Sam tried to picture what grownups did after they started a car. He was pretty sure they stepped on the brake before putting the vehicle in gear. He found the left pedal in the dark, shoved it hard with his foot, and grabbed the selector lever. It had a side-button you were supposed to push in with your thumb; he depressed it and hauled back on the stick, and was startled by how easily it moved—the little orange indicator jumped downward, right past R and N, and onto D.

“No—goddammit—”

He felt the car try to jerk forward against the resistance of the brake; still holding the selector, he shoved it upward and got the orange pointer onto R.

The woman was screaming again, and now the man joined in, the sound deep and guttural. The guy’s fist came down on the fractured windshield once more; the spiderweb spread outward, and the impact point sagged deeper in.

Sam was an instant from letting off the brake when a new sound came at him—the shrill scream of a young child, somewhere beyond the passenger side of the vehicle. He twisted in place and saw the newcomer: a boy no older than nine or ten, scrambling out of the smoky darkness toward the Escort. The kid vaulted onto the hood of the car and attacked the windshield on the right side, where the glass was still uncracked. For the moment, his small fists had no effect.

It was the kid’s face that grabbed Sam’s attention. A chunk of skin the size of a playing card had been torn loose from his left cheek, and hung flapping over the corner of his mouth. A running sheet of blood covered the raw tissue that had been exposed; Sam could make out the cords of facial muscle contracting and tensing as the kid screamed.

Even as Sam reacted to that sight, something thumped hard against the car’s back end. He looked over his shoulder and saw a bald man, maybe in his fifties, clambering onto the big hatchback window above the rear seat. In the same moment, at least two more of the afflicted pressed into position outside the driver’s door, their hands and arms spastically pawing at the glass. The crush of bodies shoved the young woman in the pink sweatpants tightly against the window. Sam caught a glimpse of one soft breast mashed onto the glass, six inches from his face, and then the woman was shoved aside and a red-haired man with a shaggy beard was right there, shrieking at him and attacking the pane with his bare knuckles; their skin burst and bled with each impact.

The afflicted were coming in from all over the place. Sam could see a dozen or more now, emerging from the smoke haze at a shambling run, drawn by the screams and the commotion.