We moved, Code and me, and neither of us said anything for the first stretch of it.
The road took our boots without comment. Straight through the infected — past the ones standing in the junction with their shadows cut hard under the steady lamps, past the ones wedged between parked cars where the panic had left them.
A woman in a good coat, handbag still hooked on her arm, chin on her chest as if she had paused to remember a name. A boy who couldn't have been fifteen, mouth open, a dark crust at the corner of his lips that the night air had already dried.
I put my hand flat on a man's back as I went past him. He not turn. I took my hand back and kept walking.
My heart was at rest for the first time in days. Sherry was behind a door with May and Becky. Most of the others were inside arm's reach and breathing.
"You know there's nobody running these walls right now?"
Code said it without looking at me. Eyes on the next stretch of asphalt.
And all of it arrived at once.
