“That’s the last,” she said to Peter. “We’ve got about ten seconds before they figure out the current’s off.” Caleb was straddling the top of the fence now. “Caleb,” she yelled, “move your ass!”
He took the last five meters at a drop, rolling as he landed and vaulting to his feet. His cheeks were wet from crying, smeared with dirt and snot; his feet were bare. In another few seconds they’d be in the dark again.
“Are you hurt?” Alicia said. “Can you run?”
The boy nodded.
They took off toward the station. Peter felt the virals coming before he saw them. He turned in time to see one launching toward them from the top of the fence. A blast of gunfire went off next to his ear: the creature twisted in the air and went down, skidding across the hardpan. He turned to see Alicia, her rifle shouldered, her eyes fixed on the fence. She let off three more shots in quick succession.
“Get him out of here!” she yelled.
He raced with Caleb to the ladder. Behind them, Alicia continued to fire, the sound of her rifle shots reaching him as muffled pops that echoed through the yard. More virals were inside the fence line now. Slinging his rifle, Peter mounted the ladder; when he reached the top, he turned to look. Alicia was backing toward the wall of the station, shooting into the shadows. When her gun went silent she cast it aside and began to climb; Peter shouldered his rifle and aimed in the same general direction and squeezed the trigger. The barrel kicked up, his shots sailing uselessly into the dark. His whole body shook with the feel of it, its wild force.
“Watch what you’re doing!” Alicia cried, pressing her body to the ladder below him. “And for godsakes, aim!”
“I’m trying!” There were three now, coming out of the shadows toward the ladder’s base; Peter took a step to his right, clamping the stock hard against his shoulder. Aim it like a cross. He had very little chance of hitting them, but maybe he could scare them off. He squeezed the trigger and they jumped away, rolling across the yard and skittering into the dark. He’d bought a few seconds at most.
“Shut up and climb!” he yelled.
“I will if you stop shooting at me!”
Then she was at the top. He found her hand and pulled hard, vaulting her onto the concrete surface of the roof. Caleb was waving to them from the mouth of the hatch.
“Behind you!”
As Alicia clambered down the hatch, Peter turned; a single viral was standing on the edge of the roof. Peter raised his gun and fired, but too late. The place where the creature had stood was empty.
“Forget the smokes!” Alicia yelled from below. “Come on!”
He dropped straight through the opening, tumbling into Caleb, who folded under him with a grunt. A sharp pain sliced his ankle as he hit the platform; the rifle clattered away. Alicia stepped over the two of them and reached up to seal the hatch. But something was pressing down on the other side. Alicia’s face clenched with exertion; her feet scrabbled at the ladder, fighting for leverage.
“I… can’t… close it!”
Peter and Caleb leapt to their feet and pushed. But the force on the far side was too great. Peter had done something to his ankle when he’d fallen, but the pain was vague now, unimportant. He scanned the platform below for his rifle and found it, lying at the top of the stairs.
“Let go,” he said. “Drop the hatch. It’s the only way.”
“Are you crazy?” But then he saw, in Alicia’s eyes, that she understood his intentions. “Good, do it.” She turned to Caleb, who nodded. “Ready?”
“One… two… ”
“Three!”
They released the hatch. Peter dropped to the platform, the pain exploding in his ankle as he made impact; he lunged for the rifle and swung around, thrusting the muzzle upward through the opening. There was no time to aim, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to.
He didn’t. The end of the barrel went straight into the viral’s open mouth. The barrel speared him like an arrow, sliding past the rows of glossy teeth, coming to rest where it pressed against the bony ridge at the top of his throat, and Peter looked him in the eyes and thought, Be still, giving the rifle one hard shove to drive it home before he shot Zander Phillips through the brain.
TWENTY-ONE
There was one great difference between the world as it was now and the world of the Time Before, Michael Fisher thought, and it wasn’t the virals. The difference was electricity.
The virals were a problem, sure-about forty-two and a half million problems, if the old documents in the HD shed behind the Lighthouse were correct. A whole history of the epidemic in its final hours, for Michael the Circuit to read. “CV1-CV13 National and Regional Summary of Select Surveillance Components,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia; “Civilian Resettlement Protocols for Urban Centers, Zones 6-1,” Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.; “Efficacy of Postexposure Protection Against CV Familial Hemorrhagic Fever in Nonhuman Primates,” United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, Fort Derrick, Maryland. And so on, in that vein. Some of which he understood, some of which he didn’t, but all saying the same basic thing. One person in ten. One person taken up for every nine that died. So, assuming a human population of 500 million at the time of the outbreak-the combined populations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico-and forestalling, for the moment, the question of the rest of the world, about which very little seemed to be known-and even assuming some kind of mortality rate for the virals themselves, say a modest 15 percent-that still left 42.5 million of the bloodthirsty bastards bouncing around between the Panamanian Isthmus and the Bering Frontier, gobbling up everything with hemoglobin in its veins and a heat signature between 36 and 38 degrees, i.e., 99.96 percent of the mammalian kingdom, from voles to grizzly bears.
So, okay. A problem.
But just give me enough current, Michael thought, and I can keep the virals out forever.
The Time Before: he sometimes trembled just to think of it, the great buzzing man-made electrical juiciness of it all. The millions of miles of wire, the billions of amps of current. The vast generating plants turning the bottled energy of the planet itself into the eternally affirmative question that was a single amp of current shooting down a line, saying, Yes? Yes? Yes?
And the machines. The wondrous, humming, glowing machines. Not just computers and Blu-rays and handhelds-they had dozens of these devices, scavenged over the years from trips down the mountain, socked away in the shed-but simple things, ordinary everyday things, like hair dryers and microwaves and filament lightbulbs. All wired up, plugged in, connected to the grid.
Sometimes it was like the current was still out there, waiting for him. Waiting for Michael Fisher to throw the switch and turn the whole thing-human civilization itself-back on.
He spent too much time alone in the Lighthouse. Fair enough. Just him and Elton, which most of the time was like being alone, in the social sense of things. In the let’s-chat-about-the-weather and what’s-for-chow sense of things. He didn’t say he didn’t.
And there was lots of juice still out there, Michael knew. Diesel generators the size of whole towns. Huge LNG plants fat with gas and waiting to go. Acres of solar panels giving their unblinking gaze to the desert sun. Pocket-sized nukes humming away like atomic harmonicas, the heat in the control rods slowly building over decades until someday the whole thing would just go sailing through the floor, exploding in a shower of radioactive steam that somewhere, high above, a long-forgotten satellite, powered by a tiny nuclear cell of its own, would record as the final agonies of a dying brother-before it, too, darkened, soaring headlong to earth in a streak of unacknowledged light.