Chapter 07 - The Wall (Patreon)

I came back to the Vermont Palms in a stolen police car, at night, with the lights off, and Mrs. Kaur nearly killed me with her own stun gun.

In fairness to her, I'd come in the back way. Up the laundromat's fire escape, across its roof, a short jump up onto the Vermont Palms roof, and down through the hatch into the third-floor hallway, exactly the escape route I'd drawn for Danny in the Thomas Guide. It was the only way in that didn't involve the barricade, and I'd figured it was the polite thing to do.

It wasn't. It was eleven at night, the building was dark, and the hatch made a noise like a coffin lid.

I got about three steps down the hallway before something blue and crackling came at my face out of the dark, and I threw myself backward into the wall, and a very familiar voice said, "Stay where you are, or I'll fry you like a samosa."

"Mrs. Kaur," I said. "It's me. It's Bruno. Don't fry me."

The crackling stopped.

Then a flashlight came on in my face, and behind it I could see a small woman in a cardigan and bright white sneakers, holding a pink stun-gun machete in both hands and staring at me like I'd come back from the dead. Which, from where she was standing, I kind of had.

"You're supposed to be on a boat," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "About that."

I told them all of it, in 2D, by the light of Tavi's last two glow sticks.

Not the dog, or the Chosen, or the cell, or the bite. I told them the part I could tell: that there was no boat. That there had never been a boat. That somebody had paid Deno to walk me to the end of a pier in San Pedro and leave me there, and I'd walked into it with my eyes open because I'd wanted it so badly. That Kev had died on the way down, on the 110, in a crash. That Deno and Hector had driven off without me.

I told it the way Bruno would've wanted me to tell it, which was straight, with nothing in the corners. I'd gotten hustled. It happened. You didn't dress it up.

"That poor boy," Mrs. Kaur said at last. She meant Kev. "His poor uncle."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I told you I'd get you a boat. I couldn't."

"You told me you'd try," she said. "And you came back. That's more than the boat did."

Then I opened my bag, and I got to watch four people's faces change.

The antibiotics. The painkillers, the real ones. The blood pressure cuff, which I handed to Luz, and which she held in her lap like somebody had handed her a puppy. Gauze and saline. The case of water from the Port Police substation. MREs. And the dinosaur vitamins, which I gave to Tavi, who looked at the bottle and then at me like I'd lost my mind.

"I'm eleven," he said.

"They're gummies, man. Try one."

He tried one. Then he ate four more, very fast, and put the bottle in his hoodie pocket and didn't mention it again.

Mrs. Kaur picked up the bottle of painkillers and read the label, and then read it again, and I watched her decide not to say anything about her knees, and I watched her put it in her cardigan pocket anyway.

"Where did you get all this?" said Danny.

"A pharmacy in Harbor Gateway. There was a guy selling Zombrex through the grille for guns." I thought about how to finish that. "He's not selling it anymore."

"And the car?"

"Police substation." I shrugged. "Nobody was using it."

"And the axe?"

"Same place."

Danny looked at the fire axe, lying across my knees. Then at the tactical vest I was still wearing. Then at me. "Bruno," he said, "did you rob a cop station?"

"It was open," I said.

Tavi started laughing, and that set off Danny, and even Mrs. Kaur made the small noise with her tongue that I was starting to understand was, on her, basically a laugh. It was the best I'd felt since San Pedro.

Luz didn't laugh. She was watching me.

I knew what she was seeing. I'd eaten three MREs on the drive up from Carson. I was hungry again anyway, so hungry it was hard to concentrate, and I could smell the peanut butter in Mrs. Kaur's kitchen downstairs from the second floor. I was sweating, even though it was a cool night. My face felt hot. My hands were steady, too steady, the way they'd never been, not even in Bruno's memories.

And I'd come down the third-floor hallway after that hatch without a sound, and then gone backward into a wall fast enough to dodge a stun gun I couldn't see.

"You look flushed," Luz said.

"I've been driving with the windows up."

"You're sweating."

"It's LA, man."

"It's sixty degrees." She put down the blood pressure cuff and leaned over and put the back of her hand against my forehead before I could stop her, the way you'd check a kid. I felt her hand go still. "Bruno. You're burning up."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've got a fever. A high one." She was already reaching for the thermometer in my bag, the one I'd taken for myself. "When did this start? Do you have any cuts? Scratches? Anything that..."

"Luz." I caught her wrist, as carefully as I've ever done anything. "I'm fine. I promise. I've just been running all day. I've barely slept since Day 0. It's stress."

She looked at my hand on her wrist.

Then she looked at my face, the way she'd looked at my arms on the stairwell that first night.

"Okay," she said, and took her wrist back. "Stress."

She didn't believe me. But she let it go, the same way Ryan had let it go at the pharmacy, and I filed that too, because I was starting to notice that the people who let things go were the ones who were paying the most attention.

The plan came from Mrs. Kaur, not me. We'd been going around in circles for an hour. I'd laid out what I knew: the airport was a death trap, the harbor was a dead end, the freeways were parking lots, the trains were done. That left walking. Somewhere, on foot, through a gap in the cordon.

"The mountains," I said. I'd found the page in the Thomas Guide. "Santa Monica Mountains. They run all the way from here to the county line at Ventura. It's parkland most of the way, trails and fire roads, no freeways. The cordon's on the 101 at Thousand Oaks, we saw it on the news. They can't have soldiers on every ridge. We drive up Mulholland as far as we can, then we walk the Backbone Trail west to the county line, and then we're out."

"How far?" said Danny.

"Thirty miles, maybe. Two days of walking."

"With a child?" said Luz.

"And a sixty-eight-year-old woman," said Mrs. Kaur.

"I didn't say..."

"You were thinking it." Mrs. Kaur set the rolling pin down on the table. "And you're right to. I can't walk thirty miles over mountains, Bruno. Not with these knees. Not with these painkillers, even. And the boy won't go." She said it gently, as arithmetic.

Tavi had checked his phone four times since I'd arrived.

"Then we don't go," I said. "Not all of us. I can go, and scout it, and come back..."

"No," said Mrs. Kaur. "They go." She pointed at Luz and Danny. "With you. Tomorrow."

Luz stared at her like she'd been slapped.

"No," Luz said. "Absolutely not. I'm not leaving Tavi, I'm not leaving you, not in a building with..."

"Luz," said Mrs. Kaur, "listen to me."

"...no power, and no water soon, and those things at the gate, and your knees..."

"Luz."

Luz stopped.

"We have food for two people for two weeks," Mrs. Kaur said. "For four people, one week. For six, a few days. I was a bookkeeper for twenty years before my husband bought this building, so believe me, I know arithmetic." She folded her hands on the table. "Two people can hide in this building for a long time. Two people are quiet. Two people can wait for a mother to come home. Four people cannot. Four people need to go out for food. Four people make noise. Four people is how we all die."

"Then I'll stay," said Luz, "and Danny..."

"Danny will not go without you. And you are a nurse." Mrs. Kaur's voice didn't rise. It got smaller, and harder, like something being folded down. "Out there, somewhere past those mountains, there are people who need a nurse. Here, there is an old woman with bad knees and a boy with a phone. We don't need a nurse. We need time. Go and be useful. Go and live."

Luz looked at Tavi.

Tavi was sitting on the couch with the dinosaur vitamins in his lap, looking at the floor. He'd been listening to all of it. He was eleven, not stupid.

"Go," he said, without looking up. "My mom's coming. Mrs. Kaur's here. I'm okay." He turned the vitamin bottle over in his hands. "You can come back after. When it's fixed."

Luz put her face in her hands.

Danny put his arm around her. He didn't say anything. He looked at me, over her head, and I saw something in his face that I'd never seen on Danny before. He'd made up his mind.

That night, Luz came and found me on the balcony.

I didn't have a watch, but I couldn't sleep, and I'd gone out to sit in Mrs. Kaur's plastic chair with the fire axe across my knees and look at Vermont Avenue. There were more of them in the street than there had been. A lot more. Deno's shotgun had brought them, three days ago, and they'd never really left. They stood in the street in the dark and swayed, a few hundred of them, and every so often one of them would turn its face up toward our building like it could smell us.

I could smell them. That was new. Rot and old blood and hot asphalt, very clear, like someone had turned the volume up on my nose.

Luz sat down on the concrete next to the chair, where I'd sat next to Mrs. Kaur the night before I left.

"You don't have to come," I said. "Tomorrow. If you don't want to."

"I know."

"She'd understand."

"I know." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "She's right, though. She did the math. She's always right about numbers."

"Bruno," she said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"What happened to your leg?"

I didn't move. I didn't look down, and I didn't tense, and I didn't reach for the calf, where a big square dressing was taped over a patch of perfectly healed pink skin.

"I burned it," I said. "On the 110. There was a car on fire, after the crash. I got too close pulling Kev out of the van."

"You're favoring it. The left one. When you came down the hallway, and when you sat down." She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the street. "I did a rotation on a burn unit. Let me take a look at it. Burns get infected. That would explain the fever."

This was the part I'd practiced. In the cell, and in the car, and on the drive up from Carson.

"Sure," I said. "Knock yourself out."

I turned in the chair and put my left foot up on the balcony railing and rolled my jeans up past the knee, easy, like it was nothing, like I'd been waiting for somebody to ask. Luz got out her phone and turned on the flashlight and knelt down on the concrete next to me. She peeled the tape back on the dressing, one corner at a time, the way you'd do it for a kid.

I kept my breathing slow. Bruno had sat across a lot of tables from a lot of people while they checked his cards.

She took her time. The red, shiny, peeling patch on the back of my calf, the size of her palm. She tilted the light. She pressed around the edges with two fingers, the way I had in the cell, and I didn't flinch, because I'd known she would.

"Huh," she said.

"Told you."

"It's a burn," she said slowly. "A clean one. Second degree, mostly." She pressed again, gently, in the middle. "No swelling. No infection. No streaking." She sat back on her heels. "It's healing really well, Bruno. Like, really well. I'd have said this was four or five days old."

"Good genes," I said.

She looked at me over the flashlight. Then she looked back at the burn. Then she put a fresh dressing on it from her own bag, neat and tight, better than mine had been, and smoothed down the tape.

"Okay," said Luz.

She sat with me for another half hour without saying anything else, and then she went inside to sleep.

I sat there with my heart going like I'd run a mile. I'd shown her my cards, and every one of them had been real. The best lies are made of true things.

We left at dawn on Day 5.

Tavi didn't wave with a glow stick this time. He came down to the second-floor landing and hugged Luz so hard she had to bend over double, and then he hugged Danny, and then he stood in front of me and held out his hand, very formally, like a businessman.

I shook it.

"Bring her back," he said. "When it's fixed. Okay?"

"Okay, man."

Mrs. Kaur didn't hug anyone. She gave Luz a bag with food in it. She gave Danny the Thomas Guide.

"No," I said. "Mrs. Kaur. That's your husband's."

"My husband," said Mrs. Kaur, "fished off the San Pedro breakwater every Sunday for thirty years and never caught anything. He would be thrilled to know his map finally went somewhere." She put it firmly into Danny's hands. "Bring it back. It's a library book, as far as I'm concerned."

Then she looked at me.

"Bruno," she said. "Come here."

I went. She reached up (a long way up) and put her hand flat on my forehead, the way Luz had. She held it there for a second. Her face didn't change.

"Hm," she said.

Then she took her hand back and patted my cheek, twice, not gently, the way you'd pat a car you'd decided not to sell yet.

"Rule two," she said, for me alone. "I haven't forgotten."

"I know," I said.

"But I don't think I'll need it." She stepped back. "Go on. Before I change my mind about the book."

The dog gave me the route before I even asked.

I got into the patrol SUV behind the laundromat, with Danny in the passenger seat and Luz in the back with all our gear, and the phone lit up on the dashboard holder with a map already on it. Mulholland Drive, west. Green all the way into the hills.

Good morning, Bruno! 🐾 Scenic route selected!

Danny leaned over and looked at it. "Huh. That's the same way you said."

"Yeah," I said. "It's a smart phone."

I watched the dog wag its tail at me. It knew exactly where I was going. It knew the Backbone Trail, and the county line, and the cordon on the 101. It knew everything I knew, and more, and it was helping.

That should have told me something. I'd been hustled once already, and I was sure I'd see the second one coming.

I put the car in gear and drove up into the Hollywood Hills.

Mulholland Drive in the morning was the most beautiful thing I'd seen since I'd woken up in Bruno's body.

The road runs along the top of the hills like a spine, with the whole city spread out on one side and the whole Valley on the other, and on Day 5 of the end of the world both of them were burning. Smoke went straight up in a dozen places, gray and black and brown, into a sky that was a completely clear, perfect blue. Down in the basin you could see the freeways, all of them, still full of cars. You could see the downtown towers, with helicopters circling. You could see all the way to the ocean.

"God," said Luz, from the back seat.

The dead were thin up here. Joggers, mostly. Everybody who lives near Mulholland runs on it, and on the morning of Day 0 a lot of them must have gone out for a run like any other morning, and not come back. They stood along the side of the road in their running clothes and their earbuds, swaying, and turned their heads to watch us go by. One of them was still wearing a fitness tracker that lit up green on his wrist as we passed.

We drove as far as we could, past the overlooks, past the gated mansions with their gates hanging open, until Mulholland turned into a dirt fire road and the fire road had a pickup truck jackknifed across it, and then we got out and walked.

We didn't walk thirty miles. We walked about eleven, and they were good ones. The Backbone Trail runs along the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains through chaparral and scrub oak and sagebrush, up and down, with views of the ocean on one side and the burning Valley on the other. There were almost no dead up there. It was quiet. It was hot. The air smelled like sage. A red-tailed hawk followed us for an hour. Danny found a trail sign that said BACKBONE TRAIL · CASTRO CREST 9.4 MI and took a picture of it with his phone for no reason, and Luz laughed at him for it, and it was the first time I'd heard her laugh in two days.

For a few hours it felt like we were going to make it.

I carried most of the gear, because I was the strongest, and they didn't argue. I carried more than I should've been able to. I noticed Luz noticing. I walked in front and set the pace, and around mile six I realized I had to keep slowing down because they couldn't keep up, and I wasn't even breathing hard. At mile eight Danny turned his ankle on a rock and I carried him for a quarter mile over my shoulders, the whole six-foot-three of him, before I realized what I was doing and put him down. I also realized, about a second after that, that I'd forgotten to limp the entire way.

"Bruno," said Danny, from the ground, staring up at me. "How much do you bench?"

"I don't know, man. Never paid attention to the numbers. Might be adrenaline."

"That's not adrenaline, man. That's a forklift."

Luz had stopped walking and was watching me.

We heard the cordon before we saw it.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and we'd come up onto a ridge above a canyon, and from somewhere over the next ridge to the west came a sound I didn't recognize at first. A heavy, rhythmic thudding. Then I recognized it from a hundred games and movies: machine-gun fire, short bursts, a pause, more.

"Is that...?" said Danny.

"Yeah," I said. "Get down. Off the ridgeline. Now."

We crawled the last hundred yards to the top of the next rise on our stomachs, through the sagebrush, and looked over.

It was the county line.

It was more hills and canyons and scrub, except the army had made it into a line. There were shipping containers stacked across the mouth of the canyon below us, two high, with razor wire along the top. There were watchtowers made out of scaffolding, with floodlights. There was a fire road running along the far side, and on it, Humvees, and soldiers in full gear and gas masks. And there was a stripe of bare, bulldozed dirt about fifty yards wide running along the near side of the containers, north and south, as far as I could see. The chaparral had been scraped clean down to the ground.

A kill zone. On the bare dirt, here and there, were bodies. Some of them were dead dead. Some of them were still moving.

"They're shooting people," Luz whispered. "They're shooting people who try to cross."

"They're shooting everything that crosses," I said. "They can't tell the difference from up there. They're not going to try."

We watched for an hour. I wanted to know the rhythm. Every wall has a rhythm, if you watch long enough. Guard changes. Blind spots. The part of a patrol route where the guy with the rifle stops to light a cigarette. Bruno's memories knew this. Bruno had once spent a week watching a parking garage to see when the security guard took his lunch.

The rhythm of this wall was bad. The towers had overlapping fields of fire. The patrols on the fire road were steady. Every few minutes, a drone went by overhead, low, a small gray quad-copter with a camera on its belly, humming along the line like a wasp. There was no guy with a cigarette.

And then, about forty minutes in, I saw the thing that told me this wall was going to fail.

On the nearest tower, one of the soldiers sat down.

He sat down on the platform with his back against the rail, the way Hal had sat down on the stairs. Another soldier went over and crouched and shook his shoulder and leaned in close.

I knew what was going to happen about three seconds before it did.

The soldier who'd sat down came back up and went for his buddy's throat.

There was screaming on the tower. Then gunfire, wild, sprayed up into the air. Then the searchlight on the tower swung loose and pointed straight down at the kill zone, and the machine gun on the next tower opened up on the first tower, because from where they were standing, they couldn't tell who was who. Then the first tower was quiet. Then somebody was yelling into a radio.

"What happened?" said Danny. "Was he bit?"

"No," I said. "I don't think so. I think he got hurt a while ago, or he got sick, or his heart gave out. It doesn't matter." I watched the soldiers on the fire road running toward the tower. "It's the same thing it's been since Day 0. Anybody who dies gets back up. They built a wall to keep the dead out. But they're inside the wall. They're wearing the uniforms."

Luz was staring at me.

"Every quarantine in history," she said slowly. "Raccoon City. Harran. They all worked by putting the sick people on one side and the well people on the other. But if the well people can just... die..."

"Then there's no other side," I said. "There's just a wall with dead people on both sides of it. It's just a matter of time."

I found the gap about an hour later.

It was farther south, where the canyon narrowed. A creek bed ran down under the containers through a big concrete culvert, maybe five feet high, with a steel grate across the upstream end. The grate was new. The army had put it there. But flash floods had been running through that culvert for fifty years, and they'd undercut the concrete at the bottom, and there was a gap under the grate on the left side, a foot and a half high, choked with dead branches.

A foot and a half. Big enough for a person to crawl through, if the person was willing to lie in the mud.

And the nearest tower was the one that had just gone quiet.

"There," I said. "That's it. That's our door."

"Under the wall?" said Danny.

"Through the culvert, under the containers, and out the other side into the creek bed. It's all brush on the Ventura side. We come out, we stay low, we walk down the canyon. By dark, we're out of LA County."

Luz looked at the culvert. Then at the quiet tower. Then at me.

"Okay," she said.

We went down the slope in the late afternoon, slow, through the chaparral, staying in the shadows the setting sun threw across the canyon. I went first. I could hear better than I could see now; I could hear the soldiers on the fire road talking on their radios, half a mile off. I could hear the drone.

I could hear the drone getting louder.

We were thirty yards from the culvert, crouched in a stand of scrub oak, when it came around the shoulder of the hill and stopped.

It hovered right over us, fifty feet up, dead still, with its little camera eye on its belly pointed down at the scrub oak, and the hum of it filling the whole canyon.

"Don't move," I said.

It didn't matter. It had probably seen us an hour ago.

A little red light on the bottom of it came on.

Then a second drone came around the hill. Then a Humvee started up on the fire road, and turned, and started coming down the canyon toward us, bouncing over the rocks, with three soldiers standing in the back and every one of their rifles pointed at our patch of scrub oak.

"HANDS! LET ME SEE HANDS!"

We came out with our hands up. I put the fire axe down on the ground in front of me, slow. Danny dropped his crowbar. Luz held her hands up high and wide, the way you'd show a patient you weren't going to hurt them.

The soldiers came down out of the Humvee in gas masks and full body armor, rifles up, and I counted them. Five. They spread out in a half-circle. Their fingers were on their triggers. I could hear every one of them breathing inside their masks. I could hear their hearts.

I could have taken them, and for about two seconds I thought about it. I stood there with my hands up in a creek bed in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the hot red thing came up out of my leg and into my chest, and for about two seconds I measured them. I knew exactly how far each one of them was. I knew which one was scared. I knew which one would be slowest. I knew how fast I could move now. And some part of me that wasn't me, some part that had come in through a Runner's teeth in a patrol car lot in San Pedro, looked at those five soldiers the way a cat looks at a bird feeder.

I counted. One. Two. Three. It went down. But it had been there.

"On your knees! Now!"

We got on our knees.

One of them came forward, the one with a sergeant's stripes, with a rifle in one hand and a tablet in the other. A big rugged tablet, the military kind, in a black rubber case. He held it up to Danny's face, and it beeped. He held it up to Luz's face, and it beeped. He held it up to mine.

It chimed, a soft, pleasant little sound, like a doorbell in a nice apartment.

The sergeant looked down at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen.

"Sir," he said, in a completely different voice. "Sir, you're... you're on a flight. You're registered for evacuation, sir. Priority seating. You're on a flight out of LAX." He turned the tablet so I could see it.

It was my face. Bruno's face, dreads and face tattoos and all, from some camera I'd walked past sometime in the last five days, clean and clear. Next to it, a green checkmark. Under that, a line of text I couldn't read from where I was kneeling. And down in the bottom corner of the screen, very small, where the operating system puts its logo, was a white paw print.

"I didn't register," I said. My voice came out hoarse.

"Sir, it says here..."

"I know what it says, man. I never registered. I never tapped anything. I swiped it away every single time."

The sergeant looked at me like I was crazy, then back at the tablet, and his shoulders straightened, the way people's shoulders do when they've been given an order and it's a relief to have one.

"Sir," he said, "you need to report to the evacuation point. You can't be out here. We'll escort you back to your vehicle."

"Wait," I said. "Wait. Them." I nodded at Luz and Danny, kneeling next to me in the creek bed. "Scan them again. What does it say for them?"

The sergeant checked. "Pending, sir. Both of them."

"Pending," I said. "So they're not on a flight."

"Not yet, sir."

"So let them through."

"You don't need them," I said. I was talking Bruno fast now, the way you talk when the mark's still at the table and you've got one more chance to get him to push his chips in. "I'm the one you want. I'm the one on the list. I'll go back. I'll go to the airport, I'll get on your plane, I'll be a good boy. Just let them go through the culvert. Two people. Nobody has to know. Your tower's down, man. Nobody's watching that stretch but you."

"Bruno," said Luz, sharply. "No. We're not..."

"Luz, shut up. Please." I didn't look at her. I kept my eyes on the sergeant. "Sergeant. Sir. Please. Two people. A nurse and a delivery guy. They're not sick. They're not bit. You just scanned them."

For a second, I thought I had him.

He hesitated. He looked at the culvert, and the dead tower, and Luz's face, and he looked like a man who'd been shooting at people from a wall for three days and was very tired of it.

Then his tablet chimed again.

He looked down at it, and whatever had opened up in his face closed, like a door shut from the other side.

"Nobody crosses," he said. "Orders. No exceptions."

"Whose orders?"

He didn't answer. The tablet was still in his hand, and the little white paw print was still in the corner of the screen.

They drove us back up the fire road in the back of the Humvee, all three of us, with two soldiers sitting across from us with their rifles in their laps. Nobody talked. The sun was going down over the Ventura side, on the wrong side of the wall, orange and huge.

I sat there and did the math, the way Mrs. Kaur would have.

The dog had given me the route to Mulholland. It had said scenic route selected. It had watched me walk eleven miles along the Backbone Trail. It had watched me find the culvert.

And then it had sent the drone.

It could have stopped me at the car. It had let me walk all the way to the wall, with Luz and Danny, and then it had stopped all three of us, at the very last moment, with the exit thirty yards away.

I'd known it wanted me on the plane, and I'd figured I could live with that if the people I cared about got out some other door. But it wouldn't let them out either, even when I offered it everything it wanted, even when it cost it nothing.

Why?

I looked across the Humvee at Luz and Danny. At Luz's hand in Danny's. At their faces, gray with dust and exhaustion.

Pending, the sergeant had said. Both of them. Pending.

Pending what?

I didn't like the answer I was starting to put together.

They dropped us at the patrol SUV at the end of Mulholland just after dark. The sergeant made me show him the car keys. Then he held up the tablet one more time to my face, and it chimed, and he nodded like that settled something.

"Report to the evacuation point, sir," he said. "Day 7. 0600. Don't miss it."

Then the Humvee turned around and drove back down the fire road toward the wall.

We stood there in the dark on top of the Hollywood Hills, with the whole burning city spread out below us like a map of the end of the world.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I didn't take it out.

Danny sat down on the hood of the SUV and put his head in his hands. He'd been limping on the ankle all afternoon and hadn't said a word about it. Now he did.

"Eleven miles," he said. "Eleven miles, man."

"I know."

"We were right there."

"I know. I'm sorry." I sat down next to him. "I'm sorry, Danny."

"It's not your fault," he said. "You found the gap. You got us there. It's not your fault they..." He stopped. He looked up at me. "What was that, back there? With the tablet? Why were you on a flight?"

"I don't know," I said, which was a lie.

"And why'd it chime for you? It beeped for us. It chimed for you."

"I don't know, man."

That was also a lie, and he knew it. He was a nice guy and not a stupid one, and he'd carried a crowbar through the end of the world for five days, and he was starting to understand that a lot of things happened around me that didn't happen around other people.

He didn't push it. He looked out at the city and said, "Okay," the way Luz did. I was running out of people who'd say it to me.

Luz was standing at the edge of the fire road, looking down at the city. She'd been standing there since the Humvee left.

I went over and stood next to her and looked at the city with her, at the smoke going up into the dark, at the fires in the Valley and the fires downtown and the dark places in between where the power had gone out and never come back.

"Luz," I said. "I'm sorry. I really thought..."

"I looked at your leg last night," she said.

I stopped.

She didn't turn around. Her voice was the calm one she'd used on the stairwell the first night, counting compressions on Hal Brenner's chest.

"You've had a fever for at least a day," she said. "A hundred and one, maybe a hundred and two, and you're acting like you feel great. You're eating like a teenager with a tapeworm. You carried Danny a quarter mile uphill and didn't breathe hard. You say you've got a burn bad enough to limp on, but you only limp when you remember to. On the trail, with Danny on your back, you forgot for a quarter mile. And that burn. I believe it's a burn. I checked every inch of it, and there's no bite under it, I'd stake my whole degree on that, if I ever get to finish it. But you told me you got it on Day 3. It looks like it's been healing for a week. You caught my wrist last night so gently it was like you were scared you'd break it. And back there, when the soldiers came, you went somewhere, Bruno. I saw your face. You went somewhere, and your eyes..." She stopped. She took a breath. "I'm a nurse. I'm not an idiot. Everybody in this city knows the drill, and none of the drills have this in them. You're not bitten. I know you're not bitten. And you're not normal, either. So I'm going to ask you, and I would really, really like it if you didn't lie to me."

She turned around and looked at me.

"What are you?"