Noble Romance Publishing, LLC

Dead Kitties Don't Purr

ISBN 978-1-60592-529-5

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright 2012 Amber Green

Cover Art by Fiona Jayde

This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any existing means without written permission from the publisher. Contact Noble Romance Publishing, LLC at PO Box 467423, Atlanta, GA 31146.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

Blurb

People who take their shots and do as they're told have nothing to fear. Right? Right.

The Rabies Z epidemic began and ended in Miami this past summer, didn't it? And that guy my daddy saw at the Jacksonville airport last week was just having an epileptic fit.

No cause for alarm. Epilepsy always causes an eighteen-hour hazmat shutdown at a major airport.

So while my twin tours to flog her newest album, here I am, Camie Invisible, parked at this nice, safe college—as far as I can get from the infection and still pay in-state tuition.

Only now, my studies have become focused on the fascinating Risa Ruiz. And she has eyes for me.

Isn't this the perfect time for the zombies to show up?

Chapter One

At my dorm's October mixer, a costume party, I went downstairs wearing white jeans, a white T-shirt, and a crown of flower petals cut out of paper plates.

A quartet of girls in cowboy boots and cheek-baring shorts turned to me like sheep in a herd and bleated, "Wall-flower!"

My face burned. That obvious, was it? I got a cup of sparkling apple juice and a handful of unbuttered popcorn before finding a section of wall that might could use someone to hold it up for a while.

I'd promised my roommate and her boyfriend one hour of privacy. By my phone, it was 8:39. At 9:39, I could head upstairs and get my Catriona-proof earphones to block out this dumpidy-dumpidy-dumpidy racket.

The cold front was two days past, so only a few people wandering in and out wore cover-ups. The cotton-candy-colored furries snuggling in the corner by the fireplace were probably sweating. Maybe on purpose, to give them something to lick off each other's necks.

Someone cut off the music with its relentless three-four beat, and put on a new disk. I eyeballed a path to the nearest door, expecting the newest Catriona Wall megahit, but instead heard something electronic, vaguely familiar.

"You're Camie Wall."

I turned and stared straight at a naked cafe au lait throat and collarbones decorated with an intricate necklace of sharp claws and curved fangs, backed by a curtain of straight, glossy, black hair. I looked up. And gulped.

Risa Ruiz taught the principles of esthetics class I'd chosen for my art elective.

Someone else's name was on the syllabus, but Risa, the grad student in the class, had taken over two weeks ago. And I had memorized every curve and angle of her long-fingered, capable hands.

"I'm Risa, from—"

"I know." Oh, crap! That came too fast, like I'd snapped at her. I gave a smile I knew looked sick. "I've been watching you."

Oh, shit—that was worse. I was a bitch and a dork and a stalker. Just the kind of person she'd want to know better.

She smiled gently. Her lips were full and dark. A pale thread of a scar accented the right outer edge of her bottom lip. Her white stretch-lace top was off the shoulder, baring plenty of tawny skin under that intricate necklace.

I dragged my gaze up before it could sink into her cleavage and still couldn't think of anything to say. That smile hypnotized me. She had dark-carnelian eyes, the richest possible shade of brown, and her pupils expanded as she watched me.

"Noisy in here," she commented after a moment.

Was that a hint? "If I had someplace quieter to go, I'd be out the door already."

She laughed, a sound as rich and mellow as her eyes. "Then walk with me, if you dare."

If I dared? I'd dare a lot to spend time listening to that voice, watching that mouth shape words. She called me Camie Wall, as if that were my whole name. Not Catriona Wall's twin Camie, who doesn't sing—can you believe it?

I dropped my crown and cup onto a table cluttered with used cups and spilled popcorn and followed her out into the moonlight.

She wore white, like me, but she had a long, filmy skirt instead of jeans. Her hair fell straight down her back, well past her bra-strap. I'd tried growing long hair, but the first day it stuck to my deodorant, I'd gross out and have to cut it.

Maybe I'd be more patient if my hair lay smooth and swung as hers did, in counterpoint to her hip-sway.

She turned left, toward the wall of condos, churches, and beer halls along the southern edge of campus. She strolled between the dark Methodist Student Center and the well-lit oyster bar, waving casually as someone called her name from the tavern.

The five-lane thoroughfare beyond marked the limits of what I knew of the city's geography.

She paused at the edge of the street, midblock, as if uncertain whether to go left or right. When the light at the nearest corner changed, though, she stepped quickly off the curb.

Jaywalking. Something I never did.

But I stepped off the curb with her, and a strange elation swept through me.

But then a car came rushing toward us, its blaring horn and evil little blue headlights dazzling. I recoiled, ready to run back the way we'd come.

She pulled me hard against her side. "Careful."

I'm always careful. Ask anybody.

Without thinking, I put my arm around her waist. We strode across the lanes with her skirt whipping against my shins and knees.

"Some friends of mine are practicing for a recital," she said, turning left on the sidewalk. She slid her hand under the waistline of my jeans, but not far enough to touch bare skin. "Rachmaninoff, mostly. Would you like to listen in?"

Chill bumps prickled my skin. Even my nipples puckered to match. I couldn't be mistaking her intent, could I? How could I? I hitched my step to match hers. I didn't know Rachmaninoff from Checkov, but . . . yeah. "I'd love to."

She looked at me, all Egypt-eyed. "I thought you might."

We crossed a side street, and then turned away from the thoroughfare and the streetlights. Azalea bushes crowded the narrow, cracked sidewalk, and crickets chirped unseen. Our shadows stretched way out in front of us, undulating with our matched steps.

A door slammed in a house as we approached it, and a man yelled, "See if I care!"

He came down the short walk to the sidewalk, as if he didn't see us in his way.

I shrank back. Yes, he was talking and walking in a coordinated manner, but even if he wasn't infected, I've always hated brushes with angry people.

He recoiled too and gave us a short bow. "Your pardon, damsels."

Huh?

He waved us to pass, and stomped in the opposite direction.

Risa had, I realized, gone taut under my hand. Had I done something, or was it the guy? I decided to give it a couple of steps. If she stayed tensed up, that meant the problem was walking along with her. But the tension dissipated.

"His name is Dustin," she said after a bit. "He's unpredictable. Avoid him when you're alone."

Not my doing. I relaxed. A little bit. "Your friends won't mind me being there?"

"It's my place. If they want to use it, they won't mind anyone I bring." She spoke calmly, like a queen.

My sister Tri would have giggled if she'd tried to speak like that. Which was, I guessed, part of her charm.

We'd fallen out of step. I hitched again to synch with her and lengthened my stride, even though I had to swing my hips to stretch out like that.

Her thumb traced the top edge of my hipbone. I didn't know how to respond.

Halfway? She'd draw back to match, wouldn't she? So should I take initiative on the next step?

The Internet couldn't be down tonight. Couldn't. Because I had to look up body language and stuff before the next time I got a chance to walk with Risa Ruiz.

If I ever got another chance.

"I like your taste in colors," she said into the night.

Was that a dig? "I like white."

"White is the ultimate canvas. I own an entire wardrobe of white tops. Of course, mine are ice-whites and yours is more ecru, but that's as it should be. Too stark a white would clash with the subtlety of your coloring."

Subtle is the nicest possible way of saying blah, isn't it? But her thumb traced the crest of my hip again.

The dorm's safety rules echoed in the back of my head. Never leave campus with someone you've just met. If you see anyone walking strangely, having convulsions, or standing too still, run as fast as you can to where the people are. Never approach anyone lying down, or anyone sitting in the wrong place. Stay on well-lit streets. Let someone know where you're going, who you're with, and when you'll be back. Keep a phone on you at all times, and never turn it off.

And I, the careful one, the most timid freshman in the quietest dorm on campus, didn't give a shit.

I had my hand on the top edge of Risa Ruiz's gauzy skirt, feeling her flank muscles stretch and contract.

We reached another corner and turned into one of those dark cul-de-sacs that don't even rate a single working streetlamp. I blinked, trying to see.

She pulled me off the sidewalk.

I wondered for half a second, but then a bicycle whispered by.

She was paying attention—something I should be doing, as well. But there we were, off the sidewalk, away from the streetlights and headlights, and the crickets rasped as if giving coded messages, only all the messages overlapped and competed with one another, and the moonlight glittered on Risa's pectoral of claws and fangs while it shimmered on the swirling lace below.

"I want to kiss you," I said, my voice a stranger's. I swallowed, waiting for her to laugh at me, to push me away.

Instead, she pulled me closer, hip-first, and tilted her head. "What's stopping you?"

I reached up and gathered fistfuls of that hair, cool and warm at the same time, and I pulled her face down into reach, and I touched her lips with mine. And there it had to end, because I'd never opened my mouth to a kiss without wanting to gag.

But there it didn't end. She cupped my head in her hands, opened her mouth, and gently sucked my bottom lip between hers. My pulse pounded in my lips, in my temples, in my breasts where they nestled against hers. For what seemed a long time, she played with my bottom lip, licking it, then licking inside it.

She tasted of popcorn, or maybe that was me, and she smelled of something deep, woody, and rich—sandalwood or cedar, or both, or something I'd never encountered before. I desperately wanted to wash in whatever soap made her smell like that.

She pulled back, disengaging my trembling fists from her hair. "You're not used to this, are you?"

My skin shrank against my face. "I'm sorry."

At least I hadn't gagged on her. Hadn't had the first inclination to gag, come to think of it.

She brushed a kiss over my cheekbone. "Don't be. Don't be nervous, either. And whatever you do, don't hesitate to tell me to slow down if I take this too fast."

"Okay."

She gave my hands a brief squeeze, then led me past an overgrown camellia and turned up the walk to a bungalow with a screened front porch and a bedspread for a front window curtain. Light glowed through the gold-and-red mandala design, barely illuminating the porch swing.

The door opened onto a narrow, dark foyer, with light angling from the other end. I smelled scorched popcorn and espresso, and Risa's woodsy scent. Women spoke quietly, in the English and Italian mix that means music talk has gone all technical.

Worse, I heard a ripple of notes from what had to be one of those huge harps.

My soul shriveled, remembering my sister's tutor telling Mom I had all the musicality of a rusty typewriter.

I hesitated in the foyer, with one hand on the door and one on the lock. Ahead of me, Risa glided into the light from the room, then paused and looked back at me.

The conversation stopped.

My face burned. I was a dork and making her look awkward in front of her friends.

She took two steps back into the dark with me and laid a warm hand on my shoulder. "What's wrong, Camie?"

"I—" I couldn't talk. I shook my head and swallowed. I'm shy, okay? I just am. It's not a crime and it's not a mental illness. It just is.

She touched my hand. "Come on in. If you don't know music, I can tell you what to listen for. It will be good."

I hesitated. Could I find my way back to the dorm if she threw me out now?

She leaned in, brushing my breasts with the soft warmth of hers, brushing my cheek with her cool hair. "Trust me."

The words whispered over my cheekbone, where I still felt her kiss.

I gulped and let her lead me inside.

The front room was small, dominated by the gleaming black mass of a piano with bared white teeth, crouched on a raised platform, and a giant floor harp. Between them, in a red leather chair, a plump girl with shining red-gold braids and very thick glasses squinted, looking up from the violin on her lap. I nodded a vague greeting at her. She didn't respond. I wasn't sure she saw me. A white guy with a scraggly beard sat on the floor behind the harp, his long, skinny legs stretching out on either side of it.

He stared at me with his eyes half-shut, his hand resting possessively on the soundboard.

"Hello."

I flinched. I'd walked right past someone. A cellist, and her cello, leaned against the wall. She was not even my height, and darker than the wood of her instrument. She wore a crimson headband that matched the ribbons tied about the neck of the cello.

"H-hi," I whispered. My face burned.

She smiled slightly, polite but not showing her teeth or crinkling her eyes. "I take it you're not a music major?"

"No. I don't play at all."

The redhead bubbled a laugh. The guy kicked her chair leg, and she shut up.

Risa drew me closer to her side. "The one with manners is Mindy. That's Junia, and our token dude is Didier. Y'all, this is Camie. She's in that esthetics class I've been subbing in."

Didier snickered. "Like you'd sub."

Risa stiffened beside me. "Fuck off, Didier. We don't need harp tonight, anyway."

He scowled. "Apologies. I really need to work on Stairway tonight. Want me to make some more espresso?"

The redhead took off her glasses and rubbed at the dents along her nose. "Are we going to practice or bicker?"

"Practice. Didier can play piano. Camie and I will listen."

Didier flashed a grin, the first likeable thing I'd seen about him. "Sure."

Mindy carried her instrument to the other side of the piano and took a kitchen chair. She framed the cello with her splayed knees. "Ready. Could you please get the light, Risa?"

"Sit right where you are, Camie." Risa pointed at the hardwood floor. "Listen for a four-note pattern."

I slid down her legs to settle on the floor, careful to leave room between me and the wall. Just in case she wanted to occupy that space.

She flipped the switch, leaving us in complete darkness. I couldn't see my hand spread on my white jeans.

But seeing was an extra I didn't need. Risa settled behind me, one leg on either side of me, her crotch hot against my butt. I couldn't be mistaking that heat, that intimate positioning.

"One, two, three, four."

I shimmied in to fit more precisely against her, the sounds of our movements swallowed by the aggressive piano notes.

"Four notes. Hear them?" She played my ribs like they were piano keys. "Stop!

Didier, what kind of lento do you call that? What happened to lento lugubre?"

"I was about to say," Junia grumbled.

"Piano sets tempo," the guy said loftily. "You don't need to count."

"From the beginning." Risa snapped her fingers. " Lento lugubre. "

"One," interrupted Didier. "Two, three—"

Crack!

My skin shrank.

No, maybe something outdoors just broke. The swing, maybe. But everyone else seemed to hold their breath as I did, and I smelled fear. Risa's heart pounded as fast and hard as my own. Her arms came up about me, either to shield me or use me as a shield.

C-c-c-c-c-c-crack! A volley.

"Rifle fire." Mindy's voice quavered. "They're here."

Risa sprang up behind me. Overhead, an electric motor whined.

"Didier, would you please get the back room's shutters down?" Risa strode across the room to the side door.

How could she sound all this-is-only-a-drill like that? I'd smelled her sudden sweat, heard the hammering pulse.

The heavy slats of hurricane shutters slid like a shade over the window. So she had a reason to be businesslike instead of terrified.

Didier moved from the questionable cover of the piano slowly, creeping through the open archway to the dining/kitchen area as if hoping someone else would get to the back room's shutters before he did.

I watched him. Once I knew where the switch was, I could race him for it next time. Bet I'd win.

Assuming I was around some other night. And that I had the courage to unball myself.

A loudspeaker echoed in the distance, blaring something that became coherent as it moved closer. ". . . on the street will be tested and/or shot. I repeat: Everyone remain indoors! Lock your doors; lock your windows. A curfew is in effect immediately.

Anyone seen on the street will be tested and/or shot."

"Meaning shot, and then tested and found to be merely drunk or something."

Junia lifted her violin and played something creepy. "Everyone knows the Z-bug never made it out of Miami, right? That guy who went berserk in the Jacksonville airport yesterday was just having a grand mal seizure, right?"

Didier kicked her chair. "Quit that!"

Junia played on, the music oozing from her strings growing creepier by the bar.

"Why? We have to practice, right? With the security Risa put in to protect the instruments, we're as safe as we would be about anywhere."

"We don't have to practice that Nightwish crap!"

"Okay. When everyone's back, let’s do Stairway."

Risa reappeared. "Bathroom and bedroom secured. Let me make sure Gramma's sewing room is locked up and we'll be snug."

Someone hammered on the front door. Everyone jumped. Me too. We all looked at Risa.

"Risa!" A guy yelled. "Risa, let me in! They're shooting people out here!"

Risa's dark lips thinned to a white line. "Didier, slip to the back real quick, and if the porch is empty, toss his sleeping bag out there." She raised her voice. "You can sleep it off on the back porch, Dustin."

"Bitch! Let me in! You owe me!"

Risa's face went blank. I hugged my knees. Blank faces scare me.

The back door opened and closed very quietly. Didier reappeared and nodded.

Risa took a deep breath. "The sleeping bag's on the back porch, Dustin. There's a door you can shut against the boogeyman, but that's all I owe you."

"No sense trying to play until he's gone," Mindy muttered. "Remember last time?

With him out there thumping and howling and messing with the meter? Why don't you just have him arrested?"

Risa flashed a tight-eyed, unfriendly look at her. "He's family. Or close enough."

Didier gulped and looked away.

We waited quietly. My nerves stretched tight, and my stomach twisted. What did Risa owe this guy, for real? And since when was it any of my business? I kept reminding myself that the best thing I could do there was not get in the way.

My hearing sharpened in the silence. I heard shuffling on the porch, along with muttering. After a little while, I heard a heavy creak. The swing? Or the screen door?

Junia's whisper echoed harshly. "Think he's going to sleep on the swing?"

Mindy shook her head. "Didn't sound drunk enough."

Risa stared at the covered front window. "Don't think it's alcohol tonight. I smelled him a couple of minutes ago. No booze then."

Junia plucked one dissonant note. "Z?"

Risa shook her head, brushed her hair back, and tied it in a loose knot I knew wouldn't hold. "Too coherent."

The creak came again, then shuffling across the porch floor. The screen door slammed.

"Think he'll get arrested, wandering around out there?"

Risa shook her hair loose of the knot, then shook the tension out of her arms and shoulders. "Not our problem. We'll leave the lights on for now, though. We need them to read Stairway for the next few run-throughs anyway."

"Speak for yourself." Junia smiled.

"She can hear it and play it," Didier said to me. "Like Mozart. I just wish she wouldn't listen to all that Euro-goth metal. It creeps me out."

"Operatic power metal." She corrected him.

Didier returned to the harp. " Stairway to Heaven. We agreed."

What about drums? I loved the drum score on Stairway. I hugged my knees.

"How do you play Stairway to Heaven without drums?"

"Carefully." Risa sat at the piano, her white skirt spilling gracefully over the bench. "Our drummer disappeared in Miami, so we downloaded a score orchestrated for trio."

Drums . . . I remembered the feel of the swinging sticks in my hands and hugged my knees tighter. "Did you keep the drum set?"

Risa regarded me from her place at the piano. Her eyes were large and dark, and deep enough to drown in. "I know where a set is stored. Can you play?"

Reality struck; I hid my burning face against my knees. "Never mind. No, I can't."

When Dad caught me playing around with a friend's drum, he'd immediately arranged tutoring. The tutor gave up on me early . . . and eventually had given up on the lessons too.

After a moment, paper rustled. Risa played a few adagios and then counted down to the launch of the song.

My phone buzzed. My roommate. "Where are you? They shot some drunk down by the oyster bar and now the campus is crawling with National Guard."

"I'm okay. I'm off campus."

"Well, stay wherever you are. They won't let Ted go back to his dorm. Is that live music?"

"Yes." I hung up.

They played Stairway twice, then the Rachmaninoff trio they'd planned to start the night with. They played some Tchaikovsky thing the Rach Trio was supposed to be written in homage to, and were playing one of them again when I nodded off.

I woke up when Risa urged me to move to a pallet of blankets that had appeared at the edge of the room, but I didn't stay fully awake long. They played on and on. The songs were so long and so similar I couldn't tell one from the next. Especially when they took to repeating bits, discussing whether to contrast them or emphasize the echoes.

Clearly, what the group got from Junia was precision, and she got the feedback she needed to put heart into her accurate notes. Didier poured passion through his hands but needed discipline. He also needed sheet music and light to read by.

I was glad of the dark. My dad, who survived the Miami quarantine, said the z-things were usually much calmer in the dark. Bright light hurt them, made them go psychotic. So did car horns, stepping on a hot road, thirst. Their throats went raw, so that swallowing was agony. Even if nothing else sent them into their deadly rages, the thirst eventually did.

The magic of the night happened when Didier touched the harp. Sometimes, the others stopped playing to listen to him. He didn't seem to notice; the music shifted his existence to some other reality.

I wondered if that other reality had Rabies Z, the z-things, and deputies who went door to door shooting family pets unless shown a current vaccination certificate. I remembered the nightmare of searching for my cat Hufflestuff's rabies certificate and finally getting the vet to fax me a copy. Only to find that my mom had taken Huffie to a Voluntary Surrender station.

Honestly, Camilla! Get hold of yourself. With us on tour and you away in college, he would've been boarded for months on end. What kind of life is that?

I'd burned all my precious things that night. The next morning, I'd gone to a Navy recruiter. He showed me pictures of his young daughter and her cat, lost behind the quarantine line in Miami, and he let me use up half a box of his tissues. He'd advised me to leave for college early, instead of enlisting. I'd lived in a motel room until the dorms opened. I think my mom knew better than to try to talk me out of it.

My eyes burned, remembering. A dull headache, the one I'd carried around like a dead weight since losing Huffie, pulsed at the back of my skull. I let the tears spill, since nobody was watching me. But the music sweetened my tears, made the memories less bitter. And the headache slowly eased.

Long after midnight, Didier escorted Mindy and Junia to one bedroom while Risa led me to the other.

The bed wasn't a big one. She might have had it since she was a kid. Which just meant I had to snuggle in close. I was sleeping with Risa Ruiz. And I was so tired that all I could do was wrap my arm around her waist and go back to sleep.

I slept better than I had in months.

Chapter Two

I woke up with plans to ditch my chemistry 1101 class, especially since my text and notebook were in the dorm, but Risa had a class to teach and one to take. So I bought the download version of the text. I'd be squinting at the diagrams, but it would get me through one class.

Risa insisted I wear a blouse and underpants of hers so that she could wash mine while I was gone. Her top was tight enough to make me look like I was advertising, but she found a soft blue scarf to knot artfully at my shoulder.

I skipped coffee rather than risk spilling. Wearing her clothes was as intimate in its way as sleeping in her arms, and I didn't want to mess it up. Plus, leaving my clothes here was a double guarantee that I was allowed—expected—to come back.

Half the people did not show up for chemistry. The instructor popped a quiz at us, then let us out early.

My next class, Western Civ., wasn't until eleven. I liked to eat brunch before it, so I could avoid the jostling mobs at lunchtime. The student union was fuller than usual, but oddly quiet. Everyone had a phone or netbook scrolling the news.

So the internet was up today. Looked like it was a good cell-phone day too.

The headlines said no one was allowed to cross I-4 in either direction. People—

nobody would say how many—had been shot trying to cross.

Didn't I-4 go right through Orlando?

This summer, when Miami was quarantined, they'd strung concertina wire—

several prisons' worth of it—all along 826, the Palmetto Expressway, and had dropped napalm on random sections of the roadway day and night. On top of shooting anyone they saw trying to cross.

Miami again, only more so. Remembering the Miami stories of fighting over food, I went back through the line and stacked my tray high with Pop Tarts, apples, satsumas, Ramen noodle cups, and boxes of milk.

The cashier didn't want to let me check out with that much, kept cancelling the transaction as I swiped my card. But I'm stubborn.

Finally, she let me buy everything just to get the line moving again. She even handed me a wadded-up grocery sack to carry it all.

Next, I headed to the bookstore, bought a new backpack—a dinky one-strap job, since the nice ones were out of stock—and filled it with peanut butter, raisins, and flat packages of Ramen. A student can never have too much Ramen.

Loaded with groceries, I trekked to Risa's house. The place was locked up tight, so I left the backpack behind a potted aloe on the front porch. The plastic grocery sack I tied to the arm of the porch swing, with pillows piled around it for camouflage.

Then I went to my dorm room and got my own backpack with my books and laptop. And two changes of clothes. And my shampoo, deodorant, and makeup bag.

And the rest of my underwear. And my windbreaker.

When I looked around, I realized I'd packed just about everything I'd brought to school with me, except the fan, the aluminum baseball bat my dad made me bring, dirty laundry, bedding, and the laundry detergent. So I hauled out my overnight bag and packed the rest of it. Except the laundry detergent box, which was half-empty and leaked; I didn't want that spilling on everything.

Western Civ was half-empty too. Mutters around me said the out-of-state students were all down at the airport, trying to leave while they still could. Other students were on the roads trying to get home. Even if it meant sneaking across the quarantine lines. But nobody could agree on where those lines were.

Packed as I was, I must have looked ready to head out too.

After Western Civ, I had to race across campus so I wouldn't be late to Calculus I, the only really easy class on my schedule. I arrived out of breath and with bruised shoulders. Following calc was principles of accounting, which, as usual, dragged on and on. My mind kept drifting to Risa's underpants, the delicate scent on her scarf.

After class, I found Mindy and Didier on the porch, munching on peanut butter and Poptart sandwiches. Mindy offered me half a satsuma and said Risa should be back any time now.

Was she late? Neither of her friends seemed concerned.

They'd demolished half the groceries I'd brought. I sat with my back to a porch post and stewed about that . . . for about a minute and a half.

Then Risa came striding past the unclipped camellia that guarded the house from the sidewalk. Her face lit up, her eyes widening and her frown melting, and then that beautiful, full-lipped mouth smiled. At me.

I'm Catriona Wall's invisible sister. I know when someone is looking in my direction while staying focused elsewhere. Risa Ruiz came to me and took my hand like I was the only person on the porch.

"I'm so glad to see you. And your suitcase."

Her voice soothed me like shade in summer. I soaked it in. I couldn't think of anything to say back. My bag wasn't really a suitcase. Except that, really, it was.

One corner of her smile curled a little more, giving her a look that said she knew, and she understood, and she didn't mind.

Didier broke in. "Hey, lovebirds. Are we going to practice, or what?"

" What, I think." Risa didn't look away from me. "I already called all of you to cancel. Some people need to check their messages."

"I don't show a missed call," Mindy said thoughtfully. "And I've had bars all day.

I hear more cell towers got decommissioned. They're pinching off our communications and our travel. Do you think this is how it started in Miami?"

That's exactly how it happened, my dad said. During the Miami quarantine, he'd sometimes been able to get a call through, but we'd always had more news than he had of what was going on around him. He saw the sky-glow from the burning highway, but not the broadcasts of Cuban gunboats intercepting flotillas of refugees from Miami, dumping everyone into the water, and blowing up the empty boats.

People said some of those gunboats were actually manned by the US Coast Guard. But Daddy said that couldn't be true.

Risa finally looked away from me. "If they bring the quarantine anywhere near this far north, y'all come here. Bring bottled drinks, instant food, paper plates . . .

anything you'd bring for a hurricane. Who brought this fruit and all?"

"I did."

She turned those richly toned eyes back to me. "Good thinking. My paycheck doesn't post until tomorrow, so fresh fruit is welcome today. Although you probably meant it to last longer than one afternoon."

I shrugged my shoulder that wasn't as sore. "It doesn't matter."

She squeezed my hands. "It matters to me. Thank you."

We carried what was left of the groceries inside. The air was stuffy and stale.

Risa opened two shutters a little way and opened the attic vent wide, which set up a nice cross-breeze, and asked if I had any schoolwork to do while we had daylight to see by.

"Later."

She draped her arms across my shoulders. "Darling, anything is possible. We might not have electricity later."

I shivered.

"If anything's possible, we might not have later at all." The brave person inside me grabbed Risa's sleek black hair. "We need to spend now on something important."

And I kissed her.

She melted against me. So soft, so warm. Her tongue tasted of caramel. Then she caught me by the hips and shuffled me in a half circle with her. The wall pressed against my back, and Risa's breasts mashed against mine. Our tongues danced and twined. Our teeth knocked together, and we laughed into one another's mouths.

Then she pulled me into the bedroom. I stumbled after her, holding the kiss, holding her hair, laughing and desperate not to stop—whatever happened, not stop—

this wonderful thing.

She skimmed her hands up my sides, and my too-tight T-shirt gathered in folds at her wrists. I let go her hair so she could pull the shirt off over my head. Her shirt went next, then she pulled her sheer-lace champagne bra off over her head while I had to reach back to undo suddenly stubborn hooks. Her breasts bounced free, releasing a sweet, lightly spicy scent.

I had to touch them. They were smooth, and soft, and heavy for their size. Her nipples were dark and small, and puckered tightly. Mine ached, echoing that hard pucker.

She reached around me, trapping my hands between us, undoing the hooks I'd abandoned.

I tasted her throat, her neck, her shoulder. She brushed my hair back, and I looked up at her. She kissed me again. Deeply, slowly, completely. My knees gave way, and my eyes lost focus. Something hit the back of my legs—a bed. I fell back, and she crawled atop me, nipping along my jaw and shoulder, and then my collarbones, and then to my breast. She suckled hard, and her thigh ground into my crotch. I bucked under her, humping that leg.

"Works better without jeans in the way." She shook her hair back, flaring it in the dimly lit room. "Hold still."

I held still. Actually, I gripped fistfuls of her sheets to keep from reaching for her.

She skimmed out of her skirt, discarded a slim, white garter knife along with her champagne underpants, then flipped the snap at my waist and fumbled a bit at my zipper before yanking it down.

The fumble reassured me, eased some qualm that she was a teacher playing me, that I was no more than this semester's student who was fool enough to crush on her. I squirmed to help her get my pants off. Then I squirmed more, because squirming against her slender thigh felt so good.

She rested her weight as much on me as on her elbows beside me. Fear jolted through me. This was it. This was the real stuff.

Her thigh moved off me. The back of her hand brushed my cheek. "Camie, are you okay?"

I grabbed her shoulders. "Yes. Don't stop. Don't stop."

She grinned, and she kissed me again. Her soft lips moved all over my face. She touched my nipples then, and it was like her hands were kissing me. Her soft, knowing fingers and her soft, caramel mouth kissed my breasts, my arms, my shoulders, my neck, my face.

I curled up, trying to reach her, to kiss her back, but her fingertips rested on my mouth, and I kissed her there. Then she moved in her unhurried way back down to my aching nipples. One hand kneaded my breast, gently, and I took the cue to touch hers the same way, or as close as I could come. My hands shook, so it was different at least that much. I couldn't stop touching her breasts, her belly, her thrusting hips, her flanks, her breasts again, her beautiful shoulders.

She held her leg hard against me, and I humped it instinctively. She reared back, grinding hard against me, and a flush darkened her breasts, moving up to her face. A thin, keening noise whistled around me. She looked down at me then, her eyes half-shut and her mouth open, and she came back to my breast.

When she bit me, I came hard. Everything flashed bright around me, a glorious blast of pure joy, pure sensation. I convulsed helplessly under her.

She lay heavily over me, panting just as I was, then rolled to her side. Our skin peeled apart, the sweat that had stuck us together chilling my skin in the evening air.

Eventually, our heartbeats and then our breathing slowed to normal.

She brushed my hair out of my face. "You are beautiful, Camie. That was beautiful."

I touched her face. She turned her head and kissed my fingertips.

Then she smiled that knowing smile at me. "What kind of vibrator do you use?"

C-c-c-crack!

"Get on the floor!" Risa shoved me off the bed, not waiting for obedience, and followed. "I'll get the shutters."

I rolled onto my hands and knees. "You get the front. I'll get the back."

I had to find the switch for the back shutters, which I found only after I found the back porch light switch, the laundry light switch, and two kitchen light switches, so by the time I had the shutters halfway down, Risa was at my side.

"Get down, Camie. You're safer at floor level." She wore only the white lace garter, with the slim, white dagger in it.

"The walls aren't bullet proof?" I meant it as a joke, but it sounded lame even to me. I dropped to my butt. The hardwood floor needed sweeping, not that I was going to say anything about Risa's housekeeping when I didn't own a broom myself.

And from there, Risa's scent overwhelmed me. Made me drunk and reckless. She trimmed her pubic hair. I'd watched my roommate do that, and while I'd always thought watching such a ritual would be arousing, Jenny was too laughably self-absorbed to be sensuous.

With Risa, I knew watching the process would be unbearably erotic.

As the metal slats clanked into the bottom nook and she threw the bolt, I grabbed her by the thighs and buried my nose between her lower lips. She tasted like salted honey, the delicately sweet alfalfa honey I love.

She dropped a hand on my head. "Not now, darling."

I rocked back on my heels, face burning. "Sorry."

She crouched by me, put her hands on my shoulders. "Let's get away from the perimeter."

And do what? Hide? Homework? Yeah. We dressed, and I did my homework while she did paperwork.

Afterward, we shared a shower. I massaged her scalp with coconut butter conditioner. She produced a pair of tiny scissors and trimmed my bush. It should have been so sexy.

But with every noise from outside, whether a distant siren or what might be a tree branch scratching the house, I'd flinch. And I'd look at Risa, and see the same fear in her solemn, dark eyes.

Chapter Three

On Thursday, I got an email that calculus had been cancelled, so I only had Risa's class and accounting. Unlike yesterday, both were crowded and cluttered with chatter.

People had been turned away at the airport, the bus wasn't running, and the train hadn't stopped. The news was full of advice to stay put—neighboring counties had

"residents only" signs on the gas pumps. Someone insisted that couldn't be true—it was unconstitutional, a violation of the commerce clause.

A girl next to me in accounting sneered. "What constitution? We're back under martial law, and this time, the whole state is quarantined, even though they're not announcing it yet."

I privately agreed.

My sister and two friends sent me links to a check-in board for our high school. I was listed as "no recent contact." Tri had checked in today, signing her name Tri Glee as she had in high school so the search engines wouldn't find her. I moved my name to the accounted-for list and signed it Gleek so they'd know it was me.

Before the upload was confirmed, my connection died. Hisses and cussing erupted all around.

The guy standing in for the professor coughed. "Ladies and gentlemen, do you mind? I am trying to teach."

My face burned. But for the rest of class I watched the phone, willing it to come back to life.

It didn't.

Was this how it felt to be pushed off the gangplank and fall endlessly, waiting to hit the water and meet the sharks?

At eleven, I bypassed a mob at the student union—only thirty students were being allowed in at a time—and made a note to avoid the place for a while.

Risa and Miss Vella, an old lady in a scooter chair, took me grocery shopping.

Large signs read, Limit One, but shelf after shelf was bare, showing grotty buildups of dust and dead roaches in the back recesses. The store had no milk—fresh, boxed, or canned—or meat. No juice or beer. No bread, crackers, or cookies. No peanut butter, no jelly. No Ramen, no pasta. No candles, no batteries, no toilet paper.

Signs read, We have nothing in the back. Please try tomorrow.

Risa muttered, "Yeah, right. The highway is packed with delivery trucks."

"It's worse than a hurricane." Miss Vella agreed. "I sure am glad I was here Monday. Just wish I'd had you-all and the van with me, so I could've carried home more than one bag full."

I wrapped my arms around me. I'd had money Monday, but hadn't thought of shopping. At least I had cash; both my cargo pockets were stuffed with fifty-dollar bills.

The cleaning supply shelves looked normal, except for the Limit One sign. But what about food? We couldn't eat fifty-dollar bills or drink dish soap.

Wincing at the prices, we got what food was there: exotic dried fruit, organic almond butter, weird soups, canned crustaceans, pickled mushrooms, caviar, seaweed wraps for sushi rolls, ghee, Irish cheese, baby artichoke hearts from Spain.

A deputy stood impassively at the end of every second or third aisle. I wondered if the cops' pantries were stocked and if they were making note of who bought more than an armload of food.

* * * * *

Risa and I were halfway through putting away the old lady's stuff when her front door opened and a cheerful male voice called, "Behold! I come, Grandmother—

and verily, I have brought lasagna!"

Risa and the old lady traded panicked glances.

"I'll send him away." Vella offered.

Risa bent to hug her shoulders. "No, we'll slide out the back. We'll bring your van back tonight, okay?"

"Sure. Go." She made shooing motions.

We went. Getting into the van, I asked, "This is that same guy? Dustin?"

She blew out a breath and pulled her hair forward over her shoulder, away from the window. "Yeah. I don't freak out over every guy I run into."

Just this one, then. I wondered if he knew she wore a garter knife. I wondered if she carried it for him. "The old lady's safe?"

"Oh, yeah. His great-grandmother. He adores her."

Her tone was carefully neutral. I dropped the subject.

We unloaded surreptitiously. Until Monday, when the student grant money was to be disbursed, half the neighbors were living off peanut butter.

If they had peanut butter.

Risa's cupboards were crammed full of canning jars filled with dry beans, rice, and cornmeal. No peanut butter. Had her "friends" eaten both of the jars I'd brought?

I fumed but said nothing. I had no business criticizing her choice in friends, and she'd known them a lot longer than she'd known me.

Then she tucked a select few items in the crawlspace. I watched, awed that she'd trust me with her stash location.

She was smarter than I was, to have a stash.

Rinsing the dust and cobwebs from her arms, Risa looked at the clock. "We're almost out of gas, but do you feel like walking to the tiendita on Eighth? They only take cash, and the prices are ungodly, so they might still have good stuff."

I'd seen the little Latin market, just past the building with the telescope dome.

"Sure. Let me unload my backpack."

"Good thinking. And I'll get my silver quarters, just in case."

I bit my lip. Her decision, her business. But my daddy had been through Miami, and what he learned might be good for her to hear. "Hold off if you can. Dollars might be good for toilet paper soon, but silver is always silver."

She nodded sharply, her earrings tinkling behind a sleek veil of hair. "You got that right."

* * * * *

The tiendita's front window was broken and boarded up, and the sign said closed.

Risa reached through the broken window to pound on the plywood, calling out in Spanish.

A very short, middle-aged woman with a bruised face answered the door. Risa cried out, raising one hand to touch the bruise. The woman smiled, and they chattered at one another.

The door opened.

"Cash only," she said in English.

Risa nodded and said something like, " Siclato."

Someone had trashed the store. Puddles of fruity liquids soured on the floor. The short woman locked us in with the mess, then went alone into the back. She returned with two grocery bags packed with cans and set them on the plywood counter. "Three hundred dollars. Cash."

"What's worth that?" The labels showed through the thin plastic of the bags, but meant nothing to me. No way was I going to shell out three hundred bucks for what might be dog food. I reached for the bags.

Risa blocked my hand and counted out a stack of six fifties on the plywood.

"Remember the kindergarten line? 'You get what you get, and you don't pitch a fit.' Not if you want the door to open again next time."

"For two little bags?"

She showed her teeth. "Yes, and happy to get them. Smile and say thank you."

I gave the lady my sister's smile and tried to pronounce gracias muy amabolly.

She gasped and rattled out something in Spanish. Something with Catriona Wall in it.

"We're twins." I held onto the smile. I don't look that much like Tri. For one thing, my hair's never been brightened. But sometimes, the resemblance gets me privileges that being Camie Nobody wouldn't.

She babbled, came around the counter, and had Risa take a picture of me and her hugging, both of us smiling my sister's trademark smile.

"We can't look loaded down," Risa said, packing everything into my backpack.

"We also get to carry out something disgusting as if that's all we could buy."

We took half-mashed black bananas, discussed them in the autumn sunlight, and walked home with them.

Home. Risa's place was home. When we got the doors locked and one shutter barely open to provide a draft, she brushed my hair behind my ears and stood close enough to let me drown in her scent.

I came up for air, trying to focus my eyes. "Will the others be here soon?"

"No. We're meeting at the old folks' home for our Thursday gig, but that's not until three, and it's only two blocks off."

Then she kissed me.

After what might have been a long time later, we moved baskets and boxes out of a deep, narrow closet that had probably been designed as a nursery and laid her mattress on the floor. She broke two matches trying to strike them, took a deep breath, struck a third match without breaking it, and lit a thick stub of a candle high on one wall.

I watched her. "You sleep here during hurricanes?"

"And football games. But never mind that. I want to see you naked by candlelight." She stood on the mattress and watched me, her face hungry.

I undressed, tossing my clothes out the door a piece at a time.

She parted my legs and caressed me with her finger. Either she was slick, or I was. Had to be me, though I hadn't turned on my vibrator in days now.

Oh, crap. Was it clean? Did I smell okay?

"Have you been thinking of me, Camie?"

I nodded helplessly.

She smiled, watching me through her dark lashes. "I think you've been thinking rather a lot."

I had. Oh, I had.

While exploring with her finger, she kissed my inner thighs. Sometimes with her mouth open, sometimes with it closed. She didn't rush. She made me wait, while she backed off and came closer, then backed off again, making me squirm in anticipation.

When she stroked my thigh, though, I remembered I hadn't shaved above the knee. Did she mind? She didn't seem to. I took a breath to apologize, but before I made a sound, she rubbed inside. Deeper, and then deeper.

Her finger felt nothing like my own. Nothing.

Two fingers.

She nuzzled between my lips.

Oh, no. I pulled away. I hadn't had a shower in . . . how many hours?

I looked down the length of my torso, face screwed up in apology. I couldn't do this.

She smiled and shouldered my legs far apart. "All day long, I've thought of tasting you."

She curled her fingers inside me. Whoa, pressure!

I gasped, twisting under her. I couldn't help it. I wanted more.

I got more. She dipped her head and kissed me while pressing with her fingers. I didn't know how to move, what to do.

Risa knew, though, and that was enough. She caught my hands and hooked them under my knees, and I held on for dear life.

I panicked suddenly, thinking she would take one taste, realize her mistake, and move on. But she kept on.

She licked hard all along one side, striking a chord that vibrated through me. A chord . . . I couldn't think of anything else to call it. She licked even harder along the other side, or maybe I felt it more. The humming spread deep within me. Her tongue took up a quick, flicking beat, echoed within. My labia swelled as she licked each side in turn. Her fingers and mouth worked rhythmically, playing my body like an instrument, and my nerves sang with pleasure.

"I love the taste of you," she murmured. "I love that scent you have right now. If you walked through a crowded room smelling like this, half the people there would follow you, even though hardly any of them would know why. I love how your pussy lips ruffle along the edges. But most of all, I love that taste."

As if to prove it, she sucked hard on one side, then the other. Then, only then, did she circle my clit. I held my breath.

She took to licking there, quick and hard. Her fingers rubbed with the same quick and hard rhythm. The hum filled me, vibrating all through me, triggering sensations I had never felt before. Building a crescendo I couldn't take, couldn't take—

I came hard.

She held me a long time afterward, murmuring things that couldn't possibly be true. I'd read up on the psychology. She was making me feel secure as I came down.

Making me feel cherished. Keeping those endorphin levels high.

I didn't care how deliberate it was or how instinctive. I felt cherished. And that was enough.

* * * * *

Later, we walked to the old folk's home, which looked like a security condo. Miss Vella volunteered there, despite being older than half the residents. She'd gotten Risa's ensemble a regular Thursday afternoon gig. Risa played piano and sang, competently but not with star-level flash. Her vocal range was lower than my sister's, heavy on the smoky, torch-singer tones. Junia played like a star; if they'd had a spotlight, it probably would've stayed on her. Mindy's cello carried the common threads for them.

I sat between a pair of old ladies from somewhere east of Germany and showed them large-print pages with the sheet music and lyrics in their language.

Didier arrived late and disheveled. He slid onto the piano bench while Risa shifted to the standing singer's mike.

Even without his harp, Didier wrought magic. The others played better with him there. The background chatter dropped by more than half, and the old people shushed one another to hear better.

When they were done, the applause was long and fervent. Afterward, we sipped tea and chatted with the old people before leaving to beat curfew.

Risa and I walked home in step, our long shadows swaying in harmony. It was a good day.

Chapter Four

On Friday morning, two of the big dorms on the science/math end of the campus were sealed shut, the doors blocked by rubble-filled Dumpsters. National Guardsmen in desert camo were uncoiling a spiraling fence of cruelly glittering concertina wire around the pair of buildings. Crumbs of safety glass, some of it stained red, crunched under the guardsmen's boots.

Twenty feet up, and every ten feet up from there, bent-over flaps of safety glass sagged from the busted-out windows. Flags and curtains fluttered in the wind.

Frightened faces looked out.

People had been left to die in there. Like my daddy had been left to die, along with everyone else in Miami. My stomach rolled.

Around me, other students were recording the scene on their phone-cameras.

"Thirty-six hour quarantine," a woman in a suit kept saying. "They've been furnished with food, pre-loaded serum syringes, and instructions on how to give themselves the shots."

My stomach rolled again. I hate needles. But if she was telling the truth, the survivors had a chance. If not, thirty-six hours should have everyone inside dead instead of ravening maniacs. Incinerating the dead was a lot less dangerous than trying to cure the sick.

Next door, guardsmen stopped and questioned people coming out of the telescope-capped building. Out of every dozen students, the guardsmen led two or three aside and loaded them into a bus.

I watched from the bicycle racks. Two buildings down, the chemistry auditorium had normal traffic. But I didn't need to study chemistry that much. None of my classes was worth the risk of being caged inside one of these buildings.

"Thirty-six hour quarantine," the woman said again.

Sawhorses blocked the sidewalk leaving campus. Signs said the campus was quarantined. Twenty or so students argued with a trio of deputies at the crosswalk.

When the light changed, the walk-tone squawking like a duck's quack played backward, two big guys tried to push across.

A deputy crouched, swinging her club low, and whacked the nearest one across the shins. The guy fell. The other guy broke a run and was hit with three sets of electric darts.

He screamed and belly-flopped in the road. Other students surged toward him, but the deputies closed in around his thrashing body.

That guy was so fucked.

I faded into the shade of a camphor tree and waited for the closest deputy to get distracted by the growing fight. When he took a step away from me, I stayed where I was, giving my best big-eyes/small-mouth scared look. Sure enough, he looked back at me. Then he jogged over toward the fight.

I jaywalked. No, I jay-ran. And kept running.

The tiendita—that'd be my first stop. If I couldn't get to Risa's, I'd be living out of my backpack until I could get across the state line. Under the best conditions, that walk would take from now until midnight.

The store looked just as closed, and smelled even worse, but the short woman inside was happy to see me again.

"Cash only," she reminded me and added something in Spanish.

" Siclato," I responded, as Risa had.

I laid two hundred dollars on the counter and received a bag of hard candies, canned milk, canned chicken, a box of raisins, a brick of coffee, and a ten-pack of tortillas. It fit easily in my backpack. I didn't even have to take out my books. What a rip-off.

Just outside the tiendita, police converged on me. I back-stepped, holding out a reeking, dripping bag of rotten potatoes, complete with its cloud of tiny flies. " Look at what they're selling for good money these days!"

"Are you a student, miss?"

"I live off campus. Are you going to do anything about this mess?"

"ID, please?"

Crap. "I don't have anything with my new address on it."

The biggest guy stepped real close, inside my personal space. "What is your new address, then? If your lease has been registered, we can pull it up."

His voice held the hint of a taunt. Were most leases registered? Were any?

Not that it mattered. I didn't know the name of Risa's street, and an old bungalow with a screened front porch wasn't going to get me anywhere.

They escorted me back to campus, which now had stacks of cement parking turtles blocking off the roads, and assured me that the next quarantine violation would get me jailed. A guy in a wheelchair asked them how the fuck he was supposed to get home. They said he could call for directions when the quarantine was lifted.

Speaking of fucked.

Men were stringing a fence along the edge of the sidewalk. I ditched the rotten potatoes and went to use the library's computers to see how far around the fencing had gone.

The news said the fence was now all the way around campus. Several people had been arrested for trying to cross.

Plainly, the fence wasn't all the way around yet. But I couldn't find where the gaps might be without using enough time to make "all the way around" true.

A new banner scrolled across the screen, urging me to join a flash mob on the library green in five minutes.

Oh no. Not me. I'd sit right there.

But no, the library wasn't a safe place to hide. The protestors would come flooding in there as soon as the situation got ugly.

And it would get ugly.

I hoisted my pack and set out at a trot for the old Wharton gym, one line of buildings over. I loved the old building, with its main floor made of two-by-fours set on end. Risa's class occupied a side room next to a ballet class. I loved the tall windows with the small glass panes that were old enough to cast wavering shadows on my hands. I loved how the ballet instructor's voice echoed into our room. "Demi plie, demi plie, grand plie, tendu, fondu, releve’, susu!"

And, by whatever trick of geography or architecture, the old volleyball court on the roof—now used mostly by various martial arts clubs—had spectacular phone reception.

I needed to call home. It wasn't that I wanted my mommy. Or my daddy, for that matter—he'd be in the hospital at this time of day. Or even that I wanted to hear Tri's voice. I just wanted to hear that they were okay. Maybe tell them I was okay.

But I got the all circuits are busy, please try again later recording.

Same result for Dad's number.

The frightened faces in the walled-up dorm's windows haunted me. How many cages-within-cages were being set up? Maybe while the cops were busy with the flash mob, I could sneak over the fence somewhere. Not be left to die here.

Crap—I needed to run to the student health center while I could and see if they'd issue me some syringes, in case someone at Risa's got exposed.

A scream tore across my nerves. The phone fell, hit my toes.

I picked it up and looked out through the safety barrier and over the rooftops.

Saw nothing on the library green except treetops. A chant rose, many voices, not unified enough to project words.

The scream came again, closer, echoing. Then more screams, echoing, filling the gym below me.

I called 9-1-1.

"Nine one one. What is your emergency?"

"I hear screams at the Wharton Gym. I think it's the z-things."

"The National Guard has taken responsibility for that campus. I'll give them the message. Do not try to leave campus. Stay where you are and remain calm."

I swallowed. "You don't know where I am. It's not safe here."

"Honey, I—" She caught her breath. "The National Guard will be there as soon as possible. Please do not call again. Our lines are flooded."

She hung up.

The roof door burst open. Wild-eyed, blood-spattered girls rushed out onto my rooftop sanctuary. One cradled a basketball against her chest. They slammed shut the door, leaned against it, and jabbered about how to block it.

Blood. Apart from the splashes and smears, one had a gushing nose, and at least two had sets of oozing scratches on their arms. One had a bitten hand.

Some babbled that they'd been vaccinated. The bitten one babbled that she needed to get the shots. The others said they'd go with her.

I slid to the other side of the platform that competition judges sat on and checked the time on my phone.

My dad's an immunologist. Last fall, he was called to Atlanta for the outbreak of Rabies X, which, unlike standard rabies, could be easily spread by rodents. X mutated to the wildly virulent Rabies X-1 just in time for the Fulton County Fair. Two months later, kids who visited the fair's petting zoo commenced spreading X-1 through daycare centers, kindergartens, malls, and holiday gatherings.

There was a vaccine. There were also fakes. In Miami, someone sold thousands of doses of the third world serum for standard rabies.

After a few dozen vaccine-related deaths, people decided to wait for a reason to take the cure instead of risking the prevention.

In April, X-1 became Y, with its quick onset.

A Y victim's body became riddled with virus-infested cells over the course of several hours. Then, as if signaled by the baton-slash of some internal conductor, every infected cell would blast out a potent neurotoxin. Street cams recorded people with briefcases or shopping bags suddenly falling, convulsing on the sidewalk. And then just lying there, paralyzed, until the hazmat people hauled them off.

My dad said the serum would keep half of them alive.

The president declared martial law, set curfews, and quarantine zones. Maybe they did some good. I don't know.

Martial law was officially lifted on July 4. Officially. But Mom and Tri's agent still spent hours filling out forms for each state they wanted to stop in or travel through.

Meanwhile, in Miami, Y became Z. Same extraordinary virulence. Same rapid onset. Same fifty-fifty cure rate. Same loss of higher brain functions. But no paralysis.

Tortured neurons turned a victim into an enraged psychopath, with a psychopath's inhuman strength.

And the brain of an overstressed preschooler.

I'd been vaccinated against Y. Most people who think they were, though, weren't. Most people's dads aren't immunologists.

The basketball players frantically wiped blood off one another, smearing the germs into any tiny shaving cut or scratched zit.

I probably had five or six hours before any of them showed symptoms. And an easy ten hours until dark.

Was the student health clinic being mobbed and trashed yet?

The chanting from the green splintered, replaced by howls, and angry shouts. A stinging whiff of something awful assaulted my nose and eyes. I pulled up my shirt to cover my face. The wind was coming from the green. Tear gas?

Whatever it was, it burned. I croaked when I tried to speak and choked with every breath. Felt like the air had hot splinters in it, and I was trying to breathe them.

My vision smeared.

Gagging and coughing, the players tore apart the judging platform and made a bridge to the neighboring roof, which had no roof door but was only a good jump from the next roof down, which had a ladder of a fire escape. They pounded down the ladder.

I followed, wishing I had a sweatshirt on so I could use the sleeves to glove my hands as I put them on the bloody metal of the ladder.

The basketball players poured toward the health center. I cut perpendicular to the wind and ran until I found clean air. I bent over and braced on my knees, sucking in deep breaths and pushing the jagged stuff out of my lungs.

Sirens echoed, none very close. None entering campus. I caught a glimpse of orange flames laced with black smoke.

What idiot set a bonfire in October, when the whole state is dangerously dry?

The smoke-choked wind shifted, caught me. Crap! I ran, ducking between the snack bar and the anthropology building, slamming my weight against one locked door after another until I shoved one open—to my surprise—and found an echoing garage-like space with two bleach-heavy swimming pools, and locker rooms, and other rooms beyond them.

A student clerk guarded the desk at the entrance. She looked up at me, her eyes red and her mouth pressed thin. "A valid, current student ID is required for use of the facilities."

Yeah, that's what the sign over her head said. My dad talked about people like her in Miami. One hotel maid hauled buckets of water up the stairs every day to scrub the bathrooms on a hotel's twenty-sixth floor.

I showed her my ID and rented a nice, thick, towel. In the echoing lavatory, I washed my hands, which had touched the same ladder surfaces those bloodstained basketball players had touched, and then I washed them again. I drank from the faucet, listened to another wave of screams outside crest and fade, and washed again.

The electricity went off.

Crap.

I could still see. The building had high, wire-laced windows under the roof overhang all around.

But losing electricity . . . in Miami, that was a bad, bad sign.

And I'd drunk too much water, too fast. No toilet paper. At least the water still ran. But for how long?

Ka-Boom! An explosion rattled the building.

I dove under the line of sinks, but nothing fell inside. The security glass in those high windows didn't even crack, as far as I could tell. A little dust sifted through the air, but I coughed mostly because my throat was still raw from the tear gas.

Two smaller booms echoed off the locker-lined walls. Then a rush of echoing screams: screams of terror, screams of pain, and screams of anger.

My eyes burned. Tear gas, I told myself. Evil stuff. But I hadn't wanted to curl up and cry until those screams started.

I forced myself to breathe deeply, slowly, and tried to analyze what sound quality set these screams apart from Tri's fans' deafening shrieks. After a while, I gave up. Couldn't find any objectively identifiable difference. Like I'd hoped, though, the exercise distanced the noise, or distanced me from the overwhelming emotions it carried.

Now what caught my attention was the muted, fluttery sound of many running feet fleeing past the building. Like they really had someplace to go.

Shivering, I hugged myself. I had to get to Risa's. She was on campus somewhere, maybe. I couldn't blindly search the entire place, so I had to hope she was home. That she was safe behind those hurricane shutters. Or that she could get there, sooner or later.

The electricity came back on, browned out, and went off again. I looked at the cement benches and industrial-strength lockers in the next room. Ten hours until dark.

Come dark, the z-things would be everywhere. But since light hurt their eyes, they were a lot more aggressive by day. Meaning they were less so by night.

I crammed myself and my backpack into a locker, used a piece of cardboard to keep the lock from latching, and set myself to wait.

* * * * *

I sweated through most of the afternoon, listening to wailing sirens, gunfire, snarls of rage, and blatting incomprehensible loudspeakers. And screams. The action came closer, then drifted into the distance, then came closer. I heard heavy machinery, and sounds peculiarly like the soundtrack of an earthquake movie.

People came. Most drank at the sinks. Some filled water containers. Eventually, they left. Other people came, ran water, and left.

Close to six p.m. by my phone, a group of girls huddled just outside my locker for a while, trying to get their phones to work and discussing whether they could use some of these lockers to blockade the doors and hole up here—the vending machines were empty, but at least they had water. They decided there had to be food in there somewhere and noisily ransacked the desk. When locker doors commenced clanging, I braced to defend myself and my food.

Someone yelled, "Motherlode!"

They all went into another room and came back crunching and slurping. The smell of chocolate and sour apples hit me. My mouth watered. Under cover of their noise, I unwrapped a ball of candy that turned out to be pineapple. Not my favorite, but I needed something in my mouth.

After lots of discussion, some of them decided to head over to Kimiko's apartment. She was sure to know some secret Japanese martial art they could use to fight off the zombies without hurting them. Since the zombies were not dead, much less undead, bashing in their heads was a really evil thing to do. A mortal sin. A terrible Karmic burden.

I chewed through a pair of tortillas while they talked. Then, like an idiot, I fell asleep.

Chapter Five

Upon waking up, or rather after a minute or two spent figuring out where I was, I checked my phone for internet access. Nothing, not even a readout of the time. I felt stiff and old; unfolding myself from the locker took another full minute.

The moon was high and almost full. Moonlight alone wasn't usually enough to rouse the z-fury. But tripping that circuit didn't take too much of anything. A chill breeze would do it. Or a stubbed toe.

More than half the buildings around were dark. One building was smoking.

Thick, black plumes blacked out the stars. The library and a building next to it glowed with deep orange and red embers.

Other buildings had crumbled corners, like in news photos from a war zone.

Some something like a tank had to have come through here. No car or truck could have knocked off the corners of those brick buildings.

By now, people had to have breached the fence around the campus. Probably somewhere along the south part of the west edge, where the beerhalls and poolhalls clustered, and where the Anarchy International Center boasted all kinds of law-evading technology and know-how.

Of course, the law might also concentrate there.

People ghosted along with me, but I split off when they stopped to cut the fence around a brightly lit construction zone. I didn't share their eagerness to see if the pit in the middle had an opening to the legendary steam tunnels. Say I got into a steam tunnel. How would I navigate? How would I see? If threatened, where would I run?

My map had shown what I thought was a dark corridor between this lit area and the English building, then a huge dark space on the other side, almost to my dorm. Not that I intended to stop at my room.

I saw movement and noticed how stark my shadow lay across the grass. I was in the light slopping over the edge of the construction zone. I got out of it, into the tender shadows, as fast as I could. There, my shadows fanned out toward the darker zones. I picked one and followed it, hoping to get my night vision back by the time dark surrounded me.

Shrieks erupted, shockingly loud. I ran.

In the deep, hulking blackness of the English building's shadow, I looked back and wished I hadn't. The carnage under those too-bright lights in the construction zone was like a bad TV movie.

Then I heard sobbing close by, from someone huddled under a picnic table.

Maybe infected, maybe not. Either way, nobody I could help, or anyone who could help me.

The construction-zone screams bubbled. Should have ended by now, but no—

sounds that might have been torn out of hell splashed through the air again. I wanted to yell to drown out that horror.

Distant thunder rumbled, or maybe that's what a tank sounded like, echoing in the night. I turned round and round, trying to figure out what I heard, and what it meant. But it moved away, faded.

Somewhere in the noise, a singer hummed in the four-four time that always makes me think of ballads.

Not a hum—a violin. Was the classical station broadcasting?

No, it was a single violin, and now it played the Rachmaninov Trio. Risa's music.

I crept toward the arcade linking the English building with what a sign said was the Classics building. My steps echoed in the arcade, and I cringed at the sound. Finally, at the other end, I peeked around the corner into the lit quad between Wharton Gym and the biggest of the music buildings.

Z-things, dozens of them, swayed and shuffled among the cement picnic tables.

Junia stood atop one table, her violin under her chin, her face lifted to the moonlight. I couldn't see her face at this distance, but I knew her shape and her long braids, and I knew her playing. Something or someone lumpish leaned against her side.

She was doomed. Even if they were calm now, something would happen. Then everything would happen.

But she was Risa's friend. I knew her. And even if she could get down from that table, someone who didn't see any better than she did would get lost winding through the rubble. Not to mention the fun she'd have if she bumped into one of the z-things and made it fall down, go boom. Or, worse, made it fall into another of them.

I sneaked closer. Stumbling, not-dead people—students and professors and admin people and campus cops and National Guard alike—milled about Junia's table.

They were calm, even with the strong moonlight and the emergency lights from the buildings still burning like electronic embers all around.

The wind toyed with tendrils of Junia's hair; she scrunched her brows and frowned, but she played on, some dreamy, slow tune I didn't know. Then she played Brahms, the stupid fucking lullaby I'd worked so hard at and never made into more than typewriter-taps at different notes.

Noise bothers the Z-things. Maybe music, sonorous music, was the anti-noise. Or maybe it appealed to some part of their brains that remembered being human. I could get away now, with them clustered there. But how could I leave Risa's friend to die up there alone?

I couldn't. I had to get her down, get her someplace safe. Safer than here, anyway. The real trick would be getting through these things without pissing off one badly enough to start the frenzy.

She played one of the classical pieces my sister had set her lyrics to. I knew it well enough to whistle in tune. Sort of in tune. At least none of the moaning, gagging z-things tried to rip off my face for screwing up their concert.

Junia lifted her head, looking about, and scraped a note. The z-things growled between us. She bent her shoulders against the wind and played on. Moonlight glimmered on a tear.

I moved toward her, still whistling. The things let me ease between them as they swayed and shuffled.

The wind caught a fleck of dark-speckled foam and splashed it across my sleeve.

I cringed, but I didn't have any broken skin on that arm. If simple contact was all it took, I was already dead. But not so dead, I couldn't get Junia off that table before she collapsed.

I eventually reached the bench and climbed up. The bulky thing slumped against Junia's leg and side turned out to be one of those masochist-sized backpacks.

White streaks striped her face. Salt tracks. She must have been crying for hours.

Dark patches on her knuckles spoke of blood. She brushed her knuckles again and flinched, and shining black blood ran down her fingers. The z-things stirred.

I whistled in echo, as best I could with her tune going all complex on me, then stepped up onto the table beside her.

"The moon is setting soon," I murmured, keeping the tempo of the music. "It's only a little higher than the roof of the music building now. Hang on for another thirty-forty minutes, maybe. Forty-five tops. We'll have more than an hour between moonset and dawn."

She segued into something I recognized but couldn't name. "Save yourself. I'm bleeding. They'll smell me. They'll be all over me as soon as I can't play anymore. Even in the dark, blood does it to them."

"Says who?" I didn't need an answer, though. The z-things downwind of us were noticeably more agitated than the ones upwind.

"I got a text. Don't know who sent it. Just one of those texts."

"We'll move upwind until they thin out, then cut back toward Risa's. Let the things fight each other in our wake."

"Save yourself. Get to Risa. She'll take care of you. Take my pack. Got Ramen."

"Just Ramen noodles?" I stared at the huge and bulging pack. How many cases fit in there? At least it couldn't weigh much.

She squawked a note. The things around us stirred.

"And Nutella."

"Keep playing," I said. "You don't want to hear what I'd do with your fiddle if I had to take over."

I set my back to the chill of the wind. If no other part of my plan worked, I could stand there and let her know she wasn't dying alone.

A broken sound came out of her mouth, but she smoothly played on.

I thought about her accent. "You're from around here?"

"Yeah. Risa's gramma practically raised me in that house of hers."

"Are there really steam tunnels all under this campus?"

"Used to be. They were all blocked off—supposedly—around the time I was born."

"So we can't use them to get off campus."

She switched to a jaunty tune. The Ants Go Marching One By One, Hurrah.

"I can't believe you're playing that. Hurrah, hurrah!"

She played on to the next chorus. "I'd play the Hokey Pokey if it'd get me out—of here. What are the zombies doing all around—me, here?"

"They're dancing. Sort of."

They were dancing. Much more than when she'd played the classical. She wasn't pied or a piper, but if she could control them even a little, we might get out of there together.

I slung my backpack to ride in front. "I'm going to put on your backpack now, and I'm going lead you down to the ground and right on out of here. If you can just tell me which way to go, do you think you can?"

"You don't follow meter very well, do you?"

My ears heated. Guess that's why I never became a drummer. "I am under a little bit of stress."

"You're not trying. Just follow the music. How hard can it be?"

My temper sizzled. Maybe I could hear a lot better than she could see, but that didn't mean I could do everything I wanted to with what I heard. "How about if I jump down and jog on out of here, and you do your best to stay right behind me? How hard can it be?"

She scraped a note. "Bitch."

"Hate to be the one to break it to you—" bitch. I took a breath. "Never mind. Play something every little kid dances to. Something happy and simple."

If You're Happy And You Know It worked. The z-things shuffled peacefully as I got Junia down from the table. We sidled through the mob, easing upwind, and they milled behind us. We might be okay, if the scent of blood or some of them bumping one another didn't start up a shark frenzy.

And then we were out of the cluster of them. They clapped like drunks, swinging wide, and missing often, and clumsily drunk-danced in our wake. Our following grew, and more were heading in our direction, but most of the ones between us and the edge of campus were yards and yards apart. We could dodge them.

This was going to work. It had to work.

We crossed a parking lot, losing a lot of the z-things as we wove among the tightly packed vehicles, and my spirits rose.

A pair of work vans parked nose to nose blocked the final driveway. We climbed on their kissing bumpers to get between them. I had to wrestle the packs, then Junia struggled with her hands full of violin. I helped her balance, flinching at every noise and shift of wind, and she got through. If we didn't run into deputies, we were practically home free.

But on the other side, a triple-tiered wall of loosely coiled concertina wire glittered in the moonlight.

Junia bumped into my back. "What is it?"

"Razor wire. I'm going to lay your backpack over the wire, and you're going to keep your balance while you walk across it. Then there's a clear space; you're going to wait for me there. I'll retrieve your pack, if I can. Then we'll deal with the next barrier.

It's only barbed wire." Getting over barbed wire would take nothing more than patience.

"Do it."

Wasn't asking for permission. I didn't say it out loud. I just shrugged off her big pack and eyeballed the best way to lay it. "This might not bridge the entire barrier. Be careful at the far end."

"Shut up and do it." She segued to The Hokey Pokey.

I heard the z-things bumping against the vans. We had to cross before one of them got cut and started the rage. I heaved the pack and fell on top of it to mash the coils of wire.

Oww! Crap! I'd forgotten the cans and stuff in my belly-pack. Oww!

I started to turn over, painfully, but something held my arm. The coils had sprung together in an arch less than a yard over me. They'd catch Junia waist-high.

Then I smelled blood, and then I saw the shining black pulsing gently inside my elbow and running across my arm. And then it hurt.

I wasn't going to die while a master violinist played The Hokey Pokey. "Stop playing, and crawl across me. Fast. Stay low."

"Fuck!" She shoved the violin inside her shirt.

I turned back onto the bruising cans, giving Junia my smooth back as a bridge.

Bow in hand, she scrambled over me, planting her unexpectedly bony knees in all kinds of tender places. The ramen crunched.

Junia grabbed my hand. "Get up! Run!"

I got up, feeling dizzy and distant and unreal. While Junia crossed the barbed wire, I watched the black splotch spread across my shirt, my pants leg. Then I crossed, to the tune of Junia swearing.

She dragged me at a half-run down a street I didn't know and to another street, a bigger one with the streetlights still on. The z-things would be avoiding this street. I stuck my hand in my pocket. Hot blood ran down my side and went cold on me as the wind blew.

After another block, I dragged to a stop. Other than Junia panting beside me, and my own loud heartbeat, I heard nothing close by. The nearest yelling was far away.

"You're bleeding bad!"

"Yeah." My voice sounded like someone way off, saying something unimportant.

Smack! Junia slapped me, hard. "Tell me you're vaccinated!"

I blinked away tears. My face burned hot on the side she'd hit, cold on the other.

"I am."

Against X-1, and Y. Not Z.

"Good, because we both have zombie snot all over us, and we're both bleeding."

"Five to six hours." My knees didn't want to hold me. Blood. Blood everywhere. I gulped.

Smack! She hit me again.

Crap! That hurt!

I shoved her away, hard.

"You stay on your feet, Camie Wall. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! You have to get me to Risa's. She can hose us off or something"—she panted—"and handcuff us to the porch rail or something until—She'll find a way to get your arm stitched."

Stitches? My stomach tried to send back the tortillas. "I don't know where the crap I am."

"I do. Just don't let me step in a pothole or anything, okay? If I bust an ankle, we're both lost."

I stared at her. Under the orange streetlight, her round face looked fierce and determined.

"Okay."

I fuzzed out a few times. I know I did at least once. I came to cold, soaked, with the wind blowing and Risa telling someone which fucking spool of wire to get.

I woke again, throwing up. Dry heaves, really. Nothing in the stomach. But the heaves twisted me like a whip cracking.

Brilliant light flashed painfully in my eyes.

I yelled.

No shit, I yelled. Anybody would yell when that brightness hit out of nowhere.

The light went out.

Crickets rasped around me. People talked, but the crickets rasped louder.

Something cool touched the back of my neck. Someone—Risa—bathed my face and let me scrub my tongue on a wet cloth. My right arm wouldn't move. When I tried harder to move it, Risa told me to hold still.

Someone else brought me a hot mug of ginger tea to sip. The heat in my middle helped.

Across the street, the live oaks looked utterly black against a sky just beginning to turn pale.

Didier played the harp, not far away. And not with any closed door or hurricane shutters to stop the magic from flowing out around me.

I took another hot sip of spicy tea and found my voice. "I don't want to die."

Risa laid her long hand across my face. "You've been vaccinated, right?"

I nodded, leaning into her hand. But who really knew how much good the vaccine would do?

"I'm going to dry your hair and then cover your eyes again, Camie."

"Do I have the fever? How bad is my arm? Do I have to get stitches, really?"

"The cuts are mostly only skin deep and very clean. We painted them with baby teething gel to numb them up, then used dots of super glue to close them."

She covered my eyes and snuggled down next to me, there on the porch. When I shivered, she threw another blanket over me.

Didier's music drew me out of my own heavy, achy self. I dreamed of sitting with Risa on the porch swing, with Huffie purring in her lap.

Chapter Six

I woke up with birds singing. A pile of blankets covered me, and something softish was under me. My arm ached. I raised—tried to raise it. My wrists were strapped to my belt. Something pinned my ankles under the blankets.

I blinked stupidly. My arm hurt dully, but not all that much.

The day was hot, way too hot for all these blankets. Bamboo screens blocked every side of the porch and any chance of a breeze. Every part of me ached.

The smell of spaghetti taunted me. My stomach growled.

I turned over to my left side, carefully, so as not to jar awake any pains. Another pillow lay beside mine, and the pallet I was on stretched for more than two feet in that direction.

Risa. She'd slept with me. Knowing I could sweat or drool or bleed Z-germs onto her, she'd stayed with me.

My insides glowed.

A toilet flushed. And, instantly, I had to pee. "Hello? Risa? Anybody home?"

Risa came to the screen door with a slotted spoon in her hand. "Good afternoon."

"Afternoon?" How did I sleep until afternoon? I never do that.

She came through the door to cock her head and beam down at me. "It's half past twelve. You look good."

"I feel like crap." Saying it made me feel worse, like the words made themselves come true. "You can let me up now. I have to go pee."

She hesitated, looking searchingly at me. "The sleeping pills will make you feel like crap, all gooey and crusty inside."

"If you wanted to keep me from feeling hungry or horny, you succeeded."

She settled beside me, covering her long legs with that white lace skirt and laying the spoon off to the side. She moved tensely, as if she hadn't slept well, and spoke as stiffly. "I need you to say the alphabet backward for me."

I really had to pee. "If you think I have the Z-bug, you're too close."

"Z. Y. What's next?"

"X, as in X-treme need to go to the bathroom. W, as in wee-wee. V, as in half of Dubya, which still means wee, which I'm going to do all in your blankets unless U let me up. T, as in Tee-tee, a synonym of wee-wee. And I hate tests like this because I always get tangled around R. Let me up! "

The stiffness left her face. She pulled back the blankets. "It's been seven hours, and you don't show any symptoms. I think you're safe."

" Arthur Pendragon Marley! " A strange voice bawled. "Get off the harp!"

"Fuck." Risa worked open the buckles to my left wrist, then struggled with the right. "I'm going to kill them both."

"Go. Save Didier's harp."

She rose gracefully and yanked open the door.

I peered at the tarnished brass buckle. Old and not cared for. As stiff as I felt.

"Waa-ahh!"

"How dare you touch my kid?"

"How dare you let your brat climb the harp my papa made? You said you'd watch him!"

Okay, Risa had taken in refugees. Not my business, not really. I worked hard on holding my water long enough to get my ankles unstrapped. Then I tottered inside.

Risa was holding a wriggling toddler by the back of his overalls. She'd pry one little hand off a harp string and the other little hand would clamp on. A red-faced woman wrestled with Risa.

I shut the bathroom door just as some man added bellows to the mix. I hoped it was Didier.

My stomach kept moving around. I wanted that hearty-smelling spaghetti. I didn't want anything to eat—the first swallow would come right back on me.

Risa threw open the bathroom door and kicked it shut before I had time to do more than drop my hands over my lap. Yeah, modest. My face burned too.

"Excuse me," she said and stepped into the bathtub and drew the curtain. "Ignore me. I just have to pretend I'm by myself for at least one full minute."

Wow. I got that feeling when I was stuck in the tour bus for days on end. I dressed quietly and waited—until I realized she was crying.

"Um, Risa? Is it safe to go for a walk? Would that help?"

Water ran. "No, it's not safe. I'm going anyway. Need to check on Miss Vella, and the phones are down."

"I'll go with you."

The curtain opened with a horror movie shring! "You can't possibly feel well enough. You bled so much—"

"I sure don't feel well enough to fight off harp-climbing ankle-biters, or their mothers, either. If we find a drugstore open, I can get pills for iron-poor blood." Or better stuff, if it wasn't guarded.

She laughed, a strained and unhappy sound. "Like any drugstore is going to be open. But Vella's bathroom is practically a pharmacy."

We collected my baseball bat and a wrecking bar for Risa and slipped out without anyone noticing. Or with everyone pretending not to notice.

At two houses past the corner, I heard an eager trill and looked down just as a small black cat with a white throat bounded out of the azalea bushes. A z-cat!

I swung. Risa, quicker, scooped up the cat. My bat crashed into the twiggy bush.

The cat purred madly, scrubbing its head against Risa's chin and licking at the corner of her mouth.

My cat Huffie used to do that. Tears stung my eyes.

The cat put her paws up to frame Risa's face and mewed insistently, as if telling her something terribly important.

Risa smiled and sniffed the cat's ears. "Are you a lonesome, little sweetie?"

"You're lucky that's not a rabid little sweetie." I peered around. "You don't know she's not."

"Thank you for watching out for me." She pinched up the skin on the cat's back, and the pinched ridge stayed there. "She's been vaccinated—see the pink stain here at the skin? Vets were doing that here, for a while at least. But she's also dangerously dehydrated. Tell me you're not deathly allergic to cats?"

I gave up. "Not allergic. But the vaccination isn't—"

"I know. Picking her up was stupid, but I couldn't help it. Hold her while I get her some water."

How about no?

Risa handed me the cat anyway. Then she opened the nearest gate, to a miniature front yard strewn with torn cushions, tumbled shelving, and broken planters with dirt and bonsai trees spilling out. The house's door stood wide open, the TV on.

Didn't have to be the trail of a z-thing. All that trash could signify a drunk or a frustrated football fan—in which case, I'd hate to see what happened if we'd lost the game instead of forfeiting due to the quarantine.

But why was the door standing open with nobody there?

I tried to follow Risa. Really, I did. But my feet wouldn't move past that gate. No more than Risa's could have continued on past the little cat.

The cat vibrated against my throat. I awkwardly ran a thumb across the base of her ears. Wasn't her fault, what happened to my Huffie. But I'd sworn never to love another cat.

Something bothered me, but so many things bothered me right then I couldn't figure out what it was about this house and yard that was so wrong. The neatly trimmed shrubs, some of them with what looked like miniature pomegranates on them, the trash scattered across the yard, the door open, the Weather Channel showing on TV

though the busted-out window.

And a closed gate. That now stood open, from where Risa had passed through.

She leaned her crowbar against the brick foundation wall of the house and turned on a faucet hidden in the shrubbery.

I put the cat in my backpack and zipped it shut before she realized what I was doing. "Come back, Risa. Now."

She left the running faucet and came. No question, no hesitation.

A bandy-legged bald man in a stained wife-beater and dirt-smeared long johns emerged from the side yard, squinting heavily. He paused at the edge of the deep shade and howled.

Risa raced past me. She yelled, "Sorry, Mr. Calvin!"

I slapped the gate shut, rammed the latch home, and ran after her. The howling picked up behind us and echoed all around.

No! Crap! More of them howled all around. Like barking dogs—the sound of one set them all off.

Sure. Sensitivity to light, cold, or noises.

"This way," Risa said urgently.

The cat mewed pitifully in my pack, slapping against my back.

A small herd of z-things shuffled into the road ahead. Risa vaulted a picket fence and ran across another manicured, trash-strewn yard. I followed.

She stumbled, but lifted her skirt high in one fist and ran on. I grabbed up the cement toad she'd tripped on and pitched it at the z-things. It hit the road short of them and shattered. Shrapnel must have caught a couple of them, because they screamed and took to tearing at one another.

The cat wailed, raking frantically at the inside of my pack. I sure was glad for the back padding. I sure hoped the cat wasn't going over. I sure hoped I didn't get killed and leave her to die slowly, trapped in my backpack.

Risa darted onto the road, crossed it, and cut the next corner. She stopped at a taller gate, to a taller fence, and fought it open. She held it for me and shut it behind me, latching it. Then she dodged the ramp to pelt up the mossy brick steps to the front porch. " Miss Vel-la! "

"Risa!" The door opened to a darkish room, and Vella's scooter chair whined out of the way.

I followed Risa inside.

"What is in your pack, child? Not a baby!"

"Um, a cat. She probably hates me now."

The woman chuckled. "Washroom at the end of the hall. Shut yourself in and make friends again. If the juice goes off, use the candle and lighter under the sink. Make yourself at home."

Okay, yes. Hiding in a near-stranger's bathroom, making friends with a terrified little cat, would be a lot less painful than sitting around making small talk with someone I've only met once while not-undead things shuffled up and down the street, rattling the gate outside. Besides, the kitty was dehydrated.

And the bathroom had a bowl of water next to a bowl of kibble, next to a litter box. When the cat stopped trying to mimic a ping-pong ball in zero gravity, she visited each of them in order. Then she hid behind the toilet stool and hissed when I reached for her.

Be that way. I sat under the towel rack and waited. She had come to us. She was one of those cats that would die without people to love on her. All I had to do was wait.

After a little bit, she mewed pitifully. I mimicked the sound. She mewed less pitifully. I echoed that. Eventually, she came and put a paw on my knee. I let her sniff my unbandaged fingertips, and she let me pet her a little. Then she was my lifelong friend, or was doing her best to convince me of it, scrubbing her little head against me and talking as earnestly to me as she had to Risa.

We came out to the smell of coffee and soft voices.

"Yes, you will take it. I won't be here in a week, sweetie. My insulin ran out today. They told me to order refills early, but I didn't." The old lady smiled sadly and paused to stroke a huge white cat draped across her lap. "Don't mourn me. It was my own doing."

I hesitated in the hallway. This was so not the time to butt into their conversation.

But Little Cat mewed, and the big white one looked up lazily.

Uh oh, cat fight? No. The white cat settled where it was, head on the old lady's wrist. Only the lashing tail betrayed its awareness that Little Cat and I existed.

The old lady smiled at me.

Risa paced. "I bet the student health center has a ton of the stuff. I bet they have the kind that doesn't need refrigeration."

"Bet it's trashed. And anyone who crosses the street to or from the campus is fair game for the SWAT snipers and the National Guard."

"Faith Community?"

"It was overrun yesterday evening. Onnie Mae's great-grandson, the one with all that metal in his face, got hisself killed there, giving a shot to someone who was going zombie on him."

"How about the old fol—the retirement village? It has a clinic."

"Yes—But Dusty still works there. And it's likely overrun too. I swan. If you got messed up for trying to get my insulin, I'd have to haul my old bones over there and take a rusty saw blade to someone."

Risa leaned in and gave her a hug. "I'll be careful, and I've been handling Dustin for a long time. Would it be okay for Camie and the kitten to stay with you until I get back?"

"I'm going with you." The stranger inside me spoke. The brave one. Not the one who wanted to curl up in a nice, cool bed and whine until someone brought me a bowl of hot soup.

Risa looked at me with her steady gaze. "I'd rather you stayed and kept Miss Vella safe."

"I'd rather it too," I said honestly. "But if you don't come back, I'll have to go see what happened to you, and then I'd be alone against whatever managed to bring you down. So I need to go with you." And if that Dustin guy we ran into Tuesday night was at the clinic, she didn't want to be alone around him.

The old lady stroked her white cat and looked at me with watery eyes. "Do you have a gun, honey, or do you prefer a knife?"

I blinked and hoisted the bat. "I have this."

"Supposing that gets knocked out of your hand, what do you have?"

"Feet to run. So long as there's stuff to trip over, outrunning the z-things isn't all that hard." Or wouldn't be, if I didn't feel like I had the flu.

"The monsters outnumber the undead, hon. Go to the back bedroom there and look in the closet for my old fishing tackle box. Get the fillet knife out of it, and tie it on your belt or on your forearm, whichever is easiest for you to reach in a hurry. Stick it in anywhere under the ribs—front, back, or sides. Stick it in all the way. Then twist it.

Then run. Leave the knife if you must, but run."

Something in her voice, in her face, spoke of hard-earned experience. "You must've learned from a pro."

I wanted to bite my tongue. Not my business. And what if I'd dredged up memories best forgotten?

But her watery old eyes glowed. "I did. Parris Island."

Risa's head snapped around to look at her. "Miss Vella?"

"Honey, my granddaughters don't know, and somebody has to. One of you is likely to be be burying me soon enough. I want to be buried with my medals and with my kids' baby teeth. They're in the boxes on my dresser."

I was trying to guess her age and do the math. "You were a nurse in—um—

Korea?"

"I was a rifleman in World War Two. What I saw over there—all the death, all the waste—was what gave me the courage to come home and live as the woman I really am."

I looked over at the side table, with dozens of photos. All four of her kids looked alike. None looked like her. Or like the fair-haired man who stood with her in some of the pictures. Adopted?

Risa whispered something to her.

She shook her head and patted Risa's wrist kindly. "I'm old enough to speak my mind, not that I was ever shy. If you're too afraid to live, you might as well die."

Words to live by.

* * * * *

The knife I found had a thin, wickedly sharp blade, too long to fit in my pocket.

Maybe under the bandage?

The bandage over my arm was a sock with the toe slit, and the slight bulk under it was a panty liner. Or, as long as it was, maybe a heavy days pad. I pulled the sock back over the pad, not wanting to see what was under it. My fingers were swollen and sore and had the faintest touches of dark bruising at the base of the nails. Thin, dark streaks now ran from the base of each nail to the tip.

The world took a slow roll to the left. I sat on the floor and let the dizziness pass.

My dad was in Miami for the summer. With a camera. Developing the definitive photographic record of the early stages of Z.

All those vaccinations had bought me was time.

If I used this knife to open an artery, I wouldn't have to face dying as one of those Z-things. But if I did it there, who'd have to clean up?

I had to get out of there. It could be as little as an hour before I became virulently contagious. Or maybe I was now.

I had to leave. Before I sneezed on anyone. Before anyone else touched me.

The kitten bounced into my lap. She'd been vaccinated.

For all the good it would do her. Or maybe it would save her, since the animal vaccine was much more effective than—

Risa had lain beside me as I slept. Perhaps she'd kissed me.

No, no. Please, no.

I went back to the bathroom and bleached everything I'd touched. Taking the time to think. If I tried to split off from Risa, picked a fight with her or just stormed out, would she get hurt and let me go? Or would she follow me and try to—yeah, she'd try to make up. And arguing would waste time I didn't have.

I bagged up my trash and washed my hands. Time for what?

The little cat pounced on my back and then to the sink, where she trilled. I wanted so bad to hold her, to cry into her fur as I had into Huffie's. But Huffie was gone.

I could wipe her off with damp toilet paper, but that would probably stimulate grooming. Which would get any germs into her mouth while they were nice and fresh.

Wasn't anything I could do, except get away from her. Immediately.

And not cry. Fluids pass the virus fast.

But if the old folk's home had a clinic with insulin, maybe it had the Z-serum.

And Risa could get me in there.

But she needed to know the risks of trying.

The kitten patted my arm with her dainty paws, and I gave in. Cuddling her felt so good.

I debated taking the kitten with me, probably to die, or leaving her with the pretense I was coming back for her later, and risking her passing my infection to the old lady. On the one hand, the risk of transmission wasn't very high, since the virus would have had to mutate again for me to shed while I could still tolerate light this bright. On the other hand, it wasn't right to risk somebody else's life. Especially with a risk she didn't know about.

I shook the food bowl to remind the kitten it was there, and she dug in. I slipped out, shutting her in the bathroom. In the living room, Risa had that white line around her mouth. She had enough to worry about already. I hesitated, but only for a second. I couldn't withhold information when ignorance could kill her.

"I have the bug," I said flatly.

Her eyelashes dropped. "Will you need a sunhat and shades to get to the clinic?"

I blinked. "You knew?"

Her tone hardened. "Will you need—?"

I raised a hand to stop her. "Maybe. I think I'm all right, but halfway there the situation might change."

She studied me. "I think you're going to stay all right. But I'd like to borrow a hat and your sunglasses, Miss Vella, if we may?"

"Certainly. You know where they are."

The old lady was peculiarly serene. Could be she was stoned. Could be she was just calm. Maybe I'd be that calm too, if I thought sure I was going to die before the Z

bug could get me.

I blinked a lot going out into the sunlight, but I always do. The wind shifted, colder than before, but my shiver didn't mean extra sensitivity from Z. Risa was shivering too.

The old folks' home had electricity, probably from its own generator, so Risa's volunteer swipe-card got us through the front door.

Inside, the place smelled okay. Not like old pee. Not like anything worse.

Relief unknotted my stomach, some. A place like this gets to stinking fast when it's not kept clean, when the residents aren't well tended.

We turned a corner into the atrium, and whoa—kids played on the furniture and splashed in the fountain. They weren't noisy, but they were kids, and kids don't hold still. A quick count said fifteen of them. Kids and grandkids of the employees?

What better way to keep a full staff, and keep them indoors when the infection was out there?

I so did not need to be shedding virus around kids.

In the clinic at the end of the hallway, a kneeling man swore repetitively under his breath while rooting through cardboard packing boxes. He looked up as we entered and went pale. "Deedee? You left yesterday. How'd you get back in?"

"Risa. I sing with Didier. My swipe card worked."

"Shouldn't have. Doodlespit. Something else to fix. Okay, if you want to stay, you have to work. Gina's orders."

His nametag said Mr. Josh. I never heard of Josh as a last name. Was he being cutesy?

"We don't want to stay. We need enough insulin to get someone through the quarantine, and we need the Z-serum, and if I'm not talking science fiction, we need a shot of something that will build up somebody's blood supply."

He looked her up and down and then saw me. His gaze locked on my bandaged arm. Pivoting, he pulled out a tiny black pistol. "Say something coherent, young lady."

I swallowed. "Is 'don't shoot' coherent enough?"

He pocketed the gun. "Have you been vaccinated?"

"Against X-1 and Y. I reacted to the second and, given the speed of mutation, a prophylactic Z-vaccination was contraindicated."

He blinked. "You're a med student?"

"I'm Dr. Wall's daughter." I took off the old lady's hat to show my face.

He blew out a breath. "Camilla. My wife and I had promised to look you up, but with one thing and another—" He gestured helplessly. "You need three doses, hon, three days apart. I have only one dose. The freaking National Guard commandeered most of my supplies, and my so-called assistant helped himself to as much of the rest as he could carry. Like he didn't think anyone would ever know. He's got another think coming."

Risa muttered in Spanish.

I leaned against a counter. Hadn't felt all that good before, and losing this last chance just took the air out of my tires. The trick now was to get out to someplace away from this nice guy and Risa and use the knife before I started tearing people's faces off.

Although tearing off Dustin's face might be particularly satisfying.

The guy heaved himself to his feet and reached into a small fridge. "What's the dosage on the insulin?"

Risa tried to hand him a slip of paper.

Without even looking at the paper, he handed her a white box, not quite as big as a package of Oreos. "This is what we have to spare. The patient it came for is in intensive care now, if such a thing exists. Good luck with it." He then dug out a single, prefilled syringe from behind all the boxes and jars. "If you were anyone else's daughter, I'd send you straight to the National Guard post, in hopes some human being there would look at you and see a fellow human being. But your father saved thousands of lives in Miami." He laid the syringe on the counter by the sink. "Are you allergic to anything I need to know about?"

Nothing I could think of. Except needles. I used to say that when I was a little kid. Not that it ever got me out of a shot. I closed my eyes. At least they don't give shots in the stomach any more.

Risa came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me. "You're going to be okay, Camie. I know you are."

The needle bored in. I told myself I'd be brave for a shot this time, this one time, but little whimpers crawled out of my mouth anyway.

Risa tightened her arms. I leaned back against her.

"If you got bitten, you also need a broad-spectrum antibiotic."

"Concertina wire cuts," Risa said, her voice vibrating in my chest. "Very sharp slices. I washed them out with bleach-water under pretty good pressure, then super-glued the skin together."

"I'd say come back if you see any sign of infection, but nobody else is coming in for the duration of the quarantine." He pressed a bottle into my good hand. "Take two of these with food, right now if you've eaten recently, then one at a time twice a day with food. Even if you can't lay hands on another dose of serum, keep taking these. And if you're going anywhere, go now. You're going to be a mighty sick puppy once the serum hits your system. Waiting for tomorrow to go beg a dose off the Guard is probably a bad idea."

I nodded.

"Say something coherent, Camilla. Please. I have to hear it."

Or else what? He was going to un-shoot me? "Thank you for giving me pills instead of another shot."

He patted my shoulder, then scrubbed his hands. As we left, he was bleaching everything I'd come close to touching.

In the sunlight, I looked at the sky to prove I could, then put on the hat because I didn't want to carry it. "I'm going to Dustin's place."

Risa hugged me and skipped half a step to walk in sync with me. "We'll drop the insulin at Miss Vella's on the way. You know Josh wouldn't have given up that dose for just anyone, don't you?"

That hurt, because it was true. I was as much Dr. Wall's daughter as I was Catriona Wall's sister. I shrugged. "That house Dustin was coming out of Tuesday night. That's where he lives?"

"No, he's half a mile farther south. But you don't need to find it. I'll take you there. He'll listen to me."

I wanted to believe her. And I didn't want to argue. So I didn't ask why. Even when she shivered.

Chapter Seven

Vella really didn't want us borrowing her van. Her wrinkled old mouth pinched tight, and her hand gripped the white cat's fur. But she let us. The little cat we'd left with her mewed plaintively from somewhere out of sight.

I climbed into the passenger seat, which felt soothingly warm. In some places, fall is when leaves change color. Here, leaves just fall and that's in winter. The clearest sign of autumn is when seats stop leaving first-degree burns. "Why did you want to drive? This thing might not have enough gas to get two blocks, much less half a mile."

"Then we'll take it as far as it goes and park it. I didn't want the van anyway. I wanted the key ring."

The brass ring looked like a big bangle bracelet and held at least twenty keys of various shapes and sizes. Probably most of them older than me. "Does she have Dustin's house key?"

"She does unless he's taken it away from her or changed his locks."

"What do you owe Dustin?"

"Don't worry about it."

I know when I'm being pushed aside. It's easiest to give in, to fade into the wall.

But this time, I didn't want to. "What does he want from you?"

"Not your problem."

I took that like a slap in the face. If she and I had something together, anything that bothered her so badly would automatically be my problem, wouldn't it?

She swerved around a kid who was sitting in the middle of the road, crying.

I braced my good hand on the dash and debated contradicting her. My head ached. That's never a good time to start an argument. In my view, no time is good for squabbling, but that's just me.

I kept my hand on the dash as she parked in a drift of oak leaves and crunchy acorns in a short driveway.

She unclipped her seatbelt and flipped through the keys. Some were labeled.

She pulled a house key off the ring, then handed me the ignition key with the rest of the ring. "Wait here for me. Keep the doors locked against anyone else. Especially against Dustin, no matter what he says. If I'm not out in half an hour, drive home.

Okay? Mindy will let you in."

"No."

She stopped fiddling with the key ring and studied me. "Are you okay, baby?"

Baby? "I'm not okay. But that's not the problem. Except really it is. If you're going to have some sort of showdown, you're doing it for me. So I'm going with you."

She leaned close and touched my cheek. "We don't have time to argue."

"Right. So don't." I caught her cool hand and pressed it against my cheek. "Please, don't make me mad at you. Don't make me feel like I'm useless."

"You mean a lot to me, Camie. Stay here."

I let her get out of the van alone and opened my door while she was wrestling with the yard's front gate. I left the van door standing open, happy no door alarm was bleating ding-ding-ding at me, and crept to the back bumper. When she was halfway to the front porch step, I trotted to catch up with her. Tried to. My feet weighed fifty pounds apiece. But I got across the lawn and caught up with her beside a leaf-filled birdbath.

She looked sidelong at me. "I don't have time to say what I'm thinking."

I reached out to her, then dropped my hand in case I was shedding virus. The serum stops that, but not instantly. I shouldn't have let her touch my face. Shouldn’t have held her hand. "I don't have time to hear it. And Dustin's unpredictable."

She threw an arm over my shoulder, not letting me pull back. "Stop it. You're not contagious. And if you were, it's too late."

From the front yard, Dustin's house could have been Risa's, down to the weedy-looking lantana sprawling around the edges of the screened front porch. But there was no roll of metal slats over the front window. And the side fences were six-foot privacy panels. Since the left hand wall didn't match the right one, I got the feeling the neighbors had fenced out Dustin, rather than Dustin fencing in his own space.

Risa stopped, looking down at the first step. I squinted and saw what looked like a piano wire stretched at shin height across the step.

A chill breeze kicked up, sending her hair to tickle my face. My nipples tightened at a sudden memory of her hair tickling me in the dark.

I shivered, then smiled. For one of the z-things, that sudden chill would be intolerably painful, and the tickle would be enraging. Not something to make me breathe deeply of her scent.

Even though her scent was sharp now, acrid.

Risa looked into the shady depths of the porch and called out, "Knock knock!"

Within the screen porch, the door slammed open. A mocking voice flowed through the shadow. "Who's the-e-ere?"

So much for using the key to sneak in.

Risa pointed at the wire. "Booby traps are illegal."

"Like you have enough boobie to trap?" Dustin came to where the sunlight came through the screen door. "You gon' have me arrested again? Will any jury care what a man does in times like this to protect his own house?"

"His own cache?" Risa added quietly.

He stared down at her. His voice lowered. "Have you a need, my lady?"

"Serum. Six doses."

Two for me and three for Junia? For Risa, who'd been too close to me? One extra to hedge her bets?

His voice flowed smooth as syrup. "What's it worth to you?"

She swallowed and shoved me behind her. "The difference between your house and mine. We'll swap."

I stumbled. She was offering her house? Her grandmother's house? Her security?

The instruments—how could they be moved without a truck and a crew? I wanted to lean on something, but the birdbath was out of reach, and Risa didn't need any distraction. She'd made that plain enough.

Dustin unlatched the screen door and bumped it open, then turned and headed indoors as it slapped shut again. "C'mon in. Bring the spare twat with you."

Risa bristled. "She's infected."

"Huge surprise," he called over his shoulder. "Bring her anyway. I have bleach.

And condoms."

Risa hesitated, then beckoned me to follow and held open the screen door for me.

Her hair, draped over her forearm, rippled as she trembled. "I didn't say anything about screwing."

"My ears work fine, but a guy has needs. I got used to my regular cadre of old people popping out their dentures and giving me a gum job if they wanted their medication with no hitches. You think you're going to get off any lighter?"

Risa exhaled, long and slow, and the tremor left her. She watched Dustin's back with eyes flat as a voodoo doll's.

I knew then she was going to kill the man.

The furniture inside was a mix of battered antiques and student makeshifts.

Dustin didn't invite us to sit while he dug through his fridge. I leaned against the wall and watched him lay six prefilled syringes in a precise arc on the top of a waist-high woofer.

Looking from his triumphant grin to Risa's sick face and green-lined lips, I made a decision. She was not going to do this. Not for me.

My pulse hammered, and I focused with an odd precision on him alone. I fingered the knife under my bandage. My hands no longer seemed so heavy, so clumsy.

Was this adrenaline?

More to the point, how could I get behind him? I looked past him and saw the bathroom door. I pushed off the wall. "I gotta pee."

He kept grinning at Risa. "Go pee in the yard. I don't need your germs."

My face heated. "I'd leave a trail coming back. Talk about germs."

"Okay, okay. I'm sure you can find the can. Risa and I need to have a little talk, anyway. Don't we, milady?"

I dragged my feet some, to make myself nothing worth watching. He glanced at me once, then fastened his attention on Risa. I hated how sick she looked. I hated the twitch in the corner of one beautiful, dark eye, the shimmer of sweat on her face.

I ran water while peeling the sock off my forearm and extracting the blade. Then I flushed and limped out holding it down behind my leg.

Dustin gave me one dismissive look and planted his elbows on the woofer. He wore a pale blue polo shirt. His spine made a bluntly serrated ridge of light and shadow, and his belt made a smooth, narrow ridge crossing it.

One fist's distance to the side of his spine and just above the belt. That's where his kidney was.

"You're the one in a hurry," he said. "I got all day."

No you don't. I bit back the words. I had to remain beneath notice until— now.

I plunged the knife into his back. And, like the old lady said to, I twisted it.

Blood gushed. Dustin fell forward, knocking over the woofer and scattering the syringes across the hardwood floor.

Risa scrambled to scoop them up.

"Keep your skirt clean." I wiped my blade on the back of his slacks. It would have to be cleaned thoroughly later, to remove his DNA.

My stomach twisted painfully. And now my hands weighed fifty pounds apiece again.

He needed killing, the saying goes. Does anyone, though?

I couldn't cry. I had no call to cry. It was just that my head hurt so badly. That's all. My unbandaged arm shone with sweat, and my armpits prickled with it. Dragging in a deep breath took all my strength. "I think the serum-sickness is kicking in."

She grabbed me, held me tight against her side, and backed to the door with me while Dustin jerked and howled and painted himself red in his own blood.

Tears ran down her face.

"We gotta go," I said, trying not to whine.

"Yes." She led me to the van, loaded me in, and clipped my seatbelt for me.

My head hurt. I closed my eyes.

Epilogue

The electricity went off while I was sick, but came back—at least in our area—

after only nine days. Luckily for us, the water stayed on for all the WWII-era houses in our area, and we all had septic tanks.

Junia, Didier, and Mindy moved into the house next door, which belonged to little Arthur unless his mother ever showed up again. They came back at night—and when rough people were around—to hide behind Risa's fortified windows.

The phones stayed dead, the internet dark. The weekly newspaper read like fiction. Maybe it was. Certainly, the statement that the campus suffered only thirty percent casualties was a bald-faced lie. The county as a whole was supposedly better off than any of the surrounding counties. I wondered if every county was told that, to keep the people from hitting the road. Maybe. But if other counties were much worse off . . . .

Mom. Daddy. Tri. My friends back home and online. They could all be gone.

If they were gone, I still had Risa. And our friends here. And Happy Cat. And the kid we called Kiko, who was probably about six, and who stuck so close to me that Risa and I had to schedule violin lessons to get any nookie at all.

On the first of December, I was braiding Mindy's hair on the back porch while we watched strangers exploring the yard across the back fence. We'd planted collard greens in that yard while the house was vacant, but they weren't worth fighting over.

The onions in our own yard were worth at least a shouting match, though. And our baseball bats were openly displayed.

Oblivious of the tension, the little cat in my lap purred so hard she occasionally chirped. Beside me, Kiko was drawing another of her pictures with a smiling mommy, daddy, and two kids, with a blue stripe of sky overhead and a green stripe of grass underfoot. When she finished, we knew she'd scribble all over it with red. We kept having to melt together pieces of red crayon to give her something to work with.

At the other end of the house, the doorknocker sounded, banging so hard the harp strings might be shimmering with faint echoes.

"Inside, Kiko," Mindy said.

She left her crayons and ran inside. Mindy and I backed into the house with our bats and locked the door. As usual, I stayed on guard at the peephole while she joined Risa before they opened the front door. The back door had been kicked in, and we didn't trust this new one.

"Oh, you've come to help!" Mindy gushed. "Thank you! Thankyouthankyou! We need water! And food! We have little kids who need milk!"

"Milk!" Risa insisted. "We need milk! And vitamins!"

Sounded like the cops, looking for assets to reallocate. We begged shamelessly every time they came by. Once, they'd given us some pool chlorine and a printout on how to make bleach. Once they'd taken a quart jar of rice. Usually, they checked the cupboards and left empty-handed. They didn't check the crawlspace, luckily.

But today, the voices were lower. Something twitched at my nerves. I fidgeted with the need to go identify it. But this was my post.

Then I heard it.

"I'm Harry Wall, and—"

"Daddy!" I blundered through the house, blind with tears. "Daddy!"

He caught me up like I was no bigger than Kiko, and he let out a whoop that made my ears ring.

"You're alive, you're alive, you're alive," we both kept saying. I cried into his collar, and he cried into my hair.

Finally, he put me down. He needed a kitchen towel to wipe his face. So did I.

When I turned to get it, I saw Risa's face, impassive and braced for pain.

For an instant, I saw with her eyes. I was going to leave her, to go back to reliable electricity and a housekeeper and pizza on tap.

I grabbed her hand with both of mine and turned back to my dad. "You have another daughter. This is Risa."

~The End~

About the Author

Amber Green's college housemates often spent evenings sprawled around the living room with bodice-rippers, reading racy scenes aloud. After losing jobs requiring competent use of shovel, calculator, spatula, or carbine, Amber took up studying the law. Her resultant need for escapism brought her back to those racy scenes, which she commenced to write.

Learn more about Amber online at www.shapeshiftersinlust.com

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Epilogue