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her into the darkness, scouting out the black territories, finding a final haven where it would matter how much she had loved him. Where they could be together forever. Together Forever. And then she found she couldn’t really invest much in the fantasy. It was too much like Barbie and Ken in heaven.
    Besides, her father had taught her that there was no afterlife, an idea he had tried to dress up by talking about becoming one with the universe and scattering one’s atoms back into primal matter. But Clare had seen a lot of rotting bodies since Pest had taken over, and she now recognized that he had been a romantic. Scattering atoms back into primal matter was a nasty business.
    She remembered her father at his computer, writing Bridge Out Ahead . She remembered pizza night for the cheerleading squad. Reading Mrs. Dalloway at two in the morning. Michael, slightly drunk, kissing her after the Spring Dance—where she had been elected Princess by those who probably didn’t realize such things usually went by blood. The kiss had surprised her. The Princess status had not. She was, after all, the only cheerleader who could do decent back flips. And when she did enough of them, she could, finally, stop thinking—as the blood roared in her ears, as she became nothing more than her body.
    She thought of Michael and Robin and Chupi and of Mrs. Hennie, lying dead in the street. And then she thought of Plan B—of the man who had called himself the master-of-the-situation.
    Whoever he was, he had made big promises.
    Clare watched the mists rising from the city below until Bear nuzzled her, asking for more attention. She stroked him for a while and then stood up and carefully folded the piece of paper with Michael’s name on it.
    “Let’s go,” she said to Bear. She wanted to go into Fallon to look for supplies and then get back to the cabin before nightfall—even if the night were probably still safe. Her father had thought the Cured would stay in the cities for a long time.
    Clare had already broken into some of the other places near the cabin to look for supplies, and she had found some food, a couple of hurricane lamps, more candles, a camping stove. But she also found, inevitably, bodies. In one small house, a body had decayed into the bed it lay on; fluids leaked into the sheets leaving a grisly outline. In another house, two bodies on a sofa clutched each other, while another, almost skeletonized, lay on the floor.
    And everything stank.
    Every time she emerged from a Pest house, she felt darkness and stench clinging to her, penetrating her clothes, infecting her breath with death.
    The houses in Fallon belonged largely to people who came to the hills only for the summer. Clare hoped that these houses might be empty of bodies and full of stored food. And Fallon had a grocery store, a gas station, and a general store that stocked everything from toys to linens to camping equipment. It also had a yarn store and a basket outlet. Even before Pest, Clare had never understood the phenomenon of the basket outlet. But the other places—even the Yarn Barn—had potential.
    There were animals everywhere in that sunlit morning. Clare thought that maybe there had never been so many wild animals in the world, or that soon enough that would be true. There were rustlings in the unmown lawns, and she startled three deer that were lying in the grass nearby—they bounded away, white tails held high like absurd semaphores. Bear left her side to pursue the deer, and, although she called him, although he stopped and looked back at her for a moment, a second later he was crashing through the fields after them. A startled fox ran in front of her and a covey of partridges burst into the sky. And everywhere there were rabbits—nibbling at the verge of a meadow, lying in the shade of the bushes. They would freeze until she was almost on them and then lollop, casually, into the deeper grass.
    The world was thriving. And she felt pretty good. Not