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on the go proves too difficult for me, and I waste several rounds trying to hit the waitress in the head.
    Joey and Dom hurry back out to the Mercedes, having heard the gunfire pick up. They dump the supplies in the back and climb in while Quentin runs around the front of the SUV and enters on the driver side.
    “We’re going west,” I tell Danielle.
    “West?” she squawks as she throws the car in reverse. She backs the cruiser up, knocking down the waitress. “Sorry,” she says. I’m not sure if she is apologizing to the dead waitress, or to me for damaging the car. She shifts the car into drive and looks around the road again. “Which way is it?” she wonders.
    “West!” I repeat.
    “Just say right or left!” she yells in frustration.
    I point to the right, and she peels out of the gas station onto the road. I glance back to make sure the Mercedes made it out behind us. The four-lane road provides enough room to weave through the shambling dead and abandoned vehicles. Clouds of smoke billow from fires burning unopposed in the surrounding townhouses. Through the haze, I catch glimpses of the chaos down the side streets as we pass. A stroller lies mangled beneath the wheels of a car, a few feet away from the half-eaten remains of an infant in the street. A charred body lies smoking on the lawn of a burning home.
    A few survivors hail us from a second story window. I almost tell Danielle to stop the car when I see them waving their arms, but then I spot the dead below. There must be fifty or sixty of them pounding their way through the flimsy glass windows to get inside. We will just get ourselves killed if we stop to help them. So I force myself to look away from their faces and don’t say a word as Danielle continues down the road.
    We approach a sign for a grocery store at the entrance to a strip mall. The closer we get, the louder we hear a blaring alarm. The sound is coming from a bank with a Ford Escape overturned in the lobby. Hundreds of walking corpses crowd the vast parking lot between the bank and the grocery store. They must have been drawn there by the sound. The giant storefront windows of the grocery store are all smashed in. Shopping carts are piled high by the automatic doors like someone tried to make a stand there. By the look of it, it didn’t end well. Everything here belongs to the dead now.
    We cross the intersection and follow the road over a hill. I stop breathing when I see the community college campus on the left.
    “Oh my God,” gasps Danielle. “The school.” She slows the car to a stop in the middle of the road and stares at the college in disbelief. At the entrance, an ambulance and a couple of squad cars sit with their lights flashing in the intersection. A long line of abandoned cars stretches back to the parking lot, their doors flung open, some with the running lights still on. Hundreds of undead students spill across the road below from the campus lawn. There is no way in hell we can make it through so many of those things.
    “Damn it!” I pound a fist against the dashboard of the car. We have to go back now and figure out some way around this nightmare.
    “I have a friend that goes to that school,” Danielle says. She squints her eyes at the crowd in the road.
    “Turn the car around,” I urge her. “Go back to the last street.”
    She stares at the shambling students. They shuffle towards us in their sneakers. She doesn’t even seem to hear me. It’s like I’m talking to a wall.
    “Danielle!” The sound of my voice yelling her name startles her, and she whirls to face me. Her eyes are filled with real terror now. She blinks at me a few times then looks back at the road and wheels the car around.
    “Where do we go now?” she asks.
    “Take a right at the light. We can try the next block over.”
    Danielle swerves to avoid a dead crossing guard holding a stop sign in the middle of the intersection. The maneuver causes us to clip an abandoned shopping cart that