Guilder’s chief of staff, whose name was Fred Wilkes, advanced into the room. Like all residents of the Hilltop, his eyes had the bloodshot look of a chronic pot smoker’s. He also possessed the glossily sleek appearance of a twenty-five-year-old—a far cry from the wiry septuagenarian of Guilder’s first acquaintance. Wilkes had been the first to come aboard; Guilder had discovered the man hiding out in one of the college’s dormitories in the first days after the attack. He was holding—hugging, really—the body of his late wife, whose hefty proportions had not been improved by three days of gaseous decomposition in the Iowa heat. As Wilkes related, the pair had fled the refugee-processing center on foot when the buses had failed to arrive; they’d made it all of three sweltering miles before his wife had clutched her chest, rolled her eyes heavenward, and toppled over, dead of a heart attack. Unable to leave her behind, Wilkes had scavenged a wheelbarrow and carted her mountainous form to the college, where he’d taken refuge with only her corpse, and his memories of a lifetime shared, for company. Despite the horrendous smell (which Wilkes either didn’t notice or much care about), the two of them made for a genuinely heartrending sight that might have moved Guilder to tears if he were a certain kind of man, which he might have once been but was no longer.
“Listen,” Guilder had said, kneeling before the grief-sticken man, “I’d like to make you a proposition.”
And so it had begun. It was that very day, that very hour in fact, even as he’d watched Wilkes take his first disgusted sip, that Guilder had heard the Voice. As far as he could tell, he was still the only one; none of the other staffers gave so much as a hint of experiencing Zero’s mental presence. And as for the woman, who knew what was going on inside her head?
Now, the width of one and a half human lifetimes later, his grand design coming to fruition and the last of humanity having been gathered at his feet (the Kerrville thing, like the Sergio thing, being a small but significant irritant, a pea under the mattress of the Plan), here was Wilkes with his omnipresent clipboard and a facial expression, evidently, of not-good news.
“I just thought you should know the gathering party’s back. What’s, ah, left of it.”
With this disconcerting introduction, Wilkes withdrew the top sheet of paper from his clipboard and placed it on Guilder’s desk and backed away, as if he were happy to be rid of the thing.
Guilder scanned it quickly. “What the hell, Fred.”
“I guess you could say things didn’t go exactly as planned.”
“Nobody? Not one of them? What is wrong with these people?”
Wilkes gestured toward the paper. “The flow of oil has been at least temporarily disrupted. That’s a plus. It opens a lot of doors.”
But Guilder was beyond consolation. First Kearney, now this. There had been a time when scooping up survivors had proved a relatively clear-cut undertaking. The woman appeared; the gates swung open, the wheel of the vault began to turn, the drawbridge descended over the moat; the woman did her stuff, like a lion tamer at the circus; and the next thing you knew, the trucks were galloping back to Iowa, packed with human cargo. The Kentucky caves. That island in Lake Michigan. The abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. More recently, the California raid had been a bona-fide bonanza, fifty-six survivors taken, most of whom had marched like lambs into the truck once the power was cut and the terms were set. (Get in or you’re meat.) The usual attrition rate—some died en route, others failed to adapt to their new circumstances—but a solid haul nonetheless.
Since then, it had been one out-of-control bloodbath after another, starting with Roswell.
“Apparently there wasn’t much of a negotiation phase. The convoy was pretty heavily armed.”
“I don’t care if they had a nuclear missile. We knew that going in. These are Texans.”
“In a manner of speaking, that’s true.”
“We’re about to go on-line here, and this is what you tell me? We need bodies, Fred. Living, breathing bodies. Can’t she control these things anymore?”
“We could go in the old-fashioned way. I said so from the start. We’d take some casualties, but if we keep hitting their oil supply, sooner or later their defenses will weaken.”
“We collect people, Fred. We don’t lose them. Have I failed to make myself clear? Can