That night he slept in the back of an abandoned gas station, behind a locked door with working electric lights blazing, which was the best security he’d had in a while. He sank deep and dreamed long, mostly of a woman holding a claw hammer. She swung and swung but connected with nothing.

In the morning he plugged in his cell phone and let it charge up. He found bottled water in the station’s coolers and some pork rinds to break his fast. The cash register popped open when he hit it with the flat of his hand and he found about seventy dollars inside. Cash still had its uses, so he pocketed the worn bills, but he was much more excited when he found a box in the stockroom full of potted meat. The stuff was purplish gray and tasted like cat food but it didn’t go bad in his pack and it would sustain him for the coming day’s hike.

Maybe his last. The thought startled him so much he stood there behind the counter looking up at a security camera for a good long minute. He could be in Olympia before dark if he pushed himself hard enough. After the weeks he’d put in walking from San Francisco, he’d almost forgotten that he had a real destination. That he was going somewhere.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. When he’d come up with this plan, such as it was, there had been so many unknowns. What would he do once he got to Seattle? How would he talk his way through the barricades and then… how would he stay alive in there? Lacking answers, he’d promised himself he could figure these things out when he arrived. That the important thing was to start, to proceed northward, to get there.

He’d walked for weeks in that vacuum of rationality, a hazy kind of walking hypnosis that ate up the hours and the miles. Now he wondered if he could handle the last leg.

Tim shook his head. He still had hours to go, before he had to really think about anything. He gathered up his phone from the counter and unplugged it from the charger. He considered briefly calling in the bus full of possibly infected people. There was a national hotline you were supposed to call, 1-800-FLU-HELP. He thought about the woman in the suit, however, and what he’d done to her life, and he just used the phone to check the weather report.

Eighty-one degrees and sunny. Just like the day before.

There was a big display of road atlases near the front of the store but he passed them by. He didn’t need maps anymore—Interstate Five would take him all the way home.

Outside again, hot already by ten in the morning, sweating. Thirsty. He moved his feet and his arms and kept on trucking. The road shot straight as an arrow over flat land, distant mountains on his right, Mount Rainier a constant companion, as white and dependable as the moon. The road ran through orchards and farmland, through belts of trees where pale orchids flashed in the darkness of lost forests. It passed through town after town, small little crossroads places and bigger, more important-sounding municipalities. Toledo, Napavine, Centralia. Maytown.

Funny. He’d been to Maytown, once, or at least through it. There was a veterinarian with an office near there, a nice guy with a mole that bisected one eyebrow. He’d vaccinated Tim’s dog against the parvovirus, back when Tim had a dog.

The sun went over his head and sank again toward the sea. And then…

And then.

The sound of the helicopter made him blink in a syncopated rhythm. It made his chest feel funny. It was huge, one of the big transport ones with counter-rotating rotors. It was dark against the sunset, almost black. It hung there in the air as if it were pinned there, like an insect mounted on a colorful board.

Below it the lights and windows of Olympia twinkled in the haze. The inlet burned like liquid fire. If he squinted, if he looked in just the right place, he could make out the new capitol building.

Olympia. It wasn’t home, not quite. It was the wrong end of Puget Sound. But it was as close as he was going to safely get. The rest of the journey, the unsafe part, would come later.