“I want to thank you.” The bus driver sat down next to Tim on the side of the road and stuck out a sweaty hand. Tim shook it without looking at the man.

“Supposed to call it in,” Tim said automatically. “Every case is supposed to get called in.”

The driver stared at him open-faced. He knew it as well as Tim did. If one passenger on the bus had been infected it was likely others were, too. The bus could carry the disease someplace that was still clean.

“You a cop?” the driver asked, when Tim didn’t say anything.

“A librarian,” Tim told him. He shook his head. “Used to be.”

“You did us a big favor there. None of us are armed. When I saw you on the side of the road there I figured you had to be a cop or a soldier or something.”

Tim squinted. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror in quite a while but he doubted he looked very official. He hadn’t washed or laundered his clothes in a week and his straw hat didn’t exactly make him look tough.

“I figured anybody headed north had to be some kind of a badass. I’m Bill Peaslee,” the driver said.

“Tim. Tim Kempfer.” Tim nodded but he kept looking down at his knees. The fear was gone, washed out of him by a kind of dread mixed with nausea. It had never been like that before. Of the six people he’d killed since the Flu hit (all of them infected), he’d never felt like an executioner before. Always it had been self-defense.

“You look like you’ve been on the road awhile,” Peaslee said. “Mind if I ask where you’re headed?”

“Sure. Seattle.”

The driver laughed, then cut himself short. “I guess you’re the last guy on Earth who actually wants to go there.”

Tim shrugged. He shouldered his pack and made to get up. He understood Peaslee’s surprise, of course. Seattle was ground zero, the first place in America to get infected. The Russian Flu had come across from Vladivostok (hence the name—the authorities were saying lately it probably started in India) and hit Vancouver like a terrible wave. For a while it had looked like it was going to be contained there. All of America had gathered close around tv sets, waiting to hear what came next. People had gone out and bought jugs of distilled water and all the canned food they could scrounge. The President had made a speech that scared a lot of people, and FEMA and the CDC had braced for the worst while hoping for the best.

Their idea of the worst had fallen far short of the mark. Their epidemiological models had accounted for transmission by bodily fluids but they’d thought that meant sneezing and coughing. Until it was too late nobody had thought about what it meant to have an infected population that passed on its viral load aggressively, actively seeking out the healthy and attacking them. Biting them. Half of Washington state was infected in the first week, with the worst outbreaks localized in cities. The bigger the city, the more people crowded together in one place, the faster it spread. Seattle had been the first city to officially fall.

More than half a million people had tried to get out, before the military finally shut them in. The entire city was abandoned territory now, fenced off and left to rot. Nobody went in and nothing would ever be allowed to come out.

“I’ve got my reasons,” Tim said, and realized he had no desire to share them.

Peaslee didn’t prod. “We’re the First National Congregation of Jesus, plus a couple folks we picked up on the way. We’re from Chehalis, you know where that is?”

Tim did.

“Bad up there. We held on as long as we could, after they announced the travel ban. Tried to stay in our houses and when that didn’t work, when they started coming after us and nobody was stopping them, we took refuge in the church itself. That didn’t hold either. We figured we’d head south, try some place maybe in California. You been down that way?”

“Yeah.” Tim thought about his last day in San Francisco. He’d hoped to hitch a ride north, at least part of the way to Washington. Instead he’d found every highway out of town had turned strictly one way, with refugees crowding down out of the Pacific Northwest, packed into minivans and the beds of pickups. Mexican kids had run around the cars as they inched forward, selling bottles of water and wrapped sandwiches. Then the infected had come. It had seemed impossibly slow as it unfolded, a horde of them stumbling up an off ramp, slamming into the cars, dragging people out onto the street. Tim had turned at right angles to the road and high-tailed it before the screaming had properly started. He hadn’t stopped at all that night, just kept moving, asleep on his feet but still he could put one foot in front of another. A day later and fifty miles north he had tried making some phone calls. Whatever number he’d tried he’d just gotten a recorded message from FEMA, asking him to keep the lines clear, that regular service would be restored shortly.

“You might want to skip California,” Tim said.

Peaslee’s upper lip was thick with sweat. “They’d probably turn us back at the border anyway. Especially if you tell them what happened to us.”

“If I were you I’d head east. The last time I was in Chicago things were pretty good there. People were scared, yeah. Nobody went out in the street if they could help it. But it was clean.”

“A lot of checkpoints between here and Illinois,” Peaselee breathed.

Tim sat up and looked at the bus. A group of the passengers were struggling to change the blown-out tire, a crew of them working a big jack. Another bunch were burying the body of the man he’d killed while the woman in the wrinkled suit—had to be his wife, Tim thought, with only the thinnest stab of sympathy—stood with her hands steepled in front of her face, praying, even as tears slicked her cheeks.

“Come with us,” Peaslee said, suddenly. “I don’t know what you’re looking for but you won’t find it back there. Come with us.”

Tim shook his head. He got up and adjusted the straps of his pack. He’d wasted enough time. Wherever the bus was headed it was away from what he needed.

“Just—hey, if you won’t come with us, don’t rat us out either, okay?” Peaslee shouted at Tim’s back. “We’re just trying to make it, you know?”

Tim nodded and waved without turning.