Excerpt from Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I ain't sure why we thought poking the shambler with our sharpened sticks was a good idea, but everyone started doing it, creeping in close enough to stab the creature and then dancing out of the way before her hands could reach us. The game might have gone on longer if the dead Miss Farmer hadn't managed to pull herself free.

Bobbed wire ain't a long-term fix for a shambler wanting in to the plantation. Since they don't have any kind of survival instinct it's no big deal for them to eventually pull themselves free of such an entanglement, ripping off great big swatches of themselves to do so. And this is exactly what the undead Miss Farmer did. One moment she was jammed up in the bobbed wire, the next she was stumbling toward us, half her dress and a good bit of arm skin left behind on the fence, which now listed to one side.

Most of the kids, myself included, screamed and ran. I took off for the field of sharpened sticks, knowing that would slow the undead woman down. But when I looked over my shoulder I realized that not everyone was with us.

Joe was standing right where he'd been, not moving, frozen in the path of the dead woman and her gaping maw. The boy had always been a bully, and the thing about bullies is they never learn how to run like the rest of us do. So Joe stood his ground, sharpened stick at the ready, convinced he was going to kill that shambler.

At some point in the woman's lunge toward Joe he realized that a stick wasn't much of a weapon against the dead, but it was too late. Joe was about to be shambler chow.

If it hadn't been for Zeke.

It was Zeke that slammed into Joe, pushing him out of the way of the woman. It was Zeke the woman bit, sinking her teeth deep into his throat. It was Zeke that cried out like a wounded animal, trying for a few precious moments to push the much heavier woman off him as she tore away a great chunk of flesh. And it was Zeke that let out one soft, anguished cry as his life bled out into the dirt of Rose Hill, the sound almost indistinguishable over the noise of the dead Miss Farmer feeding.

"Joe!" I yelled, and the boy looked at me, expression distant and caught somewhere between grief and horror. I ran back to where he'd landed, pulled him to his feet, and dragged him by the hand through the field of sharpened sticks, to the safety of Rose Hill.

As we ran back we passed the patrol coming to put down the dead. I didn't stay to watch; I'd seen enough carnage for one day. They say when they got there Miss Farmer had started on Zeke's face, and that two of the men vomited before they even got to putting her down and driving a nail into Zeke's head so he wouldn't come back.

Momma gave Zeke a proper burning, and gave Mr. Isaac and Auntie Evelyn his ashes. Joe ran off a few years later, presumably to one of the combat schools, and so their heartbreak was complete, Auntie Aggie clucking her tongue and saying, "Told you them twins was an ill omen."

It took me a long time before I left the safety of the main house, and I never ventured to the borders of Rose Hill again, not until I came to Miss Preston's years later. I learned two valuable lessons that day.

One: the dead will take everything you love. You have to end them before they can end you. That's exactly what I aim to do.

And two: the person poking the dead ain't always the one paying for it. In fact, most times, it's the ones minding their own business who suffer. That's a problem I still don't have an answer for yet.

Excerpted from Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. Copyright © 2018 by Justina Ireland. Excerpted by permission of Balzer + Bray. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.