“Carrie was with you,” he says, trying not to scream in her face. “Do you know where she went?”

Mary seems to come back to life. She points.

Danny looks. Toward the woods. He turns to run, but she reaches out and grabs his arm with surprising strength.

The focus is back in her eyes. She looks at Danny. “She’s lost a lot of blood by now. That tourniquet can only do so much. You understand, Danny? She is probably in deep shock. She needs a hospital. Right away. Or she will die.”

Danny nods. She lets him go.

That’s when, over the thunder of the fight between Eric and Colchester, Danny hears a gunshot.

He sees Alana, looking like she has been through a war, walk to her daughter. They embrace, and Alana takes her sword back from Grace.

Danny doesn’t have time to wait for them. He slaps the bus and yells at Tyler to start driving. “Get out of here! Go!”

He races headlong into the dark.

He starts with a basic grid search pattern. He tries to be organized and logical. But as the clock in his head counts down, measuring the amount of time he thinks Carrie must have left, he breaks down and simply runs in ever-larger circles. He finds more bodies. But not hers.

Then he stumbles down the far side of the hill. Carrie is on the ground by Buzz. Buzz is quite clearly dead, the top half of his skull missing.

Carrie doesn’t move when he grabs her. She barely opens her eyes.

“Oh sure,” she says softly. “Now you come to say goodbye…”

She passes out completely. He checks her pulse. It is fast and weak, like the fluttering wings of a bird. Her skin is cold. He shakes her. She won’t open her eyes, even when he says her name. Even when he shouts it. She will not wake up.

Danny feels, for an instant, an overwhelming sensation of loss and rage. He cannot lose her now. It wouldn’t be fair. That would just be stupid.

The cool, computerlike part of his brain clicks on again.

He does the math. They are thirty minutes from the hospital under ideal conditions, and these are not ideal conditions. The buses are gone, grinding their way down the hill with their own wounded. Even if he calls 911 and gets an ambulance out here, it will be an hour before she is in an operating room. Minimum.

That’s not good enough.

Danny thinks harder. Then he has a solution. He almost always has a solution. This one, like so much else tonight, is locked away in the past. But it’s all he’s got.

Carrie would have remembered it immediately, of course.