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across difficult ravines. By the time the sun was halfway on its descent to the horizon, she arrived at an overlook that gave her a view of the small valley that Crested Butte occupied.
    The little town’s heart lay below in a neat grid, with streets and homes and a few stores clustered in the center with additional homes sprawling around the edges. Carrie lay on her stomach taking it all in, watching for movement.
    Cars would have been easy to spot moving around the town, but at this distance she had to work to pick out the people standing, sitting, and walking below. Some were in their yards, gardening or repairing something, or just playing. Two kids on bikes rolled up and down the street freely, a good sign. A cluster of women had gathered in one backyard to wash clothes together, and were obviously deep in conversation. Carrie suddenly felt a pang of envy and longed for such social connection. She nearly jumped up to join them.
    Then she saw a man in a uniform patrolling the street one block over. He carried a shotgun and had a dog with him. Now that her eyes were keyed in on guns, she spotted another man with a deer rifle standing near an intersection, and a woman walking out of a building in the heart of town with a pistol strapped to the hip of her jeans.
    A roadblock had been set up on the south side of the town where a road came in. Two teenagers were sitting behind it. Carrie traced the streets with her eyes until she spotted another similar barricade on the opposite side of the town. As she watched, a man with an AR-model rifle approached to speak to them for a moment, nodded, and left.
    It seemed that not all was as idyllic in this mountain village as she’d first assumed. She wondered what the town’s residents had seen, what they’d faced so far that made them lock down the streets and break out the guns. She didn’t relish the idea of being on the business end of one of those barricades, with all the gun-toting men in town rushing toward her full of suspicion. But did want to get down there and find someone to talk to.
    She scanned the edges, looking for a house she could approach without alerting the armed patrolmen to her presence. There were plenty of houses outside the guarded perimeter, but they appeared mostly empty. One was even burned out, with blackened walls and a section of roof missing. An old man sat in the yard of one run-down home, spitting wads of tobacco and kicking at a dog that was chained to his chair. Carrie decided against that one.
    That left one cottage that had smoke coming from its chimney. She couldn’t see who was inside, which made it very risky. But she was getting restless and couldn’t afford to stay on the ridge until the sun went down.
    She got up and moved down the hillside through the trees, circling toward the house she’d picked out, hoping to get close enough to see who was inside before knocking. She had to cross an open road to get into more trees, which she accomplished without being seen after waiting to make sure no one was coming.
    Slinking along a quiet dirt road on which several houses sat empty, Carrie approached the house with the smoking chimney. From the cover of a few trees she peered into a side window that didn’t have shades drawn, but could see only the foot of a bed. She reached up to grasp a thick branch and pulled herself up into the tree she was using for cover. From this height she could see someone lying in the bed. It looked like a teenaged boy reading a book. Nothing else in the house seemed to be moving.
    Something wasn’t right. Carrie sensed that she was missing something. Why would a boy be lying alone in an unprotected house in the middle of the day? Was he some kind of outcast? Had the townspeople banished him?
    Then it hit her: he was in quarantine. He must have had a contagious disease, and a very serious one if the townspeople wouldn’t even let him stay within their defensive perimeter. Of course, without access to a working