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tore through downtown and left behind all those weird flowers the news reports were saying caused a massive influx of respiratory disorders.
    Jim slapped her again. His fingers dug into her. Screaming, he called her terrible names, when suddenly his mouth yawned open wide, his eyes rolled back, and his face . . . exploded. Darkness shot out of his eyes and nose and mouth, and she breathed it in. All of it, she breathed it in.
    That’s how it spread. First came the storm, then the flowers that spread the seeds of infection. People turned violent just before the seeds, which had taken root inside them, exploded out of their faces, infecting others even as it killed the hosts, then somehow brought them back from the dead. Lira had gotten a lungful of the spores, not just that first time with Jim but half a dozen times since, and had never gotten sick. Had never died and come back. For whatever reason, maybe the residual effects of childhood asthma she thought she’d outgrown, she was immune.
    When Lira got outside, the dead were still everywhere. Bodies in various stages of decay littered the street. A good number of them had been killed by the rage-driven infected. People had simply taken after each other with whatever weapons they could find, including fists and teeth. When they died and came back, those violent tendencies were even worse.
    A larger number of the corpses had been killed by the soldiers first dispatched to the streets of downtown Pittsburgh in the aftermath of the tornados that had swept much of the city into rubble. When the riots began, some of the people now lying dead on the streets had been shot. A lot had been burned. Fire seemed the only sure way to keep the bodies from getting up again. The Army had come through with tanks and jeeps, guns and flamethrowers. They’d finally dropped a bomb, which had been stupid since the Resurrected could manage to stagger around with broken limbs and faces sheared away, while the uninfected couldn’t do much to defend themselves in the same condition. Plus, it had destroyed streets and buildings, ruining whatever might’ve been salvaged from inside. For that reason alone, Lira gave the U.S. government a giant “fuck you.”
    Now she picked her way carefully through a scattered blockage of concrete chunks. She had a small LED flashlight, but it was better to use the moonlight. The Resurrected didn’t sleep, so far as she could tell, but they didn’t seem to see in the dark any better than a living person.
    She’d have gone on foot even if the streets were clear because though a car or truck would’ve carried a lot more supplies, it would’ve been impossible to gas up and would attract too much attention. A motorcycle or scooter could navigate the debris, but she wouldn’t be able to carry much more on one of them than on her back, and if she fell off and hurt herself, there’d be nobody with her to help. No, on foot was better even though that meant it took longer, and she could only carry a few things back at a time.
    In her old life, Lira had bought herself a gym membership every January with high hopes, only to discover that by March, self-discipline had left her. She’d preferred to curl up on the couch and read a book than run on a treadmill. She’d favored flowery skirts and pretty shoes and paid someone to mow her lawn because once when she’d tried to herself, she’d run over a nest of baby bunnies, traumatizing her into being incapable of even touching the mower again. She’d scooped up spiders in paper cups and released them outside. She’d never held a gun.
    She’d discovered she preferred a knife, anyway.
    Guns were loud and had to be reloaded; you had the advantage of distance, but her accuracy, while much improved, was not good enough to fell a charging Resurrected determined to tear off her face. She’d picked up a hunting knife with a six-inch blade off the street in those early days after the storms ripped the city apart. Using it