place and pulled the bolt. Here they would make their stand. “Everyone, get ready!”
They heard the front door give way. Alicia, closest to the bedroom curtain, spun around and began to fire.
The one that got her wasn’t the first, or the second, or even the third. It was the fourth. By then her gun was drained. Later, Peter would recall the scene as a sequence of discrete details. The sound of her last shell casings ricocheting on the floor. The swirl of gunpowder smoke in the air and the descent of Alicia’s empty clip as she reached to pull a new one from her vest; the viral hurling itself toward her through the tattered curtain, the pitiless smoothness of its face and the flash of its eyes and open jaws; the barrel of her useless gun lifting, and the dart of her hand to draw her blade, too late; the moment of impact, cruel and unstoppable, Alicia falling backward to the floor, the viral’s burrowing jaws finding the curve of her neck.
It was Hollis who took the shot, stepping forward as the viral lifted its face and spearing the barrel of his rifle into its mouth and firing, spraying the back of its head against the wall of the bedroom. Peter scrabbled forward and grabbed Alicia under the arms, dragging her away from the door. The blood was running freely from her neck, a deep crimson, soaking her vest. Someone was yelling, saying her name over and over, but maybe that was him. Braced against the wall, he hugged Alicia to his chest, holding her upright between his legs, reflexively putting his hands over the wound to try to stop the bleeding. Amy and Sara were on the floor now, too, huddled against the wall. Another creature came through the curtain and Peter lifted his pistol and fired, his last two rounds. The first one missed but not the second. In his arms, Alicia was breathing strangely, all hiccups and gasps. There was blood, so much blood.
He closed his eyes and pulled her tightly against him.
• • •
Lacey turned; Babcock was perched above her, at the top of the tunnel’s mouth. As great and terrible a thing as God had ever made. Lacey felt no fear, only wonder at the magnificent workings of God. That He should make a being so perfect in his design, fit to devour a world. And as she gazed upon him glowing with his great and terrible radiance—a hallowed light, like the light of angels—Lacey’s heart swelled with the knowledge that she had not been wrong, that the long night of her vigil would end as she’d forseen. A vigil begun so many years ago on a damp spring morning when she had opened the door of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Memphis, Tennessee, and beheld a little girl.
Jonas, she thought, do you see that I was right? All is forgiven; all that has been lost can be found again. Jonas, I am coming to tell you. I am practically with you now.
She darted back into the tunnel.
Come to me. Come to me come to me come to me.
She ran. She was in that place but also another; she was running down the tunnel, drawing Babcock inside; but she was also a little girl again, in the field. She could smell the sweetness of the earth, feel the cool night air on her cheeks; she could hear her sisters and her mother’s voice, calling from the doorway: Run, children, run as fast as you can.
She hit the door and kept on going, down the hall with its buzzing lights, into the room with its gurney and beakers and batteries, all the little things of the old world and its terrible dreams of blood.
She stopped, pivoting to face the doorway. And there he was.
I am Babcock. One of Twelve.
As am I, thought Sister Lacey, as, behind her, the bomb’s timer reached 0:00, the atoms of its core collapsed into themselves, and her mind filled up forever with the pure white light of heaven.
SIXTY-NINE
She was Amy, and she was forever. She was one of Twelve and also the other, the one above and behind, the Zero. She was the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, who lived a thousand years; Amy of Multitudes, the Girl with the Souls Inside Her.
She was Amy. She was Amy. She was Amy.
She was the first to rise. After the thunder and the shaking, the trembling and