Maybe they got stopped. He didn’t know what he was supposed to hope for now.

Then he heard the booming sound of a hand pounding on the back of the truck.

He swung open the door.

Khaled stood there with two of his pals, Gamal and Tariq. All three wore medical scrubs. Khaled carried the cooler. He hoisted it inside the trailer, then reached out his hand.

Dylan hauled him up. He stared at the cooler. “That can’t be them.”

Khaled grinned. “It is. God really wants this country to fall.”

Dylan couldn’t believe it. He opened the cooler, then swore to himself.

Dry ice smoked around four severed heads. They looked like nothing human, not really. They were gray and wrinkled and swollen, the flesh hanging off them like poorly wrapped shopping bags. One eye stared at him, dead as a marble.

Dylan stepped back. The lid fell closed.

Khaled, meanwhile, surveyed the interior of the truck. He nodded.

Everything was there, as Konrad had promised. The tubes and the machines, which sat like waiting insects, ready to buzz into life.

He looked back at Dylan. “You’ve done well. You’ll be rewarded.”

Dylan finally started to figure it out. There was no payday coming.

“Hand me those,” Khaled demanded. He meant the heads.

Dylan nearly vomited, touching the dead skin as he passed them to Khaled. Khaled placed them in the empty metal sockets at the neck of each corpse.

Any hope Dylan had that this was just a crazed fantasy had evaporated. He knew, just as sure as he was holding the heads of corpses while Khaled tightened the bolts.

In the meantime, Gamal and Tariq were strapping themselves into the chairs, hooking up the electrodes to their skin.

It began to dawn on Dylan, something he’d heard long ago in one of those science classes he flunked, you can’t get something for nothing. . . . Whatever was going to run those corpses had to be kick-started somehow.

He knew it now. This was real. All of it was real. This would work. He had helped to place these things on the Earth.

And he was going to die.

Khaled waited, unmoving, somehow communicating his impatience with just a stare. Gamal and Tariq were strapped down, faces tight with anticipation.

Khaled tightened the screw at the neck of the last creature. He was done.

Dylan glanced at the back of the truck. He had a clear shot at the door.

Now or never. Run or die.

He ran, sprinting for the door. He had it up and was scrambling out, diving like a swimmer for the pavement.

He hit hard and rolled. He could hear Khaled cursing him as he got up.

Dylan kept running. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. He was done with this nightmare.

He was gone.