140 RUE COLLINS

THE RCMP GUYS TOOK CARE of the logistics. They were the experts. The others, like Bobby, were there to keep an eye out for trouble and avoid unpleasant surprises. They had placed men on each side of the street, as well as on the neighbouring street, Savane, where it intersected with Collins, and even farther down on both sides of the road. They’d joked about dressing up an agent as a cow and placing him in the field. But the small street was quiet, or as Bobby said: “Dead as a doornail.” When he quit yammering for no reason on his walkie-talkie and looked up, he saw, on the other side of the street, through the living-room window, the uninhabited house. In early September, it had been used as a surveillance post by the Combatants, so they could keep an eye out for the scumbags’ meetings. And now they were in the house next door, the same sort of people. If the infection kept spreading, it would take over the entire neighbourhood.

He looked up, trying to understand what the man across the street was doing, standing on the kitchen table, head toward the ceiling. Maybe he could learn something instead of standing there doing nothing. He saw the man drill a hole in the ceiling, stick his hand in the opening, and place a microphone. Then, he got off the stepladder, moved it a little, and made another hole, passed the wire though the ceiling into another hole in the hall, and continued on this way to the bathroom. Once there, the RCMP man drilled a hole in the skylight and passed the wire right through it to connect to, Bobby guessed, the transmitter. Then he would probably pass the antenna through the skylight, to ensure a good signal to the house next door, but Bobby couldn’t be sure since his line of sight, limited by the bathroom door, only gave him a view of the stepladder, with two feet sticking out. Another man was covering the wires with masking tape before plastering over every hole, leaving no trace of them being there. Bobby had been looking at this work for a while now, thinking the man did his job well. Anything that needs to be done, he thought, needs to be done well. It was like having his father’s voice in his head.