Instead of joining the highway down in the valley on the Talas side, they fled via a smaller road up and over the ridgeline above the village. At the crest, Marcus turned and looked down the valley. Toward Talas, distant confusion, a strange glow that shifted colors and made the horizon roil with menace. The lights from planes or helicopters cut through air, fading in and out as if passing through banks of thick cloud. He thought he could see large shapes moving in the valley, but each time he tried to focus on one it seemed to blend into the mirk and vanish.

He knew, though. Horrors were out there. The certainty of it made his skin crawl.

He pulled his gaze in to what mattered, the people he cared about. The caravan of jokers crept upward under the bone-grey highlights of a full moon. The truck Olena had commandeered in Talas led the way, its engine rumbling loud despite the fact that it inched forward at a walking pace. The bed was crammed with children and the old, and those for whom walking was hard, or impossible. Behind it came the rest of the village’s vehicles: Timur’s truck, an old Russian-made van, a car missing doors on one side, another pulling a makeshift trailer piled high with supplies, and a motorcycle that looked absurd beneath the three teenage boys who shared it. In among the motorized vehicles, a procession of wagons creaked along, drawn by an old nag, a mule, and a joker who looked more like a white bull than like the man he’d once been. Many just walked.

Silently, Marcus wondered, How are we ever going to make it? Five hundred miles … It seemed an impossible distance, but it was the only way. He wouldn’t leave them.

Neither, apparently, would Olena. She’d had a dustup with her father, both of them speaking machine-gun rapid Ukrainian. Marcus wasn’t sure what she’d said, but she must’ve had him by the balls in some way or another. Instead of liquifying Timur and just taking his truck, Vasel had stood by impatiently as they packed. Now, he kept pace beside Olena’s truck, continuing to lecture her, gesturing his frustration with his entire body. He still scared the hell out of Marcus, but not the way he had as the cool customer who had first shown up in a helicopter with a mini-army at his call. He was jumpy in a way he hadn’t been before. There was fear in him. And just that fact chilled Marcus, underlined how real this all was.