Can’t wait to sit down for a while. This pretending to be brave and strong is getting old.

Because there was something to be said for going through life in a fog. In the fog, you couldn’t see the monsters coming.

Then he knew what hell was like. It wasn’t a hot place where a pointy-tailed beast poked you with a pitchfork. Hell was inside your own head, where the doors were closed, where hope never knocked, where darkness and pain and self-pity were the only companions. Forever.

Readers respond to authenticity, originality and excitement, even if it’s not packaged in a way they expect.

I’m the government now,” Sarge said. “Sure, there might be other bunkers like this one. Maybe even our beloved president is playing a hand of poker and drinking beer in one as we speak. I’ve heard rumors there are serious bunkers out in Colorado where they have entire armored divisions and even planes in shielded bunkers, where the electromagnetic pulse wouldn’t have affected them. Maybe even the Russians and Chinese are already rolling this way.

Well, who’s real? The living or the dead?

That would be just dandy. All we’d have to do is sit back and wait for them to wipe each other out. But that doesn’t explain the message written in blood. That’s the mark of a seriously deranged mind. An intelligent mind, but one without a conscience.

What the hell is he talking about? Then he saw them, gathering in formation like tiny jets on a strafing run. He thought at first they were doves, but that made no sense, because doves didn’t congregate in such coordinated patterns and they were too far inland to be seagulls. He couldn’t judge their size or distance, so high and feathery was.

But we’re not a family.

You put a weasel in a forty-dollar suit, and you get a forty-dollar weasel.