Gone

wall.
    Quinn was looking up at the screen as well, rotating slowly in one of the engineer’s chairs. “See if you can get another channel, that one’s boring.”
    “It’s a map,” Edilio said. “There’s Perdido Beach. There’s some little towns back in the hills. It goes all the way to San Luis.”
    The map glowed pale blue, white, and pink, with a red bull’s-eye in the center.
    “The pink is the fallout pattern in case there is ever a release,” Astrid said. “The red is the immediate area where the radiation would be intense. It gets data on wind patterns, the contours of the land, the jet stream, all that, and adjusts it.”
    “The red and the pink, that’s the danger?” Edilio asked.
    “Yes. That’s the plume where the fallout would be above acceptable levels.”
    “That’s a lot of land,” Edilio said.
    “But it’s weird,” Astrid said. She guided Little Pete to his feet and went closer to the map. “I’ve never seen it look like that. Usually the plume goes inland, you know, from the prevailing winds coming off the ocean. Sometimes the plume stretches all the way down to Santa Barbara. Or else up across the national park, depending on weather.”
    The pink pattern was a perfect circle. The red zone was like a bull’s-eye inside that outer circle.
    “The computer’s not getting satellite weather data,” Astrid said. “So it must have reverted to its default setting, which is this red circle with a ten-mile radius, and a pink circle with a hundred-mile radius.”
    Sam peered at the map, unable at first to make sense of it. Then he began to locate the town, beaches he knew, other features.
    “The whole town’s inside the red zone,” Sam said.
    Astrid nodded.
    “The red zone goes right to the far south end of town.”
    “Yes.”
    Sam glanced at her to discover whether she saw what he saw. “It runs right through Clifftop.”
    “Yes,” she said slowly. “It does.”
    “Are you thinking…”
    “Yes,” Astrid said. “I’m thinking it’s a pretty amazing coincidence that the barrier seems to line up with the edge of the danger zone.” Then she added, “At least what we know of the barrier. We don’t know that it includes the entire red spot.”
    “Does this mean there’s been some kind of radiation leak?”
    Astrid shook her head. “I don’t think so. There’d be radiation alarms going off all over the place. But what’s weird is, it’s like cause and effect, only backward. The FAYZ is what cut off the weather data, which caused the computer to default. FAYZ first, then the map goes to default. So why would the FAYZ barrier be following a map whose lines it caused?”
    Sam shook his head and smiled a little ruefully. “I must be tired. You lost me. I’ll go find some food.” He headed down the hall in the direction Astrid had indicated.
    When he looked back she was standing, staring up at the map, a tight, grim expression on her face.
    She noticed Sam watching her. Their eyes locked. She flinched, like he had caught her at something. She put one protective arm around Little Pete, who had buried his face back in his game. Astrid blinked, looked down, took a deep shaky breath, and deliberately turned away.

TWELVE
    272 HOURS , 47 MINUTES
    “COFFEE.” MARY SAID the word like it might be magic. “Coffee. That’s what I need.”
    She was in the cramped, narrow teachers’ room at Barbara’s Day Care, searching the refrigerator for something, anything, to feed a little girl who refused to eat. She had almost fallen into the refrigerator, she was so tired, and then she spotted the coffeemaker.
    It’s what her mother did when she was tired. It’s what everyone did when they were tired.
    In response to Mary’s desperate, late-night plea for help, Howard had supplied the day care with a single box of diapers. They were Huggies for newborns. Useless. He had sent over two gallons of milk and half a dozen bags of chips and Goldfish. And he had sent Panda, who proved to be worse than useless. Mary had overheard him threatening to smack a crying three-year-old and had shooed him out of the building.
    But the twins, Anna and Emma, had come on their own to help out. It wasn’t enough people, not by a long shot, but Mary had been able to get two full hours of sleep.
    But then, when she woke that morning—no, it was afternoon, wasn’t it, she had lost track. She was so groggy, she not only had no idea what time it was, for the first few seconds she had no idea where