"This is going to suck," Lucky said again.

  "We need that dynamo fluid," Stu repeated.

  "I know, but--"

  "We don't need to clean the place out. We just need three canisters of the stuff. We'll get in, get out, and get back on Route 90. If this Baron guy was able to make it out of this factory alive, I think we can do the same."

  "I don't think it'll be that easy."

  "Do you have a better idea?"

  "Not really," he admitted. "Actually, I think you're right -- I think it might be worth a shot. We only need three canisters to get to Lon Halos, like you said, but if we can collect more than that...well, dynamo fluid is valuable. We can use it to barter for supplies along the way." He sighed. "But it's going to suck, and I don't know how Luna's going to feel about it."

  They found Luna still working on her glider; she had been attending to it so diligently that she hadn't even noticed that they had been gone. "Looks good, doesn't it?" she said proudly, wiping the body down with a rag. "You can hardly see the scratches." She stopped and frowned them. "Where have you two been?"

  "We went to see Marshal Tempo," Lucky said, and he told her all about their conversation.

  Her frown only deepened. "A robotics factory? In Heart's Glow?"

  "We should have enough dynamo fluid in the glider to make it there," Lucky pointed out.

  "But you said it's full of zombies."

  "Everywhere's full of zombies," Stu muttered.

  She turned her gaze on him. "This is your plan? Searching for dynamo fluid in a rotting factory? What if this Baron is wrong -- what if there's no fluid to be found there? We'll be stranded in Heart's Glow."

  "It's risky," he admitted. "I know that. But we don't have any other leads, and if we stay here, it could be months, or years, before we manage to gather up enough dynamo fluid to get to Lon Halos. I don't want to wait that long."

  "You really want to meet this Dr. Snowe," she observed.

  I really want to go home, he thought. "Yes."

  "Well, we do have other options," she said.

  "Such as?"

  "We could steal a couple of canisters from Tempo."

  "Are you kidding?" Lucky blurted. "He'd kill us!"

  "I didn't say it was a good option. But it is an option."

  "Tempo's been good to me," Stu said. "I don't want to steal from him, or from any of these settlements either. They need this stuff as much as we do. What else have you got?"

  "Most of the Pale Riders' bikes run on gasoline," she said, without missing a beat. "They get it from a treated Blaster's well on the other side of Meku, along with their oil and some other things they need."

  Stu didn't know what a Blaster's well was, but he wasn't particularly interested, either. "So?"

  "So we could borrow a bike, or a truck, instead. I could leave my glider here."

  "That's no good," Lucky said. "Gas-powered engines aren't as efficient as dynamo engines. You know that. We'd have to stop and refuel half a dozen times on our way to Lon Halos."

  "The Riders have refueling stations in their outposts," she said. "They'd top us off if we asked them -- all Stu has to do is show them that Rider's coin Tempo gave him."

  Reminded of the coin, Stu took it out of his pocket and looked at it. According to Tempo, any Rider they showed it to would offer to help them. Could he really win over a bunch of hardened gangsters with a coin, though? He doubted it, and even Tempo had admitted that there were some crazies among his fellow Marshals. Stu wasn't willing to put that much faith in it.

  "No," he said after a moment. "Having to find places to refuel, and having to depend on the Pales Riders for help, would only complicate things."

  "Fair enough," she said. "I agree with that, actually; I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the alternatives." She put a hand on her glider and sighed. "A robot factory in Heart's Glow, huh? And it's crawling with irregulars?"

  "Apparently."

  She shrugged. "Well, it wouldn't be my first choice. Desperate times, though..."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Desperate times," Lucky repeated sadly.

  "All right, then. Let's get moving."

  * * *

  They spent the rest of the day, and part of the next day, preparing for their journey. They gathered food, water, and other supplies, purchased items from traders in Beggar's Town, and made sure their weapons were fully functional: Stu tested his Midnighter, Lucky tested his railgun, and Luna tested her shotgun, which she had acquired from a Wild Pack gangster during the battle at the Dealership. Stu had an entire box of .45 ACP ammo for the Midnighter -- fifty rounds -- while Lucky had about forty cylinders for his railgun. Luna, unfortunately, only had six or seven slugs for the shotgun, but she also had a small revolver with six rounds in the cylinder, and of course all three of them were well-equipped with melee weapons. Stu had his aluminum baseball bat, which he called Excalibur, along with a machete and some knives, while Lucky had a hatchet and Luna had, among other things, a long knife, a heavy wrench, and a steel pipe which she had welded into a sort of spear. The three of them were practically bristling with weapons, in fact, but Stu didn't doubt that they'd be needing them at some point.

  They kept the food -- mostly potatoes, but also carrots, cucumbers, and other vegetables -- in a kind of plastic cooler that Lucky had found; the water they stored in three gallon-sized jugs. It probably wouldn't be enough to get them to Lon Halos, but it was all they could afford and all they could fit in Luna's glider -- the vehicle was the equivalent of a speedy sports car, and didn't have a lot of storage space. But they made do, placing their supplies in the trunk and stuffing the rest of it in the backseat (along with Lucky).

  One of Marshal Tempo's men also provided Luna with an old map of the Astrian Union, which depicted various roads and highways, but he warned her that many of the roads had fallen into disrepair over the last ten years and were no longer passable; others had been deliberately blown apart shortly after the outbreak in a vain attempt to stop its spread. But the map would give them a pretty good idea of where they were, at least, and where they were going.

  By the afternoon they were ready to go. Stu could see that Lucky was starting to seem a little anxious; he asked him if anything was wrong.

  "It's just...I've never been more than a few miles out of Meku City before," he said. "The idea of leaving it...it's a little scary."

  Stu shook his head in amazement. Exploring dark and haunted subway tunnels and wading through zombie guts was no big deal for this kid, but leaving Meku City, apparently, was enough to give him pause. Strange.

  He gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder anyway. "You'll be back."

  "Well, hopefully," he said gruffly. "You ready, Luna?"

  "Ready," she said. She got behind the wheel, Stu got into the passenger seat, and Lucky climbed over their supplies to wedge himself into the backseat. Luna then fired up the engine, which caused the glider to begin to levitate a few feet off the ground. Stu had no idea how these gliders worked, other than that they used "grav boosters" to generate the levitation effect and turbines to push the vehicle forward and backward, but the technology was pretty slick, and the ride was very smooth -- there was no bumping or jostling around as in an ordinary automobile.

  Luna drove the glider up to the gates of Beggar's Town, which were opened by a couple of guards. Waving goodbye to the townspeople, they pulled out into the main road, and before long they were hitting twenty-five or thirty down the streets of Meku City. But the streets were cluttered with wrecked cars and detritus, and Luna was constantly having to swerve around various obstacles.

  They spotted a few zombies in the streets, as they usually did whenever they ventured out into the city. They were turning a corner around an old restaurant when Stu suddenly felt a sort of electric jolt, jumping through his brain, and without actually seeing it he just somehow knew that there was a zombie standing on the sidewalk around the corner. He realized that this must be his Zombie Radar at work; the skill would activate whenever a zombie came within fifty feet of him.

  Fortunately this particular zombie was no danger to them; they zipped past it in a second, as Luna turned the glider around the corner. "How fast can this thing go?" Stu asked, over the rush of the wind.

  "I don't know," she admitted. "I outran a speedy once, on Bleeder's Street. Hit almost seventy-five. But I think she could do ninety, or even a hundred, if she had to."

  Stu hadn't considered the fact that a speedy might be able to catch up to them in the glider. Having just battled one in the subway the previous day, the thought of it made him uneasy.

  Luna and Lucky both had a pretty good mental map of Meku City and had no trouble finding their way out of it, but by the late afternoon they were approaching the outskirts of the city, and Lucky especially was starting to look a little glum. Stu felt bad for him. Maybe the kid should have stayed behind.

  Luna's expression had turned serious as well, but she was obviously having a great time piloting the glider -- the further they got out of Meku City, the more the roads opened up, allowing her to really push the vehicle; they began to hit sixty and even seventy miles per hour, according to the glowing speedometer on the glider's weird futuristic dashboard.

  With nothing better to do, Stu spent his time studying the scenery, which was sad and sometimes strange and haunting, but beautiful, too, in its way. Crumbling buildings, empty roads, and weedy fields dominated the landscape, and after ten years, it was clear that nature was slowly beginning to reclaim what it had lost -- trees were growing in the highway medians, and they saw a remarkable amount of wildlife, including deer, raccoons, bald eagles, and some strange creatures that looked like armadillos but which Stu had never seen before in his life. "What are those things?" he asked Luna.

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. "Bellbacks," she told him. "You've never seen a bellback before?"

  "I guess not." Apparently it wasn't just the geography of this world that was unique; it had its own unique animal life as well. "Does the zombie virus affect animals?"

  "Not that I know of," she answered. "But there's a lot we don't know about zombies. We don't even know how all of this got started."

  "But surely people have...theories."

  She shrugged. "Some people think it broke out of a lab in Taxens. Other people think it started in New Mahacan, after a group of scientists dug up some weird mummies they found in the desert. But no one knows for sure."

  "What do you think?"

  "I think it doesn't matter. This is the world we live in now; we just have to make the best of it."

  Lucky had said something similar a while back; in fact he had used that very same expression. Stu wondered if he had gotten it from his sister.

  It's the world you live in, he thought to himself, once again turning his eyes to the haunting scenery. I'm only visiting.