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Most of the living victims wanted to be left alone to tug at their restraints. But three of them, strangers trapped together, all begged to be shot, just as the young man had done on the first morning. He took a deep breath and obliged every one of the three in the same way that his father taught him to dispatch game— shoot quick, take them by surprise if you can, and show mercy by getting it right the first time.
    Before another hour passed, Blackburn realized that he was at that strange house where he and his men had heard the woman's terrible screams during their long march to the square. He sent his men in, but decided to join them and check for clues about the source of the screams.
    It turned out that there was nothing there, only more of the endless dead, beaten by the quake. He got his men out of there with scant minutes to spare. There wasn't even time to examine the bodies. His team had done all that they could, and it was no longer possible to keep ahead of the fires. He sent them back to Portsmouth Square to get some rest.
    He doubted that there was anyplace else for him to go back to; his apartment building stood within the previous day's burn area. At the moment, he felt more upset about not knowing where to go to get some uninterrupted rest than over the loss of his home. As far as his apartment was concerned, there wasn't much to lose. The place itself had merely been somewhere to store clothing and to sleep between stretches of overtime. The only possessions that held any grip on his affection pertained to his work, and those were still safe inside his sergeant-sized police locker in the more fortunate part of the station.
    Despite his efforts, he realized that the earthquake had taken a much smaller toll on him than the majority of the people he was paid to protect. Something about that felt right to him, since helived in such simplicity and diverted nearly all of his energy to his career. But there were days, now that he was over thirty, when he found that the world had little patience for a single man, a widower (how he hated the word) who had been alone for nearly ten years without ever coming close to remarrying. Society in general tended to dismiss him as a confirmed bachelor and a social standoff. In his bleakest moments of reflection, Blackburn found that the idea of close friendship between men, or of romances with women, somehow seemed more like the performance of an exotic play than something he might actually find in daily life. But now with the fires continuing to eat up the city, he couldn't let go of the desire to rush home and try to retrieve something, anything, and join the treasure hunters sifting the rubble for their own belongings.
    The lieutenant was not a fool and could judge how close to cracking from exhaustion all of his men were, so he ordered Blackburn and a few of the others to crawl into the nearby police command tent. They were advised to get a few hours of rest but then stay put until needed. The lieutenant reminded him that there was no point in trying to go home, anyway. Everything was gone.
    Blackburn was too drained to argue, especially now with the chance to sleep. He found himself lying on a blanket pad in the police tent without remembering how he got there. The instant he closed his eyes, he fell into a deep slumber filled with sensations of physical torment and images of disaster. As awful as these things were, they barely raised his pulse. There was nothing in the realm of nightmares that hadn't already been exceeded in the waking world.
    Shane Nightingale stayed with the same crowd of refugees that he had joined in front of his house, even after they turned northward and trailed along in front of the dynamited mansions on Van Ness Avenue. Within an hour, maybe two, his band of wanderers made it all the way up to the boat docks at the top end of the city. Theirjourney over the rubbled streets and through the smoky air was made in silence, mostly broken by nothing but