Bell looked down at the dead man as he passed him. He began to load rounds into the fancy-looking twenty gauge as he walked into the brightly lit hotel lobby.

Bell looked out on the lit outdoor pool and large patio area. Some kind of party had been going on by the pool when the Howlers attacked. A band had been playing; a wooden dance floor had been erected over the middle of the large heated pool, steam coming off of its surface. Men’s and women’s bodies floated in the pool. Some of the band’s equipment had been tossed into the water during the fight with the Howlers. Bell saw a set of brass cymbals lying at the bottom of the deep end, surreal.

“We have to get away from them,” Lacy said behind him.

Bell turned around. “How? There’s two of them and they’re well-armed,” Bell said. And we need their car. All the cars in the parking lot have had their windows smashed—did you notice? We’d freeze in any one of them. Try calling your father. Tell him where we are. Tell him to come get us,” Bell said.

Lacy took out her cell phone and dialed her father’s number. “There’s no signal,” she said.

“We’ll go up to the top floor and try,” Bell said. “Maybe there’ll be a signal up there.”

“I’m scared, Ken,” Lacy said. It was the first time she’d used his name.

“Me too,” Bell said. He walked to where they’d set up the food service. The table had somehow survived the mayhem and was full of food. The food warmers were still on, as were the gas heaters around the pool’s verge, their gas elements glowing blue-orange.

“Let’s eat something. Then we’ll go up on the roof.”

“I can’t,” Lacy said. “Eat, I mean.”

“Eat something. If we’re going to make it out of this, we have to eat,” Bell said. He was contemplating going down to the bar and killing the two. But he was afraid that if he failed, Lacy would be alone and doomed. He made a sandwich out of French bread and cheese and began to eat ravenously while looking for a beer. He found the drinks and opened a beer and guzzled it. Lacy looked at him. He realized he’d not eaten much of anything since that morning more than twelve hours ago, and what seemed like a lifetime now. He looked at his watch; it was 3:00 in the morning.

Lacy walked toward the food and picked up a piece of French bread.

“Put some protein on it,” Bell said. She did what he said. “And drink something, too.” He put down the shotgun and sat down on an Adirondack chair and looked out at the pool floating with debris and dead bodies, some of them bleeding into the water. It was only yesterday, he realized, that the world had been totally normal. He’d been planning a trip with his brother. They were going to meet in Scottsdale and watch the Giants play their first spring training game.

“Are they everywhere?” Lacy said. She came and sat on a chaise longue next to him. A pretty girl had been beaten with an ice bucket and was lying a few feet away, her chest having been bashed in with an electric guitar lying near her. Lacy turned away, looking for something to look at that wouldn’t sicken her.

“I don’t know,” Bell said. He picked up the beer and drained it. The alcohol made him feel better, looser and almost normal. He was physically exhausted in a way he’d never been before. It was as if he weighed 300 pounds. He made another sandwich and ate it, then another. While he ate the third one, he went around to the dead bodies and began to rifle purses and men’s pants pockets, looking for their wallets.

“What are you doing?” Lacy said, watching him rifle the dead.

“We may need to pay them if there’s no cell signal. We may be on our own,” Bell said, not looking at her.

“Let’s kill them,” Lacy said.

He found a wallet belonging to one of the well-dressed, dead party-goers. He opened it and pulled it out, but there was no cash. He saw a business card: Michael C. Fox, Vice President, Facebook.

Bell tossed the man’s empty wallet into the pool and moved onto the next body. Only the wait staff carried any cash; the well-to-do guests had none. When he was finished walking around the pool and the dance floor, he had $520 in cash. He looked up and saw Lacy picking up a purse. A young girl, about twenty, had had been dragged to the edge of the pool and drowned; her long red hair was floating around her shoulders, losing its dyed color that was bleeding slowly out into the pool.

*   *   *

Price heard a loud banging on the glass. A Howler was trying to bust the glass with a chair, but the plastic office chair bounced off the bulletproof glass. The Howler stared at Price,  the thing’s mouth covered in dried spit. Price saw that the thing had blue eyes; it finally turned away and headed aimlessly into the city room.

Howard Price had been locked in his office for the last twenty-four hours. He watched the same three Howlers rummaging around the Herald’s destroyed city room. Howlers had attacked the office park, scores of them, coming in droves off the nearby highway. He’d been terrified and had been able to escape to his interior office. Several of his staff had stupidly run out of the building and been killed outside; but he’d known better, somehow, than to run blindly away. The bullet-proof glass, installed after a mass shooting in one of the office park’s buildings, had successfully kept the Howlers from breaking into his office and killing him. They couldn’t break it. He was able to concentrate on the satellite radio reports, and on his theories about what was happening.

Miles Hunt had called him with his own theory about the irradiated food being the cause, but he knew it couldn’t be that. The CEO of Genesoft had told him, in fact, that the new genetically irradiated foods had not yet been shipped. There had been a problem with the company’s new irradiation technology, which the company’s top executives had kept from everyone, even their investment bankers, who were about to bring Genesoft’s stock public in New York.

The CEO had sworn Price to secrecy in exchange for stock options. Price had been persuaded to join the conspiracy because he knew the paper’s owner was going to fire him at the end of the month, for continuing his 9/11 crusade. He was facing life at sixty with no savings to speak of, no job prospects, and no family. His wife had left him years before for an up-and-coming reality television producer. The producer, from an old-line Hollywood family and very wealthy, had in turn left Price’s ex-wife, gotten a sex-change operation and become a woman called Cathy, who then starred in her own reality TV show. Price’s ex-wife, traumatized in the worst way by her second husband’s gender change, had called Price and pleaded with him to take her back, but he’d refused.

Since then he’d been all on his own—lonely, yes, but not unhappy either. He’d taken the CEO’s bribe and received a million dollars’ worth of Genesoft stock options, in exchange for running articles that touted the companies new products and their “health benefits”—all of it a lie cooked up by a fancy PR firm in Chicago. Price had been ashamed of himself, but he was scared to death of ending up homeless. He’d reached the end of his emotional and financial rope. The very real prospect of being penniless and out on the street had frightened him in a way he’d never been frightened before.

Howard, his blue pinstriped shirt untucked and his tie off, looked at the maps he’d pinned to the wall. He wiped sweat off the back of his neck. For some reason the building’s heat had been turned up during the attack. The building’s emergency generators had, he guessed, only a few hours of diesel fuel left. The rest of Nevada City, he’d heard on the radio, was without power since the Howlers had attacked and destroyed a central power station in Sacramento, which serviced much of the mid-Sierra region. Many of the buildings in the office park were already completely dark.