“Okay, you’re right. You’re my rock, Tone.”

“You’ve always been mine. Be back before you know it. No wild parties while I’m gone.”

Her eyes glimmered, her smile wobbled. But his Katie had always been game. “I already ordered the strippers.”

“Tell them to keep it on till I get back.”

He walked out, trudged to his car. It started to snow in anemic wisps he barely felt. He slid into the minivan they’d bought only two weeks before, in anticipation of the twins.

Lowering his head to the wheel, he wept out his broken heart.

CHAPTER THREE

By the end of the first week of January, the reported death count topped a million. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic spreading with unprecedented speed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified it as a new strain of avian influenza, one that spread with human-to-human contact.

But no one could explain why the birds tested showed no signs of infection. None of the chickens, turkeys, geese, pheasants, or quail—confiscated or captured within a hundred-kilometer radius of the MacLeod farm—revealed any infection.

But the people—the MacLeod family in Scotland, their neighbors, the villagers—died in droves.

That detail the WHO, the CDC, and the NIH kept under tight wraps.

In the scramble for vaccines, distribution ran through complex and maddening loops. Delays incited rioting, looting, violence.

It didn’t matter, as the vaccines proved as ineffective as the fraudulent cures selling briskly on the Internet.

Across the globe, heads of state urged calm and called for order, promised assistance, spoke of policies.

Schools closed, countless businesses locked their doors as people were urged to limit contact with others. The sale of surgical masks, gloves, over-the-counter and prescription flu remedies, bleach, and disinfectants soared.

It wouldn’t help. Tony Parsoni could’ve told them, but he died in the same hospital bed as his mother-in-law less than seventy-two hours after her.

Plastic barriers, latex gloves, surgical masks? The Doom scoffed at all and gleefully spread its poisons.

In the second week of the New Year, the death toll topped ten million and showed no sign of abating. Though his illness went unreported, and his death was kept secret for nearly two days, the President of the United States succumbed.

Those heads of state fell like dominoes. Despite extreme precautions, they proved just as susceptible as the homeless, the panicked, the churchgoer, the atheist, the priest, and the sinner.

In its wave through D.C. in the third week of the Doom, more than sixty percent of Congress lay dead or dying, along with more than a billion others worldwide.

With the government in chaos, new fears of terrorist attacks lit fires. But terrorists were as busy dying as the rest.

Urban areas became war zones, with thinning police forces fighting against survivors who looked at the end of humanity as an opportunity for blood and brutality. Or profit.

Rumors abounded about odd dancing lights, about people with strange abilities healing burns without salve, lighting fires in barrels for warmth without fuel. Or lighting them for the thrill of watching the flames rise. Some claimed to have seen a woman walk through a wall, others swore they’d seen a man lift a car with one hand. And another who had danced a jig a full foot off the ground.

Commercial air travel shut down in week two in the vain hope of stopping or slowing the spread. Most who fled before the travel bans, leaving their homes, their cities, even their countries, died elsewhere.

Others opted to ride it out, stockpiling supplies in homes and apartments—even office buildings—locking doors and windows, often posting armed guards.

And had the comfort of dying in their own beds.

Those who locked themselves in and lived clung to the increasingly sporadic news coverage, hoping for a miracle.

By week three, news was as precious as diamonds, and much more rare.

Arlys Reid didn’t believe in miracles, but she believed in the public’s right to know. She’d worked her way from a predawn newsreader in Ohio, doing mostly farm reports and a few remotes at local fairs and festivals, to a fluff reporter at a local affiliate in New York.

She gained popularity, if not many opportunities for hard news.

At thirty-two, she’d still had her eye on national news. She hadn’t expected to get it by default. The star of The Evening Spotlight, a steady, sober voice through two decades of world crises, went missing before the end of the first week of the pandemic. One by one, in the pecking order of replacements, came death, flight, or, in the case of her immediate predecessor, a sobbing breakdown on air.

Every morning when Arlys woke—in her nearly empty low-rise only a few blocks from the studio—she took stock.

No fever, no nausea, no cramping, no cough, no delusions. No—though she didn’t actually believe the rumors—strange abilities.

She ate from her meager supplies. Usually dry cereal, as milk had become nearly impossible to find unless you could stomach the powdered stuff. And she couldn’t.

She dressed for a run, as she’d discovered running could be necessary, even in broad daylight, even for a handful of blocks. She strapped her briefcase cross-body. Inside, she kept a .32 she’d found on the street. She locked her door and hit the streets.

Along the way, if she felt reasonably safe, she took pictures with her phone. Always something to document. Another body, another burned-out car, another broken shop window. Otherwise, she kept up a steady jog.

She kept in good shape—always had—and could kick into a sprint if needed. Most mornings the streets remained eerily quiet, empty but for abandoned cars, wrecks. Those who roamed the nights looking for blood had crawled back into their holes with the sunlight like vampires.

She used the side door, as Tim in security had given her a full set of keys and swipes before he’d disappeared. She always used the stairs, as they’d had a couple of power outages. The climb up five flights helped make up for missing her five-times-weekly hour at the gym.

She’d stopped letting the echoing silence of the building bother her. The lunchroom and the commissary still had coffee. Before she started a pot, she ground extra beans for the plastic bag in her briefcase. Only a day’s supply at a time—after all, she wasn’t the only one still coming to work who needed that good jolt.

Sometimes Little Fred—the enthusiastic intern who, like Arlys, continued to report to the TV station every day—restocked. Arlys never questioned where the bouncy little redhead acquired the coffee beans, the boxes of Snickers, or the Little Debbie snack cakes.

She just enjoyed the largess.

Today, she filled her thermos with coffee and decided on a Swiss Roll.

Taking both, she wound her way to the newsroom. She could’ve taken an office—plenty of them available now—but preferred the open feel of the newsroom.

She hit the lights, watched them blink on over empty desks, blank screens, silent computers.

She tried not to worry about the day she hit the switches and nothing happened.

As always, she settled down at the desk she’d chosen, crossed her fingers, and booted up the computer. The Wi-Fi in her apartment building had hit the dirt two weeks earlier, but the station still pulled it.

It ran painfully slow, often hiccupped off and on, but it ran. She clicked to connect, poured her coffee, settled back to drink and wait—fingers still crossed.

“And so we live another day,” she said aloud when the screen came up.

She clicked on her e-mail, drank, and waited until it fluttered on-screen. As she did several times a day, she searched for an e-mail from her parents, her brother, the friends she had back in Ohio. She’d had no luck phoning or texting in more than a week. The last time she’d been able to reach her parents, her mother had told her they were fine. But her voice had sounded raw and weak.

Then nothing. Calls didn’t go through, texts and e-mails went unanswered.

She sent another group e-mail.

Please contact me. I check my e-mail several times a day. You can phone my cell, it’s still working. I need to know how you are. Any information from you and your location. I’m really getting worried. Melly, if you get this, please, please, go check on my parents. I hope you and yours are well. Arlys.