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moved toward her, staggering on bowed legs, his gait made awkward by the absence of one shoe. As he reached out toward Nix, she saw that his palms and forearms were crisscrossed with wounds. When she realized what they were, it sickened her. Defense cuts. The kind a person gets when they’re backing helplessly away from someone trying to cut them. Had this man been unarmed against a reaper? There were similar cuts all along the insides of his arms and outer chest. Nix could imagine him backing away from a killer, arms spread in a hopeless attempt to shelter someone else. A wife, perhaps, or children. Using his own flesh as a shield, and knowing with each cut that nothing he could do, not even the sacrifice of his flesh and blood, would be enough to keep the knives of those fanatical killers from doing their horrible work.
    It made Nix want to gag. This man had suffered so much. There was a final deep gash across his throat from where the death blow had been dealt, and his clothes were stained with blood that had pumped out of him with his failing heart. That heart hung still and silent within the walls of his chest, a thing that had been both defeated and broken by evil.
    If Nix could have turned and run away, she would have. But there was only sheer rock behind her. The path to escape was behind the zom. There was no option left except to fight. To do more harm to this man.
    A black goo dribbled from the creature’s mouth, viscousand heavy, and Nix thought she could see tiny white thread-worms wriggling in the mess.
    She swiftly knelt to snatch up a fist-sized rock, and as she did so Nix saw one more thing that made no sense. The one shoeless foot was swollen and discolored, a sign of advanced decomposition. There was similar discoloration on the man’s arms and chest, and some on his face. Discolored veins were visible through his skin, and some of his fingernails had even fallen off. The tissues were becoming swollen as the process of decay released gasses from the disintegrating tissues.
    But . . . that was impossible.
    One of the enduring mysteries of the post–First Night world was that zoms decayed to a certain point, and then the process stopped. No one knew why. The living dead did not corrupt to the point where their flesh actually fell apart. But this man looked ready to burst apart; his soft tissue was beginning to liquefy. And that did not happen. Not to any zombie. Only after a zom had been quieted did the normal process of decomposition run its full course. This was something she had never heard of. Not even in Dr. McReady’s reports. Was this a new form of mutation? If so . . . what did it mean? What could it mean?
    The zom kept moving toward her. He did not run, but it was more than a shuffling walk. Even with the advanced decomposition, he moved with more speed than a regular zom, and even more coordination.
    Nix hurled the rock as hard as she could. It struck the monster in the chest with a sound like a bursting watermelon. Fetid black blood erupted from the wound. The smell was so intense that Nix staggered backward. The only thingthat pungent she’d ever smelled was pure cadaverine, but that was weird, because a body only produced cadaverine when it was going through advanced decomposition. Her science class had toured the cadaverine plant in town, and they’d seen how the technicians harvested it from rotting animal flesh.
    Nix took that moment to pick up two more stones as fast as she could, hurling them sidearm, hitting the thing in the shoulder and face. It staggered sideways into the rock wall, but it rebounded and came after her again. Nix scooped up a bigger stone. It was too big to throw, so she gripped it with both hands, raised it over her head, ran down the slope, and brought the stone down with all her strength.
    The zom’s head exploded.
    Black goo splattered her face and hair and clothes. She screamed and began hysterically slapping at the wormy muck.
    Behind her the zom