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a good thirty feet from the soldiers until it was standing room only on the floors and the stairs. Each new gang was represented: the Geeks, the Nerds, the Sluts, the Skaters, the Freaks, the Pretty Ones, and Varsity, which was now made up of every male athlete in the school. No one spoke to the soldiers, for fear of getting shot at again. The more kids who appeared, the faster the soldiers worked. Within a half hour, they erected a single-occupancy booth equipped with an identification scanner and a video screen above it. It was stationed off to one side of the steel doors. One of the soldiers powered up the booth. The screen flickered to life, and a man in military fatigues appeared on-screen. He was in his forties, with hair so thin on top it looked like a brown mist hanging above his scalp. The skin under his drooping eyes was dark and sunken.
    The crowd of students collectively leaned forward for a better view of the twenty-inch screen.
    “I don’t know where to start,” the man said through the machine’s tinny speakers. The machine’s feeble volume put a hush over the crowd. No one could bear to miss a word.
    “I’m Lieutenant Bernard Sanders. I’m here for the day to oversee the installation of the machine you’re watching me on right now. Your government would like me to express its—” The man paused to swallow.
    “ Our regret that you’ve been left alone so long with so many unanswered questions. I will try to explain the current situation as best I can. You are carriers of a contagious, parasitic virus. In the simplest terms, the virus thrives only in the bodies of pubescent teenagers, and it makes you fatally poi-sonous to everyone else. Any adult or any young child who comes within a few feet of you dies almost instantly. The toxic pheromone you now produce attacks the tissues of the lungs, rapidly breaking them down. It would be the equivalent of inhaling a highly potent acid. Your virus was engineered, illegally, by the labs of the nearby weapon manufacturer, Mason Montgomery Technologies. You may know it. Some of your parents may have even been employees there. A military task force was sent in to investigate the illegal activity and shut them down. There was a raid. They found teenagers held captive as test subjects for the virus.”
    The man stopped. He took a long drink of water and kneaded his eyes like he was working a knot out of a muscle.
    “The raid,” he said, “did not go as planned. One of the infected teens escaped. Once outside, he stole a car. He was chased and very nearly caught. But he got away, and he ran into your school. Knowing the catastrophic repercussions of an entire school becoming infected with this virus, the decision was made to destroy the East Wing of your school.” The crowd gasped. People began to talk, stirred up by the implications. Others hushed the talkers so that the rest could be heard.
    “We fired a missile. The hope was that we could minimize the casualties, destroy the virus, and spare the lives of the rest of you. The virus was not destroyed, as you know. Despite our efforts, many infected students escaped that day, and they have infected other teenagers. It spread far faster than we could contain it. More than three thousand died in the first forty-eight hours. Colorado is under evacuation orders, but as you can imagine, that has been an extremely challenging and complicated process. Meanwhile, the virus continues to spread, and casualties are mounting. We hope to reach containment of the virus soon, but there is no way to know when.
    The situation changes every day.”
    People around David were starting to panic as the impact of those statistics settled in.
    “Do you think Dad—” Will said to David.
    “No,” David said, cutting him off. “He was traveling that day, remember? He was in—”
    “California!”
    “Right. He’s fine.” That seemed to be enough for Will, and David was glad to have a believable answer for once.
    “I do have .