Dog Blood

where you keep getting them from.”
    “You don’t want to know,” Paul pipes up.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I saw you,” he says, “checking the pockets of corpses.”
    “Well, they don’t need them anymore,” she argues. And she’s got a point. But does that make her any different from the Unchanged I saw fleecing bodies earlier?
    “You’re disgusting,” Keith sighs.
    “I’m addicted,” she answers back quickly, “and I don’t want to quit. Cigarettes are one of my few remaining pleasures. Where else am I supposed to get them?”
    “At least open the window, then. Last thing I want to do is be breathing in your secondhand smoke all night.”
    “Hold your breath, then,” she grumbles, begrudgingly winding down her window. The cool, relatively fresh air that floods into the van is a relief, and I breathe it in deeply.
    I look around at the three people I’m traveling with tonight, and I can’t help but feel concerned. I haven’t seen any of them in action yet, but I don’t hold out much hope. Keith looks like he’d be more at home in his garden than on the battlefield. Carol appears permanently angry. She has bulging eyes and short, dark hair that obviously used to be colored (the dye’s grown out, leaving a brassy red tidemark). She has long nails that probably used to be filed and painted but that now look more like talons or claws. She reminds me of a woman I used to work with-a bitter, drink-addled ex-publican. She has the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker and looks like she’d be happiest either behind a bar or propping one up. Paul, on the other hand, at least looks like he’s ready to fight. He’s an arrogant fucker. Since we’ve been driving he’s already told me several times what a great fighter he is and how he’s lost count of the hundreds of kills he’s made. I can see straight through him. His bragging and aggressive talk are there to hide his insecurities. He’s struggling just as much as the rest of us.
    So, all in all, not a great team. Still, if they help me get closer to finding Ellis, I’ll put up with them.
    “Give us a clue then, friend,” Keith says, glancing back at me over his shoulder. I lean forward to try to get a better view of where we are. The van vibrates intensely and lurches from side to side as we move quickly down a wide, rubbish-strewn road, and it’s difficult to see very much from where I’m sitting. The fact that Keith’s driving without lights on doesn’t help, but when the ominous black shape of a huge enemy helicopter crawls across the early evening sky just ahead of us, taillights flashing in the gloom, I’m thankful that we’re hidden.
    There’s a road sign up ahead. Keith stops the van, and all four of us stare up at it, trying to make out the place names and directions. Much of the sign is covered in a layer of green-brown dirt and moss.
    “This is Chapman Hill, isn’t it?” Paul says. I look in front and behind, trying to get my bearings. He’s right. I bought my last car from a garage close to here, but I didn’t recognize the place. Now that I know roughly where I am, though, everything slowly comes into focus, and the streets and buildings begin to regain some semblance of familiarity. This is bizarre-everything looks basically the same, but it’s all changed, too. The landmarks and structures I used to know are mostly still there, but absolutely everything seems to have been indelibly scarred by the war. A long line of once-thriving shops is now a crumbling, blackened ruin, almost completely destroyed by fire. The front part of the garage I remember has collapsed, flattening the few dust-covered cars that remained unstolen and unsold. Next to the garage an office building now stands at barely half of its prewar height, surrounded by mounds of rubble that used to be its top five floors. In the fading light it looks like every road and sidewalk for as far as I can see is covered with a layer of dust and debris. The bodies are the only shapes that are easy to distinguish among the chaos. Just ahead of us a skeletal hand is sticking up from a pile of fallen masonry as if its dead owner wants to ask us a question or hitch a ride.
    “Well,” Keith says impatiently, “you just here to sightsee or are you gonna tell me which way to go?”
    “Sorry,” I answer quickly, forcing myself to snap out of my trance. “Keep going straight for another mile or so, then it’s a right. I’ll tell you when we get