I stared, eyes finally adjusting to the light. There was some kind of sticky, rusty brown matter encrusted in Tyrel’s knuckles and matted in the hair on his fingers. My eyes moved to the Ka-Bar dagger on his vest, the stains on the sheath, the smudges on the handle. I said, “Ty, where did you go last night?”

“Hunting. I went hunting.”

The next question was obvious, so I didn’t bother asking it. We sat in the cold silence of the room, Tyrel’s fingers drumming on the rifle’s foregrip, until finally he said, “The Rot finally stopped crooning about 0100. Gave ‘em another hour just to be sure, then went down to check out the hallway where Rojas got shot. Found the slug in the wall; a .308, or maybe a .300 Win mag. By the size of the hole in the wall, it had to have come from less than 300 meters.” He shook his head. “Went straight through him, the poor bastard. Never had a chance. Round like that, at that range, doesn’t much matter where it hits you. Anyway, it gave me a good idea where the shot came from. Weren’t too many angles a sniper could have used, not with all the other buildings in the way. So I worked my way to the north side of town, used the buildings for cover. Took a while. Finally got to where I was pretty sure the shot came from and started searching with the night eye.”

He patted the night vision scope on his carbine. “Spotted him on the third floor of an office building. Had a nice setup, rifle rest on top of a desk, nice comfortable chair to sit in.”

His hand strayed to his Ka-Bar and touched the blood smudges. “Took me about half an hour to sneak up on him. Grabbed him from behind before he could do anything about it. Told him, ‘You killed my friend, you son of a bitch. Now you’re gonna die.’ Then slit his throat.”

Tyrel made a cutting motion across the front of his neck. “You wanna hear some shit, though?”

I did not like the look on Tyrel’s face. “What?”

“It wasn’t a him. It was a her. The sniper was a woman.” He laid the rifle on the ground with shaking hands and stared at it. “Wouldn’t have changed anything, though. Even if I had known, I still would have done it.”

The room was silent for a time. Birds welcomed the dawn outside, chirping and whistling back and forth, oblivious to the doings of man, alive or dead. The sun coming in through the window grew brighter until I felt warmth through the leg of my pants. I picked up the sniper rifle and said, “Tyrel, it’s warming up. We have to go.”

He nodded and stood, hands balled into fists at his sides. “I still would have done it.”

“Tyrel, we need to move.”

He looked up, eyes bloodshot, marked underneath in shades of black, “But if I had known, I don’t think I would have cut her throat.”

I studied the flint-sharp lines his face, half illuminated in gold, the other half in shadow, and wondered which one of us he was talking to.

FIFTY-EIGHT

The wagon was moving away from us.

I drew my pistol and fired a single shot into the trees. Even from a hundred yards, I could see the driver jump. His initial reaction was to lay flat against the bench, snatch a rifle from the buckboard, and take aim in our direction. Tyrel and I both raised our hands and waved them over our heads.

The driver’s face was bright red when he reached us. “What the hell is wrong with you two? There’s infected all over the place.”

“Relax,” Tyrel said. “If they were close enough to be a problem, they’d have heard your wagon. You hear any moans?”

The driver’s anger dimmed somewhat. “No. I guess I don’t.”

“Then why don’t you hop down and help us with the bags?”

“I ain’t no goddam porter,” the man said. “Move your own cargo.”

“You just used a double negative,” I replied. “Which means you are, in fact, a porter. Now if you want any more business from us in the future, my friend, you’ll hop your ass down here and get to work. You might be cheap, but you’re not the only game in town.”

He looked confused for a moment, shook his head, said something unpleasant, and set the brake.

When we had left Woodland Park, we knew our bags of salvage were too heavy to carry more than a few hundred yards. We also knew it would not be long before the infected thawed out, so after retrieving our gear from where we had cached it in the hills, we liberated a tarp from an abandoned house and used sticks and paracord to improvise a sled. What followed was a long, difficult hike, and we were both exhausted by the time we reached the rendezvous.

Overhead, clouds began to gather. Low, dark, gunmetal gray clouds born along on a high, speeding wind. On the slopes above us, snow blew down in swirling plumes, scattering on the surrounding pines and cedars. The wind funneled down into the valley, and by the time we finished loading the salvage, we had to cover our eyes against the stinging ice and lean forward to keep our footing.

“We need to move,” the driver shouted over the howling noise. “Bad weather coming in.”

No shit, detective. “Let’s go then,” I said.

As we hurried back toward town, the horses tossed their heads and whinnied at the storm. The driver leaned over to Tyrel and asked, “Where’s that Mexican fella that was with you?”

Tyrel set his jaw and shook his head.

“What happened?”

“None of your goddam business.”

The driver looked offended. He started to say something else, but Tyrel turned his flat black-eyed glare toward him, and the driver snapped his mouth shut.

The wind blew strong and cold on the way back to the Springs.

*****

The headquarters for the Colorado Springs Volunteer Militia Corps occupied the gutted remains of what had once been a big-box retail store.

Outside was an empty parking lot, the cars abandoned there long since hauled away for scrap. On the inside, shelves and display stands had been cleared out and replaced with rows of desks, file cabinets, and locked storage containers. The containers covered two-thirds of the floor space and were where the militias kept the majority of their after-tax wealth.

After putting our salvage in storage on the west side of town, Tyrel and I hired a carriage to drive us to headquarters to deliver the bad news about Rojas. When we arrived, LaGrange was at his desk, as usual. Sometimes I wondered if the man ever left the building when not on a mission. Maybe he slept and took his meals there and only went outside to use the latrine.

He looked up when he heard us coming, his face its usual mask of barely concealed irritation. His eyes flicked back and forth between us.

“I don’t like the looks on your fool-ass faces,” he said.

Tyrel and I sat down in two of the three chairs facing him. He put down his pen and stared at us. “Well? What is it?”

I looked at Tyrel, who nodded to me. “We ran into some trouble in Woodland Park,” I said, not meeting LaGrange’s eyes. “Rojas … he didn’t make it.”

The irritation left LaGrange’s face. His cheeks sagged and the lines around his eyes seemed to deepen. “Shit. What happened, infected get him?”

I shook my head. “No. Salvage hunters. Rogue group, never seen them before.”

The sagging cheeks began to darken. “Where are they now?”

“Dead,” Tyrel said. “We killed them.”

“All of them?”

Ty nodded.

LaGrange heaved a sigh. “Any indication of where they came from?”

“No,” Tyrel said. “We searched, but all they had were clothes and weapons. That was it.”

No one spoke for a stretch, the noise of the other militias doing business around us a low din of voices and chairs scraping over concrete. LaGrange opened a desk drawer, removed two forms from a binder, and held them out to us. We took them, and he shoved a cup full of pens in our direction.

He said, “Start from the beginning.”

I spent the next hour describing what happened, leaving out the incriminating parts and omitting certain items of salvage we recovered, such as a dozen grenades. Tyrel and I had gotten our story straight on the way over, so I knew his account would match up with mine with no discrepancies. When we were finished, LaGrange read both our reports and nodded in satisfaction.