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them they’d been in bed. Some were naked, half-naked, others in pajamas and robes. Kids, women, men, it took them all. Unless you actually saw it firsthand it was almost impossible to imagine a group of these unfortunates pouring into the streets in the December snow and biting wind and doing their dance.
    As he sat there, they jumped and whirled, turning circles and thrashing on the ground. Some of them looked like they were practicing some crude free-form ballet or interpretative dance because they moved with very studied, repetitious movements; others were just wild and screeching, tearing out their hair and scratching their faces until they bled.
    There was n o music.
    Nothing but the wind, the cold, a few snow flurries, and a sliver of pale yellow moon rafting the clouds high above.
    Luke was pretty much trapped because there was no way he could get out without backing over one or more of them and he did not trust them not to throw themselves under his wheels. So he locked his doors and waited it out. They danced around the truck, oblivious to his presence—faces pallid and scratched, steaming with hot fever-sweat, eyes huge and wet. They spun about, falling down, getting up or getting crushed beneath the other dancers. They held hands and danced across the street like some insane conga line. If it hadn’t been so horrifying and insane, he supposed it might have been almost funny.
    But it wasn ’t funny.
    They were bumping into the truck and slapping their faces against the windows. They all had the same shoebutton doll eyes with horribly dilated pupils like they were tripping their brains out on some real nasty shit.
    The y were not truly dangerous to anyone but themselves (outside of the plague burning hot and communicable within them), but scary all the same. Their faces—so mindless, so empty…like what they had once been was gone or retreating fast and they were waiting for something else to fill up the void.
    Within ten or fifteen minutes, they were all down in the snow, shaking and chattering their teeth, puffing out big white clouds of vapor.
    Then the soldiers showed.
    They must have been waiting.
    A couple trucks rolled down the street and out came the collectors in their gore-streaked Hazmat suits. Like alien invaders harvesting human crops, they came charging out of the shadows and picked up the fallen and started th rowing them in the back of the trucks…right on top of the others.
    Luke jumped out and grabbed one of the soldiers. “Hey! These people aren’t dead!”
    He got shoved aside and two more troopers charged over, putting their M-4 rifles right in his face.
    “Wait a minute now,” Luke said, putting his hands up. “I was just saying that—”
    “ We heard what you were saying. Now move along. These bodies are contaminated.”
    “ But they’re not dead…look, for chrissake! They’re breathing! They’re moving!”
    A rifle barrel was planted dead center of his chest. “On your way! You don’t get the fuck out of here, you’re going in the truck with them!”
    Luke started backing off. There was nothing he could do. He knew these guys weren’t getting any kicks out of the job they were doing. As usual, it was the soldiers and the cops who had to clean up the mess. Nobody was going to be exactly sane after spending all day tossing corpses into trucks and dumping them into burning pits, but those people were still alive. But it was beyond him to help them.
    When the others moved off, one of the soldiers came over. “These bodies have to be burned,” he said. Even through the gas mask Luke could hear the voice of a kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, whose world had not only been turned upside down and inside out, but had become some Medieval nightmare of plague pits and mass graves. An eighteen or nineteen year old voice fractured by stress and fragmented with horror. It was like listening to a dying old man trying to mock the voice of his seventeenth summer: “I’m sorry, mister,