"Unless your immunity theory is correct."
Alex was amused to see annoyance on several faces. Even at civilization's end, society's rejects were still shunned—by organisms from outer space.
"If Siegel is right, we are only in danger from external attack," said Alex. "That means that we, and other people like us, are the last chance the human race has got."
"But even if she is right," Elvin said in typically flat tones, "that doesn't mean that they can never find a way to infect us."
"If they could have done it, they would have by now," argued Mavis. "They're fresh out of healthy people, so they should have started in on us a long time ago."
"That seems to be a reasonable assumption, given what we know now, but we can't be sure they won't find a way to start in on us once their food supply is completely gone."
"That means that this abomination has to be driven from the face of the Earth," Samuel intoned.
At any other time, Alex might have smiled at Samuel's declaration, but not now. Samuel was right; the only way to win was to drive them from the earth. That, however, didn't seem possible.
Nevertheless, the guerrillas were stirred up. They had won a few skirmishes in recent days. Even if these were not major victories, the little group had taken heart from them, and the setbacks they had suffered had not discouraged them. Alex considered this a healthy trend.
"What about that woman of yours," Polly asked Alex. "Are you sure she isn't infected anymore?"
"I don't think she is," Siegel answered for him. "We'll know for sure when she wakes us, though."
"You mean you left her alone? She could be opening the front door of the armory right now."
"Unlikely. She's physically exhausted. She won't be up for at least twelve hours. We'll talk to her then, and we'll find out if the colloid has left her body."
That assertion seemed to quiet them, but a dark, repressed fear mushroomed again in Alex's consciousness. What if Jo's mind had been destroyed by the colloid?
"Do you think you can hold down some food?" Siegel asked.
"I'd sure like to try," Jo said, smiling wanly.
Alex smiled, too. She seemed to have shaken the colloid. Unless it was even cleverer than they believed it to be, it was gone. But did that mean that it was dead, or merely that it had left Jo's body in search of another host? Well, it would have to travel quite a distance to find a healthy brain, and it was no longer in its drifting, dormant stage. Most likely, it couldn't live outside the host for even a brief period.
"There are some jars of baby food in our stores," Siegel said. "Those would probably be the best thing for you right now."
"Pabulum?" Jo said. "Sounds great."
"I'll get it in a minute." Siegel shook a thermometer. "In the meantime, stick this in your mouth."
As soon as they were left alone, Alex bent and kissed Jo on the cheek. She put her arms around him and held him to her with what little strength she had.
"Thank you for staying with me through it all, Alex," she said. "I don't know if I could have made it without you."
"You would have made it, Jo," he said. "You've got a will of iron."
"Alex," Riquelme's voice came from outside the door, "there's something you should see."
"I'll be right back," he said to Jo. Taking the Ingram, he went out to see what it was. They went to a window, where Riquelme pointed down at the street. Nobody was out there.
"They're gone," Riquelme said. "For the first time since we came here, they're gone."
Alex opened the window and stuck his head outside. There was nothing moving. This should have been a welcome sight, but he found it disturbing instead. Why would the colloids want to surrender the armory to the guerrillas, without leaving even a token force to continue the siege?
Siegel approached. "Alex, what is it?"
"The infected are gone. The streets are empty."
"Then the fourth stage must have begun," Siegel said. "That's the only logical explanation."
"But why would all of them leave?"
"Perhaps they are all needed somewhere else now."
"Needed? For what?"
"I don't know, Alex, but I suppose we'll find out in due time."
Siegel and Elvin went off, leaving Alex to ponder this unexpected turn of events. It occurred to him that the smartest thing for him to do was to go outside and try to find out where the infected had gone. It seemed a sensible plan, but he hated to leave Jo alone so soon after her ordeal. He supposed that she would be safe enough here, though, with Dr. Siegel to look after her.
He gathered enough provisions to last a few days, cleaned the Ingram, and slipped out through the fire exit on Cuthbert Street. Except for a scurrying rat, he saw no signs of life at all in the mid-morning streets. It was a cloudy day, though it didn't look to Alex as if it were going to rain. The weather was unseasonably warm, in fact, somewhere in the mid-fifties as he set out.
It seemed logical to ford the river and find out what things were like in Center City these days. Since there was nobody around, he saw little risk in crossing by bridge instead of passing through the tunnel.
Half an hour later, he stood in the shadow of One Liberty Place, a sixty-one storey skyscraper. The huge, neo-deco tower had been left miraculously untouched during the war, except for a few broken windows. Its silver-blue spire was luminous against the glowering clouds, a gigantic tombstone overlooking a cemetery that had once been a thriving city.
"Shit," Alex said softly. "Where is everybody?" At this point, he almost would have been relieved to see a colloid. The city seemed picked clean of life, as if nothing could exist here ever again. A barren garden, sown with salt.
He wandered through the side streets and alleys, hoping to find someone, anyone. He could almost believe that the entire population of the Earth had vanished, except for his little band of guerrillas. But that seemed highly unlikely. There were many others like them, neurologically damaged people everywhere. They all had a chance; they might die by the hands of the infected, but they could not contract the disease themselves. There were thousands of mentally ill people in Philadelphia alone, millions in North America. Perhaps tens or even hundreds of millions worldwide. If they could come together as a fighting force, then the colloids would have something to worry about.
"You alone?" The voice came from behind him.
Alex turned quickly, crouching and looking for cover. But there were only stone walls on either side of the narrow alley. He pointed the Ingram at the person who had spoken.
"Don't shoot," the bedraggled Asian-American kid said. "I'm not one of them, please believe me."
Alex lowered the barrel of the Ingram. "I'm sorry," he said. "But you shouldn't have come up behind me that way."
"I was afraid you'd get away before I could talk to you. You don't know how long it's been since I've had somebody to talk to."
"Well, you'll have plenty of people to talk to, if you come with me. What's your name?"
"Tony. Tony Chang. What's yours?"
"Alex Ward." Alex stepped forward and extended his right hand. Tony's grip was firm, but he was so thin that Alex suspected he hadn't eaten for days. "If you know a good place to sit down, Tony, I've got some rations. Why don't we eat and compare notes?"
"Sounds good to me," Tony said. "I know just the place."
Tony led Alex to a Burger King. The front wall had been blasted inward, but in the back were a couple of intact booths. They sat down at one and Alex opened the rations, offering some to Tony before he took any for himself. Tony ate slowly, in spite of his intense hunger, savoring every bite.
"Do you know where they all went?" Alex asked.
"No, but I saw them moving toward the river."
"How many?"
"There must have been thousands of them. Others were joining them all the time, like they were migrating or something."
"Heading south, like snowbirds?"
"No, it looked like they were going north."
"Going north for the winter. Not very smart."
Tony looked at him as if he didn't understand, and then he burst into laughter. "No, not very smart."
"What could they be up to?" Alex said.
Tony shook his head. "I don't know, but I'm glad to see them going away from here."
"Yeah, but where do you suppose they're headed?"
"To hell, I hope."
"Look, Tony, I'm going to follow them, try to find out what's going on. Do you want to come with me?"
"Come with you? Look, we just got rid of them. Why push our luck?"
"Because they're probably planning something worse than what's already happened."
"Shit, what could be worse?"
"Whatever it is, it will be the final blow to what's left of the human race."
"You think so?"
"They haven't got far to go."
Tony smiled. "You really think we can fight back, don't you, Alex?"
"I know we can. We've won several battles already. And we've found a way to fight infection."
"How?"
"We've got a drug that can drive a colloid out of a human body. It's been tried successfully once."
"Really?"
"We also think that some people are immune to infection. You might be one of those."
"You mean all this time I didn't have to worry?"
"I don't know about that. A lot of people who weren't infected have been killed."
"Tell me about it." Tony loked as if he were not ready to buy this theory. "Why are some people immune?" he asked.
"The colloids tend to stay away from people who have suffered neurological damage."
Tony stared straight at him, and then burst into laughter. "You mean, after growing up my whole life with people not accepting me, now some virus doesn't accept me, either?"
"Something like that." That had crossed Alex's mind more than once; he and Tony were on the same wavelength.
Throwing back his head, Tony laughed until tears came to his eyes. "Wow! I always knew I had been put on this Earth for some special purpose. But when I told people that, they said I was nuts and put me away."
"Well, you're alive and those who said you're nuts probably aren't. Maybe you
were
put on earth for some special purpose. I'm not very religious, but if I were, I'd probably believe that God, in his infinite wisdom, had created us poor unfortunates to save the world."
"I know you're not serious, but it's the sort of thing a smart preacher or politician could make work for him," Tony said. "Rhetoric to get the blood boiling among the masses."
"Who can argue with a little well placed fire and brimstone?" said Alex.
"We could probably use some of that fire and brimstone, if we're going to follow the infected on their Conga Line to New Jersey, or wherever they're going."
Alex smiled, realizing that Tony intended to go with him. "You don't have a gun, do you?"
"No, and I don't want one."
"Let me guess . . . you're a secret master of Tae Kwan Do?"
"Something like that." Tony grinned knowingly, and Alex didn't know whether to take him seriously or not. That was the trouble with crazy people—you never knew if what they said had any basis in reality.
"So," Alex asked, "you coming with me, Tony?"
"Why not?"
They finished eating and walked through the blasted wall of the Burger King, out onto Chestnut Street. They headed north to Race Street and made their way east, toward the Delaware River. The remains of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge was a cat's cradle of twisted, blue girders on the Pennsylvania side; over on the New Jersey side, the riverfront was a gaping hole where the bridge's pilings had stood.
"Camden has never looked lovelier," Tony said.
"If I saw before-and-after photos, I could hardly tell the difference," Alex agreed, enjoying the old Philadelphia game of making fun of New Jersey, "except for that crater where the bridge abutments used to stand. Those bombed-out buildings behind it don't look much different than they used to."
"The Walt Whitman Bridge is still standing in South Philly," Tony said.
Alex nodded. "I'm relieved to know that I won't have to swim to Jersey, if I ever get the urge to go over there again."
"An old Chinese proverb: 'Every cloud has a silver lining.'"
"Is that Chinese?"
Tony shrugged. "Who knows?"
They walked a little further before Tony said, "We'll be coming up on the interstate in a few minutes. We should get out of sight as soon as . . . "
Alex shushed him, pushing him into an alleyway. Someone was walking in the street ahead. Not one, but several people. They were shambling up the ramp toward the interstate highway.
And on the highway, like an insectile army, thousands of the infected moved toward the north, slowly but with unmistakable purpose.
"It looks like these are the stragglers," Alex said. "Once they've gone, the city will be deserted, except for the uninfected."
"What about full-grown colloids?" Tony said.
Alex thought about that, and realized that he hadn't seen a single colloid all day. "They seem to be gone already. I don't know how they did it, though."
"Maybe they're hibernating in the city someplace."
"Wouldn't that be great? If we could just find their hiding places, we could burn them all alive."
"That would warm our hearts, wouldn't it?"
"We better get closer, instead of daydreaming."
"Closer?" Tony said.
"How else can we find out anything about them?"
"Yeah." Tony seemed resigned to go through with this. Perhaps human companionship was more important to him than safety. In any case, Alex was glad to have his company, not to mention his help.
Keeping themselves out of sight as much as possible, they advanced by fits and starts. Now hiding in the shadow of an abandoned car or building, now dashing quickly to a shattered wall, they attempted to minimize the time spent in the open as much as possible, while they methodically approached the highway.
Zigzagging in a generally northeast direction, they soon found themselves at a complex of old, brick storage buildings, rusting rails leading away from them like blood trails. They walked on packed gravel blackened by a century of soot and oil, climbing a hill that led to a concrete wall. The wall bordered the west side of the interstate for a couple of miles where the six-lane highway stretched toward the northeast. It was brightly painted with colorful murals depicting city life, a relic of the seventies.