"Ashley was the first to do whatever had to be done." But you're the one who said we had to accept whatever happened and whatever we had to do." Words...aren't action, Miguel." He shook his head. "Intellectually, I knew we could die at any moment even before Zombie-Night. The zombies make it a point not to let us ignore it. Every second of every day they scream 'You are going to die!'"He shrugged. "So the truth is, you can trust Ashley. The rest of us are going to do stupid things until we accept. She poured about three pints of water from the kettle of water Dell had prepared from melted snow and spooned four tablespoons of coffee grounds into the top of the percolator's basket. She put the top with the little glass center on the coffee pot and placed it on top of the stove, next to the pan of beans. Then, she stirred the beans to make sure they were heating evenly and didn't burn on the bottom. The degree of heat on the top of the stove couldn't really be controlled very well - at. Here was my chance to shine, and I volunteered for the Forlorn Hope, the band of men who led the storming party through a breach, or in this case over the walls of a redoubt which was a part of the outer defences of the city.Fortune favoured me, and I was rewarded for being the first man over the wall of the Redoubt of San Francisco. I did not start up the scaling ladder as the first man, but as those ahead of me were killed and fell I found myself alone on the top rung of the ladder. Several. These 'Shadows' as they were referred to, would grant 'deals' and almost godlike power that enabled people to manipulate the world in such a way that could make the impossible possible. If these deals were broken people would vanish or die. Politicians made it illegal for person to make any of these alleged wagers with these Shadows, but as fate would have it, these public servants would also simply disappear or be found dead with injuries that were impossible to explain by medical science. Law.