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Great—two of them filling the house with noise now. Why did there have to be so bloody many of them? As he made a mad thirty-second dash around the kitchen to check for food and other useful items, he realized the noise might actually help if he could get away from here without the dead realizing he’d gone. He paused by a side door and looked out. Another building about a hundred meters away, maybe a hundred and fifty. It looked like a used-car sales place. If he could get there without any of them noticing, he might still have a chance.
    Several more corpses stumbled toward the house as Driver slipped out and ran toward the car lot for all he was worth.
    *   *   *
     
    He’d done eight or nine of these stop-start sprints to safety, and he was exhausted. The mad dashes were getting harder and the breath-catching gaps between them longer. It would be completely dark soon. Time to find somewhere to rest.
    By the time he reached a shacklike roadside café, which appeared to be constructed almost entirely from sheets of corrugated metal nailed to a creaking wooden frame, he was doubled-over with effort. He let himself in and to his immense relief, as he didn’t have the energy to fight again tonight, he found he was alone. He sat at a rickety table, swigging from his last bottle of water and looking out through the cobweb-covered window like any diner might. After the frantic, frightening events of the last days, this moment of silence and calm was both unexpected and blissful. And then, in this snatched moment of almost-normality, the enormity of recent events finally caught up with him. He wept openly, both for himself and for those he’d left behind, and again he struggled with his conscience, feeling a very real need to double-back to try and help the others. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good. Even if he made it back to the hotel, the seething crowds surrounding the building would make any attempt at rescue nigh on impossible. This was the very worst time to try and go back.
    A lone female corpse stumbled in the road outside the café, its awkward, staccato movements illuminated by moonlight. The dead woman’s shredded blouse rippled in the gentle wind, and the soft blue light on her ice-white skin gave her an unsettling, almost ghostlike appearance. She dropped heavily to her knees, and Driver watched as she awkwardly picked herself up again and carried on. Her tattered skirt was now just a strip of rag caught around one swollen foot, and she was otherwise naked, deformed and decayed almost beyond all recognition. She must have suffered some damage in the fall just now, because he noticed she was suddenly limping badly, barely able to keep walking. Driver stood up and moved closer to the window, hidden from view by a curtain of grime. The dead woman in the street outside looked so helpless and alone that, just for the very briefest of moments, he almost began to pity her. But then, without warning, she spotted something he couldn’t see, and her pace quickened to an ominous, predatory speed.
    Driver leaned back against the wall and screwed his eyes shut, not sure whether it was even worth trying to keep going.
    *   *   *
     
    He didn’t move again until first light. Sufficiently rested, and having decided that if he was going to give up (and he still wasn’t sure) there’d be countless better places to do it than here in this dingy little roadside café, he went back outside.
    The long, straight road was clear in both directions, and this morning he could see for miles. Today he walked rather than ran, moving slowly and silently, hoping to mimic the slow crawl of the dead. Occasionally he slowed himself even further and dragged his feet along the ground when he thought he saw flashes of movement in the trees. At one point a particularly hideous monster, completely naked and with skin like a badly sewn-together patchwork quilt, crossed the width of the road just a few meters ahead of him, and