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forward to take a better look at what had stopped them.
    Shattered glass crunched under Miller’s dress shoes. A multiple car pile-up in the middle of the next intersection. Six, maybe seven or eight cars; they were hard to count, they were too tangled. They must have been driven on manual, blind in the storm. First just two cars, then the third must have hit the mess, then the fourth behind it, and so on.
    Now that he was close enough he could see what the other trapped drivers had been staring at. It wasn’t the dead passengers, or the slinky, armour-faced rat-things clambering into the wrecks through shattered windows. It was the family that had gotten out of their car after its automatic driver stopped it.
    The father, laying halfway across the opposite lane, was the only one Miller could bear looking at. He was still alive, barely. Twitching. Nose streaming with snot, vomit everywhere, convulsing like he’d been hit with some kind of nerve agent. What Miller first took for a light dusting of blood covering the dad’s chin, where the snot was drying out, turned out to look more like scarlet threads of silk or lint. The beginnings of the cobweb-like shroud fungus that had been devastating the Midwest, triggering the New Dust Bowl by killing everything— everything —in the topsoil.
    When its spores spread, even prairie dogs died en masse, effectively gassed in their burrows so their corpses could serve as fertilizer to feed the fungal growth.
    Miller tore his eyes away from the dying family. Their youngest was already gone, and Miller had no idea what to do. Dialling 911 was a thing of the past.
    Red specks of dust swirled around in front of the goggles of his gas mask, and Miller found himself slowly looking up to the black sky of the dust storm above. How many tons of dust were hanging in the wind over his head right now? How much of it was laced with shroud fungus?
    No wonder the air was so foul.
    One of the drivers nearby, safe in their car, banged on their windshield, yelling something Miller couldn’t hear over the roar of the wind. Timidly, Miller stepped closer, holding the shotgun low, against his leg.
    “What?” he yelled, not that they’d hear it through his mask.
    She slapped the windshield again, pointed past the family’s stopped car, her face frantic.
    Miller turned around, he hadn’t wanted to look. But someone was hunched over a child’s body. A woman stood nearby, staring at Miller. Five people, in all. None of them were wearing gas masks. Some of them were coughing, spluttering, but none of them seemed to care about toxic fungal blooms. They were filthy, unwashed, slick with sweat. Swaying in unison.
    The Infected.
    “Why are you out of your car?” one called, her voice overrun by another asking, “Is it the Rapture?”
    Just five of them weren’t enough to start the chorus of moans, words colliding into a tangle of noise. But five of them were enough. One of them hefted a baseball bat to her shoulder.
    “Is it the Rapture?” the other demanded again, her eyes wide. “The ungifted are dying. God hates them now. Is it the Rapture?”
    “Trix?” Miller leaned his head to the side, lifting a hand to cover his earpiece and hold the transmit key.
    “ Miller? ”
    “Y’all are going to want to get out of the Bravo,” he said, slowly, “without letting too much of this shit in, and grab a mask from the trunk. Then head up here with the Gilboa.”
    “Why are you wearing a mask?” one of the men demanded, stepping closer, then halting until the others caught up, stepping forward again... shambling forward, stop, go, stop, go.
    “He’s not gifted.” “Ungifted?” “Why hasn’t the Rapture taken him?”
    Miller backed away a step, another, swinging the shotgun up to his shoulder as the Infected with the baseball bat came around to the front. The rapid click-slam of one of the Bravo’s doors was followed by the sound of retching, which drew the small mob’s attention for an