At the sixth level she exits the stairwell into a long, dark hallway and starts to turn left, then stops and cocks her ear. The sirens have stopped. From somewhere outside the stadium, I hear the distorted squawk of a megaphone. I can’t make out the words, but the tone is fiery and melodramatic, more theatrical than military.
“Who is that?” Julie mumbles under her breath and moves toward the outer wall. I follow with mounting dread, the answer rising in my throat like vomit.
At the end of a hallway, there is a section missing from the wall and covered by a sheet of black plastic. The plastic undulates in the wind, heaving in and out like a cancerous lung. The megaphone sounds like someone speaking through a kazoo, shrill and piercing but stripped of its phonemes, a loud but meaningless buzzing.
“What the hell’s happening out there?” Julie says. She grabs a corner of the plastic and gives it a hard yank. The corner tears away, then the wind catches it and pulls the rest free. The black sheet floats off into the city like a wraith, drifting over broken towers and flooded parking lots, toward a horizon that’s hazy with dust and windblown trash. There’s a sad and desolate beauty to the ruins, but I spare only a second for the view before my eyes drop to the ground.
We are almost directly above the stadium’s front gate, where a small contingent of troops waits with weapons at the ready. I see many more lining the walls, guns bristling from every window, deck, catwalk, and fire escape. All of them point toward the mouth of the unfinished Corridor 1, where a strange traffic jam is in progress.
Main Street is backed up from the stadium to the freeway, a line of armored bank trucks hauling armored cargo trailers—at least five times as many as I saw in the Ardents’ town. The truck at the front stands out from the procession because it’s painted solid white from top to bottom, including the wheels and tires. The noise is coming from this one, of course, from the roof-mounted megaphone and the man shouting into it somewhere inside that metal box.
A shift in the wind carries his voice up to us, and I can finally make out the words.
“…has been trying to tell us for so long, in so many ways, to let go. To surrender to his plan. The story is over and he’s closing the book, but we keep trying to hold it open. We keep trying to write new chapters, but we are creations, not creators, and God is not interested in our contributions. The world is God’s story, this is the last chapter, and there is no sequel!”
M looks at me quizzically. “Why’s he driving an ice cream truck?”
I see a faint smile twitch on Nora’s lips, though her eyes are still glassy. Her brother watches her intently, as if trying to cure her with sheer will.
The wind muffles Paul Bark’s sermon for a moment, and when it blows back, it seems to be concluding.
“…allow you all a chance to leave this enclave before we surrender it. We are not here to kill you; life belongs to God. But we will tear down these idols of progress. We will lie naked in the dust before God until the Last Sunset burns us away.”
I hear the pulsing growl of helicopters behind us. The sun winks out as they pass overhead. Two local news choppers with large-caliber cannons welded onto them. One National Guard gunship.
“What is your answer?” Bark demands from the dim interior of his truck as the gunship hovers in front of him. “What will you submit to? God’s will, or his judgment?”
There’s a streak of smoke and a loud concussion and the trailer Bark was towing leaps into the air, flinging the truck up with it before snapping free. Both the truck and the trailer crash down on their sides, dented and smoking but apparently undamaged—except for a man-sized hole in the trailer.
The only sound now is the whir of the choppers. Then the megaphone crackles and squeals with feedback. I hear Bark’s distorted breathing as he struggles with the mic in his overturned vehicle. But he sounds barely perturbed when he says:
“God’s Jury is just. He guides their hands and teeth. We will pray for you.”
Like a torn spider’s nest, the trailer spews forth a stream of skeletons, scrabbling through the hole and spreading into the streets. Behind it, Ardents in riot armor hop out of all the trucks and run to the rear of their trailers, pushing through the Boneys with their Plexiglas shields. All three choppers open fire and a few of the men go down…but not enough.
They unlatch the trailer doors. They run back to their trucks and lock themselves inside. And then, almost all at once, like an explosion, thousands of skeletons spread out across the city.
-
I CAN’T HELP IT. I laugh out loud. The great pratfalling clown show of human rapacity. A plague strikes the world, and we see opportunity for advancement. It turns people into walking corpses, and we see cheap labor. Two months ago, through means I still don’t understand, Julie and I sent out a signal that the Boneys would no longer profit from us, and they scattered. And then my old friend Paul saw those festering swarms of skeletons and thought, Just what I need to grow my business!
A few blocks behind the church’s convoy, a white phosphorus grenade flashes on the roof of a highrise, a cheap special effect lost in the big-budget horror they’ve unleashed.
I laugh harder.
“Hey.”
M punches me in the shoulder. “Don’t you go crazy on me too. Got enough to deal with here.”
Nora is drooling on his shoulder. Tomsen is pacing in a circle, rubbing her scalp and muttering to herself. Julie is staring at the chaos below with a faraway expression.
“They’re going to lose,” she murmurs.
I can barely hear her over the racket of war, the drumroll of gunfire from the wall, the steady roar of the helicopters punctuated by thumping missile blasts. In a world where most battles involve ragged gangs with revolvers and machetes, this is an awesome display of military might. But it’s three choppers and a few hundred soldiers against several thousand ravenous skeletons. Even if Axiom hadn’t spread itself thin with its ill-timed foreign invasions, I’m not sure they could stop this.
“They’ll run out of ammo before they get halfway through that swarm,” Julie says, shaking her head. “Axiom’s going to lose.”
For the moment, the Boneys are focused on the Ardents, clawing at their armored trucks like bears trying to open campsite canisters. But hunting is the one area in which their minds are still adaptable, and they quickly recognize the futility of this effort. In almost perfect unison, they abandon the trucks and rush toward the stadium, where a richer pot of flesh awaits. They die in waves as bullets strafe their ranks. Their skulls explode like ceramic urns, scattering their ashes to the wind. But for each one that goes down, three more rush in behind it.
“Hate to tell you,” M says to Julie, “but that’s not good news. If they lose, we lose.”
Julie nods. “Oh I know. We’re probably going to die.”
M raises his eyebrows. “Well shit! What happened to Miss Sunshine?”
Julie finally pulls her eyes away from the battle. She looks at me like she’s been talking to me the whole time. “Everything’s going to fall apart.” Her voice is faint, her eyes slightly widened. “But like that guy at the diner said…like Gael said…maybe that’s what we need.”