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grips the steering wheel and barely
slows when we reach the stop sign at the end of the block. The
tires screech and the car fishtails around the corner.
    “ Dad!”
    “ Finn! Not now. I need to
think.”
    “ Think about what? This is
crazy! Slow down.” I point out the windshield, gesturing at the
road ahead. “Speed limit's twenty-five here! You're going to
kill—”
    And that's when I see them.
    They're everywhere— in the streets, on
lawns. Standing around with their faces in the air, as if they were
watching something in the sky but suddenly forgot that they were.
They all turn to look at us, and they all have those dead, empty
eyes.
    Every coherent thought in my head
completely vanishes. They look like zombies.
    “ Can't go through town,”
Dad mutters. “Too many.”
    “ Too many what? Dad, what's
wrong with them?”
    The muscles in his cheeks ripple as
his jaw flexes. He casts a look over at me, purses his lips, then
focuses again on the road.
    “ Dad?”
    “ It's some sort of
disease,” he answers, and once more the Z-word comes to mind. But
there's no blood. No one is trying to eat anyone else. No
blood yet , anyway,
because nobody realized what was happening until much later, when
most people were already lost to the infection.
    Only then was there blood. And a hell
of a lot of it.
    “ What kind of
disease?”
    But he refuses to say anything else.
He doesn't explain how he knows, and I don't press him on
it.
    The erratic driving makes my nose
throb again. Thankfully, it's not bleeding. A lump has formed on
the side of my head where I hit it on the door jamb.
    We drive for another thirty minutes,
taking side streets and avoiding crowds of people. Everywhere, the
power is out. Signal lights aren't working. There's surprisingly
little traffic on the roads. Apparently, everyone decided to walk
instead of drive.
    Dad tells me not to look, but I can't
help it. What happened to them? How long will it last? How did it
spread so quickly?
    The afflicted are in no hurry. They
just amble along. At least until we get close enough to pass them.
Then they run, and they all have that same loping, slithering gait
I first saw in front of the house.
    At some point, panic finally sets in
among the unafflicted. People are beginning to understand that
something very bad is happening, that there's something very wrong
with these people. They start fighting back, which only makes
matters worse. That's when I see my first killing.
    It's a horrible, bloody, violent
ordeal, over in a matter of seconds, though in my mind it stretches
out to an eternity. And when they're done, there's practically
nothing left of the victim but a few tattered strips of flesh and
glistening white bone.
    “ Finn,” my father pleads
with me, “don't look.”
    When I turn to him to beg him to wake
me up, when I see the tears on his own face, I know I'm not
dreaming. This is real.
    We end up at the small regional
airport that services the tiny jets of the rich folks who live and
work in the valley. I ask where we're going, if we're flying out.
He sighs and says, “Don't worry.”
    “ What about Mom? What about
Harper and Leah?”
    “ We had a plan,” he
explains. “In case this sort of thing happened.”
    This sort of thing? I want to shout. This sort of thing is absolutely
crazy. How do you plan for this sort of
thing ? But my throat has constricted. I
scramble for my inhaler before remembering I still don't have
it.
    Through the fog of the asthma attack,
I hear him say, “They're supposed to meet us here.”
    They never did.
     

Dad shakes me awake, and for a moment I'm back on the plane that
brought us to the evac center. I blink away the sleep as the
austere surroundings of our private quarters in the bunker return
to me, followed by the memory of the previous day's
accident.
    “ Eddie?” I ask.
    He nods, lets out a deep breath, and
sits down on the thin pad beside me. He's close enough to make this
feel personal, yet far enough away