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Since childhood, Reagan Castaneda had only broken character in public one time: college, freshman year. It was just a mumble, under the breath. He’d never even looked up at the professor droning on about the inherent patriotism of ‘civil unrest.’

“You morons and your anarchy,” he’d said. When he looked up, he was surrounded by staring faces... like now.

He stood shirtless in a waiting room and watched cable news for twenty minutes before he prepared to leave the hospital. His hair was still wet from the scrubbing he had given himself in the bathroom sink.

Key West was one of four locations covered by on-scene news crews—four cities, four riots. He gazed directly up, only a few feet away, when the feed switched over to Duval Street. A few seconds of bouncing footage appeared, people running in every direction on the narrow street.

A woman with a microphone said, “Mark, the third night of unrest since the police shooting of two unarmed bikers has been the most chaotic. So far, the heightened police presence has done nothing to calm the—” A series of loud bangs sent the camera into a frenzy. “Gunshots. I... I think we’re hearing gunshots.”

Reagan shook his head and chuckled as, seated nearby, a mother and her young son watched him. “Riots on Key West,” he said, his voice suddenly timid and uncertain. “Who would’ve guessed?”

The screen again showed the newsroom, and the anchorman promised an update as soon as the feed could be restored, but it never came. The rest of it was flashes of the rioting in Philadelphia, which had whole sections of the city ablaze, a few snippets from San Francisco and Memphis, and endless commentary on the nature of the most recent wave of protests. After a commercial break, the anchor assured viewers that every member of the news crew in Key West was alive and uninjured.

Violence in Key West, unconfirmed reports of dozens hurt.

Reagan didn’t need the news to know this. The hospital looked like a forward MASH unit overrun with wounded. He’d stood in the ER, the eye of the hurricane, holding Charles Stratton as the blood from his unconscious body dripped steadily onto the floor.

They’d found him a room... finally! Reagan had only slightly exaggerated the man’s wealth and importance, and although the triage nurse had acted unimpressed, a few minutes later, they had their room.

Two doors down, a body lay on a gurney, covered in a sheet—the second he’d seen. Tonight, the dead had to wait.

Reagan made his way through a current of medical staff, running and fast walking, back to the girls. Before they looked up, he crossed his arms tightly over his chest and let his face go slack.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “Something is happening with the riots and stuff. The news showed us, but it was short, and it was all weird. I’m going to try and find out what’s going on out there.”

“They’re working on him right now,” Mary said flatly, and wiped at her dry cheeks. “They’re working so hard.” Her voice came slow and even.

It was as though she’d exhausted all capacity for emotion, and was now only acting on habit. Huddled in a hospital hallway, still wearing the black one-piece swimsuit and a flimsy pullover, she again wiped at tears that were not falling. Then she composed herself, and held out both arms, as if Reagan were a child and she were inviting him into her loving, motherly embrace.

Reagan’s breath caught in his throat. Does she know what I just did? Does she suspect what I really am? What’s really going through my head?

When he made no move, she stepped over and wrapped her arms around him. Her pullover parted, and the sheer material of her swimsuit pressed over his crossed arms against his bare chest. For a split second, he felt her tender breath on his shoulder. His hands slowly dropped to his side. For a moment, he could only hold still.

“It’s Mary,” she said, just above a whisper. “After tonight, it’s only ever Mary.”

“Mary,” he said, and had to force the air into his lungs to say anything else. “It will be all right.” He looked over Mary’s shoulder at her daughter, and cleared his throat. “H-hey, Krissy.”

Krissy was still absorbed with her phone. Her jaw was quivering, and her eyes were moist, but otherwise she appeared calm. She looked up and said, “One of the nurses told me we have to make a police report. She said they’re really busy with the crowd control and stuff, but we still have to talk to the cops.”

Mary let go of him and once more wiped reflexively under each eye. “Reagan, why did you put the towel on that man’s face?”

“We... we were wrestling with the knife and he got cut and just stopped moving. The whole thing was nuts. Something is wrong. That guy at the pier was crazy. And then that other guy.... You saw that naked dude running down the street. It’s like there’s something in the water. I’m kinda freaked out. I need to talk to some people that have been here for the last couple nights. Maybe the cops can tell me what’s going on.” He nodded down at Krissy’s phone. “Have you found anything online?”

She stopped texting and cried, “I literally just got a signal. Literally just now. My dad just got stabbed. You might try being a little supportive, you know. You’re my boyfriend, Cas. Remember?”

He went to Krissy and wrapped his arms around her. Standing there in a t-shirt and shorts, hair held back by designer sunglasses, white bikini straps visible on each shoulder, an 18-year-old beauty that caught the eye of every man who walked by, she held stiff, her arms down at her side, and Reagan held her like a sister.

He told Mary, “I don’t know when I’ll talk to the cops. If the road is clear, I’m going to try to get back and put up the boat.”

“I’ll be careful. Maybe I can come back with some of our stuff.” He patted Krissy’s shoulder when he disengaged, but she still didn’t look up. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be here. It could be days.”

He left them with a promise to be back just as soon as he could, and exited the hospital chaos. He started to jog, and felt the car keys in his pocket. The crazy man’s vehicle would still drive, but Reagan wasn’t worried about speed. He wanted to hear the island, wanted to sense it, and in no way wanted to be confined in a strange car if suddenly attacked.

On this spring night on Stock Island, a few blocks away from Cow Channel and the short bridge onto Key West, stars smattered the sky and a breeze carried the smell of something burning, along with the usual scents of seawater and tropical plants. There had been no police in the ER, and no police cars outside, and he wondered how long it would be until he had to explain the killing on the pier. A normal soon-to-be college graduate would have been a wreck of emotions.

He didn’t grow up obsessed with the end of the world. Until the age of fifteen, he’d been something of a momma’s boy. His father worked construction, rode a motorcycle, drank heavily, and did little else. He and his sister, Miranda, were raised by their mother, a sweet-hearted, cherub-faced woman with wide hips and an abiding belief that she was blessed, no matter how many times she had to help her inebriated husband get into bed at night.

One day, Miranda told Reagan that she was going to start working at a yogurt shop. She wasn’t worried about money, just wanted to buy their mother a birthday present.

Mother had always fussed over them and knew exactly what they liked and what they hated, but for all the presents packaged with care that they ever opened, they’d never seen their mother receive a real gift. Father always gave her the same things—earrings or perfume—every birthday, every Christmas, every Mother’s Day, always the same. Never mind that mother rarely wore perfume and cared nothing about jewelry. Miranda had it in her head to save up some money and buy her a gift on her own, something Mother would appreciate.

Fourteen-year-old Reagan Castaneda could think of nothing more glorious than to see his mother’s face upon receiving a gift bought with hard work and love. How would she feel to know how much they adored her?

He hassled his father to let him work concrete with the day laborers that he hired, but his father had just laughed. He was too young, and the other men would complain. However, his dad had a brother, Juan, who did brick work with usually just one or two hired hands, and Juan told Reagan he could work with him. Reagan worked all that summer for six dollars an hour. He worked hard in the relentless South Florida sun, and by the end of summer, not just Uncle Juan, but all the other vatos on the work sites had taken their pendejo as one of them.

When school started again, he continued to work with the men on his weekends, and that September, Mother opened a birthday card from her two children.

She didn’t just find the usual birthday wishes, but also a gift card for a weekend at a posh day spa in Long Beach. This was why her beloved children were working, and that realization made her cry so hard that, eventually, even Father came inside from the front porch and asked if she was all right. Of course, she didn’t need to be consoled. Yes, everything was fine. It was more than fine. It was perfect.

And it would stay perfect for the rest of that fall. Reagan now had money he didn’t know what to do with, but Uncle Juan, who had an actual bank account at an actual bank and knew about these things, told Reagan that he should open an online trading account and invest his money. He was young, and now was the time. So, Reagan’s mother opened an account, and he put his money into it under her name. The year was 2008.

When the financial sector collapsed, and Reagan saw his little nest egg evaporate, he searched the internet for the reason why. It was then that he first encountered the words, Peak Oil. Knowledgeable men explained, with a brutality that only mathematical charts can deliver, how the world had reached the point at which it was drawing oil from the ground as quickly as it ever would. The easily reached reservoirs were tapped. From now on, the amount of oil available to the industrial world would ride its current plateau, and eventually decline. The world economy, based on eternal growth, would wobble through saw teeth of bankruptcies and restructuring, and all the while, prices for the basic necessities, for food and water, would rise until the shit hit the fan. That meant that social order would break down, and the strong would survive by living off of the weak and the unprepared.

Reagan was an intelligent child, smart enough to see the plain logic of this grim future, but he was also a momma’s boy. So the feeling of impending doom swirled and blustered outside the safe walls of his home. It would be all right, somehow. He didn’t know how, but somehow. Even if the proverbial shit did hit the fan, his mother would smile and cook, and decorate, and hug, and it would all be okay. His mother and her soft hair would always be there; his mother and her ever-present smile; his mother and the undiagnosed lymphoma that would end her life only seven months after the Lehman bankruptcy.

At fifteen years of age, Reagan stood everyday over the little urn in his mother’s backyard garden, with tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d been living a lie. The world had no safe havens. It was a machine with gears and teeth that mangled its innocent victims, and when the shit did hit the fan, as it surely would, Reagan Castaneda would be ready. For the world and its servants, those strong men harvesting the lives of the innocent sheep around them, he would be waiting—waiting to tear their throats out with his bare teeth, waiting to make this savage world pay for what it had done to his mother.

As soon as he started prepping, his friends all made fun of him. “We don’t need to get ready,” they said. “We’ll just wait until it happens and take all your stuff.” He told them to just try it.

Still, a thought formed that prepping for the fall of mankind—real prepping—had to be done in secret. All the people he saw on TV, with their bunkers and their camouflage, were drawing attention to themselves. Maybe someone really would slit their throats in the middle of the night. And so, Reagan told anyone who would listen—and since his childhood friends were becoming more distant, now that they could no longer understand him, those numbers were few—that it had all been a phase. The world would go on as it always had, and Reagan Castaneda would be just like everyone else.

He divided his efforts into categories: combat training, self-sufficiency skills and knowledge, cash and barter goods, survival gear, relationships that might prove useful, and, finally, scenario training that would give him some sort of idea of the problems he might face in a world gone mad.

For the first, he enrolled at a martial arts school. After exploring his options, he would have preferred Japanese Jiu Jitsu or one its many offshoots, like Krav Maga or Aikido, but not far from his house in the blue-collar end of Hialeah Gardens in Miami, he found a Thai boxing gymnasium run by a Polish-born world champion, who had learned Muay Thai while working overseas for an import/export company. The location was essential since, by this time, his father once again spent more time on his cross-country bike rides than he did in town, and since Miranda could not always give him a ride.

The art may have been less than ideal for a world outside the fighting ring, one that would soon be full of weapons and completely emptied of rules, but the instructor was perfect. Jan Dziena, Master Jan, was the very picture of focus and intensity. He fully expected his students to beat their shins against wooden posts—or any other hard surface, for that matter—until they could hardly walk. He would run them around the gym, then out the doors and down a hillside, and into the shallows of the nearby pond, where they had to block each other’s punches while he splashed water into their eyes. He taught Reagan how to be hard, how to be strong, how to stare the mad, diseased world right in the eyes, grit his teeth, and fight with every last ounce of his energy. Reagan was still a young man who sometimes felt afraid, but after many months training with Master Jan, he would never again feel powerless.

However, to be a prepper meant to be a realist. He wanted to make himself as difficult a target as possible, and after watching any number of pure stand-up martial artists tied into pretzels or choked unconscious by experienced grapplers in the octagon, he decided that he needed some ground fighting skills as well. He didn’t have the money to spare from his cash and barter fund for another martial arts dojo, so at the start of his junior year in high school, he went out for the wrestling team. It was awkward at first, because he wasn’t built like a wrestler, at just over six feet of wiry muscle. He didn’t care about championships, however... only technique.

Brooks Hinckley, who sneered when Reagan first showed up in the gym wearing a muscle shirt and pair of plaster-stained jean shorts, cared only about himself. Brooks—good-looking, stocky, compact in the ideal wrestler fashion, utterly lacking impulse control—and Reagan soon became friends. With Brooks, that meant that he practically requisitioned Reagan to drive his semiconscious body home from parties, apologize to girlfriends for him, answer, “Yes, Brooks is spending the night,” if his parents ever called and asked, and negotiate all the other intricacies of teenage life that Brooks couldn’t be bothered to master for himself. This forcibly put Reagan in the crosshairs of the in crowd, something he’d never experienced, but which he thought might figure into his category for useful relationships.

Although he rarely flirted with the popular girls—none of which he thought would last five minutes in a true survival situation—once he started hanging around the popular boys, he became fair game for them. They needed little encouragement.

“Hello Reagan. Are you going to be at Thomas’s party Saturday night, Reagan? You know who you look like Reagan? You look like that soccer player.”

Reagan had his Mother’s soft Anglo-French facial features, his father’s dark Hispanic skin, and a body being tempered by hour upon hour of strenuous Thai boxing, and even more strenuous wrestling, and then brick-laying almost every weekend. His frame filled out, and by his senior year, he attained true popularity. Everyone had forgotten his brief stint as the strange boy who thought the world was ending, sitting by himself and eyeballing the rest of them in the cafeteria.

After graduation, he followed Brooks to the University of Florida and the Sigma Phi fraternity house. The school was close enough for him to drive home on weekends for work and a boxing session or two. And frat life would give him a chance to test how well he could ingratiate himself into a group of people who were nothing like him—a test for his situation category.

Brooks was a legacy. He was also a practiced alcoholic. Reagan thought Brooks would emerge in Greek life like a hedonistic messiah who arrived merely in answer to destiny’s call. Brooks was ideal. What he did not expect is that he himself would become the frat’s iconic figure, the one they all called ‘the legend’—only half-joking.

It started during pledge week, when they were forced to drink until sick, and stand in the backyard of the frat house while one of the seniors came around and smacked them hard on their legs with a wooden paddle. The senior hit one of the pledges so hard that the boy dropped to the grass, balling in pain.

Then Reagan stepped out of line and playfully challenged, “Hey, man, what the hell?”

Reagan lifted a leg, and when the paddle splintered against his hardened shin, he never even flinched.

After their sophomore year, Brooks was expelled for an on-campus fight and a grade point average worthy of John Belushi. Reagan considered leaving the frat and becoming one of the nameless faces walking the campus. In fact, he cared not even a little whether the other Sigmas liked him—they were all sheep—but the others somehow mistook his apathy for the height of cool. Nothing phased Cas, and it soon became apparent that they would never let him fade into the crowd. They wanted to be like him. They wanted to know him, and called him when he was working out by himself, or at home on the weekends, and asked him where he was at and what he was doing. Reagan had to dedicate whole pages of his survival journal to all the lies he had told.

He found sorority girls ridiculous, but they too mistook his feelings. Cas was hard to get. He would be the ultimate challenge, the ultimate conquest, for somebody. He dated a few of them, but never for long. None of them learned his secrets.

Krissy was a convenience, someone he used as a shield. He was ready to graduate and go back to Hialeah Gardens, and dating her kept the others away. She was safe, too—he would never have any feelings for her. She was too immature and much too self-conscious. She was, however, exceedingly rich, with a father in Greenwich who commutes to his office in Manhattan, and owns a fifty-foot yacht docked by his four-thousand-square-foot beach house in Naples, rich. The idea of wealthy contacts fit squarely into his useful relationship category, even if he couldnt quite figure out how to exploit it, since he had no intention of ever living with the obnoxious girl, and wanted even less to work in finance like the old man.

What Reagan Castaneda wanted was land. He wanted to work contract jobs, off the books, to stay under the government’s radar, while he saved enough money to buy a plot of farmland where he could grow a few crops and keep a few chickens. His sister Miranda had married a court reporter and moved to Fort Meyers, and he barely kept in touch with his father, except for the rare weekends where they were both in the house at the same time. Reagan would work, and he would save, and he would find a place away from any major highway with fresh water and clean sight lines in all directions.

The first was two years ago while scenario training. Over Christmas break, he took a commuter bus into the Everglades. He walked back with nothing more than his clothes and an ID. At a roadside gas station, he asked a few drivers if he could hitch a ride. Two men tried to rob him.

At the gym, Reagan had been pulling his punches for years. Even with the gloves on, his strikes had become dangerously powerful. Other fighters wanted their strikes to be hard enough to win. Reagan wanted his strikes to be perfect—tight fingers, wrist straight, knuckles too callused to flinch. He wanted perfection, and he didn’t want any of the others to know how close he had come to attaining it.

That night, the two robbers were both transported to an emergency room over an hour away. One of them died from a brain bleed. Reagan had pulled nothing. Now he knew: he could kill with his bare hands.

The man on the pier was technically only his second kill. Technically. But in Reagan’s mind, he was not the hundredth or even the thousandth. His mind had come to think of the world in terms of threat assessments. He would stand next to someone, or sit beside them in class, and imagine them suddenly pulling a weapon. To him, he’d not just killed one or two; in his imaginings, he’d already destroyed legions.

No one ever knew. They never even suspected the truth. He looked just like them, after all, and he would go on looking just like them, as long as he could somehow convince the police that he was just an innocent victim, and convince Mary that he had just managed to take a precious human life out of desperation, in order to save her idiot husband.

He might also need an excuse for his physique. My hobby is rock climbing. No big deal.

He’d let the moment overwhelm him. That was something for the future. He had to be careful what he said in the heat of the moment, if he wanted to maintain the ruse.

Part of him wished to God that this were true. If the shit had hit the fan while he was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to pick up useful fishing tips and trying, really and truly trying, to maintain his sanity in the vortex of elitist snobbery that infused every inch of space between Charles and Krissy Stratton, then maybe he could drop the act. This could be his Coming Out party, his own little survivalist quince.

Now he needed intel, to get his overnight bag off the yacht, and a plan. The man who had been preparing for nine years suddenly found himself playing catch-up on a running clock.

But what kind of clock is running? What in the world is happening on this island, and does it even warrant a survivalist response?

The ex-army ranger that dominated his favorite survivalist site had a saying: “Prepare for the worst survivable scenario, and then walk it back.”

Don’t prepare for the Earth to go hurtling in to the sun. There’s nothing you can do about that. Start with the worst-case scenario for anything you could do something about. When you find out it’s not that bad, you’ve lost nothing, you’ve just over-prepared. No loss.

One derelict boat. One deranged man with a knife and oddly purple lips. Two car crashes. One still blocking the bridge between Stock Island and Key West as I jogged over. Nearly as many cars going onto the island as there are coming out, a few honking with impatience. The guy we saw in the street....

His first thought was drugs, something heavy-duty, something spread all over town. Then he thought about how gullible some people, like Brooks Hinckley, could be, and thought about drinking the Kool-Aid and where that expression came from, and he revised: a cult where everyone just drank some purple narcotic that makes them all violent. Then he thought about his favorite movies of mass violence, and he revised his worst-case scenario again. The thought was so absurd that he said it out loud.

It made him want to stop in place and log on. Zombies were not a real collapse scenario. In the survivalist blogosphere, Zombies were just a hypothetical, a game preppers played to think through collapse without really facing up to the shroud that hung over all their lives.

Get your stash. Get up high and pull up the ladder. Get to a boat. Get to an island. If you could only take one celebrity to your island, one book, one album, one movie... what do you pick?

Certainly, he wasn’t going to work his way down from something as insane as a viral rabies epidemic that turned everyone into killer zombies. But in Reagan’s mind, the possibility had to be confronted logically before it could be dismissed. He’d already learned that lesson through his training. Be disciplined. Think it through.

In fact, a sudden disease seemed far more likely that anything else he could think of.

In the last four years, Reagan had been cozy with any number of overdose cases. He once stopped Brooks from stripping down on the front lawn of the Gamma house. The man on the pier looked like he might have just smoked K2, but he also could have been sick. The car crashes? Sure. The man he and the girls had seen running in the street? Now that one looked different. His arms were down at his side. His shoulders were hunched forward. He looked vaguely ape-like. Dangerous. If not for the girls, Reagan might have run him down. Could he have been on a drug? The same drug?

Then Reagan stopped jogging, breathing heavy, looking straight at the three-car wreck that had forced their detour, still in the middle of Roosevelt Street, and the two men fighting—not like rage-fueled zombies, just like normal men, swinging ineffectively while their women tried to pull them apart. But behind them, and off on the sidewalk beneath a light pole, stood a collection of others.

He observed their faces, one by one: a middle-aged man in business attire twitched. Drugged? Infected? Reacting to an insect bite?

Unless it did. What if the two bikers were just like the man on the pier? Is this collapse? How can I be sure?

How could anyone ever be sure? History was littered with the bodies of the sheep that never saw it coming.

How can anyone know when the shit was about to hit the fan? How do you know when to stop playing by the old rules, tell the boss what you really think of him, start shattering storefronts, and shoot anyone that tries to take your stash?

Argentina during the collapse... New Orleans during Katrina... out of the blue, one day their lives were completely normal, and the next it was pure chaos.

What if there is a disease, but nobody noticed the spread because they’re too busy with their little ‘civil unrest’?

A mother was pushing a stroller right in front of him, next to a street where every tenth car sped by as if the driver had just seen the devil. Down the street, in the parking lot, laughing, shouting teens ducked suddenly at the sound of gunshots, then looked around, then went right back to their laughs and their shouts. In the distance, a man dressed like law enforcement, with a plastic shield swinging at his side, emerged from an apartment courtyard, running full tilt in the opposite direction from Reagan. And another.

He did. Reagan moved. This time he ran, not jogged, just as fast as the police he’d seen fleeing whatever was behind them. He needed to get on the boat, had to get his equipment.

A car sped out of the pier parking lot nearly just like Reagan had two hours before. He ran wide around the cars—too many places for a surprise attack—and stopped at the water’s edge. The body still lay right where he’d left it, but someone had moved the towel.

He walked to it, stepping around the blood. Reagan thought the only blood he got on him was Stratton’s, but the thought of coming cheek to cheek with whatever this was made his skin crawl.

From the south, in the direction of Duval and Caroline Streets and the usual hubbub of downtown, he heard the angry rushing water sound of a constant din of human voices. Screams? Cries? Shouts? Glass breaking? It had all blended together into a single cacophony of human chaos—the riot still in full swing, and whatever it was hiding.

Reagan stopped a moment at the pier. If he was wrong, this was going to take one hell of an explanation. Breathing hard, he untied the rope and stepped quickly into the dinghy, then pull-started the motor. Next, he steered the little boat to the center of the bight, where the yacht floated, and tied it onto the back. He had no time for the niceties of minimal wakes or steering away from the buoys as he powered the Bull Run away from Key West. Now he had one more riddle to answer: how do you hide a fifty-foot yacht? Further complicating matters, he was running low on both time and gas.

He needed to find a place to put the boat where he could easily reach it later, so that he could start making store runs before they all emptied.

He had to assume the worst: whatever had scattered the cops was going to provoke a response.

Tanks, helicopters, gunships; if it’s a world with a rapidly progressing infection, I’m the cliché hospital patient who just woke up surrounded by crazies.

Charles Stafford would survive the attack, and Reagan and the girls would have to wait until Charles could be moved to get off the island. Key West would be several days into some kind of quarantine by then, and Reagan would have to move three New England socialites—who defined a yacht’s toilet backing up as a crisis—through a gauntlet of soldiers in HAZMAT suits and a waterway blockaded by the navy.

He gazed out at the lights on the tiny islands that formed a close-knit ring to the north and to the west. He first steered around Wisteria Island, the wind fluttering his hair. The boat was a luxury machine and handled like one.

For three days, Reagan had found reasons to get close to the old man while he sat in the pilot’s chair, so that he could memorize the controls.

He thought of anchoring on the far side of Wisteria—no one else was there—but that felt wrong. He had to think.

That meant a yacht, by itself, would look highly conspicuous. So, he went south the few hundred yards to Tank Island. This one was crowded with high-end houses, and people, probably too many, but Reagan had few choices, and a boat left here would look like it belonged.

Wait for dark. Create a distraction. Slowly inch away from the pier, then make a run.

It was madness. Reagan laughed aloud and shook his head. His mind, for which he’d been running simulations for nine years now, began to sink its teeth into the real thing. If he were to come back for the boat, he would need help. The Strattons were dead weight. He was going to have to attach himself to some other survivors—extra hands, extra guns, lookouts. He needed to start making useful contacts as soon as he got back.

He moored the boat at a dock on the south side of the island, then ran to the ship’s hold and grabbed four empty gas cans, which he took back to the dinghy. He then scurried from room to room—a few soup cans, a jar of peanut butter, and two loaves of bread. The perishable food would be useless. He pulled the nice heavyweight flashlight out of the galley, then stuffed clothes and bath items into a pair of duffle bags in the master bedroom. Lastly, he carried the bags into the VIP room where he and Krissy had been sleeping, on the wall-mounted berths that nearly touched at the top of the V-shaped room. For two nights, he’d gone to sleep with his head only a few feet from a steady stream of sorority gossip and sexual innuendo, all giggling delivered with so little real emotion that it felt like she was reading lines off a teleprompter.

He found another long-sleeve shirt for himself, then changed into jeans. He would have to get gloves and a mask back at the hospital. When he finished pushing in clothes and toiletries, he slung one of the overstuffed bags over his shoulder and, with the same arm, picked up the other. Next, he went to his berth and the innocent-looking overnight bag. He lifted it and unzipped it with his teeth—razor, toothbrush, hair gel, washcloth, and underneath the washcloth a double layer of Ziplocs with a compass, a box of Everlight matches, one fixed-blade knife in its scabbard, tape, a single roll of bandages, and a Beretta .45 PX4 with one extra mag, nine rounds in each clip, one in the chamber.