by David Wong
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?”
EPILOGUE
It was December 22nd, or Christmas Eve Eve Eve as John so irritatingly called it. I was alone, staring out of the kitchen window of a cheap, mostly empty mobile home supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There was a single Christmas card on the counter next to me, laying on top of its mutilated envelope.
The trailer had come with furniture, but the sofa smelled so bad we had dragged it out into the yard. I think the trailer had previously seen service in New Orleans after the hurricane and I think it got moldy. In the corner of the living room was our Christmas tree, a two-foot-tall plastic tree with huge googly eyes and a mechanical mouth. John had found it in a thrift store, it had a voice box on the bottom and I think originally it was supposed to do a humorous Christmas rap when somebody walked by. When we put batteries in it, the mouth locked in the wide-open position and it uttered a high-pitched, electronic scream of garbled feedback until we pried the batteries out again.
Under the tree sat John’s gift, a wrapped object that was perfectly the shape of a crossbow.
I had a feeling it would take me years to piece together the whirlwind of lies that had obscured the incident the news media had finally decided to call the “Zulu Outbreak.” The consensus seemed to be that fewer than 70 people were ever actually infected with the pathogen, which they decided was some kind of rare form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, caused by the consumption of some kind of mutated protein from contaminated sausages. So the final death toll was, according to the final CDC reports, 68 dead from Zulu, 406 dead from the violence resulting from mass hysteria.
Plenty of people from in town came forward to dispute those reports. And plenty of other people came forward to dispute those reports. A hundred different versions came out and so the public just defaulted to what the guys in suits told them. In the end, They didn’t need to cover up anything—They just drowned it out in a blizzard of conflicting stories. The world eventually gives up and moves on. Like the whole thing with the envelopes of anthrax after 9/11.