Author's Notes: Heya, everyone! I hope that my promises of future action are still being believed. Oh, the troubles of slow burn. I suspect this story will look much better when it's all done and can be read in one piece. Kinda like watching Lost on DVD. Fairly light on the babble today, but you'll probably want Google open, as usual. (If you have understood everything so far without resorting to looking it up, you must be Tom Clancy.)

---

The road into Paradise was a surprisingly uncluttered venue; not all that much traffic on a Tuesday noon. Truewell counted two cars at the side of the road – one had evidently been brought to a sliding stop, with the driver nowhere to be seen. Another car had simply hit the ditch at an awkward angle and flipped onto its side. Truewell steered the rental car past both of the wrecks; the town just ahead was far more interesting.

"You see everything okay?" Will asked from the passenger's seat; Truewell nodded, and the full-face mask followed. His voice was muffled in a way closely resembling the effect of talking into a tea cup.

"It's better than I thought it would be," she replied, her voice distorted likewise.

Neither of them wanted to waste air.

Their getup was the deluxe version of what Will had worn to the quarantine tent: instead of relying on the drawstrings, all gloves, boots and zippers were secured with duck tape. The side mount of the mask led to an electronic valve system on the back, switchable from main supply (a large pressurized air tank) to a smaller "escape bottle". Various pouches distributed over the torso held other gear; the largest, sitting on the left hip, contained a simple gas mask and two sealed filter cartridges. The entire shebang was fastened to a carrying vest and thereby quickly proving itself to be absolutely horrible for sitting or crouching or lying or moving around in.

It was just a few seconds after getting past the town sign that Truewell had to first suppress the urge to rip the gear off and find a place to deposit her lunch. At least a dozen bodies littered the street, none of them looking like they had had the privilege of dying quietly. A woman in a service overall still dangled from a telephone pole by her safety line, a track of sun-dried vomit all along one of her sleeves – and continued down a few more feet of pole. Truewell brought the car to a stop.

"Do you need a moment?" Will asked.

"Yes," Truewell replied, then turned the ignition off. They sat in the car, and as the engine noise disappeared, so did everything but their heavy breathing. "I think I'm afraid of getting out of the car," she said with a flat voice.

"Most people wouldn't just admit that."

"Fear is a survival adaption," she said, "because it warns you when you're about to do something stupid."

"It doesn't get much dumber than walking into a hot zone just before nightfall," Will replied.

"Let's just get this over with, then."

Will nodded his assent and began to pat down his carrying vest for a quick equipment drill. Truewell followed his lead.

"GPS, check," he began, bringing the little PDA device out of standby and confirming that it read their current location. "Flashlight, check. Spare batteries, check. Air supply – " he glanced at the meter mounted on his right arm – "check. Radio…uh, repeat the frequencies."

"Channel 1, one-six-three megahertz, goes to Captain Fleming's guard unit. Channel 2, one-seven-one megahertz, goes to the cellphone repeater in the car."

"Check," Will replied, then brought the radio to life. "Sawdust 6, this is Eagle 2, do you copy? Over."

"Roger that, Eagle 2," came an unfamiliar voice, "Sawdust 6 here, good copy. Over."

"Uh," Will said, "I wanted, uh, the other Sawdust 6. Please identify yourself. Over."

"This is Sawdust 6," the voice insisted. "Eagle 2, I think you want Sawdust 6 Actual, over."

"Yes, sorry. My mistake. Put me through to Sawdust 6 Actual, then. Uh, over."

"Eagle 2, hold for Actual, over."

Will turned to Truewell. Their masks hid each of their attempts to keep a straight face.

"Where exactly did you learn radio protocol?" Truewell asked.

"Pope explained it to me over a beer," he replied.

"You should have bought him another round," she said, forcing a smile into her voice.

"Hah," Will exclaimed, then paused for a moment. "Yeah, should have."

The levity left as quickly as it had arrived.

"You want me to handle comms?" she asked.

"If you don't mind. I've got my work cut out with the investigation, anyway."

The sun was low over the horizon when they finally got out of the car. Paradise's main street stretched before them, with the town's major intersection just ahead. The town core was made up of small businesses, all of them still running on automatic – doors, lights, even some radios. Even that forced cheer couldn't make up for the utter lack of engines, chatter and footsteps. Truewell felt a little better after the first few steps. Maybe getting out of the car had done it; maybe it was just having had more time to adjust to the situation.

"Eagle 2," Will's radio crackled with Fleming's voice, "this is Sawdust 6 Actual. What's your status? Over." He reached for the send button, but Truewell beat him to it.

"Sawdust 6, this is Eagle 1," she coughed, then found her voice. "Eagles are in position and starting the search now. Next check in fifteen minutes, over."

"Copy that, Eagle 1. I've put Agent Brown on the circuit, he answers to Eagle 3. He wants to be informed when you find something. Oh, and don't spook my Corporal again, over."

"Wilco, Sawdust," Truewell said. "Eagle 1 over and out."

The sun was in Will's eyes, and for a second he brought up his arm to cover his face. He was staring back westwards, at the road they'd come on, and in retrospect he really should have seen that coming: hovering just over the horizon, the sun was in swift retreat, content to let the night take center stage. As awe-inspiring a spectacle as that was, from a sense of wonder perspective, it did not fail to give Will a better appreciation for what light remained.

"We should make a note of where we parked," he said, already adding a waypoint to his GPS. Truewell silently did the same. "Did Fleming tell you where the Mayor's house is?"

"No, he didn't," Truewell said, "but it was in the briefing. It should be right down the street here, maybe three hundred feet. Do you see anything yet?"

Averting his gaze from the road out of town, Will's eyes swept the storefronts close to him. A DVD rental shop, a small convenience store and a hairdresser's shop all stood in a formation he would have called a block in a big city; neither of them had bodies outside, but he had little doubt they'd find some inside. Something above the entrance to the convenience store caught his eye; he squinted and held his hand beside the lenses of his mask to shield them from the glare.

"Camera," Will pointed out, "there's a security camera on that storefront."

"Let's check it," Truewell said.

The two strolled off together, Truewell focused on the entrance, Will's head swiveling from side to side looking for other things to investigate. A near-whispered "My God…" brought his attention back front and center.

"What is it?" he asked.

A body rested against the sliding doors of the convenience store from the inside; Will's steps around Truewell to look at the corpse brought him close enough to the door's sensor to trigger it, and the entrance slid open, with the body simply dropping onto the floor. Finally, a pleasant chime to greet Will sounded.

"I'll be frank with you, Dr. Anthros," Truewell said, "this doesn't help my anxiety at all."

"If I said that we'll find a lot more like that and that you'll have to tough it out…"

"…wouldn't help, at all."

Will sighed. "Psychologist, therapy thyself."

"It's not the bodies, it's how they died," Truewell admitted. "Okay, distract me. What are we looking for inside?"

"You can go look for the security system, I'll deal with the bodies."

"Right. I'll be in the back."

Truewell noted the full shelves of the store as if that detail was important; her brain kept pinging on all the impressions that told it to expect a living, breathing town, as if hell had come to Paradise and done a spectacularly untidy job of it. Past the magazine rack, the stocks of candy and sweets next to the register and two more bodies between the small aisles, she fought her way behind the counter and into the "Employee only" room. Another corpse, an old Latino male, was crouched beneath the sturdy desk against the wall.

Duck & cover, Truewell thought.

Besides ledgers and a half-eaten bar of almond chocolate, the desk held a small TV and a VCR. The TV's picture from the camera's perspective was frozen, with only the timestamp in the upper right corner refreshing every five seconds. The VCR below was still whirring, recording those stills with the unthinking tenacity of a machine. Truewell stopped the tape and hit the rewind button. It took her a few seconds to go back through those last few hours, with their arrival a few minutes ago the only movement on the camera since lunchtime. Finally, she found a section with people in it and pressed play.

They were panicking.

In five-second stills, she saw people outside stumble into the store, even those short bursts of insight into their movement looking stilted and painful. If they had figured out that it was something in the air, getting inside might have seemed like a good idea. But they didn't know that they were already dead…

Truewell sat down onto the chair and took a few deep breaths. The flapping motion of the exhaust valve on her mask echoed through her head like a firecracker going off in a lunchbox. Her eyes shot to the supply meter attached to her right forearm. 90 minutes, it said, in a cheerfully fake pretense of reliable accuracy. 90 minutes until her air supply would run out. Sure, she carried filters with her, on the not-so-unreasonable theory that they might make the air around her breathable, but what if the concentration was too high for it to work properly? No, they'd have to be out of Paradise by then. Probably much sooner, to have a safety factor. In a way, that helped. It put an expiration date on her fears.

This is silly, she thought, then rewound the tape a bit further. Knowing exactly what was happening to her was unsettling, but it drove her mind to the matter of Anthros: perhaps he was taking this too well. Perhaps she was just making excuses for herself.

And then, there it was. She didn't consciously register it, but something made her stop and play the tape; after a minute, she saw it. The camera, barely catching the main intersection at the edge of its vision, had caught a tanker stopping right on the intersection. She watched this unfocussed presence sitting there for at least a minute before driving off, but this wasn't much more than an incidental clue, at best: the angle, distance and quality of the picture swallowed all details required to identify the truck; worse, the black & white picture didn't even give her a color to work with. And with the means at her disposal, even the limited magic of video processing would have to wait until she could physically get the tape to Berkut. Reaching into the carrying gear, she wrestled a large evidence bag from one of the zillion pouches on her vest and placed the videotape in it. After a quick look around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, Truewell rose from the chair and hurried back into the store proper.

"Got something!" she shouted through her mask before she could see Will; he rose from behind an aisle, his quizzical look piercing the eyelenses of his breathing apparatus with ease. "Go to 2, I need to phone home with this."

"Got it," Will said, switching his radio to the second frequency.

---

Jaime entered her apartment to a complete lack of fanfare, her ears primed for the sounds emanating from the kitchen. She saw Becca at the oven, fixing dinner, and her first instinct was to hurry over and greet her sister, the way she always did.

But that was before she'd carried a gun.

Instead, the same speed was applied to a different route as Jaime hurried into her room. She closed and locked the door behind her, then threw her Berkut bag onto the bed. After a second's deliberation, she grabbed a nearby chair, sat down on it and proceeded to phase two, a minute's deliberation. Her eyes were locked onto the bag so hard that she found herself almost tearing up from the strain, finally averting her gaze in favor of a less offensive subject. The gun wasn't leaving, no matter how much she looked at it or tried to ignore it. The arguments against it came easier that evening than the day before, a sharper mind not lulled into compliance by the promise of sleep.

There had never been guns in the Sommers household; her father preferred shots of the celluloid variety, and a hardcore pacifist like her mother would have never raised a stone, much less a semi-automatic. Lectures about guns, though, had abounded: talk of moral vacuum, and the churning guts of an industrial beast nourished by mankind's self-loathing, and other such high- and-holy concepts that seemed a bit more distant after knowing the feeling of being in the crosshairs. In a way, Jaime admired her mother for that: she'd never given up her faith in nonviolence, no matter how many rifles or sticks or tear gas grenades were against her.

But then, nobody had ever specifically tried to murder Madeline Jo Sommers. This was different. Jaime kept repeating the phrase in her head, trying to banish its hollow ring. This is different. Normal rules do not apply. I believe in the rules, but they do not apply here. This is different.

Something her father had said about Vietnam went through Jaime's head like a sniper's bullet. It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. It was gone before she realized that it didn't really have anything to do with her situation. The train of thought in her head was a runaway one, steaming past association over association down a track of violent imagery she didn't know was buried there.

Stop, she finally added to the choir in her head. Stop, shouted with more force into her consciousness, the strained voice of a teacher at the edge of a professional breakdown. The rallying cry of the portion of herself that demanded a time-out.

She got up in a jump, trying to build momentum to power through her thoughts, and grabbed the bag from the bed. She ripped the zipper of the main compartment open with a bit more force than she intended, but all that mattered was getting at the gun. Finally, she grabbed it, pulled it out, and had it up and aimed at the door before she knew what was happening. She took a few steps back, probing the situation while the weapon stayed welded to her hands. A bright red dot on the door.

Pull the trigger and you destroy this.

With a flick of her thumb, she worked the magazine release and let the magazine drop free; too caught up in the moment, she missed moving her left hand to catch it, and it clattered to the floor. She bowed down to fetch it; her right arm followed automatically, keeping the pistol aimed at the door. Much more careful now, she laid the magazine onto the desk and then pulled the pistol's slide backward, extracting the last bullet from the chamber. She put it next to the magazine.

Slide release, slide goes forward, hammer cocked, hit decocker, hammer down.

Safe. It's safe.

She put the pistol onto the desk, unlocked the door and left the room.

---

She came back into the living room just as Becca turned around from the oven; after an awkward moment, Jaime closed the door behind her and only then walked over to Becca for a hug.

"Hey," she said after they had separated. "How was your day?"

"Forgettable," Becca answered, implying further elaboration to be improper. "I'm making cornbread and chili."

"Great timing," Jaime said, "how did you know I was coming?"

"I didn't," Becca replied, averting her eyes and drawing the sound out; if it was to convey a basic sense of embarrassment, it went on longer than necessary.

The sound of a flushing toilet had Jaime's eyes dart to the bathroom door.

"Your boss is here," Becca said.

Jaime's heart rate accelerated. Jonas Bledsoe was a hard person to read at the best of times, but what did her enigmatic benefactor want from her here? And how, exactly, had he managed to get here faster than she had?

Tom Zucker walked out of the bathroom. Jaime felt the strong urge to not be present.

"Hey, Jaime," he said, extending his hand to shake. She took it, more surprised than reluctant. "You gave us quite the scare yesterday."

"He told me about the mugging," Becca said. "I'm –" she said, then trailed off.

"We were all worried," Zucker said. "You hurried out so quickly yesterday and we found the bathroom mirror all smashed up…"

"I don't know exactly what happened," Jaime said, a strange calm infiltrating her thoughts. "This woman, she sneaks up on me and I think she's coming on to me, so I try to excuse myself – but she was after my wallet."

"That blonde piece of work?" Zucker asked, interpreting Jaime's glance as confirmation. "So what happened?"

"Well, what do you think happened, Mr. Zucker?" Jaime said. Have to explain the lack of blood, she thought. Blunt weapon, a voice suggested. "She had a weapon, you know, one of those batons, the ones you just swing and they extend, like –" she mimicked the motion – "and I just barely get out of the way, but I don't see her left hand and it hits me right on the chin, I think, because it hurt like hell when I came to."

"That's…and you ran after her?"

"Sure," Jaime said, "what would you do?"

"You could have told me to call the cops," Zucker said, "and we would have gotten you an ambulance."

"I don't think I was all there when I came to," Jaime admitted. "I know, stupid, right? Not like I even had anything big with me. Guess I gave up and then I found my way here. I don't remember it too well, it's kind of a blur."

"I'm more concerned that it's a repeat," he said, "that can't have been good for your concussion."

"It wasn't a concussion," she replied, "and this isn't either. I'm fine. I'm scrappier than that."

"You really should have told your sister, though," he said, and Jaime looked at Becca.

Her expression was difficult to read; Jaime considered her next words, but finally all that came out was "I'm sorry I didn't tell you, we can talk about this later. Can you watch the food while I finish up with Mr. Zucker?"

"Sure," Becca replied and turned away, several of her issues reinforced in one neat go.

"My point is," Zucker insisted, "that I can understand you're shaken up, and I didn't want you to get the impression that I don't care about that. You keep to yourself and I'm fine with that, but you know I'm here if you want to talk about it. And about the quitting…"

"That's final," Jaime said, her eyes still tracking Becca before she looked back at him.

"Well then," Zucker said with a sigh, "I have your money, it's in the envelope on the table. You really were only there for an hour, so…"

"What are you giving me?" Jaime asked, her voice level. "That hour?"

"No, no," Zucker said, "it's all there."

"Thank you – Tom," Jaime said, the same neutrality in her pitch. "Sorry for making this so complicated for you."

"I'll be at the office, if you want to come in. Talk, or, you know…"

"I don't want my job back."

"…we're hiring. It'd be a new job for a qualified bartender, not your old job back."

"The answer's still no."

"Just wanted to make sure you're okay, Jaime."

"I am."

"Guess I'd better get going, it's pretty wild tonight."

"Tom?"

"Yeah?"

"No."

Tom Zucker nodded, grabbed his jacket and walked out of Jaime's life. She felt something without knowing what to call it.

"Jaime," Becca said from behind, "can we talk?"

Jaime closed her eyes, counted to 3, then turned around and sat down with her little sister at the kitchen table. The smell of fresh cornbread sweetened the air, but didn't make the lies come any easier. The faint presence of Jonas Bledsoe's voice in her head did, however.

Good evening, Miss Sommers, he said. We're monitoring the situation. Would you like some moral support?

"Yes, let's do it," Jaime said.

Just keep it simple.

"I'm listening," Becca said, too wrapped up to be self-conscious about the expression.

"I won't be working at the bar anymore," Jaime said. Good. Start off with something small and true. Take it from there. "That's because I have a new job." Good…

"A new job? When were you going to tell me?"

"Actually, today, because I just got back from signing the contract." Alright, that's enough details. Put some spin on it.

That hung in the air exactly how a cannonball doesn't, so Becca took the opportunity to dig in.

"So, what is it? Who do you work for?"

"A guy named Jonas Bledsoe." Now, go with the contract. "I'm his new…personal assistant."

"…how did that happen?"

"Okay, this is going to be a bit complicated," Jaime said. No, don't do this. Too elaborate. Don't oversell your hand. "Well, not really," she corrected herself. "I saved him from his ex-wife. Stepped in when she was making a scene at the restaurant, got a handbag to the face for my trouble. That's why they took me to the hospital on Sunday. He was there when I woke up, together with Will. He offered me the job right there on the spot." Very nice, you're a natural.

"No way!" Becca said, a smile spreading over her face. "No freakin' way!"

"I know, right?" Jaime said, matching her sister's smile. Good play, wrap it up. "Anyway, this guy is loaded. He gave me this prepaid credit card, said I should get myself something nice to wear, no strings. 15,000 dollars, Becca. There were 15 grand on that card."

"What," Becca exclaimed, her face now twisted into a full grin.

"So I'm starting tomorrow," Jaime said. "And next weekend, we're just gonna tear up the town together, you and me. What do you say?" I don't recall giving you the weekend off, Miss Sommers. "Well, if he lets me go," she added.

"He's got to!" Becca exclaimed.

"I'm sure I can sneak away for a few hours," Jaime said. "He's already got me on speeddial, anyway."

"But…Jaime, that's great!" Becca said, jumped up from her chair and rounded the table; Jaime got up just in time to be hugged, with more intensity than the last time. Becca separated only after a few seconds, and her eyes met Jaime's.

"So, how much do you earn?"

"A lot," Jaime answered.

"New clothes?"

"That's what the card is for, isn't it?"

"A new place?"

"Yeah, the commute's kind of harsh right now, we'll consider it."

"…a second car?"

"Don't push your luck," Jaime said. Becca gave her a mock scowl, but behind it lurked the certainty that things were going to turn around for the Sommers sisters.

"Now," Jaime said, "let's eat before the bread gets cold."