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"I can’t find hiines; at the back of the line, one of the buses drew clear, then another and another In a burst of fury, Kittridge raed toward the door But the girl would have none of it; she was fighting hirip
"I can’t leave without hio!"
Ahead he saw Pastor Don at the base of the steps Kittridge shoved April forward "Don, help me! Get her on the bus!"
"I can’t leave, I can’t leave!"
"I’ll find hih theher toward the door; then she was gone The bus was only half full, but there was no tili his naet them out of here!"
The doors closed The bus pulled away
In her basement chamber of the NBC facility, Lila Kyle, who had spent the last four days in a state of narcotic suspension-a seht in which she experienced the room around her as if it were but one of severalsi: a si driven to the hospital to have her baby Whoever was driving the car, Lila couldn’t see; the fringes of her vision were draped in blackness Brad, she said, are you there? And then the blackness lifted, like the curtain over a stage, and Lila saw that it was Brad A shiht, thru We’ll be there soon, , Brad said We’ll be there any second This isn’t all going to hell in a handbasket You just hold on The baby is co The baby is practically here
And those were the words Lila was saying to herself-the baby is co-when the roos falling, the floor beneath her lurching like a tiny boat at sea-and she began to scream
Chapter 21
The viral pod that swar center in the earlyout of Nebraska Estimates made later by the joint task force, code-named JTF Scorch differed on its size; some believed it was fifty thousand, others many more In the days that followed, it would convene with a second, larger pod, co south from Minnesota Always their nuo, they were half athe defensive peri the city within twenty-four hours
The first virals to breach the wires of the refugee-processing center arrived at 4:58 CTD By this time, extensive aerial operations in the central and eastern portions of the state had been under way for eight hours, and, in fact, all but one of the bridges over the Mississippi-Dubuque-had already been destroyed; the ti of the quarantine had been deliberately enerally believed by the leaders of the task force-a conclusion supported by the coence communities-that a concentrated human presence within the quarantine zone acted as a lure to the infected, causing them to coalesce in certain areas and thus ue, in the words of one task forcebehind a population of refugees was simply the price that needed to be paid in a war that lacked all precedent And in any event, those people were surely dead anyway
Major Frances Porcheki of the Iowa National Guard-in her civilian life, a districtapparel-was unaware of the h a highly trained military officer, Major Porcheki was also a devout Catholic who took couidance froees under her protection, as she had been ordered to do, followed directly from this deeper conviction, as did her choice to devote the final energies of her life, and those of the soldiers still under her command-165 men and women, who, nearly to a one, took up positions at the western wire-to provide cover for the escaping buses By this ti after the vehicles, screa to be done Well, that’s it, Porcheki thought I would have saved athered to the west, a wall of quivering radiance, like a glowing hedgerow Jets were streaking overhead, unleashing the fury of their payloads into the heart of the pod: glea tracers, spouts of flaauntlet of destruction the pod e Porcheki leapt fro, "Hold your fire, everyone! Wait till they’re at the wire!," then dropped to a firing position-having no ive, she would face the enean to pray
Time itself acquired a disordered feel A in unforeseen ways In the base At the veryon the rooftop, Horace Guilder, who had been hiding from Nelson in the office when the assault commenced, his decision not to telephone his counterparts at the CDC having lifted one burden from his mind only to create another (he had no idea what to do next), had descended the stairs to the basement with considerable difficulty to find Masterson and Nelson frantically cra words to the effect of "Where the hell have you been?" and "We have to get out of here!" and "The place is co down around our ears!" But these sentiuely The thing that mattered noas Lawrence Grey And all at once, as if he’d been slapped in the face, Guilder knehat he had to do
There was only one way Why hadn’t he seen it all along?
His whole body was poised on the verge of paralyzing spas tube of his throat And yet he -to reach out and seize Masterson’s sidear hi trae was knocked to the ground As he atteht hi over hi feet and bodies; it was all he could do to assuround with his hands over his head
"Tim! Where are you?"
Then he saw hi in the dirt not ten yards away Kittridge hobbled to his side, skidding in the dust
"Are you okay? Can you run?"