much ground when she heard two booms from behind her. Not letting off the gas she looked in the mirror and saw the man who had been talking to her standing outside the disabled car. He had fired two blasts from his shotgun, but as far as she could tell neither had found their mark.
Staying on the throttle Katie shot through a couple of intersections, then forced herself to slow when she realized she’d pushed the truck to over a hundred miles an hour. Slowing to a more sedate speed she looked at the Safeway as she passed, a grim expression settling on her face when she saw several bodies lying in the parking lot. The men were still guarding the front of the store. The crowd in the parking lot had withdrawn behind their vehicles. Even at a glance she could see lots of long guns and didn’t want to be anywhere in the area when the real battle started.
She made it home without any further incident, impatiently waiting for first the gate then the garage door to open. Katie didn’t step out of the truck until the door was fully closed behind her. She started to survey the damage to the truck, but the dim bulb in the door opener didn’t provide enough light. Turning on a bank of overhead fluorescents, she caught her breath.
The sheet metal on the driver’s side of the Ford was dented and scraped for most of the length of the vehicle where she’d rammed into the Buick. Walking down the side she stopped and shivered when she saw the damage from two shotgun blasts. The man hadn’t missed, and she hadn’t been far enough away.
On the left rear fender an area larger than a dinner plate had close to twenty holes punched through the metal. A matching spot was also on the tailgate, directly in line with the driver’s seat. If he’d aimed a little higher… Katie started to think, then stopped herself from going there. She had made it back safely, that was what mattered.
Turning the lights off, she walked into the house, poured a stiff shot of vodka and sat down on the couch to see if there was any news being broadcast on the TV.
5
The time passed slowly, Katie struggling to deal with the tedious boredom. The power was still on so she tried running on the treadmill, but was distracted and after half an hour shut it off. Not only wasn’t she in the frame of mind for exercise, she was concerned about not being able to hear anything other than the whine of the belt and her pounding feet. She didn’t have any information that conditions had gotten worse, but she didn’t see how they could have improved.
A couple of days passed and Steve hadn’t called her back. The sat phone didn’t have signal and wouldn’t ring in the house, so she was in the habit of going outside every half an hour to check for voice mail. Every time she was outside she dialed John’s number, but never received anything other than a recorded message that the network was unavailable.
More times than not while outside, she’d hear gunfire. Sometimes it was distant, others it sounded fairly close. The pistol never left her hip and she’d taken to carrying the rifle outside with her, hanging from a one-point sling around her shoulders.
Late in the afternoon she couldn’t wait any longer to hear from Steve. Walking out into the heat, she gave the phone time to connect to a satellite then dialed his number. After several rings he answered, sounding groggy from sleep. She’d forgotten the time difference between Arizona and Australia.
They talked for a few minutes, Steve sounding slightly warmer than the first time she’d spoken to him. He had finally found a way late the previous evening to gain access to satellite imagery and filled her in on what he’d seen. He started with Atlanta; her heart sinking when she heard the majority of the city had burned.
He took her around the country, describing the devastation he was seeing and the herds of infected that were starting to form.
“What does the Phoenix area look like?” Katie asked, holding her breath.
“Lots of fires,” he said after a few minutes of looking for the right feed and zooming in. “Lots of fighting. There’s a steady stream of traffic heading north on the Interstate, but it’s barely moving. Where are you in the area? Wait. Never mind. I can pull