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strewn on the floor.
    “There! Finished,” Reed announced as he dried his hands on a dish towel.
    As they drove south, they passed many vehicles abandoned when their drivers succumbed to the disease. Most of the zombies had ambled into the nearest towns or wandered into the desert to die of starvation. They were forced to drive around a jack-knifed semi blocking most of both lanes near Biosphere 2. The rear door had been forced open and the contents scattered. Instead of the hoped for food someone had expected, the truck’s cargo had been cell phones and electronic devices. Discarded boxes of them lay scattered in the ditch.
    A t one point, Reed swerved his Toyota onto the shoulder at forty miles per hour to take out a female zombie clad only in panties and slippers. The woman turned at the sound of the truck but showed no awareness of her immediate danger. As the truck’s right front fender crushed her chest, she spiraled into the air, and landed in a broken heap in the ditch. Jake shook his head in dismay. Reed’s personal vendetta against zombies could get him killed. A simple flat tire could strand him out in the open miles from shelter. He understood the former teacher’s hatred for the creatures, but he refrained from foolish actions. Jack’s Law #3 – A fool and his life are soon parted.
    Catalina was a small town flowing along both sides of the highway. One strip mall where Jake had sometimes eaten breakfast was now only blackened ruins in a sea of cracked asphalt and rusting automobiles. Many other buildings had suffered similar fates, as unattended stoves and ovens had ignited gas leaks or other flammable material. Some fires had been deliberately set by vandals or looters. Zombies roamed the parking lot of the Basha’s grocery store where he had once shopped and attempted to pursue the two vehicles, but moved too slowly to present a problem. As one of the creatures rushed down the hill on which the grocery store was situated, it stumbled and rolled head-over-heels to the bottom. It picked itself up, looked around as if searching for whoever had tripped it, and continued toward the highway. Freshly turned zombies or zombies who had just fed, Runners, could move swiftly, but the longer they existed without feeding, the slower and weaker they became, Shamblers. He didn’t know how long they could survive without eating, but so far, he had encountered no zombies dead from natural causes.
    In Oro Valley, beyond the pass between the Tortalita and the Catalina mountains, the devastation was less severe, but vehicles filled the parking lots of the Oro Valley Marketplace Mall, including military trucks and police squad cars. Jake frowned at the empty squad cars. He might have known some of the officers that had driven them, not friends but at least acquaintances. The remains of a FEMA medical tent city in the open area between parking lots lay scattered by the wind. The shattered chain link fence that had protected it and the weathered skeletons dotting the asphalt around the tent reminded him of the confusion and misery of those final days when he had still been a cop. He had helped ferry the sick to the FEMA facility after the Oro Valley Hospital had become overwhelmed with patients. Some had gone willingly. Others had gone in handcuffs. None had survived. They had simply died away from home and loved ones. His participation in such acts of forced incarceration had been one of the turning points in his decision to quit the force. His dwindling faith in the government’s ability to solve the problem wasn’t as strong as his faith in himself.
    Zombies roamed the empty stores and parking lot s in search of food. Many turned their heads in his direction at the sound of the jeep and the truck, but even with their limited mental capacity, they knew the vehicle was too far away to chase after them.
    Further south, across from a large shopping center, several corpses littered the CVS parking lot. Jake didn’t bother