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CHAPTER 1

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall,

one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Sir Edmund Burke

Robert “Rusty” Fulmer Bennett III wasn’t a guy to just sit around if he could help out. But he also wasn’t, still, in the best of shape.

When he’d boarded the cruise ship Voyage Under Stars with his buddy, Ted, he’d weighed 337 lbs, nekkid. By the time the rescue teams from Wolf Squadron found him, Ted had long before zombied and Rusty weighed 117 lbs and was naked, covered in bed sores and mostly unconscious on his filth covered bunk. Since he was still 6' 7", and, honestly, big boned, 117 was pretty bad. The one nurse Wolf had found so far, no doctors, said it was a miracle he’d survived.

So he still wasn’t in the best shape of his life when he sat down in the “Wolf Squadron Human Resources” office. In the four weeks since he’d been found he’d put on about twenty pounds but that wasn’t much. And he could barely work out at all. He wasn’t sure that he could hack it as a “clearance specialist” but he was all up for killing zombies.

He filled in his name on the clipboard and took a seat. Then he opened up a packet of sushi and started to munch.

“Still putting on weight, huh?” the guy next to him asked.

“I never thought I’d like sushi,” Bennett said, offering some of the rolls. “Anything is, like, the best food in the world, now. Except hummus. If I never eat hummus again I’ll be so glad. ”

“Gotta try fish eyeballs,” the guy said, taking one and nodding. “Mmmm… tuna is sooo much better raw than dolphin. Brad Stevens. ”

“Rusty Bennett,” Rusty said.

“Not the Flipper, ark, ark, kind,” Stevens said. “It’s a kind of fish. But, hey, when that’s what you’ve got. ” He shrugged. “I’d have eaten a, you know, dolphin, dolphin if I could have caught one. There were a couple of times I’d have eaten the asshole of a dolphin… ”

“I’d have eaten the asshole of an asshole,” Rusty said.

“You’re like a string-bean pole,” Stevens said. “How much did you lose?”

“Two hundred pounds,” Rusty said. “I was kinda big when we got locked down. ”

“Oh,” Stevens said, wincing. “In one of the cabins on the Voyage?”

“Yep,” Rusty said. “One of the reasons I want to go do something is every time I walk in the damned cabin I’m afraid the door’s going to close behind me and never open again. ”

“I thought I’d lost weight. I can’t believe they cleared you for work. ”

“I just walked down here,” Rusty said, shrugging. “The worst they can do is say no… ”

“Stevens…?”

* * *

“You’re still in very poor shape, Mister Bennett,” the lady said. Like most he’d seen, she was pregnant.