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gasped.
    Sitting on the sidewalk with its back against the car was the runt of a creature Scott had encountered on his way out of the rehab center. It had ripped the pants from the missing lower leg of the slain behemoth who had lost his head to the roaring shotgun blast, and was tearing chunks away with its broken and busted teeth, slurping and moaning and gnawing and chewing as Scott stood before it, a look of stunned disbelief etched upon his face.
    The creature looked up, its scorched and tattered rags barely covering the three-foot-long torso supporting its hideously misshapen head. “ What?” he said.
    Lila tugged loose her pistol, and Warren said, “No!” She leveled it at the flesh-eater and he grabbed her wrist. “No, don’t. They’ll hear it and come after us!”
    “Yeah, you’re right,” she said, holstering her weapon and looking up the street in the direction Dub and his boys had carried off their disgusting bounty.
    The creature went back to his meal, and Warren said, “Use a knife. You got one, don’t you?”
    “Damn right I do.” Lila pushed a hand into the knapsack hanging off her shoulder, pulled out a sheathed hunting knife and slid the blade free.
    Scott said, “What in the fuck are you doing?”
    “What do you think?”
    “What, you’re going to kill it?”
    The creature looked up when Scott said, “You’re going to butcher the damn thing?” It took the chewed up limb from its bloody mouth, and said, “Hey, what’d I ever do to you? Ain’t it enough what I already been through with this shit? You think I wanta be like this? I didn’t ask that goddamn fireball to nail my ass. I didn’t volunteer to have my face burnt halfway off and my legs melted together. The fuck am I supposed to eat? Dirt? Gimme a break here!”
    Scott looked at Lila, whose eyes had not moved away from the object of her scorn.
    “He’ll give us away,” Warren said.
    “Said the kettle to the pot,” said Scott.
    “We gotta kill him. Those big bastards come back, he’ll tell ‘em—”
    “What? What’ll he tell them? That he saw us walking through here? So what? We’ll be long gone by then.”
    “Long dead if they find us,” said Warren , and Lila said, “We can’t chance it.”
    “You can’t do this,” Scott said. “It just isn’t… right. Where’s your humanity, for chrissakes?”
    Warren chuckled, laughing out the words, “ Humanity? Look around, Scotty-boy.” He nodded at the pathetic looking creature holding a gnawed-on piece of leg in its lap. “Look at that . That’s where our humanity went—seven weeks ago while you were sleepin’ like a baby down at your rehabilitation center.” He paused for a moment, looked up at Lila, and then back at Scott. Finally, he said, “You’ll see, eventually. Whoever you were before all this happened, you won’t be for long.”

Chapter Three

    Dub sat on the edge of a three-foot-high concrete wall, the top of the wall level with and bordering what once had been the finely manicured lawn of a real estate office, covered now by dust and ash and brittle pieces of dead grass. On the sidewalk before him, his four companions busied themselves with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and rations of roasted flesh carved from the burned and blackened corpse that had been laid out like an unholy sacrifice next to Dub on the flat surface of the wall.
    Dub wasn’t happy about losing those men, and he sure as shit didn’t like it that no one had paid a price for them. Four men splattered from here to Sunday—by what? Hell, they didn’t even know who’d done it. Whoever it was must have been some brave motherfuckers. Not brave enough to stick around to face them, though. Too bad—he’d like to have gotten a good look at those cocksuckers, get a little up-close-and-personal action going so they could see what grabbin’ the horns does for you. See what happens when you fuck with The Devil’s Own. Maybe what was left of the spics showed up while they were busy