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  With one hand, she grabs the Honda’s door handle, flings open the door, and falls into the car. She closes her burning eyes, lets her hands drop to her lap. She’s breathing heavily, erratically, coughing sour phlegm. After a moment, she stares blankly toward the wreckage, at the people moving about frantically at its edge.

  The police officer is finished herding a few people into his flashing cruiser, and now he’s ducking into the driver’s seat. The vehicle jumps into the motion, hightailing it down College, right past her, and she shares a glance with the cop. He appears determined and steely. The instant glance pushes a little resolve into Rachel’s veins.

  Alan speaks up. “Did you learn anything?”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment, just breathes deeply despite the smoke burning her lungs. Sarah is now murmuring against Alan, sounding close to giving in to sleep.

  “Yes,” Rachel says in a faraway voice. “I think this…this thing? I think it’s happening everywhere.”

  Chapter 5

  Continuing east on Olive and then southeast on Riverside, they behold wreckage as far their eyes can see—automobiles askew, angry scrawls of smoke on the horizon, even occasional survivors wandering the streets. The road is surprisingly clear for their progress. The majority of the collisions are out of the way, as if the drifting vehicles, minus conscious drivers, came to eventual stops wherever their momentum carried them, usually against a curb to the left or right.

  At one point, Alan gestures to the north of Riverside toward a woman carrying a child in her arms, screaming at the sky. They move farther away from the dark haze of the FedEx wreckage in Old Town, and the other fires in the distance became clearer. Far east of the city, in particular, there are two huge pillars of black smoke, fires clearly out of control, soot tendrils snaking across the sky. Are these more airliner disasters? Whatever they are, the world is like an eerily silent war zone.

  Sarah has quieted in Alan’s arms, sleeping deeply now, and Rachel is grateful for the girl’s ability to escape the pain, if only for a while.

  Rachel maneuvers her way southeast at a low speed, weaving in and out of frozen traffic, neglected collisions. Like every crashed vehicle she’s seen, each one of these has a driver and even passengers slumped over in their seats. In one car, she saw a whole family inert in their seats, the small children still strapped into their car seats. At first, she brakes the Honda to peer into every one of the cars, seeking signs of life, but now she avoids looking inside, focusing her gaze instead on the twisting paths before her.

  She has seen a few other cars navigating the roads. There’s an increasing number of them snaking through the mess, as she is. Near Lemay, some kind of convertible sports car pulls alongside her Honda. A wildly gesticulating bald man begs her to stop, reaching out his left arm to slow her car to a stop by sheer force of will.

  “Wait, wait, wait!”

  He’s wearing a blue tee-shirt, the neck all stretched out. He, too, looks like he just stepped out of bed.

  She nods at him and comes to a slow stop.

  “What’s happening to everybody?!” the man cries. “Do you know anything?!”

  Rachel shakes her head. “We probably know as much as you do.”

  “Everyone’s dead?! Why? Why would that happen?” His eyes are peeled wide.

  “It’s not everyone…” she says, not knowing how to answer or placate this man.

  He glances wildly around, taking in the smoke and the desolation. “It might as well be! What the hell is going on?!”

  “I think that’s the question on all our minds right now,” she says as calmly as she can.

  “My wife is on the kitchen floor! My son is in his bed. They’re both dead!” He’s yelling almost belligerently at her, but Rachel can see tears welling up in his eyes. “Electricity is out, phone is out, all the fucking neighbors are dead!”

  “I know.”

  The man goes quiet, red-faced. “Is anybody in charge?”

  “There’s a cop in Old Town trying to take care of that fire—it’s a downed plane.”

  “A cop? One cop?!” The bald man bites his lip at this information. “They did it, they fucking did it, the Arabs, right? It’s gotta be. They finally found a way to get all of us.”

  “I doubt—”

  “No, it’s them. Fuck! They got us!”

  “Look,” Rachel says, louder, “I’ll admit my first reaction was terrorism, but it doesn’t add up. I think it’s something else.”

  The man gives her an angry look, ignoring her. “I need to find my sister,” he says, his tone descending from hysteria. “She’s up at Terry Lake.”

  “Good luck,” Rachel says, then, “Whatever’s happening inside these bodies, it’s dangerous. That’s one thing I do know. It hurts you.” She gestures behind her. “It hurt this poor little girl. We’re taking her to the hospital. Maybe they’ll have answers there.”

  The man wordlessly raises his hands, shows them to her. They’re pale and damaged, like her palm. A little fear makes its way onto his features, but he grimaces past it.

  “Good luck finding your sister,” Alan says.

  The three of them stare at each other for a few moments, fear and uncertainty heavy in the space between them. At Alan’s words, Rachel feels a pang of urgency for her dad. Where is he? Is he alive? If he was at work when this thing began, surely he’s no longer there. Where would she possibly begin to look for him, assuming he was among the living?

  The man in the sports car barks out a gruff “Thanks” and continues driving in the opposite direction.

  “Friendly fellow,” Alan says quietly, and then Rachel is moving again. After what seems an hour of stress-crazed agony, they’re in sight of the hospital. There’s some activity there, even a few moving vehicles. As she approaches from the north, Rachel sees one car barrel up Lemay toward her and take the sharp right into the emergency lot. Survivors are gravitating here, seeking help.

  Rachel pulls into the south emergency entrance and parks in the small, tree-lined lot beyond the front double doors. She shuts off the engine and looks around. There are two unmanned ambulances parked ahead of her. She turns toward the double doors, sees commotion there, people moving about. The doors slide open, and a middle-aged man comes running out to his Subaru wagon, opens the rear door, and heaves out a heavy, unconscious teenaged girl in skimpy shorts and a football jersey. He kicks the door closed with his foot and drags the girl into the hospital.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Rachel says, opening her door. “At least they have power in there.”

  She opens the rear door and ducks in. Alan is there, cradling Sarah. He makes no effort to release her or help her out. Rachel reaches over.

  “Here, let me—”

  “There’s no need.”

  Sarah’s arms are still wrapped tightly around Alan’s chest, over his shoulder, and the little girl’s ruined face is buried against him. She is dead. Alan is weeping, one hand still caressing her hair, his cheek pressed against her head.

  Rachel slumps to her knees next to the car, hardly aware that she has fallen.

  “Not fair,” she whispers. “This isn’t fair.”

  She reaches out numbly to touch Sarah’s leg, one of the few areas on the girl that was left unmolested by the red luminescence. Alan’s eyes are closed, but there are tears in his eyelashes. A thought flutters through Rachel’s mind—This is a good man—and then she’s rising, supporting herself on the doorjamb, looking around, feeling hopeless again.

  Anger rises inside her, and she feels a sneer taking hold of her mouth. She glares down at Sarah’s corpse, at this unmoving, gone little girl, and she feels a sharp, empty pain in her heart, a hatred for the cause of this nightmare. It’s an inky hatred that feels like a hot stain through her ribcage.

  “Fuck!” she yells out. “Fuck! Fuck!”

  Her voice catches on the last exclamation, and her throat constricts with new emotion.

  There are more people at the hospital entrance, and
here comes another vehicle, a minivan, into the parking lot. It parks near a security fence, and the lanky young male driver locks eyes with her briefly as he steps out. He slides open the van’s side door and carefully extricates the lifeless body of an older woman in a nightgown—clearly his mother. Cradling her, he hurries to the entrance. Rachel can see him pause in the vestibule, then go further in, out of sight.

  With effort, Rachel swallows down her angry grief.

  “Let’s at least get her inside,” she says. “We can show them what happened.”

  Alan doesn’t speak for a moment, then, “All right.”

  They bring Sarah out of the car almost reverently, handling her gently between them. Alan stands and takes the girl fully into his arms again.

  “You got her?”

  He nods, and they make their way to the sliding doors of the emergency entrance. Alan is slow, shuffling with the burden that he has claimed as his own, but she lets him take his time. They step through and see perhaps a dozen people attending to various situations. Two of them hover over a mewling woman who is sitting in the waiting room; the woman’s face is pale and subtly disfigured, obviously suffering from the same kind of affliction that claimed Sarah. There’s almost a melted quality to the flesh, as if it has been superheated and left to cool too quickly. The two people help her into a wheelchair. The woman is drugged, and now Rachel can see the hypodermic needle that one of the two apparent volunteers—a nervous, scared-looking young man—has used to calm her.

  It’s terribly hot in here already, sticky and foul-smelling, no movement to the air. The main waiting room to the right of the administration area is filled with people, half of them stationary in rows of plastic seats, a bunch more standing against the walls talking in small groups. The ones standing are restless, moving in and out of a set of double doors to the left. Rachel assumes that the bodies of their loved ones have been taken back there. The large waiting area is loud and humid, a pressure-cooker if Rachel ever saw one.

  There are a multitude of voices coming from beyond the scuffed-metal inner doors that lead further into the treatment area. She watches the doors, getting occasional glimpses of gurneys and bodies beyond them, and notices Alan heading to the reception desk, where several people seem to be arguing. Rachel is about to accompany him, when—

  “Rachel?” The voice comes from her right.

  She turns her head and sees a familiar face. It takes her a moment to place her. The young woman’s dark-rooted blond hair is flat and disheveled—again, straight from bed—and she’s without makeup. The girl’s glasses throw her off, too. Planted in one of the green, plastic waiting-room chairs, the young woman immediately rises when Rachel turns, and then it’s clear, the way she moves her body. It’s Jenny from her history class at Front Range Community College, a class she shares with both her and Tony. Rachel feels a kind of elation recognizing her. She’s known Jenny in passing since grade school, but now she seems like the closest friend she’s ever had in her life. Her heart swells with emotion.

  “Jenny!” she says, feeling a grateful smile come to her lips. Jenny seems to share the elation, and her expression melts into tears upon seeing Rachel. They move to each other around the seats of the waiting room and embrace, holding tightly to each other.

  The simple fact of finding someone she knows, even slightly, grounds Rachel in the real. It has the effect of bringing immense calm to her nerves but also reinforcing the fact that she’s not imagining anything. She finds herself clutching Jenny tightly, welcoming that sense of calm even as new tears begin flowing from her eyes. Soon, both young women are sobbing, and they fumble down into seats and hold each other.

  “Are you okay?” Jenny asks, finally pushing away. “Are you with the little girl?”

  Rachel nods. “I was. She died on the way here.”

  Jenny’s hands fly to her mouth, and behind her glasses, her eyes fill with grief. “Oh my god. Is she your sister?”

  “No, no, a neighbor, but…terrible.”

  Jenny appears confused. “But I thought…I mean, I haven’t talked to my parents, they’re in Boston, and there are no goddamn phones working, but people here thought whatever happened, it happened all at once. Like, in the night.”

  “This was different.” She nods toward the woman in the wheelchair, now being pushed, dazed, into the corridor. “Like her.”

  Jenny follows Rachel’s gesture. “What do you mean?”

  Rachel tells her what she believes to be Sarah’s tragic story, of a little girl wanting desperately for her parents to wake up, even as her proximity to them was killing her. Tells her what happened with Susanna this morning, when Rachel first encountered the red glow. She shows her the scaly skin of her own palm.

  Jenny listens with a horrified look on her face, her head reared back. Still, there’s a dark curiosity in her expression, too. “So that’s what’s happening,” she murmurs.

  “Tony’s dead,” Rachel says flatly.

  At this news, Jenny appears merely numb. “You found him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry. I know you two—”

  “It’s okay. Thanks.” Rachel reaches up to touch Jenny’s eyewear. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your glasses.”

  “Oh, right…not much time for contacts this morning.” Her eyes go watery again. “I brought my sisters—” She can’t go any further, her voice wobbling up several octaves, and she falls into Rachel’s embrace again.

  Over her friend’s shoulder, Rachel watches with a kind of detached curiosity as two more people enter the emergency room’s main double doors. They don’t seem to be communicating anything, and no one jumps to their aid. They have to search around to find someone to offer help. Rachel was hoping to find some sense of control here. Someone in charge.

  Rachel sees that Alan is now against the north wall, still holding Sarah, and talking quietly with an elderly woman who is examining Sarah’s face. She’s moving the little girl’s hair aside to assess the damage. When Jenny lifts her head from her shoulder, Rachel gently extricates herself from the embrace and stands.

  “I need to—”

  “Have you talked to them yet?” Jenny asks.

  “Hmm?”

  Jenny gestures to the admittance desk, where Rachel noticed a clutch of arguing people before. Taking a closer look, she sees several bleary-eyed people arranged into a somewhat haphazard group. They seem to be the center of operations here, a modest focal point amid swirling human chaos. And now two young men—a studious-looking guy with dark armpit stains on his blue shirt and a well-built African American teenager—burst into the room from the inner door and seem to report on something.

  “No, I haven’t.” Rachel starts to move toward Alan and Sarah, and Jenny walks with her.

  “I got here an hour ago,” Jenny says. “I live the next street over. My mom works here. That man in the middle? The one with the red hair? I know him. His name is Scott, and he works here, too. Just a pediatric assistant, not an administrator or anything, but he’s kind of taken control of things here by default, I think.”

  Scott, the red-haired man, is perhaps 30 years old, and he looks stress-ravaged already. Three people are vying for his attention, in addition to the two young men, and he’s occasionally casting glances through to the inner hallway that Rachel can’t see.

  “What’s happening back there?” she asks.

  “Just ... bodies,” Jenny reports quietly.

  Rachel and Jenny approach Alan, and the older woman facing him glances over her shoulder at Rachel while she continues to examine Sarah. Rachel sees that the woman has tears in her eyes, and she’s recovering from a wet sob. The woman wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

  Alan says, “Rachel, this is Irene. She says we should take Sarah through here to room 109.”

  “It’s all we can do for now,” Irene explains through tears. “Until things start to make sense.”

  “What’s in room 109?” Rachel asks.


  Irene looks at her sadly. “People like her.” And then she moves toward the front doors when she notices someone new coming in.

  “Let’s go,” Rachel says.

  “I’ll wait here,” says Jenny, “but don’t go anywhere without me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Rachel pushes through the double doors into a wide, humid hallway, and what strikes her first is the number of people—almost all of them supine. She holds the door open for Alan, who carries Sarah in. They both stand still for a moment, taking it all in.

  The hallway is lined with gurneys, and atop each one is a body draped with a white sheet. Next to perhaps half of the gurneys stands a loved one. The hallway is exceedingly crowded and close, and there’s a ghastliness to the scene. It’s a snapshot of collective, bewildered mourning. She recognizes the man who came in ahead of her, from his minivan. Most of the people look over at Rachel and Alan as they enter, and there’s something in their eyes Rachel can place immediately.

  Hope. It’s a glimmer, but it’s still there.

  In the face of impossible tragedy, they’re looking for someone to appear through these doors and tell them they have the answer. That the horror of this morning has an easy solution, and that the young woman who walked through these doors of death is about to communicate it.

  Rachel feels a low burn of shame, however misplaced, that she can’t provide that answer, that she offers only more death, in the form of this little girl.

  She trudges forward with Alan into the gloom. There’s a teenage boy to her left, eyes blasted with grief, who lets his gaze linger on her face longer than the others do, and Rachel casts her eyes down, trying to avoid contact, but she finds that nearly impossible. He’s standing there beside three sheeted bodies, one of them small, smaller than Sarah. And Rachel tries not to imagine the brutal trajectory of his morning, tries like hell not to see him frantic in his awful, lonely discoveries.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers, without being able to help it.