This Book is Full of Spiders

Posted on FreeRepublic.com by user DarylLombard, Nov. 11, 1:31 P.M.

They laughed. They laughed when I stocked up on canned goods, they laughed when I stocked up on ammunition, they laughed when I said the storm clouds were gathering. Same as they laughed at Noah. And, as with Noah, they come clawing at my door as the flood rolls in. Sorry. This is why I was building an ark while you were doing drugs and watching reality TV.

I appreciate all of the prayers and expressions of concern from you over the last week (for those of who you don’t know, I live not three miles outside of Outbreak Ground Zero in [Undisclosed]). But we are safe because we have prepared. We have food to last a year. We have water from our own well. We have fuel to last three years. We have guns, and everyone in our family is trained to use them.

On the day of outbreak, one of my son’s (the “musician”) druggie friends and his little girlfriend came by. You can picture him even without my description—long hair, covered in tattoos, track marks on his arms, showing early signs of HIV infection. A pro-Atheism bumper sticker on his car.

He wanted to shack up with us, eat our food, drink our water, sleep under our protection while the pestilence and depravity ran rampant outside. I pulled him aside by his scrawny arm and said:

“What can you do?”

He looks at me with that slackjawed look and says, “What do you mean, dude?”

“I mean what can you do? Can you shoot a rifle accurately at fifty yards? Do you know how to gut an animal? Or make a fishing net and clean what you catch? Can you fertilize a garden? Or purify water? Can you repair a small engine? Or even gap and change a sparkplug? Can you wire an electrical outlet? Repair a roof when it leaks? Set a broken bone? Can you make your own clothes? Field strip and clean a rifle? Reload ammunition from spent brass? Disinfect and sew shut a wound?”

Of course he said he didn’t know how to do any of these things.

He had spent his life playing video games and doing drugs and had probably fathered five welfare babies, demanding the whole time that I pay for their health care. When a pipe leaks, he calls the landlord (at best) or (more likely) just lets it leak. Let the next tenant find out the floorboards have rotted and that every wall is covered with mold. His little girlfriend would be the type to cry about rights for animals because she thinks meat grows in the grocery store display counter. Smoking pot and spitting on our soldiers when they return home from fighting terrorists because she lives obliviously in a little cocoon built from our sweat and blood and tears.

I said to him, “Imagine there’s a meteor coming to destroy the world. But some rich men have pooled their resources and built a big rocket ship to get people off the planet. They don’t have room for everybody, but you want a seat on that ship. Now, your having a seat means somebody else doesn’t get one. Space is limited. Food is limited. What would you tell the man standing at the door? What case would you make for getting a seat on that rocket ship at the expense of another person? What can you offer that would justify the food you would eat, and the water you would drink, and the medicine you would use?”

He said to me, “I don’t know, dude. I don’t see no spaceship here.”

And I said, “What you didn’t realize was that you were always in that situation. Only the spaceship is planet Earth, and your creator built it for you. And you had your whole life to make your case for why you should be allowed to stay. Instead, you did drugs, and played video games, and collected welfare. Well, this ship is taking off without you.”

That boy walked away without a word.

Maybe I’ll see him and his little girlfriend again, out among the diseased and the starving, running from the riots and the chaos. And I will say, “You had your chance. All your life those ‘crazy’ preachers were trying to tell you that the day of reckoning was coming. You chose to ignore it. Now it is too late.”

This is the way it should be. There are two kinds of people in the world: producers and parasites. When a society gets too many parasites, we need the disaster, the tsunami, the earthquake, the war, the flood, the disease to wash away the garbage, to rinse the safety nets of the slugs that use them as a hammock. Let them fall into the fire, so that the strong, the faithful and the capable will be left behind to rebuild, and renew humanity.

That day has come.

They laughed at me when I stocked up on food and fuel and ammunition.

Who’s laughing now?

12 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John was rocked out of unconsciousness by the blast of a shotgun and the warm splash of brains in his hair.

Hands were grabbing him from all over, tugging at the spindly legs of the unholy daddy longlegs creature. When he was free of the monster, John rolled over and saw a cowboy-looking dude in incredibly tight pants holding a smoking double-barrel shotgun. He was wearing earmuffs.

The crowd of people standing around John were surprisingly human-looking for infected, and were pretty well-dressed for zombies. The cowboy said, “You all right, buddy?”

John couldn’t think of how to answer that. His ribs hurt and it was kind of hard to breathe. The back of his neck was wet with monster blood, and he had gotten all worked up anticipating his own mortality only to find out it was on back order. He needed a drink so badly he was wondering if there was a gas station nearby that pumped ethanol, and if there would be a way to crawl into the underground tank.

Three burly guys were wrestling the spider monster. The human head at the center was shattered from the shotgun blast, but the parasite inside was still thrashing for life. A massive pickup truck sporting dual wheels and flared rear fenders backed up in the street. There was some kind of machine in the bed, a big red thing with a motor and chutes and wheels. Somebody started it. It sounded like a lawnmower. Only when they started cramming the giant, squirming daddy longlegs into the chute did John realize it was a wood chipper.

There was that terrible shriek, and red slush went spraying into the neighbor’s yard. When the last of the creature’s eight legs vanished into the jaws of the machine John thought, well, that’s one way to do it.

John tried to get up, but Cowboy pointed the shotgun and said, “Now, just stay seated for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

From behind John, Falconer barked, “I’m a cop, asshole! See that on my belt? That’s a badge.”

Falconer was marched over and forced to sit next to John. Holy shit, did he look pissed.

Cowboy pulled down his earmuffs and said, “Just to be clear, I got nothin’ but respect for law enforcement, officer—”

“Detective.”

“Detective, but at this point in time I’m pretty sure that what you see here is all the law that exists in this town at this here moment. When the feds huddled up behind their barricades on the other side of town, it came down to us to walk these here streets. And now that they left town altogether, well, we’re pretty sure that makes this our town. ’Til we hear different.”

Falconer said, “I understand. Now you tell me specifically what needs to occur before you let me continue what I was doing.”

“You need to convince us that you’re not a zombie.”

John said, “Do we look like zombies?”

“Ain’t you heard? The zombies look just like everybody else.”

Falconer said, “This is all some huge prank, isn’t it? Is somebody filming my reaction, to put it up on the Internet?”

“Now,” Cowboy said, “the infection takes root in the mouth, that much we know. Then it spreads to the brain and then the rest of the body. So there’s a real simple test: we have to take somethin’ out of the mouth. If you’re infected, you won’t feel it, because it’s not really part of your body. If you’re clean, it’ll hurt like hell. So I’ll let you pick.”

From his back pocket, Cowboy pulled out a pair of vise-grip pliers.

“We can take a tooth…”

From his other back pocket, he produced a six-inch-long pair of pruning shears.

“… or a piece of tongue.”

11 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I was locked in a supply closet while the reds gathered to discuss execution methods. I didn’t care. It’d all gone wrong, the kind of wrong that not even Owen properly understood. Otherwise he’d realize he was about to give me a cleaner end than most people on earth were going to get over the coming weeks and months and years. Including him.

Amy was my only regret. I just wished I knew that she was safe, and if so, that I could get word to her not to come after me. Even if she had made it out of town, Amy wouldn’t just leave the situation alone. She and I had that in common. Can’t stand to be on the other side of a fence from where we want to be. Not a fence somebody else put there, anyway.

I wished there was a way to tell her all that in person. To hug her, feeling her warmth and smelling the fruity shampoo in her hair. If I had that, and if I could hear her laugh one last time, I could carry that with me into eternity and that would be okay.

I kept trying to think back to everything that had happened since I woke up with that spider thing biting me in bed, trying to figure out what I was supposed to have done differently. It was stupid, I knew. Questioning how my life would have gone if I hadn’t made bad choices was like a fish asking how his life would have turned out if he’d only followed through on his dream to play in the NBA. I don’t beat myself up over my choices. My shame circuits burned out from overuse years ago.

Wait. This started before the spider showed up in your bed.

See, that was the thing, right there. I’d been so busy running around since that night that I’d never really had a chance to stop and put it all together. There was a common thread through all of these events that stretched back even before that night.

Tennet.

Goddamned Dr. Bob Tennet. He shows up in my life as my supposed court-appointed paranoia therapist. Asking me about monsters and trying to get me to work through all of that shit. Then the spider shows up and starts spreading this infection. And who’s there the whole time, showing up at quarantine? Dr. Tennet. Monitoring the situation. Watching it unfold. Tapping away at his laptop and recording his observations.

Anyway. So there’s two things I wish I could take care of before my execution. People have died with longer to-do lists.

I leaned my head against the wall and tried to make myself smell shampooed red hair instead of hospital sadness chemicals. I dozed off.

11 Hours, 40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John was actually weighing the “tooth or tongue” options when Falconer said to Cowboy, “Let me say this as a red-blooded, not possessed by any kind of inhuman organism, all-American man. If you get near my mouth with either of those tools I’m going to shove your head into the ground so hard a Chinaman will see it fly out of a volcano.”

Before Cowboy could react, John said, “Hold on. Do you know who this is next to me? This is Detective Lance Falconer.”

Cowboy looked like he sort of recognized the name, but couldn’t place it. John said, “You can’t tell me you haven’t seen him on the news. He caught the Portland Strangler?”

From behind Cowboy, a lady said, “Oh my God, it is him!”

“Show them your ID, detective.”

Falconer did. The lady was duly impressed.

John said, “We were kind of in the middle of getting to the bottom of this whole thing when you showed up.”

Tightpants Cowboy said, “Is that right?”

John said, “Yeah, that is right. It’s looking like the government is behind it all.”

Tightpants cursed and said, “Son of a bitch. I been saying that since day one. Day one.” To the guy next to him: “Haven’t I?”

Falconer said, “I’m standing up now.”

He did. No one objected. A kid in the crowd said, “What’s it like to fight somebody on top of a train?”

“Windy.” To Tightpants, “What do you mean the feds left town? When?”

“Breach at their headquarters. Somethin’ blew up. You didn’t hear it?”

“Oh,” said John. “We, uh, were wondering what that was.”

“Convoy headin’ out of town right now. So now we got to do what they couldn’t. Which is the way it always winds up. Which is why I been sayin’ it since day one. Me and my brother went door to door, within two hours of the feds roping off the town, gatherin’ up everybody with a gun and a set of balls. We’re the ones who got shit back under control, not the soldiers tripping around in their space suits. We’re the ones who put a stop to the looting, we’re the ones who have been patrolling the streets every minute of every day, in shifts, outside of the so-called Green Zone the feds set up. There’s almost two hundred of us now, working in three shifts, ’round the clock, pumpin’ buckshot into zombies and feedin’ ’em to Chip back there. Making sure everybody outside that hospital is clean, everybody who ain’t gets put down, and makin’ sure that hospital stays sealed off until the president grows the balls to drop a couple dozen cruise missiles on it.”

This got John’s attention. “Wait, what? They’re dropping cruise missiles? When?”

“When they grow the balls, like I said.”

“We don’t have a more specific timeline on the balls situation?”

“Are you askin’ because you want it to happen, or because you don’t want it to happen?”

“Well what about the people inside who aren’t infected? We got to get them out, right?”

“Buddy, anybody that’s spent a day inside that place is infected by now, five times over. If there’s anybody alive in there, they ain’t human no more. That’s the only thing we know about the infection. Once you get it, there ain’t no cure. You’re walkin’ dead. If you got people you care about in there, you need to treat ’em just like you saw them go into the ground yourself. Picture the dirt goin’ in over the casket. Take time to mourn, do what you got to do. But you got to get past that. Feelin’ sorry for them, it’s like feelin’ sorry for the fire that’s burning down your house. These infected, they’ll say anything, anything at all, to make you let down your guard. They can look just like you and me, can talk just like you and me. Or your neighbor, or your best friend, or your momma. But you cannot hesitate. Think of ’em just like a parrot imitatin’ human speech—the words sound the same, but they ain’t got no soul inside. You come face-to-face with ’em? You. Cannot. Hesitate.”

Nearby, somebody said, “Fuckin’ A.”

Falconer said, “See, that just makes me more pissed off at the bastards who are gonna get away with this. They’re going to turn all the victims to ashes and sweep it all under the rug. Somebody needs to answer for this shit.”

About ten different people muttered, “Damn right” or something to that effect.

Tightpants said, “Tell me what you need, detective.”

“As you see, I’m gonna need a ride. Unless you know a tire shop that’s open.”

“What the hell are we waitin’ for? Hop in the truck.” To another guy Tightpants said, “Tell Bobby to follow me. Everybody else should finish their sweep. We’re behind enough as it is. Don’t forget to check in on Eve Bartlett, make sure she got her insulin okay.”

The crowd started to disperse. John didn’t move from the spot where he was sitting in the yard.

Falconer said, “You comin’?”

“Dave is alive. I saw him, when I was on the Sauce earlier. Gonna go find my car and see what I can do.”

The look on Falconer’s face told John that he thought he was looking at a dead man, but knew that there was also no point in trying to talk John out of it. Instead, Falconer shook John’s hand and said, “Don’t fuck everything up, okay?”

3 Hours, 10 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

The supply closet door was yanked open and I awoke to see Owen there with his co-chair, Mr. Gun. They led me to the yard and I found that it was morning—I had managed to sleep several hours among the mops and buckets, exhaustion catching up with me. The group of reds had swelled, huddled around the bonfire to hear my sentence.

Owen said to me, “We figure we’ll give you the choice, bro. You can either crawl through that steam tunnel and whatever happens, happens. Or I can shoot you right here and let your fat ass fuel the fire. It’s all the same to me, aside from the second option settin’ me back one bullet.”

I shook my head and said, “Nah, that tunnel smelled like a graveyard for dogshit. Am I allowed a piece of paper and a pen to write a note to my girlfriend, if she’s even still alive? No idea how she’s ever going to see it but I’d feel bad if I didn’t make the effort. You know like when you forget to call home on Mother’s Day.”

Owen didn’t answer, because he was looking past me. Something deep in my nasal passages noted that the scent of the smoke took on a more sophisticated tone. Instead of the meaty smell of barbecue mixed with the acrid smell of particle board and veneer, I suddenly smelled the sweet, rich fragrance of pipe tobacco. I turned and there was Dr. Marconi, puffing on his pipe with one hand dipped into the jacket pocket of a pinstriped suit. He looked so out of place here he seemed like a hologram.

Marconi said, “Can I ask what this gathering is about?”

I said, “I been sentenced to die but Owen here has agreed to let me write a note to Amy before he shoots me.”

Marconi nodded and said, “I see. You realize, David, that other men do not find themselves in this kind of predicament with the same frequency that you do? I’m beginning to think it’s something you’re doing.”

To Owen, he said, “Can it wait fifteen minutes? I would like to pull Mr. Wong aside and take him up to my floor. I actually believe I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with detection but I’ll need his skill this one last time.”

No answer from Owen. Marconi said, “It really is for the good of all of us, if it works. You can stand right outside my door, if you think this is a ruse to help him escape, though I personally cannot imagine what such a plan would entail. It would also give him the chance to confess his sins, so it would be a personal favor to me, as a former man of the cloth it would weigh on me greatly if I didn’t at least offer him the opportunity.”

Owen pointed the gun at the sky and said, “If it was anybody but you, doc…”

“You know I do not ask lightly.” To me, he said, “Will you take this opportunity to let me show you something? And to reconcile yourself with the creator you’re about to meet?”

3 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John jolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.

He had fallen asleep in the Caddie, his shotgun in his lap. He must have shifted position at some point. If he’d coughed, he’d have vaporized his own skull. The sun stared angrily through his windshield. John blinked and threw open the driver’s-side door, needing to get out and take a piss. He almost fell and broke his neck—the Caddie was sitting six feet off the ground. Then he remembered.

The night before, he’d parted company with the Undisclosed zombie militia and made the nervous trek on foot from Dave’s house up to the burrito stand, only to find the Caddie was not in fact where they’d left it. At that point his only possible hope of finding it again was if it had gotten towed away, back at a stage of the apocalypse when a car partially blocking the street was still considered a priority on somebody’s list. John jogged twelve blocks to the towing company impound yard, expecting to be decapitated by a monster at any moment.

The good news was that he wasn’t. The further good news was that the Caddie was in fact there and that the tall fence had been cut open by some other looter or vandal days ago. The bad news was that the Caddie was apparently the last seized vehicle before towing was shut down—it was still on the back of the tow truck. The truck was the flatbed type, where the whole bed tilted down to form a ramp and let the car roll on and off—a technology that probably came about because the old hook style yanked off too many bumpers in the course of dragging cars out of handicapped parking spaces.

John had jumped up onto the truck’s bed and opened the Caddie’s trunk, expecting to find that everything had been stolen. But apparently even the looters who ransacked the impound yard took one glance at the rusting piece of shit and deduced that there could be nothing in the trunk worth the effort of prying it open. That was probably a good thing for both the citizens and law enforcement of Undisclosed. Inside they’d have found the aforementioned shotgun (a custom-made triple-barrel sawed-off), two hundred shells, Dave’s blood-splattered chainsaw, the green mystery box taken from Dave’s shed, a bag of Dave’s clothes, a bottle of Grey Goose, a bad black velvet painting of Jesus and a fucking flamethrower.

The keys had still been in the tow truck (in fact, the driver’s-side door was standing open from when the driver had run screaming from whatever mob or unholy terror was coming his way). John spent twenty minutes trying to figure out the controls for tilting down the ramp and never could. It was either take the tow truck itself, or walk. So, for the third time in ten days, he commandeered a vehicle for use in a mission, promising himself he would return it when it was over. He was one for two so far.

That is how John wound up spending the night tooling around town in the tow truck with the Caddie piggybacking. One thing he had noticed when he was out: people. Lots of people. Since REPER had retreated and stopped enforcing the curfew, every street corner had grown clumps of people bristling with hunting rifles and shotguns and revolvers and machetes. John was comforted by that for about five seconds, then he saw the looks in the eyes of these harried, tired, cold, frustrated people and realized they would butcher his ass if he even so much as let out a yawn that sounded too much like a moan.

Just before dawn, John had passed the quarantine, which looked even more impregnable than it had with time on pause. Floodlights and armed drones were all powered up and standing guard. Driving slow to avoid the armed crowds that were wandering across the streets, John had made his way up to the asylum. A crowd was busy up there. Dozens of members of the militia were surrounding an RV parked in the yard. The pickup with the wood chipper was parked next to a long ditch that had been dug in the yard, and the chipper was running.

John had edged closer, as close as he could without exiting the tow truck (which he was not going to fucking do) and saw bodies. The militia was dragging them out of a basement window and laying them in a row in the grass. Another crew was picking them up, one by one, and feeding them into the chipper. The chipper was, in turn, filling the ditch with red slush.

Oh holy mother of—

John had heard a scream at that point, and saw a gang of militia approach from the street, dragging a cursing man covered in tattoos. He was thrashing around and lobbing insults at his captors, insisting on his innocence, and his humanity. The captors conferred with Tightpants Cowboy, who was in charge of the zombie disposal operation apparently. The tattooed man’s trial lasted forty-five seconds, then Cowboy vaporized the man’s forehead with two shotgun shells. Into the chipper he went.

John got the fuck out of there.

He had headed as far outside of town as he could get without running into the REPER barricades. So, John had parked the tow truck, with the Caddie piggybacking, in a cornfield a mile or so from the water tower construction site, the REPER barricade now standing between there and where he’d spoken to Dave for the last time. He had gotten drowsy, then climbed up to the Caddie because he figured the higher vantage point would give him an advantage if he was ambushed while he slept.

John sat upright and worked his stiff joints. He threw the shotgun into the passenger seat where it clinked off the empty Grey Goose bottle. The gun was a custom-made job he’d bought at one of the gun shows he frequented. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked—firing all three barrels would chop down a small tree. He kept double-aught buck loaded into the two side barrels, and a slug in the middle. Give the target a nice variety of projectiles to think about.

He needed to get into quarantine. And not as a patient, either. He needed to get in there with the implements of destruction in the Caddie’s trunk. John pictured himself just plowing toward the fence in the tow truck, but remembered the concrete barricades meant to stop somebody from doing just that.

Well, sitting here was accomplishing nothing. John jumped down, pissed for several minutes, then threw himself into the tow truck.

2 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Marconi led me up to the second floor, with Owen in tow. He made Owen stay outside of the makeshift hospital within a hospital, telling him there was a risk of him spreading the nasty stomach flu to the rest of the quarantine.

Once on the other side of a door, Marconi muttered, “We have less time than I thought.”

“What? Before Owen shoots me?”

“No. Believe it or not, that’s actually not our most pressing problem.”

He led me to a window and said, “Look. Beyond the fence.”

I did. A freaking crowd was gathering out there. “Holy shit, doctor. Who are those people?”

“Looks like everyone.”

Hundreds of people. Cars were parked here and there, scattered like toys out beyond the fence. People were sitting on the hoods, or were off in bunches, talking. Everyone seemed to have a gun. I swear one person actually brought a pitchfork.

Marconi said, “Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people who mow your lawn and deliver your mail.”

Nobody mows my lawn.

“I don’t understand.”

“Critical mass, Mr. Wong. They’re going to get what They wanted. And I haven’t the faintest idea of how to stop it.”

“Who? Who’s going to get what they want? The mob, you mean?”

Marconi looked me in the eye and said, “We’re speaking in private, I assume that we can drop all pretense. This conversation will take longer if we filter everything through a façade of skepticism of the supernatural, and at least one of us doesn’t have the time. If I have seen the shadow men lurking about, then I assume you have, too.”

I sighed and said, “Yes, doctor.”

“So when I speak of an invisible ‘They’ working against us, you’ll not waste precious seconds asking who ‘They’ are. The shadows, and the men who knowingly or unknowingly work on their behalf.”

They.

I often wondered if “they” had an office building somewhere, where They sat around a long, black granite conference table with a pentagram etched into the top. Or maybe They had a headquarters inside a hollowed-out volcano, like a James Bond villain. Or maybe They had the technology to leap effortlessly across time and space, holding shareholder meetings on the surface of Mars, or on top of a plateau in Pangaea circa 200 million B.C.

John and I knew very little about Them, which made me an expert when compared to the general population, who don’t know They exist at all. They are people, or at least They assume the form of people. They are wealthy, or at least have access to wealth, or maybe have means which render wealth as we understand it moot. The little Asian man who disappeared into the burrito stand was surely one of Them, as was whoever was waiting for that convoy of black trucks we saw last summer.

But all I have are rumors, stories John dug up on the Internet probably written by people who know even less than we do. Some say it’s a cabal of wealthy men who, centuries ago, poured Their wealth into experimentation with the occult. At some point, the story goes, They tapped into a dark power that They saw as one more resource to be exploited, the way that humans would later learn to split the atom and use it to power our televisions and hair driers. Instead, the legend goes, the dark energies that poured forth infected Them, corrupting these men who learned too late that the power They had bought would cost them the last remnants of Their own souls. That’s the story, anyway. Shit, for all I know, They wrote that version of the story and the truth is another three layers down. That’s how They work.

These days, if you ask John to summarize who They are, you get only one answer: “Well, they’re not fucking vampires, I’ll tell you that.” Then he’ll stare hard at you for a solid minute until you walk away.

Marconi tapped the side of one of the jugs that contained the spider specimens. It didn’t react, but still I wished he wouldn’t do it. He said, “This was always chess, not checkers. I’m not sure you ever fully understood that.”

I said, “Tennet. You know that name? Claims to be a psychiatrist but suddenly turns up consulting for this agency nobody’s ever heard of? REPER?”

“Oh, he’s a psychiatrist. Search his past and you’ll find twenty-five distinguished years in that profession, an expert on the virulent nature of fear. And likewise, if it just so happened that he needed to be a plumber in order to be in an advantageous position to observe and influence the situation, then you would find a quarter century of plumbing in his background. And so on. He would be whatever is required.”

“Can’t somebody investigate him? If his licenses and all that are fake then—”

“I didn’t say he would use false documents. I said he would actually have twenty-five years on the job. Whatever job. Do you understand? Again, chess. With a very advanced player who can see many moves ahead. They put their pieces into position.”

Marconi checked the vitals on a sleeping patient as he spoke, puffing on his pipe the whole time. I again wondered to what degree Dr. Marconi actually knew anything about medicine.

He said, “In the case of Dr. Tennet, he not only has specialized in treating violent and paranoid patients since the 1980s, but has written multiple prominent books on the subject, and dozens of journal articles. More pertinent to this situation, he has also written extensively on the subject of group paranoia and crowd dynamics in crisis situations. He didn’t have to infiltrate the government. When the ‘outbreak’ hit, they came to him. Do you understand? The pieces are always positioned where They need them.”

“Right, and ‘They’ are dicks.”

“But we can’t stop there. We need to ask the big question: what do They want?”

“To… kill us all?”

“Ha! We should be blessed with an adversary with such uncomplicated ambitions. No, war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

2 Hours, 40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John didn’t get within three blocks of the hospital quarantine. There were people everywhere. It was like the afternoon of the Fourth of July, when everybody ambles out to the park in loose groups to find a place to watch fireworks. Only instead of carrying blankets and lawn chairs, everybody was armed to the teeth. From the driver’s seat of the tow truck, John recognized a familiar cowboy hat and denim-wrapped ass walking nearby. John pulled up to where Tightpants Cowboy was on the sidewalk, shouting orders to somebody. John rolled down the window and Tightpants said, “Did Hank send you out here? We’re still four short.”

John said, “Uh, no. Is Falconer around?”

“The detective? He went off on his own. Said he had to follow up on a lead.”

“Shit. What is all this?”

“It’s the end of the world, where you been all week?”

“What?”

“What’s your name again?”

“John. Yours?”

“Jimmy DuPree. Pleased to meet you. We’re makin’ sure the quarantine holds until the air force can blow the shit out of it in about…”

2 Hours, 35 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Marconi said, “I mentioned my book earlier. The Babel Threshold.”

“Yeah. I said I hadn’t read it. I usually wait for the movie.”

“Try to focus, please. Do you understand the significance of the title? You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?”

“Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.”

“Exactly. ‘And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men buildeth. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language.’ It’s right there in the text, Mr. Wong—God’s motivation in that story is that he was afraid. He limited our ability to communicate because he was afraid that, operating as one, we would challenge His power.”

“Man, I hope you’re not about to tell me that all of this shit is a curse from God because we built our buildings too tall. Kind of a flat town to impose that lesson on. You’d think he’d take it to Dubai.”

“No. But there is a parallel. Are you familiar with Dunbar’s number?”

“No.”

“You should, it governs every moment of your waking life. It is our Tower of Babel. The restraint that governs human ambition isn’t a lack of a unified language. It’s Dunbar’s number. Named after a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He studied primate brains, and their behavior in groups. And he found something that will change the way you think about the world. He found that the larger the primate’s neocortex, the larger the communities it formed. It takes a lot of brain to process all of the relationships in a complex society, you see. When primates find themselves in groups larger than what their brains can handle, the system breaks down. Factions form. Wars break out. Now, and do pay attention, because this is crucial—you can actually look at a primate brain and, knowing nothing else about what species it came from, you can predict how big their tribes are.”

“Does Owen have a watch? Because when you told him fifteen minutes I’m not sure if he’s going to take that as a literal fifteen minutes, or…”

“We’ll deal with him in a moment, but I take your point. The salient issue here is that every primate has a number.” Marconi gestured to the crowd gathering outside the fence. “Including those primates out there. Including you and I. Based on the size of a human’s neocortex, that number is about a hundred and fifty. That’s how many other humans we can recognize before we max out our connections. With some variability among individuals, of course. That is our maximum capacity for sympathy.”

I stared at him. I said, “Wait, really? Like there’s an actual part of our brain that dictates how many people we can tolerate before we start acting like assholes?”

“Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is. You see the problem right away—everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than a hundred and fifty. Governments. Corporations. Society as a whole. And we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups—those inside the sphere of sympathy and those outside. Black versus white, liberal versus conservative, Muslim versus Christian, Lakers fan versus Celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected versus clean.

“We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such. This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills a hundred thousand people. This is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create ten thousand deformed infants. Because of this limitation in the mental hardware, those Malaysians may as well be ants.”

I stared at the crowd outside and rubbed my forehead. “Or monsters.”

“Now you’re getting it. It’s the same as how that crowd out there doesn’t see us as human. The way the rest of the country won’t see anyone inside city limits as human. The way the rest of the world soon won’t regard anyone in this country as human. The paranoia rippling outward until the whole planet is engulfed. This infection, this parasite that dehumanizes the host but is utterly undetectable, it is perfectly designed to play on this fundamental flaw, this limitation in our hardware. That will be the real infection.”

Marconi emptied his pipe into a bedpan, and pulled out a bag of tobacco.

“Which brings us back to the Tower of Babel. Humans were always destined to be derailed by this limitation in our ability to cooperate. At some specific point, determined by the overall size of the population on the planet and a host of other factors, we will destroy ourselves. That is the Babel Threshold. The point at which the species-wide exhaustion of human sympathy reaches critical mass.”

“And you think this whole thing, starting with me finding a giant alien spider in my bed, was Their plan to trigger that event.”

He nodded. “The parasite’s ability to stay undercover indefinitely, the infected showing absolutely no symptoms… it’s perfection. Anyone can be infected, at any moment, anywhere in the world. If you want to see what the future of life on planet Earth looks like, simply take a glance out that window.”

I found a chair and collapsed into it. There was a harsh knock on the door behind me.

From behind the door, Owen said, “It’s been long enough, doc.”

“Five more minutes won’t change anything, Mr. Barber.”

Lowering my voice, I said, “Wait, you wrote a book about this happening before it happened? Damn, why didn’t you send me a copy?”

“You shouldn’t have needed a book to see this coming. No one should have. This is what They’ve been building toward since civilization began, accelerating as it got closer, like the last sand running from an hourglass. Look at the games children play now. The average child has killed ten thousand men on a video game screen by the time he enters high school. Reinforcing that lesson one button press at a time—the shapes at the other end of your gun are not human. And when news of the infection spread, what did the world immediately call the infected?”

“Zombies.”

“Exactly. Our culture’s most perfect creation—an enemy you are absolutely, morally correct in killing, because they are already dead. Why, you are doing them a favor by smashing in their skulls. We as a species were so primed for this that to get combustion, They only needed the tiniest spark. It actually happened sooner than I expected, but…”

He shrugged as he lit his pipe, as if to say, “Eh, can’t be right every time.”

I said, “Well, you took a long time to say what I pretty much already knew. We’re screwed. I mean, to be clear, we’re rooting for the bombs, right? That’s the only way to satisfy the paranoia, let them blow all this to shit on live TV while the mob out there cheers.”

Marconi puffed on his pipe and stared out the window.

I said, “I mean, we absolutely cannot let that part get out, right? The fact that the zombies are undetectable until they’re biting your brain? That fact needs to die with the quarantine, otherwise it’s going to be a global lynch mob out there. Which means making sure none of them get out, even if innocents die in the process. I mean, it’s shitty, but that’s all we can do, err on the side of overkill. Right?”

Marconi said, “The sedative is running out. One of my infected patients woke up.”

I said, “Jesus. Really? Did you—”

“I’ve been talking to him all morning. He’s still strapped to his bed. I calmly explained to him the situation, and he asked me to leave the restraints on. He said it was the only responsible thing. What do you make of that?”

“I… I don’t know. But you can’t just leave him like—”

“You’re right. I can’t.”

“I mean it’s just a matter of time, right? Until he monsters out and kills who knows how many people?”

Marconi studied me.

Owen banged on the door again. Marconi said, “We’re coming.”

2 Hours, 30 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

To Tightpants, aka Jimmy Dupree, John said, “So we know for sure now? They’re going to bomb it?”

Jimmy nodded. “You’re the one who was askin’ earlier about the innocent people inside quarantine.”

“Got a friend in there.”

“No, you don’t. What this is, with the bombs, is a mercy killing. Nothin’ more. You need to get that straight.”

Staring through the windshield at the fence down the street, John nodded.

Dupree said, “Don’t know if you heard the shots last night, but there was an outbreak, from the quarantine. Bunch of ’em found an old utility tunnel that the government, in its infinite wisdom, failed to spot on the blueprints. Few dozen tried to get out. Looked like some militia tried to stand their ground and got themselves torn to pieces in the process. Don’t got any idea how many zombies got out into the wild but I spent my night disposin’ of thirty bodies. There’ll be more, a lot more, if they don’t do somethin’ about that quarantine. It’s a bag of live snakes in a nursery. Well, word finally filtered in, from the feds at the perimeter. The bomb drops at noon. We just got to keep it secure until then, then this whole flippin’ nightmare will be over. And if noon comes and nothin’ happens, we’re gonna surround this place and pour bullets into that fence until nothin’ on the other side draws air.”

2 Hours, 25 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I couldn’t help but notice that Owen had the reds build up the fire. Looked like they had found some more wooden pallets somewhere. That shit really burned.

To Owen, I said, “You know what? I never got to sit down and write that note to my girlfriend. Marconi used up all my time. And all he did was give me a chili recipe. Do you want it?”

He didn’t answer. It was a beautiful morning, though some clouds were moving in. I could actually hear birds chirping somewhere. Birds don’t give a shit about the apocalypse any more than we’d care about some species of bird going extinct in the Amazon. Which had probably happened twice already this morning.

All of the reds were awake and standing around me. I looked back at the hospital entrance and saw a smattering of greens standing there. I glanced up at the roof, and there were the rest of them, lined up along the ledge and looking down.

From behind me, Marconi said, “Mr. Barber, I don’t know if you can hear the commotion on the other side of the fencing, but we do appear to have larger problems here.”

Owen said, “With all due respect, doc, I’m not a fuckin’ idiot. Those people are about to riot out there because they figured out this quarantine isn’t secure, thanks to last night’s breakout. And guess who we have to thank for that?”

“Killing David here will not assuage their panic. It will, in fact, accomplish nothing except to confirm their worst fears about us.”

“ATTENTION.”

Everybody turned toward the booming sound of a voice coming from a public address system.

“PLEASE MOVE A THOUSAND FEET AWAY FROM THE QUARANTINE FENCE. FOR YOUR SAFETY, PLEASE WITHDRAW FROM THE QUARANTINE PERIMETER TO A DISTANCE OF AT LEAST ONE THOUSAND FEET.”

2 Hours, 20 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John heard the PA system outside the fence announcing something he couldn’t quite make out from inside the truck. Warning the crowd away from the gates probably. He pulled the tow truck up through the quarantine crowd, gently knocking over a DO NOT CROSS BY ORDER OF REPER—HIGHLY INFECTIOUS—TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT sign. Beyond it were the four-foot-high concrete barricades. Beyond them was an unmanned jeep with a mounted gun that John assumed would shoot anyone who touched the fence. Beyond it, the fence itself. For all he knew, Dave could be no more than fifty feet away, on the other side of that chain link. A cheap pair of bolt cutters would get through it in two minutes. But it might as well be the center of the Earth. He needed a drink. They had a little over two hours until either the army incinerated this place, or the entire town went apeshit on it. Two-plus hours in which to accomplish… what?

The crowd was actually moving back, to his surprise, and then it dawned on him that the military was trying to get the rubberneckers out of the blast radius of whatever they were going to drop on this place. He wondered if he was close enough to be engulfed by whatever came streaking down from the sky. He threw the truck into park.

The PA system repeated its message. John lit one of his last two cigarettes. He twiddled with the levers on the console. He heard a humming from behind him and a shadow inched across the cab. Oh, hey, he’d figured out how to work the stupid ramp mechanism. It’d have been nice to have done that before he was forced to steal some guy’s tow truck, but that was how every single possible thing had gone so far in this situation. Just a little bit behind the curve, a little slow to figure out the right thing. Story of his fucking life.

John realized at the very least he needed to get this poor bastard’s tow truck out of the blast zone, and that leaving it here would be a major dick move considering he no longer needed it. John got out and climbed up onto the tilted truck bed, released the cable that secured the Caddie and got behind the wheel. He twisted the ignition and woke up the bear under the hood. He reversed off the truck bed, flattening out on the street below. Creedence loudly assured him that a bad moon was rising.

2 Hours, 15 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Marconi was trying to voice another objection, but Owen wasn’t listening—his eyes never left mine. He cut off Marconi in midsentence and said, “All these people in here. All those greens. And look, you got exactly one guy standing up for you. Look up, at all the greens up there, watchin’ this from the roof. Notice how none of them came down to advocate on your behalf? None of ’em are throwing themselves in front of you and sayin, ‘you take him, you got to take me, too!’ You know why? Because every single one of ’em knows you wouldn’t do it for them.”

2 Hours, 14 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John backed up in the Caddie, and kept backing up. Farther and farther down the street, the tow truck and its tilted bed shrinking in his windshield. He stopped. He thought.

He flicked his cigarette out of the window.

He buckled his seat belt.

2 Hours, 10 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Owen said, “Dude, this is going to be lost on you. But I need to say it. Because we are going to die, Wong. Don’t think I don’t understand that. I know the feds aren’t gonna let us outta this place. So let me say my bit. I have kept the order in this quarantine since the day the feds pussied out of here. All in all, I’d say it’s the best thing I ever done in my life. Maybe the only positive thing I’ve ever done. And that’s all right. Whether it’s bombs in here, or bein’ torn apart by the mob out there, I will stand before the good Lord and say that I held things together as long as I could. And my final act is to declare you guilty, for the deaths of thirty men and women, and the probable deaths of two hundred and seventy more. I find you guilty of committing the only real sin Jesus ever asked us not to commit: the sin of not giving a shit about anyone but yourself. Doc, step aside.”

From behind Owen, somebody said, “They’re having a block party out there. Listen.”

“What?”

“They’re playin’ music. Creedence.”

They were turning up the volume, too. “Bad Moon Rising” swelled in the distance, getting louder and louder. And under it was another sound, a terrible noise like a mechanical Chewbacca that fell into a rock-crushing machine.

At that moment, John’s Cadillac came soaring through the air.

It cleared the first fence and almost cleared the second—the rear tires caught the razor wire and started unspooling it from the top of the fence, trailing behind the falling Caddie like the streamers on a kite.

Everyone scattered. The grille of the Caddie plunged right into the middle of the bonfire, scattering smoke and flames and bones to the wind. The Cadillac finally bounced and jolted to a stop among a rain of burning human skulls.

The voice of John Fogerty garbled and died. The driver’s door opened and John flung himself out, clutching a sawed-off shotgun. He screamed, “DID SOMEBODY ORDER SOME FUCKING PRISON BREAK WITH A SIDE OF SHOTGUN?”

Guardian: Be advised, a vehicle has breached the quarantine fence along the western side. I repeat, a vehicle, appears to be a civilian passenger car, has breached the fence.

Yankee Seven-Nine: Guardian, are you we looking at containment failure here?

Guardian: Negative, uh, Yankee, the fence appears to be intact.

Yankee Seven-Nine: Okay I need clarification, Guardian, I thought you said it had been breached by a vehicle—

Guardian: Affirmative, there is a vehicle inside the fence, the driver has exited.

Yankee Seven-Nine: Then how is the fence still intact, Guardian?

Guardian: It, uh, appears he went over.

Yankee Seven-Nine: He what?

Guardian: Yankee, I think he ramped it. There’s a… some kind of truck with a platform on the back and I think he used it as a ramp.

Yankee Seven-Nine: All right, did you say you had a clear shot at the driver?

2 Hours, 5 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John grabbed my shoulders and screamed into my face. “DAVE! ARE YOU IN THERE? IT’S ME. JOHN. I AM YOUR FRIEND. CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“Why are you talking like that?”

I looked inside the Caddie. John had come alone.

“Where’s Amy?”

“I don’t know! Outside town I think.”

“Oh. Thank God.”

“Or not. I actually don’t know.”

Owen strode up and kicked aside a smoldering skull. He raised the pistol.

John raised his shotgun. Their eyes met.

John said, “Owen? What the hell are you doin’ here?”

“You are one crazy son of a bitch, John.”

To me, John said, “Is he infected?”

“I don’t think so.”

Owen said, “Ain’t none of us infected.”

I said, “We… don’t know that.”

John said, “Well, whatever. Everybody needs to get the hell out of here! By lunchtime this is all gonna be a crater. Did you hear the announcement out there, Owen?”

I said, “Wait, do you two know each other?”

“Yeah, remember I said I was doing setup for him? This is DJ O-Funk.” To Owen, he said, “Hell, I thought you’d be out there on Daryl’s farm, ridin’ this thing out.”

“I was. Went into town on a beer run and got scooped up by the feds. I punched one of those guys in the space suits and I guess they took that as a sign of infection.”

I noticed the rest of the inmates were staring at us, shell-shocked, as we held this conversation next to the crashed Caddie and among the scattered pile of smoking human remains. It finally occurred to me to turn my eyes up to the circling drones, wondering if they were zeroing in on our skulls right now. I had a vague thought that we should run for cover, but the entrance to the hospital was a hundred feet away. It’d be a nice, leisurely couple of shots for some guy sitting at a console out in the desert. We could duck in the car, but the drone was also equipped with the kind of rockets that could turn it into two tons of burning steel confetti.

Actually, why hasn’t he shot us already?

Dr. Marconi walked up and John glanced at him. “Doc? You been here the whole time?”

“John. I would ask you what you are doing but I fear you would actually tell me.”

“I’m just here to get Dave. Now we’re gonna get in my Caddie and I’m gonna drive a Caddie-shaped hole in that fence over there. The rest of you can walk right out behind us. Once out, you will owe me a case of beer. Each of you.”

Owen said, “You didn’t see the big fuckin’ guns lined up outside? They’ll turn you into chunks in two seconds.”

“I didn’t see any big fuckin’ guns, I saw a bunch of little fuckin’ guns. I don’t think they were anticipating Cadillac-driving zombies. But either way, you need to find a way outta here, before they bomb the place.”

John ducked into the Caddie and said, “Oh, Owen, did paychecks go out last week before this all happened?”

Owen glanced at me, then John, and said, “How the fuck did you two ever find each other?”

To me, John asked, “You comin’?”

I took to the passenger seat. The Caddie seemed to be listing somewhat and steam was oozing from under the hood. But the engine was still running, so that was good.

John said, “Marconi! There’s room in the backseat.”

Marconi leaned in and said, “I assume your plan didn’t progress beyond this exact moment.”

“I try to take it one step at a time.”

Marconi shifted his eyes to me and said, “Remember what I said?”

“Yeah, the Babylon Protocol.”

He started to correct me, but instead said, “There is a way to beat it. But with God as my witness, I do not know how any of us will get the chance.”

“Just tell me what we need to do.”

“Think it through. Think about the symbols we rally around. Think about what binds people together.”

“Just fucking tell me—”

“I think you already know. David, there needs to be a sacrifice.”

“A sacrifice? Why?”

“Think it through.”

“What, like somebody has to die? One of us?”

Marconi backed away and said, “Go, before the drone operators finally make sense of what they’re seeing and open fire.”

We buckled our seat belts. John threw the Caddie into reverse. He backed up, rolling through the fire pit, knocking aside a wheelchair. He cranked the wheel and got the Caddie pointing behind the building, not far from the strip of woods John and I had escaped through on that first night, before there was a big-ass fence there.

The crowd of inmates in front of us split like the Red Sea.

John floored it. The back tires dug down into the mud. We launched forward, barreling toward a section of fence bearing the words, FLAME GRILLED FRIDAY, AT CUNTRY KITCHEN. I braced my hands against the dashboard and heard myself screaming.

The fence never stood a chance. The hood bashed through the first layer, whipping down the layer of plastic sheeting. The fencing was still raking its way down the rear windshield when we hit the second layer of fence, smashing a wooden pole in two, ripping through the chain link. The boundary between quarantine and the outside world was pierced once and for all. And then—

CRASH

—with a cataclysmic sound of metal and plastic splattering against concrete, we hit the vehicle barrier both of us had forgotten about until that moment.

The King Kong fist of inertia punched me in the back. My last memory before I blacked out was the filthy windshield about one inch from my face, and the seat belt then yanking me roughly back. When I came to, the hood was crumpled up in front of me and John was shaking me, saying, “GET DOWN!”

Since I had temporarily forgotten where we even were, I also had forgotten what exactly I was ducking away from. I groggily turned to look outside of the driver’s-side window, and saw a hulking camo-painted vehicle with no driver. I had no problem figuring out what it was. I saw a turret on top of it, light glinting off of a camera lens and on either side of the lens were two massive gun barrels.

The machine whirred and the barrels spun on me. The movement wasn’t robotic at all, but quick and smooth and purposeful. I froze, mesmerized, staring into the twin black holes and chose that moment to wonder what Marconi was talking about when he was going on about “sacrifice.”

EIGHT HOURS EARLIER…

Bing…

Bing…

Bing…

The RV’s door-open chime wafted through the frozen night.

It was the soundtrack of Amy’s last moments. The thing in front of her breathed and its breath smelled of exotic dead meat. It sniffed her. A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn’t change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.

A tongue licked her forehead. Amy instinctively threw up her hand to ward off her attacker, and grabbed a handful of fur.

Amy opened her eyes and in the darkness, found Molly staring back at her.

Molly sniffed her again, turned, inspected the Pop-Tarts on the floor among the broken glass, then trotted over to the side door of the RV, staring at Amy and wagging her tail. Dog language for, I need you to open this door for me because I do not possess hands.

Strangely, that got Amy’s leg’s moving again. Molly needed to go out. Amy had responded to that canine nonverbal cue a thousand times. She moved quickly to the door, steeled herself, and pushed it open. Molly jumped into the night, into the still air that minutes ago had carried dying screams and the visceral crack of gunfire. Into the night, where teeth and mindless appetites waited, digesting the entrails of boys she’d been laughing and joking with an hour before.

Stop freaking yourself out and MOVE.

Molly returned, looking at Amy expectantly. Amy stepped into the night air, crouching low, keeping her eyes focused on Molly to keep the terror at bay. The dog was not afraid. Amy got ready to run, trying to decide which direction to go. She looked at Molly, as if hoping for a suggestion.

Molly made a beeline for the basement window.

No.

Molly jumped over two piles of guts that used to be Josh and Donnie, and disappeared into the cafeteria Amy had seen on the grainy camera.

No.

From below, Molly barked. Amy decided that dying out here, in the yard, in the open air, was somehow better than dying down in that dark basement. Molly barked again, but this time it was followed by the sound of shuffling footsteps behind her, somewhere in the night. A lot of them. Something was out here. Down there in the room, Molly was still alive and unharmed. Still, Amy half decided to just go running off into the night. But to where?

She got down on hand and knees and crawled through grass that was slimy and sticky with blood and other bodily discharges that were never meant to leave the confines of their organs. Her knees squished through spilled entrails until she awkwardly climbed/fell through the window.

Amy was blind in the darkness. The lantern was gone, the flashlight was gone. Molly was immediately at her side. Amy reached down to touch her, then grabbed her collar. Molly pulled her along, Amy using her as a Seeing Eye dog.

Amy kicked a corpse and stumbled, catching herself via the pure desperation to not have to crawl through any more guts. Molly led her out of the room, into the hallway, and Amy tried to pull her away from the direction of the stairwell, and the maintenance room down there that she knew was now a mass grave. Molly would not budge, pulling the other way, heading for the stairs.

No.

Amy didn’t care what Molly had in mind. She wasn’t going down into that basement. Not now, not ever. Not for a million dollars. Not if her life depended on it. Amy pulled one way. Molly planted her feet and pulled the other.

Fine.

Amy let go, and charged off into the darkness of the hall, toward whatever lay at the opposite end from the stairs and the twitching, writhing tomb she knew lay below. She threw her hand in front of her, walking blind, and eventually found a metal door just like the one she was running from.

A locked door.

She ran her hand along the handle and dead bolt, hoping to find a lever but instead finding a keyhole, one requiring a key she did not have. Clawed feet scratched up the floor tiles behind her, Molly coming back to say, “See?”

Amy didn’t move. She shivered. Her pants were wet. Her fingers were sticky with other people’s blood. Molly barked. Amy grabbed her collar, and allowed herself to be led down the hallway. They reached the end, and the stairs.

Down they went. They emerged onto the cell block and there was the stench of sewage and gunpowder, and there were the doors, and the scratching noises behind the doors. Amy blocked it all out. Molly pulled her along, and Amy knew where they were going. They reached the MAINTENAN door. In the darkness, Amy ran her hand over it and felt puckered bullet holes. She closed her eyes, let out a breath, and said a silent prayer.

She pushed the door open.

What lay beyond the door was Hell. Smoke filled the room, wafting between the rusting pipes and ducts that made the big room look like it was being attacked by a giant robot octopus. It stank like fireworks and burned cloth and scorched meat. A single, tiny white shaft of light stabbed up from the center of the floor from a dropped flashlight. It illuminated just enough of the nightmare so that Amy would be seeing it for the rest of her life. Dead, open eyes stared up at the ceiling. Open mouths, twitching fingers. All of the bodies wearing the same solid color. She felt her stomach turn.

Molly pulled free and stepped across corpses, trotting past the tiny shaft of light, continuing into the shadows beyond. She stopped at the opposite wall, looked back at Amy, and wagged her tail.

Amy focused on the light—she was determined to block out everything else from this nightmare place. If she could just make it there, then she’d have a flashlight, and everything would be a bit better. She carefully stepped over limbs and squishy things and explored with her toes to find the solid floor in between. One step, two, three… eventually she got close enough to grab the flashlight, trying to block out the fact that it was curled in three dead fingers. She plucked out the light and made her way toward Molly. The smoke was getting to her now, toxic, stinging fumes that burned her eyes.

There was a hole in the wall. Cinder blocks had been smashed and knocked aside. This was where the monsters had tunneled into the room. She shined the light inside and found that wasn’t quite right—the tunnel had already been there. It was made of brick and looked like the old-fashioned sewers they have under European cities. Old rusty pipes and stuff. Did the zombies live down here? Under the town?

Molly pushed past Amy, jumped and scrambled up into the tunnel.

“Molly! Wait!”

It was barely more than a whisper. The tunnel was crawling with bugs and dripping with muddy water. But that wasn’t the worst of what she knew lurked in there. Molly scampered into the darkness, the scratches of her claws disappearing into God knew where.

“Molly!”

Amy shined the flashlight down the tunnel, and saw two eyes reflecting back at her. Molly had stopped and looked back at her, but stayed where she was.

No. No, no, no, no, no—

Amy climbed into the tunnel, realizing it wasn’t tall enough for her to crouch. She would have to crawl, on her hand and knees, over the bricks. She started, realizing the flashlight was next to useless in her right hand, the beam whipping around crazily as she edged forward. She briefly thought about sticking the flashlight in her mouth, but pictured the dead hand that had been clutching it and decided no way.

She pressed on.

Amy crawled, and crawled, and crawled. The brick ate up her knees and the stump of her left hand and the knuckles of her right that were trying to simultaneously clutch the flashlight and act as her front paw. Molly had taken off, her claws echoing down the tunnel until not even the echoes could be heard, and Amy wondered how long this tunnel could possibly be.

She crawled. Pain flared up each time a bony kneecap struck brick, grinding away at the paper-thin skin between the bone and the denim of her jeans. It seemed like she had crawled for miles, and hours. Water dripped in her hair, and on her back. She pushed through spiderwebs, she squished bugs under her hand, she thought she saw a rat scurry off at the sight of the flashlight beam.

She had to stop and rest. She couldn’t take the agony in her knees and fingers. The crawling was pulling and twisting at muscles she hadn’t used since she had learned to walk.

She stopped, pulled up her knees and leaned up against the rusty pipes. She shined the light back the way she came. She could barely see the entrance to the tunnel. She shined it ahead of her. No end in sight. Her knees were wet and dark. Blood. She was turning her kneecaps into hamburger. A cockroach crawled across her lap and she swatted it away. Suddenly the thought struck her, and in that moment, in that place, she believed it fully: she had died back in the RV, and now was in Hell. This is what Hell was, a cramped, dark, cold tunnel that you crawled through forever and ever, grinding away the skin and muscle and bone of your hands and then your arms and then your legs, endless brick that chewed away your body until you were just a helpless lump for the insects and rats to come feed on, forever.

She heard a noise. Behind her, from the direction of the room full of dead. Something was coming. That got her moving again. She crawled, faster than before, shutting out the pain, hoping that whatever was pursuing her was as poorly designed for crawling as she was.

Time stood still. All that existed was the bricks and the darkness and the chilled breaths tearing in and out of her lungs. Scuffling, over bricks, from behind her. No way to tell how far behind. She tried to go faster but she was crawling, and fast crawling was slower than slow walking and as she inched slowly along the tunnel she became sure this was a nightmare, the classic nightmare everyone has about being chased in the dark and you try to run but you can’t—

Suddenly, there was Molly, ahead to her left. Molly barked. There was an intersection in the tunnel, where you could continue straight or turn left. Molly wanted to take the turn and Amy was in no position to argue.

A few feet into the turn, the tunnel came to a dead end. It was blocked by wood, ancient and covered in mildew. Molly scratched at it. Amy crawled up and pushed Molly out of the way. She sat back on her butt and kicked the wooden barrier as hard as she could. It didn’t break but it bounced and cracked.

She pounded it again, and again.

Her pursuer got closer, slithering and slapping at the bricks. She heard it breathing. It would round the corner at any moment—

She screamed like a karate master, lashing out with her exhausted legs, her muddy tennis shoes cracking against the board. And then there was no board, it flew away in one piece, slapping against a tile floor somewhere beyond.

Amy scrambled out, climbed to her feet and immediately fell over, the muscles in her thighs spasming and seizing from the crawl that seemed to have lasted weeks. She forced her way up and swept the flashlight around the room. Next to the tunnel exit she had crawled through was a vending machine, of all things, full of bags of chips and cookies and candy bars. On the other side of it was about three feet of space between it and the wall. She went around, put her back to the machine and her feet on the wall and pushed. It tipped over and landed on its side with a crash that sounded like a building being demolished. It didn’t block the tunnel entirely, but it blocked most of it.

She got back to her feet and picked up the flashlight. There was one door out of the room. She was sure it would be locked, so sure, but it wasn’t and when she pulled it open, she was bathed in light.

And just like that, she was suddenly in a spacious, well-lit office. There were a dozen computer workstations around the room. The computers were new, the desks were ancient. The place was empty but looked like it had been vacated just minutes before; there were half-full cups of coffee sitting around, one chair still had a winter coat draped over the back. A manila folder had been dropped on the floor, spilling printed forms where it landed. A box of donuts had been knocked onto the floor nearby.

Everyone had left in a hurry.

Amy turned back to the door she had just entered, and listened intently. Nothing from the other side. She checked to make sure Molly was in the room with her, then locked the dead bolt. She stood there a few minutes more, listening for the sound of someone or something struggling to push over the vending machine. She heard only her own pounding heart.

Had she really even heard anything in the tunnel? Or was she running from her own echoes? Or a raccoon?

Amy turned her attention back to the room. It was warmer in here, but not room-warm. She did a loop around the room and found a pair of kerosene space heaters that somebody had remembered to turn off when they evacuated. She turned them back on, felt the warm air waft up at her and she just stood there and shivered and wished she had a change of clothes. She smelled like sweat and mold and pee.

There were two doors leading out of the room. She inspected one and found it was locked from the inside, and she decided to leave it that way. The other led to a tiny bathroom that she was shocked to find had running water. She ducked inside and spent several minutes going about the completely unnecessary yet, in that moment, incredibly important task of cleaning herself up. There was a pump with antibacterial soap on the sink and she pulled down her pants and scrubbed the raw skin on her knees. She cleaned her hand and her wrist and her glasses and even got her hair down vaguely into hair shape. She got to where she recognized the face in the medicine cabinet mirror again. It helped.

She emerged from the bathroom and, out loud, asked Molly, “So where are we?”

But that wasn’t hard to figure out, was it? She drew a map in her head of the building and the tunnel thing that ran south toward the hospital. She had taken a left turn and that would put her in the basement of that smaller building behind the asylum. This would have been the administration building, with all of the offices and stuff.

Amy glanced around at the computer workstations and suddenly had a revelation that made her feel like Neo in The Matrix, the first time he realized he had gained the power to stop bullets.

This was the nerve center of the quarantine, before the government abandoned it. And they left their computers behind.

Figuring out which workstation she wanted was an easy choice—there was one that had three monitors attached to it. She held her breath and hit the power button. It came up, and she wondered how much electricity she had—the room had to have been running off of a generator, but the guys in charge of putting gas in it or whatever were gone. There was nothing to do for it, but to work fast.

The system booted and a network password box came up. At this point the question was how many passwords did this system require. There was a big difference between getting through one password and getting through three—getting through three would be much easier.

She was, after all, at the workstation—she wasn’t trying to break in remotely (which she couldn’t do, but she knew people who could) and in the world of computer security there is a threshold of just how many passwords a human can remember. Give them one, and they’re fine. Two, they’re probably still okay. But give them three—say, one for the workstation, another for the network, and a third for whatever application they use—and they’re going to have to start writing them down. She started opening creaky desk drawers and found the big one in the middle contained nothing but a box of ballpoint pens and a single Post-it Note with a list of nonsense words and characters. The first would be the username, the rest would be passwords.

And just like that, she was in. She tried to make sense of what programs they had on their desktop, then noticed something that made her yelp with joy.

This computer has Internet access.

Holy crap. She didn’t even know where to start.

She nervously checked both of the locked doors—still no sounds from the other side—and settled in at the workstation. The first task, she decided, would be to get a sense of the layout of the system, and what exactly she had available to her. She found what they were using for e-mail, and saw tons and tons of messages in the in-box with attachments—status reports and equipment requests and lots of other standardized forms. Bureaucratic spam. There were also long e-mail exchanges about sound—reports and experiment results about frequencies and modulation and terms she had never heard before, like “infrasound.” The staff were sending audio clips back and forth, and huge walls of analytical text referring to them full of technical gibberish. She’d have to set all that aside for now, she could spend weeks trying to get through it all.

She next found a program that, when she clicked on it, took over all three screens, filling them with banks of various camera feeds. Absolutely nothing was going on in most of them—you wouldn’t know they were live if not for the occasional bit of trash that would blow into view—but they were clearly of the exterior of the hospital quarantine.

She got out of that, and found a separate application that gave her a full aerial view of the hospital grounds, rotating slowly just like the gun-camera video Josh had shown her earlier. She was going to hit “Esc” to back out of it, but suddenly had the irrational fear that if she hit the wrong key, she’d see a missile come flying out of the bottom of the screen and blow everybody up. After a little more snooping she found out that the aerial drone thing was controlled elsewhere, which made sense. You wouldn’t control something like that from a keyboard, you’d want a control stick and all that. She was just watching the feed as a spectator—

David.

She saw him, because the camera view swung around and focused on him. She had no control over that, whoever was operating the drone, wherever they were, had done it. The view blinked and zoomed in, then blinked and zoomed in again.

It was David, plain as day, in a standoff with a big guy who looked really mad. They were surrounded by a crowd, next to the huge bonfire Josh had said was some ceremonial thing (and no matter how she looked at it, it really did look like skulls and bones in there). There was radio chatter going back and forth in the video feed, but it was faint and Amy couldn’t make it out word for word. What she was able to gather was that the guy flying the drone was asking for permission to fire from a superior, and then Amy realized that she wasn’t just watching this through a camera, but a gun camera, and that the gun was pointing right at David.

“No! Don’t shoot!” she said, stupidly, at the computer monitor. She had to have some ability to contact them, right? There were landline phones here. And she would say, what? That she was a random girl who sneaked into the REPER command center and that she didn’t want them to shoot her zombie boyfriend? All that would do would alert them to the fact that they had an unauthorized person on their network and that they needed to remotely shut down everything.

On the video feed, the big guy raised a gun, pointing it right at David. The camera view shifted slightly, putting the big guy in the crosshairs.

“Yes! Shoot that guy!”

They didn’t. She picked up enough of the radio chatter to get that the drone pilot (who she gathered went by the code name “Guardian”) had been told to stand by and await further orders. Several excruciating minutes later, David was hauled away and taken inside the hospital building, and the camera view zoomed back out so that it could see the whole yard and, presumably, any zombies who tried to make a run for the fence. The next most likely one to make a run for the fence, however, was David, if she knew him at all. And David was not a zombie. This was not wishful thinking on her part—when David was talking to the big gun guy, he was gesturing and conversing exactly the way David had the last time she had talked to him. David was no more a zombie than he had been two weeks ago, and Amy had faith that the drone operator in fact did not know that. He had been sold the same B.S. that Josh believed, about murderous infected non-humans. Those things did exist—Amy just watched them eat the crew she had ridden down here with. One could burst in that tunnel at any second. But the people inside that fence were people.

And the military was about to bomb them all.

In the end, it took Amy an hour to make the connection. As a hacker, she was a novice, but she knew that by far the most effective way into any system was what hackers called “social engineering.” The biggest weakness in any network is the human beings. It doesn’t matter how many firewalls or passwords you set up, in the end the system was manned by people. Lazy, busy, harried people who when all was said and done, would take the path of least resistance.

Figuring out where the drone pilot was operating from was easy—a Google search told her that Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or UAV pilots operated from only one location—Creech Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Next she went sifting through the e-mail system to see if she could somehow get so lucky as to find e-mails from dronepilotdude@creechairforcebase.mil but there was no such luck. What she did find was a series of e-mails flying back and forth from the day before, with various people clarifying the “ROE” (which she figured out was Rules of Engagement) with the “Zulus” in the quarantine, as apparently the drone had shot a guy who was attempting to climb the fence and Amy gathered from reading fifty or so e-mails that they were supposed to wait until somebody actually got over the first fence before shooting. Somewhere buried in all of these forms she found an “Eyes Only” document that had been sent to the guy who manned this workstation, some kind of after action report on that incident that named the drone operator: a Captain Shane McInnis.

This was part of an e-mail thread that bounced back and forth between people with REPER e-mail addresses. The issue was the kid who had been shot, a twenty-two-year-old male they were referring to only as Patient 2027. She sifted through a bundle of scanned Eyes Only reports, until she found some kind of admission form they were using for the quarantine. Everything was expressed in jargon and acronyms but Amy was able to piece together that the kid had been held only because he was found in proximity to somebody else who was infected—the kid had killed that person with a baseball bat. But the relevant part of the report on the kid himself were these five words that ended the admission form:

“No signs of infection detected.”

Patient 2027 was not a zombie. He was just a kid. And now he was dead.

One thing became clear when following the chain of e-mails on this subject: that particular fact had not been shared outside of a very small group of people in REPER.

Amy looked down at the clock. It was now 4 A.M., which would be two in the morning Nevada time. The shooting happened at 3 P.M. yesterday. Obviously it wasn’t the same guy manning the drone all the time. Did they work some kind of regular shifts? If so, that meant Captain McInnis would be back behind the stick in the morning. It really didn’t matter either way, that name was all she had.

All right. Start simple. Did Captain Shane McInnis have a Facebook page? She searched. Yes, he did. Set to private, which made sense for a guy in that line of work. She could break into that—Facebook’s password reset request form was easy to fool—but she wasn’t sure that’d get her what she wanted. Back to Google. She looked up the schools around where the air force base was located, and searched for anything on Google with the names of the schools and “McInnis” in the same article.

Boom. Nevaeh McInnis, point guard on the middle-school basketball team. Want to bet that’s Captain McInnis’s daughter? Thirteen years old—Amy knew she’d have a Facebook page. Ten seconds later, it was up on her screen. She had left everything public, her pics—including shots of her posing with Dad in a dress uniform—her friends list (there was Dad, listed under “family”). Nevaeh had 132 Facebook friends. Amy sent her a friend request, wondering what time Nevaeh would wake up in the morning to check it. But Nevaeh was apparently a night owl, because even at two in the morning her time, she was up to immediately accept a friend request from a total stranger ten years older than her.

Teenagers.

Five minutes later Amy was chatting with Nevaeh McInnis, and realizing that this was going to have to be handled with some delicacy.

Nevaeh McInnis: who is this?

Amy Sullivan: Hi navaeh, this is going to sound really weird but this is kind of an emergency and we don’t have much time.

Nevaeh McInnis: Nevaeh

Nevaeh McInnis: Not navaeh

Amy Sullivan: Oh sorry

Nevaeh McInnis: its heaven spelled backward

Amy Sullivan: Right its very pretty

Nevaeh McInnis: I cant sleep

Nevaeh McInnis: Chatting with my friend in Taiwan

Amy Sullivan: Anyway this isn’t a scam or anything, I’m not going to ask you for any money or account numbers ok

Nevaeh McInnis: k

Amy Sullivan: And no naked pictures or anything like that

Nevaeh McInnis: I have a friend named Taylor, she’s only a year older than me, and this guy emailed her and offered her a modeling contract and then her mom drove her all the way to LA to have pictures taken, and do you know what happened then?

Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, this is really important. I’m in [Undisclosed] right now. Do you know what that means?

Nevaeh McInnis: omg are you a zombie

Amy Sullivan: No! That’s kind of the point.

Nevaeh McInnis: oh wow dont tell anybody but my dad is in the air force and he flies a robot plane shooting zombies

Amy Sullivan: I know

Amy Sullivan: That’s why I contacted you

Amy Sullivan: I’m here on the ground and so is my boyfriend

Amy Sullivan: And we’re not zombies

Amy Sullivan: But your dad doesn’t know that

Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed

Amy Sullivan: OK is he going to fly the robot tomorrow

Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time

Nevaeh McInnis: i think so

Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, I’m really scared

Amy Sullivan: We’re all scared down here

Amy Sullivan: Because I think they’re going to shoot all of us

Nevaeh McInnis: They won’t do that

Amy Sullivan: I need you to make sure they don’t

Amy Sullivan: I need you to talk to your dad

Nevaeh McInnis: I cant talk to him about his work

Nevaeh McInnis: hes not allowed to talk about it

Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets mad

Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets quiet

Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time

Amy Sullivan: Then you have to let me talk to him

Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed

Amy Sullivan: I just need his e-mail address.

There was a long, long pause without a response. This was the point where any caution young Nevaeh had developed about strangers on the Internet should have triggered her alarm bells. Amy tried to picture the girl on the other end, almost two thousand miles away. She imagined her simply closing her laptop and curling up in bed. Then she imagined her going into her father’s room and trying to wake him up. Then she imagined her calling the police.

Finally, the chat window blinked to life again, and an e-mail address appeared.

It was as simple as pulling up the e-mail that had the attached form with the analysis of Patient 2027, and forwarding it to the personal e-mail account of UAV pilot Captain Shane McInnis. “No signs of infection detected.” The body of Amy’s e-mail was concise and to the point:

Read this. The boy you shot was not a zombie. The people inside the quarantine are not infected. They are people. They are American citizens. You have been lied to.

There were a million things that could go wrong with this—it could wind up in his spam folder, he might not even check his e-mail in the morning before going on duty, he might dismiss it as a hoax. But she couldn’t think of where else to go with it.

All right. What next? After the drones, the other layer of security around the fence was the unmanned gun things. Amy brought up the bank of video screens, which she had figured out were feeds from those guns. Still a whole lot of nothing going on outside the fence, a series of static scenes tinged night-vision green. She spent the next half hour poking around, trying to figure out how the guns worked. They were called Gladiators (long name: Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or TUGVs). They had diesel engines that both turned the wheels when they needed to move and charged onboard generators to keep themselves powered up. Just as with the aerial drone, she hit a brick wall when she tried to find an application that would let her actually control one of them. That was too bad because she had this fantasy about taking one over and just rolling it around the fence, going on a robot shooting spree and taking out all of the others. But, again, she wasn’t thinking—those machines were military, the room she was in was REPER. And no matter how hard she tried, she could not figure out who was operating them.

She was getting frustrated at this point, but she knew that wouldn’t help. This was a system, one set up by people, and it had flaws. What was the flaw here?

Diesel.

The Gladiators (or TUGVs or whatever) needed fuel and that meant they needed people to fuel them. Even if the human operators were on a base in Japan, the refueling job had to be done by people here, on the ground, operating out of this very building. Which meant that there had to be some mechanism by which they could disarm the guns so they wouldn’t get shot when they approached them with gas cans. She just needed to find it. And she would.

From the room behind her came the sound of metal scraping against floor.

Something was pushing the vending machine out of the way.

Amy sprang to her feet. She couldn’t panic. She had a door on the opposite side of the room she could unlock and run through. Where it led, she didn’t know, but she would get there as fast as her feet could carry her.

Molly ran over and faced the door standing between them and the intruder. She let out a low growl. The scraping continued. When it stopped, what replaced it was the sound of something stepping over the vending machine. Then, there was the crunching of glass, something stepping across the shards that had crashed out of the machine when Amy tipped it over.

Amy ran for the opposite door and cranked open the dead bolt. Molly did not move from her spot. Amy was about to call to her when she heard—

“Who’s there?”

A tiny voice, from the room the intruder had entered. It sounded like a little girl, and Amy had the crazy thought that Nevaeh McInnis had somehow teleported in from Nevada.

The little voice said, “Can you unlock the door? Hello?”

Amy cautiously made her way over and said, “Who’s there?”

The voice answered, but Amy couldn’t hear. Then, louder, it said, “What’s your name?”

“My name is Amy. Are you lost, little girl?”

“I’m not little, I’m eight.”

“Who’s with you?”

“It’s just me. Can you let me in? I’m scared.”

Amy glanced back at Molly, who looked as skeptical as a dog can look.

Amy unlocked the door, and opened it just a crack. “Uh, hello. Who are you?”

The little voice said, “Anna.”

2 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I ducked down and banged my head on the window crank on the Caddie’s door. I anticipated the thunder of gunfire and the sound of lead punching holes in the Cadillac’s door panels. Then I realized I may very well hear nothing at all, because John had grossly underestimated the caliber of the sentry guns. The twin barrels on that turret looked big enough to put my thumb into, ready to fire bullets that would effortlessly pierce the thin metal of the Cadillac’s door panels, a microsecond later taking a nice leisurely path through my squishy internal organs.

But the guns did not fire.

John screamed, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

“What? No!”

“We got ’em confused, we have to get out before they get their shit together and turn us into Swiss meat!”

He opened his door and dragged me out. He reached into the backseat and grabbed something—the green mystery box from my toolshed.

We ducked down, putting the Cadillac between us and the gun—not that there wasn’t another, identical gun on the other side—and ran. We hurdled the concrete barrier and there, in front of us, were the woods. Beyond it, a convenience store bathroom that would hopefully take us away from here.

Déjà vu.

Only there were no soldiers chasing us now. No, now there was a crowd of armed townspeople, carrying shotguns and hunting rifles and machetes, half of them running, half of them aiming their guns and drawing down on us. And, unlike the National Guardsmen in those disorganized early hours of the crisis, here were people who knew what a breach in that fence meant. I risked a look back and saw the gaping hole we’d torn in the fence. Red jumpsuits were gathered on the other side, everyone gawking out at the outside world, as if a hole had suddenly been ripped open in the sky.

And then I saw the gathering crowd, onlookers on the other side of the fence—every one of them armed—with the exact same expression on their face. Two sides of a mirror, the same ideas dawning on both sides.

The fence was broken.

The sentry guns were not working.

Everything had changed.

Shots were fired. We plunged into the darkness of the trees, we scrambled across the muddy ditch, we emerged from the other side and ran for BB’s.

Assuming that BB’s is even still there…

It was. And this time, we didn’t even care where the magical shitter door spat us out, as long as it wasn’t here. If the door wasn’t working, if the network of interdimensional wormholes or whatever they were had been shut down by the shadowy fuckers in charge of all of this, then we were dead. We would be torn apart by the mob.

We tumbled into the bathroom and pulled the door closed. A gunshot punched a hole in the door right as the door did its thing and then, we were tumbling—

It was a baffling sensation. The whole world turned, like we were on an amusement park ride. I fell on top of John, both of us suddenly flat on our backs. The door that had been in front of us was now on top of us, we were looking up at it. I got a leg untangled from John and kicked the door. I was looking up at an overcast sky. I pulled myself out and realized I was emerging from the ground, like a vampire rising from his coffin after sundown. Boards and bricks and broken glass covered the grass around me. I climbed out, and looming above me was the old Ffirth Asylum. There was a huge hole in the wall, the debris of which was scattered all around me. We had teleported less than half a mile away. We were alone for the moment, but could hear the shouts of the mob down the street.

I stumbled out onto the wreckage and John emerged behind me. He stared down at the hole we had come from, confused, and then closed the door I had thrown open. I saw that the door and its frame were in fact laying loose on the ground, flung aside when the blast destroyed the wall. When John picked up the door again, underneath was just dead grass.

John said, “Shit, I left my shotgun shells back at the Caddie.”

I took a breath and said, “Look… you remember when we watched Star Wars with Amy? And she’s like, ‘Why is Princess Leia being such a bitch when those guys just rescued her?’ Well I don’t want to be the Leia in this situation and I completely appreciate what a sweet ramp job that was back there. But did you have any kind of a plan at all?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Because time is running out here…”

John was looking up at the old building, staring hard at the mossy brick walls.

I said, “What?”

“I took some Soy Sauce earlier.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. And I came by here.”

“Okay…”

“And… there were shadows here.”

I followed his gaze. The rows of windows in the moldy brick were boarded over with ancient, warped plywood. It kind of made it seem like the building had cataracts. I saw no shadow people.

I said, “Do you see any now?”

“No.”

He turned and saw something else, though, and said, “Here,” handing me the green mystery box. He jogged away from me, heading for the corner of the building. I spotted the ass of an RV parked there. I followed him. Faint shouts from the armed mob were growing louder.

“John! What are you—”

My words died at the sight of bloodstained grass surrounding the loose earth of a huge, freshly filled-in hole. Like a mass grave. John pulled out his ridiculous customized shotgun (he had it wedged down the back of his pants) and ducked into the RV. The windshield was busted out and when I followed John through the driver’s-side door, I saw that the tan upholstery of the driver’s seat was one big bloodstain.

Christ.

Leading with the shotgun, John quickly searched the inside. There were rows of hooks on the opposite wall that it took me a moment to realize were gun racks, all of which were now empty. John started throwing open foot lockers and found them stocked with at least four different types of ammunition.

“Bingo,” he said, stuffing his pockets with shotgun shells. “See? Things have a way of working out. We needed shells, and here they are.”

I looked around. On the floor was a busted laptop computer. At the very back, the floor was damp and it smelled like piss. There didn’t seem to be anything of use here other than the bullets—

I froze.

“Oh, no. Oh, fuck no. No, no, no…”

John joined me and said, “What? I think these were…” but his words trailed off. He saw what I saw.

Two objects, that a man in denial could have dismissed as meaningless: a mostly empty tub of red licorice, and an orthopedic pillow designed for people with back problems.

Amy.

It really only told me what I already knew. She’d come for me, because that’s who she was, and she’d find a way in, because she was too capable not to.

John glanced nervously out of a side window. The mob would wash in at any moment. He was saying, “Okay, we don’t know this was hers. And even if it was, we do know that isn’t her blood in the driver’s seat. Amy can’t drive…” but I was already jumping out of the RV. Outside, I immediately I saw another, smaller bloodstain, this one in the grass in front of an open basement window. Laying in it was a single empty shoe. A man’s.

I said, “Amy got somebody to give her a ride in. So they pulled up, something nasty came flying out of that window down there, and they killed the shit out of it. Look—next to the window. Spent shotgun shell. Maybe it got the driver first. Then the rest of the posse in the RV, and Amy if she was with them, they bail out and go inside. Probably in there right now. Then a hobo came along and pissed in the RV.”

“Dave, why would they—”

Ignoring him, I leaned my head down toward the basement window and yelled, “AMY! HEY! AMY? IT’S DAVE.” Nothing. “ANYBODY? IS THERE ANYBODY IN THERE?”

A shot was fired. A bullet took a chip out of the wall. We ducked and John grabbed my sleeve, yanking me around the corner, toward the front door. Neither one of us had to debate the merits of getting down and crawling through that basement window. That violated two rules of living in Undisclosed: 1) never put yourself in a spot where you don’t have an open, and fast, means of escape, and 2) don’t go through any entrance that has a huge goddamned bloodstain in front of it.

We reached the front door and John said, “Plug your ears.” He pointed the shotgun at the locks on the front door and blew a grapefruit-sized hole in the wood. We pushed our way inside.

105 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

It appeared the feds left behind anything that would take more than five minutes to load onto a truck. Boxes of medical supplies and biohazard suits and filters for biohazard suits and every other thing lined the main hallway, abandoned in the evacuation. Halogen work lamps were set up on stands here and there, a few of them still on, blasting bluish beams through the shadows of the huge corpse of a building. We pushed the front door closed and dragged a huge metal cabinet in front of it.

Out of breath, I said, “We could have relocked that door but somebody blew a hole in it.”

“I’m sorry, princess.”

“And by the way, those shotgun shells in the RV? They weren’t there waiting for us because a guardian angel dropped them from the sky because you needed help. They were there because somebody else, somebody who believed in being prepared, paid for them with their own money. Keep that in mind the next time you get yourself in a bind and somebody is there for you with bail money or a sofa to sleep on. It isn’t providence. It’s generous people who work hard jobs to buy things you can take.”

We were jogging down a main hallway now, heading deeper into the building. John said, “Search one of these crates. See if you can find some fucking antidepressants.”

“All right, all right—”

“Seriously, it’s an emergency. I’ll cram them down the barrel of the gun and blow them right into your brain.”

We moved in silence for a moment and I said, “How did we screw this all up so badly, John?”

He shook his head. “We always find a way.”

We had to stop to climb over a knocked-over pile of plastic storage bins in the hall. I said, “Damn, the feds left in a hurry. They got overrun? By infected?”

“Not exactly. I told you Falconer had to spring me out of here, we had to blow a huge hole in the wall to do it. They had us in like a big gymnasium and we saw a couple of liquid oxygen tanks along the wall and we’re like, ‘Let’s blow that shit up and get the hell out of here.’ It worked but I guess in the confusion a bunch of the infected they were holding here got loose and they decided to just leave town and let the situation sort itself out.”

“Wait, you’re the reason the feds abandoned ship? Jesus, John.”

“Well I feel like it’s their fault for trying to hold me. They should have known that shit comes with consequences.”

John clicked three shells into his ridiculous tri-barreled shotgun, glancing nervously back toward the front doors. Nobody came crashing through. Wait, was the armed, angry mob scared to come in here? That couldn’t be a good fucking sign.

“AMY? ANYBODY?”

Echoes bounced off moldy walls. The building seemed five times bigger on the inside. It had the tangled floor plan common to all hospitals, seemingly designed by someone who believed in the healing power of watching confused visitors aimlessly wander around hallways. It didn’t help that all signage in the place had faded, or been stolen, or painted over with graffiti. We came to a “T” in the hall.

I said, “Which way?”

“When I was here earlier I—HEY!”

John took off running to his right. I followed, the heavy green mystery box banging off my legs as I ran. I considered dropping the stupid thing.

“What? What did you see? John!”

We skidded to a stop at the end of the hall.

“I saw somebody.”

“Was it a… person?”

He shook his head, in a way that meant he didn’t know.

“Are you sure you saw them?”

“Is that an elevator?” It was. Down at the end of the hall. The doors were closed. “Probably no power to it though, right?”

I said, “I think you might be wrong. I rode in it. They had me down in the basement for a while.”

“They did? You didn’t tell me that. What’s down there? Surely nothing worth complaining about, or else you would have brought it up by now.”

“Don’t know. They had me knocked out the whole time and then put a bag on my head when they hauled me out to go to quarantine. I don’t want to shake your faith in government but I’m thinking this REPER is kind of a shady operation. Find the stairs.”

There was no need to debate getting on the elevator, thanks to rule number one I mentioned just a moment ago. You get on one of those things, and you’re sealed up and somebody else is controlling where you go. All of these rules were learned from terrible experience.

John said, “Boom. Stairs. Right over there.”

We jogged toward the stairwell door and at the exact moment John’s hand grabbed the handle, the elevator dinged behind us. We heard the doors slide open.

From behind us, a tiny voice said, “Walt?”

90 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I very nearly pissed my pants. John saw the look on my face and spun around with the shotgun. He led the way, and we inched toward the now-open elevator. Inside was a little girl. Long, black, straight hair. She wore a filthy nightgown.

John said, “Holy shit. What are you doing here?”

I said, “John, back up…”

The little girl looked at me and said, “Don’t be scared.”

“Anna?”

She nodded.

John said, “You know her?”

“Don’t lower the gun, John.”

“Do you want to hold it? I’m not pointing a shotgun at a toddler.”

Anna said, “Why are there so many holes on that gun?”

I said, “What do you want?”

“I can take you to see Amy.”

“Is she here?”

Anna nodded, silently.

John and I exchanged a look.

Quietly, he said, “Okay, I admit she’s pretty creepy.”

I whispered, “Man, if this was a horror movie the audience would be screaming for us to get the fuck out of here.”

“Well, they’d be thinking it. They wouldn’t scream it unless they were bla—”

“She’s downstairs,” interrupted Anna. “Your dog is here, too. Get in.”

John said, “Uh, no. If we go down, we take the stairs.”

Anna shook her head. “There are no lights in the stairs. We should stay away from the dark.”

I swallowed and said, “Because of the shadow man.”

She nodded. John whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

To John, I said, “I’m gonna leave it up to you.”

He clearly had no idea. This was so obviously a trap. And we so obviously had nowhere else to go.

John asked Anna, “Where is she? What floor?”

“The second basement. Mr. Bear is down there, keeping a lookout.”

“Okay, and is Mr. Bear a—”

“It’s a stuffed bear,” I said, answering for her.

“Right.” John said to me, “We do it this way. You wait here. For two minutes. I’m taking the stairs. If there is something waiting for us, I’ll find out how it likes buckshot. Then you head down on the elevator and I’ll meet you there. Then if she, uh, attacks you, you only have to last for two floors. Against a toddler.”

Anna said, “I think we should all ride together.”

John was already heading to the stairs. I took a breath, steeled myself, and stepped into the elevator with Anna. I hovered my finger over the “B2” button, and counted to a hundred. I braced myself for the sound of shotgun blasts, or screams, or anything.

Nothing.

I hit the button.

The door closed.

Anna stood to my left, motionless, looking forward the way people do on elevators. The elevator rumbled and we were heading down, and down. A tiny, soft, warm hand curled around mine. I looked down at Anna and she smiled up at me.

We jolted to a stop.

The light went off.

The little fingers squeezed around mine. I slapped at the door and yelled, “JOHN! HEY!”

No answer. Anna’s hand squeezed tighter. Strong. Too strong.

I punched buttons on the panel. Nothing. I kicked at the door. I tried to pull my hand away from Anna’s grip and I couldn’t.

The fingers changed. I felt them melt under my grip, fusing together, becoming something like a snake or a tentacle—

The light blinked on. I wheeled on Anna and she was just a little girl with little girl hands.

She said, “The lights do that sometimes.”

I stared hard at her. Her eyes were the picture of innocence. The door opened, and John was there, aiming a shotgun at my face.

I said, “Don’t shoot. The, uh, light went off. We all clear here?”

“Yeah.”

Anna led the way out of the elevator, stopping to pick up a teddy bear that looked like it had been bought and sold in three different garage sales over twenty years. She clutched it and headed down the hall.

I recognized the corridor and the rust-pitted steel doors, and the smell of shit. I followed Anna and John followed me. He had the shotgun by his ear, aimed at the ceiling, trying to look in every direction at once.

We turned a corner, passing more doors. We reached the end of the hall and a bullet-riddled maintenance door that had been barricaded from this side, metal bars laid over it with fresh welds locking them in place. There were empty bags of cement and masonry tools scattered around the hall, and I wondered if on the other side of that door I would find a steam tunnel sealed with fresh brick and concrete.

Anna turned left, down another hall. Then it was through a doorway marked ANNEX, which opened to an impossibly long hallway that seemed too long for the building. We headed down, our footsteps echoing endlessly in both directions. The walls were covered with a faded mural, depicting huge, smiling faces that may have been clowns or mimes. Time and moisture had peeled the paint in patches, so that huge swaths of the colorful landscape were corroded and eaten away, the smiling inhabitants unaware that the very fabric of their world was crumbling. Graffiti artists had painted signatures and anarchy signs and cocks. Along the wall to my left, in huge letters, was the phrase:

THE END IS NOT NEAR

IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED

WE JUST DIDN’T CARE

Anna looked back and me, and smiled. Invisible ants raced up my back.

I glanced back at John and saw on his face that he had already realized that what was up there, whatever it was, was not Amy. What was up there was bad news, and it was only a matter of how we would deal with it. We were not in control of the situation. We were never in control. The last of the working emergency lights was only halfway down the hall, and the light faded long before we reached the end. Our own echoes followed us down, and down, into the darkness. Anna slowed down and I once again felt the tiny, warm hand in mine. We walked together and at the end of the dark hall I could see a closed door, with light pouring from the bottom. Just like people describe in near-death experiences—the long passage with a door of light at the end.

“Amy is in there,” whispered Anna. And in that moment, I decided that this was probably right, but not in a literal way. Whatever was waiting behind that door was, almost certainly, the quickest way to see Amy. Or at least, to join her, if there is no such thing as seeing in that place.

We reached the door. Anna let go of my hand and said, “It’s locked. Only she can open it. Call for her.”

I said, “Amy?” but thought it was too soft for even Anna to hear. I cleared my throat and said it louder.

In that moment, I realized I was smelling something, a scent totally out of place in this rotting, forgotten building. A scent I had smelled a hundred times before, one that was sparking memories that triggered a wave of sadness.

I heard the latch turning on the door.

70 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

The smell was microwave popcorn.

The door opened and there was Amy, her handless left arm curled around said bag of popcorn. Her eyes got huge behind her glasses and then her arms were around me and we were crushing a popcorn bag between us. She was sobbing and pressing her face into my chest so hard her glasses had gone askew. I squeezed her and ran my hand through her hair and whispered to her that it was all right, that everything was all right.

I have no idea how long we stood there like that, or how long John and Anna stood there and waited. All I could think was how much I wished, for the second time, we could just freeze a moment and run credits over it.

John said, “Sorry that took so long. I had to ramp something.”

Amy pulled away and wiped her eyes and said, “Oh my God you won’t believe what I just did. I got hungry and I used a microwave to make this and it tripped a breaker that I guess runs out to the generator and if the computers had been on that same breaker we would have lost everything.”

She gathered herself and said to John, “I never doubted you.”

John said, “Now there’s a lie. But I don’t blame you.”

I said, “Shit, I’m still doubting him.”

Amy looked down at Anna and said, “You and Mr. Bear did good. We’re all here. Even Molly’s here.”

She was. Curled up on the floor, under a desk. Holy shit did that dog get around.

“How did she—”

I was talking to Amy’s back. She was scurrying across the room to a desk where she had set up no fewer than five computer monitors and three keyboards. There was a box of donuts and a pot of coffee going. It looked like she’d been working here for a week.

Amy said, “Okay, this setup looks ridiculous but I finally figured out they had different parts of the security set up on different workstations and there was no way to monitor them all without running back and forth across the room. I had to crawl around and reroute network cables and—anyway, all of the security robots around the quarantine are offline, they’re in maintenance mode and as far as I know they can’t be reset remotely, so that should be taken care of. The UAVs, the drone things, I think they’re okay. It’s—it’d take a long time to explain but I e-mailed a guy and got that taken care of. All that is the good news. The bad news is—wait, the good news is that I know how they’re blocking the cell phone signals, it’s not done through the provider level or anything, they have a jammer somewhere, probably outside of city limits, it’s a big thing called a warlock jammer, a TRJ-89, it sits on the back of a truck. The bad news is that I can’t shut it down from here. There’s an actual crew manning it, that’s why I think it’s outside of town because REPER pulled all of their staff out beyond city limits but they’re still manning the jammer because it’s really, really important that nobody in town be able to call out until they drop the bombs.”

Amy stuffed a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

I said, “Right, they’re going to bomb the quarantine at noon.”

She shook her head so hard that her hair went slapping around her cheeks.

Around a mouthful of chewed popcorn she said, “Huh uh. They’re going to bomb the whole town.”

1 Hour Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John said, “Even that Cuban sandwich place?”

She nodded. “An hour from now.”

I said, “Bullshit. They can’t get away with bombing an entire city. What are they gonna do, claim an asteroid fell on it?”

Amy looked surprised, and said, “David, you don’t understand what it’s been like out there, out in the real world. Everything has been just totally cut off from the town. Everything the world knows about what’s going on in [Undisclosed] is based one hundred percent on what REPER has told them. They don’t have to claim it’s anything. The whole country is begging them to do it. Here. Look. This was twenty minutes ago.”

She spun around to face one of her monitors and brought up a video clip, from one of the network news sites. It was a group of haggard-looking middle-aged men, facing a bank of microphones. And there, among them, was my shrink. Dr. Bob Tennet.

The first guy, introduced as the head of the outbreak task force, spoke and confirmed that they had in fact been given permission by the president of the United States to use military assets to “disinfect” the entirety of Outbreak Ground Zero, and that this would proceed as soon as it could be confirmed that all military and REPER personnel were clear of the area.

I pointed to Tennet standing in the back and said, “You see that guy back there, with the Caesar haircut? That’s my therapist.”

“But why would he be—”

“It was all part of the setup. He works for Them.”

“Who? Oh, you mean capital ‘T’ Them.”

John said, “He’s talking.”

On the video, Tennet strode up to the microphone, his title displayed as DR. TENNET, CONSULTANT, REPER.

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary, I’ll be brief. You’ve all come to know me over these trying days, and I’ve found myself in the unexpected position of relaying to the public the serious nature of this threat with what I hope you appreciate as frankness, honesty and transparency, while trying to ensure that caution did not turn into panic. What I have been saying from day one continues to be just as true now, if not more so: fear is the most dangerous contagious disease.

“So with that, I want to address the question a moment ago about deaths resulting from the bombardment, that is, the thermobaric disinfection of the affected area that Secretary Fernandez just explained, which will, as he said, commence at noon local time. This needs to be made perfectly clear, for you here, for those watching this on the news, and for our children and grandchildren who will try to understand this act when it passes into the pages of history books. As far as we know, there is no one left alive in the city of [Undisclosed]. As you know, the National Guard and multiple agencies including the CDC, FEMA and REPER took decisive coordinated action to create a buffer around the city, a five-mile band that we referred to as the Yellow Zone but in the news media has been unfortunately redubbed the Dead Zone. In this, we were successful, and we may never know how many lives were saved by moving rapidly and decisively to isolate the infection zone.

“However, efforts to stop the spread of the contagion, which has colloquially become known as the Zulu Parasite, within the city itself have utterly failed. The infection rate within city limits is now at or near one hundred percent. This operation is about the disposal and disinfection of tens of thousands of highly—highly—infectious corpses. Now, I have worked very hard all week to shoot down the more outlandish rumors that have spread about the parasite, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life doing the same. That is the nature of that contagion we call paranoia. But the situation is this. Whatever residents of [Undisclosed] are still walking and moving, are, for all intents and purposes, effectively dead. We have explained this ad nauseum; the parasite completely breaks down and effectively rewires the victim’s brain tissue. The victims retain some basic motor control and become extremely, extremely violent as the parasite continues to corrupt the central nervous system. From then, until the victim is finally rendered immobile, they are highly, highly contagious. This stage of the disease is what has unfortunately led to some of the more sensationalist rumors of ‘zombies’ and the like. But I want to make it perfectly clear: these are nothing more than people who, after death, are able to remain mobile, dangerous and infectious.”

John said, “Well, that should put everybody at ease.”

I snorted.

Amy said, “I wasn’t even paying attention, all I can picture is you having sex with him.”

John said, “What?”

Tennet was still talking:

“… which is what makes the situation so exceptionally dangerous if we don’t completely eliminate the threat using all means available to us. The sights and the sounds of this terrible, but necessary, process, will be shocking. This is something none of us wanted to see happen in an American city. But let me make it clear now, and for all time: we are only disposing of the dead. Nothing more. Thank you.”

John pointed at the screen and said, “You notice they even started using a ‘Z’ word to describe the parasite? Might as well have called it the ‘Zombie Virus.’”

I shook my head. “Son of a bitch. Marconi was right. That panic is just going to ripple out, like splashing a rock in a pond.”

John said, “What do we do?”

I said, “We get the hell out of town and find some other place to live. Man, I wonder if the insurance will pay for my house getting bombed…”

Amy said, “David, we can’t let them do this.”

“Babe, I don’t think there’s a choice. They set it up so that it would be the only option. If they don’t scour this town off the face of the earth, then people will never be satisfied. People will be killing each other in the streets, a new panic set off every time a normal-looking person monsters out. It’s shitty that they’ll get what they want, but… this is kind of checkmate. They kill [Undisclosed], or the world kills itself.”

John said, “‘They.’ What a bunch of assholes.”

Anna walked up beside Amy.

“Can I have some of your popcorn?”

“You can have the bag, honey. Sorry it kind of got squished.”

“It’s okay.”

Damn, that was a creepy kid.

To Amy, John said, “You’ve got working e-mail there? Can’t you send a message to the New York Times or somebody? Telling them what’s going on?”

“Oh, I did. I also found out that the news channels and all the big papers were getting over a hundred thousand messages a day from zombie cranks and apocalypse crazies and everybody else. Mine will be one more in the pile. Maybe some intern will get to it six months from now. Maybe it’ll mean something to the town they build on top of the ashes of this one.”

I said, “Damn, girl, you got cynical in the last couple of weeks.” She didn’t smile. I read something in her face and said, “Wait a second. How did you get here? Did you come in on that RV?”

She nodded. “I came down with some guys. Hipsters who thought they were going to come down and shoot zombies and have future high schools named after them.”

“They, uh, didn’t make it, did they?”

She shook her head.

“Jesus, Amy. Nobody else made it?”

She shook her head again.

I went to her and hugged her again. “How the hell did you get away?”

She couldn’t answer. Instead, she pulled away and said, “It really is perfect the way they set this up. It brought everybody’s worst fears out of the woodwork, and every little thing the government said made it just a little bit worse. It was all there, David. Under the surface. They just came along and pricked everybody’s balloon.”

I said, “Well, it doesn’t change anything. Our mission is to get the hell out of here. Then if, you know, they drop the bombs, that sucks, but all we can do is tell the world what we know.”

Amy stood up and brushed a dozen pieces of dropped popcorn off her lap.

She said, “What are we waiting for?”

I gestured toward Anna and said, “What do we do with her? We don’t have time to find—”

“Where’d she go?” John was looking around the room.

I said, “She was right he—”

The lights went out.

“Damn it! I knew she was a monster! John! Amy! Listen! Guard your buttholes.”

I heard John knocking objects off a nearby table, blindly grabbing for his shotgun.

From the pitch blackness, Amy said, “Calm down, it’s probably just the generator. It probably just ran out of gas.” She shouted, “Anna? Honey? Are you okay?”

I heard the click of a door lock.

Molly started barking.

“Somebody’s leaving! Who’s leaving? I heard the door!”

John said, “I got the shotgun. Somebody look for a flashlight.”

“Anna? Are you in here? It’s okay, honey, don’t be afraid.”

I said, “That’s right, little girl. Everything is fine. Come… get in front of John’s shotgun.”

Something long and slim and warm slid into my palm. It had bumpy ridges, like an earthworm. It slipped through my hand and around my wrist and forearm.

I yelled and yanked my hand away but the thing—the Anna thing, in its true form—held fast. It slithered around my elbow and came to rest under my armpit. Then another tentacle was wrapping around my knee. I made panicked, cursing noises and stumbled backward.

“DAVE! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU?!”

I went to the floor. There was a crash in the darkness, presumably John tripping over a chair while blindly flailing to my rescue.

Amy screamed. “DAVID!”

“IT’S GOT ME! SHE’S GOT ME!”

I kicked and thrashed and the bundle of flexing tentacles slipped around my abdomen. And then, around my neck.

I threw myself to my feet, and tried to find a wall to slam into, to crush it. I wound up flinging myself through thin air, tripping over a box.

The monster was shrieking in my ear. I pulled at the limb around my neck but it was strong, so freaking strong.

Everybody was yelling, but I could hear nothing over the screeching that was turning into an ice pick in my ear. Then, there was a crash from the room next to us, metal and glass like something big and heavy had been knocked over. Amy screamed. Molly barked.

I got to my feet once more, wearing the Anna monster like a writhing backpack. I found a wall and slammed backward into it.

It didn’t budge. Somebody was screaming my name.

I heard a door burst open.

“ANNA!”

This was a new voice, a man’s voice, with an accent.

A blast of light flooded the room. Everyone froze.

Standing in the doorway was a Latino guy who I thought looked like Marc Anthony. I knew I had seen him before but in my state of panic, couldn’t place where. He was holding a huge flashlight and he whipped it around the room, first finding Amy, who was still standing next to the dead computer and squinting at the sudden brightness. Then he spotlighted John, who was pointing his shotgun right at my face.

Then the light found me, and I felt the tentacle loosen from around my neck. The Anna thing slithered to the floor, and in the harsh shadows of the beam I saw a filthy nightgown tangled around a nightmare wad of tentacles that looked like they were made of knotted clumps of black hair. Somewhere in the center of it was a pair of eyes on either side of a sideways mouth and clicking mandibles.

The man with the flashlight said, “Anna. Are you okay?”

The tentacles started twisting and bundling together, fusing and melting and re-forming. In a few seconds, there was the little girl again. She straightened her nightgown and sniffled and started crying.

The man said again, “Are you okay?”

Anna shook her head.

“No, you’re all right.”

In the shadows I could see John looking back and forth, between me, the guy, and Anna. He was still pointing the shotgun at me, he realized, and he pointed it at the floor instead.

To me, the guy said, “Are you all right? You’re David, right?”

“She… turned into a… thing…”

“I know that. Did she hurt you?”

“The light went off and she got me around the neck…”

“Did she hurt you?”

“No.”

Anna sobbed and said, “He hurt me!”

The guy said, “Now Anna, you scared him. You turned and you scared him.”

“I didn’t mean to! The lights went out and I c-couldn’t h-help it…”

“Anna, you need to say you’re sorry to David.”

Anna did not agree with this.

“Anna…”

She defiantly said, “I’m sorry.”

To me, he said, “Do you accept her apology, as heartfelt as it clearly wasn’t?”

I had no words. “I… she turned into a… thing…”

Anna started crying in earnest once more. Amy said, “Hey. David.” I turned and out of the darkness, an object came hurtling toward me. I flinched, threw up my hands and squealed. A filthy, stuffed bear bounced off my gut.

I found it on the floor. Handling it like I was passing a piece of meat into a tiger cage, I kneeled and extended the bear toward Anna.

She flung herself toward me, utilizing her preternatural, little-girl speed. I had no time to react. She flew at me, and threw her arms around my neck. She pressed her wet face against mine and hugged me. She said, “I’m sorry I scared you, Walt.”

“It’s, uh, okay.” I put an arm around her, and for the tenth time in a week felt like I had become numb to the ridiculous.

Anna pried herself away from me, plucked Mr. Bear from my hands and navigated her way through the wrecked room, over to the flashlight man. He kneeled down to catch her, and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

I said, “I… don’t understand. Is she…”

“This is my daughter, Anna. She’s eight years old.”

“And you are…”

“I’m Carlos.”

50 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John, reading the expression on my face, said, “You two know each other?”

Carlos answered for me, saying, “We were over in quarantine together.”

I said, “And you are… you’re like her? Right?”

“No. Not like her. What I mean is, she’s not like me. She won’t hurt you. She hasn’t hurt anybody. Not like me.”

“So, you are the one who—”

“Not in front of her. But yes.”

“But you want us to believe that we’re safe. From you, I mean.”

“There is a lot about this situation that you do not understand. In quarantine, they were using you to sort the infected from uninfected, right? But you can’t really do it. Not like I can. Me, I can see them, as easy as telling man from woman. I can see it at a glance.”

“All right. But I don’t under—”

“There isn’t time. Let me just say that… I can tell you what I know, but you don’t want to know it. About who is and isn’t infected, I mean. And when I say you don’t want to know, I’m not trying to up the suspense. I am saying that you don’t want to know. It won’t make doing what you need to do any easier. It won’t make it easier for you to live in the world.”

I started to ask a question, but stopped myself. I tried to absorb what he was saying. Finally, I said, “Dr. Marconi… he, uh, hinted to me that there may be more infected than everybody thinks.”

“Let’s say he’s right. Let’s say he’s really, really right. Now we got to ask ourselves what that word means. ‘Infected.’ Infected like me? Or like my Anna here?”

I had no answer. I tried to weigh the implications of this, and couldn’t begin to. Molly had joined Anna, and the little girl was scratching her behind the ears.

“Or infected like Dr. Bob Tennet.”

“You mean he’s—”

“He’s something else altogether. When I look at him, you know what I see? A black cloud. I don’t even see a man. Do you understand what I’m saying? He’s not a man. And maybe neither am I and maybe that doesn’t mean anything anymore. But I’m going to say this to you, David, and to your friends here—Tennet is more dangerous than a million of me. He and the people he works for, they figured out how to use a signal, inaudible sound waves, to affect people like me. Turn us, make us lose control. I’m telling you, when left to myself, I can control it. The parasite, it whispers in my ear but I can overcome it. You just got to have the will, to put that cockroach in its place.”

I said, “So we’re supposed to just turn our backs on you and walk out. Knowing all of the people who are—” I glanced down at Anna “—who are, uh, gone, because of you. I’m supposed to just let that go. And you’re going to just, what, go back to work next week? Everything back the way it was?”

“I’m all she’s got. Her mother is gone. And she has to deal with her… condition on top of that. Well, she’s going to have a life, the life a little girl should have. And she’s going to learn how to live with this. Who else is going to teach her? Who else will understand?”

He nodded at John and said, “So, what, you want your friend to shoot me with his sawed-off five-barrel shotgun? And then Anna either gets rounded up by the government and dissected in a laboratory, or torn to pieces by that mob out there? No, you won’t do that to her. I know you won’t.”

I groaned and rubbed my forehead.

John said, “Okay, can somebody quickly just summarize for the shotgun department who it’s okay and not okay to shoot?”

Carlos said, “The world doesn’t make it that simple for us, friend.”

I said, “Yeah, if somebody tries to make a video game based on this situation, I’m telling you right now I’m not fucking buying it.”

Carlos stood, and took Anna’s hand in his own.

I said, “And I still don’t… I mean, I didn’t think children could get infected.”

“Dummy, she’s not infected like the rest. She’s been this way for years. This isn’t new. How can you, of all people, not know that?”

“I… I guess I…”

John said, “Well, I’m lost.”

I said, “Marconi. He had infected patients he was studying, but he had this theory that some of them would literally never turn, that the parasite could just… live there.”

John said, “So, what, we just accept that? These invisible bugs multiplying inside people and we just shrug and move on? Knowing that any day any random person can just murder the shit out of a roomful of people?”

Carlos just shrugged and said, “That’s been the situation for longer than you know. Way longer. And you need to ask yourself, are you even sure all of you are uninfected?”

Amy said, “We’re sure.”

“Are you? Your man there, he spent a lot of time in town, in quarantine, in the basement of this place. He can’t even account for his own whereabouts for the last week or so. You a hundred percent sure he came out of all that clean?”

John shrugged and said, “Eh, he wasn’t all that clean before. No offense, Dave.”

“Fuck you, John.”

To Amy, Carlos said, “I’m not joking, you know. How would you truly know—”

I said, “She knows what I am.”

“But if you were infected you would deny it—”

“Carlos. She knows what I am.”

Silence. Then he nodded and said, “All right, then. Now are you going to let my Anna, and all the rest like her, get burned up in the hellfire they rain down on this place?”

Amy said, “We have to stop the bombs.”

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. “How can that possibly be our responsibility?”

John said, “There’s a way. Everything Tennet said in his press conference is bullshit. The streets out there aren’t full of shambling hordes. They’re full of all-American types carrying hunting rifles and protecting women and children. The reason Tennet had to lie is because he knew he’d never sell the public on those people being zombies. We just got to show them.”

I said, “And then when those all-American Joes get out, and some of them fucking turn into monsters, what happens then?”

Amy said, “Then we will once again err on the side of not letting people be murdered. You take the choice in front of you. And then you keep picking the non-murder choice as long as you can.”

I said, “And that is why I wanted you to stay home.”

John said, “We have to shut down their cell phone jammer. Twenty-thousand cell phones and cameras and Internet connections will suddenly blink to life. Then people can call and e-mail and upload videos and that’ll be that, the lid will be off their whole charade.”

It took me a moment to figure out what John had said because he pronounced it “sha-rod.”

Amy said, “Then the president will realize he can’t bomb the town without losing a bunch of votes next election.”

I said, “Setting aside the fact that we now have less than an hour to accomplish this, and that we’ll be gunned down the moment we set foot outside this building, do you have any way to find out where the jammer even is?”

“Well, I think there’s only one place it can be. It needs line of sight, right?”

“Okay.”

“So it needs to be someplace high. The highest point they can get it.”

“Where’s that?”

“Well it’d be somewhere around the water tower, right? For the same reason.”

“The water tower needs line of sight?”

“It needs to be at the highest point.”

“Oh.”

“Because the gravity pushes the water down and that’s what makes the water come out of your faucet.”

“Yes. Right. I absolutely knew that before right now.”

John said, “Shit, we saw it. That big-ass black semi they had parked out there. They had it in place the first day. So, fine, let’s go fuck that shit up.”

To Carlos, Amy said, “Can you lead us out of here? We don’t have a flashlight.”

45 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We spilled out of the elevator onto the first floor. Carlos and Anna stayed behind, Carlos holding the door open.

I said, “I don’t want this to come off as a lack of confidence on my part, but you might consider trying to get out of town. Just, you know, on the tiny chance that the three of us are unable to thwart the plans of the most powerful fighting force on the planet.”

Carlos shook his head. “Got people I can’t leave behind. We’re all counting on you now. Including little Anna here.”

Goddamnit.

We turned and headed for the front door. I noticed that Molly stayed behind with Anna. I wondered if she hadn’t chosen the better team.

In the lobby, John said, “Stop.” To Amy, he said, “We need you to open the box for us.”

I said, “No. Oh, no.”

“We got no choice, Dave.”

“Absolutely not, John. I thought we were toting this around just to make sure the bad guys didn’t get it. It would be irresponsible to—”

“To what? Risk damaging something? Dave, they’re going to blow all this to hell. If there was ever a time to use… it, this is that time.”

I reluctantly sat the green mystery box on the floor.

Outside, thunder rumbled.

To John, I said, “I can’t see the latch. Can you?”

“Yeah, I can now.”

I said before that there was no visible latch or lock on the box. That was true. But there was an invisible one. I stared at the front of the box, and focused. If I stared hard enough, a simple lever swam into view. It had been a long time since I’d taken Soy Sauce. I assumed John could see it clearly.

You may have heard about amputees feeling a “phantom limb” beyond their stump, the nervous system sending back false reports that gives the illusion that the appendage is still there. Well, if John looked at Amy’s missing hand, he would see a literal phantom limb, a translucent hand. If she closed her eyes and concentrated on opening and closing the hand, and flexing the fingers, John—and anyone else under the influence of Soy Sauce—would see the fingers flex. Even though Amy herself would probably not. Amy’s abilities came and went, she had never taken the Sauce but I think she caught some effects from me due to, uh, transfer of bodily fluids.

She squinted and said, “I can see the latch, but just barely. It’s just a shimmer, like the Predator.”

Amy had done the trick with the box lever once before. She leaned over and, to an outside observer, held the stump of her left wrist a few inches from the box. To John’s eyes, her phantom hand grasped the hidden lever and pulled.

A click. The lid rose slowly, on its own.

Inside the box was what looked like a gray lump of fur the size of a football. It was actually metal, and the “fur” was thousands of rigid metal strands, thinner than needles, standing straight up. The first time I saw it, I said the thing looked like a steel porcupine. John said it looked like a wig for a robot. The only part of the device not covered by the metallic fur was the simple metal grip at the end, where it could be picked up. On the handle was a trigger.

It was a gun. What did it do? Well…

Back in the summer, after we lifted the box from the convoy, we had brought it home and spent several days figuring out the ghost latch. We then stared at the object inside for a bit, and debated what to do. John dubbed the thing the “furgun” because we had decided it was some kind of weapon and of course it had that metal fur on it.

Then, late one night, John and I had gotten good and drunk and taken the furgun out to a field to test fire it. John set up three green Heineken beer bottles on a log, then pointed the furry gun thing and squeezed the trigger.

The device made a sort of honking sound, like some people make when they blow their nose. There was a strange ripple in the air, like the heat-warped space above a fire. The beer bottle on the far right was suddenly five times bigger than it was before. John had cheered and whooped and declared the device to be an enlarging ray. He said he’d point it at cornfields and use it to cure world hunger. He fired it again, aiming at the next bottle. It stayed the same size, only turned white. When we approached it we realized the bottle had been turned into a bottle-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. John stated that he would still use it to cure world hunger, but more importantly, he pointed out that he had been thinking of mashed potatoes at the exact moment he had pulled the trigger, and speculated that the gun could react to your thoughts somehow. We fired it at the third bottle and it immediately turned into a double-ended dildo. A black one. John said this confirmed this theory.

He had then handed the furgun to me, and I fired at the first bottle.

That bottle, and the dildo, and the log, and the ground, all were consumed in a ball of fire so bright it looked like a miniature sun had landed in the middle of the field. The blast was so intense that John and I were blinded for half an hour after, and saw blue-white spots in front of our eyes for most of a day. When the fire subsided, there was a twenty-foot circle of earth in front of us that had been scorched into black glass. The papers said the light was reported by witnesses six miles away.

That next morning we had sat at my kitchen table, my head pounding, eating Amy’s macaroni and cheese–filled omelets and staring at the green box in front of us.

John said, “I want to try it again tonight.”

Amy shook her head. “Come on, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

I said, “Yeah, it clearly doesn’t work.”

John said, “We don’t know that. We just have to learn how to use it.”

I shook my head. “No. Remember the truck, and what happened to the guys guarding the thing. If They couldn’t control it, and They built the damned thing… well, in our hands we might as well be cramming gunpowder and ball bearings up our assholes.”

John said, “See, I got a different theory. I don’t think They built it. I think They found it, and had no idea what to do with it. But here’s the thing. At the moment when you were taking your piss turn off the tower, I was thinkin’ back to the best birthday present I ever got. I was nine, and my uncle had gone to a garage sale and found, for ten bucks, a cardboard box of GI Joe action figures. Even had all their guns, backpacks, everything. There were more than thirty of them in there, somebody’s entire collection. Then, well, you saw what happened to the men in the truck. I made that happen, Dave. With my mind. From a thousand feet away. We can master this thing. We just need practice.”

Amy said, “You almost started a forest fire.”

“Dave did. We’ll be more careful next time.”

Amy sat a plate in front of him and said, “Uh huh. You just turned a truck full of people into toys. But either way, good luck opening the box without me.”

Needless to say, it was never opened again. Until today.

I reached in and took the furgun by the handle. John said, “Uh, no.”

“What?”

“I actually agree that the gun isn’t safe in your hands. Give it to me.”

Amy said, “I’ll take it.”

She did. I said, “What am I supposed to use?”

John said, “We shouldn’t have to use anything at all. We get to a door—you know, one of the wormhole doors—and we go right to the water tower. We break their jammer thing, everybody’s phones work again, the world sees the city isn’t full of zombies and the bad guys got no choice but to call off the bombing. Tennet goes to jail and we all go to Waffle House and have breakfast.”

I nodded at the furgun and said to Amy, “We run into anybody, point and imagine something nonlethal. Just… imagine you’re Dumbledore, casting that spell that knocks people’s weapons out of their hand but doesn’t hurt them.”

She sighed and said, “You think I’m five.”

John said, “All right, I’m thinking we can’t use BB’s, because there’s probably a huge mob there by now and I’d prefer to not have to shotgun two dozen rednecks today. What’s the next closest door?”

“No. Think, John. We went through a door and came out here—right where we needed to be. You made that happen. Because of the Soy Sauce, you have control. You can control the doors the way They do. We’ll go back to the door we came in, the one out on the lawn. You’re going to concentrate—and I know you can do this—you’re going to concentrate on the water tower Porta-Potty and it’s going to take us right there. Right?”

Thunder rumbled outside. The wind picked up and the arthritic old building creaked under the strain.

John nodded and said, “Right. This is going to work.”

We ran to the front door. We dragged away the cabinet we’d used as a barricade. I took a deep breath, opened the front door and was immediately staring down a dozen gun barrels.

Armed townspeople were swarming the scene. Amy said, “Don’t shoot!”

I put my hands in the air and, to the firing squad in front of me said, “I know you’re all worked up, but listen to me. The feds aren’t going to bomb the hospital. They’re going to bomb the whole town. That means as of right now, we are all in the same boat. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, all of us are infected.”

The guy nearest to me, a big black guy who was built like a linebacker, screamed, “DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND LAY FLAT ON THE GROUND. THIS IS THE ONLY WARNING YOU GET.”

Then I noticed the earmuffs everyone was wearing. I took a deep breath and screamed, “THEY ARE GOING TO BOMB THE TOWN IN AN HOUR!” I tried to pantomime a plane dropping a huge bomb, but I think the motions conveyed that I was warning about a bird shitting on his head.

No response. To John and Amy, I muttered, “I’m thinking we need to go back inside.”

Under his breath, John said, “One. Two. Three—”

We spun and ran back through the big wooden doors—

—and I ran gut-first into a rusting Ford sedan. Amy slammed into my back. I looked around and realized that we were not, in fact, inside the main hall of the asylum. Rows of broken cars grew in a field of yellow weeds all around us.

John cheered. “HA! It worked! Screw those guys!”

Amy said, “This is not the water tower.”

It was, in fact, the junkyard south of town.

John and I spun around at the same time and saw the blue Porta-Potty standing in the weeds behind us.

“Damn it!” said John. “They moved the shitter. What is this, the junkyard? We’re way the hell on the other side of town.”

The first sprinkles of rain were coming down. I took a calming breath and said, “It’s okay. You’re going to concentrate, and we’re going to go back into the Porta-Potty, and you’re going to send us to the water tower. There has to be a door there we can come out of up there. You’re going to send us to that door. Any door in the vicinity. You are not going to send us back to the asylum. Right?”

Something changed with the light, like a shadow was passing overhead. I looked up and, for the second time that day, saw that a car was flying toward me through the air.

We ran screaming in three directions as a rusting sedan flattened the Porta-Potty with a thunder of rending metal. I stumbled, fell and got a face full of dried weeds. I scrambled to my feet and screamed for Amy, found her crouching behind a hatchback.

John screamed, “There! There!” and we turned to see a shrunken, dried-up old man who looked about ninety. He was maybe twenty-five yards away, standing near a twenty-foot-tall faded fiberglass statue of a smiling man holding a slice of pizza. The old guy looked completely normal, other than the fact that he had a huge third arm growing from his groin, and had massive leathery wings.

The old man bent over and with his dick arm wrestled an old engine block out of the dirt. He shrieked and threw the engine at us underhand, like a softball. The four-hundred-pound hunk of metal turned in the air, little sprays of rainwater flying out of its cylinders. We dodged again, moments before the engine crushed the roof of the hatchback in a cloud of glass bits.

John’s shotgun thundered next to me. It had absolutely no effect on the old man—I don’t know if he missed or if the old guy was immune to bullets. John broke open the gun and fumbled with three more shells. Two of them fell into the weeds.

“AMY! SHOOT HIM!”

Amy turned, raised the furgun, closed her eyes and fired.

The alien gun made that low, foghorn honking sound. The air rippled. The old man recoiled, his hands flying to his face. When his hands came away I observed that he now had a thick, white wizard beard.

John screamed, “GODDAMNIT, AMY! YOU’VE GOT IT SET ON BEARD.”

The man advanced. Amy fired again. The man’s beard grew twice as long.

I yelled, “AMY! YOU CAN GO LETHAL ON THIS ONE!”

“I’M TRYING!”

The old man was running now, terrifyingly fast, arms pumping. Running right at us. We ran away. Amy tried to turn and fire the furgun. The shot went wild and suddenly the fiberglass pizza man had a huge beard.

I screamed, “GIVE IT TO ME!”

Amy tossed me the furgun. Before I could turn on the old man, I was sent sprawling with a blow to my back that knocked the air out of my lungs. I hit the weeds, gasping. I rolled over to see the old man ready to swing a car bumper at me a second time. I pointed the furgun up at the old fart. I squeezed the trigger.

The gun went off with a booming sound that shook the earth. There was a gut-wrenching impact, and the man was disintegrated into a fine, red mist. The grass burned in the spot where he had stood, the soil itself charred.

John walked up and said, “Jesus, Dave. Why don’t you, uh, give that back to Amy.”

Amy said, “The toilet! That car flattened the toilet!”

“We don’t need it.” I looked at John. “John just needs to concentrate.”

“Hey, it worked last time, they just moved the—”

“I know, I know. You’re doing great. Now just find something we can go through. The doors aren’t random, not for you. You have the power to control them.”

John jogged down the row of cars, rain plinking off of metal trunk lids. He arrived at a windowless van, took a moment to concentrate, then pulled open the doors.

John said, “I think I can see it. I can actually see where it goes…”

“Okay, great. Where?”

“I can’t tell. But there’s an army truck parked there.”

“Perfect! Go.”

We climbed through—

—and tumbled out of the back of a different van in the rear parking lot of some restaurant or other. It was certainly not the water tower.

40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I punched the air and cried, “GODDAMNIT WHY ARE WE SUCH FUCKUPS?”

There were in fact two military trucks parked nearby, so he had that part right. No personnel in sight.

Amy said, “Go back—”

John said, “No, we have to find a different door. That’ll just take us back to the junkyard.”

John jogged toward the restaurant and went through an open EMPLOYEES ONLY door. We followed him into an empty kitchen—stainless appliances and grease-tanned walls. It smelled like detergent and vaporized animal fat. We passed into a main dining area full of small round tables. The building was silent, the restaurant closed—probably had been since the outbreak. We could hear the soft drumming of rain on the roof. Along one wall was a bar lined with bottles and two big-screen TVs that would be showing some kind of sporting event if it weren’t early morning on a Monday during the apocalypse. The opposite wall was covered with a mural depicting a smiling cartoon buffalo, eating a burger.

“Oh. Buffalo burger,” John said, unnecessarily. We had all eaten here before (yes, the burgers were made from buffalo meat) and we were apparently going to be incinerated here.

“Find a door, John. We—”

Glass shattered. We all ducked, and there was a chubby, balding guy in his fifties on the sidewalk out front, wearing earmuffs. He had bashed in the glass front door with the butt of a shotgun.

“SHIT!”

The guy ducked through the shattered glass and racked a shell into his shotgun.

“HEY! WE’RE UNARMED! WE’RE NOT INFECTED!”

The guy put the shotgun to his shoulder. He knew exactly who we were.

We dove behind the bar. A shotgun blast shattered three bottles, bringing a rain of liquor and glass. Amy blindly stuck the furgun up over the bar and squeezed the trigger. A small wheel of cheese landed softly on the bar and bounced to the floor.

“GODDAMNIT, AMY! LETHAL!”

A shotgun blast punched the bar, flinging chunks of particle board between us. Amy raised the furgun, squeezed her eyes in concentration, and fired.

The gun honked.

The air rippled.

A huge, black blur the size of a minivan flew through the air above us, a furry shape that bellowed with a sort of grunting moo. In the split second it was airborne I somehow registered what the object was: a buffalo. And I mean a real buffalo, huge and furry and trailing a stink like wet dog.

The buffalo hurtled toward the man, its dangling feet flailing as it soared through the air. It smashed into the bald guy, flinging him aside, then blew through the door behind him, wrenching it off its hinges.

“YEAH!” screamed John, triumphantly. “That’s what you get! THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”

The buffalo turned on us. It snorted, belched, farted, sneezed. It charged back into the restaurant, loping across the floor tiles, each hoof landing with a sledgehammer impact that I could feel in my gut. Amy screamed. The beast blasted a swath of carnage through the dining room, tossing aside tables and chairs like they were doll furniture. We scrambled to our feet and tried to run. I made it out from behind the bar, then tripped over a chair and fell, taking Amy with me. She rolled over, leveled the furgun at the beast, and fired.

The buffalo recoiled, stopping in its tracks. It suddenly had a thick beard, streaked with gray, as big as a man’s torso.

“RUN!”

I don’t remember who said it, but none of us needed to be told. We dodged and juked around tables, jumping over the unconscious bald guy, rounding the buffalo and heading for the street. It was trying to get turned around, knocking over six tables in the process.

We flew through the smashed doorway, emerging onto a sidewalk downtown. Rain hammered the street, soaking our clothes. Two seconds later the buffalo blew through the door behind us, tearing off another foot of door frame on every side.

We ran across the four lanes of street, looking for cover or, better yet, a door. I turned to Amy and screamed, “HERE! GIVE IT TO ME!”

I took the furgun. I squeezed the trigger, and for a second, nothing happened. The beast charged, hoofs drumming across pavement. Then, out of nowhere, the buffalo was hit by a semi. The truck splattered buffalo guts thirty feet in every direction as it plowed through the screaming beast. It finally skidded to a stop, scraping a half ton of buffalo meat along the pavement and leaving a crimson skid mark of blood and entrails that stretched for a block and a half.

We all stood and looked at this with disgust for a moment.

Amy said, “Gross.”

John said, “Over here!”

He was running into the alley, toward a Dumpster. He stood up on a crate, took a moment to gather his energies, and threw open the lid.

“BOOM! That’s it! I see water tower, bitches!”

John climbed in. I helped Amy up next.

I stepped up on the crate and looked down. I saw it. That is, instead of garbage, I saw open landscape. Patches of wet, green grass and mud puddles. It was dizzying, looking down and seeing the horizon at my feet. Rain was falling on the back of my neck, and falling perpendicular to that inside the universe of the Dumpster.

I threw my legs over and stepped through, and felt that roller coaster flutter in my guts as gravity changed and—

I stumbled forward as the ground rushed up at me, smacking my palms. I was suddenly on my hands and knees in mud, cold rain pounding down my back. I got to my feet, soaked from head to toe, mud caked on my knees and shoes. I squinted through the pouring rain. Thunder rumbled overhead.

The water tower was right in front of me. I looked around for the truck John described, and found it. A big, black semi tractor trailer. Next to it was a black military troop transport. Next to it was a black Humvee. Next to it was another. Then about three dozen more.

John said, “Ooooh, shit.”

The water tower construction project was now the home to the makeshift REPER command center. Black military vehicles and mobile homes and tents stretched out as far as we could see. And, standing around us, were dozens and dozens of guys in black space suits, carrying assault rifles. All of them were currently screaming at us to drop our weapons and lay flat on the ground.

A man strode up in a white space suit, carrying a helmet under one arm. His gray hair was still somehow perfectly combed even under the bombardment of the rain.

Dr. Tennet glanced at his watch and said, “I was starting to think you wouldn’t make it.”

37 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We were hauled under a tent, an open one like you’d see at a county fair. There were two long folding tables and along the back of the tent, just outside of the rain, were a series of carts holding stainless-steel canisters.

There were two spacemen right behind us, holding some kind of weapons on us that I didn’t recognize. They were bulky and ended in some kind of slanted lens thing. I kind of wanted to get shot with one just to see what it did. Then, fifty feet or so outside the tent, were a dozen gunmen with regular old military-grade assault rifles. I was one hundred percent sure that their instructions were that if we overpowered the two guards next to us, they were to turn everything—including the guards—into the finale of Bonnie and Clyde.

Tennet strode up from behind us, and handed Amy a towel. Not sure why John and I didn’t get one.

Tennet said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we are, of course, outside of the blast radius—though close enough that the noise will be very, very loud—unless someone at the Air Combat Command has made a grievous error in their calculations. A series of twenty-five thousand bombs will be dropped from the back of C-130 aircraft, starting from the center of town outward, in a series of concentric circles. The shock wave from each bomb can shatter ten city blocks, and liquefy any organism standing within a thousand feet in any direction. Once all of the structures have been blown into kindling, a second squadron of B-52 bombers will drop a series of thousand-pound CBU-97 incendiary cluster munitions, releasing a flammable aerosol that will ignite and raise the temperature at the center of town to a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun. The resulting conflagration will inhale so much surrounding oxygen that from here, we’ll feel like we’re in a monsoon—winds will reach fifty miles an hour. I’m told the noise of all the air rushing to feed the massive open-air furnace sounds like the world itself is howling in anguish. It should really be something.”

John said, “And let me guess: you’re going to jerk off while you’re watching it. And you’re going to make us watch you.”

Amy was actually using the towel to dry her hair, and I felt like she should have just left it wet out of solidarity.

Ignoring John, Tennet said, “That’s the good news. The bad news is that you are of course being charged for this session.”

He went back to the row of steel canisters and examined them. “I kid, of course.”

I said, “So how do you get into the supervillain business, anyway? Is it something that happens gradually or do you just wake up and decide to go for it?”

Tennet said, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and I apologize ahead of time because learning this will mark the end of your extended childhood. Nobody involved in a conflict thinks they’re the villain. And considering I’m on the verge of saving a couple of billion lives, I’m thinking I deserve hero status on this one. Even if you’re too shortsighted to understand.”

I said, “Uh huh. So who is the bad guy, then?”

“Everyone, depending on the day. In this case, I don’t know who is responsible for the parasite. That is, I don’t know their names. This is what you can’t—or aren’t willing to—understand. You found a cockroach in your hamburger. You want a two-word answer to the question of who put it there. Well, it’s not that simple. Was it the kid working the grill, who didn’t check the beef? Was it the franchise owner for buying beef from a shady supplier? Was it the slaughterhouse, for failing to adhere to contamination standards? Was it the government, for not funding FDA enforcement of those standards? Or was it you, the customer, for demanding lower taxes that resulted in that funding being cut, and for participating in a consumer culture that rewards cutting corners? Well, in that scenario, think of me as the harried assistant manager who has to apologize to the unhappy customer and try to keep the restaurant from getting shut down. Only here the ‘restaurant’ is all of civilization.”

I said, “Okay, I’m… wait, what does the hamburger represent again?”

“My point is, I have a job, just like you. I get a paycheck, I get memos. Just like you, I have superiors, and they have superiors who I am not allowed to speak to. Orders filter down from on high, arriving at my level stripped entirely of all context or rationale or justification. Orders do not come with an illustration of how they serve the overall goals of the organization. Same as any other job. Was the parasite released intentionally? And if so, for what purpose? It is not my job to know. All I know is that it is a near certainty that if it gets out, it will destabilize civilization as we know it. I have worked nonstop since the outbreak to contain this in a way that would let the world move on. And, I’m proud to say, I’m on the verge of succeeding.”

Amy said, “By killing everyone.”

“No. Not everyone. One medium-sized town. Some perspective helps here. Globally, a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day. From natural causes, accidents, war. The population of this town will be barely a blip in the worldwide dying that happens in an average month. So while you think you’re being heroic in saving it, you are, right now, in this situation, the villains. I know you don’t think you are. But you are.”

I said, “Then why are you the one giving the supervillain monologue?”

He walked back to the silver canisters. He put his back to us and started messing with some mechanism in whatever mad scientist setup he had back there. I heard liquid running. We were not restrained in our chairs, but there were so many guns on us that if I scratched my nose, the shooting aftermath would look like somebody had just spilled a huge lasagna here. I looked at Amy, who was impassive, and then at John, who looked like he was mentally running through escape options just like I was. The furgun was still laying in the grass where we had landed when we arrived. They probably thought it was a hairbrush. I pictured John trying to wrestle away one of those futuristic-lens guns the two guards behind us were carrying. Then I pictured him squeezing the trigger and a cartoon boxing glove popping out of the end.

I watched Tennet work fluids from his steel canisters and wondered if we weren’t choosing between quick death under a hail of bullets, or something much, much worse caused by whatever he was brewing up there. He turned back to us, striding calmly our way. He placed three small Styrofoam cups in front of us.

“We have sugar over there, but I’m afraid we’re out of creamer.”

Coffee. I left mine in front of me. Amy, without asking, had been given a cup of hot water and a tea bag. She dropped in the tea bag and asked Tennet if he had any honey.

She is terrible at this.

Tennet walked back to the coffee carts and returned with a container of honey shaped like a bear.

He said, “Think. Who allowed the outbreak to occur? Who failed to report the appearance of the parasite to any authorities? Who prevented any containment at your house? Who created the breach at the REPER command center? Who created the breach in the quarantine containment fence? Who has single-handedly spread this infection?”

John said, “We didn’t do any of it on purpose. We’re just… not very good at things.”

“Or, it could be that just maybe, one can act on what one believes is his own agency, while in reality perfectly serving the purposes of another.”

He held up the honey bear.

“Where do you think this comes from, hmm? Do you think the bees toiled night and day to make this because they knew we were going to take it away from them and drip it into our tea? Of course not. Because we are a higher life form than they, we can make them serve our purposes, while letting them believe they are serving their own. You have been used like bees.” He glanced at me. “This was all but explained to you before.”

Another space suit walked in out of the rain, and went and got a cup of coffee from the coffee carts. I wondered how he was going to drink it.

Tennet continued, “Don’t get me wrong, I know why you think what you think. I have sons in their twenties. I was there myself once, believe it or not. Because you have no responsibilities, you get to sit back, in school or at your inconsequential service job, and judge the grown-ups on the impossible choices we have to make. Of course, if you were in our position, you’d never go to war, or lay off a factory full of workers, or enlist the help of one murderous dictator to stop another one who’s even worse. All moral choices seem easy when you don’t actually have to make them.”

Amy shook her head slowly and said, “You can’t talk your way into this being anything other than mass murder. And people are going to know.”

Tennet said, “What exactly do you think they’re going to know?”

“That the people in the town are just people. That this isn’t so clear-cut. They’re going to know.”

“Even if someone decided that the infection rate down there was something less than one hundred percent, and if they could go to a mountaintop and shout it to the world, it wouldn’t matter. Because the people want this. They want their neighbors to be monsters. It’s why we lust over news stories of mothers murdering their children, and run after conspiracy theories about a government full of greedy sociopaths. If the monsters didn’t come, we would have willed them into existence.”

John nodded and said, “Just so they have an excuse to sue the burger place.”

I said, “You’re… several steps behind here.”

Amy sipped her tea and said, “The people out there won’t believe it if they don’t have a choice. If they see it for themselves.”

Tennet calmly said, “I know you came here to try to take out the warlock jammer. As the villains in this story, that’s exactly what I expected you to do. This would be why we have an entire army protecting it.”

Amy said, “Speaking of which. The guys standing right behind us with the weird guns, do they know that you’re going to have them killed, too? There’s no way you can let all these people wandering around here in their space suits just go back home tomorrow, knowing what you did here. Somebody will talk, right? To their wife or their kids, or maybe they go online and blog about it. Maybe cash in on a book deal. Do they know you’re going to orchestrate something for them, just like you did for the town?”

Tennet said, “I like you. I do. But think about all of the assumptions you just made. First, you assumed that the men behind you could hear you. Second, you assumed that the men behind you have ears at all. Third, you assumed that the men behind you are even men. Would you like to know what’s under the hoods of these decontamination suits?”

The space suit back by the coffee turned toward us. He sat his coffee on the cart and approached our table. Tennet didn’t turn to look at him. Whatever was inside the space suit reached up and started undoing clasps around the neck of its red-tinted face mask.

Then, it pulled open a zipper.

The gloved hands then raised and grabbed the sides of its helmet, and lifted.

30 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We barely had time to register the face we were seeing before the spaceman pulled out an enormous silver handgun, and pointed it at Tennet’s head.

Detective Lance Falconer said, “Freeze, shitbird.”

Tennet sighed and said, “And who are you?”

“Shut up. Call off the planes.”

“Infecting the whole world to prevent you from putting a bullet through my skull would be an incredibly selfish move on my part.”

Amy said, “Forget it, we don’t need him.”

John said, “He’s right, we just need to turn off the cell phone jammer. Then he won’t have a choice. It’ll blow the lid off the whole sha-rod.”

“STOP SAYING IT LIKE THAT.”

Tennet looked right at me and said, “Is there something you want to say about this, David? Before this man splatters my brains? I’ve been reading it on your face.”

I met Falconer’s eyes, then Amy’s.

I said, “I, uh, am not sure he isn’t right.”

Amy said, “David…”

I shook my head. “I don’t like it. I don’t. Amy, you know I don’t. But… Marconi… he was right. The fuse is lit and this, right here, this is our chance to snuff it out. There has to be a sacrifice. He said that.” I looked at John. “John, I’m telling you, he saw all this coming. Marconi knows his shit. And maybe if we’d been smarter, if we’d handled it better, we could have put a stop to it without anybody getting, you know, incinerated. But we just kept fucking up and… it has to end at some point. And preferably some point before an event that could be called an ‘apocalypse.’” I made air quotes with my fingers. “Guys… we have to grow up and see this through. This is our chance, to save the world. From itself.”

John looked at the ground resignedly, and I knew he agreed.

Falconer said, “Bullshit. They are not getting away with this.”

John shook his head and said, “They are, detective. They really are. Try to put that guy on trial. You’ll see. Your witnesses will disappear. Or maybe you’ll disappear. Hell, your suspect there will disappear. He’s just a pawn like the rest of us. Aren’t you?”

Tennet didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

Amy wasn’t listening to us. She was turned, looking over the town, as if to take it in for the last time. Thunder crashed. Rain drummed on the tent.

Amy walked out into the rain, looking up into the sky, her hands forming a visor over her eyes. A dozen gun barrels followed her.

I said, “Amy… you understand why we have to do this, right?”

She turned and said, “Do you mind if we continue this discussion under the table?”

“What?”

The spacemen outside the tent were suddenly alarmed. One of them was looking up at the sky, and trying to get the attention of the others. Radios appeared in hands. Black figures started running. I looked past Amy, squinting into the gray sky. There was, up there, a speck, a shape that I mistook for a bird for the second time in two days. The speck grew in the sky, taking on the shape of a tiny, thin, pilotless plane.

Amy got down on her hand and knees and scurried under the table. It hadn’t dawned on the rest of us what was happening. She said, “David! Get down!”

A pair of white streaks grew out of the bottom of the drone, zipping across the sky and down, rocketing off to our right. I turned just in time to see the black semi truck vanish into a cloud of smoke. The shock wave threw us to the grass, flinging me under the table on top of Amy. A huge piece of debris—I think it was a truck tire—whizzed past the tent, trailing black smoke like a contrail.

I was laying in the grass, my ears ringing, Amy’s elbow in my face. Her tea had spilled on my shirt.

Amy scrambled to her feet, threw her arms in the air and said to the sky, “YAY! YOU RULE, SHANE! WOO!”

27 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Falconer wrestled Tennet back to his feet, his gun at his temple. Falconer said, “Well, that fucking settles that.”

Amy looked down at me. “You know this is the right thing. Even if you don’t know you know it.”

John said, “Shit yeah, I’m on Team Amy now.”

I said, “Who the fuck is Shane?”

Tennet said, “That accomplished nothing. That pilot will be convicted of treason. But before he can even be prosecuted, They’ll get hold of him. There’ll be nothing I can do about it. Do you have any idea what They can do? Maybe They’ll inject him with Compound 66. That’s a serum that will turn a man into a cannibal. Let him eat his own children before they arrest him.”

Two dozen spacemen were on the scene now, guns raised, creeping forward. Falconer got an arm around Tennet’s neck and was using him as a human shield.

Falconer said, “Call off the planes. It’s over.”

The word “call” triggered something in Amy’s mind, and she dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “Hey! I’ve got bars!”

Tennet said, “You have absolutely no leverage here, detective. You shoot me, my men will cut you to pieces. The bombs will drop and nothing will change. I’m sorry your supercop fantasy isn’t going to play out like you wanted. But you have no cards left to play here.”

Falconer repeated his demand, but Tennet went silent. Falconer threatened him with creative bodily violence. Tennet gave no reaction. Minutes passed this way, and I sensed the time bleeding away from the bomber countdown. I glanced nervously at the sky, then back toward the town.

And then, in the distance, came the crackle of gunfire.

19 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We all rushed out, looking toward the sound. Down the hill and toward the highway, where the REPER barricades had stood since the morning of the outbreak. A pickup truck had crashed through the barriers and was laying on its side. REPER spacemen were filling it full of holes.

Then, a spaceman went down. And another. On the other side of the barricade was the Undisclosed angry mob. And they were armed.

Amy said, “I think somebody figured out that they are about to be bombed and remembered as zombies in their obituaries.”

John said, “There! See? It’s over. The word is out. You’re not going to be able to cover this up, doctor. Call off the planes.”

Tennet said, “You would be surprised what They can cover up.”

I said, “You call off the planes, and he’ll let you go. No charges. You get out of the country, change your name and go retire in Argentina like Hitler.” I looked at Falconer and said, “Right?”

Falconer said, “Yep. Absolutely,” in a way that did not convey an ounce of sincerity.

To the spacemen behind us, Tennet said, “On the count of three, if he does not release me, start shooting. If you can get him over my shoulder, that would be nice. But if you have to shoot through me, so be it. This is bigger than me.”

Falconer withdrew his arm from around Tennet’s neck, grabbed something small and black from a pocket and held it in front of Tennet’s face.

“Do you know what this is, shitbird?”

I didn’t, but Tennet nodded.

“And you know what happens if I push this button?”

Tennet didn’t answer. But he knew, and didn’t like it.

“Yeah, I know more than you fucking thought, don’t I?”

To me, Falconer said, “Look to your right. See that big-ass monster truck thing with the huge wheels? We’re all going for a ride.”

Falconer put an arm around Tennet’s neck and dragged him toward the vehicle that did in fact look like an armored monster truck. Amy and I followed. John took off the other direction, then came running back with the furgun. Through all of this, the spacemen kept their weapons trained on us, waiting for an order that never came.

To John, Falconer said, “Can you drive this thing?” and before he finished the word “thing” John was already behind the wheel. Falconer forced Tennet into the passenger seat at gunpoint, then took the backseat so he could keep his gun pressed to the back of Tennet’s skull. I went around and slid in next to Falconer, Amy jumped in beside me and slammed the door. John made the engine of the monster truck rumble to life, and a hundred miles away a seismologist saw the needle on his machine twitch.

Amy mumbled, “I cannot imagine the penis of the guy who designed this thing.”

John said, “Where to?”

Falconer answered, “Right down there, past the barricades. Inside the blast zone. Let’s see if that motivates this asshole to pick up this radio and call off the planes.”

With no hesitation, John rumbled down toward the area that was about to be bombed into scorched rubble. Somewhere, the ghost of Charles Darwin smiled and lit a cigar.

16 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

There was a road. John did not take it. He tore diagonally across the cornfield, tearing through broken cornstalks toward the mass of angry humanity at the Highway 131 barricade.

The spacemen were winning. There were a lot of them, and they had taken cover behind their vehicles, rattling gunfire into the crowd. We rolled to a stop just short of the mayhem. I heard a stray bullet ping off the grill of the truck.

To me, Falconer said, “Watch this.” He told John, “You see that button there, marked ‘loudspeaker’? Punch that. Turn that volume knob all the way to the right.”

John did. Falconer pulled the little black box from his pocket.

“Open the mic. Click the—yeah. Hold it there.”

Falconer reached up toward the mic mounted on the console and pressed a button on his little gadget. I could almost hear the noise the little gadget made. In the cab of the monster truck it felt more like an irritating vibration, like if you pulled a long strip of crinkled aluminum foil between your teeth. I saw Amy wince.

But the effect on the spacemen was immediate. They flinched, or fell to a knee, or dropped their guns. Some collapsed entirely. The longer the tone played, the more debilitating the effects.

Several of them turned their guns on the truck and opened fire, bullets plinking off the armor and leaving white bird shit–like pockmarks in the bulletproof windshield. Then the spacemen charged the truck. One of them climbed the front bumper, and I realized he had found the loudspeaker on the roof. Others reached the doors and clawed at the handles. I flinched at the sound of something crashing against the window next to me, and saw a spaceman rearing back for another blow on the glass with the butt of his rifle. He slammed it again, and made a crack. Amy ducked.

Meanwhile, the guy on the hood was going after the loudspeaker, smacking it with the butt of his own rifle. But none of the men had a fraction of their usual strength. Falconer kept his thumb on the death buzzer, and the spaceman collapsed onto the hood, landing right in front of the windshield, his faceplate shattering with the impact.

Amy gasped.

Two open, dead eyes looked back at us. The eyes were different colors, one brown, one blue.

The rest of the face was gone. What was left was a skull, held together with pink tendons and ribbons of fraying, decaying muscle. Running all through the skull, twitching between the gaps in bone and sinew, were ropes of something that looked like spaghetti, twisting and pulling and, I was sure, reaching down through the ruined body of the former man inside, operating him like a puppet.

The spaceman outside my door had also collapsed—the ground around the truck was now littered with them. Falconer let off the buzzer. The battle had gone silent.

The mob on the other side of the barricade was frozen, baffled by what they were seeing. They weren’t even celebrating. Even if it meant winning the battle, this was a group of people who absolutely did not feel like seeing any more weird bullshit today.

Amy opened her door and yelled to them, “We’re the good guys! Don’t shoot!”

John said, “Look! What the hell?”

Something was going on with the face of the dead spaceman on the hood of the truck. One of his eyes was twitching. Then the eye started pushing forward out of his skull, oozing out like a snake. The other eye did the same.

Amy said, “What? What is it?”

Out from the spaceman’s dead skull crawled two spiders, each as thick as a bratwurst, each covered in tiny legs, each ending in a single, lidless, human eye.

From outside the truck, I heard glass breaking. Faceplates on dead spacemen were cracking and bursting open. Out from each crawled a pair of the eye spiders.

John yelled, “OH FUCK! TENNET TELL THEM TO BOMB THIS! RIGHT HERE! NOW! SHIT!”

The spiders raced through the grass, toward us. And there was Amy looking right at them, out of her open door, because she couldn’t see them.

I lunged across her and pulled her door closed right as one of the spiders leaped, wedging itself into the gap at the last second before I could get it all the way closed. Amy screamed, because now she could see it, now that the thing was writhing in the gap of the partially closed door a foot away from her face. Its legs were thrashing as it frantically tried to press its way inside, the single, human eye twitching, looking all around the cabin of the truck.

The hood man’s eye spiders had crawled onto the windshield. Others had joined them, the skittering parasites hopping onto the truck, running across the hood and windows. Soon a dozen disembodied human eyes were staring in at us, hungrily looking for new skulls to occupy.

They skittered over to Amy’s door, toward that few inches of gap the first spider was holding open with its body. They crowded around and started forcing their way in, a mass of disembodied eyeballs on black parasite bodies. I pulled with all my strength, trying to crush the little bastards. But they were too well armored and I wasn’t strong enough.

One finally pushed its way in, flipping onto Amy’s lap. She shrieked. Another followed it. Then it was a torrent of the squirming creatures, pouring into the cab of the truck.

One leapt at John’s face. He caught it, cursing.

Falconer, who couldn’t see the invaders but who could easily guess what was happening, yelled, “OPEN THE MIC! OPEN THE MIC AGAIN!”

John, fighting with the parasite trying to burrow into his face with one hand, found the loudspeaker button with the other. Falconer pressed the button on his gadget. The hum filled the air. The spiders shrieked.

One by one, they exploded, splattering the interior in a spray of yellow goo.

Finally, the pained shrieks died, and all that was left was the soft drumming of the rain.

I wiped eyeball spider guts off my face.

John said, “Seriously, just, right here. All the bombs. Right here in this spot. We’ll wait.”

I said, “I agree.” Amy was too traumatized to say anything at all.

But to John, Falconer said, “We’re running out of time. Drive.”

He did.

12 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John rolled over bodies of spacemen—going out of his way to do it, it seemed—and rolled past the carnage of the pitched battle that had been raging just minutes ago. He knocked aside REPER vehicles and pushed through the damaged barricades on the highway. The mob in front of us fell silent, parting as we rolled slowly into town, into the blast zone of the bombs that even now were riding in the bellies of planes just over the horizon.

“That’s far enough.”

John stopped, and Falconer yanked Tennet out of the truck. He reached back into the cab and grabbed the mic for its radio and pulled it as far as the little coiled wire would let it. Falconer put his gun to Tennet’s head and said, “All right, shitbird. This is ground zero. They drop those bombs, you get flash fried just like the rest of us. Now get on this radio and tell them to abort.”

Tennet looked at him with genuine disdain. “What you are threatening me with is the best-case scenario if I fail in my task. How are you failing to understand this?”

A huge, blue, extended-cab pickup truck emerged from the crowd in front of us. It had a wood chipper in the bed, and out from the driver’s seat stepped a guy in a cowboy hat and absurdly tight pants. From the passenger seat emerged Owen, still in his quarantine-issued red jumpsuit. The cowboy had a shotgun, Owen had his pistol. They looked like the stars of an eighties’ era show about loose cannon undercover cops. Called something like O-Funk and the Cowboy. From the backseat of the pickup stepped Dr. Marconi. I tried to imagine the conversation the three of them had on the way over and my brain just spat out error messages.

To me, Marconi said, “I managed to convince them that, despite their differences, they also have a great deal in common.”

The Cowboy hurried over to Falconer and said, “Holy shit. You got the son of a bitch. I owe you a twelve-pack, detective.”

“It’s not over yet. The bombs are coming and this asshole won’t call them off.”

Owen spoke up and said, “Why don’t we start feeding his feet into the fuckin’ wood chipper, see if that changes his mind.”

Tennet said, “All right, all right. Give me the mic.”

Falconer handed it to him. Tennet yanked, ripping the wire out of the console, and tossed the mic onto the ground.

Falconer growled, smashed the butt of his gun into Tennet’s face and threw the man to the ground. Falconer followed him down, straddling his chest, punching him over and over.

I said, “Should we, uh, stop him?”

John said, “Nope.”

9 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Marconi walked up and said, “Why do I have the feeling I am not going to receive my consultant’s fee for this project?”

I said, “Everybody is so freaking droll today. Jesus.”

John said, “Well, what the hell do we do now?”

To Amy, Marconi said, “You have one of those fancy cell phones, correct? One that can capture video?”

She said, “Yep,” and pulled it out.

“You have a signal, correct? And access to the Internet?”

“Sure, sure.”

Somebody in the crowd said, “Look! There’s a plane! To the north! They’re coming!”

I turned. There was a speck in the sky, that even from this far away I could tell was not our friendly Predator drone coming back to rescue us somehow. Not sure what it would have done anyway. This was a big bastard, with propellers on the wings, one of the big cargo planes you always saw on the news hauling troops back and forth to the Middle East.

Marconi asked, “And you can stream video? Meaning you can capture video and upload it live?”

“Yeah. What am I recording?”

Marconi sighed and said, “Our deaths.”

8 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

I said, “What? That’s your plan?”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and gave me a sad look through the rain.

“What’s that around your lady friend’s neck?”

I didn’t have to look at her to answer. It was always there.

“What, her necklace? The crucifix?”

“Think about it. What I said before, back at quarantine. The—”

“The Babylonian Bureau. Yes. Goddamnit we don’t have time—”

“The sacrifice, David. That is how mankind overcomes the Babel Threshold. Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his very life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it. Unfortunately, as I feared, today that is to be us.”

The plane grew on the horizon. Two more appeared in the distance behind it. I could hear the ever-so-faint buzz of its engines. Appropriately enough, they sounded like bees. Just like Tennet had said. A swarm of bees, attacking a… hamburger I guess.

Amy was staring at me, eyes wide. Owen and Cowboy looked befuddled. Falconer was standing over an unconscious Tennet, his fists bloody, eyes defiant.

7 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John said, “Fuck that bullshit. Everybody in the truck, we’re heading out.”

Marconi said, “So we ride to safety, while the tens of thousands who remain in the city behind us burn? And then what? We drive out across the buffer zone outside those barricades, and a few miles later you will meet another, larger barricade, manned by the U.S. military. Martyrdom isn’t something you choose. It is thrust upon you.”

Amy said, “Oh! Wait! Ohmygod it’s so simple. We just—okay, we just have to get to an open area. Between us and the plane, so he sees it—the cornfield! Everybody go to the cornfield!”

To John, she said, “Get on the, uh, the speaker thing in the truck! Tell everybody to go to the cornfield!”

We didn’t need to tell anybody anything. Hundreds of people were flowing past us, through the ruined barricades, the city draining out through the highway like water.

We piled into the truck, managed to get it turned around without running over a dozen people, and rumbled off toward the cornfield.

On the way, Amy said, “The plane! Oh God I can’t believe I didn’t think of this! It’s flying low, under the clouds! We can see it! So it can see us!”

“I don’t understand how that—”

“The pilot thinks we’re zombies. We just have to show him we’re not.”

5 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We rumbled to a stop in the field, refugees of Undisclosed scattering past us, on foot and in trucks and on bicycles, heading off toward the second military cordon that I was pretty sure most of them didn’t realize was there. What did they think they would find out there? Their out-of-town loved ones, waiting for them with a six-pack? The president, with an apology bouquet?

John took to the loudspeaker and said, “WE GOT ABOUT FIVE MINUTES TO PULL THIS SHIT OFF, SO LISTEN UP. GATHER AROUND. WE ARE GOING TO SPELL OUT A MESSAGE FOR THE PILOT OF THAT PLANE UP THERE. HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S ABOUT TO BOMB. WE ARE GONNA SHOW HIS DUMB ASS.”

We all bailed out of the truck. The pickup carrying Owen, the Cowboy and Marconi, which upon further reflection is totally a cop show I would watch, pulled up alongside.

I glanced nervously up at the plane and said, “Son of a bitch. We don’t have time, we don’t have time—”

John said, “It has to be something simple! Like ‘HELP’ or something!”

“WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO FORM FOUR FUCKING LETTERS, JOHN!”

Marconi said, “You don’t need letters, David. You need a symbol. One that man up there is sure to recognize.” Marconi nodded toward Amy.

John said, “Right! He’s right!” John ran off, stopped a group of women and said, “Stand in a line! Right here! Hurry! You! Over there! Stand here! COME ON, GODDAMNIT, WE NEED AT LEAST A HUNDRED PEOPLE! MOVE!”

* TRANSCRIPT OF AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN CAPTAIN PABLO VASQUEZ (SPEARHEAD), PILOT OF AN MC-130 H TALON II, LEAD AIRCRAFT IN OPERATION LEPPARD, AND COPILOT CAPTAIN LAWRENCE MCDONNEL (STALLION) AT 11:59, NOVEMBER 15TH *

Spearhead: Loadmaster, we are six-zero seconds from primary payload release. Prepare to open bay doors, on my mark—

Stallion: Hey, uh, take a look at the barricade area. On the road, the uh, highway—

Spearhead: I see it.

Stallion: We have a, uh, crowd forming, are those REPER?

Spearhead: Negative.

Stallion: Friendlies Evac should have been completed by—

Spearhead: Negative, those are not REPER.

Stallion: Jesus, are we looking at Zulus here?

Spearhead: Affirmative, I’m seeing overturned vehicles and debris, it looks like the barricade has been overrun.

Spearhead: Will the blast get them out there?

Spearhead: Affirmative. Loadmaster, we are now three-zero seconds from primary payload release. Opening bay doors now.

Stallion: Look. Down at the uh, that area to the east of the highway. In that field.

Spearhead: Copy that, there is a crowd forming in the field—

Stallion: Look. Look how they’re standing.

Spearhead: Is that—

Stallion: Look at the rows, they’re perfect rows—

Spearhead: They’re almost forming the shape of—

Stallion: It’s not almost. It’s perfect, it’s too perfect a shape—

Spearhead: All right. This is—Uh, Command, this is Spearhead, do you read me? We, uh, I don’t believe what I’m seeing here, but we are observing a crowd of Zulus less than a kilometer outside of the target area and they are standing, uh, they are standing in the shape of a human penis. I repeat, the Zulus have organized themselves into a perfect shape of a human penis in an open field below us. We are looking at this with our own eyes.

Stallion: They are not Zulus.

30 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

We stood there, in the field, shivering in the rain, in the shape of the dick John had formed us into. Dr. Marconi was to one side of me, looking disapproving. Amy was in my arms, her eyes turned upward, rain bouncing off her glasses. She was praying.

The cargo plane growled toward us, swooping lower, so low that I wondered how the thing expected to escape its own explosion.

Amy closed her eyes and buried her face in my chest and said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“It’s turning! Look!”

The hulking plane banked, making a gentle turn in the sky and veering away from the town. We nervously watched it humming off into the distance, making a wide circle to head back the way it came.

A cheer went up in the crowd around us. There were five planes in the formation, and we watched as one after another they peeled off and circled back.

Falconer walked up and said, “I just want to say right now that this is the stupidest shit I’ve ever been involved in.”

John said, “Hey, you don’t have to like our methods, but you can’t argue with the result. Everything turned out okay, right?”

10 Seconds Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Amy said, “Why isn’t that plane turning back?”

The trailing plane in the formation was not, in fact, changing its course. It growled straight through the air, swooping right over us. The crowd all watched it glide into the distance, heading toward the part of town that had become home to the quarantine.

The plane swooped lower and lower in the sky, as if it was going to attempt a landing. Only it was not slowing down, it was speeding up. It released its payload, following the bombs down until both bombs and plane met the earth. A silent, black plume instantly appeared in the distance, the boom reaching us two full seconds later. The detonation would be heard two states away.

We were too far away to realize it at the time, but both buildings of the old Ffirth Asylum had been reduced to a crater full of thousands of tons of shattered concrete and brick. All of it was cooking in a furnace fueled by aviation fuel, floorboards, old furniture and tons of other flammable debris that would still be smoldering ten days later. Somewhere, at the bottom of it all, rooms full of malformed inmates were vaporized in a fraction of a second. In the old administrative building next door, a single basement room full of computers and gigabytes of incriminating data on hard drives, all melted into a bubbling, black stew.

The Soy Sauce, Redux

John said, “Now there’s a shitty bomber pilot.”

The rain was starting to let up. I took a deep breath of morning air and said, “The town is still there, Tennet. You played your hand, and you lost—wait, where is he?”

Falconer said, “Oh, son of a bitch!”

The blue pickup, which Tennet had apparently stolen while we were all standing in the shape of a dong and waiting to die, was barreling north up the highway.

I said, “Who cares? He’s going to run smack into the Army’s cordon. Hopefully they’ll arrest his stupid ass.”

But Falconer was already sprinting toward the monster truck. He was damned if he was going to let somebody else get his collar after all this. I was about to bid him good hunting, when John brushed past me and jumped into the passenger seat. And then Amy was running toward the truck and I realized that nobody else was going to be happy until they saw a proper end to this. I ran and jumped into the backseat, my shoe dragging on pavement as the truck almost took off without me.

The sight of the Army’s airtight cordon operation instantly ruined every zombie movie for me. These people weren’t stupid. Strategy was their thing. They assessed the enemy, and adjusted their plan accordingly. If it was zombies, so be it.

Thus, there was not a single soldier visible, not a single exposed face or neck available to be bitten and zombified. Instead, there was a row of armored vehicles full of soldiers—Bradley Fighting Vehicles, I would later learn—arranged in a formation that would give them clear shots from their gun ports and from the turrets mounted at the top of each vehicle. They sat well back from concrete barricades that would stop any suicide vehicles in their tracks. Coils of razor wire were strung along the ground on both sides of the barrier. A horde of five thousand zombies—even fast zombies—could rush the formation and they would be easily blown to pieces by a crisscross hail of large-caliber rounds. These men were told they were staring into the ravenous maw of a zombie outbreak, and they were prepared to mow that shit down like dead grass.

After having followed him the five miles across the Dead Zone, we thought Tennet’s truck was going to just keep going and plow right into that green wall of death, at which point I assumed he would find his weight in lead rushing through his windshield at the speed of sound. Was this a suicide-by-armored-vehicle? For what, just to spite Falconer? Goddamn this guy was a dick.

Instead, Tennet’s truck skidded to a stop short of the barbed wire. We stopped behind him, watching. Tennet jumped out, and walked toward the soldiers, waving his arms in the air. It wasn’t like he was signaling surrender, it was more like he was waving them away, screaming and pointing and acting like a crazy person.

Then, he was tackled and ripped to pieces by a monster in a black space suit.

I said, “Well, that worked out.”

We all watched Tennet’s well-deserved and awesomely ironic death, when we heard the first thud of heavy machine guns erupt from the line of vehicles ahead.

To our right, descending down from the water tower construction site, was a nightmare horde of shambling, malformed, infected REPER personnel. They crawled and howled and shrieked and sprouted snapping appendages. Then it hit me that this was, in fact, Tennet’s dying plan. Tennet had thrown his personal horde of infected at the army cordon, giving them their zombie apocalypse, and every reason in the world to unleash hell on the city beyond, regardless of what one airplane pilot claimed he saw.

I screamed, “GET US OUT OF HERE!”

The infected were washing in from our right, swarming toward us and the line of armored vehicles in front of us. More and more of the vehicles were going weapons free on the horde, the turrets and machine guns punching fire and lead into the air.

Falconer was already throwing the monster truck into reverse, cranking the wheel and getting us perpendicular to the highway, then cranking it the other way to get the big bastard of a vehicle heading the other direction. The roar of the big guns outside was like the finale of a fireworks display. I couldn’t hear myself think.

The truck shook. Amy screamed. Something had hit us.

Falconer growled and fought with the wheel. We weren’t moving. I smelled smoke. Another shell smacked the front of the truck, knocking the hood askew.

Flames flew up in front of the windshield.

“GET OUT! GET OUT AND GET FLAT!”

Falconer threw open his door and ducked out. John was messing with something in his lap. The furgun had fallen to the floorboard. I grabbed it, then climbed over Amy and threw open the door. The sound of monster shrieks and cannon fire filled the air. My shoes hit the pavement and I heard Falconer scream, “THE DITCH, GET TO THE DITCH.”

I saw where he was going—the deep drainage ditch along the west side of the road, no more than ten feet in front of us. John spilled out behind me, all of us now using the burning truck as cover against the barrage of gunfire. Falconer sprinted forward, making himself as low to the ground as he could, and dove into the ditch.

Amy screamed, “JOHN!”

John wheeled around to see a big infected fucker loping toward him from behind, dragging the tattered remains of a black space suit.

I fumbled with the furgun but before I could even get it sitting properly in my hand, John hit the let’s-just-call-it-a-zombie with three barrels of shotgun. Suddenly the monster was missing everything from the neck up.

To Amy, I yelled, “Stay low! As low as you can! GO!”

We ran from behind the truck and tumbled down into the drainage ditch. Bullets punched the dirt and pavement overhead. The truck exploded, sending flaming debris whirling through the air above us. It was the second time I’d almost been hit by a flaming truck part in the last half hour, a new personal record.

Amy screamed, “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US!”

I said, “DOWN! GET YOUR HEAD DOWN!”

A spray of bullets raked across the water behind us, punching into the mud of the embankment.

She yelled, “WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!”

John was frantically trying to pull something out of his pocket—shotgun shells, I assumed. Something whistled past my ear. Next to me, Falconer tumbled into the shallow water of the ditch. The stream under him ran red.

“FALCONER!”

“AMY! NO!”

I grabbed for her arm. She pulled away from me.

She scrambled up the embankment.

Right into the line of fire.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. She stood up, right into the storm of bullets, and started waving her arms in front of her, like she was trying to flag down an oncoming car. She was shouting something at them that not even I could hear over the hellstorm erupting all around her.

Time seemed to stop. I had this frozen, snapshot image of her, standing up there, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky, her pants soaking wet and splattered with mud, her skinny freckled arms up in front of her, pulling the tail of her shirt up to reveal two inches of pale, vulnerable skin. All these details, captured perfectly in my mind, in that endless moment.

And the moment was, in fact, endless, because time had stopped.

From behind me John said, “Finally. Jesus.”

It was dead silent all around us. The water at my feet had frozen. A spray of bits of mud hung in the air in the embankment above me, where a bullet had struck a microsecond before.

I turned to John, who had the Soy Sauce container in his hand. I said, “What the—”

“Oh, Dave! You’re here with me. I stopped time. I hope that’s okay.”

“You… you can do that now?”

“Yeah, ever since I took the Soy Sauce last night. I’m like Zach Morris in Saved by the Bell. The only catch is you can’t actually accomplish anything while time is stopped. You can move yourself but it’s, uh, mostly informational I guess.”

I climbed up the embankment, taking in the frozen battle all around me, like some sort of huge, open air, incredibly fucked-up sculpture in a museum. I looked back at Amy, a statue frozen with her mouth open, exposing her crooked incisors.

I shrugged and said, “Well, it’s actually not the weirdest thing that’s happened on the Sauce.”

John walked up behind me and said, “I wouldn’t even put it in the top five. And I know what you’re thinking, and no, we can’t push her out of the way. Nothing can be moved. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they tell you not to change anything when you go back in time, like it’s a rule or something. I mean literally nothing can be moved. I tried.”

I said, “I can move the furgun.” I still had it in my hand.

“Right, and you’re moving your pants when you walk. I think it’s anything you were touching when everything stopped.”

“How long does it stay like this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only done it once before. I couldn’t intentionally make it start up again but… I got the sense that it lasts until you do what you need to do. Whether you know what you need to do or not. If that makes sense.”

“What do we need to do?”

I stared over at the column of smoke frozen over the burning truck, the still flames looking like orange-blown glass sculptures. Then, from the still, black column, a whisp of smoke moved.

At the exact same moment I thought it, John said it out loud:

“Oooooh, shit.”

The shadow men were here.

It started with that single, black shadow, hanging in midair. It was moving toward us.

Then I saw another one. And another. They grew out of the air, black shapes like holes burning in the white curtain of reality, revealing the darkness beyond. Three and four at a time they appeared, the darkness taking on the vague shapes of men. Each time my eyes focused on one spot, walking shadows would appear where I wasn’t watching. It was like trying to count snowflakes as they landed on a windshield.

John and I backed away from them, then realized they were behind us, too, on the other side of the ditch.

We were an island in a black tide of them.

PAGE 312 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

and I must emphasize that my encounters with the Shadow Men have been rare, in the sense that stepping in dog feces is rare. That is, the potential is always there, you never forget it when it happens, but you go just long enough between incidents to let your guard down. Yet, everyone has been in the presence of a Shadow Man, in the same way that everyone has been in the presence of electricity. It is all around you, invisible, tickling at the periphery of your perceptions. Then one day, you touch a bare wire…

These beings live in between moments and outside of time, across dimensions and perhaps never fully exist in any particular one. They have been called ghosts, and no doubt they wear the faces of the recently dead in the imagination of a person trying to reconcile what they saw in that dark corridor, or in the silence of their bedroom at three in the morning. For others, they will perhaps appear to be tiny, gray aliens. Centuries ago a Shadow Man would have been called a faerie, or succubus. That is how the human brain works, when it looks at a formless cloud, it tries to see a shape, or a face, or otherwise associate it with something that makes sense in some known cultural context, like the proverbial image of the Virgin Mary seen in the grain of a tree stump, or a slice of toast. But make no mistake—the observer supplies the face.

You have never heard of anyone being harmed or killed by a Shadow Person, in the sense that you have never met someone who failed to be born. Our unique, limited perception limits us to see only one possible outcome of an event. If we grow tiresome of a tedious conversation with a man, we cannot, say, simply switch to another quantum reality in which that man did not survive a bout of childhood pneumonia, winking him out of our thread of existence like turning the channel on a television. The Shadow Men can.

There are enthusiasts of the paranormal on the Internet and elsewhere who point to the tens of thousands of people who go missing worldwide each year and speculate that they have been taken by the Shadow Men. But I am prone to think that this is misunderstanding their methods. If the Shadow Men, say, invaded your home and took your wife, you would in that next moment have no recollection of ever having been married. At best, you would have only a terrible, gnawing sense of something missing. A hole in your life into which something should perfectly fit, something that should rightfully exist, but does not.

One young man I know, who has written about the incident in his own book, claims that he retains distinct memories of a friend who was lost in an encounter with the shadows. The parents of the friend still live in town. Yet, they do not recall a son. The rental records of his apartment show no person under that name ever resided there, the records of the public school system retain no mention of a student by that name. The difference between our reality and the reality that this young man remembers could be so close that only molecules separate them—a particular sperm that failed to fertilize a particular egg in one reality, but that was successful in another. Some speculate that we sense the ripples of these changes in the form of déjà vu, or those infuriating occasions when we insist we remember an event or a conversation with a group of friends that no one else in the group recollects. You hear of a prominent person passing away, and swear that you heard that same news years earlier.

But of course, the real power of the Shadow Men is that we do not perceive them at all.

The Bible II

John and I backed up. I raised the furgun, stupidly, having no idea what effect it would have on these beings. We retreated, slowly, bumping backward against the rigid Amy statue what was still standing there, frozen. Her arms were outstretched, her eyes wide, unwittingly putting herself in an absolutely perfect posture for the situation.

The shadow man closest to me was no more than ten feet away. I had the furgun on him because I had nothing else. Where there would be eyes on a man, burning coals of yellow and orange flared on the shadow man, like a pair of lit cigars floating in the blackness. And in that moment I knew that this wasn’t just a shadow man, but was the shadow man, the one I had seen in my bathroom, the one that lurked in my cell in the basement of the old asylum, the one that now, in this moment, I sensed was actually never far from me. I could not bring myself to think, What are you? Instead, the feeling was more akin to, It’s you again.

I… have spoken to it before…

The blackness closed in on us, no gap between the shadow men now, their cold intelligence, malice and cataclysmic lethality advancing as a solid black wave, like the artist who painted our reality had knocked over an ink bottle on it. We had no room to retreat, both of us pressed against the Amy monument.

“Dave…” John hissed. “Dave… shoot. Shoot them. Do something…”

But my eyes were fixed on the burning coals of the shadow man in front of me, and something was passing between us. There were no words, but we were communicating. The thoughts passed instantly, faster than words could have managed, like files instantly streamed between two computers. If I had to translate what the shadow man told me into words, it would be this:

What is a man? What do you think a man is? What do you think we are? What do you think your relationship is to us?

You believe in a spirit, or a soul. What do you think that is? It lives inside your flesh, but only your flesh can interact with the world, only your flesh can speak and eat and fight and fuck and reproduce, and ultimately the soul must obey the impulses of the flesh. What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs? By virtue of your birth, you make a prisoner of a soul. An enslavement that multiplies as you multiply, breeding with grunts and stench and the spilling of squirming fluids.

You recoil in horror at the idea of the parasites, these creatures who against your will can commandeer your sensory interaction with the world, imprisoning your mind behind a repulsive monstrosity that can command your limbs and even your very thoughts, poisoning every aspect of your being with its own alien desires until it becomes impossible to distinguish your own personality from the urges of the squirming thing living invisibly inside your body. Until nothing that is truly you remains.

Now, you understand.

For us, man is the parasite.

Somehow, I could feel their hate, an energy that was too big and too cold to get the scope of it, the way that from the ground, the curvature of the earth just looks like a straight line. The shadow people moved in. So, so slowly. A dark tide creeping in on an island of mud and grass maybe ten feet in diameter and shrinking. All those glowing eyes, little pinpricks of light floating on dark, featureless faces.

John said, “Dave… do it. Dave. Now.”

“Do what?”

“Focus! Focus on the most powerful thing you can imagine and squeeze that trigger.”

But that wasn’t right. A nuclear explosion would not work here. Fire would not work. Violence would not work. That was the energy they were made of. Shadows aren’t repelled by the dark, they’re repelled by the light—

The shadow man—my shadow man—floated right up to me, right up to Amy. I found myself shrieking, “NO! NO! NOOO!” in short, barking bursts, the single word over and over again.

Amy’s outstretched arms were beside me and the shadow man was on her now, drifting right into her left hand. My stomach turned as I watched her hand dissolve and vanish completely. All that was left was a stump, her left hand gone forever. But, no, that must have been the confusion of the moment because of course her left hand had always been gone, the accident and all that.

I raised the furgun, pointing it right at the “chest” of the shadow man. It was in his chest.

My mind was blank.

I reached out and grabbed Amy’s other, frozen hand and squeezed. I closed my eyes.

I need to think like Amy.

In that one second before I squeezed the trigger, a face popped into my head. The face was the same one that would have come to probably 75 percent of Americans, if put in the same situation. A bearded face that was surely from the imagination of some long-lost Italian painter, a face that looked nothing like a Middle Eastern Jew. I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible kid shows my adoptive parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned toward the camera and said some variation of, “I know how we’ll solve this problem! With Christianity.”

Well, their programming worked. When terror drove everything out of my mind, I fell back on the iconic face and all I could picture in my head was that painting, that shitty velvet Elvisey Jesus that had hung on my wall, that was still sitting in the trunk of John’s Caddie for all I knew.

I squeezed the trigger.

A flash of white light poured forth from the device in my hand. The whiteness condensed down to a shape. Small. Square.

Suddenly, hovering there before us, in midair, was that stupid painting.

The painting swiveled, facing the dark hordes. The eyes on the face of Velvet Jesus burned with white fire. The mouth opened, and let loose an inhuman roar.

Velvet Jesus faced a shadow man to my left. Laser beams fired from his eyes.

The shadow man exploded.

The eyes lit up again, and fired. Another shadow man left the world. The painting turned in midair, we hit the dirt. Beams of white fired left, then right, clearing swaths through the shadows, piercing the blackness with a glare that was somehow equally terrible, a white-blue light that I knew would leave me blind if I looked too long. The terrible light chewed through the shadows with a sickening righteous energy that genuinely made me pity them. I suddenly knew how the scientists of the Manhattan Project felt the first time they saw a nuclear detonation, witnessing the power of what they had unleashed, the reflection of the light off of the surrounding sand bright enough to blind a man wearing dark glasses. Power so astonishing that it became hideous.

And then, there was only one shadow man left, my shadow man, the one in front of me that had taken Amy’s hand, or made it so that her hand was already gone.

Velvet Jesus flew toward the shadow man, then circled behind him. The painting screeched like an animal and the mouth on the painting opened wide. The painting launched itself at the shadow man.

Velvet Jesus bit his head off.

The shadow man’s body evaporated like a cloud of car exhaust.

Then there was a flash, so bright that I couldn’t close my eyes to it because they were already closed, but the brightness penetrated to the back of my eyeballs, burning all through me. There was a thud in the ground, a shock wave that sent a ripple through reality. The painting disappeared. The furgun exploded in a miniature supernova of blue light.

I don’t know how I ended up flat on my back, but I was staring up at the still, gray clouds and trying to blink spots out of my eyes. All was silent.

John appeared over me and said, “When they write the sequel to the Bible, that shit is definitely gonna be in there.”

My ears were ringing. Somehow, all of my senses were ringing. Overload. Then John was pulling me to my feet and saying, “Look! Look at that one’s face.”

He was pointing to one of the still life–infected REPER men, one I didn’t even know had been standing there when the world froze. It had been in the process of rounding the burning truck, running toward us. It would have reached Amy in about three seconds if John had not called his Soy Sauce time-out. I walked over to the infected spaceman. His eyes were a pair of road flares, sizzling and crackling and smoldering with white light.

The parasites were burning.

All of the parasites were burning—at least the ones around us. The white, crackling pinpricks of light were twinkling from the infected spacemen, the sizzle of the frying spiders filling the preternatural silence in that still world.

And then the lights blinked out, one by one, the sizzling of the flesh fading, as the last of the parasites in the field died. The men they had lived in would not suddenly wake up and find themselves cured—happy endings like that never happened in Undisclosed. When time sped up, they would collapse, dead. But they would be free. And they would be no threat to us.

In the stillness of the aftermath I said, “Man, I need a nap.”

I looked around at the frozen battle, one that nobody involved in knew had just taken a radical turn in the infinity between ticks on the clock. “What happens now?”

John surveyed the landscape and said, “We just got to get out of the way, right? Time starts back up and the army realizes the zombies are all down and they’ll stop shooting and then they’ll give us all medals.”

I said, “Amy is still out in the open. If I position myself so that I’m kind of pushing her over, when time starts back up we’ll tumble down into the ditch, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Try not to break her neck.”

“Go down there and get ready to catch us.”

John jumped down into the ditch, looking over Falconer, who had been shot multiple times. He certainly looked dead because he wasn’t moving, but nobody was moving so we couldn’t know for sure. I walked toward Amy, her frozen arms outstretched toward me like she was trying to ward me off.

Something hit me in the chest.

Actually, I ran into something. Something hovering in midair, something small and sharp.

A bullet.

An inch long and as thick as a pencil. Fired from one of the many guns bristling out of the line of green vehicles behind me.

There was no mistaking the trajectory. It was heading right for Amy. Specifically, right for Amy’s heart. In the frantic fog of zombie combat some guy—who had probably enlisted to help pay for his college education—had taken a shot at the waving figure next to the ditch, and the shot was good. It was going to take her right out.

John saw me standing there, slackjawed, looking at this frozen projectile, this little copper-jacketed death warrant hanging in the air about eight feet away from Amy. He looked back and forth between the bullet and the frozen Amy and didn’t need me to mutter, “Headed right for her,” though I did it anyway.

He said, “Okay, okay. Let’s think it through. What if we—”

“One of us has to die.”

“Now, that’s not true—”

“Either it tears through her heart, or one of us stands in front of her and lets it tear through ours.”

“Bullshit. It doesn’t have to be your heart. You can, like turn sideways to it, press your bicep against it, get that big bone in your arm in front of it.”

“A bullet like this… John, this thing is traveling at half a mile per second. They design them to punch through military-grade helmets and body armor. It’ll smash through the bone and rip through your lungs and take out your heart anyway.”

“You don’t know that—”

“I do, because, Marconi was right. I knew he was right. They still need their freaking sacrifice. Otherwise this thing won’t end. It’s a bill that needs to be paid. Somebody has to die.”

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Dave…”

“If you don’t understand the symmetry here, well, just think about it. It has to be me. It’s right. It fits. You said yourself that time won’t resume until we do what we’re supposed to do. If you stand here, in front of this thing, you’re going to be waiting forever. It won’t go off pause until I do it.”

He said, “Fine. Then leave it on pause. We’ll go do, whatever. Whatever we want. Piss off the top of the Statue of Liberty. Walk across the ocean and screw with frozen tourists in Paris. We got all the time in the world. We’ll use it. We’ll tour the world, you and me.”

I shook my head. “And leave her here, this thing hovering in front of her heart? Knowing things could suddenly snap into action at any second? No, I’d never be able to relax, knowing that. We’re screwing around somewhere on the other side of the world and suddenly she takes a bullet and she dies here, alone? Calling for me, her last thought to wonder where I am? No. I spent my whole life putting off what I knew I needed to do. No more of that.”

“Well fuck you, then.”

“Yep. Fuck me.”

“Wait! You can leave a note. Like, a final message to her.”

“I don’t have anything to write with.”

“You have the contents of your own body. Smear the note onto the street. With your shit.”

I stared at him. “Yes, John, let’s have that be Amy’s last memory of me. I mean, once time starts again all of this is going to just be instantly in front of her. So from her point of view, she stood up, then in the blink of an eye suddenly I’m sprawled dead in front of her and I LOVE YOU BABE spontaneously appears onto the pavement, spelled out in smeared human feces.”

“Oh my God, do it! You’ll be a legend.”

He laughed. I laughed.

I said to John, “Good-bye, man.”

“Just… just wait, okay? There’s no hurry. There’s a whole list of things I need to say first—”

“No, there isn’t. There really isn’t. Whatever you think you need to say, I already know. Trust me. Just… if you make it out of here, don’t…”

I thought, and shook my head.

“Just don’t waste yourself. Do you understand?”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

I nodded toward Amy and said, “And take care of her.”

“She takes care of herself, if you haven’t noticed. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t mean it. “You got your phone?”

“I got your phone. Want me to call somebody?”

“No. You’re going to get video of this. Once things start up again, I mean.”

I had a feeling time was going to whip back up to speed the moment I was in position. “Let’s do this.”

I took a deep breath, my last, I figured, and stood about a foot in front of the bullet, its shiny tip aimed right at my sternum. I had been shot before, and it hurt quite a bit. But I had a feeling I was never going to feel this one. I thought this bullet had a serious chance of passing through my breastbone and through the soft tissue behind it, through my spine and then out again. But by then the bullet would be badly off course, tumbling through the air, breaking into fragments. It should miss her easily.

I steeled myself, trying to make my body harder, as if that would make a difference. I stared down the projectile, waiting for time to resume. I started to get impatient, and made a twirling motion with my fingers. “Come on. Start the clock, damn it.”

In the last second before time resumed and the bullet exploded forward, I registered an orange blur, bouncing along the ground. I turned—

Sacrifice

An explosion of noise crashed in on me from every direction. In an instant, the guns were barking and the wind was howling and the stink of smoke was burrowing into my nostrils.

The orange blur was right in front of me, kicking and thrashing through the air. And then there was a thud and a yelp and Molly was bleeding at my feet.

Amy was yelling “DON’T SHOO—” at the soldiers, finishing her sentence from before the Great Pause, her words choked off in confusion. In a blink, there I was, standing in the road in front of her—to her eyes, I had teleported there. And there, on the ground in front of me, was Molly.

I spun and dove and tackled Amy, pinning her to the ground, sending her glasses askew. The guns thundered behind us, and I craned my head around to see that Tennet’s army of infected were, as I thought, simply collapsing dead where they stood, like marionettes whose strings had all simultaneously been cut. Their parasite puppeteers had been burned to ash.

Torturous minutes stretched out as we lay there and the gunfire continued over and around us, the amped-up soldiers getting their money’s worth. Bullets skipped off pavement and whistled overhead. But slowly, finally, one gun after another got the cease fire command. The Zulus were down.

Amy squirmed out from under me, and goddamnit, she ran right out into the open again, and toward Molly.

She kneeled down over her, crying, pressing her face to the dog’s.

I slowly stood, waving my arms at the soldiers, for all that good it had done Amy last time. Nearby I saw the shredded sleeve of one of the black space suits, and I grabbed it and waved it like a flag.

They didn’t shoot.

I went over to Amy and Molly. The dog wasn’t whimpering or howling, thank God, because I don’t think either of us could have handled that. She was silent, her eyes closed, still. She never even felt it.

Molly had moved when the rest of the world was still, she had been able to navigate the paused world just like John and I had, and I doubted I would ever know how, beyond the fact that there were a lot of things about this animal that I didn’t understand. When things had stopped, she ran, from wherever she was, and she ran as fast as her paws could take her, knowing where she needed to be and what she needed to do. And what she needed to do was to steal my goddamned hero moment.

We kneeled there in the cold, and finally somebody called out to us. It was a soldier, who I had a feeling was doing it against orders. He had emerged from a hatch at the top of one of the vehicles, and was yelling something at us. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so I just showed him my empty hands and said, “We’re not armed.”

If somehow the crying girl at my feet and I still looked like zombies, then John convinced him otherwise since he was performing the distinctly human—and distinctly non-zombie—activity of filming everything with a cell phone.

The soldier climbed out of his vehicle and jumped down, then crossed the barricades.

See, that’s how you get eaten in a zombie movie, kid.

I heard cars approach from the highway behind us, refugees from Undisclosed who had presumably been huddled down in the Dead Zone behind us, hearing World War III erupting up ahead. But now they came, in their pickup trucks and dirt bikes and ATVs, driving with an adherence to posted traffic laws that zombies so rarely display.

No one on the other side of the barricades panicked and opened fire. The spell had been broken. Amy was whispering to Molly, stroking her fur. I was standing over Amy, my hand on her shoulder, looking down at them. Boots appeared on the road next to me and my eyes tracked up past gray camo pants and black knee pads. A wicked-looking assault rifle was pointed at the ground, a gloved hand on the grip, the finger resting outside the trigger guard.

The soldier said, “Sir! Please identify yourself.”

“My name is David Wong. I am not a zombie or infected with any kind of disease that creates zombie-like symptoms or whatever other bullshit you were told by your commanding officers.”

The soldier gestured toward the approaching vehicles and said, “You’ve escaped the city? Are there other uninfected back there?”

I thought for a moment, studying Amy’s face. I swallowed and said, “As far as I know, everybody in town is uninfected. The effects of this outbreak have been grossly exaggerated.”

“STOP FILMING, SIR! SIR!”

John obeyed, stuffing the phone in his pocket. He said, “You can confiscate the phone if you want. A copy of the video is currently hosted on my Web site. And you can try to get that taken down I guess, but it’s on a server based in the Ukraine. So good luck with that.”

Other soldiers were approaching cautiously from behind the first guy, and in a zombie movie this is when Molly would spring back to life and bite one of them, and then everything would go to hell. But this was not a zombie movie, Molly stayed where she was, her blood turning cold on the pavement.

The cold rain started again. John took off his jacket and laid it over Molly, so she wouldn’t lay there and get soaked. It was for Amy’s benefit, I knew.

One of the soldiers behind the first guy, a medic apparently, said, “Is anyone in need of medical attention?”

John said, “No. We’re fine.”

Then a furious voice emerged from the ditch to my left, saying, “UH, HELLO? I’ve got three bullet wounds down here and I’m laying in fucking freezing water. Somebody?”

We didn’t realize at the time that we would have to basically ban ourselves from watching television in the aftermath. The video clip of the small, wet, redheaded girl weeping over her shot dog would be downloaded 18 million times from YouTube alone in the next month. It would air on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, all three broadcast networks and everywhere else. Amy couldn’t stand to watch it, and for a long time, it was everywhere.

If it had been me laying there, nobody would have given a shit. A big, chubby guy in a green prison jumpsuit and a weird reputation? The factions who were still calling for blood afterward, who talked of undetectable infection and for internment—if not extermination—of the town, would maybe have still won out. Same if it had been John, or Falconer, or Owen. They could have dug up dirt on us, claimed the corpse was infected, claimed we had killed a dozen orphans just prior to taking the bullet. We’d have just been one more body in the street.

But no one could argue against a dog.

The loyal dog, sacrificing itself to save its owner, laying there bleeding in the rain. Then add in the tiny girl kneeling over her—the dog’s owner that the bullet had been meant for—who couldn’t have appeared more harmless if she’d been made of kittens. The image doused the world’s bloodlust like a bucket of ice water. A perfect, undeniable symbol for the price the innocent pay for unchecked paranoia.

Eulogy

John wrapped up Molly in his jacket and laid her in the backseat of the pickup Tennet had driven out to this spot. A crowd was forming, and vehicles were now lined up bumper to bumper down the highway, an echo of the scene from the day of the outbreak. We were heading the other direction, though, back into town. In the distance, the column of smoke from the asylum inferno drifted into the sky. We passed one house where a guy was unloading suitcases from his trunk and glancing around in confusion, like he had just come back from a two-week vacation and was wondering what the fuck happened while he was gone.

We drove to my house, or the charred remnants of my house, anyway. Amy was pretty upset at the sight of it but John pointed out that we had in fact burned the place down ourselves.

I was exhausted down to my bones, but there was this last piece of business to take care of and no way to put it off. I grabbed the shovel laying in my yard and John and I took turns digging a grave for Molly, rain pelting our shoulders. The temperature dropped into the forties but Amy stood out in it the whole time, watching us, shivering.

I laid Molly in the ground and John volunteered to say the eulogy:

“This here is Molly. She was a good dog. And when I say ‘good dog’ I don’t mean it the way other people mean it, when they’re talking about a dog that never shit on the floor or bit their kids. No, I’m talking about a dog that died saving Amy’s life. By my rough count, that’s half a dozen times Molly saved one of our lives. How many dogs can say that? Hell, how many people can say that? One time, Dave was in a burning building, and Molly here rescued him by getting behind the wheel of his car and driving through the wall. You know that couldn’t have been easy for her.

“Anyhow, Molly died in the way that all really good things die, fast and brutal and for no apparent reason. They say that even though it often appears that God just really, really doesn’t give a shit about what happens down here, that that’s just an illusion and He really does care after all, and it’s all part of His great plan to make it appear that He doesn’t care. Though what purpose that serves I can’t possibly imagine. I think God probably just wanted Molly for Himself, and I guess I can’t blame Him.

“Well, God, here’s your dog back, I guess. We hereby commit Molly to doggy heaven, which is probably nicer than regular heaven, if you think about it. Amen.”

Amy and I said, “Amen” and I noticed she was crying again and felt utterly helpless to stop it. She buried her face in my chest and I stroked her tangled, wet mess of red hair.

I said, “Let’s find a roof.”

She said, “Let’s find a bed.”

We walked away from the ruins of my former house and John said, “Wait, what if Tennet arranged all of this as some elaborate form of therapy?”