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signs of partial demolition and halted ground clearing. Many places were still occupied by silent heavy equipment parked next to towering mounds of gravel and broken brick. Repurposing the base had met with numerous complications. There were issues of soil and groundwater contamination as a landfill in the southwest corner had been found to contain PCBs and was the subject of a Superfund project, as well as concerns over flood plans, local wildlife, and legal issues. There were existing leases to consider, and a stubborn historical society that had hired some expensive lawyers and planted its feet, determined to hold its ground. The Naval Air Museum, which included stewardship for the World War II carrier
Hornet
, had proven a worthy adversary in the battle to reclaim the valuable property.
    The old base wasn’t entirely abandoned. Some buildings had been converted to fitness clubs, design studios, tech companies, auction houses, and nightclubs, as well as a training facility for the City of Alameda Fire Department. Several reality shows—
Angie’s Armory
among them—regularly filmed out on the old runways when working with explosives. A plane crash had been staged there for one movie, and still another film company had actually constructed a great looping road around the airfield in order to film a car chase.
    Most of the three hundred buildings, however, were vacant and decaying in the sea air. Cavernous hangars were home to pigeons and gulls; two- and three-story barracks sat behind dead, brown lawns while weeds grew unchallenged up through sidewalk cracks and asphalt. Vandals had had their way, broken windows and graffiti marring what had once been clean, uniform structures.
    Back when it was a naval facility, a high, sturdy fence topped with razor wire had encircled the base, well maintained and regularly patrolled. Now, decades after the closing, the fence was in disrepair: cut or pulled aside in places by curious explorers, rusted and sagging in others, or missing altogether to permit demolition and the passage of bulldozers and dump trucks. The roads into the vacant blocks of the on-base housing sections were closed off only by sawhorse barricades and
No Trespassing
signs.
    NAS Alameda was not secure. Despite its empty and remote nature, it was not free of the dead.
    Calvin and his group followed the slow-moving Bearcat on foot as it traveled through the evening streets, keeping close together. They stopped only once, when they found a trio of landscaping trailers parked along a curb, loaded with lawn mowers and tools. They collected whatever they could find: spades, hedge clippers, long-handled limb saws, and scythes. Ragged and armed with these primitive weapons, they resembled a small, medieval army marching behind a siege engine, heading off to war.
    In the rear of the armored truck, Xavier sat on a bench watching Rosa as she knelt beside the infected girl on the floor, cooling her forehead with a damp rag and checking her pulse every so often. He knew he should be praying for the girl, but he wasn’t. He had told Rosa he was a priest, but was that really true? While ministering to Alden as he died, Xavier had thought that maybe he hadn’t lost his faith after all and could possibly reclaim what he thought he had forsaken. When the dead had him cornered on that San Francisco dock, he had begun to pray, but did that mean anything? Was it only reflex, a habit? There had been no stunning revelation of faith, no sense of God’s return to his life. As Rosa had pulled the patrol boat into the Alameda dock, he had stood ready with the shotgun not because he feared he would be facing the dead, but because of the armed strangers arriving on the barge ahead of them, his fellow man.
    No, still not a priest. And now he was a liar as well.
    He wondered what would become of the girl on the floor. She would turn, most likely, and have to be put down. Who would do it? Could he? Not if he had any hopes of regaining God’s