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I don’t know anymore if we rescued her. The more I see Eve’s body, the more I think they gave it to us. Her lips have turned full purple. We’ve added cuffs and leg irons to the bed restraints. She’s never tried to escape, but she scares the hell out of us all the same.

Morenz’s instructions were clear: keep the room dark, two men on the door at all times, never an officer and never anyone that knew her before. Ignore everything she says. If she tries to get out of that bed, shoot and keep shooting, and hold on until help arrives.

She was many things: Eve to us, Evie to her family, and Evil to those who knew her on the streets. Evelyn Daniels was a good officer. No... she was a damn good officer. Her wife Jennifer worked in dispatch, and Eve made sure to get her out early. It cost me a communicator, but at least Eve Daniels stayed. One hundred twenty pounds soaking wet and she stayed, through it all, right up until Mr. Gray got her and left her tied up with a ball gag in her mouth.

She lay unconscious for the first three days after we brought her back. Even when she came to, she didn’t say much. She’d taken a hell of a beating, but some of us wondered if it was more than that. We figured maybe Gray took off his mask and let her see whatever the hell he is hiding under there.

I don’t know what we’ve got tied up in that bed, but it’s not her. I know that. Eve Daniels is dead. I don’t care what it says. It’s not Eve.

As much as it gave me butterflies, I had to go talk to her again. Our spotters gave us the message from Memorial.

CDC has arrived.

They want your sick and are offering supplies.

The Twos have a fifty cal.

John was so pissed he actually tapped out “FUCKING” in the reply, but I know the score.

We’re going. It’s not like I have a choice. We’re near twenty down with yellow fever. Six are critical. One of them is Madison’s eleven-year-old daughter. Ammunition is down to almost nothing.

Trumbo seemed like a dream at first—water on three sides, fenced off, plenty of buildings, a huge swimming pool we keep full of fresh water and covered—but people keep disappearing. The beach doesn’t stop the Twos. Nothing stops them.

Morenz theorized that Cauthron had figured out a way to program them, deep hypnosis or something like that. He didn’t even think it was a different disease. The spotters saw Morenz die. Morenz had tried to get to us on the water, a little two man kayak, but a big splash and they were both gone. Morenz and the other guy got pulled under.

I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of regret anyway, but now I know we’re not the only ones holding back. A fifty cal... they must have gotten it off one of the gunboats. Had to be. They can swim and neither Tisdale nor Throat ever bothered to tell us. Why the hell are they even keeping us locked up in here if the Twos are making contact? The Twos may already be outside the government’s precious perimeter.

Too bad. If Morenz had lived, I think he would have realized that we’re talking about a different strain. The Dragon never had a chance to work his Voodoo on Eve.

I had a little hand-crank lantern, which I gave a few turns before going into the room. It kept everything dim. We moved all the stuff out of there before we put her inside; only the bed and some empty bookshelves remained. I don’t know who used to live in this room when the Navy was here, but I’m pretty sure they won’t want it back.

It liked to get under my skin. Take it to the bathroom. Sure. And the way it said my name, in Eve’s voice... not Captain, not Sir. Perry. Like it’s above me in rank and I’d better not forget it.

Eve had always kept her hair in a bun at work, per general orders. She kept it that way after the bridge. I don’t think I’d ever seen her with it down before we brought her back. Even its face looked different. I don’t mean the bruising. I can’t really say how. If I described it to a sketch artist, I guarantee it would look just like Eve Daniels, but this was different. I don’t know... something it did with its facial muscles.

“We’ll take you in a minute,” I said, trying to sound composed. “You know, it sounds like you’re not going to be here with us much longer.”

“Perry,” it said, as if I were a six-year-old. Its voice kept doing these subtle changes—bitter, then patronizing, innocent, then back to sexual. “Perry, he has made up his mind. No one goes from Stock to Key West, and no one goes from Key West to Stock. It’s over. It’s over, Perry. You’ll never see the hospital again.”

“What’s he going to do? Helicopters, gunships, jets... the military is going to throw in everything to make sure this happens.”

It dropped its head back against the pillow. “Oh, I don’t know. He’ll think of something. He’s smarter than you, Perry. I don’t mean a point or two higher on the captain’s test smarter. I mean like a person-staring-down-at-a-cockroach smarter. You try to take me across the channel and you’re a dead man, Perry Nelson.”

It exploded. “I want to die! You think I don’t? You think I want those doctors to dissect me piece by piece? Fill me with chemicals?”

“Then give me something! Give me something I can give them, something to convince them that you’re different. Get them to take a blood sample without a physical inspection. Tell me what’s happening inside of you.”

“What’s happening?” It settled back. Then its head tilted toward the ceiling and its eyes moved all around in their sockets, and it looked as if it was testing the air. “It’s spinning. Everything is spinning.”

“I just don’t know that there are words to describe this, Perry. You’ll have to wait and see for yourself, I’m afraid.”

“It means you’re going to get it. Everyone is. Hopefully, not the same way. Mr. Gray is not a gentle lover, Perry. It means you’ll find out what it’s like when it’s inside of you, crawling through your veins. You can’t stop him.”

“That’s just what I thought. Next thing I know, I’m tied to a bed under someone wearing one of those ghost masks... that’s the one he wore while he was raping me.”

“Can I go to the bathroom now? I seem to have to go all the time these days.”

“You know, I think I might be pregnant.” The voice was low, almost a whisper, like it was sharing a secret that only I should know. I turned to face it and saw the sagging lips, and heard a pouty purr begin to grow.

I hung at the door as the purr disappeared behind a grin that spread across its face. The purr was consumed by a chuckle, which swelled to laughter as I walked out the door. I found Wisdom and told him.

“I want a plan, a good one. I want it redundant, can’t miss. We figure out every contingency.”

“She... it let something slip while it was having a go at me. We can’t have an affair because it’s in my chain of command.”

“We were careful. Real careful. There’s no way that thing knew about us. No way. What the hell are we up against, Matt?”

[6-hour-and-12-minute delay]

At sunset, they were where they always were, the westernmost building at the tip of the point, on the veranda, sitting in their wicker chairs, holding a council meeting out in the open air. It could have been seen by drones, or spotters, or anybody who gave a damn what moves these little chess players devised. They started to stand when Wisdom and I rounded the fence, but I motioned them back.

Hutchins wore a button-down that let his gut hang out. Peduto and Maniot sat next to each other, arms nearly touching. Their relationship was the worst kept secret on the point. Madison needed to get some sleep, but I suppose it’s hard to fault him when his daughter was so close to death. Peduto would have been thoroughly broken if not for Giri, and whenever she finally got sick of him, it was going to be ugly. He looked as if he’d been bracing himself against bad news so long that his nerves were shot. They knew the CDC had landed, knew that they wanted Eve.

“I already talked to Tisdale,” I started. “We’re taking Daniels out tomorrow, day after at the latest.”

“Even with all the healthy deputies, you could only put forty into cars,” said Hutchins.

“I can’t put anything like forty into cars. We don’t have forty guns, and I think we can all agree that sticks just won’t cut it anymore.”

Madison tried to cut in but I stopped him. This briefing was for his benefit more than anyone.

“Just making the run with three vehicles will mean someone is going to get a mouth full of gasoline while siphoning the tanks.”

“No, Elmond, they won’t. My guess is that they won’t give us any more food either, unless we make the attempt.”

The Maniot-Peduto power couple wanted to make sure I would try to wring everything I could out of the Navy. They had nothing to worry about on that score. Hutchins demanded that Delarosa and his deputies get the bulk of the weapons. The idiot. He also wanted to make sure that Delarosa was on the run, right there beside me. Back at the start, I thought Delarosa might be a good man, just scared and hiding behind his guns. I was wrong. An errant bullet might solve that problem... some day. For now, I was not about to have someone in Elmond’s pocket watching my back. Not this time.

“Not possible,” I told him. “If this operation goes tits up, the Point would lose both the commander over the officers and the commander over the deputies. That’s too much. I’m taking Vic Wallace. He can pick any three of his guys except McKenzie or Wells. I need my specialists here.”

“I do. Even with the promised air support, I think someone takes a crack at us. Can’t promise it won’t be our monster.” I said that last bit to Madison.

“Make it? Absolutely. We’ll take some fire, might even have some casualties, but we should be able to stitch up anyone who doesn’t colossally screw up. With the concentrated air support, I’m reasonably certain we can punch through.”

“Johnny Q and Navlin have worked up a couple of vehicles. They’ve got an armor-plated van that should take care of small arms stuff. We’re working on a bed or something comfortable for transporting them.”

“I know.” I caught myself thinking of Angie. “I’m not prone to promises, but you need to know that Matt and I will give it everything we’ve got. They’ll have to come through us before they get to her.”

Hutchins still didn’t like the pecking order. “You’re not going to tell us your plan.” It wasn’t a question. He sounded more his old self than any time in the last month. Not a good sign.

“No, I’m not. Right now, I’ve got to sort out a few things with the admiral, and I’ll be honest, since the day we cleared out of the courthouse, trust has not been a particularly good resource for me.”

“Right now, I don’t really care and I don’t have to. When we go, everybody in the cars will have the route. Maybe one of The Dragon’s people has super hearing. Doesn’t matter. He’ll find out right before we roll. That’s it.”

“One more thing.” I turned to Hutchins. “If I don’t make it, Buckley is in charge.”

[2-hour-and-37-minute delay]

I just got off the horn with Tisdale. We finally came clean with each other. Clearly the hospital people gave up the Twos. Fine by me. I was sick of all of the clandestine shit.

He went first. “Captain, I understand your primary concern is that Lieutenant Cauthron now appears to have a group of associates, and you’re afraid of an attack en masse.”

“Your people have nearly blown me up. You’ve been playing me off against Hutchins, maybe Cauthron, too, and I highly suspect that the person who keeps calling me in the middle of the night is one of your cronies playing head games. As long as that’s what you mean by ‘understanding each other,’ then yes, Admiral, I believe we do.”

“I want you to put every uninfected person on this island on a boat and get us the hell out of here.”

“You understand why that can’t happen until the doctors evaluate your patient?”

“Let me tell you what I understand. In all our talks, we’ve never gone over a whole lot of the day-to-day here on the island. Well, it sounds like you’ve figured out that there are a lot of things we’ve never gone over. I would think, with all the cameras you have in the air, that you know more about what’s going on than I do. Still, I suppose being on the ground does lend a certain perspective.

“So, anyway, after your people high-tailed it and we took over the Point, when it started getting so rough that we couldn’t get to most of the confines anymore and they couldn’t get to us, we started having some folks that made it to the gate. They did not want food, they wanted to join. They wanted us to let them in. Of course, the problem with that is knowing who’s infected and who isn’t, just like why you won’t take us off the island. Our solution was the Poor House. It used to be a storage building. We made it livable and put anybody in there that was willing. Two weeks... that’s how long they had to stay. We had guards outside the whole time.

“One day, this guy shows up and says he wants in. Tells us his name is Jones. Thick beard... you couldn’t see his mouth, but he clearly wasn’t acting like an infection case, so we didn’t make him shave. There were eight other people in the Poor House with him. Nobody suspected a thing. Hell, I sat across the table from him one night after we cleared him. At that point, we hadn’t seen your boy Cauthron with anybody else. We knew from the guy in the hotel that he talks, but none of us had ever heard him say anything. I sure wasn’t expecting someone like him to chat me up about whether or not the Heat had made the playoffs.”

[8-second delay, audible panting]

“He was there for our mayor. Hell if I know why. It’s not like she was actually running anything. But one night we hear shooting from inside the hotel and we’re running around trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and we find him down the hall from Mayor Upton’s room. We hear noise and get a light on him, and he’s dragging her, Upton, by an ankle. One of my guys shoots him—center mass—and this guy just gives us this look....”

[7-second delay, audible panting]

[5-second delay]

“He jerks her up in front of him and grips her by the neck while he’s shooting at us with a pistol. We can’t get a shot because she’s in the way, but he’s squeezing and squeezing while he’s shooting at us, and we can see her face... red as a beat... blood coming out of her nose.”

[9-second delay]

“So we rush him. He shoots one of my guys point blank, but we keep coming. He was moving fast—crazy fast, like every move was a muscle spasm and he’s not even in control of himself. He shoves Upton into me. He knocked the other guy with me down, and then he grabs Upton and I’m trying to hold onto her, on the ground trying to hold her arms, but he’s too strong and he tears her out of my grasp, and before me or Wisdom can get another shot, he just smacks her against the wall. Just smacks her like a wet towel. Twice.”

[13-second delay, audible crying]

Tisdale asked if we killed him, and I told him how everyone thought he’d gone into the car bay, and that we set up outside and stormed it, but it was empty. The next morning, we found his blood trail. It led straight out into the water. There was a gunship anchored not 200 yards away.

Then Tisdale got all apologetic, but still felt the need to remind me that if I wanted the supplies, I had to get the thing over to Memorial.

No one would help. No one. I got the wolves in touch with seven of the confines, but not a single one of them was willing to pitch in manpower or equipment. Most said they were willing to leave us alone in exchange for future food drops.

White Street? Those bastards actually said they’d kill us if we tried to move any part of their barricades. The witch, the medium, or whatever is in charge over there, has got them so messed up that they won’t do anything without consulting her. I’m curious what cards she pulled. Lady of Situations? The Hanged Man?

The other guys were waiting for me and Wisdom in the mission room, surrounding a desk.

The basic design was a convoy, but instead of a line, we’d be playing leapfrog up and down the island. The SWAT BearCat would be the golden chariot at the center, and everything depended on getting it to the end. We had one tricked-out squad car and one armored van loaded with the sick. We’d be putting two of our irregular “deputies” in the back of the BearCat with the creature. Nobody wanted the job, but that would be the safest place in the line as long as the thing didn’t make any serious effort to get out of its flex cuffs and shackles.

I pushed Tisdale for a few extras. While we did the heavy lifting, he’d give us some flyovers and arrange for a few “distractions” from the water. The NAS would start with some drones, buzzing low, to get the more unfriendly confines looking to the skies, followed by a few air strikes in the no man’s land to draw their attention away from the roads. The abandoned McDonald’s on US 1 would take the first hit, followed by a trio of drone strikes on Miriam St, on the south side of Stock Island. The last would be an empty parking lot on Windsor. Wisdom and Plunkett had identified the best targets during a food drop—I just hoped they were still empty when the rockets knocked them into the water. From the north, a derelict yacht would bear down on the Marriott, to draw the attention of sniper’s alley toward the gulf. The choppers would hit it right before it ran aground.

Koz and Santiago would take the lead squad. Santiago hasn’t said a word in almost a week, just volunteered himself with a hand. We’ve all been stressed, but I get the feeling that part of him wants to die, just to get it over with. Vic Wallace would drive the sick van with one of the deputies riding shotgun. Malone’s daughter and the worst of the sick were going to have to fit in the back, strapped down and covered with a thick blanket of Kevlar vests.

The straight shot to the hospital would go through a pair of heavily defended areas. Maybe the witch really would have her people shoot at us, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single gunshot from one of their people. They don’t have much of anything. The New Town strip malls were another story. Tisdale says that most of the drones that had been shot down were in that area. Ever since the biker’s disappeared and the hospital guys got attacked in the Sears, I wondered if that wasn’t where Cauthron was holed-up. It offered plenty of places for him to rig-up more traps.

The high school was still property of the wolves, but the 6th Street confine was almost as belligerent as Boat Town, and we had enough problems already. Instead, we’d go south, cutting back to Windsor, and hoping that the explosions would keep most of the heads down until we could reach United. A hard left—and everybody would have to be square on this—it would be a hard left, because we wouldn’t slow down for shit, and then we’d push down on White Street, south of the barricade. One last hard left on Atlantic, figuring that all the hippies in their tents and shacks on the White St. Pier wouldn’t care, and we’d push east under the cover of the helicopters.

This is where it could get a little dicey. The Sheraton confine hasn’t given a damn about anything except who is running their show, but they still have the street blocked. It’s nothing special, just a few cars. That’s when the BearCat would move into the lead and hit it like a wrecking ball. Then we’d follow the road up the channel.

That’s it. We don’t dare tap any particulars to the hospital, but they’ve got both sides of the Cow Channel Bridge. The DoubleTree knows too. I briefed the two headbangers when they showed up last night for their second food run of the day. God, it’s tempting to just tie up Daniel’s body head to toe and let those two cart her over to Memorial, since it seems like they can go anywhere. They get around better than the Wolves. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that Cauthron knows just about every movement on the island, and that the only reason he hasn’t put those two down is that it doesn’t fit into his plans for some reason.

Once we round the curve, the last point of major concern will be the bridge. If Cauthron has anymore explosives, that would be the time to use them. Drones have run under it, and so far it’s clear. If he doesn’t try anything there, we might just be home free at that point. The metal heads said we could count on help from the DoubleTree on our side—even if they didn’t say exactly what that help would be. Whatever. As long as they don’t get in the way.

If we make it past the bridge, any set ambushes should be on College Street. That’s when we’ve got them, because we’re not going on College Street. We’re going to press strait up Highway 1 and then shoot north through the old golf course. The grass is overgrown to hell, but nobody knows this part of it except me. The only thing I told the troops was once we are past the bridge to follow me. Unless he’s clairvoyant, or the witch is feeding him intel, it should be nothing but tearing up the course with an armored car and surprising the hell of the hospital crew when we show up at the back door instead of at the front.

The last order of business before sack time was Hutchins. Wisdom and I agreed on this.

Hutchins has been getting all high and mighty again. He thinks he’s got something. Gotta be... thinks he’s back in the game. But what could he possibly have? The only thing we could think of is too frightening to even consider.

Even so, Koz is tight with a couple of the deputies, so we sent him out to ask around and see if our mayor pro tem had ever paid the Eve-thing a visit.