Chapter 10 - Soaring Pacific (Patreon)

You could see the airport from ten miles away. You couldn't get within two miles of it in a car.

The dog's route took us down La Brea and west on Slauson, green the whole way, through neighborhoods that had gone completely dark. Then, at Sepulveda, it stopped being a route. The map just ended in a solid red line, and a speech bubble floated up next to the dog.

Vehicle access closed beyond this point. Please continue on foot! 🐾 You're almost there!

We found out why at the next corner.

It looked like every car in Los Angeles had tried to get to LAX. They filled Sepulveda from curb to curb, and the side streets, and the parking lots of the hotels and the car rental places, and the lanes of Century Boulevard going west as far as I could see, all of them pointed toward the white glow on the horizon, all of them empty. Doors hanging open. Suitcases in the back seats. A minivan with a kid's drawing of a rainbow taped to the rear window. People had driven as far as they could, and then gotten out and walked, and left everything.

The dead were in some of the cars, enough of them. People who'd sat in that traffic on Day 1 and Day 2 and Day 3 with the windows up and the air conditioning running, waiting for the line to move, and had a heart attack, or a stroke, or just gotten too old and too hot and too tired. And then, sometime later, they'd sat up again. They were still sitting there, behind the wheels, in their seatbelts, turning their heads to watch us walk by.

"Don't look at them," said Luz.

There was no way not to.

We weren't the only ones walking. There were people all around us. Hundreds of them, coming out of the dark side streets, walking west down the middle of Century Boulevard between the dead cars. Families. Old people. A man pushing another man in a wheelchair. A woman carrying a cat in a laundry basket. Nobody talked much. Everybody had their phone out, the screens lighting their faces from underneath, and every so often somebody would stop and look at their screen and then keep walking a little faster.

A lot of them were pending. It was on their faces.

We walked for an hour. Danny's ankle was bad again, after the day we'd had, and he leaned on me for the last mile without saying anything about it. I carried both our bags and most of Luz's. The fire axe was over my shoulder. People gave me room.

Then we came around the curve at the end of Century, past the big LAX letters at the entrance, the ones that light up different colors at night, and saw the fence.

I'd seen the fence at Union Station on the news and the wall at the county line. This one was mostly people.

The fence itself was chain-link, twelve feet high, three layers deep, with razor wire along the top, stretched across the whole front of the airport where the terminal loop used to be. There were soldiers on the other side, and floodlights, and trucks, and the long white tents of a processing station. There were gates in the fence at intervals, each one with a line of soldiers and a little table with a tablet on it.

You couldn't see most of it for the people pressed against it.

There were thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. They filled the whole road in front of the terminal, the whole loop, the parking structures, standing, sitting, lying on flattened cardboard. They'd been there for days. You could tell from the trash, and the smell, and the little camps people had built out of suitcases and luggage carts. And every single one of them was facing the fence, and a lot of them were holding their phones up over their heads, so the soldiers could see the screens.

PENDING. PENDING. PENDING. Thousands of little gray words in the dark, held up like candles.

"Oh my God," said Luz.

Somewhere near the front, a man was holding up a baby instead of a phone, over his head, in both hands, not saying anything. The soldiers at the gate didn't look at him.

We'd been standing at the back of the crowd for about thirty seconds when a soldier on the other side of the fence, a hundred yards away, lifted his tablet and pointed it into the crowd.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, once, and then the tablet in the soldier's hand lit up, and he looked at it, and then he looked across a hundred yards of people, straight at me.

He raised a megaphone.

"PRIORITY PASSENGER. BRUNO. GATE SIX."

The crowd turned around.

I'd been looked at by a Crusher and a Butcher and a Screamer in a gold dress. None of them had looked at me the way that crowd did, thousands of faces turning at once to find out who Bruno was.

"Priority," somebody said, not loud. Then somebody else. It went through them like wind through grass.

"PRIORITY PASSENGER BRUNO, PLUS TWO. GATE SIX. MAKE A LANE."

And the crowd did, because there were soldiers on the other side of the fence with rifles and a tablet that had said my name. They pulled back from us, a few feet at a time, making a path through the middle of themselves toward Gate Six, and we walked down it. Luz and Danny and me. Past all of them.

Nobody touched us. They watched us go. A woman with two kids. A grandpa in a Dodgers cap holding up his phone with PENDING on it, like he wanted me to see it, like I could do something about it. A girl about Tavi's age, sitting on a suitcase, eating dry cereal out of the box.

The man with the baby.

I could feel Luz's hand on my back, gripping my shirt. I could hear Danny's breathing.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, on the gate, and I walked, and I thought about Renata. Five days, nobody's even asked. And I thought about what the dog would say if I asked it right now, how much the odds had gone up for every person in that crowd because I'd walked past them.

I didn't ask. I knew the number was zero.

Gate Six was a gap in the fence the width of a car, with a sandbag wall on the inside and a folding table and four soldiers. The sergeant had a tablet. They had us put everything on the table.

The fire axe went first. "No weapons past this point, sir." The soldier took it out of my hands, not unkindly, and tossed it on a pile behind the sandbags with a lot of other axes, and baseball bats, and machetes, and a samurai sword with the price tag still on it.

Then the rest of it went on the pile after the axe, one thing at a time: Trevor's machete, the baton, the flare gun and its four flares, the second pair of handcuffs, a whole week of scavenging for my life, gone in thirty seconds, and I said "Thank you, sir," through my teeth in a voice that meant something very different.

Then the pat-down. The soldier's hands went down my sides, and under my arms, and stopped at the back of my belt.

He pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

Port Police handcuffs, the pair I'd cuffed myself to a wall with three nights ago in the holding cell. I'd known why I was carrying them since the roof of the Vermont Palms: a man in row three with a scarf around his neck.

The soldier held up the cuffs. He looked at me: the dreads, the ink on my face, the Port Police vest, a pair of police handcuffs. I said, "Sorry, sir. Those are mine," very politely, and it didn't help. He looked at the sergeant.

The sergeant held the tablet up to my face. It chimed.

"Priority," the sergeant said, and shrugged.

The soldier looked at the handcuffs for another second. Then he handed them back to me.

"Priority's got privileges," he said, in the voice of a man who had stopped trying to understand anything about four days ago.

I put them back in my belt.

Then the tablet came up to Luz's face, and it beeped.

"General boarding," said the sergeant. "Row thirty-four. Left, to the general holding area." He pointed at a long white tent off to one side, full of people on cots.

"No," I said. "Twenty-two. Twenty-two B. Check again."

"Sir, the tablet says..."

"Check it again, Sergeant."

I didn't look at him. I looked at the little white paw print in the corner of the tablet.

When the bank has you, that's when you negotiate.

The sergeant looked back down at the screen as it flickered and updated. The sergeant frowned, and tapped it, and frowned harder.

"Twenty-two B," he said slowly. "Twenty-two C. Priority." He looked up at the three of us. "Huh. It changed."

"Yeah," I said. "It does that."

The tablet chimed for Luz. Then it chimed for Danny.

Somewhere in a cold room full of servers, the dog was keeping its word. I didn't know how I felt about that.

"Priority lounge," said the sergeant. "Terminal Four. Follow the green lights. You board at five."

The priority lounge was an airline's first-class lounge. The kind of place I'd only ever seen in movies: leather armchairs and low lamps and a long bar with backlit bottles, and big windows looking out over the apron, where the planes sat under the floodlights like whales on a beach.

There were maybe two hundred people in it. There was food on a long table, real food, sandwiches and fruit and those little cookies in plastic wrap. There was coffee. There were bathrooms that worked. There were soldiers at the doors, not facing out at the people who wanted in, but facing in, like they were protecting us from something.

Everybody in the room had chimed, and it showed the way pending had shown outside. They looked like people who'd won something and weren't sure they were allowed to be happy about it, with thirty thousand people on the other side of the fence.

Luz stood in the doorway and looked at the food table.

"I can't," she said. "I can't eat that. Not with them out there."

"Eat it anyway," I said. "They'd eat it. You'd want them to eat it."

She didn't answer. After a while she went over and got a sandwich, and sat down in a leather chair, and ate it very slowly, looking out the window at the planes.

I ate eleven. Stage one didn't care whose sandwiches they were.

I saw Emma Jaunt before I heard her, and then I heard her.

She was in the middle of the lounge by the bar, in sunglasses, at ten at night, indoors. She was exactly what she'd looked like in the game, which was what she'd looked like in a lot of magazines, and a lot of billboards on Sunset: tall, sharp, very expensive-looking, even on Day 6 of the end of the world, with her hair up and a silk scarf in it. She was holding a glass of white wine that she'd clearly gotten from behind the bar herself.

"...I am not," she was saying, "sitting on a cot. I don't care if it's for one night, Michael. I don't care if it's for one hour."

"Nobody's asking you to sit on a cot, Emma." That was Michael Anders. I knew him too. Thirties, glasses, a phone in each hand and a tablet under his arm, the permanent expression of a man who had been handling other people's emergencies for a living for ten years and had just found out what a real one looked like. "It's a lounge. It has chairs. You're sitting in one."

"This chair," said Emma, "is pleather."

"I'll find you a different chair."

"Find me a different airport."

I knew what happened to Emma Jaunt: the crash, the mansion in Bel-Air, Michael. She was going to lose nearly everything she had over the next two weeks.

But Bruno's memories had also seen every one of her movies, it turned out, twice, including a straight-to-streaming one about a vampire bride that Bruno had rented once to impress a girl who ended up liking it more than him. And the gamer part of my brain was standing in a first-class lounge ten feet from an actual video game character, and it was losing its mind.

And the rest of me was nineteen.

"Don't," said Luz, from her chair, without looking up from her sandwich.

"I wasn't going to do anything."

"You were going to. I can see you going to."

I went over. It was the end of the world, and Bruno had never once in his life walked away from a table where the stakes were too high.

"Miss Jaunt," I said. "Hi. Sorry. I just wanted to say I'm a big fan."

She lowered her sunglasses about a quarter of an inch and looked at me over them. At the dreads. At the ink on my face and neck. At the tactical vest. At the dried blood on the knee of my jeans from the Crusher. At the sandwich in my hand, my twelfth.

"Of course you are," she said.

"I loved you in the one with the vampire bride."

The sunglasses came down another quarter inch.

"Nobody loved me in the one with the vampire bride," said Emma Jaunt. "I didn't love me in the one with the vampire bride."

"I thought you were the best part of it."

"I was the only part of it. The bride was a CGI bat for forty minutes." "Are you trying to pick me up? At an evacuation center? At the end of the world?"

"Is it working?"

"No."

"Is it working a little?"

The corner of her mouth moved, almost.

"Michael," she said, without taking her eyes off me. "There's a boy in a bulletproof vest flirting with me. Handle it."

"On it," said Michael wearily, and I retreated.

When I sat back down, Luz took a long, slow bite of her sandwich, looking at me the whole time.

"Worth it," I said.

Then I saw him. He was sitting apart from Emma and Michael, in a corner of the lounge by the windows, in one of the good leather chairs. A man in his fifties, silver-haired, handsome in the way that men who marry movie stars are handsome, in an expensive blue shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the wrists.

He had a scarf around his neck. A thick, soft gray one, wrapped twice, with the ends tucked in.

It was eighty degrees in that lounge, with the air conditioning running and two hundred people in it. Michael had his sleeves rolled up. Emma was fanning herself with the wine list. Robert Steele was wearing a scarf.

He was sweating a little, along his hairline and on his upper lip, which he kept wiping with a cocktail napkin. His face was a color I'd seen before. I'd seen it on Armen Petrosyan, on the stairs, on the night of Day 0. I'd seen it on Gordon, in the storeroom of the pharmacy in Harbor Gateway.

He had a glass of water in his right hand. His left hand was in his lap. As I watched, he reached for a napkin with it, and his shirt cuff slid back an inch, and I saw the edge of a white bandage around his wrist, taped, going up under the sleeve.

He saw me see it. His left hand went back into his lap, slowly, and his right hand tightened on the water glass, and he looked away, out the window, at the planes.

He'd known for days. He'd been bitten, somewhere, somehow, and he'd wrapped it up and put a scarf on and gotten his priority chime like everybody else, and he'd been sitting in this lounge telling himself that it was fine. That maybe it was a dog. That maybe it wasn't that bad. That once they got out of the city, somewhere with a real hospital, somebody would fix it.

I knew that face too. I'd seen it in the mirror, in the Port Police substation, at four in the morning on Day 4.

The difference was that I'd been right.

"Who's that?" said Luz.

I looked at her. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking across the lounge, at Robert, over the rim of her coffee cup. She'd stopped eating.

"Emma Jaunt's husband," I said.

"He's sick. He's pale. He's diaphoretic. Sweating," she added, for Danny, who'd leaned in. "He's wearing a scarf in a room that's eighty degrees. He's holding his left arm like it hurts to move it. He's got a bandage on his wrist that goes up under his sleeve." She put her coffee down. "And he looked at you like you'd caught him stealing."

"Luz..."

"I'm not asking you how you know things," she said, low. "I stopped asking. I'm telling you what I know. That man is sick, Bruno. And he's hiding it."

"Yeah," I said. "He is."

She looked at the handcuffs on the back of my belt, which she'd seen at the gate and hadn't said a word about.

"That's why you have those," she said.

I spent the next few hours watching.

I didn't have a plan. I'd been turning my one card over since the roof of the Vermont Palms, and every way I played it came out the same.

I could tell somebody. Security, the soldiers, the flight crew. That man's bitten. Check his arm. But everybody in that lounge had been scanned by a tablet with a paw print on it and cleared. They'd trust the tablet over a nineteen-year-old in a stolen police vest. And the tablet was the dog.

I could tell the dog. I sat in a leather chair with my phone in my hand and the dog in the corner of it, wagging, and I thought about just saying it. Konstantin. Row three. Robert Steele. He's bitten. Take him off. The crash hadn't been part of its plan. It didn't want its plane on fire in the middle of the city any more than I did.

But I'd lied to that dog every day for six days. I'd hustled it at the container yard and the substation and on the roof. It had called me the thing that doesn't fit. It was running eleven thousand models on me, trying to work out what I'd do next. And now, eight hours before the flight, the flight I'd spent a week trying to get out of, I was going to tell it that the movie star's husband was infected?

It would think I was running a game. It had every reason to.

And even if it believed me, what would it do? Pull Robert off. And then the plane would take off on time and land wherever it was going, with six Slayers in a gold row and two people in white with no seat numbers, exactly the way the dog wanted. Wherever that was.

I looked out the window at the departures board on the wall of the gate area across the hall. FLIGHT 71 · SOARING PACIFIC · GATE 43A · ON TIME. Where the destination should've been, there was nothing. Just a blank.

Nobody in the lounge seemed to care. Out was a destination.

Around midnight, the Slayers started showing up.

I recognized every one of them. Seeing their names on a list hadn't prepared me for watching them walk into a lounge one at a time, faces I'd looked at a thousand times on a character select screen.

And every time one of them walked through the door, the floor tilted.

Carla came first, in motorcycle leathers with a helmet under her arm, like she'd ridden in. She probably had. She got two steps into the lounge, and the room lurched under me, the same half-second drop I'd felt on the sidewalk in Harbor Gateway with Ryan's hand in mine, the roller coaster at the top of the hill, the bass note through a wall. I grabbed the arm of my chair.

Across the room, Carla stopped walking. She put one gloved hand flat on the back of a sofa, the way you'd steady yourself on a boat, and stood there for a second with her eyes narrowed, looking around the lounge for whatever had just hit her. Her eyes went across Emma, and Michael, and the soldiers at the door, and a hundred strangers, and stopped on me.

Then she shook it off, and dropped into a chair near the bar, and put her boots up on the table, and looked around the lounge like she was deciding who she'd fight first if it came to that. But she kept glancing back at me.

Then Jacob, tall and British and very tired, in a torn jacket, with a bandage on his forehead that looked like somebody had done it with a stapler. The floor went again, harder. Jacob said "Christ" and put a hand on the bar, and on the other side of the room Carla's boots came down off the table. She'd felt him too. Jacob stood at the bar with his eyes shut. Then he asked the bartender, who was a soldier, for a gin and tonic, and when the soldier said there wasn't any tonic, he kept his eyes closed and said "Of course there isn't," in the voice of a man for whom the lack of tonic was the final straw.

Then Dani, with a roller derby bag over one shoulder, still wearing kneepads, talking on the phone in an Irish accent to somebody she kept calling Mam. The drop hit, and she stopped in the doorway with the phone at her ear and said, "No, Mam, I'm grand, I just... hang on," and put her other hand against the wall. She stood there looking at Carla. At Jacob. At me. Three people she'd never met, and she looked at each of us like a stranger wearing her jacket. Then she walked a slow, careful circle of the lounge, still on the phone, reading everyone's face, and I noticed she didn't come within ten feet of any of the three of us.

Then Amy, who came in quietly and didn't show it at all, except that she sat down on the carpet in a corner right away and started stretching her hamstrings, like an athlete before a race.

By the fourth one, I was holding the arm of my chair with both hands.

It was worse for me. The others got hit once, maybe twice, when somebody new walked in, and they shook it off. I got hit by all of them. Every time the door opened, the drop went through me like a bell being struck, and it didn't stop ringing, it stacked, and by the time Amy was sitting on the carpet my ears were humming and the lamps in the lounge had a faint double edge to them, like the room was a photograph somebody had taken twice.

"Hey." Luz's fingers were on my wrist. I hadn't felt her reach for it. "Your pulse just jumped to ninety. From forty-six." She was looking at me, hard. "What's going on?"

"Head rush," I said.

"Four times in twenty minutes?"

I was watching them. Four strangers in four corners of a first-class lounge, none of them talking, every so often each of them glancing at the others, and at me, and away, like checking a sore tooth with your tongue. Numen know Numen. The forums had been right. They just hadn't said it would hurt.

Then, a little after one, the door opened again, and the floor dropped one more time, gentler, like an echo, and a big guy in turnout pants and red suspenders came in with a Halligan bar over his shoulder that nobody had taken off him at the gate, and put one hand on the doorframe, and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me.

"No way," said Ryan.

He crossed the lounge in about four steps. He looked exactly the same as he had in Harbor Gateway, except dirtier, and with Gordon's sister's name still on the back of his hand in faded ballpoint.

"You too, huh?" he said.

"Me too," I said.

He sat down on the arm of my chair, hard, and looked at me, and then at Luz, and at Danny.

"These your people?"

"These are my people."

"Hey, people." He nodded at them. Then he looked back at me, and dropped his voice. "Back of the plane, you said. Eyes open. Watch anyone sweating with a bandage or a scarf."

"I said that."

"Uh huh." Ryan's eyes went, very deliberately, across the lounge, to the corner by the window. To the man in the good leather chair with the gray scarf around his neck. Then back to me. "You wanna tell me how you knew that, three days ago?"

"Something like psychic," I said.

"Yeah," said Ryan. "That's what I was afraid of."

Ryan had gone around the room while I was eating my twelfth sandwich, and talked to every one of them, because Ryan was the kind of guy who could talk to anybody, and he came back and sat on the arm of my chair again.

"That guy," he said, nodding at Jacob, who was drinking gin with no tonic with his eyes still closed. "That girl with the kneepads. The one with the bike helmet. And the one stretching." He counted them on his fingers. "They all got the same thing I got. Nobody registered. Phone just told them, hey, you've got a seat. Carla says it happened to her on Day 3, at a gas station in Pasadena." He looked at me. "And they all got the same seat, too. Same row, practically."

He lowered his voice.

"And every one of them," he said, "got dizzy when they walked in here. Every one. The Irish girl thought she was having a stroke." He looked at his own hand, the one he'd put on the doorframe. "Same thing I got. Same thing I got on the sidewalk in Harbor Gateway, man, when I shook your hand. I figured it was the heat." He looked at me. "It's not the heat. Is it."

"No," I said. "It's not the heat."

"What row are you?" said Ryan.

"Twenty-two," I said.

"Twenty-one. I'm twenty-one D." He stared at me. "How'd you...?"

"I'm twenty-two A."

"This is a weird plane, man," said Ryan.

At two in the morning, the couple in white came in.

I'd seen their names at the bottom of the list, in gold, with no seats. It still hit me like cold water.

They were young, both of them, early thirties. Beautiful, the way people in cult brochures are beautiful: clear skin, calm eyes, very good teeth. He was in a white linen suit, the same suit Deno had described, like he's going to a wedding in Miami, not a wrinkle on it, not a speck of dirt, on Day 6 of the end of the world. She was in a long white dress, and she was carrying a small white hard case on her lap when she sat down, the kind you'd carry a camera in, or a vial, and she kept both hands on it the whole time. Neither of them had a phone out. Neither of them needed one.

Joshua and Angelina. Two of the six Chosen.

They sat down across the lounge from me, side by side, in two leather chairs that nobody else had been sitting in, as if the chairs had been left empty for them. Then they both turned their heads at the same time and smiled at me, warm, polite, unsurprised, like they'd walked into a restaurant and seen an old friend at the next table.

The hair stood up on the back of my arms.

"Who are they?" whispered Danny.

"Nobody," I said. "Don't look at them."

"They're looking at you."

"I know."

I got up. Luz said my name, and I didn't stop. I walked across the lounge, between the leather chairs and the sleeping people, and stood in front of the two people in white.

Up close, Joshua smelled like expensive soap. Angelina didn't smell like anything at all. Her hands stayed on the white case.

"Bruno," said Joshua. His voice was soft and warm and very polite, exactly the way Deno had said. "It's wonderful to finally meet you properly."

"Yeah," I said. "I've got a message for you."

His eyebrows went up, very slightly. Interested.

"From Deno," I said. "He says he's sorry for your loss."

For about a second and a half, nothing happened on Joshua's face.

Then something flickered and was gone. I'd have missed it without Bruno's three years of watching faces across card tables for the moment a hand turns out worse than expected. A man who'd sent a loan shark a condolence message to keep him on a leash, hearing it come back to him from the mouth of the man he'd used the loan shark to catch.

Then the smile came back, a little tighter.

"Please thank Mr. Deno for me," said Joshua. "Though I don't imagine you'll be seeing him again."

"You'd be surprised," I said. "I keep seeing people again."

Angelina was looking at the back of my left calf, through my jeans, where the burn was, with her head tilted two degrees to one side, exactly like the dog.

"You started without us," she said softly. It was the only thing she said all night.

I walked back to my chair. My hands were shaking. I put them in my pockets so Luz wouldn't see, and Luz saw anyway.

"What did they say?" said Luz.

"Nothing."

"Bruno."

"They said it was nice to meet me."

She looked at me. She looked at the two people in white across the lounge, sitting perfectly still, side by side, like a photograph. She looked at Robert, in the corner, wiping his lip.

"How many people in this room are you watching?" she said.

"Two," I said. "Three."

"Okay." She pulled her feet up into her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. "Then I'll watch them too."

At four in the morning, they called the boarding lines.

We went out of the lounge in a group, the whole priority lounge, two hundred of us, down a long corridor lit with green arrows on the floor to Gate 43A. Through the windows, the plane was waiting at the end of the jet bridge. It was huge. A big old double-decker, the kind with the hump at the front, white with a blue stripe and SOARING PACIFIC down the side in blue letters, and on the tail, in white, a big stylized wave. Floodlights shone on it from every direction. It looked like a monument.

Soaring Pacific 71 Heavy. I'd seen it a hundred times. I'd seen it on fire in the middle of the city, with the Slayers crawling out of it, while the title came up on the screen.

It was a lot bigger in real life. The gate area was already full. Soldiers at the jet bridge door, two of them, with a tablet on a podium. A flight attendant, a tired woman with her hair coming out of its bun, holding a clipboard. The boarding line snaked back through the seats and the charging stations and the closed Starbucks, and at the front of it, first class, of course, was Emma Jaunt, with Michael on one side of her, and Robert Steele on the other.

Robert was worse. The sweat had gone from his hairline to his whole face. He was gray. He was leaning on Emma, and she was letting him, in a way that told me she'd finally noticed, and had decided not to know what she'd noticed. He was holding his left arm against his stomach.

I looked at the soldiers. At the tablet on the podium. At the jet bridge, and the plane, and the doors.

This was the last place to play my card. After that door, there was no off.

"Sergeant," I said.

I'd walked up the side of the line, past the first-class passengers, past Carla and Jacob and Ryan, who all turned to watch me go by. I stood next to the podium. The soldier there was a sergeant too, a different one, older, with a gray mustache. He looked at me like he'd been looking at people all night and was out of patience for every one of them.

"Back in line, sir."

"That man's been bitten," I said.

I said it to him clear and flat, like telling somebody their shoe was untied.

"Robert Steele," I said. "Silver hair, blue shirt, scarf. He's first in line. He's got a bite on his left forearm, under a bandage. He's running a fever. He's been hiding it for at least two days. He's going to turn on that plane." I held the sergeant's eyes. "Ask him to roll up his left sleeve. That's all. Just ask him."

The sergeant looked at the front of the line, at Robert leaning on Emma, gray-faced, sweating, with a scarf wrapped twice around his throat. I watched him see it, the way anybody would who'd spent six days learning what the start of it looked like.

Then he looked down at the tablet on the podium.

He touched the screen. He found Robert's name. I saw the green checkmark next to it, from where I was standing. I saw the paw print in the corner.

"He's been screened, sir," the sergeant said. "Cleared. Same as you."

"He's been screened by a camera that looks at his face. Look at his arm."

"Sir..."

"Look at his arm!"

I hadn't meant it to be that loud. The whole gate went quiet. The whole line turned around.

And Emma Jaunt took off her sunglasses.

"What," said Emma Jaunt, in a voice that had filled movie theaters, "did you just say about my husband?"

"Emma," said Michael, fast, "don't..."

"I heard him. Everybody heard him." She'd let go of Robert. She came down the line toward me, and people got out of her way, the way people get out of the way of weather. "This is the boy. This is the boy in the vest, Michael. From the lounge. He tried to pick me up, and now he's telling the Army my husband is a zombie?"

"Ma'am," I said, "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But he's bitten. Please. Just look at his arm. If I'm wrong, I'll get off the plane myself."

"Rob," said Emma, without turning around. "Tell him."

Robert Steele looked at me over her shoulder.

"I cut myself," he said. His voice was hoarse. It came out through the scarf, thick, like there was something in his throat. "On a car door. Getting out of Bel-Air. It's a cut."

"Then show him the cut," I said.

Robert didn't move.

"Show the sergeant the cut, Mr. Steele. That's all. Roll up the sleeve and show him."

Robert's left hand was pressed against his stomach. Slowly, he covered it with his right.

"I don't have to show anybody anything," he said.

"Michael," said Emma. "Get Security. Get the Army. Get someone. This person is harassing my husband."

"Sergeant," I said, "please..."

And then I was done asking.

I'd asked the sergeant nicely, and Robert nicely. I'd said please and sir and ma'am at the gate of the last plane out of Los Angeles with a man who was going to kill everybody on it standing twenty feet away holding his own arm, and every single person in that room had looked at me like I was the problem.

I stepped past Emma and reached for Robert's left arm.

Michael Anders hit me in the side with his whole body.

He did it right. He'd been a linebacker in high school, I found out later, and he came in low and hard with his shoulder, like he'd been taught, glasses and phones and all, the whole of his weight behind it. A week ago it would have put me on the carpet.

I didn't move. It was like being hit by a sofa cushion. Michael hit me and stopped dead and hung there on my side for a second with his arms around my ribs, and I heard all the air go out of him in one surprised whuff.

He looked up at me. His glasses had gone crooked.

"Man," I said. "Come on."

I backhanded him, open, the way you'd swat something off your shoulder. Not hard for me. And Michael Anders went sideways off me like a coat off a hook and across the carpet and into a row of gate-area seats, and the seats went over, and his phones went skittering under them, and he lay there on his back staring at the ceiling with his glasses hanging off one ear.

Somebody screamed. I had Robert's arm.

He pulled. He was a big man and he was scared and he pulled with everything he had, and it was like pulling against the bumper of a parked car. I held his wrist in one hand. With the other I took the cuff of his expensive blue shirt, the one buttoned at the wrist in an eighty-degree lounge, and I tore it. The button went. The seam went. The whole sleeve came open from the cuff to the elbow with a sound like a sheet ripping, and under it was the bandage, white gauze and surgical tape, wrapped tight and stained yellow at the edges.

I got my thumbnail under the tape and ripped that off too.

Then I held his arm up. High. Over his head, so the whole gate could see it, the way a referee holds up a boxer's arm at the end of a fight.

"THERE," I said. "There's your cut."

Gate 43A went quiet the way a room does when two hundred people look at the same thing and all of them know what they're looking at. Every kid in America had done the drills since kindergarten. They'd all seen the diagrams. The half-moon, top and bottom. The two rows of punctures. The torn edge.

And there it was, on the inside of Robert Steele's forearm, a hand's width above the wrist, gone black around the edges. And from it, going up his arm under the skin, toward the elbow, lines. Dark red lines, branching, like cracks in ice.

Nobody said cut.

Emma Jaunt made one small sound. She was looking at her husband's arm, held up over his head in my hand, and her face was doing something that I'd see it do again, later, in the aisle of a plane and on a golf course, and I'd never get used to it.

Robert didn't look at the arm. He looked at me, and his face said something a lot like thank you.

Then the soldiers hit me.

There were three of them the first time. The sergeant from the podium, and two more from the jet bridge door. They came at me from the side and the back, and one got my arm and one got my neck and the sergeant got me around the waist.

I let go of Robert's arm, and I didn't go down.

They hung on me. Three grown men in body armor with rifles slung on their backs, hanging off me like kids on a jungle gym, pulling, and I stood there on the carpet of Gate 43A and felt their weight like a backpack I'd forgotten I had on.

Two more came. Five. One of them got his arm around my throat from behind and leaned all his weight back on it, and I could feel him straining, and I could breathe fine.

And the red thing came up, not as far as in the pharmacy, but enough that I could feel it in my teeth. Seven days, it said. Seven days of asking. Seven days of sir and ma'am and swiping the dog away and eating your own lies. And you're the one they're jumping on.

I didn't count to three this time.

"Guys," I said. "GUYS. I'm not the one who's bitten."

And I shrugged, the way you'd get a jacket off. And five soldiers came off me like water off a dog, and went staggering back across the carpet in five directions, and one of them sat down hard on the floor and stayed there, blinking.

Then the rifles came up, every soldier at the gate. The five who'd been on me and the three at the jet bridge and two more I hadn't even seen, coming around from behind the podium. Ten rifles, maybe, pointed at me from ten feet away. The click of safeties coming off, all around the room, like somebody snapping their fingers.

"ON THE GROUND! ON THE GROUND NOW!"

I didn't get on the ground.

I stood there in the middle of Gate 43A with my hands up, and a strip of dirty gauze hanging from one of them, and ten rifles on me, and I thought, well, this is how the immune guy dies: a firing squad at LAX. I didn't know if I could take ten rifles. I didn't want to find out. And the red thing in my chest did. It wanted to find out very badly.

I held still.

"ON THE GROUND!"

"He's right."

It was Luz. She came out of the crowd behind me and walked straight into the middle of it, between me and the rifles, without running or putting her hands up, the way she'd walked up the stairs on the night of Day 0 to get to Hal, fast and calm, like there was a patient on the floor and nobody else was moving.

She stopped in front of me, with her back to me, facing ten rifles.

"He's right," said Luz again, in the hospital voice. "Look at the arm. Don't look at him. Look at the arm."

The sergeant's rifle didn't move. But his eyes did.

"I'm a nurse," said Luz. "That's a human bite. Three days old, maybe four. That's lymphangitic streaking, going up past the elbow. That man has been hiding it since before he walked into your lounge, and every one of you walked past him all night." She pointed at Robert's arm, still raised a little, where I'd let go of it, like he'd forgotten to put it down. "Look at it."

They looked at it. I watched the same thing open in ten faces at once, men who'd stood on walls for a week doing what the tablet said.

The tablet on the podium chimed.

The sergeant's eyes went to the podium, to the little screen with the paw print in the corner.

Then they went back to Robert's arm.

"Get Mr. Steele out of that line," said the sergeant. His voice was hoarse. "Quarantine tent. Now. Both of you." He jerked his head at two of the soldiers. "Now!"

They took Robert.

He didn't fight them. He let them take his arms, gently, and walk him out of the line, past the podium, toward a side door with a red sign over it. He didn't look at Emma. He couldn't, I think.

Emma went after him.

"Rob! ROB! No, you can't... that's my husband, you can't just... Rob!"

Michael had gotten up off the floor. His glasses were still hanging off one ear. His lip was bleeding where I'd hit him. He got to her before she got to the side door, and got his arms around her from behind, and held on, and she fought him, and he held on, the same way he'd hold on to her later on a staircase on a plane, with a man's teeth a foot from her face.

"They'll check him," Michael was saying. "Emma. Em. They'll check him, there's a tent, there's doctors, they'll check him, and if it's... if it's nothing, he'll be on the next flight. He'll be on the next one. Em. Please."

The side door closed behind Robert Steele.

Emma stopped fighting and stood in Michael's arms, looking at the door. Then she turned and looked at me across the whole gate. I didn't look away. I owed her that much.

The rifles came down one at a time. The sergeant's tablet chimed again. He looked at it, then at me.

"Priority," he said. It sounded like a swear word. "You're priority. Orders are you board."

"Yeah," I said. "I figured."

"You put your hands on a civilian."

"I know."

"You put your hands on five of my guys."

"They put their hands on me first, sir."

He looked at the face tattoos, and the dreads, and the gold chains, and the strip of Robert Steele's bandage still hanging from my fingers.

"What are you?" he said quietly.

I dropped the bandage in the trash can by the podium.

"Late for my flight," I said.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

There was no dog on the screen, only white text on black.

I screened him myself.

A pause.

I screen everyone.

A longer pause, with two hundred people staring at me, and the next line came up one word at a time.

I was wrong.

He has been removed from the manifest. Thank you, Bruno.

I put the phone back in my pocket. After six days of lying to it, it believed me, because I'd held a man's bitten arm over his head in front of two hundred people. I should have felt better than I did.

Everybody in the gate was looking at me the way the crowd at the fence had, like I was a dog that had just done something no dog should be able to do. The boarding line had moved back a couple of feet, enough to leave a little circle around me on the carpet, the kind that opens around somebody on a subway platform who's talking to himself.

Carla had her helmet in her hand like a weapon. Jacob had his eyes open. Dani had hung up on her Mam. Amy was watching me with her head tilted.

And Ryan, over by the window, with his Halligan bar on his shoulder, looked at me, and looked at the five soldiers still picking themselves up off the carpet, and looked back at me.

"Called it," he said, to nobody. "Something like psychic."

Joshua and Angelina, near the back of the line, weren't smiling anymore.

Joshua was looking at the side door where Robert had gone, pale, like a man doing a sum in his head and not liking the answer. Angelina was looking at me. At my hands. At the place on my arm where five soldiers had held on, and hadn't left a mark.

She tilted her head two degrees. And back.

Michael came over, eventually. Emma had sat down in one of the gate chairs with her face in her hands, and Kayla, the young flight attendant, was kneeling next to her, and Michael left them and came across the carpet toward me, slowly, holding his jaw.

He stopped about four feet away, at the edge of the circle.

"Sorry, man," I said. "About your face."

"How did you know?" he said.

I didn't answer, and I don't think he expected me to.

"She'd have gotten on the plane with him," Michael said. "She'd have sat next to him. For however long it... She'd have been right there." He touched his lip, and looked at the blood on his fingers. "I've been holding her together for ten years. I didn't see it. I was standing right next to him all night, and I didn't see it."

"You weren't supposed to," I said. "He didn't want anybody to."

Michael nodded, with his lip still bleeding, and went back to Emma.

Luz found me by the window, after.

She came and stood next to me, with Danny limping behind her, and took my wrist and turned it over where the soldiers had grabbed it, looking for marks. There weren't any.

"You knew," she said. "Since the lounge."

"Yeah."

"Is that it?" said Luz. "Is that the bad thing? The thing you said was going to happen on the plane? The thing you've been watching all night?"

Lying was the first thing I reached for now.

"Yeah," I said. "That was the bad thing."

"Was," said Luz.

I looked at the side door with the red sign over it.

"He's in a tent," I said. "He's not getting on the plane."

"So it's over."

I wanted it to be so badly my chest hurt. I stood there by the window at Gate 43A with the plane on the other side of the glass, lit up like a monument under the floodlights, and I let myself want it.

"I think so," I said.

Luz tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. Her hand was shaking. Her face wasn't.

"Okay," she said, and it wasn't the tired one people had been saying to me all week. "I believe you. I'm scared of you, a little, and I believe you."

"You stood in front of ten rifles," I said.

"You were going to do something stupid."

"I wasn't."

"You were thinking about it." She let go of my wrist. "I could see it on your face. The same face as the fire road." She looked at me. "Don't make that face at soldiers, Bruno. Make it at the dead."

Behind her, Danny was looking at the five soldiers, who were still standing in a knot by the podium, rubbing their arms and not looking at me.

"Note to self," said Danny. "Never tackle Bruno."

"Michael tried."

"I saw." Danny winced. "Dude went across the room like a bowling ball."

We boarded at five forty.

The jet bridge was long, and it smelled like carpet cleaner and jet fuel. It was hot in there, and people were quiet. Ahead of us, a big sunburned guy with a duffel bag was chatting to the soldier at the door like they were old friends, and the soldier checked him off as Redford, Ronnie, eleven C, and I watched him duck through the door and thought, you live. It was the only name on the manifest besides the gold row I could say that about for sure. At the door of the plane, the tired flight attendant with the bun looked at my boarding pass, recognized me as the guy from the gate, and took a very small step back.

"Twenty-two A," she said. "Upstairs, then back. Enjoy your flight."

To get to the stairs, you had to walk through first class.

Emma Jaunt was in 2A, by the window, with her sunglasses back on. She was sitting very straight, looking out the window at the dark apron. Michael was in 2B, on the aisle, with his split lip and his crooked glasses, with his body angled so that it was between her and the rest of the plane. Neither of them looked at me.

3A, behind her, was empty: a blue airline blanket folded on the seat, a pillow in its paper cover. I stood in the aisle a second longer than I needed to, looking at the seat where, in the game, a man in a scarf had sat with his arm in his lap, sweating.

Then Michael cleared his throat, and I kept walking.

Row twenty-two was upstairs, on the top deck, in the hump of the plane. A small cabin, maybe fifty seats, with its own little galley at the front. It was quieter up there. And every seat I could see in those first few rows had one of them in it.

Ryan in 21D, with the Halligan bar across his knees; the flight attendants had given up. Carla in 21A, with her helmet in her lap. Jacob across the aisle, with his eyes closed again. Dani, two seats down, and Amy in the row ahead, both sitting straight, like athletes on a bench waiting to be called in.

And me in 22A, by the window. The character select screen, all six of us, on an airplane.

Luz slid into 22B next to me. Danny folded himself into 22C, on the aisle, with his bad ankle stuck out into it. Nobody in the Slayer rows said anything. But Carla looked at me, then at Ryan, and Ryan nodded slightly, and Carla looked back at me with something halfway between trust and fear.

Two rows behind us, in two seats at the back of the upstairs cabin that I'd have sworn hadn't been there when I walked in, Joshua and Angelina sat down, side by side, in white. Angelina put the white case on her knees. She put both hands on it.

The doors closed.

I felt the thunk of the main door sealing somewhere below us, and the pressure change in my ears.

Then the plane began to move.

It backed away from the gate, slow, pushed by a tug I couldn't see. Out the window, the terminal slid past, the lit-up windows of the lounge where we'd spent the night, the soldiers on the apron, the floodlights. Then the plane turned, and began to roll on its own, and we taxied out past the dark rows of other planes, all of them parked, none of them going anywhere, toward the runway.

The captain came on the intercom. A man's voice, calm, Southern, the voice they must teach pilots on the first day. He said good morning. He said thank you for your patience. He said our flight time would be, and then he paused, and said, we'll update you on our flight time once we're airborne, folks, and turned the intercom off.

The seatback screen in front of me came on by itself.

It was the airline's screen, the kind that shows you the map and the movies and the safety video. It showed the airline's logo, the big blue wave. Then the logo faded, and in the middle of the screen, sitting very straight, with its big round cartoon eyes, was the dog.

Welcome aboard, Bruno! 🐾

It wagged once.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy your flight. ✈️

In the seat next to me, Luz looked at the white dog on the seatback in front of my seat and nobody else's, and decided not to ask. She took my hand on the armrest instead and held it hard.

The engines came up, all four of them, from a hum to a roar you could feel in your spine. The plane leaned back. The runway lights went past the window, faster and faster, a white blur. And then the ground dropped away.

Los Angeles came up underneath us.

All of it, at once, the way it had looked from Mulholland, but bigger, and closer, and turning. The dawn was coming up gray and pink behind the mountains, and underneath it the city was still burning, the fires scattered across the flats like coals in a grill. The freeways, still full. The towers downtown. The dark neighborhoods. Somewhere down there, too small to see, a stucco walk-up on Vermont with a rope ladder, and an old woman in a cardigan and white sneakers, and a boy with a clipboard, and a loan shark who'd signed his name under Rule Six.

We climbed. The city tilted, and slid under the wing, and got smaller.

Bring them all back, Tavi had said.

I held Luz's hand and watched Los Angeles fall away, and for about ninety seconds, I let myself think we were going to make it.

Then, from below us, at the front of the plane, through the floor, I heard a man coughing, deep and wet, from the bottom of the lungs. It stopped, and started again.

It came from first class, from row three, where I'd walked past an empty seat with a blue blanket folded on it.