Rue Crooker stood in the middle of a street rapidly emptying of spectators, surrounded by broken, bloody bodies and the loved ones grieving over them. Armed men and women in black body armor wove between abandoned floats and spread out to encircle the scene while a woman in civilian clothes strode through, glancing left and right to survey the carnage. People in hazmat suits rushed by her, heading for the crashed BMW. The body-armored security detail approached the car with weapons leveled, as if they expected to be attacked from within.
One of them paused by the corpse of the BMW driver—the man who’d killed and injured so many—and went to nudge the body with the toe of his boot. A muffled bark from one of the hazmat suits made him freeze and back away. Whoever the driver had been, the person in the hazmat suit knew him. Recognized him. Had expected to find him here.
Of course they had. How else could a squad of Blackcoats show up so fast?
She went to Ted, went down on one knee beside him. “Hey, no,” she said as he tried to rise. “You need to stay right here.”
His eyes were glazed with pain and grief. He glanced over at the bodies of his ex-wife and his son, then cringed and looked away, unprepared. Five feet away, his daughter Rose wept in the embrace of her girlfriend. Ted cast a pleading glance up at Rue.
“Maeve,” he said.
“I know,” Rue replied, though she didn’t, really. How could she possibly guess what part of this horror had carved itself deepest? “Just wait. You need doctors to look you over.”
Ted seemed to agree, or maybe he was just numb.
Rue’s heart thumped like it wanted to break free. Flushed with heat, somehow she felt cold inside. So this is shock, she thought, observing the whole, wretched tableau that spread around her. Several of those struck by the car were still alive and in dire need of medical attention. Ted seemed in remarkably good condition. He had jumped right before the car hit him, which Rue thought might have saved his life. At the very least, it had saved him from a broken leg or two.
Sirens wailed. Police officers hurried through the remnants of the crowd. Several EMTs were on-site, moving from victim to victim, searching for those who were not already beyond their help. Someone shouted for an ambulance. Others called to the Blackcoats for aid but received no reply. The young civilian woman also seemed deaf to these cries. Even the hazmat team paid no attention to the people who’d been struck by the BMW, but Rue had expected that. They weren’t here for the broken, bleeding ones—they had come because of the man behind the wheel.
“Ted, just keep still,” she said. “Help is coming. I’ll make sure of it.”
He groaned and nodded, squeezing his eyes closed. There were tears on his face, but Rue thought they had sprung from grief instead of physical pain. She turned away, let him have his privacy.
She went to Rose and her girlfriend, Priya. Touched Rose on the shoulder. “Stay with your dad.”
Sniffling, Rose nodded, still in Priya’s embrace.
The hazmat team surrounded the dead driver. The civilian woman began to shout orders, apparently in command, and the Blackcoats closed in, beginning to surround the people who had been touched by the driver or by Maeve Sinclair. Rue whipped out her phone, tapped the screen, and began to record.
“Excuse me!” she shouted. “Excuse me, what are you doing? Who are you? How did you get here so quickly?”
The woman in charge raised a hand to halt the Blackcoat security team. The hazmat crew had already yanked out a body bag and started to transfer the driver into it without a single crime scene photo having been taken, without even a police officer approving their actions. They didn’t stop what they were doing, but whatever menace the Blackcoats had intended toward those mourning their dead had halted or at least paused.
“I’m going to ask again!” Rue said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Popcorn containers and other parade debris blew along the pavement. A stroller had been left behind in the hurried exodus of onlookers. Someone had snatched up their baby and just run, and Rue didn’t blame them at all. She probably should have run as well, but she wasn’t wired that way. At the age of fifty-four, neither her knees nor her demeanor were inclined to do much running.
“Put that phone away. It’s illegal to record during a crisis like this,” the young woman said, not taking a step.
Her whole team seemed to be frozen. More sirens blared. Local police started to shout to one another. An ambulance drove up onto the lawn of a house on the corner of Kingsbury. Another black helicopter buzzed overhead and seemed to hover a thousand feet above the BMW. The woman put a hand to her ear, frowning, and Rue realized that though she might appear to be giving the orders, she was getting them from somewhere else.
Rue kept recording. She took a step closer. One of the Blackcoats turned his weapon on her.
“The phone. Now,” the woman said.
“Fuck you. If you’re any kind of law enforcement, which I doubt, there’s nothing illegal about me filming. And since you’ve got a private security detail with no badges or identification, I’d say you’ve got even less authority over me.”
The woman whirled her hand in the air and turned her back on Rue. On that signal, the entire response team began to behave as if Rue had turned invisible. The confidence in that disregard broke through the numbness and shock and made Rue afraid all over again. She wasn’t a concern—less trouble than a mosquito—which meant these people had a lot of power or had much larger worries, or both. Probably both.
“Attention, all civilians!” the woman shouted. “I’m sorry for your loss and your pain, but please stand away from the deceased. I repeat, you must step back from the bodies. I know you don’t want to be parted from your loved ones, but each of them must be temporarily quarantined. This will be a brief quarantine, and I promise they will be returned to you as quickly as we’re able to process and release them.”
Rue kept recording, but hardly anyone moved. Some of them understood immediately, horror dawning on their faces as they recalled the way the driver had touched these people, only to have them collapse in painful seizures and die. Others were too numb to put it together.
A police lieutenant jogged over to the woman and quietly demanded to know what she was up to, who she was. Basically the same questions Rue had been asking. The woman flashed some kind of ID, and Rue watched the cop blink in surprise and nod, backing away, hands raised as if in apology for interrupting. So whoever the fuck she is, she does have some authority behind her.
A Blackcoat called to her. “Vargas.” So now the woman had a name, which helped give Rue someone to hate. Vargas had a head of tight curls, dyed red, and Rue might’ve found her attractive under other circumstances. But not today.
Ignored, Rue glanced around at the people who had died after being touched by the BMW driver, or by Maeve Sinclair, who’d run off in the chaos. She refused to look at the bodies of Ellen and Logan Sinclair, but she did glance back at Ted. Stubborn as he was, and despite his own fifty-three years, Ted had managed to get to one knee and was trying to rise, one arm across his ribs, his face etched with pain. There were scrapes and bloody bruises on his arms and right cheek, but still he struggled to stand. Rose pulled away from Priya, reached for her father, and the two of them held one another, both shaking. Over Rose’s shoulder, Rue could see Ted’s eyes, which were flat and dull. Empty.
Bereft. That was the word. Of course he was bereft. Ted had slid into shock. Maeve had run off, vanished up into the woods of Mount Champney, the tallest peak along the Mekwi Range. Rue Crooker and Ted Sinclair had met years earlier but had become best friends their sophomore year in high school, thanks to a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert and their shared crush on a freckle-faced freshman girl neither of them would ever get to kiss. Now they were both divorced from their respective wives. Rue felt like her divorce had left her happier, but the same couldn’t be said for Ted.
Ted broke away from Rose and started limping toward the bodies of his wife and son.
“Sir!” a Blackcoat shouted. “I’m going to have to ask you to back away.”
Confused faces stared at the soldier, then at Vargas. Rue had thought her a civilian, but that seemed unlikely now if she were the one giving the orders. Whoever these people were, however, they weren’t completely wrong. The locals were grieving and horrified. Her friends and neighbors would need answers that Rue knew weren’t forthcoming. She saw a bearded man stand, both of his huge fists clenched, sweat stains on his Red Sox Nation T-shirt. He started toward the soldier.
“Wait!” Rue said, lowering her phone. She let the hand holding it dangle at her side, but didn’t stop the recording. Even if the only video was of the pavement, at least it would pick up the audio. “Please … listen. They’re right. You saw how these people died. This is some kind of contagion. Back away from the dead and don’t touch them until medical personnel have cleared them. Everyone, please just stand back, but don’t go anywhere. All of you will have to be checked out, too.”
Ted stared at Rue. She had seen him so drunk he couldn’t raise his head, and so high he couldn’t remember his own birthday, but she’d never seem him like this. He looked utterly lost.
“They died in, like, two seconds,” the huge-fisted man growled. “If I got infected by that, I’d already be lyin’ in the goddamn road.”
He had a point, but they couldn’t take any chances. Not with something so deadly. Rue began to reply, to plead with them to follow instructions, when she felt a cool shadow blot out the Fourth of July sun. She turned to see a towering black-armored soldier behind her, with Vargas standing beside him.
“Clear the area,” Vargas said, copper eyes glinting.
Rue glared. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t recall asking—”
“These people don’t know you. They need to be comforted, and they need medical attention. They need to be quarantined. We need to be sure they—”
“I don’t know who you think ‘we’ might be,” Vargas said, giving her the disdainful once-over that Rue’s hair and tattoos prompted all too frequently. “But ‘we’ isn’t you. We’ll be quarantining the remains. Everyone else can go home and wait for the bodies to be released.”
Something snapped in Rue. The caul of shock that had hung over her tore away, her thoughts clearing. “You want them to go home? They were just exposed to what looks to me like the deadliest germ in the world, and I’ve seen some deadly fucking germs. Nothing kills on contact like that. Nothing. You want to send these people home, you’re either monumentally stupid or you already know they’re not infected. I’m going to guess the latter, since you people buzzed in here about a minute and a half after the dead guy in the Beemer. I get the idea you know exactly who this is and what just happened here.”
Rue pointed to Ted. “My friend just lost half his family and got hit by a goddamned car. Maybe you want to explain to him why that happened? Oh, and also … who the fuck are you?”
Vargas stepped in so close that Rue could smell her tropical-scented body wash. The woman had gone unsettlingly still.
“You seem to know what you’re talking about,” Vargas said, studying her more critically than before. “You don’t look like a scientist.”
Rue couldn’t decide whether to laugh or knock her on her ass. Instead, her spine stiffened. “Dr. Rue Crooker. I’m a biologist at Boston University, and you’re pushing folks around in my hometown when they’ve just seen people die in front of them. So maybe dial it back, Vargas.”
The smaller woman blinked, perhaps startled that Rue knew her name. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.
“I think we’ll have to quarantine you, too, Dr. Crooker,” Vargas said, gesturing to two of the Blackcoats.
Rue had never put her phone away, never stopped the recording. Now she picked it up and held it between herself and Vargas, making sure the other woman knew she was on camera.
“I don’t think we’ll be doing that today.”
Which was when Ted took a few shuffling steps toward Vargas. With every second that passed, the bruising and swelling of his injuries seemed worse. “Take a look around,” he said. “You think we’re going to let Dr. Crooker go anywhere with you?”
Behind him, his daughter Rose broke a little further, her face contorted with loneliness and shock. “Dad?”
“No,” he said. “You girls stay back.”
Rue glanced across the street, between buildings, at the woods and the mountains beyond. Maeve had taken off in that direction. Finding her was going to be vital, but first this situation had to be contained.
The bearded man in the Red Sox Nation T-shirt stepped up beside Ted. “You see how many cameras are on you?”
Vargas blinked and for the first time seemed to notice there were at least half a dozen people with their phones out, recording what had been unfolding. Most seemed to be bystanders who had stayed behind to help the injured but were unencumbered now that more EMTs and police had shown up. One was a middle-aged woman who stood protectively over a dead man. Tears streamed down her face, but the look of determination in her eyes was unmistakable.
“People aren’t stupid,” Ted said, wiping at his eyes. “This might be a small town, but it’s a Fourth of July parade in America, and you come in here in your black helicopters and talking contagion. There’s going to be half a dozen news trucks here in half an hour or less. Now tell us what just happened, goddamn it. We deserve an answer.”
Vargas glanced from Ted to Rue and then turned toward the police lieutenant who’d backed down from her before. The man had been clearing the intersection, shouting for people to remove the floats that were blocking more emergency vehicles from arriving. Now he turned, said something to a pair of EMTs who were hustling a gurney toward their ambulance, bearing a man who’d been struck by the BMW and badly injured.
“Lieutenant,” Vargas called.
But as the policeman started toward her, another voice interrupted them, and the lieutenant almost collapsed with relief. Chief Kaminski had arrived.
“Ma’am, I’m Len Kaminski, chief of police. Obviously, we’ve got a lot on our hands here,” the chief said, waving at his officers to go back to what they’d been doing. “I’m told you wanted us to stay out of your business.”
“That’s changed,” Vargas said. “Place all these people under arrest for interfering with a federal investigation.”
Voices erupted all around her, but to Rue, all that noise suddenly seemed little more than a distant buzz. Tiny details resolved into sharp contrast. The last two letters on Kaminski’s badge had been worn away, as if the chief had scraped up against something. He had a little scar under his left eye and a few wiry white hairs in his otherwise dark eyebrows. His nostrils flared in disgust as he glanced around at the people with their phones out, and for half a moment, his gray eyes rested on Rue. Then he looked at Vargas.
“Lady, this is New Hampshire. Live Free or Die is our state motto. You come in here in the midst of the ugliest, most heartbreaking thing that’s ever happened in this town, no identification, and tell me to arrest people who just suffered loss and horror like this? You’re either that arrogant or that stupid, and I don’t really care which. Any idiot can see this is some kind of government bullshit gone haywire. You want to cover up the mess you made, you’ll have to do it with your own people, and face the media shitstorm that comes your way. I guess what I’m saying is, go fuck yourself.”
People in the crowd—Rue guessed people who hadn’t just watched their friends or spouses die—clapped and cheered. More phones had come out during this mini-speech, while Vargas’s fury visibly simmered.
“This whole town is about to be quarantined,” Vargas sneered as if the words were punishment.
“You were ready to send everyone home a minute ago,” Rue replied. “You know that whatever this is, none of us has it.”
Vargas responded with the most venomous smile Rue had ever seen. “Can’t be too careful, Dr. Crooker. If you want to make sure none of you get infected, I suggest you stop making my job more difficult.”
Rue flinched, wondering if she’d heard right. Not the words—those were clear enough—but the tone. Then she noticed the way the Blackcoats had shifted, several of them moving into position near Vargas, as if guarding her. Chief Kaminski noticed, too, and cast a nervous glance toward Rue, as if warning her to heed Vargas’s words. Their eyes met, Rue saw the policeman’s fear, and that was when she knew she’d heard Vargas’s threat exactly as it had been intended.
She thought about Ted Sinclair’s daughter, off in the woods, terrified and alone and maybe worse, and knew she ought to say something. Whatever this threat was, the dead people in the street were testament enough to how dangerous it could be. But someone would tell Vargas soon enough, or there’d be cell phone footage of what happened when Maeve hit the driver with that baseball bat, and then these helicopters and the soldiers in their gleaming body armor would be all over the mountainside hunting for her.
Rue thought it would be a good idea if somebody else found her first.