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“Then you shouldn’t.”
“Hope they don’t lynch us,” Underwood said.
They all looked toward the church as the door opened again, and the priest stepped out, with a woman. “We can’t all stay here. There are more than a hundred of us, we can’t stay here. People are panicking. They have children.”
“Goddamnit!” Moscowitz said. “I didn’t really know I’d signed up for this.”
The priest shouted, “I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
“He said, ‘Go back inside.’ They’ll be in to talk in a few minutes,” Lucas shouted back.
The priest and the woman hesitated, then went back inside and Lucas said to Underwood, “You should probably check Catton before you do anything else.”
Underwood nodded, said to Moscowitz, “Let’s go,” and to Lucas and Rae, “Back up. Don’t get too close to the cops.”
Underwood and Moscowitz clumped over to Catton’s body, knelt beside it, talked for a minute, then rolled the body over, her arms flopping like a rag doll’s. Lucas could see that they were pulling up the back of her blouse, then looking at something else.
“Fanny pack,” Rae said. “Let’s back up a little farther.”
They backed up, then Underwood stood and looked toward them and shouted, “Four open vials and paper towels stained by media. It looks like she was probably wiping the media on the seats inside…”
They talked together again, then stood, and Moscowitz picked up the antiviral tank and they started spraying Catton’s body, rolling heras they did it, until she was completely soaked. Then Underwood shouted at Lucas, “Tell one of the cops to get all of the spray tanks out of the van and bring them toward you. Also, we need a big blue bag. Big blue bag. Tell the cops not to get too close to you. Not too close. Then you pick up the tanks and bags and bring them toward me. Not all the way, halfway, and we’ll come and get them.”
They did that—it took another five minutes. The blue bag contained a heavy black body bag. Underwood and Moscowitz unzipped it, picked up Catton’s body and put it inside, then zipped it up, and sealed the zipper with tape. They used one of the spray tanks to soak the bag.
That done, Underwood shouted, “We’re going in.”
They walked through the church door, and more than a hundred frightened and angry faces turned toward them: men in what looked like space suits.
—
“What a fuckin’catastrophe,” Rae said.
Lucas: “You say ‘fuck’ a lot.”
“Both of us have been. Because everybody may be more fucked than everybody has been fucked in the entire history of the universe,” Rae said. “I don’t know, Lucas. I’m not sure we can stop it.”
Lucas looked around the plaza, the cops now having gotten as far back as they could, the MPs with them. “Gonna get hot. People are gonna start to get impatient. I gotta talk to that major chick.”
“We got a major chick?”
“You know what I mean,” Lucas said.
He spotted her, standing in a circle of NCOs, and yelled at her: “Major! Major!”
She turned her head and he waved, and she took a step toward him. Lucas took out his phone and shouted, “I’m going to call you.”
He had her in his “favorites” list, tapped, it and she answered: “Yes?”
“You gotta figure out what to do,” Lucas said. “You and the colonel. Nobody else has the experience. Those people inside probably have water, but they’re gonna need food, and you have to figure out how to deliver it without getting anyone contaminated.”
“We don’t know about contamination,” she said.
“You have to talk to Underwood and Moscowitz when they come out. You have to figure out how to barricade this place so nobody can escape. You need to get the food going, but there probably aren’t any cooking facilities inside, so you might have to deliver microwaves. You might have to deliver diapers if there are babies,” Lucas told her. “There’s a Walmart here, you can probably get a bunch of stuff there. You might have to provide hospital beds, if this is gonna get as ugly as some serious people think it will. Medical equipment. You have to figure all this shit out.Youdo.”
“What about you?”
“They’re gonna quarantine Rae and me. We’re out of it.”
