Maggie walked calmly over to me, slapped me hard across one cheek, and then, while I was still staring at her in confusion, throwing her arms around my shoulders. “We thought you were dead,” she hissed, through gritted teeth. “You didn’t call, and you didn’t call, and we thought you were dead. You asshole. Next time, find a way to send a fucking message.”

“How about there’s not a next time? Can we do that, instead?” Maggie wa clothed. I essentially wasn’t, which was making this hug even more awkward than it would normally have been. I extricated myself from her embrace, looking around the room again. “I know we said to close the windows, but I didn’t mean you had to go quite this far.”

“Wait—what?” Alaric pulled away from Becks, looking utterly bemused. “What do you mean? After you told us to close the windows—don’t you know what’s going on out there?”

Maggie studied my face for a moment, horror dawning in her expression. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You really don’t know. You have no idea, do you?”

“No idea about what?” I shook my head. “We haven’t seen anyone since Kansas, but we thought it was just the storm keeping people inside—”

“It’s not just the storm.” Alaric walked across the room with sharp, jerky motions and grabbed the television remote, turning the TV on. He hit another button and the infomercial that had been playing disappeared, replaced by CNN.

The picture showed a flooded street, helpfully labeled “Miami—Live Footage.” A newscaster was speaking in a low, anxious tone, saying something about death tolls and tracking survivors. I didn’t really hear him. I was transfixed by the picture, my brain refusing to accept what my eyes were telling me.

As always, it was George who grasped the reality of the situation first, and her understanding allowed me to understand. Oh, my God… she said, horrified.

I couldn’t argue.

The street was choked with debris and abandoned cars, brown-and-white water swirling everywhere as it tried to force itself down clogged sewer drains. They should have been cleared before the flooding could get this bad, and the city had tried to clear them; that much was obvious from the number of people in fluorescent orange shirts who were shambling down the street, moving jerkily along with the rest of the mob. I had never seen that many infected in one place. I counted fifty before my brain shut down, refusing to process any more.