Tim scrambled back down from the top of the truck. What he was going to do next he had no idea. The droolers from the medical container were still advancing—in a few seconds they would be on him. The droolers from the other side of the barricade could be anywhere.

He had to get away, had to get somewhere. The entrance to Safeco Field was close by but what would he find in there? A wide open baseball diamond with nowhere to hide, endless rows of seats full of nothing but ghosts.

The revolver in his hand felt heavy and useless. He could start shooting at random—he could probably take down the droolers, they barely qualified as moving targets. But there were more than six of them. They would be on him before he could reload, he was sure of that. The gun was dragging him down. He wanted to drop it, or throw it at the droolers marching steadily, silently toward him. He fought down that urge.

On the other side of the street a multi-story office building sat dark and unwelcoming, but it looked like its revolving door was still open. He dashed across the street and pushed against the glass doors, felt them yield under his weight. Behind him the droolers turned slowly, still coming toward him. Still possessed of no thought whatsoever except that he had to be destroyed, bitten, trampled. Tim spun into the dark lobby of the building and looked around for anything he could use to block the door behind him. A wooden bench stood next to a potted fern. When he tugged at it he found the bench wasn’t bolted down—that was a real lucky break. He got behind it and shoved and pushed it into one wedge of the revolving doors, leaving half of it hanging out into the lobby.

The droolers were already at the door. One pushed into the opposite wedge and shoved its face and shoulder against the glass, smearing the door with black slime. The door began to turn—and then stopped with a loud clunk. The bench kept it from traveling any further.

More droolers were coming up to the door, pressing against the plate glass windows that looked out into the street. Tim could still hear the siren wailing over by the dockyards, and a little light from there flickered on the faces of the infected. Otherwise the world might have frozen, time might have stopped. The droolers didn’t hammer on the glass, nor did they turn away. They just stood there, looking in at him. As he moved around the lobby their eyes tracked him.

He was safe—at least temporarily. He was also trapped inside the office building, no closer to his goal than he had been since he left the dockyards.

“Damnit,” he whispered. Then repeated the curse much louder.

What was he going to do now? He couldn’t get to Seward Park. The droolers beyond the barricade were just waiting for him to try. He couldn’t get back to the boat channel that was his rendez-vous, even if Sasha had been waiting for him there, and she wasn’t. Unless he found a lot of .357 ammunition in the building—which was highly unlikely—he couldn’t fight his way out.

“Stop panicking,” he told himself. “Think it through.” That was the one advantage he had over the droolers, his ability to solve problems. Nothing presented itself, no immediate solution, but with time he would think of something. What came first?

He couldn’t stay in the lobby. Looking at the droolers out there just brought back the fear, the acid churning in his stomach, the coldness in his veins. He headed deeper into the lobby, his hands outstretched to find any furniture he couldn’t see in the dark. There was probably a light switch somewhere in the room but he had no idea where it might be and he didn’t want to stick around long enough to find it. After a few paces his hands touched the far wall. Fine. He moved sideways then until he found the end of the wall. Reaching down he discovered the first riser of a flight of steps going up. Careful not to trip, testing each step with a tentative foot, he started climbing upward. Eventually he came to a second floor, a corridor even darker than the lobby. He ran his hands over the walls looking for a light switch. Instead he found a door. A long window panel set into the door was slightly grayer than the blackness around him. Good enough. He searched for the doorknob, found it, turned it. The door wasn’t locked.

He slipped through into a small office. A little light streamed in through broad windows—enough for him to make out a desk and a couple of chairs. He searched the wall and—yes—finally found a switch. He flipped it on and a lighting fixture in the ceiling flickered into life. The fluorescent tubes up there never quite reached full brightness—and one switched endlessly on and off like a strobe light—but it was so much better than nothing.

The office must have belonged to a low-level executive in the Mariners franchise. A baseball bat stood in a brass mounting on top of the desk. There were signed baseballs attached to plaques on the walls. In one corner of the room stood an almost-life-sized cardboard cut-out of a baseball player Tim didn’t recognize.

A skeletal black plastic chair sat behind the desk. It was surprisingly comfortable when Tim sank down into it. He pulled open every drawer of the desk, hoping against hope that he would find a gun in there but all he found were paper files and a laptop computer with a dead battery.

He leaned back in the chair, let its cantilevered limbs hold him. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever sat in something so perfectly designed for the human form. He had to think, he had to plan, find someway out of the trap he’d set himself. He had to… he had to close his eyes, that would help him concentrate. He had to close his eyes.