Page 56

“Oh, I have faith in your driving—for now. Flip the car or lose a freaking wheel in the gutter, and it’s over.”

I scoffed. “In my defence, the second car wasn’t my fault.”

Kirby reached through from the back and patted my shoulder. “That’s what everyone says about the second car.”

Luke slowed and crossed to the other side of the road as we approached the biggest pile-up we’d encountered so far.

Almost a dozen cars had stopped, with belongings scattered across the road. Pools of blood had turned the surface patchy, and the vehicles at the back of the line had left skid marks behind them before they’d ploughed into the car ahead.

Infected wandered mindlessly through the wreckage, arms dangling at their sides, expressions blank.

Luke switched between eyeing the mirrors and navigating through the debris.

“What the hell went wrong here?” Kirby asked, gripping both front seats. “There’s nothing else around.”

We reached a white SUV at the front with no tyre marks behind it. The bumper was crumpled, and the airbags activated. Blood spatter covered the cracked windshield, and a lone shoe sat on the ground beside the door.

A woman in loungewear moved along the edge of the bitumen, one bare foot blackened with dirt, and a police car had pulled halfway onto the shoulder, the driver’s door left open. The officer lay dead on the road, legs splayed. His mask and uniform were still intact, but his skull had been so violently injured, he wouldn’t be getting up again.

They’d tried. Everywhere we’d gone, there were signs the authorities had attempted to fight back, but it was uncontainable.

“It’s just going to get worse, isn’t it?” I said. “All these people running. The panic.”

Luke gave the slightest nod, his eyes never leaving the road. “Better to know what we’re up against now than when we’re driving into Melbourne. Who knows how bad it is there.”

If his comment triggered any concern from Kirby about her parents, she didn’t say anything.

Farther up the road, an infected boy in his mid-teens stepped out from behind the guardrail, wearing scuffed shoes and ripped jeans.

My stomach dropped, and for a beat, I was transported back to the airport, where another boy’s eyes lost focus as everything inside him shut down. The beginning, when the three of us met. When everything we’d known had been obliterated.

“Ava.”

I blinked hard at the sound of Luke’s voice and forced myself to look away. “I’m good.”

He checked on me a couple more times as the feeling passed.

“Next rest stop we see,” Kirby said from the back, “I need a bathroom break.”

“Yes,” I said, grateful for a routine task. Something normal. “Me too.”

I almost laughed as I stared out the window.

As if anything would ever be normal again.

A sign, almost hidden in a heavily treed section of the highway, signalled an upcoming rest area.

There’d been no abandoned cars or crashes in a while, and the dead were spread out in sparser numbers. The last one we’d swerved around was a lone man still wearing a backpack, his exposed guts hanging over the top of his pants.

Luke braked and turned into the narrow entry, easing to a stop near a steel-clad toilet block. He killed the engine and unfastened his seatbelt. “I’ll keep watch outside.”

“You don’t have to do that.” I gave him a quick smile. The place looked empty. “No one’s around, and we’ll only be a minute. Unless you need to go, too?”

He shook his head, his mouth lifting in a slight smile. “I’ll leave the car running then,” he said, restarting the engine. “Keep it warm.”

I grabbed my nail gun from the footwell. “Back soon.”

Kirby collected her axe and jumped out with me into the frigid air. We took a moment to scan the area, but the only clue anyone had been here recently was the dark set of tyre marks leading straight to the exit.