“Won’t work on us,” Joan says, shaking her head. “We’re over it.”
I feel a mist coming into my eyes. I tug my collar aside and show them my new bite. “Me too.”
A moment later everyone is free and ready to run. Except Nora. Nora can barely stand. She sways back and forth, head down, mumbling incoherently.
“I’ll take her and the kids,” M says, slinging Nora’s arm over his shoulders. He shoots me a meaningful look which I’m not sure how to translate. “You do…whatever you need to do here.”
He hauls Nora to the exit and Julie turns to Tomsen. “Are you good?”
Tomsen nods, blinking delirium out of her eyes. “So odd. So very odd. Such a sickly stew, psychology, pharmacology, virology, thanatology, manually triggered vacillations, impossible stuff, like they’ve tapped some reservoir of—”
“Huntress,” Julie cuts her off. “We need to get the rest of these people out. We have maybe five minutes. Are you good?”
Tomsen rubs her face and lets out a puff of breath. “Good. Great. Best.”
“Get a few more free and let them do the rest. We have to finish our job before the whole place locks down.”
“Our job?”
“See that briefcase—” She cuts off. “R! Where are you going?”
Where am I going?
Their voices are growing fainter as I wander toward the back of the warehouse. I am staring up at the jungle of IVs dangling from the ceiling. I am following the pink hose that runs from the ceiling hub to wherever the pink syrup comes from. I am moving past the last row of chairs and encountering a series of white curtains placed across the warehouse like office partitions. I am pushing through them.
The pink hose runs down from the ceiling into a machine that resembles a soda fountain: several pressurized canisters feeding into a central mixing unit, but the hose doesn’t end there. It continues out the other end of the machine and connects to the base of a clear tank. And in this tank, floating in cloudy pink syrup, are several grinning skeletons. They wriggle and writhe, clawing against the Plexiglas, and then go still, drifting. They thrash again; one rips an arm off the other, a rib, a foot, then they go still. They float in the syrup like scorpions in tequila, infusing it with plague—their shriveled thoughts, their mindless hunger, their dark, sub-animal emptiness. And the machine mixes this with other poisons and pumps it into people, a chemical-spiritual cocktail.
What human mind could create this? What unspeakable product is this company trying to produce?
From some distant overhead viewpoint, I watch myself pull the hose out of the tank and tip over the mixing machine and hammer it with one of the steel canisters until I’m sweating and gasping and the machine is a heap of smashed parts.
Only then do I notice I have an audience.
Behind me is a chain-link corral just like the one in Pittsburgh, except the Dead locked in this one are not a feral horde. They are clean and placid, like embalmed corpses propped upright. Human resources waiting to be spent.
“I know they’ve done things to you,” I tell them. “They’ve put things in your blood and brains. But you can push them out.”
Their expressions are mostly blank, but I catch faint hints of curiosity. A crowd of about two hundred, like the crowd I once faced from the community stage while Lawrence Rosso cheered me on. And what was it he told me a few hours later as he bled out in my arms?
Show them. Help them wake up.
I recognize one of them. Young and muscular, with pockmarked brown skin. His name comes to me easily now. “Evan Kenerly.”
His eyes widen, then they squint. I see him straining to remember.
“Your name is Evan Kenerly.” I move up close to the fence. “Major Evan Kenerly. You worked with Lawrence Rosso. You loved Nora Greene.”
“R!” Julie shouts from the other end of the warehouse. “We have to go!”
I hear the escapees stampeding for the exits. I hear distant shouts. Gunshots. No time to finish my little sermon. I raise the canister over my head and bring it down on the corral’s padlock once, twice—snap.
“You’re not dead,” I tell the people behind the fence. “You can come with us.”
Without waiting to see the results of my latest impulsive act, I drop the canister and run.
WE
“YOU’RE DOING THE RIGHT THING,” Abbot says.
Abram watches the manager take a drag of his cigarette and release it in puffs that the wind instantly erases.
“Axiom has its issues, but it’s the only game in town. It’s going to be the new government, and no branch breaks or religious pyromaniacs are going to change that. So we might as well get on-board.”
The smoke blows into Abram’s eyes but he’s already squinting, watching the horizon, the freeway. He and Abbot stand in the stadium’s open gate as troops buzz in and out, preparing.
“When you have a family,” Abbot says, “you don’t always get to ‘do the right thing’ anymore. You don’t get to take risks or make sacrifices to indulge your moral qualms. You have to do what’s best for them.” Another drag, another wind-swept cloud of tar. “Anything can be ‘the right thing’ if you’re doing it for your family.”
“Sir?” Abram says.
“Yeah?”
“Should I go help the defense set up?”
Abbot presses his lips together. “All business, aren’t you, Roberts? That’s okay. I’m preaching to myself anyway.”
“I just want to make sure we’re ready.”
Abbot grunts and looks out at the horizon. “We’re ready. This place is a vault. The old management just repelled a skeleton swarm two months ago, and we’re twice as well armed.”
“I heard Executive sent half of Security to acquire Portland.”
Abbot waves this off. “We have eight hundred men here and six hundred at Goldman for backup, not to mention three armed choppers. We’ll mow them down before they even reach the walls.”
Abram nods toward the line of panicked immigrants being herded away from the gates. “What about them?”
“We’re putting them in the camps. Sealing up a few highrises for shelter.” He shrugs. “They might get hit, but we’re overpopulated anyway.”
Abram watches a young couple that was at the front of the line into the stadium, now at the back of the line away from it. The man carries their bags, the woman carries their crying daughter; both of them look dumbfounded at their bad luck. But every line to every sold-out show has one tragedy like this, turned away a single step from the entrance.
“Hey,” Abbot says, flicking the ash from his cigarette. “There’s a lot of people in the world. Worry about your own.”
Abram does. He never stops. He had hoped to drop by the foster home before joining the defense to tell Sprout to hide in the basement. He wanted to assure her that they will leave this horrible place but they have to wait for the right moment, that perfect strategic window when the risk is low and they have plenty of time and they’re healthy and fed and well-rested. Until then, just a while longer, they have to play along.
The chance never came. Abbot brought him to the gate without ever letting him out of sight. He seems to have made Abram’s “probation” his own personal project, watching his every move with a calm but stern vigilance. But the man has been surprisingly lenient with him. Abram knows company policy; he should have been terminated ten times over for his countless infractions, but here he is working at the Team Manager’s side. Abram wonders how many times Abbot has served as father-boss, how many young men he’s raised into the Axiom family, and how long it’s been since his last.