"Zoe! Cress! Time to leave!"

Dirge's bark rent the empty black silence of her sleep and forced her eyes open. The broken bits of sleep fell from her mind like glass shattered by a high note and she groaned.

"Are there zombies?"

Cress heard Zoe's drowsy mumble, but the lullaby thump of her heart kept steady. Dirge had shaken his head no. Cress drug the first breath of the day laboriously into her lungs, and smelled nothing but Dirge, the dog, and the tantalizing aroma emanating from Zoe.

"No zombies close by, but there is a city about five or six miles that way. The chances are slim, but maybe this one has some people left that can help."

Before Cress had time to uncurl and stretch her stiff, wilting muscles, she was hoisted bodily to her feet by Dirge's huge hand, holding her wrists where they were crossed by the rope in a vicegrip. She bit back a squeal of pain and alarm.

"I'm afraid you'll have to catch up on your beauty rest sometime later."

Had she the strength, she would have laid him flat with one solid telekinetic blast to the back of his bald skull head. All she could do was grit her teeth behind the mask and the gag and work her popped shoulders back into place.

If she didn't find something substantial to drink soon, she'd waste away. She hadn't even had a proper rest in weeks, and that had sapped her strength as much as the lack of fresh, living blood. She closed her eyes, flexed her shoulders, and wished bitterly that she had stopped in that graveyard and dug up one of the empty coffins to sleep in. She didn't care how rotten or how smelly it was; all she wanted to do was crawl in, lay down and wrap herself in the blessed wooden cocoon of silence.

Thock went her shoulder and she groaned again, this time bringing a backward glance from Zoe, who was trotting along on Dirge's heels. Cress raised her head and brought her own dim, clouded eyes up to meet Zoe's tired but alert ones. Dark blue circles were set deep into the thin, pale skin around her eyes, painted there by nights spent sleepless, hungry, and alone. The girl gazed at her for a long time, unafraid. Cress was taken aback; even grown men could not meet her hypnotic, piercing eyes for long. The vampire blinked, and Zoe turned away.

you're weaker than you thought. your eyes don't even work anymore. you need to drink, the wheedling voice of her hunger whispered, tugging her mind toward...

"Not her... not her," she mumbled to herself, out of earshot of the zombie and his dog. Through the straggly sheet of her chin-length blonde hair, her eyes settled on the dog padding behind Dirge. The dog, Cerberus, had either seemed to grow a few inches or Cress had shrunk. He had stopped to let Zoe clamber up on his back, and the girl's legs did not even reach past the bottom of the dog's belly. An eerily lupine head sat high and alert on a strong neck, which in turn grew down into a deep chest and massive shoulders. Muscles rippled under his patchy fur all down his back, and Cress did not doubt his powerful back legs would allow him to break even with a racing Thoroughbred, had he the chance. In life he could have been a German Shepherd or he could have been a Malamute. It was hard to tell, because more of him was stitches and bald patches of skin than what used to be his original body. But one thing was unmistakably clear to Cress: he had been a police dog. If aspects of an organism's earthly existence carried over beyond death, then this dog had the bearing and the discipline of half a well-trained, seasoned K9 police unit. Cress herself had worked with and had been partnered with several K9 units on cases over the years, and the only difference between Cerberus and those Shepherds was that the small flame of life was dead in this dog's haunted, watchful eyes.

That spark, on the other hand, was anything but dead in the eyes of the little girl astride Cerberus. From the moment she had set her large oildrop eyes on Cress, the vampire had become intrigued, fascinated with the bold young thing, and not just as a source of nourishment. Zoe herself was small, the top of her head nearly level with Dirge's knee, but the desire to survive beat so powerfully in her heart that it nearly overwhelmed Cress. Her threadbare grey shirt bore the silhouette of a raven, perched vigilant on an invisible branch, watching Cress, it seemed. Another shirt, this one big and flowing, was tied by the sleeves around her waist, and below the shirt Zoe wore long, loose pants that seemed to be, like the rest of her outfit, hand-me-downs from an older brother. Her sneakers were scuffed and torn open in several places, a bleak contrast to Cress' own impregnable steel-toed workman's boots she had stolen from a victim several months ago. Zoe's sable hair was done up in two fraying pigtails, her long, choppy bangs covering the last traces of a healing cut on her cheek. Her soft, timid voice and demeanor belied the deep reservoir of strength and courage Cress saw shining in her, and the vampire began to regret almost killing the girl.

She promptly received a mental slap in the face by the voice: don't tell me you're that far gone. she's prey. she's fair game.

She shook the voice out of her head, and nearly fell over with dizziness.

need i try to convince you further?

"Ah, the city," proclaimed Dirge, and with monumental effort, Cress raised her head. The ragged, wrecked skyline of what was once a mighty metropolis reached plaintively to the sky, broken and bent like the old wooden fence of a haunted house.

"Looks promising," Zoe moaned.

"Come on. Maybe we'll have better luck here." Dirge's voice suddenly lost its rough, croaky edges and took on an almost begging tone as he glanced back at the girl perched on Cerberus' broad back. "Remember we haven't seen any zombies for the past half hour. Maybe they all know to stay away from this place because there are people here who can defend themselves."

"But you're a zombie. If there are people here, they won't know you're good. They'll try to kill you too, and Cerberus, and maybe even..." Zoe glanced back at Cress, "her. Maybe they'll kill all of us."

"We won't know until we try. Come on."

greeeeeeeeaaaaat. let's follow the dead guy into the jaws of death... again. i'm not sure if this is irony or just plain stupidity.

Cress repeated Dirge's empty reassurance to the voice as the four travelers plodded down the main thoroughfare into the city, its turtlebacked asphalt littered with dead leaves, broken road signs, ancient litter from the city's active past, and the occasional puddle of dirty black liquid that could have been water or blood.

The main huddle of high-rises into which they crept had fared slightly better than the suburbs, which had been so completely decimated by fire, storms, zombies and time that the individual rubble piles of houses were no longer distinguishable from each other or the ground. Rather, it was as if the ruins of the skyscrapers themselves had been built from the scraps of the suburbs, dripping like soggy sand through the hand of a giant to the jagged drip-towers at some dismal beach.

They passed a skyscraper with only its bottom four floors and a single "U" on the front left intact, and then came the stench that almost made Cress topple over again. A dangerous, phlegmy growl sounded from Cerberus, and Dirge had already drawn his shovel.

"Cerberus!" Dirge did not even need to finish the command, and the dog hurtled off like a stitched juggernaut. Squelchings and crunches and savage barks reached Cress' oblivious ears. She stood anchored to the ground, bone-chillingly scared for the first time in her immortal life. She was out of strength, and the bolt of adrenaline that would have been crashing through her system by now had been absent for over two hundred years. She had no weapon, and no power of her own with which to blast the zombies back like last time. She hunkered down near Zoe, seeking a measure of protection, but in the next moment she realized that Zoe was what these zombies were after, and she flung herself away. Dirge stood tall and protected the girl, wielding his shovel as an extension of his right arm, slicing one zombie down the middle of its mangled face, and another clean in half at the ribs. He leapt at the zombies with furious energy and used every inch of his weapon for a kill. The butt of his shovel pierced the stomach of one behind him just as the flat of the blade dealt a sickening blow to the head of another limping dangerously close to the girl.

The sound of blood rushing through her veins reminded the vampire of Niagra Falls as the zombies circled closer to them. She watched Dirge stare out over the sea of dripping flesh midway through a punishing snap kick that made the head of the unlucky zombie explode like a watermelon under a mallet. The tide was coming in, and Dirge was quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Suddenly, he whipped his head around, his wide eyes glittering with battlelust, and locked her eyes onto his. His dead, gravelly voice seemed to squirm into her mind like earthworms into a freshly-buried corpse. You touch Zoe, you spend the rest of your existence with a lead pipe stuck between your eyes.

Then, with a deep, mighty bellow of rage and all the coiled energy of a lion pouncing on its kill, the zombie vaulted into the air high above the heads of his kind and landed like a cat upon several of them, his shovel already swinging. Cress realized then what had happened. Now she was alone with Zoe, while Dirge fought back the zombies from a less desperate position. She looked at Zoe, and Zoe looked back at her. The girl was frightened, but not of her. Bound, gagged and weak to the point of collapse, there was not much the vampire could have done to her, as much as she would have wanted. Instead, the girl drew close to her and they huddled together as Dirge and Cerberus mowed through the zombies around them.