There wasn’t any way to get through the fence, and it was too far to go around. I thought about pulling my gun, but I’d done the gun thing already and was wearing scars from that, filling my head nightly with dark bad dreams. I was determined not to do it again. I leaped at the fence, climbed over, dropped to the other side.

No sooner had I landed than he came for me. He was hot to trot, and in my headlights he looked like a bad dream. What I had seen on his face was blood and dirt, and I figured the blood wasn’t from him. I caught a glimpse of the woman – a girl, really. One of her hands quivered like an animal in a trap.

He charged me and I sidestepped, slapped at the back of his head with both hands. He went past fast, slammed into the fence, turned, came at me again. I side-kicked him and knocked him back, but he didn’t go down. He leaped at me and I brought an elbow up and under his chin, but all that did was make him fall back a pace.

He jumped on me like a spider. I spun around, bent forward, and he flipped over my shoulder. He hit the ground, came up as if he had bounced off a trampoline. I hit him repeatedly, but he kept coming. The only thing I had fought before with this much tenacity and ability to absorb damage was a rabid squirrel, but the squirrel had been much smaller and Leonard had been there to help kill it.

I got him by the back of the head with one hand, the chin with the other, stuck my index finger in the soft spot on the side of his neck. He went around and down, but pounced up. We hammered at each other and I caught a good one over the eye. He came in for a tackle, and I hooked my arm under his neck and let his momentum carry me back. I stuck a foot in his balls as we went. He went up high and came down hard on his back. I rolled him over on his stomach, still holding on to his neck, trying to choke him out.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl, lying there in the pool of yellow from the headlights. She was covered in blood, and one eye was nothing but a dark wet hole. Her head had literally been driven into the ground.