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people brought down by mean scared over the years, and it usually wasn’t the one who was worried. It was a bystander… or a friend.
    “Nathan,” he said, finally. “I’ve been traveling around this country since I was five. Never saw any Rovers. Never even heard anyone mention them. But they scare you. They scare you more than anything we’ve seen together. So what gives?”
    “They don’t move much out of California.”
    “And why is that?”
    “I don’t know! Okay? They just stay on the west coast. That’s all.”
    Sam thought about this for a moment, then got out of the car and popped the trunk. Nathan joined him, slamming the passenger door angrily.
    “Sam! We have to get out of here. What are you doing?”
    Sam rummaged through the trunk and removed a small pouch.
    “What’s that?” asked Nathan.
    “Maps,” said Sam.
    “Maps? Seriously? Where’d you get ‘em?”
    “Different places. Old gas stations mostly.”
    He riffled through them until he found a map of California, then threw the pouch back and closed the trunk.
    “Right,” he said, carefully unfolding the map and laying it flat. “We’re about here, I think. Where’s the nearest city?”
    “Um…Century City, I think. There.”
    Nathan pointed to a spot near a place called Los Angeles. Century City was marked in much smaller letters, but there was nothing unusual about that—lots of the old cities had fallen into ruin and been replaced by new cities in more easily defensible areas.
    “Right,” said Sam. “Let’s go.”
    He folded up the map and got back in the car. He waited until Nathan had joined him, then peeled out of the parking lot and sped away down the narrow highway, in the opposite direction from the Rovers. Nathan gripped the dashboard and stared at Sam.
    “So now you want to go to a city?”
    “Last night we were jumped by guys with expensive night-vision gear,” said Sam. “Then today these…Rovers turn up and give us the once-over. My guess is that it isn’t a coincidence.”
    “Yeah, but why?”
    “Don’t know. Don’t really care. We arrive in California and stuff starts happening. I say we raise some money, get some stock and head somewhere safe…like Detroit.”

Chapter 4

    C entury City had looked pretty close on the map, but the drive took them the best part of the day. Sam began to glance nervously at the gas gauge, which was far from reliable and got really iffy at around the quarter of a tank mark. It could mean he had nearly half a tank; on the other hand there had been times when it meant he was running on fumes.
    He had just decided that they’d better leave the highway and search for a settlement and some fuel, when the dusty road began to change. The number of potholes diminished and some repairs looked like they might even have been made within living memory. The road got wider, too, and Sam guessed that it had once probably had three lanes or more going in each direction. Every so often there’d be an off-ramp, leading away to a nowhere that had once been somewhere, with the occasional remains of huge green signs, crushed and bent by the side of the road, that had told drivers exactly how far away the somewhere was.
    Then the fencing began. Crude wooden pickets set up along the road, narrowing the approach to a single lane. There were other vehicles, too. A small van and what looked like some kind of motorized wagon, as well as a couple of donkey carts.
    The going got slower and the fencing higher until it towered above the road and led to a massive wooden gate bounded by two watchtowers, each of which was equipped with a small dish.
    Sam felt his stomach lurch.
    “I’m not liking this,” he muttered as they fell into line behind the wagon and came to a complete stop.
    Up ahead they could see two men in uniform who seemed to be talking to the people in the vehicles. They’d chat for a while, then the gates would grind open and the vehicle would pass through.
    “What are they doing?”