The Cooler Man. That’s what all the kids called him. The Cooler Man on Beverly Glen Boulevard.

Sam had been six or seven when he’d first seen the Cooler Man. Sam’s mom had been driving, and Sam had been sitting there in the passenger seat, staring out at the city going by. Then they’d stopped at a light, and just like that the Cooler Man was there, standing on the curb six feet away, staring in at him. The cooler in question was a little green-and-white thing, big enough to hold a few sandwiches and a soda can, maybe. The man held it low in his left hand, where it jerked in spastic little twitches.

Ah shit, not this guy, Sam’s mom had said. Don’t look at him, he’s got a couple gears missing.

Sam knew what that meant—that the Cooler Man was crazy—but even then, that very first time, he didn’t believe it. Sam had seen plenty of crazy people on the streets. He knew what crazy looked like. It was all in the eyes.

But there was nothing crazy about the Cooler Man’s eyes. That was part of what made him so scary—the fact that he appeared normal. He looked at you the way a teacher in the hallway might look at you, right before asking if you had permission to be out of class. The Cooler Man would just stand there on the street corner, staring at you like it was the most ordinary thing in the world … and then he would move.

He would turn and seem to lose his balance for a second, then throw himself forward in a lunge that turned into a run, fifteen or twenty feet in some random direction on the sidewalk. Pedestrians would flinch and pull their kids out of his way. He would offer a little wave sometimes, like, Hey, sorry about that. And then he would jerk to a halt, and get his balance, and look around, and do it all over again. The Cooler Man. He had been a regular fixture on Beverly Glen Boulevard until Sam was ten years old, and then he’d disappeared. Maybe he’d gone off to unnerve people someplace else.

That was how the afflicted moved. Like the Cooler Man. They weren’t slow or shuffling or lethargic, like zombies on TV. They lunged. They ran.

As Sam watched, a fourth body on one of the lawns twitched and rolled over and got up on all fours. A man in his thirties or forties, it looked like. He was wearing khaki shorts and a black T-shirt. He hunkered there on the grass like a crouching chimp, jerking his gaze left and right.

Then the man’s attention locked onto something: a utility box near the sidewalk, a grey metal structure the size of a big suitcase.