The nurse unclips the badge and throws it at Rose’s feet. Eddie grabs it up, opens the door, then drops the badge inside so Rose can use it. From the corner of her eye, Rose sees him hustling Chuck down the hall. A minute later, she hears the pickup roar to life. In two hours they should be safely hidden in the mountains of North Carolina, as anonymous as any tourists fleeing the heat of the lowlands.

Rose has done it. She has rescued Chuck. If she hasn’t accidentally murdered him.

She waits another minute. Karen is thinking, gearing up; Rose can read resolution, stocked by cresting anger and druggy logic, writ plain on her broad face. Any second now, she is going to blow her top. Without taking her eyes off Karen, Rose backs to the sliding glass door, retrieves the badge, and presses it to the black plastic reader.

“This is going to cost me my job.” The nurse spits out the words in a stream like foul-tasting liquid.

“You didn’t tell them about last time?” Rose asks.

“They would have fired me. I need this job. I’ve got a kid.”

Rose feels bad about that. “Okay,” she decides. “You’ll be a hero.” She steps outside the door. “You single-handedly disarmed me and saved the other residents from fates worse than death.” As the door whooshes shut, she tosses the pistol into the lockdown unit.

Neat as a Hollywood stuntman, Karen hurls herself from the couch and snatches the gun from the floor. From a prone position, she shoots six times.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Rose shrugs, mouthing, “Sorry.” Then turns and runs, hoping to reach the greenway before the modern equivalents of hounds of hell are loosed.

CHAPTER 27

Alternately walking and jogging, Rose follows the greenway the two and a half miles back to Royal’s house. There, she ducks through the flap of the teepee and collapses on the wolf skin, using its head as a pillow. Sweat sticks her clothes to her body and burns between her breasts as if acidic poison oozes from her skin.

A fan would be nice, but the teepee has no electricity. Marinating in her own toxic waste, she stares at the apex of the tent where a smoke hole that has never known smoke exposes a fragment of light-polluted sky, streetlamps turning a high thin overcast a pale orange.

The end of the world would be pale orange, Rose thinks; the last ding-dong of doom would ring out from the speaker of a cell phone. This night she has held a fellow human being at gunpoint. Drugging Karen—twice—and wrestling with her on the MCU’s floor hadn’t left Rose as … what? Changed? Drained? Battered?