Nick drove.

He took the high mountain roads out of Eight Springs, taking cautious turns through the winding pathways choked with abandoned vehicles. There were tire tracks out here already, and he followed them until that afternoon when they began to turn westward and head into a distant city. Its image sat immobile on the horizon, like a cardboard cutout covered in ash. Nick stared at it for a while, chewing on canned beans and listening to Rob's teeth crunching on dog kibble in the seat next to him.

He drove.

By the second day, Eight Springs was pretty far off. When he stopped for lunch, he turned on the radio and tried to pick up Elaine's signal, but couldn't. All he heard was blaring static and the President's voice every once in a while, wavering in and out of focus. Nick shuffled through both the AM and FM frequencies and found nothing, save for the D.C. signal. Just static.

As he was fiddling with the dials for the radio, he heard the click of the CD player coming to life.

It started up mid-song, and the speakers he'd jacked up to try and pick out something from the veil of static blared out the pounding of snare drums and the rhythm of a strumming guitar:

'Hey, you, get off of my cloud! Hey, you, get off of my'

Nick fumbled for the volume dial, twisting it down to silence. He'd nearly jumped to the other side of the car in surprise, and his meal of crackers almost ended up on the floor. With a swallow, he looked out the windshield, hoping that nothing big and angry had heard the sudden noise.

He played it safe. Nick set his food aside and put the SUV into drive, slipping down a side road and parking underneath some trees before shutting off the lights. From here, the car looked just like all the others: forgotten and empty. The road ahead of him showed nothing, and he couldn't hear anything but the soft whistling of wind outside.

"Shit, that was loud, huh?" he asked of the dog, who was gazing at the food he'd brought back into his hands. "Oh, knock it off, Rob, you just ate."

Nick nibbled on the corner of one cracker and gently turned the volume back up on the CD player.

'I can't get no, I can't get no, when I'm watchin' my T.V., and a man comes on to tell me...'

Despite everything, Nick felt a smile coming onto his face. "Shit. It's been a long time since I've heard The Stones," he muttered. He kept the volume down low, but the lyrics and the wailing of the electric guitar were still audible.

'But he can't be a man because he doesn't smoke...'

Nick tapped one fingernail on the steering wheel, surprised at his ability to recall the lyrics. He hadn't heard a song— a good song— for a very long time. Bearded men screaming incomprehensibly into a microphone didn't count, even if that band's pyrotechnics had been the thing that pulled him and Coach and the others out of the amusement park.

When he was finished with the crackers, he began off again, taking a right onto the wide, open highway. The LED display near the rear-view read northeast, which was good enough for him.

Mick Jagger's voice sang quietly about mothers on antidepressants and how sometimes, you got what you needed.

Nick drove.


It was no surprise to him that by the fifth day he was beginning to run low on gasoline. He'd jammed three ten-gallon containers into the back that were completely full when he'd left. Now only one of them held anything inside, swirling sadly around the bottom quarter of the tank.

Nick had brought a length of garden hose with him, just like when he and the boys had been traveling out of D.C. It took him longer on his own, wandering from car to car, trying to ignore the chill of the wind and the awful silence of the area around him. Rob stuck with him, sometimes rolling in the snow nearby while Nick listened to the precious fuel dripping out of the hose and into the tank. The dog didn't seem to mind the snow — in fact, he looked like he was having a hell of a time, kicking it up everywhere and flopping around like an idiot.

"Are you retarded?" Nick asked suddenly while he was on the sixth car, spitting the gasoline from his mouth.

Rob lifted his head from the snow nearby and looked at him, then jumped up and dashed away, as if he'd seen something, or expected Nick to give chase. He still favored one of his back legs, but he seemed just as nimble and athletic as when Nick had first stumbled upon him.

"I'm serious. I think you got dropped on your head when you were a puppy."

The dog made a playful whuff and trotted up close, dancing around just outside of Nick's range.

"What? I'm not chasing you. I'm busy."

He looked back to his tank and hose, listening to the trickling flow of gas.

Rob huffed again and ran off, out of sight around a nearby truck that had crashed into a tree. He came back with a large stick in his mouth, and dropped it next to him.

"What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

Rob nudged the stick with his nose, then backed up a few steps.

"You want me to throw it?"

The dog wagged his tail.

Nick scoffed and turned back to the hose and tank. "Fine. Give me a second."

He sank back on his haunches until the flow petered off, then he tugged the hose out of the car and wrapped it around the handle of the gasoline container. Sighing, he stood, turning toward his dog.

Rob dropped down immediately on his front legs, tail in the air.

"Jesus. This is stupid," Nick grunted, bending down and taking the stick off the ground. He waved it up and down in his hand. Rob didn't take his eyes off it. "Wow, you're desperate." Nick flipped the stick in his hand, like a baton, then drew back and threw it down the road, gasping softly at the flare of pain in his side. The dog took off after it, galloping down the road.

Nick watched as he came back with it, tail wagging.

"Good dog," he said.

Rob's tail went faster and he dropped the stick at his feet.

Nick threw the stick a little more gently from then on, giving it a more horizontal toss rather than an overhead one. How hilarious would it have been if he'd have to return to Eight Springs after five days because he'd undone all of the healing his ribs had gone through. It wouldn't be fun to explain to Sean.

"I bet you want this stick," he teased as he held it up in the air again. "Want the stick, Rob?"

He flinched as the dog let out a loud bark. It echoed across the fields and Nick turned as if he would be able to see the sound waves rolling through the air, dropping the stick to the ground. When the silence settled in again, and he didn't see anything moving nearby or hear anything distinctly zombie-like, he relaxed and looked back down to his dog.

He remembered that those Hunters in the movie theater had never made a sound until they'd attacked, and felt a little bit colder. Had the other zombies adopted the same tactic?

Nick could still hear the bellow of the Tank on the lake in his head. Obviously a zombie that big wouldn't give a shit. Tanks didn't need to sneak up on you. Especially one that fast and that powerful. Something that could flip a freight train and rip it apart right in front of you wasn't exactly something that could be outmaneuvered.

Outsmarted, though — that was still a possibility.

The voice in his memory spoke in that raspy wheeze:

Nick, I'm scared.

He shook his head, and sighed.

Terrence would have had a blast in Eight Springs, he thought.

And it was likely he would've taken the kid with him when he left.

Nick stared out at the road ahead for a minute, then went back to collecting gasoline.


The days passed, and the landscape didn't change. Above, the clouds were the same dark gray, and the snow around them seemed to take on the same shade, making it look more akin to ash. He saw nothing living — no zombies, no animals. The dark blue of his SUV seemed the only splash of color in the world, the only thing that was moving. Even that seemed dampened, muted, as if he'd suddenly been struck colorblind.

Almost every morning he would wake up and the windows of the car would be snowed over, and he'd have to crawl out into the weather to brush it all off again. It was even worse outside, where the wind had begun to pick up and create big drifts over everything, like flash-frozen ocean waves.

As the sun would begin to fall and the world around them darkened, Nick would immediately seek out the nearest place to park the car — a gas station or a garage, sometimes just a tree. He wasn't going to risk traveling at night, not with his vision, even if the nights were so much longer than the days. There was a lot of down time, and while he had a battery-powered lamp, he tried to use it as little as possible, keeping himself and the dog in the icy stifling dark as much as he could.

Most nights were so cold that he could barely sleep for the trembling in his limbs; he'd burrow himself under every blanket he had and still be freezing, clinging to his own arms and tucking his legs as close to his body as possible. Rob would snake himself in under the covers and worm himself into Nick's arms or against his chest or back, and there they would lay until morning. It took Nick a long time to drift off, anymore.

There were a lot of dreams.

Sometimes it was Coach's soft smile and other times it was his horrified grimace, the last thing Nick had ever seen with whole vision. Sometimes it was Rochelle's gentle voice, her hands, the delicate rings of gold around her wrists or hanging off her ears, but other times it was her looking down on him and sobbing that high awful terrible noise, holding his own jacket against his face as he lay bleeding to death on the floor of a helicopter. And sometimes it was Ellis, the kid's drawling voice telling a story or just rambling, it really wouldn't matter, he just wanted to hear it — and then at other times his voice was low and dark and truthful:

I don't think you're going to...

The kid would shut his eyes, turn his head slightly away —

Ro', there's so much blood...

His head would give a little shake, and a forced smile would come across it as he turned back to face him —

You're gonna be fine, brother. I've got you.

And sometimes, he dreamt of the cruise ship. Of water.

He dreamt that he'd never gotten off, and drowned down there, scrabbling at a door that had opened when he'd gone through in real life but this time it didn't, and there was no real life, this dream was his reality and there were no second chances, and the water tasted like salt on his tongue and the reflexive gasp of his lungs dragged it in —

And he'd wake up, disoriented, terrified. His heart a snare drum in his throat, he'd drag in a shuddering breath, and then struggle to comprehend that it hadn't filled his chest with icy seawater.

Then Nick would realize he'd been dreaming, again, and slowly sink back down to the floor. Rob would tuck closer to his body, with a small, gruff noise. He'd bury his fingers in the dog's fur and stare at nothing, until finally sleep reclaimed him and, inexorably, the cycle would start over.

Nick had been traveling for a week. He was somewhere in the northeast section of Pennsylvania, where he'd been making his way slowly up Interstate 220. It wasn't much more than a tiny red line on his map, but he traced it with a pencil from place-to-place, even scribbling in the names of towns that weren't listed.

At least twice a day he would trace a finger over those lines, proposing his upcoming path. 220 seemed like a clear, open stretch of road at the moment, but he knew that could change in a few miles and he could be face-deep in zombies. He wanted to try and follow it for a while longer at least, perhaps even to New York, at which time he'd probably have to start making more right turns to get himself a little further eastward.

He tried his best to stay optimistic. After all, he'd already covered at least ten times the amount of ground he would have taken on foot. He'd be in New York soon. The fact that he'd made it that far in so short a time was a strange feeling, and then he'd remember that he used to be able to take a plane from one end of the country to the other and arrive in eight hours.

The sky had been empty since the cruise ship had gone under.


On the morning of the tenth day, just outside the state line of New York, he woke up to Rob growling.

He jolted upright, looking around wildly, but all he could see out the windows was gray. Rob was standing near the driver's seat, staring at the windshield, a low snarl building up in his chest. It seemed dark in the SUV — how long had he been asleep? — and Nick fumbled for the electric lamp. He stopped as his brain finally figured out why it was so dark.

The windows were snowed over again. Inside the car, the air seemed heavier, as if the snow was pushing at the vehicle from all sides, trying to trap him in there.

Nick pushed the blankets off himself and moved over to where Rob was, setting a hand on the dog's ruff. Rob didn't move, or look at him — his eyes were fixated on the windshield, hackles raised up, standing stiff and intimidating in the small space.

"What is it? Rob, what —"

His voice dropped away as a sound came from outside. Some kind of thump, like a body falling from high up. He jolted, and reached for the dog. He could hear something moving around out there.

"Shh, Rob."

Nick let out a breath and leaned toward the front of the car, reaching down and taking the revolver out of the cubbyhole beneath the CD player. His hands were shaking as he ejected the cylinder, assuring the firearm was loaded. The tiny click that the gun made when he pushed it back into place sounded like a shout.

He set the gun in his lap and moved closer to Rob, reaching out to grab the dog's face. He wrapped both hands carefully around his muzzle and held him still.

"Shh," he whispered, turning back toward the windows, wishing that the snow would fall away, and also hoping that it froze to the glass and never melted.

There came a soft sound like a wood pole being dragged over stone, rhythmic and scratchy.

Tap-shkk.

Tap-shkkk.

Nick tracked it as best he could without being able to see it, swearing that he could feel his bones creaking in his neck from moving so slowly. He kept his grip firm around Rob's mouth, the dog's huff blowing hot air into his face.

He didn't dare open his mouth to hush the dog further.

A shadow fell across the snow at the back window. Nick shrank back, although he was already near the front of the SUV; Rob started growling again, a deep noise that reverberated in Nick's chest like a double bass playing in its lowest notes. He tightened his grip over the dog's mouth, and Rob tossed his head, ripping himself away from Nick's hands.

The dog swung toward the back window, seeing the shadow out there. Nick scrambled after him, grabbing at his collar, trying to get him to stay quiet.

He hissed, "Shh —"

There was a low murmuring noise on the other side of the glass, unintelligible, but Nick could hear the curiosity in its tone. He yanked at Rob's collar, but trying to move the dog from his appointed position was impossible.

The gray layer of snow over the back window lightened a bit, then darkened, then lightened again. Something dragged itself through the snow, a finger or a hand, brushing away a thin line from the glass.

Oh, fuck this, Nick thought, feeling his heart trying to climb up to the back of his tongue.

He scrabbled for the driver's seat, fumbling with the keys. When the SUV's engine snarled awake in front of him, there was an answering roar from the rear of the car. Nick turned on the windshield wipers and put the vehicle into drive, slamming his foot down on the accelerator.

The tires shrieked as they tried to make purchase in the soft, fresh snow, catching momentarily before spinning again, catching again, spinning.

"Come on, just fucking go!" Nick cried, hearing that awful booming noise from behind him again.

The SUV jolted forward and started through the snow, windshield wipers struggling to remove the heavy build-up. He couldn't see anything; Nick was terrified of hitting a pole, yes, but his fear of whatever was trying to get at him from outside was a lot worse at the moment.

Rob was barking in the back, a sound he knew meant danger. The tires caught and spun again.

"Oh, no, no, no, come on!"

He heard a noise like a freight train in his head, earsplitting, and couldn't shield his ears for the frantic beating of his heart, the desperate pressure of his foot on the accelerator. The tires were humming, making the whole car vibrate — or it was whatever was outside, its noise becoming impossibly louder, and Nick was sure his eardrums were going to rupture —

The vehicle leapt forward again, and this time it didn't immediately get stuck in the snow. He pleaded for it to keep moving, unsure if he was saying the words aloud or not because he couldn't hear anything but low-frequency ringing in his ears. Part of the snow on the windshield finally fell away; he could see the world outside again, overcast and empty.

He'd gotten halfway off the road in his terror, and swung the steering wheel back to the left, feeling a bump as he came over a curb or dead body. Nick didn't even want to look behind him, but on reflex his eye drew to the rear-view mirror, glancing to the back of the SUV, where Rob was still moving as if he were barking, but he couldn't hear him at all. The snow had fallen away from the back window and there was something black-brown and huge out there on the road, behind him, and for a second he thought it was a goddamn bear, but it wasn't — it was a zombie.

As he watched, it picked up speed and flew toward him, toward the SUV, and he felt like his whole brain was vibrating but he realized that it was just making that horrible noise again, but he could only feel it, not hear it. Desperate, Nick yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, trying to avoid a collision.

For a split-second, he was sure that it was going to hit the car and tear it apart; he grabbed at the revolver but it wasn't in his lap anymore. A curse left his mouth as air because there was no noise to give it meaning.

The car shuddered underneath him as the zombie brushed against the rear-left bumper, and kept going, straight past the snow-covered windows and ahead of him.

Nick saw it — the hulking form, huge like a Tank, but it wasn't a Tank at all. One massive arm dragged through the snowfall on the road, and the other was nonexistent. Its legs were huge, muscular, bare. There wasn't a scrap of cloth on it at all. It turned, pivoting on one leg, centering its gaze on him. Its jaw was hanging off its face.

Nick had never been so scared to see a Charger. The SUV rolled forward, obnoxiously slow compared to the zombie's rush.

The Charger lunged at him and the car and he screamed, his whole world in complete silence as it lifted that huge arm and brought it down on top of the vehicle.

Nick could actually see the dent it had created, buckling the roof down toward him. The whole car jerked as if it were a toy in a child's hands. He gripped harder to the wheel, trying to turn away from the Charger, stomping his foot down onto the accelerator. For a second, he could see the zombie outside, mere feet away on the other side of the windshield. There was a gaping hole where its throat used to be with the dislocated jaw hanging down next to it.

The SUV jumped forward, and the Charger drew away behind him as he managed to keep his purchase with the road. Nick tried to keep his eye on the road ahead of him and an eye on the zombie behind him. It wasn't easy.

He must have been on the outskirts of a town or something similar; houses and buildings began to flash past the windows. The SUV kept going straight, as straight as it could be with all the cars on the road and the snowfall built up everywhere. He was too scared of trying to turn and ending up flipping the entire vehicle over. At this speed, on snow, he wouldn't be able to prevent it.

Nick thought some of his hearing might be coming back; there was a rhythmic sound behind him that might have been Rob barking. His ears were mostly just hissing, like the static on the radio. The car shuddered underneath him and he couldn't tell if he was driving over something or if the Charger was coming at him; he couldn't look at the mirror for fear it'd be feet away.

Keeping a straight path on the road brought him struggling up a hill, where at the top the SUV fishtailed crazily, and he was sure it would get stuck or flip or stop completely and that'd be it. The tires gripped to the snow though — it didn't seem so deep around here — and brought him down a wide lane filled with cars, and shops springing up on either side.

Noise built back up in his limited hearing and Nick turned the wheel again, brushing against a white sedan on the road. The steering wheel shook in his hands as he tore away from it, and in his peripheral vision, on his right, he saw movement.

It was the Charger, but it had missed him again. At a speed Nick would never be able to obtain with his car, it rammed into a parked truck. Shoving his foot onto the pedal, he expected entirely for the truck to shift a bit in the snow but ultimately stick, and for the Charger to bounce off of that and come straight at him.

Instead, when the zombie hit the truck, both kept going, the vehicle bending inward as if it had wrapped itself round a phone pole, and the Charger continued to drag it straight into and through the glass windows and doors of an Italian restaurant. The impact shook everything; part of the building's roof and eaves collapsed inward, throwing dust and snow into the air.

Nick tore his gaze away and drove, begging aloud that it had died in there, oh God please don't let it come back out, just die in there, just die, just die. He could only hear the lowest tones of his own voice, as if he were listening in on the other side of a thick door.

The hill drew gently upward, and terror filled him when the earth began to fall away on his right side, revealing a stretch of huge office buildings that drew further and further below him. He fought the urge to hit the pedal as hard as he could, just to try to go faster, to get away from that decline.

In the rear-view, the Charger re-appeared, looking more or less completely unscathed.

He was so terrified that he felt like he was being strangled when he looked ahead again and saw the clumped, abandoned cars on the left side of the road, just shadows of what they were beneath the blanket of snow. The SUV was feet from the downward slope of the hill.

Nick knew the Charger was coming. He could do nothing to stop what was about to happen.

It hit him.

The Charger got a good part of his rear bumper, just like before, hitting the left side, shoving the car into a turn toward the hill.

Precise.

Planned.

Nick's view of the road swung harshly to the right, and the car was shivering like a jackhammer underneath him. He swung the wheel hard in the opposite direction, trying to brake, trying to get the car to stop.

He couldn't do it. The front of the vehicle dipped down and the whole thing headed to the bottom, snow and weeds flying up into the windshield. Nick was pointlessly kicking the brake, but it wasn't going to work. He was heading for a building, a big one, glass windows all along the bottom, some of them boarded, most of them broken.

The hill leveled out into the parking lot and the SUV skidded sideways as Nick tried to stop it, back end swinging out the other way as the front-wheel drive tried its best to slow his path through the snow. He just kept going, straight at the building. His hands suddenly wished for the revolver. All he had in them was the steering wheel.

He yanked it again, hard, feeling the sensation in his chest of his own voice, pleading and begging for something, and yet nothing, to happen. The car straightened out and went nose-first into the building's barricaded glass windows.

Nick was sure he was dead right there, but there wasn't any sudden darkness, or lack of sensation, or anything. The car still trembled underneath him. Splinters, snow, and glass sprayed off the hood and in all directions. A cheap office partition exploded in front of him and he was in a hallway, a big wide one, drinking fountains on one side, CEDA posters on the other.

When he braked, he did hear something — the high pitched squealing of his own car's tires on linoleum. He begged for carpet, and received none. He blasted through a set of swinging double doors, into another hall, clinging to the steering wheel as if it would shield him from everything, seeing a wall coming at him now, filled with framed photos of smiling employees.

Nick kept his foot on the brake but he couldn't watch anymore; the wall rushed to meet him and he raised his hands to protect his face from whatever was going to be coming at it soon. For a sudden, sharp second he feared for his dog, thought the impact would throw Rob right out the windshield.

The impact never came.

He heard the squealing of the tires for another long few seconds, and then it quieted.

Under his quaking body, the vehicle was still.

Slowly, he drew his arms away from his face, and saw the photo of an aged woman grinning back at him.

The SUV idled a foot or so from the wall, its hood remarkably intact, save for a sprinkling of glass and snow amongst the dips and valleys of the dents he'd incurred.

Nick dropped his hands to his sides and might have sobbed, or it was just a really deep breath. He fumbled for the stick, shifted into park. Rob's cold nose touched his cheek.

Then, the low, distant roaring again, just on the edge of what he was able to hear.

His heart dropped and turned cold in his chest. In the rear view, he saw a flash of movement somewhere down the path he'd plowed through the building.

Nick looked at his dog. Dug his hand into the rough fur, pinched the collar between his thumb and forefinger for a half-second. He dropped his arm and picked up the Steyr.

"I'll be back, Rob," he said, or thought he was saying, and grabbed the handle of the driver's side door. He had to shove his shoulder hard against it to get it open because of the dent the Charger had made. His boots hit the wet linoleum, and he moved away from the SUV, slamming the door shut behind him.

"Stay, Rob," he breathed, and clicked the safety off his rifle.

Nick turned, and saw the shadow at the other side of the hall, and lifted the scope to his eye.


(A/N: A million apologies for the delay. I hope to be on time from now on. The key word here being hope.

Thanks for the skills of my beta-readers, Kit and Sanima.

The songs are, obviously, by The Rolling Stones, the first of which being 'Get Off My Cloud,' followed by '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.'

Coming up next: The Veteran.)