They scrambled through the doors, barricading themselves and climbing to the vantage point on the banisters, looking down on the gathered dead - little girls with teddy bears and half their heads missing and office workers dropping body parts through the cuffs of their shirts and school kids with wide, foggy eyes and blood from head to toe.

Through the mass of festering corpses went a kind of guttural half-strangled wail, a slow, terrible moan that chilled her down to the marrow. She tried very hard to push the thought away, to hear only the inhuman grunt and snarl of things that had been impossible, Hollywood fantasies and kid's stories, until two weeks ago. To see only monsters, out to kill and destroy her like they had Nathan and... everyone. But the dead, undeniably, were crying.

And she realized what that chill was now, knew it so well that she had almost forgotten it. She heard it in the murmurs, saw it in the way they huddled together, bodies too far gone for tears. She'd thought it was some herd mentality, like ants or bees or some alien horror guided by a hidden mother ship or queen slime with razor teeth. But she recognized it now.

The dead were lonely.