“How do we get back over the border?” Jimmy asked. There were four of us now in Harrigan’s car, and we were feeling anxious and hemmed in despite the roomy interior.

“It might not be as difficult as all that,” said Ruth. “They don’t want anyone to leave the U.S. given the quarantine, but they will likely allow medical personnel to enter.”

“And that’s what we are,” Harrigan added. “Medical personnel. Dr. Baxter has her own identification; I’ve got ours.” How that man worked so fast, I’ll never know; he’d only had the previous night to get together whatever appropriate documentation he thought we’d need.

Ruth was right; the border guard glanced at what we gave him and seemed to shrug an “it’s your funeral” at us before letting us across. Rather than being a relief to me, I felt my anxiety growing at how quickly we overcame our first obstacle. It was too easy, and it didn’t seem likely that anything ahead would ever be easy again.

Ruth’s revelation would seem to have put Harrigan in an odd position — after all, his clients’ main purpose was to get the “longevity formula,” and only Ruth Baxter had it, not Gerald Lindstrom. But their specific directions, he pointed out, had been to find Dr. Lindstrom. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “that’s still my goal.”

I still wasn’t sure I believed him — Harrigan’s story about his clients continued to seem fishy — and if his assertion was meant to assure Ruth Baxter that she was safe with us, it hardly mattered, as Ruth Baxter seemed to have little interest in anything Harrigan or Jimmy had to say. She had given them and herself a “makeshift vaccine” that she had created a while back, having known what Lindstrom’s potential tricks might be. “No guarantees,” she warned. “It may only provide temporary immunity, if that. As long as we keep moving, we should be OK.”

We kept moving — there was little to stop us. Nobody else was on the road. Harrigan had put a number of gas canisters in his trunk so we wouldn’t have to stop frequently to refuel (and, importantly, could refuel in places that didn’t seem like perfect targets for ambush the way an interstate gas station did). Ruth would not tell us the grand plan; she would only give Harrigan vague driving directions — which interstate to take, when to switch to a country road, which routes to avoid, where to turn. I wasn’t sure she even had a grand plan worked out in entirety; at times, despite her steely exterior, she seemed to be holding her breath just a little, her eyes darting from one side of the road to the next, uncertain, anxious. Just as we all are these days.

After one of the refueling stops, Harrigan, perhaps annoyed at Ruth’s cryptic commands, decided to challenge her. “I don’t think we should continue this way, Dr. Baxter. The roads were in sad shape when we drove up, and since we aren’t going back to the city, there’s no reason we shouldn’t take another route.”

“We are going to the city,” she replied crisply.

It was not what any of us thought she would say. “Are you telling me the most wanted man in the world is hiding in the middle of Manhattan?” Jimmy’s incredulity must have shown in all our faces; it seemed beyond unlikely that Lindstrom had been practically our neighbor all this time. Of course it wasn’t an impossibility — I myself had discovered that it was a lot easier to hide in a crowd than away from one — but it was hard not to feel like we had been chasing our own tails for the past week.

And yet this was not the Manhattan we had left. The city’s silence and stillness unnerved me, not because there was no life in anywhere but because there was plenty of life everywhere, only it was suppressed life, life we could sense in every building and house, crying from every window and door, but unseen, unmoving, helpless.

We didn’t see movement at all until we neared Central Park, when we suddenly came upon what looked like a scene from the Great Depression: nearly a hundred people of all ages on foot, carrying very little but trudging as though burdened with tremendous weight. They froze almost in unison when they heard our car, and as we got closer we could see the looks on their faces: not fear but resignation. For a moment these people, all of them, thought they had run out of luck. When they saw us, when it was clear we weren’t going to harm them, that looked vanished, though what replaced it wasn’t quite relief.

Harrigan slowed cautiously, rolled down his window halfway and addressed a clump of people who had moved aside just enough not to get run over by the car but not so much that we could pass by easily — which, I imagine, was their goal. There was an odd silence that followed his questions about who they were, as though nobody was sure what to say, even though it had to be one of the easier questions to answer.

“Wiley,” a pale, middle-aged man finally answered. “We’re all from Wiley. Upstate,” he added unnecessarily — these were clearly not Manhattan hipsters.

I had never heard of Wiley, New York, though there were an awful lot of tiny towns upstate that no one in the city ever heard of. This might have been the entire population of the town.

“Have you been infected?” Ruth asked from the back seat.

“No,” the pale man said quickly. “We’ve been walking a long time, that’s all. Our cars ran out of gas before we got into the city and none of the gas stations were open.” He did not answer the real question we all wanted to know: what were they doing here? Not one of them said another word, just stood and stared, mostly at me. I’m used to that, yet there was still something profoundly unsettling about the whole bunch of them. I darted my eyes toward Harrigan and I could see his suspicion radar going bonkers as well. New York was where the virus had originated; who in their right mind would go toward it? Besides us, of course, though we were here because of Ruth, and I wasn’t all that sure of her right-mindedness.

Suddenly a woman at the edge of the crowd shrieked. “Look out!”

Another car was approaching behind us. It wasn’t traveling especially fast — in fact, if anything it slowed as it came nearer, but that seemed even more frightening than if it had been thundering down the road. The car was small, white, and ordinary, but the citizens of Wiley seemed to recognize it or at least what its purpose here was and ran in twos and threes into the park, spreading themselves out in anticipation of what would come — whatever that was.

“What the fuck,” Jimmy choked.

He was looking ahead and not behind. Ahead two motorcycles came roaring toward us, not slowing down one bit. It was clear the riders intended to go after the small white car. It was also clear that both riders carried shotguns, and that they were both small woman with dark hair.

“What do we do,” Jimmy whispered as though he might give away our position, right there in the middle of everything.

Each of us had a gun — many people did these days. Harrigan had several — an impressive array. None of this seemed to give us comfort.

Brakes screeched. The car turned around. The driver’s window opened as it retreated, and something was flung toward the fleeing people on foot. A canister, like an aerosol spray can, spewing a faint white mist.

The virus. It was being spread just as Ruth had described.

I watched the canister in mid-flight. It exploded in a ball of fire. The explosion wasn’t loud or strong but all four of us were knocked to the floor of the car in shock.

“The fuck,” Jimmy echoed.

Undeterred, the driver lobbed another canister. It, too, exploded. The women on the motorcycles were shooting them down.

“That’ll spread it,” Harrigan growled.

“No,” Ruth said. “The virus won’t survive the explosion.”

“Who are these people?” Jimmy asked. I didn’t answer him, and yet, though I had no idea who had been in the car, I knew who the motorcyclists were: two women who looked an awful lot like me.

+

He’d joined his neighbor’s stupid militant group in order to get the vaccine — and in order to find out more about Gerald Lindstrom. Frustratingly, he found out nothing — there were at least a dozen captains and lieutenants and other such idiots in the chain of command, all of whom likely had zero contact with the man. So instead of useful information he was only given some canisters and told to cover a designated 20-square blocks of Manhattan. He wanted to laugh out loud at that: he, the Lao Baby Killer, was being told what to do, expected to take a bunch of aerosol spraycans and skulk around the upper west side spraying people with a virus that gave them fatigue. And all the while a half dozen grenades tucked in the lining of his vest. He almost dropped the box of canisters and turned away right then and there, but then they told him about them. He stopped, listened, decided to at least pretend to go along with the group for the sake of this very useful new information. He had no intention of following their orders and fulfilling their silly mission. He had his own mission to accomplish.

It seemed they were out there, no longer in hiding, actively seeking out the group members to thwart them. It also seemed that they were naturally immune to the virus. He knew something they weren’t immune to, though.