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on his staff watching them.
    “Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “if the feds wanna help, let ’em keep their sorry asses north of the city handing out sandwiches or something. The last thing I want is a bunch of SEAL team wannabes blowing up cargo freighters while I’m trying to rescue civilians. Tell Laidlaw to keep his people out of my way, understand?”
    “Yes, sir,” she said.
    Her tone was withdrawn, chastened, and he was sorry he’d snapped at her. She didn’t deserve that. It was just that he was so damn tired. Really, really tired.
    “Anything else?” he said.
    “We had three more deaths this afternoon in the shelter over at the rec center.”
    “Damn,” he said. “How many is that now, eighteen?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What were these last three, the salmonella?”
    “That’s what Dr. Bailey thinks. He told me all about it. And then he went on a very long tirade about how bad conditions were down there. He reminded me, several times in fact, that you promised him something would be done about the Porta-Potties.”
    He scanned the room, watching his staff at their stations. Hector had done so much damage to southwest Houston they’d been forced to appropriate the campus as a forward dispatch point for relief efforts. They now occupied a large meeting room in the M.D. Anderson Library, the library’s cozy armchairs and lamp fixtures hastily tossed aside to make room for laptops and maps and phones.
    Originally, the university had given permission for Shaw and his staff to move in here for the duration of the disaster. But that was before Hector caught the 2.5 million people in the evacuation zones of Galveston and Harris County flatfooted. Within hours of the storm, Shaw found himself the only functioning police authority in the affected area. He had an empty campus—built to house thirty thousand students, equipped with its own hospital and sewage plant and dormitories and restaurants and even a grocery store—that was situated right next to the only major highway leading out of the disaster zone. He had tens of thousands of injured, sick, and starving people stuck on that same highway.
    And so, acting far beyond his authority to do so, Shaw made the only decision his conscience would allow and opened the entire campus and all its facilities as a shelter for any of the evacuees who could get there. Within a day they had swollen the campus to a population of more than eighty thousand.
    But what began as a decision made for mercy’s sake quickly became a nightmare of filth and disease. They had, within a few days, run out of medicines and food and clean water and especially places for people to go to the bathroom. Staph and strep had already made an appearance. So too had salmonella. They had dialysis patients they couldn’t care for. Broken bones they couldn’t set. Cuts they couldn’t keep clean. There was even ominous talk from the few doctors they had of an imminent cholera outbreak.
    “I’ll call Bailey back later,” he said. “Maybe smooth a few ruffled feathers.”
    “Good luck,” Eleanor said.
    Shaw nodded.
    Sheltering all these people here had been a bad idea. He could see that now. Never mind that it had been done for all the right reasons. Never mind that he would have been crucified in the national media, and probably in the history books, had he failed to do so. All that really mattered was that someone was going to have to answer for the mess it had become, and that person was going to be him.
    “Thank you, Eleanor,” he said. “Hey, by the way, how’s your family, your daughter—uh, Margaret, right?”
    She brightened. “Madison. She’s doing good. I’m proud of her. We’ve got this older neighbor whose house got hit by a tree during Hector. . . . She’s staying with us. But she’s not doing so hot. Madison’s been really strong, though. You know, helping out, taking care of her. I almost hate to say it, but I think this experience has been good for