“They’re not off him,” Mike said as the flames danced in the reflections of his goggles. “They’re in him.”

“What?”

“He’s too young. He’ll sit catatonic like that until he dies-unless you feed him. Then he’ll sit that way until he hits puberty and the rapeworm kicks in.”

“What?”

“Amanda can’t have gone far, not yet. We’re going to catch her before she joins the bang at Athens.”

Athens was the home of Ohio University, nested in the wooded hills of southern Ohio. Mike was convinced that’s where the rapeworm colony had collected.

“Because it’s the biggest city around?” I asked.

“No,” he said, as he thumped a box of clinking wine bottles into the bed of his 4x4. “Because the dog was wearing an O.U. collar-green and white, go Bobcats.”

“Ah.”

We left Nick with Josh in one of Mike’s deer blinds across the road. Bitter smoke filled the sky where the fire was smoldering out amid the snow-wet trees and the wet leaf cover.

“Dad, don’t leave me here,” he said.

“You have to be brave,” I said. “We’re going to go rescue Amanda, but I promise we’ll come back.”

After Mike and I climbed into his truck and pulled out of the woods onto the main road, he said, “Don’t kid yourself-we’re not going to rescue Amanda.”

He had to choke out the words.

To calm himself down, he started to explain that in Georgia, they’d seen the victims of the worms follow the paths of least resistance, moving along roads to the places where they gathered, what the soldiers had called bangs.

“Why bangs?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was stupid.

“Huh?”

Mike shook his head. Then he lifted his fist in the air and made a whistling sound like a bomb falling as he lowered it toward the dash. When it touched down, he popped it open and said, “Bang.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, there was that reason too. Once a bang started we used to let them gather until there were enough to make the strike count,” he said. Then he had to knuckle the corner of his eye. He shook it off and kept his head up, scanning the sides of the road for Amanda as we drove toward Athens.

I had the.38 in my pocket and the shotgun on my lap. Mike had checked both of them for me. He was loaded with ordinance like some video game character. I didn’t like the way this was headed.

“The people who are infected, they’re still people,” I said.

“Maybe not. The scientists were saying that the worms don’t just rewire the brains when they lodge in them, they rewrite the DNA. The military guys thought, given enough time, they’ll find a virus or something that will take it out.”

“But the people, like Amanda, like Nick, we can do something for them, keep them safe, keep them comfortable, until we find a cure-”

He laughed out loud.

“Wait until we get to Athens, you’ll see,” he said.

But we didn’t get to Athens. We came up over a hill, and Mike slammed on the brakes. “Shit,” he said.

He put it in reverse and backed down below the rim of the road.

Just over the hill, there was an old white farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. Next to the house were three tall blue silos and a red barn with the name McAufley, 1895 spelled out in colored shingles on the roof. A long, one-story animal shed stood next to an unharvested cornfield.

I had to wait until we loaded up and crouched back to the top of the road to see what Mike had seen instantly.

The farmhouse door hung open, with the ripped ends of curtains fluttering through the broken glass of the windows. On the barn, a rope hung from the hayloft pulley, spiraling around and around in the wind. A combine was tipped on its side in a ditch by the road.

There were people moving around the animal shed.

The shed was on the far side of the other buildings. We approached it carefully, creeping along the fence for cover. The stench of blood and shit and sugar was overwhelming. Anguished moans sounded and faded.

“Something’s wrong here,” I whispered. “The worms didn’t start falling until after the harvest. There shouldn’t be any corn-”

“Some folks thought it was the end of the world and stopped doing everything,” Mike said, shrugging. He nodded at the combine. “Maybe there was a rapture, and this guy was the only guy who got taken.”

Something rustled in the corn, the tall stalks swaying. Mike pushed me to the ground, dropped beside me, and brought up his gun.

An old man in a Tommy Hilfiger sweater walked out of the corn: his hair and beard were untrimmed and unkempt; his clothes hung from his body, tatters trailing like fringes from his arms; his smile was beatific and he mumbled nonsense words as he carried an armful of corn back toward the shed.

Mike gestured me to come along, and we followed the bearded guy around the other side of the shed, where we ducked down behind a four-hundred-gallon gas tank.

One wall of the shed had been pulled open, and the building was divided in half. On one side, a boy rested in the bed of straw. A woman crawled away from him, pulling ragged clothes back on. I was relieved to see it wasn’t Amanda.

On the other side of the shed, a dozen or more women were lined up in rows. Their heads were covered with rags, and pieces of old shag carpet and odd bits of blanket were wrapped around their shoulders to keep them warm. They stood in thawing mud, bare feet shifting constantly. The sound that I had mistaken for moaning was a constant low murmur of nonsense words.

When I saw that many of them were pregnant, I wanted to puke.

Mike shifted position, crouching around the other end of the tank. He was looking for Amanda. I was too disgusted to move. Every bone and muscle in my body screamed at me to throw down my guns and run away.

One woman moaned louder than the others. Her swollen belly popped out of her sparkly tee-shirt and soiled sweatpants.

The boy rose up from his bed of straw-he was not much older than Josh, with no beard to speak of and pale as a ghost. When he leaned in to sniff the woman’s mouth, she tried to bite his nose. He jerked his head away, then he bent down to sniff her crotch. Something satisfied him, because he tilted his head back and crooned in some inhuman language.

The old man in the fringe-tatter Tommy Hilfiger sweater dropped his new armload of earcorn and came, whining out his own reply. A third man, still wearing his business suit and tie, but hairy and ragdemalion like the others, came trotting around the corner.

Thing was, I could have known any of those men. I even recognized the cheerful smiles on their faces from a thousand days at the office, from the trips to the mall, from the visits to school.

While I stood there uselessly, Mike ran over to a Chevy parked near the far end of the shed and held a scope in his hand to peer inside.

Tommy Hilfiger and Three-piece repeated the sniffing at mouth and crotch while the woman moaned and panted, clearly in labor. The women around her shuffled out of her way, keeping up their continuous flow of jabberwocky.

The old man took out a knife and handed it to the pale boy. They exchanged words in their weird groaning language, and then without prelude, the boy thrust the knife into the underside of the woman’s belly.

I jerked up the shotgun, banging it into the tank, startling myself. I shrank back, expecting to be seen, but the others were too focused on their task.

The ghostly boy sliced the woman open from hip to hip. At first I thought her intestines were spilling out: then I saw that it was a pile of worms, silver-gray and wet, hundreds or thousands of them, swimming like a school of squids out of the ocean of her belly.

She moaned with another contraction. Three-piece reached his hand up into her stomach and pulled.

A creature flopped out. At first I thought it was a human baby, stillborn, deformed-its head was too small to be fully developed. I thought it was just food for the worms to feed on, and I waited for the mass of tiny creatures to engulf it.