Date: 2018-11-18 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post Apocalyptic; Apocalyptic
Description: The Alt Apocalypse is the newest ground-breaking series from Tom Abrahams. It explores survival under the most extreme circumstances, but with a twist ( and no cliff-hangers ).This series, which can be read in any order, features the same core characters in each complete story. But every book dunks them into a new, alternate apocalypse; a nuclear holocaust, an earthquake, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane, a plague, and even zombies. Different heroes will emerge in each novel. Different characters will survive and perish. Your favorite character dies in one book? He or she will be back in the n
Publisher: Piton Press LLC

AFFLICTION

The Alt Apocalypse Survival Series

Tom Abrahams

A PITON PRESS BOOK

AFFLICTION

The Alt Apocalypse Survival Series

© Tom Abrahams 2018. All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

Proofread by Pauline Nolet and Patricia Wilson

Formatted by Stef McDaid at WriteIntoPrint.com

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

http://tomabrahamsbooks.com

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WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

THE ALT APOCALYPSE SURVIVAL SERIES

ASH

LIT

TORRENT

AFFLICTION

THE TRAVELER POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES

HOME

CANYON

WALL

RISING

BATTLE

LEGACY

THE SPACEMAN CHRONICLES POST-APOCALYPTIC THRILLERS

SPACEMAN

DESCENT

RETROGRADE

PILGRIMAGE: A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL STORY

MATTI HARROLD POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

SEDITION

INTENTION

JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

ALLEGIANCE

ALLEGIANCE BURNED

HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

Acknowledgements

For Courtney

In sickness and in health

“It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”

—William Osler, physician and founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital

CHAPTER 1

January 9, 2026

DAY 14

San Francisco, California

Derek Hoover was awestruck. He was frozen, fixated on the scene outside his high-rise office, which was straight from a horror movie in some far-off land clinging to civilization by the barest of threads. But it wasn’t a movie. It was unfolding on the streets of his hometown, San Francisco, stories below the gleaming tower that housed Interllayar Holdings and a dozen other Bay Area technology companies.

He planted his fingertips on the glass. His breath bloomed and evaporated in puffs. His mind spun; his head hurt; his chest was tight. His eyes couldn’t focus on the countless dramas playing out beneath him. From his vantage point on the top floor of the glass and steel monument, he was a giant watching Lilliput and Blefuscu from above. He was Gulliver straddling the islands with his boots barely wet in the South Indian Ocean.

He couldn’t decide which of the elements on the dark tableau was more surreal. Was it the police in riot gear and gas masks? Was it the Cal Guard troops outfitted in bright yellow Tychem TK Level A protective hazmat suits? Was it the thunder of the tanks rolling along Folsom Street , which he swore he could feel in his bones? Or was it the hordes of sick and dying people, coughing and vomiting blood onto others who littered the street in protest?

Yes, he thought to himself. It is that. It was the people that was the most unbelievable of all. They were the collateral damage.

But aren’t they always?

Derek’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He jerked with surprise, unaware cell service was viable. He’d assumed it wasn’t. Given that all communication was out across either radio or encrypted satellite phones for the last ten days, he hadn’t given it much thought.

He fished into the deep, heavily lined pockets of his linen pants and grabbed the device with his fingers, flipped it over, and blinked at the name on the display. LOVING WIFE. He exhaled and cursed under his breath. Now was not a good time. He noted there were six unread text messages and four hundred nineteen emails he’d failed to open.

There were emoji hearts on either side of the caller identification Derek’s wife had given herself in his phone. It was an assurance she’d given him. She had, after all, left her first husband for him. There was something in the back of his mind, no matter how much she reassured him, that he might be just her second husband, nothing more. As in the second that precedes the third. Or the second she found something shinier, she’d bolt like she had from the poor schlub who was reduced to minimum wage down the coast.

He swiped the screen and drew the device to his ear. His eyes drifted back to the silent movie sixty-five stories below.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” she asked. “I’ve been texting you.”

Recognizing her voice was laced with concern, not accusation, Derek sighed. He thought he saw a pair of protestors pry the shield from a riot officer and attack him.

“Derek?”

“I’m at work,” he said. “In my office.”

“Did you get any of my texts? There must have been five or six of them. I’m worried.”

The riot officer was beneath a heap of people now. Other officers were trying to beat back the attackers. It looked like someone had dropped a cube of sugar and the ants were piling on.

“I didn’t get them,” he said. “Or I didn’t notice them. Sorry.”

“What are you doing?” A hint of accusation seeped into her voice now. “Why are you there? You said you’d be home by now.”

A large truck was spraying a high-powered blast of water at the pile of protestors, knocking some of them loose from their perch. More black-clad officers were encircling the mound of protesters now. They were armed. Smoke ejected from a couple of their weapons. Bean bags? Rubber bullets? Real bullets?

“You’re not listening to me, Derek,” said his wife, irritation resonating in each word. “What. Is. Going. On?”

“I can’t talk right now,” he said. “Things have gotten out of control again. Just stay in the house. Keep the doors locked. Turn off the air-conditioning. I love you.”

“What? Turn off the air-cond—”

He ended the call as a knock at his door drew his attention from the growing number of lifeless bodies on the street below. Was that blood? More blood? There was too much blood. The yellow Tychem suits converged on the bodies.

The man standing in his open door was wringing his hands, his face grim. “We think we have it isolated.”

Derek waved the man into the room, and he moved silently across the room to a waiting chair. Derek motioned for him to sit down as he sank into the plush leather chair that dominated the space behind the desk, the whoosh of air escaping as the cushions broke the silence.

“Go ahead,” said Derek.

The man across from him wore deep furrows in his brow. They looked like the nouveau logo design for a river retreat, a quartet of wavy but parallel lines that ran the length of his forehead. His eyes were perpetually puffy from what Derek imagined was both a lack of sleep and water retention. He’d never seen anyone add as much salt to food as Dr. Robert Chang. Then again, given what he’d suffered this time, every time, he couldn’t blame the man. If ignorance was bliss, intelligence was a curse in his case.

Chang pinched the bridge of his nose. He puffed his cheeks and exhaled. Derek noticed the wedding band still on his swollen finger. It looked like it might be cutting off circulation.

“How’d the call go?” Chang asked.

“Inconsequential,” said Derek. “They’ve got their orders. Nothing we can do about them right now. By the way, the radio’s not working. It’s all sat phone now.”

Chang nodded. He sank a little into his chair and placed his palms flat on the narrow arms. “The tests are complete. The labs confirm some of what we suspected. Other elements we can’t explain except to say the disease is mutating.”

Derek leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on Chang, who glanced away. “Mutating? What do you mean? When we looked at it less than a week ago, you said it was stable. You’d identified what was happening. You were ahead of the CDC.”

Chang kept his gaze on the desk. He didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular, just some vague point to avoid Derek.

There was no denying that Robert Chang was a genius. He was Ivy League and Cambridge educated. He was a neurosurgeon who also held degrees in epidemiology, biochemistry, and had done the last of his three fully funded fellowships at Stanford. His day job was in Los Angeles, fixing people’s brains and spines. In his spare time, what little he had, he worked with Derek. He was, by a magnitude, the highest paid consultant among the many employed at Interllayar. When he spoke, people listened, and they took his direction without question. Yet for some reason, some alpha-male dynamic neither man could fully understand, Chang cowered beneath Derek’s glare.

Chang looked at his hands and ran his right thumb across the thin gold band on his left ring finger. He shook his head. “I mean mutating. I’ve checked with Dr. Moss. The cellular composition is changing, adapting. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I can’t explain it beyond the simple explanation I’ve already given to you, Derek. Even Moss hasn’t gotten further than that. And he’s…well…he’s Moss.”

“Guy’s a genius,” Derek acknowledged.

“His first name is Albert for a reason,” said Chang. “He’s the Einstein of diseases, you know.”

Derek nodded. He knew. He’d hired Albert Moss personally, as he had Chang. But Moss hadn’t lost what Chang had. Not yet.

He raked his fingers through his hair and swallowed hard. Chang still wasn’t looking at him. “Bob,” he said, “I know how difficult this is for you. I do. But we need you on this one maybe more than any of the other—”

Derek stopped, considering the next word carefully. It was an important word and he didn’t want to undersell or oversell what it was they were doing. Chang knew the stakes already. He was one of the few who did, the few who really knew. There was no need for hyperbole that stretched either way.

“—projects,” Derek finished. “This project is as critical, maybe more critical, than the others.”

Chang looked up. His narrow gaze tightened, if that was possible. He spun his ring with his thumb and forefinger. “I understand, Derek. That’s why I haven’t even buried her yet. She’s been in the lab. I’ve been in the lab. It’s not something…it’s not normal.”

“What’s normal nowadays?” Derek asked in all seriousness. “Every single time we think we have it figured out, we don’t. We…”

The thought hung in the air like the invisible disease that was ravaging California and Arizona, Oregon, and the western edges of Colorado and New Mexico. Both men understood what they were doing. They knew their roles. They’d weighed and measured the stakes.

“Go ahead and bury her,” said Derek, choosing to shift course. “You and Bobby deserve that closure. Take a day. Then come back and get to work. We’re running out of time.”

“Again,” said Chang.

“Again,” Derek agreed.

Chang stood from his seat, his knees cracking, and nodded at Derek. It was almost the start of a genuflection, but he stopped it as soon as it started. Derek offered a weak smile and spun his chair to look out the window. Chang silently soft-shoed his way from the office.

Derek’s view from behind the desk, seated, was so much better than the one standing against the glass. From here he could see out into the bay. The sun was shining. There wasn’t a hint of rain.

CHAPTER 2

DAY 6

West Carson, California

Clint Anthony felt like he was going to die. Part of him half-jokingly wished for the end. His head was pounding; his mouth was dry; his stomach grumbled. He felt like he might soil himself if he coughed again. He hadn’t been this sick in a long time, if ever.

He’d long ago convinced himself that he was bulletproof. He’d suffered from so many different types of colds, been exposed to such a variety of communicable diseases, that he believed his immune system could fight off anything.

This was different though. This was more than a passing bug. The ache in his neck and the heaviness in his chest told him that. Not to mention that this headache was different from the ones he’d been having on and off for months. Those were dull annoyances that felt like weak migraines, accompanied by an odd sense of déjà vu. There was no sentimentality with this headache. It was throbbing. Every beat of his quickened pulse shot a zing of pain across his forehead. His eyes burned, but he kept them open.

Outside, he could hear the commotion of the late morning from the dozens of other squatters who’d taken shelter beside him in tents along the railroad tracks at West 117th. There were men arguing, laughing, and talking amongst and to themselves.

Clint didn’t like it here. He wasn’t much for camping in a tent, let alone living in one. He’d almost have rather been back in prison. There he had a mattress and three meals a day. Access to drugs was easier too. On the inside he could barter for a fix. Out here on the streets everything was cash. If it wasn’t hard cash, the price wasn’t something Clint was willing to pay.

He stared at the orange nylon ceiling of his tent. Through the fabric he could make out the bright smudge of the sun high above the Los Angeles sky. He debated getting up to go to the bathroom, but his headache suggested he lay there a while longer.

There were portable bathrooms and sinks at the homeless camp in the area called West Carson. The government had set up the hygiene stations after a hepatitis outbreak years earlier. Rather than do something to curb the homeless population, city and state leaders had acquiesced to it. They’d actually made it worse instead of better by initiating programs to make life on the streets tolerable.

This sickness, whatever it was, was not tolerable.

Clint coughed, winced against the bolt of pain in his chest, and rolled onto his side. Traffic rushed by on the ramps high overhead. He listened to the whoosh and rumble of the late morning push. Despite the noise, this spot was better than the camp closer to the freeway some three miles farther down Figueroa. Clint had tried that one first. It was too crowded and backed up to legitimate houses. Looking at the homes, the glow of the lives inside, amplified the depression he fought to control. At least here under the freeway and beside the tracks there was no reminder of the kind of life he could have had in some alternate universe.

He cleared his throat and rolled onto his back. Outside his tent, someone was yelling now. He assumed it was Crazy Barry or Colonel Mick. Both of those men had a penchant for loud discussions with the voices in their heads. People tended to ignore them, and neither Barry nor Mick ever hurt anyone. It was best to let them rant.

Then the zipper that kept his tent closed slid open, and a familiar face popped his mop of hair through the hole. His eyes were wide. “Hey, you gotta see this. Somebody out here is puking up blood. It’s like they got some bad gravel. It’s disgusting. You gotta see it.”

Clint leaned up on his elbows and faced his friend Filter. That was his nickname. He and Clint had done time together at San Quentin. Filter, whose real name Clint had never bothered to ask, got the moniker because he was one who always seemed to have the latest information from the outside world. From sports to news to whose appeals were getting denied, all news was filtered through him.

“Bad gravel?” asked Clint. “Is that what you’re calling it now? Gravel? Isn’t that a bit old school?”

He tried laughing. It came out as a wheeze, which brought tears to his eyes. He grabbed at his chest and cleared his throat through his gnashed teeth.

“I could just call it crack,” said Filter, his long, narrow face stretching into a yellow smile. “But where’s the fun in that? C’mon, dude. You gotta see. It’s worse than that time in the Q when—”

Clint waved off the invitation. “No, thanks. I’m not feeling so good.”

Filter unzipped the tent a little more and slid inside through the bright wash of light that shone into the tent from the outside. The yelling was louder now. Clint thought he heard someone call for an ambulance.

“I don’t feel all that good neither,” said Filter. He was crouching inside the tent now and slapped Clint’s foot with his long bony fingers. “I got a fever, I think, and I could probably dump a load every five minutes. Seriously.”

“Maybe you got some bad gravel.”

Filter laughed. His Adam’s apple slid up and down along his neck. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d worn for the last week: baggy, faded jeans, a braided leather belt that cinched the gapping pants at his narrow waist, and a worn T-shirt that read SORRY I’M LATE. I DIDNT WANT TO COME across the front of it.

“Seriously,” he said, scratching an old scab on his forearm, “I gotta go to work in a minute. Come outside for a sec and take a look. It’ll make you feel better.”

Clint doubted that, but he also knew that unless he agreed to pick himself up and follow Filter outside, his friend would keep hounding him. Filter was nothing if not persistent. It was what made him so good at getting information from people. He was like water; he always found a way to get where he wanted to go.

Water Filter, Clint thought as he took Filter’s hand to pull himself up. Water filter. That was funny.

Clint squeezed through the unzipped flap and stepped onto the hard dirt that served as his front porch. He rose from a crouch to his feet, squinting to adjust to the light, and turned to see the man who’d ingested the bad batch of gravel, crack, or whatever it was.

He was convulsing on the ground not far from the row of portable sinks. As Clint approached, he could see the man’s limbs were stiff. His fingers were spread wide as if he were reaching for something. His eyes were rolled back into his head, and his mouth was bleeding. Clint recognized him as someone who’d been at the camp for a few weeks. He didn’t know his name or his situation.

Nobody was helping the man. The dozen or so squatters there before Clint stood in a wide circle, apparently not interested in getting too close. Then the odor hit him. It was awful, something between the men’s bathroom at the shelter and the dumpster behind Ralph’s on Sepulveda.

Filter cleared his throat, coughed, and nudged Clint with his shoulder. “I told you,” he said. “Worth it, right?”

Clint watched the man twitch and writhe for another minute without saying anything. His headache was more pronounced from having left his tent. He tried taking a deep breath but couldn’t. A hitch in his lungs made him cough and wince. The man on the ground stopped convulsing. His body went limp. His jaw went slack, and blood oozed from his nose and mouth. It was a lot of blood.

“You sure that’s a bad batch?” asked Clint. “That looks like something more than that.”

“It’s gotta be, dude,” said Filter. “That’s why I stick to Kush. Nothing they can do to that.”

Clint kept his eyes fixed on the man he was sure was dead. “You know that’s not true. They can lace weed with anything these days.”

“I guess,” said Filter. He put his hand on his stomach. “I gotta use the men’s room before I head to work.”

“Work?”

“Cleaning windows,” he said. “I’ve still got my entrepreneurial spirit, dude.”

Filter had owned an electronics shop on Venice Beach. He sold as much to the spendthrift tourists as he did to the clientele who knew to ask for off-the-book deals. The shop had served as both business and home for Filter. He’d lived in the back room where he’d fixed tossed phones, tablets, and laptops. Sometimes he’d repair radios or watches. He also knew how to hack devices people had “found” and reprogram them so they could be repurposed or sold for cash. He didn’t ask questions, which became a problem when he sold an iPhone and a pair of high-end headphones to an undercover cop.

Filter had beaten the case, something about entrapment, but lost the shop and his home. He’d joined Clint in the suburbs, living in a tent, determined to fight his way back to something more respectable than homelessness. Clint often told Filter he was the most motivated stoner he’d ever met.

“What’s your angle?” asked Clint.

“No angle,” said Filter. “Just cleaning windows in Westwood.”

“Westwood?”

“Yep,” said Filter. He lifted a leg and released a gurgling sound from between his legs. “High dollar. And that sounded wet, didn’t it?”

Clint’s face soured, but he didn’t comment. “Westwood is like an hour and a half from here.”

“The money’s worth it,” said Filter. “People up there got nothing better to do than part with their casheesh.”

Clint shrugged and motioned to the portable toilets. “Go part with whatever is bothering you first.”

The two fist-bumped and Clint turned back toward his tent. He’d taken a half dozen difficult steps when he heard someone retching to his left. Colonel Mick was on his knees, trembling, a line of spittle trailing from his hanging lip to a puddle on the ground. Then he vomited again. Clint swore there was blood in it.

Clint thought for a moment about helping old Mick, but he wasn’t much for helping others unless there was something in it for him. Even when there was, he wasn’t the sort of man who’d follow through by doing the right thing.

Instead of helping Mick, Clint thought about what size boots the man wore. Were they the right size? They looked new. They looked comfortable.

He glanced back at the dead man; he was barefoot. Clint scanned the row of tents to that side of the encampment. Which one had belonged to him? Did he own anything of value?

Mick puked again and Clint walked back to his tent, slid inside the opening, and zipped it closed. He was winded. His headache was more violent, a rhythmic jabbing behind his eyes. His stomach was pinched with cramps. He forced a belch and tasted bile.

Clint dropped to one knee and twisted onto his back. He lay down and closed his eyes, trying to focus on something other than his discomfort. It was virtually impossible.

His breathing was ragged, his lower back ached, and he was bloated and nauseated. He leaned onto his side to cough, little more than a soft hack caught in his chest. He barked again and again. He tried sitting up. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t catch his breath. Cough. Cough. Cough. He tried sucking in air between the choppy hacks but could do little more than squeak a small amount of air into his ailing lungs.

Clint’s eyes welled. He was drooling now. Warm saliva filled his mouth. Snot dripped from his nose. His throat tightened as he tried to gasp for air between ragged spasms from his chest.

After what felt like an eternity, the fit ebbed. He wheezed, but he could breathe. Air flowed in through his congested nose and open mouth. He wiped his glassy eyes with his knuckles and cleared his throat again. He was leaning on one elbow, twisted onto his side. His heart pulsed in his chest, threatening to burst from it.

Clint sighed, exhaling what little air he had sucked into his ailing lungs, and wiped the snot from under his nose and the drool from his sopping chin.

He drew up his hand before wiping it on the thin pale blue blanket that served as a mattress on the tent floor, and noticed the dark stain on his fingers. It was bright red. He ran his thumb across his fingertips, smudging the blood. He glanced at the blanket. A red splatter decorated the cotton, mixing with the blue to give the spray a purplish hue.

Clint swallowed hard. A knot tightened in his sore throat. His vision blurred from the new, emotion-fueled tears that flooded his eyes. Through the blur he looked at the zipped flap of his tent and the dead body that lay beyond it. The fresh corpse had been thrashing about on the ground like a struggling fish moments earlier. Now it was a pile of meat and bones.

In his mind he could hear Mick retching beyond the taut orange fabric of his tent. He could smell the mix of regurgitated fluids pooling on the ground.

This was his future. Whatever illness he’d caught, it would kill him.

CHAPTER 3

DAY 9

Los Angeles, California

Ellen Chang stared at the glowing red digits through bleary eyes. The clock glared back at her tauntingly. It was nine thirty. Nine thirty-one. Nine thirty-two. It was more than two hours later than she normally got up and moving. It was four hours since she’d awakened from an uncomfortable sleep. It wasn’t really sleep either. Not good sleep.

She hadn’t felt like herself in three days. Not since her trip to the Hammer in Westwood. Not since a vagrant had tried cleaning her windshield at a stoplight. He’d approached the car aggressively with the handheld wiper in his hand and leaned over the hood, his ghostly figure against the side-view mirror. She’d noticed he was wearing a grungy T-shirt with a threadbare collar that had the words SORRY I’M LATE, I DIDN’T WANT TO COME printed across the front. She waved him off. He ignored her. She rolled down her window to the distinct and sweet odor of marijuana and told him to stop. He did. Then he hocked a loogie and spat on the driver’s side door as she took her foot off the brake to ease the car past him at the light.

Some of the ambient spray hit her face. She squeezed her eyes shut, grunted angrily, and drove the toe of her Louboutin onto the brake, jerking the car to a stop.

Her name-calling and threats went unanswered by the man, who’d moved to the SUV behind her. He was talking to himself.

With the light still red, she leaned across the front cabin and pulled a wet wipe from a package she kept in the glove box. She used it to cleanse her face, spending extra time at her nostrils and lips. The light flipped green.

“I’m going to get sick,” she grumbled and slapped her foot down on the accelerator. The sedan’s tires screeched on the pavement and she powered away from the moment that would end her life.

The tightness in her chest began that same night. She was in the sitting room off the master bedroom, holding a glass of chilled, but not cold, Prosecco in one hand and the latest Kindle in the other. She was reading a Peter Clines novel, which dealt with alternate universes and steampunk mechanics. It wasn’t her usual fare, but her son had recommended it, so she’d indulged him by swiping through the story. Now she was into it. It gave her as much enjoyment as the sweet wine.

She cleared her throat, sensing the discomfort in her chest, and attributed it to the chilled drink. Sometimes if it was a touch too cold, it might induce a cough or two.

An hour and forty swipes later, perspiration beaded on her forehead and she simultaneously felt clammy and flush. A chill ran along her spine. Again, she thought it could be the wine. She’d had three glasses.

Then she coughed hard enough that she felt warm, thick phlegm coat her tongue and paste her lips. She used an index finger to wipe her mouth. It came away stained red. She stared at it in disbelief, her brow wrinkled with confusion, until she recognized the coppery taste of blood.

Her pulse quickened and she put down the glass on the white marble pedestal next to the chair. Still holding the Kindle in one hand, she used the other to push herself to her feet. Her knees buckled. The room spun. She dropped the tablet onto the travertine floor, cracking its screen in the instant before she collapsed next to it, unconscious.

Now, seventy-two hours later, she rolled onto her side and coughed again. She winced at the biting pain that shot through her body as she hacked. She shuddered and barked again. The sounds coming from her were so unfamiliar that, had she not known better, she’d have thought they were the ear-raking noises from someone else. She gagged and retched on the thick mixture of infection, phlegm, and blood that shot up from her lungs and into her mouth. She caught it in her cheeks for a moment, then the next racking cough forced it from her stores, and a rotten pink spray splatted across the white bed linens only partially covering the king-sized mattress.

Ellen groaned and licked her lips, calling for her husband. “Bahhhhhb,” she croaked. Her voice sounded as if she’d run her vocal cords across a cheese grater.

“I’m right here,” he said. “I’m next to you.”

She hadn’t noticed him sitting at her bedside. He held a washcloth in one hand as if he were waiting to put it down. His voice was soft. There was pity in it. She recognized pity. She wanted to tell him not to pity her, but she didn’t have the energy. A wave of nausea rolled through her and she gagged again.

“Baaaahb,” she said again, the sounds dragging across thick gravel to escape her cracked lips. “I cahhhhn’t dooooo thissss.”

Bob was whimpering now. Wait. No. It wasn’t Bob. She was whimpering. She sounded like the bichon frise they’d had years ago, a yappy puppy in need of attention.

She rolled onto her back, choked on the blood pooling in her mouth, and coughed again before turning to face Bob. Her vision was blurred and she couldn’t make out his features. She couldn’t see his kind, sad eyes, his broad nose, or the deep furrows that ran along the inside of his full cheeks.

“You’ll be okay,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a toddler. “You’ll get through this. I’ve had some colleagues over here. They’ve got you on the strongest meds for what’s indicated.”

His voice was muffled.

Why is it muffled?

“I tried to get you into a hospital,” he said. “There are no beds. Not even for us.”

Is he in surgical scrubs?

“Reagan, Cedars, nobody is taking patients,” Bob said. “Everything is overflowing. Besides, even if I had gotten you in, you’re safer here.”

Safer here? Safe from what?

Ellen narrowed her eyes and tried to focus on her husband. She couldn’t. But there was something blue stretched across his face, and he wore gloves on his hands. It wasn’t a washcloth he held. It was a glove.

“Whass wifff duh masss?” she mumbled, asking about the mask covering his face. “An duh glubs. Why glubs?”

Bob Chang’s blurry physique shifted in his seat. The wing chair’s feet scraped against the travertine. Was it moving back? Farther away from the bed? Chang cleared his throat. There was virtually no phlegm.

Above the fog of catastrophic illness, she would have recognized the clearing as a stall tactic. As it was, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her who’d tried to pull up the fluid in her chest. A bead of sweat dripped into her eye. It stung and she contorted her face into a squeeze. Somehow, amidst the exhaustion and pain that pulsed across every inch of her failing body, the burn of sweat focused her attention.

Bob was talking now, but she didn’t hear him. Actually she did hear him, but she didn’t process any of what he said. She listened to the sound of her heartbeat throbbing in her temples. With her eyes closed, she envisioned the blood pumping to and from her heart, to and from her brain, to and from her fingertips and her toes. Ellen could see her circulatory system fighting to work, to keep the oxygen moving through her muscles and organs.

Her focus shifted again, above the drone of Bob’s voice, to her legs. They were warm and then cold. They were wet: her thighs, the sheet underneath her, her groin. The unmistakable odor of urine crept into her nose, and she forgot the sweat in her eyes and the blood in her vascular system. She’d wet the bed. Or was it more than that? Her stomach roiled. A foul stench made her stiffen. Ellen whimpered again and tried speaking.

“Soooo sorrrryyy,” she mumbled. “Puhhhleease, Bahhhhb. Don’t beee mah-yud.”

She couldn’t be sure if she’d actually said the words aloud or only spoke them in her mind. She couldn’t be sure of anything. Her mind drifted. What was left of Ellen’s consciousness wandered aimlessly. The questions pulsed one after the other.

Where was she? Was she at home? Why was she at home? Why not a hospital? Was Bob trying to kill her? Did he do this? Where was their son, Bobby? Why wasn’t he here? Was he at the hospital, waiting for her? Why hadn’t she gotten her nails done? She couldn’t go to the hospital without shellac. Was she late for her appointment? When was her Organiz tomato with fior di latte mozzarella arriving? Hadn’t the waiter taken the order an hour ago? Why was she in an aisle seat? Didn’t Bob know to book her a window seat?

There was the lick of flames in her ears. The wash of water. The percussion of explosions.

She could taste the Prosecco on her tongue. It was drenched with the sour aftertaste of a drink long since swallowed.

Images of Van Gogh’s Irises danced in front of her. There was the bright abstraction of Basquiat’s Untitled Skull. There were square social media photographs of her son, Bobby, playing volleyball on the beach in Barcelona and standing against the serrated mountains of Montserrat and its ancient monastery. He was smiling. He was happy. So happy. The briny scent of the Mediterranean air washed over her like a wave, crashing into her.

And then, as suddenly as the smells, and sounds, and sights of her life materialized and enveloped her in a cocoon of sensations, they were gone. There was nothing in their place. Ellen Chang’s blood stopped pumping. She didn’t hear her husband’s muffled cry or his call for help. She didn’t see the sheet-entangled horror of what remained of her disease-riddled body.

CHAPTER 4

DAY 10

Westwood, California

Dub Hampton wavered outside the Ackerman Student Union in a line that stretched across the courtyard toward the infirmary. The sun was bright, blindingly so, and the sky that framed it was a cloudless deep blue. The air was dry and cool. A breeze drifted across his face, chilling the beading sweat at his temples.

His legs tingled and his shoulders and neck ached. His stomach grumbled. His throat was sticky with phlegm. He swallowed and tried to loosen it.

The coed in front of him glanced over her backpack-laden shoulder and scowled. “Could you not cough on me?” Her voice was sour. “I mean, seriously.”

“I didn’t cough,” Dub said through the wet rasp in his voice. “I was clearing my—”

“Whatever,” she interrupted and took a half step forward, farther away from him and closer to the student in front of her.

Their line stretched across Bruin Plaza. A spot that normally saw hurried foot traffic and selfie-takers at the bronze Bruin Bear statue, was instead the queue ue for a visit with the overwhelmed medical staff inside the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center. The Ashe Center, known as the infirmary, was where most students dealt with the flu, birth control, or anxiety. Every student at the school was insured through the university or bought a supplemental plan that covered the basics at Ashe.

Dub swiped the sweat from his forehead with his fingertips. It wasn’t hot outside, but it felt like it was. He had a fever. The burning sensation in his eyes, the warmth across his face and the back of his neck, and the general malaise that accompanied an infection were all there.

He’d put off going to Ashe for two days now, and there weren’t any appointments available. Not for him or for anyone. There were so many sick students that the infirmary had become a walk-in clinic, not dissimilar from a public hospital’s emergency room. His body told him he was markedly worse than he’d been the day before. Despite the hassle and the wait, Dub’s girlfriend, Keri, had convinced him to trudge down the hill from his dorm and get a spot in line.

He’d been diagnosed as iron deficient three weeks earlier. He’d been trying Keri’s vegan diet and wasn’t taking the same supplements. He’d been weak and tired since and had chalked it up to that until the coughing showed and the fever joined it.

He’d been here now for nearly two hours, his oversized can of yerba mate was empty, as was his sticker decorated Hydro Flask of water, and he wasn’t sure he’d advanced in line more than five or six feet. The line had grown behind him so much so that it snaked into the union and past the computer section to the minimart.

He was considering giving up and letting the illness take its course when somebody behind him caught his attention. It was a coed he vaguely recognized as having dated one of his roommates. She was in a sorority, but he couldn’t remember her name. She was talking loud enough for anyone within earshot to hear her.

He shot a glance at her. She wore denim overall shorts over a pale blue UCLA tank. The tops of the school’s acronym peeked above the frayed edging on the overalls. The lettering was cracked and worn but still recognizable enough. Her hair was pulled into braids. She wore no makeup and looked as sick as everyone else in line. She pulled a fist to her mouth and coughed into it. Dub spun around to face the line in front of him, but listened to the woman.

“I heard this isn’t the flu,” the woman said. “Even though the news is calling it the flu, it’s not. It’s like a combo disease.”

“Where did you hear that, Gem?” asked one of what Dub supposed was her friends.

Gem. He remembered. His roommate Barker had dated her. Then he’d dumped her for her sorority sister. Or maybe she’d dumped him. Dub couldn’t remember and it was beside the point.

“I just heard it,” said Gem. “And I heard it started in the homeless camps.”

“Homeless camps?” said the other woman, incredulity dripping from her tone more thickly than the phlegm draining relentlessly into Dub’s throat.

“Yes,” said Gem, coughing again. “Homeless camps. That’s what I heard. And, like, nobody knows exactly what this is yet.”

“I heard it’s airborne,” said the other woman. “I didn’t hear the homeless part.”

“It is,” said Gem. “And it’s spreading superfast. Like ridiculously fast. I mean, look at the line. They’re going to have to cancel classes.”

A third woman spoke up. “I heard they’re cancelling them starting tomorrow and that they’re shutting down campus.”

“They can’t shut down campus,” said Gem. “Where would we go? I mean, seriously, how many of us live on campus? We eat on campus. I don’t want to lose swipes at B Plate over this. My meals don’t carry over.”

“There’s a line of sick people wrapped around Bruin Walk and you’re thinking about your meal swipes?” asked someone else in line.

“A girl’s gotta eat,” said Gem. “Besides, it makes no sense to close down campus.”

“It does if people are dying from it,” said someone else.

Gem had attracted a lot of attention in a short amount of time. It was the kind of attention not even denim overall shorts and braids could attract. A murmur grew into a louder rumble of discussion. The only thing intelligible amongst the din was the repeated use of the word die.

Dub glanced back and saw the line behind him had morphed into more of a blob. People were gathered around Gem. All of them looked as sick as Dub felt. Some wobbled; others leaned on one another. Nobody looked healthy. Nobody had the familiar and somewhat stereotypical SoCal glow from a little too much time in Santa Monica or Venice Beach. They all looked pasty and sallow like how Dub imagined students at any ivy-covered college in the Northeast might appear.

“Are people dying?” asked Gem. “Who said that?”

“I thought you would have heard,” said her doubting sorority sister, “given, like, everything else your sources gave you.”

Dub took a step toward the crowd. Amidst the coughing and wheezing, he picked up serious concern in the voices of those engaged in the discussion. Was this sickness, whatever it was, fatal?

A tall, heavier student in a gray UCLA half-zip stepped aggressively toward Gem. He had stubble along his jawline and chin and jabbed his finger at her as he spoke. “You shouldn’t be spreading rumors. That’s the kinda stuff that makes people panic. You need to shut your mouth.”

The mumble amongst the crowd amplified. Some pointed their fingers at the half-zipped, finger-pointing, would-be patient, while others jumped on board and angrily took the moral high ground regarding gossipmongering and the viral spread of fear. The crowd was devolving into a potential mob. The impending chaos was palpable.

Not one for conflict, Dub tried speaking above everyone else. He waved his hands above his head. The crowd turned, all eyes facing him warily, and he swallowed hard. The taste of infection coated his tongue. “C’mon,” he pleaded, “let’s not do this. We’re all sick. None of us feel good. There’s no point in pointing fingers or accusing—”

“Who are you?” asked the half-zip. “Where do you get off telling—”

A shrill scream drew everyone’s attention past Dub to a man lying on the plaza in a pool of blood. He was no more than twenty feet from the entrance to the infirmary. One scream turned into three, turned into nine, turned into a cacophony of cries and shouts. Suddenly the potential chaos rooted in fear and anger behind Dub blossomed into chaos fueled by fear and shock and confusion in front of him.

Dub bumped past the backpack-clad coed in front of him, not bothering to apologize, and rushed toward the crowd gathering around the fallen man. He wasn’t sure what he could do to help or why he was giving up his coveted place in line, but instinct drove him there. He pushed his way past a couple of smaller students and stood at the edge of the impromptu circle formed around the man.

He was not unconscious or bleeding from the fall, as Dub had first thought. He was awake. At least his eyes were open, and his body was convulsing. His limbs twitched erratically as if sparked into movement by bursts of electricity. His fingers were rigid, his mouth puckered. There was blood leaking from both sides and bubbling from his nose. He was gargling.

Dub stood there paralyzed for a moment. He’d never seen anything like it. Not in person. Yet there was something familiar about watching someone writhe in agony, as if he’d seen it before somewhere.

He pushed the thought from his mind and then eyed the entrance to the infirmary. He wove his way through the gawking, coughing crowd to the entrance. He slid past men and women in line, some of whom muttered their protests. Nobody stopped him, though, and he stepped to the counter next to a woman who was giving the receptionist her name. Both gave Dub a disapproving glare when he interrupted. He was breathing hard. His pulse pounded. Sweat rolled down his spine and bloomed under his arms.

“Excuse me,” said Dub. “Sorry, but there’s a sick man in the plaza. He needs help.”

“Everyone here is sick,” said the receptionist.

Dub, wheezing from the adrenaline-fueled romp through the crowd, tried to catch his breath. He leaned on the counter. The receptionist scooted away from him. “No, he’s bleeding. He’s having a seizure. He’s right outside the door. He needs help.”

The woman’s brow furrowed with confusion, and then she stood, looking past Dub and into the line of patients awaiting their turns to see doctors. Although it was impossible for her to see the seizing man from her vantage point, standing and staring at the crowd apparently convinced her Dub was telling the truth.

She picked up a phone and hurriedly punched some numbers into its face. Cradling the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she waved over another receptionist. Then someone on the other end of the line must have answered.

“Yes,” she said, locking eyes with Dub. “We need a doctor outside in Bruin Plaza. There’s a student having a seizure.”

“And he’s bleeding from his mouth and nose,” said Dub.

“He’s bleeding,” said the receptionist. “Okay. Thank you.”

Still holding the phone, she nodded at Dub, thanked him, and stood with her hands pressed against her thighs. Her eyes were wide with concern as if this were the moment she understood the gravity of the burgeoning situation. The amusement-park line stretching from her desk, across the plaza, and into the union hadn’t affected her, but knowing one of these sick students was unconscious and bleeding changed things.

Dub walked away, heading back outside. When he shouldered and squeezed his way through the crowd, the ambient body heat of others radiated at him. Coughs sounded louder. Moans and groans sent shivers along his spine. Whatever it was these people had, whatever it was that made them sick, was likely the same contagion attacking his body.

He worked his way outside and back into the sunlight. He squinted, his eyes adjusting to the brightness of it. He could hear the commotion, the shouts and instructions, before he could see the seizing man and those crowded around him.

The noises were louder than before, spiked with more urgency. Then, as his vision came into focus, he saw the seizing man wasn’t the only one in need of help. There were no fewer than five or six more people on the ground. Were there ten? Was it a dozen?

There was blood and violent coughing and yellow sputum. There were more seizures; people’s bodies vibrated on the ground at different frequencies. Some vomited onto themselves and others, which, in turn, caused others to puke. At least two had defecated on themselves. It was like a viral bomb had exploded in the plaza, and Dub was walking amongst the wounded. Had it not been so horrifying, it might have been comical. There was so much of everything awful it bordered on the satirical.

Dub’s mind struggled to process it. He thought of the Mr. Creosote wafer scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and the pie-eating scene from the movie Stand By Me. His gut twisted and a tsunami of nausea washed over him, flooding his senses. He staggered into someone and lost his balance before recovering.

A sheen of sweat coated his neck and face. It dripped into his ears and down his back. He could taste the salt on his lips.

Screams and calls for help, moans, and guttural sounds that Dub couldn’t convince himself were human overwhelmed him. He wanted to cry out and demand it stop. The sounds, the sights, the smells—it was all too much.

Clutching at his stomach, he wandered away from the crowd. He couldn’t help anyone. He had to help himself. As he wobbled past the Wooden Center and toward the hill, medics or doctors were directing traffic, triaging patients right there in the middle of the plaza. They were demanding other sick people move away. The panic in their voices was as evident as the illnesses they were treating.

Dub glanced over his shoulder one last time, bracing himself against a trash can. It was a mosh pit. Everyone needed help, and it appeared nobody was getting it. The doctors and nurses, or whatever adults had come to help, seemed paralyzed. It had devolved in seconds from worse to catastrophic.

The wail of emergency sirens pulsed in the distance. They were coming from the medical center that separated campus from the trendy shops and restaurants in Westwood Village. They were getting louder. The alternating high and low tones pierced the air, carried by that breeze that Dub couldn’t feel any longer. He wheezed, trying to suck in a deep enough breath to slow the pulse that pounded at his chest and thumped at his temples.

He leaned harder on the trash can, using his elbows and forearms to brace himself. His legs tingled. His knees and ankles were rubbery. His stomach lurched and spun.

He closed his eyes, willing himself both the calm and the strength it would take to haul his compromised body up the steps and slopes leading back to his dorm. The distance he had traveled effortlessly, mindlessly, for the entirety of his time at UCLA now seemed daunting and insurmountable.

Somehow he’d managed to keep himself from collapsing, from becoming so dehydrated he slipped into convulsions. He hadn’t yet bled from his mouth or nose. Was that coming? Would it come faster, would he slide into an unrecoverable state if he climbed his way back to his dorm? Was he better off staying here at the trash can? He could sit down. He could take a break. He could maybe fall asleep, regain some strength, and try later.

Yes. That was what he’d do. He’d take a break.

Dub stood up straight, but not steady, and managed to turn himself around so he could slide down the face of the trash can with his back. He closed his eyes and heard his name. His subconscious was calling him.

“Dub? Dub, are you okay?”

I’m not okay, he told himself. I’m not okay.

“Dub? Can we help you?” The voice was deeper now. It didn’t sound like his own, even in his feverish mind.

A touch on his arm. The hand was cold, icy. He flinched, drew away from the light grip, and opened his eyes. It wasn’t his subconscious talking to him. There was somebody there. There were two somebodies.

He blinked twice and focused on the pair in front of him. His roommates, Michael and Barker, stood shoulder to shoulder. Barker, stocky and balding prematurely, had his hands on his hips. Michael, with curly red hair and a T-shirt-straining belly, had his hands extended as if coaching a toddler to walk, ready to grab hold if needed. Still high in the cloudless sky, the sun cast shadows across their faces, but he recognized them.

He tried saying something. He opened his mouth and moved his tongue. But he couldn’t speak. He wanted to tell them he needed to rest. That was all. A little rest.

His jaw was so heavy. His tongue was too thick. He closed his mouth again and shut his eyes.

He leaned against the box-shaped trash can and started sliding along its face, letting gravity pull him toward the ground. He didn’t make it. His roommates caught him under his elbows and pulled him up. They were talking to one another, grunting and struggling with his weight. He was sure they would drop him.

He wanted to tell them to let go. He wanted to rest here for a few minutes; then he’d be good to go. He’d be strong enough to climb the hill and find his way to his bed. That was the end game, getting back into the bed he never should have left.

The weight of exhaustion overtook him and the sounds around him faded. His body was suddenly weightless. The breeze pushed across his face. He slid into an uneasy sleep.

CHAPTER 5

DAY 10

Pacific Palisades, California

OASIS was an acronym for Order of Apocalyptic Survivors In Sync. They were a collective of Californians who’d long ago determined the world as they knew it was more likely than not to end in their lifetimes. They’d joined the secretive society, paid their hefty dues, and drank the Kool-Aid. As the world above them struggled to cope with a plague devouring everything from the Bay Area to the San Fernando Valley and beyond, they were hunkered down inside their doomsday bunker built underneath the famed cliff-perched Getty Villa.

Nobody in the OASIS now could trace the true beginnings of the organization or the self-sustaining bunker. There was an anecdotal history of both that older members passed along to newer ones, but they were murky and led to more questions than answers.

They all knew there were other bunkers. Some were government controlled, like the complex underneath the Denver airport, and some, including the Getty OASIS, were privately held. The government bunkers were meant for people of importance: elected officials and leaders in the fields of medicine, technology, finance, agriculture, and engineering. They could house thousands of people. The private bunkers were designed with a similar goal, to represent the fundamental needs of a society rebuilding itself after disaster. The private bunkers and clubs were much smaller in size, able to accommodate fewer than a hundred survivors each. Keeping the OASIS secret up until TEOTWAKI was one of its basic tenets. It would only expand to outsiders when the moment came to descend into its protective walls.

That, however, had not always been the case. In the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, OASIS members had publicly recruited their friends and neighbors to join. More often than not they were met with skepticism or derision. They were called a doomsday cult and, instead of refuting the assertions, decided to take their club back underground literally and figuratively.

Each member held invitation cards they kept in safe places. Those cards were transferrable if the original owner didn’t or couldn’t survive an apocalypse. They would use the cards to gain entry to the bunker at regular intervals to make certain it was running as it should when the time came.

The bunker itself was spiral. Its original designers had believed stairs would be too difficult to manage, especially if survivors had suffered mobility injuries, so the complex was built around the descending circular path that bore its way deep into the hillside. It was an ingenious corkscrew, not unlike the one in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, that provided a singular path to any spot within the sprawling complex of chambers that populated both sides of the central hallway.

The compound had power through a hydro electric generator driven by water secretly diverted from the Mullholland Dam and Reservoir high in the Hollywood hills.  The gravity pressure of the water drove the hydro turbines, plus provided a source of fresh water. It supplied the toilets and showers and allowed for the irrigation of a small secondary greenhouse, which supplemented the primary source of fresh food—a hydroponic greenhouse that grew algae and potatoes.

The OASIS had long decided that those two sources of food were both the easiest to maintain and provided the best spectrum of nutrients for the survivors who planned to live within the bunker’s walls for as long as was necessary. There was dry storage, which the members would cycle through to keep the provisions within their expiration dates. There was also a healthy supply of MREs, a last resort given the length of their viability and their general lack of taste.

While everybody in the OASIS had their own expertise, their own raison d’être, it was a member named Gilda Luster who ran the food production. She was the one with a green thumb. She’d devised the hydroponics, kept the provisions growing, and was constantly improving the efficiency of her operation. The irrigated greenhouse was a work in progress. She hadn’t quite gotten the grow light temperature in its sweet spot, as she had the larger hydroponics space. She was working on it.

The idea of the apocalypse had always been some esoteric, in-the-future what-if. Despite her full belief it was coming, there was never a hard date. Even the vague sense that she’d somehow lived through disasters before never made the end of the world real. She’d always believed there would be plenty of time to work out the kinks, to improve her methodologies, to be ready.

With the end coming in the form of some superbug, she wasn’t so sure she was ready. She hadn’t worked out all of the kinks. Her methods weren’t quite where she wanted them to be. Until this moment, she’d thought this might be a drill. This illness would force them to fully test their capabilities. They’d be underground for a few weeks, possibly a month or two. She could fine-tune her deficiencies. That was what she’d thought.

Sitting in the bunker’s kitchen four days after moving underground, her mind wasn’t on her job. Instead, Gilda tightened the blond ponytail atop her head and drilled her ice blue eyes into the man in front of her. She’d heard him, but didn’t believe him. If he flinched, if he twitched, maybe that would be a sign he was kidding.

“I’m not kidding,” said Steven Konkoly, a man better known as Doc. “Everything we’re hearing from the surface is that this disease…is…unstoppable. It makes Ebola look like child’s play. The mortality rate is ridiculous.”

“Is that your medical opinion, Doc?” asked Gilda with one eyebrow arched higher than the other. “The mortality rate is ridiculous?”

She was as much frustrated by the situation report as she was with the deliberate, thoughtful pattern of Doc’s speech. She wanted to hurry him up.

“It’s not my opinion,” he said, unlocking her gaze and scanning the faces of the others gathered in the space. “It’s what we’re hearing on the radio. It’s what we’re seeing on television news reports. Like you, Gilda…and…everyone else here with us, I’m not on the surface to come to any medical opinion on my own.”

Doc exhaled and put his hands on his hips. He was tall and thin and always wore the tense expression of someone concerned about everything all of the time. He looked at the assembled survivors over the tops of his omnipresent reading glasses. They were gathered in the kitchen of their underground bunker.

Along with Doc and Gilda were the bunker’s receptionist and operational secretary, Betty; the man in charge of radio communications, Victor; a firefighter nicknamed Ritz; and two married couples—Barbie and Hal, and Sam and Loretta. There were others in the bunker who hadn’t joined the impromptu meeting in the kitchen, and there were those present who weren’t officially part of the group, but who’d found their way there by happenstance or casual invitation.

One of those guests was a woman named Claudia, a waitress whom Gilda had invited to join her. They’d been at Claudia’s restaurant when Gilda received an alert suggesting she move to the bunker and bring along a “plus one” if possible.

Claudia had been topping off Gilda’s fourth cup of coffee and leaving the check. She’d thanked Gilda and lamented the lack of diner traffic because of an illness the news was calling the Super Flu, even though it wasn’t any known strain of influenza.

She pointed at the thirty-two-inch wall-mounted flat-screen television in the corner of the diner. Closed-captioning populated along the bottom of the display while an impeccably styled reporter named Lane Turner read the news.

“That guy on the news said people should go home and lock their doors,” Claudia informed Gilda. “He said to shut off the air-conditioning and close all of the windows. The Super Flu, that’s not a flu, is airborne.”

Lane Turner earnestly delivered the latest breaking information on the developing story about the untreatable bug killing people across the Golden State.

The waitress waved the coffee pot in a circle as she spoke. The black, muddy drink swooshed like a tidal pool in the glass carafe. “I wish I had somewhere to go.” Claudia sighed. “I’d dig a hole and stay there.”

Gilda placed her hands flat on the laminate table, the condensation from the coffee cup wetting her palms. She narrowed her gaze at Claudia and bit her lower lip before taking a leap. Her stomach tightened. A cramp intensified in her gut and she winced. But it passed and she exhaled. “I could offer you a place. I have a hole in the ground. There’s food, water, a bed.”

Claudia shook her head with an embarrassed smile. “I couldn’t. You don’t know me. I brought you a plate of egg whites and three cups of coffee.”

“Four,” Gilda corrected. “You brought me four. And I’d like to help you. Let me.”

Claudia looked over one shoulder and then the other, her gaze lingering on the muscular black man working the grill behind the counter. “Could I bring my friend Arthur?” she asked. “He’s a cook. And he’s…we’re…I like him.”

Gilda motioned toward the thin young man working next to Arthur. There was something familiar about him, something comfortable. “What about him?” she asked. “The other cook.”

“Danny?” asked Claudia in a voice above a whisper. “What about him?”

Gilda pursed her lips to consider how her own question had sounded. Why had she felt compelled to ask about the cook? It was odd. She admitted that to herself and then decided asking Claudia to join her was odd too. It had been impulsive but somehow compulsory. She’d known that she was to invite people who could contribute, who had special skills or an impressive desire to survive. Had Claudia done any of those things? No. She’d served her coffee and made small talk. But Gilda reasoned that being at work, venturing out into the world when so much of it was already recoiling into dark corners with fear, was something admirable. She could sell that to the rest of the group without a problem. There were rules, yes. But this wasn’t a drill. This was the real thing.

What were they going to do? Kick Claudia out? They wouldn’t do that. She could defend her decision. There was something that told her Claudia belonged with her.

Gilda realized she was staring at Danny and hadn’t answered Claudia’s question. A commiserating smile spread to her high, narrow cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can only bring one person. If I said yes to…?”

“Arthur.”

“Yes, Arthur.” Gilda straightened her head. “If I said yes to Arthur, then might Danny be next? Or the man sitting two booths over? It can only be you.”

Claudia ran her thumb along the long black handle of the carafe. She puffed her cheeks in and out and rolled her eyes, mulling the possibilities.

“How long would we be gone?” she asked. “Not gone, but in the bunker?”

“As long as it takes to make sure we survive.”

Claudia glanced back at Arthur one more time and then nodded, her eyes glistening. She swallowed hard. “I’m in,” she said, “I just need to get a few things. I’ll catch the next bus and meet you back here.”

“No need to get the bus,” Gilda said. “I have a truck. You live around here?”

Claudia laughed. It was a laugh that suggested that as much as Gilda might have a sense about knowing her, she clearly didn’t know enough.

“I can’t afford to live around here,” she said. “I’m east about forty-five minutes.”

“Not a problem,” Gilda offered. “I gotcha.”

Now Claudia sat in the kitchen amongst the others. Her arms were folded across her chest, her face squeezed tight with concern. Gilda looked over at her and Claudia met her gaze. Then the waitress raised her hand.

“Yes?” said Victor. He nodded toward Claudia and rubbed his thumb along the side of a porcelain mug. Its rim was coffee stained.

He was soft-spoken and regal in appearance. Tall and kind-eyed, Victor had a way of making everyone around him feel important. He was in charge even if nothing written or spoken gave him that authority. It was merely understood.

Claudia lowered her hand. She opened her mouth and closed it again without saying anything. She scanned the room, checking with everyone seated or standing around her. She cleared her throat and put both hands onto the table. They were balled into fists. Her thin aging skin stretched across her thick protruding knuckles.

“Go ahead,” encouraged Victor. “The floor is yours.”

Her mouth curled into a frown. It wasn’t so much a scowl but rather the natural resting position of her face. Deep lines stretched downward from the corners of her mouth, giving her face the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“How long are we going to be here?” she asked, her eyes darting around the room. “I don’t want to be here forever. I thought it might be a week or two. I have a life up there. This whole thing seems a little fishy.”

Victor drew the mug to his lips and took a healthy sip from it. He searched the others, perhaps waiting to see if anyone else wanted to field the loaded question. When nobody did, he took it. “Fishy how?” he asked, cradling the mug in his sizable hands.

Claudia shrugged. “I haven’t seen any of these news reports saying that everyone is dying. I watched the news. I didn’t see that. They said it was bad. They didn’t say people died.”

“And?” prompted Victor. He set the mug on the table in front of him.

“And this is weird,” said Claudia. “Gilda randomly invites me down here. Says I can’t bring anybody else. Then all of a sudden, after four days, the world is coming to an end?”

“Is that a question?” asked Victor.

Claudia shrugged again. “No offense, but I get a very creepy vibe down here. It’s like you all want it to be, like, the apocalypse or something.”

Victor eyed Gilda. Gilda sighed and nodded.

“Claudia,” she said, “nobody forced you to come here. Nobody will force you to stay. When I met you, you told me you would dig a hole and stay in it if you could. So I offered you a place here. Again, nobody forced you.”

The room was silent for a moment. Claudia shifted in her seat. She leaned back and adjusted her blouse, picking lint from her chest. “Why did you offer me a place here?” she asked. “Why me? What is it you want from me? I get the sense that you want something from me. I don’t have any money; I don’t have any property. I work double shifts at a diner for minimum and tips. That’s it.”

“Why would you think we want something from you?” asked Gilda. “We haven’t asked anything of you since we arrived. We’ve given you a bed, food, a safe place to stay.”

Claudia pointed at Doc. “That one poked and prodded me when we showed up,” she said. “It was like an alien probe or something.”

“I poked and prodded Gilda too,” said Doc. “And Victor and Ritz. I check everyone who comes here to make sure they’re not bringing disease with them. I’m sorry if that was—”

“I think I want to leave,” Claudia cut in. “I’m not buying what you’re selling. I never should have come here.”

Before anyone could respond, Claudia pushed away from the table and wound her way through the assembled people, from the kitchen, and into the corkscrew. Vic held up a hand to stop Gilda from chasing after her.

“Look,” he said to everyone, “it’s fine. She can leave if she wants. Or, if she calms down, she can stay.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gilda, clearing phlegm from her throat. “Bringing her here was a bad decision.”

Victor shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. Her behavior just now is not completely unexpected. Think about it. We’ve had years now to plan for this. We expected it. We’ve been running drills. We’ve even participated in testing with Interllayar to better understand how we should attack a variety of end-game scenarios. This is nothing new to us.”

He paused and raised the mug. He drew another slug from the cup and held it at his chest, motioning with it as he spoke. “Think about it from her perspective, though.” His dark eyes worked the room as he spoke, drawing nods from those gathered in the room. “She’s not prepared. She’s not expectant. Imagine being Claudia right now. She’s in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. She’s underground. There’s no sunlight. There’s no fresh air.”

“Cabin fever,” offered Ritz, the firefighter.

“Stir-crazy,” added Hal, of Barbie and Hal.

“Exactly,” said Victor. “Add to it that we don’t know her background. She’s an older woman, single, working a difficult job on her feet every day. I can’t imagine life has been as kind to her as it’s been to others. She might suffer from trust issues.”

“That’s a leap,” said Gilda. “I’m all for defending my choice, Victor, but suggesting she has trust issues is—”

“Probably accurate,” said Doc. “She sounded a little paranoid to go with everything else.”

“Another clinical diagnosis?” countered Gilda.

Doc’s jaw clenched. His eyes narrowed.

“Enough,” said Victor, his omnipresent half smile still there. “No need for this right now. Gilda, why don’t you go talk to her? See if you can get to the root of it. If she still wants to leave, we let her go. But it happens with the understanding she cannot come back.”

“That’s fine,” Gilda said, suppressing a cough. “I’ll meet you in the radio room after I talk with her.”

Victor set his mug on the table and pushed it toward the center. “I think we’re done here for now. Let’s meet again tomorrow. Regular shifts apply. Stay calm. If this is the real thing, we’re prepared. If our guest Claudia is right, and it’s not, more good practice.”

The gathering dispersed, and Gilda moved along the hallway, running a hand along the rough-hewn stone walls of the spiral descent. The ambient hum of the generator was more audible in the corkscrew hallway. The farther she traveled down the path, the stronger she felt its rumble in her boots. It was always noticeable until it became like white noise. By the time she’d reached Claudia’s room, she’d forgotten about it completely. She knocked on the door.

“Claudia?”

From beyond the thick door, the waitress responded, “That you, Gilda?”

“Yes. May I come in? We need to talk.”

Claudia didn’t respond, but inside the room, the shuffle of feet growing louder told Gilda her charge would let her into the room. The metal click and slide of the lock preceded the creak of the door as Claudia pulled it inward.

She looked up at Gilda and motioned for her to enter the modest space. Gilda stepped past her and immediately felt the cool rush of air that filled every bedroom.

The rooms, which were cut from the rock, were of course windowless, and the lack of natural light or surface heating from the sun kept them at an even, comfortable temperature. Gilda’s skin pimpled at the cooler climate, and she found the empty chair at Claudia’s desk.

“May I sit?” she asked.

“Be my guest.”

“Thanks,” said Gilda. She spun the chair around and sat on it backwards. She leaned on the low molded plastic back, trying to affect a relaxed, collegial posture. It wasn’t easy for Gilda. She hoped the effort didn’t appear as forced as it felt. She panned the room. It was nearly identical to her own.

The walls were a mixture of stone and plaster, bare except for a small photograph above the bed. It was a candid shot of Claudia with a man Gilda recognized as the cook at the diner. His name was Arthur, she recalled, and she wondered how much he was playing a role in her desire to get back to the surface.

The bed itself was a thin twin mattress atop a piece of plywood cut to fit an array of cinderblocks. It was pressed against the corner opposite the door. It was the most comfortable piece of furniture in the room. In reality, it was the only comfortable piece of furniture in the room. The bed was adorned with a single foam pillow, sheets, and a wool-blend blanket, all military surplus.

Next to the bed on what amounted to the back wall of the room was a simple desk. There were no drawers or cabinets. It was four legs and a tabletop. The chair was foldable plastic.

There was an open wardrobe with shelves on the wall to the right of the entry. It had a bar with a few wire hangers atop the shelves. Gilda noticed Claudia’s clothing still hung there. On one of the wardrobe shelves, a collection of toiletries sat neatly in a small plastic container: a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, deodorant, baby powder, and some body lotion. Her suitcases were at the foot of the bed. They were closed.

Claudia moved to the bed, plopped down on the mattress, and slid her back against the wall. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped them with her arms. She looked like a little girl who’d been sent to her room for playing with her food at the table.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” said Gilda.

Claudia’s face soured. She rounded her shoulders.

“I should rephrase that,” Gilda said. “I hope you’re not leaving, are you?”

“I don’t know,” said Claudia. Her eyes flitted to the photo to her left. Her wizened eyes moistened. “This is a lot to take in, you know? And I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone,” said Gilda.

“Not physically,” said Claudia. “Emotionally, I mean. I don’t know any of you. You seem nice and all. Maybe a little weird, like too nice. I’m still spooked by this place. All of you are strangers. I’m alone.”

Claudia swallowed the last couple of words, her voice warbling as she appeared to fight back the emotion she’d lamented. She blinked at the tears that had swelled and began streaming down her cheeks.

“I understand,” said Gilda. “We are strangers. And conventional wisdom would tell you that if something seems too good to be true, like a stranger offering you refuge, it probably is.”

Claudia dabbed at her tears with her fingertips. “Exactly,” she said. “And I miss Arthur. I shouldn’t have left him up there. If people aren’t dying, I’m a fool for leaving him. If people are dying, I’m a horrible person for leaving him.”

Gilda stood from the chair and spun it around to slide it into its place under the desk. She crossed the floor, stepping on the round rug at the center of it, to sit on the bed. She eased onto the mattress next to Claudia and sat on its edge.

“You’re not a horrible person or a fool,” she said. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. I know it’s trite, but it’s true. We do what we need to do when it comes to survival. It’s instinctual. Besides, wouldn’t Arthur want you to be safe?”

Claudia bit her lower lip, appearing to consider the question with more intensity than Gilda would have thought. Claudia’s eyes brimmed again with tears.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, yes, he would. Of course he would. But with the way I up and left him…”

Gilda let the unfinished thought hang in the air. She considered a half dozen responses before placing a hand on Claudia’s knee. She looked at Claudia, trying to gain her attention. “Can I play shrink for a second?”

Claudia locked eyes with Gilda, searching for an explanation. “Shrink?”

“Yes,” said Gilda. “I’m an amateur psychologist. I like to get inside people’s heads to better understand what makes them tick, what drives them.”

Claudia’s frown deepened, but she shrugged. “I guess.”

Gilda shifted on the edge of the mattress, turning her body more toward the waitress. The wiry mattress springs creaked against the movement. “I think your issues with being here, with living amongst strangers in an underground bunker, have more to do with how you feel about yourself than you do about us.”

As soon as the words had escaped her lips, Gilda wondered if she should have said them. She was making a huge assumption about a woman she hardly knew. She held her breath while Claudia appeared to mull it over.

Half a minute passed before the waitress nodded slowly. Claudia’s gaze was set across the room on the desk and plastic chair. It was distant, ponderous. It looked to Gilda as if Claudia saw something in her mind’s eye, but it wasn’t in this room. It was miles away, maybe in the diner, maybe in her apartment, maybe on the beach walking hand in hand with Arthur.

“Maybe,” Claudia conceded, breaking the silence. “I’m usually the one who doubts everything, the skeptic. You wait tables long enough and you learn a lot about people. You start to expect the worst and become surprised when people are good, instead of being disappointed in them when they don’t meet expectations.”

Claudia blinked from her reverie and turned her attention back to Gilda. She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

Gilda had the sense Claudia was holding something back, that she was talking around whatever it was that truly bothered her. She didn’t dig though. She let the woman talk.

“I’m probably disappointed in myself,” she said. “I didn’t question anything. I saw a chance to hide and I took it. That’s not me. I thought it wasn’t, anyhow. I thought I was tougher than that. I thought I was more…hardened. I guess not.”

“That’s introspective,” said Gilda, “and depressing.”

The two women shared a smile and a chuckle. Claudia wiped her eyes again. She lowered her knees, stretching her legs and allowing her feet to hang off the side of the bed. She yawned and shook her head.

“I’ll stay for now,” she said. “But not because you’re making me. Because I gotta know what’s going on out there before I leave this place.”

“Good,” said Gilda. “I think you made the right decision. Remember, nobody is forcing you to stay here. Any of us can leave at any time.”

Claudia nodded and Gilda pushed herself to her feet, the mattress giving way under the force of her hands. Both women straightened their clothes and said their goodbyes. Gilda reminded Claudia about dinner, adjusted her ponytail, and headed for the door.

She turned the knob to open it and stopped when Claudia called after her. The waitress was standing now, her arms folded across her chest. Gilda, her hand still on the knob, looked over her shoulder and waited.

“Can I ask you a weird question?” asked Claudia. She was absently scratching her arm.

“Sure.”

“Do you ever get the sense we’ve met before?” asked Claudia. “I mean, like we’re not really strangers?”

Gilda took her hand off the knob and faced Gilda. She wasn’t sure how to respond. This, she was sure, was what Claudia had been holding back, what she’d danced around during their circular conversation.

“I know it sounds crazy,” said Claudia, “but even that day at the diner I felt I knew you. I think that’s why I came here. I trusted you for some reason. You were familiar.”

Gilda took a step back into the room. “How so?”

Claudia glanced at the floor. “I don’t know. I just had the overwhelming sense that we’d met and that you’d helped me find safety before. It sounds stupid. I—”

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” said Gilda. “It’s why I invited you here. You were familiar to me too.”

Claudia was scratching both arms now. “I don’t remember you being a regular at the diner. I’m good with faces. I associate them with tips. It reminds me whether or not to go out of my way with this customer or that. I don’t have a sense about you, except that I do.”

“I’d never been to the diner before,” said Gilda. “I’m in the area a lot. I’ve seen the place. I may have even walked inside before to get out of the heat, maybe use the restroom. It’s familiar to me. But the other day was the first time I’ve eaten there. I’d never talked to you before, I don’t think.”

The women stared at each other. Gilda thought neither of them knew what to do with the information they’d just shared with one another. Then she went a step farther. “I felt the same way about that cook.”

Claudia tilted her head in confusion. “Arthur?”

Gilda shook her head. “No, the other one.”

“Danny.”

“Yes,” Gilda confirmed. “Danny.”

“That’s why you asked me about him?”

Gilda nodded. “I couldn’t place it. I still can’t. But I get these waves of déjà vu. Only they’re not déjà vu. They’re stronger than that. And sometimes they come with—”

“Headaches,” said Claudia.

Gilda’s eyes widened. Her pulse quickened.

“You think it’s the disease?” asked Claudia. Her face stretched with worry, making the thin crow’s-feet that fanned out from the corners of her eyes more apparent. “The super flu that’s not a flu, I mean. Are we sick? Is it playing with our heads? Are we infected and just don’t know it yet?”

“I don’t think so,” said Gilda. “But honestly, Claudia, I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

CHAPTER 6

DAY 10

Los Angeles, California

Danny heard his dog, Maggie, barking before he heard the knock at the door. It was more of a pounding, the kind of sound that comes from the side of a fist banging repeatedly against a cheap metal apartment door. Given the low rent of both his efficiency apartment and the neighborhood in general, he’d recently installed three slide-bar locks on its front door and a metal bar that prevented the back slider from opening.

He was on the second floor of a three-story building. There was no elevator. Whoever came to visit had to trudge up a dank, narrow staircase that had made moving in his few belongings challenging. He was thankful the efficiency came with a Murphy bed that folded into the wall behind a pair of French doors.

He was sitting on the bed watching the news about the spread of the disease when the knocks came. There was cell phone video from a bunch of students collapsing while awaiting treatment at UCLA. A lot of the video was blurred because the newsman, Lane Turner, had told viewers it was too disturbing to show.

Even with the blurring, the blood was visible. The screams were audible. They were almost as loud as the incessant pounding on his door.

“Okay,” he said. “Hang on.”

He stomped the short distance to the door, looping his fingers inside Maggie’s collar to restrain her, and checked the peephole.

On the other side was a warped, fish-eye view of somebody in a yellow hazmat suit. There might be more than one person, but he couldn’t see. One was enough to obscure anything else on the other side of his door.

“Who is it?” he said, stepping back from the door.

Maggie was grumbling but had stopped barking. He eyed her and she sat at his side. He let go of her collar. She was a good dog.

“Cal Guard, sir,” came the muffled voice on the other side of the door. “We’re evacuating residents and escorting them to a secure location. Could you please open your door?”

Maggie whimpered. Danny looked at her and put a finger to his lips. She quieted and licked her snout. He stepped back to the peephole. Yellow filled his vision.

“What secure location?”

“It’s secure, sir. We’re not at liberty to discuss specifics. We can say it’s in southern California and it’s a comfortable—”

“Secure location,” interrupted Danny.

“Yes, sir. Please open the door.”

“Do I have to open the door?”

“Yes.”

Danny flexed his hands, balling them into fists before stretching his fingers. He thought about his karate lessons. He hadn’t been to the dojo in a week. He wished his sensei were there with him. He’d have a much better sense of how to handle overly aggressive Army reservists.

Sure, the soldiers were merely doing their jobs. They were following orders. But Danny didn’t like being told to leave his home. It had happened before, when his wife left him for a Silicon Valley douchebag. She’d cheated on him and kicked him out. Then she’d sold the place and moved north to the Bay. He was stuck with the debt and an old VW he couldn’t afford to drive. If it weren’t for Maggie, a dog who’d found him as much as he’d found her, and this crappy apartment, he’d have nothing.

He wasn’t about to give up next to nothing to a bunch of Cal Guard bullies. They’d pushed a button his ex had forged. He decided he wasn’t going with them no matter what they said.

“Do you have a search warrant?”

Danny knew they didn’t. He was stalling, trying to formulate some semblance of the beginnings of the start of a plan.

Standing there and fighting them wouldn’t work. He wasn’t a black belt. He wasn’t a brown belt either. There were too many of them anyhow. Granted, he didn’t know how many of them there were. More than one would be too many. They were trained soldiers; he wasn’t. He was a fry cook.

“The governor of California has declared martial law for the safety of all citizens,” said the voice. “We have the right to—”

“I thought we were under a state of emergency,” said Danny, taking a step back from the door. He raised his voice to compensate for the distance. “Big difference.”

“The threat level is elevated. We’re now under martial law. Article 1 section 9 of the Constitution of the United States allows for the suspension of habeas corpus during times of threatened public safety. If you don’t let us in, we’ll be forced to make entry through an alternative method. It won’t be pleasant for either of us.”

There were other voices outside. They were muffled too, but they were distinct. He would be outmatched if he stayed.

“I’d rather stay.”

“Not an option, sir.” The voice sounded more distant, as if the speaker had moved away from the door. “Your safety is our primary concern. To ensure it, we need you to come with us to the nearest secure facility.”

“I’d like to stay in my apartment,” said Danny. “I’m not sick and—”

Something heavy pounded against the door, startling Danny. Maggie stood, squared her shoulders, and snarled.

Another bang. Danny felt the vibration rattle through his body. Maggie’s snarl turned into a bark and she bared her teeth. The hair at her neck stood on end. She was equal parts frightened and angry.

Danny glanced over one shoulder, surveying the four-hundred-square-foot space. Then he checked over the other, eyeing the bathroom and the kitchen. They were the only other two rooms in the house. He briefly considered hiding in the closet.

He took another step away from the door as a bang bent the jamb. Another pound at the door from the outside and the dingy yellow-tinged light from the outside hallway cracked through the edges. All three of the slide bars threatened to separate from the doorjamb. Danny hadn’t done as good a job installing them as he’d thought.

“C’mon, girl,” Danny said to Maggie and spun toward the rear of the small apartment. He glanced at the slider, but given the obstacle of the metal security bar that kept it shut, he decided instead to dart into the galley kitchen. The dog gave chase and together they made it into the cramped space before a percussive explosion told both of them the door was breached.

Danny climbed onto the counter and slid open a window above the sink. He coaxed Maggie up and awkwardly pulled her onto the counter with him. Her rear paws slid into the stainless-steel sink. She wobbled on a stack of plates, but he steadied her before stepping through the small window and onto a Juliet balcony that framed the window on the rear of the building.

He balanced himself against the wrought-iron railing, squeezed onto the narrow platform. He knocked a leaded glass soap dispenser from the ledge and onto the balcony at his feet.

He called for Maggie to join him. But when she tried to leap through, a pair of men in bright yellow hazmat suits appeared in the kitchen. They shot to the sink, moving with surprising speed given the weight and design of their suits.

“Maggie!” called Danny. “C’mon!”

Maggie looked at him, her front paws on the window ledge, and then back at the soldiers who approached. She snarled again, barked at them, and when one tried grabbing her haunches, she spun and launched herself at him. One of the suits backed away as Maggie tore into the arm of the one who’d grabbed at her. She shook her head, jerking it violently from one side to the other with the soldier’s Tyvek-covered arm in her jaws.

Danny called her again, but she wasn’t having it. She loosened her bite for an instant, only to chomp down again to grab a better hold. The man inside the Tyvek suit howled, and fog bloomed on his see-through plastic mask. He tried punching Maggie, but she was at an angle, her feet in the sink, and he couldn’t make a good connection.

There were several others in the home now too. Their voices came from near the front door. Outside he could hear sirens; they were close. The whip of helicopter rotors thumped in the air above him. The rumble of large trucks that sounded more like tanks thundered beyond the apartment building’s edge.

His neighborhood, while never a candidate for Best Places To Live, sounded and felt like a war zone now. He couldn’t wrap his head around it.

A flash of something dark caught Danny’s attention, and he glanced away from Maggie to the second Tyvek-suited soldier who’d appeared at the sink. He or she, Danny couldn’t be sure which, was raising an arm. In the thick glove was a long black stick with two metal prongs on the end. Whatever it was, the soldier was fumbling with it, trying to activate it, turn it on, or get a better grip.

Danny reached down and grabbed the soap dispenser at one end. With his fingers wrapped around the heavy glass, he leaned through the window, flinging it at the armed soldier’s head.

The glass hit the soldier squarely on the face with a dense cracking sound. The soldier’s head snapped back as the soldier stumbled to one side, extending the black baton.

The stick jabbed the soldier in Maggie’s grasp and emitted the zapping sound a bug catcher makes when electrocuting mosquitoes. The soldier began convulsing wildly.

“Maggie!” Danny shouted.

The dog turned towards Danny and he helped her through the opening and onto the ledge. He didn’t look back, but heard the scramble of people at the sink. “Maggie, stay!” In one fluid motion, he climbed onto the wrought-iron railing and jumped.

It was a short fall, maybe eight feet. The building was nestled into the slope of a hill, so that the first floor was half-buried on the back side of the structure. Danny landed on both feet, spun, and called to Maggie.

The dog paced in the narrow space, avoiding the yellow gloved hands reaching through the window. She snapped at one, catching a finger and buying her some time. She squeezed her head through the bars at one corner of the balcony, which were wide enough for her entire body to fit between. She hedged and whimpered.

“C’mon, girl,” Danny urged. He held out his hands as if to catch her. “Now, Maggie. C’mon!”

The dog stepped back, then forward again. A yellow, masked head poked through the window, then the torso followed.

“Now, Mag—”

The dog jumped and hit Danny square in the chest, sending them both tumbling to the asphalt. Danny’s head snapped back and knocked against the rough, hard surface. White bursts of light sparked in his vision, but he kept his wits about him and scrambled to his feet. He slapped his thigh, ignored the sharp pain at the crown of his head, and the two of them ran away from the building they’d called home.

Danny had no sense of how long it might be before they’d be back, but he wasn’t thinking about that at the moment. He was trying to put as much distance between himself and the soldiers calling after him as he could.

He ran along familiar streets that suddenly seemed foreign. He stuck close to the buildings, ducking into shadows where he could.

Maggie kept pace, her tongue wagging from the side of her snout. She looked happy. Running always made her happy. And this time she wasn’t constrained by a leash.

Danny thought about what the men had said about martial law. Was the sickness that bad? Were that many people dying? The news hadn’t made it sound so dire. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe the government didn’t want them knowing. Instead, they chose to sneak up on unsuspecting, healthy people and take them into custody.

Secure facility? What secure facility? It sounded to Danny more like a quarantine or something. He wasn’t one for conspiracies, but this sure felt like one. Then again, he was a divorced fry cook with a prepaid cell phone. Who was he to know anything about anything?

He stopped running and felt his front pocket, then his back. His cell phone wasn’t there. Neither was his wallet. He’d left them behind. Danny cursed himself as he stood flat against the wall of an Asian grocery. It was closed. The doors were padlocked. He didn’t have to worry about anybody seeing him here.

Maggie stood at his side, looking up at him expectantly. Her tongue and tail wagged.

“You know what my dad used to say,” he said to his dog. “This world is made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, and morons.”

The dog cocked her head to one side. She blinked and shifted her weight on her front paws as she sat.

“Guess which one I am?” he asked. “We’ve got no money, no ID, and no phone.”

The dog tilted her head the opposite direction. She shifted her weight again. Her tail whipped back and forth along the concrete sidewalk in front of the grocery’s entrance.

“I’m the mor—”

A rumble stopped Danny midsentence. He pressed his back against the metal bars that protected the glass doors leading into the grocery. The entry was recessed from the rest of the frontage. He was trying to hide while at the same time watching for whatever it was that was rolling in his direction.

The rumble grew louder. It was coming from his left. He squeezed himself into the corner of the recessed entry, hoping that whoever, or whatever, was about to pass by him would be looking straight ahead and not see him from their vantage point. He snapped his fingers and Maggie pressed next to him before lying down on the cement.

Danny could feel the noise in his chest as it amplified. It vibrated the metal bars. It made his teeth chatter. It was a mechanical roar, the sound of metal and grinding gears. He caught his first glimpse of the monster that made the noise in the reflection in the glass opposite him in the alcove. It was warped and somewhat obscured by the vertical bars protecting the glass. It was a tank. A military freaking tank. It wasn’t alone; rolling behind it in a parade of desert brown and olive green came Humvees and other large trucks that Danny couldn’t identify other than to say they were mean looking.

He’d heard on the news, when the anchor talked about the emergency declaration, that the California Military Department, known as Cal Guard, was divided into the Army Guard, the Air Guard, the Reserve, and youth programs. The governor had activated the Army and the Reserve and was planning to mobilize the Air Guard if needed.

As a pair of Black Hawk helicopters thundered overhead, Danny guessed they were mobile already. He remembered something about the 146th Airlift Wing, but it didn’t mean anything to him.

He crouched, squatting with his butt on his heels, and covered his ears. The parade of war machines thundered past him with a deafening roar. He didn’t know where it was heading, but he could guess. If the state was rounding up healthy people and putting them in secure locations, they’d need guards to keep them there.

Danny figured there’d be roadblocks too. The state would want to limit movement and restrict access to areas that were either clean or infected.

He did notice that none of the soldiers in the trucks or Humvees were wearing the bright yellow Tyvek hazmat suits he’d seen on the soldiers who had broken into his apartment. He couldn’t see all of them, he was sure, so he considered that maybe only the ones tasked with direct contact were wearing the suits.

The last of the vehicles rolled from sight and Danny’s pulse slowed a bit, although it was still pounding against his neck and in his chest. He leaned back against the bars and wondered what he should do now. Where should he go? It wasn’t like he could just up and drive out of southern California. Even if he could evade the Cal Guard, which was unlikely, and get to his VW, he couldn’t afford the gas.

He chuckled thinking about the uselessness of a car he couldn’t afford. He’d thought so many times about selling it. He figured he could get a couple of grand for it, but he couldn’t part with the only asset he owned. Danny was someone who liked owning his own things. The VW was the last vestige of a life where he owned everything, including his dignity.

Now the VW sat parked in a garage two blocks from his cheap apartment. He only took it out for a spin once a month to keep its engine running smooth. If he didn’t have money in the bank, he could always grab some cash from the stash he kept in the glove box.

The glove box.

His emergency gas stash. There had to be sixty bucks in the car.

He didn’t have his keys on him. But that wasn’t a big deal. He’d left a spare set with the garage attendant in case they had to move the car for some reason. There was round-the-clock access to the office in the basement. If he could get there, he’d be golden. If he could get there.

Danny took stock of where he was. He figured he was maybe two miles from the garage. In his VW, he’d have a place to sleep for the night, somewhere to stay out of sight while he planned his next move, and he could grab some much-needed cash. There might even be a can of stale Pringles under the passenger’s seat, and he was pretty sure he’d left a half full bottle of water in the driver’s side door when he’d last driven it two weeks earlier. It wasn’t ideal. It was something though.

He stepped slowly from the alcove and stretched his neck to check both ways. The street was empty in both directions, save the shrinking parade, which was rolling farther away from him. He patted his thigh and Maggie followed. The two of them stuck close to the low-slung buildings that lined the street. He passed a nail salon, another grocery, a poke restaurant, a coffee shop, a secondhand clothing store that claimed to sell vintage fare, and a pharmacy. All of them were closed. All of the doors were locked, the lights off.

He carefully crossed an intersection and led Maggie along the edge of another row of commercial buildings in various states of disrepair: an electronics repair shop, a travel agency, another nail salon.

Los Angeles, Danny had decided, was a never-ending collection of block-long strip centers, apartment houses, and hillside bungalows. Its buildings, like its people, were rife with has-beens and wannabes at the bottom, with the allure of fame and wealth sitting on high like an attainable dream. It was those dreams at high altitude, perched on the hillsides, that kept everything below grinding away.

Danny was certainly a has-been, even if he hadn’t aspired to the Hollywood lifestyle and failed. Thing was, he’d been a wannabe and failed. That was what made him who he was now. He was a man whose dreams had never materialized, not yet.

His dream had up and left him for the Bay Area. He was little more than a man who had been in love, had been a husband, and had been driven. None of this, however, was on his mind as he turned right and sprinted diagonally across the empty street to the other side.

That was a good thing about a plague. It took your mind off your problems.

Danny darted between two parallel-parked cars and hopped onto the wide sidewalk. As he moved with hurried, short steps, he noticed there weren’t any parking spaces. That was another thing about Los Angeles. There was never any free parking, apparently even in the direst circumstances.

He wondered if the cars were there because their owners were in secure locations, if the Cal Guard had managed to corral them and take them to wherever it was the healthy people were going.

None of the cars had tickets on the windshields. That was another giveaway that things bigger than parking enforcement had engaged police. Danny stopped, trying to slow his pulse and the rhythmic throb that radiated from the back of his head.

He found an alcove, a recessed entrance to a vitamin shop, and bent over at his waist. He rested his hands on his knees and took slow, deep breaths. It was something his sensei had taught him: how to slow his heart rate and breathing by consciously controlling it. It was a tactic meant to preserve energy and strength. The sensei also told him it slowed the buildup of lactic acid in muscles, but Danny wasn’t so sure about that.

Maggie panted, wagging her tail, and looked up at her master as if awaiting instructions. She was the smartest dog Danny had ever owned. Truthfully, she was the only dog he’d owned. He’d never been a dog person until he found her on the street. She wouldn’t leave him alone, following him back to his place. They’d been virtually inseparable since. He was grateful for her unconditional love, something he’d never found anywhere else, beyond maybe his mother. Regardless, Maggie’s love was the kind that only dogs provided. It was always there, on the surface, available for consumption.

Maggie was grateful for him too. She thanked him daily with her tail wags, her desire to be close to him, and what to Danny looked like a perpetual smile. Well, it was perpetual when she wasn’t tearing into the hazmat-suit-covered arm of a Cal Guard intruder.

“We’re headed to the car,” said Danny. “Maybe we’ll find a treat there.”

Maggie’s ears pricked at the word treat. She shifted her weight on her paws and looked in the direction they were headed.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said T-R-E-A-T. Not fair. Look, if there’s anything there, you can have it. You don’t even have to share.”

She looked back at Danny and sat. She stopped panting and licked her chops. Then she glanced back up the street and her ears pricked again. She stood. Her stare was intense, expectant. She was on the verge of barking. Danny could see it in her posture, in the way she looked like a coiled wire ready to spring. She worked her front paws up and down as if the concrete sidewalk was molten.

Danny peered around the edge of the alcove. He’d caught his breath. His pulse was slow and the pain was dull now. He squinted to focus his vision and saw what had the dog’s attention.

A trio of people was walking toward them. They were in the middle of the street, not making any effort to hide themselves. As they drew closer, Danny could see they wore surgical masks. One of them carried a baseball bat. Another had a handgun. The third, perhaps a woman, held something in her arms. All three of them were laden with large packs.

Danny ducked back into the alcove. It was too late. They’d seen him. Or Maggie.

“Hey,” called one of them. A man’s voice. “We see you. We see your dog.”

Danny patted his thigh. Maggie glanced at him but stood her ground.

“Stay,” he said under his breath. “Good girl. Stay.”

Maggie let out a guttural-sounding growl. It wasn’t quite a bark, but it was the beginning of one. It was the same sound she made when she wanted to go out in the morning. She’d nudge him at the side of the bed and make that sound. If he ignored her, it grew into a full-fledged, weighty bark.

“Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay. Stay.”

The man’s voice echoed off the buildings and along the empty street. “Dude, we see you. We just want to walk past.”

“Feel free,” said Danny.

He could hear their footsteps now. They were getting close. Maggie was getting antsy. The hair was prickling at her neck.

“Your dog bite?” asked the other man. “We gotta worry about it?”

“Depends entirely upon you,” Danny said. If they went about their business and kept moving, Maggie would sit and watch. If they tried something, she’d rip into them. He wouldn’t have said that before today, before she’d done it to the yellow-suited soldier.

The footsteps stopped. Danny’s pulse quickened again. The throb in the back of his head returned. This was not a good day.

“We’d feel a lot better about this if you weren’t hiding behind that wall,” said the first man. “We just want to pass.”

Danny wasn’t armed with anything other than Maggie’s instinct. If they opened fire on him, he’d be a sitting duck. Actually, he was a sitting duck regardless. All they had to do was round the edge of the alcove. He had nowhere to hide.

He exhaled and took a large step forward. His hands were open and above his head. His eyes were on Maggie until he emerged from the alcove. That was when he saw the gun leveled at his chest.

Danny raised his hands higher. “I’m not armed. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a cell phone, no keys, nothing.”

He was so focused on the gun he couldn’t see the smile spread across the armed man’s face.

“Dude.” The man chuckled through the mask, the edges of words dulled by the filtering fabric that covered half of his face. “If I wanted your money, I’d take it.”

Danny’s eyes shifted and he got his first good look at the trio. The man with the bat had it slung across his shoulder like a baseball player on deck. He too wore a mask. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin was pale. He wore a black Dodgers cap and a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the hint of colorful tattoos on both biceps. He was muscular. His shoulders were broad and he stood there with an arrogance Danny had only seen in athletes, movie stars, and one particular tech gazillionaire from the Bay Area.

Then he saw the woman. Her eyes were red, swollen, and framed by large bruise-colored half circles. Even with the mask on, it was obvious she hadn’t slept.

In her arms she held a baby swaddled in a pink blanket. Danny couldn’t see how old it was, but the woman cradled it like a newborn. Her tight-fitting T-shirt, made out of a glossy wicking material, clung to her body and revealed what looked like the aftereffects of a recent pregnancy. She was thin, but carried the soft belly of a new mother.

The man with the gun was taller than his companions. He held the gun in a way that suggested he’d fired it before. He stood with his feet shoulder width apart, angled forward awkwardly, with his hips tucked behind his torso.

He wore eyeglasses with black rectangular frames. Thick, bushy black eyebrows curled over the tops of the glasses. It almost made him look like Groucho Marx but with a smaller, less impressive nose. His skin was ruddy, his hair wavy and slicked back with product. Or maybe it was wet. Danny couldn’t tell.

His eyes darted amongst them. They were fifteen or twenty feet from him.

Maggie stood still. Her muscles were tense, her jaw square. She was ready to go if Danny gave the word.

“What do you want, then?” asked Danny. “If you want to pass, just pass.”

“You’re the first person we’ve seen,” said the armed man. “And you’ve got Cujo here, so…”

Danny kept his hands as high as he could hold them. His shoulders protested. A throb of pain pulsed in the back of his head. He winced.

“Where are you going?” asked the man with the bat. “You’re not with Cal Guard, right? You don’t look like you’re with Cal Guard. They’re the only ones we’ve seen with dogs.”

“Them and LAPD,” said the armed man. His eyebrows moved up and down when he spoke.

Danny shook his head. “I’m not with either.”

The man with the gun glanced over his shoulder. Then he eyed Danny up and down again. “You can put your hands down, dude. I’m not gonna shoot you.”

Danny lowered his arms. Sweat trickled down his spine. He could feel cold perspiration under his arms now.

“Not yet.” The man chuckled. He lowered the weapon. “But you might want to ask Cujo to stand down. I got some questions for you.”

Danny glanced at Maggie and back at the trio. He realized the bruises under the woman’s eyes weren’t actually bruises. They were dark circles from lack of sleep. The baby shifted in the blanket. It looked like a caterpillar moving inside a cocoon.

“I doubt I have any answers,” said Danny. He motioned past the trio with his head. “I just wanna keep heading that way. That’s it.” He patted his thigh. “Sit, Maggie.” She did.

“You won’t get far,” said the armed man. “They’re setting up roadblocks and checkpoints. They’re hauling in everybody they can find within a five-mile radius. They’re saying this is one of the epicenters.”

“Epicenters?” Danny echoed. “Epicenter of what?”

“The Super Flu,” the woman said, her voice dripping with exhaustion. The words blended together as if she didn’t have the energy to enunciate. If Danny didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was drunk. Then again, maybe she was.

“It’s not a flu,” said Danny. “The news called it that, but it’s not a flu.”

“Whatever it is, this is one of the places they think is responsible for it,” said Bat Man. “They’re sending everybody to a—”

“Secure location,” Danny cut in. “Yeah.”

The armed man took a half step forward. The gun was still at his side, but he adjusted his grip. His eyebrows lowered and his eyes narrowed behind the glasses. “You’re not clueless. You know about the quarantine.”

Danny’s eyes were on the gun. “I never said I didn’t.”

“You work for them?” asked the woman. Her tone was shrill, but the words still melted together.

“For who?” Sweat was coating Danny’s neck now. His lower back was drenched.

The muscular man shifted the bat from one shoulder to the other. The one with a gun took another step forward. Maggie stood.

“The government,” said the woman. It sounded more like “gubmuhnt,” but Danny understood her. She cleared her throat. The sound was thick and raspy, like she was trying to get something up and out of her chest.

“No,” he said defensively. He wanted to raise his hands again. “I’m a fry cook.”

“They got spies, you know,” said Bat Man.

“Spies?” Danny was confused.

He had no idea what they were talking about, but he could sense the situation deteriorating. He swallowed hard. A wave of pain thumped in the back of his head and stretched to his neck. “Look, why don’t you go your way and I’ll go mine? I’m just trying to—”

He stopped himself short. He wasn’t about to tell these people he had a car. That could be suicide. They already appeared stressed to the point of instability.

“To what?” asked the man with the gun.

Danny searched his mind for the right words. It was hard to think. The pain made it difficult to focus.

“To what?” Bat Man persisted.

“Get out of here,” Danny said. “I just want to get out of here. Cal Guard came to my house. They tried to take me. We barely got away. That’s why I don’t have any cash, phone, or keys. Now I’m screwed. I don’t want any trouble. I just want to go where I was headed. That’s it.”

“How’d you get away?” asked the armed man.

Danny started to tell them and then thought better of it. “How’d you get away?” he countered. “I’ve been telling you a lot about me. You haven’t said anything about who you are. How do I know you’re not spies?”

Danny knew that idea was ludicrous. They weren’t spies any more than he was. But he needed to deflect, to put them on their heels. The whole idea of spies was paranoia as far as he was concerned.

Even in the midst of martial law, there was no way the California government was organized enough to employ spies in the early hours of a crisis. They couldn’t even balance a budget or figure out how to manage a water crisis, how were they going to fund and manage espionage?

The man with the gun cocked his head to one side. His tone softened. “Good point. Even if you were a spy, you couldn’t contact anyone without a phone. Not without running to one of those checkpoints. By then we’d be gone.”

The woman coughed. It was a bark more than a cough, but it was wet. Her body jerked and the man with the bat quickly moved to her, putting his free hand under the swaddled child.

The man with the gun stared at the two of them for a moment, glanced at the other man, and they exchanged a nod. He took two more steps toward Danny. Maggie grumbled. Her tail swept across the concrete once, twice.

“We gotta go,” said the man with the gun. “We’ve got somewhere to be. Sounds like you do too. We’ll forget we saw you if you forget you saw us.”

Danny nodded. While he didn’t fully understand why they were so edgy, so wary of a passing stranger on an empty street, he didn’t question it.

“Sounds like you know as much as us,” said the man with the gun, “but in case you don’t, we’re hearing that everybody gets tested when they get to the secure location. The healthy go to one site, the sick to the other. Doesn’t matter if it’s a kid or a mom, a husband, or whatever. They’re separating the good eggs and bad eggs. No questions. No answers.”

Danny wondered what they’d done to escape the secure location. What had they already seen that made them so…whatever it was they were? Danny noticed for the first time the bat had a dark stain on its sweet spot, and it looked like there was a clump of hair stuck to it.

“Go ahead,” he said, trying not to stare at the bat. “Be careful a couple of blocks up. It looks like the Cal Guard is using it for transport.”

The woman coughed again, this time louder and with sharp edges. Her face squeezed with pain and she hunched her shoulders. A dark spot appeared at the center of her mask and leached into the fabric, spreading into an abstract circle. It was blood.

Danny unconsciously took a couple of steps back. The trio moved back into the center of the road and kept walking. The man with the bat now had an arm around the woman’s waist. She wobbled as she walked.

She wasn’t drunk, and the slur was from exhaustion. The woman was sick. She was drugged.

Danny watched them disappear around a corner and squatted on his heels from the release of tension in his body. Maggie came over to lick the sweat from his face. Her hot breath was not the kind of unconditional love he wanted right now. He rubbed her behind the ears, moving her face from his, and thanked her. “Good girl, Maggie. You’re a good girl.”

She grunted and tried to lick his ear. Her tongue lapped at the air.

After a minute, Danny stood. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve and started walking again. If his next encounter with a person was anything like the one he’d just had with the triumvirate of creepy, he was fine with never seeing another human again, that was for sure. It was the only certain thing at the moment in a world he realized he didn’t understand anymore.

It took him two hours to wind his way to the garage. He avoided any street where there appeared to be traffic. He stayed away from pedestrians and listened for sirens and the sounds of military trucks. Finally, after walking five times as far as he’d originally planned, he crossed the street and into the first floor of the parking structure. It was cooler in the garage, a welcome break from what had become an abnormally warm and dry afternoon in the city.

His footsteps and Maggie’s panting echoed off the concrete walls of the garage. As they trudged toward the office, they shuffled along.

He leaned on the door and knocked.

No one answered.

He pressed the service buzzer and got no response, pressed his face to the door, and yelled through it for help. Nobody came.

He looked at Maggie and shrugged. She stared back at him with nothing to offer.

“All right, girl, we gotta figure this out.”

He tried the door handle, feeling stupid for not having attempted that first. But it didn’t budge. He stood there for another minute, considering whether he should try to break into the office or break into his car. Neither was appealing.

Then he decided his car might be unlocked. That was a possibility. So rather than damage the office window unnecessarily, Danny trekked up the ramp and around to his spot.

His VW sat there, as it did most days. It was a beater. The tires were bald, the tint on the rear windows and back glass had bubbled and was peeling in spots, and the passenger-side door had a dent the size of a grapefruit.

He sighed and walked to the passenger door first. He tried the handle and tugged. No luck. Then he walked around to the driver’s side and tried it. Nope.

Maggie was sitting in the middle of the garage. She scratched her ear with one paw and then licked the paw. She scratched again.

Danny tried the door again, just because, and then banged his fist on the roof out of frustration. The sound reverberated through the structure and Maggie stopped mid-scratch to stare at him.

“Sorry, Maggie. My bad.”

She resumed her scratching, her collar jingling.

Danny walked to the back of the hatchback GTI, leaned his butt against it, and folded his arms across his chest. The car sagged on its rear tires under his weight. He rubbed his chin and scratched his elbow. It was dry and his light brown skin had turned chalky white at the joints.

It was quiet in the garage. Even the distant sirens were barely audible within the three stories of concrete. It felt like a trip back in time, a spot the chaos hadn’t claimed yet. It reminded him how fast things had deteriorated.

As he scratched the dry patches of rough skin at his elbows, he realized he was thirsty. When was the last time he’d had anything to drink? The day before? Two days ago?

Danny reached up and touched the tender spot on the back of his head. It exploded with pain. He winced and an aftershock rolled to his extremities. He craned his neck to one side and widened his eyes to clear the discomfort.

He considered the headache might be as much dehydration as it was the knot on the back of his head. At least he wasn’t bleeding.

“I’m trying to think of the positive,” he said to Maggie. The mixed lab tilted her head back, her tongue wagging. Danny squatted and motioned for her to come closer.

She did, putting her paws on his knees and licking his face. He rubbed behind her ears and reminded her how good a dog she was.

“Gotta be positive, right?” he said to her. “I think if—”

There were voices. They were a floor below. They were low, muffled even. Danny was sure there were people in the garage. He held his finger up to his lips and motioned for Maggie to hop down. She did and lay at his feet, her tail sweeping slowly along the garage floor.

Danny listened for the voices again. Maybe he’d heard something else and mistaken it for voices? No. There they were again. Maggie’s ears pricked and she picked up her head, looking for the source of the noise.

There were two voices, and they were moving. Along with their voices, there was the sound of heavy feet on concrete. Both the voices and the footsteps echoed up the structure.

Danny wondered if it might have been the motley trio of armed survivors he’d encountered earlier. Then he remembered, as the voices grew louder and more discernible, that the men and the baby-carrying woman had been heading in the opposite direction. They couldn’t have followed him.

Rather than risk another encounter with whomever the voices belonged to, he stood, softly patted his thigh, and started up the ramp toward the roof. Maggie’s collar chimed as she trotted alongside him. Danny stopped and took off her collar, stuffed it into his pocket, and resumed his climb.

He felt the burn in his thighs as he ascended, turned one hundred eighty degrees, and climbed up in the opposite direction. His muscles were tired. They lacked water. The barest hint of a cramp gnawed at his calf.

Once he’d reached the fourth of five levels, daylight peeked through the opening that led to the roof. He walked up, paying attention to the shifting angles of light as he moved around the final corner.

He emerged from the garage, stopping at the opening once the ramp had flattened out. He surveyed his surroundings and caught his breath. He took small controlled sips of air through his nose and mouth until the throbbing in his head subsided. The bright sunlight and its sharp contrast to the dim gray illumination in the garage didn’t help.

He exhaled and trudged forward to get a better look. The garage had twenty-five or thirty spots on the roof. It was empty. Not a single car, truck, or scooter occupied the open surface. In sunny California, everyone was always looking for the shade when possible. The only time he’d ever seen the roofs of parking garages occupied was when every covered spot was taken. Surrounding the rectangular space was a waist-high brick wall. In one corner was the phone-booth-looking entrance to the stairwell.

As trying as the ramp had been, given the circumstances, he could only imagine the burn and relative exhaustion the stairs would have induced. The sky was blue. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen until his eyes settled far to the west. Over the Pacific, which he couldn’t see from here, there were fluffy pillows of white clouds laden with dark gray in their bellies. From one cluster, the dark gray extended downward in a sheet. Rain. Not far offshore there was rain. Danny licked his dry lips, his tongue catching on cracked peels of skin.

He turned his head back toward the mouth of the garage and looked into the darkness. He couldn’t hear any voices beneath him. That was the good. The bad was that there was nowhere to hide on the roof should the people attached to the voices find their way up top.

He’d hoped there might be a couple of cars or small SUVs he could use to conceal Maggie and himself. No such luck.

Content there was no imminent approach, Danny walked across the roof to the eastern-facing edge and leaned his body against the brick. The top of it came to his chest and was hot to the touch. Despite the time of year, the sun still packed a punch.

Maggie found a spot along the northern wall that apparently housed a particularly interesting odor. Her nose was to the ground, buried in the hunt for the scent’s source.

He pressed his weight into the wall, careful not to burn his fingers on the ledge, and looked out across this part of the city. Midrise buildings and the occasional thirty-story tower blocked some of his view. Even from this limited vantage point, it was obvious the city was different. Its pulse was altered.

The usual sound of whooshing traffic, or the idling of engines in congestion, was missing. No honking horns, no ambient white noise that made a city like Los Angeles what it was. Traffic was every bit a part of LA’s personality as was the movie business and transplanted, sunshine-fed palm trees.

He could hear the sirens now. There was the echo of a bullhorn squelching somewhere nearby. Someone barked orders he couldn’t quite make out. There was the lone rumble of a diesel truck. A random pop. Then another.

Was that gunfire?

It had been, what, three days since he’d first heard about some horrible illness wiping out homeless camps? People were dropping dead after convulsing and bleeding from every hole in their bodies.

It had sounded foreign to him. It was like something he’d see on a Facebook or Snapchat feed that claimed to be informing him of some dire emergency in a far-flung part of the world he’d never been and would never go. It might be some sick-looking photograph attached to 140 characters on Twitter. It was a push alert to a video on the cable news channel. He hadn’t given any of it much attention until he had. They were homeless people and he wasn’t homeless. Or he hadn’t been. He wasn’t sure what he was at the moment. Could he go home? Would he ever go home?

Risking a burn on his palms, he lifted himself up onto the ledge. He lay on it with his stomach, the bricks’ heat leaching through his thin shirt. It was uncomfortable but tolerable enough, so he held himself there and peered over the ledge to the streets below. He started at one end of the street and worked his way toward the other but stopped in front of the garage directly beneath him.

There was a pair of large tan Humvees parked there. Outside one of them were two people in Tyvek suits. Their bright yellow costumes made them stand out against the grays, blacks, and dull reds of the surroundings. They were standing at the front of one of the Humvees with a large piece of paper, maybe a map, stretched across the hood. One of them was pointing at the map. The other would jab a gloved finger at it and then wait for the first to locate another spot.

Movement farther to his right caught Danny’s attention, and he craned his neck to focus clearly on it. Two more yellow suits were positioning orange and white barriers at the intersection. One of them was flush with the sidewalk on Danny’s side of the street. Several feet away, the next one was abutting the sidewalk on the opposite side. A third matched the first. They were constructing a serpentine barrier. It was the kind of thing he’d seen in movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers protected checkpoints or the entrances to bases and embassies.

The sound of an engine shifting gears pulled his attention back to the left end of the street. A third vehicle rounded the corner, this one a large truck with a canvas, covered-wagon type of roof sheltering its bed. It slowed to a stop, its brakes squealing, and the engine cut off. Hazmat-suited soldiers hopped out from underneath the bed cover and began hauling out barricades.

Danny watched them for about ten minutes while they secured the barricades and created a serpentine entrance that mirrored the one on the other end of the street. He gave the street one final scan and backed away from the ledge.

Maggie was following an invisible lead along the edge of the roof, sticking close to spots where the brick met the concrete. She was onto something. Danny guessed it was cat poop. She loved the stuff. It was protein packed and irresistible to her. He didn’t deny her the treat, but wouldn’t let her tongue near him for a day or two after she’d ingested the prize.

Danny marched past Maggie to the opposite side of the garage. He repeated his reconnaissance on that side, and then on the two remaining, to get a better picture of what he faced.

The crazy trio with the baby had been right. The authorities were restricting movement. They were creating zones. On one street, instead of the serpentine barrier, there was a designation spray-painted onto the street in an orange color whose fluorescence was matched only by the yellow of the Tyvek suits.

INFECTED ZONE A4

The word infected was actually just “infect” and zone was “zn,” but Danny extrapolated the actual designation. He read the paint several times to make sure there wasn’t some other possible meaning for the abbreviated words. Certain there wasn’t, he lowered himself to the roof and sat down with his back to the brick. He’d found a narrow sliver of shade cast by a nearby billboard advertising the latest film adaptation of a popular R. E. McDermott novel. Danny had listened to the book on Audible, as had millions of others, and had been excited to see the movie. Not now.

It hit him as he sat there, movies were a thing of the past for the time being. Anything leisurely was on hold. Surviving was the important thing now. Getting out of Infected Zone A4 and finding his way to somewhere safe from disease and the Cal Guard was the priority.

Infected Zone A4. That meant there was an Infected Zone A3. And A2. And A1. Were there also Infected Zones B and C? Were there uninfected zones? Or were those places the secure facilities in which Cal Guard had promised him a spot?

His head was swimming. He was stuck inside an infected zone, surrounded by people who wanted to quarantine him and his dog. Who knew what they’d do with Maggie? They’d probably separate them.

No, they’d definitely separate them. Once they did, he was sure he’d never see his best friend again, so that wasn’t happening. He wasn’t risking getting caught.

As if she could hear him thinking about her, Maggie padded her way next to Danny. She spun in a circle a couple of times as if chasing her tail, then curled into a ball on the shaded concrete. He put his hand on the top of her head and gently rubbed his fingers over it. She didn’t move.

The good news was that as long as they were up here on the roof and nobody could get in or out of Infected Zone A4, he couldn’t get sick. If he hadn’t contracted the illness already, he was as isolated from it as he could be atop a garage.

The bad news was that they couldn’t stay on the roof of a garage forever. He needed water. Maggie needed water. They’d both need food soon enough.

He listened to the undulating whine of emergency sirens. There was another shout from a bullhorn. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one. It sounded closer this time. Or it was farther away. Overhead, the thwap of helicopter blades cut through the still air. He worried about a chopper flying overhead spotting him and reporting him to one of the hazmat relocation teams downstairs. When he opened his eyes, he saw two large Black Hawks flying close to one another as they made a wide arcing turn a good half mile from him. Their dark, sleek shapes disappeared behind the skyline and reappeared in the warped, angled reflection of a glass tower next door.

He closed his eyes, stealing a moment of rest, and swallowed. The scratch of his dry throat made it uncomfortable, and when he tried to swallow again, he subconsciously hitched.

“We need water, Maggie,” he said. “Between the heat and the stress, I think I’m bone dry. You thirsty? You want a drink?”

Maggie stood. She inched closer to his face and he put up his hand in time to prevent a lick to the ear. The last thing he needed right now was a cat-poop-laced pasting on the side of his head.

Danny stood, using the ledge for balance, and the blood rushed from his head. He wobbled in place for a moment but steeled himself before moving toward the mouth to the garage ramp.

Maggie followed him, prancing at his heels. Danny had said the word drink and she’d responded. It was a trigger word she easily recognized, like treat, walk, bath, and bite-the-arm-of-the-intruder-trying-to-quarantine-us-through-martial-law.

They descended to the fourth floor of the garage. It was darker now than it had been when they’d emerged onto the roof. Danny’s eyes adjusted to the low light a few steps in, and he could better see his surroundings. Once he’d focused again, he stopped and listened for voices.

Not hearing any, he led Maggie down the ramp toward the second level and his VW. Each time they turned a corner, Danny used a support pillar or adjacent car to hide himself long enough to evaluate whether or not they were alone.

The fronts of his shins started bothering him by the time they reached his car. His toes, having pushed against the fronts of his shoes on the way down, felt bruised. “We should have taken the stairs,” he whispered to Maggie.

He stopped at the rear of the VW and considered the best way to get into his car. If he broke a window, anybody on the first level or standing at the street entrance to the garage would hear it. They’d come running and likely catch him.

Moving to the first floor wasn’t a great option either. He was certain that the office was in sight of the hazmat teams positioned on the street.

He looked at Maggie. She didn’t offer any ideas. Perhaps sensing what Danny wanted to do, she moved closer to the hatchback and jumped onto it with her front paws. She stood there on her hind legs, looking alternately at Danny and the bubble-tinted rear window.

“Hop down,” Danny stressed in a low voice. He stared at her intently, trying to effect some sort of dominance.

She ignored him. Her nails scratched against the worn paint job.

Danny snapped his fingers and pointed at the ground. “Maggie.”

The dog licked her chops, yawned, and hopped down, her nails screeching against the rear of the hatchback.

Danny grumbled his annoyance and checked the paint. Despite there being much bigger issues at hand, he was still compelled to rub his thumb across the scratches. They were surface scratches, but they’d taken off some of the car’s color. He rubbed his fingers over the slight damage and cursed under his breath. Then he pushed on the latch, out of habit, and the hatch’s pneumatic hinges hissed as the rear of the VW opened.

Before Danny could say anything, Maggie had hopped past him and found her spot on the pilled blue blanket that stretched from one side of the space to the other. She did her customary tail chase and lay down. Danny could have sworn she winked at him.

“You’re something else,” he said to her and leaned across her to flatten the rear seats. Both of them popped and the seat backs folded over onto the seats. Maggie didn’t move, even while Danny weaseled his way to unlock the rear passenger door. He opened it and then slid back out to gently close the hatch. He almost slammed it out of habit, but remembered the dangers lurking outside before he managed to close the back of the car with a click.

He walked around to the side of the car, looked around the garage one last time, and climbed into the rear passenger’s side. He closed the door and repositioned himself so he could search the front seats, netting a half bottle of water, an unopened can of Pringles potato chips, a partially melted Kind brand snack bar still in its wrapper, and a package of peppermint Tic Tacs. From the glove box he recovered an expired travel-sized container of Tylenol. It was a bounty.

He downed four of the Tylenol, split the chips and the water with Maggie, saved the bar and the mints, and pulled a corner of Maggie’s blanket over his torso.

“We’ll worry about finding a way out of this mess when we wake up, Maggie.” He suggested she close her eyes, which she did. He kept his head away from hers, given the ripeness of her breath, and both of them were asleep within minutes. Going to sleep in the car would prove to be a bad idea.

CHAPTER 7

DAY 11

San Francisco, California

Three men stood together in a lab on the twenty-ninth floor of the Interllayar Tower. The entire floor was a series of labs, some of them more tightly controlled than others. This one was general purpose and served as a meeting place. The man holding the meeting, Albert Moss, told the others he felt more comfortable in a stark lab than he did in the burled wood and chrome environs of an executive suite. Moss raked his fingers through his neatly trimmed beard, seemingly aware of exactly where the pesky white strays had populated the otherwise brown facial hair. He’d expected both of the others would immediately pepper him with questions, yet neither man had said anything for a long minute, which was stretching into two.

He ran his thumb and forefinger along the spots on his face where his mustache reached his beard. The hair was thinner there. His eyes darted between the two other men, Robert Chang and the boss, Derek Hoover.

Hoover stood with his feet shoulder width apart, his arms folded across his chest. His chiseled jaw was set. Moss couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what he’d learned or if he didn’t understand it. It was impossible to tell.

Chang leaned against the black granite of the laboratory bench and glanced at what Moss determined was a dumbfounded look on the boss’s face, pinched the bridge of his nose, and squeezed his eyes shut with a pained expression.

Moss tried to imagine what was rushing through Chang’s mind. The new information made sense, except that it didn’t.

He considered that Chang might be wondering how his wife had contracted a fatal disease and he hadn’t gotten as much as a cramp or sniffle. He hadn’t taken any precautions until he realized her illness was much like the one debilitating much of the West Coast at historic speed. Those were reasonable concerns. Moss could give him that.

Finally, when the boss didn’t say anything, Chang did.

“That’s what you think it is?” he asked after exhaling a long breath. “You think it’s two bacterial infections that have merged together and created a new type of illness?”

“A new type of illness? Like a new virus?” asked the boss, Derek Hoover.

Moss understood that Hoover was in the lab as a courtesy and as a convenience. Chang had invited him so Moss wouldn’t be burdened with being an emissary, having to re-explain the findings to Derek. Moss would have been fine with a one-on-one. He didn’t like crowds. Three was a crowd. Still, he’d acquiesced to Chang’s insistence. That was saying something. He was not the kind of man to acquiesce to what other people wanted.

Albert Moss was a singular man who plowed forward, searching for truth, without bending to the whims of others around him. He wasn’t unpleasant, he was just so utterly focused on his life’s work that he rarely stopped to consider anything other than the path he’d laid out in front of himself. He was a team player as long as everyone on the team played the way he believed was most effective. Such was the way of brilliant men who knew how brilliant they were. It was hard for others to understand whether it was the brilliance that made them obstinate or the obstinance that made them brilliant. Chicken. Egg.

Moss was a leading epidemiologist or, to some in the profession of infectious diseases, the leading epidemiologist. A native Californian, he’d done his undergraduate work at Berkeley, attended the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health for his master’s, and gotten his PhD at George Washington’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. The Centers for Disease Control recruited him, and he’d worked there for a decade before taking a management position at the World Health Organization, until the politics of the United Nations became tiresome. So when a tech company called Interllayar offered him a position at four times the money and a chance to return to his native California, he’d taken the job and not looked back.

Now he was nodding at Chang and the man who’d hired him, Derek Hoover. He’d spent twenty minutes explaining exactly what he thought was happening. Chang had reduced it to a single sentence.

“No,” said Moss. “And yes.”

“Which is it?” asked Derek.

“It’s not a virus or multiple viruses,” said Moss. “It’s bacterial. So yes, it’s multiple bacteria combining. I have no doubt. Absolutely no doubt. I see clear evidence of bacterial conjugation.”

“You said that about the conjugation.” Chang’s eyes were open now, but he was squinting.

“What I didn’t say is that, frequently, the process is helpful to the bacteria,” said Moss.

“What do you mean?” asked Derek. “Helpful how?”

Moss glanced at Chang, as if seeking approval he didn’t need, and then back to Hoover. He stopped raking his beard midstroke and pursed his lips. Then he clicked his tongue on the back of his teeth as if considering the best way to answer the question. “Bacterial conjugation. I’m giving you the basic Wikipedia definition here. You’re okay with the basic definition? It will facilitate a much faster explanation.”

Hoover, a brilliant man in his own right, clenched his jaw. He shot Moss a look that told the scientist to keep talking but without the condescending tone he was currently employing. Moss was intuitive enough to understand that.

“Good then.” Moss clasped his fingers together and held them out in front of him to demonstrate. “Bacterial conjugation is essentially a transfer of genetic material between cells. The cells create bridges called piluses between one another; then one uses the bridges to transfer the material to the other.”

“It sounds like sex,” said Derek. He used another demonstrative gesture using his hands that was less appropriate.

Moss frowned. “It is, if you want to think about bacteria having sex.”

Chang chuckled. It was the first time Moss had seen him crack a smile since his wife had died.

“Except it’s not sexual reproduction in a real sense,” explained Moss. “There’s no gam—”

“I get it,” Derek interrupted.

Moss raked his fingers across the scruffy beard on his neck. It wasn’t as well trimmed as the rest of it. “Regardless, one of the benefits for the recipient bacteria is typically an antibiotic resistance. The implications with regard to genetic engineering are remarkable, really. But when it comes to disease transformation, the results can be catastrophic. Under the right circumstances, of course.”

“And we’re under the right circumstances,” said Derek.

“Yes.”

“What bacteria is it?” asked Chang. “I have my suspicions based on what I’ve seen on the news and what I…what I witnessed with Ellen.”

Moss sighed. “I’ve identified three components. The first is the Escherichia coli strain O157:H7.”

“E. coli?” asked Derek. “Like the stomach thing you get from uncooked foods that have crap on them?”

“Yes,” said Moss.

Chang nodded. “Not surprising.”

Moss wondered what he might say that would be surprising to Chang. The man rarely seemed fazed.

“Is that deadly?” asked Derek. “Don’t you just get, I don’t know, diarrhea and puke?”

“It can be deadly,” answered Moss. “There’s a two percent chance that the O157:H7 strain will be fatal. The infection damages red blood cells and harms the kidneys. Typically, young people and the elderly are the most susceptible. But this is not typical.”

“Because of the bacterial conjugation?” asked Derek.

“Yes.”

Derek ran his hands through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “What’s the other disease?”

Moss eyed both men. He swallowed. “It is unfortunately the deadliest infection in the world.”

Derek scrunched his face with confusion. “AIDS?”

Moss slid his hands into his lab pockets. “No, HIV is still among the most deadly.”

“Then what is it?” asked Derek.

“Tuberculosis.”

Chang pinched the bridge of his nose again and exhaled.

Derek worked his neck like a pecking bird. His face was squeezed with confusion. Then he waved his hands in front of him like a football referee signaling an incomplete pass. “Wait,” he said with disbelief. “Tuberculosis? There’s a vaccine for that. There are antibiotics. How could it be tuberculosis?”

Moss raised his hands in surrender. “I know,” he said, shaking his head to commiserate with the befuddled Derek, “it sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.”

“He’s right, Derek,” said Chang. “It’s tuberculosis. I could tell when my wife was coughing, when there was blood in the sputum.”

“I thought that was, like, an Old West disease,” said Derek, “and that we’ve had it under control.”

“Actually,” said Moss, “the disease likely stretches back to Egyptian times. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that we had a vaccine. It was only given to infants at high risk of developing the disease.”

“The first treatments for those who had already contracted it was later, 1943,” Chang explained. “Selman Waksman used streptomycin. It worked. The problem is, antibiotics are overprescribed. So now many diseases have strains that don’t react to the medication. They’re resistant.”

Derek leaned on the lab table. His gaze softened but focused. His thoughts were somewhere else. He blinked back to the conversation and eyed both bearers of bad news. “What else is resistant?”

“Staph is one,” said Chang, “especially the golden staph known as MRSA. The bacteria that causes gonorrhea is another one.”

“What about E. coli?” Derek asked. “Is E. coli one of them?”

Chang and Moss exchanged glances. Moss raked his beard. Chang shifted uncomfortably in his stance. He nodded almost imperceptibly at Chang, as if to give permission to speak. Finally, Moss answered Derek’s question.

“Yes. Third- and fourth-generation cephalosporins are ineffective with many of the strains of E. coli.”

“We have two drug-resistant bacteria that have combined to make this deadly disease,” said Derek. “And it’s spread through the air?”

“Through the air,” said Chang. “Through touch. Either one.”

Derek tugged at his hair. He sighed, the heavy exhale full of exasperation. His eyes narrowed and he motioned to Chang. “You were around your wife. How do we know you’re not sick? How do we know you haven’t contracted…what are we calling this?”

“The CDC hasn’t given it a name yet,” said Moss. “They’ve identified the same conjugation I have, but they’re hesitant to name it. I was on the sat link with them right before this meeting. We agree on our findings. So does Berkeley.”

“Berkeley?” Derek echoed.

“The school of public health,” said Moss. “They’ve got specimens too. UCLA has some. Everybody’s working on this. It’s tentatively XDRO157:H7.”

“What’s the third?” asked Chang, not answering Derek’s previous question about his own health.

“The third what?” asked Moss.

“The third bacteria,” said Chang. “You mentioned you’d identified three distinct components.”

Moss shook his head. “I haven’t identified the third component yet.”

“Why not?” asked Derek.

“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’m here with one lab assistant. The CDC, Berkeley, they have teams tackling this.

Derek took a step back, aiming a finger at Chang. His eyes narrowed again. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said to the recent widower. “How do we know you’re not sick with this…extro…whatever…disease? How do I know you’re not giving it to all of us as we stand here speaking?”

Chang shrugged. “Because you do.”

“Do I?” asked Derek.

Chang took a step toward Derek. The filtered air hissed through the lab. “Of course. Every single time we get to this point, I’m fine. You’re fine. Moss, when he’s here, is fine. It doesn’t matter which of the scenarios unfolds, we’re always tasked with living through the horror of it. Whatever it is, we see it through. It’s like some punishment for knowing something we’re not supposed to know.”

Derek frowned. He folded his arms across his chest and looked at the floor, considering what Chang was telling him. He was processing it. He was remembering whatever it was he could remember. He winced.

Moss wondered if his boss was suffering from a headache or the more typical disorientation-laced déjà vu. They’d all been there. They’d all be there again. He was sure of it. This time was like all the others. There wasn’t a nuclear wasteland; fires weren’t burning out of control; a city wasn’t underwater; the temperature hadn’t sunk below zero. And for the love of God, there weren’t zombies. Nonetheless, this was apocalyptic. It was an alternate ending to the same story Moss had either witnessed or been taught by the two men standing in his lab.

CHAPTER 8

DAY 11

West Carson, California

Clint had seen a lot in his life. His drug addiction had put his senses onto things both real and imagined that had changed his perception of the world around him. Time in jail and then in prison had only opened those senses further.

He’d witnessed things he couldn’t unsee. He’d smelled things seared into memory. He’d heard things that still kept him awake at night with their echoes. Through all of that, he’d never witnessed the overwhelming sensory consumption he was experiencing in the homeless camp in West Carson.

There were smells he couldn’t identify that made him retch, so strong they stung his eyes. Still, through the moist sheen in his watery eyes, he could see the blood and the other fluids.

So much blood. Too much.

All of this, all of these sensations, became more acute as Clint’s own health rapidly deteriorated. What had begun as an annoying tickle in his throat and a distracting gurgle in his stomach had become an unbearable combination of pain unlike anything Clint had previously conceived.

Each barking, fluid-filled cough sent bolts of pain from his chest that electrified his extremities. The coughs then aggravated the discomfort in his digestive system. He’d lost control of his functions too many times to count. He couldn’t believe there was anything left to lose. Yet it would happen again and again.

Alone in his tent, he lay there sweating, bleeding, agonizing. The diffused red light that bathed the space offered Clint the illusion that he was, in fact, in Hell. His fever didn’t help. It was spiking again. He was at once hot and cold. His head throbbed. His mouth, aside from the phlegm and remnant blood, was bone dry.

The waves of heat that rolled through his body felt like the undulating blasts from a furnace or an out-of-control fire. He lay there, his eyes half open and unfocused, imagining he was surrounded by fire. The flames licked at the tent, melting through the man-made fabric. They lapped at his skin, torturing him, scalding him, before devouring him alive.

This was more than his imagination. Clint believed, in his feverish daydream, that he was on fire, that he’d burned like this before. It wasn’t fire though, it was something worse than fire. It was percussive and sudden. It was radiant heat from a blast that leveled everything around him. Then he was cold. He was covered in a gray, flaky ash that fell silently from a sky whose sun was little more than a thumbprint smudge of yellow against a bleak, never-ending cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon.

He shivered. Where was he? Was he dead yet? He couldn’t be. The pain was there. The odors that permeated everything filled his nostrils.

He coughed. His body jerked, convulsing against the explosion of sharp, daggerlike pain that jabbed at him. Clint rolled onto his side and drew his knees up toward his chest. His pulse thumped wildly and he felt it through his body—at his temples, in his neck, against his ribs.

His eyes watered and thick drool escaped his lips. It ran down his cheek and puddled next to him. Every breath was more laborious than the one before. His body sagged and he was reminded of heroin without the high.

There was the heaviness and the dry mouth, the drowsiness and the nausea. It was as if he’d injected it into the vein, had moved past the ten seconds of pleasure and only got the downside.

To his side or behind him, he couldn’t tell which, the loud zip of his tent flap opening caught his attention. Somebody was there. A cough preceded a weak but friendly greeting.

“Hey,” said Filter. “You alive, Clint? You still with me?”

Clint tried to answer him. In his mind he told Filter he was alive. He was in pain. He couldn’t sit up. Breathing was too difficult. He said all of these things, though none of them aloud.

“Oh wow,” Filter said. “It’s ripe in here, man.”

Ripe? What did he mean was ripe? Clint couldn’t define the word. Ripe. It seemed to him, in his stupor, that he was the opposite of ripe. He was past ripe. He’d gone bad. He was past the sell-by date. He’d all but expired.

“Hey,” Filter said, moving closer. He hacked and cleared his throat. “You there, dude?”

Clint’s eyes were open. From the periphery he could see Filter. He could hear him too. His breathing was raspy. Or was it his own breathing? He didn’t know.

“Don’t die on me, man,” said Filter. “Everybody’s dying on me.”

The warmth of Filter’s body next to his registered as Filter’s face came into frame. It filled his field of view, blocking the floor of the tent that stretched out in front of him and ran to its wall. Filter’s breath was rancid.

“Hey,” he said. “Your eyes are open. You’re still with me.”

Filter’s long face stretched into a smile. Blood seeped from between his teeth. He slurped it back into his mouth and winced as he swallowed. “Can you move? If you can, you gotta get outta here.”

Clint moved his eyes to focus on Filter’s. The muscles stretched and burned. His eyes watered. His head throbbed.

“Can you move?” Filter repeated. “They’re coming for us.”

His breath hung in the air at Clint’s nostrils. It was rank with sickness and infection. It was foul. It was familiar. It smelled like the taste coating Clint’s tongue.

“They’re rounding people up,” said Filter. “They’re putting us in camps. They’re taking us to die.”

Clint didn’t need to go anywhere to die. He was going to do it right here. He was going to die on the floor of his tent, bathed in his own ripe filth. Ripe.

“They already got some of us, Clint. They’re coming back though. They’re coming for us. It ain’t good, dude. It’s like the apocalypse or something. It’s like the plague.”

The plague? That made sense. A death blow to what was left of humanity. It was a mercy killing for the countless Californians too poor to sustain themselves. It was a good thing. It was better than being burned alive. It was better than freezing to death. Or was it? Freezing to death might be less painful.

Clint tried swallowing a cough. A spray of blood spewed from his mouth and painted Filter’s face.

Filter cursed aloud, rolling away from Clint, and then coughed himself. He was on his back, frantically wiping the bloody sputum from his face. He was cursing and shouting and coughing. Then he stopped. He lay there on his back, his hands covered in Clint’s blood, and he started laughing. It was a raspy smoker’s laugh. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

No, thought Clint. It doesn’t. He coughed again. Knives of pain stabbed him in his chest and his back. His heart pounded against his chest and then weakened. His breathing slowed. He tried inhaling. It was like he was sucking air through a clogged straw.

“I mean, seriously, dude,” said Filter, apparently unaware of Clint’s new struggle. “None of it matters. I’m already dead, right? You’re dead too. We’re all dead. This crap is killing us all.”

Clint opened his mouth to suck in a warm, wet breath.

Filter coughed again and then laughed. “They’re out there in their yellow suits,” he said to the tent’s pitched roof. “Acting all gestapo on us. They’re yelling stuff about martial law and habeas corpus. They’re acting all—”

Filter sucked in a wheezy breath and coughed again, cursed, and rolled onto his side, facing Clint. His hands were tucked behind him now, as if cuffed.

“Sorry, man,” he said, his voice weaker. “Sorry. Couldn’t help that. It just…happened. I’m so sorry, man. I know it’s rotten.”

Rotten. That was a much better word than ripe, Clint thought. But he couldn’t smell whatever Filter had unwittingly done. He couldn’t see him. He could barely hear him.

He focused on the lack of air, the building tightness in his chest that accompanied a heavy burn. His vision was gone now. He stared into blackness.

Outside the tent there were sirens growing louder. There was the rumble of trucks. People were yelling now. There were boots. Rifle shots. There was…there was…there was…nothing.

The last of the air escaped Clint’s dirtied lungs, leaked into his windpipe, drained from his mouth and nose, and evaporated into the ether. He thought maybe Filter had said something to him, had implored him not to go. He couldn’t be sure. Clint was dead.

***

Filter saw the life drain from his friend’s eyes. Clint’s body trembled, shuddered, and then went limp. A leaky, high-pitched squeak blew through his open mouth. And that was it. Clint was gone.

Filter barely had time to process it when the tent flap peeled back and a rifle-toting, yellow-suited soldier dipped into the space. He ordered both of them to come out of the tent. If they didn’t, they’d be burned inside it.

Filter rolled onto his knees and told the soldier he was coming out. He tried raising his hands, but couldn’t balance himself. His equilibrium was off, so he dropped onto all fours.

“Both of you,” said the soldier. “I need both of you out here now.”

“He’s dead,” said Filter. “He’s not coming.”

The soldier backed away from the flap. “You alone, then. Now.”

Filter would have told the man he was obeying the command, but he coughed instead. The fit stopped him in his tracks a couple of feet from the flap. His chest burned. His mouth filled with blood.

“Slowly,” said the soldier. “Exit slowly.”

Filter nodded and moved each limb as methodically as he could. His head was throbbing. His mouth was dry. He was hungry and somehow nauseated at the same time. His pants were soiled. He was bloodied. He understood why the soldier wanted him avoiding fast movements.

He finished the short crawl through the flap and emerged into the daylight. It was blinding. Sweat bloomed on his forehead. It drained into his eyes, and he squeezed them closed as large gloved hands grabbed him under his sweaty pits and started dragging him away from the tent.

His feet trailed across the dirt, catching on divots and rocks, as the strong grips carried him with purpose. A blast of heat washed over him, and Filter opened his eyes to find two suited soldiers moving him toward a large truck.

He looked to one side in the direction of the heat. There was a pile of something, a large heap, and it was burning. Flames built around its edges and grew toward the center. They lapped at the air, sucking in the oxygen. Black columns of smoke poured from the mound, and it exploded in flame with a bulge of fire that seemed to bloom from nowhere. Then Filter saw them.

To one side of the pile was a trio of yellow-suited fire-starters holding what looked like flamethrowers. The machines roared with each pulse of burning gas that shot toward the collected debris. Filter recognized there was more than one mound. There were four or five. There were seven. They were macabre hedges, half-moons that throbbed with orange and red flame. Each of them was ruled over by flamethrowing, hazmat-suit-wearing soldiers. They appeared to relish the job as they swept their blades of fire across their targets.

Their backs were arched, their hips thrust forward to carry the weight of the side-mounted cannons. Blast after blast. Burst after burst. The air became acrid. The particulate drifted across what had been the homeless camp. Filter breathed it in with what little breath he could and coughed it out.

He could taste the ash on his tongue, in his throat. He spat it out on the ground in front of him, drool clinging to his chin.

“What are you burning?” he asked. They were getting closer. He couldn’t make out what was in the mounds, the heaps, the piles. Were they tents? Clothes? Human remains? His question was for either or both of his transporters.

“What are you burning?” he repeated. “Who are you burning?”

He looked down through the gap in his armpit. Through the haze of building smoke and the kick of dust from his feet, there was a lone fire-starter standing in front of Clint’s tent. The yellow suit shifted and clutched the flamethrower at the hip, the nozzle extended toward the tent. Flames shot from the nozzle at the red A-frame. The nozzle moved from side to side, dousing the tent in fire. The tent curled and melted before succumbing to the flames.

Filter’s eyes widened. A knot grew in his already ravaged throat. He tried swallowing but couldn’t. He had his answer. They were burning everything and everyone.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

He struggled against the tight grip under his arms. He tried eyeing the soldiers behind their masks. He couldn’t see their faces. Not from his angle, not with the building yellow-gray haze of smoke that drifted across the camp in thickening waves.

He tried finding a hold on the ground, getting his feet underneath him. The men lifted him, as if sensing his plan, so he couldn’t stand on his own, tightening their grips. Their push toward the truck was more forceful, more urgent.

They came to a ramp at the back of the large vehicle and stopped there. His eyes stinging from the smoke, Filter narrowed his watery gaze and focused on the inside of the truck’s cargo hold. There were overhead LED lights that glowed white and gave the inside of the hold an antiseptic appearance.

There were others there already, their sallow faces and sunken eyes peering out from the back of the truck. The light gave them ghostly appearances. It washed whatever color might have remained in their faces, in their tired, aching limbs.

Men and women sat on benches that lined each side of the hold from the cab to the tailgate. There was a divider that separated the cab from the hold, with only a small window leading from one to the other. Along the walls, above the benches, were shelves that held large duffel bags and other equipment Filter couldn’t identify.

He surveyed the sick people inside the truck. They slouched, leaned on each other, or sat slumped with their chins to their chests.

The two soldiers stepped forward closer to the truck, and Filter saw that all of them were strapped in at the waist and across their shoulders. Otherwise, he gathered, they’d have fallen over onto one another or the metal floor. A yellow-suited soldier inside the truck was affixing a belt to a woman sitting in the seat closest to the divider on the passenger’s side.

As the soldier yanked on the shoulder straps to insure they were taut, the woman vomited on the yellow suit. Blood, bile, and whatever else was in her stomach splattered the soldier’s face mask, and the soldier stumbled backward, bracing a gloved hand against the opposite wall to regain some sense of balance.

Nobody else in the truck appeared to notice or care about what had happened. The soldier marched from the truck, down the ramp, and around the truck until Filter couldn’t see him or her anymore.

A soldier standing guard at the back of the truck motioned Filter and his escorts up the ramp. The inside of the cargo hold was like a mausoleum of the soon-to-be-dead.

There was moaning. There was whimpering. There was a chorus of hacking coughs that sounded like someone had taken a grater to the occupants’ throats. Filter shuddered as the soldiers led him up a ramp and hoisted him into the back. He dropped to his knees, the bang of them on the floor reverberating through the hot, enclosed space. One of the soldiers who’d carried him helped him to his feet and nudged him toward the last empty space on the driver’s side bench. He was directly opposite the woman who’d vomited moments earlier. It looked as if she wasn’t breathing now. Her lips were blue, her head hung lazily, her eyes were closed, and there was blood leaking from her nose.

Filter thought he recognized her, although in this light, under these conditions, he couldn’t be sure of who anybody was anymore.

“Sit here,” said the soldier through his mask. “Sit up straight.”

Filter tried to comply, but he was out of breath. He wheezed and hunched over, coughing out the latest glob of thick fluids that had collected in his lungs. He winced against the sharp pain. His stomach lurched and constricted. He grabbed at his side, doubled over in the seat.

A soldier gripped him at the shoulders and shoved him back flat against the thinly cushioned wall. Filter considered resisting. He didn’t. He couldn’t. He sat there, his weight resting against the soldier’s force, and let the man strap him into his seat.

He closed his eyes, unwilling to look at the woman he was certain was now dead. To his right he heard the unmistakable sound of metal sliding on metal as the soldiers retracted the ramp into the undercarriage of the truck.

“Good to go,” said one of the soldiers. “Cross-check.”

“Cross-check,” said another. “All good here.”

The doors slammed shut. The grind of a locking mechanism sliding into place echoed in the back of the hold, and the overhead lights turned off. It was dark, the sounds of Filter’s fellow passengers amplified in the enclosed space.

There was the double thump of someone banging on the tailgate, and the truck whined as it lurched forward. Filter’s weak body leaned into the straps, straining the fabric that essentially held him upright.

He wanted so badly to cover his ears as the truck began to rumble. The crunch of rock under the tires, the cacophony of suffering, the retching and gagging of those around him was too much.

Filter lowered his head, his chin touching his chest, the back of his neck stretching. He bounced in his seat lifelessly and tried to disconnect himself from the grotesque reality that surrounded him.

He was thankful that his sense of smell was moderately dulled by the congestion that clogged his sinuses. Otherwise the melting pot of odors in the back of that truck would have forced up whatever was left in his gut. There was nothing there, of course. He hadn’t eaten in two days. But he was certain that full, unadulterated whiffs of the ambient air in the truck would have initiated a wave of dry heaves.

The truck accelerated and the sounds of its large engine and oversized tires spinning on the highway served as noise cancellation for the dying next to him and in front of him. Filter thought about opening his eyes, searching the others for some signs of hope. He resisted.

After what felt like an eternity, the truck slowed. It screeched to a stop and the truck jerked still. There were voices outside, a lot of loud voices. The metal lock slid open and daylight rushed into the cargo hold. The overhead lights illuminated.

Filter craned his sore neck to the right and stared toward the open tailgate. A pair of dark figures were working the ramp; then one of them climbed it and stood at the back of the truck. The figure was large enough that, despite being backlit, Filter knew it was another soldier, or someone in a position of power, in a hazmat suit.

“Holy Mary,” said the figure. It was a woman’s voice, her words muffled behind the hooded mask she wore. “How many of these are already dead?”

“What’s the total headcount?” asked another voice. Filter couldn’t find its source, though he was reasonably certain it belonged to a man.

“Twenty,” said the woman. She was holding a computer tablet.

Filter’s vision began to focus as it adjusted to the light. She was definitely a woman. Her delicate features appeared to glow behind the mask. There was another hazmat suit behind her, on the ramp and over her left shoulder.

“What’s their point of origin?” asked the man.

“West Carson,” she said, as if none of them could hear her. “Homeless camp.”

“Figures,” said the man dismissively, as if none of them could hear him. “That accounts for the…”

“The what?” The woman shifted awkwardly in the suit, trying to face the man.

He gestured with his suited arm, waving it across the truck like a game-show model introducing a prize.

“The…this,” he said.

The woman looked down and used a stylus to tap the tablet. She swiped up and then tapped the screen before lifting her eyes and scanning the truck’s occupants again. “Let’s get this started. Anyone who’s unconscious, pull them to the left and get them checked for vitals. If they’re not breathing and/or don’t have a pulse, deliver them to the pile.”

The man looked away and motioned to someone Filter couldn’t see. He turned back and put his hands on his hips. “And the ones who are awake?”

“We’ll move them to the field,” the woman said, “but I don’t think we’ll have many of those.”

She stepped farther into the truck, moving methodically along the length of the narrow bed floor that separated the two exterior walls. She shuffled her boots, careful to avoid stepping on the forty feet she passed on her way toward Filter and the woman across from him. She looked at every person in the truck, staring at them for a moment. Then she tapped her stylus on the tablet and shuffled again.

“This one’s gone,” she said. “Pretty sure. Check him.”

She tapped the screen again and shuffled.

“This one too.”

Shuffle.

“Maybe this one.”

Shuffle.

She stopped in front of Filter, her back to him. The plastic chemical odor of the yellow hazmat suit masked every other scent in the truck. Filter breathed it in as best he could. It was welcome relief.

“Definitely this one,” she said and turned one hundred eighty degrees to face Filter.

He looked her in the eyes and her gaze moved from the tablet to his face. He made sure she could see he wasn’t dead. Not yet. The pile could wait. He didn’t know for certain what the pile was, but given what he’d seen at the camp, he could imagine.

The woman’s eyes were green. Or they could have been hazel. Filter held onto them. She stared back, searched his face, but she remained silent. There was no empathy, no warmth, and no compassion. He was a medical subject. That was all. Nothing more, nothing less.

“All right,” she said, still looking at Filter but speaking to someone else, “I’ve got six who are conscious. Five are deceased. The rest are undetermined. Let’s get this done. There’s another load pulling up now.”

The woman spun on her boot heel and marched from the truck, no longer careful to avoid feet as she moved. Filter saw her crunch four or five under her boots as she stomped from the cargo hold and down the ramp.

One by one, suited soldiers or sanitation workers unstrapped, picked up, and removed people from the hold. They’re people! Filter wanted to shout. They were every bit as human as the alien-looking grunts tasked with sorting them.

Filter wanted to argue they were more human than the aliens. They were survivors, at least the ones who were still breathing. They’d forged ahead, day after day, without roofs over their heads, without careers, without mental stability, and they’d lived.

What had these hazmat-suit-wearing drones done with their lives? Had they truly lived? Had their character been tested day in, day out?

Maybe it had. The soldiers among the suited sorters had likely lived. Filter knew a lot of veterans. They were good people. They were human.

Maybe it hadn’t. So many of the sorters looked detached. They carried one after another from the truck as if this were Sunday chores and they were taking out the trash or hauling bags of grass clippings.

One after another of his fellow meat-wagon passengers were pulled from the truck and carried down the ramp and into the sunlight. Some were moved to the left and out of sight. Some were taken to the right. Filter’s pulse, as weak as it was, accelerated. For the first time in hours it thumped against his temples with enough strength that he felt it. It reminded him he was still alive, that something in his body was still working as it should.

With renewed energy, as slight as it was, Filter pressed his shoulders back against the thin padding. He clenched his fists and released them, flexing his fingers in and out, in and out.

He wanted to be sure that the men coming for him knew he was alive and conscious. They were only two people away from him at this point.

Filter lifted his head, the muscles in the back of his neck straining, and he tried breathing through his nose. He took a sip of air through his mouth, trying to avoid a catch in his chest. It didn’t work. His breath caught, trapped in the thick sputum built up in his lungs and in his throat.

The first cough was painful. Sharp needles of pain poked his chest. He tried sucking in a compensating breath and that only made it worse. The pain exploded outward from his lungs, and a second, more violent cough gave way to a third and a fourth.

His body strained against the straps, the nylon fabric digging into his shoulders and pressing hard against his waist. Filter tried sucking in air. It wouldn’t come. He was out of air, yet his body kept expelling the thick bloody fluid trapped in his airway.

His stomach cramped and Filter grunted against the fit. His eyes watered. He twisted against the straps, his arms flailing at his sides. He wanted to find the latches to the straps and free himself. He needed to move. He had to find air. He gasped. Another burst of intense, searing pain punched his chest. He couldn’t stop coughing.

His vision weakened behind the sheen of welling tears and then faded to black. Out of air, he slipped into unconsciousness.

When he woke minutes later, he couldn’t be sure how long he’d been out or if, in fact, he was awake again. He wondered if he was dead.

“Am I alive?” he croaked before realizing he was lying on his back on a canvas gurney.

His body swayed gently as two hazmat-suited soldiers carried him somewhere. Neither of them answered him.

“Am I alive?” he asked again, not realizing his voice wasn’t much more than a raspy whisper.

He opened his eyes slowly and saw the blue sky above him. The sun had shifted. It was descending now. It had to be late afternoon. What day was it? Did it matter?

A helicopter buzzed low overhead, the thwap of its rotors beating against the air and momentarily drowning out the rumble of large trucks that dominated the sounds around this camp.

That was where he was, right? A camp? He was alive but not really? Did they know he wasn’t ready for the pile? Did they know?

Panic swelled in Filter’s mind and his pulse quickened again. He worked to calm himself. They had to know he was alive. They had to know he hadn’t died. Not yet. Not quite yet.

It crossed Filter’s mind for a split second as the now-familiar whoosh of a blowtorch roared somewhere to his right that he was tripping. The Kush he’d been smoking was laced. Sometimes the high was too good. He’d come down and get the jitters, become super paranoid. He’d swear off the stuff only to hit it a day later.

Was this a trip? Was he so high he’d created a new world in which everyone was exploding into bloody, fecal-soaked blobs ready for the incinerator?

The idea, for that instant, was comforting. Then it wasn’t.

Filter knew this wasn’t some drug-induced fantasy. This was the real thing. And he was being carted somewhere against his will. He couldn’t fight. He was too weak, too disoriented.

He rolled his head to one side and caught a glimpse of a familiar building. He narrowed his eyes to focus. The building bounced and swayed, and his vision was blurred, but he was sure he recognized where he was now.

Stretching out beyond an open parking lot, across which he now moved, was the western edge of the Los Angeles Coliseum. It wasn’t the iconic entrance on the east side. He’d have immediately recognized that. This was the lesser known exterior view, the one from Vermont Avenue.

He’d spent some time shacked up with a woman on Wisconsin and Thirty-Ninth. It was a block from here. He’d seen this side of the coliseum too many times to count. They were taking him to the coliseum? Was that where the camp was?

Filter moved his head and tried getting a better sense of his surroundings. It was daunting, even for a man who couldn’t fully appreciate the scale of it. He was in parking lot two, between Vermont and Bill Robertson Lane, one of six staging areas around the coliseum. The southern edge, where the trucks were arriving, was also the morgue. Lot six, which ran along MLK, was a depository for the dead. They were catalogued, their blood was drawn and stored, and they were dumped into large piles for incineration. He couldn’t know the procedural bureaucracy, of course, nor could he see the bodies in various states of decomposition and the workers picking through them like shoppers at a produce stand.

Men, women, and children, or what was left of them, created rounded pyramids of flesh, bone, muscle, and disease. Large birds circled above them, some flapping their wings and others using the currents to glide above the piles.

The piles.

Despite not seeing the piles, had Filter better been able to smell, he’d have noted the strong, distinctive odor of burning human flesh. It permeated everything within a square mile of the coliseum. Smoke drifted with the intermittent breeze that blew from the southeast. It blanketed the coliseum itself and then dissipated across the Natural History Museum and Jesse Brewer Park. It was as if the wall that edged the University of Southern California along Exposition Boulevard was a barrier to the smoke. It wasn’t visible by the time it crossed the barrier that separated the private school from the surrounding, less pristine neighborhoods.

Filter’s handlers took him from the parking lot to a sidewalk that ran along a mural-painted wall separating the stadium from parking lot two. On his side so as not to choke, Filter noticed two of the images on the wall. The first was Martin Luther King Junior, his hands clasped in prayer at his chin. He was looking down reflectively. Next to MLK was a profile of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was looking to the left and smiling.

Filter’s eyes dragged across the two faces. It wasn’t lost on him that both men had been assassinated. Both died violently. He’d read about them when he was younger. When he was in prison at San Quentin, Filter had read Profiles in Courage, the award-winning book Kennedy had written when he was in the Senate.

Courage was something Filter knew he’d need in his final hours. He figured that was how long he had to live. It couldn’t be more than that.

Once his handlers had passed the wall, they turned right into a gated entrance at the coliseum. It was gate sixteen, Filter noted, an entrance for deliveries.

He was a delivery. There was a barricade at the end of the short drive leading to the wide asphalt path that encircled the stadium. As they approached it, a guard lowered the barrier. It hissed until the metal plank clanged against the ground. The handlers stepped over the lowered barrier and hastened their pace.

There were other handlers with canvas stretchers moving along the pathway. They walked in all directions and Filter couldn’t make sense of the organization. Where were they headed? Was he still going to the pile?

His handlers turned into one of the tunnels that led directly toward the field. It was darker and cooler. The clap and stick of their rubber boots against the concrete echoed against the walls.

As they worked their way through the crowded tunnel, his stretcher bumped into others. Coughs and moans, croaks and wheezes drowned out the boot echoes the deeper they traveled into the passageway.

The handlers turned and sunlight hit Filter’s face. It was distant and pale, but it was sunlight. They were closer to the field now. Then they stopped. There was a line of people, like him, awaiting a turn to emerge from the tunnel and exit onto the field.

They were in the southwestern section of the coliseum, underneath the stands. There was a bottleneck at the exit. Filter squinted against the sunlight. His vision was shot anyhow. He couldn’t see more than rough shapes and muted colors now.

His breathing was shallow. He wasn’t even sure he was breathing. If it weren’t for the sounds and smells that threatened to overwhelm him, he’d have thought his heart wasn’t beating anymore either. It was coming anytime now. The reaper was close. Filter wondered if the scythe-wielding undertaker was on one of the stretchers next to him. Maybe one of his handlers wore the dark, hooded cloak under his Tyvek suit.

A resigned smile spread uneasily across his face as the line began to move. The light beyond his closed eyelids grew brighter.

“Onto the field and to the right,” a muffled voice said with authority. “Find an open spot as far down the field as you can. Drop the patient with its head toward the opposite end of the stadium. If you have questions, there are guides out there to make sure you comply with the protocol.”

They began moving again. His handlers said nothing as they moved from the cool of the tunnel to the relative warmth of the grass field. Filter had been here once before.

He’d hooked a ticket broker up with some first-class weed and jailbroke his iPhone to put non-iOS apps on it. The broker got him decent seats to the UCLA versus USC game.

Filter wasn’t much of a sports fan, but it was a big game, and it was free. He’d watched young men bash each other for the better part of three and a half hours. They’d slammed themselves to the turf, driven their shoulders into midsections and ribs, and celebrated the abuse.

The crowd had cheered relentlessly. The more violent the hit, the louder the crack of bodies colliding, the more crazed the throngs in the stands had become. Filter had watched with wonderment, and while he couldn’t remember the outcome of the game, who’d won or lost, he did remember the oddity of it all.

It so reminded him of what he thought it must have been like when Romans threw Christians to the lions, leopards, and boars. Although Filter was no more a religious man than he was a football fan, he couldn’t help but connect the two.

Now, however many years later, he was here again, sacrificed on a bloody field. As the handlers marched toward the center of the field on its southern end, that was what he thought, that this was a just end.

If there were a God, this was punishment. The plague was a cleansing in the City of Angels. It was the deity’s way of resetting the clock, changing possession, and starting over with a fresh set of downs.

Filter’s mind danced and skipped from bizarre thought to random epiphany until the handlers reached their destination. They stopped and adjusted their grips, nearly tilting Filter from the stretcher and onto the worn field bare of grass.

“This is good,” said an authoritarian voice from behind Filter’s head. “Drop it here. Then proceed to the opposite end of the stadium for cleansing and decontamination. You’ll be issued new suits there.”

It.

The voice called him it. That was the second time. It. He wasn’t even a person anymore, he was one of countless men, women, and children lying on the field like hash marks from one end of the stadium to the other.

A helicopter passed overhead. Filter squinted, not able to see much more than a dark blur whipping across the sky above the stadium. Then a second and third blur followed closely behind, the sound of the rotors growing louder and then fading.

Had he seen the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and its grounds from the vantage point of the Cal Guard airmen aboard those choppers, he’d have seen the scope of the effort there. He’d have tried to count the yellow dots that represented the hundreds of Tyvek-wearing Cal Guard volunteers and California Department of Public Health employees working to move, catalog, and destroy the growing number of infected.

He’d have seen the burning pyres, the dark smoke billowing up to the clear sky before trailing into wisps of ash that disappeared above the wash of the rotors. He’d have marveled at the bursts of flames that from above looked like sparks ignited at the end of long handheld lighters. He’d have grown sick at the sight of the bodies catching fire then smoldering as the clothing, hair, skin, and muscle melted away, leaving little more than remnant bone.

Filter would have been awestruck by the long lines of military trucks, all of them hauling the next load of living and dead to their final destination. This was the final resting place for all of them. If they weren’t dead when they arrived, they would be soon.

Filter would have known that too if he’d been aboard one of the choppers. He’d have witnessed the constant checking of the dying on the field. The suited workers moved up and down each column and row. If they spotted an expired patient, they’d raise their hand, and two others would come and haul them away, taking them to the piles.

The piles.

He wasn’t in the air looking down, though. He was on the ground. He was flat on his back. In an hour, he’d be dead. In two he’d be ash.

CHAPTER 9

DAY 13

Westwood, California

Dub stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. His skin was pasty and his eyes were sunken. His sweat-soaked hair was matted to his forehead and the tops of his ears. His cheekbones looked like they were going to poke through his face. But he was feeling better. He was through the worst of it.

His throat hurt and he was congested, but he was alive and his fever was gone. It had been a rough seventy-two hours since his collapse in the plaza outside the Wooden Center near Ashe, but Keri had nursed him through it.

A sophomore biology major, she’d explained to him that his iron deficiency might have helped him fight the disease, whatever it was. While she was guessing, she was so excited about the possibility of being right. Dub had gone along with her.

“There’s a cell in our tissues and in white blood cells called macrophages,” she’d told him. She’d been talking with her hands. Dub, barely able to breathe, had tried to keep his focus on her as she spoke.

“The macrophages carry infections, like tuberculosis, throughout the body. They’re like an unwitting host to disease. It’s often the iron in the macrophage, the iron in the blood, which helps these infections spread more quickly. With less iron, the spread isn’t as bad. That’s the theory.”

She’d kept talking about it and he’d fallen asleep. That was two nights ago. When he’d awakened hours later, it was because she was coughing, her body shuddering next to his.

Michael was sick too. So was Barker.

All four of them had holed up in their dorm room on the fifth floor of Rueben Vista. Their air-conditioning was off, their windows closed. They’d sprayed everything with Lysol and drowned the bathroom fixtures in bleach.

They’d done everything the news had suggested they do to keep themselves healthy except for the most important step. They hadn’t stayed away from someone who was already infected. Though apparently not among the vast majority of those who’d completely succumbed to the illness, Dub was still sick. He’d carried it. He’d spread it.

He’d spent the last twenty-four hours, as he’d improved, caring for the other three. None of them were good, and there was nowhere to take them. Every clinic, hospital, urgent care center, doctor’s office, and emergency room in the area was either inundated or closed.

He’d tried. He’d killed his cell battery waiting on hold and wading through the series of automatic prompts most places made him navigate. None of them could help.

Improvising, he’d plied his friends with NyQuil, Tylenol, and leftover antibiotics from the last time he’d had the flu. He’d chilled wet washcloths in the micro fridge and kept cycling them amongst the others. He’d given them clean towels when they’d started coughing up blood. He was almost out now.

He’d opened the door to the hall once. There were three bodies littering the floor. He’d counted three. There might have been more. He couldn’t be sure.

Now, having just gone to the bathroom, he was trying to muster the energy to walk back into their dorm room and nurse his patients. They’d all been napping. He’d worked hard not to wake them from their uneasy sleep.

He turned off the light to the bathroom and opened the door. He picked up the can of Lysol and sprayed the knob, then moved into the bedroom. He closed the door, repeated the process, and set the Lysol on top of the micro fridge next to an unopened box of Oreos. Oreos, Dub had learned, were vegan.

The room was bathed in darkness and the stench of infection. Dub hadn’t noticed it until he’d left it for a few minutes and returned. He crinkled his nose, his face squeezed into a sour look as he waded across the short distance to his lofted bunk. His toes sank into the fibers of the plush oval rug at the center of the room. To his left, he could hear the wheezing duet of his roommates. One wet inhale was higher pitched than the other. Both friends sounded awful, but they were breathing. That was good. All Dub could hope for now was to keep them comfortable and alive. He hoped, despite the growing evidence to the contrary, they might survive the disease, as he had.

He climbed the ladder onto his bunk, crossed over Keri’s body, and slid next to her. He put his hand on her hip, which was buried in the tangle of sheets.

The mattress creaked under his weight and he stopped moving. He didn’t want to wake her up. It had been so long since she’d slept this soundly. He listened to her breathe. He didn’t hear anything.

He closed his eyes, concentrating, and tilted his ear closer to her face. Still nothing.

Dub’s pulse skipped. He reached over to the bedpost and twisted on the clipped lamp that sat perched at the head of his bunk. Pale white light bathed his corner of the room. Shadows bounced off the walls, casting sharp lines across the wall-tacked photographs of Keri and Dub at parties and at the beach. Glossy images of the two clinging to each other or laughing loomed over Dub, and a nervous tingle rippled through his body. He swallowed hard and shifted his body to face her. She was on her back.

Keri wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t responding to his touch or his voice. Dub was on top of her now. He held her face in his hands.

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “Stay with me. Stay with me.”

Her skin was clammy and cold. Her lips and eyelids were blue. Dried blood stained the edges of her nostrils and her cheeks. There was more blood soaking the sheets beside her head, appearing black against the white sheets.

He slid his hands to her shoulders and lifted her limp, lifeless body up toward his and wrapped his arms around her. A thick ache swelled in his neck. His eyes welled.

“Pleeeaase,” he cried out. “Don’t leave me. Please, Keri, stay with me.”

She didn’t respond. Her head flopped back and her mouth dropped open. Blood leaked down her chin.

Dub was shaking now. His whole body trembled uncontrollably. His pulse raced, pounding against his own chest. He thought for a moment that it was Keri’s pulse. He laid her down and laid his ear against her. Nothing.

He tilted back her head, pinched her nose, and placed his mouth on hers. He blew everything he could into her lungs. The heavy breath forced him to cough, and he turned his head to the side, blew out the ragged air, and tried again.

After several breaths, he tried starting her heart. With his palms flat against her solar plexus, he pushed and pushed and pushed, then tried breathing into her again. Her chest rose with each supply of air, only to leak out audibly from between her blue, bloodstained lips.

Dub stopped his efforts and slid down the ladder onto the floor. He reached under his lofted bed to his desk and found his charging cell phone. He dialed 911. It was busy. He hung up and tried again. Busy again. He dropped the phone to the floor and his body to his knees.

Tears filled his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He grabbed his hair, tugging at the greasy strands through clenched fists. His stomach tightened.

Dub wanted to scream. He wanted to hit something. He wanted to die.

From behind him, a weak voice webbed with phlegm said, “Dad?”

He glanced over his shoulder. It was Michael. His thinning, fiery red hair was muted as if his own flame was dimming. He was sitting up on his elbows, staring at the door.

Dub swallowed hard and calmed himself. He knuckled tears from his eyes and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Michael?” he said. His voice trembled when he spoke. He couldn’t shake the emotion. “You need something?”

Michael’s chest heaved up and down. He was clutching his stomach, his face drawn tight with pain. He didn’t turn toward Dub, keeping his focus on the door. “Dad?” he repeated. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be here. This place is bad.”

Dub checked the door to make certain nobody was actually there, and faced Michael and snapped his fingers. “Michael.”

Michael coughed. Blood leaked from his nose. He licked his lips. “No,” he said. “I don’t have classes. I didn’t miss classes. I’m sick. This place is sick.”

Michael coughed again and wheezed. He doubled over, grabbing his gut. He moaned loudly and threw his head back. He slapped himself flat onto his face and kicked his legs free of his sheets. He cried out, a high-pitched squeal piercing the small room and hanging in the humid air. What he said, if it contained any real words, was garbled.

Dub stood and stepped toward Michael’s top bunk. He carefully put his hands on the bed rail and softly called to his friend. “Michael? Can you hear me?”

Michael kicked out one of his legs, banging his knee into the railing. Then he spasmed. His body shook wildly then tensed. He was rigid, his eyes open. His teeth bit down on his lower lip, drawing blood.

Dub let go of the railing and stood there helplessly, unsure what to do. He stepped quickly to the end of the bed and climbed up to the foot of the top bunk. He crawled next to Michael and held his head.

Michael’s eyes were rolled back. His nose was bleeding. His mouth was bleeding. He’d wet himself. Again. His toes were pulled back, his fingers cramped like claws.

Dub spoke to him, trying to reassure him he was there. He promised everything would be okay, that he would help him. He told Michael not to be frightened, to calm down.

Michael bit down harder on his lip, puncturing the skin. His body trembled yet stayed stiff at the same time. He wasn’t responding to anything Dub tried.

Dub knelt next to him for a long while, sweat pouring into his own eyes as he fought to help Michael’s seizing body. Then, as quickly as the spasms began, they ended.

Michael’s body went limp. His eyes closed and a heavy, rattling breath escaped his mouth. Dub sat there motionless for a moment, trying to understand what had happened.

Michael was still. Dub tried shaking him. He didn’t respond. He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse.

Dub’s eyes misted again. The uncomfortable knot in his throat swelled. He jumped from the bed, landing awkwardly and falling onto his side. He winced but grabbed for his phone lying on the floor.

He tried 911 again. Another busy signal. He dialed the infirmary. Fast busy signal. He called his parents. It rang twice before a recorded voice told him all circuits were busy.

He squeezed the device in his hand and thought about throwing it against the wall, but stopped himself. He tossed it to the floor and looked up at Barker. He was in bed, his body curled into a ball on his side, his back to Dub, sweat staining his shirt. He was on top of his sheets and comforter.

Dub stared at Barker’s back, trying to see if his friend was breathing. He couldn’t tell, and he crawled toward the bed to get a closer look. Then he saw it: the minuscule rise and fall of his side as Barker inhaled and exhaled. He was still alive. Barker was alive. For now. Dub collapsed onto the floor. He lay flat on the rug, staring at the ceiling.

He couldn’t comprehend it. One of his best friends and the love of his life were lying dead in his room, and he couldn’t do anything for them. He couldn’t save them. He couldn’t get them help. He couldn’t even move them. What was he going to do?

He couldn’t dump their bodies in the hallway, as others had done. He couldn’t burn them, as he’d read the government was doing to prevent the spread of the disease.

The disease. They had a name for it now. He’d read that too. Lane Turner, the newsman, had actually read it to him on one of his phone’s news apps.

“Researchers are working tirelessly to develop a vaccine for the illness they’re now calling TBE,” Turner had said. His bright and shiny news set stood in sharp contrast to the dim, disease-riddled world outside. “They’ve identified the components of the relentless, highly contagious illness and in a news conference revealed an aggressive combination of both tuberculosis and E. coli bacteria.”

Dub stared at a thin crack in the ceiling of his dorm, recalling the script the newsman had read with such sincere concern. He’d been on the toilet, cramping, while he’d watched the news report. It had been thirty-six hours earlier when he was sick but on the mend, while his friends were deteriorating.

“The bacteria is spreading through touch and through the air. Close contact is not necessary to contract the illness. It has an incredibly high mortality rate. Researchers are working on the numbers, but they believe as many as forty-seven percent of those who contract it will not survive.”

Forty-seven percent. Dub shook his head. It was higher than that in his own dorm room. The sheen of tears swelled and spilled down his temples. He was the reason half of his inner circle was dead. He’d killed them. If he hadn’t contracted the illness, had they not insisted on helping him before they knew how contagious it truly was, they’d be alive.

He reached for his phone again. There had to be new information out there. He needed an update. Maybe there was something that could help him help Barker before the mortality rate in his dorm became seventy-five percent.

He unlocked the phone and tapped the local news app. The app opened, but the main page wouldn’t fully load. The campus Wi-Fi was still working, which was good given the horrible cell service, but it was slower than it had been before the spread of the disease. Still, Dub could read the headline and the teaser sentence underneath it.

“Four hundred thousand feared dead in TBE bacterial outbreak. Hospitals, clinics overwhelmed.”

Dub waited until the accompanying video loaded. It played automatically and he thumbed up the volume, holding the phone above his face.

“…martial law is critically important to the containment of TBE, according to both the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the CDOH in Sacramento,” read Lane Turner. He was looking into the camera with his typical intensity.

“The entire state of California is under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the areas where TBE is most concentrated, are more restrictive.”

Barker shifted in his bed, the mattress springs creaked, and Dub lowered the volume on his phone. He pulled it to his ear, figuring listening to the information was more important than watching Lane Turner’s expressive face.

“There are quarantine zones in both metro areas. Movement between zones is prohibited. If Cal Guard troops request you evacuate with them, you are under orders from the governor of California to comply.”

Barker wheezed, coughed, and rolled onto his back.

“Here is a map of the quarantine zones,” said the anchor. “There are multiple secure facilities in each of the zones. The larger facilities include the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Forum, the Los Angeles Convention Center, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the Long Beach Convention Center, Memorial Coliseum, the Anaheim Convention Center and Arena…”

Dub switched hands and put the phone up to his other ear. He checked Barker. His friend was still breathing. His mouth was open, his chest rising and falling.

“If you see smoke,” said Lane Turner, “do not call 911. Emergency lines are overwhelmed throughout the Southland, and they cannot handle the volume of calls. As for the smoke, there are controlled burns initiated by Cal Guard troops. Do not worry. There are no out-of-control fires. There are no wildfires. They are, I’ll repeat, controlled burns.”

Dub knew what the anchor meant without the newsman having to say it. The kindling for those controlled burns were dead people. So far he’d gotten little information he didn’t already know. The secure facilities and quarantine news was helpful. It told him he shouldn’t be leaving campus. But he didn’t know much more about the disease than he had two days ago. He didn’t know what, if anything, authorities were doing to stop its spread beyond the physical separation of the sick from the healthy.

At the top corner of the screen, Dub noticed the video he was watching was actually a livestream. Whatever information he was learning now was the newest available.

“Joining me now is the associate director for Healthy Water, National Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Mateo Negro, PhD, is live via satellite from Atlanta.”

Dub lowered the phone to his ear. His eyes stung from the clinging, remnant tears. He sucked in as deep a breath as he could and exhaled.

The anchor thanked the doctor for being on the program, they exchanged pleasantries, and the doctor got to business. He did not candy coat it.

“This is not an extinction-level event, but it is catastrophic,” he said. “We have cases on both coasts and in Texas. We think we’ve managed to contain the infected in all locations but California, Oregon, Arizona, and Washington State. But that means, of course, we haven’t contained it.”

“These are bacterial infections?” Lane asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Negro replied. “They are bacteria. There are, as many of your viewers may know, three types of microbes: fungi, viruses, and bacteria. There are also parasites. Together they are the causes of infectious diseases. In this case, it is solely bacterial. Unfortunately it is antibiotic resistant. So treatment, to this point, is ineffective in most.”

“People are surviving it, though?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “We’ve seen as many as half of the reported cases survive the infection. At this point, we’re finding that if someone can fight off the disease within the first seventy-two hours of symptomatic onset, they’ll make it.”

“What are some tips that—”

Dub dropped his arm to the floor and glanced toward his bunk. Keri’s pale, lifeless fingers stuck out from underneath the railing. Her dark pink nail polish was chipped but glossy. Dub stared at her fingers. His mind drifted to her hand in his and the soft, cool touch of her skin. His hands were always warmer than hers. He’d frequently chided her about it.

“Cold hands, warm heart,” she’d say.

“Does that mean I have a cold heart?” he’d ask.

She’d kiss him and tell him that of course it didn’t, that the transitive property didn’t apply. He’d kiss her back and tell her he didn’t think that was actually the transitive property. But she was smarter than him, he’d acknowledge, so maybe she was right. She’d demand she was right by evidence that his heart was as warm as hers.

Now her heart was cold. It was stopped. It didn’t work anymore. A swell of guilt rose again like a tide in his gut. His stomach tightened and the tide brought with it nausea and anger and disbelief.

Barker grunted, drawing Dub from his melancholy reverie. A gagging cough followed the grunt, and Barker sat up in his bunk, nearly hitting his head on Michael’s bed above him. Dub rolled over and moved to Barker’s side.

“Hey, Barker. How you doin’?”

Barker was wide-eyed, dazed looking. His thinning hair looked even more sparse than usual. It was wild and matted and sticking out in all directions. If Dub hadn’t known better, he’d have thought either Barker was doing his best impression of Doc Brown from the half-century old Back to the Future movies or had stuck a fork in a toaster.

Barker blinked a couple of times and wiped his chin. “It’s like a truck is on my chest and I’m sitting in an oven.”

His words were slurred and dipped in thick, stringy spittle. He blinked again and squinted at Dub. “You crying?” He shoved a pillow against the wall and shifted on his bed, pivoting his body so he could lean his back against it. His eyes never left Dub’s.

Dub glanced away. He swallowed hard. He couldn’t say the words. He couldn’t tell him they were in a room with two dead people—two dead people who were their closest friends.

Barker adjusted the pillow behind his back. He coughed into his balled fist and winced.

“Geesh, that hurts,” he said. Then he cursed and cleared his throat.

Dub’s vision blurred. His chest fluttered and heaved. He tried catching his breath but couldn’t. This wasn’t from TBE. Tears poured from his eyes and streaked down his cheeks. His nose filled; his chest tightened.

Barker shot a glance past Dub at his bunk. He scanned the bed and his face contorted with horror. His chin quivered. His eyes blinked rapidly, fighting the tears that came. He shook his head, denying the truth.

Understanding that Barker had seen Keri’s lifeless body, Dub nodded slowly. Without thinking about it, his own eyes drifted up to the bunk above Barker.

Barker’s shoulders sank, shuddering. He drew his hands to his face and tugged at his sallow skin, running his clawed fingers across his scalp. Still on the verge of hyperventilating, Dub crawled to Barker’s bunk and climbed in next to him. The two college friends, two survivors, wrapped their arms around each other and sobbed. For the better part of an hour neither of them said anything.

Then Barker climbed from the bunk and checked on each of his deceased friends. He was holding Keri’s hand when he asked, “What do we do with them? We need to tell their parents. We have to tell someone.”

Dub motioned at his phone, which was still on the floor. “I tried all sorts of numbers. I can’t get through.”

“Did you try texting?” asked Barker. “Sometimes texting works when phone calls don’t. They use less bandwidth.”

Dub nodded. “Good idea.”

He slid from Barker’s bed and grabbed his phone. He selected his contacts list and tapped out the first few letters of the entry for Keri’s father, Bob. He was a mechanic in New Orleans, a tough father of three women who loved his family more than anything.

Dub hit the message icon and started typing his short missive, his thumbs dancing across the screen.

Mr. Monk, this is Dub. I’m with Keri. I tried calling. I can’t get through. We are all sick. I know Keri told you she had a fever.

Dub’s thumbs hovered above the virtual keyboard on the phone’s screen. He glanced up at Barker. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “How do I tell him she’s…?”

“Don’t yet,” said Barker. “Send what you’ve got and wait for a response.”

Dub nodded and hit send. The completion bar at the top of the screen moved from right to left and stopped before completion. Then it sprinted to the edge of the screen and disappeared. The message was sent.

Immediately, text bubbles appeared on the left bottom edge of the display. Bob was responding. Sweat beaded on Dub’s forehead. The phone trembled in his hands.

Hi Dub. Good to hear from you. Been trying to call her. Can’t get through. Everything okay? She getting better? It sounds horrible there. Two cases at the airport here. Nothing big yet. They’ve got the cruise terminal shut down.

“What did he say?” asked Barker, his eyes dancing between the screen and Dub’s face. “What did he say?”

Dub read the text aloud. The words didn’t come easy. He choked on them twice.

Barker sat down in Dub’s chair, which was underneath the lofted bunk that now served as little more than a catafalque for Keri’s body. There were clothes and towels draped across its back. Barker leaned on them and exhaled, his wheezy breath rattling in his chest.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Barker. “There’s no easy way to do this. There’s no right way to tell him.”

Dub bit the inside of his cheek and started typing again on the screen. His fingers ached as he tapped out each letter of the new text.

I don’t know how to tell you this. I wish I could do it in person. I wish I could talk to you. But I can’t. Keri has passed away.

He pressed send and then kept typing before Bob could respond. His thumbs moved faster now. No text bubble yet.

I loved her, Mr. Monk. I really did. I wish I could have taken better care of her.

He hit send and typed more. The words came more easily now. Still, no responding bubble from Bob Monk.

She is here in my room. I will leave her here so that when this is over, she can have the burial she deserves. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.

Dub hit send for the final time. He looked away from the screen and at Barker. His friend’s hair was a mess. His skin was almost translucent; his eyes were reddened, the skin around them swollen. But he was alive. That was something.

“I need to text Michael’s mom,” said Dub. “She needs to know.”

“She’s in North Carolina?” asked Barker, it was as much an affirmation as it was a question. “Wilmington?”

Dub nodded. He found her contact information in his phone and opened a new message screen.

Mrs. Turner, this is Dub Hampton, Michael’s roommate. I’m writing to you about his illness. I think he told you he was sick. It was either yesterday or the day before.

He pressed send and waited for her response. He didn’t know how long it might be. If what Michael had told them was true, she and his dad were always busy. When they weren’t at work, or traveling for work, they were out. They were on their boat. They were playing tennis. They didn’t do much with Michael and from the time of his early childhood had left him to his own devices.

While he awaited a response from Michael’s mother, a text notification flashed at the top of his screen, accompanied by a buzzing vibration. It was from Bob Monk. A second notification appeared on the screen before he could tap the first.

I don’t understand. I tried calling you at this number. I can’t get through. I tried Keri’s phone. I tried the campus switchboard. I need to talk to you. This doesn’t make sense.

Dub read the message silently, then aloud to Barker. Then he read the second message.

How could she be dead? She just talked to us two days ago. She texted us yesterday. I don’t understand. Her mother is beside herself. Please explain.

“You did explain,” said Barker. “What do they want?”

“I don’t know.” Dub tapped the screen and started thumbing a new message. “I think I just need to be straightforward.”

She is dead. She is in my room. She got worse and worse. Less than an hour ago she wasn’t breathing. Her heart stopped. I tried CPR. I tried mouth-to-mouth. I tried 911. Nothing worked. She is dead. My roommate Michael is also dead.

He hit send. “I hate doing this,” he said through his teeth. He felt tightness in his chest and he coughed. “I’m not good at this.”

“Nobody is good at this,” Barker said reassuringly. He was sweating again, a sheen of perspiration coating his forehead, cheeks, and the sides of his neck. His fever was breaking.

A new message appeared at the top of Dub’s screen. Michael’s mother.

Hi Dub. Thanks for the update. Hope everyone is getting better. Give Michael my love.

Dub read the message three times before he shared it with Barker. “Is she that clueless?” asked Dub. “Michael said they were detached, but this…” He held up the phone and shook it. Another message vibrated.

Barker shrugged and coughed, winced. “Maybe she’s in denial,” he said. “Or maybe she’s clueless.”

The newest message was from Bob Monk. It was lengthy. Dub read it aloud rather than suffer through it more than once.

It doesn’t make sense to us, Dub. How could she be dead? She was healthy last week. She is an athlete. She’s in great shape. Are you sure she’s not breathing? You’re not a doctor. Can you get a doctor? There has to be someone who knows whether or not she is breathing. I’m trying to come there, but my wife can’t find flights right now. I might drive. But you can’t be sure she’s dead. Also, weren’t you sick first? How is she dead and you’re not?

“Holy crap,” said Barker.

“I’ve got to reply to Michael’s mom,” said Dub. “I don’t know what to say to Keri’s dad. I need a second. Can you think of something?”

Barker didn’t say anything. He leaned his chin on the towel folded over the back of the chair.

Dub thumbed a new message.

Mrs. Turner. Michael is not okay. He got very sick. He had a seizure. I tried to help him. He stopped breathing. His heart stopped. I could not save him. He has passed away. I am so sorry.

The phone buzzed again. Bob Monk.

I’m looking at the news. They say only half the people die. Half the people live. How could Keri be dead? It doesn’t make sense, Dub. I’m driving there now. Please get Keri to a doctor. Get someone who knows what they’re doing.

Dub started to respond but didn’t. There was nothing more he could say at the moment. Keri’s dad would be on the road for two days, or three, or more. It was close to nineteen hundred miles, and it was a pretty safe assumption that once he reached Arizona, he’d run into problems. Still, he started to tell Barker what the message said, looking for affirmation that he shouldn’t reply instantly. He was halfway through reading it aloud when there was a heavy knock at their door.

A second, more urgent knock reverberated against the metal. Dub stood up and crossed the room slowly, motioning for Barker to stay where he was. With his phone in one hand, he placed his ear to the door and listened. Another series of insistent knocks shook him from the threshold, and he backed up a step. His phone vibrated. He ignored it.

“Who is it?” he asked.

A woman’s voice answered. “Is Barker there?”

The voice was familiar. Dub knew it but couldn’t place it, couldn’t put a face to it. He glanced back at Barker, who shrugged.

“Who is it?” Dub repeated.

“It’s Gem. Is Barker there?”

Dub’s phone vibrated again. He ignored it again. “Hang on.”

“C’mon,” she whined, pounding against the door again. “There are dead bodies out here. Could you please let me in? I’m not sick.”

Barker motioned for Dub to open the door. Dub held up a finger in hesitation.

“I saw you in line at the infirmary the other day,” he said. “How do we know you’re not infected? Why were you at the infirmary if you weren’t infected?”

Dub didn’t so much care about her illness as far as contagion was concerned. He was on the mend and assumed Barker was too. But he couldn’t nurse another person, not with how weak he still felt, how little food they had in their room, and given that there were two dead people already in their beds.

“I’m not sick,” Gem insisted. “If I were sick, there’s no freaking way I could have crossed campus from Hilgard and climbed the hill. No way. Seriously, dude. If Barker is there, let me in.”

“I heard you coughing,” said Dub. “You were in line and you were coughing. You were sick.”

“I was,” she said. “I’m not now. I’m over it. I’m fine.”

Dub checked over his shoulder with Barker. Barker shrugged again and mouthed, “Let her in.”

Dub unlocked the door and pulled it toward him. Standing in the hall was the woman he remembered from the line outside the health center. She was wearing the same clothes, or similar clothes. Denim overall shorts were hooked over both shoulders and covering a long oversized UCLA T-shirt. Her hair was braided but frayed. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. There was dark mascara at the corners and streaked on her cheeks.

She looked at Dub, past him to Barker, and back again. Dub stood there blocking her entrance.

“Can I come in?” she pressed.

Dub nodded and stepped aside. The phone in his hand buzzed.

Gem crossed the room to Barker and threw her arms around him. She stood on her tiptoes, holding him tightly. He stood with his arms caught at his sides and off balance. He put one hand on the small of her back.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said. She kissed his cheek and put her hands on the sides of his face. “You’re clammy. You’ve been sweating.”

“You’ve been crying,” he said.

Gem, seemingly oblivious to the two dead bodies in the room, told him she had been. Half of her sorority sisters were dead, and the rest were sick. Although some of them were recovering, some of them probably wouldn’t.

“I thought you two broke up,” said Dub. He was still standing at the door.

“We did,” said Barker. “We’re back together.”

“We’ve been back together,” Gem corrected. “He’d hooked up with my sorority sister, Becca. It was before we’d ever dated or started talking or anything. But I was jealous. I broke up with him. I got over it. Becca said she wasn’t into him. It’s all good.”

“How’s Becca?” asked Barker. “Is she sick?”

“No. Well, I don’t know,” Gem said. “She went home before everybody got sick. I haven’t seen her. I don’t think she’s coming back.”

Barker coughed into the crook of his elbow. He stepped back from Gem, bumping into the chair. “How did you get over here?”

“I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “You didn’t respond to my texts. I couldn’t get through on my phone. So I…”

Gem stopped talking. Her mouth remained open, slack-jawed. Her eyes narrowed and then widened. Dub realized she wasn’t looking at Barker anymore.

She drew her hands to her mouth and suppressed a squealing cry. She backed away from Barker, shaking her head. Then she pointed at the bunk behind him. Her finger was wagging at Keri.

“Is that…is she…who…what—” she stammered.

“That’s Keri,” Dub said flatly. “She died an hour ago. Could be two hours. I’m not sure.”

She stood there blinking back tears. Dub wasn’t sure what to make of it. She’d crossed the campus, seeing countless dead or dying people. She’d witnessed half of her sorority sisters die. But she was emotional about a woman Dub was certain she’d never met.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…it’s that…I didn’t expect that. You didn’t say there was a dead person in here. I didn’t know.”

Dub motioned toward the bunk behind her and Michael’s body. “There are two dead bodies. Our roommate Michael is gone too. He had a seizure right after I tried to save Keri.”

Gem spun around and backed into Barker. He put his hands on her shoulders. She drew hers to her face again and stared at the top bunk. Her chin quivered and tears streaked down her cheeks. “Michael?” she said, a bubble of spit forming in her mouth. “Poor Michael. I loved Michael. He was so sweet.”

“You knew him?” Dub asked. There was a sharpness in his voice he hadn’t intended, but he didn’t like this virtual stranger invading his space, coming into what had become a place of mourning, and acting as if she belonged here. His body tensed, his aching muscles reminding him he was still recovering.

Barker and Gem exchanged glances. Barker stepped toward Dub. Dub’s phone buzzed again. He squeezed it in his hand but didn’t check the message.

“It’s okay, man,” Barker said. “She’s cool, okay? She knew Michael. We’d go hit up B Plate sometimes. She’d swipe in both of us and pay for our meals.”

“Sometimes?” asked Dub. “As in more than once?”

Barker nodded. “Yeah. A bunch.”

“How did I not know this?” Dub snapped. Again, he didn’t intend to bite. But he did. Anger was setting up camp. “Where was I? What was I doing when you were at B Plate?”

Barker swallowed. His Adam’s apple slid up and down in his throat. One hand was holding Gem’s and the other ran through his wild hair. He stopped at his crown and scratched nervously. “You were with Keri,” he said. “You two were in the library or working out or at Santa Monica Pier.”

Santa Monica Pier. An image flashed in Dub’s mind. He was with Keri. They were playing Skee-Ball in the arcade. A memory—was it a memory?—crystalized. He could see it as if it had been yesterday. He could smell the briny Pacific air. He was there on the pier.

He’d felt a rumble in his legs. Initially, he’d blown it off as the ambient environment. But Keri had changed his mind when she’d touched him on the shoulder.

“Did you feel that?” she’d said. “I felt something.”

“Like a wave?” he’d asked. He’d been focused on the wooden ball in his hand and the concentric circles at the end of the ramp in front of him. He’d stooped, flicked his wrist, and rolled the ball toward the circles. The ball had accelerated, launched into the air at the end of the ramp, and rattled into a hole marked 30.

Dub had grunted and said, “Or an earthquake?”

She’d shaken her head. “No, like an explosion.”

The memory dissolved as quickly as it had materialized, and Dub was back in his dorm room. Keri and Michael were dead. Barker and Gem stood in front of him, both of them sharing the unmistakable softened gaze of pity.

“Oh,” said Dub. “Sorry. Excuse me, I’ve got to use the restroom.”

He turned without saying anything else or waiting for a reply and stepped into the bathroom their dorm shared with the triple next door. He hadn’t seen any of those guys since the outbreak.

He shut the door behind him and leaned against the counter. His phone in his palm, he held it up and used the biometric scanner to unlock the device. The screen glowed to life and Dub saw he had several messages from Bob Monk and from Mrs. Turner.

He opened the message from Monk first. It was a series of short texts, one after the other.

I’m on my way. I should be there in a day and a half. GPS says it’s a straight shot on I-10. Not stopping for anything but gas. Tell Keri I’m coming. Tell her Dad is on his way. I’ll be there soon. Already making good time.

Dub read the fifth and sixth texts over and over again. Bob Monk was in denial. There was no talking him down or changing his mind. Keri was alive as far as he was concerned, and he was coming to save her.

Dub’s thumbs hovered over the screen, twitching as he considered how best to respond. Then he tapped away at the screen.

Okay. Keri will be in my room when you get here. See you then. Update me with your progress. I’ll let her know you’re coming.

He hit send and cycled to the series of texts from Michael’s mother. There were two longer messages. They weren’t any less disturbing than Bob Monk’s.

I’m not sure why you’re telling me this, Dub. This is not funny. I know that you boys think games like this are hilarious. I don’t think they’re hilarious. I think it’s awful. I’m not playing your game. You tell Michael to text me immediately. Your mother would be very disappointed in you, Dub. Shame on you.

That was the first message. The second one was sent ten minutes later.

So you’re ignoring me now? Have Michael text me, please. I’ve tried calling him and can’t get through. I’ve texted and he isn’t responding. You’re all sick. This is sick. Have my son get in touch with me immediately.

Dub sighed and slumped his sore shoulders. On some level he understood why both parents were behaving the way they were. It didn’t seem real. Not in a text message. Not when they couldn’t see the misery worn by the person delivering the horrible news or hear the depth of angst in his voice.

He imagined he wouldn’t believe the news either. He would be in denial. He would doubt the veracity of the news he couldn’t independently confirm. He didn’t blame them. He was there in the room with both of them as they died, and he couldn’t accept it. How could they?

He pressed the screen to open a text box so he could respond to Mrs. Turner. He wiped his nose with the back of one hand and then typed the reply. He started to explain the truth, how he wasn’t lying, wasn’t playing a game, and her son was dead. He started to explain how he’d tried to save him and the awful way in which Michael had taken his last agonized breath. Then he held the delete key and started over.

Okay. Sorry. Michael is in our room.

Dub slid the phone into his pocket and emerged from the bathroom. Barker and Gem were standing at Michael’s bed. Barker was actually perched on the edge of his bunk, leaning over the railing at Michael’s head.

Dub moved closer and noticed they’d pulled the sheet over Michael’s head. Gem was muttering something to herself. She was praying.

Barker stepped down and turned to Dub. “We should do the same for Keri,” he said. “I mean, you should do it.”

Dub nodded. He stepped across the room and climbed up onto the top bunk. He positioned himself next to her body and fought the swelling emotion aching to consume him again. He steeled himself and untangled the soiled sheet from her body. His hands brushed against her skin. It was cold and didn’t feel at all like her. It was foreign. It was alien.

Dub took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and draped the sheet across her body. It ballooned over her and then drifted slowly into a form-defining shroud atop her. He pressed his hand onto her leg and prayed.

“I love you,” he said, his voice trembling.

He climbed down to the floor. He ran his hands through his hair and eyed the others. “We getting out of here?”

Gem nodded. “I think it’s a good idea. We could go to my house.”

“Your house?” asked Dub.

“She lives in Thousand Oaks,” said Barker. “I mean, her parents do.”

“Then why aren’t you already home?” asked Dub.

Gem shrugged. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a big deal at first. Then I got sick. Now I’m better. Probably time to go home.”

“Why didn’t your parents come get you when you got sick?” asked Dub.

“They’re out of the country,” she said. “Anniversary trip on a cruise of New Zealand and Australia. I can’t get a hold of them except for a couple of emails here and there.”

Dub sat down in his chair. His legs thanked him. “How do we get to your house?”

“Not sure,” she said. “We can figure that out. Maybe Uber?”

“Ride-sharing is suspended,” said Dub. “So is all public transportation.”

“We could take bird scooters,” she said. “They’re everywhere. People leave them all over the place.”

Dub leaned on the back of the chair. He raised an eyebrow. “Scooters?”

Gem frowned. “You have a better idea?”

Dub glanced at Barker and back to Gem. “No.”

“Let’s pack up some stuff and head out,” said Gem. “You guys have backpacks, right?”

“Yeah,” said Barker. “I know Michael’s got some LED flashlights in his desk. We could take those.”

“I think there are earthquake packs down in the dorm office,” said Dub.

“Why don’t we load you two up with everything we think we’ll need here,” Gem suggested. “Then I can carry a couple of the quake packs.”

They spent the next few minutes silently rummaging through the room, searching for anything and everything they might need on their trek north to Gem’s parents’ house. Phone chargers, batteries, dry food, bottles of water, tape, pens, extra T-shirts and socks and belts.

Dub even fished three empty tea bottles out of the trash, cleaned them with shampoo in the bathroom sink, and refilled them with water. He took a bar of soap too.

Once they’d stuffed the packs, the three of them stood looking at each other. They were ready to go, but not ready to go. Dub adjusted the straps on his shoulders and motioned toward Keri and Michael.

“We should tag them,” he said.

Barker’s brow furrowed. “Tag them?”

“Yeah. Leave something that tells people who they are, how to get ahold of their families. We might not be coming back here before this is over.”

“Good idea,” said Gem. She walked over to the printer perched on top of a dresser and pulled three pieces of paper from the tray. She leaned over Barker’s desk and scribbled on the paper. She looked up from the desk, the pen hovering over the papers. “What are their last names and phone numbers?”

Dub gave her the information and she resumed writing. She capped the pen and dropped it onto the desk.

She instructed Barker to turn around and she unzipped the small compartment on the back of his pack. She fished out the tape and ripped off three pieces with her teeth, sticking them to her shirt while replacing the roll in the pack.

She taped the pieces of paper, one at a time, to the top side rails of the bunks. The third piece she held in her hand. “This one’s for the door.”

Dub read both pieces of paper. Gem’s handwriting was large and loopy, and he half expected to see the I’s dotted with hearts. But it was easily legible and served the purpose. The placards offered his friends’ names, when they’d died, and the phone numbers for their parents.

Dub nodded his approval to Gem, and she offered a twitch of a smile. The three of them moved to the door, walked through it, and she peeled the last piece of tape from her shirt. She stuck the last piece of paper to the door, running her index finger along the tape to make sure it stuck.

There are two dead people inside this room.

They are our friends. Please take care of them.

Their names and contact information are with them.

God bless their souls.

“Thank you,” Dub said.

Gem nodded curtly. “You’re welcome.”

Dub led the trio through the hall of horrors, again thankful that his sense of smell was impaired. The odor of rotting flesh was pungent enough to cut through the mucus clogging his sinuses. He swallowed hard and tried to hold his breath as they sidestepped the seven bodies that littered the corridor between their room and the large open area near the study room, trash room, and elevators.

Dub recognized all of them. Four men, three women. He knew their names, their hometowns. His eyes watered as he passed the last of them. Reaching the elevator bank, he bent over at his waist, his hands on his knees, and exhaled loudly.

Barker leaned against the wall. What little color he’d had left in his face had drained.

Even Gem appeared rattled from the brief trip through the minefield. Her hands were on her hips, her cheeks puffed out, her lips puckered. She let the air from her cheeks, stepped to the elevators, and punched the call button. “That was worse the second time,” she said. “And I swear there were more bodies this time.”

“If this is an indication of what’s to come, I’m not sure I can handle it,” said Dub. “I mean, I don’t know if my stomach can handle it. I’m not one hundred percent.”

“It’ll be better when we get outside,” said Gem. “Trust me.”

The elevator chimed and the door retracted. They rode down to the first floor silently, the gentle rumble of the elevator car serving as the only noise. It slowed and hissed to a stop, the door opened, and they stepped into the main lobby of the dorm building.

Across from the elevators was the building’s residential office. The door was open, and along one wall was a row of red emergency backpacks.

They weren’t truly earthquake packs, as Gem had called them, but that was why they were there. She grabbed two of the packs and unzipped them to check their contents.

Inside she found a flashlight, batteries, first aid materials, shampoo and liquid soap, duct tape, tissues, and a surgical mask. It was a three-day survival kit for a single person. With two of them amongst the three friends, Gem told the men she figured they had more than enough for the trip to Thousand Oaks. It was a thirty-five-mile trek. If they had scooters, they might be able to do it in four or five hours. On foot, it would take them three times as long, especially if they stayed off the major road and used Backbone Trail as their primary route. Given how all three of them were still in the final stages of illness, it could be longer than that.

They adjusted their gear and looked at each other, checking their readiness. Dub sensed the others shared his sense of dread, desperation, and concern.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s do this.”

CHAPTER 10

DAY 14

Pacific Palisades, California

Gilda took the key from Betty, the operational secretary, and thanked her. She backed away from Betty’s desk inside the entrance to the bunker and spun around. She took a couple of steps to a door and, in a fluid set of movements, slid the key into the lock, turned it, swung open the door, and removed the key. She returned the key to Betty, thanked her again, and walked through the door. She closed it behind her and an electronic hum filled the space.

Like the rest of the OASIS, the room was lit by sconces evenly spaced along the walls, and she walked for a short distance along a shallow rise in elevation. At the end of the corridor, it opened into a large rectangular room that resembled a command center. There were tables decorated with maps and diagrams. There were electronic consoles connected by wires, which ran along the walls and ceiling in a web. Sitting around the desks and at the consoles were Doc and Victor.

“Decided to join us?” asked Victor. He pulled headphones from his ears and draped the set around his neck.

Gilda feigned a smile. “You know I can’t stay away from the hub,” she said, taking her seat at the table. “Especially when there’s work to do.”

The room was warmer than the rest of the OASIS. Despite their best efforts to ventilate it, the heat from the electronics collected in the space. There were large fans whirring against the backs of the machines, helping to keep them as cool as possible.

Doc typed something into his console and then asked Gilda, “How’d you sleep?”

“Not great. The headaches are worse.”

“I’ve got some prescription analgesics I could give you,” he offered. His fingers were still poised above his keyboard. “Would that help?”

“Yes. The over-the-counter stuff isn’t working.”

The headaches were only part of the issue when it came to Gilda’s insomnia. She’d been having vivid nightmares when she did manage to fall asleep. They felt more like past experiences than they did dreams, and in every single one the world was irrevocably altered by some catastrophic event. She saw fire, ice, famine, and a southern California that didn’t remotely resemble the place she’d long called home.

She’d awaken every night and every morning bathed in sweat, convinced she was sick with the bacterial illness now called TBE. She’d jump from her bed to take her temperature. It was always normal. It was the only thing normal right now. Everything else was twisted and backwards. The world above and outside was dying. TBE had spread to nine states, Canada, Mexico, and El Salvador. It could be more than that now. She hadn’t received an update in eight hours. The projections they’d seen had it covering much of the globe within another seventy-two hours.

Gilda considered for the first time it might not be worth surviving the end of the world as she knew it. It might have been better to be up above with the sick, coughing, and bleeding to death. Being down here in a hole was getting old fast. She felt helpless and cowardly.

She wasn’t doing anything to fix what was happening up there, she was hiding. She’d come to understand why the waitress, Claudia, was so conflicted about being saved.

“You with us, Gilda?” Victor asked. His eyebrows were arched with genuine concern. “You okay?”

Gilda shook free of the daydream that consumed her thoughts and nodded. “Sorry. It’s my head, that’s all.”

“I’ll make sure you get the meds tonight…at dinner,” said Doc. “I’d do it now, but, you know, we’ve got things to do.”

“Thanks,” said Gilda. “I do appreciate it.”

Victor eyed a digital clock at the far end of the room. The red numbers displayed the hour, minute, second, and tenth of a second. “Are we ready, then?” he asked. “We’re running a couple of minutes late.”

Doc nodded and picked up a headset from the table in front of him. Gilda did the same.

Victor pulled his headphones onto his ears, adjusting them for comfort, and spoke into the tabletop microphone in front of him. “This is K6VWV calling K6WVW. Do you copy me, K6WVW?”

There was static but no reply. He tried again, no response.

“You think they’ve skipped out since we’re late?” asked Doc.

“We’re only three minutes behind the scheduled contact time,” Victor replied. “They’ll wait five at least.”

He called again, using their radio call sign and that of their intended partner. That partner didn’t answer.

Victor eyed the clock again. “I’m trying the sat phone. Stand by.”

Gilda’s headset was connected to Victor’s and Doc’s. In it, she could hear both Victor’s transmissions and whatever communication came from the other end of the line. Her mic and Doc’s, however, were localized. Both she and Doc could communicate with each other and Victor, but the receiver couldn’t hear anyone but Victor.

The system allowed the three of them to discuss appropriate responses without the caller on the other end hearing their deliberations. Victor spoke for the group once they’d arrived at the appropriate response. Victor had designed it himself when he’d built the hub from scratch. It had taken years to collect the equipment, build in redundancies with backup equipment, power, fiber, and install it. It was his pride and joy.

Gilda heard the familiar but odd tones of the satellite phone dialing. The ring warbled once, twice, and then someone answered.

“Is this Victor?” asked a man’s voice.

“It is,” he said. “We tried the radio. You weren’t there.”

“We’ve got a problem with it. Not sure where that problem is, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Not going to get fixed.”

“Understood,” said Victor. “Sat phone from here on out?”

“Affirmative. However long that might be.”

“How’s it going up there?” asked Victor. “Is it as bad as it appears? Worse than our call two days ago?”

“Affirmative,” he said with an audible exhale. “It’s a circus, a bloody, anarchical circus.”

Victor glanced at Gilda and Doc, his face wrinkled with concern.

“What does he mean?” asked Gilda.

Victor keyed the mic. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s out of control. There are riots on the streets now. People aren’t responding well to martial law, and Cal Guard is ill equipped to handle such mass insurrection.”

“How does it compare?” asked Doc.

Victor took his hand off the transmit bar at the base of the desktop microphone. “Compare to what?”

Doc’s brow was furrowed, as if he was surprised Victor didn’t understand his question. “The…other times,” he clarified.

Victor glanced at Gilda. “Should I ask that?”

Gilda wasn’t sure. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know the answer, she wondered if it was appropriate to know the answer. She shook her head with a shrug. “Whatever you think,” she said to Victor. “I’m not sure it’ll do any good, but either way I’m fine with it.”

“You there?” asked the voice on the other end of the line. “Can you hear me?”

Victor keyed the mic. “Yes, we’re here. Could you tell us how this compares to the other times?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. After a few seconds, Victor started to press the mic bar again, his mouth already open to speak, when the man on the other end of the line responded.

“This is the worst. Of everything we’ve seen, none of it has been on this scale. Even a nuclear attack is more narrowly focused than a disease that’s spreading even faster than the SIR model would indicate.”

“SIR?” asked Victor.

“It’s a differential equation model that calculates the spread of a disease. This TBE is unlike anything epidemiologists have ever recorded.”

“We’re stuck,” said Victor. “We need to stay here.”

“Yes. For the duration. As you know from our agreements and the studies you’ve done previously, some group must survive every iteration. Nothing can be an extinction-level event. If that happens…”

“If that happens, what?” Victor prompted.

“It can’t happen,” said the voice. “That’s all we need to discuss about that. Tell me how you’re faring.”

“In this iteration?”

“Yes.”

Victor glanced at Doc and then at Gilda before he answered. Even in the dim light of the hub, the concern etched into his face was apparent. Gilda knew Victor was processing the new information, as was she.

This was no drill. It was no short-term deployment. This one was the real deal, and it looked like her long-term future was underground, safe from the TBE disease that threatened to wipe humanity off the face of the planet.

She should have been happy. She was alive. She was safe at a time when so many weren’t. Yet she was far from rejoicing. Her gut ached. She was queasy. Her headache was more acute.

“We’re doing as well as can be expected,” said Victor. “Our food supply is good. The hydroelectric plant is generating sufficient power and cooling. Our population is healthy and docile.”

“That’s good. Ultimately, our end game involves survivors who can model the entirety of the scenario and add to research as a whole.”

“How are you? Up top, I mean?” Victor asked. “Aren’t you in danger of being exposed?”

“No. We’re sequestered here. There’s ample security. Nobody’s getting in or out.”

“I guess that’s good,” said Victor.

“It’s not as if we have a choice. The military has taken over San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Every city is blocked into quarantined zones. There’s no travel between zones. There are internment camps.”

“Wait,” said Victor, “what do you mean, internment camps?”

The voice on the other end of the line huffed with evident exasperation. He drew in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “I mean internment camps. People who are sick are essentially being sent to die in controlled environments. Their bodies are incinerated once they die or are close to it. I mean, nobody’s checking pulses, you know? And the ones who aren’t sick are going to camps where they’re held until…”

“Until when?”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m calling them internment camps. There’s no end date. People are forcibly removed from their homes and separated. So we couldn’t leave here if we wanted to.”

“They’re not coming for you? What about your wife?”

“We’ve got special dispensation from the governor on this. It’s not a problem as long as we stay put, don’t let anyone inside, and stick to our work.”

“And your wife?”

“She’s at home. We’re far enough out of the city that it’ll be weeks before they reach her. By then, I’m hoping the need for internment or quarantine or whatever is over.”

“I’m sorry,” said Victor.

“Look,” said the voice, ignoring the sentiment, “I wish I could take a deeper dive into how you’re faring, the day-to-day of things, but I can’t. I’ve got a meeting with Dr. Chang in a minute. He’s got some news for me, I’m told. I need a second to decompress before he gets here.”

“Got it,” said Victor. “Hang in there, Derek. We’ll talk in forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours,” said Derek Hoover. “Talk then.”

The line went dead. Victor slid his headphones around his neck. Doc and Gilda removed their headsets. They sat there for a couple of minutes. The whir of the fans cooling the equipment was the only sound in the space.

Gilda broke the silence. “It’s worse than they thought?”

“It appears so,” said Victor. “It’s spreading faster than the sure model anticipated.”

“SIR model,” Doc corrected.

“Sorry,” said Victor. “SIR. What exactly is that anyhow?”

Doc sighed and folded his arms across his chest. He looked at both of his friends over the top of his glasses. “As best I understand it, it’s a compartmental model that divides the population into groups. It assumes that everybody within a particular group has similar characteristics. It’s really a simple formula…mathematically speaking.”

“That says what?” asked Gilda. “What does SIR even mean?”

“Well, it’s an acronym for susceptible, infectious, recovered. Those are your three compartments, essentially. But you have to account for time. That’s the variable. At any given time, or as time elapses, what happens to each of those compartments? How does time affect them…and how does one of the compartments…over time…affect the others?”

“Doesn’t sound so simple,” said Gilda.

“It’s simple mathematically, if math is your thing. It’s not simple…in the truest sense of the word. After all, the dynamics of an epidemic vary.”

“Some diseases might spread faster than others,” said Gilda. “I mean, diseases that don’t have vaccines.”

“Sure,” said Doc. “Dengue is faster spreading than West Nile…or malaria. Now those are viruses and not bacteria. You get the point though.”

Gilda rubbed the back of her neck. It eased the throb in her head.

“Let’s look at historic diseases and how quickly they…dented the population,” said Doc. “The plague, first traced to China in the sixth century, had a transmission rate of one point three. So every person who got sick infects a third of a person…statistically. One hundred million people have died from the plague.”

“One hundred million,” said Victor.

“In the course of history,” clarified Doc. “Yes. That’s nothing compared to the flu.”

“Seriously?” Gilda said.

“Yes,” said Doc. “The transmission rate, depending on the strain, can be anywhere from one to three. As many as a half million die every year. And this started in the sixteenth century.”

“I had no idea,” said Victor.

“That’s nothing compared to SARS,” said Doc. “That respiratory disease is new. It probably started in China in a bat reservoir in 2003. It’s viral, linked to the common cold, and has a transmission rate of three.”

“Everyone who gets sick,” said Gilda, “gets three more people sick.”

“Exactly,” said Doc. “There’s no vaccine and it has a fatality rate of one in ten. Only a thousand people have died from the virus. Mainly because it has such a long incubation period.”

“Whatever this is,” said Victor, “this TBE, it’s historically bad.”

“Yes,” said Doc. “From what I’ve been able to gather on the research which, mind you, isn’t a lot, there are multiple components to this bacterial cocktail that are antibiotic resistant. So anyone who is surviving it has some innate immunity…that’s not replicable yet.”

“In the meantime we’re stuck,” said Gilda. “Down here. In the hole.”

“It’s an OASIS.” Victor’s lips twitched, threatening to smile.

Gilda rolled her eyes. “We need to tell everyone we’re down here for the duration.”

“Agreed,” said Victor. “There’s no rush though.”

“True,” said Doc. “We have all the time in the world.”

CHAPTER 11

DAY 14

Infected Zone A4

The knocking startled Danny from his uncomfortable sleep. He opened his eyes, not remembering where he was, and tried to focus. Maggie was even slower to react. When she did, at the second round of measured raps, she snarled and started barking. Her sharp reports filled the small space and Danny recognized his surroundings.

He was in his car, in the parking garage where he’d been for the better part of four days. He’d tried escaping from Infected Zone A4 multiple times. Each failed attempt had resulted in Danny and Maggie returning to his VW and sleeping for as long as they could. They’d scavenged water and bits of food from other parked cars and trash cans. They’d also, by happenstance, found other supplies that might be useful when the time came. They were stuffed into the door pockets and hidden in the glove box. Most of it was junk, but Danny kept it anyway. Just in case.

Nonetheless, the last four days had been miserable. Misery had ensured, however, that they’d remained undetected and free of a trip to wherever it was the endless parade of transport vehicles were taking people. Until now.

Danny hushed Maggie to a low, grumbling growl and found the source of the knocking. A trio of Tyvek-suited soldiers stood outside his car, one of them aiming a rifle at the window.

Maggie’s growl erupted into a cascading bark. Danny calmed her but didn’t sit up from his awkward sleeping position in the cramped back seat of the VW.

“You need to get out of the vehicle,” said one of the suited soldiers.

Danny didn’t respond but pushed himself up onto his elbows. When he did, he saw there were three more soldiers behind him on the other side of the car, and one was standing at the back of the hatchback. He was essentially surrounded.

There was no escaping this.

“Can you hear me?” asked the soldier in the now familiar muffled command voice. All of the soldiers sounded the same behind the protection of their hooded masks.

Danny stretched his neck, tilting his chin to one side and then the other. For some inexplicable reason—fear, resignation, or a combination of the two perhaps—he said, “I don’t think I’m coming out.”

The Tyvek soldiers stiffly eyed one another from behind their tinted visors. It reminded Danny of confused storm troopers at Mos Eisley Spaceport.

One of them tapped the window again. “I don’t think you understand that we’re not asking you to come out of the car. We’re telling you. This area is under martial—”

“I know,” he cut in, “martial law. Blah, blah, blah. You have the right to take me and my dog and do whatever you want. I do understand. But I’m not leaving my car.”

He was surprised by how emboldened he felt. It was as if he’d awoken a different person, someone confident and defiant. Maybe it was the four days in hiding, or his anger that in a time of crisis during which he’d done nothing wrong, he was a fugitive who couldn’t return home.

He and Maggie were reduced to scavenging for food and water. They stunk. They were exhausted. The last thing Danny wanted to do was follow orders from people in yellow suits.

“We will shoot you if it comes to that,” the soldier said flatly. “We don’t want to do that, but we will.”

Another soldier, behind Danny’s head on the passenger’s side of the car, said, “We could shoot the dog first if that will lubricate your compliance.”

Danny eyed Maggie. She bared her teeth, her tail stiff. Her snarl was like an angry purr. The hair on her neck and back stood on end. She swiped her nose against the glass, following the taunting soldier on the other side, leaving wet smudges in wide arcs. She pawed at the glass. She was agitated now, as if she understood English and understood what the soldiers were suggesting.

“No need for that,” said Danny. He was stalling. He needed time to figure a way out of this even if he believed there was no way out. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

A soldier tugged on the door handle and found it locked. He tugged at it again, rattling it. Danny silently thanked himself for having had the foresight to keep the GTI locked while he slept. He’d done it out of fear that other fugitives might try to hurt him or steal something. He wasn’t thinking the Tyvek brigade would find him.

“There’s no negotiation here,” said the first soldier. “We’re going to give you ten seconds to exit the vehicle. If you don’t, we will use force to restrain you. We will kill your dog.”

Danny sat up straight, keeping his eyes on the soldier with the rifle. He motioned with his hands toward Maggie. “If I come out—”

“Ten,” said the lead soldier.

“If I come out,” Danny said more loudly, “what do you want—”

“Nine.”

“—me to do with my dog?”

“Eight.”

“Seriously,” Danny pressed. “What assurance do I have that—”

“Seven.”

“—when I open the door to come out, you won’t—”

“Six.”

“—shoot her on sight anyhow?”

“Five.”

Holding one hand up to feign complicity, Danny reached for the door with the other.

“Four.”

Maggie snarled and barked. She pawed at the glass on the passenger side and then hopped into the front seat, maneuvering from side to side across the center console and gear shift.

“Three.”

Danny inched closer to the door, keeping his eyes on the soldiers, with one hand up and the other extended for the handle.

“Back away so I can get out,” he said.

The lead soldier motioned for his team to step back.

“Two.”

Quickly, Danny glanced down at the door pocket beneath the handle and in a swift movement pulled from it an oblong egg-shaped device. He’d found it in a dumpster behind an Army surplus store along with spent shell casings and a box of glow sticks. He pulled the pin and held it up to the window before the soldiers could react.

The soldiers took giant steps back and looked at the lead for guidance.

“One?” Danny asked defiantly.

The soldiers didn’t respond. No doubt they were assessing the threat: a man trapped in a car with his dog and a live hand grenade.

Danny waggled the grenade; then he pressed it against the window. The soldiers instinctively flinched at the sound of the grenade slapping the glass. “You going to shoot me and blow yourselves up?”

Danny was trapped. The doors were locked and he was surrounded by soldiers. None of that had changed. But now he had the upper hand. He had the threat of violence they couldn’t match.

“No need for that,” said the soldier. “We are not interested in harming you.”

“Or my dog?” asked Danny. “Her name’s Maggie, by the way.”

At the mention of her name, Maggie’s ears pricked, and she hopped between the front seats to the back. She licked Danny’s ear and sniffed it.

“Please return the pin to the grenade,” said the lead soldier. His voice was still muffled, but now he was breathing more heavily. The sound of respiration almost overpowered his projection.

The soldier took a step forward. His eyes and expression hidden by the reflective mask, he held out his hands, palms up. “Don’t let go of the spoon and you can replace the pin. No harm, no foul.”

Danny reached across his body, pulled on the handle, and shoved open the door. “Maggie, stay.” All but the lead soldier backed another step away from the car.

The lead held his ground, his gloved hands above his head. “Don’t be foolish. We’re under a quarantine. There are units everywhere. There are barricades. You won’t get far.”

Danny stepped from the car and stood with the grenade at his side. He whistled and Maggie hopped out beside him and sat. “Take off your suit.”

The lead soldier didn’t move.

“Let me rephrase that,” said Danny. “Tell the rifleman here to lower the weapon. Tell him to put it on the ground and back away. Then take off your suit.”

The soldier held his hands out in front of himself pleadingly. “I don’t—”

“I’m going to count to ten,” said Danny. “Then I’ll kill all of us. Does the thought of that lubricate your compliance?”

The adrenaline was coursing through Danny’s body. His pulse thumped, his breath was quickened, but he was holding it together. He was invigorated. There was something intoxicating about this, empowering.

The lead soldier pivoted, his suit crinkling, and ordered the armed soldier to put his weapon on the garage floor and step away. The armed soldier hesitated.

“Ten,” said Danny.

“Do it,” snapped the lead soldier. The subordinate complied.

“Who else is armed?” asked Danny.

He couldn’t see all of the soldiers from his vantage point. He needed them all in front of him.

“Scratch that,” he said. “Get everyone over here on this side of the car. Anyone armed puts their weapon next to the rifle on the ground.”

Nobody moved.

“Nine,” said Danny. Without pausing for a breath, he continued. “Eight. Seven.”

“Everyone move,” said the lead soldier. “Relieve yourself of your arms.”

The other soldiers moved toward the group on the driver’s side. Two of them laid weapons onto the ground.

“That it?” asked Danny.

“Yes,” said the lead.

“Six,” said Danny. “Take off your suit.”

“This is an infected zone,” the lead protested. “I’ll be exposed.”

“I’m exposed,” said Danny. “I’m fine. Five.”

“This is an infected zone. TBE is in the air. I’ll get exposed. I’ll—”

“Four.”

“I don’t think you get it,” said the lead. “People are dying. The transmission rate is five, and I—”

“Three.”

“We’re not all bad here,” said the lead. “We’re not even all military. I’m a doctor. Most of us are doctors.”

That explained why not all of them were armed. Only the soldiers had weapons. It didn’t matter. Doctors, soldiers, candlestick makers—they were all trying to take him into custody and separate him from his best friend.

“Two,” said Danny. “You don’t want me getting to one.”

“Okay,” said the lead, his voice full of fear and exasperation. “Okay.”

He waved over a subordinate, who helped him begin removing the suit. The hood came off first and revealed the sweaty, overwhelmed government researcher who’d tried to take Danny into custody against his will. His dark hair was matted with sweat. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. He didn’t look much older than thirty-five, save the specks of white in his spotty beard. He looked ashamed as he stepped out of the suit, standing there in only undergarments like the kind professional athletes might wear. Form-fitting and perspiration-wicking, the black outfit clung to his body.

“What now?” he asked.

“The rest of you,” said Danny. “Take off yours too.”

“You’ll kill all of us,” said the researcher. “You can’t ask us to—”

“I’ll kill all of you if I toss this grenade,” said Danny. “That’s definitive. You dying from exposure is a possibility. You have a better chance of surviving if you do as I ask.”

Danny stepped forward and removed the magazines from the semiautomatic rifles and tossed them over his car. They clattered on the far side of the garage. All of the weapons save one were now empty except for the rounds in the chambers. With his free hand, he grabbed a loaded sidearm that one of the soldiers had dropped onto the ground. It was a semiautomatic pistol. Danny didn’t know anything about guns other than how to load them and unload them. But having one pointed at the troops was better than not having one pointed at them. He aimed it at the leader’s chest and stepped back to Maggie’s side.

The leader scanned his team and softly told them to remove their suits. They did as they were told.

Danny stood there watching. When they were finished, he said, “Pile your suits on top of the weapons.” They obeyed.

He ordered them to the other side of the garage, to the parking spots opposite his VW. They slowly shuffled there, all of them, and stood huddled together in their black undergarments. They looked smaller and less intimidating. He could see their faces, their furrowed brows, the collective fear in their eyes.

Had he condemned them to death? No. If he’d survived for four days in the zone, they could too without exposure. He didn’t need to be a government researcher to add two and two.

“Everyone on your knees,” Danny said. “Hands looped behind your heads.”

All of them did as he instructed without question or complaint.

Danny tucked the sidearm into his waistband, certain the safety was on, and strode to the pile of Tyvek suits. He grabbed one of the suits and slid his legs into it one at a time.

He zipped it up to his waist and, one-handed, tied the suit’s arms in a loop around his midsection like a loose belt. He grabbed a hood and tucked it under his arm and whistled for Maggie to follow him.

He took a half dozen steps down the sloping level and stopped. He faced the collected, suitless unit and gave them one last warning.

“Count to one thousand by ones, out loud,” he said. “When you get to one thousand, put your suits back on and go about your business. I’m coming back in three minutes to check on you. If you’re not doing as I’ve instructed, I’ll toss the grenade.”

Danny walked away, Maggie at his side. He rounded the corner and descended to a lower level of the garage, not believing he was walking away from certain capture.

He’d improvised all of it. And he’d stolen from scenes in movies or chapters in books where heroes and heroines used silly commands to facilitate their escapes. Somehow, it had worked.

The fact that most of the unit was likely medical personnel and not military certainly helped. He figured that any soldier who took orders from a government doctor must not be seasoned enough or confident enough in his own abilities to challenge the easy acquiescence of the unit to a lone man with a grenade and a mutt.

He also wondered how motivated any of them were to be there. They were soldiers, true. They were brave and trained. But they were also reserve and forced to leave their families in a time of crisis. Fires, mudslides, and earthquakes were one thing as far as emergency deployment went. Leaving loved ones in the midst of a spreading deadly outbreak of a drug-resistant bacteria was something else altogether.

Then again, it could have been luck. Danny found that luck, or the lack of it in his case, had frequently been the lady who’d directed the course of his life. There was another woman who readily came to mind as a direct influencer, but she was no lady. She’d been his wife.

Now she was the problem of some douchebag in the Bay Area and he was arm in arm with the fickle beauty who’d guided him away from certain capture.

Danny rounded the last corner and saw daylight ahead. He stopped where the light leaked in far enough to illuminate the garage floor.

Danny let go of the grenade and tossed it to the side. The metallic replica, inscribed with the words “Go Ahead, Make My Day,” rolled harmlessly into the corner and came to rest against a concrete pillar.

He loosened the hazmat suit’s arms at his waist, slid his body the rest of the way into the suit, then donned the hood and took the firearm in his right hand. There was still air in the regulator, which was good. It indicated he had about half of his filtered supply left in the suit. He hoped it would be enough to get him past the immediate blockades.

He took a deep breath, and marched into the sunlight, Maggie at his side. They’d somehow managed to escape.

Standing at the entrance to the garage, he looked to his left and then to his right. He glanced down at Maggie, who wagged her tail. She was panting.

“Which way, girl? Which way will get us out of here the fastest and with the least amount of trouble?”

The dog’s ears pricked. She cocked her head to one side. She turned right, walking toward the busier of the two blockaded intersections. Danny figured she had just as much chance of being right as he did, so he followed.

The suit was hotter than he’d anticipated. The strong off-gassing odor of plastic and what he imagined was the previous owner’s sweaty musk was gag-worthy. A couple of times he reached up to rub his nose and thumped his gloved hand against the plastic face shield.

Maggie looked at him both times and Danny swore she smirked at him. He glared at her with that wrinkled warning face parents give their children or their pets, then realized she couldn’t see it. She was smirking at him. No doubt.

They reached the end of the street, Danny trying to walk confidently. He pulled his shoulders back and widened his gait. He carried the handgun as if it were an extension of his right arm.

Ahead of him was a cadre of armed biosuited guards. They stood amongst concrete Jersey barriers set up alternately to force a zigzag queue and prevent vehicles from passing. Danny hadn’t noticed the new iteration of the barriers until now. He remembered them being plastic before.

Although most of the sentries appeared unfazed by Danny’s approach, two of them regarded him with suspicion. They stepped through the barrier maze and blocked the narrow entrance. Danny noticed both of them had their finger on the outside of their rifles’ trigger guards.

He kept his weapon pointed at the ground and waved with his left hand, greeting the men and women through whom he would have to pass convincingly. He decided not to speak unless spoken to, and he imagined they’d speak.

Maggie angled her trot and sidled up against Danny’s leg. She wasn’t smirking anymore, but she tensed. Danny sensed it. She purred. He shushed her and asked her to be calm.

“Where are you headed?” asked one of the two guards blocking the entry.

Danny glanced past the barricade toward a large staging area a block beyond it. There was a hive of activity. Military trucks idled. Yellow suits marched purposefully. People, not in suits, were led around corners or into the backs of some of the trucks.

There was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. The blades were looped across the top of the fence, which, from Danny’s vantage point, appeared to be the walls of a large holding pen.

Danny motioned with his left hand toward the pen. “There,” he said flatly.

His voice echoed inside the hood. His breathing was faster than he’d have liked. He hoped the guards couldn’t hear it.

“What’s with the dog?” asked the other guard, motioning his rifle toward Maggie.

Aware they couldn’t see his eyes, Danny stole another look at the pen. He assumed it was a temporary place to hold people destined for a secure facility.

“She’s trained for drugs, nukes, whatever,” said Danny. “We gotta go sniff people before they get transferred.”

Danny had no idea whether a canine trained to root out illicit drugs was also capable of detecting radiation. He hoped the two men in front of him didn’t either. He’d have held his breath awaiting their response if he’d been capable. Instead he exhaled, the warmth of his breath condensing on the inside of his visor before evaporating.

“Where’s your rifle?” asked the same one who’d asked about the dog.

“I’ll be in close quarters in that pen up there,” said Danny, thinking more quickly than he’d believed himself to be capable. “Not safe to have a long gun. Too risky. Especially given how jumpy and unpredictable these people are. I’d just as soon be unarmed, but orders are to have my sidearm. So I do what I’m told.”

Danny stepped forward, expecting the men to part and leave an open path through the barricade. They didn’t budge.

The first one who’d questioned Danny’s itinerary bounced from one Tyvek boot to the other and back again. His invisible gaze made Danny swallow hard. He motioned behind Danny as if someone was there.

Danny didn’t take the bait. He stood his ground and kept his head facing forward. Sweat dripped down his back. His pulse was pounding now. He wondered if they might be able to hear that above his breathing it was so loud in his head.

“Where’s the rest of your unit?” asked the guard. “We’re not supposed to travel alone on foot.”

“I’m not alone,” said Danny. “Maggie here is worth five of you. No doubt.”

Both men angled their hoods toward the dog. As if on cue, Maggie licked her chops and exposed her teeth, her shoulders squared.

“She hasn’t eaten in a while,” said Danny. “She’s hungry.”

One of the men flinched.

The other stepped to the side, but the entry was still blocked. He tightened his grip on his rifle and stiffened.

“I need to go, gentlemen,” said Danny. “She has a job to do. I have a job to do. I’d hate for somebody to get on one of those transports and make a mess of things because you two, with nothing better to do than guard concrete, kept us from where we have to be.”

The guards awkwardly turned toward each other, eying one another through their shields. From Danny’s perspective in front of them, a funhouse image of one reflected in the face mask of the other.

“I wouldn’t confuse your rank with my authority,” pressed Danny.

“All right,” one of them said. “Go ahead. Keep that dog away from me, though.”

The men stepped apart and left the entry open for Danny to enter the concrete maze and weave his way through the queue to the opposite end. He clicked his tongue at Maggie and she followed him.

“Hey,” called a guard to the others protecting nothing on the other side of the maze, “let him through. He’s headed to the pen.”

A few of the others acknowledged the orders with muffled grunts or nods. None of them hassled or blocked Danny as he led Maggie beyond the Jersey barriers to the short stretch of open street that separated the barriers from the heavy foot traffic and the awaiting trucks.

Danny sighed with relief as he threaded his way perpendicular to the flow of the crowds moving hurriedly, or reluctantly, toward an awaiting pool of military personnel transports. When he emerged from the thick of it, he stopped for a moment to soak in the surreality evolving around him. He patted his left thigh and Maggie sat at his side while he observed.

To his right, Danny saw several white and green tents erected from one edge of the street to the other. The green ones looked like the kind of canvas structures he’d seen portrayed on battlefields. The white ones looked like they were plastic and more akin to the ones depicted in news reports about refugee camps in Syria or Ukraine. The tents were guarded much as the Jersey barricade was, with men or women in yellow suits standing at the ready with their semiautomatic rifles at their waists and aimed at the ground.

The flow of people through which he swam came from those tents. Clusters of men and women led by pairs or quartets of armed escorts trudged from the makeshift clinics or processing centers, whatever they were, and made their way to Danny’s left and the awaiting rows of trucks. Suited clerks with clipboards stood waiting at the rear of the trucks with handheld scanners. As new people approached, the clerk would scan what Danny guessed were coded bracelets on their wrists. The clerks would check the scanner and then wave the people aboard the trucks. Some of the vehicles appeared to be standard military transports. Others looked to be little more than extended-bed pickup trucks.

It was an endless parade of men, women, and children passing by Danny. The men and women wore backpacks or carried duffel bags. A few rolled compact suitcases. The children toted stuffed animals or plastic dolls.

A shriek drew his attention back to the trucks, and for the first time he noticed guards separating the people from their belongings. The suitcases, duffels, and backpacks represented what Danny imagined were the most important belongings people had taken with them when they’d been “evacuated” from their homes.

Now they were being separated from them. Even the stuffed animals weren’t getting on those trucks. It was a child’s shriek that had drawn his attention. Now the child’s father was involved. Both of his hands gripped the shoulder straps of a heavy pack on his back. His knuckles were white. His face was red.

“We were told we could take what we could carry!” he shouted above the ambient din. “They told us to bring it.”

A guard was responding, but Danny couldn’t hear him. Two other guards had moved in position behind the father. The man hadn’t noticed them. His wife and daughter stood to the side. The girl was still clutching a plush, floppy-eared rabbit and keeping it pressed against her chest.

“We’re not handing them over,” said the father, spit flying from his mouth. “We’re not doing it.”

The guard said something and took a menacing step closer to the man. Two more comrades appeared from nowhere and joined the pair already closing ranks on the family of three. The girl leaned into her mother’s leg and buried her face. The mother wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and pulled her close, tears streaming down her face. She was trembling as her husband resisted.

Then the man made a mistake. He let go of the pack strap with one hand and jabbed a finger at the guard in front of him, using words not meant for his daughter to hear and admonishing the guards for their inhumanity.

He was mid-profanity, his finger still jabbing like a jackhammer, when the guard put an end to the burgeoning insurrection. In a move so quick that Danny wasn’t even sure he’d seen it, the guard reached out with a free hand and snatched the hammer finger out of the air.

He twisted it to the right and then, stepping into a well-practiced motion, looped the man’s arm around and behind his back. The man was now facing his wife and child, his face crimson and contorted with pain. He looked up at the sky, wailing, as the guard pressed and applied upward pressure on the man’s arm. He still had a grip on the man’s finger.

An instant later two guards separated the mother and daughter from one another. The girl was lifted from the ground, her feet kicking. She reached out for her mother and lost hold of the rabbit, which dropped to the ground. She was squealing and inconsolable. The guard who held her kept her at arm’s length as if holding something explosive or toxic.

The mother, held in place by two guards, who stood beside her and held her biceps tight beneath her armpits, cried out for her child, strings of spittle stretching across the space of her wide-open mouth. She pleaded with the guards to let her child free.

The father struggled futilely until he dropped to his knees in surrender. He was drooling, his eyes watering, and he’d bitten his lip. Blood trickled from his mouth and mixed with the watery spittle on his chin.

The guards removed the pack from the father’s back and heaved it into a growing heap of belongings piled alongside the last of the trucks. One of them picked up the rabbit and did the same.

The family was forcibly led, or carried, to the back of a truck on the far right of the row. They disappeared beyond the tailgate and into its dark space. Danny couldn’t hear them anymore.

Within a minute three of half a dozen trucks had pulled away. A bucket loader moved into place and maneuvered to the pile of confiscated belongings. Danny stood there watching the operator fill its lift and then dump them into one of the pickups. He was mesmerized by the operation that didn’t in any way resemble something that would happen in his country, let alone southern California within walking distance of his home.

He was driven from the daydream by a thump on the back of his shoulder. Then another.

“Hey, you,” called a muffled voice from behind him.

Another yellow-suited Cal Guard enforcer was standing in front of him. He was armed like most of the others at this checkpoint, or distribution point, or blockade, whatever it was. Everyone looked the same, and the muffled voices were virtually indistinguishable aside from gender. He cursed himself for having gotten lost in the moment.

“What?” said Danny.

Maggie turned with him. She was behaving herself and sat next to him, waiting for a cue.

“Didn’t you have somewhere to be?” It was one of the two guards who’d questioned him at the barricade. “At the pen, was it?”

Danny stared at the reflection of his own mask in the one facing him. He looked like one of them. It startled him for an instant before he composed himself and shot back his response.

“What’s it to you? Didn’t you see that altercation over there? I was standing by in support. If that father had caused more trouble…”

“You’d have what?” asked the nosy guard. “Were you gonna sic your dog on him?”

The question dripped cynicism. Danny didn’t like it. He didn’t think he owed the guard any answers.

“I don’t owe you any explanation,” he said. “Go back to babysitting an empty street.”

Danny had already taken a step away from the guard when the man grabbed his shoulder to stop him. Danny shrugged him off, turned back and, without thinking about the consequences of his actions, brought up his right arm, swinging it in a wide arc, and slammed the butt of the handgun into the side of the guard’s head.

The guard’s hooded head snapped back and he stumbled, falling onto the street. He dropped his rifle, which bounced and then skidded a few feet.

Danny whipped his head in both directions, scanning the preoccupied crowd to see if anyone had seen what he’d done. He half expected to be tackled from behind, but nobody came for him. Nobody, it seemed, had witnessed it.

Confident the guard was unconscious, Danny took two big steps to one side and picked up the rifle. Now he had two weapons. And he had Maggie. That made three.

With his wits still about him, he walked toward the trucks and found the closest guard who appeared to have some semblance of authority. He walked up to him, Maggie in tow, and called out, “Hey, we’ve got an infected guard. He’s sick. Told me he needed to puke and then he passed out.”

Danny aimed the rifle toward the guard still lying motionless on the street, people walking around him as if he weren’t there. Danny hoped he hadn’t killed the guy.

“All right,” said the man next to him. His face shield followed Danny’s lead. “Thanks. We’ll get a team on him immediately.”

Danny thanked the man and disappeared into the crowd as a trio of suited medics hustled past him carrying a stretcher, yelling for the crowds to clear a path.

No sooner had Danny reached the fence than he wanted to turn back. What he saw in front of him was beyond anything he could have imagined. He suddenly understood the setup at the checkpoint for Infected Zone A4 and the gravity of what had befallen his home.

He now knew the people being loaded onto those trucks were the healthy ones. They were sent without any of their belongings to prevent latent transmission of the bacteria. It made sense now that he’d figured it out. As much as he hurt for that little girl and her rabbit, as much as he sympathized with the dad fighting for his family’s last material possessions, the guards had done what they were supposed to do. They were sending off that family to stay healthy, to get them as far away from the deadly illness as they could, as unpleasant as the journey might be.

Danny’s eyes welled with tears as he stood a foot from the fence and soaked in the macabre tableau that played out before him. It appeared to him like Dante Alighieri himself had drawn the epic scene that was anything but poetic. It was death incarnate and something Danny regretted he would never unsee, in this life or any other.

The ones inside the fence, the caged people who’d lived in Infected Zone A4, were the sick ones. There were elderly, infants, people in various stages of decay as they descended to the next level of the inferno. Danny was grateful his filtered air blocked the odor of anything beyond the petrochemical suit and the now faint musk.

His pulse was still amped. His eyes darted from one story to the next: a man cradling a dead woman as he coughed up blood; a child facedown on the pavement, motionless and alone; an elderly man grabbing the back of his pants and wincing as he waddled aimlessly around.

Inside the fence there were no yellow suits. There were only the dead or dying, the infected and infectious. It was flesh and gore and excrement multiplied endlessly within a finite space.

His attention was on a far-off corner of the space, where a woman was holding a child whose arms were limp at her sides, when a cry and the rattling of aluminum snapped his attention to the fence in front of him.

A woman leaned into the fence, her face pressed against the diamond pattern of the links. Her fingers gripped them and pulled. Her nose was bleeding, her eyes were swollen, and her hair was matted with vomit or something else. Her clothing, what there was of it, was stained varying shades of brown.

She was hissing at him. Her voice was so weak Danny couldn’t understand whatever it was she was trying to say.

He didn’t move. She couldn’t see his misty eyes or the concern etched into his forehead. He was hidden behind his reflective mask and he was frozen.

She became more agitated, like a caged animal seeking freedom or attention. Danny could tell she was urging him closer to her. He considered that she was speaking so softly not because of the illness, but because she was trying to draw him in toward the fence and within her reach.

He held his ground and checked to make sure Maggie was there with him. She was sniffing the air, her front paws dancing as if on hot asphalt. She could sense the misery beyond that fence much the way she instinctively knew to lick his swollen knees after a long session at his dojo.

Danny considered telling the woman he couldn’t hear her. Before he could, she reached above her head, her long, stringy blond hair draping like a curtain across her arms, and grabbed the fence. Holding it tightly, she pulled herself up enough to curl her toes inside the links a good eighteen inches off the ground.

Her body was suspended now, her fingers and toes sticking her to the fence. She was elevated a few inches higher than Danny’s head, and she looked down on him and wailed.

“Hellllllllp meeeeee!” she cried, blood leaching onto her gums and framing her teeth. “Hellllllllp meeeeeee!”

Danny trembled and stumbled back two steps. Maggie tucked her tail and lowered her ears, her eyes remaining fixed on the woman on the fence.

The woman kept pulling and pushing against the links with her hands and feet. She was gaining momentum. The fence rattled and rippled as she shook it back and forth. The concertina wire atop the fence chimed and echoed like a plucked slinky toy.

Maggie whimpered; then she barked. Danny tried to hush her, but he couldn’t. Her shoulders were squared now and she snarled between gasping barks that the woman on the fence began to mimic. She tilted her head back and howled.

“Let’s go, Maggie,” Danny told her.

He could sense other guards would be descending upon the scene, and he wanted no part of it. It occurred to him in that moment that it might actually serve as a genuine distraction so he could exit the checkpoint and move a step closer to his home. If he could make it there, he’d be safe. It was already checked and cleared. He doubted anyone would come back again if he stayed out of sight and quiet.

But Maggie wasn’t playing along. She inched closer to the woman, still barking, spit flapping from her muzzle as she argued with the dying woman, who was clearly at her wit’s end.

“Maggie,” Danny ordered. “Now. Let’s go.”

It was as if the dog didn’t hear him or was completely ignoring him. She was in a zone and had one focus: the woman rattling the fence and her cage. She edged closer to the fence, aggravated but intrigued. There was something about the screeching woman that mesmerized her.

Danny looked around, searching for oncoming trouble. There wasn’t any yet, but people inside the cage were paying attention. They were gathering around the feral, stringy-haired beast clamoring for attention. They were shouting now too, which only served to further agitate Maggie.

Danny stepped toward her and put his hand on her back. “Mag—”

She turned on him and snapped at the air before realizing it was him. Danny recoiled with shock and backed up.

Maggie cowered for a beat in submission and apology then returned to the task at hand. She swung her large head back to the fence, looked up at the woman shaking the fence, and pawed another step closer. She was inches from it now and barking fiercely. Each throaty snarl exploded into an emotive percussion. Maggie was incensed. She was defensive and aggressive at the same time.

Her sinewy muscles flexed. Her neck thickened and her shoulders rolled forward. The thin spray of spit had become yarns of saliva that hung from her jowls. Her teeth, yellow at the gums, were bared, her snout curled up. The hair on her neck and back stood straight. She inched forward again.

Beyond the fence the crowd was in the dozens now. The sick cell block of prisoners was closing ranks. In varying stages of decay they somehow found the strength to rally in protest.

On some level, Danny sympathized. He understood their anger and frustration. They were dying, yet nobody was helping them. There was no dignity in this: sent to a cage in the middle of a Los Angeles intersection, exposed and abandoned to suck in a few last painful breaths surrounded by strangers.

But the more consuming emotion was fear. He could see the posts that held the fence in place beginning to shift as a man joined the woman on the fence. He was larger and heavier. His weight strained the linkage as he swung his heft in sync with the woman.

Maggie inched forward again. She snapped at the woman, her teeth grazing the fence. She’d timed the bite wrong, missing the swing’s movement closest to her. The woman flopped her head back and howled. The man bellowed. A third and then fourth diseased prisoner jumped aboard.

One of the posts bent and the fence bent forward. It wouldn’t be long before it collapsed outward.

“Maggie!” Danny called. He stepped next to her and tried to get her attention. For the first time since he’d adopted her, he was afraid of what she might do to him.

Maggie snapped at the woman. This time she caught her foot and held the woman in place for a moment before letting go. It was enough to draw the woman’s foot free of the fence. She lost her hold and tumbled from the fence onto the hard street below. Danny couldn’t hear her connecting with the asphalt, but saw the woman’s body contort unnaturally when she landed. The woman howled again; this one was darker, racked with pain. Her foot was bleeding.

Maggie edged toward the man, no dip in her intensity. Danny moved with her and tried to focus her attention on him. But the circus behind the fence was too much for Maggie to ignore. The sights, sounds, and odors must have combined to become sensory overload for the normally obedient dog.

Danny stole a glance behind him. Where were the guards? What were they doing? Nobody was responding.

He swung back in time to see two more people jump onto the fence. They rode it like a bronco, swinging wildly, pushing it outward so much so that it now looked as if they were crouched on top of it instead of hanging from it.

And then the cavalry came.

Danny didn’t know what was happening, despite the sound of firecrackers exploding behind him. He could only see that one fence-rider and then another were falling from their respective perches. They’d jerk suddenly and then fall to the ground. It wasn’t until the fourth prisoner spasmed that Danny saw the mists of blood spray from bullet wounds.

He swung around to see a half dozen yellow-suited guards take aim with their rifles. The weapons were pulled tight to their shoulders, their hoods tilted toward the sights. It was a strange sight, as if watching an alien army attack.

Armed with two weapons himself, Danny didn’t want to use them. He wasn’t going to kill people who already had a death sentence. Of more importance was getting clear of the gunfire, the fence, and the rabid throng of diseased protestors.

He took the butt of his rifle and jabbed it at Maggie’s rear haunch. It was hard enough to grab her attention, but without enough force to hurt her.

The dog whipped her snarl toward Danny, thick noodles of spit flying from her jaws. She pivoted her body, snapping at the air. Then she lunged at him.

Had she forgotten he was in a suit? Did she suddenly think he was the enemy?

Danny was dumbstruck by the attack. Maggie leapt at him and knocked him to the ground. He dropped the rifle but still held the pistol in his left hand. She had his suit in her mouth, jerking her head to tear at the Tyvek fabric on his arm.

Danny wrapped his arms around her and pulled her flailing body toward him into a bear hug. He rolled onto his side, fighting off her attack.

The constant pop of small-arms fire, the screams of those inside the fence and shouts of those outside it, and the nasty growl of his dog made it difficult for Danny to focus his thoughts.

“Maggie!” he yelled through his mask. “It’s me, Maggie. Stop! Stop, Maggie!”

Then he felt the thick, bruising puncture of her teeth in his arm. He grunted but refused to fight back. She released her hold and bit down again. Tears welled in Danny’s eyes. His hot breath fogged his mask. He swallowed hard, the thick knot in his throat growing more intrusive as the confusion and pain of the moment began to overwhelm him. His best friend was attacking him, fighting to hurt him, but he was more worried for her. How frightened she had to be to lose her senses and unwittingly attack her only companion and caretaker.

Danny tried grabbing her muzzle. She shook free and bit down again, grazing a spot she’d already chomped. He tried rolling over onto her, trying to pin her down and gain some leverage over her so she’d submit. But as soon as he tightened his own grip around her body, he felt an immense, sudden weight on his side. Maggie yelped and squirmed, but she stopped her attack. The sudden push against his side knocked the air from his lungs at the same moment a warning light flashed inside his mask. The filter was almost dead. He’d lose oxygen flow in less than five minutes.

Danny couldn’t move. His arms were trapped. His legs were pinned. Maggie whimpered soft cries beside him. The fence had given way and collapsed on top of them. Darkness surrounded him. Only thin ribbons of light shone through to his visor.

The weight keeping Danny on the ground, and Maggie virtually immobile, was from the bullet-riddled bodies of the fence-riders. A couple of them moved or groaned. A thin trail of dark liquid traced its way from one side of Danny’s mask to the other. He was certain it was blood.

His arm throbbed from Maggie’s attack. He’d lost hold of the pistol, and his left hand felt thick, as if he were swollen from too much salt. His right arm was trapped underneath the dog. She was breathing heavily and trying to maneuver herself free.

The display in Danny’s hood flashed red. He had four minutes to get the mask off or he’d start asphyxiating. He twisted his body and felt some of the weight on top of him shift. He tried pushing with his right arm to lift his body. He moved up maybe an inch and then collapsed again.

Maggie squirmed against him. He spoke to her in as calm a voice as he could, aware that every breath he took was one closer to his last if he couldn’t free himself.

“It’s okay, girl,” he said, not really believing it. “We’re okay, Mags. It’s okay.”

With his trapped arm, which was underneath her body, he managed to rub his gloved hand along her side. His arm was going numb. He could feel it at his shoulder.

He worked hard to suck in short breaths through his nose. His heart raced, his arm hurt, and his back ached. Yet he fought the overwhelming urge to panic.

This couldn’t be how it ended, at the bottom of a human pile, suffocated inside a hazmat suit.

That’s as unlikely as dying from a mountain lion attack.

Why that thought had popped into his head instead of a shark bite or lightning strike was beyond him. But there it was, the image of a large cat bearing down on him.

Another warning came from his hood. Three minutes.

The bodies above him weren’t moving anymore. They were quite literally dead weight. There was no sound aside from Maggie’s soft whimper and his own quick, suppressed breathing. The muffled sounds of the outside world were gone.

He pushed again, tried using his legs, knees, and even the elbow of his injured arm. Nothing worked. Slight shifting of the weight on top of him only proved to make things worse. The heaviest of the pressure was on his hip now, and his left arm was essentially immobile. He could move it below the elbow, but not much more than that. He tried raising it toward his hood so he could unlatch it and try to breathe external air, as fetid as it might be. That would save him for now. But no matter how much he wiggled, twisted, grunted, or nudged, he couldn’t do it. He screamed inside his hood so loudly it hurt his ears and left his throat feeling scratchy and raw.

Maggie whined. Her body moved up and down against his pinned arm. He tried to stroke her again but couldn’t feel his fingers. He tensed and relaxed his body, giving in to the weight that surrounded him.

Two minutes, the hood warned. One hundred twenty seconds and counting.

Danny sipped air now. He tried slowing his heart rate as his sensei had taught him. That might buy him an extra minute or two. Not that it mattered. They were stuck. They were buried alive. They were invisible.

Danny focused on the slivers of light that shone through the dark shapes above him. He tried to think of happier times. But instead of sunshine and lazy days at the beach, his mind drifted to darker places.

He saw himself fighting for his life with a knife-wielding assailant, of wandering through an ashen wasteland he barely recognized as Los Angeles. His mind filled with memories of sitting across a table from his nemesis, the man who’d taken his wife from him. They were talking about headaches and déjà vu.

These felt like memories to him, like his life playing back in a loop. And while it seemed as if he’d experienced these things, he knew he hadn’t. He’d never had a real conversation with his ex’s new man. He hadn’t seen SoCal covered in ash, nor had he been in a knife fight with a man he was certain wanted to kill him. None of those things had happened, but he felt them in his core as if they had.

Danny tried refocusing on images he knew to be true: Maggie catching a Frisbee; the sounds and briny aroma of the surf roiling onto the shore in Malibu; funny conversations with Arthur, his fellow fry cook, while they flipped burgers or scraped butter across the grill. But the other, dingier “memories” kept floating to the surface.

Suddenly his head throbbed at the temples, enough so that he forgot about the equivalent pain in his wounded arm. Was it oxygen deprivation already?

One minute now, according to the hood. Danny held his breath as long as he could before replacing it with the tiniest inhalation he could. His heart rate increased as he lessened the flow of oxygen into his body. In the back of his mind now was the image of a ticking clock counting down with seconds to go.

He wasn’t sure what was worse, the images of a past he hadn’t experienced in this life, or the one that subtracted the final moments of his existence with an ambivalent ticktock. Neither was preferable.

Instead of thinking about himself, he focused on Maggie. He gave up conserving air, deciding that was only prolonging the inevitable. He stroked her side with what movement he could with his fingers. He shushed her and tried to make her comfortable.

She would outlive him. He’d be unconscious in a few minutes, and she’d be essentially alone under the debris of chain-link and corpses. That thought was now worse than any of the others that had washed through his head, the idea that his only true friend would suffer a more agonizing fate than he.

Danny twisted his body one final time, trying to free himself, pressing his body against the interior of the Tyvek suit, straining against the material.

It didn’t work. He was stuck in roughly the same spot. The pressing weight on his body was too much, and he realized with the last heave that the fence was the problem. It was sandwiched between him and the bodies above it. He couldn’t move the bodies because the chain-link between them and him wouldn’t allow it.

The inside of his suit flashed red. A warning light strobed. The supply of filtered air was empty. He would be buried alive in a body-shaped coffin. Danny’s chest heaved as he hiccupped the beginning of a sob. He choked it back and told Maggie how much he loved her. He apologized for not taking better care of her. He grabbed a fistful of her fur with his gloved fingers.

“You saved me too many times to count,” he told the whimpering dog. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. It was too much. He pressed his lips together, tasting the salt from the tears he didn’t realize had welled and trickled onto his face.

Danny was light-headed now. Darkness closed around him. This was it.

These were his last moments. He was dying. He was as good as gone. The disease had killed him after all. Not directly, but it had found a way. Maggie whimpered. Her side rose and fell under the touch of his gloved hand. At least he was with her at the end. There was that. Small consolation as it was, he was—

A shaft of light at the corner of his field of view brightened. Widened. Beyond it Danny thought he saw shadows moving, backlit by the light from beyond the pile.

Then the weight shifted on his body, and more light poked through. There were voices.

“Down there,” said one. “I think I see it.”

Danny opened his eyes as wide as he could. The tingling sensation in his head intensified. It reminded him of the sensation he’d get as a kid when trying to hold his breath underwater for too long. He managed to stay conscious long enough to see someone pulling a body from atop the fence that covered him. Then he passed out.

CHAPTER 12

DAY 14

San Francisco, California

“I don’t understand what it is I’m looking at,” said Derek. “You’re telling me it’s mutated. Okay, fine. It’s mutated. It all looks the same to me under the microscope.”

He wasn’t looking into the microscope. The microscope’s image was projected in a three-dimensional, high-resolution image on the wall of the lab. Robert Chang was standing against a lab table with his arms folded and his fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose. Albert Moss had a tablet in his hands. He was using it to manipulate the display.

“You can actually see the mutation occurring,” said Moss. “Watch it. Before the bacterial cell divides, it duplicates. This happens within the cell’s DNA. Hang on.”

Moss tapped on the tablet and the display changed. The live image was replaced with one recorded earlier.

“This is from the CDC,” he said. “They shared this with me a couple of days ago when they suspected the mutation. We conferred and—”

“I got it,” said Derek.

Moss nodded and tapped the tablet. The video began playing. He stepped to the display and pointed at it with his free hand as he spoke. “We’re looking at the genetic sequencing here. This is the code. There are nucleotides here that make up the DNA. They pair up and match. But sometimes, because the copying happens so quickly, there are mismatches among the nucleotides. That’s when you have a mutation.”

Moss turned his body so he was facing Derek to make sure he understood what he was explaining, as a teacher might a disruptive pupil.

“A mutation here or there actually harms the bacteria,” he said. “But if there are enough of them, if there’s the introduction of new material, it can result in a drug-resistant bacteria.”

“We already knew it was drug resistant,” said Derek. “We knew that tuberculosis and E. coli had somehow married and created their superbug with a ridiculous infection rate. That’s the mutation.”

“That’s part of it,” said Moss. “But that was the beginning. It’s changed since then. It’s rapidly altering its sequence again with the introduction of another element. Watch this.”

He pointed at the screen as little oblong blobs joined together, merging into larger blobs before they split into two, four, and eight different shaped blobs. The material in the center of the new blobs varied greatly from the originals.

“Because the new drug-resistant bacteria has no competition,” Moss said, “it can multiply superfast. It’s sorta like natural selection, you know.”

“How so?” asked Derek.

“Living things that adapt, that have the most favorable characteristics, are the ones who survive,” answered Moss. “Survival of the fittest, for lack of a better way to describe it.”

“So a mutation makes the bacteria stronger,” Derek concluded.

Moss equivocated with a waggle of his head. “Sometimes. In this case, yes. There are three different types of mutations.”

Chang crossed his legs at his ankles. “Do we need to get into this, Albert? Is this important right now?”

“I think so,” said Albert. “Humor me for another minute. It’s not as though it will cost us anything. Time, as you’ve been so good at pointing out since I came here, is relative.”

Chang and Derek exchanged glances. Chang exhaled. “Continue.”

“There are multiple types of mutations. There is a point mutation. That’s when a single nucleotide is replaced with a different one. That, in turn, changes the information sent to the RNA and then results in a different protein that—”

Derek raised a hand. “Move to the second type of mutation.”

Moss swallowed hard and continued. “The second is what’s called a frame shift. That’s when an extra nucleotide is added into the DNA sequence. That shifts the reading of the rest of the code. So that, again, mutates the resulting protein. Frame shift has a more significant defect than point.”

“And the next?” Derek prodded.

“There are non-sense and missense mutations,” Albert said. “Again, there are changes in singular nucleotides. Missense changes the amino acids at the end of the process. The non-sense mutation is then the—”

“All of this is nonsense,” said Derek. “I mean, it makes no real sense to me. And to be perfectly clear, Albert, I don’t need to know this.”

Albert frowned. He looked at the toes of his running shoes, which stuck out from underneath the too-long hospital scrubs he wore along with his lab coat.

Derek softened. “Look, I don’t mean to be short. Understand that we’re dealing with something here unlike anything we’ve confronted before.”

Moss looked up from his shoes. He scratched his beard.

“I’m sorry, okay?” said Derek. “I know you love what you do. It’s obvious. That’s why we hired you. But I need the basics here. What is the mutation?”

“Campylobacter,” Moss said flatly. “TBE now has a third component, which is making it even harder for us to come up with a treatment. The CDC was on the edge of a vaccination using a live culture of TBE. Now, with the introduction of a new element—”

Derek glanced at Chang for an explanation. “What is Campylobacter?”

“It’s a foodborne illness,” said Chang. “It causes bloody diarrhea, fever, nausea, and vomiting.”

“There was an outbreak in early 2018,” said Moss. “It started with dogs sold in pet stores. They contracted it and spread it to their humans. Nobody died, but it was a drug-resistant strain.”

“And so is this one?” asked Derek.

“Yes,” said Moss. “Somehow, somewhere, the three elements combined. Now we have a bug transmitted through the air, latent contact, and bodily fluids. It’s a mess. I’m told we’re a week away from anything resembling a vaccine. That’s best case, with all of the top teams working on this, and by then the disease will be everywhere. We can’t contain it anymore.”

Derek stared at the screen without expression. He didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

“Are you working on a vaccine?” asked Chang. “I mean, given the new data?”

Moss nodded. “My team is downstairs. We’re throwing everything we have at it. It’s not cheap, but you said cost wasn’t a factor.”

“It’s not,” said Chang.

“May I ask a question of you?” asked Moss.

“Sure,” said Derek.

“Why did you hire me?” he asked. “I mean, the money is good enough…was good enough, that it didn’t really matter how the pieces fit together.”

Moss had the tablet tucked under his arm. He held his hands out in front of him, his fingers laced together like interlocking puzzle pieces. “Plus, I knew about Dr. Chang, so I was comfortable with the arrangement.”

Derek raised an eyebrow. “You’re uncomfortable now?”

Moss unlaced his fingers. His eyes found the floor again. He sucked in his cheeks, appearing to consider the question. “Not so much uncomfortable as I am confused. I don’t understand why Interllayar, a tech company with endless funding, needs an epidemiologist.”

“Uh-huh,” said Derek.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the compensation,” said Moss. “It’s fantastic. You’ve given me carte blanche to build my team, my labs, pretty much everything. The coffee could be better. That’s my only complaint. And my company car. Couldn’t you have sprung for the turbo?”

“We’ll get right on that,” Derek said with a hint of irritation. He wasn’t in the mood for Albert’s ill-timed sense of humor.

Moss scratched his neck and smiled weakly. “You’re not involved in biotech. There’s no genetic engineering, no artificial intelligence, or anything like that, which might require someone of my ability. Again, I’m not complaining. I just, you know, I like to ask questions. I’m a scientist.”

“Anything else?” asked Derek.

“No,” said Moss. “I seem superfluous. That’s all.”

“All true,” said Derek. “We’re not involved in any of those things you mentioned per se.”

“Per se?”

“We’re involved in some very advanced tech. It’s unpredictable. We have the need for people who can address any of the variables we encounter during…development.”

Moss’s eyes narrowed as he met Derek’s. He shook his head slowly. “What are you not telling me? Before you tell me it’s top secret or classified or whatever, remember that I’ve signed fifteen different nondisclosure agreements. I can’t share anything with anyone. You’d take out my organs and donate them while I watched.”

Derek chuckled at Moss this time. Although the response surprised him, Moss’s description of the NDAs, while hyperbolic, wasn’t too far from the truth. The agreements everyone at Interllayar had signed, including Derek Hoover, were as lock tight as any ever drafted. The repercussions were borderline draconian.

Derek smiled at Moss, understanding his curiosity. He glanced at Chang for approval. Chang gave an infinitesimal nod.

Derek sighed. “You won’t believe me when I tell you, Albert. To be honest, I think you have more important things to do than to focus on this.”

“My team is working without me. They have plenty to occupy them.”

“What I tell you will be a huge distraction. It will become difficult for you to refocus.”

“Try me,” said Moss. “I spent a dozen years working in progressively more competitive environments. That’s after my undergrad but before I finished my schooling. I can focus.”

“This is not like school,” warned Derek. “It’s an entirely different kind of education.”

Moss folded his arms across his chest and raised his eyebrows.

“Okay,” said Derek, exhaling as he spoke. “Everything I’m about to tell you is true.”

Derek explained to Moss the true purpose of Interllayar. He told him about the earth-shattering revelations they’d uncovered and how it was both directly and indirectly connected to the TBE outbreak. He explained how they’d been working to understand exactly what it was they’d discovered or, rather, had built.

The science behind it was mind-boggling, something straight out of H. G. Wells’s imagination but with modern theory supporting its abilities.

“It’s allowed us to see the end of the world again and again,” said Derek. “Robert and I have witnessed—”

“A wide variety of catastrophes,” Chang finished. “Some global, some more focused, more regional in nature.”

“Without overloading you with too much information,” Derek said, “and I know it’s probably too late for that, but suffice it to say Interllayar is at the intersection of a new reality. It’s a reality in which we are able to alter the course of mankind.”

Chang put up a hand and shook his head. He pushed himself away from the lab table. “That’s not entirely true. We have not altered anything as far as we know. Not yet. Even though the circumstances of the catastrophe change, the root causes are different, we still arrive at a game-changing event or events.”

“We’ve been conducting studies with volunteers,” said Derek. “They’ve been a part of our trials.”

“Even though they have no idea what’s going on,” said Chang.

“Not really,” said Derek.

“And there seems to be some connection between the technology and the subjects that we don’t understand and can’t rationalize yet,” said Chang. “These subjects, and those closely connected to them, are always at the center of what’s happening.”

Moss opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it again.

“We’ve also discovered some sort of neurological connection,” said Derek. “The subjects, and Robert and I, all experience vague recollections of other catastrophic events. It’s like déjà vu, but more intense. And there are headaches. We don’t know if it’s related to the implants.”

“They’re subdural,” said Chang. “Injected during a brief surgical procedure.”

“They’re trackers,” said Derek. “Not in the traditional sense, mind you. But we are able to monitor them. That’s how we know what happens during each iteration.”

“Of course, our symptoms are more acute because we know what’s happening,” Chang added. “We’re able to move between scenarios with the knowledge of past experience.”

Derek nodded. “Except it’s not really past experience.”

Chang shrugged. “Not really. You’re right.”

Moss stood there wide-eyed and slack-jawed. He was also apparently speechless. It was as if the information had frozen him in time.

“I told you it would be a distraction,” said Derek. “It’s a lot to comprehend.”

Moss blinked. He started to speak and stopped. Again.

“If you have questions, now is the time,” said Derek. “We need to get back to figuring out how this one ends.”

“Subjects?” Moss said. “Where…who…are these subjects? Am I one of them?”

Chang shook his head. “No. We did a study through the psychology department at UCLA. We got kids to sign up and paid them a nominal fee for participation.”

“We also hooked up with some preparedness-minded people,” said Derek. “They’re vaguely aware of what’s going on, but not fully.”

“There was also a prison program for a while,” said Chang.

“And these were all volunteers?” asked Moss, hung up on that aspect of the incredible story he’d just heard. It was like focusing on the deck chairs as the Titanic sank.

Chang and Derek eyed each other again. Then Derek held out his hand and wiggled it to indicate “sort of.”

“Mostly.”

“What do you mean mostly?”

“There are a couple of people caught up in this that didn’t ask for it,” said Derek. “Their proximity to us somehow sucked them into the vortex of the experiment.”

“Who?”

“My wife’s ex for one,” said Derek. “We don’t know how, but he’s smack-dab in the middle of almost all of the iterations. Not every one of them. But nearly all.”

“And my wife,” said Chang. “She dies at the onset of every apocalypse. Without exception she dies. We can’t stop it.”

Moss’s eyes, still wide with disbelief, danced between his bosses. After a few moments of silence, he settled on Derek. “And your wife’s ex? Does he die every time?”

“No,” said Derek. “Thankfully. But he has died.”

Moss squeezed his eyes shut. He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled loudly. “So you hired me,” he said without opening his eyes, “in anticipation of a plague-type event?”

“Sort of,” said Derek.

“Elaborate,” said Moss, opening his eyes. He blinked a couple of times and then narrowed his gaze at Derek.

“With the technology Interllayar has built, we can see all iterations, or eventualities, at once.”

“Theoretically,” Chang said with a finger pointed straight up. “Theoretically.”

“Yes,” Derek admitted. “Theoretically. The iterations are limitless. There are too many of them, way too many, for us to absorb all of them at once.”

“They’re infinite,” said Chang.

“Yes.” Derek nodded. “There are infinite iterations.”

Moss began talking about ethics, lecturing about what was right and what wasn’t. He suggested they’d crossed a line. That was when Derek tuned out. He didn’t need or want judgment.

His mind drifted to the issue at hand, this disease that was destroying everything in its path. None of the other “iterations,” as he liked to call them, had been as hopeless as this.

Even the nuclear war left him with more expectations for the future. There were major cities unaffected by the fallout and the ash. Populations relocated, began anew.

Fires and flooding were localized, even if some of the key players behind Interllayar’s work didn’t survive the madness of those events, whose rippling effects had spread outward like a pebble tossed into a pond. What were initially isolated catastrophes eventually led to subsequent, cascading apocalyptic scenarios.

The frozen Earth scenario was bleak, but hope burned eternal beneath the layers of ice and snow. It was the starkest of the iterations they’d seen to date, but it was survivable.

They’d overcome what amounted to a zombie apocalypse, maybe more successfully than anything else. And when the Ring of Fire had erupted into global chaos and the West Coast was ruptured beyond recognition, they’d survived.

Mankind recovered. People died, yes. Key people died. But humankind persisted. That didn’t seem to be what was happening here. Not in the so-called civilized world. Perhaps some far-flung and remote tribes of indigenous people in the Amazon, the Outback, Papua New Guinea, or Borneo might survive because of their isolation. The rest of the globe, however, the parts connected to the Internet and transportation, would cease to exist as population centers.

Derek rationalized that even if a reasonable percentage of people lived, were immune, or could be treated before the disease mutated again and killed them, those people wouldn’t be functioning in a society with which they were familiar.

Cities would be wastelands. Basic services like power and water would eventually stop. Food production would slow and cease. Survivors would panic. Anarchy would take root.

He thought about a series of books he once read about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, set in Texas after a pneumonic plague killed two-thirds of the world’s population. Texas was a lawless, bandit-run colony abandoned by the rest of the United States.

He’d thought at the time, having read it for fun, it was preposterous. It was pulp fiction.

Not anymore. He tried to think of the name of the main character. He tried to think of his sidekick, the precocious and sad little girl who threw knives.

It escaped him. No matter. He could see himself in that wasteland now. It wasn’t so far-fetched anymore. It loomed as his reality.

The only saving grace was the bunkers, the underground societies already taking shape. They would live. That would seed the next generation of people living in this iteration.

“What’s the purpose?” asked Moss, shaking Derek from his reverie.

Chang answered the question with his own. “Of what?”

“What you’re doing?” Moss clarified.

It was a good question and one to which Derek hadn’t given a remarkable amount of consideration. He was aware of the mission, which was clear from the moment Interllayar was funded. But was that the right answer?

Chang clearly thought it was. “We are looking for an iteration in which the world doesn’t collapse,” he explained, “or for the least objectionable…apocalypse. That’s our goal. We’ve not found either yet.”

Moss narrowed his gaze. He spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. “For what purpose?” he asked. “For whose purpose?”

Chang flashed a smile at Derek. Derek rolled his eyes. Moss was brilliant. He was asking the right question.

“We have very powerful people who have significant interest in Interllayar and its success,” Chang went on. “They’re people who’d like to have options when the time comes.”

“Options?”

“They’d like not to be stuck in the worst-case scenario,” said Chang.

“Wait, what?” said Moss, waving his hands in front of his face. “What does that mean?”

Chang started to speak, but Derek raised his hand to silence him. Then he took a step toward Moss. Derek didn’t like the questions anymore. More than that, he didn’t want to justify himself or Interllayar’s true purpose to an epidemiologist. Yes, he was top notch. He was exactly as advertised. Little good it had done them. At least this time it hadn’t stopped what was obviously the inevitable. Maybe next time. Still, Moss hadn’t earned the right to question them in such a way that made Derek inwardly cringe at his own motivations.

He jabbed a finger at the scientist. “We’ve said enough. You have work to do. We have work to do.” Derek motioned to Chang and nodded at the door. “C’mon, we’ve said too much already.”

They said goodbye to Moss, reminding him about the necessity of his discretion and the consequences of violating their trust. They were at the threshold, Derek halfway in the hall, when Moss stopped them.

“Oh,” he said, “there is one other thing we’ve identified. I shared my findings with the CDC and the WHO.”

“What’s that?” asked Derek.

“The incubation period is longer than we thought.”

Chang stood up straight. “How much longer?”

“It’s sixteen days.”

“People could have been sick for two weeks,” said Derek, “showing no symptoms, and then just became sick now?”

“Yes.”

“What about the clean zones they talk about on the news?” asked Derek. “There are people in those zones thinking they’re healthy.”

“They’re probably not,” said Moss. “Nowhere is safe. Not now. You could be deep underground in a bunker and you wouldn’t be safe.”

CHAPTER 13

DAY 14

East of Agoura Hills, California

“What do we do?” asked Gem. “Do you think they see us?”

Dub wiped the sweat from his forehead. He shrugged the pack higher onto his back and adjusted his balance by pressing one hand against the rock in front of him. “They don’t see us,” he said quietly. “They’re focused on the neighborhoods and the highway beyond them.”

“I think the sun has our backs,” Barker pointed out. “They’d be staring right into it if they were even looking this way.”

The three of them were crouched behind an outcropping of boulders on the edge of an overlook. They were south of Ventura Freeway, which they could barely see, stopped between the wealthy enclaves of Calabasas and Agoura Hills.

There were clusters of neighborhoods on both sides of them and up ahead a shopping center and office park. There was open field, hilly and barren as it was, between them and the Community Center. They could barely make out the edges of the tennis courts.

The trio had taken much longer than anticipated to travel from Westwood toward Gem’s parents’ place in Thousand Oaks. There hadn’t been any scooters, as she had anticipated, so they’d traveled on foot the entirety of the thirty-five miles to that point. To slow them further, they hadn’t counted on roadblocks and restricted zones forcing them off easier routes and into the high desert hills that separated the beach from the inland territories. Even some of the trails they’d planned on using were blocked off.

They’d managed, so far, to avoid any direct confrontations with authorities. They’d seen police and military patrolling, and witnessed the detention of more than one person at the hands of people in large yellow hazmat suits. While Gem had served as a capable guide, even she wasn’t sure what to do now.

The sun was behind them. They were directly north of Malibu.

“It’s too far to go south and then cut west before heading up to Thousand Oaks,” said Dub. “And if we try to head straight west, we’re in no-man’s-land for a little while with no paths or streets. We’d have to skirt that neighborhood there, and it could be tough going.”

“What about going north?” Barker suggested. “You think we could reach the highway before they see us?”

Dub looked toward the highway. The road and its drought-ravaged surroundings were awash in orange sunset light. The glow of dusk reflected off the large windows of some of the homes and glinted against passing military trucks as the occasional convoy rolled silently in the far distance.

“Too risky,” he said. “Those guards would see us. They’d be on us fast.”

“If south is too far,” said Gem, “and east and north get us caught…”

She let the answer hang in the air. Dub grabbed it.

He checked over his shoulder, shielding his squinted eyes with a salute at his brow. He scanned the horizon toward the Santa Monica Mountains, wondering what was happening across the rest of the Southland. They’d been without information for much of the last twenty-four hours. Their phones worked, but cell service was spotty at best. Video had no chance of loading. Although Dub had news alerts set on his device, even those wouldn’t fully populate on the screen. All he’d get was a vague headline that offered the latest depressing statistics.

TBE responsible for three thousand deaths, possibly more

CDC working on vaccine, still days/weeks away

WHO: 140 of world’s 195 countries have cases of TBE

Is it mutating? Latest on TBE research

“West it is,” he said. “Let’s give it another few minutes though. The sun is going to set. It’ll be easier for us to move in the dark.”

“Easier how?” asked Barker. He opened his pack and pulled out a flask of water. “We won’t be able to see.”

Gem coughed and apologized. “Flashlights. Like we used last night. We’ll be able to see well enough.”

“I don’t think we can use lights tonight,” Dub countered. “We probably were stupid to use them last night. We’re lucky we didn’t get caught.”

“I’ll repeat my question,” said Barker. He uncapped the flask and tipped it nearly upside down to draw the last few dribbles of water from it. “How will we see?”

“We’ll have the dark to camouflage us. I think we’ve got a full moon, or close to it,” said Dub. “The sky is clear. If we’re smart, we could navigate the last bit of this without too much trouble. I mean, aside from the terrain.”

“I’m out of water.” Barker shook the flask and then ran a hand through his hair. “You guys?”

“I filled up at that park water fountain,” said Gem. She sniffed and cleared her throat again.

“So did I,” said Barker.

“You’re a glutton,” said Gem. “I told you to pace yourself.”

“I tried. I think I’m getting dehydrated.”

“It’s pretty dry out here,” said Dub, running his hand across the dirt coating the boulder in front of him. “I’ve got some water left. I’ll share with you if you need it.”

Barker thanked him, capped his empty flask, and zipped up his pack. He looped his arm under one of the straps and slung the pack onto his back with a grunt.

“What?” asked Gem.

“I don’t know,” said Barker. “This whole thing. It’s a lot to take in, right? Our friends are dead, and we’re trying to avoid being picked up by the National Guard or cops. It just doesn’t seem real.”

Gem nudged Barker with her hip and put her arm around him. She whispered something into his ear that made him smile. He kissed her forehead.

Dub watched them. A knot thickened in his throat and his eyes stung with tears. He turned away from them, pretending to look toward the direction of their looming nighttime trek.

He was happy for them. They had each other. In a time like this, one that Dub agreed didn’t seem real, everybody should have someone. So he wasn’t envious or jealous. He didn’t begrudge his friend a companion.

His deep, crushing sadness came from knowing that he no longer had someone. He was alone. Yes, he was traveling with two other people. But he was, ostensibly, a third wheel.

His thoughts drifted to his first date with Keri. Dates weren’t much of a thing anymore. There were hookups, there was chatting online, but dates were rare. But Dub was old-fashioned, and he figured a woman like Keri wouldn’t give him the time of day unless her first impression of him was remarkable. So he had asked her out on a date, called it that, which had surprised her, she later admitted, and she’d agreed. Dub had told her to dress comfortably. He was going to surprise her.

He’d rented a car, instead of relying on Uber or Lyft, and drove her up the coast. They’d eaten an early dinner at Gladstone’s in Malibu and headed north along the Pacific Coast Highway. He’d pulled off the road at Point Mugu State Park and stopped at a small semicircle beach at the base of the Sycamore Canyon Trailhead. It faced southwest toward the ocean, surrounded by the Pacific on one side and the curving PCH on the other.

“Are you trying to seduce me?” Keri had asked when they’d stepped onto the sand.

Dub, a blanket and a box of vegan cupcakes under his arm, had blushed and stammered out a nonsensical answer.

She’d laughed and taken his hand. “I’m teasing you,” she’d said. “But I liked seeing you struggle.”

That set the tone for their relationship. She’d challenged him. She’d made him look at himself in a way nobody ever had. She’d been his greatest champion and biggest critic. She’d made him want to be a better person. All of that was gone.

Keri was dead. Michael too. They’d been alive and healthy a month earlier. They’d had dreams, aspirations, the kind of futures kids at elite schools tend to have. Now they were lying in beds with notes tagged to their corpses, dreamless and without futures.

Dub took a ragged breath. That sunset at the state park years earlier was so different from the one he was looking at now. He filled his lungs with air and held it in his cheeks before exhaling slowly. He kept his back to his friends and wiped his nose with the back of his wrist.

The sun was low now, slipping below the hills and casting long shadows. It wouldn’t be long until they’d be able to move.

He checked his phone. There were old texts from Keri’s father and from Michael’s mother. He’d stopped responding to them. The conversations were useless and only served to frustrate him. Neither could accept their child’s death, and the increasingly caustic tone of their messages, while understandable, was distracting now. He needed to focus on getting to a safe place.

There was also a message thread with his own mom. She and his dad were healthy. They’d stayed at home in Houston, virtual shut-ins since the outbreak. They’d watched the news with interest and concern, his mother told him. They loved him, they missed him, and they warned him to be safe and to take care of his still-fragile immune system.

She’d wanted to fly out and nurse him herself, but travel restrictions had prevented it. So they waited patiently, she’d messaged, for good news. Dub hadn’t told her about Keri or Michael. He didn’t want to burden her with it. Not yet.

He tapped the GPS application and it opened. Gem’s address was saved in the app. He told the device to find it from his current location. It started the process but stalled. He looked up overhead, as if that might provide an answer as to why he couldn’t get a signal, and then put the phone away. They’d be hiking blind, and not just because it would be dark.

Dub was having second thoughts about his plan. The hills, the rise and fall of them more evident from the shadows they now cast, wouldn’t be easy terrain to navigate in the daylight. They could be treacherous at night.

“Gem, can you get us to your house without using the highway as a marker?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I think so. As long as I know we’re headed toward town, I can get us there. I might make a couple of wrong turns, but yeah, we should be okay.”

“We’re going to head west, although I don’t think we can stay moving in that direction. The more I think about it, the more I think the hills and canyons are too much.”

“I don’t disagree,” said Gem, “but I didn’t have a better idea.”

Dub glanced at her. “You were going along with it despite your reservations?”

“Yeah.” Barker snickered. “That’s a first. You typically play devil’s advocate just to get a rise out of people.”

Gem rolled her eyes and mimicked him with a sour face. Then she punched his shoulder. He grabbed his arm, pretending it hurt.

“Look,” said Dub, “I don’t want acquiescence for the sake of it. This is your hood. I need your input. I was thinking staying completely off the road was the best idea. Now I’m not so sure.”

“What do we do?” asked Barker.

“If I’m right,” said Gem, “and I think I am, Agoura Road runs parallel to the highway. It’s south of it. I think it stays that way up to Westlake.”

“Westlake?” Dub said.

“A community this side of Thousand Oaks. There’s a golf course right off Ventura; then we’re maybe only a couple of miles from my house.”

Dub nodded. “Okay. So maybe we head west past the neighborhood closest to us; then we sneak north and hit Agoura Road.”

“What about the checkpoints and the patrols?” asked Barker. “I mean, that’s what we’ve been trying to avoid. If we go north, we’ll get caught. That’s what you were saying, like, ten minutes ago.”

“I changed my mind,” said Dub. “I’m still not thinking clearly. Not like I should.”

Though they weren’t one hundred percent healthy, all three of them were better than they’d been when they’d left campus. The fresh air had helped them regain some of their strength. The hiking and lack of water had sapped some of that renewed vigor. Dub was convinced the illness was manifesting itself differently in each of them.

Barker was dehydrated. Gem was subdued. She had her moments of snark, but the physical exertion it took to move up and down in elevation had taken its toll faster than it otherwise might have. Dub was mentally foggy, and he was grieving in a way the others weren’t.

“I know what would make me think clearly. Diddy Riese.” Barker patted his belly and twitched a smile. “A couple of cookies, a slab of ice cream.”

Gem grinned. “Chocolate macadamia nut and vanilla?”

Barker’s smile widened. “Yes. I can taste it.”

Dub killed the buzz. Fantasies were a waste of time at the moment. They were distracting and counterproductive. He needed all the focus he could muster.

“It’s dark enough,” he said, interrupting the ice cream dreams. “Let’s move. We can talk about the ice cream sandwiches we’ll never have again once we’re in the clear.”

“Sheesh,” said Barker, “I was just trying to add a little levity to the gravity of the situation.”

“Nice word play,” said Gem. “He’s just jealous ’cause he’s vegan, right? Didn’t you say Keri had him—”

Dub shot a glare at Gem and snapped, “Don’t say her name. You didn’t know her. Got it?”

Gem pressed her lips together and nodded.

Barker reached out for Dub’s arm. “C’mon, dude. She didn’t mean anything by it. She—”

Dub jerked away from Barker’s hold. “I don’t want to hear it from you either,” he said without looking at him.

He jumped to his feet and started moving away from the rocks, moving with long purposeful strides. He didn’t wait for his friends. His angry steps crunched on the gravel and dirt. Behind him he heard low voices and then short hurried steps working to catch up with him.

A tinge of guilt crept into his chest. He shouldn’t have snapped at them. They didn’t mean anything. They were coping with all of this in their own ways. Still, he resented it. And he wasn’t about to apologize. Not right now.

To his right and in the far distance he could see the bright lights of the checkpoint. They glowed against the darkness around them. That was the spot they’d eyed from the outcropping of rocks. It was at the southern end of a neighborhood that stretched into the hills from the highway. To the west, there was more light. Additional checkpoints.

The light was a good thing. It blinded the soldiers or police manning them from anything beyond the reach of the portable LED balloon lights. They’d been close enough the night before to see them perched atop thin tripods at the edges of the barricaded positions through which almost nobody passed.

Dub slid his thumbs under the padded straps of his pack and tugged. Despite its ergonomic design, his shoulders were raw from the bounce of the heavy gear on his back. He held the straps in place as best he could and stepped across the barren, dark terrain.

He slowed his pace and looked toward the purplish sky. It was nearly black to the east, hints of lavender to the west. The moonlight hadn’t yet materialized, so Dub squinted, trying to force his vision to acclimate to the low light. He started sliding his feet as he moved, dragging his toes across the dirt with a scrape.

It was louder than he would have liked, but the noise was better than a misstep, twisted ankle, or worse. Small rocks rolled under his feet and he skated across the terrain.

His thighs protested when he climbed sharp inclinations. His shins barked when he haltingly descended the opposite slopes.

The temperature was dropping fast. It was already cooler here in the hills than it was in Westwood. The lack of sunlight or paved roads that had absorbed and radiated daytime heat made it chilly.

A breeze brushed against Dub’s face, and his skin armored itself with goose bumps. He shuddered, but kept moving as silently as possible. Fifteen minutes had passed when Barker sidled up next to him. Gem was a couple of steps behind. Her loud breathing was the giveaway.

Dub pretended he couldn’t sense his friend and pressed his weight into the rising ground. He exhaled, pushing air from his lungs, and climbed higher.

“Hey,” Barker said. “What’s with the silent treatment?”

Dub didn’t respond. He didn’t want to say something he’d regret. He bit the inside of his cheek and pressed forward. The first hint of pale blue moonlight was beginning to illuminate their path.

“Dub,” said Barker, “stop. Look at me.”

Dub reached the peak of the rise and stopped. He adjusted the pack on his back, wrapping his fists around the straps, and stood there without turning to face Barker. Gem was still climbing a few feet behind them. She was grunting like a tennis player hitting a ball with force.

“C’mon,” implored Barker, his breathing labored between words, “don’t be like this. We know you’re hurting. We are too.”

That Barker spoke of himself in the plural, as if he and Gem were one, didn’t ease the tension. Dub clenched his jaw and didn’t acknowledge the sentiment. His grip tightened around the straps on his shoulders. His pulse quickened and a wave of heat rushed through his chest.

“I’m sorry, Dub. I’m sorry she’s gone. I’m sorry Michael is too. I’m sorry about a lot of things, dude, but none of it is my fault. It’s not your fault either.”

“I never said it was my fault,” Dub exploded, spitting venom. “Why would you think that? Why would you even say that?”

His voice echoed loudly. His ire reverberated off the peaks and canyons surrounding them.

Barker raised his hands in surrender. “Whoa. Seriously, I wasn’t implying anything. I’m telling you that I understand you. I—”

“You don’t understand me,” said Dub. “You don’t even—”

A low growl silenced him. His eyes widened.

Gem, who’d reached the flat peak between slopes, whispered, “Did you hear that?”

She was answered with another growl. It was more a grunt the second time. It was resonant and rich. Dub’s hair stood on his neck and arms.

It was close. Within fifteen or twenty feet. Dub turned his head from one side to the other, searching for the source of the growl. The cold air, the uneven terrain, and the disorientation of the near darkness made it impossible to know from which direction the sounds had come. He scanned for shadows, shapes, anything that might tell him who or what was out there. He saw nothing but the gray outlines of the hills, the distant buildings, streetlights that lined far-off neighborhoods, and the lone bubble lights at the checkpoints to the north.

Now, though, he could hear heavy breathing. It wasn’t Gem or Barker. It was something large. The breaths were flavored with hints of grunts or groans. Another, louder sound that resembled something close to a roar was closer now. Dub imagined a dragon in the seconds before it spits fire. Still, he couldn’t determine its source location. Was it behind him? In front of him? How close was it?

With trembling hands, Dub slowly unhooked his grip from the strap and reached across his body to unhook a flashlight from the side of his pack. He thumbed the carabiner clip and slid it from a fabric loop. He brought it to his front and cupped his other hand over the lens while he turned on the LED beam.

“What. Are. You. Doing?” Barker asked in a measured whisper that sounded like puffs of air.

Dub’s heart was beating against his chest and in his ears. His breathing was shallow and rapid but virtually silent. He uncovered the lens, and a bright bluish-white cone of light shone directly in front of him. It revealed brown dirt and brush. He swept the light to his left and found more of the same. He swept back to the right, completing a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc. He was moving back again when something at the edge of the beam moved. It was large and fast, and the breathy, throaty growl it emitted was almost deafening. Its heavy feet pounded the earth, and as Dub swung to locate it in the center of the light, something heavy and solid slammed into his right side. It was muscular and its musk was oily. The scent filled Dub’s nostrils, and an explosion of pain electrified his body. It was as if a truck had run into him and kept plowing ahead at full speed. The force of the sideswipe pushed him back and to the side. The weight of the pack on his back accelerated the momentum. Dub cried out, cursing, futilely attempting to maintain his balance, not realizing his feet weren’t on the ground any longer. By the time he understood he was airborne, it was too late to do anything about it.

“Watch out!” he shouted, not sure what he was warning his companions to watch out for. He didn’t recognize the voice as his own. It was high pitched and more of a squeal than a masculine call to arms.

He lost hold of the light and twisted awkwardly in the air and hit the ground. Landing on his chest, the air knocked from his lungs, his eyes went wide with panic. He gasped, not able to breathe.

Behind him he heard a scream and shouting. Struggling for air, he rolled onto his side. The flashlight, on the ground, cast its beam toward some sort of chaotic movement. In the shadows, a behemoth moved faster than would seem possible. Flashes of its broad, dark shape entered the light and then disappeared.

There was more screaming, shouting, and then a whoosh of air before the beast roared again. It huffed and stomped, its breathy growls louder. Dub sensed it was close again. It moved past him, its gait erratic, its guttural groans racked with pain.

Dub stayed still, in part because he was frozen with fear and in part because he still couldn’t breathe. Had it been seconds? Minutes? How long had he been on the ground while the chaos exploded around him?

The grunts faded, as did the sounds of the beast pounding the dirt into the distance. On the verge of unconsciousness, Dub finally caught his breath. He was still on his side. His chest hurt, his left shoulder was bruised, and his left hip throbbed.

“Barker,” he hissed. It was all he could manage. “Gem? Are you okay? Can you hear me? Where are you?”

Nobody replied. The silence was nauseating. He tried again, a little louder. “Guys, are you okay?”

He rolled onto his aching chest and lumbered to his feet. His balance was off from the pain in his left side. He could stand though. That was something. He searched the darkness immediately around him and found the flashlight.

He took two long careful strides, wincing as he moved, and picked up the light. His trembling hand guided the bluish white beam across the ground. He saw Barker, and his stomach lurched. His friend was on his back, his eyes closed. His hands were bloody, as was his forehead. He wasn’t moving. His pack was still looped over one arm and was off to one side on the ground.

Dub inched toward him, limping as fast as he could, dragging his left foot across the dirt. He dropped to the ground beside his friend, tears welling again. What was the last thing he’d said to Barker? It hadn’t been nice. He remembered that much.

He reached out and touched his friend’s shoulder, shaking it softly.

“Barker?” He held the light at his friend’s chest and saw the slow rise and fall of it. He was breathing. Dub exhaled with relief.

He swung the light around, looking for Gem. He called to her. At first there was nothing. Then he saw a piece of her clothing, a shred of it, on the ground.

He bit the inside of his cheek, drawing blood, but prevented himself from vomiting. He hadn’t been kind to her either. He cursed himself and set to work on the person he believed he could help.

He shrugged off his pack and slung it to the ground next to Barker. Holding the light in his mouth and ignoring the swelling pain along half of his own body, he unzipped the pack and withdrew a first aid kit.

He set it on the ground next to the pack and unsnapped the box. He found alcohol wipes and began cleaning the dark, sticky blood from Barker’s forehead. All the wipes did, however, was smear the blood. There was too much of it for the relatively weak absorbency of the towelettes. He found a package of gauze and tore it open, unfolded the square piece of cotton, and swiped it gently across Barker’s head until he found the source of the blood.

He’d expected some huge gash, a life-threatening wound. Instead, it was a narrow cut no more than a quarter inch in length. It wasn’t even wide enough to need stitches, though it was swollen, and dark bruising was building around the edges.

He took a clean wipe and dabbed it on the cut, squeezed a pouch of bacitracin on the wound, and covered it with a large bandage. He was about to work on Barker’s hands when a voice startled him. He fell back onto his side from the shock of it.

“I thought you were dead,” Gem said sheepishly from behind him.

Dub swung around to face her, leaving Barker for the moment with his hands still bloodied. He smiled and tried to get up. She waved him off and limped toward him.

He shined the light toward her, careful not to aim it into her eyes. Her shirt was torn on the side. A large piece of it was missing. Aside from that and whatever was forcing her to favor one leg, she appeared okay.

“I could say the same for you,” he finally replied. “When I saw a piece of your clothing torn off by whatever it was that attacked us, I thought—”

“It was a bear,” Gem said. “A black bear.”

Dub’s hands began trembling again. The light wavered around Gem. Her expression shifted from relief to horror, and she drew her hands to her mouth. Her eyes glistened, reflecting the artificial light from the flashlight. She staggered, still limping, toward Barker. Through her hand, cupped over the bottom half of her face, she whimpered, “Is he alive?”

“Yes,” Dub said. “He’s breathing. He’s unconscious though.”

Gem took another step and knelt awkwardly beside Dub. She put her hands on Barker’s thigh and sobbed. “He saved me, you know,” she cried. “He got in the way. He gave me time to get away.”

She picked up one of his hands and then, realizing it was soaked in blood, dropped it onto his waist. She gasped again, the tears coming in streams down her cheeks.

Dub picked up the bloody hand and turned it over, searching for a wound. He couldn’t find one. Then he reached across Barker’s body and checked his other hand, which was equally bloody to the wrist. There was no evidence he was hurt.

“I don’t think that’s his blood,” he said, placing Barker’s arms at his sides. “I think it’s the bear’s.”

Barker groaned and turned his head to one side. His chest heaved and his legs shifted.

“Don’t move yet,” said Dub. “You’re okay. You’re all right. Just lie still.”

Barker’s legs relaxed; his breathing slowed. Then his eyes popped open and he sat up with a start. He tried scrambling to his feet while gasping for air, his fingers scrabbling in the dirt for something. He was disoriented and afraid.

Gem sniffed back her tears and squeezed his leg. “Shhhh, it’s gone. We’re okay. We’re all okay.”

Barker stared at her for a moment; then he shot a wild glance at Dub before his tense expression softened. His chest shuddered; his chin trembled. He let out a sigh that sounded like one of Gem’s sobs. His shoulders sagged. He winced and brought a bloody hand to his forehead. “Are you sure we’re alive? It doesn’t feel like we’re alive.”

Dub slid back away from Barker so Gem could move closer to him. She kept one hand on him the whole time, never letting go.

She put her hands on both sides of his face and pulled him toward her. She kissed him on the lips and pulled back only an inch. “We’re alive,” she said. “We’re alive because of you.”

Barker’s response was slow. “I don’t know,” he slurred. “I don’t think so.”

A breeze blew past them and a chill ran through Dub’s body. He shivered and turned away from his friends, aiming the flashlight’s cool beam toward the direction the bear had traveled. It was in the same direction they’d planned on going.

“Is there a high-pitched noise?” asked Barker. “Does anyone else hear that? It’s like white noise.”

He sat up fully, wobbling a bit, and balanced his weight on locked arms. He blinked deliberately a couple of times and stretched his face to widen his eyes. “Things are a little blurry too. I don’t feel right.”

Gem turned to Dub, her hand resting on Barker’s leg. She spoke as if he weren’t there or couldn’t understand her. Her eyes welled and glistened in the brightening moonlight. “I think he’s got a concussion,” she said and turned back to face Barker. “Do you feel nauseated? Do you have to puke?”

“No. Just…off. I feel off. And my head hurts.”

Dub glanced over his shoulder again, searching the open ground behind them. He swept the flashlight across the ground and noticed dark splotches on the gray dirt. They looked like blood. The bear was injured. It might have been badly hurt, given the amount of blood decorating a nearly straight path over a rise about fifty yards to the west. “I think the bear is injured,” he said to nobody in particular.

“It probably is,” said Barker. “I hit it with a rock a couple of times.”

“You did?” asked Dub. “You hit a bear with a rock?”

“A couple of times,” said Barker before belching like he was going to vomit. He drew a fist to his mouth and swallowed hard. “I might puke.”

Dub couldn’t remember the rules for bear encounters, even though he should have. He and Keri liked to hike the plethora of hills and canyons that wound through and around the Los Angeles area. With one type of bear it was better to play dead. With another it was better to make yourself big. It was never good to run. Fighting with rocks wasn’t on either list.

“I sprayed it with mace,” said Gem. She was rubbing circles on Barker’s back as a wave of nausea appeared to roll through him. “I mean, not mace. It’s pepper spray. I have it on my lanyard.”

“You both attacked the bear and it didn’t kill either of you?” Dub asked. “And aside from what I’m agreeing is a concussion, neither of you are seriously hurt?”

Gem shrugged.

Of all of the unlikely events he’d witnessed, this dumfounded Dub more than most. His two essentially unarmed friends had beaten back a bear, in the dark.

“What about your shirt?” he asked.

Gem shrugged again. “I tripped over something and fell. I think my shirt snagged on something and tore off. It wasn’t the bear.”

“I don’t think it was attacking us,” said Barker. “I think it was running away and we got in the way. I think we scared it.”

Gem helped Barker up. He stumbled but gained his balance. She held his elbow with one hand and wrapped the other arm around his waist. “We should probably get going if you’re okay to walk,” she said. “It could come back.”

“We need to head north,” said Dub. “We can skirt that neighborhood ahead and hit Agoura Road. If we head west, we could run into that bear again.”

They resumed their trek, with Dub leading the way. They’d gone about a hundred yards when he slowed and eased alongside his friends. “How’re you doing?”

“Good,” they said in unison.

“My head hurts,” added Barker, “and that ringing in my ears is still there. I’ll be fine though. I’ve got a knot on the back of my head and on my forehead. I heard swelling is a good thing.”

Dub replayed the bear encounter in his head. He hadn’t seen much of anything, having been knocked out of the fight instantly. There were screams and shouts, none of which he remembered clearly understanding. There was the roar and grunt of the bear, the squeals.

Squeals?

“Were there two bears?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Gem. “I only saw the one.”

“I wonder if there was a baby bear too,” he said.

Gem shrugged. She was good at that. “Could be. I didn’t see it though.”

“What are bears doing here anyhow?” Dub asked. “I didn’t think there were any south of the highway. I mean, I remember reading there were black bears north of here.”

“Sometimes they’ll wander over,” she said. “I’ve never seen one. My mom did once. It was at the Westgate Shopping Center in the parking lot. Freaked. Her. Out.”

They shuffled silently for another ten minutes, working their way slowly north. Dub finally worked up the nerve to say what he’d failed to mention in the minutes after the attack.

“Hey,” he said, swallowing hard, “I’m really sorry.”

Barker looked confused. “For what?”

“Snapping at the two of you back there. Before the bear thing. I—”

“Don’t apologize,” said Gem. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I mean, I can. This whole thing, this TBE, is numbing. It doesn’t seem real, right? I’m not processing all of it, I don’t think. But seriously, I haven’t lost anyone I love. So…”

Gem surprised Dub. Maybe he’d misjudged her. He’d treated her poorly from the moment she’d entered their dorm room, but here she was after fending off a bear and who knows what else she’d had to endure in the past three weeks, and she was forgiving him.

Based on what she’d told him and the psychology classes he’d been taking, he guessed she was in denial. The scope of the plague hadn’t hit her. How could it? She was still in the midst of it. Someday, and probably soon, it would crash down on top of her and she’d feel the weight of everything she’d experienced.

Right now, as they crossed the barren high desert of the southern California hills, she was coping. She was surviving. That meant she couldn’t wallow, she couldn’t be afraid, she couldn’t blame. She had to press forward, find solutions, and overcome obstacles.

“Thank you,” Dub said. “I’m glad you’re with us.”

She rolled her eyes with a crooked smile on her face. Dub could see it in the moonlight, which now cast a grayish hue across everything.

“Don’t stop being a jerk on my account,” she said with a soft chuckle.

“Don’t worry,” Barker said. “He won’t.”

“That’s the concussion talking, isn’t it?” Dub asked.

The three of them laughed together, and then Dub’s eye caught the checkpoint up ahead. With the moonlight, his flashlight, and the distraction of their conversation, he’d seen but not processed how close they were getting to it. They were no more than five hundred feet from it.

Dub stopped walking and turned off the flashlight. He held out his arm to stop the others. They stopped, looking over at him with furrowed brows. Barker wavered but stood straight with Gem’s help.

It was too late. They’d been spotted. Either the echo of their conversation or the illumination from the flashlight had given them away. The guards were scrambling now. They were pointing. There was the distant echo of radio chatter.

Dub cursed as the trio stood there, virtually frozen in place as they watched two Tyvek-suited guards climb into a Humvee. They were armed with rifles.

The open-top vehicle peeled out, dust blooming behind it, and then the driver spun the wheel so that the bright circular lamps shone directly at them. They couldn’t see the Humvee anymore, but the smell of diesel filtered through the air. Its engine revved as the truck shifted from first through third gears. It was moving fast and closing the short distance between them.

They were literally caught in the headlights.

“What do we do?” asked Barker.

“Run,” said Dub.

They did.

Dub led them north and east. They were running diagonally toward a neighborhood that dipped from Agoura Road south into the hills, the dim yellow glow of the streetlights their guide.

The moonlight was enough that Dub could see the backs of the southernmost houses. Their tiled roofs reflected the moonlight. He pumped his arms to propel his aching body forward. His limp all but disappeared from the adrenaline coursing through his body. The ache in his hip vanished. The bouncing pack, whose straps rubbed against his raw shoulders, swung back and forth with his momentum.

They were getting closer, maybe only fifty yards to go. The Humvee was gaining, the whine of its engine louder. There was someone yelling something over a loudspeaker. Dub kept moving.

He stole a glance to his right and saw the Humvee’s lights. From his peripheral vision, he could see Gem and Barker only a few feet behind him. He had no idea how his concussed friend was moving as fast as he was, but he didn’t have time to ask him about it. He pushed the thought from his head and looked straight ahead.

He climbed a final rise, his legs thick with acid and his arms pumping up and down, then skidded down the beginning of a downward slope.

Headlights bounced to his right. The loudspeaker squelched.

“Stop!” called out a man’s voice. It was muffled but clear enough, close enough, for Dub to understand the commands he would not obey. “Stop now or we will open fire!”

For a split second, Dub considered stopping. He thought about raising his hands and giving himself over to the military, or the police, or whoever it was ordering him to comply.

Maybe they would take them to where they wanted to go. They would see they were healthy, save the bumps and bruises, and would have no cause for quarantining them. They could drive them to Gem’s house and let them be. Surrendering could be a good thing. It could be the right thing. It definitely was the legal thing. All of these thoughts raced through his mind simultaneously. As muddied as his mind had been since falling ill days ago, it was crystal clear in this moment. It was firing on all cylinders. It told him he was an idiot for considering surrender. No good could come from being in the authorities’ hands. He’d seen too much of the encampments on the news to know they’d never let them go. They’d hold them and then ship them off to either a secure facility, as they were being called, or to one of the stadiums where they were letting people die. He’d even seen there were outdoor holding cells built with chain-link at major LA intersections where infected zones were separated from clean zones.

It was better to run. No doubt. So he ignored the thoughts and focused again on the task of staying free.

He found himself at the back of the neighborhood behind a pair of large houses that would have fit in perfectly next to the McMansions in his Houston neighborhood.

The ten-foot-high fences that separated them from the wilderness prevented him from slipping into the relative protection of their properties. He turned ninety degrees to the left, away from the approaching Humvee, and followed the fence line.

He checked over his shoulder and saw his friends were on his heels. The Humvee wasn’t far behind, the headlights bouncing up and down. He squinted into them, turned forward, and ran on. His chest was burning now, and a stitch in his side threatened to double him over. He didn’t stop.

“Stop!” came another call, louder and overmodulated. “This is your final warning. We will open fire.”

Dub had no reason to doubt the veracity of the threat, yet he disobeyed and darted to the left, the pack tugging opposite his momentum, and zagged right. “Keep moving!” he shouted breathlessly over his shoulder. “Don’t stop. This fence has got to end somewhere.”

Ahead of him, no more than twenty feet, the fence stopped its westward expansion and turned north toward the highway. Dub followed it and quickly found himself on asphalt bathed in yellow-orange light. He was running in the neighborhood now, along a north-south street that ran up the center of the development.

Dirt shifted loudly under the Humvee’s oversized tires, and a spray of rocks spattered across the dry land at the edge of the street. Then he heard a series of pops. They were like distant firecrackers or those little twisted pieces of paper with gunpowder wrapped inside. He’d thrown them onto the ground as a kid, relishing the exploding sounds of the popping caps.

These weren’t harmless pops though. They weren’t fun or the result of brilliant, celebratory sky decorations. They were gunfire.

More pops, and this time zips of air rushed past his head. He ducked instinctively, and at an intersection ahead and to the right, he cut across the front yard of a McMansion, bounding onto the curb and across the xeriscaped front yard. His shoes crunched against the pebbled granite lining beds of cacti and oleander. He pushed a hanging limb from his path and skipped past a modernist sculpture, hopped from the curb, and ran back onto the street.

He was running east now. There were footsteps behind him. They sounded like two pairs, accompanied by grunting and labored breathing. Both Gem and Barker were there. They were hustling to keep up, but they were there.

The Humvee’s engine accelerated and the gears shifted again, the tires screaming against the asphalt. It missed the turn and was doubling back. That gave the trio some space and, more importantly, time.

They needed somewhere to hide. They couldn’t outrun the Humvee for much longer. It was miraculous they’d made it this far. Another round of pops and zips and Dub zigged. He crossed the street, calling for his friends to keep up and follow.

After the dark having been a disadvantage when the bear attacked, the light from the overhead lamps was a problem. The amber glow gave those in the Humvee an unfair advantage. It was like they were graced with tactical eyewear.

Dub remembered from a physics class that blue light, with its shorter wavelength, scattered more easily than other colors and made focusing on objects difficult. Absence of blue light, as in filtering the light through red, orange, yellow, or a combination of the colors, improved sharpness and depth perception.

He cursed himself for not having stayed hidden in the high-desert, moonlit wilderness. This was a mistake.

He jumped a curb on the north side of the street and darted through the narrow but deep front yard of a white stucco Spanish-style house. He dashed between the house and its detached four-car garage, finding himself again in the dark. Behind him, Barker grunted and Gem huffed. None of them spoke. They kept moving.

Beyond the narrow covered passageway that connected the two buildings was a waist-high wrought-iron gate. Dub ran into it, not having seen it, adjusted himself, and climbed over it one leg at a time.

Once over the fence and in the ink-black backyard, he spun around and helped his friends. Gem was wheezing now. Her skin was clammy with sweat and her shirt was drenched.

Barker had trouble negotiating the fence. His balance was wonky and he seemed out of it as Dub supported his weight and helped him over the fence. Each breath was labored. He too was drenched.

Dub took his pack from him and told Gem to lead him into the darkness. Barker couldn’t keep going. It was too much to ask of him.

“Find a hiding place,” he said. “Stay there until it’s clear.”

Gem nodded without question. Dub waved them away from the oncoming Humvee. Wait.

Where was the Humvee?

He’d lost track of it as he’d helped his friends. Dub stepped backward, away from the gate, working unsuccessfully to control his own breathing. His chest was heaving and the cramp in his side was thickening. He put his hands on his hips and listened.

It was silent. Even the sound of the Humvee’s engine had disappeared. Had they lost them?

And then, from nowhere, bright round lights snapped on and blinded him. The Humvee was parked at the edge of the driveway where it met the street. It was facing him. Dub raised his arms to block the light. He was caught. His mind swirled with choices, with moves and countermoves. He was never good at chess. That was Michael’s game. Seeing ahead, anticipating the variables was never his strength. He missed Michael.

“Stop!” came the call from the bullhorn. “We’ve fired warning shots until now. The next shot will not be a warning.”

Warning shots? They’d warned him they would shoot him when they were chasing him. The consequence of not following the order was getting shot. That was the warning. They hadn’t warned him they would warn him. A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. He had them.

They didn’t want to shoot him. They were hesitant. That gave him an advantage he hadn’t seen seconds earlier. He dropped Barker’s pack onto the ground.

“Stay where you are,” said the voice. “I’ve got two officers who will—”

In a fluid series of moves, Dub lowered his hand, pivoted to one side, and dropped his torso toward the ground. He squatted for an instant and then, crouching, sprinted as fast as he could to the back of the house. He was up against the stucco, the outside of the house, the roughly applied exterior brushing against his shoulder as he moved away from the pursuers.

They called after him again. Not far behind him was the heavy sound of boots pounding into the backyard. Dub ran to the opposite end of the house.

Men shouted after him, but they couldn’t navigate the relative darkness as swiftly as he could. They were awkward in their Tychem suits. He could sense it from the heavy, irregular movements. They carried LEDs of some kind, in their hands or attached to the sides of their weapons. The beams danced around him, behind him. The ambient light chased his heels, but it didn’t catch him. He was quick enough.

At the edge of the house he cut back to the right and darted deeper into the backyard. His feet were on stone now, a decking of some kind that differed from the material at the edge of the house. He dashed behind a large tree, pausing at the exact moment interior lights flipped on, glowing through the windows and illuminating a large covered porch that stretched half the distance of the home’s rear. Dub hadn’t noticed it as he’d passed it, having been too focused on the proximity of the pursuers.

Dub was out of sight, but he could clearly see the two yellow suits now. The men stood at the edge of the flagstone porch, their faces hidden by hooded reflective shields, their hands gripping rifles. They were scanning the darkness for Dub and his friends.

“Hey,” said the bleary-eyed, unshaven homeowner. “This is a clean zone. Why are you here? What are you doing in my backyard?”

He was in his mid-forties or early fifties. He was in a Berkeley T-shirt and baggy sweatpants. His full head of salt-and-pepper hair was wet and brushed back from his narrow forehead.

The twin suits said something in response. Dub caught the muffled vibrations of whatever explanation they offered, but he couldn’t decipher the words.

“I don’t want you on my property,” the man said with an angry energy that surprised Dub. It appeared to surprise the sentries too. One of them actually jumped. The other took a step back from the porch. Dub glanced behind him, into the darkness, and backed slowly away from the tree.

“Martial law or not, you need to leave,” said the man. “I don’t care who you’re looking for. You’ll scare my children, my wife. Please. Go.”

A squeaky child’s voice pierced the air, carried on the slight but now constant breeze. She was standing at her father’s side, nearly wrapped around his leg in the way that shy children do.

“Daddy,” she said, a question mark punctuating the end of the inquisitive, “what’s happening?”

The father draped his arm over the girl, wrapping it around her side and then resting his hand on top of the nest of curly dark hair atop her head. He said something to the suits. His tone was sharper.

Dub didn’t need to listen to more of the conversation. He needed to employ it to his benefit, use the distraction to further separate himself from his would-be captors.

Through the thin canopy of foliage overhead, he saw the muted light of the moon hidden behind thin clouds. He exhaled, still trying to catch his breath, and spun to run more deeply into the yard.

He rolled his feet from heel to toe as he ran lightly, tiptoeing from the stone and onto what felt like mulch or tree bark. He was a good thirty yards from the porch when low shrubs brushed against his legs. Then he was at a fence. It was cedar and eight feet tall. Dub reached up and grabbed the capped top of the fence, gripping it with both hands. The pack was heavy on his shoulders.

He couldn’t make the leap with it on his back. He quickly released his hold, shrugged off the pack, pulled himself up onto the fence using the rough-hewn boards for a foothold, and heaved himself over it. He crashed on the other side onto hard, compacted dirt and grunted from the sudden connection with the ground.

He’d landed on his left side; a radiating bolt of pain electrified his hip. He bit into his lip, grimacing, to keep from crying out in agony.

Dub lay there for a good minute in silence. Tears pooled and spilled from his eyes. His nose filled with snot. A cool sheen of sweat coated his forehead and the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure he could walk now.

Despite the pain, he listened for the pursuers. Where were they? Had they given up? Had they listened to the owner and left the property? His answer came in the form of a conversation on the other side of the fence.

“I found his pack,” said one muffled, masculine voice. “It’s back here against the fence.”

“He must have climbed over,” said someone else. “I don’t think we can navigate the fence in these suits.”

“Tell Darsky we lost him,” said the first one. “He’ll have to notify the other nearby patrols to be on the lookout for him.”

“The other two also,” said the second voice. “They’re out there somewhere too. And you’re telling Darsky. Not me.”

A punch of nausea hit Dub’s gut and traveled up into his throat. He swallowed against it and the burn of stomach acid stung the roof of his mouth. He stayed quiet, breathing quickly through his nostrils, keeping his body as motionless as possible.

The men kept talking, their voices moving away from the fence now. They were arguing over who had to be the bearer of bad news.

“He’s gonna rail on us,” said one of them. “Doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Three infecteds are loose in a clean zone. It’s bad.”

“We don’t know they’re sick,” said the other. “With the way they moved, how they outran us, I doubt they’re sick. No way they have TBE. Especially the new version.”

The men kept talking until their voices faded. Dub still didn’t move. He thought about the last thing they’d said.

Especially the new version. What new version? Is the disease changing?

Gritting his teeth against the almost unbearable pain in his hip, he slowly rolled onto his back. He exhaled as the sharp pings of heat popped in and around his outer thigh and his hip.

Dub cursed again. He wanted Keri. He wanted to be in his bunk, under the blankets, a tablet on his lap and a streaming movie on the display as she snuggled onto his shoulder.

The tears began again. They streaked the sides of his cheeks. His chest heaved and he fought the urge to sob. It was silent emotion though. He was quiet. The world was quiet. It was a world of which he no longer wanted any part.

Then he heard Keri’s voice in his head, telling him not to give up, not to give in, and not to forget how strong he was.

It was as if she were there, whispering in his ear. He closed his eyes and pictured her. He saw her as she’d been, not as she was now. He pushed the image of her dead body from his mind and forced himself to see her alive and vibrant, running across campus or cheering him on during an intramural basketball game. He saw her smile. He saw her laugh.

It was enough for the moment to pull him from the depths of self-pity. He sniffed back the tears and focused on the task at hand. He needed to find his friends, and they needed to get to Gem’s house and out of the line of fire. He believed that, if given another chance, the yellow-suited Humvee patrol would shoot to kill. There would be no further warnings. Nor warnings of warnings.

He drew his hand to his hip and held it above his body, hesitant to touch it. Then he did. Dub gently put his fingers to his pelvic bone and pressed, applying increasing pressure to various spots along the joint. The deep throb, which matched his accelerated heartbeat, wasn’t affected by the pressure. That was a good sign. Maybe he hadn’t fractured anything.

He tried controlling his breathing. He drew in deeply through his nostrils, pulling the cool, dry air into his lungs, and exhaled through his mouth, blowing the air out evenly, deliberately.

It helped. The throbbing slowed. The sharp pain he’d experienced was dulling. After several minutes he tried gathering his courage.

“All right, Dub,” he said aloud. “You can do this. If you can pass Stats 10, you can get to your feet.”

Dub started to roll over when a voice from behind him made him freeze.

“You had trouble with Stats 10?” came a voice from behind him. It was a whisper, but loud enough to carry above the breeze.

He glanced back to see Gem standing next to him. She had her hands on her hips, her shadow backlit by distant ambient light.

“You are definitely a north campus major,” she said and reached down to help him up. “Liberal arts all the way.”

“Sheeesh,” said Dub, not responding directly to her dig. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“Is that what I smell?” she asked. She chuckled and suppressed a cough.

Dub rolled his eyes in mid-wince as he attempted to pull himself to his feet. “You have no sense of comic timing.”

He was standing on both feet but hesitant to put weight on his injured hip. He eyed Gem for a moment then glanced over her shoulder. “Where’s Barker?” he whispered. “Those guys are still out there.”

“He’s fine. He’s a block from here near Agoura Road. There’s no checkpoint there. I think we’ll be home free.”

Dub scanned the bare earth around them. They were on a narrow strip of undeveloped land that ran between the neighborhood and a utility easement. He shook his head in disbelief. “How did you—”

“C’mon,” Gem said, gravel in her voice, “we gotta keep moving. Like you said, there are guys still out there.”

She eased around to his side and ordered him to drape his arm over her shoulder. She stood on his bad side and acted as an extra leg. He could move, but a dull ache made it uncomfortable at best.

They hobbled in silence until they met up with Barker. He was sitting against a tree behind some low shrubs, hidden from sight adjacent to Agoura Road. North of them, a military convoy rumbled past on the highway. Agoura was dark and quiet. There was no traffic, and the checkpoints were well behind them.

Barker smiled at Dub when he saw him. “You made it. I didn’t know if you would.”

His voice was still measured, slow and this side of slurred. Dub had no doubt his friend had a concussion.

Dub squatted and sat down, carefully positioning himself to minimize the pain in his hip. He leaned against the tree next to Barker and made room for Gem to sit. She squeezed into a spot and crossed her legs.

“I think we’re only a mile from my house,” she said. “It could be less. I know both of you losers are hurt. But we’ve got to move. We can be safe and sound inside a half hour if we go now.”

“What’s with the attitude?” asked Barker. “You’re kinda snippy.”

Gem licked her lips and frowned. “No attitude. But I’m the only one not hurt. I need to have the energy for all three of us. Believe me, Barker, I feel like crap. My chest is killing me, my head hurts, and I’m out of breath. But we have got to get home.”

The roommates agreed and used the tree to get back to their feet. Gem walked between them, guiding them along the edge of the road. They were far enough from the thoroughfare to hide in the shadows as they moved.

As she cajoled and encouraged the men, Gem explained that when Dub had distracted the men in the Humvee, she had led Barker around the other side of the house and back to the street. Nobody was looking in that direction. She’d hustled Barker to the safe spot under the tree and behind the shrubs; then she went back for Dub.

“I thought they’d gotten you,” she said, “but I couldn’t abandon you. That wouldn’t be cool. So I crept back around and heard voices. Some dude in the house was yelling at the soldiers. He was telling them how horrible they were. They weren’t having it.”

“I heard the man too,” said Dub, limping along far more slowly than he’d have liked. “And his daughter.”

“Yeah,” said Gem. “Well, while they were arguing, I scooted back to the front of the house and listened to the men in the Humvee. After a couple of minutes, I heard the radio. They’d lost you. Couldn’t find you.”

“I jumped the fence,” said Dub.

Gem coughed and glanced over at him incredulously. “I know. I found you there?”

“Right,” said Dub, focusing again on each alternating painful step. “How did you find me there?”

“It was a guess, and it wasn’t the first place I looked,” said Gem. “I waited for them to pull out of the driveway. When the Humvee was gone, I checked the backyards of both neighboring houses. You weren’t in either one. I decided to check behind the houses. I figured that was the only place you could have gone.”

Dub tried to calculate how long that must have taken her. It felt to him like she’d appeared only minutes after he’d jumped the fence. It couldn’t have been that quick. He limped a couple more steps, unable to rationalize it. “How long did that take you?”

Gem wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I don’t know. Maybe a half hour. Perhaps less.”

Dub nodded. None of them spoke for nearly the entirety of the last half mile. It wasn’t until they’d turned onto a tree-lined street with wide yards and stylish custom homes that Gem spoke.

“All right, this is it. My house is a block up on the right.”

The street was intermittently dark and lit with the soft yellow light of overhead lamps. They were spaced far enough apart that they didn’t fully illuminate the winding road that appeared so narrow two cars couldn’t pass in opposite directions.

Some of the homes were dark. Dub couldn’t make out anything about them other than vague, large shapes and the pale, milky reflection of the returned moonlight on their slate or tile roofs.

Other houses were awash with the warm, welcoming glow of landscaping lighting that fanned upward from the yards in front of the homes’ facades. They were unremarkable, aside from their size, except for something Dub noticed at their entries.

On all of them he could see, there were large red letters and numbers spray-painted onto the doors. Most of them looked like Xs with the numbers next to them. He wasn’t the only one who noticed them.

“What are those?” asked Gem. “On the doors?”

They were walking more slowly now, paying more attention to their surroundings than the path ahead. Dub glanced at her, noting the worry in her face, and then at the door on the house to their right. “I’m pretty sure it means that these houses have already been checked. I saw these after a storm in Houston. There was a lot of flooding, some tornado damage.”

He motioned toward the door with his hand as they passed it and wiggled his finger as if tracing the marks. He sighed as he spoke, trying to ignore the throb of pain in his hip and lower back. “Rescuers would mark the houses as they checked them. Mark them with Xs. Then they’d write the number of people in the house so they wouldn’t go back and recheck the same places again or waste another crew’s time. The numbers of people, I think, were to help account for anyone who might be missing.”

They passed another two houses. Gem whimpered, breaking the relative silence.

Dub stopped walking. So did Barker. He’d been quiet until now. He took hold of Gem’s arms and faced her. His features were difficult to make out in the dim light, but Dub saw he was squinting, trying to focus on his girlfriend’s face.

“What is it?” he asked.

Her chest heaved. Her breathing hitched on the edge of hyperventilation. Each word came with a gulp of air. Her jocular attitude since taking charge had vaporized. She was now the one in pain.

“I…don’t…know.” She sobbed, her voice raspy. “It’s just…it doesn’t seem real. And now…in my neighborhood. It…it…I just…” She gestured toward the houses on both sides of the street and then grabbed her head with her hands. Barker looked at Dub as if for help, and then pulled Gem toward him. He embraced her, bent over to put his mouth next to her ear, and comforted her with soft words Dub couldn’t hear.

Dub stood there awkwardly for a moment and hobbled backward, giving himself some space. He took a couple of steps closer to the house on their side of the street. There was a crushed granite pathway that led from the sidewalk to the front door. He moved onto the path, listening to the crunch of the rocks underneath his feet.

He surveyed the house. It was dark aside from the landscape lighting. Either everyone was asleep or nobody was home. He turned around and scanned the opposite side of the street. All of the houses were dark. None of them had any lights on inside. None of them. It wasn’t late enough in the night for everyone to be asleep.

The street had been evacuated. The numbers weren’t necessarily survivors. They were the numbers of those taken away from their homes either voluntarily or by force. They were in a clean zone so far as they knew, but what did that really mean?

They would have to be careful here. They couldn’t relax. They couldn’t assume that because they’d made it inside Gem’s home, they’d be good to go in perpetuity. That was something they’d have to discuss.

He looked back at his friends still locked in their embrace. They were his people now. Until the threat had passed, whenever that was, this was his world.

***

The soft leather was cool underneath his skin. He pushed a button on the side and the lounger reclined. Dub settled into the plush seat and ran his hands through his damp hair. “Thanks, Gem. The shower was awesome. And the peanut butter sandwich was even better.”

Gem worked her hair into a ponytail, braiding it as she worked toward the end. She magically flipped a rubber band from her wrist onto the strands of hair and tied off the ponytail.

“It’s vegan,” she said with a wry grin, “just like Oreos.”

She hadn’t eaten anything. She’d told them she wasn’t hungry. When Dub had tried to force a sandwich on her, she’d declined forcefully until he’d given up.

Barker shifted in his seat, eliciting a squeaking sound from the leather. He was on the other side of Gem. The three of them were in the media room on the second floor of the home. There were no windows and the door was closed.

“That wasn’t me,” Barker said. “It was the seat. I swear.”

Gem giggled. Although her eyes were still red from her earlier emotional outburst, she was smiling now. All of them were smiling. They’d all showered, eaten, and changed clothes, Dub and Barker borrowing from Gem’s father’s closet, and they were now in the safest room in the house.

Once they’d entered the house through a back door with a key hidden behind the outdoor kitchen grill, they’d maintained a low profile. At Dub’s suggestion, they’d left off the lights and the air-conditioning. They’d raided the kitchen and washed up in the dark. Now, in the cave of a media room, they could turn on lights and watch television.

Dub’s hip ached, but the sharp pain had dulled. He was convinced it was a deep bruise. Barker was still a beat slow. He’d taken Tylenol and popped a couple of melatonin. He was hoping to fall asleep while the others absorbed the latest news.

Gem wiped her mouth with the paper towel in her hand, aimed the remote at the screen, and flipped to Dub’s recommended station. It was the same one whose app he’d been using to keep up to date. His jaw dropped when the large screen glowed into focus.

The newscaster, a woman he recognized but whose name he didn’t remember, was reading the news from behind a surgical mask. Her voice was muffled but intelligible. A graphic over her shoulder displayed the smiling face of Lane Turner.

“…was the leader of our newsroom,” said the woman. Her eyes glistened and it was obvious she’d been crying. “He came to the Southland from Florida, where he’d worked for several years covering hurricanes, criminal trials, and other high-profile assignments.”

“Did that dude die?” asked Gem.

“I think so,” said Dub, not taking his eyes from the screen. “I can’t believe it.”

“…dedicated newsman,” said the anchor, “who put his job first. Lane was a friend to all of us and never let a story get in the way of his dedication to teamwork. He shared sources, cell phone numbers, and story ideas with anyone who asked. Competitive but kind, he was a rarity in our field.”

“He went fast,” Barker remarked. “Didn’t you just see him on your app, like, yesterday?”

Dub nodded.

“Lane was hospitalized late last night. He’d developed a cough and fever. Our managers pulled him from his duties and sent him to an emergency clinic.”

“I didn’t think there were any clinics,” said Barker. “How does that dude get into a clinic?”

“He’s Lane Turner,” said Dub.

“He was Lane Turner,” Gem corrected.

The anchor kept talking as video of Turner reporting replaced her image on the screen. “His symptoms worsened rapidly, and within the last ten minutes, our friend, colleague, and leader Lane Turner succumbed to the illness we’ve come to know as TBE. Lane Turner was just thirty-seven years old.”

The happiness of their survival, the refreshing cleanse of their bathing and nourishment, was zapped. The three sat silently. Dub was stunned by how fast the disease had taken a man who’d been so healthy twenty-four hours earlier.

The anchor wiped her eyes and moved to the next story. “Now we’d like to bring back Dr. Mateo Negro with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Dr. Negro, thanks for joining us again. We know how busy you are working on a solution for this horrible affliction.”

He was appearing via satellite, according to a small graphic at the top right of the screen “Thank you for having me,” said the doctor, who appeared in a split image next to the anchor. “I’m happy to answer questions about our work.”

The doctor was dressed in a lab coat. Dark, swollen circles under his bloodshot eyes said more about him than his forced smile. Patches of salt-and-pepper stubble dotted his jawline. His hair was combed but not coiffed.

“Our colleague, Lane Turner, just died from TBE within the hour,” said the anchor. “He appeared to be fine yesterday. Is this disease progressing?”

“Yes,” Negro replied. “Its cellular composition is incredibly aggressive. As soon as we figure out what we’re up against, the disease shifts. It takes on new characteristics that defy conventional biochemical rules.”

“How so?”

“The speed with which it’s mutating is unprecedented. Also, its infection rate is unlike anything we’ve seen. Lastly, it appears the incubation period is stretching.”

“What do you mean?” asked the anchor. She adjusted the mask and pinched it at the bridge of her nose.

“It appears that the incubation period is longer than we initially concluded. That means people, such as your unfortunate colleague, could be sick for as long as sixteen or seventeen days without knowing they’ve contracted the illness. Then the symptoms appear rapidly. Depending on which strain of TBE a patient contracts, he or she could survive the illness, worsen over the course of several days, or succumb within hours.”

“Strain? There’s more than one type of TBE?”

“Yes,” the doctor replied with an emphatic nod.

Dub exchanged looks with Barker and Gem. He wondered if the expression on his face was as wrinkled with concern as theirs.

The doctor exhaled and continued. “As I mentioned, the disease is changing. It’s adapting to its environment in an unprecedented way. So we have what we’re calling G1-TBE, that’s generation one, which is what I believe is the original culprit. It’s what we know first existed in homeless camps in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. Somebody contracted the illness, spread it to one of the camps, and then someone traveled along the coast to the other.”

“A homeless person traveled?”

“It may have been,” said Negro. “Or it may have been an air worker, a volunteer. We don’t know. What we do know is that G1-TBE has a relatively quick onset of symptoms and can take several days to fully manifest. G2 is more aggressive. The symptoms take longer to reveal themselves. That’s critical because it allows for hosts, people that is, to move about within a population, thinking they are healthy. It allows the hidden illness to spread more quickly.”

“What about clean zones, then?” asked the anchor. “Are they useless?”

“In some cases, yes. That’s why the quarantines are so critical. They allow not only for separation of the sick from the healthy, but also for testing of those we believe are healthy. We can find out, before symptoms present, if someone is positive.”

The anchor sighed through her mask. The thin blue fabric puffed at her mouth.

“There is also G3,” he said. “This is the worst of them. It contains a third bacterial component. It creates a triple threat. Those who may not be affected by or fall ill to generations one and two are more likely to succumb to generation three.”

“You’re saying that anyone who’s healthy now may become sick?” asked the anchor. “That we’re not out of the woods yet?”

“Far from it. We are still in the early stages of TBE. It is a disease on a global scale. We don’t foresee any civilized region going untouched by this. Just because you are healthy today doesn’t mean TBE won’t kill you tomorrow. Even those who’ve contracted it and survived are not safe from another attack. In fact, their compromised immunity makes them more likely to contract G3.”

The anchor’s eyes went wide. The color drained from the upper half of her face. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and cleared her throat. Her eyebrows, which had arced upward with worry, angled downward with concern or anger. “What exactly are you saying?”

Dub stood from his seat, ignoring the jolt of pain in his hip, and pointed at the screen. The frustration in his own voice surprised him. “What do you think he means? He means we’re all going to die. There is no fixing this. Are you that thick?”

Gem suppressed a cough and grabbed his wrist. She squeezed. “It’s okay, Dub. Just sit down and watch.”

Dub looked back at her. There were tears streaming down her cheeks. Barker’s too. They understood the same thing he did. None of them were in the clear. None of them could know definitively they weren’t still sick, a time bomb inside them counting down on a molecular level. She held a rumpled paper towel in one hand. It was balled into a fist.

Dub swallowed against the ache building in his throat. He blinked back the sting of welling tears and sat, turning back to the interview on the screen.

“…so blunt,” Negro was saying. “It’s not my nature to state things so plainly. But that is where we are. It’s best everyone understand that we don’t have solutions yet. We have answers that lead to more questions.”

“There is no vaccine?” said the anchor. “No prevention and no cure?”

“No.”

“What do we do?”

Negro attempted a weak smile again. He nodded an understanding of the question that everyone, everywhere was likely asking. “We are working with private labs, university laboratories across the globe, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, foreign governments, you name it, to formulate a definitive response to this epidemic. Understand we have untold teams of people working around the clock, attempting to formulate prophylactics and curative measures. It’s important that—”

The screen went black.

Gem stood there holding the remote at the screen. Her thumb was on the power button. She was staring blankly at the empty display. “I can’t take any more. I feel manic. I’m good one second and at the end of my rope the next. People are dead. More are dying. My parents are halfway around the world. I can’t pretend to be okay anymore. I can’t joke about it.”

“It’s okay,” Barker said, attempting to use her own vaguely reassuring psychology on her. “We’ll be okay.”

She shook her head. “No, we won’t, Barker. Didn’t you hear the man? Everybody is going to die from this.”

Barker frowned against the hyperbole. “Not everybody,” he said. “Not—”

“Nearly everybody. It doesn’t matter that we’re here in my house. Even if we’re safe for now. We’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of nonperishable food. Then what? We go out? We get infected then?”

“Let’s take one day at a time,” said Barker.

Suddenly, the dude with the concussion was the reasonable one, the one trying to maintain the relative but shaky calm. Barker’s weary eyes darted between Gem and Dub.

Gem raised her hand to Barker’s face and ran a thumb along his cheek. She inhaled deeply and sighed. Her body shuddered. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She turned to Dub. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” asked Dub. “What are you sorry about?”

“Everybody’s allowed to lose it,” said Barker. “Five seconds ago it was Dub. Now it’s your turn.”

She shook her head and stood. She spun around, coughing, and opened her hand. She uncrumpled the paper towel and held it up in front of her.

It was blood soaked.

Barker started toward her. She held up her hand and stopped him. The tears flowed from her eyes. Her nose was running. It was a combination of snot tinged with blood. She wiped it away with the paper towel and steeled herself.

“I started coughing again when we were hiking,” she said. “I thought it was from the elevation and the exercise. Then I tasted the blood in my mouth.”

“When?” asked Barker. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “I really didn’t. Not until—”

Barker jabbed a finger at the television screen mounted on the wall behind his dying girlfriend. “The CDC guy just now?” Barker said, anger swelling in his voice. “That quack. You believe him? You’ve already been sick. You got better. You’re fine.”

“You’re in denial,” she said. “You heard him.”

Gem coughed again, her body convulsing. She tried to cover her mouth with the paper towel. Blood sprayed from the edges.

“Gem,” Barker said, lunging for her with a wide step.

She tried pushing him back, but he pulled her to him. They cried together. Dub’s own chest shuddered with the overwhelming sadness that had filled the room. Those few moments of contentment, of naïve bliss, were long gone. This house was as much a prison as their dorm room, as any secure facility they might find themselves dragged to against their will.

Gem was sick with G3. That meant all of them were sick with G3. It was only a matter of time now. Unless there was a miraculous cure pulled out of the air, chances were they’d be joining Keri, Michael, and countless others in the afterworld.

Dub sank deeper into the cool leather. It wasn’t as comfortable as it had been minutes earlier. His eyes drifted from his sobbing friends consoling one another to the dark brown ceiling above him. Somehow, he’d known this moment was coming, the moment when hope was lost. Deep within him, this realization was inevitable. There was something predetermined about it.

He’d always felt invincible as a kid. It didn’t matter what he did, where he went, or what risks he took, he knew deep down he would survive them.

Yet in recent months that had changed. He’d had recurring dreams of the end of his world. In some cases it was the end of the world, and in some it was merely a seismic shift in his own life. A wave of heat washed over him, the briny taste of seawater filled his mouth, and the smell of death overwhelmed them both.

Dub closed his eyes, trying to define the moment his outlook had changed. When was it that he’d stopped believing he was immortal, in the figurative sense, and started understanding his life was short in the literal sense?

His mind drifted until he saw the face of a man sitting across from him in a psychology lab. The man was older, in his mid-thirties, and well-dressed. He’d called himself an angel investor.

He worked for a tech company, or owned a tech company, or invested in a tech company called something Dub couldn’t remember. It was right there on the tip of his tongue. Inner something. Or Inter something. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the paycheck from the experiment. What mattered was being a part of psych research. What mattered was that he’d convinced the angel investor to let his friends participate too.

Dub had told the man they were all out-of-state students, and tuition was ridiculous. There was no financial aid for out-of-state kids whose parents made decent money. They needed the easy cash.

The investor, the man running the research, had agreed and included them. He promised them the same stipend. All they had to do was undergo a brain scan under the influence of a light anesthesia. Then they’d periodically come by the lab and answer questions.

That was it. Easy money. Too easy. Too good to be true.

Since the study had begun, Dub had suffered from periodic headaches and recurring nightmares. Keri’s migraines had gotten worse. Michael’s nervous tics had intensified. Barker complained of serious déjà vu every time they stepped out of the dorm room.

None of it mattered now. All of it was pointless. It didn’t matter what he did now, or what he’d done, he was at the end of his world. Still, when he opened his eyes again to stare at the ceiling, a nagging sensation told Dub this wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last.

CHAPTER 14

DAY 17

Pacific Palisades, California

Gilda’s eyes fluttered open. They felt sticky from heavy sleep. She tried swallowing. It hurt and took her three tries before she could complete the task. Her vision was blurry. She could see light and shapes but couldn’t make out what exactly they were or where she was. A familiar voice gave her a hint. The voice was muffled, as if coming from behind a wall. She recognized it. It was Doc Konkoly.

“Gilda,” he said, “can you…hear me?”

Gilda tried to move and realized she was restrained. Her wrists and her ankles were strapped to something. She strained against them. She tried speaking but couldn’t. Little more than air hissed from between her teeth. Her jaw ached.

“Gilda,” said Konkoly, “relax. There’s no need to panic.”

That was when panic welled in her chest. Her limbs trembled. Her breathing sped up. It was shallow and painful. Her chest burned now. Her throat tightened. Her stomach seized. She wanted to scream. She needed to scream. She couldn’t. A thick lump swelled in her sore throat.

“Gilda,” Konkoly repeated in his familiar halting cadence, “you’re…in an isolation bay…in the infirmary. We have you restrained…for your own safety.”

Gilda squeezed her eyes closed, wishing away her reality. She told herself this was a dream. She was asleep. She was in her room. She was dreaming, as she had for months. This was another one in a long succession of nightmares that bordered on reality.

Sweat stung her eyes and her body shivered involuntarily. She was drenched in perspiration. Her lower back was stuck to the sheet underneath her body. Her hair was matted to her forehead and neck.

“Your fever is breaking,” said Konkoly. His voice was less muffled than hollow, she realized.

Where is he?

She opened her eyes again, understanding this might not be a dream, and tried focusing on her surroundings. Still blurry, but clearer than before, she made out the stone walls of the room. They matched that of her own room in the bunker. They matched every wall in the bunker, for that matter. Above her hung a single strand of LED lights. They shone directly into her eyes, and she turned away from them to find a metal intravenous pole holding a pair of plastic bags on twin hooks.

The bags were half full of clear liquids. Both had lines running from the bags and into her right arm. The line was hidden by surgical tape at the entry point into her vein. She was lying at an angle, her head and chest elevated above her hips and legs.

Then she noticed the faintest hint of a hum, and Konkoly spoke again. It was then she spotted the speaker mounted on the wall. Next to it was the circular black lens of a digital video camera. She glared at it, fighting the urge to pounce at the device and rip it from the stone wall.

“You’re sick, Gilda,” he said. “You’ve contracted TBE. Claudia found you unconscious in the greenhouse. You hit your head on one of the hydroponic tables. You…lost blood.”

TBE? How could she have TBE? She was healthy. She had been fine when she moved underground two weeks ago. The incubation period wasn’t that long, was it?

She had questions to ask. She needed answers. The look on her face must have conveyed something to Konkoly. He seemed to know what was going on in her head.

“I know this is disorienting,” he said. “I know you’re confused. Victor is here to give you an update on…the situation.”

The speaker clicked and Victor’s deep, resonant voice replaced Konkoly’s. He began by apologizing for having her quarantined and restrained.

“You’re quarantined for our protection,” he explained. “We cannot risk you infecting the entire population down here. We have you restrained, as Doc mentioned, for your protection. If you were free to get up and move around, you’d only hurt yourself. You’re weak. You’re sick. Frankly, we want your final hours to be as comfortable as possible.”

Final hours?

Bile crept up her throat, burning and inducing the urge to retch. She suppressed it.

Victor apologized again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That didn’t come across the way I intended. But you do have TBE, and it’s what is now being called Gen3. The incubation period is as long as sixteen or seventeen days, which means you were probably infected when you arrived.”

Gilda’s mind raced. None of this seemed possible, let alone probable. She willed herself to wake up. She had to wake up.

“There’s a likelihood you’ve infected others,” said Victor, “because two people have already died. Another eight are showing advanced symptoms of the illness; five others are beginning to present. They are also quarantined. Actually, nearly everyone is quarantined.”

If there were others quarantined, where were they? Why was she the only one in an infirmary bay? Why couldn’t she be in her own room, away from prying eyes? And how would they know she was the one who infected everybody? Might someone else have been patient zero? Doc Konkoly, again appearing to read her mind, returned to the microphone. His voice echoed off the stone walls of the enclosed space.

“The others are in their rooms,” he said. “You’re in the infirmary because of your fall. We didn’t realize you were…infected…until after you were here. Rather than move you, we kept you here.”

A tightness built in her chest and she coughed. Blood sprayed from her mouth and splattered on her chest. Her eyes widened with fear and she blurted out something that sounded like a banshee’s wail. The sound of her own voice, or whatever it was, sent a shudder along her spine. Her body shook with fear. She tensed against the restraints.

“Claudia…is dead,” said Doc. “You coughed into her face when you arrived in the infirmary. It was twelve hours…and she was gone.”

Gilda was certain this was a nightmare now. It had to be. Nobody could die within twelve hours from TBE. Nobody. How long had she been unconscious in the infirmary? How long had she been restrained?

“Ritz is gone too,” said Doc. “He was the first to treat you. He…died within an hour of Claudia.”

Victor returned to the mic. “You’ve been here for close to forty-eight hours. Quite frankly, we thought you’d have passed by now. It’s encouraging to see you fight so hard. You’re an incredible woman, Gilda.”

None of this made any sense. The timeline, the dead people, her survival. She was more convinced than ever it was a dream, that she was asleep and struggling to awaken from the mental prison.

Gilda’s head began to throb. Her temples pulsed with pain. Her vision blurred from the sheen of tears that wouldn’t stop flooding her eyes. She swallowed hard and focused. She needed to speak.

“There’s a mic near your bed,” said Victor. “We can hear you.”

She swallowed again. “Why,” she managed before forcing the air from her lungs. Her voice was barely more than a scratchy whisper. “Why are you alive?”

The words hung in the air without an answer for what seemed forever, a very long moment. Was her sense of time warped? Didn’t dreams do that? Mess with the temporal reality of things?

“We don’t know,” said Victor, “but we suspect it’s a matter of time before we fall ill.”

“You handled all of the food, Gilda,” Doc Konkoly said. “We’ve all eaten the food. If you were sick from the outset, or even if you contacted it from someone else in the early days of our seclusion, we’re…all exposed.”

“All of the surviving members are secluded from one another,” said Victor. “I’m in the hub by myself.”

“I’m in the primary lab,” said Doc, “but everyone else is in their rooms.”

“Hal is delivering food and water once a day,” said Victor. “He’s the only one moving around the OASIS at this point. And he’s not offering provisions to those who are already symptomatic.”

“We expect to last a few more days,” said Doc, “perhaps a week. It’s…not looking good. Not with the new data, which suggests that nobody is immune. This is probably the end of the civilized world as we know it, Gilda.”

“Our experiment here failed,” said Victor. “We were as prepared as any group of people could be. No expense was spared to provide comfort, power, food, and water. We were self-sustaining. None of it mattered.”

“We know that we’re overloading you,” said Doc. “You’re sick. You’re weak. This is, I’m sure, too much…to comprehend.”

That’s an understatement, thought Gilda. It was beginning to sink in that she was, in fact, awake. Everything she tried to rouse her subconscious from uneasy sleep, everything that had previously worked, had failed.

“We…didn’t think you’d wake up,” said Doc. “We didn’t plan on telling you anything.”

“But we thought we owed it to you,” added Victor, “as difficult as it is, as harsh as it sounds. We owed it to you to tell you what was happening.”

“And knowing you, Gilda,” said Doc, “we knew you wouldn’t want it candy-coated. We knew you’d want…the unvarnished truth.”

They were wrong. She didn’t want the truth. She wanted to keep pretending this was a dream. She wanted them to tell her she’d awaken in a new reality in which everyone survived the apocalypse. That was what she wanted. But she was certain now that this was no dream.

Her mind sent her back to her conversation with Claudia in the diner. She’d been cramping then. She’d chalked it up to menstrual cramps and had forgotten about it when her cycle hadn’t materialized.

The clearing of her throat, the constant need to pull phlegm from her chest, had been a sign too. She hadn’t recognized it.

This was her reality. This was her unvarnished truth. She’d brought the disease with her and killed everyone inside the bunker. The first one to go had been the one she sought to save; poor Claudia.

She tried speaking again. Her voice was barely audible. It was getting harder to breathe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I didn’t…know.”

She exhaled heavily with the last word. Her stomach roiled. Her chest tightened.

“Nobody blames you,” said Victor. “Nobody. We’re all in this together. Sometimes you succeed; sometimes you don’t.”

Victor was matter-of-fact about their impending demise, about the end of the world as anyone knew it to be. He didn’t seem bothered by it, let alone angry or resentful.

“Let’s hope that whatever it is the folks at Interllayar are doing will resolve this…eventually,” said Doc. “That one of these…iterations…as they like to call them…turn out the way we all hope. I take comfort in that hope.”

Hope.

That was the promise of the future, wasn’t it? Without hope man was doomed, regardless of disease or war or famine or freeze. Hope and the promise of good days to come was what got people up in the morning, what had them fight through hardship and accept the bad things in life. Somewhere, Gilda believed, along the not-too-distant horizon, lay good things. Better things.

Could those things still exist if not in this world? Did it matter if it didn’t happen here and now? Gilda couldn’t wrap her head around it. Not in her condition. She could barely form a coherent thought in her head as the fever built again and her body began to shut down. Her lungs were filling with fluid. Her bowels couldn’t contain themselves. This was no dream. It was a living, waking nightmare from which there was no escape.

As bad as it was for her, for those who’d already succumbed to TBE Gen1, 2, or 3, had Gilda been able to process her surroundings, she might have empathized with the men watching her die.

They were the ones watching their futures unfold before them on a closed-circuit digital video feed. They were seeing what would happen to their bodies in the coming hours and days.

Theirs was a horizon empty of hope and promise of better things to come. Theirs was one of pain and futility.

“Let’s hope you’re right about Interllayar,” said Victor. “Pray they’ve figured something out or we’re doomed.”

Doc chuckled into the microphone before stifling a cough. “I think it’s safe to say we’re doomed…this time,” he said flatly, “as we’ve been countless times before. The question remains…whether or not we will be…next time.”

CHAPTER 15

DAY 17

Clean Zone 2

Danny blinked his eyes open to a foul odor and the sensation of something rough and wet on his face. Still half-conscious, he swatted at his cheek, catching Maggie’s tongue.

She stood over him, straddling him, bathing him with kisses. He reached up and took both sides of her head, turning his to the side.

“You smell like you ate a rotten diaper filled with cat poop,” he said, without realizing the simile’s non sequitur.

Maggie licked his ear and pushed a paw into his sternum as she moved to his side. She snorted and licked her chops.

Danny turned his head to look at her. He smiled. She was seemingly unhurt and she was free of the human avalanche. So was he. He was okay.

“We almost lost you, soldier,” said a solid voice. “If it hadn’t been for your K-9’s constant whimper, we’d have never gotten to you in time. You have him to thank for saving you both.”

“Her,” Danny said.

The owner of the voice stepped into Danny’s view. He was a tall, thin man. His hair was cut high and tight, flecked with gray. His steely eyes drilled into Danny with precision. He had the look of a man who’d seen too much to look at the world with optimism but still harbored flecks of hope.

He raised an eyebrow and bristled. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” Danny apologized. “The dog. She’s a girl. Her name is Maggie.”

The man’s hardened expression relaxed. “Got it. Maggie. Good name. Rod Stewart fan?”

“Who?” Danny asked. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and surveyed his surroundings. He was on a fabric cot in a large tent, like a field hospital. There were a half dozen additional cots perched on their aluminum legs and awaiting patients. There was an IV in Danny’s arm, and he traced the line to a hanging bag of clear. There was also plastic tubing draped around his ears that looped under his chin. He touched it with his fingers.

“That’s oxygen,” said the man. “Maggie pulled it free a minute ago. I was going to reinsert it, but she firmly insisted I not touch you anymore.”

Danny snapped his fingers and pointed to the floor. “Hop down,” he told Maggie. She obeyed and sat at his side. He turned back to the man. “Sorry.”

“Not a problem,” the man said. “I’m Nick Smith. Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security?” asked Danny. He lay back against the pillow underneath his neck.

“I should say I’m a reservist with Cal Guard, really,” said Smith. “My day job is with the Homeland Security Division of OES. I’m an EMT as well, so I’m here helping you.”

“OES?”

“Office of Emergency Services.”

Danny nodded. “And a reservist.”

“Yes,” said Smith. “Was in the Army. Field medic. Last stationed at Fort Des Moines. Got a degree in emergency management at Upper Iowa. Finished. Got out. Got a job. Moved to Sacramento.”

His candor was surprising. His wizened face belied his apparent affability. All Danny had asked was if he was a reservist, and the seasoned veteran had offered a Wikipedia version of his adult life.

Smith took Danny’s wrist and checked his pulse. “How are you feeling?”

Danny shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“You’ve got some contusions,” said Smith. “Superficially that seems to be the worst of it. I don’t have the capability of any internal diagnostics here. No X-rays, MRIs, or that sort of thing, and you’re not going to get into a hospital anytime soon. So unless you’re complaining of any unusual internal discomfort, you should be good to go soon.”

“Thanks,” said Danny.

“What unit are you with?” asked Smith.

Danny eyed a neatly folded Tyvek suit on a metal folding chair in the corner of the tent then glanced back at Smith. He tried to dodge the question. “Why aren’t you in a suit? Everybody in the zone is in a suit.”

Smith nodded. “True,” he said. “We’re not in the zone. I mean, not in Zone 4, where you were.”

Danny sat up again. “Where are we?”

“Clean Zone 2,” he said. “Everybody here is good to go. No need for the suits. Not here.”

Danny’s eyes again surveyed the tent. It was empty other than the loquacious Smith, Maggie, and him. It was quiet outside, too, aside from the distant rumble and squeal of large trucks. The aural chaos of Infected Zone 4 was gone.

“How did we get here?”

Smith shrugged. “Transport.”

Danny swallowed. “How long have I been out?”

“The better part of three days,” he said. “We tapped the filter to your suit with clean air once they’d pulled you from under the fence. You were still breathing, barely. O2 levels were super low. But we couldn’t take off your suit until we were clear of the zone and had you decontaminated. Then we pumped you full of drugs, kept you sedated.”

Danny motioned toward the metal folding chair. “That’s not my suit?”

Smith followed his eyes to the folded suit. He chuckled. “No, that’s a fresh one. We incinerated the other ones.”

“Oh,” said Danny.

“What’s your name?” asked Smith. “We couldn’t find an ID on you. No tags or anything.”

“Where exactly is this clean zone?” he asked, avoiding another question. “I mean, where am I?”

“I’m not sure,” Smith said. “I’m from Sacramento and not familiar with Los Angeles. I do know we’re near the beach. And I can see a Ferris wheel in the distance.”

“Santa Monica,” said Danny. “We’re close to Santa Monica.”

Smith shrugged. “Okay. Makes sense. Santa Monica Pier? I’ve heard of that. I’ve seen it in movies. But I didn’t know that’s what it was.”

Danny sat up. “I gotta go.”

Smith inched toward Danny and gently put a hand on his chest. “Hold on, soldier. Not yet. You’ve got plenty of time to get back to work.”

Danny relaxed. He glanced at Maggie. She was lying on the floor of the tent. Her head rested on her paws. Her eyes were closed. Her back leg was twitching. She was dreaming.

“What’s your battalion?” asked Smith. “And your name? I’ve told you about me. I don’t know anything about you other than you being one lucky SOB.”

“Lucky?” Danny asked.

“Surviving that chaos,” said Smith. “The gunfire. The collapse. You should be dead. I saw it happening. The way that fence, those bodies, piled on top of you…”

“Yeah,” said Danny flatly. “I’m lucky.”

“Three other soldiers didn’t make it,” said Smith. “And I don’t know how many of the sick got early termination notices. Dozens probably. When that fence collapsed, a few tried to run for it. They were summarily executed on the spot. That stopped the rest of them from trying to escape. It was bad.”

“I’m glad I didn’t see it,” said Danny.

“I wish I hadn’t,” said Smith. “This is as bad as anything I’ve ever seen, especially because it’s our people. It’s Americans, you know? It’s easy to be detached from the blood and guts of a foreign deployment. They’re not your people. They’re strangers in another land. It’s not home. You ever been overseas?”

“No.”

That was true. Danny had never traveled abroad save a short weekend trip to Cabo with his ex. They’d stayed at a nice couples’ resort. He’d learned about tequila and its aftereffects. He’d tried ceviche for the first time and gotten too much sun.

“So you’re reserve?” asked Smith.

“I’m Russell,” he said, giving Smith the first fake name that came to mind. He extended his hand, pulling taut the intravenous line attached to the saline bag. “Russell Blake.”

Smith took his hand and shook it with a firm, muscular grip that was just shy of too strong. He smiled. “Nice to meet you, Russell Blake. So you’re in what unit? I’m guessing you’re local?”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “My civilian job is in Santa Monica.”

Danny hoped using a word like civilian would further his weak ruse. It was a matter of time before Smith figured out he wasn’t military. He searched his mind for any bits of information he could recall about Cal Guard. There were bits and pieces from news reports.

“You’re close to home,” said Smith. “That’s good and bad, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Danny.

“Who are you with?” Smith asked again. “Which team?”

Danny racked his brain for the last time he’d seen the newsman, Lane Turner, interviewing someone from Cal Guard. It hadn’t been long before the Army had invaded his apartment.

“Fortieth,” Danny said, hoping he was right about the number.

Smith’s expression flattened. His eyes narrowed. He was studying Danny, searching for some tell Danny couldn’t identify.

Smith shifted, squaring his shoulders and putting himself between Danny’s cot and the tent’s exit. “Fortieth what?” he asked, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Danny shot back, without thinking about it, “Battalion.”

Smith raised an eyebrow again. “What company?”

“C,” said Danny. It was the only one he could identify. Charlie Company. It was famous during Vietnam or something, wasn’t it? He thought he’d once watched a documentary about the famous Charlie Company.

Smith’s face relaxed. His shoulders sank. “Huh,” he said. “Makes sense, I guess. They’re out of Manhattan Beach?”

“Yes,” said Danny. “Speaking of that, can I get out of here? Maggie and I have things to do.”

Smith checked the saline bag and looked at the readout from the oxygen sensor on Danny’s finger. He picked up a tablet from an adjoining table and tapped on it a few times. He nodded and forced a smile. “Sure thing, Russell Blake. I can step next door and grab you something to wear. What size?”

Danny noticed for the first time he was in boxers and a T-shirt. He shrugged.

“I’ll grab a large,” said Smith. “Size ten boots?”

Danny nodded.

“I’ll be back,” he said and, with the tablet tucked under his arm, stepped from the tent.

Danny was alone. The second Smith was gone, he pulled the IV from his arm, blood pooling at the puncture, and hopped from the cot. He high-stepped it to the tent’s exit and peeked his head through the opening.

He was in a row of tents. It looked like an encampment of sorts, the kind one would find at a forward operating base. Danny didn’t know the term, but he was familiar with the concept.

To the right men in Army combat uniforms were walking back and forth, dipping in and out of tents. To the left was the same. Except it wasn’t the same. About seven or eight tents down, Smith stood with his back to Danny. He was pointing over his shoulder with his thumb, and he was talking to a trio of men with patches on their left arms. The Velcro patches had, in large black lettering, the letters MP.

Danny cursed himself. He hadn’t fooled Smith. Not at all. Smith probably knew there was nobody in Charlie Company named Russell Blake. That was assuming there was a Charlie Company.

Danny ducked back inside the tent and scanned the tent for some idea as to how he’d escape. He was in his underwear. He was unarmed, except for Maggie, and blood was trailing down his arm.

He padded over to his cot and looked for something, anything, he could use to help him get away. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the exit, and saw the yellow suit. It wasn’t great, but it would do.

Forty-five seconds later he and Maggie were walking out of the tent. He was dressed in the hazmat suit and wearing the hood. He’d taken three steps to the right when he heard someone shout for him to stop.

“You!” called someone. “In the suit. You! Stop now. That’s an order.”

Danny didn’t bother to look back or follow orders. As they likely knew, he wasn’t military, and he didn’t give two flips about martial law.

He and Maggie bolted along the rows of tents, dodging the myriad of soldiers or lab techs at work, his feet pounding against the soles of the rubber boots. His breath was hot and damp inside the hood. This suit carried with it a different aroma than the last. It didn’t have the remnants of someone else’s musk. This one was all about the off-gassing chemicals in the suit. Danny inhaled the strong odor of plastics and rubber as he ran. His head pulsed at the temples, but his headache had subsided. It was a nuisance. His vision was clear, at least as clear as it could be inside the condensation-clouded reflective face shield.

Maggie was ahead of him, seemingly sure of where she was going and of the urgency. She wove in between and amongst moving obstacles like a motorcyclist in rush-hour traffic on the 405, or traffic any time of day on the 405. Danny pumped his arms and lifted his knees as he ran after her. He saw a metal cart to his right, electronics sitting atop it with cables cascading down its side. He angled for it and, as he brushed past it, reached across the top to grab at it and fling it to the ground.

Danny spun out of the way, like a football running back avoiding an arm tackle, and the table toppled behind his feet, its contents spilling into the pathway that ran between the facing rows of tents.

“Stop now or we will—” called the voice still trailing him. The sounds of someone grunting and falling, cursing, and grunting again finished the sentence.

Maggie turned right on a dime and disappeared between two tents. Danny followed her blindly. As he rounded the corner with less precision than his dog, his momentum carrying him wide to the left, he glanced to his right.

There were three men chasing him. Two of them wore the military police patches on their arms. The third man was Nick Smith. His affability was gone. His face was squeezed with exertion, and maybe anger, and he led the other two. They were only fifteen yards behind him. Danny was struck that they weren’t closer. Maybe his endless hours of Shotokan training had helped his athleticism.

He turned back to refocus on what was ahead of him when his left foot caught a tent spike and he tripped forward. He was caught for several lunging, off-balance steps in that windmill of an expectant face-plant, when he somehow recovered and regained his speed.

Nick Smith yelled after him. His call was a collection of alternating commands, observations, and heavy breaths. “Stop. Whoever you are, it’s not worth it. Don’t run. You can’t get far. Stop!”

Without looking over his shoulder to be sure, Danny knew they’d gained on him. His trip and near fall had cost him what little distance he had on the pursuing trio. He couldn’t tell if they had their weapons drawn.

They were armed. They were soldiers, military police. They had to be armed. It was only a matter of time before they opened fire, right?

Danny skirted the taut line and stake of another tent and spotted Maggie some fifteen yards ahead of him. She was headed somewhere with purpose. He hoped he could make it wherever that somewhere might be.

Smith called after him again at the same moment Maggie turned left between two of the tents at the edge of the encampment. Instead of following her, he darted left parallel to her course and then cut behind the tents to find her.

There was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence a few feet ahead. Maggie squatted and then squeezed underneath a tear folded back at one of the posts. Danny knew he couldn’t fit underneath it. Instead, he jumped and caught the fence with his gloved hands, much as the woman in the pen had done days earlier. The boots didn’t provide much help. They slipped and Danny was sure the trio would grab him by the legs and yank him to the ground.

With what strength he had left, and the flexibility he’d earned through hours in the dojo, he managed to swing one leg up to the top of the fence and catch it in the coiled concertina wire. That gave him enough momentum to lift himself just out of their reach as they closed in on him.

The wire snagged the suit, but didn’t cut through it enough to injure Danny. Wincing with expectation, he grabbed the fence just underneath the wire and heaved himself over it.

He swung to the other side of the fence but caught on the wire. He hung there awkwardly on the opposite side of the fence, facing the three men who’d been chasing him.

The wire, and its sharp blades, did cut his left hand. He was pretty sure one had nicked the back of his leg as well when he’d essentially tumbled over the top.

Smith reached through the fence and grabbed a handful of the suit. He was seething. Danny could only partially see Smith, given his sideways position on the fence, but he could hear the angry frustration in the man’s voice.

“We have orders to shoot you if necessary,” said Smith. “Is it necessary, Mr. Blake?”

He stressed the word Blake as if he knew it was a pseudonym. He spat as he said it. It wasn’t intentional, Danny didn’t think. The man was nearly wheezing.

Danny tried yanking himself from the wire. A blade cut deeper into his hand, and he grunted then sucked in air through his teeth. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he tried blinking away the burn.

The blood was beginning to rush to one side of his body, and his shoulder ached. It was supporting much of his weight as he hung from the wire. His hand was throbbing now. The burning sensation was pulsating. Warmth spread across his palm and between his fingers. The cut was bad. No doubt about it.

“I asked you a question,” said Smith. His breathing was less labored. He puffed air through full cheeks and inhaled deeply through his nostrils. He’d turned his body so he could look directly into Danny’s reflective visor.

“It’s not necessary,” said Danny.

Still gripping a pluck of Danny’s suit, Smith glanced at one of the two MPs and motioned toward the hole in the fence. “Can you fit under there?”

The soldier frowned but dropped to the ground and tried squeezing through the opening. It wasn’t wide enough. “Can’t do it,” he said.

“Cut it wider,” ordered Smith.

“With what?”

Smith grunted. Then he cursed. “Go around. Find a way past this fence and get to the other side. Take Bustello with you.”

The two MPs exchanged looks, acknowledged Smith with a nod, and started jogging along the fence line to search for an opening. A third MP appeared at Smith’s shoulder. He was out of breath, the knees of his uniform were soiled, and a streak of road rash ran along the side of his face. It was freckled with spots of blood and was beginning to bruise at his cheek.

He was breathing hard and bent over at his waist. “I’m here,” he said through ragged breaths. “Got tripped up by that cart. Think I twisted my—”

“Not interested,” said Smith. “We’ll take a look at your injuries after this is finished. Can you help me now or not? What’s your name?”

“Francis.” The soldier wiped his palms on the side of his uniform. The motion left dark brown smears on the digital camouflage print that blended with the desert-colored fabric.

“I sent Abbott and Bustello that way,” said Smith. “You go that way and try to find a way around the fence. We need to drag this guy, whoever he is, back to command. We can’t have him running around aimlessly. It’s too big a threat.”

If he hadn’t been hanging by razor wire in an overheating Tyvek suit, Danny would have laughed at that characterization. A threat? That was laughable.

Danny was a loner, a divorced loner whose wife left him for a wealthier man. He was a fry cook with endless debt and barely enough money for streaming service and a prepaid cell phone. His apartment, what passed for an apartment, was a dingy, water-stained, popcorn-ceilinged relic that shouldn’t have survived the last four-point-two tremor that had rattled the windows a month earlier. Plus, as much time as he’d spent at the dojo, he wasn’t any better at karate than some of the talented middle-schoolers who’d slyly wink at him when they’d outperform him. Danny wasn’t a threat to anyone or anything. He wasn’t sick, and he surely wasn’t dangerous by any measure.

His dog, however, was a different story. Maggie was the threat. She’d proven she could defend herself and attack when provoked.

Come to think of it, where was she? Where was Maggie? Danny twisted his head around without trying to shift his weight. He failed, and another deep burn exploded in his palm. He was going to need stitches and a tetanus shot. But the chances of getting either were unlikely whether or not he escaped from Cal Guard for the third time since the bacterial outbreak. He winced against the pain and suppressed a grunt. His eyes scanned the sideways world behind him.

Maggie was watching him intently. She’d moved toward the fence and was twenty feet from Danny. She was whimpering at him in between prodding half-barks that signaled her impatience. She’d glance at the empty street and then at him. She wanted to go. She was imploring him to get unstuck and follow her lead. The dog shifted her weight on her front paws, from one to the other and back.

Danny did too. But the more he yanked at the concertina wire, the more entangled his suit became, and the more damage he did to his hand. He jerked away again and managed to drop a couple of inches, but it twisted his body into a more uncomfortable position. It was like he was in some sadistic version of the old game Twister his parents had told him about.

As Francis hobbled as quickly as he could alongside the fence in the opposite direction of the other two MPs, Smith turned his attention back to Danny. He let go of the fabric, perhaps realizing Danny was stuck there whether or not he held onto an inconsequential amount of Tyvek suit through the chain link.

“What’s your real name?” said Smith. “Don’t tell me it’s Russell Blake. There’s no Blake, at least not one with the first name Russell, in the entirety of the guard. There certainly isn’t one in the fortieth battalion, C Company, out of Manhattan Beach. Nice try though. You had me for a half second.”

Danny didn’t say anything. He was focusing on the pain in his hand. He was pretty certain a blade was stuck in his palm. If he moved the wrong way, it would tear through his hand and slice it wide open. His heart was pounding so heavily against his chest he could hear it in his helmet. The indicator display told him the auto filter had about forty-five minutes left of air. He’d burned through a lot of it by running and breathing hard. This time, though, Danny wasn’t worried about the time remaining on the filter indicator. He’d be long out of the suit in forty-five minutes one way or the other.

“You might as well tell me who you are,” said Smith. “It’ll make things easier once we get you back.”

“How do you know I’m not Cal Guard Army reservist Russell Blake?” Danny asked, admitting the ruse but not giving up anything new.

“It was obvious from the moment we put you in the back of the transport,” said Smith. “But you weren’t sick, you weren’t an immediate threat given your unconsciousness, so with my superior’s permission, I brought you to a solitary field tent, where I could find out exactly who you are and what it is you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything,” said Danny, “except hanging around against my will.”

The edges of Smith’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t smile. He pressed his face against the fence and positioned it so Danny could see him. He looked straight into the reflective mask.

“I’m an average Joe,” Danny said. “Nothing special about me.”

“You’re hiding something,” he said. “You’re working for somebody. You’re not an average Joe. An average Joe doesn’t do what you did. An average Joe doesn’t get that far into a secured area wearing a stolen Tyvek suit. There’s nothing average about you.”

“Tell my ex that,” said Danny.

He wasn’t sure from where his defiance had grown. How had he gained the strength, the wherewithal, the guile to do what he’d done and, up until this very moment, avoid detention in one of the state’s secure facilities? Maybe this guy Smith was right? Maybe his ex was wrong.

“Tell me what you’re doing now,” said Smith, “and I promise I’ll put in a good word for you. You’ll get special treatment if I can arrange it.”

A shift in his tone to signal a change in his approach. He was now a one-man good cop/bad cop, tough one second and sympathetic the next. He wasn’t very good at it.

Danny told him the truth. “I’m not doing anything,” he admitted. “I’m trying to stay away from whatever secure facilities you people are running. I want to go home. I want to be with my dog. I want to sleep in my bed. I want to watch the news on my TV.”

Smith’s eyes stayed fixed on Danny’s visor. He was listening, Danny could tell. He was soaking it in and trying to determine if he should buy what Danny was selling.

He didn’t. “Okay.” He shook his head. “Have it your way. My men will be here in a minute, and you’ll be going back with us for what I’m sure will be an unpleasant debriefing.”

Danny shifted his hand, and he felt the edge of the blade embedded in his palm for the first time. He winced, biting his lip as he moved his hand in the direction that he hoped would free it from the razor wire. His side and leg were still caught in wire that had uncoiled and was dangling from the top of the fence. Danny was maybe three feet from the ground now, but stuck nonetheless.

Maggie inched closer. She whimpered, gurgled something akin to a grumble, and barked. Danny was angled now such that he couldn’t see her.

“It’s okay, girl,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“You know she can’t come with you,” said Smith. “We have no provisions for pets.”

For the first time since he’d been forced from his home, anger swelled within Danny. It was visceral, coming without any warning, and nearly exploded from him. The tightening of his muscles only exacerbated the discomfort and stinging pain. His head throbbed while other parts of his body were beginning to tingle with the early stages of numbness. It was too much, and now this man who didn’t even know his name was telling him that he couldn’t keep Maggie.

“Why are you doing this?” Danny snapped. “I’m not a criminal. I haven’t done anything wrong. You have no right to—”

“Stop it,” said Smith. He eyed Danny with renewed intensity. He surveyed the tangled mess of suit and man hanging along a fence line. Danny couldn’t see his face anymore, but he could hear his voice. “We’re trying to keep people alive. This disease, this TBE, is mean. Its infection rate is absurd. It’s transmitted in the air, by active and latent contact. It’s horrible.”

“I’m not sick,” Danny said. “Neither is my dog.”

“We’re around the fence,” came the distant echo of either Bustello or Abbott’s proclamation. “We’re coming.”

Danny tugged at the wire with a renewed sense of urgency. He dropped another inch. His hip twisted uncomfortably. He tried looking behind him to gauge how long he had. He couldn’t see them.

“We didn’t ask for this job, Russell,” said Smith. “And we’re not the enemy. But if we ignored random civilians who stole hazmat suits, gained access to places they shouldn’t be, and then run off after being nursed back to consciousness, we’d be derelict. We would be the bad guys.”

“Be there in a minute.” Another call from the MPs. It was louder. They were close now.

Danny kicked his leg out, trying to tear it away from the constrictive razor wire. The fabric tore and his leg shifted. It dropped him awkwardly another few inches.

“You have to ask yourself the purpose of your government before thinking our intentions are bad or conspiratorial or rights-restricting,” Smith said.

Danny was half listening now. He didn’t want the lecture whether Smith was right or not. He wanted out. He wanted down that road and on the beach. With his free hand, he reached up and grabbed at a piece of fabric caught on the wire. He yanked on it, slicing his arm but freeing his leg. He half somersaulted to the ground. His heels slid against the backs of the boots as they planted firmly beneath him. It was just his hand now. That was all that kept him from freedom. It was virtually numb at the surface. He couldn’t feel it well enough to pull it free. All of the pain was deep within his hand.

His mask was fogged with the perspiration that was collecting along the inside of the face shield. Blood resettled in places from which it had drained, and he wobbled. He was almost weightless and then heavy again. The blade dug into his hand.

Smith wasn’t lecturing anymore. At least, he wasn’t lecturing Danny. His elevated voice, rife with an unusual combination of exasperation and anxiety, called out for action. “Move now,” he said. “Shoot at will. Do not let him get away.”

Shoot?

Danny was still stuck to the fence. Why would anyone shoot him? Weren’t they taking him back for an interrogation? What had changed? He almost protested then understood the unfolding situation.

He turned, squinting through the haze of condensation and sweat on his visor, and saw the two MPs only twenty feet from him now. They were stopped, their arms extended in front of them, their hands palms out, as if staving off an impending attack. Neither of them had his hand on his weapon.

Danny swung his body and saw Maggie squared and ready to pounce on either or both of them. Her teeth were bared. She was growling a warning that neither man should move.

“If you don’t stop that dog,” said Smith, “I will.”

“I’m not shooting a dog,” said Abbott.

“Me neither,” said Bustello, shaking his head. “It looks like mine.”

“If I go for my gun, that thing is gonna pounce,” Abbot said. “I’m not dying in a dogfight.”

Smith cursed both of them. “Neither of you is worth your uniform.”

Danny swung back, the blade twisting in his hand, and cried out in pain when he saw Smith remove his sidearm from his hip. Running his thumb along the side, he placed his finger on the trigger guard. He had it aimed at Maggie, yet when he spoke, it was directed at Danny.

“Tell your dog to stand down. Get her to sit, or obey, or whatever it is you need to do to back her off the ledge. You’ve got three seconds and then I do it for you.”

What was it with countdowns and Cal Guard? Was everything an ultimatum with these guys?

Danny called out to Maggie as he jostled his hand, trying to pull it free of the embedded blade. He spoke softly through his teeth, trying to ignore the pain that had become unbearable. He wondered if maybe he was going into shock.

“Hey, girl,” he said. “Sit. You hear me? Sit.”

Maggie licked her chops. She glanced away from her targets and eyed Danny for a moment. She stopped growling. Then she yawned and repositioned herself closer to Danny but still within reach of the MPs if they made a sudden move. Then Maggie’s attention shifted past Danny. Her ears pricked.

“I made it,” said an unfamiliar voice joining the standoff. “I—”

It was Francis, who’d returned from his voyage around the fence. He was favoring one leg as he stood there with his hands on his hips, nearly frozen. His wide eyes danced from Smith’s nine millimeter, to the dog, to the MPs, to Danny, and back to the gun.

“Thanks,” Smith said without taking his eyes off Danny. “Since you’re closer to our friend here, help him from the fence. He’s stuck.”

He kept the weapon leveled at Maggie while Francis obeyed. He inched slowly, one limping step after the other, to Danny’s side. Maybe it was his lameness, his other injuries, or something else that Maggie sensed, but she didn’t appear threatened by him. Her squared body, still ready to spring despite the lack of open, audible aggression, was fixated on the other MPs.

Francis tried not to look Danny in the eyes as he worked to remove his hand from the concertina wire. He pulled a utility blade from his pocket and sliced through the Tyvek from Danny’s elbow up to the back of his hand. Then he peeled away the material and exposed the gore underneath.

Danny nearly fainted when he saw the amount of blood staining his arm and hand. His knees weakened. Maggie whimpered as if she sensed it and moved next to him. She sniffed his legs and then curled around him to face the MPs. She growled at them and held her hind end against Danny, pressing it against him.

“Stand as still as possible,” Francis warned, which was a task for Danny. Francis wrapped the piece of removed Tyvek around his own hand and gripped Danny’s wrist, while at the same time using his wrapped hand to grab the wire.

Danny’s breathing was rapid and shallow. He was forcing himself to weather the searing pain that exploded from his palm as Francis shifted the wire and wiggled to free the jagged blade embedded underneath the skin.

It tore further and Danny cried out in pain. When he grabbed his freed, deeply wounded hand and bent over at his waist, Maggie lunged at Francis.

Her sudden attack knocked Danny to the side, and he almost fell over in his cumbersome hazmat suit. He steadied himself to see the dog had Francis’s pant leg in her mouth. She was shaking it like a chew toy, snarling, her head whipping from side to side.

Still on the other side of the fence, Smith was looking for an opening to fire his leveled weapon, but Francis was between him and the dog, squealing in terror while trying to wiggle loose.

His balance regained, Danny ignored the waves of pain in his hand and wrist and turned toward the road. He shouted for Maggie and bolted.

Sweat rolled from his forehead into his eyes, stinging them. Danny couldn’t do anything about it. His neck and back were soaked with perspiration. His feet were beginning to slip inside the soles of the boots from the moisture that collected there after it rolled down his legs.

He heard a series of pops behind him. Gunshots. More shouting. He didn’t stop or turn around. He kept running in the suit. Maggie was even with him now, galloping beside him, her tongue hanging from the side of what Danny was sure was a wide smile.

“Run!” he told her in between heaving, raspy breaths. “Run, girl!”

His hand throbbed, but he held it up in front of him, trying to lessen the flow of blood. His hand and lower arm were painted with it. He had work to do.

His heels were blistered. They rubbed and slid up and down against the interior heel of the boots. Every high step picked at raw, bleeding flesh that surfaced from under the peeling top layer.

His chest was heavy. His lungs burned. His muscles were thick with acid. He was running out of steam. He swung right and then left again to find Maggie five yards ahead of him.

She jumped over a waist-high barrier, the kind that had the alternating orange and white stripes meant to deter people without really providing any security. Once she’d cleared the hurdle, she slowed and looked back expectantly at Danny.

He had no concept of where she was heading. So focused on escaping the men who were likely steps from tackling him, he’d lost track of his wider surroundings. Then he saw it, obscured by the tents and Danny’s tunnel vision. Only a couple of hundred yards ahead was the beach. They were on a street, barricaded on either side to block it from neighborhood access, and as far as he could tell, their path was clear. Maggie had led him to one of the major thoroughfares running east and west to and from the beach.

Danny didn’t stop to read street signs. He didn’t know which road he was traveling. He did feel the asphalt under his feet now. Only now did he glance back. The soldiers weren’t chasing them. They’d given up. Danny sighed with relief.

They reached the end of the street where it met one running parallel to the beach beyond. They slipped around a final barrier and pounded their way onto the sand. Danny’s heavy boots sank into the soft, dry surface. His calves burned.

Up and ahead and to the left was a public bathroom, a squat concrete and tile building planted squarely on the beach near a collection of bike racks and a single winding path that ran along the edge of the beach and through a series of craftily planted palm trees. They trudged the short distance to the bathroom, and Danny led Maggie inside the one closest to them.

It was darker inside the bathroom, lit only by the ambient light shining through the opaque panes of glass that lined the walls beneath the roof. It was a dingy light that gave the dank space an abandoned aura, like nobody had used the space in decades.

With one good hand, Danny managed to maneuver the hood from his head. He sucked in the surprisingly humid air, decorated with the foul scent of ammonia, and threw the hood to the floor. Then he stepped to a sink and pressed the button that started a temporary flow of water. It spat air before offering an uneven flow. He clenched his jaw, cradled his trembling, injured hand in the good one, and placed it under the spurt. The air-temperature water felt good at first. Then it stung. It burned. It elicited a throb Danny thought he could actually see. He gritted his teeth and sucked in more of the fetid air through his nose.

Maggie wandered over to a toilet and started drinking from it. The slurp and lap of water drew Danny’s attention for an instant, and he considered telling her not to drink from a public toilet. But if his dry mouth was any indication of how parched she might be, there was no point. Nasty water was better than no water, and her gut was made of steel. Anything that could devour cat poop like it was Tootsie Rolls and not get sick could probably handle some toilet water.

The sink’s flow sputtered and stopped, and Danny punched the button again. The water spat from the faucet with a hiss and gurgle. The new stream began washing away some of the blood on his palm, revealing the deep, ragged tear in the center of his hand. It ran from the base of his thumb and across the meat of his palm. It was two inches across but not a straight line. Suturing it wouldn’t be an easy task. No matter what he did to close it, he’d have a scar. He hoped he didn’t have significant nerve damage.

As the water washed away the old blood, a new spring of it oozed from the cut. He had to stop the bleeding. That was imperative.

Holding his bad hand up and away from him, he managed to wiggle free of the suit. It took him a good ten minutes to remove it completely. Then he slid out of his drenched undershirt and wrung it free of excess sweat.

Maggie was sitting near him now. She’d apparently had her fill of gray water. She panted softly as she sat on her haunches. Danny stood barefoot on the crumpled Tychem suit. He was wearing only his underwear.

He washed his hand and arm one last time before taking his T-shirt and twisting it into a modified cotton rope. Then he wrapped it around his palm and half knotted it at the back of his hand. It was too much fabric for the job, but he didn’t have the strength or desire to tear the shirt into strips.

It wasn’t sterile, and he was at a pretty significant risk for infection, but there wasn’t anything else he could do, at least not in the beach bathroom. It was time to move.

“I know I’m in my underwear, Maggie. I’m aware. I don’t have a choice. And frankly, Mags, I don’t think anybody is going to care.”

She blinked at him and stopped panting.

“Stop judging me,” he said.

After he splashed some water onto his face and neck and slurped some into his mouth, he motioned for the exit. Maggie stood, wagged her tail, and followed.

Together they marched back onto the beach. Maggie stayed at his side as Danny trudged barefoot through the soft sand. Each step took a tremendous amount of effort. Although he wasn’t sure exactly where he was, he was headed for Santa Monica. He figured he couldn’t be more than a few miles from the diner. There was a first aid kit there. There might be food. They were in a clean zone. So he was hopeful. As long as he could avoid the Cal Guard, they’d be okay. He kept telling himself that as they walked closer to the surf and the wet, compacted sand. It made the walk easier. Nothing was easy, but this walk on the shore, with the surf tickling his feet and raw heels, was as close to it as he was going to get.

CHAPTER 16

DAY 22

San Francisco, California

“There’s no answer,” said Derek. “What does that mean?”

He was sitting at his desk, holding his satellite phone away from his ear, listening to the warbled ring of a dialed number that nobody was answering.

“It means they’re dead,” said Chang. “Like everybody else.”

“It’s the OASIS. Derek’s tone was ripe with disbelief, denial, or both. “How can they be dead? They’re underground in a bunker. They’re isolated.”

Chang was sitting opposite Derek. He rapped the desk with his knuckles and stood. Slowly, he moved around the desk and walked toward the large windows overlooking the streets below. As he approached, he saw the particulate dancing in the air outside the high-rise. Flecks of ash spiraled along the currents of air that blew amongst the buildings as it washed ashore from the bay. He dipped his hands into his pockets and walked deliberately across the expansive space. When he spoke, he didn’t turn to face his boss.

“When we last spoke,” he said, “they told us that half of them were already gone. The other half was infected. Even Victor was gone. What did you expect, Derek? Are you living in a fantasy land where people magically survive incurable diseases?”

Derek spun his chair around to face Chang’s back. The physician was at the glass, his hands deep in his lab coat and his shoulders hunched forward.

“My wife is dead,” said Chang. “My son, Bobby, too. Your wife is probably dead. When was the last time she texted you?” Chang eyed the streets below. He waited a moment and glanced at Derek over his shoulder. “Four days? Five?”

“Five,” Derek replied.

“It’s no surprise they’re all dead,” said Chang. “This one is the worst yet. It had all the signs of being the one we couldn’t wrap our heads around. If this is the one, if this is the apocalypse that befalls us, we’re done for.”

Derek got up from his seat and marched toward Chang. He stopped far enough away from the window that he didn’t have to see anything beyond the smoky skies directly outside his office. He didn’t want to see. He folded his arms across his chest. “It is a fantasyland, you know,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s exactly what it is. We’re living in fantasyland.”

“Is it that?” asked Chang. “Or is it something else? I wouldn’t call this a fantasy. In my mind, fantasies aren’t made of ash and smoke. They don’t involve so much sadness, so much loss. They certainly don’t end with everyone choking on their own saliva, their organs shutting down, and their lives ending with such misery.”

Derek shrugged in partial agreement. Fantasies, from his perspective, weren’t always happy. There wasn’t always a happily ever after. “You know those old Grimm fairy tales?” he asked without awaiting a response. “They didn’t end well. People died. Kids were put in ovens. Wolves ate grandmothers.”

“Those weren’t fantasies,” said Chang. “They were morality tales. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Derek countered. “They were somebody’s fantasy, even if they were morbid warnings about how to behave in the world. How is that different from what we’re doing here?”

Derek stepped closer to the window, keeping his chin up. Flecks of ash skittered past the window. Some of them stuck to the damp panes of glass.

Chang pivoted toward Derek. His hands were still in his lab coat pockets, straining the white collar against the back of his neck. He raised a judgmental eyebrow and bit his lower lip before sighing and offering his rebuttal. He nodded toward the window, referencing the scene below that Derek refused to see. “Is that your fantasy, Derek? Have any of these iterations been fantasies of yours? If so, then I’ll tender my resignation. If this is fantastical to you, then I’ve had the wrong idea about Interllayar’s purpose, about our purpose.”

Derek took a step back. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean, Robert.”

Chang withdrew his hands from his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. “What do you mean, then, Derek?” He punctuated his boss’s name in a distasteful tone that forced Derek to wince.

“I mean,” Derek said, taking a step forward, “none of this seems real. It’s all straight out of a bedtime story. One iteration after the next is a cautionary tale. None of them provide the answers we seek. No matter how much we search for that happy ending, we can’t find it.”

Chang’s hard, dubious expression softened as if he finally understood the metaphorical comparison between their project and a collection of early nineteenth-century stories not nearly as sanitized as their twentieth-century iterations.

“We’ve only just begun,” he counseled. “For all of the failures, for all of the pain, it only takes one success. That’s all we need, Derek.” Chang held up his index finger. “We need one. That’s all. And we have limitless time to find it.”

Derek’s eyes dropped from Chang’s to the floor. He studied the veins in the travertine, following the waves of cream and brown. Each large tile of porous stone was its own story, its own collection of patterns that ended at its corners. But somehow, when looked at in context, with all of its surrounding pieces of stone, it blended. They all blended to create a contiguous, seamless expanse.

“Limitless,” he muttered, looking up again. He caught Chang’s wizened gaze, taking note of the deep crow’s-feet that framed his dark eyes. “I don’t think we have limitless time. Eventually, we’ll run out.”

Chang’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline and he frowned. He shrugged and stuffed his hands back into his coat pockets. Without saying anything, he turned back to the window and looked down.

Derek took another step toward the window, taking note of the gray skies. He hadn’t seen the sun in days. Or was it weeks? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the golden light reflecting off the glass of the buildings across from his own. He searched his memory, but it wouldn’t come. What clawed its way to the surface instead was his last conversation with his wife.

“I’m scared,” she’d told him. Her voice had warbled over the satellite connection, and he couldn’t be sure if it was the transmission or her fear that created the vibrato.

“I understand,” he’d replied, offering little comfort. “I’m sorry I can’t be there with you.”

She coughed. It was a wet, raspy cough that bordered on a sharp hack. He pulled the phone away from his ear at the overmodulated barks.

“I’m bleeding, Derek. And my stomach hurts so badly. I can’t even stand anymore. I think I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying,” he said while typing on his laptop keyboard. He knew she was, but what was he going to say?

“I am,” she whimpered before another coughing fit interrupted the conversation. “I know I am. And I’m here alone. Can’t you come be with me? Can’t you, please? I don’t want to be here alone.”

“I wish I could,” he said. But he didn’t wish that. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her; he did. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to comfort her; he couldn’t. He couldn’t watch her die.

She coughed again through her tears and asked him if he remembered the day they’d met. He’d told her he had. She asked him about their wedding day. He told her how beautiful she was, would always be. He assured her that if he could be with her, he’d have been at her side all along. He told her again and again how much he loved her.

She cried and rasped and coughed and gagged. Her words dissolved into slurred babble, masked by the unsettling sounds coming from her body.

She really had been dying. She did die. Before they’d hung up the phone, a call Derek had been reluctant to take but was then remorseful for not having said more, done more, she was gone. He’d recognized the death rattle from her lungs and had heard the phone hit the bamboo floors of their home at the same time her body had slumped.

He’d been thankful the video chat service had failed. He couldn’t have borne seeing for real what his mind’s eye had conjured.

He stepped toward the window, standing next to a man who’d also lost everything. Both of them had suffered again and again, every bit as much as those beyond the protection of Interllayar Holdings’ glass tower.

“You can’t look, can you?” said Chang. “You don’t want to see what’s left.”

Derek’s eyes were closed. He was conscious of the slow, measured breaths he took of the filtered cool air that circulated through the office.

Despite intermittent power and a lack of infrastructure support, the building’s emergency systems had maintained the atmosphere throughout the tower. None of the creature comforts and none of the critical laboratory systems were compromised.

“I’ve seen this before,” said Derek. “Every iteration brings with it the denouement.”

“I think you’re misusing the term.”

Derek opened one eye to spy Chang staring back. The doctor had a sly grin on his face. It was one of superiority that Derek had seen countless times before. It was why he liked the man. Despite everything that had failed, despite their inability to achieve the core of their mission, despite what Derek was certain was carnage below and all around them, Robert Chang was correcting his use of language.

As much as Derek admired Chang’s ability to disconnect from the emotional toll of their job and chat about the mundane, it also worried him. How many times would they experience the end of the world? How many times would they see their loved ones die? How many times would they subject innocents to the horrors of apocalypses large and small?

He corrected himself in his own mind. He wasn’t subjecting anyone to these iterations. He wasn’t responsible. Chang wasn’t either. They were merely observers. They were there to witness, catalogue, and learn. But what had they learned?

The questions piled upon one another as he stood there, averting his eyes from what would greet him on the streets below. The one that kept pinging his brain was the most worrisome of all.

Had they become numb to the death and destruction? Were they like news reporters who callously knocked on the doors of grieving families? Were they the seasoned cops who saw criminals as perps and their victims as complainants? Had they lost their humanity?

Derek didn’t want to believe that. How could they find the solution if they couldn’t maintain their compassion for others? A heaviness weighed on his chest.

He sucked in a deeper breath of the filtered air, filling his lungs, and let out a ragged breath. It was too much to consider right now. He couldn’t. That was, for the moment, proof that while humanity was losing another round, he had maintained his. He couldn’t be sure about Chang. Still, he played Chang’s game.

Derek bit. “How did I misuse denouement?”

“Denouement is the ending of a story in which all of the loose ends are tied up neatly and completely. It is the culmination of the plot, the postscript to the climax. It is satisfying. Nothing about this is satisfying, nor have we finished our story. There are still elements and twists and action ahead.”

Derek opened his other eye, still keeping his chin up to avoid looking down, and returned his own knowing grin. He faced his friend and colleague and raised a finger. When he spoke, his tone was every bit as didactic and bordering on condescension as Chang’s. “Okay, I get that. But I would suggest that the denouement is frequently ambiguous and unsatisfying. Often, it leaves the audience wanting more. It leaves them on the verge of understanding what’s just happened but also keeps them at bay just enough to frustrate them.”

Chang’s smile lingered for a moment. His eyes searched Derek’s the way a doctor examines his patient. Then the smile flattened and he motioned toward the street below. “Look down and tell me if there’s any ambiguity.”

Derek’s smile vaporized. He tightened his jaw and turned back to the window. His warm breath bloomed on the chilly glass. He braced himself, the muscles in his neck and lower back tightening as he lowered his chin.

The condensation on the glass disappeared and he could see what he’d feared. It was every bit as bad as he’d imagined. There was no ambiguity. There were no loose strings to tie.

Where he had once seen people fighting for their lives, for their relative freedom, he now saw char. Where there had been authorities in yellow Tychem suits, he now saw tendrils of smoke and the flicker of smolder.

All along the streets, piled at intersections like natural dams, were mounds of black, sooty remains. From his elevation he couldn’t distinguish one body from the next, one man’s arm from a woman’s leg. It was all the same. It was the remnants of society corralled into a four-block radius. It was the end of the iteration.

He stood there silently for what might have been seconds or a half hour. When he inhaled, realizing he’d been holding his breath for some period of time, he glanced away. Through the glossy sheen that fogged his vision, he saw the tears on Chang’s cheeks. They matched his. He was relieved to know that Chang hadn’t lost his humanity either. He was coping. There was a difference.

Derek sidestepped to Chang and put his arm around the man’s shoulder. He squeezed his upper arm in consolation. “Should we move on? Head downstairs and try again?”

Chang nodded. Before he could respond, Albert Moss burst into the room.

“There’s a vaccine!” he said, bounding toward them. The energy in his voice belied his appearance.

He was nearly out of breath. His eyes were weary. He wore a wrinkled T-shirt and sweatpants pulled up above his calves. His skin was pallid.

“We got it,” he said. “CDC synthesized a workable product. The pharmacology is good. We provided a lot of the base research, but they just got it. That’s the good news.”

Derek grimaced. “What’s the bad news?”

“Producing enough of it quickly enough to make an immediate difference,” he said, “and delivering it.”

“What does that mean?” asked Derek. “They have a fix but can’t use it?”

“Sort of,” Moss said. “It means there is a long-term solution. Eventually, TBE will go the way of smallpox, rinderpest, and poliomyelitis.”

“Eventually those all came back,” Chang pointed out.

“It took a while,” said Moss. “And when they did, they weren’t the threat they’d once been. This is good news.”

“Not for the people who have it or for those likely to contract it in the coming days and weeks,” said Chang. “It’s too little, too late for our purposes.”

Moss’s shoulders sank. His earnest expression faded and he looked at the floor. “It’s something,” he muttered. “After all of this death, it’s something. It means it’s not the end of the world.”

“Perhaps,” Chang conceded. He turned his attention back to Derek. “Does this change our next move?”

Derek glanced at Albert before answering Chang. “No. We need to head downstairs and begin the next iteration.”

“What does that mean?” asked Albert.

Derek gestured for him to follow. “Come with us and see for yourself.”

CHAPTER 17

DAY 41

Santa Monica, California

Danny rubbed Maggie’s head. She was asleep in the booth next to him. She’d eaten canned chili, which was bound to create gastric issues later, and was in dreamland, kicking her paws in imaginary play.

Across from them, sitting with his elbows on the table and his hands wrapped around a steaming porcelain mug filled with coffee, was Arthur the fry cook. He rubbed his thumbs up and down the mug.

“How long?” asked Arthur.

“How long what?” Danny ran his fingers along Maggie’s head, feeling the soft strands of fur drag against his fingertips. His stomach grumbled, but he wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t been hungry in days and found himself only eating when Arthur cajoled him into it.

“How long do we stay here?” Arthur clarified. “It’s been a while now. I’ve been here longer than a month now. I’ve lost track of the days. It’s only a matter of time before we run out of food, lose power for good, or somebody figures out we’re here and breaks in.”

They’d been lucky. Nobody had bothered them. Even the military, which wasn’t making regular patrols anymore, hadn’t noticed them. The two of them and Maggie had lived in isolation since Danny’s arrival more than three weeks earlier. It was miraculous really.

Arthur had nearly shot him when he knocked at the door to the diner. Maggie’s bark had prevented a blast of the Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun Arthur kept in the kitchen. Arthur had told Danny that more than once.

“We could go to my place,” Danny said. “According to the maps on the internet, it’s a clean zone now.”

“If we were going to go there,” countered Arthur, “we could as easily go to my place. It’s closer than yours.”

“You said your building doesn’t allow dogs,” said Danny. “Otherwise we’d have left the diner two weeks ago.”

Arthur frowned. He picked up the mug and drew it to his lips. He blew on the hot liquid and tested its temperature before blowing on it again and putting it back on the table. A dribble of it splashed over the rim and leaked onto his fingers. He winced and licked them clean.

“I don’t think that’s a real concern now,” he said, smacking his lips from the taste of the spilled coffee. “I mean, I wouldn’t think it would be. Who cares about a dog when half the city’s dead?”

“It’s more than half,” said Danny.

Arthur shrugged. “I know.”

The two sat in silence for another minute before Arthur tried his coffee again. He slurped a mouthful, swallowed, and gently lowered the mug to the table. His gaze grew distant. His mind was somewhere else. Danny knew where.

“They say the vaccine is working,” said Danny. “There’s always a chance.”

Arthur blinked and eyed Danny, back in the moment. He shook his head. “She’s dead. I’m sure of it. I’d have heard from her otherwise.”

“You don’t know that,” said Danny. He was trying to be nice.

Every day since he’d arrived, their conversation had inevitably turned to Claudia and her unexplained disappearance. They both believed she was dead. Danny played devil’s advocate, trying to keep Arthur’s spirit from turning dark.

“I know it,” he said. “She’d have come back if she were okay. We had a thing, you know. And you don’t just leave that unless you can’t come back.”

He didn’t need to tell Danny they had a thing. He’d reminded him of it, as if revealing a secret for the first time, too many times to count. Danny played along.

“She could be stuck somewhere,” he said. “You know, in a bunker somewhere, just waiting for the right time to come up for air. With the vaccine—”

“She’s dead, Danny.” Arthur glowered at him. “I appreciate you pretending, though we both know she’s dead along with just about everybody else we know.”

An image of Danny’s ex flashed in his mind. Was she dead too? What about Derek, the tech gazillionaire?

Danny didn’t like either of them. Loathed them, really. He’d spent countless hours imagining horrible ways in which the two of them would die. But now that the possibility truly existed that they were dead, he didn’t like it. He didn’t wish death for them. Not really.

He’d seen too much to wish TBE on anyone. He’d somehow been immune. Not even the third or fourth generation of the disease had sickened him. Arthur had also been immune. He hadn’t suffered so much as a tickle in his throat.

It was coincidence, and maybe grand design, that the two of them were together now. Two men who knew each other, liked each other’s company, and had beaten the affliction were planning their next steps together.

“Do we go to your place, then?” asked Danny. He was trying to change the subject. He knew how long the conversations about Claudia could last if unchecked.

“Tomorrow,” said Arthur.

“Tomorrow,” said Danny. “Before the weather turns cold.”

“Cold for southern California,” Arthur corrected with a chuckle. “I mean, cold here is a summer heatwave in some places.”

“True,” Danny said.

“It’s pretty amazing,” said Arthur wistfully.

“What?”

“The weather.” Arthur was staring out the window now. “The sky, the clouds, even the ocean.”

“I don’t follow,” said Danny, searching for whatever it was that held Arthur’s attention beyond the glass.

He didn’t see any movement. No people. No animals. Even the high, puffy clouds that climbed like towers off the coast looked frozen in place. The palm trees were still, the fronds drooping. There was no wind.

Arthur sighed. “I guess I’m saying the world moves on without us.”

Danny locked eyes with the cook, whose gray hair had whitened. His skin was ashy except for the streaks down both sides of his face, where tears were leaving behind a wet reminder of their paths.

Arthur sniffed and wiped both sides of his face with the back of his hand. He laughed, clearing a bubble in his throat. His chin trembled. He clenched his jaw.

Danny considered reaching out, touching Arthur’s hand, offering some gesture of empathy. He’d felt the same way.

Before he could extend his arm, Arthur was staring out the window again. The moment had passed.

“Think about it,” said Arthur. “Think about what’s happened to us. Our civilization is hanging on by a thread. There’s chaos, there’s death, there’s violence. People are going crazy, right?”

Danny didn’t answer. He knew it was a rhetorical question.

Arthur wrapped his hands around his coffee cup. He rubbed his thumbs up and down the porcelain. Danny shifted in his seat. The vinyl squeaked.

“Yet,” Arthur went on, “when you look at nature, it’s as if nothing happened. It’s just another Tuesday.”

He waved his hand at the view beyond the glass. Danny followed the motion and saw a flock of birds low to the ground in a V formation. They flapped their wings and then simultaneously stopped, gliding on the air.

“It’s Thursday,” Danny said absently, his attention still on the birds.

Arthur shrugged. “That’s my point. The world moves on. Days pass, grass grows, the sun rises and falls, the moon goes through its phases. We’re a blip, Danny. We’re nothing in the scheme of things.”

He drew the coffee cup to his lips and tipped it back. He swallowed, gulping the rest of the coffee. He set the cup on the table with a rattle.

“What’s the point of it?” he asked. Another rhetorical question. Or not. He raised his eyebrows, seemingly wanting a response from Danny.

“The point of what? Existence? Our lives? Fighting to survive?”

Arthur’s eyes glistened, the tears forming again. He sniffed and licked his teeth. He shook his head with resignation and lowered his chin. “All of it. I know I’m getting all philosophical and whatnot, but really, what’s the point?”

He lifted his head again, blinking against the tears that were now following the well-worn paths down his cheeks. He didn’t bother wiping them.

“The point is,” said Danny, “we’re here on this Earth for a reason. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if I ever will, if we ever will. But, getting all philosophical, I gotta believe there’s a purpose to all of this. There is a point. And if we stick together, we’ll figure it out.”

Danny offered a smile, and this time he reached across the table without hesitation and put his hand atop Arthur’s. He squeezed.

“Don’t give up,” he said. “Don’t ever give up.”

***

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to my team of incredible professionals who helped get this book into your hands. Felicia Sullivan, Pauline Nolet, Patricia Wilson, Hristo Kovatliev, and Stef McDaid are worth their weight in gold.

Thanks also to Steve Kremer, master of all things, for his keen eye and valuable insight, and to Albert Moss for his insights and suggestions.

Courtney, Sam, and Luke always support me and give me the strength to keep pecking away at the keys. I love you all.

To my parents, mother-in-law, and siblings, thanks to you for all of efforts to spread the word. I am grateful.

And thank you to everyone who’s supported The Alt Apocalypse. I’m humbled by how you’ve embraced such a unique concept in disaster fiction.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

Acknowledgements