Her name (or the name her adopted parents had given her) was Tammy, but her followers called her Mistress Lilith, Queen of Night. At the moment, she had only one disciple, and he was more interested in getting in her pants than aiding her in opening the way for the old gods. Chad Roberts was lacking in true devotion, but assembling a legion of believers in a dust bowl like Rockwood — five square miles of town spread across thirty — was no easy task. Chad wasn't her first choice, but he could be useful in a muscle-bound lackey sort of way.

Tammy and her cult of one squatted by the ceremonial fire in the burnt-out remains of Make Out Barn. He hummed the theme to Bonanza while tracing patterns in the dirt with his fingers. The firelight glinted off her ritual dagger.

"Uh. . Tammy. ."

She tossed him a hard look.

"Mistress Lilith," he quickly corrected, "I don't think they're coming."

Sighing, Tammy snatched up her worn copy of the abridged Necronomicon next to her pile of clothes. She flipped through the pages to the ritual of Thanatos's Risen Children, but there was nothing in the book to help her. They'd performed the ceremony a dozen times. Even Chad, who didn't have much in the way of brainpower and understood nothing of black magic, could execute the spell by memory. No, it wasn't a flaw in the casting. It had to be the zombies. They just weren't enough.

"Damn that fat old bitch."

Any normal person would flee from the risen dead. Why didn't she? Something new was needed. Something more powerful.