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Greer shut the door, turned the lock, and pocketed the key. “Keep it down in there,” he barked through the slot. “I don’t want to have to come back here.” He turned to look at Michael. “What happened to your head? That looks like it hurt.”

“Not to sound ungrateful, but I’m thinking your being here is not good news.”

“We’re moving to Plan B.”

“I didn’t know we had one of those.”

Greer handed him Winfield’s pistol. “I’ll explain on the way.”

—

Peter, Apgar, and Chase were looking over Michael’s passenger manifest when shouts erupted in the hall: “Put it down! Put it down!”

A crash; a gunshot.

Peter reached into his desk for the pistol he kept there. “Gunnar, what have you got?”

“Nothing.”

“Ford?”

The man shook his head.

“Get behind my desk.”

The handle of the door jiggled. Peter and Apgar took positions against the wall on either side. The wood shuddered: somebody was kicking it.

The door blew open.

As the first man entered, Apgar tackled him from beind. A shotgun skittered away. Apgar pinned him with his knees, one hand on his throat, the other lifted, ready to strike. He stopped.

“Greer?”

“Hello, General.”

“Michael,” Peter said, lowering his gun, “what the fuck.”

Three soldiers charged into the room, rifles drawn.

“Hold your fire!” Peter yelled.

With visible uncertainty, the soldiers complied.

“What was that gunshot outside, Michael?”

The man waved casually. “Oh, he missed. We’re fine.”

Peter was shaking with anger. “You three,” he said to the soldiers, “clear the room.”

They made their departure. Apgar climbed off Greer. Chase, meanwhile, had come out from behind Peter’s desk.

Michael gestured in Chase’s direction. “Is he okay?”

“In what sense?”

“I mean does he know?”

“Yeah,” Chase said tersely, “I know.”

Peter was still furious. “The two of you, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Under the circumstances, we thought a direct approach was best,” Greer replied. “We have a vehicle outside. We need you to come with us, Peter, and we need to leave right now.”

Peter’s patience was at its end. “I’m not going anywhere. You don’t start talking sense, I’ll toss your asses in the stockade myself and throw away the key.”

“I’m afraid the situation has changed.”

“So the virals aren’t coming back after all? This is all some kind of joke?”

“I’m afraid it’s the opposite,” Greer said. “They’re already here.”

* * *

53

Amy was going to miss this place.

They had decided to leave the rest of their chores undone for the day. There seemed no point in finishing them now. Sometimes, Carter told her, you got to let a garden tend itself.

She felt sick, almost feverish. Could she control it? Would she kill him? And what of the water?

You got to do it the way Zero done, Carter had told her. Ain’t no other way to go back to the way you were.

The girls were watching a movie in the house. It was one Amy remembered, from being just a girl herself: The Wizard of Oz. The movie had terrified her—the tornado, the field of poppies, the wicked witch with her sickly green skin and battalion of airborne monkeys in bellman’s hats—but she had also loved it. Amy had watched it in the motel where she and her mother had lived. Her mother would put on her little skirt and stretchy top to go out to the highway, and before she left she’d sit Amy down in front of the television with something to eat, something greasy in a bag, and tell her: You sit tight now. Mama will be back soon. Don’t you open that door for nobody. Amy could see the guilt in her mother’s eyes—she understood that leaving a child by herself wasn’t something her mother was supposed to do—and Amy’s heart always went out to her, because she loved her, and the woman was so remorseful and sad all the time, as if life was a series of disappointments she could do nothing to stop. Sometimes her mother could barely get out of bed all day, and then night would fall, and the skirt and the top and the television would go on, and she’d leave Amy alone again.

The night of The Wizard of Oz had been their last in the motel, or so Amy recalled. She’d watched cartoons for a while and, when these were over, a game show, and then she flipped around the dial until the movie caught her eye. The colors were odd, too vivid. That was the first thing she noticed. Lying on the bed, which smelled like her mother—a mélange of sweat, and perfume, and something distinctly her own—Amy settled in to watch. She entered the story when Dorothy, having rescued her dog from the clutches of the evil Miss Gulch, was racing from the storm. The tornado whisked her away; she found herself in the land of the Munchkins, who sang about their happy lives. But, of course, there was the problem of the feet—the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, sticking out from beneath Dorothy’s tornado-driven house.