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The fires reached upward with fingers of yellow and orange and red and clawed at the ceiling of clouds. Those clouds glowed as if they were about to burst into flame too.
From here, from this vantage point, Ferdinand could not hear the screams. Or the moans. All he could hear was a long, loud, sustained roar as tens of thousands of buildings and homes burned. He could not see the dead—or the living, if there had been any left before he began setting his fires. But he could imagine those souls flickering upward inside the flames, escaping through the clouds into heaven.
He leaned against the fender of an abandoned car. Electromagnetic pulses from the nukes that had wiped out most of the big cities had killed all the cars. Somehow San Francisco hadn’t been nuked, but the EMPs still turned off all the power.
That had made it harder to escape. The lack of power, of lights, of vehicles had probably killed more people than the plague itself. One of the last official statements had been some nonsense about using nuclear weapons to wipe out the main areas of infection. That hadn’t worked, and any bloody fool could have told the bozos in Washington it was a stupid plan. All it did was make sure the people had no way to flee. It turned off every light but the one that more or less said “Open Buffet—All You Can Eat.”
The smoke from the fire was being pushed around by the wind, and some of it was beginning to come in his direction.
He moved away, allowing himself to be chased into the darkness by the sooty evidence of his crime.
He was sure that there had to be some living people down there.
Had to be. Surviving, as he had survived for so long.
Now . . .
No.
Now San Francisco was going to burn to the ground. No engines would come, no burly firefighters would douse the conflagration. It would all burn.
Maybe it would spread, too.
Ferdinand had left trails of gasoline across the Golden Gate to coax the fires.
He wanted it all to burn.
That was the point.
Nukes didn’t kill the infection.
Fire always did.
It was just that there hadn’t been enough fire.
Now maybe there would be.
Fire purifies. They even set controlled fires on farm fields to restore and refresh the land.
Maybe it would do that here, too.
He hoped so.
He wiped at the tears in his eyes. Ferdinand was not in the habit of lying to himself. He never had. He didn’t try to convince himself that those tears were from the smoke.
No.
Down there, somewhere within those towering walls of flame, were Alex, and the boys, and his parents.
His sister, too.
All of them.
Or . . . the versions of them that had been left to haunt him once they’d contracted the plague. The versions of them that had attacked one another. The versions that had tried to kill him before he’d overpowered them and locked them in rooms.
Now they were burning.
Burning.
