“No. Think, John. We went through a door and came out here—right where we needed to be. You made that happen. Because of the Soy Sauce, you have control. You can control the doors the way They do. We’ll go back to the door we came in, the one out on the lawn. You’re going to concentrate—and I know you can do this—you’re going to concentrate on the water tower Porta-Potty and it’s going to take us right there. Right?”
Thunder rumbled outside. The wind picked up and the arthritic old building creaked under the strain.
John nodded and said, “Right. This is going to work.”
* * *
We ran to the front door. We dragged away the cabinet we’d used as a barricade. I took a deep breath, opened the front door and was immediately staring down a dozen gun barrels.
Armed townspeople were swarming the scene. Amy said, “Don’t shoot!”
I put my hands in the air and, to the firing squad in front of me said, “I know you’re all worked up, but listen to me. The feds aren’t going to bomb the hospital. They’re going to bomb the whole town. That means as of right now, we are all in the same boat. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, all of us are infected.”
The guy nearest to me, a big black guy who was built like a linebacker, screamed, “DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND LAY FLAT ON THE GROUND. THIS IS THE ONLY WARNING YOU GET.”
Then I noticed the earmuffs everyone was wearing. I took a deep breath and screamed, “THEY ARE GOING TO BOMB THE TOWN IN AN HOUR!” I tried to pantomime a plane dropping a huge bomb, but I think the motions conveyed that I was warning about a bird shitting on his head.
No response. To John and Amy, I muttered, “I’m thinking we need to go back inside.”
Under his breath, John said, “One. Two. Three—”
We spun and ran back through the big wooden doors—
* * *
—and I ran gut-first into a rusting Ford sedan. Amy slammed into my back. I looked around and realized that we were not, in fact, inside the main hall of the asylum. Rows of broken cars grew in a field of yellow weeds all around us.
John cheered. “HA! It worked! Screw those guys!”
Amy said, “This is not the water tower.”
It was, in fact, the junkyard south of town.
John and I spun around at the same time and saw the blue Porta-Potty standing in the weeds behind us.
“Damn it!” said John. “They moved the shitter. What is this, the junkyard? We’re way the hell on the other side of town.”
The first sprinkles of rain were coming down. I took a calming breath and said, “It’s okay. You’re going to concentrate, and we’re going to go back into the Porta-Potty, and you’re going to send us to the water tower. There has to be a door there we can come out of up there. You’re going to send us to that door. Any door in the vicinity. You are not going to send us back to the asylum. Right?”
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.