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just stood there, wordlessly, in the blowing snow. Luke looked tense and Alger looked positively haunted.
    “ I’m going to lock my door when I get home,” Alger said. “And I’m not going to open for anyone. You hear a knock at your door tonight, Luke, by God, you better not answer it.”
     
     
     
    12
    He hadn ’t been to work in weeks by that point and he didn’t suppose he’d ever go back. Just for the hell of it—and maybe out of the need to hear another human voice—he called the garage and Stubby was there. Stubby was the Public Works super and he told Luke that less men showed up every day and if they got a good blizzard, he didn’t know how he was going to handle it. Only Johnny K. and Milt Penney had been showing up regularly. Tiny Christiansen called in two weeks before and hadn’t been heard from since. Even old Ronny Hazek who’d been tailgunning on the back of the honeywagon for forty years—dumping trash cans into the hopper with the zeal of a twenty year old—hadn’t been in for three days. Garbage was piling up. Side streets were unplowed. There were entire neighborhoods without water.
    “ Things are going straight to hell, Luke. Ain’t shit we can do but wait and see if it blows over.”
    Sure.
    Luke knew better. Things were at crisis stage. Even if the plague stopped tomorrow, the country would never be the same. It would be so depopulated that it would take years and years to get things moving again.
    The economy was crashing on all fronts. People were dying, people were sick, others too frightened to l eave their homes. Factories, mills, restaurants, saloons, and malls were empty. Nobody was producing and nobody was buying. Small towns were drying up, cities desolate. Banks closing their doors along with state and federal office buildings. There was nowhere to turn. The infrastructure of the country and the world at large had gone belly-up.
    It really took something like this to illustrate just how weak and fragile was a country dependent upon a free market economy. When the money went, so did everything else—goods, services, employment, management of resources and people…all of it went into the shitter.
    They were at the outer edge now, Luke knew, the very outer edge of what a government could hope to absorb before complete collapse ensued. Then it would be survival of the fittest.
    How long, he wondered, before the electricity went out?
    Until the TV and radio stations went off the air and the Internet crashed for good?
    Until the Army dissolved into armed bands?
    Until the sto ckpiles of medicine and food dried up and armed assholes were raiding in the streets taking what they wanted by force?
    It was coming, he knew, oh God yes, it was coming.
     
    13
    One evening he took a ride to grab a few things at the store before there was nothing left. He was amazed at how desolate Wakefield was. By day, it was practically a ghost town, but by night…an absolute graveyard. He saw a police car and a tow truck, but that was about it. It was a cold night, but there should have been someone out walking a dog or something. There were 5,000 people in town and they couldn’t all be infected…or could they? Almost everything was closed. A few bars were open, but even their neon and Pabst Blue Ribbon signs had only snagged a few customers judging by the vehicles parked out front.
    After he grabbed what he could at the A & P (which was mostly canned goods and boxed dinners, being that the fresh food just wasn ’t coming anymore), he stowed his stuff in the bed of the truck and had just jumped behind the wheel when he saw them: a group of eight or ten people whose number quickly swelled to thirty if not forty like metal filings drawn to a central magnet. Maybe it was that or the maybe the infected had some psychic shortwave— come one, come all, it is the time of the dance.
    Regardless, they came.
    The first group was about what he’d come to expect in that it looked like when the hysteria got