Chapter 25: One Door

Dawn came up gray and red over the burned camp.

The nineteen woke one by one behind the chimney, coughing, and nobody spoke above a whisper.

On the porch roof of the lodge, the loudspeaker repeated Calvin's message.

"Come to the lodge cellar. There is a cure waiting, and only one door."

The old woman with the bandage inside her elbow sat up and listened to it twice.

"That's the door we just came out of," she said.

"Yes," Jonas said.

"Then why does he want us back in it?"

Nobody on the roof had an answer yet.

I crawled to the edge and looked down.

About a hundred survivors were shuffling toward the lodge steps through the smoke, with guards in gray walking beside them and rifles held low.

The turned were out there too, drifting between the burned barracks.

They were turning their heads toward the speaker, one after another.

"He's calling the dead to the door," I said.

"He's calling them to the noise," Jonas said. "And he's lining up a hundred people for them to eat."

"Why?"

He pointed east, past the roofline.

On the pad behind the stables sat the black helicopter, with its rotor turning slowly and two men loading a steel cooler through the side door.

I knew that helicopter.

It had turned after us over Spokane nine days ago.

"He's leaving," I said.

"Everyone will be watching the cellar," Jonas said. "Nobody looks at the sky."

I stood up.

"Then I'm going to the door," I said.

"It's two hundred yards of turned."

"It's a hundred people walking into a box. I'm not watching that again."

Jonas looked at me for a long moment, and then at his shoulder, where the rope burn from the ladder had bled through his shirt.

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