It wasn’t a bad life, really.

In the morning the entire community came together, rain or shine, the men carrying steaming cups of coffee, the few children rubbing at their eyes. They went down to the shore together, their bare feet clotting over instantly with wet sand, and dug for geoducks. The big clams were repulsive to look at, white slimy flesh oozing out of sharp shells, topped by a siphon that looked exactly—exactly—like a flaccid penis. They made great eating, though, and they kept the small community of Camp Romeo alive.

They numbered less than five hundred. Most of Olympia’s residents had been evacuated in the first insane days after Seattle became infected. Whole extended families had been carried off, whole segments of the town. Those who stayed behind had their reasons. There were two cops who had stayed behind to direct traffic for the last of the convoys. Tim was introduced to a whole team of museum curators and librarians who had stayed behind to protect the town’s treasures—they invited him to join their poker night. There were professors from the college who had stood together in their refusal to leave, and Tim got the sense they half-believed the military had created the Flu just to evict them from their hallowed halls of academe. They talked openly and often of how Horne had just wanted to break up the Marxist Student Collective and force them into a state of late capitalism.

The joke was on Horne, if that was the case. If anything Camp Romeo had evolved into a commune. Everybody worked, and money was only used for luxury goods. Food, shelter and clothing were distributed evenly and without charge.

Most of the citizens of the camp seemed genuinely happy. If anything, the Flu had improved their lives. If it weren’t for the weekly virus screenings the civilian survivors could have fooled themselves into thinking they were free and in control of their own destinies. Even those screenings weren’t so bad—not nearly as intrusive as the checkup they’d given Tim on his arrival. Typically an Army doctor just scraped the inside of one’s cheek with a swab. It was more degrading than painful.

The swabs were tested then and there, dipped in a solution that reacted quickly with substances found in the eponymous drool of the infected. If the solution stayed clear, one was allowed to go about his business.

Tim reached down and tried to grab the siphon of a geoduck. His back ached from bending over but he didn’t want to complain. The siphon pulsed in his hand and a thin stream of briny water spouted up, nearly hitting him in the eye. “What happens if the solution changes color?” he asked.

Scott stood up and looked out to sea. Scott was a former chiropractor from Everett. He’d stuck around because he wanted to help the infected—only to discover that the Army wasn’t looking for volunteers. Now he pulled clams like everyone else. “That hasn’t happened in a while. The first couple weeks, sure, people got outed. They put them in the back of a truck and took them away, to get the help they needed.”

“They ever come back?” Tim asked, dropping to his knees.

“No,” Scott said, less of an admission than a door closing on the conversation. He walked off, his feet leaving deep shadowed prints in the sand.

Tim dug with his hands and scooped the clam up, dropped it in the bucket.

The afternoon was devoted to maintenance on the houses and yards of Camp Romeo, or to working in the shops and small manufactories off the main street. Clothes always needed to be mended, machines—some of them irreplaceable, like the camp’s portable water desalinization plant—had to be tended and cleaned. A surprising number of people worked in the local coffee shops, servicing the great caffeinated ritual of the Pacific Northwest. Espresso beans and flavored syrups and especially biscotti were among the chief luxuries that had to be paid for with real money. The baristas in the shop were mostly middle-aged former executives, businessmen and women who liked to play at keeping an economy going. It was all done with a great deal of humor and fun, though competition between the shops was intense.

Everyone came together for a shared meal in the evening. Linguine with clam sauce was a staple. So was clams casino. There were plenty of reconstituted vegetables (dropped off in big crates by the soldiers) and an entire city’s worth of beer and wine to go around. Conversation tended to be light, most of it about how great the internet had been, or who had traveled the most, back when there were airplanes. Tim told his story of walking from San Francisco several times to different groups of diners. He took out the part about shooting the drooler on the bus and focused on how the night sky had appeared on nights of preternatural clarity, or what a sense of peace he’d felt in the great forests of Oregon now the loggers were gone.

Almost everyone was in bed by nine or ten. A few—usually Buzzard among them—stayed up as last as midnight talking and passing around a bottle but Tim rarely joined them. He would go up to the clean, simply appointed room in Helena’s boarding house and lie on the bed and try to sleep, or at least try to think pleasant thoughts.

It never quite took. Alone, for the first time all day, in silence, he always ended up thinking about Augusta, his cousin’s roommate in San Francisco. He would think about her lying curled on her bed, her face to the wall. He would think about how easy and comfortable it would be to just curl up in Olympia, to lose himself in the group, and forget about revenge.

It would be too easy, he told himself. He owed his wife and child more than that.