“Jesus,” Sasha said, “there’s too many of them. We’ll have to go back and find another way ‘round.”

“No. There’s no time,” Tim said. He watched the mass of droolers swarm over each other, climbing over each others’ backs, pulling and tugging at one another. They were jockeying for position, trying to get at something he still couldn’t see. It was big, whatever it was. Maybe as big as a car.

“So we mother-fucking make time. I ain’t going into that, not even with all the bullets in the world.”

Tim squinted into the darkness. There was something—something red underneath the mound of bodies. Not the red of blood but the color of metallic paint. The kind of paint used on cars. “I wonder—” he breathed.

“What? You wonder what, man?”

Ice cubes clinked together in Tim’s stomach. He started to look up and around, peering through the low light looking for street signs. He was afraid he knew what he would find. “Oh, shit,” he said, because he’d been right.

He knew this intersection. Of course, the last time he’d seen it had been in broad daylight. He’d also seen it from above, looking down through the lens of a camera onboard a helicopter. He’d seen it on CNN, and then again on digital video disc in a hangar at SeaTac.

This was the intersection. It was no more than five minutes from his house. It was the place where Karen and Jake died.

He was almost completely certain that the droolers packed into the street in front of him were climbing over and around his own car, the one Karen had used to try to escape the chaos. The one that had failed her at exactly the wrong time.

This was it, then. He’d come back to the place he’d started from. He had finished the journey. He scanned the crowd of droolers for Phil Nero’s face, but didn’t see him. He winced and looked again for Karen but she wasn’t there either.

As had happened before he felt life compressing, narrowing down to a single sharp point. Everything else fell away. He felt as if he were racing down a tunnel at incredible speed looking at the single point of light at its end. He felt like iron blinders had come down around the edges of his vision and he could see nothing but the rising and falling throng of bodies.

He climbed off the bike.

“What the fuck, Kempfer? Where are you going?”

“I have to see,” he said. He didn’t bother to explain further. “You can wait here for me if you like. You can leave if you want to. I don’t know if I’m coming back.”

“You’ll get yourself killed, you idiot! Don’t you take another step.”

Tim shook his head and pulled the gun out of his pack. It felt flat and cold in his hand, like a tool. Like something you would use to achieve a very specific end.

“At least let me help,” Sasha said, grabbing his arm.

It felt like the icy surface of a frozen lake cracking open. Suddenly he recovered himself, looked around and saw things the way they were again. “Yeah…” he said. “Yeah. Listen. I have an idea here but you have to really trust me. Do you?”

“Of course not.” Sasha stared at him. She was breathing hard, he saw, and he wondered if she was scared too. Of course she was, he decided. The fear wasn’t his alone. “What’s the idea?”

He smiled coldly, then lead her back up the street, away from the pile of bodies. He took her as far back as the drooler handcuffed to the street sign. “I almost got killed a while back. A drooler almost bit me. I shot him, just in time, and got his blood and spit all over me.” He stepped closer to the drooler, who was silently lunging for him. He leaned back as its loose hand swung out at him. As the drooler spun around, recovering from the wild swing, he stepped in and blew its brains out, splattering himself with its fluids. Just like before.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Sasha told him.

“Don’t—that might change your smell and ruin the effect.” The yeasty stink of the drooler’s infection filled his nostrils and his throat, making him want to gag too. He grabbed the dead drooler’s face and hauled it upward again, smearing black spit over the palm of his hand. “Come here,” he said.

Eventually she did. He wiped the drool across her shoulders of her fur coat before she could jump back.

“It dries out after a while and then it’s useless,” he warned her. “We need to move fast.” He lead her back to the throng, pressing in closer this time until a couple of them looked up and sniffed the air, their vacant eyes rolling in his direction. Behind him Sasha moved in, though not as fast, her nickel-plated revolvers out and in her hands. Tim drew his own gun and stepped closer. The droolers looked up one by one—and then looked away, their attention turning once more to the car they hid with their bodies. Tim tried to push his way in through their arms and heads and legs. Individually they were quite weak and he was able to haul them away from the car, but en masse they resisted him like a brick wall.

“Get the fuck back,” he howled, suddenly desperate. He kicked and scratched and dragged at the bodies, but even as he got them to move, even as he shoved them away they just scrabbled and fought to get right back to the car.

A heavy grunt sounded from the mass and Tim jerked backwards, uncertain what was going on. He saw Sasha yanking droolers off the car, one by one. Helping him. “Don’t waste time looking at me,” she shouted, grabbing another one and throwing it down in the street.

Tim nodded and went back to prying the bodies off the car. He could make out its shape clearly now and he saw he’d been right. It was a red Nissan Sentra. When the license plate was uncovered it had the right number.

A drooler grabbed his arm. Not in an aggressive way—it just wanted to get back to clawing at the windows. He started pushing it away and then he recognized the sweater it was wearing.

It was Karen.

Sasha reached for Karen’s arms to pull her away. “Stop,” Tim said, staggering backwards.

Karen was infected, like all the rest. She was horribly wounded where Phil Nero had bit her but she didn’t look like she was in any pain. She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t look at him, even when he called her name again and again.

“You know her,” Sasha said. It wasn’t a question. “You do what you got to do.”

Tim nodded. It was what he owed her. This isn’t Karen anymore, he told himself. It didn’t help. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he whispered. Then he brought up his gun and shot her right through the head.

His arm thrummed. His body shook. This was too much—he was going to vomit. He was going to die on the spot of sheer heartbreak.

And then nothing happened. He didn’t die and he didn’t throw up. Had he come so far, he wondered? Had he become somebody who could do that and not even flinch?

He’d done her a favor. Maybe he just understood that, deep down. He’d done right by her. Maybe it was just shock. He’d done the only thing he could do for her anymore. Maybe he was just so exhausted, so ready to stop, that even this atrocity was just one more step on his road.

There was another one ahead of him. He had to see. Jake.

He pushed and struggled and shot his way through the crowd. Finally he managed to get the droolers off one of the windows. Finally he managed to look inside, into the back seat.

Jake had managed to unbuckle himself from the car seat. Tim had thought that would be impossible but desperation must have given the boy great strength. Once he was free, though, there had been no place for him to go. He’d been too smart to open the door, of course.

The flesh of Jake’s lips was dry and broken, pulled back from grey gums. His eyes were closed as if he’d fallen asleep.

His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.

“It can’t be,” Tim said out loud. He stepped back away from the car and the droolers shoved around him, desperate to get back into position. They wanted the food trapped inside. They wanted to eat his son. His still living son.

“It can’t be,” he said again.

The floor of the car was littered with empty Poland Spring bottles and boxes of cookies, empty wax paper sleeves torn open so that Jake could lick out all the crumbs. Bags and bags full of canned food sat in rows next to Jake.

“She must have been stocking up—Karen—when she heard the news, she must have gone right to the grocery store. She must have bought months worth of food for us, in case we couldn’t get out. Oh, my God, Jake—Jake had plenty to eat and drink. He was always such a smart kid, he figured it out, figured out what he needed to do—”

“He’s alive?” Sasha asked, incredulous.

“Barely. He’s sick, it looks like. Oh God. I’m going to throw up. For real this time.”

He dropped to his knees. Everything was suddenly so complicated. His narrow focus, his need, his revenge, made less sense. And more.

He vomited copiously. Then he looked up.

Phil Nero looked back.