The soldier started miming at him. Turning his hand, as if he were shutting off the truck’s ignition.
“Please,” Whitman said.
“You gonna tell me why?” Angie asked.
“Yes! Yes, later, just—”
The soldier raised his voice until Whitman could finally hear him. “Switch off your engine! Then come out one at a time, with your left hand visible!”
“Go!” Whitman screamed.
Angie shoved the gearshift lever hard as she stamped on the pedals. The truck didn’t want to switch directions. It didn’t want to move backwards—took forever to start accelerating, to get rolling away from the soldier and the APC. Through the windshield Whitman could see the soldier raising his weapon. The soldier was still shouting but not at Whitman or Angie, now—he was shouting at his buddies back in the APC. The armored vehicle had enough machine guns mounted on its roof to shred their truck, to turn it into strips of bright metal in the space of a minute. What that would do to all the bodies inside wasn’t worth considering.
He shouted for Angie to hurry up, to get the truck moving.
The soldier opened fire before they’d even rolled back ten feet. His assault rifle tore through the truck’s grille, into the engine compartment. Whitman could hear bullets rattling around in there like BBs in a cup. The windshield starred and turned white.
But the truck moved. Angie stared at her side mirror and spun the wheel and they were accelerating, gaining speed. She fishtailed the truck and got it turned around, and there were more shots, a lot more, and someone screamed.
But they were gaining speed.
The truck died fifteen minutes later.
Whitman had to give it to the truck’s makers—the ponderous thing wheezed and rattled and screamed, but it kept running long after its radiator was shot full of holes. It bled coolant across ten long Brooklyn avenues and got them clear of the soldiers who were chasing them.
Working together, the bunch of them managed to push the truck into an abandoned taxi garage. Whitman felt it was important to get a roof over it, just in case anyone was tracking them with satellites or drones.
“Why would anyone do that?” Angie asked. “Are we so important?”
Whitman shook his head and bent over the steaming radiator again. The guy in the coveralls said he was a mechanic. He’d taken one look at the truck’s engine, though, and started swearing. Now it was Whitman’s turn to stare at the damage and try to pretend like there was something they could do.
Angie picked up a wrench and pointed it at him. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the one they’re looking for,” she said.
“I’m nobody.” He poked his finger through a bullet hole in the manifold, because he didn’t want to look at her.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Angie asked. “I need to make a plan if I’m going to help these people. To make a plan I need information.”
Whitman rubbed at his head. “I don’t know anything. How could I? I’m out here just like you.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“I don’t know anything,” he repeated.
She lifted the wrench as if she would club him to death. He didn’t even know if he would resist if she tried.
But then, after a second, she lowered the wrench again.
Did she believe him? She didn’t say anything more.
The baby in her arm gurgled and reached for her hair with its tiny fist. A tiny fist with a tiny plus sign inked on the back.
“Your kid’s adorable,” Whitman said. Even to his own ears it sounded like he was trying to change the subject.
“He’s not mine,” Angie said, staring daggers at him.
“No?”
“Somebody left him in a car seat. They just left him sitting on the sidewalk in a car seat and they never came back. I was inside, in my place. Trying to hunker down. But this little guy,” she said, stroking the baby’s nose until it wriggled in joy, “was right outside and kept crying. What else was I supposed to do? I went outside,” she said, “thinking I would just bring him in. That was when I saw Mr. Tydall from next door, limping up the sidewalk. Covered in bite marks. I knew I had to help as many people as I could. That it was going to be a long time before the government came to save us.”
Whitman studied the bullet holes in the radiator. He knew nothing about cars or engines or anything.
“Those soldiers were willing to shoot us all,” Angie said. “They were willing to shoot this baby rather than let us get away. You knew that.”
“I don’t know—”
“You knew.”
She dropped the wrench, and it clattered on the concrete floor. Several of the others looked up at the commotion. Some craned their heads around the side of the truck to see what had happened. How many of them were listening?
He couldn’t tell Angie everything. But she deserved at least a hint of the truth.
Even so, it was hard to start. “How did you get that?” he asked, pointing at the plus sign inked on the back of Angie’s hand.
“That’s not important.”
“Please. It is. One of the guys in the truck, one of the people you brought with you—he said you ran one of the local hospitals.”
“Hardly,” Angie said. She bounced the baby on her hip. “I’m a nurse. An RN.” She shook her head. “Fine. It was about a week ago. A guy from the CDC came through and interviewed all of us. He asked who among us had been exposed to zombies. Well, that was hilarious, right? We’ve been dealing with this epidemic for nearly six months now. You find me one nurse or doctor or orderly or x-ray technician even who hasn’t been bitten or spat on or bled on by a zombie. You find me even one and I’ll be surprised. So this guy from the CDC, he went down the line and stamped each of us. He didn’t even explain what it meant, though we could pretty much guess. It means we’re positives. Possibly positive.” She actually smiled a little. “What a bunch of horseshit, right? There’s no way this thing is that aggressive. No way we’re all infected.”
“No,” Whitman agreed. “It’s not likely. But this thing—this disease. There’s a major problem with it. It’s asymptomatic.”
One of the men leaning around the side of the truck cleared his throat. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means,” Whitman said, picking his words carefully, “when somebody turns into a zombie there’s no warning. It just happens. You can’t predict who’ll it happen to, or when.” He threw up his hands. “There’s no way to diagnose it, no test. Nothing anyone can do to say this person is infected and dangerous and that person is clear.”
“So the plus signs . . .” Angie prompted.
“You’re a nurse. You know about reverse triage.”
Angie’s face went blank. All expression just drained away, all at once.
She got it.
“I don’t know about it,” somebody said. The mechanic. “What the hell is that?”
“Normally at a hospital,” Angie said, “we do triage. In the emergency room. We figure out who’s about to die if we don’t help them first. Then we make everybody else wait, all the people who just have bad headaches or they’ve got the flu, or whatever. We focus our resources on the people who need them the most.”
“And reverse triage?” the guy asked.
Angie looked down at the baby. “That’s for when things get bad. I mean, monumentally bad. That’s when you look at the people who are about to die and you . . . you just let them go. You use your resources to help the people who have the best chance of making it. The people with the least threatening injuries. And everybody else can just . . . they . . . you try not to think about them.”