she said. “Don’t you come near me.” She looked down at her feet again, to verify that she was still centered on the black patch of asphalt. It wasn’t ideal. The surface was somewhat reflective of the sunlight and therefore not as black as she would like, but it was as close as she could get given the circumstances. The man was gone—the infected man—but she still repeated her warning. “Don’t you come near me.” April Yettin turned a slow circle on her patch of asphalt, trying to figure out where she was. She struggled to tell one day from the next, and couldn’t put any context to the march of time, but she was sure of one thing—it hadn’t been this bad in a long, long time. She remembered the kids. She remembered their frightened faces looking up at her from their school desks as she stood on the slope of the overturned chalkboard. She remembered the voices shouting down the hallways and wondered how they had known so quickly. April snapped back to the present and verified her patch of asphalt again. Another wave of puppy-sized robots streaked through the deep shadows cast by the noon sun.
