There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there. It would do, at least for a while.

He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn’t look up at Nick.

Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a whiny gasbag, maybe, but someone they hung with, just the same. He had died like a rat in a trap with some horrible swelling sickness they didn’t understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.

He laid hold of Vince Hogan’s meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince’s head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.

It took ten minutes to get the big man’s remains down the steep stairs. Panting, Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot in his cell.

He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June twenty-third had become the twenty-fourth, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.

And, of course, there was the very personal terror—that he would wake up with it himself.

He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something—or someone—very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel’s got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.

He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.

Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.

“You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain’t that what you wanted? Ain’t that your revenge? Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin freight train goin up a hill!”

But Nick’s first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.

He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever-sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.

“Nick. Come in. What is it?”

“V. Hogan died last night. Warner’s dying, I think. He’s awful sick. Have you seen Dr. Soames?”

She shook her head, shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: “Can you call his office for me?”

“Yes, of course. Bring me the phone, Nick. I seem… to have had a setback in the night.”

He brought the phone over and she dialed Soames’s number. After she had held the receiver to her ear for more than half a minute, he knew there was going to be no answer.

She tried his home, then the home of his nurse. No answer.

“I’ll try the State Patrol,” she said, but put the phone back in the cradle after dialing a single number. “The long-distance is still out of service, I guess. After I dial 1, it just goes wah-wah-wah in my ear.” She gave him a pallid smile and then the tears began to flow helplessly. “Poor Nick,” she said. “Poor me. Poor everybody. Could you help me upstairs? I feel so weak, and I can’t catch my breath. I think I’ll be with John soon.” He looked at her, wishing he could speak. “I think I’ll lie down, if you can help me.”

He helped her upstairs, then wrote: “I’ll be back.”

“Thank you, Nick. You’re a good boy…” She was already drifting off to sleep.

Nick left the house and stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next. If he could drive, he might be able to do something. But…

He saw a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn of a house across the street. He went to it, looked at the house it belonged to with its drawn shades (so much like the houses in his confused dreams), then went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although he knocked several times.

He went back to the bike. It was small, but not too small for him to ride, if he didn’t mind his knees whamming the handlebars. He would look ludicrous, of course, but he was not at all sure there was anyone left in Shoyo to see… and if there was, he didn’t think many of them would be in a laughing frame of mind.

He got on the bike and pedaled clumsily up Main Street, past the jail, then east on Route 63, toward where Joe Rackman had seen the soldiers masquerading as a road crew. If they were still there, and if they really were soldiers, Nick would get them to take care of Billy Warner and Mike Childress. If Billy was still alive, that was. If those men had quarantined Shoyo, then surely the sick of Shoyo were their responsibility.

It took him an hour to pedal out to the roadwork, the bike weaving crazily back and forth across the center line, his knees thumping the handlebars with monotonous regularity. But when he got there the soldiers, or road crew, or whatever they had been, were gone. There were a few smudgepots, one of them still flickering. There were two orange sawhorses. And the road had been torn up, although Nick judged it would still be passable, if you weren’t too choosy about the springs of your car.

Black flickering movement caught the tail of his eye, and at the same instant the wind stirred around a little, just a soft summer breath, but enough to bring a ripe and sickening odor of corruption to his nostrils. The black movement was a cloud of flies, constantly forming and re-forming itself. He walked the bike over to the ditch at the far side of the road. In it, next to a shiny new corrugated culvert pipe, were the bodies of four men. Their necks and swollen faces were black. Nick didn’t know if they were soldiers or not, and he didn’t go any closer. He told himself he would walk back to the bike, there was nothing here to be scared about, they were dead, and dead people couldn’t hurt you. He was running by the time he was twenty feet from the ditch, anyway, and he was in a panic as he rode back toward Shoyo. On the outskirts of town he hit a rock and crashed the bike. He went over the handlebars, bumped his head, and scraped his hands. He only hunkered there for a moment in the middle of the road, shivering all over.

For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner’s permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Let’s get them to Camden. We’ll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.