The stone staircase turned left, then left again. When Hélène reached the bottom, she stopped, looked, and listened.

The basement was deep, and as silent as a tomb. She was at least three full meters below the restaurant, maybe more, and whatever was happening upstairs she couldn’t hear. Everything down here except the ceiling was built of stone, and it was at least five degrees cooler.

She stood at the end of a long, narrow corridor, lit by bare fluorescent lamps spaced several meters apart, with gloomy gaps of near-darkness between them. She couldn’t see the other end of the corridor, but she was certain it stretched beyond the end of the restaurant above.

She lowered her bound hands until they were behind her thighs, then she sat on the stairs. Facing a short hallway across the corridor that led to a women’s restroom, she lifted her legs, bent her knees and brought her hands around in front of her. Her eyes fixed on the restroom, she freed her hands using the knife she’d picked up in the kitchen. Tossing the binds aside and rubbing her wrists, she realized that she couldn’t continue down the corridor without first making sure that the restroom was clear. She took a deep breath and stood. Knife in hand, she advanced into the short hallway.

She pushed open the restroom door and took a step inside, the knife out in front of her. A clump of thick, dark hair flopped down in front of one eye. With a twitch of her head, she swung the clump away and surveyed the room.

To her right were three sinks, filthy white porcelain grimly lit by flickering florescents. Across from the sinks were three stalls, their doors closed, their interiors concealed. She would have to check them out. With a sigh, she moved swiftly to the first stall and kicked it open. Nothing but a toilet. She stepped to the next stall and kicked it open too. Just another toilet.

She moved to the final stall, and in the moment that she kicked its door, a noise from upstairs drew her attention sideways. Had something crashed against the door at the top of the stairs? Was the wild-haired man trying to get in? Or was it the zombies? She waited, her eyes focused on the restroom entrance, but the air was once again silent and still.

Then a rustling sound drew her attention back to the stall. Seeing what was inside, she gasped and dropped the knife and stumbled backwards onto the floor. Her scuttering feet pushed her away from the stall and under the sink, where she stopped abruptly with her back against the wall.

The thing in the stall had once been a young man. Now it was a zombie. It didn’t advance on her, but it was eyeing her hungrily and reaching out for her with both hands. Its fingers were grey and bony, and its nails were cracked and caked with dried blood.

Hélène was about to stand and flee when she realized that the zombie was stuck. Not only was it hanging by the neck from a pipe up inside the suspended ceiling, it had no legs and no midsection. It was only a head, two arms and a trunk dangling a meter and a half off the ground. The floor below it was covered in thick gore, much of which had oozed out of the stall. Hélène might’ve noticed the gore before had it not been for the poor light and her impatience.

She stood. This zombie was no threat. It was a vicious dog at the end of a leash, wanting to tear her apart but unable to reach her. She picked up her knife and took a step toward it. One of these things had killed her mother and Harry’s wife, and by now one had likely killed Nic and the American. Yet this was all they were: mindless eating machines, inhabited by some force that made use of them to satisfy its hunger for as long as their brains were intact.

Hélène took another step forward and raised the knife. It would be too easy, perhaps even cruel, but she would end this one. She would drive the tip of her knife straight into its forehead.

“Er het aube hie gschaffet,” someone said.

Hélène turned. The wild-haired man was standing in the doorway. The sound she’d heard before had been the door upstairs opening and then crashing closed. She’d taken the key but apparently he’d had a franc.

“Er het probiert sich ds Läbe znäh,” the man went on, “aber sie hei ihn scho gfunde gha. I ha ihm no wöue häufe, aber I ha nid chönne. Auso hani ihn haut eifach dert la si.”

Hélène didn’t understand a word, but she knew she was in trouble. She was trapped between the zombie in the stall and the man she’d left behind to fend for himself. As if relieved that the man had arrived, she smiled innocently — and concealed the knife behind her.

***

Walker sprinted across the field, completely unnoticed by the creatures he passed. What was it? Was he too fast for their deadened vision? Or was it that their focus was elsewhere?

A group of creatures had gathered by the windows of the building that Walker now saw was a restaurant, and they were being joined by others. There was the sound of breaking glass, of nails being pulled out of wood and heavy planks clattering to the floor inside. The creatures were getting in.

To his right, between the restaurant and a smaller building, there was a wide gap. There were no creatures there, just a bike shelter with a low wall running along the restaurant side, so Walker sprinted to it and ducked down inside the shelter behind the wall. If any of the creatures had noticed, he was ready for them. The gun he’d used to kill Adrian and his son was in hand and poised.

A full minute passed before Walker felt confident that none of the creatures had seen him break away. It was time to move. On his hands and knees, he made his way through the shelter, inching past the metal racks, carefully avoiding the few bikes parked there for fear of disturbing them. When he reached the end of the wall, he found himself in the dead center of the gap and unsure about his next move.

The door to the restaurant, like the windows, was boarded up, and Walker was starting to wonder if he’d guessed right about Hélène being inside. If she’d been taken there by whomever had knocked him out, how had they gotten in? Maybe this was just the last stand of a group of survivors that’d been holed up inside since the beginning. Maybe Hélène wasn’t in there at all.

Walker put his free hand down and felt cold metal where he’d been expecting stone. It was too dark to clearly see what he was touching, so he moved his hand around until he found the metal’s edge and traced it in the dim light. Eventually his vision adjusted, and he discerned a square slightly darker than the stone that surrounded it.

Walker looked at the smaller building, which appeared to be an adjunct to the restaurant. Its interior was tiny but it had a large terrace, and Walker guessed it was used mainly during the summer. Walker smiled. An elevator.  Supplies for the restaurant and its cousin must’ve been delivered here and brought down to a cellar that the two buildings shared, a cellar that could be accessed from either side.

Walker stood and walked unconcealed to the terrace beside the smaller building. Before him stood a wall of glass doors, and he saw himself reflected in them: a rifle strapped to his back, a gun in his hand, a look of fearless determination on his face. This situation, although horrifying on the surface, was bringing out the best in him.

He glanced toward the restaurant. He couldn’t see the broken window from that angle, but he could see the crowd of creatures. More and more were joining them, and their efforts to enter the building were intensifying. They were so focused and making so much noise themselves, Walker was sure they wouldn’t notice any noise he made. So he picked up one of the terrace’s metal chairs and threw it through the glass door in front of him.

***

Hélène had never cut a man before. And so of course, when the time came, she did it badly.

Still wearing an innocent smile, she stepped away from the hanging half-zombie and toward the wild-haired man. When the latter opened his arms as if to envelope her, she brought the knife around from behind her back and tried to drive it into his stomach. But the move wasn’t quick enough — her arm arced out in what felt like slow motion — and the man had time to cross his arms and bring them down in front of him. In the end, all she succeeded in doing was slashing his forearm, and the shock caused her to immediately drop the knife.

She didn’t wait to see how the man would react. She slipped past him, sprinted down the short hallway and ran up the stairs. Better back up to the restaurant she knew than down the long, mysterious corridor. But at the glass door at the top, she stopped short. Through the reinforced glass, she could see that several zombies had made it inside and were milling around, and more and more were climbing in through the broken window behind them.

One zombie spotted her and threw himself at the door, slamming into it with ferocious force. Horrified, Hélène stumbled backward just as two other zombies joined the first. Each time they slammed into the door, the bolt held, but the glass was giving way, as was the door’s steel frame. Hélène ran back down to the basement.

At the bottom of the stairs, she found the wild-haired man in the restroom doorway, staring dumbstruck at his wounded arm. The cut was bleeding heavily, and a puddle of blood was forming at his feet. He looked up, anger in his watery eyes, and when his lips parted there were strings of saliva between his teeth. She thought he might speak — or scream — but she heard only the beginnings of some guttural growl.

He wasn’t angry: he was furious. And he had Hélène’s knife in his hand. He took a lurching step in her direction. Meanwhile the zombies upstairs were noisily making progress. Her choices were being made for her. She turned and ran down the corridor as fast as she could.

The first couple of turns she arrived at she didn’t take. The poor light in the corridor provided only the dimmest of views into their murk. When she finally did take a chance on one of these offshoots, she ran straight into a wall, then into a locked door. Returning to the corridor, she saw that the wild-haired man had made good progress in her direction. He was in a frenzy, swinging the knife wildly, his wounded arm apparently forgotten.

“Sie hei d’Tür ufbroche!” he howled. “Gang! Gang schnäu!!”

Behind him, the first of the zombies had reached the corridor, and the shadows of the ones coming down behind it were dancing on the stairwell wall.

So much had changed over the last few days. Her world kept getting smaller and smaller. Had it all been leading to this?

No. If she was going to die, after having been stripped of everyone she loved and everything that was important to her, it was going to be on a mountaintop somewhere, not here in this fucking basement.

She ran.

Suddenly she remembered the ceiling. The man in the stall had hanged himself from a pipe inside a suspended ceiling. Which meant that above her there was a space in which she could hide, if only she could reach it.

As she ran she looked up, and just then the floor went wet and she started to slip. Her feet shot out in front of her and she fell, her hands flailing. She hit the floor hard and slid, her head tapping the stone tiles several times as she went. The pain shut her eyes, and when they opened again, she had stopped sliding and she was on her side looking at the face of a dead man.

She sat up quickly. Her hands touched the floor and she quickly pulled them back. The area around her was slick with blood, and the body next to her wasn’t the only one nearby. In a wide alcove off the corridor, at least a dozen bodies had been dumped haphazardly. Some were dressed in similar white shirts and black pants. Maybe they’d once worked at the restaurant. The rest wore regular street clothes. Former customers, perhaps. Two, she saw, were children.

Standing, struggling to keep her footing, she looked behind her. The wild-haired man on his way, and the corridor behind him was quickly filling up with zombies. Time was running out. She looked up at the panels of the suspended ceiling and made a quick decision.

Choking back her horror and disgust, she grabbed a body and dragged it through the alcove, placing it on top of a body near the wall. Then she took hold of another body and again looked up at the ceiling, judging the distance. She was making a pile to reach it. A third would make it possible, but a fourth would make it sure. But did she have time?

In the corridor, the din of the wild-haired man and the undead was escalating.

***

The corridor ended at a staircase that led up to the smaller building. Walker came down off the bottom step into a pool of darkness, his handgun leading the way, his eyes wide and alert.

At the far end of the corridor, perhaps a hundred yards away, he could make out an indistinct number of lumbering figures. Creatures. They’d made it into the restaurant and down to the cellar and were headed in his direction.

At first he felt disappointment. Lost was his opportunity to avenge himself against the man who’d knocked him out and taken Hélène. If Hélène had been in the restaurant, she’d been overrun, and there was no chance of saving her now.

Then it occurred to him: maybe she’d made it down to the cellar ahead of the pack. Maybe she was here somewhere between him and the creatures and desperately in need of his help.

He swung the rifle around to his free hand and slipped his finger in front of the trigger. He wasn’t sure he could fire it this way, but it felt good having two weapons out in front of him. He checked the creatures’ progress. It was steady, but slow. Then he advanced.

He found her in a small alcove filled with the rotting dead. He couldn’t see her face — her upper body was hidden up inside the ceiling — but he recognized the rest of her, her jeans and black sneakers. A man in a suit with a head of unruly grey hair was standing on a pile of bodies trying to pull her down, and she was kicking at him wildly.

“Hey!” Walker barked.

The man released Hélène and stepped back.

Hélène dropped out of the ceiling and onto the pile, horror in her eyes as she tumbled back onto the floor, shaking off blood and gore.

The man stepped forward, his hands raised. His lips were moving like he wanted to say something but he’d forgotten how to speak.

Walker shot him twice in the face.

Hélène stood. Walker smiled.

“Let’s go,” he said.

***

Nic moved along the edge of the field in a crouch run, his eye against the scope of his rifle, his focus on the creatures gathering at one of the restaurant windows. Jane and Ryan were several meters behind him, struggling to keep up as they practically crawled through the grass, but Nic was not about to slow down for them.

He was known as a brave and selfless man — back in Bern, it had been his idea, not Harry’s, to help the Sheffields — but this was about Hélène, not them. He had loved Hélène’s mother, and he had let her down. The zombies had gotten to her because, he believed, he had failed to protect her. And although Hélène would always hate him as the man who’d shot her mother — never mind that she’d been a zombie — his love and devotion had transferred from mother to daughter, and he was determined to keep her alive. Hélène’s survival would be his redemption.

Two gunshots came in quick succession, and Nic pivoted toward the small building near the restaurant. The shots had come from there. Leaving Jane and Ryan behind, he broke into a run, approaching the side of the building opposite the restaurant to provide himself cover. He leapt up onto the terrace and immediately saw the broken glass door. Just as he was about to move to it, Hélène appeared.

She was covered in dirt and what could only have been blood, although she appeared to be unharmed. Her face was twisted into a startling combination of strength, determination and terror. She rushed through the broken door and out onto the terrace and would’ve run right past Nic had he not reached out and grabbed her. He held her tight and closed his eyes, the fear and tension he’d been immersed in now replaced by passionate relief.

“Je suis soulagé de voir que tu est en securité,” he told her.

Hélène violently threw his arms off her and took several steps back, glaring at him with pure loathing. Nic opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. If words hadn’t worked before, they certainly wouldn’t work now. She seemed to hate him more than ever.

Walker stepped out onto the terrace, and Hélène ran to him, throwing her arms around him, pressing her face against his chest, closing her eyes. Walker placed his free hand — the other was holding a gun — on Hélène’s back and gave it a reassuring stroke.

Nic didn’t understand, and it must’ve shown on his face because, watching him, Walker smiled and shrugged. Then Nic knew. He hadn’t saved Hélène. Walker had. And now she was indebted to him.

Jane and Ryan appeared at Nic’s side and stared at Walker with a mixture of relief and disbelief.

“It’s okay,” Walker said, then he squeezed Hélène’s shoulders. “We’re okay.”