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You’ll see, and then you’ll understand
too.”
    Josie handed over the map. It was simple and
straightforward: northeast until he hit the fabled Wall.
    “We’re headed for the East Coast if you ever
want to look us up. Maybe you’ll join us out there someday. Someday
things will be right again. Trust me.”
    Thackeray said those two words with such dead
certainty that Adam wondered what he hadn’t been let in
on.
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, rolling
the map up and placing it inside his jacket. “I wish you the best,
Thackeray.”
    “Please. Todd.” Thackeray shook Adam’s hand
for the last time. “Take care of yourself. And her.”
    “I will.”
     
    * * *
     
    Thackeray and a couple other men walked Adam
to the edge of the quarry.
    “Listen, I have to ask you something,”
Thackeray said. “You probably get this all the time...” He looked
expectantly at Adam, who stared blankly back.
    “About... the nature of things. God.
Afterlife.”
    “What about them?”
    “Are they real?”
    The other two men stopped, the same yearning
in their eyes. It was almost childlike... and what good would it do
them, really, to know?
    Adam didn’t have to wrestle with that
particular quandary. “I don’t know,” he said. “You have to
understand that it was never necessary that I know such things as
God’s nature, or where people go... so I never did.”
    “Well, what do you think? ” Thackeray
pressed.
    Adam forced a smile. “I think it’s all in
what you believe. There’s no knowing.”
    He had sensed high beings before. He knew
there was something out there, that he’d come from somewhere ... but whether or not that something gave a damn
about humanity was another story.
    “So who’s the ‘King of the Dead’?” he asked
Thackeray. They were both glad, as it turned out, to change the
subject.
    “He used to run a traveling circus in the
badlands. I know people who saw it—he would perform tricks with
undead animals. People too. They say he was infected, and he’d let
the rotters take bites out of him One night he kissed one and it
tore his lips off. That’s what they say.
    “They say that he eventually turned, but not
alone. He talked his performers into turning with him. They were willingly infected—most of them anyway. I’ve heard of people
committing suicide by infection but this was different. They
celebrated their deaths. And when they came back, they kept
traveling—kept performing, kept entertaining, audiences none the
wiser until the next morning when the circus was gone and so were
their children.”
    “I don’t think such a thing is possible,”
Adam said. “I’ve spent more a century among the dead. I’ve seen
undead capable of frightening, lifelike things—but for ferals to
work together, like a pack? That’s beyond their grasp. Their only
drive is self-preservation.”
    “Fair enough,” Thackeray replied. “Just
remember that things change. You changed.”
    “I did,” Adam said, “but by choice—and they
have no will.”
    He passed under the lizards hanging from
their branches and gave the men a wave. “Be safe.”
    “The East Coast!” Thackeray called.
“Remember!”
    Adam didn’t look back.
     

Six / The Wall
     
    “The Wall” actually referred to the security
wall surrounding the entire Great Cities region. In addition, each
city had its own type of barricade set up around its perimeter. In
the event that the outer Wall was breached, citizens could rest
easy while troops swarmed the “dead zone” between cities and
cleaned out the rotters, be they man or animal. But such an
incident was thought impossible by most, because the Wall was the
pride of the Cities.
    The work of two generations of Senators, it
was three stories tall and five feet thick, concrete poured over a
steel skeleton with roots buried deep in the earth. Every thousand
yards there was a guard post, where soldiers would ascend a ladder
or stairs to the walkway atop the Wall and