Miles walked to the window. The new five hundred-car employee parking lot lay below. It was almost empty.

        *   *   *

A siren wailed in the distance when Dr. Poole came back from lunch at the Copper Penny across the street. The doctor knew his waiting room would be full of one-o’clock appointments, and he felt oddly bored with the predictable afternoon. Looking at schoolboy tonsils and twisted ankles, he thought. You know you love them. If it was predictable sometimes, it was always gratifying to be respected and needed. Coming here to live was your idea, he reminded himself. He had quit the Center for Disease Control to bring up his kids in the mountains, as far away from big cities as he could get them. He and his wife joked that they would be the first black couple in America with children on the U.S. Olympic ski team.

   Marvin heard the siren again and realized that it was coming into town and getting louder. Must be a fire. He stepped into his office through a side door and buzzed his receptionist.

  “Okay. I’m back, Lisa. Is it full out there?”

“Is this the flu season?” his receptionist asked.

“Let the games begin,” Marvin said.

Two sheriff’s deputies dragged Willis Good by the arms through the waiting room and into Poole’s office. Good’s thigh was bleeding horribly from a laceration that was hemorrhaging badly; the bleeding had soaked his jeans so that the bottom of his right pant leg was saturated. Willis was screaming at the men who were dragging him.

“Let me go, they’re on the way. Let me go!”

The officers were fighting with Good, who was acting like a man possessed by the devil. He kicked out with both feet. He caught Marvin’s receptionist dead in the nose with the heel of his right dress shoe, knocking her into the wall and splattering her face with blood from his leg wound. She screamed in pain as blood began pouring from her nose; she sagged to the floor. Patients in the waiting room were trying to dodge Willis’ feet as he lashed out at them too, like a mechanical devil. A mother holding her toddler tried to run by Willis but he caught her with a vicious kick, sending her and the child into a table, knocking it over and sending magazines spilling across the floor as children and mothers screamed. The two sheriffs, trying desperately to control Good, were losing the battle.

“What the hell is going on here?” Poole shouted over the bedlam. He’d rushed out of one of the two examining rooms and into the chaotic waiting room. He immediately ran to his receptionist, holding her bleeding nose, and tried to lift her up.

“Just get his ass sedated, Doc,” yelled one of the deputies, battling Willis. The cop managed to smack Willis in the temple with the butt of his Maglite, but it seemed only to stun him. In a moment Willis was at it again, kicking out with both his feet like a wild animal. The deputy struck Good a second time, much harder. Willis went limp, knocked unconscious by the blow. Poole broke for the drug cabinet in the hallway and began rifling the drawers, frantically looking for something he could knock Willis out with.

Willis’ eyes were bloodshot and frightened when he regained consciousness two hours later.

“Willis, are you all right, son?” Dr. Poole asked. It was quiet. The two sheriff’s deputies had stayed behind until they too were called away by another emergency—some kind of riot at the Target on Highway 50. Marvin had assured them he could handle Willis. It seemed as if Timberline had been turned upside down in the matter of a few hours.

Marvin closed the door to the examination room. He’d had to send his receptionist home after bandaging her broken nose. The waiting room was a mess, his patients long gone. The chairs and tables all turned over. The men had struggled with Good a second time, until Poole had finally jabbed Willis with a 25-milligram dose of Haloperidol that had knocked him out almost immediately.

“Are they here yet?” Willis asked, looking up at the doctor.

“Who?” Marvin asked.

Willis started to get up, swinging his feet off the examination table. “What time is it, doctor?”

“Four o’clock,” Marvin said.

“What day?”

“Tuesday.”

“Have they gotten here yet?” Willis asked.

“Who?”

“The things. The things we saw, T.C. and I. Where’s T.C.? T.C. Where is he?”

“T.C.?”

“T.C. McCauley, goddamn it. He saved my life out there,” Willis said. He tried to sit up.

The doctor put his hand on his chest. Poole had cut Willis’ shirt off so that he was naked from the waist up. Good’s shoulders were very pale under the examination room’s harsh fluorescent lights. His jeans had been cut away from his wound, Marvin having cut his pants up the thigh so he could work on the bleeding leg. Willis had a horrible laceration, now stitched up—thirty reddish stitches visible and running from Good’s left knee all the way to his upper thigh. The young man’s face was drawn and ashen from the loss of blood. He seemed to Marvin to have aged ten years.

“I don’t know,” Marvin said. “You had a bad injury from the crash.”

Willis began to laugh. A portion of hair was missing from his scalp. Marvin had cut the tangled bloody hair off the side of Willis’ head, thinking he’d been cut there too. Clumps of hair and shirt covered the floor at Poole’s feet. The doctor glanced down at the mess of hair and bloody clothes. Have to move him to the hospital in Sacramento.

“Kill me, please, Marvin.” Willis said, sitting up. He reached out and grabbed Marvin’s white lab coat, pulling him close, looking at Poole in a way no one had ever looked at the doctor before. Haloperidol dilated Good’s pupils. “I want you to kill me before they get here. I don’t want it to happen to me a third time,” he said. “Not what happened to them, please. I don’t want to be here when they come,” Good pleaded. “I know they’ll come. It happened to Ann and to T.C. I know. Do you understand?”

“When who comes?” Poole said, thinking that Willis had completely lost his mind.

“Them—those things that attacked T.C. and me on the road,” Good said. “I saw what they did. T.C. … he got sick, too. I was bringing him back here to Timberline when we were attacked.”

Marvin heard the phone ring outside in the office. He looked into the young man’s eyes.

“I want you to rest. I’m going to call an ambulance. You’ll have to go to the hospital in Sacramento. You’ve had a bad head injury, too, on top of the nasty cut, I’m afraid.”

Dr. Poole went out to the front office and picked the office landline phone up from the floor. It immediately began to ring.

“Marvin.” The doctor heard his wife’s voice. “Honey, Vivian’s sick. Should I bring her into town? I think it’s that flu you were talking about.” Marvin glanced into the surgery. He saw Good slide off the examination table and stand over a tray of instruments, his back to the doctor.

“What’s wrong with her?” Marvin said. He watched Willis hold himself up, unsteady, using the corner of the examination table to support himself.

“She’s got a fever, a hundred and three,” his wife said.

“I’ll come home. Put her to bed. And stay with her.” Marvin put down the phone. He walked back into the surgery.

Willis turned around and faced him. He had a short stainless-steel scalpel in his hand. He raised it and put the short fat blade against his throat.

“I’m not going to be here when they come,” Willis said. “Do you understand that? I had to kill my own wife. She’d turned into one of those things . . .  No one believed me, and now it’s too late.”