Chase Ryder's eyes snapped open to a world crawling with the infected.A scream tore up his throat and came out as a broken hiss.What happened to my voice? His throat felt like sandpaper. He couldn't even shout.Then he saw his own arm mottled blue, blotched with dark spots and the truth hit him like a fist.He was dead. Or he had been.The virus had ripped through New York eight weeks ago, and the city had folded in on itself within days. Chase had been lucky. His parents were gone, but they'd left him their house out in Westchester high walls, a locked gate, a pantry stocked for a war. For a while, that had been enough.Then Vanessa Cole called him, crying.Her family's apartment was in a packed building in Queens, she said. The infected were everywhere. Food was almost gone. Her voice cracked over the phone, and something in Chase's chest cracked with it.So he drove into the city for her. Alone. Because that's what you did for the person you loved.When he finally hauled her pare

Chase spun around and stormed out, slamming the door behind him hard enough to rattle the frame.The bang drew every infected within earshot straight to the house and straight into Chase's fists. A few solid hits later, they scattered back the way they'd come, uninterested in a fight they clearly weren't winning.Chloe stood frozen in her kitchen, staring at the closed door.Was he... angry?She replayed the last few minutes. He'd brought her an entire suitcase of food. He'd just personally beaten off a small crowd of zombies outside her house. That wasn't the behavior of something that wanted to eat her.Is he... a good zombie?Her stomach growled, loud and insistent, cutting the thought short. She dropped to the floor beside the suitcase and ate like she hadn't eaten in days because she hadn't, not really, not a full meal. Tears blurred her vision halfway through, and she let them fall without bothering to wipe them away.Chase headed back toward the Westchester estate on foot. Dri

"Chase Ryder."He tapped the pen against his own chest after writing it."Oh Chase. Right, I think I actually recognize you. From around the neighborhood."He nodded, then pointed toward the stairs."You should sleep. I don't need to. I'll keep watch."Chloe hesitated. It was one thing to accept food from a zombie standing on her porch. It was another thing entirely to fall asleep upstairs with one technically still a strange man wandering her living room.Chase seemed to read the hesitation on her face. He stepped to the center of the room, raised his hand, and a fireball roared to life above his palm bigger than he meant it to be, close enough to the crystal chandelier overhead that it nearly caught the glass alight.He blinked, startled by his own strength, and let it dissolve."If I wanted to hurt you," he wrote, "I would have done it already."Chloe read the note twice, something in her chest loosening. If Chase hadn't shown up with that first suitcase, she probably wouldn't have

Chase could feel his body settling into something new, something sturdier. High-tier cores clearly hit different than the low-level ones every green core barely registered anymore, but two blue cores in one night had left a fluctuation he could actually feel, humming under his skin.If Lulu had made a single move against him back there, he wouldn't have hesitated. His first read on the woman who'd shot out his tire hadn't exactly been glowing, and if she'd turned hostile after he'd bothered saving her twice, he'd have written her off the same way he was planning to write off Vanessa and maybe tasted that gold core of hers while he was at it.But she hadn't. She'd stood there quietly while he finished testing his limits on Vivian, and once he stopped, she'd simply said, "...Thank you. For saving me. Twice now."Chase studied her sheepish expression. His senses were unusually sharp right now crisp, almost hyper-defined and he realized, testing it, that the effect wasn't just his own.

There was no getting around it Chase had gotten handsome. Genuinely, distractingly handsome, to the point that "zombie" barely applied to him anymore at first glance.Chloe and Lulu were both staring at him with the exact same slightly baffled expression, like the awkward guy next door had somehow transformed into a magazine cover overnight."What, you're both speechless now?" Chase raised an eyebrow. "I look basically the same as before. Just... sharper, I guess."Every guy carries a small, stubborn confidence about his own face, and Chase was no exception though in his case, it happened to be justified. He wasn't just stronger now; the soft, rounded features he'd carried through years of hunching over a keyboard had resolved into something leaner. Cleaner lines. Actual jaw definition."You sound... different too," Chloe said, then caught herself before finishing the thought out loud and it's a good different because his voice had gone from ruined rasp to something low and rough in