“Okay,” the sentry said, “you’re good to go. Report to the processing area, they’ll billet you.”
“What about the bus?” Kittridge asked.
“All fuel and vehicles are being commandeered by the United States military. Once you’re in, you’re in.”
Kittridge saw the stricken look on Danny’s face. One of the soldiers was boarding the bus to drive it away.
“What’s with him?” the sentry asked.
Kittridge turned to Danny. “It’s okay, they’ll take good care of it.”
He could see the struggle in the man’s eyes. Then Danny nodded.
“They better,” he said.
The space was packed with people waiting in lines before a long table. Families with children, old people, couples, even a blind man with a dog. A young woman in a Red Cross T-shirt, her auburn hair pulled back from her face, was moving up and down the lines with a handheld.
“Any unaccompanied minors?” Like Porcheki, she’d given up on the mask. Her eyes were harried, drained by sleeplessness. She looked at April and Tim. “What about you two?”
“He’s my brother,” April said. “I’m eighteen.”
The woman looked doubtful but said nothing.
“We’d like to all stay together,” said Kittridge.
The woman was jotting on her handheld. “I’m not supposed to do this.”
“What’s your name?” Always good, Kittridge thought, to get a name.
“Vera.”
“The patrol that brought us in said we’d be evacuated to Chicago or St. Louis.”
A strip of paper slid from the handheld’s port. Vera tore it off and passed it to Kittridge. “We’re still waiting on buses. It shouldn’t be long now. Show this to the worker at the desk.”
They were assigned a tent and given plastic disks that would serve as ration coupons, then moved into the noise and smells of the camp: wood smoke, chemical toilets, the human odors of a crowd. The ground was muddy and littered with trash; people were cooking on camp stoves, hanging their laundry on tent lines, waiting at a pump to fill buckets with water, stretched out in lawn chairs like spectators at a tailgate party, a look of dazed exhaustion on their faces. All the garbage cans were overflowing, clouds of flies hovering. A cruel sun was beating down. Apart from the Army trucks, Kittridge saw no vehicles; all the refugees appeared to have come in on foot, their gasless cars abandoned.
Two people had already been billeted in their tent, an older couple, Fred and Lucy Wilkes. They were from California but had family in Iowa and had been visiting for a wedding when the epidemic hit. They’d been in the camp six days.
“Any word on the buses?” Kittridge asked. Joe Robinson had gone off to find out about rations, Wood and Delores to see about water. April had let her brother run off with some children from the adjacent tent, warning him not to wander far. Danny had accompanied him. “What are people saying?”
“Always it’s tomorrow.” Fred Wilkes was a trim man of at least seventy, with bright blue eyes; in the heat he’d removed his shirt, displaying a fan of downy white chest hair. He and his wife, as generously proportioned as he was undersized—Jack Sprat and the missus—were playing gin rummy, sitting across from each other on a pair of cots and using a cardboard box as a table. “If it doesn’t happen soon, people are going to lose patience. And what then?”
Kittridge stepped back outside. They were surrounded by soldiers, safe for the time being. Yet the whole thing felt stopped, everyone waiting for something to happen. Infantrymen were stationed along the fence line at one hundred meter intervals. All of them were wearing surgical masks. The only way in or out seemed to be the front gate. Abutting the camp to the north he saw a low-slung, windowless building without visible markings or signage, its entrance flanked by concrete barricades. While Kittridge watched, a pair of sleek black heliocpters approached from the east, turned in a wide circle, and touched down on the rooftop. Four figures emerged from the first helicopter, men in dark glasses and baseball caps and Kevlar vests, carrying automatic rifles. Not military, Kittridge thought. Blackbird, maybe, or Riverstone. One of those outfits. The four men proceeded to take up positions at the corners of the roof.
The doors of the second helicopter opened. Kittridge placed a hand to his brow to get a better look. For a moment, nothing happened; then a figure emerged, wearing an orange biosuit. Five more followed. The rotors of the helicopters were still turning. A brief negotiation ensued, then the biosuited figures removed a pair of long steel boxes from the helicopter’s cargo section, each the approximate dimensions of a coffin, with wheeled frames that dropped from their undercarriages. They guided the two boxes to a small, hutlike structure on the roof—a service elevator, Kittridge guessed. A few minutes passed; the six reappeared and boarded the second helicopter. First one and then the other lifted off, thudding away.
April came up behind him. “I noticed that, too,” she said. “Any idea what it is?”
“Maybe nothing.” Kittridge dropped his hand. “Where’s Tim?”
“Already making friends. He’s off playing soccer with some kids.”
They watched the helicopters fade from sight. Whatever it was, Kittridge thought, it wasn’t nothing.
“You think we’ll be okay here?” April asked.
“Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I don’t know.” Though her face said she did; she was thinking the same thing he was. “Last night, in the lab… What I mean is, I can be like that sometimes. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t want to.”
She was somehow looking both toward him and away. At such moments she had a way of seeming older than she was. Not seeming, Kittridge thought: being.
“Are you really eighteen?”
She seemed amused. “Why? Don’t I look it?”
Kittridge shrugged to hide his embarrassment; the question had just popped out. “No. I mean yes, you do. I was just… I don’t know.”
April was plainly enjoying herself. “A girl’s not supposed to tell. But to put your mind at ease, yes, I’m eighteen. Eighteen years, two months, and seventeen days. Not that I’m, you know, counting.”
Their eyes met and held in the way they seemed to want to. What was it about this girl, Kittridge wondered, this April?
“I still owe you for the gun,” she said, “even if they took it. I think it might be the nicest present anybody ever gave me, actually.”
“I liked the poem. Call it even. What was that guy’s name again?”
“T. S. Eliot.”
“He got any other stuff?”
“Not much that makes sense. You ask me, he was kind of a one-hit wonder.”
They had no weapons, no way to get a message to the outside world. Not for the first time, Kittridge wondered if they shouldn’t have just kept driving.
“Well, when we get out of here, I’ll have to check him out.”
17
Whiteness, and the sensation of floating. Grey became aware that he was in a car. This was strange, because the car was also a motel room, with beds and dressers and a television; when had they started making cars like this? He was sitting on the foot of one of the beds, driving the room—the steering column came up at an angle from the floor; the television was the windshield—and seated on the adjacent bed was Lila, clutching a pink bundle to her chest. “Are we there yet, Lawrence?” Lila asked him. “The baby needs changing.” The baby? thought Grey. When had that happened? Wasn’t she months away? “She’s so beautiful,” said Lila, softly cooing. “We have such a beautiful baby. It’s too bad we have to shoot her.” “Why do we have to shoot her?” Grey asked. “Don’t be
