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"Give ie and take our kids to a safe place"

He shook his head and looked down at his daughter Her breathing was ragged and she looked worse than the las!" The wife held out her arrabbed hold of her brother and pulled hio with your sister," she answered firan to weep as he neared his wife She looked as good as dead, looking worse by the moment Reluctantly, he held out the so with our other kids to safety Go!" Catherine held her daughter tightly to her, cradling her head against her shoulder "Go!"

Jenni et on the bus and they obeyed They looked shell-shocked and terrified, but they obeyed Curtis took hold of Douglas’ aruided him to the bus The man could not take his eyes off his wife and child

"If we can get them to a doctor…" he mumbled

Curtis shoved him up into the bus and clirip tightened on her daughter as the srowl Blood splattered across her cheek and lips as she gripped the child close

Jenni raised the rifle and the wo away at her breast She nodded tears on her cheeks

"Catherine! Catherine!"

Jenni could hear the wo

She fired

The first shot stilled the child and tore a hole through Catherine’s chest

The woht her and ripped the top of her head off

Jenni turned and got onto the bus in silence She looked at the father as clutching his children to hiazed at the two kids ere near hysterics as they clung to their father

Curtis was pale and had tears in his eyes Bill looked calned to it all

Jenni slaainst it Tears slid down her own cheeks as she thought of her dead children and onceof their deaths She hated the world in thatabout it How it stole children from parents and parents froain Never wanted to see a fa death But she knew that she would and it ry

If she could help it, she would never let it happen again

"When we get back, I’ht," Jenni said softly to Bill

He nodded at her and put the bus in gear and they started the return trip back to the fort

2 The Quiet Before The Storm

Katie walked up the stairs to one of thethe new entry point The sun was setting and the construction creorking hard until the last shards of light faded

It was co around the clock It was rough going and stressful There had been a few attacks by zoed the parties went out into the town (alithin a few blocks of the fort) to salvage what they could, a trickle of survivors began to arrive They were usually pale shadows of the people they had been, near starvation, and sometimes severely dehydrated

Belinda, the town librarian, had hunkered doith a stack of medical books and tried hard to store and the convenience store She wanted desperately for them to raid the clinic, but Juan had explained that the clinic was packed to the gills with zombies If they went into the clinic, it would have to be carefully planned out and loss of life would have to be expected

Katie rubbed the tip of her nose and sighed Her face was slowly healing and now there was just a pale swath of green and purple bruising Her lip had healed and the soreness was fading But she still felt battered and bruised froy of the kills, and shooting thata damn

That still haunted her She had killed him and not cared At first, she had not been certain why she had found it so easy to pull the trigger, then after her dream, she had understood

After someone was bitten, the end result was inevitable To put them out of their misery quickly and efficiently was not only humane, but also necessary for the safety of all She knew that, of course, in theory But the sheer horror of knowing that Lydia was still out there, undead, destroying other lives, was tooover what had been accomplished so far, Katie couldn’t help but smile The outline of the enorh wall, three feet thick, extended the length of a block and a half They had blocked both ends of the block to construct the ith the storage containers and other heavy equip to one up as fast as they could get it up The abandoned businesses had not been incorporated into the fort due to their dilapidated condition, but the wall had been built right up against them