“Where are they all going, dad?”
I capped my binoculars, and she zipped them back into my pack. “To their deaths,” I told her and placed a hand on her shoulder, pulling us further into the bracken at the edge of the woods, deeper into the shadows.
A mile down the hillside, a meandering caravan of motorcycles, cars, and SUV’s — anything The Crazies could still get running — idled through an obstacle course of abandoned vehicles left dead in our old neighborhood. Behind the caravan, clouds of flame and brown smoke as they burned homes and once-pristine lawns. Ahead of the caravan, people we once called friends screaming and running for their lives.
“Let’s go,” I said and tugged the back of her shirt.
She twisted, pulling away. “I want to go back.” She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her hand. It came away wet. “I want to go home.”
Our yellow two-story stood defiantly on a hill, facing the approaching caravan. Windows shuttered. Doors boarded. No one would run screaming from that house. “There’s no going back.” I tugged again, and this time she came. “All we can ever do is move on.”