Inside the Humvee, a tangle of voices compete for expression across the ether, gradually resolving into a single urgent female voice, Patriot 3-2, Patriot 3-2, this is Patriot, how copy, over? The radio blasts white noise for ten seconds. Then the message repeats.
Something rustles in the trees, sighing.
Wendy tramps numbly through the ash along the road, surveying the hellish gray landscape warped by shimmering heat waves. The giant wall of smoke continues to rise over the smoldering ruins of Pittsburgh like a distant storm. Heavy particulates flow steadily up into the sky, riding pulses of heat. The highway races east in a long straight line that dissolves into the smoky haze. Figures toil in the distance—refugees, probably, fleeing the inferno. Tiny headlights glimmer in the ash fall. She wonders what it would be like to lie down in the warm soot in the gulley below the guard rail and surrender herself to the earth. Philip did that, she remembers. He was tough as nails but one day he saw a Wall Street Journal with the wrong date and sat in the ashes and that was that. He had become numb, too. He could not handle seeing his world die. When you find yourself envying the dead, you are not long for it.
Stopping at the hospital was a mistake, she knows. They invested their hopes in its promises, believing they found a place where they could at last feel safe. But that is not the world they live in. All of those hopes—of living instead of barely surviving, of having some sort of future after the end of Infection, of being able to dream again—were blindly and cruelly crushed. In this world, giant faceless things haunt abandoned buildings and duel with armored fighting vehicles in the dark. In this world, entire cities burn to the ground and everything you ever knew and loved is converted into tons of ash floating on the upper atmosphere. In this world, the children are dead. It is best not to hope in this world. It is best to keep moving and never stop.
The only thing giving her strength is that brief moment of contact she experienced with Sarge last night. The memory of that contact is still burning in her chest. She had gone into his room on impulse intent on dropping a hint, maybe flirting a little: I see you, she wanted to let him know. You see me and I see you, too. She found herself kissing him and falling into blissful nothingness. She told herself that the world was ending and love was in very short supply and so you had to grab it where and when you could find it. Wendy and Sarge were made of the same stuff, she thought; that is what attracted her to him. He is a soldier without an army, a centurion still fighting even though his legion is dead; she is a cop in a lawless land. Then she slept in his arms for a short time and had never felt safer. It amazes her how just a simple man could make her feel that safe in a world this dangerous.
Wendy begins to pass a motley group of refugees, mostly young men and women, some of them wrapped in blankets, others carrying backpacks and umbrellas, some decked out in goggles and respirators. All of them are armed with knives and crowbars and baseball bats and even makeshift spears. The soot is beginning to form a paste in her mouth, a grit between her teeth. She spits and wishes she had thought to bring along a canteen.
“Hello,” she says, eyeing them curiously. “You all right?”
The people ignore her, walking by in a daze, their hair and shoulders covered in gray-white ash.
“You’re going the wrong way,” a man says, flashing gray teeth.
One of the women notices her badge and belt and asks her if she is a cop.
“Where are we supposed to go?” the woman says.
Wendy pauses to spit out her gum, which has become gristly with dust. The woman watches it fall into the cinders with longing.
“My advice would be to keep going west,” Wendy tells her. “Get as far away from Pittsburgh as you can.”
“You mean there’s no rescue station on this road?”
A man with a bleeding ear shouts, “ARE YOU FROM THE FEMA CAMP?”
“I don’t know of any FEMA camp, sir.”
“WHAT?”
“If it’s not on this road, where is it?” the woman says, her voice edged in panic.
A small crowd is gathering. The people stare at her with a mixture of hope and resentment and shock, shivering in the heat. The man who shouted stumbles, briefly disoriented, and then shouts again, “THERE’S NO HELP AHEAD? WE’RE ON OUR OWN?”
“I don’t know of any rescue station or FEMA camp anywhere. I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m with another group of people leaving the city after the fire.”
“We lost everything,” the woman pleads. “We have no food. Some guys with guns back there on the road took the last drop of water I had. Where am I supposed to go?”
“Where were you cops when those monsters were ripping my family apart?” a woman says, her eyes glazed with fever. Most of her hair and eyebrows have been burned off and the right side of her face is covered by a filthy, bulky bandage. “That’s what I want to know. I called 911 and nobody came. Nobody came and now Edward is dead. Edward and Billy and Zoe and little Paul. Now you show up and try to tell us what to do? Where the hell were you, lady?”
The crowd presses in, angry, its slim hopes dashed and its resentments stoked.
“I’m sorry,” Wendy says. She wants to explain her situation—that her precinct was overrun, that she is on her own, that she cannot help them—but these people do not care. She is a symbol to them. They look at her with hungry, feral eyes gleaming from the folds of bundles of rags tied around their heads. They cough into their fists loudly, struggling for enough air to scream.
“Give me something,” a woman hisses, reaching out for Wendy’s face.
Wendy takes a step backward and places her hand over her pepper spray dispenser. She senses a dangerous line forming—knows it is there because it is about to be crossed. The crowd closes in, muttering.
A man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a walking stick marches past and yells, “Hey, now! What are you bugging that girl for? There ain’t no rescue coming and there ain’t no police. She ain’t no cop. Get over it.”
Wendy bristles, but before she can say anything, she hears the echoes of gunshots back in the smoky haze. All of them turn toward the noise, flinching. A moment ago they were menacing her but the fact is they are terrified and running on fumes.
“There you go, officer,” the man says, still walking. “There are a couple of guys back there with a truck robbing people and shooting anybody who fights back. You want to be a cop? Do something about it.”
Ethan follows Sarge past the Bradley and pauses with his mouth hanging open in awe. The rig looks like it lost a brick fight. The welded aluminum armor is pockmarked with dents and scratches. Several plates on its side are missing.
Sarge turns and sees him lagging behind.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I could use a drink of water.”
“I’ll get you water after we do this thing, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Anne can be a little rough.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan says, meaning it. The truth is he feels completely numb. He does not feel pain. He does not feel anything. “What happened to your tank?”
“Those plates are explosive reactive armor,” Sarge tells him. “It protects the vehicle by exploding outward when something comes at it trying to explode inward, canceling it out.”
What could have hit the Bradley with that much force?
“What happened last night?” Ethan says.
“There was a fire,” Sarge tells him. “See all the ash starting to rain down on us? That’s what’s left of Pittsburgh—west of the Monongahela and the Ohio, anyhow.”
“What happened to the vehicle?”