Elliot didn’t have a gun yet. He didn’t have anything more than a plastic flashlight with a rubberized handle and no more weight than the two D batteries contained within. Around him were only racks of clothes: no shovels or bats or fireplace pokers. He was entirely unarmed.

Evajean was still screaming behind him as he fell back, away from the crazy woman. Elliot’s mind did its best to process the situation and come up with a solution but this was all happening too fast. He flailed out with his arms, grabbing at anything near, and came away with a metal sign from atop one of the racks, a sale price indicator held in a frame of aluminum with a weighted base. This he swung in front of him, waving it at the woman while Evajean stood screaming, showing only a void expression of horror.

He couldn’t see, making out just quick flashes of that blue vest, cut off again and again as the arc of his swings brought the for sale sign through the flashlight’s beam. “Evajean!” he called. “Help, dammit!”

He’d backtracked enough that Evajean, off to one side, was between him and the Wal-Mart woman. In the diffuse light of the beam he saw her shake herself, stand tall, and then, as he shouted at her to stop, charge their assailant.

Evajean hit the woman low and hard, knocking both of them to the ground. She was still screaming, the long call coming to form his name as the two women rolled back and forth on the tile, trashing and tearing.

What the hell is she doing? he thought, unable to decide between rushing over to join the fray or using this briefly stolen moment to retrieve a better weapon. His mind, racing ahead of his consciousness, settled on the latter and Elliot turned away from the melee to look for a larger club.

There, maybe ten paces away, barely made out in the flashlight—and Elliot immediately felt the sting of leaving Evajean back in complete darkness with a crazy person—was a mannequin, arms stuck out flamboyantly, a man dressed for a night out in a cheap suit. Elliot ran at it, pulled off the jacket, and wrenched one arm out of the thing’s trunk. Holding this new, and much heavier, weapon above his head in one hand, he turned back to where Evajean and the Wal-Mart woman were still on the floor, still fighting furiously.

“Get back,” he shouted when he was near them. “Get up!”

And she did. As soon as Evajean was away, Elliot started swinging. The impacts were immense, the shock traveling through the mannequin’s arm, through the plastic hand, and into his. But he kept beating her. He didn’t want to stop, not in this terrible, dark store that had scared the shit out of him long before they’d come across the psycho; not in this empty, hollowed out town where he’d had friends and family, a wife, a child, and lovers. He beat this woman like she was all of it, like he could exercise the pain via her bloodied corpse.

Elliot only stopped when Evajean grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arms around his own, saying, “Elliot! Elliot, stop it!”

He did.

The Wal-Mart lady lay on the tile, one leg kicking, her arm twisted under her back. She gazed up at Elliot and Evajean, eyes still wide and aware, though glazed with the craziness both had seen before during the slow deaths of loved ones. Elliot was suddenly angry at her for making him do this, for forcing him to hurt her so badly that she’d be dead in a few minutes. It was somehow easier when the disease took them, no matter how painfully, but to have it make another person do it, even in self defense, only heightened Elliot’s derision of the virus—or bacteria, or whatever the hell it was.

Evajean said, “Is she okay?”

Elliot looked at her. Surprisingly, she appeared unhurt, aside from a gash across one cheek, a ripped ear, and torn clothes. “I think she’s going to die,” he said.

Evajean mouthed “Oh,” and turned away.

Elliot crouched down next to the Wal-Mart lady and leaned close to her face. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The rage was gone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do that.”

The woman shifted her eyes to his and some of the crazy tension went out of her face. She opened her lips, slid out her tongue, and then started babbling again, though this time quieter and more measured.

It sounded like a language to Elliot. Callie has made odd noises like all kids do but this was different. With his daughter, they’d clearly been only sounds, random syllables her mind assembled as it tried to wrestle down the vocabulary and syntax the adults were bombarding it with. But with this woman, driven mad by the disease, he heard actual language. Of course he didn’t know what any of it meant, just like if he’d been dropped in a foreign country, and the words were distorted from forcing them through the pain of her wounds, yet it had the sound of actual speech.

“What are you saying?” he said to her, getting his ear as close to her mouth as he was comfortable doing with a lady who had, minutes ago, been trying her best to smash Evajean’s head in with her fists.

But just that strange language came out, none of the words recognizable. Each sentence was clouded with humming, though—that constant “Mmm…” that she’d been calling out when she’d first charged the two of them.

Then, abruptly, the “Mmm” broke through, like it had been blocked up but now the whole word was free. “More!” she shouted. “More!” Again and again that single word.

“More what?” Evajean said. “Does she want you to hit her more?” This last she said with sick incredulousness.

The shouts lead to coughing, however, and the coughing consumed whatever was left of the Wal-Mart woman’s strength after the terrible injuries. She faded fast then and within a minute Evajean and Elliot were standing and sitting next to nothing more than a corpse of the kind they’d both seen far too many of.