The convoy was bogged down, then surrounded then almost completely wiped out. A single column of troops got away, although Blake reported that individual soldiers could have escaped too. The zombies relished their victory and the station was mobbed by ever more of the things. Finally, when they realized no one else was coming to save Blake, they broke into the building and the radio audience listened as Blake gave his last program. It ended in static and a white flash of superheated light; the feds had set off a nuke with the station as ground zero.

The morning the bomb fell Max watched his wife succumb to a zombie bite and turn into one of the enemy herself. Through a series of mishaps he ended up leaving her in the attic where she died, Max had been lucky not to break his neck when he fell out of the attic access. With his companions he fled Denver, passing not too far away from ground zero themselves. His traveling companions were Jane Stewart, a former police officer, Tom Eby, a computer administrator for MAC Co. where Max had worked before the current crises and Amelia Bryon, an administrative assistant, also from Mac Co. That rounded out the adults, who were all wounded and tired, but so far, bite free. They also had Max's kids, Nick who was ten and Jessica who was seven and Amelia had brought along a boy she found along the way, Cory, who was also ten. The last girl they found sitting in the police cruiser, weeping silently. Her wrist had been cut and bandaged and she appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old. So far she had not been too talkative, but Amelia had coaxed her name out of her — Erin.

The drive from Denver had been extremely stressful on all of them, one moment they were driving at a walking pace through smoky burning suburbia with no one in sight, the next they were hitting the gas and driving far too fast for conditions trying to get away from zombie mobs that seemingly sprang up from the very ground.