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When he’s at the sedan, he reaches in through the broken window and hits the unlock button. Then he swings open the driver’s door and angles the unbroken side mirror so he can see behind him as he works between the door and the seat, pretending to be tinkering with the dashboard.

When something moves in his peripheral vision, he resists the urge to back out fast. This is the point—look distracted. And after that first flicker of motion, he doesn’t see anything else.

He shifts left and then right, widening his field of vision. Still nothing.

The angled mirror was a good idea, but what if Raymond realizes his approach is too exposed and loops around to come up behind the vehicle?

Henry adjusts the rearview mirror. That helps, giving him a wider field, but he still—

There! Something definitely moved, but it’s below where either mirror can pick it up. Henry ducks, as if to check something on the car floor, and that lowers his field of vision and—

There’s something on the road. Flat on the road and moving across it.

Henry turns, expecting to see Raymond on his belly like some kind of guerrilla fighter creeping through the jungle.

At the last second, he thinks of another possibility, one that makes his stomach drop.

Zombies.

But it isn’t Raymond or a zombie. It’s the old man. He’s moving in an odd creep-crawl, pulling himself on his arms and one leg, head lowered with the effort. Henry goes still and stares, and he wants to say this is another hallucination because the guy cannot have survived, but then he sees a belt wrapped around the thigh above the man’s severed calf.

Henry’s mouth goes dry, sweat breaking out across his forehead.

This whole time, he’s been telling everyone that the old man is dead because he couldn’t live through that injury. But he never considered this. What if the guy found a way to tie it off? The bartender said he was a professor. He was smart.

They’d heard the man screaming in the forest. They’d seen him alive, but then he disappeared, and it seemed to have been a hallucination.

What if the disappearance was the hallucination?

Henry really did think the man couldn’t have survived. He hadn’t lied.

He’d just been wrong.

Henry runs toward the man, calling, “Stay there. I can help.”

The man collapses as if in relief, face down on the road. Henry reaches him and bends down, hands to the man’s shoulders.

“It’s me. Henry. The paramedic. I’m going to help you.”

Even as he says it, he’s inwardly laughing, that laugh edged with hysteria. Help him? Help him how? They’re all trapped here, doomed to die.

It doesn’t matter. They’ll keep fighting until they can’t, the bartender’s mockery be damned.

Henry reaches under the man’s armpits and lifts him up from the road. The poor man’s head lolls, as if he doesn’t have the energy to even look up. Henry raises him to his face level.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m going to need to carry you. It might hurt but—”

The man’s head wobbles up, his eyes shut, and Henry’s breath catches. The man’s cheek is sliced open so deep Henry sees teeth. Then those teeth open, the man’s eyes opening too, and they’re black pits and the man’s skin is already rotting and sloughing off—

Henry drops the man and staggers back, but he’s still crouched, and he stumbles and the man lunges at him.

Not a man.

A zombie.

The thing’s teeth snap at him, and Henry pulls back just in time. He kicks at the creature, one foot hitting it square in the chest and sending it flying back. Then Henry’s on his feet. He doesn’t run—it’s a zombie with one leg—but he moves back slowly, his gaze on the thing.

Zombie.