Still of Night by Jonathan Maberry & Rachael Lavin

Author:Jonathan Maberry & Rachael Lavin [Maberry, Jonathan & Lavin, Rachael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2018-11-09T08:00:00+00:00

— 14 —

DAHLIA AND THE PACK

Life became strange for Dahlia. Surreal. That was the word, she decided. That said it all.

She had always loved that word. Before. It had been a vocabulary word in tenth grade, and she liked the description in one of the dictionaries she read. Perception marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream. That was fun, though she understood at the time that “irrational” did not necessarily mean “bad.” It meant that it made no logical sense. That seemed to apply to a lot of things in her world. The whole concept of physical beauty—a lucky happenstance of genetics—being the yardstick by which people were judged made no sense at all. That was irrational. She was so much smarter than pretty much all of the “in crowd,” the preps, the whatevers. Dahlia had been one of the smartest kids in her class, but because she’d always been fat the others discounted her intelligence. Waistlines mattered more than IQ or GPA. Which was nuts. That was surreal in a bad way. The fact that she knew that her brains would matter ten times more when they all graduated was another kind of surreal. Her ability to dive into literary worlds and become lost in them as if what lay between the pages was more real than anything in school . . . yeah, that was surreal. It was an escape hatch that kept her sane and made her smile when nothing else did.

Then the world came to an end and the rules changed. A lot of the pretty kids got eaten. Those that still had enough meat on the bone to reanimate were now pretty fucking ugly. And their clothes looked like shit. How embarrassing to be wearing last year’s fashions forever? That made Dahlia smile, even now. Even though it was petty and a little catty. It was also surreal, though. In a different way, and not entirely in a bad way. Not for her. While everyone she knew at school was dying, she’d come more fully alive. She’d become the leader of a roving band of survivors carving out their place in a post-apocalyptic world mostly populated by zombies. Actual zombies.

So freaking surreal.

And now . . .

Now this.

Dahlia stood in the center of a clearing, wearing a blindfold around her eyes, holding a Sharpie in each hand. Red in her left, blue in her right. Instead of knives. It was day seven of her training. And her life had now become some kind of action movie training montage. Weird exercises that were part wax-on, wax-off and part Jedi mind tricks. She’d tried calling the old man “Mr. Miyagi” or “Yoda,” but instead of taking offense he’d merely told her to grow up. That stung. A lot more than she thought it would.

“Again,” said Mr. Church.

She heard his voice but couldn’t tell exactly where it came from. He was spooky like that. He made only exactly as much sound as he wanted to. He could

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