But R…
R is still talking, like a man in a dream, unaware of anything around him. Like a little boy smiling at a girl on a playground, oblivious to the dark clouds on the horizon.
“I think we’re born with it and we die with it, and no one is ever cured. But that doesn’t mean it has to kill us!”
Abbot sighs. “You’re never gonna shut up, are you?”
He fires.
R lurches forward but doesn’t fall. He doesn’t even turn around to see who shot him. He laughs, and it’s a joyful sound, like he’s discovered something too beautiful to believe.
“We don’t have to let it win.” He turns away from the camera and takes an unsteady step toward Julie, whose blood-speckled face is frozen in shock. “We can fight it and hold it off.”
Julie is shaking her head, eyes filling with tears as R touches her cheek.
“Maybe just long enough to live a good life.”
His knees buckle. His eyes roll up. He collapses in a puddle of bright red blood.
Julie releases a scream that sounds like “no.” It rises until her voice breaks. She drops to her knees and grabs R by the shoulders.
Abram is staring at the blood. There’s blood everywhere. There always is, wherever he goes. It oozes from Julie’s leg and from Marcus’s side and from R’s chest. It gushes from his wife’s forehead, and from his brother’s and his father’s and his mother’s, however and wherever they died.
And it seeps from three claw marks on his daughter’s cheek as she stands in the doorway of the dome, staring at him with two horrified eyes, one brown, the other yellow, uncovered and blazing with its strange and terrible fire.
The other two children rush in behind her and slam the door like they’re being pursued, but Abram doesn’t see whatever’s pursuing them. He sees only his daughter’s eyes as they move from the dying man on the floor to the gun in Abram’s hand.
“Daddy?” she says, incredulous and dismayed, and he finishes her accusation in his mind. Is this what you meant by waiting for the right moment? Stalling, bargaining, compromising, conceding, standing back and keeping silent while brave fools take the bullets?
Abbot is signaling to the pitchmen, giving them the all-clear so they can retake the stage and address the world and undo whatever damage this fool might have done with his words. But as that grinning trio steps into the dome, Julie leaps to her feet, fists clenched at her sides, and stares into the camera with savage intensity.
“Come here,” she growls. “All of you.”
Abbot raises his gun, then hesitates, cocks his head, turns to Abram. “You do this one, Roberts.”
“I know you’re out there,” Julie says to the camera, trembling with rage. “I’ve seen you filling up the towns, watching your TVs like you’re waiting for something…”
“Roberts,” Abbot says. “You put a bullet in her head, and you’re off probation. You get a job, a home, a comfortable life for you and your daughter.”
Abram’s rifle becomes buoyant in his hands. It begins to rise.
“Well it’s happening now,” Julie tells the Dead. “The world is ready for you. We want you back.” Tears are streaming from her eyes. “Help us!”
“Roberts!” Abbot snarls. “Shoot that bitch, now!”
Abram points his rifle at Julie, but he’s not looking at her. His daughter’s eyes hold him like a vise.
“Dad,” she says, stepping toward him. She shakes her head with such gravity that he barely recognizes the little girl he raised. The toddler who begged for late-night stories to clear away her nightmares. The baby whose sun yellow eye seemed to burn right through him until he could no longer stand it. “No more,” she says, and he’s amazed at the authority in her tiny voice, not just a plea but a command. “No more.”
Abram looks away.
“The gate’s wide open for you,” Julie tells the Dead. “Come home!”
Abram fires.
Team Manager Abbot looks perplexed. He wears the expression of a man searching for answers. We can feel him reaching into our shelves, digging for older stories from better times, some sort of context for how he came to this moment. His eyes are wide with confusion, and one of them is a tunnel through his head. For an instant, sunlight shines through it. Then it fills with blood.
Abram is aware of a hulking form rushing toward him from the shadows, but he doesn’t turn. He kills the soldier guarding Nora. He kills the soldier guarding Marcus. He takes a few bullets from the remaining two soldiers, but he kills them too. Only then does he address the man in the black tie, turning just in time to feel his ribs shatter as the man crashes into him.
He hits the ground. Fists as unyielding as granite pummel his body, snapping bones, spattering blood. He raises his arms to shield his face, and his eyes lock with his assailant’s. What he sees makes his arms sag.
A vivid blue contact lens has slipped to the side of the man’s eye, and what’s underneath is not a gray iris but no iris at all. It’s a hole, like the hollow gaze of ancient statues, leading back into the cave of his skull.
Crouched over Abram like a rabid animal, the thing in the black tie bares its teeth and takes a greedy bite of his neck.
Numbness creeps from the wound, and understanding comes with it. This is what he spent his life working for. This and the heap of bones in that box, now spilling out onto the floor and rattling toward his face. A beast that can’t be bargained with, appeased, or avoided. A beast that has to be fought.
He searches for his daughter in the mess of running feet and dying bodies that litter the floor. He sees her; she’s screaming, crying, but she looks tall and powerful from down here. So does Julie as she raises Abbot’s revolver, and Abram thinks, Do it. I let them kill your lover. This is the paycheck I’ve earned.
But Julie doesn’t point it at him. She doesn’t take her deserved revenge or deliver her verdict on his life. She points it at the creature that’s eating him and blows its head into dusty fragments.
“We apologize for this disruption,” Blue Tie is telling the camera. “If you found any of the preceding content confusing or upsetting, please disregard those feelings at this time.”
“We invite you to feel calm,” Yellow Tie says with a comforting smile. “Normal programming will resume in a—”
Julie shoots her through the mouth. Yellow Tie’s bright grin becomes a dark hole. The contents of her skull burst out the back of it, brittle and bloodless like freeze-dried meat.
Blue Tie’s face bends into a frown, a man mildly inconvenienced. “Your behavior may be negatively affecting—”
Marcus rips his head off. He cracks it open on his knee and raises it to the camera, displaying the crystallized brain inside. Blue Tie’s face is peeling around the edges, just barely clinging to the skull, but still grinning. Marcus gives the camera a shrug as if to say Your call, folks, and tosses the head aside.
And it’s done. For a moment at least, they’re safe.
The wind finds its way through the arch windows and stirs the strange debris on the floor, the fragments of the pitchmen and the buzzing bones of their bosses. Julie’s eyes are wide and blank as she watches Nora tear open R’s shirt and begin to examine his wound. And then Julie turns her gaze to Abram. It’s a cursory glance, a quick assessment of his bites and bullet holes and the blood pouring from them, but it baffles him. In the midst of all this pain and terror, while her lover bleeds out in front of her, she spares a moment for the person who helped make all this happen, a person who’s a stranger at best, an enemy at worst.