It was raining when they let him go outside, just a fine warm drizzle that actually felt good on his face. A jeep waited for them outside the building Horne used as his headquarters—a courthouse, Tim noted, now that he got a chance to really see it. The driver was old enough to shave but not to drink. He didn’t say a word as they climbed into the back seat. Maybe people dressed in nothing but blankets weren’t uncommon in Olympia. He expressed this idea to Buzzard, who laughed.

“Even before the Flu, maybe,” he said. He held on to the back of the driver’s seat as they rumbled through the deserted downtown streets. “This was Freak Central, you know that? Evergreen College was just over there.” He pointed west. “That place—man, there were no grades. The teachers just told you how you were doing in a non-confrontational way. More hippies per square mile than they got anywhere in California, more Greens than Vermont. You know what their motto was? Omnia extrares. You translate that from the Latin and it means—”

“Let it all hang out,” Tim said. “I lived here, remember? Or close enough, anyway. My wife graduated from Evergreen. You’re no local, though.” Buzzard had an accent that made Tim think of the east coast. Maybe even New York.”

“Jersey. Carteret, to be exact, though I made my fortune in Hoboken. I’m a reporter by trade.” His smile was very wide and so unlike Horne’s cold grimace it was infectious.

“Is that why they call you Buzzard?” Tim asked.

“Sorta. Also because I came here right when things were going bad, just came out here like you except this was back when you could still rent a car and drive up like a human being. People were all headed the other way and they said I was crazy. When I said I wanted to stick around a while, even when Horne took over and gave everybody a chance to leave in style, free ride in a helicopter, well, the locals could only look at me askance. They figured I had a kink for grim stuff, and maybe they weren’t wrong. I got this friend who said I was like a vulture, circling Seattle waiting for something to die so I could write about. She wasn’t wrong. I came out here to get a front row seat for the apocalypse.”

Tim scowled but he admired the man’s honesty.

“So somebody else said, no, don’t call him a vulture. Call him a buzzard. Cause of my name, right? Brezinski the Buzzard. At your service. I’m going to write the official book about what happened here, when this is over.”

“You think there’ll be anybody to read it?”

Buzzard’s face went slack for a second as if he’d never considered the possibility. “Yeah, there’ll be somebody. This thing ain’t gonna kill all of us. Nah.”

The jeep took a left turn and then followed the looping shore of an inlet. They passed through a residential zone similar to the one Tim had broken into the night before, and he saw that some of the houses had they lights on even in the daytime. “Abandoned?” he asked.

Buzzard looked where he pointed. “Yeah. They keep the lights on so they can see better at night. And so it doesn’t look so fucking eerie all the time. You ever hear about Chernobyl, about what it was like? Worse than this, I guess. There was no birds or dogs or anything. No people anywhere, just houses, street after street of little cozy houses with broken windows and overgrown lawns. The Russians strung up loudspeakers all over town and played music, nice Classical all day long, so people who went there—cleanup crews, journos like me, whatever—didn’t get too freaked out.”

“Where does the power come from?” Tim asked. He’d seen the Portland PZ—from a distance—at nighttime, and had been bothered by its utter darkness. The buildings of the city had looked like austere rock formations, the roads like dry riverbeds. “There can’t be anybody to run the power plants anymore.”

Buzzard nodded. “Horne brought in these things, they’re called, um,” the reporter looked up as if consulting notes written on the tops of his eye sockets, “radiothermic generators. They used to use them on satellites and space stations, he said—totally automatic. No muss, no fuss, though when they get used up you gotta bury them a hundred miles down cause they’re hot forever. He hooked them up to the city grid and now we got all the light and heat we want for free.”

“Is the power on in Seattle, too?” Tim asked.

Buzzard’s eyebrows drew together in the middle. “Brother, I’m the wrong guy to ask. You still think you’re going there, some day?”

“Yes,” Tim said. He stared at the back of the driver’s head but the soldier didn’t glance back or even shift in his seat.

“To kill one drooler. Man, there’s just a couple hundred thousand of ‘em. You’re gonna go in there, wade your way through all those bitey teeth, find your one guy and plug him. Even though you know he isn’t responsible for his actions. That he’s just sick.”

“Yes,” Tim said again. He was getting sick of having to explain himself. “You have any kids, Buzzard? A wife?”

“Hell, no. I never met shall we say the right woman. At least not a woman who was right for more than a couple of weeks at a time.”

“You wouldn’t understand, then. You don’t understand what a man’s responsibility to his family means.”

Buzzard laughed, long and hard. By the time he’d stopped the jeep had reached its destination.