“David. Stop talking. Did you not get any of my voice mails? I got on a bus to [Undisclosed] this morning —”
“Shit! Turn around! Amy, it’s chaos in there. Get off at the next stop and—”
The background noise had cut off from her end and I knew the call had gotten dropped. No bars on the phone.
“Shit! John, she’s on her way down here!”
“No, that’s good news, man. She’ll be coming in on the highway, right? We figure out how far the bus got and we’ll meet her there. Hell, if we head north we’ll run into her at some point.”
My phone screamed again. Text message this time, from Amy.
The message said simply, WHAT IS HAPPENING.
There was a photo attached. I opened it.
All of the warmth in my body drained out through my feet, all my life and strength forming a puddle on the tile floor.
The photo was of my burning house. Taken from not twenty feet away.
I sat down, an act that was not entirely voluntary. I was in a forest of legs. My head was swimming.
John was talking to me. “Dave? Dave. What’s happening?”
“She’s at my…”
I swallowed.
“She’s at my fucking house, John. Amy. She took the bus this morning and she went to my house. To find me.”
“She’s… I’m sure she’s fine. She’s smarter than both of us put together, she’ll—”
“I have to go back for her.”
“You’re damned right.”
He pulled me to my feet. I shoved my way through the crowd, knocking rudely through shoulders and elbows.
In the parking lot John said, “All we got to do is get back to the water tower, take the door, get back to the burrito stand. With any luck the Caddie will still be there—”
“We can’t walk. We have to, uh, borrow a vehicle. Something that can drive right the hell across that cornfield.”
“Look.” He pointed. “Left of the Greyhound.”
There was a very muddy pickup, on jacked-up suspension. In the bed was an equally muddy dirt bike.
I was praying that the keys were in the truck. They weren’t, and the truck was locked.
Looking around nervously, we rolled the bike out of the truck bed. I had only driven a motorcycle twice in my life, and hadn’t crashed either time. John had actually owned one a few years ago, but had crashed it twice. We didn’t discuss it, I jumped on and John climbed on behind me. I kicked it to life, and we were off. Across the parking lot, onto the grass, into the stubble and mud of the cornfield.
We bounced along the ruts and John had his arms around my rib cage so tight I thought he was breaking bones. I told him to loosen up because I couldn’t breathe. I aimed the bike right at the vertical columns of the tower, brown at the seams where they had been welding the plates together. I saw the blue Porta-Potty at the base, as it grew out of a speck in the distance. November wind froze my ears and cheeks. I felt like I was watching myself do all of it from afar.
They couldn’t have Amy. They could have me, they could have John, they could have Undisclosed and the Midwest and America. I’ll cede all of that to them, whoever they are. But they don’t get Amy. She’s off the table.
Amy had already lost her family, in that car accident years ago, the same one that took her hand and left her tethered to a bottle of pain pills she could never allow out of her sight. She lost her brother, she lost her home. The world owed her more than it would ever be able to repay but by God, it was going to have to try.
The reporter’s face kept flashing through my mind. A flesh-eating spider, chewing through her eye—
—and Amy was closer than that. Closer to the infested house than the reporter. How in the hell had she gotten so close? Why didn’t they stop her? Maybe the National Guard had gotten her by now, or the CDC. Maybe they’d just hold onto her until they got all of this under control.
I was numb all over, a combination of the cold and the vibration and the panic and exhaustion. I couldn’t feel the bike jolting over the ruts in the field, I couldn’t feel John’s arms around me, I couldn’t feel the half-dozen wounds that had been complaining all over my body.
I pulled up to the Porta-Potty, found the kickstand and said, “If it looks like the feds have it under control, we find somebody in charge and—”
John was not there.
I jumped off the bike and looked back. There was a tiny figure way off in the distance, frantically waving his arms and running. He had fallen off somewhere around the first third of the trip.
No time to wait for him. I pulled out my phone and wrote out a message to him in an unsent text, telling him to give us thirty minutes to get back before getting as far away as he could.
I went to the door of the middle Porta-Potty and whispered, “Burrito stand.”
To be clear, the doors absolutely did not work that way. It was just wishful thinking, or a prayer.
I opened it, stepped inside.
The plastic Porta-Potty door clapped shut behind me. I knew I wasn’t at the burrito stand. There were no burrito smells. There was noise. Panic, from outside. I opened the door and had a split second to register that I was in the restroom at BB’s.
Shouted commands, panicked screams. Gunshots.
I wanted to turn back to the door, to retreat to the field. Instead I found a gun barrel pointed in my face. I threw up my hands.
“No! Don’t—”
Leviticus
John heard muffled gunshots as he approached the toilet, and they sounded
He reached the door and was about to yank it open when he had second thoughts. Wait, if there were dudes with guns at the other end of the “door” or portal or wormhole, could they shoot through it? Was that what he heard? If he opened it, would a hail of bullets fly out? Would a dude with a machine gun spring out at him? Or had some soldier or cop been taking a shit when Dave burst in, so now the two of them were having a gunfight, pressed chest-to-chest in the tiny booth?
Unarmed and with no other plans for the day, John took a deep breath and pulled open the door.
Filthy, chemical toilet. A crumpled bag of Doritos on the plastic floor. Empty toilet paper roll.
John climbed inside. Closed the door.
Nothing happened.
You could feel when the doors worked, there was a change in the air, and a slight smell like the gas that comes out of aerosol cans of whipped cream before the cream comes out. When he opened the door, he was unsurprised to find it was just the field again.
He tried it ten more times.
Finally he gave up and stepped out of the booth, and noticed something for the first time.
