The Twelve

3

Denver Police Dept.

Case File 193874

District 6

Transcript of Interview with Lila Beatrice Kyle

VIA: Det. Rita Chernow

3 May 4:17 A.M.

RC: Let the record show that the subject has been fully apprised of her rights and has declined to have an attorney present at this interview. Questioning conducted by Detective Rita Chernow, Denver PD, District Six. The time is four-seventeen A.M. Dr. Kyle, would you please state your full name?

LK: Lila Beatrice Kyle.

RC: And you’re an orthopedic surgeon at Denver General Hospital, is that correct?

LK: Yes.

RC: And do you know why you’re here?

LK: Something happened at the hospital. You wanted to ask me some questions. What is this room? I don’t know it.

RC: We’re in the police station, Dr. Kyle.

LK: Am I in trouble?

RC: We talked about this, remember? We’re just trying to figure out what happened in the ER tonight. I know you’re upset. I have just a few questions for you.

LK: There’s blood on me. Why is there blood on me?

RC: Do you recall what happened in the ER, Dr. Kyle?

LK: I’m so tired. Why am I so tired?

RC: Can we get you something? Coffee maybe?

LK: I can’t drink coffee. I’m pregnant.

RC: Water, then? How about some water?

LK: Okay.

(Break.)

RC: So let’s start at the beginning. You were working in the emergency room tonight, is that correct?

LK: No, I was upstairs.

RC: But you came down to the ER?

LK: Yes.

RC: At what time?

LK: I’m not sure. Sometime around one A.M. They paged me.

RC: Why did they page you?

LK: I was the orthopedist on call. They had a patient with a broken wrist.

RC: And was that patient Mr. Letourneau?

LK: I think so, yes.

RC: What else did they tell you about him?

LK: Before I went downstairs, you mean?

RC: Yes.

LK: He had some kind of animal bite.

RC: Like a dog bite?

LK: I suppose so. They didn’t say.

RC: Anything else?

LK: He had a high fever. He’d vomited.

RC: And that’s all they told you?

LK: Yes.

RC: And what did you see when you got to the ER?

LK: He was in the third bed. There were only a couple of other patients. Sunday’s usually quiet.

RC: What time would this be?

LK: One-fifteen, one-thirty.

RC: And did you examine Mr. Letourneau?

LK: No.

RC: Let me rephrase. Did you see the patient?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle?

LK: I’m sorry, what was the question?

RC: Did you see Mr. Letourneau tonight in the ER?

LK: Yes. Mark was there, too.

RC: Are you referring to Dr. Mark Shin?

LK: He was the attending. Have you talked to him?

RC: Dr. Shin is dead, Dr. Kyle. He was one of the victims.

LK: (inaudible)

RC: Could you speak up, please?

LK: I just… I don’t know. I’m sorry, what did you want to know?

RC: What can you tell me about Mr. Letourneau? How did he seem?

LK: Seem?

RC: Yes. Was he awake?

LK: He was awake.

RC: What else did you observe?

LK: He was disoriented. Agitated. His color was strange.

RC: How do you mean?

(Pause.)

LK: I have to go to the bathroom.

RC: Let’s just get through some questions first. I know you’re tired. I promise I’ll get you out of here as quickly as I can.

LK: Do you have children, Detective Chernow?

RC: I’m sorry?

LK: Do you have any children? I was just curious.

RC: Yes, I have two boys.

LK: How old? If you don’t mind my asking.

RC: Five and seven. I have just a few more things to ask you. Do you think you’re up to that?

LK: But I bet you’re trying for the girl, aren’t you? Believe me, there’s nothing like having a baby girl of your own.

RC: Let’s focus on Mr. Letourneau for now, would that be okay? You said he was agitated. Can you elaborate on that?

LK: Elaborate?

RC: Yes. What did he do?

LK: He was making a funny noise.

RC: Can you describe it?

LK: A clicking sound, in his throat. He was moaning. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain.

RC: Had they given him anything for the pain?

LK: They’d given him Tramadol. I think it was Tramadol.

RC: Who else was there besides Dr. Shin?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle? Who else was there when you examined Mr. Letourneau?

LK: One of the nurses. She was trying to calm him down. He was very upset.

RC: Anyone else?

LK: I don’t remember. An orderly? No, two.

RC: What happened then?

LK: He started to seize.

RC: The patient had a seizure, you mean?

LK: Yes.

RC: What did you do then?

LK: Where’s my husband?

RC: He’s right outside. He came with you. Don’t you remember?

LK: Brad is here?

RC: I’m sorry. Who’s Brad?

LK: My husband. Brad Wolgast. He’s with the FBI. Maybe you know him?

RC: Dr. Kyle, I’m confused. The man who came with you is named David Centre. He’s not your husband?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle? Do you understand what I’m asking you?

LK: Of course David is my husband. What a strange thing for you to say. Where did all this blood come from? Was I in an accident?

RC: No, Dr. Kyle. You were at the hospital. That’s what we’re talking about. Three hours ago, nine people were killed in the ER. We’re trying to figure out how that happened.

(Pause.)

LK: It looked at me. Why did it just look at me?

RC: What looked at you, Dr. Kyle?

LK: It was horrible.

RC: What was?

LK: It killed the nurse first. There was so much blood. Like an ocean.

RC: Are you speaking of Mr. Letourneau? He killed the nurse? I need you to be clear.

LK: I’m thirsty. Can I have some more water?

RC: In a minute. How did Mr. Letourneau kill the nurse?

LK: It happened so fast. How could anybody move that fast?

RC: I need you to focus, Dr. Kyle. What did Mr. Letourneau use to kill the nurse? Was there a weapon?

LK: A weapon? I don’t remember a weapon.

RC: How did he do it then?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle?

LK: I couldn’t move. It just… looked at me.

RC: Something looked at you? Was there somebody else in the room?

LK: He used his mouth. That was how he did it.

RC: Are you saying that Mr. Letourneau bit the nurse?

(Pause.)

LK: I’m expecting, you know. I’m going to have a baby.

RC: I can see that, Dr. Kyle. I know this is very stressful.

LK: I need to rest. I want to go home.

RC: We’ll try to get you out of here as quickly as we can. Just to clarify, is it your statement that Mr. Letourneau bit the nurse?

LK: Is she all right?

RC: She was decapitated, Dr. Kyle. You were holding the body when we found you. Don’t you remember?

LK: (inaudible)

RC: Can you speak up, please?

LK: I don’t understand what you want. Why are you asking me these questions?

RC: Because you were there. You’re our only witness. You saw nine people die tonight. They were ripped apart, Dr. Kyle.

LK: (inaudible)

RC: Dr. Kyle?

LK: Those eyes. It was like looking into hell. Like falling forever into darkness. Do you believe in hell, Detective?

RC: Whose eyes?

LK: It wasn’t human. It couldn’t have been human.

RC: Are you still speaking of Mr. Letourneau?

LK: I can’t think about this. I have to think about the baby.

RC: What did you see? Tell me what you saw.

LK: I want to go home. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Don’t make me.

RC: What killed those people, Dr. Kyle?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle, are you all right?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle?

(Pause.)

RC: Dr. Kyle?

4

Bernard Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” realized it was time to leave the morning the power went out.

He wondered what had taken so long. You couldn’t keep a municipal electrical grid running without people to man it, and as far as Kittridge could tell from the nineteenth floor, not a single human soul was left alive in the city of Denver.

Which was not to say he was alone.

He had passed the early hours of the morning—a bright, clear morning in the first week of June, temperatures in the mid-seventies with a chance of bloodsucking monsters moving in toward dusk—sunning on the balcony of the penthouse he had occupied since the second week of the crisis. It was a gigantic place, like an airborne palace; the kitchen alone was the size of Kittridge’s whole apartment. The owner’s taste ran in an austere direction: sleek leather seating groups that were better to look at than sit on, gleaming floors of twinkling travertine, small furry rugs, glass tables that appeared to float in space. Breaking in had been surprisingly simple. By the time Kittridge had made his decision, half the city was dead, or fled, or missing. The cops were long gone. He’d thought about barricading himself into one of the big houses up in Cherry Creek, but based on the things he’d seen, he wanted someplace high.

The owner of the penthouse was a man he knew slightly, a regular customer at the store. His name was Warren Filo. As luck would have it, Warren had come into the store the day before the whole thing had broken to gear up for a hunting trip to Alaska. He was a young guy, too young for how much money he had—Wall Street money, probably, or one of those high-tech IPOs. On that day, the world still cheerily humming along as usual, Kittridge had helped Warren carry his purchases to the car. A Ferrari, of course. Standing beside it, Kittridge thought: Why not just go ahead and get a vanity plate that says, DOUCHE BAG? A question that must have been plainly written on his face, because no sooner had it crossed Kittridge’s mind than Warren went red with embarrassment. He wasn’t wearing his usual suit, just jeans and a T-shirt with SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT printed on the front. He’d wanted Kittridge to see his car, that was obvious, but now that he’d allowed this to happen, he’d realized how dumb it was, showing off a vehicle like that to a floor manager at Outdoor World who probably made less than fifty grand a year. (The number was actually forty-six.) Kittridge allowed himself a silent laugh at that—the things this kid didn’t know would fill a book—and he let the moment hang to make the point. I know, I know, Warren confessed. It’s a little much. I told myself I’d never be one of those assholes who drive a Ferrari. But honest to God, you should feel the way she handles.

Kittridge had gotten Warren’s address off his invoice. By the time he moved in—Warren presumably snug and safe in Alaska—it was simply a matter of finding the right key in the manager’s office, putting it into the slot in the elevator panel, and riding eighteen floors to the penthouse. He unloaded his gear. A rolling suitcase of clothes, three lockers of weaponry, a hand-crank radio, night-vision binoculars, flares, a first-aid kit, bottles of bleach, an arc welder to seal the doors of the elevator, his trusty laptop with its portable satellite dish, a box of books, and enough food and water to last a month. The view from the balcony, which ran the length of the west side of the building, was a sweeping 180 degrees, looking toward Interstate 25 and Mile High field. He’d positioned cameras equipped with motion detectors at each end of the balcony, one to cover the street, a second facing the building on the opposite side of the avenue. He figured he’d get a lot of good footage this way, but the money shots would be actual kills. The weapon he’d selected for this task was a Remington bolt-action 700P, .338 caliber—a nice balance of accuracy and stopping power, zeroing out at three hundred yards. To this he’d affixed a digital video scope with infrared. Using the binoculars, he would isolate his target; the rifle, mounted on a bipod at the edge of the balcony, would do the rest.

On the first night, windless and lit by a waning quarter moon, Kittridge had shot seven: five on the avenue, one on the opposite roof, and one more through the window of a bank at street level. It was the last one that made him famous. The creature, or vampire, or whatever it was—the official term was “Infected Person”—had looked straight into the lens just before Kittridge put one through the sweet spot. Uploaded to YouTube, the image had traveled around the globe within hours; by morning all the major networks had picked it up. Who is this man? everyone wanted to know. Who is this fearless-crazy-suicidal man, barricaded in a Denver high-rise, making his last stand?

And so was born the sobriquet, Last Stand in Denver.

From the start he’d assumed it was just a matter of time before somebody shut him down, CIA or NSA or Homeland. He was making quite a stir. Working in his favor was the fact that this same somebody would have to come to Denver to pull the plug. Kittridge’s IP address was functionally untraceable, backstopped by a daisy chain of anonymizer servers, their order scrambled every night. Most were overseas: Russia, China, Indonesia, Israel, Sudan. Places beyond easy reach for any federal agency that might want to pull the plug. His video blog—two million hits the first day—had more than three hundred mirror sites, with more added all the time. It didn’t take a week before he was a bona fide worldwide phenomenon. Twitter, Facebook, Headshot, Sphere: the images found their way into the ether without his lifting a finger. One of his fan sites alone had more than two million subscribers; on eBay, T-shirts that read, I AM LAST STAND IN DENVER were selling like hotcakes.

His father had always said, Son, the most important thing in life is to make a contribution. Who would have thought Kittridge’s contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse?

And yet the world went on. The sun still shone. To the west, the mountains shrugged their indifferent rocky bulk at man’s departure. For a while, there had been a lot of smoke—whole blocks had burned to the ground—but now this had dissipated, revealing the desolation with eerie clarity. At night, regions of blackness blotted the city, but elsewhere, lights still glittered in the gloom—flickering streetlamps, filling stations and convenience stores with their distinctive fluorescent glow, porch lights left burning for their owners’ return. While Kittridge maintained his vigil on the balcony, a traffic signal eighteen floors below still dutifully turned from green to yellow to red and then to green again.

He wasn’t lonely. Loneliness had left him, long ago. He was thirty-four years old. A little heavier than he would have liked—with his leg, it was hard to keep the weight off—but still strong. He’d been married once, years before. He remembered that period of his life as twenty months of oversexed, connubial bliss, followed by an equal number of months of yelling and screaming, accusations and counteraccusations, until the whole thing sank like a rock, and he was content, on the whole, that this union had produced no children. His connection to Denver was neither sentimental nor personal; after he’d gotten out of the VA, it was simply where he’d landed. Everyone said that a decorated veteran should have little trouble finding work. And maybe this was true. But Kittridge had been in no hurry. He’d spent the better part of a year just reading—the usual stuff at first, cop novels and thrillers, but eventually had found his way to more substantial books: As I Lay Dying, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby. He’d spent a whole month on Melville, drilling his way through Moby-Dick. Most were books he felt he ought to read, the ones he’d somehow missed in school, but he genuinely liked most of them. Sitting in the quiet of his studio apartment, his mind lost in tales of other lives and times, felt like taking a long drink after years of thirst. He’d even enrolled in a few classes at the community college, working at Outdoor World during the day, reading and writing his papers at nights and on his lunch hour. There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.

And then, of course, the end of the world had happened.

The morning the electricity failed, Kittridge had finished uploading the previous night’s footage and was sitting on the patio, reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities—the English barrister Sydney Carton had just declared his everlasting love for Lucie Manette, the fiancée of the haplessly idealistic Charles Darnay—when the thought touched him that the morning could only be improved by a dish of ice cream. Warren’s enormous kitchen—you could run a five-star restaurant out of the thing—had been, unsurprisingly, almost completely bereft of food, and Kittridge had long since thrown away the moldy take-out containers that had constituted the meager contents of the fridge. But the guy obviously had a weakness for Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, because the freezer was crammed with the stuff. Not Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia or Phish Food or even plain old vanilla. Just Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Kittridge would have liked some variety, considering there was going to be no more ice cream for a while, but with little else to eat besides canned soup and crackers, he was hardly going to complain. Balancing his book on the arm of his chair, he rose and stepped through the sliding glass door into the penthouse.

By the time he reached the kitchen, he had begun to sense that something was off-kilter, although this impression had yet to coalesce around anything specific. It wasn’t until he opened the carton and sank his spoon into a soft mush of melted Chocolate Fudge Brownie that he fully understood.

He tried a light switch. Nothing. He moved through the apartment, testing lamps and switches. All were the same.

In the middle of the living room, Kittridge paused and took a deep breath. Okay, he thought, okay. This was to be expected. If anything, this was long overdue. He checked his watch: 9:32 A.M. Sunset was a little after eight. Ten and a half hours to get his ass gone.

He threw together a rucksack of supplies: protein bars, bottles of water, clean socks and underwear, his first-aid kit, a warm jacket, a bottle of Zyrtec (his allergies had been playing hell with him all spring), a toothbrush, and a razor. For a moment he considered bringing A Tale of Two Cities along, but this seemed impractical, and with a twinge of regret he put it aside. In the bedroom he dressed himself in a wicking T-shirt and cargo pants, topping this off with a hunting vest and a pair of light hikers. For a few minutes he considered which weapons to take before settling on a Bowie knife, a pair of Glock 19s, and the retrofitted Polish AK with the folding stock: useless at any kind of range but reliable close in, where he expected to be. The Glocks fit snugly in a cross-draw holster. He filled the pockets of his vest with loaded magazines, clipped the AK to its sling, hoisted the backpack over his shoulders, and returned to the patio.

That was when he noticed the traffic signal on the avenue. Green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red. It could have been a fluke, but he doubted it.

They’d found him.

The rope was anchored to a drainage stack on the roof. He stepped into his rappelling harness, clipped in, and swung first his good leg and then his bad one over the railing. Heights were no problem for him, and yet he did not look down. He was perched on the edge of the balcony, facing the windows of the penthouse. From the distance he heard the sound of an approaching helicopter.

Last Stand in Denver, signing off.

With a push he was aloft, his body lobbing down and away. One story, two stories, three, the rope smoothly sliding through his hands: he landed on the balcony of the apartment four floors below. A familiar twang of pain shot upward from his left knee; he gritted his teeth to force it away. The helicopter was closing in now, the thrum of its blades volleying off the buildings. He peeled off his harness, drew one of the Glocks, and fired a single shot to shatter the glass of the balcony door.

The air of the apartment was stale, like the inside of a cabin sealed for winter. Heavy furniture, gilt mirrors, an oil painting of a horse over the fireplace; from somewhere wafted the stench of decay. He moved through the becalmed space with barely a glance. At the door he paused to attach a spotlight to the rail of the AK and stepped out into the hall, headed for the stairs.

In his pocket were the keys to the Ferrari, parked in the building’s underground garage, sixteen floors below. Kittridge shouldered open the door of the stairwell, quickly sweeping the space with the beam from the AK, up and down. Clear. He withdrew a flare from his vest and used his teeth to unscrew the plastic top, exposing the igniter button. With a combustive pop, the flare commenced its rain of sparks. Kittridge held it over the side, taking aim, and let go; if there was anything down there, he’d know it soon. His eyes followed the flare as it made its descent, dragging a contrail of smoke. Somewhere below it nicked the rail and bounced out of sight. Kittridge counted to ten. Nothing, no movement at all.

Three flares later he reached the bottom; a heavy steel door with a push bar and a small square of reinforced glass led to the garage. The floor was littered with trash: pop cans, candy bar wrappers, tins of food. A rumpled bedroll and a pile of musty clothing showed where someone had been sleeping—hiding, as he had.

Kittridge had scouted out the parking garage the day of his arrival. The Ferrari was parked near the southwest corner, a distance of approximately two hundred feet. He probably should have moved it closer to the door, but it had taken him three days to locate Warren’s keys—who kept his car keys in a bathroom drawer?—by which time he’d already barricaded himself inside the penthouse.

The fob had four buttons: two for the doors, one for the alarm, and one that, he hoped, was a remote starter. He pressed this one first.

From deep within the garage came a tart, single-noted bleep, followed by the throaty roar of the Ferrari’s engine. Another mistake: the Ferrari was parked nose to the wall. He should have thought of that. Not only would this slow his escape; if the car had been facing the opposite way, its headlights would have given him a better look at the garage’s interior. All he could make out through the stairwell door’s tiny window was a distant, glowing region where the car awaited, a cat purring in the dark. The rest of the garage was veiled in blackness. The infected liked to hang from things: ceiling struts, pipes, anything with a tactile surface. The tiniest fissure would suffice. When they came, they came from above.

The moment of decision was upon him. Toss more flares and see what happens? Move stealthily through the darkness, seeking cover? Throw open the door and run like hell?

Then, from high overhead, Kittridge heard the creak of an opening stairwell door. He held his breath and listened. There were two of them. He stepped back from the door and craned his neck upward. Ten stories above, a pair of red dots were dancing off the walls.

He shoved the door open and ran like hell.

He had made it halfway to the Ferrari when the first viral dropped behind him. There was no time to turn and fire; Kittridge kept on going. The pain in his knee felt like a wick of flame, an ice pick buried to the bone. From the periphery of his senses came a tingling awareness of beings awakening, the garage coming to life. He threw open the door of the Ferrari, tossed the AK and rucksack onto the passenger seat, got in, and slammed the door. The vehicle was so low-slung he felt like he was sitting on the ground. The dashboard, full of mysterious gauges and switches, glowed like a spacecraft’s. Something was missing. Where was the gearshift?

A wang of metal, and Kittridge’s vision filled with the sight of it. The viral had bounded onto the hood, folding its body into a reptilian crouch. For a frozen moment it regarded him coolly, a predator contemplating its prey. It was naked except for a wristwatch, a gleaming Rolex thick as an ice cube. Warren? Kittridge thought, for the man had been wearing one like it the day Kittridge had walked him to the car. Warren, old buddy, is that you? Because if it is, I wouldn’t mind a word of advice on how to get this thing in gear.

He discovered, then, with the tips of his fingers, a pair of levers positioned on the undersides of the steering wheel. Paddle shifters. He should have thought of that, too. Up on the right, down on the left, like a motorcycle. Reverse would be a button somewhere on the dash.

The one with the R, genius. That one.

He pushed the button and hit the gas. Too fast: with a squeal of smoking rubber, the Ferrari jolted backward and slammed into a concrete post. Kittridge was hurled back into his seat, then tossed forward again, his head smacking the heavy glass of the side window with an audible thud. His brain chimed like a tuning fork; particles of silver light danced in his eyes. There was something interesting about them, interesting and beautiful, but another voice inside him said that to contemplate this vision, even for a moment, was to die. The viral, having tumbled off the hood, was rising from the floor now. No doubt it would try to take him straight through the windshield.

Two red dots appeared on the viral’s chest.

With a birdlike quickness, the creature broke its gaze from Kittridge and launched toward the soldiers coming through the stairwell door. Kittridge swung the steering wheel and gripped the right paddle, engaging the transmission as he pressed the accelerator. A lurch and then a leap of speed: he was thrust back into his seat as he heard a blast of automatic weapon fire. Just when he thought he’d lose control of the car again he found the straightaway, the walls of the garage streaming past. The soldiers had bought him only a moment; a quick glimpse in the rearview and Kittridge beheld, in the glow of his taillights, what appeared to be the detonation of a human body, an explosive strewing of parts. The second soldier was nowhere visible, though if Kittridge had to bet, he’d say the man was surely dead already, torn to bloody hunks.

He didn’t look back again.

The ramp to the street was located two floors above, at the far end of the garage. As Kittridge downshifted into the first corner, engine roaring, tires shrieking, two more virals dropped from the ceiling, into his path. One fell under his wheels with a damp crunch, but the second leapt over the roof of the barreling Ferrari, striding it like a hurdler. Kittridge felt a stab of wonder, even of admiration. In school, he had learned that you couldn’t catch a fly with your hand because time was different to a fly: in a fly’s brain, a second was an hour, and an hour was a year. That’s what the infected were like. Like beings outside of time.

They were everywhere now, emerging from all the hidden places. They flung themselves at the car like suicides, driven by the madness of their hunger. He tore through them, bodies flying, their monstrous, distorted faces colliding with the windshield before being hurled up and over, away. Two more turns and he’d be free, but one was clinging to the roof now. Kittridge braked around the corner, fishtailing on the slick cement, the force of his deceleration sending the viral rolling onto the hood. A woman: she appeared to be wearing, of all things, a wedding gown. Gouging her fingers into the gap at the base of the windshield, she drew herself onto all fours. Her mouth, a bear trap of blood-lined teeth, was open very wide; a tiny golden crucifix dangled at the base of her throat. I’m sorry about your wedding, Kittridge thought as he drew one of the pistols, steadied it over the steering wheel, and fired through the windshield.

He blasted around the final corner; ahead, a shaft of golden daylight showed the way. Kittridge hit the ramp doing seventy miles an hour, still accelerating. The exit was sealed by a metal grate, but this fact seemed meager, no obstacle at all. Kittridge took aim, plunged the pedal to the floor, and ducked.

A furious crash; for two full seconds, an eternity in miniature, the Ferrari went airborne. It rocketed into the sunshine, concussing the pavement with a bone-jarring bang, sparks flying from the undercarriage. Freedom at last, but now he had another problem: there was nothing to stop him. He was going to careen into the lobby of the bank across the street. As Kittridge bounced across the median, he stamped the brake and swerved to the left, bracing for the impact. But there was no need; with a screech of smoking rubber, the tires bit and held, and the next thing Kittridge knew he was flying down the avenue, into the spring morning.

He had to admit it. What had Warren’s exact words been? You should feel the way she handles.

It was true. Kittridge had never driven anything like it in his life.

5

For a time, a long time, which was no time at all, the man known as Lawrence Grey—former inmate of Beeville Men’s Correctional Facility and registered sex offender of the Texas Department of Public Safety; civilian employee of Project NOAH and the Division of Special Weapons; Grey the Source, the Unleasher of Night, Familiar of the One Called Zero—was nowhere at all. He was nothing and no place, a being annihilated, possessing neither memory nor history, his consciousness dispersed across a shoreless sea of no dimension. A wide, dark sea of voices, murmuring his name. Grey, Grey. They were there and not there, calling to him as he floated alone, one with the darkness, adrift in an ocean of forever; and all above, the stars.

But not just the stars. For now had come a light—a soft, golden light that swelled above his face. Blades of shadow moved across it, gyring like a pinwheel, and with this light a sound: aortal, heartlike, a thrum-thrum-thrum that pulsed to the rhythm of its turning. Grey watched it, this wonderful, gyring light; and the thought crept into his consciousness that what he beheld was God. The light was God in his heaven above, moving over the waters, brushing the face of the world like the hem of a curtain, touching and blessing his creation. The knowledge blossomed inside Grey in a burst of sweetness. Such joy! Such understanding and forgiveness! The light was God and God was love; Grey had only to enter it, to go into the light, to feel that love forever. And a voice said:

It’s time, Grey.

Come to me.

He felt himself rising, lifted up. He rose and as he rose the sky spread its wings, receiving him, carrying him into the light, which was almost too much to bear and then was: a brightness blinding and obliterating, like the sound of a scream that was his own.

Grey, ascending. Grey, reborn.

Open your eyes, Grey.

He did; he opened his eyes. His vision crawled into focus. A dark form was whirling unpleasantly above his face.

It was a ceiling fan.

He blinked the grime away. A bitter taste, like wet ashes, painted the walls of his mouth. The room where he lay possessed the unmistakable sense of a chain motel—the scratchy coverlet and cheap foam pillow, the cratered mattress below and popcorn ceiling above, the smell of recycled, overused air in his nostrils. His brain felt as empty as a leaky pail, his body a shapeless mass, vague as gelatin. Even to move his head seemed to require a feat of strength beyond his power. The room was lit with a sticky yellow daylight filtered through the drapes. Above his face, the fan spun and spun, rocking on its bracket, its worn-out bearings rhythmically creaking. The sight was as abrasive to his senses as smelling salts, and yet he could not look away. (And wasn’t there something about a thrumming sound, something in a dream? A brilliant light, lifting him up? But he no longer recalled.)

“Good, you’re awake.”

Sitting on the edge of the second bed, eyes downcast, was a man. A small, soft man, filling out his jumpsuit like a sausage in its casing. One of the civilian employees of Project NOAH, known as sweeps: men like Grey whose job it was to clean up the piss and shit and back up the drives and watch the sticks for hours and hours, slowly going loony; sex offenders to a one, despised and forgotten, men without histories anyone cared to remember, their bodies softened by hormones, their minds and spirits as neutered as a spayed dog.

“I thought the fan would do it. Tell you the truth, I can’t even look at the thing.”

Grey tried to respond but couldn’t. His tongue felt toasted, as if he’d smoked a billion cigarettes. His vision had gone all watery again; his goddamned head was splitting. It had been years since he’d drunk more than a couple of beers at a time—with the drugs, you were too sleepy and pretty much lost interest in everything—but Grey remembered what a hangover was. That’s how this felt. Like the worst hangover in the world.

“What’s the matter, Grey? Cat got your tongue?” The man chuckled at some private joke. “That’s funny, you know. Under the circumstances. I could go for a little cat tartare right now.” He turned toward Grey, his eyebrows arcing. “Don’t look so shocked. You’ll see what I mean. Takes a few days but then it kicks in, real hard.”

Grey remembered the man’s name: Ignacio. Though the Ignacio that Grey remembered was older, more worn-down, with a heavy, creased brow and pores you could park a car in and jowls that sagged like a bassett hound’s. This Ignacio was in the pink of health—literally pink, his cheeks rouged with color, skin baby smooth, eyes twinkling like zircs. Even his hair looked younger. But there was no mistaking who it was, on account of the tat—prison ink, blurred and bluish, a hooded snake rising up his neck from the open collar of his jumpsuit.

“Where am I?”

“You’re a regular riot, you know that? We’re at the Red Roof.”

“The what?”

He made a little snort. “The fucking Red Roof, Grey. What did you think, they’d send us to the Ritz?”

They? Grey thought. Who were they? And what did Ignacio mean by “send”? Send for what purpose? Which was the moment Grey noticed that Ignacio was clutching something in his hand. A pistol?

“Iggy? What are you doing with that thing?”

Ignacio lazily raised the gun, a long-barreled .45, frowning at it. “Not much, apparently.” He angled his head toward the door. “Those other guys were here for a while, too. But they’re all gone now.”

“What guys?”

“Come on, Grey. You know those guys. The skinny one, George. Eddie whatzisname. Jude, with the ponytail.” He looked past Grey toward the curtains. “Tell you the truth, I never did like him. I heard about the stuff he did, not that I’m anyone to talk. But that man, he was flat-out disgusting.”

Ignacio was talking about the other sweeps. What were they all doing here? What was he doing here? The gun wasn’t a good sign, but Grey couldn’t call up a single memory of how he’d come to be where he was. The last thing he recalled was eating dinner in the compound cafeteria: beef bourguignon in a rich gravy, with a side of scalloped potatoes and green beans and a Cherry Coke to wash it all down. It was his favorite meal; he always looked forward to beef bourguignon. Though as he thought about it, its greasy taste, his stomach clamped with nausea. A squirt of bile shot up his throat. He had to take a moment just to breathe.

Ignacio gave his pistol a halfhearted wave toward the door. “Look yourself if you want. But I’m pretty sure they’re gone.”

Grey swallowed. “Gone where?”

“That depends. Wherever they’re supposed to go.”

Grey felt totally at sea. He couldn’t even figure out what questions to ask. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t like the answers, though. Maybe the best thing was to lie quietly. He hoped he hadn’t done something terrible, like in the old days. The days of the Old Grey.

“Well,” Ignacio said, and cleared his throat, “as long as you’re awake, I guess I better be moving on. I’ve got a long walk ahead of me.” He rose and held out the gun. “Here.”

Grey hesitated. “What do I want a gun for?”

“In case you feel like, you know, shooting yourself.”

Grey was too stunned to reply. The last thing he wanted was a gun. Somebody found a gun on him, they’d send him back to prison for sure. When he made no move to accept the weapon, Ignacio placed it on the bedside table.

“Give it some thought, anyway. Just don’t drag your feet like I did. It gets harder the longer you wait. Now look at the fix I’m in.”

Ignacio moved to the door, where he turned to cast his gaze a final time around the room.

“We really did it. In case you were, you know, wondering.” He took a long breath, blowing out the air with puffed cheeks, and angled his face toward the ceiling. “Funny thing is, I really don’t see what I did to deserve this. I wasn’t so bad, not really. I didn’t mean to do half those things. It was just the way I was built.” He looked at Grey again; his eyes were filmed with tears. “That’s what the shrink always said. Ignacio, it’s just the way you’re built.”

Grey had no idea what to say. Sometimes there was nothing, and he guessed this was one of those times. The look on Ignacio’s face reminded him of some of the cons he’d known in Beeville, men who’d been inside so long they were like zombies in some old movie. Men with nothing but the past to dwell on and, ahead, an endless stretch of nothing.

“Well, fuck it.” Ignacio sniffled and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “No use complaining about it now. You make your bed you have to lie in it. Think about what I said, okay? Be seeing you, Grey.” And with a wash of light from the open door, he was gone.

What to make of that? For a long time Grey lay still, his mind spinning like a bald tire on ice. Part of him wasn’t sure if he was awake or still sleeping. He reviewed the facts to give his mind a point to fix on. He was on a bed. The bed was in a motel, a Red Roof. The motel was somewhere in Colorado, probably, assuming he hadn’t gone far. The light in the windows said morning. He didn’t appear to be injured. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, maybe more and maybe less, but probably not more than a day, he’d blacked out.

He’d have to go from there.

He drew himself up on his elbows. The room reeked of sweat and smoke. His jumpsuit was stained and torn at the knees; his feet were bare. He gave his toes a wiggle, the joints cracking and popping. Everything seemed to be working.

And come to think of it, wasn’t it true that he was feeling better? And not just better—a lot better. The headache and dizziness were gone. His vision had cleared. His limbs felt firm and strong, full of fresh, coiled energy. His mouth still tasted foul—finding a toothbrush or a pack of gum was job one—but other than that, Grey felt right as rain.

He swiveled his feet to the floor. The room was small, just space enough for the beds, with their brown-and-orange coverlets, and a little table with a television. But when he picked up the remote to turn it on, all he got was a blue screen with a sound like a dial tone. He flipped through the channels; the network affiliates, CNN, the War Channel, GOVTV—all were blued out. Well, didn’t that just figure. He’d have to tell the manager about that. Though as far as he recalled he hadn’t paid for the room, and his wallet had been confiscated months ago, when he’d first arrived at the compound.

The compound, Grey thought, the word dropping to his gut like a rock. Whatever else was true, he was in a heap of trouble. You didn’t just up and leave. He remembered Jack and Sam, the two sweeps who’d gone AWOL, and how pissed off Richards had been. Who was not somebody you wanted to piss off, to put it mildly. Just a glance from the man made Grey’s bowels twist.

Maybe that’s why the sweeps had all run off. Maybe it was Richards they were afraid of.

His thirst hit him then—a mad, crazy thirst, like he hadn’t had a drink in days. In the bathroom he jammed his face under the tap, gulping fiercely, letting the water stream over his face. Slow down, Grey, he thought, you’re going to make yourself sick if you drink like this.

Too late; the water hit his stomach like a crashing wave, and the next thing he knew he was on his knees, clutching the sides of the toilet bowl, all the water coming up.

Well, that was dumb. He had no one to blame but himself. He stayed on his knees a moment, waiting for the cramping to pass, breathing in the stink of his own vomit—mostly water, but in the final instance a gooey, yolk-like glob, no doubt the undigested remnants of the beef bourguignon. He must have strained something, too, because his ears were ringing: a faint, nearly subaural whine, like the sound of a tiny motor whirring deep inside his skull.

He struggled to his feet and flushed the puke away. On the vanity he saw a little bottle of mouthwash in a tray with soaps and lotions, none of it touched, and he took a swig to clear the taste in his mouth, gargling long and hard and spitting into the sink. Then he looked at his face in the mirror.

Grey’s first thought was that somebody was playing a joke on him: an elaborate, unfunny, improbable joke, in which the mirror had somehow been replaced by a window, and on the far side stood a man—a much younger, better-looking man. The urge to reach out and touch this image was so strong he actually did it, the man in the mirror perfectly mimicking his movements. What the fuck? Grey thought, and then he said it: “What the fuck?” The face he beheld was slim, clear-skinned, attractive. His hair brushed over his ears in a lush mane, its tone a rich chestnut. His eyes were clear and bright; they actually sparkled. Never in his life had Grey looked so good.

Something else drew his eye. Some sort of mark on his neck. He leaned forward, tilting his head upward. Two lines of symmetrical beadlike depressions, roughly circular in their arrangement, the top of the circle reaching to his jawline, the bottom skimming the curve of his collarbone. The wound had a pinkish color, as if only lately healed. When the hell had this happened? As a kid he’d been bitten by a dog once; that was what this looked like. A surly old mutt-dog from the pound, but still he’d loved it, it was something that was his, until the day he’d bitten Grey on the hand—no good reason for it; Grey had only meant to give him a biscuit—and his father had dragged him to the yard. Two shots, Grey recalled that clearly, the first followed by a yelping squeal, the second dimming the dog forever into silence. The dog’s name was Buster. Grey hadn’t given him a thought in years.

But this thing on his neck. Where had it come from? There was something familiar about it—a feeling of déjà vu, as if the recollection had been stored in the wrong drawer in his mind.

Grey, don’t you know?

Grey spun from the mirror.

“Iggy?”

Silence. He returned to the bedroom. He opened the closet, knelt to look beneath the beds. No one.

Grey. Grey.

“Iggy, where are you? Quit fucking with me.”

Don’t you remember, Grey?

Something was wrong with him, really wrong. It wasn’t Iggy’s voice he was hearing; the voice was in his head. Every surface that met his eyes seemed to throb with vividness. He rubbed his eyes, but it only got worse. It was as if he weren’t just seeing things, but touching and smelling and tasting them too, as if the wires in his brain had crossed.

Don’t you remember… dying?

And all at once he did; the memory pierced him like an arrow to the chest. The aquatic blue of the containment chamber, and the slowly opening door; Subject Zero rising above him, assuming his full and terrible dimensions; the feel of Zero’s jaws on the curve of his neck and the clamp of boring teeth, picketed row upon row; Zero gone, leaving him alone, and the blare of the alarm and the sound of gunfire and the screams of dying men; his stumble into the hall, a vision of hell, blood everywhere, painting the walls and floor, and the grisly remains, a slaughterhouse of legs and arms and torsos with their roping entrails; the sticky, arterial spurt through his fingers where he held them to his throat; the air whooshing out of him, and his long slide to the floor, blackness enveloping him, his vision swimming; and then the letting go.

Oh God.

Come to me, Grey. Come to me.

He tore from the room, daylight blasting his eyes. It was crazy; he was crazy. Across the parking lot he ran like a great, lumbering animal, sightless and without direction, his hands clamped to his ears. A few cars dotted the lot, parked at haphazard angles, many with their doors standing open. But in its white-hot state, Grey’s mind failed to register this fact, just as it failed to note other troubling details: the smashed front windows of the hotel; the highway on which not a single vehicle could be seen to move; the vacant filling station across the access road, its windows smeared with red, and the body of a man slumped against the pump in the manner of an impromptu siesta; the wrecked McDonald’s, its chairs and tables and ketchup packets and Happy Meal toys and patrons of various ages and races hurled through the windows in violent disgorgement; the plume of chemical smoke from the still-burning wreckage of a tractor-trailer two miles away; the birds. Great wheeling clouds of large, black birds, crows and ravens and buzzards, the scavengers, idly spinning overhead. All of it suspended like the aftermath of a terrible battle, bathed with pitiless summer sunshine.

Do you see, Grey?

“Stop it! Shut up!”

He stumbled on something soft. Organically damp and squishy, under his feet. It sent him crashing to his hands and knees, skidding on the blacktop.

See the world that we have made.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He was heaving for breath. He knew without looking that the squishy thing was a body. Please, he thought, not sure whom or even what he was addressing. Himself. The voice in his head. God, whom he’d never quite believed in but was willing to believe in now. I’m sorry for whatever I did. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

By the time he finally looked, all hope had left him. The body was a woman. The flesh of her face was sucked so tightly to the bones it was hard to tell how old she was. She was dressed in sweatpants and a scoop-necked T-shirt with a little frill of pink lace at the neckline; Grey supposed she’d been in bed and had come out to see what was happening. She was splayed on the pavement, her back and shoulders twisted. Flies were buzzing over her, dipping in and out of her mouth and eyes. One arm lay outstretched on the pavement, palm up; the other was bent across her chest, the tips of her fingers touching the wound at her throat. Not a cut or gash, nothing as tidy as that. Her throat had been chomped away, down to the bone.

She was not the only one. Grey’s vision widened, like a camera lifting over the scene. To his left, twenty feet away, a Chevy half-ton was parked with the driver’s door open. A heavyset man in suit pants with suspenders had been pulled from his seat and now hung half in and half out of the truck, dangling head-down over the running board, though his head wasn’t there; his head was somewhere else.

More bodies lay near the hotel entrance. Not bodies, strictly speaking—more like a zone of human parts. A woman police officer had been eviscerated as she’d stepped from her cruiser. She rested with her back propped against the fender, pistol still clutched in her hand, her chest opened like the flaps of a trench coat. A man in a shiny purple tracksuit, wearing enough gold around his neck to fill a pirate chest, had been hurled upward, his torso lodging like a kite in the limbs of a maple tree; his bottom half had come to rest on the hood of a jewel-black Mercedes. The man’s legs were crossed at the ankles, as if the lower half of his body hadn’t heard it was missing the rest.

By this time, Grey knew himself to be in something close to a trance. You couldn’t look at something like this and allow yourself to feel anything.

The one that finally did it was the one that wasn’t there. Two vehicles, a Honda Accord and a Chrysler Countryside, had collided head-on near the exit, their front ends crumpled into each other like the bellows of an accordion. The driver of the sedan had been shot through the windshield. The sedan was otherwise untouched, but the minivan looked ransacked. Its sliding door had been ripped away and hurled across the parking lot like a Frisbee. On the pavement by the open door, in a plume of debris—suitcases, toys, a jumbo pack of diapers—lay the prostrate body of a woman; just beyond the reach of her outstretched hand, tipped on its side, was an empty baby carrier. What happened to the baby? Grey thought.

And then: Oh.

Grey chose the pickup. He wouldn’t have minded driving the Mercedes, but he guessed a truck would be more sensible. He’d owned a Chevy half-ton, back in a life that didn’t seem to matter now, so the pickup was something familiar to cling to. He eased the decapitated driver free and laid him on the pavement. It was troubling, not having the head to give back to the poor guy. It didn’t seem right to leave him there without it. But the head was nowhere obvious, and Grey had seen enough. He looked around for a pair of shoes his size—13EEE; whatever Zero had done to him, it hadn’t shrunk his feet any—and finally chose a pair of loafers from the feet of the man on the Mercedes. They were Italian lambskin, soft as butter, and a little narrow in the toe box, but leather like that would stretch. He got in the truck and started the engine. There was a little more than three-quarters of a tank of gas; Grey figured that would get him most of the way to Denver.

He was about to pull away when a last thought occurred to him. He put the vehicle in park and returned to the room. Holding the pistol a little distance from his body, he walked back to the truck and deposited it in the glove compartment. Then, with only the gun for company, he put the truck in gear and drove away.

6

Momma was in the bedroom. Momma was in the bedroom, not moving. Momma was in the bedroom, which was forbidden. Momma was dead, precisely.

After I’m gone, remember to eat, because you sometimes forget. Bathe every other day. Milk in the fridge, Lucky Charms in the cupboard, and hamburger casseroles to reheat in the freezer. Put them in at 350 for an hour, and remember to turn off the oven when you’re done. Be my big boy, Danny. I love you always. I just can’t be afraid anymore. Love, Momma.

She’d left the note tucked beneath the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table. Danny liked salt, but not pepper, which made him sneeze. Ten days had gone by—Danny knew this from the marks he put on the calendar every morning—and the note was still there. He didn’t know what to do with it. The whole place smelled something awful, the way a raccoon or possum did when it had been run over again and again for days.

The milk was no good, too. With the electricity off, it had gone sour, warm and unpleasant in his mouth. He tried the Lucky Charms with water from the tap, but it wasn’t the same, nothing was the same, everything was different because Momma was in the bedroom. At night he sat in the dark in his room with the door closed. He knew where Momma kept the candles, they were in the cupboard over the sink where she kept her bottle of Popov for when her nerves got to her, but matches were nothing for him. They were on the list. It wasn’t an actual list, it was just the things he couldn’t do or touch. The toaster, because he kept pushing the button back down and burning the toast. The pistol in Momma’s nightstand, because it wasn’t a toy, it could shoot you. The girls on his bus, because they wouldn’t like it, and he wouldn’t get to drive the No. 12 anymore, which would be bad. That would be the worst thing in the world to Danny Chayes.

No electricity meant no TV, so he couldn’t watch Thomas, either. Thomas was for little boys, Momma had told him so a million times, but the therapist, Dr. Francis, said it was okay to watch it as long as Danny tried other things, too. His favorite was James. Danny liked his red color and matching tender, and the sound of his voice the way the narrator did it, so soothing it made his throat tickle at the top. Faces were hard for Danny, but the expressions on the Thomas trains were always precise and easy to follow, and it was funny, the things they did to each other, the pranks they liked to play. Switching the tracks so Percy would run into a coal loader. Pouring chocolate all over Gordon, who pulled the express, because he was such a haughty engine. The kids on his bus sometimes made fun of Danny, calling him Topham Hatt, singing the song with not-nice words in place of the real ones, but for the most part Danny tuned this out. There was one kid, though. His name was Billy Nice, and nice was not what he was. He was a sixth grader, but Danny thought he’d probably been held back a few times, on account of he had a body like a full-grown man’s. He boarded each morning without so much as a book in his hands, sneering at Danny as he mounted the steps, high-fiving and what-upping the other boys as he sauntered down the alley between the seats, dragging a smell of cigarettes.

Hey, Topham Hatt, how are things going on the Island of Sodor today? Is it true that Lady Hatt likes to take it in the caboose?

Har-har-har, Billy laughed. Har-har-har. Danny never said anything back, because it would only make things worse; he’d never told Mr. Purvis anything, because he knew what the man would say. Goddamnit, Danny, whatcha let the little shit treat you like that for? Lord knows you’re one weird duck, but you’ve got to stand up for yourself. You’re the captain of that ship. You allow a mutiny and the next thing you know everything goes in the dumper.

Danny liked Mr. Purvis, the dispatcher. Mr. Purvis had always been a friend to Danny, and Momma, too. Momma was one of the cafeteria ladies, so that was how they knew each other, and Mr. Purvis was always coming around the house, fixing things, like the disposal or a loose board on the porch, even though he had a wife of his own, Mrs. Purvis. He was a big bald man who liked to whistle through his teeth and was always hitching up his pants. Sometimes he visited at night, after Danny was in bed; Danny would hear the TV going in the living room, and the pair of them laughing and talking. Danny liked those nights. They gave him a good feeling in his mind, like the happy-click. When anybody asked, Momma always said that Danny’s father “wasn’t in the picture,” which was precisely true. There were pictures of Momma in the house, and pictures of Danny, and pictures of the two of them together. But he’d never seen one with his father in it. Danny didn’t even know the man’s name.

The bus had been Mr. Purvis’s idea. He’d taught Danny to drive in the parking lot at the depot, and went with him to get his Class B license, and helped him fill out the application. Momma hadn’t been so sure at first, on account of her needing Danny to help around the house, being a useful engine, and the Social Security, which was money from the government. But Danny knew the real reason, which was the different and special way he was. The thing with a job, Momma had explained, using her careful voice, was that a person needed to be “adaptable.” Things would happen, different things. Take the cafeteria. Some days they would serve hot dogs, and some days lasagna, and other days chicken cutlets. The menu might say one thing, but it turned out to be another; you couldn’t always know. Wouldn’t that upset him?

But a bus wasn’t a cafeteria. A bus was a bus, and it ran on a schedule, precisely. When Danny got behind the wheel, he felt the happy-click bigger and deeper than he’d ever felt in his life. Driving a bus! A big yellow one, all the seats in their orderly rows, the gearshift with its six speeds and reverse, everything laid out nice and neat before him. It wasn’t a train but it was close, and each morning as he pulled away from the depot, he always imagined he was Gordon or Henry or Percy or even Thomas himself.

He was always on time. Forty-two minutes from depot to drop-off, 8.2 miles, nineteen stops, twenty-nine passengers, precisely. Robert-Shelly-Brittany-Maybeth-Joey-Darla/Denise (the twins)-Pedro-Damien-Jordan-Charlie-Oliver (O-Man)-Sasha-Billy-Molly-Lyle-Dick (Dickhead)-Richard-Lisa-Mckenna-Anna-Lily-Matthew-Charlie-Emily-JohnJohn-Kayla-Sean-Timothy. Sometimes a parent would wait with them on the corner, a mother in a housecoat or a father in a jacket and tie, holding a mug of coffee. How’s it going today, Danny, they might say, wearing a good-morning smile on their faces. You know, a person could set their watch by you.

Be my useful engine, Momma always said, and that’s what Danny was.

But now the children were gone. Not just the children: everyone. Momma and Mr. Purvis and maybe all the people in the world. The nights were dark and still, no lights burning anywhere. For a while there had been a lot of noise—people yelling, sirens wailing, Army trucks roaring down the street. He’d heard the pop of guns. Pop! went the guns. Pop-pop-pop-pop! What are they shooting at, Danny wanted to know, but Momma wouldn’t say. She told him to stay inside, using her strong voice, and not to watch TV, and to keep away from the windows. What about the bus, Danny asked, and Momma only said, Damnit, Danny, don’t worry about the bus now. School’s out today. What about tomorrow, Danny asked. And Momma said, It’s out tomorrow, too.

Without the bus, he didn’t know what to do with himself. His brain felt as jumpy as corn in a hot pan. He wished Mr. Purvis could come over and watch TV with Momma, it always made her feel better about things, but the man never did. The world went quiet, the way it was now. There were monsters out there. Danny had figured that out. As a for instance, there was the woman across the street, Mrs. Kim. Mrs. Kim taught the violin, kids coming over to her house for their lessons, and on summer days when the windows were open Danny could hear them playing, twinkle-twinkle and Mary-had-a-little-lamb and other things he didn’t know the names of. Now there was no violin and Mrs. Kim was hanging over the porch railing.

And then one night Danny heard Momma crying in the bedroom. Once in a while she cried like this, all alone, it was normal and natural and nothing for Danny to worry about, but this felt different. For a long time he lay in his bed listening, wondering what that must be like, to feel something so sad it made you cry, but the idea was like something on a shelf he couldn’t reach. Sometime later he awoke in the dark to the feel of someone touching his hair and he opened his eyes to see her sitting there. Danny didn’t like to be touched, it gave him the jangly feeling something awful, but it was okay when Momma did it, mostly, on account of he was used to it. What is it, Momma? Danny said. What’s wrong? But all she said was Hush now, hush now, Danny. Something was resting in her lap, folded in a towel. I love you, Danny. Do you know how much I love you? I love you, too, Momma, he said, because that was the right answer when someone said I-love-you, and to the feel of her hand caressing him he fell asleep, and in the morning her bedroom door was closed and never opened and Danny knew. He didn’t even have to look.

He decided to drive the bus after all.

Because maybe he wasn’t the only person still living. Because it gave him the happy-click, driving the bus. Because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, with Momma in the bedroom and the milk spoiled and all the days gone by.

He’d laid out his clothes the night before the way Momma always did, a pair of khakis and a white collared shirt and brown tie shoes, and packed a lunch. There wasn’t much left to eat except for peanut butter and some graham crackers and a bag of stale marshmallows, but he’d saved a bottle of Mountain Dew, and he put it all in his backpack with his pocket knife and his lucky penny, then went to his closet to get his hat, the blue-striped engineer’s cap that Momma had bought him at Traintown. Traintown was a park where kids could ride the trains, just like Thomas. Danny had gone there since he was little, it was his favorite place in the world, but the cars were too tight for Danny to fit in with his big legs and long arms, so he liked to watch the trains go round and round with their little puffs of smoke chuffing from their stacks. Except for trips to Traintown, Momma didn’t let him wear the hat outside the house, on account of she said people would make fun of him, but Danny figured it would be okay to wear it now.

He set out at dawn. The bus’s keys were in his pocket, flat against his thigh. The depot was 3.2 miles away, precisely. He hadn’t walked a block before he saw the first bodies. Some were in their cars, others were lying on their lawns or draped over garbage cans or even hanging in the trees. Their skin had turned the same blue-gray color as Mrs. Kim’s, their clothing stretched tight over limbs that had swollen in the summer heat. It was bad to look at, bad but strange and also interesting; if he’d had more time, Danny would have stopped to get a closer look. There was a lot of litter, bits of paper and plastic cups and fluttering grocery sacks, which Danny didn’t like. People shouldn’t litter.

By the time he got to the depot, the sun was warm on his shoulders. Most of the buses were there but not all. They were parked in rows with empty spaces, like a mouth with missing teeth. But Danny’s bus, the No. 12, was waiting in its usual spot. There were many different kinds of buses in the world, shuttle buses and charter buses and city buses and coaches, and Danny knew about them all. That was something he liked to do—to learn everything there was to know about one thing. His bus was a Redbird 450, the Foresight model. Built to the most exacting engineering standards, with all-permanent frame fixtures, Easy Hood Assist™, an advanced driver’s information display providing a wealth of system knowledge to both the operator and service technicians, and the purpose-built, single-scope Redbird Comfortride™ chassis, the 450 was the number one choice for safety, quality, and extended life-cycle value in the industry today.

Danny climbed aboard and wedged the key into the ignition; as the big Caterpillar diesel roared to life, a warm surge filled his belly. He checked his watch: 6:52. When the big hand hit the twelve, he put the bus in gear and pulled away.

It seemed odd at first, driving through empty streets with no one around, but by the time Danny was approaching his first stop—the May-fields’, Robert and Shelly—he’d settled into the rhythms of the morning. It was easy to imagine that today was just an ordinary day. He brought the bus to a halt. Well, Robert and Shelly were sometimes late. He’d honk the horn and they’d come dashing out the door, their mother calling after them to be good, have fun, and sending them off with a wave. The house was a bungalow not much bigger than the one Danny lived in with Momma but nicer, painted the color of a pumpkin and sitting behind a wide front porch with a swing. In spring there were always baskets of flowers hanging off the rails. The baskets were still there, but the flowers had all wilted. The lawn needed mowing, too. Danny craned his neck to look up through the windshield. A window on the second floor looked like it had been ripped from its frame. The blind was still hanging in the space where the window used to be, lolling out of it like a tongue. He honked the horn and waited a minute. But still nobody came.

Seven-oh-eight. He had other stops to make. He pulled away from the corner and guided the bus around a Prius lying on its side. He came to other things in the road. An overturned police car, smashed flat. An ambulance. A dead cat. A lot of the houses had X’s spray-painted on their doors, with numbers and letters in the spaces. By the time he arrived at his second stop, a townhouse complex called Castle Oaks, he was already running twelve minutes late. Brittany-Maybeth-Joey-Darla/Denise. He gave the horn a long honk, then another. But there wasn’t any point. Danny was just going through the motions now. Castle Oaks was a smoking ruin. The entire complex had burned to the ground.

More stops: all were the same. He guided the bus west into Cherry Creek. The houses were bigger here, set back from the road behind wide, sloped lawns. Big leafy trees draped curtains of dappled shade over the street. There was a quiet feeling here, more peaceful. The houses looked like they always did, and there were no bodies that Danny could see. But still there were no children.

By now his bus would have had twenty-five kids in it. The silence was unnerving. The noise in the bus always built along the route, each stop adding a little more with every kid who got on, the way music rose in a movie, approaching the final scene. The final scene was the bump. A speed bump on Lindler Avenue. Do the bump, Danny! they’d all cry out. Do the bump! And though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d give the bus a little extra gas, jolting them from their seats, and for that one moment he’d feel himself to be a part of them. He’d never been a kid like they were, just a kid going to school. But when the bus went over the bump, he was.

Danny was thinking about this, missing the children, even Billy Nice and his stupid jokes and har-har-har, when up ahead he saw a boy. It was Timothy. He was waiting with his older sister at the end of their driveway. Danny would have known the boy anywhere, on account of the cowlick—two spikes of hair that stuck up from the back of his head like antennae on a bug. Timothy was one of the youngest kids, second grade or maybe third, and small; sometimes the housekeeper waited with him, a plump brown woman in a smock, but usually it was the boy’s older sister, who Danny guessed was in high school. She was a funny girl to look at, not funny ha-ha but funny strange, with hair streaked the color of the Pepto that Momma gave him when his stomach got nervous from eating too fast and heavy black eyeliner that made her look like one of those paintings in a scary movie, the kind with eyes that moved. She had about ten studs in each ear; most days she was wearing a dog collar. A dog collar! Like she was a dog! The odd thing was that Danny thought she was sort of pretty, if not for all the weird stuff. He didn’t know any girls her age, or any age, really, and he liked the way she waited with her brother, holding his hand but letting it go as the bus approached so the other kids wouldn’t see.

He drew up to the end of the driveway and pulled the lever to open the door. “Hey,” he said, because that was all he could think of. “Hey, good morning.”

It seemed like their turn to talk, but they didn’t say anything. Danny let his eyes quickly graze their faces; their expressions were nothing he could read. None of the trains on Thomas ever looked like these two did. The Thomas trains were happy or sad or cross, but this was something else, like the blank screen on the TV when the cable wasn’t working. The girl’s eyes were puffy and red, her hair kind of smooshed-looking. Timothy had a runny nose he kept rubbing with the back of his wrist. Their clothing was all wrinkled and stained.

“We heard you honking,” the girl said. Her voice was hoarse and shaky, like she hadn’t used it in a while. “We were hiding in the cellar. We ran out of food two days ago.”

Danny shrugged. “I had Lucky Charms. But just with water. They’re no good that way.”

“Is there anybody else left?” the girl asked.

“Left where?”

“Left alive.”

Danny didn’t know how to answer that. The question seemed too big. Maybe there wasn’t; he’d seen a lot of bodies. But he didn’t want to say so, not with Timothy there.

He glanced at the boy, who so far had said nothing, just kept nervously rubbing his nose with his wrist. “Hey, Timbo. You got allergies? I have those sometimes.”

“Our parents are in Telluride,” the boy stated. He was looking at his sneakers. “Consuela was with us. But she left.”

Danny didn’t know who Consuela was. It was hard when people didn’t answer your question but instead answered some other question you hadn’t even thought of.

“Okay,” said Danny.

“She’s in the backyard.”

“How can she be in the backyard if she left?”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Because she’s dead.”

For a couple of seconds, nobody said anything. Danny wondered why they hadn’t gotten on the bus yet, if maybe he’d have to ask them.

“Everybody’s supposed to go to Mile High,” the girl said. “We heard it on the radio.”

“What’s at Mile High?”

“The Army. They said it’s safe there.”

From what Danny had seen, the Army was pretty much dead, too. But Mile High would give them someplace to go. He hadn’t really thought of that before. Where was he going?

“I’m April,” the girl said.

She looked like an April. It was funny how some names were like that. They just seemed to fit.

“I’m Danny,” he said.

“I know,” said April. “Just please, Danny? Get us the hell out of here.”

7

The color wasn’t right, Lila decided. No, it wasn’t right at all.

The shade was called “buttercream.” On the sample from the store it was a soft, faded yellow, like old linen. But now, as Lila stood back to inspect her work, dripping roller in hand—honestly, she was making such a mess; why couldn’t David do these things?—it looked more like: well, what? A lemon. An electrified lemon. Maybe in a kitchen it would have been all right, a bright, sunny kitchen with windows looking out to a garden. But not in a nursery. My God, she thought, a color like that, the baby wouldn’t sleep a wink.

How depressing. All her hard work wasted. Hauling the ladder up the stairs from the basement, laying the drop cloths, lowering herself onto her hands and knees to tape off the baseboards, only to find she’d have to go back to the store and start over. She’d planned to have the room done by lunch, leaving enough time for the paint to dry before she hung the wallpaper border, a repeating pattern of scenes from Beatrix Potter. David thought the border was silly—“sentimental” was the word he’d used—but Lila didn’t care. She’d loved the stories of Peter Rabbit when she was a girl, crawling onto her father’s lap or snuggling down in bed to hear, for the hundredth time, the tale of Peter’s escape from Mr. McGregor’s garden. The yard of their house in Wellesley had been bordered by a hedgerow, and for years—long after she should have stopped believing in such things—she’d patiently searched it for a rabbit in a little blue jacket.

But now Peter Rabbit would have to wait. A wave of exhaustion enfolded her; she needed to get off her feet. The fumes were making her dizzy, too. Something seemed to be wrong with the AC, although with the baby, she always felt a little overheated. She hoped David would get home soon. Things were crazy at the hospital. He’d called her once to let her know he’d be late, but she hadn’t heard from him since.

She made her way downstairs to the kitchen. The place was an awful mess. Dishes piled in the sink, counters stained, the floor beneath her bare feet tacky with grime. Lila stopped in the doorway, feeling puzzled. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d let things go, and what had happened to Yolanda? How long since she’d been here? Tuesdays and Fridays were the housekeeper’s regular days. What was today? To look at this kitchen, thought Lila, you’d think Yolanda hadn’t been to the house in weeks. Okay, the woman’s English was not the best, and sometimes she did strange things, like confusing the teaspoons with the tablespoons—how David grumbled about that—or depositing the bills, unread, straight into the recycling bin. Annoying things like that. But Yolanda wasn’t one to miss even a day of work. One winter morning she’d shown up with a cough so bad that Lila could hear it from upstairs; she’d practically had to pry the mop from the woman’s hands, saying, Por favor, Yolanda, let me help you, I’m a doctor. Soy médico. (Of course it was bronchitis; Lila had listened to the woman’s chest right there in the kitchen and written the prescription for amoxicillin herself, knowing full well that Yolanda probably didn’t even have a doctor, let alone insurance.) So, okay, she sometimes threw the mail away and mixed up the silverware and put the socks in the underwear drawer, but she was a hard worker, tireless really, a cheerful and punctual presence they depended on, what with their crazy schedules. And now not even a call.

Which was another thing. The phone didn’t seem to be working, on top of which there was no mail. Or newspaper. But David had told her not to go outside under any circumstances, so Lila hadn’t checked. Maybe the newspaper was sitting in the driveway.

She fetched a glass from the cabinet and turned on the faucet. A groan from below, a burp of air, and… nothing. The water, too! Then she remembered; the water had been out a while. Now she’d have to call a plumber on top of everything else. Or would have, if the phones were working. Wasn’t it just like David to be away when everything went to hell in a handbasket. That had been one of Lila’s father’s favorite expressions, hell in a handbasket. A curious turn of phrase, now that Lila thought about it. What exactly was a handbasket, and how was it different from a regular basket? There were lots of phrases like that, even just simple words that could suddenly look strange, as if you’d never seen them before. Diaper. Misled. Plumber. Married.

Had that really been her idea, to marry David? Because she didn’t remember thinking, I will marry David. Which a person should think, probably, before they went ahead and did it. Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn’t remember what you’d done to make it all happen. She wouldn’t have said that she loved David, exactly. She liked him. She admired him. (And who could fail to admire David Centre? Chief of cardiology at Denver General, founder of the Colorado Institute of Electrophysiology, a man who ran marathons, sat on boards, held season tickets to both the Nuggets and the opera, who daily hauled his patients from the very brink of death?) But did these feelings add up to love? And if not, should you actually marry such a man because you were carrying his child—nothing planned, it had simply happened—and because, in a moment of characteristically David nobility, he had announced that he intended to “do the right thing”? What was the right thing? And why did David sometimes seem not like David but someone resembling David, based on David, a man-sized, David-like object? When Lila had told her father the news of their engagement, she’d seen it in his face: he knew. He was sitting at his desk in his study, surrounded by the books he loved, stroking glue onto the bowsprit of a model ship. In just the tiniest lift of his generous eyebrows, the truth was written. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat, pausing to screw the top onto the little jar of glue. “I can see how, under the circumstances, you might want to. He’s a good man. You can do it here if you like.”

Which he was, and which they had, flying off to Boston on the front edge of a spring blizzard, everything rushed and jammed into place, just a handful of relatives and friends able to make it at the last second to stand awkwardly in the living room while vows were exchanged (it had taken all of about two minutes) before making their excuses. Even the caterer had left early. It wasn’t the fact that Lila was pregnant that made it all so awkward. It was, she knew, that someone was missing.

Someone would always be missing.

But never mind. Never mind David, and their awful wedding (really, it had felt more like a wake), with its piles of leftover salmon and the snow and all the rest. The important thing was the baby, and taking care of herself. The world could go to hell in a handbasket if it wanted to. The baby was what mattered. She would be a girl; Lila had seen her on the ultrasound. A baby girl. Tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny heart and lungs, floating in the warm broth of her body. The baby liked to hiccup. Hiccup! went the tiny baby. Hiccup! Hiccup! Which was a funny word as well. The baby breathed the amniotic fluid in and out, contracting the diaphragm, causing the epiglottis to close. A synchronous diaphragmatic flutter, or singultus, from the Latin singult, “the act of catching one’s breath while sobbing.” When Lila had learned this in medical school, she’d thought: Wow. Just, wow. And of course she had immediately started to hiccup herself; half the students had. There was a man in Australia, Lila knew, who had been hiccupping continuously for seventeen years. She’d seen him on Today.

Today. What was today? She had made her way to the front hall, becoming gradually aware, as if her mind were lifting on tiptoes to peer above a ledge, that she had drawn the curtain aside to take a look outside. Nope, no newspaper. No Denver Post or New York Times or that trashy little neighborhood thing that went straight into the bin. Through the glass she could hear the high, tree-borne buzz of summer insects. Usually you’d see a car or two gliding by, the postman whistling his way down the block, a nanny pushing a stroller, but not today. I’ll be back when I know more. Stay inside, lock the doors. Don’t go out under any circumstances. Lila remembered David saying these things to her; she remembered standing at the window to watch his car, one of those new hydrogen-powered Toyotas, zip silently down the drive. Good God, even his car was virtuous. The pope probably drove one just like it.

But wasn’t that a dog? Lila pressed her face closer to the glass. The Johnsons’ dog was toddling down the middle of the street. The Johnsons lived two doors away, a pair of empty nesters, the daughter off married somewhere, the son away at college. MIT? Caltech? One of those. Mrs. Johnson (“Call me Sandy!”) had been the first neighbor to show up at their door the day they’d moved in, all bundt cake and big hellos, and Lila saw her nearly every evening when she wasn’t on call, sometimes in the company of her husband, Geoff, out walking Roscoe, a big grinning golden retriever so submissive he’d hurl himself tummy-up on the pavement when anyone approached. (“Excuse my fucking fairy of a dog,” Geoff said.) That was Roscoe out there, but something wasn’t right. He didn’t look the same. His ribs were sticking out like the keys on a xylophone (Lila was touched, fleetingly, by a memory of playing the glockenspiel in grammar school, and the tinkling melody of “Frère Jacques”), and he was walking in a disconcertingly aimless manner, gripping something in his mouth. Some sort of a… floppy thing. Did the Johnsons know he’d gotten loose? Should she telephone them? But the phones weren’t working, and she’d promised David she’d stay indoors. Surely someone else would notice him and say, Why, that’s Roscoe; he must have gotten out.

Goddamn David, she thought. He could be so stuck on himself, so inconsiderate, out doing God knows what when here she was, no water and no phone and no electricity and the color in the nursery all wrong. It wasn’t even close! She was only twenty-four weeks along, but she knew how the time raced by. One minute you were months away and the next thing you knew you were hustling out the door in the dead of night with your little suitcase, driving pell-mell to the hospital, and then you were on your back beneath the lights, huffing and puffing, the contractions roaring down upon you, taking you over, and nothing else would happen until you had the baby. And through the fog of pain you would feel a hand in your own and open your eyes to see Brad beside you, wearing a look on his face you had no name for, a beautiful terrified helpless look, and hear his voice saying, Push, Lila, you’re almost there, one more push and you’ll be done, and so you would: you would reach inside yourself and find the strength to do this one last thing and push the baby out. And in the stillness that came after, as Brad handed you the magical swaddled present of your baby, rivers of happiness running down his cheeks, you would feel the deep and permanent rightness of your life, knowing that you had chosen this man above all others because you were simply meant to, and that your baby, Eva, this warm new creature you had made together, was just that: the two of you, made one.

Brad? Why was she thinking about Brad? David. David was her husband, not Brad. Pope David and his popemobile. Had there been a Pope David? Probably. Lila herself was a Methodist. She wasn’t the person to ask.

Well, she thought, Roscoe having wandered out of sight, enough was enough. She’d had it with being trapped in a filthy house. David could do as David liked; she saw no reason to sit out this perfectly beautiful June day, not with so much to do. Her trusty old Volvo awaited her in the driveway. Where was her purse? Her wallet? Her keys? But here they were, sitting on the little table by the front door. Just where she had left them some period of time ago.

Upstairs, she went to the bathroom—my God, the toilet was in such a state, she didn’t even want to think about that—and examined her face in the mirror. Well, that was not so good. You’d think she’d been in a shipwreck—her hair a rat’s nest, her eyes sunken and bleary-looking. Her skin was all washed out, like it hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. She wasn’t one of those women who needed an hour to primp before leaving the house, but even so. She would have liked a shower, but of course that was impossible; she settled for washing her face with water from one of the jugs on the sink, using a washcloth to scrub her skin pink. She ran a brush through her hair, applied blush to her cheeks, stroked mascara onto her lashes, and put on a bit of lipstick. She was wearing only a T-shirt and panties in the heat; she retreated to the bedroom, with its guttered candles and heaps of dirty laundry and the musty smell of unwashed sheets, and pulled one of David’s long-tailed shirts from the closet. What to wear below this was a problem—nothing really fit anymore. She settled on a pair of loose jeans she could wriggle into if she didn’t do the top button, and a pair of sandals.

Once more to the mirror. Not bad, Lila concluded. A definite improvement. It wasn’t like she was going anyplace special, after all. Although it might be nice to stop for lunch, once her errands were done. She certainly had earned it after all this time indoors. Someplace nice, where she could eat outside. Few things were nicer than a glass of tea and a salad, sitting outdoors on a spring afternoon. Café des Amis—that was just the ticket. They had a marvelous patio draped with vines of fragrant flowers, and the most wonderful chef—he had visited their table once—who had trained at Cordon Bleu. Pierre? François? The man could do the most amazing thing with sauces, teasing the deepest flavors from even the simplest dishes; his coq au vin was to die for. But the desserts were what Des Amis was known for, especially the chocolate mousse. Lila had never tasted anything so heavenly in her life. She and Brad always shared one after dinner, spooning it into each other’s mouths like a couple of teenagers so besotted that the world barely existed beyond the two of them. Such blissful days—courtship days, all the promises of life opening before them like the pages of a book. How they’d laughed when she’d damn near swallowed the engagement ring he’d tucked within its airy cocoa folds, and again on the night when Lila had sent Brad out into the pouring rain—anything would do, she told him, a Kit Kat or Almond Joy or a plain old Hershey’s—and awakened an hour later to see him standing in the doorway of the bedroom, soaked to the bone, wearing the most hilarious smile on his face and bearing a giant Tupperware container of François’s—Pierre’s?—famous chocolate mousse, enough to feed an army. Which was just the kind of man Brad was. He’d gone around to the back, where a light was still burning, and pounded on the door until somebody came to receive his rain-drenched fifty-dollar bill. Which was the sweetest thing of all. My God, Lila, Brad said as she spooned a mouthful to her lips, the way you’re going, this baby is going to be born half chocolate.

But there she went again. David. David Centre was her husband now. Lila really had to get a handle on that. Not that she and David had ever shared a chocolate mousse or been to Café des Amis or done anything remotely of the kind. The man didn’t have one romantic bone in his body. How had she let a man like that talk her into marriage? As if she were merely one more item on a glorified to-do list? Become a famous doctor, check. Get Lila Kyle pregnant, check. Do the honorable thing, check. He hardly seemed to know who she was.

Down the stairs she went. Outside the sun was pouring down, filling the hall like a golden gas. By the time she reached the door, a pure excitement was coursing through her. What sweet release! After so much time cooped up, to venture out at last! She could only imagine what David would say when he found out. For God’s sake, Lila, I told you it’s not safe. You have to think of the baby. But it was the baby she was thinking of; the baby was the reason. That’s what David didn’t understand. David, who was too busy off saving the world to help with the nursery, who drove a car powered by asparagus, or pixie dust, or wholesome thoughts, or whatever it was, and who had left her here alone. Alone! And what was worse, really the worst thing of all, was that he didn’t even like Peter Rabbit. How was it possible she was going to have a baby with a man who didn’t like Peter Rabbit? What did that say about him? What kind of father would he be? No, it was none of David’s business what she did, Lila concluded, lifting her purse and keys from the hallway table and unbolting the door. It was none of his business if she went outside, or if she painted the nursery chartreuse, or vermilion, or puce. David could go screw himself. That’s what David could do.

Lila Kyle would buy the paint herself.

8

It was not a good day in the office of the deputy director. Today, May 31—Memorial Day, not that it mattered—was an end-of-the-world kind of day.

Colorado was gone, basically. Colorado was kaput. Denver, Greeley, Fort Collins, Boulder, Grand Junction, Durango, the thousand little towns in between. The latest aerial intel looked like a war zone: cars crashed on the highways, buildings burning, bodies everywhere. During daylight hours, nothing seemed to be moving except the birds, huge spiraling swarms of them, like the word had gone out from Vulture Central Command.

Would somebody please tell him whose idea it had been to kill the entire state of Colorado?

And the virus was moving. Spreading in every direction, a twelve-fingered hand. By the time Homeland had sealed off the major interstate corridors—those dithering assholes couldn’t get themselves out of a burning house—the horse was already galloping from the barn. As of this morning, the CDC had confirmed cases in Kearney, Nebraska; Farmington, New Mexico; Sturgis, South Dakota; and Laramie, Wyoming. And those were just the ones they knew about. Nothing yet in Utah or Kansas, though that was a matter of time, maybe just hours. It was five-thirty in northern Virginia, three hours till sundown, five in the west.

They always moved at night.

The briefing with the Joint Chiefs had not gone well, though Guilder hadn’t expected it to. To begin with, there was the whole “problem” of Special Weapons. The military brass had never been particularly comfortable with, or especially clear on, what DSW did, or why it existed outside any military chain of command, drawing its budget from, of all things, the Department of Agriculture. (Answer: Because nobody gave a shit about agriculture.) The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant, and as far as the brass could see, Special Weapons answered to no one, its pieces cobbled together from a dozen other agencies and private contractors. It resembled nothing so much as a game of sidewalk three-card monte, the queen always moving, not quite where you thought it would be. As for what DSW actually did, well, Guilder had heard the nicknames. “Distraction from Serious Warfare.” “Department of Silly Wingnuts.” “Deep-Shit Weirdness.” And his personal favorite: “Discount Shoe Warehouse.” (Even he had started calling it the Warehouse.)

So it was that Deputy Director Horace Guilder (were there any actual directors anymore?) had found himself sitting before the Joint Chiefs (enough stars and bars around the table to start a Girl Scout troop) to offer his official assessment of the situation in Colorado. (Sorry, we made vampires; it seemed like a good idea at the time.) A full thirty seconds of dumbfounded silence ensued, everyone waiting to see who would speak next.

Let me see if I have you right, the chairman intoned. He leaned his folded hands over the table. Guilder felt a bead of sweat drop from his armpit to slither the length of his torso. You decided to reengineer an ancient virus that would transform a dozen death row inmates into indestructible monsters who live on blood, and you didn’t think to tell anybody about this?

Well, not exactly “decided.” Guilder hadn’t been with DSW at the outset. He’d come in at the change of administration, so much money and so many man-hours already down the rat hole that he couldn’t have put the brakes on if he tried. Project NOAH was under a chain of command so obscure, even Guilder didn’t know where it had originated—probably NSA, though he’d gotten the sense it might have gone even higher than that, even to the White House itself. But sitting before the Joint Chiefs, he understood that this distinction was pointless. Guilder had spent three decades working in agencies where so much was a secret that nobody was actually responsible for anything. Ideas seemed to flower of their own accord. We did what? No, we didn’t. And so, off into the shredder it went. Which was exactly what was about to happen to Special Weapons; probably even to Guilder himself.

But in the meantime, there was blame to be doled out. The meeting had quickly devolved into a shouting match, Guilder taking verbal punch after verbal punch. He felt relieved when he was banished from the room, knowing that the situation was out of his hands. Henceforth, the military would deal with this the way they dealt with all problems: by shooting everything in sight.

In hindsight, Guilder might have put the situation more diplomatically. But the CDC’s projections spoke for themselves. Three weeks, four at the outside, and the virus would take out Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake. Six weeks and they were looking at the coasts.

Vampires, for Christ’s sake. What had he been thinking?

What had everyone been thinking?

And yet there was no doubt that Lear had been on to something. The great Jonas Lear—even Guilder was intimated by the man, a Harvard biochemist with an IQ of a zillion who had, for all intents and purposes, invented the field of paleovirology, retrieving and resuscitating ancient organisms for modern use. Within his professional circle it was generally assumed that Lear was a shoo-in, someday, for a Nobel Prize. Okay, maybe using death row inmates hadn’t been the smartest move. They’d gotten ahead of themselves there. And certainly Lear wasn’t rowing with his oars entirely in the water. But you had to admit the idea had possibilities. Such as, for instance, not dying. Ever. A matter in which Guilder had lately found himself holding a not-inconsiderable personal stake.

His only hope was the girl.

Amy NLN. The thirteenth test subject, snatched from a convent in Memphis, Tennessee, where her mother had abandoned her. Guilder hadn’t felt exactly comfortable signing off on that. A kid, for the love of God. Somebody was bound to notice, and they had; by the time Wolgast had brought her in, everybody from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to the U.S. Marshals was scouring the country for her, and Richards, that lunatic, had left a trail of bodies a mile wide. The nuns at the convent, shot in their sleep. A pair of small-town cops. Six people at a coffee shop whose only mistake was coming in for breakfast at the same time as Wolgast and the girl.

But the request for the girl, which had come from Lear himself, was nothing Guilder could make himself refuse. Each of the cons had been infected with a slightly altered variant of the virus, though the effects had been the same. Illness, coma, transformation, and the next thing you knew they were hanging upside down from the ceiling, gutting a rabbit. But the Amy variant was different. It hadn’t come from Fanning, the Columbia biochemist who’d been infected on Lear’s misbegotten excursion to Bolivia; it had come from the group of tourists who’d started the whole thing—terminal cancer patients on a lark in the jungle with an ecotour group called Last Wish. They’d all died within a month: stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, their bodies blowing apart. But in the meantime, they’d shown remarkable improvements in their condition—one man had even grown back a full head of hair—and they’d all died cancer-free. Reading Lear’s mind was a fool’s errand, but he’d come to believe this variant was the answer. The trick was keeping the first test subject alive. For this he’d chosen Amy, a young, healthy girl.

And it had worked. Guilder knew it had worked. Because Amy was still alive.

Guilder’s office, on the third floor of an otherwise nondescript low-rise federal office building in Fairfax County—DSW shared space with, among other entities, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Department of Homeland Security Special Energy Task Force, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a day care—looked out on Interstate 66. Monday of Memorial Day weekend, yet there was almost no traffic. A lot of people had left the city already. Guilder imagined a lot of chits were being called in. A mother-in-law in upstate New York. A friend with a cabin in the mountains. But with all air transportation grounded, people could get only so far, and it wouldn’t make much difference in the end. You couldn’t hide from nature forever. Or so Horace Guilder had been told.

The girl had made it out of Colorado somehow. They’d caught her signature in southern Wyoming in the first few hours. Which meant she was in a vehicle, and not alone—somebody had to be driving. After that, she’d disappeared. The transmitter in her biomonitor was short-range, too weak for the satellites; she had to be within a few miles of a cell tower, and not some rural co-op but one connected to the federal tracking network. Which, in southern Wyoming, as long as you stayed off major highways, would be easy to avoid. She could be anywhere now. Whoever was with her was smart.

A knock at the door broke his train of thought; Guilder swiveled from the window to see Nelson, the department’s chief technical officer, standing in the doorway. Christ, what now?

“I have good news and bad news,” Nelson announced.

Nelson was dressed, as always, in a black T-shirt and jeans, his dirty feet shoved into a pair of flip-flops. A fast-talking Rhodes scholar with not one but two PhDs from MIT—biochemistry and advanced information systems—Nelson was the smartest guy in the building by a mile, a fact that he knew only too well. He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was. Though their relationship was cordial, Nelson had a habit of treating Guilder like a doddering elderly parent, a figure of respect but no longer quite worthy—which was exasperating, coming from a guy who seemed to comb his hair every fourth day, though not, Guilder had to admit, entirely unwarranted. He was twenty-eight to Guilder’s fifty-seven, and everything about Nelson conspired to make him feel old.

“Any sign of her?”

“Nada.” Nelson scratched his scraggly beard. “We’re not getting any of them.”

Guilder rubbed his eyes, which stung of sleeplessness. He needed to go home for a shower and a clean suit. He hadn’t left the office in two days, grabbing only a few winks on the couch and living on junk from the vending machines. He was having trouble with his fingers, too. Numbness, tingling.

“You said something about good news?”

“Depends on how you look at it. From a free-speech point of view, probably it’s not the best, but it looks like somebody finally shut down that lunatic in Denver. My guess would be NSA, or else one of Lear’s little pets finally got to him. Either way, the dude’s off-line in a permanent way.”

Last Stand in Denver: Guilder had watched his videos, like everybody else. You had to hand it to the guy for balls. Theories abounded about his identity, the general consensus being that he was ex-military, Special Forces or SEALs.

“So what’s the bad?”

“New numbers just came in from the CDC. It seems the original algorithm failed to take into proper account just how much these things like to eat. Which I could have told them if they’d asked. Either that or some summer intern moved a decimal place when he was daydreaming about the last time he boned his girlfriend.”

Sometimes talking with Nelson felt like trying to corral a five-year-old. A genius five-year-old, but still. “Please, just spit it out.”

Nelson shrugged. “As it now stands, based on the most recent projections, it appears we’re looking at a more succinct timeline. Something on the order of thirty-nine days.”

“For the coasts you mean?”

“Um, not exactly.”

“What then?”

“The entire North American continent.”

A gray shadow swooped over Guilder’s vision; he had to sit down.

“A response is already in the works at Central,” Nelson continued. “My guess is they’ll try to burn it out. Major population centers first, then anyone else who gets left behind.”

“Christ almighty.”

Nelson frowned. “Small price to pay, on the whole. I know what I’d do if I were, say, the president of Russia. No way I’d let this jump the pond.”

The man was right, and Guilder knew it. He realized his right hand had begun to tremble. He reached for it with his left, trying to bring the spasms under control while also making the gesticulation seem natural.

“You okay there, boss?”

His right foot had begun to shake as well. He felt the incomprehensible urge to laugh. Probably it was the stress. He swallowed effortfully, a taste of bile in his throat.

“Find that girl.”

Once Nelson was gone, Guilder sat in his office for a few minutes, trying to collect himself. The trembling had passed, but not the impulse to laugh—a symptom euphemistically known as “emotional incontinence.” Finally he just gave in, ejecting a single, cleansing bark. Jesus, he sounded possessed. He hoped nobody outside had heard.

He departed the building, got his car from the garage—a beige Toyota Camry—and drove to his townhouse in Arlington. He wanted to clean himself up, but this suddenly seemed like work; he poured himself a Scotch and flipped on the TV. It hadn’t taken long for each of the networks, right down to the Weather Channel, to brand the emergency with a catchy slogan (“Nation in Crisis,” etc.), and all the broadcasters looked harried and sleep-deprived, especially the ones reporting from beside a highway somewhere—a cornfield in the background, long lines of vehicles creeping past, everybody pointlessly honking. The whole country was seizing up like a bad transmission. He checked his watch: 8:05. In less than an hour, the middle of the country would go dark.

He heaved his disobedient body from the couch and climbed the stairs. Stairs—that had been a concern for the future. What would he do when he could no longer climb the stairs? But it hardly mattered now. In the master bath he turned on the shower and stripped to his shorts, standing before the mirror while the water heated. The funny thing was, he didn’t look especially sick. A little thinner, perhaps. There was a time when he’d thought of himself as athletic—he’d run cross-country at Bowdoin—though those days were long past. His line of work, with its attendant demands for secrecy, had made marriage impossible, but well into his forties Guilder had managed—well, if not to turn heads exactly, then at least to keep himself occupied. A series of discreet affairs, everyone apprised of the facts. He had prided himself on the well-managed quality of these encounters, but then one day it had all simply stopped. Glances that might have been returned slid past him, conversations that before had merely served as elaborate preambles went no place. Inevitable, Guilder supposed, but nothing to cheer about. He surveyed his reflection, taking stock. A square-jawed face that had once looked rugged but had long since sagged at the jowls. A scrim of thinning hair swept back over his scalp, trying not quite successfully to conceal the ghostly white presence of his scalp. Bags of skin beneath his eyes, a rubbery paunch at the waist, legs skinny and insubstantial looking. Not a pretty sight, but nothing he hadn’t accepted as the inescapable degradations of late middle age.

To look at him, you’d never know he was dying.

He showered and changed into a clean suit. His closet contained almost nothing else; an understated two-button—dark navy usually but sometimes gray with a subtle pinstripe, occasionally khaki poplin in summer—paired with a shirt of powder blue or starched white and a tie as neutral as Switzerland was so closely aligned with his sense of himself that he felt naked without one. Minding his balance, he descended the stairs to the living room, where the television was dutifully barking out its parade of bad news. Though he possessed no appetite, he heated up a frozen lasagna in the microwave, standing before it as the seconds ticked away. He sat at the table and did his best to eat, but the diazepam made everything taste bland and vaguely metallic, and the tightness in his throat had not abated, as if he were wearing a collar two sizes too small. His doctor had suggested he try milk shakes, or something soft like macaroni, but resorting to kiddie food was nothing he could face. From there, everything would go downhill.

He dumped the unfinished lasagna down the disposal and checked his watch again. A little after nine. Well, whatever was happening in the middle of the country was happening. Nelson would call if he needed him.

He left the townhouse and drove to McLean. What lay ahead was a grim duty, but Guilder was the only one to do it. The facility was set back from the road behind a sweeping green lawn; by the driveway a sign read, SHADOWDALE CONVALESCENT CENTER. At the check-in desk, Guilder presented his driver’s license to the nurse, then proceeded down the medicinal-smelling hallway, past its mass-produced paintings of green fields and summer sunsets. The place was quiet, even for the hour; usually there were orderlies around, and patients in the common room, those who still got some benefit from human company. Tonight the place was a tomb.

He came to his father’s room and gently knocked, opening the door without waiting for an answer.

“Pop, it’s me.”

His father was propped in his wheelchair by the window. His jaw drooped open, the muscles of his face as slack as pancake batter. A pendulum of spittle dangled from his mouth to the paper bib around his neck. Somebody had dressed him in a stained sweat suit and orthopedic shoes with Velcro tabs. He gave no sign of recognition as Guilder stepped into the room.

“How you doing, Pop?”

The air around his father tanged of urine. The Alzheimer’s had progressed to a point where he recognized no one, but still one had to go through the motions. How terrifying it was, Guilder thought, the solitude of the mind. Yet his father’s silence, the feeling of absence, was nothing new. In life—as now, in death—he had been a man of almost reptilian coldness. Guilder knew that this was just the way his father had been raised—the son of small-town dairy farmers who’d attended church three times weekly and slaughtered their own hogs—yet still he couldn’t bring himself to put aside his resentments for a boyhood spent hoping to win the attention of a man who was simply incapable. It had been a small thing, a natural thing, what he’d asked of his father, simply by being born: to treat him like a son. A game of catch on a fall afternoon, a word of praise from the sidelines, an expression of interest in his life. Guilder had done everything right. The good grades, the dutiful performances in auditoriums and on athletic fields, the full ride to college and swift ascent into a useful adulthood. Yet his father had had virtually nothing to say about any of this. Guilder could not, in fact, recall a single instance when his father had told him he loved him, or touched him with affection. The man just didn’t care.

Hardest of all had been the toll it had taken on Guilder’s mother, a naturally sociable woman whose loneliness had driven her to the alcoholism that eventually killed her. In later life, Guilder came to believe that his mother had sought comfort elsewhere, that she had had affairs, probably more than one. After his father had been moved to Shadowdale, Guilder had cleaned out the house in Albany—an absolute mess, every drawer and cabinet crammed with stuff—and discovered, in his mother’s dressing table, a velvet Tiffany box. When he’d looked inside he’d found a bracelet—a diamond bracelet. Probably it had cost as much as his father, a civil engineer, had made in a year. It was nothing he could have afforded, and the box’s location—concealed in the back of a drawer beneath a pile of moldering gloves and scarves—had told Guilder what he was looking at: a lover’s gift. Who had it been? His mother had been a legal secretary. One of the lawyers at her firm? Somebody she had met in passing? A rekindled romance of her youth? It had gladdened him to know that his mother had found some happiness to brighten her lonely existence, yet at the same time this discovery had sank him into a depression that had continued unabated for weeks. His mother was the one warm memory of his childhood. But her life, her real life, had been a secret from him.

Always these visits to his father brought these memories to the surface; by the time he left, he was often so dispirited, or else seething with unexpressed rage, that he could barely think straight. Fifty-seven years old, yet still he craved some flicker of acknowledgment.

He positioned the room’s only chair in front of his father. The old man’s head, bald as a baby’s, was tipped at an awkward angle against his shoulder. Guilder retrieved a rag from the bedside table and wiped the spit from his chin. An open container of vanilla pudding sat on a tray with a flimsy metal spoon.

“So how you feeling, Pop? They treating you okay?”

Silence. And yet Guilder could hear his father’s voice in his head, filling in the spaces.

Are you kidding me? Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even take a proper shit. Everyone talking to me like I’m a child. How do you think I am, sonny boy?

“I see you didn’t eat your dessert. You want some pudding? How would that be?”

Fucking pudding! That’s all they give me around this place. Pudding for breakfast, pudding for lunch, pudding for dinner. The stuff’s like snot.

Guilder tucked a spoonful between his father’s teeth. Through some autonomic reflex, the old man smacked his lips and swallowed.

Look at me. You think this is a picnic? Drooling on myself, sitting in my own piss?

“Don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately,” Guilder said, delivering a second spoonful into his father’s mouth. “There’s something I thought you should know about.”

So? Say your piece and leave me alone.

But what did Guilder want to say? I’m dying? That everyone was dying, even if they didn’t know it yet? What purpose could this information possibly serve? A chilling thought occurred to him. What would become of his father when everyone was gone, the doctors and nurses and orderlies? With everything that had happened in the last few weeks, Guilder had been too preoccupied to consider this eventuality. Because the city was emptying out; soon, in weeks or even days, everyone would be running for their lives. Guilder remembered what had happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes, first Katrina and then Vanessa, the stories of elderly patients left to wallow in their own waste, to perish slowly of hunger and dehydration.

Are you listening to me, sonny boy? Sitting there with that big dumb look on your face. What’s so all-fired important that you came here to tell me?

Guilder shook his head. “It’s nothing, Pop. Nothing important.” He spooned the last of the pudding into his father’s mouth and wiped his lips with the rag. “You get some rest, okay?” he said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

Your mother was a whore, you know. A whore a whore a whore …

Guilder stepped from the room. In the vacant hallway, he paused to breathe. The voice wasn’t real; he understood that. But still there were times when it felt as if his father’s mind, departed from his bodily person, had taken up residence inside his own.

He returned to the front desk. The nurse, a young Hispanic woman, was penciling in a crossword puzzle.

“My father needs his diaper changed.”

She didn’t look up. “They all need their diaper changed.” When Guilder didn’t move, her eyes darted upward from the page. They were very dark, and heavily lined. “I’ll tell someone.”

“Please do.”

At the door he stopped. The nurse had already resumed working on her puzzle.

“So tell someone, goddamnit.”

“I said I’d get to it.”

A fierce protective urge came over him. Guilder wanted to shove her pencil down her throat. “Pick up the fucking phone if you’re not going to do it yourself.”

With a huff she lifted the phone and dialed. “It’s Mona at the front. Guilder in 126 needs changing. Yes, his son is here. Okay, I’ll tell him.” She hung up. “Happy?”

The question was so absurd he didn’t know where to begin.

Guilder wouldn’t die like his father—just the opposite. ALS: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Major motor function would be the first to go, the muscles spasming and dimming into uselessness, followed by speech and the ability to swallow. The spontaneous laughing and crying were a mystery—nobody knew quite why this happened. Ultimately he would die on a respirator, his body utterly stilled, unable to move or speak. But worst of all was the fact that he would experience no diminishment of his ability to think or reason. Unlike his father, whose mind had failed first, Guilder would live every moment of his decline with full awareness. A living death, no one but some sulky nurse for company.

It was clear to him that in the aftermath of his diagnosis, he had gone through a period of profound shock. That was the explanation he gave himself for the foolish thing he’d done with Shawna—though, of course, that wasn’t even her real name. For two years Guilder had been visiting her on the second Tuesday of each month, always at the apartment provided by her employers. She was dark-skinned and slim, with subtly Asiatic eyes, and young enough to be his daughter, though this was not the attraction—if anything, he would have preferred that she were older. He had originally found her through a service, but after a probationary period he had been permitted to call her directly. The first time, he had been as nervous as a college boy. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and he’d found himself worrying that he wouldn’t measure up—in hindsight, a preposterous concern. But the girl had quickly put him at his ease, taking command of the occasion. Always the ritual was the same. Guilder would ring the bell outside; the buzzer would sound; he would mount the stairs to the apartment, where she would be waiting in the open door, wearing a welcoming smile and dressed in a black cocktail dress beneath which lay an erotic treasure of lace and silk. A few pleasantries, as might be exchanged by any two lovers meeting in the afternoon, followed by the unremarked-on placement of the envelope of cash on the dresser; then on to the thing itself. Always Guilder undressed first, then watched as she did so herself, allowing the cocktail dress to fall to the floor like a curtain before stepping regally away from it. She made love to him with an enthusiasm that seemed neither manufactured nor overly professional, and for those slender minutes, Guilder’s mind found a serenity that nothing else in his life came close to matching. At the moment of his release, Shawna would say his name over and over, her voice losing itself in a wholly persuasive facsimile of womanly satisfaction, and Guilder would find himself floating on these sounds and sensations, riding them like a surfer onto a tranquil shore.

Why don’t I see you more often? she would ask him after. Are you happy with the things I do? There isn’t anybody else, is there? I want to be your only one, Guilder. Very happy, he would say, stroking her velvety hair. I couldn’t be happier than I am with you.

He knew nothing about her at all—at least, nothing real. Yet in the weeks that followed his diagnosis, the only refuge his mind could take was in the absurd idea that he was in love with her. The memory embarrassed him now, and the psychological subtext was obvious—he didn’t want to die alone—but at the time, he’d been utterly convinced. He was madly, hopelessly in love, and wasn’t it possible, likely even, that Shawna shared his feelings? Was that what she meant when she said she wanted to be his only one? Because what they did and said to each other couldn’t be false; those things occurred on a plane that only two people who were truly connected could share.

On and on like this, until he had worked himself into such a state that Shawna was all he thought about. He decided he would give her something—a symbol of his love. Something expensive and worthy of his feelings. Jewelry. It had to be jewelry. And not something new from a store, but something more personal: his mother’s diamond bracelet. Energized by this decision, he wrapped the Tiffany box in silver paper and drove to Shawna’s apartment. It wasn’t Tuesday, but that didn’t matter. What he felt wasn’t anything a person could schedule. He rang the bell and waited. Minutes passed, which was strange; Shawna was always very prompt about the bell. He rang again. This time the speaker made a little burst of static and he heard her voice. “Hello?”

“It’s Horace.”

A pause. “I don’t have you in the book. Do I? Maybe this is my fault. Did you call?”

“I have something for you.”

The speaker seemed to go dead. Then: “Hang on a second.”

A few minutes passed. Guilder heard footsteps descending the stairs. Perhaps the buzzer wasn’t working; Shawna was coming down to open the door. But the figure that turned the corner wasn’t Shawna. It was a man. He looked about sixty, bald and heavyset, with the piggish face of a Russian gangster, wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, his necktie loosened. The implications were obvious, yet in its agitated state, Guilder’s mind refused them. The man stepped through the door, giving Guilder a cursory glance as he passed.

“Lucky you,” he said, and winked.

Guilder hurried up the stairs. He knocked three times, waiting with buoyant anxiety; at last the door swung open. Shawna wasn’t wearing the dress, just a silk robe cinched at the waist. Her hair was disheveled, her makeup smeary. Perhaps he’d caught her taking a nap.

“Horace, what are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly breathless. “I know I should have called.”

“To tell you the truth, it’s not really the best time.”

“I’ll only be a minute. Please, can I come in?”

She eyed him skeptically, then seemed to soften. “Well, all right. It’ll have to be quick, though.”

She stood aside to let him enter. Something felt different about the apartment, though Guilder couldn’t say exactly what. It seemed dirty, the air unpleasantly dense.

“Now, what’s this I see?” She was eyeing the silver-papered box. “Horace, you shouldn’t have.”

Guilder held it out to her. “This is for you.”

With a warm light dancing in her eyes, she undid the wrapping and removed the bracelet.

“Isn’t that thoughtful. What a pretty thing.”

“It’s an heirloom. It belonged to my mother.”

“That makes it even more special.” She kissed him quickly on the cheek. “You give me a minute to clean up and I’ll be right with you, baby.”

A titanic wave of love broke over him. It was all he could do not to throw his arms around her and press his mouth to hers. “I want to make love to you. Real love.”

She glanced at her watch. “Well, sure. If that’s what you want. I don’t have the full hour, though.”

Guilder had begun to undress, madly unbuckling his belt, yanking off his wingtips. But something was wrong. He sensed her hesitation.

“Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?” she asked.

The money. That’s what she was asking for. How could she think about money at a time like this? He wanted to tell her that what they shared couldn’t be counted in dollars and cents, words along those lines, but all he managed to say was “I don’t have it with me.”

She frowned. “Honey, that’s not how this works. You know that.”

But by this time Guilder was so frantic he was barely processing any of it. He was also standing in front of her wearing only his boxers and undershirt, his pants bunched around his ankles.

“Are you all right? You don’t look so good.”

“I love you,” he said.

She gave an airy smile. “That’s sweet.”

“I said, I love you.”

“Okay, I can do that. That’s no problem. Put the money on the dresser and I’ll say anything you want.”

“I don’t have any money. I gave you the bracelet.”

Suddenly there was no sign of warmth or even friendship in her eyes. “Horace, this is a cash business, you know that. I don’t like the way you’re talking.”

“Please, let me make love to you.” Guilder’s pulse was throbbing in his ears. “You can sell the bracelet if you want. It’s worth a lot of money.”

“Baby, I don’t think so.” She held it out to him with unconcealed contempt. “I hate to break it to you, but this is glass. I don’t know who sold it to you, but you should get your money back. Now go on, be sweet. You know the drill.”

He had to make her understand how he felt. In desperation he reached for her, but his feet were still tangled up in his trouser legs. Shawna released a yelp; the next thing Guilder knew, he was sprawled on the floor. He raised his face to discover a pistol aimed at his head.

“Get the fuck out.”

“Please,” he moaned. His voice was thick with tears. “You said you wanted to be my only one.”

“I say a lot of things. Now get out of here with your crappy goddamned bracelet.”

He rose heavily to his feet. Never had he experienced such humiliation. And yet what he mostly felt was love. A helpless, melancholy love that would devour him whole.

“I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying, baby.” She waved the pistol at the door. “Do like I say before I shoot your balls off.”

He knew he could never face her again. How could he have been so stupid? He drove to his townhouse, pulled into the garage, shut off the engine, and sealed the door with the remote. He sat in his car for a full thirty minutes, unable to muster the energy to move. He was dying. He had made a fool of himself. He would never see Shawna again, because he meant nothing to her.

Which was when he realized why he was still sitting in the Camry. All he had to do was turn the engine back on. It would be like falling asleep. He’d never have to think about Shawna again, or Project NOAH, or live in the prison of his own failing body, or visit his father at the convalescent center—none of it. All his cares lifted, just like that. Following an impulse he could not explain, he removed his watch and took his wallet from his back pocket, placing them on the dashboard—as if he were getting ready for bed. Probably it was customary to write a note, but what would he say? Who would the note be for?

Three times he tried to make himself turn the key. Three times his resolve failed him. By then he had begun to feel silly, sitting in his car—one more humiliation. There was nothing left to do but put his watch back on and return his wallet to his pocket and go into the house.

As Guilder was driving home from McLean, his handheld buzzed. Nelson.

“They’re on the move.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska. A large group massing in western Kansas.” He paused. “That’s not why I called.”

Guilder drove straight to the office. Nelson met him in the hallway. “We picked up the signal a little before sunset. Grabbed it off a tower west of Denver, a town called Silver Plume. It took some doing, but I was able to call in some favors at Homeland and reroute one of the drones to see if we could get a picture.”

At his terminal he showed Guilder the photograph, a grainy black and white. Not the girl; it was a man. He was standing beside a pickup truck parked on the side of the highway. It looked like he was taking a leak.

“Who the hell is this? One of the docs?”

“It’s one of Richards’s guys.”

Guilder was perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

For a moment, Nelson appeared faintly embarrassed. “Sorry, I thought you were in the loop on this. They’re paroled sex offenders. One of Richards’s little projects. For security reasons, all sixth-tier civilian personnel were harvested from the national registry.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not.” Nelson tapped the image on the screen. “This guy? Our lone survivor of Project NOAH? He’s a fucking pedophile.”

9

The pickup gave out late on the morning of Grey’s second day on the road.

The hour was just shy of noon, the sun high in the sky. After a restless night in a Motel 6 near Leadville, Grey had picked up I-70 near Vail, then made his descent toward Denver. As far east as the town of Golden, the interstate corridor had been mostly clear, but as he moved into the city’s outer suburban ring, with its huge shopping centers and sprawling subdivisions, things began to change. Portions of the highway were choked with abandoned cars, forcing him onto the access road; the vast parking lots lining the highway were scenes of frozen disorder, store windows smashed, merchandise strewn over the pavement. The stillness was different here, too—not a simple absence of sound but something deeper, more ominous. A lot of the bodies he saw were headless, like the suspendered man at the Red Roof. Grey guessed maybe Zero and the others liked to take the heads.

He did his best to keep his eyes on the road, forcing the carnage to the fringes of his vision. The weird, buzzing energy he’d felt at the Red Roof had not abated; his brain was humming like a plucked string. He hadn’t slept in a day and a half, but he wasn’t tired. Or hungry, which wasn’t like him at all. Grey used to slam it down, but for some reason the thought of food wasn’t remotely appealing. In Leadville he’d gotten a Baby Ruth from a vending machine in the lobby of the Motel 6, thinking he should try to put something in his stomach, but he couldn’t get the damn thing past his nose. Just the odor of it made his insides clench. He could practically smell the preservatives in the thing, a nasty chemical stink, like industrial floor cleaner.

By the time the city’s core rose into view, Grey knew he would have to abandon the interstate. There was simply no way around the cars, and the situation was only going to get worse the closer he got. He drew the truck into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and checked his map. The best route would be circling downtown to the south, he decided, though this was just a guess; he didn’t know Denver at all.

He veered south, then east again, picking his way through the suburbs. Everywhere was the same, not a living soul about. He wished he could at least have had the radio for company, but when he scanned up and down the dial, all he could get was the same empty wash of static he’d heard for a day and a half. For a while he honked the truck’s horn, thinking this might alert anyone left alive to his presence, but eventually he gave up. There was no one left to hear it. Denver was a crypt.

By the time the engine died, Grey had entered a state of such complete despair that for several seconds he actually failed to notice. So disturbing was the silence that it had begun to seem possible that he would never see a living soul again—that the whole world, not just Denver, had been swept clean of humanity. But then he realized what was happening, that the engine had lost power. For a few seconds the truck coasted on its own momentum, but the steering had locked up, too; all Grey could do was sit and wait for it to glide to a halt.

Christ, he thought, this is all I need. Sliding Iggy’s gun into the pocket of his jumpsuit, he climbed out and lifted the hood. Grey had owned enough junky cars in his day to know a broken fan belt. The logical step would have been to abandon the truck and find another vehicle with the keys in it. He was on a wide boulevard of big-box retail outlets: Best Buy, Target, Home Depot. The sun was glaring down. Each lot had a scattering of cars in it. But he had no heart to look inside them, knowing what he would find. He’d swapped out a fan belt lots of times. All he needed was the belt and a few basic tools, a screwdriver and a couple of wrenches to adjust the tensioner. Maybe the Home Depot had auto parts. It couldn’t hurt to look.

He crossed the highway and headed for the door, which stood open. The cage of propane tanks by the entrance had been pried open, all the canisters taken, but otherwise the front of the store appeared undamaged. A phalanx of lawn mowers, chained together, rested undisturbed by the doorway, as did a display of patio furniture dusted with yellow pollen. The only other sign that anything was amiss was a large square of plywood propped against the wall, spray-painted with the words NO GENERATORS LEFT.

Grey drew the pistol from his pocket, wedged the door open, and stepped inside. The power was out, but a semblance of order had been maintained; a lot of the shelves had been stripped bare, though the floor was mostly clear of debris. Holding the gun out before him, he advanced cautiously along the front of the store, his eyes scanning the signs over the aisles for one that said AUTO PARTS.

He had made it halfway down the rows when Grey stopped in his tracks. From ahead and to his left he heard a quiet rustling, followed by a barely audible murmuring. Grey took two steps forward and peered around the corner.

It was a woman. She was standing in front of a display of paint samples. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s dress shirt; her hair, a soft brown, was swept behind her ears, fixed in place by a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. She was also pregnant—not have-the-baby-right-this-second pregnant, but pregnant enough. While Grey watched, she pulled a little square of color from one of the slots and angled it first this way and then the other, frowning pensively. Then she returned it to its slot.

So unexpected was this vision that Grey could only gaze at her in mute astonishment. What was she doing here? A full thirty seconds passed, the woman taking no notice of his presence, wholly engaged by her mysterious business. Not wanting to frighten her, Grey gently placed the gun on an open shelf and took a cautious step forward. What should he say? He’d never been good at icebreakers. Or even talking to people, really. He settled for clearing his throat.

The woman glanced at him over her shoulder. “Well, it’s about time,” she said. “I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes.”

“Lady, what are you doing?”

She turned from the display. “Is this or is this not the paint department?” She was holding out a group of sample chips, fanned like a deck of playing cards. “Now, I’m thinking maybe Garden Gate, but I’m worried it will be too dark.”

Grey was utterly dumbfounded. She wanted him to help her pick paint?

“Probably nobody ever asks your opinion, I know,” she continued briskly—a little too briskly, Grey thought. “Just put it in a can and take my money, I’m sure that’s what everybody says. But I value the judgment of someone who knows his business. So, what do you think? In your professional opinion.”

Grey was standing within just a few feet of her now. Her face was fine-boned and pale, with a subtle fan of crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “I think you’re confused. I don’t work here.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t?”

“Lady, no one works here.”

Confusion swept over her face. But just as quickly it disappeared, her features reorganizing into a look of irritation. “Oh, you hardly need to tell me that,” she said, tossing his words away. “Trying to get a little help around this place is like pulling teeth. Now,” she went on, “as I was saying, I need to know which of these would go best in a nursery.” She gave a bashful smile. “I guess it’s no secret, but I’m expecting.”

Grey had known some crazy people in his days, but this woman took the cake. “Lady, I don’t think you should be here. It’s not safe.”

Another little hitch of time passed before she answered; it was as if she was processing his words and then, in the next instant, rewriting their meaning.

“Honestly, you sound just like David. To tell you the truth, I’ve had just about enough of this kind of talk.” She sighed heavily. “So, Garden Gate it is then. I’ll take two gallons in an eggshell finish, please. If you don’t mind, I’m in kind of a hurry.”

Grey felt completely flustered. “You want me to sell you paint?”

“Well, are you or aren’t you the manager?”

The manager? When had that happened? The fact was dawning on him that the woman wasn’t just pretending.

“Lady, don’t you know what’s going on around here?”

She pulled two cans from the shelves and held them out. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’m buying some paint, and you’re going to mix it for me, Mr.— Now, I don’t believe I got your name.”

Grey swallowed. Something about the woman seemed to make him absolutely powerless, as if he were being dragged by a runaway horse. “It’s Grey,” he said. “Lawrence Grey.”

She pushed the cans toward him, forcing him to take them. Christ, she practically had him filling out an employment application. If this went on much longer, he’d never get a fan belt. “Well, Mr. Grey. I’d like two gallons of Garden Gate, please.”

“Um, I don’t know how.”

“Of course you do.” She gestured toward the counter. “Just put it in the whatchamacallit.”

“Lady, I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“Well, just for starters, the power’s out.”

This remark seemed to have some beneficial effect. The woman tilted her face toward the ceiling.

“Now, I think I did notice that,” she said airily. “It does seem a little dim in here.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” she huffed. “So, no Garden Gate. No color at all, from what you’re saying. I have to tell you this comes as a disappointment. I was really hoping to get the nursery done today.”

“Lady, I don’t think—”

“The truth is, David should really be the one doing this, but oh no, he has to go off and save the world and leave me stuck in the house like a prisoner. And where the hell is Yolanda? Pardon my French. You know, after everything I’ve done for her, I’d expect a little consideration. Even just a call.”

David. Yolanda. Who were these people? It was all completely baffling, and not a little weird, but one thing was obvious: this poor woman was completely alone. Unless Grey found a way to get her out of here, she wouldn’t last long.

“Maybe you could just paint it white,” he offered. “I’m sure they got lots of that.”

She looked at him skeptically. “Why would I want to paint it white?”

“They say white goes with anything, right?” For the love of God, listen to him; he sounded like one of those fags on TV. “You can do anything with white. Maybe add something else with color in the room. The curtains and stuff.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. White does seem a little plain. On the other hand, I did want to get the painting done today.”

“Exactly,” Grey said, and did his best to smile. “That’s just what I’m saying. You can paint it white, then figure out the rest when you see how it looks. That’s what I’d recommend.”

“And white does go with anything. You’re correct about that.”

“You said it was a nursery, right? So maybe later you could add a border, to jazz it up a little. You know, like bunnies or something.”

“Bunnies, you say?”

Grey swallowed. Where had that come from? Bunnies were the glow-sticks’ all-time favorite food. He’d watched Zero gobble them down by the cartload.

“Sure,” he managed. “Everybody likes bunnies.”

He could see the idea taking hold of her. Which raised another question. Assuming the woman agreed to leave, what then? He could hardly let her go off on her own. He also wondered just how pregnant she was. Five months? Six? He wasn’t a good judge of these things.

“Well, I think you really may have something there,” the woman said with a nod from her fine-boned chin. “We really seem to be on the same wavelength, Mr. Grey.”

“It’s Lawrence,” he said.

Smiling, she held out her hand. “Call me Lila.”

It wasn’t until he was sitting in the woman’s Volvo—Lila had actually left a wad of cash at one of the registers, with a note promising to return—that Grey realized that somewhere between his carrying the cans to the car and loading them into the cargo area, she had successfully maneuvered him into agreeing to paint the nursery. He didn’t recall actually doing this; it just kind of happened, and the next thing he knew they were driving away, the woman steering the Volvo through the abandoned city, past wrecked cars and bloated bodies, overturned Army trucks and the still-smoking rubble of gutted apartment complexes. “Really,” she remarked, guiding the station wagon around the burned-out hulk of a FedEx delivery truck with barely a glance, “you’d think people would have the sense to call a wrecker and not just leave their cars sitting in the road.” She also chattered on about the nursery (he’d hit pay dirt with the bunnies), tucking in more snide asides about David, who Grey figured was her husband. Grey guessed the man had gone off somewhere, leaving her alone in her house. Based on the things he’d seen, it seemed likely he’d gotten himself killed. Maybe the woman had been crazy before, but Grey didn’t think so. Something bad had happened to her, really bad. There was a name for this, he knew. Post-traumatic something. Basically the woman knew but didn’t know, and her mind, in its terrified state, was protecting her from the truth—a truth that, sooner or later, Grey would have to tell her.

They arrived at the house, a big brick Tudor that seemed to soar above the street. He’d already guessed the woman was well-off from the way she’d spoken to him, but this was something else. Grey retrieved the supplies from the Volvo’s cargo area—in addition to the paint, she’d selected a package of rollers, a tray, and an assortment of brushes—and mounted the steps. At the front door, Lila fumbled with her keys.

“Now, this always sticks a little.”

She shouldered the door open to a wash of stale air. Grey followed her into the foyer. He had expected the interior of the house to be like something in a castle, all heavy drapes and overstuffed furniture and dripping chandeliers, but it was the opposite, more like some kind of office than a place people actually lived. To his left, a wide arch led to the dining room, which was occupied by a long glass table and some uncomfortable-looking chairs; to the right was the living room, a barren expanse interrupted only by a low-slung couch and a large black piano. For a moment Grey just stood there, dumbly holding the cans of paint, trying to put his thoughts together. He smelled something, too—a pungent whiff of old garbage coming from deep within the house.

As the silence deepened, Grey scrambled for something to say. “Do you play?” he asked.

Lila was depositing her purse and keys on the little table by the door. “Play what?”

Grey gestured at the piano. She swiveled her head to look at the instrument, seeming vaguely startled.

“No,” she answered with a frown. “That was David’s idea. A little pretentious, if you ask me.”

She led him up the stairs, the air thickening as they made their ascent. Grey followed her to the end of the carpeted hall.

“Here we are,” she announced.

The room felt disproportionately snug, considering the dimensions of the house. A ladder stood in one corner, and the floor was covered by a plastic drop cloth taped to the baseboards; a roller sat in a tray of paint, hardening in the heat. Grey moved farther in. The room’s original tone had been a neutral cream, but someone—Lila, he guessed—had rolled broad, haphazard stripes of yellow up and down the walls, following no organized pattern. It would take him three coats just to cover it.

Lila was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “It’s probably pretty obvious,” she said with a wince, “I’m not much of a painter. Certainly not a professional such as yourself.”

This again, Grey thought. But as long as he’d decided to play along, he saw no reason to disabuse her of the notion that he knew what he was doing.

“Do you need anything else before you get started?”

“I guess not,” Grey managed.

She yawned into her hand. A sudden weariness seemed to have overcome her, as if she were a slowly deflating balloon. “Then I suppose I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to get off my feet for a bit.”

With these words, she left him alone. Grey heard the snap of a door closing down the hall. Well, wasn’t this the damnedest thing, he thought. Painting a baby’s room in some rich lady’s house certainly wasn’t anything he’d imagined himself doing when he’d woken up at the Red Roof. He listened for more sounds from her but heard nothing. Maybe the funniest thing of all was that Grey didn’t mind, not really. The woman was as nutty as they came, and not a little bossy. But it wasn’t as if he’d deceived her about who he was, since she’d never even asked. It felt good to be trusted by someone, even if he didn’t deserve it.

He retrieved his supplies from the foyer and got to work. Painting wasn’t anything he’d ever done much of, but it was hardly rocket science, and he quickly settled into its rhythms, his mind a pleasant blank. He could almost forget about waking up at the Red Roof, and Zero and Richards and the Chalet and all the rest. An hour passed, and then another; he was cutting in the edges along the ceiling when Lila appeared in the doorway, bearing a tray with a sandwich and a glass of water. She had changed into a high-waisted denim maternity dress that, despite its roominess, made her appear even more pregnant.

“I hope you like tuna.”

He climbed off the ladder to receive the tray. The bread was covered with furry green mold; there was a smell of rancid mayonnaise. Grey’s stomach flipped.

“Maybe later,” he stammered. “I want to do a second coat first.”

Lila said nothing more about this, instead stepping back to look around the room. “I have to say, this really looks better. So much better. I don’t know why I didn’t think of white before.” She pointed her eyes at Grey again. “I hope you don’t think me too forward, Lawrence, and I don’t want to assume anything, but you don’t by chance need a place to stay the night?”

Grey was caught short; he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t thought ahead at all, as if the woman’s delusional state were contagious. But of course she’d want him to stay. After so many days alone, there was no way she was letting him get loose now—keeping him here was the point. And besides, where would he go?

“Good. It’s settled then.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I have to say, I’m very relieved. I feel so guilty, dragging you into this, never even asking if you have someplace else to be. And after you’ve been so helpful.”

“It’s okay,” Grey said. “I mean, I’m glad to stay.”

“Don’t mention it.” The conversation seemed over, but at the doorway Lila turned, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Sorry about the sandwich. I know it probably isn’t very appetizing. I keep meaning to get out to the market. But I’ll make you a nice dinner.”

Grey worked through the afternoon, completing the third coat as the sun was setting in the windows. He had to say, the room didn’t look half bad. He deposited his brushes and rollers in the tray, descended the stairs, and followed the central hallway back to the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, the room had a spare, modern appearance, with white cabinets, black granite countertops, and appliances of gleaming chrome, the effect marred only by the garbage bags that were piled everywhere, reeking of old food. Lila was standing at the stove—the gas appeared to be working—and stirring a saucepan by candlelight. The table was set with china, napkins, and silverware, even a tablecloth.

“I hope you like tomato,” said Lila, smiling at him.

Lila directed him to a small room behind the kitchen with a utility sink. There was no water to wash the brushes, so Grey left them in the basin and used a rag to clean his hands as best he could. The idea of tomato soup repelled him, but he would have to do a convincing job of trying to eat—there was simply no way to avoid it. By the time he returned, Lila was ladling the steaming soup into a pair of bowls. These she carried to the table with a plate of Ritz crackers.

“Bon appétit.”

The first spoonful nearly made him gag. It didn’t even seem like food. Against every instinct, he managed to swallow. Lila appeared to take no notice of his distress, breaking the crackers into her soup and spooning it into her mouth. By sheer force of will, Grey took another spoonful, then a third. He could feel the soup lodging at the base of his gut, an inert mass. As he attempted a fourth, something viselike clamped inside him.

“Excuse me a second.”

Trying not to run, he retreated to the utility room, arriving at the sink in the nick of time. Usually he made a racket when he puked, but not now: the soup seemed to fly effortlessly out of his body. Christ, what was the matter with him? He wiped his mouth, took a moment to steady himself, and returned to the table. Lila was looking at him with concern.

“Is the soup all right?” she asked gingerly.

He couldn’t even look at the stuff. He wondered if she could smell the puke on his breath. “It’s fine,” he managed. “I’m just… not very hungry, I guess.”

The answer appeared to satisfy her. She regarded him for a long moment before speaking again. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, Lawrence. But are you looking for work?”

“More painting, you mean?”

“Well, certainly there’s that. But other things, too. Because I have the impression, and forgive me if I’m leaping to conclusions, that you may be a little bit… at loose ends. Which is fine. Don’t get me wrong. Things happen to people.” She squinted across the table. “But you don’t really work at Home Depot, do you?”

Grey shook his head.

“I thought so! Really, you had me going for a while there. And regardless, you’ve done a beautiful job. A beautiful job. Which only proves my point. If you see what I’m saying. Because I’d like to help you get back on your feet. You’ve been so helpful, I’d like to return the favor. God knows there’s plenty that needs doing around here. There’s putting up the border, and of course the problems with the AC, and the yard, well you’ve seen the yard …”

If he didn’t stop her now, Grey knew, he’d never get her out of here. “Lady—”

“Please.” Holding up a hand, she gave him a warm smile. “It’s Lila.”

“Lila, okay.” Grey drew a breath. “Have you noticed anything… strange?”

A puzzled frown. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Best to back in slowly, Grey thought. “Like, take the electricity, for instance.”

“Oh that,” she said, and waved a hand dismissively. “You already mentioned that, at the store.”

“But doesn’t it seem odd that it’s still out? Don’t you think they would have fixed it by now?”

A vague disturbance moved across her face. “I haven’t the foggiest. Honestly, I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

“And David, you said he hasn’t called. How long has it been?”

“Well, he’s a busy man. A very busy man.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason he hasn’t called.”

Her voice was absolutely flat. “You don’t.”

“No.”

Lila’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Lawrence, do you know something you’re not telling me? Because if you’re a friend of David’s, I hope you would have the decency to tell me.”

Grey might just as well have tried to snatch a fly out of the air. “No, he’s not a friend of mine. I’m just saying …” There was nothing to do but just come out with it. “Have you noticed there aren’t any people?”

Lila was staring at him intently, arms crossed above her pregnant belly. Her eyes held a look of barely contained rage. She rose abruptly, snatched her bowl from the table, and carried it to the sink.

“Lila—”

She shook her head emphatically, not looking at him. “I won’t have you talk this way.”

“We have to get out of here.”

With a clatter she tossed the bowl into the sink and turned on the tap, violently pumping the lever back and forth, to no avail. “Goddamnit, there’s no water. Why is there no fucking water?”

Grey got to his feet. She spun to face him, her fists balled with anger.

“Don’t you understand? I can’t lose her again! I can’t!”

Did she mean the baby? And what did she mean by “again”?

“We can’t stay.” He took another cautious step, as if approaching a wary animal. “It’s not safe here.”

Furious tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Why do you have to do this? Why?”

She lurched toward him, fists raised like hammers. Grey was thrust back on his heels. She began to pummel his chest as if she were trying to break down a door. But her attack wasn’t organized; it was an expression of pure panic, of the storm of emotion breaking inside her. As she reared back again, Grey regained his balance and pulled her into him like a boxer into a clinch, encircling her upper body and pinning her arms to her sides. The gesture was reflexive; he didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t say that,” Lila pleaded, thrashing inside his grip. “It isn’t true, it isn’t true.…” Then, with a rush of breath and a whimper of surrender, the air let out of her and she collapsed against him.

For a period that might have been a full minute they stayed that way, locked in an awkward embrace. Grey couldn’t have been more astonished—not by her violent reaction, which he could have foreseen, but by the mere presence of a woman’s body in his arms. How slight she was! How different from himself! How long had it been since Grey had hugged a woman, hugged anyone? Or even been touched by another person? He could feel the hard roundness of Lila’s belly pressed against him, an insistent presence. A baby, Grey thought, and for the first time, the full implications of this fact dawned in his mind. In the midst of the chaos and carnage of a world gone mad, this poor woman was going to have a baby.

Grey relaxed his grip and backed away. Lila was looking at the floor. The brisk, officious woman he’d met in the paint aisle was gone; in her place stood a frail, diminished creature, almost childlike.

“Can I ask you something, Lawrence?” Her voice was very small.

Grey nodded.

“What did you do before?”

For a moment he didn’t understand what she was asking; then he realized she meant what job. “I cleaned,” he said, and shrugged. “I mean, I was a janitor.”

Lila considered his statement without expression. “Well, I guess you’ve got me there,” she said miserably. She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was anything at all.”

Another silence descended, Lila staring at the floor, Grey wondering what she would next say. Whatever it was, he sensed their survival depended on it.

“I lost one before, you see,” Lila said. “A baby girl.”

Grey waited.

“Her heart, you understand,” she said, and placed a hand against her chest. “It was a problem with her heart.”

It was strange; standing in the quiet, Grey felt as if he’d known this about her all along. Or, if not the thing itself, then the kind of thing. It was as if he were looking at one of those pictures that made no sense when you saw it up close, but then you backed away and suddenly it did.

“What was her name?” Grey asked.

Lila raised her tear-streaked face. For a moment she just looked at him, her eyes pulled into an appraising squint. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, asking this. The question had just popped out.

“Thank you, Lawrence. Nobody ever asks me that. I can’t tell you how long it’s been.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know.” Her shoulders lifted with a tiny shrug. “I guess they think it’s bad luck or something.”

“Not to me.”

A brief silence passed. Grey didn’t think he’d ever felt so awful for anybody in his life.

“Eva,” Lila said. “My daughter was Eva.”

They stood together in the presence of this name. Outside, beyond the windows of Lila’s house, the night was pressing down. Grey realized it had begun to rain—a quiet, soaking, summer rain, pattering the windows.

“I’m not really who you think I am,” Grey confessed.

“No?”

What did he want to tell her? The truth, surely, or some version of it, but in the last day and a half, the idea of truth seemed to have slipped its moorings completely. He didn’t even know where to begin.

“It’s all right,” Lila said. “You don’t have to say anything. Whoever you were before, it doesn’t make much difference now.”

“It might. I’ve had… some troubles.”

“So that would make you just like the rest of us, wouldn’t it? One more person with a secret.” She looked away. “That’s the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You’re just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.”

Grey nodded. What was there to say?

“Promise me you won’t leave,” Lila said. “Whatever happens, don’t do that.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll look after me. We’ll look after each other.”

“I promise.”

The conversation seemed to end there. Lila, exhaling a weary breath, pushed her shoulders back. “Well. I guess I’d better turn in. I expect you’ll want to be leaving first thing in the morning. If I’m reading you correctly.”

“I think that’s best.”

Her eyes wistfully traveled the room with its shiny appliances and overflowing trash bags and dirty dishes in piles. “It’s too bad, really. I did want to finish the nursery. But I guess that will have to wait.” She found his face again. “Just one thing. You can’t make me think about it.”

Grey understood what she was asking. Don’t make me think about the world. “If that’s what you want.”

“We’re just …” She looked for the words. “Taking a drive in the country. How does that sound? Do you think you can do that for me?”

Grey nodded. The request struck him as strange, even a little silly, but he would have put on a clown suit if that’s what it took to get her out of there.

“Good. Just so long as that’s settled.”

He waited for her to say something more, or else leave the room, but neither thing happened. A change came into Lila’s face—a look of intense concentration, as if she were reading tiny print that only she could see. Then, abruptly, her eyes grew very wide; she seemed about to laugh.

“Oh my goodness, what a scene I made! I can’t believe I did that!” Her hands darted to her cheeks, her hair. “I must look terrible. Do I look terrible?”

“I think you look fine,” Grey managed.

“Here you are, a guest in my home, and off go the waterworks. It drives Brad absolutely crazy.”

The name wasn’t one he’d heard from her before. “Who’s Brad?”

Lila frowned. “My husband, of course.”

“I thought David was your husband.”

She gave him a blank stare. “Well, he is. David, I mean.”

“But you said—”

Lila waved this away. “I say a lot of things, Lawrence. That’s one thing you’ll have to learn about me. Probably you think I’m just some crazy woman, and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Grey lied.

An ironic smile creased her fine-boned face. “Well. We both know you’re only saying that because you’re being nice. But I appreciate the gesture.” She surveyed the room again, nodding vaguely. “So, it’s been quite a day, don’t you think? I’m afraid we don’t really have a proper guest room, but I made up the couch for you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just leave the dishes for the morning and say good night.”

Grey had no idea what to make of any of this. It was as if Lila had broken her trance of denial, only to slip back into it again. Not slip, he thought; she had done this to herself, forcing her thoughts back into place with an act of will. He watched in dumb wonder as she made her way to the doorway, where she turned to face him.

“I’m so very glad you’re here, Lawrence,” she said, and smiled emptily. “We’re going to be good friends, you and I. I just know it.”

Then she was gone. Grey listened to her slow trudge down the hallway and up the stairs. He cleared the rest of the dishes from the table. He would have liked to wash them, so she could come down to a clean kitchen in the morning, but there was nothing he could do but deposit them in the sink with the others.

He carried one of the candles from the table to the living room. But the minute he lay down on the sofa, he knew sleep was out of the question. His brain was bouncing with alertness; he still felt a little nauseated from the soup. His mind returned to the scene in the kitchen, and the moment when he’d put his arms around her. Not a hug, exactly; he’d just been trying to get Lila to stop hitting him. But at some point it had become something huglike. It had felt good—more than good, actually. The feeling wasn’t anything sexual, not as Grey recalled it. Years had gone by since Grey had experienced anything that even approximated a sexual thought—the anti-androgens saw to that—on top of which, the woman was pregnant, for God’s sake. Which, come to think of it, was maybe what was so nice about the whole thing. Pregnant women didn’t just go hugging people for no reason. Holding Lila, Grey had felt as if he’d stepped into a circle, and within this circle there were not just two people but three—because the baby was there, too. Maybe Lila was crazy and maybe she wasn’t. He was hardly the person to judge. But he couldn’t see that this made a difference one way or the other. She’d chosen him to help her, and that was exactly what he’d do.

Grey had almost talked his way into sleep when the silence was cut by an animal yelp. He lurched upright on the couch, shaking off his disorientation; the sound had come from outside. He hurried to the window.

That was when he remembered Iggy’s gun. He’d been so distracted, he’d left it at the Home Depot. How could he have been so dumb?

He pressed his face to the glass. A dog-sized hump was lying in the middle of the street. It didn’t seem to be moving. Grey waited a moment, his breath suspended. A pale shape bounded through the treetops, the image fading, then gone.

Grey knew he wouldn’t shut his eyes all night. But it didn’t matter. Upstairs Lila slept, dreaming of a world that was no more, while outside the walls of the house, a monstrous evil lurked—an evil Grey was part of. His mind returned to the scene in the kitchen, and the image of Lila, standing at the sink, desperate tears flowing down her cheeks, her fists clenched with rage. I can’t lose her again, I can’t.

He would stand guard at the window till morning, and then, come sunrise, get them the hell out of here.

Lila Kyle was brooding in the dark.

She’d heard the yelp from outside. A dog, she thought; something had happened to a dog. Some thoughtless motorist, speeding down the street? Surely that was what had happened. People should be more careful with their pets.

Don’t think, she told herself. Don’t think don’t think don’t think.

Lila wondered what it would be like, being a dog. She could see how there might be some advantages. A purely thoughtless existence, nothing on one’s mind but the next pat on the head, a walk around the block, the sensation of food in one’s belly. Probably Roscoe (because it was Roscoe she had heard; poor Roscoe) hadn’t even known what was happening to him. Maybe a little bit, at the end. One minute he was snuffling down the street, searching for something to eat—Lila recalled the floppy thing she’d seen in his mouth that morning, instantly pushing this unpleasant memory aside—and the next: well, there was no next. Roscoe was sailing into oblivion.

And now there was this man. This Lawrence Grey. About whom, Lila realized, she knew exactly nothing. He was a janitor. He cleaned. What did he clean? Probably David would have a conniption if he knew she’d let a total stranger into the house. She would have liked to see the look on David’s face. Lila supposed it was possible she’d misjudged the man, this Lawrence Grey, but she didn’t think so. She’d always been a good judge of character. Granted, Lawrence had said some disturbing things in the kitchen—very disturbing. About the lights being out and people missing and all the rest. (Dead, dead, everyone was dead.) He’d certainly gotten her upset. But to be fair, he’d done a wonderful job with the nursery, and she could tell just by looking at him that his heart was in the right place. Which was another of her father’s favorite expressions. What did it mean, exactly? Could the heart be anywhere else? Daddy, I’m a doctor, she’d told him once, laughing; I can tell you for a fact, the heart is where it is.

Lila heard herself sigh. Such an effort, just to keep everything straight in her mind. Because that was what you had to do; you had to look at things in a certain light and no other, and no matter what happened, you couldn’t break your gaze away. The world could overwhelm you otherwise, it could drown you like a wave, and then where would you be? The house itself was nothing she would miss; she had secretly hated it from the moment she’d stepped inside, its show-offy dimensions and too-many rooms and gaseous yellow light. It wasn’t at all like the one that she and Brad had lived in on Maribel Street—snug, homey, full of the things they’d loved—but how could it be? What was a house but the life it contained? This pompous monstrosity, this museum of nothing. It had been David’s idea, of course. The House of David: wasn’t that something from the Bible? The Bible was full of houses, the house of so-and-so and the house of such-and-such. Lila remembered being a little girl, snuggled up on the sofa to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas—she’d loved Snoopy almost as much as Peter Rabbit—and the moment when Linus, the smart one, the one who was really just a man pretending to be a boy with his blanket, stepped downstage to tell Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about. And there were in that same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

City of David, House of David.

But the baby, Lila thought. The baby was where her thoughts belonged. Not with the house, or noises from outside (there were monsters), or David not coming home (dead David), or any of the rest. All the literature had clearly shown, indisputably shown, that negative emotions affected the fetus. It thought as you thought, it felt as you felt, and if you were frightened all the time, what then? Those upsetting things Lawrence had said in the kitchen: the man meant well, he was only trying to do what he thought was best for her and Eva (Eva?), but did these things have to be true, simply because he’d said them? They were theories. They were just his opinions. Which wasn’t to say she disagreed. Probably it was time to go. It had gotten awfully quiet around this place. (Poor Roscoe.) If Brad were here, that’s what he would have said to her. Lila, it’s time to go.

Because sometimes, lots of times, all the time, it felt to Lila Kyle as if the baby growing inside her wasn’t somebody new, a whole new person. Since the morning she’d squatted on the toilet with the plastic wand between her thighs, watching in mute wonderment as the little blue cross appeared, the idea had taken root. The baby wasn’t a new Eva, or a different Eva, or a replacement Eva: she was Eva, their own little girl, come home. It was as if the world had righted itself, the cosmic mistake of Eva’s death undone.

She wanted to tell Brad about it. More than wanted: his name produced a longing so powerful it brought tears to her eyes. She hadn’t meant to marry David! Why had Lila married David—sanctimonious, overbearing, eternally do-gooding David—when she was already married to Brad? Especially now, with Eva on the way, coming to make them a family again?

Lila still loved him; that was the thing. That was the sad and sorrowful mystery of it all. She’d never stopped loving Brad, nor he her, not for a second, even when their love was too much pain for either to carry, because their little girl was gone. They had parted as a way to forget, neither being able to accomplish this in the company of the other—a sad, inevitable sundering, like the primordial separation of continents. Until the very end they’d fought it. The night before he’d moved out, his suitcases in the hall of the house on Maribel Street, the lawyers properly apprised, so many tears having been shed that no one even knew what they were crying about anymore—a condition as general as the weather, a world of everlasting tears—he’d come to her in the bedroom he had long since vacated, slid beneath the covers, and for a single hour they’d been a couple again, silently moving together, their bodies still wanting what their hearts could no longer bear. Not a word had passed between them; in the morning Lila awoke alone.

But now all of that had changed. Eva was coming! Eva was practically here! She would write Brad a letter; that’s what Lila would do. Surely he was going to come look for her, it was just the kind of man he was, you could always count on Brad when things went to hell in a handbasket, and how would it be for him to find she wasn’t there? Her spirits restored by this decision, Lila crept to the little desk under the windows, fumbling in the drawer for a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper. Now, what words to choose? I am going away. I don’t know quite where. Wait for me, my darling. I love you. Eva will be here soon. Simple and clear, elegantly capturing the essence of the thing. Satisfied, she folded the paper into thirds, slid it into an envelope, wrote “Brad” on the outside, and propped it on the desk so she would see it in the morning.

She lay back down. From across the room, the letter watched her, a rectangle of glowing whiteness. Closing her eyes, Lila let her hands drift down to the hard curve of her belly. A feeling of fullness, and then, from within, a gaseous twitch, then another and another. The baby was hiccupping. Hiccup! went the tiny baby. Lila closed her eyes, allowing the sensation to wash over her. Inside her, in the space beneath her heart, a small life was waiting to be born, but even more: she, Eva, was coming home. The day was catching up to her, Lila knew; her mind was riding the currents of sleep like a surfer paddling on the curve of a wave; in another moment the wave would wash over her, taking her under. Eva had quieted under her fingertips. I love you, Eva, thought Lila Kyle, and with that she fell asleep.

10

It was nearly ten A.M. by the time they got to Mile High. Driving into downtown, Danny found himself caught in a maze of barricades: abandoned Humvees, machine-gun positions with their piles of sandbags, even a few tanks. A dozen times he was forced to backtrack in search of an alternate route, only to find his passage blocked. Finally, as the last of the morning haze was burning off, he found a clear path under the freeway and ascended the ramp to the stadium.

The parking area was a grid of olive-green tents, eerily becalmed under the morning sun. Surrounding this was a ring of vehicles, passenger cars and ambulances and police cruisers, many of them looking half-crushed: windows smashed, fenders torn from the frames, doors ripped off their hinges. Danny brought the bus to a halt.

They disembarked into a stench of decay so thick that Danny nearly gagged. Worse than Momma, worse than all the bodies he’d seen that morning, walking to the depot. It was the kind of smell that could snake inside you, into your nose and mouth, and linger there for days.

“Hello!” April called. Her voice echoed across the lot. “Is anybody here? Hello!”

Danny had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Some of this was the smell, but some wasn’t. He had the jangly feeling all over.

“Hello!” April called again, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Can anyone hear me?”

“Maybe we should go,” Danny suggested.

“The Army’s supposed to be here.”

“Maybe they left already.”

April removed her backpack, unzipped the top, and withdrew a hammer. She gave it a swing, as if to test its weight.

“Tim, you stay by me. Understand? No wandering off.”

The boy was standing at the base of the bus’s steps, pinching his nose. “But it smells gross,” he said in a nasal voice.

April slid her arms into the straps. “The whole city smells gross. You’ll just have to deal with it. Now come on.”

Danny didn’t want to go either, but the girl was determined. He followed the two of them as they made their way into the maze of vehicles. Step by step, Danny began to comprehend what he was seeing. The cars had been positioned around the tents as a defense. Like in pioneer times, the way settlers would circle the covered wagons when the Indians attacked. But these weren’t Indians, Danny knew, and whatever had happened here, it looked to be long over. There were corpses, somewhere—the smell seemed to intensify the farther they went—but so far they’d seen no trace of them. It was as if everyone had vanished.

They came to the first of the tents. April entered first, holding the hammer up before her, ready to swing. The space was a mess of overturned gurneys and IV poles, debris strewn everywhere—bandages, basins, syringes. But still there were no bodies.

They looked in another tent, then a third. Each was the same. “So where did everybody go?” April said.

The only place left to look was the stadium. Danny didn’t want to, but April wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the Army said to come here, she insisted, there had to be a reason. They moved up the ramp toward the entrance. April was leading the way, clutching Tim with one hand, the hammer with the other. For the first time, Danny noticed the birds. A huge black cloud wheeling over the stadium, their hoarse calls seeming to break the silence and to deepen it at the same time.

Then, from behind them, a man’s voice:

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

The Ferrari had died as Kittridge was pulling into the parking area. By this time the car was bucking like a half-broke horse, plumes of oily smoke pouring from the hood and undercarriage. There was no mistaking what had happened: Kittridge’s rocket ride out of the parking ramp—that leap into space and then the hard bang on the pavement—had cracked the oil pan. As the oil had drained away, the motor had gradually overheated, metal expanding until the pistons had seized in their cylinders.

Sorry about your car, Warren. It sure was good while it lasted.

After what he’d seen in the stadium, Kittridge needed some time to collect himself. Jesus, what a scene. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t have predicted, but staring it in the face was something else. It sickened him to the core. His hands were actually shaking; he thought he might be ill. Kittridge had seen some things in his life, horrible things. Bodies in pits lined up like cordwood; whole villages gassed, families lying where they’d fallen, their hands reaching out in vain for the last touch of a loved one; the indecipherable remains of men and women and children, blasted to bits in a marketplace by some lunatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. But never anything even remotely on this scale.

He’d been sitting on the hood of the Ferrari, considering his options, when in the distance he’d heard a vehicle approaching. Kittridge’s nerves snapped to attention. A large diesel engine by the sound of it: an APC? But then, lumbering up the ramp, came the surreal vision of a big yellow school bus.

How about that, Kittridge thought. Holy son of a bitch. A goddamned school bus, like a class trip to the end of the world.

Kittridge watched as the bus came to a stop. Three people emerged: a girl with a streak of pink in her hair, a knobby-kneed boy in a T-shirt and shorts, and a man in a funny-looking hat, whom Kittridge guessed was the driver. Hello! the girl called out. Is anybody here? A moment of conferral, then they advanced into the tangle of vehicles, the girl leading the way.

Probably it was time to say something, Kittridge thought. But alerting them to his presence could incur a host of obligations he’d vowed to avoid from the start. Other people weren’t part of the plan; the plan was to get gone. Travel light, stay alive as long as possible, take as many virals with him as he could when the end came. Last Stand in Denver making his bright, meteoric descent into the void.

But then Kittridge realized what was about to happen. The three of them were headed straight for the stadium. Of course that’s where they’d go; Kittridge had done the same. These were kids, for God’s sake; plan or no plan, no way could he let them go in there.

Kittridge grabbed his rifle and hustled to head them off.

At the sound of Kittridge’s voice, the driver reacted so violently that Kittridge was momentarily frozen into inaction. Erupting with a yelp, the man lurched forward, stumbling over his feet while simultaneously burying his face in the crook of his elbow. The other two scurried away, the girl yanking the little boy protectively to her waist, swiveling toward Kittridge with a hammer held before her.

“Whoa, steady there,” Kittridge said. Pointing the rifle skyward, he raised his hands. “I’m one of the good guys.”

Kittridge saw that the girl was older than he’d first guessed, seventeen or so. The pink hair was ridiculous, and both her ears had so many studs in them they looked like they’d been riveted to her head, but the way she regarded him, coolly and without a hint of panic, told him she was more than she appeared. There was no doubt in his mind that she’d use the hammer on him, or try to, if he went another step. She had on a tight black T-shirt, jeans worn to threads at the knees, a pair of Chuck Taylors, and bracelets of leather and silver up and down both arms; a backpack, crime-scene yellow, hung from her shoulders. The boy was obviously her brother, their familial connection evident not only in the unmistakable arrangement of their features—the slightly too-small nose with its buttony tip, the high, sudden planes of the cheekbones, eyes of the same aquatic blue—but also in the way she had reacted, shielding him with a fierce protectiveness that struck Kittridge as distinctly parental.

The third member of their group, the driver, was harder to quantify. Something was definitely off about the guy. He was dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt buttoned to the collar; his hair, a reddish-blond mop peeking from the sides of his peculiar cap, looked like it had been cut by pinking shears. But the real difference wasn’t any of these things. It was the way he held himself.

The boy was the first to speak. He had just about the worst cowlick Kittridge had ever laid eyes on. “Is that a real AK?” he said, pointing.

“Quiet, Tim.” Drawing him closer, the girl lifted the hammer, ready to swing. “Who the hell are you?”

Kittridge’s hands were still raised. For the moment, the notion that the hammer presented an actual threat was something he was willing to indulge. “My name’s Kittridge. And yes,” he said, speaking to the boy, “it’s a real AK. Just don’t go thinking I’ll let you touch it, young man.”

The boy’s face lit with excitement. “That’s cool.”

Kittridge lifted his chin toward the driver, who was now gazing intently at his shoes. “Is he okay?”

“He doesn’t like to be touched is all.” The girl was still studying Kittridge warily. “The Army said to come here. We heard it on the radio.”

“I expect they did. But it looks like they’ve flown the coop on us. Now, I don’t believe I caught your names.”

The girl hesitated. “I’m April. This is my brother, Tim. The other one is Danny.”

“Pleased to meet you, April.” He offered his most reassuring smile. “So do you think it would be all right with you if I put my hands down now? Seeing as we’ve all been properly introduced.”

“Where’d you get that rifle?”

“Outdoor World. I’m a salesman.”

“You sell guns?”

“Camping and fishing gear, mostly.” Kittridge replied. “But they give a nice discount. So what do you say? We’re all on the same team here, April.”

“What team’s that?”

He shrugged. “The human one, I’d say.”

The girl was weighing him with her eyes. A cautious one, this April. Kittridge reminded himself that she wasn’t just a girl; she was a survivor. Whatever else was true, she deserved to be taken seriously. A few seconds passed, then she lowered the hammer.

“What’s in the stadium?” Tim asked.

“Nothing you want to see.” Kittridge looked at the girl again. She seemed like an April, he decided. Funny how it sometimes worked that way. “How’d you all get by?”

“We were hiding in the wine cellar.”

“What about your folks?”

“We don’t know. They were in Telluride.”

Jesus, Kittridge thought. Telluride was ground zero, the place where everything had started.

“Well, that was smart. Good thinking.” He gestured toward Danny again. He was standing ten feet off to the side with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground. “What about your friend?”

“Danny was the one who found us. We heard him honking.”

“Well, good for you, Danny. I’d say that makes you the hero of the day.”

The man gave Kittridge a darting, sidelong glance. His face bore no expression at all. “Okay.”

“Why can’t I see what’s in the stadium?” Tim cut in again.

A look passed between April and Kittridge: Not a good idea.

“Never mind about the stadium,” April said. She returned her attention to Kittridge. “Have you seen anybody else?”

“Not for a while. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Probably it’s wisest if we assume we’re alone.”

Kittridge could see where this was all headed. An hour ago he’d been riding down the side of a building, fleeing for his life. Now he was facing the prospect of looking after two kids and a man who couldn’t even meet his eye. But the situation was what it was.

“That your bus, Danny?” he said.

The man nodded. “I drive the blue route. Number twelve.”

A smaller vehicle would have made more sense, but Kittridge had the feeling the man wouldn’t be leaving without it. “Feel like maybe driving us out of here?”

The girl’s expression hardened. “What makes you think you’re coming with us?”

Kittridge was taken aback; he hadn’t considered the possibility that the three of them wouldn’t want his help.

“Actually, nothing, you put it that way. I guess you’d have to invite me.”

“Why can’t I see?” Tim whined.

April rolled her eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Tim, just shut up about the stadium, will you?”

“You said the F word! I’m telling!”

“And who are you going to tell?”

The boy was suddenly on the verge of tears. “Don’t say that!”

“Listen,” Kittridge cut in, “this really isn’t the time. By my count we’ve got eight hours of daylight left. I don’t think we want to be anywhere near here after dark.”

Which was when the boy, sensing his opening, spun on his heels and bolted up the ramp.

“Shit,” Kittridge said. “Both of you stay here.”

He took off at a hobbling run, but with his leg, he was in no condition to close the gap; by the time Kittridge caught up to the boy, he was standing in the open mouth of one of the gates, staring dumbly at the field. Just a few seconds, but it was enough. Kittridge snatched him from behind and hoisted him to his chest. The boy went limp, collapsing against him. He made no sound at all. Jesus, Kittridge thought. Why had he let the kid get the jump on him like that?

By the time he reached the base of the ramp, Tim had begun making a sound that was half hiccup, half whimper. Kittridge lowered him to the ground in front of April.

“What do you think you were doing?” Her voice was thick with angry tears.

“I’m… s-sorry,” the boy stammered.

“You can’t go running off like that, you can’t.” She shook him by the arms, then pulled him into a desperate hug. “I’ve told you a thousand times, you stay with me.”

Kittridge had moved to where Danny was standing, gazing at the ground with his hands in his pockets.

“They were really all alone?” he asked quietly.

“Consuela was with them,” Danny stated. “But she left.”

“Who’s Consuela?”

He gave a loose-limbed shrug. “She waits with Tim at the bus sometimes.”

There wasn’t much else to say on the subject. Maybe Danny wasn’t all there, but he’d rescued two helpless kids whose parents were almost certainly dead. It was more than Kittridge had done.

“So how about it, my friend,” Kittridge said. “Feel like firing up that bus of yours?”

“Where are we going?”

“I was thinking Nebraska.”

11

They left an hour after dawn. Grey took whatever he could find in the kitchen that still looked edible—a few remaining cans of soup, some stale crackers, a box of Wheaties, and bottles of water—and loaded it into the Volvo. He didn’t have so much as a toothbrush of his own, but then Lila appeared in the hall with two wheeled suitcases.

“I took the liberty of packing you some clothes.”

Lila was dressed as if leaving on vacation, in dark leggings paired with a crisply-starched, long-tailed shirt. A brightly colored silk scarf lay over her shoulders. She’d washed her face and brushed her hair, and was even wearing earrings and a bit of makeup. The sight of her made Grey realize how dirty he was. He hadn’t washed in days; probably he didn’t smell the best.

“Maybe I should clean up a bit.”

Lila directed him to the bathroom at the head of the stairs, where she’d already laid out a change of clothes for him, neatly folded on the toilet seat. A brand-new toothbrush, still in its wrapper, and a tube of Colgate rested on the vanity beside a jug of water. Grey peeled off his jumpsuit and washed his face and splashed his armpits, then brushed his teeth, facing the broad mirror. He hadn’t looked at his reflection since the Red Roof, and it still came as a shock, how young he looked—skin clear and taut, hair growing lushly over his scalp, eyes radiating a jewel-like glitter. He looked like he’d lost a lot of weight, too—not surprising, since he’d eaten nothing in two days, but the degree to which this had occurred, both in quantity and kind, was startling. He wasn’t just thinner; it was as if his body had rearranged itself. Turning to the side, holding his gaze on his reflection, he ran a hand experimentally over his belly. He’d always run on the chubby side; now he could discern the taut outline of muscles. From there it was a small step to flexing his arms, like a kid admiring himself. Well, look at that, he thought. Actual biceps. God damn.

He put on the clothing Lila had left for him—white boxers, a pair of jeans, and a checked sport shirt—discovering, to his continued amazement, that it all fit rather well. He took one last look at himself in the mirror and descended the stairs to the living room, where he found Lila sitting on the sofa, paging through a People magazine.

“Well, there you are.” She regarded him up and down, smiling in her airy way. “Don’t you look nice.”

He wheeled the suitcases to the Volvo. The morning air was weighted with dew; birds were singing in the trees. As if the two of them were just taking a drive in the country, Grey thought, shaking his head. Yet as he stood in the driveway wearing another man’s clothes, this almost seemed true. It was as if he had stepped into a different life—the life, perhaps, of the man whose jeans and sport shirt now graced his newly slender, muscled body. He took a deep sniff, expanding his chest. The air felt fresh and clean in his lungs, full of scent. Grass, and new green leaves, and damp earth. It seemed to contain no trace of the terrors of the night before, as if the light of day had cleansed the world.

He sealed the hatch and looked up to see Lila standing at the front door. She turned the lock, then removed something from her purse: an envelope. She withdrew a roll of masking tape from her purse and taped the envelope to the door, standing back to look at it. A letter? Grey thought. Who would it be for? David? Brad? One of these, probably, but Grey still had no idea who was who. The two seemed virtually interchangeable in Lila’s mind.

“There,” she announced. “All set.” At the Volvo, she handed him the keys. “Would it be all right if you drove?”

And Grey liked that, too.

Grey decided it would be best to stay off the main roads, at least until they were out of the city. Though this fact was unstated, it also seemed part of his agreement with Lila that he should avoid passing the sorts of things that might upset her. This turned out not to matter: the woman barely looked up from her magazine. He picked his way through the suburbs; by midmorning, they were in a parched, rolling land of empty fields the color of burnt toast, moving east on a rural blacktop. The city faded away behind them, followed by the blue bulk of the Rockies, vaporizing in the haze. The scene around them possessed a barren, forgotten quality—just a scrim of feathery clouds high overhead, and the dry fields, and the highway unspooling under the Volvo’s wheels. Eventually Lila gave up her reading and fell asleep.

The oddness of the situation was inarguable, yet as the miles and hours passed, Grey felt a swelling rightness in his chest. Never in his life had he really mattered to anyone. He searched his mind for something, anything to compare the feeling to. The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt—a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn’t been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else’s baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

And the thing was, Grey liked women; he always had. The other thing, with the boys, was different. It wasn’t about what he liked or didn’t like but what he had to do, because of his past and the things that had been done to him. That was how Wilder, the prison shrink, had explained it. The boys were a compulsion, Wilder told him, Grey’s way of returning to the moment of his own abuse, to reenact it and, in so doing, seek to understand it. Grey no more decided to touch the boys than he decided to scratch an itch. A lot of what Wilder said sounded like bullshit to Grey, but not that part, and it made him feel a little better, knowing he wasn’t entirely at fault. Not that it let him off the hook any; Grey had beaten himself up plenty. He’d actually felt relieved when they sent him away. The Old Grey—the one who’d found himself lingering on the edges of playgrounds and cruising slowly past the junior high at three o’clock and dragging his feet in the locker room at the community swimming pool on summer afternoons—that Grey was nobody he ever wanted to know again.

His mind returned to the hug in the kitchen. It wasn’t a boy-girl thing, Grey knew that, but it wasn’t nothing either. It made Grey think of Nora Chung, the one girl he’d dated in high school. She hadn’t been a girlfriend, exactly; they’d never actually done anything. The two of them were in the band together—for a brief period, Grey had gotten it in his head to play the trumpet—and sometimes after practice Grey would walk her home, the two of them not even touching, though something about those walks made him feel for the first time that he wasn’t alone on the earth. He wanted to kiss her, but he’d never summoned the courage; eventually she’d drifted away. Curious that Grey should remember her now. He hadn’t so much as thought her name in twenty years.

By noon, they were approaching the Kansas border. Lila was still sleeping. Grey himself had lapsed into a half-dream state, barely paying attention to the road. He’d managed to avoid towns of any considerable size, but this couldn’t last; they’d need gas soon. Ahead he saw a water tower poking from the plain.

The town was named Kingwood—just a short, dusty main street, half the store windows papered over, and a few blocks of dismal houses on either side. It looked harmlessly abandoned; the only evidence that anything had happened was an ambulance parked in front of the fire station with its rear doors hanging open. And yet Grey sensed something, a tingling at his extremities, as if their progress was being observed from the shadows. He cruised the length of the town, finally coming to a filling station on its eastern edge, an off-brand place called Frankie’s.

Lila stirred when Grey shut the engine off. “Where are we?”

“Kansas.”

She yawned, squinting through the windshield at the desolate town. “Why are we stopping?”

“We need gas. I’ll just be a sec.”

Grey tried the pump, but no dice: the power was off. He’d have to siphon some off somehow, but for that he’d need a length of hose and a can. He stepped into the office. A battered metal desk, covered with stacks of paper, stood by the front window; an old office chair rested behind it, rocked back on its hinges, giving the ghostly impression of having only recently been vacated. He moved through the door that led to the service bays, a cool, dark space that smelled of oil. A Cadillac Seville, late-’90s vintage, was perched on one of the lifts; the second bay was occupied by a Chevy 4×4 with a jacked-up suspension and fat, mud-choked tires. Resting on the floor was a five-gallon gas can; on one of the workbenches, Grey located a length of hose. He severed off a six-foot section, slid one end into the 4×4’s fuel port, drew in a sip that he spat away, and began to siphon gas into the can.

The can was nearly full when he heard a scuffling above his head. Every nerve in his body fired simultaneously, clenching him in place.

Slowly he lifted his face.

The creature was suspended from one of the ceiling beams, hanging upside down with its knees folded over the strut like a kid on monkey bars. It was smaller than Zero, more human-seeming. As their eyes locked, Grey’s heart froze between beats. From deep inside the creature’s throat came a trilling sound.

You don’t have to be afraid, Grey.

What the fuck?

His feet tangled under him as he lurched backward, sending him pitching to the hard concrete. He snatched the gas can off the floor, fuel still gushing from the siphon, and charged from the service bay into the office and out the door. Lila was standing with her back braced against the car.

“Get in,” he said breathlessly.

“You didn’t notice if they had a vending machine inside? I’d really like to get a candy bar or something.”

“Damn it, Lila, get in the car.” Grey threw open the Volvo’s hatch, tossed the can inside, and slammed it closed. “We have to go right now.”

The woman sighed. “Fine, whatever you say. I don’t see why you have to be so rude about it.”

They raced away. Only when they were a mile from town did Grey’s pulse begin to slow. He let the Volvo coast to a stop, threw the door open, and stumbled from the car. Standing at the side of the road, he placed his hands on his knees, breathing in huge gulps of air. Jesus, it was like the thing had spoken to him. Like those clicks were a foreign language he could understand. It even knew his name. How did it know his name?

He felt Lila’s hand on his shoulder. “Lawrence, you’re bleeding.”

He was. His elbow looked ripped open, a flap of skin dangling. He must have done it in the fall, although he’d felt nothing.

“Let me look.”

Wearing an expression of intense concentration, Lila gently probed the edges with her fingertips. “How did it happen?”

“I guess I tripped.”

“You should have said something. Can you move it?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Wait here,” Lila commanded. “Don’t touch it.”

She opened the hatch of the Volvo and began to rummage through her suitcase. She removed a metal box and a bottle of water and dropped the tailgate.

“Let’s sit you down.”

Grey positioned himself on the tailgate. Lila opened the box: a medical kit. She rubbed a dab of Purell into her hands, removed a pair of latex gloves, snapped them onto her hands, and took his arm again.

“Do you have any history of excessive bleeding?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hepatitis, HIV, anything like that?”

Grey shook his head.

“How about your last tetanus shot? Can you remember when that was?”

What Lila was this? Who was Grey seeing? Not the lost woman of the Home Depot, or the defeated soul in the kitchen; this was someone new. A third Lila, full of efficiency and competence.

“Not since I was a kid.”

Lila took another moment to examine the wound. “Well, it’s a nasty gash. I’m going to have to suture it.”

“You mean like… stitches?”

“Trust me, I’ve done it a million times.”

She swabbed the wound with alcohol, removed a disposable syringe from the box, filled it from a tiny vial, and tapped the needle with her forefinger.

“Just a little something to numb you up. You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”

The prick of the needle and in just a few seconds, Grey’s pain melted away. Lila unfolded a cloth onto the tailgate, laying out a pair of forceps, a spool of dark thread, and a tiny scissors.

“You can watch if you want, but most people prefer to look away.”

He felt a series of tiny tugs but that was all. Moments later, he looked down to see the gash and its flap of skin replaced by a tight black line. Lila spread ointment over it, then dressed it with a bandage.

“The stitches should dissolve in a couple of days,” she said as she was snapping off her gloves. “It may be a little itchy, but you can’t scratch it. Just leave it alone.”

“How did you know how to do that?” Grey asked. “Are you a nurse or something?”

The question appeared to catch her short. Her mouth opened like she was about to say something; then she closed it again.

“Lila? Are you okay?”

She was sealing up the kit. She returned her supplies to the Volvo and closed the hatch.

“We better be going, don’t you think?”

Just like that, the woman who’d stitched his arm was gone, the moment of her emergence erased. Grey wanted to ask her more but knew what would happen if he did. The pact between them was clear: only certain things could be said.

“Do you want me to drive?” Lila asked. “It’s probably my turn.”

The question wasn’t really a question, Grey understood. It was the natural thing to ask, just as it was his job to decline the offer. “No, I can do it.”

They got back in the Volvo. As Grey put the car in gear, Lila took up her magazine from the floor.

“If it’s all right with you, I think I’m going to read a bit.”

A hundred and twelve miles to the north, traveling east on Interstate 76, Kittridge had also begun to worry about fuel. The bus had been full when they’d started; now they were down to a quarter tank.

With a few minor detours, they’d managed to stay on the highway since Fort Morgan. Lulled by the motion of the bus, April and her brother had fallen asleep. Danny whistled through his teeth while he drove—the tune was nothing Kittridge recognized—gamely spinning the wheel and working the brakes and gas, hat tipped to his brow, his face and posture as erect as that of a sea captain facing down a gale.

For the love of God, Kittridge thought. How in the hell had he ended up in a school bus?

“Uh-oh,” said Danny.

Kittridge sat up straight. A long line of abandoned vehicles, stretching to the horizon, stood in their path. Some of the cars were lying upside down or on their sides. Bodies were scattered everywhere.

Danny stopped the bus. April and Tim were awake now as well, gazing out the windshield.

“April, get him out of here,” Kittridge directed. “Both of you to the back, now.”

“What do you want me to do?” Danny asked.

“Wait here.”

Kittridge stepped down from the bus. Flies were buzzing in vast black swarms; there was an overwhelming odor of rotten flesh. The air was absolutely still, as if it couldn’t bring itself to move. The only signs of life were the birds, vultures and crows, circling overhead. Kittridge moved up the line of cars. Virals had done this, there was no mistaking it; there must have been hundreds of them, thousands even. What did it mean? And why were the cars all together like this, as if they’d been forced to stop?

Suddenly Danny was beside him.

“I thought I told you to wait with the others.”

The man was squinting into the sunlight. “Wait.” He held up a hand, then said, “I hear something.”

Kittridge listened. Nothing at all, just the creak of the crickets in the empty fields. Then it came: a muffled pounding, like fists on metal.

Danny pointed. “It’s coming from over there.”

The sound became more distinct with each step. Somebody was alive out there, trapped inside the wreckage. Gradually its components began to separate, the pounding underscored by a strangled echo of human voices. Let us out! Is somebody out there? Please!

“Hello!” Kittridge called. “Can you hear me?”

Who’s out there? Help us, please! Hurry, we’re cooking to death!

The sound was coming from a semitrailer with the bright yellow FEMA insignia printed on its sides. The pounding was frantic now, the voices a shrill chorus of indistinguishable words.

“Hang on!” Kittridge yelled. “We’ll get you out!”

The door had been knocked kitty-corner in its frame. Kittridge looked around for something to use as a lever, found a tire iron, and wedged the blade under the door.

“Danny, help me.”

The door refused them at first; then it began, almost imperceptibly, to move. As the gap increased, a line of fingers appeared beneath the lip, attempting to draw it upward.

“Everybody, on three,” Kittridge commanded.

With a screech of metal, the door ascended.

They were from Fort Collins: a couple in their thirties, Joe and Linda Robinson, the two of them still dressed for a day at the office, with a young baby they called Boy Jr.; a heavyset black man in a security guard’s uniform, named Wood, and his girlfriend, Delores, a pediatric nurse who spoke with a thick West Indian accent; an elderly woman, Mrs. Bellamy—Kittridge was never to learn her first name—with a nimbus of blue-rinsed hair and an enormous white purse that she kept clutched to her side; a young man, maybe twenty-five, named Jamal, with a tight fade haircut and brightly colored tattoos winding up and down his bare arms. The last was a man in his fifties with the coarse gray hair and barrel-shaped torso of an aging athlete; he introduced himself as Pastor Don. Not an actual pastor, he explained; by trade, a CPA. The nickname was a leftover from his days coaching Pop Warner football.

“I always told them to pray we didn’t get our asses kicked,” he told Kittridge.

Though Kittridge had initially assumed they’d traveled together, they had wound up with one another by accident. All told versions of the same story. They’d fled the city only to be stopped by a long line of traffic at the Nebraska border. Word passed down from car to car that there was an Army roadblock ahead, that nobody was being let through. The Army was waiting for word to let people pass. For a whole day they’d sat there. As the light had ebbed, people had begun to panic. Everyone was saying the virals were coming; they were being left to die.

Which was, more or less, what happened.

They arrived just after sunset, Pastor Don said. Somewhere ahead in the line, screaming, gunshots, and the sound of crunching metal; people began to tear past him. But there was nowhere to run. Within seconds, the virals were upon them, hundreds blasting out of the fields, tearing into the crowd.

“I ran like hell, just like everybody else,” Pastor Don said.

He and Kittridge had stepped away to confer; the others were sitting on the ground by the bus. April was passing out bottles of water they’d collected at the stadium. Pastor Don removed a box of Marlboro Reds from his shirt pocket and shook two loose. Kittridge hadn’t smoked since his early twenties, but what could it hurt now? He accepted a light and took a cautious drag, the nicotine hitting his system instantly.

“I can’t even describe it,” Don said, ejecting a plume of smoke. “Those goddamn things were everywhere. I saw the truck and decided it was better than nothing. The others were already inside. How the door got jammed I don’t know.”

“Why wouldn’t the Army let you through?”

Don shrugged philosophically. “You know how these things work. Probably somebody forgot to file the right form.” He squinted at Kittridge through a trail of smoke. “So what about you, you got anybody?”

He meant did Kittridge have a family, somebody he had lost or was looking for. Kittridge shook his head.

“My son’s in Seattle, a plastic surgeon. The whole package. Married his college sweetheart, two kids, a boy and a girl. Big house on the water. They just redid the kitchen.” He shook his head wistfully. “The last time we spoke, that’s what we talked about. A fucking kitchen.”

Pastor Don was carrying a rifle, a .30-.06 with three rounds remaining. Wood was carrying an empty .38. Joe Robinson had a .22 pistol with four cartridges—good for killing a squirrel, maybe, but that was about all.

Don glanced toward the bus. “And the driver? What’s his story?”

“A little off, maybe. I wouldn’t try to touch him—he’ll just about have a seizure. Otherwise he’s okay. He treats that bus like it’s the Queen Mary.”

“And the other two?”

“They were hiding in their parents’ basement. I found them wandering around the parking lot at Mile High.”

Don took a last, hungry drag and crushed the butt underfoot. “Mile High,” he repeated. “I’m guessing that was nothing nice.”

There was no way around the wreckage; they would have to backtrack and find another route. They scavenged what supplies they could find—more bottles of water, a couple of working flashlights and a propane lantern, an assortment of tools, and a length of rope that had no obvious use but might find some purpose later on—and boarded the bus.

As Kittridge mounted the bottom step, Pastor Don touched him on the elbow. “Maybe you should say something.”

Kittridge looked at him. “Me?”

“Somebody has to be in charge. And it’s your bus.”

“Not really. Technically, it’s Danny’s.”

Pastor Don met Kittridge’s eye. “That’s not what I mean. These people are worn out and frightened. They need somebody like you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

He gave a cagey smile. “Oh, I know you better than you think I do. I was in the reserves myself, way back when. Just doing the quartermaster’s books, but you learn to read the signs. I’m guessing ex–Special Forces. Rangers, maybe?” When Kittridge said nothing, Pastor Don shrugged. “Well, that’s your business. But you obviously know what the hell you’re doing better than anyone else around here. This is your show, my friend, like it or not. My guess is, they’re waiting to hear from you.”

It was true, and Kittridge knew it. Standing in the aisle, he surveyed the group. The Robinsons were seated up front, Linda holding Boy Jr. on her lap; directly behind them was Jamal, sitting alone; then Wood and Delores. Don took the bench across the aisle. Mrs. Bellamy sat at the rear, clutching her big white purse with both hands, like a retiree on a casino junket. April was sitting with her brother on the driver’s side, behind Danny. Her eyes widened as their glances met. What now? they said.

Kittridge cleared his throat. “Okay, everybody. I know you’re scared. I’m scared, too. But we’re going to get you out of here. I don’t know just where we’re going, but if we keep heading east, sooner or later we’re going to find safety.”

“What about the Army?” Jamal said. “Those assholes left us here.”

“We don’t really know what happened. But to be on the safe side, we’re going to keep on back roads as far as we can.”

“My mother lives in Kearney.” This was Linda Robinson. “That’s where we were headed.”

“Jesus, lady.” Jamal scoffed. “I told you, Kearney’s just like Fort Collins. They said so on the radio.”

In every group, Kittridge thought, there was always one. This was all he needed.

Linda’s husband, Joe, twisted in his seat. “Close your mouth for once, why don’t you?”

“I hate to break it to you, but her mother’s probably hanging from the ceiling right now, eating the dog.”

Suddenly everybody was speaking at once. Two days in the truck, Kittridge thought. Of course they’d be at one another’s throats.

“Please, everybody—”

“And just who put you in charge?” Jamal jabbed a finger at Kittridge. “Just because you’re all, like, strapped and shit.”

“I agree,” said Wood. It was the first time Kittridge had heard the man’s voice. “I think we should take a vote.”

“Vote on what?” Jamal said.

Wood gave him a hard look. “For starters, whether or not we should throw you off this bus.”

“Fuck you, Rent-a-Cop.”

In a flash, Wood was up. Before Kittridge could react, the man gripped Jamal in a headlock; in a flurry of arms and legs, they went tumbling over the bench. Everyone was shouting. Linda, clutching the baby, was trying to scamper away. Joe Robinson had joined in the fray, attempting to grip Jamal around the legs.

A gunshot slapped the air; everyone froze. All eyes swiveled to the rear of the bus, where Mrs. Bellamy was pointing an enormous pistol at the ceiling.

“Lady,” Jamal spat, “what the fuck.”

“Young man, I think I speak for everyone when I say I’m tired of your crap. You’re just as afraid as the rest of us. You owe an apology to these people.”

It was completely surreal, Kittridge thought. Part of him was horrified; another part wanted to laugh.

“Okay, okay,” Jamal sputtered. “Just put that cannon away.”

“I think you can do better than that.”

“I’m sorry, okay? Quit waving that thing around.”

She thought a moment, then lowered the pistol. “I suppose that will have to do. Now, I do like the idea of a vote. This nice man in the front—I’m sorry, my hearing isn’t what it used to be—what did you say your name was?”

“Kittridge.”

“Mr. Kittridge. He seems perfectly capable to me. I say all in favor of his running things, let’s see a show of hands.”

Every hand went up except Jamal’s.

“It would be nice if it could be unanimous, young man.”

His face was burning with humiliation. “Christ, you old bag. What else do you want from me?”

“Forty years of teaching public school, believe me, I’ve dealt with more than my share of boys like you. Now, go on. You’ll see how much better you feel.”

With a look of defeat, Jamal raised his hand.

“That’s better.” She directed her attention at Kittridge again. “We can go now, Mr. Kittridge.”

Kittridge glanced at Pastor Don, who was trying not to laugh.

“Okay, Danny,” Kittridge said. “Let’s turn this thing around and find a way out of here.”

12

They’d lost him. How the good Christ had they lost him?

Last they knew, Grey had been driving into Denver. He’d dropped off the screen at that point—the Denver network was a mess—but a day later they’d picked up his signature from a Verizon tower in Aurora. Guilder had asked for another drone to sweep the area, but they’d found nothing; and if Grey had gotten off the interstates, as now seemed likely, and headed into the sparsely populated eastern half of the state, he could travel for miles without leaving a mark.

And no sign at all of the girl. For all intents and purposes, she’d been swallowed by the continent.

With little to do but wait for news from Nelson, Guilder had plenty of time to ponder Grey’s file, including the psychiatric workup from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He wondered what Richards had been thinking, hiring men like this. Human disposables—although that was, Guilder supposed, the point; like the original twelve test subjects, Babcock and Sosa and Morrison and all the creepy rest, the sweeps were no one anybody was ever going to miss.

To wit: Lawrence Alden Grey, born 1970, McAllen, Texas. Mother a homemaker, father a mechanic, both deceased. The father had served three tours in Vietnam as an Army medic, honorably discharged with a bronze star and a purple heart, but it had done the guy in anyway. He’d shot himself in the cab of his truck, leaving Grey, just six years old, to find him. A series of common-law stepfathers followed, one drunk after another by the looks of it, a history of abuse, etc.; by the time Grey was eighteen, he was on his own, working as a roughneck in the oil fields near Odessa, then on rigs in the Gulf. He’d never married, though that was no big shocker; his psychiatric profile was a bag of problems, everything from OCD to depression to traumatic disassociation. In the shrink’s opinion, the guy was basically heterosexual, but with so many hang-ups it didn’t even figure; the boys had been Grey’s way of reliving his own childhood abuse, which his conscious mind had repressed. He’d been arrested twice, the first time for exposure, which he’d pled down to a misdemeanor, the second for aggravated sexual assault. Basically, he’d touched the kid—not exactly a hanging offense, but nothing nice, either. With the first conviction on his sheet the judge had sentenced him to the max, eighteen to twenty-four years, but nobody did the full bid anymore, and he’d been paroled after ninety-seven months.

After that, there wasn’t much of a story. He’d moved back to Dallas, done little bits of work but nothing steady, met with his PO every two weeks to pee in a cup and swear eight ways to Sunday he hadn’t set foot within a hundred yards of a playground or school. His court-ordered regimen of anti-androgens was standard, as was a fresh psychiatric evaluation every six months. By all accounts, Lawrence Grey was a model citizen, at least as far as a chemically neutered child molester could be.

None of which did anything to tell Guilder how the man had survived. Somehow he’d escaped the Chalet; somehow he’d managed to avoid getting himself killed since then. It simply made no sense.

Nelson’s new plan was to retraffic all the cell towers in Kansas and Nebraska, shutting down both states for a period of two hours and trying to isolate the signal from Grey’s chip. Under usual circumstances, this would have required a federal court order, a pile of paperwork ten miles high, and a month’s lead time, but Nelson had used a back channel at Homeland, which had agreed to issue a special executive order under Article 67 of the Domestic Security Act—more commonly known in the intelligence community as the “Do Whatever the Fuck You Want” Act. The chip in Grey’s neck was a low-wattage transmitter at 1432 megahertz; once everything else was cleared out, and assuming Grey passed within a few miles of a tower, they could triangulate his position and retarget a satellite to get a picture.

The shutdown was scheduled for eight A.M. Guilder had come in at six to find Nelson typing away at his terminal. A buzz of music was leaking from the earbuds stuffed in the sides of his head.

“Let Mozart work,” he said, shooing Guilder away.

Guilder was running on coffee and adrenaline; he went down to the break room to get something to eat. All they had were vending machines; he’d already paid his three dollars for a Snickers when he realized it would take too much effort to swallow. He tossed it in the trash and got a Reese’s, but even that, with the sticky peanut butter, was difficult. He snapped on the TV, tuned it to CNN. New cases were suddenly popping up all over: Amarillo, Baton Rouge, Phoenix. The U.N. was vacating its New York headquarters, relocating to The Hague; once martial law was declared, the military would be recalled from overseas. What a fiasco that would be. It would make Pandora’s box look like a picnic basket.

Nelson appeared in the door. “Bow down,” he declared with a grin. “Houston, we have a sex offender.”

Nelson had already targeted the satellite. By the time they reached the terminal, the image was coming in.

“Where the hell is this?”

Nelson worked the keyboard, bringing the picture into focus. “Western Kansas.”

A grid of cornfields came into aerial view and, at the center, a long, low-slung building with a grid of parking spaces in front. A single vehicle, some kind of station wagon, was in the lot. A figure stepped from the building, pulling a suitcase.

“Is that the same guy?” Nelson asked.

“I’m not sure. Bring it in closer.”

The image faded, then resolved again, assuming an approximate aerial distance of eighty feet. Now Guilder felt certain he was looking at Lawrence Grey. He’d changed out of his jumpsuit, but it was him. Grey returned to the building; a minute later he reemerged with a second suitcase, which he deposited in the car’s cargo compartment. He stood a moment, as if lost in thought. Then a second figure emerged from the building, a woman. A little heavy, with dark hair; she was wearing slacks and a light-colored blouse.

What the hell?

They had less than thirty seconds left. Already the picture had begun to lose its crispness. Grey opened the passenger door; the woman lowered herself into the car. Grey glanced around the parking lot one more time—as if, thought Guilder, he knew he was being watched. He got into the vehicle and drove away, just as the image dissolved into sparkles of static.

Nelson looked up from his terminal. “Looks like our target made a friend. From the psych workup, I have to say I’m a little surprised.”

“Call back the last shot with the woman in it. See if we can enhance it.”

Nelson tried, but the results were only a modest improvement.

“Can we figure out what that building is?”

Nelson had slid his chair to an adjacent terminal. “Thirty-eight-twelve Main Street, Ledeau, Kansas. A place called Angie’s Resort.”

Who was she? What was Lawrence Grey doing with a woman? Was she from the Chalet?

“Which direction was he going?”

“Looks like straight east. He’s headed right into the thick of it. If you want to grab him, we’d better move.”

“Locate our nearest asset. Something outside the quarantine line.”

More taps of the keys; then Nelson said, “The closest for something like this would be the old NBC lab in Fort Powell. The Army shut it down three years ago, when they moved everything to White Sands, but it should be an easy matter to get the lights turned on.”

“What else is around there?”

“Not a lot except for Midwest State, which is about three miles east. It’s your basic football factory with a few classrooms attached. Otherwise you’ve got a National Guard armory, some hog and cattle processing, a little light manufacturing. There’s a small IAC hydroelectric facility, but it was mothballed when they built a larger one downstream. Pretty much the only reason the place exists is the college.”

Guilder took a moment to think. They were the only ones who knew about Grey, at least so far. Probably it was time to bring in the CDC and USAMRIID.

Yet he hesitated. Partly because of the bad taste in his mouth from his meeting with the Joint Chiefs. How would it go down when Central Command learned that they’d put Lear’s monstrosities under the surveillance of a bunch of paroled sex offenders? He’d never hear the end of it.

But that wasn’t the real reason.

A cure for everything. Weren’t those Lear’s exact words? Wasn’t that where the whole misbegotten thing had begun? And if Grey was infected but for some reason hadn’t flipped, was it possible that the virus in his blood had changed somehow, achieving the very result Lear had hoped for? That he was in every way a prize as valuable as the girl? And wasn’t it also true that, although death was everyone’s problem, especially now, it was for Guilder just as pressing and personal—even more so, because the fate that awaited him left nothing to chance? Didn’t he have some right to muster whatever resources he could on behalf of his own survival? Wouldn’t anybody do the same?

We’re all dying, baby. Fair enough. But some of us more than others.

Maybe Grey was his answer, and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just some lucky schmuck who’d managed to claw his way out of a burning building and avoid the glowsticks long enough to make his way to Kansas. But the more Guilder ruminated over it, the more he didn’t think so. The odds were simply too long. And once he turned the man over to the military, he doubted they’d hear anything from Grey, or this mystery woman, again.

Which wasn’t going to happen. Horace Guilder, deputy director of the Division of Special Weapons, would keep Lawrence Grey for himself.

“So? What do you want me to do?”

Nelson was staring at him. Guilder calculated the mechanics. Who else did he need? Nelson wasn’t somebody Guilder would have described as loyal, but for the time being he could appeal to the man’s naked self-interest, and he was the best person for the job, a one-man band of biochemical know-how. Sooner or later he’d catch wind of what Guilder was up to, and decisions would have to be made, but that was a bridge Guilder would cross when he came to it. As for making the pickup: there was always somebody off the books for tasks like that. One phone call and everything would be set in motion.

“Pack your things,” he said. “We’re going to Iowa.”

13

Sunrise of the second day: they were deep into Nebraska now. Danny, hunched over the wheel, his eyes stinging with sleeplessness, had driven through the night. Everyone except for Kittridge had fallen asleep, even the obnoxious one, Jamal.

It felt good to have people on his bus again. To be useful, a useful engine.

They’d found more diesel at a small airport in McCook. The few towns they’d passed through were empty and abandoned, like something from a movie about the Old West. Okay, so maybe they were lost, kind of. But Kittridge and the other man, Pastor Don, said it didn’t matter, as long as they kept heading east. That’s all you got to do, Danny, Kittridge said. Just keep us headed east.

He thought of what he’d seen on the highway. That was really something. He’d seen a lot of bodies in the last couple of days, but nothing as bad as that. He liked Kittridge, who sort of reminded him of Mr. Purvis. Not that he looked like Mr. Purvis, because he didn’t at all. It was the way the man spoke to Danny—as if he mattered.

While he drove, he thought about Momma, and Mr. Purvis, and Thomas and Percy and James and how useful he was being. How proud of him Momma and Mr. Purvis would be now.

The sun was peeking over the horizon, making Danny squint into its brightness. Before long, everyone would be awake. Kittridge leaned over his shoulder.

“How we doing on gas?”

Danny checked. They were down to a quarter tank.

“Let’s pull over and refill from the cans,” Kittridge said. “Let folks stretch their legs a bit.”

They pulled off the road, into a state park. Kittridge and Pastor Don checked the bathrooms and gave the all clear.

“Thirty minutes, everyone,” Kittridge said.

They had more supplies now, boxes of crackers and peanut butter and apples and energy bars and bottles of pop and juice and diapers and formula for Boy Jr. Kittridge had even gotten Danny a box of Lucky Charms, though all the milk in the grocery store’s cooler had spoiled; he’d have to eat it dry. Danny, Kittridge, and Pastor Don unloaded the jugs of diesel from the back of the bus and began to pour it into the tank. Danny had told them that the bus had a fifty-gallon capacity, precisely; each full tank would get them about three hundred miles.

“You’re a very precise guy,” Kittridge had said.

When they’d finished refueling, Danny took the box of Lucky Charms and a can of lukewarm Dr Pepper and sat under a tree. The rest were seated around a picnic table, including Jamal. He wasn’t saying much, but Danny had the feeling that everyone had decided to let bygones be bygones. Linda Robinson was diapering Boy Jr., cooing to him, making him wiggle his arms and legs. Danny had never been around babies much. He’d been led to understand that they cried a lot, but so far Boy Jr. had kept quiet as a mouse. There were good babies and there were bad babies, Momma had said, so Boy Jr. must be one of the good ones. Danny tried to remember being a baby himself, just to see if he could do it, but his mind wouldn’t go back that far, not in any orderly way. It was strange how there was this whole part of your life you couldn’t recall, except in little pictures: sunshine flaring on a windowpane, or a dead frog squashed in the driveway by a tire tread, or a slice of apple on a plate. He wondered if he’d been a good baby, like Boy Jr.

Danny was watching the group, feeding fistfuls of Lucky Charms into his mouth and swilling them down with the Dr Pepper, when Tim rose from the table and walked over to him.

“Hey, Timbo. How you doing?”

The boy’s hair was standing all whichaway from his sleeping on the bus. “Okay, I guess.” He gave a loose-boned shrug. “Mind if I sit with you?”

Danny scooched over to make room.

“I’m sorry the other kids tease you sometimes,” Tim said after a minute.

“That’s okay,” said Danny. “I don’t mind.”

“Billy Nice is a real dickhead.”

“He picks on you, too?”

“Sometimes.” The boy frowned vaguely. “He picks on everybody.”

“Just ignore him,” Danny said. “That’s what I do.”

After a minute, Tim said, “You really like Thomas, huh?”

“Sure.”

“I used to watch him. I had, like, this huge layout of Thomas trains in my basement. The coal loader, the engine wash, I had all that stuff.”

“I’d like to see that,” said Danny. “I bet that was great.”

A brief silence followed. The sun was warm on Danny’s face.

“You want to know what I saw in the stadium?” Tim asked.

“If you want.”

“Like, a thousand million dead people.”

Danny wasn’t sure what to say. He guessed Tim had needed to tell someone; it wasn’t the kind of thing you should keep bottled up inside.

“It was pretty gross.”

“Did you tell April?”

Tim shook his head.

“You want to keep it a secret?”

“Would that be okay?”

“Sure,” said Danny. “I can keep a secret.”

Tim had scooped up a little bit of dirt from the base of the tree and was watching it sift through his fingers. “You don’t get scared much, do you, Danny?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“But not now,” the boy stated.

Danny had to think about that. He supposed he should be, but he just wasn’t. What he felt was more like interested. What would happen next? Where would they go? It surprised him, how adaptable he was being. Dr. Francis would be proud of him.

“No, I guess I’m not.”

In the shade of the picnic area, everyone was packing up. Danny wished he could find the words to make the boy feel better, to wipe the memory of what he’d seen in the stadium from his mind. They were walking back to the bus when the idea came to him.

“Hey, I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his pack and removed his lucky penny and showed the boy. “You hold on to that, I promise, nothing bad can happen to you.”

Tim took the coin in his palm. “What happened to it? It’s all squished.”

“It got run over by a train. That’s what makes it lucky.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“I don’t know, I’ve just always had it.” Danny dipped his head toward the boy’s open hand. “Go ahead, you can keep it.”

A moment’s hesitation, then Tim slipped the flattened penny into the pocket of his shorts. It wasn’t much, Danny knew, but it was something, and there were times like these when just a little thing could help. As a for-instance: Momma’s Popov, which she visited when her nerves got bad, and the visits from Mr. Purvis on the nights when Danny could hear them laughing. The roar of the Redbird’s big caterpillar diesel coming to life when he turned the key each morning. Driving over the bump on Lindler Avenue, and all the kids hooting as they shot from the benches. Little things like that. Danny felt pleased with himself for thinking of this, like he’d passed along something he knew that maybe not everybody did, and as the two of them stood together in the morning sunshine, he detected, from the corner of his eye, a change in the boy’s face, a kind of lightening; he might have even smiled.

“Thanks, Danny,” he said.

Omaha was burning.

They saw it first as a throbbing glow over the horizon. It was the hour when the light had flattened. They were approaching the city from the southwest, on Interstate 80. Not a single car was on the highway; all the buildings were dark. A deeper, more profound abandonment than anything they’d seen so far—this was, or should have been, a city of nearly half a million. A strong odor of smoke began to flow through the bus’s ventilation. Kittridge told Danny to stop.

“We have to get over the river somehow,” Pastor Don said. “Go south or north, look for a way across.”

Kittridge looked up from the map. “Danny, how are we doing for gas?”

They were down to an eighth of a tank; the jugs were empty. Fifty more miles at the most. They’d hoped to find more fuel in Omaha.

“One thing’s for sure,” said Kittridge, “we can’t stay here.”

They turned north. The next crossing was at the town of Adair. But the bridge was gone, blasted away, no part left standing. Only the river, wide and dark, ceaselessly flowing. The next opportunity would be Decatur, another thirty miles to the north.

“We passed an elementary school a mile back,” said Pastor Don. “It’s better than nothing. We can look for fuel in the morning.”

A silence descended over the bus, everyone waiting for Kittridge’s answer.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

They backtracked into the heart of the little town. All the lights were out, the streets empty. They came to the school, a modern-looking structure set back from the road at the edge of the fields. A marquee-style sign at the edge of the parking area read, in bold letters: GO LIONS! HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!

“Everybody wait here,” Kittridge said.

He moved inside. A few minutes passed; then he emerged. He exchanged a quick look with Pastor Don, the two men nodding.

“We’re going to shelter here for the night,” Kittridge announced. “Stay together, no wandering off. The power’s out, but there’s running water, and food in the cafeteria. If you need to use the facilities, go in pairs.”

In the front foyer they were met by the telltale scents of an elementary school, of sweat and dirty socks, art supplies and waxed linoleum. A trophy case stood by a door that led, presumably, to the main office; a display of collages was hung on the painted cinder-block walls, images of people and animals fashioned from newspaper and magazine clippings. Beside each of them was a printed label bearing the age and grade of its creator. Wendy Mueller, Grade 2. Gavin Jackson, Grade 5. Florence Ratcliffe, Pre-K 4.

“April, go with Wood and Don to find some mats to sleep on. The kindergarten rooms should have some.”

In the pantry behind the cafeteria they found cans of beans and fruit cocktail, as well as bread and jam to make sandwiches. There was no gas to cook with, so they served the beans cold, dishing everything out on metal cafeteria trays. By now it was dark outside; Kittridge distributed flashlights. They spoke only in whispers, the consensus being that the virals might hear them.

By nine o’clock, everyone was bedded down. Kittridge left Don to keep watch on the first floor and climbed the stairs, carrying a lantern. Many of the doors were locked but not all; he selected the science lab, a large, open space with counters and glass cabinets full of beakers and other supplies. The air smelled faintly of butane. On the whiteboard at the front of the room were written the words “Final review, chaps. 8–12. Labs due Wednesday.”

Kittridge stripped off his shirt and wiped himself down at the washbasin in the corner, then took a chair and removed his boots. The prosthesis, which began just below his left knee, was constructed of a titanium alloy frame covered in silicone; a microprocessor-controlled hydraulic cylinder, powered by a tiny hydrogen cell, adjusted fifty times per second to calculate the correct angular velocity of the ankle joint, imitating a natural gait. It was the very latest in prosthetic limb replacements; Kittridge didn’t doubt it had cost the Army a bundle. He rolled up his trousers, peeled off the mounting sock, and washed his stump with soap from the dispenser by the basin. Though heavily callused, the skin at the contact point felt raw and tender after two days without care. He dried the stump thoroughly, allowed it a few minutes of fresh air, then fixed the prosthesis back in place and drew down his pant leg.

He was startled by a sound of movement behind him. He turned to find April standing in the open doorway.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He quickly drew on his shirt and rose to his feet. How much had she seen? But the light was dim, and he’d been partially concealed by one of the counters.

“It’s no problem. I was just getting cleaned up a little.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “You can come in if you want.”

She advanced uncertainly into the room. Kittridge moved to the window with the AK. He took a moment to quickly scan the street below.

“How’s everything outside?” She was standing beside him.

“Quiet so far. How’s Tim doing?”

“Out like a light. He’s tougher than he looks. Tougher than I am, anyway.”

“I doubt that. You seem pretty cool to me, considering.”

April frowned. “You shouldn’t. This calm exterior is what you’d call an act. To tell you the truth, I’m so scared I don’t really feel anything anymore.”

A wide shelf ran the length of the room beneath the windows. April hoisted herself onto it, bracing her back against the frame and pulling her knees to her chest. Kittridge did the same. They were face-to-face now. A stillness, expectant but not uncomfortable, hovered between them. She was young, yet he sensed a core of resilience in her. It was the kind of thing you either had or you didn’t.

“So, do you have a boyfriend?”

“Are you auditioning?”

Kittridge laughed, felt his face grow warm. “Just making talk, I guess. Are you like this with everybody?”

“Only the people I like.”

Another moment passed.

“So how’d you get the name April?” It was all he could think to say. “Is that your birthday?”

“It’s from ‘The Waste Land.’” When Kittridge said nothing, she raised her eyebrows dubiously. “It’s a poem? T. S. Eliot?”

Kittridge had heard the name, but that was all. “Can’t say I got to that one. How’s it go?”

She let her gaze flow past him. When she began to speak, her voice was full of a rich feeling Kittridge couldn’t identify, happy and sad and full of memory. “‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain…

“Wow,” said Kittridge. She was looking at him again. Her eyes, he noted, were the color of moss, with what looked like flecks of shaved gold floating atop the surface of her irises. “That’s really something.”

April shrugged. “It goes on from there. Basically, the guy was totally depressed.” She was tugging a frayed spot on one knee of her jeans. “The name was my mother’s idea. She was an English professor before she met my stepdad and we got all, like, rich and everything.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

“My father died when I was six.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

But she didn’t let him finish. “Don’t be. He wasn’t what you would call an admirable sort. A leftover from my mother’s bad-boy period. He was totally loaded, drove his car into a bridge abutment. And that, said Pooh, was that.”

She stated these facts without inflection; she might have been telling him what the weather was. Outside, the summer night was veiled in blackness. Kittridge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

“I saw you, you know,” April said. “Your leg. The scars on your back. You were in the war, weren’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

She made a face of disbelief. “Gosh, I don’t know, just everything? Because you’re the only one who seems to know what to do? Because you’re all, like, super-competent with guns and shit?”

“I told you. I’m a salesman. Camping gear.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

Her directness was so disarming that for a moment Kitteridge said nothing. But she had him dead to rights. “You’re sure you want to hear it? It isn’t very nice.”

“If you want to tell me.”

He instinctively turned his face to the window. “Well, you’re right, I was. Enlisted straight out of high school. Not Army, Marines. I ended up as a staff sergeant in the MPs. You know what that is?”

“You were a cop?”

“Sort of. Mostly we provided security at American installations, air-bases, sensitive infrastructure, that kind of thing. They moved us around a lot. Iran, Iraq, Saudi. Chechnya for a little while. My last duty was at Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan. Usually it was pretty routine, verifying equipment manifests and checking foreign workers in and out. But once in a while something would happen. The coup hadn’t happened yet, so it was still American-controlled territory, but there were Taliban all over the place, plus Al Qaeda and about twenty different local warlords duking it out.”

He paused, collecting himself. The next part was always the hardest. “So one day we see this car, the usual beat-up piece of junk, coming down the road. The checkpoints are all well marked, everybody knows to stop, but the guy doesn’t. He’s barreling straight for us. Two people in the car that we can see, a man and a woman. Everybody opens fire. The car swerves away, rolls a couple of times, comes to rest on its wheels. We’re thinking it’s going to blow for sure, but it doesn’t. I’m the senior NCO, so I’m the one who goes to look. The woman’s dead, but the man is still alive. He’s slumped over the steering wheel, blood all over. In the backseat is a kid, a boy. He couldn’t have been older than four. They’ve got him strapped into a seat packed with explosives. I see the wires running to the front of the vehicle, where the dad is holding the detonator. He’s muttering to himself. Anta al-mas’ul, he’s saying. Anta al-mas’ul. The kid’s wailing, reaching out for me. This little hand. I’ll never forget it. He’s only four, but it’s like he knows what’s about to happen.”

“Jesus.” April’s face was horrified. “What did you do?”

“The only thing I could think of. I got the hell out of there. I don’t really remember the blast. I woke up in the hospital in Saudi. Two men in my unit were killed, another took a piece of shrapnel in the spine.” April was staring at him. “I told you it wasn’t very nice.”

“He blew up his own kid?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“But what kind of people would do that?”

“You’ve got me there. I never could figure that out.”

April said nothing more; Kittridge wondered, as he always did, if he’d told too much. But it felt good to unburden himself, and if April had gotten more than she’d bargained for, she had a way of hiding it. In the abstract, Kittridge knew, the story was inconsequential, one of hundreds, even thousands like it. Such pointless cruelty was simply the way of the world. But understanding this fact was a far cry from accepting it, when you’d lived it yourself.

“So what happened then?” April asked.

Kittridge shrugged. “Nothing. End of story. Off to dance with the virgins in eternity.”

“I was talking about you.” Her eyes did not move from his face. “I think I’d be pretty screwed up by something like that.”

Here was something new, he thought—the part of the tale that no one ever asked about. Typically, once the basic facts were laid bare, the listener couldn’t get away fast enough. But not this girl, this April.

“Well, I wasn’t. At least I didn’t think I was. I spent about half a year in the VA, learning to walk and dress and feed myself, and then they kicked me loose. War’s over, my friend, at least for you. I wasn’t all bitter, like a lot of guys get. I didn’t dive under the bed when a car backfired or anything like that. What’s done is done, I figured. Then about six months after I got settled, I took a trip back home to Wyoming. My parents were gone, my sister had moved up to British Columbia with her husband and basically dropped off the map, but I still knew some people, kids I’d gone to school with, though nobody was a kid anymore. One of them wants to throw a party for me, the big welcome-home thing. They all had families of their own by now, kids and wives and jobs, but this was a pretty hard-drinking crowd back in the day. The whole thing was just an excuse to get lit, but I didn’t see the harm. Sure, I said, knock yourself out, and he actually did. There were at least a hundred people there, a big banner with my name on it hung over the porch, even a band. The whole thing knocked me flat. I’m in the backyard listening to the music and the friend says to me, Come on, there are some women who want to meet you. Don’t be standing there like a big idiot. So he takes me inside and there are three of them, all nice enough. I knew one of them a little from way back when. They’re talking away, some show on TV, gossip, the usual things. Normal, everyday things. I’m nursing a beer and listening to them when all of a sudden I realize I have no idea what they’re saying. Not the words themselves. What any of it meant. None of it seemed connected to anything else, like there were two worlds, an inside world and an outside world, and neither had anything to do with the other. I’m sure a shrink would have a name for it. All I know is, I woke up on the floor, everybody standing over me. After that, it took me about four months in the woods just to be around people again.” He paused, a little surprised at himself. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never told anybody that part. You would be the first.”

“Sounds like a day in high school.”

Kittridge had to laugh. “Touché.”

Their gazes met and held. How strange it was, he thought. One minute you were all alone with your thoughts, the next somebody came along who seemed to know the deepest part of you, who could open you like a book. He couldn’t have said how long they’d been looking at each other. It seemed to go on and on and on, neither possessing the will, or the courage, or even the desire, to look away. How old was she? Seventeen? And yet she didn’t seem seventeen. She didn’t seem like any age at all. An old soul: Kittridge had heard the term but never quite understood what it meant. That’s what April had. An old soul.

To seal the deal between them, Kittridge removed one of the Glocks from his shoulder holster and held it out to her. “Know how to use one of these?”

April looked at it uncertainly. “Let me guess. It’s not like it is on TV.”

Kittridge dropped the magazine and racked the slide to eject the cartridge from the pipe. He placed the gun it in her hand, wrapping her fingers with his own.

“Don’t pull the trigger with your knuckle, the shot will go low. Just use the pad of your fingertip and squeeze, like so.” He released her hand and tapped his breastbone. “One shot, through here. That’s all it takes, but you can’t miss. Don’t rush—aim and fire.” He reloaded the gun and handed it back. “Go on, you can have it. Keep a round chambered, like I showed you.”

She smiled wryly. “Gee, thanks. And here I don’t have anything for you.”

Kitteridge returned the smile. “Maybe next time.”

A moment passed. April was turning the weapon around in her hand, examining it as if it were some unaccountable artifact. “What the father said. Anta-something.”

“Anta al-mas’ul.”

“Did you ever figure out what it meant?”

Kittridge nodded. “ ‘You did this.’ ”

Another silence fell, though different from the others. Not a barrier between them but a shared awareness of their lives, like the walls of a room in which only the two of them existed. How strange, thought Kittridge, to say those words. Anta al-mas’ul. Anta al-mas’ul.

“It was the right thing, you know,” April said. “You would have been killed, too.”

“There’s always a choice,” Kittridge said.

“What else could you have done?”

The question was rhetorical, he understood; she expected no reply. What else could you have done? But Kittridge knew his answer. He’d always known.

“I could have held his hand.”

He kept his vigil at the window through the night. Sleeplessness was not a problem for him; he had learned to get by on just a few winks. April lay curled on the floor beneath the window. Kittridge had removed his jacket and placed it over her. There were no lights anywhere. The view from the window was of a world at peace, the sky pinpricked with stars. As the first glow of daylight gathered on the horizon, he let himself close his eyes.

He startled awake to the sound of approaching engines. An Army convoy was coming down the street, twenty vehicles long. He unsnapped his second pistol and passed it to April, who was sitting up now as well, rubbing her eyes.

“Hold this.”

Kittridge quickly made his way down the stairs. By the time he burst through the door, the convoy was less than a hundred feet away. He jogged into the street, waving his arms.

“Stop!”

The lead Humvee jerked to a halt just a few yards in front of him, the soldier on the roof tracking his movements with the fifty-cal. The lower half of his face was hidden by a white surgical mask. “Hold it right there.”

Kittridge’s arms were raised. “I’m unarmed.”

The soldier pulled the bolt on his weapon. “I said, keep your distance.”

A tense five seconds followed; it seemed possible that he was about to be shot. Then the passenger door of the Humvee swung open. A sturdy-looking woman emerged and walked toward him. Up close her face appeared worn and lined, crackled with dust. An officer, but not one who rode a desk.

“Major Porcheki, Ninth Combat Support Battalion, Iowa National Guard. Who the hell are you?”

He had only one card to play. “Staff Sergeant Bernard Kittridge. Charlie Company, First MP Battalion, USMC.”

Her eyes narrowed on his face. “You’re a Marine?”

“Medically discharged, ma’am.”

The major glanced past him, toward the schoolhouse. Kittridge knew without looking that the others were watching from the windows.

“How many civilians do you have inside?”

“Eleven. The bus is almost out of gas.”

“Any sick or wounded?”

“Everybody’s worn out and scared, but that’s it.”

She considered this with a neutral expression. Then: “Caldwell! Valdez!”

A pair of E-4s trotted forward. They, too, were wearing surgical masks. Everyone was except Porcheki.

“Let’s get the refueler to see about filling up that bus.”

“We’re taking civilians? Can we do that now?”

“Did I ask your opinion, Specialist? And get a corpsman up here.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

They jogged away.

“Thank you, Major. It was going to be a long walk out of here.”

Porcheki had removed a canteen from her belt and paused to drink. “You’re just lucky you found us when you did. Fuel’s getting pretty scarce. We’re headed back to the guard armory at Fort Powell, so that’s as far as we can take you. FEMA’s set up a refugee-processing center there. From there you’ll probably be evaced to Chicago or St. Louis.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, do you have any news?”

“I don’t mind, but I’m not sure what to tell you. One minute these goddamned things are everywhere, the next nobody can find them. They like the trees, but any sort of cover will do. The word from CENTCOM is that a large pod’s massing along the Kansas-Nebraska border.”

“What’s a pod?”

She took another gulp from the canteen. “That’s what they’re calling groups of them, pods.”

The corpsman appeared; everyone was filing out of the school. Kittridge told them what was happening while the soldiers established a perimeter. The corpsman examined the civilians, taking their temperatures, peering inside their mouths. When everyone was ready to go, Porcheki met Kittridge at the steps of the bus.

“Just one thing. You might want to keep the fact that you’re from Denver under your hat. Say you’re from Iowa, if anyone asks.”

He thought of the highway, the lines of torn-up cars. “I’ll pass that along.”

Kittridge climbed aboard. Balancing his rifle between his knees, he took a place directly behind Danny.

“God damn,” Jamal said, grinning ear to ear. “An Army convoy. I take back everything I said about you, Kittridge.” He poked a thumb toward Mrs. Bellamy, who was dabbing her brow with a tissue taken from her sleeve. “Hell, I don’t even mind that old broad taking a shot at me.”

“Sticks and stones, young man,” she responded. “Sticks and stones.”

He turned to face her across the aisle. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. What is it with old ladies and the snot-rag-in-the-sleeve thing? Doesn’t that strike you as just a little unsanitary?”

“This from a young man with enough ink in his arms to fill a ditto machine.”

“A ditto machine. What century are you from?”

“When I look at you, I think of one word. The word is ‘hepatitis.’ ”

“Christ, the two of you,” Wood moaned. “You really need to get a room.”

The convoy began to move.

14

The plan was in motion. His team was assembled, the jet would meet them at dawn. Guilder had been in touch with his contact at Blackbird; everything had been arranged. The server and the hard drives at the warehouse had all been wiped. Go home, he’d told the staff. Go home and be with your families.

It was after midnight when he drove to his townhouse through quiet, rain-slickened streets. On the radio, a continuous stream of bad news: chaos on the highways, the Army regrouping, rumblings abroad. From the White House, words of calm assurance, the crisis was in hand, the best minds were at work, but nobody was fooling anybody. A nationwide declaration of martial law was sure to come within hours. CNN was reporting that NATO warships were churning toward the coasts. The door would slam on the North American continent. The world might despise us, Guilder thought; what will it do when we’re gone?

As he drove, he kept a watchful eye on the rearview. He wasn’t being paranoid; it was just how things tended to unfold. A roar of tires, a van pulling in front of him, men in dark suits emerging. Horace Guilder? Come with us. Amazing, he thought, that it hadn’t happened already.

He pulled into the garage and sealed the door behind him. In his bedroom, he packed a small bag of essentials—a couple of days’ worth of clothes, toiletries, his meds—and carried it downstairs. He fetched his laptop from the study and placed it in the microwave, sizzling its circuitry in a cloud of sparks. His handheld was already gone, tossed from the window of the Camry.

In the living room he doused the lights and peeled back the drapes. Across the street, a neighbor was loading suitcases into the open hatch of his SUV. The man’s wife was standing in the doorway of their townhouse, clutching a sleeping toddler. What were their names? Guilder either had never known or couldn’t remember. He’d seen the woman from time to time, pushing the little girl in a brightly colored plastic car up and down the driveway. Watching the three of them, Guilder was touched by a memory of Shawna—not that last, terrible encounter but the two of them lying together in the aftermath of lovemaking, and her quiet, whispering voice, tickling his chest. Are you happy with the things I do? I want to be your only one. Words that weren’t anything more than playacting, a bit of cheap theatrics to crown a dutiful hour. How stupid he’d been.

The man accepted the child from his wife’s arms and gently lowered her into the backseat. The two of them got in the car. Guilder imagined the things they’d be saying to each other. We’ll be all right. They have people working on it right now. We’ll just stay at your mother’s a week or two, until this all blows over. He heard the engine turn over; they backed from the drive. Guilder watched their taillights vanish down the block. Good luck, he thought.

He waited five more minutes. The streets were silent, all the houses dark. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being watched, he carried his bag to the Camry.

It was after two A.M. when he got to Shadowdale. The parking area was empty; only a single light burned by the entrance. He stepped through the door to find the front desk unmanned. An empty wheelchair sat beside it, a second in the hall. There were no sounds anywhere. Probably there were security cameras watching him, but who would examine the tapes?

His father was lying on his bed in darkness. The room smelled awful; nobody had been in for hours, perhaps as long as a day. On the tray by his father’s bed, somebody had left a dozen jars of Gerber’s baby food and a pitcher of water. A spilled cup told him his father had attempted the water, but the food was untouched; his father couldn’t have opened the jars if he’d tried.

Guilder didn’t have long, but it was not an occasion to rush. His father’s eyes were closed, the voice—that hectoring voice—silenced. Better that way, he thought. The time for talk was over. He searched his memory for something nice about his father, however meager. The best he could come up with was a time when his father had taken him to a park when Guilder was small. The recollection was vague and impressionistic—it was possible it had never happened at all—but that was all he had. A winter day, Guilder’s breath clouding before his face, and a view of bare trees bobbing up and down as his father had pushed him on a swing, the man’s big hand at the center of his back, catching him and launching him into space. Guilder recalled nothing else about that day. He might have been as young as five.

When he slid the pillow from beneath his father’s head, the man’s eyes fluttered but didn’t open. Here was the precipice, Guilder thought, the mortal moment; the deed, that, once done, could never be undone. He thought of the word patricide. From the Latin pater, father, and caedere, to cut down. He had lacked the courage to kill himself, yet as he placed the pillow over his father’s face, he experienced no hesitation. Gripping the pillow by the edges, he increased the pressure until he was certain no air could reach his father’s nose or mouth. A minute crept by, Guilder counting out the seconds under his breath. His father’s hand, lying on the blanket, gave a restive twitch. How long would it take? How would he know when it was over? If the pillow didn’t work, what then? He watched his father’s hand for additional movement, but there was none. Gradually it came to him that the stillness of the body beneath his hands meant only one thing. His father wasn’t breathing anymore.

He drew the pillow away. His father’s face was just the same; it was as if his passage into death represented only the subtlest alteration in his condition. Guilder gently placed his palm beneath his father’s head and moved the pillow back into place. He wasn’t trying to hide his crime—he doubted anybody would be around to examine the situation—but he wanted his father to have a pillow to lie on, especially since, as now seemed likely, he would be lying there for a very long time. Guilder had expected a rush of emotion to overcome him at this moment, all the pain and regret unloosed inside him. His awful childhood. His mother’s lonely life. His own barren and loveless existence, with only a hired woman for company. But all he felt was relieved. The truest test of his life, and he had passed it.

Outside, the hallway was quiet, unchanged. Who could say what degradations lay behind the other doors, how many families would be facing the same cruel decision? Guilder glanced at his watch: ten minutes had passed since he’d entered the building. Just ten minutes, but everything was different now. He was different, the world was different. His father was nowhere in it. And with that, tears came to his eyes.

He strode briskly down the hallway, moving past the empty common room and the vacant nurse’s station and farther still, into the early morning.

15

It was late on the second day, approaching the Missouri border, that Grey saw an obstruction ahead. They were in the middle of nowhere, miles from any town. He brought the car to a halt.

Lila looked up from the magazine she was reading: Today’s Parenting. Grey had gotten it for her at a mini-mart in Ledeau, with a pile of others. Family Life, Baby and Child, Modern Toddler. In the last day, her attitude toward him had shifted somewhat. Perhaps it was the mental effort of maintaining the fiction that their journey was nothing out of the ordinary, but she was becoming increasingly impatient with him, speaking to him as if he were an uncooperative husband.

“Will you look at that.” She dropped the magazine to her lap. On the cover was the image of a ruddy-cheeked girl in a pink jumper. WHEN PLAY DATES GO BAD, the caption read. “What is that?”

“I think it’s a tank.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“Maybe it’s lost or something.”

“I don’t think they just lose tanks, Lawrence. Like, excuse me, have you seen my tank anyplace? I know it was around here somewhere.” She sighed heavily. “Who just parks a tank in the road like that? They’ll have to move it.”

“So you’re saying you want me to ask them,” Grey stated.

“Yes, Lawrence. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

He didn’t want to, but to say no seemed impossible. He exited the car into the falling dusk. “Hello?” he called. He glanced back at Lila, who was watching him with her head angled through the open passenger window. “I think it’s empty.”

“Maybe they just can’t hear you.”

“Let’s just turn around. We can find another road.”

“It’s the principle of the thing. They can’t just block the road like that. Try the hatch. I’m sure there has to be somebody inside.”

Grey doubted this, but he didn’t want to argue. He clambered up on the exposed treads and hoisted himself to the top of the turret. He positioned his face above the hatch, but it was too dark to see anything down there. Lila had exited the Volvo and was standing at the base of the tank, holding a flashlight.

“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” Grey said.

“It’s just a tank, Lawrence. Honestly. Sometimes you men are all the same, you know that?”

She passed him the flashlight. There was nothing to do now but look inside. Grey pointed the beam through the hatch.

Jesus fuck.

“So? What’s down there?”

Grey guessed there had probably been two of them. It wasn’t the easiest thing to sort out, visually. It looked like somebody had dropped a grenade, that’s how torn up the soldiers were. But it wasn’t a grenade.

Do you see, Grey?

He startled, as if hit by a jolt of current. The voice. Not like the one in the garage; the voice was in his head. The voice of Zero. Lila was staring at him from the base of the tank. He tried to say something, to warn her, but no words would leave his mouth.

Are you… hungry, Grey?

He was. Not just hungry: famished. The sensation seemed to take hold of every part of him, each cell and molecule, the tiniest atoms whirring inside him. Never in his life had he felt a hunger so profound.

It is my gift to you. The gift of blood.

“Lawrence, what’s the matter?”

He swallowed. “I’ll be… just a sec.”

Down the hole he went. He had dropped his flashlight, but that didn’t matter; the tank’s dark interior was bright to his eyes, each surface glowing with its beautiful coating of blood. A titanic need seized him, and he pushed his face against the cold metal to drag his tongue along it.

“Lawrence! What are you doing in there?”

He was on his hands and knees now, licking the floor, burying his face in the syrupy remains. So wonderful! As if he hadn’t eaten for a year, a decade, a century, only to be presented with the richest banquet in the history of the world! All the joys of the body rolled into one, a trance of purest pleasure!

The spell was broken by a violent boom. His fingers were in his mouth; his face was covered in blood. What the hell was he doing? And what was that sound, like thunder?

“Lawrence! Come quick!”

Another boom, louder than the first. He scrambled up the ladder. Something was wrong with the sky; everything seemed lit by a fiery glow.

Lila took one look at his bloody face and began to scream.

A pair of jets roared low overhead, splitting the air with their velocity; a violent white sheen lit the sky, and Grey was slapped by a wall of heated air that knocked him off the roof of the tank. He landed hard, the wind sailing out of him. More planes shot past, the sky to the east flashing with light.

Lila was backing away from him, her hands held protectively before her face. “Get away from me!”

There was no time to explain, and what would he have said? It was clear what was happening now, they had wandered into the war. Grey grabbed her by the arm and began to drag her to the car. She was kicking, screaming, thrashing in his grip. Somehow he managed to open the passenger door and shove her in, but then he realized his mistake: the instant he closed the door, Lila hit the locks.

He pounded on the glass. “Lila, let me in!”

“Get away, get away!”

He needed something heavy. He scanned the ground near the car but found nothing. In another moment Lila would realize what she had to do; she would take the wheel and drive away.

He couldn’t let that happen.

Grey reared back, squeezing his hand into a fist, and sent it plunging into the driver’s window. He expected to be met by a wall of pain, all the bones of his hand shattering, but that didn’t happen; his hand passed through the glass as if it was made of tissue, detonating the window in a cascade of glinting shards. Before Lila could react, he opened the door and wedged himself into the driver’s seat and jammed the car into reverse. He spun into a 180, shifted into drive, and hit the gas. But the moment of escape had passed; suddenly they were in the midst of everything. As more planes rocketed past, a wall of fire rose before them; Grey swung the wheel to the right, and in the next instant they were barreling through the corn rows, the tires spinning wildly in the soft earth, heavy green leaves slapping the windshield. They burst from the field and, too late, Grey saw the culvert. The Volvo rocketed down, then up, the car going aloft before crashing onto its wheels again. Lila was screaming, screaming-screaming-screaming, and that was when Grey found it: a road. He yanked the wheel and shoved the accelerator to the floor. They were racing parallel with the culvert; the sun had dipped below the horizon, sinking the fields into an inky blackness while the sky exploded with fire.

But not just fire: suddenly the car was washed with a brilliant light.

“Stop your vehicle.”

The windshield filled with an immense dark shape, like a great black bird alighting. Grey jammed his foot on the brake, pitching both of them forward. As the helicopter touched down on the roadway, Grey heard a tinkle of breaking glass and something dropped into his lap: a canister the size and weight of a soup can, making a hissing sound.

“Lila, run!”

He threw the door open, but the gas was already inside him, in his head and heart and lungs; he made it all of ten feet before he succumbed, the ground rising like a gathering wave to meet him. Time seemed undone; the world had gone all watery and far away. A great wind was pushing over his face. At the edge of his vision he saw the space-suited men lumbering toward him. Two more were dragging Lila toward the helicopter. She was suspended face-down, her body limp, her feet skimming the ground. “Don’t hurt her!” Grey said. “Please don’t hurt the baby!” But these words seemed not to matter. The figures were above him now, their faces obscured, floating bodiless over the earth, like ghosts. The stars were coming out.

Ghosts, Grey thought. I really must be dead this time. And he felt their hands upon him.

16

They drove through the day; by the time the convoy halted, it was late afternoon. Porcheki emerged from the lead Humvee and strode back to the bus.

“This is where we leave you. The sentries at the gate will tell you what to do.”

They were in some kind of staging area: trucks of supplies, military portables, refuelers, even artillery. Kittridge guessed he was looking at a force at least the size of two battalions. Adjacent to this was a gated compound of canvas tents, ringed by portable fencing topped with concertina wire.

“Where are you off to?” Kittridge asked. He wondered where the fight was now.

Porcheki shrugged. Wherever they tell me to go. “Best of luck to you, Sergeant. Just remember what I said.”

The convoy drew away. “Pull ahead, Danny,” Kittridge said. “Slowly.”

Two masked soldiers with M16s were positioned at the gate. A large sign affixed to the wire read: FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY REFUGEE PROCESSING CENTER. NO REENTRY. NO FIREARMS PAST THIS POINT.

Twenty feet from the entrance, the soldiers motioned for them to halt. One of the sentries stepped to the driver’s window. A kid, not a day over twenty, with a spray of acne on his cheeks.

“How many?”

“Twelve,” Kittridge answered.

“City of origin?”

The tags had long since been stripped from the bus. “Des Moines.”

The soldier stepped back, mumbling into the radio clipped to his shoulder. The second was still standing at the sealed gate with his weapon pointing skyward.

“Okay, kill the engine and stay where you are.”

Moments later the soldier returned with a canvas duffel bag, which he held up to the window. “Put any weapons and cell phones in here and pass it to the front.”

The ban on weapons Kittridge understood, but cell phones? None of them had gotten a signal in days.

“This many people, the local network would crash if people tried to use them. Sorry, those are the rules.”

This explanation struck Kittridge as thin, but there was nothing to be done. He received the bag and moved up and down the center aisle. When he came to Mrs. Bellamy, the woman yanked her purse protectively to her waist.

“Young man, I don’t even go to the beauty parlor without it.”

Kittridge did his best to smile. “And right you are. But we’re safe here. You have my word.”

With visible reluctance she withdrew the enormous revolver from her purse and deposited it with the rest. Kittridge toted the bag to the front of the bus and left it at the base of the stairs; the first soldier reached inside and whisked it away. They were ordered to disembark with the rest of their gear and stand clear of the bus while one of the soldiers searched their luggage. Beyond the gate Kittridge could see a large, open shed where people had gathered. More soldiers were moving up and down the fence line.

“Okay,” the sentry said, “you’re good to go. Report to the processing area, they’ll billet you.”

“What about the bus?” Kittridge asked.

“All fuel and vehicles are being commandeered by the United States military. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

Kittridge saw the stricken look on Danny’s face. One of the soldiers was boarding the bus to drive it away.

“What’s with him?” the sentry asked.

Kittridge turned to Danny. “It’s okay, they’ll take good care of it.”

He could see the struggle in the man’s eyes. Then Danny nodded.

“They better,” he said.

The space was packed with people waiting in lines before a long table. Families with children, old people, couples, even a blind man with a dog. A young woman in a Red Cross T-shirt, her auburn hair pulled back from her face, was moving up and down the lines with a handheld.

“Any unaccompanied minors?” Like Porcheki, she’d given up on the mask. Her eyes were harried, drained by sleeplessness. She looked at April and Tim. “What about you two?”

“He’s my brother,” April said. “I’m eighteen.”

The woman looked doubtful but said nothing.

“We’d like to all stay together,” said Kittridge.

The woman was jotting on her handheld. “I’m not supposed to do this.”

“What’s your name?” Always good, Kittridge thought, to get a name.

“Vera.”

“The patrol that brought us in said we’d be evacuated to Chicago or St. Louis.”

A strip of paper slid from the handheld’s port. Vera tore it off and passed it to Kittridge. “We’re still waiting on buses. It shouldn’t be long now. Show this to the worker at the desk.”

They were assigned a tent and given plastic disks that would serve as ration coupons, then moved into the noise and smells of the camp: wood smoke, chemical toilets, the human odors of a crowd. The ground was muddy and littered with trash; people were cooking on camp stoves, hanging their laundry on tent lines, waiting at a pump to fill buckets with water, stretched out in lawn chairs like spectators at a tailgate party, a look of dazed exhaustion on their faces. All the garbage cans were overflowing, clouds of flies hovering. A cruel sun was beating down. Apart from the Army trucks, Kittridge saw no vehicles; all the refugees appeared to have come in on foot, their gasless cars abandoned.

Two people had already been billeted in their tent, an older couple, Fred and Lucy Wilkes. They were from California but had family in Iowa and had been visiting for a wedding when the epidemic hit. They’d been in the camp six days.

“Any word on the buses?” Kittridge asked. Joe Robinson had gone off to find out about rations, Wood and Delores to see about water. April had let her brother run off with some children from the adjacent tent, warning him not to wander far. Danny had accompanied him. “What are people saying?”

“Always it’s tomorrow.” Fred Wilkes was a trim man of at least seventy, with bright blue eyes; in the heat he’d removed his shirt, displaying a fan of downy white chest hair. He and his wife, as generously proportioned as he was undersized—Jack Sprat and the missus—were playing gin rummy, sitting across from each other on a pair of cots and using a cardboard box as a table. “If it doesn’t happen soon, people are going to lose patience. And what then?”

Kittridge stepped back outside. They were surrounded by soldiers, safe for the time being. Yet the whole thing felt stopped, everyone waiting for something to happen. Infantrymen were stationed along the fence line at one hundred meter intervals. All of them were wearing surgical masks. The only way in or out seemed to be the front gate. Abutting the camp to the north he saw a low-slung, windowless building without visible markings or signage, its entrance flanked by concrete barricades. While Kittridge watched, a pair of sleek black heliocpters approached from the east, turned in a wide circle, and touched down on the rooftop. Four figures emerged from the first helicopter, men in dark glasses and baseball caps and Kevlar vests, carrying automatic rifles. Not military, Kittridge thought. Blackbird, maybe, or Riverstone. One of those outfits. The four men proceeded to take up positions at the corners of the roof.

The doors of the second helicopter opened. Kittridge placed a hand to his brow to get a better look. For a moment, nothing happened; then a figure emerged, wearing an orange biosuit. Five more followed. The rotors of the helicopters were still turning. A brief negotiation ensued, then the biosuited figures removed a pair of long steel boxes from the helicopter’s cargo section, each the approximate dimensions of a coffin, with wheeled frames that dropped from their undercarriages. They guided the two boxes to a small, hutlike structure on the roof—a service elevator, Kittridge guessed. A few minutes passed; the six reappeared and boarded the second helicopter. First one and then the other lifted off, thudding away.

April came up behind him. “I noticed that, too,” she said. “Any idea what it is?”

“Maybe nothing.” Kittridge dropped his hand. “Where’s Tim?”

“Already making friends. He’s off playing soccer with some kids.”

They watched the helicopters fade from sight. Whatever it was, Kittridge thought, it wasn’t nothing.

“You think we’ll be okay here?” April asked.

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“I don’t know.” Though her face said she did; she was thinking the same thing he was. “Last night, in the lab… What I mean is, I can be like that sometimes. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t want to.”

She was somehow looking both toward him and away. At such moments she had a way of seeming older than she was. Not seeming, Kittridge thought: being.

“Are you really eighteen?”

She seemed amused. “Why? Don’t I look it?”

Kittridge shrugged to hide his embarrassment; the question had just popped out. “No. I mean yes, you do. I was just… I don’t know.”

April was plainly enjoying herself. “A girl’s not supposed to tell. But to put your mind at ease, yes, I’m eighteen. Eighteen years, two months, and seventeen days. Not that I’m, you know, counting.”

Their eyes met and held in the way they seemed to want to. What was it about this girl, Kittridge wondered, this April?

“I still owe you for the gun,” she said, “even if they took it. I think it might be the nicest present anybody ever gave me, actually.”

“I liked the poem. Call it even. What was that guy’s name again?”

“T. S. Eliot.”

“He got any other stuff?”

“Not much that makes sense. You ask me, he was kind of a one-hit wonder.”

They had no weapons, no way to get a message to the outside world. Not for the first time, Kittridge wondered if they shouldn’t have just kept driving.

“Well, when we get out of here, I’ll have to check him out.”

17

Grey.

Whiteness, and the sensation of floating. Grey became aware that he was in a car. This was strange, because the car was also a motel room, with beds and dressers and a television; when had they started making cars like this? He was sitting on the foot of one of the beds, driving the room—the steering column came up at an angle from the floor; the television was the windshield—and seated on the adjacent bed was Lila, clutching a pink bundle to her chest. “Are we there yet, Lawrence?” Lila asked him. “The baby needs changing.” The baby? thought Grey. When had that happened? Wasn’t she months away? “She’s so beautiful,” said Lila, softly cooing. “We have such a beautiful baby. It’s too bad we have to shoot her.” “Why do we have to shoot her?” Grey asked. “Don’t be silly,” said Lila. “We shoot all the babies now. That way they won’t be eaten.”

Lawrence Grey.

The dream changed—one part of him knew he was dreaming, while another part did not—and Grey was in the tank now. Something was coming to get him, but he couldn’t make himself move. He was on his hands and knees, slurping the blood. His job was to drink it, drink it all, which was impossible: the blood had begun to gush through the hatch, filling the compartment. An ocean of blood. The blood was rising above his chin, his mouth and nose were filling, he was choking, drowning—

Lawrence Grey. Wake up.

He opened his eyes to a harsh light. Something felt caught in his throat; he began to cough. Something about drowning? But the dream was already breaking apart, its images atomizing, leaving only a residue of fear.

Where was he?

Some kind of hospital. He was wearing a gown, but that was all; he felt the chill of nakedness beneath it. Thick straps bound his wrists and ankles to the rails of the bed, holding him in place like a mummy in a sarcophagus. Wires snaked from beneath his gown to a cart of medical equipment; an IV was threaded into his right arm.

Somebody was in the room.

Two somebodies in fact, the pair hovering at the foot of the bed in their bulky biosuits, their faces shielded by plastic masks. Behind them was a heavy steel door and, positioned high on the wall in the corner, watching the scene with its unblinking gaze, a security camera.

“Mr. Grey, I’m Horace Guilder,” the one on the left said. His tone of voice struck Grey as oddly cheerful. “This is my colleague Dr. Nelson. How are you feeling?”

Grey did his best to focus on their faces. The one who’d spoken looked anonymously middle-aged, with a heavy, square-jawed head and pasty skin; the second man was considerably younger, with tight dark eyes and a scraggly little Vandyke. He didn’t look like any doctor Grey had ever met.

He licked his lips and swallowed. “What is this place? Why am I tied up?”

Guilder answered with a calming tone. “That’s for your own protection, Mr. Grey. Until we figure out what’s wrong with you. As for where you are,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that just yet. Suffice it to say that you’re among friends here.”

Grey realized they must have sedated him; he could barely move a muscle, and it wasn’t just the straps. His limbs felt like iron, his thoughts moving through his brain with a lazy aimlessness, like guppies in a tank. Guilder was holding a cup of water to his lips.

“Go on, drink.”

Grey’s stomach turned—just the smell of it was revolting, like some hideously overchlorinated pool. Thoughts came back to him, dark thoughts: the blood in the tank, and Grey’s face buried greedily in it. Had that actually happened? Had he dreamed it? But no sooner had these questions formed in his mind than a kind of roaring seemed to fill his head, a vast hunger lurching to life inside him, so overwhelming that his entire body clenched against the straps.

“Whoa now,” Guilder said, backing away suddenly. “Steady there.”

More images were coming back to him, rising through the fog. The tank in the road, the dead soldiers, and explosions all around; the feel of his hand crashing through the Volvo’s window, and the fields detonating with fire, and the car sailing through the corn, and the bright lights of the helicopter, and the space-suited men, dragging Lila away.

“Where is she? What have you done with her?”

Guilder glanced toward Nelson, who frowned. Interesting, his face seemed to say.

“You needn’t worry, Mr. Grey, we’re taking good care of her. She’s right across the hall, in fact.”

“Don’t you hurt her.” His fists were clenched; he was straining against the straps. “You touch her and I’ll—”

“And you’ll what, Mr. Grey?”

But there was nothing; the straps held firm. Whatever they had given him, it had taken his strength away.

“Try not to excite yourself, Mr. Grey. Your friend is perfectly fine. The baby, too. What we’re a little unclear on is just how the two of you came to be together. I was hoping you might help us with that.”

“Why do you want to know?”

One eyebrow lifted incredulously behind the faceplate. “For starters, it seems that the two of you are the last people to come out of Colorado alive. Believe me when I tell you, this is a matter of some interest to us. Was she at the Chalet? Is that where you met her?”

Just the word made Grey’s mind clench with panic. “The Chalet?”

“Yes, Mr. Grey. The Chalet.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Then where?”

He swallowed. “At the Home Depot.”

For just a moment, Guilder said nothing. “Where was this?”

Grey tried to put his thoughts together, but his brain had gone all fuzzy again. “Denver someplace. I don’t know exactly. She wanted me to paint the nursery.”

Guilder quickly turned toward the second man, who shrugged. “Could be the fentanyl,” Nelson said. “It may take him a little while to sort things out.”

But Guilder was undeterred. There was something more forceful about the man’s gaze now. It seemed to bore right into him. “We need to know what happened at the Chalet. How did you get away?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was there a girl there? Did you see her?”

There was a girl? What were they talking about?

“I didn’t see anyone. I just… I don’t know. It was all so confusing. I woke up at the Red Roof.”

“The Red Roof? What’s that?”

“A motel, on the highway.”

A puzzled frown. “When was this?”

Grey tried to count. “Three days ago? No, four.” He nodded his head against the pillow. “Four days.”

The two men looked at each other. “It doesn’t make sense,” Nelson said. “The Chalet was destroyed twenty-two days ago. He’s not Rip Van Winkle.”

“Where were you for those three weeks?” Guilder pressed.

The question made no sense. Three weeks?

“I don’t know,” Grey said.

“I’ll ask you again, Mr. Grey. Was Lila at the Chalet? Is that where you met her?”

“I told you,” he said. He was pleading now, his resistance gone. “She was at the Home Depot.”

His thoughts were swirling like water going down a drain. Whatever they’d given him, it had screwed him up good. With a thump in his gut, Grey realized what the straps were all about. They were going to study him. Like the sticks. Like Zero. And when they were done with him, Richards, or somebody like him, would put the red light on Grey, and that would be the end of him.

“Please, it’s me you want. I’m sorry I ran away. Just don’t hurt Lila.”

For a moment the two men said nothing, just stared at him from behind their faceplates. Then Guilder turned toward Nelson, nodding.

“Put him back under.”

Nelson took a syringe and a vial of clear liquid from the cart. While Grey looked on helplessly, he inserted the needle into the IV tube and pushed the plunger.

“I just clean,” Grey said feebly. “I’m just a janitor.”

“Oh, I think you’re much more than that, Mr. Grey.”

And with these words in his ears, Grey slipped away again.

Guilder and Nelson stepped through the air lock into the decontamination chamber. First a shower in their biosuits; then they stripped and scrubbed themselves head to foot with a harsh, chemical-smelling soap. They cleared their throats and spat into the sink, gargling for a minute with a strong disinfectant. A cumbersome ritual but, until they knew more about Grey’s condition, one they were wise to observe.

Just a skeletal staff was present in the building: three lab technicians—Guilder thought of them as Wynken, Blynken, and Nod—plus an MD and a four-man Blackbird security team. The building had been constructed in the late eighties to treat soldiers exposed to nuclear, biological, or chemical agents, and the systems were buggy as hell—the aboveground HVAC was on the fritz, as was video surveillance for the entire facility—and the place had a disconcertingly deserted feel to it. But it was the last place anybody would look for them.

Nelson and Guilder stepped into the lab, a wide room of desks and equipment, including the powerful microscopes and blood spinners they’d need to isolate and culture the virus. While Grey and Lila were still unconscious, they’d each had a CT scan and blood drawn; their blood tests had been inconclusive, but Grey’s scan had revealed a radically enlarged thymus, typical of those infected. And yet as far as Nelson and Guilder could discern, he’d experienced no other symptoms. In every other way he appeared to be in the pink of health. Better than that: the man looked like he could run a marathon.

“Let me show you something,” Nelson said.

He escorted Guilder to the terminal in an adjacent office where he’d set up shop. Nelson opened a file and clicked on a JPEG. A photo appeared on the screen of Lawrence Grey. Or, rather, a man who resembled Grey; the face in the photograph looked considerably older. Sagging skin, hair a thin flap over his scalp, sunken eyes that gazed into the camera with a dull, almost bovine look.

“When was this taken?” Guilder asked.

“Seventeen months ago. These are Richards’s files.”

God damn, Guilder thought. It was just like Lear had said.

“If he’s got the virus,” Nelson said, “the question is why it’s acting differently in his body. It could be a variant we haven’t seen, one that activates the thymus like the others and then goes dormant somehow. Or it could be something else, particular to him.”

Guilder frowned. “Such as?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Some sort of natural immunity seems the likely culprit, but there’s no way of really knowing. It might have something to do with the anti-androgens he was taking. All the sweeps were taking pretty big doses. Depo-Provera, spironolactone, prednisone.”

“You think the steroids did this?”

Nelson shrugged halfheartedly. “It could be a factor. We know the virus interacts with the endocrine system, same as the anti-androgens.” He closed the file and turned in his chair. “But here’s something else. I did a little digging on the woman. Not much to find, but what there is is mighty interesting. I printed it up for you.”

Nelson presented him with a fat file of papers. Guilder opened to the first page.

“She’s an MD?”

“Orthopedic surgeon. Keep going.”

Guilder read. Lila Beatrice Kyle, born September 29, 1974, Boston, Massachusetts. Parents both academics, the father an English professor at BU, the mother a historian at Simmons. Andover then Wellesley, followed by four years at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for her medical degree. Residency and then a fellowship in orthopedics at Denver General. All impressive, but telling him nothing. Guilder turned to the next page. What was he looking at? The first page of an IRS form 1040, dated four years ago.

Lila Kyle was married to Brad Wolgast.

“You’re kidding me.”

Nelson was wearing one of his victorious grins. “I told you that you were going to like it. The Agent Wolgast. They had one child, a daughter, deceased. Some kind of congenital heart defect. Divorced three years later. She got remarried four months ago to a doctor who works at the same hospital, some big cardiologist. There’s a few pages on him, too, though it doesn’t really add anything.”

“Okay, so she’s an MD. Is there any record of her at the Chalet? Was it possible she was on the staff?”

Nelson shook his head. “Nothing. And I seriously doubt Richards would have missed this. As far as I can see, there’s no reason not to think Grey found her just like he said.”

“She could have been in the truck in that first aerial we got. We wouldn’t have seen her.”

“True. But I don’t think Grey’s lying about where he met her. The story’s just too weird to make up. And I checked: her Denver address puts her within just a couple of miles of a Home Depot. The way Grey was headed, he would have gone right through there. You’ve talked to her. She seems to think Grey is some kind of handyman. I don’t think she has a clue what’s going on. The woman’s crazy as a bedbug.”

“Is that your official diagnosis?”

Nelson shrugged. “There’s no history of psychiatric illness in the paperwork, but consider her situation. She’s pregnant, hiding, on the run. People are getting ripped to shreds. Somehow she manages to stay alive, but she gets left behind. How would you feel? The brain’s a pretty nimble organ. Right now it’s rewriting reality for her, and doing a hell of a good job. Based on Grey’s file, I’d say she’s got plenty in common with the guy, actually.”

Guilder thought a moment and returned the file to the desk. “Well, I’m not buying it. What are the chances that these two would simply bump into each other? It’s too big a coincidence.”

“Maybe,” Nelson said. “Either way, it doesn’t tell us much. And the woman might be infected, but we’re just not seeing it. Maybe her pregnancy masks it somehow.”

“How far along is she?”

“I’m no expert, but from fetal size, I’d say about thirty weeks. You can check with Suresh.”

Suresh was the MD Guilder had brought in from USAMRIID. An infectious diseases doc, he’d been tasked to Special Weapons only six months ago. Guilder had told him little, only that Grey and the woman were “persons of interest.”

“How long before we can get a decent culture from him?”

“That depends. Assuming we can isolate the virus at all, somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-two hours. If you’re really asking my opinion, the wisest course would be to pack him off to Atlanta. They’re the ones who are best equipped to handle something like this. And if Grey’s immune, I can’t see why they wouldn’t just let bygones be bygones. Not with so much at stake.”

Guilder shook his head. “Let’s wait until we have something solid.”

“I wouldn’t wait long. Not with the way things are going.”

“We won’t. But you heard the guy. He thinks he’s been sleeping in a motel. I doubt anybody’s going to take us seriously if that’s all we’ve got. They’ll lock us both up and throw away the key if we’re lucky.”

Nelson frowned, touching his beard with a thoughtful gesture. “I see your point.”

“I’m not saying we won’t tell them,” Guilder offered. “But let’s move cautiously. Seventy-two hours, then I’ll make the call, all right?”

A frozen moment followed. Had Nelson bought it? Then the man nodded.

“Just keep digging.” Guilder clapped a hand on Nelson’s shoulder. “And tell Suresh to keep the two of them sedated for the time being. If either of them flips, I don’t want to take any chances.”

“You think those straps will hold?”

The question was rhetorical; both men knew the answer.

Guilder left Nelson in the lab and rode the elevator to the roof. His left leg was dragging again, a hitch in his step like a hiccup. Outside, the Blackbird officer in charge, named Masterson, nodded a terse greeting but otherwise left him alone. Vintage Blackbird, this guy: built like a dump truck with arms as thick as hydrants and a face petrified into the self-satisfied sneer of an overgrown frat boy. In his wraparound sunglasses and baseball cap and body armor, Masterson seemed less a person than an action figure. Where did they get these characters? Were they grown on some kind of farm? Cultured in a petri dish? They were thugs, pure and simple, and Guilder had never liked dealing with them—Richards being Exhibit A—though it was also true that their almost robotic obedience made them ideally suited for certain jobs; if they didn’t exist, you’d have to invent them.

He moved to the edge of the roof. It was just past noon, the air breathless under a shapeless white sun, the land as flat and featureless as a pool table. The only interruptions to the perfectly linear horizon were a gleaming domed building, probably something to do with the college, and, just to the south, the bowl-like shape of a football stadium. One of those kinds of schools, Guilder thought—a sports franchise masquerading as a college where criminals drifted through phony courses and filled the coffers of the alumni fund by pounding their opposite numbers to pieces on autumn afternoons.

He let his eyes peruse the FEMA camp below. The presence of refugees was a wrinkle he hadn’t anticipated, and initially it had concerned him. But when he’d considered the situation more closely, he couldn’t see how this made any difference. The word from the Army was that in a day or two they’d all be gone anyway. A group of boys were playing near the wire, kicking a half-deflated ball around in the dirt. For a few minutes Guilder watched them. The world could be falling apart, and yet children were children; at a moment’s notice they could put all their cares aside and lose themselves in a game. Perhaps that was what Guilder had felt with Shawna: a few minutes in which he got to be the boy he never was. Maybe that was all he’d ever wanted—what anybody ever wanted.

But Lawrence Grey: something about the man nagged at him, and it wasn’t just his incredible story or the improbable coincidence of the woman in question being Agent Wolgast’s wife. It was the way Grey had spoken of her. Please, it’s me you want. Just don’t hurt Lila. Guilder never would have guessed Grey was capable of caring about another person like that, let alone a woman. Everything in his file had led Guilder to expect a man who was at best a loner, at worst a sociopath. But Grey’s pleas on Lila’s behalf had obviously been heartfelt. Something had happened between them; a bond had been forged.

His gaze widened, then taking in the entirety of the camp. All these people: they were trapped. And not merely by the wires that surrounded them. Physical barricades were nothing compared to the wires of the mind. What had truly imprisoned them was one another. Husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and companions: what they believed had given them strength in their lives had actually done the opposite. Guilder recalled the couple who lived across the street from his townhouse, trading off their sleeping daughter on the way to the car. How heavy that burden must have felt in their arms. And when the end swept down upon them all, they would exit the world on a wave of suffering, their agonies magnified a million times over by the loss of her. Would they have to watch her die? Would they perish first, knowing what would become of her in their absence? Which was preferable? But the answer was neither. Love had sealed their doom. Which was what love did. Guilder’s father had taught that lesson well enough.

Guilder was dying. That was inarguable, a fact of nature. So, too, was the fact that Lawrence Grey—this disposable nobody, this goddamn janitor, a man who had in his pathetic life brought nothing but misery to the world—was not. Somewhere in the body of Lawrence Grey lay the secret to the ultimate freedom, and Horace Guilder would find it, and take it for his own.

18

The days crawled past. And still no word on the buses.

Everyone was restless. Outside the wire, the Army came and went, its numbers thinning. Each morning, Kittridge went to the shed to inquire about the situation; each morning, he came away with the same answer: the buses are on the way, be patient.

For a whole day it rained, turning the camp into a giant mud bath. Now the sun had returned, cooking every surface with a crust of dried earth. Each afternoon more MREs appeared, tossed from the back of an Army five-ton, but never any news. The chemical toilets were foul, the waste cans overflowing with trash. Kittridge spent hours watching the front gate; no more refugees were coming in. With each passing day, the place had begun to feel like an island surrounded by a hostile sea.

He’d made an ally of Vera, the Red Cross volunteer who had first approached them in the check-in line. She was younger than Kittridge had first thought, a nursing student at Midwest State. Like all the civilian workers, she seemed utterly drained, the days of strain weighing in her face. She understood his frustration, she said, everyone did. She had hoped to take the buses, too; she was stranded like the rest of them. One day they were coming from Chicago, then next from Kansas City, then from Joliet. Some FEMA screwup. They were supposed to get a bank of satellite phones, too, so people could call their relatives and let them know they were okay. What had happened to that, Vera didn’t know. Even the local cell network was down.

Kittridge had begun to see the same faces: an elegantly dressed woman who kept a cat on a leash, a group of young black men all dressed in the white shirts and black neckties of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a girl in a cheer-leading outfit. A listlessness had settled over the camp; the deflected drama of nondeparture had left everyone in a passive state. There were rumors that the water supply had become contaminated, and now the medical tent was full of people complaining of stomach cramps, muscle aches, fever. A number of people had radios that were still operating, but all they heard was a ringing sound, followed by the now-familiar statement from the Emergency Broadcast System. Do not leave your homes. Shelter in place. Obey all orders of military and law enforcement personnel. Another minute of ringing, and the words would be repeated.

Kittridge had begun to wonder if they were ever getting out of there. And all night long, he watched the fences.

Late afternoon of the fourth day: Kittridge was playing yet another hand of cards with April, Pastor Don, and Mrs. Bellamy. They’d switched from bridge to five-card poker, betting ludicrous sums of money that were purely hypothetical. April, who claimed never to have played before, had already taken Kittridge for close to five thousand dollars. The Wilkeses had disappeared; nobody had seen them since Wednesday. Wherever they’d gone, they’d taken their luggage with them.

“Jesus, it’s roasting in here,” Joe Robinson said. He’d barely been off his cot all day.

“Sit in a hand,” Kittridge suggested. “It’ll take your mind off the heat.”

“Christ,” the man moaned. The sweat was pouring off him. “I can barely move.”

Kittridge, with only a pair of sixes, folded his cards. April, wearing a perfect poker face, raked in another pot.

“I’m bored,” Tim announced.

April was sorting the slips of paper they used for chips into piles. “You can play with me. I’ll show you how to bet.”

“I want to play crazy eights.”

“Trust me,” she told her brother, “this is a lot better.”

Pastor Don was dealing a fresh hand when Vera appeared at the flap of the tent. She quickly met Kittridge’s eye. “Can we talk outside?”

He rose from the cot and stepped into the late-day heat.

“Something’s going on,” Vera said. “FEMA just got word that all civilian transportation east of the Mississippi has been suspended.”

“Are you certain?”

“I overheard them talking about it in the site director’s office. Half the FEMA staff has bugged out already.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not even telling you.”

So there it was; they were being abandoned. “Who’s the officer in charge?”

“Major something. I think her name is Porcheki.”

A stroke of luck. “Where is she now?”

“She should be in the shed. There was some colonel, but he’s gone. A lot of them are gone.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

Vera frowned doubtfully. “What can you do?”

“Maybe nothing. But at least it’s worth a try.”

She hurried away; Kittridge returned to the tent. “Where’s Delores?”

Wood lifted his eyes from his cards. “I think she’s working in one of the medical tents. The Red Cross put out a call for volunteers.”

“Somebody go get her.”

When everyone was present, Kittridge explained the situation. Assuming Porcheki would provide fuel for the bus—a big if—they would have to wait to leave until morning, at the earliest.

“Do you really think she’ll help us?” Pastor Don asked.

“I admit it’s a long shot.”

“I say we just steal it and get the hell out of here,” Jamal said. “Let’s not wait.”

“It may come to that, and I’d agree, except for two things. One, we’re talking about the Army. Stealing it sounds like a good way to get shot. And two, we’ve got at most a couple of hours of light left. It’s a long way to Chicago, and I don’t want to try this in the dark. Make sense?”

Jamal nodded.

“The important thing is to keep this quiet and stick together. Once this thing gets out, all hell’s going to break loose. Everybody stay close to the tent. You, too, Tim. No wandering off.”

Kittridge had stepped from the tent when Delores caught up with him. “I’m concerned about this fever,” she said quickly. “The med tents are being completely overrun. All the supplies are used up, no antibiotics, nothing. This thing is getting out of hand.”

“What do you think it is?”

“The obvious culprit would be typhus. The same thing happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Vanessa. This many people crammed in, it was just a matter of time. If you ask me, we can’t leave fast enough.”

Another worry, Kittridge thought. Quickening his stride, he made his way to the shed, past overflowing dumpsters where crows were picking at the garbage. The birds had showed up the prior evening, attracted, no doubt, by the reek of accumulating trash. Now the place seemed full of them, so brazen they would practically snatch food from your hand. Never a good sign, he thought, when the crows showed up.

At the command tent, Kittridge chose the most direct approach, doing nothing to announce his presence before stepping inside. Porcheki was seated at a long table, speaking into a satellite phone. Three noncoms occupied the room, a densely packed jumble of electronic equipment. One of the soldiers yanked off his headset and shot to his feet.

“What are you doing in here? This area is restricted, no civilians.”

But as the soldier stepped toward Kittridge, Porcheki stopped him.

“It’s all right, Corporal.” Her face a mask of weariness, she put down the phone. “Sergeant Kittridge. What can I do for you?”

“You’re pulling out, aren’t you?” The idea had formed in his mind even as he’d spoken the words.

Porcheki weighed him with her eyes. Then, to the soldiers: “Would you excuse us, please?”

“Major—”

“That’s all, Corporal.”

With visible reluctance, the three exited the tent.

“Yes,” Porcheki said. “We’ve been ordered back to the Illinois line. The entire state goes under quarantine at eighteen hundred hours tomorrow.”

“You can’t just leave these people. They’re totally defenseless.”

“I know that, too.” She was looking at him closely. She seemed on the verge of some announcement. Then: “You were at Bagram, weren’t you?”

“Ma’am?”

“I thought I recognized you. I was there, with the Seventy-second Medical Expeditionary Group. You wouldn’t remember me, I don’t think.” Her eyes darted downward. “How’s the leg?”

Kittridge was almost too stunned to reply. “I get around okay.”

A faint nod and, on her troubled face, what might have passed for a smile. “I’m glad to see you made it, Sergeant. I heard about what happened. That was a terrible thing, with the boy.” Her officious manner returned. “As for the other, I’ve got two dozen coaches en route from the arsenal at Rock Island and a pair of refuelers. Plus your bus, that makes twenty-five. Not enough, obviously, but it’s what I could put together. This is not for general consumption, mind you. We don’t want to start a panic. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say I’m going way off the reservation here. Are we clear?”

Kittridge nodded.

“When those buses pull in, you’ll want to be ready. You know what these things are like. You keep control as long as you can, but sooner or later it gets ragged around the edges. People will do the math, and you can bet nobody’s going to want to be left behind. We should have time to make four trips before the border closes. That should do it, but we’ll have very little margin. You have a driver for your bus?”

Kittridge nodded again. “Danny.”

“The one with the hat? Forgive me, Sergeant, I mean no disrespect to the man. But I need to be sure he can handle this.”

“You won’t do better than him. You have my word.”

A quick hesitation, then she agreed. “Have him report here at oh-three-hundred. The first load departs at oh-four-thirty. Just remember what I said. You want to get your people out of here, get them on those buses.”

The next thing surprised Kittridge most of all. Porcheki leaned down, opened the bottom drawer of her desk, and removed a pair of pistols. Kittridge’s own Glocks, still in their holsters. She handed him a blue windbreaker with FEMA stenciled on the back.

“Just keep them under wraps. Report to Corporal Danes outside and he’ll escort you to the armory. Take all the rounds you need.”

Kittridge slid his arms through the straps and put on the jacket. The woman’s meaning was plain. They were behind the lines; the front had passed them by.

“How close are they?” Kittridge asked.

The major’s expression darkened. “They’re already here.”

Lawrence Grey had never known such hunger.

How long had he been here? Three days? Four? Time had lost all meaning, the passage of hours broken only by the visits of the space-suited men. They came without warning, apparitions emerging from a narcotic haze. The hiss of the air lock and there they were; then the prick of the needle and the slow filling of the plastic bag with its crimson prize. Something was in his blood, something they wanted. Yet they never seemed satisfied; they would drain him like a slaughtered steer. What do you want? he pleaded. Why are you doing this to me? Where’s Lila?

He was famished. He was a being of pure need, a man-sized hole in space needing only to be filled. A person could go mad with it. Assuming he was a person, still, which hardly seemed likely. Zero had changed him, altered the very essence of his existence. He was being brought into the fold. In his mind were voices, murmurings, like the buzz of a distant crowd. Hour by hour the sound grew stronger; the crowd was closing in. Against the straps he wriggled like a fish in a net. With every stolen bag of blood his strength drained away. He felt himself aging from within, a precipitous decline, deep in the cells. The universe had abandoned him to his fate. Soon he would vanish; he would be dispersed into the void.

They were watching him, the one named Guilder and the one named Nelson; Grey sensed their presence lurking behind the lens of the security camera, the probing beams of their eyes. They needed him; they were afraid of him. He was like a present that, when opened, might burst forth as snakes. He had no answers for them; they’d given up asking. Silence was the last power he had.

He thought of Lila. Were the same things happening to her? Was the baby all right? He had wanted only to protect her, to do this one good thing in his wretched little life. It was a kind of love. Like Nora Chung, only a thousand times deeper, an energy that desired nothing, that took nothing; it wanted only to give itself away. It was true: Lila had come into his life for a purpose, to give him one last chance. And yet he had failed her.

He heard the hiss of the air lock; a figure stepped through. One of the suited men, lumbering toward him like a great orange snowman.

“Mr. Grey, I’m Dr. Suresh.”

Grey closed his eyes and waited for the prick of the needle. Go ahead, he thought, take it all. But that didn’t happen. Grey looked up to see the doctor withdrawing a needle from the IV port. With careful movements he capped the needle and deposited it in the waste can with a clang. At once Grey felt the fog lift from his mind.

“Now we can talk. How are you feeling?”

He wanted to say: How do you think I’m feeling? Or maybe just: Fuck you. “Where’s Lila?”

The doctor withdrew a small penlight from a pouch on his biosuit and leaned over Grey’s face. Through the faceplate of his helmet his features swam into view: a heavy brow, skin dark with a yellowish cast, small white teeth. He waved the beam over Grey’s eyes.

“Does it trouble you? The light.”

Grey shook his head. He was becoming aware of a new sound—a rhythmic throbbing. He was hearing the man’s heartbeat, the pulsing swish of blood through his veins. A blast of saliva washed the walls of his mouth.

“You have not had a bowel movement, yes?”

Grey swallowed and shook his head again. The doctor moved to the foot of the bed and withdrew a small silver probe. He scraped it quickly along the soles of Grey’s bare feet.

“Very good.”

The examination continued. Each bit of data was jotted onto a handheld. Suresh pulled Grey’s gown up over his legs and cupped his testicles in his hand.

“Cough, please.”

Grey managed a small one. The doctor’s face behind his faceplate revealed nothing. The throbbing sound filled Grey’s entire brain, annihilating any other thought.

“I am going to check your glands.”

The doctor reached his gloved hands toward Grey’s neck. As the tips of his fingers made contact, Grey darted his head forward. The action was automatic; Grey couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. His teeth bore into the soft flesh of Suresh’s palm, clamping like a vise. The chemical taste of latex, profoundly revolting, then a burst of sweetness filled his mouth. Suresh was shrieking, struggling to break free. His free hand pushed on Grey’s forehead, fighting for leverage; he reared back and struck Grey across the face with his fist. Not painful but startling; Grey broke his hold. Suresh stumbled backward, clutching his bloody hand at the wrist, thumb and forefinger wrapping it like a tourniquet. Grey expected something large to happen, the sound of an alarm, men rushing in, but nothing of the kind occurred; the moment felt frozen and, somehow, unobserved. Suresh backed away, staring at Grey with a look of wide-eyed panic. He stripped off his bloody glove and moved briskly to the sink. He turned on the tap and began to scrub his hand fiercely, muttering under his breath:

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Then he was gone. Grey lay still. In the struggle, his IV had torn loose. There was blood on his face, his lips. With slow pleasure he licked them clean. The merest taste, but it was enough. Strength flowed into him like a tide upon the shore. He tensed against the straps, feeling the rivets start to give. The air lock was another matter, but sooner or later it would open, and when it did, Grey would be waiting. He would alight like an angel of death.

Lila, I am coming.

19

0330 hours: The group was gathered at the tent, gear packed, awaiting the dawn. Kittridge had told them they should sleep, to prepare for the journey ahead. Shortly after midnight, the promised buses had appeared outside the fence, a long gray line. From the Army, no announcement, but their arrival hadn’t escaped attention. All through the camp the talk was of leaving. Who would get to go first? Were more buses coming? What about the ill? Would they be evacuated separately?

Kittridge had gone with Danny to the command tent for Porcheki’s briefing. What was left of the civilian staff, FEMA and Red Cross, would directly supervise the loading, while the last of Porcheki’s men, three platoons, would manage the crowds. A dozen Humvees and a pair of APCs would wait on the far side of the fence to escort the convoy. The trip to Rock Island would take a little under two hours. Assuming everything went as planned, the last of the four loads would reach Rock Island by 1730, just under the deadline.

When the meeting broke up, Kittridge took Danny aside. “If anything happens, don’t wait. Just take what you can carry and go. Stay off the main roads. If the bridge at Rock Island is closed, head north, like we did the last time. Follow the river until you find an open bridge. Got that?”

“I shouldn’t wait. Stay off the main roads. Go north.”

“Exactly.”

The other drivers were already headed for the buses. Kittridge had only a moment to say the rest.

“Whatever happens, Danny, we wouldn’t have gotten this far without you. I’m sure you know it, but I wanted to say so.”

The man nodded tightly, his gaze slanted away. “Okay.”

“I’d like to shake on it. Do you think that would be all right?”

Danny’s brow furrowed with an expression, almost, of pain. Kittridge was worried he’d overstepped when Danny extended his hand with furtive quickness, the two men’s palms colliding. His grip, though hesitant, was not without strength. A vigorous pump; for a second Danny met his eye; then it was over.

“Good luck,” said Kittridge.

He returned to the tent. Nothing to do now but wait. He sat on the ground with his back against a wooden crate. A few minutes passed; the flaps of the tent parted. April lowered herself beside him, drawing her knees to her chest.

“You mind?”

Kittridge shook his head. They were looking toward the compound’s entrance, a hundred yards distant. Under a blaze of spotlights, the area around it glowed like a brightly lit stage.

“I just wanted to thank you,” April said. “For everything you’ve done.”

“Anybody would have.”

“No, they wouldn’t. I mean, you’d like to think so. But no.”

Kittridge wondered if this was true. He supposed it didn’t matter. Fate had pushed them together, and here they were. Then he remembered the pistols.

“I’ve got something of yours.”

He reached under his jacket and pulled one of the Glocks free. He racked the slide to chamber a round, turned it around in his hand, and held it out to her.

“Remember what I told you. One shot in the center of the chest. They go down like a house of cards if you do it right.”

“How did you get it back?”

He smiled. “Won it in a poker game.” He nudged it toward her. “Go on, take it.”

It had become important to him that she have it. April took it in her hand, leaned forward, and slid the barrel into the waistband of her jeans, resting against her spine.

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “I’ll use it in good health.”

For a full minute, neither spoke.

“It’s pretty obvious how all this is going to end, isn’t it?” April said. “Sooner or later, I mean.”

Kittridge turned his face to look at her; her eyes were averted, the lights of the spots glazing her features. “There’s always a chance.”

“That’s nice of you to say. But it doesn’t change a thing. Maybe the others need to hear it, but I don’t.”

A chill had fallen; April leaned her weight against him. The gesture was instinctive, but it meant something. Kittridge draped his arm around her, drawing her in for warmth.

“You think about him, don’t you?” Her head lay against his chest; her voice was very soft. “The boy in the car.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Kittridge took a long breath, exhaling into the darkness. “I think about him all the time.”

A deeper silence fell. Around them the camp had fallen quiet, like the rooms of a house after everyone had gone to bed.

“I’d like to ask a favor,” April said.

“Name it.”

Kittridge felt her body tense just slightly. “Did I mention I was a virgin?”

Despite himself, he laughed; and yet this did not seem wrong. “Now, I think I’d remember something like that.”

“Yeah, well. There haven’t been what you’d call a lot of men in my life.” She paused, then said, “I wasn’t lying about being eighteen, you know. Not that it matters. I don’t think this is a world where stuff like that means much anymore.”

Kittridge nodded. “I guess maybe it doesn’t.”

“So what I’m saying is, it doesn’t have to be any big thing.”

“It’s always a big thing.”

April wrapped his hand with her fingers, slowly brushing her thumb over the tops of his knuckles. The sensation was as light and warm as a kiss. “It’s funny. Even before I saw your scars, I knew what you were. Not just the Army—that was obvious to everyone. That something had happened to you, in the war.” A pause, then: “I don’t think I even know your first name.”

“It’s Bernard.”

She pulled away to look at him. Her eyes were moist and shining. “Please, Bernard. Just please, okay?”

It was not a request that could be refused; nor did he want to. They used one of the adjacent tents—who knew where its occupants had gone? Kittridge was out of practice but did his best to be kind, to go slow, watching April’s face carefully in the dim light. She made a few sounds, but not many, and when it was done she kissed him, long and tenderly, nestled against him, and soon was fast asleep.

Kittridge lay in the dark, listening to her breathe, feeling her warmth where their bodies touched. He’d thought it might be strange but it wasn’t strange at all; it seemed a natural part of all that had occurred. His thoughts drifted, touching down here and there. The better memories; the memories of love. He didn’t have many. Now he had another. How foolish he’d been, wanting to give away this life.

He had just closed his eyes when from beyond the gate came a roar of engines and a flare of headlights. April was stirring beside him. He dressed quickly and parted the flaps as he heard, coming from the west, a roll of thunder. Wouldn’t you know they’d be leaving in the rain.

“Are they here?” Rubbing his eyes, Pastor Don was emerging from the tent. Wood was behind him.

Kittridge nodded. “Get your gear, everybody. It’s time.”

Where the hell was Suresh?

Nobody had seen the man for hours. One minute he was supposed to be examining Grey; the next he’d vanished into thin air. Guilder had sent Masterson to search for him. Twenty minutes later, he’d come back empty-handed. Suresh was nowhere in the building, he said.

Their first defection, Guilder thought. A crack like that would widen. Where could the man hope to get to? They were in the middle of a cornfield, night was pressing down. The days had passed in futility. Still they had failed to isolate the virus, to draw it forth from the cells. There was no doubt that Grey was infected; the man’s enlarged thymus told them so. But the virus itself seemed to be hiding. Hiding! Those were Nelson’s words. How could a virus be hiding? Just fucking find it, Guilder said. We’re running out of time.

Guilder was spending more of his time on the roof, drawn to its sense of space. Past midnight once again, and here he was. Sleep was only a memory. No sooner would he drift off than he would jolt awake, the walls of his throat closing in. The seventy-two-hour deadline had come and gone, Nelson only raising his eyebrows: Well? Guilder’s windpipe was so tight he could barely swallow; his left hand fluttered like a bird. One whole side of his body was dragging as if a ten-pound dumbbell were tied to his ankle. There was no way he could hide the situation from Nelson much longer.

From the rooftop, Guilder had watched the Army’s ranks diminishing over the days. How far away were the virals? How much time did they have?

His handheld buzzed at his waist. Nelson.

“You better come see this.”

Nelson met him at the door of the elevator. He was wearing a dirty lab coat, his hair askew. He handed Guilder a sheaf of paper.

“What am I looking at?”

Nelson’s face was grim. “Just read.”

DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY

U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND

7115 SOUTH BOUNDARY BOULEVARD

MACDILL AFB, FL 33621-5101

010500JUN16

USCENTCOM OPERATION ORDER—IMMACULATA

REFERENCES: EXECUTIVE ORDER 929621, 1st HL Recon BDE OPORD 18–26, Map Sheet V107

TASK ORGANIZATION: Joint Task Force (JTF) SCORCH, including elements of: 388th Fighter Wing (388 FW), 23rd Fighter Group (23 FG), 62nd Homeland Aerial Defense Group (62 HADG), Colorado Army National Guard (CO ANG), Kansas Army National Guard (KS ANG), Nebraska Army National Guard (NE ANG), and Iowa Army National Guard (IA ANG)

1. SITUATION

a. Enemy Strength: Unknown, +/- 200K

b. Terrain: Mixture of high plains/grasslands/urban

c. Weather: Variable conditions, moderate day visibility, limited night visibility, low to no moonlight

d. Enemy Situation: As of 010500JUN16, 763 infected person groups (“pods”) observed massed in Designated Areas 1–26. Enemy movement expected immediately following sunset (2116).

2. MISSION

JTF SCORCH conducts combat operations from 012100JUN16 through 052400JUN17 within designated Quarantine Zone in order to destroy all infected persons.

3. EXECUTION

Intent: JTF will conduct air and ground combat operations within Quarantine Zone. Priority task for JTF SCORCH is elimination of all infected personnel within Quarantine Zone. All personnel, including civilians, within Quarantine Zone are assumed to be infected and are authorized for elimination in accordance with Executive Order 929621. End state is elimination of all infected personnel within Quarantine Zone.

Concept of the Operation: This will be a two-phase operation:

PHASE 1: JTF deploys tactical air units of the 388 FW, 23 FG, and 62 HADG 012100JUN16 to conduct massed bombing of Designated Areas 1–26. PHASE 1 complete with 100% bombing saturation of Quarantine Zone. PHASE 2 will commence immediately following PHASE 1 complete.

PHASE 2: JTF will deploy 3 Mechanized Infantry Divisions from tactical ground units of the CO ANG, KS ANG, NE ANG, IA ANG to conduct free-fire assaults on remaining enemy forces within Designated Areas 1–26. PHASE 2 complete with 100% infected personnel destroyed within Quarantine Zone.

It went on from there: logistics, tactical, command, and signal. The bureaucratese of war. The upshot was clear: anyone behind the quarantine line was now forfeit.

“Jesus.”

“I told you,” Nelson said. “Sooner or later, this was bound to happen. It’s less than two hours till dawn. We’re probably okay for the night, but I don’t think we should wait.”

Just like that, the clock had run down to zero. After all he’d done, to accept defeat now!

“So what do you want me to do?”

Guilder took a breath to steady himself. “Evacuate the techs in the vehicles, but keep Masterson here. We can box up Grey and the woman ourselves and call for pickup.”

“Should I notify Atlanta? You know, so they’re at least aware of the situation.”

It was, he thought, to Nelson’s credit that he didn’t indulge himself with a second I-told-you-so. “No, I’ll do it.”

There was a secure landline in the station chief’s office. Guilder made his way upstairs and down the empty hallway, his left leg dragging pitifully. All the offices had been stripped bare; the only things in the room were a chair, a cheap metal desk, and a telephone. He lowered himself into the chair and sat there, staring at the phone. After some time he realized his cheeks were wet; he had begun to weep. The strange, emotionless weeping that had come to seem like a harbinger of his fate, and the body’s unbidden confession of his wretched little life. As if his body were saying to him: Just you wait. Just you wait and see what I’ve got in store for you. A living death, sonny boy.

But this would never happen; once he picked up the phone, it would all be over. A small comfort, to know that at least he wouldn’t live long enough to suffer the full brunt of his decline. What he had failed to accomplish that day in the garage would now be done for him.

Mr. Guilder? Come with us. A hand on his shoulder, the march down the hall.

No.

20

By the time they reached the buses, the soldiers had established a perimeter. A crowd was forming in the predawn darkness. Danny’s bus was in the third slot; Kittridge glimpsed him through the windshield, hat wedged onto his head, hands clamping the wheel. Vera stood at the base of the steps, holding a clipboard.

God bless you, Danny Chayes, Kittridge thought. This is going to be the ride of your life.

“Please, everyone, keep calm!” Porcheki, moving up and down the line of buses behind the barrier of soldiers, was yelling through a megaphone. “Form an orderly line and load from the rear! If you don’t get a seat, wait for the second load!”

The soldiers had erected barriers to serve as a kind of gate. The mob was pressing behind them, funneling toward the gap. Where were they going? people were asking. Was the destination still Chicago, or somewhere else? Just ahead of Kittridge’s group was a family with two children, a boy and girl, wearing filthy pajamas. Dirty feet, matted hair—they couldn’t have been older than five. The girl was clutching a naked Barbie. More thunder rolled in from the west, accompanied by flashes of light at the horizon. Kittridge and April were both keeping a hand on Tim, afraid the mob would swallow him.

Once through the gap, the group moved quickly to Danny’s bus. The Robinsons and Boy Jr. were the first to board; at the bottom of the steps were Wood and Delores, Jamal and Mrs. Bellamy. Pastor Don brought up the rear, behind Kittridge, Tim, and April.

A burst of lightning, ghostly white, ignited the air, freezing the scene in Kittridge’s mind. Half a second later, a long peal of thunder rolled. Kittridge felt the impact through the soles of his feet.

Not thunder. Ordnance.

A trio of jets shot overhead, then two more. Suddenly everyone was screaming—a high, shrill sound of undammed panic that built from the rear, engulfing the crowd like a wave. Kittridge turned his face toward the west.

He had never seen the virals in a large group before. Sometimes, from his perch on the tower, he had seen three of them together—never less or more—and of course there’d been the ones in the underground garage, which might have numbered as many as twenty. That was nothing compared to this. The sight suggested a flock of earthbound birds: a coordinated mass of hundreds, thousands even, rushing toward the wire. A pod, Kittridge remembered. That’s what they’re calling them, pods. For a second he felt a kind of awe, a pure breathtaken wonder at its organic majesty.

They’d sweep over the camp like a tsunami.

Humvees were racing toward the western wire, rooster-tails of dust boiling from their wheels. Suddenly the buses were unguarded; the crowd surged toward them. A great human weight crashed into Kittridge from behind. As the crowd enveloped him, he heard April scream.

“Tim!”

He dove toward her voice, fighting his way through the mob like a swimmer against the current, tossing bodies aside. A clot of people were trying to jam themselves into Danny’s bus, pushing, shoving. Kittridge saw the man who had been ahead of them in line holding his daughter over his head. He was yelling, “Please, somebody take her! Somebody take my daughter!”

Then Kittridge saw April, caught in the crush. He waved his hands in the air. “Get on the bus!”

“I can’t find him! I can’t find Tim!”

A roar of engines; at the back of the line, one of the buses drew clear, then another and another. In a burst of fury, Kittridge rammed his way toward April, grabbed her by the waist and plunged toward the door. But the girl would have none of it; she was fighting him, trying to break his grip.

“I can’t leave without him! Let me go!”

Ahead he saw Pastor Don at the base of the steps. Kittridge shoved April forward. “Don, help me! Get her on the bus!”

“I can’t leave, I can’t leave!”

“I’ll find him, April! Don, take her!”

A final thrust through the melee, Don reaching forward, finding April’s hand, pulling her toward the door; then she was gone. The bus was only half full, but there was no time to wait. Kittridge’s last glimpse of April was her face pressed to the window, calling his name.

“Danny, get them out of here!”

The doors closed. The bus pulled away.

In her basement chamber of the NBC facility, Lila Kyle, who had spent the last four days in a state of narcotic suspension—a semiconscious twilight in which she experienced the room around her as if it were but one of several movie screens she was viewing simultaneously—was asleep, and dreaming: a simple, happy dream in which she was in a car at night, being driven to the hospital to have her baby. Whoever was driving the car, Lila couldn’t see; the fringes of her vision were draped in blackness. Brad, she said, are you there? And then the blackness lifted, like the curtain over a stage, and Lila saw that it was Brad. A shimmering golden joy, weightless as June sunlight, thrummed through her entire being. We’ll be there soon, my darling, Brad said. We’ll be there any second. This isn’t all going to hell in a handbasket. You just hold on. The baby is coming. The baby is practically here.

And those were the words Lila was saying to herself—the baby is coming, the baby is coming—when the room was buffeted by a violent explosion—glass shattering, things falling, the floor beneath her lurching like a tiny boat at sea—and she began to scream.

21

The viral pod that swarmed the eastern Iowa refugee-processing center in the early morning hours of June 9 was part of a larger mass gathering out of Nebraska. Estimates made later by the joint task force, code-named JTF Scorch differed on its size; some believed it was fifty thousand, others many more. In the days that followed, it would convene with a second, larger pod, coming north out of Missouri, and a third, larger still, moving south from Minnesota. Always their numbers increased. By the time they reached Chicago, they were half a million strong, penetrating the defensive perimeter on July 17 and overwhelming the city within twenty-four hours.

The first virals to breach the wires of the refugee-processing center arrived at 4:58 CTD. By this time, extensive aerial operations in the central and eastern portions of the state had been under way for eight hours, and, in fact, all but one of the bridges over the Mississippi—Dubuque—had already been destroyed; the timing of the quarantine had been deliberately misreported by the task force. It was generally believed by the leaders of the task force—a conclusion supported by the combined wisdom of the American military and intelligence communities—that a concentrated human presence within the quarantine zone acted as a lure to the infected, causing them to coalesce in certain areas and thus make aerial bombardment more effective. The closest analogue, in the words of one task force member, was using a salt lick to hunt deer. Leaving behind a population of refugees was simply the price that needed to be paid in a war that lacked all precedent. And in any event, those people were surely dead anyway.

Major Frances Porcheki of the Iowa National Guard—in her civilian life, a district manager for a manufacturer of women’s sporting apparel—was unaware of the mission of JTF Scorch, but she was no fool, either. Though a highly trained military officer, Major Porcheki was also a devout Catholic who took comfort in, and guidance from, her faith. Her decision not to abandon the refugees under her protection, as she had been ordered to do, followed directly from this deeper conviction, as did her choice to devote the final energies of her life, and those of the soldiers still under her command—165 men and women, who, nearly to a one, took up positions at the western wire—to provide cover for the escaping buses. By this time, the civilians who had been left behind were racing after the vehicles, screaming for them to stop, but there was nothing to be done. Well, that’s it, Porcheki thought. I would have saved more if I could. A pale green light had gathered to the west, a wall of quivering radiance, like a glowing hedgerow. Jets were streaking overhead, unleashing the fury of their payloads into the heart of the pod: gleaming tracers, spouts of flame. The air was split with thunder. Through a gauntlet of destruction the pod emerged, still coming. Porcheki leapt from her Humvee before it had stopped moving, yelling, “Hold your fire, everyone! Wait till they’re at the wire!,” then dropped to a firing position—having no more orders to give, she would face the enemy on the same terms as her men—and began to pray.

Time itself acquired a disordered feel. Amid the chaos, lives were overlapping in unforeseen ways. In the basement of the NBC facility, a bitter struggle was ensuing. At the very moment that the Blackbird helicopter was alighting on the rooftop, Horace Guilder, who had been hiding from Nelson in the office when the assault commenced, his decision not to telephone his counterparts at the CDC having lifted one burden from his mind only to create another (he had no idea what to do next), had descended the stairs to the basement with considerable difficulty to find Masterson and Nelson frantically cramming blood samples into a cooler packed with dry ice, yelling words to the effect of “Where the hell have you been?” and “We have to get out of here!” and “The place is coming down around our ears!” But these sentiments, reasonable as they were, touched Guilder only vaguely. The thing that mattered now was Lawrence Grey. And all at once, as if he’d been slapped in the face, Guilder knew what he had to do.

There was only one way. Why hadn’t he seen it all along?

His whole body was poised on the verge of paralyzing spasms; he could barely draw a breath through the narrowing tube of his throat. And yet he mustered the will—the will of the dying—to reach out and seize Masterson’s sidearm and yank it free of its holster.

Then, amazing himself, Guilder shot him.

Kittridge was being trampled.

As the buses pulled away, Kittridge was knocked to the ground. As he attempted to rise, somebody’s foot caught him in the side of his face, its owner tumbling over him with a grunt. More pummeling feet and bodies; it was all he could do to assume a posture of defense, pressing himself to the ground with his hands over his head.

“Tim! Where are you?”

Then he saw him. The crowd had left the boy behind. He was sitting in the dirt not ten yards away. Kittridge hobbled to his side, skidding in the dust.

“Are you okay? Can you run?”

The boy was holding the side of his head. His eyes were vague, unfocused. He was crying in gulps, snot running from his nose.

Kittridge pulled him to his feet. “Come on.”

He had no plan; the only plan was to escape. The buses were gone, ghosts of dust and diesel smoke. Kittridge hoisted Tim at the waist and swung him around to his back and told him to hold on. Three steps and the pain arrived, his knee shuddering. He stumbled, caught himself, somehow stayed upright. One thing was certain: with his leg, and with the boy’s added weight, he wouldn’t make it far on foot.

Then he remembered the armory. He’d seen an open-backed Humvee parked inside. Its hood had been standing open; one of the soldiers had been working on it. Would it still be there? Would it function?

As the soldiers at the western wire opened fire, Kittridge gritted his teeth and ran.

By the time he reached the armory, his leg was on the verge of collapse. How he’d made it those two hundred yards, he had no idea. But luck was with him. The vehicle was parked where he’d seen it, among the now-empty shelves. The hood was down—a good sign—but would the vehicle run? He lowered Tim to the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and pressed the starter.

Nothing. He took a breath to steady himself. Think, Kittridge, think. Hanging beneath the dash was a nest of disconnected wires. Somebody had been working on the ignition. He pulled the wires free, picked two, and touched the ends together. No response. He had no idea what he was doing—why had he thought this would work? He arbitrarily selected two more wires, red and green.

A spark leapt; the engine roared to life. He jammed the Humvee into gear, aimed for the doors, and shoved the accelerator to the floor.

They barreled toward the gate. But a new problem lay before them: how to make it through. Several thousand people were trying to do the same thing, a roiling human mass attempting to wedge itself through the narrow exit. Without taking his foot off the gas, Kittridge leaned on the horn, realizing too late what a bad idea this was—that the mob had nothing to lose.

It turned. It saw. It charged.

Kittridge braked and swung the wheel, but too late: the hordes swallowed the Humvee like a breaking wave. His door flew open, hands pulling at him, trying to break his grip on the wheel. He heard Tim scream as he fought to keep control. People were lunging at the vehicle from all directions, boxing him in. A face collided with the windshield, then was gone. Hands were reaching over his face from behind, clawing at him, more pulling at his arms. “Get off me!” he yelled, trying to bat them away, but it was no use. There were simply too many, and as more bodies rolled over the windshield and under the vehicle’s tires and the Humvee began to tip, he reached for Tim, bracing for the crash; and that was the end of that.

Meanwhile, at a distance of three miles, the line of buses—carrying a total of 2,043 civilian refugees, 36 FEMA and Red Cross workers, and 27 military personnel—was roaring eastward. Many of the people on board were sobbing; others were locked in prayer. Those with children were clutching them fiercely. A few, despite the earnest pleas of their fellows to shut the hell up, were still screaming. While a handful were already undergoing the wrenching self-reproach of having left so many behind, the vast majority possessed no such misgivings. They were the lucky ones, the ones who’d gotten away.

At the wheel of the Redbird, Danny Chayes was experiencing, for the first time in his life, an emotion that could only be described as a magnificent wholeness of self. It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes. Like the bus whose course he guided, Danny had been shot forward, propelled into a new state of being in which a range of contrary feelings, in all their distinctive contours, existed simultaneously in his mind. He was afraid, genuinely and soulfully afraid, and yet this fear was a source of not paralysis but power, a rich well of courage that seemed to rise and overflow within him. You’re the captain of that ship, Mr. Purvis said, and that’s what Danny was. Over his left shoulder, Pastor Don and Vera were talking away, speaking in urgent tones about this and that and the other; behind them, on the benches, the others were huddled together in pairs. The Robinsons with their baby, who was making a kind of mewing sound; Wood and Delores, who were holding hands as they prayed; Jamal and Mrs. Bellamy, the two of them actually hugging; April, sitting woefully alone, her face too stunned for tears. Their deliverance had become the sole purpose of Danny’s life, the fixed point in his personal cosmos around which everything else revolved, yet in the excitement of the moment and Danny’s discovery of the amazing fact of his aliveness, their presence was a pure abstraction. At the wheel of his Redbird 450, Danny Chayes was in union with himself and with the universe, and when he saw, as no doubt the drivers of the other buses did as well, the second mass of virals rising from the predawn darkness to the south, and then the third, coming from the north, and discerned in his mind’s eye with swift three-dimensional calculation that these two bodies would subsequently unite to form a single encircling mass that would swarm over the buses like hornets loosed from a nest, he knew what he had to do. Swinging the wheel to the left, he broke free from the convoy and jammed the accelerator to the floor, soaring past the other buses in the line. Seventy, seventy-five, eighty miles an hour: with every ounce of his being, he willed the bus to go faster. What are you doing? Pastor Don yelled. For the love of God, Danny, what are you doing? But Danny knew just what he was doing. His goal was not evasion, for there could be none; his goal was to be the first. To hit the pod at such barreling velocity that he would sail right through it, carving a corridor of destruction. The space behind him had erupted in a chorus of screams; beyond his windshield the pods were merging, a swelling legion of light. His knuckles were white on the wheel.

“Get down, everyone!” he yelled. “Get down!”

“What the fuck!”

Nelson was backing away, holding his hands protectively before his face. Guilder realized the man pretty much expected him to shoot him, too. Which was nothing he was particularly averse to, though in the near term he had other requirements.

“Get the woman,” he said, gesturing with the pistol.

“There’s no time! Christ, you didn’t have to kill him!”

There were more concussions from above. The air was swirling with dust. “I’ll be the judge. Move.”

Later, Guilder would have cause to wonder how he’d known to get the woman first, one of the more fateful decisions of his life. He might have chosen to leave her, bringing about an altogether different outcome. Intuition, perhaps? Sentimentality for the bond he’d discerned between her and Grey—a bond that had eluded him all his life? Pushing Nelson forward at the end of his pistol, he crossed the lab to the door of Lila’s chamber.

“Open it.”

Lila Kyle, aroused by the explosions, had given herself over to incoherent and terrified screaming; she had no idea where she was or what was happening. She was strapped to a bed. The bed was in a room. The room and everything in it were moving. It was as if she’d awakened from one dream to find herself lost in another, each equally unreal, and she experienced only a partial awareness of Nelson and Guilder as they entered the room. The two men were arguing. She heard the word “helicopter.” She heard the word “escape.” The smaller of the two was plunging a needle into her arm. Lila could offer no resistance, yet the instant the needle pierced her skin a jolt of energy hit her heart, as if she’d been connected to a giant battery. Adrenalin, she thought. I have been sedated, and now they are injecting me with adrenalin, to wake me up. The smaller man was hauling her to her feet. Beneath her gown, a cold nakedness prickled her skin. Could she stand? Could she walk? Just get her out of here, the second man said.

With a tremendous urgency she could not make herself share, he half-dragged, half-carried her across the wide room, some kind of laboratory. The lights were out; only emergency beams shone from the corners. In the distance, a series of roars, and after each a moment of prolonged shuddering, like an earthquake. Glass was jostling, making a pinging sound. They came to a heavy door with a metal ring, like something on a submarine. The smaller man swung it open and stepped inside. She was being held by the larger man now; he was brandishing a pistol. He gripped her from behind, one hand wrapping her waist, the other pressing the barrel to her midsection. Her thoughts were coming clearer now. Her heart was clicking like a metronome. What would emerge from the door? She could smell the man’s breath close to her face, a warm rottenness. She felt his fear in his grip; his hands, his whole body were trembling. “I’m pregnant,” Lila said, or started to say, thinking this might alter the situation. But her voice was cut short as, from the far side of the door, came a womanly sound of shrieking.

The aerial operations over western and central Iowa on the night of June 9 were not without risks. Chief among them was that the pilots might fail to carry out their orders, and, in fact, some did not: seven flight crews refused to deploy their payloads over civilian targets, while three more claimed to have suffered mechanical malfunctions that prevented them from doing so, an operational failure rate of six percent. (Of these ten flight crews, three were court-martialed, five were reprimanded and returned to duty, and two dropped to the deck and were never seen again.) In the coming weeks, as the mission of JTF Scorch expanded to include centers of population throughout the nation’s middle section and the Intermountain West, members of the task force would recall this statistic with something like nostalgia—the good old days. By the first of August, so many aviators were either sitting in the stockade as prisoners of conscience or had vanished with their aircraft into the skies above the dying continent that it became increasingly difficult to mount a coherent aerial offensive, casting the very mission of JTF Scorch into doubt. These difficulties were compounded by secessionist movements in California and Texas, both of which proceeded to declare themselves sovereign and appropriate all federal military resources within their borders, effectively daring Washington to stop them by force—a remarkably shrewd gambit, both militarily and politically, as by this time the situation was in pure free fall. Much bluster ensued on both sides, culminating in the Battle of Wichita Falls and the Battle of Fresno, in which vast numbers of American military, both on the ground and in the air, threw in the towel, laid down their arms, and asked for sanctuary. Thus, by mid-October of the year that came to be known by subsequent generations as the year zero, the nation known as the United States could be said to exist no more.

But in the early morning hours of June 9, beneath a moonless Iowa sky, JTF Scorch was still on-line, enjoying the full, or nearly full, cooperation of its assets. In confirmation of the task force’s projections, great masses of Infected Persons had collected in four distinct hot spots across the state: Mason City, Des Moines, Marshalltown, and the FEMA refugee-processing facility in Fort Powell. By 0200, the first three had been dispensed with; Fort Powell was the final prize. A combination of A-10 Warthogs and F-18 fighter-bombers began the assault; concurrently a C-130 transport was inbound from MacDill. Within its bay lay an explosive device called a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB. Containing 18,700 pounds of H6 high explosive, the MOAB was the largest non-nuclear bomb in the United States military arsenal, capable of producing an impact crater five hundred feet in diameter and a blast wave sufficient to level an area the size of nine city blocks; its fires would burn for days.

When Nelson bent to undo Grey’s straps—straps no longer attached to anything—Grey lurched forward, seizing him by the biceps and burying his teeth in the man’s neck. A deep bite: he felt Nelson’s windpipe being crushed beneath his jaws. As the two tumbled backward over the bed, Grey shook him like a wolf with a rabbit in its teeth; a jet of hot blood filled Grey’s mouth. They were on the floor now, Nelson face-up, Grey above him. An agonal twitch of Nelson’s hands and feet, and that was all. Grey burrowed his jaws deeper, into the soft meat.

He drank.

Had it been this easy for Zero, Grey wondered, this pleasurable? A rich vitality poured through him, a glorious immensity of pure sensation. With a final, soul-satisfying inhalation of blood, Grey pulled his face away. He allowed himself a couple of seconds to regard the corpse on the floor. The flesh of Nelson’s face looked as if it had been shrink-wrapped to its underlying structure; his eyes, like the eyes of the woman in the parking lot of the Red Roof, bulged reptilianly from their bony orbits, staring into the heart of eternity. Grey searched his mind for some emotion that corresponded to his actions—guilt, perhaps, or pity, or even disgust. He was a murderer, a man who had killed. He had stolen the life of another. But he felt none of these things. He’d done what he had to do.

The door to his chamber stood open. Lila, he thought, I am coming to save you—all that has happened has ordained it.

He stepped through.

What emerged from the door was a man. The figure was backlit, sunk in shadow. As he advanced, beams from the emergency lights slanted across his face. His gown was bathed in blood.

Lawrence?

“Don’t.” The man with the gun was dragging Lila backward, jabbing its barrel deep into her ribs. His steps were uncertain, fluttering. His whole body was shaking like a leaf. It seemed that any second he might fall. “Keep your distance.”

Grey reached his bloody hands plaintively forward. “Lila, it’s me.”

Horror, revulsion, a protective mental numbness at the violent swiftness of events—all combined in Lila’s mind to grip her in a frozen, focusless terror in which her body and her brain seemed like only tangentially associated phenomena. Through the fog she realized what the screams from the chamber meant. If the state of his gown was any indication, Lawrence had not merely killed the small man but torn him to pieces. Which made a kind of sense; Lila should have seen this coming. She remembered the tank. She remembered Lawrence’s face, a mask of gore like some Halloween horror, as it popped from the hatch, and the glass of the Volvo’s window splintering under his fist. Lawrence had become a monster. He had become one of those… things. (Poor Roscoe.) And yet there was something about his eyes, which she could not look away from, that told her not to be afraid. They seemed to bore straight into her, shining with an almost holy light.

“Don’t you know what’s happening?” the man barked. “We have to get out of here.”

“Let her go.”

Another blast from above and a lurching wave passed through the floor. Glass was falling; everything was caving in. The gun’s barrel was pressed against her ribs like a cold finger pointing at her heart. The man angled his head toward a corner of the room.

“Up the stairs. There’s a helicopter waiting.”

“Put the gun down and I’ll go with you.”

“Goddamnit, there’s no time for this!”

Something was happening to her. A kind of awakening, and it wasn’t just the gun. It was as if she were returning to consciousness after years of sleep. How foolish she’d been! Painting the nursery, of all things! Pretending they were taking a drive in the country, as if that could change anything! Because David was dead, and Eva was dead, and Brad, whose heart she had broken; she had convinced herself the world wasn’t ending, because it already had. And here was this man, this Lawrence Grey, who had come upon her like a redeemer, an angel to lead her to safety, as if the baby she carried were his own, and she knew what she had to say.

“Please, Lawrence. Do what he asks. Think about our baby.”

A fraught moment followed, so suspended as to seem outside the flow of time. Lila could read the question on Lawrence’s face. Could he get to the pistol before the man fired? And if he could, what then?

“Show us the way out of here.”

By the time they reached the roof, the helicopter’s blades were turning, casting a whirling wind across the rooftop. The sky was glowing with an eerie, emerald-tinged light, like the insides of a greenhouse. It seemed the helicopter would leave without them, a final irony, but then Lila saw the pilot urgently waving to them from the cockpit. They climbed aboard; Guilder slammed the door behind them.

Upward.

Kittridge became aware that he was face-down in the dirt. A taste of blood was in his mouth. He tried to get to his feet but realized he had only one; his prosthesis was gone. He lifted his face to see the Humvee tipped on its side a hundred yards away, like a beached sea creature. Its windshield was smashed; steam was pouring from its hood and undercarriage. The mob had fallen on it like a pack of animals; some were attempting to rock it back onto its wheels, but the effort was disorganized, coming from all sides. Others were standing on the top, shoving and kicking competitors away, defending their positions as if the mere possession of such a thing might offer some protection.

Kittridge crawled to where Tim lay. The boy was breathing but unconscious—a small mercy. His body was splayed at a tortured angle; his hair was matted with blood. More was running from his mouth and nose. Kittridge realized the shooting had stopped. Soldiers were tearing past, but there was nowhere to run. A mass of virals lay at the wire, felled by the soldiers’ bullets, but as his eyes scanned the scene, Kittridge understood that the attack had been a test, an advance force sent to exhaust the soldiers’ defenses. A second, vastly larger pod was now amassing. As it roared toward them, the image stretched, flowing like a shimmering green liquid as it surrounded the encampment. The final assault would come from all directions.

He lifted Tim’s body by the shoulders and held his chest against his own. They were in the midst of chaos, people running, voices shouting, bombs falling; yet as they crouched in the dust, a bubble of silent inactivity seemed to encase them, protecting them from the destruction. Kittridge turned his face toward the east. For a brief moment he imagined he could see Danny’s bus streaming away in the darkness, though this was an illusion, he knew. By now they were gone, far beyond the reach of his vision. Godspeed to you, Danny Chayes. A deep stillness wrapped his being and, with it, a feeling of the past, an experience like déjà vu: he was where he was but also not, he was here and also there, he was a boy at play and a man at war and the third thing he’d become. Images flashed through his consciousness: the viral in her wedding dress clinging to the hood of the Ferrari; a view of sparkling sunlight on a river he had fished for years; April, on the night when they had sat together in the window of the school, watching the stars, and the look of quiet peace on her face as the two of them made love; the boy in the car, his eyes full of a terrible knowledge, and his hand—his little boy’s hand—desperately reaching, then gone. All of these and more. He recalled his mother, singing to him. The warmth of her breath on his face, and the feeling of being very small, a new being in the world. The world is not my home, she sang in her silky voice, for I’m just passing through. The treasures are laid up somewhere, high beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Tim had begun to make a choking sound; his eyes flickered, fought to open, then stilled. The virals, having completed their encirclement, were surging toward the wire. Kittridge became aware of an absence of sound around them. The battle was over; the planes had broken away. Then, in the quiet, he detected, high above, the drone of a heavy aircraft. Kittridge angled his face to the sky. A C-130 transport, coming from the south. As it passed overhead an object released from its belly, its dive abruptly stalled by the puff of a parachute. The plane climbed away.

Kittridge closed his eyes. So, the end. It would happen instantaneously, a painless departure, quicker than thought. He felt the presence of his body one last time: the taste of air in his lungs, the blood surging in his veins, the drumlike beating of his heart. The bomb was dropping toward them.

“I’ve got you,” he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

The blast wave from the MOAB struck the helicopter carrying Grey and Lila broadside: a blinding sheen of light, followed by an earsplitting slap of heat and sound. As if lifted on the crest of a wave, the helicopter lurched forward, its nose pointed earthward at a forty-five-degree angle, rocketed up again and began to spin, its angular momentum accelerating like a line of skaters wheeling on an ice rink. It spun and as it spun the pilot pitched to the side, his neck broken by the force of impact with the windshield; but by this time, between the sound of the alarm—a harsh blaring—and the centrifugal force of their velocity, nobody inside the helicopter was thinking very much at all. The forces that had held them aloft were gone, and nothing else would happen until they reached the ground.

Lawrence Grey experienced the crash itself as a severing in time: one moment he was pressed against the wall of the helicopter in its death spiral, the next he was lying in the wreckage. He felt but did not specifically recall the moment of impact; it had lodged in his body as a ringing sensation, as if he were a bell that had been struck. There was a smell of fuel, and hot insulation, and an electrical crackling sound. Something heavy and inertly soft was lying on top of him. It was Guilder. He was breathing but unconscious. The helicopter, what was left of it, lay on its side; where the roof should have been was now the door.

“Lawrence, help me!”

The voice came from behind him. He shoved Guilder’s body off his chest and felt his way to the rear of the helicopter. One of the benches had twisted loose, pinning Lila to the floor, crushing her at the waist. Her bare legs, the flimsy fabric of her gown—all glistened with a heavy, dark blood.

“Help me,” she choked. Her eyes were closed, tears squeezing from the corners. “Please, God, help me. I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding.”

He tried to pull her free by her feet, but she began to shriek in agony. There was no other way; he’d have to move the bench. Gripping it by its frame, Grey began to twist. A groan and then a pop and it broke away from the decking.

Lila was sobbing, moaning in pain. Grey knew he shouldn’t move her, but he had no choice. Positioning the bench beneath the open door, he hoisted her to his shoulder, stepped up, and laid her gently on the roof. He followed, climbing up the opposite side. He slid down the fuselage, circled back, and reached up to receive her, easing her body down the side of the helicopter.

“Oh, God. Please, don’t let me lose her. Don’t let me lose the baby.”

He lowered Lila to the ground, which was strewn with rubble from the destroyed laboratory—twisted girders, concrete blasted into chunks, shards of glass. He was weeping, too. It was too late, he knew; the baby was gone. Gouts of blood, clotted with black, were spilling from between Lila’s legs, an unstoppable flow. In another moment she would follow her baby into darkness. A childhood prayer found Grey’s lips and he began to murmur, again and again, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.…”

Save her, Grey.

You know what to do.

He did; he knew. The answer had been inside him all along. Since the Red Roof and Ignacio and the Home Depot and Project NOAH and long before.

Do you see, Grey?

He lifted his face to behold them. The virals. They were everywhere and all around, emerging from the darkness and flames: flesh of his flesh, unholy and blood-driven, encircling him like a demonic chorus. He was kneeling before them, his face streaked with tears. He felt no fear, only astonishment.

They are yours, Grey. The ones I give to you.

—Yes. They are mine.

Save her. Do it.

He needed something sharp. His hands searched the ground, lighting upon a sliver of metal, some broken shard from a world of broken, piecemeal things. Eight inches long, the edges ragged as a saw. Positioning it lengthwise across his wrist, he closed his eyes and slashed a deep gash into his flesh. The blood spurted forth, a wide, dark river, filling his palm. The blood of Grey, the Unleasher of Night, Familiar of the One Called Zero. Lila was moaning, dying. Any breath might be her last. A moment’s hesitation—some last, extinguishing human light inside him—and Grey placed his wrist against her lips, tenderly, like a mother easing her breast to the mouth of a newborn babe.

“Drink,” he said.

Grey never even saw it: the chunk of concrete, thirty-four pounds of solid rock, that Guilder, with all the strength he could muster, hoisted into the air above Grey’s head and then brought down upon him.

22

They made their way into Chicago as the sun was setting, filling the sky with a golden light. First the outer ring of suburbs, empty and still; then, rising before them like a promise, the shape of the city. The lone survivors, their lives joined by the mysterious bond of their survival: they traveled in silence, dreamers in a forgotten land, their progress marked only by the grumble of the bus’s engine, the hypnotic whoosh of asphalt beneath their wheels. Ghosts sat beside them, the people they had lost.

As the city came into focus, Pastor Don bent forward from his seat behind Danny. Helicopters were floating over the city, buzzing among the skyscrapers like bees around a hive; high above, the contrails of aircraft cast ribbons of color against the deepening blue. A zone of safety, it seemed, but this couldn’t last. In their hearts they knew there was none.

“Let’s pull off a minute.”

Danny drew the bus to the side of the roadway. Pastor Don rose to address the group. The decision was upon them. Should they stop or continue? They had the bus, water, food, fuel. No one knew what lay ahead. Take a minute, Pastor Don said.

A murmur of agreement, then a show of hands. The verdict was unanimous.

“Okay, Danny.”

They circled the city to the south and continued east on a rural blacktop. Night fell like a dome snapping down on the earth. By daybreak they were somewhere in Ohio. A landscape of pure anonymity; they could have been anywhere. Time had slowed to a crawl. Fields, trees, houses, mailboxes streaming by, the horizon always unreachable, rolling away. In the small towns, a semblance of life continued; people had no idea where to go, what to do. The highways, it was said, were jammed. At a mini-mart where they stopped for supplies, the cashier, glancing out the window at the bus, asked, Can I go with you? On the wall behind her head, a television screen showed a city in flames. She spoke in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard. She didn’t ask where they were going; their destination was simply away. A quick phone call and minutes later her husband and two teenage sons were standing by the bus, holding suitcases.

Others joined them. A man in overalls walking alone on the highway with a rifle over his shoulder. An elderly couple, dressed as if for church, their car expired on the side of the road with its hood standing open, steam exhaling from its cracked radiator. A pair of cyclists, Frenchmen, who had been riding across the country when the crisis began. Whole families squeezed aboard. Many were overcome, weeping with gratitude as they took their places. Like fish joining a school, they were absorbed into the whole. Cities were bypassed, one after the other: Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Pittsburgh. Even the names had begun to feel historical, like cities of a lost empire. Giza. Carthage. Pompeii. Customs evolved among them, as if they were a kind of rolling town. Some questions were asked but not others. Have you heard about Salt Lake, Tulsa, St. Louis? Do they know what it is yet, have they discovered the answer? Only in motion was there safety; every stop felt fraught with peril. For a time they sang. “The Ants Go Marching,” “On Top of Spaghetti,” “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

The landscape rose and fell, enfolding them in a green embrace: Pennsylvania, the Endless Mountains. Signs of human habitation were few and far between, the leavings of an era long passed. The battered coal towns, the forgotten hamlets with a single factory shuttered for years, red-brick smokestacks forlornly poking a blue summer sky. The air smelled strongly of pine. By now they numbered over seventy, bodies crammed into the aisles, children on laps, faces pressed to the windows. Fuel was a constant worry, yet somehow they always found more in the nick of time, their passage protected by an unseen hand.

By the afternoon of the third day, they were approaching Philadelphia. They had traveled half the width of a continent; ahead lay the eastern seaboard, with its barricade of cities, a wall of humanity pressed to the sea. A feeling of finality had taken over. There was no place else to run. They homed in on the city along the Schuylkill River, its surface as dark and impenetrable as granite. The outer towns felt to be in hiding, houses boarded, roads empty of cars. The river widened to a broad basin; heavy trees, dappled with sunlight, draped like a curtain over the road. A sign read: CHECKPOINT 2 MILES. A brief conferral and all were agreed: they had come to the end. Their fates would find them here.

The soldiers gave them directions. Curfew was two hours away, but already the streets were quiet, virtually without movement except for Army vehicles and a few police cars. Narrow, sun-drenched lanes, ramshackle brownstones, the infamous corners where packs of young men had once lingered; then suddenly the park appeared, an oasis of green in the heart of the city.

They followed the signs past the barricades, masked soldiers waving them through. The park was teeming with people, as if for a concert. Tents, RVs, figures curled on the ground by their suitcases as if lodged there by a tide. When the crowds grew too thick they were forced to abandon the bus by the side of the road and continue on foot. A terminal act: to leave it behind felt disloyal, like putting down a beloved dog who could no longer walk. They moved as one, unable to let go of one another yet, to fade into a faceless collective. A long line had formed; the air was as heavy as milk. Above them, unseen, armies of insects buzzed in the darkening trees.

“I can’t do this,” said Pastor Don. He had halted on the path, a look of sudden horror on his face.

Wood had stopped, too. Twenty yards ahead lay a series of chutes, harshly lit by spotlights on poles; people were being patted down, giving their names. “I know what you mean.”

“I mean, Jesus. It’s like we only just came from here.”

The mob was streaming past. The two Frenchmen moved by with barely a glance, their meager belongings bundled under their arms. They could all feel it: something was being lost. They stepped to the side.

“Do you think we can find gas?” Jamal asked.

“I just know I’m not going in there,” Pastor Don said.

They returned to the bus. Already a man was trying to jimmy the ignition. He was skinny, his face blackened with grime, his eyes roving in their sockets like he was on something. Wood seized him by the scruff of the neck and hurled him down the steps. Get the fuck out of here, he said.

They boarded. Danny turned the key; the engine roared under them. Slowly they backed away, the crowd parting around them like waves around a ship. The air was drinking up the last of the light. They turned in a wide circle on the grass and pulled away.

“Where to?” Danny asked.

No one had an answer. “I don’t think it matters,” Pastor Don said.

It didn’t. They spent the night in Valley Forge park, sleeping on the ground by the bus, then headed south, staying off the highways. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina: they kept on going. The journey had acquired its own meaning, independent of any destination. The goal was to move, to keep moving. They were together; that was all that mattered. The bus jostled beneath them on its tired springs. One by one the cities fell, the lights went out. The world was dissolving, taking its stories with it. Soon it would be gone.

Her name was April Donadio. The child that even now had taken root inside her would be a boy, Bernard. April would give him the last name Donadio, so that he might carry a piece of each of them in name; and across the years she spoke to the boy often of his father, the kind of man he was—how brave and kind and a little sad, too, and how, though their time together was brief, he had imparted to her the greatest gift, which was the courage to go on. That’s what love is, she told the boy, what love does. I hope someday you love somebody the way that I loved him.

But that came later. This bus of survivors, twelve in sum: they could have continued that way forever. And in a sense, they did. The green fields of summer, the abandoned, time-stilled towns, the forests thick with shadow, the bus endlessly rolling. They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.