Dany can just make out the ruined rails of the roller coaster, its black bones rising into the sky. She knows better than to be here. Knows to leave well enough alone. Knows the smart thing to do is turn her back and say goodbye. She knows all of this, but it’s not so easy letting go of those you love. So Dany takes one step and then another, huffing her way up the hill, as her kid sister falls behind.
When they crest the hill, she sees the whole of the prison. The old racetrack is girded by fences, each topped with razor wire. Where once were horses, she sees infected. Where once were grooms, she sees prisoners in orange jumpsuits. And watching over all of them, inside and out, military guards.
Below them, scattered across the face of the hill, a dozen little groups. The families of the women they’ve locked up inside. Some cluster around foam coolers, some sit on what scant grass can be found and some, she can tell, have given up on the visit. Laid out on old blankets, their faces are tuned to the clouds. Some, like her, have one eye on the prison-hospice. Dany is scanning the compound when the kid’s tiny hand slips into hers. Tugs once, twice.
“Give me a sec,” she tells Mac. Dany wants to see Aunt Norah, but there’s no sign of their aunt. Not yet. But there, just inside the fence, Dany spots a chicken coop. Beside the coop, a half dozen birds are stacked in tiny cages. Stunned and ragged, the birds shift on bony feet. In one of the cages, a bird lays dead. Its legs jut out, stiff as Popsicle sticks.
There’s an old and stunted apple tree at the bottom of the hill. But it’s not nearly tall enough, and besides, it’s too far from the fence. But there, beyond the apple tree, she sees an enormous maple with leaves the size of dishrags. The maple is close to the fence, and a few of its branches arch up and over the barbed wire. Her eyes follow the largest branch, trace a path over the razor wire, make the ten-foot drop to the chicken coop’s roof.
Again with the tugging, but Dany is looking at the racecourse – an oval track dotted with a hundred of the infected. More virals than she’s ever seen together in one place.
Stick thin legs. Sallow skin. A strange human herd.
Onlyherd isn’t the right word. Together like this, the infected don’t move like any group of animals Dany’s ever seen. They don’t move like a crowd of people, either. Each viral’s path is erratic. When she traces pathways over the track, she sees dark particles in a stirred glass. Atoms in Brownian motion. And then a picture of the virals lives in her mental album,
