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Murph cried, “Get back, get back!”

Then the floor gave way under him. He jumped up, trying to grab at something, anything, that would keep him from falling down into the pit. His meaty fingers managed to curl around a lighting fixture that was hanging from the ceiling. Clutching it for dear life, he looked frantically around, his feet dangling in midair, and then pushed himself off the light to a solid piece of ground a few feet from where he’d been standing.

He looked around. Spiff, Margie, and Avi were all at various points in the room. Avi was on the floor, massaging his bad leg. “Y’all okay?”

They all nodded. Avi said, “I’ll live. What the fuck happened?”

“Shit, look!” Margie was pointing down at the floor.

Murph looked over and saw that the floor where he’d been standing had collapsed, falling downward at an angle into the hole that led to the basement. The fish could probably run right up that!

Sure enough, that was what she did a second later. Murph scrambled around trying to find his semi-auto. Or, shit, Margie’s shotgun, the fish’s sawed-off, even those sissy blades Eddie carried, anything he could use as a weapon against that woman.

Before he could find it, she ran up, her boots slamming onto the wood. Murph was sure she was gonna take him out the way she took out Eddie, but instead she grabbed the same light fixture he’d used and swung up to the grid on the ceiling. He lost sight of her a second later.

“Shit,” he said, shaking his head. He’d already broken his promise to the Lord, so what the fuck. Besides, this struck Murph as a situation that called for some serious cussin’.

Especially when he heard a familiar clicking sound.

Oh, fuck.

All of a sudden, the pooches came running up the ramp, cables trailing behind them but not really slowing them down.

One of them leapt right at Murph, snout glistening with blood.

Murph’s last thoughts as the pooch’s teeth sank into his throat and ripped it out were that he never should’ve started cussin’.

Alice sat crouching in the light grid of the KLKB television station and watched as her captors were torn apart by the very dogs they’d tried to kill her with. One tore apart Murph, the guy with the pockmarked face. Another chewed off the arm of Margie, the woman with the baby doll. All of them were literal dog food after a few minutes. Alice wondered how they had managed to keep them in check in the first place and then realized that the one she’d killed—Eddie—was probably the ringleader, or at the very least the dog wrangler.

Once they were out of people to munch on, the dogs wandered around the television station for a while and then headed out, instinctively moving to a place that was less empty of living human flesh to feed on.

When they were gone, Alice jumped down, her knees bending with the impact as she landed on the damaged studio floor.

Trying not to slip in the blood of her captors, she walked back into the room where she’d found Margie and took her bike keys and her weapons back. She also grabbed the Kukri blades. They were priceless and could be useful, particularly against the undead.

Just as she stepped back out into the daylight, her watch beeped.

Looking down at the battered Timex, she saw that she had only a minute before the satellite would be overhead.

Fuck.

As the watch beeped down—59…58…57…56—she ran to the BMW and pulled a desert camouflage tarpaulin out from one of the containers that dangled from the side of the bike. After laying the bike down on its side, she whipped the tarp out to full size and draped it over the bike. Then she threw some of the sand that had blown into the parking lot and the grass onto the tarp to make it look less conspicuous. Between that and the bike being on its side, it wouldn’t jump out as being a bike.

25…24…23…

Shrugging out of her coat, she ran to the doorway to KLKB, dusting the ground behind and in front of her to eliminate any evidence of footprints.

10…9…8…

Finally, she crouched in the doorway, covering herself with the duster, hoping