The doll sat in the middle of the empty room, plastic arms twisted and reaching toward the door, one eye opened wide and the other stuck halfway shut. It sat in the center of the pool of morning light streaming in through the bare window.

Shawn had taken two wary steps into the room. I stopped just outside, instinct screaming now that something bad was coming. The blood rushing through my veins was making me lightheaded as I tried, and failed, to think.

Colton had to be up there somewhere, and someone had to have activated that doll, but I didn't believe for one second that our friend was the one behind the macabre joke. After everything that we had been through, it wasn't funny.

I was suddenly very sure that we were the prey in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

"Sha-"

The door abruptly swung away from the wall, banging closed right in my face. I startled so hard that I narrowly missed slicing into my own leg with my machete. Without the light from that room, the already dark hallway turned to night.

On the other side of the door someone cursed, and something heavy thumped into a wall. I was already wrenching the doorknob and throwing my shoulder into the door.

I burst into the room. Inside, Shawn was grappling with an imposing stranger, using both hands to try to keep a wicked looking knife away from himself. My eyes flew from the blade to the curving line of red that he now had running across his jaw and down his neck.

My feet were moving before I even knew what I was doing. In the split second that it took me to cross the room, I must have made some sort of sound, because the attacker twisted away from Shawn far enough to plant a huge boot directly in my stomach.

My back connected with a wall and every ounce of air in my lungs left me in a rush. Stunned, I tried desperately to suck in a breath, staggering away from the wall. My run in with the sharp end of the bottom of a fence, not so long ago, had left deep cuts to my shoulders, and they immediately started throbbing. It felt like the guy's boot was still firmly planted in my middle. My lungs started screaming for air.

It felt like an eternity passed before I gained control again.

When I managed to pull in a gasping breath and my swimming vision cleared, I was able to wheeze out the phrase that had been trying to escape me for the last long seconds. "Son of a bitch!" The words were breathy, and strained.

The stranger, having sent me flying, had avoided the machete that I had every intention of using on him. At least until I could stand up straight again. But his momentary distraction had cost him. Shawn had managed to wrestle the knife away from him. The bloody blade skidded across the floor and stopped near my feet. Still reacting on pure instinct, I grabbed for it. If I had his knife, he couldn't easily reclaim his weapon.

He saw me. The man managed to shove Shawn off of him and looked at the knife that I now had in a death grip. His calculating gaze then moved to the machete in my other hand, before skipping to Shawn who was recovering from the push and back on his feet already.

In a split second, the stranger made his decision.

Moving surprisingly quickly for someone that large, the guy spun away from both of us, and dove toward an object on the floor near the door. I had the time to recognize the shape of a small radio as his hand closed around it. Still running, he brought the radio to his mouth and bolted into the hall.

Adrenaline was making me feel high, a little disconnected, and a lot invincible. Now I knew what it meant when someone saw red. The blood staining the knife clutched in my hand had come from the one of the few people I had left. And all I knew in that second was that I needed to make sure that it never happened again. I didn't even feel my own injuries in that moment.

"Bri, no!"

I ignored the warning, sprinting past Shawn and into the hallway.

The sheer surprise of the move, that I would run after our attacker, was enough to get me to the door before Shawn, but only by a fraction of a second. After being in the brightly lit room, it was hard to see, darkness and speed making the outlines of the hallway vague and shadowy. Ahead of me, the stranger was shouting something into the radio that I couldn't make out. Suddenly, he dropped from sight.

Grunting and gasping accompanied the terrible sound of a human body tumbling down the stairs. He landed at the bottom with a muffled thud and was silent.

I skidded to a halt at the top of the steps. Below, the man lay in an unmoving heap, illuminated by the light coming in from the door that we had left open to the outside. Shawn hesitated next to me for a long second. He touched my shoulder and I heard him exhale in a shaky sound.

"You wait here."

This time I listened. The shock of seeing and hearing the other man take such a terrible fall had broken me out of the mindless need to chase him down. It could just as easily have been me laying broken at the bottom of those stairs, as careless as I had been.

Shawn started out going down slowly, but picked up the pace when a moan echoed up the stairwell. I held my breath when he reached the body at the bottom, afraid that the stranger would suddenly come to life.

Leaning down, Shawn prodded the guy with the tip of his knife. Another low moan sounded.  He looked at the man for a long second, and my heart almost jumped out of my chest when he reached down and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. But my fears were unfounded as Shawn dragged the attacker a few feet to the side before letting him drop unceremoniously.

The man moaned again and the streaks of fresh blood that had smeared while he was being moved gleamed in the sun.

Shawn jogged back up the stairs.

"He's not going to be a problem anymore," he grabbed my shoulder and angled me in a vain attempt to try to find some light. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah. What about you?" The blood from the cut to his neck had stained the front of his shirt. The sight made my stomach roll. I reached up to touch him but he backed out of my grasp.

"It can wait. We need to find Colton and get back to the others. We need to get out of here before we find out who that guy was trying to get on the radio."

I had completely forgotten about our missing friend in the chaos. A sinking feeling in my gut, I spun around to begin looking.

A more thorough search of the upstairs ended with us back in that empty room. The closet in there was the only place left to look and had to be where we would find Colton.

I was determined not to think about why our friend would be shut in a closet.

That determination lasted until I reached for the knob and saw a detail that had escaped my notice before.  A bright red smear marred the white paint of the door. Then my eyes were drawn down to the red stain that was growing more visible in the dark colored carpet. I was standing right in it.

I pulled my hand back, the picture in my head of another pool of red. Of blood steadily dripping from the back of a pick-up. I had never actually looked inside that truck, but the drip- drip-dripping of that scene haunted my sleep.

When Shawn shuffled me to the side, I let him. I was very sure that I did not want to look behind that closed door, but I couldn't not look this time.

The door opened with a quiet click, and the sound that escaped my throat was caught somewhere between despair and rage. We had found Colton. The attacker had succeeded with him where he had failed with Shawn. A deep slash had opened up his neck from ear to ear.

"We have to get out of here now."

I couldn't tell if I was breathing. Now that I had seen the body in the closet I couldn't look away. Grabbing my arm, Shawn pulled me back out of that room. He kicked the doll as we passed it, venting a fraction of the emotion that he was feeling, and sending it flying into a corner.

It didn't feel like this was reality as we stepped back into the light of the first floor. Another pool of blood, smaller than the one upstairs, was gathering under the stranger. It was evident why Shawn had declared him no longer a threat.

The white of bone showed through his pants on one thigh. The arm on the same side was bent at an impossible angle. He could have been dead except for the movement of his breathing. The man may have been alive, but he wasn't going anywhere.

I didn't feel an ounce of compassion for him as we quickly grabbed the bags we had left nearby, and hurried from that house.

We'd only made it to the front lawn when a large suv  pulled onto the street ahead of us. My heart sank when I realized it had come from the house where we had left Luna, Rex, and Alex. But I only had a second to worry about them before the vehicle sped towards us. Standing in the middle of the open yard, there wasn't anything to hide behind fast enough to avoid being seen.

Shawn was trying to shove me behind him when the suv screeched to a hard stop on the street just feet away.

Heavily tinted windows hid whoever was in the vehicle until the front door popped open and Charlie peered out. The back hatch lifted.

"Get in!"

We ran for it. I hit my knee while scrambling inside and didn't even care. Shawn yanked the door closed behind us.

To my relief, Rex was already standing in the cargo area. The space was cramped with two people, a dog, and several stuffed backpacks in it. Maya was turned around in the seat just ahead of us, holding on to Rex's collar to keep him from jumping out of the door when it had opened.

"We've gotta get out of here right now," Shawn told the group as he tried to untangle a foot from the strap of a bag.

"Where's Colton?" Charlie was turned around in her seat up front, her eyes wide.

"He's gone. I'm sorry, but we need to go now."

Maggie's mouth tightened at his words, but she didn't hesitate. It was then that I realized just how much she had come to trust us as the vehicle lurched forward.

"I knew you were taking too long. I knew you all ran into the Crazies too," Charlie muttered from the front.

Looking more closely at the people crammed into the seats in front of us, it was obvious that they had run in to trouble of their own. Bloody scratches marked Maya's cheek. None of us were clean, but Charlie was even filthier now. And a small spot of blood had seeped through Bill's shirt from the gun shot wound that had almost killed him.

Shifting the bags aside, I made myself a place to collapse. Hot panting in my face was the only warning I got before Rex began licking me, exuberantly happy to be reunited. I was pushing the dog away when the suv suddenly came to a stop.

"It's a woman," Maggie said out loud. From clear in the back, with everyone else's heads in the way, I couldn't see why she had stopped. "What do you think?"

It took Charlie a second to reply, "Looks like she needs help."

"Can we trust that?" Alex sounded skeptical.

"I don't think we can leave a woman out there alone . Especially one that looks like that," Bill's answer silenced everyone in the suv.