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the fact that, just a short distance from where he was sitting, the people he’d left behind in the hotel were suffering. How many of them were still alive back there? He sat up in his already elevated seaand tried to look for them again, but it was no use. He could barely see anything, just a little of the angular outline of the roof of the building through the tops of the trees.
    He’d had no choice, he kept telling himself, he’d had to do it. Even if he’d shown the rest of them the escape route he’d discovered, it wouldn’t have done any of them any good. By the time they’d finished bickering about who was going and who should stay, the unstoppable avalanche of corpses would most likely have settled the matter for them. And even if, somehow, they’d still managed to get away, Driver knew exactly what they’d be doing right now. He could picture the lot of them, either standing in the middle of this junction or crammed into the back of one of the trucks, all arguing about whose fault it was the hotel had been lost. None of them would have accepted any responsibility; they’d all have been too busy pointing the finger at everyone else to take the blame.
    No, as harsh as it seemed and as wrong as it felt, this was the best option for all concerned. He’d go back for what was left of the rest of them when he could.
    Arming himself with a golf club he’d found stashed in the cab of the truck, Driver psyched himself up to move. He knew the disturbance around the hotel and the fires on the golf course would inevitably provide him with a brief pocket of freedom in which he could try to make his escape.
    Short, sharp hops.
    The key to getting away from here in one piece, he’d decided, was to move fast and stay exposed for brief periods at a time. And with so many thousands of corpses in the immediate vicinity, he had to stay on foot to remain quiet until he was more confident about his surroundings. He peered out through the truck window and surveyed the little of the landscape he could make out through the steadily increasing late-evening gloom. About fifty meters ahead was the outline of a lone house, and before the light had all but disappeared he’d seen that the front door had been left open invitingly. There were only two bodies that he could see between him and the house, and as far as he could tell, neither of them yet knew he was there.
    Driver took a deep breath and carefully eased his unfit bulk down onto the road. He reached back up to grab his duffel bag and the golf club, then ran like hell. In his navy days he wouldn’t even have broken a sweat covering a distance as short as this, but he was no longer in such good shape and the rigors of life since the end of the world—a poor diet and next to no exercise—definitely hadn’t helped. Already panting, and barely halfway there, he swung the golf putter around and caved in the side of the first corpse’s skull, leaving a neat rectangular indentation which perfectly matched the head of the club. The corpse immediately collapsed at his feet as if he’d flicked an off switch, barely managing an untidy half-pirouette before it hit the deck, all arms and legs. Desperately wishing he was in better condition, Driver half-ducked, half-fell out of the way of the second creature as it made an uncoordinated grab for him. Picking himself up, he scrambled into the house and kicked the door shut. The remaining body was outside almost immediately, banging on the door. He knew he had to move fast before the noise brought countless others to the house.
    There’s something in here with me .
    Before he’d even realized it was there, Driver caught the pint-sized cadaver of a small boy as it leaped up at him, holding onto it by the arm of its crusty, bloodstained sweater. Its arms and legs thrashed wildly as he shoved it into a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, then wedged the back of a chair under the handle to stop the damn thing from getting out.