They found Blane dead on the desert below. His head had hit a rock and it had broken open like an egg. They took off his white robes to make a shroud and pinned it down with rocks as they had the three previous fatalities. The Sergeant said a few mournful words over him before they left him behind.

"How did no-one notice how bad he was feeling?" asked Bright as they made their way back up to the road. She stared at the people around her as she waited for an answer. "We had a suicidal man with us for over an hour and no-one noticed?"

"We were all too wrapped up in our own concerns to notice," Gruber replied. "We're too busy trying to tell truth from hallucination. Trying to make sure we don't innocently do something that kills the person next to us."

"And while doing that, we did kill the person standing next to us," the linguist pointed out. "We did it with inaction rather than action but we did it nonetheless. And now we're in the same position he was. We're responsible for a person's death."

"You're not going to do something stupid, are you?" asked the doctor.

"Is that what you think?" demanded Bright, rounding on him angrily. "That what he did was stupid? What he did was an act of guilt and despair, not stupidity, and none of us saw the state he was in."

"The irony is that Dennings is the one who would have noticed," said Summers sadly. "In a way, what happened was karma because the one who could have saved him was the one he killed."

"Is anyone else feeling responsible for what happened to him?" asked Bright. She was directing her words mainly at the soldiers, the ones who'd known him before today. None of the experts had had a chance to form an emotional bond with him, but to the soldiers he was a brother in arms. Someone they might have fought beside in the past. Maybe some of them owed him their lives.

None of the soldiers answered, although Jackson and Leonard glanced at each other before turning their faces back to the road ahead. Bright noticed, though, and increased her pace until she was walking beside them. "Did you know him?" she asked.

"He kept to himself for the most part," Jackson replied. "In fact, now that I think of it, I know almost nothing about him. I don't even know if he was married."

"He had a girl in Gary, Indiana, I think," said Leonard. "He mentioned her once, I think. Can't remember her name."

"What do we tell her when she asks how he died?" asked Bright.

"We say he died in the line of duty," the Sergeant replied, turning his head to look back at them. "The same as Bernstein and Grey. He died defending his country."

"Amen," said Jackson.

"Chances are that's what they'll say about all of us," said Duffy. "And this isn't even my country."

"If the anomaly keeps growing it'll reach Canada sooner or later," Bright told him. "We're all here to defend our countries."

"If the anomaly keeps growing," the physicist replied. "Let's hope we don't find that they gave their lives for nothing. For all we know, maybe it has stopped. Maybe it's started to shrink and we're wasting our time here."

"We assume the worst until we know better," the Sergeant told him. "Let's pick up the pace. I don't like this place any more than you do. I want to get the job done and get out of here."

"Now you're talking," Duffy replied, and they all increased their pace, following the road towards the small Arizona city.

☆☆☆

"Unbelievably, we seem to be almost there," said the Sergeant some time later.

He pointed, and Jeffcott saw that there were trees on the horizon ahead of them, along with a billboard standing by the side of the road telling visitors about an exciting new housing development that would soon be taking place on the land they were crossing. The sun had crossed the sky, he saw, and was now telling them that it was early afternoon, as if six or seven hours had passed since they'd left the command post. He was as hungry as if a full day had passed since their meal at the underpass.

Some of the mounted soldiers had galloped ahead, he saw, and were returning now to report to the Sergeant. He listened to what they told him, then walked back to the experts. "They say the troopers guarding the barrier are all dead," he told them. "Nobody left to keep us from getting through. All we've got to do is shift the concrete barrier segments. There're packed vehicles on the other side, though. Shifting them'll take longer. Looks like we may be held up for a couple of hours. You can take the opportunity to get a bite to eat."

"What about once we're past the barricade?" asked Duffy.

"As far as they can tell the rest of the city's deserted," the Sergeant replied. "No bodies in the streets. It seems they took long enough to die that they were able to go inside and find a comfy bed to lie down on."

"That probably means the Institute'll be empty, then," said Robinson with visible relief. "It was a place of work, not a residence."

"Some of the interns may have lived in," Jeffcott told her. "Those that couldn't get digs with people in town. City! Sorry." He glanced across at Bright but she was saying something to Gruber.

"Maybe," condeded Robinson, "but they'll be in the top floor, probably. Away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The Furnace is in the basement, well away from any decomposing corpses. I was worried that the staff might have dropped dead where they were, at their workplaces. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with the smell on top of everything else."

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"Maybe Doctor Summers and I'll look in on them while the three of you are looking at the mad scientist's laboratory," said Summers. "See if we can figure out a cause of death."

The two doctors had an opportunity to examine a corpse sooner than they'd expected, though. The barricade was right at the edge of the city, where the desert gave way to a grid work of nice, suburban homes as if they'd passed through an invisible city wall. The street was bordered by low brick walls in front of which were small trees and shrub beds, making it impossible to drive the wagon off the road. There was no way to get around the barrier. They had to go through it.

"They thought an epidemic had broken out," said Summers as the soldiers dismounted and began examining the large, concrete barrier segments, trying to figure out how they were going to shift them. "They wanted to stop the people of the city from spreading it across the rest of the country. Logical, I suppose. Everyone starts getting sick at the same time. What else were they going to think?"

Jeffcott nodded, remembering the news headlines from a week earlier. Arizona city hit by mystery epidemic. There'd been no mention of the anomaly at the time but it must have been there; a dome of mysterious, shimmering light covering the whole city. It wouldn't have taken them long to notice that entering the anomaly was enough to make people sick even if they hadn't come in contact with any previously sick people, but they had no procedures to cover such a situation. They did have procedures to cover an epidemic so they followed those instead. Having procedures to follow, no matter how pointless, had probably been a source of comfort in the face of the utterly mysterious.

"They said there are soldiers here," said Summers. "Dead soldiers."

The Sergeant looked across as the two doctors, followed by the other experts, made their way to the barricade, clearly wondering if he should try to stop them, but then he shrugged. "Don't touch any of the weapons," he called across. "They might go off." They wouldn't, of course. Not inside the anomaly, but his training was probably too strong to ignore.

Summers raised a hand in reply, and then he was squeezing his way between two of the concrete barrier segments, Jeffcott close behind him. On the other side, vehicles of all kinds were packed edge to edge completely blocking all six lanes as well as the strip of bare ground separating the north and south bound lanes. The troopers had sat with their backs to the concrete segments as their sickness worsened, their guns still in their hands, ready to do their duty even as they felt their bodies quivering and shaking with anomaly effects. Determined to protect the rest of their country from whatever was happening here even if it meant an unwitnissed death. Unwitnissed dedication to duty. There was a nobility to them that Jeffcott found profoundly moving, so that when the two doctors stopped to examine the nearest trooper his first instinct was to protest, to demand that they be left to rest in peace.

He got a grip on himself. The dead were dead. They didn't care. The part that might once have cared was long gone. He crowded closer, therefore, to get his own look at what the anomaly had done to the poor man.

His skin was brown and wrinkly, like a dry, dead leaf. He'd expected the whole corpse to be shrunken and mummified as the heat sucked the water out of it, but there was still plenty of flesh between the thick, crusty skin and the bones beneath. There was no decomposition that he could see, unless it was happening inside, out of sight. Maybe the anomaly had killed the bacteria that rotted dead bodies.

Summers handed his spear to Jeffcott, freeing his hands to examine the corpse. "No rigor mortis," he said, lifting the arm. "The skin is thick and leathery, possibly lichenification. The flesh beneath feels well hydrated. No dessication. Now examining the mucous membranes..."

He opened the man's mouth and looked in. The rest of them, along with a couple of the soldiers, were now gathered around, watching with morbid fascination, knowing that only the magnets they were wearing were keeping them from suffering a similar fate.

"Mucous membranes are also thick and leathery," Summers continued. "Like the skin. This possibly accounts for the lack of dessication in this heat. There's nowhere on the body for the water to escape. I suspect the entire alimentary canal is in a similar condition." He lifted an eyelid. "The eyeball is hard and yellow with no visible iris or pupil. The man was probably blind for some time before he died. I'd need to perform a full autopsy to learn more. Perhaps there'll be time when we get to the institute."

"You want to bring him with us?" said Chery in disgust.

"I expect there'll be other subjects to study when we get there," the doctor replied. "Those interns, for example."

"All right," said the Sergeant irritably. "If we've all satisfied our morbid curiosities perhaps we can get this barrier shifted."

The two soldiers who'd been watching Summers examine the body jumped up guiltily and hurried over to where the others were attaching ropes to one of the concrete barrier segments. They then unhitched the horses that had been pulling the wagon, put them in a line and tied the ropes to their collars. When the soldiers led them away in a walk, the barrier segment was dragged along the tarmac with a loud, grating sound. They repeated the process with another barrier segment, opening a gap large enough for the wagon to pass through.

While some of the soldiers hitched the horses back to the wagon, others went to the vehicles choking the road, opening doors, leaning across leathery-skinned corpses to take off handbrakes and then pushing the vehicles back, away from the barrier, to where there was room to push them to the side. It took quite a while. Some of the vehicles were large, requiring all the soldiers together to move them, but gradually they were able to open up the middle, south bound lane. Beyond that, the roads were pretty much clear. There was, hopefully, nothing left to keep them from going the rest of the way to Kensington Labs.

"Oh!" Bright was walking past an expensive looking sportscar. The soldiers had left the door open and the corpse inside was fully visible, grinning as the leathery skin of its face shrank and tightened. The linguist stared at it, then strode over, grabbed it by the shoulder and gave it a good shake. The corpse's head nodded back and forth, then lay flopped to the side when the psychologist let it go.

"You okay?" Jeffcott asked her.

"Yeah," she replied, still staring at the corpse. Then she sighed and closed the car door with a slam. "Just having a slight false perception episode. I thought for a moment that it had moved, that it turned its head and looked at me. God, it was so believable."

"I saw a corpse move just now," said Duffy. "Just an anomaly hallucination." He laughed nervously at himself. "The teenage girl with the hitched up skirt. I thought she was trying to cover her modesty."

"The girl in the green dress?" said Gruber. "I swore I saw her hand move too. How could we both have the same hallucination at the same time?"

"Are we sure they're actually dead?" asked Jeffcott nervously. "Are you sure she didn't actually move?" He was suddenly very aware that there were dozens of the things all around them, both soldiers and refugees kept from fleeing the town. If they all suddenly started coming to life...

"They're dead, Dave," said Bright firmly. "They're all dead. We're all having hallucinations. It's just a coincidence that two of us had a very similar one at the same time. Come on, let's get to the lab."

She was right, Jeffcott knew. Of course she was right, but he still watched the corpses nervously as they passed them by, walking behind the wagon on which the generator was being carried. He saw the corpse of a truck driver turn its head and look at him. It grinned broadly, its leathery skin splitting open to release streams of yellow pus. Then it raised a hand to beckon him over. The corpse was clearly visible to everyone but no-one else reacted.

Just a hallucination, Jeffcott told himself. He fixed his full attention on the corpse and suddenly it was lying just where it always had been, baking in the hot Arizona sun. He turned his back on it and walked on, following the others deeper into the city.