STEPHEN KANESHIRO WAITED UNTIL he began to hear radio reports of the new illness. Then he put on his gloves and drove with Ingraham into Barstow. From there, by phone, he tried to locate his wife and son. He had been with Keira until then, had seemed content with her, but he felt he had a duty to bring his wife and son to relative safety, though they must have given him up for dead long ago.
Eli warned him that no one knew what effect the disease might have on a young child. Stephen understood, but he wanted to give his family what he felt might be their only chance.
He could not. It took him two days of anonymous, sound-only phoning to discover that his wife had gone back to her parents and recently had returned with them to Japan.
He came back to the mountaintop ranch and Keira. Her hair was growing in thick and dark. She was pregnant—perhaps by Stephen, perhaps from her one night with Eli. Stephen did not seem to care which any more than she did.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked him. He was a good man. He had helped her through the terrible time after the deaths of her father and sister. He did not excite her as Eli had. She had not known how much she cared for him, how much she needed him until he went away. When he came back, all she could think was: No wife! Thank God! Then she was ashamed. Sometime later she asked the question.
“Will you stay with me?”
They sat in their room next to the nursery. Their room in Meda’s house. He sat on the bed and she on the desk chair where she could not touch him. She could not bear to touch him until she knew he did not plan to leave her.
“We’ll have to cut ourselves off even more than we have so far,” he said. “I brought new weapons, ammunition, and foods we can’t raise. I think we’re going to have to be self-sufficient for a while. Maybe a long while. You and I couldn’t even have a house. Not enough wood.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“San Francisco is burning,” he continued. “I bought a lot of news printouts in town. We haven’t been getting enough by radio. Fires are being set everywhere. Maybe uninfected people are sterilizing the city in the only way they can think of. Or maybe it’s infected people crazy with their symptoms and the noise and smells and lights. L.A. is beginning to burn, too, and San Diego. In Phoenix, someone is blowing up houses and buildings. Three oil refineries went up in Texas. In Louisiana there’s a group that has decided the disease was brought in by foreigners—so they’re shooting anyone who seems a little odd to them. Mostly Asians, blacks, and browns.”
She stared at him. He stared back expressionlessly.
“In New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, doctors and nurses have been caught spreading the disease. The compulsion is at work already.”
She thought of her father, then shook her head, not wanting to think of him. He had been so right, so wrong, and so utterly helpless.
“Everything will be chaos soon,” Stephen said. “There have been outbreaks in Germany, England, France, Turkey, India, Korea, Nigeria, the Soviet Union. …It will be chaos. Then a new order. Hell, a new species. Jacob will win, you know. We’ll help him. And Jacob thinks uninfected people smell like food.”
“We’ll have to help him to help ourselves,” she said.
“We’ll be obsolete, you and me.”
“They’ll be our children.”
He lowered his eyes, looked at her belly where her pregnancy was beginning to show. “They’ll be all we have,” he said, “the two of us.” There was a long pause. “I’ve lost everyone, too. Will you stay with me?”
She nodded solemnly and went to him. They held each other until they could no longer tell which of them was trembling.