“Sorry about this, buddy. I don’t know who you are but I bet you were a hell of a ball-player.” Tim unzipped his fly, pulled out his penis, and urinated right on the face of the cardboard cut-out.

It was just about life sized and it was printed in full, even garish color. It showed a baseball player in the act of swinging a bat. It was about an eighth of an inch thick, but Tim was really hoping that wouldn’t matter.

The looters had used anatomical skeletons to fool the infected. The droolers’ behavior was so simplistic that they couldn’t differentiate between a pile of plastic bones and a living human being. If something looked even vaguely human and it didn’t smell like it was infected, they would attack it. The urine was just Tim’s attempt at improving the lure, making the cut-out seem even more human.

It was his best chance. If it didn’t work he still had fifteen bullets. He could shoot as many droolers as possible and then make a break for it and hope the rest couldn’t catch him. The odds on that kind of sucked, he told himself.

Holding the dripping cut-out away from himself he moved to the window. He held it out like a kite to catch the breeze, then threw it spinning over the heads of the droolers. Droplets of urine misted away from it as it flew, arcing up and then suddenly coming straight down in the middle of a pack of droolers. Every emotionless eye down in the street watched it spin and fall, just as they’d watched the drooler he’d pegged with the baseball. For a second that was all. They watched, but didn’t move.

Tim sighed a curse into the wind.

One of the droolers near the fallen cut-out shuffled toward it a step or two. Another twitched its nose. A third move up and kicked at the cut-out with its shoe. The cardboard rattled noisily and a couple of the droolers jumped as if they’d heard a gunshot.

One by one they all turned—and started in on the cut-out. The ones nearest to it collapsed on top of it, biting and tearing at the cardboard. Soon they were out of sight as others piled on top of them. The mass of their bodies writhed and rose and fell as they tore and bit and gobbled at the hidden cut-out.

Tim didn’t waste a second on cheering or exulting or saying a silent apology to the baseball player he’d just sacrificed in effigy. He got as far back as he could, then ran right at the broken window. He launched himself out and forward and just had time to wonder if he was going to make it far enough, if he would land on the canvas cover of the military truck or if he would fall short and break his legs when he hit the street. His upper body collided with the cloth top and one of his arms smacked against a support strut hidden underneath. Kicking wildly he rolled on top of the truck, then over the far side. He clutched at the dry canvas to slow his fall and somehow landed on his feet.

The body of the truck stood between him and the nearest drooler. He couldn’t see if they’d noticed his stunt dive or not. The fear in his belly was enough to spur him on regardless. He was still in the middle of the forgotten traffic jam, and he still had a lot of ground to cover. Tim jumped up onto the hood of the next car, then ran up the windshield to its roof. He leapt to the back on a pickup truck and hit painfully on the bed. His shins felt bruised but they would still support him. He climbed up on to the cab of an army truck and looked for his next jump.

Behind him he heard something dent in the side of a passenger car door. He looked back and saw droolers squeezing inbetween the abandoned vehicles, pushing their way toward him, shoving their bodies through tiny gaps. He guessed they’d had their fill of baseball players and now they wanted the main course.

He had to move fast—but he couldn’t afford to miss a jump. If he twisted his ankle now it would be the end of him. He jumped onto the slick roof of a yellow school bus and ran down its length to drop onto the top of a Ford sedan. The car jam seemed to stretch on forever before him but he kept moving, even as the droolers kept pushing and oozing through the mess behind him. Tim jumped from the top of the sedan onto the trunk of another car, clambered up a ladder on the side of a water truck, dashed down the other side and through a gap between two fire trucks. A big construction vehicle—a backhoe loader with a bulldozer blade in front—came next where he had to jump and grab the top of the blade and then haul himself up onto the cage-like cab. Behind him he saw one drooler clutching to the side of the school bus, hauling itself along with its hands along the open windows like a horizontal ladder.

It had been a mistake to look. In the time it took him to glance back Tim’s baseball bat had gotten caught in the open cab of the loader. It threw him off balance and his foot came down hard on the side of the cab, nearly throwing him down to the street. He twisted himself around in time not to break his ankle but in the process his body fell backwards and he slid down hard into the green cushioned seat of the construction vehicle.

Through the open space before him he could see the foremost drooler not twenty feet away.