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.

I could hear the reassuring sound of Becks loading her rifle behind me, underscored by the equally reassuring sound of Alaric emptying the contents of the primary weapons locker onto the apartment floor. He might not be a field man, but he’s one of the most well-informed weapons geeks I’ve ever met. That’s not a contradiction in terms. Being comfortable on the firing range doesn’t mean you’ll have a damn clue what to do when a zombie comes at you. The belief that the two skill sets translate directly gets a lot of people killed.

You’re getting distracted, chided George. She sounded anxious. I couldn’t blame her. Focus, asshole. This would be a stupid way to die.

“I know, I know.” I shoved the last of the drives into my pocket. Time to start moving.