He wasn’t the only one trying to get to Seattle. It was a crowded, noisy flight, but he could hear people crying around him. He could hear people promising each other it was going to be alright.

By the time they landed in San Francisco, after circling for hours due to fog, every airport in the country was shut down. The gates were empty, no one even waiting around just in case. Abandoned suitcases littered the terminal, and through the big plate glass windows he could see the runways were bare. Not a plane to be seen.

Cousin Angie had said she’d met him at baggage claim, though his bags were probably still sitting in Chicago waiting for someone to pick them up. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter—Seattle was only a few hours away by car. He had reached the coast, and that was what mattered.

“Oh, shit, Tim,” she said, rushing up to hug him. Her face was red and puffy. She was about a head shorter than him and she had short blonde hair that didn’t quite hide a port wine stain on her neck. He hadn’t seen her since a Christmas visit to California when she was ten—now she was a student at a design college. He knew almost nothing about her, had in fact not spoken to her in as long as he could remember.

It didn’t matter. He was finding out how few things actually mattered. His life was falling away—all of his hopes were gone, all of the things he’d thought about doing. All the future days he had planned.

Angie had no car, just a little Vespa scooter. It was cute, and it could run circles around the gridlock traffic in the city, but as she rocketed them down the ridiculous hills of San Francisco he was convinced they would spill at any moment. He was also convinced there was no way it could get him to Seattle. That didn’t matter, he told himself. He could take a bus or a train or just buy a car if he had to. He had about ten grand in the bank in savings and he didn’t care if he had to spend all of it in as many days.

She took him back to her dorm room, a tiny space made of white-painted cinderblock and lined with her drawings. Cute, colorful monsters with enormous eyes stared down at him from every side. She shared the room with a girl named Augusta who was curled up in bed by the time they arrived, though Tim got the sense that she wasn’t actually asleep. In previous epochs—hell, two days earlier—he would have felt supremely uncomfortable spending the night on the floor of the dorm room. He would have felt like a pedophile and a sponge. As he lay down on the carpet with his backpack for a pillow, however, he could only think it didn’t matter. The fact that the carpet smelled like spilled bong water didn’t matter. The fact that the curtains didn’t block out much of the orange streetlight didn’t matter.

He couldn’t have slept that night if he’d sprung for a room at the Fisherman’s Wharf Sheraton. He couldn’t have slept if he’d swallowed half a bottle of Ambien. He couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate enough to even make a plan. He could only play the image over and over in his mind. The video clip of Karen’s last moments. The fuzzy blob in the back of the car that had to be Jake.

He kept thinking about Phil Nero’s face. He kept thinking about Karen hitting that face with the hammer. He couldn’t imagine her hitting him hard enough.

The prick, he thought. The son of a bitch. There were all kinds of names for the asshole. The cunting motherfucker who had taken away Tim’s family.

Phil Nero had to die.

“In the morning I went to the bank and took some money out. I spent far too long trying to book passage north, only to have every plan I made cancelled out from under me. When the President declared the national state of emergency, when they started reporting cases in Idaho and Montana, they told me I had to stay put. That there was a nation-wide travel ban and people were supposed to stay where they were. It was the only way, they said, they could stop this thing from spreading. Then cases started showing up in Oakland and at Berkeley. It became clear to everyone that it wasn’t going to stop. That it would spread no matter what we did. Then everybody wanted to get out of town on the same day. That’s when I headed out on my own.”

The man in the fishing hat leaned forward in his chair. “What about your cousin? Is she okay?”

Tim shrugged. He just didn’t know. “I tried calling her a couple of times from the road. I got that stupid FEMA message telling me to keep the lines clear.”

Colonel Horne cleared his throat noisily. “You came back,” he said, very slowly, putting the facts together out of Tim’s long soliloquy, “to get revenge on the man who killed your family.”

“Yes,” Tim said. Yes. It was that simple. The weeks on the road had taught him that much. If you wanted something badly enough, and if it was a simple thing, then nothing could stop you from getting it.

“No,” Horne said. “I’m sorry you wasted all that time. This is as far as you go.”