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he stared up at her, his mouth opening and closing as if desperate for food or water. The creature had no legs and wha t trailed behind him instead were strands of rotted intestine that slid through his black trail of blood like a limp tail. He snapped his jaws at her as he drew closer.
    Beyond the eviscerated creature were more of the living dead, all of them with tremendous wounds that would've killed a normal man. They reached out to her as they staggered forward and clawed at the space between, as if hoping to hasten their advance any way they could.
    Echo Dawn turned away in time to be blinded by the muzzle flash of the guard that chased her. There was no pain before the darkness.

     

CHAPTER 1 – Surviving in a Dead World
    BEN WATANABE
     
    Twenty years had passed since the outbreak of the zombie virus decimated the world's population. I survived while six and a half billion others died. I didn't survive on luck.
    My father prepared me for this. He trained me to fight and survive in a post apocalyptic world. While my friends were watching television or playing videogames, I was in the wild, learning to kill animals with deadfall traps. He taught me how to filter water through a sock filled with gravel before boiling it to ensure safety. He scolded me as I used my knife too often, insisting that it should be a tool of last resort when all other possibilities failed, to help keep the blade sharp for when I really needed it. Our vacations were never to Disney World, or Six Flags - instead, he would blindfold me and drop me off in the middle of a forest preserve with the promise that he would return in a week to see if I survived. My birthday presents were blowguns, bows and arrows, and guns.
    My father saved my life, but he did it with the intention of turning me into an assassin.
    The apocalypse had been planned, but the men holding the reins lost their grip. I was only thirteen and living in Georgia when it began, but was captured and brought to a facility where they ran tests on me and several other children, most of them much younger than I was. My capture wasn't an accident, and got me close to my first target, a general that was involved in the development of the virus. Unfortunately, by the time I found him he was already dead. A shard of glass had been pushed into his throat.
    My father was supposed to meet me in a safe house several miles away from the city, but he was gone when I got ther e. He left behind twelve files labeled with a name that contained all of the information he'd been able to gather about the people responsible for the apocalypse, including where they were scheduled to go after the virus spread and what land they owned. The first file, labeled 'Covington', concerned the general I'd found dead in the facility where they were running tests on me. I burned that file and moved on to the next target.
    The next two targets were easy to find and convinced me that my mission would be easier than it ended up being. Nineteen years have passed since then, and in that time I've only managed to find two more of the initial twelve, leaving me with seven files unburned. I'd nearly resigned myself to failure when I was tipped off about a caravan traveling north of Colorado that was being run by a man named Jerald Scott.
    Jerald Scott's file was the thinnest of them all. He was a member of the military, but all details about his service were missing. I had a picture of him, staring at the camera with a hateful scowl and a pock marked face, that had my father's writing on it.
    "Kill on sight. Don't let him speak."
    It was the only file my father had scrawled something on, and that made Jerald Scott feel somehow more important than the others. For that reason, I abandoned my other leads when I heard someone mention that a man named J. Scott had taken control of a nearby group of traders. That's how I ended up laying on the second floor of a ravaged home in a forgotten town near the Colorado border of