FIFTEEN
When all time ended, and the world had lost its memory, and the man that he was had receded from view like a ship sailing away, rounding the blade of the earth with his old life locked in its hold; and when the gyring stars gazed down upon nothing, and the moon in its arc no longer remembered his name, and all that remained was the great sea of hunger on which he floated forever—still, inside him, in the deepest place, was this: one year. The mountain and the turning seasons, and Amy. Amy and the Year of Zero.
They arrived at the camp in darkness. Wolgast drove the last mile slowly, following the beams of the headlights where they broke through the trees, braking to crawl over the worst of the potholes, the deep ruts left by winter runoff. Fingering branches, dripping with moisture, scraped the length of the roof and windows as they passed. The car was junk, an ancient Corolla with huge, gaudy rims and an ashtray full of yellowed butts; Wolgast had stolen it at a mobile home park outside Laramie, leaving the Lexus with the keys in the ignition and a note on the dash: Keep it, it’s yours. An old mutt on a chain, too tired to bark, had watched with disinterest as Wolgast jimmied the ignition, then carried Amy from the Lexus to the Toyota, where he laid her across the backseat, cluttered with fast food wrappers and empty cigarette packs.
For a moment Wolgast had wished he could be there to see the owner’s face when he awoke in the morning to find his old car replaced by an eighty-thousand-dollar sports sedan, like Cinderella’s pumpkin turned into a coach. Wolgast had never driven anything like it in his life. He hoped that the new owner, whoever he was, would give himself the gift of driving the car once, before finding a way to make it quietly vanish.
The Lexus belonged to Fortes. Had belonged, Wolgast reminded himself, because Fortes was dead. Fortes, James B. Wolgast had never actually learned his first name until he read the registration card. A Maryland address, which probably meant USAMRIID, maybe NIH. Wolgast had tossed the registration out the window into a wheat field somewhere near the Colorado-Wyoming border. But he’d kept the contents of the wallet he’d found on the floor beneath the driver’s seat: a little over six hundred dollars in cash and a titanium Visa.
But all that was hours ago, time’s passage magnified by the distance they had traveled. Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, the last passed entirely in darkness, viewed only through the cones of the Corolla’s headlamps. They’d crossed into Oregon at sunrise on the second morning, traversed the wrinkled plateaus of the state’s arid interior as the day wore away. All around them the empty fields and golden, windswept hills were blooming with purple sagebrush. To keep alert, Wolgast drove with the windows open, swirling the interior of the car with its sweet perfume: the smell of boyhood, of home. In midafternoon he felt the Toyota’s engine straining; they’d begun, at last, to climb. As darkness was falling the Cascades rose to meet them, a brooding bulk that sawtoothed the rays of the setting sun and lit the western sky in a fiery collage of reds and purples, like a wall of stained glass. High up, their rocky tips glinted with ice.
“Amy,” he said. “Wake up, honey. Look.”
Amy lay across the backseat, covered with a cotton blanket. She was still weak, had slept most of the last two days. But the worst seemed over. Her skin looked better, the waxy pallor of fever worn away. That morning she’d actually managed a few bites of an egg sandwich and some sips of chocolate milk that Wolgast had bought at a drive-through. One funny thing: she was acutely sensitive to sunlight. It seemed to cause her physical pain, and not just to her eyes. Her whole body recoiled from it, as if from an electric charge. At a service station he’d purchased her a pair of sunglasses—movie-star pink, the only ones small enough to fit her face—and a foam trucker’s cap with the John Deere logo, to pull down over her eyes. But even with the hat and glasses, she’d barely peeked her head from the blanket all day.
At the sound of his voice, she rose against the tidal pull of sleep and followed his gaze out the windshield. Still wearing the pink sunglasses, she squinted into the sunlight, cupping her hands around her temples. The wind of the open car tossed the long strands of hair about her face.
“It’s … bright,” she said quietly.
“The mountains,” he explained.
He drove the final miles by instinct, following unmarked roads that took him ever deeper into the forested folds of the mountains. A hidden world: where they were going there were no towns, no houses, no people at all. At least that was how he remembered it. The air was cold and smelled of pine. The gas gauge was nearly on empty. They passed a darkened general store that Wolgast recalled vaguely, though the name was not familiar—MILTON’S DRY GOODS/HUNTING, FISHING LIC.—and began their final ascent. Three forks later he was on the verge of panic, thinking he’d gotten them lost, when a series of small details seemed to rise before him out of the past: a certain slope of the roadway, a glimpse of star-dressed sky as they rounded a bend, and then, beneath the Toyota’s wheels, the expansive accoustics of open air as they crossed the river. All just as it had been when he was small, his father beside him, driving him up to camp.
Moments later they came to a break in the trees. By the side of the road stood a weathered sign reading, BEAR MOUNTAIN CAMP, and beneath that, hanging from a pair of rusted chains, FOR SALE, with the name of a real estate agency and a phone number with a Salem exchange. The sign, like many Wolgast had seen along the road, was pocked with bullet holes.
“This is the place,” he said.
The camp’s driveway, a mile long, traced the crest of a high embankment above the river, then hooked right around an outcrop of boulders and took them into the trees. The place, he knew, had been closed up for years. Would the buildings even still be there? What would they find? The charred ruins of a devastating fire? Roofs rotted and collapsed under the weight of winter snow? But then, out of the trees, the camp emerged: the building the boys had called Old Lodge—because it was old even then—and behind and around it, the smaller outbuildings and cabins, about a dozen all told. Beyond lay more woods and a pathway that descended to the lake, two hundred acres of glasslike stillness held in place by an earthen dam and shaped like a kidney bean. As they approached the lodge, the Toyota’s headlights flared across the front windows, momentarily creating the illusion of lights coming on inside, as if their arrival were expected—as if they had traveled not across the width of the country but back through time itself, across the gulf of thirty years to when Wolgast was a boy.
He pulled the car up to the porch and shut off the ignition. Wolgast felt, strangely, the urge to say a prayer of thanks, to acknowledge their arrival in some manner. But it had been many years since he’d done this—too many. He climbed from the car, into the stunning cold. His breath gathered in equine streams around his face. The beginning of May, and still the air seemed to hold the memory of winter. He stepped around to the trunk and keyed the lock. When he’d opened it the first time, in the parking lot of a Walmart west of Rock Springs, he’d found it full of empty paint cans. Now it held supplies—clothes for the two of them, food, toiletries, candles, batteries, a camp stove and bottles of propane, a few obvious tools, a first aid kit, a pair of down-filled sleeping bags. Sufficient to get them settled, though he would have to go down the mountain soon enough. Under the glow of the trunk’s bulb, he found what he was looking for and ascended the porch.
The hasp on the front door gave way with one hard yank of the Toyota’s tire iron. Wolgast turned on his flashlight and stepped inside. If Amy woke up alone, she might be frightened; but still he wanted to have a quick look around, to make sure the place was safe. He tried the light switch by the door, but nothing happened; the power was off, of course. Probably there was a backup generator somewhere, although he’d need fuel to get it going, and even then, who knew if it would work at all. He shone his beam around the room: a disorganized assemblage of wooden tables and chairs, a cast-iron woodstove, a metal office desk shoved against the wall, and above it a bulletin board, bare except for a single sheet of paper, curling with age. The windows were uncovered, but the glass had held; the space was tight and dry and, with the woodstove going, would warm up fast.
He followed his beam toward the bulletin board. WELCOME CAMPERS, SUMMER 2014, the paper read, and beneath it, filling the page, a list of names—the usual Jacobs and Joshuas and Andrews, but also a Sacha and even an Akeem—each followed by the number of the cabin to which he’d been assigned. Wolgast had been a camper for three years, the last—the summer he’d turned twelve—working as a junior counselor, sleeping in a cabin with a group of younger boys, many of them beset by a homesickness so debilitating it was like an illness. Between the ones who cried all night and the midnight antics of their tormentors, Wolgast had barely slept a wink all summer. And yet he’d never been so happy; those days were, in many ways, the best of his boyhood, a golden hour. It was, in fact, the very next autumn that his parents had taken him to Texas and all their troubles began. The camp had been owned by a man named Mr. Hale—a high school biology teacher with the deep voice and barrel rib cage of a linebacker, which he once had been. He was a friend of Wolgast’s father, though he’d never acknowledged this friendship through any special treatment that Wolgast could recall.
Mr. Hale had lived upstairs during the summers with his wife, in some kind of apartment. That’s what Wolgast was looking for now. He stepped through a swinging door off the common area and found himself in the kitchen: rustic pine cabinets, a pegboard of oxidizing pots and saucepans, a sink with an old-fashioned pump, and a stove and refrigerator with its door half open, all surrounding a wide pine-plank table. Everything was coated with a heavy scrim of dust. The stove was an old commercial unit, white steel, with a clock on the faceplate, the hands frozen at six minutes after three. He turned one of the burner dials and heard a hiss of gas.
From the kitchen, a narrow stairway ascended to the second floor, a warren of tiny rooms tucked under the eaves. Most were empty, but in two he found a couple of cots, the mattresses turned over to face the walls. And something else: in one of the rooms, on a trestle table by the window, an apparatus of dials and switches that he took to be a shortwave radio.
He returned to the car. Amy was still sleeping, curled beneath the blanket. He shook her gently awake.
She rose and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
“Home,” he told her.
He found himself, in those first days on the mountain, thinking of Lila. Strangely, his thoughts did not include a more general curiosity about the world, what was happening out there now. His days were consumed by chores, by setting the place to rights and attending to Amy; but his mind, free to go wherever it wished, chose to move over the past, hovering atop it like a bird over some immense body of water, no shoreline in sight, only the distant reflection of himself in its shining surface for company.
It was not true that he had loved Lila right away. But something had happened that felt like falling. He’d met her on a wintry Sunday when he came into the ER, suspended by the shoulders of two friends reeking of gymnasium sweat. Wolgast wasn’t much of a basketball player, hadn’t played at all since high school, but he had let himself be talked into playing on a team for a charity tournament—three-on-three, half-court, the stakes low as could be. Miraculously, they’d made it through two rounds before Wolgast went up for a jump shot and came down to a wet pop in his left Achilles tendon and then, as he melted to the floor—the shot bouncing sadly off the rim, adding insult, literally, to injury—an explosion of pain that brought tears to his eyes.
The ER doc who examined him declared the tendon ruptured and sent him upstairs, to an orthopedist. This was Lila. She stepped into the room, spooning the last of a cup of yogurt into her mouth, dropped it in the trash, and turned to the sink to wash her hands, all without once glancing at him.
“So.” She dried her hands and looked briskly at his chart, then at Wolgast, sitting on the table. She was not what Wolgast would have described, right off, as classically pretty, though there was something about her that caught him short, a feeling like déjà vu. Her hair, the color of cocoa, was held in a bun by some kind of stick. She was wearing a pair of black eyeglasses, very small, that rode down the slope of her narrow nose. “I’m Dr. Kyle. You hurt yourself playing basketball?”
Wolgast nodded sheepishly. “I’m not what you’d call an athlete,” he admitted.
At that moment her handheld buzzed at her waist. She peeked at it quickly, frowning. Then, with calm precision, she placed a single outstretched finger on the soft spot behind the third toe of his left foot.
“Press here.”
He did, or tried to. The pain was so fierce he thought he might be ill.
“What kind of work do you do?”
Wolgast swallowed. “Law enforcement,” he managed. “Jesus, that hurt.”
She was writing something on the chart. “Law enforcement,” she repeated. “As in, police?”
“FBI actually.”
He looked for a flicker of interest in her eyes but saw none. On her left hand, he noted, she wore no ring. Though this didn’t necessarily mean anything—maybe she removed it when she saw her patients.
“I’m sending you for a scan,” she said, “but I’m ninety percent sure the tendon is ruptured.”
“Meaning?”
She shrugged. “Surgery. I won’t lie. It’s not fun. An immobilizer for eight weeks, six months to fully recover.” She smiled ruefully. “Your basketball days are over, I’m sorry to say.”
She gave him something for the pain that made him instantly sleepy. He barely awoke when they wheeled him in for the MRI. When he opened his eyes again, Lila was standing at the foot of his bed. Somebody had pulled a blanket over him. He checked his watch to find it was nearly nine P.M. He’d been at the hospital for almost six hours.
“Are your friends still here?”
“I doubt it.”
She had scheduled him for surgery at seven o’clock the next morning. There were forms to sign, and then he’d be taken to a room for the night. She asked him if there was anybody he needed to call.
“Not really.” His head was still woozy from the Vicodin. “It seems a little pathetic, I guess. I don’t even have a cat.”
She was regarding him expectantly, as if waiting for him to say something else. He was on the verge of asking her if they’d met before when she broke the silence with a sudden, shining smile.
“Well, good,” she said.
Their first date, two weeks after Wolgast’s surgery, was dinner in the hospital cafeteria. Wolgast, on crutches, his left leg entombed in an apparatus of plastic and Velcro from knee to toe, was forced to wait at the table like an invalid while she fetched their food. She was wearing scrubs—she was on call all night, she’d explained, and would be sleeping at the hospital—but she’d put on a bit of lipstick and mascara, he saw, and brushed her hair.
Lila’s family was all back east, near Boston. After med school at BU—horrible, she said, the worst four years of her life, of anyone’s life, like being dragged from a car—she’d moved to Colorado for her residency in orthopedics. She thought she’d hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her.
“I mean, it seemed so normal here.” She was spreading cream cheese onto a bagel—breakfast for her, though it was nearly eight o’clock at night. “I guess I never even knew what normal was. It was just what an uptight Wellesley girl needed,” she explained.
Wolgast felt hopelessly outclassed, and told her so. She laughed brightly, with embarrassment, and quickly touched his hand. “You shouldn’t,” she said.
She worked long hours; seeing each other in any kind of customary way, going to restaurants or movies, was impossible. Wolgast was on disability and spent his days sitting around his apartment, feeling antsy; then he would drive to the hospital, and the two of them would eat dinner together in the cafeteria. She told him all about growing up in Boston, the daughter of college teachers, and about school, her friends and studies and a year she’d spent in France, trying to be a photographer. He got the idea she’d been waiting for somebody to come along in her life for whom all this would be new. He was wholly content to listen, to be that person.
They didn’t so much as hold hands until nearly a month had passed. They had just finished their dinner when Lila removed her glasses, leaned across the table, and kissed him, long and tenderly, her breath tasting of the orange she had just eaten.
“There,” she said. “Okay?” She looked around the room theatrically and lowered her voice. “I mean, I am, technically, your doctor.”
“My leg feels better already,” Wolgast said.
He was thirty-five, Lila thirty-one, when they married. A day in September: the ceremony was held on Cape Cod, at a small yacht club overlooking a tranquil bay of bobbing sailboats beneath a sky of crisp, autumnal blue. Nearly everybody who came was from Lila’s side of the family, which was huge, like some enormous tribe—so many aunts and uncles and cousins that Wolgast couldn’t keep count, couldn’t hope to keep everyone’s name straight. Half the women in attendance seemed to have been Lila’s roommates at one time or another, eager to tell him tales about various youthful escapades that seemed, in the end, to be all the same story. Wolgast had never been so happy. He drank too much champagne and stood on a chair to give a long, maudlin toast, utterly sincere, that ended with his singing, wincingly off-key, a verse from “Embraceable You.” Everyone laughed and applauded before sending them off under a corny torrent of rice. If anybody knew that Lila was four months pregnant, they didn’t say a word to him about it. Wolgast chalked this up to New England reserve, but then he realized that no one cared; everyone was honestly happy for them.
With Lila’s money—her income made his own look laughable—they bought a house in Cherry Creek, an older neighborhood with trees and parks and good schools, and waited for the baby to come. They knew she would be a girl. Eva had been the name of Lila’s grandmother, a fiery character who, according to family lore, had both sailed on the Andrea Doria and dated a nephew of Al Capone’s. Wolgast simply liked the name, and in any event, once Lila suggested it, it stuck. The plan was for Lila to work until her due date; after Eva was born, Wolgast would stay home with her for a year, and then Lila would go down to half-time at the hospital when he returned to the Bureau. A crazy plan, full of potential problems they both foresaw but didn’t dwell on. Somehow, they would make things work.
In her thirty-fourth week, Lila’s blood pressure went up, and her obstetrician put her on bed rest. Lila told Wolgast not to worry—it wasn’t so high that the baby was in any danger. She was a doctor, after all; if there was a real problem, she’d tell him. He worried that she’d worked too hard, spent too many hours on her feet at the hospital, and he was glad to have her home, lying about like a queen, calling down the stairs for her meals and movies and things to read.
Then one night, three weeks before her due date, he came home and found her sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bed as she held her head in agony.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
At the hospital, they told Wolgast her blood pressure was 160 over 95, a condition known as preeclampsia. That was the source of the headache. They were concerned about seizures, about Lila’s kidneys, about harm to the baby. Everyone was very serious, especially Lila, whose face was gray with worry. They would have to induce, her doctor told him. A vaginal delivery was best in cases like this, but if she didn’t deliver in six hours, they would have to do a section.
They hooked her up to a Pitocin drip and a second IV, of magnesium sulfate, to suppress seizures. By this time it was after midnight. The magnesium, the nurse said, with infuriating cheerfulness, would be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable how? Wolgast asked. Well, the nurse said, it was hard to explain, but she wouldn’t like it. They hooked her up to a fetal monitor, and after that they waited.
It was awful. Lila, on the bed, moaned in pain. The sound was like nothing Wolgast had ever experienced; it rocked him to the core. It felt like tiny fires, Lila said, all over. Like her own body hated her. She had never felt so terrible. Whether this was the magnesium or the Pitocin, Wolgast didn’t know, and nobody would answer his questions. The contractions began, hard and close, but the OB said she wasn’t dilated enough, not even close. Two centimeters, tops. How long could this go on? They had been to the classes, done everything right. No one had said it would be like this, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
Finally, just before dawn, Lila said she had to push. Had to. Nobody believed she was ready but the doctor checked her and found, miraculously, that she was at ten centimeters. Everybody began running around, rearranging the room with all its wheeled objects, snapping on fresh gloves, folding away a section of the bed below Lila’s pelvis. Wolgast felt useless, a rudderless ship at sea. He took Lila’s hand as she pushed, once, twice, three times. Then it was over.
Somebody held out a pair of angled scissors, for Wolgast to cut the cord. The nurse put Eva in a warmer and did her Apgars. Then she put a hat on the baby’s tiny head and wrapped her in a blanket and handed her to Wolgast. How astonishing! Suddenly it was all behind them, all the pain and panic and worry, and here was this sparkling new being in the room. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this, the feel of a baby, his daughter, in his arms. Eva was small, just five pounds. Her skin was warm and pink—the pink of sun-ripened peaches—and, as he pressed his face close to hers, gave off a smoky smell, as if she’d been plucked from a fire. They were sewing Lila up; she was still groggy from the drugs. Wolgast was surprised to find there was blood on the floor, a wide dark slick below her; in all the confusion, he had never seen this happen. But Lila was fine, the doctor said. Wolgast showed her their baby and then held Eva a long, long time, saying her name over and over, before they took her to the nursery.
· · ·
Amy grew stronger by the day, but her sensitivity to light did not abate. Wolgast found, in one of the outbuildings, stacks of plywood and a ladder, and a hammer and saw and nails. He had to measure and cut the boards by hand, then carry them up the ladder and hold them in place while he nailed, to seal the windows of the second floor. But after the long climb at the compound—a feat that, in hindsight, seemed completely incredible—this small, ordinary chore seemed like not so much.
Amy rested most of each day, awakening at dusk to eat. She asked him about where they were—Oregon, he explained, in the mountains, a place where he had gone to camp as a boy—but never why; she either knew already or didn’t care. The lodge’s propane tank was nearly full. He cooked small, easy meals on the stove, soups and stews from cans, crackers and cereal wetted with powdered milk. The camp’s water supply was faintly sulfurous but otherwise drinkable, and poured from the kitchen pump so icy cold it made his fillings tingle. He could see right away he hadn’t brought nearly enough food; he’d have to go down the mountain soon. In the basement he’d found boxes of old books—classic novels in a bound set, moldy with age and dampness—and at night under the glow of candlelight he read to her: Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Sometimes she would come out during the day, if it was cloudy, and watch him do the chores—cutting wood, fixing a hole in the roof under the eaves, trying to make heads or tails of an old gasoline generator he’d found in one of the sheds. Amy would sit on a tree stump in the shade, wearing her glasses and cap, with a long towel tucked under the headband to cover her neck. But these visits never lasted long; an hour, and her skin would turn a ferocious pink, as if scalded by hot water, and he’d send her back upstairs again.
One evening, after they had been at the camp for nearly three weeks, he took her down the path to the lake to bathe. Apart from her brief hours outside watching him work, she hadn’t ventured from the lodge, and never so far. At the base of the path was a rickety dock, extending thirty feet past the grassy shoreline. Wolgast stripped to his underclothes and told Amy to do the same. He’d brought towels, shampoo, a bar of soap.
“Do you know how to swim?”
Amy shook her head.
“All right, I’ll teach you.”
He took her by the hand and led her into the lake. The water was shockingly cold. They stepped together into deeper water, until it reached Amy’s chest. Wolgast picked her up then and, holding her horizontally, told her to move her arms and legs, like so.
“Let go,” she told him.
“Are you sure?”
She was breathing quickly. “Uh-huh.”
He released her; she sank like a stone. Through the ice-clear water, Wolgast could see that she’d stopped moving; her eyes were open and looking around, like an animal examining some new habitat. Then, with a startling grace, she extended her arms and brought them around, turning her shoulders and pushing herself through the water in a deft, froglike motion. A perfect whip kick: in an instant she was gliding along the sandy bottom, gone. Wolgast was about to dive in after her when she emerged ten feet away, in water that reached well over her head, smiling with exhilaration.
“Easy,” she said, treading with her legs. “Like flying.”
Wolgast, dumbfounded, could only laugh. “Be careful—” he said, but before he could finish she’d filled her lungs with a gulp of air and dived down again.
He washed her hair, did his best telling her how to do the rest. By the time they were done, the sky had darkened from purple to black. Stars by the hundreds, their flickering light doubled in the lake’s still surface; no sounds at all except for their own voices and the basal throb of the lake’s water against the shoreline. He led them up the path with the beam of his flashlight. They ate a dinner of soup and crackers in the kitchen, and afterward, he took her upstairs to her room. He knew she would be awake for hours; the night was her domain now, as it was becoming his own as well. Sometimes he’d sit up half the night, reading to her.
“Thank you,” Amy said as he was settling down with a book: Anne of Green Gables.
“What for?”
“For teaching me to swim.”
“It looked like you already knew. Somebody must have showed you.”
She considered this claim with a puzzled expression. “I don’t think so,” she said.
He didn’t know what to make of any of it. So much of Amy was a mystery. She seemed well—better than well, in fact. Whatever had happened to her at the compound, whatever the virus was, she appeared to have weathered it; and yet the business with the light was strange. And other things: why, for instance, did Amy’s hair not seem to grow? Wolgast’s hair now curled below his collar; and yet Amy, as he looked at her, appeared exactly the same. He’d never trimmed her fingernails either, nor seen her do this. And of course the deeper mysteries: What had killed Doyle and everyone else in Colorado? How could that have been both Carter and not Carter on the hood of the car? What had Lacey meant when she’d said to him that Amy was his, that he’d know what to do? It seemed so; he had known what to do. And yet he could explain none of this.
Later, when he finished reading for the night, he told her that in the morning he’d be going down the mountain. She was well enough, he thought, that she could stay in the lodge by herself. It would only be for an hour or two. He’d be back before she knew it, before she was even awake.
“I know,” she told him, and Wolgast didn’t know what to make of this, either.
He left at a little after seven. After so many weeks sitting idle, collecting pollen from the trees, the Toyota put up a long, wheezing protest when he tried to start it, but eventually the engine caught and held. The morning fog off the lake was just beginning to burn away. He put it in gear and began his long creep down the drive.
The closest real town was thirty miles away, but Wolgast didn’t want to go that far. If the Toyota broke down, he’d be stranded, and so would Amy. The gas gauge was close to empty in any event. He retraced the route of their arrival, pausing at each fork to double-check his memory. He saw no other vehicles, which wasn’t surprising in such a remote place; and yet this absence disturbed him. The world he was returning to, however briefly, felt like a different place than the one he’d left three weeks ago.
Then he saw it: MILTON’S DRY GOODS / HUNTING, FISHING LIC. In the dark, that first night, it had seemed larger than it was; in fact it was just a small, two-story house of weathered shingles. A cottage in the woods, like something in a fairy tale. No other cars were in the lot, though an old van, mid-1990s vintage, was parked on the grass at the rear. Wolgast exited the Toyota and stepped to the front door.
On the porch were half a dozen newspaper vending boxes, all empty but one: USA Today. He could see the large headline splashed across it through the dusty door, which was propped open. When he withdrew a copy, he found that the paper was just two folded sheets long. He stood on the porch and read.
CHAOS IN COLORADO
Rocky Mountain State Overrun by Killer Virus; Borders Sealed
Outbreaks Reported in Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming
President Places Military on High Alert, Asks the Nation to
Remain Calm in the Face of “Unprecedented Terroristic Threat”
WASHINGTON, May 18—President Hughes vowed tonight to take “all necessary measures” to contain the spread of the so-called Colorado fever virus and punish those responsible, declaring, “The righteous anger of the United States of America will swiftly befall the haters of liberty and the outlaw governments that give them harbor.”
The president spoke from the Oval Office in his first address to the nation since the crisis began, eight days ago.
“Unmistakable evidence exists that this devastating epidemic is not an occurrence of nature but the work of anti-American extremists, operating within our own borders but supported by our enemies abroad,” Hughes told an anxious nation. “This is a crime not only against the people of the United States but against all humanity.”
His speech came after a day when the first cases of the illness were reported in neighboring states, just hours after Hughes ordered Colorado’s borders closed and placed the nation’s military on high alert. All domestic and international air travel was also grounded by presidential order, leaving the nation’s transportation hubs in turmoil, as thousands of stranded travelers sought other means to get home.
Seeking both to reassure the country and counter growing criticism that his administration has been slow to act on the crisis, Hughes told the nation to prepare for a formidable struggle.
“I ask you tonight for your trust, your resolve, and your prayers,” the president told the country. “We will leave no stone unturned. Justice will be swift.”
The president did not specify which groups or nations were the targets of federal scrutiny. He also declined to elaborate on the nature of any evidence the administration had uncovered to indicate the epidemic is the work of terrorists.
Presidential spokesman Tim Romer, when asked about a possible military response, told reporters, “We’re ruling nothing out at this point.”
Reports from local officials inside the state indicate that as many as fifty thousand people may have died already. It is unclear how many of the victims succumbed to the disease itself and how many were slain by violent attacks at the hands of those infected. Early signs of exposure include dizziness, vomiting, and a high fever. After a brief incubation period—as short as six hours—the illness appears, in some cases, to bring about a marked increase in physical strength and aggressiveness.
“Patients are going crazy and killing everybody,” said one Colorado health official, who asked to remain anonymous. “The hospitals are like war zones.”
Shannon Freeman, spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, downplayed these reports as “hysteria” but conceded that communication with officials inside the quarantine zone had broken down.
“What we know is that this illness has a very high fatality rate, as high as fifty percent,” said Freeman. “Other than that, we can’t really tell what’s going on in there. The best thing anyone can do for the moment is stay indoors.”
Freeman confirmed reports of outbreaks in Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming, but declined to elaborate.
“That appears to be happening,” she said, adding, “Anyone who thinks they have been exposed should report to the nearest law enforcement official or hospital emergency room. That’s what we’re telling people at this point.”
The cities of Denver, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins, placed under martial law on Tuesday, were all but empty tonight, as residents ignored Colorado Governor Fritz Millay’s orders to “evacuate in place” and fled the cities in droves. Rumors that Homeland Security forces had been ordered to use deadly force to turn back refugees from the border were widespread but unconfirmed, as were reports that units of the Colorado National Guard had begun to evacuate the ill from hospitals and move them to an undisclosed location.
There was more; Wolgast read and read again. They were rounding up the sick and shooting them—that much seemed clear, if between the lines. May 18, Wolgast thought. The paper was three—no, four—days old. He and Amy had arrived at the camp on the morning of May 2.
Everything in the paper: it had happened in just eighteen days.
He heard movement in the store behind him—just enough to tell him he was being watched. Tucking the paper under his arm, Wolgast turned and stepped through the screen door. A small space, smelling of dust and age, crammed to the rafters with every kind of merchandise: camping supplies, clothing, tools, canned goods. A large buck’s head was suspended over a doorway, guarded by a beaded curtain, that led to the rear. Wolgast recalled when he’d come down here with his friends to buy candy and comic books. Back then, a spinning wire rack had stood by the front door: Tales from the Crypt, Fantastic Four, the Dark Knight series, Wolgast’s favorite.
On a stool behind the counter sat a large man, bald, in a checked flannel shirt, his jeans held up on his wide waist by a pair of red suspenders. On his hip he wore, in a tight leather holster, a .38 revolver. They exchanged wary nods.
“Paper’s two bucks,” the man said.
Wolgast took a pair of bills from his pocket and put them on the counter. “Got anything newer than this?”
“That’s the last I’ve seen,” the man said, tucking the bills into the register. “Guy who delivers hasn’t shown up since Tuesday.”
Which meant today was Friday. Not that it mattered.
“I need some supplies,” Wolgast said. “Ammunition.”
The man looked him over, his heavy gray eyebrows furrowed appraisingly. “What you got?”
“Springfield. A .45,” Wolgast said.
The man drummed his fingers on the counter. “Well, let’s have a look. I know you got it on you.”
Wolgast withdrew the gun from its place against his spine. It was the one Lacey had left on the floor of the Lexus. The clip was empty; whether she’d been the person to fire it or somebody else, Wolgast didn’t know. Maybe she had said something, but he couldn’t remember. In all the chaos it had been hard to tell what was what. In any event, the gun was familiar to him; Springfields were standard Bureau issue. He freed the clip and locked the slide to show the man it was empty and placed it on the counter.
The man took the weapon in his big hand and examined it. Wolgast could tell, from the way he turned it around, letting its finish hold the light, that he knew guns.
“Tungsten frame, beveled ejection port, titanium pin with the short trigger reset. Pretty fancy.” He looked at Wolgast expectantly. “I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a fed.”
Wolgast did his best to look innocent. “You could say I used to be. In a former life.”
His man’s face took up a sad smirk. He placed the gun on the counter. “A former life,” he said with a dispirited shake of his head. “Guess we’ve all got one of those. Let me take a look.”
He passed through the curtain into the back, returning a moment later with a small cardboard box.
“This is all I have in a .45 ACP. Keep some around for a fellow retired from the ATF, likes to take a twelve-pack up into the woods and shoot the cans as he empties them. Calls it his recycling day. But I haven’t seen him in a while. You’re the first person to come in here in most of a week. You might as well have them as anyone.” He placed the box on the counter: fifty rounds, hollow points. He tipped his head toward the counter. “Go on, they’re no good in the box. You go right ahead and load it if you want.”
Wolgast freed the clip and began thumbing rounds into place.
“Anyplace else I can get more?”
“Not unless you want to go down into Whiteriver.” The man tapped his breastbone, twice, with his index finger. “They’re saying you got to hit them right here. One shot. They go down like a hammer if you do it right. Otherwise, that’s it, you’re history.” He stated this fact flatly, without satisfaction or fear; he might have been telling Wolgast what the weather was. “Doesn’t matter if it used to be your sweet old grandma. She’ll drink you dry before you can aim twice.”
Wolgast finished loading the clip, pulled the slide to chamber a round, and checked the safety. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Internet. It’s all over.” He shrugged. “Conspiracy theories, government cover-ups. Vampire stuff. Most of it sounds half crazy. Hard to tell what’s bullshit and what ain’t.”
Wolgast returned his weapon to the hollow of his spine. He considered asking the man if he could use his computer, to see the news for himself. But he already knew more than enough. It was entirely possible, he realized, that he knew more than any person alive. He’d seen Carter and the others, what they could do.
“I’ll tell you one thing. There’s a guy, calls himself ‘Last Stand in Denver.’ Posting a video blog from a high-rise downtown. Says he’s barricaded in there with a high-powered rifle. Got some good footage, you should see these bastards move.” The man tapped his breastbone again. “Just remember what I told you. One shot. You don’t get two. They move at night, in the trees.”
The man helped Wolgast gather up supplies and carry them to the car: canned goods, powdered milk and coffee, batteries, toilet paper, candles, fuel. A pair of fishing rods and a box of tackle. The sun was high and bright; around them, the air seemed frozen with an immense stillness, like the silence just before an orchestra began to play.
At the back of the car, the two shook hands. “You’re up at Bear Mountain, aren’t you?” the man said. “You don’t mind my asking.”
There seemed no reason to hide it. “How did you know?”
“The way you came.” The man shrugged. “There’s nothing else up there except for the camp. Don’t know why they never could sell it.”
“I went there as a kid. Funny, it hasn’t changed at all. I guess that’s the point of places like that.”
“Well, you’re smart. It’s a good spot. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
“You should bug out, too,” Wolgast said. “Head higher into the mountains. Or go north.”
Wolgast could read it in the man’s eyes; he was making a decision.
“Come on,” he said finally. “I’ll show you something.”
He led Wolgast back into the store and passed through the beaded curtain. Behind it lay the store’s small living area. The air was stale and close, the shades drawn tight. An air conditioner hummed in the window. Wolgast paused in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust. In the center of the room was a large hospital bed on which a woman lay sleeping. The head of the bed was elevated at a forty-five-degree angle, showing her drawn face, which was tipped to the side, toward the light that pulsed in the shaded windows. Her body was covered with a blanket, but Wolgast could see how thin she was. On a small table were dozens of pill bottles, gauze and ointment, a chrome basin, syringes sealed in plastic; an oxygen tank, pale green, was parked beside the bed. A corner of the blanket had been drawn aside, exposing her naked feet. Cotton balls were tucked between her yellowed toes. A chair had been pulled up to the foot of the bed, and on it Wolgast saw a nail file and bottles of colored polish.
“She always liked to have pretty feet,” the man said quietly. “I was doing them for her when you came in.”
They retreated from the room. Wolgast didn’t know what to say. The situation was obvious; the man and his wife weren’t going anywhere. The two of them stepped back into the bright sunlight of the parking area.
“She has MS,” the man explained. “I was hoping to keep her at home as long as I could. That’s what we agreed, when she started to get bad last winter. They’re supposed to send a nurse, but we haven’t seen one in a while now.” He shifted his feet on the gravel and wetly cleared his throat. “My guess is, nobody’s making any more house calls.”
Wolgast told him his name. The man was Carl; his wife was Martha. They had two grown sons, one in California, the other in Florida. Carl had been an electrician at Oregon State down in Corvallis, until they’d bought the store and retired up here.
“What can I do?” Wolgast asked.
They’d shaken hands before but did so again. “Just keep yourself alive,” Carl said.
Wolgast was driving back to the camp when, suddenly, he thought of Lila. They were memories of another time, another life. A life that was over now—over for him, over for everyone. Thinking about Lila, as he had: he was saying goodbye.