Where are Noah and Jake? They could be outside the fence patrolling. We should backtrack and swing wide around the fence. Emma complied without internal debate, too weak to argue, constantly on the look-out for danger. An hour later, she found the old hunting cabin far up in the hills above the main house. It too had been thoroughly rebuilt, but after a long while of stuporous observation the voice roused her and she concluded that it was unoccupied. A chair strangely sat right in front of the door. She moved it aside and entered.
After a quick inspection of the single room, Emma feasted on the cabin’s stocks of breakfast cereal and beef jerky, guzzled water straight out of the sink’s faucet, and unfolded one of the cabin’s six cots. She put the butcher knife she had found in the kitchen under her pillow and lay down for a rest.
When she woke, it was nearly dusk. It had been a mistake to go to sleep in an unexplored place.
Take another look around before sunset. Emma headed back down toward the main house with the butcher knife in hand. Half way there, she heard distant talking. No, not distant. Hushed. Giggling. Nearby. Emma approached cautiously.
Her niece and nephew sat on a steep embankment twenty yards away. They had military-style rifles. Emma crept to a higher and closer vantage, taking care with each step to avoid brush or pebbles, holding her knife in her teeth when she needed both hands. They sat side-by-side passing a vape pen back and forth. “I can’t believe you bought that much pot!” Chloe said.
Jacob coughed out a huge plume of vapor. “I cashed in those bonds Mom and Dad gave us. My life savings! Probably worthless now anyway.” Emma inched into position above her laughing, inattentive niece and nephew. Are their rifles loaded? asked the voice. Probably, she guessed. A round chambered? Maybe not. Safeties definitely on, knowing the care Noah would’ve taken in teaching them. Each impediment to firing would afford an attacker precious seconds. Emma could kick one of the two teens over the cliff on which they perched—preferably Jacob—then yank Chloe’s short ponytail backwards to expose her throat. If Chloe was quick, she would shoot Emma. But they weren’t expecting an attack, and Chloe would be shocked when she saw that the attacker was her aunt. Plus, they would be buzzed from the pot.
This was her best chance yet to get a firearm, but her heart was pounding and hands vibrating. She was ready to act, but she struggled to control the rush of adrenaline. Losing herself to the frenzy could lead to mistakes. Like getting killed! added the voice.
Despite the voice’s warning, she coiled herself for the leap with both feet down the hill and right onto the center of Jacob’s back, but froze—Stop!—when she heard what Jake said next. “I swear to God I think Aunt Emma is up there. I’ve been looking for her with the drone ever since that college boy got infected, and when I flew over the cabin, the chair that Dad put in front of the door had been moved. Does that freak you out, thinking she might be up there?”
“No. She’s family. We are all supposed to stick together. It’s our family against everybody else, like Dad said.”
Jacob was nodding. Emma hesitated. If they think that way, came the voice, they might prove useful. They might agree to a contract. Emma needed time to think about what that agreement would say, and how it could be enforced.
Wisps of vapor escaped Chloe’s lips with each word. “What do you think they’re really like?” She coughed. Emma began edging away, retracing her path of approach. “I mean do you think they’re, I dunno, better than us, or not as good?”
“Not as good,” Jacob said, “of course, ’cause, I mean, they have brain damage. Our same brains, only parts don’t work right.”
“Or are different,” Chloe said. Her head jerked around. She stared straight at Emma.
Emma darted away. Chloe shouted, “Look!” but no shots rang out.
Instead of returning to the cabin, which they might go check, Emma allowed her adrenaline to propel her on the run down the old road all the way to the state highway. There, she lay totally still behind cover till her breathing recovered and night fell, then climbed the fence without snagging clothes or cutting skin and headed toward the town she had studied from a distance the day before. That’s where weapons would be. There was no traffic on the dark road. Emma paused to drink bottled water and eat the dry cereal from her pocket. Up ahead was a mailbox. A driveway traversed the ditch and led through a padlocked gate.
“Nichols,” read the name on the mailbox. It held maybe a day’s worth of junk mail, meaning mail was still being delivered, and it was checked regularly at this house. Emma climbed the gate and began the march up the mountain alongside the drive.
When she came to the house, it was lit only by a fireplace and candles. But in the darkness, it stood out even at a distance. The windows were all open. Emma saw movement, possibly just the shadow of a branch that occasionally dipped in the wind, but also possibly a sentry. She lay still and saw nothing more until she noticed over time that lights were being extinguished, presumably as people went to bed. She edged closer.
There were no fences, lookouts, or patrols. Voices inside argued. A screen door slammed shut. Emma ducked behind a broad tree. A woman, or a boy, Emma couldn’t tell from stolen peeks, went into a dark and sloppily erected shed, which had no doors. A rifle was propped on the outside of what smelled like a latrine. Emma made straight for it and got all the way to the outhouse wall before a teenage boy said, “Who’s there?”
Emma raised the rifle high into the air over the top of the irregular boards of the privacy wall and brought it down onto the boy’s head.
The rifle butt landed enough of a blow to send him sprawling backwards. He made animal noises as Emma raised the rifle and struck him again. That left him immobile, helpless, but still gurgling and trying to cry out. Sooner or later he might awaken. She took her butcher knife, was careful to avoid the filth of the latrine when kneeling over the boy, about Jacob’s age, and put an end to all the noises. Only when it was done did she begin to calm. She searched his pockets and found three spare rifle cartridges.
“Hey!” a man shouted from the house. An adrenaline rush sent Emma running into the black woods with the rifle and ammo. In her weakened state, sapped further by her exhausting agitation, she tired quickly. A prickly feeling crept up her torso. She had tried to use energy she didn’t have.
The return trip to the cabin was several times more difficult. Emma was drained and bone-weary. The rifle was a heavy additional burden. It was moonless. She avoided the smooth highway out of fear of discovery, but her footing through the ditch parallel to it was uncertain. Emma had several ankle turns and one trip and fall. The darkness, however, paid off. From the soggy bottom of the ditch, pressed flat into the muck and still as a log, Emma watched a pickup, presumably from the Nichols’s house, speed past. Its bed was filled with dark forms, all armed, almost certainly hunting for her.
The second time Emma encountered that truck was when she reached the Miller family’s property. In the headlights Emma could see men arguing, and one woman being consoled by another, in front of Noah’s locked gate.
Chapter 17
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 51, 2200 GMT (6:00 p.m. Local)
Natalie had consented to serving their family dinner “just this once” in front of the big TV in the living room. The Millers stared at familiar scenes of leafy and green Central Park, made unfamiliar by countless police lights as darkness descended on the metropolis. Noah kept glancing down at his phone, but his last text message—a reply from Isabel as to her whereabouts—still read, “NYC.”
Noah had texted back several times. “Iz, get out of there.” “It’s going to get bad.” “What are you doing?” “Are you there?!?!” But none of the texts had gone through. It was as if nature were rolling back human advancement—the Internet era giving way to the TV and telephone—one technological generation at a time on their steady return to the animal kingdom.
The reporter stood on the walk along the park side of Central Park West. “If I can ask the camera operator to take a closer shot?” The reporter turned from the lens and pointed across the broad street. “You can see barricades going up.” Residents streamed and ultimately sprinted past the orange and white striped sawhorses—one well-coifed couple pushing a tandem jogging stroller—as police blocked the cross street and its sidewalks. A heavy-set middle aged woman ignored shouted police orders and found herself pinned between the last segment of barricade to be swung into place and a piano store’s plate glass showroom window, crisscrossed with tape, as if that would help. Then again, who would break into a piano store? A brief but heated argument ensued, which the woman won with a finger shaken in the face of the cop, who shrugged, let her pass, then was besieged by a quickly swelling and clamorous mass trapped behind the barrier, all of whom now brazenly ignored the curfew.
Within seconds, the throng grew on the quarantined side, arriving only moments too late to escape. Everyone wore something over their mouths and noses, from proper masks to absurdly bulky woolen scarves. Cops in masks, goggles, and gloves warned the crowd back with hands raised in air, palms out, as if physically pressing against them, but from a distance. “The people caught on the wrong side of the barricades,” the local reporter said, “are growing quite vocal.” His microphone picked up angry but indistinct shouting. The camera, however, zoomed in. The scene was shaky and dimly lit, but had the makings of an unmistakable powder keg. Men and women leaned over the sawhorses, straining red-faced in their desperate shouts and threatening demeanor.
“Have they turned?” asked Chloe, who like the others had forgotten her dinner.
“Probably not,” Noah replied, “yet. Everybody eat. The food is getting cold.”
The news, which was constantly “Breaking,” jumped from one outbreak to another, each with scenes eerily similar, no matter the locale. Turkish troops opening fire amid the minarets of Istanbul. Scottish civilians carrying makeshift wooden shields clubbing a human form on an Aberdeen sidewalk. A candlelight vigil outside a quarantined apartment building in Copenhagen. A flyover whose slow-motion video depicted Hamburg fragmented by hastily erected barricades of overturned cars and dumpsters—some manned, some broken, some in flame—all surrounded by toxic, uncollected bodies.
The kids were having an argument in whispers. Annoyed, Noah muted the TV and asked what they were talking about.
“Nothing!” Jake replied.
But Chloe stared back at her brother before turning to her parents. “We think we saw someone yesterday. When we were on patrol.”
Noah fought a cringe, silently cursed, and braced himself. “When you were what?” Natalie asked. “On patrol. You and Jake?”
Jake broke quickly under his mother’s glare. “Sometimes, Chloe and I go out on patrol without Dad.”
There it was. “What!” roared Nat. When Noah turned to her, she slapped him squarely on the jaw.
He was stunned and rubbed his face. “Natalie! Jesus.”
“You let them go out there alone? The two most stupid fucking teenagers who’ve ever walked the Earth?”
Chloe cried, “Hey!” Noah tried to explain.
But Natalie said, “No! Not my children! No! You had no right!” Her variations on the same comment filled the next several minutes.
Noah allowed her to vent while checking his teeth with his tongue. Where would he find an uninfected dentist if need be? When Natalie ran out of steam, he said, “Here’s the thing. They need to be comfortable out there. You too, Nat. In case we get flushed.”
“Flushed? What does that mean? Flushed? Like my life? Flushed down the toilet?”
“I mean, in case we can’t hold out here and have to run!” Noah was perturbed at having been struck and had barked at her more loudly than intended.
Nat’s lower lip quivered, but that could still be anger, so he returned to the main point by saying to the kids, “You saw someone on our property? Yesterday? And you didn’t tell us?”
Jake seemed angry with his sister for reasons that eluded Noah. But Chloe nodded sheepishly. “What the hell do you think a patrol is for?” Noah practically shouted.
Natalie wiped quiet tears from her face and demanded details. Apparently, the two idiots were taking a break on a hillside when they glimpsed someone running away. It seemed innocuous enough of an encounter.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Natalie asked. The kids looked at each other but said nothing. “Who was this person you saw? Describe them.”
“She looked like,” Chloe began, again glancing at her brother, “Aunt Emma?”
Oh, shit! Natalie quizzed them further. Caucasian female, age twenty, to forty or fifty or whatever, petite, tanned with a bad hairdo and overgrown bangs. The kids had nothing more to add but shrugs and general but unexplained guardedness.
That began close to half an hour of attacks by Natalie and defenses by Noah. He had no idea Emma was coming there. “But you got her released, and she thought of this place just like you did. Or did you tell her to come here?” She’s his sister, Noah attempted. What was he supposed to do? “Not get us all infected or killed would be a good start.” Emma could be helpful to them, was Noah’s final try.
“We’ll see,” Natalie replied, amazing Noah by then letting it drop. Noah suspected his wife harbored a more evolved and nuanced view of their plight than he yet understood.
On TV, the Vatican had sealed itself off from the rest of Rome, which was aflame. Once-tidy streets in Vienna were glittering with broken windows of looted storefronts. Barcelona was shown from a distance being bombed by the Spanish air force. There were no pictures out of Warsaw, only the YouTube video of a family of four saying good-bye to the world, in English, each listing what had been best about it—“Chocolate. Chopin. Football. Love.”
Noah felt more than saw Natalie’s eyes on him and turned to her. She sat in an oddly stiff position. Her tray of food in her lap had a full glass of red wine and a daisy Jake had picked on his and Chloe’s patrol that afternoon. Her face was frozen in quiet terror.
Noah looked back down at his phone, whose text app still only read “NYC.”
Chapter 18
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Infection Date 51, 2300 GMT (7:00 p.m. Local)
All Rick said to Isabel, in a quiet voice meant only for her, was, “Showtime.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” she replied, startling Rick. “No, I mean, I’m scared. Look.” She held her hand out, palm down. It shook visibly. Rick pulled her into his expansive warmth. They were in a conference room, alone for a rare moment. He smelled faintly of dried sweat and the outdoors, but that was okay. She probably did too, although that somehow seemed less okay. She nestled deeper into his arms and under his chin with an unobserved but contented smile.
An hour earlier, after returning with Rick from his obsessive tour of local defensive preparations, they had joined the crowd around a police radio in the
offices of the manager of the American Copper Buildings. Once confirmation of the outbreak had been announced and a fruitless expansion of the quarantine zone ordered, Rick had pulled Isabel aside. No need to stay for the bewildered and futile speculation to follow. “We’re holding in the north! How the hell did it suddenly show up in Central Park West?”
They had settled into the well-appointed conference room looking east across the verdant St. Vartan Park and waited for their next orders. The outbreak—the one they knew about, anyway—was sixty blocks away. All was still peaceful in Murray Hill as night fell. The streets and sidewalks were oddly empty after a twenty-four-hour curfew had been imposed throughout Manhattan “until further notice.”
Isabel abandoned her awkward attempt at cuddling and arched her back, which was sore from the heavy burdens it now routinely bore. Rick described plans for their personal escape. He was such a Marine that he shaved every morning, even “in the field.” She ran the back of her hand across his smooth face, which was so unlike the scruffy look more common to their generation, then laid her head on his chest. “Are you listening?” he asked.
“Uh-huh,” she lied, eyes closed, as his instructions vibrated and his breast rose and fell.
“So if we get separated,” he said, “and the Black Hawk doesn’t show?”
“We won’t get separated.”
“Cross the FDR to the Esplanade and get on the East River ferry. Use your White House pass. Don’t wait in any lines, and ignore any griping. If they get aggressive, flash your M4. If they get physical, use it. Get on any ferry, they’re all going to the same place, which is where?”
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