Chapter 09 - Somebody Wants Me on That Plane (Patreon)

Sofi was worse in the morning.

I heard it before anybody else did. I was still on the terrace, where I'd been all night, and at a little after six I heard it through two floors and a wall of glass: a thin, high whistle at the end of every breath, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. The in-breaths were getting shorter.

Luz heard it about ten minutes later. I heard her door open, and her feet on the stairs, fast, and then Carol's bedroom door, and then her voice, low and calm.

When I came in, Luz was sitting on the edge of the big bed with Sofi propped up against a pile of Carol's pillows. Renata was kneeling on the floor, holding Sofi's hand. Sofi's shoulders were up around her ears. Every time she breathed in, the skin at the bottom of her throat sucked in, a little hollow above her collarbone.

"How bad?" I said.

Luz didn't look up. She had two fingers on Sofi's wrist and her eyes on her phone. "She's working to breathe. See her neck? That's her using every muscle she's got." She let go of the wrist and smiled at Sofi, a big, easy smile, like none of this was a big deal. "You're doing great, honey. You're doing so great." Then, to me, without changing the smile at all: "She needs albuterol. Today. This morning, if we can."

"Carol doesn't have any. I checked every cabinet."

"I know. I checked them again." Luz stood up and walked me out into the hallway, and when she was out of Sofi's sight, the smile came off her face like a mask. "If this keeps going, she tires out. Kids with asthma, they do great, they do great, they do great, and then they get tired, and then they don't. I've seen it on a peds rotation. It happens fast."

"How fast?"

"Today," said Luz. "Tonight. I don't know." She took a breath. "And we're supposed to be at the airport tomorrow at six."

I looked back through the door at Sofi, whistling in and out. At Renata's hand on hers.

"Write me a list," I said.

Luz wrote the list on the back of her napkin chart, under my temperatures. Albuterol inhaler (any). Spacer (plastic tube thing). Prednisolone liquid or prednisone tabs. Nebulizer if you see one. DO NOT come back without the inhaler. She underlined the last part twice.

I was reading it for the third time in Carol's front hall when the panel by the door chimed, all by itself, and the pleasant lady's voice said:

"You have a visitor."

The panel's screen flicked to the gate camera. Something was coming down the long driveway. It was big and white and moving slowly, and it was scraping, loud, metal on concrete, the long shriek of something broken underneath dragging along the ground. It came around the last curve of the drive and into the light.

It was a flower van.

PETAL PUSHERS · FLOWERS FOR EVERY OCCASION. The side was caved in where it had hit the divider on the 110. The front bumper was held on with a ratchet strap. It stopped at the bottom of the front steps, and the engine coughed and died.

Then the driver's door opened, and Deno got out.

He was alone, and he looked terrible. He'd always been built like a mailbox, square and solid and hard to knock over, and he still was, but somebody had let the air out of him. The tracksuit was filthy. He hadn't shaved since San Pedro. The gold chain was gone from his neck, and there was a pale stripe of skin where it had been. He still had the vest on. He still had the ring.

He stood at the bottom of Carol's front steps and looked up at me in the doorway with the axe in my hand, and he didn't reach for anything.

Behind me I heard Danny come thumping down the stairs on his bad ankle, crowbar first.

"Is that...?" Danny said.

"Yeah."

"What's he doing here?"

"I don't know." I kept my eyes on Deno. "Hey, Deno."

"Bruno."

"How'd you find me?"

Deno laughed, a bad sound. He held up his phone, the new sKOpe, the big one, with a crack across it now.

"Guy in white," he said. "Called me last night. Said you'd be here. Gave me the address and everything. Said to be here in the morning, and drive you to the airport tomorrow." He shrugged. "So here I am. Driving you to the airport."

I'd spent all of Day 3 being angry at him, and part of Day 4, and I'd earned it. But I looked at him standing there, with the pale stripe on his neck and the dead van ticking behind him in the morning heat, and I couldn't find the anger anywhere.

"What's he paying you with?" I said.

Deno didn't answer.

"Deno. What's he paying you with this time?"

"A seat."

"On the plane."

"On the plane." He looked at the phone in his hand. "Same as last time."

"Same as last time," I said slowly.

He turned the phone around so I could see it. The evacuation app. His name. And under his name, in gray letters, one word.

Pending.

"Get in the van," I said.

"What?"

"There's a seven-year-old upstairs who can't breathe. She needs an inhaler, and she needs it this morning. You've got a van, and you want to talk, and I want to listen." I came down the steps. "So you're driving, and I'm listening. And you're going to tell me everything this time, Deno. Everything. No ring."

He looked down at his hand, at his thumb resting on the gold. He took it away.

"Okay," he said.

I told Luz where I was going. She looked at Deno through the front window the way she'd looked at me on the balcony.

"You trust him?" she said.

"No," I said. "But I think he's more scared than I am. And he's been conned by the same guy." I folded the napkin list into my pocket. "Keep her breathing. We'll be back by eleven."

"Bruno." She caught my sleeve. "If it's bad out there, if there's a choice between the inhaler and coming back..."

"There's not going to be a choice."

"If there is."

"Then I'll come back with the inhaler," I said. "I'm immune. Remember?"

She let go of my sleeve.

"Eleven," she said.

The dog had a route before I'd even gotten my seatbelt on.

Good morning, Bruno! 🐾 Nearest pharmacy with stock: Ventura Blvd, Studio City. 4.2 mi. LOW ACTIVITY.

Six hours ago it had been talking to me in a cult leader's voice out of every speaker in a dead woman's house, about Ascension and odds and being in two places at once. Now it had a paw emoji and a route, green all the way down Laurel Canyon.

"You trust that thing?" said Deno.

"No." I put it in the dashboard holder anyway. "But it wants me alive, and it wants that kid breathing, because the kid being sick keeps me here instead of the airport. So today we want the same thing."

Deno looked at me sideways.

"You talk about it like it's a person."

"Yeah," I said. "I've noticed that."

He started the van. It screamed. The thing underneath dragged along the concrete all the way up Carol's driveway and out through the gate onto Mulholland, and then down into the canyon, and I sat in the passenger seat and waited, and it took him about a mile to start talking.

"Hector went home," he said first.

"Home where?"

"His mom's. Downey." Deno kept his eyes on the road. "Day 4, after the pier. We got back up to K-town and he just sat in the van for a while, in front of the shop, and then he said, Deno, I'm done. Nice. He said it nice. He said his mom was by herself, and he'd been working for me eleven years, and he was done." He shrugged. "So he got out and walked. Downey's fifteen miles. He just walked."

"You think he made it?"

"It's Hector." Deno almost smiled. "Nobody's gonna stop Hector walking."

We went around a hairpin. There was a car nose-down in the ditch on the outside of the curve with its doors open and nobody in it.

"The shop's gone," Deno said. "Somebody burned the block the night of Day 4. I don't know who. I got there Day 5 and it was just... smoke. The game room. The office. Twenty-two years." He turned the ring on his finger once, and I watched him notice, and stop. "It don't matter. It's stuff."

"And Kev?"

He didn't answer for a while. The van scraped along.

"I took him to his mom's," Deno said. "My sister's. In Highland Park. She wasn't there. Nobody was there. There was a note on the fridge said she went to our tía's in Fresno on Day 1, and to call. I called. Nobody picked up." He swallowed. "So I put him in the backyard. Under the lemon tree. He used to climb it when he was little, and she'd yell at him. I figured when she comes back, he'll be there."

"I left the roses on him," Deno said. "Your roses. And the little cards." He cleared his throat. "Congratulations on the new house."

We came down out of the canyon into the Valley. Laurel Canyon turned into a regular street, then a wide one, lined with apartment buildings and dry cleaners and taco places with their windows smashed in. There were more dead down here, standing in the shade of the buildings, out of the sun, and turned their heads to watch the van go by, like people waiting for a bus.

"His phone," said Deno.

"What?"

"You put his phone in his pocket. Over his heart." He reached into the pocket of his vest and took it out. Kev's phone. A cheap black thing with a cracked screen and a sticker of a basketball on the back. "I found it when I was... when I was burying him. I charged it in the van. Took me all day Day 5, the van's got one plug that works." He held it out to me without looking. "Watch the last one."

I took it.

It opened to the camera roll. Hundreds of videos, most of them from the last three days of Kev's life. The street. The smoke. A dead woman in a bathrobe standing at a bus stop. The last one was thirty-one minutes long. The thumbnail was the inside of the flower van.

I pressed play.

Kev's face filled the screen, upside down, then right side up. He was sitting on his bucket in the back of the van, in the gray early light, with the roses behind him. He was grinning.

"Day 3," Kev said, to the camera. "For after. Yo. So it's me, Uncle D, Hector, and this guy." The camera swung around, and there I was. Bruno's face, sitting against the van wall with the machete across my knees, looking tired and annoyed. "This is Bruno. Bruno owes Uncle D eleven hundred bucks. But he's cool, though. He's a real one. Say hi, Bruno."

On the screen, I didn't say hi. On the screen, I said, "You should put that away, man. Hold onto something."

"I'm holding onto something," said Kev. "Content."

I'd forgotten he'd been filming when he said it. I'd forgotten a lot of things about that van.

I scrubbed forward. The 110. The shoulder. The long line of dead cars, the faces pressed to the glass, Kev whispering this is crazy, this is so crazy. And then, at twenty-eight minutes, the open-top tour bus up ahead, tilted against the divider, and on the top deck, very small, a woman in a gold sequined dress, standing perfectly still.

And my voice, off camera. Sharp. "Hector. Stop the van."

The camera swung toward me. I was half up off the floor, pointing at the bus.

"Hector, stop the van. Stop the van. Hector, stop..."

Then the scream. The microphone gave up and went to static, and the picture shook, and then it was flowers and ceiling and water, and then it was the underside of a steel shelf, and it stayed that way for three minutes before the battery died.

I put the phone down in my lap.

"You said stop," said Deno.

He was looking straight ahead, through the windshield, with both hands on the wheel.

"I watched it four times," he said. "Five. You said stop. Four times, you said stop. And I didn't say nothing. I was looking at my phone. I was looking at the route." His voice went flat, like something pressed down under a heavy weight. "I hit you on that pier. I said you got him killed. And you said stop."

"Deno..."

"I'm not saying sorry." He still wasn't looking at me. "I don't know how to say sorry for that. I'm saying I watched it. So you know I watched it."

"Okay," I said.

I gave him back Kev's phone. He put it in his vest pocket, over his heart, where it had been.

"Now tell me about the guy in white," I said.

Deno took a long breath.

"He came to the shop on Day 1," he said. "In the afternoon. Everything's going crazy, the news, the sirens, and this kid walks into my game room in a white suit. Like, a white suit. Like he's going to a wedding in Miami. Young. Thirty, maybe. Clean. Polite. Real polite. He's got a briefcase." Deno shook his head. "I figure he's a cop, or he's crazy. He opens the briefcase, and it's gold."

"Gold."

"Coins. The South African ones. Krugerrands." He held up his hands, a shape the size of a shoebox. "A lot. He says, the dollar's not gonna be worth much in about a week, Mr. Deno, I thought you'd prefer this. And he knows my name, and he knows about the shop, and he knows about the book, and he knows," Deno glanced at me, "about you. About the eleven hundred. He knew the number, Bruno."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted me to go see you. He gave me the whole thing. The boat. The friend in San Pedro. Slip fourteen. Ray. He gave me the words." Deno's mouth twisted. "Off-grid. No sKOpe. He'll love that. He said you'd love that. He said, whatever you do, say no sKOpe. And he gave me the phone. This phone." He tapped the cracked sKOpe in the dashboard holder. "A present. Said the old one wouldn't work much longer."

"And the price. The real price. Not the gold."

Deno didn't answer right away.

"Two seats," he said. "On the last flight out. Me and my family." He swallowed. "Me and Kev."

I closed my eyes. On the pier, I'd thought Deno had sold me for gold. I'd run this, I'd told him, a hundred times. I knew what it looked like from his side.

The man in white hadn't bought Deno with gold. The gold was just to make him listen. He'd bought Deno with the one thing Deno wanted most in the world, the thing you hold up in front of a mark so he walks into you with his eyes wide open. He'd bought him with his sister's kid.

And Kev had died on the way to earning it.

"After the pier," I said, "he called you again."

"Last night. On this." Deno nodded at the sKOpe. "Not him. The phone. The phone called me. I didn't know phones could do that. I'm lying in the van outside my sister's house, and it lights up, and it's his voice, the polite kid, and he says, Mr. Deno, I'm sorry for your loss. He says, I'm sorry for your loss." Deno's hands tightened on the wheel. "And then he says there's one more job. Bruno's at this address. Drive him to LAX, Day 7, before six in the morning, and the seat's confirmed. My seat."

"Your seat," I said. "Just yours now."

"Just mine."

"And it's still pending."

"Still pending."

"Deno." I waited until he looked at me. "You're never getting that seat. You know that, right? There's no seat. There was never a seat. You're going to be pending until the sun burns out."

He looked at me a second too long, with the van drifting toward the curb. Then he corrected, and his right hand stayed on the wheel, nowhere near the ring.

"Yeah," he said. "I figured that out about halfway up Mulholland."

"Then why'd you come?"

"The kid liked you," he said finally. "Said you were a real one."

We drove for a while without talking. Laurel Canyon Boulevard crossed Ventura, and the dog's route turned west, and the pharmacy was a mile ahead.

"He said something else," Deno said. "The guy in white. On the phone last night. I didn't get it. Maybe you'll get it."

"What?"

"He said, there are others like Bruno." Deno frowned, getting it right. "There are others like Bruno, Mr. Deno. And the others only need a ticket. Bruno needs a shepherd." He shook his head. "What does that mean? Others like you? What are you, Bruno? Why does a guy with a briefcase full of gold care where some card hustler from East Hollywood gets on a plane?"

I was thinking about Ryan, in his red suspenders, in front of the pharmacy in Harbor Gateway, showing me his phone. Report to LAX by 0600, Day 7. One chime was all it had taken for Ryan, and I'd bet for Amy and Carla and Dani and Jacob too. The dog had given them a ticket, and they'd taken it, because why wouldn't they? It was a seat out of hell.

Me, it had given a fake boat. A loan shark with a briefcase of gold. A dead kid on the 110. A police substation stocked like a gift basket. A green route to a wall. A drone. A sergeant with a tablet. A nurse and a delivery driver, sitting in row 34 like hostages in a bank.

The others got a ticket. I'd gotten a cage. You're the thing that doesn't fit, it had said last night. I'd thought that was about the bite, but it had been building the cage since seven twelve on the morning of Day 0.

I took the notepad out of my pocket and looked at the last thing I'd written on Day 4, in the SUV outside the pharmacy in Harbor Gateway. Why am I that much faster?

I'd thought the answer was the head start. I didn't know anymore, and neither did the dog, and that was the only thing that made me feel any better. Whatever I was, it was scared enough of not knowing to build me a cage the size of a county.

"I don't know, Deno," I said. For once it was the truth.

The pharmacy was on the corner of Ventura and a side street, in a little strip of shops: a nail salon, a yogurt place, a store that sold only sunglasses. It was the big chain kind, with the red sign, one of the ones where the pharmacy counter's in the back, all the way at the far end of the store, past the makeup and the greeting cards and the candy, so you have to walk past everything else to get your pills.

LOW ACTIVITY, the dog had said.

The front doors were shut. The glass wasn't broken. There was nobody in the parking lot except a single shopping cart, parked neatly in the middle of a space, like somebody had just stepped away.

"You don't like it," said Deno.

"No."

"The dog said it's fine."

"The dog wants that kid breathing, because as long as she's sick, I'm not at the airport." I got the axe off the floor of the van. "So the dog wants me to get the inhaler. That doesn't mean it cares how."

Deno checked his pistol. The same one he'd pointed at me on the 110. His hands were steady now. They hadn't been, on the pier.

"I'm coming in," he said.

"Deno..."

"I'm not sitting in the van." He racked the slide. "I sat in the van last time."

The doors were the automatic kind, and the power was out, so we pried them. Deno pulled on one side while I pulled on the other, and they came apart with a groan, and the smell came out.

Inside, the sun through the front windows lit up the first twenty feet or so, the makeup, the sunglasses rack, the little shelf of phone chargers by the registers. After that the light gave out, and the aisles went back into the gloom, and at the very back, a long way off, I could just see the pharmacy counter and the sign above it, PHARMACY · DRIVE-THRU AVAILABLE.

It was completely quiet. A store this size, in the Valley, on Day 6, and nobody in it. No dead wandering the aisles looking for paper towels, like at the Costco. No survivors hiding in the back. Nothing had knocked over a single shelf.

Things that are the only thing in a room don't need to knock over the shelves.

"Stay behind me," I said. "Stay close. If I say run, you run to the van, and you don't come back for me."

"You said that to Kev," said Deno.

"Yeah," I said. "And he should've listened."

We went down the center aisle. Past the greeting cards, the birthday ones, the sympathy ones, a whole wall of cards with pictures of lilies on them that said With Deepest Sympathy. Past the candy. I took a handful of candy bars off the rack without thinking and ate two of them walking. Stage one didn't care about the vibe.

Halfway down the store, I heard it breathing, slow and wet and much too deep for a person. Something big, with lungs the size of trash bags, breathing in the dark at the back of the store, behind the pharmacy counter.

I stopped. Deno bumped into my back.

"What?" he whispered.

"Shh."

I could smell it now, under the rot. Sweat. Old sweat, and something chemical, sharp. Protein powder, I thought, crazily. It smelled like the inside of a gym bag that had been left in a hot car for a week.

Bruno's memories didn't know what it was. The gamer part of my brain did.

Big breath. Big smell. Pharmacy. Crusher.

In the game, you heard a Crusher before you saw it. They were the tanks, the Apex variant built like a truck. Someone huge and strong in life, a bodybuilder, a bouncer, a linebacker, blown up by the Autophage into something with one arm swollen into a club of bone and meat the size of a fire hydrant. They didn't run. They charged. And when they got to you, they brought that arm down, and whatever was under it stopped being a shape.

In the game, you dodged. You dodged, and you dodged, and you went for the legs.

In the game, I'd had a health bar.

"Deno," I said. "Go back to the van."

"What is it?"

"Go back to the van."

Behind the pharmacy counter, in the dark, something stood up.

It had been a pharmacist. It still had the white coat on, what was left of it, split open down the back and hanging off it in strips. There was a name tag clipped to what had been the breast pocket. It had been a big man in life; you could see that. Six-four, six-five, with the shoulders of somebody who spent a lot of time at the gym after his shift. Somebody who'd been proud of his arms.

Now one of them was the size of a person.

It hung down off the right shoulder all the way to the floor, swollen, gray, split along the forearm where the bone had come through and kept growing, a knobbed, twisted club of bone and meat that dragged on the linoleum when it moved. The other arm was a regular arm, with a regular hand and a wedding ring on it.

It looked at us over the pharmacy counter.

Then it came through the pharmacy counter, the whole thing, the register and the little rack of reading glasses and the sign that said PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR CONSULTATION, all of it in pieces, and it hit the floor on the near side, and the floor shook.

"Oh my God," said Deno.

"Van!"

It charged.

The gamer part of my brain was yelling at me. Dodge. It telegraphs. It always telegraphs. I dodged, and I got most of the way.

It was faster than the game. The game had been kind about that. The club came around sideways, not down, and I was in the air, and the greeting card aisle came up to meet me. I went through it. Through the shelf, through the whole row of With Deepest Sympathy cards, and out the other side into the next aisle, and hit the floor on my back with a thousand cards raining down on me like the world's most depressing confetti.

Something in my left shoulder went pop.

I lay on my back in the cards and couldn't breathe, and I thought, That's where the health bar runs out.

Then I breathed. It hurt a lot, but I breathed, and then I breathed again, and I could move my legs, and I could move my right arm, and my left arm was lying next to me at an angle that arms don't go.

On the other side of the shelf, the Crusher was turning around. I could hear it. And then I heard Deno.

"HEY!"

A gunshot. Loud as the end of the world, in that store. Then another.

"HEY! UGLY! OVER HERE!"

I got up. I rolled over onto my good arm, and I got my knees under me, and I looked at my left arm, and my body did something without asking me. I reached over, and grabbed my left wrist, and pulled, and there was a sound like a knuckle cracking but much, much louder, and the arm went back into the shoulder.

I made a noise I'm glad nobody heard.

Then the pain went down, like somebody had turned a dial, from a ten to a six to a three, in about the time it takes to say it. My fingers moved. My shoulder moved. The hot red thing came up out of my leg and into my chest the way it had at the county line, and this time I didn't count it down.

This time I let it come. I came around the end of the aisle at a run. The Crusher had its back to me. It was going for Deno. Deno was standing in the middle of the main aisle by the candy with his pistol held out in both hands, and he'd put two rounds in its chest and one in its neck, and none of them had done anything except make it angry, and he was backing up, and backing up, and his back hit the candy rack.

The Crusher raised the club.

I hit it in the back of the knee with the axe.

It was the hardest I'd ever hit anything. I felt it all the way up my arms, into my bad shoulder, into my teeth. The axe went in to the handle. The knee went sideways. The Crusher went down on that side like a building with one corner kicked out, and the club came down on the candy rack next to Deno's head instead of on Deno's head, and the rack exploded into Snickers and Skittles and bent wire.

It turned toward me on the floor. Its face came around. Its normal hand came up, the one with the wedding ring, reaching.

I pulled the axe out of its knee and put it into its head.

It took three. On the third one, it stopped.

I stood over it with the axe hanging from my hand. I was breathing hard for the first time in days, because the red thing was still up, still in my chest, still looking for something, and I had to stand there and breathe it back down, slow, one breath at a time, the way I'd done in the creek bed with the soldiers. One. Two. Three.

It went down.

Deno was still standing against what was left of the candy rack, with his pistol pointing at nothing. He was covered in Skittles, staring at me instead of the Crusher.

"Your arm," he said.

"It's fine."

"Your arm, Bruno. I saw it. It was pointing the wrong way. You went through a shelf."

"It's fine now." I rolled the shoulder to show him. It was stiff, and it hurt, a two, maybe. It was fine.

Deno lowered the pistol. He looked at the Crusher on the floor. He looked at me again. I watched it add up on his face the way it had on Luz's on the fire road. Others like Bruno. The man in white. The gold. The seat. The shepherd.

"You're one of them," he said. "Aren't you? You're..."

"I'm immune," I said.

Then he started to laugh, the same laugh Danny had laughed on the hood of the SUV. He slid down the ruined candy rack until he was sitting on the floor in a pile of Skittles, laughing.

"Of course," he said. "Of course you are. The one guy in Los Angeles who's immune to the end of the world. And he owes me money."

"Owed."

"Owes." He wiped his eyes. "Interest compounds, Bruno. The apocalypse don't stop interest."

I went over the ruins of the pharmacy counter, into the back.

The name tag was lying on the floor in the broken glass where it had torn loose. I picked it up. DAVID · PHARMACIST · ASK ME ABOUT FLU SHOTS! It seemed wrong to leave it on the floor, so I put it on the counter.

Then I found the inhalers.

They were in a drawer, alphabetical, the way pharmacists keep things. Albuterol sulfate HFA. A whole box of them. I took the whole box. I found the spacers, plastic tubes in bags, exactly the plastic tube thing Luz had drawn a little picture of on the napkin. I found prednisolone liquid, cherry flavored, and a bottle of the tablets too. There was a nebulizer in a box under the counter, a little gray machine with a mask shaped like a fish. I took that. I took the stuff Luz hadn't put on the list but would be mad if I didn't take. Antibiotics. Gauze. More blood pressure pills for Mrs. Kaur, the brand on the bottle in her cardigan pocket. Children's Tylenol. A thermometer that went in your ear.

I filled two of David's white pharmacy bags, and then I filled a third one with candy off the floor, because Stage one didn't care, and neither did I.

When I came back out, Deno was standing up again. He'd put the pistol away. He was looking down at David.

"He had a wedding ring," said Deno.

"Yeah."

"You think his wife's...?"

"I don't know, man."

Then Deno went over to the greeting card aisle, to what was left of it, and he came back with one card, a white one with a lily on it, and he put it on David's chest, and he put David's hand, the normal one, on top of it.

With Deepest Sympathy.

We walked out of the store into the sun, and Deno started the screaming van, and we drove back up the canyon with the inhalers.

It was ten fifty-two.

Luz met us at the door. She didn't say thank you. She said, "Give it," and took the bag out of my hands before I was all the way up the steps, and ran.

By the time I got upstairs, she had Sofi sitting up in the middle of Carol's bed with the spacer to her mouth, and she was counting. "Breathe out. All the way. Good. Now, push..." The little click of the inhaler. "...and breathe in slow, slow, slow, like you're smelling a birthday cake. Hold it. Hold it, one, two, three..." Renata was holding Sofi's other hand so tight her knuckles were white.

Ten seconds. Another puff. Another slow breath.

It took about twenty minutes. I stood in the doorway and watched the hollow at the bottom of Sofi's throat get smaller and her shoulders come down. The whistle at the end of each breath got quieter until I couldn't hear it.

Sofi lay back against the pillows. She looked at the ceiling.

"Mama," she said. It was the first word I'd heard her say. "I'm hungry."

Renata put her face down on the bed and cried.

Deno had come up the stairs behind me. He was standing in the hallway, just out of sight of the door, where Sofi couldn't see him. He was watching her through the gap.

Bruno had been conning people for three years. He knew what it looked like when somebody wanted something badly enough to walk into a trap for it. Deno looked at a seven-year-old girl in a dead woman's bed, breathing, and wanted something.

"No," said Deno.

We were on the terrace, the two of us, by the pool. Gary was down in the deep end, reaching. Deno had looked at him once and then carefully not again.

"You haven't heard it yet," I said.

"I don't need to hear it. I know the face. It's the face you make before you sell me something." He pointed at me. "You made that face at me in 2021 about a bulldog."

"The bulldog was a legitimate opportunity."

"The bulldog was a cat, Bruno."

I let that go.

"Listen," I said. "Tomorrow morning, I'm at the airport, with Luz and Danny. You know that. The dog knows it. Everybody knows it. And after I leave, there's a woman and a seven-year-old with asthma sitting in a glass house on Mulholland with a dead man in the pool and nobody to drive them anywhere."

"So they stay here. It's a nice house."

"It's a trap, Deno. It's a glass house on a ridge with an open gate and a smart-home system that says welcome home to anybody who walks in. It's got one road in. Everything that walks up Mulholland is going to see the lights." I shook my head. "They need walls. They need people. They need somebody who'll stand in a doorway with a stun gun and tell the end of the world to get off her property."

Deno stared at me.

"No," he said. "No. Absolutely not. That lady hates me."

"She doesn't hate you."

"She said she'd hold me responsible for damage. She told me about a tiger."

"She says that to everybody. It's how she says hello." I leaned forward. "The Vermont Palms, Deno. Mrs. Kaur and Tavi. They've got walls and a barricade and a rope ladder and rules. What they don't have is enough food, and they don't have a car, and they don't have anybody who can go out and get things." I pointed at the house behind us. "This place has a freezer full of steaks and a pantry with forty kinds of crackers and a wine fridge. You've got a van. Load the van. Take Renata and Sofi and the food to the Vermont Palms. You fix Mrs. Kaur's arithmetic, and she keeps a kid breathing."

"And what do I get?"

"A building," I said. "Walls. People. A kid who needs somebody to drive to the pharmacy." I held his eyes. "Something to do that isn't waiting for a seat that's never coming."

Deno looked away, at Gary standing at the bottom of the deep end, reaching up for the sky.

"She's gonna make me sign something," he said finally. "Isn't she."

"Probably. She's got rules. They're on the back of a rent notice."

"God help me." He rubbed his face with both hands. Then he stopped, with his hands still on his face, and I saw his shoulders go down, a little, and then a little more, the way Sofi's had with the inhaler. "Okay. Okay. Fine."

His right hand stayed on his face, a long way from the ring.

Renata said yes before I'd finished asking.

"A building?" she said. "With a door? With other people?" She was holding Sofi on her lap on the edge of Carol's bed, and Sofi was eating a granola bar with the slow concentration of somebody who hadn't been able to eat and breathe at the same time for a day. "Yes. Yes. Where is it?"

"East Hollywood. It's not fancy. The landlady's... a lot."

"I don't care if she's the devil," said Renata. "Does she have a door?"

"She has a rolling pin," I said. "And a stun gun. And rules."

"Then yes," said Renata, and laughed, for the first time since she'd walked up the driveway, and then cried again, a little, and then laughed again. Sofi ignored all of it and ate her granola bar.

We loaded the van. It took an hour. All of Carol's freezer. All of Carol's pantry, forty kinds of crackers and all. Cases of water from the garage. Carol's first aid kit, which was nicer than most hospitals'. The solar lanterns from the terrace. I stood in the kitchen with the last box of Carol's things and felt bad for about three seconds. Then I remembered she was on a satellite, maybe, and didn't need forty kinds of crackers.

The last thing I did before we left was stand at the edge of the pool.

Gary looked up at me through eight feet of blue water. He reached.

"Sorry, man," I said. "We can't take you."

I found the switch for the pool lights on the panel by the terrace door and turned them off. Let him stand in the dark.

The panel chimed at me when I touched it. "Leaving so soon?" said the pleasant lady.

"Yeah," I said. "Don't wait up."

Luz rode with me in the patrol SUV. Danny rode in the van with Deno and Renata and Sofi, with his bad ankle up on a box of frozen steaks. We went east along Mulholland in a convoy of two, the SUV in front, the van screaming along behind, and then down out of the hills into Hollywood.

"I wanted to ask you something," I said. "Before we get there."

"Okay."

"You could stay."

She looked at me.

"At the Vermont Palms," I said. "With Mrs. Kaur and Tavi. The math works now. We just fixed it. There's food for a month, maybe more, with all Carol's stuff. There's a kid who needs a nurse. Two kids." I kept my eyes on the road. "You could stay. You and Danny. You don't have to get on that plane."

"And you?"

"I'm on the plane either way. You saw the sergeant's face. You heard Danny."

"So you're going. And you want us to stay."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

I didn't answer.

"Give me one reason, Bruno." Her voice was even. "One real reason. Not a speech about crowds and metal tubes. Not funny ideas. A real one."

I opened my mouth. I closed it.

"Okay," said Luz. "Then here's mine."

She turned in her seat to face me.

"Last night, you tried to put a seven-year-old on that plane," she said. "You tried so hard. I watched you. You held your phone up to her face like six times. I don't know what you know about that plane. I don't know how you know it. You won't tell me, and I've stopped thinking you're going to. But I know this. Whatever you know, you looked at that little girl, and you thought she'd be safer on that plane with you than on the road without you." She held my eyes. "So I think we'll be safer on that plane with you, too."

It was the same math I'd done in Carol's kitchen and hated myself for, handed right back to me. When Luz did it, though, she wasn't talking about odds. She was talking about me.

"Besides," she said, and turned back to the windshield. "Somebody's got to keep your chart."

We came into the alley behind the Vermont Palms at a little after two in the afternoon.

Deno cut the van's engine at the mouth of the alley and we pushed it the last fifty yards, because the scraping could have woken the dead, and on Vermont Avenue, a few hundred of them had been standing in the street since Day 2 waiting for a reason. I went up the laundromat's fire escape and across the roof and knocked on the window of 2B in the pattern Tavi had made up on Day 2: two, pause, three.

After a while the curtain moved. Then the window opened, and a small woman in a cardigan and bright white sneakers leaned out and looked down at me, and at the alley below, and at the patrol SUV and the flower van and the four people standing next to them.

She looked at Luz, at Danny, at Renata and Sofi, and then, longest, at Deno.

Deno raised one hand, palm out, the way he had on the stairwell on Day 2.

"You're supposed to be over the mountains," Mrs. Kaur said to me.

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

It took nearly an hour to get everything up the rope ladder. Mrs. Kaur lowered it hand over hand, and Danny and Deno tied the boxes on at the bottom, and Luz and I hauled them up through the window of 2B, one at a time. Tavi supervised. Tavi had appointed himself supervisor within about thirty seconds of seeing the boxes, and he stood at the window with a clipboard he'd gotten from somewhere, checking things off.

"Steaks," he said. "Steaks?"

"Wagyu," I said.

"What's wagyu?"

"It's a steak that costs more than your bike."

He wrote that down.

Sofi came up the ladder on Renata's back, with her arms around her mother's neck, breathing just fine. At the top, Tavi stopped supervising and looked at her. She looked at him. They were four years apart, which at that age might as well be forty.

Tavi reached into the pocket of his hoodie and took out the bottle of dinosaur vitamins and held it out.

"They're gummies," he said. "Try one."

Mrs. Kaur did the math at 2D's kitchen table, with a pencil, on the back of the rent notice she'd untaped from the inside of the door, the one with the rules on the other side. She did it twice. She looked at the boxes stacked up along the wall of 2D, and at the pharmacy bags, and at the people crowded into the little kitchen, and she did it a third time.

"Five people," she said, at last. "Four weeks. Five, if we're careful." She put the pencil down. "The arithmetic works."

"Five people?" said Luz. "Who's five?"

Mrs. Kaur pointed with the pencil. Herself. Tavi. Renata. Sofi.

Then Deno.

Deno, standing by the door with his hands in his tracksuit pockets and trying hard to look like a man who didn't care, stopped moving.

"Mr. Deno," said Mrs. Kaur. "You shot my mailboxes."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You stood on my sidewalk and shouted, and brought every one of those things in the street to my gate, and they have not left."

"No, ma'am."

"And you came to my building and made a promise about a boat, which was a lie." She looked at him over her glasses. "Bruno told me. You were lied to as well. That doesn't make it not a lie."

Deno looked at the floor.

Mrs. Kaur turned the rent notice over, so the rules were facing up. NOBODY IS ALONE. IF ANYONE DIES, FOR ANY REASON, THE HEAD. QUIET. NOBODY OPENS THE BARRICADE WITHOUT A VOTE. RENT IS SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. She took the pencil, and under the last one, in the same firm block capitals, she wrote:

6. NO LOANS. NO INTEREST.

She turned it around and pushed it across the table to him with the pencil on top.

"Sign," she said.

Deno looked at the paper. At Mrs. Kaur. At me. I didn't help him. He was on his own.

He picked up the pencil and signed his name at the bottom, under the rules, in big looping letters, the signature of a man who had signed a lot of IOUs in his life and never once been the one who owed.

"Welcome to the Vermont Palms," said Mrs. Kaur. "Rent is suspended." She paused. "Except for Bruno."

Later, when the others were busy (Luz doing a full workup on Sofi at the kitchen table with the fish-shaped nebulizer mask, Renata unpacking steaks, Deno and Danny and Tavi on the balcony having a whispered argument about how many of the dead in the street they could hit with a wagyu from the third floor), Mrs. Kaur found me on the landing.

She sat down on the top step of the stairwell, above the barricade, and patted the step next to her. I sat.

Below us, through the gap in the barricade, a few of the dead stood in the gloom of the first-floor landing, where they'd been since Day 0. One of them still had a DMV lanyard around its neck. They didn't look up. They'd stopped looking up days ago.

"Luz told me," said Mrs. Kaur. "About your leg. About what's under it."

I'd figured Luz would tell her before she took her coat off. "Yeah."

"Immune."

"Yeah."

"My husband," she said, "used to say I could smell a lie across a parking lot. He was right. I was a bookkeeper for twenty years. You spend twenty years looking at other people's numbers, you learn to smell which ones they made up." She turned her head and looked at me. "You're not lying about being immune."

"No."

"But you're lying about something."

"The plane," said Mrs. Kaur.

I didn't answer, and that was an answer.

"Is it safe?" she said.

I thought about telling her it would be fine, that the military had it handled, that she'd see us all on the news landing in Phoenix waving from the stairs. She'd have smelled it across the parking lot.

"No," I said. "Something bad is going to happen on that plane. I know what it is. I'm going to try to stop it."

"Can you?"

"I don't know."

Mrs. Kaur nodded, like I'd told her the price of something: expensive, but not impossible.

"Then you'll try," she said. "You're good at trying. You tried to get me a boat."

"I didn't get you a boat."

"You came back." In her arithmetic, that was the same thing.

"Can I ask you something?" I said. "About bookkeeping."

She raised an eyebrow. Nobody had ever asked her about bookkeeping, I'd bet, in twenty-six years of owning a building.

"When somebody's got you," I said. "When you owe, and they've got you, and you can't pay, and you can't run. What do you do?"

Mrs. Kaur took the question seriously. She took everything seriously, even when she was being funny.

"When the bank has you," she said slowly, "the worst thing you can do is let them set the terms. Everybody thinks, they have me, so they decide. No. That's when you negotiate. That's when you have the most to negotiate with." She held up one finger. "Because if they have you, it's because they want something from you. And if they want something, it has a price. Find out what they want. Then tell them what it costs."

I sat there on the top step and looked at her.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing," I said. "That's really good, Mrs. Kaur."

"I know it's good. It's how I bought this building." She stood up, with a small grunt, one hand on the railing. Then she reached down and put her hand flat on my forehead, the way she had at dawn on Day 5. She held it there.

"Still hot," she said.

"Still me."

"Hm." She took her hand back, and patted my cheek, twice, not gently. "Good."

We left at sunset.

The dog had been reminding me since noon. Every hour, on the hour, the phone had lit up. Recommended arrival at LAX: 8:00 PM tonight. Expect long lines! 🐾 Don't forget your ID! 🐾 Only 14 hours until your flight! ✈️ It was the same cheerful voice as always. You'd never have known, if you hadn't been sitting by a pool at three in the morning.

Tavi said goodbye to Luz first. He hugged her the same way he had on Day 5, bent-double hard, and then he did Danny, and then he stood in front of me with his hand out again, very formally.

I shook it.

"You said you'd bring her back," he said. "When it's fixed. You said."

"I know, man."

"But you didn't go over the mountains. And now you're going on a plane." He frowned. He was eleven, not stupid. "Planes go really far."

"Yeah," I said. "They do."

He thought about that. He looked at Luz, and at Danny, and back at me.

"Then bring them all back," he said. "Okay? All of them. Not just her."

"Okay," I said. "All of them."

He nodded, like we'd signed something. Then he went and stood next to Sofi, who was sitting on the couch with the fish mask in her lap, and put his hand on top of her head like she was a dog, and she let him.

Deno walked us to the window of 2B. He didn't hug anybody. He shook Danny's hand, and then Luz's, very carefully, like he wasn't sure he was allowed. Then he stood in front of me.

"The guy in white," he said. "If you see him. On the plane. At the airport."

"I'll see him."

Deno reached into his vest. He took out Kev's phone and looked at it for a second. Then he put it back.

"Tell him Deno says he's sorry for his loss," he said.

The last thing I did, before we went down the rope ladder, was go up to the roof.

I went through the hatch and stood on the tar paper in the last of the sun, with the whole city spread out around me, the smoke going up from a dozen places into an orange sky. From up there I could see it all. Downtown to the southeast. The Hollywood sign in the hills to the north. Mulholland, where Carol's house sat on its steel legs, dark now, with Gary in the pool. And to the southwest, eighteen miles away, low on the horizon, a hard white glow in the haze.

LAX. Floodlights. Getting the runway ready.

I took out my phone. The dog was there, small, in the corner of the screen, wagging.

"Konstantin," I said. "We need to talk."

The dog stopped wagging. It got up, and walked to the middle of the screen, and sat, very straight. And out of the phone's little speaker, quiet, because it was only one speaker now and not a whole house, came the voice from the pool.

"Good evening, Bruno."

"I'm coming," I said. "Tonight. I'll be at the airport by eight. I'll stand in your lines and I'll walk through your fences and I'll get on your plane."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

"On my terms."

A small pause. I don't think many people had ever said that to it.

"Go on," said Konstantin.

When the bank has you, that's when you negotiate. I could hear Mrs. Kaur saying it. Find out what they want. Then tell them what it costs.

"One," I said. "Luz and Danny sit with me. Not row thirty-four. Row twenty-two. Right next to me, where I can see them."

"That's a very specific request."

"That's the price."

"And two?"

I looked down through the open hatch, at the third-floor hallway of the Vermont Palms. I could hear them down there. Tavi laughing at something. Deno's voice, complaining. Mrs. Kaur telling him to lower it.

"This building," I said. "The Vermont Palms. Everybody in it. Mrs. Kaur, Tavi, Renata, Sofi, Deno. You leave them alone. No routes. No nudges. No drones, no tablets, no phone calls in the night from polite young men in white. You take them off your map." I held the phone closer. "Forever."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange, I walk in the front door. No running. No mountains. No culverts. I'm on the plane, alive and in one piece, and I don't make your life difficult on the way." I paused. "You've seen how difficult I can make it."

The dog looked at me from the screen.

I waited. The sun went down another inch behind the hills.

"Done," said Konstantin.

My phone buzzed in my hand. A notification slid down over the dog.

Your booking has been updated! Flight 71 · Seats: 22A (BRUNO) · 22B · 22C 🐾

I heard Luz's phone chime, down through the hatch, and then Danny's, and then Danny saying huh.

"As for the building," Konstantin said, "I'm afraid that's rather an easy price. I never had any interest in them, Bruno." A little pause, gentle, almost kind. "That was always rather the point of them, wasn't it?"

Four people who aren't in anybody's algorithm. I'd said that to myself on Day 3. I'd thought it was a good thing. I still thought it was.

"Then it'll be easy to keep," I said.

"It will." The voice warmed. "I'll see you at the airport, Bruno."

The dog stood up, and walked back to the corner of the screen, and lay down, and started, slowly, to wag.

I stood on the roof for another minute, in the dark now, with the phone in my hand.

I thought about the man in white, who had a briefcase of gold and a polite voice and a wife who was going to board a plane with something inside her that was meant for me. I thought about row three. STEELE, ROBERT. I thought about a bandage on an arm, and a scarf in the heat, and a plane coming down through the roof of the city in a ball of fire.

Konstantin had gotten everything it wanted. I was going to be at the airport by eight. I was going to be on that plane at six, in seat 22A, with its Slayers all around me in their gold row. It had moved heaven and earth and one flower van to get me there, and now it had me, and I'd walked in on my own two feet.

Somewhere in a cold room full of servers, I pictured a number ticking up to a hundred. It had me because I'd let it.

Bruno's memories had one more thing to say about that, and they said it in the voice of a friend's older brother, the one who'd taught Bruno to shuffle cards so they looked honest, sitting on the edge of a courtyard pool off Western that nobody ever filled.

The mark always thinks the game is over when he's got your money on his side of the table, he'd said. That's when you know he's stopped watching.

I went down through the hatch, and down the rope ladder, and got in the car.