Back | Next
Contents

Descent into the Underworld

“Seems you have unwanted guests,” she said, stepping back from the tower viewer and inviting him to look. The Umbrian countryside below was a scene of pastoral tranquility—at least, it appeared that way from the mountaintop. Farmhouses dotted fields of subsistence crops, hemmed in by orderly rows of cypress trees like green spears.

Anna grimaced. “Go on, take a peek. Tourists used to pay three euros to use this, and they never had the view you’re about to.”

Silvio Cipriano peered through the viewer’s telescopic lens. It was aimed on his village’s northern border, where fencing terminated at a rocky gulch by the woods.

And someone was there.

Silvio’s natural thought was that one of the villagers was collecting timber for fuel. Then he noticed the man’s naked condition, the dirt and bloody scratches on his body, the wild hair and scraggly beard. The intruder lurched from the forest, limping rapidly towards the gulch.

“It’s a zombie,” he muttered, using the English word. “One of the shy ones, looks like.”

Anna nodded. “And you’re about to see him disappear.”

He swiveled the view to the watchtower below, a defensive structure he’d insisted the village construct during the previous winter. Sure enough, a lookout was up there—Salvatore, the college kid who’d fled from Rome with his parents—but he was facing the wrong way, reclining in his perch with a cigarette in hand, rifle at his feet.

Silvio hissed his displeasure.

“Keep watching,” Anna said.

“For what? Our intrepid lookout is not looking where he’s supposed to. That zombie could wander right into a yard and . . . ” His breath caught. “Holy shit!

From the edge of the lens, a dark flood erupted from the woods. Silvio jerked the viewer back to the gulch to see the largest pack of dogs he’d ever witnessed—some thirty or forty animals strong. They were a gangrel bunch—even before the outbreak, feral dogs had been a problem in Italy, crowding out local fauna, breeding wildly (and interbreeding with wolves), and harassing unwary travelers. The situation had only gotten worse since the Fall. Man’s best friend had learned that, in the absence of man, there was strength in numbers.

The zombie whirled in panic, and then the pack was upon him. Jaws snapped, tearing away sheaves of flesh, grasping at every limb. The victim dissolved into dozens of hungry mouths.

If there was any kind of pecking order, Silvio didn’t see it. Chalk it up to one more feature of the new reality: any hint of domesticity in canines was long gone. He shuddered but couldn’t look away from the carnage; a particularly wolfish-looking dog ripped off the zombie’s hand and went scampering off with it. In the village watchtower, young Salvatore had finally heard the disturbance, grabbed his rifle, and was staring in slack-jawed amazement through his scope.

Shivering, Silvio stepped back from the viewer. “That’s a bad way to die,” he said softly. “Even for one of the infected . . . ”

Anna’s eyes were bright in the late afternoon glow. “Did I tell you I was a tour director in Pompeii? There were always homeless dogs in those ruins, begging for scraps.”

“They’re not begging anymore.”

She heard the anxious tone in his voice. “You should move up here, Silvio. You, your daughter, and your mother. It’s not safe down there.”

“Nowhere is truly safe.” Haunted memories flickered at the edge of his thoughts, and not all of them were from these cruel apocalyptic days. “Do you know what the traders from Venice told me last week? Fishermen are having problems with octopuses! The things have moved into the canals and turned crafty and aggressive. They pull down the nets, they mess with the salt pools.” He glanced back to the blood-stained gulch. “It’s like with these dogs. Humanity is fighting for its place in nature again.”

“There are no octopuses or dogs up here.”

Silvio’s gaze flicked to the wrought-iron gates behind her, where a narrow path led into the mountaintop caves. They had once been a tourist attraction: a twisting, labyrinthine system of tunnels dating back to the Etruscans. Since the Fall, a group of survivors had seen the wisdom in rediscovering their ancestral stomping grounds: Anna’s people grew vegetables atop the mountain, but their real achievement was the pigeons: like the bygone Etruscans, they’d taken to raising pigeons for meat. A convenient, sustainable source of protein to replace bygone supply chains.

But as with everything in the post-Fall reality, no group could afford isolation. Trade was how humanity had invented civilization . . . and it promised to do so again.

As the infected began to wither away with the old year, a Trade Road began forming along the old highways. Italian communities were warily reaching out, eager to barter for essentials. Half-sunken Venice supplied fish, salt, and potassium chlorate (cooked down from seaweed). Boats from the south were bringing lemons and other fresh fruit. A scavenger faction west of Bologna had looted a warehouse of paper products and canned goods. Cheeses and salted pork were trickling in from a repurposed medieval monastery . . . 

Silvio hefted his bag of smoked pigeon meat—an offering from the cave people to prove they were ready to join the effort. “I’ll let the traders know your group is open for business,” he said.

Anna gave a sidelong look. “You’re evading the subject.”

“You noticed that, did you?”

“You live in an unprotected village, Silvio.”

“Not true. We have a fence.”

“And a useless lookout.”

“I’ll be having a conversation with young Salvatore,” he growled. “Believe that.”

“One kid with a rifle isn’t good security. The caves here are—”

“Dangerous.”

She raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“For a little girl,” he clarified. And it was true. The mountain’s geography made it a natural citadel, but for a child—especially one as relentlessly curious as his Caterina—there were dangers. One misstep and she could fall off a cliffside perch, or go tumbling down a narrow chasm.

“Besides,” he added, “I didn’t exactly make friends here today.”

Anna shook her head. “Is that what you’re concerned about? Listen, Giuseppe was a jerk before the world ended. He likes to throw his weight around, figuring no one will stand up to him. You showed him he was wrong.” She gave a winning smile. “By the way, where the hell did you learn to fight like that? Giuseppe’s a big fellow, but you swatted him down like he was nothing.”

Quickly, Silvio said, “He was drunk. It’s no measure of fighting skill to topple a drunk.”

His new friend looked less than content with that answer, and Silvio cursed himself for being careless. There was wisdom in ending a fight fast—there were no hospitals for fixing a broken hand or repairing a broken jaw.

Yet the truth was that Silvio had been drunk, too—an extra cup of Chianti had put him over the edge. And for a man of his skillset and body count, that was bad business. Giuseppe, the wannabe alpha male of the mountain, had made one too many unflattering comments about Silvio’s village and its farmers, and Silvio—already in a dark mood and feeling the wine—responded in kind. Like any bully, Giuseppe had puffed up at the talkback. He’d grabbed Silvio . . . 

 . . . and that had been a mistake.

Anna hunched over the tower viewer again, listlessly taking in the village. “Um . . . isn’t that your daughter?”

Silvio brushed her aside and peered through the lens again. Sure enough, he spotted little Caterina. She was not allowed to leave the cottage yard by herself, but there she was, playing in the gulch with her stuffed bunny. Unaware that just around the bend, dozens of feral dogs were feasting on the dead.

A rifle shot cracked from the watchtower. The dogs melted away, dragging what remained of the bloody corpse into the woods.

Silvio sprang back from the viewer. “Goddam it! I told her to stay indoors until I returned!”

“The dogs are leaving,” Anna pointed out.

“She’s breaking the rules!” He hauled the bag of meat over his shoulder and ran full-tilt down the mountain path, terrified that the pack might return and sniff out a second course. Terrified at the thought of losing what was left of his family.

Terrified that wherever he went and whatever he did, violence was always nipping at his heels.


Before the Fall, he had killed forty-three people.

They had been contract-jobs, usually for the Sicilians or Croatians—but they had been jobs. Lots of guys who worked the crime syndicates were eager to embrace it as a lifestyle. They strutted through nightclubs coked to the gills, picking fights, starting feuds, attracting attention. Most came from the streets like Silvio, beaten down and impoverished; joining the criminal nouveau riche gave them a chance to wear expensive suits, drive sports cars, and fuck surgically perfect trollops.

But Silvio always maintained professionalism. He did his work and went home. He stayed off the radar of law enforcement and rival syndicates. His targets were a means to a paycheck—jobs measured in single-paragraph dossiers and color photos.

He didn’t enjoy violence. Didn’t enjoy the kill.

Yet I almost killed Giuseppe today, he thought as he ran down the mountain. It would have been easy: pressing one hand against the man’s eyes to draw up his defense . . . and then driving a single blow into his windpipe.

He’d done it before, and he shuddered, double-timing it to his cottage above the gulch.

“Caterina!” he cried. “Come here!”

The cottage had been his safehouse in the old days, when he needed to lay low after high-profile jobs. It therefore was the most logical destination when the cities began falling . . . first to the infected, then to the unchecked fires. Umbria became a natural place for survivors making a similar exodus.

“Caterina!”

His daughter appeared on the hillcrest, clutching her plush bunny. Her golden hair made her seem a princess from a fairy tale. Her pale dress was dirty from where she’d been playing among the rocks and weeds.

She waved to him excitedly. “Papa! Where did you go?”

“I told you, I had to go to work.” Silvio scooped her up, heart pounding.

“Did you see the bird people?”

“I did.”

“Did you see the birds? I want to feed the birds!”

Thinking of the pigeon meat in his bag, he decided to change the subject. “What were you doing in the gulch?”

Her smile fell. “Please don’t be angry, Papa.”

“When I go to work, you are never to go beyond our fence!” The dogs’ grisly feast replayed in his mind. “Why did you disobey me? Why go into the gulch?”

“I was looking for the treasure.”

He blinked. “What treasure?”

“Nana says she heard people digging for buried treasure! Papa, can we look for treasure? Please!”

The cottage’s backdoor swung open, and his mother emerged. In the failing light, she seemed a shriveled old woman—a harsh reversion to her days in a crumbling, crime-infested Salerno neighborhood—and it hurt Silvio to see. She’d done her best to raise him, had sacrificed what little she had. In return, he helped raise her out of those slums . . . 

 . . . and yet now, the world itself was a crumbling slum. The past was nipping at their heels again.

Silvio put his daughter down. “Wash up for dinner.”

“But the treasure . . . ”

“There’s no treasure here.” He scowled at his mother.

As Caterina scurried inside, the old woman approached, shoulders slouched, anxiously kneading her hands. She glanced to his bag and said, “Things went well?”

“They have food to trade,” he said evasively.

“We could use the meat. The fish from Venice don’t always arrive fresh . . . ”

“Mama,” he interrupted, voice brittle. “What is Caterina talking about?”

The woman looked at her feet. “I didn’t tell her there was buried treasure. I said . . . it sounded like people were digging. I heard talking. I looked out the window and . . . ”

“And?”

The woman’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t see anyone. But . . . but . . . I heard the shovels! I heard . . . ”

“You were hearing things again, Mama.”

He didn’t know what the rest of the world was dealing with. Since the Fall, his own life had narrowed from international assignments to the village’s day-to-day concerns and the formalization of the Trade Road. The infected had faded; since winter’s thaw, they’d rarely been seen at all.

No, the real concern was of a skinned knee that could turn septic without antibiotics. Or a broken hand that would cripple a farmer whose life depended on tilling the land.

Or the medicine that kept his mother’s mind clear.

The zombies might be gone but so were the pharmacies. Hell, most Italian cities were gone, too—without firefighters, blazes had reduced urban centers to ash; Silvio’s flight to the safehouse had been shadowed by a hellish horizon like something out of Dante. Medicine was a fading dream; Silvio knew that by the time Caterina was an adult, the ERs and clinics and online ordering he’d taken for granted would seem like fables too lofty to be believed. The need for medicine—and a dependable supply route—had been the motivation behind his reconnaissance for the Trade Road: helping to connect survivors, tally what they offered, and establish safe stations along the way.

With a heavy heart, Silvio pointed into the gulch. Mossy boulders lay strewn like giant’s teeth. The low hills beyond were a rolling, uninhabited horizon as far as the eye could see—two kilometers if it was a step—and without a single home, shack, or tent. Too rocky to be farmed: bleak and beautiful and bereft of any human soul.

“Look down there, Mama. There are no people. When you tell Caterina things like that, she wants to investigate.”

“But—”

“You need your pills.”

His mother’s expression was so lost and frightened that it was a lance through his chest. She was eighty-two, tough as Italian mothers tended to be, but her pills had run out with winter. She was starting to forget things. Twice he’d caught her talking to people who weren’t there . . . 

“I heard people,” she insisted, looking to the gulch. “I think . . . I think they were speaking English! I heard digging! Silvio, why would I imagine something like that?”

“What book have we been reading to Caterina?”

The woman stiffened.

“Mama?”

A tear rolled down her cheek, and her voice broke as she said, “Treasure Island.”


When the dinner plates were cleared away, Silvio sent Caterina straight to bed without a story. She protested this injustice—their nightly tradition was for him or her Nana to read tales of lofty palaces and deep dungeons, monsters and treasure. This time, he stood vigil as she brushed her teeth. Then he carried her to bed, tucked her in with her bunny, and made sure the ground-level window was closed.

“Papa?”

“Go to sleep,” he whispered, blowing out the candle. Withdrawing to the corridor, he saw his mother standing at the end of the hall, looking crestfallen. He hated seeing her like that. “Goodnight, Mama,” he said, and she bowed her head and retreated to her own room.

Silvio went outside and sat on the porch steps. He withdrew his hunting knife and a small piece of black pine—as a kid, he’d taken up whittling as a form of meditation, and the habit had persisted through adulthood. Here in Umbria, he’d decided to create a miniature set of fairy tale beings: a king, queen, noble knight, scaly dragon, horses, and a castle; there were no toy stores anymore, no Disney channel, and so when next Christmas arrived, he wanted to surprise his daughter with new playthings. The bunny was getting threadbare.

As he worked, he glanced to the village. It was a portrait of frosted moonlight and rich shadows. A tiny light glinted atop the watchtower; Salvatore had gone to bed, and it was Old Man Matteo’s shift in the crow’s nest. Silvio had insisted on rotational guard duties for the village’s defense, and he had memorized the schedule with the same clinical efficiency that he’d employed when planning his kills. He wished Matteo had been up there earlier, because as a veteran of the Italian Armed Forces, the man was a crack-shot. The dogs needed culling.

He considered, too, what else needed to be done. The fence had to be expanded and reinforced, which meant an organized timber-fetching expedition. When harvest came, new tools and storage bins would be required. And medical supplies . . . what were they going to do about medical supplies?

His thoughts trailed off as he spotted a lonely figure entering the village from the mountain path. Too far away to glean any details, except for one: it was creeping steadily towards his cottage.

Fuck.

Silvio hadn’t discounted the possibility that Giuseppe’s pride might inspire some attempt at revenge. Honor duels had been part of Italian culture from Salerno right up to the Cosa Nostra, and apparently into the apocalypse as well.

He abandoned his whittle-work and ducked into the shadows near his fence gate. His hand tightened on the knife, thinking: jab the jugular, pull hard across the throat . . . 

The intruder reached his gate and swung it open. Silvio sprang up—

—and checked his action, recognizing his visitor.

“Anna?”

The former-tour-director-turned-cave-survivalist spun around at the sound of his voice. “Silvio? Hi! I didn’t mean to startle you . . . ”

Tucking the knife into his palm, he said quickly, “I wasn’t expecting company, sorry. What are you doing here?”

She shrugged. “It’s not like I can call ahead, you know? I wanted to apologize again for what happened earlier.”

“Not your fault.”

“Giuseppe was out of line. He doesn’t seem to understand that things have changed. Acting like a belligerent asshole isn’t a good survival skill.”

Silvio considered her in the moonlight, a chiaroscuro Venus come down from Olympus. She noticed his attention and chanced a smile, but he looked away, ashamed. His wife Maria had been dead less than a year. It was always close in his thoughts. Close enough that it seemed he could still smell her perfume sometimes.

Anna cleared her throat. “Don’t judge us too harshly, is what I came down here to ask.”

“I won’t.”

“For what it’s worth, Giuseppe isn’t a bad guy. He cracked a tooth right to the gum, and it’s not like he can go to a dentist. It’s getting infected. He’s in a lot of pain. This morning I could see he was feverish.”

Silvio felt a twinge of guilt. “He needs antibiotics. Believe me, it’s the top item on our wish-list.”

She blew a stray hair out of her face. “How fragile society turned out to be, huh? I always figured the future would be flying cars and moon-bases, not this . . . historical reset.” She nodded towards the countryside. “But you know . . . see those straight rows of cypress trees? That’s not a coincidence. The Romans planted them, to shade legions on the march. Whenever you see a neat line of trees like that, there’s a lost Roman road there. The past is always with us.”

“No argument here.”

The sound of skittering pebbles interrupted the night’s solitude. A light breeze set the community garden wavering like a gentle surf.

Anna playfully kicked his shoe. “Want to go for a walk?”

“The world’s a bit dangerous for that, don’t you think?”

“Something tells me you’re capable of protecting us.” She grinned. “But okay, we’ll play it safe. Show me around your garden. You be the tour director.”

“This isn’t exactly Pompeii, but fine.” He shrugged and secretly pocketed his knife. “To our right is a sweet potato crop from the Cipriano Dynasty, planted in the hallowed era of February . . . ”

Together, they strolled along the vegetable garden—high nutrition crops consisting of potatoes, garlic, and onions. The village had partitioned their community garden so that each homestead shared in its development, from maintenance of water lines to tilling new furrows for plantings.

“What did you do before the Fall?” Anna asked.

“Salesman.”

“Peddling what?”

“Insurance.”

“Oh, the irony.” She chuckled, looked at him curiously. “They teach a lot of self-defense in those insurance seminars, do they?”

“Self-defense is a form of insurance, if you think about—”

His words cut off as he heard another rattle of stones, and this time he was able to pinpoint the source: the gulch. It seemed too deliberate to be from the wind.

A person was walking around down there.

Instinctively, Silvio glanced to his daughter’s bedroom window.

It was open.

“Goddam it.” He sprinted to the window, briefly hoping that Caterina had merely drawn it open for fresh air. Instead, he saw an empty bed. Cursing, he vaulted the backyard fence as a bewildered Anna pursued him.

“Silvio?”

“Caterina!” From atop the ledge, he scanned the gulch. Moonlight glinted off rocks, deepened the shadows.

Anna stood beside him and said, “You think she went outside again?”

Someone is creeping around, and she’s not in her bed!” He descended the slope, peeking behind boulders for signs of a mischievous four-year-old. At a particularly flat, crooked boulder, he stopped short, breath catching.

A plush bunny lay in the grass.

Silvio’s blood ran cold. Caterina never abandoned her bunny; it had become her protective talisman, a surrogate friend in these trying times and, equally, something she could protect.

Where the hell could she have gone? He’d only tucked her in twenty, maybe thirty minutes ago. The gulch was deserted as far as he could see, surrounding hills as untroubled as a painting.

Anna came up behind him and saw the bunny. “Is that hers?”

“Yes.” He crouched to examine the grass.

“What was she doing back here?”

“Looking for buried treasure.”

“You put a lot of gold in the ground, do you?”

“Of course not.” Silvio ran his fingers along the earth, noting how the grass blades had been trampled, bent backwards against the grain. A short pace away was another flattened patch, and another. It formed an unmistakable trail of footprints into the gulch. He tracked it to the base of a swollen hill . . . 

 . . . where it ended without explanation.

What the hell?

Anna had stayed behind; now, she called to him excitedly. “Silvio! Look at this!”

He turned to see her lying down on her stomach at the base of the flat, crooked boulder. She produced a small flashlight, shining it into a hollow space beneath the rock.

“The tracks go the other way,” he protested.

“Look how deep it goes!” She moved the beam back and forth, revealing an oddly rectangular ledge and a dark hollow. An inviting place for a curious four-year-old; Caterina was notorious for crawling into corners of the cottage’s root cellar and closets.

He flattened himself beside Anna, pawing around in the recess. “Caterina! Are you hiding in there?”

“It’s an ancient well!” Anna cried. “The Etruscans cut wells in this angular style! Looks like someone tried concealing it, to keep people from falling.”

Mind racing in terror, Silvio flipped around and inserted himself feet first, bracing his shoes against the sides of the chute. Anna handed him the flashlight and he took it with trembling fingers.

“I’m going down,” he stammered, and began a spiderlike descent into the bowels of the earth.


There was no fear he’d known that could compete with the blind, raw panic impelling him on. He fought off images of reaching the bottom of the well to find his daughter’s broken, lifeless body. Yet it made horrifying sense. Why else would she have dropped the bunny near the boulder? Why else would she be nowhere else in sight? It even explained why he hadn’t heard her scream. He was nearly hyperventilating as he half-clambered, half-slid and, suddenly, he splashed into warm water.

Oh my God!

Silvio used the flashlight to scan the narrow space. The water was shallow.

A human body would float.

Anna landed behind him; he hadn’t even known she was following. She took in the secret underground with wide eyes. “Why is this water so warm? It’s March! It should be ice cold!”

Silvio let the flashlight beam crawl along the walls, and to his surprise he spotted a jagged, slanting fissure, like a wide lightning bolt. Earthquakes were more common in Italy than people suspected, and this was clearly the result of one or several quakes over the centuries, splitting the clay and opening a deeper passage.

“She could fit through this,” he muttered.

Anna touched his arm. “Silvio, does that make sense? Could a child have gotten all the way down here and . . . ”

“And survived the fall? Enough to go spelunking?”

She swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

He said nothing. A numbness began to spread through his limbs, but he rebelled against it. Squeezing through the fissure, he stumbled into the next passage and was abruptly neck-deep in water. He dropped the flashlight, and when he plunged his head underwater to retrieve it, his eyes were burning. There was a chemical taste in his mouth.

When he came up for air, he saw that Anna had followed him once again. Her eyes grew wide. “Silvio, are you seeing this?”

“This water has chlorine in it,” he muttered.

She pointed a dripping hand. “Look!”

And then he saw something that should not exist.

They had wandered into a subterranean lagoon. It filled a cavernous space like the grottos of Capri. The water was preternaturally warm and highly chlorinated, but it was also electric blue in color! By that luminosity, Silvio spotted a pale, sandy beach a hundred meters away, and upon that beach—

Impossible! he thought.

—were dozens of fold-out chairs and striped umbrellas, lined up in a neat row along the shore!

Silvio’s mind flipped around as he tried processing the sight. Farther inland from the beach chairs stood a Caribbean-style bar with a thatched roof, festooned in gaudy Christmas lights.

“Am I having a stroke?” Anna asked, jaw agape.

“If so, we’re sharing the same hallucination.”

“But how is this possible? Do you think—”

He clamped his palm over her mouth. With his other hand, he pointed to the far end of the beach.

The sandy stretch appeared to be deserted, but he’d long ago learned that appearances were deceiving. Shapes moved in the gloom. A cigarette burned a hole in the shadows near a small building marked by lavatory signs.

“Two men,” he said grimly.

Anna’s forehead creased. “How can this place exist? Who the hell are these people?”

“See the pier? There are pool floats tethered.”

“I see them.”

“It’s dark there. Good cover. And we’ll be within earshot of the smoker and whoever he’s with. Follow me.”

Silvio bobbed along, staying low and tasting chlorine. As he attained the pier, he caught some of the strangers’ conversation. They were speaking English. American English. Silvio had never been to America—his assignments were limited to Europe—but he knew enough of their movies and music to recognize the accent. And he had killed American targets; they were easy pickings, always clashing in clothing and mannerism with the countries they visited.

Hiding in the darkness of the pier, Silvio turned to check on Anna’s progress.

She was halfway across the lagoon, looking scared but determined, when the gunshot rang out and she collapsed into the water.


The gunshot.

Silvio tasted bitter adrenaline in the back of his throat, and for a moment he was back in his Milanese apartment, sitting at the kitchen table, hands laced around the coffee his wife Maria had just poured for him. The air smelled of her perfume.

He’d just returned from a job across the Swiss border. It had been an ugly hit, and the memory of that ugliness trailed him as he drove straight through the night, anxious and eager to see Maria and their daughter. Not just ugly but risky—a high-profile lawyer for a multibillion-dollar, multinational corporation. Even the Cosa Nostra treaded carefully around multinats, who were as corrupt, petty, and vengeful as any “criminal” faction; hell, they were rumored to employ their own wet-work specialists, and at rates that would make the Russian bratva seem like two-bit counterfeiters.

Maria pushed the table aside so she could straddle him where he sat. “How was the conference?” she asked.

Silvio raised an eyebrow. “Sorry?”

“Your sales conference.”

He forged a tight smile. “PowerPoint presentations and motivational speakers. You really want to hear about that?” His briefcase, resting against a table leg, actually did contain pamphlets and Xeroxed corporate flyers; the trick to an effective lie, he’d learned, was to wrap it in layers of corroborating evidence. Like the suicide note he’d left by the body of the attorney, throat slashed in a Zurich hotel bathtub.

Maria didn’t smile, and he suddenly realized how anxious she looked. “I’m willing to listen to anything right now, mio caro. Anything to get my mind off the radio.”

“What’s on the radio?”

“The virus.”

He blinked. “Virus? What virus?”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Guess that conference really sealed you away, huh? Some disease in America is making people go crazy.”

Silvio didn’t know what to say to that. There was a sudden scream—a high keening sound that made him jump—and he instantly looked to the bedroom door where Caterina was still asleep.

But it was only the sound of the tea kettle on the stove. Maria kissed him, hopped off his lap and poured herself some tea. “It’s getting really scary,” she said. “They’re saying it’s a bioterrorism attack. A doctor on the radio suggested it might be a weaponized form of rabies, can you believe that?”

Already unsettled, Silvio took out his smartphone and checked the news—he’d driven back from Switzerland with the phone powered down, intent on leaving no digital breadcrumbs to connect him to Zurich. Now he stared in astonishment at news of a mysterious outbreak in New York City. A wave of infections and violence, with spotty rumors of the disease spreading deeper into the country.

Frowning, Silvio paged through the newsfeed. “Maybe we should get out of town for a while. Take Caterina south to the countryside.”

Maria turned from the stove, a steaming teacup in her hand. “I was hoping you would say—”

The window cracked behind her. Maria collapsed, the teacup shattering and—

JESUS GOD!

—her head emptying onto the floor.

Silvio threw himself atop her. Part of his mind was performing trigonometry, noticing the height of the bullet-hole in the window and realizing the shot must have come from the nearby grocer’s rooftop.

But the rest of his thoughts were focused on trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his shirt and wrapped it around what was left of Maria’s skull. His briefcase was spattered with pink bits of bone and brains.

Caterina’s door flung open. “Mama?”

“Back in your room!” Silvio screamed.

His daughter’s eyes grew wide as she saw him, blood-drenched and clutching her mother. “MAMA! MAMA!”

As his eyes misted over, Caterina seemed to dissolve. He couldn’t see her. He could only hear her screaming—as high-pitched as the tea kettle.

And in the following months, as the world fell apart country by country—first from America and through Asia and at last like a wildfire through Europe—he was forever remembering that awful scream. The world died, but a part of him was already dead, and he could close his eyes and feel Maria’s warm blood as he’d held her lifeless body . . . his love . . . his life . . . 


Anna’s head vanished beneath the water. A second gunshot rang out, followed by a woman’s cry and the screech of car tires. A scratching guitar riff kicked off a breathless gallop of drum-work.

Silvio found that he couldn’t look away from where Anna had disappeared. When her mass of black hair resurfaced, she swam to him and gripped his arm. Eyes pink with chlorine, she whispered, “They’re shooting at us!”

“No,” he grumbled. “No one’s shooting.”

“The gunshot—”

“We’re hearing an outdoor movie theater, like a drive-in.”

Anna considered this. On the beach, the smoker took a final drag of his cigarette, crushed the butt into an ashtray, and disappeared into the lavatory. His partner strayed to the bar to return a bottle of whiskey. Silvio pulled himself along the pier and crept onto the sand, drawing his knife.

Trailing him, Anna whispered, “How can there be a beach and theater underground? This is Umbria, for God’s sake!”

“Think about it. And while you’re thinking, stay here.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to use the bathroom.” Mindful of the fellow at the bar, Silvio slipped quietly past the smoking ashtray and entered the lavatory.

A single plug-in light provided the only illumination. A tall fellow stood at the urinal. He wore a red cap, and a sky-blue uniform with a holster-and-sidearm. Silvio waited as the man emptied his bladder; when he turned to use the sink, Silvio struck him with a three-knuckled punch to the diaphragm and dropped him like felled timber.

Then he straddled the man’s chest, pressing the knife to his throat.

“The girl,” he whispered in English. “What happened to the little girl?”

The man fought for air. He tried focusing on Silvio’s face through tears and pain. “How the fuck do you know about that? No one knows!”

“Obviously you do.” Silvio jabbed the knife deeper, directly against the carotid. At the same time, he soaked up details of the man’s uniform. A patch over the breast-pocket read: BOCCACCIO BUNKERS. “Tell me where she is, and I’ll leave you tied up here but alive. What happened to her?”

The man licked his lips, and in a husky, smoker’s voice, said, “She drowned.”

Silvio felt his blood run cold. “Drowned? You mean . . . ”

“The Newells are keeping it quiet, okay? You with the Fontaines? The Chatfields? Listen, the Newells are paying blue-boxes to hush this up. Blue-boxes, man! Porn, liquor, pot . . . harder stuff if you want! Whoever you’re with, it doesn’t matter. You keep your mouth shut, we’ll give you a cut, okay?”

Silvio didn’t have the vaguest idea what the man was saying; the slang strained his limited knowledge of English. “You’re lying,” he managed.

“I’m not! I helped bury the body!”

“Where did you take her?”

“Topside! We went out to the hills and . . . ” The man squinted at him. “Wait, who the hell are you? How the fuck did you get in—”

The knife seemed to move of its own accord. The blade opened the man’s throat, and his eyes grew wide as he choked, sputtered, and died; blood spread out along the floor tiles in dark lines.

He wanted to slump back and weep, but footsteps sounded near the door and another man appeared, wearing a similar sky-blue uniform. This second opponent instantly registered the dying body on the floor and the intruder squatting over it. He reached for his holstered sidearm.

Silvio was faster. Snatching the dead man’s pistol, he sighted his target and squeezed the trigger. The lavatory wall was sprayed with a ropy sludge of brains. The man tipped backwards and struck the floor hard.

Outside, a movie explosion sounded. An unseen audience clapped and cheered.


He let the pistol clatter from his hands. When Anna appeared in the doorway, he gazed at her with hollow eyes.

She regarded the scene in open-mouthed astonishment. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “Are you okay? I heard the gunshot and . . . Silvio? Are you hurt?”

“She’s dead.”

The two words seemed deadlier than any bullets, and on the heels of this grim pronouncement came the thought: I deserve this.

Forty-three murders. For Silvio, it had been the fastest way out of the Salerno slums. He’d started out as just another low-level killer working for cheap cash, but most low-level killers didn’t last long. They were messy, idiotic, and impulsive. They got themselves caught, or pissed off the wrong people and ended up in the obits. Silvio paid attention. Took his first job at thirteen and did it with a knife, wearing latex gloves and with a change of clothes he’d brought in a plastic bag—no loud gunshots or bloody clothes to attract the neighbors. He didn’t boast, didn’t gamble, didn’t bury his nose in cocaine or run with street thugs. He was determined to be professional . . . what they called in the business a “master-class.” And it wasn’t long before that reputation reached the top ranks of the Cosa Nostra.

It was a gruesome career track, but Silvio soothed his conscience by telling himself he didn’t enjoy the violence. Didn’t kill unnecessarily. Didn’t revel in it.

Anna carefully stepped around the bodies. “Silvio, get up.”

“My little girl is dead.”

“No, she’s not.”

He blinked at her.

She crouched beside him and touched his face. “Caterina is somewhere in this Stygian pit. And I think I know where to find her.”

He pointed to the dead man beneath him. “He told me—”

“I heard,” she insisted. “I crept to the doorway when you were talking with him. Had to dive behind a trash-bin when his friend showed up.”

“Then you heard what he said!”

“That someone drowned, yes. Someone in the Newell family, whoever the hell they are. They weren’t talking about your daughter. I have a sick idea of what’s been happening.” She regarded the carnage around them. “And I suspect you’re exactly the person to resolve it.”


“Did you know that most of Pompeii escaped the volcano?”

They were moving stealthily away from the beach, shadowing a lighted cobblestone path and artificial palm trees with polyurethane leaves. Silvio felt like he was on autopilot. Afraid to hope, he fell back on his tactics of adapting to the available terrain.

He didn’t know the headcount of this underground bunker, but it was reasonable to assume they’d be able to tell an intruder at a glance. To that end, Silvio had stripped the first corpse of its blood-stained uniform and changed into it, donning the cap and taking the weapon—a SIG Sauer P226 with a fifteen-round magazine—and the clip from the second pistol as backup. Assuming the “public” areas would be under electronic surveillance, he kept to the shadows, head lowered beneath his cap, and shielding Anna with his body as they went.

She nudged him and continued softly, “The volcano was smoking for days. Ancient people weren’t stupid. Most fled town. Those who stayed were the wealthiest families, hunkering down with their comforts and riches, waiting for things to pass. Of course, what passed was a pyroclastic eruption . . . ”

“Anna, I don’t know what you’re—”

“You asked me to think about what this place is.” She thumped the badge on his stolen uniform. “Boccaccio Bunkers must be a place for rich families in case of an apocalypse. When the virus hit, they packed up and burrowed in.”

Ahead of them, the path forked—a three-way signpost indicated the ways to SERENITY BEACH, STARDARK THEATER, and DREAM ESTATES.

“The guards here are ex-military,” Silvio muttered. “American. Maybe former SEALs.”

“How do you know?”

“A feeling.”

She gave a sidelong look. “Are you ex-military?”

“Not exactly.” He led the way towards DREAM ESTATES. A security gate stood ahead, with an occupied guard station. Yet there was also a wall lined with potted flowers and faux ivy. Silvio hoisted Anna onto its ledge, pulled himself up after her, and dropped quietly to the other side.

“Mother of God,” he whispered.

This wing of the bunker resembled a high-priced condo complex, with each unit’s façade built directly into the rock wall. A mock dead-end road ran in front, complete with streetlamps and individual mailboxes. Each home sported a minuscule square of Astroturf.

“This was all tunneled out of an existing cave system,” Anna said. “The well we discovered? That was probably an Etruscan cistern! Whoever built this place didn’t know about it, or they would have filled it in!”

“Which means there’s a different point of egress. These people didn’t rappel down a chute with my daughter.” He looked sharply at her. “You said you had a sick idea of what’s been happening . . . ”

“The mailboxes,” Anna interrupted. “We’re looking for the name ‘Newell.’”

As it turned out, their destination was three units in along the road. The neighboring structures were dark and quiet—apparently, movie night at Stardark Theater was a major social event.

“They won’t be at the movie,” Anna said softly.

“How the hell do you know?”

“Were you listening to that guard? He told you what was happening before you . . . um . . . ”

He regarded her, face pitted by darkness. “Before I killed him?”

Anna touched his hand. “You killed him in self-defense, right? It might not hold up in court, but . . . ”

“There are no courts anymore.” Silvio walked to the Newell’s front door and knocked three times. Music played loudly within—suspiciously loud. The peephole darkened as someone peered through the lens. Silvio kept his face lowered, the BOCCACCIO BUNKERS cap concealing his features.

The door swung open, revealing a well-groomed man with silver hair and an improbable tan.

“Everything okay?” the man barked. “You people swore that everything would be—”

His words dissolved as Silvio’s fist caught him in the teeth and shattered them like bone china.


He once killed three Croatian drug-runners operating out of a Nyhavn waterfront in Copenhagen. They’d gotten in the habit of ordering takeout, so one night Silvio intercepted the deliveryman while posing as one of his targets. He poisoned the meal, and delivered it himself. An hour later, he entered the apartment to find two targets dead . . . but the third leapt out of a closet to tackle him. Despite being poisoned—sweating and shaking violently—the guy had fought like a fucking demon.

Mr. Newell of Boccaccio Bunkers put up no such resistance.

The man was sprawled out from one punch, and Silvio leapt over him, plunging deeper into the household. He passed an empty den, glancing at mounted photographs: they variously showed Mr. Newell with a stunning blonde, lots of vacation pics, and a young girl—also blonde—who could be no older than four or five.

Beneath the otherwise deafening music, Silvio heard voices from a corridor. There, a bathroom door was ajar. A little girl cried as a woman scolded her. Silvio burst into the room and the scene pierced his brain in scattered shards.

Mrs. Newell was forcibly washing the hair of a young girl, who had been made to stand before a sink. There was a box of blond hair dye on the counter. The little girl looked up and . . . 

“Caterina,” Silvio whispered.

The woman roared in outrage. “What the hell are you doing in my house? Who the hell do you think—”

The music covered his next actions. He dragged a semi-conscious Mrs. Newell to the lobby, depositing her alongside her bleeding husband. Then he returned to fetch Caterina, and she wept in his arms.

“Papa!”

“Papa is here,” he said, kissing her cheek as he brought her out. He handed her off to Anna and added, “Take her outside. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Anna hefted the little girl into her arms. “What are you going to do?”

He withdrew the knife from his boot. “Personal matter.”

“We rescued your daughter! There’s no need to—”

“We rescued her,” he snapped, “because these people took her!”

“This isn’t self-defense.”

“This is exactly self-defense.”

“Silvio, we’re better than this!”

That platitude was a luxury of the old world,” he said thickly, and as he stared at the Newells he felt his vision constricting like a rifle-sight. He recalled the scene from the bathroom. The box of hair dye. The new clothes draped over a hamper. His hands curled around the hilt of his knife. It would be an eight-second job, like butchering chickens.

“Besides,” he growled, “if we leave them alive, they’ll alert the whole place. As it is, we don’t know where we’re going. We certainly can’t leave the way we arrived.”

Anna stared coldly at the couple on the floor. “How do we get out of here?”

It was Mr. Newell, clutching his battered mouth, who mumbled, “The front gate. Turn left at the carousel and go down Market Hollow.” He spat a gob of saliva and teeth into his palm.

“Tie them up,” Anna told Silvio.

“They abducted my daughter—”

“To replace one who died!”

Silvio felt his venom dissipate as he remembered what the security guard had said: She drowned . . . the Newells are keeping it quiet . . . I helped bury the body . . . topside! This must have been what his mother heard from the previous night, when she thought strangers were digging in the hills.

Anna touched his arm and, in a gentle voice, said, “Silvio, let’s go home.”

“You can’t take her!” Mrs. Newell wailed, makeup running in greasy rivulets. “You can’t do this to us!”

Holding Caterina in her arms, Anna regarded the woman. “I’m sorry for your loss, I really am. Many people have lost loved ones during this.”

“I don’t care about them!” Mrs. Newell screamed, and she pointed a bony finger. “She’s the right age! No one here has to know! She can be Becky!”

Silvio stared coldly. “Her name is Caterina, and she doesn’t belong to you.” He dragged the Newells to the bathroom, stripped them, and bound their hands and feet with their own clothes. He tried not to think of his knife, or the SIG Sauer in its holster.

As he turned away, Mrs. Newell cried, “We can’t be the only ones who lost a child! The other families will talk! They’ll talk about us!


They were within sight of Market Hollow’s garish carousel when klaxons erupted like a scream. Whether they had triggered some surveillance tripwire, or the Newells had hit a hidden panic switch, Silvio didn’t know and there wasn’t time to care.

Market Hollow was a blasted-out cavern occupied by storefronts with kitschy names—On the Rocks Tavern, Wendy’s Hair & Nails, Farmer’s Market, and a pharmacy called The Apothecary. Silvio turned in amazement to this latter window, seeing past his reflection to endless rows of medicines, pill bottles, bandages, tissue boxes. Giuseppe’s toothache, mama’s dementia, the cuts and fevers and injuries that tomorrow was certain to bring . . . all those needed treatments were here.

Six men emerged from the hollow’s far end in three-by-three formation, clad in Boccaccio Bunkers raiment. Thinking fast, Silvio seized Anna by the neck and shoved her and his daughter to the ground. He waved excitedly to the oncoming men.

“I’ve got two of them!” he shouted in his best imitation of the guard’s husky American accent. “The others went that way! Be careful—they’re armed!”

The deception worked . . . partly. The first set of men darted past, grinning eagerly, looking forward to real action in what must have been a somnolent posting. A fourth man peeled off from his team and followed. The remaining two jogged up to Silvio.

“Take a look!” he insisted, pointing.

The men looked down, and Silvio killed them both with point-blank headshots.

Caterina sobbed. “Papa!”

“Papa’s here,” he assured her. “We’re almost home.”

At the end of Market Hollow, a wide stairway was hewn into the rock. On the level below, a heavy-duty, reinforced jeep sat before an immense set of double-doors. White lettering on the wall read: GATE RELEASE. There was also a skinny metal chute climbing into the cavern ceiling with the words OUTSIDE VIEW; Silvio was reminded of war-time trench periscopes.

This is how they come and go secretly, he thought. The night they buried the dead girl, and hours ago when they abducted Caterina . . . these fucking Morlocks take a peek to ensure the way is clear. Then they emerge like trapdoor spiders.

He sprinted to the gate mechanism and pulled the release handle. The doors swiveled inward, spilling dirt and stones. Bright moonlight illuminated the widening gap.

“Silvio!”

Anna waved him over to where she stood before a large whiteboard mounted on the wall. He almost didn’t bother with it; he’d seen enough of these people to figure they were best left alone, their life of privileged moles no concern of his now that Caterina was back in his arms. But there was a horrified tone in Anna’s voice that made him pay attention, so he hesitated, peering closely at the whiteboard.

“Holy shit,” he gasped.

In red marker, someone had sketched a crude map of the village. The position of individual cottages was accurately rendered, and each was designated with a number—several “3”s and “4”s and a “5.” They appeared to show the number of inhabitants; Silvio’s own cottage sported a “3.” The watchtower was drawn with a large red circle around it. And each sector of the community garden contained a list of the crops being grown . . . 

 . . . with the expected dates of harvest.

With Caterina in her arms, Anna touched the board with a trembling hand. “They’ve been watching us! Watching us closely!

Silvio felt a dangerous fury spread through his veins. This was how they knew about Caterina, he realized. They’ve been conducting detailed reconnaissance on us. Noting our population, resources, defensive capabilities . . . 

Perhaps it had begun innocently, as a way of passing the months in quarantine. Idle curiosity, boredom, a kind of game. Yet Silvio gleaned sinister intent in what he was seeing, and he reflected on the shoppes of Market Hollow. Boccaccio Bunkers was not a self-sustaining community: when their stockpiles were exhausted, they would starve. Farming, hunting, and bartering with others was the only viable roadmap to future recovery . . . yet these people had opted for total, indulgent isolation.

So what would they do when their coffers were depleted?

“They’re planning on raiding us,” Silvio hissed. “Once our crops are ready for harvest, they’re going to swoop in like locusts and take what they want.”

Anna looked stricken. “And they’ll kill whoever gets in their—”

A bullet hole perforated the whiteboard two centimeters from her head. She cried out and ducked as Silvio hit the floor and fired at the oncoming rush of Boccaccio security.

“Go!” he cried. “I’ll cover you!”

He had to admire the fact that she didn’t question this, didn’t stare blankly, didn’t hesitate. The world had changed and people with it: in the days before the Fall, it seemed the human race had fallen into a semi-coma, coddled by convenience. That dreamy luxury was not to be found in the survivors. Anna acted decisively, dashing with Caterina out into the night. Silvio crawled backwards, emptying his clip and slapping his only spare into place.

Then he was out in the fresh air again.

And he immediately recognized where he was.

It was the gulch behind his cottage. The precise location where he’d been tracking strange footprints that had vanished without explanation, until Anna discovered the Etruscan well.

From the outside, the bunker’s doors had been cunningly hidden. The steel had been covered with an outer coat of fake grass, stones, and weeds, efficiently blending it into the hillside. It was here that paying customers had entered when the infection began, arriving by helicopter or private car, gripping their luggage, and hurrying into their sanctuary.

Silvio saw that Anna had scrambled up the slope towards his cottage. He looked to the watchtower and cried out, “Matteo! Over here! We need help!”

Then he climbed the hill, mind racing to consider how his opponents might deploy.

When they did emerge, in the suped-up jeep he’d seen, he was too stunned to immediately react. The vehicle roared into the moonlight like a mythical beast from its lair, hurtling unevenly along the gulch. It banked left and climbed the nearest hill, parking at the summit some three hundred meters away. The far doors fanned open, and three men hopped out, using their armored ride as cover.

One of them shouted, “Hi there! We weren’t expecting visitors! Kind of rude not to introduce yourself, you know?”

The jeep shone in the moonlight, the shadows behind it so deep they resembled a chasm.

“You did good!” the man continued, voice cracking in a way suggestive of debilitating pressure, narcotics, or both. “Seriously, well done! I’d love to know how you infiltrated the bunker. More than that, I’d like to know why. You break in, murder my people, and shoot up the place. What did we do to you? Are you just a thrill-killing psycho? What’s the deal?”

Silvio knew the guy was trying to goad him into giving away his location. The smart move was to stay quiet and wait for their action. Yet he couldn’t help himself, and before he knew what he was doing, he called out, “You kidnapped a little girl!”

The man was silent for a moment. “Is that what this is about? Jesus Christ! Here I thought I was being clever, slipping in, grabbing the brat, and sneaking back.” Another hesitation. “She’s your daughter, is that it? Nothing personal, paisan. She’s the same age as the Newell girl, that’s all. Young enough that the family could keep her out of sight, give her a makeover, and no one would suspect there’d been a switch when they see her again.”

“You sick fuck!”

A muzzle flashed across the jeep’s roof. Bullets thumped against the hilltop, and Silvio ducked, peppered by fresh dirt.

“Hey paisan? Listen up! I’ve killed insurgents in nine countries! I could wipe out your village in a single night! But it doesn’t have to be like that! Hand over the girl. The Newells can give her a better life than you can! She’ll want for nothing. Believe me, that’s a better deal than other survivors are—”

A shot cracked from the watchtower—from Old Man Matteo’s IAF rifle. One of the Boccaccio security slumped over into the moonlight, dead before he hit the ground.

To Silvio’s amazement, his main opponent laughed—a shrill, wild laugh that was partway between a sob and scream. “You stupid piece of shit! Now I’m going to take the bitch by force! I offered you a reasonable trade! I didn’t have to do that! You think you people have any real power here? I’ve got a fucking arsenal under your feet!”

Anna whispered, “Silvio? Do you see that?”

He swallowed hard. “I certainly do.”

“The world is gone!” the man cried, unaware of the black tide spreading from the forest behind him in eerie, coordinated silence. “My country, your country . . . it’s all fucking gone! People like me make the rules now. People like me are in charge! People like me are the masters of—”

And then the dog pack was upon him. The remnants of Boccaccio security shrieked as they were torn apart by dozens of slavering jaws.


Caterina snuggled under her blanket, clutching her stuffed bunny protectively to her chest. Her eyes were bright coins in her bedroom’s candlelight. “Papa? Will you read to me?”

Silvio kissed her forehead. “Sorry, my gumdrop. Papa has to go to work. But Nana will read you a story tonight.”

A day had passed since his descent into the underworld. Even in an era without social media, the story had gained considerable traction. Both the village and mountaintop cave-dwellers were discussing the strange intruders who had emerged from a secret door in the gulch. A caravan from the Trade Road had arrived that morning, listening eagerly to the tale of a little girl’s rescue from flesh-and-blood devils beneath the earth.

Caterina had recovered quickly—perhaps too quickly—from her ordeal. Silvio had assigned a round-the-clock watch detail on the hill since escaping; the only significant occurrence since the midnight shootout had been the bunker doors sealing up once again; by Silvio’s reckoning, there were at least two remaining guards of the bunker’s security force, as well as unknown quantities of military-grade ordnance, fuel for the jeep . . . 

 . . . and other resources.

One consequence of her abduction, however, was that Caterina was jumpier than before. As a shadow passed behind her bedroom window, she started up in panic. “Papa!”

“It’s okay,” Silvio assured her. “Some men from the village are out there. And some from the mountain, too. They’re all here to keep you safe.”

She tilted her head sidelong in a way that reminded him of her mother. “Are they going to look for treasure? They should be careful, Papa. Those people underground were not nice.”

Silvio felt his heart harden at his daughter’s simple yet accurate assessment. “You’re right. They were not nice.” He kissed her again. “I love you, my gumdrop.”

Caterina giggled. “I love you too, Papa.”

He blew out the candle and headed outside to join the others.

A full posse had gathered on the ledge behind the cottage, with young Salvatore and Old Man Matteo and even a very repentant Giuseppe from the mountain. There weren’t many firearms to go around, though the dead guards had three AK-47s between them, and Anna—she had insisted on being part of the posse—wielded a double-barrel shotgun retrieved from her mountaintop armory.

Silvio walked into their midst, and every head turned towards him. He playfully slapped Giuseppe’s shoulder. “How’s the tooth?”

The man chuckled. “You could have done me a favor and knocked it out of my mouth.”

“Maybe next time.” He regarded the group in the faint starlight. “We have a lot of work to do, my friends. A terrifying danger is in the woods. Our fence needs to be expanded. The Trade Road is growing, and it requires formal rest-stops and refueling stations—I want each one marked by a bright green flag, to tell travelers it is safe and under protection. We have much to do, if we want to survive.” He hesitated. “No, ‘surviving’ is not enough. We want to rebuild.”

The group nodded. Anna held his gaze with steely resolve.

“We have a future to make,” Silvio continued. “But first, we must deal with something from the past.”

He led the way into the gulch. He checked his firearm and the knife in his boot.

Then he was first to descend into the well.


Back | Next
Framed