Eden Rising

10

Sanjay peered out the third-floor window at the alley. It was still empty.

Where was she?

It shouldn’t have taken Kusum more than four hours at most to make the round trip, but five had already passed. He cursed himself for about the thousandth time. He should have been the one to go, not because he thought she was incapable, but at least he would know what was going on. Instead, he could only sit there as his anxiety spiraled out of control. But the decision had apparently not been his to make.

“You went for the close-up look of the survival station,” Kusum had said. “That means it is my turn.”

“Why do we need to take turns?”

She looked at him, clearly thinking it was a stupid question.

“Maybe we should both go,” he suggested, hoping for at least a partial victory.

“Someone needs to stay here and keep an eye on what is going on,” she said. “You are familiar with both the buildings and the people—”

“Not all the people,” he interjected.

“Many of them. You will stay. I will go.”

He was beginning to see the pitfalls of falling in love with a woman who was smarter and potentially more competent than he was. “If you take too long, I will come look for you,” he said.

“You will not,” she said. “If I do not return by sundown, you will go to the camp, but you will not come looking for me. Do you understand?”

“Sundown? Impossible. I cannot wait that long.”

“Sanjay,” she said, her voice mellowing in the way it did when she tried to point out the obvious. “There are many people counting on us now. If something happens to both of us, they will have no chance.”

“I will not let anything happen to you.”

“I know. And I love you for that. But do not come looking for me.”

What else could he do but agree? Of course, that didn’t mean he had to stick by the bargain. He looked down the alley again. Nothing.

Dammit. Where are they?

Kusum had gone to the furniture factory to fetch the three others who had come with her and Sanjay into the city. Given the situation at the Pishon Chem compound, it seemed a good idea because their help might be needed.

Patience, the voice of Kusum said in his head.

He moved across the room to the window on the other side. His hideout was an apartment in a building two blocks from the compound. Though the Pishon Chem facility was visible from the window where Sanjay was perched, he could see only the very tops of the Pishon Chem buildings and a small portion of the fence that surrounded the property.

He was supposed to be closer, had been closer, in fact, until just an hour ago when he’d returned to this meeting point, expecting to find Kusum and the others waiting for him. Seeing they weren’t there, he didn’t even consider going back to his former position.

On the roof of one of the compound buildings, he spotted one man in a UN uniform patrolling the top. It was disturbing to him how hard they were trying to sell the United Nations angle. Most survivors would arrive at the facility in a state of shock. If the soldiers were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and only had the letters UN hand painted on the sides of their helmets, people would believe them.

The sound of something scraping the ground floated through the window on the other side of the room. Sanjay quietly ran over and looked outside. The alleyway was no longer devoid of movement. At the far end was a man approaching along one of the walls, his movement odd, off-balanced.

It was another few seconds before he moved into a shaft of light.

Not just any man. It was Prabal, one of the people Kusum had gone to fetch.

He was limping, his right leg swinging carefully forward with each step. And running down the side of his face, a wash of blood.

While it had been disturbing enough moving through the seemingly empty city with Sanjay, Kusum found it downright terrifying doing so on her own as she made her way back to the camp.

The quiet was the worst part. Here she was in Mumbai, one of the largest and busiest cities in the world, yet there wasn’t the sound of a motor, the cry of a child, the laugh of an adult. There was no music, either, something that been such an integrated part of the background noise that she noticed the lack of it now more than she’d ever noticed its presence.

Sticking to smaller streets and pathways, she was easily able to avoid the soldiers, seeing only a single group of three near the site of an old market. She hoped the same would be true when she and the others headed back to Sanjay.

The camp was set up in the courtyard of a small factory that had made and repaired furniture. Semi-organized piles of chair legs and tabletops and bed frames took up much of the courtyard space, but there was still plenty of room for Kusum’s and Sanjay’s friends to spread out. The best feature of the place was that it allowed them to hide from view if anyone passed by on one of the surrounding streets, while still having open air above them. If they needed shelter, there was plenty of that inside.

Kusum entered through a back door that led into a basement, where she took the stairs up into the main workshop. Along the interior wall was a large door that could be opened onto the courtyard, but whoever had left the business last had shut it and locked it in place — a hopeful act that he or she would return. She exited through the smaller door on the right and stepped into the outdoor space.

“Stop.” The voice was low, the tone commanding.

“It is only me,” Kusum said.

“Kusum?”

“Yes.”

Darshana stepped from the shadows behind a stack of wooden planks, in her hand an iron rod. After she could see it was indeed Kusum, she lowered her weapon.

“Sorry, I did not realize it was you,” she said.

“Never be sorry for this,” Kusum said. “I could have been anyone. I would have been surprised if you had not greeted me like this.”

Darshana tried to maintain a neutral expression, but Kusum thought she saw a flash of pride cross her friend’s face. Though they were about the same age, Darshana and the rest of their survival group considered Kusum and Sanjay to be their leaders, and looked up to them more than Kusum thought they should.

“The others?” Kusum asked.

“Sleeping.”

“We must get them up. I need you all to come with me.”

“This way.”

Darshana led Kusum around the piles of wood and metal to the open area where Prabal and Arjun were stretched out on thin blankets.

“Wake up,” Darshana said, shaking first Arjun’s shoulder then Prabal’s. “Come on. Wake up. We need to go.”

Prabal rolled onto his back with a groan. “What?” he asked, his eyes struggling to open.

“Kusum is here. She needs us to go with her.”

Arjun raised himself on an elbow. “Kusum?” He looked around as if he didn’t quite understand, and then his gaze fell on Kusum. “Oh. Oh, Kusum.” He sat all the way up. “I am sorry. I am…um…still…”

“It’s okay,” Kusum said. “Please get up and gather your things.”

Arjun immediately began rolling up his blanket.

“What’s going on?” Prabal asked, slowly sitting up.

“I need you all to come with me,” Kusum said. “We found something and we might need your help.”

“What did you find?”

Darshana shoved Prabal in the back. “You don’t need to ask what. If Kusum needs us to go with her, we go.”

“Of course, we go,” Prabal said. “I was just wondering what we were going to. It was only a question.”

“It is a stupid question,” Darshana said. “We will find out when we get there.”

As Prabal rose to his feet, he said, “It is not a stupid question. It is simply a question. Who are you to—”

“Please,” Kusum said. “There is no need for this. Nothing is a secret here. We are going to a place close to the so-called UN survival station.”

Prabal shot a see-it-wasn’t-stupid look at Darshana.

“So-called?” Arjun said. “So it is not what they are saying?”

Kusum shook her head. “It does not look like it. Many of the people there are the same ones who were in charge of distributing the disease throughout the city.”

“Are you serious?”

“It is even worse than that,” she said.

“How worse?” Prabal asked.

“Survivors are coming in and being locked in holding areas.”

“You have seen this?” Arjun asked.

“Yes. Not too long before I left, a group of four women arrived. Thirty minutes later they were led to one of the holding areas.”

“What is going to happen to them?” Prabal asked.

“No way to know for sure, but I cannot imagine it is good.” She let this sink in for a moment, then said, “We need to go. There may be nothing we can do, but if there is, we need to be in a position where we can help them.”

Darshana, clearly not needing to hear more, started repacking her bag. Within seconds, Arjun and Prabal were doing the same.

As they headed through the building, Kusum said, “Keep conversations to a minimum. There are soldiers patrolling the city. They will be dressed in UN uniforms, but I do not think they are really from the UN. We need to consider them dangerous.”

“Perhaps we should leave all of this alone and go back to the school,” Prabal suggested.

“If you want to return to the school, you can,” Kusum said. She looked at the others. “Any of you can. But Sanjay and I will not leave these people in danger if there is a chance we can stop it.”

“Do not worry,” Darshana said, shooting a look at Prabal. “We are all coming with you.”

“I was not saying I would not come,” Prabal said. “It was merely a suggestion.”

“Maybe you should keep your suggestion in your head,” Darshana said.

“If anyone else has something to suggest, say it now,” Kusum told them. “Once we go, you need to be quiet.”

When no one spoke up, she led them out of the factory onto the street. From there, she kept to the same route she’d used on her trip to the camp.

She could tell the silent city was having its effect on the others. The looks on their faces were often wide eyed and shocked, as if this couldn’t really be Mumbai but perhaps a replica or a movie set they had somehow wandered onto.

Their path took them through a dense residential section that had once been teaming with life, each place they passed no longer a home but a tomb.

“Please tell me we don’t have to walk through something like that again,” Prabal said, after they came out the other side.

Darshana twisted around and shushed him.

“No more like that,” Kusum whispered. “But we are getting close now, so we need to be extra careful.”

She led them down the street, keeping them tight to the buildings.

The roar of the motor seemed to come out of nowhere — one moment silence, the next a car engine revving to life only two blocks away. Kusum jammed to a stop, and pressed up against the shop they were passing. The others followed suit. Down the street, headlights popped on, pointing in their direction.

She glanced back the way they’d come. The businesses lining the street were smashed together, in a continuous wall with no breaks between them for at least a hundred meters. No way she and the others could make it down and around the end without being seen. Most of the entrances to the stores were flush with the wall, providing no place to hide.

Swinging her gaze back around, she focused on the cars parked at the curb only a few feet away.

“Down,” she said, pointing at the ground near the vehicles.

As they ducked behind the cars, she was sure it was too late. The car with the headlights was already heading in their direction. She could almost feel the light touch her skin.

“Listen,” she said quickly, and gave them an address. “That is the building we are supposed to meet Sanjay in. Third-floor apartment, number sixteen. Say it back to me.” They each did. “If we have to split up, go there.”

From the increasing growl of the vehicle’s engine, she knew it was almost abreast of them. For a second, she thought maybe their luck would hold and the car would drive by, but a squeal of brakes and a drop in RPMs told her the problem was not going away so easily.

A clomp, clomp, clomp of feet hitting the road, but no sound of doors opening. Strange.

“Please come out,” a male voice said. “We know you’re there. We are here to help you, not hurt you.”

Kusum looked back at her three friends and mouthed, “When I say run, run.”

They stared back at her, all three looking as scared as anyone Kusum had ever seen.

“It will be okay,” she whispered.

“Come out now, please. If you are ill, we can treat you. If you are not ill, we can vaccinate you so that you will stay that way. We’re here to help.”

Kusum could see a question forming in Prabal’s eyes, that perhaps whoever was out there was not as evil as Kusum and Sanjay thought they were.

“Stay down,” she whispered, emphasizing her words by patting her hand against the air.

When she felt confident they would do as she said, she stood up.

“I’m here,” she said.

Three armed soldiers stood in front of a roofless Jeep, the barrels of their rifles pointed at the ground.

“There were others with you,” the nearest soldier said. From the sound of his voice, she knew he was the same one who’d called out a moment before.

“No. Only me.”

“I saw others.” He started walking toward her.

Kusum moved around the car and onto the street. “I’m the only one here.”

She could see hesitation in his eyes, and knew he wasn’t sure if he’d really seen anyone else.

“It would be a mistake to lie,” he said. “We’re only here to help.”

Trying to sound both desperate and relieved, she said, “You are the first people — I mean, living people — I have seen in three days. Tell me, do you really have a vaccine for the flu?”

“Yes. It’s back at the survival station.”

“I did not think it was possible.”

“If you’ll come with us, we’ll take you there,” he said.

The last thing she wanted to do was get into the Jeep with them, but she didn’t see how she had a choice. She was sure if she said no, they would force her to come anyway, and they’d probably search around the car to make sure she hadn’t been lying. The only way to save Darshana, Arjun, and Prabal was to sacrifice herself.

She donned a relieved smile, and parted her lips to say, “Yes, thank you,” but the words never left her mouth.

Prabal knew he was probably about to die. The men standing in the street were surely armed, and if what Kusum said was true, then the men would consider it no big deal to kill four more people after they’d already murdered millions, maybe even billions.

“Stay down,” Kusum whispered.

Stay down? Of course, he was going to stay down. Standing up would be suicide, would be—

— exactly what Kusum was doing.

No! For a second he wasn’t sure if he’d only thought it or said it out loud. He knew Kusum whispered something more, but he didn’t hear what it was. In fact, he was having a hard time hearing anything other than the blood rushing past his ears.

Kusum, not content to make herself merely a stationary target, moved around the front of the parked car and out into the street where the men were. Again Prabal wanted to shout, “No!” as the voices of Kusum and the man who’d called out to them mixed together into an incoherent drone in Prabal’s head.

You have to get out of here. You have to get out of here.

He tried to concentrate, to hear what was going on, but the warning booming through his mind was too loud.

You have to get out of here!

A hand clamped down on his shoulder. He jerked, thinking one of the men had sneaked up behind him, but it was Darshana. She was holding a finger to her lips, her face tense.

What did she mean? He wasn’t making any noise. He’d be the last to make any noise.

You have to get out of here!

The voice was right. No matter how quiet he kept, the soldiers — they had to be soldiers, right? — were going to find him.

You have to get out of here! You have to get away!

Yes, away.

Now!

He ripped Darshana’s hand from his shoulder, jumped to his feet, and began to run.

“Hey! You! Stop!”

Prabal didn’t hear that, either, but it wasn’t the blood in his ears that was masking the shouted words. It was the sound of his own scream.

The yell surprised Kusum as much as the soldiers. Instinctively, she glanced over her shoulder.

Prabal was racing down the sidewalk away from them. Why he hadn’t stayed hidden, she didn’t know, but at the moment the answer was unimportant.

“Run!” she shouted. “Run!”

As soon as she saw Arjun and Darshana jump to their feet and take off, Kusum whipped around and started to run in the opposite direction.

“Stop them!” the main soldier yelled to his colleagues, pointing after Darshana, Arjun, and Prabal. Instead of going with them, though, he headed after Kusum.

Putting her head down, she sprinted to the next intersection and turned left, away from the survival station site.

“Where are you going?” the soldier yelled, still behind her. “We’re here to help!”

If they had really been there to help, Kusum was sure that instead of chasing her and her friends, they would have remained by their Jeep, dumbfounded that anyone would flee their assistance.

The soldier must have realized the same thing, because he gave up the argument after another try, and focused his efforts on cutting the distance between them. Though Kusum was young, in good shape, and a better-than-average runner, she knew if she couldn’t shake him quickly, his better stamina would win out.

The slums were the answer. All she had to do was race into the maze of cobbled-together homes and she could lose her pursuer. Unless her sense of direction was completely off, it would be to her left.

As she took the next corner, she heard the man’s voice again, but it wasn’t loud enough for her to make out his words.

Forget about him. Just run!

Prabal didn’t realize he’d been screaming until he turned onto the empty block and heard his own voice. He cut off the sound so abruptly that he swallowed spit down the wrong tube, and fell into a coughing fit until he was finally able to breathe halfway normally again.

The spasm had slowed his pace and caused him to momentarily forget why he was running at all — a reality that came rushing back in a flash as Arjun suddenly sped past.

“Keep going!” Arjun said. “They are right behind us.”

Prabal took off after his friend.

“Darshana…Kusum…where are they?” he asked between breaths.

“Do not know,” Arjun said. “Thought Darshana was behind me.”

Prabal checked over his shoulder. No Darshana, but the two soldiers were a ways back, running after them.

“We have to hurry,” he said. “They are only—”

Prabal’s foot plunged into a basketball-sized pothole, his shin slamming into the side of the ripped asphalt, spilling him to the ground. While his chest and shoulder took the brunt of the impact, his forehead knocked against the pavement, opening a cut above his right eye.

Hands grabbed him under his arms and tried to pull him up.

“We have to keep going,” Arjun said.

On his feet again, Prabal took a step and nearly fell back to the ground, the ankle that had gone into the hole howling in pain. Seeing his condition, Arjun tucked himself under Prabal’s arm and swung his own around his friend’s shoulder.

“As fast as you can,” he said.

With Arjun’s assistance, Prabal hobbled forward, but they both knew there was no way they would outdistance the soldiers now.

Arjun looked around, then said, “Over here.”

He helped Prabal into an alley just wide enough for a car to pass through. About twenty feet in was a pile of rubbish — bags and loose trash and who knew what else.

“Hide in there,” Arjun said, nodding at the waste.

“What?”

“Just hide. I will lead them away, then come back for you after I lose them.”

The idea of crawling into the trash disgusted Prabal, but he didn’t see how he had any other choice.

Arjun half carried him to the pile. “You can do it yourself, yes?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Stay quiet. I will be back.”

Before Prabal could say anything, Arjun took off down the alley.

Knowing he had very little time, Prabal dropped painfully to the ground and pulled several big pieces of trash on top of him. When he heard the soldiers’ footsteps right around the corner, he stopped moving, hoping he was covered enough.

A particularly strong wave of pain rushed up his leg as the soldiers entered the alley. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut to fight off the sensation. As the throbbing subsided, he realized that while he could still hear the men’s running footsteps, they were already past the rubbish pile, fading away.

They hadn’t seen him.

He was safe.

He wouldn’t be taken away.

He wouldn’t be killed.

He wanted to fling the debris off then and there, but what if the soldiers came back this way? Best, he thought, to stay as he was until Arjun returned, no matter how unpleasant the smell.

Between bouts of stinging pain, he listened as best he could for any approaching noise. For the longest time there was nothing, and then somewhere down the alley he heard something scratch or, maybe, tap the ground. He’d almost convinced himself it was just the breeze when he realized it was getting close.

Scratch-scratch-scratch. Pause. Scratch. Pause. Scratch-scratch-scratch.

Very close, actually.

When the odd sound was only a couple meters away, he realized what it must be.

He shoved the garbage away and jumped to his feet. His ankle screamed in pain, but he was too freaked out to pay any attention to it.

The scratching retreated several meters, but not far enough away that he couldn’t see he’d been right.

Rats. Two big, ugly ones.

A shiver ran up his spine. If he hadn’t moved, he was sure they would have tried to make a meal of him.

“Get away,” he whispered through clenched teeth as he took a threatening step toward them.

The rats backed off another half meter, but apparently saw no reason to go into a full retreat.

Prabal took a breath and looked around. Where the hell was Arjun? More than enough time had passed for him to lose the soldier and return.

Had something happened to him? Had he been caught? Or maybe killed?

Prabal looked both ways down the alley, as if expecting soldiers to round each corner and close in on him like a vise. But except for the rats, he was still alone.

They’ll be back, he thought with sudden certainty. I can’t stay here.

Without a map, it would be hard to find the address Kusum had made them all memorize, but he knew it was close to the new UN compound — or, rather, fake UN compound. He wasn’t excited about going in that direction, but his only other choice was to head out of town and try to find his way back to the boarding school.

Though Prabal could be an ass sometimes, he could, on occasion, pull himself together and do the right thing. It was why he’d volunteered to come on the mission in the first place. Sanjay would need to know what happened, and Prabal might be the only one left who could tell him.

He repeated the address once more, and then limped toward the end of the alley.

After Sanjay helped Prabal up to the third-floor apartment, he listened to the man’s story. As concerned as he had been before Prabal showed up, it was nothing compared to now.

“You do not know what happened to the others?” Sanjay asked.

“No.”

“Not even if any of them were taken?”

“I am sorry. I wish I knew, but I do not.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“I am not sure. I must have lain in that alley for at least thirty minutes waiting for Arjun to return before I left. As you could see, I cannot walk very fast. I do know it was still very dark when I started.”

Outside the sky had lightened with the imminent sunrise.

“One hour? Two hours?” Sanjay asked.

“I do not know.”

It was clear Sanjay wouldn’t get anything else of use. “All right. I want you to stay here in case someone else shows up,” he said. “Can I trust you to do that?”

“Of course, but where are you going?”

“Where do you think?”

11

Brandon woke to the sound of someone walking by the door to his family’s motel room. He sat up and looked around. Both his father and Josie were still asleep. Given the last evening’s excitement, he knew he should be, too, but he was done sleeping.

After changing into the cleanest clothes he had, he found a pad of paper in the drawer of the nightstand and jotted down a quick note:

He left it on the nightstand, tiptoed to the door, and let himself out.

Though it was still dark, he could easily make out the clouds hanging over the town. The good thing was the storm seemed to have tapered off, only a few scattered flakes still falling. In fact, it had dissipated enough that he could now easily see the building on the lot next door, where all the action had been.

Hours earlier, when he’d scrambled to the top after Chloe, he hadn’t even thought about its size, but this morning it looked huge. Pre-plague, Brandon probably wouldn’t have climbed it in the dark, with a rifle, no less. Post-plague, Brandon would not hesitate to do it again, or whatever it took to protect his family and friends, even if it meant shooting someone else.

Rick, it turned out, was Ginny’s cousin.

“My dad and Rick’s dad were brothers,” Ginny had told them once they were all back at the motel. Matt was the one doing the questioning, while several others — including Brandon, Josie, and their father — looked on. Rick was in another room having his missing finger treated by Lily while Dr. Gardiner finished with Chloe. “They owned Thorton’s Equipment together.”

“What happened to your parents?” Matt asked.

Ginny bit her lip, fighting back tears. “Mom and Dad, they…they died quick, day after Christmas.” She paused for a second. “Uncle Jerry held on for a couple more days. He’s the one who gave us the rifles. Told us to protect everything.”

Brandon couldn’t help but ask, “From what?”

“Looters,” she replied. “Bad people. People who would make us sick.”

“Did you ever have any looters?” Matt asked.

She shook her head. “We saw a few people walk by, a couple cars, but that was it. No one even tried to come through the gate.”

“When was the last time you saw someone?”

“Before you?”

“Yeah.”

She thought for a moment. “Three days ago…no, four now.”

“So when you heard us…” Matt left the sentence unfinished.

“Rick thought you were type of people Uncle Jerry warned us about. He thought that if we shot in your direction for a while, we could scare you off. I wasn’t so sure who you were. I was just…” Her tears started to flow. “We were only…I’m sorry.”

Matt put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s all right. I understand. We all do. You were doing what you thought you had to.”

She looked like she wanted to believe him but was having a hard time. Brandon knew he should do something, but didn’t know what. Josie didn’t seem to have the same problem. She walked over to Ginny and put her arms around the girl.

I should have done that, Brandon thought at the time.

And now, as he remembered what Ginny had told them before they’d all finally gone to sleep, he had the same thought again. He wasn’t sure why, but somewhere in the middle of her story, he had started to feel protective of her. Maybe it was because she was about the same age he was, or maybe it was because she’d done the same thing he would have done if their roles had been reversed.

He entered the motel lobby and walked over to the door behind the counter. Carefully, he opened it a few inches. There was just enough light for him to see the cellophane wrapper he’d shoved in the room the night before. While a few crumbs had been left behind, all the crackers were gone.

The cat whined.

Brandon nearly snapped the door shut in surprise. The animal was much closer than he expected, not more than a few feet behind the door. He reached into his pocket and found he still had a couple sticks of the string cheese he’d been snacking on during the drive yesterday. He peeled back the wrapper on one, but instead of tossing it inside as he first intended, he held the stick out so that it protruded beyond the edge of the door.

The cat made a sound that was part whine, part meow. Quiet for a moment, then the sound again, much closer.

“Come and get it,” Brandon said. “All yours.”

A low, audible whine, as if the cat really wanted the cheese, but couldn’t bring itself to close the remaining distance.

“It’s right here. All for you. Come on, kitty.”

A silent standoff.

Finally, a nose topped by long tan fur peeked around the door. A sniff was all it took for the head to follow. The cat looked at the cheese, and then at Brandon. Another meow.

Are you going to give that to me, or what? That’s what it sounded like to Brandon.

“Sure,” he set the cheese stick on the floor and let go.

The cat looked at it again before taking two hesitant steps forward. It lowered its mouth, and nibbled at the end of the stick before it seemed to remember Brandon was there. It clamped down on the cheese and dragged it away from the door, out of sight.

Brandon pulled out the second stick, but before he could open it, he heard Josie’s voice. It wasn’t quite a yell, but it was plenty loud enough for him to hear his name. He pulled the apartment door closed so that whatever heat was still in there would remain, and headed for the door. When he stepped out onto the pathway, he saw Josie looking in the other direction.

“Brandon, where are you?” she said.

“Right here.”

She twirled around. “Why did you take so long to answer me?”

“Because I just heard you.”

“Where were you?”

“Why is that important?” While there was really no reason not to tell her, he didn’t like the tone of her voice.

“I’m…because…never mind. Dad wanted me to get you.”

“You could have said that first.”

The door near the far end opened, and Matt stepped out. “You two done waking everyone up?” he asked.

“Oh, sorry,” Brandon said.

“Sorry,” Josie chimed in. “I was looking for my brother.”

“It’s all right,” Matt said, laughing. “It’s time we all got up anyway. Do me a favor and spread the word — meeting in my room in fifteen minutes.”

WHEN SIMS AND his team reached the junction of the I-90 and I-15 outside Butte the night before, there was no reason to set down. If any tracks had been left showing the direction the others had taken, the storm had completely obliterated them.

He ordered the pilot to continue on to Butte, where they found shelter for the night in a large house near the outskirts of town. They removed the bodies inside — a task that was nearly second nature at this point — and fell asleep on mattresses arranged around the fireplace.

Upon waking in the morning, Sims checked outside to get a sense of the weather. It was still snowing, maybe a tad less than the night before, but not by much.

“Dammit,” he said under his breath.

It would be hours at the earliest before they could get underway again, and if the storm kept up like this, they might not be able to leave at all.

He pulled out his phone, knowing it was time to update the principal director.

12

Rachel Hamilton leaned against the wall of the communications room, exhausted. Unlike the comm room in the Bunker back in Montana, the one at the Resistance’s alternate headquarters, hidden in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, was a confined space where only three people could fit comfortably. At the moment, five were present.

If Rachel hadn’t been the one in charge during her brother’s absence, she would have slipped out into the comparatively fresh air of the narrow corridor. But since that was not currently an option, she ignored as best she could her growing sense of claustrophobia by focusing on the terminal Leon Owen was manning.

“There,” Leon said, pressing the left side of his headphones closer to his ear. With his other hand, he tapped one of the arrow keys on his keyboard several times. “Got it. Much clearer now.” He flicked another button, and suddenly static burst from a set of speakers on his desk.

Rachel leaned forward but it all sounded like white noise to her.

“There it is again,” Leon said.

The other three nodded.

“Yeah,” Crystal agreed. “Sounds like coordinates.”

“Or a phone number,” Dennis suggested.

Rachel frowned. “I don’t hear a damn thing.”

“It’s very faint,” Crystal said. “It took me a few seconds to pick it out.”

Rachel smirked. “What you’re really saying is that I’m old and my hearing sucks.”

“You’re not old,” Paul said.

“Thanks for that.”

The other four focused once more on the speaker, and Leon began jotting something down on the pad of paper by his keyboard. When he finished, they all looked at what he’d written.

Rachel tapped Dennis on the back. “May I see?”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, and moved to the side.

Written on the top sheet was a twelve-digit number.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you need two sets of numbers for coordinates,” she said.

“No, you’re right,” Leon replied. “This is the only one they’ve been repeating. I’m sure of it.”

“So was Dennis right, then?” Rachel said. “Is it a phone number?”

Leon brought up a list of country codes. The number he’d written down started with 881, but the only codes on the list that began with 88 were 880 for Bangladesh and 886 for Taiwan.

“№ 881,” he said.

“Maybe you wrote it down wrong,” Paul suggested.

Leon looked at him, annoyed. “Neither zero nor six sounds anything like one.”

“Yeah, but there’s a lot of interference,” Dennis countered.

“Be my guest, then.” Leon brought up the phone application on his screen and held out his headset.

“I’m just trying to look at all the angles,” Dennis told him without taking it from him.

“We should at least try, don’t you think?” Rachel said. “Leon, give it a go.”

Leon didn’t exactly scoff as he put the headset back on, but he came close. He dialed the number using the 880 Bangladesh prefix. It took only a couple of seconds before a series of tones came out of the speakers. These were followed by a message informing them in heavily accented English that no such number existed.

He tried 886 next. This time there was a delay of several seconds, but the number turned out to be another dead end.

Crystal’s terminal began emitting a soft bong-bong-bong. She checked her screen. “It’s Matt,” she said as she donned her headset and clicked the ACCEPT button. “Hey, Matt. It’s Crystal…she’s right here. Hold on.”

She gave her headset to Rachel.

“Are you back on the road?” Rachel asked her brother when the headset was in place.

“Not yet,” Matt replied. His voice sounded as tired as hers must have sounded to him. “Had a little incident last night.”

“What kind of incident?”

He gave her a quick rundown of what had happened.

When he finished, she asked, “Is Chloe going to be all right?”

“Just a few bruised ribs and a sprained wrist. Physically, she’ll be fine.”

“Physically?”

He hesitated a moment before replying. “Something happened to her while she was up there. I don’t know how, but I think she’s starting to remember.”

Rachel almost asked, “Remember what?” when she realized what he meant. “You’ve told me yourself that’s not possible.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

My God, Rachel thought.

She caught sight of Leon and the others. They all had their eyes on her, no doubt trying to figure out what Matt had said. “Hold on,” she said into the mic, then put her hand over it. “Can you guys give me the room for a moment?”

Crystal looked at her terminal, obviously not comfortable with the thought of being away from it.

“If a message comes in, I’ll come get you,” Rachel assured her.

“Okay,” Crystal said. “Sure.”

“No problem,” Dennis said.

Leon stood up. “If you need us, we’ll be right outside.”

“Thanks,” Rachel said. “Shut the door on the way out.”

Leon looked disappointed, but he nodded and followed the others out.

Once alone, she said, “So what has she remembered?”

“Nothing definite. It’s, well, the girl we found last night — she’s about Brandon’s age. Her name’s Ginny. I think that might have triggered something.”

Though Ginny was not Jeannie, the name was very close, and if the girl was Brandon’s age…

Oh, Lord.

“What did she actually say?” Rachel asked.

“Nothing, really. It’s more that she knows there’s something there to remember.” He paused. “I’m sure it’s going to be fine. I’ll keep a closer eye on her.”

“My God, Matt. If she remembers, and starts to ask questions—”

“We’ll deal with that if that happens.”

“You need to keep me informed.”

“I will, but like I said, it’s going to be all right,” he said. “Tell me where we are with the interventions.”

She gave herself a moment to lock away her concerns about Chloe, and then said, “We’ve identified seven more groups overnight. And have told them we’ll bring them vaccine, so most have agreed to stay where they are for at least another twenty-four hours.”

“Can we get people to all of them in that time?”

“We think so. It’ll be tight. One of the groups is in Nova Scotia. They’re really itching to get over to the survival station in Montreal. I have a plane that can get to them after a stop in Pennsylvania, but I’m concerned the Nova Scotia group won’t stick around.” She paused. “Matt, people are really buying into the whole UN angle. A couple times we’ve even had to pretend we’re with the UN, too. I don’t like lying like that. Could be a problem for us later.”

“If that’s what it takes, then it’s a problem we can live with,” Matt said. “Have you heard anything from Tamara and Bobby?”

“She checked in yesterday,” Rachel said.

“And?”

“They found the NSA monitoring facility.”

“Thank God. Can they pull it off there?”

“Tamara says Bobby thinks so. He’s got some of the equipment running, but he’s having problems with the uplinks.”

“He’s got to get it working, and it needs to happen now.”

“I know how important it is. They know how important. They’re doing everything they can.”

“I realize that, but it’s….Listen, tell them the minute they’re ready to go, they shouldn’t wait for the okay from us. Just do it.”

“All right. I’ll tell them,” she said. “How long until you get here?”

“The storm has really messed things up. We were able to tap into a NOAA satellite a little while ago. We’re not getting hit too hard here anymore, but it’s still pounding the Rockies and continuing to head south. I’m thinking we’re going to need to dip down into New Mexico to get across, and it’ll probably still be pretty slow going even then. If we can get to Nevada in three days, it’ll be a miracle.”

Rachel frowned. “Don’t lie to me, Matt. I know what you’re thinking.”

“What are you talking about?”

“New Mexico?”

“Don’t know if you’ve looked at any satellite images, but that storm’s pretty bad.”

“I know the storm is bad, but you’d be heading for New Mexico anyway, wouldn’t you? That’s why you want Tamara and Bobby to hurry up. You need their distraction.”

In the silence that followed, she knew he was regretting showing her the message from C8.

“Matt, it’s too dangerous. You don’t have a large enough team. Besides, we haven’t done the necessary recon.”

“I’ve been there before,” he said.

“A long time ago.”

“And nothing will have changed since then,” he said.

“Except that they won’t be welcoming you at the door.”

“You never know,” he said, trying to make a joke.

“If you have to go through New Mexico, you damn well better stay to the north. Albuquerque straight into Arizona. Las Cruces is off limits.”

“You’ve seen the message, Rachel. He’s there. NB219. Cut off the head and the body dies.”

“Bullshit. It didn’t work at Bluebird. Why would it work now?”

“Because of what happened at Bluebird. They’re already weakened. If they lose their second leader in a few weeks, it will rip them apart.”

“Can you even imagine how much security he’ll have in place?” she argued.

“Less than you think. In his mind, who’s going to come after him?”

“Us.”

“He doesn’t even know who we are.”

“He knows exactly who you are,” she countered.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. And as far as anyone at Project Eden is concerned, I’m buried in the past. Rachel, don’t you see it? This could very well be the only chance we will ever get. They’ve pulled off their eradication plan; there’s nothing we can do about that. What we can do is stop them from being the ones who benefit from it. Someone is going to have to lead the human race into this new age, but I’ll burn in hell before I let it be any of them. Right now, they’re still decentralized. It won’t be long before this new principal director and his puppet directorate are buried beneath layers and layers of protection. We have to take advantage of this situation and you know it.”

As much as she wanted to argue that point, she couldn’t.

“Have you told the others?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“They might not be happy you kept it from them.”

“I’ll deal with it.”

She rubbed a hand across her forehead, her eyes closed. “If you do this, you can’t fail,” she whispered.

“I have no intention of failing.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I won’t fail. Better?”

It wasn’t.

While they waited in the hallway that connected the comm room with the rest of the base, Leon, Crystal, Dennis, and Paul couldn’t help but speculate on what Rachel and Matt were talking about. But any attempt to find out came to an abrupt halt the moment the door flew open, and Rachel, her face strained, strode out.

“How’s Chloe?” Leon asked.

Rachel looked at them as if she hadn’t expected them to be there. “Chloe? Um, she fell off a roof, but she’ll be okay.”

“How did that happen?” Dennis asked.

Rachel started walking away again, but went only a few feet before she turned back. “Have we heard from Tamara and Bobby this morning? Have they made any progress?”

The others all looked at Paul. He was the one who’d last spoken to the former PCN reporter and her cameraman.

“No contact yet today,” Paul said.

“I need to talk to them as soon as possible.”

“Uh, sure. I’ll see what I can do.”

Rachel walked off without another word.

“Now I really want to know what’s going on,” Leon whispered to Crystal as they filed back into the room.

Returning to their respective desks, they got back to work. For Leon, that meant trying to tease out what the series of numbers he’d written down from the radio message meant. Not coordinates. Not a phone number. A web address?

Though the Internet had become spotty, with many websites unreachable as servers began to malfunction, other sites still worked exactly as they had been designed to do. He typed the number into his browser and hit ENTER.

Not a web address, then. At least not one that worked anymore.

Taking the shotgun approach next, he pasted the number in the box of a still functioning search engine, and clicked. He was presented with a long list of links, but none were direct hits.

He was running out of ideas fast, and was tempted to consider it a dead end. But someone out there had broadcast it, someone who was still alive. He had to exhaust every possibility.

That’s when he realized he had never dialed the exact number he’d written it down, but only tried alternate country codes. Given that there was no 881, he was sure he’d experience the same failure as earlier, but in the interest of being thorough, he had to make the attempt.

He punched the numbers into his phone app.

No series of tones. No call failed message.

A ring.

He slapped Crystal on the arm.

“Hey! Watch it!” she said.

He turned on the external speakers just in time to catch the third ring.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“The number,” he said, holding up the piece of paper.

“But it didn’t work.”

“I didn’t try it exactly like—”

“Hailo?” A man’s voice, tentative and surprised.

“Hello?” Leon said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes. Can.”

The person on the other end sounded older, with an accent Leon couldn’t place yet.

“Were you broadcasting your phone number on the radio?”

“Yes! Yes! Radio. Number. Thank you, call.”

“You’re welcome. My name is Leon. Who are you?”

“Wait. Wait.”

There was movement over the line, and then nothing.

“Hello?” Leon said. “Hello?”

“Are you still connected?” Crystal asked.

According to the computer, he was. He tapped the button that would record the call, something he should have done right away, and said to Crystal, “Go get Rachel back here. She’ll want to hear this.”

Crystal clearly didn’t want to leave.

“She can’t have gone far,” Leon said. “Go and come right back. You won’t miss much.”

She rose with reluctance and headed out the door.

“Hello?” Leon said into his mic.

Still nothing from the other end. He double-checked to make sure his mute function wasn’t on, and that the line was truly still connected, and everything was as it should be.

The sound started out so soft he wasn’t sure he heard anything, but as it grew louder and louder, he realized he was hearing steps.

“Hello?” a new voice said. A woman this time, younger.

“Hello. My name is Leon. Who am I speaking to?”

“I am Jabala.” She sounded excited. “So good to hear you.”

“Good to hear you, too, Jabala. Where are you?”

“The St. William Boarding School.”

“Where exactly is that?”

“I am sorry. I do not know the name of the town.”

“Well, where is it near?”

“Oh, um, it is a few hours away from Mumbai.”

“Mumbai? Mumbai, India?”

“Yes. India. Where are you? Are you close? Are there others with you?”

He pulled up the list of country codes again. India was 91, not 881. “No, no. I’m in, uh, the US. And not alone.”

“I am so happy to hear that.”

“How many are with you?”

“There are thirty-two of us now.”

He pulled up the protocol sheet for first contact so he wouldn’t miss anything. The first question always made him pause. “Uh, how many of you are, um, sick?”

“Sick? You mean with the flu?”

“Yes.”

“No one. How many of you are sick?”

He knew from experience gained over the last several days that some survivor groups had at least a few people starting to show signs of the disease, so he was relieved to hear Jabala’s people were untouched. Still, she could have been hiding the truth. “We’re okay here, too.” Wanting to probe a bit further, he asked, “You’ve been able to avoid contact with anyone ill?”

“For the most part, yes. But we are safe. We have been vaccinated.”

Leon could feel his chest contract. Vaccinated? Was this St. William Boarding School one of Project Eden’s survival stations?

“Where exactly are you?” he asked.

“What do you mean? I have already told you.”

“Tell me, Jabala, when did you receive the vaccine from the UN?” In his mind, he was already starting to write them off as future Sage Flu victims.

“The UN?” she said. “We did not receive the vaccine from the UN.”

That stopped him for a moment. “Then who gave it to you?”

“My sister’s husband, Sanjay. He stole it for us.”

Leon’s tension eased a bit. This Sanjay had probably gotten his hands on some kind of home remedy, or perhaps some antibiotics from a hospital. Neither would be effective against the virus, but they also wouldn’t be as deadly as Project Eden’s “vaccine.”

“Maybe I should speak to Sanjay,” he said.

“He is not here now.”

“Okay, maybe I can talk to him later, but you need to listen to me very carefully. The people who are claiming to be from the UN are lying. They are not here to help anyone.” Behind him, he heard Crystal enter the room. He glanced back and was surprised to see she was alone. “You need to stay away from them. In fact, you should stay away from Mumbai completely. It’s not safe.”

“We already know this,” Jabala said.

Again, her response caught him off guard. “What do you mean, you already know?”

“Sanjay. He told us the same thing. It is why he and Kusum went to the city. To find out for sure.”

“He and…Kusum are in the city?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very dangerous. They could get—”

“They are very careful. They know what they are doing.”

Maybe, maybe not, but there wasn’t much Leon could do to help them at the moment. “What made Sanjay think they were lying?”

“The UN people are using the same location as the company that spread the disease through our city,” she began.

When she finished telling him about Pishon Chem and the “miracle mosquito spray” Sanjay and others had been hired to douse the city with, Leon realized that maybe the vaccine Jabala’s brother-in-law had given everyone was the real thing after all.

“I definitely need to talk to Sanjay as soon as he comes back.”

“I could send someone to bring him back.”

“No!” he said quickly. “You shouldn’t send anyone else to the city. It’s too dangerous. The most important thing you can do right now is to stay alive, and that means you and your people should stay where you are. Do you understand?”

“Of course. Staying alive is what we are doing already.”

“We’re happy to count you among our new friends, Jabala. We can definitely help each other.” Leon gave her a number that would connect her directly to the comm center. “Call that number anytime you want to talk to us. Someone will always be here to answer. And I’ll definitely check back with you later.”

“Okay. Thank you, Leon. It is good to have you as a new friend, too. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Jabala.”

Leon disconnected the call. After staring at his keyboard for a second, he looked over at Crystal, eyes wide.

“What?” she asked.

Jeeval whimpered, wanting to be lifted up, as Jabala set down the satellite phone.

“You are fine where you are,” Jabala said. She wasn’t as fond of the dog as her sister was, but while Kusum was away, Jeeval had become her responsibility.

“Well?” Naresh asked. He had been the one who’d figured out how to work the shortwave radio, and had taken to broadcasting a few times a day the number of the satellite phone Sanjay had found in a building the next town over.

“The man said the same thing Sanjay told us, that the UN is not the UN,” she said.

“Sanjay did not tell us that. He said maybe not.”

“Well, the man on the phone did not say maybe, so I think Sanjay’s instincts were correct.”

“Based on a conversation with someone you have never met,” Naresh pointed out.

“I feel that he spoke the truth. You do not believe him?”

“I could not hear what he said, but if this is what he told you…” Naresh paused, and shrugged. “I believe him, too.”

“Then why did you fight me?”

“I did not fight you. I merely pointed out something that needed to be taken into consideration.”

Grunting in annoyance, Jabala looked away.

While she had been concerned when Kusum, Sanjay, and the others had left, she was extremely worried now. What if they ran into trouble with these people claiming to be with the UN? What if they needed help?

What if they needed help right now?

Ap, ap, ap, Jeeval barked, pawing at Jabala’s leg.

“Jeeval, not now!”

She pushed the dog away harder than she meant to, sending Jeeval tumbling backward into Naresh’s chair. Jeeval yelped as she scrambled back to her feet.

Jabala immediately knelt down and stroked the dog’s head. “I am sorry. Are you okay?”

A whimper, followed by ap, ap.

She picked up the dog. “Good dog,” she said. With her free hand, she picked up the satellite phone and looked at Naresh. “How does this work?”

“A signal comes down, and—”

“No. That is not what I meant. Does this have to stay in one place, or can it move around like a mobile phone?”

“Of course it can move around. Do you see any wires?”

“Why are you being difficult? Does it have other equipment that needs to travel with it, or is this it?”

“What other equipment would it need?”

She bit back her frustration. “I will assume that the answer is no.”

“Well, it does have a charger,” he said. “The battery does not last forever.”

“And where is that?”

13

“My Dad was right,” Rick said, his eyes narrowed to slits. “All you want to do is take what’s ours.”

The teenager was sitting on the bed of the motel room he and Ginny had been put in after the previous evening’s events. Matt was surprised they hadn’t tried to get away. Of course, if they had, they would have found one of Matt’s men stationed outside.

“All we want to do,” Matt said, “is get out of town. But the only way that’s going to happen is if we clear the roads.”

“So you’re going to just take one of our snowplows.” It was amazing how little the kid’s lips moved as he spoke.

“Two of your plows,” Matt corrected him. “And one of your cargo trucks to haul gas in.”

Rick’s uninjured hand unconsciously rolled into a fist. “They don’t belong to you.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“And if I say no?”

“That would be disappointing.”

“You’ll still take them, won’t you?”

Matt stared at him, his expression neutral. “Rick, do you realize what’s going on?”

“I know you’re going to steal our stuff.”

“I mean, the bigger picture?”

Rick glared at Matt for a moment before looking over at his cousin by the window.

“I asked a question,” Matt said.

“Lot of crazy things going on.”

“That’s one way to put it.” Matt adjusted his position on the end of the bed. “The human race is dying. There’s not a lot of people left. If we’re all going to survive, we’re going to need to work together. So, yes, we will take those vehicles, but they will still technically be yours because the two of you are coming with us.”

“Like hell we are,” Rick said.

Matt leaned back. “So you’d rather stay here? What happens when you run out of food? Or don’t have anything left to burn to stay warm? Maybe you make it through this winter, but what about the next? Any prepackaged food you’ll find will have gone bad by then. You’ll have to spend your entire summer growing food for when things get cold again. Do you know how to farm? Do you know how to store food so it will last the winter? Do you really want to bet your cousin’s life on that?”

“We can take care of ourselves!”

“Can you?” Matt looked down at Rick’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky we have medical personnel with us to take care of that. What happens when you’re out in the field, using a piece of equipment you’ve never used before, and you slice open your leg? Or what if you get sick? I’m not talking Sage Flu. Out here, by yourself, pretty much anything could kill you.”

Silence.

“Rick,” Ginny said. “I think we should go with them.”

“Shut up,” Rick told her.

“I don’t want to die,” she went on. “He’s right. We will if we stay.”

“I said, be quiet!”

She took a couple steps toward the bed. “What if no one else comes by? This might be our only chance to get away.”

“We’ll be fine on our own!”

Ginny bit her lip, clearly not agreeing with him, but Matt could see the will to argue with her cousin — someone she’d been putting all her faith in up to this point — draining away.

“You won’t be fine,” Matt said. “Ginny knows it, and you do, too.” He stood up. “But I’ll tell you what. If you want to stay, you can stay.”

“What about our vehicles?” Rick asked.

“Two plows, one cargo truck go with us. But we’ll pay for them.”

“With what?” Mick scoffed.

“I’ll leave you a high-powered field radio. Maybe someday you’ll want to try to reach someone.”

“Doesn’t seem like a very fair trade.”

“You’re right. It isn’t. I could probably find a dozen plows within a mile of here, and twice as many cargo trucks. A good, working radio? That’s what’s hard to find. It’s worth more than all your vehicles combined.”

Though a sneer was still on Rick’s face, there was also uncertainty in his eyes.

Matt held out his hand. “So, do we have a deal?”

“For something you’d take anyway?”

“I’d rather do it this way, man to man.”

Rick looked at the proffered hand, and finally took it. “All right. It’s a deal.”

“Good.” As Matt released his grip, he turned to Ginny. “If you have anything you want to bring along, you should go get it now. We’ll be leaving soon.”

“Whoa!” Rick said, jumping up. “Ginny’s staying with me.”

“You think so?” Matt asked. “Ginny?”

She looked from her cousin to Matt and back. “We’ll die if we stay here,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “Rick, please.”

“We’ve done fine so far,” Rick said.

“For a week,” Matt pointed out.

“We have to go with them,” Ginny said.

Rick stood motionless for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said. “That’s fine. Go with them. I’m staying.”

“What?” Ginny said. “No!”

“You want to go, you go. But I am staying.” He turned to Matt. “When do I get my radio?”

Brandon was missing yet again. They’d been packing up their things in their room when he said he had to check on something, and left. Josie ended up having to load not only her and her father’s bags, but her brother’s, too, into their Humvee.

When she returned to the room and he was still not there, that was it. Enough.

“Brandon!” she yelled as she stepped back out onto the walkway. “Brandon, where are you?’

Around her, the others moved in and out of the rooms as they prepared to leave. She asked a few if they had seen her brother, but no one had. She was about to start a room-by-room search when Brandon came out of the door to the motel office. In his arms was a blanket that appeared to be full of something.

She marched toward him. “What have you been doing? It’s almost time to—” She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him. “What happened?”

Across the right side of his jaw were two thin lines of blood. Scratches.

“What?” he asked.

She pointed at his face. “That.”

He touched the wounds and looked at the blood on his fingertips. “Oh, uh, yeah. Nothing.”

“Nothing? That’s not nothing. Did you fall?”

“No. It’s nothing. I’m o—”

The blanket he was holding began to twist as if something were squirming inside.

Josie took a quick step backward. “What have you got in there?”

Looking defeated, Brandon said, “I couldn’t just leave him there.” He peeled a portion of the blanket back, and revealed the head of a tan, very scared-looking cat.

“Where did you find him?” Josie said, moving in for a closer look.

“Chloe and I found him yesterday when we searched the motel,” he said. “Please don’t tell Dad.”

“You think he’s not going to notice?”

“I mean, don’t tell him until after we get started. It’ll be too late then.”

Josie moved her hand cautiously over the cat’s head. Its eyes followed the movement, but when she began stroking the area between its ears, it seemed to relax some.

“Fine,” she said. “I won’t say anything. But if he gets mad, I don’t get in trouble for this.”

Brandon smiled. “No, of course not. It’s all my fault.”

She petted the cat a few more times. “Does it have a name?”

“I don’t know what it used to be called, but I was thinking Lucky would be good.”

She smiled. “No kidding.”

While the snowplows were checked out and the cargo truck loaded up with canisters of gas, Matt had one of his men take a spare radio into the room Rick was in and show the kid how to use it. When everything was set, the whole group gathered in the motel parking area.

“You can still come with us,” Matt said to Rick.

“I’m fine here,” the teen answered quickly, as if he’d been rehearsing the response for an hour.

Despite Rick’s words, Matt could tell the kid was terrified. “All right. You change your mind in the next four or five hours, give us a call on your radio, and we’ll send someone back to get you.”

Rick took a step back. “You’d better get going.”

“Rick, come with us,” Ginny said. “Please.”

Her cousin shook his head. “No reason for you to stay here any longer. Go on. Get out of here.”

He turned, walked back to his room, and shut the door.

Josie put an arm around Ginny. “Come on. You can ride with us.”

Tears rolling down her cheeks, the girl let herself be led away. Soon the only ones standing outside were Matt and Hiller, one of his men.

Matt pulled a zippered case out of his pocket and handed it to Hiller. “Hopefully you won’t have to wait long, but if it goes more than a couple of hours, use this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s vaccine in there, too. For after,” Matt told him. “Be careful.”

As Hiller hurried off, Matt walked over to his Humvee and climbed into the front passenger seat. They had quite a convoy now. Ahead of him were the two plows, and behind, the rest of the troop transporters and the cargo truck.

He grabbed the radio mic and clicked the talk button. “Let’s move.”

Rick paced back and forth through the garage area of Thorton’s Equipment Rental Center. In one of the bays was a pickup truck that had been in mid-repair when everyone started dying, and in another, a tractor with a busted axle. Tools and oil jugs and parts were scattered everywhere, all reminders that Rick was alone now, and that the only one who could finish fixing any of the vehicles or could put everything away was him.

You screwed up big time, he told himself.

What the hell had he been thinking? Stay here? Alone? That was suicide. But even if the others had still been out front, pride and the words his father had said not long before dying would have prevented him from taking the offer.

“You’re in charge now,” his old man had told him. “You need to take care of things.”

He’d already messed that up, hadn’t he? Ginny was gone. She was family. He was supposed to take care of her. He wanted to be pissed off at her for defying him, but did he honestly think she would have been safer here with him?

No. Not even close.

He’d always thought being a grown-up would be so easy. No one to answer to. All the decisions his own. And yet here he was, with the freedom he’d been hoping for, and he just wanted to go back home, curl up under his covers, and stay there forever.

He wanted to be a kid again

He wanted things back to normal.

At some point he realized he’d been crying, but he couldn’t stop. Back and forth he paced, his mind in turmoil as the minutes turned to hours.

“All right, that’s enough. You’re making me dizzy, kid.”

Rick thought the words were only in his head until the man stepped out from behind the damaged tractor. Even as the man walked over to him, he couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. The man was alone, but…

“Hey!” Rick said, trying to jerk away as the man stuck a needle into his arm.

But the guy grabbed him with his other hand and held him in place. “Sorry about that. Was really hoping you’d decide to follow my friends on your own. Could have avoided this.”

“What?” Rick was suddenly dizzy, and while he heard the man’s words, he couldn’t quite understand their meaning.

“It’s all right. Here, let me help you down,” the man said.

Before Rick realized it, he was sitting on the concrete floor.

“What are you doing?” Rick asked, the words feeling heavy in his mouth.

The man had another needle in his hand and was moving it toward Rick’s arm.

“You don’t want to get sick, do you?”

The prick of the needle stung less than the one a moment before. Still, Rick wanted to brush it away. He tried to raise a hand, but apparently it was content to stay in his lap.

“Sorry for all this,” the man said. “But we couldn’t let you die out here.”

Rick closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead as the world began to sway.

“Just relax,” the man told him. “Here.”

Rick was moving backward, slow and steady. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring up at the ceiling.

“Let it take you,” the man said.

Take me? Rick thought. Take me where?

“Close your eyes.”

As if acting on their own, his lids slid shut, and everything went black.

“Sleep.”

Once more, the power of suggestion worked its magic.

Hiller chose the best of the last three remaining snowplows on the lot, loaded the kid into the passenger seat, and headed south. Between them was the portable radio Matt had never intended to leave behind.

When they reached the interstate, Hiller turned on the radio, checked to make sure it was set to the right frequency, and picked up the mic.

“Retrieval to M1,” he said. “Retrieval to M1.”

Matt’s voice jumped out of the speaker only seconds later. “This is M1. Go, Retrieval.”

“En route. Had to go active.”

“That’s too bad. Glad you’re on the way, though. Wait for you at checkpoint three.”

“Copy. Checkpoint three.”

Two hundred miles to the west, on board the Project Eden helicopter that was now flying in a parallel southward direction, the copilot, charged with monitoring radio transmissions, picked up the faintest of voices, hearing words like “is” and “route” and “bad” and “three.” The static was so bad, though, he couldn’t tell if it was one voice or two.

As he tried to fine-tune his reception, the transmission ceased. He hunted around, hoping to pick it up again, but there was nothing.

Since he had no idea what was being said, and no way of knowing which direction it came from, he decided not to disclose the information to Sims and the others. If he did, he was sure his boss would order them to search for the source, a task that would only succeed in keeping them through the storm.

Better to keep heading south. In a few more hours, they’d be in the relative warmth of New Mexico.

14

Martina knew it was a bad idea before she tried it. But she also knew, if they were ever going to get on the road again, the first step would be to open her eyes.

Thankfully, she had had the sense to close the curtains before toppling into bed after their New Year’s Eve celebration. If not, she’d have been permanently blinded by the sunlight.

Dear God, her head hurt.

How much had she had to drink? Three glasses of champagne? Or was it four? Could her head hurt that much from only four glasses? She had no idea. She hardly ever drank, and quite possibly never would again.

Maybe it had been more than four. She had a fuzzy memory of someone — Noreen, she thought — suggesting they walk back to the liquor store for another bottle when they ran out, but she had no recollection of actually doing so.

What was it her college roommate Crissy told her? “For every glass of alcohol, drink a glass of water. That’s the secret.”

Well, Martina had drunk absolutely no water the night before. That was one thing she did remember. Though it would be hours too late, she could probably use some now.

She flopped her legs off the bed and sat up. Immediately, she froze as her stomach did a complete somersault, threatening to disgorge everything it held.

“Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t, please don’t,” she said under her breath.

When the tumult in her abdomen eased, she tried slowly rising to her feet. The trip to the bathroom was made in a series of step-pauses that probably would have looked hilarious if she had not been the one doing it. There had been a glass on the sink the evening before but it wasn’t there now, so she cupped her hands and fed water straight from the tap into her mouth.

The first couple gulps went down with relief, but the third was a mistake. She barely lifted the lid off the toilet before the water and the rest of her stomach contents made a quick, loud exit.

When she was through, she felt better. Even her headache had eased. Though she was apprehensive, she knew she should drink some more. This time she stopped at the two gulps and was relieved when they seemed to stay down.

Thinking a shower would help even more, she stripped off her clothes and climbed in. She was pleased to find the motel’s water heater still worked. Standing head bent under the warm stream, she let the water pound into her neck and shoulders for several minutes before washing herself. When she finally climbed out, she actually felt, if not exactly normal, 65 to 70 percent there. She toweled off, carried her dirty clothes into the other room, pulled out something clean from her bag, and got dressed.

Though she knew she’d been making a lot of noise, both Noreen and Riley were lying exactly as they had been when Martina had gone into the bathroom. She tiptoed to the door adjoining the two rooms and peeked inside. Craig was still out, too.

Well, this was going to be fun. “Happy New Year, everyone,” she said in as loud a voice as her head would allow her. “Time to get up!”

“The Rose Parade,” Noreen said.

All four of them were sitting around the same table at Carl’s Jr. they had used the night before. Martina had found some frozen sausages and hamburger buns in the back, and had been able to get enough of the kitchen gear working to warm everything up.

At first, no one wanted to touch the food, but after the initial bites were taken, everyone devoured his or her portions and asked for more.

“What about it?” Riley asked.

“I missed it. It’s always over by now.”

Martina eyed her friend wearily. “Noreen, I’m fairly certain there was no parade this year.”

For a moment Noreen said nothing, lost in melancholy. “I know that. It’s just kind of a tradition. Mom and I would always get up early on New Year’s Day and watch.”

“It’s just a boring parade,” Craig said. “You’re not missing anything.”

Martina and Riley turned on him, glaring.

“What?” he asked.

“Were you born an idiot?” Martina asked.

“It’s okay,” Noreen said. “He’s right. It is boring. Was boring. The last couple of years Mom had to force me to get up with her.” Her gaze drifted out the window. “I really wish she’d had to do that today.”

Martina thought her friend would start crying, but Noreen’s eyes remained dry.

“Let’s finish up,” Martina said. “We’re closing in on noon. I’d hoped we’d be on the road for a couple hours by now, at least.”

“Have you decided which way we’re going?” Riley asked.

Martina nodded. “To the coast, I think. If Ben heads south, that’s the way he’d come.”

Ben spent one last night in the house he’d grown up in. Maybe he’d come back. Maybe he’d never see the place again. He wasn’t sure which he preferred. He just knew at that moment the place held nothing but memories of death and loss.

South was where he wanted to go. South to the desert, to Martina.

What happened after he found her, they could figure out together.

He loaded up his Jeep with supplies and clothes and camping gear. As he walked through the house for the last time, he considered grabbing photo albums and mementos, but, in the end, the only thing he took was a framed family picture of the five of them. It had been taken at a neighbor’s barbecue. Nothing fancy, just his mom and dad on one side of a wooden picnic table, and he and his sisters on the other. A quick “look at the camera and smile” kind of thing, but his mother had always loved the shot, had said more than once it was her favorite.

Climbing into his Jeep, he tucked the photo under the front seat and started the engine. He had to force himself not to look at the house again. If he did, he knew he would probably be sitting there all day. So he kept his eyes forward, shifted into gear, and pulled into the street.

Even though it had been days since he’d seen anyone else moving around, it was still surprising to be the only one driving down the freeway. Here and there he’d pass abandoned cars, most pulled over to the side, but a few left in the middle of lanes.

A straight drive to Ridgecrest would be, at most, an eight-hour trip, but he wasn’t going straight there. He needed to make a stop at his place in Santa Cruz.

As he moved out of the city and into the hills, he turned on his radio. Like always, it automatically synced with the phone in his pocket, and began playing the song it had left off with last. In this case, Green Day’s “American Idiot.” He dialed up the volume and blasted it. It was something he would have never done in the past, but who would care now?

Thirty minutes later, as he entered the city of Santa Cruz, the Arctic Monkeys gave way to Adele singing “Someone Like You.” The song was too maudlin for his current mindset, so he reached toward the radio, intending to skip to the next track.

His finger had barely touched the button when something darted into the upcoming intersection.

“Oh, crap!”

He slammed on the brakes, the tires squealing and the Jeep shimmying from the sudden deceleration. For half a second, he thought the back end was going to swing around and he’d flip over, but he was able to keep control and bring the vehicle to a stop.

Ten feet.

That was all that separated his front bumper from the large, brown horse that had run in front of him. Instead of continuing on its way, the animal stopped in the middle of the road, looking at him much like he was looking at it, as if neither could believe the sight of the other.

A bray, not from the horse in front of him, but from back the way the horse had come. A moment later a second horse and then a third ran into view, both nearly as big as the first. Behind them a fourth jogged out, this one clearly younger, half the size of the others. Dark gray halters were strapped around each of their heads and noses. The second horse had a dangling rope that looked like it had been cut so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.

The three joined the first on the street, and as a group they continued on.

Ben sat there, parked in the middle of the road, watching in near disbelief until they passed out of sight. Had their owner, knowing he or she was about to die, used a last bit of strength to let them go?

Ben suddenly realized there must be other horses trapped in stables and corrals, unable to get free and forage for themselves. Not just horses — goats and cattle and sheep. Dogs and cats, too, locked in backyards and houses. He had thought about nothing but his family and Martina since the outbreak had begun, hadn’t considered what had happened to all the animals that relied on humans to survive.

He looked around and saw several houses down the road the horses had come from. Were there animals in them? Should he check?

It was a Pandora’s box, he realized. Check one and he’d have to check the next and the next and the next. He made a pack with himself. Any home he came close to in the course of doing something else, he would open a door, or, if it was locked, bust out a window. If there was anything inside, it could then come out if it wanted to.

As the adrenaline that had coursed through him began to subside, he started to laugh.

A horse. He was the only driver on the road and he’d nearly run into a horse. That was not something that happened every day.

The apartment Ben rented was a small, one-bedroom place over the garage of a house about a mile from the university. His landlords, the Tanners, were a newly retired couple who had treated Ben like one of their family, often inviting him down for dinner.

As he pulled into the driveway, he wondered if they had survived. Probably not, but at least their bodies wouldn’t be inside the house. They had gone to their daughter’s place in Los Angeles for the holidays before all this had begun.

Instead of parking in his usual spot, he drove all the way up to the garage and pulled around the side where the stairs leading up to his place were located. The moment he shut off the engine, he was enveloped once more in the near silence that had taken over his world. The sound of leaves rustling in the trees, the squawk of a distant bird, but that was it.

He headed up the stairs, anxious to get back on the road. The main room of the apartment served as living room, dining room, and kitchen. A small bathroom was directly opposite the front door, and taking up the back half of the available space to the right was the bedroom.

He headed to the latter and went straight to his dresser. The item he’d come for was tucked in the bottom drawer. He moved a pile of sweaters to the side and pulled out the box. Palm-sized and only an inch thick, it was wrapped in red Christmas paper, with a white bow on top that was bigger than the box.

Martina’s Christmas present — a pair of small but brilliant diamond earrings. He’d spent over a week searching for just the right ones. They had cost him more than he had intended on spending, but they were perfect.

It was ridiculous, really, coming back here for this. He could have stopped at a hundred places on his way to Ridgecrest, and picked out something ten times as nice for free now. But he had chosen this, had paid for it himself. To him, that meant something more.

After he slipped the box into his jacket pocket, he grabbed his favorite sweater, a couple T-shirts, and his UC Santa Cruz hoodie before heading back outside. He stuffed everything into the duffel that had the most room, and was about to climb back into the driver’s seat when he remembered the promise he’d made not fifteen minutes earlier.

He looked down the driveway. The Tanners didn’t have any pets, so he didn’t need to worry about their place, but he knew some of the neighbors did.

Three houses in either direction and the ones directly across the street, that’s it, he told himself.

The people right next door had one of those small dogs, a Yorkie or something like that. It was a yappy thing that had kept Ben awake more than once. He went there first. The front door was locked, so he let himself into the backyard and tried the sliding glass back door. It was also locked. He found a gardening trowel and used the butt of the handle to smash the window.

He didn’t bother calling the dog. If it was there, it would find its way outside. Returning the way he’d come, he almost shut the gate before realizing that would be almost as confining as leaving the animal in the house, so he propped it open and moved on to the next place.

Over and over he repeated this procedure. He found some doors unlocked, but most of the places required a window to be broken. Limiting his range to only three houses on either side proved to be impossible, however. His conscience wouldn’t let him stop until he reached the end of the block.

He finished up and headed back toward his apartment, not really sure how much good he’d done. Not once had he seen a pet wanting to get out. Still, he was glad he’d made the effort.

He had just turned onto his driveway when he heard something in the distance that sounded like a voice. He twisted around and looked down the street. No one there.

He was probably hearing things. A few times back in San Mateo, as he cared for his dying sister, he’d thought he’d heard voices, too, but every time he’d investigated, he’d found nothing.

Wishful thinking then, and wishful thinking now.

He turned back toward his Jeep and started walking again.

“Help!”

That was no wishful thinking.

He turned in a circle, trying to figure out where the voice had come from.

“Please! Help!”

To the right. A woman’s voice.

Ben raced up the driveway to his Jeep, jumped in, and backed it out to the street. At the first intersection, he turned right in the general direction toward the voice. Then he threw the engine into neutral and popped up on his seat.

Cupping a hand around his mouth, he yelled, “Where are you?”

“Oh, my God! Can you hear me? Please, get me out of here!”

The voice was closer than he expected, again to his right somewhere.

“I don’t know where you are!” he shouted. “Keep yelling!”

“I’m over here! Please help me! Get me out of here!”

Ben drove slowly forward, zeroing in on her voice.

“Are you there? Hello? Don’t leave me here!”

As he came abreast of a tired-looking Cape Cod place, he rolled to a stop.

“Am I close?” he yelled.

“Here! I’m right here!”

Her voice was coming from between the Cape Cod and a ranch-style house on the other side of it. He killed the engine and jumped out of the Jeep. As he ran across the front yard, he yelled, “I’m coming!”

“Oh, thank God! Thank God!”

He nearly slipped on the grass as he skidded around the corner. About fifteen feet back, a tall wooden fence stretched between the two houses.

“Which house?” he asked.

“What do you mean, which house? This one! Please help me!”

Her voice was coming from behind the Cape Cod. The gate was locked, so he pulled himself over the top, and dropped onto a concrete patio on the other side. She wasn’t in the side yard, so he moved around the corner and came to an abrupt halt. She wasn’t in the backyard, either. What the hell?

“Where did you go?”

“I didn’t go anywhere. I’m right here.”

The voice seemed to have come from almost directly behind him. He whirled around.

Low on the back of the house was a basement window, broken and barred on the outside. Looking out of it was the woman. She had a dirt-stained face and a head of tangled brown hair, and looked to be in her mid-twenties.

“Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God,” she said, spotting him. “Please, help me.”

“Are you trapped down there?”

“Yes! Yes! I can’t open the door.”

Ben looked around for an outside entrance to the basement, but didn’t see any. He would have to go into the house. “Hold on. I’ll be right down.”

He needed to smash a window to unlock the back door, but he didn’t think the woman would mind. The smell of death hit him the moment he stepped inside. He clapped a hand over his mouth and nose, and had to blink a few times as his eyes watered up. After his vision cleared, he scanned the interior.

To the right was a kitchen, and to the left, a space that would’ve probably been considered a family room. The only furniture, though, was an old couch and a wooden coffee table. Both the furniture and the rooms looked dated but well maintained.

No basement door, though.

He moved into a hallway. The smell was stronger here, and seemed to be coming from the left, so he went right. He didn’t have to go far before finding himself in a living room where the spartan décor continued — in this case, two chairs, another coffee table, and a magazine basket, the latter filled but neat. Again, no entrance to the basement.

Tightening his grip on his face, he returned to the hallway and began opening doors. The first two led to a bathroom and an understocked linen closet. When he opened the third door, he found a room that, unlike the rest of house so far, was fully furnished — a bed, a nightstand, a dresser, a desk, and a full bookcase. The walls were covered with pictures and posters, most of which featured an early-twenties Justin Timberlake. It was obvious this had been a teenage girl’s room.

He moved on. Only one door was left, the one hiding whoever had died. Ben pulled it open, already sure it wouldn’t be the door to the basement, but he had to check. Sure enough, it led into a second bedroom.

This one, apparently, had been the master. A simple dresser sat against one wall, and a queen-sized bed against the other. The body of a middle-aged man was on the bed, half covered by a blanket. In a rare break from the cleanliness Ben had seen throughout the house, used tissues were scattered on the carpet.

Ben blinked to keep his eyes clear as they watered up again, and scanned the room, looking for a basement door he knew wouldn’t be there. The only things he saw were three pictures hanging on the wall, family portraits of a man, a woman, and a girl. In the oldest one, the girl was maybe twelve or thirteen, and in the most recent, probably almost out of high school. The man was definitely the guy in the bed.

“Hey! What’s going on?” The floor muted the woman’s voice, making her hard to understand.

Ben hurried out of the bedroom and yelled, “I can’t find the basement door!”

“It’s just off the kitchen!”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Come on! Get me out of here!”

The only thing just off the kitchen was a laundry room consisting of a washer, a dryer, and a closet half filled with neatly arranged cleaning supplies.

He started to close the closet.

“Did you find it?” the woman yelled.

Instead of being muted by the floorboards this time, her voice seemed to be coming through the closet. He ran his hand across the back and found a latch. As he pulled it up, the whole back wall moved out of the way. Someone had gone to great lengths to hide the door.

“Found it!” he shouted as he headed down the steps.

At the bottom, he was confronted with another door, this one metal. He tried the knob, but it was locked.

“Open it,” the woman said from the other side.

“It’s locked from this side. You can’t open it from there?”

“Do you think I’d still be down here if I could?”

“Well, I can’t kick it down. It’s too strong.” He turned for the stairs. “Maybe I can find a crowbar or something. I’ll be right back.”

“No, don’t leave me!”

“I’ll just be a minute.” As he headed up, he wondered how long she’d been there. A couple hours? A day? Two?

Reentering the laundry room, he knew there was an easier solution than hunting for something he could break down the door with. There had to be keys somewhere. The problem was, the most likely place they’d be was with the dead man.

Overcoming his reluctance, he went back into the bedroom. The search was mercifully quick. In the top drawer of the dresser, he found a set of keys sitting next to a wallet, and was back at the basement door in no time.

Half a dozen keys were on the ring. The one that worked was the fourth he tried. As he pushed the door open, the woman rushed past him, knocking him to the side.

“Come on,” she said as she started up the stairs. “We need to leave before he comes back.”

“Before who comes back?”

She paused on the steps, hesitating, “Um, my, uh…Mr. C–C-Carlson.”

She started heading up again.

“Wait,” Ben said. “What does he look like?”

She looked back at him. “What?”

“What does this Mr. Carlson look like?”

“Doesn’t matter. We need to get out of here.”

“Tell me.”

She shot a look toward the top of the stairs as if expecting someone — Mr. Carlson, no doubt — to be standing there. When she looked back at Ben, she gave him a quick description that perfectly matched the dead man in the bed.

“How long have you been down here?” Ben asked.

“Please, can we talk about this someplace else? I can’t stay here any longer.”

Not waiting for him to respond, she raced up the rest of the way and disappeared into the first floor of the house.

Before heading after her, Ben glanced into the room where she’d been. It was not what he expected. Modern, a big TV, a large bed, a sitting area, even a refrigerator. The kind of apartment a college kid could only dream about.

Resisting the urge to go in for a better look, he ran up the stairs. It wasn’t hard to tell which way the girl had gone. The front door to the house was wide open. When he stepped outside, he spotted her in the middle of the street, not far from his Jeep, staring at the house.

“Is this your car?” she asked as he neared her.

“Yeah.”

“I need you to get me out of here, okay? Before he comes back.”

“What’s your name?”

“Me? Uh, Iris. Are you going to take me or what?”

“I’m Ben,” he said. “Iris, Mr. Carlson isn’t coming back.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t know. A few days ago.”

“Is that how long you’ve been in the basement?”

“Not even close.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know,” she said, defensively. “Why is this important?”

“Has it been more than two weeks?”

“Yeah. I think we can safely say that.”

“Iris, Mr. Carlson’s dead.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I’m serious. He died of the flu.” Ben gestured toward the other houses. “Everybody did.”

Her lips parted in a wary grin as she backpedaled. “Right. Everyone’s dead.”

“They are,” he said, matching her step for step. “Just listen. Do you hear any cars? Any voices? Today’s New Year’s Day. It’s beautiful outside. Don’t you think there should be people in their yards? At least some kids playing?”

She pointed at him. “Stay right where you are.”

“I’m not trying to scare you, but it’s the truth. Look around. We’re the only ones here.”

“I swear, don’t you take another step.”

He stopped. “I don’t know what happened to you in there, but Mr. Carlson is dead, and you don’t need to worry about him anymore. You’re all right. He can’t do anything to you now.” He nodded back at the house. “He’s lying in his bedroom. Been dead for days.”

“Oh, I get it. This is some kind of mind game, right? You’re one of…Mr. Carlson’s buddies he always talks about, aren’t you? You’re trying to screw with me.”

“The only thing I’m trying—”

Before he could finish, she turned and sprinted down the block.

“Help!” she yelled. “Help me!”

Ben stood there for a moment, stunned. He had obviously handled that poorly. The question was, what should he do now? Let her run off and figure things out for herself?

Like you could do that.

With a groan, he took off after her.

15

Sanjay could see Darshana, Arjun, and Kusum sitting together in the middle of one of the fenced-in confinement zones within the walls of the survival station. Though they were too far away for him to see any cuts or bruises, they didn’t appear to have any obvious injuries.

After Prabal had shown up that morning, Sanjay had spent as much time as he could searching for the others before the sun rose too high, and then worked his way back to the building where they were supposed to rendezvous. For hours he hoped Kusum and the others had been able to find someplace to hide, and were simply waiting for night to make their escape, but then, not long after three p.m., he spotted Arjun being transported in the back of a UN-labeled truck.

Sanjay had hurriedly worked his way back to the building he had used earlier to spy on Pishon Chem. From there, he watched as Arjun was escorted into one of the holding areas, where he was greeted by an already captured Darshana. The only good news was that Kusum appeared to still be free.

Knowing he had to risk being seen, he moved back into the city to search for her, ducking into whatever hiding spot he could find every time he heard soldiers nearby. Right before six p.m., several cars raced past on an adjoining street and screeched to a halt a few blocks away. Sanjay moved down an alley until he reached a building close to the spot where the cars had stopped. Using the stairwell just inside, he made his way to the roof, and positioned himself so he could look down on the street.

No!

Kusum was backed against a parked car, facing four UN-clad soldiers.

Her voice drifted up to Sanjay. “I did nothing wrong. You should not treat me like this. I am already heading to your survival station.”

“We are merely offering you a ride,” one of the soldiers said.

“From the way you are acting, I do not think I want your ride.”

“It is only a precaution. I must insist.”

“And I am telling you no.”

Sanjay looked from one soldier to the next, wishing he could do something. But even if he had a rifle and knew how to shoot it, he wouldn’t be able to get all of them before they did something to Kusum.

“You can either walk to the car, or one of my men will carry you,” the soldier said.

The back and forth went on for a few more minutes, but ended with the inevitable — Sanjay watching as his wife was driven away.

The rest of the evening he’d spent watching the compound. For the longest time, there was no sign of Kusum. Finally, thirty minutes earlier, she’d been led out of the main building, into the same fenced area where Arjun and Darshana were.

Sanjay was convinced whatever the fake UN personnel had planned for them wouldn’t be good, and knew he had to get them out. In fact, if possible, he had to get all the prisoners from both holding areas out, too.

In his favor, he’d spent a lot of time at the compound when he’d worked for Pishon Chem, had even lived at the on-site dormitory, so he was very familiar with the layout. There were three official entrances in all: the front and back gates, and a door along the perimeter wall across from the administration building.

Unofficially, one could always try going over the wall, but the broken glass cemented across the top would make that very difficult. There was, however, another way, also unofficial — a way that had the additional benefit of being located in a remote, seldom used part of the compound. It was an area where previous tenants had dumped things like wooden crates, old machinery casings, rusty empty barrels, and worn tires. Sanjay had no idea how long the junk had been there. He just knew the Pishon Chem people had left it untouched. Behind the piles of rubbish, a dip in the ground near the base of the wall had eroded from years of monsoons until the bottom of the wall had been exposed, and a channel to the outside created. Without much work, Sanjay figured he could widen it enough to get through.

How he would get everyone out the same hole in a timely manner, he’d figure out later.

Right now, he needed to concentrate on getting in.

Knowing her parents would forbid her if she told them what she intended to do, Jabala sneaked away from the school, pushing one of the motorcycles they had obtained, until she felt she was far enough away that she could start the motor without anyone hearing it.

She took with her only four items: a large bottle of water, a flashlight, the satellite phone with its charger, and a backpack to carry them all in. After talking to Leon from America, she knew, despite his warning, she had to go to Mumbai. It seemed he had valuable information about the survival stations that Sanjay and Kusum needed to know now. Waiting for them to return might be too late. Anything that would lessen the danger her sister and brother-in-law were facing was worth the risk of the journey.

She didn’t let the fact that she didn’t know exactly where they were deter her. She was aware of what part of town they would be in, and was confident she could find them.

So she rode into the night, only her bike’s headlamp lighting the road in front of her. Everything else was blanketed in an unnerving darkness. To keep her mind off what might be out there, she turned the trip into a game, seeing how long she could stay on the centerline without drifting to the side.

By the time she reached the outskirts of Mumbai, her record was fourteen minutes.

Pulling the dirt out of the way wasn’t the issue. No, the issue was the large rock sticking out of the ground, limiting the space to squeeze through. Sanjay thought he could move around it, and knew that both Kusum and Darshana would have no problems, but Arjun would never be able to slip through. Chances were, many of the other prisoners would get stuck, too.

He had no choice but to dig it out, wasting twenty minutes he could have been using to free everyone. When it was finally out of the way, he slipped through the hole and into the compound. Moving quietly, he headed around the piles of debris and between two storage buildings. On the other side was the parking area Pishon Chem had used to keep excess vehicles — a couple dozen Jeeps, nearly as many light trucks, and a handful of sedans. At the time, Sanjay had barely given them a second thought. Now he knew they had always been intended for use after the flu outbreak.

Unlike before, the lot was nearly empty. All the Jeeps were gone, as were most of the trucks. The only vehicles left were three pickups and five sedans.

Leapfrogging his way through the lot, he moved from vehicle to vehicle until he neared the main building. This would be the difficult part. He had to run along the side of the building, over to a storage area, and then around an annex before he finally reached the back of the holding areas.

It took him two minutes to reach the annex building and drop to the ground at the corner. Peeking around the edge, he could now see the holding areas. The one to the left was where Kusum, Darshana, and Arjun were located. It was a bit farther away than the other one, and he would have to travel across an open area to get there, but there was no moon tonight and little other illumination bleeding into the area. If he was careful, he should be okay.

Forcing himself to move at half speed, he crawled across the open ground until he reached the first of the double fences. He studied the enclosure. No one was outside, which meant they all had to be inside the only building.

He checked the guard posts he could see from his position. No one seemed to be paying the holding areas any attention. From his shoulder bag, he removed the heavy-duty wire cutters he’d found in a shop several streets away. With one hand gripping the handle, and the other covering the snips to muffle the sound, he began to cut. He went up and over two meters in both directions, creating a flap. After he passed through, he put the flap back in place so it wouldn’t be noticeable. He made a similar opening on the inner fence, pulled it out of the way, and entered the holding area.

Please do not let that have been the easy part, he thought.

Hugging the building, he circled around to the door and went inside. From his observations, he’d determined no guards were inside the holding areas, so, as he’d hoped, he didn’t find any inside the barracks, either. What he did find was a room filled with twenty bunks, three beds high, the seventeen current residents scattered among them.

A few moved at the sound of the door opening and closing, but most remained as they were, some snoring, some breathing deeply, every last one asleep.

He found Kusum, Darshana, and Arjun at the far end, the women on the same lower level of side-by-side bunks, with Arjun sleeping on the mattress above Darshana.

Seeing his wife, Sanjay had never felt so relieved in his life. Though he had not admitted it to himself, he had known there was a chance he’d never be this close to her again.

He leaned over and gently touched her shoulder. “Kusum,” he whispered. “Wake up.”

She stirred but remained asleep.

“Kusum. It’s me. Wake up.”

She blinked and looked at him, half asleep, then her eyes widened.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Why did you let them catch you?”

He hugged her and whispered, “No one caught me.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“I came for you.” He pulled the wire cutters out of his bag and showed them to her.

“You broke in?”

He nodded.

The change in her expression was quick and dramatic. First she was stunned and confused, and then she was angry.

“Are you crazy? You could have been killed.”

“How could I let you stay here? If I was the one trapped, you would come for me.”

“I would not.”

“You would,” he said. He didn’t have to see it in her eyes to know he was right, but it was there anyway. “Now get up so I can get you out of here.”

“Not without the others.”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t mean just Darshana and Arjun,” she said, correctly sensing that was his intention. “We need to get everyone out of here.”

“And we will, but I need to show the three of you the way out first so you can help me. All right?”

This time she was the one who pulled him into a hug.

It didn’t take long for Jabala to realize the empty darkness of the country was preferable to the partially lit silence of the city. The reality of what she was seeing kept fighting with her memories of how things used to be. Even at this late hour, Mumbai had always been active, always full of people.

Not tonight. Not ever again.

The closer she got to the center of the city, the more the noise created by her motorcycle concerned her. But the thought of getting off and walking terrified her more, so she settled for lowering her speed as much as she dared so that the drone of the engine would be kept to a minimum.

Ten minutes later, she was glad she did. The reduced sound allowed her to hear a car heading in her direction. She killed her engine and moved tight against a taxi parked at the curb, just as the lights of the car came into view.

She was trapped, no way to get around the parked cars and hide without drawing attention. The best she could do was sink down to the street, and act like she was one of the corpses that littered the city. Dropping quickly, she turned her head so that she was facing the parked car, and froze.

The car on the road rushed past her without even the slightest hint of slowing. As soon as the sound of its engine faded, Jabala stood back up, and started to move the motorcycle away from the car, but stopped. She’d been lucky that time, but she might not be so lucky if it happened again.

Like it or not, it was time to walk.

Sanjay and Kusum decided the best method for getting everyone out was for the two of them to escort the remaining detainees in small groups to the hole in the wall, where Arjun would help them through from the compound side to Darshana waiting on the city side.

The actual guiding of people to the hole went smoothly. Convincing them they needed to leave was the problem. Most still clung to the belief they were in the hands of the UN, and would soon be given the vaccine. But even the most die-hard of those was troubled by the way they’d been treated since they’d arrived, so while some did put up a fight, in the end they all agreed to go.

When the last person from the first holding area was safely on the other side of the wall, Sanjay turned toward the interior of the compound.

“Where are you going?” Kusum said, grabbing his arm.

“There are still more people back there,” he replied, pulling the wire cutters out of his bag. Where did she think he was going?

“No,” she said, pulling him toward the wall.

“What do you mean, no? We cannot leave them here. You said so yourself.”

“Sanjay, the ones in the other area are all showing signs of the flu. Darshana and Arjun saw several of them brought in earlier.”

So that was the difference, he thought. She was right. They couldn’t risk escorting them out. While he, Kusum, Darshana, and Arjun had been vaccinated, the people they’d rescued had not. Any exposure to the disease was likely to kill them all.

Still, how could they do nothing?

“Give me five minutes,” he said.

“Sanjay, they are sick already. We can’t take them with us.”

“I understand, and we won’t. But I’m not going to leave them locked in there.”

Knowing she would continue trying to dissuade him, he pulled from her grasp and hurried around the debris pile. When he reached the second holding area, he immediately set to work cutting an opening in the outer fence. This time, instead of creating a flap, he cut out the entire section and laid it on the ground.

He then did the same for the inner fence. He contemplated entering the barracks and telling them about the way out, but he feared he would pick up traces of the flu and carry them back to the others, so those who were inside would have to find the holes on their own.

He had hoped Kusum had gone under the fence to join the others, but she was still waiting at the wall when he returned.

“Go, go,” he whispered, motioning her toward the hole.

She didn’t move.

“What are you waiting for? Go,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“I cut a hole in their fence, that’s all.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head in disapproval, but she couldn’t help from grinning. When she looked at him again, she placed a hand on his cheek. “You are a good man.”

She kissed the corner of his mouth, dropped down, and crawled through the hole.

Omar woke in a fit of coughing.

“No,” he silently pleaded, after the spasms stopped.

He’d seen the symptoms in others countless times in the last week, and though he’d somehow been able to avoid the flu for over a week, he knew his luck had run out.

He’d woken up with a headache the previous morning. That’s what finally spurred him into going to the survival station. Until that point, he’d been too afraid to journey across the city and risk exposing himself to the disease. He wasn’t quite sure how vaccines worked, but they were still effective even if you were already ill, weren’t they?

When he arrived, he tried to mask how he felt, but somehow the soldiers had figured it out, because not only had he not gotten a shot, but they had put him into what was basically a prison, with others who seemed also ill. Oddly, only a dozen or so meters away from their enclosure was another where those who still seemed healthy were placed.

He was angry he’d been locked up, but he could at least understand it. Why the UN would lock up those uninfected made no sense to him. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter anymore. The detention pen he was in was where he’d die.

As he coughed again, someone shouted a weak “shut up.”

Thinking maybe a little fresh air would help, he shuffled through the barracks and out the door. He had no idea what time it was. He only knew it was still night.

His need to cough was replaced by an urge to pee. Having no desire to return to the barracks to use the facilities there, he walked around the back of the building and zipped down his pants. He watched the stream of water turn the dirt to mud for a moment, and then his gaze began to wander, his mind all but blank.

Several seconds passed before he realized what he was looking at. Not the chain links of the fence, but a square hole cut into the barrier. He bent down and looked through the hole. There was another missing section on the outside fence.

A way out.

This cage didn’t have to be the place where he died.

He could go home and lie down on the bed next to his dead wife.

He almost stepped through the opening then and there, but he remembered the old man, Mr. Kapur, who also talked of a wife he’d left behind. Omar was not so sick that he couldn’t take the time to let the man know about the opportunity. What Mr. Kapur decided to do then would be his business.

Decision made, Omar headed back into the barracks, content in the thought that very soon he’d be on his way home.

Senior manager Dettling woke to the sound of someone pounding on his door.

“Mr. Dettling? Are you awake?” van Assen, his assistant asked.

Dettling threw back his covers and sat up. “What is it?”

“Sir, the detainees have escaped.”

Dettling, already rising to his feet, froze for half a second. “They what?”

“Someone let them out. There are holes in the fences.”

Dettling walked quickly to the door and pulled it open. “Which pen?”

“Both, sir. We caught some from the infected group trying to get out. Four of them are still missing.”

“And the others?”

Van Assen looked uncomfortable. “The uninfected detention area is empty. They’re gone, sir.”

“They can’t be gone.”

“I have people searching the compound, but so far they haven’t found any of them.”

If the uninfected warned others to stay away, the Mumbai recovery operation could turn into a failure. “Have you sent out search parties?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for? Do it! Now!”

Jabala discovered the Mumbai survival station purely by accident. She knew she must’ve been getting close, but when she reached the next corner, she had not expected to see its gates right there in front of her.

She jumped back out of sight, hoping she hadn’t been seen, and pressed herself against the side of the building. When she was finally able to get her panic under control, she realized the street was still quiet. They had not seen her.

Slowly, she retreated to the previous block, and turned down the road that paralleled the one the survival station was on. Three businesses down was a restaurant where most of the dining had been done at tables spread under a tattered awning along the sidewalk. She sat at a table in the back corner, where she could watch the street and be able to hide quickly if anyone showed up.

Okay, now what? she wondered.

When she’d left the boarding school, she’d been sure that finding Kusum and Sanjay would not be a problem, but now that she was here, surrounded by the reality of the city, the task seemed impossible. While Sanjay had said the plan was to find someplace where they could watch the survival station, there were far too many buildings in the area. He and Kusum could be in any of them.

What do I do now? What do I…

The world was so quiet, so very quiet. And dark. And warm. And—

Her head jerked up, her eyelids shooting open. For a second she had no idea where she was.

Restaurant. Mumbai.

Right.

She blinked several times. She’d fallen asleep in the chair.

How stupid can you be?

She scanned the street to make sure she was still alone, then paused.

Is that someone shouting?

She sat up and cocked her head.

Definitely. Several people, in fact.

She eyed the street again. Still empty.

Relax, she told herself. The yelling wasn’t on her street. It was coming from a few blocks away. She narrowed her eyes, her slowly waking mind sensing that the location should be important.

A few blocks away…a few blocks…

Her brow shot up. The survival station.

As if on cue, she heard the roar of multiple engines coming from the same direction. Wanting to see what was happening, but knowing she had to be smart about it, she went over to the door leading to the inside part of the restaurant. Thankfully, it was not locked. Beyond was a single room with a small kitchen on one side and a couple of tables along the other. There was also a door in the back, exactly what she’d been hoping for.

She undid the locks holding the back door in place, and carefully opened it. The area behind the restaurant couldn’t quite be called an alley. Though open to the sky, it was barely wide enough for two people to walk down shoulder-to-shoulder — if they could get over the boxes and trash that filled much of the space. Jabala decided to give it a try, and was pleased to find that after the first stack of rubbish, the area beyond was relatively clear.

The passageway did not go all the way to the end of the street, ending instead at the back of a building Jabala thought faced the street leading to the survival station. If she could get inside, she should be able to see what was going on.

There were three windows on the old and weathered back wall, one on each floor. The ground-floor window was closed, but the one right above it was partially open. The wall had plenty of notches, so climbing up to the window was not much of a challenge. It did take some extra effort, however, to push it open wide enough for her to climb through.

Inside, she found herself in a storage room packed with stacks of dresses and suits and boxes. A window was on the opposite side, overlooking the street, but it was blocked by several bundles of cloth.

Jabala carefully moved the bundle at the end just enough so she could see outside. The survival station’s gate was wide open, and she counted eleven soldiers wearing blue helmets with the letters UN large and white on the sides. They stood armed and ready right outside the gate, their attention focused on the city.

Suddenly, several of the men looked back toward their base. When one of them shouted something, the soldiers split into two groups and moved to the sides. A few seconds later, a truck with a dozen more soldiers rumbled out of the gate and onto the road. As soon as it was gone, the men on the ground moved back into place.

Something was definitely going on.

Jabala leaned closer to the window to try to see more of the survival station. That’s when she heard the floor creak behind her.

Sanjay’s first instinct was to get everyone out of the city right away, but several of the people they’d rescued were elderly and needed more rest before attempting to hike out of Mumbai. So they took them all to the building where Prabal was waiting.

“Everyone stay inside,” Sanjay instructed them. “And, please, remain quiet at all times. We will wait until the sun goes down again before we leave.”

Most were still in a state of semi-shock, from both their sudden imprisonment and subsequent rescue. A few wanted to know exactly what was going on. Sanjay promised to tell them everything after they were safely out of the city.

He and Kusum were getting ready to lie down themselves when all hell broke loose over at the compound.

“What’s going on?” Darshana asked, bolting up from where she’d been trying to sleep.

“I will check,” Sanjay said. “Make sure everyone stays quiet.”

Sanjay headed up the stairs to the roof, Kusum right behind him like he knew she would be. As they peered out at the survival station, Sanjay noted several soldiers moving around as if they were searching for something. Then, from behind one of the buildings, a man in civilian clothes stepped out and began running toward the front gate.

There were several shouts as a handful of soldiers moved in and encircled him a few car lengths from the gate. Though Sanjay couldn’t hear anything, he could tell a conversation was going on. The man tried to run again, but two of the soldiers grabbed him. The man kicked and yelled as the soldiers turned him around and started marching him back to the holding area.

Seeing the man’s chest heave with a cough, Sanjay realized what was going on.

“It’s the ones from the other holding area,” he whispered. “They must have found the hole in the fence.”

One of the guards shoved the prisoner hard. The man stumbled forward several steps before falling to the ground. As they jerked him back up, there was blood on his face.

“Oh, God,” Kusum said under her breath.

“I should not have cut the hole,” Sanjay said. “I should not have done it.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything, then Kusum pointed toward the back gate.

“No,” she said. “Look.”

Huddled behind a couple of the vehicles were two men. Even from this distance, Sanjay could tell one was considerably older than the other. Only two guards were on the gate, as most of the other soldiers had moved toward the shouting at the center of the compound.

The younger man peeked around the vehicle, said something to his companion, and the two of them moved across a small open space to the backside of the guard hut. Kusum sucked in a worried breath, but the men timed their move well and the guards did not see them.

The old man picked something off the ground and handed it to the younger one. A few words passed between them, then the younger one cocked his arm and threw the item toward the main part of the compound. Though Sanjay and Kusum couldn’t hear the object land, it was clear the guards could. They both turned as one toward the noise, the guard nearest the hut taking a couple steps away from the fence.

The younger man threw something else in the same direction as before. This time the guards came together, talked, and one started cautiously walking in the direction of the sound. His partner followed him for about ten paces before stopping, his back to the gate.

“They are never going to make it,” Kusum said as the younger man peered around the side of the hut, clearly intending to try sneaking out the opening.

When the guard took another step toward the center of the compound, the two men eased out from behind the hut and slipped quietly out the back gate into the city.

A muted echo. Metal. Like an empty drum.

Sanjay swung his gaze toward the sound. It had not come from the compound, but rather from an opening behind the buildings across the street from where they were. Though they weren’t high enough to see all the way down the opening, they could see much of it, and there was no missing the dark form of a person climbing over a pile of trash.

“Is it one of the soldiers?” Kusum asked.

“I do not think so,” Sanjay said.

He had no doubt the soldiers would perform a thorough search once they realized even more of their prisoners had escaped, but he didn’t think there’d been enough time for them to be sneaking around like this yet.

“One of the people who escaped?” she asked.

“Perhaps.”

“They are going to get themselves caught. We have to help them.”

She was right. Whoever was down there was moving toward the building right outside the survival station’s main gate. It would be only a matter of time before the person was discovered.

“I will go,” he said. Before she could argue, he added, “You need to get the others up and move them to where we had the camp. If that is a soldier and they are searching buildings, they will search this one, too. We cannot wait until tomorrow night to leave.”

Kusum looked like she was going to argue, but instead said, “Be very careful. And if they are sick, do not get too close.”

“Don’t worry about me. I will be fine. Now go.”

Sanjay wasted no time sneaking across the street into one of the buildings on the other side. Instead of looking for an entrance to the back passageway, he headed up to the very top and ran from one roof to the next until he reached the end.

There, he leaned over the passageway to see if the person was still there. Not surprisingly, the area was now empty, but an open window was two floors below him. As far as he could tell, it was the only thing open along the entire passage. It had to be where the person had gone.

He located the entrance to the internal stairway and made his way down. When he reached the room with the open window, he quietly crept inside. The only light was what trickled in through the windows, and for a moment he thought he was alone, but then something moved. A person stood by the front window, peeking out at the street below.

As he took another step forward, the floor groaned under his feet.

Jabala twisted around, her heart thudding in her chest. On the other side of the room was a man.

A soldier, she thought. They’ve come to get me.

She glanced to her right, hoping there was some way she could get out, but the only exit was the one behind the man.

“It’s okay,” the soldier said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

In her panic, she did not recognize his voice at first. But as he spoke the last few syllables, it clicked.

“Sanjay?” she said.

Sanjay froze.

The person at the window, a woman, knew his name.

“Sanjay, is that you?”

His eyes widened in surprise. “Jabala?”

He wasn’t sure if she let out a laugh or a sigh of relief, but the next thing he knew she was rushing toward him, throwing her arms around him.

“Sanjay! You nearly scared me to death.”

It took him a couple of attempts, but he was finally able to remove her arms from around his neck, and push her back enough so he could see her face. “Jabala, what are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you.”

“Yes, of course. But why?”

Before she could answer, the roar of another troop truck sped past the front of the building.

Grabbing her hand, he said, “Come on. We need to get out of here. We can talk later.”

Sanjay lost count of how many times they’d had to stop and wait as groups of soldiers passed near them. Sometimes the vehicles had been driving fast toward other parts of the city, sometimes they had gone by at a slow crawl, the soldiers scanning both sides of the street.

Not a minute went by that he didn’t worry Kusum and the others would be spotted. It was hard enough for only him and Jabala to stay hidden.

“This way,” he said, leading her across the now vacant street into a dark alleyway.

Several moments later, Jabala’s foot kicked something, and Sanjay heard her start to stumble. He twisted around and caught her before she could fall.

“You have to be careful,” he told her.

“It is too dark,” she said. “I cannot see where I am walking.”

“Okay, okay. We will go slower,” he said. “Keep your eyes open.”

Fourteen steps into their reduced pace, something buzzed.

“What was that?” Sanjay asked, looking back.

Jabala was already pulling something from her bag. In the dark, it looked like a black lump. She touched it and held it to her head.

“Hello?” she said.

She had a phone? A working phone?

She listened for several seconds. “No,” she finally said. “We cannot talk now. Later.” She listened again, then, “Hold on.” She put a hand over the phone and said to Sanjay, “How long until we will be able to stop?”

“Who are you talking to?” he asked.

“A friend.”

“A friend?”

“Sanjay, how long?”

Reluctantly, he said, “We still have a few kilometers to go. Could be thirty minutes. Could be two hours.”

Jabala was silent for a moment before removing her hand from the phone. “Leon, please try again in one hour…okay, okay. Good-bye.”

As she put the phone away, Sanjay said, “Who is Leon?”

“He is in America,” she said. “He answered Naresh’s radio signal.”

“That’s the satellite phone from the school?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you bring that here? It might get broken or lost.”

“I thought it important you talk to Leon yourself. He warned me about the survival stations, that the UN personnel were not who they said they are. Exactly like you have been telling us.”

“He said these things?” Sanjay asked.

“Yes.”

“What else did he say?”

She told him about the conversation she’d had.

When she finished, he was quiet for a moment. “All right. Let’s go. We have already stayed in one place too long.”

“But you do want to talk to him, yes?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, silently adding, Very much.

16

17

The three main communication workstations had been manned nonstop all morning. Several of the stations in the mobile comm trucks the Resistance had brought from Montana were also in use. Now that most of the so-called survival stations around the world had opened, the Resistance’s efforts to save what was left of humanity had gone into overdrive.

Leon and the other communication coordinators knew they wouldn’t be able to save everyone, but they would try. The biggest obstacle they were facing was convincing those who were in traveling range of a survival station to not go there. The survivors were desperate for anything that seemed like a way out of the horror, and Project Eden’s UN ploy filled that void perfectly. Of course, the Project had known that from the beginning, and had carefully planned out this phase.

Where Resistance coordinators could, they sent in teams, armed not only with proof that the UN did not exist anymore, but, more importantly, with vaccine. This personal touch worked more times than not, but there were still groups and individuals who would not listen to what the Resistance had to say and headed for the stations anyway.

By noon, Leon was in contact with fourteen different groups, but the one that interested him most was Jabala’s. She and her friends had apparently figured out on their own that the survival stations were false fronts for something more sinister. How, exactly, still wasn’t clear, but he felt particularly connected to them, and wanted to make sure they were all right.

The girl had told him to wait an hour before calling back, but he figured fifty-six minutes was close enough and input her number again. Though the computer indicated the call had connected after the third ring, he could hear nothing from the other end.

“Hello?” he said.

No, not nothing. Breathing, and…something else. A faint, rhythmic tapping sound.

“Jabala?”

“Five minutes,” Jabala said, her voice a whispered rush.

The line went dead.

Leon stared at the screen. What was going on? Was she in danger?

He checked the clock to note exactly when he could call back.

At the station next to him, Crystal was saying. “Uh-huh…okay…yes, you’re authorized. Keep us informed.”

As she was clicking off, the door opened and Rachel walked in.

“How’s everything going?” Rachel asked.

“Just got off with our people in Panama,” Crystal said. “Their team in Belize is getting bogged down. Apparently there are several pockets of survivors, but getting to each is proving difficult.”

“I’m sure they’re doing the best they can.”

“Rachel, it’s the same team that’s scheduled to visit that large group in Costa Rica tomorrow morning. No way they can make it now.”

“How soon?”

“At least another day. Maybe two.”

“When did Project Eden say they’d return to the island?”

“Going by the radio conversation we intercepted, could be anytime in the next forty-eight hours or so.”

“No way to rearrange our people?”

“The team’s in the field, away from the plane. Even if we order them back, it’d still be a day and a half until they get to the base, load up again, and go to Costa Rica.”

“No alternatives?”

“The real problem isn’t the medical team or aircraft, it’s the pilots. Panama has an extra seaplane sitting there, and there’s a med team in Guadalajara that just finished up, but no one to pick them up or fly them to Costa Rica.”

Rachel closed her eyes and rubbed a hand across her forehead. “We can’t afford to lose anyone,” she said in a low voice probably meant more for herself than anyone. She looked at Crystal again. “Do what you can. As soon as a flight team becomes available, send it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rachel switched her attention to Leon. “You look…concerned.”

He hesitated a moment before saying, “I am.” He explained what had been going on with the group in India. When he finished, he glanced at the clock. “It’s actually time for me to call them again.”

“Then do it. And please put it on speaker.”

This time the call was answered on the first ring.

“Leon?” Jabala asked.

“Jabala, are you okay? You sounded—”

“We are okay now, thank you.”

“Did something happen?”

Over the next several minutes, Jabala told him of her decision to travel to Mumbai in search of her brother-in-law Sanjay, thinking he and Leon should talk. Apparently while she was on her way there, Sanjay and Jabala’s sister Kusum had sneaked into the survival station and rescued several of the people being held there, or something like that. It wasn’t completely clear. Now they were all together, hiding from soldiers who were pretending to be with the UN.

After sharing a long, surprised glance with Rachel and Crystal, Leon said, “Perhaps I should talk to Sanjay.”

“Of course. One moment, please.”

A few seconds later, a male voice said, “Yes?”

“Is this Sanjay?” Leon asked. The man sounded younger than Leon had expected.

“Yes. And you are…Leon?”

“Right. Your sister-in-law tells me you’ve had quite an adventure this evening.”

“I am not sure I would call it an adventure,” Sanjay said, no humor in his voice.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of it.”

“It is okay. I am tired.”

“Of course. I’ll try not to keep you long. Jabala said you actually went into the survival station.”

“That is correct. But it was not that difficult. I knew about the hole under the wall from before.”

“That’s right. You worked for Pishon Chem.

“I did, well, until I found out what they were going to spray was not an anti-malaria chemical.” He explained about finding his cousin Ayush dying of exposure to Sage Flu; about getting Kusum, Jabala, and their family out of Mumbai; about sneaking into the Pishon Chem compound, and forcing the managers to give him vaccine.

“When we first heard about the survival stations, we were excited,” Sanjay went on, unaware of the stunned listeners at Ward Mountain. “But when the location was finally announced, and I realized it was the same facility used by Pishon Chem, I became suspicious. I knew we needed to check first before sending everyone there. So my wife, three of our friends, and I came here. When I saw that the people who seemed to be running the operation were the same people in charge of Pishon Chem, I knew these were not UN representatives, and that whatever they had planned could not be good.” After seconds of silence, he asked, “Are you still there?”

“Sorry,” Leon said. “It’s just, well, your story is surprising.”

“You do not believe me?” Sanjay asked, his tone growing defensive.

“Absolutely, we believe you,” Leon said. “You’ve been through a lot, that’s all.”

“Has not everyone?” Sanjay asked.

“Yes, that’s true.” Leon paused. “So when you realized these people weren’t the UN, I assume that’s when you snuck back in and helped the survivors they’d collected escape.”

Sanjay took a moment before responding. “There were two holding areas inside. One for those who were not obviously infected, and one for those who were. I brought everyone who was not infected out. I…cut a hole in the fence for the others, but left it for them to discover. I did not want to risk picking up the disease and spreading it to anyone who had not been vaccinated yet.”

The last came out as almost an apology.

“You did the right thing,” Leon said.

“I do not know about that, but, I, uh, I did what I had to.”

“Are you going to take everyone out of the city to your boarding school?”

“The school?” Sanjay said, suspiciously. “How did you know about the school?”

“Jabala mentioned it, but don’t worry, she didn’t tell me where. And even if she had, the last thing we want to do is harm you.”

“Who exactly are you?”

“We’re a group of people who have been fighting those behind Pishon Chem for a long time. Though we tried, we couldn’t keep the virus from being released. Now our goal is simply to keep the survivors alive.”

“And the others? Who are they?”

“They call themselves Project Eden. And they have been planning this for a long, long time.”

“But why? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand it, either. All I know is that they want to control those they chose to survive, and direct the future as they see fit. I’m sure this is all difficult to believe, but—”

“Not as difficult as I wish it was,” Sanjay said. “You wanted to know what I am going to do? I’m going back.”

“Going back where?”

“To Pishon Chem,” Sanjay said. “To the survival station.”

“Why would you do that?” Leon asked, not trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Because we have no more vaccine, and the people who escaped today will need it. The only place I know to find it is inside those walls.”

Leon was about to tell him that he might be able to get some vaccine to them in a few days when someone touched his arm.

“Hello, Sanjay. My name is Rachel.”

“Hello.” His reply came back tentative, as if unsure why he was being passed off to someone else.

“Sanjay, no one here thinks it’s a good idea for you to reenter the survival station.”

“What choice do we have? We are out of vaccine.”

“We have vaccine,” she said. “It will just take time to get it to you.” She glanced at Leon. He held up three fingers. “Three days at the earliest.”

“Three days is a long time,” he said. “This flu is everywhere, yes?”

“The risk of exposure is still very high, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then I do not see how I have any choice.”

She hesitated. “I said we don’t think it’s a good idea to go, but if you need the vaccine now it could be your best chance. That’s something you will have to decide. What I will promise you is that we will get vaccine to you no matter what you choose to do, in case you run into others later.”

“If anyone dies because I did not go back for more vaccine, it will be as much my fault as that of those who have spread the disease.”

“Sanjay, that’s not true.”

“Of course, it is true. How many people have died?”

“We…we don’t know.”

“Here in Mumbai there were millions and millions people. Now maybe I have seen one hundred still alive. One hundred people out of so many. Is it the same everywhere?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“Then I must go.”

The trip south had been anything but pleasant. The Dash 7 Combi aircraft belonging to the research station on Amund Ringnes Island was a hearty, four-propeller plane, but it was not immune to the heavy turbulence that kept Pax and the others strapped in their seats most of the time. Its limited flight range of a thousand miles in the best weather conditions also meant stops at deserted airports in Cambridge Bay, Yellowknife, and Edmonton for fuel.

Edmonton was the most disturbing. More than a million people had lived in and around the city. The airport had been used by large commercial airliners. Thousands of passengers had passed through its terminal every day. But during the stop, not a single person was seen.

As soon as the plane crossed the US border, Pax made his way up to the cockpit.

“Strap in,” the pilot told him, pointing at the auxiliary jump seat. “Catching up to another storm.”

The pilot’s name was Ian Lourdes, and he was dead right about the storm. Not more than a minute after Pax clicked his restraints into place and donned the headset hanging next to the seat, the plane was buffeted by a layer of unsettled air.

Lourdes glanced back at Pax. “We’re about fifteen minutes out if your coordinates are correct.”

“They are,” Pax said.

“I sure as hell hope so. If they’re not, we won’t know until we’re too low to do anything about it.”

Pax had given the flight crew the exact GPS coordinates for the end of the runway at the Ranch. With the storm, it was likely to have a fresh layer of snow, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Combi had landed in similar conditions on this trip.

“Getting low on fuel again, too,” Lourdes said. “You sure there’s enough there to get us up in the air again?”

“More than enough.” Pax hoped he was right. While the Ranch did normally maintain a large supply of aircraft fuel, there was no telling how many flights had been moving in and out in the wake of the outbreak.

Right before they began their descent, the pilot flipped on the intercom and said, “Buckle up. We’re heading down.”

“I should radio in now,” Pax said. “We don’t want to surprise anyone.”

The copilot, Frank Kendrick, flicked a couple of switches and said, “Go for it.”

“Bravo Four, this is Pax,” he said. “Bravo Four, this is Pax. Come in.”

Static.

“Bravo Four, come in. This is Pax.”

Nothing.

“Bravo Four, we are approaching your runway. Do you read?” He looked over at Kendrick. “You sure you have me dialed in right?”

Kendrick read off the frequency. It was the same one Pax had given him.

“Bravo Four, please come in.”

“They’re not going to shoot at us if we try to land, will they?” Lourdes asked.

“We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. The truth was, he had no idea what the hell was going on. The Ranch should have answered by now.

“You’re sure the runway is where you said it is?” the pilot asked. The only things they could see were clouds.

“Exactly where I said it is.”

Lourdes nodded once, not looking reassured.

“Bravo Four, this is Pax. We are about to land. Please respond.”

Dead air.

As Pax started to try again, they dropped out of the clouds into a swirl of snow. Pax craned his neck to get a better look out the window. They were at the Ranch all right. He recognized the valley.

“You’re dead on,” he said. “Runway’s just ahead.”

“I don’t see it,” Kendrick said.

“It’s there. Trust me.”

“Don’t have much of a choice now,” Lourdes said.

“Five hundred feet,” Kendrick announced, reading off the altimeter. “Four seventy-five. Four fifty.”

The countdown continued as they neared the runway.

“Bravo Four, Bravo Four, this is Pax. We are coming in now. Bravo Four, do you read?”

“Two seventy-five. Two fifty. Two twenty-five.”

“Bravo Four! Bravo Four! Why aren’t you answering?”

“One fifty. One twenty-five. One hundred.”

There was no distinction between the runway and the meadows surrounding it. As long as Lourdes stuck to the coordinates, Pax knew they’d be all right, but the knowledge didn’t keep him from clenching up as the wheels sliced through the snowdrift and hammered onto the ground. The plane shook with the impact, but stayed moving in a straight line as the momentum slowed and finally died.

“Told you it was there,” Pax said, smiling.

He instructed Lourdes to bring the plane around and taxi to a spot to the side about halfway back. There, tucked behind a stand of trees, was the fuel supply. It was also where the road to the Lodge began.

He couldn’t understand why no one was waiting for them. Even if the Ranch had somehow not heard his radio calls, a team should have been there to see who was on the plane.

When the plane stopped, he told the others to remain on board and climbed down the retractable staircase. He pushed his way through the snow away from the aircraft, raised his arms, and waved them back and forth over his head.

“It’s Pax!” he yelled. “Rich Paxton! You can come out!”

The only movement he saw was snow falling.

“Hello? Can you hear me? Tell Matt that Pax is back!”

Silence.

He tried a few more times before returning to the plane.

“I guess we’re going to have to hike in,” he said. He looked over at his men. “Tom, you’re with me. The rest of you help get the plane fueled up.”

Decked out in the same winter gear they had used up in northern Canada, Pax and Tom Grady set off for the Lodge.

The road, usually plowed in the winter, was now buried under two feet of snow, more in some places.

“I don’t like this,” Tom said.

Pax made no reply.

The Lodge was a bit over a mile away, about a ten-minute hike on a nice summer day at a strong and steady pace. Under current conditions, it took them twice as long before they could see the trees thinning ahead, signaling the meadow where the Lodge was located.

Knowing they were close, Pax couldn’t help but pick up his pace. He was anxious to see his friends again, to find out what had been going on. But as he stepped out from the trees, he stopped.

The Lodge was gone. It should have been right there, but in its place was a pile of snow-covered, charred timbers.

He looked toward the dorm building off to the side. Not there. Only another pile of debris.

“Oh, my God!” Tom said, stepping out behind him. “What happened?”

The answer to that was clear. The Lodge and the dorm had been destroyed. How and why, Pax had no idea.

“This way,” Pax said. He cut across the meadow toward the woods on the other side.

Had anyone been in the buildings when they went down? Were his friends—

Stop it! he told himself. Those were questions that would only drive him crazy. What he needed was more information.

By the time they reached the woods again, both men were panting but they kept going, weaving through the trees and slogging up the hill to the Bunker’s emergency entrance. It took Pax a few minutes before he found the configuration of trees he was looking for, but there was no need to pace off the correct distance to find the hatch. It was unburied and wide open.

Keeping his fear in check, he knelt next to it and looked inside. Snow had piled up directly below the opening, but otherwise the tunnel was dark.

He reached into the opening and felt along the wall near the ladder. When his fingers knocked against the switch, he flipped it up. Lights located along the top of the tunnel instantly drove the darkness away. At least the power was still working. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

“I’ll go down first,” he said. “If it looks okay, you follow.”

“Got it,” Tom said.

Pax descended the ladder, letting himself drop the final few feet to the ground. The tunnel stretched away for a while before bending out of sight. The part he could see was empty.

“Clear,” he yelled up at Tom.

As soon as Tom joined him, they set off for the Bunker proper.

Any hope Pax had that everything was still all right vanished when they reached the partially open blast door. The area beyond was too quiet. If nothing else, they should have heard the soft hum of the ventilators feeding fresh air into the underground space, but there was no noise at all.

Emergency lights, triggered by motion sensors, flickered to life as the two men stepped into the main part of the Bunker.

“They’re gone,” Tom whispered.

Or dead, Pax thought but kept to himself, saying instead, “Let’s take a look around.”

Behind every door they opened and every corner they turned, Pax expected to find bodies, thinking that somehow the latest strain of Sage Flu had turned out to be resistant to the vaccine he and his friends had been given, but the dorms and the common areas were blessedly empty. They checked the storage rooms at the back of the kitchen. When Pax had looked in them last, they’d all been full. Now they were empty.

Their next stop was the weapons storage area. It, too, had been cleared out. Pax was starting to understand what had happened, at least a little bit.

“Comm room,” Pax ordered.

As they stepped inside the Bunker’s nerve center, Tom said, “Oh, my God.”

Most of the computers were gone, but the monitors and all other equipment still in the room had been destroyed. Chunks of glass and metal and plastic littered the floor. Pax stepped carefully through the mess and over to the communication director’s desk.

Standard operating procedure: upon abandoning a facility, the location of the next destination was to be left, when possible, in one of three specific places around the communication director’s workstation.

Pax found what he was looking for in position number two. Etched along the upper lip of the electrical socket cover were seven characters: 113-S78.

The number eight meant nothing, as did the three and the second one. They were decoy numbers. The real message was: 1-S7.

Nevada. They’d gone to Nevada.

Pax closed his eyes and said a prayer of thanks that his friends were apparently still alive. When he opened them again, he said, “Let’s get back to the plane. There’s nothing else here to see.”

18

After twenty minutes of looking for Iris, Ben began to wonder if maybe he should have left. If the girl didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be. There were a million places where she could hide. He could search for a month and never come within a block of her.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact she was alone out there, even more so than he was. As terrifying and gut wrenching and mind numbing as living through the outbreak had been, at least he had known what was going on. Iris had clearly been unaware the world was dying around her.

He continued on for a few more blocks before finally deciding it was time to use his Jeep to cover more ground. The walk back took him thirty minutes. When he reached his vehicle, the first thing he did was pull a bottle of water out of the back and down the whole thing in one long gulp. Out of habit, he walked toward a recycling bin sitting at the curb, and had the lid open before he realized what he was doing. No one would ever collect the contents of the can. He tossed the bottle in anyway, figuring it was still better than dropping it on the street.

Instead of returning to his Jeep, however, he detoured to the Cape Cod house. Iris had all but said she’d been held captive there by this Mr. Carlson guy, but something about it — her actions, the whole setup — didn’t quite fit. Maybe if Ben could figure out what had happened, he’d have some clue about where she had gone. It was a long shot, but he thought it worth a try.

He headed down to the basement first, wanting to get a better look at the room she’d been trapped in. After blocking the door with a chair so he wouldn’t trap himself down there, he went inside. His impressions from earlier had been dead on. A lot of money had been spent in this room. Whoever had paid for it really wanted the person living there to be comfortable. He looked around for any personal items that might tell him a little more about Iris, but other than clothes and some simple jewelry, he came up empty.

Upstairs, he returned to the bedroom of the man he assumed was Mr. Carlson. He retrieved the wallet he’d seen earlier in the dresser and flipped it open. A driver’s license with a picture of the dead man indicated his name was Marvin Bernard Carlson, age forty-seven, with an address matching that of the house. There were a few business cards with the same name. Apparently Mr. Carlson worked as a manager for H&R Block. Insurance card, AAA card, a couple of credit cards, and a wallet-sized copy of one of the portraits on the wall. It was the one with the girl at her youngest.

Ben walked over to the portraits. He hadn’t realized it before, but in none of the pictures was the girl truly smiling. He noticed something else this time, too. Yes, she was a few years older now, but the girl was Iris.

A trip to the other bedroom confirmed it had been Iris’s room. PROPERTY OF IRIS CARLSON was written inside the covers of several books on the shelves. He wondered what was going on here, but then decided he probably didn’t want to know.

He exited the house and walked over to the Jeep.

“Where did everybody go?”

Iris stood half hidden behind a tree in the yard directly across from her house, her gaze firmly planted on the Cape Cod. Had she been there when he first came back? Probably, he thought.

“It’s like I told you before,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “They’re gone. There was a massive flu outbreak, and almost everyone is dead.”

“You’re not dead.”

“No.”

“I’m not dead.”

“No,” he said.

“And…Mr. Carlson?”

Ben decided now was probably not the time to call her on her deception. “He’s dead.”

She looked at the house. “In his bedroom.”

“Yes.”

Her lower lip began to tremble. She sucked it between her teeth until the shaking passed. “I need to see.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

She tore her eyes from the house and looked at Ben. “I need to. Don’t you understand?”

He nodded. “Sure. I understand.” When she didn’t move, he said, “Would you like me to go with you?”

“Yes, please. I don’t think I can go alone. ”

Staying a few paces in front of her, he led Iris into the house and down the hallway. When they passed the first bedroom, he sensed her hesitate behind him, and thought she might go inside. But Iris apparently decided against visiting her old room, and soon joined him at the door to the master.

Ben covered his nose and mouth with his shirt. “You might want to do the same.”

As soon as she did, he opened the door.

“It’s not pretty,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

“You want to go in first?”

She shook her head.

Ben walked into the room and stepped to the side. Iris remained in the hallway for a few seconds before finally entering the room.

“That is Mr. Carlson, isn’t it?” he asked.

Only a nod as she stared at the corpse.

They stood there in silence for over a minute, before Iris abruptly turned and walked out. Ben started to follow her, but stopped and returned to the dresser. He hesitated, feeling guilty for what he considered doing. But he thought it might help him figure out Iris, so he opened the drawer, retrieved Mr. Carlson’s wallet, and slipped it into his pocket.

He found Iris outside, sitting on the curb.

“I’m heading south,” he said. “If you want to come with me, you’re welcome.”

At first he didn’t think she had heard him, but then she looked up. “I’d like that. Thank you.”

Martina knew there had to be some unwritten rule about driving hung over. At first she thought it would be a good thing — the fresh air rushing past her, the bright morning sun keeping her warm. What she hadn’t taken into consideration was the helmet pressing in on her head, keeping that fresh air away and intensifying the heat to the point she could feel sweat dripping down her neck. From the looks on her friends’ faces, they weren’t doing much better. She was pretty certain none of them would be drinking again anytime soon.

She had purposely set a slower pace today, worried that in their diminished capacity they might not see a pothole or a branch in the road. Turned out the reduced speed was a good thing.

They were on Route 166, the often windy and narrow highway that separated the San Joaquin Valley from the coast, when they dipped around a bend and had to come to a sudden halt because the road in front of them was blocked.

Martina’s first thought was that there had been an accident — by the looks of it, a big one, involving over half a dozen vehicles. But then she realized that while the nearest two cars appeared to have run into each other, the ones behind them seemed to have been placed there on purpose. They were in even rows, perpendicular to the road, stretching from one shoulder to the other.

“How are we supposed to get around that?” Riley asked.

Craig popped the stand on his bike and hopped off. “I got this. Just need to push a few of them out of the way.”

He walked around the accident to the car in the first row, and leaned inside to put it in neutral. The moment his head disappeared inside, the crack of a rifle rang out from the trees beyond the blockade.

Craig jerked out of the car and dropped to the ground.

The girls stared, momentarily stunned.

“Down!” Martina yelled as another shot went off. “Everyone! On the ground!”

She hit the pavement a second before the other two.

“Why are they shooting at us?” Noreen asked. “We didn’t do anything!”

“Craig?” Riley called out. “You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Craig called back. “Scared the crap out of me, that’s all. Are you guys all right?”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “We’re okay.”

“Those were warning shots,” a male voice called from the trees. “Next one won’t miss. Now get on your bikes and go back the way you came. This road is closed!”

“We’re just trying to get to the coast,” Martina shouted back. “Not trying to cause any problems!”

“Plenty of other ways to get there. You’re not coming through here!”

“Okay, okay! No problem! Please don’t shoot at us again, all right?”

“If you turn those bikes around and get out of here, there won’t be any problems.”

“I’m going to get up,” Martina said.

Riley reached out and grabbed Martina’s wrist. “No. What if it’s a trick?”

“I think he could shoot us where we’re lying if he wanted to. And even if he can’t, what are we going to do? Just stay here?”

Riley reluctantly let go as Martina pushed herself to her feet.

When the rifle remained silent, Martina said, “Okay. Everyone up.”

Noreen was the first to join her, and then Riley stood.

“My friend’s going to come back from the car, okay?” Martina shouted.

“He shuts the door first,” the man responded.

“Craig,” Martina said, dropping her voice a few decibels. “Do as he says.”

“Hell, no. I’m not getting up,” Craig said. “He’s going to shoot me.”

“He’s not going to shoot you,” Martina said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Craig, just shut the door!”

“Uh-uh. No way.”

Martina closed her eyes for a second, frustrated. She guessed the roadblock was there to keep the man with the rifle and anyone else with him safe from people who might be infected. If she and the others did what he wanted and left, it would all be fine. Like the man said, there were plenty of other highways to the coast.

“Sir!” she shouted. “My friend’s a little worried if he moves you might shoot him.”

“He has to close the door, that’s all. Don’t want it left open for anyone else to get any ideas.”

Martina raised her hands and took a step forward.

“What are you doing?” Riley whispered.

“If you’ll allow me,” Martina shouted, “I’ll close the door. Then we’ll be on our way.”

The man said nothing for several seconds, then, “If you try anything funny, me or one of my friends will take you down.”

He’s alone, she thought.

“I won’t try anything,” she said. “Going to do exactly what I told you I would.”

She took another step forward, and then another.

“Martina,” Riley said. “Don’t!”

“You two get on your bikes and turn them around. I’ll be right back.”

She could hear Riley start to protest again, but Noreen cut her off.

“Come on,” Noreen said. “Let’s do what she said.”

Martina kept her pace consistent all the way to the car. When she reached the door, she looked down at Craig. “After I close it, get up, and we’ll walk back.”

“No. He’ll shoot us in the back,” he protested.

His fear was obviously keeping him from thinking clearly.

“If you don’t get up, we’re going to leave you here,” Martina said.

She shoved the door closed and turned back toward the motorcycles. She was five steps away before she finally heard Craig get to his feet and scramble after her.

When they were all on their bikes, she shouted, “We’re sorry we disturbed you! Didn’t realize this way was cut off!”

“You do now,” he replied.

“You know, you can come with us if you’d like,” she said.

“What the hell?” Craig whispered. “Are you crazy?”

“Thanks for the offer,” the man shouted, “but we’re good here. Best you get on your way now!”

“All right,” Martina said. “Good luck to you!”

As they headed back into the central valley, Martina wondered how many others were holed up like the man on 166. Must be hundreds or even thousands scattered all over the place. People just trying to survive. Would they chance a trip to a survival station to get inoculated? She figured some would, while others would probably be too scared to venture from the safe haven they’d created.

Well, there was one good thing that came out of the encounter. Her headache was gone.

19

Without the snowplows, the Resistance convoy would have never made it out of Sheridan. Twenty miles south, the going became easier, much of the road covered by only a few inches of snow. After they passed Douglas, there were miles of the interstate completely clear, so they were able to make it to checkpoint three — the Central Avenue/US 85 exit in Cheyenne — in just under six hours.

At a gas station near the base of the off-ramp, they fueled up the vehicles and settled in to wait for Hiller and Rick.

Chloe took the opportunity to locate some solitude behind the station. She was lucky there had been so much snow when she fell off the roof the night before. Her injuries could have been a whole lot worse. Still, having her wrist in a sling and her cracked ribs taped up meant she’d been relieved of her driving duties, something that pissed her off more than the injuries themselves.

Driving would have been good. It would have focused her mind on the road instead of keeping her constantly aware of the others inside the cab.

Aware of Ginny.

Chloe had tried to sleep, but she could still see the girl when she closed her eyes. Not as she currently was, sitting in back with Brandon and Josie, but on the roof where Chloe had first seen her. A pair of eyes peeking above a scarf, her name hanging in the air between them.

Why did this girl bother her so much? What was it about her?

Chloe was sure she’d never seen the girl before. Well, not in this part of her life. But what about in the other part? The memories from then had been lost to her for years. Which, of course, meant if Chloe had known Ginny before, the girl would have been a toddler at best, and would have looked different enough that seeing her now should not have triggered such a strong response.

So what was it?

The name, yes, but not that name, she thought. What that meant, she didn’t know. She also felt it was more than something to do with the girl’s name.

Her face? Her eyes? The way she wore her clothes?

The harder Chloe thought about it, the further the answers seemed to move away.

“You all right back here?”

She turned in surprise.

“Sorry,” Ash said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine,” she said, then narrowed her eyes. “Should you be walking around?”

“Should you?”

She allowed herself to smile.

“You looked pretty lost in thought there,” he said. “Everything okay?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be? I mean, other than the world going to shit.”

“Other than that, yeah.” He leaned up against the building. “All that riding can’t be good for us.”

“You were in the army. You should be used to it.”

He grunted a laugh and said, “You never get used to it.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “So you’re the one who found the cat, huh?”

“Sorry about that.”

The cat had been a surprise to them all, Brandon keeping it under wraps until they’d been on the road for nearly half an hour. It had hissed a few times and so far was only letting the kids touch it.

“Well, we couldn’t very well leave it there, I guess,” Ash said.

She didn’t say anything. Because of her fall, she’d forgotten all about that cat. If she’d remembered, she could have been the one who brought it along.

“Brandon said you seemed to freeze up there.”

“Up where?” she asked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

“Last night.”

She looked at the storage sheds sitting side by side at the back of the station lot. “It was cold. We were all freezing.”

“I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”

“He said you appeared to be staring at Ginny right before you slipped.”

“It was dark up there. Not sure how he could tell who was looking at who.”

“Well, I’ve noticed you’ve tried very hard not to look at her today.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“Only that I’m your friend, and you seem troubled, so that worries me.”

“Then let me ease your mind.” She pushed off the building. “I’m not troubled, so you don’t need to worry.”

Without waiting to hear what he had to say next, she started to walk away.

As she came around the building, Matt said, “Ah, there you are. Have you seen Ash?”

“Right here,” Ash said, rounding the corner behind Chloe.

“You guys have a minute? I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’d have to check my schedule,” Ash said, “but I could probably move some meetings around.”

“We’ll use my Humvee,” Matt said, not even cracking a smile.

Ash was the last to climb into the vehicle.

“How are you both doing?” Matt asked, once they were all seated and the door was closed.

“Better than I was last week,” Ash said.

Matt looked at Chloe. It seemed to take her a moment before she realized he was waiting for her to respond.

“Uh, worse than I was last week.”

Matt studied them, as if assessing his next words. “I’m considering taking a little detour before heading to Nevada.”

“Detour where?” Ash asked.

“New Mexico.”

“I assume there’s a reason why.”

Another pause, briefer this time. “As you know, in the past, we were able to get some of our people placed inside Project Eden, to help us know what was going on.”

“Didn’t really do a lot of good, did it?” Chloe said.

It looked for a moment as if Matt would snap at her, but the tension in his face quickly disappeared and he sighed. “No, you’re right. It didn’t help us stop them before. But that could change now.”

“What do you mean?” Ash asked.

“Project Eden may have altered the course of human history, but I’ll be damned if I allow them to direct which way we go next. What you two did at Bluebird was a big step in that direction.”

“We failed at Bluebird,” Ash said.

“Yes, the virus was still released, but you eliminated the Project’s directorate, and that was not a failure. With the directorate gone, a new set of leaders should have been put in place.”

“What do you mean, should have?” Chloe asked. “They seem to still be operating pretty damn effectively.”

“The Project has always functioned under a group-leadership model, with one person acting as principal director,” Matt said. “This director is supposed to work in concert with the other directors. If it hadn’t been for this structure, they would have never made it this far. When it became apparent that the directorate at Bluebird was gone, procedures were put into motion to form a new directorate. Only, apparently, what happened is that the new principal director hijacked the process, and turned the set of directors below him into a rubber stamp committee.

“Right now, the bulk of the Project is operating exactly as planned. As soon as they have eliminated the survivors they feel are unnecessary, they’ll unite the remaining population and start the final phase — the next coming of man, if you will. But instead of the whole directorate deciding things, it will be just this one man.”

“A dictatorship,” Ash said.

“Exactly.” Matt frowned. “I’m not saying I’d be happier if a committee was running things. As long as Project Eden is in charge, it doesn’t matter to me who’s calling the shots.” He paused. “What does matter, though, is the opportunity this presents to us. What happened at Bluebird was a rare thing. Having the full directorate in the same facility at the same time was an act of arrogance. If they had lived through Implementation Day, we would have never seen them all in one place like that again. It made them vulnerable, and they paid the price.”

Ash saw where this was going. “A single leader has the same vulnerability, only constantly.”

“Yes, he does,” Matt said. “Hence the trip to New Mexico. One of our people inside was able to get us a message that the current principal director, a man named Perez, is operating out of a Project Eden facility near Las Cruces, New Mexico. I’m going there, and I’m taking him out.”

“But isn’t this the same problem?” Chloe asked. “If we get rid of him, won’t someone else take his place?”

“Possibly,” Matt said. “But it will be a big blow nonetheless, more so because he’s been operating so independently. And we need to start somewhere. After he’s gone, we’ll go after the next set of leaders and the next and the next. Each time we succeed, the Project becomes more unbalanced. They have already taken so much from us. We cannot let them rule the future.”

“You’re sure this Perez person is in New Mexico?” Ash asked.

“Absolutely.”

“How are we going to get in?” Ash asked. “We can’t just walk up and knock on the door.”

“There’s a way,” Matt said.

“What way?”

“It would be better if neither of you knew that.”

“Why not?” Ash asked.

Matt eyed them both. “Because when we reach southern Colorado, the two of you and the kids will head to Nevada.”

“The hell we will,” Chloe said. “If you’re going after the Project, I’m going, too.”

“I need people who can fight,” Matt said. “Not people I have to worry about because they’re already injured.”

“You need me.” Chloe glanced at Ash. “You need both of us.”

“Yes, I do,” Matt said. “But as you were, not like this.” He grimaced. “I know how much both of you have done, that you’ve both earned the right to be there. But be honest with yourselves. You’re going to be more of a burden than help, and you know it.”

“And you’re not going to be?” Chloe said, motioning to his bad knee.

“I have to be there,” he said. “You don’t.”

“Bullshit. You…I can…” She was so worked up, she looked like she was going to launch herself right at Matt and rip out his throat. Instead, she threw open the door and charged out of the truck.

Matt’s head drooped. “I’m sure you understand,” he said to Ash.

“Oh, I understand the reasoning, but your logic is flawed.”

“I just want—”

Ash cut him off. “Injured or not, when the mission is critical, you always want your best people with you, and you’ve got no one better than Chloe and me.” He leaned forward a few inches. “The fact that you don’t see that makes me very concerned for those who will be going with you.”

He opened the nearest door and piled out, his exit not quite as graceful as Chloe’s, but his point made.

It was another seventy minutes before the snowplow driven by Hiller pulled into the gas station parking lot.

Matt was the first to greet him. “Any problems?”

“Not with the kid,” Hiller said. “He’s been out the whole time. But this thing…” He nodded his chin at the truck. “Not sure how much farther it can go.”

“We’ll leave it here, then.”

“What do you want me to do with Rick?”

“Let’s put him in Ash’s truck. At least when he comes to, his sister will be there.”

“Sure,” Hiller said. “I’ll get one of the other guys to help.”

“I can do it,” Matt told him.

Hiller looked unconvinced, but he headed back to the plow with Matt limping along behind him. Together they eased Rick out of the passenger seat. With one of the boy’s arms over each of their shoulders, they carried him toward the Humvee Ash and his family had been riding in. They were a little over halfway there when Matt saw Ginny running toward them, her eyes wide.

“Rick? Rick, oh my God!” As she neared, her steps faltered. “Rick?” She looked at Matt. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s sleeping, that’s all.”

“He looks sick. Is he sick?” she asked, panicked. Instead of backing away like most people would, she moved closer to her cousin.

“He’s not sick. He’s asleep.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Can you open the back door for us?”

With a nod, she hurried over to the Humvee and did as requested.

After Rick was situated and the doors were closed again, Matt turned to the others standing around. “Everyone load up. I’m hoping we can make it all the way to Denver before we stop for the night.”

He watched them walk off and climb into their vehicles. They were good people — great, even — all willing to do whatever needed to be done.

For how many of them, he wondered, would this be the last call to action?

20

Primary director Perez read the report, his displeasure increasing with each word.

In Mumbai, India, someone had taken it upon himself or herself to release the survivors who had already shown up at the survival station by cutting holes in the detention-area fences. Perez’s initial question was why would anyone even consider doing this? The survival stations were places of refuge as far as anyone on the outside was concerned, and those in the holding areas would believe what they’d been told, that their confinement was merely a precaution designed to keep as many people alive as possible. No way any of them would want to leave prior to receiving the promised inoculation.

To Perez, this meant it had been an inside job.

Though not acknowledged to the Project Eden general membership, it had long been known among those in charge that some members were not quite as dedicated to the cause as everyone else. They were sympathetic to those outside the Project, willing to risk everything the Project stood for to avoid what they considered unnecessary deaths. Perez was sure the person who’d cut through the fences was one of these people, and that he or she was part of the Project personnel assigned to Mumbai.

When he finished reading, he called Claudia on the intercom. “Who’s the director in Mumbai?”

“Mr. Dettling.”

“Dettling?” he said. Perez was good with names, and had at least a passing knowledge of most of the people running Project operations around the world, but Dettling didn’t sound familiar.

“That’s Pishon Chem,” she reminded him.

Right. Pishon Chem.

There had been a problem there on Implementation Day. The previous senior manager, Herr…Schmidt, had died of complications from an injury he’d received. If Perez remembered correctly, the injury had occurred in the semi-chaos of a loading zone being used to distribute KV-27a to the unsuspecting men hired to spray the city with it. Schmitt had been punctured in the shoulder by a loose railing on one of the trucks or something like that. By the time anyone realized what had happened, he’d lost too much blood to be saved. Dettling had been the next man in seniority, and was immediately promoted.

“I want to talk to him. Right now.”

“Right away,” she said.

One minute later Perez’s phone rang.

“I have Mr. Dettling for you,” Claudia announced. “Center screen.”

“Put him through.”

The center monitor filled with a head shot of a tired-looking, middle-aged man with thinning hair.

“Principal Director,” Dettling said. “This is an honor. What is it I can do for you?”

“You can start by telling me what the hell is going on over there.”

Dettling hesitated. “I assume you mean the detainee issue.”

“Yes. The detainee issue.”

“Uh, um, most of those who had been housed in the infected enclosure were still within the compound so we’ve been able to round them up.”

“And the uninfected?”

“We’re, um, still looking for them.”

“How many have you reacquired so far?”

Another pause. “None yet, sir.”

“None? As in zero?”

“Yes, sir.”

Perez stared into the camera, letting an oppressive silence grow between them.

After several seconds, Dettling shifted nervously in his chair and said, “Sir, I promise you we will—”

“Have you caught the one responsible?”

“Not yet. I’m sure we’ll find him when we find the others.”

“And what makes you think that?”

Dettling’s eyebrows moved toward each other, his forehead wrinkling. “I’m, uh, not quite…I don’t know—”

“Why would you assume the person who cut through your fences is with the others and not still there in your compound?”

“Our compound? You mean, you think it could be one of the infected detainees?”

“Mr. Dettling, prove to me you’re not an idiot and tell me you are looking into your own personnel.”

“My personnel?” Dettling said. “You mean the Project people here?”

“It certainly wouldn’t be anyone where I am, would it?”

“Of course not. It’s just…I didn’t—”

“No, you didn’t, but now you will. Check them.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

The intercom buzzed. He hit the speaker button

“Sir,” Claudia said. “It’s time for your Madrid call.”

“All right,” Perez said. He hung up and looked back at the camera. “Mr. Dettling?”

“Yes, sir?”

“The next time we talk, you will tell me the mess is cleaned up.”

“Absolu—”

Perez hit the key that terminated the call.

21

After retracing their path back into the San Joaquin Valley, Martina and her friends headed north again on the I-5 until they reached Highway 58. Because of their experience with the man back on 166, they kept their speed down as they traveled through the mountains, and whenever they came to a blind turn, they slowed to almost a crawl. But there were no roadblocks this time. In fact, they saw very few cars at all.

By the time they reached the 101 freeway, the sun was nearing the horizon. Martina pushed her friends a little farther, but when they crossed into the Paso Robles city limits thirty minutes later, it was too dark to continue.

They found a motel just north of what appeared to be the local fairgrounds, and scrounged some food from a place called Margie’s Diner down the street before calling it a night.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Noreen asked, as they lay in their room waiting for sleep to take them.

“Who?” Martina said.

“Jilly and the others. I’ll bet the UN’s put them up in a nice place with hot meals and clean clothes and showers.”

“We’ve got a shower here,” Martina said. “And if you want clean clothes, we can stop at Target in the morning.”

“Not the same.”

Quiet for a moment.

“How many people do you think there are?” Riley asked. She and Martina were sharing a bed tonight.

“I don’t know,” Martina replied. “A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Maybe a thousand,” Riley said. “Can you imagine what it would be like to see a thousand people in one place right now? I’d love that.”

Silence again.

“Do you…do you think my dad and sister are there?” Riley asked.

“I hope so.” It wasn’t really an answer, but Martina didn’t want to tell her friend what she really thought.

This time the silence went on for several minutes, and Martina started to think she was the only one still awake.

Then Noreen whispered, “What’s going to happen?”

“We find Ben,” Martina said.

“No, I mean, you know, what’s going to happen? Next year. The year after that. The rest of our lives. What are we going to do?”

Martina was quiet for several moments before giving Noreen the only answer she could come up with.

“We live.”

When the resort had simply been a resort, the bar was where everyone gathered in the evenings. The nights had been filled with laughter and celebrations then — accounts and lawyers and managers in vacation mode, letting loose in ways they never did back home. Since those on the island had become isolated, there was little laughter and no celebrations, but attendance at the bar remained high.

Surprisingly, few abused the new open-bar policy, most choosing to have only a drink or two at most, and many none at all. It was simply the place where some people could pretend everything would be okay, while others could at least feel they weren’t alone. It was where many started their day, and most ended it.

Since the radio contact with the UN plane the day before, the mood of the residents gathered at the bar had turned hopeful. Soon the UN would bring them the vaccine, and everyone might be able to get off the island and look for loved ones who might have survived.

A favorite guessing game at the bar was: When would the UN arrive?

“I’d bet it won’t be more than a couple more days at most. They know we’re here. They can’t leave us unprotected for long.”

“The fact we are here is why they won’t be getting to us for a while. We’re contained. Safe. Why waste time on us while there are probably others in more danger?”

“We’re in plenty of danger. Plenty!”

“I don’t think it will be much more than a week. That’s what they said, right? A week? Hey, Robert, they said a week right?”

Robert had been nursing a cold glass of water at a table along the railing of the deck. The conversation had been going on over at the bar. He’d been trying to ignore it, but had known at some point they’d try to pull him in. It had happened with others several times already.

He looked over and said, “They told us it could be a few days, maybe more.”

“Could be,” one of the men in the group pointed out to his friends. “Could be a few weeks, too.”

Just like that, Robert was once more forgotten. He returned his gaze to the dark rolling sea. Of all the people at the bar, he was the only one who seemed to be still worried. Not about the UN and the vaccine, of course. He was happy about that. But until everyone was inoculated and started leaving the island, Robert was in charge of making sure they were all fed and safe. It was a responsibility that seemed to grow heavier every day.

“You should never drink alone.”

He looked up and found Estella standing next to his table.

“Don’t know if this qualifies as drinking,” he said, picking up his glass. “Water.”

“Drinking is drinking.” She pulled out the other chair, scooted it closer to his, and sat down.

Ever since their morning on the beach the day before, he’d begun to notice her around more. He wasn’t sure if she’d always been there, or if her presence around him was something new. He had to admit he didn’t mind.

“So when do you think they will come back?” she asked.

“They’ll get here when they get here,” he said.

“A smart answer.”

“Don’t know if it’s smart, but it certainly saves me a lot of grief.”

She cocked her head. “Grief?”

“Uh, keeps me from, let’s see, um, having people get mad at me for no reason.”

“Ah, okay. I understand.”

She raised her glass toward his. As they clinked, he noted she was either drinking a tumbler full of straight vodka or was also having water.

She took a sip, and put her glass down. “You are a busy man.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do I look busy?”

“You do.” She tapped her temple. “Inside, you thinking very much.”

“Well, hazard of the position, I guess.”

Again, her head cocked.

Before she could ask, he said, “Part of doing my job.”

A nod and a smile.

“What do you do back home?” he asked, wanting to move the spotlight away from him.

Her face clouded. “I do not do anything now, I think.”

“I mean before,” he said.

“I worked at a university. In the library.”

“You’re a librarian?”

“Why do you sound surprised?”

“You don’t strike me as the librarian type.”

“Strike you as the librarian type?”

“It means—”

“I know what it means. You do not strike me as the bartender type.”

“I’m not a bartender anymore.”

“And I’m not a librarian now, either.”

He smiled and looked back out at the sea.

A minute passed, or two or three — he wasn’t keeping track. When he heard Estella’s chair scrape against the ground, he looked over and watched her rise to her feet.

“Thanks for joining me,” he said. “It was nice.” He meant it. For a few moments as they’d talked, he’d been able to forget about everything else.

She looked down at him, the corner of her mouth turned up ever so slightly, and then held out her hand, palm up.

“Come,” she said.

He smiled, ready to tell her, thanks, but he had too much on his mind. Before he knew what he was doing, though, his hand was in hers and he was on his feet, all thoughts of the island and the others and the vaccine and the UN fading away.

The Resistance convoy reached Denver as the sun was going down, but since there was only a light dusting of snow on the freeway, they pushed on, not stopping until they reached Walsenburg three hours later.

Their home for the night was a Best Western north of town. Ash, Brandon, and Josie took a room on the second floor, while Ginny and Rick chose one about as far away as possible on the first. That hadn’t been Ginny’s idea. She and Josie and Brandon had begun to form a bond, and Ash knew the girl would have liked to stay near them.

Rick, on the other, had spent a good part of the trip glaring at Brandon and rubbing the hand that was missing a finger. Ash knew he would have to keep an eye on that situation. Though Brandon had become very good at taking care of himself, Rick was several years older than Ash’s son and twice his size. Ash had no doubt the kid was planning some kind of retribution.

“You all right?” Ash asked Brandon, once he and his kids were alone in their room. While his son had not outwardly let Rick’s unwanted attention affect him during the trip, Ash was concerned that inside was a different story.

“Yeah, why?” Brandon asked.

“Rick.”

“Rick? I can’t help it if he’s a jerk. If he didn’t want to get hurt, he shouldn’t have been shooting at us.”

Ash put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “True. Probably best, though, if you keep your distance. Don’t think he’s looking at things in quite the same way.”

“How’s Brandon supposed to do that when we’re all in the same truck?” Josie asked.

It was a good point, and one Ash had been thinking about. “I’ll see what I can do about that in the morning,” he said.

They ate dinner in their room, sharing cans of pears and ravioli and lima beans, and got ready for bed. Ash was finishing brushing his teeth when someone knocked on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Brandon said.

As the door opened, Ash heard Matt’s voice from the hallway. “Hey, Brandon. Your dad around?”

Ash stepped out of the bathroom. “What’s up?”

“Can I borrow you for a minute?” Matt asked.

“Sure.” He pulled on the shirt he’d just taken off and told his kids, “Be right back.”

Stepping out of the room, he saw Matt wasn’t alone. A few feet away, Chloe was leaning against the wall.

“What’s going on?” Ash asked.

“Not here,” Matt said, and headed down the hall.

Ash glanced at Chloe, silently asking if she knew what was up.

“More bullshit, I bet,” she whispered as she pushed herself off the wall and followed Matt.

Matt stopped about ten feet short of the end of the hallway, in an area where none of the rooms were being used. When Ash and Chloe joined him, he said, “I didn’t want to spring it on you in the morning, so I’m going to tell you now. This is where we part.”

“Matt, it’s not a good idea,” Ash argued.

Ignoring him, Matt said, “The 160 heads west from here. You’ll take that. Here.” He pulled a folded map out of his pocket and held it out to Ash. “The route to the base in Nevada is marked. You’ll take one of the plows and your Humvee. Head out when we do in the morning, so you beat the storm.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Chloe said. “You need us.”

“We’ve gone over this already,” Matt said. “I’m not going to argue about it again.”

Ash had yet to take the map from him.

“Chloe and I are the only ones here who’ve ever actually been in one of Project Eden’s facilities,” Ash said. “There’s a good chance you’re going to need what we know.”

“Take it,” Matt said, waving the map. “Get the kids to Nevada where they’ll be safe.”

With extreme reluctance, Ash took it from him.

Looking relieved, Matt said, “I sympathize. I really do, but trust me, this is not a mission you want to be on, especially in the condition you both are in.” He forced a smile. “Now go get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.” Then, looking as if he couldn’t get away fast enough, he walked stiff-legged to the stairs and headed down.

“This is stupid,” Chloe said when she and Ash were alone. “Even with one hand I’m better than anyone he’s got.”

Ash didn’t doubt that was true. His own condition, though, was not quite as accommodating. He knew he’d be struggling to keep up with the others, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be part of the team. If what Matt had planned would truly deliver a major blow to the Project, Ash needed to be there. That would be protecting his kids. Driving them to Nevada would be running away.

“You’re thinking it, too, aren’t you?”

He looked up and saw Chloe staring at him. “What?”

“That you’re going to New Mexico whether Matt wants you to or not.”

He hesitated. “The kids,” he said. “I can’t just leave them.”

“Your kids aren’t kids anymore,” she said. “We find a good place for them to hide and they’ll be more than capable of taking care of themselves until we get back.”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I want to. I…I don’t know.”

“I do know,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

As he watched her walk back to her room and disappear inside, he tried to figure out what would be the right thing to do, but this wasn’t his decision alone.

When he returned to the room, Brandon and Josie were lying down but still awake.

“What did he want?” Josie asked.

Ash walked over to the empty bed the kids had left for him, and sat on the corner. “I need to talk to you both about something.”

The amount of fuel left at the Ranch had not been nearly as much as Pax had expected, so they’d only had enough to get the Combi to Idaho Falls, where they were able to finally fill up their tanks. By the time they got back in the air, it was after seven thirty p.m.

Pax was sitting in the cockpit auxiliary seat, headset on, when they neared their destination.

“Bravo Eleven, this is Pax,” he said, using the call sign for the Nevada base. “Bravo Eleven, please come in.”

Static.

“Bravo Eleven, this is—”

“This is Bravo Eleven,” a female voice cut in. “Please restate your call sign.”

Grinning broadly, Pax said, “It’s not a call sign. It’s my damn name. It’s Pax. Rich Paxton.”

For a moment, there was no response, then, “Pax? Are you kidding me?”

Recognizing the voice, he said, “Is that you, Crystal?”

“Yes! Pax, oh my God! We thought—” She paused. “Hold on.”

When the static stretched to several seconds, Pax said, “Bravo Eleven, you still there? Crystal?”

“Is it really you?” A female voice, though not Crystal’s anymore.

“Rachel,” Pax said. “It’s great to hear your voice.”

“You’re alive.”

“Hell, yes, we’re alive!”

“All of you?”

“Yeah, my whole team.”

“Thank God. When we lost contact with you, we couldn’t help but think something happened. Where are you?”

“Should be touching down on your airstrip in about ten minutes.”

“Are you serious?”

“I hope so. If not, you’re going to have to pick us out of the desert.”

“I can’t believe it. We’ve really missed you around here.”

“Been busy, have you?”

Her tone turned serious. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Well, I guess you can fill me in when we get down.”

“Yeah.”

“If you could do us a favor and light up the landing lights, that’d be great.”

“Of course.”

Seconds later, a double row of lights popped on in the sea of darkness below them.

Rachel pushed open the truck door and hurried toward the plane, making it almost all the way there by the time Pax climbed out.

They threw their arms around each other, Pax lifting her into the air as they hugged.

“I can’t believe it’s really you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see you again.”

“There were a few days there I wasn’t sure about that myself,” he said. He kissed her cheek and set her down, then looked around. “I take it things haven’t exactly been normal around here.”

She almost laughed. “Oh, Pax, I’ve missed you.”

She hugged him again, and started walking with him toward the truck.

“Matt too busy to make it out to say hi?” he asked.

“He’s not here.”

She could feel Pax tense.

“He didn’t—”

“He’s fine,” she said, cutting him off. “Just out on a mission.”

“What kind of mission?”

“I’ll fill you in on everything later.”

“What about Ash and Chloe? Were they able to make it back?”

“Yes, both of them.”

“That’s something, anyway.”

When they reached the truck, they climbed into the back and waited for the rest of the team to get there. Rachel recognized all but two of the men.

When she mentioned this to Pax, he said, “No, that’s my mistake.” He waved the men over. “Rachel, I’d like you to meet Ian Lourdes and Frank Kendrick. They work with the research facility that put us up on Amund Ringnes Island.”

“Researchers?” she asked, confused by why they had come.

“Pilots,” Pax said.

Of course. Someone would have had to—

Pilots.

“Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to met you,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough for bringing our friends home. I’m guessing you both are pretty tired.”

“Exhausted,” Frank said.

She smiled and asked, “How exhausted?”

Iris had fallen asleep within moments of lying down.

Ben, on the other hand, was wide awake. In what was surely the most eventful couple of weeks in human history, today had been a banner day in his small part of it. Leaving his childhood home, given the current circumstances, would have been traumatic enough, but throw on top of that finding Iris like he had, and then hunting for her after she ran off, was plenty to place the day squarely on top.

He pushed off his mattress and headed down the carpeted aisle.

His initial plan had been to find two rooms in a motel, but the first place he checked was full of the dead. Iris, who by that point refused to leave his side, had been so freaked out she wouldn’t even let him check any other motels. Houses seemed to be out of the question, too. So Ben began looking for anyplace they could sleep halfway comfortably.

“There! There!” Iris had shouted as they were driving around on their search.

“You don’t have to yell. I’m right here,” he told her.

But when he looked to see what had caught her attention, he could almost forgive her outburst. A mattress store. Perfect.

The place turned out to be stocked not only with mattresses, but also sheets and blankets and pillows. It was the jackpot of non-hotel/non-home places to sleep.

He made his way to the back of the store, grabbed a can of soda out of the machine he’d jimmied earlier, and headed back up front, where he sat down on a bed in the window display.

Outside it was as dark as he’d ever seen it. Salinas had apparently lost its power. No street lamps, no lit signage, no emergency lights on in buildings. As strange as the darkness was, he had a feeling it would become the norm from now on, so he knew he’d better get used to it.

He popped open the can and took a sip. The soda was cool, but only because the store itself was cool. That was probably something else he’d have to get used to — not always being able to have a cold drink when he wanted one.

Or heat. Or air conditioning. Or ice.

Those were only a few items on the monstrous list of things he’d have to get used to, he thought. The truths and expectations he’d grown up with were gone.

He stared out into the pitch-black night.

This is the new reality. This is it.

Jilly pulled her blanket tight to her neck. The room was heated, but she was shivering.

We should have all stayed together, she thought. We should have gone with Martina.

On the bed below her, Valerie muttered something in her sleep, “taking it time,” or “taking it, Tim,” or maybe something else entirely. Whatever it was, Valerie sounded panicked. She twisted one way and then the other before falling silent again.

Jilly had no idea if she spoke in her own sleep, but she wouldn’t doubt it.

From the moment they’d arrived at the survival station set up inside Dodger Stadium, Jilly had had a weird feeling about things. The UN officials they’d met with had given them only kind words and smiles, but something felt off.

Each girl had been taken into a room and interviewed individually.

“And you’re from Ridgecrest, too?” Jilly’s interviewer asked.

“Yes.”

“Pretty amazing you were all able to survive.”

“I guess.” On the way to L.A., the girls had decided to keep quiet their belief that they were immune. They didn’t want to chance not being given the vaccine in case they actually needed it. They agreed that if asked whether they’d had the Sage Flu during the spring outbreak, they’d say no.

“Were you and your friends together the whole time?” the interviewer asked.

“For the most part.”

A notation on the page, then, “Did you see any others? Survivors, I mean.”

The girls hadn’t discussed this point. Should she tell the woman about Martina, Noreen, Riley, and Craig? “I didn’t see anyone,” she said. If the other girls wanted to tell their interviewers about Martina, so be it. She didn’t feel right doing it.

The questions went on for over half an hour. At the end, Jilly was led through several stadium tunnels and out onto the baseball field, where two identical fenced-in areas were set up. They looked very much like the prisoner-of-war camps she’d seen in history class.

“Quarantine,” her escort had said. “Just until we’re sure you aren’t showing any signs of the illness. At that point, you’ll be given the vaccine.”

“And then I’ll be free to go?”

He looked surprised by her question. “Well, of course, that’s a choice you can make. But we do have relocation zones where we are consolidating survivors. You’d be much happier there.” When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “Anyway, you don’t have to make that decision now.” His friendly smile was back. “There are books and movies inside the barracks building. You’ll find something to occupy your time.”

But Jilly didn’t read any of the books. She didn’t watch any of the movies, either. None of her teammates did. Though they hadn’t discussed it, she sensed they all were feeling the same way she was. That something was wrong here.

Jilly turned on her side, the uncomfortable thoughts refusing to go away. When sleep finally came, it wasn’t like a wave that pushed her deep beneath the surface, but more like a gentle swell, lapping over her face for a moment or two, but never enough to keep her under for long.