A/N: Before we begin – as stated, this is a sequel. If you want to understand what's taking place in this story (particularly the odd travelling companions) you'll need to read "The Last Game" first. Also, detailed warnings: pretty much everything in frequent and graphic detail. Sex, violence, and strong language.

Okay...onward.

Salt Lake City, Utah

The darkness was broken only by one small candle flame, and the silence only by the soft hiss of white noise from a small battery-powered radio receiver.

A young woman reached out of the gloom and twisted the dial, moving it with painstaking care as she listened for…something. Anything. Ideally a human voice, somewhere out there on the airwaves. Her hand moved another fraction of an inch, and then she drew in a sharp breath as the receiver struggled with a faint signal, catching and losing it, then catching it once more. Her fingers moved again, this time turning up the gain, and then she reached for a tattered map and tracked one fingernail over it by the poor light, searching for the coordinates she'd received.

The signal faded out entirely, but she had heard enough, and now reached over to turn off the receiver. For a few seconds there was a faint scratching as she pencilled down a few more details on a scrap of paper, then folded this up and slipped it into her pocket. Finally she stood up, wincing at a slight stiffness in her lower back from sitting hunched over the radio for almost an hour, and then moved over and unlocked the front door, taking a deep breath of sweet summer evening air with a grateful smile.

The view over the city from this mountain hideaway was undeniably impressive, all the more so for the blood of the dying sun, which painted the dead edifices in glaring ruby shades and cast their shadows askance. Had the situation been different, it would have been lit with jewels of light by now, store-front windows and street lights winking on here and there. Now, though, the city skulked by the lake and slipped seamlessly into the night like a cat in a necropolis.

They'd been here for nine days, which made it their longest rest stop so far. Never more than a week in one place, her companion had said one day when she'd asked him the simplest of questions, and he'd held them both to that pledge for three and a half years now. They'd crossed the country, up and down, east and west, their only consistent pattern being to stick to the southern states in the winter and the northern coasts in the summer, fleeing the vagaries of the climate like birds. They'd been in the process of tracking north-west, already a little late by their own schedule as the temperatures climbed, when he'd insisted upon settling down here for reasons that seemed elusive at the time and which he'd not deigned to share. Now they'd finally found what they were looking for – and, more to the point, realising that they might well have missed it entirely had they continued on to Seattle as originally planned – she was beginning to wonder if perhaps he wasn't prescient.

A small sound startled her for a second, and she looked down at her side to see that she was no longer alone on the porch. Nero had padded out to join her and sat down in silence, only the soft scrape of his claws on the boards betraying his presence. She looked down at the rangy mongrel with fondness, leaning down to ruffle one ear for a moment, which he accepted graciously, his eyes slitted in pleasure as she scratched her nails through his soft fur. She tended to talk to the dog these days. Her travelling companion, for his few worthwhile points, had never been a conversationalist of note and was even less so lately, as if he had too much on his mind to waste time in talking.

They'd found the poor beast sloping around the suburbs of Pittsburgh the summer before, half starved, stick-thin and being harassed and pecked by crows into the bargain. She'd driven them off and watched the dog latch onto her almost on the spot. He hadn't wanted the animal tagging along; they had enough trouble finding food for two, he'd said, coldly. But she'd stood her ground, and Nero had proven his worth just four nights later, when the lone walker had attacked as they'd slept...

"Come on in," she said gently, dismissing this memory and angling her head at the open door. "We'd better report this." She ushered the dog into the cabin and closed and locked the door behind them, then glanced around and headed over to the bedroom, pushing the door open with a hand that trembled only slightly.

The tiny room beyond was in complete darkness, but with the door open, there was just enough wash from the candle to illuminate the ragged mattress against the wall and outline the hulking man who slept there. She remained in the doorway for a few seconds more, and cocked her head at him, and then she moved to his side and crouched down. She paused once more to bite her lip, and then reached out.

He moved like a striking snake, his fingers closing on her arm before she'd made contact.

"What?" he muttered, his voice full of gravel and choked with sleep. Her mouth puckered slightly, and she reached out and pried his grip loose with a matter-of-fact twist before replying.

"I heard a broadcast," she said, rubbing her wrist idly and looking away for a second, hesitating.

"And?" he prompted, rolling over onto one elbow and sitting up, now much more alert. The light from the open door flicked across his face as he moved, and for a moment she saw a fiery spark cross his expression.

"Good news," she said, finally looking back at his face and steeling herself, "and, then again, bad news..."

Winslow, Arizona

"Bollocks to this."

Private Clay cuffed a river of sweat from his forehead with an irritable swipe before casting a disparaging glance around at the scenery. It had taken him roughly three days to become thoroughly disenchanted with his posting to the United States – particularly to this dull, rolling expanse of nothing much at all – and those three days were now almost nine weeks past, during which the weather had soared to uncomfortable levels of dry, dusty heat that parched his throat and eyes in equal measure.

It would have been nice, he reflected, to have been given a choice, but it seemed that the British contingent of the UN rescue mission had drawn the short straw; they were all posted to various desolate reaches of the south-west such as this. The only saving grace, as far as Clay was concerned, was the irony inherent in the situation. At last, he thought, the US had been taken down a peg or two.

Or three or four, come to that, and now he felt a little ashamed of his internal commentary. By all accounts the live population of the country had been reduced to fewer than one million people as their neighbours to both north and south had slammed shut their borders and started transmitting false outbreak reports over the airwaves; the grotesque truth was that the Canadians and Mexicans – to say nothing of the rest of the world - had gone about their business quite unconcerned as the Americans were slaughtered like cattle by their reanimated dead.

"Oi!" A hand slapped the back of his head, and he flinched. "Wake up!"

His companion on gate duty, Corporal Mitchell, was an irascible Scot, still young enough to be bearing a few traces of teenage acne on his florid cheek. The fact that he, Clay, was unable to pull rank on a man some five or six years his junior had been a source of some irritation throughout this afternoon's posting, and he would be grateful when it was over.

"I was awake," he grumbled, readjusting the set of his helmet.

"No you weren't," said Mitchell, looking him up and down with a trace of contempt buried in his eyes. "You're daydreamin'."

"Well come on," said Clay, annoyed. "It's not like we're being besieged by the fucking Mongol horde here, is it?" He waved an arm at the broad swathes of dry, dusty landscape in front of the chain link gate to illustrate his point. "There's nobody here."

The corporal's eyes narrowed just a little.

"May I remind you," he said, slowly, enunciating through his thick Glaswegian accent, "that there's still plenty o' dead up and about these parts particularly since they've been chased out o' the cities. Not only that," he went on, relentlessly, "but we've got the human survivors to worry about, too. If they've survived this long, then they're either more'n a mite lucky, or they're pretty dangerous bastards, probably worse'n the walkers. You ken?"

Clay knew, and however the facts had been expressed – he was still struggling to make sense of so much as half of what the corporal said to him – they were also, when looked at in the cold light of day, the truth. Natural selection would have pared both the living and the living dead of this ruined empire down to the strongest and most ruthless survivors.

He had just started to frame a retort when something caught his eye, and he started. "Hold up," he said, drawing his side-arm. "Looks like we've got visitors."

Mitchell squinted into the haze along the road, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun as best he could. At first he couldn't see anything, but as he watched, two figures resolved themselves in the distance, fading out of the dust-choked air as effectively as if they'd been ghosts. He initially struggled to make out any details, but as they approached at a steady, unhurried pace, he studied them carefully.

Slightly in the lead was a slender young woman with short, punkish, honey-coloured hair and wide eyes so dark that they might as well have been black; but to Mitchell, this much was background detail to the long-handled axe that she had slung over one shoulder. She turned back occasionally as she walked, addressing some unheard remark to her companion, and the expression on her face suggested that she didn't mind that she was getting very little in the way of response and was perfectly happy to do enough talking for two.

Mitchell turned his attention to the second of the new arrivals now, and unlike the woman – whose only immediately worrying attribute was the crude weapon she carried so casually – this one was broadcasting more than a few naked threat signals, all of which had Mitchell's palm sweating slightly against the cool butt of his pistol.

The other figure was a big, broad shouldered man with a swaggering gait and a pump-action shotgun strapped behind his back, and in spite of the summer heat he was wearing a shabby black duster that flapped now and again in the surging prairie winds like the wings of a carrion crow. He kept his head down as he walked, so that his long, greying hair fell over his forehead and obscured his features. As the two drew near, though, he looked up at last, and Mitchell started, stepping back a pace in apprehension.

The man's face was a horrifying mess. Not only was his right cheek marked with a vicious, jagged scar which ran from the corner of his mouth all the way to his ear, but he also wore a black patch over his left eye, beneath which could just be seen the lower edge of yet more twisted scar tissue. Beneath this devastation, however, his lips were set in the tiniest of lopsided smiles, and his one remaining eye, which was a bright, baleful blue, glittered gently as he regarded the soldiers in silence.

Mitchell was about to speak up when the woman turned her head aside, stuck two fingers in her mouth and loosed a piercing whistle that wouldn't have shamed a sailor. For two seconds it wasn't clear what this was supposed to achieve, and then a dark shape flicked over the distant roll of the prairie like a comet, darting left and right occasionally as it moved, but with a definite directional tendency. Eventually, it resolved itself into the shape of a pelting, long-legged dog – some kind of German Shepherd cross, Mitchell thought – and once it had reached the woman's side, it sat down without further instruction and rolled out about one inch of pink tongue, panting gently.

"Hi," said the woman at last, her tone bright and conversational, giving Clay and Mitchell a fleeting smile apiece. "I think we missed the signs. Is this Camp Lindbergh?"

Clay, who had also been staring at the one-eyed man in undisguised trepidation, finally shook himself out of his stupor and turned his attention to the woman. She appeared to have derived some small amusement from the soldiers' reaction to her associate, and battled down a smirk at their discomfort.

"Yeah, it is," said Clay, "but look, this is a military base, darling, and I –"

"My name's Diana," she said, dropping the axe from her shoulder and planting the head on the dirt road, raising a brief cloud of dust and causing the soldiers to jump as one man. "Diana Gordon. I don't respond well to 'darling', 'honey', 'sweetheart', 'girl', 'sugar' or 'babe'. I can live with 'miss', however." She turned and nodded at the man for a moment. "This is Hoffman."

"Just that?" asked Mitchell.

"Yes," said the woman. "Is that a problem?"

"Can he talk?"

There was a soft grunt from Hoffman, but no more than this, and he shifted his weight slightly as he hiked the shotgun a little higher on his shoulder. Mitchell responded to this movement with a sudden reflex, and his hand returned to his hip without waiting for a conscious instruction from his brain, feeling for the pistol once more.

"When he wants to, yes," said Diana, smiling without the smallest hint of humour. "And you are...?"

"Corporal Mitchell," said Mitchell, "miss," he added, nervously. "That's Private Clay."

"Nice to meet you, gentlemen," said Diana, watching him evenly, flexing her fingers on the handle of the axe as she did so. "Now, Corporal, there are a couple of things I'd like you to be clear about. One is that we have walked here all the way from Salt Lake City, which has taken a little over two weeks, so even though that's not your fault you'll understand if I'm not in the best of moods right now.

"The other," she went on, her voice still smooth and mild, "is that if you don't stop staring at my tits, I'm going to kick you in the balls so hard you'll have to go through puberty again."

Mitchell blinked. Clay, however, started to laugh beside him, and didn't stop until Diana fired him a warning glance which had him shutting up and averting his gaze with due speed. This done, she reverted to her former expression of serenity, propped her hand on her hip and sighed softly.

"I'd like to speak to your commanding officer," she said. "Please?" she finished, after a slight but telling pause for consideration, which suggested that she'd decided to play nice, at least for the time being.

"He's busy right now, miss," said Mitchell, trying to avoid adopting too confrontational a tone. In truth, he had no idea what the captain was doing; he knew only that he would rather not be the one caught between his CO and this disconcerting pair.

"Are you fucking deaf?" said Hoffman, his low growl slicing through the air. "Get him out here. Right now." To add to this, he unshipped the shotgun in one fluid movement and let it drop, the barrel slapping into his palm. The soldiers jumped again, but Diana merely glanced off to her side and curled an eyebrow at her companion as if to say I'll handle this, and, while Hoffman did not acknowledge this quiet rebuke, neither did he speak out again. By the time the subtext of this little moment had registered with Mitchell and Clay she was already turning back, looking a shade too calm for comfort.

"May we come in?" she asked.