Zoe walked at a slow pace down the street. Any faster and she would easily outpace the others, who insisted on checking, or at least peeking into, every single house along the way. She had insisted that they go to the richer district, but Luke and Eve had disagreed, saying that they likely wouldn't have much that didn't run on electricity, and they weren't sure how well electric items would work, or how stable they were.
Zoe didn't doubt that Luke had seen through her real reason to go there, or at least enough of it. She had wanted to find and utilize a bunker nearer the city. Although electronics might not work, aside from the doors there wasn't much electric at all about three-foot steel walls. If they could get behind a set of those, they would barely have to worry about anything except the door.
But Luke had still refused. He knew the tactical benefits, surely. There must be something she wasn't getting. Some sort of information she hadn't known. Michael had told her that the zombies didn't sense things through normal means. Instead of sight, or hearing, or smell, or anything like that, they had some other way to discover their targets. They didn't know what that way was, but maybe Luke did. Zoe wouldn't be overly surprised if that was the case.
He had probably convinced Eve by telling her that they would be more likely to run into zombies here. And he wasn't wrong, not exactly. After all, there were more people who lived in a smaller area in the poor district of the city. The outskirts, where people lived in absolute squalor and barely got enough to eat day to day, would be a feast for the monsters. In fact, if the infection had come from somewhere outside city limits, it could have easily overwhelmed the defenses and broken through. Zoe had assumed that it had begun at their school, but she was starting to realize just how terrible this plague might be. Overpopulation had been a serious issue, and while this could be seen as a solution, it also became more dangerous the more people there were.
Zoe sighed softly. She turned around and looked backwards.
Nothing.
They must have gone into a house.
Zoe sighed again, then she sat down. On the edge of the street, there was a small cement bump, a pathetic excuse for a curb that wouldn't do anything for any vehicle that utilized even the slightest bit of anti-gravity technology. Then again, it was possible that there weren't any maglines laid in here, so antigrav might not work anyway. But even if the vehicle didn't, the tiny lump of cement would hardly do any good anyway. Some sections of the suburbs didn't have maglines, either because the city couldn't afford them or because they were ripped up and stolen by the citizens to use for something much less important, like guns.
Zoe wrinkled her nose at the thought. Guns were so barbaric. They didn't do anything that a good bow couldn't do, and they used so much more resources to both make and fire. Every single shot required a substance called sparkpowder, and that was the cheap version. There was even a premium chemical mixture called "gunpowder" because of how effective it was, but that was only relative anyway. A halfway decent bow could outperform sparkpowder, and if the gun had gunpowder, all you needed was a couple thousand more on the price.
And Zoe could rant for nearly half an hour about bullets. They were expensive, inefficient in design, and practically useless anyway. It was far too easy to make a bulletproof alloy construct, and most people could get basic bulletproof armor.
Unless you were dirt poor, which to be fair, some people were, you could buy full-body protection up to .20 caliber, and even if you were dirt poor, the things often ended up in the trash compactors, because safety was something everyone wanted, so every general store in the suburbs that ran out immediately fell in popularity sharply. As such, practically every store ordered excess, and so many had to toss them once the effective binding period of the alloy weave passed.
And the ones made using magnetic force were even worse. Most were so weak that the people wielding them were likely better off throwing rocks. Some military-grade ones were enough to do a bit of serious damage, but that was just so messy. Rubble and blood got everywhere, even at reinforced testing grounds.
Zoe looked up just as something small, sharp, and metallic zipped past her.
Cracked bones!