Van stared out at the impenetrable white. His passenger broke the silence.

  "Just… get me to the next town," the woman said, her voice tight.

  Van eased off the gas slightly. The Glock remained steady in his hand. "How do I know you're not infected?"

  She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself. "My name is Caroline Jane. I work for Myer Materials."

  "We were scouting a relocation site. Our driver… he went to pay for gas in Hurley. He came back with a bite on his arm."

  Van's grip on the wheel tightened.

  "Two colleagues went to handle it. Then the driver started… convulsing in the car. Coughing up blood."

  "The man in the passenger seat leaned over… and the driver tore his throat out." Her voice was clinical, detached. "I ran. Your truck was the closest vehicle with someone who didn't look wounded."

  "Bodily fluids," Van stated.

  Jane nodded. "It's the only vector that fits. Not water, not air. Just direct contact."

  Van processed this. It tracked. "Next town. You're out."

  He stowed the Glock, reaching for the radio. Before his fingers touched the dial, light flared in the fog ahead.

  At seventy miles an hour, he had a second to react.

  He slammed the brakes. The Express screeched, tires fighting for grip, lurching to a stop mere feet from the source of the glow.

  Not headlights. Fire.

  A twisted metal graveyard blocked the road. A dozen vehicles, maybe more, piled and burning. A coach bus lay on its side, flames licking its windows.

  "What happened?" Jane breathed.

  "Fog. Panic." Van's mind raced. "Everyone fleeing Hurley hit the same wall."

  He carefully steered the truck off the paved road, onto the desert sand, planning to skirt the wreckage.

  It was worse than they thought. The carnage stretched for a hundred yards. A funeral pyre of steel and flesh.

  Then Van saw movement within the firelight. Dozens of shadows, shifting among the wrecks.

  He flicked on the high beams.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The light sliced through the fog, illuminating a nightmare.

  They weren't shadows. They were them. Hundreds. Stumbling, crawling, standing amidst the burning cars.

  "Shit." Van threw the shifter into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. The upgraded engine roared, hurling them backward.

  The noise was a dinner bell.

  Every head in the horde snapped toward the sound. A collective, guttural hiss rose over the crackle of flames.

  They surged forward, pouring from the wrecks, a tide of rotting meat and bone.

  The desert sand sucked at the tires. The truck wallowed, speed bleeding away.

  Van kept the pedal down, eyes darting, trying to find the road again in the gloom. The missing left mirror was a gaping blind spot.

  "They're gaining!" Jane yelled, twisted in her seat.

  Van cursed, steering blind. Then his passenger moved.

  In one fluid motion, Jane unclipped her seatbelt, rolled down her window, and leaned out into the rushing wind and fog.

  "Hard left!" she screamed over the roar.

  Van cranked the wheel. The truck slewed, narrowly avoiding a flaming figure that lunged from the mist.

  "Again! Now, back right! Straighten out!"

  Her voice was his only guide. He followed each shouted command, muscles coiled.

  "You're on the road! Go!"

  The tires found pavement. The truck's rear end steadied.

  Van kept the gas floored, flying backward down the highway, the horde receding into the choking white fog behind them.

  Jane pulled herself back in, hair wild, face pale. She clipped her belt with shaking hands.

  "Thanks," Van grunted.

  "Me too," she replied, equally terse.

  A mile down the road, Van slowed.

  Then he turned off the pavement again, creeping a short distance into the desert before killing the engine. Silence, thick and heavy, swallowed them.

  "Why are we stopping?" Jane whispered.

  "Other survivors. They'll be fleeing down this road. In this fog, at speed…" He let the thought hang.

  Jane nodded. "We'd be just another wreck."

  "There's more," Van said, his voice low. "They key on sound. Movement."

  "Back at the gas station… that thing didn't fixate until I fired the gun. Back there, the engine noise brought the whole horde down on us."

  The logic was cold and clear. Jane remembered the pinprick pupils scanning the cab before locking onto Van.

  "So we hide," she concluded. "We stay quiet, and we let the fog hide us."

  Van nodded, retrieving the Glock. He ejected the magazine. "Seven rounds left."

  He stowed it. A heavy quiet fell.

  "What's your name?" Jane asked softly.

  "Doesn't matter," Van said. He leaned back, pulling a worn blanket from behind the seat and draping it over himself.

  A moment later, Jane tugged a corner of the blanket over her own shoulders.

  Van shot her a look. "Hey."

  She met his gaze. "Thank you." This time, it sounded less like courtesy and more like an admission.

  Van just grunted, pulling out his phone. He dimmed the screen to its lowest setting. No signal. No data. He tried 911. The call died before it could connect.

  Silence returned, deeper now.

  Then… a sound.

  CLICK-CLACK.

  It was faint, cutting through the fog from outside. A dry, rhythmic clatter, like bones knocking together.

  Van and Jane froze, eyes wide, staring into the white void.

  CLICK-CLACK. CLICK-CLACK-CLACK.

  More of them. The sound grew, forming a ghastly percussion section.

  A shape materialized from the mist. A shuffling figure, jaw working mechanically, teeth clacking. Then another. And another.

  Dozens of them. They emerged silently from the fog, a slow, shuffling procession passing within feet of the truck.

  Rotting faces, exposed bone, tattered clothing. Their empty eyes stared ahead, jaws snapping open and shut in that terrible, mindless rhythm.

  CLICK-CLACK. CLICK-CLACK.

  Soon, the truck was an island in a sea of the dead, surrounded by a forest of shuffling legs and clattering teeth, hidden only by the thinning veil of mist.