How do you know that? Nilla demanded. The bear's life energy was flickering out. She felt a pang of guilt like a rippling in her stomach muscles but-hey. Stomach muscles. She look down and saw the four deep gashes there where the bear hit her first.

I know many things. I know some English, now. Before, chan fhaigh mi lorg air na facail!" He grinned sheepishly. Sometimes I slip back. I know you. I understand hunger, but do not know it. I talk to dead, you see. I learn.

Nilla frowned. What are you? I know you're not really here. I thought before you were a hallucination. You aren't though. You're real. He ignored her. I know what you are. You are shadow, like so many shadows. Different, though. Like fires in a longhouse, except... this one, it goes out. Covered fire. Then it comes back. Know it is you. Sometimes no fire is better signal than fire, yes? You are stronger, and you are smarter than the rest. I must use you.

What are you talking about?

A job, for you. A cam-borraig.Work. Purpose. You want something more than that?

What kind of job? She brushed hair out of her eyes.

He smiled. Be yourself.

She opened her mouth to speak then closed it again with a click. Be myself. Be the darkness. Be a shadow. You first come east, come to me. To my body. It is is, is in some place of high towers and broad flat canyons. We talk there. No live things, though. No more of the living. They are not allies. They are food for you.

Nilla shook her head, confused. What? I-what? She thought of Charles and Shar- and everyone else who had stared at her, condemned her, hated her. She didn't like where the thought headed (into her teeth) so she threw it away. I need them. I can't drive. I don't remember how.

Then you walk to me. The bear died. She made no death rattle, nor did she go into convulsions. She simply flickered out, the last of her vital fire gone. Darkness began to fill her up instantly. There was no transitional zone, it seemed, between life and death, or at least between life and undeath. It was a change of state, not form.

Nilla pulled her hair back in a ponytail but had nothing to tie it with so she just held it. It felt less greasy than before, strangely enough. It had more body, too. That was weird but she had no time to consider it. Screw this. I don't need a job, guy. What I need is to stay alive. If that means consorting with living people, I don't mind that at all. You want me to walk east, with no idea where I'm going.

Yes, he nodded happily.

To talk to some guy who doesn't understand English. Or clothing.

Yes.

And for this I get a sense of purpose. Oh, yes, he said, and opened his arms as if to embrace her. Let us begin. He bowed and gestured toward the east with one arm. The first pale glow of dawn was surging there. You begin, now.

No. Not tonight. She turned on her heel and started walking away, up the slope and back towards the motel. Whatever the future held it started with a shower. She was covered in the bear's lifeblood, thick gobbets of it coagulating on her skin. She could imagine a better time to conduct a job interview. When we're talking about full dental and three weeks paid vacation, then you get back to me.

Behind her she felt the bear stir, her energy smoky and dark. She didn't want to look back and see her own handiwork.

Very well, he said to her back, I'll give you what you want, though is fhasa deagh ainm a chall na a chosnadh."

What the hell does that mean?

You drive a hard bargain, but it may be worthy. Lass, you come east, to my body, and I'll tell you the name you've lost. He was gone when she turned to look. Only the bear remained, inching her way up the slope toward her interrupted meal. The look of recognition on her face was gone. Nilla saw nothing there but hunger.

KNOW THE SYMPTOMS OF CHOLERA! Diarrhea. Abdominal cramps. Nausea and Vomiting. Dehydration. [Hospital Bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control, 4/1/05] I don't see enough lights down there. It's only what, 2200 hours? There should be lights on, people should be watching primetime television. Get us closer and hit that target with the main light, Clark said over the headset built into his helmet. He couldn't hear himself think over the noise of the helicopter's engines.

I am sorry, Bannerman, do you copy me? Vikram asked from the next crewseat over. Doctor First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez is requesting that she be allowed to euthanize some of the victims, so she can dissect them. I am as discomforted as you, but I think it is the only way to- I copied you the first time, and I still won't allow it. Clark peered down at the unlit streets of Lost Hills, California. He couldn't see a damned thing. The pilot wore NODs to see in the dark but the passengers had to make do with their naked eyes. The town looked deserted. The people were scared, sure, he didn't blame them but he didn't see any vehicular traffic at all. What was going on? There were supposed to be people down there for him to interview, people who might have seen the blonde girl as she came through. Clark had gotten a truly lucky break- traditional channels had actually turned up something useful. The Kern County Sheriff's office had flipped the girl's description on a trivial shoplifting case at a local convenience store. The owner had described one of the thieves as blonde, maybe forty years old with a black tribal tattoo of a sun with wavy rays on her stomach. The Sheriff had recognized the description of the tattoo from the APB. She had been here, maybe a day or two before at the very most. This was Clark's best lead.

Bannerman, Captain, I must implore you! Destroying a few of the specimens may be the only way! What if by doing this she finds a cure? And what if she doesn't? How do I explain to the families that their dad, their grandma, their twelve-year-old son had to have his head cut open while he was still alive because we thought it might help other people with the same illness, except it turned out not to help at all? Let her use the bodies those SWAT butchers at the hospital gave us.

Vikram stared at him. In the dark cabin his eyes gleamed with frustration. Their heads were all shot to pieces. Not much use when studying a brain ailment. Clark grimaced in distaste. He stared through the polycarbonate canopy of the Blackhawk at the square shadows of buildings below. Okay, get the lamp on that structure, he demanded. The pilot flipped a switch.

In the overwhelming white light of the Blackhawk's ma in search light everything was the same flat gray, distinguishable only by ultra-black shadows blasted away by the lamp. The infected swarmed across the broken windows of a feed store like enormous maggots, their faces slack as their twisted hands reached upward to try to snag the helicopter.

One of them held a broken piece of bone. He threw it hard and it bounced off the metal skin of the helicopter with a resonating clang. Breath puffed out of Bannerman's lungs. Not in surprise, not anymore, no, this was just nervous exhaustion. Another town overrun. That made six in California, three each in Utah, Wyoming, and Texas, twelve in Colorado. More of them, certainly, that he didn't even know about yet. The infected had taken over the streets of Lost Hills. Did we receive any kind of distress call from this place before it went down?

The pilot answered on the helmet circuit. Negative, sir. These little farm places, they're full of illegals. Probably more afraid of la Migra than they are of the infected. Do you want me to initiate a search pattern of maneuvers and look for survivors, sir?

Yes, Bannerman Clark said, wondering why he was being asked such a silly question. Yes, I do. "Youve got dead- or infected, or whatever-people wandering into streams and reservoirs and rotting there.

Youve got healthy people being shuttled around like livestock to camps where they dont even have basic health services. Weve got sanitation breaking down all over the west and with that comes cholera, with that comes typhoid, and giardia on a scale you cant imagine. In Arizona, in New Mexico dirty water is going to kill us faster than these cannibals." [The Surgeon General in a briefing for NIH Field Agents, 4/2/05]

Dick did not know why he'd been brought to this zone of nak ed blood-red rock. The sun was intense. It dried him, leached the moisture out of his most hidden orifices. He chafed, and blistered, and the skin of his thighs wore away in red patches but he didn't stop. The dead don't stop for pain.

The voice in his head that was no voice knew what needed to be done. Dick did not question his instructions. He marched with his two-step gait-bare foot, then the boot, bare foot, then the boot-and devoured the miles beneath him.

Dick lacked any kind of sense of time. He could not have determined how many hours or how many days passed when he finally came to the edge of a cliff and looked down on white, foaming water. His dry body cried out for the smooth kiss of the water and the thing that steered him agreed. Dick toppled forward and fell, an ungainly diver, into the hissing silver of the river, heedless of rocks, uncaring of his clothes. He surrendered himself to the current and for a while he drifted along the bottom, his toes brushing the stony riverbed, his eyes closed. When he opened them again he had washed up on the far bank and water poured from his wet clothing, rolling back down into the stream.

He did not know how many times he had done this before, or how many bodies of water he was yet to visit. Someone else, some other force kept track of those things. Time to move on to the next errand. Dick pushed his face into a crack in the rock and dug out some spiders with his tongue. Just enough to give him strength. Then he headed forward, once again into the excoriating sunlight.

STAY TOGETHER! Know your group number by heart! [Signage posted at Evacuation Centers in Los Angeles, CA, 4/2/05]

Nilla couldn't help herself. She knocked on the door of the little apartment behind the motel's registration desk. No one answered, of course. She stepped inside into a faint smell of mildew and a lot of dust that jumped up out of her way everywhere she moved.

She found a dresser in the cramped bedroom and touched the smooth wood of its drawers for a moment before opening them. It wasn't so much that she felt bad about stealing another person's clothes, though there was that. It was more the lack of familiarity. She couldn't remember her own dresser, if she had one. She couldn't remember her own bed, the smell of the sheets, whether they were starchy or silky or even what color they were. It felt less like she was intruding on someone else's domain than as if she were inventing each gesture-the first time she ever opened a drawer, the first time she ever pulled on a pair of simple cotton boxer shorts. Things she must have done thousands, tens of thousands of times before in her living life.

Every single thing was new. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe her life had been tragic and horrible. Maybe even that didn't matter. Maybe getting a second chance, one where you didn't have to be aware of the old life you'd lost-maybe that was something valuable and good by itself.

The clothes in the dresser were men's clothes. Maybe the man on the tree, the one who blew out his own brains with a shotgun- The airy light coming in through the apartment's windows wouldn't let her dwell on thoughts like that. The little apartment was too cozy, the day too bright. She brushed the image right out of her head. It wasn't hard. She felt good, amazingly good. Maybe not as exultant as she'd felt in the middle of the night with her hands steeped in the blood of the bear. But good.

She zipped up a pair of low-riding jeans around her hips and buttoned down a soft white cotton shirt, rolling up the sleeves because they were too long. She caught her reflection in a mirror hung behind the door and had to stop a while and just take it all in. Her skin was clear. Pale, still, but... her eyes were big and warm and bright. No dark circles, no bags, not even crow's feet. Her hair looked like it had just been styled. She pulled up the shirt to check her abdomen, standing on tiptoe to see it in the mirror-a man's mirror, it only showed her from the neck up-and saw there was no discoloration there anymore. Even the wound on her belly had settled down to a few thin lines of scar tissue that looked old and well-healed where they bisected her tattoo. The only real injury she retained was the one that started it all-the circle of tooth marks on her neck and shoulder where she'd been bitten to death.

How about that, she breathed, a smile folding her lips. Pinkish lips, not blue. She laughed out loud, just a single ha but it was natural, spontaneous.

She looked great. She sniffed her armpits-nothing.

She was still admiring herself in the mirror when she heard a door slam nearby and someone come clattering out onto the motel's breezeway. Charles and Shar.

Now what was she going to do about them? It is imperative, especially now, that facilities for worship and religious observance are made available for the use of relocated persons. In the interest of saving space a standard multi-faith chapel may be erected, as long as it follows military guidelines on diversity and tolerance. [FEMA Supplementary Notice No. 74: Relocation Camps: Facilities, issued 4/2/05]

From the Bakersfield checkpoint cars were standing three miles back, most of them with their motors switched off. The marines from Twenty-Nine Palms were Iraq veterans and they knew how to perform a vehicular search quickly and efficiently. They also knew the danger of letting anything at all slip by uninspected.

Sir, with all due respect. First Lieutenant Armitrading, United States Marine Corps bit off what he was about to say. He gestured at the soldiers arrayed around the checkpoint. They wore the new ACUs with digital camoflauge, something the Marines had invented and the other service branches were starting to adopt. The grey and black uniforms looked pixilated up close, as if the Marines were characters from some truly violent video game. I get five thousand thumb-suckers a day through here, headed for the camps at California City. Most of them are blonde.

Bannerman Clark watched, only mildly indignant on her behalf, as a fifty-nine year old woman was subjected to a DNA swab from the inside of her cheek by a nineteen year old girl in pigtails, freckles, and Interceptor body armor complete with CAPPE plates. The woman's four children, the oldest the same age as the marine, stared through the windows of their stopped car as if they never expected to go anywhere again, as if they assumed they were going to set up housekeeping right there at the roadblock. The test was the creation of Desiree Sanchez, Clark's main medical investigator in Florence. She claimed it was foolproof. A few epithelial cells taken from the cheek could be examined under a microscope. If they looked vital and healthy the person was not infected. Easy.

You heard me about the tattoo, correct? This is important. I need you to start looking for her-she could be the answer to this thing. This was the place, it had to be. She was heading east, toward Nevada. Clearly she wanted to get out of California. From Lost Hills Route 15 was the easiest way to do that. If she went too far north or south she would be trapped-every road around Los Angeles and San Francisco was locked down and she would be picked up in minutes. 15 was the only way out. There were smaller roads, more circuitous paths but they all lead right through hell on earth. She'd be a fool to go that way and infected or not she had some intelligence left.

Down the line someone honked his horn three times in rapid succession. A marine dashed across the heat-smeared blacktop and smacked the hood of the offending car with the butt of his SAW. The honking stopped but the driver and the soldier had more than a few words to exchange.

Sir, I will reiterate my respect for your rank, Armitrading sneered. However this is not a joint operation, sir. You are far from your jurisdiction right now, sir. I promise I'll keep my eyes open for her. Now, if you don't mind? The First Lieutenant turned and dashed off, his M4 held at low ready, barrel pointed at the ground, finger on the trigger guard.

Up the line a car door opened -the sun flashed off of it like a warning beacon. A man holding a baby got out and just walked away, leaving his car chiming plaintively behind him. Clark wondered where he thought he was going to go.

Others in the line must not have shared his insecurity. A family of four followed him out into the shoulder on foot. A trio of young men in sweatshirts came next. Soon a small crowd had gathered at the checkpoint, their cars forgotten, intent on crossing on foot.

The Marines were there before them, falling into perfect formation. A single line of men and women, weapons in plain sight but not pointing anywhere in particular. There was a lot of screaming and gesturing going on but none of it came from the Marines.

What were these people fleeing from, Clark wondered, that would make them face off with Marines armed with automatic weapons? He pondered going inward, to Los Angeles, to see what was becoming of California. He was stopped from actually planning such a move by Vikram who came running over from the helicopter waving his arms in distress.