by David Wong
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.”
<
br /> 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 n
ot 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!”