“Damned ‘squitos are worse than the dead,” he muttered.

“Just deal. At least all they want’s a little blood.”

They kept to the road, picking their way across the broken surface. They hadn’t been maintained since the fall of civilization a decade before, and it showed; so many plants had pushed their way up through the asphalt that calling it a ‘road’ was little more than being polite. Some of the sprouted trees were surprisingly mature.

The only sounds they heard were their own footsteps, occasi...