CHAPTER 56Mara’s breath caught in her throat as she approached the edge of the roof, seeing all below. Movement and fluorescent light drew her eyes to the sidewalk across the street. There stood dozens of greenly transparent figures with stricken expressions of confusion and panic, lost souls looking out onto the street with revulsion and dread where hundreds of decomposing gray-skinned people filled Woodstock Boulevard, all of them standing still and straight, their wet black eyes turned upward toward the roof above Mason Fit-it. Most of them wore pajamas or hospital gowns that were torn or filthy or both. They stood in a landscape of desolation amid shattered storefronts, uprooted shrubbery and overturned cars. Streams of smoke hung in the air, barely visible in the light of distant stre
