Chapter 8: The Toll

I had my scrubs back on before the speaker finished its second sentence.

Jonas buckled his belt in the dark and found my hand.

"There's a drain," he said. "I saw it when I came down. It runs to the creek."

"How big?"

"Big enough for you. Tight for me."

"Then you go second."

We crawled on our knees along a concrete pipe that smelled of peaches and rot, with the voice from the speaker fading behind us.

"Pilot Mercer. You have thirty seconds to send her up."

Then a long silence.

Then boots.

I heard six pairs of them on the hatch above the cellar.

When we came out into the creek bed, the sun was low and the whole clinic lot was lit orange by the burning roof.

The General's escort stood in a tight ring around the hatch, six men in gray gear with rifles raised, facing down.

And behind them, filling the weeds along the road, came the turned.

They had followed the noise and the fire.

They came slowly at first, and then they saw movement.

"Down," Jonas said. "Stay down."

He pulled a flare out of his jacket pocket, struck it, and threw it hard in a high arc across the yard.

It landed in the dry grass on the far side of the soldiers and flared red.

Every head in the crowd of the dead turned toward it.

Then they ran.

The soldiers swung around too late.

I did not watch what happened to them.

I had seen enough of the turned in three weeks to know.

Jonas took my hand and pulled me up the far bank into the trees, and we ran until the screaming behind us stopped.

At dusk we reached the river.

A flat steel barge rode against a rotten dock, and a line of about thirty people stood waiting to cross.

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