The End Has Come

Whitman stood on the gritty shoulder of the road, keeping one eye on the trees twenty yards away. There could be zombies out there. But he had to check the van, make sure it wasn’t going to conk out at the worst possible moment.

The painted government seal on the driver’s side door was scratched to hell, and his window was a complete loss. The tires seemed alright, though, and when he bent low to look at the undercarriage, he found only a few dents and scrapes.

They’d been lucky. As fast as he’d been driving over those rough roads, they could’ve cracked an axle.

When he straightened up, he nearly jumped out of his shoes. A figure with long stringy hair was walking toward him. It was only Grace, though.

“I told you to stay in the car,” he said.

She shrugged, then nodded at Bob sitting in the back seat. The kid was still screaming, though he’d grown hoarse and it wasn’t quite as deafening.

“I’m not like him,” Grace said.

Whitman took a deep breath. He had a pretty good idea what was coming. When he’d picked these two up, back in Atlanta, he’d been aware they were both positives. Positives weren’t allowed to live inside a proper city.

Being positive didn’t mean you were actually infected. At least that’s what every one of them told themselves.

“My friend Heather and I found a zombie in this underground mall. We weren’t supposed to be there, but . . . look, it bit Heather. I get that. They took her away and I don’t know what happened to her.”

Whitman could probably guess. Heather wouldn’t have been a positive, then. She’d been a confirmed infected. Only one thing happened to people like that.

“I ran away. I know that was . . . cowardly,” Grace said. She sounded like she’d prepared this speech well in advance. “I know it was wrong. But I never even got close to the zombie. It didn’t touch me.”

Whitman nodded. He supposed he had to hear her out.

“The police wouldn’t even listen, they just tattooed me and locked me up. They don’t know all the details. I know they were just trying to be careful. But I’m not at risk.” She gave him a hopeful smile. “I’m really not. Please. You can just take me back. Tell them I’m clean.” A little shake of her hair, which probably worked great on boys her age. “Please,” she said.

“I don’t make the rules.”

“I shouldn’t be out here!” she said. “It’s dangerous — those bikers would’ve killed us, they would’ve . . . what they would’ve done to me —”

“You’ll be safe at the medical camp,” he told her. He pulled open the driver’s side door and jumped back inside. “You coming?”

She stood there for a while, her face a mask of disbelief. She must have really thought she could talk her way out of this. Finally, she turned and looked back the way they’d come.

“Those bikers —”

“They were after our water, our food, our gasoline,” Whitman told her. “They must’ve been following us for a while.”

“They’re not going to give up, are they?” she asked. “They’ll kill us.”

Whitman shrugged. “They didn’t have any guns, or they would’ve used them. I guess after ten years there aren’t any bullets left out here. That gives us a chance. Plus, we’ve got a head start now. The sooner you get in the van,” he told her, “the sooner we get to Florida.”

She got in the van.

* * *

“Once we walled in the cities,” Director Philips droned on, “zombie incidents fell by a considerable degree. New infection rates are down nearly ninety-nine per cent . . .”

Even the senators looked bored as the Director droned on with his endless report on the progression of the Crisis. Whitman barely listened to any of it. He knew the numbers. As the CDC’s ranking field agent, he’d been responsible for collecting most of them. The last few years had been a blur as he traveled around the country interviewing what passed for medical personnel, overseeing the administration of the hospital camps, working with the army to get a sense of how many zombies were still out there, hiding in the wilderness.

It had been depressing work, if vital.