“We should let ‘em burn,” he grumbled, reaching in to drag the men out with Spooky’s help, tossing them roughly onto the closest suburban lawn. He keyed his mike. “Van and team out of commission and infected. We’re extracting; people are already coming out of their houses.” Skull popped a smoke grenade and tossed it into the van. The flaming smoke mix soon ignited the dripping gasoline and the vehicle caught fire with a whoosh. By that time they were around the block and heading toward the ORP.

Zeke and Larry had already pulled through the alley up to his house’s back gate, blasting twice on the horn. Zeke exited, fastening the barrier out of the way, and then bolted inside. A moment later he ran out, carrying a skeletal boy wrapped in a blanket. Larry held the door open. Right behind him followed an athletic woman of about forty and a girl of eight.

“Hi, Cass. Hi, Millie,” Larry rumbled.

“Hi, Mister Larry!” piped the girl.

Cassandra nodded to Larry, handing him a suitcase.

Headlights appeared and the roaring of an engine sounded at the end of the alley, accelerated toward them. Cass shoved Millie into the Land Rover, while Larry reached for his shotgun under the seat.

Muzzle flashes sparkled from both sides of the oncoming vehicle, and Larry’s twelve-gauge roared over and over. Zeke hunched over Ricky, shielding him with his body, while Cassandra drew a pistol from the small of her back, taking cover behind the door to return a rapid hail of bullets.

The headlights wobbled, then skewed leftward as the oncoming vehicle bucked and rolled down the alley with a grinding crash of metal. Cassandra reloaded while Larry ran at the smoking wreck of a Suburban. He looked inside, seeing two men unconscious. He reached in, taking their guns and tossing them into a nearby garbage can, then knelt down among the wreckage.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said aloud to himself, then bit them each in turn. “Feel like a freakin’ vampire.” He returned to the Land Rover.

Larry was almost there when he heard an anguished sob, choked off, then a high keening. He leaped forward, shotgun searching for a target, but there wasn’t anything to shoot.

Cassandra knelt over Zeke, who lay stretched out on the ground. Millie stood there wailing, her small hands tangled in her hair, pulling. Larry pushed her gently aside, confident the Eden Plague would make it all right.

Not this time.

Zeke’s eyes stared sightless at the glowing suburban sky. Blood and brains leaked from the hole in his head. Cassandra stroked his face, crooning, “No, no, no…”

Larry cursed, a string of bitter vulgarities. “Come on, Cass, he’s gone. He’s gone. More might be on the way, we have to get going, we have to break contact.”

Cassandra growled with frustration, muttering under her breath, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Help me get him in. We’re not leaving him.”

Together they rolled Zeke in a blanket, then manhandled his body into the back of the SUV. Larry drove them away from the scene as rapidly as he could without attracting attention.

“What was that?” asked Spooky over the radio.

“They got Zeke. Lucky head shot. He’s gone,” Larry answered miserably.

Silence. Then, “Shit.”

“Meet at the ORP. We still have to get Zeke’s mom.”

“What?” asked Cassandra. “Why? She’s in a facility. What can we do?” Her face was a frozen mask of iron control.

“Because we can cure her Alzheimer’s, we think. It’s a new thing. But if we cure her we have to take her with us because if they find out we did, they will turn her into a guinea pig in a lab somewhere.”

Cassandra digested this as they met at the ORP. “All right, I’ll tell you where to go. Do you think they’ll be watching her?”

“We have to hope not. They can’t be everywhere.”

Twenty minutes later they pulled into a complex labeled “Green Pastures Managed Care Home.” They took her out the back way in a wheelchair, dodging a sleepy staff, and got her into the vehicle.

The return trip to the bunker was a smooth surreal nightmare. Ten bags of truck stop ice packed Zeke’s body in the back of the Cherokee. Larry drove the Land Rover, silent, bleak. Zeke’s mother Beulah sat buckled into the front seat, humming softly to herself for a while before falling asleep. Cassandra sobbed from time to time, an arm around each of her children in the back seat. Millie slept most of the way, which was a relief; it wasn’t real to her.

About two hours out, Ricky spoke up. “I’m hungry, mama.” He reached up to grasp her arm.

“Ricky!” She took his hand in hers, feeling the strength of his grip.

“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”

“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”

“That’s not for kids!”

Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”

“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”

Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.

He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.

“His hands are strong! That’s amazing; just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”

“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.

She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.

-19-

Elise and Daniel met them hand in hand at the cavern with all the vehicles, what they called the Motor Pool. Daniel knew there was something seriously wrong when he saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.

“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” Daniel saw the Land Rover but didn’t see Zeke. By the time he had looked around, the others had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.

Daniel stared at it in shock. At them. “How?” Elise clutched his hand, her eyes pouring tears.

“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then, than Daniel had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.

Daniel wanted to make some kind of gesture to Skull. If it had been Larry, he might have hugged him. He settled for putting a hand on the bald man’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”

Skull shrugged Daniel’s hand off, turning away. Daniel could smell his barely-buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.

They took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, they claimed. Daniel got the family settled into quarters. Elise stayed with them, and even though they’d only just met, the two women clung to each other in sisterly comfort. The children seemed to accept her naturally as a second mother, or at least an older sister. Eventually they all slept.

Daniel’s sleep was troubled with images of death and horror, of bodies lying asleep and he couldn’t wake them. He woke in the middle of the night, thinking, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way!

But he knew everyone died eventually.

The next morning brought some relief. When Daniel got to breakfast he found Ricky shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie and Elise at the table with him, eating more sedately. He got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them. He spoke to the boy. “How you doing, sport? You remember me?”