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until we sound the all-clear."
    "Quarantine?" said Towers. "As in a disease outbreak?"
    "We think it's contagious." Sascha shrugged and shuffled back and forth. "Not sure about the disease part."
    Towers hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and adjusted her chew with her tongue. "The whole county? That's kind of a stretch, ain't it?"
    "Make the call, officer," said Sascha. "This kind of thing can get ugly real fast."
    "That's a tall order." Towers shifted her weight from her left hip to her right. "We're talking National Guard, Homeland Security, CDC, FEMA."
    Sascha looked at Buzz. "Call POTUS, Buzz. Do it now. Make it happen."
    Before Buzz could say a word, Carrol shouted from across the street. "Let go! Let go!"
    Buzz whipped around in time to see Espinoza wrench something from Carrol's grasp and run off around a corner. Carrol teetered, off-balance, and fell back onto the fire house steps.
    Sascha, Buzz, and Towers raced to her side. "Are you all right, honey?" said Sascha.
    Carrol snatched an unlit cigarette from the ground and waved it at her. "He took my lucky lighter ! My Pittsburgh Steelers Zippo!"
    As Sascha helped Carrol to her feet, Buzz and Towers charged around the corner. There was no sign of Espinoza.
    Buzz and Towers sprinted the length of the block, then slowed and stopped at the next cross-street. Buzz put out a hand to hold back Towers while he peered around the corner...
    And then he dove back as a burning man hurtled screaming into the intersection.
    Buzz dropped his gun and pulled Towers with him, tackling her against a wall. The burning man bolted past, the flames from his body singeing the hair on Buzz's left arm.
    "Espinoza!" Towers pushed away from Buzz and ran after the burning man. As Buzz scooped up his gun from the pavement, he glimpsed a black and gold cigarette lighter and an uncapped red gasoline can in the street.
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    *****
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    Later, Towers stood over the smoking corpse on the sidewalk and made a call on her radio. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her uniform...then seemed to realize she was being watched and turned so Buzz and the others couldn't see her face.
    "Poor thing," said Sascha. "He was her boyfriend."
    Buzz almost asked how she knew...but then he let it lie. It just didn't matter.
    "Good news is, we know for sure it's contagious." Carrol paced in a circle, holding her lower back...bandy-legged, upper body cocked forward so she looked like a strutting chicken.
    "Bad news is, we know for sure it's contagious," said Sascha. "And here we all are in the hot zone."
    Towers snapped something into her radio, and Buzz nodded. "She's setting up the countywide quarantine. Where do we go from here?"
    Sascha sighed loudly. She stood, lost in thought, for a long moment, the fingertips of one hand covering her mouth. Finally, she looked at Carrol. "I wonder what Espinoza told her?"
    "He didn't tell us squat." Carrol looked at Buzz. "You said he and Towers were talking in the alley when you caught up with them."
    "I couldn't hear what they were saying," said Buzz.
    "So let's ask Towers," said Carrol.
    "We should tie her up first, actually," said Sascha.
    Carrol rubbed her back. "Only if you do the tying."
    "What's the point?" said Buzz. "Why do we care what he said to her?"
    Sascha patted his shoulder. "We're being optimistic, honey."
    Buzz frowned. "Optimistic?"
    "Yeah." Carrol strutted over and shoved her sourpuss kisser in his face. "Because if it's some kind of spell or mind control, not an airborne contagion or reality collapse, we might still have a chance of walking out of here in one piece."
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    *****
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    "He told me a story," said Towers. "The same one the little girl told him."
    "A story?" Carrol lit a cigarette and leaned back in the recliner with her feet up. She'd insisted on interviewing Towers where there was padded furniture to ease her back spasms...and Buzz had found her a comfort zone in the living room of a house along Main Street. It was one of the many homes