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PART ONE NEW ALAMO

If we don’t end ill end us

—H G WELLS

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GABRIELLA “GUTSY” GOMEZ WAS SURE every single thing—living or dead—was trying to kill her

This was the world and that’s hoas

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IT STARTED LIKE THIS

A bunch of theh Gutsy and her best friends, Spider and Alethea Gutsy’s adopted coydog, Sombra Karen Peak, head of town security The two old teachers, Mr Urrea and Mr Ford, known to everyone as the Chess Players The California Kids—Benny I, and Lilah—who’d arrived in town just as an arrizzled and scarred old soldiers had shown up as well—Benny’s older half brother, Saer’s massive and heavily armored mastiff, lurked nearby

All of them there in that room With a monster

Captain Bess Collins

She was the one who’d run a hidden military base near New Alamo She’d overseen the lab that used the citizens as lab rats for bizarre medical experiments She had allowed Dr Max Morton and his tea townsfolk, including Gutsy’s own mother, with deadly diseases so they could study the reanimation process They said it was to try and save the world, to find a way to control or destroy the parasites that created los ence to the newly risen dead To reression that made the shamblers want to kill and devour

Monsters doing ht other monsters

That was how it started

Captain Collins admitted all of this now She admitted that her team had made terriblesoldiers and accidentally turned ers

She admitted that everyone in New Alamo was expendable if the end result was a cure

And she told theo the teainal infected person, a brutal mass murderer named Homer Gibbon He had not become a shambler and could soled in a car accident during the initial outbreak Soldiers had collected as left of hiht him to Collins’s lab, where she and Dr Morton had stitched Gibbon back together like a pair of Frankensteins They’d experierous and powerful he was

Hoedy Man—had escaped

It was he who’d sent an arainst New Alamo

It was he who’d sent an even larger force toward Asheville, where the fledgling A to rise from the ashes of the old United States

It was he as going to sweep across the face of the world and devour all living things

Captain Collins told them all of this

And then, as if fate wanted to cruelly punctuate her words, screams tore the air

The dead had come back to New Alamo

Gutsy and her friends had only won a single battle The war for the right to survive—to live—was just beginning They knew this now

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