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carries the gun like a soldier advancing on the enemy. I pick up my pace, but I don’t run. Matt cups his hands around his mouth and yells for us to hurry. He turns then and cups his hands over the picture window. A second later he jumps back and laughs, then holds up both of his middle fingers at whatever is inside.
    “Can you frickin’ believe it?” Matt yells. “There’s a runner in there. Right here in town. A runner.”
    Aubrey steps up on the porch, the shotgun firmly clutched in his hands. I stand in the gravel of the driveway. The ranch has red brick going around it and vertical, white aluminum siding above the brick. Black metal shutters frame two smaller windows to the left of the door and the picture window. Bedrooms, I imagine, with soft, freshly made beds. My mind keeps the fantasy going: The towels are freshly laundered, the hand soap in the bathroom is spring fresh, and the kitchen smells of freshly baked apple pies. This last detail makes my stomach rumble. There are black, metal numbers next to the door: 11 Euclid Avenue. There’s a Virgin Mary statue in the front yard, and not far from her right hand is a concrete birdbath. The grass is high around each of them.
    Aubrey stands next to Matt. He leans in but doesn’t put his face against the glass. I step up next to him. I see his face reflected in the window. I can tell he wishes he’d never set out on the mission today. I don’t want him to see me watching him so I step closer to the glass and look inside the living room.
    Sure enough, there is a runner inside. She’s not much younger than me. She wears what I assume are pajamas because the spaghetti strap top has the same seventies style rainbow and bears on it that the front of the underpants have. The runner is well aware that we are outside, but she doesn’t know how to get us.
    “Check it out,” I say. “She can see us.”
    “Of course she can see us,” Matt says. “Look at her.”
    I don’t like Matt so I argue my point. “What I mean is, I’ve always thought runners smelled us or sensed us. But this one.”
    There’s a glass-rattling slap against the window. Her red, slimy palms keep slipping against the surface leaving long, wet streaks. Behind her is a slumping mound of slimy, gray moss that had once been the runner’s mother or father or sibling or someone she let in the house when she was human. It’s hard to tell anything about who the mound of organic matter had once been, as it went to seed a while ago.
    But not before it latched onto the walker in the skimpy PJs. We can see the tooth-tattoo along the side of her neck. We can almost count every tooth impression.
    Don’t be confused by the process. Humans are vehicles for spreading the fungus. It’s all about the plant’s survival, not ours. A runner latches onto a human and then dies once the human has absorbed the enzymes into its blood. Think vampire and zombies. The bitten, or latched, experiences fevers, falls comatose, and eventually decomposes into an oily, slimy heap of organic waste. The spore stalks grow out of this muck, releases new seeds, and they are breathed in by humans unlucky enough to have no immunity to the spores. No one knows why some people get infected and others don’t, but they’re working on it, they tell us.
    All I know is a runner doesn’t care who it latches onto, and that’s the bigger concern for the moment. The teen runner inside the house is pressing her face against the window.
    “We should take her back to Denny,” Matt says.
    “Are you a freaking idiotic or what?” Aubrey says. “She’s ready to latch. If that runner gets a hand on you, you’re a fungus feeding ground.”
    “Denny’s going to want to know,” Matt said. “He’s going to come back and get her anyhow.”
    “Denny’s got the equipment, we don’t.”
    “Equipment for what?” I ask. The boys stop arguing. They stare at me like I appeared out of the air.
    Matt gives in. “Fine. I’ll come back with