Time was running short. Once he’d rested to the point where he felt like he could go on, Tim only had a few hours left to get to his old neighborhood, find and kill Nero, and then hike back. He wasn’t sure if he could make it.

If there was one part of that mission he had to cut out, it was hiking back. He knew he would never turn back empty-handed, that he would rather miss his rendez-vous with Sasha than given up on finding Nero.

Just before he left the gardening store he made a discovery that could really help him. He’d been bitterly disappointed when he failed to find any food in the store—a lot of his weakness came from hunger—but he did turn up a stack of respirator masks, designed to be worn while applying pesticides. The masks had a plastic cover that fit over his mouth and nose and two filter packs that stuck out from the sides. They didn’t provide any real protection for his eyes but they might help him breathe a little easier. If it got to be too much even with the mask he knew he could pop into any of the stores on Rainier Avenue South and catch his breath. It would slow him down considerably but at least he wouldn’t die of smoke inhalation on the way.

As he headed out of the superstore and back onto the road he was almost grateful for the smoke. It would shield him from Horne’s prying eyes, at least for a while. He kept to the middle of the road as best he could, still alert for any threatening shadow that loomed up out of the murk. He moved over to the curb at every intersection to check the street signs, to make sure he was headed the right way and to get some sense of his progress.

Otherwise it felt like he was barely moving at all. Each block he walked was the same—cars left willy-nilly in the road, a painted line that ran down the middle of the world and disappeared into the darkness just yards ahead. He kept his pace as quick as he could manage and tried not to let the fear overcome him.

It wasn’t easy. As he approached the residential areas to the south, he knew he should expect more droolers, not less. Seward Park and the neighborhoods around it had been the first places where the infection had struck. It was a zone that had never been properly evacuated, a region where the infected had free rein. Karen and Jake hadn’t been the only victims of that chaos. Tim had a full load of bullets in his revolver and a spare speed-loader. He had a baseball bat, when those ran out. He had some ideas about how to proceed when he truly entered drooler territory, but they were just that—ideas. He had no idea how well they would work, or how long he could survive down there.

As always his best plan was just to keep moving. To try not to worry so much about what was yet to come.

He walked for what felt like hours but could only have been fifteen minutes before he started noticing more detail in the world around him. He could see the street signs even from the middle of the road. He could tell the make and model of the cars before him long before he was close enough to touch them.

He started hearing things again, as well. He hadn’t realized how silent the smoke had been before, not until he began to hear the wind rattling the branches of the trees. Not until he heard a helicopter go shooting by right over his head.

It couldn’t have been very high up, though he had no way of measuring its altitude since he couldn’t see it. He heard its chopping noise coming from out of the north, could feel it passing him by on a course headed for the south—maybe for SeaTac, the big international airport, or maybe it was heading all the way back to Fort Lewis. He knew perfectly well who had sent it.

Ten minutes later he heard it—or another just like it—coming back. This time the noise came out of the south and it took a lot longer before it fled to the north, its pitch shifting lower until it was something he felt rather than heard. Eventually it was gone.

He considered hiding in case it came back. He wondered if it had some kind of infra-red imaging system that could spot him even in the darkness of the smoke plume. He wondered if it had spotted him and was just circling until he emerged from the murk. There was no way for him to know, he decided. No way at all. He would have to press on and be ready to run for cover the second it showed up again.

When he saw the sun again, when the visibility had improved until he could see whole blocks ahead of him, he almost wished the plume would shift to follow him, that the smoke would move with him.

Still he was happy enough when the smoke broke up into individual tatters. When he could take off his filter mask and breath air that was almost clean. It was raining again, and it felt wonderful—it felt like his skin was being washed, cleansed of the oily residue of the smoke and the worse things that stuck to his arms and chest. Still, he didn’t want to get hypothermia—and he was worried about helicopters. He moved over to the sidewalk, to where he was sheltered from the sky by awnings and overhangs on the car dealerships and veterinary centers.

When he saw the sign for South Orcas Street he almost didn’t believe it. He was less than half a mile from home—a distance he could cover in no time. Beyond the commercial sector of Rainier Avenue stretched an enormous swath of single family homes, lined up almost on top of each other with peaked roofs and picture windows, each with its own little scrap of yard. It was Seward Park—how many times had he thought he would never see it again? How long had he worked and planned and fought to get there?

His phone rang in his pocket. Almost dazzled by the sight of home he automatically pulled it out and flipped it open. “Hey, Buzzard—” he began.

“Wrong fellow, Kempfer,” the phone said. “This is Colonel Horne.”