Chapter 55

Lila's dressing table detonated with a splintering crash. Guilder hauled her to her feet again and slapped her across the face with the back of his hand, sending her flying back, toward the sofa.

"How could you let this happen?" His face boiled with rage. "Why didn't you call the virals back? Tell me!"

"I don't know, I don't know!"

From the collar of her bathrobe this time: with terrifying effortlessness, Guilder hurled her, face-first, into the bookshelf. A thud of impact, things falling, Lila screaming. Sara was huddled on the floor, her body curled around Kate, the little girl wilted with fear.

"Every last viral! Nine of my men, dead! Do you know how this makes me look?"

"It wasn't my fault! I don't remember! David, please!"

"There is no David!"

Sara clenched her eyes tight. Kate was whimpering softly in her arms. What would happen if Guilder killed Lila? What would become of the two of them then?

"Stop it! David, I'm begging you!"

Lila was lying face-up on the floor, Guilder straddling her, one hand holding her by her collar. The other was balled into a fist, pulled back, ready to strike. Lila's arms lay across her eyes like a shield, though this effort would come to nothing; Guilder's fist would crush her face like a battering ram.

"You ... disgust me."

He loosened his hold and stepped away, wiping his hands on his shirt. Lila was sobbing uncontrollably. Blood bulged from a cut along her cheekbone. More was in her hair. Guilder flicked his eyes toward Sara, dismissing her with a glance. You're nothing, his eyes said. You're a character in a game of pretend that's gone on far too long.

Then he stormed from the room.

Sara went to where Lila was whimpering on the floor. She knelt beside her, reaching for her face to examine the cut. In an unexpected burst of energy, Lila shoved Sara's hand away and scampered backward.

"Don't touch it!"

"But you're hurt-"

The woman's eyes were wild with panic. As Sara moved toward her, she waved her hands in front of her face.

"Get away! Don't touch my blood!"

She leapt to her feet and ran to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

6:02 A.M.

The vehicles made their way into the flatland in the predawn darkness, gates flying open as they passed. At the head of the line, like the point of an arrow, was the sleek black SUV of the Director, followed by a pair of open trucks, full of uniformed men. Into the maze of lodges they roared, hurling clots of dirty snow from their mudchoked tires, their passage observed by the workers filing from the buildings to assemble for morning roll-weary faces, weary eyes, dully noting the vehicles sailing past. But their glances were brief; they knew better than to look. Something official; it has nothing to do with me. At least, it better not.

Guilder watched the flatlanders from the passenger window, full of contempt. How he loathed them. Not just the insurgents, the ones who defied him-all of them. They plodded through their lives like brute animals, never seeing beyond the next square of earth to be plowed. Another day in the dairy barns, the fields, the biodiesel plant. Another day in the kitchen, the laundry, the pigsties.

But today wasn't just another day.

The vehicles halted before Lodge 16. The eastern sky had softened to a yellowish gray, like old plastic.

"This is the one?" Guilder asked Wilkes.

Beside him, the man gave a tight-lipped nod.

The cols disembarked and took up positions. Guilder and Wilkes stepped clear of the car. Before them, in fifteen evenly spaced lines, three hundred flatlanders stood shivering in the cold. Two more trucks pulled in and parked at the head of the square. Their cargo bays were draped by heavy canvas.

"What are those for?" Wilkes asked.

"A little extra ... persuasion."

Guilder strode up to the senior HR officer and snatched the megaphone from his hand. A howl of feedback; then his voice boomed over the square.

"Who can tell me about Sergio?"

No reply.

"This is your only warning. Who can tell me about Sergio?"

Again, nothing.

Guilder gave his attention to a woman in the first row. Neither young nor old, she had a face so plain it could have been made of paste. She was clutching a filthy scarf around her head with hands covered by fingerless gloves black with soot.

"You. What's your name?"

Eyes cast down, she muttered something into the folds of her scarf.

"I can't hear you. Speak up."

She cleared her throat, stifling a cough. Her voice was a phlegmy rasp. "Priscilla."

"Where do you work?"

"The looms, sir."

"Do you have a family? Children?"

She nodded weakly.

"So? What do you have?"

Her knees were trembling. "A daughter and two sons."

"A husband?"

"Dead, sir. Last winter."

"My condolences. Come forward."

"I sang the hymn yesterday. It was the others, I swear."

"And I believe you, Priscilla. Nevertheless. Gentlemen, can you assist her, please?"

A pair of cols trotted forward and grabbed the woman by her arms. Her body went slack, as if she were on the verge of fainting. They half-carried, half-dragged her to the front, where they shoved her onto her knees. She made no sound; her submission was total.

"Who are your children? Point them out."

"Please." She was weeping pitifully. "Don't make me."

One of the cols lifted his baton over her head. "This man is going to bash your brains out," Guilder said.

She shook her bowed head.

"Very well," Guilder said.

Down went the baton; the woman toppled forward into the mud. From the left came a sharp cry.

"Get her."

A young teenager, with her mother's face. Onto her knees she went. She was crying, trembling; snot was running from her nose. Guilder raised the megaphone.

"Does anybody have anything to say?"

Silence. Guilder drew a pistol from beneath his coat and racked the slide. "Minister Wilkes," he said, holding out the gun, "will you please do the honors?"

"Jesus, Horace." His face was aghast. "What are you trying to prove?"

"Is this going to be a problem?"

"We have people for this kind of thing. That wasn't part of the deal."

"What deal? There is no deal. The deal is what I say it is." Wilkes stiffened. "I won't do it."

"You won't or you can't?"

"What difference does it make?"

Guilder frowned. "Not very much, now that I think about it." And with these words, he stepped behind the girl, pushed the muzzle of the gun to the back of her head, and fired.

"Good Christ!"

"You know what the biggest problem with never growing old is?" Guilder asked his chief of staff. He was wiping down the blood-tinged barrel with a handkerchief. "I've given this a lot of thought."

"Fuck you, Horace."

Guilder pointed the pistol at Wilkes's colorless face, leveling its sights at the spot between his eyes. "You forget that you can die."

And Guilder shot him, too.

A change came over the crowd, their fear turning to something else. Murmurs moved up and down the lines, whispered calculations, the building energy of people who knew they had nothing to lose. Things had moved rather more briskly than Guilder would have liked-he'd hoped to get something useful before the hammer came down-but now the die was cast.

"Open the trucks."

The canvas was pulled away. An eruption of volcanic screaming: no mystery now. Guilder walked briskly to his car, got in, and told the driver to go. They pulled away in a plume of mud and dirty snow as, behind them, the orchestra unleashed its mortal symphony: a melody of shouts and screams, high and wild and full of fear, punctuated by the syncopated rhythm of automatic weapon fire, fading to the final pops as the cols moved through the fallen bodies, silencing the last.

Chapter 56

Iowa. The ashy bones.

They'd exhausted their fuel near the town of Millersburg, sheltered the night in a roofless church, and set out the next morning on foot. Another seventy miles, said Tifty, perhaps a little more. They'd encountered two more bone fields like the first, the number of dead virals unimaginable. Thousands, millions even. What did it mean? What impulse had led them to lie down on the open earth, waiting for the sun to take them away? Or had they perished first, their corpses reclaimed by the morning light? Even Michael, the man of theories, had no answer.

They walked. Trudged, through snow that now rose in places to their knees. Their rations were scarce; they saw no game. They had been reduced to eating their final stores-strips of dried meat and suet that left a coating of grease on the roofs of their mouths. The earth felt crystallized, the air held in suspension, like bated breath. For hours, no wind at all, and then it came howling. Daylight came and left in the blink of an eye. Heavy parkas with fur-lined hoods, woolen hats pulled down to their brows, gloves with the tips of the fingers cut away in case they needed to use their weapons, though Peter wondered if they could actually manage this. He'd never felt so cold. He hadn't known cold like this existed. How Tifty maintained his bearings in this desolate place, he had no idea.

They passed their eighteenth night in an auto-repair shop that contained, miraculously, a potbellied woodstove of cast iron with a soap-stone top. Now, what to burn? As darkness came on, Michael and Hollis returned from the house next door, carrying a pair of wooden chairs and armfuls of books. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998. A shame to burn it, it went against the grain, but they needed the heat. Two more trips and they were supplied for the night.

They awoke to brilliant sunlight, the first in days, although the temperature had, if anything, dropped. A hard north wind rattled the branches of the trees. They allowed themselves the luxury of setting one last fire and huddled around it, savoring every bit of heat.

"Like ... molting."

It was Michael who had spoken. Peter turned toward his friend. "What did you say?"

Michael's eyes were focused on the door of the stove. "How many do you think we've seen?"

"I don't know." Peter shrugged. "A lot."

"And they all died at the same time. So let's suppose what's happening is supposed to happen, that it's part of the viral life cycle. Birds do this, insects, reptiles. When part of the body is worn out, they cast it off and grow a new one."

"But we're talking about whole virals," Lore said.

"That's how it looks. But everything we know about them says they function as a group. Each one connected to its pod, each pod connected to its member of the Twelve. Never mind the mumbo jumbo about souls and all the rest. I'm not saying it isn't true, but that's Amy's turf. From my point of view, the virals are a species like any other. When Lacey killed Babcock, all of his virals died. Like bees, remember?"

"I do," said Hollis, nodding along. "Kill the queen and you kill the hive. That's what you said."

"And what we saw on that mountain bore it out. But suppose each one of the viral families is actually a single organism. Each of the Twelve is like a major organ-the heart, the brain. The rest are like the feathers on a bird, or the carapace of an insect. When it wears out, the organism sheds it, in order to grow a new one."

"They don't feel like feathers," Lore said acidly.

"Okay, not feathers, but you get the idea. Something peripheral, expendable. I've always wondered what was keeping so many alive. What's left to eat? We know they can go a long time without feeding-Tifty, you proved that-but nothing can survive indefinitely without food. From the standpoint of species longevity, it makes no sense to devour your entire food supply. As predators, they're actually too successful. The idea has always bothered me, because everything else about them is so organized."

"I'm not sure I'm following," Tifty said. "Are you saying they're dying out?"

"Obviously something's happening. The fact that it's occurring all at once implies that it's a natural process, built into the system. Here's another analogy. When the human body goes into shock, it draws blood away from the periphery and redirects it to the major organs. It's a defense mechanism. Protect what's important, forget the rest. Now imagine that each of the viral tribes is one animal, and that it's going into shock from starvation. The logical thing would be to radically reduce the numbers and let the food supply come back."

"And then what?" Peter asked.

"Then you start the cycle over."

For a moment, nobody spoke.

"Anyway," Michael continued, "it's just an idea I had. I could be full of shit."

Peter knew different. "So why is it happening here?"

"That," said Michael, "is what worries me."

The time for leaving was at hand; they'd stayed too long as it was. They gathered their gear and zipped up their parkas, bracing themselves for the blast of frigid air that would assail them the second they stepped through the door.

"Six days if the weather holds," said Tifty, hitching up his pack. "Seven at the most."

"Why do I wish it were more?" said Lore.

Grey. Grey.

His eyes popped open.

Can you feel them, Grey?

"Who's there? Guilder, is that you?"

I'm sorry I have been away. You are still my favorite, Grey. Since the very first day we met. Do you remember?

His stomach clenched: the voice of Zero.