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“Will it be enough?” Trout asked.
Dez shook her head. “I don’t know.”
After a thoughtful moment, Dez nudged the camera bag toward him.
“I told you, I don’t—”
“You need to file a report,” she interrupted.
“Why? What’s the point?”
Dez bent and unzipped the case, removed the camera, studied it, and found the record button. She rested a finger over it. “This isn’t everywhere yet,” she said. “It’s spreading, but it isn’t everywhere yet.”
“I know, but—”
“You need to tell people, Billy. You need to keep telling people. You need to tell them everything we know. What it is. How it spreads. How to fight them. Everything.”
“Who’s going to listen?”
Dez shrugged. The drone of the helicopters was fading to a rumor in the sky. “What does it matter? Somebody will. Maybe if all we do is get the word out to a few, that’ll matter. Maybe we’ll help some people get through this.”
“We’ll get through it.”
Dez smiled faintly and nodded. “Then it’s on us to help whoever we can. However we can. Everything’s going to shit, Billy. We can’t be a part of that. We can’t be a part of the end. We have to be a part of whatever survives. We have to help people so they know how to fight back. Am I … am I making sense?”
He stared at her for several seconds, watching her eyes, seeing the lights deep inside the blue. Loving her for this.
“Yes,” he said, “you’re making sense.”
After a while Dez took his hand. Then Billy Trout reached out and pulled her gently into his arms. Not to comfort her.
He kissed her with all the heat and hope and love that he had left inside.
The kiss she gave back was scalding.
When they stopped, gasping and flushed, Trout murmured, “I love you.”
She said, “Now, Billy? Really? God, you’re such a girl.”
Laughing out loud, she walked back to the bus.
CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR
SUNSET HOLLOW GATED COMMUNITY
MARIPOSA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Tom Imura ran and the night burned around him.
The darkness pulsed with the red and blue of police lights; the banshee wail of sirens tore apart the shadows of the California night.
The child in his arms screamed and screamed and screamed.
Tom clutched little Benny to his chest. He could feel his brother’s tiny heart beating like the flutter of dragonfly wings. His own felt like a bass drum being pounded by a madman. Sweat ran down his chest and mixed with the toddler’s tears.
Tom turned once and saw them.
He saw her first.
