Chapter 15: Day Sixty

Lena's POV

I knew the sound before I understood I was awake.

It was the same one that had come up the highway in my first life, a long flat wail from Marlow, with a second siren under it.

I was dressed and at the window in under a minute.

Day sixty.

"Is it them?" Eli said behind me.

"It's them."

He didn't ask how I was sure.

By six-thirty the whole ridge was moving.

Hank came up his drive at a dead run, which I hadn't known he could do, and swung up onto his bulldozer.

Eli backed the plow truck across the lane behind the cattle guard and chained the blade down.

I opened the cellar, the pantry, the generator shed, and every gate I'd had hung since October.

The radio on the kitchen table said a pork plant worker had bitten a nurse.

Then it said nothing at all.

Cody stood at the foot of the stairs in his socks, holding the dog.

"Is it a fire drill?" he asked.

I crouched in front of him.

"No, honey. It's a real one. You're going to stay close to me, and you do exactly what I say."

"Where's Mom?"

I didn't have an answer.

At seven, Eli shouted from the porch.

"Truck on the road!"

I ran out with the rifle Hank had loaned me.

A pickup came up the gravel at sixty miles an hour with one headlight smashed and the tailgate open.

Behind it, a hundred yards back, a dozen figures ran in a loose line.

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