After the initial jolt, Slater looked out his side window again, just in time to see the patrolman kneeling, one arm bracing the other, and firing several rounds at the back of the fleeing vehicle.

At first, the shots appeared to have no effect, but then, after the last one, Slater saw the van suddenly zig and zag on the bridge, cutting from one lane to the other, before banging into a guardrail so hard that two wheels left the pavement, then all four. As it flipped over, tires smoking and glass spraying, it spun, like an upside-down plate, halfway down the deserted bridge.

“You okay?” Slater said to Nika.

“Yep,” she said, in a shaky voice, “but I’m not so sure about the ambulance, or the Vanes.” She, too, was looking off at the wreckage on the bridge.

He told her to use the radio to call for medical backup. “And stay on the radio until they get here. Keep away from the accident scene.”

Then he leapt out of the ambulance, and raced toward the bridge.

“Who are you?” the patrolman hollered, still holding the gun. Slater was relieved to see that the patrolman, too, had a face mask — the word had gone out — but it was dangling down around his neck.

“Stay clear!” Slater shouted, running past the damaged patrol car. “And put your mask on until I tell you otherwise!”

“On whose authority?”

“Mine!” Slater declared. “And that’s an order!”

Before the cop could issue another challenge, Slater ran right past him, his eyes fixed on the van … and praying that this was as far as both of the Vanes, and the virus, had traveled.

Chapter 56

It was the chimes Charlie noticed first.

He was upside down in the van, his head up against the broken roof light.

The chimes, the ones that went off whenever you hadn’t fastened a seat belt, or closed your door properly, were dinging sweetly.

It took him a few seconds to orient himself.

He remembered slowing down for the roadblock, and he also remembered thinking, What was the point of trying to get past it? They’d have a chopper tracking him down next. And then, before he knew what was happening, Harley had flipped out in the backseat and started screaming, “Go through it! Go through it!”

But Charlie wasn’t going to be that stupid anymore; he’d seen enough trouble in his life, and he was a reformed man now, anyway. He was trying to reason with Harley when his brother, with the blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, lunged over the back of the seat and punched the accelerator lever.

“Go through!”

The van blasted off and Charlie, knocked back as if he were an astronaut, groped in vain for the hand brake as they smashed into the front of the police car, then, instantly picking up speed again, hurtled past.

His fingers were just able to graze the wheel as the van lurched onto the bridge, but Harley was hanging over him, trying to steer. He thought he’d heard a shot — or was it a tire exploding? — and then they were crashing into a metal guardrail, the windows shattering all around. Gas canisters and gear from the back of the van flew in every direction as the wheels hit an ice slick, and the whole car flipped in the air like a pancake on the griddle.

And now all he could hear were the chimes. The inside of the van smelled like gasoline, tinged with the astringent smell of blood. His neck and shoulders aching, he glanced at the front of his coat, where a wet, dark stain was slowly spreading. The punctured airbag was hanging down like an empty saddlebag, and the glove compartment gaped open. Its contents, including the cross and icon, were scattered somewhere in the jumble of pulverized glass and twisted metal.

“Shit.”

He heard that. It was Harley’s voice. He was alive — but where?

Gradually, other sounds came to him, too. The dripping of gasoline, the creak of mangled steel, the tinkle of falling glass. The world was returning … and with it, agonizing pain.

Charlie tried to turn, but the seat belt was coiled like a snake around his waist, and his legs of course were as useless as ever. He tried moving, but only one arm came up from the wreckage. He tried to reach for the buckle on the seat belt, but the bulk of his coat was bunched up and in the way.

“Where are you?” he asked through gritted teeth.

He heard a moan, and something twitched behind his head. He had the impression it was a foot. “Try not to move,” he said, mindful of his own paralysis. “They’ll get a medic out here.” But how long would that take? They were in the middle of nowhere, in a snowstorm.

“I told you,” Harley groaned. “I told you I was gonna die tonight.”

Charlie had to admit he hadn’t been far off. But the good Lord still seemed to have some other plan in mind for them.

And then, under the howling of the wind, there was the sound of running feet. And a guy in some kind of white lab suit was crouching down beside the wreck. He had a gauze mask on, and rubber gloves. How could medics have gotten there this fast, he wondered?

Peering in at Charlie, he quickly assessed the situation, and said, “Can you breathe?”

“Barely,” Charlie replied. “The seat belt.”

And then the guy’s hands were working the buckle, prying it loose. When it popped open, Charlie’s belly fell and he felt a rush of cold air entering his lungs. Then his coat was being opened, and the medic took a long look without saying anything. Two of the spokes from the gearshift were sticking out of him like bent twigs.

“Hang in there,” he said evenly, “you’re gonna be okay.”

Christ, that’s exactly what they’d said to him after he’d hit those rocks running the Heron River Gorge.

Then he closed the coat again, and moved beyond Charlie’s narrow field of vision, to tend to Harley in back.

“Can you move your head and neck?”

Harley groaned again and swore, but the medic was slowly extricating him from the wreckage. “Don’t move anything you don’t have to,” the medic said. “Just let me do it.”

Through the empty space where his window had been, Charlie could see his brother’s mangled body being pulled from the van and onto the asphalt. Heavy snow was falling, mixing with a widening pool of something wet and viscous. For a second, Charlie thought, Could that be blood? But then he realized it wasn’t. It was gas.

Harley’s groaning was becoming more of a scream. And he was shouting something about Eddie again. “Goddamn it, Eddie, it wasn’t my fault!”

And he was struggling with the medic. It seemed like he thought the guy was Eddie.

“Calm down,” Charlie mumbled to his brother. Funny how his guts were growing colder by the second. “He’s not Eddie.”

“Fuck you,” Harley spat at the medic, his arms flailing under the blanket drenched in blood. And then, in a flash, one of his hands broke free, and it was holding the goddamned Glock semiautomatic.

“I told you to quit it!” Harley shouted. “I told you!”

The medic grabbed for his wrist, but not before a sudden spray of shots went wild into the snowy night sky.

The medic twisted the wrist, banging it on the road and trying to free the gun, but Harley managed to pull the trigger one more time. Charlie saw a blazing arc of light, a bright and beautiful orange parabola that nearly blinded him, as the bullets ripped into the overturned van and punched holes in the gas cans. That was when the whole world lifted off, painlessly and effortlessly, with an all-enveloping whomp, and Charlie was carried up into the air, as if by the Rapture itself … up out of the wreckage, out of his own maimed body, and into a darkness so deep, so dense, and so comforting that he could actually feel it …

Chapter 57

Nika froze, the radio handset dropping into her lap, as she watched the fireball unfurl and the ruined van shoot up into the air. A moment later, the impact of the blast reached the ambulance, shattering the splintered windshield and raining glass down onto the dashboard.