EPILOGUE

Nate Royal hurt everywhere. His first attempts to move, to roll over, went unheeded by his muscles. Every inch of his clothes, even his hands and his eyelids, were encrusted with ice.

At last, he managed to roll over onto his back. The room around him was entombed with ice.

His breath steamed in front of his face. He felt like some little bastard was going to town on the inside of his head with a sledgehammer. Every muscle was stiff, every joint frozen. His eyes burned. His chest felt like it was getting squeezed and it hurt to breathe. He couldn’t feel his hands. He couldn’t even curl his fingers into a fist.

Groaning, he rolled over onto his side and sat up. He recalled the beating he’d taken at the hands of Michael Barnes. They had forced him to tell about the cure and then gotten mad. They’d asked him about the cure, but they hadn’t pushed the issue. He was glad for that. Lying was one thing, but lying while taking another of those beatings was another. He’d been lucky they stopped when they did.

The flash drive was still there. He could feel it.

He fumbled with his pants until he finally got them down around his thighs. Everything hurt, his gut especially, and taking down his pants felt like he was getting murdered all over again.

Wincing, he put fingers into his ass and pulled out a Ziploc baggie.

A low groan escaped his lips.

He opened the bag and took out the flash drive and dropped the lanyard over his neck.

Only then did he rise to his feet and walk outside.

There were bodies everywhere. One man was on his back, a hand raised skyward like he was trying to take something from a shelf. Icicles hung from his fingers. Dimly, Nate remembered the sounds of the fighting from the night before.

“Couldn’t kill me,” he said, and laughed. He was a cockroach, life’s little symbol of endurance in the face of a dispassionate universe. The thought filled him with a mad sort of glee, and he laughed until the cold air caught in his lungs and made him cough.

He looked around.

He was standing in the field near one of the bigger buildings, looking toward the pavilion. There were hundreds of bodies over there, all of them encrusted with ice. It was too enormous to take in, all that death.

Nate wandered closer to the pavilion. He had to step over arms and legs bent and frozen at irregular angles. Here and there, he saw bodies on their backs, mucus frozen in tiny icicles from the corners of their open eyes and their nostrils. He saw men and women holding hands, their palms fused together by the cold. He saw young women clutching babies to their chests, and all that senseless wasting of life made him want to vomit. It was dreadful.

“Fucking maniacs,” he muttered.

He turned away from the bodies and scanned his surroundings. The Grasslands compound was hugely vast and bleak. The sky was a deep, stormy gray. The wind blew snow, gritty as sand, across the fields to the north, where a single coyote loped across a barren plain. The fence was lost in fog, but he figured that the gate had been left open. There was no other way for a coyote to get in.

He wondered which way to go. Kellogg’s words echoed in his mind. It didn’t matter if he wanted this responsibility or not. You either chose to live, or chose to die. It was a yes-or-no question, no middle ground. Choosing to live was an acknowledgment that life has some sort of meaning. Whatever that meaning was, for him at least, was tied to the cure Kellogg had stored on the flash drive around his neck. For the time being, that was reason enough to go on living. He would bring this back to the world. What they did with it was their problem.

So he turned once again and found the rising sun. That way is east, he thought. As good as any.

And, shivering against the cold, the ice crunching beneath his boots, he made his silent, solitary way into daylight.