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only the faintest and least reliable of rumours about what was happening in the rest of the world, but if the Pope or the Dalai Lama were still alive so long after the apocalypse then he’d be pretty surprised. Like all the great musicians, all the top politicians, all the innovators, artists, actors, and damn near everyone else in the world, they were almost certainly dead. Just a handful of people were left, and some of them still insisted on locking him up.
    It wasn’t until another door clanged open and he was led into the prison building itself that Noah saw his fellow inmates. Suddenly the jail didn’t seem such a bad idea. These were folks such as he’d met on the trail, only more so – rougher, angrier, hairier, more scarred. As he passed from a tiled corridor into a two story hallway lined with barred cells, a great noise of howling and whooping rose around them. Hands stretched out between the bars, clawing at the empty air. Savage looking men and women, all heavily tattooed, some with sharpened teeth or nails cut down to points. There was none of the neatness or cleanliness so prevalent in the town, but wild flowing hair, mohawks and dreadlocks, beards in a dozen different styles, and most of them dressed in little more than loincloths or a few scraps of fur.
    “See what happens when you come for us?” Poulson paused in the middle of the hall and gestured towards Noah. “We get you all in the end.”
    Noah tried to protest, but his words were drowned out by the clamor of voices, all yelling at Poulson and the guards. Heavy hands dragged Noah down the last few yards of the hall and flung him into an empty cell. One more clang – the day’s signature sound – and he was behind bars, just like his neighbor Mrs. Tallowitz had always predicted.
    He doubted she would have pictured it happening like this.
    The cell held only two pieces of furniture – a lidless toilet and a bed with a stained, threadbare mattress. But threadbare was still better than the no mattress Noah usually had. He sat down on it, leaning back against the wall, able to feel the wire mesh of the bed frame through the feeble padding.
    The cell was maybe seven feet each way, enough space for a tall man to lie down but not much spare. Every inch of it gray except for a cross painted on the back wall – it looked like these folks liked to keep people holy but didn’t trust them with the sort of crucifix you could take down and maybe stab someone with. Noah hadn’t been stuck with walls so close around him for a good long time. It wasn’t long before he could see them filling the edges of his vision, feel them closing in around him. His chest tightened like the jail was squeezing him in a vice grip.
    He took a deep breath, focused on the open hallway beyond the bars, tried to keep his shit together.
    “We’ve been through worse,” he said, trying to convince himself. “Ain’t that right buddy?”
    He patted the empty holster where Bourne should have been, an absence that felt like a missing limb.
    He reached up for his top left pocket, looking to steady his nerves with a smoke, but his cigarettes were gone. So was his lighter, his penknife, and as he frantically patted around his pockets he soon found everything else was too.
    Sorrow turned to anger, then back to a terrible tension as he tilted his head and saw the walls closing in against him.
    “Goddammit.” His hand drifted back down to the empty holster. “I really am alone.”

C HAPTER S IX

    B EAUTY AND A B EATING

    D AWN WAS CREEPING through the bars of the cell when they came back for Noah, waking him from the little sleep he’d gotten despite the occasional howl from one of his fellow captives. Several of them seemed to suffer from nightmares, and he reckoned he would too if they kept him here long with the tightening walls and the yelling in the night. Someone had clearly been in pain, screaming every hour or so, and Noah was willing to bet the townsfolk didn’t waste