A man stepped out into our path and there was a godawful thump. He went flying, crashing into the windshield hard enough to punch a spider web of cracks into the safety glass. I had a microsecond to see the man’s face. I saw the pain and panic in his eyes. Maybe Torres saw it, too. Maybe knowing that she’d crippled or killed an uninfected person would ruin her. Maybe she was already gone by then. Don’t know. The car muscled on and she never took her foot off the gas. The wind blowing past us pushed beads of dark red through the labyrinth of cracks.

“They didn’t tell us it was this bad,” said Bunny.

Torres laughed. A single snort that was a shuffle step away from hysteria. “I walked my dog this morning,” she said after a few seconds. “I had coffee with my boyfriend at Starbucks before my shift.” She shook her head. “When all of . . . this . . . started, it seemed to just explode, you know?” She cut us looks, hoping we’d understand. Needing it, as if to say that this was bigger than her, that it wasn’t her fault.

“Yeah,” I said, which was lame, but what else could I say?

We roared on. She steered the car like she’d spent her entire life training for this ride. My heartbeat was like a machine gun and my blood pressure could blow bolts out of plate steel, but I kept it off my face and out of my voice.

“It’s a plague,” I said. “A bioweapon.”

I told her the story. I told her the truth. Because why? Because fuck it. The world was falling off its hinges and this cop was in hell. In actual hell. And because she deserved to know the truth. I did not give a cold, wet shit about national security or need-to-know. That was as dead as the bodies in the street.

I knew that Torres appreciated the truth. I knew it hurt her, too. The truth is like that.

“Turn on the news,” suggested Top. I did, and most of the channels were filled with pre-programmed music. Not the time for an Eagles retrospective or classic hip hop. I found the local news and the reporter was weeping so brokenly that I couldn’t make out a single word. On another station, there was a field report from some guy back in Pennsylvania that was being broadcast nationally. His opener would have been a joke two hours ago. It wasn’t now.

He said, “This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse . . . ”

The story he told was about him and a cop named Dez Fox and several busloads of school kids trying to make it from Western Pennsylvania to Asheville, North Carolina. The roads were mostly blocked and the dead were everywhere. I heard gunshots and screams, and then the feed died. There was dead air for maybe ten seconds and then a reporter came on and tried to apologize for losing the feed.