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jabbed her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the lobby behind her and the escalators leading down to the parking garage. “And let me know as soon as possible.”
    The woman nodded and pressed past them to head for the escalators. Ethan gave Alicia a questioning look that she ignored and followed her farther down the cluttered hallway toward the lobby.
    “Where’s the emergency?” he asked as he pulled even with her and leaned close enough for her to hear him in the noisy hallway.
    “Outside,” Alicia said shortly. Ethan glanced at her and imagined he could see adrenaline pumping under her skin. “ We are going in here,” she added. She pushed open a conference room door and motioned for Ethan to enter ahead of her. “This is mine,” she said, pushing the door shut. The conference room was sparsely decorated, with only a bed and table shoved into a corner. The room’s long table had been moved aside, and it was lined with row upon row of handguns, rifles, knives, and even a few grenades. Alicia walked briskly across the room to the wall of windows, pushing the heavy curtains aside to reveal that two of the windows had already been broken out; large wooden boards were secured over the voids. She moved the wood aside from a window and leaned out to look at the ground below. “And that is the infected,” she said, seemingly to herself, as she squinted at the ground.
    Ethan joined her and chose his own window, wrestling the wood board aside with some difficulty. The infected were smashed against the glass and stone of the building, clawing at the sides as they tried to get in. He started counting and lost track at twenty-four. More steadily made their way down Andrew Young Boulevard. “What happens if they get in?”
    “We seal off the parking garage and pray they go away soon,” Alicia said. She raised her voice over the wind blowing into the conference room. She slid her pistol from its holster and leaned out enough to aim into the mass below, hanging on to the window frame. “If they take the garage, there’s no way we can get out for supplies. Once the food runs out after that, we’d be, in a word, fucked.”
    Ethan mimicked her position, holding the window frame tightly with his right hand and aiming his Glock with his left. He picked his target and squeezed the trigger without hesitation. The weapon kicked back in his hand, but he kept his grip on it as his mind settled into the familiar feeling he’d get when qualifying at the shooting range, back when his life actually meant something. Unfortunately, the infected man for which he’d aimed didn’t go down. Ethan gritted his teeth and adjusted his aim, firing several shots even as he realized the distance between him and the infected was too great for his pistol to cover.
    “Are they fucking multiplying?” Alicia asked in frustration.
    Ethan didn’t bother responding. Instead, he lowered the sidearm, grimacing as he watched the crowd that kept growing, kept surging against the hotel in an attempt to break its defenses. He eyed the movement below them, watching as the infected began to flood around the corner of the building. “It’s not holding,” he warned Alicia. “There are too many. How many people do you have in the parking garage?”
    “There isn’t supposed to be anybody in the parking garage,” Alicia said. “I know Dominic is down there, but he’s supposed to be hauling ass out of there and—wait, where are you going?”
    As Alicia spoke, Ethan started for the door, his steps brisk. “If you think for one second I’m leaving Dominic down there to tough it out alone, you’ve got another thing coming,” he said. He jerked the door open and stepped into the hallway. Several people watched him, but Ethan ignored them and started across the lobby toward the escalators separating him from whatever danger lay below.
    “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Alicia said, hurrying after him. Her expression was a perfect mixture of