Iwakeatdawnwith Iris warm against my side and three years of my self-imposed isolation in smoking ruins.
She's still asleep, her breath soft and even, her face relaxed in a way I haven't seen before. Without the fear and desperation pulling at her features, she looks like the kind of woman who deserves better than a man who's spent three years running from his own shadow.
I let myself have thirty seconds of pretending this is something real. That we're two normal people who found each other instead of two broken survivors clinging together in the dark.
Then reality crashes back. Allie. Fort Nelson. The Wolves.
We’re running out of time to get to the hospital and back before the kid dies.
I ease away from Iris, and her eyes flutter open immediately. No confusion, no sleepiness. Just instant alertness, the reflex of someone who's learned that waking slowly gets you killed.
"Time to go," I say.
We dress in efficient silence. The awkwardness I half-expected doesn't come. Whatever happened last night, we both know it changed things. Neither of us has the luxury of pretending otherwise.
The first four hours pass in a blur of empty highways and scattered undead. Iris rides differently now, her grip on my waist relaxed, confident. Her body moves with mine like we've been doing this for years instead of hours. I notice other things too. The way her thumbs stroke absently along my ribs. The way she presses closer on the straightaways, like she can't help wanting the contact.
Dangerous thoughts. I push them away and focus on the road.
Around noon, we hit trouble.
A herd crossing the highway. Two hundred zombies at least, maybe more, shuffling across the road in a mass of rotting flesh and reaching hands. The stench hits us before the sight: decay and death and something sickeningly sweet beneath.
I stop the bike. Assess.
Too many to shoot through. Too slow to navigate around without losing hours we don't have.
"How long to go around?" Iris asks, her voice tight.
"Three hours. Maybe more, depending on terrain."
I do the math in my head. Three hours there, six hours back counting the extra distance. Add it to our remaining travel time, and Allie doesn't make it.
"She doesn't have three hours," Iris says, reading my silence.
"No."
"Then we wait for them to pass."
"Could be an hour. Could be more. Herds don't follow schedules."
Her arms tighten around me. I can feel her shaking from the terror of watching the clock run out on her daughter's life.
"There has to be another way."
There is. It's insane. Suicidal, probably. The kind of desperate move that gets people killed more often than it saves them.
But I've done it before. Once. And I'm still here.
"Hold on," I tell her. "Tight as you can. Don't let go no matter what."
"What are you—"
I gun the engine and aim straight for the herd.
The bike's speed and noise create instant chaos. Two hundred zombies turn toward the sound, reaching and groaning, but they're slow and we're moving at seventy miles per hour. I weave between stumbling bodies, using their confusion against them, threading gaps that close a heartbeat after we pass through.
Iris screams. I don't blame her.
