Oh, fuck me, said George.

“My thoughts exactly,” I muttered. “Guys?”

“What?” asked Alaric.

“I think it’s time for an evacuation. Nice, easy, and oh, say, yesterday.” I pushed away from the window. “I hate to say it, but this is not a drill.”

There was a moment of relative silence as everyone stared at me, trying to rationalize what I’d just said. Then they exploded into motion, Becks and Alaric lunging for the weapons cache in the closet, Dave lunging for his keyboard. Only Kelly stayed where she was, hands still clenched beneath her chin.

Shaun—

“I’m on it,” I said, and started for the server rack.

m" >

It had been almost fifteen years since the last major outbreak in Oakland. You want the recipe for a relatively zombie-free existence? It’s easy. Take an armed population, give them an ingrained bunker mentality, and tell them they can’t depend on anyone outside the community. They’ll police their borders so well that you’ll probably never need to worry about them again. Trouble is, that sort of border patrol can wind up hurting as much as it helps. Sure, Oakland had all the security features you’d expect to find in a major urban center, but most people didn’t know exactly how they worked or how to take full advantage of them. They could handle their home defense systems. The public defenses were a little more difficult.

At least half the storefronts I’d seen during my brief survey of the street had been standing open, with their emergency gates fully retracted. Some of the blast shutters had managed to descend, but not nearly enough of them to make a difference, especially when the doors weren’t locked. Sealed blast shutters on a building whose doors were standing open wouldn’t save anyone. They’d just make sure no one could get out once the infected got in.

About half the unsealed windows had been broken—shatterproof glass is a much more academic concept when the infected are involved. They don’t have any functioning pain receptors to slow them down, and they’ll keep beating themselves against the glass until something gives way. When you’re talking about civic-use storefronts in a relatively low-income neighborhood, it’s going to be the glass that gives. There had been blood splashed all around the sidewalk, and there wasn’t much screaming coming from our immediate vicinity. For most of the locals, it was long past too late.

I stepped up to the server rack and started to disconnect drives and flip the switches to transfer as much of our data as possible to secured off-site backups. There are some files we try never to keep live on an out-facing network, including most of the research we’ve done into the conspiracy that killed my sister. Even that data gets backed up daily, both to the drives I was shoving into my pockets and to other, off-site drives, stored in safety deposit boxes, hidden caches, and stranger places all over the Bay Area. I feel I’ve earned my paranoia.