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“Where do you think they’re headed?”
“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Charleston, maybe.”
He nodded.
There were more than a hundred thousand people in Charleston.
Maybe, he corrected himself. He didn’t really know if that was true anymore.
Dez got up and went back to the bus, then returned with a bottle of water, his camera bag, and a map. She set the bag down in front of him.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“In case you want to use it.”
He shook his head.
They left it there as she opened the map and spread it out over their laps.
He studied her blue eyes for a few moments. He saw so many things in those eyes. A fear so deep that it looked like it was cracking the hinges of her sanity. He saw ghosts in her eyes. JT, the dead children, her colleagues and neighbors in Stebbins, the people who had died on the buses. Each of them had left its specter in her mind, polluting her, driving fissures into her. Trout knew with absolute certainty that if Dez had to live on this edge for much longer, she was going to break. Those qualities that made her so strong—compassion, her love for the children, her need to save as many as she could—they were each failures waiting to happen. A person cannot be sustained on a diet of their own failure, even if that failure is not their fault. This thing was so big, so vast that it even consumed people like Sam Imura. What hope did Dez really have?
He almost took her in his arms, almost made the unforgiveable error of offering comfort and a shoulder to someone who was right there at the edge of her control.
Billy Trout almost made that mistake, but he didn’t.
Some instinct stopped him even as he began to raise his hands. It was as if JT Hammond stood behind him and bent to whisper advice in his ear. JT, who was more of a father to Dez than her real one had been. JT, who was, very likely, the best person either of them had ever known.
She needs to be strong, Trout imagined he heard JT say. She needs to take these kids home.
Trout took a breath and let it out.
“Asheville, huh?”
“That’s what Sam said.”
“Okay,” said Trout, “then it’s Asheville.”
He did not dare ask what they would do if the infection had reached Asheville. That was a war they could fight on another day. If they had the chance.
For now, Asheville was a direction.
It was far away from Pittsburgh.
It was in the mountains, so maybe that would be something.
Trout didn’t know and really couldn’t make any guesses. It was a direction, a place to head to. And that felt much better than having a place to run from. So much better.
They heard a sound like thunder and looked up to see more aircraft. Helicopters this time. Dozens of them.
Maybe hundreds.
Black Hawks and Apaches. And the big cargo choppers, the Chinooks. An armada of the air. Powerful, threatening. They filled the sky, flying in waves, heading north, and the clouds seemed to fall back before them, revealing blues skies that offered at least the illusion of promise.
Trout wanted to feel hope when he looked at them, but it was slow in coming.
“The storm’s over,” he said, hoping it meant more than a weather report.
Dez watched the helicopters fly across the clearing sky.
