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“Don’t see no blood,” the old man said.
“Call the ambulance but give me something I can use to hold my guts in,” Scott groaned.
The door opened wider. “Where’s your car? I didn’t see no car coming in” and “You British?”
Scott saw the old man was holding an AK47, but pointing up toward the ceiling. He’d seen the same guns all over Africa, Russian surplus. “I am British, I might have been on the wrong side of the road…”
“Okay.” The door came wider. The man was only three feet away. “I can get you a sheet and then I’ll call…”
Scott lifted the revolver and shot the old man in the heart, the gunshot incredibly loud, echoing down the hillside. The man, dead before he hit the floor, fell backwards. Scott pushed inside, the door partially blocked by the dead man’s feet. He dragged the body out of the way, pushed the door shut, locked it, looked for the light switches, found them, and turned off the lights.
And sat, his ears still ringing, waiting for headlights, for the cops to respond to the gunshot.
Five minutes, ten minutes…and nobody came.
Still in the dark, he checked the old man’s pockets, found his keys and cell phone, then tugged the body to the back of the trailer, to a section walled off as a bedroom. He managed to push the old man under the bed and pulled the bedcover down to hide him further. And waited. Twenty minutes, a half hour.
He turned the lights back on, saw a long streak of blood on the linoleum floor. He got a towel from the tiny bathroom, wet it, and cleaned up the blood, throwing the towel under the bed with the old man. If somebody should check the trailer, Scott wanted the old man gone, not dead. The AK47 was there on the floor. He picked it up, thought about it, couldn’t see how he could use it, and shoved it under the bed with the old man’s body.
He looked at his watch: four forty. Still operating in the dark, he found the refrigerator and pulled it open. Eggs, milk, ratty-looking blocks of cheese, gray hamburger, a six-pack of Tecate beer, a bag of fresh carrots. He took the carrots out of the bag, sat on the only chair, and looked at the cell phone. An iPhone, but older. The phone wouldn’t open; it would be extremely useful if he could make it work.
Crunching on a carrot, he went to the bedroom window and looked out: no lights anywhere, nobody to see a light in the trailer—he hoped. He turned on the bedroom light, pulled the old man’s head and shoulders out from under the bed, arranged his head so his face was turned upward. The man’s eyes were mostly closed; he thumbed the eyelids up, pressed them to hold them in place, then clicked the power button and the screen lit up. He held the screen over the old man’s face, and the phone opened.
Thank you, Apple. He pushed the body back under the bed, turned off the light, and groped his way back to the chair. The phone chargewas at one hundred percent. He immediately went to “settings” and changed the screen time-out to “never.” He ate another carrot, and further considered his options, which had widened with a smartphone unknown to the cops; he had access to current maps. Once he got off the High Road, and past Santa Fe, he could take back roads all the way to the Albuquerque airport. The police couldn’t choke off every street in Albuquerque.
—
A television satat the back of the kitchen table, where it could be watched from the chair. Using the smartphone’s flashlight, he moved the television under the table, dug around in a storage closet and found a quilt, which he draped over the table. That done, he used a remote to turn the television on, switched through the channels until he found one from Albuquerque, then crawled out from under the quilt and checked the light-tightness. With a few rearrangements of the quilt, no light escaped from the television.
Back under the table, he waited for the start of a news program; when he found one, the Taos story was right at the top.
Talking head: “The military operation in Taos continues, with more than a hundred men, women, and children locked in St. Dymphna Catholic Church, where a Santa Fe woman was believed to have spread a deadly virus. Nobody is being allowed in or out of Taos, and Army MPs from Fort Bliss are conducting a house-to-house search of neighborhoods that might hide the accused mastermind of the viral terror attack, British doctor Lionel Scott…”
She continued: “Reporters were not allowed to enter Taos, but KOAT has a stringer in Taos who filed this report via the Internet…”
Scott watched, fascinated, a reasonably well-shot video of two menin U.S. Marshal jackets kicking in the door of a house while helmet-wearing soldiers were arrayed around the house with rifles. The broadcast included head shots of Catton and Scott: Scott was pleased to see that he was perfectly clean-shaven in the photo. He’d been working on a beard at the ski village, and now had a quarter-inch of silvery facial hair. Not wonderful, but better than being bare-faced.
So the authorities thought he was still in Taos. Okay. Now, he needed to move fast. When they didn’t find him, they might start spreading a wider net. He got the truck keys, cellphone, revolver and carrots, checked in both directions along the road, locked the trailer, got in the truck and started it. A slender wire stretched out of an unseen connection on the dash: a charger for the phone. He plugged it in, and with a last look around, rolled out to the highway and turned south, the iPhone’s mapping app guiding him along the way.
Catton was dead. She’d infected a church, but the church was now quarantined, and nobody was allowed out. Scott rubbed his temples. Had anyone escaped from the church? The authorities didn’t seem to know for sure, but most of the churchgoers were still inside, and the Army had set up a chain-link fence to prevent runaways.
It was all on his shoulders now.
—
Letty and Hawkins,fortified with Cartwright’s eye-openers, were up all night, as Cartwright slept, waiting to see if Scott showed up in Albuquerque. They passed the time by walking around the airport approaches, speculating on whether he’d try for another airport, or even another transportation nexus, like a rail or bus station.
“His problem is that everyone is looking for him,” Letty said. “His face is everywhere, people are freaking out and turning in everyonewith a British accent. A bus station or a railroad station wouldn’t have enough people inside to risk getting turned in. An airport…he wouldn’t have to actually get in the gates. He’d just have to contaminate the approaches.”
“But he’d have to sneak away somehow,” Hawkins objected. “If he was spotted in the airport, everything would be shut down and everyone would be quarantined.”
“So he’ll come here, but he’ll try something clever,” Letty said.
“Disguise himself as a nun, perhaps?”
“Maybe not a nun, but something,” Letty said.
“You were right about Santa Fe. Maybe you’ll be right about Albuquerque.”
