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blue-gray, especially around the mouth and eyes, meaning he’s not getting a whole lot of oxygen to circulate his system. So, not a great repair job by the nanites overall.
    But he’s moving, that’s for sure.
    “You want him?” I ask Charlie. He’s got his crossbow up and at the ready, his finger itching along the trigger.
    He nods and I hear the chunk-thwang of the bolt being set free. There’s not even the space of time a heartbeat might take between his nod and his shot. It’s a good shot, but the guy is moving, so getting a spine severing shot isn’t really an option. Still, it’s a good one and the guy’s head jerks back like he got hit in the face with a shovel. He flies backward and hits the sidewalk with a crack that makes me wince.
    “That’ll take time to fix,” I comment, and reach out for the handlebars of his bike.
    Charlie hops off and loads another bolt. I’m a little jealous of his crossbow and the way he works it so easily. Mine is one of Emily’s old ones and easy to use, but his is just too impressive for words. Where he liberated it from I have no idea, but it’s a thing of beauty. It even has a scope on it that works at night, but it sucks the juice from batteries like crazy, so he’s sparing with it even when he’s got the watch.
    “Don’t screw around, Charlie,” I warn when I see him cock his head to the side like he’s considering what to do first.
    “It’s one of them ,” he says, as if that’s all the answer I need to give him carte blanche on the in-betweener.
    I just grunt in response to that because he’s got a point. This group moved into the area some time ago, but we hadn’t laid eyes on them, only their smoke. We should have realized they weren’t the cautious and nice kind of folks because they didn’t hide their smoke like we did. But we didn’t. And when we found them, or rather, when our paths crossed, it wasn’t pretty. We never did find Gloria’s body. Maribelle lost her mother that day. We don’t forgive things like that.
    But all that’s in the past and any revenge we might have taken has already been meted out. He and his friends are in-betweeners. Anything else is wasted on them.
    Charlie lowers his bow and lifts a builder’s hammer from his belt. While the in-betweener’s nanites go into overdrive to repair the damage to their host he flops around like a fish out of water on the sidewalk.
    Even now, the in-betweener’s bearded face is hideously expressive, pulled into a rictus of hunger and need, and his head jerks upward toward Charlie while his overgrown nails scritch against the pavement. Charlie circles the in-betweener, hefting the hammer so that the former human’s eyes keep being drawn to it. Charlie is grinning. This is so unhealthy.
    “Stop screwing around and just end it,” I say, my patience wearing thin. “He’s going to draw more of them with all that noise.”
    That’s probably not entirely true because in-betweeners don’t last long in this urban desert, almost devoid of animal life except the ones that can fly, but you never know. Deaders, on the other hand, are everywhere, and while they are slow and weak, we could still get overwhelmed. My words work, because Charlie stops his circling, his eyes darting around us in quick, hyper-vigilant jerks. He purses his lips, his only sign so far of the distaste he feels for the creature at his feet. Then he brings the hammer down with devastating force right on the forehead of what was once a man—albeit a very bad one.
    The difference between Charlie’s strength and mine is obvious when he does a removal. That’s what we call it when we take out an in-betweener or a deader. It’s clinical and I doubt very much that anyone actually thinks of it that way, but we have our own forms of politeness. Calling the act of smashing someone’s head into a slime trail a removal is one of them. And now, his extra six inches of height and thirty pounds of weight really show in the force