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here, the other half for D.C. Evidently, there will be big receptions once the new residents get settled in. Too bad you didn’t stick around, Doc. You could have served punch to Councilwoman Sanders, or made crab puffs for J.J. Martin from the Yankees.”
    She refused to let his jabs hit her soft spots again. “Sounds like you’ve already seen the guest list.”
    “Yeah, and you weren’t on it.”
    She tilted her head, squinting in the darkness. “Why are you so angry at me?”
    “Look, Doc. I don’t know what you expect to find out here, but there won’t be any more trips to Cabo or late dinners after the theater. We’re back to ground zero, scraping for food, fighting off renegades. Hell, just living without power is going to do you in.”
    “You seem to have me confused with someone else.”
    “I doubt it. My guess is you were married to some hot-shot doctor. What was he? A neurosurgeon, cardiologist? Did you get your picture in the society section of the newspaper on Sundays for your charity work?”
    “My husband—” That sounded strange coming from Taeya. Randall had never really felt like a husband. More like a mentor. Eighteen years older, Randall had already spent fifteen years with the UK Medical Research Council before joining the World Health Organization.
    He was a brilliant man who could lecture on Prokaryotes and the Methanogenic Archaeon with the same admiration a weapons enthusiast might praise a particular bullet and the damage it could inflict. He was a hunter, no different from men who tracked wild game or chased tornadoes. Taeya didn’t fall in love with Randall, she fell in love with his tenacity.
    During their four years together, she couldn’t remember a time when they had more than a couple dollars in their pockets.
    She cleared her throat and started again. “My husband died in a van similar to this one. Their cargo was food and medical supplies.” She scratched at the anger that prickled her scalp. “World Health had a base set up in Santa Lucia, north of Guadalajara. He shouldn’t have even been in that van, but reports were coming back about a strain of tuberculosis in an outlying village and he wanted to make a first-hand evaluation. When the mobile unit was attacked, the looters didn’t just take the food and meds, they took the hubcaps, the seats, even the wiper blades. I don’t recall them burning the van, but they might as well have.”
    She never cried over Randall’s death. But this past year as she’d waged her losing battle against this pandemic, she missed him terribly.
    Rick didn’t have much to say as he sped through the theater district. When he got to Columbus Circle, he slowed and swung the van around to shine the headlights into the charred remains of Central Park.
    “There’s another prime example why the masses deserve to be extinguished.”
    Rumors about the riot in the park and the subsequent fire spread through the hospital as quickly as the blaze itself, but television coverage was nonexistent by then. There had been no pretty blonde on the scene, no studio commentary on why people do what they do. All anyone could see from the hospital was the billowing smoke.
    Operators at the suicide center said people were still holed up in some of the apartments on Central Park West. They must have really panicked when the riot started, sitting up in their million-dollar flats watching a mob scream at one of the mayor’s aides, demanding protection. From whom? Themselves?
    Estimates varied from a few hundred to thousands of people killed during the protest. The drivers of the incinerator trucks insisted it seemed like millions.
    And how could so many acres of lush greenspace be destroyed in a single day? Had rioters carried lit torches like villagers in some Frankenstein movie? No one really knew for sure, there were so few survivors, and so many conflicting stories. But as Rick drove slowly up Central Park West all Taeya saw was the blackened skeleton of the