No lights burned in the dockyards. Tim jogged through the maze of containers, avoiding the worst shadows. Always watching for the next attack. He’d only seen the one drooler so far, the one who’d jumped into the channel after him, but then he’d expected the dockyards to be completely deserted. It was best not to take stupid chances.

He passed a harbormaster’s shack and gave it a wide berth. He passed a customs station with its door passed open, and he slowed to a mere amble, one hand on the strap of his pack, ready to grab the revolver if he needed it.

He didn’t.

“Breathe,” he told himself, because he hadn’t been. He forced himself to stop for a minute and let the air cycle in and out of his body. This wasn’t the hard part, he told himself—that would be when he crossed over into the eastern half of the city, the zone of endless houses crammed together in tiny lots.

Past the customs house he picked up his pace again. He found the main road leading through the dockyards and made good time as he passed underneath a series of metal arches like the ribs of an enormous unfinished shed—he guessed they had to be gamma detectors, set up to scan all the facility’s cargo for radioactive material. Terrorism was yet another thing Tim had learned to stop worrying about, and he gave them little thought as he passed through their shadows.

Ahead of him he saw the fenced entrance of the dockyards, a wide chain-link gate big enough to admit two big rigs side by side. The gate stood tightly closed and it was far too high to climb. He was going to have to find a way to open it. Besides, he thought, he might come back this way after Nero was dead.

A low gatehouse stood on either side of the entrance. Both were locked up tight but the one on the left had a window low enough for him to climb through. He searched around for something to break the glass with, then saw a fifty-gallon oil drum half full of cigarette butts. The drum looked too heavy to pick up but when he kicked it over and spilled out its contents he found it was rotted and rusted away enough that he could just manage it.

Straining his arms more than he liked he heaved it over his head and through the window, which exploded inward with a roar like bells ringing. Jagged teeth of glass remained in the frame but he was able to knock those away with his shoe, then climb gingerly over the edge and into the gatehouse.

The lights were off and very little starlight came in through the broken window. In the dimness, though, he could see a single square orange light flickering away like a flame. It was an electric light, though, he could make out that much—which bore out what he’d been told, that Horne had kept power flowing in the city. That was going to make his life a lot easier, he decided, and gave a half-hearted word of thanks to the military man.

After nearly tripping and breaking his neck on a chair he hadn’t seen he found the light and saw it was a button marked EMERGENCY RELEASE. There were dozens of other buttons on the same panel but he couldn’t read their labels. Shrugging, he put his thumb on the flickering button and pressed down hard, holding it down until he heard a deep rumbling come vibrating up through the floor. He went to the window and saw the big gates sliding open, rattling and chiming as they pulled slowly back.

Then he saw a pair of flashing lights flicker into life on top of the gates, their spinning beams strobing out into the dark and lighting up the street beyond the entrance, painting abandoned cars yellow and white. A moment later a klaxon started blaring a warbling alarm that pained his ears.

He hadn’t counted on that.

He didn’t know whether the light and noise would attract droolers or not. He could only hope for the best—he saw no way to turn off the siren. Climbing back out the way he came he jogged through the gates and into the street beyond.

The fear pulsed through him again out there. The dockyards had looked deserted, had probably looked that way long before the evacuation. Psychologically they had never really felt like dangerous territory. The street beyond, though, was built for crowds. It lead straight to the parking lots of Safeco Field, where the Mariners used to play for huge audiences, fifty thousand people at a time. Wide plazas flanked the road surface, studded with tall bushy trees. Souvenir stalls and food trucks stood parked as if waiting for a horde of tourists and baseball fans to arrive at any minute, wakened by the siren and brought back to their old haunts. Tim saw shadows at every turn that could have belonged to human figures—to droolers, that meant—and he had to force himself not to run for cover.

He saw a cluster of vehicles up ahead as if a bad traffic jam had been left frozen in place and forced himself to move closer. Mixed in with the cars and light trucks were military vehicles and city buses lined up in neat rows. The area directly before the stadium’s entrance was suspiciously clear, as if any vehicles stranded there had been towed or shoved out of the way. Tim climbed up on the hood of a Ford to get a better look. He had his binoculars in his pack still but he didn’t need them to see the entrance was devoid of any life. The stadium was dark, its retractable roof wide open as if to display its lack of contents. He didn’t know whether the field had been used as an evacuation center—though it made sense, hadn’t they used the sports stadiums in New Orleans when they evacuated for Katrina?—but it looked empty now. He liked that.

He liked it so much he almost missed the noise behind him, almost lost it in the siren’s wail. It sounded like a can being kicked into a gutter, and at first it didn’t even register with his conscious mind. It was the kind of sound you heard in cities all the time, even in the middle of the night. Populated cities, anyway.