They saw their first drooler a few minutes later. It was a woman in a print dress, stained down the front with black saliva, her hair hanging out of her head in thin ribbons. She stood slumped over a trash can as if she were throwing up into it—or searching for a meal inside. In the pale, thin street light she looked like some kind of undersea creature, pulpy, pale and bloated, her skin pocked with sores as if fish had been nibbling on her. When she saw them approach she swiveled around on her heels and started lurching toward them.

Tim reached into his pack for his gun but Sasha shook her head. “Leave her alone,” she said, and gunned the bike forward. The drooler couldn’t keep up and soon she was lost in the darkness behind them.

“It’s never very smart to leave one of those things at your back,” Tim told her. “If we end up going back this way she’ll be waiting for us, and we might not see her until it’s too late next time.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” Sasha said.

“So let’s go back and take her down,” Tim tried.

“Nah.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because she didn’t hurt anybody!” Sasha yelled over the noise of the engine. “I can’t ice some bitch just because she’s sick. I’m not built that way.”

I am, Tim realized. He’d never had a real moral quandary about killing droolers. The closest he’d come had been when he executed the drooler in the bus, way back on Interstate Five. That had felt a little weird. But not overly wrong.

Horne had noticed that cold-bloodedness in him. It was part of what had impressed the dead Colonel. Even Horne had blanched at the thought of just killing droolers indiscriminately—what did that make Tim? A sociopath?

If so, he decided, then so be it. It would make it easier when he caught up with Nero.

He expected to see more droolers as they got closer to Seward Park and he was not disappointed. The residential zone was the epicenter of the Flu outbreak and it was the first part of Seattle to be abandoned and surrendered to the droolers. With each block they covered he seemed to see more of them. Glancing down an abandoned alley, he would see a pair of them climbing on a dumpster, or ambling through the shadows between street lamps. If they were more than a couple hundred yards away they didn’t pay any attention to the motorcycle, as loud as its exhaust might be. When they were closer they would turn to follow the vehicle, their faces tracking it like spectators at a tennis match, but rarely did they take even a step after them as they passed.

They got a bad scare when they came around a corner and a drooler jumped out right in front of the bike, one pale arm snatching at the air between them. Sasha cursed as the bike stalled and Tim almost fell off the back. The drooler’s mouth was wide and full of yellowed teeth, his face thin and drawn and streaked with black. “Go, go, go,” Tim said, pounding Sasha on the back. She screamed something back at him he couldn’t understand—the fear was too big in him, it had claimed his stomach and his brain and robbed him of any courage. He was too scared to even think of reaching for his weapon.

The drooler took a step toward them, or tried to. He lost his balance and fell down on his bony posterior, as if he’d been yanked backwards. When Tim had calmed down a little he saw what had happened. The drooler was handcuffed to a stop sign.

“Who did that?” Sasha asked, walking the bike.

“A cop, I guess,” Tim said. “Back when this all started.” Had the drooler bitten the cop in the process? Tim wondered if they would see the cop next. “We must be getting close to my house.”

“Almost done, huh? That’s good,” Sasha said. She would have said more but instead she looked up at the night sky—then grabbed Tim by the collar and pulled him away from the drooler and out of the street. Pressing her back up against a house wall she flung an arm across his chest to keep him back as well.

She must have had incredible hearing. Tim had no idea what she was doing until he heard the chopping noise of a helicopter rotor quartering the night. He never saw the aircraft as it passed right over their heads, its noise drowning out his thoughts.

“So much for our head start,” she whispered to him.

Tim nodded. He’d been afraid of this. The Army wasn’t about to just give up on capturing him, not after what the looters had done to Horne. The soldiers must have set up search teams right away. They must have discovered the crashed plane—and hopefully found Tony still alive inside—and immediately scrambled their air units.

“You think they’ll come in here on foot?” Sasha asked.

“No,” he said. He knew they would play it safe. They couldn’t afford to lose any more men or boys just to capture two fugitives. “They’ll stick to the air. Unless, well—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless they decide to send in tanks. I’m sure they’ve got a few at Fort Lewis. But it’ll take a while to get them up here.”

“Then let’s hurry,” Sasha suggested, “and get this done with.”

She got them moving again, taking her chances with moving faster this time. At least she did for a few minutes—until she suddenly hit the brakes and turned the bike sideways, stopping short in the middle of an intersection. She had good enough reason. Dozens of droolers stood halfway down the block ahead, just upwind. They were clustered around something, their bodies so tightly packed Tim couldn’t see what it might be.