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“We will,” said Ben.

Scott opened the gate and we drove on, back out into the green world that had replaced so much of California. I heard the gate close behind us before I hit the button to roll up the windows, and we rolled on, heading into the future.

I used to want to be an actress. Before that, I wanted to be a fairy godmother. I guess “paid killer” was a compromise between the two. Kids are weird, aren't they?

—A
MBER
B
URTON

We never got to be the heroes. Now we're just going to be statistics. That's the worst part of all.

—A
ISLINN
“A
SH
” N
ORTH

O
ur days fell into an easy, if unpleasant, rhythm. We drove through the woods as much as we could, inconveniencing the wildlife rather than risking exposure. Amber and I split the time behind the wheel, with Ben and Audrey spelling us when we needed a break. They weren't sitting idle while we drove—they were watching the forest, scanning for signs of danger, and looking for signs of new growth. Audrey had already spotted two virtually collapsed structures, and searching them had rewarded us with some as-yet-unspoiled cans of food to add to our collection. There were even four cans of old tinned beef, which was a treasure more valuable than gold or jewels in the post-zombie world. Meat prepared before the Kellis-Amberlee virus got into the air was clean; it couldn't infect or trigger conversion. There were people who'd pay dearly for the chance to taste flesh again.

The animals we saw were bold, with no fear of man. Deer grazed as we drove by, their satellite dish ears swiveling constantly, and didn't run away. Opossums watched us from the trees, pale flashes of fur amongst the branches. Audrey exclaimed every time she spotted one. Sometimes “Look, it's another possum” was the only thing she'd say for hours at a time. They were worth exclaiming over. Before the Rising, they'd been purely nocturnal. But the sun blinded zombie eyes, enough so that most of the dead chose to hunt after dark if they weren't actually starving. Opossums were too small to amplify. They weren't too small to be a snack for something larger and maddened by the disease. So they'd started coming out more and more during the day, shrugging off centuries of evolution in favor of staying alive long enough to evolve a little further. It was a remarkable adaptation. It probably mirrored similarly remarkable adaptations happening all over the world, largely unobserved now that people left the woods alone.

I was honestly sick of hearing about it.

“What's the next safe house on the map?” I asked Amber. She was wedged into the passenger seat, rifle in her lap, eyes scanning the trees constantly as we rolled along. So far, we'd used very few bullets, but the constant knowledge of where we were was grinding us all down.

“No gas stops for another two hundred miles,” said Ben, from the backseat. “There's a medical stop marked off in a business park about another fifty miles up the coast. No guarantee that they'd have fuel to spare, but they might have showers.”

“
Showers
,” breathed Amber, making the word sound like something holy. It didn't take much effort. None of us had bathed in days, and so we left the car less and less, trying to avoid fresh air. If we breathed in too much of it, we wouldn't be able to stand the thought of getting back into the car with ourselves, much less with everyone else. We were marinating in our own stink, and while that was probably a metaphor for the human condition, I doubt any of us
cared
. We just wanted to be clean. And showers meant civilization, the chance for hot food and soft beds and questions answered about what was going on in the world.

Still… “Do we know anything about it beyond ‘a medical stop'?” I asked. “Not to be a party pooper, but I'd rather not have my kidneys harvested because I decided to pull into the wrong parking lot.”

“Your kidneys are probably terrible anyway,” said Amber. “Not worth stealing. I, on the other hand, have excellent lungs.”

“Oh, yes, this is exactly the conversation I was hoping to get involved with today,” deadpanned Audrey. “Tell me more about the delightful condition of your delicate lung meats.”

“There's no need to be sarcastic,” said Amber. “I'm just stating facts.”

“According to what I have here, it's a research station, independent, run by a former associate of the CDC known to be well inclined toward refugees, especially refugees the CDC doesn't like,” said Ben. “The doctor's name is Shannon Abbey, no gender given, specialty is virology and genetic manipulation. Which sounds like the absolute best thing to run toward. You, too, could be at the center of a new outbreak.”

“But we'd be
clean
at the center of a new outbreak,” protested Amber. “Remember being clean? Clean was amazing. Clean was like having your birthday every day of your life, and the party was in your pants, where your crotch didn't smell like a dock.”

“That is an image I could have gone the rest of my life without,” said Ben. “Can we find something else to talk about? Or not talk about? We were all being quiet before, and I enjoyed that quite a bit.”

I laughed and kept on driving. “Just give me directions, and we can angle toward this Abbey person. Maybe they'll trade us some shower time for topping off their antibiotics, and we can ask what's been going on with the campaigns.” We didn't dare download anything truly in-depth with our makeshift network. There was being a small wireless booster in the middle of nowhere, and then there was being a small wireless booster trying to download specialized information. One of them told the CDC that Ben's increasingly fictional reports were exactly that—fiction—and brought the world crashing down on our heads. No, thank you.

We stuck to the coastal forest for as long as we could, keeping company with the wildlife. When we reached the point at which the woods became impassable, I turned onto a narrow frontage road, branches reaching out on all sides to snag at our windows and slow our progress. According to the maps Ben had, we were less than fifteen miles from the business park where we'd find Dr. Abbey, and maybe get our showers. From there, we just had to get through Oregon and Washington to hit the Canadian border and disappear. Freedom was close. I could almost taste it.

The road curved. I turned the wheel to follow it. Things began happening very fast after that, seeming to collapse together, leaving no room for anything but reaction. The trees to either side of us exploded with motion as people launched themselves out of the woods. They were riding what looked like modified Jet Skis, heavily armored, with lances and cowcatchers affixed to the front. I hauled on the wheel as hard as I could, sending us into a spin. Amber was shouting. Ben was shrieking. Audrey was curiously silent, and I had just enough time to worry about that before we slammed into the first of our attackers. There was a sickening crunch from the front of the ATV, the engine giving an audible whine that broke through the sound shielding.

Amber had cranked her window down and was firing into the fray, pulling the bolt back on her rifle and pulling the trigger again and again. There was a particularly loud crack, and something whizzed past my head, tracing a hot line of danger in the air, before shattering my window. Bits of glass flew outward and away. Amber screamed, rage and pain and fury, as the bullet went through her shoulder and into the seat behind it.

Audrey leaned into the front seat, a pistol in either hand, and began firing through the shattered window, giving Amber time to get her equilibrium back. I wanted to shout at her, to order her back into her own seat, but I said nothing. I was fighting with the wheel, Amber was fighting shock, and Ben didn't have the kind of marksmanship that the situation required. We needed to get out of here.

More people poured into the open, shaking the trees. One of the raiders popped up in front of us. I hit the gas, slamming into his Jet Ski as hard as I could. He went flying. Something in the engine made a crunching noise, and we lost forward momentum. I could steer, but we were losing speed fast.

Amber got her senses back and braced her shotgun against her unwounded shoulder, using her dominant hand to steady the barrel as she fired again and again. Two more raiders went down. The car continued slowing.

“Can you speed this fucking thing up?” Amber demanded.

“I wish I could,” I said.

“Then I'm buying you time,” she snapped, and unfastened her seat belt.

Until my dying day, I will swear I didn't know what she was about to do, and until my dying day, I'll be lying, because part of me
did
know, part of me
did
understand, and that part of me—that terrible, remorseless part of me—
approved
. Reducing our weight might be the only thing that kept us moving, and we'd slowed enough that it wouldn't hurt her worse than she'd already been hurt. And she'd been hurt badly. She was trying not to show it, but the seat behind her was soaked through with blood, and she was still bleeding. The bullet had severed something essential.

We were a rolling biohazard now, and Amber didn't have much time. That's what I told myself as she unlocked her door, as Ben realized what she was doing and shouted for her to stop.

She didn't stop. Unbuckling her belt, she kicked the door open and tumbled out into the clearing, shrieking like a madwoman as she brought her gun up and continued firing. The ATV picked up a little bit of speed as her weight was subtracted from its total. For a moment—a single, shining moment—I thought we might stand a chance.

The back of her shirt was black with blood, shining in the sunlight. She fired twice more before the raiders gunned her down and she collapsed, a bullet through her skull guaranteeing that she wasn't going to be getting up again. Amber was gone.

It might still have been worth it, if we hadn't been slowing down again. If her blood hadn't soaked through the seat where she'd been shot, rendering the vehicle unsafe. Even if the engine wasn't dying, we couldn't have stayed where we were long enough to get away. She'd died for nothing. No: not for nothing. She'd died so that she wouldn't amplify in an enclosed space with her friends. She'd died so that we'd stand a chance of surviving. We had to honor that.

We had to find a way out of this.

“Ash…” said Audrey, looking over her shoulder at me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. The engine rattled and died. The raiders had us surrounded. Some of them were wearing black and silver pre-Rising football gear with snarling men blazoned across the back. They looked like a gang out of an old movie, and they had us outnumbered ten to one. Even if Amber—oh, God, Amber—had still been alive, we would have lost. There was no way this could have ended any differently.

Ben reached up from the backseat, putting his hand on my shoulder. I took my hands off the wheel and put them up, signaling our surrender. Then I turned, and pulled Audrey as close as I could while avoiding the spreading stain of Amber's blood, and I kissed her like the world was ending. I kissed her like I was never going to have the opportunity to kiss her again, and ah, her lips were sweet, and ah, our tears were bitter.

The door opened behind me. Hands grabbed my shoulders, yanking me out of the car. I saw Amber's body, crumpled on the broken road. Then my head slammed into the pavement, and everything stopped for a little while, like a clock whose hands had been removed.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

I opened my eyes on blackness. For a moment—just a moment, but a terrible one—I thought I'd gone blind, or that they'd put my eyes out. That had happened before, to Irwins who stumbled into the wrong part of the underground network of black markets and illegal communities crisscrossing the world. We could be valuable as organ donors, sources of information, and… other things. I didn't like to think about those other things. I didn't
want
to.

But these people had killed Amber. Sure, she'd been firing on them at the time, and she'd been an excellent shot; I knew just from the bodies I'd seen fall that she'd managed to hit at least two of her targets. They could still have found a means of taking us without shooting her. Whoever these people were, they weren't interested in harvesting slaves. The fact that I couldn't see probably didn't speak to any permanent damage, so much as it spoke to the space that I was in.

I tried to sit up. I couldn't. Something was strapping me down, crossing my chest and legs and pinning me in place. All right. I clicked my tongue. The noise didn't travel far, but it did sound hollow as it returned to me. From the sounds of it, wherever I was wasn't large, and was at least somewhat disconnected from whatever else might be around us. Stretching out my fingers—which
did
move, albeit reluctantly—allowed me to brush them against a cold metal wall. I winced, closing my eyes again. I was in a cadaver drawer. It was the only thing that accounted for everything I was experiencing, from the darkness all the way to the faint reverberation in every sound. It was a good place to store prisoners. Even if one of us amplified, we wouldn't be able to get to anyone else to infect them, and we could be withdrawn and tested one by one, all without removing the straps. There was no telling how many people had lived and died in this exact position.

There was no way of knowing whether I was about to be one of them.

I steadied my breathing, trying to deduce as much as I could about my situation from what little information I was getting from my own body. My head hurt. I couldn't move it much, but when I did, the ache came from the side of my head and the back of my neck, implying that someone had kicked me after I fell. That would explain the conclusive nature of my blackout. It was hard to deal with two different types of trauma at the same time. Nothing else seemed to hurt, and when my hands brushed against the tops of my hips, I felt fabric. I was still dressed, then.

Wait—still, or again? I breathed in, and smelled nothing but antiseptic and citrus cleaning products. I should have smelled my own funk, which Amber had so gleefully described not long ago. Whoever had taken me had also washed me. It was a terrible thing to realize, accompanied by a profound feeling of violation and rage. In a way, I was almost glad for that. It chased away some of the grief.

Amber was dead. Of that much I was sure: I'd seen her die, and there was no way she was coming back, either as herself or as one of the walking infected. Kellis-Amberlee can fix a remarkable amount of damage in the process of getting the body up and running, but it can't fix a hole in the back of the skull, or the attendant brain damage. Thankfully. If zombies could survive head shots, we would have lost the Rising, and those of us who had managed to survive to the present day would never have been able to stand a chance.