“Who did it?”
“They’re not sure yet,” Kathy said, “but it looks like a pair of lunatics with homemade bombs drove their cars into the buildings.”
“My God.”
Ellie’s hand crept into one of his. Just the feel of her helped him relax. It was like a drug. He squeezed her hand gently.
“They think it was related to the virus,” Kathy said.
“The bombers were sick?”
“They don’t know that for sure,” she said, “but that’s not what they’re saying. Apparently the day-care center is in an area that has the highest percentage of infected kids in the state, and it had recently been quarantined by the CDC with the kids and teachers inside. And then there’s Hopkins, where they’ve been taking people who get sick in the city. Some reporter said the CDC has been working there, too.” She looked at him, her eyes muddy and foreign. “David, there were kids inside. Little kids.”
The TV cut from the reporter to one of the scenes of the crime. At first, David couldn’t tell what he was looking at. But then the camera pulled back, and David could make out the rear end of a large automobile—or what was left of it—wedged within the crumbling maw of jagged brickwork and smoldering debris. There was black smoke everywhere. A second angle showed a portion of the building blown out, debris littering the parking lot. Medics were loading small shapes buried beneath white sheets into the backs of ambulances. Men and women screamed from the street.
“. . . found here at the recently quarantined Towson Day School, where the death tally has now risen to eighteen students and three instructors,” the reporter said. “Eyewitnesses said there had only been one occupant in the vehicle that—”
“Go play in your room, sweetheart.” He rubbed the back of Ellie’s head.
“I want to see it.”
“No. Do as I say.”
She exhaled audibly, then turned and sulked down the hallway toward her bedroom.
“This is so messed up, David,” Kathy said. She was gnawing on her thumbnail. “The whole world is falling apart.”
“We’re still here,” he assured her.
She looked at him. There was something beyond fear in her eyes: There was a hopelessness so deep it looked bottomless. “For how long?” she said. “For how long, David?”
He couldn’t answer her. In his mind’s eye, he was back on the beltway, staring out the Bronco’s window at the little boy with blood spilling from his nose while black smoke fell like a shroud over the horizon. A boy with eyes like the gray backing of a mirror.
By the close of the day, there was a total of five children and four teachers dead at the day-care center. Eleven people died at the hospital, with many more treated for injuries. The suspects, both retired toll collectors named Hamish Kasdan and William Maize, were also killed in the blasts. They’d outfitted the trunks of their cars with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, similar to the cocktail Timothy McVeigh had used in the Oklahoma City bombing. A search of Kasdan and Maize’s Baltimore City apartment revealed suicide notes detailing their roles as “renegade saviors for the earth,” here to help usher in the last days of mankind. They said they were part of the Worlders’ movement, a group of radicals who praised Wanderer’s Folly for bringing an end to mankind’s parasitic reign over the planet. They hadn’t been targeting the sick, but the doctors and nurses who were attempting to help them.
Kathy wept in her sleep that night.
David hardly slept at all.
*
When dawn finally cast its lurid hues through their bedroom window, David got up, went to the bathroom, then crept into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. There was a newspaper on the kitchen counter, the front page comprised of a map of the United States with various “hot spots” where the infection was the greatest. Other cities had been completely evacuated. The report said these evacuees had been transported to one of the CDC’s quarantine stations, with D.C., Philadelphia, and Newark being the closest to David’s area. The report also listed the most recent estimated death toll, both domestic and global—numbers that increased daily and required decimal points. He balled up the paper and shoved in down into the kitchen trash.
In the living room, he slid a Paul Desmond CD into the stereo and turned the volume down low as to not disturb Kathy and Ellie. Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a steaming mug of Sumatran coffee, then pried open the window above the sink so he could smoke a cigarette without having to go outside on the porch. He had hoped the music might fool him into thinking things hadn’t changed all that much and that they could still enjoy the simple day-to-day pleasures, but it didn’t work. He couldn’t trick himself into pretending that everything was normal. The music grated on him and he shut it off.