The road drooped down before him like a snake going to ground, a linear expanse of concrete and cars that ran into the southern suburbs where it was penned down by a massive web of smaller roads and house-lined streets. Then it stopped as if it had hit a perfectly solid wall.

A wall of smoke—black and wispy, convoluted and always moving and changing shape and yet it looked, from where Tim stood, as sharply defined as a line on a map. Maybe, he thought, it looked more like a river, roaring and turbulent. It came out of the west in a plume half a mile broad. He couldn’t see what lay beyond it—it rose higher than the overpass, and it was wide enough he couldn’t see its end. He couldn’t see where it started, though he thought it might be coming from Boeing Field. Maybe a fuel tank there had caught fire somehow, and maybe it was burning still. The smoke this hypothetical fire produced was blowing west on the prevailing wind and it covered a broad swathe of Seattle like a funeral veil.

It was most of a mile away from him, yet Tim could smell it. It had none of the woody, ashy stink of a campfire—instead it smelled oily and foul. It smelled like the exhaust of the backhoe loader, frankly, acrid and stale. He could only imagine how suffocating it would be if he were actually down in it.

He might get a chance to find out, he thought. Seward Park—and Phil Nero—lay on the other side of that plume. It stretched well out over Lake Washington, cutting off every road that lead south. He could try to backtrack, to head west toward Boeing Field and find his way around the eastern source of the fumes, but that would take hours and he had very few of those left.

Maybe he could find some way through—he could find a car and drive through with the windows up, the air inside recirculating so it would stay breathable. Maybe he would find some other way. He hadn’t gotten as far as he had by worrying about every detail, he told himself.

He came down the ramp half-running, half skidding as he dodged cars left and right. At the bottom of the slope he stopped to look at the smoke plume again and saw it rising up over him like a black tsunami that never stopped rising up, never crashed down on him. The smell was worse closer to the ground but he could just about ignore it. He had other things to worry about. Up on the overpass he’d been protected pretty well against drooler attack. He’d been able to see everything ahead and behind him. Down on the ground, where I-90 widened out and flowed away from him in dozens of ramps, danger could come from any direction. He kept his bat in his hand as he moved forward, walking fast but never quite breaking into a jog.

He was paying so much attention that he saw the body in the street well before he could make out its features or details. It looked like a big plastic trash bag that fluttered in the wind but stayed stuck to the road. He moved closer, wondering what kind of disgusting surprise awaited him this time, bat cocked and ready to swing.

The body offered him no direct danger, however, except the danger of throwing up what little food he had in his stomach. It was the corpse of an obese woman, her skin bloated and stained with decay until he couldn’t tell her race or age. She wore a pink sweater that had been torn into raveled shreds and a skirt hiked way up her thighs. Tim was almost embarrassed to look at her exposed legs.

He did, though. And what he saw there did make him turn away and throw up. There wasn’t much left of the woman’s legs but bare bones. The flesh there had been torn away, the skin as ragged as her sweater. To Tim it looked as if the meat had been chewed away from her form. He looked away, towards her face, and saw part of her cheek and most of her left shoulder were gone too.

He knew exactly what he was seeing. CNN had been vague on the details but there’d been plenty of rumors to the effect that droolers had to eat something, that their bodies still needed nourishment, and that their degraded brains failed to distinguish between sources of food. The rumors had it they ate some of the people they attacked, and that sometimes, if they were hungry enough, they snacked on each other.

Tim couldn’t tell if the obese woman had been infected before she died. He knew nothing about her—but he knew she didn’t deserve to just be left there rotting in the sun, torn apart by wandering droolers. He couldn’t bury her. She was so big he doubted he could even move her off the road. In the end he just found a newspaper that had blown into the gutter and spread it out to cover her face. He wondered if he should say a prayer but he had no idea what religion she might have been in life. Instead he just bowed his head and paused a moment, giving her a little of his dwindling time as a token of respect.

When he was done he turned and headed back toward the smoke plume. He was half a block away from the body when he remembered something Helena had said. Droolers didn’t wander, she’d told him. They were opportunists and they were motivated only by things in their immediate environment. Which meant that whatever droolers had feasted on the woman’s corpse might still be close by.