A thin, black stream leaked out from the crack, it looked like a length of heavy black string had come unspooled. John laid his index finger under the stream to catch it.
Then, several things happened at once.
First, the shuffling footsteps John thought he had been hearing got louder, and faster. They had a hollow tone, like someone stomping around on the floor above your apartment. John and Falconer both spun, looking for the source. Then something leaped off the neighbor’s roof, sailing through the air like a huge, weaponized flying squirrel, coming right down on Falconer.
John’s brain had a tenth of a second to try to register what he was really seeing when the Soy Sauce made its move. At the exact same moment John’s mouth was forming the words—
“FALCONER LOOK—”
—the thin, black string of Sauce coiled around on its own like a snake, in a blink whipping around his finger, over his fingernail, and digging into his skin right at the sensitive spot where a hangnail would form. Pain flashed up John’s hand, all the way to his elbow.
Then the Soy Sauce took hold, and the world disappeared.
* * *
Dave once described taking a hit of Soy Sauce as like digging up one of those thick fiber-optic lines that feeds an entire city’s Internet connection and plugging it into your brain. All those streams of data crashing into you neurons at once, so hard and fast that you simultaneously know everything and nothing at all. John always thought his own description was clearer: it’s like an Insane Clown Posse concert where all fifty thousand members of the audience are given their own microphone and sound system, and they all start simultaneously improvising bad freestyle rap verses.
John was introduced to the stuff at a party, when he was barely old enough to legally drink (and had been drinking for eight years). It was given to him by a black dude from Ohio doing a fake Jamaican accent, the guy who would later be found with his guts splattered on the walls of his trailer—the fucker got off easy. It was the same sensation this time as the first. Soy Sauce was not something you built up a tolerance for.
Everything stopped—John was yanked out of his body, out of the world, mind freed from the confines of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth and a trillion nerve endings. A wash of alien sensations crashed over him, like being naked at the bottom of a frantic orgy involving everyone in that Star Wars cantina scene.
John found that he was suddenly somewhere else. He was standing among bombed-out buildings, avalanches of brick and wood and glass flung across streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. He had leaped forward in time, he didn’t know how much. He looked around—or rather, his view panned around, as he didn’t seem to have eyes to “look” with. Devastation and broken structures littering the landscape into the horizon and beyond. He saw that the rubble was crawling with life, small skittering things.
John walked—or rather, his view floated—toward the remains of a shattered church. A rotting human head crawled across a pile of ragged concrete, the legs of a parasite jutting below the jaw, the parasite wearing the moldering skull like a hermit crab’s shell. Another head trundled by. Then another. Then, another set of spider legs skittered by, this time trailing a tangled wad of guts.
They were everywhere. John looked around—again without turning a head or a set of eyes—and saw the streets were littered with broken and charred corpses, flies buzzing over spilled guts. The head of an old woman—eyes having long rotted out of their sockets, the skull bearing a blunt trauma wound—came wobbling by. The parasite inside opened its mouth and emitted that bone-rattling shriek. A moment later, a second head and parasite came trundling behind it. They started humping.
Then it was gone, John yanked back across time, and now he was in the sky, trees and homes whipping by underneath him. He saw rows of military trucks forming thick layers on either side of a fence—the cordon circling city limits. He flew away from it, zipping up the highway. Suddenly he was inside of an RV. And there was Amy, sitting with a bunch of dudes carrying guns. She was sticking her hand in a box of Golden Grahams, eating them dry like they were potato chips. John tried to speak to her, but of course he wasn’t really there.
Focus. Focus on getting back.
And then the world was twisting and flowing around him, the scenery stretching past until he found himself back at Dave’s burned-out house, back in his own body, staring at Falconer and the unholy thing that had jumped down at him from the rooftop above.
The scene was frozen before him. John saw that the leaping monster was transforming grotesquely in midair, Falconer still not having so much as tilted his head up to see it. The leaves at their feet were no longer blowing and the world had gone utterly silent. Time had simply stopped. John looked down at his hands, and realized that he could move his fingers, realized that time had not stopped for him, but only the rest of the world. John took a tentative step, found that he could move with no problem. Then he looked around, put his hands on his hips and in the stillness said, “Huh.”
* * *
This particular thing had never happened to John on Soy Sauce before, but that was par for the course because the same thing never happened twice. Out-of-body experiences, time travel, interdimensional travel, invisibility, yes. Stopping time? No. He’d have to tell Dave. If he remembered, that is—unfortunately, the godlike status you sometimes achieved under Soy Sauce, however briefly, was kind of like the boost in sexual confidence you got from beer: nice while you’re in the moment, but the next day you don’t remember shit. He tried to get over the initial shock of what was going on and assess the situation. Who knew how long the effect would last, and when time would suddenly burst forward again?
Falconer was frozen in place ten feet in front of John, a statue that looked like it was built to pay tribute to good style and bewildered expressions. Suspended in midair two feet above him, was a monster.
John could kind of see where it had been a man once, before the parasite did its work, but it took a few minutes. (Wait, did it? Did minutes exist?) The creature’s arms and legs both were spread straight out, so that the limbs and torso formed a sideways “H.” Along the arms and legs both were sharp, pointed protrusions of bone, so that the limbs were serrated, like a knife. It was easy to see its method of attack: in a half second of real time, it would wrap the limbs around Falconer’s neck and torso and with one brutal squeeze, leave him in three distinct bloody chunks. There was no time for Falconer to react. He was simply not going to survive the attack without intervention.
John walked toward him and thought the ground felt different. It took him a moment to realize that the grass wasn’t bending under his feet—like he was walking on titanium Astroturf. His shoes were sticking with each step, where blades of grass were pricking the soles like needles. John went to grab the shovel from where Falconer had stabbed it into the ground, and realized he could not move it. Not even to wiggle it back and forth.
So it was like that. Time was frozen but it was truly frozen—John couldn’t actually impact the world in any way. He couldn’t kill the monster, or even push Falconer out of harm’s way. Well. Shit. What good was this?
Actually …
He could find out if Dave was alive.
No, he couldn’t leave here. At any moment the Soy Sauce could wear off, time could resume and Falconer would be on his own to deal with the creature swooping down on his head. Or, rather, not deal with it. He likely wouldn’t even comprehend what was happening before his severed skull was rolling in the dead leaves of Dave’s yard. The man was good, but not that good. And so, the venture with the Soy Sauce had all been a big, stupid waste. Getting out of the asylum building, coming here, all of it. When things returned to normal, Falconer would get splattered, John would be on his own, and he would be no closer to fixing things than he was the moment he woke up hungover in the frat house earlier.
Well. Whatever.
John walked over next to Falconer and positioned himself behind, with his hands on Falconer’s back. John leaned forward, all of his weight on the man’s back (Falconer did not move, of course, it was like leaning on a bronze statue) so that at the moment time returned to normal, Falconer would be shoved instantly out of harm’s way. At the same time John would fall to the ground, and hopefully this would thwart the monster long enough that they could do … something.
John waited. And waited. Time remained frozen.
A couple of hours (?) later John was sitting on the prickly petrified grass in front of Falconer, annoyed, wondering precisely how long he should babysit this situation instead of striking out and trying to do something else. Finally, he got bored and made his way to the street, walking toward the hospital quarantine. What else was there to do?
* * *
John walked through Dave’s neighborhood and out into the life-size Undisclosed diorama. At one point he painfully banged his shin on a discarded newspaper that was in the middle of being blown by a gust of wind when time stopped. There were a few stationary vehicles on the roads—not many, with the curfew. John figured the uninfected were living the life of refugees in a war zone, hunkered down with the kids in the basement, hoping that the sounds of all hell breaking loose on their block wouldn’t be followed by the sound of their front door getting smashed in.
Out of curiosity, John approached a beat-up pickup truck frozen in the middle of the street, a cloud of exhaust hanging perfectly still in the air behind it. The bed was full of cardboard boxes, cases of toilet paper and diapers. The driver was an elderly black man with a shotgun laying across his lap. His hand was stuck halfway to the ashtray, two inches of cigarette between thumb and index finger, a curling ribbon of smoke hanging frozen over it. John reached his hand in through the driver’s side window and tried to push his finger through the frozen smoke. It was as solid as rock.
Weird.
John strolled across town and made his way to the hospital. His footsteps were utterly silent, the quiet here was less like a library and more like having earplugs. Sound waves unable to move the air, apparently. John thought he could hear his own blood sliding through his veins, and his digestion gurgling away. He wondered how long it would be until that drove him insane.