Heather broke off in the middle of a giggle and watched them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not good,” she said. “I think that’s Wayne Nessel. Daddy warned me he might try something. Daddy didn’t think he’d do it out here though.”

I knew of Wayne Nessel. He was Ashcroft’s biggest rival, and a man with a lot of resources at his disposal. People in the Zone called him “The Bull.”

“He couldn’t know you’re here.”

“He knows,” she said, and then she guided me to the far side of the Starliner.

“But how?”

“He’s got spies everywhere, Andrew.”

She crossed to the opposite side of the deck and climbed the railing.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where are we going?”

She looked down at me. “Can you swim?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She waited till Nessel’s boat lit up the Starliner with its spotlights, then she gave me a wink and dropped herself over the edge.

I went in after her.

I thought we’d cling to the side of the boat and wait it out, but that wasn’t what Heather had in mind. She went under and kept swimming under the Starliner’s hull.

I followed.

Above us, through the green murky haze, I could see the glow of the spotlights and the shimmering outlines of men running on both decks. There were a lot of muffled popping sounds that I took to be gunfire, but none of that was directed down at us. It was all boat to boat.

We surfaced on the far side of Nessel’s boat and swam to shore. I’d hidden my motorcycle in the brush next to the Starliner’s docks out of habit, and now I was thankful for my instincts. As we swam, we decided it’d be best to come ashore a little ways from the dock, just in case Nessel had men covering his back on land.

We crawled up on shore and Heather pulled her black hair back with both hands, her camisole clinging to the curve of her breasts like wet paint.

There were voices nearby, just on the other side of the bushes. Nessel’s men, I thought, left here in reserve.

I spotted them a moment later. Four men, all armed with AR-15s. They were lined up on the dock, looking out at the boats, pointing and laughing.

“Amateurs,” I whispered. “Look at that. They’re just watching the show.”

“Can you get them all?”

“No,” I said. “Not all of them. Maybe one or two, but not all of them.”

“What do we do?”

The switchback road we’d taken to the docks led a short distance up a steep hill behind us before curving out of sight. Low, scraggly oaks and cedars lined the sides of it. I told Heather to go up around the curve and wait for me.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try not to get shot,” I said.

She frowned at that, but she made her way up to the road just the same, careful to stay in the shadows.

When she was safely out of the way, I made my move.

My bike was hidden in a clump of cedar behind an old rusted truck. I crossed behind the guards and made for the bike, praying they didn’t turn around.

I got most of the way there before I heard one of them holler something. The next instant, they were firing at me. Little chunks of concrete exploded around my shoes as I made for the truck, but they didn’t hit me, and if their lack of attention on the shoreline hadn’t convinced me they were just hired goons, their shooting certainly did. At that range, professionals would have killed me with ease.

I got down beneath the truck, pulled my Glock, and waited. They were running up the slope of the lot, straight for me. I steadied my sights on the lead guy and dropped him with my first shot. My next three shots weren’t aimed. I just sprayed the crowd to make them duck for cover.

It worked. They dived behind an old boat trailer, giving me enough time to pull my motorcycle out of the bushes, start it, and go racing up the road. They fired after me, but they never got close.

I slowed long enough for Heather to jump on the back, and then we sped off into the night.

We were still wet from the swim, and it was cold on that bike. What had been a lovely cool breeze while we were dancing was now a fierce cold snap, biting through us to the bone. Heather wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I could feel her body trembling.

I slowed the bike down enough for her to hear me. “Are you okay?”

“Uh huh.”

“Why is he after you?” I asked.

“Anything to hurt Daddy,” she said, her voice coming in quick, breathy stabs. “His people are always ambushing Daddy’s shipments. Maybe he’s upping the ante now to kidnapping. Or assassination.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“Warn my father,” she said. “Daddy told me Nessel always attacks on two fronts at once. If he’s coming after me here, he’s probably trying to attack Daddy somewhere else too.”

“The radio?”

She nodded. “I tried back at the lake. Nobody answered. We’ll have to get closer into town and try for my father’s safe houses.”

“You got it,” I said, and laid into the throttle.

When we got closer into town, I pulled off the highway and parked in a lot on the top of a small hill and Heather called Naylor on the radio.

“Are you sure it’s Nessel’s people?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said.

He told us not to use the radio any more than we had to. Besides a good share of the gasoline market, Nessel controlled the sale of most of the electronic equipment in the area. The radio Heather was using was probably stolen from one of his shipments, and there wasn’t much doubt he’d be able to overhear her transmission.

“Can you get to the pickup point?” he asked.

Heather gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. “I’m pretty sure we can,” she said.

We moved out, and as we rode, I thought about this old-timer I used to know who told me what life was like before the outbreak. He said people were pretty much the same then as they are now, and that turning into zombies hadn’t changed them much. What was different, he said, was the noise. It was noisy back then. There were cars and planes and trains everywhere, not to mention all the crowds. He said you couldn’t escape it.

But these days, there are so few cars left you can drive around all day and never see another driver. Heather and I hadn’t seen any all night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane fly overhead. I’d never seen a moving train. Life in the Zone was quiet, even though it was rarely peaceful.

That’s how I knew something was wrong. Heather and I got up on the highway again and started driving, but we hadn’t made it very far before I heard the high-pitched whine of a pack of sport racing bikes.

We glanced around, looking for them. They were behind us, coming down from an overpass and getting onto the freeway at top speed. I didn’t need to ask if they were Nessel’s men. All of them had machine guns slung over their backs, and the way they were riding, they clearly knew who we were.

I got my bike up to top speed, but they were faster. My bike was just a beat up Harley Sportster, but they were riding Honda CXRs-top of the line racing bikes. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of outrunning them in a dead sprint, so when they got close enough to take their shots, I did the only thing I could think of and veered over to the far left lane, let them come up on us, then downshifted and banked the bike hard to the right, taking the connector ramp to the Connelly Loop at almost a hundred miles an hour.

Heather yelled out in surprise. Nessel’s men overshot us. I saw them lock up their brakes and slide, but none of them reacted fast enough to take the ramp with us.

Their mistake bought us a few valuable seconds. The Connelly Loop led right into the heart of the Zone. There was nothing in there but crumbling buildings and legions of the infected. As a result, it was a low priority for the bosses who made it their business to keep the roads clear, and so it was still choked with long lines of abandoned cars.