“I don’t know! Outside town I think.”
“Oh. Thank God.”
“Or not. I actually don’t know.”
Owen strode up and kicked aside a smoldering skull. He raised the pistol.
John raised his shotgun. Their eyes met.
John said, “Owen? What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“You are one crazy son of a bitch, John.”
To me, John said, “Is he infected?”
“I don’t think so.”
Owen said, “Ain’t none of us infected.”
I said, “We… don’t know
John said, “Well, whatever. Everybody needs to get the hell out of here! By lunchtime this is all gonna be a crater. Did you hear the announcement out there, Owen?”
I said, “Wait, do you two know each other?”
“Yeah, remember I said I was doing setup for him? This is DJ O-Funk.” To Owen, he said, “Hell, I thought you’d be out there on Daryl’s farm, ridin’ this thing out.”
“I was. Went into town on a beer run and got scooped up by the feds. I punched one of those guys in the space suits and I guess they took that as a sign of infection.”
I noticed the rest of the inmates were staring at us, shell-shocked, as we held this conversation next to the crashed Caddie and among the scattered pile of smoking human remains. It finally occurred to me to turn my eyes up to the circling drones, wondering if they were zeroing in on our skulls right now. I had a vague thought that we should run for cover, but the entrance to the hospital was a hundred feet away. It’d be a nice, leisurely couple of shots for some guy sitting at a console out in the desert. We could duck in the car, but the drone was also equipped with the kind of rockets that could turn it into two tons of burning steel confetti.
Dr. Marconi walked up and John glanced at him. “Doc? You been here the whole time?”
“John. I would ask you what you are doing but I fear you would actually tell me.”
“I’m just here to get Dave. Now we’re gonna get in my Caddie and I’m gonna drive a Caddie-shaped hole in that fence over there. The rest of you can walk right out behind us. Once out, you will owe me a case of beer. Each of you.”
Owen said, “You didn’t see the big fuckin’ guns lined up outside? They’ll turn you into chunks in two seconds.”
“I didn’t see any
John ducked into the Caddie and said, “Oh, Owen, did paychecks go out last week before this all happened?”
Owen glanced at me, then John, and said, “How the fuck did you two ever find each other?”
To me, John asked, “You comin’?”
I took to the passenger seat. The Caddie seemed to be listing somewhat and steam was oozing from under the hood. But the engine was still running, so that was good.
John said, “Marconi! There’s room in the backseat.”
Marconi leaned in and said, “I assume your plan didn’t progress beyond this exact moment.”
“I try to take it one step at a time.”
Marconi shifted his eyes to me and said, “Remember what I said?”
“Yeah, the Babylon Protocol.”
He started to correct me, but instead said, “There is a way to beat it. But with God as my witness, I do not know how any of us will get the chance.”
“Just tell me what we need to do.”
“Think it through. Think about the symbols we rally around. Think about what binds people together.”
“Just
“I think you already know. David, there needs to be a sacrifice.”
“A sacrifice? Why?”
“Think it through.”
“What, like somebody has to die? One of us?”
Marconi backed away and said, “Go, before the drone operators finally make sense of what they’re seeing and open fire.”
We buckled our seat belts. John threw the Caddie into reverse. He backed up, rolling through the fire pit, knocking aside a wheelchair. He cranked the wheel and got the Caddie pointing behind the building, not far from the strip of woods John and I had escaped through on that first night, before there was a big-ass fence there.
The crowd of inmates in front of us split like the Red Sea.
John floored it. The back tires dug down into the mud. We launched forward, barreling toward a section of fence bearing the words, FLAME GRILLED FRIDAY, AT CUNTRY KITCHEN. I braced my hands against the dashboard and heard myself screaming.
The fence never stood a chance. The hood bashed through the first layer, whipping down the layer of plastic sheeting. The fencing was still raking its way down the rear windshield when we hit the second layer of fence, smashing a wooden pole in two, ripping through the chain link. The boundary between quarantine and the outside world was pierced once and for all. And then—
—with a cataclysmic sound of metal and plastic splattering against concrete, we hit the vehicle barrier both of us had forgotten about until that moment.
The King Kong fist of inertia punched me in the back. My last memory before I blacked out was the filthy windshield about one inch from my face, and the seat belt then yanking me roughly back. When I came to, the hood was crumpled up in front of me and John was shaking me, saying, “GET DOWN!”
Since I had temporarily forgotten where we even were, I also had forgotten what exactly I was ducking away from. I groggily turned to look outside of the driver’s-side window, and saw a hulking camo-painted vehicle with no driver. I had no problem figuring out what it was. I saw a turret on top of it, light glinting off of a camera lens and on either side of the lens were two massive gun barrels.
The machine whirred and the barrels spun on me. The movement wasn’t robotic at all, but quick and smooth and purposeful. I froze, mesmerized, staring into the twin black holes and chose that moment to wonder what Marconi was talking about when he was going on about “sacrifice.”
EIGHT HOURS EARLIER…
The RV’s door-open chime wafted through the frozen night.
It was the soundtrack of Amy’s last moments. The thing in front of her breathed and its breath smelled of exotic dead meat. It sniffed her. A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn’t change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.
A tongue licked her forehead. Amy instinctively threw up her hand to ward off her attacker, and grabbed a
