When I woke up, or rather, flailed pathetically out of a dream in which I was firing birdshot into some zombie who, in the strange realm of dream-understanding, was Kara's recently deceased boytoy (and who happened to look disturbingly like Brad Pitt in that movie, Ocean's Eleven), Kara was already gone. There was a tense second where I was sure, abso-fucking-lutely sure, that she was Mr. Zombie Premium Kibble for some lucky, wandering undead. But the sleep hadn't quite cleared from my head, and in a second I found her, huddled up beside some now-kaput band kid's glockenspiel. Her head was in her arms, and I wasn't sure if she was napping, crying, or thinking. Then she saw I was up, and she rubbed her arm against her face, and when she looked at me, she was grinning. I might have sworn that while she was looking up, there was nothing but melancholy and tear-stains on her pretty face, but that grin told me otherwise…didn't it?

But the sole remaining human being in Raccoon City (the sole remaining human who wasn't me, anyway) got up and hefted the sweet-looking shotgun over her shoulder.

"Well, cowpoke, let's rustle us up some doggies," she said.

"Yee-haw. When we're done wrestling the doggies, can we get the fuck out of here?"

Kara stuck her short, pink tongue out at me.

"That was exactly what I meant. We'll head out to the truck, forage some supplies, and before you know it, we'll be on the open road."

I didn't even bring up the problems I had with that; Kara seemed too optimistic for me to burst her happy-bubble just now. She'd taken a big enough hit yesterday, and was doing her best not to trouble me with that. It wouldn't do for me to point out that most of the town was surrounded by dense forest, and the best, perhaps only, way out was over the Raccoon City Bridge (hotel of choice for various hobos, drifters, and lovers out looking for a safe bed-away-from-home). Add to that the added trouble of getting through traffic in a city probably choked by zombies, abandoned vehicles, and combinations thereof.

I smiled.

"Sweet. When can we head out?"

"Right away, especially if that inconsiderate zombie that kept shuffling back and forth has left."

"He probably got tired of waiting for us. Let's check it out."

Ever so carefully, my intrepid companion nudged the bass drum away from the window. Nothing moved on the other side of the window. I looked out into the hall, first down one way, then the other. The coast was clear, I hoped…I really hoped.

"Looks good," I said. I had a sudden, short-lived, and brutal vision of a legless zombie, with his lips still dripping with what used to be a person, waiting for us just outside this very door. I stood on my tiptoes, but I couldn't quite see low enough to completely shake that thought. Instead, I looked over my shoulder to make sure that Kara was right there with the gun (she was), put my hand on the doorknob, counted to a very long three seconds, and pushed, twisting the doorknob as I did. The hall was dead silent. Down one end and up the other, nothing but emptiness stalked the school as far as we could see. We could have heard a pin drop, were there any pins in dropping distance.

"Let's go," I whispered. It seemed wrong, kind of, to break that creepy silence. I suppose that I couldn't have filled it by myself, anyway.

"Yeah."

Kara was whispering, too. Must have been contagious.

The lady and I power-walked down the hall like two soldiers in Somalia (or at least, in Black Hawk Down) I took the lead, ("breaker-one, this is Scout Squad A, do you copy?"), and Kara followed, toting the Lord of the Hunt ("shut your idiot face, Dylan!"). We didn't run into any dead-heads in the school, though: the murky dark halls were completely empty, except for one boy playing soldier, and one girl playing savior.

Her truck, like her piece, was a sweet block of iron, a big Chevy 4x4 from the looks of it, and loaded for bear. The back was half-full of plywood, and what looked like loose tools from a tipped-over metal box were scattered all over the truck's bed. There was a cord of rope and some jumper cables added in, as if to make the recipe complete. The whole jumble smelled like oil and hard work; it reminded me of my own dad's garage. But he lived way up in Iowa…it wasn't like I was ever going to see him again, not with the Incident in Raccoon City. Even while I climbed up in the cab, sitting right there next to Kara, it was hard to believe we'd see another sunrise.

"Didn't you say we were going for supplies?" I asked.

Kara propped her elbows on the bottom curve of the steering wheel and gave me an irritated look.

"That's right. Do you have a better idea, oh navigator?"

"Hey, I wasn't being a dick. It just looks like you have all the supplies we'll need back in the bed."

"I don't know about that. I was thinking food, clothes, maybe a mattress or a tent. I mean…we don't know if this sickness made it past the bridge, or how far it's gotten."

"I guess you're right…you want to try that K-Mart out on Conrad?"

Kara shook her head. Her little palm tree of hair swayed in the wind.

"Already done, on the way here. I was hoping to score some more ammo, but the place is overrun with zombies. I don't know why, but they seem to be having trouble with the doors. You know, that K-Mart doesn't even have automatic doors?"

I did remember that: as a lifelong friend of detention, I had spent many a long afternoon looking out at that K-Mart. Most of the time, I would get antsy enough to want a candy bar or a Pepsi on the way home, so I'd stop in there. I remember Mr. Yin (the owner, remember?) telling me once that the automatic doors were too expensive now, and until profits picked up, I'd just have to spend some extra energy and do it myself. I asked him what the crippled people would have to do, and he smiled.

The man runs a tight ship, but he's not entirely without humor.

"Shop at Wal-Mart," he'd said.

So that's what we did. Kara tore out of the parking lot, tires screeching on the blacktop, and swung her way into the wrong lane, heading down Conrad. The Wal-Mart, if I remembered correctly, was just down that way, and once you got down near the cluster of fast food places, you took a sharp left onto Bozell Boulevard. Bozell was an important thoroughfare, and the Wal-Mart was in a little strip mall alongside it. Kara followed my directions wordlessly, weaving with dangerous skill in and out of stopped and idling cars that had fallen along the street. As we neared Bozell, I saw something rising over the east tower of the Umbrella plant.

"Kara," I said, pointing toward the suspicious shadow. "What does that look like to you?"

"Like smoke?" she said, not glancing at the gathering cloud for more than a second.

"What does that mean?"

Kara looked at me for a second, then swerved wildly around a median wall.

"Nothing for us," she responded after righting the truck's course. "All we need to do is grab some supplies and get the hell out of Raccoon."

I shut my mouth and silently watched the smoky cloud gather over East Raccoon City. Something that had never happened before happened then: coming down from the jolt that followed Kara hitting a pothole dead-on, I felt a short but vicious spike of melancholy. It dawned on me that my mother and stepdad were either dead or zombies by now, that the city of my birth and most of my life was gone. It wasn't coming back. I let a comfortable dullness settle over my mind in response to that troubling thought. Damn…I couldn't take that kind of thinking right now.

I thought about telling Kara about it, but then I remembered my dad. I suppose that Kara must have considered herself lucky for most of her life; after all, her parents were probably still together and they seemed fairly rich (she went to a private school, anyway), but now they were both dead in one way or another. All in one swift, miserable, murdering day. At least I still had my dad, the great mechanic and car lover, making his life off in Iowa. Now, she had no one. Maybe, if we got out of this alive, I could-

"Hey, dreamer. We're there."