“Wait!” Clint yelled. “I’m sorry! You don’t have to shoot me!”

She hissed at him, “Shut the hell up. They’ll hear you.”

Clint whirled around. Scanned the cheery, sleepy little neighborhood. There wasn’t another soul in sight, but he could have sworn he saw curtains twitch in the window across the street.

“I just woke up here,” he explained. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“Figure it out somewhere else.”

The roar of a car engine resounded somewhere behind Clint. He flattened himself against the door and tried to crouch low. Over the rail of the woman’s porch, he could see a truck coming down the road, full of people. He saw the glint of guns rested on knees, and every head craned and turned like they were looking for anyone caught outside without a weapon.

Clint clutched at the handle of his knife.

“Oh, shit,” murmured the woman at the window. She started to lower her window shut. “You’d better run, buddy.”

“What?”

“That’s Florence’s gang.”

“I can’t die in here,” he said, his voice rising to a panicked pitch. He twisted hard at the doorknob, which was firmly locked. “I have to save my girlfriend. If I die, she dies.”

He didn’t pause to explain himself, but he didn’t have to. The woman stared at him like she was seeing him for the first time.

The door opened a crack. Clint dove inside and slammed it shut. His hand hit the woman’s as they reached together to flick the deadbolt over.

“Follow me,” she said, army-crawling across the floor. She had a heavy camping backpack on, full to the brim. When she moved he could hear the vague rattle of metal on metal from inside. “Basement,” she explained. “Now. They’re looters.”

“Looters?”

“Jesus, did you literally just join today?” The woman scoffed and kept going.

Clint dropped to his knees and followed her, feeling ridiculous. But then from far away he heard the rattle of a gun and someone’s muffled shriek. The woman paused to wrestle a mangled copy of the Rules out of her cargo pants pocket. Only the number had now changed: 99. Another cry of bullets. As she folded the Rules back up, the number blurred and faded to 98.

“Shit! How many people were here in the first place?”

“Two hundred and fifty.” She paused in the kitchen to push open the back door. Clint almost questioned why, until he realized: she wanted to look as if she had tried to escape. “I’m surprised Death’s adding anyone new.”

Clint shrugged. “He said I’m interesting.”

“He says that to everyone.”

Clint tried not to look as put off as he felt by that.

The woman flipped her rug back to reveal a trapdoor sunk into the floor. She heaved it open and told him, “You’re going to have to pull the rug back over when you shut the hatch. Try to make it not look folded to shit.”

Clint instantly wanted to smack himself for not thinking to move any rugs or furniture, wondered how much hidden help he had left in his own home. But there wasn’t enough time to worry about that. The woman tossed her backpack down into the darkness and followed after it.

The crunch of tires resounded from the driveway. Through the open window, he heard men and women talking. Harsh bark of someone’s laughter.

Clint went down after her. He held onto the corner of the rug and tugged it as neatly over the trapdoor as he could. As he let the trapdoor click shut, he heard the woman’s front door bang open. In the darkness, he could hear only the creak and groan of boots clunking overhead.

For a moment, he froze there at the top of the ladder. Just listening.

Then the woman yanked at the bottom of his jeans, and he kept climbing down.

The cellar smelled wet and warm, and when his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, he could nearly make out the shape of shelves lining the walls. She had stacks of canned food, bottled water, boxes of shotgun shells. The woman was grabbing those, cramming them in her backpack. She whirled toward him and grabbed his shoulder, pressed her mouth to his ear to whisper quiet as a breath, “Do you have a gun?”

He shook his head, quickly.

She cursed and kicked at the air, noiselessly. Then reached behind her shelf and offered him a semi-automatic pistol. It was cold and heavier than he expected.

“Do you know how to shoot?”

Again, Clint shook his head.

The feet crisscrossed back and forth overhead. Cabinet doors banged open, and boxes hit the floor as the men scavenged. The woman was so close he could smell her sweat and fear. He clutched the gun and felt the hot tickle of her frustrated breath against his neck.

“You’re going to have to figure it out,” she muttered. “I have a plan.”

Clint sat there alone at the bottom of the ladder. One hand held his gun trained at the ceiling overhead. The other held only a can of fruit cocktail. Sweat coursed down his forehead and his arms trembled.

He watched as the woman pushed open the storm doors. She flooded the basement with light, and he saw how dim and dirty it really was. He wiped his damp palms off in his pants and grabbed his gun again.

The woman offered him a thumbs up before shutting the door silently behind her.

He was supposed to wait exactly a minute. He began counting as softly as he could—one one thousand, two one thousand—his tongue tracing the shape of the words so no one would overhear.

Exactly a minute, and then he only had to make a sound.

The footsteps were no longer overhead, not really. They seemed to be coming from all over the house. The ceiling overhead shuddered constantly with the weight of their feet and the crash of the woman’s things that the looters flung to the floor, looking for something they could use.

When he reached sixty, Clint froze for a moment. His panic was a hot thick bulb in his throat, choking him. But he thought of Rachel. He thought of the way she looked in that room, so close to death.

If you do nothing, he told himself, she’ll die. And there’s no point to anything if she’s gone.

Clint lifted the can over his shoulder and heaved at the stack of tin cans and jarred preserves with all his strength. The cans fell clattering, and the glass shattered, and overhead all the boots burst into the kitchen.

“What the hell was that?” barked a woman’s voice. A stranger. She sounded as if she was the boss, because no one offered her a good answer right away. Florence. That’s what the woman had called her. The nervous tension made the air so thick that Clint could feel it hardening in his lungs. “You told me there’s no one here.”

“There isn’t,” a man stammered.

Florence scoffed. “You think a fucking ghost made that noise, boy? There is a basement. Find the opening. Now.”

Before those feet could move, Clint heard the dense boom of the woman’s shotgun. It went off again, and with the second shot he heard the first body hit the floor, and then another. Machine guns began screaming, tearing into the kitchen walls. Something ceramic shattered.

Clint plunged up the steps with his gun in one hand. He heaved open the trap door and shot the man staring at him, too shocked to raise his gun in time. The gun seemed to explode in his hands, the bullet leaping out so fast that the gun nearly snapped back and hit Clint in the head. But he kept his arms stiff and straight and shot the man again as he opened his mouth in mute horror, catching him in the throat this time. He fell, cutting an arc of bullets into the kitchen cabinets, the ceiling.

Clint grabbed his boot and pulled him down into the basement. The man and his machine gun clattered to the floor. He leaped down after them.

A tremendous pain shot through his ankle when he hit the floor, and the earth around him exploded in little clouds of gunfire. He wrestled the gun off the man’s shoulder, raised it, and shot wildly through the floorboards overhead.

At the back of his mind, he wondered if that woman was still alive. Wondered if she’d been mowed down in a hail of gunfire before he’d ever even learned her name.

But the reassuring thunder of her shotgun told him she was still alive, at the very least.

Blood began dripping down through the floorboards, dripping over him like a leaky roof on a rainy night.

The gang’s leader called, her voice crackling with rage, “Fall back, fall back! Get back to the car!”

Clint leapt up the ladder in time to see three people fleeing: the woman who could only be Florence and two men flanking her. They all carried backpacks and semiautomatic rifles, which they hugged to their chests as they fled.

The woman’s kitchen was ruined. The windows were piles of broken glass scattered across the sink and floor. The cabinets splintered, riddled with bullets. Three men lay dead on the floor, their blood pooling all around them.

And the woman stood in the threshold of the back door, clutching her bleeding arm. She offered Clint a manic grin.

“Well done,” she told him. “I honestly didn’t think that would work.”

Clint’s stressed unspooled out of him in an impossible peal of laughter. “Then why the fuck did you ask me to do it?”

“Didn’t want to die. I have someone to save too, you know.” She shrugged and knelt before the dead men. With her good arm, she began digging through their pockets. “Help me search them.”

A hundred questions leapt to Clint’s mind. He wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but her grimace and the blood soaking her coat sleeve stopped him. “How badly did they get you?”

“Not bad. Just grazed me. Like a little bee sting.” She produced a plastic baggie of bandages from one of the men’s pockets and grinned. She slapped a thick wad of gauze over her arm and began wrestling the medical tape around it.

Clint reached over and helped her tie it on, wordlessly. He had never slowed down to look at her closely before this. Her dark hair was streaked with silver threads, her face fierce and flickering like a fire. In the light he saw that her skin was smooth and brown as an avocado seed. She was old enough to be his mother, and she looked him over like he was helpless.

Together they searched the bodies. In the man’s backpack they found matches, a blanket, a dented can of beer.

The woman nodded over her shoulder toward the basement. Her eyes caught the light: deep mottled green. “Check what he’s got.”

Clint stared at the black opening of the basement. It seemed like the mouth of a demon now. He tried not to show how badly he was shuddering as he climbed down the steps.

The man lay there face down on the floor, his blood pouring out of him. Clint stood at the edge of the pool, nausea rising in his belly. He had killed a man. True, the man had been trying to kill him, but his life ended for the last time the second that Clint chose to squeeze that trigger one more time. He hoped no one else in this game was like him. That he’d only killed one person today, and not robbed someone else’s Rachel of her chance at life.

The woman descended the ladder behind him. She peered over his shoulder and asked, “What did you find?”

Clint just shrugged and stared.

She squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. Tried on a ghost of a smile. “You did the right thing.”

“I know.” But he couldn’t bring himself to move.

The woman stepped into the blood. It lapped thick and tacky around the soles of her boots. She crouched to feel the man’s pockets, his backpack. She tossed Clint everything she found: a pocketknife, a few boxes of ammunition, an extra empty magazine

“Fifty-five rounds,” the woman told him when she offered him the bullets. “Don’t waste them.” Then she stepped out of the blood, leaving the shape of her shoes behind. She made for the storm doors. “It looks like it’s time for the both of us to move on, anyway.”

“Can I go with you?” Clint heard his voice rise nervously. He felt silly asking, like a child.

But the woman gave him a real smile this time. “I had hoped you would.”

He followed her out to the road.