The Twelve

21


The viral pod that swarmed the eastern Iowa refugee-processing center in the early morning hours of June 9 was part of a larger mass gathering out of Nebraska. Estimates made later by the joint task force, code-named JTF Scorch differed on its size; some believed it was fifty thousand, others many more. In the days that followed, it would convene with a second, larger pod, coming north out of Missouri, and a third, larger still, moving south from Minnesota. Always their numbers increased. By the time they reached Chicago, they were half a million strong, penetrating the defensive perimeter on July 17 and overwhelming the city within twenty-four hours.

The first virals to breach the wires of the refugee-processing center arrived at 4:58 CTD. By this time, extensive aerial operations in the central and eastern portions of the state had been under way for eight hours, and, in fact, all but one of the bridges over the Mississippi—Dubuque—had already been destroyed; the timing of the quarantine had been deliberately misreported by the task force. It was generally believed by the leaders of the task force—a conclusion supported by the combined wisdom of the American military and intelligence communities—that a concentrated human presence within the quarantine zone acted as a lure to the infected, causing them to coalesce in certain areas and thus make aerial bombardment more effective. The closest analogue, in the words of one task force member, was using a salt lick to hunt deer. Leaving behind a population of refugees was simply the price that needed to be paid in a war that lacked all precedent. And in any event, those people were surely dead anyway.

Major Frances Porcheki of the Iowa National Guard—in her civilian life, a district manager for a manufacturer of women’s sporting apparel—was unaware of the mission of JTF Scorch, but she was no fool, either. Though a highly trained military officer, Major Porcheki was also a devout Catholic who took comfort in, and guidance from, her faith. Her decision not to abandon the refugees under her protection, as she had been ordered to do, followed directly from this deeper conviction, as did her choice to devote the final energies of her life, and those of the soldiers still under her command—165 men and women, who, nearly to a one, took up positions at the western wire—to provide cover for the escaping buses. By this time, the civilians who had been left behind were racing after the vehicles, screaming for them to stop, but there was nothing to be done. Well, that’s it, Porcheki thought. I would have saved more if I could. A pale green light had gathered to the west, a wall of quivering radiance, like a glowing hedgerow. Jets were streaking overhead, unleashing the fury of their payloads into the heart of the pod: gleaming tracers, spouts of flame. The air was split with thunder. Through a gauntlet of destruction the pod emerged, still coming. Porcheki leapt from her Humvee before it had stopped moving, yelling, “Hold your fire, everyone! Wait till they’re at the wire!,” then dropped to a firing position—having no more orders to give, she would face the enemy on the same terms as her men—and began to pray.

* * *

Time itself acquired a disordered feel. Amid the chaos, lives were overlapping in unforeseen ways. In the basement of the NBC facility, a bitter struggle was ensuing. At the very moment that the Blackbird helicopter was alighting on the rooftop, Horace Guilder, who had been hiding from Nelson in the office when the assault commenced, his decision not to telephone his counterparts at the CDC having lifted one burden from his mind only to create another (he had no idea what to do next), had descended the stairs to the basement with considerable difficulty to find Masterson and Nelson frantically cramming blood samples into a cooler packed with dry ice, yelling words to the effect of “Where the hell have you been?” and “We have to get out of here!” and “The place is coming down around our ears!” But these sentiments, reasonable as they were, touched Guilder only vaguely. The thing that mattered now was Lawrence Grey. And all at once, as if he’d been slapped in the face, Guilder knew what he had to do.

There was only one way. Why hadn’t he seen it all along?

His whole body was poised on the verge of paralyzing spasms; he could barely draw a breath through the narrowing tube of his throat. And yet he mustered the will—the will of the dying—to reach out and seize Masterson’s sidearm and yank it free of its holster.

Then, amazing himself, Guilder shot him.


Kittridge was being trampled.

As the buses pulled away, Kittridge was knocked to the ground. As he attempted to rise, somebody’s foot caught him in the side of his face, its owner tumbling over him with a grunt. More pummeling feet and bodies; it was all he could do to assume a posture of defense, pressing himself to the ground with his hands over his head.

“Tim! Where are you?”

Then he saw him. The crowd had left the boy behind. He was sitting in the dirt not ten yards away. Kittridge hobbled to his side, skidding in the dust.

“Are you okay? Can you run?”

The boy was holding the side of his head. His eyes were vague, unfocused. He was crying in gulps, snot running from his nose.

Kittridge pulled him to his feet. “Come on.”

He had no plan; the only plan was to escape. The buses were gone, ghosts of dust and diesel smoke. Kittridge hoisted Tim at the waist and swung him around to his back and told him to hold on. Three steps and the pain arrived, his knee shuddering. He stumbled, caught himself, somehow stayed upright. One thing was certain: with his leg, and with the boy’s added weight, he wouldn’t make it far on foot.

Then he remembered the armory. He’d seen an open-backed Humvee parked inside. Its hood had been standing open; one of the soldiers had been working on it. Would it still be there? Would it function?

As the soldiers at the western wire opened fire, Kittridge gritted his teeth and ran.

By the time he reached the armory, his leg was on the verge of collapse. How he’d made it those two hundred yards, he had no idea. But luck was with him. The vehicle was parked where he’d seen it, among the now-empty shelves. The hood was down—a good sign—but would the vehicle run? He lowered Tim to the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and pressed the starter.

Nothing. He took a breath to steady himself. Think, Kittridge, think. Hanging beneath the dash was a nest of disconnected wires. Somebody had been working on the ignition. He pulled the wires free, picked two, and touched the ends together. No response. He had no idea what he was doing—why had he thought this would work? He arbitrarily selected two more wires, red and green.

A spark leapt; the engine roared to life. He jammed the Humvee into gear, aimed for the doors, and shoved the accelerator to the floor.

They barreled toward the gate. But a new problem lay before them: how to make it through. Several thousand people were trying to do the same thing, a roiling human mass attempting to wedge itself through the narrow exit. Without taking his foot off the gas, Kittridge leaned on the horn, realizing too late what a bad idea this was—that the mob had nothing to lose.

It turned. It saw. It charged.

Kittridge braked and swung the wheel, but too late: the hordes swallowed the Humvee like a breaking wave. His door flew open, hands pulling at him, trying to break his grip on the wheel. He heard Tim scream as he fought to keep control. People were lunging at the vehicle from all directions, boxing him in. A face collided with the windshield, then was gone. Hands were reaching over his face from behind, clawing at him, more pulling at his arms. “Get off me!” he yelled, trying to bat them away, but it was no use. There were simply too many, and as more bodies rolled over the windshield and under the vehicle’s tires and the Humvee began to tip, he reached for Tim, bracing for the crash; and that was the end of that.

* * *

Meanwhile, at a distance of three miles, the line of buses—carrying a total of 2,043 civilian refugees, 36 FEMA and Red Cross workers, and 27 military personnel—was roaring eastward. Many of the people on board were sobbing; others were locked in prayer. Those with children were clutching them fiercely. A few, despite the earnest pleas of their fellows to shut the hell up, were still screaming. While a handful were already undergoing the wrenching self-reproach of having left so many behind, the vast majority possessed no such misgivings. They were the lucky ones, the ones who’d gotten away.

At the wheel of the Redbird, Danny Chayes was experiencing, for the first time in his life, an emotion that could only be described as a magnificent wholeness of self. It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes. Like the bus whose course he guided, Danny had been shot forward, propelled into a new state of being in which a range of contrary feelings, in all their distinctive contours, existed simultaneously in his mind. He was afraid, genuinely and soulfully afraid, and yet this fear was a source of not paralysis but power, a rich well of courage that seemed to rise and overflow within him. You’re the captain of that ship, Mr. Purvis said, and that’s what Danny was. Over his left shoulder, Pastor Don and Vera were talking away, speaking in urgent tones about this and that and the other; behind them, on the benches, the others were huddled together in pairs. The Robinsons with their baby, who was making a kind of mewing sound; Wood and Delores, who were holding hands as they prayed; Jamal and Mrs. Bellamy, the two of them actually hugging; April, sitting woefully alone, her face too stunned for tears. Their deliverance had become the sole purpose of Danny’s life, the fixed point in his personal cosmos around which everything else revolved, yet in the excitement of the moment and Danny’s discovery of the amazing fact of his aliveness, their presence was a pure abstraction. At the wheel of his Redbird 450, Danny Chayes was in union with himself and with the universe, and when he saw, as no doubt the drivers of the other buses did as well, the second mass of virals rising from the predawn darkness to the south, and then the third, coming from the north, and discerned in his mind’s eye with swift three-dimensional calculation that these two bodies would subsequently unite to form a single encircling mass that would swarm over the buses like hornets loosed from a nest, he knew what he had to do. Swinging the wheel to the left, he broke free from the convoy and jammed the accelerator to the floor, soaring past the other buses in the line. Seventy, seventy-five, eighty miles an hour: with every ounce of his being, he willed the bus to go faster. What are you doing? Pastor Don yelled. For the love of God, Danny, what are you doing? But Danny knew just what he was doing. His goal was not evasion, for there could be none; his goal was to be the first. To hit the pod at such barreling velocity that he would sail right through it, carving a corridor of destruction. The space behind him had erupted in a chorus of screams; beyond his windshield the pods were merging, a swelling legion of light. His knuckles were white on the wheel.

“Get down, everyone!” he yelled. “Get down!”


“What the f*ck!”

Nelson was backing away, holding his hands protectively before his face. Guilder realized the man pretty much expected him to shoot him, too. Which was nothing he was particularly averse to, though in the near term he had other requirements.

“Get the woman,” he said, gesturing with the pistol.

“There’s no time! Christ, you didn’t have to kill him!”

There were more concussions from above. The air was swirling with dust. “I’ll be the judge. Move.”

Later, Guilder would have cause to wonder how he’d known to get the woman first, one of the more fateful decisions of his life. He might have chosen to leave her, bringing about an altogether different outcome. Intuition, perhaps? Sentimentality for the bond he’d discerned between her and Grey—a bond that had eluded him all his life? Pushing Nelson forward at the end of his pistol, he crossed the lab to the door of Lila’s chamber.

“Open it.”


Lila Kyle, aroused by the explosions, had given herself over to incoherent and terrified screaming; she had no idea where she was or what was happening. She was strapped to a bed. The bed was in a room. The room and everything in it were moving. It was as if she’d awakened from one dream to find herself lost in another, each equally unreal, and she experienced only a partial awareness of Nelson and Guilder as they entered the room. The two men were arguing. She heard the word “helicopter.” She heard the word “escape.” The smaller of the two was plunging a needle into her arm. Lila could offer no resistance, yet the instant the needle pierced her skin a jolt of energy hit her heart, as if she’d been connected to a giant battery. Adrenalin, she thought. I have been sedated, and now they are injecting me with adrenalin, to wake me up. The smaller man was hauling her to her feet. Beneath her gown, a cold nakedness prickled her skin. Could she stand? Could she walk? Just get her out of here, the second man said.

With a tremendous urgency she could not make herself share, he half-dragged, half-carried her across the wide room, some kind of laboratory. The lights were out; only emergency beams shone from the corners. In the distance, a series of roars, and after each a moment of prolonged shuddering, like an earthquake. Glass was jostling, making a pinging sound. They came to a heavy door with a metal ring, like something on a submarine. The smaller man swung it open and stepped inside. She was being held by the larger man now; he was brandishing a pistol. He gripped her from behind, one hand wrapping her waist, the other pressing the barrel to her midsection. Her thoughts were coming clearer now. Her heart was clicking like a metronome. What would emerge from the door? She could smell the man’s breath close to her face, a warm rottenness. She felt his fear in his grip; his hands, his whole body were trembling. “I’m pregnant,” Lila said, or started to say, thinking this might alter the situation. But her voice was cut short as, from the far side of the door, came a womanly sound of shrieking.


The aerial operations over western and central Iowa on the night of June 9 were not without risks. Chief among them was that the pilots might fail to carry out their orders, and, in fact, some did not: seven flight crews refused to deploy their payloads over civilian targets, while three more claimed to have suffered mechanical malfunctions that prevented them from doing so, an operational failure rate of six percent. (Of these ten flight crews, three were court-martialed, five were reprimanded and returned to duty, and two dropped to the deck and were never seen again.) In the coming weeks, as the mission of JTF Scorch expanded to include centers of population throughout the nation’s middle section and the Intermountain West, members of the task force would recall this statistic with something like nostalgia—the good old days. By the first of August, so many aviators were either sitting in the stockade as prisoners of conscience or had vanished with their aircraft into the skies above the dying continent that it became increasingly difficult to mount a coherent aerial offensive, casting the very mission of JTF Scorch into doubt. These difficulties were compounded by secessionist movements in California and Texas, both of which proceeded to declare themselves sovereign and appropriate all federal military resources within their borders, effectively daring Washington to stop them by force—a remarkably shrewd gambit, both militarily and politically, as by this time the situation was in pure free fall. Much bluster ensued on both sides, culminating in the Battle of Wichita Falls and the Battle of Fresno, in which vast numbers of American military, both on the ground and in the air, threw in the towel, laid down their arms, and asked for sanctuary. Thus, by mid-October of the year that came to be known by subsequent generations as the year zero, the nation known as the United States could be said to exist no more.

But in the early morning hours of June 9, beneath a moonless Iowa sky, JTF Scorch was still on-line, enjoying the full, or nearly full, cooperation of its assets. In confirmation of the task force’s projections, great masses of Infected Persons had collected in four distinct hot spots across the state: Mason City, Des Moines, Marshalltown, and the FEMA refugee-processing facility in Fort Powell. By 0200, the first three had been dispensed with; Fort Powell was the final prize. A combination of A-10 Warthogs and F-18 fighter-bombers began the assault; concurrently a C-130 transport was inbound from MacDill. Within its bay lay an explosive device called a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB. Containing 18,700 pounds of H6 high explosive, the MOAB was the largest non-nuclear bomb in the United States military arsenal, capable of producing an impact crater five hundred feet in diameter and a blast wave sufficient to level an area the size of nine city blocks; its fires would burn for days.


When Nelson bent to undo Grey’s straps—straps no longer attached to anything—Grey lurched forward, seizing him by the biceps and burying his teeth in the man’s neck. A deep bite: he felt Nelson’s windpipe being crushed beneath his jaws. As the two tumbled backward over the bed, Grey shook him like a wolf with a rabbit in its teeth; a jet of hot blood filled Grey’s mouth. They were on the floor now, Nelson face-up, Grey above him. An agonal twitch of Nelson’s hands and feet, and that was all. Grey burrowed his jaws deeper, into the soft meat.

He drank.

Had it been this easy for Zero, Grey wondered, this pleasurable? A rich vitality poured through him, a glorious immensity of pure sensation. With a final, soul-satisfying inhalation of blood, Grey pulled his face away. He allowed himself a couple of seconds to regard the corpse on the floor. The flesh of Nelson’s face looked as if it had been shrink-wrapped to its underlying structure; his eyes, like the eyes of the woman in the parking lot of the Red Roof, bulged reptilianly from their bony orbits, staring into the heart of eternity. Grey searched his mind for some emotion that corresponded to his actions—guilt, perhaps, or pity, or even disgust. He was a murderer, a man who had killed. He had stolen the life of another. But he felt none of these things. He’d done what he had to do.

The door to his chamber stood open. Lila, he thought, I am coming to save you—all that has happened has ordained it.

He stepped through.


What emerged from the door was a man. The figure was backlit, sunk in shadow. As he advanced, beams from the emergency lights slanted across his face. His gown was bathed in blood.

Lawrence?

“Don’t.” The man with the gun was dragging Lila backward, jabbing its barrel deep into her ribs. His steps were uncertain, fluttering. His whole body was shaking like a leaf. It seemed that any second he might fall. “Keep your distance.”

Grey reached his bloody hands plaintively forward. “Lila, it’s me.”

Horror, revulsion, a protective mental numbness at the violent swiftness of events—all combined in Lila’s mind to grip her in a frozen, focusless terror in which her body and her brain seemed like only tangentially associated phenomena. Through the fog she realized what the screams from the chamber meant. If the state of his gown was any indication, Lawrence had not merely killed the small man but torn him to pieces. Which made a kind of sense; Lila should have seen this coming. She remembered the tank. She remembered Lawrence’s face, a mask of gore like some Halloween horror, as it popped from the hatch, and the glass of the Volvo’s window splintering under his fist. Lawrence had become a monster. He had become one of those … things. (Poor Roscoe.) And yet there was something about his eyes, which she could not look away from, that told her not to be afraid. They seemed to bore straight into her, shining with an almost holy light.

“Don’t you know what’s happening?” the man barked. “We have to get out of here.”

“Let her go.”

Another blast from above and a lurching wave passed through the floor. Glass was falling; everything was caving in. The gun’s barrel was pressed against her ribs like a cold finger pointing at her heart. The man angled his head toward a corner of the room.

“Up the stairs. There’s a helicopter waiting.”

“Put the gun down and I’ll go with you.”

“Goddamnit, there’s no time for this!”

Something was happening to her. A kind of awakening, and it wasn’t just the gun. It was as if she were returning to consciousness after years of sleep. How foolish she’d been! Painting the nursery, of all things! Pretending they were taking a drive in the country, as if that could change anything! Because David was dead, and Eva was dead, and Brad, whose heart she had broken; she had convinced herself the world wasn’t ending, because it already had. And here was this man, this Lawrence Grey, who had come upon her like a redeemer, an angel to lead her to safety, as if the baby she carried were his own, and she knew what she had to say.

“Please, Lawrence. Do what he asks. Think about our baby.”

A fraught moment followed, so suspended as to seem outside the flow of time. Lila could read the question on Lawrence’s face. Could he get to the pistol before the man fired? And if he could, what then?

“Show us the way out of here.”

By the time they reached the roof, the helicopter’s blades were turning, casting a whirling wind across the rooftop. The sky was glowing with an eerie, emerald-tinged light, like the insides of a greenhouse. It seemed the helicopter would leave without them, a final irony, but then Lila saw the pilot urgently waving to them from the cockpit. They climbed aboard; Guilder slammed the door behind them.

Upward.


Kittridge became aware that he was face-down in the dirt. A taste of blood was in his mouth. He tried to get to his feet but realized he had only one; his prosthesis was gone. He lifted his face to see the Humvee tipped on its side a hundred yards away, like a beached sea creature. Its windshield was smashed; steam was pouring from its hood and undercarriage. The mob had fallen on it like a pack of animals; some were attempting to rock it back onto its wheels, but the effort was disorganized, coming from all sides. Others were standing on the top, shoving and kicking competitors away, defending their positions as if the mere possession of such a thing might offer some protection.

Kittridge crawled to where Tim lay. The boy was breathing but unconscious—a small mercy. His body was splayed at a tortured angle; his hair was matted with blood. More was running from his mouth and nose. Kittridge realized the shooting had stopped. Soldiers were tearing past, but there was nowhere to run. A mass of virals lay at the wire, felled by the soldiers’ bullets, but as his eyes scanned the scene, Kittridge understood that the attack had been a test, an advance force sent to exhaust the soldiers’ defenses. A second, vastly larger pod was now amassing. As it roared toward them, the image stretched, flowing like a shimmering green liquid as it surrounded the encampment. The final assault would come from all directions.

He lifted Tim’s body by the shoulders and held his chest against his own. They were in the midst of chaos, people running, voices shouting, bombs falling; yet as they crouched in the dust, a bubble of silent inactivity seemed to encase them, protecting them from the destruction. Kittridge turned his face toward the east. For a brief moment he imagined he could see Danny’s bus streaming away in the darkness, though this was an illusion, he knew. By now they were gone, far beyond the reach of his vision. Godspeed to you, Danny Chayes. A deep stillness wrapped his being and, with it, a feeling of the past, an experience like déjà vu: he was where he was but also not, he was here and also there, he was a boy at play and a man at war and the third thing he’d become. Images flashed through his consciousness: the viral in her wedding dress clinging to the hood of the Ferrari; a view of sparkling sunlight on a river he had fished for years; April, on the night when they had sat together in the window of the school, watching the stars, and the look of quiet peace on her face as the two of them made love; the boy in the car, his eyes full of a terrible knowledge, and his hand—his little boy’s hand—desperately reaching, then gone. All of these and more. He recalled his mother, singing to him. The warmth of her breath on his face, and the feeling of being very small, a new being in the world. The world is not my home, she sang in her silky voice, for I’m just passing through. The treasures are laid up somewhere, high beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Tim had begun to make a choking sound; his eyes flickered, fought to open, then stilled. The virals, having completed their encirclement, were surging toward the wire. Kittridge became aware of an absence of sound around them. The battle was over; the planes had broken away. Then, in the quiet, he detected, high above, the drone of a heavy aircraft. Kittridge angled his face to the sky. A C-130 transport, coming from the south. As it passed overhead an object released from its belly, its dive abruptly stalled by the puff of a parachute. The plane climbed away.

Kittridge closed his eyes. So, the end. It would happen instantaneously, a painless departure, quicker than thought. He felt the presence of his body one last time: the taste of air in his lungs, the blood surging in his veins, the drumlike beating of his heart. The bomb was dropping toward them.

“I’ve got you,” he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”


The blast wave from the MOAB struck the helicopter carrying Grey and Lila broadside: a blinding sheen of light, followed by an earsplitting slap of heat and sound. As if lifted on the crest of a wave, the helicopter lurched forward, its nose pointed earthward at a forty-five-degree angle, rocketed up again and began to spin, its angular momentum accelerating like a line of skaters wheeling on an ice rink. It spun and as it spun the pilot pitched to the side, his neck broken by the force of impact with the windshield; but by this time, between the sound of the alarm—a harsh blaring—and the centrifugal force of their velocity, nobody inside the helicopter was thinking very much at all. The forces that had held them aloft were gone, and nothing else would happen until they reached the ground.

Lawrence Grey experienced the crash itself as a severing in time: one moment he was pressed against the wall of the helicopter in its death spiral, the next he was lying in the wreckage. He felt but did not specifically recall the moment of impact; it had lodged in his body as a ringing sensation, as if he were a bell that had been struck. There was a smell of fuel, and hot insulation, and an electrical crackling sound. Something heavy and inertly soft was lying on top of him. It was Guilder. He was breathing but unconscious. The helicopter, what was left of it, lay on its side; where the roof should have been was now the door.

“Lawrence, help me!”

The voice came from behind him. He shoved Guilder’s body off his chest and felt his way to the rear of the helicopter. One of the benches had twisted loose, pinning Lila to the floor, crushing her at the waist. Her bare legs, the flimsy fabric of her gown—all glistened with a heavy, dark blood.

“Help me,” she choked. Her eyes were closed, tears squeezing from the corners. “Please, God, help me. I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding.”

He tried to pull her free by her feet, but she began to shriek in agony. There was no other way; he’d have to move the bench. Gripping it by its frame, Grey began to twist. A groan and then a pop and it broke away from the decking.

Lila was sobbing, moaning in pain. Grey knew he shouldn’t move her, but he had no choice. Positioning the bench beneath the open door, he hoisted her to his shoulder, stepped up, and laid her gently on the roof. He followed, climbing up the opposite side. He slid down the fuselage, circled back, and reached up to receive her, easing her body down the side of the helicopter.

“Oh, God. Please, don’t let me lose her. Don’t let me lose the baby.”

He lowered Lila to the ground, which was strewn with rubble from the destroyed laboratory—twisted girders, concrete blasted into chunks, shards of glass. He was weeping, too. It was too late, he knew; the baby was gone. Gouts of blood, clotted with black, were spilling from between Lila’s legs, an unstoppable flow. In another moment she would follow her baby into darkness. A childhood prayer found Grey’s lips and he began to murmur, again and again, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.…”

Save her, Grey.

You know what to do.

He did; he knew. The answer had been inside him all along. Since the Red Roof and Ignacio and the Home Depot and Project NOAH and long before.

Do you see, Grey?

He lifted his face to behold them. The virals. They were everywhere and all around, emerging from the darkness and flames: flesh of his flesh, unholy and blood-driven, encircling him like a demonic chorus. He was kneeling before them, his face streaked with tears. He felt no fear, only astonishment.

They are yours, Grey. The ones I give to you.

—Yes. They are mine.

Save her. Do it.

He needed something sharp. His hands searched the ground, lighting upon a sliver of metal, some broken shard from a world of broken, piecemeal things. Eight inches long, the edges ragged as a saw. Positioning it lengthwise across his wrist, he closed his eyes and slashed a deep gash into his flesh. The blood spurted forth, a wide, dark river, filling his palm. The blood of Grey, the Unleasher of Night, Familiar of the One Called Zero. Lila was moaning, dying. Any breath might be her last. A moment’s hesitation—some last, extinguishing human light inside him—and Grey placed his wrist against her lips, tenderly, like a mother easing her breast to the mouth of a newborn babe.

“Drink,” he said.

Grey never even saw it: the chunk of concrete, thirty-four pounds of solid rock, that Guilder, with all the strength he could muster, hoisted into the air above Grey’s head and then brought down upon him.





22


They made their way into Chicago as the sun was setting, filling the sky with a golden light. First the outer ring of suburbs, empty and still; then, rising before them like a promise, the shape of the city. The lone survivors, their lives joined by the mysterious bond of their survival: they traveled in silence, dreamers in a forgotten land, their progress marked only by the grumble of the bus’s engine, the hypnotic whoosh of asphalt beneath their wheels. Ghosts sat beside them, the people they had lost.

As the city came into focus, Pastor Don bent forward from his seat behind Danny. Helicopters were floating over the city, buzzing among the skyscrapers like bees around a hive; high above, the contrails of aircraft cast ribbons of color against the deepening blue. A zone of safety, it seemed, but this couldn’t last. In their hearts they knew there was none.

“Let’s pull off a minute.”

Danny drew the bus to the side of the roadway. Pastor Don rose to address the group. The decision was upon them. Should they stop or continue? They had the bus, water, food, fuel. No one knew what lay ahead. Take a minute, Pastor Don said.

A murmur of agreement, then a show of hands. The verdict was unanimous.

“Okay, Danny.”

They circled the city to the south and continued east on a rural blacktop. Night fell like a dome snapping down on the earth. By daybreak they were somewhere in Ohio. A landscape of pure anonymity; they could have been anywhere. Time had slowed to a crawl. Fields, trees, houses, mailboxes streaming by, the horizon always unreachable, rolling away. In the small towns, a semblance of life continued; people had no idea where to go, what to do. The highways, it was said, were jammed. At a mini-mart where they stopped for supplies, the cashier, glancing out the window at the bus, asked, Can I go with you? On the wall behind her head, a television screen showed a city in flames. She spoke in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard. She didn’t ask where they were going; their destination was simply away. A quick phone call and minutes later her husband and two teenage sons were standing by the bus, holding suitcases.

Others joined them. A man in overalls walking alone on the highway with a rifle over his shoulder. An elderly couple, dressed as if for church, their car expired on the side of the road with its hood standing open, steam exhaling from its cracked radiator. A pair of cyclists, Frenchmen, who had been riding across the country when the crisis began. Whole families squeezed aboard. Many were overcome, weeping with gratitude as they took their places. Like fish joining a school, they were absorbed into the whole. Cities were bypassed, one after the other: Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Pittsburgh. Even the names had begun to feel historical, like cities of a lost empire. Giza. Carthage. Pompeii. Customs evolved among them, as if they were a kind of rolling town. Some questions were asked but not others. Have you heard about Salt Lake, Tulsa, St. Louis? Do they know what it is yet, have they discovered the answer? Only in motion was there safety; every stop felt fraught with peril. For a time they sang. “The Ants Go Marching,” “On Top of Spaghetti,” “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

The landscape rose and fell, enfolding them in a green embrace: Pennsylvania, the Endless Mountains. Signs of human habitation were few and far between, the leavings of an era long passed. The battered coal towns, the forgotten hamlets with a single factory shuttered for years, red-brick smokestacks forlornly poking a blue summer sky. The air smelled strongly of pine. By now they numbered over seventy, bodies crammed into the aisles, children on laps, faces pressed to the windows. Fuel was a constant worry, yet somehow they always found more in the nick of time, their passage protected by an unseen hand.

By the afternoon of the third day, they were approaching Philadelphia. They had traveled half the width of a continent; ahead lay the eastern seaboard, with its barricade of cities, a wall of humanity pressed to the sea. A feeling of finality had taken over. There was no place else to run. They homed in on the city along the Schuylkill River, its surface as dark and impenetrable as granite. The outer towns felt to be in hiding, houses boarded, roads empty of cars. The river widened to a broad basin; heavy trees, dappled with sunlight, draped like a curtain over the road. A sign read: CHECKPOINT 2 MILES. A brief conferral and all were agreed: they had come to the end. Their fates would find them here.

The soldiers gave them directions. Curfew was two hours away, but already the streets were quiet, virtually without movement except for Army vehicles and a few police cars. Narrow, sun-drenched lanes, ramshackle brownstones, the infamous corners where packs of young men had once lingered; then suddenly the park appeared, an oasis of green in the heart of the city.

They followed the signs past the barricades, masked soldiers waving them through. The park was teeming with people, as if for a concert. Tents, RVs, figures curled on the ground by their suitcases as if lodged there by a tide. When the crowds grew too thick they were forced to abandon the bus by the side of the road and continue on foot. A terminal act: to leave it behind felt disloyal, like putting down a beloved dog who could no longer walk. They moved as one, unable to let go of one another yet, to fade into a faceless collective. A long line had formed; the air was as heavy as milk. Above them, unseen, armies of insects buzzed in the darkening trees.

“I can’t do this,” said Pastor Don. He had halted on the path, a look of sudden horror on his face.

Wood had stopped, too. Twenty yards ahead lay a series of chutes, harshly lit by spotlights on poles; people were being patted down, giving their names. “I know what you mean.”

“I mean, Jesus. It’s like we only just came from here.”

The mob was streaming past. The two Frenchmen moved by with barely a glance, their meager belongings bundled under their arms. They could all feel it: something was being lost. They stepped to the side.

“Do you think we can find gas?” Jamal asked.

“I just know I’m not going in there,” Pastor Don said.

They returned to the bus. Already a man was trying to jimmy the ignition. He was skinny, his face blackened with grime, his eyes roving in their sockets like he was on something. Wood seized him by the scruff of the neck and hurled him down the steps. Get the f*ck out of here, he said.

They boarded. Danny turned the key; the engine roared under them. Slowly they backed away, the crowd parting around them like waves around a ship. The air was drinking up the last of the light. They turned in a wide circle on the grass and pulled away.

“Where to?” Danny asked.

No one had an answer. “I don’t think it matters,” Pastor Don said.

It didn’t. They spent the night in Valley Forge park, sleeping on the ground by the bus, then headed south, staying off the highways. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina: they kept on going. The journey had acquired its own meaning, independent of any destination. The goal was to move, to keep moving. They were together; that was all that mattered. The bus jostled beneath them on its tired springs. One by one the cities fell, the lights went out. The world was dissolving, taking its stories with it. Soon it would be gone.

Her name was April Donadio. The child that even now had taken root inside her would be a boy, Bernard. April would give him the last name Donadio, so that he might carry a piece of each of them in name; and across the years she spoke to the boy often of his father, the kind of man he was—how brave and kind and a little sad, too, and how, though their time together was brief, he had imparted to her the greatest gift, which was the courage to go on. That’s what love is, she told the boy, what love does. I hope someday you love somebody the way that I loved him.

But that came later. This bus of survivors, twelve in sum: they could have continued that way forever. And in a sense, they did. The green fields of summer, the abandoned, time-stilled towns, the forests thick with shadow, the bus endlessly rolling. They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.





23


It was Dee Vorhees who said she wanted to bring the children.

Though she was not the only one. All the women, as her husband, Curtis, was soon to discover, were in on the plan. Dee’s cousin Sally, and Mace Francis, and Shar Withers and Cece Cauley and Ali Dodd and even Matty Wright—the permanently nervous, twittering Matty Wright—told their husbands the same thing. A veritable ambush, the women flanking their men from left and right with a wifely insistence that could not be refused: A few hours in the sunshine, they all said, lying in bed or washing the dishes or readying the children for school. What’s the harm? Let’s bring the children this time.

And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t taken the girls ex-murus before, Dee reminded him, the two of them sharing a quiet moment in the kitchen after putting the girls to sleep. There was that time, she said—how long ago?—when they’d gone to Green Field for Nitia’s birthday. Little Siri just a toddler, Nitia still dragging that filthy blanket wherever she went. Those peaceful hours under the spillway, and the butterflies—did he remember? The way they seemed to float along an airborne river, their bright wings falling and pumping to rise again, and the one that, surprising them all, had alighted on Nitia’s nose. Dee said: Could you not feel God’s presence in a thing like that? The sweet, free feeling of it, the little girls laughing and laughing, the warning siren hours off, some distant future time, and the blue sky suspended like heaven itself above their heads and the four of them being ex-murus together. The Green Zone, it was true, she didn’t say it wasn’t, but they could see the perimeter from there, the watchtowers and the sentries and the fences with their curling razor wire, and who decided these things, anyway? Who decided where one zone ended and the next began? How was an outing to North Ag any different, any more dangerous, really? Cruk would be there, and Tifty as well (the name had popped out before she could stop herself, but what could you do?); there were the hardboxes if anything happened, but why would it? In the middle of a summer day? The traps had gone empty for months, not even any dopeys around. Everyone was saying so. A few hours in the sunshine, away from the gray and grime of the city. A summer picnic in the field. That was all she was asking.

Would he do it, this one thing? For the girls? But why not just come out and say it. Would he do it for her, the wife who loved him?

Which was how, two days later, on a sultry July morning, the temperature already rising through the eighties and headed for a hundred, Curtis Vorhees, age thirty-two, foreman of the North Agricultural Complex, his father’s old .38 tucked into his waistband with three rounds in the cylinder (his father had shot the other three), found himself on a transport full of whole families, and not just families: children. Nitia and Siri and their cousin Carson, just turned twelve but still so slight his feet dangled three inches above the floor; Bab and Dunk Withers, the twins; the Francis girls, Rena and Jules, seated at the rear so they wouldn’t have to pay attention to the boys; little Jenny Apgar, riding on her older brother Gunnar’s lap; Dean and Amelia Wright, the two of them old enough to act bored and put out; Merry Dodd and her baby brother, Satch, and little Louis Cauley, still in a basket; Reese Cuomo and Dash Martinez and Cindy-Sue Bodine. Seventeen in all, a concentrated mass of childlike heat and noise as distinct to Vorhees’s senses as a buzzing swarm of bees. It was common for the wives to join their husbands for planting, and of course at harvesttime, when every pair of hands found work to do; but this was something new. Even as the bus cleared the gate, its old diesel engine roaring and sputtering, its tired chassis swaying under them, Curtis Vorhees felt it. A hot, dull job had suddenly become an occasion; the day possessed the hopeful spirit of a tradition being born. Why hadn’t they thought of this before, that bringing the children would remake the day into something special?

Past the dam and fuel depot and fence line, with its sentries waving them through and down, down into the valley they went, into the golden light of a July morning. The women, seated at the rear with the hampers and supplies, were gossiping and laughing among themselves; the children, after a fruitless attempt by one of the mothers—of course it would be Ali Dodd—to organize them into a rousing chorus of the Texas anthem, the only song everyone knew (Texas, our Texas! All hail the mighty State! Texas, our Texas! So wonderful, so great!), had sorted themselves into various warring factions, the older girls whispering and giggling and elaborately ignoring the boys, the boys elaborately pretending not to care, the little ones bouncing on the benches and darting through the aisle to launch their various assaults; the men up front were sitting in their customary guarded silence, communicating only through the occasional exchange of a wry look or a single raised eyebrow: What have we gotten ourselves into? They were men of the fields, their hands thickened from work; hair shorn close, crescents of dirt under their nails, no beards. Vorhees withdrew his timepiece from his pocket and checked the hour: 7:05. Eleven hours until the siren, twelve for the last transport, thirteen until dark. Watch the clock. Know the location of the nearest hardbox. When in doubt, run. Words imprinted on his consciousness as indelibly as a childhood rhyme, or one of the sisters’ prayers. Vorhees twisted in his seat to catch Dee’s eye. She was balancing Siri on her lap, the little girl’s nose pressed to the window to watch the passing world. Dee gave him a weary smile, made of words: Thank you. Siri had begun to bounce, pumping her knees with pleasure. The little girl pointed a chubby finger out the window, squealing with delight. Thank you for this.

And then, before they knew it, they’d arrived. Through the windshield of the transport, the fields of North Ag Complex leapt into view, its vast patchwork laid out below them like the squares of a motley quilt: corn and wheat, cotton and beans, rice and barley and oats. Fifteen thousand acres stitched together by a fretwork of dusty roads, and, at their edges, windbreaks of cottonwood and oak; the watchtowers and pump houses with their catch basins and nests of pipe and, dispersed at regular intervals, the hardboxes, marked by tall orange banners, hanging limply in the breathless air. Vorhees knew their locations cold, but when the corn was tall, you couldn’t always find them quickly without the flags.

He rose and moved to the front, where Dee’s brother, Nathan—everybody called him Cruk—was standing behind the driver. Vorhees was foreman, but it was Cruk, as the senior Domestic Security officer, who was really in charge.

“Looks like we’ve got a good day for this,” Vorhees said.

Cruk shrugged but said nothing. Like the field hands, he was dressed in whatever he had: patched jeans and a khaki shirt frayed at the collar and wrists. Atop this he wore a plastic vest, bright orange, with the words TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORATION printed on the back. He was holding his rifle, a long-barreled .30-06 with a sniper scope, across his chest; a reconditioned .45 was holstered to his thigh. The rifle was standard issue, but the .45 was something special, old military or maybe police, with an oiled black finish and a polished wood grip. He even had a name for it; he called it Abigail. You had to know somebody to get a weapon like that, and Vorhees didn’t have to think too hard to figure out who this person might be; it was pretty much common knowledge that Tifty was on the trade. Vorhees’s .38, with its paltry three rounds, felt meager in comparison, but there was no way he could have afforded a weapon like that.

“You can always say it was Dee’s idea,” Cruk said.

“So you don’t think this is smart.”

His brother-in-law gave a stifled laugh. It was at such moments that Cruk’s resemblance to his sister was the most striking, though it was also true that this was more suggestion than actual physical similarity, and something only Vorhees would have noticed. Most people, in fact, remarked on how different the two of them looked.

“Doesn’t matter what I think. You know that as well as I do. Dee sets her mind to something, you might as well just hang up your balls and call it a day.”

The bus gave a bone-jarring bang; Vorhees fought to stay upright. Behind them, the children shrieked with happiness.

“Hey, Dar,” Cruk said, “you think maybe you can miss some of those?”

The old woman at the wheel responded with a wet harrumph; telling Dar what to do with her bus was tantamount to an act of war. All the transport drivers were older women, usually widows; there was no rule about this—it was just how things were done. With a face ossified into a permanent scowl, Dar was a figure of legendary cantankerousness, as no-nonsense a woman as ever walked the earth. She kept time with a stopwatch hung around her neck and would leave you standing in a cloud of dust if you were so much as one minute late for the last transport. More than one field hand had spent a night in a hardbox scared out of his wits, counting the minutes till dawn.

“A busload of kids, for Christ’s sake. I can barely think with all this noise.” Dar shot her eyes to the pitted mirror above the windshield. “For the love of it, pipe down back there! Duncan Withers, you get down off that bench this instant! And don’t think I can’t see you, Jules Francis! That’s right,” she warned with an icy glare, “I’m talking to you, young lady. You can wipe that smirk off your face right now.”

Everyone fell abruptly silent, even the wives. But when Dar returned her eyes to the road, Vorhees realized her anger was false; it was all the woman could do not to break out laughing.

Cruk clapped a big hand on his shoulder. “Relax, Vor. Just let everyone enjoy the day.”

“Did I say I was worried?”

Cruk’s expression sobered. “Look, I know you’d rather Tifty wasn’t coming along. Okay? I get it. But he’s the best shot I’ve got. Say what you like, the guy can punch out a hanger at three hundred yards.”

Vorhees wasn’t aware that he’d been thinking about Tifty at all. But now that Cruk had brought the subject up, he wondered if maybe he was.

“So you think we’ll need him.”

Cruk shrugged. “Summer day like this, we’ll have no problems. I’m just being careful is all. They’re my girls too, you know.” He broke the mood with a grin. “Just so long as Dee doesn’t make a habit of this. I had to call in about fifty favors to put this little party together, and you can tell her I said so.”

The bus drew into the staging area. The last of the sweepers were emerging from the corn, dressed in their bulky pads and heavy gloves and helmets with cages obscuring their faces. An assortment of weapons hung off their persons: shotguns, rifles, pistols, even a few machetes. Cruk instructed the children to remain where they were; only when the all clear was given would they be permitted to exit the bus. As the adults began carting out the supplies, Tifty descended from the platform on the bus’s roof, rendezvousing with Cruk at the rear to confer with the DS officer in charge of the sweeping squad, a man named Dillon. The rest of Dillon’s team, eight men and four women, had gone to take water from the trough by the pump house.

Cruk strode back to where Vorhees was waiting with the rest of the men. Already the sun was blazing; the morning’s humidity had burned away.

“Clean as a whistle—the windbreaks, too.” He shot Vorhees a wink. “That’ll cost Dee extra.”

Before Cruk could even finish making the announcement, the children were bolting from their seats and streaming off the bus, clearing space for the sweepers, who would return to the city. Watching the children as they fanned over the grounds, their bodies and faces lit with excitement, Vorhees was momentarily transfixed, his mind caught in a tide of memory. For many, the youngest especially, the day’s excursion represented their first trip beyond the walls; he’d known this from the start. Yet to witness the moment was something else. Did the air feel different in their lungs, he wondered, the sun on their faces, the ground beneath their feet? Had these things felt different to him, stepping from the transport the first time, all those years ago? And of course they had: to go ex-murus was to discover a world of limitless dimensions—a world you knew existed but had never believed yourself to be a part of. He recalled the sensation as a kind of weightless physical joy, but frightening too, like a dream in which he had been given the gift of flight but found himself unable to land.

By the watchtower, Fort and Chess were sinking poles to erect a sunshade; the women were toting out the tables and chairs and hampers of food. Ali Dodd, her face shaded beneath the brim of her wide straw hat, was already trying to organize some of the children into a game of takeaway. All just as Dee had foreseen when she’d broached the subject of bringing the children along.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

Vorhees’s cousin, Ty, was standing beside him, holding a hamper to his chest. Over six feet, with a narrow, mournful face, he always reminded Vorhees of a particularly sad-looking dog. Behind them, Dar gave three beeps of the horn; with a belch of oily smoke, the bus pulled away.

“I ever tell you about my first time out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Trust me,” Ty said, shaking his head in a way that told Vorhees the man had no intention of elaborating. “That’s a story.”

When everything had been unloaded, Cruk called the children under the tarp to review the rules, which everybody already knew. The first thing, Cruk began, was that everyone needed a buddy. Your buddy could be anyone, a brother or sister or friend, but you had to have one, and you had to stay with your buddy at all times. That was the most important thing. The open ground at the base of the watchtower was safe, within those boundaries they could go wherever they liked, but they were not to venture into the corn under any circumstances; the stand of trees at the south end was also off-limits.

Now, do you see those flags? Cruk asked, gesturing over the field. The orange ones, hanging down like that? Who can tell me what those are?

Half a dozen hands went up; Cruk’s eyes roamed the group before landing on Dash Martinez. Seven years old, all knees and elbows, with a mop of dark hair; under the beam of Cruk’s attention, he froze. He was seated between Merry Dodd and Reese Cuomo, who were covering their mouths, trying not to laugh. The hardboxes? the boy ventured. That’s right, Cruk replied, nodding. Those are the hardboxes. Now tell me, he continued, addressing all of them, if the siren goes off, what should you do?

Run! someone said, then another and another. Run!

“Run where?” Cruk asked.

A chorus of voices this time: Run to the hardboxes!

He relaxed into a smile. “Good. Now go have fun.”

They darted away, all except the teenagers, who lingered an extra moment by the awning, seeking to separate themselves from the younger children. But even they, Vorhees knew, would find their way into the sunshine. The playing cards came out, and skeins of yarn for knitting; before long, the women were all occupying themselves, watching the children from the shade, fanning their faces in the heat. Vorhees called the men around to hand out salt tablets; even drinking constantly, a man working in this heat could become dangerously dehydrated. They filled their bottles at the pump. There was no need to explain the task before them; detassling was a grueling if simple job they had all done many times. For every three rows of corn, a fourth row had been planted of a second strain. That row would be stripped of its tassles to prevent self-pollination; come harvesttime, it would produce a new, crossbred strain, more vigorous, to be used as seed corn for the following year. When Vorhees’s father had first explained this process to him, years ago, it had seemed exciting, even vaguely erotic. What they were doing was, after all, part of the reproductive process, even if it was only corn. But the physical discomforts of the job—the hours in the grueling sun, the ceaseless rain of pollen on his hands and face, the insects that buzzed around his head, seeking any opportunity to bore into his ears and nose and mouth—had quickly disabused him of this notion. His first week in the field, one man had collapsed from heat stroke. Vorhees couldn’t recall who that was or what had become of him; they’d put him on the next transport and gotten back to work. It was entirely possible the man had died.

Heavy canvas gloves and wide-brimmed hats and long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the wrists: by the time the men were ready to go, they were sweating profusely. Vorhees cast his gaze to the top of the watchtower, where Tifty had taken his position, scanning the tree line with his scope. Cruk was right; Tifty was the man to have up there. Whatever else was true about Tifty Lamont, his skills as a marksman were inarguable. Yet even to hear the man’s name spoken, so many years later, aroused in Vorhees a fresh turning of anger. If anything, the passage of time had only magnified this feeling; each year that slipped past was one more year of Boz’s unlived life. Why should Tifty grow to be a man when Boz had not? In more circumspect moments, Vorhees understood his emotions to be irrational; Tifty might have been the instigator on that fateful night, but any one of them could have said no, and Boz would be alive. Yet no matter what Dee said, or Cruk, or Tifty himself—who even now, sweeping the tree line with his rifle, was offering a silent promise to protect Vorhees’s children—nothing could dissuade Vorhees from the belief that Tifty bore a singular blame. In the end, he was forced to accept his feelings as a failure of his own character and keep them to himself.

He divided the workers into three teams, each responsible for four rows. Then they made their way to the shelter to say their goodbyes. A game of kickball was under way in the field; from the far side of the watchtower came the ring of horseshoes in the pit. Dee was resting in the shade with Sally and Lucy Martinez, playing a round of hearts. Their games were epic, sometimes lasting for days.

“Looks like we’re ready to go.”

She lay down her cards, lifting her face toward him. “Come here.”

He removed his hat and bent at the waist to receive her kiss.

“God, you stink already,” she laughed, wrinkling her nose. “That’s your last one for the day, I’m afraid.” Then: “So, should I tell you to be careful?”

It was what they always said. “If you want.”

“Well, then. Be careful.”

Nit and Siri had wandered into the tent. Bits of grass were caught in their hair and the weave of their jumpers. Like puppies who’d been rolling around in the dirt.

“Hug your father, girls.”

Vorhees knelt and took them into his arms as a warm bundle. “Be good for Mommy, all right? I’ll be back for lunch.”

“We’re each other’s buddies,” Siri proclaimed.

He brushed the grass from their sweat-dampened hair. Sometimes just the sight of them moved him to a rush of love that actually brought tears to his eyes. “Of course you are. Just remember what your uncle Cruk told you. Stay where Mommy can see you.”

“Carson says there are monsters in the field,” Siri said. “Monsters who drink blood.”

Vorhees darted his eyes to Dee, who shrugged. It wasn’t the first time the subject had come up.

“Well, he’s wrong,” he told them. “He’s trying to scare you, playing a joke.”

“Then why do we have to stay out of the field?”

“Because those are the rules.”

“Do you promise?”

He did his best to smile. Vorhees and Dee had agreed to keep this matter vague as long as they could; and yet they both understood that they could not keep the girls in the dark forever.

“I promise.”

He hugged them again, each in turn and then together, and went to join his crew at the edge of the field. A wall of green six feet tall: the corn rows, a series of long hallways, receded to the windbreak. The sun had crossed an invisible border toward midday; nobody was talking. Vorhees checked his watch one last time. Watch the clock. Know the location of the nearest hardbox. When in doubt, run.

“All right, everybody,” he said, drawing on his gloves. “Let’s get this done.”

And with these words, together, they stepped into the field.


In a sense, they had all become who they were because of a single night—the last night of their childhood. Cruk, Vorhees, Boz, Dee: they ran together in a pack, their daily orbits circumscribed only by the walls of the city and the watchful eyes of the sisters, who ran the school, and the DS, who ran everything else. A time of gossip, of rumor, of stories traded in the dust. Dirty faces, dirty hands, the four of them lingering in the alley behind their quarters on the way home from school. What was the world? Where was the world, and when would they see it? Where did their fathers go, and sometimes their mothers as well, returning to them smelling of work and duty and mysterious concerns? The outside, yes, but how was it different from the city? What did it feel like, taste like, sound like? Why, from time to time, did someone, a mother or a father, leave, never to return, as if the unseen realm beyond the walls had the power to swallow them whole? Dopeys, dracs, vampires, jumps: they knew the names but did not feel the full weight of their meanings. There were dracs, which were the meanest, which were the same thing as jumps or vampires (a word only old people used); and there were dopeys, which were similar but not the same. Dangerous, yes, but not as much, more like a nuisance on the order of scorpions or snakes. Some said that dopeys were dracs that had lived too long, others that they were a different sort of creature altogether. That they had never been human at all.

Which was another thing. If the virals had once been people like them, how had they become what they were?

But the greatest story of all was the great Niles Coffee: Colonel Coffee, founder of the Expeditionary, fearless men who crossed the world to fight and die. Coffee’s origins, like everything about him, were cloaked in myth. He was a thirdling, raised by the sisters; he was an orphan of the Easter Incursion of 38 who had watched his parents die; he was a straggler who had appeared at the gate one day, a boy warrior dressed in skins, carrying a severed viral head on a pike. He had killed a hundred virals singlehandedly, a thousand, ten thousand; the number always grew. He never set foot inside the city; he walked among them dressed as an ordinary man, a field hand, concealing his identity; he didn’t exist at all. It was said that his men took an oath—a blood oath—not to God but to one another, and that they shaved their heads as a mark of this promise, which was a promise to die. Far beyond the walls they traveled, and not just in Texas. Oklahoma City. Wichita, Kansas. Roswell, New Mexico. On the wall above his bunk, Boz kept a map of the old United States, blocks of faded color fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle; to mark each new place, he inserted one of their mother’s pins, connecting these pins with string to indicate the routes Coffee had traveled. At school, they asked Sister Peg, whose brother worked the Oil Road: What had she heard, what did she know? Was it true that the Expeditionary had found other survivors out there, whole towns and even cities full of people? To this the sister gave no answer, but in the flash of her eyes when they spoke his name, they saw the light of hope. That’s what Coffee was: wherever he came from, however he did it, Coffee was a reason to hope.

There would come a time, many years later, long after Boz was gone, and their mother as well, that Vorhees would wonder: why had he and his brother never spoken of these things with their parents? It would have been the natural thing to do; yet as he searched his memory he could not recall a single instance, just as he could not recall his mother or father saying one word about Boz’s map. Why should this be so? And what had become of the map itself that in Vorhees’s memory it should be there one day and gone the next? It was as if the stories of Coffee and the Expeditionary had been part of a secret world—a boyhood world, which, once passed, stayed passed. For a period of weeks these questions had so consumed him that one morning over breakfast he finally worked up the nerve to ask his father, who laughed. Are you kidding? Thad Vorhees was not an old man yet, but he seemed so: his hair and half his teeth gone, skin glazed with a permanent sour dampness, hands like nests of bone where they rested on the kitchen table. Are you serious? Now, you, you weren’t so bad, but Boz—the boy could not shut up about it. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, all day long. Don’t you remember? His eyes clouded with sudden grief. That stupid map. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have the heart to tear it down, but it surprised me that you did. Never seen you cry like that in your life. I guessed you’d figured out it was all bullshit. Coffee and the rest of them. That it would come to nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing; it had never been, could never be, nothing. How could it be nothing, when they’d loved Boz like they did?

It was Tifty, of course—Tifty the liar, Tifty the teller of tales, Tifty who wanted so desperately to be needed by someone that any fool thing would leave his mouth—who professed to have seen Coffee with his own two eyes. Tifty, they all laughed, you are so full of shit. Tifty, you never saw Coffee or anybody else. Yet even in the midst of their mockery, the idea was staking its claim; from the start, the boy possessed that talent, to make you believe one thing while simultaneously knowing another. So stealthily had he inserted himself into their circle that none could say just how this had occurred; one day there was no Tifty, and the next there was. A day that began like any other: with chapel, and school, and three o’clock’s agonizingly slow approach; the sound of the bell and their sudden release, three hundred bodies streaming through the halls and down the stairs, into the afternoon; the walk from school to their quarters, faces winnowing as their classmates’ paths diverged, until it was just the four of them.

Though not exactly. As they made their way into the alley, its jumble of old shopping carts and sodden mattresses and broken chairs—people were always tossing their junk back there, no matter what the quartermaster said—they realized they were being followed. A boy, stick thin, with a gaunt face topped by a cap of red-blond hair that looked as if it had fallen from a great height onto his head. Though it was January, the air raw with dampness, he wore no coat, only a jersey and jeans and plastic flip-flops on his feet. The distance at which he trailed them, his hands buried in his pockets, was just close enough to encourage their curiosity without seeming to intrude. A probationary distance, as if he were saying: I might be someone interesting. You might want to give me a chance.

“So what do you think he wants?” Cruk said.

They had reached the end of the alleyway, where they had erected a small shelter from scraps of wood. A musty mattress, springs popping out, served as the floor. The boy had halted at a distance of thirty feet, shuffling his feet in the dust. Something about the way he held himself made it seem as if the parts of his body were only vaguely connected, as if he’d been pieced together from about four different boys.

“You following us?” Cruk called.

The boy gave no reply. He was looking down and away, like a dog trying not to make eye contact. From this angle, they could all see the mark on the left side of his face.

“You deaf? I asked you a question.”

“I ain’t following you.”

Cruk turned to the others. The oldest by a year, he was the unofficial leader. “Anybody know this kid?”

No one did. Cruk looked back at the boy again. “You. What’s your go-by?”

“Tifty.”

“Tifty? What kind of name is Tifty?”

His eyes were inspecting the tips of his sandals. “Just a name.”

“Your mother call you that?” Cruk said.

“Don’t got one.”

“She’s dead or she left you?”

The boy was fidgeting with something in his pocket. “Both, I guess. You ask it like that.” He squinted at them. “Are you like a club?”

“What makes you say that?”

The boy lifted his bony shoulders. “I’ve seen you is all.”

Cruk glanced at the others, then looked back at the boy. He huffed a weary sigh.

“Well, no point in you standing there like a dumbass. Come over so we can have a look at you.”

The boy made his way toward them. Vorhees thought there was something familiar about him, his hangdog look. Though maybe it was just the fact that any one of them could have been alone like he was. The mark on his face, they saw, was a large purple shiner.

“Hey, I know this kid,” Dee said. “You live in Assisted, don’t you? I saw you moving in with your daddy.”

Hill Country Assisted Living: a warren of apartments, families all crammed in. Everybody just called it Assisted.

“That right?” Cruk said. “You just move in?”

The boy nodded. “From over in H-town.”

“That’s who you’re with?” Cruk said. “Your daddy?”

“I got an aunt, too. Rose. She looks after me mostly.”

“What you got in your pocket there? I see you fooling with it.”

The boy withdrew his hand to show them: a foldaway knife, fat with gizmos. Cruk took it, the other three pressing their faces around. The usual blades, plus a saw, a screwdriver, a pair of scissors, and a corkscrew, even a magnifying glass, the lens clouded with age.

“Where’d you get this?” Cruk asked.

“My daddy gave it to me.”

Cruk frowned. “He on the trade?”

The boy shook his head. “Nuh-uh. He’s a hydro. Works on the dam.” He gestured at the knife. “You can have it if you want.”

“What I want your knife for?”

“Hell, he doesn’t want it, I’ll keep it,” Boz said. “Give it here.”

“Shut up, Boz.” Cruk eyed the boy slowly. “What you do to your face?”

“I just fell is all.”

His tone was not defensive. And yet all of them felt the hollowness of the lie.

“Fell into a fist is more like it. Your daddy do that or somebody else?”

The boy said nothing. Vorhees saw his jaw give a little twitch.

“Cruk, leave him be,” Dee said.

But Cruk’s eyes remained fixed on the boy. “I asked you a question.”

“Sometimes he does. When he’s on the lick. Rose says he doesn’t mean to. It’s on account of my mama.”

“Because she left you?”

“On account of she died having me.”

The boy’s words seemed to hang in the air. It was true, or it wasn’t true; either way, now his plea was nothing they could refuse.

Cruk held out the knife. “Go on, take it. I don’t want your daddy’s knife.”

The boy returned it to his pocket.

“I’m Cruk. Dee’s my sister. The other two are Boz and Vor.”

“I know who you are.” He squinted uncertainly at them. “So am I in the club now?”

“How many times I have to tell you,” Cruk said. “We’re not a club.”


Just like that, it was determined: Tifty was one of them. In due course they all came to know Bray Lamont, a fierce, even terrifying man, his eyes permanently lit with the illegal whiskey everyone called lick, his drink-thickened voice roaring Tifty’s name from the window every night at siren. Tifty, goddamnit! Tifty, you get in here before I have to come looking for you! On more than one occasion the boy appeared in the alley with a fresh shiner, bruises, once with his arm in a sling. In a sodden rage, his father had hurled him across the room, dislocating his shoulder. Should they tell the DS? Their parents? What about Aunt Rose, could she help? But Tifty always shook his head. He seemed to possess no anger over his injuries, only a tight-lipped fatalism that they could not help but admire. It seemed a kind of strength. Don’t tell anyone, the boy said. It’s just how he is. No changing a thing like that.

There were other stories. Tifty’s great-grandfather, or so he claimed, had been one of the original signatories of the Texas Declaration and had supervised the clearing of the Oil Road; his grandfather was a hero of the Easter Incursion of 38 who, mortally bitten in the first wave, had led the charge from the spillway and sacrificed himself on the battlefield in front of his men, taking his own life on the point of his blade; a cousin, whose name Tifty refused to give (“everybody just calls him Cousin”), was a wanted gangster, the operator of the biggest still in H-town; his mother, a great beauty, had received nine separate proposals of marriage before she was sixteen, including one from a man who would later become a member of the president’s staff. Heroes, dignitaries, criminals, a vast and colorful pageant of assorted higher-ups, both in the world they knew and in the one that lurked below it, the world of the trade; Tifty knew people who knew people. Doors would fly open for Tifty Lamont. Never mind that he was the son of a drunken hydro from H-town, another skinny kid with bruises on his face and ill-fitting clothing he never washed, who was looked after by a maiden aunt and lived in Assisted, just like they did; Tifty’s stories were too good, too interesting, not to believe.

But seeing Coffee—that was simply too much. Such a claim flew in the face of the facts. Coffee was unknowable; Coffee was, like the virals, a creature of the shadows. And yet Tifty’s story possessed the tincture of reality. He had gone with his father to H-town, its lawless, shantied streets, to meet Cousin, the gangster. There, in the back room of the machine shed where the still was located—a colossus of a thing, like a living dragon of wires and pipes and huffing cauldrons—among men with dangerous eyes and greasy smiles of blackened teeth and pistols tucked into their belts, the money changed hands, the jug of lick was procured. These excursions were routine, Tifty had described them many times before, yet on this occasion something was different. This time there was a man. He was distinct from the others, not on the trade—Tifty could tell that right away. Tall, with the erect bearing of a soldier. He stood to the side, his face obscured, wearing a dark overcoat belted at the waist. Tifty saw that his head was shorn. Evidently this man, whoever he was, was there on urgent business; usually Tifty’s father lingered, drinking and trading stories of H-town days with the other men, but not tonight. Cousin, his great round form wedged behind his desk like an egg in its nest, accepted his father’s bills without comment; no sooner had they arrived, it seemed, than they were hustling out the door. It wasn’t until they were well clear of the shed that his father said, Don’t you know who it was you saw in there, boy? Huh? Don’t you? I’ll tell you who that was. That was Niles Coffee himself.

“I’ll tell you something else.” The five of them were crowded into the shelter in the alleyway. Tifty was carving in the dust with the pocket-knife, which had, after all, stayed his. “My old man says he keeps a camp below the dam. Right out in the open, like being outside was nothing. They let the dracs come to them, then crisp ’em in the traps.”

“I knew it!” Boz burst out. The younger boy’s face practically glowed with excitement. He swiveled on his knees toward Vorhees. “What did I tell you?”

“No f*cking way,” Cruk scoffed. Of all of them, his role was the skeptic’s; he wore this mantle like a duty.

“I’m telling you, it was him. You could just feel it. The way everybody was.”

“And what would Coffee want with a bunch of traders? You tell me that.”

“How should I know? Maybe he buys lick for his men.” A new idea came into Tifty’s face. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Or guns.”

Cruk gave a sarcastic laugh. “Listen to this kid.”

“Joke all you want, I’ve seen them. I’m talking real Army weapons, from before. M16s, automatic pistols, even grenade launchers.”

“Whoa,” Boz said.

“Where would Cousin get guns like that?” Vorhees asked.

Tifty eased up on his knees to look around, as if making sure no one could hear them. “I’m not sure I should be telling you this,” he continued. “There’s a bunker, an old Army base near San Antone. Cousin runs patrols up there.”

“I can’t listen to this another second,” said Cruk. “You didn’t see Coffee or anybody else.”

“You saying you don’t believe he exists?”

The idea was sacrilege. “I’m not saying that. You just didn’t see him is all.”

“What about you, Vor?”

Vorhees felt caught. Half of what Tifty said was pure bullshit—maybe more than half. On the other hand, the urge to believe was strong.

“I don’t know,” he managed. “I guess … I don’t know.”

“Well I believe him,” Dee proclaimed.

Tifty’s eyes widened. “See?”

Cruk waved this away. “She’s a girl. She’ll believe anything.”

“Hey!”

“Well, it’s true.”

Tifty leveled his eyes at the older boy. “What if I said you could see Coffee for yourself?”

“Just how would I do that?”

“Easy. We can go through one of the spillway tubes. I’ve been down there lots of times. This time of year, they don’t release until dawn. The vents go right to the base of the dam—we should be able to see the camp from there.”

The challenge had been laid down; there was no way to say no.

“There’s no goddamn camp, Tifty.”

* * *

It took them three days to work up the nerve, and even then Cruk forbade his sister from coming. The plan was to sneak out after their parents were asleep and rendezvous at the shelter; Tifty had plotted a route to the dam that would keep them out of site of the DS patrols.

It was after midnight by the time Tifty arrived. The others were already waiting. He appeared at the end of the alleyway and made his way toward them quickly, the hood of his jacket drawn up over his head, hands stuffed in his pockets. As he ducked into the shelter, he withdrew a plastic bottle.

“Liquid courage.” He unscrewed the cap and passed it to Vorhees.

It was lick. Vorhees and Boz’s parents, prayerful people who went to church at the sisters’ every Sunday, wouldn’t have it in the house. Vorhees held the open bottle under his nose. A clear liquid with a harsh chemical odor, like lye soap.

“Give it here,” Cruk commanded. He snatched the bottle and sipped, then handed it back to Vorhees.

“You ain’t never drunk lick before?” Tifty asked Vorhees.

Vorhees did his best to look offended. “Sure I have. Lots of times.”

“When did you ever drink lick?” Boz scoffed.

“There’s plenty you don’t know, brother.” Wishing he could hold his nose, Vorhees took a cautious sip, swallowing fast to avoid the taste. A blast of stinging heat filled his sinuses; a river of fire tumbled down his throat. God, it was awful! He finished with a wheezing cough, tears swarming his eyes, everybody laughing.

Boz drank next. To Vorhees’s embarrassment, his little brother managed to take a respectable sip without much more than a wince. Three more times the bottle traveled around the circle. By the fourth pass, even Vorhees had gotten the hang of it and managed a solid swallow without coughing. He wondered why he wasn’t feeling anything, but the moment he stood he realized he was; the ground lurched beneath his feet, and he had to put out a hand to steady himself.

“Let’s go,” Tifty said.

By the time they reached the dam, they were all giggling like maniacs. The passage of minutes had altered somehow; it seemed as if they had spent a long time getting there, and no time at all. Vorhees had a fragmented memory of hiding from a DS patrol under a truck but couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, nor how they had avoided capture. He knew he was drunk, but this fact was nothing his mind could focus on. They paused in the shadows while somebody—Boz, Vorhees realized, who was the drunkest of them all—vomited into a stand of weeds. And Dee, what was she doing here? Had she followed them? Cruk was barking at her to go home, but Dee was Dee: once she’d fixed her mind to something, you might just as well try to pull a bone from a dog’s mouth. The fact was, Vorhees loved Dee. He always had. It was suddenly overwhelming, this love, like an expanding balloon of emotion inside his chest, and he was working up the nerve to confess his feelings when Tifty stepped toward them from wherever he’d gone and told them to follow.

He led them to a small concrete building with a flight of metal stairs descending belowground. At the bottom was a maintenance shaft, dank and gloomy, the walls dripping with moisture. They were inside the dam, somewhere above the spillway vents. Bulbs in metal cages cast elongated shadows on the walls. A building rush of adrenaline had started to bring Vorhees’s senses back into focus. They came to a hatch in the wall, sealed with a rusted metal ring. Cruk and Tifty positioned themselves on opposite sides and heaved with all their might, but the wheel wouldn’t budge.

“We need a lever,” said Tifty.

He disappeared down the tunnel and returned with a length of pipe. He threaded it through the spokes of the ring and leaned in. With a squeal, the wheel began to turn; the door swung open.

Inside was a vertical shaft and a ladder leading down. Tifty produced a cap flare, scraped the striker, and dropped it into the hole. Tifty descended first, then Vor, Dee, and Boz, with Cruk bringing up the rear.

They found themselves in a wide tube. A spillway vent, one of six. Through these vents, water was released from the impoundment once a day and funneled down the spillway to the fields. Behind them lay a million gallons of water held in place by the dam. The air was cold and smelled of stone. A trickle of water ran the length of the floor toward the outlet, a pale disk of moonlit sky. They crept toward it, away from the light of Tifty’s flare. Vorhees’s heart was thudding in his chest. The world of night, outside the walls: it was beyond imagining. Ten feet from the outlet, Tifty dropped to a crouch; the others followed suit. Bars of heavy steel guarded the opening.

“I’ll go first,” Tifty whispered.

He moved on his hands and knees toward the end of the tunnel. Everyone else held absolutely still. In Vorhees’s drunken mind, seeing Coffee’s camp had become an ancillary purpose; the evening was a pure test of courage, its object irrelevant. The bars were sturdy enough to keep out a viral, but that wasn’t the danger; Vorhees half-expected a clawed hand to reach through and grab their friend and tear him to pieces. Through the lingering haze of the lick, the thought came to him that Dee must be afraid too, and that he might offer her some reassurance, but he couldn’t think of what to say, and the idea died in his mind.

At the tunnel’s mouth, Tifty eased up onto his knees, gripping the bars, and peered out.

“What do you see?” Cruk whispered.

A pause. Then, from their friend, two words: “Holy … shit.”

The tone hit Vorhees as wrong. Not an exclamation of discovery but of sudden fear.

“What is it?” Cruk whispered, more harshly. “Is Coffee there?”

“I want to look!” Boz cried out.

“Quiet!” Cruk barked. “Tifty, goddamnit, what is it?”

Vorhees felt it through his knees. A rumbling, like thunder, followed by a shrieking groan of metal gears engaging. The sound was coming from behind them.

Tifty jumped to his feet. “Get out of here!”

It was water. The sound Vorhees was hearing was water being released from the impoundment. One vent and then the next and then the next, moving in a line. That’s what Tifty had seen.

They would be smashed to pieces.

Vorhees rose and grabbed Boz by the arm to yank him away, but the boy wriggled free.

“I want to see him!”

“There’s nothing there!”

The boy’s voice cracked with tears. “There is, there is!”

Boz made a dash for the outlet. Tifty and the others were already racing toward the ladder. The sound of thunder was closer now. The adjacent tube had released; theirs would be next. In another few seconds, a wall of water would slam into them. At the tunnel’s mouth Vorhees gripped his brother around the waist, but the boy held fast to the bars.

“I see him! It’s Coffee!”

With all his might, Vorhees pulled; the two of them crashed to the floor. The others were calling: Come on, come on! Vorhees gripped his brother by the hand and began to run. Cruk was waving at them from the base of the ladder. Vorhees felt a pop of pressure in his ears; an ice-cold wind was pushing in his face. As Cruk disappeared up the ladder, Vorhees began to ascend, his brother right behind him.

Then the water arrived.

It slammed him like a fist, a hundred fists, a thousand. Below him, Boz cried out in terror. Vorhees managed to keep his grasp on the ladder, but could do nothing more; to release even one hand was to be swept away. Water swarmed his nose and mouth. He tried to call his brother’s name, but no sound came. This was how it ends, he thought. One mistake and everything was over. It was so simple. Why didn’t people die like this more often? But they did, he realized, as his grip on the ladder began to fail. They died like this all the time.

It was Cruk who pulled him free. Cruk, who would forever be his friend; who would one day stand with him while he married Dee; who would watch over his children on the day when everyone had brought the children for a summer picnic in the field; who would join him in the final battles of their lives, many miles and years away. As Vorhees’s hands tore away, Cruk reached down and seized him by the wrist and yanked him upward, and the next thing Vorhees knew they were climbing, they were ascending the shaft to safety.

But not Boz. The boy’s body wouldn’t be recovered until the next morning, crushed against the bars. Maybe he’d seen Coffee and maybe he hadn’t. Tifty never gave them an answer. Over time, Vorhees came to think it didn’t matter. Even if he had, there’d be no comfort in it.


By midday, the detassling crew had covered sixteen acres. The sun was blazing, not a cloud in the sky; even the children, after a morning of games and laughter, had retreated to the shelter. At the pump, Vorhees removed his hat, filled a cup and drank, then filled it again to pour the water over his face. He removed his sweat-sodden shirt and wiped himself down with it. God almighty, it was hot.

The women and children had already eaten. Beneath the shelter, the work crew gathered for lunch. Bread and butter, hard-boiled eggs, cured meat, blocks of cheese, pitchers of water and lemonade. Cruk came down from the tower to fill a plate; Tifty was nowhere to be seen. Well, so what? Tifty could do as he liked. They ate heartily, without speaking. Soon all of them would be dozing in the shade.

“One hour,” Vorhees said after a while, rising from the table. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

He ascended the stairs to the top of the tower, where he found Cruk scanning the field with the binoculars. His rifle was resting against the rail.

“Anything interesting out there?”

For a second, Cruk didn’t answer. He passed Vorhees the binoculars. “Six o’clock, through the tree line. Tell me what that is.”

Vorhees looked. Nothing at all, just trees and the dry brown hills beyond. “What do you think you saw?”

“I don’t know. Something shiny.”

“Like metal?”

“Yeah.”

After a moment, Vorhees drew the binoculars away. “Well, it’s not there now. Maybe it was just the sun flaring in the lenses.”

“Probably that’s it.” Cruk took a sip of water from his bottle. “How’s it going down there?”

“They’ll all be asleep soon enough. A lot of the kids are down already. I don’t think anybody expected it to be this hot.”

“July in Texas, brother.”

“Gunnar wanted to know if he could help. That boy is all heart and no sense.”

Cruk took up his rifle. “What did you tell him?”

“Just you wait. Someday you’ll realize how crazy you sound.”

Cruk laughed. “And yet we were the same. Couldn’t wait to get out into the world.”

“Maybe you couldn’t.”

Cruk fell silent, gazing out over the rail. Vorhees sensed that something was troubling his friend.

“Listen,” Cruk began, “I made a decision, and I wanted you to hear it from me. You know there’s talk about the Expeditionary getting back together.”

Vorhees had heard these rumors, too. It was nothing new; rumors circulated all the time. Since Coffee and his men had disappeared—how many years ago?—the subject had never really died completely.

“People are always saying that.”

“This time it’s not just talk. The military’s taking volunteers from the DS, looking to build a unit of two hundred men.”

Vorhees searched his friend’s face. What was he telling him? “Cruk, you can’t be seriously thinking about it. That was all kid stuff.”

Cruk shrugged. “Maybe it was, back then. And I know how you feel about it, after what happened to Boz. But look at my life, Vor. I never married. I don’t have a family of my own. What was I waiting for?”

The meaning sank in all at once. “Jesus. You already signed on, didn’t you?”

Cruk nodded. “I turned in my resignation from the DS yesterday. It won’t be official until I take the oath, though.”

Vorhees felt stunned.

“Look, don’t tell Dee,” Cruk pressed. “I want to do it.”

“She’ll take it hard.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you first.”

The conversation was broken by the sound of a pickup coming down the service road. It drew into the staging area and pulled up to the shelter; Tifty climbed out. He stepped to the rear of the truck and drew down the tailgate.

“Now, what’s he got?”

They were watermelons. Everyone crowded around; Tifty began to carve them up, passing fat, dripping wedges to the children. Watermelons! What a treat, on a day like this!

“For Christ’s sake,” Vorhees groaned, watching the performance. “Where the hell would he get those?”

“Where does Tifty get anything? You got to hand it to the guy, though. He’s not going to die friendless.”

“Did I say that?”

Cruk looked at him. “You don’t have to like him, Vor. That’s not for me to say. But he’s trying. You’ve got to give him that.”

The door to the stairs opened. Dee stepped out, carrying two plates, each bearing a pink wedge of melon.

“Tifty brought—”

“Thanks. We saw.”

Her face fell with an expression Vorhees knew too well. Let it go. Please, just for today. They’re only watermelons.

Cruk took the plates from her. “Thanks, Dee. That’ll really hit the spot. Tell Tifty thanks.”

She glanced at Vorhees, then returned her eyes to her brother. “I’ll do that.”

Vorhees knew he looked like a resentful fool, just as he knew that if he didn’t say something, change the subject, he’d carry this sour feeling inside him for the rest of the day.

“How are the kids?”

Dee shrugged. “Siri’s out like a light. Nit’s gone off with Ali and some of the others. They’re picking wildflowers.” She paused to wipe her brow with the back of her wrist. “Are you really going back out there? I don’t know how you stand it. Maybe you should wait until the sun’s a little lower.”

“There’s too much to do. You don’t have to worry about me.”

She regarded him for another moment. “Well, like I said. Anything else I can bring you, Cruk?”

“Not a thing, thanks.”

“I’ll leave you to it then.”

When Dee was gone, Cruk held out one of the plates. But Vorhees shook his head.

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

The big man shrugged. He was already wolfing down his slice, rivers of juice running down his chin. When all that remained was the rind, he gestured toward the second plate, resting on the parapet. “You mind?”

Vorhees shrugged in reply. Cruk finished off the second slice, wiped his face on his sleeve, and tossed the rinds over the side.

“You should tell Dee soon,” Vorhees said.


Three o’clock, the day draining away. A faint breeze had picked up late in the morning, but now the air had stilled again. Under the tarp, Dee was playing a halfhearted game of roundabout with Cece Cauley, little Louis resting at their feet in his basket. A plump, good-natured baby, fat fingers and fat toes and a soft, pursed mouth: despite the heat, he had barely fussed all day and now was sound asleep.

Dee remembered those days, baby days. Their distinctive sensations, the sounds and smells, and the feeling of profound physical attachment, as if you and the baby were a single being. Many women complained about it—I can’t get a moment to myself, I can’t wait until she’s walking!—but Dee never had; just thirty, she would have gladly had another, maybe even two. It would be nice, she thought, to have a son. But the rules were clear. Two and done, was the saying. The governor’s office was discussing an extension of the walls, and maybe then the ban would be lifted. But probably that would come too late, and until then, there was only so much food and fuel and space to go around.

And Vor—well, what could she do? Boz’s death was an intractable barrier in the man’s mind, the truth distorted and enlarged over the years until it was the singular injury of his life. Tifty was Tifty, he always would be. One day he was being tossed into the stockade for putting a man’s head through a window in a barroom brawl, the next he was producing, through a kind of Tifty magic, a truck of black-market watermelons on a scorching summer afternoon. Probably it was just a matter of time before he ended up in the stockade for good. Yet there was no denying it: Tifty would always be a part of them, and Dee most of all. There were times when Dee looked at her older daughter and honestly didn’t know what the truth was. It could be one thing, or it could be the other. In a certain light Nitia was all Vor, but then the little girl would smile in a particular way or do that squinty thing with her eyes and there was Tifty Lamont.

A single night, not even. The whole thing, the entirety of their affair, had been more like ninety minutes, start to finish. How was it possible for ninety minutes to make so much difference in a life? Dee and Tifty had agreed in the aftermath that it had been a terrible mistake—inevitable, perhaps, a force of years that neither could refuse, but nothing to repeat. They both loved Vor, did they not? They’d made a big joke of it, even shaking hands to seal the deal like the two old friends they were, though of course it wasn’t a joke at all: not at the time and not nine months later; it wasn’t a joke now.

I will never let any harm come to you, Tifty had told her, not just that night but many times, many nights. Not you or the girls or Vor. Whatever else is true, that’s my solemn promise, my vow before God. I’ll be the ground beneath your feet. Always know I’m there. And Dee did; she knew. If she allowed herself to admit it, it was only because Tifty had agreed to accompany them that the idea of today, of a summer picnic in the field, had come about at all.

Did Dee love him? And if she did, what kind of love was it? Her feelings for Tifty were different from her feelings for Vor. Vor was steady, reliable. A creature of duty and endurance, and a good father to the girls. Solid where Tifty was vaporous, a man composed of rumor as much as actual fact. And there was no question that she and Vor belonged together; that had never been an issue. Alone in the dark, in private moments together, he spoke her name with such longing it was almost like pain; that’s how much Vor loved her. He made her feel … what? More real. As if she, Dee Vorhees—wife and mother; daughter of Sis and Jedediah Crukshank, gone to God; citizen of Kerrville, Texas, last oasis of light and safety in a world that knew none—actually existed.

So why should she find herself, once again, thinking of Tifty Lamont?

But the cards, and this hot-hot-hot afternoon in July, when they had brought the children to the field. Dee’s mind had wandered so badly, she hadn’t realized what Cece was doing. Before she knew it, the woman, grinning with victory, had successfully maneuvered her into taking the queen. Two tricks, three, and it was over. Cece gleefully jotted the tally on a pad.

“Another?”

Ordinarily Dee would have said yes, if only to occupy the hours, but in the heat the game had begun to feel like work.

“Maybe Ali wants to play.”

The woman, who had come back into the tent for water, waved the offer away, the ladle poised at her lips. “Not a chance.”

“C’mon, just a couple of hands,” Cece said. “I’m on a hot streak.”

Dee rose from the table. “I better go see what the girls are up to.”

She stepped away from the shelter. In the distance, she could see the tops of the cornstalks quivering where the men were working. She angled her face toward the tower’s apex, positioning a hand over her eyes against the glare. A ghostly moon, daytime white, was hovering near the sun. Well, that was strange. She hadn’t noticed that before. Cruk and Tifty were both on station, Cruk with his binoculars, Tifty sweeping the field with his rifle. He caught sight of her and gave a little wave, which flustered her; it was almost as if he knew she’d been thinking about him. She waved guiltily in reply.

A group of a dozen children were playing kickball, Dash Martinez waiting at the plate. Acting as pitcher was Gunnar, who had become an unofficial babysitter over the course of the afternoon.

“Hey, Gunnar.”

The boy—a man, really, at sixteen—looked toward her. “Hey, Dee. Want to play?”

“Too hot for me, thanks. Have you seen the girls anywhere?”

Gunnar glanced around. “They were here just a second ago. Want me to look?”

Dee’s weariness deepened. Where could they have gone? She supposed she could climb the tower and ask Cruk to track them down with the binoculars. But the hike up the stairs, once she imagined it, seemed too effortful. Easier, on the whole, to find the girls herself.

“No, thanks. If they come back, tell them I want them out of the sun for a while.”

“Gunnar, pitch the ball!” Dash cried.

“Hang on a second.” Gunnar met Dee’s eye. “I’m sure they’re nearby. They were here, like, two seconds ago.”

“That’s fine. I’ll find them myself.”

The wildflower field, she thought; probably that’s where they had gone. She felt more irritated than concerned. They weren’t supposed to wander off without telling anyone. Probably it had been Nit’s idea. The girl was always into something.

They had five minutes left.


From the observation deck, Tifty watched Dee walk away.

“Cruk, pass me the binoculars.”

Cruk handed them over. The wildflower field was located on the north side of the tower, adjacent to the corn. That’s where she appeared to be headed. Probably she just wanted to get away for a few minutes, Tifty thought, away from the children and the other wives.

He passed the binoculars back to Cruk. He scanned the field with his rifle, then lifted the scope toward the tree line.

“The shiny thing is back.”

“Where?”

“Dead ahead, ten degrees right.”

Tifty peered hard into the scope: a distant rectangular shape, brilliantly reflective, through the trees.

“What the hell is that?” Cruk said. “Is it a vehicle?”

“Could be. There’s a service road on the far side.”

“Nothing should be out there now.” Cruk drew down the binoculars. He paused a moment. “Listen.”

Tifty willed his mind to clear. The creak of crickets, the breeze moving through his ears, the trickle of water through the irrigation system. Then he heard it.

“An engine?”

“That’s what I hear, too,” Cruk said. “Stay put.”

He descended the stairs. Tifty pressed his eye to the rifle’s scope. Now the image was clear: a big semi, the cargo compartment covered with some kind of galvanized metal.

He took out his walkie-talkie. “Cruk, it’s a truck. Far side of the trees. Doesn’t look like DS.”

The line crackled. “I know. Double up.”

He saw Cruk emerge from the base of the tower and stride toward the shelter, waving to Gunnar to bring the children over. Tifty dragged his scope across the field: the men working, the rows of corn, the marker flags for the hardboxes drooping in the afternoon stillness. All just as it should be.

But not exactly. Something was different. Was it his vision? He lifted his face. A blade of shadow was moving over the field.

Then he heard the siren.

He turned toward the sun; instantly he knew. It had been many years since he’d felt afraid, not since that night in the dam. But Tifty felt fear now.

One minute.


Vorhees first experienced the altering illumination as a diminishment of visual detail, a sudden dimming like premature twilight. But because he was wearing dark glasses, a defense against the rain of pollen and the afternoon brightness, his mind did not initially compute this change as anything noteworthy. It was only when he heard the shouts that he removed his glasses.

A great round shape, wrapped with a glowing penumbra, was sliding over the sun.

An eclipse.

As the sirens went off, he tore down the row. Everyone else was running, too, yelling, Eclipse! Eclipse! The hardboxes, get to the hardboxes! He burst from the corn, practically running straight into Cruk and Dee.

“Where are the girls?”

Dee was frantic. “I can’t find them!”

The darkness was spreading like ink. Soon the whole field would be enveloped.

“Cruk, get these people in the boxes. Dee, go with him.”

“I can’t! Where are they?”

“I’ll find them.” He drew his pistol from his waistband. “Cruk, get her out of here!”

Vorhees raced back into the field.


Tifty, his heart pounding with adrenaline, was sweeping the field from the tower. No sign yet, but it was only a matter of time. And the truck: what was it? Still it idled on the far edge of the windbreak. He tried to get Cruk on the walkie but couldn’t raise him. In all the chaos, probably the man couldn’t hear him.

He tightened the stock against his shoulder. Where would they come from? The trees? An adjacent field? Everything had been swept by Dillon’s team. Which didn’t mean the virals weren’t there, only that he couldn’t see them.

Then: at the periphery of his vision, a faint movement of the cornstalks, no more than a rustling, near one of the flags at the edge of the field. He swung the scope in close and pressed his eye to the lens. The hatch of the hardbox stood open.

It was the one place they hadn’t looked. They’d never checked the hardboxes.


Everyone was running, grabbing their children, dashing into the field toward the flags. Tifty emerged from the base of the tower at a dead sprint.

“No!”

Cruk was carrying two children, Presh Martinez and Reese Cuomo, under his arms. Dee was running beside him, Cece and Ali just steps behind—Cece hugging little Louis to her chest, Ali with Merry and Satch.

“The hardboxes!” Cruk was yelling. “Get to the hardboxes!”

“They’re in the hardboxes!”

A burst of gunfire exploded in the field. Dee saw Tifty drop to a knee and fire off three quick rounds. She turned as the first of the virals burst from the corn.

It landed right on top of Ali Dodd.

Dee felt an urge to vomit. Suddenly she couldn’t make her feet move. The viral, which had finished with Ali, was now burying its jaws in Cece’s neck. The woman was twitching, shrieking, arms and legs flailing like an overturned insect’s. The image seared Dee’s vision like a burst of light; all she could do was watch in helpless horror.

Cruk stepped forward, shoved the barrel of his rifle against the side of the creature’s head, and fired.

Where was Satch? The boy was suddenly nowhere. Merry was standing in the dust, screaming. Dee hoisted the little girl to her waist and began to run.

The virals were everywhere now. In blind panic, people were dashing for the tent, a pointless gesture; it could offer no safety at all. The virals swarmed over it, tearing it to pieces, the air filling with screams. “The tower!” Tifty was yelling. “Head for the tower!” But it was too late; nobody was listening. Dee thought of her daughters, saying goodbye. How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one’s children distilled by the world’s swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast. She prayed they would not suffer. Or, worse, be taken up. That was the worst thing: to be taken up.

An immense force careened into her from behind. Dee tumbled to the ground, little Merry rocketing from her arms. Face-down in the dirt, she lifted her eyes to see her brother, twenty feet away, pointing his rifle at her. Shoot me, Dee thought. Whatever’s about to happen, I don’t want it. A prayer of childhood found her lips and she closed her eyes and muttered it quickly, into the dust.

A shot. Behind her, something fell with an animal grunt. Before her mind could process this, Cruk was yanking her to her feet, his mouth moving incomprehensibly, saying words she couldn’t quite make out. His rifle was gone; all he had was the pistol, Abigail. Why would a man name a gun Abigail? Why would he name it at all? Something must have happened to her head, she realized, because here she was, worrying over Cruk’s gun, when everyone was dying. Other thoughts came to her, strange things, awful things. How it would feel to be ripped in two, like Ali Dodd. Her daughters, in the field, and what was happening to them now. How terrible, Dee thought, to live one second longer than one’s own babies. In a world of terrible things, surely that was the most terrible of all. Cruk was dragging her toward the door. He was doing what he thought she wanted, but she didn’t, not at all—she couldn’t die fast enough, in fact—and with a burst of strength Dee tore away from him, racing into the field, calling to her children.


Vorhees could hear his daughters, laughing in the corn. They were, he knew, too young to be afraid. They had snuck away to do exactly what they’d been told not to, and it was all a kind of game to them, this funny thing with the light. Vorhees raced down the rows, shouting their names, his breath heaving with panic, trying to home in on their voices. The sound was behind him, it was ahead, it was on either side. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, even inside his head.

“Nit! Siri! Where are you?”

Then there was a woman. She was standing in the middle of the row. She was draped in a dark cloak, like a woman in a fairy tale, some dweller of the forest; her head was covered by a hood, her eyes by dark glasses that concealed the upper half of her face. So total was Vorhees’s surprise that for a moment he thought he might be imagining her.

“Are they your daughters?”

Who was she, this woman of the corn? “Where are they?” he panted. “Do you know where they are?”

With a languid gesture she removed her glasses, revealing a face sensuously smooth and youthfully beautiful, with eyes that glinted in their sockets like diamonds. He felt a surge of nausea.

“You’re tired,” she said.

Suddenly, he was. Curtis Vorhees had never been so tired in his life. His head felt like an anvil; it weighed a thousand pounds. It took every ounce of will for him to remain standing.

“I have a daughter. Such a beautiful daughter.”

Behind him he heard the final, random pops of panicked gunfire. The field and sky had sunk into an unearthly darkness. He felt the urge to weep, but even this seemed beyond his command. He had dropped to his knees; soon he would fall.

“Please,” he choked.

“Come to me, beautiful children. Come to me in the dark.”

Somebody yanked him to his feet: Tifty. His face was very close. Vorhees could barely focus on it. The man was pulling him by the arm.

“Vor, come on!”

His tongue was thick in his mouth. “The woman …” But there was no one; the place where she had stood was empty. “Did you see her?”

“There’s no time! We have to get to the tower!”

Vorhees would have none of it; with the last of his strength he jerked away.

“I have to find them!”

It was the butt of Tifty’s rifle that brought everything to a halt. A single, crisp blow to the head, expertly aimed; Vorhees’s vision swarmed with stars. Then the world turned upside down as Tifty grabbed him by the waist and hurled him to his shoulder and began to run. Fat leaves streamed past, slapping his face. Vorhees was calling, “Nit! Siri! Come back!” But he had no strength to resist. His family was dead, he knew that; Tifty would not have come for him if they were still alive. More gunfire, the shouts of the dying all around. The hardboxes, a voice said. They came from the hardboxes. Who would survive this day? And Vorhees knew, to his infinite sorrow, that once again he would be one of the lucky ones.

They burst from the corn onto open ground. The shelter was wrecked, the tarp torn away, everything scattered. Bodies strewn everywhere, but he saw no children; the little ones were gone. Come to me, beautiful children. Come to me in the dark. And as the door of the tower slammed behind him and he tumbled to the floor, slipping at last into a merciful unconsciousness, his final thought was this:

Why did it have to be Tifty?