Perimeter

The last ship sails in six weeks. It will not wait.

It started as chatter on the CB. Rain on Interstate 70, and strangers on channel 19 talking about people running across the lanes. People who moved wrong. Thirty minutes later, Indianapolis was on fire.

Ray drove home. He found the door open, an oil stain where his wife's car used to stand, and a note on the floor, half soaked in blood:

"They said on the radio everyone should go to—"

The rest is gone. So are Carla and his son, Owen.

He doesn't ride alone. June is eight. Her father told her to run, and she ran, and now she sits in the passenger seat of Ray's rig wrapped in his jacket. Up by Lake Erie, in a motel room full of car batteries and green screens, Eli has been listening to the end of the world on the radio, and to one voice that keeps answering: Nuuk, Greenland. Cold enough that nothing gets up there. And they're taking people.

A ship, the Aurora Bay, leaves Portland, Maine for the north. Between Ray and that pier lie 950 miles of dead America, and the dead are not the worst of it. Crews in red bandanas follow any truck with a full tank. Militia hold the bridges and take what you can't pay. And some of the dead are changing: bigger, faster, something in them still working.

Ray has one rule now: don't stop for anyone. But every night, he has to stop.

---

Hold the perimeter

Every stop on the road is a night under siege. Park the rig, lay sandbags and mines, cover Eli while he bolts together turrets out of scrap, and hold the line wave after wave, until there's enough fuel, food and water to see the dawn. Then choose your road and drive on.

A story told in painted comics · a branching route from Ohio to Maine · three difficulty levels · about 1.5 hours per run.