A gunshot slapped the air; everyone froze. All eyes swiveled to the rear of the bus, where Mrs. Bellamy was pointing an enormous pistol at the ceiling.
“Lady,” Jamal spat, “what the fuck.”
“Young man, I think I speak for everyone when I say I’m tired of your crap. You’re just as afraid as the rest of us. You owe an apology to these people.”
It was completely surreal, Kittridge thought. Part of him was horrified; another part wanted to laugh.
“Okay, okay,” Jamal sputtered. “Just put that cannon away.”
“I think you can do better than that.”
“I’m sorry, okay? Quit waving that thing around.”
She thought a moment, then lowered the pistol. “I suppose that will have to do. Now, I do like the idea of a vote. This nice man in the front—I’m sorry, my hearing isn’t what it used to be—what did you say your name was?”
“Kittridge.”
“Mr. Kittridge. He seems perfectly capable to me. I say all in favor of his running things, let’s see a show of hands.”
Every hand went up except Jamal’s.
“It would be nice if it could be unanimous, young man.”
His face was burning with humiliation. “Christ, you old bag. What else do you want from me?”
“Forty years of teaching public school, believe me, I’ve dealt with more than my share of boys like you. Now, go on. You’ll see how much better you feel.”
With a look of defeat, Jamal raised his hand.
“That’s better.” She directed her attention at Kittridge again. “We can go now, Mr. Kittridge.”
Kittridge glanced at Pastor Don, who was trying not to laugh.
“Okay, Danny,” Kittridge said. “Let’s turn this thing around and find a way out of here.”
12
They’d lost him. How the good Christ had they lost him?
Last they knew, Grey had been driving into Denver. He’d dropped off the screen at that point—the Denver network was a mess—but a day later they’d picked up his signature from a Verizon tower in Aurora. Guilder had asked for another drone to sweep the area, but they’d found nothing; and if Grey had gotten off the interstates, as now seemed likely, and headed into the sparsely populated eastern half of the state, he could travel for miles without leaving a mark.
And no sign at all of the girl. For all intents and purposes, she’d been swallowed by the continent.
With little to do but wait for news from Nelson, Guilder had plenty of time to ponder Grey’s file, including the psychiatric workup from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He wondered what Richards had been thinking, hiring men like this. Human disposables—although that was, Guilder supposed, the point; like the original twelve test subjects, Babcock and Sosa and Morrison and all the creepy rest, the sweeps were no one anybody was ever going to miss.
To wit: Lawrence Alden Grey, born 1970, McAllen, Texas. Mother a homemaker, father a mechanic, both deceased. The father had served three tours in Vietnam as an Army medic, honorably discharged with a bronze star and a purple heart, but it had done the guy in anyway. He’d shot himself in the cab of his truck, leaving Grey, just six years old, to find him. A series of common-law stepfathers followed, one drunk after another by the looks of it, a history of abuse, etc.; by the time Grey was eighteen, he was on his own, working as a roughneck in the oil fields near Odessa, then on rigs in the Gulf. He’d never married, though that was no big shocker; his psychiatric profile was a bag of problems, everything from OCD to depression to traumatic disassociation. In the shrink’s opinion, the guy was basically heterosexual, but with so many hang-ups it didn’t even figure; the boys had been Grey’s way of reliving his own childhood abuse, which his conscious mind had repressed. He’d been arrested twice, the first time for exposure, which he’d pled down to a misdemeanor, the second for aggravated sexual assault. Basically, he’d touched the kid—not exactly a hanging offense, but nothing nice, either. With the first conviction on his sheet the judge had sentenced him to the max, eighteen to twenty-four years, but nobody did the full bid anymore, and he’d been paroled after ninety-seven months.
After that, there wasn’t much of a story. He’d moved back to Dallas, done little bits of work but nothing steady, met with his PO every two weeks to pee in a cup and swear eight ways to Sunday he hadn’t set foot within a hundred yards of a playground or school. His court-ordered regimen of anti-androgens was standard, as was a fresh psychiatric evaluation every six months. By all accounts, Lawrence Grey was a model citizen, at least as far as a chemically neutered child molester could be.
None of which did anything to tell Guilder how the man had survived. Somehow he’d escaped the Chalet; somehow he’d managed to avoid getting himself killed since then. It simply made no sense.
Nelson’s new plan was to retraffic all the cell towers in Kansas and Nebraska, shutting down both states for a period of two hours and trying to isolate the signal from Grey’s chip. Under usual circumstances, this would have required a federal court order, a pile of paperwork ten miles high, and a month’s lead time, but Nelson had used a back channel at Homeland, which had agreed to issue a special executive order under Article 67 of the Domestic Security Act—more commonly known in the intelligence community as the “Do Whatever the Fuck You Want” Act. The chip in Grey’s neck was a low-wattage transmitter at 1432 megahertz; once everything else was cleared out, and assuming Grey passed within a few miles of a tower, they could triangulate his position and retarget a satellite to get a picture.
The shutdown was scheduled for eight A.M. Guilder had come in at six to find Nelson typing away at his terminal. A buzz of music was leaking from the earbuds stuffed in the sides of his head.
“Let Mozart work,” he said, shooing Guilder away.
Guilder was running on coffee and adrenaline; he went down to the break room to get something to eat. All they had were vending machines; he’d already paid his three dollars for a Snickers when he realized it would take too much effort to swallow. He tossed it in the trash and got a Reese’s, but even that, with the sticky peanut butter, was difficult. He snapped on the TV, tuned it to CNN. New cases were suddenly popping up all over: Amarillo, Baton Rouge, Phoenix. The U.N. was vacating its New York headquarters, relocating to The Hague; once martial law was declared, the military would be recalled from overseas. What a fiasco that would be. It would make Pandora’s box look like a picnic basket.
Nelson appeared in the door. “Bow down,” he declared with a grin. “Houston, we have a sex offender.”
Nelson had already targeted the satellite. By the time they reached the terminal, the image was coming in.
“Where the hell is this?”
Nelson worked the keyboard, bringing the picture into focus. “Western Kansas.”
A grid of cornfields came into aerial view and, at the center, a long, low-slung building with a grid of parking spaces in front. A single vehicle, some kind of station wagon, was in the lot. A figure stepped from the building, pulling a suitcase.
“Is that the same guy?” Nelson asked.
“I’m not sure. Bring it in closer.”
The image faded, then resolved again, assuming an approximate aerial distance of eighty feet. Now Guilder felt certain he was looking at Lawrence Grey. He’d changed out of his jumpsuit, but it was him. Grey returned to the building; a minute later he reemerged with a second suitcase, which he deposited in the car’s cargo compartment. He stood a moment, as if lost in thought. Then a second figure emerged from the building, a woman. A little heavy, with dark hair; she was wearing slacks and a light-colored blouse.
What the hell?
They had less than thirty seconds left. Already the picture had begun to lose its crispness. Grey opened the passenger door; the woman lowered herself into the car. Grey glanced around the parking lot one more time—as if, thought Guilder, he knew he was being watched. He got into the vehicle and drove away, just as the image dissolved into sparkles of static.
Nelson looked up from his terminal. “Looks like our target made a friend. From the psych workup, I have to say I’m a little surprised.”
“Call back the last shot with the woman in it. See if we can enhance it.”
Nelson tried, but the results were only a modest improvement.
“Can we figure out what that building is?”
Nelson had slid his chair to an adjacent terminal. “Thirty-eight-twelve Main Street, Ledeau, Kansas. A place called Angie’s Resort.”
Who was she? What was Lawrence Grey doing with a woman? Was she from the Chalet?
“Which direction was he going?”
“Looks like straight east. He’s headed right into the thick of it. If you want to grab him, we’d better move.”
“Locate our nearest asset. Something outside the quarantine line.”
More taps of the keys; then Nelson said, “The closest for something like this would be the old NBC lab in Fort Powell. The Army shut it down three years ago, when they moved everything to White Sands, but it should be an easy matter to get the lights turned on.”
“What else is around there?”
“Not a lot except for Midwest State, which is about three miles east. It’s your basic football factory with a few classrooms attached. Otherwise you’ve got a National Guard armory, some hog and cattle processing, a little light manufacturing. There’s a small IAC hydroelectric facility, but it was mothballed when they built a larger one downstream. Pretty much the only reason the place exists is the college.”
Guilder took a moment to think. They were the only ones who knew about Grey, at least so far. Probably it was time to bring in the CDC and USAMRIID.
Yet he hesitated. Partly because of the bad taste in his mouth from his meeting with the Joint Chiefs. How would it go down when Central Command learned that they’d put Lear’s monstrosities under the surveillance of a bunch of paroled sex offenders? He’d never hear the end of it.
But that wasn’t the real reason.
A cure for everything. Weren’t those Lear’s exact words? Wasn’t that where the whole misbegotten thing had begun? And if Grey was infected but for some reason hadn’t flipped, was it possible that the virus in his blood had changed somehow, achieving the very result Lear had hoped for? That he was in every way a prize as valuable as the girl? And wasn’t it also true that, although death was everyone’s problem, especially now, it was for Guilder just as pressing and personal—even more so, because the fate that awaited him left nothing to chance? Didn’t he have some right to muster whatever resources he could on behalf of his own survival? Wouldn’t anybody do the same?
We’re all dying, baby. Fair enough. But some of us more than others.
Maybe Grey was his answer, and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just some lucky schmuck who’d managed to claw his way out of a burning building and avoid the glowsticks long enough to make his way to Kansas. But the more Guilder ruminated over it, the more he didn’t think so. The odds were simply too long. And once he turned the man over to the military, he doubted they’d hear anything from Grey, or this mystery woman, again.
Which wasn’t going to happen. Horace Guilder, deputy director of the Division of Special Weapons, would keep Lawrence Grey for himself.
“So? What do you want me to do?”
Nelson was staring at him. Guilder calculated the mechanics. Who else did he need? Nelson wasn’t somebody Guilder would have described as loyal, but for the time being he could appeal to the man’s naked self-interest, and he was the best person for the job, a one-man band of biochemical know-how. Sooner or later he’d catch wind of what Guilder was up to, and decisions would have to be made, but that was a bridge Guilder would cross when he came to it. As for making the pickup: there was always somebody off the books for tasks like that. One phone call and everything would be set in motion.
“Pack your things,” he said. “We’re going to Iowa.”
13
Sunrise of the second day: they were deep into Nebraska now. Danny, hunched over the wheel, his eyes stinging with sleeplessness, had driven through the night. Everyone except for Kittridge had fallen asleep, even the obnoxious one, Jamal.
It felt good to have people on his bus again. To be useful, a useful engine.
They’d found more diesel at a small airport in McCook. The few towns they’d passed through were empty and abandoned, like something from a movie about the Old West. Okay, so maybe they were lost, kind of. But Kittridge and the other man, Pastor Don, said it didn’t matter, as long as they kept heading east. That’s all you got to do, Danny, Kittridge said. Just keep us headed east.
He thought of what he’d seen on the highway. That was really something. He’d seen a lot of bodies in the last couple of days, but nothing as bad as that. He liked Kittridge, who sort of reminded him of Mr. Purvis. Not that he looked like Mr. Purvis, because he didn’t at all. It was the way the man spoke to Danny—as if he mattered.
While he drove, he thought about Momma, and Mr. Purvis, and Thomas and Percy and James and how useful he was being. How proud of him Momma and Mr. Purvis would be now.
The sun was peeking over the horizon, making Danny squint into its brightness. Before long, everyone would be awake. Kittridge leaned over his shoulder.
“How we doing on gas?”
Danny checked. They were down to a quarter tank.
“Let’s pull over and refill from the cans,” Kittridge said. “Let folks stretch their legs a bit.”
They pulled off the road, into a state park. Kittridge and Pastor Don checked the bathrooms and gave the all clear.
“Thirty minutes, everyone,” Kittridge said.
They had more supplies now, boxes of crackers and peanut butter and apples and energy bars and bottles of pop and juice and diapers and formula for Boy Jr. Kittridge had even gotten Danny a box of Lucky Charms, though all the milk in the grocery store’s cooler had spoiled; he’d have to eat it dry. Danny, Kittridge, and Pastor Don unloaded the jugs of diesel from the back of the bus and began to pour it into the tank. Danny had told them that the bus had a fifty-gallon capacity, precisely; each full tank would get them about three hundred miles.
“You’re a very precise guy,” Kittridge had said.
When they’d finished refueling, Danny took the box of Lucky Charms and a can of lukewarm Dr Pepper and sat under a tree. The rest were seated around a picnic table, including Jamal. He wasn’t saying much, but Danny had the feeling that everyone had decided to let bygones be bygones. Linda Robinson was diapering Boy Jr., cooing to him, making him wiggle his arms and legs. Danny had never been around babies much. He’d been led to understand that they cried a lot, but so far Boy Jr. had kept quiet as a mouse. There were good babies and there were bad babies, Momma had said, so Boy Jr. must be one of the good ones. Danny tried to remember being a baby himself, just to see if he could do it, but his mind wouldn’t go back that far, not in any orderly way. It was strange how there was this whole part of your life you couldn’t recall, except in little pictures: sunshine flaring on a windowpane, or a dead frog squashed in the driveway by a tire tread, or a slice of apple on a plate. He wondered if he’d been a good baby, like Boy Jr.
Danny was watching the group, feeding fistfuls of Lucky Charms into his mouth and swilling them down with the Dr Pepper, when Tim rose from the table and walked over to him.
“Hey, Timbo. How you doing?”
The boy’s hair was standing all whichaway from his sleeping on the bus. “Okay, I guess.” He gave a loose-boned shrug. “Mind if I sit with you?”
Danny scooched over to make room.
“I’m sorry the other kids tease you sometimes,” Tim said after a minute.
“That’s okay,” said Danny. “I don’t mind.”
“Billy Nice is a real dickhead.”
“He picks on you, too?”
“Sometimes.” The boy frowned vaguely. “He picks on everybody.”
“Just ignore him,” Danny said. “That’s what I
do.”
After a minute, Tim said, “You really like Thomas, huh?”
“Sure.”
“I used to watch him. I had, like, this huge layout of Thomas trains in my basement. The coal loader, the engine wash, I had all that stuff.”
“I’d like to see that,” said Danny. “I bet that was great.”
A brief silence followed. The sun was warm on Danny’s face.
“You want to know what I saw in the stadium?” Tim asked.
“If you want.”
“Like, a thousand million dead people.”
Danny wasn’t sure what to say. He guessed Tim had needed to tell someone; it wasn’t the kind of thing you should keep bottled up inside.
“It was pretty gross.”
“Did you tell April?”
Tim shook his head.
“You want to keep it a secret?”
“Would that be okay?”
“Sure,” said Danny. “I can keep a secret.”
Tim had scooped up a little bit of dirt from the base of the tree and was watching it sift through his fingers. “You don’t get scared much, do you, Danny?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“But not now,” the boy stated.
Danny had to think about that. He supposed he should be, but he just wasn’t. What he felt was more like interested. What would happen next? Where would they go? It surprised him, how adaptable he was being. Dr. Francis would be proud of him.
“No, I guess I’m not.”
In the shade of the picnic area, everyone was packing up. Danny wished he could find the words to make the boy feel better, to wipe the memory of what he’d seen in the stadium from his mind. They were walking back to the bus when the idea came to him.
“Hey, I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his pack and removed his lucky penny and showed the boy. “You hold on to that, I promise, nothing bad can happen to you.”
Tim took the coin in his palm. “What happened to it? It’s all squished.”
“It got run over by a train. That’s what makes it lucky.”
The Twelve Page 14
