Tim’s legs pumped wildly as he ran for cover. Behind him a pair of soldiers hanging out the windows of a humvee lifted rifles to their shoulders, their spotlight trained right on him. He could feel the flesh of his back crawling, trying to get away. He could almost feel the bullets entering his skin, tearing him apart.

He jumped and rolled into a line of shrubbery just as the first shots hit the ground behind him. There was no time to recover, no time to think. He pushed himself forward through a tangle of branches. Leaves and scraps of wood filled his hair and his mouth. Beyond he scrambled up onto his feet in somebody’s driveway.

He could hear one of the soldiers talking on a radio. The light bathed the side of the house beside him. Tim ran.

He was screwed and he knew it. The soldiers would have a map of this neighborhood at least. If they’d been patrolling it they probably knew its ins and outs by heart. He had no idea where he was or what direction safety might lie. If there was such a thing as safety. They’d called him a drooler—obviously a reference to the black slaver the infected generated. They thought he was sick. They would never just let him get away, then. They couldn’t afford to. One sick man could infect an entire town. They’d all learned that lesson the hard way.

Houses ahead, open road to his left, thick trees to the right. He swung around and headed for the trees. If he could get back out, over the fence and out of Olympia, would they still follow him? Probably not very far. He couldn’t do that, though. He couldn’t just give up after having come so far. He couldn’t—

He had no choice.

Tim jumped over a snaking garden hose, nearly tripped on the sprinkler head. He collided hard with a waist-high fence of unfinished wood, then used his momentum to carry himself up and over it. On the far side he ducked down and ran to his left, into the thick stand of trees.

“Over there,” a soldier cried out. Tim squatted down uncomfortably and breathed through his mouth. “I definitely saw something over there.”

“I’ve got air support off the ground, headed this way in five or less,” someone answered back. “Don’t get too close. If he pops his head up blow it off.”

“Yeah, okay,” the first soldier said. He couldn’t be more than ten yards away. Tim could hear his boots scrunching on the tall grass. He sounded young. Soldiers were young in general, at least from what Tim had seen—most of them just out of their teens. This one sounded even younger, as if he might not be old enough to drive.

Jake would never be that old, Tim thought. Nobody would ever be able to teach him But there was no time for memories.

He needed a distraction. Anything would do. His hand moved across the ground he couldn’t see. There was something near him, something paler than the shadows. His hand touched it and found an old baseball, slick with mold and hard as a stone. Some child must have lost it over the fence and never found it again. Tim picked it up, cocked his arm back, and threw it up in the air as hard as he could.

He was already moving when they started shooting. The young soldier cried out as if infected maniacs were dropping from the trees. The older voice called for calm, called for his squad to regroup. How many of them were out there?

Tim just ran. He dashed from tree to tree, not even worrying about noise. He couldn’t remember how far he was from the fence. If he could find it again he could be over it in seconds. His hands still burned where the wire had dug into them the last time but he could take a little more pain.

Bullets tore the bark off a tree three yards from his face. Tim ducked his head down and ran to one side, unable to see anything, worried he might run headlong into a tree trunk and knock himself out cold. Behind him he heard soldiers running, far more of them than he’d expected. If he looked back he thought there would be a solid wall of them, a dragnet to catch him up.

He dashed forward and right out of the trees. They ended in the yard of a big house, three stories and dozens of windows. A Land Rover sat parked in the driveway, its tires slack, the car resting on dented rims. Tim dashed around the side of it and wondered where the fence was. He couldn’t have been running in the wrong direction—but yes, he realized, he could easily have gotten turned around. And if he was running now deeper into the neighborhood, into the twisting streets he didn’t know, then he was in real trouble. He turned around, wasting invaluable time trying to get his bearings.

He didn’t hear the helicopter until it was directly above him. Its rotor wash stirred up pine needles and broken blades of grass around his feet, ruffled his hair. A spotlight switched on above him and suddenly he was trapped in a column of pure blinding light.

To his left he heard a gun go off. Bullets whipped past him, so fast they made his head spin. To his right he saw soldiers jumping over the side of an above-ground swimming pool. They looked too short, as if they were a company of heavily-armed midgets. Then he realized they were just boys, some so young their faces were still clean of stubble. One cried out in the voice of a choir boy, though Tim couldn’t make out the words. A dozen rifle barrels lifted to point right at him.

Tim held up his hands in surrender, certain he was about to die.

“Hold fire,” someone yelled. An adult, it sounded like. “Hold fire!”