“Don’t move!” I tell him, and, astonishingly, he doesn’t. I feel a surge of power and with it a ridiculous sense of embarrassment, talking like that, acting out this ancient and improbable ritual borrowed from so many fictions. “Drop your gun!” I say, and again I’m shocked when he does. I kick it across the room, toward Zun. Abdul stands there, benumbed, as I cut Valerie free. As I pull the gag from her mouth she screams and points behind me. Brandishing the hard hat like a cestus, Qazwini bears down on us. His skull is a scrambled omelet. Blood covers his face, drips from his thuggish jaw. I fire and miss but the next three shots take him in the belly and the chest. Still he keeps coming, a wrecking crew, a war party, harder to kill than Rasputin. The fifth slug catches him (did some god of rectitude guide my trembling hand?) in the genitals. He falls, finally at the end of his extraordinary capacities. Two pools of blood, one above, one below, mingle, spread.

Abdul dives for his gun. His fingers close over the grip as I shoot him. I don’t know where the rounds hit.

His spittled mouth hangs open. His eyes hold a sad, flat puzzlement. Tonelessly, fumblingly, he murmurs, “Why you do that?” He falls. I stand over him, doubly tainted by this second murder, astonished by what I have done, exalted by the violence I so thoroughly disapproved of. Suddenly I feel sick, faint. Think about it later, I try to tell myself. Abdul looks up at me. He says, “You. My best friend…”

“Let’s go,” I say to Valerie, grabbing her hand.

“Go where?”

“The compound. Get a chopper from Grady and take the hell off.”

“You can’t go out there,” she says sharply. “Don’t you know the whole damned place is radioactive?”

My scalp tingles, my heart loops. Of course, I think. What other explanation could there possibly be for the thunders and the flames, the clouds of smoke that swirled in the sky to the south. The howling dogs, the silent birds. We’re up to our ears in another nuke apocalypse, our very own Three Mile Island.

“How do you know?”

“All I know is, Qazwini came bopping in here with one of his guys on guard duty out there, a couple of hours before you showed up. Then Abdul told me the reactor had gone haywire, that he was leaving the country and he was taking me with him. I said I wasn’t leaving, no way, not without you. Jesus,” Val says, “what’ll we do?”

“We’d better start walking,” I say. “Into the wind, before it changes.”