Author's Note: Sorry for the late post, everybody. I had a doctor's appointment (everything's fine).

Tim stared out at row after row of the corn starch mannequins, then turned to face Buzzard. “You remember the—” he started, meaning to say “the skeletons.” But finishing that sentence in front of Horne seemed unwise. Whatever Horne might or might not know about the looters on Vashon Island, Tim didn’t want to be the one to give away some important tidbit of information. “You remember what Helena said about stereotyped behaviors. About the decision tree of a drooler.”

“Sure,” Buzzard said, looking dubious.

“They’ll attack anything that looks even vaguely human, as long as it doesn’t smell like it’s infected. That’s the entire process. I had a cardboard cut-out of a baseball player I used to distract them, back at the docks. These,” he said, gesturing at the endless parade of faceless statues, “are more than realistic enough.” He raised an eyebrow at Horne. “You’re going to drop them all over the city, right? One for every street corner?”

“Something like that,” the Colonel said.

“Yeah, I can see it.” He bent to study the nearest mannequin, careful not to let it drip on his shoe. The mannequin’s legs ended not in molded feet but in a wide, shallow base, a yard and a half across, as if it were melting in a puddle of its own substance. “They’re bottom heavy. You drop them out of the backs of your helicopters and if you do it right they’ll land standing up. You probably don’t need that, by the way. The droolers—”

“The infected,” Horne corrected.

Tim shrugged. “The infected—won’t care if they’re standing up or lying down. They’ll attack a prone figure, no problem.”

Horne laughed. “We like tidiness in the Army. If they’re standing up they’re also easier to see from a block away.”

“Good point.” Tim waved a hand for patience as Buzzard shot him an annoyed look. “So they get these things standing all over the place, looking like frightened people. The infected will attack them simply by reflex. They’ll tear bites out of them, and in the process they’ll get a mouthful of saxitoxin.”

“Which is?” the reporter demanded.

“It’s a poison. It’s the stuff in a red tide that kills you—it builds up in the flesh of some shellfish. Maybe even geoducks.”

“Jesus,” Buzzard said. “How do you know this shit?”

“I used to be a reference librarian. I know a very little about almost everything. Don’t ask me for the chemical composition of saxitoxin, or how it works. I do know it paralyzes you, and that it’s lethal even in very small doses.”

Horne butted in to add, “Give the devil his due. It’s an incredibly humane toxin. Its victims remain conscious and calm for a few minutes and then they just stop breathing. There’s very little pain.”

“Good to know,” Buzzard sputtered.

“It’s also an organic molecule that will break down almost as fast as the corn starch statues can melt. So when it’s all over you have no statues, no lingering poison in the gutter. Just a lot of dead bodies. You really think this will work? You’re going to kill the droolers like this?”

“Every last one of them,” Horne admitted. “That doesn’t faze you, does it, Kempfer?”

Tim shrugged. “I’d be a pretty bad hypocrite if I started protesting for the rights of the infected now, after all I’ve done. The only part that bothers me is the ‘every last one’ bit. No matter how thorough you are there’s no way to account for every single drooler. There could be hundreds of them trapped inside their own houses, and you can’t get them from the air. I don’t think you can get a one hundred per cent kill rate like this.”

Horne nodded agreeably. “Probably not. There will be some mopping up. Yet there’s an elegance to this solution I find personally appealing. I don’t suppose you have a very high opinion of me, Kempfer, but I’ve actually tried to be as humane as possible here. Not just to the infected. The option is to take my men into the streets and shoot everyone we see. You’ve seen my men. Very few of them are old enough to shave. I can’t ask them to commit mass murder, not at their tender age. By dropping the lures—that’s what I call them, lures—out of helicopters I save them from that sin.”

“And yourself? What about your conscience? I get the sense you aren’t as cavalier as I am about killing the droolers.”

“Oh, no,” Horne chuckled, but his laughter was dry and reedy. “Oh, no, indeed. I have my orders, which are to render Seattle habitable for reoccupation with all due haste. My superiors back east want a success and they want it now. I will fulfill those orders to the best of my ability, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to sleep again afterwards. You may be one of those people living under the popular misconception that the Army’s job is to kill people. It’s not. We exist to protect people, namely American citizens. I abhor the notion of killing the infected—who knows whether or not in some future day a cure is found for the Flu? What if we could just confine them for a while, keep them under wraps until that time? But I don’t have any options, not now.” He put an arm on Tim’s shoulder. Tim didn’t shrug it off. “I said once, Kempfer, that I admired you as a man who wanted to live. Who would do what it took to survive. I meant it then and now, because I think in the end you have a stronger will than my own.”

The Colonel’s face darkened.

“It’s too damn bad that you couldn’t just play along,” he said.

Tim said nothing.

“So now you know what you’ve been fighting against. You’re headed for the stockade, now. When I’ve cleaned up Seattle we’ll have to see about getting you a fair trial. You shouldn’t have to spend more than about twenty years in jail, I don’t think.”

They were all startled by a loud beeping noise from Horne’s belt. The Colonel took out a handheld radio and lifted it to his mouth.

“Horne, go ahead,” he said.

“Sir—the western perimeter alarm just went off,” a boyish voice said. “I’m not sure what—”

The message cut out as quickly as it had arrived.