Dead on Arrival

Fifteen

When the man in the orange suit shot forward, Lyle caromed backward. Two, three steps, slipped. He didn’t try to break his fall. He slammed onto the ground on his ass. Of course he didn’t feel it. Every ounce of him focused on the body, the baggage handler who had been comatose, or dead, just moments before. Now the body sat upright at the waist. A wonder, Lyle thought, fear giving way to curiosity. He put all his attention on the man’s face, trying to discern the eyes. Were they open?

No. He inched closer. Still closed.

Lyle moved closer again, mostly just by his neck craning. He scraped for his phone. He found it and fiddled for the flashlight. He had to look down to make the phone work. Shit, he thought, I’ve got to input my code. I’ve got to look down at my phone. He wouldn’t take his eyes off this man, this creature, Don, held up at the waist like a marionette.

Then, suddenly, as quickly as Don had jerked upright, he fell back again.

In the cockpit:

“Jerry! What the hell is going on?”

A muffled sound from below.

Lyle wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He spit. Had he gotten the man’s spittle on him? Saliva? Something from this… host?

That’s the word that struck Lyle. Host.

Was that what he was looking at?

The body had become inert again. Now Lyle wondered if he’d imagined it. He immediately dismissed the idea; for all of Lyle’s flaws and quirks, he was not a sufferer of PTSD and so it didn’t make sense to him that he’d had some sort of flashback or emotional break, a false memory, any of that.

Then, from the corner of his eye, Lyle caught movement. He half turned; he didn’t want to look away from Don. He could see a dark shape. Jerry.

Lyle put up his hand. Stop.

“Are you okay?”

“Go back inside,” Lyle said to Jerry.

“What’s happening? Is he alive?”

Lyle didn’t answer. Cautiously, he touched the man’s neck. If there was a pulse, he couldn’t feel it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“Dr. Martin, is he alive?”

Lyle nodded. It was as much for himself as Jerry. Yes, he suspected, Don was alive.

And a host.

Jerry felt the gun in his pocket. It felt like a caged animal. He twitched. Who was Dr. Martin to put his hand up in Jerry’s face? Who was he to suddenly be playing number two to Captain Hall?

There was something else bugging him. He let himself ask the question: What was an infectious disease specialist doing on a flight that hit the ground in the middle of some kind of outbreak?

Wasn’t that a whole lot of coincidence?

Jerry’s father had worked two jobs while his mother drank herself into a near coma. The only reason she didn’t get to that point is because she fell down the stairs in a drunken mess and wound up in a wheelchair. Then Jerry got two jobs to help his dad. Jerry could see drunks a mile away. He also hated men who didn’t step up and do what was necessary. Dr. Martin looked like both, a drunk and a man who didn’t step up.

He felt the gun and turned back to the plane.

Then he looked back again and saw something that allowed him to give Dr. Martin a little bit of respect. Dr. Martin was crouched over the man, peeling back his eyelids, looking into his eyes with the light of his phone.

Pupil fixed in the middle position. Lyle aimed the light into the man’s right eye. No movement, no light reflex. That argued for brain death. But brain death didn’t lead to spontaneous movement, either. Without thinking much about it, Lyle reached to the man’s cheek and pinched his skin between thumb and forefinger.

Nothing.

Harder.

The face muscles tightened. Just a touch. Enough. Lyle focused on the right maxillary and pinched again, even harder. A clench.

Not dead.

Not brain-dead.

Lyle tightened his own jaw in thought. Tight muscles. He moved suddenly. He ran his hand over the man’s arm, the right triceps and biceps and the muscles around the rotator cuff. Taut, tensed. No, not dead. Not rigor.

Absently, Lyle gave another thumbs-up to the plane, his way of saying: Leave me alone. He brushed sweat from his forehead onto his forearm. He stared at the man’s mouth and considered the next, unavoidable move. Full lips, rosy with cold and pulled at the corners. Beneath the nose, that droplet of mucus had doubled into two drops, one settled into a small pool on the groove of the philtrum. Lyle held the phone with his left hand, creating a spotlight on the mouth. With his right, he reached for the lips, pausing only a millisecond before parting them with forefinger and thumb. He dove in.

He felt inside the cheeks, not for anything in particular, anything out of the ordinary. He picked up the warmth and the tightness inside the jaw. He kept a keen awareness of the teeth, ready to instantly withdraw should the man reflexively open wide enough to bite down hard.

“Sorry, Don,” he said. “This next part is harder on me than you.”

He opened the mouth sufficient enough to get his forefinger toward the back of the throat and lingered at the tonsillar arch. Ideally, he’d watch the pharynx to see if it elevated in a gag response, and to what extent. He’d just have to surmise. He rubbed the arch. Don, the baggage handler, spasmed. Cough. Spasm. Lyle pushed himself not to withdraw. He didn’t want to cause a stir with Eleanor and the others in the cockpit, if they could even see him. Don calmed down again.

Lyle leaned down again and swirled his finger near the back of the throat, careful to avoid another gag. Likely only so many times he could do that and not get vomited on. As he swirled, he found what he was looking for. Mucus. Lots of it. Pooling near the edges of the throat. He tried to stir it away from the throat’s entrance to keep Don from drowning. Lyle sat on his haunches.

Mucus meant the production of white blood cells. It meant the body was mounting an immune response. To what? No light reflex, tight muscles, no pupil reflex. Odd. What did it add up to?

Lyle didn’t want to take his own eyes off the man. He felt he needed to. He shone his phone light on his right hand. He put his right thumb into the thumbs-up sign. Showing Eleanor in the cockpit. Showing Jerry.

Nothing, Lyle thought, could be further from the truth.

From the corner of his eye, Lyle saw the movement again. It was to the right, in the direction of a plane hangar, unless it was used for industrial tools, like airplane steps and tractors and snowplows. Regardless, this time Lyle was sure. Movement.

He flashed another thumbs-up.

He leaned down over the body. He pushed on the belly, feeling the organs, feeling for inflammation. If it was there, it was subtle. The palpating didn’t seem to bother the felled baggage handler. For a second time, Lyle put his hand on the artery coursing through the man’s neck. This time, he erred on the side of believing what he suspected, a low pulse. Don was very much alive.

Lyle quickly considered, then dismissed, the idea of having Jerry bring the man inside the plane for further observation. First principle: Do no harm. Not to the people inside the plane.

Lyle considered lifting Don and carrying him to the hangar to keep him warm. That would only attract more attention from the cockpit. Mostly, Lyle just wanted to follow his muse. Or maybe he was dressing up what he wanted in fancy thoughts. He just wanted to get away, farther away. This was the principle that had replaced “do no harm.” Don’t be bothered. Not by a world that doesn’t give a shit.

He started walking toward the hangar.

Then paused. The eyes. Jesus, why hadn’t he realized it?

He practically sprinted back to Don.

“One more thing, patient zero,” Lyle said. He knelt by Don’s head. He focused the light on his phone on the man’s eyes. He pried open an eyelid and studied the pupil again. Lyle swallowed hard.

“Jesus,” he said.

He put the eyelid back in place. He stared at the hangar. Light from somewhere deep inside left a ghost impression in the doorway, a faint outline. Lyle started walking. Might as well; how long could it be before he was collapsed like Don?

He glanced at the torpid man’s phone. On the screen, some comically strange YouTube video showed on the screen. It no longer played, but an image of a cat on skis was stuck there. Lyle looked back at Don. Peeled the eyelid back again. What’s going on in there, Don?

Sixteen

He caught Jerry’s approach from the corner of his eye. The first officer had his gun drawn. “Dr. Martin!”

Lyle kept walking. Most of his focus fell on the foot of pavement in front of him. Insidious black ice. Lyle’s right toe caught such a patch and he carefully slid to the right.

“Dr. Martin.” Jerry gained ground. Now he hit an icy patch and slipped. “Fuck!”

Lyle turned to see Jerry doing a comical man split. Lyle couldn’t make out Jerry’s face. That’s how dark it was, even with his phone creating the slightest ambient light. Jerry’s flashlight was tucked in his jacket pocket, still on, causing a little circle of light around the fabric.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“I saw something.”

“You saw something. Is that what you said?”

“Your hearing seems to be just fine. That’s a good sign.”

Jerry righted himself and closed quickly on Lyle. He was within inches. So close that Lyle thought about pickup basketball games he had been in when some numbnuts decided he wanted to start a fight. Lyle stood his ground.

“Where are you going?”

Lyle smelled breath that reminded him of hunger and thirst. Low blood sugar, he told himself, a person not entirely stable even under the best circumstances.

“Heading to hide in the hangar and have another drink, is that it, Dr. Martin?”

“I have enough for two if you’re looking for a good time.”

Jerry shoved his handgun right into Lyle’s rib cage. He brought his lips right to Lyle’s cheek. Then he pressed the gun harder. Lyle went up on his toes to get away from the barrel. He felt the pain in his ankle from having fallen getting out of the plane.

“Not much of a drinker, I take it,” Lyle wheezed.

“What’s the story with the guy on the ground?”

“There are ways of asking that question without the artillery.”

“I’m not sure how else to get your attention, Dr. Martin. Near as I can tell, you’re doing some kind of happy-go-lucky, freelance operation here. That’s the nicest thing I can say about it.”

“Jerry—”

Jerry interrupted him with a nudge of the gun that caused Lyle to take in his breath.

“Differential diagnosis, right? That’s what you call it when you check down the list of possible illnesses. I did a little EMT training.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah, good for me. So I’m doing a little one of my own.”

“What’s your point, Jerry?”

“The symptoms involve mood swings, a manipulative streak, intense narcissism, and a strange knack for being in suspicious circumstances.”

Lyle looked confused. “Don?”

“Who? No, you,” Jerry said. “You seem like you’re a doctor, then not so sure of yourself, you talk about mystery symptoms. You manage to dupe Eleanor into letting you off the plane—”

“Technically, Eleanor wanted me to stay. It was you who—”

Another gun shove. “You want my diagnosis?”

“Sure, Jerry.”

“You’re a drunk.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not done. You’re a drunk who says he’s a doctor and happens to be in the right place at the right time for some mystery disease.”

“Right place? C’mon—”

“What brings you to Steamboat?”

“A conference.”

“In early November, in a tiny ski town?”

Lyle pictured the embossed invitation, remembered the gentle but persistent courtship. Expenses paid, small audience, decent honorarium, a chance to get his sea legs back. He looked at Jerry. He felt sympathy for the guy, connected to him in some way. Just as Lyle had lost faith in the world, so Jerry seemed to have no faith in Lyle, to have reverted to his own primitive state. Wasn’t this what was happening everywhere? A new hyperskepticism, everything politicized, facts tossed out as partisan and any faith in humanity with it.

“Or,” the first officer continued, “if you like a less conspiratorial version, then you’re just a narcissistic drunk who is putting us all in danger by romping around out here. Jesus…” He looked off in the distance. “You really don’t care, do you?”

Lyle looked Jerry straight in the eye, something approaching contrition, and gently pushed the gun down from his rib cage. Jerry allowed it to happen, indicating he’d had his say. But it was clear to Lyle this conversation wasn’t over. He needed to get the hell away from this guy.

“The man over there is named Don.”

“How do you know that?”

“It says so on his name tag. He’s alive but he’s sick.”

“Yeah?” A generally skeptical tone.

“I don’t have any idea with what,” Lyle said, suddenly realizing his strategy. He’d pepper humility with medical talk. He just had to get away from this guy.

“His pupils are moving so rapidly that they look fixed. Fixed usually means brain-dead. But it’s not that, I don’t think. He’s got mildly inflamed organs and heavy mucus around his pharynx, both of which indicate an immune system response. Tight muscles might mean any number of things. I can’t really tell out here if he’s febrile.”

“Fever.”

“Right.” Lyle allowed himself a quiet exhale; Jerry was calming down.

“Give me the bottles,” Jerry said.

“What?”

“If you think you’re off the hook with me, you’re wrong. First step, hand me the booze in your pockets.”

Lyle felt anger’s electricity. For just a moment, it was a rush to have such an unscrambled emotion. Then a major downer. Pissed off about losing his cheap swill. That was a very bad sign. Pissed off at the one guy with a gun. Maybe a worse sign. Tied for last. Lyle reached into his pocket and pulled out two bottles. Tried to look unfazed. Time to play the long game.

“My mom was a boozer.”

Lyle didn’t say anything as Jerry chucked the bottles into the distance where they shattered.

“So, where were we?”

“You were shoving a gun into my ribs and calling me a fraud.”

“Now we understand each other better. Let’s go back into the plane and you can brief us.”

“Okeydokey.” Lyle glanced in the direction of the hangar and the sliver of light. Then turned back to Jerry. “When we get in there, before we go up into the cockpit—”

“Flight deck.”

What an asshole. Let him think he’s manned up, Lyle. Long game. “Right, sorry, Jerry. Before we climb up there, we should disinfect. And maybe we should consider staying down in the hol—”

“Disinfect.”

“Right. I touched that guy, and I got a mucus spray when I tested his gag reflex.”

“Wait a second.”

“I’m not saying I’ve got it. I’m not saying you’ve got it. Certainly, you’re at least one step removed. But whatever we’re dealing with is clearly highly virulent. I can’t think of an analogue, not in my experience and not even in the literature.”

“You’ve read all the literature.” Jerry, with this poorly delivered snide remark, was showing his adolescent side and just exposing the breadth of his vulnerability. Then: “So we might have it?”

“I don’t think you do. I’m less sure of me.”

“You’re bluffing.”

Lyle tried to look vulnerable. “God, I hope so.”

Jerry took a big step backward. “Okay, so…”

“One way we might increase the odds…” Lyle tried to look like he was thinking.

“Yeah.”

“You keep your distance from me and from the guy on the ground. Get back to the cockpit, sorry, flight deck, give them an update. And I’ll chase the ghost.”

He had Jerry’s attention.

“I saw something move in there—over there.”

“I looked and I didn’t—”

“Maybe it was just light, I agree. I can’t be positive. But the way the shadows changed, it wasn’t… it was herky-jerky, like a person or an animal, not like snowfall or something. Speaking of which, it’s fucking cold.”

“Stay on topic.”

“Look, Jerry, I may have this thing. You may, too, I won’t lie. But I well might, and less likely you. So better me going in the hangar and you can tell them what I saw with Don. You know as much as I do—what I told you already.” Lyle thought about going on and remembered to keep it short and let Jerry reach his own conclusions.

They stood in silence as snow accumulated at their feet.

“The telephone game,” Eleanor muttered. Snow stuck to the window. Cold enough inside and out now that it wasn’t just melting.

The pilot turned around and saw that the woman from Lyle’s seat had her hand on the door. It had been a good three minutes since the two had spoken.

“I’m sorry I forgot your name.”

“Alex. Telephone game?”

“The kid game, where you whispered a secret to the next person and then little by little it got completely garbled.”

“Was a fan myself. It’s so quiet out there. What do you think he’s—”

“I mention it because that’s what this feels like. It’s so quiet, like everyone is whispering and then nothing makes any sense.”

“Were you ever a writer?”

“What a strange question,” Eleanor said. “Were you?”

“No, I… never mind. It is getting elliptical in here.”

Both women smiled for just an instant. The outskirts of a bond. They’d have made a striking buddy team in public, Eleanor as the one who attracted the immediate attention and Alex, slighter but with a depth anyone paying close attention could pick up. And on the steering yoke. Where were Jerry and that damned doctor? Wherever they were standing, the shadows or silhouettes were outside the view from the flight deck.

Eleanor turned on the light. The man on the tarmac lay there still. Then the light flickered and failed. Eleanor slammed her hand on the steering column.

A sound came from inside the cabin.

Seventeen

“You’re not taking the gun.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” Lyle said.

“You were thinking about it.”

“I wasn’t.” Lyle, in fact, hadn’t been thinking about it. But now that the idiot first officer brought it up, he wouldn’t have minded having the pistol. He just wanted it out of Jerry’s hands. He was more dangerous with that thing than a plane passenger with Ebola.

“You’re just going to walk into the hangar.”

Lyle nodded; more or less. “I’ll get close enough to call out. Maybe someone else is as confused as we are.”

“And they’ve not come out here to get our attention,” Jerry thought it out aloud.

“Would you?”

Jerry thought about it.

“If it was me in that hangar,” Lyle said, “and I saw some bodies and something had happened that scared the daylights out of me, I would keep glancing and trying to figure out what was going on.”

“Or glancing and waiting for another target.”

“Which is why you should go back into the plane.”

“But you won’t because you’re so selfless.” There it was again, Jerry’s skepticism, his arrested adolescence, that’s what it was.

“Jerry, listen to me.”

“You’re going to lecture me…”

“I lost my wife. She… we split. My family. You asked if I’m a drunk, and I don’t know if I am or not. But I have had a rough last couple of years. I’m in a good place to take a chance like this. And I really am a doctor and I used to be really good at it… so they told me.”

It sounded sincere.

“Go back and tell them to stay in the airplane, stay warm, not to touch that body, any of the bodies,” Lyle said.

Jerry didn’t give Lyle the courtesy of a sign-off, just turned and walked. He shrugged his shoulders, noticeably, sending a message Lyle received: This nut can do whatever he wants. It was passive-aggressive and way better, Lyle thought, than having a gun stuck to his viscera. Asshole.

Lyle turned to the hangar.

I’m going to be the voice of reason here.

Jerry willed himself to have the walk of a calm person. He imagined for a moment that he was that actor playing the lone wolf cop in Avalanche, the drama set in Park City. He was glad, in a way, Lyle had asked him to return to the plane. Now he was fully the first officer, first protector, federal flight deck officer licensed to carry, navigator. Jerry took that title very seriously. He kept things balanced. I know what Eleanor thinks of me. I know she thinks I’m neurotic. She’ll see I’m the voice of reason.

He reached the belly of the plane and looked up. Shit, the rope had fallen. Now how the hell was he going to get up there?

He heard someone yell from inside the plane.

Did he imagine it?

“Jerry!” Look. Did he hear it again? Stay calm.

He started running toward the downed man named Don. Jerry recalled that the luggage cart was near him. He could use the cart to climb into the plane. He shone the flashlight, made out the outlines of the luggage cart.

Noticed Don was sitting upright.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Jerry!” Eleanor yelled into the belly of the plane. It wasn’t panic but it was pointed. “Can you hear me?”

“There it is again,” Alex said. A sound from the passenger cabin. Scuffling or walking, something. Eleanor fiddled with the cabin camera but it wouldn’t work. The electrical system was all fucked up.

“Maybe they’re—” Alex said and didn’t finish the thought… sitting up or coming alive like that body out there.

“Get your jacket,” Eleanor said. “I’ll put on the heat in here and we’ll consult with them before we do anything… Are you limping?”

Alex swallowed. “I told Dr. Martin I have arthritis.”

Eleanor studied Alex, wondering if she had it. “I’ll lower you down—” she started to say.

Alex interrupted. “Captain. He’s out there.” She pointed.

Eleanor turned and looked through the window. She couldn’t see details through the snow. Just silhouetted light and movement of Jerry walking toward the baggage handler.

“Captain…” Alex said. She cleared her throat. “How do you feel?”

“How do I feel?”

“Faint or dizzy or anything like that?”

“No. Do you?”

“A little, I’m not sure. I—” Alex didn’t finish nor did she have to. She’d made her point that she didn’t feel exactly right.

Cough.

No doubt about it, Lyle thought. Someone coughed. He stood in the doorway of the hangar. He contemplated saying hello. Instead, he flicked off his phone. No need to bring attention to himself. It was an extreme version of what he told his students; the less attention you bring to yourself, the better. That helps avoid the observer effect.

Here, though, it was a different aim. What was the intuition, the feeling he was having? He strained to look into the dark. Not much to be made out. The light he’d seen earlier coming from this direction had disappeared. So had someone turned it off?

He peered into the darkness and thought, simply, Cavernous.

His feet felt numb. Cold coursed up his legs and back and he shivered. Untenable, this situation. He fished around in his pocket. He felt what he was looking for, a quarter. He tossed it deep into the dark cavern, giving it a three-quarters heave. It flew a long way and then clanked against something metal. A plane, Lyle surmised, or a truck or other machine.

“Hello,” he finally said.

His voice echoed.

Cough.

Lyle finally realized the feeling he was experiencing. It had been a long, long time. Fear.

Jerry kept his distance, willing himself to be that sheriff. He held the gun out front, pointed at the baggage handler who was prone again. Jerry had to check himself. The guy had been sitting upright, yes? Now he was down again. Was this some sort of zombie shit? Or, Jerry wondered, maybe this was the beginning of some kind of illness, his brain hallucinating.

“Don’t move,” Jerry muttered. “Do. Not. Move.”

No way around it, he was going to have to walk somewhat in the direction of Don if he was going to get the baggage cart. Well, unless he took a circular route. That’s what he’d do. He held the flashlight and the gun on the dude on the ground and he circled to his left, walking sideways, never taking his eyes from the man covering up with falling snow.

Cough.

There it was again.

Then another sound. A click. It didn’t take a firearms expert to recognize it.

Somewhere in the darkness, someone had a gun. Lyle froze, hoping whoever was aiming at him was equally blind in this darkness.

Eighteen

“I don’t think I should breathe on you, Captain Hall,” Alex said. She held a blue-and-white scarf over her nose and mouth, blue eyes visible over the top.

Eleanor barely registered the comment. She was too busy vacillating between duty and fury. Duty told her to retreat to a triage checklist. Not that she’d ever prepped for anything exactly like this. Who could have? But she’d prepped for disaster. Fury told her she’d already failed. She’d allowed herself the ignominious thought: all her passengers were dead, and she was the only one who hadn’t gone down with the ship. Who gave a shit if this last passenger got her sick? What was left? Not honor? Not the rest of the world?

“Jerry!” No answer. “Damn it.”

Eleanor felt light-headed. She wondered when she last ate; it was the two homemade powdered-sugar-coated lemon bars she’d stuffed into her jacket pocket in the Ziploc. She turned to the slight passenger pressing her back against the flight deck wall; the captain felt like the day she lost Frank. Outside on the windshield, white flakes blotted out the coal-black night.

The body was down again. So maybe, Jerry thought, he’d only imagined it had been sitting up. He stood ten feet away, gun out, scanning the area around him. Suddenly, he realized he was in the midst of the very fantasy he’d had a thousand times if he’d had it once; in the fantasy, for some reason set at a football stadium, militant gunmen had descended by parachutes and were killing everyone in sight until Jerry leapt on one from behind, stole his gun, started the heroic mutiny that saved the day. One of the presidential candidates in the last election had said he’d never sit around and just watch militants kill people. He’d do something. Jerry thought, Damn right. The thought of it now made him brave. With his gun, he could handle one crazy, virulent person who, anyhow, seemed paralyzed. So what, he remembered, that he’d lapsed on his gun training. At this distance, it didn’t matter. He shook off the cold that was trying to nestle in the exposed areas around his neck and wrists. He allowed himself a step forward. He trapped the flashlight right next to the muzzle of the pistol. It shone on the guy being covered up with snow, who had more of the icy slivers concentrated on his legs. That suggested that, yes, he’d sat up. The snow on his torso had dropped to his legs. Poor fucker, Jerry thought. God, just like his mom, dying right in front of him, second by second, in her case from booze, and not a damn thing he could do about it. Just watch the silent angel.

Gun on the guy, he wound a semicircle around Don to get to the luggage rack. He kept himself facing the fallen man and pulled the cart so he’d never lose eye contact. Then he pushed the cart until he reached the plane, finding confidence with each step in the ease with which he was pushing. At the base of the plane, he let himself relax a touch. He locked the wheels of the luggage cart and stepped up to the second level, which allowed him to pop his head inside the hold.

“Eleanor!”

His voice echoed without response. Huh.

“Yo, Eleanor, the cavalry is back.”

Again, nothing.

He bent and stuck his head out, trying to peer, neck craned low, wondering if she’d slipped out when he was getting the cart. But why wouldn’t she have said something? Then he fought off a malignant thought: What if she somehow was in cahoots with that manipulative doctor? He saw how she looked at that cunning shit. Stop it, Jerry. That makes no sense. C’mon, Jerry, he told himself, you’re the guy with the gun. Eleanor needs you. You have been called.

“Captain Hall,” he said, “I’m coming up.”

He pulled himself into the airplane’s gelid belly.

“You should know,” Lyle said into the darkness, “that I really don’t give a fuck.”

He almost laughed; for whose benefit was he being so honest, cavalier, or fraudulent? Or, fairly, some combination thereof—regardless, a recipe for danger in practically any ratio. He stepped forward into the cavern. Cough. Then a scuffling of feet. One, two. Lyle closed his eyes. What had he always told students? Drop the textbook and use your senses. Given the blackness in here—he was essentially blind—he could toss out sight so he closed his eyes and took in the rest of it. Now, silence. A mausoleum. Then a dampened scuffling sound, echo, then nothing. Quietly as he might, Lyle reached again into his pocket and fished. Bingo, a dime. Lyle pinched the chilly coin between his thumb and forefinger and flipped it into the nothingness in the direction of the cough and other sounds. Tink, tink, it hit cement, then skidded—clink—into something metal.

Would it prompt more movement?

Quiet. Nada. That was telling. Lyle was getting a picture.

Eyes still closed, he inhaled deeply. Bacteria smelled like roadkill, decomposition. But that wasn’t here. Nor anything smoky from fire or metallic that he imagined resulted from an explosion. He detected a whiff of almond, sweetened. Probably, he thought, oil and oxidation. Okay, so? Machine shop, Lyle told himself, and then took comfort in two things the air didn’t carry: fire or blood. Fire would’ve meant gunpowder, ignition. Blood, that spoke for itself. Another scent then. Was that coffee? No, couldn’t be.

Cough.

Cough.

Scuffle.

Aha. Lyle opened his eyes. Nearly smiled with epiphany. What he’d suspected.

“I’m Lyle Martin. I’m a doctor.” Eyes now open, he walked forward. Anyhow, what difference would it make if he was wrong? So what if he was walking into his own death when he’d been as good as dead for years?

He considered turning on the light and decided against it. The closer he got to whatever light source was back there, the better he could make out the objects he passed. To his left, a forklift then an industrial tool cabinet. To his right, empty space and then, wow, the sleek nose of a small private plane that, for a second, reminded Lyle of a dolphin’s snout.

Cough.

Lyle took a false sense of refuge beneath the small plane’s hull. The vantage point unblocked some light, and Lyle now guessed he was looking at that kind of diffuse gleam from a field lamp. The source remained hidden by what Lyle could now see was another small jet to his left. But right behind that, the source and the sounds he’d heard. Lyle closed his eyes one more time and he pictured Melanie on the night that he found his clothes piled on the doorstep. The drought had already started but, wouldn’t you know it, rain. A neighbor had craned her neck out of the house next door until she saw Lyle and withdrew. He’d won $130 playing pool and then given the entire wad to a guy outside the bar singing “American Pie.”

“A long, long time ago…” Lyle had slurred the opening lyrics up to the window.

Melanie didn’t open the window and Lyle couldn’t brook another version of he-said-she-said. He picked up his favorite sweatshirt and left the rest of the clothes and decided to spend the night at his UCSF office until he could figure out a better plan. I can still remember, how the music used to make me smile. He had pawed at the piece of paper in his back pocket, considered slipping it under the door, and decided not to give Melanie the satisfaction.

Back at the hangar, Lyle stuffed away the image, said fuck all of it to himself, walking forward past the airplane to his left and toward the source of the light, and then, startled by what he saw, came to an abrupt stop.

“Eleanor?”

“Jerry, stay where you are.”

“You’re okay.” Jerry shoved a cargo box beneath the opening in the flight deck. “Why didn’t you answer?”

“I erred on the side of caution. Wasn’t sure what, or who might hear us.”

“Work with me, Eleanor. I’m trying to look out for you here.”

“What’s your deal, Jerry? We’re coming out.”

A flicker of fury nicked him, like a lightning strike. Sometimes, he imagined that she thought of him like the boy in the bubble, that kid from the after-school movie who was so sick and pitiable he lived, isolated, in a biosphere. “Eleanor, I don’t like your tone—”

“It’s not safe in here. We’re evacuating, the two of us. We’re going to drop down there. I’m bringing the last medical supplies, but I don’t want to bring anything else from the cabin because I don’t know how it gets carried.”

She held a rucksack over the opening, as if to indicate she was going to drop it, which she did. Thud. Supplies hit the hold floor at Jerry’s feet.

“You have the gun?”

“Locked and loaded.”

“Okay, Clint Eastwood. Listen, Jerry, can I get your input?”

“Of course.”

“I’d like to leave the heat running. It’s going to eat fuel. I… these people.”

“Eleanor?”

“Never mind, I figured it out.”

“Hey, listen, it’s not your fault. You hung in there as much as you could.”

“We’re coming down. The passenger first.”

Jerry saw a foot appear in the hole. He guided it with a hand, helping the small woman until she could stand on the crate and then dismount it. Eleanor followed. When she hit the crate, she said, “Thank you, Jerry.”

“No problem, Captain.” No problem at all.

She stepped off the crate. The three quickly made their way out of the hold down to the tarmac.

“Where’s the doctor?” asked the captain once they were on the ground.

“He’s gone over to the hangar.”

“What? Why?”

Jerry sensed a moment. “I’m not sure I trust that guy.”

“What happened, Jerry? Just tell me what happened.”

“I can only vouch for what he told me.”

Jerry recounted the story, his version of it.

The three of them—the pilot and navigator and the last surviving passenger—walked to the hangar, not sure if they should be more afraid of what they were leaving behind, or what they’d find inside the dark building.

Lyle mumbled, “The Price Is Right.”

It’s what came to mind as he looked at the scene that appeared thirty feet in front of him, illuminated by a reedy light from somewhere farther back. Lyle looked at the living room set, the sort of setting that you’d see game-show contestants compete for. A couch in the middle, with a coffee table in front of it, and two end chairs. It only seemed out of place for an instant and then Lyle realized it was just a homey little construction for the workers here, an open-air rest area. What Eichler would’ve created if he’d decorated airplane hangars.

Lyle had a pretty good idea who used this setting to kick back. It was the guy sitting up on the couch with his head lolled on to the top of the backrest. Another body.

Lyle took a step closer. Then he remembered that a few paces earlier he’d passed a bucket with a mop sticking out of it. He retreated and took the cool wooden mop handle. Lyle marveled at the primitive nature of his instinct to take a weapon and wondered if it meant he cared, after all, if he lived.

Again, he said, “My name is Lyle Martin. I’m a doctor.”

He scrutinized the shape of the man on the couch. Looking for movement, anything. The man remained static. Static. The word that came to Lyle’s mind. He took another step forward. He felt a tickle on his upper lip. Shit. A drop of mucus. Lyle wiped it on his forearm and, without fully taking his attention from the man, glanced down at his arm. Was it bloody? Was it the beginning of an immune response? Or just his body’s response to cold? Lyle inhaled the sharp, frigid air. It needled the soft, pink flesh inside his rib cage. It hurtled tiny shards of glassy air at his larynx.

Just cold, he told himself and let himself believe it.

On the table to the left of the static man stood a half-foot stack that looked to be magazines or technical manuals. Just in front of the man, a tin cylinder on an electric plate that Lyle guessed was filled with coffee or hot water. Then nearer the man on the table, some confirmation of that: a mug overturned. A clue. Had the man been holding the cup when he was stricken, and then had an instant to put the cup down? Did he kick it over in a death throe?

Still no movement from the man. Had he been the source of the coughing? Lyle seriously doubted it. He squinted farther back, trying to discern the source of the light. It had the thin, atmospheric feel of a battery-powered lantern that you’d take on a camping trip and provided just enough light to an otherwise night-dead camping site. Lyle took purposeful steps forward, letting the man’s shape crystallize. No jacket. A long-sleeved shirt covered his torso and arms, though they otherwise hung vulnerable at his sides. Faster steps from Lyle until he heard the sound of steps behind him. Tap tap on the cement floor.

Lyle froze. He squeezed his hands around the mop stem. He listened to the echo of footsteps.

Nineteen

“Stay where you are,” Lyle said.

“Dr. Martin?”

“I think it’s advisable that you stay there,” Lyle said. He estimated they were fifty yards back.

“We need to talk to you.” It was Eleanor speaking, her voice coming through the darkness from near the entrance to the hangar. Lyle, without turning his head that direction, could sense the flicker of a flashlight, presumably Jerry’s.

“Can I meet you outside?” Lyle said. He directed his gaze at the right corner of the couch. Looking for movement. He heard Eleanor urge whoever was with her to stop. Lyle thought he picked up three sets of feet. Why weren’t they on the plane? Who was with the passengers? He heard a scraping noise from the area of the couch, movement on the pavement. Then it abruptly stopped.

“Why can’t we come that way?”

Lyle didn’t answer. He didn’t want to spook the person behind the couch. And a few puzzle pieces were falling into place, and he just wanted to be left alone with this patient or witness.

No such luck. He could hear the footsteps again and prepared himself for a shit show. Jerry was like the dean. A shiver seized him, warm blood fighting through cold-constricted vessels.

The steps neared and the flashlight and then they were upon him.

“What the fuck?” Jerry asked as he saw the surreal living room, and the body. Jerry directed his flashlight at the man. Lyle got his first clear look. Midthirties, beard, baseball cap crooked and nearly fallen off, windpipe and jugular exposed by the backward tilt of his head.

“Jesus,” Eleanor whispered.

“It’s okay,” Lyle said.

“Who are you talking to?”

Lyle didn’t answer.

From behind the couch, there was that distinctive click.

The hammer of a rifle being pulled into position. Then a cough.

“Get down, Captain,” Jerry bellowed. He stepped in front of Eleanor and Alex.

“Come out with your hands up,” Jerry barked.

“Put down your gun,” Lyle said.

“Put down your gun,” Jerry repeated.

“No, I’m talking to you, Jerry,” Lyle said. “Lower your gun.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Then in the direction of the couch. “Get out here, right now! Put your hands up, and get out here. I’m not going to shoot you unless I have to. You need to get your ass out here right now.”

Lyle swung with the broom. He rocked Jerry’s gun hand, causing the weapon to fall onto the ground.

“Are you out of your mind?” Jerry dove for the weapon. On his knees, he swung the gun at Lyle, then in the direction of the couch, then Lyle again. “Stop!” Lyle said. “It’s a child.”

“What?”

“Young man. I’m a doctor. I can help you and I can help your father.”

“How do you…” Eleanor started.

From behind the couch stood a boy no more than ten, pointing a rifle square at Lyle’s head.

“Lower the gun, son,” Jerry said. He pulled the hammer back.

The boy held firm.

“Jerry,” Eleanor said. “Jerry, listen to me. I want you to put the gun on the ground.”

“Kid, I do not want to shoot you. I want you to stand down.”

“Jerry…” Eleanor said low.

“He’s been on a killing spree. This is no time to be soft. World’s gone mad.”

“He didn’t kill anyone,” Eleanor said.

The comment surprised Lyle. Of course, she was right.

“Son, is that your father?” Lyle said.

The kid didn’t answer, but it sounded like he emitted a whisper.

“I’m a doctor. I can try to help him. But I can’t do it if you shoot me or make me feel like you’re going to shoot me. I know you’re scared.” Another step forward. “I was on that airplane that landed. We’re here to try to help.” Lyle left it deliberately vague as to whether they’d landed with the express purpose of coming to help or whether they’d just coincidentally landed. “Can I help?” Another step forward, hands up. The boy held the rifle, less steadily now, shaking.

“Put the gun down,” Jerry said.

“Oh for goodness’ sake, Jerry,” Eleanor said. “Stop the cowboy stuff.”

Jerry gritted his teeth. “Okay, kid,” he said, “I’m lowering my weapon and I suggest you do the same.”

The boy lowered the rifle.

“Good man,” Jerry said, as if he’d saved face.

Lyle held up his hands, poised to walk forward amid a new threat: mounting tension within his own group. Jerry, Eleanor, the kid with the gun, a ticking clock they couldn’t identify. It felt like they just might kill one another before this syndrome did it for them. Lyle walked again, slowing, trying to set up his examination of father and son. The nearer he got, the more things came into focus. Matching upholstered chairs, worn and fading, framed each side of the table. An area rug beneath. Someone had gone to great lengths to make this feel like a home. On the couch next to the father a sleeping bag bunched around a pillow, and a heavy wool blanket. Tears streaked the face of the boy with the rifle held in both arms over his chest, just a motion away from aiming again. He had a bowl haircut and, Lyle noticed, supreme posture. His dad, Lyle guessed, was a military guy, teaching manners and self-sufficiency.

“Your dad’s the mechanic here?” Lyle asked.

The kid tried to suppress a sniffle, a whimper. Lyle took it as a yes.

From behind, Eleanor said: “Dr. Martin, may I have a word?”

Lyle forged ahead.

“What’s your name?”

“Tyler.”

“Okay, Tyler, I have some good news, first. Your dad is not dead.”

No answer.

“Okay?”

“You don’t know.”

“I know.” Now Lyle was at the edge of the scarred wooden coffee table and he winced; it reminded him of something and then he remembered the dream from the airplane, where a bat had risen from a bag of powder sitting on a wooden table. For a moment, Lyle swooned. Just a coincidence. “I need to examine your father. Is that okay?”

No answer.

“You were sleeping here on the couch and you got awakened by a sound.”

“How does he know that?” Alex said.

“Shhh,” Jerry responded. But all of that was in the background.

“Are you ten?” Lyle asked.

“Nine,” Tyler said.

“Did a noise wake you up?”

The boy let out a sob. He started to cry. The walls of bravery falling, boyhood trust and yearning returned. And he said: “Can you save my dad?”

“I’m going to try,” Lyle said. He clenched his teeth. The words sounded familiar—the kind of thing he used to say—but they were devoid of any emotion. Any true caring. Robotic.

“What’s your father’s name?”

The boy couldn’t answer for the sobs. During the eruption of tears, Eleanor neared Lyle and said, “I absolutely have to talk to you.”

Lyle didn’t hear her. He reached down to feel for a pulse on the man on the couch. Abandoned the idea and looked instead at the pupils. Moving so quickly as to look still. Something very strange going on in there. He thought, None of us is going to survive the night; I have no idea what’s going on but I suspect the human body has met its match.

Twenty

“I’d urge you to keep a distance,” Lyle said over his shoulder. He couldn’t feel a pulse, but it didn’t matter. He looked at the pupils again. He could imagine a first-year medical student saying Brain-dead.

“Tyler,” Lyle said, “your dad is going to be okay.”

Tears ran down the boy’s face. Talk about fixed, paralyzed; this was all just too much for him. Lyle tried to study his face without giving too much away. Was he feverish? In pain?

“Tyler, what’s your dad’s name?” he repeated.

“Rex.”

“Okay, Tyler, I’m going to do a medical test on your dad and I don’t want it to scare you. I’m going to put my fingers in his mouth and I’m going to make sure there’s nothing blocking his airway.” It wasn’t true; he was feeling for mucus and looking for a gag response, like with the baggage handler. But he couldn’t think of a good reason to explain that to the kid. “Okay, Tyler?”

A whimper of approval.

Lyle stuck his fingers in and produced the same response he’d gotten before with the baggage handler.

Behind him, the trio watched with fascination and horror. Alex looked absolutely stricken, eyes wet. Eleanor held back her own particular anguish; the incident reminded her of the story she’d been told about the death of Frank, her great love, near the peak of Annapurna. The sherpa said he’d gotten altitude sickness at a particularly treacherous spot and fallen and the sherpa revived him, or so it seemed. Then Frank had stood up, seeming fine, and walked right into a crevasse. His oxygen-starved mind had betrayed him. Eleanor took a step backward. Jerry, feeling her need, put a hand on her back and she angrily swatted it away. She hated him, the anti-Frank. Their tension notched up.

“Dr. Martin,” Eleanor said, composing herself, “I need to speak with you—privately.” She knew it would drive Jerry nuts. But she needed to tell Lyle about the sound from inside the cabin, something alive in there.

Lyle, so engrossed, didn’t respond.

“Tyler,” he said, “is this where you were sleeping? Next to your dad?”

“Yes.”

“And you woke up and he was like this?”

The kid nodded in the affirmative.

“You tried to wake him up?”

A sob of affirmation.

“What happened when you tried to wake him up?”

“He didn’t. He wouldn’t. I…” Grief paused the boy.

“Did you hear a noise?”

“What?”

“Did a noise wake you up? Did you see anybody or hear anybody?”

“I don’t know. Is he okay? Why won’t he wake up?”

“I’m a doctor, Tyler,” Lyle said, diplomatically. He kept using the boy’s name when addressing him, as Lyle encouraged students to do; use the names of patients and their families because it makes them feel like individuals. “I want to get him someplace warm. What’s back there?” Lyle asked, referring to the other end of the hangar.

“An office. There’s a space heater. It doesn’t always work.”

“Thank you, Tyler. So you didn’t hear a noise when you woke up? You don’t remember smelling anything?”

“No.”

Lyle regretted his phrasing; too many questions, not open-ended enough. He was rusty.

“May I examine you to make sure you’re okay?”

No answer from the nearly catatonic child. Lyle left the man’s side and approached the boy. Then he paused, a glint on the couch catching his eye. Lyle looked down and saw a cell phone. It sat on the couch next to the man called Rex, frozen on an image. Lyle picked up the phone in his rubber-gloved hand and looked closely. A grainy image of a man sitting behind a desk that Lyle strained to recognize. It was Marlon Brando.

“Does your dad like The Godfather?”

“It’s his favorite movie. He told me that he’s seen it a hundred and four times and when I’m twelve I get to watch it with him,” the boy said. He was relaxing. Lyle thought, Okay, a step in the right direction. He clenched his teeth; Melanie is out there somewhere with a boy just like this. Footsteps close from behind as Lyle closed in on Tyler.

“Dr. Martin, please, a word,” Eleanor said.

“In a moment.” He didn’t want to lose the clinician’s rapport. He knelt on the cement, relieving the young man of the weapon, setting it on the ground, and took him in. Levis and a striped sweater, hands balled at his sides that looked like they’d be big mitts one day, with big, booted feet to go with them. Lyle felt a pulse on the boy’s wrist, a purely symbolic act of establishing intimacy, asked how Tyler felt (hot or cold; sick to his stomach). No, no, he felt fine, looked fine. Lyle palpated the belly; not swollen or tender.

Tyler’s lip quivered. Alex walked forward, pulling her less agile right leg a touch behind the left. Jerry seemed poised to stop her when she knelt in front of the boy.

“I bet you could run around this building ten times you’re so healthy,” she said.

He looked at Dr. Martin. “Do I have to?”

“No,” Lyle said, smiling. “I think she’s saying that you’re in good shape.” He looked at Alex appreciatively. He sensed she must know something about being scared as a child, what with her early-life illness. She liked children, knew how to care for them, maybe had kids of her own, then, Lyle thought, no, a younger sibling. Lyle dismissed his wandering thoughts and said to the boy, “Would it be okay if I speak for a second to the pilot? She’s the head of the rescue mission.”

A moment later, Lyle stood with Eleanor and felt a pang of relief. She was okay. When their eyes met, the instant held understanding, a mutual wavelength. In a low voice, just a few steps from everyone, she told Lyle what was going on in the plane.

“I assumed they were dead,” she said.

“Not quite,” Lyle said. He explained what he’d seen on the bodies, the baggage handler bolting upright.

“What is this?” Eleanor asked.

Lyle shook his head. He kept his voice low so the boy wouldn’t hear. “I have no idea, Captain Hall. It’s something I’ve never seen.” He paused. “Never read about.” He paused again, closed his eyes in thought.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m just puzzled,” he finally said. “Obviously.”

Eleanor studied his face and wondered if he was telling her everything he was thinking. She could see he was lost somewhere. “Lyle?”

He was thinking back to his neurology rotation during med school. One morning at the start of early morning rounds, the attending physician promised the handful of residents they were going to see a rarity, and an unfortunate one. The patient was an old Japanese man. He’d been delivered the night before to the hospital by his wife, who declined to explain his condition: sitting in the front seat, unable to move or speak, respiration very low, but fully conscious. Essentially catatonic but physically uninjured. The attending physician opened the door to the man’s room and there sat the shriveled patient, eyes open, breathing from a respirator, wife by his side, her face buried in a handkerchief in grief. The attending saw Lyle’s face, studying, assessing, calculating, and nudged him. “Lyle, please don’t say anything,” she said. It had become a running joke, wherein Lyle would mutter some theory during rounds, often right, about a patient’s condition. It wasn’t that Lyle was trying to show off, he just got lost putting the pieces together and would think aloud. Lyle stared at the old man, the liver spots on his temple, next to his frayed hair, the jaundiced skin, bone-thin shoulders beneath his gown, eyes blinking.

“She didn’t mean to do it,” Lyle had muttered.

The attending shot him a look. Pipe down, Lyle.

“I’m sorry,” Lyle had said, genuinely sorry. “I didn’t say he’d been poisoned.”

The attending, a young-looking Indian woman with jet black hair, all but smiled. Lyle couldn’t help himself, and he was right again. So she asked him what type of poison. This stumped Lyle. Another resident picked up the ball and suggested tetrodotoxin. Now the attending allowed herself an appreciative nod at this group, whip smart the lot of them. She led them through a quick physical exam and then left the woman to her husband and grief and took the group back outside and explained what they all now knew. The man had eaten puffer fish, a delicacy, but, if not prepared precisely in the correct way, leads to skeletal paralysis, eventually, likely, death.

Now it was clear what Lyle had meant by she didn’t mean to do it. The wife, he thought, hadn’t meant to poison the husband. Lyle had been right. The husband was suffering from stage four bladder cancer, spread to the lymph nodes, and, as it turned out, he’d dreamed of having puffer fish as a last delicacy. The old man darned well had known it was a win-win; if he survived dinner, it would be a great meal; if he died, a great last meal.

As Lyle stood in the hangar, he pictured the old man, locked in his predeath catatonia and tried in vain to remember how that toxin worked, what its physiological mechanism was. What did puffer fish do to the brain? The answer evaded him. He looked back at the mechanic on the couch and considered the eerie similarity. But there was nothing contagious or widespread about puffer fish, nothing virulent.

“Are you okay, Dr. Martin?” Eleanor said. For an instant, she wondered if the syndrome had hit him, too.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it this time, too. He’d long since learned to apologize after taking his mental junkets. He grimaced.

“Time to let us into your head,” Eleanor said.

This further jerked Lyle back to reality. The pilot sounded like Melanie, in a good way, some appreciation in her voice that he wasn’t just a lummox on a mental vacation.

“Saxitoxin,” he said, with some bit of revelation.

“What’s that?” The first officer suddenly was standing too close for Lyle’s comfort.

“I’m thinking of various poisons, nerve agents, toxins. They can paralyze the body but leave the brain intact, more or less. I can’t remember how they work.”

“What’s saxitoxin?”

“Nerve gas,” Alex said from ten feet away, where she stood next to the boy. Her outburst surprised everyone and seemed a bit to surprise her, too. She stared at them and, nervously, down at her phone. “I’m a comic book geek. Graphic novels. When I was younger, I had a lot of time on my hands…” she said. “It’s kind of a trope, neurotoxins used by bad guys, and saxitoxin gets regularly mentioned.” After a brief pause: “But it was a real thing, not made up, that the government had.”

“That’s right,” Lyle said, remembering. Saxitoxin, he recalled, had been used by American spies in covert operations. Great for assassinations because so little poison brought the desired result: skeletal paralysis and eventual death.

“Nixon ordered it all destroyed,” Alex said. “But some survived.”

Now she really had their attention.

“That’s the lore, anyhow,” she said. She noticed Lyle boring a stare through her, quizzical but distant. She fiddled with her inert phone.

Eleanor noticed that Lyle watched Alex like she was a painting in a museum and he was an obsessing art history student.

“Is your phone working?” Lyle asked Alex.

“No.”

“I notice you keep fiddling with it.”

The passenger didn’t seem like she had anything to add. She, in turn, seemed struck by the way the pilot watched Lyle. Below the surface, cliques were forming, alliances, but they hadn’t solidified.

“We need a plan,” Jerry said.

“I’ll second that motion,” Lyle suddenly said and turned to the first officer. “Let’s move the father into the office with the space heater and I’ll go get the girl from the plane,” he said.

“Say what? What girl?” Jerry turned to Eleanor.

“There’s a girl on the airplane?”

“This is nuts,” Jerry said. “How does he know that? Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts?”

Lyle had reverted to his old style of managing crisis, focusing on the medical issues, in effect barking orders at people with less understanding of the situation. The problem was that, unlike the old days, no one was imbuing him with omniscience or saintlike status. So, to them, he sounded like a know-it-all or, plainly, an asshole. Or a conspirator. What girl was he even talking about?

Undeterred, Lyle started walking back toward the plane.

“Freeze,” Eleanor said.

He kept walking.

“Dr. Martin, I’m still the captain here.”

Lyle turned around.

“A little girl is on that airplane, terrified.”

“How do you know that?”

“She’s immune to this,” he said. “They’re immune, I think.”

He’d seen a little girl on the plane earlier and Eleanor said there was a noise on the plane. It must be the girl. “I’m not, and the rest of us aren’t. I’m probably exposed at this point. I can’t speak for you.”

“Then why didn’t we get it on the airplane—with the rest of them?”

“Were you in the cockpit, er, flight deck?”

Eleanor nodded.

“I don’t know. Something airborne. Something…” He had only the vaguest ideas, not even that, just fuzzy images, not worth sharing. He could feel the shadow of gun-toting Jerry, right on his heels. Lyle shivered; this new world was feeling like a microcosm of the one left behind: growing tension, people getting their backs up, positions taken and entrenched. A gun.

Maybe there was a way to inoculate against Jerry’s seeming desire to escalate, take control. Lyle looked the first officer in the eye.

“Do you have thoughts?” he asked Jerry.

“You’re asking my thoughts? How gracious.”

“You’ve been out here with me, seen the baggage guy, you can see the weather.” Lyle left it open-ended, trying to draw Jerry in. “I don’t know airports, airplanes, weather, any of it. I mean, should we get the bodies into the plane to keep them warm and we can see what’s going on in there?” He paused.

Jerry tried to measure whether he was being baited, couldn’t quite figure it out.

“It would be easier to bring the baggage guy, into the office, back here,” he said.

“Smart,” Lyle said as deferentially as possible.

Twenty minutes later, Lyle had dragged the body of the mechanic by his armpits, with Jerry standing guard, into the back office, along with the bodies of the baggage handler and other workers. Now they stood under the airplane, ready to use the luggage rack as a ladder.

“You or me first?” Lyle asked.

Jerry hesitated.

“I guess I can stand guard,” Lyle said. “You check the plane, which is obviously your baby, and I’ll be down here if something weird goes down. But I one hundred percent defer to you.”

Jerry looked over at the hangar, where Eleanor and the passenger tinkered with the cell phone and watched the child. He could see their outline in the doorway. Jerry tried to look like he was thinking hard about this, making some complex calculation. Truth was, he couldn’t keep up. It was why he loved talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh; you had to find somebody you could trust in a world where there was just too much to think about.

“I’ve got to overrule you on this one, Dr. Martin. You go in there and do your doctor thing and I’ll keep watch if something goes down. I need to keep an eye on the women and children.”

“But…”

“I’m decided. Let’s keep the chain of command.”

Perfect, Lyle thought. What he had hoped for.

Jerry hoisted him up. “Holler if you need me.”

“If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes,” Lyle said—he paused on what to say next…

“I’ll come rescue you.”

Jesus—Lyle fought a smile—what a prick.

Seconds later, Lyle stood in the flight deck, now holding a Beefeater bottle that he’d snagged in the belly. The plane was just the way he’d remembered it, but darker and colder. The temperature differential between inside and out had diminished. Near freezing in here, though Lyle presumed that was because the cargo-hold door had remained ajar. The passengers, presumably, would be warmer.

The radio buzzed with static, the way Eleanor must’ve left it.

Lyle took a deep breath and entered the cabin. The soft ambient light would’ve suited a mortician, the cool air too, and, of course, the bodies. Row after row of the inert. Lyle stared at them while he guzzled the last drops from a tiny Beefeater bottle. He made it halfway through a second and stuffed it, and two Tanqueray gins, into his pocket. His senses cleared. He looked at a tall man in first class wearing headphones, head slumped to the right touching the head of the woman next to him, catatonic too. He whisked into coach. Was there a scent? Something burnt? He rubbed his fingers together to remind himself he wore the rubber gloves. He realized he’d long since abandoned his breathing mask.

He took the rows at speed, glancing, looking for anomalies. He saw a woman with a neck pillow seemingly suspended like a puppet by the weight of her chin on her chest. In her lap, her phone, attached to headphones in her ears. Lyle walked past the row and then did a full stop and backpedaled. It wasn’t the woman who caught his attention but the man next to her, an older guy, nearly elderly, wispy thin hair, waxy skin, different somehow, what was it?

There, Lyle noticed, blood dried below his nose. Lyle bent down and studied, started to study. Something not right.

He heard the whimper and paused. A few rows farther down. He made his way back and found the source of the noise: a lump beneath a blanket, muffling the hysterics. The girl he’d seen earlier, clutching a stuffed bear. He steeled himself against emotion.

“I’m a doctor? I’m here to help you.”

She blinked with trauma.

“What’s your name?”

Whimpering, terror.

“Is this your mom? I’m going to help her.”

“She… she won’t wake up.”

The girl had bangs and freckles and seemed uncertain if she were awake herself. Surely, this must be a nightmare. On the ground, he saw a piece of paper she’d drawn on and written her name.

“Andrea?”

She looked up.

“We are going to get help—for her, your mom,” Lyle said. He wanted to quiz her on what had happened here but there was no sense to be discussed, the girl too far gone. He simply carried her to the front and lowered her down to Jerry. Lyle started to lower himself down and he saw the truck pulled beside the airplane, with Eleanor behind the wheel. What new plan was this?

He didn’t have time to process it when he was struck by an impulse, more than that, a severe nag. Ignoring Jerry’s overtures to come down, Lyle pulled himself back into the plane. He could hear Jerry say, “I think he’s drunk.”

Lyle cruised back into the cabin and found the older gentleman. Pulling off his plastic glove, come what may, Lyle put his hand to the man’s left temple. Then felt for a pulse at the carotid. Then back to the temple. He focused on the frayed skin and couldn’t deny what he was looking at: a contusion. Without an x-ray he couldn’t be sure, but he’d have bet his damn booze bottles he was looking at a skull fracture.

He stood and nearly sprinted back to his row. He stared, surrounded by these near-dead creatures, inhaling whatever was in here. It hit him, right here, all of it, the weight of the last two hours. This was madness, impossible, all but a dream. He slammed his open palm against the overhead compartment to feel the pain and assure himself he wasn’t asleep. Then he opened the compartment and yanked out his suitcase and tossed it on the ground and unzipped it. He rummaged. He’d managed to bring a single suit, wrinkled with folding. In an inner compartment, he felt for his itinerary. An official invitation, embossed stationery, to give a midday talk at a small infectious disease conference.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Bullshit.”

He’d known it, of course, on some level. He must have? An infectious disease conference, here in Steamboat, in November?

Who was he kidding?

He reached behind the itinerary and pulled out a small, framed picture in the cheap Walgreen’s frame, the glass broken horizontally. Melanie smiling on a rock, an invisible bump in her belly, the last happy picture.

A sob caught in his throat.

He read the letter of invitation. He studied the stilted language, deliberately formal, an honorarium not too much or too little, a number to call, and a website to visit.

He tried to remember the seduction that got him to this putative conference—in the mountains, on this plane—the phone calls, the travel arrangements, a slow reel, patient, low pressure, persistent, striking his chords, eventually, finally pulling him out of his fetid apartment and his own stink. He must’ve known all along it was a setup. On some level. But what in the hell for? Who would want a washed-up infectious disease specialist? Especially one who had given up completely on humanity?

He stared at Melanie’s picture and sipped more gin. He turned and threw the bottle straight down the aisle toward the back of the airplane, a perfect strike flying between the half-dead passengers. It didn’t shatter, just hit with a thud against the wall of the bathroom door.

Lyle started back toward the front of the plane. But after a step, he paused. He returned to the overhead compartment. What had struck his attention? He looked at a red roller bag lodged next to where his own luggage had been. His eye stopped on a white luggage tag with green letters: “Google.” He turned the tag over and saw the name: Alex. No address, or phone number.

Alex. His seatmate, the woman who had survived. Where had she said she worked? She hadn’t, just that she was in technology sales. He shrugged and turned.

At the flight deck door, he stopped. Attached to the door, with adhesive, was a small gold rectangle, almost like a playing card. But it was made of metal. He pulled it off and after a brief wrangle with the powerful double-sided tape that held it, freed the unusual object. Hardly knowing what to make of it, other than its anomalous presence—had it been there before? He put it in his back pocket.

Lyle lowered himself through the bottom of the plane, hit the ground, saw the barrel of the gun.

Twenty-One

“Get in the truck,” Jerry said. He pointed his pistol at Lyle, then raised an eyebrow, like Try me.

Behind Jerry, Eleanor idled a heavy-load pickup truck. The back windows of the vehicle were tinted but Lyle felt he could see Alex and the two children in the backseat.

“Get that out of my face,” Lyle said.

“Get in the truck.” Eleanor repeated Jerry’s command.

Lyle stared at her.

“Heading to town. For help and to avoid whatever is here if it’s… contagious,” she continued. “We need to get on the same page. No more renegade missions.”

“This is a dead zone, a freaking patient-zero cluster fuck. We can’t be around this anymore,” Jerry spat. “If these kids get sick, we might need a real doctor.”

Lyle ignored him and spun an instant analysis. How best to isolate and build on the clues?

Useful to stay at the airport?

Maybe.

“Should we make a last attempt to call out over the radio?” Lyle said.

“So now you’re a doctor and a pilot,” Jerry said.

Useful to see the surrounding area?

Likely.

Lyle moved around to the passenger side of the dark blue cab and felt a gentle push from behind. “You heard the captain,” Jerry said. He climbed in after Lyle, sandwiching him in the middle.

The girl whimpered in the back. The cab smelled like Kentucky Fried Chicken. A driver’s license hung by a clip from the visor over Eleanor. The picture on the license belonged to the mechanic.

Eleanor pulled the silver lever and put the truck in drive and it slid to a start. The girl’s whimpers intensified. Eleanor turned on the radio but all that came out was static. Lyle reached up and turned it off.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s best.”

Eleanor shoved in a cassette tape. The voice of James Taylor filled the cab. The clock read 1:45.

Eleanor turned the truck in a tight U-turn and they headed to the edge of the terminal. They passed a movable ramp, and then an unblocked stretch of window through which they could see into the terminal, and the handful of bodies. One looked slumped on the counter. The sounds of “Sweet Baby James” filled the cab.

The tires slid on the ice as Eleanor pulled behind the right of the low-slung terminal and swung out of the airport. She reached in front of Lyle and turned up the heat. It was roaring now, actually starting to feel warm.

“The music and heat should let us talk without scaring them,” she said. She turned to Lyle, briefly, then back to the road. The headlights illuminated dancing snow. Not much beyond that. Dark ground stretched out in front of them. Then a sign emerged on the right. “Slow,” Jerry said. Eleanor slowed. The sign read steamboat, 19 miles.

“Dr. Martin, we’re not going to stop until we get to town,” Eleanor said and punched the accelerator.

“Sounds good to me.”

“Well, look who is suddenly agreeable,” Jerry said.

“Jerry, stop. Listen, Lyle, Jerry and I discussed it and agreed we’ve got to get these passengers somewhere safer and we’ve got to, in general, look for help. We need you to cooperate. It’s too complicated to be divided in a crisis situation.

“But I would welcome your insights. Do you know why these children are immune?”

“I work best at gunpoint.”

“Why don’t you try to knock it out of my hand again?” Jerry said.

Lyle stared straight ahead.

“That’s what I thought,” the first officer said. “Y’know, goddamn if this isn’t exactly why we have a Second Amendment.”

“Jerry, what are you talking about,” Eleanor said and sounded like what she meant was Stop talking. “What’s your medical opinion?” she asked Lyle.

“No, I don’t know why they’re immune.”

“Just hold on, Eleanor,” Jerry said. “We knew the shit was going to go down at some point. We have to be able to protect ourselves.”

“You’re gonna shoot the virus, Jerry?” Eleanor wiped the inside of the window in front of her, smudging the condensation.

“This is just one topic where we’re going to have to agree to disagree, Eleanor,” Jerry said. “I’m sure you’d at least agree we’re lucky to have this with us right now.”

“Jerry, the whole world nearly came apart the last two years. It’s been a shooting gallery in this country.” She paused and gritted her teeth. This couldn’t be more irrelevant and she couldn’t believe she was being drawn into his narrow world.

“Stop, please, the fighting,” Alex said. In the backseat, she had her arm around the girl, who had her hands over her ears.

“Dr. Martin, what’s your latest medical opinion?” Eleanor repeated.

Lyle shrugged, too imperceptibly for them to see. He looked out the right side of the front window at what appeared to be a barn, at least something that shape, no lights, and it quickly disappeared from view.

“What did you see in the plane?” the pilot pressed him.

“More of the same,” Lyle said without elaborating. Then, “Slow down.”

“We already told you, Dr. Martin, you’re not giving orders,” Jerry said.

“Suit yourself.”

Eleanor slowed down.

“Eleanor, I thought…”

“Look.”

She’d come nearly to a stop, and no wonder why: on the other side of the freeway, a car sat flipped on its roof. It looked to be a boxy four-door, like a Honda. The front of the car had slid off the road and tilted into a ditch.

From the backseat, the girl from the airplane let out a sob.

Eleanor put the truck in park and unlatched her belt.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Jerry asked.

“Jerry…” she said.

“What?”

“That’s the last time you’re going to use that tone with me,” she said.

Lyle made sure to keep his head turned forward, fearing that if he turned to see the humiliation on Jerry’s face, the first officer would put a bullet in his head. Eleanor opened the vehicle’s door, bringing in a rush of frigid air. Her foot crunched on the fresh snow. She walked to the overturned car.

“She’s gonna get it herself,” Jerry whispered, barely audible to Lyle. “Eleanor, please…”

The pilot leaned to the side, peered inside the car. She backpedaled.

“Shit, shit!” Jerry spat.

Eleanor turned and nearly ran back to the pickup, slipping as she reached the door, saving herself from falling only by grabbing the door handle. She climbed inside.

“Are you okay?” Jerry said. “Or do you not like that tone, either?”

Eleanor put the truck in drive and punched the accelerator. Her hands gripped the wheel and still shook. The cab felt like it might explode with tension.

“She was…” Eleanor started; she couldn’t seem to get the words out. Her sharp exhales puffed into tiny clouds. “She was—”

“Smiling,” Lyle said. “Was she smiling?”

“Yes, yes. Smiling. Upside down, blood on her face and forehead. But smiling. Jesus. How did you know?”

“I just realized. It just hit me. So were a lot of the people in the plane.”

A sob came from the back. Now it was the boy.

“What, Tyler?” asked Alex. “What’s the matter?”

“My dad. He was smiling.” This seemed to just crush the little guy, the idea that his father could have become comatose with a smile on his face.

“This is a nightmare,” Eleanor said. It wasn’t anything revelatory, except the way she said it, the recognition, finally spoken aloud, that an inconceivable reality had dawned or, rather, that they’d landed inside of it.

“Not usually part of the immune response,” Lyle muttered.

“Maybe they were happy to meet their maker,” Jerry said. “Eleanor, do you feel okay? Seriously, any—”

“No symptoms, if that’s what you mean.”

On the right, they passed a green sign: steamboat springs, elevation 6695. Then a yellow one advertising e.m. light & sons. And then, a half a minute later, an isolated housing development called Heritage Park with houses set back at least a quarter mile from the road. One house had a light on and Lyle could see that Eleanor was tempted to turn down the road, but she persisted.

“Dr. Martin—” Eleanor said.

“Call me Lyle. Was the radio on?” he answered.

“Where?”

“In the car back there.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I…” His voice tapered off. Then he reached into his back pocket and withdrew the golden-colored metallic rectangle he’d found attached to the flight deck door. “Anyone know what this is?” He held it up in front of him.

“Where did you get that?” Jerry asked.

“I found it in the plane.” Lyle decided not to specify; maybe one of these people put it on the door and could explain it. “Do you know what it is?” He directed his question to Jerry.

Jerry took it in his hand. “A memory card or something like that. No idea.”

“So it’s not instrumental in flying?” Lyle asked.

“Was it in the flight deck?” Jerry asked.

“Near there.”

They stared at it. It looked almost like it could be a mezuzah holder, the little rectangular boxes that Jews put inside their front doors. But gold colored. “A good luck charm of some kind?” Lyle muttered.

“May I see it?” Alex asked. “I do the tech thing.”

Jerry shrugged and handed it back to her.

While she looked, Eleanor said, “Lyle, you keep talking about the immune system, immune response. I’m assuming you mean that the body is fighting off something. Do I have this right?”

“Are you asking me if that’s what’s happening now?”

“I guess.”

“I’m not sure. It looks to me like these… bodies are fighting in the way you would if you got a virus. To answer your question more directly, the immune system, obviously, is the body’s defense. It is miraculous. Within seconds, it can sense a foreign organism in a body and begin to mount a defense.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Please, Jerry, let him talk,” Eleanor said. “I’m sorry, Jerry. I’m asking because I’m trying to figure out what to do when we get to town. What if we see a bunch of these people? Are we worried about infection? Can we help them?”

“After the immune system shows up, it sort of defines what sort of enemy it is up against and then starts making millions of copies of immune-system soldiers that are specifically built for this enemy. When the immune system gets overwhelmed, it can mean that the foreign organism, say, a virus, is not just powerful but novel.”

He got quiet. Everyone did, even the girl in the back.

“Can’t the immune system be dangerous, too?” It was Alex.

“How so, Alex?” Eleanor said.

“Crohn’s disease, arthritis, and on and on. All sorts of autoimmune disorders,” Lyle said, picking up Alex’s thread. He seemed lost in thought. “It’s a very good point. I—how do you…”

“When I was younger, I had arthritis,” Alex said. She held the odd gold object in her hand.

“The limp,” Eleanor said.

Lyle turned his neck around and was looking at Alex. With her bangs, she looked like a member of a girl punk band. She met Lyle’s eyes and she tilted her head just a touch to the side.

“Did I get that right?” she said, sounding full well like she knew she had.

“It’s a fair point, if likely off topic,” Lyle said and turned forward again. He paused. “But not necessarily.”

“Somebody explain what the hell is the point, then,” Jerry blurted.

Lyle wanted to wring his neck. “You love guns, right?”

“I love the right to own a gun, my constitutional right.”

“Why?”

“Get this guy. So I can defend myself, like when the shit goes down, like right now.”

“Okay, so this is a way of thinking about the immune system. Guns are a defense system but also dangerous in their own way. If we run amok with guns, we destroy ourselves—”

“Pinko.”

“Let him finish, please,” Eleanor said. “What’s that have to do with—”

“The immune system can spin out of control. That’s why one of its most important features is its brake.”

He explained that immune systems have two key switches, a brake and an accelerator. When the immune system is needed, neurochemicals cause the accelerator to get switched on. But when it’s done, the brake starts. “The immune system must be stopped in its tracks, a fast, immediate cease-and-desist,” Lyle continued. “It will consume the body faster than any foreign organi—”

Before he could finish, Eleanor slammed the truck brakes.

They were paused in front of the Sleepy Bear Mobile Home Park. It was fed by a paved road with snow-draped trees on either side. A dozen cars parked at an angle near what looked like a front office. Mostly hidden behind the trees, mobile homes jagged at various angles. A floodlight from somewhere in the middle of the camp gave more visibility than the group had had in miles.

“I saw a bear,” Eleanor said. She paused. “Do you see it?” She stared in the direction of the front office.

“Can you scare it off, Jerry?”

“Why?”

“If it’s in the camp, it might…” She didn’t finish the thought.

“I don’t think it’ll eat people, Eleanor. It can’t get into the homes.”

“Right.”

“Can you pull in there, anyway?” Lyle asked.

“Why?”

“I’m curious how it moves.”

“To see if it’s sick?”

“Just to be clear,” Jerry interrupted the flow between Eleanor and Lyle, “I’m not taking any chances.” Meaning: I will shoot it.

Eleanor exhaled with her growing loss of patience at his bravado. She did pull into the driveway. Trees loomed overhead, the most beautiful mobile home park setting they’d ever seen. Lodgepole and Ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, and the backdrop, the gray outline of mountains. The bear stood at a metal trash bin. It tried to shove a paw inside an opening too small for its arm. Lazily, it looked back at the pickup.

“Is that a bear?” said the girl. Her inner child had surfaced.

“Black, probably a mom,” said the boy, perking up. “You have to bundle up your food and can’t put out compost or anything like that. Sometimes, my dad…” He couldn’t finish the sentence, the thought of his father too much to handle. Then: “He’d just shoot in the air.”

“A honk should suffice,” Lyle mumbled.

Eleanor honked. The bear seemed largely unfazed but put its heavy haunches on the ground and ambled away from the pickup, in the direction of the trees and two yellow mobile homes beneath them. It moves naturally, Lyle thought, so very likely not sick. Anyway, why would it be? It’s not like animals died off when the flu came in 1918.

“Shit!” Jerry exclaimed. He opened the car door.

They could see why. There was a person who looked like he was sitting on the ground next to a white-and-gray mobile home. The more they looked, the more they realized the man was surely another victim who had slid to the ground with paralysis, or with whatever he was suffering. The bear walked near, sniffing the air.

“Be careful, Jerry,” Eleanor said.

“Honk again.”

Eleanor laid on the horn. Now, though, the bear had moved beyond twenty yards away and was half hidden by a tree. The truck horn no longer dissuaded it. It ambled forward toward the mobile home and the man slouched next to a ladder with the brand name Hitch Hiker in black letters on the top. Jerry made his way toward a lodgepole pine that was slightly to the left and between the pickup and the bear. The bear seemed to speed up. Lyle slipped to the right of the seat and out the door. Lyle shut the door to protect the people inside. It was freezing. He moved absently, curiously, almost an automaton, looking through a scientific lens. Part of him wandered, without him fully realizing it, thinking about whether the man on the ground might awaken if attacked. Part of him wondered whether the bear might ultimately ignore the man. Most animals don’t eat people if they’ve not had the taste.

Jerry stood behind the tree and leveled his gun.

“You could hit the man,” Lyle said, quickly catching up now. Snow already burned at the exposed parts of his neck and licked through his thin shoes. Jerry turned back to him and, inadvertently or not, turned the gun in Lyle’s direction. “Do not tell me what to do again.” He turned back to the bear. He whistled.

The bear half turned and then resumed its approach, albeit more slowly. It was ten feet from the man now and seemed as curious as hungry. Jerry pointed the gun at the ground and pulled the slide back. He looked up into the sky in the direction of a collection of trees and seemed to make a calculation. He aimed over the trees and pulled the trigger.

The bear froze.

“Scat,” Jerry mumbled, as if speaking to himself, hoping.

The bear turned and looked in the direction of Jerry and Lyle. Big, not huge, 225 pounds, Lyle thought. The paws, though, that was the scary part. The big prints made gaping wounds in the snow, giant mitts with razors on the edge. The bear growled. Low.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Jerry said to the bear and sounded like he very much meant it.

The bear turned back to the man felled against the mobile home.

Jerry aimed at the bear. “Please stop.” The bear took another step. Jerry tipped the gun slightly at an angle, over the bear’s head.

Jerry fumbled with the gun. It slipped from his hands. “Shit, shit.” He dropped to his knees and he recovered it and wiped the snow off and felt it sliding, frozen, in his hands. He regripped the trigger. He looked up. The bear was practically on top of the man now.

“No choice,” Lyle said.

Jerry, hand shaking, aimed at the bear’s left buttocks, as far away as he might from the direction of the man. He squeezed a bit more, steadying his arm. Then he saw a flash of movement to his right.

“Easy, easy,” Alex said. She stood ten feet from the bear. “My name is Alex.”

The bear’s ears had perked up with what could only be described as curiosity.

“Hello, bear. I have good news. I have food for you,” she said as gently and calmly as if singing a lullaby. Steadily, she reached a hand into her pocket and withdrew a Cliff Bar and tore it open. She dropped the wrapper.

“She’s going to get eaten herself,” Jerry said.

The bear took a step in her direction. Alex held up the bar, watching as the bear sniffed the air. The animal took another step, less lazy this time, more intentional. “You can have it,” Alex said. She made a show of holding the bar up into the air and then flinging it to the right in the direction of a grove of trees. The bear watched it go, sniffed the air, then walked in Alex’s direction.

“It’s time,” Jerry said, taking aim.

“Hang on. She’s slick,” Lyle said.

The bear turned its angle and headed back toward the flung energy bar. One step, two, three. Still, none of the rest of them moved.

“We should go,” Jerry said.

“We’ve still got to get this guy back inside.”

“I’m not freaking touching that.”

Without taking an eye off the snacking bear, Jerry and Lyle and Alex quickly convened around the man in the doorway of the mobile home. He wore a red-checked flannel shirt and jeans and a pair of brown slippers with fur on the inside of them. Clearly, he hadn’t walked outside planning to be there for long. In the man’s hand was a playing card, a jack of spades.

Suddenly, a blaring noise. Eleanor laid on the car horn.

“Bear’s coming,” Jerry said.

“Shit.”

The bear had turned its attention in their direction. It sniffed the air. Then it loped forward, two big steps on its front paws, accelerating.

Alex turned the handle of the mobile home and the lot of them burst toward the door, Lyle dragging the comatose man. The bear closed in. They shut the door behind them and looked up and froze.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jerry said, as Lyle dropped the man from outside with the flannel shirt and the smile on his face.

Twenty-Two

Four poker players sat around a table. Each of them frozen with the syndrome. One’s head tilted back, exposing his neck. Another’s face fell to the right, nearly to his shoulder. Two had plunged forward onto the cheap, green felt poker table. A fifth seat was empty. All were men, all, from the looks of it, at least middle-aged and two definite gray hairs. Two had puddles beneath them. The piss stench overwhelmed.

“It’s in here.”

Alex bent low and looked out a window to her right. “And that’s right out there.”

The night-lined outline of the bear moved across her view and to the door. It made a moaning noise, more foghorn than growl. A fat paw slapped at the door.

Jerry instinctively brought his shirt over his nose, wanting not to breathe in the disease or whatever it was. He took a step away from the macabre poker table to press himself against a wall. He tripped, and fell to his left, landing near another body, prone next to an ice chest. “Shit. It touched me. Shit!” He stood and scraped his hands on his chest and looked down at himself as if scouring for microscopic signs of evil. He took two more steps to the door. The bear let loose a fearsome moan.

“The window,” Jerry said. “We can…” He paused, looked down at his hand, remembering the gun. Where was the gun? Not in his hand. They all had the same recognition: he’d dropped it in the scramble to get inside.

“You knocked it out of my hand,” Jerry spat at Lyle.

Lyle appeared not to be listening, or he certainly didn’t care. “Rock and a hard place,” Lyle muttered—bear out there, syndrome in here. He scoped the room. Along the right wall, a stiff-looking yellow-and-brown couch beneath a window; to the left, a studio-style kitchen with faux-wood, cherry-colored paneled cabinets; directly across, an opening that led to what looked like it might be a small bedroom and bath. In the center, the poker table. Lyle walked forward. He focused on the man nearest him, head hung to the right beneath a fishing cap with a red fly-lure tucked into the brim. Spittle dripped from his lips. Lyle reached for the man’s carotid artery and then suddenly withdrew with a horrifying thought: he’d reached into the mouth of the man on the tarmac and the one in the airplane hangar and that had been a terrible idea! Now he realized these people might be experiencing something akin to a seizure, a paralysis state; they could have bitten his damn hand off. Foolish, rookie move, he thought.

He started at the table. In front of each man, a pile of yellow, red, and blue chips, and a cell phone. The phone nearest him was facedown. Gingerly, Lyle turned it over and saw that it was powered off. He moved to the next phone and turned it over. On the screen, a screen saver image of a lake in summer.

Then, struck with yet another thought, he turned around and saw that Alex was dragging the man from outside onto the yellow couch. Why wasn’t she more frightened? He caught Alex’s eye and she looked quickly down as he walked over and put his hand on this man’s neck. The skin was cold, unnatural.

“This one is dead,” he said.

“How did you know?” Alex asked.

“I just suspected. He’s been out there a long time,” Lyle said. “We’re running out of time.”

“For what?” Jerry asked. But it was obvious. How long could someone stay in a state like this, particularly in the snow? “Look, Doctor, you’ve seen this already. We need to get out of here.”

Lyle was already walking to the back of the mobile home.

“Hey, did you hear me?” Jerry barked. “We’re out of here.”

They looked at him, standing there beside the felled man near the ice chest. The man lay on his left side. He wore a green fishing vest. He twitched.

Then the comatose man’s arm shot up and grabbed Jerry by his left calf.

“Fuck!” Jerry shrieked. He leapt out of the grasp, smacking against the door. Behind him, the bear moaned.

“Interesting,” Lyle said.

“Interesting? Interesting! What are these, freaking zombies?”

“I doubt it,” Lyle said. He watched the comatose man’s hand slide back down. Lyle walked around, exploring, looking. “There’s got to be a comb,” Lyle said.

“Are you insane?” Jerry walked over to the window, near Alex. Clearly, he was looking for an exit. He looked like he might throw up.

“A comb, and a wool jacket.” They could barely hear Lyle; he stood in the tiny bathroom using moonlight to look on the edges of the sink, over the toilet, then inside the mirrored medicine cabinet. “Ah,” he said, finding a comb. Lost in thought, he hustled back to the main area, where he discovered that Jerry had disappeared. Of course, he’d gone back outside.

“The bear…” Alex started. “It is walking to the pickup.”

“Alex, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re worried about the children.”

“Yes, I mean, of course. They’re terrified. They have no idea what to do.”

“You have kids?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Remind me, what brings you to Steamboat?” Lyle asked her and watched her reaction as intently as he might when taking a patient history, even as he walked to a man with a heavy coat draped over the back of his chair.

“Mountain retreat, like I said.” She gave him a smile that defied interpretation. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory. Do you understand anything about science?”

“Took it in high school.”

“You’re in tech, though.”

“Sales.”

“Uh-huh. Big company?”

“Google, actually. I thought I mentioned it.”

“They only hire the best. You must know something about electricity. You ever see the trick of rubbing a plastic comb against wool? It’s like walking with your socks on the carpet. You can get a good shock.”

He rubbed the black plastic comb against the wool jacket, back and forth, with increasing vigor. So much so that it threatened to tip the man out of his chair. All the while, Lyle stared at Alex. She met his gaze, then dropped it, looked up again, and there he was, still staring. His blank face gave away little of his thinking. Then he looked down at the man sitting in the chair with the jacket. This man’s throat was exposed. Lyle put the comb to the side of the man’s head. Nothing happened.

Lyle began rubbing the comb again, more vigorously still. Alex took two steps forward, mesmerized.

Lyle withdrew the comb from the jacket and placed it on the man’s exposed neck.

The man jerked. Alex stepped backward.

“Dr. Martin, you’re…”

He studied her face.

“You’re doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“You’re—”

A gunshot exploded from outside the mobile home. Then—bang bang bang—a knock on the door. Lyle stared at the man’s body, now back in its paralysis state but, clearly, something had happened. The man no longer smiled. His head lolled to the side. Some movement.

Jerry slammed the door open. “We have to go. Now!

“Hurry! Someone’s alive!”

Twenty-Three

Lyle felt a hand around his arm. Jerry yanked him toward the door. Lyle yielded but stared at the man at the table. The guy wasn’t back to normal but he’d had a reaction. His head lolled now. Still in a state that Lyle thought of as stasis and yet not so beyond reach. Outside, the pickup had pulled as near as it could without hitting the tree line. Twenty feet to the right, the black bear sat on its haunches, growling.

“I had to shoot it,” Jerry said. “I think it can live but it’s pissed. We have to make a run for it.”

“Why?” Alex said.

“A car just passed. Heading down the road. In the direction of town.”

Jerry started running to the pickup, prompting a louder growl from the bear. Lyle followed, and so did Alex, stumbling behind. The bear started forward at them. They reached the car as the bear sped up.

“Get in, get in, get in!” Eleanor said. She laid on the horn to scare the bear.

“It’s going to eat us,” the girl screamed.

They slammed shut the door. The bear crashed into the driver’s-side door. It rocked the cabin. The girl screamed again. Eleanor had ducked to the right and fumbled from a bent position with the controls. The bear swiped at the window, cracking it. Eleanor yanked the gear shift into reverse. Without looking, zoom, the pickup spun backward. Then with a thwacking sound, paused and spun to the right. They’d hit the KOA sign.

Eleanor put the truck in drive and pulled the wheel sharply to the left. Just before she hit the accelerator she paused and saw the bear fifteen feet away, growling and bleeding. “Sorry,” Eleanor mumbled. She guided the vehicle into a sharp U-turn and back onto the main road. The truck slipped and slid and the reason was now plain to the eye: the snowfall had intensified. It wasn’t quite a blizzard and also not at all a time to be out in the middle of the night. The clock said 2:45.

“There!” Jerry said.

Up ahead, quickly getting away from them, taillights. They were heading east, away from the airport and toward Steamboat proper. A stunned silence overtook the passengers of the pickup. Not even the girl made a sound. The windshield wipers thwapped and squeaked. In the back, the boy and girl sat beside each other with Alex now on the right and the three of them huddled. Eleanor leaned forward in the driver’s seat. Jerry clicked the ammunition out of the handle of the gun and saw six bullets and clicked it back in and checked the safety. He stared vacantly out the window until he saw a sign and then said, “Two miles to town.” The industry turned more dense: a car dealership, a veterinary hospital, a shuttered café and gas station. Signs of life but not the living. Not a soul walking or driving, other than the car they had been following and could no longer see.

Lyle stared at the electrical wires running alongside the road. Then Lyle turned his head to the back of the truck. “Hey, kiddos, I could really use your help.” In his periphery, he could see the girl’s face remained choked with terror and the boy stared stoically ahead. Neither acknowledged Lyle. He said: “My wife has a son.”

This seemed to perk up the boy. “He died?”

“No, I just don’t see him anymore. It’s a long story. I’m very sad about it. I want to make sure that you guys see your parents again soon. Can I ask a question?”

It was how Lyle used to speak to patients or their families, with the human touch. Sincere in a way they might not expect from a doctor. It seemed to connect to the boy. He focused on Lyle while the snow drifted down and Eleanor followed in the direction of the ghost car.

“Do you remember when your dad got sick?”

“I was asleep and when I woke up he was… like that.”

“Did he move?”

“Yes, they all moved!”

It was an outburst from the girl. Alex put her hand on the girl’s back.

“What do you mean, Andrea?”

“They…” She was trying to tell them and she didn’t have the words.

“Did they get mad at each other?” Lyle asked.

“What? No!”

“Did they,” Lyle moved his arms around, “jerk their bodies?”

“Kind of, I don’t know, maybe like they were dreaming. I don’t know.” She sniffled. “There was this sound. I heard this sound. It was a siren. I thought the ambulance was coming.”

Lyle looked at Alex, who was staring at the girl.

“Did you hear a siren?”

Alex shook her head.

“Static, like the radio?”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Eleanor said. She passed a motel with a blinking vacancy sign, and then another mobile home park on the right. On the left, a high rock wall buffeted the highway. Trees and tufts grew nearly at right angles. The road veered to the right.

“Stop,” Jerry said.

“Why?”

He was looking out the right side of the car at Elk River Guns.

Eleanor kept driving.

“Pollyanna,” Jerry muttered.

Eleanor almost retorted but she was distracted by the emergence in front of them of a downtown strip. Lyle was still turned backward, talking to the children, but his eyes were elsewhere: on Alex.

“Did you feel anything in your body, Andrea?”

“My head hurt.”

“Have you ever had a shock, like getting your finger stuck in a light socket?”

“No.”

“I got one when I walked on the carpet in my socks,” Tyler said.

“Did it feel like that?” Lyle asked.

Both children shook their head.

“Is that what it feels like?” Lyle asked Alex.

“What?”

“When you were in the airplane and all those people got stuck. Is that what it felt like?” He really was eyeing her now, with great intensity. She shrugged. Lyle kept trying to place her and her knowing look. It looked like she felt some intimacy. Was she grasping at straws and seeing him as a source of stability amid this chaos? Or was it something more?

Did she have the disease? Was this what it looked like, a kind of intensity or derangement? Maybe this was onset. But why did it take her so long to get it? Did it have to do with her limp? Something odd about that.

“Alex, do you have that thing I found in the plane, the little golden rectangle?”

“Oh, sure, right here,” she said. She reached into her pocket. “Wait, I…” She looked around some more, in both jacket pockets, her pants pockets. “I don’t know, I—”

“Did it fall out back there?” Jerry said.

“I was running, with the bear and everything,” she said. “Is it important?”

Lyle was considering his answer when Eleanor suddenly hit the brakes. It prompted everyone to turn around and see what she was looking at. Ghost town. A beautiful, serene, peaceful ghost town. The main drag, Lincoln Avenue, unfolded before them for a good ten blocks, shops on each side, traffic lights overhead, most of them turned off. One, a few blocks down, blinked yellow. It had all the looks of a quiet mountain town in the middle of the night, with one exception. Two blocks down, a police car had smashed into the window of a shop. It looked like it had spun out and driven directly into the glass and then gotten stuck there, its back half sticking out into the sidewalk.

Four blocks farther ahead, the car they were giving chase to took a left-hand turn onto a side street.

“Any reason I shouldn’t follow?” Eleanor said.

No one spoke.

Eleanor stepped on the gas. They all looked at the police car smashed into the front of a business advertising local art. The pilot kept going. On Seventh, she took a left turn. Now things turned residential. One- and two-story houses, some just shy of ramshackle, others not fancy but tasteful and even recently remodeled. Lots of sport utility vehicles. One house had a fence with slats made entirely of old skis. They cruised through the deadened residential area, reaching foothills just a few blocks later. They followed the car when it took a left and then wound up a hill, reached a plateau, and revealed another valley, this one dark and, evidently, not much inhabited. The car in front of them had begun descending and they followed. A half mile later, they took a left turn onto a dirt road.

“He’s leading us somewhere, obviously,” Eleanor said.

A minute later they drew near to a house. In front of it was parked the station wagon. In the middle of nowhere, a two-story cabin made of thick logs, looking, at least in this dim light, expertly manicured, hand-crafted. Two horizontally rectangular windows cut the top floor, suggested two bedrooms. A picture window took up the middle of the bottom floor but a curtain concealed whatever was behind it. A rocking chair sat on the narrow porch behind the front door. Parked in front, steam rising from the hood, was the station wagon but not the person who had been driving it.

“What next?” Eleanor said.

Nobody responded.

“I’m concerned this person may be violent,” Lyle said.

“Ditto,” said Jerry.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the precautious way to think,” Jerry said.

“Precautious?”

“This syndrome, it might impact how people behave. I’m not sure about that.” Lyle was thinking about how the man on the airplane had been hit in the head. Someone had done that.

“What does that have to do with the radio waves?” Eleanor said. “You keep asking about them.”

“I’m thinking of onset. Sorry, dumb fancy word. When this syndrome hits, what happens. Do we feel something, or react in some way? How much time do we have before…”

His voice trailed off.

“Maybe the guy is just as scared as we are,” Eleanor said. She pulled up the pickup parallel to the station wagon, left it idling.

There was a flash of light and—rat-tat-tat—bullets tore through the front of the pickup.

Twenty-Four

The world lurched forward. That’s what it felt like. Bullets tore into the tires and they deflated and the pickup truck lunged with its passengers like it had fallen to its proverbial knees, sending everyone tumbling. Lyle’s forehead smacked the front panel. The girl wailed from the backseat. Lyle felt the clutch of Eleanor’s hand on his leg. He saw the blood on her own forehead as she bounced back. Jerry, head low, cracked the passenger’s-side door.

Rat-tat-tat. Another two bullets spat at the front of the car.

Steam hissed from the engine, a spark flew, metal clanged, and then silence again. The message seemed pretty clear: Don’t move or I’ll shoot.

Without taking her hands from the steering wheel, without moving perceptibly at all, Eleanor said quietly: “He’d probably have killed us already if that’s what he wanted to do.”

“Sounds like a semiautomatic, at least,” Jerry said with equal care. “We’re outgunned. But if I can get a clean look—”

“Jerry, Jerry. Don’t even think about it. If I had to guess, there’s someone out there who is just as scared as we are. So let’s not spook him further. Dr. Martin?”

“Sounds right to me, Captain.”

“You don’t think it’s some half-sick madman? Like with the disease or something?” Alex said from the back. “We’ve got children here.”

“Good point,” Jerry said.

For Lyle, the world felt like it had split into two or, rather, into two screens, each showing different camera angles of the same scene. One camera focused on the house, quaint but deadly, hiding a powerful weapon and its trigger person. The other camera focused on the car, and the people in it, the formations of alliances and coalitions, primitive psychology forming. Whom to trust? Jerry was like a less-evolved animal, dangerous, impossible to communicate with but possible to manipulate and fundamentally unaware of his primitive psychology. Quite the opposite of Alex. Every time she spoke now, Lyle sensed her many layers. She stared at him almost like he was a savior or lover. Other times, as if he were a foe.

Maybe he was going nuts, he thought.

“Deep breaths,” Eleanor said. “Let me tell you what I’m going to do.”

She explained that she would slowly open the door, hands up, and walk in surrender toward the house and let the person understand the situation.

“No, please.” It was Alex. “You’re too important. I’m just a…” Before she finished or could say anything further, she’d opened the passenger-side back door and climbed over the boy. A bullet spat the ground in front of the truck but she stood her ground.

“Back in the truck,” Eleanor said as patiently as she might, clearly about to lose her shit.

“Jerry,” Alex said. “Don’t let him shoot me.”

“Get back in the truck,” Eleanor repeated.

“Keep your hands up,” Jerry said. “Tell him you don’t have a gun.”

“Don’t let him shoot me.”

“Give me a sign if he’s crazy,” Jerry said.

“Like what? Like a little loco sign behind my back?” Alex whispered.

“Draw him out.” Jerry sounded like he’d been thinking it all along.

Alex took another step forward, arms raised, and yelled toward the house: “We have children!”

She took another step. Now she was a step in front of the pickup. This time, no shots. From the backseat, the girl whimpered and now the boy choked out a sob, too. “You two, keep it down, I don’t want to have to ask you again,” Jerry said. “I will get you out of this.”

Alex took two more steps forward. Then two more. Now she was within fifteen feet of the porch. With the headlights shot out of the pickup, she was getting less visible. Wind had joined the snow, blowing from the west. Arms over her head, Alex balled her fists for warmth.

She said something the people in the pickup couldn’t hear and then the right side of the downstairs curtain moved. Not a lot, but enough to indicate the whereabouts of someone in the house.

“We have children and a doctor,” Alex said. “We landed on an airplane.”

Eleanor clutched Lyle’s leg, and he reached over and took her hand.

From inside the house, a voice said something that sounded like: “Slowly.”

“I can’t hear,” whispered Eleanor. “Damn it.”

Alex took two more steps and stopped and raised her hands higher. She said something else.

“Channelopathy,” Lyle said, almost exclaimed, with some wonder.

“What?”

“Of course, ah,” he said.

Alex took a step forward.

“We should stop her,” Lyle said. He was emerging from a trance.

“Why? What are you talking about?”

Lyle reached over and honked the horn. H-o-o-o-o-n-k.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jerry pulled Lyle back. Lyle hardly seemed to notice, so lost was he in thought. “Sodium ion channels, it’s got to have something to do with that.”

Alex took another step forward. She was talking but they couldn’t hear what was going on. Alex had lowered her hands. One of them she now held behind her back and she was twirling it in a circle, the loco sign. This guy in here is nuts.

“Draw him out,” Jerry muttered.

“No,” Lyle said. “We need him. We need—”

The front door to the house opened, slightly, and a gun barrel emerged, pointed at Alex. She made the sign behind her back again. Somewhere along the line, Jerry had opened his door and now he was moving himself outside of it. “I’m a doctor,” Jerry lied, talking in the direction of the house. He had the gun pinned to his right side trying to keep it blocked from the gunman’s view.

“You’re going to get us all killed,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin, why do we have to keep her out of the house?”

“I don’t know. She knows something.”

“You don’t know? You don’t know?!” Eleanor hissed.

“Tell him I’m a doctor,” Jerry said to Alex, who stood with her hands now back in the air. She said something. The person from the house pushed the door open.

Images and thoughts were colliding inside Lyle’s brain: the passenger on the tarmac, the one on the couch, their smiles, the frozen screen with The Godfather, an old man with his head bludgeoned, the girl clutching her head. The way the static electricity woke up that man. It would be about sodium channels and epilepsy. What was the connection there? It had to do with how the brain transferred electricity.

His mind’s eye searched through his mental archives while through an actual blank stare, he watched as Jerry took another step forward in front of the pickup. His hands inside his jacket hid the gun.

“Jerry, tell her to come back,” Eleanor said.

He ignored her.

Alex took another step forward, then she dropped to her knees.

“What’s going on up there?” Eleanor muttered.

The front door to the house swung open and a man stood with an automatic gun slung over his shoulder. Tall and round, but sleek in his full-length leather jacket. On his woolly head, a kerchief pulled tight like you might see on a biker.

Jerry dropped to his knees and the shooting started.

Twenty-Five

Pop-pop-pop.

It was over in under two seconds.

The man in the doorway flopped backward, his hand making a last clutch at the door frame and then he collapsed.

“That’s right. That’s what I’m talking about!” Jerry exclaimed. He sounded like a high school linebacker who had just flattened a receiver.

“Jesus,” Eleanor said.

Alex lay on the ground.

“You all stay right where you are,” Jerry said. “We need to make sure he didn’t have company.”

He kept his body low and closed in on Alex. When he got to her, he gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate she wasn’t hurt. Then, still crouching, he made his way to the porch. He pasted himself against the wall next to the front door.

“Crack shot,” Lyle said to Eleanor.

“All clear!” Jerry said. “Let’s get these kids inside where it’s warm.”

Eleanor grabbed Lyle by the sides of the face and turned him her direction.

“Are you seeing something here you recognize—medically? If so, I would really appreciate you communicating it to me.”

He switched his gaze from Eleanor to Alex, watching how she watched him—with some fascination. He needed to talk to her.

The porch lit up, presumably from Jerry flicking a switch inside the door. Now it was clear that there was another building, to the right and set back slightly from the house. Out here it might be called a carriage house or even a barn, but in the city, another living quarters, like a cottage. Out front of it sat a sedan. It had only a dusting of snow on it. The image suggested to Lyle that people were inside the small building.

“Have you ever had a seizure?” Lyle asked Eleanor.

“Yes.”

“You have?”

“Two, actually, minor, when I was young, some strange syndrome that passed.”

“You remember what they were like?”

She remembered. Like her world had locked up. “These people had seizures, or are having them?”

“It’s just seizures aren’t viral.”

“So it’s not a seizure.”

“I’m not sure. When you had a seizure, what do you remember about it?”

“I just told you; the world paused.”

“Sorry, what did you remember about what happened beforehand, like, what were you doing when it happened?”

Eleanor processed the question. She couldn’t remember a thing, that was the problem; she felt like she’d lost hours of her life, like they’d gone blank. She told Lyle. He nodded. Short-term memory loss, he said, a common side effect.

“I need you to talk to me, Dr. Martin. I’m not sure what or who to trust and I need information. I’m not trying to play captain here. I’m trying to play reasonable adult in a totally alien situation. What would we do if this were another planet?”

“I’d take you to dinner.”

“What?” She laughed, seeming both slightly irritated by and appreciative of the random nature of the comment.

“It’s been a long time since I met someone who welcomed my opinion in an adult conversation,” he said.

“Hold it together, Dr. Martin.”

“I don’t know who or what to trust at this point.”

“You can trust me,” Eleanor said.

“Yep.”

Lyle reached into the glove compartment and fumbled around. His hand returned with a pen that he used to write something on a yellow scrap of paper he’d found. He scribbled on the paper and ripped it in half. He handed half to Eleanor.

“Put this in your pocket,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A note. Put it in your pocket. For later.”

She looked at it quizzically.

“Trust me.” He caught her eyes with his own and held the look for emphasis.

Then he stuck the other half of the scrap of paper in his back pocket. Lyle looked again at Eleanor and said, “You want to know the thing that my ex-wife hated most about me?”

“Not right now.”

“The thing she hated most was that I had instincts about things that I couldn’t prove, that often seemed wildly off base but that wound up being true. Like when I realized she was pregnant with someone else’s child even though I had no real basis for knowing it was true.”

“There are children in the car.”

“This is one of those times.”

“So you handed me a piece of paper with scribbles on it?”

“Something’s about to happen,” Lyle said. He slid out of the pickup.

He got out of the vehicle, sensing Alex and Jerry were watching his every move. He guessed that Jerry would be furious he’d had this intimate exchange with Eleanor, face-to-face.

“You gotta see something,” Jerry said. “Get a load of this.”

He was standing in the doorway of the house, gesturing to Lyle. Every part of Lyle wanted to ignore him.

“What are you afraid of, Lover Boy?” Jerry said.

Lyle saw that Jerry was trying to play off his lover boy comment as no big thing. He was clearly pissed while Alex’s face was implacable.

“What are you afraid of?” Jerry repeated and gestured Lyle over with his gun. Lyle couldn’t figure a way around it. He walked up the slick stairs onto the porch. He stared down at the body and then peeked inside the house and found himself fascinated. What was it about this place and this man that left him unharmed—well, until he was gunned down? The first thing Lyle saw was the image of the serpent. Along the far wall on the first floor, a banner hung with a picture of a snake. Lyle took a step inside. It smelled of cooking, boiled meat, Lyle guessed, coming from an open-style kitchen separated from the room where Lyle stood by a yellow linoleum countertop. The place was lit by a camping lamp. It showed a couch with a blanket folded neatly across it and a recliner. Along the wall to the right, a startling sight: stacks of canned goods—corn was the first thing that struck Lyle’s eye, and peas and chili—and cases of bottled water. Someone was ready for the apocalypse. To the left, there was a trophy case made of thick glass. It was filled not with trophies but with guns, big, powerful guns, stacked horizontally.

In the middle of the room, though, were the two things that most caught Lyle’s attention: a camping light that lit the cabin and a small black radio.

“What is that?” Lyle asked Jerry.

“Narrowband radio.”

“Who uses it?”

“Public safety folks, hobbyists. You know what kills me?”

“What?”

“I took out one of the good guys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Prepper.”

Lyle took his meaning and knew it was right. This dead guy was one of those militarized citizens who was “prepping,” preparing for the collapse of the government or society. Not just planning for it but hoping for it, probably. When the whole thing collapsed, the spoils would go to the ones who had stocked up on guns and food and the tools of survival.

Lyle started walking through the house taking everything in. The place was orderly to the point of being pristine. A room behind the kitchen was too dark to make out but seemed to be an office. A doorway to the right of the kitchen was padlocked. Back in the living room, he looked at the banner of the serpent: Don’t Tread on Me.

Jerry was no longer in the room. Alex fiddled with her phone.

“I’m getting a signal,” she said. “I think the network is back.”

Lyle couldn’t pinpoint what was so extraordinary about this place.

“Something’s changed,” Alex said. “Things are making sense to you.”

He stared at her. Was she turning insane?

“I don’t know you that well but you seem to be in a kind of thrall,” she said.

“He doesn’t have electricity,” Lyle answered. “That’s it. He’s off the grid.” He looked again at Alex. “Tell me how you’re feeling? Does your head hurt?

“Have you stopped limping?”

He stared at her leg. It no longer had that nuanced rectitude in it. He shook his head, wondering what to make of this new puzzle piece. Something about her immune system? No, it meant something else.

“You don’t really care about her,” Alex said, ignoring his question.

“I think you need to lie down.”

“Eleanor, the captain. That was an act, wasn’t it?”

Outside, the car honked. It honked again.

Alex smirked. “I’ve been watching you.”

He stopped now and stared at her as if she were lying on the autopsy bed. Outside, the honking was going nonstop.

“Please, lie down,” Lyle said. He started walking to the door. He felt his phone buzz. Then he felt Alex’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw an odd look on her face, like she had grand plans.

Twenty-Six

The horn outside the cabin continued to blare. “They’re in trouble,” Lyle said to Alex. It wasn’t the sort of stupid obvious thing he usually said, but this woman was well more than unnerving him. What the hell was she talking about?

“It’s only the beginning.”

“What?”

“This is alpha, not even beta, not quite the way it should go. Give me a month to work the kinks out. You helped find them, the kinks. Of course you did, I knew you would. We needed a genius, the world did, and there you were.” She paused. “I had no idea it wouldn’t work on kids. I’m glad, of course. They need it so much less.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Better days ahead.”

“What did you say you do at Google?”

He looked at the door, wondering how he was going to just get past this person.

“You won’t feel a thing, Dr. Martin.”

Then, for some reason, he found himself staring at her hat. There was something odd about it; hadn’t he thought so all along? It looked like wool, sort of, but it had these metallic strands built into it. Gold colored. Gold, right? Like that rectangle he’d found on the flight deck door.

He felt his phone buzz again. Did she say she’d gotten a signal? He pulled out his phone and thought about Melanie. She was out there, and her son. He reached the door and caught a glimpse of what was out there. Jerry lay on his back in the snow; in the pickup, Eleanor’s face was buried in the steering wheel, where she must have been—

Lyle’s phone buzzed. He swiped at it and saw the image of the cover of an album that he’d been listening to when he fell asleep on the plane.

Everything went black.