They offered him a seat on a bus.
Noah drove the Corolla instead, with a trash bag taped over the driver's window and a check engine light that had been on since the Obama administration, three hundred yards up a road with concrete barriers on both sides and a soldier every fifty feet, and at the gate a specialist with a mirror on a stick looked under his car for explosives while the window flapped.
"Sir, your window."
"I know."
"Do you want me to."
"There's nothing anybody can do," Noah said. "It's structural."
Trevor was in the passenger seat with the purple backpack on his lap and Mara was in the back with her feet up on the seat, and that was the whole convoy.
*****
Kestrel had been an Air Force supply depot until 1994. Nine hangars, forty acres of concrete, a water tower with the paint coming off, and a fence around all of it that had been keeping nothing in and nothing out for thirty years.
On Tuesday it had been empty.
On Thursday there were nine hundred people on it and somebody had already put up a sign.
The family annex was in what used to be base housing, on the west side, eleven minutes' walk from the hangars. Noah walked Mara over himself with her bag. There was a woman named Deb who ran it and had eleven kids in her care already and a clipboard, and Noah stood in the doorway of a bedroom with two beds in it and a window that faced the water tower.
He got the construction paper out of the backpack, flat, no new creases in it.
"You want it up?"
Mara looked at it a while.
"Yeah," she said.
He put it on the wall over the bed with four pieces of the duct tape he'd bought at a Kroger on the first morning of the world ending, and then he stood back and looked at a crayon handprint taped to a cinderblock wall on a federal installation, and then he had to go stand out in the hallway for a second.
*****
Intake was in Hangar Two.
There were four hundred candidates in that hangar and it turned out that when you get four hundred people together who have all nearly died in the same week, what they mostly do is line up quietly and fill out paperwork.
The paperwork took two hours.
There was a medical history form. There was a next of kin form, and Noah looked at that one for a while and then wrote MARA GALVEZ and left it. There was a form about direct deposit. There was a form that asked him to describe his ability in the space provided, and the space provided was one line long, about four inches.
"They're gonna do this every time," said the guy in line behind him.
Noah turned around.
He was maybe twenty five, built like somebody who'd been serious about a sport recently, with a fresh burn across the back of one hand in a branching shape, dressed and taped and about three days old.
"Dominic Feld," he said.
"Noah."
"You know what they had me do this morning? Bench press." Feld said it the way you'd report a crime. "A hundred and thirty five pounds. Three sets. They wrote it on a card."
"Did you do it?"
"I did eleven reps and then I put my hand on the bar and cooked the paint off it," Feld said. "They wrote that down too. On the same card. Next to the eleven."
*****
The physical was, in fact, a high school fitness test.
A mile and a half on the concrete. Push ups in two minutes. Sit ups in two minutes. Bench, deadlift, a grip strength dynamometer that a staff sergeant handed you and told you to squeeze.
Somewhere out there were eighteen thousand people who had woken up on Wednesday able to do impossible things. Four hundred of them were standing on this concrete, because four hundred was how many cots Kestrel had.
And the Department of Defense had no instrument on Earth to measure any of it, so it had reached for the only measuring stick it owned.
Noah stood in line for the dynamometer and did the arithmetic he'd been doing since the drive.
Fourteen strength was not superhuman. That was the useful part. Fourteen strength was a big farm kid, a guy who moves furniture for a living, the top end of what a body gets to without help. Fifteen endurance was a distance runner.
Nothing about the numbers gave him away.
The thing that would give him away was knowing the numbers.
So he ran the mile and a half at a pace that hurt on purpose, and he did forty two push ups and stopped at forty two, and he squeezed the dynamometer and let go a half second early, and he came off the line sweating like a person, and a private wrote something on a card.
"You just lied to the United States government about eleven times in a row," Ellery said.
"I know."
"I'm not saying don't."
"I know."
*****
He hadn't looked at his own hair since Wednesday morning.
That sounds like a lie when you say it out loud. It wasn't. There'd been a parking lot and a neighborhood and forty three driveways and a nine year old asleep under a crayon handprint, and somewhere in all of that the six white hairs above his left ear had stopped being the most interesting thing about his week.
And here's the other part, the stupid part, the part he'd think about later. You can't see the side of your own head. Not without going and standing in front of something and turning, on purpose, and meaning it.
Kestrel had two mirrors for four hundred people and a line in front of both.
Noah didn't get in the line.
*****
The demonstrations were in the afternoon and they put them on a concrete pad behind Hangar Four with a hundred people watching.
You went out, you did the thing you could do, and a woman with a tablet made a note.
A man from Odessa made the air over a fifty gallon drum go so cold that the drum sweated and then frosted.
A woman named Priya Shah, who had gone into a retention pond in her car on Tuesday night and had gotten out through the back glass, pulled about a gallon of water out of the air in front of her and held it and did not seem to enjoy it.
Trevor put a folding table into the ceiling of Hangar Four, which he apologized for immediately and at length.
Dominic Feld touched a length of rebar and the far end of it glowed.
Then a staff sergeant read Noah's name off a card.
Noah walked out onto the pad in a HOLY GUACAMOLE t-shirt in front of a hundred people, with no folding table to throw and no rebar to light up, and the woman with the tablet looked at him and said, "Whenever you're ready."
"I'm doing it," Noah said.
"Doing what?"
He'd noticed something that morning in the grip strength line and hadn't decided yet how he felt about it.
It had gotten better on its own.
In the cemetery it had been flat. Four hundred and eleven of them and no difference between any two. Now he could feel the shape of them. Old ones and new ones. Nobody had given him that. Nobody had asked.
"There's a hundred and six dead people on this base," Noah said. "There's ninety one in the ground east of the water tower, which I'd guess is older than the base. There's fourteen in the refrigerated unit behind Hangar One. And there's one in the bed of the white pickup parked outside the north door, which nobody's told me about, so either that's a person who died this morning or somebody's got something in that truck they shouldn't."
The pad got very quiet.
The woman with the tablet said, "Wait here," and walked off fast.
Somebody in the crowd laughed, high and nervous, and it did not catch on.
Noah stood out there by himself for four minutes.
*****
The ninety one east of the water tower were a cemetery from a town that had been condemned in 1943 when the government bought the land.
The one in the pickup was a staff sergeant's brother in law, who had died in Bastrop a little before dawn and who the staff sergeant had not been able to make himself hand over to anybody.
He had about four hours on him when Noah called it.
Nobody had told the staff sergeant about the twelve hours. Nobody had told anybody yet. He sat down on the bumper of his own truck when they explained it, and he stayed there a long time.
Nobody laughed after that.
*****
They posted the board Thursday night on the wall of Hangar Two.
Four hundred names. Six tiers, A down through F, and the tiers were not about how strong you were, which nobody could measure, so they were about what the woman with the tablet had written on a card.
Dominic Feld was A tier. Nine people were.
Priya Shah was B. Trevor Ellis was C, which he took very hard for about ten minutes and then got over completely when he found out C tier ate second instead of fourth.
Noah Reyes was E.
E tier was for what the sheet called SUPPORT AND SPECIALIST ROLES, NON PRIMARY ENGAGEMENT.
He stood in front of that board in a crowd of four hundred people with his name six inches off the concrete floor and felt about nine different things at once, and the loudest one, he was ashamed to notice, was insulted.
"There it is," Ellery said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to say something about the hammer."
"I was gonna say it real gently."
Feld found him in the crowd and clapped him on the shoulder on the way past, and it wasn't even unkind, which somehow made it worse.
"Hey, body guy," he said. "That was the most useful thing anybody did today. For real."
"Thanks."
"E tier's a joke. You'll move up."
"Probably not," Noah said.
*****
Vance was outside Hangar Two, leaning against a black SUV in the dark with her jacket off and her sleeves rolled, which was the most human he had seen her look.
"You saw the board," she said.
"Yep."
"You know I could move you."
"Yeah."
"You know I'm not going to."
Noah looked out at forty acres of concrete and the water tower and the lights on in the annex on the west side, where a nine year old was asleep under a crayon handprint.
"You put me in E because that's where the guy I told you I was belongs," he said.
"I put you in E," Vance said, "because on Saturday morning a team is going through the gate in Lincoln, Nebraska. Forty one people went in after it opened. Store staff, first responders, and nineteen of ours."
She let that sit.
"None of them came back. We don't know if that's forty one people who need extracting or forty one bodies, and we've been arguing about it in a room for two days, and every hour we argue is another hour."
Noah looked at her.
"I can't find the living ones," he said. "You understand that. If they're alive in there I've got nothing for you."
"I know what you can do."
"Then what do you want from me."
"I want the count," Vance said. "Whatever it is. If you walk up to that gate and feel nine, then thirty two people are still breathing on the other side and I send everybody I've got. If you feel forty one." She stopped. "Then I don't send anybody, and nineteen families get a phone call, and nobody else dies going in after people who are already gone."
"Nobody in A tier can do that," she said. "Not one of them. They can burn a hole through a wall. Not one of them can tell me what's behind it."
Noah stood there in the dark.
"Saturday," he said.
"Six a.m. Get some sleep, Mr. Reyes."