Chapter 2

The winter air hit Marcus like a slap as he burst through the dormitory's side entrance. Manhattan had become a graveyard dressed in snow. Abandoned cars clogged the streets, doors hanging open, interiors splashed with arterial spray. Bodies lay where they'd fallen, some still twitching, most picked clean by the elements and the dead.

Marcus counted thirteen infected in the street ahead. They moved with the jerky, uncoordinated gait of the freshly turned—faster than the older corpses, whose muscles had begun to decay, but still predictable. Their heads snapped toward him in unison as he emerged, crimson eyes locking onto fresh meat.

Thirteen against one. Bad odds. But I've faced worse.

He'd played against Ohio State with a fractured rib. He'd taken a helmet-to-helmet hit from a three-hundred-pound defensive tackle and gotten back up. Fear was just another opponent. You studied its moves, then you beat it.

Marcus ran.

Not away—toward them. Directly at the cluster, screaming at the top of his lungs. The infected responded to sound, to movement, to the promise of warm flesh. They converged on his position, arms outstretched, jaws snapping.

Ten yards. Five. He could smell them now—rotting meat, ammonia, the sweet stench of diabetic ketoacidosis that seemed to permeate every turned body.

Marcus dove.

A shoulder roll beneath grasping hands, coming up inside their formation. The axe sang. One skull split. Two. He spun, using the momentum, the blade catching a third beneath the jaw. Black fluid sprayed his face, blinding him for a crucial second.

Claws raked his jacket, tearing through the down insulation. He felt hot pain across his ribs, stumbled, brought the axe up in a desperate block. A female infected—had been a jogger, still wearing neon running shoes—latched onto the axe handle, her strength terrifying. Marcus headbutted her, felt her nose collapse, kicked her legs out from under her.

Seven left. Move.

He sprinted between two abandoned taxis, using the vehicles to funnel the pursuing horde. The infected weren't smart. They didn't flank, didn't coordinate. They just chased. Marcus led them in a winding path through the frozen wreckage of Greenwich Village, slowly, carefully, separating the fastest from the slowest.

When the lead infected—a former NYPD officer, still wearing his badge—lunged from behind a mail truck, Marcus was ready. The axe took him at the temple. The body crumpled.

One by one, he dispatched the stragglers. A construction worker. A college student in pajamas. A child, no older than eight, whose Barbie backpack still hung from one shoulder. Marcus hesitated for one fatal second, and the little girl-thing nearly took his throat. He buried the axe in her skull and vomited behind a dumpster.

Not human. Not anymore. Remember that. Remember that or die.

By the time he'd cleared the street, his arms trembled with exhaustion. The gunfire had moved—east, toward the East River. He followed, keeping to the alleys, moving from cover to cover like a ghost in his own city.

A hand grabbed his shoulder.

Marcus spun, axe raised, heart hammering—

"Don't! Marcus, it's me!"

Summer.

She stood in the mouth of the alley, a butcher knife clutched in both hands, her red parka splashed with fresh black blood. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and wild, but she was alive. She was here.

"Summer?" His voice cracked. "What the hell are you doing? I told you to stay—"

"And let you die alone?" She laughed, hysterical, tears streaming down her face. "I watched you leave. I watched you run into that. And I realized—if you don't come back, I don't want to survive. I don't want to live in a world where you're dead."

"Summer—"

"I don't care if it's stupid!" She screamed, the sound echoing off brick walls. "I don't care if it's selfish! You're all I have left, Marcus Cole. And if you think I'm letting you play hero without me, you don't know me at all."

Marcus stared at her. At this impossible, infuriating, magnificent woman who had followed him into hell because she loved him more than she feared death. Something cracked inside his chest—not his heart, but the wall he'd built around it. The wall that said protect her by pushing her away. The wall that said love is weakness in the apocalypse.

He pulled her into his arms. She shook against him, the butcher knife falling from numb fingers.

"You're an idiot," he whispered into her hair. "A beautiful, stupid idiot."

"Yeah," she sniffled. "And you're stuck with me."

They held each other in the ruins of the world, two warm bodies against the cold, and for a moment, the dead didn't matter. The hunger didn't matter. Nothing mattered but this.

"Well," said a voice from the street. "Isn't this touching."

They broke apart, spinning toward the sound. A soldier stood at the intersection, M4 carbine lowered but ready, his face streaked with camouflage paint and exhaustion. His name tape read REEVES. Behind him, a convoy of Humvees and a single Bradley Fighting Vehicle idled, engines rumbling like promises of salvation.

"Evacuation's this way," Reeves said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "We're hitting the FDR, heading north to the secure zone. You two coming, or you gonna keep making out in the zombie apocalypse?"

Marcus laughed—actually laughed, the sound foreign and wonderful in his throat. "Lead the way, Sergeant."

They ran for the convoy, Summer's hand locked in his, and for the first time in thirty-one days, Marcus allowed himself to believe they might actually survive this.

He didn't know about the dreams yet. The nightmares that would come in the transport truck, hot and bloody and prophetic. He didn't know about the secure zone's true purpose, or the horde marching toward it even now. He didn't know that Sergeant Reeves would become his closest ally, or that Reeves carried a secret that would change everything.

He didn't know that in three hours, he would make a choice that would cost him everything he loved.

But he would learn.

God help him, he would learn.