The three New Men froze in place, terror blooming instantly on their faces. They looked frightened and confused, unsure which rule they had broken but knowing that they had done something. They reacted to their conditioning and dropped to their knees, heads bowed, as the Australian approached. He towered over them, and the boy saw three more guards come down from the veranda and spread out in a loose line behind the blond man. They were all grinning.

The Australian nudged the rock with his booted toe.

“What’s this shit?” he demanded. The New Men did not move except to tremble with fear. It made the Australian grin broader. He raised his voice. “I said… what’s this shit?”

No answer. Even from his perch on the roof Eighty-two could see the female begin to cry, saw the first silver tears break from her brown eyes and roll down over her lumpy cheeks.

“You!” called the Australian. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you ugly ape-faced bitch. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

The female slowly raised her eyes toward the man; her companions kept their heads firmly down, though their muscles were rigid with the terror that washed through them in icy waves.

“Who told you to make a mess of the whole damned yard? Look at this squalor.” He nudged the stone again. It was the size of an egg. “You get your ass over here and pick up this mess. Now!”

The female bowed several times and then scuttled forward, keeping low to the ground, so frightened of giving further offense that she scuttled forward on all fours. But as she drew close to the guard she slowed and stopped almost out of reach before extending one tentative hand toward the stone.

The guard looked down at her and the boy could see the moment when the Australian became aware of the thin cotton shirt clinging to the female’s heavy breasts. The look on the man’s face changed, shifting from vicious anger to something else, something that was beyond the boy’s understanding. The boy knew that the man might rape the woman-he had witnessed enough abuse to understand the forms it could take. Rape, sodomy, beatings, even murder. However, no matter how many times the boy saw these acts, or saw the aftereffects of them, he could not understand it. Even in his own personal darkness, even deep in the strangeness of his own damaged dreams, he had no connection to that kind of hunger. Eighty-two leaned forward, his muscles tensing, wondering for the hundredth time what would happen if he shouted at the men while they did this. Would they stop because of who he was? Or would interference merely result in another of Otto’s beatings? Indecision trapped Eighty-two on his perch as, below, the female picked up the rock.

She bobbed and bowed and mumbled apologies in her high-pitched nasal voice.

The Australian kicked her in the stomach.

A single sharp kick that drove the toe of his steel-tipped boot into the softness of her upper abdomen and slammed all the air from the female’s lungs. She could not even scream. Her body convulsed into a ball of knotted, trembling, gasping agony as the guards laughed and the other New Men knelt nearby and wept.

The guards made jokes about it and turned away, heading back to the veranda, back to their beer and dominoes, leaving the female in the center of the yard, the stone still clutched in her fist.

A minute dragged by as the boy watched. He sniffed back a tear and then froze as the two male New Men suddenly turned and looked up. Eighty-two remained stock-still. Had they heard him? Could they see him?

Even the female slowly raised her head and looked in his direction.

The guards were laughing and talking about football. They hadn’t heard anything. The boy’s eyes burned with tears, and he slowly lifted a hand to his eyes to wipe them clear.

Down in the garden the oldest of the New Men stared upward with a furrowed brow. Then he lifted a hand and mimicked the action. Or had he simply wiped away his own tears, the action merely a coincidence?

Then the second New Man did the same.

Eighty-two held his breath and did not move.

Finally the oldest of the New Men turned back toward the female. He cast a cautious glance at the guards and then slowly crept toward the female, gathered her in his arms, helped her to her feet, and walked with her back to their companion. Both of the New Men hugged her and kissed her, but always one watched the men while the others embraced. From time to time they all cut quick glances up to the shadows on the porch roof. Then they went back to work.

The boy watched the female’s hand, hoping that she would covertly pocket the stone. He would have taken it to use later if an opportunity presented itself. To use on Carteret while he slept. It was something Eighty-two wanted to do, had thought long and hard about doing, though he had not yet done it. But the female apparently did not have that thought or was afraid of being caught, because she dropped the stone onto the pile of dirt they’d dug from the hole and picked up her shovel.

After five minutes, the boy edged back along the porch roof and climbed into his bedroom window. Eighty-two sat on the edge of his bed and thought about what to do.

Chapter Forty-Two

Deep Iron Storage Facility

Saturday, August 28, 4:06 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 91 hours, 54 minutes E.S.T.

Debris is a puzzle if you look at it the right way. You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what’s lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first. When I was working homicide for Baltimore PD I had one of those classic cases where there’s a dead body amid a bunch of broken plates and scattered books. A novice would think that the victim came home and interrupted a robbery in progress and that the place either was already trashed or was trashed during a struggle. But the carpet under the body was completely clean, no litter, which established that the murder happened first. Sure, we considered the fact that the place could have been trashed afterward, but when we looked at what lay under what it became clear that someone had walked around the room smashing things. It had been done in a circular pattern-deliberate and systematic. That’s when we started looking at the wife, who had reported finding her husband dead. The debris pattern, plus the angle of the blunt-force blow that had killed him, gave us a pretty solid circumstantial case. After that it was a matter of breaking down her alibi and grilling her in a series of interviews.

This part of the mission was cop work, so I switched mental gears to let that part of me do his job. I may not be Jerry Spencer, but I can work a crime scene.

There were dozens of overturned boxes. We knew from the firefight when some of them were knocked over. Most of the boxes were sealed with two-inch-wide clear tape. The tape had burst on about a third of the boxes, and some of the boxes and papers had landed in pools of blood. We started in the driest corner.

So I had to do some horseback math: if a stack of ten boxes fell at such and such an angle, encountering an obstacle-and for the sake of argument let’s call that obstacle the back of my head-then they’d hit the floor with x amount of force and scatter their contents in such and such a fashion. Calculating the way the papers slid out of the boxes was similar to the way blood spatter experts estimate flying blood.

And that thought made me aware of the torn bodies hidden under the box lids and I had to squash down the horror that wanted to make me either scream or throw up.

The boxes were also chewed up pretty well by gunfire. The Russians had emptied a couple of magazines each into the room. The cinder-block walls were pocked with holes and heavy-caliber bullets had plowed through the contents of the boxes. Luckily paper is a great bullet stop, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Grenades would have made this job impossible.