Nick stood, rubbing his eyes, and turned to offer her his most convincing smile. “I’ve got some applications out. I’m… going to head up north. To the cabin. Take a break.”

“Good,” his mom looked up, meeting his gaze for the first time. “You do that. Take the weekend. Refresh yourself. When you come back, we’ll look at the job listings together.”

“Yeah,” Nick picked up his go bag and grabbed the keys from the hook near the door, turning away from his mother for what very well could be the last time. “We’ll do that.”

They would not.

***

Laying on the horn seemed just as futile as everything else, so Nick did it anyway. “C’mon!”

The nearly motionless lines of cars leaving the city stretched all the way back into the metro area, past Nick’s subdivision, and onward probably all the way to Route 173. People fleeing the violence of the weekend, a bloodstorm that had been growing all week, an explosive rage that everybody agreed was poised to go off in a big way. A fear passed around on social media, but also a gnawing anxiety that could be felt in the bones, an ancient primordial herd instinct encapsulated in the need to get OUT, to get AWAY, to just GO.

But go where?

Nick’s first instinct had been his uncle’s old cabin up in Canada. It was isolated, on a lake in Ontario, miles from the nearest town. The perfect place to wait out a zombie apocalypse in relative comfort. Lacking insulation and some interior walls, largely unfinished – it was, after all, one of Uncle Joe’s “projects” – but there was running water, electricity, a stove, and indoor plumbing.

Okay, yes. He’d have to pitch a tent in the living room to keep warm, but so what? Its ramshackle and unfinished framework would lead looters to just pass on by.

And there would be looters. Nick’d watched enough movies to know that the big threat he was facing wouldn’t be the zombies, it’d be the other survivors. Humans whose true low nature would be unleashed when freed from the bondage and rules of polite society. Nick had a pretty good idea of what would happen when people stopped being polite… and started being real.

Chaos.

While Nick hadn’t consciously thought that there’d be zombies, he had never for a moment doubted that the social collapse would be real, visceral, and deadly. There were a lot of people in the world who would do anything it took to survive. People who, once the muzzle of law and order slipped, were as every bit deadly as the monsters no doubt already roaming the world.

“C’MON YOU FUCKS!” Nick screamed, spittle flying from his lips, really leaning on the horn this time.

The fucks stubbornly refused to c’mon no matter how many times he honked.

This, more than any other, was the moment when Nick began to believe – really believe – that his fears of collapse weren’t just anxiety, weren’t just a flight of fancy. The panic had set in, and city-dwellers were fleeing their rat’s nest. Had he waited too late? Had his hesitations, his uncertainty, the sentimental last attempts to convince his mother to run with him – had they doomed him? Had last night been the last chance to bug out?

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. No. No, he wouldn’t let those fears drag him down and drown him. This was bad, but weekend traffic out of the city was always bad. It couldn’t last forever, could it?

He turned on the radio.

“I-94 tied up all the way to Kenosha-”

He turned off the radio, the cold fear he’d been trying to keep at bay settling into his gut like a glacial lake that’d always been there, just under the surface. It was over five-hundred miles to the border if he avoided major cities – and you bet your ass that Nick’s Google Map route had been tweaked to avoid major cities – and at this rate he wouldn’t even hit Waukegan by the time the sun set. Could he even be sure that none of the passengers in any of the other cars weren’t already infected? Ticking biological time-bombs, ready to go off and turn the highway into an orgy of bloody carnage.

His eyes fell on a pale child sitting in the back of the station wagon in front of him. Couldn’t be more than twelve, with thin blonde hair only a shade darker than his skin. The kid paused in his nose-picking expedition and started to wave, only to be caught by an unexpected coughing jag, sinking out of view.

A strange calm settled over Nick, and all at once his anxiety vanished – blinked out – as he watched his left hand flick on the car’s hazards while his right set the parking break. They were moving of their own accord, like someone else’s hands, left turning off the engine, and the right grabbing his go-bag from the passenger seat.

Nick stepped out of the car, dimly aware of the driver of the car behind him laying on the horn in a bout of anxious outrage, but fuck that guy. Fuck all those guys. Enjoy your death traps, losers.

He circled to the back of his car and popped the trunk, grabbing from it the pack holding his dome tent and camping gear.

The guy behind him stuck his head out of the driver’s side window. “The fuck are you doing?”