The plane swooped lower and lower in the sky, as if it was going to attempt a landing. Only it was not slowing down, it was speeding up. It released its payload, following the bombs down until both bombs and plane met the earth. A silent, black plume instantly appeared in the distance, the boom reaching us two full seconds later. The detonation would be heard two states away.
We were too far away to realize it at the time, but both buildings of the old Ffirth Asylum had been reduced to a crater full of thousands of tons of shattered concrete and brick. All of it was cooking in a furnace fueled by aviation fuel, floorboards, old furniture and tons of other flammable debris that would still be smoldering ten days later. Somewhere, at the bottom of it all, rooms full of malformed inmates were vaporized in a fraction of a second. In the old administrative building next door, a single basement room full of computers and gigabytes of incriminating data on hard drives, all melted into a bubbling, black stew.
The Soy Sauce, Redux
John said, “Now there’s a shitty bomber pilot.”
The rain was starting to let up. I took a deep breath of morning air and said, “The town is still there, Tennet. You played your hand, and you lost—wait, where is he?”
Falconer said, “Oh, son of a bitch!”
The blue pickup, which Tennet had apparently stolen while we were all standing in the shape of a dong and waiting to die, was barreling north up the highway.
I said, “Who cares? He’s going to run smack into the Army’s cordon. Hopefully they’ll arrest his stupid ass.”
But Falconer was already sprinting toward the monster truck. He was damned if he was going to let somebody else get his collar after all this. I was about to bid him good hunting, when John brushed past me and jumped into the passenger seat. And then Amy was running toward the truck and I realized that nobody else was going to be happy until they saw a proper end to this. I ran and jumped into the backseat, my shoe dragging on pavement as the truck almost took off without me.
* * *
The sight of the Army’s airtight cordon operation instantly ruined every zombie movie for me. These people weren’t stupid. Strategy was their thing. They assessed the enemy, and adjusted their plan accordingly. If it was zombies, so be it.
Thus, there was not a single soldier visible, not a single exposed face or neck available to be bitten and zombified. Instead, there was a row of armored vehicles full of soldiers—Bradley Fighting Vehicles, I would later learn—arranged in a formation that would give them clear shots from their gun ports and from the turrets mounted at the top of each vehicle. They sat well back from concrete barricades that would stop any suicide vehicles in their tracks. Coils of razor wire were strung along the ground on both sides of the barrier. A horde of five thousand zombies—even fast zombies—could rush the formation and they would be easily blown to pieces by a crisscross hail of large-caliber rounds. These men were told they were staring into the ravenous maw of a zombie outbreak, and they were prepared to mow that shit down like dead grass.
After having followed him the five miles across the Dead Zone, we thought Tennet’s truck was going to just keep going and plow right into that green wall of death, at which point I assumed he would find his weight in lead rushing through his windshield at the speed of sound. Was this a suicide-by-armored-vehicle? For what, just to spite Falconer? Goddamn this guy was a dick.
Instead, Tennet’s truck skidded to a stop short of the barbed wire. We stopped behind him, watching. Tennet jumped out, and walked toward the soldiers, waving his arms in the air. It wasn’t like he was signaling surrender, it was more like he was waving them away, screaming and pointing and acting like a crazy person.
Then, he was tackled and ripped to pieces by a monster in a black space suit.
I said, “Well, that worked out.”
We all watched Tennet’s well-deserved and awesomely ironic death, when we heard the first thud of heavy machine guns erupt from the line of vehicles ahead.
To our right, descending down from the water tower construction site, was a nightmare horde of shambling, malformed, infected REPER personnel. They crawled and howled and shrieked and sprouted snapping appendages. Then it hit me that this was, in fact, Tennet’s dying plan. Tennet had thrown his personal horde of infected at the army cordon, giving them their zombie apocalypse, and every reason in the world to unleash hell on the city beyond, regardless of what one airplane pilot claimed he saw.
* * *
I screamed, “GET US OUT OF HERE!”
The infected were washing in from our right, swarming toward us and the line of armored vehicles in front of us. More and more of the vehicles were going weapons free on the horde, the turrets and machine guns punching fire and lead into the air.
Falconer was already throwing the monster truck into reverse, cranking the wheel and getting us perpendicular to the highway, then cranking it the other way to get the big bastard of a vehicle heading the other direction. The roar of the big guns outside was like the finale of a fireworks display. I couldn’t hear myself think.
The truck shook. Amy screamed. Something had hit us.
Falconer growled and fought with the wheel. We weren’t moving. I smelled smoke. Another shell smacked the front of the truck, knocking the hood askew.
Flames flew up in front of the windshield.
“GET OUT! GET OUT AND GET FLAT!”
Falconer threw open his door and ducked out. John was messing with something in his lap. The furgun had fallen to the floorboard. I grabbed it, then climbed over Amy and threw open the door. The sound of monster shrieks and cannon fire filled the air. My shoes hit the pavement and I heard Falconer scream, “THE DITCH, GET TO THE DITCH.”
I saw where he was going—the deep drainage ditch along the west side of the road, no more than ten feet in front of us. John spilled out behind me, all of us now using the burning truck as cover against the barrage of gunfire. Falconer sprinted forward, making himself as low to the ground as he could, and dove into the ditch.
Amy screamed, “JOHN!”
John wheeled around to see a big infected fucker loping toward him from behind, dragging the tattered remains of a black space suit.
I fumbled with the furgun but before I could even get it sitting properly in my hand, John hit the let’s-just-call-it-a-zombie with three barrels of shotgun. Suddenly the monster was missing everything from the neck up.
To Amy, I yelled, “Stay low! As low as you can! GO!”
We ran from behind the truck and tumbled down into the drainage ditch. Bullets punched the dirt and pavement overhead. The truck exploded, sending flaming debris whirling through the air above us. It was the second time I’d almost been hit by a flaming truck part in the last half hour, a new personal record.
Amy screamed, “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US!”
I said, “DOWN! GET YOUR HEAD DOWN!”
A spray of bullets raked across the water behind us, punching into the mud of the embankment.
She yelled, “WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!”
John was frantically trying to pull something out of his pocket—shotgun shells, I assumed. Something whistled past my ear. Next to me, Falconer tumbled into the shallow water of the ditch. The stream under him ran red.
“FALCONER!”
“AMY! NO!”
I grabbed for her arm. She pulled away from me.
She scrambled up the embankment.
Right into the line of fire.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. She stood up, right into the storm of bullets, and started waving her arms in front of her, like she was trying to flag down an oncoming car. She was shouting something at them that not even I could hear over the hellstorm erupting all around her.
Time seemed to stop. I had this frozen, snapshot image of her, standing up there, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky, her pants soaking wet and splattered with mud, her skinny freckled arms up in front of her, pulling the tail of her shirt up to reveal two inches of pale, vulnerable skin. All these details, captured perfectly in my mind, in that endless moment.
* * *
And the moment was, in fact, endless, because time had stopped.
From behind me John said, “Finally. Jesus.”
It was dead silent all around us. The water at my feet had frozen. A spray of bits of mud hung in the air in the embankment above me, where a bullet had struck a microsecond before.
I turned to John, who had the Soy Sauce container in his hand. I said, “What the—”
“Oh, Dave! You’re here with me. I stopped time. I hope that’s okay.”
“You … you can do that now?”
“Yeah, ever since I took the Soy Sauce last night. I’m like Zach Morris in Saved by the Bell. The only catch is you can’t actually accomplish anything while time is stopped. You can move yourself but it’s, uh, mostly informational I guess.”
I climbed up the embankment, taking in the frozen battle all around me, like some sort of huge, open air, incredibly fucked-up sculpture in a museum. I looked back at Amy, a statue frozen with her mouth open, exposing her crooked incisors.
I shrugged and said, “Well, it’s actually not the weirdest thing that’s happened on the Sauce.”
John walked up behind me and said, “I wouldn’t even put it in the top five. And I know what you’re thinking, and no, we can’t push her out of the way. Nothing can be moved. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they tell you not to change anything when you go back in time, like it’s a rule or something. I mean literally nothing can be moved. I tried.”
I said, “I can move the furgun.” I still had it in my hand.
“Right, and you’re moving your pants when you walk. I think it’s anything you were touching when everything stopped.”
“How long does it stay like this?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only done it once before. I couldn’t intentionally make it start up again but … I got the sense that it lasts until you do what you need to do. Whether you know what you need to do or not. If that makes sense.”
“What do we need to do?”
I stared over at the column of smoke frozen over the burning truck, the still flames looking like orange-blown glass sculptures. Then, from the still, black column, a whisp of smoke moved.