A sprawling lawn in front of one of the main houses had been dug up and the soil hoed into long dark furrows. Seeds had been found in a hardware store, corn, tomatoes, even asparagus—in time there would be fresh vegetables to round out the mollusk-heavy diet of Camp Romeo. The sun was actually out for once so Tim was put to work planting, poking a hole in the moist earth with his finger and then dropping in the tiny white seeds along with a scrap of foul-smelling clam refuse. “Just like the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, right?” Buzzard said, supervising the operation while he puffed on a foul-smelling cigar.

Tim’s back ached. He straightened up and stared at the older man.

“The Indians taught ‘em this. The ground wasn’t so hot there so they would fertilize by burying fish with the corn they planted. The fish rots away down there and feeds the plant. There’s high-grade stuff you can use nowadays, chemicals that work a lot better, but this is what you call organic.”

Tim nodded. He’d understood what he was doing. There was something that bothered him, though. “Did they find any tobacco seeds?” he asked.

Buzzard squinted at him. “What’s that?”

Tim nodded at the cigar Buzzard held. “Did they find those in an abandoned store around here? How many of those do you smoke a day?”

“A couple.” Buzzard shrugged. “What’s it to you, you allergic?”

Tim shook his head. “Eventually you’ll run out.”

Buzzard scowled at the lit end. “Suppose so.”

“You’re going to be very unhappy when that happens. Withdrawal’s pretty tough. Karen—my wife—smoked for a long time. When she quit we nearly got divorced. She was so irritable and nasty all the time. She couldn’t think about anything else.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” Buzzard ground out the cigar on the heel of his shoe and put the unburnt portion in his shirt pocket.

After dinner that evening Tim was invited up to Helena’s room for the first time. He knew that she held court up there some nights, a semi-regular bull session where the evacuees of Camp Romeo came to discuss recent events and make plans for the future. It was the closest thing the Camp had to a town council, and being invited meant that Tim was officially accepted by the group, that he was a trusted member of the community. Buzzard was there already, sitting in an enormous papasan chair reading an old issue of Newsweek. A couple other people were lounging on a couch and passing a joint back and forth. When Helena ushered him in she took a drag and held it for a while before coughing the pungent smoke back out.

Tim said nothing at first, just looked around the room. It was small but cluttered with old magazines and piles of books, huge columns of them that looked ready to fall over at any moment. The walls were decorated with posters for protest marches and demonstrations—FIGHT THE IMF, END RACISM IN OUR TIME, SAVE THE WHALES. Some of them were yellow with age and advertised events twenty or even thirty years past. The furniture in the room was all low and overstuffed and there were no electronics to be seen except an antique-looking record player and a stereo receiver that glowed the same cheery orange color as the end of the spliff.

“Nice place,” Tim said.

“It’s home.” Helena sat down in lotus position on the floor and grabbed a cat out from behind a coffee table. She stroked it in silence, smiling at him as if she were waiting for him to ask a question. He wondered if there was some kind of hazing ritual he’d have to go through or if they just wanted him to thank them for including him.

Instead he picked up a book from one of the piles near him. It was a monograph on courtship rituals in the Humboldt Squid. “You said you were an ethologist,” he said, suddenly thinking of something.

“In a previous life,” she smiled.

He bit his lip. “That’s the study of animal behavior. I’ve read a little about that—it’s fascinating stuff. I wanted to ask you about something.”

“Animals?”

“Sort of. The droolers, actually.” He saw her shift on the floor as if she were uncomfortable discussing the infected but he pressed on. There were things he needed to know. “I’ve seen them. I’ve even defended myself against them. I know they don’t think like human beings…” he let his thought trail off. If he was going to Seattle he wanted to know as much as he could before he arrived, though. As a librarian he’d always believed that forewarned was forearmed. “You must have observed them, too.”

She nodded and played with the cat’s ears. “One of the reasons I stayed here is because I thought I could get a nice paper out of them. Then things got—well, bad. After that I thought it would just be too depressing.”

He nodded in understanding but pressed on. “You made some notes, though?”

She sighed and looked right at him. “Their decision trees are not very complex. They’re opportunistic, much like the virus inside them. If they see a human being they make a quick assessment. If it smells like the other is infected, they ignore it. If it’s clean, they attack.”

“What about hunting behavior? Do they actively look for prey?”

She shook her head. “No. They stay in one spot unless they receive a stimulus. It’s what we call stereotyped behavior—they react the same way every time to the same set of conditions.”

That was good, Tim decided. That was very good. It meant that when he went to find Nero he wouldn’t have to track him very far. “What about—“ he began, but Helena interrupted him.

“It’s not their behavior that interests me right now,” she said. “It’s yours.”

Tim sat up in his chair when he realized every eye in the room was focused directly on him.