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park.
    “Maybe China’s right,” Rick said. “Let this disease run its course and start over.”
    Let them die. It certainly was the easiest solution. India had adopted the same policy; so had most of the poorer nations, although their decision was based on poverty, not stupidity.
    “Problem is,” Taeya countered, “a virus probably isn’t the best judge of who should live and who should die.”
    All of those survivors waiting to take over the Medical Center had the right connections, but did they have the right motives for getting the country back on its feet?
    Rick remained quiet as he drove through Harlem. Tired of putting his foot in his mouth? Taeya felt a little twinge of guilt, too, over that whole gourmet food misunderstanding. Best that they just keep comments to themselves. They should be in D.C. by dawn and she could scout around for a different vehicle.
    Once in Harlem, Rick slowed at 159th Street. Ahead, Taeya spotted rubble strewn on the pavement. To the right, a building smoldered, flames still flickering in what remained.
    Rick edged the van forward, driving up onto the curbing of a narrow boulevard of trees. Taeya felt the crunch of bricks under the tires as Rick eased the van through the debris.
    To her left, across the boulevard, Taeya caught a glimpse of movement, someone hobbling out of a building. A looter? How many of the survivors in the area now had guns? Were gangs organizing in the city? She shook off the tension in her shoulders. The van was impervious to assault, certainly by someone on foot.
    Up ahead, the van’s lights caught someone dashing across the grassy median and into the street. It was a woman, wearing a tattered housedress and bedroom slippers. She threw her arms in the air to stop the van. The dusky gray of her face indicated a lack of oxygen. She was drowning from the fluid in her lungs.
    A man stumbled off the curb to help block the lanes. He coughed, spraying blood into the air. The reflex made him teeter to stay on his feet. Was this influenza, or the new virus Johnson had shown her earlier in pathology?
    “They look like zombies,” Rick muttered.
    He rolled forward, hoping they would step aside, but when they didn’t, Rick stopped.
    Two more people stepped out of the shadows. Taeya saw the familiar gaunt faces, the emaciated bodies sagging with death.
    A hand slapped on Rick’s window and Taeya cried out in surprise. Rick recoiled from the man who stood peering into the van. His face was blistered with severe burns. What little hair remained on his head was crinkled from fire.
    “Help us,” he cried.
    The simple statement seemed to take everything out of him. He stumbled backwards, and when his hand left the window, the outer layer of the man’s skin remained on the glass.
    Rick almost came out of his seat. “Jesus!”
    These people must have been living in the building that burned. They’d been driven out into the streets, with nowhere to go. Perhaps they were waiting for a bus to take them to the Center to die. One last meal. Someone to pat their hand, tell them they were sorry, but it was over.
    “Is there a way you can hand something out without opening a window?” she asked.
    “Christ, Doc. What do you want to do? Feed them?”
    Boosting herself out of her seat, Taeya went to the back for her biohazard box.
    “I recall a small tray we could use to hand out passports at the Mexican border. Is this van equipped with that feature?” Taeya tapped Rick’s shoulder with the 6-pack of foil-wrapped pills.
    He stared at the sheet in his hand for a moment, reading the label. Then he banged his head against the seat’s headrest. He tilted his face up at her. Then he laid the pills in the passport tray and rotated it outside.
    The woman in the housedress shuffled over and took the pack.
    “Will this make me better?” the woman asked.
    “No,” Taeya said through the glass, “but it will end your pain.”
    With trembling fingers, the woman snapped the sections