Plague Zone

Plague Zone By David Wellington

1. Tim gave the Portland Plague Zone a wide berth. What he was looking for wasn’t there. He’d been walking so long his feet had stopped hurting, or rather that the pain didn’t occur to him much anymore. It was just there, a companion to the grittiness he felt on his skin and the dryness of his lips. He walked on the margin of Interstate Five, between the edge of the road and the guardrail, staying out of the road as much as possible so he didn’t have to spend all his time watching out for speeding vehicles. That had been a problem farther south. There wasn’t much traffic anymore, just the occasional military convoy thundering past, the soldiers waving to him out of their hatches, not even bothering to slow down to ask him who he was or where he was headed. Anyone traveling north had to be either crazy or authorized. The sick people the soldiers were looking for didn’t walk in straight lines, as a rule. He kicked old picked-over suitcases out of his way. Avoided stepping on the trucker bombs—old drink bottles, bright plastic full of yellow urine. Nobody on this road wanted to stop even to relieve themselves. The weeds he trampled on were softer than the asphalt of the highway, so that was something. According to the mile markers he was halfway to Olympia when he saw the bus coming. The road was on a slight incline, heading up over a hill so gently graded he was barely aware of the added exertion of walking uphill. The bus was coming directly toward him. It was moving fast, he thought, but it was hard to tell when he could only see it straight on. The rectangular sign above its windshield that should have listed its destination was blank. It was coming right for him. Tim had time to blink and to reach up and start to adjust the brim of his straw hat. Then his body took over, his reflexes, and he sprinted out into the road, across two lanes. Fast enough to avoid being smeared. The bus didn’t veer off, didn’t turn to track him. It plowed across the yellow dashed line, jumped as it left the road surface. There was a long, high-pitched squealing roar as it rubbed up against the guardrail. He heard a much lower roar as one of its tires exploded.

Tim was breathing hard, shaking. The fear had come back, a fear he’d thought he was done with. The bus ground to a stop fifty feet behind him, rocked on its suspension. For a second everything stopped moving. Then the doors at the front burst open and screaming people spilled out on the asphalt, grabbing at each other, shrieking, the men and the women with wide eyes, the kids looking terrified. They flowed out like blood from a wound, moving cautiously away from the bus as if they didn’t want to get too far away but just far enough. The driver came out last, a fat man in a blue shirt, and he waved at Tim with both arms, summoning him. Tim loped over, unsure what had happened, unsure what was going to be asked of him. He tried to talk but his voice was rusty after so many weeks alone, his throat too dry from the road. “Everybody okay?” he managed to creak out. “Inside. In the back—one of them—” the driver stuttered. “He just had a cold, it was the sniffles,” a woman in a rumpled business suit insisted. “Just a cold!” Tim sensed what he was being asked to do, even if no one could seem to articulate it. He scratched at his stubble-coated chin and then climbed the steps into the bus. At first he was just happy to be inside, in the shade. The bus was air conditioned against the summer heat and it was some kind of mercy to be cool again. His eyes, long adjusted to the glare of sunlight on a pale road, could make out very little of the bus’s interior. From far ahead of him, down the serried aisle, he heard a thump. Tim squinted until he could make out the rows of seats upholstered in green and red and orange. He could see piles of hand luggage tumbled out of overhead compartments, a tidal spill of food wrappers and newspapers lining the floor. At the far end of the bus stood a narrow plastic door that was rattling, someone pounding on it from behind. “Crap,” Tim choked out. He dug his arm out of one strap of his pack. Started pulling at zippers. He’d never done this before. If the driver had given him specific instructions he would have refused, turned away and kept walking. Let the passengers deal with it as best they could. No, he thought. He wouldn’t have done that. Even this late in the game he was still incapable of turning his back on people in need. But why him? What made them think he was the man for this job? The narrow door crumpled on one side, pushed hard by someone who didn’t have the brainpower to work the simple lock. With one last heave it broke free and swung out hard, then bounced back. A pale hand grabbed its edge, forced it open again. The man who staggered out of the bus lavatory wore an oxford cloth shirt with half its buttons undone. The cuffs of the sleeves hung loose as if he’d been trying to escape from his clothes when the change finally came. His head was almost bereft of hair, just a few

clumps left sticking up at random angles like obscene horns. His skin was the color of rancid cream and a thin sheet of black drool leaked from his lower lip. His eyes were completely empty. He wouldn’t have much brain left, Tim knew. The Russian Flu attacked your cerebral cortex first, drilling holes through your gray matter, turning it into a sponge so it could hold more germs. It irritated whatever was left, the medulla, making you clumsy, the amygdalae, putting you in a permanent state of fight-or-flight. The speech centers, the parietal lobe, the parts of the brain that let you read a good book or enjoy a fine wine, shut down altogether. On stiff legs the man came toward Tim, moving as fast as he could, stumbling over the seats, getting tangled up in the garbage on the floor. There was plenty of time for Tim to reach into his pack and take out his 22A. The pistol stank of oil, as it had ever since Tim had bought it from a pawnshop in San Francisco. Back when there had still been a San Francisco. The sick man took another step, raised his arms with his fingers curled like claws. Tim took the safety off, took a stance, aimed. Squeezed the trigger. The bullet went in through one side of the sick man’s forehead. The next one went through his eye. He fell down like he was going to take a very sudden nap. It took a third one to put him completely out of his misery. The .22 caliber long rifle bullets in the gun were meant for target shooting or at best shooting small game. In the end, with enough shots, it didn’t matter. 2. “I want to thank you.” The bus driver sat down next to Tim on the side of the road and stuck out a sweaty hand. Tim shook it without looking at the man. “Supposed to call it in,” Tim said automatically. “Every case is supposed to get called in.” The driver stared at him open-faced. He knew it as well as Tim did. If one passenger on the bus had been infected it was likely others were, too. The bus could carry the disease someplace that was still clean. “You a cop?” the driver asked, when Tim didn’t say anything. “A librarian,” Tim told him. He shook his head. “Used to be.” “You did us a big favor there. None of us are armed. When I saw you on the side of the road there I figured you had to be a cop or a soldier or something.”

Tim squinted. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror in quite a while but he doubted he looked very official. He hadn’t washed or laundered his clothes in a week and his straw hat didn’t exactly make him look tough. “I figured anybody headed north had to be some kind of a badass. I’m Bill Peaslee,” the driver said. “Tim. Tim Kempfer.” Tim nodded but he kept looking down at his knees. The fear was gone, washed out of him by a kind of dread mixed with nausea. It had never been like that before. Of the six people he’d killed since the Flu hit (all of them infected), he’d never felt like an executioner before. Always it had been self-defense. “You look like you’ve been on the road awhile,” Peaslee said. “Mind if I ask where you’re headed?” “Sure. Seattle.” The driver laughed, then cut himself short. “I guess you’re the last guy on Earth who actually wants to go there.” Tim shrugged. He shouldered his pack and made to get up. He understood Peaslee’s surprise, of course. Seattle was ground zero, the first place in America to get infected. The Russian Flu had come across from Vladivostok (hence the name—the authorities were saying lately it probably started in India) and hit Vancouver like a terrible wave. For a while it had looked like it was going to be contained there. All of America had gathered close around tv sets, waiting to hear what came next. People had gone out and bought jugs of distilled water and all the canned food they could scrounge. The President had made a speech that scared a lot of people, and FEMA and the CDC had braced for the worst while hoping for the best. Their idea of the worst had fallen far short of the mark. Their epidemiological models had accounted for transmission by bodily fluids but they’d thought that meant sneezing and coughing. Until it was too late nobody had thought about what it meant to have an infected population that passed on its viral load aggressively, actively seeking out the healthy and attacking them. Biting them. Half of Washington state was infected in the first week, with the worst outbreaks localized in cities. The bigger the city, the more people crowded together in one place, the faster it spread. Seattle had been the first city to officially fall. More than half a million people had tried to get out, before the military finally shut them in. The entire city was abandoned territory now, fenced off and left to rot. Nobody went in and nothing would ever be allowed to come out. “I’ve got my reasons,” Tim said, and realized he had no desire to share them.

Peaslee didn’t prod. “We’re the First National Congregation of Jesus, plus a couple folks we picked up on the way. We’re from Chehalis, you know where that is?” Tim did. “Bad up there. We held on as long as we could, after they announced the travel ban. Tried to stay in our houses and when that didn’t work, when they started coming after us and nobody was stopping them, we took refuge in the church itself. That didn’t hold either. We figured we’d head south, try some place maybe in California. You been down that way?” “Yeah.” Tim thought about his last day in San Francisco. He’d hoped to hitch a ride north, at least part of the way to Washington. Instead he’d found every highway out of town had turned strictly one way, with refugees crowding down out of the Pacific Northwest, packed into minivans and the beds of pickups. Mexican kids had run around the cars as they inched forward, selling bottles of water and wrapped sandwiches. Then the infected had come. It had seemed impossibly slow as it unfolded, a horde of them stumbling up an off ramp, slamming into the cars, dragging people out onto the street. Tim had turned at right angles to the road and high-tailed it before the screaming had properly started. He hadn’t stopped at all that night, just kept moving, asleep on his feet but still he could put one foot in front of another. A day later and fifty miles north he had tried making some phone calls. Whatever number he’d tried he’d just gotten a recorded message from FEMA, asking him to keep the lines clear, that regular service would be restored shortly. “You might want to skip California,” Tim said. Peaslee’s upper lip was thick with sweat. “They’d probably turn us back at the border anyway. Especially if you tell them what happened to us.” “If I were you I’d head east. The last time I was in Chicago things were pretty good there. People were scared, yeah. Nobody went out in the street if they could help it. But it was clean.” “A lot of checkpoints between here and Illinois,” Peaselee breathed. Tim sat up and looked at the bus. A group of the passengers were struggling to change the blown-out tire, a crew of them working a big jack. Another bunch were burying the body of the man he’d killed while the woman in the wrinkled suit—had to be his wife, Tim thought, with only the thinnest stab of sympathy—stood with her hands steepled in front of her face, praying, even as tears slicked her cheeks. “Come with us,” Peaslee said, suddenly. “I don’t know what you’re looking for but you won’t find it back there. Come with us.”

Tim shook his head. He got up and adjusted the straps of his pack. He’d wasted enough time. Wherever the bus was headed it was away from what he needed. “Just—hey, if you won’t come with us, don’t rat us out either, okay?” Peaslee shouted at Tim’s back. “We’re just trying to make it, you know?” Tim nodded and waved without turning. 3. That night he slept in the back of an abandoned gas station, behind a locked door with working electric lights blazing, which was the best security he’d had in a while. He sank deep and dreamed long, mostly of a woman holding a claw hammer. She swung and swung but connected with nothing. In the morning he plugged in his cell phone and let it charge up. He found bottled water in the station’s coolers and some pork rinds to break his fast. The cash register popped open when he hit it with the flat of his hand and he found about seventy dollars inside. Cash still had its uses, so he pocketed the worn bills, but he was much more excited when he found a box in the stockroom full of potted meat. The stuff was purplish gray and tasted like cat food but it didn’t go bad in his pack and it would sustain him for the coming day’s hike. Maybe his last. The thought startled him so much he stood there behind the counter looking up at a security camera for a good long minute. He could be in Olympia before dark if he pushed himself hard enough. After the weeks he’d put in walking from San Francisco, he’d almost forgotten that he had a real destination. That he was going somewhere. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. When he’d come up with this plan, such as it was, there had been so many unknowns. What would he do once he got to Seattle? How would he talk his way through the barricades and then… how would he stay alive in there? Lacking answers, he’d promised himself he could figure these things out when he arrived. That the important thing was to start, to proceed northward, to get there. He’d walked for weeks in that vacuum of rationality, a hazy kind of walking hypnosis that ate up the hours and the miles. Now he wondered if he could handle the last leg. Tim shook his head. He still had hours to go, before he had to really think about anything. He gathered up his phone from the counter and unplugged it from the charger. He considered briefly calling in the bus full of possibly infected people. There was a national hotline you were supposed to call, 1-800-FLU-HELP. He thought about the woman in the suit, however, and what he’d done to her life, and he just used the phone to check the weather report.

Eighty-one degrees and sunny. Just like the day before. There was a big display of road atlases near the front of the store but he passed them by. He didn’t need maps anymore—Interstate Five would take him all the way home. Outside again, hot already by ten in the morning, sweating. Thirsty. He moved his feet and his arms and kept on trucking. The road shot straight as an arrow over flat land, distant mountains on his right, Mount Rainier a constant companion, as white and dependable as the moon. The road ran through orchards and farmland, through belts of trees where pale orchids flashed in the darkness of lost forests. It passed through town after town, small little crossroads places and bigger, more important-sounding municipalities. Toledo, Napavine, Centralia. Maytown. Funny. He’d been to Maytown, once, or at least through it. There was a veterinarian with an office near there, a nice guy with a mole that bisected one eyebrow. He’d vaccinated Tim’s dog against the parvovirus, back when Tim had a dog. The sun went over his head and sank again toward the sea. And then… And then. The sound of the helicopter made him blink in a syncopated rhythm. It made his chest feel funny. It was huge, one of the big transport ones with counter-rotating rotors. It was dark against the sunset, almost black. It hung there in the air as if it were pinned there, like an insect mounted on a colorful board. Below it the lights and windows of Olympia twinkled in the haze. The inlet burned like liquid fire. If he squinted, if he looked in just the right place, he could make out the new capitol building. Olympia. It wasn’t home, not quite. It was the wrong end of Puget Sound. But it was as close as he was going to safely get. The rest of the journey, the unsafe part, would come later. 4. A fence walled off the southern expanse of Olympia, a ten foot chain-link fence with posts sunk in rugged pools of concrete. Strong enough to stop a charging car. Tim had seen fences like that before in his travels. He knew how to handle them. There was no barbed wire on top of this one. The infected didn’t have the coordination to climb, much less pull themselves over the top. Tim had done it plenty of times as a kid. The direct approach to the city was out of the question. He’d expected to find soldiers in Olympia. Fort Lewis lay just outside of town, a sprawling military preserve that buffered Olympia from the Tacoma PZ. There’d been more soldiers on that base than there were

citizens of Olympia, before the outbreak. Earlier he’d lay prone on the surface of Interstate Five where it wound around the town and studied the streets with a pair of cheap binoculars he kept in his pack. He’d seen military vehicles in the major intersections, seen troops marching downtown. The main gate in the fence stood at the bottom of an off ramp and it was flanked by search towers and machine gun nests. Spotlights roamed back and forth across the main roads leading in. The quiet little hippie town had turned into an annex of the Fort, it looked like. He had considered walking up to that gate and asking politely to be let in. He’d considered it for all of about five seconds. The Army didn’t like people moving around, walking from town to town. It was one way the Flu spread. If they didn’t shoot him on sight—just in case—they would have turned him back. He couldn’t let that happen, not after walking all the way from San Francisco. Even if he’d been willing to give up his quest, where would he go? The thought of walking inland, of walking all the way around Olympia and Tacoma, brought up a sharp psychosomatic ache in his feet and his shinbones. The option he came up with was to sneak in. Hence, the fence. Weeks of walking had left his shoes soft and malleable. They dug easily into the gaps in the chain-link. His fingers burned as he pulled himself upward. His arms creaked and groaned and demanded he rest. Halfway up, though, five feet up in the air, he felt so badly exposed even in the darkness that he scrambled the rest of the way up and over without a pause. On the far side he clambered down as far as he dared and then dropped to the soft grass of somebody’s backyard. No sirens sounded. No dogs barked at his presence. Good enough. Tim gathered himself up, checked his pack. He hurried under the shelter of a pine tree and peered out through the thick branches. Ahead of him lay a quiet street, empty of traffic. He didn’t know how many civilians were left in the town—probably not many. This whole region of Washington had been evacuated early on, back when there’d been plenty of helicopters and trucks to carry refugees and plenty of places to take them, too. Most likely Olympia was empty except for soldiers, which meant he had his work cut out for him. He’d had time to come up with a kind of half-assed plan—he would get down to the waterfront and steal a boat, presumably one with a good outboard motor and plenty of fuel. Then he would high-tail it up the Sound to Seattle. The problem, of course, was that he had to do all that without being seen, crossing an entire town he only vaguely remembered visiting, while the entire Army was watching. The darkness would help, some.

Keeping to the shadows behind a row of houses he moved as quietly as he could in a generally northward direction. From time to time he would peep out from the corner of a house and check to make sure the street was still empty. It always was. Only about one in five of the houses had any lights on. He kept listening for familiar sounds—the whining hum of a television, the clink of plates being knocked together in a kitchen sink. The constant rising and falling wave sound of cars driving back and forth. Olympia was nearly silent, though. It looked okay, like everyone had just stepped away for a minute and would be right back. The houses were still freshly painted and though the lawns needed a good mowing they hadn’t become overgrown with weeds and saplings yet. It was eerie, though, how quiet it had become. Ahead of him the row of houses ended and a cross-street ran perpendicular to his path. Tim crouched down behind a hydrangea bush and studied the road. It looked clear. It looked abandoned. Maybe the soldiers didn’t use this part of town. Maybe they’d cleared it out of the infected and of evacuees and left it for dead. Maybe they weren’t even watching it anymore. There was only one way to find out. Holding his breath, clutching his pack so it wouldn’t rattle, he ducked down and ran right into the street. On the far side he could see more houses and the broad concrete wall of what looked like a school. He would only be exposed for a few seconds, no more than half a minute until he could make the shelter of trees on the far side. He was going to make it. He was almost there— “Shit! Drooler!” someone shouted, and light burst all around him. 5. Tim’s legs pumped wildly as he ran for cover. Behind him a pair of soldiers hanging out the windows of a humvee lifted rifles to their shoulders, their spotlight trained right on him. He could feel the flesh of his back crawling, trying to get away. He could almost feel the bullets entering his skin, tearing him apart. He jumped and rolled into a line of shrubbery just as the first shots hit the ground behind him. There was no time to recover, no time to think. He pushed himself forward through a tangle of branches. Leaves and scraps of wood filled his hair and his mouth. Beyond he scrambled up onto his feet in somebody’s driveway. He could hear one of the soldiers talking on a radio. The light bathed the side of the house beside him. Tim ran. He was screwed and he knew it. The soldiers would have a map of this neighborhood at least. If they’d been patrolling it they probably knew its ins and outs by heart. He had no

idea where he was or what direction safety might lie. If there was such a thing as safety. They’d called him a drooler—obviously a reference to the black slaver the infected generated. They thought he was sick. They would never just let him get away, then. They couldn’t afford to. One sick man could infect an entire town. They’d all learned that lesson the hard way. Houses ahead, open road to his left, thick trees to the right. He swung around and headed for the trees. If he could get back out, over the fence and out of Olympia, would they still follow him? Probably not very far. He couldn’t do that, though. He couldn’t just give up after having come so far. He couldn’t— He had no choice. Tim jumped over a snaking garden hose, nearly tripped on the sprinkler head. He collided hard with a waist-high fence of unfinished wood, then used his momentum to carry himself up and over it. On the far side he ducked down and ran to his left, into the thick stand of trees. “Over there,” a soldier cried out. Tim squatted down uncomfortably and breathed through his mouth. “I definitely saw something over there.” “I’ve got air support off the ground, headed this way in five or less,” someone answered back. “Don’t get too close. If he pops his head up blow it off.” “Yeah, okay,” the first soldier said. He couldn’t be more than ten yards away. Tim could hear his boots scrunching on the tall grass. He sounded young. Soldiers were young in general, at least from what Tim had seen—most of them just out of their teens. This one sounded even younger, as if he might not be old enough to drive. Jake would never be that old, Tim thought. Nobody would ever be able to teach him But there was no time for memories. He needed a distraction. Anything would do. His hand moved across the ground he couldn’t see. There was something near him, something paler than the shadows. His hand touched it and found an old baseball, slick with mold and hard as a stone. Some child must have lost it over the fence and never found it again. Tim picked it up, cocked his arm back, and threw it up in the air as hard as he could. He was already moving when they started shooting. The young soldier cried out as if infected maniacs were dropping from the trees. The older voice called for calm, called for his squad to regroup. How many of them were out there? Tim just ran. He dashed from tree to tree, not even worrying about noise. He couldn’t remember how far he was from the fence. If he could find it again he could be over it in seconds. His hands still burned where the wire had dug into them the last time but he could take a little more pain.

Bullets tore the bark off a tree three yards from his face. Tim ducked his head down and ran to one side, unable to see anything, worried he might run headlong into a tree trunk and knock himself out cold. Behind him he heard soldiers running, far more of them than he’d expected. If he looked back he thought there would be a solid wall of them, a dragnet to catch him up. He dashed forward and right out of the trees. They ended in the yard of a big house, three stories and dozens of windows. A Land Rover sat parked in the driveway, its tires slack, the car resting on dented rims. Tim dashed around the side of it and wondered where the fence was. He couldn’t have been running in the wrong direction—but yes, he realized, he could easily have gotten turned around. And if he was running now deeper into the neighborhood, into the twisting streets he didn’t know, then he was in real trouble. He turned around, wasting invaluable time trying to get his bearings. He didn’t hear the helicopter until it was directly above him. Its rotor wash stirred up pine needles and broken blades of grass around his feet, ruffled his hair. A spotlight switched on above him and suddenly he was trapped in a column of pure blinding light. To his left he heard a gun go off. Bullets whipped past him, so fast they made his head spin. To his right he saw soldiers jumping over the side of an above-ground swimming pool. They looked too short, as if they were a company of heavily-armed midgets. Then he realized they were just boys, some so young their faces were still clean of stubble. One cried out in the voice of a choir boy, though Tim couldn’t make out the words. A dozen rifle barrels lifted to point right at him. Tim held up his hands in surrender, certain he was about to die. “Hold fire,” someone yelled. An adult, it sounded like. “Hold fire!” 6. A high pressure hose smashed water across Tim’s chest, his face. It got up his nose and he sputtered in panic. He was naked and cuffed to a pipe with a plastic loop that cut angrily into his wrist. His mouth was taped shut. A soldier in padded armor—it looked to Tim like a brown snowsuit, and it covered him from head to toe—came closer and jabbed something into his free arm. A needle. Tim thrashed in pain as another armored soldier swabbed his eyes, his ears and his nose. One long swab, slick with Vaseline, went up his anus and he tried not to clench. Then they pulled back. Someone slapped a light switch and he was alone in near perfect darkness. He heard a lock slamming shut though his eyes were still swimming in the blackness and he couldn’t see where the door was.

He was deep in the basement of a civic building, that much he knew. They hadn’t let him see much as he was transferred from the back of a troop transport into this new prison. He’d glimpsed a façade of glass, a revolving door and then he’d been rushed down a flight of stairs and into this room. The soldiers had taken no chances with him. They’d torn off his clothes, hauled his pack away. One of them in a padded suit had wrapped duct tape around his mouth, sealing it shut in case he tried to bite them. He knew he shouldn’t take it personally. They thought he might be infected—that was all. Nobody wanted to get close to a sick person—to a drooler. It only took the slightest bite or scratch to pass on the Flu. They could have left the lights on, though. In the darkness, barely able to breathe for all the water in his nose, freezing cold in his nakedness, he found it extremely difficult not to hate them. It only got worse hours later, when the door opened again. Sudden light blasted Tim’s eyes and he shielded them with his free arm. He saw someone throw a blanket and an MRE packet inside the door. He tried to protest that he couldn’t reach either item from where he was but they slammed the door shut before he could make a sound. He blinked his eyes in the resumed dark and tried to calm himself down. There had to be something he could do to improve his situation. Anything. He reached up and found the end of the tape that covered his mouth. The soldiers had been thorough and wrapped the tape around and around his head, covering his lips and much of his chin. He was just lucky they’d left his nose exposed or he might have suffocated. With his free hand he scratched and pulled at the tape until he found the loose end. Carefully, trying not to tear out half his hair, he unwrapped himself. Some skin came off his lips when the last layer of tape pulled off and he could feel them bleeding but at least he could breathe through his mouth again. He started to shout, then, loud and long, protesting his innocence, demanding that he was clean, that he was an American citizen, that he had rights, goddamnit, civil rights, rights under the Geneva convention, rights under the Patriot Act at the very least. The dark cell rang with his shouts but gave him no answer at all. When he was tired of yelling he decided to make a try for the blanket. The MRE was too far away by half but he was pretty sure that if he stretched himself out as far as he could go—painfully so, it turned out, as the plastic loop dug deeper and deeper into the abraded skin of his wrist and hand—he could just touch the blanket with his toe. Grunting and straining and sweating he managed to drag it closer, just a little closer. Exhaustion rumbled through him and he sat down hard, his joints aching, his back cramping up. He let himself rest a few minutes then he tried again. Finally he got the blanket close enough to grab with his free hand. He pulled it around himself greedily, the rough fabric cold against his skin at first. Slowly he began to warm

up. Hunger attacked him then but he knew he couldn’t reach the MRE. It was just too far away. He was trying anyway when the door opened again. “A survivor, then. Good instincts.” A tall figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Tim could just make out that it was a man in an Army uniform. “I’m clean,” Tim said, as calmly as he could manage. “There’s no need for all this. I’m clean.” The soldier nodded. “That’s what the test results say. No viral load, no antibodies. We could do a cranial CT scan to make sure, check your grey matter for spirochete holes, but frankly, I’m satisfied. You can bite me all you want.” He stepped into the dark room. Tim glanced around himself, saw that he’d been cuffed to a water heater tank. The room wasn’t a prison cell at all. With a pocketknife the soldier cut through Tim’s plastic restraint. He grabbed up Tim’s hand in both of his own and studied the torn skin at his wrist. “Some people would have given in to despair. They would have just given up, huddled in the corner and waited to be killed. You fought even though you must have known your chances were infinitesimal. That’s a good sign. I like a man who isn’t ready to die.” Tim pulled his arm back and rubbed at his wrist. “There are things I haven’t done yet.” “Come with me, please,” the soldier said, and lead him up the stairs. 7. “Do you have a name?” the soldier asked. “Kempfer,” Tim said. He wrapped the blanket closer around himself. The soldier hadn’t given him any clothes to put on. It was warmer upstairs, at least. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Colonel Horne. I’m nominally in charge of Fort Lewis and, under martial law, the reclaimed sections of Olympia.” “Nominally?” Horne smiled coldly. “Technically General Forbes is still the CO. Of course, he’s not much good at giving orders now. Not since he was infected. I have him in a stockade over in the fort, locked up where he can’t hurt anyone. I have a lot of good men there. I’m hoping that when this all clears up, when it’s over, I can get him the treatment he needs to return to his family.”

Tim shook his head. “There’s no treatment for the Flu. If he’s—if he’s that far gone, that you need to lock him up, then his brain will be completely eaten away. You can’t recover from something like that. Better to just shoot him and put him out of his misery.” Horne nodded as if agreeing that it was a nice day out. “You could be right. Come this way.” He opened a door and gestured for Tim to enter a small room lined with windows. The sun was shining outside—it looked like it had just dawned. Several other people were already in the room waiting when they arrived. Only one of them was a civilian—a heavy-set man with a white beard who wore a fishing cap and a leather bomber jacket. He lounged in a swivel chair as if it were his office they had entered. Across the room two men in Army khaki were sitting on a desk while a boy in a uniform with no insignia served them cups of coffee. He couldn’t be more than fifteen. Tim stared at the boy. “You’re using child soldiers,” he said. “I’m using what I have available.” Horne’s face darkened for a moment, then a smile curled his mouth again. “It takes three days or so for the virus to incubate. In that time the only symptom is a moderate headache and sometimes a ringing in the ears. When the disease you call the Flu came down from Vancouver, when it first broke out in Seattle, General Forbes’ men were among the earliest responders. Along with the police and fire departments we went in en masse and tried to get out as many healthy individuals as we could find. A lot of us got bitten in the process—we didn’t know at the time what that would mean. It was generally believed then that a short course of antibiotics could stave off the disease before it could spread.” “That doesn’t work,” Tim said. “No. After the third day of rescue work, we found that out for ourselves. The disease flashed through our barracks, whole companies and even battalions of men coming down with the secondary symptoms overnight. Hair loss. Confusion and then dementia and then violent outbursts. Over two thirds of the General’s men were infected before we even understood what had happened, and many of the rest were lost when we tried to instill proper quarantine procedures. It was chaos.” “I would have expected the military to be more disciplined than that,” Tim said, trying not to sound snide. Knowing he was failing. “All I can say for us is that we did our best. As for the police and fire departments—they don’t exist anymore.” Tim kept his mouth shut. He didn’t know what this man was going to do to him. The fact that he hadn’t been given any clothing so far didn’t bode well. “I needed fresh recruits. I needed people under my command if I was going to keep order here. So I went to the evacuees and I made a request. I asked for their sons. I promised

them only that their children would be well cared for, well fed and kept in sanitary conditions. Very few of them refused.” Tim wondered how many of the evacuees had had a choice in the matter. He figured Horne had probably asked nicely enough, and been sincere in his offer. But when you were the guy with all the guns and all the planes and trucks that would be taking the rest of your family out of town, how easy would it have been to say no? “How about yourself?” Horne asked. “What’s your story, Kempfer? You’re not infected, we established that. You’re not a local, either.” “I was born in Seattle. I had a—a house there.” He’d almost said the word family. That would have hurt, to put Karen and Jake in the past tense. “We caught you sneaking into town from the south. That’s the wrong direction if you were coming from the Seattle PZ.” Tim shook his head. “No, I was out of town when the Flu hit. Chicago—for a professional conference. I tried to get home right away but they’d already shut down all transportation channels in the Pacific Northwest. The closest I could manage was a flight to San Francisco. I tried to arrange transport from there but nobody was going my way.” “That was over a month ago,” Horne said, still smiling. “Back before they shut down the western airports. What have you been doing since then?” “Walking,” Tim admitted. The civilian in the fishing hat leaned forward in his chair. “That’s, what, seven hundred and fifty miles? You walked all that way?” “It’s why I’m so late getting back,” Tim said. Horne laughed. “But why, Kempfer? Why come back at all?” Tim shrugged. He didn’t trust this man. “I figured if the world was ending I might as well go home and get comfortable.” The Colonel laughed again. Then he nodded at the two men on the desk. They got up instantly and came over to stand on either side of Tim. He looked from one to the other but they didn’t return his gaze, just kept their eyes on Horne. “I’d like an honest answer,” the Colonel said, just a polite request. There was no steel in his voice. “Alternatively, I can have you taken back to the basement. What do you say?” 8.

“I was in Chicago for the American Library Association’s annual conference. I was supposed to present a paper on virtual reference.” Tim closed his eyes. It had been a very boring paper to write. Reading it out loud didn’t make it any more exciting. When he’d finished he acknowledged the forced applause and then headed straight for the hotel’s lounge. At a conference like ALA you never got out of the hotel. You went from your room to the restaurant to the conference rooms and when you weren’t sitting listening patiently to someone’s statistics on usage by young adult patrons of new media materials you were talking about raising circulation statistic with piped-in music in small groups in the bar, or at best in pizza pubs just down the street. It was the first of three days of that and Tim was still jet-lagged and two hours off his normal rhythm. He thought he could just manage a beer or two before passing out. When he’d arrived in the lounge, though, he’d found it taken over by his colleagues— dozens of women and a few men huddled around tables, talking excitedly about RFID chips and new chemical treatments for the preservation of acid-damaged texts. He’d groaned inwardly, knowing that at any second he would be sucked into the vortex of one of these conversations, which was likely to go on for most of the night. Normally he would have been in heaven. Men made up only fifteen per cent of librarians nationwide—and men under sixty were ever rarer. They were welcome at pretty much any table they chose, and were guaranteed some nice harmless flirtation amidst the shop talk. With the bad news out of Canada, though, and things looking grimmer by the day, he was having trouble mustering any real interest in the relative merits of the Dewey Decimal system versus Library of Congress classification. That was when he saw her, a woman sitting alone at the bar wearing a silk blouse, her hair up in a tightly-pinned bun. She wore horn-rimmed glasses as if she’d invented the look. If she put a shawl on she would have looked fifty years old and dowdy. Without it she was in her mid-thirties and she caught every male eye in the room. As Tim walked up to the bar she looked up at him with a truly great pair of eyes, though he thought her mouth was a little too big for her face. “Hi,” he said, not really understanding why he was talking to her. Or rather understanding perfectly but not knowing where it would go. “I’m Tim Kempfer. Reference, with Seattle Public.” “Yes, I can see that,” she said, smiling warmly. She glanced down at his nametag and then back up at his face. He laughed. It gave him an excuse to look down at her own tag, which dangled on a silver chain between her breasts. “Nancy Forester, Bergen County Public. That’s in New Jersey.” The tag said her specialty was Adult Circulation. “You just gave that talk,” she said. “The one on infomatics and virtual reference.” “Did you hear it?” he asked.

She smiled again. Her mouth was just the right size, he decided, when she smiled like that. “No,” she admitted. “I just saw it on the program.” They chatted easily for a while. Tim had always suffered from a distinct quality of shyness when talking to women in his adolescence and his early adult years. Ever since he’d been married, though, he’d found it effortless and endlessly pleasant. Since nothing could ever come of it, there was no real pressure. Nancy Forester proved more interesting, as well, than the average librarian. She had a pilot’s license, for one thing, and had some amazing stories to tell about flying small planes. She also had three dogs and he encouraged her to talk about them at length until she turned red and looked away. “You’re just being nice,” she said, finally. “You don’t actually care about my Airedales.” “You’d be surprised,” he said. She excused herself to go to the restroom. When she stood up off her stool he reached over, not really thinking of anything, and ran a finger down her spine, sliding through the silk of her blouse. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. Just stood there, as if waiting for something more. Tim put one foot down on the floor. He felt light-headed, and as if none of this were particularly real. The finger he’d used was the one that wore his wedding ring. He looked down at Nancy’s hand and saw she had one too. He put his other foot down and stood directly behind her. His face was only a few inches from her ear. He didn’t know what he was going to say next, but he didn’t worry about how it would sound, either. That was when a woman in a cardigan stamped into the lounge and cleared her throat near the exit. “Hello, everyone,” she called. Tim looked at her and saw there were tears in her eyes. “There’s been a report—on CNN. Fox News has it as well. It’s.” She cleared her throat again. “It’s in Seattle.” 9. Nancy Forester followed Tim up to his room but there was no thought of anything happening between them, no spark. Or if there was something they had tacitly agreed it was on hold until they could get some more information. Tim unlocked the door then dashed inside and switched on the television. Nancy picked up the remote and flipped through the channels while he took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He didn’t pay much attention to what the commentators were saying. They were repeating the same scant bits of information over and over. At least twenty-one confirmed fatalities reported, hospitals were bracing for a heavy case load. Police and Army units

were in the streets and all public transportation had been shifted to a reduced schedule. None of that meant anything. It was the pictures that mattered. There were five or six video clips they repeated in tight rotation, only breaking them up every so often to show a talking head giving out a new list of statistics. Whenever the video stream was interrupted Nancy would switch to a different channel. The clips showed: Helicopters in the air over Seattle, hovering motionless just above the haze and fog. Military helicopters in green and Coast Guard in orange and white stripes. Television helicopters painted bright colors—Tim saw the King5 News logo. Police helicopters with badges on their sides. They stood in the air not drifting at all. It could have been a still image if he hadn’t seen their rotors spinning. A line of people waiting at the bus station, filling the aisles between rows of benches. A cute toddler was climbing over her obese mother, who looked distinctly worried, her eyes focused on something outside of the camera’s view. A military authority—a General, Tim figured—standing at a podium, talking animatedly and gesturing at a chart Tim couldn’t understand. It showed a pyramid made of stick figures, their faces painted green. In a hospital downtown (for some reason he thought it must be Virginia Mason) a team of nurses, their torsos wrapped in yellow plastic, their faces covered by complicated-looking respirator masks, pushed an empty gurney down a hallway full of people with blood on their arms and faces. Finally—a man staggering down a suburban street. The image was grainy as if it had been shot in low light or from far away. It was detailed enough to show that most of his hair was gone, as if he’d pulled it out in thick handfuls. His face was pale and drawn and when his mouth opened a rope of black spit drooped down across his plaid shirt. “That’s your home town,” Nancy breathed, shaking her head. Tim shushed her with a finger across his lips. The traditional gesture of the annoyed librarian. He saw the irony but not the humor. He sat down on the heavy bedspread with its pattern of black and fuchsia flowers and stared at the screen. The bald man’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. One of his arms hung down straight at his side and sometimes it twitched violently. There was something—something about him. Something Tim responded to, but he couldn’t say what. The image was horrible, sure, but he’d seen similar pictures before. It showed a victim of the Russian Flu in the final, tertiary stage. Tim had watched video taken in Vancouver just weeks earlier, of a hospital ward full of people like that. He’d read all about the Flu, about what it did to you. About

how it wasn’t really a flu at all but a new strain of cranial meningitis, much more virulent and nasty than the old kind. He’d heard unconfirmed reports of what it had done to Siberia and Vladivostok—hence the name, even though the latest theory held it originated in India or Pakistan. It had been traveling east all that spring. It had hit Canada in early March, and then seemed to stall there. The President had been on television urging calm. The old Surgeon General with the sideburns had come on and told people they just had to be careful, that it was important not to travel if you felt like you had a headache. That you should cover your mouth when you coughed. There had always been a chance, they’d said, that it could come to the States. Nobody had really seemed to take that seriously. They’d said the same thing about SARS, and Avian Flu, and those had just fizzled out. Was that why the picture of the infected man bothered him so much? Just because it showed an American citizen, perhaps the first to show such marked symptoms? Tim didn’t think of himself as that provincial. He tried calling home, of course. He called every number Karen had—home, cell, work, fax. He kept getting a message from FEMA asking him to keep the lines clear for emergency use. He called his parents, and Karen’s parents, and all his cousins. He called his cousin Angie in San Francisco, the college student, and spent half an hour calming her down and telling her it was going to be alright. At some point he fell asleep. He didn’t remember even closing his eyes, just opening them later. Nancy Forester was asleep in the easy chair across the room, her hair down and partially covering her face. She must have taken his shoes off and loosened his collar —he didn’t remember doing those things, either. She’d also muted the sound on the television. It was dark outside the windows. He sat up slowly, his head aching, his eyes half shut with mucus. On the tv they were still showing the same clips. Except when they got to the one of the infected man staggering down the street it looked as if they’d found more footage. The clip was twice as long. As Tim watched the man moving painfully around he got a sudden flash of recognition and knew exactly where he’d seen that man before. The missing hair threw him off but yeah, it was Phil Nero. He saw in his mind’s eye an electrician’s van with a cartoon image of a Roman emperor on the side, a fiddle in his hand. Phil Nero. He’d done some work on their house in Seward Park, fixing a light switch that had just stopped functioning. It was the same guy. Tim was sure of it. If he needed any confirmation he got it in the expanded footage. Whereas before the camera had cut away after showing Nero walking down an unidentifiable street, now it followed him farther. It pulled back to get a wide shot showing a pair of cars that had collided in a wide intersection. One was a red Nissan Sentra that Tim recognized

immediately. He could almost read the license plate, and what he couldn’t make out he could fill in from memory. The door of the Nissan swung open hard and a woman in a long skirt spilled out onto the pavement. She looked horrified. She had a claw hammer in her hand and as Nero approached she raised it as if she would hit him right in the face with it. Nero just grabbed her arm and held it there. The woman was screaming by that point. She didn’t stop as Nero bit deep into her arm with a mouth full of white teeth. She didn’t stop until he’d torn a long strip of flesh out of her arm, until blood fountained across the street. “Karen,” Tim wheezed. His wife’s name came from deep inside of him. He stared at the car, then, tried to force the image to gain resolution by pure willpower. There was a shadow in the backseat. A shadow the size of a ten year-old boy. “Jake,” he said. Loud enough to wake Nancy. 10. He didn’t think of revenge at first. He couldn’t think about much of anything at all. Like an animal he rushed to get to his nest—the driving urge was that primal. O’Hare had been a mess—everyone seemed to want to get somewhere else. He’d stood in line for hours, swore he’d packed his bag himself. Lines stretched out the door and around the block, departures monitors were flickering with changes, 10 MINUTE DELAY, 30 MINUTE DELAY, LONG DELAY. There were rumors that the TSA would shut down every airport in the country. There were people who thought that would be a good idea, especially the talking heads on the CNN screens at every gate. “The virus spreads person to person, if you have people crammed inside coach class breathing on each other—” he heard as he rushed down a moving walkway, his backpack slapping against his side. At the next gate: “—brought this on ourselves, in a way, in previous centuries diseases spread slowly and tended to self-localize,” he shook his head, it didn’t mean him, it wasn’t about him, he was flying toward what they were already calling a Plague Zone, not fleeing from it, at the next gate, “—wonder what the Spanish Influenza of 1918 would look like with 747s and Airbuses to move it around,” he blanked it out, shut his ears to it. Other people, people who were sick, shouldn’t be flying, certainly, but he was healthy. He was clean. FLIGHT 709 SEATTLE/TACOMA 1 HOUR DELAY****PLEASE CHECK-IN AT GATE B5. He stared at the screen for a long awful while and wondered, wondered whether the plane would take off at all. Wondered how long it would take that hour delay to turn into something worse. On CNN an astronomer was talking to Wolf Blitzer. “I’d love it. Absolutely love it. Airplane contrails destroy clear viewing, absolutely destroy it. After September Eleventh, when they grounded all the flights, we recorded more data than we would in a normal year. Absolutely amazing.”

“Fuck you,” Tim said to the television. A middle-aged woman clucked her tongue at him and covered her baby’s ears with her hands. Tim apologized but he was already moving, already headed to the next gate. The departure monitors flickered again. BOSTON 1 HOUR DELAY DETROIT CANCELLED LOS ANGELES 2 HOUR DELAY MIAMI 2 HOUR DELAY NEW YORK CANCELLED PITTSBURGH CANCELLED SAN FRANCISCO 1 HOUR DELAY. Tim reached gate B5 to find it packed with people, people shoved two in a seat, people camped in the aisles. There were no clerks at the desk, no one to give him any information. The screen listing flight information just read FLIGHT 709 SEATAC PLEASE STAND BY. He tried asking a few people what was going on but they had no more information than he did. They were parked where they were, just hoping to get on the plane, afraid that if they moved they would lose their spots in line. Not that there was an official line. Across the corridor at gate B7 people were filing onboard a plane to Houston. The ticket clerk was feeding their boarding passes through a turnstile and almost pushing them forward, hurrying them on. He started dashing across the way, waving to get her attention, but she just shook her head at him and went back to what she was doing. A phone was ringing somewhere, just ringing and ringing and no one picked it up. CNN whispered over his shoulder, “—reports of infection in Portland, Oregon, and as far east as Spokane. The Governor of Washington has declared Seattle an official Disaster Area, which is going to mean several things for local residents—” A flickering light in his peripheral vision made him turn his head. ORLANDO CANCELLED CLEVELAND CANCELLED MEMPHIS STAND BY SARASOTA CANCELLED, more and more of them scrolled by, they weren’t even in alphabetical order, they must be coming up as soon as they were officially grounded. He couldn’t find SEATAC anywhere on the monitors, but SAN FRANCISCO PRE-BOARDING was only three gates away. “I need to change my flight,” he said. The clerk rolled her eyes but he slapped his boarding pass down on the desk. “You have checked baggage,” she said, pointing at a code on his boarding pass he couldn’t begin to unravel. “It’s already on the plane.” “That’s fine, they can forward it to me, or, or I’ll just—I’ll buy new clothes in California,” he told her. “I need to get out there, somewhere, as close as I can.” “Sir, that’s quite impossible—”

Tim felt panic bubbling inside of him, felt it come surging up his throat. “You’ll need to step back, sir, so I can help the next person,” the clerk told him. “My wife is fucking dead! My son is dead! Get me on this plane,” he screamed. The clerk stared at him wide-eyed, but then she reached for a rubber stamp. He pushed his boarding pass toward her and she gestured to the gate. “We begin boarding coach passengers in five minutes,” she said. 11. He wasn’t the only one trying to get to Seattle. It was a crowded, noisy flight, but he could hear people crying around him. He could hear people promising each other it was going to be alright. By the time they landed in San Francisco, after circling for hours due to fog, every airport in the country was shut down. The gates were empty, no one even waiting around just in case. Abandoned suitcases littered the terminal, and through the big plate glass windows he could see the runways were bare. Not a plane to be seen. Cousin Angie had said she’d met him at baggage claim, though his bags were probably still sitting in Chicago waiting for someone to pick them up. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter—Seattle was only a few hours away by car. He had reached the coast, and that was what mattered. “Oh, shit, Tim,” she said, rushing up to hug him. Her face was red and puffy. She was about a head shorter than him and she had short blonde hair that didn’t quite hide a port wine stain on her neck. He hadn’t seen her since a Christmas visit to California when she was ten—now she was a student at a design college. He knew almost nothing about her, had in fact not spoken to her in as long as he could remember. It didn’t matter. He was finding out how few things actually mattered. His life was falling away—all of his hopes were gone, all of the things he’d thought about doing. All the future days he had planned. Angie had no car, just a little Vespa scooter. It was cute, and it could run circles around the gridlock traffic in the city, but as she rocketed them down the ridiculous hills of San Francisco he was convinced they would spill at any moment. He was also convinced there was no way it could get him to Seattle. That didn’t matter, he told himself. He could take a bus or a train or just buy a car if he had to. He had about ten grand in the bank in savings and he didn’t care if he had to spend all of it in as many days. She took him back to her dorm room, a tiny space made of white-painted cinderblock and lined with her drawings. Cute, colorful monsters with enormous eyes stared down at him

from every side. She shared the room with a girl named Augusta who was curled up in bed by the time they arrived, though Tim got the sense that she wasn’t actually asleep. In previous epochs—hell, two days earlier—he would have felt supremely uncomfortable spending the night on the floor of the dorm room. He would have felt like a pedophile and a sponge. As he lay down on the carpet with his backpack for a pillow, however, he could only think it didn’t matter. The fact that the carpet smelled like spilled bong water didn’t matter. The fact that the curtains didn’t block out much of the orange streetlight didn’t matter. He couldn’t have slept that night if he’d sprung for a room at the Fisherman’s Wharf Sheraton. He couldn’t have slept if he’d swallowed half a bottle of Ambien. He couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate enough to even make a plan. He could only play the image over and over in his mind. The video clip of Karen’s last moments. The fuzzy blob in the back of the car that had to be Jake. He kept thinking about Phil Nero’s face. He kept thinking about Karen hitting that face with the hammer. He couldn’t imagine her hitting him hard enough. The prick, he thought. The son of a bitch. There were all kinds of names for the asshole. The cunting motherfucker who had taken away Tim’s family. Phil Nero had to die. “In the morning I went to the bank and took some money out. I spent far too long trying to book passage north, only to have every plan I made cancelled out from under me. When the President declared the national state of emergency, when they started reporting cases in Idaho and Montana, they told me I had to stay put. That there was a nation-wide travel ban and people were supposed to stay where they were. It was the only way, they said, they could stop this thing from spreading. Then cases started showing up in Oakland and at Berkeley. It became clear to everyone that it wasn’t going to stop. That it would spread no matter what we did. Then everybody wanted to get out of town on the same day. That’s when I headed out on my own.” The man in the fishing hat leaned forward in his chair. “What about your cousin? Is she okay?” Tim shrugged. He just didn’t know. “I tried calling her a couple of times from the road. I got that stupid FEMA message telling me to keep the lines clear.” Colonel Horne cleared his throat noisily. “You came back,” he said, very slowly, putting the facts together out of Tim’s long soliloquy, “to get revenge on the man who killed your family.” “Yes,” Tim said. Yes. It was that simple. The weeks on the road had taught him that much. If you wanted something badly enough, and if it was a simple thing, then nothing could stop you from getting it.

“No,” Horne said. “I’m sorry you wasted all that time. This is as far as you go.” 12. Anger lit up Tim’s face and neck. “You can’t stop me. You can’t tell me what to do.” Horne shrugged. “Actually, I can. That’s my job.” Tim clutched the blanket around himself. He wanted to jump up, fight his way out of the room. Run all the way to Seattle then and there. They wouldn’t let him do that, however. They would probably shoot him if he tried. There were plenty of guns in the room, on Horne’s hip, slung over the shoulders of the two adult soldiers. Wait for it, he told himself. Wait to make your next move. Another thought burst through him. Fuck that. I’ve waited long enough. “Just give me back my pack and drop me in the PZ. Anywhere in Seattle. You can throw me out of a helicopter so you never have to set foot in there yourself.” Horne smiled sadly. “It’s my duty to protect the citizens of Olympia. Which as of now includes you, Kempfer.” Tim started to say something more but Horne held up a hand for silence. “I’m not interested in hearing your ideas of how best to do that job.” He gestured to the boy soldier in the blank uniform. The kid reached behind the desk and brought out Tim’s ragged backpack. The zipper had been cut away and it sagged open emptily like a toothless mouth. “You can have your things back. We burned your clothes and your hat in case there were any virus crystals adhering to them—can’t be too careful these days.” Tim grabbed the pack and thrust his hand inside. He knew the contents intimately, having lived for a month on only what he could carry around. He didn’t find what he was looking for. “Your peashooter stays here,” Horne told him. He took the Smith and Wesson 22A out of a pocket of his fatigues and waggled it in the air. “We have a strict policy about civilians and weapons. They aren’t allowed any.” “You know how dangerous the infected are,” Tim said. “What if I need to defend myself?” “The camp where you’ll be staying is under a hygiene order. Everyone receives regular checkups. If they show any sign of viral load they’re moved to the stockade. I know it sounds like medical fascism. I prefer to call it security. There are no infecteds in the camp

and there never will be. My men and I defend the place with our lives. That means you’ll be watched at all times, by the way. I keep track of my charges, very close track. There will be no more stupidity tolerated in my city.” Tim closed his eyes and tried not to cry. He had gotten so close, just to be locked up in an evacuation camp. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t over, he promised himself. “If you want to commit suicide you can do it the old fashioned way,” Horne said, sounding as if he were just about through with Tim. “Though we’ll try to stop you if you try, of course. I’m turning you over to this man,” he said, nodding at the civilian in the fishing cap. “He’ll show you how things work here.” “Paul Brezinski,” the civilian said, standing up and holding out his hand. “They call me Buzzard.” “Brezinski is a member of the Evacuee Oversight Committee,” Horne explained. “He’s been here to make sure you weren’t unduly mistreated. Mr. Brezinski, was our friend here beaten or abused in any way in your presence?” “No,” Buzzard said, shaking his head. “Does he appear to have been harmed or given rough treatment before you arrived?” Buzzard said no again. He had the same tone Tim had used when he’d been asked at the airport if he’d packed his own bags. This was just a formality, Tim realized. “Please take him to Camp Romeo, then, and see to it he receives an allotment of clothing. Get him a place to stay and a hot meal.” Tim stared at the Colonel, saying nothing. “I admire your tenacity, Mr. Kempfer,” Horne said, finally, sounding bored. “I admire how you’ve stayed alive so far. Now let me take things from here.” Tim felt spit building up in his mouth. He swallowed it carefully. “Am I dismissed, then?” Horne smiled. “Civilians are not dismissed, Mr. Kempfer. They are free to come and go as they please. Ah, well, within certain parameters. There’s one last thing I require and then we’re finished.” He nodded to one of the soldiers, who came forward holding a plastic case in his hand. The soldier had a caduceus on his collar—he had to be a doctor of some kind. He opened the case and took out a syringe with a wide-bore needle. The barrel of the syringe was full of clear liquid with something shiny like a flake of metal floating inside. He took Tim’s arm gently and looked him in the eye.

“Please don’t flinch or pull away,” the doctor said. Then he jabbed the needle in Tim’s forearm and pushed down on the plunger. It hurt—a lot—but Tim just gritted his teeth. As the doctor swabbed down his arm with alcohol and put a bandage over the puncture wound Tim expected someone to give him an explanation, but they didn’t. That was alright. He could pretty much guess what they’d done. “That was an RFID chip, wasn’t it?” Tim asked, looking at Horne. “Inserted subcutaneously. So you can track my movements. Now that is what I call medical fascism.” “I call it keeping order. Goodbye, Mr. Kempfer. If you wish to talk to me about anything, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to come to my office.” Horne nodded sharply and then walked out of the room, his soldiers and the uniformed boy following without a word. “Come on,” Buzzard said. “I can imagine all the things going on in your head right now. But they can wait until we find you some pants, right?”

13. It was raining when they let him go outside, just a fine warm drizzle that actually felt good on his face. A jeep waited for them outside the building Horne used as his headquarters—a courthouse, Tim noted, now that he got a chance to really see it. The driver was old enough to shave but not to drink. He didn’t say a word as they climbed into the back seat. Maybe people dressed in nothing but blankets weren’t uncommon in Olympia. He expressed this idea to Buzzard, who laughed. “Even before the Flu, maybe,” he said. He held on to the back of the driver’s seat as they rumbled through the deserted downtown streets. “This was Freak Central, you know that? Evergreen College was just over there.” He pointed west. “That place—man, there were no grades. The teachers just told you how you were doing in a non-confrontational way. More hippies per square mile than they got anywhere in California, more Greens than Vermont. You know what their motto was? Omnia extrares. You translate that from the Latin and it means—” “Let it all hang out,” Tim said. “I lived here, remember? Or close enough, anyway. My wife graduated from Evergreen. You’re no local, though.” Buzzard had an accent that made Tim think of the east coast. Maybe even New York.” “Jersey. Carteret, to be exact, though I made my fortune in Hoboken. I’m a reporter by trade.” His smile was very wide and so unlike Horne’s cold grimace it was infectious. “Is that why they call you Buzzard?” Tim asked.

“Sorta. Also because I came here right when things were going bad, just came out here like you except this was back when you could still rent a car and drive up like a human being. People were all headed the other way and they said I was crazy. When I said I wanted to stick around a while, even when Horne took over and gave everybody a chance to leave in style, free ride in a helicopter, well, the locals could only look at me askance. They figured I had a kink for grim stuff, and maybe they weren’t wrong. I got this friend who said I was like a vulture, circling Seattle waiting for something to die so I could write about. She wasn’t wrong. I came out here to get a front row seat for the apocalypse.” Tim scowled but he admired the man’s honesty. “So somebody else said, no, don’t call him a vulture. Call him a buzzard. Cause of my name, right? Brezinski the Buzzard. At your service. I’m going to write the official book about what happened here, when this is over.” “You think there’ll be anybody to read it?” Buzzard’s face went slack for a second as if he’d never considered the possibility. “Yeah, there’ll be somebody. This thing ain’t gonna kill all of us. Nah.” The jeep took a left turn and then followed the looping shore of an inlet. They passed through a residential zone similar to the one Tim had broken into the night before, and he saw that some of the houses had they lights on even in the daytime. “Abandoned?” he asked. Buzzard looked where he pointed. “Yeah. They keep the lights on so they can see better at night. And so it doesn’t look so fucking eerie all the time. You ever hear about Chernobyl, about what it was like? Worse than this, I guess. There was no birds or dogs or anything. No people anywhere, just houses, street after street of little cozy houses with broken windows and overgrown lawns. The Russians strung up loudspeakers all over town and played music, nice Classical all day long, so people who went there—cleanup crews, journos like me, whatever—didn’t get too freaked out.” “Where does the power come from?” Tim asked. He’d seen the Portland PZ—from a distance—at nighttime, and had been bothered by its utter darkness. The buildings of the city had looked like austere rock formations, the roads like dry riverbeds. “There can’t be anybody to run the power plants anymore.” Buzzard nodded. “Horne brought in these things, they’re called, um,” the reporter looked up as if consulting notes written on the tops of his eye sockets, “radiothermic generators. They used to use them on satellites and space stations, he said—totally automatic. No muss, no fuss, though when they get used up you gotta bury them a hundred miles down cause they’re hot forever. He hooked them up to the city grid and now we got all the light and heat we want for free.”

“Is the power on in Seattle, too?” Tim asked. Buzzard’s eyebrows drew together in the middle. “Brother, I’m the wrong guy to ask. You still think you’re going there, some day?” “Yes,” Tim said. He stared at the back of the driver’s head but the soldier didn’t glance back or even shift in his seat. “To kill one drooler. Man, there’s just a couple hundred thousand of ‘em. You’re gonna go in there, wade your way through all those bitey teeth, find your one guy and plug him. Even though you know he isn’t responsible for his actions. That he’s just sick.” “Yes,” Tim said again. He was getting sick of having to explain himself. “You have any kids, Buzzard? A wife?” “Hell, no. I never met shall we say the right woman. At least not a woman who was right for more than a couple of weeks at a time.” “You wouldn’t understand, then. You don’t understand what a man’s responsibility to his family means.” Buzzard laughed, long and hard. By the time he’d stopped the jeep had reached its destination.

14. Camp Romeo turned out to be the civilian sector of Olympia. The only place in town where soldiers weren’t in the majority. The jeep rumbled to a stop on a road lined with quaint little houses, their lawns perfectly maintained and slickly green with the light rain. There were no lights on in those houses, but there was no need for them, since there were people everywhere. Normal looking people going about their business, looking unafraid. It was like Tim had fallen backwards in time, to before everything went to shit. There was a coffee shop where people were sitting eating soup. There was a bookstore full of people looking for something to read. There were people talking on cell phones and others driving cars and even a couple holding hands. Suddenly it was not okay to be wearing nothing but a damp blanket. People stared at Tim and whispered amongst themselves, some turned away with red cheeks. “I need to get some dry clothes. Horne could have given me a set of fatigues to wear,” Tim said. Buzzard nodded amiably. “Yeah, he could have. But you gotta understand. That’s a man who likes to leave a firm impression on you. He wanted you ashamed and feeling vulnerable, huh?”

Tim looked at the older man. “You sound like you’re not a fan.” Buzzard spat in the street. “Hate the guy. We all do, and that’s just how he wants it. If we hate him he knows he can’t trust us. If we pretended to like him he’d never know if it was real or not. Now I’m not saying I’m not grateful. He keeps us alive, right? And clean. He could be less of a dick about it, though.” Tim said nothing. He imagined that everything Horne had done to him—giving him an overly-vigorous health inspection, burning his clothes, injecting him with the RFID chip —had come straight out of some FEMA or US Army manual on how to deal with survivors in the aftermath of a lethal viral outbreak. Horne had a tough job, to keep all these civilians alive in a place trapped between multiple PZs, and Tim could find some respect inside him for anyone who had the willpower to make that happen. Yet already he was starting to think of the Colonel as his enemy. Did Buzzard, and maybe the other civilians in Camp Romeo, hate Horne enough to be allies? He had no idea who he could trust. Buzzard took him to a shop that sold sportswear. Tim picked out a black windbreaker, some t-shirts and a couple pair of jeans, socks, underwear. A pair of Timberland hiking boots. He reached into his pack to get money to pay for everything but the store clerk shook his head. “Dude, it’s on the Colonel. He called over like ten minutes ago and said you’d be coming in” Tim thanked the sales clerk and went to the dressing room to, well, dress. He left his lessthan-fresh blanket on a hook. Feeling about ninety per cent more human, he let Buzzard lead him across the street to a boarding house where he could get a room. “You’ll love Helena. She used to be a professor at the college. Lead the students when they said they wouldn’t be evacuated. General Forbes had her kids taken away by force, but she was chained to a lamp post so they just left her. Not,” Buzzard said, leaning in close, “a huge fan of the military.” They walked up a short flight of steps onto a tidy porch lined with rocking chairs. At the side door an enormous woman met them. She had silver hair falling in ringlets down to her waist, which was wrapped with a bright purple skirt. Its fringe draped across the floorboards. She smiled so broadly and warmly that he was stopped dead in his tracks. He hadn’t imagined anyone would ever look at him like that again. “You must be Tim,” she said. “Um, yes,” Tim admitted. “Hello, Tim. And welcome. Will you come in and have some lunch with us?” He nodded agreeably. He was starving.

“Are you a vegetarian, Tim? Or a vegan? We can accommodate that if you are. Do you keep kosher or halal?” She lead him through a front room and into a broad dining area where a dozen or so people were seated around a massive oak table. They were sharing loaves of bread and some kind of stew. “I suppose the only real problem would be if you ate gluten-free. You don’t have celiac disease, do you, Tim? Because if you do we’ll find a way. There must be some spelt still in one of the specialty grocery stores, if someone just bothers to go look for it. Are you sensitive to gluten?” “No, no, I’m not. You were a professor, Helena?” he asked. “In a past life,” she said, and flashed him the big smile again. “Ethology. Doesn’t mean what you think it does, by the sound of it. Please, now, both of you, sit. Eat! It’s good food, I made half of it myself. I’ll see about sorting out a room for you, Tim, while you meet everyone, that’s Carl, and Bobby, and Franke. Don’t be shy, introduce yourself. That’s grapefruit juice in that pitcher. I’ll be right back.” She swept out of the room with a twirl of a pashmina and left the two of them to find their own seats. Tim shook some hands, introduced himself around. He sat down at an empty place and helped himself to a corn muffin. The main course was a clam stew, the white meat flaky and delicate, not very chewy at all. “Geoducks,” one of the diners told him, when he remarked on it. “You don’t want to know what they look like before they go in the pot, but they taste fine cooked.” Tim smiled and started piling food onto a plate. Yellow sunlight leaked in through the broad windows at the back of the room and lit up the bowls and trays full of good, healthy food. The people around the table laughed and gossiped amongst themselves. Warmth, food, companionship. It had been a long time. Tim’s body sagged into his chair, a wound-up tension inside him coming loose. “Almost makes you forget there’s half a million droolers just up the road, huh?” Buzzard asked, crumbs of cornbread stuck in his beard. 15. It wasn’t a bad life, really. In the morning the entire community came together, rain or shine, the men carrying steaming cups of coffee, the few children rubbing at their eyes. They went down to the shore together, their bare feet clotting over instantly with wet sand, and dug for geoducks. The big clams were repulsive to look at, white slimy flesh oozing out of sharp shells, topped by a siphon that looked exactly—exactly—like a flaccid penis. They made great eating, though, and they kept the small community of Camp Romeo alive.

They numbered less than five hundred. Most of Olympia’s residents had been evacuated in the first insane days after Seattle became infected. Whole extended families had been carried off, whole segments of the town. Those who stayed behind had their reasons. There were two cops who had stayed behind to direct traffic for the last of the convoys. Tim was introduced to a whole team of museum curators and librarians who had stayed behind to protect the town’s treasures—they invited him to join their poker night. There were professors from the college who had stood together in their refusal to leave, and Tim got the sense they half-believed the military had created the Flu just to evict them from their hallowed halls of academe. They talked openly and often of how Horne had just wanted to break up the Marxist Student Collective and force them into a state of late capitalism. The joke was on Horne, if that was the case. If anything Camp Romeo had evolved into a commune. Everybody worked, and money was only used for luxury goods. Food, shelter and clothing were distributed evenly and without charge. Most of the citizens of the camp seemed genuinely happy. If anything, the Flu had improved their lives. If it weren’t for the weekly virus screenings the civilian survivors could have fooled themselves into thinking they were free and in control of their own destinies. Even those screenings weren’t so bad—not nearly as intrusive as the checkup they’d given Tim on his arrival. Typically an Army doctor just scraped the inside of one’s cheek with a swab. It was more degrading than painful. The swabs were tested then and there, dipped in a solution that reacted quickly with substances found in the eponymous drool of the infected. If the solution stayed clear, one was allowed to go about his business. Tim reached down and tried to grab the siphon of a geoduck. His back ached from bending over but he didn’t want to complain. The siphon pulsed in his hand and a thin stream of briny water spouted up, nearly hitting him in the eye. “What happens if the solution changes color?” he asked. Scott stood up and looked out to sea. Scott was a former chiropractor from Everett. He’d stuck around because he wanted to help the infected—only to discover that the Army wasn’t looking for volunteers. Now he pulled clams like everyone else. “That hasn’t happened in a while. The first couple weeks, sure, people got outed. They put them in the back of a truck and took them away, to get the help they needed.” “They ever come back?” Tim asked, dropping to his knees. “No,” Scott said, less of an admission than a door closing on the conversation. He walked off, his feet leaving deep shadowed prints in the sand. Tim dug with his hands and scooped the clam up, dropped it in the bucket.

The afternoon was devoted to maintenance on the houses and yards of Camp Romeo, or to working in the shops and small manufactories off the main street. Clothes always needed to be mended, machines—some of them irreplaceable, like the camp’s portable water desalinization plant—had to be tended and cleaned. A surprising number of people worked in the local coffee shops, servicing the great caffeinated ritual of the Pacific Northwest. Espresso beans and flavored syrups and especially biscotti were among the chief luxuries that had to be paid for with real money. The baristas in the shop were mostly middle-aged former executives, businessmen and women who liked to play at keeping an economy going. It was all done with a great deal of humor and fun, though competition between the shops was intense. Everyone came together for a shared meal in the evening. Linguine with clam sauce was a staple. So was clams casino. There were plenty of reconstituted vegetables (dropped off in big crates by the soldiers) and an entire city’s worth of beer and wine to go around. Conversation tended to be light, most of it about how great the internet had been, or who had traveled the most, back when there were airplanes. Tim told his story of walking from San Francisco several times to different groups of diners. He took out the part about shooting the drooler on the bus and focused on how the night sky had appeared on nights of preternatural clarity, or what a sense of peace he’d felt in the great forests of Oregon now the loggers were gone. Almost everyone was in bed by nine or ten. A few—usually Buzzard among them— stayed up as last as midnight talking and passing around a bottle but Tim rarely joined them. He would go up to the clean, simply appointed room in Helena’s boarding house and lie on the bed and try to sleep, or at least try to think pleasant thoughts. It never quite took. Alone, for the first time all day, in silence, he always ended up thinking about Augusta, his cousin’s roommate in San Francisco. He would think about her lying curled on her bed, her face to the wall. He would think about how easy and comfortable it would be to just curl up in Olympia, to lose himself in the group, and forget about revenge. It would be too easy, he told himself. He owed his wife and child more than that. 16. A sprawling lawn in front of one of the main houses had been dug up and the soil hoed into long dark furrows. Seeds had been found in a hardware store, corn, tomatoes, even asparagus—in time there would be fresh vegetables to round out the mollusk-heavy diet of Camp Romeo. The sun was actually out for once so Tim was put to work planting, poking a hole in the moist earth with his finger and then dropping in the tiny white seeds along with a scrap of foul-smelling clam refuse. “Just like the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, right?” Buzzard said, supervising the operation while he puffed on a foul-smelling cigar. Tim’s back ached. He straightened up and stared at the older man.

“The Indians taught ‘em this. The ground wasn’t so hot there so they would fertilize by burying fish with the corn they planted. The fish rots away down there and feeds the plant. There’s high-grade stuff you can use nowadays, chemicals that work a lot better, but this is what you call organic.” Tim nodded. He’d understood what he was doing. There was something that bothered him, though. “Did they find any tobacco seeds?” he asked. Buzzard squinted at him. “What’s that?” Tim nodded at the cigar Buzzard held. “Did they find those in an abandoned store around here? How many of those do you smoke a day?” “A couple.” Buzzard shrugged. “What’s it to you, you allergic?” Tim shook his head. “Eventually you’ll run out.” Buzzard scowled at the lit end. “Suppose so.” “You’re going to be very unhappy when that happens. Withdrawal’s pretty tough. Karen —my wife—smoked for a long time. When she quit we nearly got divorced. She was so irritable and nasty all the time. She couldn’t think about anything else.” “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” Buzzard ground out the cigar on the heel of his shoe and put the unburnt portion in his shirt pocket. After dinner that evening Tim was invited up to Helena’s room for the first time. He knew that she held court up there some nights, a semi-regular bull session where the evacuees of Camp Romeo came to discuss recent events and make plans for the future. It was the closest thing the Camp had to a town council, and being invited meant that Tim was officially accepted by the group, that he was a trusted member of the community. Buzzard was there already, sitting in an enormous papasan chair reading an old issue of Newsweek. A couple other people were lounging on a couch and passing a joint back and forth. When Helena ushered him in she took a drag and held it for a while before coughing the pungent smoke back out. Tim said nothing at first, just looked around the room. It was small but cluttered with old magazines and piles of books, huge columns of them that looked ready to fall over at any moment. The walls were decorated with posters for protest marches and demonstrations —FIGHT THE IMF, END RACISM IN OUR TIME, SAVE THE WHALES. Some of them were yellow with age and advertised events twenty or even thirty years past. The furniture in the room was all low and overstuffed and there were no electronics to be seen except an antique-looking record player and a stereo receiver that glowed the same cheery orange color as the end of the spliff.

“Nice place,” Tim said. “It’s home.” Helena sat down in lotus position on the floor and grabbed a cat out from behind a coffee table. She stroked it in silence, smiling at him as if she were waiting for him to ask a question. He wondered if there was some kind of hazing ritual he’d have to go through or if they just wanted him to thank them for including him. Instead he picked up a book from one of the piles near him. It was a monograph on courtship rituals in the Humboldt Squid. “You said you were an ethologist,” he said, suddenly thinking of something. “In a previous life,” she smiled. He bit his lip. “That’s the study of animal behavior. I’ve read a little about that—it’s fascinating stuff. I wanted to ask you about something.” “Animals?” “Sort of. The droolers, actually.” He saw her shift on the floor as if she were uncomfortable discussing the infected but he pressed on. There were things he needed to know. “I’ve seen them. I’ve even defended myself against them. I know they don’t think like human beings…” he let his thought trail off. If he was going to Seattle he wanted to know as much as he could before he arrived, though. As a librarian he’d always believed that forewarned was forearmed. “You must have observed them, too.” She nodded and played with the cat’s ears. “One of the reasons I stayed here is because I thought I could get a nice paper out of them. Then things got—well, bad. After that I thought it would just be too depressing.” He nodded in understanding but pressed on. “You made some notes, though?” She sighed and looked right at him. “Their decision trees are not very complex. They’re opportunistic, much like the virus inside them. If they see a human being they make a quick assessment. If it smells like the other is infected, they ignore it. If it’s clean, they attack.” “What about hunting behavior? Do they actively look for prey?” She shook her head. “No. They stay in one spot unless they receive a stimulus. It’s what we call stereotyped behavior—they react the same way every time to the same set of conditions.” That was good, Tim decided. That was very good. It meant that when he went to find Nero he wouldn’t have to track him very far. “What about—“ he began, but Helena interrupted him.

“It’s not their behavior that interests me right now,” she said. “It’s yours.” Tim sat up in his chair when he realized every eye in the room was focused directly on him. 17. “By all accounts you’re fitting in nicely,” Helena said. She made it sound like she hadn’t expected that to be the case. “Buzzard tells me you’re a hard worker, and we can certainly use all of those we can scratch up.” “It’s either work or starve, right?” he asked. She shrugged. “Some people have a hard time adjusting. Some of them function just fine but you can see a blankness in their eyes—they’ll never stop seeing the horrors. Other people just curl up in bed and can’t seem to get up again.” Tim thought of Augusta, his cousin’s roommate. She’d been like that. He hadn’t known there were people like that in Camp Romeo but he supposed it made sense. These people had been right at ground zero in the first American Plague Zone. They acted happy and well-adjusted but they must all have been exposed to things no human being should ever have to see. Many of them, he knew, had lost family members, just like himself. Others had seen their sons taken away to become soldiers. There was probably a lot of posttraumatic stress disorder going around. Either he’d been blind to it or they’d hidden it from him, put on a brave face to make him think the Camp was a kind of demi-paradise. “It’s a bad time for all of us,” he said, which sounded like it fell ludicrously short of the point. It was all he had, though. Ever since he’d watched Karen die he’d had trouble summoning much sympathy for anyone else. “Then there are the guys who think they’re more badass than the apocalypse,” Buzzard said. “The ones who want to go over to Horne’s office and knock that chip off his shoulder. They’re the ones we watch out for.” It took Tim a second for him to realize they included him in that category. He felt his throat grow thick and he said nothing. “As far as you’re concerned,” Helena said, “we all know you didn’t see yourself ending up here. I’m of the mind that you can settle down, if we show you how good a life we’ve made here. Buzzard has a different opinion.” “Oh?” Tim asked, swallowing hard. The reporter leaned forward in his chair, struggling against the giant cushion. “I think you’re just biding your time. That you’re going to pull a runner the first chance you get.”

Tim could feel his cheeks flushing. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions,” Buzzard said. “About stuff that maybe you should just forget about. You know, if you want to be one of us.” He hadn’t thought he’d been so obvious. “You lost a great deal,” Helena said, looking sympathetic. “Now you want revenge. It’s only natural to want to punish the one who took it from you. That’s understandable. Being a student of animal behavior has taught me a few things about what makes people tick. I know you’re being pulled in a very dark direction right now. But you have a choice. You can turn away from that reckless path. You can make your peace with things.” “Or you can pull some bonehead play and get us all in hot water,” Buzzard countered. “If you try to escape, that chip in your arm will send an alarm to Horne’s HQ. He’ll be on you like a rat on somebody’s thrown-away bagel. His boys’ll drag you back here and they’ll punish us all. Not that he’d beat us up or cut our food supply or anything, he’s not evil. But he’ll double the virus checks, maybe. Or they’ll post soldiers on the street down there to watch us night and day. So nobody else gets any ideas.” “So that’s what I’m here for, tonight? For you to try to stop me?” Helena and Buzzard shared a long look. When it was done she looked deeply into his eyes. “Let’s say we’re trying to show you that you have options.” “Like, you can get along, or you can be moved along,” Buzzard told him. “You can convince us you’re with the program, or we can take action.” “Like what?” Tim asked, anger welling inside him. “Like we call Horne and tell him you’re not breakable. That you’re never going to give up. It’s happened before. We had one guy here who wanted to leave, about three weeks ago. He wouldn’t shut up about it, kept saying he had a right to go where he wanted. We tried to work with him but he thought we were just wimps.” Buzzard licked his lips. “He’s over in Horne’s stockade, now. They gave him a nice little room, right between two holding cells for droolers. We haven’t heard from him since. You getting me, son? You understanding this?” Tim nodded and grabbed his knees with tight fingers. He stared down at the shag carpet and tried to think. He thought about the posters on Helena’s walls. She had refused to leave Olympia—she had chained herself to a tree, he’d heard. How could someone so committed to civil liberties turn around so fast? But he knew exactly what had changed her. He had seen it on the road between San Francisco and Olympia. It was one thing to fight and protest and demonstrate when there

was a free world out there, when you had options. When all that went away, when all the rules changed, you had to change your strategies as well. Something similar had happened to him, too. All the things he’d once thought were important—his mortgage, saving up to buy a new car, getting promoted to a Directorial position at the library—all of that had just evaporated like dew in the morning. All that remained was his duty to Karen and Jake. They wanted to know if he could fit in to their fragile little bubble of a community. To make the same leap of logic and conscience they had. He didn’t have to think long to find his own answer. “You have questions,” Helena said. “Ask them, please.” “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I guess I want to know—where do you get your pot?” 18. Helena and Buzzard shared a glance, then the two of them got to their feet. The other evacuees, the ones on the couch, must have understood what was happening. They filed out quickly and discretely. Tim didn’t move from where he sat. When the others were gone he explained himself. “Everything you have here came from one of two places. Either the military gave it to you or you found it somewhere inside the boundaries of Camp Romeo.” He had seen the fence the soldiers had strung around the outside of the camp. It was supposed to keep the droolers out, and to that end it was ten feet high, just like the fence that ringed all of Olympia. This inner fence, however, was topped with barbed wire, which could only mean one thing. It was also meant to keep the evacuees in. “I’m willing to buy that you found a smoke shop here, and that’s where your cigars came from,” he told Buzzard. “But then there’s the coffee. People here drink what, two or three cups a day on average? That’s a lot of beans. Over a month’s time, that’s what?” he did a quick calculation in his head. “Five hundred people drinking two cups a day for a month is thirty thousand cups of coffee. A hell of a lot of beans, and nobody seems to worry about what happens when the supply runs out.” “There are plenty of coffee shops and Starbuck’s stores inside the Camp,” Helena suggested, though he could see from her face she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Tim shook his head. “Maybe the soldiers go out into the abandoned parts of the town and bring back coffee for you, I don’t know. But I do know the Army has a zero tolerance policy on marijuana.” He pointed at the joint in Helena’s hand. She stubbed it out hurriedly in a beanbag ashtray. “You can feed yourselves pretty well, on clams and old canned food. But the luxury items give you away. I played cards with Scott the chiropractor the other night and we drank single malt scotch. He had a whole cabinet full of the stuff. By all rights you guys should be barely making it. Instead you’re living the

high life. There’s got to be some kind of channel of goods coming in from outside, which means you’re in contact with somebody other than Horne. So who’s supplying you?” “It ain’t like that,” Buzzard spat, but Helena shook her head to stop him. “Alright, you’ve caught us,” she said. “We know some people. Some kids who weren’t rounded up during the evacuation. They’re still living up north with nobody watching them. They find the things we want, and we trade for them.” “Looters, you mean,” Tim said. “Looters, scavengers, black marketers, whatever,” Buzzard agreed. “They ransack Seattle one house at a time, always staying clear of the droolers. You want to talk about bare survival, oh, man. That’s where they are. They’re a pretty sketchy bunch and they can’t help you, whatever you think. They wouldn’t, not without a damned good reason.” “The trade has to go both ways,” Tim announced. “You must provide them something in exchange for the liquor and cigars.” “Food that doesn’t come from a can,” Helena admitted. “Medical supplies, whatever the Army gives us that we don’t need. And advice. They’re just kids, like I said. They knew nothing about staying alive. They contacted us originally because they knew a lot of us were professors from the college and they needed information desperately. Information on how to avoid the infected, how to get clean drinking water. One of them broke a leg once and came here in the middle of the night so Scott could splint it. That was one scary night—we were all convinced Horne would know something was up and send soldiers to investigate.” “He didn’t?” Tim asked. Helena shook her head. “So there’s a way for them to come here unnoticed and then get away again. That means I could go the same thing, follow that channel back to where they come from. I’m not saying they would do it out of the goodness of their hearts. I’m not that naïve. But they could get me into Seattle, if I could afford to pay them.” Buzzard and Helena both just stared at him. “You don’t want me to try, I know. You don’t want to get in trouble. You don’t want to ruin a good thing, I understand that,” Tim said. “But I can’t just stay here and wait to die. I can’t let my family go, not that easily.” “If you know what’s good for you,” Buzzard said, “you will.”

Helena reached over and grabbed the reporter’s arm. “Please,” she said. “There’s no need for threats. Tim, even if we wanted to help you, we couldn’t. You’re forgetting something.” She squeezed Buzzard’s arm again and then grasped her own. “You’re forgetting we’re chipped.” Tim frowned in incomprehension for a moment, then looked down at his own arm. There remained a red dot where Horne had him implanted with his RFID tag. He smiled then, broadly enough to make the evacuees lean back in their seats. “You mean this?” he said, brandishing his arm. “This thing? That’s not a problem.” 19. Helena sighed and dropped her head. “I was afraid of this. Look, Tim. We’re a community here. That means we have to make some hard choices, some times. I’ll give you three days to change your mind. That’s when Horne’s men come for the next medical sweep. If you can’t get along by then we’ll turn you over to them.” She made a point then of looking him right in the eyes. He said nothing in return. The three of them went their separate ways then, Tim headed back to his room. It was a simply-appointed space with a bed and a chair and a window that looked out on a swaying willow tree. He hadn’t bothered to decorate it, thinking he wasn’t going to stay long. He still didn’t, though he wasn’t sure what his next move might be. When Buzzard knocked on his door at eleven thirty, he figured the reporter was just checking up on him. Making sure he hadn’t tried to run away under cover of the darkness. Instead Buzzard held one finger to his lips and then squeezed in through Tim’s half-open door. “Some of us think Horne can hear us through these things,” the reporter said. He indicated his left forearm. “Definitely not,” Tim answered. “What’s your plan? Are you going to dig it out with a knife?” Tim had considered that but he knew it wasn’t necessary. “Nothing so drastic. All it takes to beat this system is a little tin foil. You wrap it around your arm a couple of times and the tag is useless.” Buzzard frowned. “That’s not going to work. Even if it did block the signal, Horne would know right away because you would blink out on his radar. Or something.”

Tim shook his head. He sat down on the side of his bed and spoke quietly. “This isn’t a microchip, and it’s not a radio either. It’s an RFID tag, a little scrap of magnetic tape. It’s like the strip on the back of a credit card. It doesn’t do a thing—it’s completely passive. It’s just encoded with a number that a scanner can read. The high-tech part is the scanner, which can read the tag from a distance—and even then it only works out to about fifty feet away. If the tag is hidden from the scanner you might as well be invisible.” Buzzard bit his lip. “That’s not what they told us.” “They were lying. Or maybe they just overestimated the system.” Tim shrugged. “I used to work in a library where every book had one of these tags. We could tell when a book walked out the door, and we could compare it with our computerized records so we knew if it was properly checked out or if somebody was stealing it. They used to use them on dogs and cats, too, so if they ran away a pound could scan them and figure out who their owners were.” “What if this is something more advanced that only the military’s got?” Tim lifted his hands in resignation. “I followed the technology pretty closely. I suppose there’s always that chance. I think it’s a lot more likely Horne just kept you all in the dark intentionally.” “You honestly think you can sneak past their sensors? That you can get out of here without setting off an alarm?” “Yes,” Tim said. “With a little assistance.” Buzzard sat down in Tim’s chair and stared at the floor for a while. “I know I put up a pretty rough game back there. With the threats and all. But I do feel for you, kid. I’d like to help you if I can.” Tim blinked rapidly. “Really? That’s—that’s very nice of you.” “Yeah, whatever. We’ll need to be careful, though. Helena’s a sweetheart but she’s got fangs enough when she needs them. She’ll send somebody to do a bed check any minute now. I think I might be able to help you there. Stay here and wait for me, okay?” Buzzard left and Tim remained sitting on the bed. Was it a trap? He supposed it was possible. He had no real reason to think that the reporter was as good as his word. Still— if they expected him to incriminate himself, to give them good reason to turn him over to Horne, it was a pretty strange set-up. It took ten minutes for Buzzard to return, long minutes when Tim could only wonder what was going to happen. When he did come back the reporter didn’t knock, just slid open the door and lead in a young man a little shorter than Tim, though his hair was the same color. Tim hadn’t seen him before.

“This is Duncan,” Buzzard said. “Pleased to meet you,” Tim said, rising automatically. Duncan didn’t reply. He was well-groomed and though he was a little skinny he looked healthy enough. His eyes showed a different picture, though. They were blank and they didn’t track. Tim resisted the urge to pass a hand in front of Duncan’s face. “Dunk, you’re going to sleep here tonight,” Buzzard said. Duncan nodded and climbed into Tim’s bed, pulling the sheets over himself with a practiced motion. He turned his face to the wall and then he lay there motionless. Tim had a feeling he wouldn’t get out of the bed until someone came to fetch him. “He’s a real basket case, but he’s a good kid,” Buzzard said. Tim understood immediately. When Helena came to check she would find someone sleeping peacefully in Tim’s bed. She wasn’t the type who would turn on the lights and check to make sure it was really him. With his face turned away from the door Duncan was almost a perfect simulacrum for Tim. Tim slid on the straps of his pack—which held everything he owned. He wasn’t sure if he was coming back, though he didn’t say as much. Buzzard lead him out into the hallway. The house was sleeping and they didn’t meet anyone on their way down to the kitchen. Moving as quietly as they could they stole a box of aluminum foil from a drawer and then headed out into the insect-noisy alley on the side of the house. When they were far enough away from the house Buzzard whispered, “Okay. That was the easy part. You’d better be right about these tags.” Tim nodded. Then he grabbed the other man’s shoulder. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Really? Don’t tell me it’s out of the goodness of your heart.” Buzzard grinned widely, his teeth pale in the shadows. “Fuck no. I just want exclusive rights to your story. The greatest revenge caper of all time, or the idiot who jumped into hell and got hisself killed. Either way, it’ll make great copy.” 20. The waterfront of Olympia wasn’t just deserted. It was dark, too, with signs posted up all around warning that it was a monitored area and that non-military personnel should keep out. No fence blocked it off, however, and no guards patrolled the area. Tim saw why almost at once. There were no boats. Waves slapped endlessly, noisily at the empty slips, chewed at by a light rain. Once this had been a busy little marina where

pleasure boats and water taxis came in and out all day. Now it was just the place where the land ended and the dark water began. “Did Horne remove all the boats?” Tim asked. “So nobody could try to get away?” Buzzard grunted a negative. “He didn’t need to. The boats all left during the evacuation. Loaded ‘em up with people until they were sagging down in the water and steamed out north toward the ocean. I don’t know where they all headed but they didn’t come back.” He tapped Tim on the shoulder and pointed at a radar mast that loomed over the deserted docks, half obscured by the rain. “That looks new.” Tim trained his binoculars on the mast and said, “Yeah. That’s got to be the scanner.” The mast was corroded with rust and flaking paint, but a square housing had been mounted near its top quite recently. A power cable wrapped around the mast and lead through a broken window into the abandoned harbormaster’s office. There were no blinking lights or auto-focusing camera lenses to give it away but the freshness of its paint was damning enough. “I’d say that’s about a hundred feet from us right now. It won’t detect us until we halve that distance.” “And what if your genius idea doesn’t work? What if it does see us?” “Only one way to find out.” Tim put his binoculars away and started walking directly toward the mast. His forearm was wrapped in several thicknesses of tin foil, secured with masking tape. He was certain he was right and that he would be invisible to the scanner. He had been the one who installed the RFID systems at the library. Many of his coworkers had fought the new technology, thinking that it invaded the privacy of their patrons. He’d had to educate himself about the abilities and shortcomings of RFID so he could counter their arguments. Seventy-five feet away. Knowing the specifications of a technology was one thing, he decided. Actually testing it with his own personal safety was another. He admitted to himself that he was a little scared. “Doing great there, champ,” Buzzard called from behind him. The reporter had tin foil around his own arm but clearly wanted Tim to go first and be the guinea pig. Fifty feet away. The rain leaked down Tim’s forehead and got in his eyes. Thirty. Finally he walked up to the radar mast and touched it, like touching base in a game of tag. For all he knew alarms were ringing all over Fort Lewis. For all he knew a helicopter was being scrambled to come intercept him. What would Horne do if he was caught at the waterfront? If he was taken to the stockade, locked up with the droolers, he would never get a chance at Phil Nero. He would never be able to avenge his family. It was a risk he had to take. He stood there trying not to breathe too heavily. When ten minutes had passed he waved at Buzzard and the reporter came jogging over to join him. “It’s got to be safe by now,” Tim said. “We would have seen something, some response.”

“Either that or they’re lying in wait, watching us to see what we’ll do next,” Buzzard suggested, but he had committed himself by coming so close to the detector. “I guess I’m screwed if that’s the case. So now we get to wait for a while. I put in a call to my friends and they sounded intrigued. They’re gonna send a boat for us.” Tim hugged himself with his arms. It was a little chilly down by the water and his clothes were soaking through. “Did they say what they wanted in return?” “That’s up to you. I hope you got something good in that bag,” Buzzard said. Tim hoped so too. He had a few ideas on what the looters might want but he had no way of knowing if his offerings would be well received. He stared out at the water of the inlet, glinting in the starlight. “Do you trust them not to just kill us, take what we’ve got, and dump us in the Sound?” he asked. Buzzard snorted. “Buddy, I don’t trust you not to do that.” He looked around himself, then nodded at the deep shadows cast by the harbormaster’s office. “If it’s alright by you I might wait over there.” Tim nodded and the too of them sat down on the rain-slicked wooden dock where not even stray beams of light from Olympia could reach them. Neither of them said much while they waited. Tim could feel Buzzard’s tension in the air and knew it had to match his own. He thought of all the people he was defying just by being there and knew how much more trouble he was going to make for himself if the plan actually worked. It didn’t matter. Karen and Jake mattered. Their memories mattered. 21. Near midnight, just after the rain stopped, Buzzard saw a dark shape moving out on the water and shortly thereafter Tim heard a sound no louder than a mosquito buzzing in the night. The sound cut out almost at once but the shape kept moving toward them, growing steadily larger. It wasn’t until it was almost on top of them that they could make out what it was. Tim had expected a cigarette boat or a fishing trawler with a powerful inboard engine—something flashy. Instead what approached them looked more like a rowboat. It sat low in the water and had a single small outboard at the back. A dark figure in the back of the boat pushed it forward with an oar, apparently unconcerned as the nose swung back and forth. Buzzard turned to face Tim, his eyes invisible in the shadows. “This is just an information-gathering trip, okay? We go out there, we meet some people, you can talk to them all you want. But then we get back in the boat and we’re home before dawn, you follow? Helena will want to wake you up personally tomorrow. If she finds Duncan still in your bed, if the two of us are missing, she’ll raise holy hell.”

“Fine,” Tim said. He didn’t really know what he was going to achieve with the looters but he knew it would take some finesse. Anyone who had remained under Horne’s radar for this long would be naturally paranoid. He had imagined the looters a dozen different ways since he’d heard of their existence. The most realistic picture he’d come up with was a family of survivalists, bearded balding men with big guns and multiple wives. Maybe with a White Power flag hanging on their wall. As he and Buzzard stepped forward into the low light to greet their contact Tim saw he’d been mistaken. The woman rowing the boat toward them was something else entirely. She was black, maybe twenty-five years old, and quite beautiful. She wore a baseball cap low over her eyes and around her neck were three or four strands of pearls. Her body was hidden under an enormous mink coat. “Mother always said there was nothing warmer than fur,” she announced as she tied up at the dock. She must have seen him staring. “Sasha, this is Tim Kempfer, the guy I told you about,” Buzzard said. “Charmed,” she replied. “I appreciate you coming all this way for me,” Tim said. He needed this woman on his side and that meant being as polite as possible. “We’re always looking to expand our customer base. Hop on in, boys,” Sasha said. The boat sagged alarmingly into the water as the two men climbed over its gunwale. Dark water spilled in over the far side and she threw Buzzard a plastic bucket so he could bail. “Sorry about the poor accommodations,” she said to Tim. “The Sound’s a dangerous place these days. All kinds of radars and alarms and shit. But I see you know the rules,” she said, pointing at the aluminum foil wrapped around Tim’s arm. “That’s really all it took?” “Apparently. We haven’t been bothered yet by unwanted company,” he told her. She smiled. “Well, let’s keep it that way. This old tub is almost completely wooden, yeah? Just a few bits of metal hardware. Makes us harder to see. Even if they had somebody watching us with a telescope we probably look like a big log floating on the current. That’s why I cut the motor so far out, too.” She picked up an oar and handed it to Tim. “You look like a fine strong man. You can take a turn now.” Tim nodded and sat down where he could row comfortably. He looked at the three inches of water in the bottom of the boat and observed, “The hem of your coat is getting soaked. I hope it’s not ruined.” She smiled again. “What do I care if it is? I know where to get another one. Now everybody keep real quiet until we’re away from here, alright?”

That was fine with both of the men. Tim put his back into his rowing and soon the Olympia waterfront shrank away from view. The water was silky smooth, barely any chop at all, and he made good headway. The only noise was the occasional bump of the oar on the gunwale and the splashing of Buzzard’s pail as he worked to keep them from sinking. He was surprised, constantly, at how easily he seemed to be escaping from Horne’s domain—surely if the Colonel had them under observation he would have swooped in to snatch them up by that point. Sasha’s coolness surprised him a little, too. From what Buzzard had suggested this was the first time anyone from Camp Romeo had ever been taken to the camp of the looters. Surely she had no reason to trust him. He glanced back over his shoulder now and again to look at her but she was just watching the horizon, trailing her fingers in the water from time to time. He wondered if she was armed. That big coat could hide a lot of firepower, he thought. After about twenty minutes of solid rowing he looked back once again and she nodded at him. He shipped his oar and changed places with her so she could get the motor running. It was abruptly very loud as it snarled to life and he instinctively ducked his head and stared back at the lights of Fort Lewis. There was no sign anyone had heard them, though. The little boat picked up speed instantly and shot over the glassy water, spray jumping up from its bow. Sasha steered them expertly up the Sound, passing on the eastern side of every island they passed and soon they were even with Tacoma, and dead ahead Tim could make out the dark spires of his home town. Seattle—the place he’d come so far just to return to. He wanted to grab the tiller and just steer them right there. He wanted to be done with all this skullduggery and just get to work. He knew, however, that the game he was playing had certain rules that couldn’t be ignored. He couldn’t go to Seattle, not quite yet. Not until he was properly armed.

22. They swung around the tip of Point Defiance, a spur of Tacoma that reached out deep into the water, and then right ahead of them was Vashon Island, a broad mound of trees and expensive houses that stood out in the Sound not a mile from Seattle. No lights burned on the island but Sasha didn’t seem to need any navigational aids. She sped them right up the narrow channel between Vashon and Maury Islands and into a protected harbor there, then cut her engine and drove her tiny craft right up onto a rocky beach on sheer momentum. Pebbles hissed and clattered against the bottom of the hull and then they were stopped, Tim’s nerves still thrumming with the engine’s vibration.

“Both of you, help me with this, cool?” Sasha asked, jumping out onto the shore. She wore spotless Timberland boots and a pair of jeans that looked like they’d been tailored for her long legs. Tim and Buzzard both grabbed onto the boat’s wooden side and strained to pull it farther up out of the water. “That Army dude sends helicopters up here sometimes,” she explained. “We try to be a little discrete.” A pile of green pine branches lay a hundred feet away from where she’d landed and the three of them carried armfuls to cover the boat from prying airborne eyes. The end result of their camouflage looked pretty obvious to Tim but he supposed that from the air it would fool a casual eye. “I guess Horne would take you out pretty quick if he knew you were here,” Tim suggested, trying to find a common enemy with the woman. His suggestion just made her laugh, though. “Yeah, I suppose he might, if he ever dragged his lazy ass up all this way himself.” She shrugged. “Most of his soldiers, though, have got reason to turn a blind eye away, seeing as how they’re our best customers.” Buzzard looked shocked. “You’ve been supplying them, too?” he asked. “Don’t feel so bad, old man.” She grabbed Buzzard’s left bicep and squeezed. “It’s just business, and to be sure, I’d rather trade with you hippies, believe me. Every deal we make with the soldier boys is all cloak and dagger shit, we got to meet with them some place neutral that’s hard to get to, they search us for guns before they even say hello, who needs it. With you guys it’s more chill.” She started up the beach at a brisk pace and the two of them rushed to keep up. “Now enough squawking, alright? Vashon’s pretty well cleared off but I need to pay attention or we could all get eaten before we even get back to the clubhouse.” She drew a revolver from her belt and held it at her side with the barrel pointing at the ground as she walked. “You’re worried about the infected?” Tim asked. “I’m not carrying enough heat for mountain lions,” she told him, with a warm smile. “Now keep it down.” She lead them up the shore a bit, then turned to enter a stand of pine trees that sighed endlessly in a breeze off the water. Between the trees it was almost pitch black but she didn’t slow down, her feet easily finding a track that was invisible to Tim. Clearly she’d been this way before. They crossed the back yard of a timber-framed house with no lights on. Tim got a good look in through one of the windows and saw dust piled on the floor an inch thick. The furniture was shaggy with it. A few dead houseplants stood next to the window. Somehow the emptiness of the room, its complete abandonment, made it creepier than if it had been splashed with blood and entrails.

He felt weird staring in through the window. In the time before the virus he would never have done such a thing—it would have been rude. Yet there was a certain fascination to it as well. He could understand what motivated the looters, he thought. Suddenly he wanted to go into every house on the island and see what secrets it contained. There was no time for that, of course. He wasn’t here to join them. He looked up and saw that Sasha and Buzzard had gotten a fair piece ahead of him— maybe fifty yards. He turned to run and catch up when a hand came down on his shoulder. “Shit,” he screamed, half expecting to whirl around and find one of Sasha’s fellow looters behind him. Knowing he didn’t dare take the chance. He ducked low and kicked out behind him, his foot connecting solidly with a human frame. Not even looking back he ran into the woods, desperate to get away. He tried to look over his shoulder but in the dark he couldn’t see much. There—was that—he thought maybe, behind him there was— The side of Tim’s face collided with a tree trunk, scraping his cheek badly. His skull hit the wood with a noise like a bongo drum being struck and his brain stopped working for a second while stars shot all through his vision. He must have hit a nerve, too, because a jangling electric pain ran all the way down his left arm to his fingertips. Stunned and feeling very stupid, he looked around and found himself sitting on a pile of pine needles, looking up at the branches of a very tall tree. He grabbed the bark and started hauling himself up and then he saw the drooler still coming towards him. It was taking its time, one foot in front of the other. It was naked, a naked woman with no hair and with dark sores all over her skin. Black drool dripped from her breasts and spattered her thighs. Tim wanted to throw up. More than that, he wanted to get away. He eased himself around the tree trunk and tried to look for the best direction to run. He could see a patch of starlight to his left and he dashed that way, hoping he wouldn’t hit another tree or trip over a bush or break his leg by stepping in a hole. He was unarmed—there was nothing he could do but run. Pushing through the trees, his arms up to protect his face from the lower branches, he shouted Sasha’s name, Buzzard’s name. He would have shouted for Horne if he thought the Colonel could hear him. He hit a wet branch that doused him in cold rain water, then broke out into an open patch of ground covered in nothing but overgrown grass. He spun around, knowing that even if he’d outrun the female drooler there might be others nearby.

He was not wrong. Three of them. One came toward him from the right, crawling out of a pile of plastic trash cans. He seemed to have gotten stuck in them somehow. The other two stumbled down from the porch of an Arts and Crafts house straight ahead. “Shit,” he said. His breath was ragged with exertion and his feet hurt from running on broken ground. He was lost in drooler territory. He was still faster than they were but he couldn’t see them all in the dark, whereas they could smell him just fine. He had to think, had to come up with some kind of plan— Then Sasha came running onto the patch of grass, a pistol in her hand. She shot the first drooler, the one in the trash cans, right through the temple, blowing a jet of diseased brain matter right out of his ear. Sliding to a stop on the wet grass she spun around and fired five more shots into the two on the porch even as they came staggering towards Tim. One of them went down with a bullet through his left eye. The other took three rounds in his knees and crashed forward like a tree coming down in the forest. He kept trying to crawl towards Tim, pulling himself along with his hands, so she shot again, blowing out the back of his head. Tim tried to catch his breath. He raised his hands to try to thank her, to tell her he was alright. She tossed something toward him, shouting, “Behind you!” He managed to catch the thing she’d thrown—a pistol, heavy, metallic. He looked down just long enough to see it was a revolver and to cock the hammer. Then he spun around and saw the naked female drooler coming out of the woods behind him. He fired all six rounds in the gun at her, one after the other, not taking a moment to think about what he was doing. Eventually she fell down and stopped moving. Sasha came up behind him. He turned to face her and saw Buzzard crashing through the trash cans on the right. The reporter must have stepped in something nasty—take your pick, Tim thought—because he danced over the last of the cans grunting in disgust. When he’d joined them Sasha looked from one man to the other. “No merit badges for either of you motherfuckers,” she said. “We’re going to move fast now and you better keep up because that’s the last time I’m coming back for you.” She stared down at Tim’s hands. “If you don’t mind?” she asked. He looked down and saw he was still holding the smoking revolver. “Oh, sure,” he said, and gave it back to her. Then she turned and lead them back toward the path.

23. After about two hundred yards the trees thinned out a little, then ended abruptly in a broad clearing where a massive, ancient farmhouse stood in the middle of a lawn gone over to weeds and tall grass. A gravel road circled the house and stood littered with

dozens of cars and light trucks. The house itself was dark, all its windows covered over with sheets of plywood, but Tim could tell it wasn’t deserted. A thin piping sound warbled out through the shutters and a heavier thumping rhythm like a massive heartbeat set the whole place vibrating. Occasionally he could hear a scrap of human voice raised above the beat, though he couldn’t make out any words. His attention was focused more on the house’s sentinels, anyway. Fifty or maybe more human skeletons stood guard in a ring around the building, standing no more than ten feet apart from each other. They were pale and slightly shiny in the starlight, their eye sockets staring outward as if they were searching for oncoming threats. He fought down his fear and noticed they were wired in place or hanging from thin metal stands anchored to the ground. They weren’t undead guardians, just replicas of human anatomy. “Jesus,” Buzzard said. “If those are supposed to scare me off, they’re doing a hell of a job.” Sasha smiled at the two of them, but said nothing. Tim moved closer. He knew where the skeletons had come from, at least. Vashon Island had been the home to the largest manufacturer of anatomical models and prosthetics in the Pacific Northwest, a place locals called the Bone Factory. He doubted the skeletons were made of real bones—most likely they were plastic resin, dyed white or yellow as the customer desired. He moved closer to one and saw that it had been modified from its factory standards. Electrical wires looped around the ribs and the jawbones, and electronic boxes had been mounted inside the rib cages as if someone had tried to turn them into robots. That seemed unlikely. He reached out to touch one but Sasha made a curt noise that warned him off. “You finger that, boy, you’re gonna have about a hundred bullets in you before you let go,” she told him. Tim dropped his hand quickly. “What’s this?” Tim asked, pointing at a circuit board hot-glued to the sternum of one of the skeletons. “Car alarm,” Sasha told him. “Ain’t no shortage of those.” Tim followed the wires down the leg of the skeleton to where they hooked into a dry cell battery. “Very nice. Very smart.” “You care to fill me in?” Buzzard asked. “If a drooler attacks one of these, it’ll set off the car alarm. That gives the people inside plenty of warning they have a threat to take care of.”

“Why would they attack some old bones?” Buzzard asked. “Stereotyped behavior,” Tim said. “Just like Helena told us about. Any drooler coming this way will go for the first humanoid thing it sees that doesn’t smell like it’s infected.” He turned to Sasha. “Skeletons, though? Is that enough to fool one of them?” She shrugged amiably. “We’ve had two alarms go off since we set this up. The droolers go right for ‘em. Saves us having somebody on watch twenty-four seven.” Tim chewed on his lip. Maybe the skeletons looked just human enough. Droolers didn’t have a lot of brainpower to waste on making that kind of distinction. He wondered, though. The Bone Factory turned out much more realistic models of human bodies. The looters must have picked skeletons for a reason. Either the fleshed models were too creepy—or they just thought the skeletons looked cool. “Come on, we’re wasting darkness,” Sasha said, and lead them up onto the house’s porch. She unlocked the front door with a key she kept on a string around her neck. The door opened abruptly, yanked out of her hand, and the barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun rammed out into the night air at the same time the music playing inside flooded over the three of them. “Cut that shit out, Mikey,” Sasha said, and pushed the shotgun barrel out of her face. “You know it’s me, man. You two,” she said, looking at Tim and Buzzard, “this is Mikey. He’s the guy who’s going to shoot you if you try anything funny.” Tim nodded politely at the man behind the door. Mikey was probably six foot five and most of that wide. He looked like a body-builder and he wore a magenta running suit with leather patches and stripes. He had tattoos on his face, cobwebs and guns and knives and naked women that crawled up over his shaved head. "Any trouble?" he asked Sasha. "I heard shots." She nodded. "Nothing I couldn't handle. Now be nice and say hello to our guests." “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “By all means, do come on in.” Tim and Buzzard followed Sasha inside the house, into a wide living room. The music was almost deafening—loud enough to make Tim wonder how they could hear the car alarmed-skeletons outside if they did go off. The room was brilliantly lit, with table and floor lamps supplementing very expensive-looking recessed lighting in the ceiling. It was also full of well-dressed people. On a couch near a sixty-inch plasma television two young men were playing a video game about heavily-armored soldiers shooting pasty-faced aliens. One of them wore a three-piece suit and tie, while the other was dressed in silk pajamas. Across the room a trio of teenagers in polo shirts and designer jeans were playing quarters with a bottle of

Jose Cuervo 1800. Between the three of them they must have worn a king’s ransom in jewelry—rings, necklaces, earrings and chains. At the back of the room a man wearing an immaculate Sonics jersey with a hologram patch on the sleeve was laughing into a cell phone. Tim saw right away that this guy was the one he wanted to talk to. He had a girl on his arm dressed in a ball gown and brown-tinted sunglasses, while a bodyguard in well-oiled biker leathers squatted next to him cradling a Mac-10 machine pistol in his gloved hands. Buzzard just turned around and around in circles, taking it all in. Tim didn’t blame him— this was the last thing he’d really expected to find on Vashon Island. He was too busy sizing the place up to waste time on astonishment, himself. Having identified the leader Tim’s eyes went to the walls, where dozens of rifles and shotguns were propped up behind the furniture. Next he saw the piles of DVD players, video game systems, and computer parts still wrapped in plastic. At the back of the room he saw a doorway that looked like the entrance to a walk-in closet. It had been sealed off with a bike chain and a Krypton lock. A very stoned-looking girl, maybe fifteen years old, sat on the floor next to the door, giggling to herself. Every once in a while she rapped on the door with her knuckles. In response the door shook and jumped as if someone behind it were trying to get out. “That’s Tony over there, he’s kind of our—” Sasha said, tilting her head at the man in the basketball jersey. “Yo, yo, fuck that,” Tony shouted, obliterating anything else she might have said. “I told you so many times you fucking speed freak.” Without warning he drew a massive pistol from under his jersey and swung it around the room. Everyone, even Mikey with the tattooed face, ducked in horror. The gun came around and blasted a hole through the plaster right next to the face of the stoned girl sitting by the closet door. She closed her eyes and stopped giggling but she didn’t seem to notice that a piece of exploding plaster had cut her cheek. Tony stormed over to her and grabbed her hard by the shoulders. He shook her violently as he screamed into her face. “That’s my mother-fucking brother in there,” he said. “You do not fucking bug him, you got it?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, Tony, sure,” the girl said, her eyes wide but not with fear. Tony dropped her back to the floor. “Yo, Tone,” the girl in the ball gown said. “Over here.” The big man turned slowly, looking irritated, until he was facing Tim and Buzzard. Then his face went through a complete transformation. His eyes lit up, his face fell and then climbed back upward in a friendly smile. “Oh, hey,” he said, raising his arms as if he

would hug them both. He was big enough to do it. “Yeah, hey, wow, it’s you guys. Awesome!”

24. Tony ushered the two of them back into the house, toward a spacious kitchen with a gleaming stainless steel island. A pair of middle-aged women were cooking an enormous feast back there—pots of macaroni and cheese, trays of lasagna and piles of microwave burritos. When they saw Tony they hurriedly wiped their hands on their aprons and scurried from the room, one of them stopping long enough to whisper something in the looter’s ear. “You go on, Mom,” he said, when he’d heard what she had to say. “We’ll just be a minute.” Tim sat down at a long table and Buzzard took a chair after a second. The reporter’s eyes were very wide and Tim wondered if he was trying to gather as many details were possible for his story. Very little of the strangeness in the looters’ “clubhouse” mattered to Tim. He just wanted to get this over with. “You guys want a Coke? Or maybe a beer?” Tony asked. “Anything you want, just ask, we probably got it. I’ve got like this killer liquor cabinet going. Only the finest stuff, you know? I’ve got like everything. Unless you want fresh milk or something.” He laughed. “Not a lot of fresh stuff on this side. We’ve been eating out of cans and boxes, you know, dried stuff like noodles. It’s okay if you don’t think about what you’re missing.” Tim asked for a can of soda and sipped it quietly while Tony stirred a pot of macaroni. He wondered how old Tony could be—maybe in his twenties? Certainly not his late twenties. Yet it was clear he held the looters together with his bare hands. “We’re gonna have dinner soon, and you both can totally stay,” he told them. Tim thanked him for the offer, planning on turning him down. Buzzard stopped him with a hand on his foil-wrapped arm. “Mind if I ask you a few questions while we wait?” the reporter asked. Tony smiled. “Shoot.” “How did you end up here? I mean, how did you get to Vashon?” The looter pursed his lips in thought. “When the droolers came I was at my house, in West Seattle. They started talking on the tv about how we needed to line up for evacuation at the high school and my Mom wanted to but I knew it was going to be a bad scene. I headed down to where I kept my boat but Mikey and Pat were already there, trying to steal it. I guess they had the same idea I did. I mean, so did about a million other people—every boat was headed out that day, and there weren’t enough cops around to

stop us from just making a run for it. We came here because we figured the big houses here would make good places to fortify, and we were right about that. There was some fighting in the first couple of days, and we had to move a couple of times but that was alright. It was kind of exciting, actually. The ways things are now I’m starting to get bored.” He laughed as if he’d told a joke. “How long have you been here at this location?” “About two weeks now.” Tony squinted. “Maybe a little less. We kind of trashed our last place. We thought we could make some modifications, make it like a real fortress, but I guess we didn’t know what we were doing. We ended up burning part of it down while we did our modifications. Mikey’s Dad got burnt up. That wasn’t cool.” “How many families are there in your group?” Tim asked. “Just three, mine, Sasha and her Mom, and then Pat and his sisters—that stupid bitch who keeps bugging my brother is one of his sisters. Some of the others we just found and they decided to work with us. There were some more guys before but they split off, they didn’t like the way I ran things. I don’t know what happened to them. They headed south and maybe your soldiers got them. I don’t know.” He shrugged and poured hot sauce into his pot. “We figured we’d be safer if we stayed up here, you know? Nobody bugs us here, except sometimes droolers. And we can handle them. Everything we need is in the houses here, or almost. The rest is what we trade for.” “Have you cleared out Vashon Island yet, or are you still going house to house?” Buzzard asked. Tony shrugged and ate some noodles off a spoon. “This is where the richie riches lived. There’s all kinds of great stuff to find in their houses.” “Do you ever go farther afield?” Tim asked. “To Seattle, maybe?” Tony looked straight at him as if he’d asked something forbidden. “No. I mean, um, we haven’t yet. Maybe we will eventually. There’s a lot of them over there.” “Droolers,” Buzzard suggested. “Yeah. What do you want to know all this stuff for?” “I’m just curious,” Buzzard explained. “By nature.” “He’s going to write a book about you,” Tim said. Buzzard glared at him but he went on, “When this is all over, you know? When they clean everything up and life goes back to how it was before.”

Tony froze in place. His eyes went wide and he slowly put down his wooden spoon. “You mean this might be temporary?” 25. At dinner the looters gathered around a massive table and gulped hungrily at their food. Tony stirred his own food around on his plate as if he wasn’t hungry—at least until Sasha announced she had some news from Chicago. “The internet’s out, and there’s no tv,” she explained to Tim and Buzzard, “but I got a cousin back east who calls me every once so often, and lets me know what’s happening.” “You have a working phone?” Tim asked. “Sure, how do you think Buzzard called me to say you guys were coming out here? The soldiers use their cell phones to keep in touch with each other, so they power up the network a couple hours every day. When I’ve got bars, I can call anywhere and I don’t think the phone company knows where to send my bills.” That got a few laughs around the table, until Tony sat up in his seat and demanded to know what the news was. His mother reached to pat his arm but he pulled it away. Sasha wiped her mouth with a napkin, then took a long drink of soda before she answered. She was milking it, pushing Tony’s buttons, which Tim thought had to be a spectacularly bad idea, but he supposed she knew what she was doing. Either that or she was just bored and saw some entertainment value in ratcheting the big guy up. “Ten confirmed cases in Chicago. And there’s rumors it’s as far east as Atlanta. The military is clamping down hard but they can’t stop this thing, just slow it a little.” “That’s… that’s too bad. For Chicago, anyway,” Tony said. He stared down at his plate for a second, then reached for the salt. Tim could hardly blame him for wanting the plague to spread, if he thought about it. Tony had managed to live free, away from the tyranny of men like Horne, for a while. If order was ever restored, though, if Seattle was cleaned up and turned over to its citizens again, he could be facing a lot of trouble. Horne had rights under martial law to shoot any looters he found and Tim didn’t think the Colonel would hesitate if he got the chance. “So,” Tony said, after shoveling food in his mouth for a minute, “we have some new faces at the table today. That’s nice, huh? We’re getting pretty sick of looking at each other all the time.” Pat, who was dressed in his silk pajamas even at dinner, raised a glass and said, “Hear, hear,” but no one followed suit.

“Buzzard, we’ve dealt with you before. You’re one of our favorite clients,” Tony announced. “We look forward to dealing with you and your people for a long time to come. You, though. Tim. This is your first time. You risked a lot coming out here—was there something in specific you wanted, or are you writing a book, too?” Tim smiled at the looters. “No, no, I have something very specific in mind. I want to buy a boat.” Tony threw an arm over the back of his chair. “We don’t have any to spare. Maybe we can work something out, though. Where you headed?” “Seattle. I used to live in Seward Park and I have some business to attend to there.” Pat clinked his fork loudly against his plate, but shook his head when everyone looked at him. “Just surprised, is all. Who would want to go there? It’s a death trap.” “Keep your opinion to yourself,” Mikey told him. The tattooed face was turned toward where Tony sat at the head of the table. “We don’t ask questions of our clients, do we? A man wants to kill himself, that’s his business.” “Sure. But I wouldn’t want to send a boat over there,” Tony said, frowning. “It might not come back.” “I’ll take him,” Sasha said. “I can drop him wherever he wants, right under the Space Needle. Wherever. I don’t even have to go ashore, just drop him and then head back out onto the water. No muss, no fuss.” Tony nodded agreeably. “Sure. Then you could come back later, pick him up. If you want to get picked up, that is.” Tim shrugged. “I suppose so. It shouldn’t take too long to do what I need to do. I’ll need something else, though. I need a gun.” Half the table laughed at that one. There were shotguns and rifles standing upright in every corner of the dining room—far more of them than there were diners. “Take your pick. Of course, none of this comes cheap,” Tony said. “I didn’t expect a free ride.” Tim picked up his pack and laid it on the table. “I have about two thousand dollars with me.” More laughter. “You got a place to spend it, too?” Mikey asked.

Tim hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “Alright. I can trade information. Like I say, I used to live here. I know where all the richest pickings are, I can direct you to places full of good stuff—” Tony waved a hand in the air. “Half of us were born in the Emerald City, man. You’re going to have to do better than that. What have you got that’s actually useful to us? Buzzard and his people have fresh food and stuff. You got some green vegetables in there, huh? Enough to feed us all?” Tim shook his head. There was a half-eaten Twinkie in there, wrapped up in foil to keep insects out. He had one other thing, which he’d been saving for himself. It would be a small price to pay for what he needed, though. “You’re a family man, Tony, isn’t that right?” The looter smiled at his mom. “I can appreciate that. I used to have a family. In fact, that’s why I’m here. There was a guy—a drooler, now—and he took my family away. He killed my wife and my son without mercy or compassion.” “That sucks,” Tony said, sounding genuinely sympathetic. “Still. I need—” “I think maybe you need this.” Tim took two boxes of pills out of the pack and set them on the table. “Or to be more specific, I think your brother needs them.”

26. Tony went pale. “You don’t know my brother. You’ve never seen him.” “I saw you had him locked in a closet in the other room.” Tim looked around the table. No one was eating, none of them were whispering amongst themselves. Tim wasn’t sure if he’d broken a serious taboo by even talking about Tony’s brother. If he had he was probably already in trouble, so he pressed on. “What’s his name?” It was Tony’s mom who answered. “Philip,” she said, and her voice was thick. “I told you about the last place we had. The one that got kind of burnt. We had to leave in a hurry before it all came down on top of us. Phil was in charge back then—he was a tough guy, you know? Real tough. Used to beat the shit out of me when we were kids. After this shit went down he said he would take care of me, that he would keep me safe. He watched out for all of us. He made something for us, here. Something good. When we

left the old place, he was the first one out. I don’t know if the droolers were curious and the fire drew ‘em, or if they were just hanging around outside, waiting for us. Either way the second Phil stepped out of the house they swarmed on him. None of us knew what was going on—we were hauling buckets, trying to put out the fire, or we were gathering stuff up, getting ready to go. I was near the back making sure Mom was okay when I heard gunshots up front. I ran up there to find Phil loading his desert eagle back up, calm as fuck, man. He looked right at me and told me to take care of mom, that he was putting me in charge. There was like five droolers lying on the sidewalk and they were all dead, but Phil, he had a chunk bit out of his arm. He was covered in blood.” Tony trembled in his seat with the emotion of the memory. “He was going to blow his own brains out. I guess he was kind of weak, though, with blood loss or some shit, because I grabbed for the gun and for the first time in my life I actually got something over him. By the time we were ready to go, he was sweating and shaking and he just did whatever I told him to. When we got here he crawled in that closet on his own. We put food under the door for him, every day, and I guess he eats it.” Tony looked away from the table as if he were afraid someone might catch him crying. He said nothing for a long while. Tim touched the boxes on the table. They were white cardboard, printed in black lettering, and each one contained a bottle filled with orange tablets. Tim rattled one of them and everyone heard the pills shaking inside the bottle. “You’re full of shit,” Tony said, standing up and pounding his fists on the table. “There’s no cure. There is no fucking cure for the Russian Flu!” “No,” Tim agreed. “But these will help. You can have one bottle now, and one when I come back from Seattle. I think that’s a fair price.” “Tony, I never heard of anything like that, not from my cousin, not on tv,” Sasha announced. “Are you a trained doctor?” Tim asked her. “Are any of you?” “No,” Mikey said. “But I don’t think you are, either. Where’d you get those?” “They were handing them out at a checkpoint—a military checkpoint—in California. People with the early symptoms, you know, bad headaches, paranoid thinking, excessive salivation, anything like that, they were supposed to take these and report to the nearest hospital. Of course people knew better. Once they showed up at the hospital they just got taken off to jail cells or worse. The pills are supposed to slow the disease down, though. Do we have a deal?” “How—how do we give it to him?” Tony asked. “He’s not, I mean, he doesn’t talk anymore. If we open that closet he’ll attack the first one of us he sees. I can’t get him to take a pill.”

“Grind one up and put it in his food.” Tim read the back of the box. “Once every eight hours. You should see results right away.” He shoved a box hard so it slid across the table and stopped right in front of Tony’s plate. “You’re robbing me blind, honestly. Do you know how much that box is worth?” Tony picked it up, read the information on the back. There wasn’t much there a layman could understand, just the instructions. There were no indications or warning labels. Just a very hard-to-pronounce name for the drug inside. Chlorpromazine 25mg. “You swear this will help him?” Tony asked. Tim sighed. “Listen, the brain damage is probably irreversible. We all know that this thing eats grey matter. I don’t think he’s ever going to be your big brother anymore, no. But it’ll make him human again. I promise.” “Then you’ve got a fucking deal, pal.” Tony rubbed at one eye with a thick knuckle. “When do you want to leave for Seattle?” “Tonight,” Tim said. Buzzard kicked him under the table, but Tim didn’t even flinch. 27. Sasha and Mikey left to get the boat ready. Tony retired to his bedroom and most of the looters went to their own parts of the house—the pool room, the den, the kitchen if they were still hungry. A few remained in the front room playing video games or just hanging out. A joint went around, its red cherry leaving trails in Tim’s vision. He was tired—he’d been up since early that morning, and he’d put in a full shift digging clams, which had left his back sore and his arms feeling weak and trembling. He would have loved to go lie down for a while before they had to leave. Buzzard wasn’t about to let that happen. He grabbed Tim’s arm hard, his thumb digging right into the inside of Tim’s elbow. He all but dragged Tim deeper into the house, into a corridor that lead to a large bedroom that would have once faced the water. Now all its windows were covered over with sheets of plywood. Otherwise it hadn’t been altered much. There were still pictures on the walls of children at various ages. There was one picture of a teenaged girl holding the reins of an enormous horse. She had a green ribbon pinned to the front of her Western shirt and her cowboy hat was tilted back on her head. She was smiling with a grin toothier than that of the horse. Jake had been afraid of horses, Tim thought. He sat down on the bed and waited for Buzzard to check the hallway then close the door.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” he said, first. Tim just shrugged. “You heard what I said, I know it. You heard what I said and then you had to go fuck everything up. This was just a meet-and-greet! An informational session. I should knock you unconscious and drag you back to Camp Romeo myself. Better yet I should take you halfway there and then dump you in the Sound.” “I would just try to swim to Seattle,” Tim told him. Buzzard fumed a while longer but he clearly was at a loss for words. “I know,” Tim said, “that this isn’t what you wanted. You need me back in my bed by dawn so Helena never knows we left. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. Not when I’m so close.” “When she finds you missing she’s going to call Horne and tell him you ran off in the night. Horne will still put the clamp on us but if we volunteer the information it’ll go easier on us. For you it’ll be all over, anyway. He won’t take a second chance on you, he’ll throw you in his stockade instantly and probably swallow the key.” “Not if I’m in Seattle. His troops don’t go up there, so they won’t be able to capture me again. Once I’m inside the city I can do what I need to do without any more interference.” “And what about when you come back? Or do you not plan on coming back?” Tim stared at the shag carpet while he thought about what to say. “Listen, Buzzard. I want you to go back to the Camp and talk to Helena. Do whatever it takes to convince her not to call Horne. It’s still a couple of days until the next medical check, right? Horne won’t know I’m gone until then. I think I can finish what I need to do and get back in that time.” Buzzard’s eyes narrowed. “Once you get your revenge, this is over, right? You won’t go sneaking off again?” Tim nodded agreeably. To himself he admitted that he didn’t know what he would do once Phil Nero was dead. Maybe he would kill himself. Maybe he really would go back to Olympia and play nice with the other survivors. If Buzzard covered for him, though, it could forestall a possible problem. Horne would go ballistic when he learned one of his evacuees had escaped, Tim knew. There was no telling what the Colonel would do to get him back. He might even send helicopters up to the Plague Zone. He might send teams of boys in military uniforms to come look for Tim—which would mean the boys would be in danger, and possibly get killed. Tim didn’t want that on his conscience.

“You’re going to owe me such a huge favor if I agree to do this stupid thing,” Buzzard said. His voice sounded like it was a long shot but Tim knew the reporter was already on his side. “There’s a very real reason why I have to go tonight,” Tim said. “You’re worried I’m going to double cross you?” “No,” Tim said, “I’m worried about the looters. They’re going to start medicating Tony’s brother right away. It could be as early as tomorrow morning that they realize I just sold them a box full of thorazine.” Buzzard’s eyes went wide. “But that’s—” “A sedative. It’ll calm the drooler down, maybe. Make him less violent—I hope. It might kill him for all I know. Or it could have no effect at all. I have no idea, but I don’t want to be here when Tony finds out.” “Jesus love a duck,” Buzzard said. It was less than an hour later that Sasha came for them. The boat was ready, fueled up and sitting in the water. He could leave any time he wanted. “I’m not going into the PZ with you,” she said, as if he had thought otherwise. “I’m going to ferry you over and then skedaddle my ass away. But I’ll come back for you. How much time do you need?” she asked him. Tim glanced at Buzzard, who was pacing around the living room, anxious to go home himself. “Twenty-four hours,” Tim said. “That should be enough.” She shrugged. “Better check your watch, make sure it’s working okay. I don’t intend to sit around very long waiting if you’re late.” Together they headed back down to the beach. No one molested them on the way there. Tim climbed into the boat first and reached for an oar but Sasha shook her head. “No need—we can use the motor all the way. Ain’t like the droolers care if we make a little noise, and they’re all that’s left over there.”

28. The Space Needle stood up out of the skyline like a thumbtack in a map, telling Tim he had arrived. He was tempted to ask Sasha to drop him off at Pioneer Square so he could see his city one more time.

But no. He had work to do. She didn’t speak as she hurried them across the Sound. He pointed where he wanted her to go and she steered the little boat easily. Rain chewed at the waves for a while and filled up the bottom of the boat but with just the two of them weighing it down the boat didn’t sit so low in the water, and it was easy for him to bail faster than the water came in. As they got closer the city revealed itself in stages, blocks of buildings emerging from the mist, streets opening up long vistas to him as he peered down their lengths. He didn’t see any people, not even droolers, but the streets were still clogged with cars, just as he remembered. Of course, these cars weren’t moving, but they reassured him just by their presence. The trees that lined the streets were still green and they still shook and bowed in the wind off the water. The windows of the buildings weren’t broken. The street signs weren’t tilted over to the side. There was so much that looked right, that looked normal. He let himself daydream for a while, let himself imagine what it would be like to land on the waterfront, to walk down those streets, and watch everyone come out to get their newspapers, to run to catch buses headed for work, to see children playing and riding their bikes. He could pretend that it was just before dawn, that the city was just sleeping. Not dead. He knew better, of course. On CNN, the last time he’d seen CNN, they had called downtown Seattle the White Zone. Not like the white zones at the airport, that were for loading and unloading only, no. White because the map might as well be blank— everything north of Olympia and Fort Lewis was one long Plague Zone where no human being ever went, where civilization had been wiped clean. The tension between that horror and what he actually saw, the innocence of the city when seen from the water versus what he’d seen happen to his family, left him keyed up and restless. He bailed faster than he needed to, and when the water was all gone he checked his pistol over and over, making sure it was clean, making sure it wouldn’t jam when he shot Phil Nero in the head. It was a big, heavy gun, a Ruger Blackhawk revolver. He’d picked it because he remembered the name from a detective novel he’d read years earlier and he figured it would probably be a reliable weapon. It had six chambers and he’d pocketed two speed loaders just in case. Just in case. He didn’t expect to have much trouble finding Nero and finishing what he’d come for, but you never knew. The little boat sped into Elliott Bay and Tim pointed at a narrow channel of water on the east side of Harbor Island. He’d spent a while studying maps of the city, looking for the quickest route through to Seward Park and his old neighborhood. The fastest route, of course, was through the Lake Washington ship canal. He could have taken Sasha’s boat through the city and into Lake Washington, then south almost all the way to his neighborhood. Sasha had put the kibosh on that very quickly—the locks of the canal were closed and there was no one left to open them again. So Tim would have to go overland to get home. He’d chosen a route through the port facilities—which Sasha had agreed

would probably be deserted, since they’d been heavily defended during the evacuation. He would head past Safeco Field and then through a couple of miles of residential neighborhoods. That would be the dangerous part but if he stuck to the highways he thought he would be alright. “There,” he said, pointing at a long boat channel carved into the docklands, just north of Harbor Island. Sasha steered them down inbetween two high walls slick with green algae and toward the end of the channel, where a metal ladder lead up to the top. She cut the motor and left them bobbing next to the ladder. He turned to speak to her but she was watching the high walls as if expecting droolers to emerge and jump down into the boat. “I’ll be okay, really,” he said. She still didn’t look at him. “Twenty-four hours.” “Sure, sure—” “Twenty-four hours, starting now.” He could tell she wasn’t going to say anything more. He shoved the gun in his pack, then hauled it onto his shoulders. It wasn’t easy standing up in the tiny boat but he managed to lean forward and catch himself on the water-slick rungs of the ladder. It felt slippery but he thought he could manage it. He started climbing up, testing each rung with his feet, and almost fell when he heard her backing the boat up. He hung there and watched her go, her face turned away as she watched the channel behind her. He understood, of course. She didn’t want to waste time worrying about somebody who she must have thought of as suicidal. Okay, he told himself. If that’s how it’s going to be. He climbed up the ladder, taking his time, letting himself rest after every few rungs. It was hard work hauling himself upwards, hand over hand, his knuckles white on the cold, wet metal. Just a few more. He could see the top, and darkness beyond. He put another hand up, grabbed hard. Another foot, another foot, another hand. He lifted his head up and looked over the side. A face glistening with black slime looked back down at him.

29. The fear hit him hard.

He was no stranger to the fear. He’d felt it in San Francisco, whenever he thought too hard about what had happened to Karen and Jake. On the road to Olympia he’d felt it plenty of times, whenever he saw a drooler, whenever he just thought one might be nearby. It was a different kind of fear than those he’d known before the Flu came. It started with a rumbling in his guts, as if he were about to shit himself. It grew threw him, spreading ice through his veins. It paralyzed his limbs and cancelled out all thoughts. He could not move, nor fight, nor do anything useful. Tim could only hold onto the rungs of the ladder. He would have fallen off if he hadn’t been so terrified that his fingers had turned into frozen claws. The drooler stared down at him silently, its eyes blank, its face as slack as a rubber mask. He could see the sores on its skin weeping black fluid, he could count the number of hairs it had left on its barren head. He could not decide if it was a man or a woman, whether it had been old or young before it got sick. In the dark all droolers looked the same. A thin ribbon of black slime slid down through the air and stained the shoulder of Tim’s shirt. Revulsion rippled through him until one of his hands came free of its rung. “God, no,” he shouted, terrified suddenly of falling. That was a nice, normal fear. It was realistic, for one thing. He was nearly twenty feet up in the air. If his other hand let go he would fall to hit the water hard, fall and maybe strike his head on the concrete bottom of the channel and maybe he wouldn’t come back up. He could use that good old-fashioned fear, he decided. It could drive him to get his hand back on the ladder. So far so good. He put a foot down, reached for the rung below. If he climbed up any farther the drooler would bite his hands, he knew. So down it was. He took another step down—and the drooler lunged. An arm slid down through space to grab, to scratch at him. The other oozed over the edge as if it had no bones inside. Tim wanted to jump backwards, away from the attack, but that would have been a bad idea. Instead he pushed himself closer to the ladder, shoving his belly and his crotch against the wet concrete. He took another step down. The drooler lunged forward still farther, scraping across the edge. Its torso and one hip appeared above Tim and then it was on him, jumping down at him and the fear surged up his throat and escaped like steam from a teapot, forming screams in the air as hands grabbed at his clothes, as drool-blackened teeth dug deep into the strap of his pack. He braced himself for the feel of teeth in his flesh, for the inevitability of death. Then the drooler was gone. Tim’s eyes were closed, so he didn’t see it fall past him. He heard it splash below, a noise so sudden and so loud that it made him wince. Water splashed his shoes and ankles and he scrambled up a step of the ladder just to get away from the splash.

He forced himself to open his eyes. He looked down. The drooler was there, splashing in the water, standing armpit deep, hands raised to grab and pull Tim down. It took a step forward to get to the ladder and fell into the water, unable to put any weight on its left leg. The bone there must have shattered when it hit bottom. In a moment it rose again from the darkness, just its face this time cresting the water, its mouth washed clean and its teeth glistening in the moonlight. Tim didn’t waste any time getting up the ladder and over the edge. He sprawled out on the concrete there and just breathed for a while, shuddering as the fear nipped and tugged at him. Slowly it drained away from him, even as his pant legs dried. Without rising he looked around himself, studying his environment. He was watching for more droolers but he didn’t see any. The area where he lay was a great paved space hundreds of yards wide and maybe half a mile long. It was a maze of shipping containers, red and blue and yellow and all rusting in the dark. They waited stacked and ready to be picked up by the long arms of the giant cranes that loomed over the dockyards, unmanned now and reminding Tim of the skeletons of vast dinosaurs caught standing upright by some flash of catastrophe. He rolled into a sitting position and then took off his pack. One strap was nearly chewed through by the drooler’s teeth but it would hold a while longer. Better the strap than his own skin. He drew out the revolver and stared at it. When the drooler had appeared and the fear hit him, he hadn’t even thought about using it. There had been no time—and his brain had seized up. In that moment he’d been as stupid as his adversary, his highlytrained mind as useless as the rotting grey matter that dripped from holes in the drooler’s soft palate. He would have to do better than that when he faced Nero. Tim struggled to his feet and rubbed at his face with his hands. He checked his watch and saw he’d wasted nearly twenty minutes. As soon as he was sure his legs would support him he started loping east at a paced jog. He had work to do. 30. No lights burned in the dockyards. Tim jogged through the maze of containers, avoiding the worst shadows. Always watching for the next attack. He’d only seen the one drooler so far, the one who’d jumped into the channel after him, but then he’d expected the dockyards to be completely deserted. It was best not to take stupid chances. He passed a harbormaster’s shack and gave it a wide berth. He passed a customs station with its door passed open, and he slowed to a mere amble, one hand on the strap of his pack, ready to grab the revolver if he needed it.

He didn’t. “Breathe,” he told himself, because he hadn’t been. He forced himself to stop for a minute and let the air cycle in and out of his body. This wasn’t the hard part, he told himself—that would be when he crossed over into the eastern half of the city, the zone of endless houses crammed together in tiny lots. Past the customs house he picked up his pace again. He found the main road leading through the dockyards and made good time as he passed underneath a series of metal arches like the ribs of an enormous unfinished shed—he guessed they had to be gamma detectors, set up to scan all the facility’s cargo for radioactive material. Terrorism was yet another thing Tim had learned to stop worrying about, and he gave them little thought as he passed through their shadows. Ahead of him he saw the fenced entrance of the dockyards, a wide chain-link gate big enough to admit two big rigs side by side. The gate stood tightly closed and it was far too high to climb. He was going to have to find a way to open it. Besides, he thought, he might come back this way after Nero was dead. A low gatehouse stood on either side of the entrance. Both were locked up tight but the one on the left had a window low enough for him to climb through. He searched around for something to break the glass with, then saw a fifty-gallon oil drum half full of cigarette butts. The drum looked too heavy to pick up but when he kicked it over and spilled out its contents he found it was rotted and rusted away enough that he could just manage it. Straining his arms more than he liked he heaved it over his head and through the window, which exploded inward with a roar like bells ringing. Jagged teeth of glass remained in the frame but he was able to knock those away with his shoe, then climb gingerly over the edge and into the gatehouse. The lights were off and very little starlight came in through the broken window. In the dimness, though, he could see a single square orange light flickering away like a flame. It was an electric light, though, he could make out that much—which bore out what he’d been told, that Horne had kept power flowing in the city. That was going to make his life a lot easier, he decided, and gave a half-hearted word of thanks to the military man. After nearly tripping and breaking his neck on a chair he hadn’t seen he found the light and saw it was a button marked EMERGENCY RELEASE. There were dozens of other buttons on the same panel but he couldn’t read their labels. Shrugging, he put his thumb on the flickering button and pressed down hard, holding it down until he heard a deep rumbling come vibrating up through the floor. He went to the window and saw the big gates sliding open, rattling and chiming as they pulled slowly back. Then he saw a pair of flashing lights flicker into life on top of the gates, their spinning beams strobing out into the dark and lighting up the street beyond the entrance, painting

abandoned cars yellow and white. A moment later a klaxon started blaring a warbling alarm that pained his ears. He hadn’t counted on that. He didn’t know whether the light and noise would attract droolers or not. He could only hope for the best—he saw no way to turn off the siren. Climbing back out the way he came he jogged through the gates and into the street beyond. The fear pulsed through him again out there. The dockyards had looked deserted, had probably looked that way long before the evacuation. Psychologically they had never really felt like dangerous territory. The street beyond, though, was built for crowds. It lead straight to the parking lots of Safeco Field, where the Mariners used to play for huge audiences, fifty thousand people at a time. Wide plazas flanked the road surface, studded with tall bushy trees. Souvenir stalls and food trucks stood parked as if waiting for a horde of tourists and baseball fans to arrive at any minute, wakened by the siren and brought back to their old haunts. Tim saw shadows at every turn that could have belonged to human figures—to droolers, that meant—and he had to force himself not to run for cover. He saw a cluster of vehicles up ahead as if a bad traffic jam had been left frozen in place and forced himself to move closer. Mixed in with the cars and light trucks were military vehicles and city buses lined up in neat rows. The area directly before the stadium’s entrance was suspiciously clear, as if any vehicles stranded there had been towed or shoved out of the way. Tim climbed up on the hood of a Ford to get a better look. He had his binoculars in his pack still but he didn’t need them to see the entrance was devoid of any life. The stadium was dark, its retractable roof wide open as if to display its lack of contents. He didn’t know whether the field had been used as an evacuation center— though it made sense, hadn’t they used the sports stadiums in New Orleans when they evacuated for Katrina?—but it looked empty now. He liked that. He liked it so much he almost missed the noise behind him, almost lost it in the siren’s wail. It sounded like a can being kicked into a gutter, and at first it didn’t even register with his conscious mind. It was the kind of sound you heard in cities all the time, even in the middle of the night. Populated cities, anyway.

31. A wheeled metal stand rolled in the street, long and glistening in the low light. It looked like the kind of thing you would use to hang up an IV bag. It was seriously out of place outside the deserted ball park. Tim froze, the fear bursting foul bubbles in his stomach. He couldn’t see where the IV stand had come from, couldn’t see much of anything. He peered into the darkness and

saw a shipping contained maybe fifty feet away. He’d seen hundreds of the things since he came back to Seattle but this one was in the wrong place. Nor was it exactly like the others. Those had been featureless rectangular boxes, distinguished only by their colors and the white serial numbers painted on their sides. This one was blue, and had its own number, but there was more to it as well. Long thick black electrical cables snaked out of the far end and a complicated antenna assembly stuck up from its top. Its door, on the side facing him, was open a crack, and flapping slightly back and forth as if shoved by passing breezes. There was no wind that Tim could feel, however. He watched the door creep open another few inches. A splash of thin blue light leaked from inside as if someone in there was watching television. The door clanged noisily and then slapped open as a hospital gurney shot out, its wheels clattering on the uneven pavement. It traveled a dozen feet or so and then tilted over on its side and smashed to the ground. A drooler lay strapped down to its thin mattress, its bald grey head thrusting forward again and again, its teeth gnashing. It was completely secure where it was but Tim didn’t approach it, didn’t want to get anywhere near it. That revulsion probably saved his life. The door clanged open again and droolers started pouring out. They were dressed all alike in black-stained paper scrubs, their heads wrapped in plastic shower caps. Some had tubes or wires hanging from their chests and mouths. Their skin hung slack on their bones and their faces were thin and emaciated. What were they doing in there? They looked like they’d been under medical care. The container was full of equipment and beds. But what—why? Tim thought maybe he knew what it meant. Safeco Field was behind him, and just north of that was Qwest Field where the Seahawks had played. The capacity of the two stadiums and their proximity to the docks must have made them perfect collection points for the evacuees when it came time to abandon Seattle. Yet amongst the healthy, terrified people looking to get to safety there must have been some who had already been infected. They must have been shoved inside the container, given whatever medical treatment was available in the chaos. And then, when everyone else got to leave, they must have been left there to rot. “Horne,” Tim breathed, shaking his head. “It was your order, wasn’t it?” The Colonel had locked up his own infected—his soldiers—in his stockade at Fort Lewis. Apparently civilian infected hadn’t merited the same level of respect. The droolers came toward him slowly, their arms at their sides. He could see in their slack faces, though, and their biting teeth, what they wanted with him.

Maybe there would be a chance to confront Horne with this horror later. Tim drew his revolver. Then he counted the droolers. They must have been stacked in bunks inside— there were far more of them than he would have thought could fit in one storage container. He didn’t have an exact count but he knew there were plenty more of them than there were bullets in his gun. He turned around, the fear threatening to paralyze him if he kept looking at the slowly creeping mass of droolers. He turned toward the entrance of Safeco Field, then to the street that ran past it. If he kept his calm, if he didn’t trip over something in the dark, he knew he could outrun the infected. He could put them behind him and after a few blocks of pursuit surely they would lose his scent and give up. He didn’t need to shoot every drooler he saw—that would be a waste of time and ammunition. He leaned forward into a fast jog, trying to pace himself. Behind him the droolers came shambling on, their savaged brains slowing them down, ruining their balance and their coordination. They walked like drunkards, like the extremely old. Tim was in decent shape for his age and he was certain he would get away. Then he saw the road in front of him blocked by vehicles, dozens of them driven up on the sidewalks, slammed together in bad collisions, knocked sideways by military bulldozers that had themselves been pushed to the side for bigger vehicles. He couldn’t see a way through, no gap big enough to squeeze past. He would have to climb over the barrier. That was okay, he told himself. That was just fine. Droolers couldn’t climb after him. They lacked the motor skills. Just one quick scurry up over the cab of a pickup truck and then he would be past, he would have a barrier between himself and his pursuers, he grabbed a side mirror and hauled himself upward, his foot on the rough surface of a tire. Just a little further—he slid up onto the hood, stopped to take a glance backwards. The droolers had closed with him to about twenty feet back. That was—that was fine—he looked forward, looked toward the road beyond the traffic jam. Up ahead, each of them connected by long snaking power cables, were at least ten more of the cargo containers turned into makeshift hospitals. Some were still shut tight, their doors jumping on their hinges as the droolers inside fought to get out. Others were wide open and spilling blue light over the sea of cars and trucks. 32. Tim scrambled back down from the top of the truck. What he was going to do next he had no idea. The droolers from the medical container were still advancing—in a few seconds they would be on him. The droolers from the other side of the barricade could be anywhere. He had to get away, had to get somewhere. The entrance to Safeco Field was close by but what would he find in there? A wide open baseball diamond with nowhere to hide, endless rows of seats full of nothing but ghosts.

The revolver in his hand felt heavy and useless. He could start shooting at random—he could probably take down the droolers, they barely qualified as moving targets. But there were more than six of them. They would be on him before he could reload, he was sure of that. The gun was dragging him down. He wanted to drop it, or throw it at the droolers marching steadily, silently toward him. He fought down that urge. On the other side of the street a multi-story office building sat dark and unwelcoming, but it looked like its revolving door was still open. He dashed across the street and pushed against the glass doors, felt them yield under his weight. Behind him the droolers turned slowly, still coming toward him. Still possessed of no thought whatsoever except that he had to be destroyed, bitten, trampled. Tim spun into the dark lobby of the building and looked around for anything he could use to block the door behind him. A wooden bench stood next to a potted fern. When he tugged at it he found the bench wasn’t bolted down —that was a real lucky break. He got behind it and shoved and pushed it into one wedge of the revolving doors, leaving half of it hanging out into the lobby. The droolers were already at the door. One pushed into the opposite wedge and shoved its face and shoulder against the glass, smearing the door with black slime. The door began to turn—and then stopped with a loud clunk. The bench kept it from traveling any further. More droolers were coming up to the door, pressing against the plate glass windows that looked out into the street. Tim could still hear the siren wailing over by the dockyards, and a little light from there flickered on the faces of the infected. Otherwise the world might have frozen, time might have stopped. The droolers didn’t hammer on the glass, nor did they turn away. They just stood there, looking in at him. As he moved around the lobby their eyes tracked him. He was safe—at least temporarily. He was also trapped inside the office building, no closer to his goal than he had been since he left the dockyards. “Damnit,” he whispered. Then repeated the curse much louder. What was he going to do now? He couldn’t get to Seward Park. The droolers beyond the barricade were just waiting for him to try. He couldn’t get back to the boat channel that was his rendez-vous, even if Sasha had been waiting for him there, and she wasn’t. Unless he found a lot of .357 ammunition in the building—which was highly unlikely— he couldn’t fight his way out. “Stop panicking,” he told himself. “Think it through.” That was the one advantage he had over the droolers, his ability to solve problems. Nothing presented itself, no immediate solution, but with time he would think of something. What came first? He couldn’t stay in the lobby. Looking at the droolers out there just brought back the fear, the acid churning in his stomach, the coldness in his veins. He headed deeper into the lobby, his hands outstretched to find any furniture he couldn’t see in the dark. There was

probably a light switch somewhere in the room but he had no idea where it might be and he didn’t want to stick around long enough to find it. After a few paces his hands touched the far wall. Fine. He moved sideways then until he found the end of the wall. Reaching down he discovered the first riser of a flight of steps going up. Careful not to trip, testing each step with a tentative foot, he started climbing upward. Eventually he came to a second floor, a corridor even darker than the lobby. He ran his hands over the walls looking for a light switch. Instead he found a door. A long window panel set into the door was slightly grayer than the blackness around him. Good enough. He searched for the doorknob, found it, turned it. The door wasn’t locked. He slipped through into a small office. A little light streamed in through broad windows —enough for him to make out a desk and a couple of chairs. He searched the wall and— yes—finally found a switch. He flipped it on and a lighting fixture in the ceiling flickered into life. The fluorescent tubes up there never quite reached full brightness—and one switched endlessly on and off like a strobe light—but it was so much better than nothing. The office must have belonged to a low-level executive in the Mariners franchise. A baseball bat stood in a brass mounting on top of the desk. There were signed baseballs attached to plaques on the walls. In one corner of the room stood an almost-life-sized cardboard cut-out of a baseball player Tim didn’t recognize. A skeletal black plastic chair sat behind the desk. It was surprisingly comfortable when Tim sank down into it. He pulled open every drawer of the desk, hoping against hope that he would find a gun in there but all he found were paper files and a laptop computer with a dead battery. He leaned back in the chair, let its cantilevered limbs hold him. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever sat in something so perfectly designed for the human form. He had to think, he had to plan, find someway out of the trap he’d set himself. He had to… he had to close his eyes, that would help him concentrate. He had to close his eyes. 33. He woke up with a jerk, spittle flying from his face. Tim panicked for a second and wiped at his chin with his hands, then studied them in the grey light coming in through the windows. His saliva was clear and normal, though, and that reassured him enough to get him breathing again, to sit up in the chair and blink his eyes, run his tongue around the foul taste in his mouth. Then he sat up again with a new jerk, a new terror. Asleep—he had been fallen asleep. What the—what the hell? He rubbed his hands on his jeans, then ran his fingers through his hair. He’d been tired, yes, tired before he even left Vashon Island. He’d been exhausted, to be plain about it. The fear had sucked him dry of what energy he’d had left. So when he’d finally reached safety, when he sat down in the chair, his adrenal glands had stopped firing and he’d crashed. It was normal, a perfectly normal reaction to given stimuli. A stereotyped behavior.

He glanced down at his watch. It was ten thirty in the morning. He’d slept more than eight hours. “Oh, no,” he whined, wanting nothing more than to put his head down on the desk and go back to sleep. Knowing he’d already wasted more than a third of his allotted time in Seattle. He had so much to do, so much more to accomplish before he went back, before he met Sasha down at the docks. He stood up and all the blood rushed out of his head. He snarled in pain and annoyance but he couldn’t let his body rule him, not anymore. Not if he was going to have a chance at Nero. Maybe the unscheduled nap had its plus side, though, he thought. The droolers outside would have gotten bored and wandered off while he slept. It would be safe to go outside again. He walked a few steps to the office’s windows and looked down at the snarl of cars and trucks down there. The droolers looked up. One slack face after another tilted back, dead eyes focusing on him through the glass. Dozens of them. More than he remembered from the night before. “No,” he said, a rejection. A refusal to accept reality. It didn’t work. The droolers didn’t vanish into thin air. His watch didn’t start running backwards. He slumped back into the chair. Stared at the ceiling tiles. What was he going to do? What could he do? He was trapped in the office building. “No,” he said again, and this time it was a decision. He was not going to give up, not so soon after he’d started. There had to be something he could do. He could try to find a back door, maybe. He could hope there were no droolers back there, or that he could be quiet enough to slip out without any of them noticing his leaving. He gathered up his pack and headed out of the office. Just in the doorway he felt the fear churning inside of him and he had a sharp urge to go back. To go back in and curl up and go back to sleep, to face the wall. To stop. Violently shaking his head he moved out into the shadows of the hall. The light was better now that the sun was up and he could see there were three more office doors he hadn’t tried. He doubted he would find anything inside that would be useful. He went to the stairs instead and started down, thinking any rear or fire exit had to be on the ground floor. He made it down six steps before he smelled them. They had a thick, yeasty smell on top of the general smell of unwashed human bodies. The slime they constantly drooled smelled like the slop bucket outside a brewery. He smelled them long before he saw they’d gotten into the lobby.

But maybe not soon enough. In the dark part of the stairs a drooler was waiting for him, arms outstretched, mouth open. Waiting to suck him in and devour him. Tim jumped back, screaming, and slid down four more risers. He looked up and saw the lobby was full of them. The wooden bench he’d used to jam the revolving door was in splintery pieces. Their bodies clogged up the door mechanism as they pushed and pulled in random directions but some of them had managed to cram inside. A hand with fingers like claws slammed down on his shoulder. He’d slid right past the one on the stairs and now it was coming down on top of him. Adrenaline was the only thing that saved him. He ducked under its biting jaws and threw himself down across the stairs. The drooler tried to grab him up in its arms but he was too fast, kicking his legs out and knocking it right off its feet. It went sprawling, lacking the coordination to even break its fall with its arms. He heard its jaw connect with the tile floor of the lobby, with a sound like a steak hitting a butcher’s block. The drooler didn’t waste time on feeling pain, though. It got back up, its jaw wobbling inside the slack rubber mask of its face. Black spit had spilled across its nose and one eye but the other one looked right at Tim. He yanked his revolver out of his pack and fired three shots into it, aiming for its head. Fear threw off his aim and two of the shots went into its neck and chest. The third went straight in through its drool-smeared eye. The others in the lobby looked up at the roar of the shots. They looked up and right at Tim. He got his feet under him and ran back up the stairs. 34. Tim slammed the office door shut behind him, twisted the deadbolt. Backed up until his legs hit the desk behind him. He could hear the droolers coming up the stairs. They couldn’t climb fences but a simple staircase was still within the limit of their powers, it seemed. Before he’d even caught his breath they were pounding on the door. He could see one through the rectangle of glass set into the door, its face pale and patchy, broken with sores. It felt a film of black drool on the window as it pressed its mouth against the glass, its lips making an obscene seal there. He could see its blackened tongue lolling for him. He raised the revolver, intending to shoot through the little window, then stopped himself. He reached up with his left hand and gently tugged his right arm down until the gun wasn’t pointing at the door anymore.

“Do better,” he told himself. “Use your fucking brain.” He was still a long way from Seward Park. If he used all his bullets now he would be defenseless until he found Nero—and then, how would he kill Nero, would he club him to death with an empty revolver? He would need another weapon. Something he could find in the office. The baseball bat on the desk was mounted on a pair of brass stands that he unscrewed easily. The bat was heavy but it felt good in his hand, well-balanced. Tim hadn’t swung a bat since little league but he supposed he remembered how. That was a nice start, he congratulated himself, but it didn’t solve much. Opening the door seemed unwise. Not with so many droolers out there. He might break a few heads before one of them got close enough to bite him but that would be pointless. It wouldn’t get him justice for Karen and Jake. He would have to leave the office another way. A harder way. Striding up to the windows he took a stance and then made a few practice swings. He needed to be careful—if he hit the glass at the wrong angle it could splash back on him. He’d read about the dangers of broken glass, and he knew that glass in real life was nothing like the stuff people jumped through in the movies. As soon as he shattered the window he thought it was going to splash into a trillion tiny flying daggers, any of which could cut him badly enough to make him bleed out. He didn’t have anything clean he could use as a bandage, so he hoped to avoid that. One, two, three—he swung, hard, and the bat slammed into the surface of the window, hard enough to send thrumming vibrations up his arms. The glass splintered and shook and grew cobwebs of cracks that ran instantly outward from the point of impact, filling the pane and turning it almost opaque. The window held, however, other than a few chips of glass that flew outward and spun down to hit the cars below. Tim shook out his hands and studied the window. Was it made of some weird tempered glass, some shock-resistant stuff? He moved closer, got his face right up near the window. That was when he heard the noise. A noise like ice crackling on impact as it fell into a glass of warm tea. It was a tiny, chiming noise, repeated over and over, hundreds of times a second. “Shit,” he yelled, and jumped back, just as the entire pane of glass let go at once and fell like a sharp waterfall to the floor. Most of it fell out, through the window frame, but some large jagged spikes fell inward to crash around his feet. Cool, fresh air rushed into the office and ruffled his hair. Stepping forward he put his head through the new opening and looked down.

The droolers looked up at him with no curiosity in their faces, nothing at all in their eyes. One, who had been standing closest to the building, had been showered by the falling glass and had a shard sticking out of his cheek. A little dark blood wept from the cut but the drooler didn’t seem to mind at all. A military transport truck stood about six feet out from the window, its canvas top only a few feet down from where Tim stood. If he took a running jump he could land right on it, then scramble down the side to the street level. That was exactly where he needed to be. There was one problem, of course. There were droolers all around the truck. He needed to distract them somehow. Even just for a few seconds—that might be enough time. Tim looked at the baseballs mounted on plaques on the walls. They were glued down and he couldn’t pull them off their wooden mountings. The bat did a good job of separating them, though. He picked up a couple, warmed up his arm. He took aim and pegged one of the droolers right in the head. Tim was no baseball player, he doubted the ball left his hand at more than thirty or forty miles an hour. Still it was enough to knock the drooler off his feet. The others turned to look, for the first time their eyes moving away from Tim. He got ready to make his leap—then stopped. The droolers had all turned to look back up at him. The one on the ground slowly got back up on his feet. He was beginning to understand that they didn’t feel pain. Beyond that—without frontal lobes to speak of, they were incapable of anything but the lowest animal curiosity. He thought about what Helena had told him. About stereotyped behaviors. About creatures that responded the same way every time to a given stimulus. He looked around the office, desperate for some new plan. Then he saw exactly what he needed and he laughed out loud. 35. “Sorry about this, buddy. I don’t know who you are but I bet you were a hell of a ballplayer.” Tim unzipped his fly, pulled out his penis, and urinated right on the face of the cardboard cut-out. It was just about life sized and it was printed in full, even garish color. It showed a baseball player in the act of swinging a bat. It was about an eighth of an inch thick, but Tim was really hoping that wouldn’t matter. The looters had used anatomical skeletons to fool the infected. The droolers’ behavior was so simplistic that they couldn’t differentiate between a pile of plastic bones and a living human being. If something looked even vaguely human and it didn’t smell like it was infected, they would attack it. The urine was just Tim’s attempt at improving the lure, making the cut-out seem even more human.

It was his best chance. If it didn’t work he still had fifteen bullets. He could shoot as many droolers as possible and then make a break for it and hope the rest couldn’t catch him. The odds on that kind of sucked, he told himself. Holding the dripping cut-out away from himself he moved to the window. He held it out like a kite to catch the breeze, then threw it spinning over the heads of the droolers. Droplets of urine misted away from it as it flew, arcing up and then suddenly coming straight down in the middle of a pack of droolers. Every emotionless eye down in the street watched it spin and fall, just as they’d watched the drooler he’d pegged with the baseball. For a second that was all. They watched, but didn’t move. Tim sighed a curse into the wind. One of the droolers near the fallen cut-out shuffled toward it a step or two. Another twitched its nose. A third move up and kicked at the cut-out with its shoe. The cardboard rattled noisily and a couple of the droolers jumped as if they’d heard a gunshot. One by one they all turned—and started in on the cut-out. The ones nearest to it collapsed on top of it, biting and tearing at the cardboard. Soon they were out of sight as others piled on top of them. The mass of their bodies writhed and rose and fell as they tore and bit and gobbled at the hidden cut-out. Tim didn’t waste a second on cheering or exulting or saying a silent apology to the baseball player he’d just sacrificed in effigy. He got as far back as he could, then ran right at the broken window. He launched himself out and forward and just had time to wonder if he was going to make it far enough, if he would land on the canvas cover of the military truck or if he would fall short and break his legs when he hit the street. His upper body collided with the cloth top and one of his arms smacked against a support strut hidden underneath. Kicking wildly he rolled on top of the truck, then over the far side. He clutched at the dry canvas to slow his fall and somehow landed on his feet. The body of the truck stood between him and the nearest drooler. He couldn’t see if they’d noticed his stunt dive or not. The fear in his belly was enough to spur him on regardless. He was still in the middle of the forgotten traffic jam, and he still had a lot of ground to cover. Tim jumped up onto the hood of the next car, then ran up the windshield to its roof. He leapt to the back on a pickup truck and hit painfully on the bed. His shins felt bruised but they would still support him. He climbed up on to the cab of an army truck and looked for his next jump. Behind him he heard something dent in the side of a passenger car door. He looked back and saw droolers squeezing inbetween the abandoned vehicles, pushing their way toward him, shoving their bodies through tiny gaps. He guessed they’d had their fill of baseball players and now they wanted the main course. He had to move fast—but he couldn’t afford to miss a jump. If he twisted his ankle now it would be the end of him. He jumped onto the slick roof of a yellow school bus and ran

down its length to drop onto the top of a Ford sedan. The car jam seemed to stretch on forever before him but he kept moving, even as the droolers kept pushing and oozing through the mess behind him. Tim jumped from the top of the sedan onto the trunk of another car, clambered up a ladder on the side of a water truck, dashed down the other side and through a gap between two fire trucks. A big construction vehicle—a backhoe loader with a bulldozer blade in front—came next where he had to jump and grab the top of the blade and then haul himself up onto the cage-like cab. Behind him he saw one drooler clutching to the side of the school bus, hauling itself along with its hands along the open windows like a horizontal ladder. It had been a mistake to look. In the time it took him to glance back Tim’s baseball bat had gotten caught in the open cab of the loader. It threw him off balance and his foot came down hard on the side of the cab, nearly throwing him down to the street. He twisted himself around in time not to break his ankle but in the process his body fell backwards and he slid down hard into the green cushioned seat of the construction vehicle. Through the open space before him he could see the foremost drooler not twenty feet away. 36. Tim tried to reach around himself, to get at his pack and his revolver. The drooler was headed right up a slot between two cars, right toward the blade of the loader. Tim had no more than a couple of seconds to react. He didn’t have time to crawl out of the dozer’s cab, he knew that much, and he couldn’t seem to get his arm around to get his pack open in the tight space. The solution was right there in front of him, of course. The keys of the loader were still in the ignition. He could use the machine to kill the drooler and make his escape—his stupid fall, his clumsy landing on the loader’s control seat, was actually a blessing in disguise. He just had to figure out how to make the machine work. Tim had done some landscaping and light construction work when he was a teenager. He’d worked around construction equipment and had once even been allowed to drive a backhoe—though only in circles around a parking lot that was slated for demolition anyway. If he’d had a few minutes he was sure he could figure out how to make the loader work. He had seconds, at most. With one foot he kicked the starter of the loader and it rumbled to life. The drooler didn’t seem surprised or even curious by the throaty roar of the diesel engine. It came closer, and closer, until it could reach up and grab the blade. “Gotcha,” Tim said, and threw the loader into gear. It stumbled forward an inch or two but no more, shuddering and vibrating so badly his vision blurred, but it didn’t go anywhere. Panicking, Tim looked down and saw that the loader’s stabilizing legs were

planted firmly on the asphalt, locking it in place. The legs were there to give the loader traction when it engaged the backhoe attachment on its rear. They kept the machine from moving around dangerously while it was digging—but they also kept Tim from getting anywhere. The drooler leapt up and got part of its torso over the blade. Tim pushed himself back in the seat, unable to think straight, unable to hear anything over the grinding noise of the machine as it shook itself violently back and forth. He reached down and started flipping switches and toggles on the control panel, but only managed to lift the blade, raising it up in the air and bringing the drooler even closer. Black spit rolled down the infected man’s shirt and splattered the cab around Tim. He started to scream—but his fingers kept working the controls madly, blindly hoping to find some way to save himself. The drooler stood up in the blade, its curved face lifted almost perpendicular to the ground. It staggered back and forth trying to keep its balance, or maybe it was getting ready to jump down into the cab with Tim. The blade shook and the drooler almost fell off. Almost, but not quite. It did stop the sick man from jumping. Tim forced himself to look down and study the controls. He found the lever he wanted and shoved it all the way up. The loader’s blade came down and hit the road surface hard enough to send up a cloud of dust and rubble. The drooler tottered and then fell away from Tim, disappearing in the brown cloud. Moments later it appeared again, looking completely unhurt. It stepped forward and grabbed the top of the blade, ready to heave itself up again. This time, though, Tim was ready. He’d managed to get his pack off and had the revolver firmly in hand. Sighting carefully, he put a bullet right through the drooler’s head. It fell down once again, for good this time. He didn’t have time to congratulate himself. More droolers were coming up the gap between the cars, a pack of them with dead eyes and wide-open mouths. The fear turned Tim’s hands to ice but it didn’t paralyze him, not this time. He found the control that raised the stabilizers. They folded up neatly like the legs of a spider drawing back. He found the clutch and the gearshift and threw the loader in reverse. There were a few cars behind him but they were easily pushed out of the way with a smash and a chorus of breaking glass by the mass of the construction vehicle. The droolers kept coming on but Tim was moving, gaining speed as he rumbled backwards up the street. The loader bleated out a repetitive warning chime as it maxed out its top reverse speed at about ten miles an hour. It felt to Tim like he was stuck in molasses, barely moving at all, but when he checked on the droolers they were losing ground—they could move barely as fast as a healthy human being could walk, maybe four miles an hour, even as they struggled and grasped to get near him, to get to him and bite him and destroy him.

He backed up until they were tiny figures in the distance, far enough away that he dared to stop and get the loader turned around. Its big tires squealed on the pavement as he pulled a three-point turn, barely clipping the cars parked on either side the street, smashing in the radiator grille of one and popping the tires of another. Once he was faced the right way—east—he put the loader back into gear and headed for the highway. It had been nearly twelve hours since Sasha had dropped him off at the dockyards. Half his time was gone. 37. On a normal day, allowing for traffic, it would have taken Tim half an hour to get from Safeco Field to his house in Seward Park. It was a drive he’d taken many, many times— one of the routes he’d used while commuting to and from his job at the new Seattle Central library downtown. Most of it was on big roads, I-90 and then Rainier Avenue South, and he could have driven it with his eyes shut. That was before the Flu, of course. Before Seattle was drained of its people and named the first real Plague Zone. He expected delays and obstacles in his path. Not a single leg of his journey had been easy so far—why should this last stretch be different? There were some things he could not have predicted, though. Some things he could not have imagined. In his mind, when he was planning this trip (though he’d never planned it very carefully, always assuming he would just work things out when he arrived), he would have been riding a motorcycle (even though he didn’t know how) or a big SUV that could just mow down any droolers that got in his way. He had never thought he would end up riding to vengeance on top of a bright yellow backhoe loader. It was slow. Even on open stretches of road with plenty of time to accelerate, the dozer topped out at thirty miles an hour. He might have been faster on a bicycle. It had a terrible suspension—at that top speed it was difficult even to hold on to the steering wheel, with the entire vehicle shaking and rumbling beneath him until he was afraid he would be ejected from the open-work cab without warning. Its exhaust stank and made it hard to breathe, its controls were sluggish and slow to respond. It cornered like a boat and its steering veered to the left so he constantly had to correct his course, the dozer weaving back and forth all over the road. He had plenty of opportunities to trade it in for a car or a pickup truck or anything he might choose—but he knew almost instantly that it was the only vehicle for the job. For one thing the elevated section of I-90 was a parking lot.

The grey ribbon of the road rose before him, weighted down with hundreds of cars— every make and model, some covered in mud, most of them shining brilliantly from glass and chrome. Some sat forlorn with doors open wide, some looked as if they were still waiting patiently for their owners to return. Tim could guess what had happened. He’d seen the chaos in other places, places that hadn’t even yet been touched by the infection. When the evacuation of Seattle had been called the traffic must have been legendary. When the traffic had stopped moving, evacuees must have gotten out of their cars and proceeded on foot to the dockyards and the ships waiting to take them away to safety. They weren’t packed nose to bumper. There was room between them, enough room that with the loader’s blade down he could slowly, painstakingly, shove them out of his way. It would be very slow going, though. Making sure there were no droolers in sight—and keeping his baseball bat handy—he stopped the loader and jumped down to take a look at other routes. From halfway up the onramp he used his binoculars to scan the surface streets, looking for an easy route through. The roads down there were a lot clearer, though they were still full of abandoned cars. He would have to pick his way through carefully, always keeping an eye out for movement. He would have to find his way through neighborhoods he’d never visited before. Sighing, he watched the trees shimmer in the wind off the bay. He watched the traffic lights down there cycle from red, to green, to yellow again, endlessly guarding against collisions that would never come. It looked peaceful down there. It looked almost normal. Anything could hide down there, though. Every corner was a potential ambush, every crossroads a possible trap. Unsure of whether he was making the right choice or not, Tim got back up on the loader and started shoving his way up onto the overpass. It was slow going as he picked his way through one knot of cars after another. They resisted his passage, shoving back against the blade. The loader’s diesel engines roared and whined but they got him through. For an hour he worked steadily, focused on nothing but moving cars, on getting another few feet up onto the overpass. He forced himself not to look at his watch, and to take occasional sips from the bottle of water in his pack. When it became too much, too frustrating, he gnawed on a stale cookie he’d kept with him since the last day on the road, since before he’d reached Olympia. Then he got back to work. When he was certain a full hour had passed, he stopped to admire his handiwork. Looking back he saw the lane he’d plowed through the cars like an icebreaker bursting through the polar ice pack. It looked like he’d come quite a ways. Then he looked forward—and saw that he’d just crested the interchange where I-90 passed over I-5. He’d gone maybe a few thousand feet. He grunted in frustration. He tried to hold back tears—then let them come. He was never going to make it like this. The loader had been some measure of safety and speed. It had

been his best shot but now it was just slowing him down—he could have walked four miles in the time he’d wasted trying to clear the cars. So be it, he told himself, forcing down the thwarted rage he felt. So fucking be it. He had walked from San Francisco, had walked for a month for this chance at revenge. He’d gotten soft since he’d arrived at Olympia, the calluses on his feet had started to heal. He could still do it, though, if he had to, and it was clear he had to. He switched off the loader and jumped down to the road surface. He shouldered his pack and shoved the baseball bat through the straps so it rode in the small of his back, where he could draw it quickly like a sword from a scabbard. Then he started to walk, winding his way around the cars, settling into a rhythm of walking his body still remembered. He had made maybe fifty yards further down the highway when an arrow shot past his ear, fast enough he could feel its slipstream ruffle his hair. He dropped to the road surface, suddenly terrified, and tried not to breathe too loudly. Tim was only a few feet from the edge of the road, from the concrete guard wall that kept cars from plunging over the side to crash onto the buildings below. Slowly he crawled toward that edge, then poked his face over to see what might be down there. He saw a woman on a rooftop far below. He saw her nock another arrow, saw her take aim right at his face. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, hold your fire!” Then he rolled back away from the edge, and just lay there, waiting. Eventually, finally, he heard her calling him from below. “Hello?” she shouted. He could just make out her voice. “Hey! You’re not one of them, are you?” “No,” Tim shouted back, still keeping himself away from the edge. It was slowly dawning on him that he was talking to the first uninfected person he’d encountered since he arrived in Seattle. “No—and you’re not, either.” “No. Hey, can you show yourself again? Just so I can make sure?” “That depends,” Tim shouted. “Can you not shoot me full of arrows?” Slowly he pushed his head and shoulders back over the edge again. “What’s your name?” he asked. She still had the bow in her hands, with an arrow ready to go. He understood her caution but he kept himself ready to jump back as he stared at her. She was short of stature, with short dark hair and true green eyes. She looked terrified. She wore a halter top and shorts and had a quiver full of arrows on her back. “Sandi,” she called up to him. “Sandi Carron.”

“I’m Tim,” he told her. “What are you doing up there, Tim? If you don’t mind my asking?” “Trying to get home.” She shook her head. As if she didn’t understand but she figured they could clarify later. “This is home?” “Yes. Seattle—Seward Park, you know where that is? I was away when all this happened.” Suddenly he didn’t want to tell her his whole story. Suddenly he worried what she might think. She saved him from that by telling him her own story. “I’m from Connecticut originally —I was just visiting some friends here. My husband’s still back east. I tried to get out but then the radio said everybody should just hunker down and stay inside. I think I made a mistake.” Time dropped his head. “Yeah,” he agreed. “This—this is just for now, right? I mean. I mean they’re going to do something about it! They’re going to fix it. Right?” “I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “There are others—other survivors. Down in Olympia. You think you can get there?” In answer she lifted the bow in her hands. “Not without a lot more arrows.” He started to ask her about the bow but then he took in more of the scene. She stood on the roof of a low brick building. In the streets surrounding the building on all four sides lay the bodies of dead droolers. Some had been killed with gunshots to the head. Others had arrows sticking out of their temples or their eyes. He looked for, and found, a rifle lying on the roof near Sandi’s feet. She looked down as if following his gaze. “I ran out of bullets yesterday. Lucky for me I’ve hunted with a bow before.” “Yeah,” Tim said. “Lucky for you. You nearly killed me!” She bit her lip and stared up at him for a second. “Yeah,” she said, finally. “Sorry about that. Listen. Do you want to come down here? I’ve got some food, if you’re hungry. We’d probably be safer together.” Tim’s stomach roared at the prospect. He had other plans, though. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“I said I was sorry about the arrow! Listen—Tim—I’m scared. I’ve been holding them off for a long time. I’ve been okay. But I can’t keep doing this alone!” He rolled back away from the edge. She was right, they would be safer together. They could help each other out. But he couldn’t ask her to join his mad crusade to find Phil Nero. And he couldn’t just stay with her, and wait out the Russian Flu. “Sandi,” he called out, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” He looked down at her, then slapped the concrete lip of the overpass. It was a sheer drop of maybe twenty feet to her rooftop. “For one thing there’s no way for me to get down there.” “We’ll think of something!” He closed his eyes. Tried not to think about whether he was betraying her or what his duty to her might be. He hadn’t even considered this—that there might be other people in Seattle with functional frontal lobes. That there might be responsibilities to meet. This was supposed to be about just him, Nero, and his gun. “I have to be somewhere,” he told her. He stepped back from the edge so she couldn’t see him again. “I’m—sorry.” “Wait!” she shouted at him. “Hold on!” “I’ll try to send help for you, if I can,” he told her. “The Army. Or somebody!” But he was already walking away. He had to move fast. He had to keep moving fast or his conscience would make him turn around. “I promise!” “I said I was sorry!” she bellowed. “Please! Don’t leave me here alone!” She kept shouting but soon he couldn’t hear her anymore. Soon he was just one man walking again. Soon he had lost all sense of time passing—there was just more road ahead, as there always had been. So he was unsure how far he’d traveled before he started smelling the smoke. 38. The road drooped down before him like a snake going to ground, a linear expanse of concrete and cars that ran into the southern suburbs where it was penned down by a massive web of smaller roads and house-lined streets. Then it stopped as if it had hit a perfectly solid wall. A wall of smoke—black and wispy, convoluted and always moving and changing shape and yet it looked, from where Tim stood, as sharply defined as a line on a map. Maybe, he thought, it looked more like a river, roaring and turbulent. It came out of the west in a plume half a mile broad. He couldn’t see what lay beyond it—it rose higher than the

overpass, and it was wide enough he couldn’t see its end. He couldn’t see where it started, though he thought it might be coming from Boeing Field. Maybe a fuel tank there had caught fire somehow, and maybe it was burning still. The smoke this hypothetical fire produced was blowing west on the prevailing wind and it covered a broad swathe of Seattle like a funeral veil. It was most of a mile away from him, yet Tim could smell it. It had none of the woody, ashy stink of a campfire—instead it smelled oily and foul. It smelled like the exhaust of the backhoe loader, frankly, acrid and stale. He could only imagine how suffocating it would be if he were actually down in it. He might get a chance to find out, he thought. Seward Park—and Phil Nero—lay on the other side of that plume. It stretched well out over Lake Washington, cutting off every road that lead south. He could try to backtrack, to head west toward Boeing Field and find his way around the eastern source of the fumes, but that would take hours and he had very few of those left. Maybe he could find some way through—he could find a car and drive through with the windows up, the air inside recirculating so it would stay breathable. Maybe he would find some other way. He hadn’t gotten as far as he had by worrying about every detail, he told himself. He came down the ramp half-running, half skidding as he dodged cars left and right. At the bottom of the slope he stopped to look at the smoke plume again and saw it rising up over him like a black tsunami that never stopped rising up, never crashed down on him. The smell was worse closer to the ground but he could just about ignore it. He had other things to worry about. Up on the overpass he’d been protected pretty well against drooler attack. He’d been able to see everything ahead and behind him. Down on the ground, where I-90 widened out and flowed away from him in dozens of ramps, danger could come from any direction. He kept his bat in his hand as he moved forward, walking fast but never quite breaking into a jog. He was paying so much attention that he saw the body in the street well before he could make out its features or details. It looked like a big plastic trash bag that fluttered in the wind but stayed stuck to the road. He moved closer, wondering what kind of disgusting surprise awaited him this time, bat cocked and ready to swing. The body offered him no direct danger, however, except the danger of throwing up what little food he had in his stomach. It was the corpse of an obese woman, her skin bloated and stained with decay until he couldn’t tell her race or age. She wore a pink sweater that had been torn into raveled shreds and a skirt hiked way up her thighs. Tim was almost embarrassed to look at her exposed legs. He did, though. And what he saw there did make him turn away and throw up. There wasn’t much left of the woman’s legs but bare bones. The flesh there had been torn away, the skin as ragged as her sweater. To Tim it looked as if the meat had been chewed away

from her form. He looked away, towards her face, and saw part of her cheek and most of her left shoulder were gone too. He knew exactly what he was seeing. CNN had been vague on the details but there’d been plenty of rumors to the effect that droolers had to eat something, that their bodies still needed nourishment, and that their degraded brains failed to distinguish between sources of food. The rumors had it they ate some of the people they attacked, and that sometimes, if they were hungry enough, they snacked on each other. Tim couldn’t tell if the obese woman had been infected before she died. He knew nothing about her—but he knew she didn’t deserve to just be left there rotting in the sun, torn apart by wandering droolers. He couldn’t bury her. She was so big he doubted he could even move her off the road. In the end he just found a newspaper that had blown into the gutter and spread it out to cover her face. He wondered if he should say a prayer but he had no idea what religion she might have been in life. Instead he just bowed his head and paused a moment, giving her a little of his dwindling time as a token of respect. When he was done he turned and headed back toward the smoke plume. He was half a block away from the body when he remembered something Helena had said. Droolers didn’t wander, she’d told him. They were opportunists and they were motivated only by things in their immediate environment. Which meant that whatever droolers had feasted on the woman’s corpse might still be close by. 39. On the ground the smoke lost the sharp definition it had shone from afar. As Tim headed down strip mall-lined Rainier Avenue it still loomed before him but the farther he got the farther it seemed to shrink back. Yet he knew he was entering the plume when wisps of it, black and oily, started curling around his feet. They got caught in the trees, crouching there like half-real giant spiders, or filled up the bright awnings of shops and coffee houses until they were loosed by the wind and spilled free to flash away on the air. The smell got worse with every step. It filled up the back of Tim’s throat and made him cough. It left a nasty residue he could feel on his skin. As he kept moving south it got thicker above and around him, an oily fog that flapped past the disk of the sun and turned its light green and weak. After the first few blocks he had to stop and wrap a spare t-shirt around his face to keep from choking. After a few more blocks even that didn’t help. He sat down on the pavement—the air was slightly clearer down by the ground—and took off the shirt. A nasty yellow stain had appeared where it had covered his mouth and nose and he wondered how toxic it might be. Cancer was the least of his worries, though. He was more concerned with smoke inhalation, which could kill him a lot faster. He wetted down the shirt with a little of his rapidly-dwindling water and that seemed to help.

It didn’t keep his eyes from burning, of course. He squinted through the smoke and rubbed and scratched at his eyes with his filthy hands. Tears tracked down through the soot on his cheeks and he constantly had to wipe them away. He considered finding a car and driving through the smoke. After another few blocks, though, he realized that would be suicidal. The fumes had snuck up on him and now the street was as dark as it might be on a bad cloudy night. He could barely see a few yards ahead of him. On foot that was fine, he could see obstacles before he ran into them, but he knew if he tried to drive through the gloom he would crash into the first abandoned car that got in his way. There were plenty of them, though they were sparser on the ground than the frozen traffic jam had been up on the overpass. The parking lots that lined either side of the street were almost empty but the streets were full of forgotten collisions and vehicles that had been hastily parked and abandoned, trucks that had been half-filled with suitcases and trash bags full of clothes, and plenty of cars that had just run out of gas. From time to time he would see one that was still occupied. Corpses lay head first on steering wheels as if they were just taking a quick nap before they got back on the road. Some cars had been torn open by droolers and dry blood splattered their doors and dashboards. He couldn’t help but think of Karen and Jake. Had Karen been heading for the docks when Phil Nero got to her? He wondered if she’d even had that much of a plan. It had happened so quickly—she had been one of the first victims—had the call for the general evacuation even come yet? Or had she been trying to beat the rush, desperately attempting to get out before the onslaught of humanity that she might have sensed would come howling after her? The bodies in the cars were in pieces, most of them. The skin and flesh had been torn away by human teeth. Tim tried to deny to himself that something similar had happened to Karen and Jake. Then he shook his head and forced himself to face facts. Nero had eaten his wife and child, or at least left them dead for other droolers to snack on. When he got to Seward Park, Tim fully expected to find his wife’s body butchered and mostly consumed. The thought made him feel ill, of course. It also filled him up with a new resolve. One more crime Nero had to answer for. One more violation to avenge. It put a spring in his step, alright. There was another possibility, one he wasn’t ready to consider fully. Karen—or more likely Jake—might not have died when Nero attacked. She could be—she could be infected, could be a—a— A drooler. A soda can rolled down the street, just one more urban tumbleweed. It was rolling against the wind, though. Tim froze exactly where he stood, his baseball bat clutched in both

hands. He tried to open his eyes wider, to listen and smell with all his being. The smoke got in his head and made him want to cough and hack it away but he forced himself to stand stock still while his throat burned and his body surged with the fear. He could hear footsteps, somewhere nearby. He could hear legs rubbing together, that ridiculous noise corduroy makes when it scratches against its own texture. He could see nothing through the smoke. Nothing at all. Then from behind him he heard the can roll to a clattering, rattling stop. Then someone stepped on it with a crunch that made his heart leap. He was surrounded. 40. How many of them were there? At least two but the smoke could have hid multitudes. The fear forced him to breathe deep, to fill his lungs before he fought or fled. That was a bad mistake. The smoke surged into his body and it cringed at the poisonous stink of it, the stale, asphyxiating death smell of it. He doubled up heaving, coughing and puking at once, his eyes streaming, snot falling out of his nose. Behind him the can crumpled again. It must have gotten stuck on the drooler’s shoe. He heard it again, a little closer. Were they even aware of him? He couldn’t smell their yeasty breath, so how could they smell him? He couldn’t see them—how could they find him in the dark? He heard the corduroy shuffle closer. If nothing else they were coming toward each other, maybe just to pass in the smoke, maybe to inspect one another for the proper viral credentials. Either way they would pass right by him, close enough for one or the other to notice him standing there leaning over from the waist. He had to run. He straightened himself up, forced himself to take slow, shallow breaths through the damp fabric of his shirt. He waited a second longer—and then he started sprinting forward, baseball bat clutched tight in his hands. Behind him the tin can scratched on the pavement. The drooler back there had heard him, he knew it. It was coming for him. He dashed forward, desperately afraid of finding the other one waiting with open arms. He turned to the side, ran perpendicular to where he thought the drooler waited. A third one came out of the smoke then, a shadow as big as a man, barely shuffling forward.

Tim hadn’t hit a human being since a few fistfights in primary school. He’d shot some droolers, sure, and he’d thrown a baseball at one. This was different. The bat became an extension of his arms and it swung forward through the darkness with pure lethal intent. It connected with flesh and bone with a jolt that made the bones in his forearms vibrate. His momentum carried him forward another half step and he saw what he’d done. The drooler had been a woman, once, just about Karen’s age. She wore a print dress and a necklace of turquoise and silver. Her skull, just above the line of her eyes, was caved in, a nasty dent in her forehead the width of his bat. Her eyes were still blinking and she stood there looking mostly confused. Her chin and lips were dry and clean. Terror rushed through him as he studied her face. What if she had been a survivor like Sandi Carron? What if, impossible as it seemed, she hadn’t been infected? What if she had heard him coming and thought that finally, after so long, someone was coming to help her? Then a line of black spit pulsed out of her mouth, flecked with bright bubbles. She had been a drooler after all. That made it okay that he had just caved in her head. Maybe it didn’t feel okay. That didn’t matter. Feelings were for later, for when he wasn’t fighting for his life. He watched her fall down and didn’t try to catch her. Behind him in the smoke he heard the swishing sound of corduroy pants again. It was very close, though he still couldn’t see the drooler making that noise. So he ran. He couldn’t see any street signs, didn’t know what direction he was facing. He just ran and hoped for the best. His feet took over and pushed him through the smoke. He was gasping for breath, bright spots bursting and exploding in front of his eyes. His muscles felt loose and weak as if he would collapse at any second. He could see nothing through the tears, couldn’t read street signs, couldn’t find his way even if he’d known where he was going. He ran right into the drooler in the corduroy pants. Before the Flu came along, the drooler had been a big man. Tim could see it in the thing’s jowelly face, in the way its skin hung from its arms and belly like a poncho. It was naked from the waist up, and its swishing pants were down around its thighs, held up barely by a leather belt that had worn white where it had once strained around its buckle. In the days since the infection spread, the drooler had lost a lot of weight. It was almost skinny now. Its multiple chins wagged back and forth as it looked down at Tim where he’d fallen at its feet.

It did not smile or make any sound of excitement as it leaned down to get a bite of him. It didn’t look hungry or disappointed or joyful or afraid or even resigned to its fate. It looked like a man made out of rubber, a clockwork toy designed for one purpose alone. Tim wondered what his own face showed. His mouth was open wide behind the mask of the shirt around his face. His body was uncoordinated, his limbs tangled in a meaningless heap. Did he look like a puppet with cut strings? He yelled at his arms to lift the bat, to fight. His arms failed to respond to his pleas. As the drooler’s empty face came closer and closer Tim barely twitched on the ground. He had so little energy left, his body was so abused and wracked by pain and anoxia that he wondered if he would even feel it when the drooler got him. 41. The drooler’s face came closer. Time seemed to stretch out as it came on, each moment pulled out like taffy. The face slowed as it approached, inching toward him, then proceeding by fractions. It wasn’t just in his head. Tim realized suddenly that the drooler’s arms were flailing madly like flabby tentacles, that the drooler was moving toward him as fast as it could. It was bending from the waist, trying to get down to his level. Clearly it couldn’t bend that far. The drooler looked like he couldn’t have touched his toes before he got infected— what about the sickness would have made him more limber? It wasn’t going to be enough to save Tim’s life. Eventually the drooler would totter over and fall on him. It wouldn’t care if it had to lie down to bite him. To eat him. It did give Tim a fraction of a second to breathe, to gather up the last shreds of his strength. He pulled off his pack, his hands tearing feebly at the straps. He got the zip open. The drooler started to fall forward, its jaws wide. Tim pulled out the revolver just in time. He pointed it up at the face above him just as the jaws clicked shut on the end of the barrel. The drooler’s teeth worked at the gun, worried at it like a dog with a chew toy. Tim had enough strength to squeeze the trigger. Bits of blood and black drool and shredded brains rained all around him. A lot of it got on him, on his clothes, his hands, his face. Tim marshaled enough disgust to roll out from under the still-falling corpse, enough energy to roll clear and lie wheezing in the street. He lay there getting weaker, sucking more and more poison into his lungs, for far too long. He lay there because he couldn’t do anything else. His throat felt raw and diseased. His eyes felt blind, though still a little sunlight got into them, making them hurt worse.

He lay there until he heard the can scratching on the pavement again. The other drooler—the one that had been chasing him—was close again. Too close. He still had the revolver in his hand but he felt ridiculously vulnerable lying there in the street. He felt terrified. Crick-critch. Creech. The drooler didn’t bother to shake the can off his foot. Tim reached down inside of himself and looked for anything he had left. Any kind of strength or belief or just pure desperate survival instinct. He found very little. The smoke had slipped in and pushed all that out of him. Crup. Crup-crup. He put one hand down on the pavement and felt it cold and rough. He pushed against it and his body shifted a little to one side. He closed his eyes, thought of Karen, and with both hands he pushed until he was sitting up. His head swam and the spots that danced before his eyes exploded like fireworks. He didn’t need droolers to kill him, he realized. He was perfectly capable of doing himself in. Clunk. The noise of the can was very close now. Tim was suddenly standing up. He didn’t have the energy to stand up and remain conscious at the same time, so his body just took over and let his brain rest for a second. His eyes cleared slowly and he felt himself wavering back and forth like a reed in the wind. Clup. The drooler was standing right next to him. The fear paralyzed Tim as it never had before, sent his mind shrieking down dark corridors of nothingness and horror. He could no more have raised the gun and fired than he could have jumped into the air and flown away. The drooler wore overalls and a weight belt. The can had wrapped around a pair of yellow leather boots. The drooler’s face was hunched over and tilted to one side. Tim waited for it to bite him. He would try to flinch away at the last second, he told himself. He would try that much for Karen and Jake. The drooler’s face smashed right into Tim’s shoulder, nearly knocking him over. Tim closed his eyes and told himself he’d made a good run at it. If he died trying to avenge Karen and Jake, that was all he could ask of himself, wasn’t it? The drooler head-butted him again. Still it didn’t bite. Even over the stench of smoke Tim could smell its yeasty breath. He could feel its bare whisper of body heat. It slapped at him with one bony hand.

Then it turned slowly on its heel, the can on its foot squeaking noisily. It turned and started off, away, into the smoke. It took one step. Another. A third. Tim’s arm cramped up painfully. He could feel it coming up, stretching out. Without a single thought or impulse on his part it pointed the revolver at the back of the drooler’s head and yanked the trigger. The bullet tore through the side of the drooler’s neck and sent blood spurting out in a long arc. Tim fired again but the revolver was empty—he’d fired all six chambers. The drooler turned to look at him. There was no surprise in its eyes but there was some definite confusion. Then it fell down on its knees and smashed its face into the street. Tim couldn’t understand. What had happened? Why hadn’t it bit him? Why hadn’t it attacked? He looked down at himself and got it, even with his weary brain. He was still wet and dripping with the blood and spit of the drooler in corduroy, the one who’d tried to eat his gun. The drooler with the can on his foot had smelled those fluids and just assumed that Tim was just like himself, a host to the infection. “Good to know,” Tim said out loud in a croaking voice. He bent down and picked up his baseball bat. Then he turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, directly away from the corpse, and started walking. There was no other choice and his feet knew it. As far as he might get before he collapsed, that was as far as he intended to go. 42. He ended up in a parking lot, a fact he could only be sure of because the ground under his feet was broken up by white lines painted every so far on the pavement. He saw something ahead of him, a shadow in the murk, something that was the wrong shape to be a drooler. It was too low, too wide. He pushed on farther, unable to run, barely able to walk. His lungs were cramping up, his body screaming at him that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He felt light-headed and heavy-bodied. If he didn’t get out of the smoke soon, he knew, he was going to die. It was that simple. He reached the shape and wrapped his fingers around cold metal wire. He felt along its length and it started to move away from him. It was a shopping cart, that was all. It had one wobbly wheel. He pushed past it and found another, and then more of them, a whole shoal of them that rattled calamitously as he fell against them. He got down, low to the surface of the lot, where the air was at its cleanest. It wasn’t enough. The smoke was still thick down there and his body refused to breathe properly. He tried to stand back up but it didn’t work. His legs just wouldn’t support his weight. He imagined himself crawling around the lot, miserable, sick, like a wounded animal. He

imagined himself crawling around in circles like that for a while and then collapsing, dying. It wasn’t all that hard to imagine. In his mind’s eye that end was quite clear. He grabbed one of the carts. Hauled himself up its side with the muscles in his arms. They hadn’t been fatigued as much as his legs had by recent events. The cart held his weight, helped him get almost upright. He pushed forward and the cart moved away from him. He held on tight and his feet had no choice but to keep moving. He used the cart like an oversized walking frame, and followed it wherever it rolled. Ahead of him the darkness thickened and grew solid. The cart rolled up a short ramp and then started to roll back. Tim gave it a little shove and it clattered up onto a curb. Ahead of him a wall grew more and more solid, resolved itself into bricks and mortar and a wide glass entrance way. He followed the cart as it rolled forward toward a stretch of dirty glass that chimed as it slid open before him—an automatic door, still functioning. Inside lay a broad open space that was only filmy with smoke. The air was so sweet that Tim gulped at it as if he were drinking a nice cold beer, his lungs stretching out as they absorbed all that beautiful wonderful if slightly stale oxygen. Around him coils and tendrils of smoke leaked into the enclosed space, and jealous of the newfound air he rushed inside and let the doors close behind him. Before him stood a rank of check-out registers, each with its own laser scanner and conveyor belt. Just beyond them stood a waist-high chiller cabinet full of bottles of water. Tim could not believe his good fortune. It was possible he had died and gone to heaven, he thought, as he tore open one of the bottles and brought it up to his lips. The water spilled all over the yellow-stained shirt that covered his mouth and nose and he laughed, then pulled down the makeshift bandana and sucked hungrily at the cold, cold water. The air wasn’t perfect, it still stank of burning fuel. Almost instantly though it revived him, gave him his body back. His vision grew brighter and his throat even felt a little better once it was lubricated. “Now just let this be a supermarket,” Tim said to himself. “And let it have a great selection of canned foods.” When he felt well enough to get up and look around, though, he realized that his luck wasn’t as good as that. Tim had never expected Heaven to be perfect, but he would have preferred if it hadn’t turned out to be a gardening supply store. There were thousands of plants on display, none of them edible. There were piles of tools for sale, wheelbarrows and hoes and rakes and trowels and weeding claws, but none of them looked particularly effective as weapons with which to fight droolers, at least none more effective than the baseball bat already in his possession.

There was no food to be had anywhere in the store. In the back offices he found a break room, complete with a refrigerator that hummed away merrily. Inside he found several half-eaten cups of yogurt and a pastrami sandwich covered in furry blue mold. He was hungry enough to try the sandwich but he knew that it must have been there for over a month. There was no way it was still good. If he ate it and subsequently threw up that would just weaken him further. He had a few crumbs of protein bar left in his pack. They tasted delicious. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, he told himself. The water was what he’d really needed, and there was more of it than he could ever carry. The air inside the superstore was even more to his liking. He sat down in an aisle full of colorful seed packets and just let himself breathe for a while. He could feel that the smoke had done real damage to his lungs—there was a slight hitch every time he inhaled too deeply—and he wanted to rest for a while before moving on. Before going back into the smoke. Just sitting was boring, of course. He wanted something to engage his attention, so he took out his cell phone. That was less than restful, because it gave him two shocks, experienced in rapid succession. The first came when he looked at the clock display. He had less than five hours left before his rendez-vous with Sasha—it had taken him nineteen hours just to get as far as the superstore. The other shock was that the little envelope icon showed at the top of the display, the symbol that said he had messages waiting. Thirteen of them. 43. All the messages were from Buzzard, and none was more than a few seconds long: “Just wanted to know if you were okay. Call me.” “It’s been a while, just wanted to hear if there was any news.” “Sasha says if you want, she can come back early. Call me.” Tim plugged in his phone charger and let them play on speaker while he closed his eyes and took a three-minute cat nap. When the voicemail system’s robotic voice said, “End of Messages. You have… no saved messages,” he clicked the phone shut. It surprised him that the cell phone network was still operational. He’d known the city had power but he would have expected the local providers to shut down their systems during the evacuation. He supposed that Horne might have reactivated them—it would make it easier for his troops to stay in touch while they moved around an area as big as

the city if they could use their cell phones—but he hadn’t seen or heard any sign that Horne’s child soldiers ever went into the city at all, much less carried out coordinated activities there. Maybe the Colonel kept the network up just in case. Tim didn’t suppose it mattered. He picked up the phone again, paged through his call log and found Buzzard’s number. He wondered what he would say to the reporter, other than to tell him he was still alive, or that he’d seen some droolers and killed as many as he could. Sitting there on the floor of the gardening store he thought about that for the first time, really. He had killed the droolers back there in the smoke, and before that he’d killed some near the baseball stadium. He had acted in self-defense, of course, every time. Well, maybe all but once. He thought of the woman he’d clubbed to death with his baseball bat. Once he started thinking about her he couldn’t stop. She’d been Karen’s age. He wondered if she’d had kids before she got infected. He wondered who had bitten her, and infected her—was her husband out there, dreaming of revenge against that one particular drooler, the only one that mattered? If that hypothetical husband could know what Tim had done, how would he feel? Would he add Tim to the list of people he wanted to kill? “Buzzard,” the phone said when Tim dialed the number. “It’s me. I’m still alive.” “I was beginning to work up toward having my doubts,” the reporter told him. “It’s good to hear your voice, Kempfer. Are you done yet? On your way back?” “No,” Tim admitted. “I ran into some trouble on the way.” Buzzard half-grunted, half-laughed in reply. “You don’t say.” “There were some—some infected people, they—” “You mean the ones at the baseball stadium?” Buzzard asked. Tim’s eyes went wide. “You wondering how I know about that? Yeah, I guess you are. Horne told me, guy. There’s something I got to tell you about. I tried plenty of times but you never picked up.” Tim bit his lip before replying. “I just got your messages. But hold up—Horne knows I’m here? I thought you were going to cover for me.”

He could hear the resignation in Buzzard’s voice. “I did my best, kid. Didn’t make a lick of difference. Horne tumbled you himself. He said he’s got eyes and ears all over the Emerald City. Wouldn’t give me details but he said apparently you set off some kind of alarm down by the docks. He got a satellite image of that area and saw droolers milling around in the street. It didn’t take a nuclear physicist to figure out somebody had ‘em riled up, and even Horne was smart enough to figure that had to mean you. He came down on Camp Romeo like a plague from the Bible and now we’re all under camp arrest. Which means we got soldiers watching everything we do.” “Jesus. I’m sorry, Buzzard.” The reporter took a long time replying. “That’s alright, don’t sweat it. Listen, I just wanted you to know what’s going on. So you know to be careful—Horne’s promised he’ll eventually track you down, and I don’t put it past him to send somebody to find you up there. For whatever reason he’s dead set on keeping you from killing yourself—or anybody else for that matter, drooler or otherwise. I know that complicates things for you.” “Yeah,” Tim said. He saw the woman’s face, the dent in her forehead again. “Yeah, this is already tougher than I thought it was going to be. Buzzard—do you think I’m crazy for doing this?” “Absolutely,” the reporter told him. Tim laughed. “Okay, maybe I have a death wish. But you understand why I’m here. Don’t you? You know why I’ve got to kill Nero.” “I think it makes a good story.” Tim started to interrupt but Buzzard stopped him. “Don’t take that the wrong way. Stories are important. Yours is the one thing keeping you going, right? ‘Once there was a man who loved his wife and child so much he went to hell to avenge their death.’ If you didn’t have that—if you couldn’t tell yourself you were working towards some kind of happy ending, what would you do? Blow your own brains out? Curl up in bed like my buddy Duncan and just never get up? No, I don’t think you’re crazy, not really. I think you found a way to stay sane and you got to see it through. That enough for you?” “Thanks, Buzzard,” Tim said, and started to hang up. Then, almost as an afterthought he said, “Wait—there’s somebody—there’s a survivor, at least one, in here.” “Yeah?” Buzzard asked. “Her name is Sandi Carron. She’s just south of the I-90 overpass, near where it crosses I5. Can you find some way to tell Horne about her? So he can send a helicopter?” Jesus,

Tim thought. He’d almost forgot. How deep inside his own ego was he, that he’d almost forgot? “I’ll find a way,” Buzzard said. “Wow. If they pick her up, if they save her—that’ll make you a hero, buddy.” “Yeah. Sure,” Tim said, and clicked the phone shut.

44. Time was running short. Once he’d rested to the point where he felt like he could go on, Tim only had a few hours left to get to his old neighborhood, find and kill Nero, and then hike back. He wasn’t sure if he could make it. If there was one part of that mission he had to cut out, it was hiking back. He knew he would never turn back empty-handed, that he would rather miss his rendez-vous with Sasha than given up on finding Nero. Just before he left the gardening store he made a discovery that could really help him. He’d been bitterly disappointed when he failed to find any food in the store—a lot of his weakness came from hunger—but he did turn up a stack of respirator masks, designed to be worn while applying pesticides. The masks had a plastic cover that fit over his mouth and nose and two filter packs that stuck out from the sides. They didn’t provide any real protection for his eyes but they might help him breathe a little easier. If it got to be too much even with the mask he knew he could pop into any of the stores on Rainier Avenue South and catch his breath. It would slow him down considerably but at least he wouldn’t die of smoke inhalation on the way. As he headed out of the superstore and back onto the road he was almost grateful for the smoke. It would shield him from Horne’s prying eyes, at least for a while. He kept to the middle of the road as best he could, still alert for any threatening shadow that loomed up out of the murk. He moved over to the curb at every intersection to check the street signs, to make sure he was headed the right way and to get some sense of his progress. Otherwise it felt like he was barely moving at all. Each block he walked was the same— cars left willy-nilly in the road, a painted line that ran down the middle of the world and disappeared into the darkness just yards ahead. He kept his pace as quick as he could manage and tried not to let the fear overcome him. It wasn’t easy. As he approached the residential areas to the south, he knew he should expect more droolers, not less. Seward Park and the neighborhoods around it had been the first places where the infection had struck. It was a zone that had never been properly evacuated, a region where the infected had free rein. Karen and Jake hadn’t been the only victims of that chaos. Tim had a full load of bullets in his revolver and a spare speed-

loader. He had a baseball bat, when those ran out. He had some ideas about how to proceed when he truly entered drooler territory, but they were just that—ideas. He had no idea how well they would work, or how long he could survive down there. As always his best plan was just to keep moving. To try not to worry so much about what was yet to come. He walked for what felt like hours but could only have been fifteen minutes before he started noticing more detail in the world around him. He could see the street signs even from the middle of the road. He could tell the make and model of the cars before him long before he was close enough to touch them. He started hearing things again, as well. He hadn’t realized how silent the smoke had been before, not until he began to hear the wind rattling the branches of the trees. Not until he heard a helicopter go shooting by right over his head. It couldn’t have been very high up, though he had no way of measuring its altitude since he couldn’t see it. He heard its chopping noise coming from out of the north, could feel it passing him by on a course headed for the south—maybe for SeaTac, the big international airport, or maybe it was heading all the way back to Fort Lewis. He knew perfectly well who had sent it. Ten minutes later he heard it—or another just like it—coming back. This time the noise came out of the south and it took a lot longer before it fled to the north, its pitch shifting lower until it was something he felt rather than heard. Eventually it was gone. He considered hiding in case it came back. He wondered if it had some kind of infra-red imaging system that could spot him even in the darkness of the smoke plume. He wondered if it had spotted him and was just circling until he emerged from the murk. There was no way for him to know, he decided. No way at all. He would have to press on and be ready to run for cover the second it showed up again. When he saw the sun again, when the visibility had improved until he could see whole blocks ahead of him, he almost wished the plume would shift to follow him, that the smoke would move with him. Still he was happy enough when the smoke broke up into individual tatters. When he could take off his filter mask and breath air that was almost clean. It was raining again, and it felt wonderful—it felt like his skin was being washed, cleansed of the oily residue of the smoke and the worse things that stuck to his arms and chest. Still, he didn’t want to get hypothermia—and he was worried about helicopters. He moved over to the sidewalk, to where he was sheltered from the sky by awnings and overhangs on the car dealerships and veterinary centers. When he saw the sign for South Orcas Street he almost didn’t believe it. He was less than half a mile from home—a distance he could cover in no time. Beyond the commercial

sector of Rainier Avenue stretched an enormous swath of single family homes, lined up almost on top of each other with peaked roofs and picture windows, each with its own little scrap of yard. It was Seward Park—how many times had he thought he would never see it again? How long had he worked and planned and fought to get there? His phone rang in his pocket. Almost dazzled by the sight of home he automatically pulled it out and flipped it open. “Hey, Buzzard—” he began. “Wrong fellow, Kempfer,” the phone said. “This is Colonel Horne.” 45. Tim slapped the phone shut and stared at it as if he held a hissing cockroach instead. It began ringing almost instantly. He tried to let it ring, tried to force Horne to go to his voicemail. Could the Colonel track his location through the phone? Maybe he should just throw it away from him, as far and as hard as he could. Maybe if he didn’t answer it was okay— but no, he didn’t think that was right. For Horne’s call to reach him it needed to establish which cell of the network he was closest to. It had to be routed through a specific tower. If Horne knew which tower he was using, he could track Tim to within at most five hundred yards. Yes. It was best to throw the phone away. To get rid of it. If the Army man caught him now, if he sent his helicopter back to snatch him up, he would never get a chance at killing Phil Nero. He couldn’t let that happen. He just couldn’t— The phone rang again, jangling out the chorus of a Yes song. Almost by habit alone Tim opened it up. Horne would already have his location, or at least the location of the nearest tower. He might as well hear what the Colonel had to say. It might even be useful. Horne might slip up and give away how many men (or boys) he’d sent to intercept Tim. Or maybe, just maybe, Tim could convince Horne that he should be left alone. Fat chance. Still— “I’m kind of busy, Colonel,” he said, putting the phone to his ear. “Are you in danger right now? I’d be happy to lend a hand.” Tim shook his head. “I’m doing just fine by myself, thanks. I’m almost done here. Can I make a deal with you? Can I promise to come back if you just lay off for, say, three more hours?” “No.”

Tim shook his head. “Just like that. Why am I so important to you? I’m just one guy out of thousands under your protection.” Tim could almost hear Horne grinning. “When a man breaks out of prison they don’t let him just go. They don’t say that it’s alright since they still have thousands behind bars. I’m responsible for you, both as one of many and as an individual.” “Then make a deal with me. As an individual.” “I’m afraid I’m not calling to negotiate. I need you back as soon as possible, Kempfer. Frankly, the fact that you’ve been out of my control for this long looks very, very bad to my superiors. The fact that anyone has breached the Seattle Plague Zone has put me in some pretty hot water. If you die out there I could be court-martialed for dereliction of duty.” Tim sat down on the sidewalk. This was going to take a while, he knew. Time he really didn’t have. He stared out at the rain and hardened himself. “I can’t really pretend to feel bad for you, Colonel.” “I’ve never asked for sympathy from anyone I protect, and I won’t ask for yours now. I would hope that a man as smart as you would understand the reasons for everything I’ve done, though. Believe me when I say that the choices I’ve made have all been hard, and that I regret much of what has happened.” “I do understand,” Tim admitted. “I don’t think I would have done things all that differently if I was in your place. But it’s a long walk from understanding to acceptance. I have a job to do, Colonel, and I intend to finish it. I have two people I need to find justice for. That’s the word I’m calling it—justice. If you can’t help me achieve that—” “And if I could?” Tim’s blood went cold. “I don’t know what you mean. Are you saying you would kill Nero for me?” “Hardly. It’s my brief to protect people, not kill them. I can’t kill him just like I can’t kill you, Kempfer, as easy as that would be, and as much as it would help me do my job. But I might be able to help you find some peace of mind. I might be able to reduce your load of guilt by half, if you’ll work with me.” “You’re spouting bullshit now. Trying to confuse me.” Horne laughed. “Oh, I don’t think I’m a smart enough man to do that. You’ve already shown you’re the tricky one. But let me speak for a moment. After you told your story I called down to Atlanta and had CNN send me a digital copy of the tape they took here, the video of your wife fighting that poor infected fellow. They were most obliging. They even sent me some footage they never ran on the air. I watched it all, with great interest. I

watched your wife die. I don’t say that to enrage you. I watched that happen because I needed to understand what drove you. I watched it over and over again until I felt your horror and your need. Then I watched what came next.” “What—what are you talking about, you bastard?” Tim choked. “I watched Nero stumble away. I watched him kill your wife and then leave. Kempfer, do you understand? Your son was still inside the car, strapped into the back seat. I don’t know if Nero couldn’t see inside the car or if he just never saw Jake sitting there. I do know that Phil Nero never laid a hand on your son.”

46. “You’re fucking lying. Stop it.” Tim’s eyes welled over with tears and his hand dropped to his lap, the phone cradled in his fingers now like a precious jewel. Exactly the same way he had once cradled his son’s head, the day he came home from the hospital. Tim and Karen had been so in awe of the child, so in love so instantly it just hadn’t made any sense. Even in the dark weeks had followed—Karen had suffered from some extreme form of post-partum depression, and had even muttered in the middle of the night about harming the baby—the sight of Jake’s tiny face had never failed to make things okay again. Then had come the years of watching him grow. Watching him turn into a boy. An incredibly smart little boy who asked such engaging questions. Who liked to explore on his own. They would take him to a playground and he would go up to each swing, each piece of jungle gym equipment, and study them like a scientist who has met, for the first time, a new form of life, a new variety of rock formation. Jake would spend hours in the sandbox just letting the sand sift through his fingers, watching it fall and catch the light. There had been a brief terrifying period where they’d thought he might be autistic. The child psychologist they consulted had told them that wasn’t the case at all—Jake was just a curious child. One who wanted to find out how things worked and what they were for. It was a sign of very high intelligence, though in a kid that young things like that were notoriously hard to test for. Jake had just started kindergarten when Tim had gone off to Chicago. He had been fitting in fine, quickly making friends and happily sharing toys. All the worries and concerns and sleepless nights had seemed to pay off. Tim’s son was going to thrive, and with his new job as head of reference at Seattle Central it had looked like their little family was going to be moving up in the world. Building something bigger and better than any of them could have had alone. Phil Nero had taken all that away because a virus in his head had bored tunnels through his brain. Because something smaller than the eye could see had moved in and started renovating one perfectly particular electrician’s brain.

“Kempfer!” the phone shouted. Tim stared down at it, torn. He wanted to pick it up and learn more. If he did, though—if Horne told him that Jake was still alive, that he was still a father and therefore had certain responsibilities beyond revenge—that would make everything change. It would take away the pure simplicity, the story Tim had been telling himself. The one thing that had gotten him as far as Seward Park. He had to know. He put the phone to his ear. “Okay. I’m here. Tell me what you know.” Horne sounded almost apologetic. “Maybe it’s better if I show you. I can show you the tape if you want to come back to me. I can show you that Nero didn’t kill your son.” “I don’t need to see that tape again,” Tim said. “It wouldn’t prove anything. Even if Nero didn’t kill Jake while the cameras were rolling, how do you or I know that he didn’t just come back later and finish the job? Or that some other drooler did it for him? No, Horne, that’s not enough. For all I know you could have edited the tape.” “Okay. That’s understandable. How about something else, something a little more tangible?” “What have you got?” Horne smiled down the phone line—Tim could hear it in his voice. “You’re on South Orcas, right? Just south of that smoke plume. No, you don’t have to confirm it. In five minutes I want you to look down the street, toward the west. Your instinct is going to be to run away but fight it. Fight it for yourself, not for me. If you like what you see, you come back to me.” “How do I know—” Tim began, but Horne had already ended the call. Tim held on to the phone like a magic amulet for a second afterward, unable to put it down. Then he shoved it in his pocket. Seward Park was directly to the east. It would take minutes to lose himself in the maze of house-lined streets there, lose himself so thoroughly that Horne’s men wouldn’t find him for hours. He could do it, just walk away from whatever mad demonstration Horne had in mind. He could go, complete his quest, get his vengeance. But what if Horne’s offer was a one-time deal? What if he only got this one chance? What if Jake was still alive? The particulars didn’t matter. He could have been picked up by the evacuation, taken east. He could be living happily with Tim’s parents back east even at that very moment. He

could be sleeping in cousin Angie’s dorm room in San Francisco, if there was still a San Francisco. Jake could be holed up in their house, all the doors locked, eating expired peanut butter out of his last jar. He could be waiting to be rescued. No, Tim told himself, the particulars didn’t matter—at least not until he found out what Horne knew. If Jake was alive then getting revenge for Karen’s death didn’t matter, either. What mattered was finding Jake and protecting him. The five minutes evaporated like water from the bottom of a boiling pan. Tim hadn’t even moved from his spot on the sidewalk when Horne showed his hand. A helicopter— probably the same one he’d heard overflying the smoke—came over the rooftops straight toward him, cutting through the thin rain. It was a light transport copter, maybe a Blackhawk. Tim didn’t know how to tell military helicopters apart. It had a single rotor and a sliding door on its side that could be opened to let troops jump out. The helicopter stopped in midair and then slowly bobbed down toward the street, blasting up a great wash of dust and trash and rainwater that splattered the windows of the stores on either side. It pivoted in the air until Tim could see it side-on, maybe three hundred yards away. The door slid open and Tim peered inside its belly. Standing there, dressed in a poorly-fitted khaki uniform and a comically large helmet, stood a boy who could not have been more than six years old. “Jake!” Tim screamed, and then he started to run. 47. The helicopter bobbed up and down as if it couldn’t quite land—or as if it were taunting him, beckoning him on only to dance away at the last second. Tim didn’t care. He’d never been so unconflicted in his life. He wanted one thing and it was onboard that helicopter. “Jake!” he screamed, his voice torn apart by the chopper’s roar. He didn’t care, he just kept running. Suddenly he was there, even with the bobbing helicopter. Hands reached down and grabbed his, pulled him upward and onto the aircraft’s deck even as it lifted up away from the ground. What was their hurry? Were they worried droolers would come chasing after him, that they would flood on board the helicopter? Someone pushed a helmet toward him but he shook his head and tried to get his feet under him. The boy had been pulled back further into the chopper’s belly, away from the doors. Tim shoved his way through arms and hands that tried to stop him, pushed inward with all his strength. The troop area wasn’t big enough to get lost in. He reached out and

pulled the boy toward him, smelled the familiar boy smells, shampoo in the hair, smelled the skin, pulled the boy into a deep hug. The boy laughed as if he’d been tickled. Tim just held him tighter and tighter. “Mister Kempfer,” someone shouted behind him. “Mister Kempfer, let him go.” “Fuck you,” Tim said, and pulled the boy tighter into his hug. He already knew, of course. He knew. He knew because the smell was just a little wrong. Gradually, a little at a time he loosened his grip on the boy, let his arms loosen. He wanted to prolong the moment because he knew what came next was pure pain. He let the boy squirm out of his arms, finally, and look up at him. It wasn’t Jake. It was a boy the same age as Jake would be, if Jake were still alive. It had all been a trap, and he had walked right into it. “What’s your name?” he asked the little soldier. “Dana,” he replied. “Are you Mister Kempfer?” “Yes, I am. Where are your parents, Dana?” “In Olympia. They sent me to be a soldier with all my friends.” He looked very proud of what he said next. “They’re safe.” “I guess I am too, now,” Tim said, and sat back. A soldier who was maybe eighteen pushed him gently back into a crew seat, then handcuffed him to a rail that ran beside it. “You expect me to jump out?” Tim asked, nodding his head toward the still-open door. He could see the houses and stores of Seward Park sweep by below, at least a hundred feet down. “That would be suicide.” The soldier shrugged. He put a helmet on Tim’s head and adjusted the straps. When he spoke next Tim heard it over speakers built into the helmet over his ears. “We were told you might try anything. Can I have your weapons, sir?” Tim nodded. He felt like such an idiot—certainly he no longer deserved the Ruger or the baseball bat. He would never have used them against the soldiers, of course. Little Dana might have gotten hurt in the crossfire. Without further argument he pointed at his pack and let the soldier draw out the revolver, which he dropped in a red plastic box with a padlock on its handle. The bat he just threw out through the open door.

The helicopter made a tight circle in the air, then streaked south. The door was closed so Tim couldn’t even see where they were headed. No one beat him but they didn’t speak to him, either. The eighteen year old was the oldest person onboard, with the possible exception of the unseen pilot. Three other soldiers, ranging from twelve to fifteen, sat in seats like Tim’s, rifles shipped across their laps. Dana had a special child seat at the back with elaborate straps to keep him from wriggling. “He doesn’t get a gun, I hope?” Tim said, trying to engage the eighteen year-old. “He’s in training.” It was the only response that Tim got. They flew for only a few minutes before Tim’s stomach grew light and he realized they were descending. The chopper set down easily and the soldiers lined up near the door, the oldest leading Dana by the hand. The door slid open and they all jumped out. Through the opening Tim could see a wide stretch of concrete with some tall buildings in the distance. Maybe five hundred yards away a Learjet stood alone, unattended. It looked like SeaTac International Airport. Why he had been brought there Tim had no idea. He was left alone in the crew hold, still handcuffed to his seat. He waited for a very long time, alone with his thoughts, before Colonel Horne appeared in the open doorway and smiled into the dark interior. “Kempfer! How wonderful to see you again. You’ll be happy to hear we picked up Ms. Carron. She was a little dehydrated and very scared, but she’s fine now. She’s extremely grateful to you. As am I.” Tim stared right at Horne. Stared through him. “Hmm,” the Colonel said. “I imagine you probably hate my guts by now.” Tim looked away from the man. It wasn’t that simple. His feelings for Horne went deeper than hate, and they were a lot darker. “I won’t apologize for lying to you,” the Army man said. “I think it’s alright to lie to a man, if it keeps him from killing himself, don’t you?” Horne didn’t seem to expect much of a response. “I do have some things to show you, that much wasn’t a lie. If I uncuff you, do you promise not to strangle me?” “Would you believe me if I said yes?” Tim said, glaring at Horne. The Colonel just laughed.

48. Tim was never given a chance to attack Horne. Armed soldiers—adults, this time— escorted him from the helicopter and into a cavernous hangar where he was allowed to sit

down in a chair before they handcuffed him again. Bright klieg lights shone down across the empty, oil-stained floor, lighting up the only other furniture in the room, a table on which sat a television and a DVD player. Tim figured he knew what was showing. Horne left him there, still under guard. A while later someone else came in. It was Buzzard, wearing his fishing hat and his vest. The reporter looked glum but as he came up to the chair he held out his hand. Tim refused to shake it. “Listen, kid, I know you’re about as mad as ten badgers in a burlap sack, and I don’t blame you. It ain’t me you should be pissed with, though.” “No?” Tim asked. The reporter scratched his head under the ridiculous hat. “No. Maybe I didn’t do you any favors, but there’s bigger things at stake here. When I helped you before I didn’t know what Horne had planned. I thought he was gonna leave us all in Camp Romeo to rot. But it ain’t like that. He’s gonna take us all home. He couldn’t do that until you were in custody, though.” Tim looked at his shoes, which were still splattered with black drool and brain matter. “You gave him my telephone number.” “Yeah,” Buzzard admitted. “I told him about your friend Sandi, right? Just like you asked. Then he wanted to know how I knew about her. What the hell was I supposed to say? Magical fairies told me? I said I’d been in contact with you. He wanted your number and he was willing to make my life very uncomfortable until I gave it to him. Look on the bright side—Sandi gets to live because of it.” “Did you know he could track me through my cell phone? I guess you must have known.” “He didn’t lie to me.” Buzzard came around the side of the chair and leaned against the table. “Maybe he doesn’t tell the whole truth some times, but he’s never lied to me. I heard what he did with the fake kid, and that sucks, I agree.” “I suppose he didn’t lie to me, either. He never said he actually had Jake. I just wanted that to be true so badly I saw what I wanted to see.” Buzzard fiddled with the remote control for the DVD player. “You don’t want to see this, you know. It’s just going to hurt.” “I know.” “But you’re going to watch anyway. Cause you have to, don’t you? You have to know what’s on this disc.”

Tim nodded. He could barely manage to summon up any anger—mostly he felt tired. He turned the chair around to face the television and nodded for Buzzard to do his worst. The footage on the screen was cleaner than what Tim had already seen. The definition was so high that he could make out the license plate of Karen’s car, and even the warning sticker on the side of her hammer. He watched her swinging wildly, watched Nero come at her without even flinching. He could see the emptiness in Nero’s eyes this time, which bothered him. He didn’t bother exploring why. Nero bit Karen, tearing at her flesh. She went down in a bloody heap and the crystal clear footage let him see every drop of her life as it hit the street. It didn’t hurt to watch that as much as he’d expected. It was almost nice getting to see her again, if only through the remove of the television screen. He kept looking at the car, though, rather than at her. Even in the better resolution Jake was no more than a shadow in the back seat. Tim kept hoping that the shadow would give away some detail that would prove it wasn’t Jake at all—that it was in fact just a suitcase Karen had loaded in the back, or maybe somebody else’s son. That hope was shattered when the camera veered away from Karen’s death and focused on the shadow. This was new—Tim hadn’t seen this part. The camera zoomed in a fraction and Tim saw Jake’s arms waving, saw his screaming, crying face. That was when it really started to hurt. Nero started lurching toward the car, Karen forgotten at his feet. His face was smeared with her blood and one of his eyes was squinted closed. He grabbed at the car with unfeeling hands, shook it as if he could rattle hard enough to make Jake come rolling out. When that didn’t work he moved down the side of the vehicle, slapping at its sides, smearing it with blood and black drool. “This is the part that was too rough for tv,” Buzzard explained. Tim shushed him. There was no sound to go with the video but he didn’t want any distractions. This might be the last he ever saw of his son and he steeled himself to take in every last detail, every scrap of information. He needed to know, regardless of whether or not the knowledge would benefit him in any way. The footage rolled on with an inexorability that sickened Tim. There was no flicker to the image, no ghosting of interlaced scan fields. The digital video was clearer and steadier than any film stock. It was like watching something through a window. Jake went crazy in the back, rocking back and forth, his mouth wide, his eyes streaming. He was stuck in his car seat, belted in so tightly he couldn’t get loose. The car seat was designed so that its occupant couldn’t release the straps. That had seemed like an important safety feature when they bought it. Jake had always loved that seat because it had a pattern of airplanes and parachutists. He’d always loved planes.

Nero took another step. Tim could see it in his face as the drooler tried to work out how to get inside the car. He reached—lunged—and then Jake managed to reach over, to struggle just enough free of his straps to grasp the door handle and slam it shut, sealing himself inside the car. Nero bashed at the windows a few times with his bare hands. He stared in through the glass as Jake flinched away, his tiny hands over his eyes. Then Nero just turned and walked away, presumably to look for some easier prey. The screen cut to black, then, without even a credits sequence to soften the blow. Tim wanted more—he needed to know what happened next. There was nothing more to be seen.

49. Horne came in while Tim was still crying, still handcuffed to the chair, still facing the television screen. The Colonel stood a respectful distance away and waited for Tim to get control of himself again. Eventually Tim turned his chair around to face the military man. “He could still be alive,” Horne said. “No,” Tim replied. It was something he knew, deep in his bones. “I have a team investigating right now. We were able to figure out which intersection is shown in the video and they’re going to—” “My son is dead,” Tim said. “You can’t know for sure.” “My son is fucking dead! I wish Nero had gotten him. That would have been quick. How many weeks has it been since that footage was shot? He’s been trapped in that car this whole time, unable to get out of his car seat. Without Karen to set him loose he could do nothing but sit there and be terrified and wonder when his Daddy was going to come save him. He must have been hungry, so hungry, but in the end he almost certainly died of thirst after just a few days. Maybe he had a sippy cup of juice with him, and maybe he didn’t, but either way there’s no chance he made it.” Horne rocked back in his boots as if he’d been slapped. “That’s a hell of an attitude.” “It’s the attitude that got me this far,” Tim explained. “It’s called realism. You can talk all you like about high-minded principles, Horne. You can tell me every life is sacred and that you had to go to all this trouble to save me. It’s bullshit, all of it. While my son was dying of thirst watching droolers stumble around just feet away, I was in Chicago trying

to get laid. The funny thing is I love my wife. I always have. I wasn’t angry with her or feeling some kind of seven year itch. I just saw an opportunity to get some while I was out of town and I thought hey, why not? Karen would never know. Nobody would get hurt.” Horne frowned. “You aren’t being punished for your sins, Kempfer.” “Of course not. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Things just happen. There’s no reason for them, and there’s no big story they all fit into like puzzle pieces. Life fucks us, all of us, again and again and we do what we do to try to make sense of it but that’s a fool’s game. You can’t win. Senselessness is just too big to fight.” Horne’s eyes had glazed over while Tim was speaking. His hands shook as he reached down to undo Tim’s handcuffs. “Come with me,” he said, and nothing more. The two of them walked out of the hangar side by side, the armed guards and a confusedlooking Buzzard following a few steps behind. The rain had stopped and the sun was low and orange on the horizon, not quite hot enough to dry up the wet concrete runway. Thousands of tiny cracks riddled the tarmac, darker than the surrounding material. They had a ways to go. Horne led Tim down a runway that seemed to go on forever, passing empty hangars on the left and right. It almost felt good to Tim to walk under an open sky without the fear that droolers would come running at him at any moment. It almost felt good—except he was pretty sure nothing would ever feel good again. Not like it used to. Ahead of them the runway was cluttered with thousands of white shapes, each about the size and dimensions of a human being. As they got closer Tim saw they looked like marble statues though they also looked stained, which confused him. Eventually they got close enough to see what they were. They were statues of a kind though they didn’t look like stone at all. They looked more like Styrofoam. They had no faces, just blank round heads, and their arms were raised in a gesture of horror. They were all of them identical in pose and aspect, differing only in that some had visible seams running up their legs and sides while others were smooth. Each statue had a dripping dark stain on its shoulders and neck. Some kind of dark fluid had been sprayed on them and it had dripped down their chests and groins. It looked like the fluid had melted them a little wherever it fell. They stood in silent rows, one after the other as far down the runway as Tim could see. “Creepy,” Buzzard said behind them. Tim didn’t even glance back.

“Corn starch,” Horne said. When Tim didn’t respond to that either he explained. “They’re molded from corn starch so they’re fully biodegradable. One good rain would send them all down the gutter and into the Sound.” A pair of uniformed boys wearing elaborate respirator masks were moving between the rows, each of them carrying a heavy spray rig. They took turns splashing the statues with more of the dark fluid. One of the boys turned around suddenly and sprayed his partner across the back. The victim jumped up and down, then whirled to fire back. “Privates! Stand to attention at once,” Horne said, and the boys stopped horsing around and snapped into postures of obedience. Horne had clearly trained them well, even if he hadn’t gotten all the mischief out of them. “What is that gunk?” Buzzard asked. “The Army calls it TZ. Civilians know it as saxitoxin.” Tim nodded, once. “I get it,” he said. “Could you tell me?” Buzzard demanded. 50. Tim stared out at row after row of the corn starch mannequins, then turned to face Buzzard. “You remember the—” he started, meaning to say “the skeletons.” But finishing that sentence in front of Horne seemed unwise. Whatever Horne might or might not know about the looters on Vashon Island, Tim didn’t want to be the one to give away some important tidbit of information. “You remember what Helena said about stereotyped behaviors. About the decision tree of a drooler.” “Sure,” Buzzard said, looking dubious. “They’ll attack anything that looks even vaguely human, as long as it doesn’t smell like it’s infected. That’s the entire process. I had a cardboard cut-out of a baseball player I used to distract them, back at the docks. These,” he said, gesturing at the endless parade of faceless statues, “are more than realistic enough.” He raised an eyebrow at Horne. “You’re going to drop them all over the city, right? One for every street corner?” “Something like that,” the Colonel said. “Yeah, I can see it.” He bent to study the nearest mannequin, careful not to let it drip on his shoe. The mannequin’s legs ended not in molded feet but in a wide, shallow base, a yard and a half across, as if it were melting in a puddle of its own substance. “They’re bottom heavy. You drop them out of the backs of your helicopters and if you do it right they’ll land standing up. You probably don’t need that, by the way. The droolers—”

“The infected,” Horne corrected. Tim shrugged. “The infected—won’t care if they’re standing up or lying down. They’ll attack a prone figure, no problem.” Horne laughed. “We like tidiness in the Army. If they’re standing up they’re also easier to see from a block away.” “Good point.” Tim waved a hand for patience as Buzzard shot him an annoyed look. “So they get these things standing all over the place, looking like frightened people. The infected will attack them simply by reflex. They’ll tear bites out of them, and in the process they’ll get a mouthful of saxitoxin.” “Which is?” the reporter demanded. “It’s a poison. It’s the stuff in a red tide that kills you—it builds up in the flesh of some shellfish. Maybe even geoducks.” “Jesus,” Buzzard said. “How do you know this shit?” “I used to be a reference librarian. I know a very little about almost everything. Don’t ask me for the chemical composition of saxitoxin, or how it works. I do know it paralyzes you, and that it’s lethal even in very small doses.” Horne butted in to add, “Give the devil his due. It’s an incredibly humane toxin. Its victims remain conscious and calm for a few minutes and then they just stop breathing. There’s very little pain.” “Good to know,” Buzzard sputtered. “It’s also an organic molecule that will break down almost as fast as the corn starch statues can melt. So when it’s all over you have no statues, no lingering poison in the gutter. Just a lot of dead bodies. You really think this will work? You’re going to kill the droolers like this?” “Every last one of them,” Horne admitted. “That doesn’t faze you, does it, Kempfer?” Tim shrugged. “I’d be a pretty bad hypocrite if I started protesting for the rights of the infected now, after all I’ve done. The only part that bothers me is the ‘every last one’ bit. No matter how thorough you are there’s no way to account for every single drooler. There could be hundreds of them trapped inside their own houses, and you can’t get them from the air. I don’t think you can get a one hundred per cent kill rate like this.” Horne nodded agreeably. “Probably not. There will be some mopping up. Yet there’s an elegance to this solution I find personally appealing. I don’t suppose you have a very high

opinion of me, Kempfer, but I’ve actually tried to be as humane as possible here. Not just to the infected. The option is to take my men into the streets and shoot everyone we see. You’ve seen my men. Very few of them are old enough to shave. I can’t ask them to commit mass murder, not at their tender age. By dropping the lures—that’s what I call them, lures—out of helicopters I save them from that sin.” “And yourself? What about your conscience? I get the sense you aren’t as cavalier as I am about killing the droolers.” “Oh, no,” Horne chuckled, but his laughter was dry and reedy. “Oh, no, indeed. I have my orders, which are to render Seattle habitable for reoccupation with all due haste. My superiors back east want a success and they want it now. I will fulfill those orders to the best of my ability, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to sleep again afterwards. You may be one of those people living under the popular misconception that the Army’s job is to kill people. It’s not. We exist to protect people, namely American citizens. I abhor the notion of killing the infected—who knows whether or not in some future day a cure is found for the Flu? What if we could just confine them for a while, keep them under wraps until that time? But I don’t have any options, not now.” He put an arm on Tim’s shoulder. Tim didn’t shrug it off. “I said once, Kempfer, that I admired you as a man who wanted to live. Who would do what it took to survive. I meant it then and now, because I think in the end you have a stronger will than my own.” The Colonel’s face darkened. “It’s too damn bad that you couldn’t just play along,” he said. Tim said nothing. “So now you know what you’ve been fighting against. You’re headed for the stockade, now. When I’ve cleaned up Seattle we’ll have to see about getting you a fair trial. You shouldn’t have to spend more than about twenty years in jail, I don’t think.” They were all startled by a loud beeping noise from Horne’s belt. The Colonel took out a handheld radio and lifted it to his mouth. “Horne, go ahead,” he said. “Sir—the western perimeter alarm just went off,” a boyish voice said. “I’m not sure what —” The message cut out as quickly as it had arrived. 51.

Horne started barking orders into his radio. He might be a philosopher at heart but he could shout like a drill sergeant when he needed to. He sent the older soldiers away, toward the hangars and the Learjet sitting out on the tarmac, then turned to bellow at Buzzard and Tim, ordering them to stay close to him until he knew what was going on. The boys with the spraying gear took up a position behind the Colonel, standing at ease. The civilians—Tim and Buzzard—weren’t so easily herded. “Any clues?” Buzzard asked, pulling a pen and notebook out of his pocket. “An alarm went off, that’s all. A simple motion detector out on the western fence. We’d already established there were no infected over there. I strung that one up just on principle. I don’t have video or radar, so it could be anything. It could be a flight of geese taking off. Stay quiet and stay put, alright?” It wasn’t a flight of geese. Tim was the first one to see the van come tearing toward them, crossing over runway lanes, jumping over median strips and knocking down rows of lights. It was a big black Ford van with round black portholes in back and a tinted windshield. A thin red racing stripe ran all the way across its side. The back doors were open and swinging and it had be doing seventy miles an hour. As it got closer Tim saw that much of the paint had been scratched off the hood and one of the headlights was dangling like a popped eyeball. “They must have come right through the fence,” he said, smiling, thinking this was too absurd to be a real threat. “I’m surprised they didn’t blow out their tires.” “You know something about this?” Horne asked. Tim shook his head as the van braked hard, leaving long streaks of rubber across the runway surface. It slewed around to a rocking stop not thirty feet from where they stood and for a moment nothing happened. The five of them just stood there staring at the van, which pinged heatedly in the sunlight. Then men and one woman boiled out of its doors and its back hatch, draped in furs and immaculate leather jackets, carrying heavy assault rifles with laser scopes and shotgun attachments. They moved quickly, though without much coordination, and circled Horne and his group in short order. “Who are you and what do you want?” Horne demanded. Buzzard put his hands up, even though he must have recognized them. Tim certainly did. There was Mikey, the quiet tough guy carrying an AK-47. Sasha, a nickel-plated revolver in either hand, stood next to Pat in his Harley Davidson leathers, who stood next to Tony, the leader of the looters, still wearing his Sonics jersey with the hologram on the shoulder.

Tony ran up and smashed Horne right in the jaw with the butt of his shotgun. The Colonel’s head rolled back but he didn’t go down, just reached up and rubbed at the already-discolored skin of his jaw. “Shut up,” Tony added. Unnecessarily, Tim thought. Tim thought the scene was almost funny. At least he did until Pat worked the action of his big M-16. Then one of the boy soldiers made his big move. Bringing up his spray gun he twisted a knob on the tank at his belt and a billowing spray of TZ hit Pat right in the face. The biker dropped to the pavement instantly, grasping and clawing at his face. Mikey didn’t wait to see what would happen next—he just opened fire. Both boys were torn to scraps as his rifle fired on full automatic at point blank range. Tim screamed something—it wasn’t a word so much as a plea—but it was already too late. Horne grabbed at the pistol on his belt but Tony just hit him again, this time in the stomach. The Colonel went down on the tarmac with a thud. Before Tim could stop him Tony lined up a shot and blew Horne’s brains all over the runway. “What about you?” Sasha asked Buzzard, a pistol tapping him on either temple. “I’m good,” Buzzard said. “What the fuck? What are you doing?” Tim screamed. “What does it look like?” Tony asked. “We’re saving your sorry ass. Come here and give me a hand.” He was down on his knees, wadding up Pat’s leather vest and putting it under his head like a pillow. The biker was slowly turning blue, his face calm but his arms twisted up across his chest as if he were holding on to something for dear life. “Kempfer, tell me what to do! How do I save him?” “He’s been poisoned,” Tim said, sounding like an idiot to his own ears. “So what’s the antidote? What do I fucking do?” Tim shook his head. “I’m… I’m sorry, Tony. There’s a treatment, but we don’t have the drugs or the supplies. I can’t help him.” Tony screamed, then buried his face in Pat’s chest. They all stood there watching him grieve until he was done. Then he jumped up and started walking toward the van. “Come on,” he shouted back over his shoulder. “They’ll be all over us in a second.” Tim had no idea what else to do next. It had all happened so quickly, with no warning at all. He found himself running after Tony just so he didn’t have to stand there feeling lost and confused. Halfway there he turned to look at Buzzard. “You told them that Horne caught me?” he asked.

It was Sasha who answered. “He’s a reporter,” she said. “Telling other people’s secrets is what he does best. Now come on! I for one want to live through this.” 52. They all scrambled into the back of the van while Mikey ran forward to the driver’s seat. It was crowded in the back—there were no seats, just boxes full of guns and candy bars. Tim crowded up against the passenger seat and had Pat’s head shoved into his lap—Tony having decided they couldn’t just leave their friend behind. “Drive,” he shouted at Mikey, and the big guy got the van moving but suddenly there were people shouting on every side of Tim and he couldn’t make sense of any of it. “What the fuck did you do, Tony? What did you fucking do?” “It was self-defense, you saw—” “Those were just boys—two of them, two boys!” “Self-defense!” “And the old guy? He looked important, Tony. Like somebody you don’t fuck with!” “I was defending myself and—” “And now Pat is dead!” “We came here for one reason, which we have now achieved. Yeah?” “For this idiot? For this idiot we came here and killed those people?” “And who the fuck is that one?” “My name’s Buzzard, we’ve actually met.” “Shut up!” “It was self-defense, everybody saw that,” Tony wailed, louder than anyone else. “Guys,” Tim tried to break in, “I’m really grateful that you came for me, but I wonder if we didn’t just create some new problems where—” “You shut up!”

Mikey craned his head around the back of the driver seat. “Where am I going, Tony? Back the way we came?” “Yeah,” Tony said, even as Sasha screamed no. Everyone looked at her. “We got through because they didn’t expect anybody coming from that direction. Now they will all expect us to go back that way. You get us turned around, Mikey, and head north, that’s best, alright?” “Fucking ignore her. Back through the fence,” Tony announced. “She’s right,” Tim tried. “Shut up!” someone screamed, right in his ear. Tim wouldn’t let it go. “She’s right—the Colonel sent soldiers back the way you came, it was pretty much the last thing he did. If you go back you’re going to find serious resistance.” Tony glared at him, then at Sasha. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Fucking okay! Go north.” A hole opened up in the right side of the van, a circular hole about an inch across. It made a sound like a tin can being pried open and sunlight jumped in through the new opening. A moment later another hole appeared, and then a third. For once Tim had no idea what was happening. Then he realized they were being shot at. “Change of plans—head left,” Tony shouted. “Get away from whoever’s shooting us up!” The van veered to the side and nearly rolled over. Pat’s body was thrown off of Tim’s lap and it slapped up against Sasha, who was plastered to the side of the van. As Mikey brought them back down onto four wheels Pat rolled away to hit the floor and Sasha slapped at her jacket maniacally, as if it were full of roaches. Tony laughed. “He’s dead, bitch, he ain’t gonna bite you!” “Fuck you, asshole—and don’t call me bitch. His face was all wet and he got that poison shit on me, that’s all,” Sasha told him, shaking one of her revolvers in his face. Tony grabbed the barrel and tried to pull it away from her. “Guys, relax,” Mikey shouted from the front seat. “We’ve got bigger problems.” Tim climbed up the back of the passenger seat and jumped into it, then fastened his seat belt. He felt a lot safer than he had in the back, even though through the windshield he could see what Mikey meant. There were soldiers in khaki uniforms all over the runway —some of them just kids, some full grown warfighters. All of them were armed. Tim started to point toward the nearest group, a squad of four teenagers who were down in

firing crouches, when the van jumped around him. A bullet had hit the radiator grille and white steam shot up out of the sides of the hood. “Shit,” Mikey spat, and threw the van into another swerve. From the back came noises of protest and hurt. “This was supposed to be easy! This was supposed to be a lightning raid,” he panted. “No muss, no fuss.” “The best laid scheme of mice and men,” Tim said. “Look, over there—” A flurry of shots hit the van all at once, rocking it back and forth on its wheels. One of the tires exploded with a noise far louder than the gunfire, and suddenly the van was leaning over, curving hard to the left, barely on two wheels. Tim was thrown one way then the other in his seat belt. Mikey wasn’t wearing one. The van didn’t have airbags, either. Mikey’s head hit the top of the steering wheel with a sickening crunch, then slammed against his side window hard enough to star the glass. When he slid back down in his seat he left a bloody imprint on the broken window. “Mikey,” Tim said, his own head none too clear after the violent shaking he’d received, “wake up. You’re—you’re asleep at the wheel.” “Jesus,” Tony said in the back. “Jeeeessssus. My arm.” Tim tried to turn around in his seat but his seat belt had frozen in place, binding him tightly where he was. “Sasha? Tony? Are you okay? Buzzard?” “Fuck no!” Tony said. “Mikey, I’m going to personally kick your ass for driving like that, you fuck.” “I’m okay,” Sasha said. “I just bounced off Pat a couple of times. Buzzard’s fine, he bounced off me.” “I think my arm’s broken,” Tony said. “It feels like somebody tried to tear it off. Mikey, did you hear me? Did you hear me you little fuck?” “No, I don’t think he did,” Tim said. He reached over and grabbed the driver’s wrist. There was no pulse. Outside the soldiers had formed a ring around the van, and were moving in, weapons at the ready. 53.

The van knelt to one side, everything in sight off by just a few degrees. It was a maddening difference. Tim’s vision went out of focus for a second, then cleared up. He could barely breathe with the seat belt so tight across his chest. He reached down and tried to unbuckle it but missed the release button, so he had to try again. The back door of the van flapped open and he felt cool air hit the back of his head. He craned around as best he could to look but all he saw were hands grabbing at something moving too fast to follow. Through his side window he saw Buzzard running across the tarmac, his hands up in the air, screaming something Tim couldn’t hear. It had been less than five minutes since Tim and Horne had discussed the big plan to reinhabit the city. A soldier of maybe fifteen years rushed forward toward Buzzard, rifle up and ready to fire. Buzzard dropped to his knees. Tim could see tears rolling down the reporter’s face. “That’s a really good plan,” Tim said, reaching for the seat belt release again. Missing, again. The boy soldier smacked Buzzard across the face with the butt of his rifle. Buzzard slumped to the surface of the runway, either dazed into motionless or knowing better than to make any sudden moves. Other soldiers pressed in closer. “How many people are in that van?” the fifteen year old shouted. “Tell me!” “None,” Buzzard said, and the soldier raised his rifle again. “No!” “Tell me the goddamned truth!” Buzzard lifted his chin off the ground. “I meant they’re all dead. They’re dead!” “Good little fucker,” Tony sighed. “You think they’ll fall for it?” Tim’s thumb found the button at his side. His seat belt released with a clunk and he froze in panic—what if the soldiers heard that sound? Maybe they did hear it, but If they did they didn’t show it. Maybe they assumed it was just the van settling, some part of its battered engine falling into pieces. They ran toward where Buzzard lay, forming a throng around him. Apparently they bought his story. “That just bought us one second,” Sasha said. “One good second. You ready, Tone? Kempfer?”

Tim crawled over the back of his seat. Sasha grabbed a pistol from Pat’s belt and tossed it to him. He nearly dropped it—which he thought would have made a loud enough sound even the boy soldiers wouldn’t have mistaken it. “What makes you think I want this?” he asked. Sasha shrugged. “You got two choices, way I see it. You can turn French and do like your buddy, sure. You can surrender and they can lock you up for the rest of your natural born life. ‘Course, they already think you’re dead so you come crawling out of here they might just shoot on sight. On the other hand, you can come with us, and make some noise, and run for it. You’ll probably get shot, and probably killed, but you got a chance to get away and get your revenge after all. That is something you still want, ain’t it?” Tim wasn’t necessarily ready to answer that question. Nothing else had driven him through the droolers, through the smoke, through Horne’s perfidy. The revelation that Jake had survived the original attack—only to die soon after—had shaken him to the core. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted. It was hardly a time for moral ambiguity, though. “Fine,” he said, “but where are we going?” He stared out at the expanse of runway they could see through the back doors of the van, which looked as arid and empty as the Mojave desert. There was nothing out there but exposure and vulnerability. There were plenty of hangars out where they could hole up and make a desperate stand, but they were far enough away to look like mountains on the horizon. “Do we have a plan?” he asked. “We just improvise. Trust our guts,” Tony suggested. “Cancel that. Look,” Sasha said. She gestured with one nickel-plated revolver at the Learjet standing alone on the runway. “That’s no more than a hundred yards away. What’s your best time at the hundred yard dash, Kempfer?” “Slower than a speeding bullet. But yeah, it’s the closest thing, and at least it’ll give us some cover. We go together, right? On three?” “Ex-fucking-cuse me,” Tony said, “but I’m in charge here.” “Sure,” Tim said. “Alright. What do you think about going on three?” “One two three,” Tony said, then jumped out the back of the van. They got their second of surprise. The soldiers weren’t even looking as they dashed toward the small aircraft, their heads down, their guns up. No one shot at them for almost ten seconds, and then only half-heartedly.

Tony ran backwards and started squeezing off rounds from a Mac Ten almost immediately. Sasha pointed her revolver backwards and fired randomly, not intending to hit anyone. Tim didn’t shoot at all—he just ran as fast as he humanly could. Bullets chewed up the tarmac in front of him but none got close enough to make him flinch and nothing could make him stop. Breath surged in and out of his mouth as he came around the nose of the Learjet and fell down into a crouch behind its forward landing gear. A moment later Sasha and Tony followed. They all got down as low as they could and Tim put his fingers in his ears to muffle the sound of the machine gun volleys he expected at any moment. When no one shot at him he was only confused. 54. Tim moved a fraction of an inch at a time, exposing as little of himself as possible as he moved back from the landing gear that was his only cover. He looked under the fuselage of the Learjet, expecting to be shot in the eye. No bullets were forthcoming. He could see the boy soldiers moving, probably taking up positions from which to fill the plane full of lead, but for the moment they weren’t actively trying to kill him. He decided to take a risk. He stood up. Then, with one smooth motion, he twisted the handle on the Learjet’s main hatch and then pulled down. The door slid easily open on counterweights and revealed a short flight of stairs leading up into the cabin. Tony went first up the stairs, holding onto his bad arm. Sasha followed and then Tim, who pulled the hatch shut behind him. He ran from side to side of the plane, watching as the soldiers moved to circle them. Still no one fired a weapon. “Holy fuck yes,” Tony said. He’d found a bottle of bourbon which he decorked with his good hand and then sucked at hungrily. “You cannot imagine the amount of pain I’m in right now. You would need a thesaurus to describe it properly.” “Stop crying, baby,” Sasha said, slumping down in a leather-covered swivel seat. There were six of them arranged around a mahogany coffee table in the middle of the cabin. Tim took a second to look around. He had to whistle he was so impressed. The walls were lined with green velvet and the floor swallowed his feet in luxurious shag carpet. The bottle of bourbon had come from a fully stocked, if miniature bar and there was a four burner stove in the galley at the back of the plane.

Mounted on the ceiling were three huge flatscreen panels that could be pulled out on flexible arms and arranged any way one pleased. Behind a panel in the purser’s closet were a DVD player and a top of the line computer server. “What is this, Bill Gates’ personal plane?” Sasha asked. “Maybe,” Tim said. Sasha found a pair of soft slippers in a compartment under her chair. She pulled off her boots and put on the slippers and closed her eyes in pure contentment. Tony just drank and brooded. Tim shook his head. They were still in immediate and certain danger. The soldier would attack the plane at any moment. Then again, maybe they wouldn’t. “I think they have orders not to shoot this thing,” he said. “Horne must have been saving it for something special. Maybe he own personal getaway vehicle.” In the end, though, Tim knew he wouldn’t have used it. Whatever his sins or excesses the Colonel had been committed to Seattle’s reoccupation. He had planned on seeing it through to the last detail. Then the looters went and shot him. Maybe, Tim thought, Horne had kept the plane the way some recovering alcoholics keep a bottle of liquor around. On bad days Horne could tell himself he always had an escape route. On good days the plane would remind him just how firm his resolve was, that even in the face of obvious salvation he would accept his damnation with equanimity. Or maybe Bill Gates was coming back for it, who knew? “Don’t know, don’t fucking care. They try to come through that door and I will personally ventilate them,” Tony said. Sasha had discovered that her chair would massage her back if she pressed the right button. She pressed it repeatedly. “Jesus,” Tim said. “What are you two made of?” He rethought the question. “Why the hell did you do this? Why come for me? You don’t owe me anything.” “Hell yes I do,” Tony said. “You saved my brother.” “I… did?” Tim asked. It wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. He had cheated Tony with the thorazine he’d given him, selling him sedatives as if they were a vaccine for the Flu. If anything he’d expected Tony to come howling for his head, guns blazing as he tried to get revenge for Tim’s fraudulent deal. Sasha’s eyes went very wide, though, and Tim knew better than to say too much. “Those pills I gave you worked okay?”

Tony grimaced and drank more. Already his words were growing thick and running together. “Sure did. I gave him one myself and like twenty minutes later he started to calm down. It was amazing, dude. After an hour he wouldn’t attack me, even when I poked his chest. He was on his way to being okay.” “Then you had to go and fuck up,” Sasha said. “Yeah. I had to go and fuck everything up.” Tony gritted his teeth and looked away. “I thought, you know, one pill makes him calm, maybe two will make him even better. Maybe five will cure him. That makes sense, right?” “Sure,” Tim said. He wondered how old Tony was. He looked like he was in his early twenties but maybe he was younger. Had he never heard of an overdose? Again he decided it was better not to say some things. “He got real quiet, and real peaceful. He looked like he used to, like he was my braw again. It was so awesome. Then he fell asleep. I don’t think he’d had an hour of sleep since he got bitten. I can not tell you how grateful I felt to you at that moment, man. My Mom cried. Like a lot. We took him upstairs and put him in bed and said goodnight, and let him sleep.” Tony shook his head. “In the morning. In the morning—” “He went peaceful, that’s what you remember,” Sasha finished. “That’s all you need to remember. Your bro died in his sleep, which is more than we can ask for now.” Tim sat up with a jerk. He peered out the round windows of the plane and saw the soldiers closing their ring. They still weren’t firing—but in a few seconds they would be right on top of the Learjet, surrounding it on every side. What happened then was anybody’s guess but Tim expected it to be painful. 55. Tim rushed to the jet’s hatch and looked for a way to lock it. Nothing immediately presented itself. The soldiers outside could just turn the latch and open the door the way he had and there was no way to stop them. He didn’t think they would come rushing inside, not with three armed, desperate people onboard. The boy soldiers were trigger-happy but he didn’t think they were stupid enough to poke their heads in a place where they were likely to get shot. He knew for a fact that Tony would just start shooting if they did. That didn’t solve any problems, though. The soldiers could just sit out there and wait and eventually Tim and the looters would have to come out. The soldiers could call up reinforcements, and maybe heavy weapons. They apparently had orders not to damage the plane, but they could bring in tear gas or flashbang grenades or—or they could just pump liquid saxitoxin into the plane until the three of them were dead.

Eventually the soldiers would figure out a way to retake the plane. There was food onboard and plenty of water but long before they starved the soldiers would figure out something. Or they would just get bored enough to disobey their orders—especially now that Horne was gone and could no longer enforce those orders—and just blow up the jet. It was a losing proposition, no matter how Tim looked at it. “So are you going to say thank you?” Tony demanded. Tim glared back at him with wild eyes. Thank you? Horne had captured Tim, and yes, the looters had removed him from that situation. He couldn’t think of a single way in which his life was better than it had been an hour before, though. He couldn’t see any upside to what Tony and his crew had done. Then again, Tony was probably thinking the same thing. He’d risked a lot—including his own life—to repay his imagined debt. As far as he knew he had saved Tim from a fate worse than death. “Thank you,” he said, trying to sound sincere. “You have any ideas about what we do now?” Tony raised the half-empty bottle of bourbon and waggled it in his hand. Sasha clucked her tongue and climbed out of her chair. “I’m going to ask you one easy question, Kempfer, alright? Can you handle that, or are you too freaked out?” Tim studied himself. His pulse was racing, he was breathing too hard. Fear—not the fear the droolers engendered, just normal, garden variety terror—had a hard grip on him. He forced himself to calm down. To swallow all the spit in his mouth. “Okay,” he said. “Alright.” Sasha nodded. Speaking softly and slowly she asked, “You’re a bright guy. You seem to know a lot of things.” Tim shrugged. “Okay. Do you know how to fly a jet plane?” He nearly laughed. He nearly fell down and cackled maniacally and lost it right then and there. Instead he closed his eyes and counted to ten. “No,” he said. “Not even a little bit?” He shook his head. Sasha sat back down. “Then I’m out. I guess this is it.”

Tim sat down in one of the very comfortable chairs and put his face in his hands. He imagined the Learjet screaming down the runway, then lifting into the air on sleek wings and banking away high over Seattle. In his vision he had no destination in mind but he knew the plane was headed far, far away, away from everything that had gone so horribly wrong. He dropped his hands. He looked into empty space. That wasn’t good enough. Even if he could have flown the plane he knew he wouldn’t have done it. He wasn’t finished with Seattle. He wasn’t finished with revenge. Things had gotten—complicated. But the basic drive, his need, his duty to Karen and Jake was still there. He could still reach for it and it could still give him strength. He stood up. Then he went forward and opened a thin door that separated the cabin from the cockpit. There were two seats in there and an enormous number of dials, switches, toggles, gauges, computer screens and unidentifiable controls. He saw two things, though, that he recognized. He saw a main power switch—it was clearly labeled—and he saw a control yoke. “Strap yourselves in,” he told the looters. Tony looked at him in pure confusion but Sasha started reaching around the seat for her safety webbing. Tim dropped into the pilot’s seat and switched on the power. The plane whined beneath him and lights came on all over the control console. He didn’t know what any of them meant but that didn’t matter. Through the windshield he could see the soldiers jumping away from the plane as if it had become electrified. “Kempfer?” Sasha called from back in the cabin. “You doing something cool up there? Something I ought to see?” “Just hold on,” he shouted. “And get Tony secured if he can’t do it himself. This is going to suck in a minute.” He pushed forward on the control yoke. Nothing happened except a light started flashing on the board. He looked over and saw that it said SAFETY BRAKE ON. He pushed it and it went dark. Then he touched the yoke again. The plane moved forward. Slowly, smoothly. The soldiers in front broke and ran. Tim gave the yoke another push and the plane sped up, taxiing up the runway, headed due north. An alarm went off and Tim panicked for a second—then found a light that said FASTEN SEATBELTS DURING ALL MANEUVERS. He cursed as he realized he hadn’t secured himself. With trembling hands he pulled a belt across his lap and another across his shoulder.

The plane kept speeding up. It accelerated much faster than he’d expected. The runway blurred under his wheels as more alarms went off and more lights lit up. Dead ahead he saw a fence coming toward him like a brick wall.

56. Tim started to scream, then. He had no intention of flying the plane—he planned on taking it right through the fence. He’d had no idea what the fence would look like. It was fifteen feet high, with nasty-looking barbed wire strung along its top. At its bottom stood a concrete wall three feet high. There was no time to turn the plane, no time to do anything. Tim threw his arms across his face as every thought was torn bleeding out of his head. The plane continued on its course, the only thing it could do. The laws of physics determined what happened next. The nose of the plane hit the fence and crumpled, ruining hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of electronics. The fence bowed out, then snapped open like a cut cable, lashing out at the trees that lay just beyond. Then the front landing gear hit the concrete wall and snapped off. The plane flew forward like a javelin, smashing through the branches of the trees. The windshield cracked with the impact and then popped out of its frame, flying backward to crash against Tim’s arms and bash his forehead. The left wing sheared off all in one piece and the plane spun to one side, still sliding forward through the trees and across a stretch of overgrown grass. It spun as it careened across the grass and started to roll over. The remains of the right wing, battered and torn, dug deep brown furrows in the earth and slowed down the plane’s headlong rush but couldn’t stop it. Then the grass ran out and the plane jumped over a curb and came screeching down on a feeder road full of abandoned cars. The fuselage smacked an SUV with its nose, then hit a Cooper Mini like a golf club hitting a ball. The Mini absorbed much of the plane’s remaining momentum and went spinning and bouncing end over end. The plane stopped there, though it continued rocking back and forth for a while. Parts of it collapsed in on themselves while others just fell off. Tim had lost consciousness for much of the crash. When his eyes opened again they were full of blood. He couldn’t breathe—something was pressed against his face. With arms that felt like they’d been shredded he pushed away a piece of the windshield and then he sank back in his chair and just tried not to die. He heard a groaning noise behind him. “Sasha? Tony?” he asked. “Are you alive?”

“Oh, shit,” Sasha said. Tim clawed at his seat and shoulder belts and tried to get up. The control console was tilted down across his legs and he panicked, thinking he was trapped. With some furious wriggling, though, he was able to get free. “Sasha? What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Tony threw up all over the place. Bill Gates is going to be pissed.” Tim laughed hysterically and then forced his way back to the cabin. The mess was unbelievable and the plane was totaled. All three flatscreens had snapped off their mountings and lay shattered in the back. The carpet was torn up where the bottom of the fuselage had torn open in several places and one of the massage chairs had been crushed where the side of the plane had caved in. There were tiny bags of peanuts everywhere, some of them having burst open and thrown nuts all over the cabin. Sasha looked fine. Tony looked like death warmed over. “Thank God we lived through that,” Tim said. “It was the best plan I could think of.” “You did fine, Kempfer. Help me with this idiot.” Tim knelt down by Tony’s side and unfastened his seat belt. The looter was minimally conscious, barely able to open his eyes and groan. His arm, previously broken, now hung limp from his shoulder. Blood slicked the arm from his elbow down to his wrist and Tim thought he saw shivers of bone poking out through the skin. “He needs medical attention, and soon,” Tim said. “Yeah. Well, the soldiers will take care of that.” She checked her pistols and shoved them back in their holsters. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” Tim stared up at her. “We can’t just leave him.” “Sure we can. If we stay here the soldiers will catch up with us and they will shoot us. Do you feel me? They will shoot us. Hopefully they won’t shoot him, just arrest him. That’s the only way he’s going to get medical help now.” Tim bit his lip. He knew she was right. “Okay. Let’s get out of here.” “Glad to see we’re on the same page.” Sasha hurried forward to the hatch but found it crumpled shut. She lead Tim forward to the cockpit and they crawled out through the empty viewport, then slid down the blunted nose of the plane and onto the asphalt. Tim looked back at the fence—or where the fence had been—but there was no sign of any military presence there. The soldiers had been on foot, and he figured it would take them a minute or two to catch up.

He turned around and saw that Sasha had started walking away. He rushed to her side and saw where she was headed. “Our only real option now,” she said, “is to requisition one of these vehicles and hightail it, right? Now, a car couldn’t get through this mess.” She pointed at the endless traffic jam. “This might do.” She had found a motorcycle, a sleek narrow thing with one headlight standing alone, propped up on its kickstand. The keys were still in the ignition. She started up the machine and watched the fuel gauge needle kick up. “Come on,” she said, and then, “Yes!” when it showed half a tank of gas remained. “I’m driving,” she said. That was fine with Tim. 57. Author's Note: Because Monday is a holiday in the US, Chapter 58 will appear either late Monday or early Tuesday. Chapter 59 will appear on Wednesday, at the usual time. Have a great weekend. The feeder road was lined on either side by high fences, so there was only one way they could go. It lead deeper into the city, farther away from Vashon Island. That was fine by Tim but he wasn’t sure how Sasha would feel. Even on the motorcycle they had a hard time dodging around the abandoned cars. Sasha took her time, wheeling them around and around until Tim felt carsick. She never stopped moving—the soldiers had helicopters, and could follow from the air. It was crucially important to get some distance from the airport before those choppers scrambled. Time kept moving, too. Darkness fell before they found their way out of the maze of roads around SeaTac. The roads cleared up a little as they shot out into a grid of residential streets but Sasha actually had to slow down. Every third streetlight flickered into life but failed to shed enough lights for them to read the street signs as they rolled past. They had to stop frequently to make sure they didn’t get lost. Sasha seemed to know where they were going. Tim kept wondering when she would turn west and head back for the Sound and for the Island—if she did, he would have to convince her somehow to head northeast instead, toward Seward Park. She passed up every good chance she had to turn off, though, and eventually he realized she was taking him home. He had no idea why she would do that. It could only put her in danger. “You know what I’m here for, don’t you?”

“Revenge, yeah. Buzzard told me the whole story about the guy who ate your family.” Tim bit his lip. “I get why Tony owed me—” he said, but she cut him off. “Why he thought he owed your sorry white ass,” she said, laughing. “We both know what happened, don’t we? I know, anyway, what kind of pills you gave him. Goddamned thorazine. Like that was going to help.” “You knew what it was?” She shrugged. It was hard to hear her over the roar of the engine but her voice was clear and she knew how to project. “My Dad went a little crazy before he died. Started hearing stuff in the night time, voices calling him and all. He would toss and turn all night and sometimes he would get up and walk around the house, looking for where the voices were hiding. The doctors gave him all kinds of drugs to try to calm him down, to help him sleep, and thorazine was one of the ones that actually worked for a while.” “So you knew what I was doing. You know that I was trying to trick Tony, but you didn’t stop me.” “I saw that pill bottle and thought, shit, if it calmed the drooler down maybe we could all sleep a little better. Then when it seemed to work I was just happy for Tony and his Mom. They were so damned excited. I knew what would happen after that, of course. The drooler would build up a tolerance and eventually it would stop working. So I fed him that line about if one pill was good, then two would be better.” Tim was shocked. “You must have known—” “Guy, the best thing you can do for a drooler is put him out of his misery. Who wants to live like that? I was doing everybody a favor—especially Tony’s Mom.” It wasn’t what Tim would have done, given any other options. He could follow her logic, though, and even admit she could be right. “Okay, but that just begs my next question. Why are you helping me now?” She shrugged again. “I know you ain’t done yet, and that if I try to turn around you’ll just jump off the bike. Let’s just say I got no desire to head back to Vashon all alone.” She stopped the bike and looked around. “We turn right here, yeah?” Tim looked at the street sign she pointed out. “Yeah,” he said. “You know this place pretty well. Are you from here?” “I lived in Ballard before this. But I know the whole town, mostly. I used to be a taxi driver.”

“Seriously?” She looked at him over her shoulder. “Uh-huh. I’ve been all over the Emerald City. It was the only way I could make ends meet. Then the world went and ended and here I am, driving the white folk around still. Alright, hold on.” Tim grabbed the sides of the bike seat as she wheeled them around and headed north. “This might not be it, you know,” he told her. “What do you mean?” “The end of the world. This might not be it. I know things look bad, but it sounds like the government actually has a plan to fix things. Horne was going to poison all the droolers so people could move back into their homes.” “He the one got his brains scrambled back there?” “Yeah,” Tim admitted. “But that doesn’t mean the plan won’t go ahead. That’s one thing the Army’s pretty good about—if the guy in charge gets killed, they already have somebody else ready to pick up right where he left off. In a month Seattle might not be a Plague Zone anymore.” “Tony’ll hate that. Hey, though—that’s good for you, isn’t it? You can just let them kill your guy. Problem solved.” Tim laughed bitterly. “Nope.” “Why not?” she asked. “Why not just tell me to head back to Vashon where we can hole up for a month in fine style, then come back when they’re done—you can even identify the body afterwards, if you need that.” “It’s not the same. I owe my wife and my son a debt. Letting somebody else get revenge for me won’t fix what’s broken. If I don’t do it I’ll never forgive myself.” “Fair enough,” she said, and goosed the throttle.

58. They saw their first drooler a few minutes later. It was a woman in a print dress, stained down the front with black saliva, her hair hanging out of her head in thin ribbons. She stood slumped over a trash can as if she were throwing up into it—or searching for a meal inside. In the pale, thin street light she looked like some kind of undersea creature, pulpy, pale and bloated, her skin pocked with sores as if fish had been nibbling on her.

When she saw them approach she swiveled around on her heels and started lurching toward them. Tim reached into his pack for his gun but Sasha shook her head. “Leave her alone,” she said, and gunned the bike forward. The drooler couldn’t keep up and soon she was lost in the darkness behind them. “It’s never very smart to leave one of those things at your back,” Tim told her. “If we end up going back this way she’ll be waiting for us, and we might not see her until it’s too late next time.” “Yeah, maybe so,” Sasha said. “So let’s go back and take her down,” Tim tried. “Nah.” “Why the hell not?” “Because she didn’t hurt anybody!” Sasha yelled over the noise of the engine. “I can’t ice some bitch just because she’s sick. I’m not built that way.” I am, Tim realized. He’d never had a real moral quandary about killing droolers. The closest he’d come had been when he executed the drooler in the bus, way back on Interstate Five. That had felt a little weird. But not overly wrong. Horne had noticed that cold-bloodedness in him. It was part of what had impressed the dead Colonel. Even Horne had blanched at the thought of just killing droolers indiscriminately—what did that make Tim? A sociopath? If so, he decided, then so be it. It would make it easier when he caught up with Nero. He expected to see more droolers as they got closer to Seward Park and he was not disappointed. The residential zone was the epicenter of the Flu outbreak and it was the first part of Seattle to be abandoned and surrendered to the droolers. With each block they covered he seemed to see more of them. Glancing down an abandoned alley, he would see a pair of them climbing on a dumpster, or ambling through the shadows between street lamps. If they were more than a couple hundred yards away they didn’t pay any attention to the motorcycle, as loud as its exhaust might be. When they were closer they would turn to follow the vehicle, their faces tracking it like spectators at a tennis match, but rarely did they take even a step after them as they passed. They got a bad scare when they came around a corner and a drooler jumped out right in front of the bike, one pale arm snatching at the air between them. Sasha cursed as the bike stalled and Tim almost fell off the back. The drooler’s mouth was wide and full of yellowed teeth, his face thin and drawn and streaked with black. “Go, go, go,” Tim said,

pounding Sasha on the back. She screamed something back at him he couldn’t understand —the fear was too big in him, it had claimed his stomach and his brain and robbed him of any courage. He was too scared to even think of reaching for his weapon. The drooler took a step toward them, or tried to. He lost his balance and fell down on his bony posterior, as if he’d been yanked backwards. When Tim had calmed down a little he saw what had happened. The drooler was handcuffed to a stop sign. “Who did that?” Sasha asked, walking the bike. “A cop, I guess,” Tim said. “Back when this all started.” Had the drooler bitten the cop in the process? Tim wondered if they would see the cop next. “We must be getting close to my house.” “Almost done, huh? That’s good,” Sasha said. She would have said more but instead she looked up at the night sky—then grabbed Tim by the collar and pulled him away from the drooler and out of the street. Pressing her back up against a house wall she flung an arm across his chest to keep him back as well. She must have had incredible hearing. Tim had no idea what she was doing until he heard the chopping noise of a helicopter rotor quartering the night. He never saw the aircraft as it passed right over their heads, its noise drowning out his thoughts. “So much for our head start,” she whispered to him. Tim nodded. He’d been afraid of this. The Army wasn’t about to just give up on capturing him, not after what the looters had done to Horne. The soldiers must have set up search teams right away. They must have discovered the crashed plane—and hopefully found Tony still alive inside—and immediately scrambled their air units. “You think they’ll come in here on foot?” Sasha asked. “No,” he said. He knew they would play it safe. They couldn’t afford to lose any more men or boys just to capture two fugitives. “They’ll stick to the air. Unless, well—” “Unless what?” “Unless they decide to send in tanks. I’m sure they’ve got a few at Fort Lewis. But it’ll take a while to get them up here.” “Then let’s hurry,” Sasha suggested, “and get this done with.” She got them moving again, taking her chances with moving faster this time. At least she did for a few minutes—until she suddenly hit the brakes and turned the bike sideways, stopping short in the middle of an intersection. She had good enough reason. Dozens of

droolers stood halfway down the block ahead, just upwind. They were clustered around something, their bodies so tightly packed Tim couldn’t see what it might be. 59. “Jesus,” Sasha said, “there’s too many of them. We’ll have to go back and find another way ‘round.” “No. There’s no time,” Tim said. He watched the mass of droolers swarm over each other, climbing over each others’ backs, pulling and tugging at one another. They were jockeying for position, trying to get at something he still couldn’t see. It was big, whatever it was. Maybe as big as a car. “So we mother-fucking make time. I ain’t going into that, not even with all the bullets in the world.” Tim squinted into the darkness. There was something—something red underneath the mound of bodies. Not the red of blood but the color of metallic paint. The kind of paint used on cars. “I wonder—” he breathed. “What? You wonder what, man?” Ice cubes clinked together in Tim’s stomach. He started to look up and around, peering through the low light looking for street signs. He was afraid he knew what he would find. “Oh, shit,” he said, because he’d been right. He knew this intersection. Of course, the last time he’d seen it had been in broad daylight. He’d also seen it from above, looking down through the lens of a camera onboard a helicopter. He’d seen it on CNN, and then again on digital video disc in a hangar at SeaTac. This was the intersection. It was no more than five minutes from his house. It was the place where Karen and Jake died. He was almost completely certain that the droolers packed into the street in front of him were climbing over and around his own car, the one Karen had used to try to escape the chaos. The one that had failed her at exactly the wrong time. This was it, then. He’d come back to the place he’d started from. He had finished the journey. He scanned the crowd of droolers for Phil Nero’s face, but didn’t see him. He winced and looked again for Karen but she wasn’t there either. As had happened before he felt life compressing, narrowing down to a single sharp point. Everything else fell away. He felt as if he were racing down a tunnel at incredible speed looking at the single point of light at its end. He felt like iron blinders had come down

around the edges of his vision and he could see nothing but the rising and falling throng of bodies. He climbed off the bike. “What the fuck, Kempfer? Where are you going?” “I have to see,” he said. He didn’t bother to explain further. “You can wait here for me if you like. You can leave if you want to. I don’t know if I’m coming back.” “You’ll get yourself killed, you idiot! Don’t you take another step.” Tim shook his head and pulled the gun out of his pack. It felt flat and cold in his hand, like a tool. Like something you would use to achieve a very specific end. “At least let me help,” Sasha said, grabbing his arm. It felt like the icy surface of a frozen lake cracking open. Suddenly he recovered himself, looked around and saw things the way they were again. “Yeah…” he said. “Yeah. Listen. I have an idea here but you have to really trust me. Do you?” “Of course not.” Sasha stared at him. She was breathing hard, he saw, and he wondered if she was scared too. Of course she was, he decided. The fear wasn’t his alone. “What’s the idea?” He smiled coldly, then lead her back up the street, away from the pile of bodies. He took her as far back as the drooler handcuffed to the street sign. “I almost got killed a while back. A drooler almost bit me. I shot him, just in time, and got his blood and spit all over me.” He stepped closer to the drooler, who was silently lunging for him. He leaned back as its loose hand swung out at him. As the drooler spun around, recovering from the wild swing, he stepped in and blew its brains out, splattering himself with its fluids. Just like before. “I think I’m going to throw up,” Sasha told him. “Don’t—that might change your smell and ruin the effect.” The yeasty stink of the drooler’s infection filled his nostrils and his throat, making him want to gag too. He grabbed the dead drooler’s face and hauled it upward again, smearing black spit over the palm of his hand. “Come here,” he said. Eventually she did. He wiped the drool across her shoulders of her fur coat before she could jump back. “It dries out after a while and then it’s useless,” he warned her. “We need to move fast.” He lead her back to the throng, pressing in closer this time until a couple of them looked up and sniffed the air, their vacant eyes rolling in his direction. Behind him Sasha moved

in, though not as fast, her nickel-plated revolvers out and in her hands. Tim drew his own gun and stepped closer. The droolers looked up one by one—and then looked away, their attention turning once more to the car they hid with their bodies. Tim tried to push his way in through their arms and heads and legs. Individually they were quite weak and he was able to haul them away from the car, but en masse they resisted him like a brick wall. “Get the fuck back,” he howled, suddenly desperate. He kicked and scratched and dragged at the bodies, but even as he got them to move, even as he shoved them away they just scrabbled and fought to get right back to the car. A heavy grunt sounded from the mass and Tim jerked backwards, uncertain what was going on. He saw Sasha yanking droolers off the car, one by one. Helping him. “Don’t waste time looking at me,” she shouted, grabbing another one and throwing it down in the street. Tim nodded and went back to prying the bodies off the car. He could make out its shape clearly now and he saw he’d been right. It was a red Nissan Sentra. When the license plate was uncovered it had the right number. A drooler grabbed his arm. Not in an aggressive way—it just wanted to get back to clawing at the windows. He started pushing it away and then he recognized the sweater it was wearing. It was Karen. Sasha reached for Karen’s arms to pull her away. “Stop,” Tim said, staggering backwards. Karen was infected, like all the rest. She was horribly wounded where Phil Nero had bit her but she didn’t look like she was in any pain. She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t look at him, even when he called her name again and again. “You know her,” Sasha said. It wasn’t a question. “You do what you got to do.” Tim nodded. It was what he owed her. This isn’t Karen anymore, he told himself. It didn’t help. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he whispered. Then he brought up his gun and shot her right through the head. His arm thrummed. His body shook. This was too much—he was going to vomit. He was going to die on the spot of sheer heartbreak. And then nothing happened. He didn’t die and he didn’t throw up. Had he come so far, he wondered? Had he become somebody who could do that and not even flinch? He’d done her a favor. Maybe he just understood that, deep down. He’d done right by her. Maybe it was just shock. He’d done the only thing he could do for her anymore. Maybe

he was just so exhausted, so ready to stop, that even this atrocity was just one more step on his road. There was another one ahead of him. He had to see. Jake. He pushed and struggled and shot his way through the crowd. Finally he managed to get the droolers off one of the windows. Finally he managed to look inside, into the back seat. Jake had managed to unbuckle himself from the car seat. Tim had thought that would be impossible but desperation must have given the boy great strength. Once he was free, though, there had been no place for him to go. He’d been too smart to open the door, of course. The flesh of Jake’s lips was dry and broken, pulled back from grey gums. His eyes were closed as if he’d fallen asleep. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. “It can’t be,” Tim said out loud. He stepped back away from the car and the droolers shoved around him, desperate to get back into position. They wanted the food trapped inside. They wanted to eat his son. His still living son. “It can’t be,” he said again. The floor of the car was littered with empty Poland Spring bottles and boxes of cookies, empty wax paper sleeves torn open so that Jake could lick out all the crumbs. Bags and bags full of canned food sat in rows next to Jake. “She must have been stocking up—Karen—when she heard the news, she must have gone right to the grocery store. She must have bought months worth of food for us, in case we couldn’t get out. Oh, my God, Jake—Jake had plenty to eat and drink. He was always such a smart kid, he figured it out, figured out what he needed to do—” “He’s alive?” Sasha asked, incredulous. “Barely. He’s sick, it looks like. Oh God. I’m going to throw up. For real this time.” He dropped to his knees. Everything was suddenly so complicated. His narrow focus, his need, his revenge, made less sense. And more. He vomited copiously. Then he looked up. Phil Nero looked back.

60. Author's Note: Well, that wraps up another one! Thanks to everyone who read this far, and everyone who commented, and everyone who supported me in the process of writing Plague Zone. Special thanks as usual to Alex, who made it all happen, and who inspired me to write another zombie story. I will be back with another serial in 2008. In the meantime, have a great Halloween! The bastard was across the street, no more than twenty yards away. He was wearing that stupid plaid shirt. All of his hair had fallen out and black drool had coated his chest and groin. He looked painfully thin, as if he hadn’t eaten enough, and his eyes were dead empty pools. “There,” Tim said. This at least made sense. Droolers didn’t wander. They were opportunists—Helena had told him as much. They stayed close to the scene of the crime. It made sense on another level, too. Wherever Tim had journeyed, wherever his feet had taken him, this little intersection was all that remained of his world. Everybody that counted was right here. Karen, Jake, Nero. “What, him? That’s the guy?” Sasha asked. She didn’t fit into the nice little tableau, not really. It had been her role to get him this far, but now she was extraneous. “You want me to grab him?” she asked. “No. He’s mine. I came this far—” He stopped in mid-sentence and looked straight up. He was not surprised to hear the rotors of a helicopter again. “Not now,” he said. Not now! This was it, his primal scene. He was supposed to be left alone in it long enough to do what was necessary. But of course he had screwed up too badly for that. He had made a mess of things. Nero was so close, though, he could still finish the jerk off and— And then what? Jake needed medical help. He knew it. Jake would die if he didn’t get him to a hospital. How long could a child live on just cookies? A light came on in the sky. It was bright enough to blind Tim for a second. It descended in a dusty cone from right overhead and it lit up the intersection perfectly, freezing everything in place with its illumination. It sent long sinister shadows streaming away from him. He felt like an actor on a stage in a nasty, brutal play with a bad ending.

Across the street Nero slipped into the shadows, lumbering away. Had he been scared off? Doubtful. Yet maybe he knew, on some level, how close he had come. Sasha moved first, stepping backward, away from the center of the light, toward the motorcycle. A bullet whined through the air and sent dust puffing up from the ground near her feet. She jumped back, her hands going wide. “Stay right where you are,” an amplified voice insisted. “We have ground units closing on your location. Do not attempt to flee.” The light stayed centered right on Tim. If he tried to move while inside that cone of light he would be shot down and his journey would be over and complete. If he didn’t move, he would be picked up by the boy soldiers and put in jail, probably for a very long time. He looked not at the helicopter above but at Sasha. She frowned a question at him. While Tim stood perfectly still, his arms raised, she slowly reached down to her belt. Tim tensed his legs while she carefully drew one of her revolvers, then the other. They were hidden inside the voluminous folds of her fur coat, for the moment. She was willing to distract the helicopter pilot for him. She understood her part, finally, in this grim scenario. Almost certainly she would be killed, torn apart by machine guns, if she lifted her weapons. Yet it would give Tim one tiny fraction of a second to run. To chase after Nero, to take him down. To end what he had started. “I’ll do it,” she said, looking him right in the eyes. She would do it for him. Who knew why? It didn’t matter. She would do it. And with that tragic offering, that act of offered sacrifice, she broke the spell. He owed her. He owed her his life, and he could not take hers. Nothing had ever been as simple as he thought. Everything had always mattered, even the things he’d shouldered free from, the irrelevancies and the obstacles. He had hurt so many people on his road, or let them be hurt. “No,” he said. “No.” He had a duty to her. And much more important, he had a duty to Jake. If Jake was still alive—then Nero didn’t matter. What he’d done to Karen was unforgivable, yes. But if Jake was alive then Tim’s purpose wasn’t revenge any more. It was to protect his son. To save his son.

Phil Nero was gone, swallowed up by the night. Tim doubted he would ever see the man again. He threw his weapon in the gutter, and gestured for Sasha to do the same. They would go to the stockade. They probably deserved to go to the stockade, after what they’d done. Maybe they would let Jake visit him, though. And eventually he would be released. Then they could go home. “Hey,” he shouted, and started waving his arms in the air. “Hey! Come get us! Come rescue us! We’re clean! We’re clean!” Slowly, picking its way carefully down through the air, the helicopter came in for a landing.