He drove six blocks to Lomas Boulevard. This part of the city still had power. The road luminous with streetlights, traffic lights, the glow of fast-food restaurant signs that stretched for a quarter mile in either direction like a glowing mirage of civilization. Jack pulled through a red light and into the empty westbound lanes. The orange reserve tank light clicked on.

As they passed through the university’s medical campus, someone stepped out into the road, and Jack had to swerve to miss them.

Dee said something.

“What?”

“Go back,” she shouted.

“Are you crazy?”

“That was a patient.”

He turned around in the empty boulevard and drove back toward the hospital and pulled over to the curb. The patient already halfway across the road and staggering barefoot like he might topple-tall and gaunt, his head shaved, a scythe-shaped scar curving from just above his left ear across the top of his scalp, the kind of damage it would have taken a couple hundred stitches to close. The wind rode the gown up his toothpick legs.

Jack lowered his window as the man collided breathlessly into his door. He tried to speak but he was gulping down breaths of air and emanating the hospital stench of sanitized death.

At last the man raised his head off his forearms and said in a voice gone soft and raspy from disuse, “What’s happening? I woke up several hours ago. The doctors and nurses are gone.”

Jack said, “How long have you been in the hospital?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know how you got there?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re in Albuquerque.”

“I know that. I live here.”

Jack shifted into park, eyeing the rearview mirror. “It’s October fifth-”

“October?”

“Things started about a week ago.”

“What things?”

“At first, it was just bits on the news that would catch your attention. A murder in a good neighborhood. A hit-and-run. But the reports kept coming and there were more everyday and they got more violent and unbelievable. It wasn’t just happening here. It was all over the country. A police officer in Phoenix went on a shooting rampage in an elementary school and then a nursing home. There were fifty home invasions in one night in Salt Lake. Homes were being burned. Just horrific acts of violence.”