This Book is Full of Spiders

PAGE 55 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

For the concept of the zombie, we can thank two parties: ants, and a dog who probably died more than ten thousand years ago. Let us start with the dog.

First, you must imagine humanity as it would have existed at the time. Agriculture is a new concept, a radical practice that must have seemed like magic. Settlements are becoming larger. Humans everywhere are struggling with the transition from living in sparse, nomadic tribes hunting gazelle and gathering berries in the woods, to everyday life in close proximity to dozens of strangers in something that could be called a village.

All of this would have been a startling and hugely stressful change for our ancient ancestors. Yes, on one hand there is suddenly more food and comfort and spare time than the species had ever known. But maddening complexity arises at every turn. Language explodes. Man evolves the ability to think in words, essentially creating an entirely new schematic for his brain with which he will create abstract thought for the first time. And along with it, questions. Man needs to understand his place in the universe, and his relation to his creator. But this is not the beginning of science. It is the birth of superstition. What he does not understand, he fills in with this newfound cognitive power. The universe that this man inhabits will be one born from the astonishing new power called “imagination.”

Already at this point, superstitions about the dead would have arisen; decaying flesh is a playground for infectious disease and bacteria—man would have long realized that too much time spent in the presence of the dead means sickness or even death for one’s self. They find burying or burning the dead in a special place, away from the rest of the tribe, prevents this.

So one day, some nameless and now long-forgotten man dies. He is buried in a shallow grave by his friends, as is now their custom. But along comes a dog, or a wolf, which smells under the loose soil the irresistible scent of slightly putrid meat. The dog digs and finds a hand. It pulls it up from the soil with its jaws, but then becomes distracted in its task and runs away. Along come the deceased man’s friends once more, and what do they find? A pale, dead hand, pushing up through the soil, as if clawing for the sky. Their friend, though still clearly dead, attempts to escape from his grave and walk! And thus the undead enter our cultural memory once and for all. That image, of the pale, decaying hand emerging from the grave, can still be found on endless movie posters and horror novels. From that primal fear would develop the mythology of the zombie and the vampire and countless other incarnations across time and cultures.

But why does this haunt us so profoundly? After all, a shambling, decaying man should present less of a physical danger than a quick, strong, able-bodied man who wishes us the same harm. If anything, such a man would be easier to outrun, outwit, and eventually put down. Why would mankind spend a hundred centuries obsessing over such an easily vanquished opponent?

For the answer, we must look to the ant.

As I alluded to, even before civilization began to emerge, agriculture must have seemed to early humans an inconceivably brazen attempt at playing God. Why, to refuse the nuts, berries and game that were naturally placed before you by providence and to instead plant and grow your own? It would be the ancient equivalent of some mad scientist today promising to grow a child in a vat. This bitter divide among early man finds its way into our mythology with the story of Adam and Eve—the decision to abandon the self-sustaining garden in favor of food that only grows reluctantly from the ground by “the sweat of thy face.” But this kind of audacious assault on nature—an act not observed in any other of the world’s creatures—required man to accept (or believe, if you prefer) that he was unique. Blessed. Divine. The planet is there for the taking and he must believe that he is destined to subdue it. Thus mankind embraces his identity as an eternal creation, a being above and beyond the physical. A being capable of choice, where all of the other beasts and fishes function according only to the simple arithmetic of crude instinct. A bear’s actions can be boiled down to hunger, or fear. But a man is capable of decision, because he has this indefinable but all-powerful spark. This is what makes him man.

But then man observes the ant.

Clearly no individual ant possesses this same spark. No ant ever created a work of art, or felt love, or loyalty. No ant ever thought through a decision—ants mindlessly follow pheromone trails, to the point that if the leader forms a circle, the colony will follow it around and around, endlessly, until all have died from exhaustion.

Yet, they create vast colonies, with separate chambers for the hatching of eggs and waste and storage. They grow and harvest fungi for food. The tunnels are designed with ventilation to the surface to carefully regulate temperature and air quality. A human would need years of formal study to learn all of the various principles and skills required to build a structure as complex as those created by the “mindless” ants.

So what, then, makes humans so special? Of what good is this explosive wonder we call imagination, or the internal monologue we call our “mind” or “personality”? Of what value is the divine “spark” that we believe grants us dominion over all, including those ants? All of our greatest achievements can apparently be duplicated without it.

That is why we fear the zombie. The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.

8 Days, 12 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John noted that somebody could actually chart in miles per hour the speed at which the panic and bullshit rippled outward from Undisclosed.

They left the highway to get gas about an hour north of the town, and at that point everything still seemed just a couple of ticks off from normal. The convenience store was busy but not crazy. John bought cigarettes and two Red Bulls and even chatted with the girl at the counter about what was going on. She talked him into getting a couple of hot dogs that had been slowly rotating in their warmer for a week or so. Amy grabbed a huge bag of strawberry Twizzlers and the biggest Diet Mountain Dew they had. Amy paid and John promised to pay her back. Then he had a moment of panic when he wondered if the guy who wrote his paycheck every two weeks was even still alive. Or if the bank where he had his checking account was still standing. If not, then what? He had nothing. Just the clothes on his back.

Then, when he and Amy stopped at another convenience store just twenty-five miles up the road, both of them urgently having to use the bathroom for different reasons, the place was a madhouse. The lines to the gas pumps led all the way to the street, blocking traffic as people waited to turn in. All of the bottled water, milk and bread had been stripped from the shelves. An Indian guy behind the counter was arguing with someone about a per-customer limit he had just imposed on everything in the store at that moment. Everyone was on their phones, yelling about packing up, getting the kids from basketball practice, heading to Mom’s house. Yes, now, they’d say. A curfew was coming. Martial law was going to be declared for the whole tri-county area. Or the whole state. Or the whole country.

“Terrorist attack” was the key word in all the conversations. A biological weapon, released by a cop who went crazy and became a jihadist. The stuff made the skin rot off your bones, ate through your brain, made you kill your family. Highly contagious. Countless infected may have gotten out of the town before the government sealed it off. We could all be infected for all we knew. Some thought this was what the government wanted. Some thought the government itself released the pathogen.

John and Amy got out of there as fast as they could, not even stopping to buy a courtesy item which Amy said was her normal policy when using the bathroom at a business. John said that was the kind of rule that got suspended during the apocalypse.

John was trying to stay calm because Amy was getting worked up and panic has a way of multiplying when you have two people’s fear flowing back and forth, creating a feedback loop. She kept asking questions that he didn’t have answers to. Wouldn’t somebody from the government come looking for them for breaking quarantine? Wouldn’t they know to look for the Bronco? He didn’t know.

They were heading back to her dorm at the university because they had literally nowhere else to go. But Amy kept asking questions about that, too. Wouldn’t they come looking for them there? If the infected were dangerous, shouldn’t they get some guns or something? John thought all of those were great questions but he wasn’t entirely clear what he was supposed to do about any of them. Say they dumped the Bronco. Then what? Walk? Steal a car?

Yes, somebody would eventually come knocking at the dorm if they stayed there too long (though he thought the government had bigger fires to put out at the moment) but goddamnit, they needed to stop somewhere and sit down and reorganize. He had just slept for a couple of hours the night before, in a chair at the police station. He just needed to… reset himself. Get something to drink.

Yes, it would be nice to have the flamethrower plus a shotgun and ten or twenty boxes of shells. They didn’t. He also didn’t have the cash to buy a gun, but even if he did, he was pretty sure if they stopped at a Walmart they would find the line to sporting goods wrapped around the store. All of the guns would be gone, along with all of the ammo and cleaning kits and knives. Also gone would be the camping supplies, the water purification tablets, the tanks of propane, the batteries, the hand-cranked emergency radios and so on. This is a part of the country that created a nationwide ammunition shortage the day after they saw a non-white president won an election. They’ve been waiting for this shit.

Not that John could criticize, because he knew better than any of them what was coming—what was really coming—and here he was, driving in the night in Dave’s beat-up Bronco, without so much as a flashlight in the way of emergency supplies. Not that he would put it like that to Amy. Goddamn he needed a drink. Just to get things back on an even keel.

John cursed himself. Or rather, he cursed the past version of himself for so thoughtlessly screwing over the current version of himself. Everything that would come in useful right now was in the trunk of his Caddie. The Caddie that was parked outside of the burrito stand the last time he saw it, but that by now was either impounded by the government, or stolen, or on fire, or flipped over in a riot.

They were on the exit ramp headed to Amy’s campus when her phone chimed to announce a text message (by playing “One Night in Bangkok,” a private joke between her and Dave). Amy opened it, then scrunched up her face like she’d just watched a waiter at a restaurant slap a squealing live pig on the table in front of her.

John said, “What?”

“It’s… a text. From David.”

She said nothing else. John’s brain seized up.

“And?”

She read it off her screen: “‘I want you to know that I am fine. They have asked us to stay here as a precaution. Ignore the rumors, everything is fine and they are treating me well.’”

John and Amy both were silent for several seconds. Finally, both burst out laughing.

Amy said, “If David wrote that, I will eat this phone.”

John said, “‘They’re treating me well’? I want you to seriously imagine those words coming out of Dave’s mouth. He wouldn’t say that even if they were treating him well.”

“They might as well have had him speaking Japanese.”

“I have his phone in my pocket, by the way.”

The laughter died as quickly as it had come and Amy said, “Why would they send me a fake text?”

“I bet they sent them to everybody on the network. Probably the same one. Trying to pacify the people on the outside, to keep them from beating down the barriers to get into town. Think about it, you got husbands separated from wives, kids separated from parents. Imagine you go out of town to go see a concert or something, you leave the kid with a babysitter, then head back home to find the road blocked by a wall of National Guard trucks, telling you you can’t see your child, who by the way is trapped inside ground zero of a bioweapon outbreak.”

“Do you have any idea how mad David will be when he sees this? Sending this out in his name like that?”

John didn’t say anything. Just let that conversation fade. For now, the goal was to get her away, and safe, and to sit down somewhere quiet and figure out what to do next. Over a beer.

The bullshit reached Amy’s dorm ahead of them, so John’s final estimate was that it traveled at about 80 miles an hour. Of course, bullshit picked up speed exponentially in the information age—the situation in Undisclosed would make a newscast in Japan within the next two hours, and Internet rumors would assure everyone everywhere that they were all equally in danger of a terrorist/zombie attack.

The common room on Amy’s floor was packed with students, gathered around a TV mounted to the wall. It was tuned to CNN, which John guessed meant this was the most CNN anyone in this building had watched in years. It was clear from the coverage that nobody had gotten a camera crew inside the town after the Action 5 News team got eaten. They did have three short video clips that they showed on a loop, all of them shot with shaky cell phones and presumably uploaded to the Web before all of the communication lines went dark. The first was the least exciting, showing a crew of National Guard putting up temporary fencing around the hospital. They were working fast, using a huge drill thing attached to a backhoe to punch holes in the dirt while a crane filled said holes with poles three times as tall as a man. The view cut to a roll of absolutely sinister looking razor wire on the ground, then to a group of guys standing guard, holding assault rifles that John recognized as M4s, as he had gone shopping for one that last summer.

Still no hazmat gear on those guys. Jesus.

Finally one of the soldiers shouted something at whoever was holding the camera and the clip abruptly ended.

Then the next two clips were prefaced by the anchor warning that the following scenes were very disturbing, and that you should leave the room if you were a giant pussy. They then cut to the second clip, shot from inside a car that was creeping along downtown, the driver presumably trying to steer while holding their phone out of the window to record what looked like some bodies laying in front of a smashed-up storefront (John recognized it as Black Circle Records, on Main Street—it hadn’t been smashed up quite as much the last time he saw it). The shot zoomed in on a mutilated body laying facedown. Well, part of it was facedown, the torso part. The pelvis was a twisted pink mess, and the legs were turned all the way around, so that they were toes-up. Suddenly one of the legs snapped into action, bending at the knee as if the legs were going to get up on their own and walk away without the rest of the body. The shot cut to black before we could see if they did.

Finally, they cut to a grainy scene shot from an upper-story window, looking down at the street below. There were three soldiers in a standoff with a lone guy who was holding a curved object that looked like a scythe—it was hard to make out from that distance. The soldiers were shouting commands at the guy, gesturing for him to get facedown on the ground. He advanced on them and they opened fire, all three of them. The clip had no audio but you could see repeated puffs of gunsmoke drifting into the air and bits of flesh flying off the guy. He never went down. He didn’t even stumble. Instead he reared back and threw the scythe thing at the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his neck and went down.

The other two soldiers ran.

The camera view started shaking, which John interpreted as the cameraman going nuts and probably yelling to the other people in the room about what had just happened. This got the attention of the monster below, who turned and looked up, directly into the camera, and thus into the eyes of everyone in the dorm common room.

The man reached into his coat and pulled out another scythe. John had a split second to realize he had actually pulled out one of his own ribs, before he hurled it at the window, shattering it.

Everyone in the common room flinched.

The scene cut to black.

A kid at the front of the room with black hair, a beard, and horn-rimmed glasses said, “Now tell me that wasn’t a zombie.”

John’s college career had been brief and he had never lived in a dorm room. This one reminded him of a prison cell. Amy and her roommate slept in bunk beds. They had no TV. There was a bathroom and shower that they shared with the people in the next room. There was a little mini-fridge next to the window, a hot plate sitting on top of it. Not even enough floor space to do a push-up. Not that he hadn’t lived in worse.

In one corner John found a familiar sight, what he thought of as Amy’s “nest.” At the center was an old beanbag chair that looked like it had come from a garage sale or a vintage store. Surrounding it was her Apple laptop, a rolled-up, half-empty bag of Cheetos, an open box of Cocoa Pebbles cereal that she would eat dry, and four empty bottles—orange juice, orange juice, Diet Mountain Dew, water. If she were at home you would also find two prescription bottles there, one pain pill and one muscle relaxer that John knew she took for her back. She probably kept those in her purse, shit like that would get stolen in a college dorm. You could sell OxyContin for ten or twenty bucks a pill here. Price would probably go to ten times that now that the apocalypse was here.

You stop that apocalypse shit. Keep your head, John.

Amy had the lower bunk, which John knew because on the wall next to it she had taped up a little world map with a dozen cities in Europe and Australia bearing red stars she had drawn on with a Sharpie. Cities she wanted to visit someday. John noticed she had added a star to Japan since the last time he had seen it. He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—

“John, you’ve met Nisha, right?” John had. Amy’s gorgeous Indian roommate. She was on the top bunk in pajama pants and a tank top, glued to her phone and tapping in Facebook updates. A bottle of absinthe leaned against the wall next to her, a textbook nearby served as a tray for an ornate glass, sugar cubes and a disposable lighter. Saturday night!

Nisha said, “Okay, I am freaking out over this. Did you see that zombie video?”

Amy said, “Yeah, it’s crazy. David is still there. In the town.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh, wow. I’m so sorry. Is he okay?”

“We don’t know. Nobody knows anything. John was there when everything happened, he just barely made it out.”

She looked at John. “Oh. Wow. And he’s not… infected or anything, is he? He didn’t get bit?”

“No, no. He was way away from everything when it happened. They actually let him out at the checkpoint, they checked him over and said he was fine.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“But don’t tell anybody, okay? People will freak out. You know how people are.”

“Oh, totally.”

“Do you mind if he crashes on the floor tonight? Tomorrow we’ll make some calls and go back and pick up David.”

Pick up David, John thought. Like he just needs a ride.

John thought the absinthe looked like it had barely been touched.

“Absolutely,” said the roommate, even more oblivious. “Hey Pizza Factory is doing their two-for-one thing tonight.”

John thought,

Brains, splattered on blue plastic.

As Amy said, “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we need to eat. Uh, John, what do you take on your pizza?”

A part of John realized this was crazy, but another part of him wondered if there would be such a thing as pizza a week, or a month, from now.

“John?”

“Meat. I want meat on it. All of the meat that they have.”

Amy sank into her beanbag chair and John noticed she called the pizza from speed dial. Nisha nodded to her absinthe bottle and said to John, “Wanna drink with me?”

Well… it would be rude not to at this point.

8 Days, 1 Hour Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy couldn’t help but notice that after John had gone on and on about how tired he was and how he’d had no sleep because he was busy rescuing David the night before, he was still going strong at midnight. He and Nisha finished off the absinthe but then Nisha went down the hall and came back with another bottle of some kind of liquor or other. It had a pirate on the bottle. John was getting talkative and was suddenly in action hero mode. “We need weapons, that’s the first step,” he said. “We may have to improvise something. All those assholes gotta pay.”

Pay for what?

He was getting loud and that made Amy nervous because, apocalypse or not, it was against building policy to have overnight visitors from off campus and if the RA caught John in the room she’d make him leave. And then what would he do? Sleep in the truck? But now, he and Amy’s roommate were getting drunk and downing pizza and making a party out of it.

Uh, everybody deals with crisis differently… I guess?

They asked Amy if they could use her laptop and they both huddled over it, refreshing the news Web sites and all of the social networking hubs over and over and over again, even though nothing new was coming out of Undisclosed and Amy was pretty sure nothing new would come out until daytime. If nobody had reporters on the inside and the phone lines were down, then all that was coming out were the stupid rumors. Sitting there and sucking up the rumors wasn’t doing anyone any good, it was just following the crisis as a form of entertainment. The crisis that David was stuck right in the middle of. Amy didn’t think either of them even noticed when she got up, put on her jacket and walked out.

There were still a lot of people in the common room. The channel got switched to Fox News and a panel of experts was desperately trying to fill airtime by finding ways to rephrase the nothing that they knew, over and over again. She thought it was fascinating how the coverage on the Internet and the coverage on TV were from alternate universes. TV was all “terror… terrorist… Al Qaeda…” and the Internet was “zombies… zombies… zombies…”

Amy just kept walking toward the elevator and headed down, out of the building. She needed air.

The campus was buzzing. The hot dog truck was pulled up in front of the building and there was a line three wide and ten deep in front of it. Amy walked past because she wanted to wish Spiro the hot dog guy a happy birthday—his was one of the over two hundred birthdays programmed into the calendar app on her phone. He smiled and told her the hot dogs were free tonight, one per customer. Not because of his birthday, but because of the other thing.

She passed a flyer posted to a utility pole with a huge letter Z on it, which she ignored, but then she passed another one, and another. Then she arrived at the visitor’s parking lot and found one under the windshield of David’s truck (and all of the other cars) and read it:

Zombie nerds. They probably had the flyers already made up for this. There was nobody creepier than the zombie nerds, college guys who not only watched zombie movies and read zombie novels and played zombie video games, but actually formed clubs and collected zombie-killing weapons. Gun shops around there actually stocked zombie targets, and special zombie bullets with glow-in-the-dark tips. Not toy bullets, mind you. These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.

She climbed inside the truck. She wasn’t going anywhere. She had never learned to drive, her car accident happened not long before she would have been due to take her Driver’s Ed courses in high school. She never got back around to it after she went back to school and now the thought of it terrified her. She didn’t know how anybody did it. Hurtling down the highway at 65 miles an hour while a barrage of other cars come flying toward you like huge cannon shells, whipping past in the next lane, just five feet from your own squishy body. If at that moment one of you nudges your steering wheel at the wrong time, two seconds later your body is a bunch of spaghetti wrapped around bundles of twisted steel. She’d yell at David for eating while he drove, a Coke between his legs and a hamburger in one hand, steering with two fingers, at night. It’s like nobody in the world gets how fragile life is. How fragile our bodies are.

Amy got the crying to stop about ten minutes later. Her tear ducts were getting sore. She turned the flyer over and found a pen in her purse. She held the flyer to her thigh with the stump of her left wrist, and began writing with her right. She was making a list.

1. Call the Centers for Disease Control.

John said that’s who was on the scene of the house fire, which made sense because this was sort of a disease. If so, at some point they had to establish a hotline for people to get in contact with their loved ones inside quarantine. There’d be riots otherwise. They were still Americans, there was still such a thing as the Constitution. All she needed them to do was confirm that David was okay, even if she wasn’t allowed to see him or talk to him.

2. Exhaust all means of contacting David.

One way or the other, it didn’t seem plausible that the government could really shut down all forms of communication. Not in the twenty-first century. She could have John post a message to him on his blog, she would post on Facebook, she would e-mail him, she would try the cell again. Write a paper letter addressed to the Undisclosed quarantine operation sent ATTN: David Wong.

It was driving her crazy, not knowing. Where was he right now? At this moment? Wandering free around town? In a temporary CDC plague tent or something? Crashing at John’s old place? She thought for a moment then jotted down:

3. If David is in CDC custody, get him a care package.

His house had burned down. That meant he needed… everything. Clothes. Heartburn pills. Replacement contact lenses in case he lost one. Dandruff shampoo. Some Oreos. A book.

One more idea occurred to her. It should have come to her sooner. She wrote:

4. Contact Marconi?

“Marconi,” if you haven’t heard of him, was Dr. Albert Marconi. He wrote books and hosted a show on the History Channel about monsters and ghosts and stuff. David and John knew him because their paths had crossed a few times. If anybody knew what to do, he would. Heck, he was probably on his way here. Probably started calling his producer and packing his bags the moment that “zombie” video hit the news. Then, with resolve, Amy filled in the last item:

5. If none of the above can be done, get into the quarantine.

Getting out of a quarantine was hard, but getting in would be the easiest thing in the world, right? All you had to do was show up and say you were infected. She wouldn’t even need to lie—she had spent twelve straight hours with somebody who was at Outbreak Ground Zero. Just tell them that. Instant ticket in. The problem would be figuring out how to find David once she was in there—if the government had him somewhere, they may not allow them to stay together since they’re not married. If they didn’t have him, finding where he was in town could be a chore. Still, just being inside the city would put her 90 percent closer.

She folded up the paper and put it in her purse. There. Now she had a plan. She felt better. She would get some sleep and get a fresh start with John tomorrow.

7 Days, 13 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy started trying to wake up John at nine in the morning. He didn’t get up until two in the afternoon. He was cranky and despondent. When she suggested calling Dr. Marconi and asked him if he had a phone number for him, John mumbled that he would “take care of it.” After she reminded him six more times over the next two hours, finally he got on her laptop and started doing something or other, which she took as progress until she leaned over him and realized he was on the freaking Web site for Marconi’s TV show, trying to find a phone number. She could have done that. Eight hours ago. John wound up calling a number that she was pretty sure was for ordering DVD box sets of Marconi’s show, and leaving a rambling voice mail that no sane human being would respond to.

Then the rest of that evening was spent trying to find John a place to stay. But all of the hotels in town were booked with people unable to get back home to Undisclosed and all the news media converging on the area. They wound up having to put him up in a motel an hour away, so now John would have to make a two-hour round trip every time they needed to do anything. So here are all the other people running around in a panic trying to stock up to survive the end of the world, and Amy and John were farting trying to find a hotel and… ugh.

She wasn’t going to cry.

Oh, and Amy paid. For everything. John said he was expecting a paycheck from the temp job he had working for a DJ doing parties and weddings and stuff, but of course said DJ lived in Undisclosed so who knows if he got out or if he was dead or if he was a monster.

So anyway, that was Sunday gone.

6 Days, 18 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy had taken to avoiding the common room because there was almost a party atmosphere there. Sure, people would talk about it like it was this big national tragedy, but you could tell they were into it, like it was something they could seize on to break up the routine. Just one more bit of drama that played out on the big common room TV.

The big news Monday morning was that the government had scheduled a press conference, the first one since all of this happened. It was also streamed on the Internet, so Amy could follow it from her phone in her dorm room, away from the spectators. The stream on her phone was delayed by seven or eight seconds for whatever technical Internet reason, so it created a weird effect where she could faintly hear the guy leading the news conference say a line down the hall before he’d say it again on her phone a few seconds later. She was alone, John was at the hotel and her roommate was down the hall with the crowd.

First, the guy—a middle-aged guy with a young George Clooney haircut—announced a phone hotline they had set up, but said to please not call with inquiries about loved ones. The number was purely to report that you or someone you knew were showing symptoms of infection, so they needed to keep those lines free since containing infection had to be first priority. He read off the number and Amy hurriedly dug the zombie flyer out of her purse and jotted it down.

The guy also said that they had set up a patient treatment facility at the Undisclosed hospital, and that all infected and suspected infected were being transported there and given the best care possible. In the meantime, they were imposing a strict sundown curfew in the city, and they would be going house to house to check for infected individuals. The guy was good at his job, Amy found herself actually feeling better. As horrible as John had described the situation and what they had seen, this guy here seemed on top of it.

Then, something weird happened.

The guy was winding down the press conference with some generic lines about how they were busily researching the outbreak, and urged people to neither believe nor spread irresponsible Internet rumors. Then CNN abruptly cut back to the anchor and everyone in the common room screamed their heads off. This completely baffled Amy, as the anchor was just a lady in a pantsuit. But then she remembered the delay. She had five solid seconds to tense up her whole body while she waited to see what they had seen.

The anchor quickly said that they had exclusive new video that had just leaked from Outbreak Ground Zero, and in the middle of her sentence they cut to a grainy video, shot from inside a car at night. The chaos had already started before they got the camera up—there were screams and confused shouts from within the car, inhuman growls from outside. Glass shattered. A fist punched through, a grotesque face biting at the cameraman. A flash of light and a pop filled the interior of the car—a gunshot. The monster recoiled from the window. There were plenty more behind it, four or five hands now pushing in through the glass. More gunshots.

A female voice in the car screamed, “DRIVE! DRIVE!”

Squealing tires. Another relieved voice rasped, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, that was so close…”

The view swung across the street. Amy thought she saw a reddish dog trot past. She thought, Molly?

The woman holding the camera phone had rested her arm so that the camera was now pointing at her lap, but continued recording—that’s why the viewers knew she was doomed before she did. While the woman held a nervous conversation with the driver, a crimson stain started forming across her abdomen. Then a puckered hole formed in her belly, like she was being shot from behind by the world’s slowest bullet.

Guts spilled out onto her lap, a tangle of wet sausages.

The woman screamed.

The clip cut to black.

Amy shut off her phone. She breathed. She called John and got his voice mail. She paced around her dorm room for a few minutes, trying to think of what to do next. Then she went into the bathroom and threw up.

6 Days, 6 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John saw Amy’s messages piling up on his phone and by Monday night he wanted to throw the thing through a fucking window. He knew how serious the fucking situation was, he could turn on a TV or look out his window—his motel was down the block from a Pentecostal church and he could see people piling through the door. On a Monday.

And oh, by the way, he wanted to say, he had been friends with David for ten years before Amy even knew his fucking name. John felt the loss in ways she couldn’t even conceive. He didn’t need her calling him every five seconds to tell him to do, what, exactly?

John had promised himself he wouldn’t drink today, he had overdone it Saturday night. But by Monday evening he started to have that swimmy, flu-feeling in his head and gut and realized it was stupid to try to put himself through rehab on a week when he needed to be 110 percent. He’d stick to beer, though, that much he decided. He got a twelve-pack and settled in for the night in the motel room, watching the news carefully for updates.

He’d call Amy tomorrow.

From the Journal of Amy Sullivan

Tuesday 11/8:

Lines everywhere. Lines at the stores, lines at the gas station. Everyone is freaking out. People are leaving town and heading north, new people are showing up from the south like refugees. The National Guard has extended the quarantine zone out five more miles from around [Undisclosed]. Class cancelled. I haven’t slept.

No answer from John all day. Tried to call Dr. Marconi myself. Left a message.

Wednesday 11/9:

Left John nine messages. Campus and the rest of town is now under a curfew. I think they are going to come looking for us. We SHOULD NOT STILL BE HERE.

Decided I’m not going back to the dorms. Staying with some guys who live off campus. Didn’t tell anyone in the dorm where I was going.

Rumors from inside quarantine are crazy. News has a rumor that the CDC had to pull all of their staff out of the hospital treatment facility. Government denies it. Hopefully David isn’t there either way.

Thursday 11/10:

FINALLY talked to John in the P.M. Suddenly he’s all bluster, says if we don’t hear anything by SATURDAY NIGHT—one week after all this started—then he and I will go down to [Undisclosed] ourselves and break David out on Sunday. Told him I didn’t need to break him out, I just needed to know that he was okay.

Meanwhile, getting calls on my cell from unlisted numbers. I don’t answer them.

Friday 11/11:

Got a call from Nisha, said somebody from the government showed up at the dorm looking for me.

I called John. Voice mail. All day. Voice mail.

I cried again. Broke my streak.

Saturday 11/12:

Absolute information blackout from [Undisclosed]. No more video clips, no new information. I am going crazy. I can’t keep food down. A week. Where has David been sleeping that whole time? Is he in pain? Is he hungry?

The government FINALLY put up their Web site for families and friends of outbreak victims to search for names. Three categories—Quarantined, Status Unknown, and Deceased. The Quarantined list was HUGE, hundreds of names. David wasn’t on it. It was in alphabetical order but I read the list four times to make sure they didn’t just put his name in the wrong spot. Then I moved on to Status Unknown, and he wasn’t on there, either, and then I decided it was a stupid list because whose status do we actually know at any given time? They could have the whole world on there. I just closed the browser.

No return call from Marconi. When I tried to call John, got voice mail only. Again.

Left a message reminding him that tomorrow was the day. I gave him a location & told him to pick me up there at eleven A.M. No reason he can’t be up and around at that hour.

Scared. Excited. Going to see David tomorrow one way or the other.

18 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy wasn’t sure if she had been more freaked out about the crazy bustle of the campus earlier in the week, or the ghost town that it was now. Campus had emptied, everybody had left to go back home to Mom and Dad, scared the university would get swallowed up in the expanding quarantine zone. Well, those who had parents, anyway.

That morning, Amy wound up spending a solid hour just trying to get dressed, standing in the “guest room” at the house where she was now holed up (a huge old house occupied by three gay guys she had met in a pottery class). The “guest room” was just a converted attic covered in Bollywood movie posters and full of discarded exercise machines that had each once starred in their own informercial. The hour was spent almost entirely standing over her suitcase in her underpants, trying to figure out what would be practical to wear in this situation. After imagining a hundred different scenarios for what they’d see once they got down there, she finally realized that the quarantine staff would probably seize everybody’s clothes and give them hospital pajamas or something. So the best bet was to wear something she didn’t care about losing to an incinerator.

So then she was running late, and still had to go to the drugstore. She’d been avoiding it all week because she thought it’d be a madhouse like everything else. But it, like everything else, was eerily empty now.

Also empty? The shelves. There were handmade signs everywhere about per-customer limits. She wanted to get both of her prescriptions filled, but they were out of Oxy and could only do a partial refill of the muscle relaxer. She tried not to let the guy at the counter see how much this freaked her out, doing the math in her head to see how long the painkillers would last her until she was basically flat on her back and unable to stand up (answer: nine days). Then again the quarantine would be full of doctors so they probably had all kinds of stuff there.

She bought nasal strips—couldn’t sleep without them. She wanted some over-the-counter allergy pills. All gone. She looked for antacid tablets for David, all those were gone but they had some tropical-flavored Tums that even in an emergency nobody would buy.

Tampon aisle was bare. She also noticed the condom case was empty, though she figured that was a little too, uh, optimistic anyway. She did successfully get some sensitive-teeth toothpaste and the one brand of deodorant that didn’t give her a rash. Finally, the candy aisle. Twizzlers were gone, but she did get some Red Vines, which were basically like stale Twizzlers.

She could have kept going around and around the store for the rest of the day thinking up things she and David might need, but she was already running late and if John arrived at the meeting site to find she wasn’t there, he might freak out.

In her message, Amy had told John to pick her up at a bus stop in front of a huge Mexican restaurant that was impossible to miss. She took only one change of clothes, her bag full of pharmacy stuff, and her pillow. With her back the way it was, the pillow was a necessity. She could not sleep on any other pillow. They could have everything else, they could send her into quarantine wearing a potato sack. But they weren’t getting the pillow away from her.

She got to the bus stop at three minutes until eleven, and saw the white Bronco round the corner right at eleven on the dot. She took a deep breath and said a prayer.

14 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Two hours later, Amy was still sitting at the bus stop.

It hadn’t been John coming around the corner and it hadn’t been a Bronco, it was a different make. Some hillbilly behind the wheel.

She called John for the fifth time. Voice mail.

As she hung up, two guys walked past her on the sidewalk carrying shotguns. Right there in broad daylight.

She was freezing, her butt numb on the bus stop bench, sitting there with her pillow on her lap. She called the front desk of John’s motel to ask if they could check on him (they wouldn’t). She called Nisha, to see if she’d heard from him (she hadn’t).

No crying. She imposed a no-crying rule until further notice. She had eaten half a dozen of the Red Vines.

An SUV pulled over about a block down. Four guys got out of it, all of them carrying hard plastic cases that were shaped like they held rifles. Some had little briefcase-shaped ones that she guessed held pistols or some other kind of littler gun. They all headed off in the same direction.

She stared at her phone, willing it to ring.

At around 1:30, she finally got John to answer his phone.

“Hello?”

“John! Oh my god. Where are you?”

“I’m, uh, at the motel. What’s happened?”

“What do you mean what’s happened? I’m here at the bus stop.”

“Okay are you taking the bus here or…”

“What? John? It’s Sunday.”

Pause.

“The buses don’t run on Sunday?”

“John…”

“Yeah? What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

She took a moment to compose herself, failed.

“Hello? Amy?”

“John, we were supposed to go down to the city today. To see David.”

“Oh, yeah, okay. I didn’t hear your voice mail until just now. My phone has been messing up, I think the network is dropping a lot of calls because of the—”

“Are you coming?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Today isn’t good, I’m really sick. Think it’s food poisoning. Probably something going around at the motel, everybody has it. But it’s probably for the best anyway, I think we should hold off. But I’ve been doing a ton of research. It turns out the government has put up a list of names on their Web site. I haven’t been there yet but let me give you the address—”

Amy hung up on him, and turned off her phone.

It was, she would have to say, the angriest she had ever been in her entire life. She took a dozen deep breaths, trying to remember the techniques from the meditation class she had taken (somebody claimed it could do as much to control pain as any prescription painkiller, ha-ha).

She only had one other option. She dug the zombie flyer from her purse, unfolded it, and dialed the hotline number the guy had given out during the press conference.

She punched her way through a series of voice options, then when she reached an operator said, “Uh, hi. My name is Amy Sullivan. My boyfriend’s name is David Wong. His house is where the infection started. Both of us were there. I’m showing symptoms. I think I should be quarantined but I’m two hours away and I don’t have transportation.”

Long pause on the other end.

“Please hold.”

After a minute, a friendly sounding male voice came on the line and said, “Ms. Sullivan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll come get you. Stay exactly where you are. Don’t panic.”

“Okay. Do you know where the bus stop is in front of—”

“We know where you are. We’ll be there within thirty minutes. Please stay where you are. If someone else approaches you, ask them to stay at least fifty feet away. Remain calm.”

Thirty minutes? So they did have people in town.

She hung up and bit into a Red Vine. She felt stupid. This is what she should have done all along. She’d be in Undisclosed before dark.

13 Hours, 30 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Dark. Thirsty.

I had been hospitalized only once before, for a concussion and some cuts and a fractured eye socket I suffered in a car accident, and for a minor gunshot wound unrelated to the accident. I don’t remember any of it clearly, it happened during a period of my life that is mostly lost to my memory. But one thing I do remember is the long, slow, touch-and-go bob to consciousness that came with the artificially induced coma of anesthesia. Sights and smells drifting in under the haze of nonsense dream logic, and a sense that the world had skipped ahead in time without me. And under it all, the thirst. This was like that.

My last solid memory was stepping through the Porta-Potty, stepping out of the BB’s restroom door and into a shouting, shoving crowd that had gathered behind the store. The people were being herded into that spot by National Guard—confused, scared kids with assault rifles and no protective gear. Somebody started shooting and a head burst like a balloon next to me, the dead guy flailing back through the door I had just exited.

Days had passed since then. I knew that. I could feel it in my sore joints, and I had a vague sense of cycles, of consciousness and unconsciousness—sleeping through a night, drifting in and out of a day that was just as dark. I had been moved, and moved again, rolled down a hallway on a gurney. I remember having an IV in my arm for a while, and then they took it out, and then put it back. I had been outside at some point, behind a fence, talking to other people. I remembered screams, and panic. All of it just flashing through my brain, like headlights passing a bedroom window at night. There and gone. Meaningless.

Sleep.

Awake.

Dark.

I had eyes. I felt the twitch of my eyelids opening and closing, though the view remained the same either way. Was I blind?

I moved my right arm. I couldn’t feel the dragging weight of plastic tubes attached, so I had been unhooked at some point. With some effort I lifted my hand to my face, to see if my eyes were covered. They were not. I blinked. I tried to lift my head, and groaned—a bolt of pain fired up my neck. I looked around for the glow of a digital clock, or a slit of light under a door, or blinking green lights on a console measuring my vitals.

Nothing.

I tried to sit up. I peeled my back off of the sheets, but my other arm wouldn’t come with me. I tugged on it and heard the clank of metal and felt cold steel around my wrist. I was handcuffed to the bed.

That is never a good sign.

I peeled apart dry lips and croaked, “Hello?”

Nobody would have heard it unless they were sitting on the bed with me. I tried to swallow and give it another shot.

“Hello? Is anybody out there?”

Something about the echo of my voice told me I was in a small room.

“HELLO?”

I waited, for the sound of a shuffling nurse’s footsteps outside, or even the jingling of keys and a burly prison guard to tell me to shut the hell up or he was going to put me in solitary.

Nothing. I thought I detected the sound of water dripping, somewhere.

Suddenly I was certain—absolutely certain—that I had been abandoned here. No question, they had stuck me in a building, chained to a bed, and left me here to die of thirst. They didn’t even leave a light on. I’d lie here, for days, pissing and shitting myself, like a neglected dog in a trailer park whose owner was off doing meth somewhere.

“HEY! ANYBODY?”

I yanked at the cuffs. It didn’t do anything but make an irritating noise. I couldn’t even see a door.

There isn’t a door, they just built up a brick wall over the opening, or locked me in a shipping container and bulldozed a thousand tons of dirt on top of it or sank it to the bottom of the ocean.

“HEY! HEY!”

I got one leg up—neither was restrained as far as I could tell—and kicked at the railing the cuffs were attached to. I had no strength in the leg. The railing didn’t give.

“HEY! GODDAMNIT!”

“Sir?”

A tiny voice. I froze.

Did I actually hear that?

I blinked into the darkness, stupidly, looking for movement. Somebody could have been sitting on my lap and I wouldn’t have seen them.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

“It’s just me.” Sounded like a little girl. “Can you be quieter? You’re scaring us.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Anna. Is your name Walt?”

“No. My name is David. Who’s Walt?”

“I thought they called you Walt earlier. When they brought you in.”

“No. Oh, okay. Wong. They probably said Wong, that’s my last name. David Wong.”

“Are you from Japan?”

“No. Who else is in here?”

“Just us. You me and Mr. Bear.”

“Okay, Anna, this is going to seem like a weird question but is Mr. Bear an actual bear or a stuffed bear?”

“He’s stuffed when grown-ups are around. Sorry if I scared you.”

“What are you doing here, Anna?”

“Same as you. We might be sick and they want to make sure other people don’t catch it.”

“Where are we?”

“Why didn’t you ask that question first?”

“What?”

“It didn’t make sense to ask me what I was doing here if you didn’t know where here was.”

“Are we in the hospital?”

No answer.

“Anna? You there?”

“Yes, sorry, I nodded my head but I forgot that you couldn’t see me. We’re in the old hospital. In the basement.”

“Then where is everybody? And what happened to the lights?”

“You can ask the spaceman when he comes by again. There were lots of them here before but everybody has been gone for a while.”

I didn’t need to ask who the spacemen were. Guys in contamination suits.

“How long has it been since they’ve come by?”

“I don’t know, I don’t have my phone. It was two sleeps ago. I’m sure they’ll be back soon. Maybe they close on the weekend.”

“Do you remember when they brought you here?”

“Sort of. They came and got my dad and they told us we couldn’t go home and moved everybody downstairs to the special hospital. And, that’s where we are now.” In a whisper she said, “I think we should be quiet now.”

“How old are you, Anna?”

She whispered, “Eight.”

“Listen to me. I don’t want you to be scared, but they left us here with no power, and no food, and no water. Now hopefully they’ll come back and take care of us but we have to make plans assuming they won’t.”

“If you drank all of your water you can have some of mine.”

“I… do I have water? Where?”

“On the table next to you.”

I reached over with my right hand and hit a row of shrink-wrapped bottles. I dug a bottle out and drank half of it and went into a coughing fit.

“Sssshhhhh. We really should be quiet. There’s a box of granola bars and stuff over there, too, but they’re not very good.”

“Why are we being quiet?”

“I think I hear the shadow man.”

I choked on my water.

“Shhhhh.”

“Anna, we—”

“Please.”

We laid there in silence, floating in still darkness like a pair of eyeless cave fish.

Finally Anna said, “I think he’s gone.”

“The shadow man?”

“Yes.”

“Describe him to me.”

“He’s a shadow with eyes.”

“Where did you see him?”

“Over there.”

“I can’t see where you’re pointing.”

“Over in the corner.”

“When? When did you see him before, I mean?”

She sighed. “I don’t have a clock.”

“What… uh, what did it do?”

“It just stood there. I was scared. Mr. Bear growled at him and he eventually went away.”

I had read somewhere that you could get out of handcuffs if you broke the bone at the base of your thumb. Or maybe just dislocated it? Either way I’d have to find out if my legs were strong enough to do that. The issue would then be trying to get the presumably locked door open one-handed. Maybe Anna could help.

I said, “Okay. We have to get out of this place.”

“They told us we couldn’t leave.”

“Anna, you’re going to find out soon that grown-ups aren’t always right. We… let’s just say that it’s better if we’re not here when that thing comes back. But if it does, I don’t want you to panic. I don’t think it’s here for you, I think it’s here for me.”

“Yes, that’s what he said.”

“He talked to you?”

She hesitated. “Sort of. I could hear him. I don’t think he had a mouth. Like Hello Kitty.”

“And… what did he say?”

“I don’t want to repeat it but I don’t think he likes you.”

I said nothing.

Anna asked, “Do you want Mr. Bear?”

“No, thank you.”

I pulled my hand as far out of the handcuff as I could, which wasn’t far. I could feel the little knob of bone stopping it, two inches down from the thumb. If I yanked it hard enough, surely it would scrape off that bone, and the blood would lubricate it. Be a matter of not passing out from the pain. And me not being too much of a pussy.

Metal scraping. I was about to ask Anna what she was doing when it registered that—

HOLY SHIT THAT’S THE DOOR THE DOOR IS OPEN

I sat up and threw aside the blanket. The room was bathed in light, a pair of powerful flashlights in the doorway, side by side like the eyes of a giant robot that had poked his head up through the floor. I was momentarily blinded by the light, but I squinted and looked to the corner, yelling, “Anna! Get—”

The words died in my mouth. The room I was in, now fully illuminated by the flashlights, contained a small bedside table, a toilet, a filthy sink, and one bed. Mine.

I was absolutely alone in the room.

On the floor was a tattered, filthy old teddy bear.

Gloved hands grabbed me, holding me to the bed. It was two dudes wearing decontamination space suits, but the suits weren’t white—they were black, and they had pads on the arms, torso and thighs like body armor. Their faceplates were tinted, so you couldn’t see the face of the wearer.

The cuff was removed from the bed rail and locked around my other wrist. Leg irons were placed around my ankles. I was dragged from the bed and marched down a long hallway lined with rusting steel doors just like the one I had been yanked through.

There were other people here, roused to life by the sound of us passing their cells. I heard an old man screaming for his wife, or daughter (“KATIE!!!! KAAAATIE! CAN YOU HEAR ME??!?”) with no response. I heard a scraping from behind one door, like somebody was clawing to get out. I heard someone beg for food, I heard someone beg for pain pills.

At the moment I passed a particular door, a male voice on the other side said, “Hey! Buddy! Hey! Open this door for me. Please. It’s my wife, my wife is in here and she’s bleeding. I’m begging you.”

I stopped.

“I’m here. What’s—”

The gloved hands clamped on me again to pull me along.

“Hey! Are you gonna help that guy? Hey!”

No answer from the guards. From behind me, the desperate voice begged and howled and wept.

The hallway came to a bend and continued to the right, but I was stopped in front of a TV screen that had been mounted on the wall. There was a speaker mounted below it, with a “push to talk” button. The screen blinked to life and there was a man in another decontamination suit, this one the normal, friendly white like you’d expect from a government agency. The face behind the clear Plexiglas mask was familiar to me, the neatly cropped silver hair and weathered wrinkles.

“Good morning, Mr. Wong. How are we feeling today?”

“Dr. Tennet? What the hell are you doing here?”

Am I dreaming this?

“If we just keep answering each other’s questions with questions this conversation won’t go anywhere, will it?”

“I’m feeling like shit. Why are you here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Obviously not.”

“What do you remember?”

“A bunch of guys in space suits were shooting people in BB’s parking lot. Guts sprayed all over me. Next thing I know I’m chained to a bed in this prison. And now my therapist is here for some reason.”

“Prison? Is that where you think you are?”

“There are tiny rooms with locks and handcuffs and I can’t leave. Call it whatever you want. How long have I been here?”

“You honestly don’t remember? Anything at all?”

“No.”

“You’ve lost all memories from your arrival until now? Think hard for me.”

“I don’t remember anything, goddamnit.”

“I completely understand your agitation. But I’m going to have to beg for a little bit more of your patience. I’m part of the team sent to observe you and the others. We’re trying to get you well.”

He looked down and was doing something with his hands. Tapping on a laptop. Making notes. Immune to the sound of muffled suffering echoing down the hall behind me.

“Doctor, is somebody going to help those people back there?”

“That would be… ill-advised. I assure you that the patients who actually need help are receiving it. Again, this is not a prison.”

“So am I free to leave?”

“If I’m satisfied that you’ve stabilized, you’ll be free to rejoin the others in quarantine.”

“Where’s that?”

“Over at the hospital grounds. The primary quarantine area.”

“But I can’t leave there?”

“I’m afraid not. The government would have some very strong words for me if I were to let any of you wander out.”

“Where am I now?”

“In the old Ffirth Asylum, the abandoned TB hospital just down the street. Temporary REPER command center and patient processing.”

I thought he said “raper” and decided then and there that I had lost my mind.

“The who command center?”

“R-E-P-E-R. Rapid Exotic Pathogen Eradication slash Research. A not widely publicized task force for situations like this.”

“What situations are ‘like this’?”

“You and I have had this conversation before, by the way. I know what you’re about to ask next.”

“Are John and Amy here?”

“And once again, I can tell you we have three Johns—Washington, Rawls and Perzynski. But no Amys.”

I had a dozen follow-up questions: Were they okay? Did they get out of town? Where were they now? But I knew this asshole wouldn’t answer them.

“Wait, did you say ‘rejoin’? So I’ve been in quarantine before?”

“We brought you over for testing, but we’re ready to transport you back.”

“Testing.”

“Yes, we’re still trying to perfect our method of detecting the infection.”

“And this test wiped out my memory.”

“That’s merely a side effect, one I do believe is temporary.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Here, or in quarantine in general?”

“Let’s go for the second one.”

“Ever since the outbreak.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Longer than most of us would have preferred to stay, let us just put it that way.”

Oh, fuck you.

“And you get to keep us here, forever, until you figure out how to cure the infection?”

“If you have a better idea, you be sure to let us know. Trust me, no one is enjoying this. The best thing you and everyone else can do is cooperate.”

He finished his laptop work with a flourish of key taps and looked me in the eye.

“So. In that spirit, tell me how you are feeling.”

“Why is it dark in here?”

“Electricity is out to much of the town. We have diesel generators but they are insufficient for the whole facility, so we are forced to pick and choose. Other than your missing memory, are you having any other symptoms? Dreams, hallucinations?”

“Well if I was, I wouldn’t remember them, would I? You know, because I’m missing my goddamned memory.”

“Of course. How are you feeling, physically?”

“I have a headache and my joints hurt.”

“Those are expected side effects of the tranquilizers and being bedridden, and also should pass quickly. Do you remember why you were put under tranquilizers in the first place?”

“Any question you ask me that begins with the words ‘do you remember’ is going to be answered with ‘no.’”

“Ha. Understood! Do you feel like you are up to rejoining the others?”

“The others? How many others are there? Can you tell me that?”

“In the primary quarantine area? Nearly five hundred. At one time.”

Jesus Christ.

“And how many of them are people like me, who you know goddamned well aren’t infected?”

“Now David, can’t you see that I do not know that?”

“Do I fucking look infected?”

“Ah, I see. Due to being muddled by the medication, you are missing some key information about our circumstances. It turns out that appearances are not a perfect indication of infection. Not, unfortunately, until it’s too late. So hopefully you understand that we must take precautions.”

“Dr. Tennet, can you hear the fucking people behind me, screaming for help? Can you hear them over this intercom thing?”

“Which people? The gentleman asking for help with his wife? We lost two staff members trying to help that man’s poor ‘wife.’ If you open that door, you’ll indeed find what looks like a very frail, wounded woman. If you get within striking distance, you’ll find that woman is the transfigured tongue of a grindworm.”

“A what?”

“I’m sorry, we have to come up with names for the organisms the parasite transforms its victims into. Without getting into detail, let me just say that we spent sixteen hours trying to recover our two staff members from the creature, their screams echoing down this hall the entire night, and next day, as they were slowly twisted to pieces. The creature has been spitting splinters of their bones under its door ever since. So hopefully you’ll understand why we’re leaving that door locked. ‘Fool me once,’ as they say.”

“So… you just lock everybody up and wait for us to turn monster?”

“As I said, we’re making progress. But, regardless, this conversation is only wasting time and taxpayer money at this point, when all I need to know is if you feel up to joining the others out in the fresh air and sunshine of the hospital lawn. We need your room, to be perfectly frank.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“Great, great. If you turn to your right and continue down that hall, you’ll find an elevator.”

“And then what will—”

The monitor blinked off.

One of the two guys behind me told me to hold still, and unlocked my cuffs and leg irons. He pointed, and through a speaker in his helmet said, “End of the hall.”

I said, “What about the girl?”

“Sir, move to the end of the hall.”

“There was a little girl in my room, named Anna. I don’t know if she snuck in and back out or what but she was in there right before you guys arrived.”

The guy gave a glance to his partner. Uncertainty? The partner said, “Move to the elevator, or you’re going back to the room.”

I obeyed, my unsteady footsteps echoing in a dim hallway where the only illumination was dribbling out of a set of emergency lights to my left. Way down at the end was a barely lit elevator standing open.

Halfway down I turned and looked back for the two guards. Not there. Just lonely blackness beyond the pool of emergency light.

Goddamn did this seem like a long walk. My legs were weak and shaky—how long had I been strapped to that bed? What kind of drugs did they have me on? I felt my face and had no bandage there, just a little bump where the spider had bitten me. Where were John and Amy? What happened to the town? Had the world ended? Why did this hallway smell like shit?

“Walt.”

A whisper, behind me. I stopped, and held my breath. Had I actually heard it?

I continued, the elevator waiting right up ahead in the darkness, barely enough light inside to fill the tiny space.

I stopped again. I thought I could hear smaller, lighter footsteps trailing mine. Or maybe an echo.

I whispered, “Anna?”

Not sure any sound actually came out.

I turned and walked as fast as I could toward the open elevator, without breaking into what could be called a run. I made it inside, spun around and punched the button that said “1.” All the other buttons from there up had been covered with electrician’s tape.

Nothing happened. I was standing under what seemed like a 25-watt bulb that was slightly brighter than a candle. Dead silence.

No, wait. There was a faint sound. Not footsteps. A light scraping, then a brief pause, then the scrape again. The irregular rhythm of somebody trying to drag or carry an awkward load, or maybe just trying to walk with a severely wounded leg.

Getting louder. Closer. I could now make out a smacking, sticky sound, like a person loudly eating pasta right next to your ear.

I punched the “1” button again. I punched the “Close Door” button. I punched the “1” button again. Then I mashed the buttons under the electrical tape. All of them.

“Walt.”

That wet sound, scraping toward me. I could hear it clearly now, not ten feet away. Moving faster.

“Walt. Walt. Walt.”

The door closed.

If they didn’t want the patients at the Undisclosed Ffirth Asylum command center slash patient processing facility to feel like prisoners, they were doing the world’s shittiest job. In the light I saw I was wearing a green prisoner jumpsuit. When the elevator arrived at the top, two more black-suited space men roughly dragged me out, put a black hood over my head, and threw me into the back of a military truck.

The hospital was just a couple of blocks away, but the trip took twenty minutes. We drove, stopped, waited, drove, waited again, then an alarm went off and I heard an electric sound like a garage door opening. We rolled forward for five seconds, then the sound again, and the clicks of latches. Then there was another gate opening, followed by the opening of the doors of the truck. I felt sunlight and a blast of cold air hit my hood. I was dragged out and told to lay flat on the grass. I was told that if I raised any part of my body before commanded to, I would be shot.

Holy shit.

They yanked off my hood. The truck left and I risked craning my neck enough to see a chain-link fence roll shut behind it. I turned the other way and saw that there was… another fence. I was in a gap the width of a city street, between two tall fences that were each topped with coils of Fuck-You razor wire. The inner fence, the one opposite the one the truck had just slipped out of, was opaque—they had attached tarps or some plastic sheets to it. The goal was clearly to make sure the separation between the hospital quarantine and the outside world was absolute. The plastic sheets were colorful and had printing all along them. The one nearest to me said 91.9 K-ROCK ROCKTOBER ROCKOCALYPSE.

I wondered how long they’d leave me laying like this, but soon a gate in the inner fence slid open and a voice from a PA system told me to go through. I obeyed, and entered quarantine, apparently for the second time.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find inside the gate, but it was just the hospital lawn. The building itself was immediately to my right, the front lawn of the hospital stretching off to my left. The sun hatefully spat daylight into my eyes—how long had it been since I’d seen the sun?—and I gathered it was probably midafternoon or so.

My first thought was, “Ribs.” Meat smoke hit my nostrils, like being downwind from a barbecue joint. I heard voices. Somebody laughed.

Hell, it’s a party.

What was stranger than that was what wasn’t there: men in space suits carrying guns. I assumed I would be roughly dragged in and told to go report to this tent or to submit to some tests or shit. But I was on my own. No soldiers. Nobody who looked official. No staff.

Instead, a smattering of tired-looking people in jumpsuits, some with hospital blankets wrapped around their shoulders, were staring at me like they were expecting someone else. When they saw it was me, they all shambled away without a word.

Well, screw you, too.

I spotted a pillar of smoke a hundred yards or so away, off near the fence that wrapped its way around the perimeter of the hospital grounds. A fence that did not exist the last time I was here, and that was covered entirely in garish ads that were each… wrong somehow, like they didn’t have a big enough tarp and covered it in rejected billboards somebody had laying around in a warehouse (SUBWAY: COME TASTE OUR NEW BEARD!). I wandered toward the fire, having absolutely no idea what else to do. It was the same strategy I employ at parties: find the food first. My lungs quivered at the contact with the chilled air. Not an unpleasant feeling. Kind of felt like freedom.

“Hey! Spider-Man! Spider-Man’s back!”

The voice came from above me and I admit my first reaction was to glance around for the actual Spider-Man. Why not?

He wasn’t here. I found the source of the voice, a black dude poking his head out of a fifth-floor window of the hospital. I had no idea if he was talking to me or somebody else, so I kept walking. I couldn’t help but notice the window he was yelling from was not open—the glass was busted out. That seemed weird to me.

I passed a fat lady in a dark green janitor’s jumpsuit like mine, sleeping under a blanket on what looked like a waiting room sofa that had been dragged out into the yard. The upholstery was discolored, like it had been rained on. I kicked an empty water bottle. It skidded and bounced off another one. Trash was everywhere. I noticed somebody had knocked over the Florence Nightingale statue, laying on its side like they had just toppled a dictator.

I shuffled toward the bonfire, a lot of people were congregating over there. Everybody wearing jumpsuits, either green like mine, or blood red.

Tennet, tell me this is not a goddamned prison yard.

I passed the main entrance to the hospital. The sliding glass doors were propped open with two overflowing garbage cans. From the dim reception area inside it appeared the whole building was without power. Postapocalypse. How long has it been? A year? I wondered if the White House was trashed like this, the Lincoln Bedroom full of refugees. Or zombies.

I caught a whiff of that meat smell from the fire and my stomach growled. How long since I’d eaten? I felt slightly thinner, though that could have been due to the huge jumpsuit I was wearing. A clump of red jumpsuit guys were up ahead, talking and eating from bowls. I was going to ask them where the food table was but at the sight of me they all stopped talking, giving me a look like I was a cop and they were all hiding joints. Everybody had patchy beards. Greasy hair. Nobody shaving, nobody showering. On the ground were discarded plastic forks and paper plates tattooed with old grease stains and muddy shoe prints where they’d been stepped on a dozen times.

The huddle of red suits on the opposite side of the bonfire also fell silent. The bonfire, by the way, was a crackling pile of smashed furniture, wooden pallets, at least one mattress and bundles of what looked like blackened sticks.

Everybody looking at me now. I scanned around for some fellow green jumpsuits but there was just one guy who looked about eighty years old and another middle-aged woman who looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes showed no signs of even vague interest in this situation. The biggest of the reds, a guy with shoulder-length blond hair and more neck than head said, “We about to have a problem here?” He had the voice of a man with four testicles. His jumpsuit was zipped down to reveal an Iron Cross tattoo on his sternum.

“Not that I know of. Can somebody point me toward the food?”

Nervous glances. Was the food a sensitive subject around here? Nobody seemed to have barbecue ribs.

Four-balls said, “You playin’ a fuckin’ game here, bro?”

“Have we met?”

“Man, just fuck off.”

“If I agree to fuck off will you tell me where the food is?”

The man scowled and said, “Ask Sal where the food is. Go ahead. He’s right there.”

He nodded toward the bonfire. A skinny guy with a bandage covering one eye said, “Let it go, man. Walk away.” He said it to me.

“Why am I the one who has to walk away? Maybe I wanna enjoy the fire?”

Four-balls stepped toward me and said, “Dude, you got five seconds to walk away or else you’re goin’ in there with Sal. I don’t give a shit what anybody says.”

“Wait, do you have me confused with someone else?”

“Whoa, whoa!” from behind me. It was the black guy from the window. Green suit. “Easy, man. Easy. Dude just got outta the hole.”

Four-balls said, “I don’t give a shit.”

Black guy grabbed my sleeve and pulled me away, saying, “Let’s go inside, it’s cold out here.”

I went with him, and realized he hadn’t come alone. Four more green suits were with him. What, were we on teams? What the hell was this? Had I stepped into some weird alternate dimension? Again?

“Man, we didn’t think you were comin’ back,” he said. “This is just in time, too. We got the warning buzz about forty-five minutes ago so truck gonna be here any time.”

I said, “I didn’t understand one word of that.”

Just short of the front door he stopped, leaned into my ear and screamed, “WE GOT THE WARNING BUZZ FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AGO SO THE—”

“My hearing is fine. I don’t know who you are. I’ve lost time, I have no memory of all this. Last thing I remember everything was going to shit out there, out in the town. Then I woke up in the basement of the old creepy-ass TB asylum down the street. In the ‘hole,’ is that what you called it?”

The black guy rubbed his head and said, “Shit. You get knocked over the head or somethin’?”

“No, they said it was a side effect of whatever they did to me over there.”

He let out a breath, glanced around nervously and pulled me inside the hospital. The place was absolutely trashed. Once upon a time, there had been a huge oval-shaped desk right inside the doors where you could check in with a row of secretaries who’d log you into their computers and put a band on your wrist, filtering out the people who didn’t have insurance. Now there were just ragged splinters and deep gouges in the tile where the desk had been roughly ripped from the floor.

The black guy said, “Firewood. See, their plan is to take the easy stuff first—stuff close to the door—and burn it. That way, when we’re all more tired and sick a month from now, the only wood left will be the shit that’s hard to get to on the tenth floor. Makes good sense if you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

“How long? Tell me. How long since the outbreak happened?”

“’Bout nine days. You don’t remember nothin’?”

“Holy shit, we trashed the hospital this bad in nine days?”

“Oh, no, man, the CDC had staff here keepin’ things in order for the first few. Then they bailed out. We done all this since Wednesday. This is Sunday.”

“And no, to answer your question, I don’t remember anything after showing up here. I don’t even know your name.”

“Name’s TJ. I knew John before all this. You and I met once at a party but you probably don’t remember that for a different reason.”

“Wait, is John here? The guy said—”

“No, man. We got a lot to talk about. Let’s get up to my room, come on.”

He led me to a stairwell that was pitch dark and, despite everything that had transpired, still smelled like hospital—old food, chemicals, death. I’m going to get rich one of these days selling a hospital disinfectant that doesn’t stink of despair.

We emerged into a fifth-floor hallway and there wasn’t anybody there who wasn’t in a green jumpsuit. TJ announced, “Look who’s back!” A chubby black guy who looked like he’d been dozing in a wheelchair said, “Spider-Man! You escape or they let you out?”

Before I could answer, TJ said, “Let him out, dumped him off in the truck just now. He’s still groggy from when they sedated him.” To me, TJ said, “You hungry? They feed you?”

“If you got food, I’ll eat it.”

“Then follow me.” He continued down the hall. I got the feeling he was trying to pull me away from a conversation with Wheelchair Guy. From behind us he said, “Gonna need him out in the yard in about ten minutes. Buzzer sounded a while ago.”

TJ said, “We heard it. We’ll be there.”

We reached the last door at the end of the hall. Two hospital beds, some cardboard boxes on the floor that looked to be full of Ramen noodles, energy bars and bottles of water. In the opposite corner there were a dozen plain white plastic jugs, looked like old Clorox bleach bottles with the labels ripped off. Something was written on them in Sharpie but I couldn’t read it.

“David! Yay!”

That came from one of the beds where a white girl with dreadlocks, thick-rimmed glasses and a pierced nose was turning a sheet of paper into origami. She was wearing a necklace that it took me a moment to realize she had made by stringing line through a half dozen of those red plastic caps from syringes. She gave me a smile that I thought would make cartoon songbirds come land on all of our shoulders.

TJ hurriedly closed the door behind me and said, “Got a complication here, babe.”

Dreadlocks Girl got a crestfallen look and said, “Oh, no. Please tell me—”

“No, no, it’s not that. He can’t remember anything.”

TJ looked at me and said, “Right?”

“Yeah.”

“You recognize her?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

Dreadlocks said, “Like amnesia? He doesn’t remember his own name or anything?”

“No, I remember everything until, uh, this. All this started. National Guard coming in and all that. I remember getting grabbed by some dudes and then I woke up in the dungeon. A little while ago.”

“You don’t know what they did to you? Over there?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

She said, “I’m Hope, by the way.” To TJ she said, “Maybe it’ll all come back to him?”

TJ shrugged and went to the window. The same busted-out window he had yelled from when I first showed up on the yard.

I said, “If you don’t mind replaying conversations I’m sure we’ve had already, can I ask what the hell is going on in general?”

TJ said, “Well, we’re in quarantine, and beyond that we don’t know shit. This hospital was full of CDC in biohazard suits for the first few days, they had all of us confined to rooms with guards in the halls. But then some of the guards got infected and that turned ugly. Screams from the halls. You look out there, those aren’t coffee stains on the tile. Then that was it, they bailed out. All the staff. Some of them got evacuated—you could hear helicopters on the roof—some they just left here, now they inmates like us. Some got taken across the way, where you just were. They just left the hospital to us.”

I joined TJ at the window and scanned the fences at the edge of the yard, trying to see what was behind them. I saw the tops of some white tents, but not much else. We weren’t high enough to see much into the distance.

I said, “So, what, the CDC just retreated over to the other building?”

“CDC gone, man. They left, these other people swept in. REPER. National Guard gone, too, they pulled out to the perimeter around the city. Left my ass behind.”

I said, “Wait, you’re the TJ John mentioned? You were on the scene the day it all started.”

“Yes, sir. National Guard. Deemed an infection risk. Some REPER motherfucker thanked me for my service, took my rifle and sidearm and left me on the wrong side of the fence. There’s more than a dozen of us in here. Least there was anyway. The first bunch of us on the scene didn’t have Level C suits or nothin’. Clusterfuck.”

From behind me Hope said, “Here” and handed me a crunchy granola bar, a little bag of peanuts and a “fun size” Snickers bar.

“There’s no hot water left from lunch or else I’d have made you some Ramen. Coffee’s gone, too. Didn’t last long. There’s bottled water on the floor there.”

TJ looked appalled and said, “Damn, girl. He gets the last Snickers? Almost had to wrestle a dude for that.” To me he said, “Don’t talk to nobody too much, all right? As you can probably tell from Owen down there—that was the dudebro with the big-ass hair and neck—things are kinda tense. Tell people you’re tired or you got that stomach flu or that you got a migraine. But I wouldn’t let it slip about the memory thing. No need for a complication. They all still need you out there, red and green both, so let’s not upset that balance until we got to. You’re our Spider-Man, and we don’t got a backup.”

“Okay why does everybody call me—”

A buzzer sounded, an angry noise like the expiring shot clock in a basketball game.

TJ said, “Showtime. You can eat that on the way down. Just follow my lead. Don’t say more than you have to.”

He picked up two of the bleach bottles from the corner and hurried out the door.

There were half a dozen of us clomping down the stairs by the time we reached the bottom. I had been shocked when Wheelchair Guy got up from his chair to follow us, for some reason it never having occurred to me that he was just using the chair as a chair and in fact had no disability. In the stairwell, Wheelchair said, “Owen been tellin’ people that he was gonna cure the whole next batch. Sayin’ it ain’t worth the risk.”

TJ said, “Well we gonna have to talk to Owen. But it don’t matter now, we got Spider-Man back. He hasn’t failed yet. You’re not goin’ to, right, Spidey?”

I started to answer but he cut me off with, “You do this, we’ll get you some rest. You probably just dehydrated is all.”

Out through the lobby and back into the yard. Everybody out there was standing and staring. Not at me, but at the fence, at the gate I had just come through.

Man, there’s no guard tower or anything. What would they do if we just tried to run? Just charge that gate when they open it…

Nobody spoke. I could hear the bonfire crackling. Somebody had thrown some more fuel on it since last time, piling the scraps into a pyramid shape to create that jet engine afterburner effect, for when you wanted your bonfire really, really hot. If there were soldiers on the other side of that fence, they weren’t chatting or shouting instructions or doing anything else. I couldn’t even hear idling engines. It really did feel like we were alone and I couldn’t shake the idea that we could just walk out. Maybe everybody with guns fell back and figured they would stop the outbreak at city limits. So why not break out of here?

And what makes you think the “infection” stopped at city limits, hmmm? Last time you saw these guys in action they didn’t exactly have shit under control.

There was a faded white line painted into the lawn, forming an arc around the gate like an NBA three-point line. No one crossed it. No one got within twenty feet of it. I opened my Snickers and shoved the whole thing into my mouth. I dragged my peanuts from my pocket—they had an American Airlines logo on the bag—and sat down on the grass.

TJ roughly grabbed my elbow and yanked me to my feet.

“Do not fuckin’ do that,” he hissed. “Shit, man, you forgot everything.”

I started to ask him if those two flimsy fences were really the only thing between us and freedom, but he shushed me. He leaned into my ear and whispered, “Listen, man. Buzzer sounds an hour before new arrivals. Buzzer means nobody gets within ‘run for it’ distance of the gate. It goes off again right before it opens, as a final warning. In a few seconds, truck gonna come through there. It’s gonna be full of new inmates, people they rounded up off the streets because they might be infected. They get processed over at the asylum and run over here. Then you gonna look at ’em and make sure they’re clean. Right?”

“And how exactly am I gonna—”

But I didn’t need to finish that sentence.

Check them for spiders.

Because I can see the spiders.

I’m the Spider-Man.

I glanced down at the two white jugs TJ had set at his feet. I found Hope standing behind me. She was chewing on her thumbnail. Nervous. Everybody was nervous. The air hummed with it. The fence closest to me displayed a picture of a woman’s lower body wearing only underwear, a pink slogan saying VICTORIA’S SECRET CHRISTMAS PANTY BLOWOUT.

There were some faint clicks and clanks in the distance—having heard it before, I knew it was the outer gate sliding open. Beyond the plastic sheeting of the inner fence, a military cargo truck rumbled in. We heard truck doors open and shut. Engine. Exterior gate again. Silence.

The shot-clock buzzer sounded once more, and the inner gate finally rattled open on its own. Laying on the grass, in the exact spot where I had been minutes ago, were four people. All of them young, looking to be college age. Three guys, one girl. The three guys were in green suits, the girl in red. Their hands were bound behind them.

“Goddamnit,” muttered Wheelchair Guy from somewhere behind me. “Wish they wouldn’t lay them on the ground like that. Those dudes are gonna get a shock one of these days when Carlos comes up for a snack.”

I swear that every other sentence somebody uttered in this place sounded like a foreign language. It was starting to piss me off.

The four new citizens of the Undisclosed Spider Quarantine stumbled awkwardly to their feet and shuffled into the yard. The split second the last one was through, the gate slid shut on its own. The mechanism was fast—I’d say two full seconds from fully open to locked.

The huge blond-haired guy—Owen, TJ had said his name was—shouted to them, “Welcome to quarantine. Please listen carefully to what I am about to say, and don’t talk until I’m finished. This will save you a lot of questions later.”

His voice echoed through the yard, huge lungs making the words split the air like a rifle shot in the woods.

“As you can see, there ain’t no guards here. There ain’t no feds, there ain’t no soldiers. They ran out on us several days ago. And that’s just fine with us. We have food and water and medical supplies, you are welcome to whatever you need. That’s the good news. Bad news is there ain’t no mail. There ain’t no phones, there ain’t no Internet, there ain’t no televisions or radio. What we’ve got, don’t get a signal. We are cut off.”

Owen paused, to let that sink in.

“Also, there’s no power. Maybe it’ll come back and maybe it won’t. We’ve been getting by without it and we will continue to get by, until somebody gets their shit together and comes and lets us out of this prison. Okay, so now that you’re caught up on all that, let me get to the important part. There’s a little more than three hundred of us in here. And not a one of us you see here is infected.”

Pause again. He made eye contact with each of the four, individually.

I thought Tennet said five hundred…

“Yeah. That’s right. Only reason we’re still stuck here is because even after nine days, the feds ain’t come up with a test that works. So they’re guessin’. And I’m gonna bet that none of you are infected, neither. So here’s how we do it. We got an expert here, who can spot infection on sight. He’s gonna look you over, and once you’ve got a clean bill of health, we’ll cut off those handcuffs, take you indoors and get you set up with a room and some blankets and whatever else you need. Sound good?”

Nobody answered.

Owen looked at me. The new kids looked at me. Everyone else looked at me. I was not breathing.

TJ said, “Do it, and then it’ll be done.”

He walked me up to the first guy, a geeky-looking kid with acne cheeks. He was squinting because he had apparently lost a pair of glasses at some point. TJ said, in a voice that suddenly reminded me he had spent some years in the military, “I’m going to need you to open your mouth for me, sir.”

The kid’s eyes darted around, looking for someone to rescue him from all this.

Man, chill out. I just need to check to see if a mind-controlling spider monster has possessed your head.

He opened his mouth. Looked like a regular human mouth. Lots of cavities in his back teeth.

I said, “He’s fine.”

The kid closed his mouth and his eyes at the same time. Relief rolling off him like a boulder. All at once it hit me that I was the most powerful man in the quarantine.

TJ said, “What’s your name, sir?”

“Tim,” said the geeky kid.

“Welcome to quarantine, Tim. We’re glad to have you.” TJ spun him around and pulled out a pair of wire cutters. He snipped the plastic bands that served as handcuffs and the kid immediately rubbed the deep red marks on his wrists.

I moved to the next kid. Tall, square jaw. Probably played high school or college basketball. Without me asking, he opened his mouth and moved his tongue around, making sure I could see everything. Confident. Here was a guy who’d never failed a test in his life, mental or physical. Probably be a senator someday. Perfect teeth.

I said, “Yeah, he’s fine.”

This one said, “Kevin” as TJ snipped off his cuffs. “Kevin Ross. And I can climb that fence in about ten seconds if we can get something draped up over that razor wire. Rip up some carpet from in there, something like that.”

TJ said, “Yeah, that thought was thought before. Didn’t work out so well.”

Two people left now, the girl and a kid with curly hair who reminded me of Jonah Hill’s character in Superbad.

The girl was next. She was a hippie. I could tell, even dressed in a red prisoner jumpsuit. She had some haphazard braids in her hair, and that dopey trusting look in her eyes, like she was seeing the goodness of your soul at a glance.

She gave me what I can only describe as a tragic smile and in a shaky voice said, “Hi. What’s your name?”

“David. Just open your mouth for me, okay?”

“I feel like I’m going to be sick, David.”

“I’ll stand off to the side, then. This’ll only take a second.”

She smiled again. A tear ran down her cheek.

I said, “Come on, open up.”

She did. She was a smoker, apparently, the front teeth had some yellow. Not a single cavity, though. Good for her.

She was fully crying now.

I said, “It’s fine, it looks fine. You can calm down, okay? We’ll all get through this.” I put a hand on her arm. Look at me, acting all in charge and professional.

Don’t worry! I’m the expert!

She whispered something between sobs that I couldn’t make out.

“What was that?”

“Check again.”

“I can if you want but—”

“Because a week ago I had a pierced tongue, with a stud in it.” She squeezed her eyes and sobbed, trying to suck in breaths to get the words out. “And now I don’t.”

“What? I don’t under—”

But I did understand.

She woke up one morning, and realized her mouth was not her own.

Oh Jesus no no no.

She held her mouth open, extra wide this time. I didn’t want to look. But I couldn’t help it. And, of course, I saw it. Between her lower front teeth and her lower lip, two black mandibles rested there.

I recoiled in horror, and everybody nearby reacted with me.

Owen was already on the move, striding toward the girl from behind, with purpose. She went down to her knees, weeping.

TJ got in front of me, pushing me back away from her. I said, “Okay, okay. You, uh, you said you got a cure, right? We’ve got a procedure here?”

TJ said, “Cover your ears, man.” He was cramming something into his ears, it looked like cotton balls. The people around me were covering their ears with their hands.

“But why are—”

Owen stepped up behind the girl, pulled an automatic pistol from his waistband, and splattered her brains all over the grass in front of her.

Her body flopped to the ground. The other three new arrivals flew into a panic.

I had thought everyone was covering their ears for the gunshot, but then the piercing shriek started, the cry of the spider creature. I wedged my fingers into my eardrums as hard as I could. I could still feel it vibrating my bones.

They worked fast. Owen—who I noticed had cigarette butts wedged into his ears—flipped the girl over. I could see the spider trying to detach and crawl out of her skull now, growing out of the girl’s mouth like a huge, grotesque black tongue. TJ uncapped both jugs, then carefully poured the contents of one jug into the other. Mixing something. After a moment, steam or smoke emerged from the opening of this new concoction. Owen stepped back and TJ poured the entire contents of the jug into the girl’s mouth.

The shriek was cranked up to a level that sent a tremor through my guts. The spider thrashed. The girl’s cheeks and lips dissolved under the acid, the liquid running out of ragged holes in her skin. The spider was dissolving, too, legs falling off as it thrashed.

Eventually, its horrific cries died down, and it was still.

Owen stuffed the pistol into his pants and grabbed the girl’s feet. He said, “Come on, before Carlos comes calling.”

The one I’d been calling Wheelchair Guy shouldered past me and grabbed the girl’s wrists. They dragged her toward the now-roaring bonfire. On the count of three they tossed her corpse right into the blaze, sending an explosion of sparks heavenward. The flames tore into her flesh and I smelled what I had mistaken for smoked barbecue ribs just minutes ago.

Then, finally, I saw.

Bones.

In the bonfire. Bones and bones and bones. It was full of them. Blackened skulls and ribs and pelvic bones and straight leg and arm bones jutting out like sticks. Hundreds and hundreds of bones.

The girl’s hair was burning. Her jumpsuit was peeling off of her in black strips, like the skin on a hot dog roasted over a campfire. I was just talking to her.

I will remember that smell for the rest of my life. I will never eat meat again.

Owen said to me, “Get over it, bro. You got one more.”

“No. No. That… cannot be the only way to do this.”

Owen growled, “Bull shit. You didn’t have no problem when it was Sal you were callin’ out. Now you lose your fuckin’ nerve?”

“Man, I don’t remember—okay, look, that was then. That… that’s the past and it doesn’t matter now. I can’t do that anymore. I’m sorry.”

There was a commotion behind me and TJ shouted, “Hey! Stop! Don’t!”

He was shouting at Kevin, the basketball player kid. He was sprinting toward the fence. The kid leaped, landing halfway up the fence with his fingers hooked in the links. He scrambled up toward the razor wire—

He fell. He hit the ground like a crash-test dummy. Limp, dead weight. A pool of blood spread below his face. A chunk of his skull was missing.

I never heard the shot that took him out. I whipped my head around, looking for the gunman. I saw no one. In the sky were just some birds, gliding along with wings outstretched, riding the thermals, circling lazily overhead. Maybe they were buzzards, hearing the sounds of death like a goddamned dinner bell.

TJ said, “Stupid motherfucker. What, he thinks we’re all here because none of us know how to climb fences? Shit, I could have gave him an extension ladder, got one in the maintenance room.”

The Jonah Hill–looking kid was paralyzed with fear. His hands were still bound behind him. His eyes were wide, his lips were white, his mouth clamped so tight it was pressing the blood out of them. Owen walked up behind him and put the pistol to the back of his skull.

“You check him, or else we cure him right now. Him and everybody else who comes through that gate. Fuckin’ Carlos runnin’ around here, that’s bad enough. Now multiply him by three, or six, or a dozen. The feds will come into this place a month from now and find nothin’ but chunks of meat and bones and crawlin’ nightmares. Well I got a wife I’m gonna get home to. I got a kid I’m gonna get home to. The feds left us in here. Left us to get torn to pieces. We’re all we got. But when that gate finally opens and they give the all-clear, I’m walkin’ outta here. As a man. Help me, or don’t. It’s up to you.”

To the kid I said, “Open your goddamned mouth or he’s gonna shoot you in the head.”

The kid obeyed. I pulled at his lower lip, then his upper. The kid had braces. I saw nothing else.

“He’s fine.”

Owen said, “You sure about that, now?”

“Yeah.”

Owen stashed the pistol and used a pocketknife to cut the kid’s hands free.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Corey. I think I’m gonna pass out.”

Owen grabbed a toppled wheelchair and sat it upright. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Corey did, putting his head in his hands, trying to wake up from what he surely thought was a terrible dream. Owen, TJ and Bruce the Wheelchair Guy went to go get the basketball player’s body away from the fence and presumably onto the fire. More bones for the pile.

From behind me I heard a warbly voice say, “This isn’t right. How can they allow this? Where’s the government? Where’s the army? Where’s the police?”

That was that first kid I’d checked, Tim, the geeky one. Without turning to face him I said, “I think we’re on our own, man.”

The men were dragging the basketball kid’s body toward the fire. I couldn’t watch this again. I turned to face Tim, who was sitting on the ground, cross-legged.

“Hey, I don’t think you’re supposed to sit on the grass. They get mad.”

“Why?”

“It… upsets Carlos apparently.”

“Who’s Carlos?”

“I dunno. The groundskeeper? I kind of just got here myself.”

I could feel something, a rumble at my feet. Faint, like somebody using a jackhammer nearby, or thumping bass-heavy music. But there was no sound, just the tremor in the earth. Then, people were running and shouting. TJ was sprinting toward us and waving his arms.

“Get up! Get off the ground!”

That finally convinced Tim, who unfolded his legs so he could get up—

His face froze, in an expression of confused shock. His jaw flexed, his mouth working to form silent words. His eyes met mine and I had the thought that this is what people look like when they’re suddenly stabbed from behind in an alley.

“Hey are you—”

He howled in pain. He pushed himself off the ground but he looked like his butt had been glued there. He screamed again, a garbled and halting sound, as if it was coming through a microphone that kept cutting out.

Summoning the thrashing, animal strength of a fox ripping off its own leg to get out of a trap, Tim got his feet underneath him and pushed his body up off of the ground with everything he had. He rose a foot off the grass, and in a brief moment I could see that something was still tethering him there. It looked like he was shitting spaghetti. A bundle of thin, writhing tentacles, turning and curling and spinning. Working their way up into his bowels from below, like a puppeteer.

Tim sat hard back on the ground. He screamed one last time, then spasmed into a seizure that mangled the scream into a spastic UCK-UCK-UCK chant. His eyes rolled back into his head. Sprays of blood erupted from his mouth. I thought I saw one of the thin, yellow spaghetti tentacles flick up between his teeth. Tim’s body thrashed once, twice, three times. There was a huge, wet slurping sound, and then he slumped over sideways.

When he did, he left behind a wad of guts the size of a potato sack. The yellow tentacles reached up and dragged the pink pile under the dirt, leaving behind nothing but a gopher hole in the ground, soaked in blood.

An out-of-breath Wheelchair Guy stopped behind TJ and said, “Fuckin’ Carlos, man. Told ya we shoulda killed him when we had the chance.”

TJ, seeming amazingly calm—

—because he’s seen this several times before oh goddamn oh holy shit—

—sighed and said, “Well. We didn’t know then what we know now, did we? What’s important is that we do know it now. And that we follow procedure.”

He stared at me. “Right, Spider-Man?”

I didn’t answer.

Owen stomped up behind them and jabbed his finger at me.

“He didn’t spot the girl. You notice that? Far as I’m concerned, that’s the last I want to hear about his so-called one hundred percent hit rate, bro.”

“Told you, he’s still groggy from bein’ in the hole.”

“Yeah, and about that. What went on over there? We don’t know, do we? That may not even be the same fuckin’ guy. He looks like he don’t even know who he is.”

TJ rebutted, “Yeah, and that girl was wearin’ red. Or did you not notice that, Owen? That’s three reds in a row. That’s easily three out of every four infected that was in a red jumpsuit when they burned. What does that tell you?”

“You want to have a talk about that, TJ? We’ll convene a panel. You, me and my Beretta nine millimeter. How about that?”

“Fuck you, man.”

I love the way black guys say “Fuck you.” Emphasizing the first syllable hard, like a verbal punch. I wondered if they practiced it in front of a mirror. TJ and Owen stared each other down for a minute, then TJ turned his attention to the curly haired kid. Corey.

“Come on, let’s go inside. It’s gonna stink real bad once all three bodies get to burnin’. Oh, and welcome to quarantine.”

Everybody headed upstairs. TJ said, “You should get off at the second floor and see the doc. He’s been askin’ about you, let him see about your memory and all that.”

Fuck that. I wasn’t heading for the second floor, or the fifth. I was heading to the roof.

I had to get out of this goddamned madhouse. I wanted to get up there, to look out, to see what exactly was holding us in. TJ followed me, trying to tell me that we had done all this before, and that I myself had declared that there was nothing to see. He did not seem surprised when, after hearing this, I still insisted on going up.

Five minutes later we were ten stories up, standing among the silent air-conditioning units and the bird shit, looking out over the red and green figures loitering in the yard below. The wind picked up, garbage blowing around with it, fluttering paper plates and food wrappers. The trash was starting to pile up against the western fence like a snowdrift. And among all this, the inmates, clumps of red and clumps of green, huddled in conversation. It looked like the world’s shittiest Christmas pageant. It had been a mild (uh, mid-November?) day but up here, on the cusp of evening, it was goddamned freezing. I didn’t care. I paced from one ledge to the other, scanning the landscape. The pulsing grip of a panic attack was slowly squeezing around my brain.

Past Dave was right—there was nothing to see. A fence, another fence, and then the town. There were a few white tents set up outside the gate, but there were no guards walking along the fence with rifles, nothing.

That’s not enough. That’s not enough to fucking keep me in here. Why am I still here? Jesus the smell of that girl’s burning hair…

I asked TJ, “Where are the shooters?”

“The what?”

“The guns, man. The snipers or whatever who shot that kid. They didn’t shoot from the asylum, it’s too far away.”

I stared off toward the asylum, the big, depressing mossy gray brick box sitting nestled among some trees next to a smaller identical box, as if they had a bunch of those bricks left over from the main building but not enough to build another whole one. No sign of men with rifles on the roof over there. Or anyone, really.

TJ pointed to the sky.

I followed his finger, to where the birds circled lazily overhead. I shrugged. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Man, talkin’ to you…” He smiled and shook his head. “Like you a time traveler. No, wait, it’s more like you’re a caveman they just unfroze. ‘What is this strange devilry, future man?’”

He pointed up again.

“Sniper drone. Three-three-eight-caliber rifle mounted under an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Computer-assist targeting, can put an antipersonnel round into your brain from a thousand yards out. Did assassinations in Afghanistan, a lot neater than the Hellfire missiles that’d take out the Tango and the entire kid’s birthday party the Tango was attendin’ at the time.”

I looked up at a pair of tiny black crosses drifting below the clouds. I liked it better when I thought they were vultures. He continued, “Not that it don’t have the missiles, too. Them drones, they look tiny up in the sky but on the ground they’re pretty big, almost as big as a real plane, and those Hellfires it’s got under the wings, if we stood one up here it’d be almost as tall as you. If things got outta control down here, drone could launch one down into the yard and take out thirty of us in one shot.”

“‘Unmanned’? So this place is being patrolled by robots?”

“No, no. Remote control. Somewhere there’s a dude sittin’ at a console, cup of coffee on his right, jelly donut to his left, and on his screen is a black-and-white shot of this hospital turnin’ around and around real slow. He can go to infrared at night. Switch to thermal in case there’s too much fog or if we get clever and try to create a smoke screen for cover. Maybe he’s lookin’ at us right now. Wave to him. But don’t make any threatening moves, man can zoom in so that your head will fill his screen. Gun barrel is stabilized by computer, automatically compensates for vibration, wind speed, everything.”

“Okay, okay.” I ran my hands through my hair, thinking. “Okay, so, the operator is down there in one of those tents? Like, uh, if we could get somebody over there and beat the shit out of him…”

“No, no, we been over all this before. Drone operations is several states away, in Nevada, believe it or not. The 17th Reconnaissance Squadron. Creech Air Force Base, just outside of Vegas. And even though it’s eighteen hundred miles or so from here, he hits his little red ‘fire’ button, the command reaches the drone point-seven-five seconds later.”

“Fuck.” I bent over at the waist.

Breathe. Just breathe.

“I know, right? Weird to think that all the taxes you and me ever paid wouldn’t even replace a broken wing on that shit. Just try to calm down, alright?”

“Okay, so there’s two of ’em up there?”

He nodded. “I’d say one’s a spotter, probably set to scan the whole grounds at once, the other’s got the guns—”

“Okay, so how about we—”

“And before you ask, no, we can’t all rush the walls at different spots at once to give ’em too many targets to hit. They got ground-based hardware outside the fence, unmanned units called Gladiators. Just look like little Jeeps only with no place for a driver to sit, guns mounted on the back. Between them they got sensors in the ground that detect vibration, they got motion detectors, body heat sensors, lasers, all that shit. Anything bigger than a bunny rabbit tries to sneak through, somethin’ bad will happen to it. And no, we don’t have any way of tunneling out. Even if we had equipment—which we don’t—and the means to do the work without the UAVs noticin’—which we also don’t—where do we tunnel to? We got no intel about the situation out there, other than the fact that the damned REPER command center is right over there. I mean I know the geography and you probably do, too, but even if we could find an exit spot with nice, soft dirt, one that’s secluded, and not too far away, how do you know you don’t pop up right into a patrol? Six weeks of diggin’, wasted.”

“There’s that word again. REPER. You ever hear of that in your life before this week?”

He shook his head. “Nope. But when shit went bad last week and the CDC pulled out their people, this REPER took their place. You see the gear on those guys? Hazmat suits tricked out with Kevlar, modified M4s with targeting HUDs in their damned faceplates. You think they came up with that gear overnight? Shit, each of those suits probably cost half a million bucks. That’s specialized equipment, and all these dudes know exactly what they’re doin’. They sweep in and suddenly they’re in charge. They’re ordering around us National Guard like we answer to them, and nobody says shit otherwise. They tell me to stay behind and I’m like, bullshit, I’m gettin’ on that chopper. But guess what? Here I am. Never seen anything like this.”

I walked back across the roof, to look out at the rear of the building and the little strip of woods that from up here looked like the end product of a Brazillian bikini wax. Smoke rose in the distance, maybe somebody else’s house on fire. I heard no sirens.

TJ followed me and said, “You know, this conversation is a lot more discouraging the second time ’round.”

I said, “But there’s nobody here. That’s what I can’t get over. The whole operation on this side looks like it’s staffed by like two people. So what, it’s all just the drones and sensors and shit?”

“Well, yeah, they tryin’ to keep down the infection risk. They don’t need people like me swellin’ the ranks of the infected. And if you ask me, the automated shit seems like it’s workin’ just fine. You saw that kid try to climb the fence.”

From behind us a female voice said, “You should write down everything he said up to now, so he doesn’t have to do it all again if your brains get scrambled next week.”

Hope had joined us on the roof.

I said, “I just don’t accept that there’s no way out of this place. I mean it wasn’t built as a prison, right? It was built as a hospital. No way they’ve covered everything.”

Hope laughed, and to TJ she said, “It’s so funny to see him go through the five stages again.”

I said, “The what?”

TJ explained, “It’s the same for everybody they dump in here. First it’s the confusion, right? ‘What’s happening, where am I?’ That’s stage one. But then you go to stage two: pissed off. ‘How can they do this to us, man? I got rights.’ Okay, then there’s stage three. Defiance. ‘I gotta get outta here, there’s gotta be a way out.’ Stage four is the depression. ‘Why me, man? Boohoo. I wanna go home, I wanna see my girl.’ Then hopefully you land at stage five, which is, ‘we got to make the best of this situation, and be smart.’”

“I really made it all the way to stage five before?”

Hope said, “Oh, no. You stopped somewhere between stage two and three.”

12 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John’s head was pounding.

He tried to call Amy back, but she was ignoring him. He had a sick feeling that began around his navel and extended all the way up to his scalp. No doubt that was partly due to the huge egg breakfast he had eaten at sunrise to help absorb some of the vodka and Crown Royal he had flushed through his system, but the feeling was mostly due to the fact that he had clearly hit one of his patented Rough Stretches. Those bits of his life where every string of shitty luck converged into one horrible knot that everybody blamed him for. As if he had chosen things to work out this way. No, Amy, I did not just decide to bring about the apocalypse this month.

Times like this, you just gotta disconnect from the world and ride it out. It was a process he and Dave had, the two of them rarely hitting low points at the same time, one always there to cheer the other up and to pull them off the sofa to go hit the “town” (Dave always made air quotes around “town” when referring to Undisclosed, since the party train only ran through two bars and Munch’s trailer.)

John glanced around, half expecting to see a disheveled Dave pulling himself up from some spot on the floor. He’d be squinting, his hair matted down, looking like he’d just been shit out of a dinosaur. He wasn’t there, of course, and wouldn’t ever be there again. John immediately wanted to go back to sleep on the floor.

Wait. Whose floor? Where the hell was he? John had told Amy on the phone that he was back at the motel, but that was because he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t actually know. He was in somebody’s basement. There was a full bar down here. Maybe a frat house? He was close to campus, he knew that. The last thing he remembered was coming down here and watching round-the-clock apocalypse coverage on their sixty-inch TV, then someone introduced him to the modern wonder that was the Irish Car Bomb (Guinness, Baileys, and Jameson) and the next thing he knew, his cell phone was shooting noise bullets into his temple and the clock said afternoon. John surveyed the floor around him and saw a lot of tall black guys. He had gotten drunk with the basketball team, apparently.

John stumbled to his feet and spent a few minutes looking for his shoes. He never found them, so he figured he would just trade with one of the guys there. He put on a pair of Nikes he found by the door that were downright huge—seemed to be size 18 or so. They looked newer than his own but he figured he could catch up with the guy later to see if he wanted to trade back. Some people like shoes that are a little more broken in…

John realized he was staring at the wall and that some time had passed without him realizing it. Brain was still trying to boot up, loading all of the extra shit into the task bar. Finally he made himself get up and head out. Amy was going to do something rash if he wasn’t there to calm her down. He hit the cold air and found the Bronco parked haphazardly across the lawn. John cursed when he saw some jackass had spray painted ZOMBIE ASSAULT VEHICLE on the door, but then recognized it as his own handwriting.

He pulled out and saw the dorm tower looming ahead. He actually wasn’t more than five or six blocks away from Amy’s bus stop at the Mexican place. Awesome. He let the Bronco idle for a bit so the heater would have time to warm up.

John found the bus stop easily enough, but instead of a bus, pulled up to it were four windowless, black vans. Yellow tape roped off the whole sidewalk and the parking lot beyond. Guys in black space suits were prowling everywhere.

Amy was nowhere in sight.

John stopped right in the middle of the street, threw open the door off the Bronco and ran to the first van. He yanked open the back door.

“AMY! HEY!”

Nobody there. He ran to the second one. Before he could get it open, two of the space suit guys grabbed him.

“Sir! Sir! You are risking contamination by—”

“AAAMYYY!”

The men dragged John away from the vans and wrestled him to the sidewalk. John got a good look at what they were wearing and it was fucking terrifying. The glass on their helmets was tinted so that when light hit it, it glinted blood red. They had armor and machine guns and wires and shit running around like they were on the way to fight a war on Mars.

A third space suit guy came up to them and said, “What, is he family?”

John said, “Yes! I’m Amy Sullivan’s… dad.”

“Sir, do you know—”

“Listen! I’m infected! Take me and let her go! The infection, I got it all over. Look at my enormous inhuman feet!”

The guy said to his coworkers, “Okay, see if you can get ID and let him ride with Otto.”

For the second time in nine days, John’s hands were bound with the heavy-duty zip tie handcuffs. He was stuffed into the third van, but Amy wasn’t in there, either. Twenty minutes later it jolted to a start, and he knew that he and Amy would be in Undisclosed in a little over two hours. He had that much time to think up a plan.

45 MINUTES EARLIER…

Forty-five minutes before John would get hauled away in a van…

Amy sat and waited at the bus stop bench for the government to get there, watching as four more people with gun cases and army satchels strolled by. Were they like a militia or something? The sight of these regular people wandering around with all that hardware scared her more than the zombie thing. If everything fell apart and civilization came down to this, to guns and people fighting over food and medicine, what would she do? She wasn’t strong. She didn’t have strong friends. She didn’t have a family. The closest she had was David, and what if he was hurt or—

“Excuse me, what’s your name?”

Amy looked up, expecting to see a guy in a jumpsuit and gas mask or something. Instead it was a hipster-looking guy with a beard and glasses and wearing a black peacoat.

“Amy.”

“Hi. My name’s Josh, and we keep running into each other. We sat across from each other on the bus on Z Day. Remember? Then I come back and it turns out you live on the floor below me.”

Amy remembered him now, but wouldn’t if he hadn’t brought it up. He was a nice-looking guy but he also looked exactly like seven hundred other guys on campus. Same build, same beard, same glasses.

Z Day?

“Oh, yeah. I remember.”

“Did you lose someone in [Undisclosed]?”

“My boyfriend is there.”

“Me, too. Not my boyfriend. I’m not gay. My brother, my nephew and one of my best friends. That’s three different people obviously. Are you here for the meeting?”

“Oh, no. I’m just waiting for a ride.” She realized in that moment the strap Josh had draped over his shoulder was not a backpack, but a rifle case. “Wait, is this the gun meeting everybody’s going to? Because I left all my guns at home.”

“You should come anyway.” From an inside pocket he pulled out a sheet of paper, and she didn’t need to read the details. She recognized the huge letter Z the moment he unfolded it. “When your ride gets here, bring them, too.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’ll want to come. The CDC or whoever is coming to pick me up to take me to quarantine.”

Alarmed, Josh said, “Excuse me?”

“Yep, I’ve wasted a week here and finally I said, screw it. If that’s where David is, that’s where I want to be. I told them to come get me.”

Josh looked nervously down the street in both directions, then said, “Amy, listen. You need to come with me. Give me ten minutes to explain what’s going on. If after that you don’t think I’m right about this, I’ll bring you back here. Hell, we’ll drive you down to the checkpoint ourselves. But you don’t have all of the information and I’m telling you right now, if you go with whoever shows up here, you will never see your boyfriend again.”

Another nervous scan of the street.

“Come on. I’ll explain everything once we’re off the sidewalk.”

Amy sighed and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “So, so many kidnappings begin this way.”

“We’re going right down there, to the Powder Keg. It’ll be packed with people. It’s full of rednecks with assault rifles and shotguns, if anyone tries to put a hand on you, they’ll be perforated. Come on. There’s no time.”

He put a hand under her armpit.

“Up.”

She went with him. They hurried along the sidewalk, Josh with his hand flat on her back pushing her along and ducking down like they were dodging machine gun fire.

The Powder Keg was a gun store/shooting range and not, as Amy had thought, a gay nightclub (this wasn’t a snide private joke, it would be days later before she would remember that the nightclub she was thinking of was called the Bomb Shelter). The place was absolutely packed, and the crowd was armed to the teeth. In any other country on earth, this kind of gathering would be cause for an all-out military response.

Josh pushed her through the door and into a crowd. He stopped to tell two burly shotgun-bearing men, “REPER is looking for her. If they show up at the door, tell them we’ve never seen her.”

Amy thought, Did he say Reavers? Like on Firefly?

Josh pushed inside, pulling Amy through the crowd behind him to the front of the room, Amy still carrying her bag of pharmacy stuff and her stupid pillow.

He reached a spot where a white bedsheet was hanging in front of a display of earmuffs and safety glasses. Josh put his back to the wall and stepped up on a huge cardboard box of clay pigeons, so he’d be a couple of feet above the crowd. He quieted everybody and said, “Okay everybody, we don’t have much time. Now, I need to get something out of the way first thing, I begin every meeting with this. Some of you were dragged here by friends or family, rolling your eyes over the whole ‘zombie’ thing. If you don’t like that word, feel free to pick one that suits you. The Zombie Response Squad was a club promoting physical fitness, weapons training and safety, and wilderness survival. These are skills I believe that every human should possess regardless—they can save your life in the event of anything from natural disaster to civil unrest. The zombie angle was just our way of having fun with it and, obviously, we had no way of knowing that, you know, something like this was coming.”

He paused here. That seemed like a really important point to him.

“So if you don’t like the word zombie, feel free to mentally substitute any word you wish when you hear it. But for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to use the word zombie. The infected are contagious, they exhibit animalistic and predatory behavior toward other humans, they can survive massive organ and tissue trauma. So regardless of what science eventually figures out about this outbreak, right now, the danger these creatures pose to your personal safety, and the method of dealing with them, fully fits the profile of ‘zombie.’ So just deal with it.”

Josh gestured to a guy in the crowd and said, “Fredo?” That was presumably Fredo’s cue to turn on a projector hooked to his laptop. An image appeared on the sheet next to Josh.

Oh my dear god, Amy thought. They have a PowerPoint presentation.

Josh said, “Okay, very quickly. Here’s what we know. For some of you this will be repeat information, just bear with me here.”

A blue slide appeared, with white writing in Comic Sans font. It said, ORIGINS?

“We don’t know where the infection originated from. We may never know. Since it behaves in a way that’s different from anything known to science, I prefer to think it’s man-made. In fact, I also happen to think that the pathogen was specifically engineered to ‘zombify’ the victims, for the psychological impact. Humans have been scared of walking dead since hunter-gatherer days. Zombies are burned into our genetic memory. I was just reading about that in a book. Fredo…”

Next slide. This one had a line graph, starting at zero and spiking rapidly upward. The left-to-right axis was ticking off the days since the outbreak.

“OGZA estimates are that the infection rate within the borders of [Undisclosed] was at twenty percent as of last Wednesday. It exceeded fifty percent yesterday, and will be at ninety to one hundred percent within forty-eight hours.”

Gasps from the crowd. Amy thought, that couldn’t be true, could it? And who was OGZA?

Fredo hit the next slide. It said, WHO IS OGZA?

“For those of you who haven’t been to previous meetings and who have been following this story in the mainstream press, let me quickly fill you in. A group of resistance fighters have formed inside town, gathering supplies and scouting secure locations where they can hole up as the situation deteriorates. They call themselves Outbeak Ground Zero Alpha.”

He brought up his final slide, which said, SO WHAT ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT?

“One final point I want to make, and I leave this for last because it’s what you need to keep with you when you watch TV tonight. An anonymous source within the government has leaked a series of e-mails between the Centers for Disease Control and the task force for Rapid Exotic Pathogen Eradication slash Research, outlining what they call Operation Leppard. From these e-mails we know that REPER determined within forty-eight hours of the outbreak—based on autopsies of infected dead—that the physiological changes caused by the infection are radical… and irreversible.”

Another “let that sink in” pause from Josh.

“Even if they could kill off the agent of the change—the bacteria, virus, parasite or whatever it is—the subject’s entire nervous system is no longer recognizable as human. There is nothing to be done for the infected. From there they have made the logical conclusion that quarantine is not separating the infected so that they may be isolated and cured. They are being separated—and concentrated in one location—so that they can be wiped out in one step. Just like amputating an infected limb.”

He let that sink, too.

“And our goal, as of now, is to do whatever we can to help them accomplish this.”

The room erupted in cheers.

8 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John found himself packed into the most depressing room he’d ever been in—and in Undisclosed, that was really saying something. It was a gymnasium in the depressing old Ffirth TB asylum, a building that had been old, abandoned and almost certainly haunted since his father was a kid. Inside, the place was even more of a rotting, mildewing shithole than out. The long boards in the old gym floor had warped and curled up over time, creating a rippling floor that, if painted blue, would look like the surface of the ocean on a windy day.

He didn’t see Amy there but he wouldn’t have even if she were—there were partitions with curtains set up to divide the gym into dozens of little rooms containing cots. Teams of guys in those spooky Darth Vader space suits were rolling a cart from one “room” to the next, taking blood samples from everyone. John wondered what exactly they were checking for. He wondered what his blood-alcohol level was.

John’s hands were still bound behind him. Everybody else was getting a standard checklist read off a clipboard (“Are you having hallucinations? Any unexplained urges or mood swings? Are you experiencing any unusual sores or lesions in the mouth area?”) but they came back to his cot twice after his interview, asking him his name, asking how he knew Dave and Amy, and so on. Finally they asked him if he knew Amy’s whereabouts, and John felt a Gatorade bucket of relief get dumped over his head.

They don’t have her.

On the fourth visit, they brought a white space suit that contained a smiling, gray-haired guy who John instantly disliked.

“Hello there, John. I’m Dr. Bob Tennet. How are we today?”

“I know you somehow…”

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, but I know your friend David.”

“Right, right, you’re his crossbow therapist.”

Tennet grabbed a rolling office chair and dragged it over. He sat on it backward, straddling it so that he could cross his arms over the back in a casual, folksy way, which looked absurd in his huge, bulky hazardous-materials suit. He pulled out a device with a series of clips dangling at the end of thin wires.

“Your left hand, please.”

Tennet clipped the five clips to John’s fingers. At the other end of the wires was a box with a small screen. Tennet punched in some settings. Was this thing going to give him a manicure?

“Now please answer the following questions honestly. They might seem odd to you, but reading your reaction will give us vital insight into your condition.”

John said, “Whatever. Wait, you said ‘know’ David, present tense. Is Dave still… around?”

“We’ll explore that in a moment. As you can imagine, John, we’re working just as hard as we can to give a clean bill of health to the people who don’t need our help so we can devote as much time and attention as we can to the ones who do.”

“And by help, you mean throwing them behind that goddamned prison camp you’ve built next door?”

“You feel what we’re doing here is unethical.”

“Is that… some kind of a joke? You can’t tell me the government knows what’s really happening here. We have… rights and shit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why do I say there is such a thing as human rights? Wait, what is all this? Who are you?”

“You understand the irony of you asking that question, when my entire role here is figuring out who—or what—you are. You and the rest of the patients in this facility.”

“We have rights either way.”

“Human rights.”

“Yes.”

“But you may no longer be human.”

“Jesus Christ. Look at me. You know damned well there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m sitting here having a rational conversation with you. In English.”

“There is a species of carnivorous turtle whose tongue has evolved to look exactly like the worms local fish are known to eat. The fish swim right into its mouth, going after the ‘worm’, only to have their heads severed by powerful jaws. If, say, a hypothetical predator of humans had learned to mimic human speech and mannerisms in order to make it a more efficient predator, that would hardly make it human, or guarantee it rights under our Constitution or any common system of morality.”

“Holy shit. The whole world has gone insane out there, hasn’t it? So you just throw everybody in a concentration camp and figure you’ll sort it out later? That’s where things are at?”

“Ah, your friend called the quarantine a prison, but you have elevated it to concentration camp! Your generation does have a flair for the hyperbolic when it comes to describing your own adversity.”

“Wait, so you did talk to David? So he’s alive?”

Tennet looked up from his readout and said, “Let’s explore that. That’ll be a good jumping off point for us. If David were here, but was infected, would he still be David?”

“What?”

“Say his personality remained exactly the same, but the parasite caused his head to transform so that his face was replaced with the face of a leech, complete with circles of tiny teeth for sucking human blood. Would you still consider him to be your old friend?”

“Are you saying he’s infected, or are you just fucking with me?”

Instead of answering, Tennet studied the screen on the device hooked to John’s fingers and made some notes on his clipboard. “Good. Now let’s say the opposite happened. Say he still looked, spoke and acted like David, but was, in reality, an inhuman predator. How would that make you feel? Please answer.”

“Are you serious?”

“Please, we have a lot of patients to get to.”

“It would make me feel bad.”

Tennet nodded and checked something off of his clipboard.

“Now let’s say that he was not infected, but was sent to quarantine with hundreds of people who are, and that their infection has dissolved the part of their brain capable of making moral decisions. And let’s say that they overpowered David, restrained him, defecated into his mouth and taped his mouth shut with duct tape, and left him there to writhe and slowly swallow feces all week, how would that make you feel?”

“Who are you?”

A check of the screen. A mark on the clipboard. “Almost done. Now, if you had to choose, either to have Amy Sullivan gang-raped by twenty-seven infected males in town over the course of ten days, or to have David’s digestive tract surgically restructured so that his large intestine fed directly into his mouth, which would it be? And please provide support for your answer.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

Tennet glanced at his clipboard and said, “If you had to choose, and if you were not allowed to see either ahead of time and had no other information to go on, would you rather fight Mindcrow or Gonadulus?”

“This isn’t a government operation, is it?”

“If it wasn’t, tell me how that would make you feel.”

“You’re behind this. All of this. You people released that thing in Dave’s house. You set all this in motion. What’s your real name?”

Tennet casually glanced at another page on his clipboard and said, “All right, John, I think we’re in good shape here. What we’re going to do is observe you overnight—standard procedure, don’t read anything into it—and tomorrow morning we’ll do this all again, so we can cross-check the results. Between now and then I want you to really mull this over: if you were carrying the parasite right now, how would you know?”

John didn’t answer. Tennet stood, pulled the clips from John’s fingers and as a good-bye, said, “You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.”

7 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was in the Zombie Response Squad’s headquarters, aka an old RV Josh inherited from his parents. Parents who Amy suspected were fairly rich. One wall featured a rack of five guns that Amy had never seen outside of an action movie or video game. Josh insisted on showing them all to her, and the footlocker of bullets and shotgun shells they had stockpiled. She nodded and tried to act impressed but she had no idea what she was looking at. The guns all looked like they would knock her over if she tried to shoot one. Josh insisted this wasn’t the case and that he would show her how to shoot if she wanted. He asked her if she wanted anything to drink or to eat or, you know, anything else because he was there for her. Massages, boob inspections, whatever.

Amy couldn’t get John on the phone but at this point she expected that and, to be honest, hated his guts for it. Josh was on his laptop now, showing her a map of Undisclosed that somebody was updating with zombie sightings. There was a big red blob in one corner and Amy asked if that meant there were a lot of zombies there or if there was just one flamboyant zombie who was really easy to see.

“Uh, that’s the hospital there, they’ve fenced it off and used it as a quarantine. They’ve got the place built up like a supermax prison now, but it got so bad that not even the CDC staff could stay inside it. Now, it’s a dumping ground. When somebody in town turns up infected they move them there, behind the fences. So that area is pretty much one hundred percent infected, because if you’re not but they stick you in there anyway, well, how long are you going to last?”

“But they don’t know for sure who’s infected and who’s not?”

“Right.”

“So if your neighbor or whatever calls them and says they suspect you are infected, you get dumped into that camp or whatever. Which is full of hundreds of people who are infected and have turned into monsters and stuff.”

“That’s what we’re hearing, yes.”

“Oh, wow, that’s like the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s what I was saying at the meeting. If you’re the government, and your job is to make sure this thing doesn’t spread, and once you’ve finished sweeping the town and have everybody who might be infected all in this big red blotch here, and you know for a fact that they can’t be cured, what do you do with the red blotch? I’m thinking one MOAB would do it. Fuel-air bomb that will cook everything within a square mile to four thousand degrees.”

“I bet the guy who invented that had a really weird relationship with his mother.”

“What?”

“Do we know when they plan to do it?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“I checked the list on their Web site, David wasn’t on there at all. What do you think that means?”

“I think it means that keeping people informed isn’t their top priority. Look at this.”

Amy leaned over Josh’s shoulder and watched a black-and-white video clip play out. It didn’t look like anything. Some dark squares and tiny dots. At the center were white crosshairs, and some numbers were ticking off in the corners.

“It’s aerial video. A military pilot leaked it, I think it’s a gun camera. This big dark bunch of rectangles here, that’s the hospital. If they zoomed out, you’d see the REPER HQ buildings to the upper left, but it’s offscreen on this view. See this? You can sort of see the fencing and stuff around the edge of the quarantine. He’ll zoom in in a second, to get a view of the yard…”

The shot blinked in as the pilot upped the magnification. Much clearer now—Amy could make out the dots as people, and make out the shapes outside the fence as tents and trucks.

It zoomed in again. Now she could see the people in some detail, enough to tell the difference between someone sitting and standing, and when someone raised their hand to their mouth to smoke or eat something.

She said, “Wait, that’s inside the fence? Those are the infected monster zombies? They’re just standing around. They look like people.”

“No. See this blotch here? That white part in the middle, that’s heat. Fire. See all this stuff jutting out on all sides? Look close. Those are bodies. Skeletons, of uninfected victims they’ve killed. They seem to be burning them in some kind of primitive ritual—”

“DAVID! Look!”

“What?”

“That’s David! I see him!”

“Are… are you sure? At this resolution I couldn’t even tell you which ones are women and which are—”

“Oh my god, he’s right there. Oh my god. I have to tell John.”

Josh was still protesting, but Amy could have read David’s body language from outer space. He was staring at the fence, with his arms folded, and he was really really mad.

She said, “We have to get him out of there. Tonight. Or tomorrow morning. How soon can we get down there?”

“Amy… even if we wanted to risk a breach of the quarantine, do you want me to point out all of the military vehicles surrounding that place? Plus whatever aircraft this video came from? You heard me say it’s a gun camera, right?”

“Then I’ll go myself. That’s what I was trying to do, get them to take me to that place. That’s what I was doing and you stopped me and now I’m here and David is there and they’re going to heat it to four thousand degrees.”

“Amy… if that’s really him, and he’s in there with those… things, then it might not really be him anymore. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t.”

“Uh huh. So how soon can we be down there?”

6 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

TJ claimed it was around 9 P.M., which he said he could tell by looking at the moon. That sounded like bullshit but it didn’t feel like he was off by much. He and Hope were in my room, the latter heating a coffeepot full of water over a Sterno can. She said, “The last bunch of supplies had boxes of macaroni and cheese but we don’t have enough heat to boil the water that long. You know it never occurred to me until now how much energy it takes to heat water. I mean, I’ve had science classes and I understand that’s why they use water to put out fires. But like when you’re at home you don’t think about it. You run a hot shower or let hot water run in the sink while you brush your teeth and you don’t realize that somewhere down the line it took like several pounds of coal to make enough electricity to heat it. We are soooo wasteful.”

TJ said, “Goddamnit, Hope, why did you have to mention hot showers? You wagin’ a psychological torture campaign against me tonight. Don’t know what I did to offend you.”

She dipped her finger in the water. “Okay, we got two flavors of Ramen and they both taste exactly the same.”

There was a moment soon after that, as we sat around the room eating noodles out of coffee cups, hearing muffled conversation from the hall, when everything seemed normal again. We could have been camping. I felt a strange sense of calm and realized what I was feeling was the release of responsibility. Nobody expected me to be at work the next day. Nobody was trying to call me. I had no e-mail to check. Ghost enthusiasts weren’t stalking me on Facebook. Our responsibilities were stripped down to the bare biological basics: thirst, hunger, cold. All at once I could see why lifelong convicts got to where they couldn’t function outside of prison walls. You’re almost functioning more at a level for which the human brain was intended.

I asked TJ, “What’s the deal with the colors? The red and green? How’d we wind up on teams?”

“Well, that’s the thing. Nobody knows. Everybody went through decontamination and when you stepped out of the chemical shower you were handed coveralls. Half got red, half got green. They didn’t tell us nothin’ or put us in different sections. Just, ‘here, put this shit on.’ But it don’t take Dr. House to figure out that the reds are way more likely to spider out. Carlos was a red, Sal was a red. Danny, Marcus, that fat Muslim dude. It’s not a hundred percent but it’s not within margin of error, either. Red means ‘high risk’, seems pretty common sense. Everybody figured it out before anybody said it out loud. The colors started separatin’ to themselves. As colors tend to do.”

“Owen has the only gun?”

“Yep. Until somebody finds another. Owen has appointed himself the de facto President of the Quarantine based on the fact that he happened to find a sidearm that got left behind in the melee. Lot of human history works like that.”

We had boarded up the broken window, but could still hear the bonfire crackling down in the yard. TJ continued, “The lobby and the bit of yard outside the lobby, that whole patio area, that’s shared territory. The second floor, that’s where the hospital still functions as a hospital. The doc and two nurses got left behind, they’re treatin’ the sick. The regular sick, you know. People keep cuttin’ themselves on broken glass, about a dozen people got them nasty shits that’s goin’ around. You ever talk to the doc, by the way? Since you been back?”

“No. Tomorrow.” I had a thing about doctors, for a very good reason.

TJ continued, “So, then the third and fourth floors are all red territory. We’re here on the fifth and up, those are the green floors. The two sides, we don’t shoot each other on sight but it gets tense, as you saw. And you can tell which side has the gun, by who got the lower floors.”

“Why?”

Hope interjected, “No elevators. Nobody wants to tromp up and down a million stairs to get to their room. Everybody would prefer to just pile down at the bottom. Owen declared his people got the good floors.”

I said, “Why did I wind up back at the asylum?”

TJ shrugged. “Like they’d tell us. Loudspeaker came on and said you needed to go to the gate. Truck hauled you away. That was Friday morning. Now you’re back.”

“How long can we keep this up? Before the food and everything runs out?”

TJ said, “They dropped in supplies. Truck dumped out boxes of stuff. I assume they’ll do it again.”

“Yeah, but I’m saying… let’s say that hypothetically they can’t figure out a cure or even a reliable test for the infection. They keep dumping the suspects here in the quarantine and… what? We’re still here ten years from now? Somethin’ has to give, right?”

Looking into his cup, TJ said, “What would you do?”

“Drop a nuke on it. Write a letter of apology to the surviving family members. Send ’em some coupons to Outback Steakhouse as compensation. Rest of the country breathes a sigh of relief.”

He shrugged. “That rumor started about two minutes after outbreak. I was hearing that shit everywhere. Man, people got a low opinion of the armed forces, don’t they? Watch too many zombie movies. No way they get away with that in the real world.”

Hope said, “What if they cover it up? Make it look like something else?”

I said, “What, like fake a gas line explosion?”

“No, all they have to do is poison our food. Then say the infection did it.”

That brought silence to the room.

TJ said, “Both of you think you bein’ cynical, but you’re not. Reality is, if they wanted us dead, they don’t have to do anything. Situation we got here is what cops call a self-cleaning oven. Some gang neighborhoods, they’d just let be. Come back in five years and it’s all quiet, all on its own. You know, because everybody shot each other. It’d be just like that here, because instead of organizing and figuring out how to work together, we all got paranoid, like Owen.”

He stood up.

“It’s early, but I’m goin’ to bed. No TV and it too dark to read. What else am I gonna do?”

Hope said, “Ugh. The nights are the worst. I’m to where I can tolerate the days as long as nobody dies. But the nights go on forever.”

TJ said, “I agree. And yet, the night comes just the same. Like the rotation of the Earth don’t give a shit what we think.”

Hope was making a huge freaking understatement when she said the nights were the worst. I realized when TJ left that I was also exhausted, but it was only after I went to bed that it became screamingly apparent that we had no lights and no heat and were basically living in a third world gulag. I tried to remember what day TJ said it was. Sunday? So the rest of the country was probably watching Sunday Night Football. Or were they? Maybe it was like this everywhere. Everyone in America huddled in the dark, waiting.

TJ and Hope left the room to me at bedtime, so I guessed it was my room. I wrapped myself up in as many blankets as I could find. I knew exactly where to find them, just as I knew where to find the hunk of particle board we used to cover the broken window. My specific memories never came back but a lot of the automatic stuff was still programmed in. I suddenly remembered that I had broken the window by throwing a little television out of it. I couldn’t remember why.

I shivered and wrapped up the covers a little tighter.

We had a bunch of emergency kerosene space heaters that had been left behind in a storage building, but not much kerosene to fuel them. Here on the fifth floor we had two of them in the hall and they’d keep them lit for a few hours at night to take the chill out of the air, but that was it. People set pots of water on top to heat, killing two birds with one stone. Some people slept in the hall to be closer to the heaters, but the kerosene fumes stank so bad the stench radiated into my brain and gave me a headache. TJ pointed out that the stuff was jet fuel, after all.

I shivered. Couldn’t get warm. Or maybe the shivering was something else. So damned quiet. No TV. No ticking clock. No soft whoosh of heat blowing through vents. Not even the reassuring hum of countless electronic devices that you don’t even register until it’s gone.

Somebody coughed out in the hall. A dog barked way off in the distance.

I shivered.

I remembered getting into a drunken argument with a guy about American prisons, him talking about the injustice of the system, me talking about how it’s ridiculous that we spend forty grand a year per inmate to maintain what are basically super-clean hotels for rapists and crack dealers, complete with a computer lab and TV room and pool tables. But now I understood what he was saying. That knowledge that you can’t leave, it’s a twisting knife in your gut. All I could think about was that razor wire at the top of the fence, meant to slice your hands down to the tendons if you tried to climb over. My own government put that there, with my hands in mind. Those hundreds of vicious blades hanging fifteen feet over the bloodstains and brains in the grass of the last guy who tried to climb up. But even prisoners knew when their sentence was up, they could tick off days on a calendar, feel themselves progressing toward freedom. But this place? They could keep us here forever. Or poison our food, like Hope said. Or starve us out. Or let the drone operator use us for target practice. Or fill the yard with nerve gas.

I shivered.

I couldn’t stop. I laid on my side and brought my knees up, trying to control it. Where was Amy right now? Could she have gotten out of town? How the hell could she, the way they were locking the place down at the end there?

I thought I’d lay there, shivering, staring at the wall until the sun came up. I could sense no sleep on the horizon. But when I heard footsteps in my room later, I realized I had drifted off.

I didn’t move. I pulled open my eyes and stared at the wall. I heard nothing, decided I dreamed it. My eyes slipped shut—

My bed shifted. Weight. Gentle, settling in.

I thought, Hope?

She was friendly earlier, but were we… friendly? Holy shit was that possible? I wouldn’t think I’d do that to Amy but… here, alone, in this cold place? Would I turn down a warm girl and soft skin and the chance to do the one thing that would let me forget all this? I admitted, I didn’t hate the idea. I stayed frozen, on my side, not sure what to do. I thought about reaching back, looking for a thigh or a hip. Casually, you know. Just to see who was there. I wondered if I would find her naked. An entire separate part of my nervous system roared to life at the thought. I moved my hand, slowly. My heart was pumping.

Now watch, you’ll roll over and it’ll be TJ, wearing a tiny leopard-skin thong.

I reached out and rolled over at the same time.

I grabbed a handful of red fur.

Molly

Note: Do not ask the author how the details of the following sequence of events were obtained. The explanation would only leave you more confused and dissatisfied than would any theory you could come up with from your own imagination.

Experienced pet owners know that if your pet ever goes missing, the first step is not to panic. The vast majority of the time, the pet will simply find its way back home on its own.

Molly knew this, so she hadn’t been all that concerned when her male human first went missing nine days ago. In the beginning, things had been in a general state of agitation everywhere Molly went, so she figured it had something to do with that.

That was the day all of the people had been shouting at each other, and running, and falling down. It was hard to find a place to sleep quietly but eventually she found a shady spot between two buildings, and she curled up in the shadow of one of those huge green boxes humans use to store their extra food. This one had some great-smelling poultry in it, maybe four or five days old, but those boxes were hard to get out of once you got into them and she wasn’t hungry. She had just eaten the rest of the discarded meal that her human had forgotten to give her the night before.

What passes for language among dogs—made up mostly of a lavishly detailed sense of smell and a well-tuned but cautious sense of empathy for all living things—cannot be translated neatly into English. But if it could, the closest translation of Molly’s name for her human, the one other humans called David, was “Meatsmell.” His breath always smelled like meat—always, as if he had just eaten some recently, no matter when you encountered him. To a dog that spoke of an awe-inspiring accomplishment. She was proud of Meatsmell’s ability to always have access to such riches. She knew she had taught him well.

But she also knew that Meatsmell was always getting confused. Molly knew that he couldn’t look after himself, and that he depended on her. She guarded his house every night, keeping all of the predators and bad guys at bay. She sometimes let him pet her, feeling his stress and agitation melt way as he did so. She also kept dropped food picked up off the floor, and fished out the edible items when he would accidentally drop them into those big flimsy bags and take them out to the yard (where anyone could get them!). Molly was certain that Meatsmell would not last more than a day or two on his own.

On the evening of that day, the day when everything went wrong, Molly had woken up after dark, the hard ground having grown cold under her. It had started to rain a little. She made her way back toward home, but that took a long time. She kept having to stop and investigate smells. There was smoke that stung her nose everywhere she went, things were burning here and there and she knew that could not be good news because the humans were already riled up. When things started catching on fire that rarely calmed them down. She had stopped and sniffed a patch of fresh blood, and the freshly dead human laying next to it in the rain. A little way down the road, she stopped and smelled another one, sniffing around where some of its insides had spilled out onto the ground.

She got closer to her home and there were several such people laying around, with parts separated and some burned up. One of them was very small. None of them were Meatsmell, she would have known that from far away. The smoke smell was here, too. There was no fire now, but there had been recently. Now, everything was just smoky and cold and wet. She went into the house, because the door was open, and went right to her food and water dishes.

It was all wrong. Everything was all black and twisted. Her water dish had water in it, but it was rainwater that tasted like smoke. There was no food in her dish at all. That is when she knew Meatsmell was in trouble—he would not forget food time. If he had forgotten to feed Molly, who knew how long it had been since he had fed himself.

It was then that Molly had noticed that it was still raining on her as she stood over her bowls. This wasn’t right. The wind was still coming in, too. Where was the warmth and light and the endless food smells? She went looking for her bed but even it was cold and wet and strangely flat. She couldn’t get comfortable—she hated sleeping in the rain—and trotted around outside the house until she found the small entrance to the space under the floor where she sometimes went when she didn’t want to be bothered. It was nice and dry and shielded from the wind. She curled up on the dirt and drifted off, deciding that if Meatsmell came back soon she would let him sleep down here, too.

Light poured into the entrance to her sleeping spot and Molly instinctively moved to go somewhere darker. But then she realized Meatsmell still was not home and that he was probably somewhere scared and hungry and waiting for Molly to come get him.

Molly went on the hunt. Tracking Meatsmell would clearly begin with the last spot where she had seen him—at the little building down the road where he always bought his rolls of spicy meat. She set off down the street under the morning sun. She was disappointed to see that the humans had not settled down one bit after a night’s sleep—a lot of men who were all wearing the same clothes, with big coverings over their heads, were shouting at the other people who were all wearing different clothes, maybe telling them that they should all be wearing the same clothes, too. There was a terrible bang and Molly flinched. Noises that loud didn’t happen in the normal world, only people could make sounds like that. One of the different-clothed people fell over and they weren’t alive anymore.

Molly ran to get some distance from the shouting people, then turned one last time to get a look. She had noticed something curious and had to double-check. One of the people in the different-clothes crowd was not in fact people. He looked just like a person, but he was something else, just pretending to be one. It was the same for one of the same-clothes people, and she got the feeling the other same-clothes people did not realize this. This phenomenon was not new to Molly, but she always took note of it because it seemed to be the source of a lot of anxiety for Meatsmell and his friends.

Molly hurried down the street and arrived at the tiny spicy meat building. No one was there at this time in the morning, but the place was bursting with smells. Not just all of the exotic meat the place cooked in big heaping piles, but of people. Molly sniffed the ground, making a full circle of the hard, cold surface around the building. She picked up the scent of Meatsmell, and the angry man who was trying to hurt Meatsmell, and John.

She followed the scents right to the narrow door, now standing open. She sniffed her way into a little room full of items that were not food. She sniffed and sniffed, in an instant learning the long and dramatic story of a possum who had died nearby a few days ago, then someone stepped in the juices that leaked from his body, then they tracked it into this room. Then a cat slept in here not even one day ago.

Molly was so distracted by the drama of the tiny room’s floor that she failed to notice that the sun had gone away. She turned around and went back outside, only to realize she was no longer at the little building. She was now looking at a flat expanse of pavement exploding with fresh smells. Blood. Sweat. Smoke. Terror.

Molly had sniffed and sniffed, taking it all in, replaying through her nose the story of scared men killing other scared men.

There.

Meatsmell had been here. The scent led off toward where lots of the same-clothes men were gathered. Meatsmell was not among them. There was a fence that went both ways as far as Molly could see, and she sensed that Meatsmell was on the other side. So she just needed to find a way in. Shouldn’t be a problem. Molly went and found a sunny spot, and curled up and went to sleep.

It took a full week to find her way in. In that time she was chased by some of the same-clothes people, and other dogs, and was almost hit by cars more times than she could remember. But she made it, inside the big building full of terrible smells—layers upon layers of ancient sickness and slow death. Now she was curled up next to Meatsmell and it wasn’t raining on them and everything was back the way it was supposed to be. She fell into a deep sleep, inside this huge building full of anxious and tired people, many of whom she noticed were not really people.

4 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John had lost track of how many consecutive days he had woken up not knowing where he was. This place was full of people and echoes and creaky boards and mold. Someone was shouting at him to wake up. He sat up on the cot and the first thing he saw was one of the terrifying Darth Vader guys holding a machine gun. John thought, oh, right. It’s this bullshit still.

Two spacemen surged forward and lifted John off his cot and took him roughly out of the gym and into an old shower room covered in ancient chipped tiles held together by mildew. John half expected to see a dozen naked men in black space helmets snapping towels at each other. Instead he found himself alone, the long-dry shower room now piled high with boxes of rubber gloves and syringes and trash bags and every other thing. He was alone for ten minutes, until he was joined by—

“Detective Falconer! Shouldn’t you be wearing a space suit?”

Falconer was wearing his street clothes—jeans, a black turtleneck and an empty shoulder holster under his armpit. Cowboy boots. Little bit of beard stubble. John wondered if the guy would walk from one end of the street to the other without winding up covered in bitches.

Falconer said, “A suit wouldn’t help, would it?”

“Might buy you a few seconds. Where’s Amy?”

“Who?”

“Dave’s girlfriend? Redhead. Only one hand? They snatched her up. Both of us. But I think she got away, they don’t seem to know where she is. I don’t know if she’s in town, or…”

“Didn’t see her.”

“What about Dave?”

“I can ask but they won’t tell me either way.”

“Because you don’t work for the CDC.”

“Does this shit look like the CDC to you? You see what those guys were wearing? What they were packing? No, they’re not CDC and I’m not one of them. I’m being processed for infected, just like you. I turned myself in. I got them to let me talk to you because I said you might have information, but when we’re done, both of us will get tossed over the fence down at the hospital. And it sounds like nobody comes back out of there.”

“You turned yourself in? Great plan you had there, detective.”

“I am really trying to restrain myself here. Do you understand? This all happened because of you two shitbirds.”

“Man, fuck you. I don’t think Dave made it out. Did you know that? I’m pretty sure he got his brains blown out when everything went bad. Or if not, they got him after shit went to hell. Either way…”

“Well, I’m sorry if that’s true. But I can say that I don’t know that to be true, either. Some people were killed in that first round of riots but I never heard that he was among them.”

John shrugged.

“But, none of this is my main point.” Falconer moved to a spot where he could see the gym from where he was standing. Making sure nobody was close enough to listen.

“My point is, I’ve seen everything I need to see in here. So I figure that instead of rotting in their quarantine, I might as well get to the bottom of this and save the world.”

John stood up. “Now you’re talking.”

“Don’t get excited. If I think you can help me, I’ll get you out of here, too. But you have to prove you can help me first.”

John sat. “Okay, fine. Want me to show you some karate or…”

“I watched both of you go into a door at a taco stand and not come back out. Where did you go?”

“To a construction site outside of town.”

“How?”

“Magic door. No, seriously. Don’t get mad. The door is magic. It’s not my fault.”

“But it didn’t work for me. And if the illegal aliens they got manning the grill at that place go through the back door, they’re not gonna wind up outside town.”

“Correct. Neither will most other people. Me and Dave can do it, so can some other people around town. They’re the ones who built the doors. We just stumbled across them.”

“‘Doors.’ There’s more than one?”

“Yeah, they’re all over.”

“And who are these people who put them there?”

“We’d love to find out. They’re very well funded, and very powerful and they dabble in weird shit. They’re also almost certainly the people responsible for this outbreak. Which as Dave tried to explain to you, is the work of invisible monsters. I think that Tennet guy is with them. He has that vibe.”

“A few days into this situation, CDC, military, everybody pulls out and this new agency—REPER—sweeps in. They got all the right equipment and all the right training for this exact thing. And nobody has heard of them before.”

John shrugged as if to say, “Sounds about right.”

“These guys, the ones you say are behind this, do they do anything else, other than build magical doors and monsters? I’m having a little bit of trouble figuring out how they make money off that.”

“Dave thinks the monster stuff is a side effect, an accident. He thinks they’re experimenting under the table with the door stuff, quantum teleportation or wormholes or however they do it, and that when they started dicking around with the fabric of space-time and dimensions and so on, weird shit started leaking through. From, you know. Other dimensions or wherever they come from. But the stuff that came through, don’t think of it as just animals that run around biting people. Some of it is intelligent. Superintelligent, maybe. Dark shapes, like ghosts.”

John could tell from Falconer’s face that he was losing him.

“Detective, all that stuff I just said, we didn’t just fill this in with our imagination. We’ve had encounters here and there, stuff has leaked out from inside the operation. We look like a couple of assholes but Dave has actually worked really hard to put this together. And you’ve seen enough weird shit in your time here to give us just a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.”

“These people, you think they’re part of the government?”

“I think that when the government comes to investigate something that goes down here, these guys can make some calls and that shit just disappears. Cases get closed. Also, they’ve been around a while. Stories about this town go back as far as the history books go. Maybe forever.”

“What’s so special about this town?”

“Don’t know. Maybe there’s some kind of electromagnetic conditions that make it ideal for whatever it is they do. Maybe they just got a good deal on the land. Who knows.”

“And what’s so special about you and David? Why can you use the doors? Why can you see the monsters?”

“Short answer, we’re magic. Longer answer, he and I took a magic potion that gave us the ability. The longer still answer is that a drug hit the streets, looks kind of like molasses, or motor oil that hasn’t been changed in a decade. The dealer was calling it Soy Sauce. You take it and you change instantly. The veil comes up off your perceptions. When you’re on it, the first few hours, you’re like a fuckin’ demigod. You can slip through time, space, unlock the mysteries of the universe and shit. Then you come down and you feel normal again. But some of the effects are permanent. You become a member of the club.”

“That drug, it came from these people, right? All the weird shit comes from them?”

“Yeah.”

“You have any of it left? The drug?”

“You don’t want to take it. It kills ninety-nine percent of the people who come in contact with it. Mostly in gruesome ways. The dealer who sold it to me, they found him splattered on the walls of his trailer. But in answer to your question, yes, we do have some of the Soy Sauce left.”

“Where?”

“I’ll take you to it. No bullshit. But we got to get outta here first.”

“I agree.”

“And I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that they’re not gonna agree to release us, even if you wave your badge at the dude guarding the door.”

Falconer said, “You’re right, for once. But I don’t know if you realized it, but these assholes picked the single most fucked up building in a hundred mile radius in which to set up their ad hoc HQ. They have generators in the parking lot and power cables draped through windows and boxes stacked everywhere. I’m thinking they have not had time to work out exactly what they would do in the event of something unexpected. Like a fire.”

“We’re totally on the same page here. Let’s burn this shit down.”

Falconer closed his eyes, let out a steadying breath and said, “No, we just need some smoke. Enough to make them go through the process of carefully moving aaalll of these patients and staff and shit out of the building. All those guys in their bulky-ass space suits tripping over cables, patients tryin’ to escape. And in the confusion, we slip away. Now, if I go out there now and occupy as many staff as I can with some ruse, do you possess the resourcefulness to sneak away and create a nice, smoky but controlled fire in a trash can somewhere? Without fucking it up?”

John looked him dead in the eye and said, “Throw some rubber gloves in there, it’ll smell just like an electrical fire.”

3 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

I marched Molly into the hallway, intending to ask if anybody had seen her around before. Hell, maybe she’d been here from the start and we’d just missed each other. I got my answer without asking—as soon as we stepped into the hall a dozen people gathered around and said, “How’d you get a dog in here?”

Molly wasn’t talking. She just panted and wagged her tail and let everyone pet her. She was filthy, mud caked on her legs and chest. Was there a spot to dig under the fence unnoticed? Both fences?

It only took ten minutes for word to filter down to the yard, and for Owen to call a meeting because apparently he could do that in his role as Only Guy With a Gun, according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Shortly thereafter, at least a hundred people were huddled in the yard around the fire pit. The night air was cold as shit, so we all huddled around the smoldering coals and blackened, smoking rib cages, rubbing our hands together and hoping nobody was secretly taking our picture. Kind of hard to run for office later with a photo circulating of you warming your hands over a pile of glowing skulls.

Owen had the automatic in his hand, but wasn’t threatening with it. In this setting it seemed more ceremonial, like a gavel. He said, “I don’t like it. It don’t make sense. That’s a big dog, it ain’t like a squirrel gettin’ past the sensors and shit out there. Dog probably weighs a hundred pounds, if it can make it through, a dude can make it through.”

I said, “Well, awesome. If there’s a way in, there’s a way out, right? Maybe there’s a place you can dig under the fence after all, out of sight of the—”

“Dipshit,” interjected Owen, “we have been around and around that fence. It’s all we got to do, all day, bro. No, there ain’t no good place to cross the fence. There ain’t any storm drains, there ain’t any big sewer pipes like in the damned Shawshank Redemption.”

I shrugged. “Well I personally observed this dog, in town, eating a burrito, after the hospital was locked down. She was on the other side of that fence and she didn’t come in on the last truck. So…”

“Speaking of which,” Owen said, “What are we supposed to do with it?”

I said, “Why do we have to do anything? To be clear, there’s no indication that dogs can get infected, right? So we’re not worried about that end of it?”

TJ said, “No, dogs don’t get it. Animals and kids, they don’t get it.”

Owen said, “You’ll bet your life on that? All of our lives?”

I said, “So, I’ll check her mouth.”

“That ain’t a hundred percent, neither.”

“So, what, you want to put her down? She’s our ticket out of here.”

“Our ticket outta here is keeping this place safe and secure until we hear the all-clear. There ain’t no reason in the world to make a jailbreak even if your dog leads us to a magical train platform that hauls us all to Hogwarts.”

Everyone stared at Owen until he said, “I told you, I got a kid. Fuck off.”

I said, “Your ‘let’s remain calm and stay put’ speech would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t giving it in front of a pile of burning skeletons. So, we kill the dog because maybe she’s not a dog and maybe she’s some new kind of undetectable monster. We gonna us that same standard on the next human who walks through those gates? Where does that shit end, Owen? Government shows up to give the all-clear and it’s just you and a mountain of bones?”

Owen had no rebuttal for this and I have to be honest, I detected relief in his face. He didn’t want to have to shoot a dog.

“She monsters out, and it’s your ass.” Owen stuffed the gun into his pocket and apparently that signaled that the meeting was adjourned. The reds huddled among each other and the greens headed back inside.

I walked with TJ and said, “There’s somethin’ else to this, but I don’t want to jump to any conclusions or anything. Molly really belongs to my girlfriend, Amy. I think Molly showing up here, it’s not coincidence. I think she was sent here, as a signal to me. John and Amy—hopefully just John, I guess, with Amy in some safe place—I think one or both of them are out there, and are trying to bust me out or trying to show me how to sneak out.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Means I have to figure out what the plan is. But I feel like they definitely have a plan.”

Somewhere beyond the fence, an explosion lit up the sky.

3 Hours, 30 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John sprinted across the asylum parking lot screaming, “SHHIIIIIIIT!”

Black smoke poured through the house-sized hole that had been blown in the gymnasium wall. Screams and gunshots chased him. Nearby, a car windshield shattered. There was another explosion, and the shock wave threw John to the ground, scraping his palms on the pavement. Falconer grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him to his feet.

They made it to the Porsche parked a block away and ten seconds later were tearing through the streets of Undisclosed, drawing the attention of every gun-toting spaceman they passed. And there were a lot of them, clusters of them seemed to populate every corner.

Falconer growled, “That was liquid oxygen, dumbass! That’s why those tanks had those huge orange warning stickers all over them. They use it in rockets.”

“I didn’t know! Jesus.”

“You didn’t know oxygen burns? Where did you go to school?”

“Here! Look around! It’s a shithole!”

The Porsche smashed through wooden barricades set up in the street, and on the other side was a ghost town.

Broken glass in the streets. Garbage piled on the sidewalk. The Porsche turned down an alley and John realized that what was crunching under the tires like gravel were brass shell casings from machine guns.

John said, “Holy shit. Is everybody dead?”

“There’s a twenty-four hour curfew outside the Green Zone. Inside those barricades we drove through, they’ve still got military doing foot patrols. But out here, it’s lockdown. Nobody on foot, just armored Humvees making sweeps every now and then. Anyone seen roaming the streets out here is presumed infected and either shot or hauled off to quarantine, depending on how far gone they are.”

“Christ. How is that legal?”

Falconer shook his head. “I have never seen anything like this in all my days. Everybody you see inside town, all hazmat suits, all the vehicles—that’s all REPER. Everybody else has withdrawn outside of town. If we turned right here, we’d eventually run into a REPER cordon at city limits. Get past it, and you’re in the Dead Zone—it’s a five-mile-wide ring around the city where nobody is allowed. All the houses in that ring have been evacuated, all the businesses shut down. REPER patrols it in armored vehicles. It acts as a vacuum seal between the city and the outside world. At the end of the Dead Zone, you find the National Guard. I’m talking tanks here. Rows of them, guns aimed at the city like they expect Day of the Dead to come pouring out at them at any moment.”

Falconer pulled off into the yard of an abandoned house, and parked in a spot behind the garage where the car wouldn’t be visible from the street.

He continued, “But you see what they’ve done. What the outside world knows about what’s going on in town, is only what REPER tells them. There is no one else. All the phones are jammed. No news crews, no Internet access. The military, they’re on the other side of five miles of no-man’s-land. Whatever the people are hearing, whatever the government is hearing, comes from REPER. It’s their show.”

John said, “And I’m pretty sure at least one of the guys in charge is crazy.”

“I’ll agree with that assessment. Let’s just say that I’ve heard some shit. About what goes on in that asylum.”

John said, “Well, what now?”

“We wait to make sure they’re not still after us. I’m hoping the shitstorm you left behind back there makes us a low priority. They got to get containment back in place first.”

John said, “Can we get to Dave’s place? Are they… guarding it or anything?”

“Why would they?”

“They would if they knew what was there.”

Falconer said, “The drug, you mean. The Soy Sauce.”

“Let me apologize ahead of time, detective. Because shit is about to get weird.”

3 Hours, 15 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was about to explode. She didn’t get mad often, and it took a lot. But once the pin on that grenade had been pulled, there was no containing it. This was something she had in common with David, though he didn’t realize it.

Amy’s mom, back when she was alive, had said God had made sure to give her brother Jim all of the size and Amy all of the temper. He had been as big as a bear, but was always the voice of reason in an argument—the only time she had seen him fight, it was to defend her. Amy was literally less than half of his size but had that grenade inside her. Her mom called it her “Irish” as in, “now calm down, your Irish is coming out” which, ironically, made Amy furious. Wasn’t that racist or something? But the look on Josh’s face right now, it was about to get all Irish up in here.

“We have to go now. We should have left two hours ago. Fine, you don’t care about David, you don’t care if he gets eaten by a zombie or burned up to ashes, but who knows how many more are in there? Women, kids, who knows? We have to get them out. As many as we can.”

Josh, not making eye contact, said, “I totally understand you’re upset, but we have to be smart about this. Mike and Ricky aren’t here, they’re helping their families move before the quarantine swallows this place. And I told you about Zach, he’s got food poisoning. He’s already in bed. That’s three guns we’re short. But tomorrow—”

“Oh, for the love of— You know what you are? All of you? Children. Little kids playing pretend, with toys. You’ve spent years obsessing about this and now it’s here, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s actually here, and it’s ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Tomorrow, when the sun comes up. Tomorrow, when the weather’s warmer. Tomorrow, when we have more help, when things aren’t so bad, when everything is aligned just right so that there’s no risk of anything bad possibly happening.”

“Calm down.”

“Screw you!” Amy shrieked it, a sound that tore a hole in the air.

Grenade, Amy, watch it.

“You want to sit here in your little fantasy, your little suburban womb. With your laptop, in your little clubhouse, rubbing oil on your guns and congratulating yourself on how brave and strong you turned out to be in the stupid zombie war fantasies that play in your head. You’re not a man. You’re a boy. All of you. You’re little boys because you choose to stay little boys. You don’t become a man until you wake up one day and realize that today the world needs you to be a man. Josh, so help me, if you don’t step up, and become a man right now, people will die. Tonight. Not tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer. He had his MacBook open and was fiddling around with the touchpad, and he had that look on his face that had pulled Amy’s pin. A mask of feigned nonchalance. It took practice to come up with that look. Somebody who had been shamed so many times that he’d adapted to simply never showing it, rather than changing to not do things he was ashamed of. She wanted to slap him and slap him and slap him.

“Amy, all I’m saying is—”

“AAAAARRRGGGHHHH!” Amy bent over and screamed at the floor. She didn’t know what else to do. Mom was right, if the Lord had given her Jim’s body, she would have thrown this kid through the windshield of the RV.

“Fine,” she said. “All I want you to do is give me a ride down there. Drop me off at the barricades. I’ll figure out a way to get across. I’ll figure out a way to find David and anyone else who needs help in there and I’ll figure out a way to get them out and if I don’t, then I will die. And that’s okay because while I’m dying trying to save the people I love, you’ll be back here in your cocoon, playing your zombie video games and jerking off and dying would be better than watching you do that.”

The side door of the RV ripped open. A short dusky kid who Amy remembered was called Fredo leaned in and said to Josh, “Did you hear?”

“I couldn’t hear anything over her.”

“Outbreak inside the REPER command center. All hell broke loose, there was an explosion, the building’s on fire, all their containment breached. Infected pouring out of their holding area.”

“Holy shit.”

“OGZA says fire trucks headed one way, then ten minutes later REPER were going the other. Pulling out. Leaving the Green Zone. Leaving everything.”

“They’re pulling out of [Undisclosed]?”

“Looks like it.”

Amy said, “So what does that mean?”

Josh said, “It means all the manpower is now devoted to keeping anyone from leaving the city, and anybody left behind is now on their own.”

Fredo said, “OGZA put out a call for assistance, anybody and everybody with a gun. They said this is about to go from a class two to a class three zombie outbreak.”

Amy said, “Is a class three the one where you guys actually do something?”

Fredo said, “They said they can get us inside the city. They got friends on the cordon but that’s only until the feds change the guard rotations.”

Josh hesitated, studying the ridiculous collection of guns on the wall. Finally, he said, “Tell everyone it’s a go. The feds shit the bed, and now it’s up to us. We roll in thirty minutes.”

3 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John couldn’t help but notice that, while all of Undisclosed appeared to be the aftermath of a post–Super Bowl riot in Detroit, if you had woken up in Dave’s neighborhood you wouldn’t have noticed any difference. Same old busted windows and same months-old trash bags sitting on porches. John found this comforting.

The big change, of course, was where Dave’s little eleven-hundred-foot bungalow had previously stood, there now wasn’t much of anything. Just a floor supporting the black frames of two burned-out walls and piles of wet, charred debris. Blackened drywall and two-by-fours and roofing and gnarled wiring.

John really didn’t feel anything about this, one way or the other. And not just because he had been the one to burn it down. John didn’t get sentimental about houses. Maybe it was because he bounced around so much as a kid, thanks to three different divorces. But he liked to think it just made more sense to not get attached to things. The memories didn’t get burned up with a house, or transferred to the new owners if it got sold. A house was just wood and nails. Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

Falconer wanted the Porsche out of view, in case REPER came by or somebody tried to steal the stereo or something. One of the abandoned houses down the street had left its garage door open, and Falconer pulled in. John personally thought it was wiser to have the car within lunging distance in case they needed to make a desperate getaway, but apparently desperate getaways were what other people did in Falconer’s world, while Falconer chased them and told them they had the right to remain silent.

Once parked, John found the prospect of opening the car door and stepping out into the night erased any illusions he had that this was the same old neighborhood. In the rearview mirror, John saw curtains rustle in the dark house across the street. An infected? Or somebody hunkered down, scared that John and Falconer were infected? Who knows. If it was some terrified refugee crouched with a shotgun, John was hoping that the Porsche would put them at ease. No zombie’s gonna drive a Porsche.

There you go, with that zombie bullshit.

They eased the heavy garage door down, closing it behind the Porsche. They headed down the sidewalk, at which point John thought he saw somebody slip around a corner, but then realized he didn’t. He thought he heard footsteps, but it was a windy night and the sound was a strand of Christmas lights—from last year—tapping against a window at the neighbor’s place.

Falconer asked, “The Soy Sauce, was it in the house when it burned?”

“No. I’ll show you.”

John was afraid Falconer would say, “Great, I’ll wait here!” but instead Falconer led the way, striding into Dave’s yard like a man with a huge gun. Falconer glanced this way and that, alert but not scared. John followed and made his way around the yard to find the toolshed hadn’t burned. It was also still unlocked from when he’d grabbed the chainsaw the day everything went to shit. He reached inside and grabbed a shovel. He tossed it to Falconer.

“The sauce is in a little silver container, about the size of a spool of thread. Inside is a really thick, black liquid. When we find it, don’t open it. Not only will the shit kill you if it gets on your skin, but it will come after you. Have you seen The Blob? It’s like that. Only tiny.”

“And when you say it will kill ‘you,’ you mean ‘me.’ Because you can handle it for some reason.”

“Yes. You’ll see.”

“Uh huh. And judging from the shovel, I assume you buried it?”

“Yeah, around here somewhere. Don’t look at me that way, I need you to do the digging, you’ll see why. It’s not deep. Now, the container is somewhere here in the backyard. I know where. But I’m not going to tell you. I want you to walk to a random spot—what you think is a random spot, anyway—and dig down about a foot.”

Falconer didn’t move from where he was standing. He plunged the shovel into the dirt right in front of his feet. Three scoops and then—

“Look. Right there.”

Falconer looked down, and in the moonlight saw the glint of brushed steel, poking out from the mud. “All right, how did you do that?”

“I didn’t. It did. The Sauce. When we buried it, Dave just threw the shovel like a javelin and said wherever it landed, that’s where we’d bury it. That’s where it landed. Where you’re standing. Because the Soy Sauce wanted it to land there. Because it knew you would be standing there a year later.”

“‘It’ knew. So the Sauce is alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now you’re going to swallow some of it.”

“That’s the least painful way, yeah.”

“And you have no idea how it does what it does.”

“Let’s just say it’s magic.”

“Let’s just say that I need a little more explanation than that if I’m going to go along with this.”

John sighed. “Okay, have you heard of nanotechnology?”

“Yeah. Microscopic robots, right?”

“Right, and imagine they can make millions of these robots and embed them in a liquid, so that you now have a liquid infused with the power of all these machines. Got it?”

“All right.”

“Now imagine if, instead of tiny robots, it’s magic.”

John dug the bottle from the mud with his fingers.

“Stand back.”

“If you take that shit and you go into a seizure or cardiac arrest, I’m leavin’ you here.”

“Detective, if I take this shit and it looks like the trip is going bad, fucking run.”

John squeezed the bottle in his hand. He thought he heard the footsteps again, but decided he needed to stop falling for that at some point. He took a deep breath, and said, “All right. Here goes.”

2 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was rumbling through the night in a crowded RV, heading south, scared out of her mind. Her head was between her knees, staring at the filthy floor and praying silently, as had been her habit since she’d been a toddler. She had realized she was doing it out of reflex. If God was the type who needed to be asked verbally before he would support your side over man-eating monsters, then she wasn’t sure what good he would be once he joined. She hadn’t been to Mass since her brother Jim was alive. Her faith could be summed up in two sentences, from one of the Narnia books. Speaking about Aslan, the lion that symbolized Jesus, a character says:

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Amy hated—hated—the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so slow to actually do anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don’t need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God—maybe the only thing—is that he favors those who act. David also believed that, though he didn’t realize it.

Guns were clicking all around her. The zombie nerds were pushing all variety of bullets into all varieties of gun parts. Long, gleaming brass bullets, bright red shotgun shells. Guns designed with the elegant lines of sports cars, slick oiled metal and curved textured plastic meant to fit right into your hand. Josh rammed a lever forward on his and it clicked satisfyingly into place. Don’t get her wrong, she saw the appeal. She also saw how you could start thinking of them as toys.

Josh held up a blood red shotgun shell and said, “Dragon’s Breath. Zirconium-based incendiary pellets, looks like a flamethrower every time you pull the trigger. This is an automatic shotgun with a twenty-round drum. Three more drums in my backpack. We get in a jam, this thing will unleash a wall of hellfire, as fast as I can pull the trigger.” He clicked shells into a plastic drum the size of a large saucepan and said, “These shells are fifteen dollars apiece, by the way.”

And there it was. She suddenly realized that she’d rather have David or John, either one, armed with a baseball bat, than any of these guys and their video game hardware. David and John had a look in their eye when things went bad—a sad but resigned familiarity. They weren’t trained for violence and maybe weren’t particularly competent at it, but they weren’t going to go pee in the corner, either. Both of them had come from bad homes, both had gotten hit quite a bit as kids and maybe that’s all it was. Maybe they just understood something about the world and were more ready for it when things took a turn. She didn’t see that look in any of these suburban kids.

A couple of months ago, Amy had come to stay with David over the long Labor Day weekend. At around midnight on Friday night, a crazy guy started showing up. He knocked on the door and said he had a pizza—they hadn’t ordered one—and he handed them this filthy pizza box, like something he’d dug out of the trash. David opened it and it had dog poop in it. They called the police, but the guy was gone when they got there. The guy came back, Saturday night. This time the old pizza box had a dead squirrel in it. David threatened the guy, slammed the door in his face. The guy comes back at two in the morning, another pizza box. David doesn’t even answer the door, just calls the police again. Again, no sign of the guy when they get there.

At around 7 P.M. on Sunday, the crazy guy starts showing up once an hour. If they didn’t answer, he’d stand there and ring the doorbell, over and over and over. The third time, David goes to the door and this time the guy says something to David, through the closed door. Whatever he said, it made David open the door. They exchanged low, heated words, and the guy leaves a pizza box on the porch and walks away. David looked inside, closed it, and threw it in the trash barrel outside. He wouldn’t tell Amy what was inside. As the man drove away David yelled, “You ever come within a hundred feet of her again, and I’m gonna tear your throat out with my teeth.” Only there were a lot more curse words.

But the guy did come back. At three in the morning. To their bedroom window. They were both fast asleep and Amy slowly woke up and heard whispering, a foot from her head. And it’s the crazy guy, whispering her name, over and over.

She screamed. David sprang out of bed, grabbed that ridiculous crossbow that John bought him at a gun show, and charged out of the house.

David shoots the pizza guy in the chest and the guy goes down, screaming. But then comes the twist—the guy is carrying a fresh pizza, from a local twenty-four-hour pizza place in town. He works for them. The guy is wearing a clean, new uniform, he looks totally sane and acts completely shocked that he got attacked by a customer. The pizza was for a house down the street. He said he just went to the wrong door.

After all of the legal craziness, with charges filed by the guy and talk of a civil suit for his medical bills, Amy asked David what they’d do if the guy came back some night, in crazy mode. David’s answer? “I hit him someplace where I know it’ll be fatal.”

And he would. Even if it meant jail. He would do it for her.

A kid in the back was trying on a pair of night-vision goggles. There were eight people packed into the RV. Fredo was driving. About 150 people counted themselves among the Zombie Response Squad when the wave of zombie panic hit the university. Seven answered the call when it came time to actually meet the threat—all of them piled in the RV with Amy, clacking the mechanisms on their guns.

Amy was scared out of her mind. But she would push through the fear and finish this. And she would have to hope the men sitting around her would do the same. Amy had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy four times, and was starting on her fifth. There was a bit she had memorized when the Ents were marching off to war against seemingly impossible odds (all odds probably seemed against you when you were a big ridiculous walking tree). It was running through her head now and would keep looping from now until they arrived at Undisclosed:

“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends, that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.”

Yes, Amy had long ago made peace with the fact that she was a huge, flaming nerd.

Soy Sauce

John twisted the silver bottle. It separated in the middle, along a seam that was invisible when it was closed. He didn’t open it all the way—he’d learned that wasn’t always wise if the Soy Sauce was “awake.”

A thin, black stream leaked out from the crack, it looked like a length of heavy black string had come unspooled. John laid his index finger under the stream to catch it.

Then, several things happened at once.

First, the shuffling footsteps John thought he had been hearing got louder, and faster. They had a hollow tone, like someone stomping around on the floor above your apartment. John and Falconer both spun, looking for the source. Then something leaped off the neighbor’s roof, sailing through the air like a huge, weaponized flying squirrel, coming right down on Falconer.

John’s brain had a tenth of a second to try to register what he was really seeing when the Soy Sauce made its move. At the exact same moment John’s mouth was forming the words—

“FALCONER LOOK—”

—the thin, black string of Sauce coiled around on its own like a snake, in a blink whipping around his finger, over his fingernail, and digging into his skin right at the sensitive spot where a hangnail would form. Pain flashed up John’s hand, all the way to his elbow.

Then the Soy Sauce took hold, and the world disappeared.

Dave once described taking a hit of Soy Sauce as like digging up one of those thick fiber-optic lines that feeds an entire city’s Internet connection and plugging it into your brain. All those streams of data crashing into you neurons at once, so hard and fast that you simultaneously know everything and nothing at all. John always thought his own description was clearer: it’s like an Insane Clown Posse concert where all fifty thousand members of the audience are given their own microphone and sound system, and they all start simultaneously improvising bad freestyle rap verses.

John was introduced to the stuff at a party, when he was barely old enough to legally drink (and had been drinking for eight years). It was given to him by a black dude from Ohio doing a fake Jamaican accent, the guy who would later be found with his guts splattered on the walls of his trailer—the fucker got off easy. It was the same sensation this time as the first. Soy Sauce was not something you built up a tolerance for.

Everything stopped—John was yanked out of his body, out of the world, mind freed from the confines of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth and a trillion nerve endings. A wash of alien sensations crashed over him, like being naked at the bottom of a frantic orgy involving everyone in that Star Wars cantina scene.

John found that he was suddenly somewhere else. He was standing among bombed-out buildings, avalanches of brick and wood and glass flung across streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. He had leaped forward in time, he didn’t know how much. He looked around—or rather, his view panned around, as he didn’t seem to have eyes to “look” with. Devastation and broken structures littering the landscape into the horizon and beyond. He saw that the rubble was crawling with life, small skittering things.

John walked—or rather, his view floated—toward the remains of a shattered church. A rotting human head crawled across a pile of ragged concrete, the legs of a parasite jutting below the jaw, the parasite wearing the moldering skull like a hermit crab’s shell. Another head trundled by. Then another. Then, another set of spider legs skittered by, this time trailing a tangled wad of guts.

They were everywhere. John looked around—again without turning a head or a set of eyes—and saw the streets were littered with broken and charred corpses, flies buzzing over spilled guts. The head of an old woman—eyes having long rotted out of their sockets, the skull bearing a blunt trauma wound—came wobbling by. The parasite inside opened its mouth and emitted that bone-rattling shriek. A moment later, a second head and parasite came trundling behind it. They started humping.

Then it was gone, John yanked back across time, and now he was in the sky, trees and homes whipping by underneath him. He saw rows of military trucks forming thick layers on either side of a fence—the cordon circling city limits. He flew away from it, zipping up the highway. Suddenly he was inside of an RV. And there was Amy, sitting with a bunch of dudes carrying guns. She was sticking her hand in a box of Golden Grahams, eating them dry like they were potato chips. John tried to speak to her, but of course he wasn’t really there.

Focus. Focus on getting back.

And then the world was twisting and flowing around him, the scenery stretching past until he found himself back at Dave’s burned-out house, back in his own body, staring at Falconer and the unholy thing that had jumped down at him from the rooftop above.

The scene was frozen before him. John saw that the leaping monster was transforming grotesquely in midair, Falconer still not having so much as tilted his head up to see it. The leaves at their feet were no longer blowing and the world had gone utterly silent. Time had simply stopped. John looked down at his hands, and realized that he could move his fingers, realized that time had not stopped for him, but only the rest of the world. John took a tentative step, found that he could move with no problem. Then he looked around, put his hands on his hips and in the stillness said, “Huh.”

This particular thing had never happened to John on Soy Sauce before, but that was par for the course because the same thing never happened twice. Out-of-body experiences, time travel, interdimensional travel, invisibility, yes. Stopping time? No. He’d have to tell Dave. If he remembered, that is—unfortunately, the godlike status you sometimes achieved under Soy Sauce, however briefly, was kind of like the boost in sexual confidence you got from beer: nice while you’re in the moment, but the next day you don’t remember shit. He tried to get over the initial shock of what was going on and assess the situation. Who knew how long the effect would last, and when time would suddenly burst forward again?

Falconer was frozen in place ten feet in front of John, a statue that looked like it was built to pay tribute to good style and bewildered expressions. Suspended in midair two feet above him, was a monster.

John could kind of see where it had been a man once, before the parasite did its work, but it took a few minutes. (Wait, did it? Did minutes exist?) The creature’s arms and legs both were spread straight out, so that the limbs and torso formed a sideways “H.” Along the arms and legs both were sharp, pointed protrusions of bone, so that the limbs were serrated, like a knife. It was easy to see its method of attack: in a half second of real time, it would wrap the limbs around Falconer’s neck and torso and with one brutal squeeze, leave him in three distinct bloody chunks. There was no time for Falconer to react. He was simply not going to survive the attack without intervention.

John walked toward him and thought the ground felt different. It took him a moment to realize that the grass wasn’t bending under his feet—like he was walking on titanium Astroturf. His shoes were sticking with each step, where blades of grass were pricking the soles like needles. John went to grab the shovel from where Falconer had stabbed it into the ground, and realized he could not move it. Not even to wiggle it back and forth.

So it was like that. Time was frozen but it was truly frozen—John couldn’t actually impact the world in any way. He couldn’t kill the monster, or even push Falconer out of harm’s way. Well. Shit. What good was this?

Actually…

He could find out if Dave was alive.

No, he couldn’t leave here. At any moment the Soy Sauce could wear off, time could resume and Falconer would be on his own to deal with the creature swooping down on his head. Or, rather, not deal with it. He likely wouldn’t even comprehend what was happening before his severed skull was rolling in the dead leaves of Dave’s yard. The man was good, but not that good. And so, the venture with the Soy Sauce had all been a big, stupid waste. Getting out of the asylum building, coming here, all of it. When things returned to normal, Falconer would get splattered, John would be on his own, and he would be no closer to fixing things than he was the moment he woke up hungover in the frat house earlier.

Well. Whatever.

John walked over next to Falconer and positioned himself behind, with his hands on Falconer’s back. John leaned forward, all of his weight on the man’s back (Falconer did not move, of course, it was like leaning on a bronze statue) so that at the moment time returned to normal, Falconer would be shoved instantly out of harm’s way. At the same time John would fall to the ground, and hopefully this would thwart the monster long enough that they could do… something.

John waited. And waited. Time remained frozen.

A couple of hours (?) later John was sitting on the prickly petrified grass in front of Falconer, annoyed, wondering precisely how long he should babysit this situation instead of striking out and trying to do something else. Finally, he got bored and made his way to the street, walking toward the hospital quarantine. What else was there to do?

John walked through Dave’s neighborhood and out into the life-size Undisclosed diorama. At one point he painfully banged his shin on a discarded newspaper that was in the middle of being blown by a gust of wind when time stopped. There were a few stationary vehicles on the roads—not many, with the curfew. John figured the uninfected were living the life of refugees in a war zone, hunkered down with the kids in the basement, hoping that the sounds of all hell breaking loose on their block wouldn’t be followed by the sound of their front door getting smashed in.

Out of curiosity, John approached a beat-up pickup truck frozen in the middle of the street, a cloud of exhaust hanging perfectly still in the air behind it. The bed was full of cardboard boxes, cases of toilet paper and diapers. The driver was an elderly black man with a shotgun laying across his lap. His hand was stuck halfway to the ashtray, two inches of cigarette between thumb and index finger, a curling ribbon of smoke hanging frozen over it. John reached his hand in through the driver’s side window and tried to push his finger through the frozen smoke. It was as solid as rock.

Weird.

John strolled across town and made his way to the hospital. His footsteps were utterly silent, the quiet here was less like a library and more like having earplugs. Sound waves unable to move the air, apparently. John thought he could hear his own blood sliding through his veins, and his digestion gurgling away. He wondered how long it would be until that drove him insane.

The hospital was now a POW camp. The grounds were surrounded by the kind of high fence you’d see on a maximum security prison, razor wire at the top and everything. Outside of the fence were concrete barriers they’d dropped in to keep somebody from getting the bright idea to just ram through the fence with a truck. Yet, John found no human guards on the outside. Were they all in bed? Instead, stationed every two hundred feet or so was a driverless vehicle. On the back of each was a turret, two thin barrels on each side of a cylinder outfitted with a bank of lenses. Mechanical eyes, with radar or infrared or thermal imaging like the Predator. This place was totally being guarded by robotic sentry guns. Badass.

John had come hoping he could just get a look into the yard—if Dave was alive and outside, and if John could get a glimpse of him, that would be enough. But they had covered the damned fence in tarps that, inexplicably, were all printed with misspelled advertisements (blocking the section of fence in front of him was a huge billboard that said TRY THE BLACK ANUS QUARTER POUNDER). He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. John walked all the way around the fencing, a trip that took him at least an hour. Or zero time, depending on how you looked at it. That raised the question in John’s mind as to whether or not time would ever resume to normal speed. What would he do if it just stayed this way forever? Take up a hobby?

John didn’t find an obvious way into the quarantine—he had been hoping that somebody had been walking through an open gate at the exact moment time stopped—and climbing the fence would be no easier in freeze-frame than it would be at normal speed. In fact, the coils of razor wire would be worse in this state of absolute rigidity. John had a vivid image of himself falling into that wire, the blades slicing through his abdomen and shredding his intestines. And John staying like that, writhing in the razors, unable to free himself. Unable to die. For all of eternity.

John completed his circuit and made it around to the front gate again.

John noticed a frozen pillar of smoke that had been drifting horizontally over the fence in the wind, and figured maybe the inmates were all standing around a campfire, roasting weenies or something. If he could just get up high enough to see over the fence…

Boom. There were trees right behind him. They looked fairly climbable. It occurred to John halfway up that this would have been impossible two months earlier—the frozen-in-time leaves would have sliced him open just as effectively as the razor wire. But this was mid-November and he had bare branches to grab onto. He was making good progress right up until he banged his head into an invisible force field. Hanging above him was a gray haze and he finally realized it was the plume of smoke from the campfire, pushed over the fence by a gust of wind that John obviously could not feel. He re-routed himself to get past it and, now at a height where he could easily break his neck if he fell—

and lay writhing and screaming, unheard in the eternity between moments

—he suddenly realized that the plume of campfire smoke formed an imperfect bridge right over the fence and into the quarantine.

Fighting every possible sense of balance and self-preservation, John steadied himself on the gray haze and walked over the fence, trying to keep his eyes forward and not on the impossibly flimsy, transparent bridge he was edging across. The footing wasn’t bad, though; the tiny, suspended particles of ash had a rough texture, like walking on a huge bar of Lava soap.

The plume got uncomfortably narrow as he got closer to the fire, and as soon as he passed over the fences he had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl. He jumped to the ground because it seemed like a bad idea to walk into the glowing embers of a dying bonfire, even if it was frozen in time. He had no idea how that worked.

No longer focusing on trying not to fall on his head, he finally had time to register what was going on in the yard. There were dozens of people in red and green jumpsuits. Well, shit, he didn’t see why the situation in here was any worse than out in town. Nobody had a monster hovering over them and they were all safely behind a fence, guarded by robots. If Dave was here and alive, then it seemed like a best-case scenario. Then John happened to glimpse what was being burned in the fire pit and thought, Oh.

John tore his gaze away from the bones in the ash—he had caught himself trying to count the skulls in there and was up to sixty-two when he stopped—and started moving through the still life of the wax dummy quarantine. None of the people standing in the yard were Dave, so he headed for the hospital itself. Fortunately the door was propped open so he wasn’t going to have to figure out some convoluted way in—

Dave!

There, next to the main entrance of the hospital. John almost missed him because he was bent over, paused in the middle of tying his shoe. He had an open can of beans sitting on the ground next to him, a little plastic spoon sticking out. And there was Molly, standing next to him, poised to start eating the beans with Dave’s attention diverted.

A dam burst inside John, a river of relief crashing through him so hard he almost collapsed.

Dave was alive. Somehow.

His friend was pale, and had lost some weight. A lot of it. And while Dave could stand to lose some weight, he had lost it because he was in a prison camp against his will, eating cold beans and shit. Packed in here with other dudes he almost certainly hated by now, cut off, standing among garbage and broken windows and burning corpses. Because they had left him here. Because John had left him here.

And then another dam burst, this time unleashing a black tide of self-hatred that was poised to come crashing over the sand castle of John’s mind. But he held it at bay, knowing this was no time to let things go dark in his head. He wanted a drink. Later. For now, he was going to take a shot.

“Dave?” said John, and the words seemed to die right in front of him, swallowed into the stillness of the paused world. It was like the little pocket of time that let John move around ended two inches in front of his face, and that’s all the sound could travel. He leaned in closer and said, “Dave, I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m coming. Be ready. Stay near the fence. If anything I’m saying is capable of sinking in, let it be that. Wait for the sound of shit hitting the fan.”

No reaction from Dave, of course. John tried to think of something else that could be accomplished while he was here, but he imagined time suddenly resuming while he was standing here, so that the end result of the whole project would be that he was now trapped inside the quarantine with Amy out there trying to rescue both of them. Falconer would be in several bloody chunks.

John headed to the smoke bridge, followed it back over the fence, and nearly killed himself trying to transition from the solid smoke to the tree branches. But he eventually made it to the ground, landing with a jolt on the immovable grass, and started making his way back to Dave’s house. John’s route took him past the asylum, the main building now with a huge hole in the side that was leaking smoke. And then he saw something that almost made him shit himself.

Shadows. Walking shadows.

This was no trick of the light. These were bona fide shadow men, just like he’d seen in the hospital security video, just as Dave saw in his bathroom recently, just as random folks around Undisclosed had been reporting off and on for as far back as written records were kept. And they were moving. The former Ffirth TB asylum and now former outbreak command center for REPER, was filthy with the shadow men. Moving, twisting through the air. Not frozen, like everything else—one thing John knew about the shadows is that they were unbound by time, which is what made them unspeakably dangerous. Well, that and the fact that they were assholes.

John ran. He made it two blocks before he took a bullet to the shoulder and spun to the ground.

That’s what it felt like, anyway. Something had torn open his shirt and left a red gash underneath. He scrambled to his feet, looking around for a gunman. Finally, he looked back the way he came and saw his assailant: a moth, frozen in midair. Tiny, fragile, yet utterly unmovable. John pressed on, toward Dave’s house, slower this time, glancing back over his wounded shoulder for trailing shadows.

Back in Dave’s yard now, which was unfortunately exactly how he’d left it: with a deformed motherfucker swooping down on Falconer, ready to saw his body into pieces.

This was incredibly frustrating. He had as long as he wanted to form a plan, but since the only thing he could move was his own body, this advantage amounted to nothing more than the ability to throw himself into the monster’s jaws instead of Falconer. Even now, he saw how stupid his idea had been earlier, to try to just shove Falconer out of the way. They’d both wind up on the ground, with the beast on top of them. All he’d be doing is supersizing the monster’s lunch. John wondered if he had stuffed a weapon in his pocket before he froze time, if he’d be free to use it? After all, his clothes moved with him—

Ah, there we go. He did have something.

From Falconer’s point of view, John stood in front of him and started to open his little silver pill bottle. Then John got a momentary look of panic on his face, shouted, “FALCONER LOOK—” and suddenly blinked out of existence. At the exact same moment, a growling, shrieking, inhuman mass of thrashing limbs fell onto Falconer’s back, flinging him to the grass.

Falconer rolled over and whipped out his sidearm in one motion. What was in front of him was a spastic tableau of absurdity.

A grossly deformed once-human monster was rolling around, howling in frustration. It had four jagged limbs full of huge white teeth that it was trying to whip through the air to slash anything in the vicinity. It couldn’t, though, because it was restrained by lengths of cloth that knotted the limbs behind its back like handcuffs. Standing over this flailing, shrieking beast was John, in tiny black jockey shorts, screaming, “Yeah! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck yoooooooouuuuu!!!”

Falconer kicked away from the monster and got to his feet. John looked at him and yelled, “What are you waiting for? Shoot him in the mouth!”

The word “mouth” could not be heard over the gunshots.

A minute later John, heart pounding and breathless, untied his pants from the twitching beast and pulled them on. Falconer was reloading. Falconer had put six bullets in the creature’s maw but John had no idea what it took to kill a spider—the only one he’d ever successfully killed was the one he drowned with the turkeys. Glancing nervously at the creature, John suddenly remembered the real reason he had made Falconer bring him here. He said, “The box.”

“What?”

“The green box, get it out of the toolshed and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Falconer ran to the shed and said, “Not here.”

“Shit! They took it. No, wait. Dave put it in the trunk of the Caddie while I was burning the house. We have to find it. What would they have done with an abandoned car? We left my Cadillac at the burrito place…”

“If it was blocking traffic, they’d have impounded it. Maybe. Who knows. Why do we need the box?”

“Trust me, we need it. Or rather, we need it to not wind up in the hands of somebody else. Oh, wait! Damn it!”

“What?”

“It just occurred to me that I could have written Dave a message on a wall using my own shit!”

Falconer didn’t ask for clarification on this, he just jogged down toward the garage that held the Porsche, with John in tow. This time John knew he was hearing footsteps. Fast steps. A lot of them. Out of breath, John hissed, “Detective…”

“I hear it. Move.”

It took both of them to open the garage door—it was old and the springs were busted, which meant it was heavy as hell without the lift system to help. John was left to keep it propped over his head while Falconer ran in to start the car.

Footsteps. A stampede. Something had been roused in the night, probably by the sound of the gunshots. John whipped his head around, squinting in the night, nervous mists of breath puffing into the night air.

A crowd rounded the corner.

Blocking the street.

Dozens and dozens of shambling figures, so many that no light slipped between them.

“DETECTIVE!”

The zombies approached fast, coming up the street like a tide. John turned and saw that they were coming from the opposite direction, too, converging like a hammer and anvil. The Porsche started and John was calculating the time it would take Falconer to back out, stop, let John in, pull into the street, and plow through the crowd—

The tires were flat.

It was so dark in the garage he almost didn’t notice. Both of the back tires had been slashed—shredded, in fact—and John was going to guess the same went for the front. He was just about to tell Falconer this but at that moment, John felt something touch his face. A caress, like a finger. Only it was definitely not a fucking finger.

That was all it took—John cursed and ducked inside the garage. The door slammed shut, sealing them off from all light.

“Detective! Your tires! Shit!”

From inside the car, “WHAT? GET IN!”

“NO! WE—”

Falconer flipped on the headlights, lighting up the interior of the garage.

There was a giant daddy longlegs spider covering the entire inner surface of the garage door—easily eight feet across. Where the body of the spider would normally be, was a human face.

The creature jumped.

125 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

I was in the middle of tying my shoe when an idea popped into my brain, out of nowhere. Somehow, I suddenly just knew that Molly was eating my beans.

“Hey! Stop that! Bad dog!” I slapped her snout away from the can. She licked bean sauce from her nose, sniffed the air, and took off, presumably to find someone else’s food to steal. I considered eating the rest of the beans even though they were contaminated with dog spit now, but decided I hadn’t gotten quite that low yet. I decided to go back to bed, and took one step inside the main entrance when a drum solo of rapid footsteps approached from the stairwell. TJ skidded to a stop on the tile and said, “Roof.”

I thought he had barked at me, but he headed for the stairs and I followed him all the way up. Two dozen people were up there, lined up along the ledge like pigeons. Hope met us as soon as we stepped out of the roof access door. She grabbed my elbow, pulled me to the edge like she was going to toss me over. She leaned close, pointed and whispered, “Look. That’s the boom we heard earlier.”

I said, “The asylum.”

From behind me TJ said, “Now you see all them headlights, lookin’ like it’s rush hour in Atlanta? All them vehicles headin’ off to the north? That’s REPER buggin’ out. Headin’ for the highway.”

“Perfect. Let’s break outta here.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘perfect.’ Means the situation out there has gone so much to shit that a few hundred men with body armor and assault rifles decided it’s not safe for them. Plus I don’t see any reason they’d take the rest of security offline. If anything they need it more, right? I bet tomorrow instead of two of them UAVs up there they’ll have six, or ten.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if they’re just giving up containment of the quarantine, that means somewhere right now there’s a table full of guys with medals on their jackets trying to figure out exactly what type of bomb you need to vaporize several city blocks, and what would be a cool name for the operation. Something like Operation Cleansing Dawn.”

“Damn, man, that is a good name. I’d feel proud to get burned up in somethin’ called that.”

“You seriously don’t think that option’s on the table?”

“I don’t know, man. I didn’t ten minutes ago.”

I said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re all gonna have to make our own decision here. Me? If I can get my dog to help me figure out how to get outta here, I’m going. And I mean tonight, if at all possible. Cover of dark, while they’re good and confused out there.”

“Uh huh. So you wind up on the other side of the fence and then what? You’re out on the streets, unarmed. You think you just show up at Wally’s tomorrow and clock in like nothing ever happened?”

“Like I said, do what you want. But for me the choice between inside and outside a cage is no choice at all.”

Goddamn I would not miss the stairs in this place. A hundred freaking stairs to get to the roof and it somehow seemed like even more to get back down. I had gotten down ninety-two of them when, from below me, Hope screamed.

When TJ and I got to the bottom, we found Hope staring terrified at Molly. The dog had something long and horrible and meaty in her jaws. It took me a moment to register that it was a very fresh-looking human spine.

Damn, she was hungry.

120 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

John was screaming and trying to run directly through the garage door, hoping to smash through it like the Kool-Aid Man. The daddy longlegs creature landed on top of the Porsche, wrapping its legs around the entire body of the car.

Falconer was paralyzed by fear for a whole .5 seconds before he screamed, “GET DOWN!” and reached over the roof of the car with his automatic. He squeezed the trigger and filled the closed space with lightning and thunder. Chunks flew off the monster, but it held on.

“MOVE!”

John saw the rear lights flare up on the Porsche not six inches from his face. He threw himself out of the way as tires spun and the Porsche smashed backward through the garage door. Huge slabs of rubber flew in every direction as the Porsche flung off the ruined remnants of its tires. The car hobbled backward down the driveway, off into the grass, through a mailbox, and into a shallow ditch full of dead leaves.

Immediately John registered good news and bad news:

The good news was the spider was gone—the garage door had scraped it off.

The bad news was that he and Falconer were dead. The street was full of zombies. Fast zombies. The shadows were thick with crouching shoulders, tensed limbs and crazy eyes. The Porsche spun out helplessly, bare rims trying in vain to dig their way out of the muddy ditch.

For some reason, this was the moment the little flame of hope inside John blew out, everything inside him was oddly cold and dark and calm. The crowd washed in, swarming the Porsche. Detective Lance Falconer was yanked roughly from the car like a toddler and dragged away.

It was all happening in silence for John, the desperate screaming and cursing and everything falling apart.

John had time to think—

I am not the star of a zombie movie. I am the guy in the background who gets eaten in the first montage.

—when he was bear hugged from behind.

Eight thin, horrible arms wrapped him up from neck to ankles, squeezing the breath from his lungs, cracking ribs. The spider’s shriek filled the world.

105 Minutes Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy jolted awake, ripped out of an awful nightmare that involved something terrible happening to the people she loved. She didn’t remember the details of the dream, but didn’t need to. That was the only nightmare she ever had.

She was shocked that she had drifted off. If you ever needed proof that we are prisoners of biology, there it is. These could be her last minutes on earth and her body decided to sleep through a bunch of them. Josh was rubbing his finger on the screen of his phone and Amy was pretty sure he was playing a game.

They were absolutely alone on the highway, not meeting a single car coming the other direction, no taillights as far as they could see. Amy moved up and took the empty passenger seat next to the driver, Fredo. He looked more scared than she was. She kept him company. She found out his last name was Borelli and that he was getting a degree in Public Relations, but was thinking of changing his major because a lot of the classes depressed him. Fredo’s brother was in the marines, as his father had been, as his father had been. Fredo’s dad had fought in Desert Storm, Grandad in Vietnam. Brother saw action in Afghanistan. Fredo took classes in PowerPoint. Fredo was really into Japanese anime, but none of the porn stuff, he assured her. He didn’t have any friends or family in Undisclosed, but hoped David was okay. They talked about Battlestar Galactica for a while. That made the time go by, as Amy knew it would, and soon Josh was telling Fredo to turn and exit the highway onto a country road that Amy knew would eventually take them around the lake, past the woods and the turkey farm/stench factory.

“Where are we going?”

Josh said, “We have to get off the highway before the army’s roadblock, this road circles around the lake and comes in behind the industrial park. The friendly checkpoints are there. Once we get through, then we meet up with OGZA.”

“Where are they?”

“They set up inside the building REPER abandoned, I guess they left a ton of equipment and supplies behind. But that means they’re right there outside of quarantine and they’ll be the first to get overrun if the quarantine fails. So the first order of business is to meet up with them and get a status update. But it’s a fortified building, and we’re all going to be armed. Everything is going to be fine.”

Josh turned out to not be full of crap on the subject of getting inside town—the army guys manning the checkpoint on the country road south of the lake let the RV through after a short conversation with Fredo. But then, a few miles later, they met a second checkpoint, one that was approximately ten times scarier than the first. It was a terrifying wall of black vehicles and men in equally terrifying black suits. They had night-vision goggles or something behind their visors that lit up red in the night, making them look like freaking demons.

“Josh? What is this? Who are—”

Josh shushed her, but Amy thought he looked like he was trying with all his might to keep poop from escaping his body. An army of the black-clad men with their elaborate machine guns swarmed the bus, those red eyes floating in the night. Barrels were raised, like they were ready to paint the inside of the RV red. One of the guards went to the driver’s side door and Fredo held a one-way conversation with him. Fredo gave the guy the OGZA pass code or whatever, but there was no answer. The guy backed away and conferred with someone else. After a tightly knotted minute, he waved them through. Amy and the seven members of the Zombie Response Squad entered Outbreak Ground Zero.

The power seemed to be out in most of the town and all the stores were closed, but they would be anyway since it was the middle of the night. Still no signal on her phone. Fredo said, “We’re six blocks away. Still nothing from OGZA?”

Josh tapped on his laptop and said, “No. Everything has been cut off for the last hour.”

Amy said, “We probably just got close enough to the town where the wireless signals are all blocked or whatever. Like maybe they can still send but we can’t receive now.”

Josh said, “That’s probably it,” in a way that did not sound at all convincing. “I actually don’t know how they were getting around the blackout before.”

Fredo said, “Whoa, is that it? The lights down there?”

Josh answered, “That’s the quarantine. That’s the city’s hospital back there behind all that. They got the perimeter all lit up. Look at that fence.”

“Jesus,” Fredo breathed. “It’s… right… there. They’re right there behind that fence. Jesus.”

Amy could see Fredo’s imagination spinning with images of what creatures must be shambling beyond that fence. Or maybe she was projecting, because that’s what she was doing.

And David is in there with them.

Wait, why were there advertisements all over the fence? Under one of the floodlights she could see an ad for McDonald’s bratwurst.

A chubby guy hugging a long machine gun—a gun Amy recognized as “the gun all of the bad guys use in Vietnam movies”—said, “What do we do if they’ve been overrun?”

Josh answered, “We’ll have to play it by ear,” which Amy understood to mean, “We’ll turn around and run away and congratulate ourselves for having tried.” The RV continued past the quarantine and headed right for the creepiest buildings in town: the old TB asylum, a depressing old building that looked like a giant cinder block somebody had fished out of a swamp, next to a smaller building just like it, both of them looming over a bunch of dead trees.

Amy said, “Okay, that place does not look safe.”

The larger building was damaged, with smoke drifting from a huge hole in one end. A lot of equipment was scattered around the yard. She saw boxes of supplies on a pallet and at least two hoods from decontamination suits laying in the weeds. They’d all either been killed, or run away in a panic. And this RV full of college kids was declaring it their new safe house.

Josh said, “I bet it’s one of the safest locations in town. The feds already did the job of securing all the windows and doors and OGZA says they found a lot of food and stuff left behind.”

The RV was rolling to a stop. Amy stared at the massive, smoking hole in the wall and her imagination lit up with the image of some elephant-sized creature, breathing fire, smashing through it with its fists.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me, Sullivan.

Josh said, “That’s the gym down there, with the hole in it, but OGZA got that sealed off so you can’t get into the rest of the building that way. I guess some oxygen tanks exploded.”

“Were they trying to kill a shark?”

“What?”

Amy didn’t answer. To Fredo, Josh said, “You got the flares?”

Without a word, Fredo reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an orange pistol with a comically oversized barrel. He rolled down his window, pointed the gun toward the sky and fired. The lawn was bathed in light, a tiny white star rocketing up, then drifting lazily back to earth.

Josh said, “They’re supposed to signal with a light from one of the windows. They have a lantern or something and they’ll flash it off and on.”

Everyone stared at the darkened building. Minutes passed. No lights.

“Maybe they didn’t see it.”

Josh said, “Do another one. Do you have a red one? Maybe they missed the last one.”

Another flare fired. Another wait. No response from the building.

Vietnam Gun Guy said, “Man, that’s ominous as shit. Maybe we should go back.”

Josh said, “Hey, this is what we came for, Donnie. If they need help, so be it. That’s why we brought all this hardware. This is the real thing here, we’re not just playing zombie video games and jerking off here. Everybody load up, we’re goin’ in.”

Amy finally spoke up and said what she had been wanting to say for more than two hours. It was futile, she knew, but she had to try.

“Josh… I want you to leave the guns behind.”

Vietnam Gun Guy, Donnie, said, “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”

Josh asked, “Why?”

Amy took a breath and said, “I don’t know how to say this without bruising your ego or whatever, but you’ve accidentally pointed that gun at my head four times in the course of loading it. Josh… I’m impressed that you did this, you’re amazing for just making this trip. But you don’t know what you’re doing with that thing. And I think there’s a one percent chance you’re going to actually need the guns and a ninety-nine percent chance that a stray cat is going to jump out of the shadows and you’re all going to shoot each other. And me.”

Josh laughed.

“I’m not joking. You’re not pixels on a screen. You’re flesh and blood. If you get spooked and shoot your friend, he’s dead, and dead forever, or in a wheelchair. You’ll live with that the rest of your life. Leave the guns behind. If there’s something in there, we are way, way, way more likely to survive if we just run as hard as we can back here, than if you try to stand and act out some video game fantasy. The guns will just weigh you down, Josh.”

“We’ll be careful, I promise.”

“No, you won’t, because you don’t have the training to understand what ‘careful’ is. Josh, I’m begging you.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“If you leave the guns here, when we get back, I will have sex with you. I’ll put that in writing. I am not kidding at all. Your friends can watch. You can videotape it.”

“Stop it. We’re not going in there without protection, and that’s that. And this isn’t a video game fantasy, you’re insulting all of us when you say that.”

As he spoke, Josh was affixing some small electronic device to his shotgun. Amy thought it was some kind of fancy scope, but Josh tapped away at his laptop, and a video window appeared. He swung the shotgun around and the video image swung around with it. Josh had a wireless gun camera.

He handed the laptop to Amy and said, “If we don’t make it back, make sure the video gets uploaded to the YouTube channel. The world needs to know what’s happened here.”

Amy said, “Oh, so I’m not going now?”

“We’ve got the guns—no, listen—we’re going to go make sure it’s all clear first. Then we’ll come back for you. Don’t look at me like that. We’re not being sexist here, Fredo’s going to wait behind, too, and he’s male as shit. He’s going to stay behind the wheel, engine running, in case we have to make a quick getaway. You’re going to be watching it live, on my gun cam. If things go bad in there and it looks like we’re not going to make it out, don’t hesitate to just g—”

“I won’t. Fredo, you hear that? If I say go, we go, right?”

“Yeah, I’m hitting the gas at the sound of gunshots and screams.”

To Amy, Josh said, “Okay, your new job is now to make sure Fredo doesn’t leave unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

To the men in the RV, Josh said, “Regulators, mount up.”

Everyone stood. One guy had a little flashlight attached to his gun, and he clicked it on. The kid in back strapped on his bulky night-vision goggles.

Josh said, “Remember, save your ammo. This isn’t a video game, we’re not going to pick up more along the way. Short, controlled bursts.” He turned to Amy and said, “I’ll be back. I promise.”

Josh took a deep breath and opened the side door. A blast of cold air shouldered its way in. Outside was the sound of wind whistling through the wounded building and suddenly Amy badly wanted that door closed and locked again, to have the warm, metal cocoon sealed off from whatever was out there.

Stop it.

The boys started filing out into the darkness and Amy heard Josh say, “Get your ears on.” Everybody pulled out earmuffs or plugs. Protecting against that debilitating monster shriek John had talked about.

The door clapped shut behind them. Amy looked down at the laptop and saw the asylum grounds on the shaky, grainy image from Josh’s gun feed, the barrel protruding into the bottom of the camera’s view. It lent a feeling of unreality to the whole thing. She wasn’t sitting in the middle of a clearly haunted abandoned TB asylum crawling with monsters. It was all just some stupid video she was watching on a computer.

The view bounced along the grounds, approaching the front doors of the old building. The guy to the left of Josh had the flashlight on his gun, the beam whipping wildly around the front lawn like the guy holding it was riding a mechanical bull. The view steadied as Josh arrived at the big, wooden front doors. Flashlight guy grabbed one of the old, tarnished brass handles and pulled. Locked. Josh knocked and said, “Hello? My name is Josh Cox, I’ve got a team of six armed uninfected out here. We’re offering our assistance to OGZA. Is anyone in there?” Nothing. They all stared at the locked door like a bunch of chimpanzees looking at a car engine. “We’ve, uh, been following your updates until the feed cut out a little while ago. Are any of you still at this location? Princespawn? Direwolf?”

Amy’s view whipped downward, as Josh apparently pointed the gun at the ground. The kid with the flashlight shouted, “I can pick the lock.” Another voice yelled, “No, you can’t.” Everyone screaming to be heard over their ear protection.

Josh yelled, “They probably got it barricaded. There’s probably some other door they come and go out of. Let’s go around. Everybody stay sharp.”

The view swung back up to shoulder level again, and the Hipster Zombie Squad edged along the wall of the building, the flashlight beam flashing back and forth, illuminating boarded-up windows and drifts of dead leaves blown against the foundation. Looking for another entrance.

Watching through the video feed was frustrating. Whenever the flashlight beam would swing out of view, the video window would go completely black—the little wireless camera had no night-vision capability. She peered up over the laptop and out of the windshield of the RV in time to see the gang disappear around the corner of the building. The trailing guy, the one who had the night-vision goggles and looked about thirteen years old, was sweeping his gun behind them. Watching their six, just like he saw somebody do in a movie. Or cartoon. He rounded the corner and Amy and Fredo were now truly alone.

“So,” she said. “How fast can this thing go?”

Fredo said, “Depends on how much stuff you want me to run over when I do it. Thing handles like a blimp.”

Amy returned to her laptop and in the video feed window saw the group had stopped moving. The mic on the gun camera was weak and she could barely pick up words over the background noise. Every time the wind blew, everything was drowned out by a sound like crashing ocean waves. The noise cleared up enough for her to hear Josh say “Where?”

She faintly heard Flashlight Guy yell, “Right there, man. Behind the wheelbarrow.”

She couldn’t see what they were looking at, Josh had a frustrating habit of pointing the gun camera at the most irrelevant spot possible, lazily aiming the gun at his feet, or the cloudy sky, or right at the head of one of his friends. By the time the camera angle settled on the spot, Flashlight was on his hands and knees, studying the ground in front of him. Did he lose a contact lens? Josh edged in closer, around a rusty wheelbarrow somebody had pulled out of the way, and Amy saw that they had found a basement window. The glass had been bashed out, probably decades ago. But if it had been boarded up, it wasn’t now.

Wind howled into the mic, obliterating bits of their conversation.

“—no way they just left it like this—”

“—don’t see anybody—”

“—hello? Can anyone hear me? My name is Josh Cox—”

“—No, let’s go in—”

Flashlight aimed his beam through the window while the guy with the Vietnam gun—Donnie—got down on his hands and knees, and writhed into the building, the jagged bits of broken glass making it look like a brick mouth was swallowing him whole.

For a moment, nothing happened. Amy could feel her bladder seizing up as she watched the dark basement window bobbing in the gun-cam feed. Finally, Donnie’s hands emerged and gestured that the coast was clear. Josh was next, but the camera stayed behind as he handed his gun to somebody so he’d have his hands free to crawl in. The view swirled around as the gun was handed back and forth, and then a moment later Amy was looking at a dim room that looked like an old cafeteria with a faded black-and-red checkerboard tile floor. The view swung back around to the window, then to the floor nearby where a sheet of ancient plywood bristling with curled nails had been tossed aside.

Josh yelled, “They did have it barricaded. Somebody took it off from inside.”

As another guy crawled through the window, someone off camera said, “Told you, man. They evacuated, prob’ly for the same reason the feds did. We prob’ly passed ’em on the road comin’ here.”

Josh said, “You sound relieved, Mills.”

“Man, when we didn’t get an answer I thought we were gonna find this place full of dead bodies.”

“Me, too.”

“Hey, if you’re suggesting we abort, you convinced me.”

Loudly and clearly, Josh said, “Not until we do a sweep of the building.” Amy decided Josh just now remembered that everything was being recorded for possible posthumous YouTubing.

The whole gang of six was inside the cafeteria now. Somebody shouted, “Well, we know they was here. Left a lantern behind.”

The camera found a green propane camper’s lantern in the corner. Someone yelled, “Anybody know how to light it?” They didn’t. After about ten minutes of them farting around and Amy yelling into the laptop monitor to just leave it, Jesus Christ people, they got it lit.

Lantern in hand, they ventured out of the cafeteria and into a hallway. Flashlight Guy went first, Josh right behind him with the camera gun. The lantern carrier followed, casting a soft glow and distorted shadows around the group. The team investigated two other rooms, each time going through this ridiculous SWAT team procedure that Amy had seen in movies, where guys with guns would lean on opposite sides of the door frame while Josh kicked in the door. Both times the rooms revealed themselves to be empty. Amy knew exactly nothing about SWAT procedure, but knew from where Josh’s gun camera was pointing that he never checked the corners to his right and left when he entered the new rooms. It seemed even to her untrained eye that this would make these guys really easy to ambush, and this further solidified her opinion that these guys knew even less about how to walk through a building with guns than she did. They reached a door marked STAIRS, did their room-entering dance again, and took a flight of stairs down to a subbasement. They reached a short hallway with some office type rooms—empty—and one serious-looking metal door. Big lock, a steel grate instead of a window. The kind of door you saw in a prison.

It was standing open.

Through the door, the guys entered a hallway that to Amy looked a lot like a prison block. Rusting metal doors lined up on each side, a few standing open. Inside each one they checked was a bed, a sink and a toilet.

Amy thought, they were not keeping tuberculosis patients down here.

On camera somebody said, “What’s that?” and Josh’s gun cam focused on the floor. What was laying there was, for some reason, far creepier to Amy than anything short of a severed clown head.

A tattered, old teddy bear.

A chill ran up her spine, and for the first time she considered asking Fredo if there was a way to contact the guys, to get them to come back, to think up a different plan.

Somebody off camera shouted, “Man, what’s that smell?”

“Maybe the old sewer backed up down here somewhere?”

The flashlight beam bobbed down a creepy hallway. Somebody tried one of the closed doors. Locked. They peeked inside each of the open ones. No people, or zombies.

From a foot away from Amy, a voice said, “Anything?”

She almost jumped through the roof of the RV. It was Fredo, peering over her shoulder at the laptop screen.

“They’re inside. They found a window to crawl through. Empty so far. They’re on the next floor down.”

On the video screen, somebody said, “Guys, guys. What’s that? There, on the floor?”

The gun camera swept across the floor, finding nothing until it reached one particular door. Something was oozing out from the bottom.

“Oh my God, what is it? Is it blood?”

“That’s not blood, man. Smell it.”

“Is there a sewer line back th—”

“Shhhh. Listen.”

Amy could hear nothing over the laptop’s speakers. Donnie, the only guy in the view of the camera, pulled back one ear from his earmuffs, listening intently like a dog.

“There’s something in there.”

Everyone fell silent.

“You hear it? Something scratching.”

Somebody said, “Jesus fuck.”

Josh aimed the camera, and thus the shotgun, at the door and said, “It’s not locked. Look, it’s open just a crack. Donnie, open it up. Open it and get out of the way fast.”

Slowly, a hand reached in, presumably belonging to Donnie. It pulled the latch on the door and jerked out of the way. The door swung open and—

“OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!”

Panic. The camera swung around.

“WHAT IS IT MAN WHAT IS IT? OH MAN THAT’S SHIT MAN THAT’S SHIT COMING OUT—”

“IT’S ALIVE, JOSH, IT’S ALIVE! HOW IS IT STILL ALIVE?!”

“KILL IT, MAN! KILL IT!”

There was the sound of banging on metal. The doorway swung back into view and somebody was kicking the door closed. The camera was pulling back—Josh was backing away. Somebody was whimpering, “Jesus, man. Jesus. Was that his mouth? What was that? Was that a man? What did they do to him?”

Somebody else said, “Was that OGZA? Was that one of the OGZA guys? Motherfucker.”

“We can’t just leave him like that, man, we can’t. Jesus…”

The camera view was looking at the floor, at the brown puddles. Then it tracked sideways, following the floor and the other doors down the hall.

All of the doors were oozing.

The camera tracked the ooze all the way to the end of the hall, where there was a single closed door, a partially obscured sign that said MAINTENAN at the top.

The door was riddled with bullet holes.

Josh whispered, “Guys. Guys. Pay attention.”

The flashlight swung around and lit up the door. Somebody off camera said, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

Josh said, “Amy, if you can still see this, make sure it’s saving the feed for playback later. If I don’t get back, tell my parents and sis that I love them. Safeties off, everybody.”

Amy said, “Josh! Come back! Come back to the RV! Now.”

Fredo said, “He can’t hear you.”

The camera view wobbled down the hall, the MAINTENAN door growing in the video window. Josh gestured with his free hand, and two guys, Donnie and another guy Amy hadn’t seen on camera yet, did their thing, laying against the wall at each side of the door. Josh stood in front of the door. Gun barrels edged into view on his left and his right.

Josh said, “On three. One. Two…”

The view shook. There was the crack of a boot kicking a door. This was not coupled with the sound of a doorjamb shattering. Instead, the boot gave it another try, and another. Finally the door swung in.

The view whipped around as everybody piled into the room at once. It was a huge room, full of rusting pipes and machinery and barrels and crates.

“THE FLOOR! THE FLOOR!”

The view panned down. Amy yelped.

Someone or something was writhing on the floor of the room. Grasping hands appeared in the flashlight beam. A face. The thing on the floor reached out at Josh’s leg and he kicked it away. People were screaming. Josh was screaming.

“DONNIE! GET THE—”

“HEY! NO!”

Through the gun cam came the sound of rustling—scraping shoes and gasps and shouts. The flashlight beam was spinning. The camera swung over to it and something had Flashlight Guy, throwing him around. The flashlight swept the back wall of the room—

Zombies. Wall to wall. Shambling, caked with mud, advancing.

“THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”

Flashlight Guy was spun around again and his machine gun roared. Amy heard it through the laptop first, and echoing from the building a half second later. That jolted her into the realization that this was happening right inside the building across the yard, behind exactly zero locked doors. The same thing seemed to occur to Fredo, who ran back up behind the wheel and buckled in.

The video window was black. The flashlight has gone out. Screams.

“MIIILLLSSS!”

“JESUS CHRIST GET BACK!”

“RON IS DOWN! THEY GOT RON! GET OUT!”

More rustling and jostling around the gun cam. Finally, light appeared. It was the hallway, the lantern still on the floor in front of the oozing door where they’d left it. The view was bouncing. Josh was running away.

The gun camera spun around to face the MAINTENAN room door again. No one was following. The view just froze there, the sound of Josh breathing hard, muttering, “Oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus—”

From behind the door came screams. Then gunshots.

The view swung again, and Josh was looking into the camera, looking into the barrel of his own gun. He looked like he’d aged ten years. Sweat matted his hair to his forehead. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Blood was running from his lip.

Into the camera, Josh said, “Mom, Dad, Hailey. I love you. To the rest of the world, my name is Joshua Nathaniel Cox. I have just witnessed the first shots of the Z War. Amy, go. Now. We’re going to hold them off as long as we can but if we can’t stop them, they’re going to be right on your tail—”

Something thudded heavily against the door. Josh closed his eyes and swallowed. The camera view swung back around, the view plunging forward, fast, Josh running into the battle. He stopped to scoop up the lantern, then kicked in the MAINTENAN door. He threw the lantern into the mass of thrashing limbs.

The flying lantern illuminated absolute chaos. Bodies falling on top of bodies. Strobing bursts of flame from gun barrels. Gunsmoke filling the room.

From the melee lumbered a big, bloody female zombie with matted hair that made it look like Medusa. The camera, and the gun barrel with it, drew dead center on the target and unleashed a burst of hellfire that tore into the beast. It let out an inhuman shriek and fell, flames sputtering across its ragged clothes.

The view swung to the left. A dark-skinned zombie was trying to wrestle the gun away from another member of the squad. Josh unleashed the Dragon’s Breath once more, clipping the target on the shoulder. It stumbled back, and Josh fired again, and again. Each shot blazed out like a lethal Roman candle. Josh was screaming, a battle cry. Donnie was next to him and he opened fire with his Vietnam gun. Side by side, the two unloaded into the room.

“JOSH! IT’S ME! DON’T SHOOT!”

The view swung over to show Flashlight Guy, stumbling over the tangle of smoking bodies on the floor. He joined the other two, raised his gun and the three turned the room into a shooting gallery.

Josh yelled, “WHERE’S MILLS?”

“THEY GOT HIM. THEY GOT EVERYBODY BUT US!”

“I’M OUT! I’M OUT OF AMMO!”

Josh screamed, “GET BACK!”

The camera leveled at the lantern laying on the floor. The barrel jutting up from the bottom of the frame roared once more. The lantern burst into a ball of flame.

The screen flared white, then to total darkness. The sounds of the battle faded to a trio of hurried footsteps and frantic breathing. They emerged into the hall.

“AMY! FREDO! CAN YOU HEAR ME? PREPARE FOR EVAC!”

TWO HOURS EARLIER…

At the sight of Molly and her bloody hunk of meat, TJ screamed, “Holy shit, stand back! Get back!”

I said, “Okay, I really don’t think she tore that spine out of a living person.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because she doesn’t have any blood on her paws or her face. I think she just found it. So, you know, let’s figure out whose spine it is.”

Hope was already walking down the hall, past the bank of dead elevators. Watching the floor as she went.

Blood. A smeared trail of it, where Molly had been dragging the spine. TJ followed Hope, put his hand on her shoulder, and took the lead. I made Molly drop the spine, and grabbed her collar. I dragged her along while we all followed TJ like we were the Scooby-Doo gang. We went down two flights of stairs, and arrived at a STAFF ONLY door in the basement. Behind it was a dark hallway—no windows and no lights. Without a word, Hope clicked on a flashlight and handed it to TJ.

The blood smear ended partway down the hall, presumably at the point before the spine got too heavy for Molly to keep it aloft in her jaws. But there were only three doors: an employee restroom, a break room, and a door that read BOILER ROOM.

The bathroom was clean. Well, not clean, but there were no corpses in there. People were eating calmly in the break room, by candlelight. We went back into the hall again, and stared at the boiler room door.

TJ said he’d go check it out first, since he had the only flashlight, and I thought that was a good plan. He leaned his shoulder against the door, the flashlight held at the ready like it was a gun, when he turned to me and said, “You comin’, Spider-Man?” So apparently I was an extension of TJ somehow, which was not mentioned when he apparently volunteered on behalf of both of us.

With Hope and Molly behind us in the hall, TJ pushed the door open and expertly shone the light in one corner, then the other. Ambush points, I guess. Nobody home. There was a massive, dead machine to our right, a pair of huge, armored barrels laying on their side, sprouting pipes big enough for a raccoon to crawl through. Boiler. TJ edged over, checked behind the cylinders, and swept the flashlight across the concrete floor. Nothing. Then the light found another metal door on the opposite side of the room, paint peeling around the edges and stained with rust, and I realized we weren’t finished.

The door was standing partially open, wide enough for a dog to slip through. The floor was streaked with red. TJ edged over toward it, and I wondered why we didn’t just go get Owen to lead the way with his pistol. What were we going to do if some spidered-out zombie came leaping out at us? Die, to serve as a cautionary tale to the others? Was that our role here?

TJ pushed the door in. Same procedure with the light—corner clear, clear behind the door. Suddenly we were in a room from an earlier century—exposed bricks on every wall, black with grime and patched with cobwebs. A remnant of the original building, buried by multiple renovations. TJ swept the flashlight across the floor and hit a pair of dead eyes, staring up from a white face wreathed with matted bloody hair. A woman, middle aged. Her torso was still wearing a green jumpsuit, but everything from her rib cage down was white bone draped with shredded crimson ribbons.

“Shit. That’s Rhonda.”

“Okay. And who’s the other one?”

TJ hadn’t noticed the other body yet, but I pointed and he found it with the light, facedown next to the far wall. It was a guy who looked like his ass had been blown out with a grenade. His abdomen had a flat, deflated shape, disemboweled from the back end. Spine was missing.

TJ sighed and said, “Carlos got ’em.”

He approached the facedown corpse and lifted the head with his foot.

“Don’t know this guy.” TJ did another sweep with his light to make sure that “Carlos” wasn’t in the room with us.

I said, “Who is ‘Carlos’ by the way, other than the monster who eats people’s assholes?”

TJ shrugged. “Don’t know him in any other capacity. Suave little Latino dude. We identified him as infected, but he didn’t show any signs and he didn’t seem to know. So we didn’t tell him. Then one day with no warning, he transforms right in front of us, like Optimus Prime if he was made of meat. Turns into this wicked corkscrew worm thing and digs into the dirt. Comes up when he gets hungry. Or when somebody sits down. Look.”

I followed the beam to a hole in the back wall large enough for a man to crawl through, a pile of brick bits scattered on the floor below. TJ approached it and I said, “Hey, let me get Owen. This operation needs a gun—”

“You’re gonna want to see this. Check it.”

I very slowly edged closer, trying to see into the jagged hole. “Is there another room back there or—”

“Look.”

A tunnel. Leaking, muddy and twitching with insect life. It was lined with red brick and arched at the top, extending to infinity. It was maybe five feet wide and high, but much of the space was filled with ancient, rusting iron pipes that ran along the walls.

He said, “Old steam tunnel. To service another building.”

“What other building?”

“Don’t know. Maybe one that’s not even there anymore. Crawl in there and find out.”

“No, thanks. We know it ends past the perimeter, though. And outside where anybody patrols. Man or robot.”

“Because your dog got in through here.”

“Yep.”

For the benefit of the woman waiting tensely in the hall, TJ said, “ALL CLEAR IN HERE, GIRL! WE’RE COMIN’ OUT!”

I headed for the door and said, “Am I allowed to call a quarantine-wide meeting, or is Owen the only one who gets to do that?”

“Well now wait, why does this need a meeting?”

I stopped to face TJ just short of the door to the hallway. I lowered my voice and said, “To… see who all wants to try to escape from this freaking prison?”

“You want everybody to know about this?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Even the reds?”

“I don’t think the color teams means anything outside these fences, TJ.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about taking a hundred and fifty or so high-risk patients out of quarantine.”

“Now, come on. The ‘red equals high risk’ thing, that’s just talking about the new people, right? Everybody out there has been spider-checked.”

“Owen hasn’t. A lot of people haven’t. They had you check all the new arrivals but a lot of people got grandfathered in because when we suggested a check of everybody, Owen started waving his gun around.”

“But if they haven’t, you know, monstered out by now then we know they’re not—”

“You sure about that? We got no idea when Carlos got infected. The girl you almost missed, she was walkin’ around like you and me, parasite and all, for a week or so. Isn’t that what she said? How many more like her could we have in here? Think about that, now. You lead somebody outside these gates, you’re responsible for whatever they may do once they’re out.”

“But if I leave uninfected people behind and they get incinerated if the air force nukes this place, then I’m also responsible.”

“That’s right.”

“Goddamnit, TJ.”

“Listen. Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say they intend to turn this whole facility into a crater. What that means is, somebody’s got to get them to change their mind about that. Whoever gets out of here, the first thing they got to do is get the word out to the chain of command that there’s innocent people in quarantine, uninfected. So that group that gets out, it’s got to act as a representative of what’s inside. Got to put a good face on the quarantine. So it’s got to be people we know are clean. They’re gonna be our ambassadors to the outside world, right?”

“But we don’t know how much time we have—”

“I’m not done. If, on the other hand, we help infected leak out into the town and they start wreaking havoc, and multiplyin’, then the same dudes looking at a map with a little red circle around this hospital are gonna draw a bigger red circle around this whole town. Right? And you think your girl is out there. And John, and whoever else in this town you care about.”

“That place that makes those Cuban sandwiches.”

“Yeah, Cuba Libre. You had their coffee, man? No way we can let ’em bomb that place.”

“You see the waitresses?”

“Mmmm-hmm. Whoever does the hiring there, he definitely an ass man.”

“All right, all right. So who gets to go?”

“Well, see, Spider-Man, now there’s a tough-ass decision we got to make.”

Seven people were waiting for TJ and me out in the hall outside the boiler room. In addition to Hope, Wheelchair was there, along with Corey (the curly haired kid who’d come in on the truck earlier), an old guy whose name I didn’t know, Lenny (a short balding white guy who looked like Vizzini from The Princess Bride) and the two women who heard the commotion and wandered in from the break room.

We told everyone about the tunnel, and the two bodies. Old Guy said casually to TJ, “Which wall is it on, nigger?”

Without blinking TJ said, “North.”

Old Guy nodded thoughtfully and said, “That’s what I thought. Same boiler used to service the other buildings, before they tore down the old hospital and built this one up on top of it. Probably, oh, fifty or sixty years ago. Now back in those days, if a black so much as brushed past a white woman on a sidewalk, they’d have had him hung by torchlight come nightfall, but of course a lot has changed since then. Me and my friends, we had a bluegrass band back in the 1960s—”

“I think Racist Ed is right,” said TJ. “How far to the other end, Ed?”

“Oh… you’re talking about half a mile of tunnel there, Porch Monkey. Long way to crawl. I couldn’t make it, on these knees. You know the workers back then would have a cart they’d lay on, and there was a pulley system and you’d just lay on your back and then down at the end you’d have a big strong nigger turning a crank—”

“Well there’s no pulley system in there now, so we got to make some knee pads, or else all our knees will be hamburger by the time we get out the other end. But if Racist Ed is right, there may be seven- or eight hundred meters of tunnel there; that’s a long stretch to crawl over brick and mud. If you’re in pretty good shape I bet you could make it in twenty minutes, if you’re not, and you got to constantly stop and rest your knees, you could be an hour gettin’ through there. So first question is, who’s up for it? Show of hands.”

Everyone but Racist Ed.

“That’s eight of us, and that’s a pretty big group already. If I could pick the optimal number to take on this mission I’d stop right here—”

“I’m not leavin’ without Terry,” said the bald guy. “If it comes to that I’ll stay behind.”

“I wasn’t finished! What I was sayin’ was I don’t expect any of you to leave loved ones behind, but that’s all you can take.”

Wheelchair said, “We gotta tell Dennis and LeRon.”

Hope said, “Katie and Danni…”

TJ said, “Okay now see we’re getting up to more than a dozen people now, take some time to think about it but you get very much beyond that and it goes from a group sneaking through to get the word out to an all-out prison break that’s going to provoke a full armed response. No way we can go with more than fifteen people—”

“What about the sick people? And the doc?” said Hope.

TJ sighed and rubbed his head. “What about ’em?”

“Katie’s one of the nurses. She said some of the sick are so bad off that they’re not going to last long if they don’t get to a real hospital. The diarrhea is so bad they’re getting dehydrated.”

“Babe, how are they gonna crawl through a half mile of tunnel if they’re that sick? What if they get halfway through and can’t go no farther? We got no way of getting them out and they’re clogging up the tunnel for everybody else. It’s narrow, real narrow. There’s pipes all around. You’ll see.”

“And what about the doc? He’ll have to know.”

“Why does he have to know?”

“Well for one he’s going to notice Katie gone when she doesn’t show up to the second floor to help, and if we don’t tell him where she went, he’s going to waste time looking for her. Two, we’re going to need to take some stuff with us. Bandages, basic first aid. Doc has all that up there. And we’re out of the… mouthwash. We used the last of it today. We need to take some with us and that means we need the doc to make it.”

I said, “Actually she makes a good point with people being noticed gone. Everything is going to fly into turmoil when Owen and the rest notices a bunch of us missing. People will think we got eaten or something. That could turn ugly if it becomes a witch hunt.”

TJ said, “Yeah, we’ll leave a note.”

“Saying what?”

“I’ll think of something. Fuck, man. Look. We come back and we meet out in the hall in one hour. Hope, go get Katie and tell her that if they have sick people up there who can’t last a single more day but are still somehow capable of crawling for a half mile through the freezing mud, then we’ll take them. Dave, go see the doc and get him to make up a jug of mouthwash. But you got to have him put it in something that’s not going to leak when it’s banging around in the tunnel.”

I said, “Okay do you know where the doctor is right now? Or if not, what he looks like so I’ll know when I find him?”

TJ stared at me. “The doc? Marconi?”

“Wait… he’s here?”

“Where else would he—Ah, you’re pulling that unfrozen caveman shit. Yes, he’s here. And he don’t sleep. Didn’t you go talk to him after you got back from the hole? Like I told you?”

“No…”

“You need to go now, man. He’s been asking about you.”

“The situation is much worse than I had thought,” said Dr. Marconi.

He was leaning over an unconscious woman and shining a flashlight into her eye. I had actually only seen this man in person once—every other time it was on television or on a book jacket. The neat white beard, the glasses down on his nose. And here he was, standing in front of me, not dressed in a red or green jumpsuit, but in the same style of three-piece suit I’d seen him in on TV. Only now, the man wearing it looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.

He glanced up at me expectantly and said, “What did you find out?”

“I’m… totally lost here, doctor. My memory of this whole quarantine experience only goes back to earlier today. I remember up to the chaos of the outbreak and then the next thing I remember is waking up over at the asylum with no idea where I was or how I got there. I had no idea you were here and I have no memory of us ever speaking.”

Marconi turned his back on his patient to give me his full attention. “They wiped your memory?”

“I… I don’t know. You think they can do that? Just pick a specific bunch of memories and erase it like files on a hard drive?”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s no method to do such a thing safely. I also do not believe these men give a tinker’s dam about such things.”

“You mean REPER?”

He shrugged. “If that’s what they’re calling themselves now.”

“How did you wind up here again?”

“Your friend John called me the day after the outbreak, after he got your lady friend clear of the danger. I flew down and offered my services to the task force here, who happily gave me a job and sent out a press release declaring such. You see, by then, amateur video had emerged that revealed to the public that this in fact was not a conventional disease outbreak or bioweapon attack. The word ‘zombie’ was being bandied about. Someone very high in the operation was very happy to fan those flames by attaching a name like mine. If you take my meaning.”

I did not.

“When the decision was made to pull the containment staff from quarantine last week, I volunteered to stay behind because otherwise the detained would be left without medical care.”

“Wait, are you that kind of doctor? I thought you just had a doctorate in… ghosts or something.”

Ignoring me, he said, “My instincts turned out to be right because patients that have reported here with seemingly minor symptoms have turned out to in fact be infected with the parasite.”

“Holy shit. Really?”

Marconi nodded to a row of large clear plastic pitchers sitting on a nearby cart, and I recoiled to the point of nearly falling down. Each pitcher contained a spider. Two of them were fully grown, another was no bigger than my thumb, the last was at some stage of growth in between. One of the big ones was badly damaged, half of its body missing.

Calmly he said, “They’re quite dead.”

“You can see them?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes. With great concentration. I do not have your gift, but I know some techniques. Though I should say, and I hope you will not take offense, that I would not accept your ‘gift’ if you offered it to me in a basket along with a bottle of Glenfiddich.”

“And you know how to kill these fuckers, right?” I held up the now-empty bleach jugs I’d brought with me. “You came up with the, uh, mouthwash? The poison? So you’re close.”

“Close to what? A cure? It is no great feat to kill a parasite in a way that also brutally kills the host. No, I am not close to a ‘cure’ for what the parasite does to the human body, in that what it does is rebuild the body from the inside out in a way that violates everything we know about human physiology. At this stage I’m simply trying to perfect a way to detect infection.”

“I still don’t understand how this works. I mean, I’ve watched these things crawl right up to people’s faces and they couldn’t see them, but they can merge with your body in a way that somehow blends in, like it becomes just visible enough to—”

“David, how can you of all people still be surprised when our eyes fail us? The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”

“But… we just have to figure out how to detect them, right? Like, somebody will build a machine or something? Once we can detect them, we can kill them.”

“In answer to that, I need only to offer two words: Plasmodium falciparum.”

“Do I even want to know what that is?”

“Exactly. It’s a monster that has slain several billion of your fellow man, and you don’t even know its name. It’s the microscopic parasite that causes malaria. Nearly half of all human deaths in recorded history have been caused by this invisible assassin. One could make the argument that Plasmodium falciparum is the dominant life form on the planet, and that human civilization exists purely to give it a breeding ground. Yet, until very, very recently we had no idea what it was. We blamed witchcraft and evil spirits and angry gods, we prayed and performed ceremonies and ritually murdered those we believed were responsible. And meanwhile we died. And died, and died. Yet, to this day, you could have Plasmodium falciparum on your hands right now, and you wouldn’t know. Because after all, if you can’t see it, surely it can’t hurt you.”

Marconi strode out of the room and said, “Follow me.” He walked me down the hall and showed me where six rooms were occupied with a total of nine unconscious patients. “Our ‘flu’ patients. Started showing up forty-eight hours ago with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have a feeling if we still had power to the MRI, we’d find some nasty changes going on inside. Or maybe not. Maybe you have to wait until transformation for that.”

“Jesus Christ, they’re infected?”

“This is what I wanted to tell you about. Several of them passed your mouth inspection upon arrival. It turns out, there is more than one way for the parasite to enter the body.”

“How do they—”

“Did you hear the part about the diarrhea?”

“Oh. Oh, Jesus…”

“Yes.”

“And… you’re just keeping them up here? With the sick people? They could spider out at any time…”

“I don’t think so. The Propofol seems to shut down the process. You see that we have them strapped to the beds as well. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances. When the sedative runs out in a few days, well, we’ll have a decision to make.”

“What decision? Kill the fuckers, doc. Before they get loose.”

He said nothing.

I said, “I can get you out of quarantine. And I mean right now. We found a way out.”

“You did?”

“Old steam tunnel in the basement. REPER—or whoever—didn’t know about it because it had been bricked up. Leads right past the perimeter. We’re keeping it quiet but if you want to go, come with me.”

“To what end? Where else am I going to be allowed to work hands-on with infected patients? No, I’m most effective here.”

“Suit yourself.”

“And what do you hope to accomplish, if I may?”

“Uh, freedom? And I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but word on the street is the military has declared this whole hunk of land a loss and is about to drop a big goddamned bomb on it.”

“We had a conversation about this, when I first arrived. A conversation that I suppose you now no longer remember. About my book? Titled The Babel Threshold? Ring any bells?”

“No. Sounds like it stars Jason Bourne.”

“I know time is short, but… I think you missed an important point earlier, about these patients. The symptom that brought them up here was diarrhea, not nightmarish spontaneous deformity or propensity for violence. They showed no other symptoms. None. And I’m starting to believe that there are others that show no symptoms at all. And that we may never be able to detect the infection, until it’s too late. I think the parasite is adapting, learning to stay under cover longer, and more effectively. Now what do you think will be the world’s reaction when that fact comes to light?”

My answer wasn’t something I wanted to hear myself say out loud. Finally, I said, “So what you’re saying is, if the military is going to wipe this quarantine off the map, do I really want to stop them?”

“Think about it. Think about whose purpose is served if the bombs fall. Think about whose purpose is served if they don’t.”

“How about you just tell me?”

“That would require me to actually know myself.”

On the way down, I stopped at the lobby and peeked out of the main doors, to make sure we hadn’t aroused suspicion. What few people were still out in the brisk night were gathered by the south fence, watching the sky like they were expecting a tornado.

I wandered out until I found a green—an older, bearded guy—and asked what was happening.

He shrugged. “Somebody shootin’ flares over at the asylum.”

“Flares? What does that mean?”

“Probably don’t mean shit. Could be a kid with leftover fireworks for all we know. But it took a whole three minutes for the rumor to spread around the yard that it meant a posse was gonna break through the fence and set us all free. Give us all Cadillacs for our trouble. Why not?”

Somebody said, “Look! Look! Another one. Red this time.”

I turned in time to see the ball of magnesium die and fade to earth. Murmuring from the crowd.

I said, “Well I’m going to bed. If it’s a rescue party, throw a rock up at the window or something. And save me a Caddie.”

By the time I made it back down to the basement, twenty-seven goddamned people were packed in the boiler room, spilling out into the hallway. A buzzing, murmuring crowd of people who, even though they had been stripped of all possessions when they entered quarantine, somehow all had luggage. Backpacks and garbage bags and various random shit they thought they would need. The people were knocking around and slamming doors and giggling and asking questions and basically conducting the least stealthy prison escape in history. The reds were asleep, most of them anyway, but it would take exactly one of them to discover the massive conga line of people piling into the boiler room to blow the whole operation.

TJ was so pissed he looked like steam was about to start whistling from his asshole. Hope was trying to calm him down, trying to work through the logistics.

“What about knee pads, huh?” he said, wrapping electrician’s tape around the caps of the two jugs of the binary chemical “mouthwash.” “I suppose we came up with knee pads for two or three dozen people in the last half hour?”

“No, but we have duct tape,” said Hope, reassuringly. “All people got to do is take off their shoes and tape them to their knees. You know, like Dorf.”

“Like who?”

“It works, all right? Katie and I did it and crawled around the floor, from one end of the hall and back again. It’s going to be fine.”

“Well, then that’s one of our nine hundred problems solved.” To me he said, “If we was smart, we would send one guy through by himself to make sure the path is even fuckin’ open. Or that Carlos isn’t waitin’ at the other end. They’d crawl through with the flashlight and signal back that the coast was clear, so if there’s a problem we don’t got to turn this whole ridiculous human centipede around. But we can’t fuckin’ do that because we’d have this huge noisy crowd of people standin’ out here for an hour, waitin’ to get caught.”

“It’s only gonna last until somebody else stumbles across the tunnel anyway.”

He shook his head. “Racist Ed is stayin’ behind, once the last person is through he’s gonna stack up some of them cardboard boxes in front of the hole. I already cleaned up the bricks on the floor, so hopefully that’ll throw off Owen’s dumb ass.”

TJ pulled the flashlight from his pocket and said to me, “I’m gonna let you pick. One of us will take point. The other stays behind and goes in last. The point man is the first to get to freedom, but he’s also gonna be the first to meet any bad news that might be waitin’ up there. Last guy has the easiest escape should things go wrong, but also has to spend the most time back here waitin’ for the stragglers to work through their bullshit. Guess it’s a matter of how optimistic you are.”

“No, it’s not. You’re in better shape than me, we don’t need the whole train to be waiting for me to catch my breath. You go first.”

“And you seen enough horror movies to know the black dude don’t ever make it to the end.”

“We all appreciate your sacrifice, TJ.”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed. So did I.

TJ tied a bandana around his head, Tupac-style, and wedged the flashlight in it above his ear, so it’d work like a coal miner’s headlamp. He clicked it, shook my hand, and climbed into the tunnel.

I said, “See you on the other side, TJ.”

Hope followed him in. Then Corey. It was on.

What followed was thirty excruciating minutes as one by one, the escapees slowly, clumsily and noisily clambered into the ragged hole in the brick wall. I went around the boiler room, telling people to quiet down, explaining the knee shoe process, and waiting for a red jumpsuit to throw open the boiler room door and ask us what the hell we were doing.

One by one, they went through. The crowd in the boiler room got more and more sparse. As we drew closer and closer to the “holy shit this is actually going to work” mark, the knot in my stomach pulled itself tighter and tighter.

So, so close.

Then there were only five people left. That worked its way down to two, an older woman who in my opinion had no business attempting the crawl (what would I do if we got halfway through and she told me she needed to go back?) and a suave-looking dude who looked like Marc Anthony, the Latin pop singer. Racist Ed was standing guard in the hall and I was supposed to knock twice on the door once I saw the last person go through. He’d wait a few minutes, then come in and cover up the tunnel.

The last pair of shoes disappeared into the bricks and the boiler room had finally disgorged its contents into the tunnel. Was TJ out the other end by now? Surely the fact that we hadn’t heard anything was a good sign.

Surely.

Hurrying, I knocked lightly on the hallway door and quickly jogged back across the room to the tunnel. I put my hands on the edge of the hole—

Whoa.

Dark in here. I couldn’t see the last guy who went in, and there was no sign of TJ’s bobbing flashlight up ahead. All I could see was maybe the first ten feet of muddy red brick before it was swallowed by the darkness. In the sputtering candlelight of the boiler room, it looked like a throat. I could faintly hear the hard breathing and scraping of the crawling refugees ahead, the sound fading in the distance.

I had a flashback to the dark hallway in the dungeon when I was heading for the elevator. The wet dragging sound.

Walt.

Stop that. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. Thirty people had climbed right into that tunnel ahead of me, men and women from age eighteen to early sixties. I’d be damned if I couldn’t do it.

My legs would not move.

Brick and mud. Cockroaches skittering along every surface. Spiderwebs spanned the gaps between rusty pipes. It stank of mold and mildew and rot. It stank of the grave. Water dripped from the cracks in the bricks overhead.

The shuffling of knee shoes was completely gone now, not even the echoes reached me. I had stayed behind too long. It was just me and the utter silence and the utter darkness. I remembered a video I had once watched of a wasp outside of a beehive, patiently beheading each bee that emerged from the hole. It accumulated a pile of hundreds of heads before it was done. I imagined a huge wasplike creature on the other end of this tunnel, silently and efficiently ripping the heads off of each muddy, exhausted person who emerged from the other side, tossing them into a pile.

Stop it.

I put my hands on either side of the tunnel. I said, out loud, “Here we go.”

But my legs did not move.

I started to whisper words of encouragement to myself, when a massive hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.

Owen said, “And where do you think you’re going, bro?”

Owen pinned me against the wall. Racist Ed strolled past me and started dutifully stacking boxes in front of the tunnel entrance, which made me think maybe he didn’t fully understand the plan from the beginning.

Owen said, “Dude, you are a piece of work, you know that? What is that, a tunnel?”

“Let go of me.”

“Where does it go?”

“We don’t know. Out. Out there somewhere. We got no idea what’s at the end of it but we decided whatever it was, was better than being stuck in here with you.”

“How many people went in?”

“Fuck you.”

He slammed me against the wall. “How many?”

“About… thirty.”

“Thirty. And you had no idea what’s at the other end. Nobody scouted it first? Nobody crawled through to make sure it was even open at the other end?”

“We—we didn’t have time. I—”

“Right, you didn’t have time because you were afraid of being discovered. Because you had to keep this your little secret.”

Racist Ed said casually, “Well, I know where it goes. It runs right out to the old asylum.”

We both turned toward him.

I said, “You mean the—”

I was interrupted by echoes of gunshots, cracking through the tunnel.

Gunshots, and screams. Faintly, from the other end, I heard an unfamiliar voice scream, “THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”

The Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was bouncing in her seat, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on.”

The gun cam was in the old cafeteria, trained on the door to the hallway. The other two guys—Flashlight Guy and Donnie—ran past. The camera swung around to find Donnie helping Flashlight climb up through the basement window.

To Fredo, Amy said, “They’re almost out! Get ready!”

It was taking forever. Flashlight guy was stuck in the window for some reason, his legs kicking but not making any forward progress. Josh kept swinging his gun/camera back to the door to see if they were being pursued.

Shrieking.

Not screaming—this was the kind of noise babies make, when they don’t know how to put their pain into words. It was Flashlight Guy. His legs were thrashing in the window. Something had him from the other end. Josh and Donnie grabbed his legs, trying to pull him back into the classroom. They pulled and pulled, and whatever had Flashlight from the other end finally let go. Of his legs, anyway.

Josh and Donnie found themselves on the floor of the classroom, with the lower half of Flashlight Guy twitching in their lap. Everything from the waist up was still laying in the basement window. If Josh and Donnie hadn’t had earmuffs on, they could have heard Amy scream from the RV.

Josh scrambled to his feet. He trained the gun cam on the window, and the twitching and now-silent pile of meat that was Flashlight’s torso. It appeared that something was ripping away at his guts from below, something coming out of the grass, like it had emerged from the earth itself and torn him in half. Josh shot at it, the Roman candle shells blowing Flashlight’s guts apart and sending fire streaking into the night beyond the window.

Amy flinched—she and Fredo saw the glowing projectiles streak across the windshield from the side of the building.

The view on the monitor was chaos. Donnie and Josh were arguing. Then Josh yelled, “THE DOOR! WATCH THE DOOR!” and more shots were fired, sharp reports that echoed through the night air.

Donnie screamed, until his screaming parts were ripped out of his throat.

The gun cam raced toward the basement window—which was still blocked by the ravaged remains of Flashlight Guy. The view flew through the window—Josh tossing the gun through ahead of him—and it spun around in the grass until Amy found her video feed was showing the very RV where she was sitting in the distance, weeds partially obstructing the view.

Through the camera’s mic, Amy heard a sound like a sponge being wrung out in a sink full of water. Josh screamed and then made a series of harsh grunts. The gun cam was still sitting motionless in the grass. Amy looked over the laptop at the building, then back down at the camera feed, back and forth, looking for something. Anything.

On the laptop, the camera view suddenly moved, being dragged backward through the weeds. The view swung around. Josh’s face came into view, laying on the ground, blood pouring from his mouth. He was grabbing the gun by the barrel, pulling it toward him. He was doing something with his other hand, reaching around. His mouth was wide open, making choking noises. Something came up in his throat. His eyes got wide, and Amy had a split second to see a fist-sized wad of Josh’s own intestines push out between his teeth before he pulled the trigger and blew his own head off.

Amy jumped to her feet, the laptop clattering to the floor of the RV. She had her hand over her mouth.

Fredo had heard the shot.

“What? What’s happening?”

“We have to go, Fredo, we have to go and we have to go now. We have to go. We have to…”

“What? What happened?”

“GO! Fredo! They’re dead! They’re all dead! Go! Please!”

“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT! We don’t leave men behind!”

Fredo threw the RV into gear and floored it. Instead of backing out onto the street, he plowed forward, across the lawn and toward the building. Amy stumbled back up to the passenger seat.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“Look! They’re still alive! They’re moving!”

The RV skidded to a stop outside the basement window. On the ground, in the shadows, something was in fact moving.

“NO! Fredo, just go! We have to get out of here!”

Fredo yelled, “Josh! Donnie! Answer if you’re alive!”

Someone was out there, between the RV and the wall, a lumpy almost-human figure. Fredo peered out at it. Amy hissed, “Don’t, Fredo, don’t. Back up. Please. Back up the RV—”

Fredo reached inside his jacket and pulled out a serious-looking black handgun. He said, “Donnie?”

No answer. Fredo aimed the handgun at the figure, the glass of the driver’s-side door between him and his target. Amy could see Fredo’s face reflected in the glass. His eyes went wide. He had time to say, “Holy shi—” before a series of things happened so quickly that Amy’s mind couldn’t register them all.

While Fredo had been focused on the figure out of the driver’s-side door, something smashed through the windshield to his right. Something—a long, pink blur—whipped in through the glass, grabbed Fredo’s right bicep, and neatly severed it. The arm, with the hand at the end still clutching the pistol, was yanked through the windshield and out into the night. Before Fredo could scream or even turn to see what had happened, the arm poked back through the broken windshield, now with the gun end aimed at Fredo. Fredo’s own hand, now being operated by whatever was outside the RV, squeezed the trigger. Fredo’s skull exploded.

All of this occurred over the course of 2.5 seconds. To Amy, all she registered was the shattering of glass, a wet, meaty rip and a gunshot. Then she was covered in bits of glass and droplets of warm blood.

Fredo slumped over, dead.

A Trial by the Fire

Owen was pointing a gun at my head. An impromptu late-night tribunal had formed around the quarantine bonfire. I shivered. The fire had that campfire effect of making your front too hot and your back too cold.

Owen had waited in the boiler room for somebody to come crawling back through, fleeing whatever violence had erupted on the other end. He waited patiently through hellish echoes of shotgun blasts and screams, waited as the report of machine gun and shotguns ended the screams one by one. He waited while I screamed into the tunnel, for TJ, or Hope, or Corey, or anyone. He watched me throw up in the corner and waited while I put my head in my hands and heard those screams echo through my head over and over and over and over again.

Then I had a gun at my forehead and he was pulling me to my feet.

Five minutes later I was standing in a crowd of red jumpsuits. Everybody was out of bed. The echoing rattle of gunshots from a few blocks down the street—right on the back of the mysterious flares that came from the same direction—had everyone awake and at DEFCON 1.

From behind the nine millimeter, Owen said, “Now that you got everybody’s attention, why don’t you tell them what that shooting was about.”

I was so tired. It was the unique type of exhaustion that comes from failure on top of failure. Futility and fuckups take a lot out of a man—I should know, since that was pretty much my whole life up to this point. I didn’t have the energy to defend myself.

Those goddamned screams.

“Do what you want, Owen. But don’t make a show out of it.”

“A show. That’s what you think this is, bro?” He shook his head. “All right. Allow me to summarize for the fuckin’ jury. You and TJ found an escape tunnel. Instead of tellin’ the camp about it, you tiptoed around, gathered up your green clique, and tried to crawl out while everybody else was asleep. You left behind sick people, you left behind pregnant women, you left behind moms who ain’t seen their kids since the outbreak.”

“They still got drones buzzing around up there. If suddenly the population of this place goes from three hundred to zero, and a goddamned crowd spontaneously forms outside the fence, they’re gonna figure out what happened. And then they’re gonna rain holy hell down on that crowd. It was either a few of us go, or nobody.”

“And of course you get to make that decision, all on your own, don’t you? See, because none of us are as smart as you. We couldn’t have organized a way to do it without dooming the entire quarantine. No, only you.”

I shrugged. “You’d have stopped us, Owen. And you know it. You’d have started sticking that gun in everybody’s face. Same as you’re doing now.”

“And why would I ever do such a thing? Because I’m an asshole, right? Here, why don’t you tell everybody what happened to all your friends who crawled into that tunnel.”

“We don’t… necessarily know. We heard gunshots and—”

“What happened to them is exactly what I have been saying would happen to anybody who tried to make a break for it. It’s what I would have explained to you—again—if you’d asked. Because from the first day that gate closed on this quarantine, I said that anybody who crossed that line was gonna die. Because as far as anybody outside of that fence knows, every single one of us is tainted. And that fence is the only thing keepin’ back a tide that will turn the fuckin’ rivers into blood. That means all of us in here got to band together. But you, TJ and the rest of you greens, you never got that.”

I shook my head. “No. The difference is that we had a chance at freedom and were willing to take it. Unlike you.”

“Uh huh. And just to be clear, you were gonna be among the escapees, right? If I’d showed up five seconds later than I did?”

“Hell, yes.”

“You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you, you arrogant little prick? You’re the only one who can sort infected from uninfected. If you’d gone through there, what choice would you have left us the next time a truck full of people rolled through that fence? What choice would we have—would I have—but to burn each and every one of them? You crawling into that hole would have doomed every man and woman who got shoved through that gate, bro. And you’d have condemned me to have to do the killing, in the name of protecting the other three hundred swinging dicks who are trying to stay alive in this quarantine. I get to live with the final expression of every face I put that gun in, for the rest of my life, to smell their fuckin’ skin and hair burning, every night, for the rest of my life. And I bet you never even paused three seconds to consider that.”

“I don’t know. I… Amy…”

“And if you’d made it through and the feds started raining death on this end of the tunnel, all you’d have felt is relief. You’d never have given us a second thought. It’s all about saving your own ass. And that tells me that you’re gonna sabotage this operation again the first chance you get, for whatever selfish reason pops into your fat, arrogant head. And that means we can’t trust your judgment to be our ‘Spider-Man’ any longer. And that means that as long as you’re alive and walkin’ around in here, the three hundred—I’m sorry, the two hundred and seventy—men and women in this quarantine are in danger. Is there anybody standing here, including you, Wong, who can make a convincing argument otherwise?”

No one spoke. Not even me. The wind howled. The bonfire whooshed and crackled. I looked into the fire and the burning eyes of two dozen charred skulls stared back at me.

I said, “Nope.”

Mop-Up

Amy spun out of her seat and crawled to the rear of the RV, knees and hand crunching over cubes of safety glass. She knocked aside the spilled laptop, her knee crushed a box of Pop-Tarts. She crawled and crawled and eventually ran out of RV.

She turned over and pressed her back against the rear wall. She pulled up her knees and made herself as small as possible. Frigid air blew in from the busted windshield and it felt like the tears and sweat were freezing solid on her face.

She huddled, in the cold and the darkness, staring at the dismembered and lifeless corpse of Fredo the RV driver. His right foot was twitching. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

The driver’s-side door yanked open. Amy screamed.

Fredo’s corpse was yanked out into the night. She screamed again. She pulled her knees tighter, and twisted her hair in her fingers, and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all go away.

There were tearing and smacking sounds from outside, set to the tune of the open door chime from the RV.

Bing…

Bing…

Bing…

She needed to get out, to run, to hide. Or to get behind the wheel and stomp on the gas. Instead, she balled herself tighter, and clinched her eyelids.

Inhuman feet crunched through the glass in front of her. Warmth spread across her thighs and she wet herself for the first time since she was five years old.

The steps came closer, and closer, crackling through the broken glass until she could feel warm breath on her cheek.

Bing…

Bing…

Bing…