The driver’s expression was unreadable behind the hazmat faceplate. All Dr. Menard knew was that the driver was facing his direction. The gloved hand hit a button and the door behind Dr. Menard opened. Dr. Menard refused to turn around.

The driver opened his own door and stepped outside. And walked away.

Dr. Menard looked back at the passengers. Everyone was asleep now. He came to a decision and went purposefully down the stairs. He put his foot on the badly wounded turf and moved swiftly. As he rounded the front of the bus, the thing that surprised him was the quiet of such a huge structure. Apart from some asshole yelling garbled directions through a megaphone down around the southern food court, the silence that hung over everything was unnatural, this calmness.

He turned in a slow circle and realized the main reason that such a huge place was so quiet was because most of the people were sleeping. Down on the field, people had crawled under the buses to escape the light. All those people under the buses made him think that they’d created some kind of horrible nest or burrow.

He put one foot on the top of the front tire and pulled himself onto the bus’s hood. From there he crawled up the windshield and stood on the roof, getting his first good look at the immense stadium. It looked empty. Then he saw the shapes wedged behind the seats, the rumpled seams of backbones and elbows and hair that skulked behind every row. Very few had fallen asleep sitting up. It looked like everyone had sought out the tightest, darkest, most secure spots as they drifted off, as if it was some kind of primeval ritual.

The few people he saw actually walking, or at least moving, all seemed unaware of each other. They stumbled through the rows of buses, looking for a quiet place to rest. For whatever reason, they seemed content to curl up next to someone else who was already sleeping. He couldn’t quite tell, but from the buses nearby, it looked like the front doors were all wide open, and full of sleeping figures. The only vigorous movement Dr. Menard could see was inside the back of the CTA bus directly in front of him. It looked like a group of men were gang raping a young woman. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or not. He hoped she was.

There was not one soldier, not one police officer, not one doctor, no one from the government on the field itself. After scanning the seats for a while, he finally saw a few soldiers patrolling the upper decks. There was movement behind the windows of the exclusive club levels, the expensive private rooms on the east side of the stadium. But that was all.

They had been abandoned.

He quickly slid down to the hood and climbed back to the grass. He got into the cab of the bus and closed the door firmly behind him. Of course the keys were gone. He slid his shaking fingers along the rubber molding that provided a tight seal against the elements. He kneeled on the driver’s seat, following the seam where the stiff plastic shell had been bolted into the floor. It looked like it was tight enough to keep the bugs out, but he couldn’t be sure. He explored under the dashboard and worried about the gaps between the dash and the steering column.

Hopefully the bugs wouldn’t crawl up into the engine block. And if he was still in there when people started waking up and going berserk, it should hold. It had been designed to withstand potential prisoner hijackings after all. He allowed himself to sit back and look around the stadium once again.

He didn’t understand how tens of thousands of people had been herded into Soldier Field. Why were they keeping everyone here? These people needed doctors. They needed to be decontaminated. They needed help.

The back of his collar rubbed at his neck at again and he pulled at it with irritation. His index finger brushed against something tiny, a speck of gravel or scab-like crust or something. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he brought it around and held the squirming bedbug up to his face.

He watched the legs twist, felt the tiny shell undulate under his fingers, saw how the proboscis reached for his breath, and when it couldn’t have that, it curled around to bite at the strip of soft flesh right up under the thumbnail.

He drove it into the center of the steering wheel. The horn echoed throughout the stadium.

CHAPTER 65

7:27 PM

August 14

As the sun sank behind the Loop skyline, Tommy waited in the darkness of the back of the ambulance.

Ideas, each worse than the last, swam through his head like dying fish trapped in a half-filled aquarium. Some, when he knew he was absolutely positive he was awake, seemed almost plausible. They had forgotten him when the virus had swept through the city, and they had abandoned everything. They were still watching him for any of the symptoms to appear. Or they were simply watching and waiting for his sanity to finally crack and for him to start screaming or drooling on himself.

Some of the worst ideas seemed to uncoil from the cold tendrils of his nightmares. Grace was strapped to an identical wheelchair, watching him on one of the monitors while Dr. Reischtal slid needles full of the virus into her veins. Or Tommy was trapped in a coma, only thinking he was awake, while the world withered away in dust and ashes outside.

But no matter the path of the theory, no matter what ghostly images swam into focus on the blank cellulose acetate of his mind, the utterly banal, inevitable fate waiting at the end of every train of thought was that the universe did not revolve around his problems. It was indifferent. It simply did not care.

The undeniable truth that lay in the darkest depths of his despair was the knowledge that he was going to die. Soon. And when he was gone, he understood now how little it would take, how a tiny ripple in the chaos of the world could hurt his little girl. There were so many ways to snap the life out of a four-year-old girl. Grace could die so easily.

Or maybe even something worse than death.

What would happen if Lee got his hands on her? Tommy kept seeing her in pain, hearing the anguish in her voice, watching those innocent, uncomprehending eyes as strangers touched her. . . .

A guttural cry escaped his clenched teeth.

Either he escaped or Grace died.

PHASE 6

CHAPTER 66

8:36 PM

August 14

Lee had promised her that they would be perfectly safe, but watching all the soldiers rush around all the sandbags and tanks, and listening to the distant shooting, Kimmy wasn’t so sure. The men in the hazmat suits had made Grace cry, so Kimmy now had to keep the girl on her lap. Grace kept burying her head in her mother’s shoulder, and Kimmy just knew that she was getting tears and snot all over her evening dress. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the dust getting blown around from all the helicopters landing and taking off across the street, in Daley Plaza. The wind was wreaking havoc with her hair and the dirt was sticking to her makeup.

By the time the press conference started, she would be lucky to look like one of those insulting Bratz dolls that had been buried at the bottom of a trash heap for a few weeks. And with all these reporters standing around, with all their crews, not to mention the big trailers full of generators to run the lights, you’d think that somebody would have a makeup kit around. But no, all the reporters, even the women, seemed to be shedding the air of glamour and embracing the rough-and-tumble effect, as if to remind their viewers that being in the quarantine zone was serious business.