Mike rubbed his bicep and backed away. “Listen, sweetie, it wasn’t our fault. I’ll explain everything later, but right now we need to start packing.”

Lauren walked up to them, Dad and Blake looking on. “What do you mean, start packing?”

“We have to leave,” Mike said.

“Why?” Lola asked. “What’s going on?”

“There’s trouble headed our way,” Mike said. “Serious trouble.”

*****

“San Antonio didn’t make out any better than Houston,” Dad said, following Mike and I as we unloaded Tyrel from one of the Humvees. “We barely made it back alive.”

“What happened to Tyrel?” I asked. He was unconscious, the left leg of his pants cut away to reveal a wide swath of bandages over his thigh.

“What does it look like?” Mike said. “He got shot.”

“By who?”

“Long story.”

I grunted in irritation as we carried the heavy ex-SEAL around back and up the steps. “How bad is it?”

“Not too bad. Missed the bone and the femoral artery. Painkillers knocked him out.”

Lance finished prying the last nail from the plywood covering the back door just as we arrived. He lifted it out of the way and stood aside, looking on mutely as we deposited Tyrel on the sofa. Lola followed us in and pushed me out of the way so she could kneel beside him.

“Is he going to be all right,” she asked, voice quavering.

“As long as the wound doesn’t get infected,” Blake said from behind me, “he should be fine in a few weeks.”

Lola stroked Tyrel’s hair out of his face, her hands slow and gentle. “Who did this to him?”

No one spoke. Dad looked around at the defenses Lance had erected and nodded to himself in approval. “We should be okay for a while,” he said. “Blake, Mike, let’s get something to eat. The rest of you hungry?”

We said no, explaining we had eaten already. Dad grabbed three MREs from a box in the den and tossed two of them to Blake and Mike. “So we have good news and bad news,” Dad said. “The good news is we got the fuel we need, and we found out why no other refugees made it to Canyon Lake.”

“Okay,” Lauren said. “So what’s the bad news?”

“Tyrel got shot, and there’s a giant horde of infected, as well as a thousand or so troops, headed this way.”

The room went silent as those of us who hadn’t gone to San Antonio absorbed the news. After a long pause, I said, “So that’s what Mike meant when he said we need to start packing.”

Dad nodded. “Exactly.”

When he didn’t say anything else for a while, Sophia raised her hand as though she were in a classroom. “So … you wanna explain what happened?”

Dad peeled open his MRE, sat down on the ottoman, and laid aside his rifle. “The idea was to approach San Antonio from the north, find a vantage point, and try to get an idea what was going on in the city. Maybe swing around south to Lackland Air Force Base, see what was left.”

He opened a brown mil-spec pouch of five-year-old spaghetti and meatballs and dug in with a plastic spoon. “We didn’t get very far.”

TWENTY-FIVE

It took him ten minutes to explain.

They had headed south, intent on entering the city limits by paralleling Highway 281. There were infected in the distance, but the highway was strangely clear, abandoned cars pushed to the shoulder as if by a giant hand. In a few places, evenly slotted lines pitted the pavement, indicating someone had used bulldozers to move the cars aside.

Somewhere near the junction of 281 and the 46 loop north of San Antonio, they topped a rise and saw what looked like a roadblock up ahead. Even as far away as they were, they could hear gunfire and the unmistakable thunder of tanks and artillery. Helicopters patrolled in the distance, occasionally opening up with machine guns and rocket fire.

To be safe, they backtracked, found a water tower, and sent Blake up with his massive binoculars. A short time later, he climbed down and said the roadblock was military, and extended as far as he could see. Scattered hordes of infected were approaching from the south, obscured in the distance by the hazy smoke of the burning city beyond. He couldn’t tell how many there were, but the piles of dead bodies just past the highway were enormous.

Earthmovers crisscrossed the open ground beyond the barricades pushing corpses into heaps for a small army of dump trucks to haul away. On both sides of the highway, there were earthen berms piled twenty feet high, telephone poles and fence posts and shattered remnants of cars jutting out from the hastily dug earth. Most of the fighting was happening to the south, but a few smaller hordes were filtering in from the east and west. To the north, the direction Dad was coming from, things looked clear. But there were thick clusters of trees and scattered buildings between the water tower and the roadblock. Anything could be waiting there.

At that point, they had a decision to make. It would be no trouble at all to simply fill up on gas and diesel by draining fuel from abandoned vehicles along the road. Doing so would give them what they needed without taking any unnecessary risks. But a large military force might also have information about what was going on with the rest of the country, how the fight against the infected was proceeding, and if there was somewhere we could go that was safer than Canyon Lake. They decided it was worth the risk for one of them to approach the troops and see what they could learn.

Tyrel volunteered.

The other three split up in the Humvees and found positions where they could keep an eye on Tyrel without being spotted. Blake dropped him off on River Way a mile north of the junction before falling back.

Tyrel covered the remaining distance on foot, leaving behind his gear and weapons except for a knife, a pack containing a few bottles of water, and his ever-present Beretta M-9. He made it about halfway unmolested, but as he drew closer to the roadblock, the undead began to appear from doorways and storage sheds and clusters of dense foliage. At first, he simply sped up to outpace them, but the moans they sent up alerted other infected farther down the line. Ghouls began to converge from all directions, forcing him to draw his weapon and begin taking potshots. Not enough to wipe them out—he lacked sufficient ammo for that—but enough to clear a path.

As the dead become more numerous, he had to set a harder and harder pace to keep away from their grasping hands. With over a quarter mile to go before he reached the roadblock, he found himself down to his last two magazines. At that point, he turned and signaled to Mike, who had taken position a few hundred meters away on overwatch.

From a rooftop, Mike sighted through a Leupold scope mounted to his Barrett .300 Winchester magnum and started picking off infected. After four shots, he had cleared a path for Tyrel to a house on the side of the road. Tyrel sprinted for it, kicked open the front door, and disappeared inside. Moments later, he emerged with a .22 rifle and several hundred cartridges.

.22 rifles are not very powerful, but at close range, they can penetrate a ghoul’s head—or a person’s—with lethal results. In many cases, the bullet enters the skull but loses the necessary kinetic energy to exit the other side. As a result, it ricochets inside the brain case, effectively turning gray matter into guava paste. Tyrel used this phenomenon to his advantage as he fought his way the last few hundred yards to the berm bordering the roadblock.

The moment he topped the rise, a trio of armed soldiers riding ATVs surrounded him, guns leveled. Tyrel tossed down his weapons when ordered to do so, put his hands on his head, and went down to his knees. The soldiers quickly bound his hands and feet with zip ties, lashed him to the back of an ATV, and drove back to camp. At this point, Dad and the others lost track of him.

“We weren’t sure what to do at that point,” Dad said. “For a while, we just waited and watched. Kept eyes on the camp, trying to catch sight of Tyrel. After nightfall, we set up a watch rotation and switched to night vision. Blake was on watch at about three in the morning when they finally brought him out.” Dad nodded in Blake’s direction.