Pine trees grew tall in the filtered sunlight of dawn, their astringent fragrance mingling unpleasantly with the rankness of the dead. Cottonwood tufts floated lazily in air that would be thick with heat in an hour's time. The prison, dark and dampened, was situated on low ground, a valley, in the flatlands on the edge of the county line. From afar, the complex looked abandoned, basketball courts and cyclone fencing for no one, useless guard towers studding the drought-wasted land. There were dirt roads veining the property's outer perimeter, but only walkers traced the pathways, meandering and dull-eyed. They turned as one, a united amoeba of decay, at the sound of the car approaching. A man in wastrel gray bib overalls, a fresher corpse than the others as evidenced by the yellow cuticles of his eyes and the poppy-red blood blooming from a gash on his cheek, jagged from something's teeth, lumbered with surprising quickness toward the car. His muscles hadn't yet snapped with rot.
He almost reached the driver side window of the battered Toyota, when he—it—suddenly slumped, tipping forward and smearing stagnant arterial blood across laminated glass. An arrow punctured through its head, puckering the skin in the back and spitting viscera out the forehead. Shane was at the post of the inner gate, crossbow crooked against hard, wiry muscle and bone. He looked better than the day before—thinner, thinner every day—but, cleaner. It had rained some, and after boiling and bottling, there was a splash left over. He'd cleaned grease, blood, sweat, and dirt from his face with a slick of palms. This morning, in the meager sunlight, his skin shone pale as the moon, his torso cloaked by the black leather of his vest and the sleeveless rag he'd been wearing as a shirt for a good week now.
The woman driving the Toyota—Maggie—got a squint-eyed nod from the man. He reeled that inner gate back, jogged the ten feet to the outer one, and did the same. He circumvented the car without a glance to tear his arrow from the broken skull of the dead man. And if Maggie hadn't already pressed the gas to lurch on inside, he slapped the trunk of her car, hard, to encourage her.