“See that guy in the distance?”

Ethan squinted through the windshield.

A hundred yards up the road, an abby was squatting over the double yellow. The sound of approaching engines caught its attention, and as it stood, a puff of red mist exploded out of the side of its head.

“You got a few other stragglers in your path,” Mustin said. “I’ll start clearing the way. Over.”

The sun had yet to rise above the cliffs, and the valley ahead was still draped in the light of early morning.

“Get any sleep?” Alan asked.

“What do you think?”

KATE

KATE

She heard the tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire.

Everyone in the classroom did.

She and Spitz went to work dragging the furniture away from the door and pulling the nails out of the frame.

They got it open, told everyone to wait.

Rushed out into the hall.

Up the stairs.

The noise of gunfire growing louder, and in the space between shots another sound becoming audible—the rumble of engines.

At the exit, Kate raised her AR-15 and told Spitz to get the door.

He pulled it open.

She took two steps through the threshold.

There were abbies in the schoolyard running toward a convoy of vehicles in the intersection of Tenth and Fifth—a Humvee, three pickup trucks, and two eighteen-wheelers.

An abby broke off from the pack and came hurtling toward her.

Spitz said, “You got him?”

She let it get closer, within twenty feet.

“Kate?”

She squeezed—put three bursts in a nice pattern through its chest and dropped it five feet from the door.

Now came a noise like thunder, and with it, from the second pickup truck, a bright orange muzzle flash from a gun so big it should’ve been mounted on an attack helicopter.

It cut an entire row of abbies in half.

The front passenger door of the Humvee swung open.

When Ethan stepped out, her heart swelled.

She watched him come around the front of the vehicle and run toward the fence.

As he climbed over, four abbies charged him from the playground.

Kate took aim and ripped through the rest of her magazine, bringing them all down.

Ethan looked over, eyebrows up in surprise.

For a moment, the shooting had stopped.

There were abbies lying everywhere and men climbing down out of the truck beds, beginning to set up a perimeter.

Kate ran toward him, Ethan limping, carrying a shotgun, his jeans ripped all to hell, his shirt in tatters, face streaked with blood.

Tears blurred her vision and she wiped them away.

They reached each other and she threw her arms around him.

“How are the injured?” he asked.

“One died. One’s hanging on. Barely.”

“I brought trucks. We’re taking everyone out of here, into the mountain.”

“Have you found Harold?”

“Not yet.”

“What about Theresa and Ben?”

He shook his head.