Plague Zone

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!”
 

“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.

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.”

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.

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 highly-trained 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 I-5. 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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 confused-looking 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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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