The terrible image of Vienna running through the clouds of dust without her hood or mask was seared into his mind.

He dived to the side of the narrow gap as shouts sounded behind him.

He was in a low s.p.a.ce: what had perhaps been the floor of a warehouse or factory but was now just a few feet high. The floor was not flat but was a cratered moonscape of bricks, concrete fragments, and dust.

Light beckoned to the right-hand side, and he clambered over toward it.

The s.p.a.ce suddenly sang with the rapid report of full automatic fire, incredibly loud in the restricted s.p.a.ce. Crushed bricks and rubble danced around him.

A bullet kicked up dust by his hand.

One bullet-that would be all it took.

He scrabbled over toward the light and eased himself out through a large crack in the side of the building into daylight. He had to get back and warn Dodge before they located the house.

Sweat from the exertion was already fogging his mask, but there was nothing he could do about that. He ran awkwardly through the jagged landscape, glancing around behind him to check for pursuers.

The deeper he ventured into the maze of crushed buildings, the harder it would be for them to find him. He took one twisted pathway after another, climbing over, around, or under the demolished structures.

Two soldiers appeared over to his right from behind a broken wall. He ducked behind a wooden door, blown from its hinges but otherwise intact.

The soldiers moved out of sight, and he skirted around to the left, trying to keep some distance between them and himself.

Sometimes he could tell whether he was outside or inside a building; other times the difference was not so clear.

The nuclear bomb had taken bits from everywhere and jumbled them together in indiscriminate piles. He clambered over the wrecked sh.e.l.l of a late-model car that was in the bedroom of a burned-out house. A roulette wheel was embedded in a brick wall a little farther on, flung halfway across the city by the force of the explosion.

He heard distant shots and wondered who they were shooting at.

Vienna?

Occasionally, he came to a road, although the roads were so strewn with rubble and masonry that they were no easier to pa.s.s than the broken buildings.

The farther he got from the hypocenter, however, the clearer the roads became. The buildings here had collapsed in on themselves rather than being blasted from their foundations.

He could tell from the mountains and the position of the sun the approximate direction in which to travel, but it was still a relief when he found himself on streets he recognized, close to the golf course.

Sam sprinted as fast as he could. He was surely far enough away from the searchers now that speed was more important than stealth.

He spun around a corner and kept running, his heart pounding and his breath coming in harsh bursts. Sam was halfway toward the road when he heard the sound of an engine, and one of the gray vans turned the corner behind him.

A crush of timber blocked the center of the street, blown there from a nearby lumber yard; he climbed over it, conscious that the van could not follow.

Crumbled walls of a large building, maybe a factory, rose to his right, and on the left was a jungle of jagged timber and overturned shipping containers.

He could not go left. He could not go right. When he heard the shout and a single bullet whined off the tarmac by his foot, he stopped.

There was nowhere to go.

The soldier stood on top of the pile of wood, his rifle aimed right at Sam's head.

At this distance, he could not miss. The shot had been a warning, Sam realized. Ursula wanted him alive.

That made sense. She would want to find out what he knew. What they had been up to. What their plans were.

And he knew everything.

He knew about the Plague virus, and he knew about Cheyenne Mountain.

Once they rammed a neuro-headset onto his head, Ursula would know that, too, and their only chance would be gone.

If they captured him alive, that was.

He began to back away from the soldier.

"Don't move!" the man shouted. "Or I will shoot."

Two or three other soldiers were climbing up the blockade to join him.

There is no choice, Sam thought with an eerie kind of calm, and took another step.

The man raised the rifle to his eye and sighted along it.

Sam shut his eyes.

Sometimes, as a child, he had wondered what it would be like to be dead. Suddenly dead. Without warning, from a drive-by bullet or a brain aneurysm. One moment you're charging along at 100 percent, thinking about all kinds of stuff, deciding what you're going to have for lunch and who you're going to hang out with after school. And the next minute you're not.

You're dead.

You're not thinking about anything.

You're not making any plans.

You're just not not.

There was a thud from in front of him, and he opened his eyes in time to see a jagged brick end bounce along the blockade of wood in front of the soldier and crash to the ground.

The man's gun wavered, and his eyes moved up to the right in time to see a second jagged brick come hurtling toward him, landing just behind him.

His gun pointed in that direction now, along with the weapons of the other soldiers around him, but there was nothing to see. Nothing to fire at.

As Sam watched, another brick, then another, came flying up and over the wall of the ruined factory, hurtling down toward the men.

One of them unleashed a spray of automatic fire in that direction, but the bullets just kicked puffs from the broken concrete wall.

It had to be Dodge on the other side of that wall.

The bricks were flying wild, but just by sheer numbers they were starting to connect.

One hit the barrel of one of the men's weapons, jolting it from his grasp. A second later, one of the bricks caught the first soldier across the shoulder, tearing a gaping hole in the silvery fabric of the radiation suit.

The soldier grabbed at the tear, trying to pull the fabric back across the hole but to little avail. With a look of panic visible even through the dark gla.s.s of his face mask, the soldier turned and stumbled back down on the far side of the junk pile of wood.

That was it, Sam realized. Dodge knew the one thing the soldiers would fear the most: radiation. The rain of half and quarter bricks was constant now as he flung the most primitive weapon of them all against the sophisticated weaponry of the soldiers.

Another soldier took a glancing blow across his helmet, which sliced the fabric of his hood.

Sam turned and ran, zigging and zagging to make it harder for the soldiers to aim, but there were no shots.

He made it to the end of the street and reached the tall wire fence surrounding the golf course. It was at least ten feet high, and he hurled himself at it, hauling himself up and over and dropping down onto the embankment on the other side. He ran into the forest, hoping to lose himself amongst the trees before the soldiers could regroup and follow him.

Away from the immediate danger of the men and their guns, the image resurfaced again and again despite his desperate attempts to push it out of his mind: Vienna running through the streets without her hood or mask Vienna running through the streets without her hood or mask.

Breathing in the dust.

The radioactive dust.

50

THE DAM

Dodge met him at the front of the house. Tyler was right behind him, holding the laptop, still looking weak and pale from his ordeal.

"Thanks, Dodge," Sam said.

He shrugged. "Thank Tyler; it was his idea."

"We're leaving," Sam said. "Now."

"What about Vienna?"

"I don't know."

Sam peeled off his hazmat suit, tossing it into the dry fountain, along with any dust, the residue of his frantic dash through the streets. The others did the same.

Dodge jumped in the driver's seat of the pickup truck, parked in the courtyard, and Tyler got in the front pa.s.senger seat. Sam dived in the back as Dodge gunned the vehicle, spinning the steering wheel as he flung the machine back around onto the narrow road through the forest.

His eye caught a movement as they raced back toward the North Boulder Highway. A lone figure, running, stumbling, falling.

"Vienna!" he shouted.

Dodge had seen her, too, and veered the pickup toward her. Sam jumped out even before they had stopped and hauled her up by one arm.

Her face was gray as he dragged her back toward the pickup and dumped her on the backseat before climbing in beside her.

Dodge took off as Sam was shutting the door, spraying dust into the air behind them.

Vienna coughed and coughed again, bringing up gray mucus.

Sam watched her, horrified. But there was nothing he could do.

"Where are we going?" Tyler asked as the western mountains slid their way around to the right side of the car.

"Head south," Sam said. "Maybe we can convince them we're heading for Mexico. As soon as we can, we'll hide the pickup and change cars. Then we'll cut east into Arizona and up through New Mexico to Colorado."

Sam glanced back at the mountains on the far side of the lost city. A rising plume of dust caught his eye in the center of the city.

"That's one of their vans," he said, "moving through the-"

Dodge cut him off. "If we can see their dust cloud, then they can see ours."

He floored the gas pedal and the pickup surged forward.

The vans picked them up just on the outskirts of Henderson. Sam could see two vans screaming along the freeway as they raced to beat the pickup to the interchange with South Boulder Highway and cut them off at the pa.s.s.

They narrowly made it through, swinging through the interchange on protesting tires and veering around onto Route 93 just a hundred yards in front of the vans.

"Take my gun," Tyler said, retrieving it from the glove compartment. Tyler held the gun through the gap in the front seats. Sam looked at it blankly.

"Are you kidding?" he said. "I wouldn't know which end was which. Pa.s.s me the laptop!"

It was on the floor in the front of the cab, by Tyler's feet. He pa.s.sed it to Sam.

"What are you doing?" Dodge asked.

"Government vehicles," Sam said. "They'll be LoJacked. If I can hack into the satellite system, I might be able to shut them down."

"Go for it," Dodge said with a tight grin.

"d.a.m.n. No cellular signal," Sam said after a moment of trying to connect.

"Keep your eye on it," Dodge said. "We should pick up something as we approach Boulder City."

"I'll need their license plates," Sam said.

"I don't think that's going to be a problem," Tyler said as they flew across an overpa.s.s and found themselves suddenly surrounded by tussock and scrub.

One moment they had been amongst the built-up houses of a Las Vegas suburb; the next it was gone, and the desert enveloped them.

The fence was in front of them before they realized it, blocking the road, stretching as far as they could see to either side. The end of the contamination zone. There was no way to go around it, no time to avoid it.

"Hang on!" Dodge yelled, and powered the pickup toward the center of two gates, locked with a chain.