That was all we could have asked for. Just some breathing space. A chance for Ava, a lifeline for Sadie.
She threw her arms around Varesh and Tim one last time, then blew out a quick breath and smiled at me. “We’d better go. I can hear the dead coming.”
Sure enough, a low groan and staggering footsteps drifted in from the street.
I’d already showered and changed once after our last encounter, and I wouldn’t delay our departure for anotherminute. “All right.” I clapped Varesh on the back. “See you two soon.”
As I slid in behind the wheel, the guys stood side by side watching us, and I gave them a salute before I shut the door.
In the sudden silence, Sadie pulled on her seatbelt and closed her eyes, summoning her courage.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Nope.” She sent me a flat look. “But let’s go.”
I pulled out of the car park, keeping watch on our surroundings as the engine rumbled.
We'd made it halfway down the block when I braced myself and shot a look in Sadie’s direction.
No humans were walking the street anymore.
Just the dead—everywhere—and the sinking realisation this was our life now.
The road stretched ahead, unnervingly quiet save for the wandering bodies that always seemed to turn seconds too late to follow our movements—a big, burly guy with his guts exposed to the air, a woman in a blood-soaked nightgown. I dodged a man in head-to-toe camo, as if he’d hoped to make himself invisible to the dead. Now he’d become one of them.
My hands tightened around the wheel as I waited for something to lunge at us. Nothing did, and somehow that made the anticipation worse.
“See how slow they are to react?” I kept my eyes on the street.
“That’s one thing in our favour,” Sadie said. “We can outrun them as long as we’re not surrounded.”
The world hadn’t collapsed yet, not entirely. It had just… stopped. If the infected hadn’t been loitering, it would have looked like a slightly untidier version of what we knew before.
Cars sat abandoned where the owners had panicked and fled, a few with windows smeared in rust-coloured handprints, others with doors hanging open. Shopping bags and belongings were scattered across the road. If we didn’t have enough supplies to get us to Dad’s farm, I would have considered stopping and seeing what we could salvage.
Sadie took it all in with a distant look on her face, as if her brain was trying to accept details that were almost too big to comprehend. Her axe rested beside her in the footwell, the handle pressed against her knee.
I’d tucked my sword down the side of my seat, keeping the handle next to my shoulder within easy reach.
“What do you think? Is it what you expected?” I asked, pulling up at the end of Sanderson Street. We’d finally hit some traffic. Three cars and a couple of vans passed by before I could make a turn, and I eyed each one of them, wondering where they were headed.
Owen, Laura, and the girls would be diving into this mess soon.
“I don’t even know what I was picturing,” she said, pointing at the service station up ahead showing signs of life.
A guy in a four-wheel drive had parked at a pump with anout of servicesign taped to the display. The shop windows were smashed, the automatic doors left permanently open. No doubt the inside would be looted, too. There was no chance of getting fuel, but desperation had pushed him to at least try.
When he caught on to the rumbling of our motor, his hopeful expression shifted seamlessly into a calculating one, and the first alarm bells started ringing.
We weren’t safe out here, and it wasn’t just the dead we needed to worry about.
“I’m assuming we’re not stopping for anyone?” Sadie faced the front and avoided eye contact with the man, her voice strained. “We haven’t talked about that yet.”
“We can’t. Did you see the look on his face?” I monitored the rearview as I continued driving. I’d kept a full tank of diesel throughout the pandemic, never knowing when fuel supplies would run out. Now, we were a target.
“I wish I hadn’t,” she said.
A motorbike sped by in the opposite direction, the rider barely sparing us a glance.
