On a normal day, allowing for traffic, it would have taken Tim half an hour to get from Safeco Field to his house in Seward Park. It was a drive he’d taken many, many times—one of the routes he’d used while commuting to and from his job at the new Seattle Central library downtown. Most of it was on big roads, I-90 and then Rainier Avenue South, and he could have driven it with his eyes shut.

That was before the Flu, of course. Before Seattle was drained of its people and named the first real Plague Zone. He expected delays and obstacles in his path. Not a single leg of his journey had been easy so far—why should this last stretch be different?

There were some things he could not have predicted, though. Some things he could not have imagined.

In his mind, when he was planning this trip (though he’d never planned it very carefully, always assuming he would just work things out when he arrived), he would have been riding a motorcycle (even though he didn’t know how) or a big SUV that could just mow down any droolers that got in his way. He had never thought he would end up riding to vengeance on top of a bright yellow backhoe loader.

It was slow. Even on open stretches of road with plenty of time to accelerate, the dozer topped out at thirty miles an hour. He might have been faster on a bicycle. It had a terrible suspension—at that top speed it was difficult even to hold on to the steering wheel, with the entire vehicle shaking and rumbling beneath him until he was afraid he would be ejected from the open-work cab without warning. Its exhaust stank and made it hard to breathe, its controls were sluggish and slow to respond. It cornered like a boat and its steering veered to the left so he constantly had to correct his course, the dozer weaving back and forth all over the road.

He had plenty of opportunities to trade it in for a car or a pickup truck or anything he might choose—but he knew almost instantly that it was the only vehicle for the job.

For one thing the elevated section of I-90 was a parking lot.

The grey ribbon of the road rose before him, weighted down with hundreds of cars—every make and model, some covered in mud, most of them shining brilliantly from glass and chrome. Some sat forlorn with doors open wide, some looked as if they were still waiting patiently for their owners to return.

Tim could guess what had happened. He’d seen the chaos in other places, places that hadn’t even yet been touched by the infection. When the evacuation of Seattle had been called the traffic must have been legendary. When the traffic had stopped moving, evacuees must have gotten out of their cars and proceeded on foot to the dockyards and the ships waiting to take them away to safety.

They weren’t packed nose to bumper. There was room between them, enough room that with the loader’s blade down he could slowly, painstakingly, shove them out of his way. It would be very slow going, though. Making sure there were no droolers in sight—and keeping his baseball bat handy—he stopped the loader and jumped down to take a look at other routes. From halfway up the onramp he used his binoculars to scan the surface streets, looking for an easy route through. The roads down there were a lot clearer, though they were still full of abandoned cars. He would have to pick his way through carefully, always keeping an eye out for movement. He would have to find his way through neighborhoods he’d never visited before.

Sighing, he watched the trees shimmer in the wind off the bay. He watched the traffic lights down there cycle from red, to green, to yellow again, endlessly guarding against collisions that would never come. It looked peaceful down there. It looked almost normal.

Anything could hide down there, though. Every corner was a potential ambush, every crossroads a possible trap.

Unsure of whether he was making the right choice or not, Tim got back up on the loader and started shoving his way up onto the overpass. It was slow going as he picked his way through one knot of cars after another. They resisted his passage, shoving back against the blade. The loader’s diesel engines roared and whined but they got him through. For an hour he worked steadily, focused on nothing but moving cars, on getting another few feet up onto the overpass. He forced himself not to look at his watch, and to take occasional sips from the bottle of water in his pack. When it became too much, too frustrating, he gnawed on a stale cookie he’d kept with him since the last day on the road, since before he’d reached Olympia. Then he got back to work.

When he was certain a full hour had passed, he stopped to admire his handiwork. Looking back he saw the lane he’d plowed through the cars like an icebreaker bursting through the polar ice pack. It looked like he’d come quite a ways. Then he looked forward—and saw that he’d just crested the interchange where I-90 passed over I-5. He’d gone maybe a few thousand feet.

He grunted in frustration. He tried to hold back tears—then let them come. He was never going to make it like this. The loader had been some measure of safety and speed. It had been his best shot but now it was just slowing him down—he could have walked four miles in the time he’d wasted trying to clear the cars.

So be it, he told himself, forcing down the thwarted rage he felt. So fucking be it. He had walked from San Francisco, had walked for a month for this chance at revenge. He’d gotten soft since he’d arrived at Olympia, the calluses on his feet had started to heal. He could still do it, though, if he had to, and it was clear he had to.

He switched off the loader and jumped down to the road surface. He shouldered his pack and shoved the baseball bat through the straps so it rode in the small of his back, where he could draw it quickly like a sword from a scabbard. Then he started to walk, winding his way around the cars, settling into a rhythm of walking his body still remembered.

He had made maybe fifty yards further down the highway when an arrow shot past his ear, fast enough he could feel its slipstream ruffle his hair. He dropped to the road surface, suddenly terrified, and tried not to breathe too loudly.

Tim was only a few feet from the edge of the road, from the concrete guard wall that kept cars from plunging over the side to crash onto the buildings below. Slowly he crawled toward that edge, then poked his face over to see what might be down there.

He saw a woman on a rooftop far below. He saw her nock another arrow, saw her take aim right at his face.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, hold your fire!” Then he rolled back away from the edge, and just lay there, waiting.

Eventually, finally, he heard her calling him from below. “Hello?” she shouted. He could just make out her voice. “Hey! You’re not one of them, are you?”

“No,” Tim shouted back, still keeping himself away from the edge. It was slowly dawning on him that he was talking to the first uninfected person he’d encountered since he arrived in Seattle. “No—and you’re not, either.”

“No. Hey, can you show yourself again? Just so I can make sure?”

“That depends,” Tim shouted. “Can you not shoot me full of arrows?”

Slowly he pushed his head and shoulders back over the edge again. “What’s your name?” he asked.

She still had the bow in her hands, with an arrow ready to go. He understood her caution but he kept himself ready to jump back as he stared at her. She was short of stature, with short dark hair and true green eyes. She looked terrified. She wore a halter top and shorts and had a quiver full of arrows on her back. “Sandi,” she called up to him. “Sandi Carron.”

“I’m Tim,” he told her.

“What are you doing up there, Tim? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Trying to get home.”

She shook her head. As if she didn’t understand but she figured they could clarify later. “This is home?”

“Yes. Seattle—Seward Park, you know where that is? I was away when all this happened.” Suddenly he didn’t want to tell her his whole story. Suddenly he worried what she might think.

She saved him from that by telling him her own story. “I’m from Connecticut originally—I was just visiting some friends here. My husband’s still back east. I tried to get out but then the radio said everybody should just hunker down and stay inside. I think I made a mistake.”

Time dropped his head. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“This—this is just for now, right? I mean. I mean they’re going to do something about it! They’re going to fix it. Right?”

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “There are others—other survivors. Down in Olympia. You think you can get there?”

In answer she lifted the bow in her hands. “Not without a lot more arrows.”

He started to ask her about the bow but then he took in more of the scene. She stood on the roof of a low brick building. In the streets surrounding the building on all four sides lay the bodies of dead droolers. Some had been killed with gunshots to the head. Others had arrows sticking out of their temples or their eyes. He looked for, and found, a rifle lying on the roof near Sandi’s feet.

She looked down as if following his gaze. “I ran out of bullets yesterday. Lucky for me I’ve hunted with a bow before.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “Lucky for you. You nearly killed me!”

She bit her lip and stared up at him for a second. “Yeah,” she said, finally. “Sorry about that. Listen. Do you want to come down here? I’ve got some food, if you’re hungry. We’d probably be safer together.”

Tim’s stomach roared at the prospect. He had other plans, though. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“I said I was sorry about the arrow! Listen—Tim—I’m scared. I’ve been holding them off for a long time. I’ve been okay. But I can’t keep doing this alone!”

He rolled back away from the edge. She was right, they would be safer together. They could help each other out. But he couldn’t ask her to join his mad crusade to find Phil Nero. And he couldn’t just stay with her, and wait out the Russian Flu. “Sandi,” he called out, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” He looked down at her, then slapped the concrete lip of the overpass. It was a sheer drop of maybe twenty feet to her rooftop. “For one thing there’s no way for me to get down there.”

“We’ll think of something!”

He closed his eyes. Tried not to think about whether he was betraying her or what his duty to her might be. He hadn’t even considered this—that there might be other people in Seattle with functional frontal lobes. That there might be responsibilities to meet. This was supposed to be about just him, Nero, and his gun.

“I have to be somewhere,” he told her. He stepped back from the edge so she couldn’t see him again. “I’m—sorry.”

“Wait!” she shouted at him. “Hold on!”

“I’ll try to send help for you, if I can,” he told her. “The Army. Or somebody!” But he was already walking away. He had to move fast. He had to keep moving fast or his conscience would make him turn around. “I promise!”

“I said I was sorry!” she bellowed. “Please! Don’t leave me here alone!”

She kept shouting but soon he couldn’t hear her anymore. Soon he was just one man walking again. Soon he had lost all sense of time passing—there was just more road ahead, as there always had been. So he was unsure how far he’d traveled before he started smelling the smoke.