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Dez, Boxer, and Gypsy approached the building, guns up and out, but they found nothing. The door was open, the lights were on, but the station was deserted. Jake led the way and the buses pulled into the lot and lined up in a row. Somehow Trout found it disturbing that the row was so neat. Each of the adults driving the buses parked in a precise line with the other vehicles. There was something wrong about that, but he couldn’t decide what it was.
A disconnection from reality, perhaps. He kept it to himself.
The last vehicle in the convoy was a flatbed truck they’d stolen from a construction site a few miles from Sapphire Foods. Jake had loaded his Big Bird onto it and one of the parents helped him and drove the big rig. He parked the rig with the same precision.
Maybe they’re trying to impose order on chaos, thought Trout. That was probably it, though it felt a bit like tidying the furniture and vacuuming the rugs during a house fire.
Trout got off the bus and waited for Dez to come out. He watched the parents and teachers begin lining up the kids for trips to the bathroom in the station. Some—those that couldn’t wait—were escorted to the tall grass on the far side of the parking lot. Jake, his niece Jenny, and a few of the adults who had guns, began fanning out to stand perimeter watch. As if that was something they’d always done. As if that was somehow normal.
It is now, he told himself. And that wrenched the knife in his heart another quarter turn.
Dez came out of the station, looked around for him, then came over, her shoulders slumped, face haggard.
“Anything?” he asked. “You were in there a while.”
“There’s a radio,” she said.
“And?”
She simply shook her head.
They walked together to the edge of the drop-off. He could barely walk and needed to lean on her for the seventy paces to the bench that offered a beautiful view of the mountains and the sky. On any other day it would be breathtaking.
Down below, the traffic on the highway crawled.
“At least it’s moving,” said Dez.
“Yeah, there’s that.”
Neither of them could manufacture any convincing optimism.
“What did the radio say?”
From where they sat they could hear the sobs of the children and the constant murmur of adult voices as the parents and teachers did everything they could to convince the kids that it was all going to be all right.
Trout marveled at how similar a promise sounded to a lie. Or was it all just wishful thinking?
“Dez?”
She removed the walkie-talkie from her belt and turned up the gain. It babbled at them in a dozen overlapping voices. Military and civilian authorities, and even some militia groups whose shortwave signals were breaking into the flow. It was all hysterical and most of the voices were asking for backup, for relief, for medical attention, for emergency services, for help.
For answers.
“The radio’s the same. No one has any answers,” she said. “Most people don’t know about Homer or Volker or any of that. All they know is that there’s a plague and nobody seems to be able to stop it. There’s a lot of bullshit, too. People saying it’s the Rapture, shit like that.”
“Maybe it’s true.”
?
?Don’t start, Billy.”
“Sorry.”
He bent forward and put his head in his hands. Some of the glass cuts on his scalp and arms hadn’t yet been seen to, and he didn’t care. Dez sat beside him, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, her arms mottled with powder burns, her knuckles as raw and red as her eyes as she methodically reloaded her pistol and shotgun.
Slowly, painfully, Trout raised his head as a flight of six fighter jets screamed overhead into the northeast.
“Thunderbolts,” said Dez automatically.
