They made him sign a waiver.
Noah stood at the tailgate of an SUV with a hundred and ten degrees coming up off the asphalt and a pen in his hand and a form on a clipboard, and a very young man from somebody's legal office explained that this was for his protection.
"It's for my protection."
"It's a standard release," the young man said. "It covers civilian personnel operating alongside federal assets."
"I did this street at nine o'clock this morning with a can of spray paint," Noah said. "Nobody had a form then."
"There's a form now," said the young man, and he was so pleased about it that Noah signed the thing just to make him go away.
*****
They went back into Winter Park at three fifteen with four Guard vehicles, eleven soldiers, Sergeant Bell, Ruth Vance, and a gas station attendant in a HOLY GUACAMOLE t-shirt.
"You got one of those?" Trevor said.
"I bought three."
"Can I have one."
"Later."
The neighborhood looked exactly the way it had that morning, which was the worst thing about it. The sprinklers had shut off. The little free library was still full behind its glass door. Somebody's flag was up.
And every fourth driveway had an orange X on it with a number underneath, drying in the sun, done by hand, by him.
"Talk to me," Bell said.
Noah stood in the middle of Fallbrook and let it come in.
"Forty three this morning," he said. "Thirty nine now."
Vance said, "Four."
"Four."
"Since noon."
"Since noon."
Nobody said anything for a second. Ruiz, one armed, sitting in the open door of the lead truck with his wrist in a splint, said what everybody was thinking.
"So where'd the four go?"
*****
Here is what Noah figured out in the next twenty minutes, standing in a suburb, and what everybody in the world would know by Friday.
They turned about twelve hours out. Not exactly. It ran long or short, and later people would argue about temperature and blood loss and forty other things, but twelve was the middle of it.
The Kroger fight had ended around three in the morning.
It was three thirty in the afternoon.
And the ones who died first went first, which meant it was not going to happen all at once. It was going to happen in the order people died, spread across a whole afternoon, like a row of streetlights coming on.
"I can tell before it goes," Noah said.
Bell turned around. "Say again."
"They go thin." He hated that word for it and never did find a better one. "It's like. All morning they were solid, they were just there. Before one goes it gets faint, like it's about a second from stepping out of the room." He pointed up the street without looking. "That one. Yellow house with the trampoline. That one's going in about a minute."
Eleven soldiers turned and looked at a yellow house with a trampoline.
"How long have you known that," Vance said.
"About ninety seconds."
*****
They stacked on the door.
Bell put four people on it and they went in the way they were trained to go in, and Noah stood on the lawn with a shovel and his heart going and listened to a nineteen year old girl who had died on her kitchen floor at three in the morning get put down by four men with rifles.
It took less than four seconds.
Bell came out and stood on the grass and did not say anything, and then she said, "That's going to happen thirty eight more times today."
"Thirty seven," Noah said. "One went while you were inside."
*****
It went like that for two hours and it was not a battle. That's the part he'd try to explain later to people who wanted it to have been one.
It was work.
They moved down the streets in the order Noah gave them, which was the order they were going to turn in, and mostly they got there first and mostly it was quiet. A truck came in behind them and men in white suits took the ones they got to in time and the ones they didn't.
Twice they were late.
The first time, a thing came out of the side door of a house on Aspen and took a soldier off his feet, and Noah got there in a second and a half and hit it with fourteen strength and it did not get up. That one was fast. Nobody was hurt.
The second time was the cul de sac at the end of Aspen, where six houses share a circle, and Noah called four of them going at once and was wrong.
It was seven.
*****
The seventh came out of a garage behind them after they'd already committed to the front of the circle, and the line bent, and for about forty seconds it was not work anymore.
Noah heard Bell yelling. He heard rifles going in a residential cul de sac with a basketball hoop over the driveway.
He got to the garage one.
He was reckless about it, and he knew it while he was doing it. He went straight in with a shovel instead of backing up and letting eleven trained people with rifles do the thing they were built for.
It got him. It got a fistful of his left forearm on the way past and took the sleeve and a strip of him with it.
Then Trevor pushed it into a garage door hard enough to bend the door around it, and Noah put the shovel through it while it was still stuck in the aluminum.
[+310 XP]
[LEVEL 6]
[+3 UNSPENT POINTS]
Noah stood in the driveway holding his own arm with blood coming through his fingers.
[FOREIGN BLOOD DETECTED.]
[SLOT 1 OF 1 FULL.]
[OVERWRITE?]
"No," Noah said, out loud, before he'd even read what it was offering.
[DECLINED.]
The purge went through his arm like a stitch coming out fast and he swore at nothing and Trevor said, "What?" and Noah said, "Nothing," and that was the third lie he told his friend that day.
*****
House forty one was on Cypress and it was the last one on the list, because he'd put it there.
Noah stood on the sidewalk in front of it with his forearm wrapped in gauze from a real first aid kit that he had personally bought at a grocery store that morning.
"Give me the house," he said.
Bell said, "Reyes."
"It hasn't gone. I'd know." He was already walking. "Give me the house. Please."
Vance said, "Give him the house."
He went in through the front.
She was in the kitchen where he'd left her, under the good blanket, up to the shoulders and not the face. The dish towel was still folded over the oven handle. The morning light had come all the way around to the other side of the house and the room was in shade now.
Noah crouched down next to her.
"Hey," he said. "So it turns out there's a clock."
He put his hand flat on the counter for a second.
"I'm not gonna let it happen to you in your kitchen," he said. "There's a truck outside. There's guys with a truck, and they're gonna be careful with you, I made them tell me that. And I'm gonna carry you out, because I've got this thing where that's easier for me now, and I would rather it was me than four guys you never met."
He got his arms under the blanket and lifted her.
[SKILL: CARRY (1)]
She weighed nothing. She weighed less than a bag of water softener salt, and Noah stood in a kitchen in Winter Park with a woman in his arms and understood exactly what that skill was, and where it came from, and what his body had spent fourteen months learning to do.
He carried her out the front door and down the driveway past the orange 1.
Nobody said anything to him. Bell held the truck gate. The men in the white suits were careful with her, all the way careful, the whole time, and one of them said "we've got her, sir" and Noah had to walk about thirty feet away and stand facing a fence for a minute.
Then he went back in the house.
He got the piece of construction paper off the front window, the one taped at four feet off the ground with a hand traced on it in crayon and MARA under the thumb, and he peeled the tape off slow so it wouldn't tear.
He put it in the purple backpack between two t-shirts so it would stay flat.
*****
They got out of Winter Park at seven forty with the sun going down orange behind the water tower.
Noah sat in the back of an SUV with his head against the glass and did not sleep, and did not talk, and Trevor, in the middle seat, did not make him.
Mara was on the curb at the Kroger where he'd left her.
She stood up when the doors opened. She looked at his arm, and at the gauze, and at the dried blood on the leg of his brand new cargo pants, and then she looked at his face and asked the question with her eyebrows the way kids do when they already know.
"Did you go to my house," she said.
Noah crouched down in the parking lot so his eyes were level with hers.
He thought about all the things you're supposed to say to a nine year old. He'd heard about six hundred of them in the last four days, in a funeral home and a church basement, out of the mouths of adults who meant well.
She's in a better place. Six.
Everything happens for a reason. Four.
"Yeah," Noah said. "I went to your house. Your mom's not there anymore. Some people took her somewhere they can take care of her, and I carried her out to them myself, and she wasn't alone at any point today. Not one minute of it."
Mara's chin did something.
"Are you gonna lie to me," she said. "Ever."
"No."
"Say it the way you say it. Out loud, so it's a thing you said."
Noah looked at her.
"I'm never gonna lie to you," he said.
Mara nodded once, the way she'd nodded in the hallway with the turtle night light on his face, and then she put her arms around his neck and held on, and Noah knelt on the asphalt of a burned parking lot and let her.