Yelling again, she raised her hand as if to point at him, only it wasn’t her finger she was aiming in his direction.
32
Belinda Ramsey’s snowmobile ride south has taken her just over the Illinois border when the motor begins to smoke. Another two miles on, the machine dies. With no other options, Belinda starts hiking toward the town of South Beloit, hoping she can find someplace warm to sleep. She tells herself she will look for a new snowmobile, but in the morning. She’s too tired to do that now.
As she nears a neighborhood on the edge of town, she hears something in the distance. At first she thinks someone has left a music player on somewhere, perhaps looping through a playlist that will go on and on until the power finally goes out.
But it’s not music, she soon realizes. It’s words being spoken.
She skips the neighborhood and continues toward town, toward the sound, and it’s not long before she can start making out what’s being said.
“…help you. We will be in the parking lot of the high school on Prairie Hill Road in ten minutes. We will stay there for an additional thirty. This is the Untied Nations. We are here to help you. We will be in the parking lot of…”
Belinda starts to laugh in happiness. She’s not going to need a snowmobile tomorrow. She’s not going to ever need a snowmobile again. The UN is here. Her nightmare is over.
She searches for a road sign and finds she is actually on Prairie Hill Road. But she hasn’t seen a high school yet, and has no idea how far away it is.
Though the snow is not as deep here as it was in Madison, it’s still too deep for her to run through, so she has to settle for walking fast. Even then, it’s over twenty minutes before the high school comes into sight. She is both relieved that she doesn’t have far to go, and scared to death that the UN will already be gone.
But a blue tourist bus with UN painted in white on the side is idling in the parking lot.
She weeps as a soldier meets her at the lot’s entrance. She thanks him over and over as he gives her some food and guides her onto the bus.
Three of the seats are already taken. Their occupants, wrapped in blankets, stare at her. She smiles hesitantly, then notices not one of them is sitting near another.
Hiking her scarf over her face, she takes her own isolated spot.
As the bus begins to roll, she leans back and relaxes. Before sleep can take her, though, she remembers her journal and her promise to record her journey. She opens it, enters the time and date, and then writes a single word:
SAVED!
Ben Bowerman stands in the modest living room of the Cape Cod house in Santa Cruz where he found Iris the previous day. He has returned because it’s the only place he knows that she might come back to. But she is not there.
He’s now sure he will never see the picture his mother loved so much again, or retrieve the earrings he’d picked out for Martina. Tomorrow he will head south once more, this time in the car he found in Salinas. Tonight, he will find a hotel and sleep.
But he finds he can’t leave the house just yet. He wants to know what happened here, what he got tangled up in. If there are answers in the house, he figures he will find them in the dead man’s room.
Seeing Mr. Carlson on the bed for a third time is not nearly so disturbing as it was before. Ben can see now there’s something under the man’s hand, partly hidden by the covers. A piece of paper. Ben teases it free without having to touch body or blanket. There are words scribbled on it, but the writer’s hand was so shaky Ben can only make out “Iris” and “door.”
He searches the dresser but the closet is where he finds his answer. Tucked against one end is a filing cabinet, and every item inside pertains either directly or indirectly to Iris, Mr. Carlson’s daughter.
The words on the documents say many things, but all paint the same picture. The girl does not see the world the same way others do, and never has. Drugs have been tried, hospital stays, intensive therapy. Some appear to have worked better than others, but none truly well.
Ben wants to still feel angry at Iris, but he doesn’t.
What he feels instead is tired.
At some point, Martina gives up looking for the girl and just drives. She goes into the hills above Ventura, back to the coast, and finally down Highway 1 through Oxnard toward Malibu.
She runs out of gas not long before the sun goes down, so she leaves the bike at the side of the road, wanders aimlessly onto the beach, and sits on the berm crest, facing the water.
If she’s paying attention, she will see a beautiful sunset, but she’s not. Her mind is both idle and racing.
She doesn’t mean to, but she will sleep here tonight. And when she wakes in the morning, though she won’t voice it, she will feel for the first time that she is completely alone.
The one thing Sanjay did not take from the Pishon Chem compound was a box of syringes. While the others are resting as they wait for the sun to set, he and Kusum search local medical facilities until they collect enough syringes to give shots to everyone they have rescued.
Once darkness finally falls, Sanjay, Kusum, Jabala, and Prabal say good-bye to Arjun and Darshana, who will be staying in the city to try to stop others from going to the survival station. They then head out of Mumbai with the newly inoculated escapees, in a bus they find on a nearby street.
When they arrive at the boarding school, those they have rescued are given food and shown to empty dorms, while the boxes of vaccine are stored away.
“Why are you not sleeping?” Kusum asks Sanjay later as they lie in bed.
“Why are you not?” he counters.
“I am thinking about the vaccine.”
It’s what he’s thinking about, too. “We cannot wait for people to come to us,” he says. “We need to somehow let them know we can help them.”
“I know,” she says. “But how exactly are we supposed to do that without the people from Pishon Chem finding us?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “That is why I cannot sleep.”
The restaurant dining room of the Isabella Island Resort seems a lot smaller after so many hours with everyone jammed into it. Or maybe it’s knowing what they’re hiding from that’s making it feel like the walls are pushing in, Robert thinks.
The liquid that coated the windows after the plane flew over is now dry, but no one is foolish enough to think the danger has passed.
As the evening grows late, the satellite phone Pax has brought with him rings. When he finishes talking, he waves Robert over and says, “You’re going to want to turn on the TV.”
Robert does, and is surprised to find that Gustavo Di Sarsina has been replaced by a familiar face — Tamara Costello, a reporter he has seen on TV in the past.
No one sleeps for hours, as they all watch Tamara deliver her message over and over, never quite the same way twice. When the TV is finally turned off, even Pax’s most ardent critics are starting to believe he’s been telling the truth.
Robert’s eyelids grow heavy as he lies next to Estella later.
“Do you think they might come back?” she asks.
“Who?”
“These people. Project Eden. Do you think they will come back to make sure we are dead?”
Robert puts his arms around her and pulls her to him. After a moment, he whispers the only answer he can come up with. “I don’t know.”
Brandon makes a deal with Davis. He points out there is no way Davis can stay awake twenty-four hours a day, so Brandon lobbies to help with night watch and takes the first shift, from eight p.m. to one in the morning.