“At… at least they weren’t fast zombies,” Jules muttered.

Pel had to admit, her daughter was right about that. For all their terrifying ferocity, these zombies weren’t very tenacious. She’d quickly shaken them off her tail, just by speeding toward Seacrest Avenue.

That was a good thing, right? A victory?

As she reached the grand boulevard, Pel didn’t wait for the traffic light to change, she just turned. Yes, it set a bad example for the kids, but right now, staying alive was more important than having good manners.

As Pel turned onto Seacrest Avenue, a feeling gnawed at her, one she couldn’t shake. She felt it in her gut.

They hadn’t escaped. If it felt like they had, well, that feeling was a chimera—a falsehood. Whatever evil was at work within the zombies, it had chosen to let her go. That was Pel’s conviction, and she didn’t know how to make it go away.

Why waste effort capturing that which had no hope of escape?

She didn’t dare tell the kids about this.

She wanted to believe she was wrong, but she couldn’t, and as Elpeck Bay came into view and gasps broke out in the car that hope died a little death.

As always, the cityscape gleamed brightly in the midday Sun. A week ago, that brightness would have been true, but now, it was just another lie—just a gilded sheen.

Elpeck was coming undone. No longer was it the shining city by the sea. Now, it was a sinking ship roasting in the sun; a ghost in transit, on its way to ruin.

Sounds of war broke the eerie stillness. Artillery fire pounded in the distance. Tanks’ barrels spewed their loads. Red beams flashed further down the coast, likely more of the military’s laser weapons.

Weren’t those supposed to be just in the experimental stage?

Well, it no longer mattered.

The city was alive with death. Here and there, Pel spotted a truck or a bus trundling down the streets on the waterfront streets, like ants crawling among graves. Military vehicles buzzed like flies: troop transports; wheeled artillery; hovering aerostats, using up precious fuel. And, sometimes, if she stared, she noticed slender figures flying among the skyscrapers, or in an alleyway, slithering through the shadows.

Or maybe she just thought she noticed it.

The drive down Seacrest Avenue’s broad curves was more of a crawl. The slowness was almost unbearable. Pel couldn’t stop herself from glancing up at the rear-view mirror every minute or so to answer her racing heart’s questions.

Were they following us? Were they waiting in ambush?

Pel could feel paranoia squatting behind her eyes, constantly daring her to put the pedal to the metal and blaze down the Avenue as fast as she could to get away from the horrors that had to be stalking her, even though doing so would kill them all.

Traffic was surprisingly bad, considering nearly everyone was dead.

The road was littered with cars, jutting out over the edge of the street, or onto the slender median strip. There wasn’t enough clutter to fully obstruct the way forward, but, in a way, that was even worse than a dead end, because it gave her hope.

At any moment, something could leap out, break through the windshield, and kill her and her children, and the only thing she could do about it was continue on forward, slowly weaving her car around the obstacles in her way.

It also showed her so many things she wished she could forget.

Many of the cars weren’t empty. Their owners’ corpses still sat in their seats. In some of the victims—likely those who had been dead the longest—the fungus within their bodies had begun to grow into something more than mere disease. Their cars were canned jungles, and burst forth with unholy beauty.

A new kind of nature was claiming the land.

Even so, it was the abandoned cars that worried Pel the most. She couldn’t help but wonder as to their owners’ fates. Had they lost their minds in the middle of the road? Or had someone—or something—opened the doors, and pulled them out, and claimed them, body and soul?

“Guys,” Pel muttered, “look away. You… you don’t want to look at this.”

She checked the rearview mirror again; still, nothing.

For now, at least.

Finally, they reached the Expressway. By a minor miracle—otherwise known as competent civil engineering—the onramps were completely unobstructed.

“We’re gonna take the Expressway?” Jules asked.

She seemed skeptical, to say the least.

“Would you prefer to take the old suspension bridge?” Pel said. “The ones that the monsters can cross?”

Jules gulped. “Point taken.”

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“But isn’t the power out?” Rayph asked.

“Even if it is,” Pel answered, “the Expressway’s solar panels certainly aren’t.”

“Mom,” he said, “are we gonna make it?”

“We’re certainly gonna try,” Pel answered.

She clenched the steering wheel.

“All right,” she said, “hold on. Here we go.” She drove onto the onramp, which triggered the Pirouette’s hover mode. The anxiety in her stomach didn’t react well to the g-forces, but her discomfort faded once the car leveled out onto the Expressway, riding atop a mag-lev cloud. It was hard for her not to stare at the thin piles of scrap metal wreckage scattered along the edges of the road.

If she had to guess, they were the remains of cars whose drivers had died or lost control. She could see dents and breaks in the guard railings along the edge of the Expressway where vehicles had crashed, flipped over, or broken through and plunged into the sea. Then a couple of charred wrecks came into view, as did kibbles of flesh splattered on the walls or on the underside of the glass panes of the Expressway’s barrel-shaped roof. Even here, the fungus was taking root, slowly spreading across the infrastructure.

How much longer, Pel wondered, before it swallowed it whole?

“Why are we going to Margaret’s place?” Jules asked. She pointed at the Expressway. “The Expressway continues up the coast. Wouldn’t it be safer to go past the city altogether?”

“Jules,” Pel said, “don’t do what your father does. Think about what you say before you say it.”

Jules stared at her mother. “You have a plan?” she asked.

“Always,” Pel replied, with a nod of her head. “As much as I love this car, it’s not built for long-distance travel, especially anything off-road.More importantly, right now, we just don’t have the supplies we’d need to leave the city. We need food, fuel, tools, a back-up generator or two, weapons…”

“Shit,” Jules muttered, “Margaret’s gun-closet.”

“Right,” Pel said. “Jules, you can thank the Sun that your grandmother is a doomsday prepper,” Pel continued. “Between the penthouse and the dive bar, Grandma Margaret’s place has two fortresses for us to hole up in, not to mention the RV she’s got in the garage.”

“And the robots!” Rayph said.

Pel nodded again. “Yes, they’re the most important part. They won’t need to fear the fungus, and I don’t think the monsters will attack them. They’d be invaluable to have. We can have them do reconnaissance and scout out supplies while we wait at your grandmother’s house, planning our next steps in the event we need to flee the city.”

Jules dared to smile. “You’ve really got this all planned out, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been trying,” Pel answered. She wanted to say that she had, but she couldn’t escape the sinking feeling that she was woefully unprepared, and the panoramic view from the middle of the Expressway only made that feeling worse.

From this vantage point, Pel had a clear view of the ships at the docks or out on the Bay. Every single one of them was dead in the water. Down below, not far from the Expressway, a container ship bobbed in the Bay. Most of its containers were little more than spoiled cans, burst open as the fungus growing within them had pried its way out to reach up and bask in the Sunlight. Variations of this fate played out all across the Bay.

Everywhere she looked, Pel saw vessels in the process of being consumed. As she looked, a thought poked at the back of her mind: fungus liked damp, dark places. So why was the Green Death growing toward the Sun?

Everywhere it bloomed, it reached toward the Sun.

But then Rayph let out a shout, shattering Pel’s thoughts.

“Oh shit!” he yelled.

Pel looked to where he was pointing.

“What is it?” Jules said, looking around in shock.

“Aerostats!” Rayph said.

Looking up through the windshield, Pel saw military aerostats overhead, and they were loaded to the brim with munitions.

Jules rose from her seat and leaned over the right side of the dashboard, to get a better view, and Pel didn’t bother chastising her for it. Jules let out a gasp as the aerostats launched a pair of missiles at the corrupted container ship. On impact, the incendiary explosives unleashed a massive fireball which consumed the container ship. Flaming fuel spilled on the water as the dark smoke clouds rose high, and the container ship capsized and slowly sank into the Bay.

Like with the zombies, Pel didn’t feel a sense of victory in the ship’s destruction. It was a negligible gain, a tiny grain against an unstoppable tide.

Evil was not so easily deterred, least of all an evil as great as this.

The smoke cloud passed out of sight as the Pirouette reached the city. Up ahead, the Expressway wove through the city, threading through mid-air tunnels built into Elpeck’s skyscrapers.

Pel wondered how long it would be before she set out down that road. For now, though, she banked onto the off-ramp, taking the exit for Ledèrvo Grove.

The Pirouette thumped as it rolled onto its wheels and the city street. She could hardly believe they’d made it this far. It didn’t feel real.

The Expressway let out in the shade, in the middle of the city. Bodies splayed out on the street like roadkill. Pel tried to ignore them, keeping her eyes on the road ahead, letting her inner autopilot take over as she followed down the familiar route to her parents’ apartment building. From where the on-ramp let out in the middle of Fish Street, Pel took the turn onto Petta Drive. From there, it would be a straight line to her mother’s penthouse.

Two-hundred years ago, Ledèrvo Grove had been the heart of Elpeck’s Polovian immigrant community, though, over the years, the Polovians were driven out, first by rising rents, then by soaring skyscrapers. Now, the only remains of its past were the family run jewelry stores tucked into some of the skyscrapers’ ground floors. The rest of the neighborhood was posh beyond belief, the result of years of catering to the ultra-wealthy businessmen in the Finance District. Ledèrvo Grove was the world capital of glitter-infused sidewalks, designer gastronomy, wrought-iron-framed street signs, and the chicest of conceptual art studios. Petta Drive was the Grove’s main drag, and was no stranger to traffic—foot, or car. On any other day, you could have spotted celebrities and nouveau riche walking among its streets.

But not today.

Petta Drive had never seen traffic as strange as this.

Anarchy reigned. Gunshots and screams rang out in the distance. Bands of masked marauders roamed the streets. They were phantoms of the sidewalk, dashing in through broken storefronts to carry out any luxuries that hadn’t yet been looted. Here and there, Pel saw people staggered about, wandering aimlessly, moaning incomprehensibly, their fungus-ravaged minds unable to do much more than repeat short phrases over and over, like a broken record.

“So much for the military keeping things under control,” Jules muttered.

Pel glanced at her daughter, and then eyed Rayph through the rear-view mirror. “Keep the doors and windows closed,” Pel said, “no matter what.”

“What’s going on?” Rayph asked, his eyes glued onto the window.

“People are losing their minds,” Pel said.

She drove past one of the Grove’s blue, double-decker tour buses. Utterly empty, it lingered on the side of the street, indifferent to the chaos around it.

“Shit,” Jules hissed, watching as a storefront went up in flames.

“Well,” Pel muttered, “there goes Fred Nelby’s…”

The chain of high-end boutiques had been an old favorite of hers. Sure, their employees tended to be shallow trend-chasers, but their advice was solid, and the goodson sale were never anything but the best.

Now, it was fodder for the mob.

Pel couldn’t help but slow down to look, watching the fires spread.

“Mom!” Jules snapped, suddenly frightened. “Don’t stop! Go! Go!”