The Burning

No, she refused to let herself think that way.

But she couldn't help it. She imagined her friends turning on her, calling her a stupid brown bitch, saw in her mind's eye her mother's kitchen and her father's workroom overrun with fuzzy black mold.

For the first time, she understood the utter hopelessness felt by people who considered suicide.

They went under the train tracks and around the curve. Humphreys Street was blocked off for some reason, so Derek continued on to the next stoplight and turned left, intending to take Aspen to the police station.

'Stop the car!' Angela screamed. 'Oh, my God!'

Derek slammed on the brakes, and the Hyundai slid a few inches to the right as it stopped in the middle of the street.

The car was stopped half a block in front of the hotel where she'd gone with Dr. Welkes' class.

And they were coming out of it.

The corpses from the tunnel.

Crawling, limping, sliding, pulling themselves forward with skeletal arms, broken legs dragging uselessly behind them, they emerged into the sunlight. It was a vision from a nightmare, all the more horrifying and unbelievable because it was happening in the middle of the day while smartly dressed women and business-suited men walked down the sidewalk from their offices to the restaurants where they intended to eat lunch.

'Jesus Christ,' Derek said, throwing the car into reverse and backing up on the one-way street.

Angela kept her eyes focused on the scene through the front windshield, even as it began to recede. She saw men and women turn and run away the second they saw the skeletal figures moving across the sidewalk and onto the street, saw cars come to screeching halts, saw curious people emerge from stores and restaurants to find out for themselves what was happening.

A tall mummified man dressed in rotted rags shambled across the street, like something out of an old horror movie.

Someone must have called the police, because sirens suddenly sounded, growing instantly louder, and Derek backed the car into an open space at the corner of the block just as four patrol cars, lights flashing, sped by. She wanted to see what they were going to do-Try and capture the corpses? Start blasting away with their guns?-but Edna was dead and swinging from a tree in the center of campus, murdered by a gang of crazed students, and that had to be their priority. Derek must have faced the same dilemma because he looked at her quizzically, as though wondering which was to go. She said, 'Edna,' and he nodded, taking the car around the corner and going up to the next street so he could drive straight to the police station.

The place was a madhouse. Two police cars and two motorcycles rolled past them, lights and sirens on, as the Hyundai tried to pull into the small visitors' lot, and they had to jockey for a space with four other civilian vehicles whose drivers all seemed desperate to report something.

'I think those cops were heading south,' Derek said. 'Toward the school.'

'We'll find out.'

The only parking space left was a handicapped spot, and Derek pulled right in, parking between the blue lines. 'Limp,' he suggested drily.

They got out and hurried through the front door into the station's lobby, where at least a dozen men and women, although mostly men, were lined up in front of the counter and noisily declaiming their reasons for being here to all who would listen. One couple, incongruously young, looked like they could be college students, and Angela wondered if they, too, were here to report the lynching.

Lynching.

She never thought that was a word she'd be using outside of a historical context. She tried not to think about the look of agony and abject terror on Edna's face as the doomed woman tried to claw at the noose around her neck.

She wondered if Chrissie had been in that crowd somewhere. And Winston and Brock.

She hoped not.

A blue-uniformed officer emerged from a side door and stood before the front counter, hands raised. 'Ladies and gentlemen! If you are here to report the incident on Aspen, we already know about it and have officers on the scene. The situation is under control. If you are here to report on the incidents at NAU or Flag High, we are aware of those, too, and our men are on it.'

Incidents?

Angela looked at the young couple. The girl was now sobbing on the boy's shoulders. They weren't college students, she realized. They were high school students.

What had happened at the high school?

She was not sure she wanted to know.

Nearly all of the people, with visible relief, were heading outside, but Angela, holding tightly to Derek's hand, remained and moved to the front of the room. The officer behind the counter looked at them as they approached. 'Yes?'

'We were at NAU and then we were on Aspen Avenue, so we saw both ... incidents,' she said. 'But I just thought you should know that they're both probably connected. There's this mold that-'

'Oh, that was you who reported that,' he said, eyebrows raised in surprise. 'Thank you. We were already operating on that assumption with Aspen. Obviously. The officers at the high school and college are aware of it, too. Just in case it's a factor. I don't know if Sergeant Sandidge ever got back to you, but we quarantined the apartment house on State Street and called in the CDC, which apparently one of the NAU professors had already done. I assume you talked to him?'

They both nodded.

'Well, someone from Atlanta should be here today. Possibly someone from the FBI. We're on this.'

'Thank God,' Angela breathed. Already she felt better.

There were still two men standing in front of the counter, one talking to the uniformed female cadet at the desk, another waiting to talk to Angela's officer. 'Excuse me,' he said. 'We're a little overwhelmed right now. Unless there's anything else ... ?'

'No,' Derek said. 'Thanks for your time.'

The two of them went outside, where the visitors' lot was quickly emptying. The Hyundai did not have a ticket for parking in the handicapped spot-cops definitely had higher priorities right now-and they got in, Derek starting the engine. 'Let's see where they are,' Angela said.

She did not even have to explain what she meant. 'I was thinking the same thing,' Derek said. He turned onto Aspen, planning to head back the way they'd come, but several streets ahead they could see red and blue flashing lights and striped barricades cordoning off the block containing the hotel, so he drove down to the highway, intending to come at it from another angle. There was a traffic jam on the old Route 66, however, cars and trucks completely stationary in front of them, and Derek pulled into a Wells Fargo parking lot and backtracked to an alley, driving between the old buildings toward the hotel.

There were neither sawhorses nor police cars blocking the alley on any of the side streets, and they crossed Beaver and Leroux without interference before hanging a left on the street in front of the barricades. They could have continued down the alley, entering the hotel parking lot the back way, but obviously the sight of those animated corpses had frightened Derek as much as her and he did not want to get too close to them.

Thank God.

But ... where were they?

And what had happened to the police? And the people?

Derek slowed the car as they passed by the barricades. The lights of the patrol cars were on and flashing, but it appeared at first as though the cops had run away or disappeared. Then Angela saw them, along with the onlookers who had come out from the various stores, offices and restaurants. They were lying on the ground, their faces covered with black mold that had started to creep onto the asphalt and cement beneath their dead bodies.

'No,' she said, shaking her head. Her voice was small and frightened. 'No. No ...'

'Where did they go?' Derek asked. His voice was louder but just as scared. He stopped the car for a moment, so they could look, but nothing was moving on the street or sidewalk. There were only the bodies of the policemen and the onlookers dead on the ground.

And then a desiccated corpse jumped out from the open hotel door and landed on all fours, its head swiv-