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Doent the baton; the woman toppled forward into theteenager, with her , treaphone

"Does anybody have anything to say?"

Silence Guilder drew a pistol from beneath his coat and racked the slide "Minister Wilkes," he said, holding out the gun, "will you please do the honors?"

"Jesus, Horace" His face was aghast "What are you trying to prove?"

"Is this going to be a proble That wasn’t part of the deal"

"What deal? There is no deal The deal is what I say it is" Wilkes stiffened "I won’t do it"

"You won’t or you can’t?"

"What difference does it make?"

Guilder frowned "Not very much, now that I think about it" And with these words, he stepped behind the girl, pushed the un to the back of her head, and fired

"Good Christ!"

"You knohat the biggest proble old is?" Guilder asked his chief of staff He iping down the blood-tinged barrel with a handkerchief "I’ve given this a lot of thought"

"Fuck you, Horace"

Guilder pointed the pistol at Wilkes’s colorless face, leveling its sights at the spot between his eyes "You forget that you can die"

And Guilder shot hi to so else Murmurs moved up and down the lines, whispered calculations, the building energy of people who knew they had nothing to lose Things had moved rather et so useful before the hammer came down-but now the die was cast

"Open the trucks"

The canvas was pulled away An eruption of volcanic screaot in, and told the driver to go They pulled away in a plume of mud and dirty snow as, behind them, the orchestra unleashed its h and wild and full of fear, punctuated by the syncopated rhyth to the final pops as the colsthe last

Chapter 56

Iowa The ashy bones

They’d exhausted their fuel near the town of Millersburg, sheltered the night in a roofless church, and set out the nexton foot Another seventy miles, said Tifty, perhaps a little more They’d encountered two more bone fields like the first, the nuinable Thousands, millions even What did it mean? What i for the sun to take them away? Or had they perished first, their corpses reclaiht? Even Michael, the h snow that now rose in places to their knees Their rations were scarce; they saw no ga their final stores-strips of dried rease on the roofs of their mouths The earth felt crystallized, the air held in suspension, like bated breath For hours, no wind at all, and then it caht came and left in the blink of an eye Heavy parkas with fur-lined hoods, woolen hats pulled down to their brows, gloves with the tips of the fingers cut away in case they needed to use their weapons, though Peter wondered if they could actually e this He’d never felt so cold He hadn’t known cold like this existed How Tifty s in this desolate place, he had no idea

They passed their eighteenth night in an auto-repair shop that contained, miraculously, a potbellied woodstove of cast iron with a soap-stone top Nohat to burn? As darkness came on, Michael and Hollis returned fro a pair of wooden chairs and armfuls of books The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998 A sharain, but they needed the heat Two ht

They awoke to brilliant sunlight, the first in days, although the te, dropped A hard north wind rattled the branches of the trees They allowed the one last fire and huddled around it, savoring every bit of heat

"Like"

It was Michael who had spoken Peter turned toward his friend "What did you say?"

Michael’s eyes were focused on the door of the stove "How many do you think we’ve seen?"

"I don’t know" Peter shrugged "A lot"

"And they all died at the sa is supposed to happen, that it’s part of the viral life cycle Birds do this, insects, reptiles When part of the body is worn out, they cast it off and grow a new one"

"But we’re talking about whole virals," Lore said

"That’s how it looks But everything we know about theroup Each one connected to its pod, each pod connected to its member of the Twelve Never mind theit isn’t true, but that’s Amy’s turf From my point of view, the virals are a species like any other When Lacey killed Babcock, all of his virals died Like bees, re "Kill the queen and you kill the hive That’s what you said"

"Andon that mountain bore it out But suppose each one of the viral faanisan-the heart, the brain The rest are like the feathers on a bird, or the carapace of an insect When it wears out, the organisrow a new one"

"They don’t feel like feathers," Lore said acidly

"Okay, not feathers, but you get the idea So peripheral, expendable I’ve alondered as keeping soti can survive indefinitely without food Froevity, it makes no sense to devour your entire food supply As predators, they’re actually too successful The idea has always bothered anized"

"I’ they’re dying out?"

"Obviously so all at once implies that it’s a natural process, built into the systeoes into shock, it draws blood away froans It’s a defense et the rest Now iine that each of the viral tribes is one ani into shock fro would be to radically reduce the numbers and let the food supply come back"

"And then what?" Peter asked

"Then you start the cycle over"

For a moment, nobody spoke

"Anyway," Michael continued, "it’s just an idea I had I could be full of shit"

Peter knew different "So why is it happening here?"

"That," said Michael, "is orrieswas at hand; they’d stayed too long as it was They gathered their gear and zipped up their parkas, bracing theid air that would assail theh the door

"Six days if the weather holds," said Tifty, hitching up his pack "Seven at the most"

"Why do I wish it were more?" said Lore

Grey Grey

His eyes popped open

Can you feel them, Grey?

"Who’s there? Guilder, is that you?"

I’m sorry I have been away You are still my favorite, Grey Since the very first day we met Do you remember?

His stomach clenched: the voice of Zero