A lot of small towns were declared uninhabitable after the Rising. They’re little dead zones scattered around the map of the world, places where no one goes anymore—no one but well-prepared, heavily armed Irwins looking for a story, and even then, we never go in at night. Going into a dead zone at night is like signing your own death warrant. Santa Cruz, California, is a dead zone. So is most of India. And so is Shady Cove, Oregon. It used to be a small but comfortable town of about two thousand people, surrounded by woodlands, comfortably close to the popular tourist attraction of several state and county parks. They did okay.

Until the zombies came, and the very things that made it such a nice place to live turned Shady Cove into a deathtrap. The same thing could have happened to Weed, if not for the fisheries, and Shady Cove didn’t have anything that vital to the local economy. It just had people. We lost a lot of people in the Rising. A town that size was barely even a blip in the statistics.

This is bad, said George. We need to turn back.

“This makes perfect sense. If Dr. Abbey is trying to go off the grid, a dead zone is the best place to do it, and Shady Cove was never burned.” I forced a smile. “Besides, you only know the place exists because of the number of times I begged you to let me go there.”

There’s a reason I always said no.

“I know. But it’s not like we’ve been left with a whole lot of options.”

George didn’t have an answer to that one.

The frontage roads gave way to smaller frontage roads, which gave way in turn to roads that were barely even paved. The lights of the freeway guard walls stayed in view the whole time, almost taunting me with the idea of smooth surfaces and well-marked exit signs. We were still within Dr. Abbey’s time frame, and the GPS was clearly still feeding Becks directions, because she kept driving and didn’t stop to yell at me for getting us into this mess.

When I drove past a sign reading SHADY COVE—5 MILES, I actually started to believe that we might reach our destination alive.

Then the first zombie came racing out of the woods on my left.

It was moving with the horrible, disjointed speed that only the freshly infected can manage. A normal human will always be faster in a short sprint, but the freshly infected win every time in a long race. They don’t care about pain, and they don’t really notice when their lungs stop pulling in enough air. The uninfected will eventually stop chasing you. A zombie will run until it collapses from exhaustion, and there’s a good chance that even that won’t keep it down for long.