“You have to tell me,” she said. “Was it the Ivies? Where are they? What are they doing?”

“It was the . . . Blood Man.”

“The Blood Man?” Kira tied off the bandage and started probing the rest of his body for wounds. There was too much blood to have come just from the wrist . . . and then she found it, a gaping hole in his gut where blood mixed with viscera. She reeled back at the stench. “This stab wound perforated your intestine,” she said, swallowing her disgust. “You need antibiotics.”

“The Blood Man,” he croaked. “They serve the Blood Man.”

“The Ivies?” asked Kira. She looked around wildly for something to stanch the bleeding in his abdomen, but she knew he wouldn’t make it. They were too far from anyone who could help, even if she could find a way to move him. She grunted in frustration and simply ripped her own shirt, several inches off the bottom hem, and shoved the wad into his wound.

“You have to run,” he said, his raw voice painful just to listen to. “They’ll want yours too.”

“My hand?”

“Your blood.”

She saw a flash of movement from the lake—not on the water, but under it, the dark black shadow of a massive fish.

“What’s going on here?”

DEATH

The water erupted in a geyser, a pale white figure bursting up by the edge of the dock and grabbing Kira’s arm. She screamed, backing away, fumbling for her gun, but the pale figure yanked her forward and she lost her balance, tumbling toward the water. The last thing she saw was his neck flaring open, wide fishlike gills flapping delicately in the open air, and then her face hit the water and the world went black.

Chapter Twenty-one

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Samm dreamed about Kira.

They were walking together through the ruins of old Illinois—not the flooded necropolis of Chicago, and not the toxic badlands west of the Mississippi River, but the rolling fields and wide, flat nothingness between them. They walked, hand in hand. Birds circled lazily in the sky above them, and herds of wild mustangs roamed from field to field, trampling the fences that separated the vast checkerboard of empty farms, running free in a world that didn’t remember the war, the Break, or anything but sun and wind and rain and stars. They drank from cool streams and lay on their backs staring up at the moon, finding shapes and faces in the craters. The world was still and ancient and new, and they were together.

The dreams never lasted. Samm woke up, bleary-eyed, and stared numbly at the faded walls of the old business office he used as an apartment.