Robby blinked his eyes and they adjusted quickly to dim moonlight. He was looking through a windshield at the parking lot of a rest stop on I-95. Nothing on the other side of the glass moved except the waxing and waning shadows. The moon’s light filtered through the raveled blanket of clouds overhead. The last two days reloaded into his consciousness in bursts of images. They’d been the worst two days of his short thirteen-year-old life. He’d fled his home and lost his friends and family. Robby remembered the blizzard. He remembered the panicked car trip when his dad had disappeared. He remembered the queasy boat ride back to the mainland and how his mom had disappeared. But mostly he remembered the corpses. Everywhere he went, he found dead people with their eyes exploded and running down their lifeless faces. Robby shivered with the recollection, and from the cold. The driver’s-side window beside him was shattered—he had broken it with a jack handle when he’d stolen this Volvo from its dead owner.
