The debrief was in a Hy-Vee break room with a microwave in it and a laminated sign about handwashing.
Colonel Pryor sat on one side of a folding table and Noah sat on the other, and for eleven minutes Noah answered questions about a decision he'd already made and could not unmake, and the whole time he could smell burned coffee from a pot somebody had left on since Wednesday.
"You told this room a man was alive."
"I told this room forty of them weren't."
"That's not the same sentence."
"No sir," Noah said. "It's the only one I can say."
Pryor looked at his notes for a while.
"Private Ostrom was twenty two years old," he said.
"I know."
"Do you."
"I know exactly," Noah said, "because he's still in there, and I can feel where he is, and I'm going to be able to feel where he is for as long as I'm within about two miles of that gate. So yes sir. I know."
Okoye, standing against the wall behind him, said, "Colonel."
"Staff Sergeant."
"He put me on the ground when the second one came up," Okoye said. "He put Halloran on the ground before that. If the question in this room is whether he should have been in there, my answer is that four of us are in this building because he was."
Pryor closed the folder.
"Nobody's saying he shouldn't have been in there," he said, and then, to Noah, in a completely different voice: "Son, I'm saying it doesn't get easier and I'd like you to know that now instead of in a year."
*****
Outside in the loading area they had the recovered gear laid out on tarps.
Not much. Nine sets, from the ones they'd tagged on the way down. Helmets and radios and one boot.
Noah stopped at the fourth tarp.
Lying next to a folded turnout coat with CUTLER stenciled across the shoulders was a Halligan bar. Thirty inches of forged steel, a fork on one end and an adze and a pike on the other, the tool a fire crew brings when a door is not going to open politely.
He'd been carrying a shovel for four days. He'd been carrying it because it had been standing in a pile of dirt at the exact moment he needed something, and he had never once chosen it.
"Whose is this," he said.
"Lieutenant Cutler," said the fire captain standing at the end of the tarps, who had been standing there most of the morning. "He went in with the second crew."
"Forty yards down from the gate," Noah said. "Face up the hill. He was the first one I found."
The captain didn't say anything for a second.
"Can I have it," Noah said.
He heard how that sounded and started over.
"I go back through," he said. "That's the job now, that's what they've got me for. And I've been doing it with a snow shovel from a cemetery because that's what was there." He put his hand flat on the tarp next to it. "I'd like to take his in. And I'd like to bring it back out every time."
The captain picked up the Halligan and turned it over once and handed it across.
"He'd have thought that was funny," the captain said. "He hated that thing. He said it was too heavy."
It was too heavy. That was the first thing Noah noticed. Fourteen strength and it still pulled his wrist down when he took it one handed.
The second thing he noticed was that it did not care about anything. A shovel is a blade on a stick and it wants to bend. This was a bar. It went where you sent it and the world moved instead.
*****
Here's what the next nine days looked like, because they all ran together and there's no honest way to separate them.
They called them sweeps.
Somebody would find a town or a subdivision or a nursing home where nobody was answering, and a team would go in, and Noah would walk down the middle of the road with a can of orange paint and tell them which doors.
Twelve hours after death, give or take. That was the clock, and by the second week of the world ending everybody knew it, and the ones who came up after that clock had run out were not people anymore and did not want anything a person wants.
He got good at it.
That's the part he'd have trouble saying out loud later. He got good at it. He learned to call a house from the sidewalk instead of the driveway, which saved eight seconds a house and about four hundred seconds a day. He learned which side of a mobile home they came out of. He learned to stop apologizing to them, and then he learned to start again, because the week he stopped was a bad week.
[LEVEL 7]
[HUMAN: 96.9%]
[LEVEL 8]
[HUMAN: 96.4%]
He read the second line now. Every time. He'd made himself a rule about it in a supermarket in Lincoln and he kept it, and it did not make him feel better, and he kept it anyway.
*****
He had nine points saved by the ninth day and he spent six of them on the tailgate of a truck outside a Casey's in Seward County.
"Sense," he said.
"You sure? You've got a hole at agility and you know it."
"I'm fast enough to get there. I'm strong enough to do something when I do." Noah turned the Halligan over across his knees. "What I'm not is early. Everything I've got, I've got about a second and a half before it happens, and the whole reason people are alive is that second and a half."
[SENSE +6]
[SENSE: 16]
It came in like a room getting bigger.
The map went first, because that's what he'd been aiming at. He'd been reading the dead in a circle about two miles wide and the circle went out to something like six, and the middle of it got sharper, so that a thing he used to feel as one, in there became one, second floor, back of the house, down about three days.
Then everything else showed up, and he had not asked for any of it.
The gravel under the truck got loud. Not louder. Loud in a way that had parts to it, so that he could hear the difference between Trevor shifting his weight in the cab and a bag blowing across the lot ninety feet off. The parking lot lights, which had been lights, turned out to have a hum with a wobble in it. Somebody's radio two blocks away was playing a song he could name.
The whole world came in at once and none of it was arranged.
Noah put his hands over his ears, which did nothing, and then over his eyes, which helped, and sat like that on the tailgate for about a minute and a half.
"Hey," Trevor said, from a very long way off. "Hey. Hey."
"Give me a second."
"Kid, I think you did something to yourself."
"You think."
"Strength, you've had before," Ellery said. "Not that much of it. But you've been stronger than you were at fifteen and your body knew what to do about it. Endurance, same. Speed, same. Every one of those you can get in a gym, slow, over a year, and the whole time your head is riding along keeping up."
Noah sat with his hands over his eyes and made a noise for him to keep going.
"Nobody trains this one."
"What."
"Think about it. There's no getting better at hearing. You don't work up to smelling more. A man goes his whole life with the exact same set he was handed and the only direction it ever goes is down." A pause. "So your body's got no idea what this is. There's no muscle for it and no memory of it. You just handed a nineteen year old six points of a thing that has never once gone up for anybody in the history of people, and it turned it all the way on at the same time and walked away."
"That would have been useful about ninety seconds ago."
"I didn't know ninety seconds ago."
It came apart into pieces after that. Not gone. Sorted. And what was left when it sorted was better than the map by a long way.
He caught a wrench Halloran dropped off the tailgate without looking at it. He did that twice more that afternoon, on purpose, to see if it was real, and it was, and it was not that his hands had gotten faster. It was that he knew where the wrench was going to be before it got there.
By evening he could read a license plate at a distance where the plate was a smear. He could tell that the coffee in the urn had been on since morning by standing next to it. And when a man three trucks down said something quiet about the kid with the shovel and the white hair, Noah heard every word of it and had to stand there and decide not to have heard it.
There was one more thing, and he couldn't get at it.
It sat right at the edge of all that, the way a word sits on your tongue. Something in the air out past the gravel and the lights and the radio, something with a shape to it, thin and everywhere at once, and every time he turned his attention toward it directly it stopped being there.
"Ellery."
"Yeah."
"Is there something out here."
Ellery was quiet a second longer than he needed to be.
"Keep pulling on that," he said.
Then Noah leaned over the side of the truck and was sick in the gravel, because six points at once is not a thing a nervous system says thank you for, and Trevor, who was in the cab eating a gas station burrito with the seat all the way back, said, "You want a Sprite?"
"Yeah," Noah said. "Actually, yeah."
*****
They rotated back to Kestrel on the tenth day.
Mara was on the front step of the annex with a spiral notebook, and when Noah came up the walk she held it up without saying anything, and he sat down on the step next to her and looked at it.
She'd been counting things.
Page after page. Buses that came through the gate. Meals. How many of the eleven kids were still there each morning, and their names, and a small mark next to the two who had left. She had a tally for how many nights she'd slept all the way through, which was three.
Noah looked at that notebook for a long time.
"You know what," he said. "I do this too."
"I know," Mara said. "That's where I got it."
Deb came out with two paper cups of lemonade and looked at Noah's head, at the part, in daylight, and did not say anything about it, which meant she'd noticed a while ago and had decided something about it.
"You're staying for dinner," she said. It wasn't a question and Noah didn't treat it like one.
*****
At nine that night Vance came and got him out of the mess hall.
She had her sleeves rolled and a tablet under her arm and she didn't sit down.
"Grand Island," she said. "Fifty miles west. Population fifty thousand and change, and as of Tuesday, about eleven thousand of them still in it."
"Okay."
"We've had no contact out of the northeast quarter since Sunday. Two drones went up. Both came back with nothing useful, because there's nothing moving on the street in daylight and there is a great deal moving on the street at night." Vance handed him the tablet. "Saint Anthony's is in that quarter. Regional hospital, four hundred beds. It was a shelter site. On Sunday it had somewhere between nine hundred and fourteen hundred people in it."
Noah looked at the photo on the tablet, which was a nine story building with a helipad and a parking garage and every window dark.
"You want a count," he said.
"I want a count."
*****
They put him on the roof of a grain elevator four miles out at two in the morning, because four miles was inside his circle now and a mile was not far enough to be safe.
It was cold. Nebraska in the middle of the night in the middle of the end of the world, and there was no light anywhere on that horizon except one gas flare somewhere south, and Noah lay on his stomach on cold corrugated steel with his chin on his hands and closed his eyes.
Then he opened them, and sat up, and did it again.
"Reyes," Okoye said.
"Give me a second."
He did it a third time, slow, going through the building floor by floor the way he'd learned to go through a house.
"Say a number," Okoye said.
"Nine hundred and six," Noah said. "In the building. There's another two hundred and change in the parking garage and about forty in the street around it."
Somebody behind him swore quietly.
"That's not the part," Noah said.
He was still looking west at a black building four miles away that he could not see and could feel perfectly.
"They're not spread out like people die," he said. "When a building goes bad you get them in stairwells and doorways and bathrooms, because that's where people go. These are in rings. Nine floors of them, and on every floor they're in a ring around the middle of the floor, all the way around, evenly, like."
He stopped.
"Like what," said Okoye.
"Like somebody set the table," Noah said.
Nine rings, stacked, all of them centered on the same point.
And on the fifth floor, at that point, in the middle of the middle ring, was nothing at all.
Not empty space. He knew what empty space felt like. He'd been feeling the empty space between bodies for eleven days, and empty space is just quiet.
This was a hole. A clean round hole about thirty feet across, punched through his map, on one floor of a building with nine hundred and six dead people in it, with four more floors of them stacked above it and four below and every single one of them facing in.
"Kid," Ellery said.
"Yeah."
"Whatever's standing in the middle of that," Ellery said, "I want you to think real hard about the fact that you can't see it."