neck to hold it still and pushed his knife into its ear. Blood, mixed with a thick, black goo, flowed over his hand and the creeper was still.

  He turned and faced a group of twenty volunteers for training on how to put down the dead. They met three mornings a week for six weeks- a mix of pacifist, people who had never been up close to the ghouls, teens as young as twelve, and four newcomers to the quarry. Some of them looked at Danny in awe; others looked like they were about to puke. As long as Danny kept the awe-to-puke ratio at about one to one, he figured he was doing a pretty good job.

  He clapped his hands twice to get their attention. "Okay- you just saw the three fundamentals of putting them down, all on display in one fight. Fundamental one- always put down the most aggressive one first. Fundamental two- where possible, use the DCK method; disable them, contain them, kill them. Fundamental three- never put yourself or your teammates in jeopardy. When we let them go, they gravitated toward you guys. Instead of engaging them I distracted them, led them away from you, and then engaged."

  While Danny talked with the class, a team of four cleared off the corpses behind him. Off to the side, a rectangular cage on wheels contained a dozen assorted creepers waiting for their turn to be a study aid. They constructed the cage by welding cattle panels together and reinforcing the panels with rebar fence posts every five inches. To top it off, a mesh made of a microfiber similar to woven steel covered the structure from side to side and front to back.

  Cyrus, the tunnel-dwellers’ unpleasant mad-genius inventor, found the material in a warehouse and was smart enough to recognize its value. "A crocodile couldn't bite through this stuff, much less one of the dead," said the foul little gnome.

  Twice a month, Danny led a team to the outskirts of town to round up a trailer load of the dead to use in the training. He complained about the responsibility to no end, but anyone who knew him well knew it was for effect; conducting the class delighted him.

  The six-man team trolled the neighborhoods and streets on the edge of Carthage, pulling the cage behind a truck. When they saw lone creepers or pairs they sprang into action.

  Their equipment included the catchpoles that dog catchers used- nylon cords on the end of four-foot rods. They’d loop the cord around their quarry’s neck and hold the hapless creature in place with the pole. A team member protected by thick padding around his chest and arms moved in on the target from behind, slipped a pillowcase over its head, and tied a zip tie around its neck to secure the pillowcase. They tied its arms with a second zip tie and bound its feet with a third. The ties came from Terrence, who seemed to have an endless supply of them. Once it was hooded and bound, two people grabbed its arms and another pair its legs. From there it was a simple matter to toss it into the cage.

  Sometimes Danny declared the trailer full and the team called it a day. More often, the noise and commotion they created attracted so many ravenous creepers it was unsafe to continue. The point came when packs of the dead shuffled toward the truck from every direction. That's when Danny would look around, see the converging horde, and give the command to load up and bug out.

  Back at the Underground, the trailer load of creepers went through the same process they underwent when captured, only in reverse. Team members cut the ties on their hands and feet. Others snagged them with the catch poles and led them into a holding pen built just like the one on the trailer. The only difference was that their hoods stayed on for the duration of their time in captivity.

  Two armed men guarded the cage at all times, ensuring the dead remained caged and no one approached them. Only Danny, Will, the guards, and a select few others were allowed beyond the perimeter fence that surrounded the ‘creeper coop’.

  It was a good system, put together by Jiri, the Czechoslovakian born, ex-college basketball player and ex-professor who toiled as the primary idea man for Will's group. He thought it up one afternoon after hearing about the two Originals who fled in tears when their scavenging crew encountered a lone creeper while clearing a house.

  It had never occurred to Jiri, or anyone else who had been on the road with Will, fighting the dead every day, that this long after the outbreak people still existed who had little or no face-to-face contact with them.

  The Underground was part of the fabric of Carthage; everybody in town had been in the tunnels at some point or had a relative or close friend who worked inside. The empty mines became a Civil Defense rally point during the red scare, and in the fifties and sixties, the town practiced an Emergency Response each year. School buses carried the students from all six grade schools out to the abandoned mine, where they practiced duck and cover against the cool tunnel walls.

  So, when what began as unbelievable images on grainy Internet videos grew into the lead story on the local news, and the Governor was rumored to have been bitten by an infected woman on his security detail, and the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader were tucked away in undisclosed locations, and on a miserably cold January morning the town’s emergency sirens sounded and didn’t stop, the first idea to run through the minds of Carthaginians all over town was, GET TO THE UNDERGROUND. I’LL BE SAFE THERE. As it turned out, some Originals made it without seeing anything more than a fleeting glimpse of a monstrous figure flashing by the car window or a hazy entity two blocks down the street. And some of those same people never joined the work crews that walked the perimeter of the quarry each morning, spiking the dead that stepped off the bluff above, and they huddled in their tiny cubicle-apartments the night an unknown enemy guided a small herd through the shafts to attack the tunnel-dwellers. Thus, over a year after society collapsed, the community had a few dozen souls who had never seen a creeper up close.

  Will and his core group said it often- the number one principle in the quarry was safety. But you couldn't have safety without the ability to put down the dead when the time came. And so creeper school was born.

  * * *

  Danny gave instruction on the basic elements of putting down the dead for another half hour. When he finished, he took up a spot in the center of the concrete pad and address his students. "It’s pretty easy to beat the dog out of the dead. I spent most of my life working cattle, and let me tell you- I’d rather fight a creeper than shovel shit or stick my arm up a cow’s fat old pooter and poke around for a calf.” A titter rolled through his audience. “That’s not a joke. And you guys will find, especially those of you who worked for a living, that you feel the same way.

  "Because it’s almost impossible to get taken down by one." He surveyed the class and saw a few uncertain grins and quizzical expressions. "What I mean is one creeper by itself cannot beat you. Mistakes and poor judgment are what get you killed. Not being alert to your surroundings. Not being careful when clearing a room. You allow yourself to get surrounded. Or let the dead come up on you from behind. You permit one to get close enough to take you to the ground. You’re playing around or showing off instead of doing
the job in the best way possible. That's how you die.

  "Creepers are slow. They don’t think, plan, or organize. They have one form of attack- straight ahead, slow, with plenty of noise. A living, breathing, person one on one against a creeper? That is an easy win for the person. As long as they always take care not to beat themselves.”

  As he summed up, he made eye contact with each student one at a time, looking for signs of doubt or fear. “Remember the three fundamentals. Use the DCK method- disable, contain, kill. Stay close to your team lead and always do what they say. If you do these things, you’ll go home to your squalid little home at the end of the day and make sweet love to the best member of the opposite sex you could find out of a pool of two hundred people who is willing to look at your naked body. Or, ignore what you’ve learned and go out there to do your own thing. Do that, and one day soon you’re gonna find yourself trying to poke your large intestine back in through the eight-inch gash in your belly while a meth head and the town banker take turns munching on your liver.”

  Danny was silent for a handful of seconds. He let his words sink in on the now-somber audience, then he threw it open for questions. Dozens of questions and nearly an hour later, with his mouth parched and his throat sore, he dismissed his class.

  Eight

  * * *

  Will Crandall spit a long stream of tobacco juice at a beetle scurrying across the dusty quarry floor. He hit the bug broadside, knocking it over and causing its six legs to wiggle about frantically. "Gotcha," he murmured before righting it with the toe of his boot. The beetle stood still a moment as if confused before hurrying off in the same direction from which it came.

  He watched as it departed. "Going to get in trouble for not getting the job done when you get back."