happening, and are about to happen. Shut my eyes and go to sleep happy.
But no, ‘R’. No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.
‘Julie,’ I say, bracing to confess my final sin. ‘I need… to tell you…’
The Stadium’s field halogens flare like suns and midnight becomes daylight. I can see every pore in Julie’s face.
‘What the hell?’ she gasps, whipping her head around. A piercing alarm further shatters the night’s stillness, and then we see it: the Jumbotron is aglow. Hanging from the upper reaches of the open roof like a tablet descending from Heaven, the screen plays a blocky animation of a quarterback running from what appears to be a zombie, arms outstretched and clutching. The screen blinks between this and a word that I think might be:
BREACH
‘R…’ Julie says, horrified, ‘did you
I look at her desperately. ‘No ch… no choi… no
She presses her lips together, her eyes boring into me, then gives a single shake of her head as if banishing one thought, committing to another. ‘Okay. Then we need to get inside. God damn it, R.’
We run into the house and she slams the door. Nora is at the top of the stairs. ‘Where have you guys been? What’s going
‘It’s a breach,’ Julie says. ‘Zombie in the Stadium.’
‘You mean
The disappointment in her reply makes me wince. ‘Yes and no.’
We hurry into Julie’s bedroom and she turns out the lights. We all sit on the floor on the piles of laundry, and for a while nobody speaks. We just sit and listen to the sounds. Guards running and shouting. Gunfire. Our own heavy breathing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Julie whispers to Nora, but I know it’s for me. ‘It won’t spread much. Those shots were probably Security taking them out already.’
‘Are we in the clear, then?’ Nora asks. ‘Will R be okay?’
Julie looks at me. Her face is grim. ‘Even if they think the breach started from a natural death, that guard obviously didn’t eat himself. Security will know there’s at least one zombie unaccounted for.’
Nora follows Julie’s eyes to mine, and I can almost imagine my face flushing. ‘It was you?’ she asks, straining for neutrality.
‘Didn’t… mean. Was… going… kill me.’
She says nothing. Her face is blank.
I meet her stare, willing her to feel my crushing remorse. ‘It was my last,’ I say, straining to force language back into my idiot tongue. ‘No matter what. Swear to the skymouth.’
A few agonising moments pass. Then Nora slowly nods, and addresses Julie. ‘So we need to get him out of here.’
‘They shut everything down for breaches. All the doors will be locked and guarded. They might even shut the roof if they get scared enough.’
‘So what the hell are we supposed to do?’
Julie shrugs, and the gesture looks so bleak on her, so wrong. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Once again, I don’t know.’
Julie and Nora fall sleep. They fight it for hours, trying to come up with a plan to save me, but eventually they succumb. I lie on a pile of pants and stare up at the starry green ceiling.
It seems trivial now, a thin silver lining on a vast black storm cloud, but I think I’m learning to read. As I look up at the phosphorescent galaxy, letters come together and form words. Stringing them into full sentences is still beyond me, but I savour the sensation of those little symbols clicking together and bursting like soap bubbles of sound. If I ever see my wife again… I’ll at least be able to read her name tag.
The hours ooze by. It’s long after midnight, but bright as noon outside. The halogens ram their white light against the house, squeezing in through cracks in the window shades. My ears tune to the sounds around me. The girls’ breathing. Their small shifting movements. And then, sometime around two in the morning, a phone rings.
Julie comes awake, gets up on one elbow. In some distant room of the house, the phone rings again. She throws off her blankets and stands up. Strange to see her from this angle, towering over me instead of cowering under. I’m the one who needs protecting now. One mistake, one brief lapse of my new-found judgement — that’s all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, living as a moral being.
The phone keeps ringing. Julie walks out of the bedroom and I follow her through the dark, echoing house. We step into what appears to be an office. There is a large desk covered in papers and blueprints, and on the walls various kinds of telephones are screwed to the Sheetrock, different brands and styles, all from different eras.
‘They rerouted the phone system,’ Julie explains. ‘It’s more like an intercom now. We have direct lines to all the important areas.’
Each phone has a name-tag sticker stuck below it, with the location Sharpied onto the blank.
GARDENS
KITCHENS
WAREHOUSE
GARAGE
ARMOURY
CORRIDOR 2
GOLDMAN DOME
AIG ARENA
LEHMAN FIELD
And so on.
The phone that’s ringing, a pea-green rotary dialler covered in dust, is labelled:
OUTSIDE
Julie looks at the phone. She looks at me. ‘This is weird. That line is from the phones in the abandoned outer districts. Since we got walkie-talkies nobody uses it any more.’
The phone clangs its bells, loud and insistent. I can’t believe Nora is still asleep.
Slowly, Julie picks up the receiver and puts it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘What? I can’t under—’ Her brow furrows in concentration. Then her eyes widen. ‘
She holds the phone out to me. ‘It’s for you.’
I stare at it. ‘What?’
‘It’s your friend. That fat fuck from the airport.’
I grab the phone. I put the earpiece to my mouth. Julie shakes her head and flips it around for me. Into the receiver I breathe a stunned, ‘
His deep rumble crackles in my ear. ‘Hey… lover boy.’
‘What’s… Where are you?’
‘Out in… city. Didn’t know… what would get with… phone, but had… to try. You’re… okay?’
‘Okay but… trapped. Stadium… locked down.’
‘Shit.’
‘What’s… going on? Out there.’
There is silence for a moment. ‘R,’ he says. ‘Dead… still coming. More. From airport. Other places. Lots… of
