At 4:30 a.m., Mountain time, Lourdes Hidalgo decided it was time to die.
It had been two days since that night in the ice storm. With little money, and even less time to spare, they had searched for a trail—any sign of the missing two. Nothing turned up along I-80, and nothing in Big Springs, but in Torrington, Wyoming, they found a newspaper article that led them to a devastated farm. It reeked of something unnatural.
Once they found the farm, they knew they were on the right track, because the presence of the fifth and sixth shard was as strong as a scent on the wind. What they had feared was now confirmed; those other two had lost control and had set off on a mad rampage to feed the parasites that were strangling their souls. Intuition told them that number five was the dangerous one and that number six probably fed on the aftermath of destruction like a vulture fed on a lion’s kill.
After that, following their trail was like following the ashen trail of a burning fuse. News reports had led them in the ruined neighborhood in Idaho Falls, which seemed ten times worse than what they found at the farm. They were only a day behind as they headed deeper into Idaho, terrified of what they would find next.
They rested in Boise, finding a cheap hotel for the night. It had been a major effort for Lourdes to haul herself out of the van this time, and each footstep felt like it would be her last.
Like everywhere else their journey took them, this hotel was right in the armpit of town, where old decrepit buildings loomed ripe for the wrecking ball.
Lourdes could see one such building from the hotel window, across the expanse of a vacant lot: a concrete warehouse seven stories tall, with slits for windows and a big faded sign painted on the side that said “Dakins Worldwide Storage.” The building’s few entrances were boarded over, and the abandoned property was fenced in. Apparendy Dakins had found better worldwide storage elsewhere.
While the others slept, Lourdes kept vigil and watched that solitary, lonely building, feeling a strange affinity for it as she pondered the short time remaining to her own life. Few buildings on earth could be as unloved as this one.
In the five days since they had banded together, they had witnessed wonders and had watched each other deteriorate. Winston’s dignity was the first casualty, for his body had grown so small he couldn’t see out of the van’s windows when he sat, and he had to eat soft food because all his teeth were receding. Tory, who had been a driving force all along, was slowing down, as her disease turned inward, swelling her joints with painful arthritis . . . and Michael . . . well, rather than allowing his passion to wreak havoc on the soul of every girl he encountered, Mi chael had turned his mind to a dark lonely place within himself and seldom came out. Brooding and silent, with dark, wan eyes, he looked like he was dying of cancer.
As for Lourdes, there were no mirrors large enough to present her full image. She could feel the weight on her bones growing, building density, like ice on the branches of a tree. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, fighting to force blood through clogged arteries. She could feel her bloated self, ready to burst through the shell that contained her, and knew that it could happen at any moment.
So she stayed awake . . . and at 4:30 a.m. one of the many seams on her blouse tore so violently that the blouse itself literally burst in two.
That’s when Lourdes decided that it was time to call it quits.
Outside, the rain had let up a bit, and Lourdes could see the warehouse more clearly. There were people milling about the building, and it seemed odd to Lourdes that such a lonely place would be the center of anyone else’s attention but hers, so she watched and wondered. In a few moments, things became very clear to her, and she knew exactly what she was going to do.
“Michael, Winston, wake up!” Tory shook them both, dragging them out of a deep sleep. “It’s Lourdes! She’s gone!”
Wearily, the three searched the room and the hallway.
Tory looked in the closet. The others looked under the beds—as if Lourdes could possibly fit in any of those places.
That’s when Michael happened to glance out the window. Dawn was beginning to break on the distant horizon, and in the faint half-light he could see a huge shape lumbering through a vacant lot toward an old Dakins warehouse a block away.
“Look,” he said. “There she is!”
The front of the old warehouse was teeming with activity, but Lourdes approached from the rear and no one saw her. She smiled as she approached. All this time the four of them had been running, unsure of their destina tion. It was nice, for once, to have a destination.
Her momentum took her through the chicken wire fence that surrounded the property as if it were paper, and she pushed on through the police line, tearing the ribbon as if it were a finish line. She leaned against the boarded-over door, and her sheer weight forced the door inward, leading her into a dark cavernous space where her labored breathing echoed from distant concrete walls. To the right was a flight of stairs and, without pausing for further thought, she began to heave herself step by step toward the upper floors of the desolate building.
Activity was growing at the front of the warehouse as the three kids followed Lourdes in through the back door.
Once inside they paused to listen and heard the heavy footsteps of Lourdes straining on stairs high above.
“What she gonna do? Climb out on the roof and jump?” said Winston, trying to catch his breath.
The very thought made Michael turn and bound up the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him.
Tory took a moment to look down at her hands. Her knuckles were swollen and they cracked when she bent them. It made her so angry that she squeezed them into a fist, but that only hurt more. She turned to Winston, who was still catching his breath. “Did you ever think you’d be chasing someone through a warehouse at the crack of dawn?” she asked.
“No,” said Winston, in a voice that was higher pitched than the day before. “But then I never thought I’d be five years old again either.”
It was as they turned to go upstairs that Tory glanced at the great cavern around her. The tiny slits of windows were mostly boarded over, and in the dim half-light, she could see a series of pillars stretching down the empty warehouse, holding up the floors above. There were bulges near the top of a good dozen of those pillars; bulges like tumors growing out of the concrete. And each of those bulges had a tiny, blinking red light.
Tory grabbed Winston’s arm, and yanked him around. “Winston, tell me you don’t see what I see. ...” This time when they looked, not only were the tumors visible on the concrete, but so were the wires. They draped from the dark tumors, snaked across the floor, and all came together in a bundle that made a determined path out the front door.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the tumors were explosives.
Michael reached the seventh and final floor of the warehouse, before the others had even begun to climb.
“Lourdes?”
She stood at the far end of the vast empty loft. She wobbled a bit and finally collapsed under her own enor mous weight. As she hit the ground, the concrete echoed with a boom like the slamming of a heavy vault door, and the dust burst out from beneath her like her very soul dispersing. She didn’t move.
Michael, afraid to say anything, for fear that she wouldn’t answer, approached with caution, and to his great relief saw that she was still alive.
“You okay?” asked Michael.
“Go away.” Lourdes made a mighty effort to turn her head, so Michael could not see her tears. In all the time he had known her, Michael had never seen Lourdes cry like this. She had stoically borne all her hardship with a stiff— if somewhat fat—upper lip, but not now.
Michael sat beside her and wiped the tears away.
