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“So there are lots of different communities of people who shouldn't be alive out here and will happily blow our heads off if we look at them funny,” I said. “That's splendid. I am delighted to hear it. Tonight, I'll say a special prayer to the Tooth Fairy to thank her for giving me so many opportunities to knock teeth out of heads in her honor.”

“Just try not to insult anyone, all right?” Audrey actually sounded nervous. I wanted to reassure her. I no longer knew how to do it.

I'd known since we got together that she hadn't told me everything about her past: That was one of the first truly serious conversations we'd had, sandwiched right between heavy petting and “we're finally ready to take our clothes off.” That may make it sound like I hadn't really been listening, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I had been so desperately, head over heels in love with her that I'd been willing to listen to anything she said, even if I wasn't necessarily prepared to believe it all. She'd wanted me to know, she'd said; she'd wanted me to understand what I was getting myself into. So I had listened, and she had spoken, and at the end of it, I had said that I was in for the long haul. No matter what she did, I wasn't going anywhere.

I truly hadn't been trying to lie to her. It was just that she'd been lying to me, at least by omission, and now that I was facing the consequences of that omission—all the little pieces she'd left out, all the things she hadn't trusted me enough to say—I didn't know how to feel. She knew this world, because she had been in it before. That was great for our ability to navigate, but what did it say about my ability to forgive her?

Maybe it was small and selfish of me to be dwelling on my relationship status at a time like this, but I'd always appreciated my ability to distract myself from my own impending demise, and so I didn't try too hard to make myself stop. As long as I was thinking about Audrey, I wasn't thinking about the fact that I was driving, knowingly and with intent, into a dangerous future.

The road curved, leading the ATV inexorably into a deeper patch of woodland. If I squinted, I could see the place where old concrete had been chipped away and new concrete had been laid down, artificially weathered to keep this stretch of abandoned roadway from looking any different on a satellite view. It must have taken years of careful curation to bend the road to where they needed it. I respected the work, even as I became increasingly tense. What we were driving into… this wasn't an amateur operation, something we could defeat with logic and a couple of bullets. These were people who put survival and freedom ahead of everything else. We needed to be careful.

Then the road curved sharply, and ended at a large chain-link fence with razor wire strung across the top and a padlock holding the gate closed. I stopped the car. The trees provided cover here, but they had been hacked back harshly from the fence itself, making it impossible for anything that had managed to climb up there to leap over cleanly. The razor wire would stop whatever tried to jump, shredding it where it hung. It was a dandy way of dealing with the issue of zombie raccoons, even if it was the sort of fix that required a lot of bleach.

The fence had been constructed around an old service complex, gas station and attached mini-mart and freestanding farmhouse, all about twenty yards from where we were stopped. It looked like the complex had been independently owned before the Rising, explaining the lack of logos or large signage. An RV was positioned at an angle next to the farmhouse, providing extra space for the people who lived here. People who were nowhere in evidence.

“Are we sure this place is open?” asked Amber. “Maybe they're on vacation.”

“Where do survivalists go for vacation?” I asked. “It's not like they have a lot of travel options.”

“No one does,” said Audrey. “Wait.”

We waited. Seconds ticked by, enough that I became restless and reached for the door handle. My fingers had just closed on it when the dogs appeared, half a dozen of them racing from behind the main building with their ears flat and their teeth gleaming white in the light that filtered down through the trees. They were barking madly, and the sound seemed to travel straight from my ears to my nerves, galvanizing them.

“Holy shit,” whispered Amber.

Ben leaned forward until his head and shoulders were in the front seat, his hands braced to keep him from falling. “That's a Great Dane, those are German shepherds—that looks like a Bernese mountain dog. Who still has Bernese mountain dogs?”

“They're dogs, the lot of them, and all above amplification weight,” I said, unable to keep the whine of fear out of my voice. “What are they doing here?” Zombies, gunfire, and hostile terrain, I could handle. The idea of zombie raccoons was charming and novel. But dogs? Dogs were running delivery systems for teeth and tearing and terror. Dogs were the enemy.

“A lot of people went off the grid in the first place because they didn't want to give up their dogs,” said Audrey. “For them, the relationship between man and canine was more important than the amplification risk—and to be fair, most dogs never bite people. We domesticated them for a good reason. There are people who felt that killing them all because we had made a mistake wasn't just wrong, it was monstrous.”

“No, that
dog
is monstrous,” I said, eyes locked on the fence. “How can it be so big? I don't believe it's really a dog. I think it's a bear that someone is pretending is a dog, because that someone is seriously damaged.”

A person appeared from the same place the dogs had come from. He was tall enough to also qualify as a bear, the sort of man who, were he to amplify, could take out an entire medical response team before someone managed to drill a bullet through his forehead. His hair was long, blond, and untied, making it all seem distressingly biblical.

“If he says his name is Samson, I'm turning this car around and we're going to go find a
different
illicit petrol station,” I said.

Ben laughed. Audrey snorted. Amber, who hadn't moved in several minutes, did nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the approaching man, and when I glanced her way, I could all but see the math she was running in her head about how many shots she'd need to take him down before he could open the gate and release the dogs. Maybe for the first time, I appreciated how much attention she'd always paid to her job. You don't get hired to protect a potential President because of your connections. It happens because you know how to do whatever it takes to keep people alive.

The man reached the fence and made a cranking gesture with his left hand before pointing to the windows. He wanted us to roll them down.

“This is a terrible idea,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Audrey. “Now roll down the window.”

I rolled down my window.

“Afternoon,” said the man, through the fence. “You folks lost? Because I'm afraid this is private property.” He had a pleasant voice and a mild accent I couldn't quite place. It was definitely American, but apart from broad regional differences, all Americans sounded pretty much the same to me.

“No, sir,” said Audrey, rolling down her own window and leaning very slightly out in order to address him. “We're looking for gas. We understand you might be willing to barter for some.”

The man's eyebrows raised in an expression of almost comical surprise. “Is that so? Because I don't remember putting myself in the local yellow pages.”

“What's a yellow page?” I asked, glancing to Ben. He shrugged, a look of blank confusion on his face.

“We got your location from a friend, sir,” said Audrey. “He assured us he was only giving the location of establishments that would be willing to talk before they opened fire.”

“Four gunmen in the tree line,” said Amber, speaking for the first time since we'd stopped. “Two snipers in the trees themselves. We're not getting out of here alive if they don't want us to.”

“You say the sweetest things,” I muttered, and stuck my own head out the window, flashing the man my brightest smile. It was the look that had launched a thousand stories, and I just hoped he wasn't immune. “Hello! I'm Ash. Nice to meet you.”

The man's eyebrows raised further. “Irish?”

“Born and bred,” I said. “Look, we're running short of fuel, and we've sort of torqued off some folks in your government, so it's important we keep heading for the Canadian border if we don't want to wind up shot and buried in a ditch somewhere. You seem a reasonable sort. Possibly insane, if the dogs are anything to go by, but lots of crazy people are lovely and reasonable and quite capable of selling us some petrol without shooting us in the head.”

Slowly, the man blinked. “You've done what to the government?”

“Made them really, really angry with us, which is why we need your petrol,” I said. “You don't like the government, the government doesn't like us, and that makes us friends. We have trade goods, we don't want to be fed to your dogs, and no one with hair as nice as yours can be a woodlands cannibal, so if you'd just call off your snipers and open the gates, we could continue this conversation in private, hey?”

The man continued to stare at me for several seconds, his expression broadcasting a mixture of confusion and disbelief, like we were absolutely the last thing he had expected to roll up at his gates. Finally, he asked, “What sort of trade goods?”

Amber cranked down her window and stuck her head out. If someone wanted to start shooting at us, there would now be nothing about the ATV's frame to stop the bullets. I found myself wanting to hand out Kevlar helmets, just in case. I kept smiling. A bright smile on a pretty face can disarm just about anybody. It's not a sex thing, at least most of the time. It's just that humans are inclined to be kind to pretty things, and we read smiles as friendly, deserving of our attention and acceptance. It's harder to shoot somebody who's smiling.

“Good ones,” said Amber. “We're happy to be fair with you if you're happy to be fair with us, and nobody needs any trouble.”

“You know, this isn't the best place for unescorted women to come rolling up,” said the man.

“We're not unescorted,” I said, sensing the test in his words and refusing to play along. “We have Ben—he's in the backseat, where you can't see him so well, but he's there—and we have a
lot
of guns. I find a semiautomatic makes an excellent chaperone under virtually any circumstances we're likely to find ourselves in.”

The man laughed. “All right, I yield to your superior logic. I'm Scott. Welcome.” He produced a key from his pocket and unlocked the gate, swinging it open. The dogs promptly surged out and surrounded the car, barking, sniffing, and jumping.

One of the leggier dogs stood up on its hind legs and stuck its muzzle through the open window of the ATV, investigating my face with a huge wet nose. It had a mouth large enough to hold my entire head, if it decided it wanted to. I went very still, clenching my hands on the wheel as I tried not to betray my raw terror. This was a
carnivore
, a sharp-toothed killer of men, and it was—

“Claremont! Get out of there!”

The massive canine gracefully dropped down from my window and went trotting back over to the man, where it leaned against his hip and gave him an adoring look. The rest of the dogs followed. Pack behavior was apparently a genuine thing—that, or his pockets were full of dried turkey.

“You can come in now,” called the man.

“Snipers are pulling back,” reported Amber. “Either this is legit, or it's a really complex trap. Either way, we should go in before he changes his mind.”

“We're going to be ground up and fed to dogs,” I said, starting the engine. “What a terrible demise for a bunch of really lovely people. We deserved so much better. How tragic. The dogs deserved better, too. They're all going to amplify, the poor things.”

Ben snorted but didn't say anything, and I rolled us forward, past the gate, which the man—Scott—swung shut behind us.

There was parking behind the farmhouse. There were also gas pumps behind the farmhouse, positioned such that they would be almost impossible to see from the road, and absolutely impossible to see from the air. The people who lived here must have been working for years to get the trees exactly the way that they wanted them, turning them into natural cover without blocking the solar panels on the roof so completely that the lights went off. It fit with the custodianship implicit in the road: slow, careful, and built to last forever, if that was how long this crisis went on.

“Do we leave the guns in the car?” asked Ben.

“No,” I said firmly. “You never leave your guns in the car unless you've been
told
to leave your guns in the car, and even then, you do your best to figure out a way to smuggle a gun under your clothes. Never walk unarmed into a situation you don't know anything about.”

“Won't that escalate things?”

Amber came to my rescue. “If there's something to escalate, you're already screwed. Bring your weapons.”

The four of us walked across the lush grass toward the front of the building where Scott, and all the dogs, were waiting. Not quite
all
the dogs: A new one appeared around the corner of the building, almost hip-high and covered in ropy black fur. It made a suspicious chuffing noise deep in its throat, like it was trying to decide whether barking its head off would do any good.

“Oh, look,” said Amber. “I always wanted to meet a Muppet in the flesh.”

“He's not a Muppet, he's a Briard,” said a woman, appearing around the corner of the house. She was tall, wiry, and leaning most of her weight on a surgical cane to keep herself upright. The dog promptly went to her side and pressed against her left leg, shoring her up. “They were herding dogs, originally. He just wanted to check and see whether you needed to be herded.”