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hit a hisser in the jaw, took it clean off. Its tongue swished back and forth across its sternum as it ran. “In the truck in the truck!” she yelled.
    Conner threw his supplies in th e back of the truck bed, praying that the chips wouldn’t blow away. He threw open the door and climbed in the passenger seat as Olive started the engine.
    “Well don’t just sit there, kid, shoot something.”
    As Olive tore out of the parking lot, Connor rolled down the window, climbed out and sat in the open frame, looking back over the top of the truck. He steadied his aim as Olive put them back on the road. The hissers came on at speeds matching the vehicle, and two of them managed to get hands on the truck bed, yank themselves up. Connor put a bullet through one’s head, hit the next one in the shoulder. Both fell off but only one got up again, joining its brethren in the chase.
    “Slow down,” he said.
    “What? No.”
    “I can get them.”
    “I’m not slowing, they’re too deadly as a group. Pick them off one at a time from a distance.”
    “But now they’re too far away.”
    “Then good. Get your ass back in here.”
    Connor slid back into the seat and rolled up his window. “I got one of them,” he said.
    “Then it’s one less fucking useless body in the world. You okay?”
    “Yeah, fine.”
    “We lose anything?”
    Connor looked back through the window, saw all the bags fluttering in the breeze. “We got the chips. What else was there?”
     
    T UESDAY, 12:33 PM
     
    She lay under the station wagon, watching the military truck burn. The screams had stopped and no one had emerged. They were all dead and she knew it. He mother, her father, the little girl, the old lady. All of them just gone. Tears ran down her cheeks, pooled in between her quivering lips.
    Around the truck, dead, burnt hissers smoked with blackened skin. Except one, which crawled on its arms, trying to drag its bisected torso down the street, leaving a snail trail of gore behind it.
    “Mom. Dad,” she whispered, her tears blurring her vision. It just wasn’t fa ir. She’d thought her parents dead at the start of this outbreak only to find them alive and well. And now they were gone again. And she would be too had she not flown out of the back of the truck. “God no. Please no.”
    Sssss .
    Amanita heard the hissing from somewhere behind her, craned her head under the tuck and looked back down the road beyond her feet. A dozen of the creatures had emerged from nowhere, lurking down the road as they sniffed the air for a meal.
    “Shit,” she muttered, remember the last time she’d been trapped under a car with hissers trying to get her. Only this time Connor wasn’t here to run interference for her. “Okay, okay. Get up get up get up.” She knew she had to. Knew she couldn’t stay here waiting and hoping her parents walked out of the wreckage alive. Because that just wasn’t going to happen. And if she stayed here like this, numb and frozen, then her minutes were numbered. I said get up, Am!
    She slid closer to the edge of danger, stuck her head out from under the station wagon, gauged the distance to the nearest building, a town library with small stone lions next to the front steps. The hissers were close enough that they’d see her run, probably get to the library just after she did. If the front doors were open she could race in, maybe bar the door from the inside, but she’d have to be fast and she’d have to move now.
    She glanced back at the pack of undead. They were staring at her, cocking their heads. Dammit, they saw her.
    “No,” she whispered, moving back under the station wagon, realizing it was a bad move, that it would just trap her, and then pulling herself out into the street. The hissers spit out a hungry cry and ran for her. There was no time to scream, just to squirm out from under the car and jump to her feet, peripherally noticing the blood and scrapes on her arms and legs from when the truck had flipped