from the frames, doors ripped off their hinges. Danny brought the bus to a halt.
They disembarked into a stench of decay so thick that Danny nearly gagged. Worse than Momma, worse than all the bodies he’d seen that morning, walking to the depot. It was the kind of smell that could snake inside you, into your nose and mouth, and linger there for days.
“Hello!” April called. Her voice echoed across the lot. “Is anybody here? Hello!”
Danny had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Some of this was the smell, but some wasn’t. He had the jangly feeling all over.
“Hello!” April called again, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Can anyone hear me?”
“Maybe we should go,” Danny suggested.
“The Army’s supposed to be here.”
“Maybe they left already.”
April removed her backpack, unzipped the top, and withdrew a hammer. She gave it a swing, as if to test its weight.
“Tim, you stay by me. Understand? No wandering off.”
The boy was standing at the base of the bus’s steps, pinching his nose. “But it smells gross,” he said in a nasal voice.
April slid her arms into the straps. “The whole city smells gross. You’ll just have to deal with it. Now come on.”
Danny didn’t want to go either, but the girl was determined. He followed the two of them as they made their way into the maze of vehicles. Step by step, Danny began to comprehend what he was seeing. The cars had been positioned around the tents as a defense. Like in pioneer times, the way settlers would circle the covered wagons when the Indians attacked. But these weren’t Indians, Danny knew, and whatever had happened here, it looked to be long over. There were corpses, somewhere—the smell seemed to intensify the farther they went—but so far they’d seen no trace of them. It was as if everyone had vanished.
They came to the first of the tents. April entered first, holding the hammer up before her, ready to swing. The space was a mess of overturned gurneys and IV poles, debris strewn everywhere—bandages, basins, syringes. But still there were no bodies.
They looked in another tent, then a third. Each was the same. “So where did everybody go?” April said.
The only place left to look was the stadium. Danny didn’t want to, but April wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the Army said to come here, she insisted, there had to be a reason. They moved up the ramp toward the entrance. April was leading the way, clutching Tim with one hand, the hammer with the other. For the first time, Danny noticed the birds. A huge black cloud wheeling over the stadium, their hoarse calls seeming to break the silence and to deepen it at the same time.
Then, from behind them, a man’s voice:
“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”
* * *
The Ferrari had died as Kittridge was pulling into the parking area. By this time the car was bucking like a half-broke horse, plumes of oily smoke pouring from the hood and undercarriage. There was no mistaking what had happened: Kittridge’s rocket ride out of the parking ramp—that leap into space and then the hard bang on the pavement—had cracked the oil pan. As the oil had drained away, the motor had gradually overheated, metal expanding until the pistons had seized in their cylinders.
Sorry about your car, Warren. It sure was good while it lasted.
After what he’d seen in the stadium, Kittridge needed some time to collect himself. Jesus, what a scene. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t have predicted, but staring it in the face was something else. It sickened him to the core. His hands were actually shaking; he thought he might be ill. Kittridge had seen some things in his life, horrible things. Bodies in pits lined up like cordwood; whole villages gassed, families lying where they’d fallen, their hands reaching out in vain for the last touch of a loved one; the indecipherable remains of men and women and children, blasted to bits in a marketplace by some lunatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. But never anything even remotely on this scale.
He’d been sitting on the hood of the Ferrari, considering his options, when in the distance he’d heard a vehicle approaching. Kittridge’s nerves snapped to attention. A large diesel engine by the sound of it: an APC? But then, lumbering up the ramp, came the surreal vision of a big yellow school bus.
How about that, Kittridge thought. Holy son of a