The GPS tracker in my watch showed Becks and Alaric remaining in a stationary position roughly two miles away. Two miles is the federally mandated minimum distance between an intentional zombie encounter and a licensed traveling safe zone, such as our van. Not that the infected would avoid coming within two miles out of some sort of respect for the law; we just aren’t allowed to lure them any closer than that. I did some quick mental math. If they’d already attracted a group of six, and the infected weren’t moaning yet, that implied that we had enough zombies in the immediate vicinity to form a thinking mob. Not good.

“Right,” I said, and swung myself into the driver’s seat of Dave’s Jeep. The keys were already in the ignition.

Unlike most field vehicles, Dave’s Jeep has no armor to speak of, unless you count the run-flat tires and the titanium-reinforced frame. What it has is speed—and lots of it. The thing has been stripped down to the bare minimum, rebuilt, and stripped down again so many times that I don’t think there’s a single piece left that conforms to factory standards. It offers about as much protection during an attack of the infected as a wet paper bag. A very fast wet paper bag. It’s evac only in hostile territory, and we haven’t lost a man yet while we were using it.

I braced my rifle between the seats and hit the gas.

Large swaths of California were effectively abandoned after the Rising, for one reason or another. “Difficult to secure” was one; “hostile terrain giving the advantage to the enemy” was another. My personal favorite applied to the small, unincorporated community of Birds Landing, in Solano County: “Nobody cared enough to bother.” They had a population of less than two hundred pre-Rising, and there were no survivors. When the federal government needed to appoint funds for cleanup and security, there was nobody to argue in favor of cleaning the place out. They still get the standard patrols, just because letting the zombies mob is in nobody’s best interests, but for the most part, Birds Landing has been left to the dead.

It should have been the perfect place to run Alaric’s last field trial drill. Abandoned, isolated, close enough to Fairfield to allow for pretty easy evac if the need arose, but far enough away that we could still get some pretty decent footage. Not as dangerous as Santa Cruz, not as candy-ass as Bodega Bay. The ideal infected fishing hole. Only it looked like the zombies thought so, too.