The virals were a problem, sure—about forty-two and a half million problems, if the old documents in the HD shed behind the Lighthouse were correct. A whole history of the epidemic in its final hours, for Michael the Circuit to read. “CV1-CV13 National and Regional Summary of Select Surveillance Components,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia; “Civilian Resettlement Protocols for Urban Centers, Zones 6–1,” Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C.; “Efficacy of Postexposure Protection Against CV Familial Hemorrhagic Fever in Nonhuman Primates,” United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, Fort Derrick, Maryland. And so on, in that vein. Some of which he understood, some of which he didn’t, but all saying the same basic thing. One person in ten. One person taken up for every nine that died. So, assuming a human population of 500 million at the time of the outbreak—the combined populations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico—and forestalling, for the moment, the question of the rest of the world, about which very little seemed to be known—and even assuming some kind of mortality rate for the virals themselves, say a modest 15 percent—that still left 42.5 million of the bloodthirsty bastards bouncing around between the Panamanian Isthmus and the Bering Frontier, gobbling up everything with hemoglobin in its veins and a heat signature between 36 and 38 degrees, i.e., 99.96 percent of the mammalian kingdom, from voles to grizzly bears.

So, okay. A problem.

But just give me enough current, Michael thought, and I can keep the virals out forever.

The Time Before: he sometimes trembled just to think of it, the great buzzing man-made electrical juiciness of it all. The millions of miles of wire, the billions of amps of current. The vast generating plants turning the bottled energy of the planet itself into the eternally affirmative question that was a single amp of current shooting down a line, saying, Yes? Yes? Yes?

And the machines. The wondrous, humming, glowing machines. Not just computers and Blu-rays and handhelds—they had dozens of these devices, scavenged over the years from trips down the mountain, socked away in the shed—but simple things, ordinary everyday things, like hair dryers and microwaves and filament lightbulbs. All wired up, plugged in, connected to the grid.

Sometimes it was like the current was still out there, waiting for him. Waiting for Michael Fisher to throw the switch and turn the whole thing—human civilization itself—back on.

He spent too much time alone in the Lighthouse. Fair enough. Just him and Elton, which most of the time was like being alone, in the social sense of things. In the let’s-chat-about-the-weather and what’s-for-chow sense of things. He didn’t say he didn’t.