The man looked up, blindsided. His face was full of gratitude; no one had ever given him such a present. “Thank you, sir.” A crisp nod and he moved away.
“Okay, what was that about?” Apgar asked.
Peter’s eyes followed Jock as he made his way to the range. “For luck,” he said.
—
In the orphanage, the last of the women and children were descending into the shelter. It had been decided that only women with children under five would be allowed to accompany their offspring; there had been many tearful scenes of separation, agonizing and awful. Quite a few mothers claimed their children were younger than they obviously were; in those instances that seemed close, or close enough, Caleb let them through. He simply didn’t have the heart to say no.
Caleb worried about Pim; the shelter was rapidly filling. At last she arrived, explaining that the children had spent the morning at Kate and Bill’s house. For Pim a painful pilgrimage, Kate’s ghost everywhere, but a helpful distraction for the girls: a few hours in familiar rooms, playing with familiar toys. They’d bounced on their old beds for half an hour, Pim said.
And yet something was off; Caleb sensed the presence of words unsaid. They were standing by the open hatch. One of the sisters, positioned on the platform below, reached up to assist the children, first Theo, then the girls. As Pim’s turn came, Caleb took her by the elbow.
What is it?
She hesitated. Yes, something was there.
Pim?
A flicker of uncertainty in her eyes; then she composed herself. I love you. Be careful.
Caleb let the matter rest. Now was not the time, the hatch standing open, everyone waiting. Sister Peg was observing from the side. Caleb had already broached the question of whether or not Sister Peg would be joining the children underground. “Lieutenant,” she’d said with a reproachful look, “I’m eighty-one years old.”
Caleb hugged his wife and helped her down. As her hands gripped the top rung, she raised her eyes, for a last look. A cold weight dropped inside him. She was his life.
Keep our babies safe, he signed.
More children came through; then, suddenly, the shelter was full. From outside the building a cry went up, followed by a voice from a megaphone, ordering the crowd to disperse.
Colonel Henneman strode into the hall. “Jaxon, I’m putting you in charge here.”
It was the last thing Caleb wanted. “I’d be more use on the wall, sir.”
“This isn’t a debate.”
Caleb felt the presence of an unseen hand. “Does my father have something to do with this?”
Henneman ignored the question. “We’ll need men on the roof and the perimeter and two squads inside. Are we clear? Nobody else gets inside. How you accomplish that is up to you.”
Dire words. Also inevitable. People would do anything to survive.
* * *
67
Michael and Greer picked up the first survivors north of Rosenberg, a group of three soldiers—stunned, starving, their carbines and pistols drained. The virals had attacked the barracks two nights ago, they said, tearing through the place like a tornado, destroying everything, vehicles and equipment, the generator and radio, ripping the roofs off the Quonsets like they were opening tins of meat.
There were others. A woman, one of Dunk’s girls, with black hair streaked white, walking barefoot along the roadway with her tippy shoes dangling from her fingertips and a story about hiding in a pump house. A pair of men from one of the telegraph crews. An oiler named Winch—Michael recalled him from the old days—sitting cross-legged by the side of the road, carving meaningless shapes in the ground with a six-inch knife and babbling incoherently. His face was chalky with dust, his coveralls black with dried blood, though it was not his own. All took their places in the back of the truck in stunned silence, not even asking where they were going.
“These are the luckiest people on the planet,” Michael said, “and they don’t even know it.”
Greer watched the landscape flow past, dry scrub yielding to the dense tangle of the coastal shelf. The intensity of the last twenty-four hours had kept the pain at bay, but now, in the unstructured silence of his thoughts, it roared back. An omnipresent, low-grade urge to vomit tossed his gut; his saliva was thick and brassy-tasting; his bladder pulsed with unexpressed fullness, febrile and enormous. When they’d stopped to pick up the woman, Greer had stepped into the scrub with the hope of passing water, but all he’d managed to produce was a pathetic crimson-tinted trickle.
South of Rosenberg, they swung east toward the ship channel. Muddy water sprayed up behind them; each bang of the truck’s carriage on the gullied roadway threw fresh punches of pain. Greer wanted a drink of water very badly, if only to clear the taste in his mouth, but when Michael drew his canteen from under his seat, took a long pull, and offered it to him, all the while staring out the windshield, Greer waved it off. From Michael, a sideways glance—You’re sure?—and for that moment the man seemed to know something, or at least suspect. But when Greer said nothing, Michael wedged the canteen between his knees and capped it with a shrug.