They were from Fort Collins: a couple in their thirties, Joe and Linda Robinson, the two of them still dressed for a day at the office, with a young baby they called Boy Jr.; a heavyset black man in a security guard’s uniform, named Wood, and his girlfriend, Delores, a pediatric nurse who spoke with a thick West Indian accent; an elderly woman, Mrs. Bellamy—Kittridge was never to learn her first name—with a nimbus of blue-rinsed hair and an enormous white purse that she kept clutched to her side; a young man, maybe twenty-five, named Jamal, with a tight fade haircut and brightly colored tattoos winding up and down his bare arms. The last was a man in his fifties with the coarse gray hair and barrel-shaped torso of an aging athlete; he introduced himself as Pastor Don. Not an actual pastor, he explained; by trade, a CPA. The nickname was a leftover from his days coaching Pop Warner football.
“I always told them to pray we didn’t get our asses kicked,” he told Kittridge.
Though Kittridge had initially assumed they’d traveled together, they had wound up with one another by accident. All told versions of the same story. They’d fled the city only to be stopped by a long line of traffic at the Nebraska border. Word passed down from car to car that there was an Army roadblock ahead, that nobody was being let through. The Army was waiting for word to let people pass. For a whole day they’d sat there. As the light had ebbed, people had begun to panic. Everyone was saying the virals were coming; they were being left to die.
Which was, more or less, what happened.
They arrived just after sunset, Pastor Don said. Somewhere ahead in the line, screaming, gunshots, and the sound of crunching metal; people began to tear past him. But there was nowhere to run. Within seconds, the virals were upon them, hundreds blasting out of the fields, tearing into the crowd.
“I ran like hell, just like everybody else,” Pastor Don said.
He and Kittridge had stepped away to confer; the others were sitting on the ground by the bus. April was passing out bottles of water they’d collected at the stadium. Pastor Don removed a box of Marlboro Reds from his shirt pocket and shook two loose. Kittridge hadn’t smoked since his early twenties, but what could it hurt now? He accepted a light and took a cautious drag, the nicotine hitting his system instantly.
“I can’t even describe it,” Don said, ejecting a plume of smoke. “Those goddamn things were everywhere. I saw the truck and decided it was better than nothing. The others were already inside. How the door got jammed I don’t know.”
“Why wouldn’t the Army let you through?”
Don shrugged philosophically. “You know how these things work. Probably somebody forgot to file the right form.” He squinted at Kittridge through a trail of smoke. “So what about you, you got anybody?”
He meant did Kittridge have a family, somebody he had lost or was looking for. Kittridge shook his head.
“My son’s in Seattle, a plastic surgeon. The whole package. Married his college sweetheart, two kids, a boy and a girl. Big house on the water. They just redid the kitchen.” He shook his head wistfully. “The last time we spoke, that’s what we talked about. A fucking kitchen.”
Pastor Don was carrying a rifle, a .30-.06 with three rounds remaining. Wood was carrying an empty .38. Joe Robinson had a .22 pistol with four cartridges—good for killing a squirrel, maybe, but that was about all.
Don glanced toward the bus. “And the driver? What’s his story?”
“A little off, maybe. I wouldn’t try to touch him—he’ll just about have a seizure. Otherwise he’s okay. He treats that bus like it’s the Queen Mary.”
“And the other two?”
“They were hiding in their parents’ basement. I found them wandering around the parking lot at Mile High.”
Don took a last, hungry drag and crushed the butt underfoot. “Mile High,” he repeated. “I’m guessing that was nothing nice.”
There was no way around the wreckage; they would have to backtrack and find another route. They scavenged what supplies they could find—more bottles of water, a couple of working flashlights and a propane lantern, an assortment of tools, and a length of rope that had no obvious use but might find some purpose later on—and boarded the bus.
As Kittridge mounted the bottom step, Pastor Don touched him on the elbow. “Maybe you