Something changed with the light, like a shadow was passing overhead. I looked up and, for the second time that day, saw that a car was flying toward me through the air.
We ran screaming in three directions as a rusting sedan flattened the Porta-Potty with a thunder of rending metal. I stumbled, fell and got a face full of dried weeds. I scrambled to my feet and screamed for Amy, found her crouching behind a hatchback.
John screamed, “There! There!” and we turned to see a shrunken, dried-up old man who looked about ninety. He was maybe twenty-five yards away, standing near a twenty-foot-tall faded fiberglass statue of a smiling man holding a slice of pizza. The old guy looked completely normal, other than the fact that he had a huge third arm growing from his groin, and had massive leathery wings.
The old man bent over and with his dick arm wrestled an old engine block out of the dirt. He shrieked and threw the engine at us underhand, like a softball. The four-hundred-pound hunk of metal turned in the air, little sprays of rainwater flying out of its cylinders. We dodged again, moments before the engine crushed the roof of the hatchback in a cloud of glass bits.
John’s shotgun thundered next to me. It had absolutely no effect on the old man—I don’t know if he missed or if the old guy was immune to bullets. John broke open the gun and fumbled with three more shells. Two of them fell into the weeds.
“AMY! SHOOT HIM!”
Amy turned, raised the furgun, closed her eyes and fired.
The alien gun made that low, foghorn honking sound. The air rippled. The old man recoiled, his hands flying to his face. When his hands came away I observed that he now had a thick, white wizard beard.
John screamed, “GODDAMNIT, AMY! YOU’VE GOT IT SET ON BEARD.”
The man advanced. Amy fired again. The man’s beard grew twice as long.
I yelled, “AMY! YOU CAN GO LETHAL ON THIS ONE!”
“I’M TRYING!”
The old man was running now, terrifyingly fast, arms pumping. Running right at us. We ran away. Amy tried to turn and fire the furgun. The shot went wild and suddenly the fiberglass pizza man had a huge beard.
I screamed, “GIVE IT TO ME!”
Amy tossed me the furgun. Before I could turn on the old man, I was sent sprawling with a blow to my back that knocked the air out of my lungs. I hit the weeds, gasping. I rolled over to see the old man ready to swing a car bumper at me a second time. I pointed the furgun up at the old fart. I squeezed the trigger.
The gun went off with a booming sound that shook the earth. There was a gut-wrenching impact, and the man was disintegrated into a fine, red mist. The grass burned in the spot where he had stood, the soil itself charred.
John walked up and said, “Jesus, Dave. Why don’t you, uh, give that back to Amy.”
Amy said, “The toilet! That car flattened the toilet!”
“We don’t need it.” I looked at John. “John just needs to concentrate.”
“Hey, it worked last time, they just moved the—”
“I know, I know. You’re doing great. Now just find something we can go through. The doors aren’t random, not for you. You have the power to control them.”
John jogged down the row of cars, rain plinking off of metal trunk lids. He arrived at a windowless van, took a moment to concentrate, then pulled open the doors.
John said, “I think I can see it. I can actually see where it goes…”
“Okay, great. Where?”
“I can’t tell. But there’s an army truck parked there.”
“Perfect! Go.”
We climbed through—
* * *
—and tumbled out of the back of a different van in the rear parking lot of some restaurant or other. It was certainly not the water tower.
40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
I punched the air and cried, “GODDAMNIT WHY ARE WE SUCH FUCKUPS?”
There were in fact two military trucks parked nearby, so he had that part right. No personnel in sight.
Amy said, “Go back—”
John said, “No, we have to find a different door. That’ll just take us back to the junkyard.”
John jogged toward the restaurant and went through an open EMPLOYEES ONLY door. We followed him into an empty kitchen—stainless appliances and grease-tanned walls. It smelled like detergent and vaporized animal fat. We passed into a main dining area full of small round tables. The building was silent, the restaurant closed—probably had been since the outbreak. We could hear the soft drumming of rain on the roof. Along one wall was a bar lined with bottles and two big-screen TVs that would be showing some kind of sporting event if it weren’t early morning on a Monday during the apocalypse. The opposite wall was covered with a mural depicting a smiling cartoon buffalo, eating a burger.
“Oh. Buffalo burger,” John said, unnecessarily. We had all eaten here before (yes, the burgers were made from buffalo meat) and we were apparently going to be incinerated here.
“Find a door, John. We—”
Glass shattered. We all ducked, and there was a chubby, balding guy in his fifties on the sidewalk out front, wearing earmuffs. He had bashed in the glass front door with the butt of a shotgun.
“SHIT!”
The guy ducked through the shattered glass and racked a shell into his shotgun.
“HEY! WE’RE UNARMED! WE’RE NOT INFECTED!”
The guy put the shotgun to his shoulder. He knew exactly who we were.
We dove behind the bar. A shotgun blast shattered three bottles, bringing a rain of liquor and glass. Amy blindly stuck the furgun up over the bar and squeezed the trigger. A small wheel of cheese landed softly on the bar and bounced to the floor.
“GODDAMNIT, AMY! LETHAL!”
A shotgun blast punched the bar, flinging chunks of particle board between us. Amy raised the furgun, squeezed her eyes in concentration, and fired.
The gun honked.
The air rippled.
A huge, black blur the size of a minivan flew through the air above us, a furry shape that bellowed with a sort of grunting moo. In the split second it was airborne I somehow registered what the object was: a buffalo. And I mean a real buffalo, huge and furry and trailing a stink like wet dog.
The buffalo hurtled toward the man, its dangling feet flailing as it soared through the air. It smashed into the bald guy, flinging him aside, then blew through the door behind him, wrenching it off its hinges.
“YEAH!” screamed John, triumphantly. “That’s what you get! THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”
The buffalo turned on us. It snorted, belched, farted, sneezed. It charged back into the restaurant, loping across the floor tiles, each hoof landing with a sledgehammer impact that I could feel in my gut. Amy screamed. The beast blasted a swath of carnage through the dining room, tossing aside tables and chairs like they were doll furniture. We scrambled to our feet and tried to run. I made it out from behind the bar, then tripped over a chair and fell, taking Amy with me. She rolled over, leveled the furgun at the beast, and fired.
The buffalo recoiled, stopping in its tracks. It suddenly had a thick beard, streaked with gray, as big as a man’s torso.
“RUN!”
I don’t remember who said it, but none of us needed to be told. We dodged and juked around tables, jumping over the unconscious bald guy, rounding the buffalo and heading for the street. It was trying to get turned around, knocking over six tables in the process.
We flew through the smashed doorway, emerging onto a sidewalk downtown. Rain hammered the street, soaking our clothes. Two seconds later the buffalo blew through the door behind us, tearing off another foot of door frame on every side.
We ran across the four lanes of street, looking for cover or, better yet, a door. I turned to Amy and screamed, “HERE! GIVE IT TO ME!”
I took the furgun. I squeezed the trigger, and for a second, nothing happened. The beast charged, hoofs drumming across pavement. Then, out of nowhere, the buffalo was hit by a semi. The truck splattered
buffalo guts thirty feet in every direction as it plowed through the screaming beast. It finally skidded to a stop, scraping a half ton of buffalo meat along the pavement and leaving a crimson skid mark of blood and entrails that stretched for a block and a half.
We all stood and looked at this with disgust for a moment.
Amy said, “Gross.”
John said, “Over here!”
He was running into the alley, toward a Dumpster. He stood up on a crate, took a moment to gather his energies, and threw open the lid.
“BOOM! That’s it! I see water tower, bitches!”
John climbed in. I helped Amy up next.
I stepped up on the crate and looked down. I saw it. That is, instead of garbage, I saw open landscape. Patches of wet, green grass and mud puddles. It was dizzying, looking down and seeing the horizon at my feet. Rain was falling on the back of my neck, and falling perpendicular to that inside the universe of the Dumpster.
I threw my legs over and stepped through, and felt that roller coaster flutter in my guts as gravity changed and—
* * *
I stumbled forward as the ground rushed up at me, smacking my palms. I was suddenly on my hands and knees in mud, cold rain pounding down my back. I got to my feet, soaked from head to toe, mud caked on my knees and shoes. I squinted through the pouring rain. Thunder rumbled overhead.
The water tower was right in front of me. I looked around for the truck John described, and found it. A big, black semi tractor trailer. Next to it was a black military troop transport. Next to it was a black Humvee. Next to it was another. Then about three dozen more.
John said, “Ooooh, shit.”
The water tower construction project was now the home to the makeshift REPER command center. Black military vehicles and mobile homes and tents stretched out as far as we could see. And, standing around us, were dozens and dozens of guys in black space suits, carrying assault rifles. All of them were currently screaming at us to drop our weapons and lay flat on the ground.
A man strode up in a white space suit, carrying a helmet under one arm. His gray hair was still somehow perfectly combed even under the bombardment of the rain.
Dr. Tennet glanced at his watch and said, “I was starting to think you wouldn’t make it.”
37 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
We were hauled under a tent, an open one like you’d see at a county fair. There were two long folding tables and along the back of the tent, just outside of the rain, were a series of carts holding stainless-steel canisters.
There were two spacemen right behind us, holding some kind of weapons on us that I didn’t recognize. They were bulky and ended in some kind of slanted lens thing. I kind of wanted to get shot with one just to see what it did. Then, fifty feet or so outside the tent, were a dozen gunmen with regular old military-grade assault rifles. I was one hundred percent sure that their instructions were that if we overpowered the two guards next to us, they were to turn everything—including the guards—into the finale of Bonnie and Clyde.
Tennet strode up from behind us, and handed Amy a towel. Not sure why John and I didn’t get one.
Tennet said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we are, of course, outside of the blast radius—though close enough that the noise will be very, very loud—unless someone at the Air Combat Command has made a grievous error in their calculations. A series of twenty-five thousand bombs will be dropped from the back of C-130 aircraft, starting from the center of town outward, in a series of concentric circles. The shock wave from each bomb can shatter ten city blocks, and liquefy any organism standing within a thousand feet in any direction. Once all of the structures have been blown into kindling, a second squadron of B-52 bombers will drop a series of thousand-pound CBU-97 incendiary cluster munitions, releasing a flammable aerosol that will ignite and raise the temperature at the center of town to a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun. The resulting conflagration will inhale so much surrounding oxygen that from here, we’ll feel like we’re in a monsoon—winds will reach fifty miles an hour. I’m told the noise of all the air rushing to feed the massive open-air furnace sounds like the world itself is howling in anguish. It should really be something.”
John said, “And let me guess: you’re going to jerk off while you’re watching it. And you’re going to make us watch you.”
Amy was actually using the towel to dry her hair, and I felt like she should have just left it wet out of solidarity.
Ignoring John, Tennet said, “That’s the good news. The bad news is that you are of course being charged for this session.”
He went back to the row of steel canisters and examined them. “I kid, of course.”
I said, “So how do you get into the supervillain business, anyway? Is it something that happens gradually or do you just wake up and decide to go for it?”
Tennet said, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and I apologize ahead of time because learning this will mark the end of your extended childhood. Nobody involved in a conflict thinks they’re the villain. And considering I’m on the verge of saving a couple of billion lives, I’m thinking I deserve hero status on this one. Even if you’re too shortsighted to understand.”
I said, “Uh huh. So who is the bad guy, then?”
“Everyone, depending on the day. In this case, I don’t know who is responsible for the parasite. That is, I don’t know their names. This is what you can’t—or aren’t willing to—understand. You found a cockroach in your hamburger. You want a two-word answer to the question of who put it there. Well, it’s not that simple. Was it the kid working the grill, who didn’t check the beef? Was it the franchise owner for buying beef from a shady supplier? Was it the slaughterhouse, for failing to adhere to contamination standards? Was it the government, for not funding FDA enforcement of those standards? Or was it you, the customer, for demanding lower taxes that resulted in that funding being cut, and for participating in a consumer culture that rewards cutting corners? Well, in that scenario, think of me as the harried assistant manager who has to apologize to the unhappy customer and try to keep the restaurant from getting shut down. Only here the ‘restaurant’ is all of civilization.”
I said, “Okay, I’m … wait, what does the hamburger represent again?”
“My point is, I have a job, just like you. I get a paycheck, I get memos. Just like you, I have superiors, and they have superiors who I am not allowed to speak to. Orders filter down from on high, arriving at my level stripped entirely of all context or rationale or justification. Orders do not come with an illustration of how they serve the overall goals of the organization. Same as any other job. Was the parasite released intentionally? And if so, for what purpose? It is not my job to know. All I know is that it is a near certainty that if it gets out, it will destabilize civilization as we know it. I have worked nonstop since the outbreak to contain this in a way that would let the world move on. And, I’m proud to say, I’m on the verge of succeeding.”
Amy said, “By killing everyone.”
“No. Not everyone. One medium-sized town. Some perspective helps here. Globally, a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day. From natural causes, accidents, war. The population of this town will be barely a blip in the worldwide dying that happens in an average month. So while you think you’re being heroic in saving it, you are, right now, in this situation, the villains. I know you don’t think you are. But you are.”
I said, “Then why are you the one giving the supervillain monologue?”
He walked back to the silver canisters. He put his back to us and started messing with some mechanism in whatever mad scientist setup he had back there. I heard liquid running. We were not restrained in our chairs, but there were so many guns on us that if I scratched my nose, the shooting aftermath would look like somebody had just spilled a huge lasagna here. I looked at Amy, who was impassive, and then at John, who looked like he was mentally running through escape opti
ons just like I was. The furgun was still laying in the grass where we had landed when we arrived. They probably thought it was a hairbrush. I pictured John trying to wrestle away one of those futuristic-lens guns the two guards behind us were carrying. Then I pictured him squeezing the trigger and a cartoon boxing glove popping out of the end.
I watched Tennet work fluids from his steel canisters and wondered if we weren’t choosing between quick death under a hail of bullets, or something much, much worse caused by whatever he was brewing up there. He turned back to us, striding calmly our way. He placed three small Styrofoam cups in front of us.
“We have sugar over there, but I’m afraid we’re out of creamer.”
Coffee. I left mine in front of me. Amy, without asking, had been given a cup of hot water and a tea bag. She dropped in the tea bag and asked Tennet if he had any honey.
She is terrible at this.
Tennet walked back to the coffee carts and returned with a container of honey shaped like a bear.
He said, “Think. Who allowed the outbreak to occur? Who failed to report the appearance of the parasite to any authorities? Who prevented any containment at your house? Who created the breach at the REPER command center? Who created the breach in the quarantine containment fence? Who has single-handedly spread this infection?”
John said, “We didn’t do any of it on purpose. We’re just … not very good at things.”
“Or, it could be that just maybe, one can act on what one believes is his own agency, while in reality perfectly serving the purposes of another.”
He held up the honey bear.
“Where do you think this comes from, hmm? Do you think the bees toiled night and day to make this because they knew we were going to take it away from them and drip it into our tea? Of course not. Because we are a higher life form than they, we can make them serve our purposes, while letting them believe they are serving their own. You have been used like bees.” He glanced at me. “This was all but explained to you before.”