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Blond.

Chelsea Jewell.

And the man—Colonel Charlie Ogden in street clothes.

They ran into the building.

Margaret whipped behind the corner, out of sight.

Clarence was already coming back from the other side. He wore a wide smile, an expression of near disbelief.

She grabbed his arm. “I just saw Chelsea Jewell.”

His smile widened. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure! It’s her. Why are you smiling?”

He actually laughed. “I don’t know. Too much death, stress, something good finally happens, and now I can’t stop grinning. Go take a look—you won’t believe who’s coming this way.”

Margaret traded places with him. Still moving slowly, cautiously, she walked to the other side of the building and looked around the corner.

And understood Clarence’s joy.

Because she felt it, too.

Coming across an empty, abandoned city block, running through the settling dust, she saw Dew Phillips, Perry Dawsey and soldiers carrying machine guns.

THE CAVALRY

If you went back in time, say, six weeks, to a point when Margaret Montoya stood in an apartment parking lot in Ypsilanti, Michigan, scared for her life because a gigantic, burned and brutally wounded infected man named Perry Dawsey was trying to tear through her biohazard suit, his wild eyes staring, his spit and blood smearing her visor, his cracked lips screaming open that f.u.c.king door and let ’em in . . . if you could go back to that moment and tell her there would come a time where she would feel infinitely happy and relieved to see his face, she wouldn’t have believed you. You could have bet her on that. Bet her with the same bill that traded hands so frequently between Clarence and Amos.

And you’d have won twenty bucks.

Perry, Dew and maybe twenty-five heavily armed and grim-faced soldiers came running down Woodbridge Street. The cavalry to the rescue. The men fanned out, working like the fingers of a hand, some pointing guns across the street at the boarded-up windows of Chelsea’s building, some darting across that same street to the building next to hers, backs against brick walls, slowly inching to the corner, some continuing down the street, probably to surround the place. Dew and Perry ran right up to her.

“Margaret!” Perry said. “We got the gate. Are you okay?” He hugged her, suit and all, picking her right up off the ground.

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