“Do you have a name?” the soldier asked.

“Kempfer,” Tim said. He wrapped the blanket closer around himself. The soldier hadn’t given him any clothes to put on. It was warmer upstairs, at least.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Colonel Horne. I’m nominally in charge of Fort Lewis and, under martial law, the reclaimed sections of Olympia.”

“Nominally?”

Horne smiled coldly. “Technically General Forbes is still the CO. Of course, he’s not much good at giving orders now. Not since he was infected. I have him in a stockade over in the fort, locked up where he can’t hurt anyone. I have a lot of good men there. I’m hoping that when this all clears up, when it’s over, I can get him the treatment he needs to return to his family.”

Tim shook his head. “There’s no treatment for the Flu. If he’s—if he’s that far gone, that you need to lock him up, then his brain will be completely eaten away. You can’t recover from something like that. Better to just shoot him and put him out of his misery.”

Horne nodded as if agreeing that it was a nice day out. “You could be right. Come this way.” He opened a door and gestured for Tim to enter a small room lined with windows. The sun was shining outside—it looked like it had just dawned. Several other people were already in the room waiting when they arrived. Only one of them was a civilian—a heavy-set man with a white beard who wore a fishing cap and a leather bomber jacket. He lounged in a swivel chair as if it were his office they had entered. Across the room two men in Army khaki were sitting on a desk while a boy in a uniform with no insignia served them cups of coffee. He couldn’t be more than fifteen.

Tim stared at the boy. “You’re using child soldiers,” he said.

“I’m using what I have available.” Horne’s face darkened for a moment, then a smile curled his mouth again. “It takes three days or so for the virus to incubate. In that time the only symptom is a moderate headache and sometimes a ringing in the ears. When the disease you call the Flu came down from Vancouver, when it first broke out in Seattle, General Forbes’ men were among the earliest responders. Along with the police and fire departments we went in en masse and tried to get out as many healthy individuals as we could find. A lot of us got bitten in the process—we didn’t know at the time what that would mean. It was generally believed then that a short course of antibiotics could stave off the disease before it could spread.”

“That doesn’t work,” Tim said.

“No. After the third day of rescue work, we found that out for ourselves. The disease flashed through our barracks, whole companies and even battalions of men coming down with the secondary symptoms overnight. Hair loss. Confusion and then dementia and then violent outbursts. Over two thirds of the General’s men were infected before we even understood what had happened, and many of the rest were lost when we tried to instill proper quarantine procedures. It was chaos.”

“I would have expected the military to be more disciplined than that,” Tim said, trying not to sound snide. Knowing he was failing.

“All I can say for us is that we did our best. As for the police and fire departments—they don’t exist anymore.”

Tim kept his mouth shut. He didn’t know what this man was going to do to him. The fact that he hadn’t been given any clothing so far didn’t bode well.

“I needed fresh recruits. I needed people under my command if I was going to keep order here. So I went to the evacuees and I made a request. I asked for their sons. I promised them only that their children would be well cared for, well fed and kept in sanitary conditions. Very few of them refused.”

Tim wondered how many of the evacuees had had a choice in the matter. He figured Horne had probably asked nicely enough, and been sincere in his offer. But when you were the guy with all the guns and all the planes and trucks that would be taking the rest of your family out of town, how easy would it have been to say no?

“How about yourself?” Horne asked. “What’s your story, Kempfer? You’re not infected, we established that. You’re not a local, either.”

“I was born in Seattle. I had a—a house there.” He’d almost said the word family. That would have hurt, to put Karen and Jake in the past tense.

“We caught you sneaking into town from the south. That’s the wrong direction if you were coming from the Seattle PZ.”

Tim shook his head. “No, I was out of town when the Flu hit. Chicago—for a professional conference. I tried to get home right away but they’d already shut down all transportation channels in the Pacific Northwest. The closest I could manage was a flight to San Francisco. I tried to arrange transport from there but nobody was going my way.”

“That was over a month ago,” Horne said, still smiling. “Back before they shut down the western airports. What have you been doing since then?”

“Walking,” Tim admitted.

The civilian in the fishing hat leaned forward in his chair. “That’s, what, seven hundred and fifty miles? You walked all that way?”

“It’s why I’m so late getting back,” Tim said.

Horne laughed. “But why, Kempfer? Why come back at all?”

Tim shrugged. He didn’t trust this man. “I figured if the world was ending I might as well go home and get comfortable.”

The Colonel laughed again. Then he nodded at the two men on the desk. They got up instantly and came over to stand on either side of Tim. He looked from one to the other but they didn’t return his gaze, just kept their eyes on Horne.

“I’d like an honest answer,” the Colonel said, just a polite request. There was no steel in his voice. “Alternatively, I can have you taken back to the basement. What do you say?”