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
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
“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.
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
